your science briefing for 05.06.2025

How long you can live away from Earth, dead stars are spraying gold into space, how late stage capitalism is driving us into slow extinction, and more...

Co-President and world’s wealthiest social media addict Elon Musk, really wants to build a city on Mars. This is, in fact, why he created SpaceX in the first place, even if his plans are completely absurd according to his former inspiration and mentor. The problem isn’t just engineering. It’s how long humans can survive while exposed to a massive surge in background radiation and deleterious effects of low gravity on their bones, blood, brains, and immune system. According to a new study from UCLA, the maximum safe time away from Earth under the most ideal possible conditions before the onset of irreversible damage is four years… (UCLA)

A hypernucleus sounds like a term from a particularly bad comic where science has been twisted into unintentional comedy. But is it very much a real thing. It’s just like a regular nucleus, but with the addition of a particle called a hyperon: a particle with a strange quark as one of its three primary components. We know they exist in regular old matter, but what we didn’t know is whether they also exist in antimatter. If we’re working under the assumption that the only thing different about antimatter charge, then they should also be able to sustain hypernuclei. And according to data from the LHC, they probably do… (APS)

The heaviest element a star can produce is iron. Why? Iron is nuclear ash. When you get to an iron nucleus, trying to fuse them yields no additional energy. This is why a massive star which is trying to fuse iron in its core will implode, triggering a massive implosion we know as a supernova. But we have lots of elements heavier than iron in the universe. So how are they formed? Well, many come from kilonovas, collisions of neutron stars or neutron stars being eaten by black holes. However, they can also be created by magnetars, or new, extremely active, magnetically supercharged neutron stars as we can now see their flares spraying gold across the galaxy… (AOL)

If you’re wondering how the cyberpunk technobabble experiment known as DOGE is going aside from smoke and mirrors from woefully unqualified randos, I’m very sorry to tell you but said unqualified randos may now have access to our sensitive secrets about America’s nuclear arsenal. We don’t know if they do or how much they may be able to see because the DOE lied about them having accounts in the first place, then retracted its lie and said they have accounts, but those accounts were never used. As this is not an administration known for being truthful and transparent, there’s still an uneasy cloud of questions hovering over what data nuke DOGE really has… (NPR)

Fertility rate across the world is dropping and we may be as little as five years away from peak humanity, 25 years ahead of schedule. There’s no one reason why this is happening. Part of it could be as simple as not needing to have as many children as life expectancy increases. Another part could be the role of runaway pollution. One more concern is crushing late stage hyper-capitalism that forces people to choose jobs over children and is driving us into insanity from boredom. But if we don’t start making serious changes, we’ll drive ourselves into a slow extinction as fertility drops below the proper replacement level of 2.7… (Earth.com)