NASA's plans for a presence on the moon "will allow the program to practice how to live in space sustainably," writes the Washington Post. "It will allow scientists to tap into the moon's considerable scientific value to learn more about how Earth was formed. And perhaps, it would also serve as a steppingstone to Mars and other deep-space destinations years in the future."

First, unlike in the 1960s — we now know that the moon has water. Water is not only key to sustaining human life, but its component parts — hydrogen and oxygen — can be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a gas station in space. That could be critical for long-duration missions, allowing spacecraft to refuel on the moon instead of lugging all the fuel from Earth. And since the moon's gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, it is a relatively easy springboard to other points of the solar system.
NASA is also considering building a nuclear reactor on the moon: It's one of several initiatives NASA has begun under its Artemis program, designed to help astronauts stay for extended periods when they'll need power, transportation and the ability to use the moon's resources.... The effort is still very much in its nascent stages, and the funding NASA would need for the long term has not materialized in full.... A sustainable presence, despite the rosy predictions coming from the top echelons of the agency, is still years away, and the technical challenges are immense.

But NASA has begun developing the technologies that would be needed to sustain astronauts on the surface for extended periods. In June of last year, the agency and the Energy Department awarded contracts, worth $5 million each, to three companies to develop nuclear power systems that could be ready to launch by the end of the decade for a test on the moon. The systems would generate 40 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power six or seven American households, and last about 10 years....

NASA is also looking to build solar farms, using arrays that point vertically and catch the angle of the sun over the horizon. And it's exploring how best to exploit what are called "in situ resources" — meaning those that already exist, such as the regolith.
The article even broaches the idea of "a lunar economy that would help sustain a permanent presence."

Planet earth "has now warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels," reports the Washington Post, "and nearly every year in the past decade ranks near the top."

"On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranked 2022 as the sixth-hottest year on record and reported that the 10 warmest have all occurred since 2010...." Twenty-eight countries set national record-high annual averages last year, including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, China and New Zealand. Despite 2022 being slightly cooler than other recent years, Berkeley Earth reported that 850 million people experienced their warmest year ever. Humans' emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases have driven this rapid warming, scientists say.

"This is a big change for the planet. And that activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 50 percent compared to where it was for the last few million years," Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said in an interview. "There's often a debate between adapting to climate change and mitigating climate change. We don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We're going to have to do both...."

"Even if we get our act together and reduce our emissions dramatically, and get our emissions all the way down to zero, the world isn't going to cool back down for many centuries, it's just going to stop warming," he said. "For better or worse, this is normal and it's our job to keep something worse from becoming the new normal past this."
Hausfather also told the Post that without La Niña cooling the Pacific ocean, 2022 would have been the second-warmest year on record, behind 2020.

Other stats from the article about 2022:

• Parts of Antarctica's ice sheet were as much as 70 degrees above normal.
• China suffered its worst recorded drought ever.
• Europe experienced its worst drought in 500 years.
• America had its third-driest year, and in late October 63% of America was experiencing drought conditions — a 10-year high.
• "Blistering temperatures in India and Pakistan spanning from March to May were so high that pavement buckled."

It was meant to be the first-ever orbital mission to take off from the United Kingdom — carried by a Virgin Orbit rocket launched from a private jumbo jet Monday over the Atlantic ocean, according to the BBC.

But instead "at an altitude of approximately 180km (111 miles), the upper stage experienced an anomaly which 'prematurely ended' the first burn. The company said this event ended the mission, with the rocket components and payload falling back to Earth within the approved safety corridor.,,,"

At this point the unmanned rocket became "a slow moving fireball in the sky," astrodynamics lecturer Marco Langbroek told Gizmodo in an email. The rocket's hellish descent was captured on video, revealing the unfortunate journey back from space. Ramón López, an observer at the Spanish Meteor Network, caught the rocket reentering Earth's atmosphere from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa. He released the footage on YouTube, as well as on Twitter.
Earlier this week Space.com noted that four previous Virgin Orbit missions have all been successful, deploying a total of 33 satellites into orbit.

