Science
The max number of hot dogs a human can cram down
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James Smoliga, a High Point University physiology and sports medicine specialist, has harnessed his expertise in the service of humanity by calculating just how many hot dogs a person could potentially wolf down in 10 minutes. Thank you, Dr. Smoliga.
Smoliga crunched the data from 39 years of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, an annual event that challenges eaters to shove as many dogs down their throats as possible in just 10 minutes. He used a mathematical model to estimate a theoretical maximal active consumption rate (ACR) for humans.
“Through nonlinear modelling and generalized extreme value analysis, I show that humans are theoretically capable of achieving an ACR of approximately 832 g min−1 fresh matter over 10 min duration,” Smoliga wrote in the research article, which was published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters. That translates to about 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
If that sounds insane, it’s not. Competitive eater Joey Chestnut demolished the competition in the Nathan’s contest this year by snarfing down 75 hot dogs (in buns) over the course of 10 minutes.
Miki Sudo, the reigning champion in the women’s division of the hot dog contest, has seen the results of the study. “I’m only 34.5 hot dogs away from perfection!” she tweeted. She managed to put away an impressive 48.5 dogs.
Smoliga took the study a step further by comparing human performance with that of some well-known eaters from the rest of the animal kingdom. It turns out people could potentially outeat a grizzly bear, but grey wolves have us beat.
There’s some fudge factor here. “The contest duration makes it difficult to directly relate ACRs between species, though comparison with existing data highlights the impressive eating capacity of humans,” Smoliga wrote.
Smoliga noted that eating competitions are unique environments where a ready and unlimited food supply and the presence of spectators may influence ACR.
The study also calls out the impressive increases in consumption performance among contest competitors over the years. Both Chestnut and Sudo set new hot dog-eating world records in 2020, making them wiener winners worthy of worship.
As for the rest of us, sticking with just a hot dog or two for dinner is probably a good idea.
Source: – CNET
Science
SpaceX sends 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
Science
NASA Celebrates As 1977’s Voyager 1 Phones Home At Last
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
Science
NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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