Since the first factories began manufacturing polyester from petroleum in the 1950s, humans have produced an estimated 9.1 billion tons of plastic. Of the waste generated from that plastic, less than a tenth of that has been recycled, researchers estimate. About 12 percent has been incinerated, releasing dioxins and other carcinogens into the air. Most of the rest, a mass equivalent to about 35 million blue whales, has accumulated in landfills and in the natural environment. Plastic inhabits the oceans, building up in the guts of seagulls and great white sharks. It rains down, in tiny flecks, on cities and national parks. According to some research, from production to disposal, it is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the aviation industry.

 

This pollution problem is made worse, experts say, by the fact that even the small share of plastic that does get recycled is destined to end up, sooner or later, in the trash heap. Conventional, thermomechanical recycling—in which old containers are ground into flakes, washed, melted down, and then reformed into new products—inevitably yields products that are more brittle, and less durable, than the starting material. At best, material from a plastic bottle might be recycled this way about three times before it becomes unusable. More likely, it will be “downcycled” into lower value materials like clothing and carpeting—materials that will eventually be disposed of in landfills.

 

“Thermomechanical recycling is not recycling,” said Alain Marty, chief science officer at Carbios, a French company that is developing alternatives to conventional recycling.

 

“At the end,” he added, “you have exactly the same quantity of plastic waste.”

 

Carbios is among a contingent of startups that are attempting to commercialize a type of chemical recycling known as depolymerization, which breaks down polymers—the chain-like molecules that make up a plastic—into their fundamental molecular building blocks, called monomers. Those monomers can then be reassembled into polymers that are, in terms of their physical properties, as good as new. In theory, proponents say, a single plastic bottle could be recycled this way until the end of time.

 

But some experts caution that depolymerization and other forms of chemical recycling may face many of the same issues that already plague the recycling industry, including competition from cheap virgin plastics made from petroleum feedstocks. They say that to curb the tide of plastic flooding landfills and the oceans, what’s most needed is not new recycling technologies but stronger regulations on plastic producers—and stronger incentives to make use of the recycling technologies that already exist.

 

Buoyed by potentially lucrative corporate partnerships and tightening European restrictions on plastic producers, however, Carbios is pressing forward with its vision of a circular plastic economy—one that does not require the extraction of petroleum to make new plastics. Underlying the company’s approach is a technology that remains unconventional in the realm of recycling: genetically modified enzymes.

 

Enzymes catalyze chemical reactions inside organisms. In the human body, for example, enzymes can convert starches into sugars and proteins into amino acids. For the past several years, Carbios has been refining a method that uses an enzyme found in a microorganism to convert polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common ingredient in textiles and plastic bottles, into its constituent monomers, terephthalic acid, and mono ethylene glycol.

 

Although scientists have known about the existence of plastic-eating enzymes for years—and Marty says Carbios has been working on enzymatic recycling technology since its founding in 2011—a discovery made six years ago outside a bottle-recycling factory in Sakai, Japan, helped to energize the field. There, a group led by researchers at the Kyoto Institute of Technology and Keio University found a single bacterial species, Ideonella sakaiensis, that could both break down PET and use it for food. The microbe harbored a pair of enzymes that, together, could cleave the molecular bonds that hold together PET. In the wake of the discovery, other research groups identified other enzymes capable of performing the same feat.

 

 

 

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday announced the authorization of the first breath-based test for COVID-19.

 

The InspectIR COVID-19 Breathalyzer offers highly accurate test results in about three minutes, without the need for uncomfortable swabbing or collection of hazardous samples. But, before you get your hopes up for a handheld device you can huff into as you head out the door, it's not quite that convenient. The test requires a high-tech device about the size of a carry-on suitcase—demo versions are literally housed in hard-shelled roll-aboard cases—and it requires a trained technician to operate. To take the test, a person has to sit next to the traveling instrument and blow into it through a straw for about 10 seconds.

 

The instrument inside the luggage is actually performing gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), which is a gold-standard analytical technique to finely separate out the components of a mixture. Generally, GC-MS samples are vaporized and mixed with an inert carrier gas before going through a capillary column, which separates out components by their boiling point and polarity. Then those components are ionized and fragmented and further separated out by their mass-to-charge ratios. The end readout is various peaks on a gas chromatogram, with each peak having a unique mass spectrum, allowing for the unambiguous identification of specific compounds.

 

For the COVID-19 breathalyzer test, InspectIR looks for the GC-MS signatures of five volatile organic compounds that are associated with a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The detection of these signatures has been shown to be highly accurate. According to the FDA, a study involving 2,409 people found that the device correctly identified 91 percent of known-positive samples as positive (test sensitivity) and correctly identified 99 percent of known-negative samples as negative (test specificity). The FDA also noted that known-positive samples came from people with and without COVID-19 symptoms and performed just as well in a follow-up study involving the omicron variant.

Exhalant results

In addition, the study showed that the test could produce reliable negative results in populations where infection rates are low. That is, in a population where only 4.2 percent of people were infected, the test had negative predictive value of nearly 97 percent. Although, the FDA cautions that "negative results should be considered in the context of a patient’s recent exposures, history, and the presence of clinical signs and symptoms consistent with COVID-19, as they do not rule out SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole basis for treatment or patient management decisions, including infection control decisions."

 

 

The test's maker, InspectIR Systems LLC, a Texas-based device company, expects the breathalyzer could be wheeled into doctors' offices, hospitals, and mobile testing sites, where each instrument could perform around 160 tests per day. Because it heats and ionizes each breath sample, there's no infectious or hazardous biological waste that requires device cleaning or disposal afterward. Test takers only need a single-use hygienic straw for sample submission.

 

But, it's unlikely to be appearing at every corner pharmacy any time soon. InspectIR expects to be able to produce just about 100 instruments per week, the FDA notes. It's also unclear how expensive each test will be at various sites.

 

Still, the portable, mini-GC-MS is an interesting—and potentially more accurate—rapid test for COVID-19 than the current antigen-based methods that are widely used.

 

The FDA's authorization on Thursday "is yet another example of the rapid innovation occurring with diagnostic tests for COVID-19," Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement. "The FDA continues to support the development of novel COVID-19 tests with the goal of advancing technologies that can help address the current pandemic and better position the US for the next public health emergency."

 

 

Amid rubble buried beneath a Maya pyramid in Northern Guatemala, archaeologists found a broken bit of plaster with a glyph painted on it. A bar-and-dot symbol for the number “7” is drawn above a deer head, representing “7 Deer,” a date in the 260-day Maya calendar system. At around 2,300 years old, the painted plaster is the oldest known use of the calendar system once used by cultures across Mesoamerica, including the Aztec and the Maya—and still used by many Maya communities today.

 

“Its persistence in many communities up to the present day stands as a testament of its importance in religious and social life,” wrote University of Texas archaeologist David Stuart and his colleagues in their recent paper about the glyph. “Our ability to trace its early use back some 23 centuries stands as another testament to its historical and cultural significance."

7 Deer, 2,300 years ago

The Maya calendar combines the numbers 1 through 13 with 20 words for animals, plants, or concepts. Those 20 words rotate in a set order; for instance, Deer is always followed by Rabbit, Water, Dog, Monkey, and Grass. When the numbers paired with the days reach 13, they start over, so 13 Rabbit would be followed by 1 Water, 2 Dog, and so on. (Pop quiz: What’s the day after 7 Deer?)

 

Eventually, that system produces 260 combinations of numbers and words. But here’s where things get slightly complicated because a Maya year still lasted 365 days. The first day of the year could fall on any day whose name included a “Year-Bearer,” one of the animals, plants, or concepts allowed to start a new year. Think of it as similar to the way New Year’s Day can fall on any day of the week in our system; the year can start on a Tuesday or a Friday with no problem.