NASA's Webb telescope has discovered an exoplanet, which is any planet that is outside of our solar system, for the first time, the agency announced Wednesday. From a report: The planet, called LHS 475 b, is nearly the same size as Earth, having 99% of our planet's diameter, scientists said. However, it is several hundred degrees hotter than Earth and completes its orbit around its star in two days. LHS 475 b is in the constellation Octans and is 41 light-years away, which is relatively nearby. Scientists are still trying to determine if the planet has an atmosphere. It's possible LHS 475 b has no atmosphere or one made completely out of carbon dioxide, but one option can be totally eliminated.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russia said on Wednesday it would launch another Soyuz spacecraft next month to bring home two cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut from the International Space Station after their original capsule was struck by a micrometeoroid and started leaking last month. The leak came from a tiny puncture -- less than 1 millimeter wide -- on the external cooling system of the Soyuz MS-22 capsule, one of two return capsules docked to the ISS that can bring crew members home.

Russia said a new capsule, Soyuz MS-23, would be sent up on Feb. 20 to replace the damaged Soyuz MS-22, which will be brought back to Earth empty. "Having analyzed the condition of the spacecraft, thermal calculations and technical documentation, it has been concluded that the MS-22 must be landed without a crew on board," said Yuri Borisov, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and U.S. astronaut Francisco Rubio had been due to end their mission in March but will now extend it by a few more months and return aboard the MS-23.

"They are ready to go with whatever decision we give them," Joel Montalbano, NASA's ISS program manager, told a news conference. "I may have to fly some more ice cream to reward them," he added. The MS-23, which had been due to take up three new crew in March, will instead depart from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as an unmanned rescue mission next month. If there is an emergency in the meantime, Roscosmos said it will look at whether the MS-22 spacecraft can be used to rescue the crew. In this scenario, temperatures in the capsule could reach unhealthy levels of 30-40 degrees Celsius (86-104 degrees Fahrenheit). "In case of an emergency, when the crew will have a real threat to life on the station, then probably the danger of staying on the station can be higher than going down in an unhealthy Soyuz," Sergei Krikalev, Russia's chief of crewed space programs, said.

"Envy the lumberjacks, for they perform the happiest, most meaningful work on earth," writes the Washington Post.

"Or at least they think they do. Farmers, too." Agriculture, logging and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness — and lowest levels of self-reported stress — of any major industry category, according to our analysis of more than 13,000 time journals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey. (Additional reporting sharpened our focus on lumberjacks and foresters, but almost everyone who works on farms or in forests stands out.)

The time-use survey typically asks people to record what they were doing at any given time during the day. But in four recent surveys, between 2010 and 2021, they also asked a subset of those people — more than 13,000 of them — how meaningful those activities were, or how happy, sad, stressed, pained and tired they felt on a six-point scale.... [H]appiness and meaning aren't always correlated. Heath-care and social workers rate themselves as doing the most meaningful work of anybody (apart from the laudable lumberjacks), but they rank lower on the happiness scale. They also rank high on stress.

The most stressful sectors are the industry including finance and insurance, followed by education and the broad grouping of professional and technical industries, a sector that includes the single most stressful occupation: lawyers. Together, they paint a simple picture: A white collar appears to come with significantly more stress than a blue one.
The Post credits "adjacency to nature" as boosting the happiness in forestry-related professions (as well as many recreational activities). The Post spoke to one forestry advocate who even argued that "Forestry forces you to work on a slower time scale. It pushes you to have a generational outlook."

"Wheat now provides 20% of the calories consumed by humans every day," writes the Guardian. Unfortunately, "Thanks to human-induced global heating, our planet faces a future of increasingly severe heat waves, droughts and wildfires that could devastate harvests in future, triggering widespread famine in their wake.

"But the crisis could be averted thanks to remarkable research now being undertaken by researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich." They are working on a project to make wheat more resistant to heat and drought. Such efforts have proved to be extremely tricky but are set to be the subject of a new set of trials in a few weeks as part of a project in which varieties of wheat — created, in part, by gene-editing technology — will be planted in field trials in Spain. The ability of these varieties to withstand the heat of Iberia will determine how well crop scientists will be able to protect future arable farms from the worst vicissitudes of climate change, and so bolster food production for the Earth's billions, says the John Innes Centre team....

