Citizen Cartwright

Good news on health, energy, planets

It seems you can read the first 15 of this Fix the News edition without a password. And I’ve got tears of exhilaration as I go through them. For example:

"The world has made remarkable progress in reducing child mortality," says UNICEF. Since 2000, the global mortality rate of children under five has dropped by 52 percent. Clicking through to the UNICEF article and seeing the photo of the baby — whose eyes show such excited intelligence — could not be a better way to start my day.

And congratulations, California, on your win-win effort to generate energy while combatting drought. A pilot project is covering canals with solar panels, simultaneously generating clean energy and preventing water evaporation, says PV Magazine. 

Among the 28 items behind Fix the News’ paywall:

— A tiny magnetic robot that can take 3D scans deep inside the body could revolutionize early cancer detection. Researchers at Britain’s University of Leeds say they’ve generated the first high-resolution three-dimensional ultrasound images taken by a probe moving through the colon. 

— In 1990, there wasn’t a single planet known beyond our solar system. We’ve now discovered nearly 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. And a proposed telescope could find Earth-like exoplanets using just one pixel of data, says BigThink.

— California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania have joined in a Clean Rides Network. The group is working on environmentally friendly transportation projects it says the federal government has abandoned, The Associated Press reports.

Universal good news

It seems that Fix the News is giving everyone access to this week’s 50 examples of good news. So I hope you’ll have time to at least scroll through the abundance of good that’s occurring on our little planet.

But I’d like to focus on one item that's simultaneously making me smile and bringing tears to my eyes.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope has captured images of 26 million galaxies, covering 10 billion years of cosmic history, The Guardian reports.

The most popular theory of the universe suggests that just 5 percent is made from ordinary matter, The Guardian says. Dark matter, an invisible substance that forms what's called the cosmic web, is said to account for 25 percent. The bulk, about 70 percent, is said to be dark energy, a “mysterious” force that's accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Adam Amara, the UK Space Agency’s chief scientist and one of the researchers who first proposed the mission 20 years ago, says, “I’m now convinced that we have the image quality in the resolution that in six years’ time, there’ll be new categories of objects discovered by Euclid.”

Sages and scientists tell us that a skill for emotional well-being is to broaden our perspective. Here are some examples, from Psychology Today.

And there couldn't be a much wider perspective than we get from the Euclid space telescope. 

Just how important is my personal to-do list or our national or international to-do list amid the 1.5 billion galaxies the Euclid space telescope is expected to document?

Tools for stressful times: The perspective of kindness

The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, but it’s far exceeded its mission.

 

In 1990, as Voyager 1 was speeding out of our solar system, mission managers commanded it to look back toward home for a final time, from 3.7 billion miles away. It snapped a series of 60 images that were used to create the first “family portrait” of our solar system.

 

The photo that would become known as the Pale Blue Dot shows Earth in a scattered ray of sunlight. The original image and a 2020 updated version using modern software and other tech are here.

 

After snapping the Pale Blue Dot and the other “family photos” on Feb. 14, 1990, Voyager 1 powered off its cameras forever. Mission planners wanted to save its energy for the long journey to come.

 

Voyager now is 15 billion miles away, traveling at 38,000 miles an hour.

 

Planetary scientist Carl Sagan wrote this about the Pale Blue Dot:

 

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

How Musk’s businesses benefit from government shrinkage

President Trump and Elon Musk took questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, and Trump signed an order directing federal agencies to work closely with Musk's effort to shrink the federal workforce.

The order sets forth rules requiring government agencies to hire no more than one employee for every four workers who leave, and it compels agencies to work with Musk's team to identify large-scale reductions in force and determine which agency components can be eliminated outright, Reuters reports.

 

“Trump resisted the suggestion by Democrats and other critics that Musk's role presents a conflict of interest,” Reuters says.

“If we thought that, we would not let him do that segment or look in that area, if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest,” said Trump.

 

Meanwhile, a New York Times article by two reporters who’ve spent the past year investigating Musk’s business with the federal government says many of the federal employees who’ve been pushed out were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Musk’s companies.

