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Have a Happy Thought:     Many of us (I’m assuming – I definitely did) wanted to be a fossil-hunter (or maybe just fossil-finder) at some point in our lives. Why are fossils important? Well, other than being really cool to find, and other than the fact that they stick to your tongue when you lick them… they give us a sense of history, a way to understand how the current plants and animals we share the earth with came to be. In other words, fossils are “the whakapapa of our celebrated flora and fauna.” 1   If you live in the US, you can get these amazing books “Roadside Geology of…” that help you “interpret the rocks and landscapes visible outside your car window… [and will] guide you to outcrops and roadcuts where you can stretch your legs and expand your minds.”   Some of this geology information is very useful to fossil-hunters, who want to know where to look for rock layers of a certain age. https://mountain-press.com/collections/roadside-geology/pro...

Have a Happy Thought:   Just over one year ago, I shared with you the beginning of a simulated mission to Mars – the CHAPEA mission. It’s run by NASA, so you know this is an acronym – it stands for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog. https://cymittw.blogspot.com/2023/06/happy-thought-for-30-june-2023.html     Mission patch for Chapea-1 https://www.nasa.gov/chapea/mission1 with the mission motto Ad Martus A Domo and the participants' names Selariu, Haston, Jones and Brockwell.   Largely, this mission was to understand the physical and psychological tolls on potential astronauts on a mission to Mars, and also to explore some of the technology that could keep those astronauts alive, fed, and happy. Well, after 378 days, their mission is complete and the four crew members have ‘returned to Earth’. The scientists, participants, and many other supporters learned a lot from this mission, and there are even two more follow-up missions planned. The n...

Have a Happy Thought:   We live in an incredible time – a time in which humans are sending robots to literal other worlds, and bringing back pieces of those worlds to study, back here on Earth.   This has happened twice now in short succession! Just last week , a Chinese-led mission returned samples of the “far side” of the moon back to Earth. This was the Chang-e 6 mission. A couple of things of note about this mission:   The mission name, Chang'e ( 嫦娥 ), is an ancient Chinese goddess or mythological figure, who lives in/on the moon with her pet rabbit, which can easily be seen from Earth, in the light and shadows formed by the highlands and craters visible from Earth. Image: the moon as seen through a telescope. Vaughan Turner, supplied. While there is no Dark Side of the Moon, there is a Far Side of the Moon: The same ‘face’ of the moon always faces the Earth, so different parts of the moon are lit by the sun as the...

Have a Happy Thought:   We have passed the solstice – halfway through the solar year – at 8:51am on Friday 21 st June, New Zealand time – that is, a few hours ago. In most years, the solstice hits on the calendar date of June 22 nd in New Zealand. But this year, it’s a bit earlier.   A couple of definitions/explanations first: The solstice occurs when the Earth’s poles are most directly pointed toward (or away) from the sun. Because it’s the North Pole that’s pointed toward the sun right now, it’s summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. And winter solstice in the southern hemisphere, because we’re pointed away from the sun. The solstice is when you get the longest night and shortest day of the year (winter)… or vice versa (summer). Equinox (think: equal) is midway in between the winter and summer solstices. So they happen in the midst of spring and autumn, and tend to have equal amounts of day and night. ...

Have a Happy Thought:     We’re learning that sperm whales might have a whole language. Not just a few words, but a complex, intricate communication.   This is one of the really cool things that machine learning (one of the aspects of what is being branded “AI”) has been used for. Scientists took a whole bunch of recordings of sperm whale songs, and broke them up into distinct “codas”.   They then took these 9000+ codas, and fed them through some machine learning algorithms to see how the whales were using them. Turns out, each coda might be roughly equivalent to a phenome (the audio equivalent of a letter), or maybe a word. They’re combined in different orders ( pat vs tap ), lengths ( tap vs tapdancing ), and even potentially adding ornamental noises ( ahem ). And the codas are used in all sorts of changing ways, so each whale is using all sorts of codas, in different ways - not just singing a repetitive “song”.   In other words (heh): it soun...

Have a Happy Thought:   3-D movies are once again* in theatres , and tech companies are, despite Facebook’s Metaverse fiasco and Google’s Glass , working toward ever-more immersive technologies.   *huh, according to Wikipedia pages, 3D hasn’t been out of the theatres since the 1950s, or by some definitions even as far back as the early 1900s , before talkies** even became a thing! **for those that don’t know, “talkies” is what people called the early movies that actually had soundtracks , including dialogue – before that, there may have just been music, often played by live orchestras! Once you learn this, it’s hard not to think very differently about the fact that we still use the word “movie”… like seriously, we haven’t yet gotten over the fact that the pictures, they move!     Back to talking about 3-D. The idea that people might want to experience something in 3-D that they weren’t physically there for? Well, at a minimum it’s been around for well o...

Have a Happy Thought:   (Keeping it short and sweet this week) The sun is always shining, and there are blue skies at least somewhere on Earth, even if not exactly where you are.   Oh, and the sun is also often doing things like this:    A Solar Filament Erupts Image Credit: NASA 's  GSFC ,  SDO AIA Team     Make sure to check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day for this and many more spectacular views of our universe.   And have a sunny weekend!

Have a Happy Thought:   Space telescopes are amazing. And we live in a time where there are multiple space telescopes, bringing us incredible views of the universe.  I’ve shared images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope before ( https://cymittw.blogspot.com/2023/06/happy-thought-for-23-june-2023.html ) and now it’s time to share some pictures from ESA’s Euclid Telescope.   Feel free to just scroll through pretty pictures, or read the captions and click the links for all of the science!   The Horsehead Nebula Euclid shows us a spectacularly panoramic and detailed view of the Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33 and part of the constellation Orion. In Euclid’s new observation of this stellar nursery, scientists hope to find many dim and previously unseen Jupiter-mass planets in their celestial infancy, as well as young brown dwarfs and baby stars. CREDIT ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. A...