"A key tool in this work was gene editing, which allowed us to make precise changes in wheat DNA. Without it, we would still be struggling with this. It has made all the difference."
This was an especially difficult struggle because wheat genetics includes multiple ancestral genomes, the article points.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.

"Luke Iseman, a serial inventor and the former director of hardware at Y Combinator, has raised at least $500,000 to launch his sunlight reflection company, Make Sunsets," reports CNBC.

"Make Sunsets plans to launch three balloon test launches releasing sulfur dioxide to cool the atmosphere in January from the land Iseman owns in Baja, Mexico." "We make reflective, high-altitude, biodegradable clouds that cool the planet. Mimicking natural processes, our 'shiny clouds' are going to prevent catastrophic global warming," reads the site's About page.... The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines released thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, temporarily lowering average global temperatures by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The idea of replicating these conditions to fight climate change has generally been dismissed as more science fiction than real science. But as the effects of climate change have grown more dire and obvious, the idea has gotten more serious attention, and the White House is in the process of coordinating a five-year research plan to study it. On the downside, injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere could damage the ozone layer, cause respiratory illness and create acid rain. It would also cost as little as $10 billion per year to run a program that cools the Earth by 1 degree Celsius, UCLA environmental law professor Edward Parson told CNBC in 2022. That's remarkably cheap compared to other mitigation techniques....

In January, Make Sunsets plans to launch three latex weather balloons that will release anywhere between 10 and 500 grams of sulfur dioxide. The balloons will include a flight tracking computer, a geo-locating tracking device, and a camera, mostly provided by hobbyist suppliers. Within a week of each flight, Make Sunsets will publish data on its website about what it was able to find.

"Aboard the International Space Station right now is a metal box, the size of a desktop PC tower," reports Popular Mechanics. "Inside, a nozzle is helping build little test parts that aren't possible to make on Earth."

The Washington Post reports: Backed by MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, astronauts on board the International Space Station on Friday completed a roughly 45-day experiment using a small microwave-sized box that injects resin into silicone skins to build parts, such as nuts and bolts. Now, after the parts travel back to Earth this weekend, scientists will evaluate the test pieces to examine whether they were made successfully — a process that could take weeks.

If so, it paves the way for astronauts to build huge parts that would be nearly impossible on Earth thanks to gravity and could upgrade space construction.It lets you build and modify space stations "quicker, cheaper and with less complexity," said Ariel Ekblaw, the founder of the Space Exploration Initiative. "It starts to unlock more opportunities for exploration."
The silicone skin is like a balloon filled with resin instead of air, an MIT engineer/researcher told Popular Science — with the resin then cured and solidified by a flash of ultraviolet light. (After which astronauts can cut away the silicone skin.)

The best part? The skin and the resin are both readily available off-the-shelf products.

SonicSpike shares a report from Space.com: A giant cloud of magnetized plasma exploded from a sunspot hidden on the far side of the sun that might turn to face Earth only two days from now, so get ready for some solar fireworks. The explosion that erupted from behind the sun's eastern edge in the early morning of Tuesday (Jan. 3) was a so-called coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, or corona. The CME was accompanied by a powerful solar flare that lasted an overwhelming six hours, solar scientist Keith Strong said on Twitter. Neither the flare nor the CME were directed at Earth, but experts warn that the hidden sunspot that produced them will soon be facing the planet as the sun rotates.

Yesterday's flare and CME were detected by multiple sun-observing spacecraft including the joint NASA/European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission (SOHO) and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The measurements helped scientists to determine that the sunspot, or active region, that produced the bursts, will move to the Earth-facing portion of the sun's disk within two days, according to Space Weather. [...] The British space weather forecaster Met Office predicts low solar activity in the next couple of days with a potential increase expected toward the end of this week as the mysterious sunspot emerges at the sun's eastern edge.

