The Guardian notes that "While leap seconds pass by unnoticed for most people, they can cause problems for a range of systems that require an exact, uninterrupted flow of time, such as satellite navigation, software, telecommunication, trade and even space travel."

So now Nature magazine reports that "The practice of adding 'leap seconds' to official clocks to keep them in sync with Earth's rotation will be put on hold from 2035, the world's foremost metrology body has decided." The decision was made by representatives from governments worldwide at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November. It means that from 2035, or possibly earlier, astronomical time (known as UT1) will be allowed to diverge by more than one second from coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks. Since 1972, whenever the two time systems have drifted apart by more than 0.9 seconds, a leap second has been added....

Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Google are among the tech companies that have called for leap seconds to be scrapped. The CGPM — which also oversees the international system of units (SI) — has proposed that no leap second should be added for at least a century, allowing UT1 and UTC to slide out of sync by about 1 minute. But it plans to consult with other international organizations and decide by 2026 on what upper limit, if any, to put on how much they be allowed to diverge....

Although in the long term Earth's rotation slows due to the pull of the Moon, a speed-up since 2020 has also made the issue more pressing, because for the first time, a leap second might need to be removed, rather than added. UTC has only ever had to slow a beat to wait for Earth, not skip ahead to catch up with it. "It's kind of being described as a Y2K issue, because it's just something that we've never had to deal with," said Elizabeth Donley, who leads the Time and Frequency division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado.

According to documents recently declassified by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), former President Donald Trump posted a classified satellite image of a failed rocket launch in Iran on Twitter in 2019. NPR reports: Now, three years after Trump's tweet, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has formally declassified the original image. The declassification, which came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by NPR, followed a grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public. Many details on the original image remain redacted -- a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the U.S. government's most prized intelligence on social media, says Steven Aftergood, specialist in secrecy and classification at the Federation of American Scientists. "He was getting literally a bird's eye view of some of the most sensitive US intelligence on Iran," he says. "And the first thing he seemed to want to do was to blurt it out over Twitter." "[A]erospace experts determined the photo was taken by a classified spacecraft called USA 224, believed to be a multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance aircraft," adds Gizmodo. "The spacecraft is similar to the Hubble Telescope, but instead of getting a closer look at the stars, it views the Earth's surface."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Say hello to ronnagrams and quettameters: International scientists gathered in France voted on Friday for new metric prefixes to express the world's largest and smallest measurements, prompted by an ever-growing amount of data. It marks the first time in more than three decades that new prefixes have been added to the International System of Units (SI), the agreed global standard for the metric system. Joining the ranks of well-known prefixes like kilo and milli are ronna and quetta for the largest numbers -- and ronto and quecto for the smallest.

The change was voted on by scientists and government representatives from across the world attending the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures, which governs the SI and meets roughly every four years at Versailles Palace, west of Paris. The prefixes make it easier to express large amounts -- for example, always referring to a kilometer as 1,000 meters or a millimeter as one thousandth of a meter would quickly become cumbersome. Since the SI was established in 1960, scientific need has led to a growing number of prefixes. The last time was in 1991, when chemists wanting to express vast molecular quantities spurred the addition of zetta and yotta.

The new prefixes can simplify how we talk about some pretty big objects. "If we think about mass, instead of distance, the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams," which is a six followed by 27 zeroes, [sad Richard Brown, the head of metrology at the UK's National Physical Laboratory]. "Jupiter, that's about two quettagrams," he added -- a two followed by 30 zeros. Brown said he had the idea for the update when he saw media reports using unsanctioned prefixes for data storage such as brontobytes and hellabytes. Google in particular has been using hella for bytes since 2010. "Those were terms that were unofficially in circulation, so it was clear that the SI had to do something," he said.

What happens when old atomic bombs are retired? Last month, the Biden administration announced its intention to withdraw the nation's most powerful weapon from the U.S. nuclear arsenal. From a report: The bomb is called the B83. It is a hydrogen bomb that debuted in 1983 -- a time when President Reagan was denouncing Russia as "an evil empire." The government made 660 of the deadly weapons, which were to be delivered by fast bombers. The B83 was 12 feet long, had fins and packed an explosive force roughly 80 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Its job was to obliterate hardened military sites and command bunkers, including Moscow's.

