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It looks like the temperature may reach the high teens tomorrow, and with plenty of sunshine too. If that proves to be accurate, it might be the first day of the year when I can reasonably use the word warm instead of simply mild. I did have a cup of coffee in the pub's beer garden this morning and it was okay, but I had a coat on. Tomorrow I have too many boring things to do to have time for a pub break, but I doubt I'll need a coat at all. :)

Current Mood: hopeful

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by John Timmer

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/university-group-sues-trump-administration-over-shutdown-of-climate-center/

On Monday, a consortium that oversees the US's premier atmospheric research center announced it was suing the Trump administration over plans to shut it down. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, provides a home for interdisciplinary and collaborative research focused on anything atmospheric. Many of the country's leading academic researchers in the field have spent time working there or have been involved in collaborations that involve NCAR.

But all of that is dependent upon government support for the research done there and, back in December, the head of the Office of Management and Budget labeled it woke and “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” calling for it to be broken up. Since then, planning has continued for the dismemberment of NCAR, with everything from its computing facilities to its headquarters building being up for grabs. But now, the group that runs NCAR is fighting back, alleging in a lawsuit that this is all happening simply because President Trump is mad at Colorado and its governor.

The center at risk

NCAR is situated in Boulder, Colorado, and provides a home for a huge range of science, from weather forecasting to climate change to the impact of space weather on the upper atmosphere. The work there is backed by two research aircraft and a supercomputing center to run the weather and climate models. All of that is managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a nonprofit that represents over 130 individual educational institutions. UCAR helps manage and maintain the facilities and apply for and distribute grant money, and it provides work space for people to pursue collaborative projects at its facilities. Graduate students, post-docs, and faculty may all spend time working at NCAR facilities or using its supercomputing resources as part of specific research projects.

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Eric Berger

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/a-large-meteor-is-visible-from-much-of-ohio-and-parts-of-neighboring-states/

A large meteor crashed through the sound barrier above northern Ohio on Tuesday morning, producing a large fireball and what local residents described as an extremely loud "boom."

According to various eyewitness reports, the meteor's bright streak through the morning sky was visible across a wide area. A National Weather Service meteorologist in Pennsylvania, Jared Rackley, captured video of the meteor passing through the atmosphere and creating a large fireball. So far, there have been no reports of impacts on the ground.

The precise location of the fireball was pinpointed by a near-infrared optical detector on a geostationary satellite at 9:01 am ET (13:01 UTC). This "geostationary lightning mapper" revealed that the meteor traversed through the atmosphere in northern Ohio, just west of Cleveland, and over Lake Erie.

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loganberrybunny

Public

Some of my British readers may be amused at the subject line, since it's a long-running slogan used by the Lib Dems! But that's not what this post is about. I'm actually cheerful because, just for once, I actually won something on one of those "spin the wheel" prize draws Vodafone has about every 15 minutes. Nothing huge, but a £10 Argos voucher certainly won't go amiss! I've got until 29th April to spend it, too, so I can muse for a while on what I might do with it. :)

Current Mood: bouncy

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by John Timmer

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/national-academies-of-sciences-resisting-pressure-to-pull-climate-info/

Judges are frequently confronted with cases that hinge upon scientific information that their educational backgrounds may leave them ill-equipped to manage. Because of this challenge, the Federal Judicial Center, a group within the judicial branch of the government, has collaborated with the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) to produce a reference manual that provides background on a range of scientific and medical issues that frequently confront the court system. The Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence is currently on its fourth edition, and it has turned out to be an unexpectedly controversial one.

For the first time, this edition of the Reference Manual has included a chapter on climate change, meant to prepare judges to manage and potentially decide cases focused on everything from federal environmental rules to charges that fossil fuel producers engaged in fraud by ignoring the many warnings of harms caused by their products. That didn't sit well with Republican politicians; a collection of red-state attorneys general sent a letter demanding that the Federal Judicial Center pull the chapter. Back in February, it complied, posting a modified version of the Reference Manual with the climate chapter deleted.

