No, seriously, NASA’s Space Launch System is ready to take flight

California to consider keeping last nuclear plant open

Bacteria fight off viruses with a protein like one of ours

Friday, August 19

The first launch of the week is SpaceX’s Falcon 9 carrying 52 Starlink satellites. The flight is marked as Starlink Group 4-27 internally and will be marked with this label in apps like ISS Detector, which let you know when and where to see the satellites when they’re in orbit. The mission will be launching from Cape Canaveral at 7:24 p.m. UTC and will be available to stream on SpaceX’s website.

Saturday, August 20

The final launch of the week will be a Long March CZ-2D rocket carrying three Yaogan 35 satellites. These are remote sensing satellites that could be used for scientific experiments, land and resource surveys, agricultural production estimates, and disaster prevention or mitigation. They will be launching from Launch Complex 3 at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at an unspecified time. It’s unlikely that the event will be streamed live, but check back next week for footage of the launch if it goes ahead.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was a Russian Soyuz-2.1b carrying an Iranian satellite called Khayyam. The satellite is an Earth observation satellite.

Next, a Chinese company called Galactic Energy launched a Ceres-1 rocket carrying satellites that will provide commercial remote sensing services.

On August 10, SpaceX launched 52 Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9.

China launched a Long March 6 from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center topped with several satellites that will be used for commercial remote sensing and atmospheric imaging.

Finally, SpaceX launched another batch of Starlink satellites.

TWIRL 78: SpaceX prepares to send Starlink Group 4-27 to space

Poliovirus detected in NYC sewage; health officials urge vaccination

A recent study has shown if banana peels are blanched, dried, and ground into a flour, they can be turned into baked goods that taste just as nice, if not better than wheat-based products.

Unless you're a devoted reader of vegan cooking blogs or a Nigella Lawson fan, you've probably never considered cooking with a banana peel. But not only is it perfectly safe, but scientists also demonstrated it really is good for you.

When their experiments products were taste-tested, consumers reported they were just as happy with the flavors as they were with peel-free sugar cookies.

You'll even get a generous helping of minerals and cancer-fighting nutrients. Enriched with banana peels, for instance, the sugar cookies made in the study contained much more fiber, magnesium, potassium, and antioxidant compounds.

On the downside, adding too much banana peel flour did result in cookies that were somewhat brown and hard, possibly from all the extra fiber. But when batches were made with flour containing 7.5 percent banana peel, the texture of the cookies hit a far more appealing balance.

As a bonus, the goods also kept well on the shelf for three months at room temperature.

While the study only looked at the consequences of adding banana peels to baked cookies, the results suggest using banana peel flour in breads, cakes, and pasta might also be worth considering.

Last year, for instance, a study on banana peel cake found the yellow skin of the fruit provides a natural food color to the baked product as well as a nutritional boost.

A 2016 study, meanwhile, found that substituting up to 10 percent of wheat flour with banana peel flour can enrich baked bread with higher protein, carbohydrate, and fat contents.

Not into baking? Nigella Lawson has used banana peels in curry, and vegan bloggers have recently popularized the idea of banana peel bacon and pulled peel 'pork'.

Eating the skin of this fruit isn't just a healthy option, it can help reduce food waste. Around 40 percent of a banana's weight is in its peel, and most of the time, this nutrition-packed skin is simply thrown away.

Sure, banana peels are pretty useless when raw. But if they are prepared right, they can actually taste pretty darn good. They can possibly even extend the shelf life of some products as the peels have antioxidant and antimicrobial properties.

The same goes for other fruit peels, too, like mango skin, which was also found to boost a cake's antioxidant properties and improve its flavor.

So the next time you strip down a banana for the fruit inside, consider keeping the skin. Your belly might thank you later.

The study was published in ACS Food Science & Technology.

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Rocket Report: SpaceX sees rideshare demand, Russia’s odd launch deal with Iran

With the Artemis 1 mission scheduled to blast off in a few weeks, NASA is poised to return to the moon for the first time in half a century. It’s a major step in a formidable plan to launch new spacecraft, assemble a lunar space station, and bring humans back to the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo program, when astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were the last people to set foot on the dusty regolith.

Artemis 1 will mark the inaugural launch of a 32-story rocket called the Space Launch System, topped by the Orion space capsule. The capsule will fly within 62 miles of the lunar surface, while deploying small spacecraft for research on—and beyond—the moon. Although this first flight will be uncrewed, others with astronauts will follow in the coming years, and Orion is capable of carrying humans farther than any spacecraft has ever flown before. While the momentous Artemis 1 mission includes some research objectives, it serves as a technology demonstration and a symbol. “To all of us who gazed up at the moon, dreaming of the day humankind returns to the lunar surface, we are going back. That journey, our journey, begins with Artemis 1,” said NASA chief Bill Nelson at a virtual press conference in early August.

The Artemis 1 launch period begins in late August, with NASA planning for the morning of August 29, and backup dates on September 2 and 5. 

If the liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the moon flyby, and Orion’s reentry and splashdown off the coast of San Diego in October go as planned, Artemis 2 will go ahead. On that first crewed mission in 2024, four astronauts will do a moon flyby. Then comes Artemis 3 in 2025 or 2026, the first lunar landing since 1972, which will include the first woman to walk on the moon. Astronauts aboard Artemis 4 in 2027 will deliver the I-HAB module, which will become crews’ main living quarters aboard the Lunar Gateway station in its orbit around the moon.

The Artemis program has been in the works since 2017, and so far, it has cost about $40 billion. Its primary goal will be establishing a sustained presence on the moon in the form of a space station and a lunar base camp or colony, as part of NASA’s broader push to prioritize human space travel. “We are beginning a long-term journey of science and exploration,” said Bhavya Lal, an associate NASA administrator, at last week’s press conference. “We have done our early reconnaissance with both robots and humans, and now we are learning what we need to know to be able to spend more time on the moon, and then to prepare for going to Mars and beyond.” 

Indeed, Artemis fits into NASA’s long-term “Moon to Mars” program, as the space agency envisions sending astronauts to the Red Planet within 20 years. “Everything that we’re doing on the lunar surface, we’re doing to explore for science, and we’re going not just for ‘flags and footprints,’ as some people refer to [Apollo], but also to test out all of the systems that we’ll eventually need to bring down risks for a human mission to Mars,” says Cathy Koerner, a deputy associate administrator at NASA, based at Johnson Space Center in Houston. 

These include the development of the Gateway robotics and habitat modules for crews, as well as a lunar rover, all of which could be precursors for future technologies on Mars. Next-generation spacesuits, to be developed by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace, will include improved life support and communication systems and would allow for extra mobility.

Assuming the early Artemis missions are successful, on subsequent voyages more components will be dispatched to the moon station, and astronauts will be deployed for extended jaunts on the lunar soil, possibly for weeks at a time. “As we’re doing these missions, they’re getting more and more complex. And so the infrastructure to support them gets more and more complex,” Koerner says.

Although no passengers will travel on Artemis 1, the capsule will carry along three mannequins. The male one, dubbed Commander Moonikin Campos thanks to a public naming contest, has been used for Orion vibration tests. He will fly alongside two female mannequin torsos, made from materials that mimic the bones, soft tissues, and organs of an adult woman. All of them will be equipped with sensors for detecting space radiation, because prolonged exposure can harm astronauts’ health. (The European Space Agency, which is collaborating with NASA on the flight, is sending along a Shaun the Sheep doll.) 

