The sea-inspired washed-down clothing boasts stunning cyano type, mimicking seaweed

Mandy Barker’s “Delesseria Tunic Ictus”

Mandy Barker

An influential book by botanist and pioneering photographer Anna Atkins, almost two centuries ago. British algae photos: impressions of cyanotypes surprised readers with its scientific power and artistry. In it, Atkins presented images of seaweed collected from the British coastline using the cyanotype method, a printing process carried out by laying objects on chemically coated paper, exposing them to ultraviolet rays and creating a cyan blue background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_7exgdvv8e

Artist Mandy Barker’s new book, British algae photo: Cyanotype defects she uses the same technique to draw attention to the ongoing pollution crisis facing our oceans. Like Atkins, Barker also scrutinised the British coastline. But rather than finding the beauty of nature, she saw abandoned clothes washed down on the beach. Her first discovery, she says, looked like seaweed. “It was kind of an attractive and beautiful fabric.” However, when jackets, dresses, shoes, underwear and school uniforms began to appear, the scale of the problem quickly became clear to her.

Inspired by the “seaweed-like shape” of the clothing, Barker decided to create a new cyanotype print (photo not the photo above) from this discovered fabric (photo above, not the photo above) to replicate Atkins’ work, which involves small but large changes. She draws attention to the climate costs associated with fast fashion by inventing the Latin name for clothing. Delesseria Tunica Ictus – Nodded to both the shirt she found and the red algae that Atkins had photographed.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Saturn boasts a total of 128 new moons, surpassing all other planets combined

Saturn currently has a total of 274 moons

nasa/jpl/space science research institute

Another 128 months were discovered, orbiting Saturn, bringing the planet to a total of 274. It's more than what's around all other planets in the solar system. However, astronomers face problems as advances in telescope technology allow them to gradually find small planetary objects.

Edward Ashton Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan and his colleagues have found a new moon with a telescope in Canada, France and Hawaii, revealing dozens who have previously avoided astronomers. They took several hours of imagery of Saturn, adjusted them through the sky for the movement of the planets, stacking them on top of each other, revealing objects that were otherwise too thin to be visible.

All new moons are 2 to 4 kilometres in diameter and could have been formed hundreds of millions or billions of years ago by collisions, Ashton said.

“These are tiny little rocks floating in space, so some people may not be doing anything,” Ashton says. “But I think it's important to have a catalog of all the objects in the solar system.”

The dot at the center of this image is one of the moons of Saturn's new “fuzzy blob”

edward ashton et al. (2025)

Despite the wealth of data collected by his team, these most recent months still only appear as “fuzzy blobs,” Ashton says. There are more powerful telescopes that can solve Moon in more detail, Many people have small areas of vision, but that would mean taking more images, he says.

The newly discovered moon is recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and Ashton and his team You now have the right to name it. Ashton, a Canadian, says he approached representatives of Indigenous Canadian people for suggestions, but also pondered the idea of ​​a kind of public naming contest.

Is there more moons there? Scientists have spent decades scanning the area around Saturn with an increasingly powerful telescope in recent years. In 2019, 20 new moons were found, and Ashton and his colleagues already 62 discovered Apart from the 128 that was recently discovered in 2023. Ultimately, further discoveries are likely to require advances in telescope technology, Ashton believes that thousands of moons are easily found in orbit around Saturn, and even discounting the small rocky remains found in the planet's rings.

Mike Alexandersen The Minor Planet Center, which records the planetary bodies of the IAU, says there are likely many moons in the solar system, as telescope improvements allow you to see small objects. He says he has to make a decision about what he doesn't do with the moon.

“I know that the IAU has decided not to prioritize naming anything smaller than a kilometer because of the number of months that are likely to exist. But that's not the same as they don't recognize it as the moon,” says Alexandersen. “Only if the spaceship goes to visit it would they name it.”

He suggests that the cutoff between the moon and the rock particles that form part of the planet's rings is probably between 1 kilometres and 1 meter in diameter. “In the end, it's probably going to be an IAU, not my decision. And it's probably going to be a relatively arbitrary kind of thing,” says Alexandersen.

Elizabeth's Day At Imperial College, London says one day there may even be commercial reasons to have an accurate map of the solar system. “You may want to extract resources from the asteroids and moons in your solar system, so make sure you understand what's important to that,” says Day.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Titan, Saturn’s moon, boasts both freshwater rivers and saltwater oceans

Titan’s north polar region, imaged using Cassini’s radar signature, shows blue hydrocarbon oceans.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Italian Space Agency / USGS

The most detailed look yet at Saturn’s moon Titan’s strange lakes has revealed a diverse marine landscape similar to Earth’s, with a mix of freshwater rivers and saltwater oceans.

Unlike Earth’s watery oceans, Titan’s lakes are composed of methane and ethane, which are liquid at the planet’s average surface temperature, about −179 °C (−290 °F).

Radar measurements from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, suggested differences in the lakes’ properties, including their composition and surface waves, but the signals didn’t contain enough information to distinguish between them.

now, Valerio Poggiali Poggiali and his colleagues at Cornell University in New York used a different radar technique to map the composition and surface of Titan’s oceans, revealing that the amount of ethane increases as you move south across the planet from the north pole. “The further north you go, the cleaner and purer the oceans become. They’re dominated by methane,” Poggiali says.

Previous radar measurements were made using signals sent and received at the same location on the Cassini spacecraft, which meant the reflected radio waves were polarized in one direction, or twisted.

The new study analyzed signals from Cassini’s radar that were reflected off the lake’s surface and picked up by NASA’s Deep Space Network, a radio antenna on Earth. The shallow angle of the reflected signal meant it contained two different polarized waves, giving Poggiali and his colleagues more information about the lake’s properties.

They found that many of the rivers and estuaries that feed the lake have rough surfaces caused by wind-driven waves, which could be a sign of active tides and currents feeding into the lake, Poggiali said. “Surface activity is very important if we want to plan future missions like a Titan submarine, but also to better understand Titan’s environment in terms of wind and atmospheric properties.”

Poggiali and his colleagues also found that the methane content was higher before the river flowed into the lake, which could help trace the methane and ethane cycle on Titan, Poggiali says. Ingo Muller-Wodarg “On Earth, when rivers flow into large, salty oceans, we find that the water becomes less saline near where the river flows in,” say researchers from Imperial College London. “Something similar is happening here, but it’s not the salinity that’s the problem, it’s the relative proportions of methane and ethane.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com