But, as noted above, the NAS arranges for the production of the Reference Manual, and it hosts a copy in its extensive library of publications. So, fresh off their success with the government, the same collection of attorneys general turned their sights on the Academies. In a letter dated February 19, they "urge" the NAS to follow the judiciary's example and delete the chapter. Citing sources such as a Wall Street Journal editorial and their own threatening letter, the attorneys general accuse the NAS of engaging in “one-sided advocacy” and “judicial indoctrination,” and say it "is building a reputation as a partisan actor."

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Posted by Jennifer Ouellette

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/the-science-of-how-fireflies-stay-in-sync/

Scientists have discovered that male fireflies in a South Carolina swamp follow local interaction rules to synchronize their flashing mating displays. The research is being presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. (A preprint is also available on the biorxiv.) Such work could one day lead to insights into how the body's cells sync to its internal circadian rhythm, or how neurons fire together in the brain, as well as the design of drone swarms communicating through synchronized flashes.

As previously reported, research into swarming and flocking was largely relegated to observational biologists for decades. But in the 1980s, a computer graphics specialist named Craig Reynolds developed the so-called “boids” program, an agent-based computational model that has dominated collective behavior studies ever since. In such a model, each individual unit in a swarm is a dot moving in a straight line at a constant speed. By introducing a few simple rules regarding interactions between dots, a flocking pattern will emerge once the dots get dense enough. Another set of rules will produce a swarming pattern, and so forth.

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, 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.

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loganberrybunny

Public

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) film poster

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Comedy-drama | Letterboxd 4.2/5 | IMDb 8.1/10 | BBFC 15

I don't particularly care about Wes Anderson per se. I do care about his film here. It's an absolutely wonderful, spectacular, superbly made movie which is both a very human story and a clear look at the rise of fascism in Europe. Ralph Fiennes is amazing in the lead role,¹ and my initial discomfort at his repeated use of blatant US English in a very British accent turned into enjoyable discomfort as I realised that was surely the point. The film is full of brilliant dialogue, the cinematography is stunning, the cast is sensational, and the hotel itself is as much a character as any of the humans. Or indeed paintings. ★★★★★
¹ He didn't even get nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Boo!

Current Mood: impressed

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by John Timmer

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/figuring-out-why-ais-get-flummoxed-by-some-games/

With its Alpha series of game-playing AIs, Google's DeepMind group seemed to have found a way for its AIs to tackle any game, mastering games like chess and Go by repeatedly playing itself during training. But then some odd things happened as people started identifying Go positions that would lose against relative newcomers to the game but easily defeat a similar Go-playing AI.

While beating an AI at a board game may seem relatively trivial, it can help us identify failure modes of the AI, or ways in which we can improve their training to avoid having them develop these blind spots in the first place—things that may become critical as people rely on AI input for a growing range of problems.

A recent paper published in Machine Learning describes an entire category of games where the method used to train AlphaGo and AlphaChess fails. The games in question can be remarkably simple, as exemplified by the one the researchers worked with: Nim, which involves two players taking turns removing matchsticks from a pyramid-shaped board until one is left without a legal move.

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Posted by Jacek Krywko

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/magnetars-drag-spacetime-to-power-superluminous-supernovae/

Some of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe,” says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For years, astrophysicists tried to understand what exactly makes superluminous supernovae so absurdly powerful. Now it seems like we may finally have some answers.

Farah and his colleagues have found that these events are most likely powered by magnetars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that warp the very space and time around them.

The power within

Magnetars have been a leading candidate for the engine behind superluminous supernovae. The theory says these insanely magnetized stars are born from the collapsing core of the original progenitor star and emit energy via magnetic dipole radiation. “This core is roughly a one solar mass object that gets crushed down to the size of a city,” Farah explains. As its spin slows down, a magnetar bleeds its rotational energy into the expanding material of the dead star, lighting it up.

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https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/magnetars-drag-spacetime-to-power-superluminous-supernovae/

loganberrybunny

Public

Note: All my posts on this subject carry the "Sandra Peabody" tag. If you wish to avoid it, then please feel free to ignore posts with that tag.

