Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Sometimes things explode on the bridge. (credit: CBS/All access)

Star Trek fans who finished season 2 of Discovery and are clamoring to see more of Capt. Christopher Pike helming the original starship Enterprise are getting their way, as CBS has announced a new series putting Pike, Spock, and Number One back on screen.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will come to CBS' All Access streaming service, the network said today. Ethan Peck will reprise his role as Spock, the Vulcan science officer originally portrayed by Leonard Nimoy from the 1960s. Anson Mount, who played Pike in Discovery, and Rebecca Romijn, who played first officer Number One, will also reprise their roles.

Many Star Trek fans began clamoring for a new spinoff set on the original NCC-1701 since Mount, Peck, and Romijn appeared in Discovery as well as several "short Trek" episodes.

Enlarge / Donald Trump speaks at a Rose Garden press briefing on Monday, May 11. (credit: Oliver Contreras/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump believes that America is the world's champion when it comes to coronavirus testing.

"In the span of just a few short months, we’ve developed a testing capacity unmatched and unrivaled anywhere in the world, and it’s not even close," Trump said in a Monday press conference. He noted that daily testing has risen from around 150,000 per day three weeks ago to around 300,000 per day this week and that the US was on track to surpass 10 million tests this week (we reached that milestone on Thursday).

Trump is correct in one respect: the US has performed more coronavirus tests than any other country with the possible exception of China. But by most other measures, the American testing effort is mediocre at best.

Enlarge / Two rings buckling under the pressure of a soap film. The top ring is a narrow band (compared to its diameter), so it buckles inward. The bottom ring has wide walls. It wrinkles out of plane as it collapses inward. (credit: Finn Box)

I once had a PhD student who joined our research program thinking he was going to be studying a mixture of plasma physics and gas diffusion. To his surprise, he ended up having to understand the mechanics of buckling. At the time, I decided that if I never saw the fourth derivative of deflection again, it would still be too soon. Unfortunately, the physics of buckling and wrinkling is especially beautiful, so I found myself unable to resist a study on how a ring is deformed and buckled by soapy water.

Release the ring

The experiment is very simple. A ring made from a soft material is gently placed on a soap film that is suspended across an opening. The mass of the ring causes the soap film to stretch downward but then everything stabilizes. The tension applied by the soap on the inside of the ring, which would normally pull it inward, is balanced by the tension of the soap between the ring and the opening. Then, the soap film outside the ring is destroyed by poking it with a pin.

The ring starts to fall. At the same time, the surface tension of the film tries to pull the ring inward. This pull would be resisted by the stiffness of the ring, but we used a soft ring, so there's not much stiffness there. It buckles and collapses, and the researchers filmed that collapse with a high-speed camera.

Enlarge / NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is leading implementation of the Artemis Accords. (credit: NASA)

NASA said Friday it has begun negotiating a series of bilateral agreements with space agencies in other countries that want to join the Artemis Program. Essentially, partner nations would need to agree to 10 basic norms as part of their space activities, such as operating transparently and releasing scientific data.

"We don’t want to only carry astronauts to the Moon, we want to carry our values forward,"  said Mike Gold, a NASA associate administrator who has led development of the Artemis Accords. "We want to use the excitement around Artemis to incentivize partners to adopt these principles that we believe will lead to a more peaceful, transparent, safe and secure future in space—not only for NASA and the international partners we’re working with, but the entire world."

He and NASA's deputy administrator, Jim Morhard, spoke with Ars in advance of Friday morning's announcement. Both were careful to say that these accords are based on the Outer Space Treaty, which forms the basis of international space law, as well as the United Nations' Registration Convention.