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Google Maps renames “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America” even faster than US government

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  Trade talks between the US and Canada broke down last week, leading to a wave of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs. US President Donald Trump also fell back on an old favorite to needle his opponents, signing an executive order on Thursday to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” The body of water, which straddles the US-Canada border, gave its name to the Canadian province rather than the other way around. Regardless, the US government now refers to this great lake as Lake America—or it will soon. Official US government maps have yet to be updated, but Google wasted no time adopting the new, Trumpian name. Google began rolling out this change for US users on Saturday. The company posted a brief update on its Google Maps blog, noting that it follows the US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) for its maps, so the company implies it had no choice but to rename Lake Ontario in Google Maps, which is the most popular mapping platform in the US by a wide margin. However, Google ...
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It turns out that Orion’s much-maligned heat shield performed really well

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  Perhaps the biggest question going into the Artemis II mission this spring was how the heat shield at the base of the spacecraft would perform during reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. The ablative heat shield, designed to char upon reentry while keeping the crew safe, had experienced unexpected losses of large chunks during a test flight in late 2022. After much deliberation, and not without controversy , NASA decided to fly the Artemis II heat shield as is but modify the spacecraft’s reentry trajectory. Obviously, the heat shield worked. The crew of Artemis II, led by commander Reid Wiseman, safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a triumphant trip around the Moon. Afterward, they and other NASA officials offered general comments, saying the heat shield looked good. But how good? During a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel this week, its members had an opportunity to review NASA’s findings during a visit to the Ames Research Center in California. The co...
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Private group wants to launch “cheapest possible” mission to Alpha Centauri

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  There are, by various estimates, several trillion planets within what is known as the Local Group of galaxies—our closest galaxy neighbors, including our own Milky Way. Many of these planets are within the habitable zone of their stars. So if life finds a way, where are the alien civilizations? This is the crux of what is known as the Fermi paradox , which posits that if life is fairly common in the Universe, humans should have collected credible evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations by now. People who think about this paradox believe there may be some “filter” that limits or entirely prevents an advanced civilization from sending out probes or even life-bearing spacecraft to nearby stars. Philip Johnston is someone who thinks a lot about the Fermi paradox. A mathematician and physicist from the United Kingdom, Johnston has gained some notoriety lately in the space community as one of the biggest proponents of orbital data centers. He co-founded Starcloud ...
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El Niño is now stronger than at any point in the last 1,000 years, study finds

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  Every few years, El Niño or its cool counterpart, La Niña, shifts rainfall across the tropics, dries out Australia, floods parts of Peru, and rearranges the weather on most of the planet. The two are the warm and cold swings of a single system, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, and that system is the largest source of year-to-year climate variation on Earth. Its swings sit atop the steadily rising temperatures driven by global warming. But we didn’t know whether global warming was making it stronger. It’s possible that the added energy in the atmosphere and oceans was causing its swings to be more dramatic. “We’ve been seeing some very strong El Niño events in the late 20th and early 21st century, and what we didn’t know was how unusual those are,” said Julie Cole, an environmental scientist at the University of Michigan. Because models disagree with one another and the instrumental data are too short to separate a trend, Cole’s team reconstructed a thousand-year-long oc...
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