Under the Martinborough Stars

The star Vega is easy to spot at the moment in spring. Look in the north and Vega is a very pretty bright star near the horizon. You might recognise the name, it is the main focus of Carl Sagan’s famous book Contact, where a young scientist detects a signal from a faraway star. After a long arduous process a team creates a wormhole transport device that takes them to the centre of the galaxy. There they speak at length with aliens but can bring back no proof of the contact—so that when they return home nobody believes them.

Vega is the brightest star in Lyra and fifth brightest star in the sky.  You’ll remember that the brightest star in a constellation is the alpha star, followed by beta, gamma, delta etc. Vega’s proper name is Alpha Lyrae, but because it is a particularly bright star it is best known as Vega.

Vega is a pretty close star to our Solar System, a real stellar neighbour. It’s only 25 light years away. The light from the star left it 25 years ago, so you are seeing Vega, and all the stars in the sky in the past. If like me, you think that wasn’t that long ago, here are some headlines to what happened in 1996. … Continue Reading

TOAST MARTINBOROUGH RESCHEDULED FOR JANUARY 

Premier annual Wairarapa wine and food event Toast Martinborough has been postponed to mid-January 2022.

            General Manager of the iconic festival, Ariel Codde, says the decision to reschedule it from Sunday  21 November to Sunday 16 January 2022 is based on current uncertainty and risks posed by the  Delta variant of COVID-19.

              “We are extremely disappointed to have to postpone. But with the information we currently have,  our scheduled date will fall outside the government’s timeframe for introducing vaccine certificate  requirements for large events.”

              Such is Toast Martinborough’s popularity, this year was a sell-out with all 8500 tickets gobbled up  early, and more than 1000 Toast hopefuls still on a waitlist. … Continue Reading

Those mysterious bitcoins

Bitcoin mining – the process in which a bitcoin is awarded to a computer that solves a complex series of algorithms – is a deeply energy-intensive process according to Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a tool from researchers at Cambridge University that measures the currency’s energy use.

“Mining” bitcoin involves solving complex math problems in order to create new bitcoins. Miners are rewarded in bitcoin.

Earlier in bitcoin’s relatively short history – the currency was created in 2009 – one could mine bitcoin on an average computer. But the way bitcoin mining has been set up by its creator (or creators – no one really knows for sure who created it) is that there is a finite number of bitcoins that can be mined: 21m. The more bitcoin that is mined, the harder the algorithms that must be solved to get a bitcoin become. … Continue Reading

Sponges at risk

Sediment plumes caused by such activities as bottom trawling and  deep sea mining  pose a threat to sponges which are crucial to the deep sea’s eco system.

Researchers have  exposed New Zealand  deep-sea sponges  to different levels of sediment concentrations. The findings were that  as the sediment increased the sponges  breathing rates fell by up to 60% with some sponges dying .

At the end of the two week experiment  sediment was found deep in the tissue of all specimens including the controls. Despite survival of a trawling the damaged caused would  continue to affect sponges beyond the disturbance