Current Events Wrap -- Nothing About Oil, Nothing About The Bakken -- May 25, 2023

Locator: 44756CUREVNTS.

ChatGPT: book blurbs. Link here. Great examples of how ChatGPT will change ... everything.

Mars: quite an international story. Link here.

On February 9, 2021, the United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country to reach Mars when the Hope probe successfully entered into orbit around the red planet. Seven years earlier, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE and ruler of Abu Dhabi, and Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, announced that the Emirates Mars Mission would be developed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), working in conjunction with international partners and funded by the UAE Space Agency.

The Cold War trained us to think of spaceflight—especially ambitious Mars missions—as something a nation does to signal that it has developed a “space economy” and possesses the expertise and technological capabilities to build and operate rockets, missiles, and spy satellites. Viewed through a geopolitical lens, it is a type of highly publicized technological flexing— a gun show. But this was not quite the case for the UAE.

Emirati engineers designed and built the Hope spacecraft in Boulder, Colorado, in collaboration with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, with support from Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley. Working side by side with LASP engineers, Hope team members learned skills that will serve them in later missions. Once Hope was completed, a Ukrainian transport plane delivered it to Dubai for testing. Finally, Hope flew to Japan for launch, where the UAE arranged with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for launch on a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket from Japan’s Tanegashima Island launch facility.

Race admissions. Link here

It is widely expected that by this summer, the United States Supreme Court will overturn long-standing precedents allowing the consideration of race as one factor among many in university admissions. The current legal regime goes back to the Court’s decision (Regents of University of California v. Bakke) in 1978 that banned racial quotas while allowing consideration of race for the purpose of creating a diverse educational environment. Although the law has evolved since then, almost all universities have relied on the Bakke framework to support their strategies to educate a diverse citizenry.

Voyage of the botanists, down the Grand Canyon. Link here.

On 20 June 1938, a trio of small boats carrying six people set off from Green River, Utah, with the goal of running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. No previous Colorado River expedition, not even those led by famed explorer John Wesley Powell, excited national news coverage in quite the way this one did, for this river party included two women. The brainchild of University of Michigan botanist Elzada Clover, who invited doctoral student Lois Jotter to join, this expedition was scientific, focused on plants. No woman had done anything like this before.

Ancient history of kissing. Link here. I had / have no interest in the subject matter per se, but the dates / dating (no pun intended) in the article was what interested me.

Recent studies maintain that the first known record of human romantic-sexual kissing originates in a Bronze Age manuscript deriving from South Asia (India), tentatively dated to 1500 BCE (1). Yet, a substantial corpus of overlooked evidence challenges this premise because lip kissing was documented in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt from at least 2500 BCE onward. Because this behavior did not emerge abruptly or in a specific society but appears to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia, the kiss cannot be regarded as a sudden biological trigger causing a spread of specific pathogens, as recently proposed (2). Further understanding of the history of kissing in human societies—and its secondary effect on disease transmission—can be gained from a case study of sources from ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria).