December 7, 2023: NASA's next big telescope is already underway, the potential fallout from America's nuclear weapons and what our editors are reading this week. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | NASA is getting serious about finding life beyond our solar system. Set to launch around 2040, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will search in infrared, optical and ultraviolet light for the biosignatures of alien life on about 25 potentially habitable planets around stars like our sun. Select teams of astronomers are busy planning the telescope's design and features. Technical specs: Like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), HWO's primary mirrors will likely be composed of honeycomb-shaped segments, and in total at least as wide as JWST's 6.5-meter starlight-gathering eye. To train its sights on a microscopic dot of light orbiting another star, HWO must remain remarkably still: JWST was designed to exhibit a "targeting drift" as tiny as one-twentieth of a micrometer (a micrometer is a millionth of a meter and a fraction of the width of a human hair). To image an alien Earth, HWO may have to be a thousand times better, maintaining a picometer-scale stability (a picometer is one trillionth of a meter). All while filtering out approximately 10 billion photons shining from the planet's home star.
What the experts say: "You might use this telescope to look for 'technosignatures'—evidence for not just simple life like bacteria but advanced life capable of building machines, industry, electric power, all of that," says Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. | | | If you haven't yet checked it out, Scientific American's package in the December issue investigates the massive undertaking by the U.S. government to modernize its nuclear arsenal. In the next decade, some 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, and their silos will be replaced and new missiles will be put back in the ground. Each ICBM has a warhead with at least 20 times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The underground silos are spread across North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. Watch our short film on the latest developments.
Why this matters: The U.S. has embarked on a $1.5 trillion nuclear build-out of its arsenal. The U.S. military says it is necessary to replace an aging nuclear arsenal. But critics fear the risks, namely, the leakage and dispersion of radioactive elements, and dangerous nuclear waste. Residents near nuclear test sites report increased cases of cancer. And global use and testing of nuclear weapons has dispersed plutonium over much of Earth's surface.
What the experts say: "Nuclear weapons are outdated," says Sharon Weiner, an associate professor and a national security expert with a focus on nuclear weapons policy, at the School of International Service at American University. "What's more horrible than a nuclear weapon and the threat that you could kill not just yourself and your adversary, but everybody else who's not even involved in the conflict?" Not everyone agrees. Our nuclear arsenal is "the safety mechanism," says Brigadier General Ty Neuman, deputy director for plans and programs at the Air Force Global Strike Command. "It's the insurance policy that we have that protects our Americans." | | | From our short film looking into the enhancement of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. | | | • Researchers successfully used a chatbot to develop prompts that could "jailbreak" other chatbots—destroy the guardrails encoded into such programs to stop them from giving out harmful information. | 3 min read | | | • The world's largest iceberg, A23a, is on the move after being trapped in place off Antarctica's coastline for almost 40 years. It's bigger than Rhode Island. | 3 min read | | | Stuck on the seafloor for decades, Iceberg A-23A now freely drifts northward toward warmer, iceberg-destroying waters. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and data from the Antarctic Iceberg Tracking Database | | | • The COP28 host country, the United Arab Emirates, the world's largest oil companies and even programs in the U.S. Department of Energy are hailing the benefits of carbon capture technology as a real solution to counter global warming. But don't be fooled, writes Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization focused on climate solutions. These technologies are far too small, costly and energy intensive to have a real impact on ameliorating climate change. "These projects give fossil fuel companies a greenwashing boost, cloaking pollution underneath fake environmental responsibility," he says. | 4 min read | | | • A thought-provoking essay on how our local environmental conditions shape our relationships. | Orion Magazine | | | • Which movies portray time travel most accurately? Check out this fun guide. | Ars Technica | | | • A new drug is getting close to market whose makers claim it gives your canine best friend a slightly longer life. | The New York Times | | | If you have an animal-lover on your holiday gift list this year, consider adopting a tiny salamander, called an axolotl, in their name (bet you thought I was gonna pitch a Scientific American subscription? Woops, I just did). In November, the National Autonomous University of Mexico relaunched a campaign to virtually adopt an axolotl, proceeds of which will go to conservation efforts to protect the endangered animals in the wild. | Send me your favorite gift recommendations for science lovers and any other feedback: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | P.S. You may have noticed that Today in Science didn't make it to your inbox yesterday. A technical glitch prevented the newsletter from being sent. We're looking into what happened! | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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