European Country With The Most Space Junk

Space is getting increasingly crowded and experts in Europe are sounding the alarm. This was made mre urget by the report from the European Space Agency that says "around 1,200 pieces of rocket and satellite debris fell back to Earth last year".

And as 54,000 space junk pieces larger than 10cm remain floating around the planet, the organization adds that they are even increasing in "number and size." Other experts argue the rate of returning objects could reach 15 a day within ten years.

France is reportedly the European nation that is posing the highest orbital risk, with 533 pieces of debris and rocket bodies scattered in orbit, as well as 105 active satellites.

That's according to a space risk score drafted by aerospace hardware manufacturer YIJIN Hardware, which analysed data compiled by Space-Track.org and N2yo.com.

Its spokesperson Gavin Yi claims a "debris cascade could lock us out of orbit for generations."

"As orbital highways become more congested, Europe's approach to space management will determine whether we maintain access to this critical domain".

France however has implemented the Space Debris Mitigation guidelines adopted by the UN, which include measures to minimise debris creation, like de-orbiting and anti-corrosion treatment for satellites at the end of their lifecycle.

The country also has a Space Operations Act that mandates responsible space activities and debris mitigation strategies.

The UK ranks second, purely because it operates the largest satellite fleet on the continent (658). Its debris creation is actually minimal, with only one piece of junk in orbit.

The European Space Agency, too, demonstrated "good orbital waste management", says the report, with 95 satellites and just 27 pieces of debris.

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Biggest Fusion Reactor Has Found Its Heart

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is more than just an exercise in extreme engineering. It is a decades-long effort involving 35 countries, and the stats of the machine highlight the cooperation and expertise of that talent pool.

When completer, ITER will be able to withstand temperatures 10 times hotter than the core of the Sun (150 million degrees Celsius) while also keeping certain components of itself near absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius).

At the heart of this engineering miracle is a 3,000-ton magnet system central to creating an "invisible shield" that keeps superheated plasma contained long enough to kickstart a fusion reaction.

Last 30 April, the ITER team announced that the last piece of this magnetic puzzle—the Central Solenoid—has been built and tested in the U.S. and is now ready for assembly at the ITER facility in France.

Once assembled, this solenoid will be the world’s most powerful magnet. The magnet is so powerful, in fact, that it’s capable of completely levitating an aircraft carrier, according to an ITER press release. It will be contained inside an "exoskeleton" — made of 9,000 individual parts from eight U.S. suppliers—which will support the Central Solenoid as it generates extreme forces capable of kickstarting a fusion reaction.

Although ITER is fundamentally different from our Sun (of course), it does work in a somewhat similar fashion. The Sun uses a "too big to fail" fusion regime—its transparent mass (330,000 times more than that of the Earth) is enough to fuse hydrogen nuclei into helium. On Earth, however, scientists need to compensate for this lack of mass with even more heat.

At a certain temperature threshold, deuterium, and tritium—isotopes of hydrogen that will be used as fuel in ITER—overcome electromagnetic repulsion via quantum tunneling and fuse. Some quick calculations using everyone’s favorite equation e=mc2 show that converting a little mass can give you tons of energy.

ITER’s 10,000 tons worth of superconducting magnets (with a combined energy of 51 gigajoules) will maintain the plasma for long enough at high enough temperatures for this fusion reaction to take place. By the scientists’ estimates, ITER should produce 500 megawatts of power for only 50 megawatts of input heating power—a 10 fold increase.

However, that’s still a long ways off, as recent ITER estimates place the reactor’s first plasma date at around 2035. But once this gargantuan machine of human ingenuity is completely, we will have truly bottled a star—or, at least, a close approximation of it.

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Physicists Claimed To Unlock The "Black Hole Bomb" Concept

Several physicists repported that they've built the first-ever "black hole bomb" — an ominous-sounding concept that dates back to the late 1960s, but that serves as little more than a harmless proof of concept.

As New Scientist published, the idea is to boost energy with a black hole, then trap it with mirrors until you get an explosion. However, what the team created in a lab is a harmless test, without a real black hole that could suck the planet into oblivion.

And instead of looking for ways to wipe enemy alien civilizations off the map, the goal of the research is to study how black holes drag and accelerate the fabric of space-time around themselves, a phenomenon first theorized by physicist Roger Penrose in 1969.

In 1971, Belarusian physicist Yakov Zel'dovich came up with a spinning system to investigate whether the rotational energy of a black hole could be extracted by exploiting the extreme conditions inside it without breaking the laws of conservation of energy. At the scale of a real black hole light-years away, the energy generated and released could be as much as a supernova, according to existing theories.

In the latest experiment, detailed in a draft paper awaiting peer review, coauthor and University of Southampton physics professor Hendrik Ulbricht and his colleagues investigated the "Zel'dovich effect," using a cylindrical mirror to amplify energy and create a positive feedback loop.

Starting in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Ulbricht built an early proof of concept out of a rotating aluminum cylinder and magnetic fields.

"Everything was closed, and I was really bored and I wanted to do something, so I built the setup and started to do these experiments, and I saw amplification," he told New Scientist. "I was so super excited that, actually, you could say it rescued me during COVID."

With the help of a team he assembled, the researchers built on his vision, rotating magnetized metal coils around a cylinder at high speeds. And surprisingly, the team ended up with an even larger magnetic field than they started with.

"You throw a low-frequency electromagnetic wave against a spinning cylinder, who would think that you get back more than what you threw in?" University of Lisbon professor of physics Vitor Cardoso, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist. "It’s totally mind boggling."

Even without a magnetic field being generated by the coils, the setup would still generate a signal, indicating the experiment seemingly confirmed existing theories about how energy behaves near a black hole.

"We’re basically generating a signal from noise, and that is the same thing that happens in the black hole bomb proposal," Ulbricht told New Scientist.

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Fake Door From Ancient Egypt Led To Nowhere

Mystery is surrounding the one-of-a-kind discovery within the Saqqara necropolis (south of Cairo, Egypt), after archaeologists found a pink granite door inside a tomb standing over 14 feet tall. The intrigue ratcheted up yet another notch when the archaeologists realized it was, in fact, a fake door. It led nowhere.

The oversized pink door wasn’t the only curious find inside the tomb of Prince Waser-If-Re—son of King Userkaf, the founder of Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty. In a joint operation between the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Zahi Hawass Foundation for Archaeological and Heritage, the 4,000-year-old discovery had plenty more intrigue baked in, according to a translated announcement from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The tomb contained 13 high-backed chairs, each of which featured statues carved out of pink granite. The Egyptian experts, which included famed archaeologist Zahi Hawass, said (according to the State Information Service) that the statues were likely of the prince’s wives, although two of the 13 were headless.

The false door, which was over three feet wide, is the first of its kind in material and size ever to be found from ancient Egypt. It was directly connected to the prince’s tomb, and featured hieroglyphs carved on the door listing Prince Waser-If-Re’s litany of titles: "Hereditary Prince," "Royal Scribe," "Vizier," "Judge," "Governor of Buto and Nekheb," and "Chanting Priest."

A secondary entrance—this one also adorned with pink granite—featured a cartouche of King Neferirkare.

Granite and statues alike also proliferated the rest of the site. The team found a toppled-over black granite statue (over four feet in length) and a red granite table (roughly three feet in diameter), the latter of which featured carved text describing ritual sacrifices.

While the tomb was originally created as part of the Old Kingdom, it was reused along the way—likely during the 26th Dynasty, Hawass said. The team found a black granite statue of a male standing over four feet tall, with names and titles inscribed on the granite that link it directly to the 26th Dynasty.

Archaeologists also discovered statues of King Djoser, his wife, and 10 daughters. Hawass believes that the statues were once located inside a room next to the king’s pyramid and subsequently moved to the tomb of Prince Waser-If-Re. Archaeologists will remain on site to see if they can decipher why the statues were moved from their original positions, and find out what else they can learn from the granite-filled tomb of a prince.

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Ancient Rome Doesn't Have A Concept Of Homosexuality

Liberals and progressives always touted that during the heght of the Roman Empire, homosexuality was allowed and widespread. This is false because Romans doesn't have a concept of sexual orientation then as we do now.

Rather than aqour hetero-normative society, they were a bi-normative society, in which men were supposed to sleep with women for reproduction and other men for pleasure.

Romans sexual mores also operated on "prison rules". A man may penetrate a woman because she is lower in social status than him. A man may also penetrate another man if he is of a lower station. But a man may not be penetrated by another man of lower status. He may not be penetrated by someone poorer, less connected, or even younger than him because that’s gay.

These same sexual mores survive in modern day prisons. Men, heterosexual men, will develop "situational homosexuality" in an all male environment. And that situational homosexuality will be used to construct a social hierarchy. This is essentially what happened in Rome. Rome was a very patriarchal society, in which women were considered property, and in which women and men didn’t interact much unless they were married.

Homosexual sex became the preferred means of recreational sex, because it didn’t risk pregnancy, and it didn’t "de-value" someone’s daughter.

Everything slowly change when Christianity, or rather when Judaism, was introduced. Many cultures had some acceptable form of homosexuality during this time, except for Judaism. The religion had a pretty blanket ban on the matter.

Some historians surmised that the ban on homosexual activity was related to the idea that sex should produce children. It should be noted that Rome was, at one point, was beset on all sides by enemies, suffered from a high mortality rate, and a high infant mortality rate. And so the ban on homosexuality emerged as a means of ensuring the survival of the tribe.

When Christianity was founded from the teachings of Judaism, it immediately spread throughout the Roman Empire, and eventually to Europe. It carried with it the Jewish sexual mores. Soon after, Medieval Europe had a ban on homosexuality, just like Judaism.

Even today, if you look at many extremely conservative Abrahamic groups, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, they have a ban on both homosexuality and contraceptives. And they’re both rooted in the same fundamental concept. That sex is supposed to produce children.

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Scientists Develop Tool To Fight Microplastics Threat

The more everyone learns about microplastics pollution, the more they have come to realize just how troublesome it really is, but a group of scientists recently developed a technology that could help alleviate the problem by improving our knowledge of it.

According to Phys.org, researchers in Michigan have developed a way to better identify the chemical makeup of microplastics collected from the environment.

Microplastics are everywhere … literally. They're in the oceans, our waterways, the air, the soil, the food we eat, and our bodies. Research has shown that microplastics are connected to a plethora of severe health complications, including cancer, developmental issues, autoimmune conditions, and neurological diseases.

Scientists determine what chemicals make up a sample of microplastic using spectroscopy, which entails observing how a substance reacts to light. It either absorbs or scatters light and then creates a unique pattern called the spectrum, which identifies the substance's "chemical fingerprint."

The current process involves researchers feeding a dataset of spectra whose identities are known to train a machine learning algorithm that learns to predict a substance's chemical makeup. The problem is that some plastics have similar chemical makeups, which can lead to similar chemical fingerprints, leading to uncertainty in the identification process.

While the newly developed process, using conformal prediction, doesn't eliminate uncertainty, it allows researchers to at least narrow down the microplastic's chemical makeup. To do this, researchers train the machine learning algorithm with a calibration set of known spectra. The conformation prediction then analyzes the differences between the predictions and the correct identities, and it adds other possibilities.

Rather than predict a single identity with uncertainty, the new process gives a set of possible identities with a high level of confidence that one of them is correct.

The team brought in an expert to manually label the particles with the correct identity, and every set produced by the new process contained the correct identity.

Developments like this will help researchers better understand the growing problem of microplastics pollution by giving those researchers a better idea of what chemical makeups are being found where. This could help inform mitigation and cleanup efforts, as well as future legislation tackling the issue.

Ambuj Tewari, a University of Michigan professor who took part in the research, wrote in The Conversation: "Data from microplastics analyses can inform health recommendations and policy decisions, so it's important for the people making those calls to know how reliable the analysis is."

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Pursuit For Limitless Energy Continues

Several simulations have revealed new breakthroughs in temperature management for the "super-high-field advanced reactor concept" fusion reactor, advancing this sustainable, carbon-free energy project toward commercialization.

SPARC, one of many fusion projects in development, is a public-private partnership including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and General Atomics, as detailed by Innovation News Network.

Using computational code from PPPL called M3D-C1, researchers have fine-tuned a gas-injection system to manage the extreme temperatures within the project's doughnut-shaped tokamak reactor.

Fusion promises a source of nearly limitless energy by mimicking the processes powering the stars, including our sun. Atoms (usually hydrogen atoms) in a plasma fuse at incredibly high temperatures, releasing energy in the process, but since Earth has weaker gravitational forces, we need to use temperatures hotter than the core of the sun, as the International Atomic Energy Agency detailed.

Given the intense heat, the superheated plasma inside a reactor needs to be managed effectively. If that plasma gets disrupted, it needs to be cooled down quickly in order to prevent damage to the device, as PPPL explained.

Through M3D-C1 code simulations, the researchers found that six valves spaced around the reactor, with three at the top and three below, help provide optimal protection against damage while maximizing valuable interior space.

"We don't currently have any material that can withstand the power per area that may be deposited during such an event," said Andreas Kleiner, the study's lead author and a staff research scientist at PPPL.

"If there is no management of these events, the heat that is ejected toward the first wall can melt it."

Each simulation takes weeks to run, even on the team's powerful exascale computers, and it's run through a variety of configurations already to reach this specific conclusion.

"These are the most comprehensive disruption simulations that had been done to that point," said PPPL deputy head of theory Nate Ferraro, who co-authored the study.

"We could have modeled this before but not with this level of accuracy," Kleiner added.

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Formation Of Space Force Is Close To Realization

The science fiction about eartThe U.S. Space Force continues to prepare to fight a war in Earth's orbit.

For years, Space Force has been training units to conduct orbital warfare, calling upon American industries to develop new spacecraft and weaponry as well as creating international partnerships to maintain peaceful norms in space. Now, the United States' newest military branch has an official "Space Warfighting" framework that outlines how Space Force leadership can train and prepare units for a war in space.

The document "establishes a common lexicon for counterspace operations" and lays out a "range of responsible offensive and defensive actions Guardians may employ to maintain control of space" and ensure the success of the U.S. military, according to a Space Force statement accompanying its release.

The Space Force's warfighting framework describes both offensive and defensive operations and largely focuses on space superiority, which "may involve seeking out and destroying an enemy's spacecraft", the document notes.

Space superiority, like air superiority, broadly defines a military's ability to project military power in space in order to protect its satellites or other assets in orbit, or to use that power to deny an adversary the use of their own spacecraft.

The service's new warfighting framework notes that, unlike warfare in other domains, combat in space will involve highly automated systems that "filter or reduce human decision making" due to the fact that spacecraft operate at high speeds over long distances in orbits that are often crowded with other satellites. "Detailed analysis must help us characterize how and when humans interact with these systems," the report notes.

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