The Bayeux Tapestry famously depicts the events leading up to the 1066 Norman Conquest of England, in which William the Conqueror defeated Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, at the Battle of Hastings. Two scenes in particular show King Harold feasting in an extravagant hall in a village called Bosham. Archaeologists think they have now located the site of that feast, concluding that it was the king's own home, according to a new paper published in The Antiquaries Journal.

“The Norman Conquest saw a new ruling class supplant an English aristocracy that has left little in the way of physical remains, which makes the discovery at Bosham hugely significant," said co-author Oliver Creighton of the University of Exeter. "We have found an Anglo-Saxon show-home.” The findings are part of an ongoing project called "Where Power Lies," intended to assess archaeological evidence for aristocratic centers across England from the pre-Norman period.

Scholars believe the Bayeux Tapestry dates back to the 11th century and was likely created just a few years after the Battle of Hastings, mostly likely commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux (although there is still considerable debate over alternative theories). It's technically not a tapestry, since it's not woven but embroidered on linen using wool yarn of various colors. There are 58 individual scenes spanning 230 feet (nearly 70 meters) in length and 20 inches (50 cm) in height. Latin text provides context for the imagery. Among the historical events depicted is the appearance of what is now known as Halley's Comet, used here as a harbinger of the coming Norman invasion.

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The Energy Information Agency has now released data on the performance of the US's electric grid over the first 11 months of 2024 and will be adding the final month soon (and a month is very little time for anything to change significantly in the data). The biggest story in the data is the dramatic growth of solar energy, with a 30 percent increase in generation in a single year, which will allow solar and wind combined to overtake coal in 2024.

But the US energy demand saw an increase of nearly 3 percent, which is roughly double the amount of additional solar generation. Should electric use continue to grow at a similar pace, renewable production will have to continue to grow dramatically for a few years before it can simply cover the added demand.

Going for the Sun

In the first 11 months of 2024, the US saw its electrical use grow by 2.8 percent, or roughly 100 Terawatt-hours. While there's typically year-to-year variation in use due to weather-driven demand, the US's consumption has largely been flat since the early 2000s. There are plenty of reasons to expect increased demand, including the growth of data centers and the electrification of heating and transit, but so far, there's been no clear sign of it in the data.

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The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies.

Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches.

In his paper, Barthelemy cites Richard Reti, an early 20th-century chess master who gave a series of lectures in the 1920s on developing a scientific understanding of chess. It was an ambitious program involving collecting empirical data, constructing typologies, and devising laws based on those typologies, but Reti's insights fell by the wayside as advances in computer science came to dominate the field. That's understandable. "With its simple rules yet vast strategic depth, chess provides an ideal platform for developing and testing algorithms in AI, machine learning, and decision theory," Barthelemy writes.

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One of the most frequently asked questions about quantum computers is a simple one: When will they be useful?

If you talk to people in the field, you'll generally get a response in the form of another question: useful for what? Quantum computing can be applied to a large range of problems, some of them considerably more complex than others. Utility will come for some of the simpler problems first, but further hardware progress is needed before we can begin tackling some of the more complex ones.

One that should be easiest to solve involves modeling the behavior of some simple catalysts. The electrons of these catalysts, which are critical for their chemical activity, obey the rules of quantum mechanics, which makes it relatively easy to explore them with a quantum computer.

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Welcome to Edition 7.28 of the Rocket Report! After last week's jam-packed action in the launch business, things are a bit quieter this week. Much of the space world's attention has turned to Washington as the Trump administration takes the helm of the federal government. Some of the administration's policy changes will likely impact the launch industry, with commercial spaceflight poised to become a beneficiary of actions over the next four years. As for the specifics, Ars has reported that NASA is expected to review the future of the Space Launch System rocket. Investments in the military space program could bring in more business for launch companies. And regulatory changes may reduce government oversight of commercial spaceflight.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

What happened to China's reusable rocket testbed? A Chinese state-owned company performed a rocket flight on January 18 (US time) aimed at testing reusable launch vehicle technology without announcing the outcome, Space News reports. The Longxing-2 test article lifted off from a makeshift launch area near Haiyang, Shandong province. The methane-fueled rocket was expected to fly to an altitude of 75 kilometers (about 246,000 feet) before performing a reentry burn and a landing burn to guide itself to a controlled splashdown in the Yellow Sea, replicating the maneuvers required to recover a reusable booster like the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9. This was China's most ambitious reusable rocket demonstration flight to date.