 

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Musk’s six companies, according to the Times.

 

Among them:

 

— Federal Aviation Administration fines of Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, for safety violations

 

— Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit pressing Musk to pay the federal government perhaps as much as $150 million, accusing him of having violated federal securities law

 

— The National Labor Relations Board, an independent watchdog agency for workers’ rights, has 24 investigations into Musk’s companies

 

— At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a public database shows hundreds of complaints about Musk's electric car company Tesla, mostly about debt collection or loan problems. The agency also would have regulated Musk’s new efforts to bring a payments service to X.

 

None of the investigations or lawsuits involving Musk and his companies, at least so far, have formally been dropped since the start of the new administration, according to more than a dozen current and former federal officials interviewed by the Times.

 

And the Times found no evidence that Musk directly ordered that an investigation into one of his companies be shut down or stalled.

“The shifts at the agencies in many cases reflect changes in national priorities that come with a president who has long complained that government regulation has been too aggressive, a view widely held in the business community,” says the Times.

“But the upheaval at federal agencies represents one of the first tests of a wide range of conflicts of interest Mr. Musk has brought to the White House, including 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies,” the Times says.

 

Musk controls Tesla, which is publicly traded. He's the founder of SpaceX; the artificial intelligence start-up xAI; the Boring Company, a tunneling venture; and Neuralink, which is developing brain computer implants. All of those are private companies. Musk also owns the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

 

Musk’s companies secured $13 billion in contracts over the past five years, making SpaceX, which collects most of that money, one of the largest government contractors, the Times says. And there's already talk in the Trump administration of expanding these deals, especially at the Air Force.

 

On Monday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency. The office had pending requests to investigate Musk based on allegations raised by Democrats in Congress last week that Musk’s role as a federal government official creates an unavoidable conflict of interest.

The letter from 12 House Democrats said, “The American people deserve assurances that no individual, regardless of stature, is permitted to influence policy for personal gain.”

Happy election day 2024!

Free and discounted rides to vote

 

Vote.gov: If you have any problems at your voting location, contact your local election office. You can also report violations to the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division online or by calling 1-800-253-3931.

Also on Vote.gov: information on your voting rights, FAQs

 

Election Protection hotlines to call if you have problems voting:

English 866-OUR-VOTE 866-687-8683

Spanish/English 888-VE-Y-VOTA 888-839-8682

Asian Languages/English 888-API-VOTE 888-274-8683

Arabic/English 844-YALLA-US 844-925-5287

 

Pizza to the Polls will bring you free pizza if the voting line is long.

 

AP: 'Explaining Election 2024' series of articles

Free and discounted rides to vote

 

Vote.gov: If you have any problems at your voting location, contact your local election office. You can also report violations to the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division online or by calling 1-800-253-3931.

Also on Vote.gov: information on your voting rights, FAQs

 

Election Protection hotlines to call if you have problems voting:

English 866-OUR-VOTE 866-687-8683

Spanish/English 888-VE-Y-VOTA 888-839-8682

Asian Languages/English 888-API-VOTE 888-274-8683

Arabic/English 844-YALLA-US 844-925-5287

 

Pizza to the Polls will bring you free pizza if the voting line is long.

 

AP: 'Explaining Election 2024' series of articles

Good news on global child survival, clean cooking, conservation in Southern Ocean

Also in the roundup this week from our Australian friends at Fix the News (formerly named Future Crunch): falling crime in the United States, school feeding programs in Africa, women's rights in Croatia, the world's newest — and biggest — dark sky sanctuary, and rewilding in Japan and Scotland.

Celebrating Voyager 1, now 15 billion miles from home

A scrambled computer signal may be the key that helps NASA engineers resume data transmission from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which was launched in 1977 and now, 15 billion miles from home, is the farthest human-made object from Earth.

 

For about four months, Voyager had been sending nonsensical transmissions.

 

Voyager 1 and its sister craft, Voyager 2, were designed to last five years but have become the longest-operating spacecraft in history. Both carry gold-plated copper discs containing sounds and images from Earth, contents that were chosen by a team headed by astronomer Carl Sagan.

