Day: November 7, 2022

Twitter, the social media site that has spawned one A24 movie and too many meltdowns to quantify, is tumbling into its next circle of hell with soon-to-be-implemented extensive monetization.

With a new $8 a month subscription to Twitter Blue, which will roll out after the midterm elections, you can get a blue verification badge (and other features) without actually verifying your identity and be immediately banned for pretending to be someone else. New owner and CEO Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, whose comprehension of comedy dilutes to walking into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink and meekly going, “Hehehe! Let that sink in!” says that his reign and bid for revenue will not only legalize comedy, but it will also “democratize journalism” somehow. Really, he’s getting most of this from a Monty Python sketch.

But Musk could soon be taking inspiration from pay-to-win video games, too. On November 2, Musk responded favorably to game designer and gamification expert Adrian Hon’s (sarcastic) Twitter thread describing “real gamification” on Twitter, jokingly proposing Twitter add video games features like “a Twitter Battle Pass, achievements, happy hour, streaks, and more!”

Not everyone seemed to understand that Hon was kidding, not even comedy expert Musk, who said that Hon’s thread had “some good ideas.”

Well, if Musk is taking suggestions from gamers, I feel that I should offer some of my own.

Twitter Coins

I’m assuming Twitter will eventually add a heads-up display to its homepage, indicating not only how many followers you have, but also crucial stats like total time on Twitter or XP, kill count (the number of times a guy named Bobby responds to one of your benign tweets with a command to drink bleach), and your current load of Twitter Coins.

I’m suggesting Twitter Coins as an in-app currency you can purchase for a generous 3-to-1 ratio—$300 for 100 Twitter Coins—which will empower you to unlock more of the important Twitter Blue features I recommend below.

And I know $3 for one Twitter Coin seems a little unfair, but how else do you expect Musk to pay off the $13 billion in debt (not including the $1.2 billion in interest payments Twitter is expected to make this year) he owes after his $44 billion acquisition? By liquidating some of his $208 billion net worth? No, that makes too much sense.

Class system

With Twitter Coins, you’ll be able to purchase exclusive starter classes, including but not limited to:

• Horny With Sunglasses
• Man With Zero Followers Who Believes Marshall’s Wiretapped His Samsung TV
• Journalist That Got Doxxed (And Laid Off)
• Woman With Zero Followers Who Started A Change.org Petition To Delay BTS’ Military Service
• Woman With 15 Followers Who Started A Change.org Petition To Stop BTS From Wiretapping Her Samsung TV

Each class comes with its own themed starter kit—Horny With Sunglasses, for example, automatically gives you 35 followers wearing sunglasses in their profile picture and a one-month subscription to a language learning site of your choice so you can know how to say “dirty girl” a few different ways.

These classes will be available for the low base price of 5,000 Twitter Coins, but you can add invaluable add-ons like Reply Guy (which has a negligible 30-minute cooldown time while he pores over your Instagram photos for a hint of toe) for 500 Coins, or Viral Tweet (applies to any tweet about the yacht-centric reality TV show Below Deck on Bravo) for 650 Coins.

Never-before-seen avatars

Once you’ve picked your starter class, it’s time to start customizing. Musk is already considering adding “cool stuff” to Twitter Blue subscriptions like animated banners, but I say he takes that idea one step further with high-tech 3D avatars to use as your profile picture.

Have you ever been to a jungle-themed restaurant chain Rainforest Cafe location? They have some beautifully haunting tree frog sculptures. 3D Twitter Avatars will pretty much be exactly like that.

When you purchase a Twitter Avatar for a paltry $50,000 worth of Twitter Coins, you’ll be in control of everything. That includes facial features, body type, and whether or not your Avatar is wearing a t-shirt that says “I Love the Song ‘Drive’ by Incubus” (I am still working on clothing options). Place your order and wait a meager 45 business days for shipping. That’s right, shipping.

Twitter Avatars are truly 3D, molded and cast from the same iconic steel and aluminum blend that destroys a Tesla immediately after coming in contact with a red light. To hell with downloadable content, we’re in the future! We should be crashing our cars even more often.

