Does turning the air conditioning off when you’re not home save energy?

The SLS rocket is the worst thing to happen to NASA—but maybe also the best?

"In our study, approximately one in six patients with type 2 diabetes claimed at least one NSAID prescription within one year," said first author Dr. Anders Holt of Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark. "In general, we always recommend that patients consult their doctor before starting a new medication, and with results from this study we hope to help doctors mitigate risk if prescribing NSAIDs.

NSAID use has previously been associated with an increased risk of heart failure in the general population but data are lacking in patients with type 2 diabetes. Given that patients with type 2 diabetes have over twice the likelihood of developing heart failure as those without diabetes, NSAIDs could be even more detrimental in this at-risk group.

This study investigated the association between short-term NSAID use and the risk of first-time heart failure hospitalization in a nationwide cohort of patients with type 2 diabetes. The researchers used Danish registers to identify patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes during 1998 to 2021. Patients with heart failure or a rheumatological condition requiring long-term NSAID use were excluded. Information was collected on prescriptions for oral NSAIDs (celecoxib, diclofenac, ibuprofen, and naproxen) claimed prior to first-time heart failure hospitalization. Using a case-crossover design in which each patient acted as his or her own control, associations between short-term NSAID use and the risk of first-time heart failure hospitalization were assessed.

The study included 331,189 patients with type 2 diabetes. The average age was 62 years and 44% were women. During the first year after inclusion in the study, 16% of patients claimed at least one NSAID prescription while 3% claimed at least three prescriptions. Ibuprofen was used by 12.2% of patients, diclofenac by 3.3%, naproxen by 0.9%, and celecoxib by 0.4%. During a median follow up of 5.85 years, 23,308 patients were hospitalized with heart failure for the first time.

NSAID use was associated with an elevated risk of first-time heart failure hospitalization, with an odds ratio (OR) of 1.43 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.27–1.63). When individual NSAIDs were analyzed separately, the risk of heart failure hospitalization was increased following the use of diclofenac or ibuprofen, with corresponding ORs of 1.48 (95% CI 1.10–2.00) and 1.46 (95% CI 1.26–1.69), respectively. Celecoxib and naproxen were not associated with an increased risk, potentially due to the small proportion of claimed prescriptions.

The researchers also analyzed the risk of heart failure with NSAID use in subgroups of patients. No association was found in patients with normal glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels (below 48 mmol/mol), which indicates well-controlled diabetes. Strong associations were found in patients above 65 years of age, while no association was found in those below 65 years of age. The strongest association was found in very infrequent or new users of NSAIDs.

Dr. Holt noted that data on over-the-counter use of NSAIDs were not included in the study. But he said: "This was a limitation but likely had no impact on the results since a previous report found that over-the-counter NSAIDs comprise a small proportion of total use."

He concluded: "This was an observational study and we cannot conclude that NSAIDs cause heart failure in patients with type 2 diabetes. However, the results suggest that a potential increased risk of heart failure should be taken into account when considering the use of these medications. On the contrary, the data indicate that it may be safe to prescribe short-term NSAIDs for patients below 65 years of age and those with well-controlled diabetes."

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Pfizer completes FDA request for fall BA.4/5 boosters; feds expect doses in Sept.

For its latest images, the Webb telescope looked closer to home

The rise of powerful new technology means that humanity must confront the risk of its own demise. The invention of nuclear weaponry, for example, has already shown just how quickly humanity’s destructive power could grow. The atomic bomb was a thousand times more powerful than conventional explosives; many hydrogen bombs were a thousand times more powerful again. Within decades, the USA and USSR between them had created over ten thousand nuclear bombs. The next generation of weapons of mass destruction, such as bioweapons by engineered viruses, could dramatically increase humanity’s destructive power again—to the point that an all-out war could threaten all human life.

If Homo sapiens were to go extinct, what would that mean from a cosmic perspective? Would some other species evolve to become technologically capable, and discover science, create art, and build civilization in our place? Ultimately, I don’t think that’s at all guaranteed. The end of Homo sapiens would therefore not merely be an unimaginable loss from our perspective; it would fundamentally change the story of the universe.

It took 200 million years for humans to evolve from the first mammals. The last common ancestor of humans and chimps was alive only 8 million years ago, and there are still hundreds of millions of years remaining (at least) until the sun’s increasing brightness renders the earth uninhabitable to human-sized animals. Given this, you might think that, if Homo sapiens went extinct and chimps survived, a technologically capable species should be able to evolve from chimps, like Planet of the Apes, in 8 million years or less. Similarly, as long as some mammals survived, even if all primates went extinct, shouldn’t we expect a technologically capable species to evolve within around 200 million years? This is a long time, but it’s still easily short enough for such evolution to occur before the earth is no longer habitable.

This argument is too quick. We don’t know how unlikely the major evolutionary transitions were, and some of them—including, potentially, the evolution of a technologically capable species—were very unlikely indeed.

This reasoning is based on the Fermi paradox: the paradox that, even though there are at least hundreds of millions of rocky habitable-zone planets in the galaxy, and even though our galaxy is 13.5 billion years old—ample time for an interstellar civilization to spread widely across it—we see no evidence of alien life. If the galaxy is so vast and so old, why is it not teeming with aliens?

One answer is that something about our evolutionary history was exceptionally unlikely to occur. Perhaps planets that are conducive for life are in fact extremely rare (perhaps needing to be in a safe zone in the galaxy, with plate tectonics, a large moon, and the right chemical composition), or certain steps on the path from the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago to the evolution of Homo sapiens were extraordinarily uncommon. Potentially improbable steps include the creation of the first replicators from inorganic matter, the evolution of simple cells into complex cells with a nucleus and mitochondria (called “eukaryotes”), the evolution of sexual reproduction, and possibly even the evolution of a species, like Homo sapiens, that is distinct from other primates by virtue of being unusually intelligent, hypercooperative, culturally evolving, and capable of speech and language. Recent research by my colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute suggests that once we properly account for our uncertainty about just how unlikely these evolutionary transitions might be, it actually becomes not all that surprising that the universe is empty, even though it is so vast.

On this view, our evolutionary history involved some extraordinary luck. What we don’t know, however, is where in our evolutionary timeline this luck occurred. Perhaps after the evolution of the first replicators, the ultimate evolution of a technologically capable species was more or less inevitable. Or perhaps that initial step was easy, and it was the formation of eukaryotes that was the really lucky step.

Or perhaps the evolution of a species capable of building a technologically advanced civilization was extremely lucky, even if mammals or other primates had already evolved. After all, in the four billion years of our evolutionary history, the evolution of such a species occurred only once. And if that evolutionary transition were easy, we should wonder why it took hundreds of millions of years after the first animals came on the scene. For all we know, the evolutionary step from animals to a species like us might have been astronomically unlikely to occur.

We therefore cannot be confident that, were human civilization to end, some other technologically capable species would eventually take our place. And even if you think that there is a 90 percent chance this would happen, the remaining risk of the permanent end of civilization would still be great enough that reducing it should be a pressing moral priority.

