The rumors have been out there for a while now, percolating through respectable corners of the astronomy and astrobiological community, that the James Webb Space Telescope has found a planet with strong evidence of life.

 

Some of this sentiment recently bubbled into the public view when the British news magazine The Spectator published an item titled "Have we just discovered aliens?" In accordance with Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer to the question posed in this headline is no.

 

But is it a hard no? That's a more difficult question. The Spectator featured comments by some serious British scientists, including astrophysicist Rebecca Smethurst, who said, "I think we are going to get a paper that has strong evidence for a biosignature on an exoplanet very, very soon."

 

Additionally, there was British astronaut Tim Peake fanning the flames with this comment: "Potentially, the James Webb telescope may have already found [alien life]… it’s just that they don’t want to release or confirm those results until they can be entirely sure, but we found a planet that seems to be giving off strong signals of biological life."

K2-18 b or not K2-18 b

To get some answers, I went straight to the source, asking officials with NASA, which is responsible for the Webb telescope, if they had found life (or, at the very least, strong evidence of life on another planet around a star other than our own). The answer was, again, no. But it was not a hard no.

 

"JWST has not found definitive evidence of life on an exoplanet," said Knicole Colón, the telescope's deputy project scientist for exoplanet science. "It is anticipated that JWST observations may lead to the initial identification of potential biosignatures that could make habitability more or less likely for a given exoplanet. Future missions will be needed to conclusively establish the habitability of an exoplanet."

 

Although she didn't say so, Colón is certainly referring to K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth that is 120 light years from our Solar System. Astronomers believe this may be a "hycean" exoplanet, meaning it has water oceans on its surface and a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.

 

Astronomers had previously studied this planet with the Hubble Space Telescope, but their interest was magnified when the Webb telescope—which became operational last year after launching in late 2022—made some intriguing observations. Among the molecules found by Webb was dimethyl sulfide.

Answers to come

So what is dimethyl sulfide? It's an organic compound that you may have smelled if you've ever cooked cabbage. It is emitted by phytoplankton in the Earth's oceans as part of their metabolism process. Critically, on Earth, dimethyl sulfide is only produced by life. That does not prove the existence of life on K2-18 b—but if dimethyl sulfide exists there, it is certainly a hair-raising clue.

 

I also spoke with a couple of other scientists who would know if we really had discovered life on an exoplanet but might not be willing to say so publicly.

 

So here, as best as I can tell, is the real story. Scientists are definitely intrigued by the observations that Webb has made of the exoplanet K2-18 b. However, there is a robust debate ongoing about the telescope's measurements of water, methane, and dimethyl sulfide. They're promising but not conclusive. As Colón said, we need more data and possibly new instruments to make a definitive call.

 

So the full story has yet to be told.

 

If this discovery were the movie Star Wars, we're at the point where Luke Skywalker just rode into Mos Eisley in a Landspeeder. There's a lot of story to go before he blows up the Death Star and saves the rebellion (or finds alien life). The reality is that science is rarely as definitive or as fast as we would like it to be, but it eventually gets to the truth. So let's try to enjoy the ride.

 

In a striking experiment, scientists from the French Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the University of Montpellier have observed the impact of selective pressure on a flowering plant. By comparing the pansy flower variety of today that grows in the Paris region to those regrown from the seeds of the same variety collected in the 1990s and 2000s, the researchers have observed notable differences.

 

According to the study’s co-author, Pierre-Oliver Cheptou, the plant’s evolution over this period has resulted in a 25 percent increase in self-pollination (or selfing) in modern two plants. “We also noticed a 10 percent decrease in the flower size and a 20 percent reduction in the nectar production, which suggests the decrease in rewards for pollinators such as bumblebees,” he said.

 

To confirm this outcome, Cheptou and his colleagues conducted behavioral tests involving bumblebees "which preferred the ancestor plants,” Cheptou said.

 

He added that the study showed the impact of pollinators’ decline on the reproductive system in these plants.

When mom and dad are the same plant

Elaborating on the experiment techniques, the study’s lead author, Samson Acoca-Pidolle, said the researchers used “resurrection ecology,” which involved using plant seeds from the 1990s and 2000s that were picked from the fields in the Paris region and stored in fridges in two botanical conservatories. “In 2021, we went to the same fields to collect the seeds of the descendants of the same flowering plant,” he said. For the study, all the plants were cultivated in a greenhouse at the same time of year to ensure consistency.

 

Cheptou said that to determine the selfing rates of the ancestor and descendant varieties, the team used a classical molecular technique that involved measuring the frequency at which individual plants had stretches of chromosomes with identical versions of genes. This happens often in selfing since the maternal and paternal copies of a chromosome come from the same individual.

 

According to Acoca-Pidolle, the research team was surprised at the rapidity of the plant’s evolution in the natural environment. “It seems that the pollinators’ decline is already strong, and there is already selective pressure on this species. The other significance of the result is that we are currently observing the breakdown in the plant-pollinator interaction for this species,” he added.

 

Acoca-Pidolle said the study suggests that the decline of pollinators could become self-reinforcing. "If plants produce less nectar, we can predict that pollinators will have less food and this could increase the pollinator decline," he said.

Everything is a trade-off

This adaptation may not necessarily turn out to be beneficial for the plant. “It depends on the time scale we are considering this adaptation as an answer to the selective pressure. In the long term, we know that selfing species have a higher extinction rate than out-crossing species,” he said.

 

Although this study was restricted to a single plant species, Cheptou suspects a similar evolutionary adaptation could be taking place in other species, too. “For plants that can practice at least a little selfing, we should expect this result. But this has to be checked by experiments,” he said.

 

According to Cheptou, future research should investigate if a similar pattern exists in this plant species elsewhere in Europe and see if a similar adaptation has occurred in other species.

 

“The other interesting aspect would be to see if plants' future evolution could be reversible, which will again make them more attractive to the pollinators and practice less selfing,” Acoca-Pidolle said.

 

New Phytologist, 2023. DOI: 10.1111/nph.19422

 

 

Good morning. It's January 16, and today we're traveling 2,600 light-years outward into space to the Cygnus Wall.

 

Although this sounds like some kind of intergalactic barrier, the Cygnus Wall's nomenclature has a more mundane origin—it looks like a wall and is located in the Cygnus constellation. It is the brightest region of the so-called North American Nebula, which in some photographs looks like the outline of North America.

 

The Cygnus Wall, if you use your imagination, somewhat resembles Central America and Mexico. It is a region of vigorous star formation with lots of hydrogen and sulfur, which produce the reddish hues in this image, and oxygen, shown in blue. This feature measures about 20 light-years across, or more than six times the diameter of our Solar System.

 

Mel Martin sent in this image, taken from a backyard observatory in Arizona. Lovely.

 

Source: Mel Martin

 

Clinicians in the US may be overprescribing topical antifungal treatments for skin infections, potentially exacerbating a growing problem of drug resistance, according to a new study.

 

Last year, a dermatologist in New York reported the country's first cases of a newly emerging skin fungus that is highly contagious and resistant to common antifungal treatments. Silent community spread appeared to be behind the unconnected cases. Overall, drug-resistant fungal skin infection cases (aka ringworm) have been identified in at least 11 US states to date.

 

With resistance on the rise, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a closer look at how US clinicians prescribe topical antifungals. As is the case of antibiotics and bacterial infections, overuse of antifungals can drive the development of resistance. And properly diagnosing skin infections can be extremely difficult without diagnostics. A 2016 survey study found that even board-certified dermatologists were frequently wrong when trying to identify skin infections just by sight.

 

As a first step to assessing the situation, the CDC researchers turned to data on prescriptions written for 48.8 million Medicare Part D beneficiaries in 2021. In the whole year, clinicians prescribed 6.5 million topical antifungal treatments. That's enough prescriptions for about one out of every eight Medicare Part D beneficiaries to get an antifungal.

 

Among the total dataset of Medicare prescribers, there were a little over a million prescribing clinicians, but only about 131,000 of those clinicians prescribed topical antifungals. When those prescribers were ranked by the volume of antifungal treatments they prescribed, the top 10 percent—13,106 prescribers—accounted for about 45 percent of all the antifungal prescriptions written that year, or 2.9 million of the total 6.5 million.

Problematic prescribers

Most of the year's topics antifungal prescriptions were written by primary care physicians, who wrote about 40 percent of the prescriptions. They were followed by nurse practitioners/physician assistants, dermatologists, and podiatrists.

 

The most common prescriptions were for ketoconazole, nystatin, and clotrimazole-betamethasone dipropionate, a combination medicine containing an antifungal and a corticosteroid. The latter is particularly concerning since the combination is thought to be a driver of drug resistance.