The mission will also deploy 10 shoebox-sized spacecraft called CubeSats, some of which will map the moon’s surface and study its pockets of ice, while others will test a space radiation shield or proceed to more distant spots, like a near-Earth asteroid.

The Artemis project will also serve as a test bed for technologies developed through public-private partnerships. NASA has already worked with Terran Orbital and Rocket Lab to launch a small spacecraft known as Capstone, which is currently scouting the future orbit of the Lunar Gateway. Maxar Technologies of Westminster, Colorado, will provide Gateway’s power and propulsion, while Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia, is working on the HALO module, a small area where the first Gateway astronauts will live and conduct research. SpaceX will launch both of those on a Falcon Heavy rocket in late 2024.

Grand programs also create opportunities for global diplomacy and relationships among space agencies. NASA is working with many international partners on Artemis, with the European Space Agency providing Orion’s service module on Artemis 1 and collaborating on Gateway’s I-HAB. Japan’s space agency is developing a cargo supply spacecraft for Gateway and is looking into the concept of a pressurized moon rover, inside which astronauts would be able to take off their bulky spacesuits. Canada’s space agency is designing a robotic arm for the station. A total of 21 countries have also signed on to the Artemis Accords, the US government’s attempt to establish best practices for future international exploration of the moon.

Yet a project as ambitious as returning to the moon is not always a political winner. It’s expensive, for one thing. Some critics, like former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, have called out the ballooning cost of the agency’s building its own Space Launch System—at a time when SpaceX is developing the less expensive Super Heavy rocket, along with the reusable Starship spacecraft.

And programs that extend through many presidential administrations with different space priorities can be vulnerable to shifting political winds. Sometimes a program won’t survive a transition in power at the White House. Former US presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump—who initiated the Artemis program—favored lunar missions, while former president Barack Obama focused on launching humans to Mars. “Artemis has spanned multiple presidential administrations, so that bodes well. But there are still a lot of unknowns, and it’s a large investment,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a space historian and curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

Public opinion can shift, as well, Muir-Harmony points out. Many Americans initially opposed the former Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ gigantic investment in the Apollo program—which dwarfs funding for Artemis today, as a fraction of the nation's gross domestic product. But all that changed after the historic moon landing in 1969. 

The space race with the former Soviet Union also spurred the Apollo program, but today potential competition with China, Russia, or even private space companies doesn’t drive investments in moon exploration the same way. Recent surveys show more public support for NASA’s climate research and efforts to monitor asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. (One of the goals of the Artemis program will be sharing off-planet images with the public, meant to inspire new generations, as the iconic Earthrise photo taken by astronaut Bill Anders on Apollo 8 did back in 1968.)

While much has changed since the 1960s and ’70s, Muir-Harmony says, the legacy of the Apollo program still looms large. It starts with the name itself: In Greek mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo. And NASA officials, she says, have made a case that Artemis should go beyond “flags and footprints”—in other words, that it must build on the achievements of Apollo. “Its presence is felt today. When you look at the rationale behind Artemis, when we talk about Artemis, it’s an essential part of that conversation,” she says. “I think it helps to build excitement. There’s a renewing of that sense of purpose. There’s some nostalgia for that, some recognition that Apollo brought a lot of people together and focused them on a really challenging goal, and in doing so it tested the best of our abilities.”

Why NASA Wants to Go Back to the Moon

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Betelgeuse is bouncing back after blowing its top in 2019

Employees who work in the Google Cloud sales department said that senior leadership told them that there will be an “overall examination of sales productivity and productivity in general.”

If third quarter results “don’t look up, [then] there will be blood on the streets,” according to a message conveyed to the sales team. The warning was first reported by Insider.

Employees told the news site that they are fearful of layoffs after the company quietly extended its hiring freeze this month without making an announcement.

The Post has sought comment from Google.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told his employees in an all hands meeting late last month that they needed to improve their focus and productivity due to fierce economic headwinds that have forced widespread belt-tightening all throughout the technology sector.

Pichai said that he wanted to solicit ideas from his employees on how to get “better results faster.”

“It’s clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead,” Pichai said.

“There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have.”

The search engine also announced a two-week hiring freeze last month, but so far it has not reversed its decision — prompting employees to fear the worst, according to Insider.

Since Pichai’s comments, “everyone has been talking about the company tightening its belt,” one employee told Insider.

Google isn’t the only tech company that has put its employees on notice.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook’s parent company Meta, blamed “one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” for a series of cost-cutting measures, including a hiring freeze.

Zuckerberg also made it clear that the company will part ways with employees who do not perform up to par.

Google and other tech giants have been forced to tighten their belts due to fierce economic headwinds.
Getty Images

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg told an all hands meeting in late June.

Facebook’s social media rival Twitter recently rescinded a job offer to a Palo Alto man as part of the San Francisco-based company’s cutting back on hiring.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal informed employees of the hiring pause in a message earlier this year, citing a recent lag on growth and revenue targets.

The company has been thrown into turmoil since Tesla CEO Elon Musk agreed to buy it for $44 billion — only to back out of the deal. Twitter is now suing Musk in an effort to enforce the terms of the agreement.

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It’s widely-known that exercise has a positive effect on the body and metabolic health. Less-studied is how exercise affects the brain, particularly where in the brain the effects are seen. Researchers from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases have conducted a new study addressing this. They reveal how the intensity of exercise plays a vital role in brain volume, particularly in areas linked to cognitive decline.

The team used data from a previous work by the same organization called the Rhineland Study, which is a large study that analyzed physical activity from 2,550 volunteers ages 30 to 94 years. Participants wore an accelerometer on their upper thigh for seven days to track exercise. To track brain activity, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used, and the scans generated information on brain volume and thickness of the cortex. To specifically characterize where in the brain physical activity benefited most, the researchers searched several databases for genes that are active in the brain areas investigated.

Results show that physical activity plays an invaluable role in almost all of the brain regions, and a trend was also discovered. Study authors say that with more intense physical activity, the larger the brain regions actually were in volume and thickness of cortex.

However in elderly people, they found the sharpest increase in volume across the board with only moderate levels of activity. This may mean that even 15-20 minutes of exercise may be protective against neurodegeneration, which is most prevalent in this demographic.

Through the gene search, the researchers found additional key information to help understand the brain’s response to exercise.

“Mainly, these were genes that are essential for the functioning of mitochondria, the power plants of our cells,” says Fabienne Fox, neuroscientist and lead author of the study. This means that there are high amounts of mitochondria in these areas, which the team thinks makes sense. The mitochondria provide the body with energy and require lots of oxygen to do so, which may explain why certain regions with these genes benefit to such an extent from physical activity.

The researchers believe that this work may provide valuable insight into neurodegeneration prevention measures in younger people, since their findings suggest that diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s can be prevented in part due to exercise.

Their work may also offer improved frameworks and clinical recommendations given to the elderly who suffer from these diseases to help them better protect their brain from further deterioration. “With our study, we were able to characterize brain regions that benefit from physical activity to an unprecedented level of detail,” says Ahmad Aziz, head of the research group “Population and Clinical Neuroepidemiology” at DZNE. “We hope our results will provide important leads for further research.”

This study is published in the journal Neurology.

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A crying baby, a screaming adult, a teenager whose voice cracks — people could have sounded this shrill all the time, a new study suggests, if not for a crucial step in human evolution.

