If microscopic black holes born a fraction of a second after the Big Bang exist, as some researchers suspect, then at least one may fly through the solar system per decade, generating tiny gravitational distortions that scientists can detect, a new study finds.

These findings suggest that if astronomers can discover and confirm the existence of such gravitational disruptions, they may be able to solve the mystery behind the nature of dark matter, the unseen material that many researchers suspect makes up about five-sixths of all matter in the cosmos.

Many researchers suggest that dark matter may be composed of unknown particles, but no experiment to date has discovered new particles that might be dark matter. As such, one alternative that scientists are exploring to explain dark matter are so-called primordial black holes, ones that have existed since the dawn of time.

Previous research suggests that about 86% of matter in the universe is composed of an essentially invisible substance called dark matter. Scientists infer dark matter's existence from its gravitational effects on everyday matter and light, but it currently remains uncertain what it might be made of.

Black holes get their name from their immense gravitational pulls, which are so powerful that not even light can escape. If a black hole does not give away its existence — for instance, by ripping apart a star — it may remain undetected against the black of space.

Over the decades, astronomers have detected many black holes, from stellar-mass black holes typically about five to 10 times the sun's mass to supermassive black holes millions to billions of solar masses in size. In contrast, the new study examined primordial black holes, which previous research suggests may only be about the mass of a typical asteroid — that is, about 110 billion to 110 million billion tons (100 billion to 100 million billion metric tons).

"The black holes we consider in our work are at least 10 billion times lighter than the sun, and are barely larger in size than a hydrogen atom," study co-author Sarah Geller, a theoretical physicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told Space.com.

Saw some communists calling vegans "ecofascist adjacent", what do you think?

This video can cure insomnia, it's just like taking a math class at 8am

cappy!

No wordswordswords screeds in the removed comments today

Probably the worst I've ever seen was the man Vs bear stuff, the neurodivergent IT experts that tend to be on lemmy really struggled with that one

Disclaimer: This may read bleak, but I'm not in a bleak state of mind. I will post a comment with my thought process behind it.

The Anti-Science Infantilization of the Modern Tech World

You get up and read the news. Halfway across the world are things happening you have no control over and if you put yourself out there and protest it, you get told to stop speaking when a politician is speaking.

You go on a job website and submit an application, but you may not ever receive a rejection and if you do, you will likely receive no information on why your application was rejected and some other person's wasn't. Was it something you did? Was it nothing you did? You don't know.

You go on a dating app and try to match with people. If you're a man, you probably send out a lot of likes or messages that never get a response. Does your profile suck? Are you sending poor messages? You don't know. Maybe they're never getting seen in the first place. If you're a woman, you probably receive more likes and messages than you know what to do with and a lot of them are mean and objectifying. You did nothing to provoke this other than existing as a woman and no matter what you do on there, it keeps happening.

You go to the grocery store to get food to live on, but some product you used has been discontinued again. You have no idea why and have to figure out a replacement. Furthermore, some product whose prices you relied on as stable have gone drastically up. Meanwhile, you're being told the economy is doing well. No one ever consults you on any of these things or tells you why it's really happening. They just say it's inevitable and your lot in life. In fact, they may say it's for your own good.

You go to use your favorite product and it got a major update. A bunch of features you were relying on have changed. They say it's a better product this way and you should get used to it.

You hear on the news that it'll be time to vote again soon. This is the one time, around every four years, that they say your decisions and your opinions matter. And they're telling you that this time, like the last times, it's the most important decision, possibly ever. Where with everything else, you were told to deal with being helpless to the fate of opaque systems you're not allowed to understand or weigh in on, you're now being told it all comes down to you. You drum up some sense of duty in you and you go do it. It's done. You did your part. The results come out and things go back to being as they were before.

You get up and read the news. Halfway across the world are things happening you have no control over and if you put yourself out there and protest it, you get told to stop speaking when a politician is speaking.

You are discouraged from using scientific process and thought to navigate the world. Everywhere you turn, the mechanisms you're up against are hidden from you. Instead, you are told to use willpower, told to use attitude, told to think differently, and eventually the universe will come together for you. Meanwhile, the machine of exploitation turns on scientifically designed wheels. The overseers of colonization, the overseers of the global capitalist empire, use science to exploit and place layers of indirection upon the process so you can't see it.

You look in the mirror. You can only see yourself anymore. They'll give you a mirror so you can focus more on yourself. You see a failure looking back, a helpless abject figure. They tell you to blame yourself. You try to work on yourself to love yourself more and build yourself up, but you keep hitting invisible walls. No matter what you try to do differently, you're flying blind. And that too, they say, is your fault. It always comes back to you and can never be them.

