“Metallic iron was available to humans in the form of rare meteoritic iron before the smelting of the metal from oxide ores started,” said lead author Dr. Beda Hofmann, a researcher at the Naturhistorisches Museum Bern and the University of Bern, and colleagues.

“The use of meteoritic iron for the fabrication of objects in pre-Iron Age times in Eurasia and northern Africa is known from find complexes in Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Siberia and China.”

“Finds of meteoritic iron artifacts in central and western Europe are very rare and up to now were restricted to two sites in Poland: the two Czestochowa-Rakowa bracelets and the Wietrzno axe.”

In their research, the archaeologists examined an unusual iron arrowhead from the collections of the Bern History Museum.

The artifact was found in the 19th century at the Late Bronze Age lake dwelling site of Mörigen in Switzerland.

“The Mörigen pile dwelling was known since 1843, first sampled by fishermen and excavated 1873-1874,” the researchers said.

“The site is located just 4-8 km southwest of the large Twannberg iron meteorite strewn field with more than 2,000 individual finds totaling 150 kg.”

The Mörigen arrowhead has a mass of 2.9 g and dimensions of 3.9 cm (length), 2.5 cm (width) and 0.3 cm (maximum thickness).

The object consists of rust-covered iron metal with a very pronounced laminated texture. In some areas, fine-grained sediment is attached.

“The arrowhead is a very flat object (aspect ratio 15.1, after correction for thickness increase due to oxidation 20),” the scientists said.

“Primary shapes of meteoritic iron are never as flat, even in case of ‘shrapnels’ (fragments formed due to explosive disruption on impact).”

“The flat aspect of the object must be due to artificial deformation of an originally less flattened object, either due to cold or hot working.”

The authors studied the Mörigen arrowhead using a combination of several exclusively non-destructive methods, including muon-induced X-ray emission spectrometry and high-sensitivity gamma spectrometry.

The elemental composition (7.10-8.28 wt% nickel, 0.58-0.86 wt% cobalt, 300 ppm germanium), the presence of nickel-poor and nickel-rich iron phases kamacite (6.7 wt% nickel) and taenite (33.3 wt% nickel), as well as the presence of cosmogenic aluminum-26 confirmed the meteoritic origin of the artifact.

They were also surprised to find that the Mörigen metal came not from the nearby Twannberg iron meteorite strewn field.

“The Mörigen arrowhead must be derived from a large (minimum 2 tons pre-atmospheric mass) IAB iron meteorite based on gamma spectrometry and elemental composition,” they said.

“Among large IAB meteorites from Europe, three have a chemical composition consistent with the Mörigen arrowhead: Bohumilitz (Czech Republic), Retuerte de Bullaque (Spain) and Kaalijarv (Estonia).”

“Kaalijarv is a large meteorite that produced a series of impact craters on the island of Saarema in Estonia.”

“As a result of the explosive impact, most of the meteorite mass (probably several 100 tons) was destroyed and recovered meteorite fragments are mostly small ‘shrapnels’ resulting from the destruction of the main mass.”

“Such a small fragment may be the source of the arrowhead, but detachment from larger masses is also possible, as is well documented for the Cape York meteorite.”

“The total recovered mass of Kaalijarv is in the order of 10 kg only,” they added.

“Based on three independent studies of organic materials from the base of lake sediments and below ejecta, the impact most likely occurred between 1870 and 1440 BCE, i.e. during the Bronze Age.”

The discovery demonstrates that iron meteorites were used and traded by 800 BCE, or even earlier, in Europe.

“Fragments of the Kaalijarv meteorite may have been traded over the same routes from the Baltic area as amber,” the archaeologists said.

Their paper will be published in the September 2023 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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It’s midafternoon. You’re full from lunch. The day is warm. You’re starting to feel drowsy. Should you give in to the comfort of a nap?

From a health perspective, it may be worth it. Though there is some debate over whether napping benefits everyone, research suggests naps can boost at least some people’s cognitive performance in the short term. And a regular midday snooze might also have longer-term impacts, from a possible improvement in cardiovascular health to a bulwark against the loss of brain volume—potentially a protective factor against dementia.

“If you can fit in a nap of anything up to about 30 minutes, which isn’t really long, there seems to be fairly good evidence that you could be helping your brain age a little bit more healthily,” says Victoria Garfield, an epidemiologist at University College London.

Several studies find that a well-timed nap can provide a short-term boost in brainpower. For example, scientists reviewed past research that focused on healthy participants with regular sleep cycles. That review, published in 2009 in the Journal of Sleep Research, showed that napping improved factors ranging from reaction time to alertness to memory performance. A brief nap can also light the spark of creativity, a 2021 study in Science Advances found. In that research, participants were given math problems that could be solved with an easy shortcut that they weren’t told about. Some participants were encouraged to take a brief, dozy nap before tackling the problems. The researchers found those who napped—and spent even just 30 seconds in the first, lightest phase of sleep—were 2.7 times more likely to figure out the math shortcut than those who stayed awake. But entering a deeper sleep phase had a negative effect on this creative insight. In other words, there may be a “sweet spot” of mental relaxation that clears the way for eureka moments.

The benefits of napping are strongest for people who have sleep debt, meaning they don’t get enough nighttime sleep. Shift workers, new parents and older people with fragmented nighttime sleep all seem to get a boost: a 2014 review of research, for example, showed that taking a nap during one’s night-shift work reduced sleepiness and improved overall performance, even if people were slightly groggy as they came out of their nap—a phenomenon called “sleep inertia.”

Timing your naps right can reduce sleep inertia, says Natalie Dautovich, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University and an environmental fellow at the National Sleep Foundation, which is primarily funded by pharmaceutical and medical device companies. A 20-minute nap is recharging, Dautovich says, and 60 to 90 minutes of sleep can be even more restorative. The nap to avoid is one lasting more than 20 minutes and less than 60 minutes, which, she says, is most likely to lead to sleep inertia.

The short-term benefits of naps are well established, but long-term effects are a little less clear. In particular, there has been debate about whether naps are good or bad for cardiovascular health after mixed epidemiological research was published on the topic. Self-reports of how frequently people nap and for how long are unreliable, Dautovich says, and pinning down the relationship between naps and any specific health outcomes is not always simple.

“The cause-and-effect association between napping and other health conditions is difficult to determine,” she says. “Greater daytime sleepiness is symptomatic of many health conditions, and therefore napping may not necessarily be the cause of these conditions but rather a consequence.”

For example, a 2021 study in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia found that long naps in older adults (who had a mean age of 81.4 years) was a risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s disease but that Alzheimer’s also led to longer and more frequent naps.

A 2017 review of research on the long-term health effects of napping, published in Sleep Medicine Reviews, found that studies in midlife adults showed napping to be associated with reduced coronary heart disease, cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular conditions. Short naps may lower blood pressure and heart rate and might also reduce the release of hormones such as adrenaline—all factors that could improve cardiovascular health—the review concluded. In adults around age 65 or older, however, some studies found that long naps of an hour or more were linked to a higher risk of cardiac problems. It’s possible these long naps were a symptom of early or undetected disease rather than a cause, the review authors cautioned.

Garfield and her colleagues at University College London have found that regular brief naps seem to improve brain health in the long run. Using data from the U.K. Biobank, which contains genetic and health information on 500,000 healthy people between the ages of 40 and 69, the team found that those who had genetic variations associated with regular napping also had a larger brain volume. All brains lose volume as they age,

Garfield says, but greater losses are linked to conditions such as dementia, sleep apnea and higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Taking a nap regularly was equivalent to saving yourself between 2.6 and 6.5 years of aging, at least as far as brain volume was concerned, the researchers reported in Sleep Health.

Not everyone can nap, of course, Garfield says. And there are other similarly healthy habits that could fill 30 minutes a day, such as going on a walk or hitting the gym. But if it works for one’s schedule and personal preference, napping seems to be a healthy habit, not a sign of sloth.

“A trial-and-error approach can help many individuals determine whether napping is a useful behavior for themselves,” Dautovich says. “Schedule permitting, beginning with a brief afternoon nap of 20 minutes or less, several days a week, can be helpful to assess if napping improves mood or functioning or interferes with nocturnal sleep and to give your body time to develop a napping routine.”

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They can be, quite literally, both simple and complex. They abound in snacks that nobody would call healthy but also appear in foods considered essential to good health.

"It gets a little confusing," said Andrew Odegaard, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, Irvine. Even experts disagree on some aspects of how carbohydrates function.

To understand how carbs work in your diet, it helps to know a few details.

"When people think of carbohydrates, what they're thinking of can vary a lot," said Odegaard, whose work has included studies on diet, diabetes and heart disease. But from the most basic perspective, a carbohydrate is a molecule made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. When digested, carbs are converted into blood glucose, or sugar, which provide fuel for cells throughout the body.

"For most people, it's the fundamental source of energy in their diet," Odegaard said.

Carbohydrates often have been classified as either "simple"—also known as "refined"—or "complex" based on how quickly the body turns them into blood glucose.

Dietary sugars, such as glucose and fructose, are simple carbs that when broken down can be a fast source of energy. Highly processed foods such as cake, candy and sugary sodas are full of simple carbs. Christopher Gardner, the Rehnborg Farquhar Professor of Medicine at Stanford University in California, noted that Americans get more than 40% of their calories from simple, low-quality carbs.

Complex carbs include starches, which are molecular chains of simple sugars. They have to be broken apart before the body can use them, making them a steady, longer-lasting supply of energy. Peas, beans, whole grains and vegetables are sources of complex carbs.

Fiber is also a complex carb. Your body can't break it down, meaning it passes through the digestive system without causing spikes in blood glucose. It provides abundant health benefits along the way.

Excess blood glucose gets converted into triglycerides, a form of fat that can cause buildups within artery walls, increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke.

Odegaard said it's not necessarily the quantity of carbs in your diet that's most important; it's their quality.

Where you get your carbs matters. Yes, that doughnut and your caramel-flavored coffee drink are full of them. But fruits and vegetables also contain carbs. The difference is: Fruits and vegetables are also full of many nutritious things that are not carbs—and are considered essential to a heart-healthy diet.

This is why putting carbs into context matters. A candy bar and a banana might have similar amounts of carbs. But that banana comes with nutrients such as potassium, magnesium and dietary fiber without the added sugar. By weight, you can also eat about twice as much banana as candy bar for the same amount of carbs.

