Bodhammer shares a report from the University of Michigan: In a step closer to skyscrapers that serve as power sources, a team led by University of Michigan researchers has set a new efficiency record for color-neutral, transparent solar cells. The team achieved 8.1% efficiency and 43.3% transparency with an organic, or carbon-based, design rather than conventional silicon. While the cells have a slight green tint, they are much more like the gray of sunglasses and automobile windows.

The new material is a combination of organic molecules engineered to be transparent in the visible and absorbing in the near infrared, an invisible part of the spectrum that accounts for much of the energy in sunlight. In addition, the researchers developed optical coatings to boost both power generated from infrared light and transparency in the visible range -- two qualities that are usually in competition with one another. The color-neutral version of the device was made with an indium tin oxide electrode. A silver electrode improved the efficiency to 10.8%, with 45.8% transparency. However, that version's slightly greenish tint may not be acceptable in some window applications.

Both versions can be manufactured at large scale, using materials that are less toxic than other transparent solar cells. The transparent organic solar cells can also be customized for local latitudes, taking advantage of the fact that they are most efficient when the sun's rays are hitting them at a perpendicular angle. They can be placed in between the panes of double-glazed windows. [The team is] working on several improvements to the technology, with the next goal being to reach a light utilization efficiency of 7% and extending the cell lifetime to about 10 years. They are also investigating the economics of installing transparent solar cell windows into new and existing buildings. The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa. This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers. The space agency's satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

The primary source is considered to be a swirling ocean of molten iron inside Earth's outer core, thousands of kilometers below the ground. A huge reservoir of dense rock called the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province, located about 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the African continent, disturbs the field's generation, resulting in the dramatic weakening effect -- which is aided by the tilt of the planet's magnetic axis. It's not just moving, however. Even more remarkably, the phenomenon seems to be in the process of splitting in two, with researchers this year discovering that the SAA appears to be dividing into two distinct cells, each representing a separate centre of minimum magnetic intensity within the greater anomaly. Just what that means for the future of the SAA remains unknown, but in any case, there's evidence to suggest that the anomaly is not a new appearance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SyFy: For the first time, scientists have detected neutrinos coming from the Sun's core that got their start via the CNO process, an until-now theorized type of stellar nuclear fusion. [...] The Borexino neutrino observatory is 1400 meters under the rock below the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy. It has an 8.5 meter wide nylon balloon filled with 280 tons of pseudocumene, surrounded by a tank of water, surrounded by over 2200 very sensitive photon detectors. They turned everything on, then waited. Over the course of July 2016 - February 2020 (1072 days), they painstakingly recorded all the events, and had to go through heroic efforts to prevent all manners of other reactions that also create little light flashes from interfering with their experiment. They also had to distinguish proton-proton chain neutrinos from ones made in the CNO cycle, but the neutrinos have different energies, which makes it possible to separate them out. They just announced their results: They detected the CNO neutrinos! About 20 per day interacted with the pseudocumene -- 20 per day, when sextillions of them had passed through! -- about what you'd expect from theory.

This is an important discovery for a lot of reasons. For one thing, while the proton-proton chain dominates in the Sun, in stars with more than about 1.3 times the Sun's mass the CNO cycle dominates (it kicks in strongly at higher temperatures), so knowing how it works in the Sun tells us about other stars. Also, the presence of heavier elements (what astronomers misleadingly call metals, meaning any element heavier than hydrogen and helium) can affect the fusion rate in the Sun's CNO cycle, and the amount of these metals isn't perfectly well known; different methods to measure them yield slightly different amounts, but enough to mess up what we know about the fusion in the core. This experiment agrees with ones that find a lower metal content. That has a ripple effect on a lot of other ideas, including details on how we think the Sun and planets formed, how the Sun ages, and how it will die. All that, from less than two dozen neutrinos a day, while countless more go undetected.

Researchers from the Institute for Space Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences have developed a technique in which lasers can measure the position of space debris during daylight conditions. Details of this unprecedented achievement were published in Nature Communications. Gizmodo reports: Prior to this, lasers could only detect space junk during twilight, as ground stations enter into darkness and objects near the horizon remain illuminated by the Sun's rays. This small window of opportunity severely minimizes the amount of time available to search for and characterize these orbiting objects, which can threaten crucial satellites.