As you'll know if you've been following my posts for a few months, I have unexpectedly found myself with a deep interest in the abusive production conditions of Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972). In 1997 with a second edition in 2000 (the one I own), David Szulkin's book Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic appeared from British publisher FAB Press. It is the only place star Sandra Peabody (also known here as Sandra Cassell) has ever spoken on the record about the movie.

During the chronological chapter following how the film was made, inevitably one segment focused on the pivotal scene where Krug (the lead villain) rapes Mari (a kidnapped young woman). Szulkin asked four people involved for their thoughts. Their quotes were presented without editorial framing. I have added each person's position on set after their name, but otherwise they are verbatim. The square brackets are in the original. "Lucy" is Lucy Grantham, not in this scene but playing Phyllis, another kidnapped young woman in the story.

Wes Craven, director: "You know, the character of Mari took an enormous amount of abuse. I liked Sandra Peabody a lot; I thought she was very pretty, and very plucky... because she was a very young actress, she wasn't nearly as confident and easygoing as Lucy was, and she had become involved in something that was very, very rough. And she hung in there. When the character was raped, she was treated very roughly, and I know Sandra said to me afterwards, 'My God... I had the feeling they really hated me.'"

Sandra Cassell, Mari: "No comment."

David Hess, Krug: "That was a difficult scene, because my style of acting is to go over the edge during rehearsal... to push it as far as I can possibly push it, just to see how far I can go. And then I set my parameters. Once I draw that box, once I have those boundaries, then I'm free to do whatever I want within my character. I think I frightened her a few times... I actually got pretty physical with her. She may have been a little bit intimidated, because she couldn't back off when the camera was running."

Yvonne Hannemann, assistant director: "That one scene was really quite upsetting. I know Sandra had to be consoled; it really got very rough. And I think they [the actors] all got very emotional. Of course, David Hess was just so frightening, that a lot of the acting was sort of method acting."

Current Mood: sad and angry

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/rocket-report-pentagon-needs-more-missile-interceptors-artemis-ii-clears-review/

Welcome to Edition 8.33 of the Rocket Report! NASA officials seem optimistic about launching the Artemis II mission next month, so confident that they will forgo another fueling test on the Space Launch System rocket to check the integrity of fickle seals in a liquid hydrogen loading line. The rocket will return to the launch pad next week, with liftoff targeted for April 1 at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC). NASA has six launch dates available in early April after the agency added April 2 to the launch period. April 1 and 2 each have launch windows that open before sunset, an added bonus for those of us who prefer a day launch, for purely aesthetic reasons.

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.

Firefly's Alpha rocket flies again. Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket successfully returned to flight Wednesday, March 11, launching a technology demonstration mission more than 10 months after the rocket’s previous launch failed, Space News reports. The launch followed several delays and scrubbed launch attempts. The two-stage Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and headed southwest over the Pacific Ocean, reaching orbit about eight minutes later. Firefly said the rocket's upper stage later reignited its engine, demonstrating restart capability required for some orbit insertion missions. This was the seventh flight of Firefly's Alpha rocket, capable of hauling more than a ton of payload to low-Earth orbit.

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loganberrybunny

Public

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) film poster

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Sci-fi | Letterboxd 4.3/5 | IMDb 8.3/10 | BBFC U

Without doubt an epic feast for the senses. The visual effects are staggering given the total lack of CGI in the era, with most holding up superbly almost 60 years later. The film is very slow, with long stretches without dialogue book-ending the section most people remember. HAL 9000 might even be the best actual character in this movie. Drops half a star for a combination of the slightly unsatisfying Star Gate section which, through no fault of its own, now looks like a 1980s computer game, and the immensely annoying folks of the "If you don't rate this six stars at least you're Not A Real Film Fan" tendency. But it's still a sensational watch even with those issues, which tells you how remarkable it actually is. 2001 would have blown my mind on a big screen in 1968, I'm sure. ★★★★½

Current Mood: calm

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Kiona N. Smith

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/centuries-before-the-inca-perus-wealthy-imported-parrots-from-afar/

Centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire, a much smaller kingdom on the central coast of Peru already had a sophisticated trade network—one it used to import live parrots across the Andes from the Amazon rainforest.