 

While the data points to some providers potentially overprescribing antifungal medications—and some antifungal medications that are particularly prone to driving resistance—the researchers didn't have diagnostic data on the cases. Thus, they couldn't tell how many antifungal prescriptions were backed up by diagnostic testing confirming a fungal infection. That said, another limitation of the study is that it didn't capture the use of over-the-counter antifungal medications. Therefore, the use of antifungals among Medicare beneficiaries is likely underestimated.

 

The study is a preliminary step to improving antifungal stewardship, the authors note. But "The substantial volume of topical antifungal and antifungal-corticosteroid prescriptions among Medicare Part D beneficiaries in the setting of emerging resistant infections underscores the need to evaluate current practices of topical antifungal use," the authors conclude. Clinicians should "be judicious," they caution, and confirm fungal skin infection diagnoses when possible.

 

Although humans may think we are alone in creating antibiotics, there is a species of ant that secretes an especially powerful one—no pharma lab required.

 

The Matabele ants (Megaponera analis) of sub-Saharan Africa eat only termites. Unfortunately, the fierce mandibles of termite soldiers cause injuries that, if infected, can turn fatal. Ants back at the nest rush to the injured and can tell which wounds are infected. They then secrete an antibiotic for them.

 

An international team of researchers observed these ants closely and analyzed their antibiotic secretion. They found it can reduce mortality by about 90 percent in injured ants and that the ants can identify chemical changes that result from infected wounds, focusing treatment on those that need it most.

Risk of infection

To see how Matabele ants carry out their treatment, researchers experimentally injured two groups of worker ants, exposing one group to soil while the other group was sterilized with saline solution.

 

It only took two hours for injured ants exposed to soil to show thoracic bacterial loads 10 times higher than sterile ants. They became a hundred times higher after 11 hours. A microbiome analysis of infected ants revealed growing populations of pathogenic bacteria that included Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can cause pneumonia and meningitis in humans.

 

Both sterile and infected ants were then either kept in isolation (with sterile and infected insects isolated separately) or returned to their colony (together). The colony was then filmed for 24 hours.

 

During the observation period, the scientists saw uninjured workers using their mouthparts to clean the wound. They would then apply a secretion from the metapleural gland in the back of their thorax. To do this, they either used their legs to gather the secretion from their own metapleural gland, transferring it to their mouthparts before applying it to the wound, or take it directly from the gland of the injured ant with their mouthparts and apply it to the wound. Although this behavior has been documented before in ants, what surprised the research team the most was that the Matabele ants can diagnose infections.

 

“Remarkably, workers were able to discriminate between infected and sterile ants,” they said in a study recently published in Nature Communications. “[Metapleural gland] secretions were deposited significantly more often on wounds of infected than sterile ants between 10 and 12 hours after infection.”

Literally life or death

But how can Matabele ants tell that a wound is infected? They were seen initially treating all wounds, which the researchers thought was to prevent infection, but later, there was a chemical change in infected wounds that they could detect.

 

Ants are already known to communicate using cuticular hydrocarbons, which are pheromones used to mark colony members according to their role and/or to recognize each other outside of the nest. Sterile and infected patients had similar pheromone profiles until around 11 hours after injury. After that, the pheromone profile of infected ants changed drastically, suggesting that they were using pheromone signaling to indicate infection.

 

The researchers found that 18 pheromone-related genes were differentially active in infected ants compared to sterile ants 11 hours after exposure to pathogenic bacteria. Since it takes some time for these changes in gene activity to produce altered levels of pheromones, this explains why the response to infection is somewhat delayed.

 

While previous studies had found metapleural gland secretions to have antimicrobial properties in other species of ants, they turned out to be especially effective in Matabele ants. The substance is made of over a hundred compounds, many of which have antibiotic properties.

 

Tests for pathogenic bacteria in the wounds post-treatment showed that the secretion reduced Pseudomonas growth by over 25 percent. This is impressive, as Pseudomonas is infamous for having developed antibiotic resistance repeatedly.

 

Could something derived from this ant-ibiotic ever be applied to humans? Maybe.

 

“The targeted treatment with antimicrobial compounds was extremely effective in preventing lethal bacterial infections by [Pseudomonas],” the researchers said in the same study. “This could potentially lead to promising new medical compounds to cure infections in human societies.”

 

If anything, fewer people may squash an ant with their shoe after knowing that these often aggravating insects may someday save our lives.

 

Nature Communications, 2023.  DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43885-w 

 

Situated in a former sand and gravel pit just a few hundred feet from the Kennebec River in central Maine, the Riverside Station pumps half a million gallons of fresh groundwater every day. The well station processes water from two of five wells on either side of the river operated by the Greater Augusta Utility District, or GAUD, which supplies drinking water to nearly 6,000 local households. Most of them reside in Maine’s state capital, Augusta, just a few miles to the south. Ordinarily, GAUD prides itself on the quality of its water supply. "You could drink it out of the ground and be perfectly safe," said Brian Tarbuck, GAUD's general manager.

 

But in March 2021, environmental sampling of Riverside well water revealed trace levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or "forever chemicals," as they're better known. The levels at Riverside didn't exceed Maine's drinking water standard of 20 parts per trillion (ppt), which was a relief, Tarbuck said. Still, he and his colleagues at the utility were wary. PFAS have been linked to a variety of health problems, and Maine lawmakers at the time were debating an even stricter limit for the chemicals. Tarbuck knew a lower standard was coming someday. The only question was when.

 

As it turns out, a tougher standard is expected early this year. That's when the US Environmental Protection Agency is set to finalize an enforceable cap on PFAS in drinking water that will require GAUD and thousands of other utilities around the country to update their treatment methods. The standard, which in regulatory terms is called a maximum contaminant level, or MCL, limits permissible amounts of the two most studied and ubiquitous PFAS compounds—PFOA and PFOS—to just 4 ppt in drinking water each. Roughly equivalent to a single drop in five Olympic-size swimming pools, this is the lowest concentration that current analytical instruments can reliably detect "within specific limits of precision and accuracy during routine laboratory operating conditions," according to the EPA. Four other PFAS—PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS, and HFPO-DA (otherwise known as GenX Chemicals)—will be regulated by combining their acceptable levels into a single value. Utilities will have three to five years to bring their systems into compliance.

 

Agency officials estimate that between 3,400 and 6,300 water systems will be affected by the regulation, which is the EPA's first ever PFAS standard and the first MCL set by the agency for any chemical in drinking water in over 25 years. PFOA and PFOS account for the majority of anticipated exceedances.

 

GAUD is now gearing up to spend $3 to 5 million on PFAS removal technology, according to Tarbuck, much of which will be passed on to its customers in the form of higher water bills. Nationally, the price tag of meeting the standard could top $37 billion in upfront costs, in addition to $650 million in annual operating expenses, according to the American Water Works Association, or AWWA, a nonprofit lobbying group representing water utilities. That's far higher than the EPA's cost estimate of $777 million to $1.2 billion and a significant burden for an industry already contending with other costly priorities, such as boosting cybersecurity and "replacing all those antiquated, leaking big water pipes that transport the water from the treatment plant to the service line” that connects to homes, said Marc Edwards, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. Chris Moody, the AWWA's regulatory technical manager, said most of the money will be spent in the next several years, as utilities race to install PFAS removal systems and other infrastructure needed to meet compliance deadlines.

 

In proposing the limits, EPA officials said that they had leveraged the latest science to protect the public from PFAS pollution. Environmental groups welcomed the moveas long overdue. But the standard has drawn widespread criticism from the water utility industry and some scientists who say that in many places, small drops in PFAS water levels will matter little for exposure or health. “There are other strategies that get us to safer, public health protective approaches to PFAS that don’t involve the really strict standard that EPA is putting forward," said Ned Calonge, an associate dean for public health practice at the colourado School of Public Health and chair of a 2022 National Academies of Sciences report on PFAS exposure, testing, and clinical follow-up.

 

A key issue, critics say, is that the standard ensnares too many utilities with very small PFAS exceedances. Roughly 98 percent of drinking water utilities in the country, including GAUD, have maximum PFOA and PFOS levels below 10 ppt, according to the AWWA. When the levels are already so low, further reductions of a few parts per trillion "is not going to have much effect on total exposure intake," wrote Ian Cousins, an environmental chemist at Stockholm University and one of the world's leading researchers on PFAS exposure, in an email to Undark.

