Cuando tenía sólo nueve años, Tatum O'Neal se convirtió en uno de los ganadores del Oscar más jóvenes de la historia. Por su papel en la película “Paper Moon” como Addie, una galleta dura con un corazón de oro. Después de eso, continuó actuando en películas durante las décadas de 1970 y 1980 como Film Trillados pero dulces “Osos de malas noticias” y la comedia sexual para adolescentes “Little Darlings”. También volvió a protagonizar otra película de Peter Bogdanovich con su padre, la comedia loca de Nickelodeon, menos bien recibida, sobre la industria del cine mudo. En su vida personal, Tatum O'Neal enfrentó desafíos relacionados con un trastorno de abuso de sustancias y un divorcio de alto perfil del tenista John McEnroe, lo que la llevó a tomar una pausa en la actuación durante varios años. También sufrió un derrame cerebral en 2020 que la dejó incapaz de hablar y tardó tres años en recuperarse (a través de Semanal de entretenimiento).
Tatum O'Neal ha escrito dos libros dolorosamente honestos sobre su vida, “Paper Life” y “Found: A Daughter's Journey Home”. Ambos detallan el conflicto entre ella y su padre. Ella y Ryan O'Neal tuvieron una relación difícil durante décadas, pero su viaje de curación quedó documentado en la serie OWN “Ryan and Tatum: The O'Neals” en 2011. Ryan O'Neal falleció el año pasado en 2023. Tatum O'Neal también ha hecho algunas apariciones memorables en televisión, incluido uno de los mejores episodios de “Sex and the City”, “A Woman's Right to Shoes” y un papel invitado en “Rescue Me” y “Law & Order: Delincuente.” . Intención”. No importa el papel y a cualquier edad, Tatum O’Neal siempre ha demostrado ser una intérprete de aplomo y sensibilidad excepcionales.
La serie gira en torno al afable Steven Grant (Isaac), que se encuentra lidiando con un severo apagón y recuerdos de una vida diferente. Steven pronto descubre que sufre de un trastorno de identidad disociativo y comparte cuerpo con un mercenario llamado Marc Spector, y se da cuenta de que deben trabajar juntos para detener a Arthur y sus malvadas artimañas. Hablando más, Hawkeye explicó cómo les presentó la idea a los oficiales de Marvel:
“Tuve este tipo de visión. Les dije: '¿Qué pasaría si estuviera escuchando a Bob Dylan y vertiendo vidrio en su zapato?' Y a todo el equipo de Marvel le encantó la idea. Lo pensé como una imagen de una página en una novela gráfica, como, ¿qué sería? Entonces lo filmamos, no estábamos seguros de qué íbamos a hacer para hacerlo y luego decidieron abrir la serie, pero creo que le da al villano un poco de excentricidad.
En cuanto a si veremos más de Steven, Marc Spector o algunos de sus otros personajes en el futuro del MCU, eso está por verse. Una segunda temporada de “Moon Knight” todavía es teóricamente posiblePero Isaac firmó sólo por una temporada. Entonces, si Disney quiere volver a visitar este rincón del MCU, tendrán mucho en qué trabajar, logísticamente.
La temporada 1 de “Moon Knight” se transmite actualmente en Disney+.
Later this week, China will embark on the world’s second-only trip to the Moon’s far side. The goal is to collect the first rocks from inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, the largest and oldest impact crater on the lunar surface, and bring them back to Earth for analysis.
A stack of four spacecraft needed to complete this unprecedented and highly challenging mission, known as Chang’e-6, is now tucked into the nose of a 57-metre-tall Long March 5 rocket, waiting to lift off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on southern China’s Hainan Island.
“The whole process is very complex and risky,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But he says it’s a risk worth taking: “Samples from the SPA basin would be very interesting scientifically and tell us a lot about the history of the Moon and of the early Solar System.”