It’s what we’re missing that makes the difference. Humans have vocal cords, muscles in our larynx, or voice box, that vibrate to produce sound (SN: 11/18/15). But unlike all other studied primates, humans don’t have small bits of tissue above the vocal cords called vocal membranes. That uniquely human trait helps people control their voices well enough to produce the sounds that are the building blocks of spoken language, researchers report in the Aug. 12 Science.

Vocal membranes act like a reed in a clarinet, making it easier for some animals to shout loud and shrill. Think of the piercing calls of howler monkeys (SN: 10/22/15). When researchers used MRI and CT scans to look for vocal membranes in 43 different primate species, the scientists were surprised by what they saw: All primates except humans had the tissue.

That loss of vocal membranes would have been a “very major, very revolutionary event in human evolution,” says Takeshi Nishimura, a paleontologist at Kyoto University in Japan.

Howler monkeys, pictured here screaming, get help being loud and shrill from the vocal membranes in their voice boxes.

Jacob C. Dunn

Primates mostly make sound in the same basic way: They push air out from their lungs while vibrating muscles in the larynx to create sound waves. To understand the role that vocal membranes play, Nishimura’s team studied videos of primate voice boxes in action in chimpanzees, rhesus macaques and squirrel monkeys. The researchers also took larynges from macaques and chimpanzees that had died of natural causes and — in what’s common practice for the field — mounted the parts on tubes, pushing air through the larynges to see how the vocal cords and membranes would react.

In both experiments, the larynges made sounds that would often fluctuate wildly in pitch. Nishimura’s team found that happens only when an animal has both vocal membranes and vocal cords.

In humans, that sort of screeching can happen when we put extreme amounts of pressure on our voice, like when we scream — or when teens struggle with controlling their growing vocal cords and their voices crack. But those are rare cases. Since humans don’t have vocal membranes, we usually make more stable sounds than other primates, the team concludes. Our mouths and tongues, the idea goes, can then manipulate those stable tones into the complex sounds that language is based on.

“That’s a really elegant explanation,” says Sue Anne Zollinger, an animal physiologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in England who was not involved in the study. It’s almost counterintuitive, she says: “You lose complexity to be able to produce more complex sounds.”

The loss of vocal membranes isn’t the only thing that makes humans more eloquent than other primates. Beyond anatomical differences, humans have specific genes that may have helped drive language evolution (SN: 8/3/18). And perhaps most importantly, human brains are structured differently from other primates in ways that also give us more control over our speech (SN: 12/19/16).

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The study randomized 61 patients to one of two treatments, the prototype of the new 'digital polytherapeutic' or a popular self-help app producing white noise.

On average, the group with the polytherapeutic (31 people) showed clinically significant improvements at 12 weeks, while the other group (30 people) did not. The results have just been published in Frontiers in Neurology.

"This is more significant than some of our earlier work and is likely to have a direct impact on future treatment of tinnitus," Associate Professor in Audiology Grant Searchfield says.

Key to the new treatment is an initial assessment by an audiologist who develops the personalized treatment plan, combining a range of digital tools, based on the individual's experience of tinnitus.

"Earlier trials have found white noise, goal-based counseling, goal-oriented games and other technology-based therapies are effective for some people some of the time," says Dr. Searchfield.

"This is quicker and more effective, taking 12 weeks rather than 12 months for more individuals to gain some control."

There is no pill that can cure tinnitus.

"What this therapy does is essentially rewire the brain in a way that de-emphasizes the sound of the tinnitus to a background noise that has no meaning or relevance to the listener," Dr. Searchfield says.

Audiology research fellow Dr. Phil Sanders says the results are exciting and he found running the trial personally rewarding.

"Sixty-five percent of participants reported an improvement. For some people, it was life-changing—where tinnitus was taking over their lives and attention."

Some people didn't notice an improvement and their feedback will inform further personalisation, Dr. Sanders says.

Tinnitus is a phantom noise and its causes are complex. It has so far defied successful treatment.

While most people experience tinnitus, or ringing in the ears at least on occasions, around five percent experience it to a distressing degree. Impacts can include trouble sleeping, difficulty carrying out daily tasks and depression.

Dr. Searchfield says seeing his patients' distress and having no effective treatment to offer inspired his research. "I wanted to make a difference."

The next step will be to refine the prototype and proceed to larger local and international trials with a view to FDA approval.

The researchers hope the app will be clinically available in around six months.

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A heat pump installed outside a house on February 8th, 2018, in Cardiff, Wales. Image: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images

The humble heat pump has finally found its moment in the spotlight. The appliance can potentially save you money on your energy bills, fight climate change, and reduce Europe’s dependency on Russian gas, proponents say. One day, heat pumps might even replace air conditioning and heating systems across the world.

Sure, that sounds super ambitious, but lawmakers are scrambling to deploy heat pumps everywhere they can. President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act earlier this year to boost domestic manufacturing of the technology, and Congress crafted major climate legislation that makes it easier for Americans to afford them. Across the pond in Europe, heat pumps are part of efforts to pivot away from Russian fuels.

With all that hype, you might want to get familiar with the technology suddenly making headlines. So, The Verge put together this guide on what heat pumps are, what they do, and why they’re making such a splash now.

First off, what in the world is a heat pump?

There are different kinds of heat pump technologies, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll focus on the appliances making the most waves right now. The appliances causing all the fuss are electric heat pumps that are used to heat and cool the air inside homes and buildings. And don’t let the name fool you. Heat pumps can do the same job as furnaces and air conditioners.

How does the thing work?

This varies depending on the type of heat pump, but the defining feature is that they move heat around to where you want it. Specifically, the appliances use a refrigerant to draw in heat and redistribute it. A refrigerant is a substance with a low boiling point that can easily absorb heat. They’re also used in air conditioners and refrigerators.

The most common kind of heat pump you’ll hear about are “air-source” heat pumps that move heat between your home and the outside air.

It’s got two parts: an indoor component and an outdoor component. When used to cool a space down, the indoor component pushes warm air from inside a space over coils filled with liquid refrigerant. The refrigerant absorbs the heat from the air, boils, and evaporates into a gas. From there, the heated up refrigerant moves on to the outdoor component, where it releases the heat. The refrigerant cools down, turns back into a liquid, and the process can begin again. When heat pumps are used to warm up a room, the process works in reverse. The refrigerant absorbs heat from outside and moves that indoors. Thanks to some relatively recent breakthroughs in heat pump technologies, this works even in cold climates because the refrigerant will absorb heat as long as it’s colder than its surroundings.

There are also “ground-source” or geothermal heat pumps that move heat between a home or building and either the ground outside or a nearby source of water.

Image: Energy Star

 That sounds surprisingly low-tech. Haven’t heat pumps been around for a while?

Yup. Austrian engineer Peter von Rittinger designed and installed the first documented heat pump system in the 1850s. The first electric ground-source heat pump is credited to American inventor Robert C. Webber, who was tinkering with a deep freezer in his cellar in the late 1940s when he realized it produced scalding water. Not wanting to waste the hot water, he diverted that to his boiler and eventually designed a system to heat his whole home.

Even though heat pumps have been around for a long time, they haven’t become mainstream. In 2020, they only fulfilled 7 percent of global heating demand. Over the years, other technologies that many people have become more familiar with — i.e., air conditioning and furnaces — became more affordable to buy and install. In many places, it was also cheaper to heat your home with gas than electricity. Plus, heat pumps haven’t always worked as well in very cold places as they do in milder climates.