Qualcomm has announced that its new processors and modems will allow phones to communicate with the Iridium satellite network, letting users send and receive messages even in areas without cell coverage. The Verge reports: The feature, called Snapdragon Satellite, will be available in phones that have both Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and its X70 Modem system, along with some additional radios. Phones that support it should be "launched in select regions starting in the second half of 2023," according to the company's press release, and there are several manufacturers working on designs, according to Francesco Grilli, a Qualcomm spokesperson who helped conduct a briefing for journalists. For now, the feature will likely only be available in flagship Android phones, as Qualcomm's only including the tech in its premium chips. Companies that want to add it to their phones will work directly with Qualcomm to figure out the software and hardware, but they shouldn't have to build new relationships with Iridium, according to Grilli. To the satellites, phones with the tech will look like any other Iridium-enabled devices. As for who will pay for the messages, "the cost of the satellite-based messaging service and dependent services will depend on OEMs and service providers and how they choose to offer the service," according to Grilli.

At first, Snapdragon Satellite will be limited to use in emergency situations, letting you contact someone for help even if you're in a remote area without cell service. According to Grilli, "Snapdragon Satellite leverages Garmin Response." When you send an SOS, "response coordinators immediately see the customer's Latitude/Longitude in their proprietary mapping and response coordination software to determine the appropriate agency to coordinate the rescue." Qualcomm says that, eventually, it'll support "premium messaging," which will likely cost extra and will have to be implemented by OEMs, cell carriers, or other over-the-top service providers. So far, this isn't something Apple offers; you can only send texts via satellite using its SOS feature.

While Qualcomm says the emergency service will be free or very cheap, it hasn't provided details yet on how much it'll cost you if you just want to be able to text your friends from remote areas, like a hiking trail, ski lift, or even a boat in the middle of the ocean. Once that service becomes available, however, Qualcomm says you'll be able to use it with your regular phone number. (That likely won't be the case for emergency use, but it matters less there.) [...] While details are sparse on what it'll be like to actually send and receive satellite messages, it sounds like the experience will be similar to Apple's in that you'll have to follow instructions on your phone to point it toward a satellite. According to Grilli, your phone will be able to predict where Iridium's satellites are months in advance thanks to the way its constellation orbits the Earth. When you go to connect to one, it'll use GPS and other measurements to determine where you need to be facing...

South Korea's Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter spacecraft, known as Danuri, has sent back some high-resolution images from the moon. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute shared the views on Twitter this week. CNET reports: The first two come from late December and show the cratered landscape of the moon with Earth peeking above the horizon. The images are reminiscent of Earthrise views seen from NASA's Apollo and Artemis missions. KARI shared a second set of Earth images snapped during the new year.

Better management of nitrogen-rich fertilisers through alternating crops, optimising use and other measures can yield huge environmental and health benefits, but must boost food production at the same time, researchers warned Wednesday. From a report: Reducing nitrogen pollution from global croplands is a "grand challenge," the group of international researchers said in a study in Nature outlining a dozen urgently-needed reforms. The intensive use of chemical fertilisers helped fuel the four-fold expansion of the human population over the last century, and will be crucial for feeding 10 billion people by 2050.

But the bumper crops of what was once called the Green Revolution have come at a terrible cost. Today, more than half the nitrogen in fertilisers seeps into the air and water, leading to deadly pollution, soil acidification, climate change, ozone depletion and biodiversity loss. "Given the multiple health, climate and environmental impacts of reactive nitrogen, it has to be reduced in all the mediums such as air and water," lead author Baojing Gu, a professor at Zhejiang University, told AFP. The benefits of doing so far outstrip the costs, he added.

The world is naturally awash in nitrogen, which is critical for the survival of all life on Earth, especially plants. Nearly 80 percent of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen, albeit in a gaseous form (N2) of little direct use to most organisms. It is made available to plants when microbes that live within plants or soils turn it into ammonia through biological nitrogen fixation. This process funnels some 200 million tonnes of nitrogen into the soil and oceans every year.

Walt Cunningham, one of the early Apollo astronauts, died Tuesday after complications from a fall. He was 90. NPR reports: Walt Cunningham flew in space just one time. His flight in 1968 was an important -- and often forgotten one -- for the lunar program. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot of the first manned Apollo mission that went to space. Apollo 7's 11-day trip around the Earth was a key stepping stone to NASA's march to the moon. "The real accomplishment, of course, was the first manned landing on the moon," Cunningham told NPR in 2016. "But that was the fifth of what I've always described as five giant steps. The first one was the Apollo 7 mission, of course. Complete test of the Apollo spacecraft."

