The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), located on Mount Graham in Arizona and run by the University of Arizona, is part of the next generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs). With two primary mirrors measuring 8.4 m (~27.5 ft), it has a collecting area slightly greater than that of a 30-meter (98.4 ft) telescope. With their resolution, adaptive optics, and sophisticated instruments, these telescopes are expected to probe deeper into the Universe and provide stunning images of everything from distant galaxies to objects in our Solar System.

An international team led by the University of Arizona recently acquired images of Jupiter's moon Io that were the highest-resolution pictures ever taken by a ground-based telescope. The images revealed surface features measuring just 80 km (50 mi) across, a spatial resolution previously reserved for spacecraft. This includes NASA's Juno mission, which has captured some of the most stunning images of Io's volcanoes. These images were made possible by the LBT's new SHARK-VIS instrument and the telescope's adaptive optics system.

Today, Earth is in a safe space. Like all the other planets in the Solar System, it is cocooned within the sun's magnetic field--a giant bubble called "the heliosphere." The heliosphere protects us from dangerous things in the Galaxy like interstellar clouds and cosmic rays.

3 million years ago, the heliosphere may have collapsed. A new paper just published in Nature Astronomy argues that a dense cloud of gas hit the Solar System, compressing the heliosphere to a fraction of its usual size.

"Earth suddenly was outside the protective bubble," says the paper's lead author Merav Opher, a fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and professor at Boston University. "Earth and all the planets were exposed to massive amounts of hydrogen, increased radiation, and interstellar dust."

Deep Freeze

It sounds pretty out-there: to save the snowy Arctic from melting away due to global warming, some scientific experts have been working on plans to hack the entire region's climate.

This doesn't entail popping the North Pole into an unfathomably large deep freezer like so much ground beef, but it would involve a slate of projects — some of which are already being undertaken — to cool the region by reflecting sunlight, according to a new video short from The Wall Street Journal.

One experiment involves pumping water to the surface, where it'll freeze to form a protective layer over the Arctic snow. Another has scientists scattering reflective glass beads on top of snow to reflect the Sun's harsh rays.

These are all forms of geoengineering, techniques to mold certain aspects of the environment in order to offset harm from climate change. The fact we are even seriously contemplating these experiments means that our collective mitigation efforts aren't enough — because last year was the warmest year on record for the Arctic.

Abstract: The Transhumanist campaign against humanity, we have outlined in Part 1, is part and parcel of a sophisticated long-game strategy waged against bodies and psyches. With the manipulation of our primal fears and altruistic impulses, the prosecution of this technological onslaught against humanity is camouflaged by linguistic shell games based on sanitising, eulogising and euphemistic language; justification through appeal to valued collective activities such as space exploration; and by claimed threats that humanity is itself the scourge, including through its propensity for "unwanted" love, which is recast as an affliction needing treatment with biochips and neuroceuticals. In this perverse "New Normal", technocratic regimes of dispossession headed by transnational economic interests and, we argue, the military-intelligence complex, are presented as self-evident and morally justified. Social order, civil rights, and human sovereignty are reconceptualised, repackaged, and reframed in public discourse as "surveillance under the skin". Part 2 broadens scope beyond NASA and its purportedly space-oriented transhumanist agenda by offering analysis of transhumanist forecasting and planning in an array of military-intelligence strategic vision or 'futures' documents, which are focused both on military personnel and civilian populations. We reveal that this evidence not only casts military personnel as fodder for transhumanist experimentation, but foresees societies and leadership agendas stratified along transhumanist lines. The trail of documentation ultimately leads to an intersection with military-intelligence scenario planning for a pandemic-ravaged dystopian global landscape in the year 2020, with real and present implications for impending global governance under the World Health Organisation, with ratification of amendments to International Health Regulations and a new Pandemic Preparedness treaty pending in May 2024.

Scientists harnessed a new method to precisely measure the amount of information the brain can store, and it could help advance our understanding of learning.

The brain may be able to hold nearly 10 times more information than previously thought, a new study confirms.

Similar to computers, the brain's memory storage is measured in "bits," and the number of bits it can hold rests on the connections between its neurons, known as synapses. Historically, scientists thought synapses came in a fairly limited number of sizes and strengths, and this in turn limited the brain's storage capacity. However, this theory has been challenged in recent years — and the new study further backs the idea that the brain can hold about 10-fold more than once thought.

In the new study, researchers developed a highly precise method to assess the strength of connections between neurons in part of a rat's brain. These synapses form the basis of learning and memory, as brain cells communicate at these points and thus store and share information.

By better understanding how synapses strengthen and weaken, and by how much, the scientists more precisely quantified how much information these connections can store. The analysis, published April 23 in the journal Neural Computation, demonstrates how this new method could not only increase our understanding of learning but also of aging and diseases that erode connections in the brain.

The "Blaze Star" T Coronae Borealis will erupt with a magnificent explosion sometime between now and September, becoming visible to the naked eye. Here's how to find it when it does.

