Nerd News: Volcanoes And What Do Bats & Death Metal Singers Have In Common?

1.  In video game news:  “Pong” turned 50 on Tuesday.  Atari released it on November 29th, 1972.  It was the first game to really blow up and get popular.

2.  In music news:  A study found bats and death metal singers both vocalize in similar ways.

3.  In space news:  The Artemis 1 mission set a new record for farthest distance traveled by a spacecraft meant for humans.  No one’s in it yet, but it made it over 268,000 miles from Earth, and took a selfie.  That beat the old record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts when they had to slingshot around the Moon to get home.

4.  In Earth news:  The world’s largest active volcano in Hawaii erupted for the first time in 38 years.  And we found two new types of minerals in a meteorite buried in Somalia.  (Scientists named them “elaliite” and “elkinstantonite”.)

5.  And we covered the Elon Musk news yesterday: His company Neuralink is still trying to use computer chip implants to merge our brains with machines.

Someday, it might help you do math, or make you really good at chess.  But they also think it could help blind people see, and let paralyzed people walk again. Elon did a big presentation this week, and said the first human trials could happen in six months.  Eventually, he said HE plans to get an implant too.