Moreover, if some step in our evolutionary history was extremely improbable, there might be no other highly intelligent life elsewhere in the affectable universe, and there might never be. If this is true, then our actions are of cosmic significance.

With great rarity comes great responsibility. For 13 billion years, the known universe was lifeless; there was no consciousness. Around 500 million years ago, that changed, and the first conscious creatures evolved: the spark of a new flame. But those creatures were not conscious of being conscious; they did not know their place in the universe, and they could not begin to understand it. And then, merely a few thousand years ago—over a little more than one ten-millionth of the lifespan of the universe so far—we developed writing and mathematics, and we began to inquire about the nature of reality.

Now and in the coming centuries, we face threats that could kill us all. And if we mess this up, we mess it up forever. The universe’s self-understanding might be permanently lost and, within just a few hundred million years more, the brief and slender flame of consciousness that flickered for a while would be extinguished forever. The universe might return eternally to the state it occupied for much of its first nine billion years: cold, empty, dead.

Excerpted from What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill. Copyright © 2022. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

If Humans Went Extinct, Would a Similar Species Evolve?

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It was the first time in history that someone had documented a celestial body orbiting a planet that wasn’t Earth, and for nearly a century, the University of Michigan boasted Galileo’s Jupiter sketch as one of its “jewels.”

“This single-leaf manuscript is one of the great treasures of the University of Michigan Library,” the university wrote in a description of the document. “It reflects a pivotal moment in Galileo’s life that helped to change our understanding of the universe.”

Then, in May, a university curator received an email from Nick Wilding.

Wilding, a professor of history at Georgia State University, wrote to express “serious doubts” about the authenticity of the Galileo manuscript, library officials wrote in a new description of the manuscript’s origin. The university’s experts found Wilding’s findings “compelling evidence,” reexamined their jewel and came to the same conclusion he had.

It was a fake, written not in the early 1600s by the father of modern astronomy but more than 300 years later by an infamous forger.

The top half of the manuscript contains the draft of a letter accompanying Galileo's official presentation of a recently built telescope to the Doge of Venice on Aug. 24, 1609. The bottom half contains draft notes recording Galileo's telescopic observations of the moons of Jupiter from Jan. 7-15, 1610. The manuscript, which has been at the University of Michigan for decades, is now believed to be a forgery. (University of Michigan)

The manuscript popped up on the public’s radar in May 1934 when an auction house was selling the library of the late Roderick Terry, a wealthy collector of antiquarian books and manuscripts. According to the auction’s catalogue, the archbishop of Pisa authenticated the document by comparing it to a Galileo letter in his personal collection.

Tracy McGregor, a Detroit businessman, bought the manuscript. After his death, a trust set up in McGregor’s name bequeathed it to the University of Michigan in 1938 to honor one of its astronomy professors.

It’s been there ever since and, throughout its 84-year stay, was presumed to be genuine.

Then Wilding, author of an upcoming biography of Galileo, examined it. The university mentioned two things that led to the historian’s “serious doubts.”

The first: A watermark on the paper — “BMO,” a reference to the Italian city of Bergamo — suggested the document was far newer than experts had thought. No other document with that watermark predates 1770, more than 150 years after Galileo had supposedly written the manuscript charting Jupiter’s moons.

The second: Experts could find no trace of the manuscript’s existence before 1930, despite the “extremely thorough” documentation of Galileo’s works.

Cardinal Pietro Maffi, the archbishop of Pisa who authenticated the manuscript, did so by comparing it to two other works he believed Galileo had written but that were later determined to be forgeries.

Both of those fakes were donated to the archbishop by Tobia Nicotra, the man Wilding suspects forged the university’s manuscript. Described as a “well-known forger” by university officials, Nicotra was convicted in 1934 of selling a fake Mozart autograph to the son of a New York Philharmonic Orchestra conductor, according to a Nov. 10, 1934, article in the New York Times. At Nicotra’s trial in Milan, police said they found evidence that Nicotra was preparing fake autographs of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, among others.

Nicotra created his forgeries by going to the Milan library, ripping out blank pages from old books and then using them to create “autographs” of famous musicians, according to the 1934 Times article. Librarians in Milan testified the forger had destroyed dozens of books doing this.

Last week, University of Michigan library officials said Wilding’s discovery will force them to reconsider the value of the forged manuscript. They ended their announcement on a positive note, saying such a reconsideration could make it more important than ever.

“In the future, it may come to serve the research, learning, and teaching interests in the arena of fakes, forgeries, and hoaxes, a timeless discipline that’s never been more relevant.”

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New York, August 29, 2022 – The flow of time from the past to the future is a central feature of how we experience the world. But precisely how this phenomenon, known as the arrow of time, arises from the microscopic interactions among particles and cells is a mystery—one that researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS) are helping to unravel with the publication of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings could have important implications in a variety of disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, and biology.

Fundamentally, the arrow of time arises from the second law of thermodynamics: the principle that microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder. The more disordered a system becomes, the more difficult it is for it to find its way back to an ordered state, and the stronger the arrow of time. In short, the universe’s tendency toward disorder is the fundamental reason why we experience time flowing in one direction.

“The two questions our team had were, if we looked at a particular system, would we be able to quantify the strength of its arrow of time, and would we be able to sort out how it emerges from the micro scale, where cells and neurons interact, to the whole system?” said Christopher Lynn, the paper’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow with the ITS program. “Our findings provide the first step toward understanding how the arrow of time that we experience in daily life emerges from these more microscopic details.”

To begin answering these questions, the researchers explored how the arrow of time could be decomposed by observing specific parts of a system and the interactions between them. The parts, for example, could be the neurons that function within a retina. Looking at a single moment, they showed that the arrow of time can be broken down into different pieces: those produced by parts working individually, in pairs, in triplets or in more complicated configurations[.]

Armed with this way of decomposing the arrow of time, the researchers analyzed existing experiments on the response of neurons in a salamander retina to different movies. In one movie a single object moved randomly across the screen while another portrayed the full complexity of scenes found in nature. Across both movies, researchers found that the arrow of time emerged from the simple interactions between pairs of neurons—not large, complicated groups. Surprisingly, the team also observed that the retina showed a stronger arrow of time when watching random motion than a natural scene. Lynn said this latter finding raises questions about how our internal perception of the arrow of time becomes aligned with the external world.
“These results may be of particular interest to neuroscience researchers,” said Lynn. “They could, for example, lead to answers about whether the arrow of time functions differently in brains that are neuroatypical.”

“Chris’ decomposition of local irreversibility—also known as the arrow of time—is an elegant, general framework that may provide a novel perspective for exploring many high-dimensional, nonequilibrium systems,” said David Schwab, a professor of Physics and Biology at the Graduate Center and the study’s principal investigator.

Authors in order: Christopher W. Lynn, Ph.D, postdoctoral fellow, CUNY Graduate Center; Caroline M. Holmes, Ph.D student, Princeton; William Bialek, Ph.D, Physics professor, CUNY Graduate Center; and David J. Schwab, Ph.D., Physics and Biology professor, CUNY Graduate Center
Funding sources: National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, James S McDonnell Foundation, Simons Foundation, and Alfred P Sloan Foundation.