To use Twitter Avatars as your profile picture, simply take a photo and upload them. Yes, folks, it is that easy. If you’d like, you can supplement your photo with the Legendary Profile Picture Package for 10 Coins a week. That adds a 40-seconds-long firework gif that pops up every time Musk’s content moderation plan leads to someone getting swatted.

Uploading a photo costs 50 Coins. You will also need to DM Musk the phrase “You are so genius and rich, papa” every fortnight or so to prove you believe in free speech.

Please do not forget to DM. Your Twitter Blue subscription will be immediately terminated and the bank will take your pets or your Funko Pop! collection, whichever is worth more.

Secret ending

After spending at least $250,000 in Twitter Coins, you’ll be lucky enough to unlock Twitter’s secret ending. I can’t give you too many specifics, as it is a secret, but I can say that it involves bankruptcy.

---

Now to get serious: it’s clear that Twitter’s pay-to-win future is looming. Are you ready for it?

 

Fourteen years ago, the mathematicians Dusa McDuff and Felix Schlenk stumbled upon a hidden geometric garden that is only now beginning to flower. The pair were interested in a certain kind of oblong shape, one that could be squeezed and folded up in very particular ways and stuffed inside a ball. They wondered: For a certain shape, how big does the ball need to be?

As their results began to crystallize, at first they didn’t notice the striking patterns emerging. But a colleague who reviewed their work spotted the famed Fibonacci numbers—a list whose entries have popped up again and again in nature and throughout centuries of mathematics. They’re closely related, for example, to the exalted golden ratio, which has been studied in art, architecture, and nature since the ancient Greeks.

Fibonacci numbers “always make mathematicians happy,” said Tara Holm, a mathematician at Cornell University. Their appearance in McDuff and Schlenk’s work, she added, was “some indication that there’s something there there.”

Their landmark result was published in 2012 in the Annals of Mathematics, widely considered the top journal in the field. It revealed the existence of staircase-like structures with infinitely many steps. The size of each step in these “infinite staircases” was a ratio of Fibonacci numbers.

As the staircase ascended, the steps became smaller and smaller, the top of the staircase crushing up against the golden ratio. Neither the golden ratio nor the Fibonacci numbers has any apparent relationship to the problem of fitting a shape inside a ball. It was bizarre to find these numbers lurking within McDuff and Schlenk’s work.

Then earlier this year, McDuff uncovered another clue to this mystery. She and several others revealed not just infinitely more staircases, but intricate fractal structures. Their results are “not something that I remotely expected to see arising naturally in this kind of problem,” said Michael Usher, a professor at the University of Georgia.

The work has revealed hidden patterns in seemingly unrelated areas of math—a reliable sign that something important is afoot.

The Shape of Motion

These problems don’t take place in the familiar world of Euclidean geometry, where objects hold their shape. Instead, they operate by the strange rules of symplectic geometry, where shapes represent physical systems. For example, consider a simple pendulum. At any given moment, the pendulum’s physical state is defined by where it is and how fast it’s going. If you plot all the possibilities for those two values—the pendulum’s location and velocity—you’ll get a symplectic shape that looks like the surface of an infinitely long cylinder.

You can modify symplectic shapes, but only in very particular ways. The end result must reflect the same system. The only thing that can change is how you measure it. These rules ensure that you don’t mess with the underlying physics.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

A huge hunk of Chinese space junk is expected to crash back to Earth on Friday (Nov. 4), but nobody knows exactly where or when it will come down.

The debris in question is the 23-ton (21 metric tons) core stage of a Long March 5B rocket, which reached Earth orbit on Monday (Oct. 31) after launching the third and final module for China’s Tiangong space station.

Atmospheric drag has been pulling the rocket body lower and lower ever since. The latest observations and models suggest that the Long March 5B will come down on Friday morning, but the error bars on that prediction remain large at the moment.

The Aerospace Corporation, for example, predicts (opens in new tab) an atmospheric reentry on Friday at 7:20 a.m. EDT (1120 GMT), plus or minus three hours. That big window puts some of North America, nearly all of Central America, much of Africa and a slice of southeastern Australia, among other areas, in the potential line of fire for falling space junk.

Related: The latest news about China’s space program

We’ve been through this troubling exercise before. Long March 5B core stages have fallen back to Earth uncontrolled on all three previous launches of the vehicle, most recently in July, after the rocket sent the Wentian module up to Tiangong.

