Jupiter’s Moon Count Jumps to 92, Most in Solar System

By Marcia Dunn

Associated Press, February 3, 2023 -- CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.  — Astronomers have discovered 12 new moons around Jupiter, putting the total count at a record-breaking 92.  That’s more than any other planet in our solar system.

Saturn, the one-time leader, comes in a  close second with 83 confirmed moons.

The Jupiter moons were added recently to a list kept by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, said Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution, who was part of the team.

They were discovered using telescopes in Hawaii and Chile in 2021 and 2022, and their orbits were confirmed with follow-up observations.

These newest moons range in size from 0.6 miles to 2 miles (1 kilometer to 3 kilometers), according to Sheppard.

“I hope we can image one of these outer moons close-up in the near future to better determine their origins,” he said in an email Friday.

In April, the European Space Agency is sending a spacecraft to Jupiter to study the planet and some of its biggest, icy moons. And next year, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper to explore Jupiter’s moon of the same name, which could harbor an ocean beneath its frozen crust.

Sheppard — who discovered a slew of moons around Saturn a few years ago and has taken part in 70 moon discoveries so far around Jupiter — expects to keep adding to the lunar tally of both gas giants.

Jupiter and Saturn are loaded with small moons, believed to be fragments of once bigger moons that collided with one another or with comets or asteroids, Sheppard said. The same goes for Uranus and Neptune, but they’re so distant that it makes moon-spotting even harder.

For the record, Uranus has 27 confirmed moons, Neptune 14, Mars two and Earth one. Venus and Mercury come up empty.

Jupiter’s newly discovered moons have yet to be named. Sheppard said only half of them are big enough — at least 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) or so — to warrant a name.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

https://apnews.com/article/science-hawaii-chile-planets-c176ea4bbee4fda4e996884802e47141Top of Form

Study Reveals New Clues about how Earth's Thermostat Controls Climate

Rocks, rain and carbon dioxide help control Earth's climate over thousands of years -- like a thermostat -- through a process called weathering. A new study may improve our understanding of how this thermostat responds as temperatures change.

From:  Penn State

February 5, 2023 – "Life has been on this planet for billions of years, so we know Earth's temperature has remained consistent enough for there to be liquid water and to support life," said Susan Brantley, Evan Pugh University Professor and Barnes Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. "The idea is that silicate rock weathering is this thermostat, but no one has ever really agreed on its temperature sensitivity."

Because many factors go into weathering, it has been challenging to use results of laboratory experiments alone to create global estimates of how weathering responds to temperature changes, the scientists said.

The team combined laboratory measurements and soil analysis from 45 soil sites around the world and many watersheds to better understand weathering of the major rock types on Earth and used those findings to create a global estimate for how weathering responds to temperature.

"When you do experiments in the laboratory versus taking samples from soil or a river, you get different values," Brantley said. "So what we tried to do in this research is look across those different spatial scales and figure out how we can make sense of all this data geochemists around the world been accumulating about weathering on the planet. And this study is a model for how we can do that."

Weathering represents part of a balancing act of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere. Volcanoes have emitted large amounts of carbon dioxide through Earth's history, but instead of turning the planet into a hot house, the greenhouse gas is slowly removed via weathering.

Rain takes the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and creates a weak acid that falls to Earth and wears away silicate rocks the surface. The byproducts are carried by streams and rivers to the ocean where the carbon is eventually locked away in sedimentary rocks, the scientists said.

"It has long been hypothesized that the balance between carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere from volcanoes and being pulled out by weathering over millions of years holds the temperature of the planet relatively constant," Brantley said. "The key is when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the planet gets hotter, weathering goes faster and pulls more carbon dioxide out. And when the planet is cooler, weathering slows down."

But much remains unknown about how sensitive weathering is to changing temperatures, partly because of the long spatial and time scales involved.

"In a soil profile, you are seeing a picture of soil where the camera shutter was open for sometimes a million years -- there are integrated processes happening for a million years and you're trying to compare that with a two-year flask experiment," Brantley said.

Brantley said the field of critical zone science -- which examines landscapes from the tallest vegetation to the deepest groundwater -- has helped scientists better understand the complex interactions that influence weathering.

For example, rocks must fracture for water to get in cracks and start breaking down the materials. For that to happen, the rock must have large, exposed surface areas, and that is less likely to happen in regions where soil is deeper.