 

Attempts to fix problems aboard the spacecraft often mean "consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today,” according to NASA.

 

And a long time lag makes solving problems more difficult. Voyager is traveling at about 38,000 mph. It takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager and another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft’s reply to reach antennas on Earth.

 

There have been celebrations of the Voyagers before, as it looked as though they may stop “calling home.” 

 

Here is one now, from Phys.org.

Pushing back the 'frontiers of our own ignorance'

For me, one of the best counterpoints to the myriad mundanities of the activities of daily life is what we’re learning about our life in this universe, from the James Webb telescope.

 

It’s been about a year since the telescope’s first images were released, and The New Yorker has an interview with Jane Rigby, NASA’s top scientist on the project.

 

She’s skilled at making astrophysics accessible to the general public. She says:

 

— The pitch when the telescope first was proposed was that we’ll see “the baby pictures of the universe.” And we’re seeing back in time 13 billion years, to about 300 million years after the big bang.

 

— Within one or two decades we’ll have the technology to find out if there’s life on other planets.

 

— Astronomy underpins our lives. GPS uses general relativity that was developed and tested on astronomical objects. The digital camera on our phone was in large part developed for astronomy.

 

— "Fundamentally, astronomy is about knowing how we got here. And everyone has wondered that. What’s the point? What’s the big picture? What’s bigger than me? And what will be here when I’m gone?

 

“This is our origin story." 

Cleaning up our 'space junk'

More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk,” were being tracked by the Defense Department as of 2021, NASA says. 

And much more debris — too small to be tracked, but big enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions — exists in the near-Earth space environment, according to NASA.  Since both the debris and spacecraft are traveling at about 15,700 miles an hour in low Earth orbit, an impact of even a tiny piece of orbital debris with a spacecraft could create big problems.

And the United States granted Amazon authorization in early February to launch more than 3,000 satellites, says The Christian Science Monitor.

Starlink, a satellite-based broadband service rolled out by SpaceX, already has put about 3,500 satellites into orbit, CSM says.

The International Space Station has had to take evasive action more than 30 times in its 24-year history, says CSM. And falling debris has the potential to affect us humans on Earth. But right now, the most frequent risks are to satellites.

To address the threats, there are companies seeking to remove objects in orbit that are no longer functional – a process known as active debris removal. Concepts include the space equivalent of a net, magnet or harpoon.

And the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, an international forum of space agencies, has put together guidelines that all satellites in low Earth orbit should be removed from that orbit within 25 years of end of mission – a number the United States recently unilaterally reduced to five years. 

On Valentine’s Day, a love letter to the universe

I love understanding what’s what about this human experience, and I particularly love it when the understanding is conveyed by good writing.

 

And a gift I've received on this day of love is a New York Times article by Dennis Overbey, whose bio says he’s “been covering the universe for more than 30 years.”

 

And lyrically, I’ve thought more than once. But never more than today:

 

"In the unfathomable darkness and time that is the universe, every star is an omen of hope, a promise of life and shelter, like the lights of a distant ship on a cold sea,” Overbey writes.

 

"And so, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope, here is another reminder of the fecundity and generosity of nature: thousands of galaxies, trillions of stars and unnumbered planets, a boundless realm of possibilities stretching back 13 billion years in a small patch of sky in the constellation Hercules.

 

"At lower center is a spiral galaxy known as LEDA 2046648. It looks like a dead ringer for the great galaxy in Andromeda, M31, or its twin, our own Milky Way galaxy — except that the LEDA galaxy is a billion light-years away.

 

"One billion years ago, when the light from this image was emitted, the first multicellular organisms had emerged on Earth and were groping their way up the evolutionary ladder toward plants, fish, dinosaurs, humans and whatever comes next.”

 

"Viewing this snapshot of eternity, it’s hard not to wonder whether microbes or something else were making a similar go of it in LEDA 2046648 or one of the other luminous blobs in the image, and whether we will ever know.”

 

Dennis Overbey, on this day I appreciate your appreciation of the vastness beyond.

 

Here is the Webb's picture of LEDA.