For the first time ever, NASA has tested its next generation of Mars helicopters in two different worlds. A new rotor for helicopters that will be used in future missions was tested recently at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, while real-life flight simulation was conducted on Mars through the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which broke altitude and airspeed records during an experimental flight. The NASA team was surprised by the performance of the new Mars helicopter while conducting the test. Know the details.
Global weirding is coming for vampires
09.11.2023 - 02:25 / polygon.com
Climate change is full of spooky phenomena (see zombie fires, ghost forests), but the widest-reaching is “global weirding,” a term coined by Hunter Lovins that takes an expansive look at the Anthropocene, the current era of human-caused environmental change. Global weirding is about how the world won’t just get warmer, but the knock-on effects will be dynamic, varied, amplified, and downright weirder.
We aren’t talking enough how this will affect vampires. After all, climate and vampire stories are both about Victorian creations that haunt us long after they should be dead — one just centers on industrial capitalism, and the other a less explicit bloodsucker.
As more and more vampire media is developed and set in the present day, the warmest years on record, we need a definitive guide to how vampire strength and behaviors could change as their world gets weirder.
Dr. Scott Coffin — an environmental toxicologist and California EPA scientist who appears to not be a vampire despite the name — is already thinking of some knock-on effects. Global food insecurity, for example, “could reduce the availability of garlic,” while desertification would decrease forest cover and make hunting humans harder, and result in “less wood for making stakes.” Yet it seems like vampires may most significantly be altered by smoky sunlight, wildlife changes, and microplastics.
For more than a century, most vampires have been nocturnal creatures. Whether light makes them sparkle or turn to dust, vampires tend to avoid daylight hours, only hunting humans at night, under clouded sky and midnight gaslamp. But how will that change as blood-red wildfire smoke covers entire skylines for days, like we saw in across the East Coast this summer? Ditto for more frequent storm clouds, rolling blackouts, and potential geoengineering projects. As global weirding continues to snowball, opportunities for feeding will only increase.
According to planetary scientist Sanaz Vahidinia, who has studied light scattering in different environments, aerosols like soot (from fires) or sulfates (from geoengineering projects) dampen the light level, which creates darker conditions, though they also let different light wavelengths through. We can see this with wildfires coloring skies orange in increasing frequency as climate change has worsened. It’s complex, and ever-changing.
“Light is constantly interacting with your environment and yourself,” she told Polygon. Although vampires like darker skies, Vahidinia questioned how they would react to different colors or levels of haze — perhaps a vamp would be able to walk under an orange sky, but only get an appetite once the moon is showing. If they like the dampened light, she suggested they could work
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