Researchers are exploring many mitigators: the beneficial pathways triggered by caloric restriction that improve health markers in old animals; targeting the inflammatory-compound-secreting senescent cells we accumulate as we grow older; boosting our stem-cell numbers; and revitalizing the energy-metabolizing mitochondria in our cells.

These are all promising, but it will take some time before they are proven to be effective and safe in humans. While we wait for the biomedical establishment to come up with powerful ways to tackle aging itself, there are three simple measures that use our understanding of advances in biology and medicine to keep us in good health as we age.

Eat Less

A calorically restricted diet means consuming the bare minimum of calories while still getting all the nutrients we need. Such a diet is difficult to follow for most people and has been reported to slow down wound healing, possibly make you more prone to certain infections, cause you to lose muscle mass, feel cold, and suffer a loss of libido. However, a moderate diet that is balanced should provide many of the benefits observed of a calorically restricted diet. Michael Pollan said it best: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Keep Exercising

Physical activity turns on many of the pathways that stimulate mitochondrial production. It also helps maintain muscle and bone mass, a serious problem as we age; counters diabetes and obesity; improves sleep; and strengthens immunity. Aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular health; load-bearing exercise helps maintain muscle mass. Both are important.

Get Adequate Sleep

All animals have the equivalent of sleep, because it is essential for life. Sleep is involved in repair mechanisms that prevent the buildup of damage to our cells, and sleep deprivation increases the risk of many diseases of aging, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. We need to ensure that we get an adequate amount of sleep.

Embrace the Synergy

The trio of diet, exercise, and sleep will together be more beneficial than any therapy currently. These three measures are all synergistic. Each of these will make it easier to carry out the other two. For example, exercise will help you sleep better. Moreover, they will all help with other things that can help with healthy aging, including preventing obesity, which is a serious cause of many diseases of old age.

Also Watch for These Factors

Stress. It is known that stress has widespread metabolic effects that are harmful for health and accelerate aging. Reducing stress is always difficult, but the trio of activities mentioned can also help to reduce stress.

Isolation. Many population studies point to loneliness resulting in poor health in old age. In an increasingly fragmented society, it’s important to maintain and nurture our social connections as we age.

Purpose. People with a strong sense of purpose were healthier and less likely to die. One study found that one effective way to acquire a sense of purpose was to volunteer in activities that provide social interaction and bring benefits to the community or society.

And Have Routine Checkups

Beyond these measures, there are some simple health precautions we should all take as we age. It is important to have routine and early checkups for blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes. All of these conditions can easily and cheaply be treated to increase our chances of good health in old age. In addition, good markers for early diagnoses are becoming available for a range of treatable diseases including some types of cancer. Early detection of breast, cervical, colorectal (bowel), skin, and prostate cancer can all improve clinical outcomes.

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In my field, Crispr gene editing and genomics more broadly, we often deal with enormous datasets—or, in many cases, we can’t deal with them properly because we simply don’t have the tools or the time. Supercomputers can take weeks to months to analyze subsets of data for a given question, so we have to be highly selective about which questions we choose to ask. AI and machine learning are already removing these limitations, and we are using AI tools to quickly search and make discoveries in our large genomic datasets.

In my lab, we recently used AI tools to help us find small gene-editing proteins that had been sitting undiscovered in public genome databases because we simply didn’t have the ability to crunch all of the data that we’ve collected. A group at the Innovative Genomics Institute, the research institute that I founded 10 years ago at UC Berkeley, recently joined forces with members of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) and Center for Computational Biology, and developed a way to use a large language model, akin to what many of the popular chatbots use, to predict new functional RNA molecules that have greater heat tolerance compared to natural sequences. Imagine what else is waiting to be discovered in the massive genome and structural databases scientists have collectively built over the recent decades.