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Yet a few theoretical physicists argue that because time does march on, it is like an arrow. This 'arrow of time' would move into the future, and to bolster their idea they invoke the second law of thermodynamics: the principle that microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder. The more disordered a system becomes, the more difficult it is for it to find its way back to an ordered state, and the stronger the arrow of time.

In short, the universe’s tendency toward disorder is the fundamental reason why we experience time flowing in one direction.

Credit: Georgia State University

A new paper hopes to shore up this belief by tackling two questions. If they looked at a particular system, would they be able to quantify the strength of its arrow of time, and would they be able to sort out how it emerges from the micro scale, where cells and neurons interact, to the whole system?

It's theoretical physics, not science as the public understands it, and often it can seem like fiction, but the researchers explored how an arrow of time could be decomposed by observing specific parts of a system and the interactions between them. The parts, for example, could be the neurons that function within a retina. Looking at a single moment, they showed that the arrow of time can be broken down into different pieces: those produced by parts working individually, in pairs, in triplets or in more complicated configurations

After accepting this decomposing of the arrow of time, the researchers analyzed existing experiments on the response of neurons in a salamander retina to different movies. In one movie a single object moved randomly across the screen while another portrayed the full complexity of scenes found in nature. Across both movies, researchers found that the arrow of time emerged from the simple interactions between pairs of neurons—not large, complicated groups. The team also observed that the retina showed a stronger arrow of time when watching random motion than a natural scene.

The authors believe this latter finding raises questions about how our internal perception of the arrow of time becomes aligned with the external world.

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Even spiders, it seems, have fallen victim to misinformation.

Media reports about people’s encounters with spiders tend to be full of falsehoods with a distinctly negative spin. An analysis of a decade’s worth of newspaper stories from dozens of countries finds that nearly half of the reports contain errors, arachnologist Catherine Scott and colleagues report August 22 in Current Biology.

“The vast majority of the spider content out there is about them being scary and hurting people,” says Scott, of McGill University in Montreal. In reality, they note, “spiders almost never bite people.”

Of the roughly 50,000 known spider species, vanishingly few are dangerous. Instead, many spiders benefit us by eating insects like mosquitoes that are harmful to people. Even with the rare exceptions like brown recluse and black widow spiders, bites are extremely uncommon, Scott says. Some stories about bites blamed spiders that don’t occur in the area, and others reported symptoms that don’t match symptoms of actual bites. “So many stories about spider bites included no evidence whatsoever that there was any spider involved,” they say.

To conduct the study, Scott and their colleagues analyzed over 5,000 online newspaper stories about humans and spiders from 2010 to 2020 across 81 countries. In addition to errors, the team determined that 43 percent of the stories were sensationalized, often using words like nasty, killer, agony and nightmare. International and national newspapers were more likely to sensationalize spiders than regional outlets. Stories that included a spider expert were less sensationalistic, though there was no such effect from other experts, including doctors.

If people knew the truth about spiders, they could spend less time blaming them for bites and killing them with pesticides that are toxic to many other species, including humans, Scott says. Clearing up the misinformation would be good for spiders, too — especially the one in your house that doesn’t get squashed out of fear. Spiders in general stand to benefit, the researchers conclude, because news helps shape public opinion, which can influence decisions about wildlife conservation.

“Spiders are kind of unique in that they seem to be really good at capturing people’s attention,” says arachnologist Lisa Taylor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the study. “If that attention is paired with real information about how fascinating they are, rather than sensationalistic misinformation, then I think spiders are well-suited to serve as tiny ambassadors for wildlife in general.”

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"Our results indicate that heart failure patients should be prioritized for COVID-19 vaccinations and boosters," said study author Dr. Caroline Sindet-Pedersen of Herlev and Gentofe Hospital, Hellerup, Denmark. "COVID-19 vaccines will continue to be important for preventing morbidity and mortality in vulnerable patient populations. Thus, studies emphasizing the safety of these vaccines are essential to reassure those who might be hesitant and ensure continued uptake of vaccinations."

Patients with heart failure are at increased risk of hospitalization, need for mechanical ventilation, and death due to COVID-19. Vaccination reduces the risk of serious illness from COVID-19. However, "Due to perceptions about possible cardiovascular side effects from mRNA vaccines in heart failure patients, this study examined the risk of cardiovascular complications and death associated with mRNA vaccines in a nationwide cohort of patients with heart failure," said Dr. Sindet-Pedersen.

The study included 50,893 unvaccinated patients with heart failure in 2019 and 50,893 patients with heart failure in 2021 who were vaccinated with either of the two mRNA vaccines (BNT162B2 or mRNA-1273). The two groups were matched for age, sex, and duration of heart failure. The median age of participants was 74 years and 35% were women. The median duration of heart failure was 4.1 years. Participants were followed for 90 days for all-cause mortality, worsening heart failure, venous thromboembolism, and myocarditis, starting from the date of the second vaccination for the 2021 group and the same date in 2019 for the unvaccinated group.

The researchers compared the risk of adverse outcomes in the two groups, after standardizing for age, sex, heart failure duration, use of heart failure medications, ischemic heart disease, cancer, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and admission with heart failure less than 90 days before the first date of follow up. Dr. Sindet-Pedersen explained, "Standardization imitates a randomized trial and is a way to obtain a better causal interpretation of the results from observational studies."

Among 101,786 heart failure patients, the researchers found that receiving an mRNA vaccine was not associated with an increased risk of worsening heart failure, myocarditis or venous thromboembolism but was associated with a decreased risk of all-cause mortality. The standardized risk of all-cause mortality within 90 days was 2.2% in the 2021 cohort (vaccinated) and 2.6% in the 2019 cohort (not vaccinated), showing a significantly lower risk for all-cause mortality in 2021 versus 2019. The standardized risk of worsening heart failure within 90 days was 1.1% in both cohorts. Similarly, no significant differences were found between groups for venous thromboembolism or myocarditis.

Dr. Sindet-Pedersen concluded, "The study suggests that there should be no concern about cardiovascular side effects from mRNA vaccines in heart failure patients. In addition, the results point to a beneficial effect of vaccination on mortality."

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Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo, a Ph.D. student at EPFL's Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERlab), made a chance discovery during his research on phase transitions in Vanadium Dioxide (VO2). VO2 has an insulating phase when relaxed at room temperature, and undergoes a steep insulator-to-metal transition at 68 °C, where its lattice structure changes. Classically, VO2 exhibits a volatile memory: "the material reverts back to the insulating state right after removing the excitation" says Samizadeh Nikoo. For his thesis, he set out to discover how long it takes for VO2 to transition from one state to another. But his research led him down a different path: after taking hundreds of measurements, he observed a memory effect in the material's structure.

An unexpected discovery

In his experiments, Samizadeh Nikoo applied an electric current to a sample of VO2. "The current moved across the material, following a path until it exited on the other side," he explains. As the current heated up the sample, it caused the VO2 to change state. And once the current had passed, the material returned to its initial state.