 

Drinking water is only one among many different pathways by which people can be exposed to PFAS. The chemicals are also in agricultural produce, fish, meat, outdoor soil, household dust, nonstick cookware, cosmetics, fast-food wrappers, stain- and water-resistant fabrics, and other products. Just how much these sources each contribute to PFAS exposure is a subject of ongoing research. But the EPA estimates that Americans get 80 percent of their PFAS intake from sources other than drinking water, and according to Cousins, dietary contributions likely account for most human exposure. The US Food and Drug Administration has required the phase out of some PFAS in food packaging. But "food is contaminated via bioaccumulation in agricultural and marine food chains," Cousins said. "We cannot clean up our food in the same way that we can add a treatment process to our drinking water."

 

Yet another point of contention has to do with EPA's methods in deriving the new limits. Scientists broadly disagree over how PFAS affect human health. Jamie DeWitt, a professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at Oregon State University who also sat on the EPA's PFAS review panel and has appeared as an expert witness for plaintiffs in PFAS cases, emphasized that evidence from different studies links the chemicals with cancer, as well as higher cholesterol levels, elevated enzymes associated with liver damage, and reduced birth weights. Much of that evidence comes from studies of people who were highly exposed under occupational settings, or who lived near sites where the chemicals were routinely discharged into the environment.

 

But evidence linking the effects to trace PFAS levels is "less convincing," said Alan Boobis, emeritus professor of toxicology at Imperial College London. Meanwhile, the EPA errs on the side of extreme caution, while health agencies elsewhere in the world apply less conservative assumptions to their own PFAS regulations. The World Health Organization, for instance, citing what it describes as "significant uncertainties and absence of consensus" over critical PFAS health endpoints, recently set a provisional guideline that limits PFOA and PFOS to a higher value of 100 ppt in drinking water and 500 ppt for all other measurable PFAS. In Australia, the drinking water PFOA guideline is 560 ppt.

 

Moody said neither grant programs nor settlements from litigation against PFAS manufacturers will fully cover the anticipated cost of complying with the EPA's new standard. Some funding could be made available through recently proposed settlements with 3M and other PFAS manufacturers worth up to nearly $11.5 billion. But the pay to any one water system is limited, and utilities that opt out of the settlements might wait years to resolve their own cases.

 

 

Moody's association says that the costs of building and operating PFAS treatment systems will be borne mainly by consumers. The AWWA's estimated rate hikes range from $305 to $3,570 per household—and could be even higher. According to Moody, the smallest communities will pay the most, since fewer households share in the total cost.

 

Given the "huge amount of money to comply to these guidelines," Cousins argued that the public might be better served by a policy that prioritizes hot spots of PFAS contamination. "That would make sense from my point of view," he said in an email. "There needs to be some pragmatism built into the regulatory process so that the limited money can be spent on the worst contamination cases first."

Around longer than you think

First created in the 1930s, PFAS were later developed for commercial use during the 1940s by companies including the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, later renamed 3M. Made from a carbon backbone entwined with atoms of fluorine, the chemicals deflect water, grease, and heat and have been produced in industrial quantities for decades. PFOA and PFOS were among the first of thousands of different PFAS produced to reach the market. Used to manufacture products such as Teflon, Gore-Tex, Scotchgard fabric protectors, fire-fighting foams, and microchips, the two compounds are dubbed long-chain PFAS because their backbones contain eight carbon atoms.

 

Unfortunately, the same properties that make PFAS commercially useful also make them stubbornly persistent. The carbon-fluorine bond is one of the strongest in organic chemistry. PFAS resist environmental degradation and metabolism by nearly all living creatures. The most contaminated sites occur near manufacturing facilities or sites where historic PFASs were heavily used before they were phased out. For instance, groundwater sampled at wells adjacent to an industrial tannery in Rockford, Michigan, operated by a company called Wolverine World Wide, contained PFOA and PFOS at combined levels higher than 75,000 ppt. But PFAS circulate in the global atmosphere, and the chemicals have been detected as far afield as Antarctica and the Tibetan plateau, deposited there by rain and snow.

 

Tarbuck said he isn't sure how the wells at Riverside Station in Maine became contaminated. "Because these numbers are so incredibly small, it's hard to pinpoint," he said. "It's a head-scratcher." The site is located far from any industrial sources, but sampling has shown slightly elevated PFAS in the Kennebec, possibly originating from contaminated sludge used as fertilizer by upstream farms. "We believe that the PFAS is coming from the river," Tarbuck said.

 

They’re everywhere

In 2003, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published sampling results suggesting that nearly all Americans had measurable amounts of PFAS in their blood. Published studies had by that time associated PFOA and PFOS with liver disease, reproductive problems, and cancer in laboratory animals, and one study suggested a link between PFOS and human bladder cancer, but only among workers who were exposed to high levels on the job for at least five years. More recent evidence associates PFOA and PFOS with testicular and kidney cancers, and based on these results, the EPA now classifies both compounds as likely human carcinogens.

 

Internal industry documents show that 3M, DuPont, and other manufacturers secretly knew decades ago that PFAS are toxic. But it wasn't until the 2000s that these companies voluntarily started pulling PFOA, PFOS, and other long-chain compounds off the market. By 2018, according to the CDC's most recent data, blood levels of PFOA and PFOS in the US population had plummeted by 70 and 85 percent, respectively.

 

But that's not to say PFAS production ended. Companies merely substituted with different molecules, such as PFBS and GenX, called short-chain PFAS in part because they contain no more than six carbon atoms each. The thinking was that short-chain PFAS—still widely used in food wrappers, floor wax, paints, coatings, and many other products—were safer because they're more rapidly excreted from the body. Yet mounting evidence shows that they too are environmentally persistent and have toxic effects. Short-chain PFAS have been shown to cause thyroid and liver problems in animal studies, and recent evidence links them to metabolic changes in isolated lab-grown human cells. Significant human exposures, Cousins said, come from short-chain PFAS contaminating the air and dust in homes. The chemicals are abundant in indoor environments, research shows, and the levels in human blood rise with increasing exposure to household dust as well as drinking water.

 

 

 

Evidence of PFAS toxicity prompted growing efforts to reduce human exposure in water and other sources. But the regulatory landscape evolved without any consistency, so now drinking water standards in the US and elsewhere vary widely according to the "interpretations of different agencies and how they view the same data and what concentrations they think are appropriately protective," said Tom Lee, a partner and leader of the PFAS team at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, LLP, an international law firm. MCLs in the US, for instance, currently range from a low of 6 ppt in Michigan for PFNA all the way to 400,000 ppt in Michigan for a compound called PFHxA.

 

The EPA's pending standard could level the playing field for PFAS exposures in water. But the agency's path to deriving the regulatory thresholds has proven divisive. In 2016, the EPA issued a health advisory of 70 ppt for PFOA and PFOS combined that EPA scientists said would be safe over a lifetime of exposure. According to the agency, the level had been derived using "the best available peer-reviewed studies" and would aid health officials confronting PFAS in their own local water systems. But health advisories such as this one are non-enforceable, and utilities were not actually bound to it.

 

Then, in 2022, the EPA pivoted to another, much lower non-enforceable target. This time, the agency called for limiting PFOS to 0.02 ppt and PFOA to just 0.004 ppt in drinking water—levels even lower than what was being detected in rainwater at various sites around the world. Moving from these interim updated health advisory levels, as the EPA called them (they are also referred to as maximum contaminant level goals, or MCLGs), to the currently proposed standard could create concern among consumers who might feel that "no matter what's in my water, it's still dangerous," said Andrew Cohen, a hydrogeologist based in Westfield, New Jersey, who specializes in PFAS and consults for DuPont.

 

The EPA had set the 2022 values on the basis of evidence suggesting that PFOS and PFOA prevent diphtheria and tetanus vaccines from raising adequate immune responses in children. In the agency’s view, this immune system toxicity was the so-called critical effect—the first adverse effect that could be observed at the lowest tested dose—resulting from PFOA and PFOS exposure, explained Michael Dourson, a former EPA official who is also president and director of science at Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, a nonprofit consulting firm that evaluates chemical hazards on behalf of industrial and government clients.

 

But the degree to which trace PFAS levels in the part-per-trillion range harm human immune systems is heavily debated, and some outside the EPA "have been very hesitant to use these data," said Boobis, the emeritus professor at Imperial College London. Indeed, health agencies in different countries—and even within the US—have based drinking water regulations on different critical effects seen at higher PFAS doses in animal studies. The Australian PFOA guideline, at 560 ppt, is the least stringent value cited in a 2023 paper on international safe doses and is based on developmental and reproductive problems observed in exposed mice.

 

Now the EPA is striking out in a different direction. Rather than basing the enforceable limits on immune effects, the agency instead derived the upcoming MCLs with an eye largely toward protecting people from cancer. But the agency took a highly precautionary stance—one that in this case amounts to a cautious policy choice, “not the state of the science,” wrote Lynne Haber, a toxicologist and a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine who specializes in the assessment of cancer risks, in an email to Undark.