"We are used to the idea that you can only see stars at night, and this has similarly been true for observing debris with telescopes, except with a much smaller time window to observe low-orbit objects," explained Tim Flohrer, Head of ESA's Space Debris Office, in an ESA press release. "Using this new technique, it will become possible to track previously 'invisible' objects that had been lurking in the blue skies, which means we can work all day with laser ranging to support collision avoidance." The new technique differs from conventional methods in that it can track objects during daylight hours, which it does using a combination of telescopes, light deflectors, and filters that track light at specific wavelengths. So even when the sky is bright and blue, scientists can increase a target's contrast, making previously invisible objects visible. Keys to this method include additional telescopes and the ability to visualize space debris against the blue sky background in real-time. In daylight tests, the distances to 40 different objects were measured with the new technique, which had never been done before.

An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek: A hypothetical spacecraft made from an extremely thin layer of a synthetic foam could technically make it to our closest neighboring star Proxima Centauri in just 185 years, scientists have said. If Voyager were to make the same journey, it would take around 73,000 years, according to NASA.

In a study that is due to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, René Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, and colleagues, propose the spacecraft as a precursor to interstellar travel — beyond our own solar system. They estimate a prototype would cost around $1 million, while the launch of an interplanetary mission would be around $10 million.

The spacecraft would be made from aerographite. This is a carbon-based foam that is around 15,000 times more lightweight than aluminium. It is versatile and light enough that it could be used to create solar sails — "which harness energy from the sun for propulsion, a process called solar photon pressure... In most cases, photons would have little impact on an object. But if the target is an ultralight material, such as aerographite, then the target can actually be pushed to significant speed," he said.

"We found out that a thin layer of aerographite, with a thickness of about 1 millimeter (0.04 inches), can be pushed to speeds that are sufficiently high to let it escape the solar system. Once it has gained an initial push from the solar radiation pressure, it will simply float through space...."

Heller said these spacecraft could travel far faster than any probe ever sent by humans before.

An anonymous reader quotes The Los Angeles Times: On Dec. 9, 1968, the then-small world of computer engineering was shaken to its core by a presentation of new technologies projected onto a screen in a San Francisco hall. The attendees at the historic event saw demonstrations of video conferencing, the first public use of a computer mouse, hyperlinking in which clicking a word in a document transported the user to an entirely new document — and more. The man who was the star of the hands-on show seen in the hall was Douglas Engelbart, whose team at the research center SRI in Menlo Park, California, had been developing them for years.

But the man who had designed what is known now as "The Mother of All Demos" and was working behind the scenes to make sure they all worked was William K. English, who died Sunday at the age of 91. Bill English played an indispensable role in more than Engelbart's demo... In 1965 the lab received a NASA grant to invent a technology for moving a cursor and selecting an item on a display screen; Engelbart developed the concept, but it was English who designed the first prototype &mdash the mouse...

English essentially choreographed Engelbart's presentation. Just as important, he made sure there were no technical glitches. That was a challenge, since Engelbart would be in San Francisco demonstrating a system that was being operated 30 miles away in Menlo Park, the two sites connected via a microwave relay. The event went off virtually without a hitch, and a new world was born. "Doug wasn't doing it," recalls Roberta, who had worked as Engelbart's secretary. "It was all Bill." Engelbart died in 2013.
English also participated in an early research project "into the psychological effects of LSD," according to the article.

But a few years after the legendary demo, English was recruited for Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center, "where he helped midwife PARC's invention of the personal computer and other innovations... He subsequently left Xerox to join Sun Microsystems and later the pioneering electronic game console maker 3DO."

Jennifer Chu writes via Phys.Org: At least twice in Earth's history, nearly the entire planet was encased in a sheet of snow and ice. These dramatic "Snowball Earth" events occurred in quick succession, somewhere around 700 million years ago, and evidence suggests that the consecutive global ice ages set the stage for the subsequent explosion of complex, multicellular life on Earth. Scientists have considered multiple scenarios for what may have tipped the planet into each ice age. While no single driving process has been identified, it's assumed that whatever triggered the temporary freeze-overs must have done so in a way that pushed the planet past a critical threshold, such as reducing incoming sunlight or atmospheric carbon dioxide to levels low enough to set off a global expansion of ice.

