Daily Archives: 2017-08-28

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Thanks to File 770 for these bits of news

  1.  World Con 75 videos
  2.   Brad Walsh, the new companion to the Doctor?
  3.  Australian city names streets after GoT characters
  4.   Actor Jay Thomas (1948-2017) died August 24.
  5.   Torchwood: Aliens Among Us Trailer

1.  Couldn’t go to World Con in Helsinki? Or, like me, couldn’t get into the room? First shock of the con was not being able to watch the opening ceremony because the room only held a couple of hundred! It seems the opening ceremony, the masquerade,  and several main event panels are on YouTube.  But no Hugo ceremony? How did that get missed? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT_U7RhKFr-If4pusZY6g8A/videos

2.  I have not yet seen confirmation, but some news sources are reporting that Brad Walsh is the new companion for the Doctor.

3.    A street too far? 

The developer of Charlemont Rise at Geelong in Victoria said he had been forced to change the name of Lannaster Road because of the link to the incestuous Lannister siblings from Game of Thrones.

“The name was knocked back by the developers next door because of the relationship between the Lannister brother and sister on the show,” said the project manager, Gary Smith. “I even changed the spelling to make it not as obvious.” Lannaster Road will henceforth be known as Precinct Road.

There have been no complaints about the other street names in the estate, more than a dozen of which were inspired by the show, Smith said. Among the names are Stannis, Winterfell, Greyjoy, Baelish and Tywin.

The most popular, however, is Snow Street – named after the fan-favourite Jon Snow. “The only big mistake we’ve made was naming a small street Snow Street. We thought Jon Snow was going to be dead but then he came back to life in the next season,” Smith said. “He’s everybody’s favourite – we should’ve given him a large avenue.”

4. Actor Jay Thomas (1948-2017) died August 24.His genre work included 20 episodes of Mork and Mindy, 6 episodes of Hercules, voicing an episode of Batman: The Animated Series, and The Santa Clause 2 and 3. 

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Astronomy News

Uranus and Neptune: Cloudy with a chance of diamonds

Researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have recreated the ice giants’ diamond rain.

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By Alison Klesman  |  Published: Wednesday, August 23, 2017
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Uranus and Neptune experience diamond rain deep within their atmospheres — and now scientists on Earth have watched this process occur in the lab. NASA/JPL-Caltech (Left, Uranus); NASA (Right, Neptune)
On Earth, we experience rain composed of liquid water. On Titan, it rains liquid methane. And on Uranus and Neptune, it rains solid diamonds. For the first time, researchers have now simulated and observed this process here on Earth, proving that this long-held assumption is likely correct, once and for all.

The work, published August 21 in Nature Astronomy, combined a high-powered optical laser with the X-ray free-electron laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The LCLS creates X-ray pulses that last a million-billionths of a second, allowing for ultrafast high-precision monitoring of processes that occur all the way down to the scale of atoms. As a result, the researchers were able to watch tiny diamonds form as shock waves passed through plastic, offering a peek at processes that take place in planetary atmospheres on a much grander scale.

The experiment focused on inducing shock waves in a plastic material called polystyrene, which contains hydrogen and carbon — two elements found in abundance inside Uranus and Neptune. According to theory, methane (four hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom) inside the planets’ atmospheres forms hydrocarbon chains that in turn form diamonds in response to the right temperature and pressure. This occurs more than 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) beneath the planets’ surface. There, the diamonds precipitate out and sink deeper into the atmosphere, a “diamond rain.”

Though this has been assumed to be the case for decades, the exact process has never been observed in experiments on Earth before now. Some previous experiments failed because the pressures and temperatures inside the atmospheres of these planets cannot be created in the lab for long, and without the ability to record data at the speed afforded by the LCLS, any transitions were missed. Other experiments produced graphite or diamond, but were conducted at lower pressures or required the introduction of additional materials.