Month: July 2022

Enlarge / Atop Falcon 9, CRS-25 lifts off on Friday night. Zooming in, you can see mosquitos dotted throughout the frame, backlit by the rocket exhaust. (credit: SpaceX)

With little fanfare this weekend, SpaceX launched two Falcon 9 rockets. The first booster lifted off on Friday night and carried nearly three tons of supplies to the International Space Station, including two new space suits, for NASA. The second mission launched on Sunday boosted another batch of 53 Starlink satellites, bringing the on-orbit total to more than 2,500 operational Internet spacecraft.

The launches attracted relatively little notice in the space community and beyond because Falcon 9 launches have become so commonplace. Already this year, SpaceX has launched 31 rockets, all successfully. This tally matches the number of Falcon 9 boosters orbited in 2021, which at the time set a record for the launch company.

But this year, SpaceX has taken its cadence to another level, with a mix of payloads including its Starlink satellites, crew and cargo missions for NASA, Department of Defense missions, and commercial satellites. As of Monday, the Falcon 9 rocket has launched every 6.4 days this year and has lofted nearly 300,000 kg into low Earth orbit. This is considerably more than every other country and company in the world combined. Two more Starlink launches are likely this week.

Enlarge / The buildings of the IHES. (credit: Dhananjay Khadilkar)

Even before this year’s Fields Medal winners announcement, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) or the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies, boasted a remarkable statistic. Since its founding in 1958, the institute has had 12 permanent mathematics professors; seven of them had won a Fields Medal, considered to be the Nobel Prize in mathematics. On July 5, Hugo Duminil-Copin was named a recipient of this year’s prize, and the IHES extended its remarkable record to eight. “I am extremely glad that Hugo won the Fields Medal. We were betting on him to win the prize this year,” IHES director Emmanuel Ullmo told Ars Technica.

People before topics

Duminil-Copin was recognized for his use of probability theory to tackle problems in statistical physics. The 36-year-old is the first professor at IHES specializing in probability theory, a trait that manifests the institute’s philosophy as well as the reason behind its success. “We don’t look for topics but individuals. While recruiting professors, our only focus is on finding the most brilliant mathematicians or physicists,” Ullmo says.

Ullmo recalls the process of hiring Duminil-Copin. “Around 2016, when I consulted experts to suggest names of brilliant young researchers, Hugo’s name was right at the top. Even though no other mathematics professor in IHES history had specialized in probability theory, we offered Hugo the position. If someone of Hugo’s level had been researching in some other field of mathematics, that would have suited us, too,” Ullmo says.

A routine cataloging procedure of a painting by Vincent van Gogh at the National Galleries in Scotland yielded an unexpected discovery: a hidden self-portrait on the back of the canvas. The portrait was revealed while conservationists were conducting X-ray analysis of Head of a Peasant Woman as part of a cataloging exercise in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. Once the exhibit opens, visitors will be able to view the X-ray image through a specially crafted lightbox at the center of the display.

As I've reported previously, X-ray imaging techniques are a well-established tool to help analyze and restore valuable paintings because the rays' higher frequency means they pass right through paintings without harming them. X-ray imaging can reveal anything that has been painted over a canvas or where the artist may have altered the original vision. 

For instance, Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window was first subjected to X-ray analysis in 1979 and revealed the image of a Cupid lurking under the overpainting. And in 2020, a team of Dutch and French scientists used high-energy X-rays to unlock Rembrandt's secret recipe for his famous impasto technique, believed to be lost to history.

Enlarge / The unnamed star of Stray poses in its strange, new world of mysteries and puzzles. (credit: Annapurna Interactive / BlueTwelve Studio)

The indie gaming genre of "silly animal exploration" has produced a bunch of fun and unique experiences. We've loved pantomiming as the following: hellraising goats, car-driving bears, and (if you'll allow it into the genre) bendy, walking slices of bread.

But three years ago, Untitled Goose Game propelled the genre to its zenith. Its production values, accessibility, and uniquely dry sense of humor were a noticeable step up from the genre's typical "glitching barnyard animal" gimmick, and the result was a breakout hit. At that point, I quietly wondered: Where else can video games featuring unexpected animal heroes go?

The answer, delivered by this week's Stray, is quite compelling. This brief yet memorable adventure is a refined take on the concept, as if it were made by an arthouse film studio. It lands somewhere between the eerie, atmospheric exploration of the first Half-Life and the childlike whimsy of a classic Studio Ghibli film. And it stars a cat: not an unrealistic talking cat with bulging eyes and Acme-brand hammers, but a puzzle-solving, nap-taking, tiny-hole-exploring cat who scurries on four paws and pretty much always lands on its feet.