Cosmic Locales.

Biological software.

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1. On Thursday morning in Japan, a bus-size telescope with X-Ray vision soared into space. It wasn’t alone. Along for the ride was a robotic moon lander about the size of a small food truck. The two missions — XRISM and SLIM — would soon part ways, one headed off to spy on some of the hottest spots in our universe, the other to help Japan’s space agency, JAXA, test technologies that are to be used in larger-scale lunar landings in the future. The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission — XRISM for short (and pronounced like “chrism”) — is the launch’s primary passenger. From an orbit 350 miles above Earth, XRISM will study exotic environments that emit X-Ray radiation, including the accretion of material swirling around black holes, the blistering plasma permeating galaxy clusters, and the remnants of exploding massive stars. Data from the telescope will shed light on the motion and chemistry of these cosmic locales with a technique called spectroscopy, which relies on changes in the brightness of sources at different wavelengths to extract information about their composition. The technique gives scientists a view into some of the universe’s highest energy phenomena and will add to astronomers’ comprehensive, multiwavelength picture of the universe. (Source: nytimes.com)

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2. China’s top science academy has updated its code of conduct with new rules that require members ensure their public statements are “in line with the general policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” and prohibit openly expressing academic views unrelated to their field of expertise. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) code of conduct, which consists of 33 articles in six chapters, is an update of a version released nine years ago. The rules were created to “maintain the academic, honorary and pure nature of the academician title,” according to the code of conduct published by the CAS last month. (Source: caixinglobal.com)

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