Although carb talk often has focused on simple versus complex, Odegaard said many nutrition experts now emphasize the role of processing. Some even blame carbohydrates from highly processed foods for obesity, although others say it's not that simple.

But the basic premise of why processing matters is easy to grasp, he said.

If you eat an apple, you'll get carbs, but also fiber, vitamins and minerals. If that apple is turned into apple sauce, the processing might add sugar while taking out some nutrients and much of the fiber, and your body will process it into blood glucose more quickly. Process it further into apple juice, and you'll have no fiber and an even faster bump to your blood glucose, because nothing is slowing down its digestion or absorption.

"It's the same thing with oranges and orange juice," Odegaard said. And with grains.

Whole-grain foods—such as brown rice, oatmeal and some popcorn—are considered heart-healthy. When grains are milled, as with white rice or white breads, it strips out healthy fiber and other nutrients. One cup of cooked instant white rice, for example, has 44 grams of carbs but only about 1 gram of fiber. A cup of cooked brown rice has about 52 grams of carbs but more than 3 grams of fiber.

Odegaard does not think carbs are inherently villains. After all, he said, "as a species, we've evolved the ability to have our bodies metabolize what we eat and turn it into the fuel that our body needs to function," and carbohydrates are the primary way of doing that.

But the popularity of low-carb diets has demonized carbs for some people.

If you aren't eating enough carbs, your body can make blood sugar from stored fat through a process called ketosis. "Keto" diets seek to trigger fat-burning by restricting intake of not only added sugars and alcohol but also grains, fruits and legumes (such as beans and peas).

Odegaard said that discussing the value of such low-carb diets is tricky because there is no standard definition for them. "There's still lots of questions to be answered," he said. But in April, an American Heart Association scientific statement evaluated 10 popular dietary patterns and ranked the "very low carbohydrate" category as the least aligned with AHA guidance for heart-healthy eating.

"Most evidence—the vast majority of evidence" points to consuming foods such as beans, fruits, vegetables and whole grains "as something that's probably pretty good for you," Odegaard said.

Federal dietary guidelines suggest that in a healthy adult dietary pattern, 45% to 65% of calories should come from carbohydrates.

The parameters are different for people with Type 2 diabetes, which Odegaard described as "a disease of carbohydrate metabolism."

In a healthy person, when blood glucose levels rise, the pancreas releases insulin to help cells absorb the sugar. With Type 2 diabetes, the body either can't make enough insulin or can't properly use what it makes. So, balancing carbs with activity can be an important part of life with diabetes.

A study published in 2019 in the Journal of the American Heart Association showed that while Mediterranean-style and other diets that emphasize fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes lowered the risk of heart disease in older women with diabetes, "paleo"-style diets that reduced carbs by restricting grains, legumes and dairy did not.

"In people with Type 2 diabetes, the proportion of your overall dietary pattern that's carbohydrates is something you may need to pay attention to," said Odegaard, a senior author of that study. "But that's something for someone to discuss with their care provider team and figure out what works for them."

Overall, Odegaard said, the root of carb confusion is the desire for people to find "one single thing" that they can avoid in order to have a healthy diet. With carbs, he said, that can be short-sighted.

Which is why Odegaard encourages people to think about where their carbs come from more than how many they consume. "I think it's just a matter of what you emphasize within a very broad range of carbohydrate-based foods," he said. Whole grains, legumes and fresh or frozen whole fruits and vegetables are great even though they have carbs. Carb-heavy cakes, cookies and sodas can be occasional treats, at most.

Gardner, who is also a nutrition scientist at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, said the goal should be to "get rid of as many of those low-quality/simple carbs as possible." Replace some of them with healthy carbs and others with sources of high-quality unsaturated fat, such as nuts, seeds, fatty fish, avocados and olive oil.

People can adapt to what optimizes their health and what's enjoyable, Odegaard said. "You can have a very healthful diet with a large proportion of your energy intake via carbohydrates, and you can have relatively healthful diet with lower carbohydrate intake."

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Handedness is a tendency to prefer the use of one hand over the year, and we are accordingly labelled right-handed or left-handed. Today is International Left-handers’ Day, observed to appreciate left-handedness in a world numerically dominated by righties.

Humans are predominantly right-handed but our planet itself is a lefty, rotating from west to east. So is the solar system. According to a 2011 study, there are more spiral galaxies rotating counter-clockwise, a.k.a. left-handed spiral galaxies, than their right-handed counterparts.

There is left-handedness within ourselves as well. Amino acids, the basic building blocks of life, are left-handed. The heart in the human body is on the left side.

While our handedness in us is for others to explain, my interest as a physicist lies elsewhere. In a general sense, left and right are relative orientations in space and are flipped by a mirror. Other than that, one side isn’t implicitly more or less special.

But this isn’t the whole truth since nature doesn’t have equal preferences for both configurations. For example, the subatomic particles known as neutrinos are left-handed. This means a neutrino’s quantum spin is aligned parallel to but in the opposite direction of its momentum. Neutrinos are the second most abundant particle in the universe (after photons) and they could just as well have been right-handed – yet they aren’t.

For another, there are three fundamental forces in nature other than gravitation. Of these, the strong force operates between protons and neutrons and the electromagnetic force, between charged particles. They are both left-right symmetric: they obey the law of parity conservation. But there is a fourth force, known as the weak nuclear force (responsible for radioactive decay), and it breaks left-right symmetry.

The Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu confirmed in an experiment in 1956 that the weak force does not conserve parity. After she published her findings, her colleagues Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1957 for working out the theory of the violation. Their attempts to have her nominated for her own Nobel Prize were in vain.

That the weak nuclear force defies parity symmetry was an important moment in the history of physics. Among other consequences, the violation gave physicists a way to develop a theory to explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe today though both should have been created in equal amounts after the Big Bang.

Taken together, physicists are very curious about why nature as we know it has any preference for one handedness over the other. Where does this preference come from? There are no ready answers but researchers are pursuing them at both the molecular and the astronomical scales.

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Called the gut microbiome, this dazzling collection of bacteria and other microorganisms has been the source of much attention – linked to a vast array of health conditions, from autism spectrum disorder and diabetes, to depression, Alzheimer's disease, and movement disorders.

But for all that researchers have discovered about the gut microbiome, there's a whole lot we still don't know – and a stack of myths it appears we need to clean up.

Writing in Nature Microbiology after scouring the literature, UK microbiologists Alan Walker from the University of Aberdeen and Lesley Hoyles from Nottingham Trent University weigh in on 12 myths and misconceptions about the gut microbiome, in part spawned by the huge potential the gut microbiome holds for human health.

"Although truly exciting, the increasing focus on microbiome research has unfortunately also brought with it hype and entrenched certain misconceptions," Walker and Hoyles write.

"As a result, many unsupported, or under-supported, statements have become 'fact' by virtue of constant repetition."

While some of these myths are relatively trivial, others are more widespread, and collectively, they could undermine progress and public confidence in the research, Walker and Hoyles argue.

So let's dive into some of the juicier myths on the list. Mind the mucus.

For starters, microbiome research is not some new field; it dates back to at least the late 19th century, when the first bacterial samples were isolated from the human intestine.

Similarly, the mysterious connection between the body's bowels and the mind, the gut-brain axis, has been researched for centuries. Only more recently have we come to appreciate how that connection operates in both directions.

Now for some numbers. The sum total of the human microbiota has been estimated to weigh between 1 to 2 kilograms (2.2 to 4.4 pounds). But Walker and Hoyles were unable to find the original source for this widely cited figure.

Instead, they calculate the human microbiota more likely weighs 500 grams or less. Their revised estimate is based on how much an average human stool weighs (200 grams wet weight), how much of that poop is made up of microorganisms (about half), and the weight of colonic contents.

Similarly, some 'back of the envelope' calculations in the 1970s gave rise to the idea that the human body houses 10 times as many individual microbes as its own cells.

Researchers have tried to clear up this myth before, finding that the ratio is probably closer to 1:1. Obviously, it bears repeating if we see those figures doing the rounds again.

Another commonly reported claim is that babies 'inherit' their microbiota from their mothers at birth. While some microorganisms are directly transferred during birth, research suggests few species actually stay with us throughout our lives.

A mother's microbiota might give babies a brief health boost, but it's our diet, antibiotics, genetics, and the environment we're exposed to that shape our microbiome.

"Every adult ends up with a unique microbiota configuration, even identical twins that are raised in the same household," Walker and Hoyles note.

The remaining misconceptions are a bit more technical, concerning the lab work of busy microbiologists.

But the last one we're probably most interested in is whether changes in a person's gut microbiome contribute to disease.

It's difficult for researchers to draw clear patterns because "such alterations are rarely consistent and the microbiota is hugely variable between individuals, both in health and disease," Walker and Hoyles write.

Age, BMI, and medication, as well as a person's metabolism and immune system, can also affect microbiota composition, which makes it all very challenging to disentangle any possible cause and effect in observational studies.

The perspective has been published in Nature Microbiology.

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What do you do for someone who has this condition?

ANSWER: Cardiac arrest, or sudden cardiac arrest as it is more formally known, is a medical emergency. Think of it as a problem with the heart's electrical activity. This synchronized electrical activity allows the heart to fill and pump blood normally. Sudden cardiac arrest can happen unexpectedly and quickly, and the heart stops working. It's not the same as a heart attack, but it is just as critical that treatment occurs rapidly.

Cardiac arrest is when the heart cannot fulfill its duties, such as pumping oxygenated blood around the body to reach critical areas such as the brain and the rest of the body. It is sometimes called "sudden" because it seems to happen without warning. A person suddenly loses all heart activity, stops breathing and becomes unconscious. Without immediate treatment, sudden cardiac arrest can lead to death.

What causes cardiac arrest?

There are two types of ways a person has a cardiac arrest. The first is when no electrical activity stimulates the top or bottom of the heart muscle to squeeze. The second is when the heart's electrical activity is no longer synchronized and efficient but is chaotic and unable to pump blood. This is called ventricular fibrillation.

Rapid, erratic heart signals cause the lower heart chambers to quiver uselessly instead of pumping blood. Certain heart conditions can make you more likely to have this heartbeat problem. Sudden cardiac arrest also can happen in people with no known heart disease.