What now for the B83? How many still exist is a federal secret, but not the weapon's likely fate, which may surprise anyone who assumes that getting rid of a nuclear weapon means that it vanishes from the face of the earth. Typically, nuclear arms retired from the U.S. arsenal are not melted down, pulverized, crushed, buried or otherwise destroyed. Instead, they are painstakingly disassembled, and their parts, including their deadly plutonium cores, are kept in a maze of bunkers and warehouses across the United States. Any individual facility within this gargantuan complex can act as a kind of used-parts superstore from which new weapons can -- and do -- emerge.

A super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river is running under the ice sheet. That could be bad news for sea-level rise. From a report: For all its treacherousness and general inclination to kill you, Antarctica's icy surface is fairly tranquil: vast stretches of miles-thick whiteness, with not a plant or animal to speak of. But way below the surface, where that ice meets land, things get wild. What scientists used to think was a ho-hum subglacial environment is in fact humming with hydrological activity, recent research is revealing, with major implications for global sea-level rise. Researchers just found that, at the base of Antarctica's ice, an area the size of Germany and France combined is feeding meltwater into a super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river running to the sea. "Thirty years ago, we thought the whole of the ice pretty much was frozen to the bed," says Imperial College London glaciologist Martin Siegert, coauthor of a new paper in Nature Geoscience describing the finding. "Now we're in a position that we've just never been in before, to understand the whole of the Antarctic ice sheet."

Antarctica's ice is divided into two main components: the ice sheet that sits on land, and the ice shelf that extends off the coast, floating on seawater. Where the two meet -- where the ice lifts off the bed and starts touching the ocean -- is known as the grounding line. But the underside of all that ice is obscured. To find out what's going on below, some scientists have hiked across glaciers while dragging ground-penetrating radar units on sleds -- the pings travel through thousands of feet of ice and bounce off the underlying seawater, so the researchers can build detailed maps of what used to be hidden. Others are setting off explosions, then analyzing the seismic waves that come back to the surface to indicate whether there's land or water below. Still others are lowering torpedo-shaped robots through boreholes to get unprecedented imagery of the underside of the floating ice shelf. Up in the sky, satellites can measure minute changes in surface elevation, which indicates the features below -- a swell, for instance, might betray a subglacial lake.

The James Webb space telescope has revealed its latest image of celestial majesty, an ethereal hourglass of orange and blue dust being shot out from a newly forming star at its center. The Guardian reports: The colourful clouds are only visible in infrared light, so had never been seen before being captured by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (Nircam), Nasa and the European Space Agency said in a statement on Wednesday. The very young star, known as protostar L1527, is hidden in darkness by the edge of a rotating disk of gas at the neck of the hourglass. However, light spills out from the top and bottom of the disk, lighting up the hourglass-shaped clouds.

The clouds are created by material ejected from the star colliding with surrounding matter, the statement said. The dust is thinnest in the blue sections and thickest in the orange parts, it added. The protostar, which is just 100,000 years old and at the earliest stage of star formation, is not yet able to generate its own energy. The surrounding black disk, which is about the size of our solar system, will feed material to the protostar until it eventually reaches "the threshold for nuclear fusion to begin," the statement said. "Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a window into what our sun and solar system looked like in their infancy," it added. The protostar is located in the Taurus molecular cloud, a stellar nursery home to hundreds of nearly formed stars around 430 light years from Earth.

NASA's Artemis 1 rocket blasted off the Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Wednesday, "lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back," reports the New York Times. From the report: At around 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket's core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters. As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth's bonds. A few minutes later, the side boosters and then the giant core stage dropped away. The rocket's upper engine then ignited to carry the Orion spacecraft, where astronauts will sit during later missions, toward orbit. Less than the two hours after launch, the upper stage will fire one last time to send Orion on a path toward the moon. On Monday, Orion will pass within 60 miles of the moon's surface. After going around the moon for a couple of weeks, Orion will head back to Earth, splashing down on Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean, about 60 miles off the coast of California.

This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA's Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon. For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system. [...] The launch occurred years behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. The delays and cost overruns of S.L.S. and Orion highlight the shortcomings of how NASA has managed its programs. The next Artemis mission, which is to take four astronauts on a journey around the moon but not to the surface, will launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon's south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future. NASA posted a video of the liftoff on their Twitter. Additional updates are available @NASA_SLS.