Far side science
Because the Moon is tidally locked to Earth, humans were only able to see its near side for thousands of years. In 1959, the first lunar far-side images returned by the Soviet probe Luna 3 revealed a face pocked with mountains and impact craters, in contrast to the relatively smooth near side. Scientists have since been collecting data from satellites orbiting the Moon to understand its little-known other half. In 2019, China’s Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft to soft land and conduct surveys on the Moon’s far side.
The upcoming Chang’e-6 mission, with its landing site carefully chosen by Chinese scientists and international colleagues, aims to give the first accurate measurements of the age and composition of the geology of the Moon’s far side. It might provide key clues to why the two sides of the Moon are so different — the so-called lunar dichotomy mystery — and help test theories about the early history of the Solar System.
The SPA Basin is a vast indentation on the lower half of the far side some 2,500 kilometres wide and 8 kilometres deep. Inside the northeastern part, Li’s team has identified three potential landing areas. They believe the sites could have a variety of materials formed during repeated asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions over two billion years, and therefore could be scientifically rich.
The South Pole-Aitken Basin is the blue area in the centre of this false-colour image. The indentation is 2,500 kilometres wide.Credit: NASA/GSFC/University Of Arizona
The most likely rock to be collected is basalt — dark-coloured cooled lava — which has previously been brought back to Earth for analysis from the Moon’s near side. With the first far-side basalt samples, scientists will be able to date them and assess their chemical composition, giving clues to their formation. “Then we can make comparative studies to understand why volcanic activities happened on a much smaller scale and ended much earlier on the far side of the Moon,” says Long Xiao, a planetary scientist at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan.
Being able to pin down the SPA Basin’s age would also be a major achievement, says planetary geologist Carolyn van der Bogert from the University of Münster, Germany. It will help settle the long-standing debate about whether the Moon and the inner Solar System was battered by a massive cluster of asteroids between 4.0 and 3.8 billion years ago. If the SPA Basin is older, then it would cast doubt on the heavy bombardment theory.
Besides basalts, scientists hope that Chang’e-6 will also pick up fragments of other rocks that have been scattered during impact events. If the Chinese mission strikes ejecta the from the deeper lunar crust or mantle, it will be scientific gold.
Engineering challenges
Chang’e-6 was originally built as a backup for the Chang’e-5 mission, which successfully returned 1.73 kilograms of samples from the Moon’s near side in 2020. Because the two craft are identical, site selection for Chang’e-6’s landing was constrained to similar latitudes as Chang’e-5’s and needed a relatively flat surface, says Chunlai Li, the mission’s deputy chief designer from the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing.
Like its predecessor, Chang’e-6 does not pre-determine its landing site but will use its instrumentation during the descent process to find the safest and most favourable spot. “The landing of Chang’e-6 would be more challenging than Chang’e-5 simply because the far side landing site is more rugged,” says Xiao.
Chang’e-6, like its twin, consists of an orbiter, a lander, an ascender and a re-entry module. When the spacecraft arrives at the Moon, it will separate into two parts, with the lander and ascender headed for the lunar surface while the orbiter and re-entry module remain in orbit.
If it pulls off the difficult soft landing, the lander will drill and scoop up two kilograms of soil and rocks. The sampling process needs to be completed within 48 hours, after which the ascender is intended to blast off from the lander and return to the lunar orbiter. There it is supposed to dock and transfer the precious samples to the re-entry module for the trip home.
During the sample collection and lunar surface liftoff, the Chang’e-6 lander would be unable to directly communicate with Earth. Every command will need to go through a relay satellite named Queqiao-2. Launched last month and now operating in a highly elliptical orbit around the Moon, Queqiao-2 is more powerful than the Queqiao satellite which served the Chang’e-4 mission. Its 4.2-metre umbrella-shaped antenna has the ability to simultaneously serve up to ten spacecraft working on the Moon’s far side.
International collaboration
Chang’e-6 is also carrying scientific payloads from France, Sweden, Italy and Pakistan. The Detection of Outgassing RadoN (DORN), which will be the first French instrument on the Moon, plans to use radon released from the lunar surface as a tracer to study the origin and dynamics of the Moon’s faint atmosphere. Pierre-Yves Meslin, a planetary scientist at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, says previous spacecraft have measured radon gas movement from orbit, but surface-level radon information is the missing piece of the puzzle.
The Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface, a payload developed in Sweden with funding from the European Space Agency, will seek to answer the question of why no negative ions have yet been detected on the lunar surface. Negative particles could be short-lived, formed either by atoms at the surface snatching electrons from the solar wind, or by molecules breaking apart from the high-energy solar radiation. The biggest challenge for this instrument is overheating, since it needs to face the Sun, says ESA project manager Neil Melville. But he says one hour of operation should be enough to gather the data.
Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics is sending a laser retroreflector for distance measurements. And Pakistan has piggy-backed its first lunar satellite to the Chang’e 6 orbiter, which will deploy after entering the lunar orbit.
Both surface instruments need to complete their work and send data back to Earth within the 48-hour window. “As soon as the samples lift off, the ascender will bring with it the communications and control system it shares with the lander. Even if the instruments on the lander continue to take data, there is no way to receive them here on Earth,” Li says
He says that like Chang’e-5 samples, the returned Chang’e-6 samples will be shared with the international community.
“When those samples come back to Earth, they will be like a Christmas present — whoever opens it will be happily surprised,” Bogert says.
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Credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences via Xinhua/Alamy
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has released the highest-resolution geological atlas of the Moon yet. The Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globereveals a total of 12,341 craters, 81 basins and 17 rock types, along with other basic geological information about the lunar surface. The maps were made at the unprecedented scale of 1:2,500,000. China will use the maps to support its lunar ambitions and researchers say that the maps will be beneficial to other countries as they undertake their own Moon missions.
Rat cells can fill in gaps in the brains of developing mice, such as missing olfactory neurons and even an entire brain region. While researchers have created other hybrid animals, such as mice with rat organs, this is the first demonstration of rat neurons becoming an essential part of controlling the mice’s behaviour.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it will raise the salaries of thousands of postdoctoral researchers and graduate students who receive a prestigious NIH research fellowship. The move could boost pay for other scientists as well, because academic institutions often follow guidelines set by the NIH. “This is a major step in the right direction and something that the majority will agree is widely needed to retain talent in the biomedical and academic research sectors,” says biomedical engineer Francisca Maria Acosta.
Almost three-quarters of readers who voted in our poll felt that these ‘nutrition labels’ would be useful. In terms of what should be included, “citation index is nasty, but there is some correlation with general journal quality”, says molecular cell biologist Simon Goodman.
The labels could be expanded beyond data that are already publicly available. “I want some sort of metric that captures whether the reviewers sent back a ‘Yeah looks good’ or whether they gave in-depth feedback for a paper,” says economist Alexander Smith. “I just want to know whether a paper got ‘whatever’ed’ or not.”
There were some worries that journals would try to game the system to make their numbers appear better or that the labels would unfairly disadvantage new journals that don’t yet have certain statistics.
Others felt that such labels would be unnecessary. “Not because that information is not useful”, says education researcher Pilar Gema Rodríguez Ortega, but because it implies that researchers aren’t able to make their own informed decisions on a paper’s quality.
Features & opinion
Three weeks after the announcement of the first ever outbreak of an avian influenza virus in dairy cattle, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has been detected in eight US states. On Wednesday, officials confirmed that genomic material from the virus has been detected in milk sold in shops. “The detection of viral RNA does not itself pose a health risk to consumers,” says dairy scientist Nicole Martin. “We expect to find this residual genetic material if the virus was there in the raw milk and was inactivated by pasteurization.” More evidence is needed to confirm that pasteurization kills H5N1. There are rules that milk from infected cows must be discarded, so the presence of viral material in commercially available milk might indicate that not every infected cow is being spotted and tested.
Researchers have discovered the genetic region that gives sugar gliders (Petaurus breviceps) and others ‘flying’ marsupials their gliding membrane. Comparing the DNA of 14 marsupial species showed that “all glider species seem to be evolving at a very high rate in a particular region, nearby a gene called Emx2”, explains molecular biologist and study co-author Ricardo Mallarino. Sugar glider embryos developed shorter gliding membranes when the activity of that gene was decreased.