What is the difference between cardiac arrest and heart attack?

When someone has a heart attack, it's more of a plumbing problem. The major arteries that supply the heart with blood and oxygen get plugged up with a clot, causing a block in flow.

The heart tissues are not getting oxygenated blood, so those tissues could die. Over time, this can lead to electrical problems like ventricular fibrillation and sudden cardiac arrest. In some instances, scar tissue after a heart attack can cause changes to one's heartbeat. When someone has a sudden cardiac arrest or sudden cardiac death, it could be a manifestation of a heart attack. But sudden cardiac arrest doesn't mean you necessarily have heart blockages.

Who is at risk of cardiac arrest?

The same heart conditions that increase the risk of heart disease can raise the risk of sudden cardiac arrest, including:

Coronary artery disease. When cholesterol builds up in the arteries that supply blood to the heart—hardening and narrowing the path—it's known as coronary artery disease. The most common symptom is chest discomfort.

Cardiomyopathy. Cardiomyopathy means there is something wrong with the heart muscle itself. This condition can be genetic. A common form is called hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy. The heart muscle is not normal and is thicker.

Heart valve disease. In heart valve disease, one or more of the valves in your heart doesn't work properly. Leaking or narrowing of the heart valves can lead to stretching or thickening of the heart muscle. When the chambers become enlarged or weakened because of stress caused by a tight or leaking valve, there's an increased risk of developing a heart rhythm problem (electrical disturbance).

Congenital heart defect.Sudden cardiac arrest in children or adolescents often is due to an electrical or structural heart problem that they're born with. Adults with a prior surgical repair for a congenital heart defect have an increased risk of sudden cardiac arrest.

•Long QT syndrome (LQTS) and other heart electrical signaling diseases.Conditions such as long QT syndrome, Brugada syndrome and arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy can cause a risk of developing ventricular fibrillation. If the heart rhythm isn't quickly restored, sudden death can occur. Young people with LQTS are especially at risk of sudden death.

What do I do if I see someone in cardiac arrest?

Survival is possible for a person in cardiac arrest, but time is crucial. It is important to restore the rhythm as fast as possible with CPR and an automated external defibrillator (AED). Always call 911, but you can assist until help arrives.

A cardiac arrest could happen wherever and whenever in life—in a mall, at school or work. If someone passes out, you want to ensure they are breathing, have a pulse, and their heart is pumping. If their heart is not pumping, then start emergent CPR. Push hard and fast on the person's chest—about 100 to 120 pushes a minute.

Often you will see AED machines hanging in hallways at a school, the office, in a restaurant or a stadium. Many people are familiar with them from TV, where patients are shocked by the device back into a normal rhythm.

Many people are nervous to use an AED because they are not medical professionals, but the device is meant for bystanders. The machine guides the user. It will recognize that the patient is not in a good rhythm. It will tell you to shock the heart.

The goal is to stabilize the patient by getting them back to a normal rhythm. This will restore blood flow to critical parts of the body, especially the heart and brain.

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Unusually, there aren’t any Starlink missions locked in at the time of writing, but after the amount of Starlink missions last week, the company is probably just catching its breath.

Sunday, 13 August

The first launch this week will be a Chinese Long March 3B/E carrying the Ludi Tance 4A L-SAR satellite which will snap photos of the Earth. The launch probably won’t be available to live stream but there should be footage afterwards.

This mission will take off at 4:55 p.m. UTC from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre. We mentioned this mission last week, it was supposed to take off on August 11 but got delayed.

Monday, August 14

The second and final launch of the week is an ExPace Kuaizhou 1A rocket carrying an unknown payload. It should have taken off on Sunday but was pushed back to Monday.

This mission will take off at 5:35 a.m. UTC, also from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre. The delay of the Ludi Tance 4A launch could have had a knock on impact on this launch.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying the Starlink 96 mission into orbit consisting of many Starlink satellites.

Just a day later, Starlink 97 was launched by a Falcon 9.

Next, China launched a Long March 2C carrying the Huanjing-2 06 satellite from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre. It’s going to be used to support disaster prevention, reduction, relief, and environmental protection.

On 10 August, we got a Ceres-1 launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre. It was carrying seven satellites which were successfully put into orbit.

Virgin Galactic’s second commercial spaceflight got a fair amount of press coverage this week, you can check out the footage below.

Next, Russia launched a Soyuz 2.1b rocket carrying the Luna-25 lunar lander mission from Vostochny Cosmodrome. Luna-25 launched on 10 August and is due to arrive at the lunar south pole on 21 August.

The lander will carry several scientific apparatus and it’s worth noting that the lunar south pole contains water so they’ll be on the lookout for that. Another interesting note is that the Luna-24 mission took off on 9 August 1976.

Finally, we got another Falcon 9 launch carrying the Starlink 98 mission.

That’s all for this week, check back next time!

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The huge and increasing range of products and flavors on the market, changes to ingredients when they are heated or interact with each other, and inadequate labeling make this a complicated question to answer.

Analytical chemistry, including my own team's research, gives some answers. But understanding the health impacts adds another level of complexity. E-cigarettes' risk to health varies depending on many factors including which device or flavors are used, and how people use them.

So vapers just don't know what they're inhaling and cannot be certain of the health impacts.

What do we know?

Despite these complexities, there are some consistencies between what different laboratories find.

Ingredients include nicotine, flavoring chemicals, and the liquids that carry them—primarily propylene glycol and glycerine.

Concerningly, we also find volatile organic compounds, particulate matter and carcinogens (agents that can cause cancer), many of which we know are harmful.

Our previous research also found 2-chlorophenol in about half of e-liquids users buy to top-up re-fillable e-cigarettes. This is one example of a chemical with no valid reason to be there. Globally, it's classified as "harmful if inhaled." Its presence is likely due to contamination during manufacturing.

How about polonium?

One potential ingredient that has been in the news in recent weeks is radioactive polonium-210, the same substance used to assassinate former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. The Queensland government is now testing vapes for it.

Polonium-210 can be found in traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products. That's because tobacco plants absorb it and other radioactive materials from the soil, air and high-phosphate fertilizer.

Whether polonium-210 is found in aerosols produced by e-cigarettes remains to be seen. Although it is feasible if the glycerine in e-liquids comes from plants and similar fertilizers are used to grow them.

It's not just the ingredients

Aside from their ingredients, the materials e-cigarette devices are made from can end up in our bodies.

Toxic metals and related substances such as arsenic, lead, chromium and nickel can be detected in both e-liquids and vapers' urine, saliva and blood.

These substances can pose serious health risks (such as being carcinogenic). They can leach from several parts of an e-cigarette, including the heating coil, wires and soldered joints.

That's not all

The process of heating e-liquids to create an inhalable aerosol also changes their chemical make-up to produce degradation products.

These include:

• formaldehyde (a substance used to embalm dead bodies)

• acetaldehyde (a key substance that contributes to a hangover after drinking alcohol)

• acrolein (used as a chemical weapon in the first world war and now used as a herbicide).

These chemicals are often detected in e-cigarette samples. However due to different devices and how the samples are collected, the levels measured vary widely between studies.

Often, the levels are very low, leading to proponents of vaping arguing e-cigarettes are far safer than tobacco smoking.

But this argument does not acknowledge that many e-cigarette users (particularly adolescents) were or are not cigarette smokers, meaning a better comparison is between e-cigarette use and breathing "fresh" air.

An e-cigarette user is undoubtedly exposed to more toxins and harmful substances than a non-smoker. People who buy tobacco cigarettes are also confronted with a plethora of warnings about the hazards of smoking, while vapers generally are not.

How about labeling?

This leads to another reason why it's impossible to tell what is in vapes—the lack of information, including warnings, on the label.

Even if labels are present, they don't always reflect what's in the product. Nicotine concentration of e-liquids is often quite different to what is on the label, and "nicotine-free" e-liquids often contain nicotine.

Products are also labeled with generic flavor names such as "berry" or "tobacco." But there is no way for a user to know what chemicals have been added to make those "berry" or "tobacco" flavors or the changes in these chemicals that may occur with heating and/or interacting with other ingredients and the device components. "Berry" flavor alone could be made from more than 35 different chemicals.

Flavoring chemicals may be "food grade" or classified as safe-to-eat. However mixing them into e-liquids, heating and inhaling them is a very different type of exposure, compared to eating them.

One example is benzaldehyde (an almond flavoring). When this is inhaled, it impairs the immune function of lung cells. This could potentially reduce a vaper's ability to deal with other inhaled toxins, or respiratory infections.

Benzaldehyde is one of only eight banned e-liquid ingredients in Australia. The list is so short because we don't have enough information on the health effects if inhaled of other flavoring chemicals, and their interactions with other e-liquid ingredients.

Where to next?

For us to better assess the health risks of vapes, we need to learn more about:

• what happens when flavor chemicals are heated and inhaled

• the interactions between different e-liquid ingredients

• what other contaminants may be present in e-liquids

• new, potentially harmful, substances in e-cigarettes.

Finally, we need to know more about how people use e-cigarettes so we can better understand and quantify the health risks in the real world.

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The world is likely to face major disruption to food supplies well before temperatures rise by the 1.5C target, the president of the UN’s desertification conference has warned, as the impacts of the climate crisis combine with water scarcity and poor farming practices to threaten global agriculture.

Alain-Richard Donwahi, a former Ivory Coast defence minister who led last year’s UN Cop15 summit on desertification, said the effects of drought were taking hold more rapidly than expected.

“Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going – I think it’s going even faster than we predicted,” he said. “Everyone is fixated on 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and it’s a very important target. But actually, some very bad things could happen, in terms of soil degradation, water scarcity and desertification, way before 1.5C.”

The problems of rising temperatures, heatwaves and more intense droughts and floods, were endangering food security in many regions, Donwahi said. “[Look at] the effects of droughts on food security, the effects of droughts on migration of population, the effect of droughts on inflation. We could have an acceleration of negative effects, other than temperature,” he said.

Poor farming practices were not helping, he said. “The degradation of soil comes with bad habits, and the way we do our agriculture will lead to degradation of the soil. When the soil is affected, the yield is affected,” he said.

Donwahi called on private sector investors to get involved and take advantage of opportunities for turning a profit. “The private sector has an interest in agriculture, and the better usage of the soil. We’re talking about [improving] yields. We’re talking about agroforestry, which is another way the private sector can have a return on investment,” he said. “We have to be innovative, to find new vehicles for finance.”