Indeed, this is a (quite undesirable) feature of the Long March 5B. Other orbital rockets are designed such that their first stages ditch into the ocean or over unpopulated land shortly after liftoff, or, in the case of SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, come down in one piece for powered landings and future reuse. But the Long March 5B core stage reaches orbit and has no way to steer itself down, so it lets atmospheric drag do the work, messily.

Though much of the rocket body will burn up in the atmosphere when it comes down on Friday, some of the sturdier pieces will survive all the way to the ground, posing a risk to people and infrastructure on the reentry path.

“The general rule of thumb is that 20-40% of the mass of a large object will reach the ground, but the exact number depends on the design of the object,” The Aerospace Corporation wrote in a Long March 5B explainer (opens in new tab). “In this case, we would expect about 5 to 9 metric tons [5.5 to 9.9 tons].”

The odds dictate that such debris will likely fall in the ocean, since seas cover about 70% of Earth’s surface. But terra firma has welcomed Long March 5B debris before. For example, singed rocket remnants from the first-ever Long March 5B launch, in May 2020, apparently hit the ground (opens in new tab) in a village in the West African nation of Ivory Coast. 

Nobody was hurt in that incident, or in any of the other Long March 5B crashes, as far as we know. But the fact that the falling rocket bodies pose any risk at all, however slight, has drawn condemnation from exploration advocates and other members of the spaceflight community.

“Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of reentries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in a statement (opens in new tab) posted shortly before a Long March 5B crash in May 2021.

“It is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris,” he added. “It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security and long-term sustainability of outer space activities.”

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).  

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Intelligence agencies in the U.S. have spent the last few years analyzing footage of hundreds of recent UFO encounters, and they want the American people to know: It’s still not aliens (opens in new tab).

According to several U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) officials who spoke anonymously to The New York Times (opens in new tab) last week, many recent sightings of UFOs — or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), as the government prefers to call them — are likely just observations of foreign surveillance operations or airborne clutter, such as weather balloons.

Several UAP incidents have been officially identified as “relatively ordinary” Chinese surveillance drones, the anonymous officials said. China has previously stolen plans for advanced U.S. fighter planes, and is interested in how the U.S. trains its pilots, the DoD officials added.

Related: NASA UFO study team includes former astronaut, scientists and more

Other UAP sightings recorded by military aircraft, which appear to show airborne objects moving in seemingly physics-defying ways, are likely the results of optical illusions. This includes the infamous video known as “GOFAST,” (opens in new tab) which was recorded by a U.S. Navy aircraft and leaked to the media in 2018. (The video, along with two other leaked films of military encounters with UAPs, was eventually declassified by the government (opens in new tab).)

While the object in the GOFAST video appears to be zooming over the water at incomprehensible speeds, this is just an optical illusion created by the angle of the recording relative to the water, the DoD officials told The Times. In reality, the object is moving at no more than 30 mph (48 km/h), the officials added.

A classified UAP report delivered to Congress this week by the DoD’s intelligence agencies likely includes the findings reported by The Times. The new report adds new details to cases described in a document (opens in new tab) that officials publicly released in June 2021, describing 144 alleged UAP incidents reported by U.S. government personnel between 2004 and 2021.

The 2021 report acknowledged that, due to a lack of high-quality data, most alleged UAP encounters could not be conclusively explained. However, the report offered several blanket explanations for UAP in general, including “technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity,” as well as “airborne clutter” such as birds and weather balloons. 

Nowhere in the report were aliens or extraterrestrials mentioned — however, that did not stop alien conspiracy theories (opens in new tab) from arising, due in part to the government’s general lack of transparency about UAP incidents.

Sue Gough, a DoD spokesperson, told The Times that the government was committed to sharing whatever UAP information it could without putting national security at risk (opens in new tab). Government officials also tend to refrain from discussing UAP incidents publicly because there is simply not enough data to conclusively explain them, Gough added.

“In many cases, observed phenomena are classified as ‘unidentified’ simply because sensors were not able to collect enough information to make a positive attribution,” Gough told The Times. “We are working to mitigate these shortfalls for the future and to ensure we have sufficient data for our analysis.”

