https://news.ku.edu/2023/08/03/paper-offers-glimpse-500-million-year-old-sea-worm-named-after-dune-monster

When she found the fossil, Rhiannon LaVine, a research associate with the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, was part of a team camping and carrying out fieldwork in the High Creek area of the Spence Shale, a geologic formation straddling northern Utah and southern Idaho. The area has been famed since the 1900s for its abundance in some 90 species of Cambrian trilobites and soft-bodied fossils.

Their findings recently were published in the peer-reviewed journal Historical Biology.

“One of the last times we were out there, I split open one of these pieces of rock and instantly knew it was something that wasn’t typical,” LaVine said. “The first thing we see are these radial blades that look like stars or flowers. Immediately, I showed it to (lead author) Julian Kimmig. He was perplexed. He’s said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that.’ We were out with Paul Jamison, a local who’s been working the site for years — and if there’s something in there that somebody’s seen, he’s seen it. But he hadn’t seen it.”

After transporting the fossil specimen back to the KU Biodiversity Institute — where today it’s part of the permeant paleontological collection — LaVine consulted with colleagues about the mysterious fossil.

I was showing it to everybody, asking, ‘What do you think this is?,’” LaVine said. “Nobody had an idea. We thought maybe it’s a wiwaxia, a very peculiar animal from about that time — but we don’t have too many representatives of it from the Spence area. Or maybe it’s a scale worm, but there’s no real scale worms known from that time. Maybe it was a juvenile jellyfish, but it’s so bladed and the lines are so straight on those things, it would be kind of odd. So, I couldn’t get a solid answer.”

Next, LaVine teamed with colleagues at the University of Missouri to conduct scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry on the fossil.

We mainly wanted to make sure that this was a biological thing, because it’s possible it could have just been some weird mineral growth with the way it looked,” said the KU researcher. “So that was primarily why we brought it to them. It’s about 7 or 8 centimeters long, maybe a little shorter than the length of a smartphone. It’s sizable for a fossil of that sort. We did the scanning to rule out that it wasn’t just a mineral growth, and we were able to do that.”

Finally, LaVine and her co-authors were able to determine the fossil to be a previously unknown species of annelid, a diverse phylum of some 21,000 “segmented worm” species found in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments all over the world.

Here we describe Burgessomedusa phasmiformis gen. et sp. nov., the oldest unequivocal macroscopic free-swimming medusa in the fossil record. Our study is based on 182 exceptionally preserved body fossils from the middle Cambrian Burgess Shale (Raymond Quarry, British Columbia, Canada). Burgessomedusa possesses a cuboidal umbrella up to 20 cm high and over 90 short, finger-like tentacles. Phylogenetic analysis supports a medusozoan affinity, most likely as a stem group to Cubozoa or Acraspeda (a group including Staurozoa, Cubozoa and Scyphozoa). Burgessomedusa demonstrates an ancient origin for the free-swimming medusa life stage and supports a growing number of studies showing an early evolutionary diversification of Medusozoa, including of the crown group, during the late Precambrian–Cambrian transition.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.2490

The space shuttle Endeavour is on its last mission today, a 12-mile creep through Los Angeles city streets on a 160-wheeled carrier. It is passing through neighborhoods and strip malls, headed toward its final destination, the California Science Center in South Los Angeles. At times, the shuttle has barely cleared trees, houses and and street signs along a course heavily prepared for the trip. The move will cost an estimated $10 million, according to the Exposition Park museum. Gathered here are a few images of Endeavour's last journey.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/10/a-space-shuttle-on-the-streets-of-los-angeles/100386/

Pioneer 10 — космический зонд НАСА массой 258 кг.

Пионер-10 стал первым космическим аппаратом улетевший дальше Марса, первым прошедшим через пояс астероидов, первым совершившим пролёт вблизи Юпитера и сфотографировавшим планету, первым аппаратом развившим третью космической скорость, первым использующим радиоизотопный термоэлектрический генератор,

Запущен 3 марта 1972 ракетой Атлас-Центавр.
15 июля 1972 вошел в пояс астероидов.
4 декабря 1973 года пролетел на расстоянии 132 тыс. км от облаков Юпитера.
В феврале 1976 года аппарат пересёк орбиту Сатурна.
13 июня 1983 года пересек орбиту Нептуна.

Последний контакт с Пионером-10 состоялся 22—23 января 2003 года. В это время космический аппарат находился на расстоянии 82,19 а. е. от Солнца и удалялся от него с относительной скоростью 12,224 км/c.

Дальнейшая судьба «Пионера-10» неизвестна, но предполагается, что он продолжает полёт и со временем покинет Солнечную систему, направляясь в сторону звезды Альдебаран.