Australian National University conservation geneticist George Olah and his colleagues recently studied feathers from a headdress in a Ychsman noble’s tomb, dating to 1100–1400 CE (the centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire). DNA and chemical isotopes reveal that the parrots the feathers came from (still bright blue, yellow, and green after all these centuries) were born in the wild on the far side of the Andes but kept in captivity somewhere on the Peruvian coast. To pull off importing live parrots from hundreds of miles away across the steep, towering Andes, the Ychsma (who the Inca annexed around 1470) must have had a far-reaching trade network that spanned at least half a continent.

And they must have really liked birds.

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Jennifer B. Nuzzo and Andrea Uhlig, The Conversation

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/we-study-pandemics-and-the-resurgence-of-measles-is-a-grim-sign-of-whats-coming/

In the three decades between 1993 and 2024, measles in the US was relatively rare—a few hundred cases each year, at most. But suddenly, the disease has become so entrenched in American life that it sometimes fails to make headlines when a new outbreak erupts.

As of March 2026, measles has been continuously circulating around the US for more than a year, starting with an outbreak in Texas that lasted from January to August 2025. Before that outbreak was declared over, an outbreak on the Utah and Arizona border began in August and is ongoing. An outbreak in South Carolina began in September, drastically increased in January 2026, and continues.

Thirty states have had measles cases this year; 47 have seen cases since the start of 2025. Health officials across the US have confirmed 1,300 infections already this year as of March 6, putting the country on track to surpass 2025’s numbers, which were the highest in 35 years.

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/anduril-the-autonomous-weapons-maker-doubles-the-size-of-its-space-unit/

Anduril Industries announced on Wednesday that it is acquiring ExoAnalytic Solutions, a space intelligence firm that operates a vast network of sensors monitoring the veiled movements of satellites thousands of miles above Earth.

"For nearly twenty years, ExoAnalytic has delivered important advantage[s] for the nation’s most critical missions," Anduril said in a press release. "Exo is a renowned leader in modeling and simulation for classified national security space programs, and provides critical software and expertise for missile warning and missile defense."

"The company also owns and operates the world’s largest commercial telescope network with more than 400 systems deployed worldwide, enabling persistent, high-fidelity awareness of deep space at a global scale," Anduril said.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/anduril-the-autonomous-weapons-maker-doubles-the-size-of-its-space-unit/

loganberrybunny

Public

At least, if you're in the UK. The really interesting low-budget horror from 1962, Carnival of Souls, which you may remember I really liked when I watched it a month ago, is being shown on Rewind TV (Freeview 81) on Tuesday. Note that this channel does not have a catch-up service, so you'll need to record it via your own hardware or use Freeview Play if you want to watch it at a different time.

Current Mood: okay

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/anduril-the-autonomous-weapons-maker-doubles-the-size-of-its-space-unit/

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by John Timmer

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/nih-director-launches-scientific-freedom-lectures-with-non-scientist/

On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it's calling "Scientific Freedom Lectures," with the first scheduled for March 20. The "freedom" theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered outrageous censorship of his ideas during the pandemic and is using his anger about it to fuel his efforts to bring change to the NIH. Given that scientific freedom is a major interest of the director, you might think that the first lecture would be delivered by a distinguished scientist. Guess again.

The speaker at the first lecture will be a former journalist best known for his fringe ideas on COVID and the climate. The topic will be the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a lab, an idea for which there is no scientific evidence.

Freedom for me

Bhattacharya was one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that we should try to protect the elderly and vulnerable but otherwise enable COVID to spread through the rest of the population. By and large, public health officials were aghast at the likely consequences—overwhelmed hospital systems, a still-substantial rate of mortality among healthy adults, the consequences of more cases of long COVID, etc.—and argued strongly against it.

