700 is an interesting number.

It’s the sum of four consecutive prime numbers: 167 + 173 + 179 + 181, which is kinda cool. It’s also the perimeter of a right triangle with the lengths 75 + 308 + 317 (the square of 317 is equal to the sum of the squares of 75 and 308). It’s also a Harshad number, which means that it’s evenly divisible by the sum of its digits (7 + 0 + 0 = 7, and 700 is evenly divisible by 7).

It’s also the number of this issue of BAN. I might argue that is it’s most important characteristic. At least personally.

This newsletter has been through a lot. I published the first one on Monday, April 16, 2018 — nearly six years ago today — which was free, and the second one for paid subscribers the following Thursday. Over time I added the third weekly issue for subscribers on Tuesdays, which is what you’re reading now.

That was on Substack, and of course now it’s on Beehiiv. Most of the kinks have been worked out by now, though a few still persist. If you’re having trouble reading the newsletter please let me know. I’m trying really hard to eliminate the bugs.

For new subscribers, thanks for signing up, and for ones who’ve been around a while, thanks for sticking around (if you’re a free subscriber and you want to go Premium, hie thee here). There’s a lot of Universe to talk about — as well as music, scifi, politics, fun stuff, and so much more — and I have no plans to stop any time soon.

Speaking of which…

Planetary scientists think they have discovered a previously unknown volcano on Mars, and it’s a doozy: the central summit stands over 9,000 meters above the average Martian surface — taller than Mt. Everest! — and it spans an incredible 450 kilometers in width. That’s smaller than the other big Mars volcanoes like Olympus Mons, but still a bruiser.

The really weird part, though, is that it was hidden in plain sight all along. It’s located in the Noctis Labyrinthus (“Labyrinth of the Night”) region, just to the west of Valles Marineris, a crack in the surface of the planet almost as long as the United States. Although not officially named, the scientists call it Noctis Mons.

I’ll note there isn’t an official paper yet; they announced their results at a conference and released a short conference proceedings-type article about it. The lead author is Pascal Lee, a respected planetary scientist with SETI and NASA’s Mars Institute, so I’m willing to provisionally accept these results.

It’s not hard to see why it took so long to find. That region of Mars is a mess, comprised of a series of huge mesas and eroded and collapsed areas. The scientists were actually looking at water ice glaciers in Noctis Labyrinthus when they realized they were looking at the remnants of a volcano.

The structure isn’t easy to see, but the mesas do seem to form a circular arc, and the flanking territory slopes away in all directions. The caldera — the collapsed inverted cone at the centers of many big volcanoes — is small comparatively, but still roughly 30 km across. There are also the remnants of volcanic deposits (like from lava pyroclastic flows) inside the structure. This really does seem to be a volcano.

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