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Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he co-authored. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing.

Wild Cards grew out of the Superworld RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game-mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with several of the original sci-fi writers who contributed to the series participating. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin a Wild Cards story involving a main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman's idea became The Sandman.) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel centered on his character Turtle, but he then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had far too many sources of the many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have one single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.

The series is basically an alternate history of the US in the aftermath of World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, had been released over New York City in 1946 and spread globally, infecting tens of thousands worldwide. It's called the Wild Card virus because it affects every individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of the latter end up with unpleasant conditions—these people are called Jokers—while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some Aces have "powers" that are so trivial and useless that they are known as "deuces."

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Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are puzzling phenomena because their details are so difficult to resolve, and observations to date have been inconsistent. Astronomers added another piece to the puzzle with the detection of an FRB that seems to originate in a dead galaxy that is no longer producing new stars, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a related paper on the event from scientists at Northwestern University.

As we've reported previously, FRBs involve a sudden blast of radio-frequency radiation that lasts just a few microseconds. Astronomers have observed over a thousand of them to date; some come from sources that repeatedly emit FRBs, while others seem to burst once and go silent. You can produce this sort of sudden surge of energy by destroying something. But the existence of repeating sources suggests that at least some of them are produced by an object that survives the event. That has led to a focus on compact objects, like neutron stars and black holes—especially a class of neutron stars called magnetars—as likely sources. Only about 3 percent of FRBs are of the repeating variety.

There have also been many detected FRBs that don't seem to repeat at all, suggesting that the conditions that produce them may destroy their source. That's consistent with a blitzar—a bizarre astronomical event caused by the sudden collapse of an overly massive neutron star. The event is driven by an earlier merger of two neutron stars; this creates an unstable intermediate neutron star, which is kept from collapsing immediately by its rapid spin.

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Physicist Mathieu Souzy of the University Twente was enjoying an evening of pasta and board games with several colleagues when the conversation turned to how adding salt to a pasta pot to make it boil faster can leave a white ring on the bottom of the pot. Ever the curious scientists, they wondered about the various factors that would contribute to creating the perfect circular pattern for a salt ring.

“By the end of our meal, we’d sketched an experimental protocol and written a succession of experiments we wanted to try on my youngest son’s small whiteboard,” said Souzy. It all comes down to three factors: the diameter of the particles (grains of salt, in this case), the settling height, and the number of particles released simultaneously, according to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

We've previously reported on physicists' longstanding interest in similar phenomena like the "coffee ring effect," when a single liquid evaporates and the solids that had been dissolved in the liquid (like coffee grounds) form a ring. It happens because the evaporation occurs faster at the edge than at the center. Any remaining liquid flows outward to the edge to fill in the gaps, dragging those solids with it. Mixing in solvents (water or alcohol) reduces the effect as long as the drops are very small. Large drops produce more uniform stains.

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For decades, we have been imaging the surface of Mars with ever-finer resolution, cataloging a huge range of features on its surface, studying their composition, and, in a few cases, dispatching rovers to make on-the-ground readings. But a catalog of what's present on Mars doesn't give us answers to what's often the key question: how did a given feature get there? In fact, even with all the data we have available, there are a number of major bits of Martian geography that have produced major academic arguments that have yet to be resolved.

In Monday's issue of Nature Geoscience, a team of UK-based researchers tackle a big one: Mars' dichotomy, the somewhat nebulous boundary between its relatively elevated southern half, and the low basin that occupies its northern hemisphere, a feature that some have proposed also served as an ancient shoreline. The new work suggests that the edge of the dichotomy was eroded back by hundreds of kilometers during the time when an ocean might have occupied Mars' northern hemisphere.