UPDATE 7:22 UTC: NASA's Artemis 1 rocket blasted off the Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Wednesday, "lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back," reports the New York Times. From the report: At around 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket's core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters. As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth's bonds. A few minutes later, the side boosters and then the giant core stage dropped away. The rocket's upper engine then ignited to carry the Orion spacecraft, where astronauts will sit during later missions, toward orbit. Less than the two hours after launch, the upper stage will fire one last time to send Orion on a path toward the moon. On Monday, Orion will pass within 60 miles of the moon's surface. After going around the moon for a couple of weeks, Orion will head back to Earth, splashing down on Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean, about 60 miles off the coast of California.

This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA's Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon. For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system. [...] The launch occurred years behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. The delays and cost overruns of S.L.S. and Orion highlight the shortcomings of how NASA has managed its programs. The next Artemis mission, which is to take four astronauts on a journey around the moon but not to the surface, will launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon's south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future. The original story from Space.com: NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission will once again attempt to launch after all. Mission managers met on Monday (Nov. 14) to discuss the flight readiness of the Artemis 1's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft following slight damage caused by Hurricane Nicole, which was swiftly downgraded to a tropical storm after making landfall, on Thursday (Nov. 10). Despite the fact that a band of insulating caulking on Orion was damaged by high winds during the storm's landfall, Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager at NASA headquarters in Washington, said "there's no change in our plan to attempt to launch on the 16th" during a media teleconference today (Nov. 14).

"The unanimous recommendation for the team was that we were in a good position to go ahead and proceed with the launch countdown," added Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA's Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. If all goes according to plan during additional preflight checks and the cryogenic fueling process on Tuesday (Nov. 15), the Artemis 1 mission will launch from Launch Pad 39B at 1:04 a.m. EST (0604 GMT) on Nov. 16. You can watch the countdown, fueling and launch of Artemis 1 live online here on Space.com courtesy of NASA.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The world's population reached 8 billion on Tuesday, growing by 1 billion in the last dozen years and reflecting the rapid population spike of the past few decades, with India projected to become the world's most populous country by next year, surpassing China. The world's population milestone of 8 billion people has long-term significance for both rich and poor countries. While it took hundreds of thousands of years for the world's population to reach 1 billion, the world grew from 7 billion to 8 billion just since 2010, a reflection of advancements in health.

As the world is expected to grow even more to over 10 billion during the next 60 years as the U.N.'s population division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) reported, population growth is slowing relative to the past, and the U.N. warns that the challenges of feeding, housing and keeping that level of people from polluting the climate will be significant. On the bright side, the increase in global life expectancy grew to almost 73 years, and is expected to reach 77 years in 2050. [...] The global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950 with under 1% growth in 2020. The report estimates that there will be 8.5 billion people in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050 and then peak at 10.4 billion people during the 2080s and remain at that level until 2100.

So, how do we know that the eight billionth baby was born today? Frankly, the U.N. says, we don't. John Wilmoth, director of the U.N. Population Division of DESA, conceded -- when the report was published -- that the day is somewhat arbitrary, but important to mark the milestone. "We do not pretend that that's the actual date and we think that the uncertainty is at least plus or minus a year," he said. That's because the combination of antiquated census gathering in many countries as well as proliferation of conflicts and the COVID19 pandemic, made a door-to-door count difficult, and the numbers are based in some countries on projections.

China just completed construction on what is now the world's largest telescope array at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The country plans to aim it at our sun as part of what one expert is calling "the golden age of solar astronomy." Popular Mechanics reports: As reported in Nature earlier today, the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT) cost 100 million yuan ($14 million USD), and is comprised of over 300 antenna dishes situated in a 3 kilometer (1.87 miles) circumference formation. Initial testing will begin in June 2024, and will focus on an upcoming increase in solar activity over the next few years, particularly on how solar eruptions affect Earth.

"China now has instruments that can observe all levels of the sun, from its surface to the outermost atmosphere," Hui Tian, a solar physicist at Beijing's Peking University, told Nature. Compared to similar telescopic arrays, the DSRT will be more finely tuned, and thus potentially capture weaker signals from high-energy particles emitted during CME events. As the sky above us becomes increasingly -- and sometimes problematically -- crowded by satellites, developing more reliable, accurate, and detailed analysis of solar activity will be critical to further expansion.

