twilightpony | Reading

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/rocket-report-rocket-lab-reports-neutron-setback-australia-backs-launch-startup/

Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launchers suffered back-to-back failures within a span of approximately 12 hours. Rocket Lab's march toward a debut of its new Neutron launch vehicle in the coming months may have stalled after a failure during a key qualification test. We cover all this and more in this week's Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Australia invests in sovereign launch. Six months after its first orbital rocket cleared the launch tower for just 14 seconds before crashing back to Earth, Gilmour Space Technologies has secured 217 million Australian dollars ($148 million) in funding that CEO Adam Gilmour says finally gives Australia a fighting chance in the global space race, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The funding round, led by the federal government's National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and superannuation giant Hostplus with $75 million each, makes the Queensland company Australia’s newest unicorn—a fast-growth start-up valued at more than $1 billion—and one of the country’s most heavily backed private technology ventures.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/rocket-report-rocket-lab-reports-neutron-setback-australia-backs-launch-startup/

loganberrybunny

Public

I've been wanting to find a film that had a significant element that was about the Indian Ocean slave trade in some way. You know, the way any number of films talk about the Atlantic one. And I've barely been able to find anything. Considering the Indian Ocean trade trafficked about the same number of people as the Atlantic one (12 million, albeit over a longer period) this is an extraordinary and deeply frustrating omission.

In fairly extensive searching, I've turned up one film (in Malayalam), a couple of TV series and a few documentaries. That's it. I wouldn't expect a $150 million dollar blockbuster, but a smaller-scale human drama could be made much more cheaply. It's pretty depressing that Hollywood appears to think slavery means the Romans and then the Atlantic slavers and pretty much nothing else. :/

Current Mood: frustrated

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by K.R. Callaway

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/tiny-falcons-are-helping-keep-the-food-supply-safe-on-cherry-farms/

Every spring, raptors return to nesting sites across northern Michigan. The smallest of these birds of prey, a falcon called the American kestrel (Falco sparverius), flies through the region’s many cherry orchards and spends its days hunting for even tinier creatures to eat. This quest keeps the kestrels fed, but it also benefits the region’s cherry farmers.

Fruit farmers have been working symbiotically with kestrels for decades, adding nesting boxes and reaping the benefits of the birds eliminating the mice, voles, songbirds, and other pests that wreak havoc by feeding on not-yet-harvested crops. In addition to limiting the crop damage caused by hungry critters, new research suggests kestrels also lower the risk of food-borne illnesses.

The study, published in November in the Journal of Applied Ecology, suggests the kestrels help keep harmful pathogens off of fruit headed to consumers by eating and scaring off small birds that carry those pathogens. Orchards housing the birds in nest boxes saw fewer cherry-eating birds than orchards without kestrels on site. This translated to an 81 percent reduction in crop damage—such as bite marks or missing fruit—and a 66 percent decrease in branches contaminated with bird feces.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/tiny-falcons-are-helping-keep-the-food-supply-safe-on-cherry-farms/

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Posted by Kiona N. Smith

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/this-67800-year-old-hand-stencil-is-the-worlds-oldest-human-made-art/

The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago.

On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island in Indonesia), a cave wall bears the stenciled outline of a person’s hand—and it’s at least 67,800 years old, according to a recent study. The hand stencil is now the world’s oldest work of art (at least until archaeologists find something even older), as well as the oldest evidence of our species on any of the islands that stretch between continental Asia and Australia.

Photo of an archaeologists examining a hand stencil painted on a cave wall, using a flashlight

Adhi Oktaviana examines a slightly more recent hand stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

Hands reaching out from the past

Archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, and his colleagues have spent the last six years surveying 44 rock art sites, mostly caves, on Sulawesi’s southeastern peninsula and the handful of tiny “satellite islands” off its coast. They found 14 previously undocumented sites and used rock formations to date 11 individual pieces of rock art in eight caves—including the oldest human artwork discovered so far.

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loganberrybunny

Public

356/365: Cottages, Wyre Hill, Bewdley
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Another day with basically nothing of consequence to report, so have a photo of some restored (some years back) cottages on Wyre Hill, a little outside Bewdley town centre. I don't know anything to speak of about the exact dates or original inhabitants, and I've never been inside. Still, they do the job of giving me a reasonably non-boring photo for tonight! :P

Current Mood: listless

loganberrybunny

Public

I am marginally impressed, but no better than that. I'd say it's about what I expected, but not as good as I'd been hoping. Thoughts:

Pros: It's quite nicely laid out, and it's easy to use and to read other people's reviews. I quite like being able to keep a kind of diary of what I've watched when. Its search feature is surprisingly well thought out. Since I've already posted my reviews on here, it's very little effort to crosspost to there. I can also link to those posts without linking to this DW with all its non-film fluff. I'm continuing to use Letterboxd for these reasons.

On the downside, the community features are pretty minimal: the commenting on reviews is clunky and ultra-basic (reply notifications only sometimes work at all) and there seems little reason to follow someone you don't already know. It doesn't feel much like, well, a community. I don't really like sites you have to use for literal years before getting any real interaction at all. And which idiot decided not to let you filter reviews by language? There are some English-language films where at least half the reviews are in Spanish or Italian or whatever.

Oh, and even if you pay for Pro, which allows custom posters, you still can't display UK-standard quad posters sensibly. (40x30 inches, landscape format – the ones I use on most film posts here.) The usual Internet US-centricism. So I won't pay.

Anyway, should anyone want to see what I post over there, which is basically what I paste here with a slicker look but less interaction, here's my Letterboxd profile.

Current Mood: blah

loganberrybunny

Public

355/365: Birmingham Hippodrome
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I was in Birmingham today. I didn't have much time to myself, but I was able to have coffee in the Dragon, which was nice as it's the pub a group of us had our post-UK PonyCon meal in last year. A lot quieter at 10:30am today, though! Here's a photo of the Hippodrome, Birmingham's largest theatre (capacity 1,935 seats), taken with a wide-angle setting hence the odd angles. The pavement decoration is because this area is right on the edge of the city's Gay Village. And the theatre district, obviously. And Chinatown (hence the name of the Dragon). And just down from New Street station. And only a few hundred yards from the UK PonyCon 2025 venue. And rather wet this morning!

Current Mood: lethargic

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Jennifer Ouellette

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/watch-a-robot-swarm-bloom-like-a-garden/

Researchers at Princeton University have built a swarm of interconnected mini-robots that "bloom" like flowers in response to changing light levels in an office. According to their new paper published in the journal Science Robotics, such robotic swarms could one day be used as dynamic facades in architectural designs, enabling buildings to adapt to changing climate conditions as well as interact with humans in creative ways.

The authors drew inspiration from so-called "living architectures," such as beehives. Fire ants provide a textbook example of this kind of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour them from a teapot like ants, as Goldman’s lab demonstrated several years ago, or they can link together to build towers or floating rafts—a handy survival skill when, say, a hurricane floods Houston. They also excel at regulating their own traffic flow. You almost never see an ant traffic jam.

Naturally scientists are keen to mimic such systems. For instance, in 2018, Georgia Tech researchers built ant-like robots and programmed them to dig through 3D-printed magnetic plastic balls designed to simulate moist soil. Robot swarms capable of efficiently digging underground without jamming would be super beneficial for mining or disaster recovery efforts, where using human beings might not be feasible.

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loganberrybunny

Public

What's Up, Doc? (1972)

This is a 1970s attempt to recapture the energy of the screwball comedies of a third of century earlier – and on the whole it does it very well. A lot of that is down to Barbra Streisand, whose Judy Maxwell is magnetically watchable even when she's being impossibly annoying, which is much of the time. Ryan O'Neal as Dr Howard Bannister looks just enough like a younger Michael Caine to be mildly disconcerting, but he does well too. Not all the jokes land perfectly, but there are so many of them that you don't have to wait long for a better one. The plot is absurd, but it's meant to be so that's okay.

An absolutely fantastic car chase scene, like a cross between Bullitt and Wacky Races and one which instantly became a favourite. The weak link is Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn), not because of her acting but because of the dated and embarrassing "hey, his actual fiancée is dowdy and whiny, isn't that amusing?" running joke; one late line about her in a courtroom scene is truly awful. Fortunately the rest is so enjoyable as to make this a largely thoroughly entertaining hour and a half. ★★★★

Current Mood: amused

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Claire Barber, Inside Climate News

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/zillow-removed-climate-risk-scores-this-climate-expert-is-restoring-them/

Even as exposure to floods, fire, and extreme heat increase in the face of climate change, a popular tool for evaluating risk has disappeared from the nation’s leading real estate website.

