75th Birthday for the Transistor - making modern life possible

 As far as we're concerned, the transistor is one of the greatest discoveries in human history...completely serious about this! It allowed for the creation of an electronic world, which literally everything is now dependent on. Learn a bit about it! 

Climate and Humanitarian issue - Landfills and Methane gas emissions

 We all know 8 billion humans are going to produce A LOT of waste everyday that goes to landfills in every country around the world. In a place like India, where human population density within cities is among the highest in the world, and combined with millions living in extreme poverty, some horrific situations can develop, such as landfills that are over 200 feet tall (as tall as the Taj Mahal). Hundreds of thousands of people live in the shadows of these literal mountains of trash. 

But an additional consequence is the decay of much of that garbage, and one of the gases released in decay is methane - a greenhouse gas many times worse than carbon dioxide. The amount of methane leaked from a single landfill this large is the same as the annual release from 350,000 cars in America. It is a humanitarian health emergency for those who are already extremely poor, but also a larger climate contributor. What is the answer to these situations??? The photo is from New Dehli, India, in April of 2022.

Perhaps you'll be inspired by this - bringing Mars samples back to Earth

 Check out a plan by NASA and others to bring back Mars soil and rock samples to Earth, using multiple spacecraft and vehicles. Would you ever want to be involved with something like this? It is very ambitious and innovative, to be sure. But also, what are the "unintended consequences" of doing this? Are there any we can and should think about? Very interesting, regardless, that humans have this sort of reach and capability to even consider doing this.

Movie of the early evolution of the universe, up to 100 million years after Big Bang

 An amazing animation coming from a supercomputer simulation of the evolution of the universe following the Big Bang has been published. This movie shows how it took tens of millions of years for the first gas atoms and molecules (almost entirely hydrogen) to begin to come together under gravity to form the first stars. What this new simulation does for the first time is include the interaction between radiation from the Big Bang and the first stars and matter (gas clouds). Filaments of gas formed in a web-like pattern, which are the white strands that develop in the movie. It is along these massive strands where more stars and eventually the first galaxies formed. We see web-like patterns of matter forming a superstructure to the universe to this day! Very cool! This is part of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which attempts to understand the birth and evolution of the universe.