"It's only when you start crossing spatial and time scales that you start seeing what's really important," Brantley said. "Surface area is really important. You can measure all the rate constants you want for that solution in the lab, but until you can tell me how does surface area form out there in the natural system, you are never going to be able to predict the real system."

The scientists reported in the journal Science that temperature sensitivity measurements in the laboratory were lower than estimates from soils and rivers in their study. Using observations from the lab and field sites, they upscaled their findings to estimate the global temperature dependance of weathering.

Their model may be helpful for understanding how weathering will respond to future climate change, and in evaluating human-made attempts to increase weathering to draw more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- like carbon sequestration.

"One idea has been to enhance weathering by digging up a lot of rock, grinding it, transporting it and putting it out in the fields to let weathering happen," Brantley said. "And that will work -- it's already working. The problem is, it's a very slow process."

Though warming may speed up weathering, pulling all the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that humans have added could take thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, the scientists said.

Other Penn State researchers who participated on the study were Andrew Shaughnessy, doctoral candidate in the Department of Geosciences and Marina Lebedeva and Victor Balashov, senior scientists in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.

The National Science Foundation and the Hubert L. Barnes and Mary Barnes Professorship supported this work.

            https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230205081323.htm

  

ThrustSSC Land Speed Record

ThrustSSC, Thrust SSC or Thrust SuperSonic Car is a British jet car developed by Richard Noble, Glynne Bowsher, Ron Ayers, and Jeremy Bliss.

Thrust SSC holds the world land speed record, set on 15 October 1997, and driven by Andy Green, when it achieved a speed of 1,228 km/h (763 mph) and became the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier.

Both Thrust SSC and Thrust2 are displayed at the Coventry Transport Museum in Coventry, England. As part of the Museum's redevelopment project, both cars were relocated by specialist haulier from their position in the Museum's Spirit of Speed Gallery to the new Biffa Award Land Speed Record Gallery which opened in 2015.

The car is 16.5 m (54 ft) long and 3.7 m (12 ft) wide and weighs nearly 10 tons. It had a reported thrust of 223 kN (approximately 50,000 pounds force) at some operating condition. If achieving full reported thrust while operating at the record speed, it works out to around 102,000 brake horsepower, calculated as force times velocity. Jet engines are not designed to operate at peak airspeed while still in ground effect; a proper estimate would need to take this into account.

Details

The car was driven by Royal Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Andy Green in the Black Rock Desert in the state of Nevada. It was powered by two afterburning Rolls-Royce Spey turbofan engines, as used in the British version of the F-4 Phantom II jet fighter. The twin engines developed a net thrust of 223 kN (50,000 lbf), giving a power output of roughly 102,000 bhp (76 MW) at the measured record speed of 341 metres per second, burning around 18 litres/second (4.0 Imperial gallons/s or 4.8 US gallons/s) of fuel. Transformed into the usual terms for car mileages based on this speed, the fuel consumption was about 4,850 L/100 km (0.06 mpg_‑imp; 0.05 mpg_‑US). The thermal power released by burning 18 litres/second of aviation fuel is approximately 630 MW which means the vehicle was operating at around 12% efficiency at its record speed, efficiency being the useful working power (76 MW) divided by the thermal power (630 MW).

The record run in October 1997 was preceded by extensive test runs of the vehicle in autumn 1996 and spring 1997 in the Al-Jafr desert (located in Ma'an Governorate) in Jordan, a location unknown before for its capabilities as a test range for high speed land vehicles.

After the record was set, the World Motor Sport Council released the following message:

The World Motor Sport Council homologated the new world land speed records set by the team ThrustSSC of Richard Noble, driver Andy Green, on 15 October 1997 at Black Rock Desert, Nevada (USA). This is the first time in history that a land vehicle has exceeded the speed of sound. The new records are as follows:

• Flying mile     1,227.985 km/h (763.035 mph)
• Flying kilometre 1,223.657 km/h (760.345 mph)

In setting the record, the sound barrier was broken in both the north and south runs.

Paris, 11 November 1997.

The complete run history is available.

Legacy

In 1983 Richard Noble had broken the world land speed record with his earlier car Thrust2, which reached a speed of 1,019 km/h (633 mph). The date of Andy Green's record came exactly a half century and one day after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in Earth's atmosphere, with the Bell X-1research rocket plane on 14 October 1947.