Amid the data deluge provided by lab-based techniques, ecologist Chris Mantegna reminds her colleagues not to lose touch with the joy of the field — especially those ecologists from historically under-represented backgrounds, who have long been subject to fieldwork exclusion or harassment. (Nature | 5 min read)
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has released the highest-resolution geological maps of the Moon yet. The Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe, which took more than 100 researchers over a decade to compile, reveals a total of 12,341 craters, 81 basins and 17 rock types, along with other basic geological information about the lunar surface. The maps were made at the unprecedented scale of 1:2,500,000.
“Every question in geology starts with looking at a geological map,” says Ross Mitchell, a geophysicist at the CAS Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing. The new lunar atlas is “really a resource for the whole world”, he says.
The CAS also released a book called Map Quadrangles of the Geologic Atlas of the Moon, comprising 30 sector diagrams which together form a visualization of the whole Moon.
Jianzhong Liu, a geochemist at the CAS Institute of Geochemistry in Guiyang and co-leader of the project, says that existing Moon maps date from the 1960s and 1970s. “The US Geological Survey used data from the Apollo missions to create a number of geological maps of the Moon, including a global map at the scale of 1:5,000,000 and some regional, higher-accuracy ones near the landing sites,” he says. “Since then, our knowledge of the Moon has advanced greatly, and those maps could no longer meet the needs for future lunar research and exploration.”
China will use the maps to support its lunar ambitions and Liu says that the maps will be beneficial to other countries as they undertake their own Moon missions. Three spacecrafthave launched aiming for the Moon so far this year, and in May, China intends to send a craft to collect rocks from the Moon’s far side.
Scientists will use the new lunar maps to better understand the Moon’s history.Credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences via Xinhua/Alamy
With the updated atlas, scientists will be able to better understand the history of the Moon, evaluate potential lunar resources and conduct comparative geological studies. It will also inform the location choices of future missions, including where to build a lunar research base, Liu says.
Carolyn van der Bogert, a planetary geologist at the University of Münster in Germany, says she was impressed by the amount of work that Chinese colleagues have put into compiling the new atlas.
“We are looking forward to being able to interact with the map in a very detailed way,” she says.
Other-worldly cartography
The atlas, which is available in both Chinese and English, was assembled using data from China’s lunar exploration programme, especially the Chang’e-1 mission, which surveyed the lunar surface from orbit between 2007 and 2009, according to Liu. “Chang’e-1’s camera conducted observation of lunar topography and geological structures, while its interference imaging spectrometer played a key role in identifying different rock types,” he says.
The new atlas was assembled using data from China’s lunar exploration programme.Credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences via Xinhua/Alamy
Observations made on the Moon’s surface by the Chang’e-3 and Chang’e-4 lander missions in 2013 and 2019, respectively, helped to verify the accuracy of the Chang’e-1 data. The atlas team also used data from missions such as the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, both launched by NASA, and India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe. “Some observations were highly complementary to the Chang’e missions. For instance, GRAIL’s data helped us identify all the deep fractures on the lunar surface,” Liu says.
Chinese researchers started to compile the maps in 2012 as they were searching for the next targets to explore on the Moon. In partnership with Russia and more than a dozen other countries and organizations, China is leading the construction of the International Lunar Research Station, which is intended to take shape in the mid-2030s at the Moon’s south pole for scientific exploration and resource exploitation.
“Contributing to lunar science is a profound way for China to assert its potential role as a scientific powerhouse in the decades to come,” says Mitchell.
Liu says that his team has already started work to improve the resolution of the maps, and will produce regional maps of higher accuracy on the basis of scientific and engineering needs. In the meantime, the completed atlas has been integrated into a cloud platform called the Digital Moon, and will eventually become available to the international research community.
