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Enlarge / Artist's conception of the early Solar System, which was at risk of a nearby supernova. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Stars are thought to form within enormous filaments of molecular gas. Regions where one or more of these filaments meet, known as hubs, are where massive stars form.
These massive stars, located nearby, would have put the early Solar System at risk of a powerful supernova. This risk is more than just hypothetical; a research team at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, led by astrophysicist Doris Arzoumanian, looked at isotopes found in ancient meteorites, finding possible evidence of a massive star’s turbulent death.
So why did the Solar System survive? The gas within the filament seems to be able to protect it from the supernova and its onslaught of radioactive isotopes. “The host filament can shield the young Solar System from stellar feedback, both during the formation and evolution of stars (stellar outflow, wind, and radiation) and at the end of their lives (supernovae),” Arzoumanian and her team said in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Enlarge / Artist's view of what InSight looked like after landing. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Mars appears to be a frozen expanse of red dust, gaping craters, and rocky terrain on the outside—but what lies beneath its wind-blasted surface? NASA’s InSight lander might have discovered this before it took its proverbial last breaths in a dust storm.
Whether the core of Mars is solid or liquid has been long debated. While there is no way to observe the Martian core directly, InSight tried. Its seismometer, SEIS, was the first instrument to find possible evidence of a liquid core. In the meantime, its RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) instrument had been measuring minuscule changes in the planet’s rotation as it orbited, “wobbles” in its axis caused by the push and pull of the Sun’s gravity.
“Our analysis of InSight’s radio tracking data argues against the existence of a solid inner core and reveals the shape of the core, indicating that there are internal mass anomalies deep within the mantle,” write the researchers behind the instrument in a study recently published in Nature.
On late Saturday morning, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft successfully lifted off Cape Canaveral, Florida. The near-infrared telescope, named after the ancient Greek mathematician who is widely considered the father of geometry, will study how dark matter and dark energy shape the universe.
In addition to a 600-megapixel camera astronomers will use to image a third of the night sky over the next six years, Euclid is equipped with a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer for measuring the redshift of galaxies. In conjunction with data from ground observatories, that information will assist scientists with estimating the distance between different galaxies. As The New York Times notes, one hope of physicists is that Euclid will allow them to determine whether Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity works differently on a cosmic scale. There’s a genuine possibility the spacecraft could revolutionize our understanding of physics and even offer a glimpse of the ultimate fate of the universe.
👋 Safe travels, #ESAEuclid!
— ESA's Euclid mission (@ESA_Euclid) July 1, 2023
The #DarkUniverse 🕵️♂️ detective ventures into the unknown. pic.twitter.com/JvWBpIz4Sx
“If we want to understand the universe we live in, we need to uncover the nature of dark matter and dark energy and understand the role they played in shaping our cosmos,” said Carole Mundell, the ESA’s director of science. “To address these fundamental questions, Euclid will deliver the most detailed map of the extra-galactic sky.”
With Euclid now in space, it will travel approximately a million miles to the solar system’s second Lagrange point. That’s the same area of space where the James Webb Space Telescope has been operating for the past year. It will take Euclid about a month to travel there, and another three months for the ESA to test the spacecraft’s instruments before Euclid can begin sending data back to Earth.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/europes-euclid-space-telescope-launches-to-map-the-dark-universe-175331413.html?src=rssEuclid launch
A shot of the Euclid space telescope against the dark of space.
Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket soars through the sky over Cape Canaveral with Europe's Euclid space telescope. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)
A European Space Agency telescope launched Saturday on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida to begin a $1.5 billion mission seeking to answer fundamental questions about the unseen forces driving the expansion of the Universe. The Euclid telescope, named for the ancient Greek mathematician, will observe billions of galaxies during its six-year survey of the sky, measuring their shapes and positions going back 10 billion years, more than 70 percent of cosmic history.
Led by the European Space Agency, the Euclid mission has the ambitious goal of helping astronomers and cosmologists learn about the properties and influence of dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up about 95 percent of the Universe. The rest of the cosmos is made of regular atoms and molecules that we can see and touch.
“To highlight the challenge we face, I would like to give the analogy: It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there’s no cat,” said Henk Hoekstra, a professor and cosmologist at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “That’s a little bit of the situation we find ourselves in because we have these observations … But we lack a good theory. So far, nobody has come up with a good explanation for dark matter or dark energy.”
Enlarge / Saturn stars in this near-infrared image taken June 25 by the James Webb Space Telescope. (credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STSci)
The James Webb Space Telescope has observed Saturn for the first time, completing a family portrait of the Solar System’s ringed planets nearly a year after the mission’s first jaw-dropping image release.
Webb’s near-infrared camera took the picture of Saturn on June 25. Scientists added orange color to the monochrome picture to produce the image released Friday.
The picture shows Saturn’s iconic icy rings shining around the disk of the gas giant, which appears much darker in near-infrared due to the absorption of sunlight by methane particles suspended high in the planet’s atmosphere.
“Are you seriously telling me that this hot mash of mushrooms and fruit is going to completely heal his wounds?” (Gilbert 2019)
It is summer 2020 and I, like many others, am sequestered indoors clutching my recently acquired Nintendo Switch playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). In wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world seemed to swarm either to their handy technological devices or towards the soothing arms of nature. Luckily for me, my technological device included encounters with some virtual greenery—the trees and flowers of my beloved tropical Animal Crossing island.