These types of discoveries have real-world applications. For the two examples above, smaller genome editors can help with more efficient delivery of therapies into cells, and predicting heat-stable RNA molecules will help improve biomanufacturing processes that generate medicines and other valuable products. In health and drug development, we have recently seen the approval of the first Crispr-based therapy for sickle cell disease, and there are around 7,000 other genetic diseases that are waiting for a similar therapy. AI can help accelerate the process of development by predicting the best editing targets, maximizing Crispr's precision and efficiency, and reducing off-target effects. In agriculture, AI-informed Crispr advancements promise to create more resilient, productive, and nutritious crops, ensuring greater food security and reducing the time to market by helping researchers focus on the most fruitful approaches. In climate, AI and Crispr could open up new solutions for improving natural carbon capture and environmental sustainability.

It's still early days, but the potential to appropriately harness the joint power of AI and Crispr, arguably the two most profound technologies of our time, is clear and exciting—and it’s already started.

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Elon Musk’s brain implant company, Neuralink, announced on Tuesday that it is launching a study to test its implant for a new use: allowing a person to control a robotic arm using just their thoughts. “We’re excited to announce the approval and launch of a new feasibility trial to extend BCI control using the N1 implant to an investigational assistive robotic arm,” Neuralink said in a post on Musk’s social media platform X.

A BCI, or brain-computer interface, is a system that allows a person to directly control outside devices with their brain waves. It works by reading and decoding intended movement signals from neurons. Neuralink’s BCI involves a coin-sized device dubbed N1 that is surgically implanted in the brain by a robot. The company is currently evaluating the safety of its BCI, as well as its ability to control a computer in individuals with paralysis.

Moving a computer or prosthetic arm is not a new feat for BCIs. In 2008, a team led by Andrew Schwartz at the University of Pittsburgh showed that a monkey could control a robotic arm to feed itself using signals from its brain. After that, researchers moved on to human volunteers. In a 2012 study published in the journal Nature, two people paralyzed due to stroke were able to guide a robotic arm to reach and grasp objects simply by thinking about it. One was able to serve herself coffee for the first time in 14 years. In another study from 2016, a man with a BCI regained a sense of touch using a robotic arm.

The BCIs used in those studies were clunky setups that required running a cable from the research participants’ head to a computer that decodes brain signals. By contrast, Neuralink’s system is wireless.

On social media earlier this year, Neuralink demonstrated that its BCI can be used to control a computer cursor. In a video on X, study participant Noland Arbaugh was shown using the Neuralink device to play chess and other games on a computer. Arbaugh, who became a quadriplegic after a swimming accident in 2016, spoke with WIRED earlier this year about how the implant has given him a sense of independence.

Arbaugh underwent brain surgery in January to receive the Neuralink implant, but a few weeks later, the device started to malfunction. The implant has 64 thin, flexible wire threads that penetrate the brain tissue. Each thread contains 16 electrodes that collect neural signals. In a blog post from May, Neuralink said several threads had retracted from Arbaugh’s brain, causing him to temporarily lose cursor control. Neuralink was able to restore Arbaugh’s control by modifying its brain recording algorithm to be more sensitive and changing how it translates neural signals into cursor movements.

Neuralink’s second participant, Alex, received the implant in July. In a company update issued prior to the surgery, Neuralink executives said they took steps to reduce the likelihood of thread retraction, including reducing brain motion during the surgery and reducing the gap between the implant and the surface of the brain.

The new robotic arm study, according to the Neuralink post on X, “will enable cross-enrolling participants from the ongoing PRIME Study.” No additional details about the robotic arm study are available yet on Neuralink’s website or clinicaltrials.gov, an online repository of medical studies involving human participants.

“We congratulate Neuralink on receiving approval for their feasibility trial,” says Marcus Gerhardt, CEO and cofounder of Blackrock Neurotech, the company that manufactures the Utah array, the brain implant used in previous studies of mind-controlled robotic limbs. “Every advancement in neurotechnology moves us closer to empowering individuals with neurological disorders.”

Brian Dekleva, a research scientist at the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs at the University of Pittsburgh, says the biggest challenge in achieving BCI control of an assistive robotic arm is the need for calibration. “The more complicated the control, the more degrees of freedom you add, the longer the calibration is going to take in general,” he says. “People don't want to sit and do a half-hour calibration at the beginning of each day so that they can use their device.”

