More from Casey Handmer's blog
The Australian Border Force won’t stop searching me and my personal devices when I visit Australia. Despite being an Australian citizen, under Australian law, I have zero recourse to this continued flagrant invasion of my privacy. After two years of harassment I am publicizing this as a considered next step in an effort to make it stop. This is somewhat different from my usual articles about space, energy, and technology – we will return to that theme shortly. As far as possible, I will relate only facts and keep editorializing to a minimum. I will update this post as the …
[Originally posted on the Terraform blog April 3, 2025.] Three years ago we set out to make cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. At the time I didn’t fully appreciate that we had kicked off the process of recompiling the foundation layer of our entire industrial stack. Last year, we made cheap pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air and expanded our hydrocarbon fuel road map to include methanol, a versatile liquid fuel and chemical precursor for practically every other kind of oil-derived chemical on the market. Unlimited synthetic methane and methanol underpinning global energy supply is a good start, but …
Some ideas on preventing cryogenic propellant boiloff in Starship during long duration cruise or while operating orbital fuel depots. The usual caveats apply! One of the major concerns with using Starship for the Human Landing System is that propellant (cryogenically liquid methane and oxygen) need to a) be transferred in orbit and b) maintained for the duration of the mission, which could be weeks, months, or years. In particular, no astronaut wants to board their Starship after a successful 6 week sortie on the Moon only to find the fuel’s boiled off and they’re stuck. The trick lies in using energy …
As of today, it is 601 days until October 17, 2026, when the mass-optimal launch window to Mars opens next. While I don’t have any privileged information, it’s fun to speculate about what SpaceX could choose to send on its first Starship flights to Mars. (Spoiler alert: Rods from the gods…) Over the next 600 days, SpaceX has a number of key technologies to demonstrate; orbit, reuse, refill, and chill. It’s hard to make predictions, particularly about the future. I’m optimistic that SpaceX will have multiple fully fueled Starships ready to go in October next year, to be followed by …
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An attack on a fundamental proof technique reveals a glaring security issue for blockchains and other digital encryption schemes. The post Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Koalas, which spend most of their lives high up in eucalyptus trees, usually die while on the ground, often mauled by dogs or hit by cars. More striking, a new study reveals that the amount of time they spend on the ground is only around 10 minutes a day. Read more on E360 →
Here are a number of items from the past week or so that I think readers of this blog might find interesting: Essentially all the news pertaining to the US federal funding of science continues to be awful. This article from Science summarizes the situation well, as does this from The Guardian and this editorial in the Washington Post. I do like the idea of a science fair of cancelled grants as a way to try to get alleged bipartisan appropriator notice of just how bad the consequences would be of the proposed cuts. On a more uplifting note, mathematicians have empirically demonstrated a conjecture originally made by John Conway, that it is possible to make a tetrahedral pyramid that, under gravity, has only one stable orientation. Quanta has a nice piece on this with a cool animated gif, and here is the actual preprint about it. It's all about mass distributions and moments of inertia about edges. As others have pointed out including the authors, this could be quite useful for situations like recent lunar lander attempts that seem to have a difficult time not topping over. A paper last week in Nature uses photons and a microcavity to try to test how long it takes photons to tunnel through a classically forbidden region. In this setup, it is mathematically legit to model the photons as if they have an effective mass, and one can model the barrier they need to traverse in terms of an effective potential energy. Classically, if the kinetic energy of the particle of interest is less than the potential energy of the barrier, the particle is forbidden inside the barrier. I've posted about the issue of tunneling time repeatedly over the years (see here for a 2020 post containing links), because I think it's a fascinating problem both conceptually and as a puzzle for experimentalists (how does one truly do a fair test of this?). The take-away from this paper is, the more classically forbidden the motion, the faster the deduced tunneling time. This has been seen in other experiments testing this idea. A key element of novelty in the new paper is the claim that the present experiment seems (according to the authors) to not be reasonably modeled by Bohmian mechanics. I'd need to read this in more depth to better understand it, as I had thought that Bohmian mechanics applied to problems like this is generally indistinguishable in predictions from conventional quantum mechanics, basically by design. In other non-condensed matter news, there is an interstellar comet transiting the solar system right now. This is very cool - it's only the third such object detected by humans, but to be fair we've only really been looking for a few years. This suggests that moderately sized hunks of material are likely passing through from interstellar space all the time, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will detect a boatload of them. My inner science fiction fan is hoping that the object changes its orbit at perihelion by mysterious means. This week is crunch time for a final push on US congressional appropriators to try to influence science agency budgets in FY26. I urge you to reach out if this matters to you. Likewise, I think it's more than reasonable to ask congress why the NSF is getting kicked out of its headquarters with no plan for an alternative agency location, so that the HUD secretary can have a palatial second home in that building.
As growing populations denude its slopes and heavy rain intensifies, Mount Elgon has become increasingly vulnerable to landslides. In response, Ugandan farmers are planting native trees and changing the crops they plant in efforts to build resilience against future disasters. Read more on E360 →