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Posted by Jennifer Ouellette

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/exploring-the-science-of-tundra-tongue/

We all remember that infamous scene in the 1983 classic, A Christmas Story, where a boy licks a cold metal post on the playground and ends up getting his tongue stuck to the surface. It's practically a childhood rite of passage. A 1996 case study coined the term "tundra tongue" to describe the phenomenon. But how dangerous is it, really? And what's the best way to free one's tongue with minimal damage?

Anders Hagen Jarmund, a graduate student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), experienced tundra tongue firsthand in his youth and had the same questions. So he decided to investigate the underlying science as part of his master's thesis, recruiting several colleagues to the project. This turned into two separate papers: one published in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology and the other in the journal Head & Face Medicine.

“I’m from a small place called Hattfjelldal, which is quite cold in the winter,” Jarmund said of the rationale for undertaking the project. “I don’t remember if it was a signpost or a lamppost behind the school, but I remember licking it, and my tongue got stuck. This was an experience that my friends had also had, actually, and then we were wondering if it was actually dangerous, getting your tongue stuck to a lamppost or railing.” (Their experience was common, it seems; Norway actually passed legislation in 1998 to prohibit any bare metal in playground equipment.)

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Twilight Sparkle

July 2017

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Page Summary

loganberrybunny - Cautiously optimistic forecast
arstechnica_science_feed - Trump's plan to shut down weather and climate center triggers lawsuit
arstechnica_science_feed - A large meteor is visible from much of Ohio and parts of neighboring states
loganberrybunny - Winning here
arstechnica_science_feed - National Academies of Sciences says no to demands it remove climate info
arstechnica_science_feed - The science of how fireflies stay in sync
loganberrybunny - Film post: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
mark in dw_maintenance - Performing some traffic maintenance today
arstechnica_science_feed - Figuring out why AIs get flummoxed by some games
arstechnica_science_feed - Magnetars drag spacetime to power superluminous supernovae
loganberrybunny - This was treated as "background colour" less than 30 years ago
arstechnica_science_feed - Rocket Report: Pentagon needs more missile interceptors; Artemis II clears review
loganberrybunny - Film post: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
arstechnica_science_feed - Centuries before the Inca, Peru's wealthy imported parrots from afar
arstechnica_science_feed - We study pandemics, and the resurgence of measles is a grim sign of what’s coming
arstechnica_science_feed - Anduril, the autonomous weapons maker, doubles the size of its space unit
loganberrybunny - Heads-up for anyone interested in Carnival of Souls
arstechnica_science_feed - Anduril, the autonomous weapons maker, doubles the size of its space unit
arstechnica_science_feed - NIH director launches "Scientific Freedom" lectures with non-scientist
arstechnica_science_feed - Don't lick that cold metal pole in winter—if you do, don't panic

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Page generated Mar. 18th, 2026 09:24 pm

Reading Room

In a Library of Friends

Reading

Cautiously optimistic forecast

Trump's plan to shut down weather and climate center triggers lawsuit

The center at risk

A large meteor is visible from much of Ohio and parts of neighboring states

Winning here

National Academies of Sciences says no to demands it remove climate info

The science of how fireflies stay in sync

Film post: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Figuring out why AIs get flummoxed by some games

Magnetars drag spacetime to power superluminous supernovae

The power within

This was treated as "background colour" less than 30 years ago

Rocket Report: Pentagon needs more missile interceptors; Artemis II clears review

Film post: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Centuries before the Inca, Peru's wealthy imported parrots from afar

We study pandemics, and the resurgence of measles is a grim sign of what’s coming

Anduril, the autonomous weapons maker, doubles the size of its space unit

Heads-up for anyone interested in Carnival of Souls

Anduril, the autonomous weapons maker, doubles the size of its space unit

NIH director launches "Scientific Freedom" lectures with non-scientist

Freedom for me

Don't lick that cold metal pole in winter—if you do, don't panic

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July 2017

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