 

“Deer” is a Year-Bearer in the Maya calendar, so 7 Deer could have marked the beginning of a new year. It could also have been the date of some other important event, or even the name of a person or deity—both could be named for days. Stuart and his colleagues aren’t sure, because there are only two other glyphs on the plaster fragment. The second is still untranslated, because it’s a very early form of Maya writing, which looks quite different from the Classic Maya that archaeologists typically see. And the third symbol may be another archaic glyph, or it may be part of an image that once accompanied the writing; the archaeologists haven’t figured that out yet.

 

But the “7 Deer” glyph is definitely an example of the 260-day calendar in use 2,300 years ago, which makes it about a century older than the next-oldest examples. Some even older examples may exist, but archaeologists are still debating their exact ages and, in some cases, whether they’re actually dates. Stuart and his colleagues are sure about the age of the “7 Deer” glyph, however; they radiocarbon-dated fragments of charcoal found near the plaster fragment, in rubble from an early phase of construction at the site of the Las Pinturas Pyramid in San Bartolo, Northern Guatemala.

 

The pink structures, labeled "Sub-V," are what the temple complex looked like when the "7 Deer" glyph was painted. "Sub-IV" is the base of the pyramid built above the older temple complex.

 

The glyph at the top of the fragment is the date "7 Deer," missing a dot on the left.

It’s pyramids all the way down

Archaeologists found the “7 Deer” glyph, along with 248 other fragments of painted lime plaster, among the several tons of rubble, mud, and rock that filled the foundations of a pyramid built at the site in the 200s BCE. Eleven of those fragments, including the “7 Deer” glyph, have Maya script painted on them, and they’re some of the oldest examples of Mesoamerican writing that archaeologists have found so far. They’re so old, in fact, that, like the glyphs that follow “7 Deer,” it’s difficult for archaeologists to translate some of the symbols.

 

Those plaster fragments are the remains of murals that once adorned the walls of a temple, a tiered platform, and a ball court and molded plaster masks that once stared down from the facades of a pyramid, all painted in several shades of red, pink, yellow, and black. But sometime in the 200s BCE, the Maya smashed the plaster and razed the buildings at the site to the ground. Over the ruins of the old temple complex, they piled several tons of rock, mud, and broken plaster to fill in the foundations of the new pyramid. The base of the new pyramid was large enough to cover the whole complex that once stood in its place: the temple, the ball court, and the tiered platform, all built over an even older site sometime around 300 BCE.

 

That process is something else that—like the 260-day calendar—several Mesoamerican cultures shared. Old temples and monuments would be ritually terminated, or “killed,” and newer, larger versions would simply be built on top of the old one. The same process happened at least six times at the Aztec Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City.

 

 

The trolley problem is a staple of discussions about ethics. The basic version is very simple: A trolley is barreling down a track toward a group of five people who remain blissfully unaware of their impending doom. You stand next to a switch that could redirect the trolley to another track, where it will kill a smaller number of people. Do you throw the switch?

 

Most people take a very utilitarian view of things and say they'd throw the switch. But there are plenty of variations on the trolley problem that suggest there's more than pure utilitarianism involved in the decision-making. Changing the number of people on the alternate track or changing how directly involved you have to be in killing someone will both shift the frequency of different answers—at least in industrialized societies.

 

Documentation of the response to the trolley problem in other cultures has been relatively spotty, raising the question of whether we can reveal any ethical universals using it. So an enormous team of researchers decided to find out, surveying more than 27,000 people in 45 countries. Although the work didn't exactly go as planned, it did provide a hint of at least one ethical tendency that's pretty universal across cultures.

One problem, many versions

Basic versions of the trolley problem are just as described above, with people asked whether to pull a switch or not, with the number of people dead depending on their decision. But there are nearly infinite variants on the basic outline. In the studies done here, the researchers used the standard version, and also two variants. In one case, they put the participants in charge of a speedboat and had them choose which of two groups of swimmers to save from drowning. While the practical results are the same—one group is saved, the other dies—this shifts the focus onto saving people.

 

In another version used in the study, there was no switch; instead, participants had to throw someone off a bridge and in front of the trolley to get it to derail and save others.

 

This latter case reveals a bit about moral decision-making in industrialized societies. Even when the deaths averted and caused are identical, people in industrialized societies tended to be more hesitant to physically throw someone under the trolley than they were to pull a switch. Researchers have labeled this an aversion to "personal force," and one of the questions here was whether this same behavior was seen in non-industrialized societies.

 

As noted above, the researchers had a large population of participants to sort this out, divided into the global East, South, and West. But that turned out to be more of a problem than it might appear.

 

The researchers had pre-registered their study plan with a set of criteria that would lead to participants being excluded from the analysis portion of things. These included indications of a loss of attention while people filled in online forms or being aware of the trolley test. Unfortunately, that covered nearly all of their participants—over 80 percent of them. As a result, if they did the analysis according to their original plan, they had very few participants, and most of the results weren't statistically significant.

 

In addition, there were some indications that participants found the whole concept of the trolley problem a bit confusing and had trouble understanding the questions. This was more common in non-Western societies.

 

As installing renewable generating sources continues to set annual records, we're reaching the point where storing the power they generate becomes essential. Proper storage can provide a way to cover temporary drops in production due to changing weather and can potentially offer a way to use power at times when renewable sources aren't producing at all.

 

So far, attention has focused on batteries as a storage technology that already works and on hydrogen as a technology that could work. But both options have problems with scaling to meet our needs. And there's one technology that's already in use that might be more flexible: heat. Heat created from concentrated solar power already allows solar plants to keep producing long after the Sun sets (some plants can generate around the clock). And we already know how to produce and store heat efficiently.

 

Now, researchers from the National Renewable Energy Lab and MIT have improved a technology for using the stored heat to produce electricity: a photovoltaic device that's sensitive to infrared wavelengths. They show that its efficiency is competitive with that of steam boilers, and it avoids the use of moving parts and water that might otherwise be scarce.

Thermophotovoltaics

Silicon photovoltaic cells—and those made from a range of other materials—can convert infrared light into an electrical current. They just don't do so efficiently. Other materials are more sensitive to these wavelengths, but the lower-energy photons in the infrared result in a correspondingly lower voltage in the photovoltaic output. That drops the efficiency of any devices targeting these wavelengths.

 

But since the research team is focusing on energy storage, they assume that they can control the temperature of the hot object that's acting as their photon source. So the researchers plan to use a relatively high temperature (in the area of 2,000° C) to boost the number of higher-energy photons near the edge of the visible spectrum. This will allow them to use a semiconductor with a higher bandgap, which corresponds to a larger output voltage.

 

To boost the efficiency further, the cell combines two different materials that absorb different areas of the spectrum in what's called a two-junction configuration. The team tried two different two-junction setups, one using aluminum/gallium/indium/arsenic and gallium/indium/arsenic and a second that's gallium/arsenic and gallium/indium/arsenic. The two have slightly different properties in what they absorb most efficiently, which we'll come back to shortly.

 

Since this configuration is entirely controllable, the researchers essentially wrap the whole device, which includes both the heating element that produces photons and the thermophotovoltaic cell that converts them to electricity, in highly reflective material. Any photon that emits in the wrong direction gets reflected to either strike the thermophotovoltaic device or be absorbed by the heating element, thus helping maintain its high temperature. The same is true for any photons that reach the thermophotovoltaic material but aren't absorbed by it. (The researchers dryly note that photovoltaics can't reflect unabsorbed photons to the Sun to keep it hot.)

 

The net result is a total device efficiency of around 40 percent, depending on which materials are used and the temperature of the heat source.

How this stacks up

A 60 percent loss sounds pretty horrific compared to a battery, where the round-trip efficiency is more than 90 percent. But the researchers note the efficiency is already higher than that of the average steam turbine generator in the US. The thermophotovoltaic devices are relatively new, and it's expected that there will be plenty of room to boost the efficiency above 40 percent; by contrast, turbines are about as mature as a technology gets.

