your science briefing for 04.10.2025

The global population is dropping faster than expected, how the news is making the political discourse in the U.S. far worse, another look at Uranus, and more...

No longer worried about unsustainable population growth, the powers that be are now hyperventilating about population collapse, demanding that we have ever more kids in spite of our current economic reality, and occasionally veering into the dystopian with their breeding plans for our species. Meanwhile, researchers are warning that we may hit peak humanity by 2030 instead of the mid-2050s as expected for a wide variety of reasons. For a world order based on the idea that there will always be new workers to replace old ones no matter what happens, this is indeed a huge problem… (Science)

Terraforming is a popular idea, but one that makes more sense in science fiction than science fact because not only does it require utterly absurd orbital infrastructure and resources, to the point of having to build a Dyson sphere to collect the energy of the Sun and lasers that could make nuclear warheads look like firecrackers, some of the worlds we want to terraform lack the required materials and will quickly revert to form. Mars is especially bad in this regard, so much so we’d need to spend 15,000 years to crash a dwarf planet’s worth of icy asteroids from the Kuiper Belt into it to get even a tenth of the viable atmospheric pressure for a human… (Universe Today)

Doom scrolling is currently one of the top preoccupations of Americans, the majority of whom haven’t thought their country was on the right track since 2004. The news is always bad. Even positive news is delivered with a dozen caveats and gotchas based on which, we’re all careening between “mired in crisis and turmoil” and “totally fucked now and forever.” And believe it or not, decades of nothing but terrible news, criticism, and constant negativity is actually really, really bad for the country, its citizens, and its politics according to therapists and clinical psychologists… (Psychology Today)

Let’s talk for a moment about where the Sun hits Uranus — I’m an adult, I’m an adult, I promise I will keep it together — and a recent revision to the length of its day. You see, a gas giant spins very quickly around its axis. But it turns out Voyager over-estimated how quickly Uranus spun by 28 seconds. Recently, astronomers used Hubble data to precisely locate the auroras around its poles and used them to monitor the rotation of the planet as solar wind lit up the magnetic field. The great thing about the technique which stretched Uranus’ day? It could be used on any planet, including distant worlds around alien suns given enough observation time and a good angle… (Space.com)

Something few people talk about is that space is disgusting. No, really. Spacecraft do not have a housekeeping service. No one is there dusting, vacuuming, or wiping down living quarters. There’s a lot of recycled urine, loose feces, sticky surfaces, and gross smells are impossible to avoid. This is true even on the Moon where astronauts left an impressive 96 bags of poop and other bodily waste fluids before flying back to Earth. But one crew’s hazmat can be your profit — until DOGE steps in to screw everything up as per its usual — and if you have an idea to recycle this stuff, you could win up to $3 million to clean up the lunar surface… (Techoreon)