Governments around the world signed a treaty pledging to combat desertification in 1992, alongside the UN framework convention on climate change, which is the parent treaty to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and the UN convention on biodiversity, which aims to safeguard species abundance.

But the desertification treaty gains least attention, and last year’s Cop15 on desertification went largely unnoticed compared with the climate Cop27 and the biodiversity Cop15 last December. Desertification Cops are held less frequently than climate summits: the next desertification conference will be held in Riyadh in December 2024, while the next climate summit, Cop28, will be in Dubai in late November.

Donwahi said the world could not afford to ignore desertification. “We need to solve all the problems together. Desertification and drought leads to climate change, leads to loss of biodiversity. And when you have climate change you have droughts, floods, storms.

“It’s not only the poor countries, everybody is in the same boat [on food security]. Climate change, droughts, storms, floods don’t know any boundaries, they don’t need a visa to go into a country.”

Rich countries should look to Africa for the solutions to the climate crisis, he added. Africa enjoys many of the natural resources – from minerals required for renewable energy technology, to forests, sun and vast groundwater reserves – needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, improve food security and preserve biodiversity.

“Africa is a continent of solutions. It’s a continent where you have the most natural resources. The people who have the finance should help the people who have the natural resources. It’s a win-win situation, a partnership situation,” he said.

He called on Africans to seize these opportunities. “If the Africans realise that Africa is a solution, they will act differently – they will come with a more positive attitude, that you’re fighting to find solutions together. That’s how we should think – you don’t want to always be the one waiting for the help, for the handout, waiting cap in hand.”

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Right now, a mini space race is afoot. Two spacecraft, one Russian and the other Indian, are headed for the South Pole of the Moon – where no lander has ever successfully gone before. The Russian and Indian vehicles are on competing quests to search for water ice and potentially useful minerals that might be tucked away in the lunar dust.

Such was the timing of the crafts' departures that they are due to reach their destinations around the same date. No one planned this showdown, it is simply a curious twist of fate – but one that has got the world watching, and wondering: who will get there first?

For decades, our reading of things that happen in space has been unavoidably shaped by the original space race of the 1960s, in which the United States and the Soviet Union vied to put a human being on the Moon. Despite the Soviet Union becoming the first nation to put a satellite in Earth orbit, launch a human into space, and land an uncrewed spacecraft on the Moon, the US grabbed the biggest prize of all when the Apollo 11 mission carried astronauts to the lunar surface. Their adventure was broadcast on TV screens around the world and it was followed by further crewed Apollo missions in subsequent years, with the last taking place in 1972. More than 50 years later, the US remains the only country to have achieved a crewed Moon landing.

The Indian lander, Chandrayaan-3, blasted off from Earth on 14 July, packed with a payload of scientific equipment as well as a small, six-wheeled rover for exploration of the lunar surface. It's due to touch down on the lunar surface on 23 August after first sling-shotting around the Earth a few times and spending several weeks orbiting the Moon in preparation for the landing. The Russian lander, meanwhile, Luna-25, departed our planet only recently, taking off just after 2am Moscow time on 11 August (11pm GMT 10 August). It is taking a much faster, more direct route to the Moon and could reach the surface in as little as 10 days post-launch, on 21 August. Officials at the Russian space agency Roscosmos have made no secret about their desire to be first to make a soft landing at the Moon's South Pole.

But Luna-25's journey might take slightly longer than that, meaning Chandrayaan-3 could arrive on the Moon first, in the end. Slow and steady could win this race.

The missions, however, reflect the renewed interest in the Moon for space exploration. The recent discovery of significant pockets of water ice on our nearest celestial neighbour has excited scientists because hydrogen in the water could potentially be extracted to make rocket fuel at a future Moon base. Plus, the water might even be drinkable after treatment.

The so-called race between Luna-25 and Chandrayaan-3 encapsulates a new era of lunar exploration, in which nations including the US, Israel, and China, as well as private companies, are targeting the Moon with spacecraft and forthcoming crewed missions. For many, it's just friendly competition. And yet, a fresh chapter of human exploration is at stake. The small steps taken by individual landers and crewed missions could add up to giant leaps in conquering the Solar System in the coming decades and centuries. Who gets there first really could matter.

"It's turned out to be more of a coincidence than anything," says Wendy Whitman Cobb, professor of strategy and security studies at the US Air and Space Force's Air University, referring to the timing of the Luna-25 and Chandrayaan-3 missions. "But it is a very interesting coincidence." Luna-25's launch has been repeatedly delayed – it was originally scheduled for 2021.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

Watch: Russia launches first Moon mission in 47 years

India has a "leg up", she says, since its spacecraft is already in orbit around the Moon. The Russians probably feel some pressure to get there first, though, she suggests, given their more direct route. Chandrayaan-3 is twice as heavy as Luna-25 and was also launched using a much less powerful rocket, meaning it needed to build up speed by taking large elliptical orbits around the Earth before it could swing out towards the Moon itself. Operators of the two craft will have to assure themselves of the performance of each vehicle before starting the touchdown procedure.

Unexpected malfunctions could push the attempt back or scupper it entirely. They won't know how it's going to go, really, until they get there.

National pride will probably be a factor in pushing ahead wherever possible. Russia is arguably hoping to prove its continued capabilities in space given that the country's space programme has been affected by sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Their space industry has really, really suffered," says Whitman Cobb.

But it's hardly a race to the Moon, as such, for Russia, says Stefania Paladini, who studies the space industry at Queen Margaret University in the UK, because the former Soviet Union succeeded in putting multiple landers and even rovers on the Moon 50 years ago. In that sense, the Russians won the race long ago and, clearly in homage to that, the name Luna-25 harks back to the last Russian lunar mission, Luna 24 in 1976. The Soviet Luna 1 space probe is regarded as the first spacecraft to reach the Moon (observers concluded that it was designed to impact the lunar body but instead passed it by, 3,725 miles (5,995km) above its surface) in 1959.

We don't want to end up in some territorial disputes on the Moon, things are bad enough on Earth – Jack Burns

Conversely, if Chandrayaan-3 touches down as planned, it "would be the first time for India to actually succeed", in achieving a "soft landing" on the Moon, says Paladini, noting how the nation's previous attempt, with the Chandrayaan-2 lander, ended in failure when the vehicle crashed onto the lunar surface in September 2019. (India has technically sent a spacecraft to the Moon's South Pole before with its Moon Impact Probe, which smashed into a ridge close to Shackleton Crater in November 2008, but it was far from being a soft landing and the spacecraft was never expected to survive the landing.)

What is new here is the targeted landing sites at the South Pole of the Moon. No spacecraft has ever touched down there successfully. All of the Apollo missions went to locations further north, near to the Moon's equator – those landing sites featured relatively smooth terrain and plenty of sunlight. At the South Pole, in contrast, the terrain is much bumper, littered with craters, and light from the Sun arrives at a harsher angle. (Read about how the boots worn by the next astronauts to walk on the Moon will cope with the conditions at the lunar South Pole.)

India's Chandrayaan-3, which took off on July 14 2023, is the country's second attempt to soft-land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon (Credit: Getty Images)

"The sun is very low over the horizon," explains Jack Burns, a professor of astrophysics and planetary science at the University of Colorado Boulder. "The shadows are very long, the Moon is very uniform in terms of its grey surface, so being able to differentiate between craters and boulders is going to be much more challenging."

The US aims to send a crewed mission, Artemis III, to the lunar South Pole as early as 2025, so learning from the experiences of robotic landers before that date will presumably be useful to some extent. But crewed spaceflight will always be much harder than uncrewed, notes Whitman Cobb. "I don't even see it as being necessarily in the same league," she says.

What really matters, going forward, is who is able to set up a sustained and worthwhile presence on the moon, argues Vishnu Reddy, professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona. He disapproves of talk of a race or competition between nations and private companies. "Honestly, I think it's a distraction," he says. "Competitions only take you to the flag. You can't have sustainable, long-term presence based on politics or trying to beat one nation or the other."

The scientific equipment aboard each lander is relatively similar, he points out. The vehicles will hopefully help scientists to better understand more about the crucial lunar water ice, minerals, and the Moon's limited atmosphere, among other things. Just getting a clearer picture of the lunar South Pole is helpful, as is proving the capacity to land safely in such a tricky location.

There is another way of framing current expeditions to the Moon, though, says Anu Ojha, engagement, international and inspiration director at the UK Space Agency, who was previously involved with the Luna-25 mission before the invasion of Ukraine led the European Space Agency to discontinue its activities with Russia. Think of it like international "architectures" competing against one another, he suggests. The US, UK and India are among 27 countries signed up to the Artemis Accords. Meanwhile, Russia and China are collaborating on their own future Moon base, the International Lunar Research Station. Construction could begin as early as 2026. Luna-25 and Chandrayaan-3 are essentially early forays from each of these two international conglomerations.

Chandrayaan-3 is taking a longer route to the Moon than Luna-25, first orbiting the Earth several times to gain the momentum needed to reach lunar orbit (Credit: Alamy)

And the question that hovers over the lunar horizon is this: what next? What if we do set up lunar bases and begin extracting resources from the Moon for use in future space missions? The Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, establishes the fact that no nation can own the Moon. However, a subsequent treaty, known as the Moon Agreement, which more carefully defines that no nation can own resources on the Moon, has never been signed by key countries including the US, China and Russia.

"What does that mean going forward, when you're mining resources? Does everybody have an equal claim?" asks Burns, pondering the political headaches that will likely face new lunar pioneers. These headaches are going to have to be sorted out somehow, he notes. "We don't want to end up in some territorial disputes on the Moon, things are bad enough on Earth."

For now, Luna-25 and Chandrayaan-3 fly silently through the vacuum of space, just small players in a human quest to explore the Moon and potentially expand the reach of our species into the vast Solar System beyond. These two landers are but tiny chess pieces on one very big board. But, as players of chess know, it is a game where every move counts.

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1. What is EG.5?