If that limitation can be overcome, BCIs that control robotic arms could allow people with paralysis to carry out simple daily tasks without assistance.

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Neutrinos are some of nature’s most elusive particles. One hundred trillion fly through your body every second, but each one has only a tiny chance of jostling one of your atoms, a consequence of the incredible weakness of the weak nuclear force that governs neutrino interactions. That tiny chance means that reliably detecting neutrinos takes many more atoms than are in your body. To spot neutrinos colliding with atoms in the atmosphere, experiments have buried 1,000 tons of heavy water, woven cameras through a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and planned to deploy 200,000 antennas.

In a field full of ambitious plans, a recent proposal by Steven Prohira, an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, is especially strange. Prohira suggests that instead of using antennas, we could detect the tell-tale signs of atmospheric neutrinos by wiring up a forest of trees. His suggestion may turn out to be impossible, but it could also be an important breakthrough. To find out which it is, he'll need to walk a long path, refining prototypes and demonstrating his idea’s merits.

Prohira’s goal is to detect so-called ultra-high-energy neutrinos. Each one of these tiny particles carries more than fifty million times the energy released by uranium during nuclear fission. Their origins are not fully understood, but they are expected to be produced by some of the most powerful events in the Universe, from collapsing stars and pulsars to the volatile environments around the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies. If we could detect these particles more reliably, we could learn more about these extreme astronomical events.

Other experiments, like a project called GRAND, plan to build antennas to detect these neutrinos, watching for radio signals that come from their reactions with our atmosphere. However, finding places to place these antennas can be a challenge. Motivated by this experiment, Prohira dug up old studies by the US Army that suggested an alternative: instead of antennas, use trees. By wrapping a wire around each tree, army researchers found that the trees were sensitive to radio waves, which they hoped to use to receive radio signals in the jungle. Prohira argues that the same trick could be useful for neutrino detection.

Crackpot or legit science?

People suggest wacky ideas every day. Should we trust this one?

At first, you might be a bit suspicious. Prohira’s paper is cautious on the science but extremely optimistic in other ways. He describes the proposal as a way to help conserve the Earth’s forests and even suggests that “a forest detector could also motivate the large-scale reforesting of land, to grow a neutrino detector for future generations.”

Prohira is not a crackpot, though. He has a track record of research in detecting neutrinos via radio waves in more conventional experiments, and he even received an $800,000 MacArthur genius grant a few years ago to support his work.

More generally, studying particles from outer space often demands audacious proposals, especially ones that make use of the natural world. Professor Albrecht Karle works on the IceCube experiment, an array of cameras that detect neutrinos whizzing through a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice.

“In astroparticle physics, where we often cannot build the entire experiment in a laboratory, we have to resort to nature to help us, to provide an environment that can be used to build a detector. For example, in many parts of astroparticle physics, we are using the atmosphere as a medium, or the ocean, or the ice, or we go deep underground because we need a shield because we cannot construct an artificial shield. There are even ideas to go into space for extremely energetic neutrinos, to build detectors on Jupiter's moon Europa.”

Such uses of nature are common in the field. India’s GRAPES experiments were designed to measure muons, but they have to filter out anything that’s not a muon to do so. As Professor Sunil Gupta of the Tata Institute explained, the best way to do that was with dirt from a nearby hill.

"The only way we know you can make a muon detector work is by filtering out other radiation [...] so what we decided is that we'll make a civil structure, and we'll dump three meters of soil on top of that, so those three meters of soil could act as a filter," he said.

The long road to an experiment

While Prohira’s idea isn't ridiculous, it's still just an idea (and one among many). Prohira’s paper describing the idea was uploaded to arXiv.org, a pre-print server, in January. Physicists use pre-print servers to give access to their work before it's submitted to a scientific journal. That gives other physicists time to comment on the work and suggest revisions. In the meantime, the journal will send the work out to a few selected reviewers, who are asked to judge both whether the paper is likely to be correct and whether it is of sufficient interest to the community.