 

The EPA’s default position when setting cancer-protective exposure levels is that, without evidence to the contrary, just one molecule of a carcinogen can spawn cancerous changes in a cell. This controversial—and some would say outdated—line of thinking is grounded in what toxicologists know as the linear no-threshold dose-response model. Dating back to the late 1920s, that model assumes that any exposure to ionizing radiation or a chemical carcinogen, no matter how small, can set off cancerous changes in a cell. Because no amount of exposure is safe, the EPA rationalizes, the MCLG for a carcinogen should be set at zero.

 

But a standard of zero is unmeasurable and therefore unenforceable, according to Detlef Knappe, a professor of civil, construction, and environmental engineering at North Carolina State University. So, the EPA instead is tying the MCL to the lowest concentration of a given carcinogen that analytical instruments can reliably detect. And in the case of PFOA and PFOS, that concentration happens to be 4 ppt.

 

The linear model is plausible, Dourson said, only in the hypothetical event that a single molecule enters the cell nucleus and changes DNA. Under that scenario, a genetically damaged cell could theoretically multiply into a tumor. Carcinogens that act on DNA are said to be mutagenic, in that their effects result from how they cause cancer-inducing mutations in the genome. But mounting research shows carcinogens can also work in ways other than interacting with DNA, Haber said. For instance, a chemical might cause cancer only after doses cross a threshold that results in organ injury. That’s the case with chloroform. A common contaminant in drinking water, it causes liver and kidney cancer in mice, but only at levels high enough to injure cells in those organs first. Tumors develop secondarily after cells start to regenerate during the healing process.

 

Weihsueh Chiu, a quantitative risk scientist at Texas A&M University, chaired the EPA’s PFAS review panel. He said the agency will depart from the assumption that a chemical follows the linear model, but only if evidence reveals a key biological event upon which cancerous changes depend, such as cell toxicity and regenerative proliferation in the case of chloroform. Scientists face a burden to prove this sort of nonlinearity, Chiu explained in an email, and in the absence of that proof, “it is assumed that there is a linear relationship between dose and probability of tumors.” When it came to PFOA and PFOS, the EPA could not establish or identify a key event that would support a nonlinear response, Chiu added.

 

But squabbles have broken out over the underlying data, and evidence in support of either linear or nonlinear approaches is very much in question. Saying that “no one really believes that one molecule of any chemical is going to cause cancer,” Dourson, whose connections to industry have sometimes drawn scrutiny, insisted that PFAS do not cause gene mutations. “So how do you get a linear dose response curve from that?” he asked. “Well, you don’t.”

 

Boobis concurred, saying that most health authorities outside the US would say that PFAS has a dose threshold, whereby cancer would be considered possible only at levels greater than a single molecule of exposure. Linear low dose extrapolation is a “uniquely American problem,” Boobis said, adding, “nobody in Europe, for example, has used the cancer endpoint to drive the risk assessment” for PFAS.

 

In a recently published commentary, Kyle Steenland, an epidemiologist at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, wrote that human testicular and kidney cancers have the strongest associations with PFAS exposure, “although the literature remains rather sparse for both.” Most of the human evidence for these two cancers comes from highly exposed populations, Steenland pointed out, citing the example of communities near the DuPont Washington Works plant in Washington, West Virginia, which dumped PFOA-contaminated wastewater into the Ohio River for half a century. In an email, Steenland stated he was unable to comment publicly on the cancer evidence, given that he was preparing for an upcoming World Health Organization meeting during which participants will rate PFOA and PFAS carcinogenicity.

 

To provide more clarity on PFAS health impacts, the 2022 National Academies of Science report broke out the risks by their associated blood levels. The report reached the conclusion that people with PFAS blood levels under 2,000 ppt likely face no risk from the chemicals. Those with blood levels ranging between 2,000 ppt and 20,000 ppt—especially sensitive populations—were advised to seek screening for elevated cholesterol and breast cancer. Pregnant people were also advised to be checked for hypertension. PFAS at blood levels higher than that were further associated with potential thyroid problems, ulcerative colitis, and signs of kidney and testicular cancer. In 2018, the CDC released data showing that blood levels of PFOA and PFOS fell sharply in the general US population after the chemicals were phased out. Average PFOA levels were 1,400 ppt in 2018, which is 70 percent lower than average measurements taken in 1999 to 2000. Similarly, PFOS levels fell 85 percent over the same timeframe—to 4,300 ppt. More recent data is not available, but in an email to Undark, Calonge wrote: “I would expect there would not be a steady state and that levels will continue to go down over time.”

 

Calonge, chair of the National Academies panel that produced the report, added that the members tried to distinguish between health effects for which there was sufficient as opposed to more limited evidence. But a key limitation in assessing the potential risks—one that also fuels Calonge’s skepticism toward the new MCL—is that scientists still haven’t resolved how PFAS levels in blood and drinking water relate to each other.

 

The chemicals are slowly excreted from the body in urine and during menstruation, so “how much would you have to drink before you reached the serum level that would put you into an area of concern?” Calonge, who is also the chief medical officer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, asked. No one knows that, and that’s “the problem with the EPA standard.” The EPA should base its MCL on a concentration that leads to harmful blood serum levels, Calonge said, instead of just analytical detection limits.

An expensive endeavor

The maximum PFAS concentration detected so far at GAUD’s Riverside well was PFOA at a level of 7.3 ppt, in November 2022. To drop below 4 ppt, GAUD plans to install a multimillion-dollar system that works by trapping PFAS molecules in granular activated carbon. Tarbuck said that system will be housed in a facility outfitted with heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, and will require permitting and additional labor to sustain operations. Disposal of the spent carbon filters is also an issue since they’re contaminated with PFAS and “that’s material that nobody wants to touch,” Tarbuck said.

 

How to get rid of PFAS and other pollutants that build up in granular activated carbon is an ongoing area of research. One option is to incinerate the material, thereby regenerating it for repeat use. But that should be done in ways that ensure PFAS are destroyed completely, Knappe said. Jennifer Kocher, a spokesperson for the National Association of Water Companies, which lobbies on behalf of water utilities, said the EPA still hasn’t come up with a plan for how to manage the wastes. “Water and wastewater companies do not create or use any of these PFAS, PFOAs—any of these chemicals—within their processes at all, and yet here we are, now we’re being charged with cleaning it up,” she said. And PFAS waste disposal could pose a “huge logistical obstacle for our water systems.” The association is now attempting to secure an exemption from federal hazardous waste laws, she said, that could shift potential cleanup costs onto PFAS manufacturers.

 

Does the effort to lower PFAS concentrations at most locations by just a few parts per trillion represent the best use of money spent with regard to water safety? Oregon State University’s DeWitt insisted the answer is yes, given that the only completely risk-free level of “these compounds that were not really ever designed to go into human bodies” is zero.

 

Offering a counterargument, Boobis suggested that small PFAS reductions in water are “not going to make a huge difference to overall exposure unless you do something else.” Along those lines, some states are setting laws to ban the sale and distribution of PFAS-containing products. Maine, which was the first to move in this direction, set a deadline of 2030 for the ban and has called on companies to report the presence of PFAS in their products beginning January 1, 2025.

 

Still, thousands of companies have requested and received extensions to the law’s notification requirements. Some of those companies insist the chemicals are irreplaceable, especially in microchip-making and battery production. And on a national level, legislative proposals to regulate PFAS in everyday items have repeatedly failed in Congress.

 

Moody said there’s another option: Raise the MCL from 4 ppt to 10 ppt. Doing that, the AWWA asserts, would allow limited resources to be targeted on areas with the worst PFAS contamination. Numerous water systems in the US have PFAS at levels in the “hundreds or thousands of ppt,” Moody said. Investing in those communities first “makes a lot more sense,” he said, especially since it’s unclear “whether or not reducing drinking water exposure at single-digit ppt will impact the blood levels.”

 

Steps toward finalizing the rule are "quite involved," Dourson said. The EPA first had to compare the standard's anticipated health benefits with its estimated costs and evaluate whether PFAS exposures in drinking water are sufficient to justify national rulemaking. Dourson said the EPA sent the rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget for approval, likely in late 2023.

 

Tarbuck said GAUD's exceedance has been a tough pill to swallow. The utility recently obtained a $200,000 grant from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services to pilot-test some PFAS removal technology. The funding will help, but it's not enough to avoid passing much of the $3 to 5 million cost on to households in GAUD's service areas. "The gut reaction is that it will be expensive for our rate payers to fix this," Tarbuck said.