The launch came after a difficult time for NASA. Just 21 months before, a fire on the launchpad killed three astronauts during a test of Apollo 1. In the interim, NASA changed many procedures and the command module underwent a series of safety improvements. Cunningham said in 2016 that if Apollo 7 had not gone well, the U.S. wouldn't have landed on the moon before the end of the 1960s. "Historically, what the public doesn't realize," he said, "It is still the longest, most ambitious, most successful first test flight of any new flying machine ever."

"There were so many things that had to be tested," he recalled. During the flight, the crew test-fired the engine that would place Apollo into and out of lunar orbit, simulated docking maneuvers and did the first-ever live television broadcast from an American spacecraft. "It was hard to imagine that we could get through all those things [in an 11-day mission] without something going wrong and saying, 'hey you need to gotta come home," Cunningham said. The mission was deemed a success but it was the last time these astronauts would fly in space. There was tension between Apollo 7's commander, Wally Schirra, and mission control. As the flight dragged on, Schirra caught a cold and so did astronaut Donn Eisele and the crew's squabbles worsened with ground controllers. Despite that, Cunningham said, "As I look back on it, it was a job, a challenge, and a task that in the end was very well done."

The new year has just begun, but the cosmos are already set to make history in 2023. From a report: A comet discovered less than a year ago has traveled billions of miles from its believed origins at the edge of our solar system and will be visible in just a few weeks during what will likely be its only recorded appearance. The comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was first seen in March 2022 as it made its way through Jupiter's orbit. According to NASA, it's a long-period comet believed to come from the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of Earth's solar system that's "like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris" that can get even bigger than mountains. The inner edge of this region is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units (AUs) from the sun -- between 186 billion and 465 billion miles.

This means that C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has made a rare, once-in-a-lifetime journey to be close to Earth. "Most known long-period comets have been seen only once in recorded history because their orbital periods are so, well, long," NASA says. "Countless more unknown long-period comets have never been seen by human eyes. Some have orbits so long that the last time they passed through the inner solar system, our species did not yet exist."

Now, the recently discovered E3 comet, which has been seen with a bright greenish coma and "short broad" dust tail, is set to make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will make its closest approach to Earth on February 2. Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett managed to capture an image of the comet in December from his backyard in California. He was able to see "intricate tail structure" in the comet's plasma tail, he said, and "conditions are improving."

Guess what's finally entering America's public domain today? Appropriately enough, it's Marcel Proust's 1927 novel Remembrance of Things Past.

Also entering the public domain today are thousands of other books, plus the music and lyrics of hundreds of songs, and even several silent movies.

Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic Metropolis enters the public domain today — and so does the Laurel & Hardy comedy Battle of the Century (which culminates with one of Hollywod's first pie fights), according to Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain: This is actually the second time that Metropolis has gone into the US public domain. The first was in 1955, when its initial 28-year term expired and the rights holders did not renew the copyright. Then in 1996 a new law restored the copyrights in qualifying foreign works. Metropolis, along with thousands of other works, was pulled out of the public domain, and now reenters it after the expiration of the 95-year term, with the once missing scenes available for anyone to reuse.
They also note that some material is in the public domain from the beginning, including government works like the images from the James Webb telescope.

But for other works, today is a big and important day, writes the Associated Press: Alongside the short-story collection "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes," books such as Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," Ernest Hemingway's "Men Without Women," William Faulkner's "Mosquitoes" and Agatha Christie's "The Big Four" — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023. Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost.

The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years. While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to "all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided."

"For the vast majority — probably 99% — of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason," Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding "Public Domain Day 2023." That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn't be used by others. On the Duke list are such "lost" films like Victor Fleming's "The Way of All Flesh" and Tod Browning's "London After Midnight...."
Also entering the public domain today:


- Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop
- A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six (illustrations by E. H. Shepard)
- Franklin W. Dixon's The Tower Treasure — the first Hardy Boys book
- Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (German version)
- The song "My Blue Heaven"
- Songs by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
- Alfred Hitchcock's early silent movie The Lodger


The UK-based newspaper the Observer adds: For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy.... The term was gradually lengthened in small increments by Congress until 1976, when it was extended by 19 years to 75 years and then in 1998 by the Sonny Bono Act. So, as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig puts it, "in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term"....