They can take away every limb, deprive every sense you have, and still they will tell you it's your fault. A failure of willpower and attitude.

in this one, the janny censored the slur in the log with *removed* but probably he called Kamala the cword AAHHHHHHHH

I would have uploaded the file but i dont have pawpay (paypig) status

Ok haul today

some days when I check, it's really slow and boring

"average yankkk liberal"

that's a new one

YANKKK

"asians are best at semiconductors"

NO LIBERALS ALLOWED

all myself i make indie game sirs

lol this short "touch grass" ban

(reminder, after 1 day or so, the content of comments leaves the lemmy modlog, and it only shows ban history)

Among the first prisoners stepping off the plane to greet President Putin was a slender brown-haired woman grasping the hand of her young daughter. She appeared to stifle a sob as she hugged Putin. He handed her a bouquet of pink flowers, and another to her daughter. Putin also hugged her husband and kissed their son.

Then, over the din of the airplane, Putin could be heard greeting the children with "buenas noches" — the Spanish phrase for "good evening."

Their parents were undercover Russian spies who posed as Argentinian citizens living in Slovenia and went by the names Ludwig Gisch and Maria Rosa Mayer Muños. They were part of Thursday's massive prisoner swap involving several countries.

"Before that, they did not know that they were Russian, that they had anything to do with our country," Peskov said in a statement on Friday.

"They asked their parents yesterday who this guy was meeting them, they didn't even know who Putin was," Peskov said, before praising intelligence officers who "make such sacrifices for the sake of their work, for the sake of devotion to the cause."

This is a post by the lemmygrad user, ExotiqueMatter, to /c/genzedong

What I got out of this is that they have a really cool emoji over there, I've never seen lemmygrad emojis b4

The hexbear crosspost has more comments:

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5257351

This whole saga (and my own personal experience in another FOSS project this past year) has really punctuated that FOSS conceived as an exercise in collective ownership is a lie. Instead of large companies, FOSS is ruled by a collection of petty tyrants clinging to ownership of release channels. The release channel is the thing in FOSS. Arbitrating what gets distributed through a release channel is what gives people clout & power in the FOSS world, and these are - almost universally - not democratically controlled. Whenever people criticize a project, they are usually given one of two replies:

Fork it

Pull requests welcome

#1 is barely worth addressing, it's equivalent to telling someone to go frick themselves or "if you don't like it, leave". PRs are much more malicious because it's just leading people on. Getting them to waste their time doing a bunch of work that the tyrant always intended to throw away in retribution. I contribute to a project where, when I'm writing a feature, the thing at the top of my mind is "how can I build a pseudo-legal case why this should be merged" instead of "how can I make this change safely on a technical level". Because access to the project is gated by a mercurial tyrant. I only persist because the project is amazing and if I don't deal with this man (and it is almost always men) other people will continue to be driven away by him.

At this point I am verging on changing my definition of "FOSS project" to require democratic governance

How can this issue be mitigated? The current system of a (usually not so) benevolent dictator(s) is the model for all FOSS projects I know of, lemmy included. As you've touched on, this is not at all democratic. However, I don't know if there are any version control hosting platforms (gitea, forgejo, etc.) that work without the code being held in the iron fist of an authoritarian code monkey. Then there is the issue of who should be allowed to contribute; there needs to be a way of keeping out people who contribute malware, or from taking so much control that they themselves become a code tyrant without a king code monkey to spitefully swat down improvements.

Even if those issues are resolved, there is still the massive gulf in power between code monkeys and non-technical users. If none of the code monkeys deign to implement features or bug fixes that non-technical users want or need, then those users are shit out of luck. Another wrench is thrown into things when it's software that runs on a server and there are also sysadmins who could pull the plug at any time even if a democratic system was built into the software.

I guess what I'm getting at is: what is a way to make FOSS as anarchic as possible without opening holes that bad actors could easily exploit and without leaving users incapable of making code be beholden to the code monkeys? The main thing FOSS has going for it is that its governance isn't as shit as how tech companies would handle it, and that's a very low bar to get over.

Watching this happen with F-Droid. A badly needed UI refresh is getting repeatedly watered down and delayed because one of the maintainers with veto power is a dinosaur who thinks people are gonna jump ship if the app looks more modern

Ironically, the dated UI is what makes me want to use third party clients like Droid-ify instead

FRICK YOU WHAT THE FRICK I LOVE THE FDROID UI

ITS OK

ITS FINE THE WAY IT IS

DONT FRICK WITH FDROID

WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH THESE LADIES

I can't even remember what I was supposed to be recapping. Something about too many mayos in a FOSS project?

scrolls upward

Yeah, too many white people on Mastodon. That checks out because mastodon is an annoying white guy in IT kind of scene

The hexbear thread doesn't remember what we're talking about either.

feudalism is when internet?