Thao and Zucker having a nighttime picnic in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Screen shot by Author)
As I planted my strategically planned flower beds and traveled from mystery island to island collecting fruits which I didn’t have, I also consulted many online forums for guidance. To my surprise, I stumbled upon PETA’s Vegan Guide to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Within, I found several suggestions on how to play the game while supporting vegan ethics. My favourite part? The commentary on what foods within the game are vegan friendly. While nowadays it’s possible to cook a variety of dishes in ACNH (even seasonal varieties!) much of the early discourse on food in ACNH was about how powerful vegan diets are. In the game, you can literally dig up entire trees with the nourishment provided after eating a singular luscious virtual fruit. Sadly, this spurred some backlash from players arguing about: (1) the boundaries of our onlife and offline selves, (2) the potential of video games as pedagogy, and (3) the politics of digital and virtual foods. But how is it possible to extract all of these insights, politics, ethics, and social tensions from a game mimicking an agricultural life on a tropical waterfront property we all secretly desire during daydreams?
In this piece I apply my concept of Digital Food Spaces (DFS) or “online communities and platforms dedicated to the sharing of food-centered ideas and media” (Dam 2023) to the realm of video-gaming. I draw from both personal experiences and the insights of fellow gamers who I recruited via Twitter. Through our conversations I apply my theory into practice by analyzing the DFS of ACNH to examine how users conceptualize and interact with food in video games. Twitter (at its peak) had the capability to house and foster dialogues of every topic without reserve—food was just one of many, and as Schneider et al. (2018) has demonstrated, contentious discussion draws activist responses in the form of digital food activism by users.
From these conversations and interdisciplinary literature review I present three arguments:
Matt’s Animal Crossing: New Horizon character chats with Franklin, the Turkey Day chef. (Screen shot by Matt Fifield)
While there are video games whose sole focus is to highlight food and related processes like cooking and eating (e.g. Overcooked and Cooking Mama), I include all games which feature some aspect of food within its play and/or landscapes. I should clarify that even though something in a game is edible by characters, I try to focus on what we can colloquially code as “food” through its relatability to offline counterparts. Basically, a food is a food within a video game if its origins can be traced back to a particular food or food idea which exists offline to some degree.[1] This tracing is rather open, considering video games also feature mockeries of offline eats for several reasons. As a result, the boundaries of onlife (Van Est et al. 2014, Floridi et al. 2015) and offline in this piece are flexibly framed because they easily flow into one another and inevitably shape each other. As Floridi et al. (2015) emphasise, because ICTS[2] shape our (1) self conceptions, (2) mutual interactions, (3) realities, and (4) our interactions with reality, there are ongoing instances of boundary blurring between reality and virtuality as well as between humans, machines, and nature. Therefore, we can easily translate insights between the different realms and apply interventions and solutions accordingly—furthering the range of intimacy that technologies have with us presently and in the future (Van Est et al. 2014).
Digital Food Spaces (DFS) are not limited to social media sites and platforms, considering discussions about food take place almost everywhere online. Given that gaming (in practice and interest) continues to grow in popularity across age groups, it is essential that we include video games in our examinations of onlives and their capabilities of shaping the offline. Such insights are crucial for identifying and charting the transformations of how people are perceiving, understanding, and engaging with different foods—most especially when they allude to offline counterparts and processes.
A common feature which links many games together is the association of life/health points being replenished by consumable items in-game, much of which are stylized as food items. Gone are the days of only red health-boosting and blue mana-boosting potions—we’ve got entire menus of gourmet foods to fill player stats and inventories now.
This has led to much reactionary discussions and creations both online and offline. Entire online communities dedicate themselves to the recreation of these edibles in their own kitchens. Whether it’s a Reddit thread, a Facebook post, or a multi-video series on YouTube, gamers are experimenting with ways to bring the fantastical foods they encounter in their favorite games into their offline lives. Several dining establishments have also launched with these sentiments, but take a more reflexive approach through creating dishes inspired by in-game characters, locations, and items—for example the (unofficial) League of Legends restaurant “Challenger” based in China. However, for those of us who wish to capture the magic at home, there is also a growing video game cookbook collection which can teach you how to make foods from games like Destiny, The Elder Scrolls, World of Warcraft, the Fallout franchise, Sims, Minecraft, Street Fighter, and more.
Some games simulate the food production and preparation processes. In the Harvest Moon series, you’re a farmer with both crops and animals which grow and transform across the seasons. In several games it is possible to hunt creatures and cook them.[3] The Cooking Mama series allows us to pick recipes, prepare them step-by-step, and receive reviews on the final dishes. Overall, video games allow players several opportunities to critically consider and connect with foods and associated activities. This inevitably spurs discussion and prompts the formation and articulation of food-related opinions and perspectives among players. Within the DFS paradigm, video games are like entrées—catalysts of inspiration to explore and engage with foods in ways that go beyond the virtual.
Video-gaming universes are seemingly infinite, in both creativity and vastness. Within, there are places for every wacky interaction and dream in between. We create our avatars from an assortment of options, and we attempt to explore the crevices of how we see (or would like to see) ourselves and the world through these choices. When given the tools (ICTs) in video games, we test the limits of what’s possible and appropriate. This logic extends to food in games as well. Think about so-called “dubious food” in the Legend of Zelda series:
“Dubious Food” from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Screen shot by Author)
“It’s too gross to even look at. A bizarre smell issues forth from this heap. Eating it won’t hurt you, though…probably” (In-game description, Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2017)
This food experimentation through hunting, gathering, and preparing foods often occurs in many explorational “open world” games, like The Elder Scrolls franchise and newer Pokémon games. For players, it provides a wider range of engagement and creativity with virtual foods while also providing insights into how cooking and mealtimes transform relationships between the player’s virtual body, their surroundings, and their in-game companions. VR games take this to the extreme by directly translating players’ physical movements into virtual simulations for added experiential depth. Hilariously, it is important to note that not all video game foods are helpful. Some creations also actively harm in-game health status and abilities, mirroring food poisoning experiences to some degree.