 

That's where the two different devices come in. One was most efficient at extracting electricity from temperatures at around 2,400° C, the second did better once temperatures dropped below 2,000° C. So it should be possible to design systems where different thermophotovoltaic devices are used to efficiently extract electricity as the temperature of a source material progressively drops. And, once the temperature drops below where thermophotovoltaic devices work well, things should still be hot enough to create steam to drive a turbine.

 

A second benefit is that the system is pretty agnostic about how it generates the heat for storage in the first place. It could come from electricity when wind and solar are overproducing. It could be part of a concentrating solar power plant (although those tend to max out at around 1,000° C). One design for a next-generation nuclear power plant would use heat storage to increase its flexibility. There may even be some industrial processes that produce waste heat at these temperatures (although they're also well above what obvious things like steelmaking require) that could be stored.

 

Finally, the team notes that an inexpensive material—graphite—can be used to store heat at these temperatures. So, as long as the cost of the thermophotovoltaic device and supporting hardware can be kept within reasonable limits, this might allow thermal storage coupled with renewables to compete with fossil fuels. The main issue seems to be the extreme temperatures needed to get this to work.

 

Nature, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04473-y  (About DOIs).

 

 

Ars Technica had the opportunity to tour NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week, suiting up for a clean room sneak peek at the Psyche spacecraft now nearing completion. This ambitious mission, named after the eponymous asteroid it will explore, is due to launch in August on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Scientists are hopeful that learning more about this unusual asteroid will advance our understanding of planet formation and the earliest days of our solar system.

 

Discovered in March 1852 by the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, 16 Psyche is an M-type asteroid (meaning it has high metallic content) orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt, with an unusual potato-like shape. The longstanding preferred hypothesis is that Psyche is the exposed metallic core of a protoplanet (planetesimal) from the earliest days of our solar system, with the crust and mantle stripped away by a collision (or multiple collisions) with other objects. In recent years, scientists concluded that the mass and density estimates aren't consistent with an entirely metallic remnant core. Rather, it's more likely a complex mix of metals and silicates.

 

Alternatively, the asteroid might once have been a parent body for a particular class of stony-iron meteorites, one that broke up and re-accreted into a mix of metal and silicate. Or perhaps it's an object like 1 Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—except 16 Psyche may have experienced a period of iron volcanism while cooling, leaving highly enriched metals in those volcanic centers.

 

 

Scientists have long suspected that metallic cores lurk deep within terrestrial planets like Earth. But those cores are buried too far beneath rocky mantles and crusts for researchers to find out. As the only metallic core-like body discovered, Psyche provides the perfect opportunity to shed light on how the rocky planets in our solar system (Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars) may have formed. NASA approved the Psyche mission in 2017, intending to send a spacecraft to orbit the asteroid and collect crucial data about its characteristics.

 

"Our understanding of what Psyche might be has not changed all that much over the last few years," Linda Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University, principal investigator of the Psyche mission, told Ars. "It has to have a large metal content, but we've never really known how much. It could be the part of a metal core of a tiny planet from early in the solar system, or it could be something that never melted and formed a core but has metal mixed into it, like pebbles with the rock. We won't really know until we get there."

 

Several instruments will be aboard the Psyche spacecraft to collect that precious scientific data. There is a multi-spectral imager capable of producing sufficiently high-resolution images for scientists to tell the difference between the asteroid's metallic and silicate (mineral) constituents. The job of mapping the asteroid's composition and identifying all the elements falls to a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer. There is also a magnetometer that will measure and map any remnants of a magnetic field. Finally, a microwave radio telecommunications system will also be able to measure the asteroid's gravity field, gleaning clues about its interior structure.

 

 

The chassis, constructed by a satellite company called Maxar Technologies, was delivered last April. It's roughly the size of a passenger van and was built largely from commercial, off-the-shelf technology. "Once in space, the spacecraft will use an innovative means of propulsion, known as Hall thrusters, to reach the asteroid," Ars Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote last year. "This will be the first time a spacecraft has ventured into deep space using Hall thrusters, and absent this technology, the Psyche mission probably wouldn't be happening—certainly not at its cost of just less than $1 billion." Here's a bit more from Berger about this innovative approach:

 

Engines powered by chemical propulsion are great for getting rockets off the surface of the Earth when you need a brawny burst of energy to break out of the planet's gravitational well. But chemical rocket engines are not the most fuel-efficient machines in the world, as they guzzle propellant. And once a spacecraft is in space, there are more fuel-efficient means of moving around. NASA has been experimenting with  [solar electric propulsion] technology for a while. The space agency first tested electric propulsion technology in its Deep Space 1 mission, which launched in 1998, and later in the Dawn mission in 2007 that visited Vesta and Ceres in the asteroid belt.

 

These spacecraft used ion thrusters. Hall thrusters, by contrast, use a simpler design, with a magnetic field to confine the flow of propellant. These thrusters were invented in the Soviet Union and later adapted for commercial purposes by Maxar and other companies. Many of the largest communications satellites in geostationary orbit today, such as those delivering DirecTV, use Hall thrusters for station-keeping.

 

Using Hall thruster-based technology enabled the mission's scientists and engineers to design a smaller and more affordable spacecraft. Each of the Hall thrusters on Psyche will generate three times as much thrust as the ion thrusters on the Dawn spacecraft and can process twice as much power. This will allow the spacecraft to reach the Psyche asteroid, located in the main belt, in January 2026, after a 3.5-year journey.

 

The Psyche team tested the twin solar arrays in March, attaching the arrays to the spacecraft body and unfolding them lengthwise, before stowing the panels until the August launch. The five-panel, cross-shaped solar arrays are the largest installed at JPL, measuring 800 square feet (75 square meters). They are specially designed to work in low-light conditions, far away from the Sun.

 

 

After launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in August, the Psyche spacecraft will plug along on its Hall thrusters until it reaches Mars in May 2023. Then it will slingshot around the red planet for a gravitational assist for the final leg of the journey to its namesake asteroid.

 

"The most important thing is to get the engine and thrusters going right away," JPL's Henry Stone, Psyche project manager, told Ars. "This is not a chemical propulsion, this is an electrical propulsion mission. That means we are powering the vehicle, propulsing all the way to Psyche, in addition to doing a gravitational assist around Mars. We need to launch the vehicle, get it into a safe state quickly, and be prepared to get the engines up and running so that we can get to the final destination."

 

Once everything is up and running, testing will begin on a laser communications experiment called Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC), which will operate for about a year. The objective of this optical system is to improve the performance of spacecraft communications substantially over conventional radio frequency (rf) systems, similar to how fiber optic cables replaced old-school telephone wires.

 

"There's a huge bandwidth crunch," JPL's Abhijit "Abi" Biswas, DSOC project technologist, told Ars. "We're running out of bandwidth because of demand from near-Earth satellites. Moving to optical opens up a nice slice of spectrum. You get much higher data rates than rf— roughly a factor of 10 for large distances—all for the same mass and power, once we work out all the kinks. We have targeted data rates at targeted distances so if we can hit those data rates, then definitely it's worked."

 

DSOC boasts a flight laser transceiver, a ground laser transmitter, and a ground laser receiver. The experiment on board the Psyche spacecraft is a proof of principle. Substantial infrastructure on the ground would need to be developed for similar optical systems to be deployed in future missions. "There has to be some investment in that because, for deep space, you need large aperture ground collectors which don't exist today," Biswas said.

 

For the Psyche technology demonstration, Biswas' team is relying on the near-infrared laser transmitter at JPL's Table Mountain facility, with the Hale Telescope at California's Palomar Observatory serving as a receiver. But that won't be operationally feasible for broad deployment on future deep space missions, such as a manned mission to Mars. According to Biswas, JPL is currently experimenting with putting mirrors on the Goldstone antennas in hopes of using the same infrastructure to operate in both the optical and rf regimes.

