Their ongoing interaction was set in motion between 25 and 75 million years ago, when the Penguin (individually catalogued as NGC 2936) and the Egg (NGC 2937) completed their first pass. They will go on to shimmy and sway, completing several additional loops before merging into a single galaxy hundreds of millions of years from now.

The James Webb Space Telescope takes constant observations, including images and highly detailed data known as spectra. Its operations have led to a ‘parade’ of discoveries by astronomers around the world. It has never felt more possible to explore every facet of the Universe.

The telescope’s specialisation in capturing infrared light – which is beyond what our own eyes can detect – shows these galaxies, collectively known as Arp 142, locked in a slow cosmic dance. Webb’s observations (which combine near- and mid-infrared light from Webb’s NIRCam [Near-InfraRed Camera] and MIRI [Mid-Infrared Instrument], respectively) clearly show that they are joined by a blue haze that is a mix of stars and gas, a result of their mingling.

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And here's a followup video on the James Webb Space Telescope YouTube channel: A Tour of Arp 142

High-temperature fusion plasma experiments conducted in the Large Helical Device (LHD) of the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), have renewed the world record for an acquired data amount, 0.92 terabytes (TB) per experiment, in February 2022, by using a full range of state-of-the-art plasma diagnostic devices.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is currently under construction in France through the international collaboration of seven parties, is expected to generate approximately 1 TB of data per experiment in 10 years, and LHD is currently the only experiment in the world that produces data closely aligned to ITER.

The promotion of "Open Science," in which large-scale research data assets are utilized and shared across society, was adopted as a joint statement at the G7 meeting held in Sendai, Japan in 2023. NIFS started full-fledged efforts toward Open Science by establishing the "Open Access Policy" in February 2022 and the "Research Data Policy" in October 2022.

Since 2023, all the data obtained from LHD experiments are open to the public immediately after acquisition and analysis is completed. All computing program source codes for data analysis are also openly available.

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cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/13128061

archive link: https://archive.ph/JlyLf

SEATTLE (AP) — William Anders, the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic “Earthrise” photo showing the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968, was killed Friday when the plane he was piloting alone plummeted into the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He was 90.

His son, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Greg Anders, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. “The family is devastated,” he said. “He was a great pilot and we will miss him terribly.” William Anders, a retired major general, has said the photo was his most significant contribution to the space program along with making sure the Apollo 8 command module and service module worked.

The photograph, the first color image of Earth from space, is one of the most important photos in modern history for the way it changed how humans viewed the planet. The photo is credited with sparking the global environmental movement for showing how delicate and isolated Earth appeared from space.

NASA Administrator and former Sen. Bill Nelson said Anders embodied the lessons and the purpose of exploration.

“He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves,” Nelson wrote on the social platform X.

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cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/9303135

Huh, though the #ElonMusk clock is broken, this is one of the times of the day it’s still correct:

Elon Musk accused Sam Altman and OpenAI of pursuing profit over bettering humanity in a new breach of contract lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court yesterday, Feb. 29.

Musk helped Altman found OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 (Musk left the board of directors in 2018 and no longer has a stake). Central to the lawsuit is OpenAI’s “founding agreement,” which, per the lawsuit, stated the lab would build artificial general intelligence (AGI) “for the benefit of humanity,” not to “maximize shareholder profits,” and that the technology would be “open-source” and not kept “secret for propriety commercial reasons.”

Musk’s new lawsuit alleges that OpenAI has reversed course on this agreement, particularly through its $13 billion partnership with Microsoft. It further calls out the secrecy shrouding the tech behind OpenAI’s flagship Chat GPT-4 language model and major changes to the company’s board following Altman’s tumultuous hiring and re-firing last year.

“These events of 2023 constitute flagrant breaches of the Founding Agreement, which Defendants have essentially turned on its head,” the suit reads. “To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”

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[archive link]

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/9006187

Over the past week or so there has been a serious spam problem hitting mastodon and rest of the fediverse especially misskey over on the japanese side of things and the story behind it is absolutely wild.

Japan's space agency said early Saturday that its spacecraft is on the moon, but is still "checking its status." More details will be given at a news conference, officials said.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, came down onto the lunar surface at around 12:20 a.m. Tokyo time Saturday (1520 GMT Friday). No astronauts were onboard the spacecraft.

If SLIM landed successfully, Japan would become the fifth country to accomplish the feat after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India.

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Video description:

Mint 21.3 is still based on Ubuntu 22.04 and its super old kernel, version 5.15. You do get the Mesa drivers version 23, but you don't get the latest Nvidia drivers either, you're still on 535.

So, you can select that new Wayland session from the login screen. I tested this on a spare laptop that uses an Intel Xe integrated GPU, and also has a dedicated Nvidia GPU.

At first glance, everything seems to work ok, but it's an experimental session, and it's missing a few things. OBS, for example, has no source for the display: Cinnamon doesn't seem to support the screen sharing protocol through pipewire, so OBS has nothing to display here. You won't be sharing your screen to anyone just yet.

Another issue I encountered is the lack of any sudo graphical prompt: anytime I needed to install a package or update the system, I had to use the command line.

I also got some inconsistencies in the place where menus appeared, there were also a few things that I couldn't find, like changing the keyboard layout in the Wayland session, the "layouts" tab doesn't appear in the settings where it should be. The gestures of Cinnamon also don't work here for now, you can enable them, but they won't do anything.