Both Thrust SSC and Thrust2 are displayed at the Coventry Transport Museum in Coventry, England. Visitors can ride a 4D motion simulator depicting a computer-generated animation of the record-breaking run from the perspective of Green.

Several teams are competing to break the record, including the Bloodhound LSR project, launched in 2008, and the North American Eagle Project, launched in 2004.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThrustSSC

  

Artificial Intelligence Technology Generates Original Proteins from Scratch

Natural language model jumpstarts protein design with creation of active enzymes

From:  University of California - San Francisco

January 26, 2023 -- Scientists have created an AI system capable of generating artificial enzymes from scratch. In laboratory tests, some of these enzymes worked as well as those found in nature, even when their artificially generated amino acid sequences diverged significantly from any known natural protein.

The experiment demonstrates that natural language processing, although it was developed to read and write language text, can learn at least some of the underlying principles of biology. Salesforce Research developed the AI program, called ProGen, which uses next-token prediction to assemble amino acid sequences into artificial proteins.

Scientists said the new technology could become more powerful than directed evolution, the Nobel-prize winning protein design technology, and it will energize the 50-year-old field of protein engineering by speeding the development of new proteins that can be used for almost anything from therapeutics to degrading plastic.

"The artificial designs perform much better than designs that were inspired by the evolutionary process," said James Fraser, PhD, professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the UCSF School of Pharmacy, and an author of the work, which was published Jan. 26, in Nature Biotechnology.

"The language model is learning aspects of evolution, but it's different than the normal evolutionary process," Fraser said. "We now have the ability to tune the generation of these properties for specific effects. For example, an enzyme that's incredibly thermostable or likes acidic environments or won't interact with other proteins."

To create the model, scientists simply fed the amino acid sequences of 280 million different proteins of all kinds into the machine learning model and let it digest the information for a couple of weeks. Then, they fine-tuned the model by priming it with 56,000 sequences from five lysozyme families, along with some contextual information about these proteins.

The model quickly generated a million sequences, and the research team selected 100 to test, based on how closely they resembled the sequences of natural proteins, as well how naturalistic the AI proteins' underlying amino acid "grammar" and "semantics" were.

Out of this first batch of a 100 proteins, which were screened in vitro by Tierra Biosciences, the team made five artificial proteins to test in cells and compared their activity to an enzyme found in the whites of chicken eggs, known as hen egg white lysozyme (HEWL). Similar lysozymes are found in human tears, saliva and milk, where they defend against bacteria and fungi.

Two of the artificial enzymes were able to break down the cell walls of bacteria with activity comparable to HEWL, yet their sequences were only about 18% identical to one another. The two sequences were about 90% and 70% identical to any known protein.

Just one mutation in a natural protein can make it stop working, but in a different round of screening, the team found that the AI-generated enzymes showed activity even when as little as 31.4% of their sequence resembled any known natural protein.

The AI was even able to learn how the enzymes should be shaped, simply from studying the raw sequence data. Measured with X-ray crystallography, the atomic structures of the artificial proteins looked just as they should, although the sequences were like nothing seen before.

Salesforce Research developed ProGen in 2020, based on a kind of natural language programming their researchers originally developed to generate English language text.

They knew from their previous work that the AI system could teach itself grammar and the meaning of words, along with other underlying rules that make writing well-composed.

"When you train sequence-based models with lots of data, they are really powerful in learning structure and rules," said Nikhil Naik, PhD, Director of AI Research at Salesforce Research, and the senior author of the paper. "They learn what words can co-occur, and also compositionality."

With proteins, the design choices were almost limitless. Lysozymes are small as proteins go, with up to about 300 amino acids. But with 20 possible amino acids, there are an enormous number (20³⁰⁰) of possible combinations. That's greater than taking all the humans who lived throughout time, multiplied by the number of grains of sand on Earth, multiplied by the number of atoms in the universe.

Given the limitless possibilities, it's remarkable that the model can so easily generate working enzymes.

"The capability to generate functional proteins from scratch out-of-the-box demonstrates we are entering into a new era of protein design," said Ali Madani, PhD, founder of Profluent Bio, former research scientist at Salesforce Research, and the paper's first author. "This is a versatile new tool available to protein engineers, and we're looking forward to seeing the therapeutic applications."