Rebel Moon – Part 2: The Scargiver, the second instalment in Zack Snyder’s Star Wars-scale epic, is getting some decidedly mixed reviews. The Guardian says that while it’s fun, it’s also bombastic and derivative, Variety says the story’s worse than the first one but the battles are better, and Empire Magazine pretty much cuts it in half with a laser sword that just happens to resemble a lightsaber.
According to the film magazine, the sequel is “marginally better than Rebel Moon – Part One, but still a weird, messy and humourless sci-fi”. Empire isn’t exactly waiting with bated breath for more movies, describing the tease of further adventures as “half-arsed” and saying that the second movie “gives you little reason to cheer the potential continuation of this Snyderverse“.
If that’s blasted a hole in your weekend viewing plans, don’t worry. There’s plenty of fun sci-fi movies for you to stream. Here are some of our favorites streaming right now on Netflix in the US (not in the US? We’ve also included where you can watch them in the UK and Australia).
The Matrix
With a fifth part of the trilogy now in development, it seems like an eternity since the original Matrix movie shook up sci-fi cinema and introduced us to bullet time. But despite its age this remains an incredibly fun sci-fi actioner, and it’s largely free of the pseudo-religious talky bits that weighed down the increasingly ponderous sequels. I re-watched this recently and I’d forgotten how funny it is, intentionally and otherwise. There are some great zingers in the script and Keanu’s seriousness is often accidentally amusing. But what really makes this a must-watch are the kinetic action sequences. Time hasn’t made them any less enjoyable.
Also available on Now TV in the UK and Prime Video in Australia.
Jurassic Park
It’s easy to forget that this is a sci-fi movie because, well, dinosaurs. But of course the dinos here are science dinosaurs, brought back from extinction via the power of preserved DNA and with considerable help from scientists who weren’t at school on the day the class were taught about hubris. It turns out that if you put incredibly dangerous things in a theme park and then cut every corner that can conceivably be cut, things are likely to go very wrong in a “aaagh munch munch munch” kind of way. And despite the cast’s best efforts, you’ll spend most of the movie rooting for the dinos rather than the humans.
Also available on Now TV in the UK and Netflix in Australia.
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Godzilla
Some of the best sci-fi takes real-world fears and puts them in mythical monsters, and you don’t need to do much analysis to see why a city-smashing monster became such a key part of Japanese pop culture. Grant Edwards’ take on the legendary monster movie is a lot of fun, a modern take on 1950s monster movies that delivers an exciting and satisfying climax. It also feels very much like a Spielberg movie in the way it takes time before the big reveal, making it a kind of Jurassic Park set in an entire city.
Also available on Now in the UK and Binge in Australia.
Rebel Moon: Part 2 – The Scargiver is an empty feast. It’s a relentless onslaught of explosions, sci-fi tropes and meaningless exposition that amounts to nothing. And yet somehow it’s still better than the first film in Zack Snyder’s wannabe sci-fi epic franchise for Netflix, Rebel Moon: Part 1 – A Child of Fire. (What do these titles really mean? Who cares.)
With all of the dull table-setting complete, Snyder is able to let his true talents soar in Rebel Moon: Part 2 by delivering endless battles filled with slow-motion action and heroic poses. It looks cool, I just wish it added up to something. Anything.
Spoilers ahead for Rebel Moon: Part 2.
If you somehow missed the first Rebel Moon film, the basic setup is that it’s Star Wars meets The Seven Samurai. Sofia Boutella stars as Kora, a former elite soldier of an evil empire who is hiding out in an all-too idyllic farming village, just planting and harvesting her days away. When a group of military baddies kills the chief of the village and starts threatening a young girl, Kora goes on a murdering spree (in defense!), leaving the community open to a retaliatory attack.
She spends the first movie recruiting potential warriors to defend the village, including a fallen gladiator (Djimoun Hounsou) and a bad-ass swordswoman (Doona Bae). (Their names are Titus and Nemesis, respectively, but those don’t really matter because the characters are paper thin.)
Full disclosure: I tried writing a review for the first Rebel Moon and just gave up in disgust. It was a shockingly boring epic, so much so that it took me several days to watch without falling asleep. By the end, I was only left with a feeling of dread, knowing that there was still another two hours of Rebel Moon ahead of me.
