your science briefing for 05.15.2025

The authoritarian hardon for regulating sex rears its head again, a narc satellite readies for orbit, the end of the universe gets more nigh-ish, and more...

Following both Project 2025 and the now famous anti-porn-to-neo-Nazi-conspiracy-theory pipeline, supposed libertarian, loyal MAGA foot soldier, and Utah Senator Mike Lee proposed a law to ban anything deemed too sexual for right wing linking. This is obviously a red flag, as anything that upsets conservative totalitarians will certainly be classified as porn and punished, and builds on the very dysfunctional public discourse about adult entertainment in America for all the wrong reasons. If we wanted to have a nuanced, grown up discussion about porn and mental health, we’d be talking consent, regulation, and comprehensive sex ed, not threats for getting Lee and the GOP a little too worked up for their unhealthy comping mechanisms to work… (Mashable)

Oh, great, just what we need, a narc satellite, or satte-narc if you will. The brand new Jackal space probe from an aerospace startup is designed to keep an eye on other spacecraft, looking for any shenanigans, tomfoolery, or potential hostile acts. Three prototypes have already been successfully launched, and the odds of a deployment for the real thing in 2026 look promising… (IEEE)

Reading is good for you. This is not a new or controversial statement to scientists. As an active process, it stimulates your brain and activates your imagination. But how? A new study catalogued brain activity of readers as they read out loud, silently, specific sentences, and just letters to come up with a detailed map of what regions are active, when, and why. The results show a wide scattering of activity and a slightly surprising involvement of the cerebellum — which is usually involved in speech and movement — across every type of reading. The hope is that the research can give us insights into how we consume and process abstract information… (ScienceAlert)

Okay, so this isn’t necessarily a groundbreaking discovery because we knew it could happen for decades now. When you smash atoms and watch them fly apart, you will get some interesting transformations. In particular, the long sought after change from lead to gold. Lead is a little heavier than gold, so when lead nuclei lose a few protons, the end result is gold. Over the LHC, enough lead has been tortured to create at least 86 billion gold nuclei over three years. But don’t get too excited. If you could grab all of them and add the electrons they need to combine into one mass, you’d have less than 30 trillionth of a gram. Still, it makes for a cool headline… (CERN)

I know this is not as dire or depressing as a porn ban, but scientists have some very bad news. The universe as we know it, or more accurately don’t know as well as we want, may dissolve into nothing in just 10^78 years. This is a severe downgrade from the previous estimate of 10^1,100 years as it turns out that Hawking radiation, how all very massive and dense objects evaporate by disrupting the fabric of space and time, relies on density. As these objects lose mass, their decay will accelerate exponentially, giving us that much shorter time frame. So, we only have sextillion sextillion sextillion quadrillion years to figure out what to do about the end of literally everything. Which, yes, includes porn… (PhysOrg)