Why are we hearing so much about heat pumps now?

First off, the technology has improved. And that’s made heat pumps seemingly ideal for grappling with several crises the world faces today.

Both the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine have contributed to a global gas crunch. It’s gotten much more expensive to heat your home with gas or rely on a gas-fired power plant to keep the lights on.

That energy crisis is really stark in Europe, where the cost of gas has risen from around $5 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) to $55 per MMBtu over the past couple of years alone. A big part of the problem is that Europe has historically been very reliant on Russia for its supply of natural gas. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the bloc has tried to quit that addiction — and electric heat pumps are a big part of that plan. Gas is currently the fuel Europe uses the most for its heating, and much of that gas has historically come from Russia. The European Commission wants to double the rate at which it’s deploying heat pumps, with a goal of deploying 10 million units over the next five years.

This is an acceleration of another transition that was already underway. One of the main strategies to slow climate change is to electrify everything — from cars to buildings. That way, they can run on clean, renewable energy like wind and solar once those power sources displace fossil fuels on the grid. Some cities — like Berkeley, California — have even banned new gas hookups in homes and buildings.

Heat pumps became an obvious alternative to old-school gas and oil heating. So, efforts to promote heat pump adoption are peppered throughout a lot of proposed climate policies. The giant climate bill Democrats are working to pass, called the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, includes up to an $8,000 rebate for income-eligible Americans who install a new heat pump in their home. Anyone who doesn’t qualify for the rebate can still get a tax credit of up to $2,000 for installing a heat pump.

So you’re saying heat pumps are good for the environment?

For the most part, yes. They’re electric appliances, so they can run on clean energy like we mentioned above. But the environmental benefits still depend on how clean the grid they’re connected to is. If you have a grid that is still dominated by coal and gas — which many still are — then that electricity isn’t very clean. At least not yet. The climate case for heat pumps is forward-looking. The thought is that if people switch from gas over to heat pumps while the grid is getting cleaned up, then countries can get to their climate goals much faster. More than 30 countries and the European Union have entrenched a goal in law or policy of reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions. And more than 100 countries have made similar proposals but are still working to adopt policies to reach those goals.

The other climate benefit that comes with heat pumps is that they are generally pretty energy-efficient. After all, they’re not generating heat — they’re simply moving it around. Air-source heat pumps are 2.2 to 4.5 times more efficient than Energy Star gas furnaces, according to a US-focused analysis published in 2020 by the nonprofit clean energy research organization RMI. Ground-source heat pumps can cut energy use by 30 to 60 percent, according to the Department of Energy. Efficiency gains vary, though, because heat pumps essentially have to work harder to gather enough heat from the ambient environment in colder climates.

All said, 70 percent of houses in the US would reduce emissions today by installing a heat pump, according to one study published last year in the journal Environmental Research Letters. That study took both greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants like particulate matter into consideration. Looking at just planet-heating carbon dioxide, the US would shrink residential CO2 emissions by a hefty 32 percent if every single-family home started using a heat pump.

Is a heat pump going to save me money?

Once again, it depends. For now, just 32 percent of households would “benefit economically” by installing a heat pump, according to the same study in Environmental Research Letters.

While the appliance can save you money in the long run through lower utility bills, heat pumps typically still come with higher upfront costs than traditional heating or cooling systems. People paid a median of $7,791 to buy and install a ducted air-source heat pump compared to $6,870 for a gas furnace, according to a Consumer Reports survey of its members. A heat pump system, however, can become more cost-competitive if it’s replacing both a gas furnace and an air conditioning unit or if it’s being built into a new structure. That’s why, in the short term, subsidies are going to be key to making heat pumps more appealing to consumers.

Thanks to their energy efficiency, heat pumps might offer the cheapest clean energy alternative to heating and cooling a home for most US households in the coming decades, according to an analysis by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

Will a heat pump work for anybody, anywhere?

Technically, heat pumps can work just about everywhere. Thanks to technological breakthroughs over the past decade, heat pumps can now heat homes even when outdoor temperatures reach subzero. The appliances, for now, just don’t work as efficiently in such cold temperatures as they do in milder climates.

Anyone who doesn’t own their own home is also going to have a harder time turning to a heat pump since it usually needs to be professionally installed. The next big advancement in newfangled heat pump technologies is easy-to-install window units, comparable to window AC units. Unlike more traditional heat pumps, these new window units can essentially just sit in your window sill. New York state recently said it would shell out $70 million to two companies — Gradient and Midea America — to produce 30,000 window heat pump units for New York City public housing.

Gradient says its product will become commercially available sometime this year. But it doesn’t come cheap. While a window AC unit might cost a couple hundred bucks or less, Gradient’s new window heat pump (which can both heat and cool a home) costs way more: $1,999.

This is a big problem with energy-efficient appliances and clean energy technologies in general. So far, many of these technologies have been out of reach for many people — often, renters and folks without thousands of extra dollars to spend on a new appliance, especially when their old one still works just fine. To really trigger a heat pump revolution, that’s going to have to change.

Heat pumps: what they do and why they’re hot now

Did giant impacts start plate tectonics?

For decades, engineers seeking to build tunnels underground have relied on huge tube-like machines armed with a frightening array of cutting wheels at one end—blades that eat dirt for breakfast. These behemoths, called tunnel-boring machines, or TBMs, are expensive and often custom-built for each project, as were the TBMs used to excavate a path for London’s recently opened Elizabeth Line railway. The machines deployed on that project weighed over 1,000 tons each and cut tunnels over 7 meters in diameter beneath the UK capital.

But British startup hyperTunnel has other ideas. The firm proposes a future in which much smaller, roughly 3-meter-long robots shaped like half-cylinders zoom about underground via predrilled pipes. These pipes, around 250 millimeters (10 inches) in diameter, would follow the outline of the proposed tunnel’s walls. Once inside them, the bots would use a robotic arm topped with a milling head to penetrate into the surrounding earth and carve out small voids that would then get filled with concrete or some other strong material. Piece by piece like this, the structure of a new tunnel would come together.

“We’re talking about thousands of them,” says hyperTunnel’s director of engineering, Patrick Lane-Nott. “Much like an ant colony or a termite colony works in swarms.”

A video released by the company includes a 3D animation of the robots beavering away on some imagined subterranean structure of gargantuan proportions. But it would be rather like building tunnels in reverse. With a TBM, you first dig the hole and then add supports or walls to keep the remaining earth surrounding the void at bay. “We put the tunnel in the ground—and then we dig the hole,” says Lane-Nott. Once the structure has been built, the material filling the tunnel’s chamber can be removed.

One advantage of this, he argues, is in using less building material overall. Instead of placing standardized sections of tunnel wall along the entire length of the project, the structure’s outer thickness could vary to suit the actual geology and pressures surrounding the tunnel at any given point.

Tunneling experts who spoke to WIRED agree that the industry is crying out for technological solutions to lower costs and heighten efficiency—it can take years to design and build a TBM and then actually dig a tunnel with it, for example. A suite of new companies promising to shake things up is emerging—from Elon Musk’s Boring Company to hyperTunnel and firms developing new high-temperature methods of blasting through the toughest rocks on Earth.

“There’s a lot going on, and I think that’s good, because the tunneling industry has to improve,” says Jasmin Amberg, a project manager at Amberg Engineering, an underground construction company founded by her grandfather. In her eyes, the business of tunnel boring needs to get faster and more sustainable.