But MIT scientists now say that Snowball Earths were likely the product of "rate-induced glaciations." That is, they found the Earth can be tipped into a global ice age when the level of solar radiation it receives changes quickly over a geologically short period of time. The amount of solar radiation doesn't have to drop to a particular threshold point; as long as the decrease in incoming sunlight occurs faster than a critical rate, a temporary glaciation, or Snowball Earth, will follow. These findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, suggest that whatever triggered the Earth's ice ages most likely involved processes that quickly reduced the amount of solar radiation coming to the surface, such as widespread volcanic eruptions or biologically induced cloud formation that could have significantly blocked out the sun's rays.

"NASA's Juno Jupiter probe has captured unprecedented views of the largest moon in the solar system," reports Space.com: During a close flyby of Jupiter on Dec. 26, 2019, Juno mapped the north polar regions of the icy satellite Ganymede in infrared light, something no other spacecraft had done before. The data, which Juno gathered using its Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, show that Ganymede's northern reaches are very different than locales closer to the equator of the moon, which is bigger than the planet Mercury. "The JIRAM data show the ice at and surrounding Ganymede's north pole has been modified by the precipitation of plasma," Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, said in a statement.

"It is a phenomenon that we have been able to learn about for the first time with Juno because we are able to see the north pole in its entirety."

This plasma consists of charged particles from the sun, which have been trapped by Jupiter's powerful magnetic field. Unlike any other moon, the 3,274-mile-wide (5,269 kilometers) Ganymede has a magnetic field of its own, which funnels the plasma toward its poles. A similar phenomenon occurs here on Earth, which explains why the auroras occur at high latitudes on our planet. But Ganymede has no atmosphere to obstruct and be lit up by these particles, so they slam hard into the ice at and around both poles.
The article notes that the $1.1 billion Juno probe "launched in August 2011 and arrived at Jupiter in July 2016."

"A European and NASA spacecraft has snapped the closest pictures ever taken of the sun," reports the Associated Press, "revealing countless little 'campfires" flaring everywhere. Scientists on Thursday released the first images taken by Solar Orbiter, launched from Cape Canaveral in February. The orbiter was about 48 million miles from the sun — about halfway between Earth and the sun — when it took the stunning high-resolution pictures last month... European Space Agency project scientist Daniel Muller described the observed multitude of "campfires" shooting into the corona, or sun's crown-like outer atmosphere, as quite possibly "the tiny cousins of the solar flares that we already know." Millions if not billions of times smaller, these tiny flares may be heating the corona, he said, long known to be hundreds of times hotter than the actual solar surface for unknown reasons... These so-called campfires, Berghmans noted, are "literally everywhere we look." Not yet well understood, they could be mini explosions, or nanoflares. More measurements are planned.

The $1.5 billion spacecraft will tilt its orbit as the mission goes on, providing unprecedented views of the sun's poles. This vantage point will allow it to capture the first pictures of the solar poles.

Engineers have developed a new type of hybrid solar energy converter, which uses energy from the Sun to create both electricity and steam. The device reportedly has high efficiency and runs at low cost, allowing industry to make use of a wider spectrum of solar energy. New Atlas reports: The device looks like a satellite dish, with a small device suspended over the center of a parabolic collector. The dish part is mirrored, and focuses the sun's rays onto the box in the middle. The bottom of this section contains multi-junction solar cells, which collect and convert visible and ultraviolet light into electricity. But the clever part is that these cells redirect the infrared light -- the heat energy -- to a separate thermal receiver, higher up in the device. This receiver is essentially a cup-shaped cavity surrounded by pressurized water, which captures the heat and turns into steam.

The team says that the total collection efficiency is 85.1 percent, meaning a very high amount of the Sun's energy is converted into either electricity or heat. The steam can be heated up to 248C (478F), which is a much higher temperature than many other thermal energy collectors. This means it's hot enough for many industrial processes, such as drying, curing, sterilizing, and pasteurizing. The other advantage is cost. The team reports that once scaled up, the hybrid device could run for as little as 3 cents per kilowatt hour. The research was published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

"A newly-discovered comet is giving skywatchers quite the show during the month of July," reports CBS News: Astronomers discovered the comet, known as Comet C2020 F3 NEOWISE, back in March. It was named for the NASA mission that spotted it, for the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer... But astronomers knew they found something unique when they spotted Neowise. On July 3, Neowise was closer to the sun than the orbit of Mercury, coming dangerously close to breaking apart. The sun heated up much of the comet's icy makeup, erupting in a large debris trail of gas and dust.