Samizadeh Nikoo then applied a second current pulse to the material, and saw that the time it took to change state was directly linked to the history of the material. "The VO2 seemed to 'remember' the first phase transition and anticipate the next," explains Prof. Elison Matioli, who heads the POWERlab. "We didn't expect to see this kind of memory effect, and it has nothing to do with electronic states but rather with the physical structure of the material. It's a novel discovery: no other material behaves in this way."

A memory of up to three hours

The researchers went on to find that VO2 is capable of remembering its most recent external stimulus for up to three hours. "The memory effect could in fact persist for several days, but we don't currently have the instruments needed to measure that," says Matioli.

The research team's discovery is important because the memory effect they observed is an innate property of the material itself. Engineers rely on memory to perform calculations of all kinds, and materials that could enhance the calculation process by offering greater capacity, speed and miniaturization are in high demand. VO2 ticks all three of these boxes. What's more, its continuous, structural memory sets it apart from conventional materials that store data as binary information dependent on the manipulation of electronic states.

The researchers performed a host of measurements to arrive at their findings. They also corroborated their results by applying the new method to different materials at other laboratories around the world. This discovery replicates well what happens in the brain, as VO2 switches act just like neurons.

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Monday, August 22

The first launch of the week will take off from China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 3 a.m. UTC. A Long March 11 will be launched from there carrying a mystery payload. Apparently, this could be the first flight of the Long March 11A variant, which features a larger first stage.

The Long March 11 is a very interesting rocket. It’s adapted from a Chinese Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and as such, launches from a tube using compressed gas before the engines are fired. This means that it can be launched at short notice and from almost anywhere, including sea platforms. Check out the video to see previous launches of this rocket.

Wednesday, August 24

The second and final launch of the week is a Falcon 9 taking off from Florida. SpaceX is launching 53 Starlink satellites to boost the coverage of its broadband-beaming satellite constellation. The Starlink satellites launching this time are known as Starlink Group 4-23 – this can help amateur astronomers and satellite watchers find this particular group of satellites through apps like ISS Detector. It’s not clear what time this mission is launching, but check SpaceX’s website on the day for a stream.

Recap

The first video from last week is of a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule undocking from the ISS and returning to Earth.

Next, we go to the launch of a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink Group 4-27.

Finally, China launched a Long March 2D rocket carrying three Yaogan-35 satellites that will be used for Earth observation.

That’s all we’ve got this week, check back next time.

TWIRL 79: China to start the week with the launch of a mystery payload

Mayapan served as the capital to some 20,000 Maya people in the 13th through mid-15th centuries but collapsed and was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family. Extensive historical records date this collapse to sometime between 1441 and 1461.

But new evidence shows drought in the century prior may have played a larger role in the city's demise than was previously known. The study authors note this is relevant today as humans grapple with a future of increased climate change.

Marilyn Masson, an archaeologist and professor and chair of UAlbany's Department of Anthropology, helped design and is a co-author of the study, which was assisted by an international team of interdisciplinary researchers. They studied historical documents for records of violence and examined human remains from that area and time period for signs of traumatic injury.

Masson, who serves as principal investigator for the Proyecto Económico de Mayapan, said she and the team found shallow mass graves and evidence of brutal massacre at monumental structures across the city.

"Some were laid out with knives in their pelvis and rib cages, and other skeletal remains were chopped up and burned," she said. "Not only did they smash and burn the bodies, but they also smashed and burned the effigies of their gods. It's a form of double desecration basically."

But that was hardly the most shocking discovery for the researchers.

That came when Douglas Kennett, the lead study author with the University of California Santa Barbara's anthropology department, dated the skeletons using accelerator mass spectrometry, an advanced form of radiocarbon dating technology, and found they dated some 50 to 100 years earlier than the city's storied mid-15th century downfall.

"So then we started asking why? Because this is a case where archaeology reveals something that's not told in history," Masson said.

Plenty of ethnohistorical records exist to support the city's violent downfall and abandonment around 1458, she said. But the new evidence of massacre up to 100 years earlier, together with climate data that found prolonged drought around that time, led the team to suspect environmental factors may have played a role.

Ruins of the monumental center of Mayapan. Credit: Marilyn Masson

Paleoclimate scientists were able to calculate annual rainfall levels from that period using a dating process that relied on calcite deposits in nearby caves, and found evidence of a drying trend throughout the 1300s. In particular, researchers found a significant relationship between a period of drought and substantial population decline from 1350 to 1430.

The Maya depended heavily on rain-fed maize but lacked any centralized long-term grain storage. The impacts of rainfall levels on food production, then, are believed to be linked to human migration, population decline, warfare and shifts in political power, the study states.

"It's not that droughts cause social conflict, but they create the conditions whereby violence can occur," Masson said.

The study authors suggest the Xiu, who launched the ultimate fatal attacks on the Cocom, used the droughts and ensuing famines to foment the unrest and rebellion that led to the mass deaths and outmigration from Mayapan in the 1300s.

"I think the lesson is that hardship can become politicized in the worst kind of way," Masson said. "It creates opportunities for ruthlessness and can cause people to turn on one another violently."

Following this period of drought and unrest, however, the city appears to have bounced back briefly with the help of healthy rainfall levels around 1400, the authors wrote.

"Mayapan was able to bend pretty far and then bounce back before the droughts returned by the 1420s, but it was too soon," Masson said. "They didn't have enough time to recover, and the tensions were still there and the city's government just couldn't survive another bout like that. But it almost did."

As food insecurity, social unrest and drought-driven migration in parts of the world continue to be of great concern, Masson said there are lessons in how other empires have handled environmental hardships.

The Aztec, for example, survived the infamous "Famine of One Rabbit," which had been fueled by a catastrophic drought in the year 1454. The emperor emptied out stores of food from the capital to feed citizens and when that ran out, encouraged them to flee, Masson said. Many sold themselves into slavery on the Gulf Coast where conditions were better, but eventually bought their way out, returned to the capital, and the empire was stronger than ever.

This strategy enacted by the Aztec imperial regime is likely what allowed for their recovery, Masson said.

"Overall, we argue that human responses to drought on the Yucatan Peninsula…were complex," the study concludes. "On the one hand, drought stimulated civil conflict and institutional failure at Mayapan. However, even after Mayapan fell, despite decentralization, intervals of mobility, temporary impacts to trade, and continuing military conflict, a resilient network of small Maya states persisted that were encountered by Europeans in the early 16th century. These complexities are important as we attempt to evaluate the potential success or failure of modern state institutions designed to maintain internal order and peace in the face of future climate change."

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Behold this award-winning image of fungus making a fly its “zombie” slave

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Dark matter makes up 85 per cent of the cosmos and binds the universe together, but exactly what it is and how it works remains unknown.

The biggest mystery in the universe could be solved one kilometre underground in a gold mine in country Victoria where a new laboratory opened on Friday.

Dark matter makes up 85 per cent of the cosmos and binds the universe together, but exactly what it is and how it works remains unknown.

“[Discovering dark matter] would help our exploration of space. And the detectors we develop would most likely be able to be used in other fields.

Probably most likely medical fields,” Iles said.

