Ring of Fire | Purple Papyrus | Asteroid Boop

If you happen to look up at the sky and see the first story below, please let me know if it lives up to the hype!

-Steve

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Ring of Fire

A ring of fire will fly through our sky today. If you’re lucky, you can witness this last annular eclipse visible in the US until 2046.

• Annular eclipse = ring shaped

• Occurs when moon is at its furthest from the sun

• First in the US since 2012

Annular eclipses can be viewed somewhere on earth every 1-2 yrs. NASA also released an interactive map to track today’s spectacle. (No cool sunglasses though)

Don’t forget special eye protection in real life!

Purple Papyrus

First word identified from a 2,000 year old scroll: purple. 2 students independently deciphered letters from the burnt papyrus using 3D scans for the Vesuvius Challenge.

• Vesuvius Challenge: machine learning competition to read Herculaneum Papyri

• Herculaneum’s library was burned in Mt. Vesuvius’ eruption (AD79)

• Students were awarded $40k and $10k prizes

The Vesuvius Challenge incentivizes deciphering ancient texts without damaging the fragile remains. More discoveries are expected now that we have at least 2 methods for parsing the burnt scripts. Maybe they’ll find a good newsletter!

Next discovery: “Be sure to read your casualSTEM”

Asteroid Boop

We found water in space! NASA shared evidence of life’s building blocks from OSIRIS-REx’s asteroid mission this week.

• Source asteroid: Bennu, 4.5 billion yrs. old

• OSIRIS-REx briefly landed to collect sample on 10/21/20

• Returning over 60g of asteroid to Earth on 9/24/23

NASA’s admin (Bill Nelson) said it best, “The OSIRIS-REx sample is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever delivered to Earth and will help scientists investigate the origins of life on our own planet”. Sadly, no cheese was found in the sample.

Booping an asteroid on the nose

You’re gonna like this

I enjoy learning from Curious Peoples every morning, I think you will too! My favorite part is “Words of Wisdom” with cool quotes related to the day’s topic.

Unnatural Selection

Last week: “Which sounds better?”

Ironically, purring is the cat’s meow.

st3v on site

Annular Slide

st3v took one look at the annular eclipse path and knew what to do. As expected, the slide was very hot.

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