Close to the edge

To view the Martian dichotomy, all you need to do is color-code a relief map of the Martian surface, something that NASA has conveniently done for us. Barring a couple of enormous basins, the entire southern hemisphere of the red planet is elevated by a kilometer or more, and sits atop a far thicker crust. With the exception of the volcanic Tharsis region the boundary between these two areas runs roughly along the equator.

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When it comes to fine-tuned motor skills like playing the piano, practice, they say, makes perfect. But expert musicians often experience a "ceiling effect," in which their skill level plateaus after extensive training. Passive training using a robotic exoskeleton hand could help pianists overcome that ceiling effect, according to a paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

“I’m a pianist, but I [injured] my hand because of overpracticing,” coauthor Shinichi Furuya of Kabushiki Keisha Sony Computer Science Kenkyujo told New Scientist. “I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpracticing and the prevention of the injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practicing.” Recalling that his former teachers used to place their hands over his to show him how to play more advanced pieces, he wondered if he could achieve the same effect with a robotic hand.

So Furuya et al. used a custom-made exoskeleton robot hand capable of moving individual fingers on the right hand independently, flexing and extending the joints as needed. Per the authors, prior studies with robotic exoskeletons focused on simpler movements, such as assisting in the movement of limbs stabilizing body posture, or helping grasp objects. That sets the custom robotic hand used in these latest experiments apart from those used for haptics in virtual environments.

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Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It’s a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. “When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain,” Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.

Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a process called glymphatic clearance. “Scientists noticed that this only happened during sleep, but it was unknown what it was about sleep that initiated this cleaning process,” Hauglund explains.

Her study found the glymphatic clearance was mediated by a hormone called norepinephrine and happened almost exclusively during the NREM sleep phase. But it only worked when sleep was natural. Anesthesia and sleeping pills shut this process down nearly completely.

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When ya gotta go, ya gotta go, and if it sometimes seems like the urge to pee seems more pressing when others nearby are letting loose—well, there's now a bit of science to back that up. It turns out that humans may not be the only species to experience "contagious urination," according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. Chimpanzees living at the Kumamoto Sanctuary in Japan are also more likely to relieve themselves when others are doing so nearby, and the behavior seems to be hierarchical, "flowing down" from dominant chimps to more passive ones.

“In humans, urinating together can be seen as a social phenomenon,” said coauthor Ena Onishi of Kyoto University. “An Italian proverb states, ‘Whoever doesn’t pee in company is either a thief or a spy’ (Chi non piscia in compagnia o è un ladro o è una spia), while in Japanese, the act of urinating with others is referred to as 'Tsureshon' (連れション). This behavior is represented in art across centuries and cultures and continues to appear in modern social contexts. Our research suggests that this phenomenon may have deep evolutionary roots.”

Onishi, et al decided to study the phenomenon after noticing that many chimps in the sanctuary seemed to synchronize when they peed, and they wondered whether the phenomenon might be similar to how one person yawning can trigger others to follow suit—another "semi-voluntary physiological behavior." There had been no prior research into contagious peeing. So they filmed the 20 captive chimps over 600 hours, documenting over 1,300 "urination events."

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From the flamboyant blossoms and birds of rainforests to the living rainbows of coral reefs, Earth’s surface is teeming with life. But some of its most diverse and fascinating biomes are thriving in the darkness below.

We used to think that the subsurface was a far-from-ideal place for living things. Habitats that can soak up light and warmth from the Sun have the energy to sustain many forms of life and so were viewed as the most diverse. That view is now changing.

Led by Emil Ruff of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass., new research has unearthed communities of underground microbes that are almost as—and sometimes more—diverse than even reefs and rainforests. Ruff and his team found that subsurface bacteria and archaea are flourishing, even at depths where the energy supply is orders of magnitude lower than enjoyed by organisms in habitats that see the sun.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

There is renewed talk of a coal power comeback in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and forecasts of soaring electricity demand.

The evidence so far only shows that some plants are getting small extensions on their retirement dates. This means a slowdown in coal’s rate of decline, which is bad for the environment, but it does little to change the long-term trajectory for the domestic coal industry.

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Lithium may be the key component in most modern batteries, but it doesn't make up the bulk of the material used in them. Instead, much of the material is in the electrodes, where the lithium gets stored when the battery isn't charging or discharging. So one way to make lighter and more compact lithium-ion batteries is to find electrode materials that can store more lithium. That's one of the reasons that recent generations of batteries are starting to incorporate silicon into the electrode materials.

There are materials that can store even more lithium than silicon; a notable example is sulfur. But sulfur has a tendency to react with itself, producing ions that can float off into the electrolyte. Plus, like any electrode material, it tends to expand in proportion to the amount of lithium that gets stored, which can create physical strains on the battery's structure. So while it has been easy to make lithium-sulfur batteries, their performance has tended to degrade rapidly.

But this week, researchers described a lithium-sulfur battery that still has over 80 percent of its original capacity after 25,000 charge/discharge cycles. All it took was a solid electrolyte that was more reactive than the sulfur itself.

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SpaceX launched an upgraded version of its massive Starship rocket from South Texas on Thursday, but the flight ended less than nine minutes later after engineers lost contact with the spacecraft.

For a few moments, SpaceX officials discussing the launch on the company's live webcast were unsure of the outcome of the test flight. However, within minutes, residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos Islands, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico shared videos showing a shower of debris falling through the atmosphere along Starship's expected flight corridor.

The videos confirmed Starship—the rocket's upper stage—broke apart in space, or experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" in SpaceX-speak. This happened well short of the spacecraft's planned trajectory, which would have seen it fly halfway around the world and splash down in the Indian Ocean after more than an hour of flight.

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SpaceX plans to launch the seventh full-scale test flight of its massive Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket Thursday afternoon. It's the first of what might be a dozen or more demonstration flights this year as SpaceX tries new things with the most powerful rocket ever built.

There are many things on SpaceX's Starship to-do list in 2025. They include debuting an upgraded, larger Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, on the test flight preparing to launch Thursday. The one-hour launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 22:00 UTC) at SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. You can watch SpaceX's live webcast of the flight here.

SpaceX will again attempt to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster—more than 20 stories tall and wider than a jumbo jet—back at the launch pad using mechanical arms, or "chopsticks," mounted to the launch tower. Read more about the Starship Block 2 upgrades in our story from last week.

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Are superheroes and supervillains the product of their childhood experiences? Not if they belong to the Marvel Cinematic Extended Universe or DC Universe, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Canadian researchers watched many hours of those movies and looked at which characters suffered considerable childhood trauma. They concluded that those traumatic experiences were not significant factors in whether those characters turned out to be heroes or villains.

Prior studies have looked at the portrayal of trauma in superheroes, most notably the murder of Batman's parents and Spider-Man's uncle, as well as the destruction of Superman's home planet, Krypton. There has also been research on children sustaining injuries while pretending to be superheroes, as well as on the potential for superhero themes to help children overcome trauma and build self-esteem.

According to co-author Jennifer Jackson of the University of Calgary in Canada, two nursing students (since graduated) came up with the idea during a lab meeting to look at adverse childhood experiences and superheroes. It might seem a bit frivolous as a topic, but Jackson pointed out that Marvel and DC films reach audiences of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. "We also know that things we see in films and other media affects life in the real world," she said. "This influence could be used as a positive factor when supporting children's mental health and wellbeing. There may be shame or fear associated with some of the ACEs, and superheroes may be an effective ice breaker when broaching some difficult topics."

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers on separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months.

The mission began with a middle-of-the-night launch from Kennedy at 1:11 am EST (06:11 UTC) Wednesday. It took about an hour and a half for the Falcon 9 rocket to release both payloads into two slightly different orbits, ranging up to 200,000 and 225,000 miles (322,000 and 362,000 kilometers) from Earth.

The two robotic lunar landers—one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months.

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