 

The spacecraft will reach the asteroid in January 2026 and spend the next 21 months in orbit mapping the body and measuring its properties. There will be three orbital stages, as the spacecraft gradually dips into successively lower orbits until it is orbiting just 53 miles (85 kilometers) above the surface.

 

Because the asteroid Psyche has such an odd shape, the mission scientists expect it most likely has a very irregular gravitational field. "We had to design the spacecraft in such a way to be able to account for that from a navigation and control standpoint," said Stone. "That's in part why we start out at a very high altitude, so we can safely orbit far away, and make measurements of the gravitational field. Then we can build that model and refine it in real time, so that we then know how to drop down successively these closer and closer orbits."

 

And then we wait for all that data to be analyzed so Psyche can reveal its secrets. "My secret hope is that Psyche is not part of a metal core, that it's something quite unusual," Elkins-Tanton said. "I would love for it to be 'reduced': Some material that had all its oxygen stripped off it so that the metal is made up of the iron that's left behind. Some previously undetected building block of planets, something we haven't seen in the meteorite collection. That would be the biggest thrill to me."

 

"High Bay Bob" is an unofficial mascot of the High Bay clean rooms at JPL.

 

 

Although the loss of smell and taste became apparent symptoms of COVID-19 early in the pandemic, researchers are still working out why that happens—is the virus directly infecting and destroying the cells responsible for these critical senses, or is it collateral damage from our immune systems fighting off the invading foe?

 

According to a postmortem study out this week in JAMA Neurology, it's the latter. The study—which dove deep into the noses, nerves, and brains of 23 people who died of COVID-19—is the most detailed look at the coronavirus' effects on our sniffers. Researchers concluded that inflammation—not the virus—is behind the loss of smell and taste during a bout of COVID-19, which is good news in some ways. It suggests that treatments with anti-inflammatory drugs could prevent severe or long-term damage to those critical senses.

 

The finding follows a mix of data on the effects of SARS-CoV-2 on our sense of smell. Some data suggested that the virus can infect the nerves that carry smells signals to our brain—olfactory neurons. Thus, the lost senses could be caused by direct infections. But others found that the virus wasn't present in those neurons at death.

 

For the new study, researchers led by pathologist Cheng-Ying Ho of Johns Hopkins University closely examined olfactory tissue from 23 patients who died with COVID-19—nine of whom had completely or partially lost senses of smell and taste. Specifically, the researchers examined olfactory neurons in the nasal mucosa, blood vessels, and the number of olfactory axons—which are parts of neurons that transmit electrical signals—in each patient. They also examined injuries to the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain where smell signals are received, and determined whether SARS-CoV-2 was present or not.

 

They compared the findings to those from 14 people who died of other causes and were not infected with COVID-19 and did not have any loss of smell or taste.

Following the scent

Compared with controls and COVID-19 patients without altered smell and taste, the COVID-19 patients who had altered senses of smell and taste had more injuries to their nasal mucosa, more damage to their vasculature, and significantly fewer olfactory axons.

 

However, that damage to the olfactory tissue wasn't linked to the documented severity of the patients' COVID-19 infections—some people who had mild COVID-19 infections had severe injuries to their olfactory bulbs, for instance. In addition, only three of the 23 patients had detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material present in their olfactory bulbs. Of those three, only one had reported a loss of smell. The other two reported no loss of taste or smell. These results suggest "olfactory pathology was not caused by direct viral injury," the authors concluded.

 

"Previous investigations that only relied on routine pathological examinations of tissue —and not the in-depth and ultrafine analyses we conducted—surmised that viral infection of the olfactory neurons and olfactory bulb might play a role in loss of smell associated with COVID-19," Ho said in a statement. "But our findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 infection of the olfactory epithelium leads to inflammation, which in turn, damages the neurons, reduces the numbers of axons available to send signals to the brain and results in the olfactory bulb becoming dysfunctional."

 

This dysfunction can be so severe that loss of smell and taste could persist for long periods or cause permanent damage. But, Ho noted in an audio interview, "if inflammation is the major cause of the injury in olfactory structures, it is possible that we might be able to use anti-inflammatory agent as the treatment," she said. "That's what I hope that our study can inspire—future studies to look into this."

 

 

Archaeologists recently unearthed an unusual tomb in a temple complex at the Huaca Las Ventanas archaeological site near Lambaeque, in northern Peru. The site belonged to the Sican culture, one of the several complex societies that flourished prior to the rise of the Inca Empire (around 1400 CE) in northern Peru. The tomb reveals that the Sican—like several other Indigenous cultures spanning the length of Peru and about 4,000 years of history—practiced a type of cranial surgery called trepanation.

The surgeon’s tomb

Trepanation is the delicate art of cutting or drilling a hole in a person’s skull. It sounds brutal, but it can help relieve pressure on the brain from inflammation or bleeding, such as might occur after a head injury. Modern surgeons sometimes use a similar procedure, called a craniotomy, to relieve pressure from bleeding under the membrane that surrounds the brain.

 

Of course, modern craniotomies are guided by CT scans and MRIs. Ancient surgeons just had to go by sight and feel, which makes their success rates pretty remarkable. Archaeologists in Peru have found the remains of about 800 trepanation patients from the last 4,000 years, and the majority of them show signs of bone healing around the edges of the hole—which means they survived serious head trauma and cranial surgery to treat it.

 

Assuming that the tools belonged to the tomb's occupant, it tells us that the Sican surgeon buried at Huaca Las Ventanas wasn’t a butcher; he was, as Sican National Museum director Carlos Elera put it in a press statement, “a specialist in cranial trepanations, and his surgical instruments were oriented to everything that was human skull surgery.”

 

A whole suite of surgical tools wrapped in a bundle was lying alongside the long-dead surgeon; archaeologists found dozens of wooden-handled bronze awls, needles, and knives in various sizes. Most of the knives were single-edged blades, but one was clearly special. The semicircular blade, called a tumi, was a staple of both surgery and ritual sacrifice for the Sican, their predecessors the Moche, and later the Inca. Ritual tumis were large and elaborate, but ancient surgeons used a smaller, more utilitarian version for trepanation.

 

“We are comparing the instruments of a modern surgeon with these objects, to see what similarities they have,” said Elera. One difference is obvious: The bronze in most of the tools contains a fairly large amount of arsenic, which would probably raise some eyebrows in a modern surgical suite.

 

On the other hand, the Sican surgeon would probably have recognized the tools used by his colleagues several hundred years earlier and several hundred miles to the south, in the Paracas culture of what’s now southern Peru. Archaeologists have found very similar surgical tools—awls, knives, needles, and tumis—at Paracas sites. But while the Sican surgeon used bronze tools, Paracas surgeons favored razor-sharp obsidian blades. They share that preference with some modern surgeons, who use obsidian scalpels for their sharpness and precision.

 

Two examples of the surgeon’s work also joined him in his grave; archaeologists found two frontal bones (the bone that makes up the forehead). One belonged to an adult, one belonged to a child, and neither originally belonged to the surgeon (his was still attached to the rest of his skull). Both had been carefully cut using a classic trepanation technique.

 

 

They were the largest land creatures the Earth has ever known. But what survived millions of years of fossilization in one specific area of the Ponte Alta region of Brazil was not their massive bones, rather, it was their rare and relatively tiny eggs. And many of them! The first titanosaur nesting site in the country was recently announced in a paper published in Scientific Reports.

 

Sauropods, a group of long-necked herbivores, were a diverse type of dinosaur that lived from the Jurassic era through the Cretaceous, a period spanning from 201 million years to 66 million years ago. Titanosaurs were a clade of sauropod—a group with a common ancestor—that was the last of this lineage to exist on this planet in the Late Cretaceous. While their name justifiably implies an enormous size, not all of them were huge.

