Month: June 2019

Enlarge / A real human brain suspended in liquid within a human silhouette carved into acrylic, on display at the Bristol Science Centre in England. New research finds more evidence that the brain operates near a critical point. (credit: Ben Birchall/PA Images/Getty Images)

The human brain doesn't seem like it would have much in common with how water freezes into ice, or heats up into a gas. But over the last decade, evidence has been mounting that the brain as a system functions much like water approaching the critical point of a phase transition. Now a team of Brazilian scientists has found additional evidence in rat brains that this might indeed be the case. The team described its findings in a recent paper in Physical Review Letters.

The notion of so-called "self-organized criticality" dates back to a landmark paper in 1987, when the late Danish physicist Per Bak concluded that nature's exquisite order was the result of a kind of phase transition. That precise moment of transition is colloquially known as the "tipping point" or "critical point."

A brain's the thing

Typically, a classical phase transition only occurs when the temperature and pressure are just right for a given system. Self-organized criticality emerges spontaneously as the result of many local interactions between the many elements of a system, like millions of grains of sand running from the top to the bottom of an hourglass. The pile grows, grain by grain, until it becomes sufficiently unstable that the next grain to drop makes the pile collapse in an avalanche. The base of the pile widens, restoring stability, and the pile-up begins anew, until the sand pile hits the critical point again. Those avalanches follow a so-called "power law," meaning smaller ones happen more often than larger ones.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base. (credit: Aurich Lawson/SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 2.03 of the Rocket Report! We're a week into June, and the small-space race is heating up, just like the Northern Hemisphere. While Stratolaunch appears to have gone by the wayside—official denials notwithstanding—Virgin Orbit is moving forward with plans to launch from both the United Kingdom and Japan. Meanwhile, efforts to build spaceports in Australia and Canada have also advanced.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Stratolaunch may soon be grounded for good. The aerospace company founded by Paul Allen, Stratolaunch, is closing operations, according to a report by Reuters that cited anonymous sources. In response to a query from Ars about potentially ending operations, a spokeswoman for the Seattle-based company replied, "We don't have any news or announcements to share at this time. Stratolaunch remains operational."

Enlarge / Sophie Turner's face often looks like it's about to explode in Dark Phoenix. (credit: 20th Century Fox)

Arguably, the biggest shockwave in recent Marvel films and series wasn't a snap from a comics villain but a click of Disney CEO Bob Iger's pen. One by one, we've seen the reverberations of Disney's Fox acquisition from last year, mostly in the form of Netflix series wrapping up so that Disney can move full steam(boat Willie) ahead with its own films and streaming service. This week sees an arguably bigger conclusion: the end of the latest X-Men cinematic series.

Dark Phoenix sees the rug getting pulled from under the series' teen-reboot incarnation, which began life in 2011's X-Men: First Class and became an overwhelming mess in 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse. That last entry wrapped a bow on an apparent trilogy, but this week's one-more-time film is a bummer for a surprising reason. Dark Phoenix starts with a glimmer of hope that this central cast could go somewhere interesting if given one more shot. Much of the film plays out like an incredible, self-contained graphic novel, with legitimate surprises, compelling intra-X conflict, and a tighter focus on relationships that the last film lost sight of.

If you're the kind of series fan who can have your wind knocked out by a lousy ending and neatly wrapped bow, Dark Phoenix's best bits may not be good enough. But up until that annoying conclusion, the film does its best to redeem the half of X-Men that never had a Hugh Jackman or Sir Patrick Stewart to lean on—and the result is a pleasant surprise in a crowded superhero-film ecosystem.