Eris is a descendant of a group of coronavirus strains labeled XBB. These are all offshoots of the Omicron variant, which arose in late 2021. EG.5 made up an estimated 17.4 per cent of global cases in the week ending July 23, according to the WHO, up from only 7.6 per cent four weeks earlier. It’s growing quickly in the US, where it recently became the most common strain, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

2. How concerning is it?

Eris poses a low risk to global public health, the WHO said. Although it’s growing in prevalence in comparison with other strains and appears to be better at evading the body’s immune defenses, there’s no evidence it causes more severe disease than other versions of the coronavirus. For its part, the CDC has said there’s no evidence it’s able to spread more easily than its predecessors. Existing vaccines and treatments are expected to remain effective against it. Since it’s closely related to the XBB family, that includes updated booster shots targeting those strains that will soon be available. 

3. What symptoms does it cause? 

The symptoms seem to be the same as those caused by other strains, said Mr Thomas Russo, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Buffalo’s medical school, in an email. Common ones include a runny nose, headache, fatigue, a sore throat and sneezing. People who are older, have compromised immune systems or suffer from multiple other conditions are at higher risk for more severe effects. These may include lower respiratory disease, chest pain and shortness of breath. The virus still kills hundreds of people each week in the US, so it’s important to get tested if you think you may be infected.

4. What’s causing a rise in US hospitalizations?

The number of people admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 is on the rise for the first time this year in the US, and wastewater data has also shown cases ticking up. There’s no evidence linking rising hospitalizations in multiple countries to new strains, the WHO says, and experts have pointed to other likely culprits. Extreme heat is driving gatherings indoors, where the coronavirus spreads more easily. Also, with the pandemic over, people are traveling again and no longer wearing masks. And for many people, it’s been months since they last got a vaccine or contracted the virus, meaning their immunity against infection is waning. 

5. Is the US prepared for a rise in Covid-19?

The US has scaled back its response to Covid-19 in recent months. The government no longer purchases vaccines and treatments for the public and free tests aren’t as widely available. Still, experts say the US isn’t likely to see the kind of surge in cases that upended life in the early years of the pandemic. Because of vaccination and prior infections, the population has widespread protection from severe disease, and therapies like Pfizer Inc.’s Paxlovid antiviral drug can reduce the risk of hospitalization and death if they’re taken early on. Even after recent increases, hospital admissions are lower than at at any other point since at least August 2020, according to CDC data.

6. What can you do to protect yourself?

New booster vaccines will be available in the fall, and experts say they’re especially important for vulnerable people. If you’re at higher risk and you’re going to be in a situation where exposure is likely, such as a large gathering, Russo says you can consider getting a booster shot of one of the older vaccines that are already on the market. In any case, masks help protect against infection. Pharmacies still offer Covid-19 testing services and sell at-home tests. If you’re at high risk and you develop symptoms, a test can help determine whether you should start taking Paxlovid.

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Challenging financials

Let's start with the financials for Virgin Galactic, which became a publicly traded company in 2019. In its latest financial statement, through the second quarter of this year, the company reported a robust $980 million cash on hand. It has also demonstrated the ability to raise additional funding.

 

Even so, the company's burn rate is rather high. Virgin Galactic reported a quarterly loss of $134 million. Some of that is due to investments in developing a future line of spaceships, but the company also has 1,100 employees, so a majority of the expenditures are on its headcount in New Mexico and California. Very roughly, this means that without additional funding, Virgin Galactic will run out of money in less than two years.

 

This basic math is unlikely to change in the near future. While Virgin Galactic has started flying into space every four to six weeks or so, it won't make a substantial amount of money any time soon. Each of these flights only carries three paying customers, plus a representative of the company in the cabin. Since a chunk of the spacecraft's partially reusable engine must be replaced after every flight, these missions are operating at a loss.

 

So why is Virgin Galactic flying at all? Because it wants to show the world what it can do, reassure investors of its technical capability, and show off the experience it can offer customers. Also, the company does have a plan to reach profitability. The problem with this plan is that Virgin Galactic must survive at least the next three years, and probably longer, before it starts generating a lot of cash.

 

That is a long "valley of death" for any company to walk through.

Finally, a cadence of sorts

In July 2021, Virgin Galactic flew its first fully crewed spaceflight, including Branson among its passengers. This felt like a hopeful moment for the company, but the spacecraft did not fly again that year. Or in 2022. Why? Virgin Galactic said it was standing down for a program to upgrade VSS Unity and its aging carrier aircraft, VMS Eve. Virgin Galactic, in fact, would not fly again until a spaceflight on May 25, 2023—a nearly two-year gap.

 

Ahead of this week's flight, I toured Virgin Galactic's facilities in Southern New Mexico. One of the guides was the company's president, an engineer named Mike Moses. He is one of the people who inspires confidence in Virgin Galactic. Moses worked at NASA for decades, including as a flight director, and he later chaired mission management teams for the final space shuttle flights. You have to be an all-star to get those assignments.

 

After the shuttle stopped flying in 2011, Moses wanted to remain in the human spaceflight business, so he came to Virgin Galactic to run its operations. After test flights in 2018 and 2019, he said, it was clear that Virgin Galactic needed to optimize Unity and Eve for more frequent flights.

 

“The physical modifications to the ship were meant to basically decrease the amount of time needed to look at things after every single flight," Moses said. "We’re increasing the robustness of some of that hardware.”

 

The idea was that, instead of having to look at every nook and cranny after every flight, a truly time-consuming process, engineers should do what they could to reduce the need for these intrusive inspections. And it seems to be working, Moses said. The company has flown in May, June, and now, at the beginning of August. It is approaching a monthly spaceflight cadence.

 

The first two launches after the modifications were clean and so far are validating the decisions made by engineers. For example, Moses spoke about a part on the carrier aircraft, Eve, that moves during flights. Previously, every time this part flew, it cracked due to this movement.

 

"We were over-constraining it," Moses said. “It wasn’t a structural problem, it was an aerodynamic fairing to keep the airflow, but it kept breaking. We redesigned it to have a little slip joint, so it just moves every time. And it’s been working awesome. So we’re seeing really great results from the mods.”

Selling an experience

Virgin Galactic has a superior experience to sell. A ticket is very far from being affordable for most, but the service is definitely luxurious. There are many fine details in the three days of preparation for the spaceflight.

 

For example, when customers first arrive at the sprawling spaceport in New Mexico, they walk into a tunnel at the front of the building. It is fairly closed-in until some large windows that reveal the production floor three stories below. The overhead view of the shiny spacecraft, mated to its carrier aircraft, is arresting. I've seen a lot of cool things in spaceflight, and this was right up there. Sorry, we weren't allowed to take pictures.

 

Prospective astronauts—let's dispense with the debate about whether space tourists are astronauts; if you strap yourself to a rocket and blast above the atmosphere, it counts—spend most of their three days in New Mexico on the third floor of the main building. This facility, named "Astra," is where they train and relax before their flight. There is a full-size version of the spacecraft there in which to get acquainted and familiarize oneself with the flight experience.

 

Virgin passengers take off from a runway like an airplane, and after their spacecraft is released and rockets to space, it lands like a glider. This is a distinctly different experience from that of Virgin's competitor, Blue Origin. Passengers on board Blue Origin's vehicle take off on a traditional rocket and land underneath parachutes inside a capsule.

 

So far, there has been far more demand for both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin's suborbital space tourism services than capacity. While Blue Origin has flown half a dozen missions with private astronauts, it experienced an accident during an uncrewed flight of its New Shepard system last September. New Shepard has not flown since. And even before the accident, Blue Origin tickets were about twice the price of Virgin Galactic's.

 

So the name of the game is execution. Who can fly often and fly safely?

The challenge of flying often

Virgin Galactic has just a single spacecraft, Unity, and carrier aircraft, Eve, in its fleet. In the spring of 2021, the company rolled out a second vehicle, Imagine, and said testing could begin later in the summer. Officials also said they had just started building a third spacecraft, Inspire.

 

More than two years later, Imagine is nowhere to be seen. And no one talks about Inspire any more. Virgin Galactic says it has put Imagine on hold while working toward commercial spaceflights. Will it ever fly? Increasingly, the answer sounds like no. "It's mostly done," Moses said. But asked whether it will actually fly, he said, "We're still debating it."

 

Simply put, Virgin Galactic has limited resources and prefers that its engineers work on a new generation of the spacecraft, called the "Delta-class." These ships are the key to profitability.

 

"We have a new fleet of ships coming out," Moses said, speaking with Unity and Eve in the background. "They’re going to look much like these. But the idea is that we want to make them more manufacturable, cheaper, and easier to make, and more maintainable so we can turn them around faster. Unity and Eve require a lot of intensive labor to check them out between flights. The new Delta class will be designed for much cheaper operations, and then the new motherships will be the same way."

 

Virgin has bet its future on the Delta ships. They will carry six passengers, not four, and are intended to fly once a week. With a fleet of them, Virgin aspires to fly 400 times a year, allowing it to reach profitability. Moses makes a good point about the ships. They're based on the same design as Unity, and will fly the same profile. Their testing should be shorter, because Virgin Galactic will be starting with a lot of data already.

 

 

That's great, but the Delta ships remain in the design phase. Construction will not begin before at least the second half of next year, with testing beginning in late 2025, perhaps. That puts the Delta ships into commercial service no earlier than late 2026—and let's be real, every major spaceflight project undergoes significant delays.

 

So it's possible that when it comes to an operational fleet, VSS Unity is it for the next three or four years, at least.

 

The company must also find the resources to build additional carrier aircraft, as VMS Eve is now 15 years old. The company's current hangar can accommodate a handful of ships, so it will also need even larger facilities to handle more spacecraft. These are all major investments for a company that lacks substantial revenue.

Putting it all together

So will Virgin Galactic make it? I would like to think so. Alongside Blue Origin and its New Shepard spacecraft, it has brought a new capability to the market. After sitting through a simulation of the experience, there is no doubt it's a huge thrill.

 

And it would be awesome for thousands of people to have that experience and share it with the world. Leaving the planet, even briefly, is for most people an affirmation that we ought to be doing everything we can to protect this world and its razor-thin atmosphere. Expanding access to space is one way in which the era of commercial space spreads its wings. I'm thrilled someone is out there giving it a full-on go.

 

But I don't know, man. It takes years to develop space hardware, and Virgin Galactic is promising a lot of upgrades with the Delta-class spaceships. If those ships under-deliver, it's ballgame. If the upgrades are delayed a few years, the company is likewise toast. And if there are some fatal accidents, well, it ends badly. So there are a lot of hills to climb.