 

Pipes are drilled into the rockface (blue), and from within them robots (orange) construct the walls of the tunnel before the central chamber is cleared.Illustration: hyperTunnel

There’s no shortage of work out there, either. China recently completed a 20-kilometer railway tunnel in the Longmen Mountains after a decade of construction. There’s the HS2 rail project in the UK, which will connect London to towns and cities in the north of the country and is set to feature more than 100 kilometers of tunnels along its proposed route. And Peter Vesterbacka, who used to work for Angry Birds developer Rovio, is behind an ambitious plan to build an undersea tunnel between Finland and Estonia. These are but a few examples.

Amberg forecasts increasing demand for underground infrastructure in the future—not least as a means of escaping rising temperatures above ground due to climate change. “It’s maybe not so bad to have a place where we have more constant temperatures,” she says.

Tunnels aren’t just for transportation. Troy Helming, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based startup EarthGrid, emphasizes the need to put power lines underground—this is what his company aims to do. The vast majority of transmission cables are above ground in the United States and Canada, he notes, leaving them exposed to hurricanes and other storms as well as, increasingly, wildfires.

“Our plan is to put a supergrid across North America,” he says, proffering a map with colored lines showing said grid stretching all the way from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific Ocean, and future offshore wind farms in the west. It’s a plan that could help link up the fragmented US grid—and potentially one day even extend as far as Europe, to tap the huge offshore wind potential there. “It’s crazy and audacious, and we know that,” says Helming.

One hurdle is the extremely tough rock, such as granite and quartzite, that makes traditional excavation in some of these places difficult or impossible. Helming is betting on plasma torch technology that heats rock to about 6,000 degrees Celsius, blasting it to smithereens, as the solution. He suggests that this could allow for the creation of tunnels in hard rock 100 times faster than with current technology. EarthGrid is developing a prototype robot wielding five plasma torches, which Helming says should be ready for testing in March 2023. The firm also aims to complete its first, small-scale commercial project by the end of this year.

Helming notes that, in EarthGrid’s case, the tunnels will not be circular in shape but rather a traditional horseshoe—imagine a square with an arch on top, instead of a flat ceiling. This, he argues, makes it easier to install cable racks or, in larger transportation tunnels, a road surface on the flat base of the tunnel.

Rival company Petra also aims to bore through tough rock using the power of heat, though with a thermal cutting device that uses a superheated fluid rather than with a plasma torch. The idea is to slice through “nightmare geologies” with relative ease, says CEO and cofounder Kim Abrams.

“We finished a 34-foot, 30-inch-diameter tunnel in granite just last week,” she says, adding that the firm hopes to begin commercial work next year. And she mentions that the company is also working on a separate solution to tackle the other end of the spectrum—extremely soft or water-logged soil, such as is often found beneath and near coastal cities.

These tunneling technologies have yet to prove that they can succeed at scale, notes Amberg. She says hyperTunnel’s concept is interesting, but adds that she is unsure how the robots will tackle harder geologies or water-logged ground, for instance.

Jian Zhao is a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University in Australia. He and colleagues have explored the use of laser, microwave, and high-pressure waterjet technologies, among others, for tunnel-boring applications. He’s skeptical that Petra’s heat-based method, for example, will itself be sufficient for large tunneling projects, but he wonders if it could be used alongside mechanical excavation.

“The seed funding, angel investing, and all that to fuel some of this innovation, I think, is fantastic,” says Michael Mooney, who is the Grewcock Chair Professor of Underground Construction and Tunneling at the Colorado School of Mines. He agrees that the “jury is still out” as to whether any of these new tunneling technologies will break through to large-scale commercial success, but he stresses that faster, cheaper techniques are very much sought-after in the industry.

He also argues that the Boring Company, which is developing its own kind of TBM that can be launched from the surface to dig underground tunnels (conventionally, for these you’d dig a hole first and then move the TBM down into it to create the tunnel), has also innovated in a commercial sense, as the firm plans to standardize tunnel-boring devices across projects.

“Building a new tunnel-boring machine for a specific project every time adds complexity and cost,” explains Mooney.

Finally, Amberg mentions that there is a plethora of existing tunnels around the world, now aging, that require maintenance and repair—many are in her own country of Switzerland. New technologies are required to do this work efficiently.

Among those targeting such markets is hyperTunnel. Lane-Nott says his firm’s bots will be able to whoosh down pipes to service the exterior structure of underground tunnels without operators having to put a halt to the road or rail traffic inside. And this revolution is already starting. Network Rail, which owns and operates much of Great Britain’s rail network, has engaged hyperTunnel on a project in this vein, Lane-Nott adds.

It’s a small step toward that vision of thousands of robots working in harmony to create vast underground structures—what he calls “the power of the swarm.”

Swarms or otherwise, our future is full of tunnels. The race is on to find out who is going to dig them, and how.

Swarms of Mini Robots Could Dig the Tunnels of the Future

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Backyard hens’ eggs contain 40 times more lead on average than shop eggs

A rural American man has been awarded £2.1 million ($2.6m) to expand the broadband ISP he built in his back garden.

Jared Mauch, a network architect, set up his own fibre broadband provider after being slapped with a £40,000 bill by Comcast to extend their Internet access to his property.

Mauch was sick of having slow internet speeds of 1.5Mbps at rip-off rates so began building the ISP (Internet Service Provider) on his land around five years ago.

Since hooking up around 70 of his rural neighbours to the network last year, he has now secured the millions of dollars in grant money to serve an additional 600 homes.

Jared Mauch had to set up his own broadband provider to get decent Internet connection (Image: youtube)

The company started with just one customer—himself—but rapidly grew after his fed-up neighbours signed up. Mauch will now be able to expand his network with an extra 38 miles of fibre broadband.

Instead of paying tons of money for dreadfully slow Internet, his customers can sign up to 100Mbps and unlimited data for £44 ($55) per month.

Mauch said he "had to start a telephone company to get [high-speed] Internet" at his house after the main American broadband companies never extended their fast networks to his area.

Mauch will now get to add an extra 38 miles to his network (Image: Linkedin)

He even asked the Internet giant Comcast to extend their network to him but they quoted him $50,000 (£40,000) to do so.

"If they had priced it at $10,000, I would have written them a cheque," he told ArsTechnica.

"It was so high at $50,000 that it made me consider if this is worthwhile. Why would I pay them to expand their network if I get nothing back out of it."

If you're thinking of building your own ISP or energy provider to avoid the skyrocketing bills this winter though, you might want to think again. Mauch was able to build his company, Washtenaw Fiber Properties, because he works as a network engineer in his day job.

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The ability of the brain to create consciousness has baffled some for millennia. The mystery of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has subjectivity, something that is like to sense, feel and think. In contrast to being under anesthesia or in a dreamless deep sleep, while we're awake we don't "live in the dark"—we experience the world and ourselves. But how the brain creates the conscious experience and what area of the brain is responsible for this remains a mystery.

According to Dr. Nir Lahav, a physicist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, "This is quite a mystery since it seems that our conscious experience cannot arise from the brain, and in fact, cannot arise from any physical process." As strange as it sounds, the conscious experience in our brain, cannot be found or reduced to some neural activity.

"Think about it this way," says Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis, "when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That's why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it." As a result, we can't reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel and think to any brain activity. We can just find correlations to these experiences.