Measuring about 3 miles across, Neowise is considered a fairly large comet — providing skywatchers with a spectacular view from Earth. The comet, which has a bright opulent tail, has been putting on a stunning show in the early hours before sunrise in the Northern Hemisphere... But late sleepers need not worry — the comet will start appearing in the evening, just after sunset, starting Saturday.

To view it, people in the Northern Hemisphere can look to the northwestern sky, just below Ursa Major, commonly known as the Big Dipper constellation. Scientists say the comet will be visible across the Northern Hemisphere for about another month.
The comet is made up of material dating back 4.6 billion years, to the origins of our solar system, according to the article. "The event is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience — the comet takes about 6,800 years to complete its path around the sun, according to NASA..."

"NASA says it will be one of the brightest comets this century."

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: Conventional theory has it that Planet 9 — our outer solar system's hypothetical 9th planet — is merely a heretofore undetected planet, likely captured by our solar system at some point over its 4.6 billion year history. But Harvard University astronomers now raise the possibility that orbital evidence for Planet 9 could possibly be the result of a missing link in the decades-long puzzle of dark matter. That is, a hypothetical primordial black hole with a horizon size no larger than a grapefruit, and with a mass 5 to 10 times that of Earth.

In a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the co-authors argue that observed clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian objects suggest some sort of massive super-earth type body lying on the outer fringes of our solar system. Perhaps as much as 800 astronomical units (Earth-Sun distances) out...

If they exist, such primordial black holes would require new physics and go a long way towards solving the mystery of the universe's missing mass, or dark matter.
Their argument also constitutes a "new method to search for black holes in the outer solar system based on flares that result from the disruption of intercepted comets," according to a statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The paper was co-authored by Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard's astronomy department, who points out that "Because black holes are intrinsically dark, the radiation that matter emits on its way to the mouth of the black hole is our only way to illuminate this dark environment."

And in an explanatory video, Mike Brown, a planetary astronomy professor at CalTech, suggests another way it could be significant. "All those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found."

Trying to get an up close and personal look at the solar system's gas giants is a tricky and dangerous journey. From a report: Jupiter, like the other gas giants, doesn't have a rocky surface, but that doesn't mean it's just a massive cloud floating through the vacuum of space. It's made up of mostly helium and hydrogen, and as you move from the outer layers of the atmosphere toward the deeper parts, that gas grows denser and the pressures become more extreme. Temperatures quickly rise. In 1995, NASA's Galileo mission sent a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere; it broke up at about 75 miles in depth. Pressures here are over 100 times more intense than anything on Earth. At the innermost layers of Jupiter that are 13,000 miles deep, the pressure is 2 million times stronger than what's experienced at sea level on Earth, and temperatures are hotter than the sun's surface.

So clearly, no human is going to be able to venture too far down into Jupiter's depths. But would it be safe to simply orbit the planet? Perhaps we could establish an orbital space station, right? Well, there's another big problem when it comes to Jupiter: radiation. The biggest planet in the solar system also boasts its most powerful magnetosphere. These magnetic fields charge up particles in the vicinity, accelerating them to extreme speeds that can fry a spacecraft's electronics in moments. Spaceflight engineers have to figure out an orbit and spacecraft design that will reduce the exposure to this radiation. NASA figured this out with the triple-arrayed, perpetually spinning Juno spacecraft, but it doesn't look as if this would be a feasible design for a human spacecraft. Instead, for a crewed spacecraft to safely orbit or fly past Jupiter, it would have to keep a pretty significant distance away from the planet.

David Collier-Brown led the Sun Microsystems Canada team specializing in performance and capacity planning. He later becoming a consulting systems programmer and performance engineer, as well as an O'Reilly author (co-authoring the 2003 book Using Samba). He's also davecb, Slashdot reader #6,526, and today submitted a story headlined "Slashdot is the answer to Facebook's 'fake news' problem."

"OK, not the whole answer, but I argue that /. is part of a defense in depth against the propagation of lies, sophistries and deliberate disinformation in discussion groups like ours and Facebook's."

There's more details on his technical blog: William Gibson once said The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed.