The Stawell project’s lead researcher, Professor Elisabetta Barberio from the University of Melbourne, said dark matter was common even in Earth’s atmosphere.

“We don’t know what the majority of the universe is made of, so understanding dark matter is understanding the universe,” Barberio said.

“Without the dark matter we would not have galaxies, we would not exist.

“There are many, many thousands of dark matter particles passing through us. So there is all this universe around us [that] we don’t see, and we would like to know what it is.”

In the next few months an eight-metre tall steel box weighing 200 tonnes will be installed at the mine, containing cylindrical crystals and liquid which will be used to carry out the study.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

A similar project is also underway at an underground laboratory in northern Italy, to make sure both record accurate results.

“We need to repeat the experiments in the Southern Hemisphere, because we want to eliminate any possibility that the signal is due to noise that has to do with season or has to do with the location where they are,” Barberio said.

Iles also said on 3AW the Stawell project was buried deep in a mine underground to ensure signals, such as radio transmissions, did not interfere with attempts to detect the unknown matter.

“Essentially you’re removing any contamination you might get up on the surface of the Earth. And then it means when you get a signal in your detector, you can be 99.9 per cent sure what you’ve measured is, in fact, dark matter and not anything else,” Iles said.

The Commonwealth and Victorian governments have each put in $5 million towards the $12 million Stawell facility, which will begin major work early next year.

Regional Development Minister Harriet Shing said the laboratory would put Stawell at the centre of cutting-edge science.

“[It] will attract the eyes of the world to this goldfield town and create local jobs while boosting investment opportunities for the region,” Ms Shing said.

Source

Among those in attendance were Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Marie Curie, along with 26 other leading physicists, more than half of whom had already won or were on their way to winning Nobel Prizes. They were there to discuss quantum mechanics – then a revolutionary new theory of matter and light – and its troubling discordance with Einstein’s description of gravity, known as general relativity.

Almost 95 years later, the same puzzle is motivating another meeting of minds underway this week in Vancouver, where organizers hope to renew the push to unite quantum mechanics with general relativity and create an overarching mathematical framework that explains all known phenomena.

The result would amount to a theory of quantum gravity, sometimes called a “theory of everything,” which would extend into places where current physics breaks down, such as inside black holes, or the instant of the universe’s creation.

“Physics is completely based on these two theories and both of them have been incredibly successful ... except that they’re incompatible,” said Philip Stamp, a professor at the University of British Columbia and chair of this week’s conference. “If that’s not an important scientific problem, it’s hard to know what is.”

The Vancouver gathering – which is set to have its own group photo on Wednesday, in an echo of the Solvay conference – has also drawn its share of Nobel laureates. Among them are Kip Thorne, an expert on black holes, and James Peebles, the Canadian-born cosmologist who helped develop the Big Bang into a well-tested and widely accepted theory of the origin of the universe. Other luminaries, including Cambridge University theorist and mathematician Sir Roger Penrose and British Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, are joining remotely.

All four will be featured speakers during the meeting’s keynote day on Wednesday, which will be oriented toward a broad public audience.

For some participants the meeting is a first opportunity to venture out and discuss new developments in the field since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But for Dr. Stamp and others, the point is to draw attention to a longer term project to establish an institute that would make Vancouver a centre for quantum gravity research.

The idea has garnered support from an array of prominent business leaders who are backing the conference and its broader aims, including real estate developer Terry Hui and video game and software entrepreneur Paul Lee.

Both have prior ties to the world of physics. Mr. Hui earned his undergraduate degree in the subject at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mr. Lee is the board chair of D-Wave, the Vancouver-area quantum computer company.

They have been joined in their efforts by venture capitalist Moe Kermani, internet entrepreneur Markus Frind and mining financier Frank Giustra. All five are listed as founding members of Vancouver’s Quantum Gravity Society, together with Dr. Stamp, Dr. Penrose and other scientists.

“I’m quite excited thinking about it,” Mr. Hui said in an interview. Calling the search for quantum gravity a “childhood dream,” he described his choice to pursue a career in business as a far easier road than the one followed by contemporaries who stayed in physics and tried to answer humanity’s deepest questions about the nature of reality.

Unexpectedly, the group’s quest to forge a new future for physics began with a concern about preserving its past, Dr. Stamp said.

It was during a visit with colleagues in the U.K., before the pandemic, that he learned of Michael Wright, an independent archivist who had collected a vast set of recordings and other materials chronicling the key developments in theoretical physics since the 1960s, including early lectures by Stephen Hawking, Dr. Penrose and others.

The problem was how to preserve and digitize the archive to make it more widely available to scientists and historians of science. Dr. Stamp, who is director of UBC’s Pacific Institute for Theoretical Physics, thought he could help. Soon he was in touch with Mr. Lee. Between them, an idea germinated: the archive could be housed in Vancouver.

Since then, legal arrangements to take over the archive have been completed, and work on digitizing the collection is now ready to proceed. The total cost of the project is estimated to be about $4-million, Mr. Lee said, which will be provided by the Quantum Gravity Society’s cohort of philanthropists.
Dr. Stamp said it was Mr. Hui who urged him and other physicists to think bigger, and plan not just for the archive but for an institute dedicated to “the most important problem in science.”

This is not the first time a science-minded philanthropist has championed such an idea in Canada. In 1999, Blackberry developer and co-founder Mike Lazaridis established the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont. The institute has since grown into a high-profile and globally significant research facility, supported by a combination of public and private funding.

Mr. Lee said the goal in Vancouver is to pursue a somewhat different plan, by facilitating strong collaborations among researchers in quantum gravity who have home bases elsewhere.

The institute would help advance science, he said, reinforce Canada’s role in the field and provide opportunities to develop or attract future Nobel laureates.

“You now, they don’t all have to leave in order to be recognized or to have ideas,” he said. “Maybe we can bring some of the world to Canada.”

Source

HERE'S THE BACKGROUND — Protons consist of particles known as quarks. There are six kinds of quarks. Three are light quarks, ones lighter than protons — up, down, and strange. Three are heavy quarks, ones heavier than protons — charm, bottom, and top.

Protons are generally thought to consist of two up quarks and one down quark, all bound together by a sea of particles known as gluons. However, quantum physics suggests there is no such thing as empty space, not even within protons. Instead, what is apparently empty space is buzzing with an infinite number of virtual particles and virtual antiparticles that briefly pop in and out of existence. As such, there is a chance that quarks other than the up and down kind can manifest inside protons.

Previous research found that heavy quarks can exist within protons in extreme high-energy collisions and that protons can also possess strange quarks and strange anti-quarks under normal circumstances. However, it was uncertain whether heavy quarks might also regularly help make up protons.

The configuration of quarks in baryonic particles. Shutterstock

WHAT DID THE SCIENTISTS DO? — In the new study, a team of scientists known as the Neural Network Parton Distribution Function Collaboration analyzed data from particle collisions — say, between a proton and an electron, or between two protons. They searched for evidence of charm quarks, the lightest of the heavy quarks. (A proton has a mass of about 940 million electron-volts, whereas the charm quark has a mass of about 1,500 million electron-volts.)