After more than 100 years of neuroscience, we have very good evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities. So how could it be that these conscious experiences can't be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can't be reduced to any neural complex activity?

This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that—until a couple of decades ago—only philosophers discussed it and even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, there still is no adequate theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem.

Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh recently published a new physical theory in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way. According to the authors, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves. In the paper, the researchers developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view. According to Dr. Lahav, the lead author of the paper, "consciousness should be investigated with the same mathematical tools that physicists use for other known relativistic phenomena."

To understand how relativity dissolves the hard problem, think about a different relativistic phenomenon, constant velocity. Let's choose two observers, Alice and Bob, where Bob is on a train that moves with constant velocity and Alice watches him from the platform. There is no absolute physical answer to the question of what the velocity of Bob is. The answer is dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. From Bob's frame of reference, he will measure that he is stationary and say that Alice, with the rest of the world, is moving backwards. But from Alice's frame, Bob is the one that's moving and she is stationary. Although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, just from different frames of reference.

Because, according to the theory, consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, we find the same situation in the case of consciousness. Now Alice and Bob are in different cognitive frames of reference. Bob will measure that he has conscious experience, but Alice just has brain activity with no sign of the actual conscious experience, while Alice will measure that she is the one that has consciousness and Bob has just neural activity with no clue of its conscious experience. Just like in the case of velocity, although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, but from different cognitive frames of reference.

As a result, because of the relativistic point of view, there is no problem with the fact that we measure different properties from different frames of reference. The fact that we cannot find the actual conscious experience while measuring brain activity is because we're measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference.

According to the new theory, the brain doesn't create our conscious experience, at least not through computations. The reason that we have conscious experience is due to the process of physical measurement. In a nutshell, different physical measurements in different frames of reference manifest different physical properties in these frames of reference although these frames measure the same phenomenon.

For example, suppose that Bob measures Alice's brain in the lab while she's feeling happiness. Although they observe different properties, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. Because of their different kinds of measurements, different kinds of properties have been manifested in their cognitive frames of reference. For Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements of his sensory organs like his eyes. This kind of sensory measurement manifests the substrate that causes brain activity—the neurons. Consequently, in Bob's cognitive frame Alice, has only neural activity that represents her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience itself.

But, for Alice to measure her own neural activity as happiness, she uses different kind of measurements. She doesn't use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly by interaction between one part of her brain with other parts. She measures her neural representations according to their relations to other neural representations. This is a completely different measurement than what our sensory system does and, as a result, this kind of direct measurement manifests a different kind of physical property. We call this property conscious experience. As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as conscious experience.

Using the mathematical tools that describe relativistic phenomena in physics, the theory shows that if the dynamics of Bob's neural activity could be changed to be like the dynamics of Alice's neural activity, then both will be in the same cognitive frame of reference and would have the exact same conscious experience as the other. Now, the authors want to continue to examine the exact minimal measurements that any cognitive system needs in order to create consciousness. The implications of such a theory are huge. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness.

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The Arctic is heating up at a breakneck speed compared with the rest of Earth. And new analyses show that the region is warming even faster than scientists thought. Over the last four decades, the average Arctic temperature increased nearly four times as fast as the global average, researchers report August 11 in Communications Earth & Environment.

And that’s just on average. Some parts of the Arctic Ocean, such as the Barents Sea between Russia and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, are warming as much as seven times as fast, meteorologist Mika Rantanen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki and colleagues found. Previous studies have tended to say that the Arctic’s average temperature is increasing two to three times as fast as elsewhere, as humans continue causing the climate to change.

To calculate the true pace of the accelerated warming, a phenomenon called Arctic amplification, the researchers averaged four sets of satellite data from 1979 to 2021 (SN: 7/1/20). Globally, the average temperature increase over that time was about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. But the Arctic was warming by about 0.75 degrees C per decade.

Heating up

Over the last four decades, the global average temperature increased by about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade, but in the Arctic, the mean increase per decade was about 0.75 degrees Celsius (left). Comparing the two trends, Arctic temperatures increased on average four times as fast as the global average, with some areas increasing as much as seven times as fast (right). The gray dotted line indicates the border of the Arctic Circle.

M. Rantanen/Finnish Meteorological Institute

Even the best climate models are not doing a great job of reproducing that warming, Rantanen and colleagues say. The inability of the models to realistically simulate past Arctic amplification calls into question how well the models can project future changes there.

It’s not clear where the problem lies. One issue may be that the models are struggling with correctly simulating the sensitivity of Arctic temperatures to the loss of sea ice. Vanishing snow and ice, particularly sea ice, are one big reason why Arctic warming is on hyperspeed. The bright white snow and ice create a reflective shield that bounces incoming radiation from the sun back into space. But open ocean waters or bare rocks absorb that heat, raising the temperature.

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The United Nations' climate science panel said in a special report in 2019 that the Arctic was warming "by more than double the global average" due to a process known as Arctic amplification.

This occurs when sea ice and snow, which naturally reflect the Sun's heat, melt into sea water, which absorbs it instead.

While there is a long-held consensus among scientists that the Arctic is warming quickly, estimates vary according to the timeframe studied and the definition of what constitutes the geographic area of the Arctic.

A team of researchers based in Norway and Finland analyzed four sets of temperature data gathered by satellite studies since 1979—the year when satellite data became available—over the entire Arctic circle.

They found that on average the data showed the Arctic had warmed 0.75C per decade, nearly four times quicker than the rest of the planet.

"The take in the literature is that the Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the globe, so for me it was a bit surprising that ours was so much higher than the usual number," Antti Lipponen, co-author from the Finnish Meteorological Institute, told AFP.

The evolution of annual mean temperature in the Arctic (dark colors) and globally (light colors). The temperatures have been calculated relative to 1981-2010 average. The linear trends for 1979-2021 are also shown.

Mika Rantanen / Finnish Meteorological

The study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, found significant regional variations in warming rate within the Arctic circle.

For example, the Eurasian sector of the Arctic Ocean, near the Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya archipelagos, has warmed as much as 1.25C per decade—seven times faster than the rest of the world.

The team found that even state-of-the-art climate models predicted Arctic warming to be approximately one third lower than what the observed data showed.

They said that this discrepancy may be due to previous modeled estimates being rendered out of date by continued Arctic modeling.

"Maybe the next step would be to take a look at the models and I would be really interested in seeing why the models do not reproduce what we see in observations and what impact that is having on future climate projections," said Lipponen.

The trend of annual mean temperature for 1979-2021 (left) and the trend of annual mean temperature relative to the global average (right).

Mika Rantanen / Finnish Meteorological

As well as profoundly impacting local communities and wildlife that rely on sea ice to hunt, intense warming in the Arctic will have worldwide repercussions.

The Greenland ice sheet, which recent studies warn may be approaching a melting "tipping point", contains enough frozen water to lift Earth's oceans some six meters.

"Climate change is caused by humans. As the Arctic warms up its glaciers will melt and this will globally affect sea levels," said Lipponen.
"Something is happening in the Arctic and it will affect us all."

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Soon after European astronomers developed the first telescopes at the start of the 17th century, they observed dark spots speckling the Sun’s surface.

They also handed their modern successors a mystery. From about 1645 to 1715, the spots, now known to be indicators of solar activity, all but disappeared. Gathering sunspot counts and other historical observations, astronomer John Eddy concluded nearly 50 years ago that the Sun had essentially taken a 70-year nap, which he called the Maunder Minimum after an astronomer couple who had previously studied it.