A new global tracker created by the nonprofit Climate Trace is helping to make clear exactly where major greenhouse gas emissions are originating. According to NPR, the interactive map "uses a combination of satellites, sensors and machine learning to measure the top polluters worldwide." From the report: It observes how much greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide -- are being emitted at specific locations, such as power plants and oil refineries. Former Vice President Al Gore, who is a founding member of the initiative, said it is meant to serve as a more reliable and accurate alternative to companies self-reporting their emissions estimates. "Cheating is impossible with this artificial intelligence method, because they would have to somehow falsify multiple sets of data," he told NPR's Michel Martin on All Things Considered.

The emissions tool employs over 300 satellites; sensors on land, planes and ships; as well as artificial intelligence to build models of emission estimates. Right now, it tracks about 72,000 of the highest emitting greenhouse gas sources. That includes every power plant, large ship and large plane in the entire world, Gore said. And that's just the beginning. By next year, Gore hopes to be tracking millions of major emitting sites. "We will have essentially all of them," he said. Gore said 75% of the world's greenhouse emissions come from countries that have made pledges to become carbon-neutral by 2050. "Now that they know exactly where it's coming from, they have tools that will enable them to reduce their emissions," he told NPR.

He added that the database, which is free and accessible online, can help inform countries about how much pollution is being emitted by the companies they are working with or considering working with. It is not enough for companies to self-report, he said. For instance, Climate Trace found that the oil and gas industry has been significantly underreporting its emissions. That doesn't mean companies were intentionally cheating, Gore added. However, he said underreporting prevents governments and the public from staying on track with their net-zero pledge. Six regional governments in Mexico, Europe and Africa have already entered into working agreements for using the tool, Gore said.

India is leading a push for the COP27 climate summit to conclude with a decision on phasing down all fossil fuels, a move that would expand the focus from just coal, but is likely to raise strong concerns from oil and gas-reliant countries. From a report: Indian negotiators formally called on the Egyptian Presidency of climate talks for the expanded language to be included in the cover text, a political statement of how countries will seek to tackle the climate crisis, according to people familiar with the matter. The push stems largely from the coal-dependent country's desire to not be singled out for its dependence on the dirty fossil fuel. The request is likely to put India at odds with other countries within its "Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries" negotiating bloc, like China and Saudi Arabia, who have typically acted as a brake on more climate ambition. There will also probably be concern that India's push is an effort to muddy the waters in reducing fossil fuel use globally, by making it harder to track and compare progress.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said that he would give away most of his money to charity, making him the latest billionaire to pledge to donate his vast fortune during his lifetime. From a report: Mr. Bezos is worth $124 billion, making him the world's fourth-richest person, according to Bloomberg. In an interview with CNN released on Monday, Mr. Bezos, appearing with his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, said they were making preparations "to be able to give away this money." He said that he wanted to give in a way that maximized the impact of the donations. "It's really hard," he said. "And there are a bunch of ways, I think, that you could do ineffective things," he said. It was the first time that Mr. Bezos announced that he, like several other billionaires, would give away the bulk of his wealth. In 2020, Mr. Bezos pledged to give $10 billion to combat climate change as part of an initiative called the Bezos Earth Fund. Previously, his largest donation was a $2 billion gift to help homeless families and start preschools.

NPR reports that "two teams of scientists — one at Northeastern University in Boston; the other at the University of Cambridge in the UK — recently announced that they managed to manufacture, in a lab, a material that does not exist naturally on Earth."

"It — until now — has only been found in meteorites." We spoke to Laura Henderson Lewis, one of the professors on the Northeastern team, and she told us the material found in the meteorites is a combination of two base metals, nickel and iron, which were cooled over millions of years as meteoroids and asteroids tumbled through space. That process created a unique compound with a particular set of characteristics that make it ideal for use in the high-end permanent magnets that are an essential component of a vast range of advanced machines, from electric vehicles to space shuttle turbines.

The compound is called tetrataenite, and the fact that scientists have found a way to make it in a lab is a huge deal. If synthetic tetrataenite works in industrial applications, it could make green energy technologies significantly cheaper. It could also roil the market in rare earths, currently dominated by China, and create a seismic shift in the industrial balance between China and the West....