That also applies to the solutions to problems, like that of finding out who's telling the truth in widespread discussion. By Gibson's dictum, we should expect to find different parts of the solution, but not together, and likely in all sorts of unexpected places. It's up to us to find them all and compose them together...

With luck, machine learning (ML) can be trained to recognize minor variants of a banned article, and refer them to the staff to be sure that's what is being recognized. Those can be treated the same way as the original posting. But how can we credibly detect the lies in time? The kind of team a site can afford are always going to be behind.

That is solved for a distantly related problem, one that is as as unexpectedly helpful as looking at policing stock trades. Slashdot.
The post describes Slashdot as "One of the older big discussion groups" that "from its inception in 1997 needed to deal with overenthusiastic commentators, flamers and trolls. In 2020, it's still easy to 'read at 4 or 5', and see a measured, reasonable and informative discussion of a difficult subject.

"Or you could 'read at -1', and listen to the madmen and flamers that elsewhere would drown out the insightful comments."

It's an interesting read, and ultimately proposes solving Facbook's "fake news" problem by empowering readers with moderation points, overseen by a staff of double-checking humans who then pass along their conclusions for execution by an automated system.

Is Slashdot the answer to Facebook's fake news problem?

U.S. technology titans face a looming test of their free-speech credentials in Hong Kong as China's new national-security law for the city demands local authorities take measures to supervise and regulate its uncensored internet. From a report: Facebook and its Instagram service, Twitter and YouTube, a unit of Alphabet's Google, operate freely in the city even as they have been shut out or opted out of the mainland's tightly controlled internet, which uses the "Great Firewall" to censor information. In Hong Kong many citizens have grown accustomed to freely using their accounts to speak out on political matters, voice support for antigovernment protests, and register their anger at China's increasing sway over the city. Now the U.S. tech companies face a high-wire act, analysts say, if authorities here ask them to delete user accounts or their content. Refusal could invite Beijing's scrutiny and potentially put them at risk of legal action under the new national-security law. Complying would alienate longtime users in the city, some of whom continue to speak out on their platforms, and leave the companies open to criticism from politicians in the U.S. or U.K.

Among the tech giants, Twitter said in a statement it "has grave concerns" about the law and is "committed to protecting the people using our service and their freedom of expression." Twitter said it is reviewing the new rules, "particularly as some of the terms of the law are vague and without clear definition." Measures to better supervise the internet and foreign media were provisions tucked into China's national-security law for the city. The law criminalizes activities in four vaguely defined areas covering secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces. "Tech companies will absolutely receive more requests to remove information that is allegedly harmful to natural security from the relevant authorities," said Haochen Sun, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. He said companies will face difficulties especially with borderline cases, such as potential requests to remove songs, for instance, that protesters have used in antigovernment demonstrations.

A team of astronomers has discovered what they think are the rocky innards of a giant planet that's missing its thick atmosphere. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature. The BBC reports: Its radius is about three-and-a-half times larger than Earth's but the planet is around 39 times more massive. In this size range, the planet would be expected to have a significant component that's gas. Yet it has a density similar to Earth, appearing to be mostly rocky. The object, called TOI 849 b, was found circling a star much like the Sun that's located 730 light-years away. The core orbits so close to its parent star that a year is a mere 18 hours and its surface temperature is around 1,527C. Researchers aren't sure whether the core lost its atmosphere in a collision or just never developed one.

If it was once similar to Jupiter, there are several ways it could have lost its gaseous envelope. These could include tidal disruption, where the planet is ripped apart from orbiting too close to its star, or even a collision with another planet late in its formation. If it's a "failed" gas giant, this could have occurred if there was a gap in the disc of gas and dust that it emerged from, or if it formed late, after the disc ran out of material.

Microsoft has just announced it will ban players who use the controversial confederate flag in Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport, which both allow users to personalize their cars with custom designs. The Verge reports: In a statement posted on Twitter last Friday, Microsoft updated its enforcement guidelines to have a zero-tolerance policy for any player using the confederate flag or other symbols that represent "notorious iconography," including Nazi imagery and the rising sun, which can be a symbol of Japanese imperialism. Microsoft will not automatically ban players that create designs with these controversial images; instead, the original designer will need to be reported by submitting a ticket.