Now, it appears the Sun is not the only star that takes long naps. By building a decades-long record of observations of a few dozen stars at specific wavelengths that trace stellar activity, a team of astronomers has identified another star going through its own Maunder Minimum period. “I am more convinced this is a Maunder Minimum star than anything else I’ve seen,” says Jennifer van Saders, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who was not involved in the discovery.

The finding, reported in a preprint last month on arXiv, could help explain what triggered the Sun’s strange behavior 400 years ago and suggests more such episodes are likely. “This is the way to study the past and future of the Sun,” van Saders says. She adds the discovery supports a theory she and colleagues have advanced: that such events are an occasional symptom of a critical transition in the magnetic field of Sun-like stars about halfway through their lifetime—a midlife crisis of sorts. Some astronomers speculate that the Sun’s transition helped favor the emergence of life on Earth, and that searching for stars in a similar stage could help identify other solar systems conducive to complex life.

Scientists have known for decades that our Sun’s activity surges and ebbs on a roughly 11-year cycle, which corresponds to how often its magnetic poles flip their orientation. During a solar maximum, sunspots proliferate, marking weak points in the magnetic field, where plasma from the Sun’s atmosphere can lash out in violent loops. Astronomers have spotted young Sun-like stars with similar cycles, and older ones that have totally stable activity. But no one had spotted a cycling star suddenly turning flat.

In 2018, as part of undergraduate research at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Anna Baum set out to combine observations of the telltale wavelengths from 59 stars taken by the Mount Wilson Observatory and the W. M. Keck Observatory to produce a 50-year chronology of star evolution. During a 7-year gap in data while Keck was upgrading a detector, one star appeared to show a drastic shift. Its activity went from cycling over a 17-year period to being virtually flat, and it’s stayed that way for the past 18 years.

Baum thought at first she’d made an error; perhaps the observatories were even looking at two different stars. But earlier this year, her colleagues came across additional observations that filled in the data gap, capturing the star’s emissions as it switched from active to quiet. The recovered data set “hit the jackpot,” says Jacob Luhn, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author on the preprint.

The discovery reinforces one popular theory about why these extended quiescent periods happen. Stars spin more slowly with age because their solar winds act as “magnetic brakes,” like a child sticking out their arms while revolving in a chair. In 2016, van Saders and her colleague Travis Metcalfe of the White Dwarf Research Corporation noticed that at some point, stars stop hitting the brakes and their velocity stabilizes—a shift, they proposed, that stems from a change in the stars’ magnetic field. Then, last year, Dibyendu Nandi and colleagues at the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India pinned down the idea with computer simulations that linked the stabilizing of the spin rate to a weakening magnetic field. During this transition, as the star heads toward a “lazy” state in which its activity is flat rather than cycling, random perturbations in its magnetic field can result in temporary cycle shutoffs like the Maunder Minimum, Nandi says.

The theory predicts that this transition state will emerge in middle-aged stars—just like our Sun and this newly identified napping star. “Everything about this discovery has actually corroborated what we’ve been talking about for the last 5 years,” Metcalfe says. “We definitely knew about stars that were not cycling, but we didn’t know how they got there—this is like the missing link in that evolutionary picture.”

Our Sun’s magnetic transition probably began around the same time life on Earth first crawled out of the sea, and that may be no coincidence, Metcalfe suggests. The incoming particles and radiation from active stars damage DNA and promote mutations, speeding evolution. They “may be part of the necessary ingredients to get life started,” he says. But at some point, energetic space weather poses a threat to complex life—“like a giant cosmic reset button that’s always going off,” he adds.

Stars undergoing a transition from cycling to stable could provide the ideal balance of spark and protection to nurture life. “If we’re looking for technological civilizations,” Metcalfe says, “maybe the best place to look is around stars that are in the second half of [their] lifetimes”—in other words, just entering a midlife crisis.

doi: 10.1126/science.ade3556

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SAN FRANCISCO — The young kings of Silicon Valley are dismounting their unicorns.

They’re writing sentimental blog posts that outline their legacies. They’re expressing hope for their companies’ prospects. They’re quitting their jobs leading the start-ups they founded.

In recent weeks, Ben Silbermann, a co-founder of the digital pinboard service Pinterest, resigned as chief executive; Joe Gebbia, a co-founder of the home rental company Airbnb, announced his departure from the company’s leadership; and Apoorva Mehta, the founder of the grocery delivery app Instacart, said he would end his run as executive chairman when the company went public, as soon as this year.

The resignations signify the end of an era at these companies, which are among the most valuable and well-known to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past decade, and of the era they represent. In recent years, investors have dumped increasingly large sums of money into a group of highly valued start-ups known as unicorns, worth $1 billion or more, and their founders have been treated as visionary heroes. Those founders fought for special ownership rights that kept them in control of their companies — a change from the past, when entrepreneurs were often replaced by more experienced executives or pressured to sell.

But when the stock market fell dramatically this year, hitting money-losing tech companies especially hard, this approach began to change. Venture capitalists pulled back on their deal-making and urged Silicon Valley’s prized young companies to cut costs and proceed cautiously. The industry began to talk of “wartime C.E.O.s” who can do more with less, while bragging about lessons learned from previous downturns.

Patience for visionaries wore thin. Founder-led companies started to seem like liabilities, not assets.

“All of that changed in the last 90 days, and it’s not coming back anytime soon,” said Wil Schroter, the founder of Startups.com, an accelerator program for young companies. The “we’ll figure it out later” story is no longer attractive to investors, he added.

In addition to Mr. Silbermann, Mr. Gebbia and Mr. Mehta, founders at the top of Twitter, Peloton, Medium and MicroStrategy have all resigned this year.

They’re not leaving on a high note. Shares of Pinterest are down 60 percent from a year ago. Elliott Management, an activist shareholder known for pressuring companies to make big changes, recently took a stake in the company. Airbnb shares are down 25 percent from a year ago. And Instacart lowered its internal valuation almost 40 percent in March, as it prepares to go public in a hostile market.

“It’s surely less fun being a C.E.O. when markets are down, the economy is trending negative and regulation is increasing,” said Kevin Werbach, a professor of business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “If you’re as already rich, famous and successful as these guys, there usually comes a point where staying in the saddle is less appealing than riding off into the sunset.”

In start-up lore, Mark Zuckerberg pioneered the modern boy boss. Carrying business cards that read, “I’m C.E.O., bitch” and ruffling Wall Street feathers with his “disrespectful” hoodie, he demanded investors let him keep a controlling interest in Facebook as it grew, ushering in today’s era of “founder-friendly” deal-making. Young, ambitious men like Mr. Zuckerberg received similar protections and leeway as venture capital firms rushed to appear as accommodating as possible, lavishing the entrepreneurs with perks (dinners, jets, celebrities) and services (recruiting, public relations, design). One firm even publicly pledged to never vote against a founder on company matters.

“It inspired our whole generation to believe in the impossible that they could start companies,” said Trace Cohen, 34, an investor in very young start-ups.
Founders took advantage of their upper hands. They stayed in the top jobs, even when the companies outgrew their skills as managers. And they kept their companies private for as long as possible, avoiding pesky business realities like turning a profit. They were given the benefit of the doubt — something female founders rarely got.

As the tech sector became a dominant force in our economy, the cult of the start-up founder made its way into popular culture via celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and TV shows like the HBO satire “Silicon Valley.”

