Toggle light / dark theme

SXSW has been a part of my life for decades. If you live around Texas, check it out. It has transformed from a simple music fest, to simply awesome.


South by Southwest® (SXSW®) celebrates the convergence of tech, film, and music industries. Join us for SXSW 2022 from March 11–20 in Austin, Texas.

The Sun is continuing its rowdy behavior, with flares and coronal mass ejections almost every day since mid-January. That means the inevitable has happened: some of those eruptions have blasted in the general direction of Earth, which means we’re in for some solar storms.

The Space Weather Prediction Center of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Met Office have both issued advisories for mild and moderate geomagnetic storms over the next couple of days.

That doesn’t mean we have anything to worry about; in fact, we’ve already been hit by mild and moderate geomagnetic storms over the last couple of days, clocking in at G1 and G2 on the five-level solar storm scale.

SpaceX drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) has departed Port Canaveral in anticipation of the company’s sixth consecutive Starlink launch.

Known as Starlink 4–12, the mission will be SpaceX’s sixth uninterrupted Starlink launch – just shy of the company’s record of seven Starlink launches between commercial payloads. Though SpaceX would probably prefer to avoid month-long streaks without commercial launches, the company’s ability to use its own launch capabilities to deploy its Starlink constellation means that it can maintain valuable economies of scale while simultaneously launching satellites that generate some revenue.

With approximately 200,000 active subscribers, Starlink should already be generating around ~$250 million in annual revenue – perhaps enough to pay for anywhere from five to ten Starlink launches. Viewed another way, $250M would also pay the average annual salaries of more than 2,300 employees. Even if it doesn’t come close to the $1–2 billion SpaceX is likely spending annually on Starlink development, deployment, and operations, it’s still better than the alternative that all other launch providers are left with: nothing.

New approach lays groundwork for compact 3D displays that create more realistic virtual scenes.

Researchers have demonstrated a prototype glasses-free 3D light field display system with a significantly extended viewing distance thanks to a newly developed flat lens. The system is an important step toward compact, realistic-looking 3D displays that could be used for televisions, portable electronics, and table-top devices.

Light field displays use a dense field of light rays to produce full-color real-time 3D videos that can be viewed without glasses. This approach to creating a 3D display allows several people to view the virtual scene at once, much like a real 3D object.

A harsh sun shines down through a cloudless sky, across a vast and unforgiving landscape. It’s covered in gray rock, giant ice sculptures and expansive fields of spiky, yellow and orange bushes. In the distance, intimidating mountain peaks dominate the desolate scene, many miles from the nearest town. Yet alpacas roam freely and flamingos seek out scarce water, both unexpected sights in this wild world.

The resembles something from a sci-fi film or another planet, but it’s right here on Earth, on the flanks of the world’s highest active volcano, 22,615-foot Ojos del Salado. Here, on the border of Argentina and Chile, a team of CU Boulder scientists seek to discover how tiny organisms persist at one of the driest and highest points on the planet.

This first-of-its-kind project may ultimately help inform the search for existing and extinct life on other planets.

“People keep finding more of them,” said Ryan Hickox, an astronomer at Dartmouth College who recently helped locate one himself. “There may be a lot more of these things in these galaxies than we could find using the traditional techniques.”

Off the Map

Dwarf galaxies are relatively uncharted astronomical territory. Ten to 100 times lighter than the Milky Way, they lack the gravitational moxie to pull themselves into the tidy round shapes amenable to theorizing. They’re also patchy, dim and generally hard to study in detail. “They’re a total mess,” Volonteri said.