It’s somewhat empty praise, but at least I didn’t fall asleep during The Scargiver. Mostly, that’s due to the film actually having a sense of momentum and a lot more action. You can turn off your brain and enjoy the pretty pictures, much like you could for Snyder’s Sucker Punch, Justice League and Watchmen adaptation. He’s more a stylist than a natural storyteller, but occasionally Snyder’s visuals, such as a baffling montage of our heroes harvesting wheat, can be almost poetic.
Netflix
It’s just a shame that I didn’t care much about the film’s characters or any aspect of its story. James Gunn’s Guardian’s of the Galaxy trilogy made us fall in love with a band of misfits and screwups, with storylines that directly led to their personal and emotional growth. The crew in Rebel Moon, instead, feel like cardboard cutouts from better movies, and the overall plot feels forced (there’s even setup for another film by the end).
Hounsou tries to sell the pathos of Titus with his eyes, but he can only do so much. And while Bae’s warrior woman exudes cool (and has a very compelling flashback), she’s mostly wasted when the action really heats up. Then there’s Jimmy, a robot voiced by Anthony Hopkins, who is briefly introduced in the first film and pops up for a few minutes here to kick butt. Why? It doesn’t matter. Somehow that character is also important enough to serve as the narrator for both Rebel Moon films (but really it seems Snyder just wanted Hopkins’ voice adding gravitas).
Perhaps the only real saving grace for Rebel Moon: Part 2, much like the first film,is Ed Skrein as the villainous Atticus Noble. As a sadistic baddie, he’s really nothing new, but Skrein’s heightened scenery chomping makes the character interesting to watch. Where Darth Vader exudes a calm sense of dread, Skrein’s Noble is entertainingly chaotic, like the Joker crossed with Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa from Inglorious Basterds. He just has a lot of fun being bad — that’s something!
Given how popular the first film was (according to Snyder and Netflix, anyway), we’ll likely see more Rebel Moon down the line. Snyder previously said he’d like to do a six-hour director’s cut of both films, and he recently told Radio Times that he’d like to stretch the Rebel Moon series out to four or six films. Somehow, that just feels like a threat.
Three companies are vying for the opportunity to send their own lunar vehicle to the moon to support NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions. The this week that it’s chosen Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab to develop their lunar terrain vehicles (LTV) in a feasibility study over the next year. After that, only one is expected to be selected for a demonstration mission, in which the vehicle will be completed and sent to the moon for performance and safety tests. NASA is planning to use the LTV starting with the Artemis V crew that’s projected to launch in early 2030.
The LTV that eventually heads to the moon’s south pole needs to function as both a crewed and uncrewed vehicle, serving sometimes as a mode of transportation for astronauts and other times as a remotely operated explorer. NASA says it’ll contract the chosen vehicle for lunar services through 2039, with all the task orders relating to the LTV amounting to a potential value of up to $4.6 billion. The selected company will also be able to use its LTV for commercial activities in its down time.
Lunar Outpost
Astrolab
Intuitive Machines, which will be developing an LTV called the Moon Racer, has already bagged multiple contracts with NASA as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, and , Odysseus, to the moon to achieve . Venturi Astrolab will be developing a vehicle it’s dubbed Flex, while Lunar Outpost will be working on an LTV called Lunar Dawn. All must be able to support a crew of two astronauts and withstand the extreme conditions of the lunar south pole.
“We will use the LTV to travel to locations we might not otherwise be able to reach on foot, increasing our ability to explore and make new scientific discoveries,” said Jacob Bleacher, a chief exploration scientist at NASA.
The White House has published a policy memo asking NASA to create a new time standard for the Moon by 2026. Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) will establish an official time reference to help guide future lunar missions. The US, China, Japan, India and Russia have space missions to the Moon planned or completed.
NASA (and the White House) aren’t the only ones trying. The European Space Agency is also trying to make a time zone outside of Earth’s… zone.