During particle collisions, extrinsic charm quarks — ones that don't normally belong within protons — would appear in the center of collisions, popping into existence with the help of the high energies of the impacts. In contrast, intrinsic charm quarks — ones that existed within the protons before the collisions — would appear far away from the center of the impacts, moving in the same direction of travel as the proton they were originally part of.

WHAT DID THEY FIND? — Using artificial intelligence software to analyze huge volumes of particle collider data, the scientists detected evidence of intrinsic charm quarks within protons. It makes up about 0.62 percent of the proton, they found.

"The proton, a particle which accounts for essentially all mass in the visible universe and that is at the core of all matter, that we have studied extensively for more than 100 years, continues to be a source of amazing surprises," study co-author Juan Rojo, a theoretical particle physicist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, tells Inverse. "This remarkable result highlights the beautiful and ever-surprising character of quantum theory — we have shown that the proton contains constituents, charm quarks, whose mass is larger than that of the proton itself."

WHAT'S NEXT? — Future research can see if the proton may also intrinsically possess the two heaviest quarks — bottom, which has a mass of about 4,200 million electron-volts, and top, which has a mass of about 173,000 million electron-volts. This latest work is just "the start of a long-term research program that aims to unveil the possible existence of other intrinsic heavy quarks in the proton," Rojo says. Such work could help answer "what determines the mass of the proton, one of the major open questions in physics," he adds.

Source

It follows an unusually dry period and hot summer in many areas.

Where are the drought areas?

Along with a large part of South-west Wales, nine areas of England are in drought:

•  Devon and Cornwall

•  East Anglia

•  Herts and North London

•  Kent and South London

•  Lincolnshire

•  Northamptonshire and East Midlands

•  Solent and South Downs

•  Thames

•  Yorkshire

The Environment Agency (EA) says the West Midlands could also be declared a drought area in the near future.

Map showing drought areas in England and Wales

Separately, Northern Ireland Water has asked the UK government to put drought order measures in place.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has temporarily banned farmers in parts of Fife from using water from the River Eden on their fields.

•  Drought declared across large parts of England

•  Scottish agency issues water scarcity warning

What is a drought?

The Environment Agency decides whether to declare a drought after speaking with water companies, government officials and groups including famers' representatives.

It looks at data including rainfall, river flows, groundwater levels, reservoir levels, and the dryness of soils.

The EA's latest water situation report shows some river levels are the lowest ever recorded.

Graphic showing four ways to save water at home

What happens when a drought is declared?

Declaring a drought in a specific area does not oblige water companies to restrict water use.

However, it means they put into operation pre-arranged drought plans, which may include temporary use bans on things like hosepipes and lawn sprinklers.

Map showing areas with hosepipe bans, as of 17 August

Other possible options include:

•  taking more water than usual from rivers

•  using desalination plants, such as the one in London

•  cutting non-essential use of water beyond hosepipe bans

The EA is also urging water companies to act to reduce leakage from pipes as quickly as possible.

•  What are water companies doing to tackle leaks?

•  Why drought can lead to dangerous flooding

Why are there droughts in Britain this year?

In the first three months of the year, England's rainfall was down 26% while in Wales it was down 22%.

This meant that even before the summer had started, average river flows were "below normal" or "exceptionally low".

Chart plotting the top ten hottest UK days on record since 1900

In July, rainfall was a quarter of the normal level.

Overuse of water has made the situation worse. The government says over a quarter of the UK's underground water sources have too much water taken from them.

•  Driest July in England since 1935 - Met Office

What problems do droughts cause?

The effects of drought can include:

•  water polluted and fish killed

•  crop failure

•  wildfires

Berry farmers have reported losing some of their crop.

Vegetables such as potatoes are at particular risk because of their high-water content.

Farmers are delay planting crops for next year such as rapeseed because of the dry soil.

Sheep and lambs are suffering from undernourishment.

There have been multiple fires, with significant damage to homes and grasslands.

London Fire Brigade dealt with 340 grassland fires in the first week of August - eight times as many as they had to deal with in the same week last year.

Because of the high risk of wildfires, some shops have removed disposable barbecues from shelves.

Map showing areas of the UK at risk of fires because of the dry weather

In Surrey and Yorkshire, the Environment Agency has had to move fish from rivers which are drying up to and deeper and cooler waters.

What happened in the 1976 and 2018 droughts?

In 1976 and 2018 the UK had severe droughts lasting months, caused by a dry springs and very hot summers.

The government got emergency powers under the 176 Drought Act to turn off domestic and industrial water supplies.

In 2018, the drought led to crop failures, which raised food prices. Multiple water restrictions were imposed.

Could we see more droughts in the future?

The National Infrastructure Commission - which advises the UK government - says there could be more droughts in future because of population growth and climate change.

It has called for people to use less water and for water companies to let less of it leak away.

It's thought up to three billion litres of water are lost in the UK every day.

Source

I look to the stars, and I see semicolons. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

It turns out that JavaScript, the programming language that web developers and users alike love to complain about, had a hand in delivering the stunning images that the James Webb Space Telescope has been beaming back to Earth. And no, I don’t mean that in some snarky way, like that the website NASA hosts them on uses JavaScript (it does). I mean that the actual telescope, arguably one of humanity’s finest scientific achievements, is largely controlled by JavaScript files. Oh, and it’s based on a software development kit from 2002.

According to a manuscript (PDF) for the JWST’s Integrated Science Instrument Module (or ISIM), the software for the ISIM is controlled by “the Script Processor Task (SP), which runs scripts written in JavaScript upon receiving a command to do so.” The actual code in charge of turning those JavaScripts (NASA’s phrasing, not mine) into actions can run 10 of them at once.

The manuscript and the paper (pdf) “JWST: Maximizing efficiency and minimizing ground systems,” written by the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Ilana Dashevsky and Vicki Balzano, describe this process in great detail, but I’ll oversimplify a bit to save you the pages of reading. The JWST has a bunch of these pre-written scripts for doing specific tasks, and scientists on the ground can tell it to run those tasks. When they do, those JavaScripts will be interpreted by a program called the script processor, which will then reach out to the other applications and systems that it needs to based on what the script calls for. The JWST isn’t running a web browser where JavaScript directly controls the Mid-Infrared Instrument — it’s more like when a manager is given a list of tasks (in this example, the JavaScripts) to do and delegates them out to their team.

The JavaScripts are still very important, though — the ISIM is the collection of instruments that actually take the pictures through the telescope, and the scripts control that process. NASA calls it “the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope.”

It seems a bit odd, then, that it uses such an old technology; according to Dashevsky and Balzano, the language the scripts are written in is called Nombas ScriptEase 5.00e. According to Nombas’ (now-defunct) website, the latest update to ScriptEase 5.00e was released in January 2003 — yes, almost two decades ago. There are people who can vote who weren’t born when the software controlling some of the JWST’s most vital instruments came out.

This knowledge has been bubbling up on the internet in Hacker News and Twitter threads for years, but it still surprised quite a few of us here at The Verge once it actually clicked. At first blush, it just seems odd that such a vital (not to mention expensive) piece of scientific equipment would be controlled by a very old version of a technology that’s not particularly known for being robust.