 

Tarbuck worries that higher water bills could be especially hard on people of limited means and said the upcoming compliance cost will now add to the financial burden of replacing aging infrastructure. "We can remove it, we will remove it," he said. If the PFAS is as risky as they say it is, Tarbuck added, then it's appropriate to spend the money. But the levels are not so high that they have caused a major public health concern, Tarbuck said, and that "could be hard for us to explain to rate payers.”

 

Charles Schmidt is a senior contributor to Undark and has also written for Science, Nature Biotechnology, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, and The Washington Post, among other publications.

 

 

 

Good morning. It's January 15, and today's image comes to us from Playa Grande, Mexico.

 

I realize that some readers may be tiring of seeing the Milky Way Galaxy, but not me! I love photos of our galaxy and so they are regularly featured in the Daily Telescope. However, this photo is truly special, as it highlights not just the heavens above, but one of the wonders here on Earth.

 

Alfonso Tamés sent me this image, and I can't get enough of it. The photo showcases both our galaxy and a bit of the Orion Nebula in the sky and bioluminescence in the ocean—that is light being emitted by marine life in the sea. One of the most amazing nights I've ever had is kayaking in a bioluminescent bay in Puerto Rico, such an eerie and otherworldly experience.

 

It is fun to contemplate all of the life on display in this image, both what is known in the ocean and what may exist around all those stars above. Have a great week, everyone.

 

Source: Alfonso Tamés

 

The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the Luddites were at all. They were organized, articulate in their demands, very much understood how factory owners were using machinery to supplant them, and highly targeted in their destruction of that machinery.

 

Their pitiable reputation is the result of a deliberate smear campaign by elites in their own time who (successfully, as it turned out) tried to discredit their coherent and justified movement. In his book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, Merchant memorializes the Luddites not as the hapless dolts with their heads in the sand that they’ve become synonymous with, but rather as the first labor organizers. Longing for the halcyon days of yore when we were more in touch with nature isn’t Luddism, Merchant writes; that’s pastoralism—totally different thing.

OG Luddites

Weavers used to work at home, using hand-powered looms (i.e., machines). The whole family pitched in to make cloth; they worked on their own schedules and spent their leisure time and meals together. Master weavers apprenticed for seven years to learn their trade. It worked this way in the north of England for hundreds of years.

 

In 1786 Edmund Cartwright invented the power-loom. Now, instead of a master weaver being required to make cloth, an unschooled child could work a loom. Anyone who could afford these “automated” looms (they did still need some human supervision) could cram a bunch of them into a factory and bring in orphans from the poorhouse to oversee them all day long. The orphans could churn out a lot more cloth much faster than before, and owners didn’t have to pay the 7-year-olds what they had been paying the master weavers. By the beginning of the 19th century, that is exactly what the factory owners did.

 

The weavers, centered in Nottinghamshire—Robin Hood country—obviously did not appreciate factory owners using these automated looms to obviate their jobs, their training—their entire way of life, really. They tried to negotiate with the factory owners for fair wages and to get protective legislation enacted to limit the impacts of the automated looms and protect their rights and products. But Parliament was having none of it; instead, Parliament—somewhat freaked out by the French Revolution—passed the Combination Acts in 1801, which made unionizing illegal. So, the workers took what they saw as their only remaining avenue of recourse; they started smashing the automated looms.

 

The aristocrats in the House of Lords told them they didn’t understand, that this automation would make things better for everyone. But it wasn’t improving things for anyone the Luddites knew or saw. They watched factory owners get richer and richer, their own families get thinner and thinner, and markets get flooded with inferior cloth made by child slaves working in unsafe conditions. So they continued breaking the machines, even after the House of Lords made it a capital crime in 1812.

 

Merchant tells his story through the experience of selected individuals. One is Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose memoir of mistreatment in his 10 years of factory work is thought to have inspired Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Another is Lord Byron, who, like other Romantic poets, sympathized with the Luddites and who spoke (beautifully but futilely) in the House of Lords on their behalf. George Mellor, another figure Merchant spends time with, is one of the primary candidates for a real-life General Ludd.

 

Edward Ludd himself doesn’t qualify, as he was mythical. Supposedly an apprentice in the cloth trade who smashed his master’s device with a hammer in 1799, he became the movement’s figurehead, with the disparate raiders breaking machines all over northern England, leaving notes signed with his name. George Mellor, by contrast, was one of the best writers and organizers the Luddites had. He’d spent the requisite seven years to learn his cloth finishing job and in 1811 was ready to get to work. The West Riding of York, where he lived, had been home to wool weavers for centuries. But now greedy factory owners were using machines and children to do the work he had spent his adolescence mastering. After over a year of pleading with the owners and the government, and then resorting to machine breaking, there was no change and no hope in sight.

 

Finally, Mellor led a raid in which a friend was killed, and he snapped. He murdered a factory owner and was hanged, along with 14 of his fellows (only four were involved in the murder; the rest were killed for other Luddite activities).

 

Even as their bodies were still practically swinging on the gallows, the aristocracy and press were already undermining and reshaping the Luddite story, depicting them as deluded and small-minded men who smashed machines they couldn’t understand—not the strategic, grassroots labor activists they were. That misrepresentation is largely how they are still remembered.

Neo-Luddites

Merchant is the technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times. His last book is called The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. So, he does not leave the Luddites in the early 19th century but highlights the relevance of their struggles to the present day.

 

In Merchant’s view, today's factories are tech companies, exemplified by Amazon and Uber. Luddites complained that surveilled, time-regimented factory work was degrading; Amazon warehouse workers and drivers have to pee in bottles because bathroom breaks have been deemed inefficient. Luddites complained not because automated looms were taking their jobs but because factory owners used automated looms to enable unskilled children to do work that they had once been proud of. The efficiencies were used to enrich the factory owners while impoverishing everyone else.

 

Taxi drivers who saved for years to buy medallions and knew the roads of their cities inside and out suffered the same fate, Merchant argues. It wasn’t the innovation of calling a car with your phone that the taxi drivers contested. It was the way that innovation was so disruptively employed: with disregard for any regulations and whether anyone could earn a livelihood. Like the Luddites, these workers only objected to being rendered obsolete; like the Luddites, they’ve been roundly mocked for standing in the way of inevitable progress that is making life better for “everyone.” And just as in the 1810s, governments who could regulate how the new tech was deployed largely sided with the owners and not the workers.

 

Luddites also protested how the factory disrupted the structure of their homebound cottage industry. Ironically, the rest of the gig work that has become so prevalent of late seems to re-grant this type of freedom to workers. But Merchant thinks that this perceived freedom is illusory. He writes that, rather than freeing workers from the factory, gig work instead sends the factory home with them. They are never free of an overseer—i.e., algorithm—now, even at home. And since they are segregated in their individual cars or home offices, they don’t develop any solidarity or opportunity to band together.

 

Many tech and ascendant AI companies have made our lives easier and more convenient. But Merchant insists that, just like factories did in the 1810s, they rely on masses of immiserated, debased, woefully underpaid, and largely hidden-from-view workers—including prisoners. And those who run them put robber barons to shame.

 

Merchant didn’t even have to bring in tech companies to bring his story up to date; he could have just stuck with textiles. Over 200 years after the Luddite uprisings, garment factory workers in fast fashion are still burning to death because of unsafe working conditions. And while it is true that more people can afford more articles of clothing now—thneeds, essentially—than they could when everything was handmade, much of it ends up overflowing landfills without ever even being worn once.

 

Luddites didn't hate machines or progress. They hated that greedy bosses chose to use machines to debase their work lives, prioritizing the bosses’ own profit over the workers’ quality of life. And wanting to smash your laptop when it doesn’t do your bidding also isn’t Luddism, Merchant notes. That’s just rage.

 

Key indicators of seasonal flu activity declined in the first week of the year, signaling a possible reprieve from the high levels of respiratory virus transmission this season—but the dip may only be temporary.

 

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its latest flu data for the week ending on January 6. Outpatient visits for influenza-like illnesses (ILI) were down that week, the first decline after weeks of rapid increases. Flu test positivity and hospitalizations were also down slightly.

 

 

But transmission is still elevated around the country. Fourteen states have ILI activity at the "very high" level in the current data, down from 22 the week before. And 23 states have "high" activity level, up from 19 the week before. (You can see the week-by-week progression of this year's flu season in the US here.)

 

The CDC says it is monitoring for "a second period of increased influenza activity that often occurs after the winter holidays."