Astronomers are perplexed by the unexplained disappearance of a massive star located 75 million light years away. From a report: A decade ago, light from this colossal star brightened its entire host galaxy, which is officially known as PHL 293B and is nicknamed the Kinman Dwarf. But when scientists checked back in on this farflung system last summer, the glow of the star -- estimated to be roughly 100 times more massive than the Sun -- had been extinguished. The head-scratching discovery was announced in a study published on Tuesday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "We were quite surprised when we couldn't find the star," said lead author Andrew Allan, a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, in a call. "It is a very extreme star, and it has quite a strong wind, so we can distinguish it from the galaxy. That's what we couldn't see in the newer observations."

The mysterious series of events began when Allan and his colleagues imaged the Kinman Dwarf in August 2019, using the ESPRESSO instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The team initially set out to learn more about massive stars located in galaxies with low metal densities. Given that the starlit Kinman Dwarf had been observed by other astronomers between 2001 and 2011, the team knew that it would be a good target for their research. "Not a lot is understood about stars in those kinds of environments, so that was the main reason we wanted to look," Allan said. "We are interested in massive stars at the end of their lives in those kinds of environments, so we were really just hoping to get a better resolution observation."

Scientists have gone back and forth over exactly what caused a mass extinction event 66 million years ago, which destroyed about 75% of all life on Earth, including all of the large dinosaurs. Some have thought that volcanic activity could be to blame, but one new study shows that a giant asteroid impact was the prime culprit. Space.com reports: In a new study, researchers from Imperial College London, the University of Bristol and University College London have shown that the asteroid impact, not volcanic activity, was the main reason that about 75% of life on Earth perished at that time, and it did so by significantly interfering with Earth's climate and ecosystems. To come to this conclusion, the researchers modeled how Earth's climate would be expected to respond to two separate possible extinction causes: volcanism and asteroid impact. In these mathematical models, they included environmental factors including rainfall and temperature, which would have been critical to the survival of these species. They also included the presence of sunlight-blocking gases and particles and carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. With these models, the team found that the giant asteroid hitting our planet would have released tremendous amounts of gas and particles into Earth's atmosphere, blocking out the sun for years on end. This effect would have created a sort of semi-permanent winter on Earth, making the planet unlivable for most of its inhabitants.

Now, while the team found the asteroid impact to be the major factor in making Earth unlivable for most animals, they also found that volcanic activity could have actually helped life to recover over time, a conclusion that scientists have drawn before. They found that, while volcanoes do release sunlight-blocking gases and particles, which would have helped to block the sun in the short term, they also release large amounts of carbon dioxide which, because it's a greenhouse gas, would have built up in the atmosphere and warmed the planet. So, as the researchers suggest in this work, while the devastating winter caused by the asteroid killed off most life on Earth, over time, the warming effect created from the volcanic greenhouse gases could have helped to restore life to habitats. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Oracle's Java magazine is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the programming language with a list of the 25 greatest Java apps ever written: From space exploration to genomics, from reverse compilers to robotic controllers, Java is at the heart of today's world. Here are a few of the countless Java apps that stand out from the crowd.

The story of Java began in 1991, at a time when Sun Microsystems sought to extend their lead in the computer workstation market into the burgeoning personal electronics market. Little did anyone know that the programming language Sun was about to create would democratize computing, inspire a worldwide community, and become the platform for an enduring software development ecosystem of languages, runtime platforms, SDKs, open source projects, and lots and lots of tools. After a few years of secret development led by James Gosling, Sun released the landmark "write once, run anywhere" Java platform in 1995, refocusing it beyond its original design for interactive television to applications for the burgeoning World Wide Web. By the turn of the century, Java was animating everything from smartcards to space vehicles.

Today, millions of developers program in Java. Although Java continues to evolve at an ever-faster pace, on the occasion of the platform's 25th anniversary, Java Magazine decided to take a look back at how Java molded our planet. What follows is a list of the 25 most ingenious and influential Java apps ever written, from Wikipedia Search to the US National Security Agency's Ghidra. The scope of these applications runs the gamut: space exploration, video games, machine learning, genomics, automotive, cybersecurity, and more.
The list includes Eclipse, Minecraft, the Maestro Mars Rover controller, and "VisibleTesla," the open source app created by an automobile enthusiast to monitor and control his Tesla Model S.