Given the Moon’s weaker gravity, time moves slightly faster there. “The same clock we have on Earth would move at a different rate on the Moon,” NASA space communications and navigation chief Kevin Coggins told Reuters.
You saw Interstellar, right? Er, just like that. Exactly like that. No further questions.
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The most error-free quantum solution yet, apparently.
What if we could build a machine working at the quantum level that could tackle complex calculations exponentially faster than a computer limited by classic physics? Despite all the heady dreams of quantum computing and press releases from IBM and Google, it’s still a what-if. Microsoft now says it’s developed the most error-free quantum computing system yet, with Quantinuum. It’s not a thing I can condense into a single paragraph. You… saw Interstellar, right?
Stability AI just unveiled Stable Audio 2.0, an upgraded version of its music-generation platform. With this system, you can use your own text to create up to three minutes of audio, which is roughly the length of a song. You can hone the results by choosing a genre or even uploading audio to inspire the algo. It’s fun — try it out. Just don’t add vocals, trust me.
Apple, hunting for its next iPhone / Apple Watch / Vision Pro (maybe?), might be trying to get into robots. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, one area the company is exploring is personal robotics — and it started looking at electric vehicles too. The report says Apple has started working on a mobile robot to follow users around their home and has already developed a table-top device that uses a robot to move a screen around.
On Tuesday, The White House published a policy memo directing NASA to create a new time standard for the Moon by 2026. Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) will establish an official time reference to help guide future lunar missions. It arrives as a 21st-century space race emerges between (at least) the US, China, Japan, India and Russia.
The memo directs NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, and Transportation to plan a strategy to put LTC into practice by December 31, 2026. International cooperation will also play a role, especially with signees of the Artemis Accords. Established in 2020, they’re a set of common principles between a growing list of (currently) 37 countries that govern space exploration and operating principles. China and Russia are not part of that group.
“As NASA, private companies, and space agencies around the world launch missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, it’s important that we establish celestial time standards for safety and accuracy,” OSTP Deputy Director for National Security Steve Welby wrote in a White House press release. “A consistent definition of time among operators in space is critical to successful space situational awareness capabilities, navigation, and communications, all of which are foundational to enable interoperability across the U.S. government and with international partners.”
Einstein’s theories of relativity dictate that time changes relative to speed and gravity. Given the Moon’s weaker gravity (and movement differences between it and Earth), time moves slightly faster there. So an Earth-based clock on the lunar surface would appear to gain an average of 58.7 microseconds per Earth day. As the US and other countries plan Moon missions to research, explore and (eventually) build bases for permanent residence, using a single standard will help them synchronize technology and missions requiring precise timing.
“The same clock that we have on Earth would move at a different rate on the moon,” NASA space communications and navigation chief Kevin Coggins toldReuters. “Think of the atomic clocks at the U.S. Naval Observatory (in Washington). They’re the heartbeat of the nation, synchronizing everything. You’re going to want a heartbeat on the moon.”
NASA
The White House wants LTC to coordinate with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the standard by which all of Earth’s time zones are measured. Its memo says it wants the new time zone to enable accurate navigation and scientific endeavors. It also wants LTC to maintain resilience if it loses contact with Earth while providing scalability for space environments “beyond the Earth-Moon system.”
NASA’s Artemis program aims to send crewed missions back to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s. The space agency said in January that Artemis 2, which will fly around the Moon with four people onboard, is now set for a September 2025 launch. Artemis 3, which plans to put humans back on the Moon’s surface, is now scheduled for 2026.
In addition to the US, China aims to put astronauts on the Moon before 2030 as the world’s two foremost global superpowers take their race to space. Although no other countries have announced crewed missions to the lunar surface, India (which put a module and rover on the Moon’s South Pole last year), Russia (its mission around the same time didn’t go so well), the United Arab Emirates, Japan, South Korea and private companies have all demonstrated lunar ambitions in recent years.
In addition to enabling further scientific exploration, technological establishment and resource mining, the Moon could serve as a critical stop on the way to Mars. It could test technologies and provide fuel and supply needs for eventual human missions to the Red Planet.