After thinking about it for a second, though, the software’s age makes a bit more sense — while the JWST was launched in late 2021, the project has been in the works since 1989. When construction on the telescope started in 2004, ScriptEase 5 would’ve only been around two years old, having launched in 2002. That’s actually not particularly old, given that spacecraft are often powered by tried-and-true technology instead of the latest and greatest. Because of how long projects like the JWST take to (literally) get off the ground, things that had to be locked in early on can seem out of date by more conventional standards when launch day rolls around.

It’s worth noting that, like the project itself, these documents that describe the JWST’s JavaScript system are pretty old; the one written by Dashevsky and Balzano is undated but came out in 2006, according to ResearchGate, and the ISIM manuscript is from 2011. (There does appear to have been a version published in 2010, but the one I read cites papers published in 2011.) It’s always possible that NASA could’ve changed the scripting system since then, but that seems like a pretty big undertaking that would’ve been mentioned somewhere. Also, while NASA didn’t reply to The Verge’s request for comment, this JWST documentation page published in 2017 mentions “event-driven science operations,” which is pretty much exactly how the documents describe the JavaScript-based system.

This knowledge base, by the way, also contains a few more details on the telescope’s 68 GB SSD, saying that it can hold somewhere between 58.8 and 65 gigabytes of actual scientific data. Wait, did I forget to mention that? Yes, this telescope’s solid state drive has around the same capacity as the one that was available in the original 2008 MacBook Air.

Anyways, we’re not here to talk about the JWST’s storage. I feel like the big question at this point is why Javascript? Sure, there’s probably a bit more angst about the language now than there was in the time when the project’s engineers were selecting tech for the project, but NASA is famous among some programmers for its strict programming guidelines — what’s the point of going with web-like scripts instead of more traditional code?

Well, NASA’s document says that this way of doing things gives “operations personnel greater visibility, control and flexibility over the telescope operations,” letting them easily change the scripts “as they learn the ramifications and subtleties of operating the instruments.” Basically, NASA’s working with a bunch of files that are written in a somewhat human-readable format — if they need to make changes, they can just open up a text editor, do a bunch of testing on the ground, then send the updated file to the JWST. It’s certainly easier (and therefore likely less error-prone) than if every program was written in arcane code that you’d have to recompile if you wanted to make changes.

If you’re still worried, do note that the Space Telescope Science Institute’s document mentions that the script processor itself is written in C++, which is known for being... well, the type of language you’d want to use if you were programming a spacecraft. And it’s obviously working, right? The pictures are incredible, no matter what kind of code was run to generate them. It is, however, a fun piece of trivia — next time you’re cursing the modern web for being so slow and wishing that someone would just blast JavaScript into space, you can remember that NASA has, in fact, done that.

The James Webb Space Telescope runs JavaScript, apparently

Not all progress is good.

Hispanolistic/Getty Images

 

It's probably a little early to be warning of extinction, but in some new cars, buttons are becoming hard to find. Given that a screen has to go into the dashboard anyway (thanks to things like backup camera requirements) and the fact that people increasingly won't consider a car without Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, touchscreens make life easier for automakers in terms of design and assembly.

 

It's just that they don't make life easier for drivers. Instead, we're treated to bad interfaces that don't create muscle memory but instead distract us while we should be driving. And now, Swedish car publication Vi Bilägare has the data to prove it.

 

VB tested 11 new cars alongside a 2005 Volvo C70, timing how long it took to perform a list of tasks in each car. These included turning on the seat heater, increasing the cabin temperature, turning on the defroster, adjusting the radio, resetting the trip computer, turning off the screen, and dimming the instruments.

 

The old Volvo was the clear winner. "The four tasks is handled within ten seconds flat, during which the car is driven 306 meters at 110 km/h [1,004 feet at 68 mph]," VB found. Most of the other cars required twice as long, or more, to complete the same tasks.

 

VB says that "one important aspect of this test is that the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems before the test started." With my devil's advocate hat on for a second, most drivers who drive regularly will regularly drive the same car, building more familiarity over months and years than a journalist will after even a week with a new model. But that kind of long-term adaptation is the user conforming to the vehicle's wishes, and shouldn't good design be the opposite of that?

Why they pushed the button on all-touch interfaces

VB lays the blame for the shift from bottons to screens with designers who "want a 'clean' interior with minimal switchgear." That's fair, but I don't think we can count out the accountants either. If everything can be achieved by touching the screen, then the company doesn't also have to pay for the plastic and wires that buttons are made from, nor the time it takes someone to make that into buttons or install them in a car.

 

Even with touchscreens, though, we can see in the spread of scores VB gave to different all-touch cars that design matters. You'll find almost no buttons in a Tesla Model 3, and we called out the lack of buttons in the Subaru Outback in our review, but both performed quite well in VB's tests. And VW's use of capacitive touch (versus physical) for the controls on the center stack appears to be exactly the wrong decision in terms of usability, with the ID.3 right at the bottom of the pack in VB's scores.

 

I'm not surprised that the BMW iX scored well; although it has a touchscreen, you're not obligated to use it. BMW's rotary iDrive controller falls naturally to hand, and there are permanent controls arrayed around it under a sliver of wood that both looks and feels interesting. It's an early implementation of what the company calls shy tech, and it's a design trend I am very much looking forward to seeing evolve in the future.

 

Again, there are examples of automakers doing this better than others. Over the past couple of weeks I've spent time in an Acura MDX and Mazda CX-50, neither of which uses a touchscreen infotainment system. Neither managed to do better than 19 mpg either, which is frankly appalling in 2022, but the CX-50 did at least distinguish itself for ease of use when it came to the infotainment system.

 

Mazda's latest system has been criticized for being bare-bones, but odds are, a driver is using Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and it's actually quite easy to use with the rotary controller and its hard buttons, which, again, are right where your right hand expects them to be (or left hand, in a right-hand-drive car).

 

The more expensive Acura also places the infotainment screen far out of reach. It's a much higher-resolution display befitting a much more expensive car, and the MDX's infotainment system is much more capable than the CX-50's in terms of apps and features. I also quite like the layout and fonts, although obviously that's a pretty subjective thing.

 

I won't subject you to the depth of my current feelings about Acura's "true touchpad," just a high-level, mostly polite version. It has a 1:1 relationship between the screen and the pad, so it doesn't work at all like any other trackpad in any other car you might have driven. And that means it requires a lot of concentration to use, particularly if you're trying to interact with CarPlay. And it doesn't need saying that "requires concentration to use" is likely the last quality anyone wants in an infotainment system.

 

I'm not that surprised that the old Volvo won, dating from a time when most functions were controlled by individual buttons and when infotainment didn't really yet exist. And in some ways, the tests played to its strengths—there's no Android Auto or CarPlay, and the only safe way your phone is showing you directions is if you bring a suction mount. Do be careful what you press if anyone's sitting in the back seat, though. In Volvos of that vintage, one of those buttons drops the rear headrests, which are rather heavy and very much wish to return to a horizontal orientation with absolute disregard for the skulls of anyone sitting in their way.

