What if ...

Excellent visualization on what the earth would look like if all the ice melted, something that could definitely happen if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the rate we are currently doing.

As National Geographic showed us in 2013, sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world's major cities.

Pretty scary without question and we haven't even talked about the impact of same. Something to think about without question don't you think?

The History of the World ... Every Year

Since 200,000 BCE, humanity has spread around the globe and enacted huge change upon the planet. This video shows every year of that story, right from the beginning.

Fascinating without question.

The GOAT

No words needed ...

Storm warning ... Jovian style :)

Storm warning ... Jovian style :)

NASA's Juno spacecraft saw this striking vista during its most recent close flyby of Jupiter. This view highlights the contrast between the colorful South Equatorial Belt and the mostly white Southern Tropical Zone, a latitude that also features Jupiter's most famous phenomenon, the persistent, anticyclonic storm known as the Great Red Spot.

Awesome to a fault.

Acronym 101 :)

Acronym 101 indeed. :)

Channeling The Flying Crowbar ...

The Cuban Missle crisis almost blew mankind away. The flying Crowbar, a thankfully abandoned weapon of doom of America's making, could have done the same thing without issue.

To whit ...

At its core, Project Pluto was just a cruise missile. Well, not “just” a cruise missile. It was a cruise missile designed around a nuclear ramjet engine, and the acronym for it should give another big clue about the pants-filling nature of it: SLAM, for Supersonic Low Altitude Missile. That means that this giant, nuclear-powered beast would be screaming around at oh, treetop level or so.

The nuclear ramjet engine at the heart of Project Pluto is key to what made this weapon so horrific. A ramjet is a very simple engine design, with essentially no moving parts. Once the missile was launched with conventional rocket boosters, the air velocity going into the ramjet’s intake would be fast enough to let the engine function, and an essentially unshielded nuclear reactor would heat the air as it entered, where it would expand and be expelled out of the engine’s nozzle, providing both lots of thrust and plenty of radioactive material.

Kubrick should have highlighted this beauty in Dr. Strangelove, IMHO. :)

The Russians channelled this fubar but its version of this doomsday device failed, for now ...

A few days ago, on August 8, there was an explosion on a barge in the White Sea near Nyonoksa, Russia. That explosion tragically killed seven people, nuclear engineers and technicians working on a project. The project was described as “an isotopic power source for a liquid engine installation,” but let’s be completely clear here: they were developing the nuclear propulsion system for a genuinely brutal and terrible weapon.

That weapon is known as 9M730 Burevestnik, known to NATO as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall, but is perhaps best understood as a modern rebirth of a terrifying American weapon concept from the 1960s known as the Flying Crowbar.

A mysterious explosion at Russia’s Nenoksa Missile Test Site on Aug. 8, 2019 killed at least seven people and caused a radiation spike that sent everyday Russians hurrying to pharmacies to buy anti-radiation pills.

The explosion reportedly involved a small nuclear reactor that powers a new kind of long-range cruise missile.

“United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall,” The New York Times reported.

“That is a cruise missile that [Russian president Vladimir] Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.”

An accidental explosion is exactly the risk that Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, feared when he described the SSC-X-9 as “batshit crazy.”

Batshit crazy kinda says it all, doesn't it?

Questions, Questions ...

Seth Rich or ...  The ghost "that" haunts the courts.

As if it weren’t enough of a downer for Russiagate true believers that no Trump-Russia collusion was found, federal judges are now demanding proof that Russia hacked into the DNC in the first place.

It is shaping up to be a significant challenge to the main premise of the shaky syllogism that ends with “Russia did it.”

If you’re new to this website, grab onto something, as the following may come as something of a shock. Not only has there never been any credible evidence to support the claim of Russian cyber interference, there has always been a simple alternative explanation that involves no “hacking” at all — by Russia or anyone else.

As most Consortium News habitués are aware, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (which includes two former NSA technical directors), working with independent forensic investigators, concluded two years ago that what “everyone knows to be Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee” actually involved an insider with physical access to DNC computers copying the emails onto an external storage device — such as a thumb drive. In other words, it was a leak, not a hack.

VIPS based its conclusion on the principles of physics applied to metadata and other empirical information susceptible of forensic analysis.

But if a leak, not a hack, who was the DNC insider-leaker? In the absence of hard evidence, VIPS refuses “best-guess”-type “assessments” — the kind favored by the “handpicked analysts” who drafted the evidence-impoverished, so-called Intelligence Community Assessment of Jan. 6, 2017.

Questions Questions indeed ...

The Great Unraveling ...

In the scheme of things, a freak lightning storm near the North Pole probably isn’t the biggest concern about the rapidly warming Arctic. But it’s yet another sign that the Arctic continues to have an abnormal one this summer.

Earth is struck by lightning roughly 8 million times per day. That’s 100 strikes per minute. But very few of those lightning bolts hit in the northern tier of the world, and very rarely near the Arctic. Yet over the weekend, the National Weather Service’s Fairbanks office reported lightning within 300 miles of the North Pole.

The Great Unraveling indeed.

WISPR

The solar wind, courtesy, the Parker Solar Probe.

Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instrument captures images of solar wind structures as they stream out from the Sun, allowing scientists to connect them with Parker's in situ measurements from its other instruments.

This video, which spans Nov. 6-10, 2018, combines views from both WISPR telescopes during Parker Solar Probe's first solar encounter. The Sun is out of frame past the combined image's left side, so the solar wind flows from left to right past the view of the telescopes. The bright structure near the center of the left edge is what's known as a streamer —  a relatively dense, slow flow of solar wind coming from the Sun — originating from near the Sun's equator.

The video appears to speed up and slow down throughout the movie because of the ways data is stored at different points in Parker Solar Probe's orbit. Near perihelion, the closest approach to the Sun, the spacecraft stores more images — and more frames for a given section make the video appear to slow down. These images have been calibrated and processed to remove background noise.

Seen below is a very elegant animation of the solar wind. :)

How cool is that? :)

In the shadow ...

Yet another reason why science rocks. :)

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This 17-minute film explores the efforts that led to this historic image, from the science of Einstein and Schwarzschild to the struggles and successes of the EHT collaboration.

Like money, science never sleeps.