As the DoD continues its investigation into UAP sightings, NASA has also launched an independent UAP study team (opens in new tab), which will operate from October 2022 to mid-2023. According to NASA, the team will focus on collecting and analyzing as much UAP data as possible, in order to develop new methods for identifying the unidentifiable objects in America’s skies.

Originally published on Live Science.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

The basic construction of China’s space station is complete, following a maneuver to shift the recently arrived Mengtian module to its permanent docking port.

China launched Mengtian, the third and final module for its Tiangong space station, on Oct. 31. Mengtian, which means “dreaming of the heavens,” docked at a forward port at Tiangong 13 hours later. 

The Mengtian module was then moved from that forward port on Tiangong to a portside berth on the station’s docking hub. The process involved a 90-degree turn of the module and was completed at 0132 GMT (9:32 a.m. Beijing time) on Thursday (Nov. 3) using a purpose-made powered mechanical device.

A similar procedure was conducted with the Wentian module in late September, moving the module to Tiangong’s starboard docking port. 

This means the China National Space Administration has now completed the construction of its T-shaped Tiangong orbital outpost, which consists of the Tianhe core module and Wentian and Mengtian experiment modules. 

The country plans to operate Tiangong for at least years, during which time it aims to keep it permanently occupied and potentially host commercial missions to the station.

The current occupants —  three astronauts belonging to the Shenzhou 14 crewed mission — entered Mengtian for the first time at 3:12 p.m. Beijing time (0712 GMT) Thursday, just hours after the transposition. 

Astronauts Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe talked to the ground control staff shortly after entering the 58.7-foot-long (17.9 meters) and roughly 48,500-pound (22 metric tons) module. 

“Mengtian, Wentian and Tiangong. The dream has come true. Shenzhou-14 reports that the crew has successfully entered the Mengtian lab module,” Chen said.

“China’s space station is a home in the heavens for all humanity,” Liu, who became China’s first woman in space in 2012, added.

The astronauts will now be involved in testing the systems of the completed Tiangong space station in its T-shape configuration.

With the space station completed, the Shenzhou 14 astronauts are expected to welcome aboard the next crew, Shenzhou 15, before the end of the year. 

A Long March 7 rocket is currently being prepared at the coastal Wenchang spaceport to launch the Tianzhou 5 cargo spacecraft which will deliver supplies to support Shenzhou 15 for its six-month-long expedition, with launch currently expected around November 12 (GMT).

Shenzhou 15 will blast off atop a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at an undisclosed time after Tianzhou 5 arrives at Tiangong.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab). 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard successfully launched a new rocket designed to eventually send satellites on Saturday (Nov. 5), according to state media reports. 

The test flight launched Iran’s new Ghaem 100 rocket, a three-stage solid-fueled vehicle, on a suborbital test flight, according to country’s state-run IRNA news agency and Reuters (opens in new tab). It is designed to carry satellites of up to 176 pounds (80 kilograms) into orbits of about 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, they added. 

“The flight test of this satellite carrier with a solid-fueled engine … was successfully completed,” Reuters quoted IRNA (opens in new tab) as reporting. Exactly where Iran launched the test flight from was unclear.

Related: Iran in space: rockets, satellites & monkeys (photos)

Saturday’s launch tested the first-stage of the Ghaem 100 rocket, according to Aljazeera (opens in new tab). The new rocket will be used for future launches of Iran’s Nahid communications satellites, said Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guard aerospace division,  Aljazeera added.

The test flight follows the launch of an Iranian military spy satellite by Russia in August of this year, the first flight of the country’s Zoljanah suborbital rocket in 2021 and the country’s first homegrown launch of a military satellite in 2020 on a Qassad rocket. 

U.S. officials watch Iran’s rocket programs closely due to concerns that such space launch technology could also be used to develop ballistic missiles as long-range weapons. 

Last month, the satellite operator Eutelsat accused Iran of jamming two satellites used to broadcast Persian-language television and radio from outside the country. That complaint, as well as Saturday’s launch, come amid widespread anti-government protests in Iran following the death of an Iranian-Kurdish woman detained by Iran’s police.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com (opens in new tab) or follow him @tariqj (opens in new tab)malik. Follow us @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab), Facebook (opens in new tab) and Instagram (opens in new tab).

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.