But it will be a long time before tetrataenite is in a position to disrupt any existing markets, Laura Lewis says. She says there is still a lot of testing to be done to find out whether lab tetrataenite is as hardy and as useful as the outer space material. And even if it turns out to be as good, it will be five to eight years "pedal to the metal" before anyone could make permanent magnets out of it. In the meantime, China's competitors are working hard to source rare earths of their own. The US is investing in mines in Australia; there's exploration ongoing in Malaysia, and the Japanese are researching ways to extract elements from mud mined from the sea bed.

America's Department of Energy awarded $3 million to Oregon State University "to explore the development of a new rechargeable battery technology that would accelerate the clean energy transition," reports the Associated Press, "without relying on rare finite minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel." OSU chemistry professor Xiulei "David" Ji, who will lead a battery research team, said it could be a game-changer. "It's a new paradigm," he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. "We are very excited and very grateful to have this opportunity to work on this project...." His plan is to explore anion batteries that provide the necessary components without using limited minerals like the ones lithium batteries use and that could potentially increase how much energy a battery can hold. "The new battery chemistry does not have to rely on these elements," Ji said. "That's the benefit of the new chemistry. It's a game changer."

Ji said the primary market for these batteries would be electric vehicles, but he doesn't rule out the possibility of anion batteries being used by large-scale utilities, like Portland General Electric's solar, wind and battery facility. He also said they could be commercialized soon and be used in homes.
The article points out that the price of lithium tripled in 2021, and according to the International Energy Agency, the world could face lithium shortages by 2025.

It's "a major cause" of our climate crisis. "It's on course to guzzle half the world's carbon budget," writes a Guardian columnist — asking "so why are governments so afraid to discuss it?"

They've reviewed every agreement announced at 26 different climates. The results? Livestock is mentioned in only three agreements, and the only action each of them proposes is "management". Nowhere is there a word about reduction. It's as though nuclear non-proliferation negotiators had decided not to talk about bombs. You cannot address an issue if you will not discuss it. The call to stop farming animals should be as familiar as the call to leave fossil fuels in the ground. But it is seldom heard.

Livestock farming, a recent paper in the journal Sustainability estimates, accounts for between 16.5% and 28% of all greenhouse gas pollution. The wide range of these figures is an indication of how badly this issue has been neglected. As the same paper shows, the official figure (14.5%), published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, is clearly wrong. Everyone in the field knows it, yet few attempts have been made to update it. Even if the minimum number (16.5%) applies, this is greater than all the world's transport emissions.

And it is growing fast. In the 20 years to 2018, global meat consumption rose by 58%. A paper in Climate Policy estimates that, by 2030, greenhouse gases from livestock farming could use half the world's entire carbon budget, if we want to avoid more than 1.5C of global heating. An analysis by Our World in Data shows that even if greenhouse gas pollution from every other sector were eliminated today, by 2100 food production will, on its current trajectory, bust the global carbon budget two or three times over. This is largely because of animal farming, which accounts for 57% of greenhouse gases from the food system, though it provides just 18% of the calories.
The article also notes an academic paper which calculated that if livestock pastures in just the world's richest nations were returned to wild ecosystems, it would fully offset 12 years worth of global carbon emissions. "This issue has become even more urgent now we know the heating impact of methane is rising.

"Livestock farming is the world's greatest source of methane released by human activities. Yet there is no mention of it in the global methane pledge launched at last year's climate summit."

Thanks to Slashdot reader AleRunner for sharing the article.

"Cixin Liu's sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem can't stop jumping to other formats," reports Gizmodo: In addition to next year's Netflix series from The Terror: Infamy's Alexander Woo and Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss, last year saw the release of a serialized podcast (different from the audiobook version).

And for 2022, we've got an animated series that's premiering actually pretty soon.

Come December 3, an anime version of The Three-Body Problem will release on the Chinese streaming platform Bilibili. This series was originally announced in 2019 with a trailer, but things have been fairly quiet on that front up until now. Developed by CG studio YHTK Entertainment in partnership with The Three-Body Universe, a studio built specifically for the purpose of managing the franchise, a new trailer for the upcoming anime was released earlier in the week during a Bilibili anime showcase.
"Having enjoyed the book, I think it looks promising," writes Slashdot reader Camembert. The 2008 book was the first in Liu's hard sci-fi series Remembrance of Earth's Past — and according to Gizmodo, this is just the beginning: Bilibili's adaptation is the first of a larger initiative called the Three-Body Global Creator Project. Per the press release, animation studios across the world are permitted to explore the Remembrance franchise to showcase its global potential through various art and animation styles....