 

 

Flu isn't the only virus that seems to be letting up a little in the data, at least for now. COVID-19 data also showed some dips, with the CDC reporting that "Despite test positivity (percentage of tests conducted that were positive), emergency department visits, and hospitalizations remaining elevated nationally, the rates have stabilized, or in some instances decreased, after multiple weeks of continual increase."

 

The CDC speculates that some of the declines in indicators could be due to people not seeking medical care during the holidays as they would otherwise. COVID-19 wastewater activity levels remain "very high," with all regions showing high or increasing levels. The South and Midwest have the highest levels in the latest data, but there are some early indications that rises in the Midwest and Northeast may be slowing down.

 

Meanwhile, RSV activity remains elevated, though some areas are starting to see declines.

 

The CDC notes that it's not too late to get vaccinated against COVID-19, flu, and (for those ages 60 and over) RSV. So far, 21 percent of adults have received the 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccine, including 41.5 percent of people ages 65 and up. Around 363,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the US since September.

 

For flu, about 47 percent of adults have received their annual shot, including 74 percent of people ages 65 and up. On Thursday, researchers in Canada published the first estimates of flu vaccine effectiveness this season, finding the current annual shots are 61 percent effective against the most common strain of flu circulating in the US (influenza A(H1N1)pdm09) and 49 percent effective against the less common influenza A(H3N2) and 75 percent effective against influenza B.

 

The CDC estimates that there have been at least 14 million flu cases, 150,000 hospitalizations, and 9,400 deaths from flu so far this season so far, the agency reported. In the first week of this year, 13 children died of flu, bringing this season's total to 40.

 

Staying up to date on COVID-19 vaccines can cut the risk of COVID-related strokes, blood clots, and heart attacks by around 50 percent in people ages 65 years or older and in those with a condition that makes them more vulnerable to those events, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

The finding, published this week in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, should help ease concerns that the shots may conversely increase the risk of those events—collectively called thromboembolic events. In January 2023, the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration jointly reported a preliminary safety signal from their vaccine-monitoring systems that indicated mRNA COVID-19 vaccines may increase the risk of strokes in the 21 days after vaccination of people ages 65 and older. Since that initial report, that signal decreased, becoming statistically insignificant. Other vaccine monitoring systems, including international systems, have not picked up such a signal. Further studies (summarized here) have not produced clear or consistent data pointing to a link to strokes.

 

In May, the FDA concluded that the evidence does not support any safety concern and reported that "scientists believe factors other than vaccination might have contributed to the initial finding."

 

But, the statistical blip could potentially cause lingering concerns. While clinicians had noted lower rates of thromboembolic events among vaccinated people, the authors of the new study noted that, until now, there were no rigorous estimates of how effective COVID-19 vaccines are at preventing those events.

 

For their analysis, they primarily looked at two groups of patients: A group of 12.7 million Medicare beneficiaries ages 65 and older and a group of around 78,600 Medicare beneficiaries ages 18 and older with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) on dialysis, a condition that increases their risk for thromboembolic events, including COVID-19-related thromboembolic events. Using medical claims records from September 2022 to March 2023, the researchers compared rates of thromboembolic events among the people in those groups that had gotten a bivalent COVID-19 booster dose and those who had only gotten the original monovalent COVID-19 vaccine in the past. To be considered a COVID-related thromboembolic event, the event had to occur within a week of or a month after a COVID-19 diagnosis.

Protective effect

In the group of 12.7 million patients ages 65 and older, about 5.7 million (45 percent) had gotten the bivalent booster, making them up to date on their COVID-19 vaccinations at the time. The remaining 7 million (55 percent) had only gotten the original vaccine.

 

During the study period, 17,746 patients who were not up to date on their COVID shots got COVID-19 and experienced a COVID-related thromboembolic event. Of the bivalent boosted patients, there were 4,255 COVID-related thromboembolic events. The researchers adjusted for confounding factors, such as age, race, and time of vaccination, and estimated that the bivalent booster was overall 47 percent effective at preventing COVID-related thromboembolic events, which again include strokes, blood clots, and heart attacks.

 

A sub-analysis including the time since vaccination indicated that the estimated effectiveness waned about two months after receipt of the vaccine, dropping early effectiveness of 54 percent down to 42 percent at 60 days or more.

 

Among the 78,600 patients ages 18 and up with ESRD, 23,229 (29.5 percent) received a bivalent dose and thus were up to date on their COVID-19 vaccines. The remaining patients (70.5 percent) had only received an original vaccine, and of those, 917 experienced a COVID-19-related thromboembolic event after getting the pandemic virus. Among the up-to-date patients, there were only 123 events. After adjustments, the researchers estimated that the vaccines' effectiveness against thromboembolic events was 51 percent in this group, which also waned slightly over time.

 

The study has limitations, such as that it can't account for previous COVID-19 infections, which could alter people's risk of developing complications from COVID-19, including thromboembolic events. It relied on medical claims, which have limitations, and it's possible there are other confounding factors, such as the use of Paxlovid and behavioral differences. Last, Medicare beneficiaries are not representative of the whole population.

 

But, given the data available, the study authors concluded that it appears the bivalent vaccine dose "helped provide protection against COVID-19–related thromboembolic events compared with more distant receipt of original monovalent doses alone." The authors recommend that, "to prevent COVID-19–related complications, including thromboembolic events, adults should stay up to date with recommended COVID-19 vaccination."

 

The CDC currently estimates that only 21 percent of adults ages 18 and up have received the latest COVID-19 booster dose, including 41.5 percent of adults ages 65 and up.

 

Welcome to Edition 6.26 of the Rocket Report! We're just 11 days into the new year, and we've already had two stunning rocket debuts. Vulcan soared into space on Monday morning, and then a medium-lift rocket from China, Gravity-1, made a picture-perfect launch from a mobile pad in the Yellow Sea. It feels like this could be a great year for lift.

 

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Vega C return-to-flight mission gets a date. The European Space Agency said it is targeting November 15 for the return to flight of the grounded Avio-built Vega C launch vehicle, European Spaceflight reports. I'll be honest. I had to double-check the calendar to make sure that it is in fact January, because that's an oddly specific date for a launch 10 months from now. But it appears there is some, ahem, flexibility in that date. ESA director of space transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen says: “The nominal date is 15 November. There is a very detailed plan that is leading to this.”

 

But then there are the caveats ... The director of space transportation did, however, add that there was a month of schedule risks that may affect the launch date, summarizing that the launch “should be at least before the end of the year.” Tolker-Nielsen’s final word on the matter was not all that convincing. “We’re pretty sure of that,” he concluded. Vega C was grounded following a failed flight in late 2022. The flight is expected to carry the Sentinel 1C Earth observation satellite to orbit, which will replace the failed Sentinel 1B satellite, plugging a significant data gap. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

China completes commercial launch pad.  A newly completed launch pad on China’s Hainan Island could increase China’s access to space, boosting national constellation projects and commercial launch plans, Space News reports. The first launch pad at Hainan Commercial Launch Site was finished in late December. It is the first of two pads that will host liquid propellant launch vehicles.

 

Fewer rockets falling into villages ... The development is intended to ease a bottleneck of access to launch facilities for both national and commercial launch service providers and allow Chinese entities to speed up plans to launch a range of constellations. It should also increase China’s ability to deploy and maintain space assets, including remote sensing, communications, and other systems for civil and military purposes. Finally, it may help reduce incidents of booster debris falling around inhabited areas following launches from the country’s inland spaceports of Jiuquan, Taiyuan, and Xichang. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Will spaceport make Australia a military target? Space company Equatorial Launch Australia has proposed a massive expansion of its space center near Nhulunbuy, around 1,000 km east of Darwin, which saw the launch of three NASA suborbital rockets in mid-2022. If approved, the plans would see the Arnhem Space Centre grow from one launchpad to 14, with the goal of launching dozens of rockets a year, the Australian Broadcast Corporation reports. The goal is to launch its first orbital rocket by 2025, said the launch site chief executive, Michael Jones.

 

But there's a catch ... While the plans have been welcomed by the local government and local businesses, they have drawn concerns from some, including a politician and Yolŋu traditional owner Yiŋiya Guyula. The Yolŋu are Aboriginal people who live in the Northern Territory of Australia. Guyula voiced fears that the Arnhem Space Centre could lead to missile testing and development on Yolŋu land. Other local officials have said the spaceport could result in the area becoming a potential military target. (submitted by ZygP)

 

Self-eating rocket engine passes test. Autophage engines, in which the rocket effectively consumes itself, were first proposed and patented in 1938. However, it took until 2018 before engineers designed and fired one in a controlled manner. Nearly five years on, and more progress is being made: more energetic liquid propellants can be used, and the fuselage can be fed into the rocket without buckling, The Register reports.