[Further information: https://github.com/salesforce/progen]

 

AI technology generates original proteins from scratch: Natural language model jumpstarts protein design with creation of active enzymes -- ScienceDaily

Evolution of Wheat Spikes Since the Neolithic Evolution

February 2, 2023

From:  University of Barcelona

February 2, 2023 -- Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. With the beginning of the cultivation of cereals -- such as wheat and barley -- and the domestication of animals, the first cities emerged in a new social context marked by a productive economy. Now, a study analyses the evolution of wheat spikes since its cultivation began by the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia -- the cradle of agriculture -- between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The authors of the study are Rut Sánchez-Bragado and Josep Lluís Araus-Ortega, from the UB Faculty of Biology and Agrotecnio-UdL; Gustavo A. Slafer, ICREA researcher at the UdL School of Agrifood and Forestry Science and Engineering, and Gemma Molero, from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, currently a researcher at KWS Seeds Inc.

A cereal that changed human history

The cultivation of wheat -- a grass that became basic food -- represented a turning point in the progress of human civilisation. Today it is the world's most important crop in terms of food security, but EU data warn that the impact of climate change could significantly increase its price and modify its production process in certain areas of the world.

Throughout the domestication process of wheat, the plant phenotype has undergone both rapid (within a few hundred years) and slow (thousands of years) changes, such as the weakening of the rachis, the increase in seed size, and the reduction or disappearance of the awns. In particular, awned and awnless wheat varieties are found all over the world, although the latter tend to be abundant in regions with arid climates, especially during the final stages of cultivation in late spring, a condition typical of Mediterranean environments.

"It is important to conduct studies that show which wheat varieties are best adapted to different environmental growing conditions, especially in a context of climate change. Studying the past retrospectively can give us an idea of the evolution of wheat cultivation over the millennia since agriculture appeared in ancient Mesopotamia," says Rut Sánchez-Bragado, first author of the study, who got a PhD at the UB.

"Awns are organs of the spike that have traditionally been associated with the plant's adaptations to drought conditions," says Josep Lluís Araus, professor at the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology.

"However, archaeological and historical records show that the wheat spike has existed predominantly with awns for more than ten millennia after the domestication of wheat. It is not until the last millennium that evidence shows in many cases the absence of awns, indicating a selection by farmers -- probably in an undirected way -- against this organ," stresses Araus, one of the most cited authors in the world according to Clarivate Analytics' Highly Cited Researchers (2022).

"The role of wheat awns in their performance remains controversial despite decades of studies," says researcher Gustavo A. Slafer, corresponding author of the study.

Spike awns: beneficial for the plant?

Is the presence of awns on the spike beneficial for the plant and the crops? Although there is no scientific consensus, "everything suggests that in conditions where the plant does not suffer from water stress, the extra photosynthetic capacity of the awns does not compensate for other potential negative effects (reduced susceptibility to fungal diseases, limitation in the total number of large ones that an ear supports, etc.)," says Araus.

"However, in wetter climates the awns accumulate moisture and can promote the spread of diseases," says Rut Sánchez-Bragado. "So, as the world's population is continuously growing, it is necessary to investigate the role of the awned spikes in the changing conditions of our climate in order to meet the world's demand for a primary food commodity such as wheat."

In arid conditions, the spikes -- including the awns -- "have better physiological characteristics than the leaves. In addition, the awns allow the light captured by the crop to be more diffused, which facilitates a better distribution of light energy and allows the crop to photosynthesise more. Therefore, in arid conditions, the awns can still be beneficial for the crop, or at most, neutral," concludes Professor Josep Lluís Araus.

         Evolution of wheat spikes since the Neolithic revolution -- ScienceDaily

The Great Gold Robbery of 1855

The Great Gold Robbery took place on the night of 15 May 1855, when a routine shipment of three boxes of gold bullion and coins was stolen from the guard's van of the service between London Bridge station and Folkestone while it was being shipped to Paris. The robbers comprised four men, two of whom—William Tester and James Burgess—were employees of the South Eastern Railway (SER), the company that ran the rail service. They were joined by the planners of the crime: Edward Agar, a career criminal, and William Pierce, a former employee of the SER who had been dismissed for being a gambler.

