Throughput: Fireball Edition

[ThT1] Last week, a spectacular fireball lit up the skies over Europe. Behold a few videos:

O meteorito na tuga pic.twitter.com/4ZxJ50ZFIo

— мила владимировна ♠️ (@milarefacho) May 19, 2024

WATCH: Large meteor streaking across the sky in Portugal pic.twitter.com/BLvcqiYGnL

— BNO News (@BNONews) May 19, 2024

Fireballs like this — the technical term is bolide — happen all the time. They aren’t usually quite this bright, lighting up the entire Iberian Peninsula. This one happened to be somewhat large and very fast. Analysis of the trajectory and luminosity indicates it was probably the fragment of a long-dead comet traveling at 100,000 miles per hour, twice as fast a typical meteor and therefore with four times the energy. As it disintegrated, it became extremely bright and left a long trail of debris through the sky.

I was reminded a bit of the Chelyabinsk meteor, a much larger fragment that exploded over Russia with the power of a nuclear bomb. That too was spontaneously captured by a variety of cameras, providing detailed information on its size, altitude and trajectory. But it would be good to spot some of these things in advance, just in case one of these cometary fragment turns out to be interested in more than putting on a pretty light show and shattering a few windows. Thankfully, new generations of telescopes will be coming online in the next few years which should significantly improve our census of what’s out there. And our ability to prevent a potential catastrophe.

[ThTh2] A lot of regulation of nuclear power is based on junk science, specifically the idea that exposure to any amount of radiation is dangerous. But we are exposed to radiation all the time. The amount of radiation that people received from, say, the Three Mile Island Accident is the equivalent of two plane flights. Or living in a brick building for a year. Or simply living for a week. Our bodies repair that kind of low-level damage on a regular basis.

[ThTh3] One of the reasons COVID-19 has become less of an issue (although it is still killing a few hundred people a week) is because we have built up resistance. So even new variants are not taking the deadly toll earlier ones did. One way to supercharge our resistance? COVID-19 vaccines. Repeated vaccination builds up the immune system’s ability to respond to new variants.

[ThTh4] In other medical miracle news, parts of a plant virus may turn out to stop various metastatic cancers. And an mRNA vaccine may treat brain tumors.

[ThTh5] Various culture warriors have been touting this study, which claims that transgender people are 12 times as likely to commit suicide as the general population. This study is extremely suspect, however. It only surveys people who visit emergency rooms. And people do not visit emergency rooms randomly. They visit when they are having a health issues — mental or physical.

[ThTh6] I would never chase storms. But I’m fine with drones doing it.

Goodness gracious @ReedTimmerUSA is doing incredible work between the drone videos and launching rockets into tornados

The fluid dynamics at play here are horrific yet mesmerizing

Look at the sub-vortices! Look at how clearly the inflow is visualized! Look at that updraft! pic.twitter.com/uZgiNkLmiz

— Chris Combs (iterative design enjoyer) (@DrChrisCombs) May 22, 2024

[ThTh7] So what has JWST been up to lately? Oh, nothing much. Just discovering black holes smashing together when the universe was only 700 million years old.

[ThTh8] The article is behind a paywall, but the headline is that gene-editing may cure some forms of blindness.

[ThTh9] It’s possible we’ve detected an atmosphere around a small rocky exoplanet. Don’t get your hopes up, though. It’s so close to its star, the planet’s surface is likely molten.

[ThTh10] We’ve detected glueballs. No, that’s not dried up Elmer’s glue; it’s a theoretical ball of gluons, the particles that bind protons and neutrons together.

[ThTh11] Solar power is now being installed faster than any tech in history. I think we will hit a limit at some point. But it’s good to see.

[ThTh12] I’ve expressed my skepticism of so-called “AI” on these pages but Google’s recent implementation is scaling the hights of absurdity, frequently mistaking Onion articles and Reddit trolling for real information. How did this get out in the wild without any real testing?

[ThTh13] And finally, what would it be like to fall into a black hole?

[ThTh14] Right after I set this to go, news broke of a new exoplanet discovery: a temperate Earth-sized planet found just 40 light years away that will be good for atmosphere study. Keep an eye on Gliese 12b. Could be huge.