 

Eat your way to space ... A prototype, dubbed Ouroborous-3, generated 100 newtons of thrust at the MachLab facility at Machrihanish Airbase in Scotland. A video of the test shows the rocket in action, demonstrating the fuselage being consumed while the rocket is throttled and pulsed. It's possible that a suborbital flight using this kind of engine could take place as early as 2027. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Gravity-1 solid rocket makes a stunning debut. A Chinese startup firm, Orienspace, has successfully launched its Gravity-1 rocket from a mobile platform in the Yellow Sea, Space News reports. The Gravity-1 rocket consists of three stages and four boosters. It can lift around 6,500 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit, or 3,700 kilograms to 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit when using a kerosene-liquid oxygen third stage. The video of the launch is pretty epic.

 

A number of firsts ... Founded in 2020, Orienspace is already making waves in the Chinese quasi-commercial space race. Gravity-1 is now the largest rocket in the sector in terms of launch capacity. It is also the first to use boosters, one of a handful to reach orbit on the first attempt, and the first to have a debut launch from the sea. Worth noting: the solid rocket motors for Gravity-1 were provided by the Academy of Aerospace Solid Propulsion Technology, which is part of the government-operated China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Mars mission slips due to HIII delays. The launch of a Japanese mission to collect samples from the Martian moon Phobos and return them to Earth, previously scheduled for later this year, has slipped to 2026, Space News reports. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, confirmed the two-year delay in the launch of the Martian Moons eXploration, or MMX, mission, blaming it in part on the H3 rocket that will launch the spacecraft.

 

Will have to make the next window ... “Owing to evaluate the demonstration results of the second H3 rocket test vehicle and considering the importance to ensure sufficient time for preliminary verification of MMX on the ground, the launch schedule for Japanese rockets has been reviewed,” the agency said. The H3 made its inaugural launch in March 2023 but failed to reach orbit when its second stage engine did not ignite, likely because of an electrical issue. A second H3 launch could occur as soon as February 14. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Vulcan makes an impressive debut. Right out of the gate, United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan rocket chased perfection, Ars reports. Vulcan hit its marks after lifting off from Florida's Space Coast for the first time early Monday, successfully deploying a commercial robotic lander on a journey to the Moon and keeping ULA's unblemished success record intact. "Yeehaw! I am so thrilled, I can’t tell you how much!" exclaimed Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO, shortly after Vulcan's departure from Cape Canaveral. "I am so proud of this team. Oh my gosh, this has been years of hard work."

 

A much-needed win ... This was a pivotal moment for ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Vulcan rocket will replace ULA's mainstay rockets, the Atlas V and Delta IV, with lineages dating back to the dawn of the Space Age. ULA has contracts for more than 70 Vulcan missions in its backlog, primarily for the US military and Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband network. It took nearly a decade for ULA to develop it, some four years longer than anticipated, but the first flight took off at the opening of the launch window on the first launch attempt. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

 

Here's what is next for Vulcan. ULA has set aside the next 60 days to review data from the "Cert-1" certification mission that launched on Monday morning, Ars reports. If the data looks good from that flight, the company will move into preparations for the next launch. ULA Vice President Gary Wentz said the earliest opportunity to launch this Cert-2 mission is "April-ish." The hardware will likely be ready, but there are some questions about the Dream Chaser spacecraft. This will be the second certification launch for Vulcan, opening the way for the company to begin launching national security payloads.

 

Five more Vulcans in 2024? ... The first of these missions will likely be the USSF-106 mission, which will carry a demonstration navigation satellite and other payloads for the Space Force. This mission's earliest possible launch date would be June, but it almost certainly will slip a bit later into the summer. And after that? ULA plans to move into an operational cadence as soon as possible. "It's dependent on whether the spacecraft are ready to support those launches," Wentz said. "So we anticipate some movements in the manifest, but right now as a baseline, there are six Vulcans contractually on the manifest." It probably won't happen, but who doesn't want to see more Vulcans fly?

 

NASA delays Artemis missions. Citing "crew safety" as the agency's chief priority, NASA officials outlined a new schedule for the Artemis lunar program on Tuesday, Ars reports. The roughly one-year delay for each of the next three missions (Artemis II, now September 2025; Artemis III, September 2026; and Artemis IV, September 2028) did not come as a huge surprise given ongoing hardware issues. In fact, the dates for Artemis III and Artemis IV are likely still very optimistic.

 

You've got to be realistic ... The Artemis II delays are due to three separate issues with the Orion spacecraft, including its heat shield, some critical components for valves, and batteries that could be impacted by certain emergency abort scenarios. As for Artemis III, the delay is attributed primarily to the Starship rocket. "We must be realistic," NASA associate administrator Jim Free said. "We're looking at our Starship progress, and need for propellant transfer, the need for numerous landings. We're looking at our spacesuits that we're acquiring in a different manner than we've done before, and developing the new spacesuits as well. It's an incredibly large challenge and a really big deal."

 

New Glenn spotted in the wild. Space photographers in Florida, including John Kraus, snapped photos this week of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket being moved outside the company's Merritt Island campus. The hardware in question is the first stage of the flight version of the New Glenn launch vehicle. Company officials have been expressing confidence, of late, that the very large rocket will take flight for the first time in 2024.

 

Lots of work to do ... Sources confirmed that this is the actual flight hardware, which is indeed a promising sign. However, the vehicle had no BE-4 rocket engines, and there is considerably more work that must be completed to outfit the rocket for launch. We also don't know the status of the rocket's upper stage, which presumably will undergo testing in the coming months. Still, I'm starting to believe 2024 might be real. What a year this would be for big rockets.

Next three launches

January 12: H-IIA | IGS-Optical 8 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 4:44 UTC

 

January 12: Falcon 9 | Starlink 7-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base | 08:59 UTC

 

January 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-37 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 00:52 UTC

 

 

 

Good morning. It's January 11, and today's image showcases a diffuse nebula known as NGC 7538, found in the constellation Cepheus.

 

Located some 9,000 light-years from Earth, the nebula is a region of active star formation and produces a large amount of hydrogen—which shows up in this image. The nebula contains a shockingly large protostar that is, astronomers estimate, some 300 times larger than our Solar System and has a mass of 2,000 Suns. Even as astronomical objects go, that's gargantuan.

 

Paul Buckley submitted today's photo, which he captured from his backyard in Elma, New York, located not far from Buffalo. He took the image over the first three days of last September. This image represents 100 six-minute narrowband images and 50 two-minute RGB images using his Celestron 9.25-inch Edge HD telescope.

 

I think it's lovely.

 

Source: Paul Buckley

 

 

The discovery of so-called "odd radio circles" several years ago had astronomers scrambling to find an explanation for these enormous regions of radio waves so far-reaching that they have galaxies at their centers. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, think they have found the answer: outflowing galactic winds from exploding stars in so-called "starburst" galaxies. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

 

“These galaxies are really interesting,” said Alison Coil of the University of California, San Diego. “They occur when two big galaxies collide. The merger pushes all the gas into a very small region, which causes an intense burst of star formation. Massive stars burn out quickly, and when they die, they expel their gas as outflowing winds.”

 

As reported previously, the discovery arose from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, which aims to take a census of radio sources in the sky. Several years ago, Ray Norris, an astronomer at Western Sydney University and CSIRO in Australia, predicted the EMU project would make unexpected discoveries. He dubbed them "WTFs." Anna Kapinska, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) was browsing through radio astronomy data collected by CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope when she noticed several strange shapes that didn't seem to resemble any known type of object. Following Norris' nomenclature, she labeled them as possible WTFs. One of those was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, "hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke ring."

 

Other team members soon found two more weird round blobs, which they dubbed "odd radio circles" (ORCs). A fourth ORC was identified in archival data from India’s Giant MetreWave Radio Telescope, and a fifth was discovered in fresh ASKAP data in 2021. There are several more objects that might also be ORCs. Based on this, the team estimates there could be as many as 1,000 ORCs in all.

 

While Norris et al. initially assumed the blobs were just imaging artifacts, data from other radio telescopes confirmed they were a new class of astronomical object. They don't show up in standard optical telescopes or in infrared and X-ray telescopes—only in the radio spectrum. Astronomers suspect the radio emissions are due to clouds of electrons. But that wouldn't explain why ORCs don't show up in other wavelengths. All of the confirmed ORCs thus far have a galaxy at the center, suggesting this might be a relevant factor in how they form. And they are enormous, measuring about a million light-years across, which is larger than our Milky Way.