Finally, someone speaks of the topic at hand:

they have a user named hypercracker... lol lmao

I am now reading the essay, linked in ExotiqueMatter's post

https://h-i.works/2024/04/a-case-for-community.html

Here's the text in full, since these people usually stop paying their webhost when it comes up for renewal

it will be called

Awujo

it's the yoroba word for community!

Astroscale's ADRAS-J orbital inspection mission has taken all-around close ups of its target piece of space debris. The stunning footage of the 36-foot-long (11 meters) rocket stage was taken from mere 164 feet (50 m) and revealed no substantial damage to the object. That means the rocket debris is a go for a ground-breaking removal attempt that Astroscale plans to undertake later this decade.

Astroscale's ADRAS-J (short for Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan) spacecraft has been examining the 15-year-old piece of space debris since February. The Tokyo-headquartered company has previously released a series of photographs revealing the 3-ton rocket stage suspended in microgravity above Earth. The new footage, released on Tuesday, July 30, captures the object from various angles while illuminated with sunlight of varying intensity.

The images used for the videos were captured on July 15 and 16 during two fly-around imaging runs that marked a key milestone in the mission.

"Astroscale has achieved an unprecedented technical milestone for a commercial company: the controlled fly-around operations of the space debris — a rocket upper stage — capturing images from various angles and lighting conditions while maintaining a controlled fixed-point relative position of approximately 50 meters from the upper stage," the company said in a statement. "ADRAS-J is the world's first attempt to safely approach, characterize and survey the state of an existing piece of large debris through Rendezvous and Proximity Operations."

Space debris is a growing problem. According to the European Space Agency, some 40,500 space debris objects greater than 4 inches (10 centimeters) currently hurtle through Earth's orbits together with millions of smaller fragments.

Travelling at speeds of several miles per second, these dead objects pose a risk to operational satellites as well as to the International Space Station. The world's space agencies are therefore trying to devise solutions to remove the most worrying space debris pieces from orbit.

Astroscale has previously demonstrated its systems designed to autonomously approach and capture uncontrollable debris objects with its ELSA-d (End-of-Life Services by Astroscale demonstration) mission in 2021.

In April, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which funds ADRAS-J, selected Astroscale for a follow-on mission, which will attempt to remove the old rocket stage from orbit using a robotic arm.

These new images gathered by ADRAS-J will help Astroscale prepare for the ground-breaking task, which could help restore order in the cluttered orbits in the future.

"Development of the ADRAS-J2 spacecraft is underway, and the heritage of the ADRAS-J spacecraft and operations, along with the data collected, will be utilized for the removal phase of the program," Astroscale said in the statement.

The recent fly-arounds confirmed that the rocket's payload adapter, which the ADRAS-J2 robotic arm is expected to grab, is intact, meaning the mission can continue as planned.

"Unprepared objects in orbit are not designed with any technologies that enable docking or potential servicing or removal, heightening the complexity of operations," Astroscale said in the statement. "The information gained from these images will provide essential data that will support a future mission to capture and remove the object."

The ADRAS-J2 mission will be one of the world's first attempts to remove a large piece of debris from orbit. ADRAS-J2 is expected to launch in 2027.

On July 11, Astroscale signed a contract with OneWeb to remove one of its satellites fitted with a magnetic docking plate from orbit in 2027. The company is also vying for a U.K. Space Agency contract to remove two defunct British satellites launched in the 1990s. That mission, called COSMIC, also intends to use a robotic arm.

The European Space Agency, in cooperation with Swiss company ClearSpace, is developing another mission known as ClearSpace-1 that could attempt to deorbit a smaller rocket part in 2026.

Browsing reactionary spaces, seems they're trying to brew the theory that the secret service purposefully let this happen, or though sheer incompetence. Wait a week and they'll start saying the secret service was compromised by Biden.

privatize the secret service !!!

Shame they missed

Eh, I don't think it really matters. The president of the US would have ended up being some imperialist lunatic either way.

busy rn so no large recap

Also I checked the lemmygrad modlogs after the shooting and it was nothing interesting, just the usual "ableism" ban for using the word schizo

Commies cope cope cope

"In this video essay, I explore many of the negative attributes of sofas."

now this is praxis