During transit, the gold was held in "railway safes", which needed two keys to open. The men took wax impressions of the keys and made their own copies. When they knew a shipment was taking place, Tester ensured Burgess was on guard duty, and Agar hid in the guard's van. They emptied the safes of 224 pounds (102 kg) of gold, valued at the time at £12,000 (approximately equivalent to £1,193,000 in 2021), then left the train at Dover. The police and railway authorities had no clues as to who had undertaken the theft, and arguments ensued as to whether it had been stolen in England, on the ship crossing the English Channel, or on the French leg of the journey.

When Agar was arrested for another crime, he asked Pierce to provide Fanny Kay—his former girlfriend—and child with funds. Pierce agreed and then reneged. In need of money, Kay went to the governor of Newgate Prison and told him who had undertaken the theft. Agar was questioned, admitted his guilt and testified as a witness. Pierce, Tester and Burgess were all arrested, tried and found guilty of the theft. Pierce received a sentence of two years' hard labour in England; Tester and Burgess were sentenced to penal transportation for 14 years.

The crime was the subject of a television play in 1960, with Colin Blakely as Pierce. The Great Train Robbery, a novel by the writer and director Michael Crichton, was published in 1975. Crichton adapted his work into a feature film, The First Great Train Robbery, with Sean Connery portraying Pierce.

In 1855 the South Eastern Railway (SER) ran a boat train service between London Bridge station and Folkestone, on the south coast of England. It provided part of the main route to Paris at the time, with a railway steamer from Folkestone to Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern France, and a train to complete the journey direct to Paris.  The service ran at 8:00 am, 11:30 am and 4:30 pm; there was also an overnight mail service that left at 8:30 pm and a tidal ferry service. Periodically the line would carry shipments of gold from bullion merchants in London to their counterparts in Paris; these could be several hundredweights at a time.  The bullion would be packed into wooden boxes, bound with iron hoops and with a wax seal bearing the coat of arms of the bullion dealers in question: Abell & Co, Adam Spielmann & Co and Messrs Bult & Co. The agents who arranged the carriage of the gold, including collecting the bullion from the three companies and delivering it to London Bridge, were Chaplin & Co. The gold shipments always went on the 8:30 pm train.  At Boulogne the bullion boxes were collected by the French agents Messageries impériales  before being transported by train to the Gare du Nord and then to the Bank of France.

As a security measure, the boxes were weighed when they were loaded onto the guard's van, at Folkestone, on arrival at Boulogne and then again on arrival in Paris.  The company's guard's vans were fitted with three patented "railway safes" provided by Chubb & Son.  These were three-feet (0.91 m) square and made of inch-thick (2.5 cm) steel. Access to the safe was through its lid, which was hinged for access; the exterior had two keyholes, high on the front.  Each of the three safes had the same pair of locks, meaning that only two keys were needed to open all three safes.  Copies of the keys were held separately by SER officials at London Bridge and Folkestone, and the company ensured no individual could hold both keys at the same time.

Participants

The originator of the plan was William Pierce, a 37-year-old former employee of the SER who had been dismissed from its service after it was found that he was a gambler; he worked as a ticket printer in a betting shop after leaving the company.  According to the historian Donald Thomas, Pierce was "a large-faced and rather clumsy man with a taste for loud waistcoats and fancy trousers. ... he was described as 'imperfectly educated'. The turf was his true schooling".

The burglar and safe-cracker Edward Agar was just under 40 at the time of the robbery and had been a professional thief since he was 18. He returned to the UK in 1853 after ten years spent in Australia and the US.  He had £3,000 in government consol bonds and lived in the fashionable area of Shepherd's Bush, London.  According to Thomas, the robbery "grew almost entirely from the absolute self-confidence and mental ability" of Agar.

James Burgess was a married, thrifty and respectable man who had worked at the SER since it had started running the Folkestone line in 1843.  He worked for the company as a guard, and was often in charge of the trains that carried the bullion.  As with many railwaymen of the time, Burgess's wages had been reduced as the railway boom had passed.

Fanny Kay, aged 23 in 1855, was Agar's partner and lived with him at his house, Cambridge Villa, in Shepherd's Bush. She had previously been an attendant at Tonbridge railway station and had been introduced to Agar by Burgess in 1853. She had a child with Agar and moved in with him in December 1854.

William Tester was a well-educated man who wore a monocle and had a desire to improve his position; he was briefly employed after the robbery as a general manager for a Swedish railway company. He worked in the traffic department at London Bridge station as the assistant to the superintendent, which gave him access to information about the carriage of valuable goods and the guards' rota.

James Townshend Saward, also known as Jim (or Jem) the Penman, was a barrister and special pleader at the Inner Temple.  His activities were described by contemporary sources as "planning and perfecting schemes of fraud, the bold audacity of which is equalled only by their success".  He was the head of a forgery gang who had been practising cheque fraud for several years.

          Great Gold Robbery - Wikipedia

  

Discussion of the International Date Line

The International Date Line (IDL) is an internationally accepted demarcation of the surface of Earth, running between the South and North Poles and serving as the boundary between one calendar day and the next. It passes through the Pacific Ocean, roughly following the 180° line of longitude and deviating to pass around some territories and island groups. Crossing the date line eastbound decreases the date by one day, while crossing the date line westbound increases the date.

Example depicting situation at 04:00 GMT Tuesday. (Times are approximate, since time zone boundaries generally do not exactly coincide with meridians. Night and day is illustrative only; daylight hours depend on latitude and time of year.)

Circumnavigating the globe

People traveling westward around the world must set their clocks:

• Back by one hour for every 15° of longitude crossed, and
• Forward by 24 hours upon crossing the International Date Line.

People traveling eastward must set their clocks:

• Forward by one hour for every 15° of longitude crossed, and
• Back by 24 hours upon crossing the International Date Line.

Failing to do this would make their time inaccurate to the local time.

The Arab geographer Abulfeda (1273–1331) predicted that circumnavigators would accumulate a one-day offset to the local date.  This phenomenon was confirmed in 1522 at the end of the Magellan–Elcano circumnavigation (1519–1522), the first successful circumnavigation. After sailing westward around the world from Spain, the expedition called at Cape Verde for provisions on Wednesday, 9 July 1522 (ship's time). However, the locals told them that it was actually Thursday, 10 July 1522. The crew was surprised, as they had recorded each day of the three-year journey without omission.  Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, was the first European to give a correct explanation of the discrepancy.

The IDL is roughly based on the meridian of 180° longitude, roughly down the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and halfway around the world from the IERS Reference Meridian, the successor to the historic Greenwich Prime Meridian running through the Royal Greenwich Observatory. In many places, the IDL follows the 180° meridian exactly. In other places, however, the IDL deviates east or west away from that meridian. These various deviations generally accommodate the political and/or economic affiliations of the affected areas.

Proceeding from north to south, the first deviation of the IDL from 180° is to pass to the east of Wrangel Island and the Chukchi Peninsula, the easternmost part of Russian Siberia.  (Wrangel Island lies directly on the meridian at 71°32′N 180°0′E, also noted as 71°32′N 180°0′W.)  It then passes through the Bering Strait between the Diomede Islands at a distance of 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) from each island at 168°58′37″ W.  It then bends considerably west of 180°, passing west of St. Lawrence Island and St. Matthew Island.

The IDL crosses between the U.S. Aleutian Islands  (Attu Island being the westernmost) and the Commander Islands, which belong to Russia. It then bends southeast again to return to 180°. Thus, all of Russia is to the west of the IDL, and all of the United States is to the east except for the insular areas of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Wake Island.

The IDL remains on the 180° meridian until passing the equator. Two US-owned uninhabited atolls, Howland Island and Baker Island, just north of the equator in the central Pacific Ocean (and ships at sea between 172.5°W and 180°), have the earliest time on Earth (UTC−12:00 hours).

The IDL circumscribes Kiribati by swinging far to the east, almost reaching the 150°W meridian. Kiribati's easternmost islands, the southern Line Islands south of Hawaii, have the latest time on Earth, UTC+14:00 hours.

South of Kiribati, the IDL returns westwards but remains east of 180°, passing between Samoa and American Samoa.  Accordingly, Samoa, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, Fiji, Tonga, Tuvalu, and New Zealand's Kermadec Islands and Chatham Islands are all west of the IDL and have the same date. American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue, and French Polynesia are east of the IDL and one day behind.

The IDL then bends southwest to return to 180°. It follows that meridian until reaching Antarctica, which has multiple time zones. Conventionally, the IDL is not drawn into Antarctica on most maps.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Date_Line