At this stage, reviewers may find problems with Prohira’s idea. These may take the form of actual mistakes, such as if he made an error in his estimates of the sensitivity of the detector. But reviewers can also ask for more detail. For example, they could request a more extensive analysis of possible errors in measurements caused by the different shapes and sizes of the trees.

If Prohira’s idea makes it through to publication, the next step toward building an actual forest detector would be convincing the larger community. This kind of legwork often takes place at conferences. The International Cosmic Ray Conference is the biggest stage for the astroparticle community, with conferences every two years—the next is scheduled for 2025 in Geneva. Other more specialized conferences, like ARENA, focus specifically on attempts to detect radio waves from high-energy neutrinos. These conferences can offer an opportunity to get other scientists on board and start building a team.

That team will be crucial for the next step: testing prototypes. No matter how good an idea sounds in theory, some problems only arise during a real experiment.

An early version of the GRAPES experiment detected muons by the light they emit passing through tanks of water. To find how much water was needed, the researchers did tests, putting a detector on top of a tank and on the bottom and keeping track of how often both detectors triggered for different heights of water based on the muons that came through randomly from the atmosphere. After finding that the tanks of water would have to be too tall to fit in their underground facility, they had to find wavelength-shifting chemicals that would allow them to use shorter tanks and novel ways of dissolving these chemicals without eroding the aluminum of the tank walls.

“When you try to do something, you run into all kinds of funny challenges,” said Gupta.

The IceCube experiment has a long history of prototypes going back to early concepts that were only distantly related to the final project. The earliest, like the proposed DUMAND project in Hawaii, planned to put detectors in the ocean rather than ice. BDUNT was an intermediate stage, a project that used the depths of Lake Baikal to detect atmospheric neutrinos. While the detectors were still in liquid water, the ability to drive on the lake’s frozen surface made BDUNT’s construction easier.

In a 1988 conference, Robert March, Francis Halzen, and John G. Learned envisioned a kind of “solid state DUMAND” that would use ice instead of water to detect neutrinos. While the idea was attractive, the researchers cautioned that it would require a fair bit of luck. “In summary, this is a detector that requires a number of happy accidents to make it feasible. But if these should come to pass, it may provide the least expensive route to a truly large neutrino telescope,” they said.

In the case of the AMANDA experiment, early tests in Greenland and later tests at the South Pole began to provide these happy accidents. “It was discovered that the ice was even more exceptionally clear and has no radioactivities—absolutely quiet, so it is the darkest and quietest and purest place on Earth,” said Karle.

AMANDA was much smaller than the IceCube experiment, and theorists had already argued that to see cosmic neutrinos, the experiment would need to cover a cubic kilometer of ice. Still, the original AMANDA experiment wasn't just a prototype; if neutrinos arrived at a sufficient rate, it would spot some. In this sense, it was like the original LIGO experiment, which ran for many years in the early 2000s with only a minimal chance of detecting gravitational waves, but it provided the information needed to perform an upgrade in the 2010s that led to repeated detections. Similarly, the hope of pioneers like Halzen was that AMANDA would be able to detect cosmic neutrinos despite its prototype status.

“There was the chance that, with the knowledge at the time, one might get lucky. He certainly tried," said Karle.

Prototype experiments often follow this pattern. They're set up in the hope that they could discover something new about the Universe, but they're built to at least discover any unexpected challenges that would stop a larger experiment.

Major facilities and the National Science Foundation

For experiments that don't need huge amounts of funding, these prototypes can lead to the real thing, with scientists ratcheting up their ambition at each stage. But for the biggest experiments, the governments that provide the funding tend to want a clearer plan.

Since Prohira is based in the US, let's consider the US government. The National Science Foundation has a procedure for its biggest projects, called the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction program. Since 2009, it has had a “no cost overrun” policy. In the past, if a project ended up costing more than expected, the NSF could try to find additional funding. Now, projects are supposed to estimate beforehand how the cost could increase and budget extra for the risk. If the budget goes too high anyway, projects should compensate by reducing scope, shrinking the experiment until it falls under costs again.

To make sure they can actually do this, the NSF has a thorough review process.

First, the NSF expects that the scientists proposing a project have done their homework and have already put time and money into prototyping the experiment. The general expectation is that about 20 percent of the experiment’s total budget should have been spent testing out the idea before the NSF even starts reviewing it.

With the prototypes tested and a team assembled, the scientists will get together to agree on a plan. This often means writing a report to hash out what they have in mind. The IceCube team is in the process of proposing a second generation of their experiment, an expansion that would cover more ice with detectors and achieve further scientific goals. The team recently finished the third part of a Technical Design Report, which details the technical case for the experiment.

After that, experiments go into the NSF’s official experiment design process. This has three phases, conceptual design, preliminary design, and final design. Each phase ends with a review document summarizing the current state of the plans as they firm up, going from a general scientific case to a specific plan to put an experiment in a specific place. Risks are estimated in detail and list estimates of how likely risks are and how much they will cost, a process that sometimes involves computer simulations. By the end of the process, the project has a fully detailed plan and construction can begin.

Over the next few years, Prohira will test out his proposal. He may get lucky, like the researchers who dug into Antarctic ice, and find a surprisingly clear signal. He may be unlucky instead and find that the complexities of trees, with different spacings and scatterings of leaves, makes the signals they generate unfit for neutrino science. He, and we, cannot know in advance which will happen.

That's what science is for, after all.

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Beliefs are convictions of reality that we accept as true. They provide us with the basic mental scaffolding to understand and engage meaningfully in our world. Beliefs remain fundamental to our behavior and identity but are not well understood.

Delusions, on the other hand, are fixed, usually false, beliefs that are strongly held but not widely shared. In previous work, we proposed that studying delusions provides unique insights into the cognitive nature of belief and its dysfunction.

Based on evidence from delusions and other psychological disciplines, we offered a tentative five-stage cognitive model of belief formation.

When faced with an unexpected sensory input or social communication, we seek to account for this based on existing beliefs, memories, and other social information. We then evaluate our account in terms of how well this explains our experiences and how consistent it is with our prior beliefs. If it passes these criteria, the belief is accepted. It then guides what we pay attention to and what other ideas we may consider.

We propose that delusions can arise at different stages in this model. Our approach highlights the importance of the individual’s search for meaning and social context in shaping delusions. It also draws attention to the impact of a delusion, once formed, on subsequent perceptions and thinking.

This model linking delusions and beliefs differs from earlier accounts that suggested delusions were distinct from belief or arise as a largely passive response to anomalous sensory input such as a hallucination. Previous research, for example, has found that some people who believed that family members were replaced by impostors (known as Capgras delusion) had deficits in processing familiar faces, which could have generated this idea.

Based on this, some have suggested that other delusions arise in a similar way but in combination with an as-yet undiscovered deficit in the cognitive process of evaluating our beliefs.

But these accounts didn’t fully consider other contributing factors, such as the individual’s prior beliefs, social context, and their personal attempts to explain their experiences.

Informative case study

The study of delusions has been informed by select informative case studies. Unlike large group studies, case studies allow researchers a more detailed exploration of the origins and course of clinical features not explained by current theories.

We recently published a paper in the international journal Cortex that describes a unique case study of a woman who temporally experienced compelling delusions during a brief hospital admission for postpartum psychosis, which can give rise to hallucinations, delusions, mood swings, and confusion. This is a rare complication of pregnancy, affecting around 1–2 in 1,000 women, thought to be due to hormonal changes or immunological factors.

Natalie (a pseudonym) had no previous medical or psychiatric history. She developed postpartum psychosis while in hospital after the birth of her second child.

As part of her condition, Natalie reported several delusions, including the belief that strangers were her parents-in-law in disguise (known as Fregoli delusion). Natalie recovered quickly with treatment. The combination of interviews and observations while she was experiencing the delusions and her later retrospective account offered a unique window into the onset and experience of her delusions.

Following a full recovery, Natalie confirmed that she considered her delusions to be strongly held beliefs. She likened them to her conviction that her husband was her husband. This is contrary to some views that suggested that delusions are different from normal beliefs.

