Anna Richards @MsHouseMD@qoto.org

Welcome to longtime scicomm friend and inspiration @JenLucPiquant !

Brief trip to London #london #photography

So, in today’s incredibly interconnected society, this seems like a reasonable plan, although why 2035 is set as the deadline for adding leap seconds as opposed to, err, now, I don’t know.

Still, philosophically, it perhaps marks another drifting disconnect between the physical world, the linked to the passage of the Sun, stars, & seasons, & the technological bubble we humans now inhabit.

And for that reason, this decision makes me slightly sad. But I’m weird like that 🤷‍♂️

Of course, the imprecise UT1 solar time & atomic-clock based UTC will still drift apart & adjustments will still be needed to avoid getting too disconnected from physical sunrise & sunset.

But the idea is to accumulate a bigger offset of one minute, which should take 50-100 years, & then make the last minute of the year twice as long as normal, meaning just a little more anticipation before the New Year’s fireworks & champagne 🎉🍾

But adding extra seconds to all of our clocks worldwide can cause all sorts of problems in today’s highly technological & interconnected society, where precise time-stamping is critical in many systems.

So this week in Paris, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measure, decided to stop the practice of adding leap seconds by or before 2035.

The idea of leap seconds is to keep UT1 & UTC no more than 0.9 seconds apart, & as above, 27 such seconds have been added to UTC since 1972.

They’re added irregularly as the slowing of Earth’s rotation rate depends on our molten core, ocean currents, & even climate change, as the ice caps melt.

If we didn’t adjust UTC to match UT1, then over ~50,000-100,000 years (I think 🧐), our clocks would drift apart by ~12 hours & the Sun would be at its highest at 00:00 & it’d be midnight at 12:00.

Observed solar time (UT1) is tied to Earth’s rotation & when we see the Sun & distant objects in the universe rise & set in our skies.

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is a human construct, the time our civilisation runs on, & is tied to International Atomic Time (TAI), the fundamental flow of time measured in labs.

Because of tidal friction between Earth & the Moon, our planet’s rotation is slowing & our day gets longer, so UT1 & UTC drift apart.

Everyone knows about leap years, when an extra day at the end of (almost) every fourth February accounts for a full solar year taking 365.2422 rotations of Earth.

Leap seconds, however, adjust for the irregular slowing of that rotation: 27 have been added since 1972.

But that’s going to stop in 2035, & solar time & atomic clock time will be allowed to drift up to a minute different 👇

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/18/do-not-adjust-your-clock-scientists-call-time-on-the-leap-second

I joined this site a fortnight ago today.

I did not have a clue how it worked, or about its lore and culture.

Now, it seems intuitive - though not because I am adept but because networks and protocols are familiar and practical things.

We use them all the time: www, mobiles, emails, etc.

And this place is structured to encourage calm civility.

It was Twitter which was strange and, in many ways, inhumane - rewarding clicks and rage and vileness.

We just got used to it.

And now we are out.

First look at the #Moon from the #Orion capsule. Image via @AndySaunders_1@twitter

I guess it's time for #introductions over here. I'm a human geneticist/computational biologist working at Seattle Children's Research. I come from population genetics but now working on individual genomes and looking forward to getting into long read. Pick a phenotype, any phenotype.

I'm just as likely to be posting about life, hiking, running, swimming. Mother of a schizophrenic son and hugely advocating for understanding and compassion. Also possibly pictures of food.

The BioSentinel spacecraft was one of 10 CubeSats deployed by Artemis yesterday. The astrobiology mission will use yeast to study DNA damage and repair due to radiation in deep space, far beyond low earth orbit (LEO).

The study, led by NASA Ames, will use two strains of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which will be activated at different times during the 6-12 month mission, in a solar orbit similar to that of earth.

https://www.nasa.gov/ames/biosentinel

Go #Artemis #BioSentinel

The Medieval Werewolves Course at Clockworks Academy begins tomorrow! Sign up and join us! I GUARANTEE* you'll love it!

*not a guarantee

https://clockworksacademy.com/courses/werewolf-course

#Artemis1 is going to produce a lot of science not only about the #moon, but #radiation, #space and even a little bit of help for people living on #Earth.

I recently wrote about 10 passengers and payloads, some flying on the #Orion spacecraft for #STEM purposes and others carrying a wide variety of #science in #space right now.

https://www.space.com/artemis-1-strange-things-moon-mission

#artemis #nasa

Red Sprites above a distant thunderstorm

🧵"Twitter 2.0" is trending.
I'm a foremost expert on this and let me tell you what you should do: quit, take the 3 month severance with your friends, and build the 2.0 version yourself. Musk will give up and buy your company in a couple years.

#NASA #Artemis - And a look at the interior of the Orion Spacecraft you can see the test article "Moonakin Campos named for Arturo Campos who was one of the key players in returning the Apollo 13 Astronauts Home, The Moonikin is wearing the Orion Pressure suit also being tested. You can also see the #Callisto experiment up front. The suit can protect an astronaut for up to 6 days in the event of a loss of cabin pressure.

It's great when people who are sick test for #SARSCoV2. But when they tell you not to worry because they tested negative: I don't want that other virus either!!! If you are sick with a respiratory illness: Stay at home & get some rest (for you and for others)

OK, so we're nearing the new launch window of #ArtemisI (which opens at 10:04 p.m. Tues PT or 1:04 a.m. Wed ET)... let's take a little time to celebrate the awesomeness that is the Deep Space Network that will not only allow #NASA to track and communicate with the mission and its secondary payloads, but ALSO keep tabs on the dozens of other missions exploring the solar system right NOW: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/how-nasas-deep-space-network-supports-the-agencys-missions #DSN #scheduling #deepspace #communications