https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/09/na...it-flying/
EXCERPTS: Why would NASA go to these lengths to keep Starliner in the game? There have been questions about Boeing’s commitment to Starliner in recent years, given its financial losses. Boeing might well have thrown in the towel. So it’s possible that NASA is meeting Boeing halfway to keep a needed spaceflight capability going. (It also helps that Boeing has excellent lobbyists.)
But NASA had limited choices given that SpaceX has repeatedly indicated that its plans to retire Dragon by 2030 are more than aspirational. Although the Dragon development program was financially backed by NASA, SpaceX has contractually fulfilled its obligations with the Dragon missions to the space agency. SpaceX can therefore do as it pleases with Dragon.
So if NASA wants to maintain a presence in low-Earth orbit, it needs a crew vehicle beyond 2030. In July, Ars wrote about how panic was setting in among companies seeking to develop private space stations in low-Earth orbit, where NASA is expected to be an anchor tenant after the end of the International Space Station. As they finalized plans for their stations, the companies were finding that SpaceX would not give them bids for crew transportation, and Boeing was not committing to a price for the 2030s, either. So they were building private space stations with no way to get people there, or back.
[...] As it contemplates a future without access to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, NASA will make some key moves to ensure that Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which has a decidedly checkered record in spaceflight to date, is safer and can continue flying after its Atlas V rocket retires.
Multiple sources confirmed to Ars that as early as next week, NASA will announce that it will order two additional Starliner crewed missions from Boeing, pay some of the costs to fix the spacecraft’s thruster issues, and provide support to certify the spacecraft’s launch on a new rocket.
[...] After long signaling it privately, SpaceX has begun to publicly confirm its intentions to wind down the Dragon program, a remarkable move given that the vehicle began flying humans just six years ago. However, the company is seeking to pivot toward its much larger Starship rocket, with the intent of launching its more lucrative Starlink satellites and a new megaconstellation focused on orbital data centers.
This week, on the All-In Podcast, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell was asked if the company would respond to demand for Crew Dragon and keep flying the vehicle “for some time.”
Shotwell would not commit to that. “We’re not retiring it today, for sure,” she replied. Then Shotwell suggested that Boeing should really step up and deliver. “There is another provider,” she said. “Boeing has been paid, I think, probably more than we have been paid to develop their human capsule. So we’re just gonna let them have some business. They should fly their capsule. The government paid a lot of money for that.”
[...] NASA did, indeed, pay a lot for the Commercial Crew program. Dating to 2010, for development and certification of their vehicles, NASA has paid SpaceX approximately $3.1 billion and Boeing $5.1 billion. SpaceX has been the critical provider. With Dragon, the company has launched 13 crewed missions to the International Space Station for NASA, with its next one set for October. All flights to date have been successful.
By contrast, Boeing has struggled mightily to bring the more expensive Starliner vehicle into service for NASA. Starliner experienced numerous issues on uncrewed test flights in 2019 and 2022; most seriously, thruster issues nearly led to the catastrophic loss of two astronauts during the spacecraft’s first crew test flight in June 2024. As a result, in February, NASA formally classified the 2024 flight of Starliner as a “Type A” mishap. The NASA astronauts on this flight, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, ultimately had to be returned safely to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle.... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.popsci.com/technology/plane-...paceplane/
EXCERPTS: Because Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t have an abrupt end—it just thins until traces of it drift past the moon—von Kármán offered a practical demarcation point. A wing works by pushing air down; the thinner the atmosphere, the faster the wing must move to push enough of it. Climb high enough, von Kármán reasoned, and a wing would have to fly so fast to hold its own weight up that it would already be traveling at orbital speed—roughly 17,500 miles per hour at the bottom of low Earth orbit, or 100 miles above the surface. At that velocity, a wing becomes moot. The object isn’t being held aloft by air pressure at all; it’s continuously falling, tugged by Earth’s gravity, but moving sideways fast enough to keep missing Earth. Too slow and it spirals back down; too fast and it sails off into space.
Von Kármán calculated that crossover at around 50 miles up, though the number drifts with fluctuations in atmospheric density. In the 1960s, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale rounded it to 100 kilometers, or 62 miles. NASA and the Air Force still use 50 miles. Regardless of the precise figure, it has become known as the edge of space, a turbulent shoreline where the physics of flying shift dramatically. Although no treaty has ever made it official, the Kármán line serves as the conventional divide between aviation law and space law, where wings serve no purpose in keeping an object aloft—only speed matters.
Getting to space requires altitude, but staying there requires speed. The gap between them is where the dream of the spaceplane has always faltered, beginning with the novel machine Crossfield helped design in the 1950s.
[...] A cross between a rocket and a plane, the engineers building the X-15 called it a “missile with a cockpit,” Griswold reported in a 1958 preview for Popular Science. Like a rocket, the plane was mostly a fuel tank. Like a plane, its stubby wings and tail fins enabled it to negotiate Earth’s atmosphere. The vessel’s most telling feature, however, was its twin sets of flight controls: one for navigating air, the other for space. As the plane approached the Kármán line, the pilot switched from traditional airplane controls to jets of superheated steam in the nose and wings, pointing the airplane with thrusters, just like a spacecraft.
[...] Air Force pilot Bob White took the X-15 to space first, reaching 314,750 feet in July 1962, earning the first astronaut wings ever awarded to a winged aircraft pilot. NASA pilot Joe Walker flew the X-15 to 354,200 feet in August 1963—67 miles up, an altitude no winged aircraft has beaten, and one of only two X-15 flights to clear the Kármán line. Air Force pilot Pete Knight pushed the X-15 to Mach 6.7 in October 1967, still the fastest a piloted airplane has ever flown. In all, 13 flights crossed 50 miles—space’s threshold by NASA’s standards. Eight pilots earned astronaut wings, among them a NASA research pilot named Neil Armstrong... (MORE - details)
Is philosophy dead?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...sophy-dead
KEY POINTS: "Scientific philosophy" seeks to closely align philosophical inquiry with scientific methods. Traditional, nonscientific philosophy is increasingly seen as outdated or even "dead." Many leading philosophical minds now work in scientific fields outside philosophy departments.
EXCERPT: Naturalist philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, were quick to counter these kinds of statements. People like me and many other scientifically minded philosophers don’t believe that philosophy has truly died. And yet, if we look at philosophy as a whole, the naturalist philosopher, or I should rather say "scientific philosopher," really is much closer to Hawking and many other scientists who have become skeptical about the value of philosophy than their defenses let on... (MORE - details)
Posted by: C C - Sep 18, 2026 12:02 AM - Forum: Zymology
- No Replies
PETER ZEIHAN (geopolitics)
https://youtu.be/IMRHLq6hiiI
VIDEO EXCERPTS: And as promised, we’re now going to take the whip to the Democrats. Now that we’ve already dealt with Trump. Okay, so there are two strategies that political parties can use in the United States.
[...] The Republican strategy is to not necessarily get the most voters possible, but to get the most reliable coalition possible. So, you know, your business voters don’t care about what happens with national defense. Your military voters don’t care about what happens with abortion. Your abortion voters don’t care what happens with fiscal issues. Everybody has the issue that they care about. They show up and they tend to win because it’s very, very reliable, even though they don’t have more voters than the Democrats.
Now, this strategy is now failing under Trump, because he has gone out of his way to eviscerate four of the main factions. And it’s not clear that there’s enough left to vote for him to win anything ever again.
But the Democrats, not to be shown up when it comes to dysfunction, have their own problems. See, their strategy is the full big tent strategy. You throw as wide of a net for potential voters as possible so you can get every possible vote. The problem with that is you’re going to include factions that are opposed to other factions in the coalition.
]...] So getting all these people to show up to vote means you can’t talk about policy. And if you do, you’re going to fracture the coalition and people won’t show up. So any candidate that tries to run ... on the issue ... they're probably going to lose. But a candidate who can ignore the policy issues and run on charisma can paper over the difference. Then you get everybody showing up in numbers, and that’s a Barack Obama or a Bill Clinton.
Well, the Democrats this round have two real problems. Number one, they don’t have anyone with charisma at all. And it’s a by-election. [...] ever since Joe Biden became president, and especially since he left, the Democrats have been leaderless, rudderless, and policyless. And it’s just really hard to generate an electoral program that is more sophisticated than "we hate Trump". ... that might not be enough because it wasn’t enough the last couple times they tried that.