 

South America is well-known for its titanosaur fossils, particularly in Argentina, home to some of the world's most spectacular titanosaur nesting sites and embryonic remains. Titanosaur eggshells and egg fragments are known in Uruguay, Peru, and Brazil, but a fossilized egg here and there doesn't provide evidence of a nesting site. Several egg clutches, numerous eggs and egg fragments in more than one layer of sediment, does.

 

The discovery marks the northernmost titanosaur nesting site in South America. While we knew the dinosaurs ranged farther north, the lack of known nesting sites there suggested they might have migrated south for egg-laying. The discovery indicates that this wasn't necessarily the case.

Lost in the limestone

These fossils were found by one of the authors of the paper, João Ismael da Silva, a paleontology technician who works at the Federal University of Triângulo Mineiro in Brazil.

 

"In the 1990s," he said in a press release, "I became aware of the occurrence of dinosaur eggs in Ponte Alta. In conversation with friends of mine who worked in limestone mining, I was able to recover some isolated eggs and, finally, an association of ten spherical eggs."

 

Limestone mining was key to the find, which came from the former Lafarge Quarry, which was in operation for 26 years—meaning that substantial ground layers now lie open. But the mine also undoubtedly destroyed many fossils that might have contributed to our understanding of lost ecosystems. The quarry remnants mean this area might have been of extraordinary paleontological value.

 

In addition to the eggs, the site yielded fossil evidence of crocodyliforms, bits of the bipedal carnivores known as theropods, fragments of titanosaurs, fish, and gastropods.

 

And this, wrote Dr. Thiago Marinho in an email, "shows how important [it] is to have a paleontologist on large-scale excavations of sedimentary rocks." (Also from the Federal University of Triângulo Mineiro, Marinho is a paleontologist and co-author on the paper.) "The presence of these beautifully preserved eggs," he continued, "demonstrate(s) that this was an exceptional paleontological site that could have provided many other important materials if this simple action of having a paleontologist in loco was taken."

 

The most well-preserved egg clutch contains 10 eggs huddled together, eight eggs facing the surface and two lying beneath the others. The specimens, mostly collected by Da Silva, were found in at least two layers of sediment, indicating that these long-necked behemoths returned year after year to this location to reproduce.

 

 

NASA will resume its efforts to complete a key fueling test of the Space Launch System rocket on Tuesday.

 

The space agency has decided to modify this test, however, due to a problem with a check valve on the rocket's upper stage that leads to a pressurized helium bottle. The valve was found to be stuck last week and will need to be replaced.

 

With the valve in this position, NASA does not feel it would be safe to load the upper stage with cryogenic oxygen and hydrogen during the "wet dress" test as originally planned. Therefore, Thursday's test will fuel only the core stage—the largest and least-proven part of the rocket—during tanking operations. As part of this test, the launch system will be brought into a terminal countdown before cutting off at T-10 seconds.

 

NASA plans to collect a trove of data from this test, and this information will inform the agency's plans going forward, officials said during a media teleconference with reporters on Monday. About 10 days after the test, NASA will roll the SLS rocket back into the Vehicle Assembly Building. There, technicians will remove the check valve, which is about 8 cm long, and inspect the part to understand why it malfunctioned. It can then be replaced, which should be a relatively simple operation, said John Blevins, the SLS chief engineer.

A path forward

"We’re very comfortable with the path forward," said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development at the NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We think it’s a great path forward."

 

The officials on Monday's teleconference seemed confident that they could get a lot of good data from Thursday's test. For example, said launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, during the terminal countdown from T-10 minutes to T-10 seconds, there are almost 25 "critical events" in the rocket's test objectives. Just two of those are specific to the upper stage, she said.

 

"There is a significant amount of testing and data and risk buy-down you get relative to the core stage, to the ground systems, and relative to the boosters," she said.

 

The upper stage, known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, was manufactured by United Launch Alliance and was delivered to Kennedy Space Center about four years ago. However, the chief SLS engineer, John Blevins, said he does not believe the valve issue was due to any shelf-life issues. The check valve in question, he said, is rated to function for 20 years or longer.

“Two days” becomes “two weeks”

The wet dress test was originally supposed to last two days when it began on Friday, April 1. But partly due to a problem with the fans on the Mobile Launch Tower, the first attempt at fueling the rocket had to be scrubbed on April 4. A second attempt last week saw NASA fill the core stage about halfway with liquid oxygen before the agency discovered that a core stage "vent valve," which is manually adjusted, was errantly left in the wrong position. Then NASA discovered the check valve issue on the upper stage.

 

Now, teams of NASA employees and contractors will be called to their stations again on Tuesday evening to prepare the vehicle and ground systems for propellant loading for the third time. The actual fueling of the vehicle is scheduled to commence on Thursday morning, with the terminal countdown reached at 2:40 pm ET (18:40 UTC). That precise timeline, of course, assumes no further delays, which seems unlikely for a two-day test that has expanded to two weeks.

 

Asked to assess next steps after this test in terms of readying the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft for an uncrewed demonstration flight later this summer, NASA officials did not want to look too far beyond the conclusion of this core stage tanking. They declined to say whether the rocket might be subjected to a second wet dress test for the entire vehicle to ensure the flight readiness of the upper stage and its ground systems.

 

"I don't think we're ready to really state, one way or the other, what we think the next step is going to look like," Whitmeyer said. "I think we really do need to do the test Thursday and then look at the data."

 

 

The mysterious Antikythera mechanism—an ancient device believed to have been used for tracking the heavens—has fascinated scientists and the public alike since it was first recovered from a shipwreck over a century ago. Much progress has been made in recent years to reconstruct the surviving fragments and learn more about how the mechanism might have been used. And now, members of a team of Greek researchers believe they have pinpointed the start date for the Antikythera mechanism, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv repository. Knowing that "day zero" is critical to ensuring the accuracy of the device.

 

“Any measuring system, from a thermometer to the Antikythera mechanism, needs a calibration in order to [perform] its calculations correctly,” co-author Aristeidis Voulgaris of the Thessaloniki Directorate of Culture and Tourism in Greece told New Scientist. “Of course it wouldn’t have been perfect—it’s not a digital computer, it’s gears—but it would have been very good at predicting solar and lunar eclipses.” 

 

As we've previously reported, in 1900, a Greek sponge diver named Elias Stadiatis discovered the wreck of an ancient cargo ship off the coast of Antikythera island in Greece. He and other divers recovered all kinds of artifacts from the ship. A year later, an archaeologist named Valerios Stais was studying what he thought was a piece of rock recovered from the shipwreck when he noticed that there was a gear wheel embedded in it. It turned out to be an ancient mechanical device. The Antikythera mechanism is now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

 

In 1951, a British science historian named Derek J. de Solla Price began investigating the theoretical workings of the device. Based on X-ray and gamma ray photographs of the fragments, Price and physicist Charalambos Karakalos published a 70-page paper in 1959 in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Based on those images, they hypothesized that the mechanism had been used to calculate the motions of stars and planets—making it the first known analog computer.

 

 

In 2002, Michael Wright, then curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, made headlines with new, more detailed X-ray images of the device taken via linear tomography. Wright's closer analysis revealed a fixed central gear in the mechanism's main wheel, around which other moving gears could rotate. He concluded that the device was specifically designed to model "epicyclic" motion in keeping with the ancient Greek notion that celestial bodies moved in circular patterns, called epicycles. (This was pre-Copernicus, so the fixed point around which they moved was believed to be the Earth.)

 

Last year, an interdisciplinary team at University College London (UCL) led by mechanical engineer Tony Freeth made global headlines with their computational model, revealing a dazzling display of the ancient Greek cosmos. The team is currently building a replica mechanism, moving gears and all, using modern machinery. The display is described in the inscriptions on the mechanism's back cover, featuring planets moving on concentric rings with marker beads as indicators. X-rays of the front cover accurately represent the cycles of Venus and Saturn—462 and 442 years, respectively.

