ReHacked #144: Tunnel more than 2 km under the surface could be destroyed, Web scraping is legal, James Webb telescope's coldest instrument reaches operating temperature and more
James Webb telescope's coldest instrument reaches operating temperature #science #engineering #nature
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will see the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang, but to do that, its instruments first need to get cold—really cold. On April 7, Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)—a joint development by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency)—reached its final operating temperature below 7 kelvin (minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 266 degrees Celsius).
Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms | TechCrunch #internet #copyrights
In its second ruling on Monday, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, which governs what constitutes computer hacking under U.S. law.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision is a major win for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists who use tools to mass collect, or scrape, information that is publicly accessible on the internet. Without a ruling in place, long-running projects to archive websites no longer online and using publicly accessible data for academic and research studies have been left in legal limbo.
Europe's Lost World (And The Megaflood That Ended It) #nature #history
The most recent of these “lesser-extent” periods is an interglacial which we now called the Holocene, where we first make an appearance. It started 25,000 years ago. That’s about a thousand generations of humans (of which we know something of the last twenty, a little of perhaps the next hundred and basically nothing about the rest).
In 1988, the harpoon retrieved by the Colinda was radiocarbon dated to 11,740 years ago (± 150 years), more or less smack in the middle of that great thawing period. And the peat it was lodged in was 20 fathoms deep - about 120 feet, or 36 metres.
So, presuming that artefact was more or less in the place where it was dropped by human hands, that’s seven times deeper than the amount of sea that would drown most of the modern Netherlands.
Chinese tests show nuclear bunkers are not what they used to be, with earth-penetrating weapons on the rise | South China Morning Post #war #security
In the past, shelters buried several hundred metres deep were rated nuclear-proof but the Chinese test facility shows that a tunnel more than 2km (1.24 miles) under the surface could be destroyed, according to the researchers.
In one test, the simulated tunnel almost crumbled after taking hits the effective equivalent of five consecutive strikes by earth-penetrating nuclear weapons, an outcome that would have once been considered impossible.
Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa | Nature Communications #nature
Jupiter’s moon Europa is a prime candidate for extraterrestrial habitability in our solar system. The surface landforms of its ice shell express the subsurface structure, dynamics, and exchange governing this potential. Double ridges are the most common surface feature on Europa and occur across every sector of the moon, but their formation is poorly understood, with current hypotheses providing competing and incomplete mechanisms for the development of their distinct morphology. Here we present the discovery and analysis of a double ridge in Northwest Greenland with the same gravity-scaled geometry as those found on Europa. Using surface elevation and radar sounding data, we show that this double ridge was formed by successive refreezing, pressurization, and fracture of a shallow water sill within the ice sheet. If the same process is responsible for Europa’s double ridges, our results suggest that shallow liquid water is spatially and temporally ubiquitous across Europa’s ice shell.