[...] Piece two is that the coalition -- the big tent -- has failed. While Trump has imploded the Republican coalition, he has succeeded in drawing a lot of voters away from the Democratic coalition. So if you look at how people actually voted the last time around, under 30 split almost right down the middle, so did Hispanics, so did organized labor. And these have been three vote banks for the Democrats going back 50, 60 years.
[...] About the only real hope that I see for a meaningful shift is if ... old school Republicans who don’t like MAGA, stay home or start acting like swing voters, which honestly is what they are now.
[...] But even in that specific scenario, which I think has an even chance of happening, you’re still not going to get two thirds of the Senate to be blue. And without that, we’re in a situation where Congress is hung, the president cannot be impeached, and we just have another two years of what we’ve had this last year...
The Democrats are screwed, too ... https://youtu.be/IMRHLq6hiiI
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/IMRHLq6hiiI
Symmetry breaking often appears in phase transitions, where a system moves from a high temperature phase to an ordered low temperature phase.
The early universe was characteristically known to be in a high temperature phase. As its entropy continues to increase, it settles into a less symmetric state. Energy, a well-known characteristic of our universe, remains constant throughout the universe.
A ball or pencil balanced on its tip, will undergo symmetry breaking when an imbalance in forces are applied to it. This is also an increase in entropy or disorder, the measure of which is a property of every physical system as the arrow of time increases.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article...out_a_body
INTRO: For centuries, defining and understanding consciousness has eluded neuroscientists, philosophers, and doctors. Is consciousness what it means to be alive? Is it knowing who we are, as individual people? How do we know if any being has consciousness or not? Now, with the dawn of generative artificial intelligence, what it means to be a conscious being ranks high among the most complex—and urgent—questions of our age.
According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, consciousness has simple origins: It lies in the feelings produced in our bodies. Damasio, a researcher at the University of Southern California, has spent his career—spanning nearly half a century—investigating our feelings, emotions, and sense of self. In his new book, Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness, Damasio lays out a framework for consciousness rooted in our physical selves.
“Consciousness is not about things in your mind alone; it is not created by your brain alone,” he explains. “It’s actually created by this beautiful partnership between brain and body.”
I spoke to Damasio about the science of consciousness, how it works in the body, and how its aim is to keep us alive. Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity... (MORE - details)
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-...uman-blood
EXCERPTS: If you think you know what DNA looks like, there may be a surprise hiding in your blood. DNA instantly brings to mind its famous double helix. But genetic material does not always remain in that familiar form. Some pieces can fold into compact, four-stranded structures.
These unusual shapes have previously been seen inside cells. Now scientists say they have caught them folded in human blood plasma. So why is DNA in our blood at all?
As cells throughout the body die, they leave behind small fragments of DNA. These enter the bloodstream like pieces of a torn message, carrying clues about what is happening inside us.
Until now, scientists have concentrated on reading the message: its genetic letters, the length of each fragment, and where in the genome it came from. A new preprint study suggests that how the message is folded could matter too. Researchers detected four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes, or G4s, in genetic material captured directly from human plasma.
"Our study provides, to our knowledge, the first direct biochemical evidence that folded G-quadruplex structures are present in nucleic acids captured directly from human plasma," University of Cologne molecular biologist Robert Hänsel-Hertsch told ScienceAlert.
[...] But the discovery opened another mystery. Although the investigation began with ultrashort DNA, the experiment could not reveal whether the detected G4s were made from DNA or RNA. RNA can fold into the same four-stranded shape, and the detectors recognize the structure rather than the molecule underneath it.
Hänsel-Hertsch described this as "a real limitation". One next step will be to treat the captured material with enzymes that destroy either DNA or RNA before testing it again. Sequencing the folded molecules could then reveal their identity and genomic origin.
Scientists also do not know which tissues released them, or whether the structures folded inside cells or only after entering the bloodstream. So what might they tell us about health?
G4s often occur in parts of the genome involved in controlling genes, and elevated G4 levels have been observed in several tumor types. This raises the possibility that G4s circulating in blood could one day provide information about cancer that cannot be found by reading DNA sequences alone. But this is not a new cancer test.
The study was designed to establish that folded G4s are present in plasma, not to compare people with cancer against healthy participants. Before considering any diagnostic application, researchers must identify the molecules and measure them in carefully characterized groups of patients and healthy volunteers.
Only then will they know whether illness changes the number, origin, or pattern of these folded structures in a useful way. (MORE - missing details)