 

I will say this: Reaching a near-monthly cadence with VSS Unity this summer builds credibility. So I think there's a chance. I don't know how big of a chance, but I'm eager to find out.

 

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Five-year-old Cooper introduced children and educators at his service to the issue of homelessness after visiting a local supermarket with his Mum and sister on the way. While walking into the supermarket, he saw a man sitting on the ground outside, with a container in front of him, soliciting donations. 

When they were inside the supermarket, Cooper asked his mother about the man, and she explained that many people struggle for money, leaving them unable to purchase food and other necessities. 

“He might be collecting money from kind people so that he can come in (to the supermarket) and buy something to eat.”

Cooper then asked if they could buy the man something to eat, choosing bananas and apples. Once the shop was finished, Cooper walked up to the man, and handed him the fruit, receiving a smile, a thumbs up, and a “you made my day!” from the man in return. 

Walking back to the car, Cooper was pleased with his kindness, sharing his story with educators and the other children when in care the next day, where the team acknowledged that this little act of kindness could be expanded to a bigger act of kindness “from all our little niños”.

“Cooper’s empathy and willingness to help serve as an example for everyone around him,” a Niño ELA representative said.

“The project also emphasises the importance of community involvement and working together to make a positive impact. It teaches children and adults alike the value of empathy, generosity and compassion.”

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Russia has launched uncrewed spacecraft to the Moon’s south pole — its first lunar mission in 47 years. If successful, the mission would be the first to land in the region, and could mark the start of considerable activity there from multiple countries and private companies.

“It’s an area where we might expect to see increased concentrations of water ice,” says Simeon Barber, a planetary scientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. “As you go further towards the pole, it gets colder and the potential for water ice increases.”

Luna 25 launched at 11.11 p.m. UTC on a Soyuz rocket on 10 August from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in eastern Russia — marking a move away from Russia’s dependence on Kazakhstan, which hosts its main launch site, the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It will take around five days for the spacecraft to reach a 100-kilometre orbit around the Moon. The landing attempt is scheduled for 21 August at the 100-kilometre-wide Boguslawsky crater, about 500 kilometres from the Moon’s south pole.

This is the first of many missions planned for the south pole. India’s Chandrayaan-3 will attempt to land in the region on 23 August. China plans to send a rover there in 2026, and NASA’s Artemis programme, which will attempt to return humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, is also focusing on the south pole. As part of Artemis, several US companies are set to attempt landings there in the coming years.

Luna 25 is “an opportunity to steal the march on other people get some positive publicity,” says Roger Launius, NASA’s former chief historian.

Search for ice

Orbital data since the 1990s suggests the Moon’s poles contain sizeable quantities of water ice, which, if accessible, could be a valuable resource for future human missions. “You can generate hydrogen and oxygen from it which could be used to produce either drinking water, breathable air, or even to produce rocket fuel,” says Nico Dettman, Lunar Exploration Group Leader at the European Space Agency. That could make the Moon “a stepping stone for further destinations” in the Solar System.

In June, Yuri Borisov, head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, described the Luna 25 mission as “high risk” with a 70% chance of success. NASA chief Senator Bill Nelson said on 8 August that the agency “wished them well”, noting that NASA saw any space race to return humans to the Moon as being between the United States and China.

Two decades in the making, Luna 25 is a stationary lander that weighs about 1,750 kilograms and is Russia’s first attempt to land on the Moon since the Luna 24 mission in 1976, which returned lunar rocks to Earth. Luna 25 by comparison is “fairly modest”, says Scott Pace, former executive secretary of the US National Space Council, carrying just 30 kilograms of scientific instruments.

The Luna 25 lander is scheduled to land on the Moon’s surface on 21 August (artist’s impression).Credit: Mechanik/Alamy

The mission’s purpose might be grander than its scientific return, says Pace. “Politically they probably feel they have to [go back],” he says, given activity from other nations. “I think it’s more of a statement that they’re still here and they still have ambitions.” The country is already working with China to build a lunar research station, with China also hoping to send astronauts to the Moon by 2030.

Digging down

Luna 25’s main instrument is a robotic arm that will attempt to dig up to 50 centimetres into the floor of the Boguslawsky crater to look for signs of water ice. Barber had been part of a European team that would have collaborated with Russia on these activities and a planned follow-up mission, Luna 27, but the collaboration ended last year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Water ice, if discovered, would be useful scientifically. “By understanding how the Moon has collected water over time, we could start to piece together the history of water in the Solar System,” says Barber. “We can start asking questions about the local conditions near Earth as it was evolving.”

But the Russian mission striking ice at Boguslawsky is “pretty unlikely”, because temperatures in the crater are too high, says Margaret Landis, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. More promising might be a smaller and more deeply shadowed crater within Boguslawsky, but it’s unclear if Russia could attempt a landing here. (Roscosmos declined Nature’s request for interview.)

“A null result is potentially just as interesting as a positive detection,” says Landis. Next year, a NASA rover called VIPER and a separate hopping spacecraft called Micro-Nova from the US firm Intuitive Machines will also look for ice inside lunar craters at the south pole. Results from this variety of surface missions could “help us narrow down where the water could be”, says Landis.

A Soyuzb rocket launched Luna 25 to the Moon from Vostochny Cosmodrome in eatern Russia.Credit: Roscosmos State Space Corporation via AP/Alamy

Luna 25 will also image the surface, study the interaction between the solar wind and the Moon, and deploy a laser reflector to precisely measure the Earth–Moon distance. Providing the landing goes smoothly, the craft is expected to operate for one year.

If Luna 25 lands, Russia will succeed where many others have failed recently. Since 1976, only China has successfully landed on the Moon, with a lander and rover in 2013 and 2018, and a sample-return mission in 2020. In 2019, India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission and Israel’s Beresheet lander crashed on the surface, and Japan’s Hakuto lander suffered the same fate in April.

“It’d be good to see somebody stick the landing,” says Landis.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02536-2

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Scientists have discovered that a key function from a "pure" branch of mathematics can predict how often genetic mutations lead to changes in function. 

These rules, laid out by the so-called sum-of-digits function, also govern some aspects of protein folding, computer coding and certain magnetic states in physics. 

"Part of what we're trying to do is find a universal explanation for a lot of these trends which have been observed in nature," said lead study author Vaibhav Mohanty, a theoretical physicist and doctoral and MD candidate at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

For every genotype — letters of DNA for a given gene — there is a phenotype, or end result: a new protein, or even a behavior in the case of a gene that regulates another set of genes. A given genotype can accrue a number of mutations before its phenotype changes; this accumulation of neutral mutations is a major way evolution proceeds. 

"We want to understand, how robust is the actual phenotype to mutations?" Mohanty said. "It turns out that that robustness has been observed to be pretty high." In other words, a lot of the "letters," or base pairs that make up the code of DNA, can change before the output does.

Because this robustness pops up not only in genetics but also in fields such as physics and computer science, Mohanty and his colleagues suspected its roots might lie in the fundamental mathematics of the possible sequences. They envisioned these possible sequences as a cube of many dimensions, known as a hybercube, with each point on this impossible-to-visualize cube as a possible genotype. Genotypes with the same phenotype should ultimately cluster together, Mohanty said. The question was, what shape would those clusters form? 

The answer turned out to be found in number theory, the area of mathematics concerned with the properties of positive integers. The average robustness of a phenotype to mutations turned out to be defined by what's called a sum-of-digits function. This means that by adding the digits representing each genotype on the cube, you can arrive at the average robustness of the genotype. 

"Let's say there are five genotypes that map to a particular phenotype," Mohanty said. So, for instance, five letter sequences of DNA, each with a different mutation, but which all still code for the same protein. 

Adding up the digits used to represent these five sequences gives you the average number of mutations those genotypes can take on before their phenotypes shift, the researchers found. 

This led to the second intriguing discovery: These sums of digits, plotted out on a graph, formed what's called a blancmange curve, a fractal curve named after a French dessert (which looks like a fancy molded pudding). 

In a fractal curve, "if you zoom into the curve it looks exactly the same as if you were zoomed out, and you can continue to zoom in infinitely and infinitely and infinitely and it would be the same," Mohanty said.

These findings revealed some interesting secrets about error correction, Mohanty said. For instance, the natural systems the researchers studied tended to handle errors differently than humans do when setting up data storage, like in digital messages or on CDs or DVDs. In these technological examples, all errors are treated equally, while biological systems tend to protect certain sequences more than others.

That's not surprising for genetic sequences, where there might be several linchpin sequences and then others that are more peripheral to the main gene function, Mohanty said. 

Understanding the dynamics of these neutral mutations could eventually be important for preventing disease, Mohanty said. Viruses and bacteria evolve rapidly, and they accumulate many neutral mutations in the process. If there were a way to prevent these pathogens from landing on the needle-in-the-haystack beneficial mutation among all the chaff, researchers might be able to stymie pathogens' ability to become more infectious or resistant to antibiotics, for example. 

The researchers published their findings July 26 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

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Following days of torrential rain, more than a dozen rivers in Vermont overflowed in early July, causing catastrophic flooding. Some parts of Vermont saw up to 23 centimeters of rain, or 9 inches, an amount exceeding even the rainfalls from Hurricane Irene in 2011. Once considered 1-in-100-year events, such floods are set to become more frequent as climate change warms the region, scientists say. That’s because warmer air can hold more moisture.  

This time, my hometown of Burlington was largely spared. But Lake Champlain, which runs the length of the city, was not. As the water from the Winooski — a 145-kilometer river that swamped the state capital, Montpelier — flows into the lake near where I live, so too does the garbage, gasoline and other pollutants that it swallowed up. 

I glimpsed this pollution firsthand while biking with friends on a path along the lake shortly after the worst of the flooding. The south end of the lake, where we started, remained surprisingly clean and free of debris, appearing light blue. But as we biked north, past the junction of river and lake, the water turned murky and brown. 

That color shift reminded me of something I’d recently read about deep-sea divers in Estero Salado, a fishing town in the Dominican Republic. The divers describe similar changes to ocean hues where they fish, and their color vocabulary is intricate. They speak of blue, black, yellow, green, purple and chocolate to describe the seawater’s appearance at different times and under different circumstances, writes medical anthropologist Kyrstin Mallon Andrews in July in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. These colors tell the divers about the state of the water and possible impacts on the behavior and visibility of sea life, such as depth, turbulence and influx of runoff from storms. 

Divers also speak of drastic changes to those colors over the years. Purple water, which “surpasses clean,” has become increasingly rare. Yellow water, caused by flooding in the nearby river and toxic runoff from the region’s rice fields, wreaks havoc on once fertile fishing grounds. Longer hurricane seasons turn the waters chocolate brown — a color too dangerous for diving — for months rather than weeks. 

My own experience and that of the deep-sea divers made me wonder if using color to describe climate change could work as a communication tool. When I pose the idea to Tim Edensor, a social and cultural geographer at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, he concurs.

Historically, the colors of a person’s world would have stayed fairly constant, he says. But climate change is rapidly altering our visual environment. And those changes can be hard to ignore. “This transformation of the color of the water, I think this is really quite perturbing and it’s also disorienting,” he says.

Deep-sea divers in the Dominican Republic say that clean water colors, such as blue (shown) and an even purer “purple,” are becoming increasingly rare as climate change alters the coastal ecosystem where they fish.
KYRSTIN MALLON ANDREWS

Such color changes are not limited to our waterways. Scientists have been talking about changes to the world’s color palette for several years. Here in New England, autumn’s vibrant leaves could become duller due, in part, to warmer nighttime temperatures that slow chlorophyll’s degradation process, researchers say. And satellite images show that while much of the Arctic is getting greener, some parts are turning brown, a sign that the vegetation could be dying (SN: 4/11/19).

Many flowers, meanwhile, have increased the amount of their ultraviolet pigments, a natural sunscreen to protect against rising temperatures and a thinning ozone layer, researchers reported in 2020 in Current Biology. While these changes are invisible to the human eye — we can’t see UV radiation — the flowers appear darker to pollinators. That change in hue could reduce a pollinator’s attraction to affected flowers, the researchers wrote.

When it comes to the world’s waterways, satellite images taken over the past 20 years show that over half the world’s oceans have become greener, researchers reported in July in Nature. Dissolved organic material in the water or changes to the type or quantity of phytoplankton are the most likely culprits, says Emmanuel Boss, an aquatic physicist at the University of Maine in Orono. “The bacteria are very happy. There is a whole microbial community that I think is having a blast.”

Another study of satellite images found that lakes in areas where average summer temperatures were once moderate and the waters froze come winter are also likely to switch from blue to green or even brown as the climate warms in coming years (SN: 10/3/22). Hot spots for this shift include northern Europe and northeastern North America.

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Are you not entertained?! Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk’s will they/won’t they continues, and it appears that the long awaited fight between the two tech billionaires could take place in Italy.

Musk tweeted this morning that he spoke to the Prime Minister of Italy and the Minister of Culture to hold the brawl in Italy. Musk said the event would be livestreamed on Meta and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and that “everything in the camera frame will be ancient Rome.”

Presumably, the fight will be handled by the Musk Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, with no involvement from UFC. Musk tweeted in a reply that all proceeds from the fight will be donated to veterans.

The fate of the fight was on the rocks earlier this week when Musk claimed he needed medical attention before he could commit to the event. Musk tweeted on August 6 that he would be getting an MRI of his neck and back for a condition that may require surgery. In an update today, Musk revealed today that an MRI on Monday showed his right shoulder blade rubbing against his ribs and that the condition requires “minor surgery” to fix with a few months of recovery time.

For now, it would appear that the Gladiator-inspired brawl is on ice. At the same time, who are we to believe that Zuck has given the OK to any of this? Musk has a tendency to try and tweet things into existence, and Zuck might not be down to make a mockery of one of his favorite hobbies, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Communication has been reportedly lacking between the two anyway, with Zuckerberg posting on Threads earlier this week that he’s “not holding [his] breath” that the fight will even go through.

This is a developing story.

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Russia is heading back to the Moon as it tries to reassert itself as a significant world power in the wake of its war on Ukraine. A rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft will mark Russia’s first lunar mission since 1976. The expedition will attempt to land the exploration vehicle on the moon’s south pole, hoping to dig up water ice beneath the surface. You can tune in to watch the launch here.

The Soyuz 2.1v rocket carrying the lander is scheduled to lift off from the Vostochny spaceport in eastern Russia at 7:10 pm Eastern time. If successful, it would be the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon’s south pole. NASA confirmed in 2020 the discovery of water molecules in sunlit parts of the Moon’s surface. Salvageable water could mark a breakthrough for lunar exploration, providing future human lunar missions with life support, fuel (through extracted hydrogen) and even potential agriculture.

Russia’s space trip also serves as a salvo in its attempt to reestablish itself as a significant world power unmoved by the West’s sanctions over its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The vessel’s name is even a callback to the Soviet Space Program: Its last mission was the Luna-24, which spent 13 days heading to the Moon and back to collect samples in 1976. Referencing an era when the Soviet Union was an undeniable world superpower fits with President Vladimir Putin’s goals to project an image of Russian preeminence.

Luna-25 is also in a race against India: the country’s Chandrayaan-3 mission launched on July 14th and entered the Moon’s orbit this week. India’s craft is scheduled to reach the Moon’s south pole on August 23rd. The Luna-25 will take five days to reach the Moon and is expected to spend five to seven days in orbit before touching down. That timeline has Russia’s lander potentially reaching the Moon around the same time as India’s, if not slightly ahead.

The craft is expected to conduct experiments — using its 68 lbs of research equipment — on the Moon for about a year. It includes a scoop that can capture samples up to a depth of 15 cm (six inches) in its hunt for frozen water.

[You can watch the launch stream below starting at around 7:10 pm EDT.]

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WHEN SUZANNE DODD’S team transmitted a routine command to Voyager 2 on July 21, the unthinkable happened: They accidentally sent the wrong version, which pointed the interstellar probe’s antenna slightly away from Earth. When they next expected to receive data, they heard nothing at all. The small error almost made humanity lose its connection with the popular spacecraft, which is now 12.4 billion miles from home. Along with its twin, Voyager 1, it is humanity’s farthest-flung spacecraft that is still collecting data.

Here’s what happened: Dodd’s team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had actually spotted the error in the command and corrected it—but then mistakenly sent out the flawed version. “It felt awful. It was a moment of panic, because we were 2 degrees off point, which was substantial,” says Dodd, the project manager of the Voyager interstellar mission.

The team settled on a solution: Blast a “shout” command in the probe’s direction, telling it to adjust the antenna back toward Earth. If the signal was strong enough, the craft could still receive it, even though its antenna was offset. 

On the morning of August 2, they sent the highest-power signal they could, using the high-elevation, 70-meter, 100-kilowatt S-band transmitter at the communication station in Canberra, Australia. The station is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network, an international system of giant antennas managed by JPL. (Because of Voyager 2’s trajectory, one can only communicate with it via telescopes in Earth’s southern hemisphere.) 

There was no guarantee of success, and it would take 37 hours to see if the solution had worked: The time it would take for their signal to ping the craft, and then—if they were lucky—for a signal from Voyager 2 to ping them back. 

The team spent a sleepless night waiting. And then, relief: It worked. Contact was restored on August 3 at 9:30 pm Pacific time. “We went from ‘Oh my gosh, this happened’ to ‘It’s wonderful, we’re back,’” says Linda Spilker, Voyager’s project scientist at JPL.

Had the attempt failed, the team would have only had a single backup option left: the onboard flight software’s fault protection routine. Multiple fail-safes were programmed into the Voyagers to automatically take actions to deal with circumstances that could harm the mission. The next routine was expected to kick in in mid-October. If it worked, it would have generated a correct pointing command, hopefully adjusting the antenna in the right direction.

The Voyagers have been flying since the late 1970s—they’re turning 46 in a couple weeks—and as Spilker points out, “that was a two-week period with no science data, the longest period of time without it.” In the 2010s, they crossed the heliopause, the boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar wind. Since then, they’ve been taking data on the edge of the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the sun, which interacts in unknown ways with the interstellar medium. 

Still, that two-week period without contact didn’t interrupt the team’s scientific work. “The Voyager science isn’t something you need to monitor constantly,” Calla Cofield, a JPL spokesperson, told WIRED via email. “They’re studying this region of space over long distances, so a gap of a few weeks won’t hurt those studies.”

While the NASA team managed to restore communications with the beloved spacecraft, it won’t be the last scare. The Voyagers have aged well past their prime, and their dwindling power means that their scientific instruments can be run for only a few more years.

The Voyager probes are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which work by converting heat from the decay of radioisotope fuel, plutonium-238, into electricity. (Such far-flying spacecraft are typically designed to run on nuclear power, rather than on solar, which doesn’t work that far from the sun.) But the fuel source has been decaying over a long time. To conserve power, the Voyager team has already shut down the heaters for all of the scientific instruments—which, despite that, have continued operating normally. In the coming years, the magnetometer, plasma wave surveyor, and charged particle detector will themselves have to be shut down, one at a time, to ensure a few more years of interstellar science.

“Everybody’s exuberant that we have the spacecraft back,” Dodd says. “It makes me realize that this mission could end anytime, whether there's human error involved, or just because the spacecraft is old and it breaks. It makes you value what you have.”

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Growing up in Cherpulassery, a small town in Palakkad, Kerala, in the ‘90s, Aswin Sekhar had access to pristine night skies. Light pollution was less. So, staring at the vast expanse of stars overhead, twinkling like precious gems, left an indelible mark on young Aswin’s impressionable mind. Back then, he did not know a celestial object would bear his name in the future.

In June, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named an asteroid after Aswin, 38, to honour his contribution to the field of meteors in meteoroid stream dynamics. The asteroid, discovered in 2000 by the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search programme (funded by NASA), will be called (33928) Aswinsekhar = 2000 LJ27. 

Aswin apart, three other Indians — astronomer Kumar Venkataramani, senior flight dynamics engineer Ashok K. Verma, and planetary geologist Rutu Parekh — also had asteroids named after them. They join an elite group of Indian scientists like Srinivasa Ramanujan, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, CV Raman, Vikram Sarabhai, and Vainu Bappu, who have had the same honour. Other eminent Indians like Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Viswanathan Anand also have minor planets named after them. But that is through a “ceremonial nomenclature”, wherein the discoverer of the celestial body can name it after the IAU nomenclature committee’s approval. In the “non-ceremonial nomenclature”, accomplished individuals in the field of astrophysics nominate a fellow scientist for the IAU’s consideration to have a minor planet named in their honour. Aswin and the other Indians were honoured through the second process.