A dim star in the night sky 3,000 light-years from our solar system could soon become visible to the naked eye for the first time since 1946 — and you can easily find it in the night sky.

The "Blaze Star" — officially called T Coronae Borealis (T CrB) — is expected to brighten significantly between now and September 2024 from magnitude +10 (beyond naked-eye visibility) to magnitude +2, according to NASA. That's about the same brightness as Polaris, the North Star, the 48th-brightest star in the night sky. (In astronomy, the brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude; the full moon's magnitude is -12.6, for example).

A rare and stunning photo recently captured a "parade of planets," in which six planets in our solar system appeared together in the predawn sky.

The image shows Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in alignment. Mars and Saturn are clearly visible near a crescent moon, while the positions of the remaining planets, which were too distant to be seen with the naked eye, were revealed by two composite long exposures.

Astrophotographer Josh Dury captured the planetary parade on June 1 in the early hours of the morning from The Mendip Hills — a range of limestone hills in the county of Somerset in the U.K. on June 1.

The annotated image shows Mars and Saturn clearly visible near a crescent moon, while the positions of the remaining planets (too distant to be seen with the naked eye but faintly visible in the image) were revealed by two composite long exposures.

"I thought no better than to climb Crooks Peak at the unearthly hour of 2am," Dury told Live Science via email. "As time passed, it was a really special experience. Being able to see one planet after another rising and being present in my images was fantastic and really encapsulated a sense of perspective of our place within the solar system, let alone the universe."

Until recently, the land of the dragon didn't have any dinosaurs. However, in the last ten years, several dinosaurs have been reported, but their life conditions were not well known. In a new study by a team from the University of Bristol and published in Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, important details have been revealed for the first time.

They found that early Welsh dinosaurs from over 200 million year ago lived on a tropical lowland beside the sea. Dinosaur trackways are known from Barry and other sites nearby, showing that dinosaurs had walked across the warm lowlands.

The discovery was made at Lavernock Point, close to Cardiff and Penarth, where the cliffs of dark-coloured shales and limestones document ancient shallow seas. At several levels, there are accumulations of bones, including the remains of fish, sharks, marine reptiles and occasionally, dinosaurs.

Former student of the Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology Owain Evans led the study. He explained:

"The bone bed paints the picture of a tropical archipelago, which was subjected to frequent storms, that washed material from around the surrounding area, both in land and out at sea, into a tidal zone. This means that from just one fossil horizon, we can reconstruct a complex ecological system, with a diverse array of marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and placodonts in the water, and dinosaurs on land.

"I had visited the coast at Penarth all my life, growing up in Cardiff, but never noticed the fossils. Then, the more I read, the more amazing it became. Local geologists had been collecting bones since the 1870s, and most of these are in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff."

It's our pleasure to welcome Walter Cruttenden, author of Lost Star of Myth and Time, as our featured author this month. Walter is the Director of the Binary Research Institute in California and has a background in math and science. His book investigates the scientific reality behind the myths of ancient cultures worldwide that spoke of a vast cycle of time with alternating dark and golden ages. Plato called it the Great Year. With the backing of new scientific evidence, Walter's book examines how this cycle of high and low ages may have some basis in fact. To better understand the physics behind the concept, Walter argues that we must observe the diurnal and annual motions of the Earth. In his article, Walter explores how the Earth's yearly revolution around the Sun significantly and profoundly affects human consciousness. He suggests a better understanding of ancient cultures' wisdom is the recipe for a higher civilization. Interact with Walter on our forum here.

A Three Body Problem

The hit Netflix series, Three Body Problem, based on the very real physics of how a multiple star system might affect life on an alien world, contains an important lesson for the future of our own sun and world.

Once thought to be rare, it is now estimated that half of all stars have partner stars. Examples include nearby Sirius A and B, and the three-star Alpha Centauri system, currently our closest stellar neighbor, on which the Netflix series is based. With the recent discovery of countless red and brown dwarf stars, some astronomers have pushed estimates to 80%, with many unseen. We would be wise to better understand the wild physics of these stellar systems before visiting one!

Ever since aurora chasers discovered Steve, a mysterious ribbon of purple light in the night sky, scientists have wondered whether it might have a secret twin. Now, thanks to a photographer's keen eye, and data from ESA's Swarm satellites, we may have found it.

Steve was a sensation when scientists stumbled across it a few years ago, thanks to the eagle eyes and excellent photography of the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group.

But its mauve hue and fleeting appearance meant it couldn't be a feature of the aurora borealis, commonly known as the northern lights, which comes in shades of green, blue and red and can last for hours. So, what could it be?

Fortunately, ESA's trio of magnetic-field monitoring Swarm satellites were perfectly placed to help investigate.

It turned out that Steve was a fast-moving stream of extremely hot gas called a sub-auroral ion drift. Or, to give Steve its full name, a strong thermal emission velocity enhancement.

But the mystery wasn't quite over.