And if animation or Netflix aren't your bag, Tencent Video has made a live action version of The Three-Body Problem, though that version has yet to receive a release date.

Microsoft is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the venerable Flight Simulator series today with the launch of the aptly named Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary update. As the company had teased before, this update to the sim will introduce helicopters and gliders, as well as a few classic aircraft. Gliders and helicopters aren't new to Flight Simulator, but when Microsoft and Asobo resurrected the sim back in 2020, they were still missing from the game. From a report: In total, the update includes 12 new planes (2 helicopters, 2 gliders and 8 fixed-wing aircraft). The highlights here are what Microsoft and Asobo call their first "true-to-life" airliner in the base game -- an Airbus 310-300 -- and the Spruce Goose, the largest seaplane and wooden aircraft ever built. Other new aircraft include classics like the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1915 Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, the 1927 Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, the 1935 Douglas DC-3, the 1937 Grumman G-21 Goose and the 1947 Havilland DHC-2 Beaver.

To celebrate the launch, Microsoft and the sim's developer Asobo Studio invited a small group of flight sim influencers and tech media to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. Why? It's where the Spruce Goose is on display, so what better place to celebrate the launch of this update (and the Spruce Goose just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its flight on November 2). During the event, I got a bit of hands-on time with the new planes. Just like in real life, flying helicopters is going to be hard -- hard enough that Microsoft added quite a few new assistance settings that simplify the experience. Without those -- and especially if you are playing on a gamepad, for example -- you will crash. Repeatedly. Once you get the hang of it, flying those helicopters (a large Bell and the small two-seat Guimbal Cabri G2 trainer) is good fun, though, and allows you to fly slow and low across Microsoft's impressive virtual model of the earth.

The United Nations is betting that satellites could help the world catch up on emissions reductions. From a report: The organization has unveiled a Methane Alert and Response System (MARS) that, as the name implies, will warn countries and companies of "major" methane emission releases. The technology will use satellite map data to identify sources, notify the relevant bodies and help track progress on lowering this output.

The initial MARS platform will focus on "very large" energy sector sources. It'll gradually expand to include less powerful sources, more frequent alerts and data from animals, coal, rice and waste. Partners in the program, such as the International Energy Agency and UN's Climate and Clean Air Coalition, will provide help and advice. The information also won't remain a secret, as the UN will make both data and analyses public between 45 to 75 days after it's detected. The system will get its early funding from the US government, European Commission, Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub. Both Bezos' fund and GMH are backing related efforts, such as studies on spotting and counteracting agricultural methane emissions.

On Thursday morning, NASA sent a giant inflatable device to space and then brought it back down from orbit, splashing in the ocean near Hawaii. From a report: You might think of it as a bouncy castle from space, although the people in charge of the mission would prefer you did not. "I would say that would be inaccurate," Neil Cheatwood, principal investigator for the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator, or LOFTID for short, said of the comparison during an interview. LOFTID may sound like just an amusing trick, but the $93 million project demonstrates an intriguing technology that could help NASA in its goal of getting people safely to the surface of Mars someday. The agency has landed a series of robotic spacecraft on Mars, but the current approaches only work for payloads weighing up to about 1.5 tons -- about the bulk of a small car. That is inadequate for the larger landers, carrying 20 tons or more, that are needed for people and the supplies they will need to survive on the red planet.

A more accurate description of the device might be that it is a saucer, 20 feet wide when inflated. It is made of layers of fabric that can survive falling into the atmosphere at 18,000 miles per hour and temperatures close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, an inflatable heat shield shares a key characteristic with a bouncy castle: Uninflated, it can be folded and packed tightly. LOFTID fit in a cylinder a bit over four feet wide and one and a half feet high. For a traditional rigid heat shield, there is no way to cram something 20 feet in diameter into a rocket that is not that wide. A larger surface like LOFTID's generates much more air friction -- essentially it is a better brake as it slices through the upper atmosphere, and the greater drag allows heavier payloads to be slowed down. For future Mars missions, the inflatable heat shield would be combined with other systems like parachutes and retrorockets to guide the lander en route to a soft landing.