Video games easily initiate learning through vicarious consumption (Veblen 2007). As players encounter, prepare, and consume virtual foods, they increase their familiarity and knowledge around them (Staiano 2014). In turn, it sparks further curiosity and thinking around the foods and their offline cultural and historical inspirations. Often, players find this learned food-related information applicable in offline scenarios and conversations even in the cases where the foods are entirely fictional.
“Cooking foods in virtual reality has transferred over to what I apply in the kitchen. I used to bake bread but I got to know a number of pastries and deserts like tiramisu.” (personal communication, @Zay_ZYXWV)
“The Fallout games have all the disgusting foods. But also a lot of parodies of actual American snacks I guess. I don’t get all of them because I am from Germany, but I have a sense that they are versions of actual foods.” (personal communication, @PrimoRCavallo)
“I recently played the controversial Russian game Atomic Heart. One of the primary themes is the Soviet Union, and one of the main food factors which is a completely mandatory item for traversing the game is condensed milk, alongside bottles of vodka. I thought it was an odd choice for a power up item in a game, but after spending some time looking into it it seems like those two items had some high degree of value to the survival of those geographical people due to their long shelf life and stability in indeterminate situations.” (personal communication, @TheAbeg)
Considering many games have foods which are modeled after offline ones, they are useful for learning about foods outside of one’s experiential range. In the MMORPG MapleStory, many places which pay homage to real offline locations have their own special consumables that allude to local dishes, for example: satay, ramen, chili crab, unagi, bento boxes, steamed buns, dumplings, laksa, chicken rice, tacos, and curries. Several tropical fruits and snacks like durian, dragon fruit, dried squid, and dango are also available in-game.
Various food items found in MapleStory SEA. (Screen shot by Author)
Scholars across disciplines have stressed the importance of considering interlinking implications and applications of happenings online with those offline (Boellstorff 2016, Taylor and Nichter 2022). Analysing the interactions and engagements of our onlives within the DFS of gaming universes can provide information about points of interventions (e.g. cases of digital obesogenic environments) or the range of shared interests of certain groups as they pertain to food. While video-gaming only simulates life or death, the impacts of digital obesogenic environments has yet to be thoroughly explored. Video-gaming allows for people to embrace (if not overexaggerate) and explore aspects of their individual values and varied performances of self (Goffman 1959). It is of interest to those working in diplomacy, marketing, and the food industry to pay attention to the reception of foods in video game universes and players’ concerns as starting points for improvements in initiatives of gastrodiplomacy, product design, food communication, and more. Doing so would help generate more interactive and reflective national foods branding given the diversity of gaming communities (Ichijo et al. 2019, White et al. 2019, Dam 2023). Furthermore, there is immense potential to expand digital food studies’ research theories and methodologies in video games while also continuously challenging the boundaries of online and offline. If art does imitate life, how are we to ignore or deny the salience of how people play with and reimagine foods and foodscapes?
[1] An honorable mention for the “dubious food” available in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
[2] Information and communication technologies
[3] There is an exhaustive amount of games where you can hunt creatures and eat them, so to list them all would be…well, exhaustive.
Atsuko Ichijo, Venetia Johannes, and Ronald Ranta. 2019. The Emergence of National Food: The Dynamics of Food and Nationalism. Bloomsbury.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57(4): 387-407.
Dam, Ashley T.K., 2023. “Dining with the Diaspora: Khmerican Digital Gastrodiplomacy”. Platypus Blog. https://blog.castac.org/2023/03/dining-with-the-diaspora-khmerican-digital-gastrodiplomacy/
Gayle, Latoya. 2020. “Nintendo fans mercilessly mock PETA for claiming vegans shouldn’t play Animal Crossing because it features virtual fishing and bug catching”. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8155471/Video-game-players-mercilessly-mock-PETA-vegan-guide-Nintendos-Animal-Crossing.html
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Lynn, Lottie. 2021. “Animal Crossing Cooking: Ingredients and how to unlock cooking in New Horizons explained”. Eurogamer. https://www.eurogamer.net/animal-crossing-cooking-ingredients-how-unlock-new-horizons-8007
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA]. 2020. “PETA’s Vegan Guide to ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons”. https://www.peta.org/features/animal-crossing-new-horizons-vegan/
Schneider, T., Eli, K., Dolan, C., & Ulijaszek, S. (Eds.). (2018). Digital Food Activism (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315109930
Staiano A. E. 2014. Learning by Playing: Video Gaming in Education-A Cheat Sheet for Games for Health Designers. Games for health journal, 3(5), 319–321. https://doi.org/10.1089/g4h.2014.0069
Taylor, Nicole and Mimi Nichter. 2022. A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus. New York: Routledge.
Van Est, R., Rerimassie, V., van Keulen, I. & Dorren, G. 2014. Intimate technology: The battle for Our Body and Behaviour. Rathenau Instituut.
Veblen, Thorstein. 2007. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford UP.