The hot corners did work though, with their nice animations and features, but there were some weird graphical things happening. Some settings pages also seemed to have some sort of infinite scroll and didn't stop at their own content, which was a bit weird.

After that, I tried the Wayland session on Nvidia, and, all the problems I had experienced previously were still there, obviously, because they all are missing features in that experimental session, so no reason to expect them to work better here. But I also didn't get any other issue that I didn't see in the wayland session with the Mesa drivers.

So just as a little experiment, I also decided to run a game in the Wayland session, namely Warhammer 40K Mechanicus:

• Wayland + Intel: 25-32 FPS
• Wayland + Nvidia: 60-65 FPS
• X11 + Intel: 32-37 FPS
• X11 + Nvidia: 65-75 FPS

Ok, so now, let's talk about the other changes in Linux Mint 21.3. In terms of apps updates, Hypnotix, the TV watching app now lets you set channels as favorites. You can also create your own custom TV channels if you want.

Cinnamon will also now let you download Actions. These are add-ons for the file manager, that will appear in the right click context menu, letting you do, well, custom actions.

Warpinator, the file sharing app now lets you connect to a device manually by just entering its IP address of scanning a QR code. The Sticky Notes app can now be managed by DBus, meaning you can manage notes using scripts, and the bulk rename tool of Mint now supports drag and drop and thumbnails.

As per the desktop itself, you can now use 75% fractional scaling on X11 if you want that, you can also set keybinds to change the window opacity again, you can disable stylus buttons if you use that sort of hardware, and gestures got a bit better with the ability to set a gesture to zoom in on the desktop.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/7345931

The average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers.

Scientists long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at Columbia and Rutgers universities did their calculations they never knew how many or what kind. Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per liter, averaging at around 240,000 according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These are particles that are less than a micron in size. There are 25,400 microns — also called micrometers because it is a millionth of a meter — in an inch. A human hair is about 83 microns wide.

Previous studies have looked at slightly bigger microplastics that range from the visible 5 millimeters, less than a quarter of an inch, to one micron. About 10 to 100 times more nanoplastics than microplastics were discovered in bottled water, the study found.

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cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/6758033

Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20231222185134/https://www.npr.org/2023/12/22/1221128897/masha-gessen-essay-israel-gaza-germany-hannah-arendt-prize

Prominent Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen received a prestigious award for political thought over the weekend, in a ceremony that almost didn't happen due to backlash over their recent writings on Israel-Gaza.

Israel's air-and-ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 20,000 people in the 10 weeks since the Hamas-led attack on Israel killed some 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage.

Gessen, who is Jewish and whose family lost loved ones in the Holocaust, has been criticized for a New Yorker essay published earlier this month in which they likened the Gaza Strip to the WWII-era ghettos that Nazis developed to segregate and control Jewish people in occupied Europe.

Gessen argues in the essay that treating the Holocaust as a "singular event," unlike anything that has occurred before or after in history, not only is incorrect but makes it impossible to learn lessons from the Holocaust that are needed to prevent future genocides.

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Release Notes: https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_virginia.php

What's New: https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_virginia_whatsnew.php

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/6327031

World leaders, international rights groups and United Nations officials have criticised the United States for vetoing a UN resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and failing to halt the war that has killed more than 17,400 Palestinians and about 1,100 people in Israel since October 7.

A UN resolution on the pause in hostilities failed to pass on Friday at the UN Security Council after the United States vetoed the proposal and Britain abstained.

The remaining 13 of the 15 current members of the UNSC voted in favour of the resolution put forward by the United Arab Emirates and co-sponsored by 100 other countries.

Here are some of the reactions:

Palestine

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the US’s veto made it “complicit” in war crimes in Gaza. “The president has described the American position as aggressive and immoral, a flagrant violation of all humanitarian principles and values, and holds the United States responsible for the bloodshed of Palestinian children, women and elderly people in the Gaza Strip,” a statement from his office said.

Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said the veto was “a disgrace and another blank cheque given to the occupying state to massacre, destroy and displace”.

Palestine’s UN envoy Riyad Mansour told the UNSC that the result of the vote was “disastrous”. “If you are against the destruction and displacement of the Palestinian people you must stand against this war. And if you support it then you are enabling this destruction and displacement regardless of your intentions … Millions of Palestinian lives hang in the balance. Every single one of them is sacred, worth saving.”

Hamas strongly condemned the US veto, saying it considers Washington’s move “unethical and inhumane”. “The US obstruction of the issuance of a ceasefire resolution is a direct participation with the occupation in killing our people and committing more massacres and ethnic cleansing,” Izzat al-Risheq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said in a statement.

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Few predicted that the smash hit video game of 2023 would feature old-school game mechanics, hours of brooding cutscenes and a vexing learning curve.

Yet “Baldur’s Gate 3,” a 20-year-old title based on a 50-year-old role-playing game, has already become one of the highest-rated video games of all time.

“This is a very specific niche of game,” admitted Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian, its developer. “We’ve never been about the money.”

Nonetheless, since Larian released the title in August 2023, the company has been raking in the money. And it has done this with a rare focus on elements like story and character, upending the industry’s conventional wisdom about what it takes to create a blockbuster game.

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