Zillow removed the feature displaying climate risk data to home buyers in November after the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which provides a database of real estate listings to real estate agents and brokers in the state, questioned the accuracy of the flood risk models on the site.

Now, a climate policy expert in California is working to put data back in buyers’ hands.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/zillow-removed-climate-risk-scores-this-climate-expert-is-restoring-them/

loganberrybunny

Public

354/365: Real Ale Tavern, Bewdley
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...here is tonight's rather belated photo. This is the Real Ale Tavern, a rather boringly named pub in Bewdley. And yes, it is known as the Rat sometimes! The building was once Barclays Bank – I can remember it being that – but it's been a pub for some years now. To the left you can just see part of the HealthPoint Pharmacy; to the right you can just see the side road that leads to the town centre car parks.

Current Mood: sleepy

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Jacek Krywko

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/macaque-facial-gestures-are-more-than-just-a-reflex-study-finds/

Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces have made it possible to more accurately extract speech from neural signals in humans, but language is just one of the tools we use to communicate. “When my young nephew asks for ice cream before dinner and I say ‘no,’ the meaning is entirely dictated by whether the word is punctuated with a smirk or a stern frown,” says Geena Ianni, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s why in the future, she thinks, neural prostheses meant for patients with a stroke or paralysis will decode facial gestures from brain signals in the same way they decode speech.

To lay a foundation for these future facial gesture decoders, Ianni and her colleagues designed an experiment to find out how neural circuitry responsible for making faces really works. “Although in recent years neuroscience got a good handle on how the brain perceives facial expressions, we know relatively little about how they are generated,” Ianni says. And it turned out that a surprisingly large part of what neuroscientists assumed about facial gestures was wrong.

The natural way

For a long time, neuroscientists thought facial gestures in primates stemmed from a neat division of labor in the brain. “Case reports of patients with brain lesions suggested some brain regions were responsible for certain types of emotional expressions while other regions were responsible for volitional movements like speech,” Ianni explains. We’ve developed a clearer picture of speech by tracing the origin of these movements down to the level of individual neurons. But we’ve not done the same for facial expressions. To fill this gap, Ianni and her team designed a study using macaques—social primates that share most of their complex facial musculature with humans.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/macaque-facial-gestures-are-more-than-just-a-reflex-study-finds/

loganberrybunny

Public

History will really not be kind to the people who could have stopped this, some of them years ago, people who were not True Believers but who refused to act when they could.

Cowards.

Current Mood: discontent

loganberrybunny

Public

Watch on YouTube

I found this Cinderella from 2000 on YouTube and thought it would be fun to share it here, especially for the benefit of those of you in poor benighted countries that don't do panto. Apologies for the iffy technical quality (360p, aspect ratio etc) but in all honesty if you require beautifully slick presentation then you probably won't enjoy panto anyway! This isn't the best panto I've ever seen, and I think it loses steam a little in the second half, but it's certainly far from the worst. And yes, non-panto-people, it absolutely is required for there to be about four hundred dodgy innuendos in front of an audience of eight-year-olds. That's how panto works. I don't even like innuendo humour, and I still make an exception here. Have fun, boys and girls!

Current Mood: amused

loganberrybunny

Public

353/365: Cyprus olive tree, Bewdley
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Getting away from the latest Trump absurdities, not a lot was going on in Bewdley today. Yes, again. We're like that, you know. I did pop into Tesco Express, but that's unlikely to be of interest to anyone much! At least I remembered to take a photo, and here it is. As the plaque says, this was donated a year and a half ago by Action for Cyprus. From memory, I think the people who run the Merchants chippy are Cypriot in origin – it's quite common for chip shops to be run by Cypriots – and this olive tree is just around the corner from the place.

Current Mood: okay

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasas-artemis-ii-rocket-rolls-to-launch-pad-but-key-test-looms-ahead/

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad.

The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

"This is the start of a very long journey," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17."

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Jennifer Ouellette

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/meet-veronika-the-tool-using-cow/

Far Side fans might recall a classic 1982 cartoon called "Cow Tools," featuring a cow standing next to a jumble of strange objects—the joke being that cows don't use tools. That's why a pet Swiss brown cow in Austria named Veronika has caused a bit of a sensation: she likes to pick up random sticks and use them to scratch herself. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, this is a form of multipurpose tool use and suggests that the cognitive capabilities of cows have been underestimated by scientists.