 

As for what caused the explosions that led to the formation of ORCs, new data reported in 2022 was sufficient to rule out all but three possibilities. The first is that ORCs are the result of a shockwave from the center of a galaxy, perhaps arising from the merging of two supermassive black holes. Alternatively, they could be the result of radio jets spewing particles from active galactic nuclei. Finally, ORCs may be shells caused by starburst events ("termination shock"), which would produce a spherical shock wave as hot gas blasted out from a galactic center.

 

 

Coil et al. were intrigued by the discovery of ORCs. They had been studying starburst galaxies, which are noteworthy for their very high rate of star formation, making them appear bright blue. The team thought the later stages of those starburst galaxies might explain the origin of ORCs, but they needed more than radio data to prove it. So the team used the integral field spectrograph at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to take a closer look at ORC 4, the first radio circle observable from the Northern Hemisphere. That revealed a much higher amount of bright, heated, compressed gas than one would see in an average galaxy. Additional optical and infrared imaging data revealed that the stars in the ORC 4 galaxy are about 6 billion years old. New star formation seems to have ended some billion years ago.

 

The next step was to run computer simulations of the odd radio circle itself spanning the course of 750 million years. Those simulations showed an initial 200-million-year period with powerful outflowing galactic winds, followed by a shock wave that propelled very hot gas out of the galaxy to create a radio ring. Meanwhile, a reverse shock wave sent cooler gas back into the central galaxy.

 

“To make this work, you need a high-mass outflow rate, meaning it’s ejecting a lot of material very quickly. And the surrounding gas just outside the galaxy has to be low density, otherwise the shock stalls. These are the two key factors,” said Coil. “It turns out the galaxies we’ve been studying have these high-mass outflow rates. They’re rare, but they do exist. I really do think this points to ORCs originating from some kind of outflowing galactic winds.” She also thinks that ORCs could help astronomers understand more about galactic outflowing winds since it enables them to "see" those winds through radio data and spectrometry.

 

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06752-8  (About DOIs).

 

If we are what we eat, there’s growing evidence to help explain how nanoplastics and microplastics are in our blood, in our intestines and in some of our organs.

 

Two new studies published this week shed further, and alarming, light on all the tiny plastic particles that people are consuming every day.

 

A liter of bottled water may contain nearly a quarter million pieces of the smallest particles of plastic. These nanoplastic particles are so small, scientists have found, that some pass through intestines and lungs or make their way into human blood and placental fluid. The bottled water study, done by researchers at Columbia and Rutgers Universities, was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Also published Monday, in the journal Environmental Pollution, was a paper from scientists at the University of Toronto and the Ocean Conservancy, which found that nearly 90 percent of 16 different kinds of protein commonly eaten by people, including seafood, chicken and beef—and even plant-based meat alternatives such as tofu and veggie burgers—contain microplastics.

 

The scientists estimated that Americans are consuming up to 3.8 million particles of microplastics per year from protein alone.

 

“Our message is that you can’t hide,” said George Leonard, co-author of the Environmental Pollution paper and chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit. “We need to know more about this, clearly,” and the health implications, he said. “There is zero chance that exposure to plastics is good for you. The question is, what is the magnitude of the risk and how do you minimize that?”

 

The two studies add to a global body of scientific research that has documented micro- and nanoplastics’ ubiquity in the world and increasingly in human bodies.

 

Researchers are still trying to understand the health implications, but many like Leonard have come to believe they’re not good.

 

Last year, the United Nations Environment Program counted 13,000 chemicals in plastic, many of them toxic. Chemical additives are used to give different kinds of plastic their own properties, such as flexibility, clarity and stretch.

 

The UNEP report, “Chemicals in Plastic,” noted that only half of the 13,000 chemicals in plastic have been screened for properties to know whether they are hazardous to people or the environment. But at least 3,200 of the 7,000 screened chemicals have been identified as potentially of concern, it concludes.

 

Some of those chemicals persist and accumulate in the environment, where they can wreak havoc on wildlife or people, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which have been dubbed “forever chemicals.”

 

Toxic chemicals added to plastic and routinely detected in people are known to mimic hormones and increase the risk of miscarriage, obesity, cardiovascular disease and cancers, according to a report published last year by the Minderoo-Monoco Commission on Human Health, a body of scientists assembled by the Australia-based Minderoo Foundation, and published by Annals of Global Health, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Plastic causes illness and death across its lifecycle, from production to use and disposal, the report concluded.

 

As plastic breaks up in the environment, it forms smaller and smaller particles.

 

Earlier studies had found microplastics in bottled water, but the bottled water study published Monday used new, more sensitive techniques that can identify the smallest plastic pieces, and found 10 to 100 times as many plastic fragments, according to a press release from Columbia’s Climate School.

 

“Previously this was just a dark area, uncharted,” said study co-author Beizhan Yan, an environmental chemist at the Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in the release. “Toxicity studies were just guessing what’s in there. This opens a window where we can look into a world that was not exposed to us before.”

 

The protein study focused on slightly larger plastic fragments that still need to be seen under a microscope.

 

The food products were purchased in Portland, Oregon, and included breaded shrimp, minced pollock fish sticks, two kinds of shrimp, skinless Alaska Pollock fillets, chicken nuggets, top sirloin steaks, pork loin chops, chicken breasts, plant-based nuggets, plant-based fish sticks, plant-based ground beef and tofu blocks.

 

The samples were sent to a lab at the University of Toronto for analysis, where scientists found no statistical differences in the amount of microplastics in land-based proteins compared to ocean-based proteins.

 

But they found evidence that food processing is a likely source of microplastic contamination. Highly processed fish sticks, chicken nuggets, tofu, and plant-based burgers and others contained significantly more microplastics per gram than minimally processed products, such as the Alaska pollock or chicken breasts, according to the study.

 

“It’s tempting to want to draw conclusions like ‘eat less of this and more of that’ to avoid microplastics in your diet,” said primary co-author Madeleine Milne, who conducted the research while at the Rochman Lab at the University of Toronto in 2022, in a press release.

 

“But right now we still know very little about the microplastic burdens in commonly consumed foods,” she said. “Our study adds to this knowledge but also demonstrates the need for further research to better understand the bigger picture, including where these microplastics are coming from and the potential human health risks.”

 

The water bottle and protein studies come amid an attempt by more than 170 nations to negotiate a treaty to address the global crisis from the production of more than 400 million tons of plastic a year, nearly all from climate-warming fossil fuels, with a recycling rate of less than 10 percent.

 

The results of the protein study were not surprising to Jane Muncke, an environmental toxicologist and managing director and chief scientific officer of the Food Packaging Forum, a science communication organization based in Zurich.

 

“It’s well known that the normal and intended use of plastic food packaging leads to the generation of micro- and nanoplastics, when tearing open packaging,” she said.

 

It is also not surprising, she said, that increased food processing leads to higher levels of microplastics because microplastics are generated by abrasion from food processing equipment, and then transferred into the food. “More processing also leads to chemical migration,” she added.

 

“I welcome this study that highlights this issue and raises awareness for the need to act on it,” she said.

 

Leonard, a marine scientist, said in an interview that while a lot more needs to be known about how micro- and nanoplastics are affecting human health and the environment, it’s clear that action is needed to reduce plastic waste in society and the natural environment, including the ocean.

 

“And, we need to make and use a whole lot less plastic,” Leonard said.

 

James Bruggers covers the U.S. Southeast, part of Inside Climate News’ National Environment Reporting Network. He previously covered energy and the environment for Louisville’s Courier Journal, where he worked as a correspondent for USA Today and was a member of the USA Today Network environment team. Before moving to Kentucky in 1999, Bruggers worked as a journalist in Montana, Alaska, Washington and California. Bruggers’ work has won numerous recognitions, including best beat reporting, Society of Environmental Journalists, and the National Press Foundation’s Thomas Stokes Award for energy reporting. He served on the board of directors of the SEJ for 13 years, including two years as president. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Christine Bruggers.

 

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

 

 

 

Good morning. It's January 10, and today's image comes from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. It's an amazing one.

 

According to the European Space Agency, the large, prominent spiral galaxy on the right side of the image is NGC 1356; the two apparently smaller spiral galaxies flanking it are LEDA 467699 (above it) and LEDA 95415 (very close to its left) respectively; and finally, IC 1947 sits along the left side of the image.

 

The galaxies appear close to one another, but looks can be deceiving! For example, NGC 1356 and LEDA 95415 seem to be interacting with one another, but they are nearly 300 million light-years apart.

 

For comparison purposes—not that anyone can really make sense of the mind-boggling distances involved in cosmology—our Milky Way galaxy spans about 100,000 light-years across. So, these galaxies are 3,000 times that distance apart from one another.

 

Source: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA