RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: For over a century, the "solar sail" has been a concept in theoretical spaceflight, in science fiction, and in the last few years, actual spaceflight. Recently, the Breakthrough Starshot project has been prompting and funding a lot of work to optimise and explore the operational possibilities of flying spacecraft to nearby stars, and this has produced another (relatively) novel idea for efficient spacecraft propulsion — an electric sail. It is well known that stars produce both radiation (light) and material outflows ("solar wind"). It is less well known that the momentum transferred by the solar wind can be considerably higher that that transferred by light. Recent calculations by the paper's authors, Loeb and Lingam, with not-unreasonable premises, show that for many classes of star (including the most common star types) the solar wind is considerably stronger than the radiation pressure. They propose that a mesh of wires, positively charged, can drive a spacecraft more efficiently than reflecting radiation. Moreover, by using the radiation to generate electrical power, the wire grid can be kept charged and incident electrons discharged in a beam to keep the spacecraft electrically neutral. Thirdly, maintaining a charge on the grid in interstellar space can act to brake the spacecraft, or even steer it, depending on the "space weather" it encounters. Clearly, applying these mechanisms to optimising "Breakthrough" spacecraft could considerably widen the range of trajectories and mission profiles possible.

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Deadly bombardment prompts more civilians to flee in northwest Syria as govt' gain terrain in last rebel-held province.

Indian Prime Minister has defended his controversial citizenship law as protests sweep the country.

"Travis Casagrande, a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at Hamilton's McMaster University has created the smallest gingerbread house ever built," writes long-time Slashdot reader Mr.Fork, "even smaller than the one made in France last year by nanorobotics researchers at the Femto-ST Institute in BesanÃon." "Decking the halls is a whole lot harder when you're decorating something 10 times smaller than a human hair," reports the CBC: Casagrande's creation is a home for the holidays -- a gingerbread house complete with a wreath over the door, a cheery brick chimney, Christmas tree details carved into the walls and a patriotic Canadian flag doormat. "Compared to the size of a typical gingerbread house that you might buy in a grocery store kit, mine is 20,000 times smaller," he explained... Zoom out slightly from the silicon structure and you'll see it's actually perched atop a smiling snowman that's giving a mischievous wink. Pull back even farther and a seemingly massive cylinder appears -- believe it or not, that's a human hair... "The point of that was sort of to make some jaws drop when you realize even the snowman, which is much bigger than the house, is extremely tiny compared to the hair you see next...." Casagrande used a focused ion beam microscope to etch out the microscopic details with a beam of charged gallium ions, which he compared to a sandblaster... " I wanted to spark some curiosity of science because that leads to better science literacy."

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I asked my friend Allen Holub what "Agile" means. He had a blog post from 2017 ready to go. Wow.

It's been cold but today there's been a bit of a thaw and a nearby creek is flowing nicely under an almost solid cover of ice.

A photo roundup of some of last week's events, including the Fifa Club World Cup and demonstrations in France.

Long-time Slashdot reader pvjr writes that "The Inquirer is giving up the ghost and going dark in March, 2020." An announcement on the site from the site's editor explains that the change is "due to a recent decline in digital advertising, along with a change of focus for the business..." "We came, we Inquired, we're off to the pub." The site will remain live until the end of March, but Thursday [was] the final day that we will be publishing new content... Before joining, I was a long-time admirer of the site, which since its debut in 2001 has energised tech journalism with its fearless attitude, snarky reporting, world-reaching exclusives and its ability to have an, er, bit fun now and again. This is all, of course, because of the fantastic team of journalists behind it... And that brings me to the most important point of all. Thank you -- yes, you! -- dear reader. Over the past two decades, you have been the lifeblood of this website. Without you, The INQUIRER would have been a short-lived experiment, but your inquisitiveness, support and, er, often honest feedback made The INQUIRER the success that it was. We'll see you down the pub...

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orange (Slashdot user #12,033) writes: In a series of articles, a security researcher along with an investigative journalist have laid bare shenanigans involving millions of dollars of scarce IPv4 address space. In the latest developments, it seems a police case has been opened in Mauritius, the island headquartering afrinic.net -- the IP address registry for the African region. Here's previous coverage at MyBroadband.co.za, with the Register giving its own take. Is this what we can expect in light of global IPv4 depletion? It's believed that the blocks of IP addresses -- valued at over $54.7 million -- were stolen with the help of an AFRINIC insider.

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Socialist Democrats' candidate Zoran Milanovic leading presidential race with 29.6 percent of the vote, exit poll shows.

Pirates attacked four ships in Libreville harbour, government spokesman says.

Kubernetes (originally designed by Google) is a prominent open-source container-orchestration system for cloud computing with over 4.3 million lines of Go source code. Over 700,000 lines of that code are comments. "We've been working on a project that surfaces TODO comments in a codebase to help developers do basic project management workflows within that codebase," reads a new essay on Medium. So what did the software learn from over 2,000 TODO comments on Kubernetes? Slashdot reader patrickdevivo writes: It finds that most TODOs are quite old (average age of 2+ years) and about a quarter of them have an assignee (so they're kind of like a ticket?) The tool used to surface the information is called tickgit, and it looks for "project management metadata" in a codebase. The data confirms what most developers intuitively understand -- many TODO comments are forgotten and typically not addressed in a reasonable amount of time. This also appears to be the case in Kubernetes, just on a larger scale.

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An odd thought. The Republicans are trying to eliminate rule of law. At the same time they're rushing to appoint judges. If they're successful, judges are just people, their opinions don't matter. Why do they care so much about judges then. Also, suppose the Supreme Court says his tax returns must be released. What does he do?

Series of attacks recorded on island of Mindanao, wounding at least 17 people including soldiers.

"China is about to start operation on its 'artificial sun' -- a nuclear fusion device that produces energy by replicating the reactions that take place at the center of the sun," writes Newsweek. schwit1 shared their report: If successful, the device could edge scientists closer to achieving the ultimate goal of nuclear fusion: near limitless, cheap clean energy. The device, called HL-2M Tokamak, is part of the nation's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak project, which has been running since 2006. In March, an official from the China National Nuclear Corporation announced it would complete building HL-2M by the end of the year. The coil system was installed in June and since then, work on HL-2M has gone "smoothly," the Xinhua News Agency reported in November. Duan Xuru, head of the Southwestern Institute of Physics, which is part of the corporation, announced the device will become operational in 2020 at the 2019 China Fusion Energy Conference, the state news agency said. He told attendees how the new device will achieve temperatures of over 200 million degrees Celsius. That's about 13 times hotter than the center of the sun. Previous devices developed for the artificial sun experiment reached 100 million degrees Celsius, a breakthrough that was announced in November last year.

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