In a long-overdue move, the FAA has announced plans to modernize America’s air traffic control systems, many of which still rely on Windows 95, paper strips, and even floppy disks. Acting FAA administrator Chris Rocheleau told Congress that this archaic setup, once seen as oddly reliable, is now a looming infrastructure risk.

Ironically, some of these outdated systems survived the recent CrowdStrike global outage unscathed, but FAA leadership insists that’s no excuse to delay. They’ve labeled this overhaul “one of the most critical U.S. infrastructure upgrades in decades.”

The current goal: eliminate obsolete technologies and implement secure, modern platforms—without compromising the nonstop operation of national airspace.

With a four-year target window and input from private sector innovators through “Industry Days,” the FAA faces both technical and logistical challenges. Still, the message is clear: it’s time to ground the floppy disks and get American air traffic flying into the digital age.

#AviationTech #FAAModernization #AirTrafficControl #Windows95 #TechUpgrade

A mind-bending discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is shaking the foundations of modern cosmology—suggesting that our universe may have been born inside a black hole.

The Clue: A Cosmic Rotation Imbalance
While studying early galaxies through the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), astronomers found a strange pattern:
Out of 263 ancient galaxies observed, 66% spin clockwise, and only 34% spin counterclockwise.

In a universe with no preferred direction, we’d expect a 50-50 split. This unexpected bias has scientists thinking: could this be a leftover imprint from the very birth of the universe?

The Theory: A Universe Born from a Black Hole
This observation lines up with an intriguing idea called Schwarzschild cosmology, which proposes:

We Exist Inside a Black Hole:
Our universe could lie within the event horizon of a massive black hole in another, “parent” universe.

Black Holes Create Universes:
In physicist Nikodem Poplawski’s torsion theory, matter doesn’t collapse into a singularity—it gets spun and twisted by extreme gravity, forming an entirely new universe.

The Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning—It Was a Bounce:
The Big Bang could have been matter rebounding from collapse inside a black hole. The spin of that black hole may have left its fingerprint on the rotation of galaxies in our universe—explaining the JWST’s puzzling spin imbalance.

Skepticism and Alternate Views
Not everyone is convinced. Some researchers suggest the anomaly might be caused by the Milky Way’s own spin influencing JWST’s readings. If that’s true, it may still offer key insights:

We may need to rethink how we measure the cosmos
It might help address big questions like the Hubble tension or the existence of unexpectedly mature galaxies in the early universe

If verified, this could change everything—not only about how we think black holes work, but about how our own universe came to be.

RESEARCH PAPER
Lior Shamir, “The distribution of galaxy rotation in JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey”, MNRAS (2025)

Scientists from the University of Bayreuth in Germany have successfully created the world’s first gene-edited spider that produces glowing red silk threads.

Using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, they inserted a red fluorescent protein gene (mRFP) directly into the silk-producing genes of the common house spider (Parasteatoda tepidariorum).

As a result, some offspring were able to spin fluorescent red silk, visible under UV light—a strong sign that the gene modification worked precisely.

This breakthrough is the first time CRISPR has been used to achieve a gene "knock-in" in spiders, and it demonstrates that functional proteins can be genetically embedded into silk threads.

In the same study, researchers also knocked out a gene responsible for eye development, causing spiders to hatch without eyes—further proving the precision of their genetic editing method.

The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Angewandte Chemie and has received international attention.

Funded by organizations including the U.S.
Navy and Air Force, the project could lead to supermaterials for use in defense, aerospace, textiles, and biomedicine—such as biodegradable sensors or stronger-than-steel fibers.

In summary, this marks a significant leap in bioengineering and spider silk research, unlocking future possibilities to design silk with custom traits directly within spiders themselves.

WASP-121 b, an exoplanet located 855 light-years from Earth, is one of the most extreme worlds ever discovered. This scorching hot Jupiter is tidally locked to its star, with one side eternally scorched and the other cloaked in night.

On its blistering day side, temperatures soar above 3,000 K (2,700°C / 4,900°F), while the night side cools to around 1,500 K (1,226°C / 2,240°F). This dramatic contrast fuels violent winds that rip across the planet at incredible speeds, dragging atoms and water molecules from day to night.

On the cooler night side, metal clouds begin to form—composed of vanadium, iron, chromium, calcium, sodium, magnesium, and nickel. Scientists believe aluminum and oxygen may bond to create corundum—the mineral that, when laced with traces of other metals, forms liquid rubies and sapphires that may rain down from the sky.

Researchers aim to use the James Webb Space Telescope to search for carbon monoxide, unlocking new clues about the formation of hot Jupiters like WASP-121 b.

RESEARCH PAPER
Thomas Mikal-Evans et al., Diurnal variations in the stratosphere of the ultrahot giant exoplanet WASP-121b, Nature Astronomy (2022)

Just 85,000 km away, yet a whole world apart.

Captured by the Apollo 15 crew in 1971, this breathtaking photo of Earth reminds us how small we are in the vast cosmic sea.

#Apollo15 #EarthFromSpace #CosmicPerspective #NASAHistory