 

Buttons beat touchscreens in cars, and now there’s data to prove it

All eyes will be on the moon as the Artemis mission’s inaugural launch blasts toward our lunar neighbor in a couple of weeks, but the rocket won’t be the only new craft heading to space. After NASA’s Orion capsule separates from the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the SLS will deploy 10 tiny satellites, each about the size of a shoebox, which will then head off in different directions. The SLS will make for a deluxe ride into deep space for the probes, which researchers usually launch into low Earth orbit aboard much smaller rockets.

One of the miniaturized spacecraft, dubbed the Near Earth Asteroid Scout, will aim for a particularly distant target: It will swing past the moon en route toward a near-Earth asteroid, where it will take detailed images. The satellite will be propelled there by a sweeping solar sail. Despite its diminutive size, the NEA Scout, as it’s known for short, can do cutting-edge science while aiding the search for the kind of asteroid that future larger-class missions might want to visit.

“We want to image everything possible regarding the asteroid’s rotation, its size, its brightness, and its local environment,” says Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and head of the NEA Scout science team. The spacecraft is equipped with a miniature yet top-of-the-line camera, similar in resolution to the one aboard NASA's OSIRIS-REx, a much larger asteroid-probing craft. “It’s very capable, but very small,” she says.

NEA Scout and its nine comrades demonstrate the many possible uses of nanosatellites known as CubeSats. Each is made up of sets of cubes that measure about 4 inches on a side. While some CubeSats are composed of three units in a row, called 3U, the spacecraft aboard Artemis 1 are 6U. 

The Capstone spacecraft, the first CubeSat launched as part of the Artemis program, is a 12U. Capstone launched in June and will scope out an orbit around the moon for the planned Lunar Gateway space station, which astronauts will assemble during future Artemis missions. All such satellites exploit miniaturized technologies and cram a battery, electronics, cameras, and other tools into an extremely compact space, enabling cheaper research than building larger spacecraft, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

After the NEA Scout deploys from the SLS rocket, it will fly by the moon, and then slowly unfurl its solar sail several days later. Like everything else, the sail will initially be packed into a small box, fitting snugly into a third of the craft. But not for long. “As soon as we give that command, four metallic booms will pop open, pulling the sail off of a spool. It’s 925 square feet, roughly a school bus by a school bus,” says Les Johnson, head of the NEA Scout technology team at Marshall Space Flight Center.

The sail is coated with reflective aluminum that’s thinner than foil—like Saran Wrap but not sticky, Johnson says. Unlike a boat, the little spaceship’s sail will propel the craft when it catches rays of light, rather than gusts of wind. As light reflects off the sail, it gives up a little bit of energy, which is converted into an extra push on the sail and spacecraft.

The solar sail also counts as a technology demonstration for JPL: a possible propulsion system for flying a small probe not too far from the sun, without the risk of running out of fuel. It follows two predecessors that voyaged beyond Earth’s orbit: Japan’s Venus-bound Ikaros in 2010 and the Planetary Society’s Lightsail 2 in 2019.

After two years of sailing—sometime around September 20, 2024—NEA Scout will finally catch up with its target asteroid, called 2020 GE. At about 15 to 50 feet in size, it will be the smallest asteroid probed by a spacecraft. NEA Scout will slow down a bit as it approaches within 60 miles of the tumbling space rock, so that it floats by at a speed of around 45 miles per hour, allowing a few hours to take images. Then the spacecraft will continue on its way while 2020 GE continues along an orbital path that will bring it near Earth: Four days after its encounter with NEA Scout, the asteroid will hurtle past the planet, but at a safe distance of about 410,000 miles, or about 70 percent farther away than the moon is from us.

This CubeSat was one of the first that NASA officials picked in 2013 to launch on the SLS. The team had initially envisioned their project as a spacecraft that could scout for the kind of asteroid that might be explored by a future crewed mission, Castillo-Rogez says. No such mission is currently in the works, though NASA and other space agencies have been designing and launching robotic asteroid missions for years. Private space companies could also one day attempt to mine asteroids for lucrative minerals. 

The asteroid 2020 GE is also relevant to the planetary defense effort to monitor near-Earth objects. NEA Scout’s target is almost the size of the impactor that exploded as it fell to Earth in 2013, landing in Chelyabinsk, Russia. But it’s much smaller than potentially more dangerous space rocks, like the target of NASA’s asteroid-smashing spacecraft called DART, which will make its mark in late September or early October.

NEA Scout will travel with a variety of other little CubeSat companions. These secondary payloads, as they’re sometimes called, include NASA’s BioSentinel, which will use a biosensor containing yeast strains to measure how space radiation affects living organisms over long periods. The Italian Space Agency’s ArgoMoon will snap photos of the SLS second stage rocket and then of the moon’s surface. And the Japanese space agency’s Omotenashi will test “semihard” landing technology by deploying an airbag to gently crash—er, land—on the moon at about 110 mph.

Artemis 1 will also carry a commercial-led CubeSat: Lockheed Martin’s LunIR will use an infrared camera, kept at low temperatures by a micro-cryocooler, to map out the moon’s surface during day and night. (Lockheed was also NASA’s main contractor in building the Orion crew capsule, which sits atop the SLS.) Onboard Orion, Lockheed, Amazon, and Cisco have added a payload called Callisto—named after one of Artemis’s companions in Greek mythology—which includes a modified version of Alexa, the AI voice assistant, that can operate without internet access, and a customized version of Webex, the videoconferencing service, on a tablet. When astronaut crews ride aboard Orion on future flights, they could make use of such tools to take stock of their craft’s flight status and telemetry and to communicate by video.

Two more CubeSats—LunaH-Map and Lunar IceCube—will study water ice on the moon’s surface, both from a scientific perspective and because future lunar astronauts may attempt to extract some of that ice for water. “We’ve known for quite some time that there’s water ice at the moon’s poles, but there are a lot of unanswered questions about how much there is and where exactly it is,” said Craig Hardgrove, a planetary geologist at Arizona State University and the LunaH-Map lead, at a NASA press conference on Monday. With these projects, researchers aim to improve maps of lunar ice and to detect ice beyond the permanently shadowed craters, if it exists.

The Artemis 1 mission is tentatively scheduled to launch August 29, although NASA has reserved two backup dates in September. The agency had planned to launch as early as 2017, but the mission has been delayed multiple times. That has created some difficulties for its ride-along projects. Five of the 10 CubeSats, including the two that will study water ice, couldn’t easily be removed from the rocket for battery charging. Hardgrove thinks LunaH-Map’s battery is probably at around 50 percent, which he hopes will be sufficient to complete the mission.

On Tuesday, August 16, the SLS rolled out to the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where engineers will complete their final preparations and hook up power, propellant lines, and other systems. The NEA Scout team and their fellow researchers are excited about the upcoming liftoff and all the little missions that will fly along with it. After years of effort, and their SLS counterparts toiling away to create the biggest rocket ever sent into deep space, they’re looking forward to seeing all that work pay off, Johnson says: “I’m glad they’re giving me a ride.”

The Mini Missions Aboard the Artemis Rocket Pack a Big Punch

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