 

The team's efforts built on Wright's work as part of the ongoing Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, which undertook more advanced 3D X-ray imaging with the help of X-Tek Systems in the UK and Hewlett-Packard, among others. The new images revealed much more of the original Greek transcription, which was subsequently translated. High-resolution X-ray tomography confirmed it was an astronomical computer used to predict the positions of heavenly bodies in the sky. It's likely that the Antikythera mechanism once had 37 gears, of which 30 survive, and its front face had graduations showing the solar cycle and the zodiac, along with pointers to indicate the positions of the Sun and Moon.

 

Buried fiber-optic cables at Etna's summit pick up subtle volcanic activity, potentially improving early warning systems.

M.A. Gutscher

 

Towering 11,000 feet above a million humans, Mount Etna is one of the most thoroughly monitored volcanoes on Earth. Hundreds of sensors dot its flanks, and for good reason: it’s Europe’s most active volcano, periodically spewing lava and huge plumes of debris that ground planes and generally make life miserable for those living in its shadow.

 

But now scientists have been spying on Etna with an unlikely new surveillance device: fiber-optic cables, like the ones that bring you the Internet. Writing last week in the journal Nature Communications, researchers described how they used a technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, to pick up seismic signals that conventional sensors missed. This could help improve the early warning system that people in the surrounding parts of Italy rely on. Millions more around the world are also at the mercy of active volcanoes, which create chaos whether they are large or small.

 

DAS is shaking up (sorry) science in a big way. When the Internet was growing in the 1990s, telecoms ended up laying down more fiber-optic cable than they needed, since the material itself was cheap compared to the labor required to bury it. That extra cable remains unused, or “dark,” and scientists can rent it out to run DAS experiments. Engineers use it to monitor land deformation, geophysicists use it to study earthquakes, and biologists are even using underwater cables to pick up the vibrations of whale calls.

 

Fiber optics work by transporting signals from point A to point B as pulses of light. But if the cable is disturbed by, say, an earthquake, a tiny amount of that light gets bounced back to the source. To measure this, scientists use an “interrogator,” which fires a laser through the fibers and analyzes what comes back. Because researchers know the speed of light, they can determine disturbances at various lengths along the cable: something happening 60 feet away will bounce back light that takes slightly longer to get to the interrogator than something happening at 50 feet.

 

These measurements are sensitive. For example, in the spring of 2020, during the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, scientists at Pennsylvania State University used their campus’ buried dark fiber optics to observe as pedestrian and vehicle movement waned and picked up again. They could even tell the source of the aboveground disturbance by the frequency of its vibration: a human footstep is between 1 and 5 hertz, whereas car traffic is 40 to 50 hertz.

 

This new research centers on the same idea, only these scientists did it on an active volcano. Because telecoms never bothered to lay fiber optics on Mount Etna, the researchers dug a three-quarter-mile-long ditch less than a foot deep and buried their own, not far from the volcano’s rim.

 

P. Jousset

 

In the image above, you can see how the fiber-optic cable was situated, its two branches outlined in white and black. (The red and yellow lines are faults.) The dots running along the cable lines are spots where the scientists had conventional sensors, like seismometers, which use pendulums to detect movement, and geophones, which convert ground movement into electrical signals. Because these sensors and the cable were colocated at those spots—at C666, C667, and so on—the researchers could compare how the different techniques were monitoring activity.

 

P. Jousset

 

The image above shows what a volcanic explosion (not a full-on eruption) in September 2018 looked like to the DAS network. The sensing stations are noted at the top of the graphic. The red and blue represent the deformation, or “strain rate” at which the cable elongates or contracts, at a given time for every six feet along the length of the cable. “So if the cable itself is, let's say, extended or compressed, then we see that in the signals,” says Charlotte Krawczyk, a geoscientist at German Research Centre for Geosciences and Technical University Berlin, co-author of the paper describing the work. “With all other seismic equipment, we don't do that. We measure the acceleration of the surface or things like that.”

 

Notice the darker vertical red and blue band at C671, which is an increase in the signal’s amplitude. If you look back at the map, you’ll see that C671 is sitting right on a fault. “This is probably an area where the density and the velocity of the ground is different,” says geoscientist Philippe Jousset of the German Research Centre for Geosciences, lead author of the paper. That changes how the energy ripples through the earth and subsequently how the DAS reads the event.

 

 

Any kid who’s ever flown a kite has learned the lesson: Once you can get the kite off the ground and high into the air, you’re more likely to find a steady breeze to keep it aloft.

 

A fledgling wind power industry is taking that lesson to heart. Flying massive kites 200 meters or more above the ground, companies are using the wind they find there to generate electricity.

 

At least 10 firms in Europe and the United States are developing variations of this kind of kite power. If they succeed, kites could make it possible to build wind farms on land that isn’t windy enough for conventional wind turbine towers. Kites might also be a better choice for offshore wind power, and one day could even replace at least some anchored towers now in use.

 

“It’s cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to transport, and also has higher efficiency,” says Florian Bauer, co-CEO and chief technology officer of Kitekraft, a Munich-based company developing a kite power system. The carbon footprint is also much smaller, he says. “If you have all those advantages, why would anyone build a conventional wind turbine?”

 

But to become a widespread source of electricity, airborne wind energy, as it’s also called, needs to overcome a number of technological and commercial hurdles, as Bauer and colleagues describe in an upcoming paper in the 2022 Annual Review of Control, Robotics and Autonomous Systems. And it will need to demonstrate that it is safe, won’t harm wildlife, and won’t create intolerable noise and visual disturbances for neighbors.

 

At the moment, kite power is in its infancy. Most companies are working on relatively small pilot projects, and none have scaled up their technology to the megawatt range that would make them comparable to conventional wind turbines. But small versions are already on the market.

 

In 2021, Hamburg-based SkySails Power became the first company to offer a commercial product. Its production model consists of a soft, steerable kite up to 180 square meters in area. The kite is attached by an 800-meter tether to a ground station contained in a shipping container.

 

In operation, the kite makes large, graceful figure eights in the sky and powers a ground-based generator capable of an average output of 80 kilowatts — enough to supply electricity to about 60 average US households. That’s small compared with a typical 2.75-megawatt wind turbine but is similar in scale to many portable industrial diesel generators. The unit is designed for use in remote locations away from the power grid.

 

Eventually, companies want to build larger kites capable of generating megawatts of power. They envision hundreds of kites grouped together on wind farms, providing electricity to the grid.

 

Source	Maximum power	No. of homes that can be powered
Existing SkySails PN-14	80 kW	60
Typical wind turbine	2.75 MW	2,160
Proposed commercial kite	3.5 MW	2,800
Small nuclear reactor	582 MW	465,600

Harnessing speedy winds

Wind close to the ground tends to be slowed down by friction with trees, buildings and hills, and the ground itself. So the higher you go, the faster the wind can travel—at 500 meters, the breeze moves between 3 to 7 kilometers per hour faster, on average, than it does at 100 meters. Over the last few decades, there have been a number of proposals for taking advantage of these speedier, elevated winds, including sending turbines up on lighter-than-air craft, or suspending them from stationary kites. But most companies, like SkySails, are pursuing an approach that makes use of steerable, computer-controlled kites that fly patterns in the air to harvest more energy.

 

Airborne wind energy systems use two basic ways to generate electricity. Ground-based approaches, like SkySails, use “pumping power” to run a generator on the ground. The ground-based end of the tether is wound around a winch, and as the kite flies across the wind it pulls against the tether and unwinds the winch, driving a generator that produces electricity. Then the kite is allowed to float while it is reeled back in, and the cycle starts again.