As previously reported, tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals. Dolphins can toss objects as a form of play, which some scientists consider to be a type of tool use, particularly when it involves another member of the same species. Potential purposes include a means of communication, social bonding, or aggressiveness. (Octopuses have also been observed engaging in similar throwing behavior.)

But the biggest surprise came when birds were observed using tools in the wild. After all, birds are the only surviving dinosaurs, and mammals and dinosaurs hadn’t shared a common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years. In the wild, observed tool use has been limited to the corvids (crows and jays), which show a variety of other complex behaviors—they’ll remember your face and recognize the passing of their dead.

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loganberrybunny

Public

US Treasury Secretary Bessent: It's a complete canard to think President Trump's action on Greenland is due to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Well sure, no evidence for that at all. Except of course the letter Trump wrote to the Norwegian PM saying "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace".

Yes, I was surprised too. He can write?!

Oh, and also: he literally writes diplomatic messages like Truth Social posts.

Lesson for future constitutional scholars: all the checks and balances in the world are no bloody use if nobody will bloody well use them.

Current Mood: weird

loganberrybunny

Public

352/365: Asda, Worcester
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I was in Worcester today for boring reasons, made even more boring by the persistent murk and light rain. As such I don't have anything thrilling to show you for today's 365 photo. I'm into the last fortnight of the project now, and it would be nice to have something vaguely interesting in the final few pictures! But instead, today you get a picture of a supermarket. :P This is Asda in Worcester city centre, taken from the balcony of the café up on the first floor. This was shot with a wide-angle setting, so the place isn't quite as big as it seems from this! You can get an idea by counting the aisles, I suppose!

Current Mood: mellow

loganberrybunny

Public

Everest (2015)

A less than cheery film now, albeit a pretty watchable one. This is a dramatised account of the 1996 Everest disaster, made with a decent amount of money ($55m) and a solid cast. Even so, the story does struggle to keep all its personnel distinct, not helped by the unavoidable covering of most of them in layers of mountaineering clothing. As such, one of the more memorable characters is Helen Wilton (Emily Watson), the base camp manager. Everest is very good at getting across a sense of the conditions, and some of the cinematography is breathtaking. (It was shot in the Alps, Nepal and... Pinewood.) The movie is pretty grim watching in the second half, though, so beware: as it's based on a real disaster, it's no spoiler to say only some of the expedition get to go home. A solid film rather than an exceptional one, but it does look very convincing. ★★★

Current Mood: awake

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Twilight Sparkle

July 2017

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Page Summary

arstechnica_science_feed - Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback
loganberrybunny - Lack of Indian Ocean slave trade films
arstechnica_science_feed - Tiny falcons are helping keep the food supply safe on cherry farms
arstechnica_science_feed - This 67,800-year-old hand stencil is the world's oldest human-made art
loganberrybunny - Cottages
loganberrybunny - So, Letterboxd...
loganberrybunny - The Hippodrome. No horses in sight, boo
arstechnica_science_feed - Watch a robot swarm "bloom" like a garden
loganberrybunny - Film post: What's Up, Doc? (1972)
arstechnica_science_feed - Zillow removed climate risk scores. This climate expert is restoring them.
loganberrybunny - In better news...
arstechnica_science_feed - Macaque facial gestures are more than just a reflex, study finds
loganberrybunny - All I can say tonight is this
loganberrybunny - Panto time! Oh yes it is!
loganberrybunny - Tree for Cyprus
arstechnica_science_feed - The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff
arstechnica_science_feed - Meet Veronika, the tool-using cow
loganberrybunny - Oh FFS
loganberrybunny - It Asda be another photo
loganberrybunny - Film post: Everest (2015)

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Reading Room

In a Library of Friends

Reading

Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback

Lack of Indian Ocean slave trade films

Tiny falcons are helping keep the food supply safe on cherry farms

This 67,800-year-old hand stencil is the world's oldest human-made art

Hands reaching out from the past

Cottages

So, Letterboxd...

The Hippodrome. No horses in sight, boo

Watch a robot swarm "bloom" like a garden

Film post: What's Up, Doc? (1972)

Zillow removed climate risk scores. This climate expert is restoring them.

In better news...

Macaque facial gestures are more than just a reflex, study finds

The natural way

All I can say tonight is this

Panto time! Oh yes it is!

Tree for Cyprus

The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff

Meet Veronika, the tool-using cow

Oh FFS

It Asda be another photo

Film post: Everest (2015)

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July 2017

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