[T]he end result is that American citizens have had to wait two decades to be free to adapt and reuse works to which we Europeans have had easy access....

The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it — especially copyright — have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It's obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?

"Cryptocurrency went through a transformation in 2022," writes CNN, noting that its peak price last year occurred on January 1 of 2022, at over $47,000: Since then, the asset — along with other cryptocurrencies — has seen a steep fall in price, remaining well below $20,000 since early November.... [Current price: $16,585]

In the wake of the FTX collapse, Emily Parker rhetorically asked, "So who will save crypto now?" Whether the currency can be saved at all is a question that divides our prognosticators. [Political commentator] Alice Stewart is the most bullish on the future of bitcoin, predicting that its peak price in 2023 will be $103,000.

[Legal analyst] Elliot Williams isn't too far behind her, guessing the asset will top out at $70,000. [Opinion contributors] Jill Filipovic and Allison Hope, however, don't anticipate a rise in price at all — speculating that its peak value next year will be just $12,000 and $13,000 respectively. "I know nothing about Bitcoin," admits Hope, "but this seems like a conservative gloom and doom figure."
In their larger collection of predictions, two CNN opinion contributors expressed mild hopes for bitcoin Raul Reyes wrote that Bitcoin "seems like the steadiest investment in the volatile crypto world," before predicting its 2023 peak price would be about $29,400.

And Frida Ghitis predicted that "Speculators will swarm in, and Bitcoin will spike up above $36,000 — before falling back to Earth again."

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, "It would be a transformative event for humankind," writes the Guardian, "one the world's nations are surely prepared for.

"Or are they?" "Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage."

This frank assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews. Over the next month or two, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of international researchers and affiliates. They will take on the job of getting ready: to analyse mysterious signals, or even artefacts, and work out every aspect of how we should respond.... "After the initial announcement, we'd be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we'll need, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we've discovered — what we know and what we do not know," says Elliott....

Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is "an important step in raising awareness at how ill-prepared we currently are" for detecting a signal from an alien civilisation. But he added that any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, meaning communication time would be on the scale of many centuries. "Even if we were to receive a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of breathing space to assemble an international team of diverse experts to attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and carefully consider how the Earth should respond, and even if we should.

"The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.

Closing out a record-setting year, SpaceX launched a $186 million Israeli Earth-imaging satellite early Friday, the California rocket builder's 61st and final Falcon 9 launch of 2022 and its seventh this month, both modern-day records. From a report: Since the rocket's debut in 2010, SpaceX has chalked up 194 Falcon 9 launches overall -- 198 including four triple-core Falcon Heavies -- putting together a string of 179 straight successful flights since the company's only in-flight failure in 2015. This year's flight total falls one short of doubling last year's. Even more flights are expected in 2023, including two NASA astronaut ferry flights to the International Space Station, at least two commercial crew flights, two station cargo flights, and the maiden orbital launch of SpaceX's huge Super Heavy/Starship rocket.

NASA is exploring whether SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft can potentially offer an alternative ride home for some crew members of the International Space Station after a Russian capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbital lab. Reuters reports: NASA and Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, are investigating the cause of a punctured coolant line on an external radiator of Russia's Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which is supposed to return its crew of two cosmonauts and one U.S. astronaut to Earth early next year. But the Dec. 14 leak, which emptied the Soyuz of a vital fluid used to regulate crew cabin temperatures, has derailed Russia's space station routines, with engineers in Moscow examining whether to launch another Soyuz to retrieve the three-man team that flew to ISS aboard the crippled MS-22 craft. If Russia cannot launch another Soyuz ship, or decides for some reason that doing so would be too risky, NASA is weighing another option.

"We have asked SpaceX a few questions on their capability to return additional crew members on Dragon if necessary, but that is not our prime focus at this time," NASA spokeswoman Sandra Jones said in a statement to Reuters. It was unclear what NASA specifically asked of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capabilities, such as whether the company can find a way to increase the crew capacity of the Dragon currently docked to the station, or launch an empty capsule for the crew's rescue. But the company's potential involvement in a mission led by Russia underscores the degree of precaution NASA is taking to ensure its astronauts can safely return to Earth, should one of the other contingency plans arranged by Russia fall through.