 

The other approach is to generate the electricity onboard the kite. Onboard generation uses a rigid kite, similar to an airplane wing, which supports small wind turbines. When the kite flies, the wind runs the turbines and electricity generated by the craft is sent down the tether to the ground station.

 

Kitekraft, Bauer’s company, uses the onboard method, which allows it to make dual use of the turbine blades. During launch and landing, the blades are powered by a motor and become propellers that allow the kite to fly and hover like an airborne drone. Once the kite is at the proper height, the turbines switch to generating energy from the wind.

 

Airborne wind energy kites generate electricity in two basic ways. “Pumping power” uses the kite’s pulling motion to spin a rotating drum on the ground, which powers a generator (producing electricity, yellow); when it reaches the end of the tether, the kite is retracted and starts again (using up a small amount of electricity, red). “Onboard power” is generated by turbines mounted on the kite itself. Onboard generation requires a rigid kite design.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All that’s left today of an ancient boat discovered in 2018 in what was formerly Uruk is the bitumen, black tar that once coated its framework of reeds, palm leaves, or wood. That fragile organic material is long gone, leaving behind only ghostly imprints in the bitumen. But there’s enough left for archaeologists to tell that in its heyday, the boat would have been a relatively slender craft—7 meters long and about 1.5 meters wide—well-suited to navigating the rivers and canals of ancient Sumer.

 

Archaeologists found the boat in an area that, 4,000 years ago, would have been the bustling hinterlands of the largest city in the world: Uruk. Founded in 5000 BCE from the merger of two smaller settlements on the bank of the Euphrates River, Uruk was one of the world’s first major cities and possibly even the birthplace of the world’s first writing (the oldest known writing samples in the world are tablets from Uruk). The Sumerian King List claims the legendary hero-king, Gilgamesh, ruled from his seat at Uruk in the 2600s BCE, which is not long before the recently excavated boat was built, sailed, and sank.

 

At its height around 3000 BCE, Uruk boasted 40,000 residents in the city, with a total population of about 80,000 or 90,000 people in the surrounding hinterlands. The area outside the city boasted smaller communities, farms, ancient manufacturing workshops, and networks of canals. Uruk was beginning its long, slow decline by 2000 BCE, around the time our boat was built.

 

 

Based on its resting place in layers of silty sediment, it seems that the boat sank in a river, which swiftly buried it and preserved it for the next 4,000 years. That ancient river has long since silted up, but a few years ago, it began to yield at least one long-held secret: erosion revealed the outline of the boat, which archaeologists documented with digital photos and measurements in 2018.

 

At the time, archaeologists from the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and the German Archaeological Institute chose to leave the boat buried, where the ancient river’s silt could continue to protect it from decay and damage. But over the last few years, it became clear that the boat was no longer safe in its resting place. Erosion in the area had picked up the pace, and parts of the boat’s structure were sticking out above the surface.

 

“Traffic passing close to the site of the discovery was an acute threat to the preservation of the boat,” explained the German Archaeological Institute in a press release.

 

That led to a rescue mission in which archaeologists had to balance urgency with delicacy as they carefully excavated the boat from its once-watery, now-silty grave. They encased the boat and a block of the surrounding sediment in a shell made of clay and gypsum plaster to make it easier to safely unearth and move it. Now, 4,000 years after setting out on its ill-fated final journey, the boat has a new homeport: the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, where archaeologists will study and conserve what’s left of the hull and eventually display it to the public.

 

Nissan is partnering with NASA on a computational approach to developing all-solid-state batteries that don’t rely on rare or expensive metals, the AP has reported.

 

The automaker, which was the first to market with an affordable, mass-produced electric vehicle in the Leaf, is clearly hoping to make up for lost time. Nissan has floundered of late with its electrification strategy. Its second EV, the Ariya, is scheduled to arrive this fall, some 12 years after the first Leaf was sold. The company hopes that its in-house solid-state batteries will debut in passenger vehicles by 2028.

 

To get there, the company said it’s opening a pilot solid-state battery plant in 2024. The small-scale factory will be a key step in rolling out solid-state technology; many of the concepts that underpin the batteries have been demonstrated in laboratories time and again, but making the leap to manufacturing often reveals unexpected problems that can take years to solve.

 

Building a pilot plant shows that Nissan is confident enough in its current solid-state battery tech that it believes it’s worth investing money to work out any manufacturing kinks. The 2028 target for mass production is similar to competitors like Solid Power. That suggests the industry is feeling confident in the timeline for when all-solid-state batteries will be ready for automotive use at scale.

 

The Nissan-NASA partnership, which also involves researchers from the University of California, San Diego, is likely looking beyond those first cells. While today’s solid-state battery designs change some fundamental parts of lithium-ion batteries—mostly by doing away with flammable liquid electrolytes—they largely leave others in place, including the use of rare or expensive metals like cobalt and nickel. By eliminating such metals, future batteries would not only be cheaper but also have potentially cleaner and more ethical supply chains. Cobalt mining, for example, is rife with human rights abuses and environmental hazards.

 

According to the Associated Press, the partners said they’ll be creating an “original material informatics platform" consisting of a large database of materials that can be mixed and matched to determine their potential properties.

 

That sounds a lot like computational materials science, a relatively new field that attempts to create, model, and predict the properties of new materials in silico, rapidly prototyping one after another on supercomputers to determine which combination might have an optimal set of characteristics. Once computers have crunched through thousands—or millions—of potential combinations and winnowed the list to a few promising candidates, research scientists can test the shortlist in the real world to see if they live up to their potential. Computational materials science promises to speed the introduction of new materials while also unearthing ones with entirely novel properties.

 

It’s not uncommon for NASA to collaborate with automotive partners. GM worked with the agency to create the Apollo missions’ Lunar Roving Vehicle, and NASA has a long history of sending wheeled rovers to other bodies in the Solar System. “Both NASA and Nissan need the same kind of battery,” Nissan Vice President Kazuhiro Doi told reporters.

 

 

11:45 am ET Friday update: Right on schedule, beneath bright blue skies in Florida, the Axiom-1 mission successfully launched into orbit on Friday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. At 12 minutes into the flight, the Dragon spacecraft Endeavour separated from the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage and began its in-space journey toward the International Space Station. It is expected to dock with the station on Saturday morning.

 

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage returned to Earth and made a safe landing on a drone ship after its fifth spaceflight.

 

Overall, this was SpaceX's sixth human spaceflight with the Crew Dragon vehicle. The company has transported 22 people into low Earth orbit across those missions in just under two years. To illustrate the rapidity of Dragon's rise, consider that China, widely regarded as having the second-most capable civil space program in the world, has launched 20 astronauts since 2003.

 

Original story: A crew of four private citizens is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station today on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center.

 

This is the Axiom-1 mission, named after the private company, Axiom Space, that organized the flight. This mission will make history, as it is the first completely private mission to the International Space Station. The orbiting laboratory was created decades ago to foster international cooperation in space at a time when spaceflight was almost solely the province of large, powerful nations.

 

But the laboratory, at least for the United States, has become an important beachhead in low Earth orbit for commercial activity. NASA astronauts have for years conducted private research experiments, deployed CubeSats, and performed other government-sanctioned activities to foster commercial spaceflight.

 

The Axiom-1 mission will take the next step. Commander Michael López-Alegría of Spain and the United States, Pilot Larry Connor of the United States, and Mission Specialists Eytan Stibbe of Israel and Mark Pathy of Canada will spend about 10 days in space and a little more than a week on the station. Their time will be their own, and they will conduct a bit of research and also enjoy the experience of living in space.

 

For Axiom, this is the first of many missions it plans and the first with private astronauts staying aboard the NASA segment of the space station. However, by late 2024, the company plans to launch its own spacious module to the station, where its customers will be able to come and go more freely. Before the end of the 2020s, this module and others subsequently launched by Axiom would break off and become an independent, private space station.

 

All of this is happening with NASA's blessing for myriad reasons. First of all, the agency wants to expand its human exploration horizon to the Moon, and possibly one day to Mars. It would like to leave low Earth orbit in the hands of private spaceflight partners. The International Space Station, too, is aging, with some modules having been in space for nearly a quarter of a century. Some day it will no longer be possible to maintain the station.

 

And finally, perhaps most obviously, the long-standing partnership between the United States and Russia that created the space station is in peril. As Russia's atrocities in Ukraine mount, it may become unsustainable for NASA and Roscosmos to continue working together in space.

 

This mission, the first of its kind, may be a little awkward. During a half-dozen pre-flight briefings, the astronauts and officials with Axiom have struggled on how to brand their experience. During one call in February, López-Alegría emphasized several times that the fliers "are not space tourists" and that the purpose of the mission was to conduct science.

 

After I tweeted about this, one former astronaut texted me with this response: "The Axiom guys claiming that they are doing science is a stretch! That's the nicest way I can put it." This astronaut's point was that these fliers were trying to deflect from the fact that they are mostly older, privileged white men who are lucky enough to be able to afford a tourist trip to space.

 

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. The Axiom-1 crew members are extremely privileged, and they are most definitely going to space because they want to, and they can afford to. But they are also more than space tourists. They have spent the better part of a year training for this mission and are well versed in both flying the Crew Dragon spacecraft, as well as working aboard the space station. There is a huge difference between this and the few hours of training a space tourist receives before taking a suborbital flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft.

 

The reality is that the crew of Ax-1 is something new: an important part of the transition from spaceflight as primarily a government-led activity to one led by commercial space companies like SpaceX. For example, this will be the fifth flight of this Falcon 9 rocket's first stage, making it a far more experienced booster than has previously been used for human spaceflight. No one really knows where this is all headed, whether it is sustainable, or how weird things might get. But with today's launch, the Ax-1 crew is among the first pioneers to explore this new commercial frontier.

 

Liftoff is scheduled for 11:17 am ET (15:17 UTC) today.

 

Axiom-1 mission.

 

 

A recent study of geological deposits and archaeological remains has identified a massive earthquake and tsunami that wiped out communities along the coastline of Chile's Atacama Desert around 3,800 years ago. Studying the ancient disaster—and people's responses to it—could help with modern hazard planning along the seismically active coast.

A long-forgotten disaster

Broken walls and toppled stones reveal the calamity that struck Zapatero, an ancient community in what's now northern Chile, about 4,000 years ago.

 

The people who lived along the coast of the Atacama Desert 5,700 to 4,000 years ago built villages of small stone houses atop massive piles of shells (Zapatero's shell-filled midden is two meters deep and spans six square kilometers). Usually, these houses stood adjacent to each other, opening onto inner patios. People buried their dead beneath the houses' floors. The cement floors were made from algae ash, seawater, and shells—the same material that held the stone walls together.

 

But stones and mortar failed in the face of the ocean's power. One house at Zapatero stands in ruins, with the stones from its walls toppled inland as if struck by a giant wave. Another lies with its stones scattered back toward the sea, in exactly the pattern you'd expect from "strong currents associated with tsunami backwash," University of Chile archaeologist Diego Salazar and his colleagues say. In a third house, the floors are covered in a layer of a washed-in sand laden with the remains of marine algae and echinoderm spines, mingled with chunks of rock, shells, and sediment ripped up from the ground.

 

Elsewhere on the Zapatero midden, Salazar and his colleagues found similar layers of sand and ripped-up ground left behind by an ancient tsunami, along with channels gouged out by the tsunami's strong, sudden current. When the archaeologists radiocarbon-dated shells from these layers, they found that many of the shells were actually older than the ones in undisturbed layers underneath—evidence that something had churned up the ground and ripped these older shells from their resting places to deposit them on the surface.

 

The same story is written in ruins and sediment at other archaeological sites along a several-hundred-kilometer stretch of the Atacama coastline. In recent surveys, Salazar and his colleagues also found geological evidence of an earthquake and tsunami that struck the region: layers of sandy, shell-laden seafloor sediment lifted several meters above sea level by seismic upheaval. The researchers radiocarbon-dated shells in these uplifted chunks of ancient coastline, along with shells and charcoal in the layers just above and below the tsunami deposits, and narrowed the date of the ancient disaster to around 3,800 years ago, give or take a century or two.

 

Combined, the geological and archaeological evidence points to a natural disaster of epic proportions: a rupture along a 1,000-kilometer stretch of the fault system where the Nazca Plate is slowly sliding under the South American Plate. The estimated magnitude 9.5 megathrust earthquake would have shoved parts of the coastline upward and triggered a tsunami 19 to 20 meters high along a huge stretch of the Chilean coast (and all the way across the Pacific in New Zealand, where geologists have also found deposits from a tsunami of about the same age).

 

The combined earthquake and tsunami struck a devastating blow for ancient people who lived close to the Pacific Ocean with a hyperarid desert at their backs. Archaeological evidence reveals that people abandoned the coast for centuries after the disaster.

Abandoned villages and scattered camps

The Atacama Desert is a hard place to live. It's the driest desert in the world outside Antarctica, with less than 1 millimeter of rain a year. But people have lived—and thrived—here for at least 12,000 years. In part, they've pulled it off by turning to the sea.

 

Just offshore, the Humboldt Current wells up with nutrient-rich water, fueling a rich, teeming coastal ecosystem that's still one of the world's most productive fisheries. Thanks to the long, slow tectonic collision between the Nazca Plate and the South American Plate, the region is also fraught with seismic hazard. But for millennia, people traded that sporadic, long-term risk for the riches of the ocean. They left behind archaeological evidence of their presence and their adaptations to life in this unique environment.

 

But in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami 3,800 years ago, people deserted the settlements of shell middens and stone houses that dotted the Atacama coast. The sea has always been vital to life in the Atacama, but it's clear that, for centuries, no one wanted to live too close.

 

Above the layers of sand and debris from the waves, mixed with toppled walls, there's little or no trace of human activity at sites like Zapatero. The only evidence speaks of very short visits: small hearths and a sparse scattering of artifacts lying atop flood debris and broken stone walls. When people had to return to the ruins of their ancestors, they clearly didn't want to stay long.

 

Archaeologists can see that wariness in the abandoned buildings and short-lived camps at places like Zapatero, but they can also read it in larger-scale changes that span the whole north Chilean coast. In one 100-kilometer stretch near Taltal, an area of northern Chile rich in archaeological sites, a survey revealed a 65 percent decrease in the number of settlements after around 3,800 years ago.

 

That date marks not only the estimated arrival of the tsunami, but the boundary between two archaeologically distinct cultures, Archaic IV (5,700 to 4,000 years ago) and Archaic V. After that boundary, settlements are scarcer, and both homes and cemeteries tend to be farther inland and on higher ground. Close to shore, what settlements there are get smaller, with fewer artifacts left buried and scattered.

Ancient mine gets the shaft

Even very important resources, like the iron oxide mine at San Ramón, were abandoned.

 

"Iron oxide was used as a pigment for several reasons, including the realization of pictures on stones that can be found in several sites along this region of the coastal Atacama Desert," University of Chile geologist Gabriel Easton, a co-author of the recent study, tells Ars. These pigments appear to have been important for local communities and were involved in their rites and ceremonies.

 

A 3 centimeter-wide vertical crack in the wall of the mine probably dates to the earthquake 3,800 years ago, and after that, work here seems to have stopped. "The San Ramón 15 archaeological site constitutes one of the most ancient [pieces of] evidence of mining activity in the Americas, exploited since 12,000 years ago, and abandoned after around 4,000 years ago, most possibly because of the effects caused by the earthquake in the region," Easton tells Ars.