locking an impressive 45.22 kilometers (28.10 miles), it has surpassed the previous record established by Opportunity of 45.16 kilometers.

Perseverance is currently traveling to an area called “Idubi”, which is part of the wider western rim of the Jezero Crater.

The wider area has been nicknamed “Lac de Charmes”, and it might have some of the oldest terrain ever directly explored in the solar system.

…
Perseverance has been on Mars for roughly 5 and a half years now, with the distance record being broken during the rover’s 2006th Martian day, or sol. This was way faster than Opportunity managed the same distance.

…

In summer 2025, JPL certified that the rover actuators – the parts that turn the wheels – will perform optimally for at least another 60 kilometers (37 miles). The goal of driving 100 kilometers (62 miles) on Mars is very possible.

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This artistically-enhanced image shows the tracks of real particles produced when a neutrino interacted in a liquid mixture of neon and hydrogen inside the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) during the 1960s. The tracks become visible when bubbles form along the paths of the particles as a piston expands the liquid. A magnetic field is produced in the detector causing the particles to travel in spirals, allowing charge and momentum to be measured.

Found via Ms. Dramko, who used this image as inspiration for her own art. Clouds and cloud chambers.

The post Science Art: Bubble chamber with colour enhanced tracks, 2026 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

The team at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, looked at 309 couples across three studies. They asked all 618 people about their musical preferences – across genres and artists – and had them complete questionnaires about their personal values and traits.

They then shuffled the respondents and created thousands of random ‘pseudo-couples’. The findings, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, were clear: “couples consistently demonstrated greater similarity in music preferences than pseudo-couples”.

Dr Julia Vigl, a co-author of the study, said it “adds another piece to the puzzle” of what makes couples click.

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You can read more about the compatibility study here, in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The post The couples that rock together, stay together…. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

High-intensity interval training (HIIT), which involves alternating short bursts of demanding exercise with easier recovery periods, may be especially helpful for older adults who want to reduce fat without sacrificing lean muscle.

In a study published in Maturitas, researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast compared three different exercise intensities. Although participants across the groups experienced modest fat loss, HIIT stood out for its ability to reduce fat while maintaining lean tissue.

“We found that high, medium and low intensity exercises all led to modest fat loss but only HIIT retained lean muscle,” said lead author and exercise physiologist Dr. Grace Rose of the University of the Sunshine Coast.

…

One possible explanation for HIIT’s advantage lies in the way it challenges the body.

Rather than exercising at the same pace throughout a workout, HIIT repeatedly pushes the cardiovascular system and working muscles through periods of intense effort, followed by easier activity.

University of the Sunshine Coast Associate Professor of Physiology and study co-author Mia Schaumberg explained how the training worked.

“High-intensity training in this study involved repeated short bursts, or intervals, of very hard exercise — where breathing is heavy and conversation is difficult — alternated with easier recovery periods.

“HIIT likely works better because it puts more stress on the muscles, giving the body a stronger signal to keep muscle tissue rather than lose it.”

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You can read more about the six-month study here, in Maturitas.

The post The only workout to lose fat and keep muscle: high-intensity. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO.

Her life’s work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: “Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon.”

“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved,” says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics.

“The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program’s success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions.”

The post RIP Margaret Hamilton, moon-shot programmer first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

If you want to know the parts, according to Dutch Wikipedia, they are:

Legend
1 Arm
2 Ampullae
3 Radial canal
4 Gonads
5 Pyloric stomach
6 Rectal caeca
7 Pyloric caeca
8 Anus
9 Stone canal
10 Madreporite
11 Genital opening
12 Arm muscle

If you’re even more curious, a “madreporite” is a sort of water filter for starfish bodies, “ampullae” are little jug-shaped organs, and “caeca” is the plural of “caecum,” which is a kind of pouch, like the appendix in humans.

The post Science Art: Dissection of Asterias rubens, by Hans Hillewaert. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

These two bird species are now in the same league as the white bellbird, which shattered the record for loudest bird in 2019 after its bizarre call was first measured and reported by Jeff Podos, a professor in the department of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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In the new study, Podos and former UMass Amherst graduate student João C.T. Menezes report that the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema occupy the same decibel range as the white bellbird. It’s tough to declare a clear winner among the three birds due to differences in measurement techniques and individual variations within each species.

Regardless, this trio is a special class that is much louder than the fourth runner-up, the screaming piha, which tops out around 116 decibels. In addition to identifying the ear-splitting avians, the team captured unprecedented measurements of vocal amplitude in 123 bird species, an effort that represents “a step forward in uncovering what enables birds to produce the loudest acoustic signals of all terrestrial fauna,” according to the study.

…

But unlike call features like tempo or frequency, vocal amplitude has been notoriously difficult to measure in the wild because it is dependent on distance to the animal, which can be tough to figure out in remote field environments, such as the Amazon rainforest.

Menezes and Podos were able to overcome this longstanding hurdle with the same laser rangefinders used by golfers to gauge the distance to holes.

“The laser rangefinders help us determine the distance between the recorder and the bird, which is important in our report as it allows us to correct our recordings of amplitude for distance,” Podos told 404 Media in an email. “But the actual recordings and thus readings of amplitude are made with another kind of device, a Sound Level Meter (normally used in industrial acoustics, but that can also serve in working with animals!).”

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There’s video at the link. You can read more about the awesomely earsplitting avians here, in Evolution.

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In 1882 there were two bright comets, one of them in many respects extraordinary. So great was the intrinsic brightness that it was observed with the naked eye, close alongside the sun. Indeed, it passed between the earth and the sun, in actual transit ; and just before entering upon the disk, the intrinsic brightness of the nucleus was seen to be scarcely inferior to that of the sun itself. It was a comet of huge proportions. Its tail stretched through space over a distance exceeding that of the sun from the earth, and parts of its head passed within 300,000 miles of the solar surface, at a speed of 200 miles a second. Probably this near approach explains what was seen to take place on recession from the sun — the breaking up of the comet’s head into several separate nuclear masses, each pursuing an independent path. Also this comet’s tail presented a variety of unusual phenomena, at one time being single and nearly straight, while again there were two tails slightly curved. Besides this, its coma was surrounded by an enormous sheath or envelope several million miles long, extending toward the sun.

I found this image and this book on archive.org.

The post Science Art: Jupiter’s Family of Comets, 1898 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: NBC News, “New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years, researchers say“, 17 Sep 2026, as used in the post, “First new cat species IDed in a century.”

ABSTRACT:
I feel like I kind of had to climb a mountain to get this done this month. Upheavals everywhere — loved ones with broken bones, loved ones prepping for chemotherapy, loved ones mourning other loved ones… and then for whatever reason, after I’d whacked down a ukulele part in the middle of the night and added some mumbled half-lyrics, then fell asleep and put the computer to sleep as well, when it awoke there was no more desktop. Like the icons appear briefly and then vanish, leaving a pointer on a black screen.

I refused to let this stop me. Brought up every program used to record, label, upload, and post this song one at a time in the command line. Got it done.

The song itself I feel like is one of those progressions that’s just always going on in the back of my mind, and maybe in everyone’s mind. There are not a lot of surprises here harmonically or melodically.

There are some interesting textures, I think. The main instrument is that ukulele pitch-lowered by two octaves to a bass register. There’s a real organette, a MIDI Rhodes piano, a strummed 3/4-size guitar for a rhythm track, and another track of lead guitar that was fed through an amp and a delay. A contrabass to round out the bottom end.

And then some half-whispered vocals about a cat being catalogued, and taxonomy being taxing. Because I guess the real discovery here was kind of a sorting-and-filing discovery.

And the thing with cats, all cats, is that they really don’t care about any of your organizational systems. They are agents of chaos and dangerous beauty.

I see no reason why the tilcayo tiger cat would be any different, however we want to measure and sort it.

LYRICS:

Add one more cat to your catalogue tonight
Index the secret names in the jungle light, the jungle light
Tiny tigers

Add one more cat to your catalogue, my friend
Classify every circle within the patterns on skin
The space between whiskers and chin
The feline mysteries now awakening
Tilcayo(x3)

Add one more cat to your catalogue at last
Tax your taxonomies, past these tiny tigers
Claw your categories
Tilcayo (3)

The post SONG: Your Catalogue first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

On Wikimedia Commons, this is calling itself a colorized photograph, but at the time, I don’t really see how Wehrli could have taken it from outside the bathysphere at this depth, except maybe in a second bathysphere. (Far likelier he took a picture of the deep-sea vessel on dry land and then painted the ocean and sea creatures around it.)

On Wikipedia, it’s captioned thusly: Else Bostelmann’s illustration of the Bathysphere’s descent, painted for the National Geographic article which Beebe wrote in return for the National Geographic Society sponsoring his dives. This seems likelier but I don’t know.

Things get murky at great depths where the sun does not penetrate.

The post Science Art: Beebe’s Bathysphäre, 1934 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.