Some founders of this era took their latitude too far. Adam Neumann’s spending and partying got him forced out of WeWork in 2018, even though he held a controlling stake in the company. And Travis Kalanick’s aggressive tactics at Uber resulted in his ouster in 2017, despite his super-voting shares.

The rest mostly held on through the companies’ initial public offerings. But it turns out that running a publicly traded company, with its attendant fiduciary duties, analyst calls and slog of quarterly earnings, is a far cry from the hustle and thrill of start-up life. Now, as troubles mount amid a market meltdown, they’re giving up the power and control they once fought for.

In his announcement, Mr. Silbermann said that running Pinterest had been “the gift of a lifetime.” Mr. Gebbia, who will become an adviser to Airbnb, posted an effusive reminiscence of the company’s early days, alongside photos, nicknames of his co-founders (Brian “Jet Fuel” Chesky and “Indiana Nate” Blecharczyk) and lessons about the goodness of humanity. (Mr. Chesky remains its chief executive.) Mr. Mehta tweeted that he “cared deeply” about Instacart — the “one thing I have thought about for every waking minute of the last decade.”

Leaving as billionaires, they have emanated Silicon Valley’s relentless positivity. Pinterest “is just getting started,” Airbnb “is in the best hands it’s ever been in” and Instacart has a “enormous opportunity ahead,” the founders wrote. Both Mr. Mehta and Mr. Gebbia said they had plans for new projects.

Investors say they anticipate more of these resignations from founders who are realizing they now have to work harder for less (relatively speaking). “Now, they can let some executives step up, take over and grow it with different incentives,” Mr. Cohen said.

Last week, Brad Hargreaves, the founder of Common, a start-up that operates communal living spaces, announced he would step down as chief executive, becoming chief creative officer. The company’s head of property, Karlene Holloman, a hotel industry veteran, will take over as chief executive.

The market downturn factored into Mr. Hargreaves’s decision. In flush times, he said, it’s good to have a founder at the top of the company who can sell investors, employees and customers on a grand vision. “Operations don’t really matter that much,” he said. “No one’s really watching the bottom line.”

Today’s environment requires someone with Ms. Holloman’s extensive experience and operational skills, he said. “In a tighter time, when operations matter a lot and nobody’s buying into any grand visions, you want an operator in that seat,” he said.

“A lot of founder-C.E.O.s stick around too long,” he added.

The founders who have so far stayed on amid the downturn — and there are many, including at Stripe, Coinbase and Discord — can expect greater demands and more pressure. The stock trading app Robinhood has laid off more than 1,000 employees this year as it loses active customers. Dan Dolev, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, said several investors had privately suggested Robinhood bring in a more seasoned executive to help its co-founder, Vlad Tenev. Mr. Tenev cannot be forced out, since he and his co-founder, Baiju Bhatt, together hold a controlling stake in the company.

“They’re typical founders where they’re very good at the ideas and creative stuff,” Mr. Dolev said, “but could use help with operations.”

A Robinhood spokeswoman said the company had recently undergone a reorganization and pointed to executive hires from TD Ameritrade and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Making matters worse, start-up founders have lost their halo of positive cultural cachet — a trend that began during the tech backlash of 2017 and that has grown with the release of devastating books and TV shows about WeWork, Uber and other tech darlings.

“Once you’ve made a certain amount of money, you’re playing for status, and the status isn’t there,” Mr. Hargreaves said.

Still, there’s always the comeback story. If the market gets worse and companies start seriously tanking, we could see the reverse dynamic of founders returning to right the ship, said Mr. Werbach, the business professor.

It would be a throwback to the original cult-hero founder, who commanded admiration long before unicorns roamed the Valley and who even inspired Mr. Zuckerberg’s swaggering business cards. He was, perhaps, the original boy boss: Steve Jobs.

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There’s growing evidence that regular exposure to man-made “forever” chemicals, which are used in a variety of household products, are linked to rising cancer rates.

A new study that examined the correlation between liver cancer and the presence of these chemicals in humans found that people with the highest levels of exposure have 350% greater odds of eventually developing the disease.

The term “forever” chemicals refers to the more than 4,700 available types of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, used widely across manufacturing industries — named as such because the substances degrade very slowly and build up over time, in soil, drinking water and in the body.

PFAS were first introduced in the 1930s as a revolutionary material used in the creation of nonstick cookware — hello, Teflon — and soon adapted to all sorts of products and packaging — from construction materials to cosmetics — that benefit from its liquid- and fire-resistant properties, as noted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The term “forever” chemicals refers to the more than 4,700 available types of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, used widely across manufacturing industries.
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Though incredibly useful, such chemicals have since been linked to the onset of cancer and other illnesses in lab animals. Following strong anecdotal evidence that perfluorooctanesulfonic acids (PFOS) alongside another common substance called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) were making consumers sick, the Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 ordered eight multinational manufacturing corporations represented in the US to phase out the use of such chemicals. Nevertheless, as their nickname implies, PFOS and PFOA are still being detected in foreign products, in groundwater and in people.

The current study, published in JHEP Reports, is the first to show a clear association between any PFAS and nonviral hepatocellular carcinoma (the most common type of liver cancer) in humans, too.

The current study, published in JHEP Reports, is the first to show a clear association between any PFAS and nonviral hepatocellular carcinoma (the most common type of liver cancer) in humans, too.

“This builds on the existing research, but takes it one step further,” said Jesse Goodrich, a postdoctoral public health researcher at Keck School of Medicine, in a University of Southern California news release. “Liver cancer is one of the most serious endpoints in liver disease and this is the first study in humans to show that PFAS are associated with this disease.”

Showing an association between PFAS and cancer in humans hasn’t been easy for scientists.

“Part of the reason there has been few human studies is because you need the right samples,” added Keck School of Medicine professor Veronica Wendy Setiawan. “When you are looking at an environmental exposure, you need samples from well before a diagnosis because it takes time for cancer to develop.”

To make this leap, researchers were given access to the Multiethnic Cohort Study database, which entails a survey of cancer development in more than 200,000 residents of Hawaii as well as Los Angeles, Calif., conducted by the University of Hawaii.

Their search was narrowed to 100 survey participants — 50 of them with liver cancer and 50 without — whose available blood and tissue samples were sufficient for analysis. Researchers were looking for traces of “forever” chemicals present in the body before the group with cancer became ill.

They reportedly found several types of PFAS among participants, with PFOS appearing most prominently among those in the group with liver cancer. Indeed, their investigation revealed that those who fell in the top 10% of PFOS exposure were 4.5 times more likely to develop hepatocellular carcinoma when compared to those with the least exposure.

The clear link between PFAS and cancer in humans is crucial to further study on how these chemicals interfere with biological processes. Per the current findings, USC scientists now believe that high concentrations of PFOS in some subjects had impaired the liver’s ability to metabolize glucose, bile acid and branched-chain amino acids, resulting in unhealthy levels of fat accumulation in the organ, otherwise known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease — a high-risk factor for liver cancer.

That’s why many scientists agree it’s no coincidence that the advent and widespread use of “forever” chemicals correlates with a rise in liver disease, cancer and other illnesses.

“We believe our work is providing important insights into the long-term health effects that these chemicals have on human health, especially with respect to how they can damage normal liver function,” said study author Dr. Leda Chatzi. “This study fills an important gap in our understanding of the true consequences of exposure to these chemicals.”

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