White, Wajeana, Albert A. Barreda, and Stephanie Hein. (2019) “Gastrodiplomacy: Captivating a Global Audience Through Cultural Cuisine-A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Journal of Tourismology 5(2), 127-144.
NASA has launched an innovative air quality monitoring instrument into a fixed-rotation orbit around Earth. The tool is called TEMPO, which stands for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument, and it keeps an eye on a handful of harmful airborne pollutants in the atmosphere, such as nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde and ground-level ozone. These chemicals are the building blocks of smog.
TEMPO traveled to space hitched to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. NASA says the launch was completed successfully, with the atmospheric satellite separating from the rocket without any incidents. NASA acquired the appropriate signal and the agency says the instrument will begin monitoring duties in late May or early June.
Spacecraft separation confirmed! The Intelsat satellite hosting our @NASAEarth & @CenterForAstro#TEMPO mission is flying free from its @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and on its way to geostationary orbit. pic.twitter.com/gKYczeHqV5
— NASA (@NASA) April 7, 2023
TEMPO sits at a fixed geostationary orbit just above the equator and it measures air quality over North America every hour and measures regions spaced apart by just a few miles. This is a significant improvement to existing technologies, as current measurements are conducted within areas of 100 square miles. TEMPO should be able to take accurate measurements from neighborhood to neighborhood, giving a comprehensive view of pollution from both the macro and micro levels.
This also gives us some unique opportunities to pick up new kinds of data, such as changing pollution levels throughout rush hour, the effects of lightning on the ozone layer, the movement of pollution related to forest fires and the long-term effects of fertilizers on the atmosphere, among other data points. More information is never bad.
TEMPO is the middle child in a group of high-powered instruments tracking pollution. South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer went up in 2020, measuring pollution over Asia, and the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-4 satellite launches in 2024 to handle European and North African measurements. Other tracking satellites will eventually join TEMPO up there in the great black, including the forthcoming NASA instrument to measure the planet's crust.
You may notice that TEMPO flew into space on a SpaceX rocket and not a NASA rocket. This is by design, as the agency is testing a new business model to send crucial instruments into orbit. Paying a private company seems to be the more budget-friendly option when compared to sending up a rocket itself.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasa-launches-powerful-air-quality-monitor-to-keep-an-eagle-eye-on-pollution-170321643.html?src=rssNASA TEMPO launch
The NASA TEMPO launch seen at night from a distance, with the rocket blazing as it takes off.
SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission has safely returned to Earth. On Saturday evening, the company’s “Endurance” Dragon spacecraft splashed down off the coast of Florida following a five-month stay at the International Space Station. The capsule was carrying NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japan’s Koichi Wakata and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina.
The four spent 157 days in orbit during an ISS rotation that was one for the history books. As Space.com points out, the Crew-5 mission saw Mann, a member of the Wailaki people, become the first Native American woman to fly in space. It was also the first time a Russian cosmonaut flew aboard a private American spacecraft, a milestone made possible after NASA and Roscosmos signed a seat-sharing agreement last year amid increasing US and Russian tensions due to the war in Ukraine.
Splashdown!#Crew5 is back on Earth, completing a science mission of nearly six months on the @Space_Station. Their @SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft touched down at 9:02pm ET (0202 UTC March 12) near Tampa off the coast of Florida. pic.twitter.com/nLMC0hbKY4
— NASA (@NASA) March 12, 2023
For Wakata, the flight was his fifth return from space, a Japanese record. The mission also marked the second orbital trip for Endurance after the capsule successfully carried the Crew-3 crew back to Earth last fall. The spacecraft will now return to SpaceX’s Dragon Lair facility in Florida for safety checks and refurbishment ahead of its next flight.
Not on the flight was NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who flew to the ISS on MS-22, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that sprung a coolant leak late last year following an apparent micrometeoroid strike. The Endurance crew temporarily retrofitted their ride to carry Rubio in case of an emergency evacuation from the ISS after Roscomos determined MS-22 could only safely transport two people. They later removed those modifications after Russia sent a replacement Soyuz spacecraft to bring Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin back to Earth.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spacexs-crew-5-mission-safely-returns-to-earth-after-five-months-in-space-184759470.html?src=rssSpaceX Crew-5 Mission
Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, left, NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata, right, are seen inside the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft onboard the SpaceX recovery ship Shannon shortly after having landed in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa, Florida, Saturday, March 11, 2023.
Another day, another scrub for the world’s first 3D-printed rocket. On Saturday, Relativity Space’s Terran 1 rocket failed to get off the ground after two launch attempts. It was a day of false starts. Following Wednesday's scrub, Relativity Space initially set its sights on a 1:45PM ET launch, a window the company later pushed back to 2:45PM ET due to "upper-level wind violations."
After the countdown restarted, all was going well until a boat entered the spacecraft’s range. Once the countdown resumed again, the company called a launch abort at t-minus zero after the spacecraft’s nine first-stage Aeon engines roared to life and then cut off almost immediately after. After blaming a "launch commit criteria violation" for the 2:45PM abort, Relativity Space said it would attempt to fly the rocket again at 4PM ET, just as its launch window was about to close for the day. Unfortunately, the second time around Relativity called an abort before Terran 1 could even ignite its engines. As of the writing of this article, the company did not provide a reason for the decision, but said the rocket was "healthy" and that it would have more information to share soon.