The news of this naming was an overwhelming and pleasant surprise for Aswin. “The recognition was particularly significant as my expertise lies in meteor sciences, an area considered niche even within the broader field of astrophysics,” he says. “Most attention tends to gravitate towards cosmology, stellar physics, or solar physics, which boasts a much larger community of professionals. This recognition by the IAU felt like a tribute to the legacy of meteor scientists who came before me and those who diligently worked in the field despite lacking acknowledgement.”

A full circle

Two celestial events sparked Aswin’s interest in studying the sky. The first one was the appearance of the Halle-Bopp comet in 1997. “I visited my uncle posted in the Assam rifles in Nagaland, Kohima. And I remember seeing this beautiful comet. The sky was spectacular,” he recalls. 

The second one was the 1999 Leonid meteor shower. Krishna Warrier, a former scientist at C-DAC Research Center in Thiruvananthapuram, had asked him to watch it. The sight of the celestial fireworks left an indelible mark on young Aswin’s mind. But there is also a bit of serendipity to this scientist’s story. “Years later, around 2010, as I ventured on my academic journey, I found myself under the guidance of renowned Scottish astrophysicist Dr David Asher for my PhD studies. Dr Asher was the one who predicted the meteor shower I witnessed back in 1999!” he says. It is tempting to say the stars were aligned in Aswin’s case.

Science and sci-fi

As a solar system dynamicist, Aswin’s day-to-day work revolves around understanding and predicting orbits. “First, there’s a theoretical dimension where I delve into understanding the intricate forces within our solar system. One of my main works has been understanding the periodic gravitational effects between Jupiter, Saturn and meteor showers. 

“The second facet of my work involves validation of theory through real-world observations. This collaboration of theory and practice advances our understanding of the cosmos and contributes to the protection of modern-day satellite systems.”

He also frequently visits scientific institutions and organisations across South India like the Regional Science Centre in Coimbatore, Kerala State Science & Technology Museum in Trivandrum, Indian Institute of Astrophysics and Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru, and Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai.

As someone who closely observes the orbits of celestial bodies, what does he make of Hollywood films and tabloid headlines about apocalyptic collisions?

Aswin chuckles at the question. 

“While certain Hollywood movies, press stories, and social media narratives can, at times, exaggerate the magnitude of celestial threats, the reality remains that these dangers are genuine,” he explains. “About 66 million years ago, an asteroid impact caused the extinction of dinosaurs. More recently, in 1908, an asteroid collision in Tunguska, Siberia, ignited a massive forest fire and vapourised portions of the impacted area. In 2013, Chelyabinsk in Russia experienced the impact of a relatively small asteroid, approximately 15 meters in size. But it shattered buildings and caused numerous injuries. So, there is a need to meticulously study, forecast, and prepare for these potential hazards.”

He reckons science fiction movies bridge the gap between scientific intricacies and public comprehension. “I recall the impact of movies like Independence Day during my formative years. The portrayal of alien invasion stirred my curiosity about extraterrestrial life,” he adds.

Need for better outreach

Though Aswin loves and does science, he is hardly like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. He enjoys life outside the laboratory as well. “I enjoy swimming, badminton, and chess. I like to cook. I go to concerts and film festivals. And I like to travel as well,” he says. Aswin’s work has taken him to over 40 countries. He has been to some of the most picturesque yet challenging terrains of telescope sites like the Himalayan and Nilgiri ranges, isolated spots in the Hawaiian volcanic peaks, Arizona deserts, the Canary Islands and others.

Aswin also likes talking about science to inspire the younger generation. He reckons that Indian scientific institutions need to increase their outreach activities. “In India, these institutions are not easily accessible to the public. Whereas, agencies like NASA have dedicated visitor centres and museums,” he says.

“The foundation of our scientific endeavours rests upon taxpayer funding, which underscores the importance of being accountable and contributing back to society. I believe scientists should communicate with the broader public and students,” he says.

After all, he, too, was inspired by another scientist to look skyward.

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To reach the spot where the nuclear age was born and human history swung, turn off of Route 380 at Stallion Gate on the northern edge of the US Army’s White Sands Missile Range, not far from the tiny desert town of Socorro, New Mexico. Drive through the flat, dry, empty scrub the Spanish called Jornada del Muerto, or the Journey of Death, ringed at the horizon by the Sierra Oscura, the Dark Mountains.

After 17 miles or so you’ll reach a vast parking lot that stands largely empty much of the year. Walk past a mangled 200-ton steel tube called Jumbo, and stand before a stone obelisk mined from nearby volcanic rock. The words on the plaque will tell you where you are: Trinity Site — where the world’s first nuclear device was exploded on July 16, 1945.

Trinity has largely faded from the public consciousness, overshadowed first by the horror of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later altogether as the fear of the bomb itself began to recede in the post-Cold War era. After World War II, the Interior Department tried to create a national monument at Trinity Site, but its efforts were continually frustrated by the military, which wanted to retain White Sands to test its growing inventory of missiles away from the public.

In truth, Americans have never known what to think about Trinity, simultaneously the greatest of technical and scientific achievements, the culmination of the Manhattan Project, and the birthplace of the first weapon of mass destruction, where the means to kill millions was tried and tested. It wasn’t until 1975 that Trinity Site was finally declared a National Historic Landmark — a few ranks down from a National Historical Park — and even now it remains largely closed to visitors, save for two Saturdays a year in April and October.

You can expect crowds to grow this fall, because the Trinity test is the hinge of Christopher Nolan’s hit biopic Oppenheimer, on the man behind the Manhattan Project. But what does it feel like to stand at the spot of Ground Zero, the site where, as Matt Damon’s General Leslie Groves says in the film: “the most important fucking thing to ever happen in the history of the world” actually happened?

The day the sun rose twice

I had a chance to visit Trinity Site myself in the spring of 2018, when I was researching my book End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World.

I’m not sure what I expected as I broiled under the New Mexico sun. A moment of existential clarity? Some monument that represents the enormity of what happened here, the moment and the place where human beings demonstrated that they would now have the power to destroy themselves?

But save for a two-inch chunk of concrete left from the original tower, and the bits of glassy green called trinitite that were liquified in the blast before falling to the earth as hardened shards, there’s little indication at Trinity Site today of what occurred more than 70 years ago. And even the more immediate aftermath left some of the witnesses underwhelmed. A few weeks after the test, Gen. Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer’s boss, was driven out to the site on an observation trip. A Manhattan Project physicist remembered Groves looking at the crater left by the first atomic bomb and remarking: “Is that all?”

But no one who witnessed the day the sun rose twice ever forgot the experience, a fact ably captured in Nolan’s magisterial recreation of the event. The day of my visit to Trinity, frame-by-frame photos of the moments after the bomb’s detonation were arranged against the fence. Here’s how I described it in my book:

At 0.006 seconds there is a bubble of perfect light, as if the dawn itself had blossomed suddenly out of the desert ground. The heat of the blast is thousands of times hotter than the surface of the sun, and the light in that single moment was a dozen times brighter. At 0.025 seconds, the bubble head keeps rising, while a fringe of fire spreads across the ground…

At 0.053 seconds, that perfect bubble begins to lose its clarity, becoming diffused and unfocused, as if overwhelmed by its own energy, while the inferno at the surface expands, gouging out the earth below. At this point every living thing within a radius of a mile is dead, or will be soon.

At 0.10 seconds, the blast looks like nothing less than a halo on the head of some Renaissance painting of Christ, as the exposure itself begins to degrade. The atomic heat has made the air grow luminous, as the force of the shock wave expands outward, shredding the matter in its path. Everything is ravaged, everything is burned.

And at 15 seconds after detonation comes the familiar image of the mushroom cloud, what the art historian John O’Brian called “the logo of logos of the 20th century” ... That mushroom cloud — like nothing seen on Earth before — is the result of intense heat at the heart of the blast, causing the air to rise in a column, before it spreads out in a mushroom’s cap.

In their definitive biography American Prometheus, the source material for Nolan’s film, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin wrote that no one can know what flashed through the physicist’s mind as he beheld the thing that he, more than any other person, had willed into being. Oppenheimer’s brother Frank remembered that, “I think we just said, ‘It worked.’”

More than his words, it was Oppenheimer’s countenance in the aftermath that was telling, another moment Nolan captures perfectly. The Manhattan Project physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi recalled it this way: “I’ll never forget his walk. I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car…his walk was like High Noon…this kind of strut. He had done it.”

Yet the site of Trinity itself today contains nothing of this triumphalism, just as it has nothing to say about the tens of thousands of people who would be killed in a few short weeks by the descendants of that original bomb.

Was it a scientific victory? An unmitigated horror? All a visitor to Trinity has is their thoughts, a bare plaque, and the silent, endless desert that surrounds them.

Where the ending began

How should we remember Oppenheimer and Trinity? Far better than we do now. Despite Bird and Sherwin’s biography, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and Richard Rhodes’s equally great 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which features Oppenheimer as a central character, both he and the test itself have received far less than their due. Oppenheimer wasn’t a president or a general, and while an excellent theoretical physicist, he was not among the 20-some scientists connected to the Manhattan Project who had already won or would go on to win a Nobel Prize.

And yet without Oppenheimer’s ability to motivate and corral fractious scientific egos, and the sheer drive that was a product of what Groves called his “overweening ambition,” the Manhattan Project would likely never have succeeded. And Trinity was the proof of that success. Nolan’s film goes a long way toward correcting that score.

But Oppenheimer’s success contained within it the seeds of its own destruction — something Oppenheimer himself, a lifelong student of Hindu thought, might have appreciated. At the end of the film, Oppenheimer is seen visiting Albert Einstein on the peaceful, leafy campus of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, far removed from Trinity’s bare desert. Oppenheimer reminds the older scientist of an earlier conversation, when Manhattan Project physicists worried that a nuclear bomb might inadvertently ignite the atmosphere.

“When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world,” Oppenheimer says.

“What of it?” Einstein replies.

“I believe we did,” Oppenheimer says.

What is Trinity Site? It is the place where those calculations were proven in nuclear fire, the Ground Zero where one possible end for us all began.

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