Provided it can get off the ground, Terran 1 would represent a significant milestone for spaceflight technology. While the rocket isn’t completely 3D-printed, 85 percent of its mass is – including its entire structure and 10 first- and second-stage engines. In theory, Terran 1’s manufacturing process produces a spacecraft that is cheaper and faster to make. Relativity Space claims it can build a Terran 1 rocket in about 60 days, and that exclusive missions will cost around $12 million to complete. With future spacecraft, the company hopes to make around 90 percent of the vehicle from 3D-printed parts.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/relativity-spaces-3d-printed-rocket-fails-to-lift-off-during-second-launch-attempt-211805294.html?src=rssTerran 1 space rocket
Relativity Space's Terran 1 rocket against a background of blue sky, clouds and palm trees.
A combination of space junk and a growing constellation of functional satellites like SpaceX's Starlink have astronomers worried about the potential for orbital materials to interfere with observations. And justifiably so, given that researchers are currently arguing over whether one observation represents one of the farthest supernovae ever observed or a spent Russian booster.
This clutter is obviously a big problem for ground-based observatories, which sit below everything in orbit. But several observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, sit in low-Earth orbit, which places them below many satellites. And a new survey of Hubble images shows that it's capturing an increasing number of satellite tracks in its images. So far, this hasn't seriously compromised its science, but it clearly shows that orbiting observatories aren't immune to these problems.
The work came from a citizen science project, the Hubble Asteroid Hunter, which organized volunteers to search for the tracks asteroids left in long-exposure Hubble observations. If an asteroid happens to pass through Hubble's field of view during this exposure, it can leave a short streak in the resulting image. But the participants started noting that some of the streaks they were seeing crossed Hubble's entire field of view during a single image (the project maintains a forum where the volunteers can discuss their work).
During my first semester of undergrad, I began my truly independent cooking journey—a path many have taken before me, but few survive. After weeks of failing to replicate one of my mother’s simplest dishes, scrambled eggs with jasmine rice, I was devastated. Arriving home for winter break, I told her about my struggles—how I looked up many recipes online and tried making them all, adding milk, sprinkling in cheese, whisking the eggs with a particular technique. Nothing seemed to replicate the correct taste or texture. The familiar experience of the eggs was absent. She laughed at me and explained she made them “Khmer style,” to which I promptly replied, “What’s ‘Khmer Style?'” Half smirking and rolling her eyes, Ma explained that the scrambled eggs have fish sauce, green onions, and black pepper in them. “Make sure you use the good fish sauce okay? Either Three Crabs Brand or the Squid Brand. How did you not know this?”
A common Khmer breakfast of grilled pork, eggs, and pickled vegetables. (Photo by the author)
Reflecting on the scrambled eggs incident across the years, I felt a bit estranged from and confused about my identity. As both Khmer[1] and Vietnamese, and having grown up the United States, I had a lot of questions about who I was and what I was eating. What was “Khmer” and “Cambodian” food anyways? Why were there so many crossovers with things I ate with my Vietnamese family? Is that just geographical proximity or something else? How do people “just know” something is Khmer? Inevitably, these thoughts trickled into conversations with my family, as well as into my online searches.
What people are eating, how they are eating it, and why they are eating it have been debated throughout time and space. With increased engagements with food with different types and layers of technologies, online food discourse has expanded rapidly (Ilde 1990, Lewis 2018). Yet people have been forming and joining online communities to share their ideas, experiences, and perspectives around food in multi-modal ways for decades (Rhiengold 1993). I refer to these communities as digital food spaces (DFS), defining them as online communities and platforms dedicated to the sharing of food-centered ideas and media. I prefer DFS over other commonly used terms like “digital food platforms” because of its broader framing. Many of these online communities have entire infrastructures, which imbue particular authorities and responsibilities to users, including founders, moderators, and anonymous members. I have had my fair share of anonymous lurking and inactivity within DFS I am a part of, and as a result I prefer the flexibility. After all, being present in a digital community differs from being present in a non-digital one.
DFS are spaces of culture exchange and learning. It seems like for every niche food interest, there is a DFS looming somewhere on the internet. Scholars of digital food have examined these digitally captured “worlds of food,” noting their capacity to facilitate communities of users with shared interests into collective action (Schneider et al.2018). DFS allow for the demonstration of shared values among members which can take many forms: for example, digital food activism, where users engage with and critique different parts of the food system online (Schneider et al. 2018), or digital gastrodiplomacy, where ideas of food and nationalism perpetually collide.
Throughout history, food and cuisine has been crucial within diplomatic relations. Unlike “culinary diplomacy,” which involves the “expansion of relations through cuisine and the eating habits of visiting ambassadors or public figures” (White et al. 2019, 129), gastrodiplomacy is centered on generated ideas around the foods of a country. Gastrodiplomacy is often paired with nation-branding, where governments allow themselves to build distinguishable personas to bring awareness and express their democratic ideals in the global arena (Zhang 2015, White et al. 2019). As one scholar kindly explained to me, “Culinary diplomacy is governments towards other governments, gastrodiplomacy is governments towards their people.”[2]
Gastrodiplomacy is important because “national foods” expand a country’s opportunities for increased cultural acceptance with other nations and its own citizens (Nahar et al. 2018, Ichijo, Johannes, and Ranta eds. 2019, White et al. 2019.) Although it can be difficult and reductionist to decide which foods can be considered “national” across populations, the benefits of sharing how many people of a country experience and relate to food are manifold. Breaking bread, sharing tea, and exchanging fruits and other sweets are just some of the ways that people have historically bonded with one another, even in the absence of nation-states.
But how does one translate this into the digital? How can governments, or other culinary authorities, communicate to their people what kinds of foods are recognized as significant within a shared national identity? This is where the DFS come into play. As relatively accessible arenas of discussion and learning, they are integral points of intervention for gastrodiplomatic initiatives. Therefore, we can understand digital gastrodiplomacy to be the collective tinkering of perceptions relating to unified ideas around a country’s “national foods” within DFS.
Unlike in its non-digital form, in digital gastrodiplomacy, flows of power tend to shift and deviate. Authority on what foods are authentic or what dishes make up a part of a country’s “national foods” expands to include more kinds of people. However, this does not dissolve the issues of over-emphasising the significance of certain foods over others within collective, nationalist food narratives, and visions.
Through digital gastrodiplomacy, citizens and members of a diaspora are able to explore, share, and negotiate ideas about food from anywhere. As informal, yet impactful shapers, DFS members have the potential to shift narratives and perspectives about different national cuisines one social media post at a time. They have become very important non-governmental actors within food discourse. Subsequently, concentrations of knowledge and authority around “national foods” become dispersed, pixelated, and multidirectional. In comparison to non-digital gastrodiplomacy, digital gastrodiplomacy can be considered a grassroots approach. DFS members have a relatively equal say and role in contributing to what makes up “national foods” because of the fluidity of DFS in both structure and governance. From Boston-based aunties on Facebook with pictures of their pets as their avatar, to hyper-stylized Instagram foodie influencers from Long Beach, the profile for gastronomic critics and commentators continues to grow.
In my explorations to connect with my Khmerness and its foods, I took to the Internet. I joined several Facebook groups, perused Reddit, and lurked on relevant hashtags on Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, and Twitter. I began by scanning “Subtle Asian Traits” (SAT), a Facebook group started in 2018 that calls itself “one of the largest Asian communities with members from all around the world.” Within SAT, I found many other subgroups I would classify as DFS, including “Subtle Asian Cooking.” However, after a few scrolls, I noticed that the posts were dominated by certain ethnicities and nationalities. At times, it felt as if “Asianness” exclusively centered East Asian culture. This did not help me in my search for either Khmer or Cambodian food and cuisine, but it stirred up some negative feelings about gatekeeping authorities of Asianness. Eventually I stumbled upon Subtle Cambodian Traits (SCT), an off-shoot group of SAT, which claims to “connect the greater Khmer community from all walks of life.” Observing that posts in this group were exclusively in English or Khmer, I sensed a decolonial edge permeating the space. No French posts… how interesting. Herein, I found a wide range of people from across the globe who self-identified as Cambodian and/or Khmer. They posted on a myriad of topics, interlinking these topics to both Cambodianness and Khmerness within their realms of understanding and experience—food was just one component. Through groups like SCT, there are ample opportunities to gain unfiltered insights on Cambodian and Khmer food between nationals and members of the diaspora.
Curious about what constitutes Khmer and Cambodian cuisine among the diaspora, I asked members of SCT for recommendations for Cambodian/Khmer restaurants within the United States and analysed the recommended places’ menus. After posting my question, I received 31 recommendations from 25 SCT members. Twenty-seven recommendations were for restaurants in the United States, three of them for pop-ups/mail order food businesses, and one for a restaurant in Cambodia. Two out of 31 recommendations were recommended more than once by SCT members. Eight out of ten cities on the Pew Research Center’s list of cities heavily populated by the Cambodian diaspora were represented (Pew Research Center 2019).
After collecting and analysing the menus of each recommendation, I noted the overlaps in how each understood and marketed their cuisine. To these restaurants, “real” Khmer and Cambodian cuisine could be defined by:
Restaurants interlinked ideas of “traditional,” “authentic,” and “special” Khmer/Cambodian dishes with the use of expensive/rare ingredients, high preparational labour demands, or both. Restaurants also used Khmer (script or romanisation) to label and re-orient commonly found pan-Asian dishes, like fried rice, as specifically Khmer and Cambodian on their menus. Comparatively, for highlighted “traditional,” “authentic,” and or “special” dishes, culinary points of reference were used: descriptions would relate them to other nations’ popular dishes. This practice allows for restaurant patrons who are not familiar with Khmer or Cambodian cuisines to easily explore, within their own comfort levels, the unique features of these cuisines. Through this, Khmericans are constantly forming points for culinary knowledge-sharing among informal gastrodiplomats, who may be community members or curious others. Such activities are further facilitated on DFS and other online communities, thus expanding knowledge, interest, and engagement with Khmer and Cambodian cuisines through digital gastrodiplomacy.
Such efforts directly support the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the National Institute of Diplomacy and International Relations’ 2020 initiative to incorporate food into their cultural diplomacy strategies through specifically gastrodiplomacy. They reflected that presently, “Cambodia has yet to fully exploit this extraordinary opportunity for nation branding.” Given that Cambodia’s rates of general tourism are considerably lower than other (southeast) Asian countries, it is crucial for both cultural and economic reasons to garner interest among travelers. Governments such as Cambodia’s have much to gain from the development of gastodiplomatic initiatives; also, they should consult DFS throughout each step. Doing so would increase the success of such endeavours by forming dynamic nation branding which is representative and considerate for as many people as possible.
[1] Khmer is the predominant ethnic group of Cambodia. I differentiate because you can be a Cambodian national and not Khmer. However, these two are often used interchangeably despite their differences.
[2] If you are the scholar who said this to me at the SOAS Food Forum seminar talk I gave in January 2023, please reach out!
Pew Research Center. (2019). “Top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas by Cambodian population, 2019”. Pew Research Center analysis of 2017-2019 American Community Survey (IPUMS). https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/chart/top-10-u-s-metropolitan-areas-by-cambodian-population-2019/
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: MIT Press.
Schneider, T., Eli, K., Dolan, C., & Ulijaszek, S. (Eds.). (2018). Digital Food Activism (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315109930
Suntikul, W. (2019). “Gastrodiplomacy in tourism.” Current Issues in Tourism 22(9), 1076–1094.
White, Wajeana, Albert A. Barreda, and Stephanie Hein. (2019) “Gastrodiplomacy: Captivating a Global Audience Through Cultural Cuisine-A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Journal of Tourismology 5(2), 127-144.
Zhang, J. (2015). “The foods of the worlds: Mapping and comparing contemporary gastrodiplomacy campaigns.” International Journal of Communication 9, 568–591.
JAXA's second attempt at launching the H3 rocket has ended up becoming a major setback for Japan's space ambitions. While the rocket was able to leave the launch pad, the country's space authorities were forced to activate its flight termination system a few minutes later after its second stage engine failed to ignite. In an announcement, JAXA said the self-destruct command was transmitted to the rocket at 10:52 AM Japan time (8:52PM ET) "because there was no possibility of achieving the mission." The agency is still investigating the incident to figure out what went wrong.
The H3 was built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries after the program was first approved in 2013, and it cost the country over 200 billion yen ($1.5 billion). JAXA was hoping to launch the rocket in 2020 — and it did complete a functional test for the H3 that year — but had to delay its inaugural flight due to engineering problems. Its first actual launch attempt on February 17th this year was aborted before the vehicle was able to lift off due to an electrical interference issue in the first stage.
According to Nikkei Asia, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida sees the H3 as "crucial to the nation's business and national security ambitions." It was created to put a lot more Japanese surveillance satellites in orbit and to become the key component of a business that will offer launch services to clients. JAXA and Mitsubishi were apparently able to halve its original launch costs to $50 million, which they believed is lower than the launch costs of SpaceX's Falcon 9. In the future, it's also expected to ferry cargo to support the NASA Artemis program's Lunar Gateway project.
The destroyed H3 rocket was carrying ALOS-3, a satellite with disaster management tools that can be quickly deployed to observe affected areas. Reuters says it was also equipped with an experimental infrared sensor that was created with the ability to detect North Korean ballistic missile launches
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/japan-h3-rocket-self-destructs-failed-launch-072818999.html?src=rssJAPAN-SPACE
Japan's next generation "H3" rocket, carrying the advanced optical satellite "Daichi 3", leaves the launch pad at the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima, southwestern Japan on March 7, 2023. - Japan's next-generation H3 rocket failed after liftoff on March 7, with the space agency issuing a destruct command after concluding the mission could not succeed. (Photo by JIJI Press / AFP) / Japan OUT (Photo by STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images)
Last year, NASA's DART spacecraft successfully completed its mission: To collide with an asteroid called Dimorphos to see if it was possible to change the trajectory of any potentially planet-killing space rock. Scientists from the DART team have been analyzing the data collected from the mission since then, and they've now published five papers in Nature explaining the details of DART's results. They've also decided that, yes, the method can be used to defend Earth if ever an asteroid big enough to kill us all heads our way.
Apparently, one of DART's solar panels hit Dimosphos first before its body fully collided with the rock at 6km per second (3.7 miles per second). The spacecraft smashed into the asteroid around 25 meters (85 feet) from its center, which was a huge factor in the mission's success, since it maximized the force of the impact. According to the studies, the collision had managed to eject 1 million kilograms or 1,100 tons of rock from Dimorphos. That spray of rubble flew outwards away from the asteroid, generating four times the momentum of DART's impact and changing Dimorphos' trajectory even further.
While NASA has only tested the mission on one space rock, scientists have concluded that for asteroids as big as Dimorphos (around 560 feet across), we don't even need to send an advance reconnaissance mission. As long as we get at least few years of warning time, though a few decades would be preferable, then we will be able to intercept future asteroid threads. Franck Marchis at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, told Nature: "[W]e can quickly design a mission to deflect an asteroid if there is a threat, and we know that this has a very high chance of being effective."
We're bound to get an even better look at the mission's effect on the asteroid after European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft arrives at Dimorphos in 2026. The mission will study the binary asteroid system Didymos and Dimorphos to further validate DART's kinetic impact method or future use.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasas-dart-spacecraft-took-out-over-1000-tons-of-rock-from-its-target-asteroid-150139905.html?src=rssNASA DART
An artist's depiction of NASA's DART spacecraft approaching asteroids.
Enlarge / The tattered shell of the first recorded supernova (SN185) was captured by the Dark Energy Camera. This image covers an impressive 45 arcminutes in the sky—a rare view of the entirety of this supernova remnant. (credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF)
In early December 185 CE, Chinese astronomers recorded a bright "guest star" in the night sky that shone for eight months in the direction of Alpha Centauri before fading away—most likely the earliest recorded supernova in the historical record. The image above gives us a rare glimpse of the entire tattered remnant of that long-ago explosion, as captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Andes in Chile. DECam has been operating since 2012, and while it was originally designed to be part of the ongoing Dark Energy Survey, it's also available for other astronomers to use in their research. This new wide-view perspective of the remains of SN185 should help astronomers learn even more about stellar evolution.
As we've written previously, there are two types of known supernovas, depending on the mass of the original star. An iron-core collapse supernova occurs with massive stars (greater than 10 solar masses), which collapse so violently that it causes a huge, catastrophic explosion. The temperatures and pressures become so high that the carbon in the star's core fuses. This halts the core's collapse, at least temporarily, and this process continues, over and over, with progressively heavier atomic nuclei. When the fuel finally runs out entirely, the (by then) iron core collapses into a black hole or a neutron star.
Then there is a Type Ia supernova. Smaller stars (up to about eight solar masses) gradually cool to become dense cores of ash known as white dwarfs. If a white dwarf that has run out of nuclear fuel is part of a binary system, it can siphon off matter from its partner, adding to its mass until its core reaches high enough temperatures for carbon fusion to occur. These are the brightest supernovae, and they also shine with a remarkably consistent peak luminosity, making them invaluable "standard candles" for astronomers to determine cosmic distances.
Enlarge / Radio observatories like the Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, are in radio quiet zones that protect them from interference. (credit: The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Visible light is just one part of the electromagnetic spectrum that astronomers use to study the Universe. The James Webb Space Telescope was built to see infrared light, other space telescopes capture X-ray images, and observatories like the Green Bank Telescope, the Very Large Array, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and dozens of other observatories around the world work at radio wavelengths.
Radio telescopes are facing a problem. All satellites, whatever their function, use radio waves to transmit information to the surface of the Earth. Just as light pollution can hide a starry night sky, radio transmissions can swamp out the radio waves astronomers use to learn about black holes, newly forming stars, and the evolution of galaxies.
We are three scientists who work in astronomy and wireless technology. With tens of thousands of satellites expected to go into orbit in the coming years and increasing use on the ground, the radio spectrum is getting crowded. Radio quiet zones—regions, usually located in remote areas, where ground-based radio transmissions are limited or prohibited—have protected radio astronomy in the past.
MS-23, the Soyuz spacecraft Russia sent to bring cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio back to Earth, has arrived at the International Space Station. Per Space.com, Russia’s Roscosmos Space Agency announced early Sunday morning that the unmanned vessel docked with the ISS at 7:58PM ET on Saturday evening. As expected, the flight launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on February 24th.
MS-23 was originally scheduled to launch later this year, but Roscosmos was forced to push up the flight after MS-22 – Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio’s original return craft – sprung a coolant leak in December following a micrometeoroid strike. The incident put Roscosmos and NASA in a tricky spot. If an emergency broke out on the ISS and the entire crew had to evacuate, it wasn’t clear whether MS-22 could carry its crew safely back to Earth. Roscosmos and NASA eventually settled on a contingency plan that would have seen MS-22 transport Prokopyev and Petelin, while Rubio would have hitched a ride on the SpaceX Crew-5 Dragon. Thankfully, the two agencies weren’t forced to put that plan to the test.
With MS-23 safely docked with the ISS, Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio will remain at the space station until at least September. The three were originally due to complete their mission in March. In the meantime, Roscomos plans to bring MS-22 back to Earth sometime next month.
SPACE-EXPLORATION/ISS
The Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft blasts off from the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan February 24, 2023, in this still image taken from video. Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT.
Russia has set a new date for when it will send a rescue ship to the International Space Station to retrieve the three astronauts whose Soyuz return craft was compromised in December. The country’s Roscosmos space agency told AFP on Saturday it is targeting a February 24th launch for MS-23, the uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft that is scheduled to bring back cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, from the International Space Station.
Roscosmos delayed the mission last Monday after Progress 82, a supply ship that had been docked with the ISS since last October, began leaking coolant over the weekend. Petelin, Prokopyev and Rubio flew to the space station in September, and they were supposed to return on the same Soyuz spacecraft that brought them there. In December, however, the spacecraft sprung a leak, due to an apparent meteoroid strike. One month later, Roscosmos announced it would send a second Soyuz craft to retrieve the three astronauts. The timing of the leaks lead to some speculation that a manufacturing issue was at fault for the Soyuz leak, not an errant space rock as Roscosmos had said. Earlier this week, the agency shared images (seen above) showing the location of the coolant leak and reported micrometeoroid strike.
NASA's Jeff Arend references the coolant leak on Progress MS-21, which occurred Saturday. Said no conclusions drawn about its cause. After the uncrewed vehicle undocks tonight it will rotate so astronauts can photograph the damage area before Progress enters Earth's atmosphere.
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) February 17, 2023
On Saturday, Roscosmos said it had carefully inspected the rescue ship to ensure it was undamaged and ready for flight. One day earlier, Progress 82 separated from the ISS. Per Space News, video broadcast during the undocking procedure failed to show any obvious signs of damage to the resupply craft. According to NASA, Progress 82 will initiate a deorbit burn at 10:15PM ET tonight. Provided Roscosmos doesn’t delay MS-23’s launch, the spacecraft will arrive at the ISS two days before Space X’s Crew-6 mission is scheduled to launch on February 26th. That flight will bring two NASA astronauts, a United Arab Emirates astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to the space station.
SPACE-EXPLORATION/RUSSIA
A view shows external damage believed to have caused a loss of pressure in the cooling system of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the International Space Station (ISS), in this image released February 13, 2023. Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT.
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