Natalie was able to identify specific features that contributed to her delusions. In the case of believing that strangers were her in-laws, Natalie identified mannerisms, behaviors, and speech patterns of the strangers that reminded her of her in-laws. This suggested that the delusion could have arisen from inappropriate activation of memory representations of familiar people based on these cues and other factors.

Natalie also recalled other beliefs, including that she was dead (known as Cotard delusion), which she did not share with clinicians at the time. She noted that she entertained this idea due to the failure of other explanations to account for her strange experiences and an idea from a television show.

Natalie said she eventually dismissed this idea as implausible while still holding other delusional ideas. This suggests that belief evaluation may involve different thresholds for different delusions. It also highlights the private nature of some delusions.

Across all of her delusions, Natalie described her active involvement in trying to explain and manage her experiences. She reported considering different explanations and testing these by seeking further information. For example, she asked questions of the people she thought were her in-laws. This suggests a surprisingly similar approach to how we typically form beliefs.

Natalie recalled the influence of television and movies on her ideas. She also recalled how she elaborated on her delusions, once formed, based on information in her surroundings.

These features challenge theories that delusions simply arise from anomalous sensory data. They instead highlight the role of the individual’s search for meaning and social context, as well as the subsequent impact of delusions on perception and thinking.

Implications

As a case study, Natalie’s experiences are not necessarily representative of all people who experience delusions or postpartum psychosis. However, Natalie’s case presents informative features that theories of delusions need to account for.

In particular, Natalie’s personalized insights highlight the critical role of the individual in actively trying to understand their experiences and bestow meaning. This is opposed to just passively accepting beliefs in response to anomalous sensory data or neuropsychological deficits. This suggests psychological therapies may be useful in treating psychosis, in combination with other treatments, in some cases.

More generally, Natalie’s account reveals commonalities between delusions and ordinary beliefs and supports the view that delusions can be understood in terms of cognitive processes across the stages of normal belief formation that we identified.

While there remain challenges in investigating delusions, further study may offer insights into the underpinnings of everyday belief and, in turn, of ourselves.

Michael Connors, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry, UNSW Sydney, and Peter W Halligan, Hon Professor of Neuropsychology, Cardiff University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Sunday, 24 November

• Who: Rocket Lab
• What: Electron
• When: 03:00 – 06:00 UTC
• Where: Wallops Island, United States
• Why: Rocket Lab will launch an Electron rocket on the second Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) suborbital mission for the US Department of Defense. It will launch the Mach-TB “Hippo” payload from Leidos on a hypersonic test flight. The mission will allow for faster testing of commercially available hypersonic systems.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 03:26 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch 20 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. Among these satellites, will be 13 direct-to-cell satellites which are newer models. This batch of satellites is known as Starlink Group 9-13. You can use this identifier on apps like ISS Detector to see these satellites in space once they’re launched. The first stage of the Falcon 9 will likely perform a landing so it can be reused.

Monday, 25 November

• Who: Rocket Lab
• What: Electron
• When: 03:55 UTC
• Where: Mahia, New Zealand
• Why: Rocket Lab will use an Electron rocket to launch five Kineis satellites to orbit. It consists of 25 satellites that provide IoT communications. The mission has been dubbed “Ice AIS Baby”.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 09:32 – 13:09 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying 24 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit. This batch will be designated Starlink Group 12-1. The rocket should perform a landing after launch.

Tuesday, 26 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 01:31 – 01:31
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: This mission will see SpaceX launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. This batch is Starlink Group 6-76. Like the other missions this week, the Falcon 9 should perform a landing. Starlink satellites are used to beam internet connectivity down to customers on Earth.

Wednesday, 27 November

• Who: Landspace
• What: Zhuque ZQ-2E
• When: 02:00 UTC
• Where: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China
• Why: Landspace will launch the Zhuque ZQ-2E on its first flight to orbit. This is an upgraded version of the ZQ-2 rocket that the company previous designed. It will use four improved TQ-12A engines on the first stage and a single TQ-15 engine on the second stage.

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Soyuz 2.1b
• When: 19:00 – 21:00
• Where: Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia
• Why: Roscosmos will launch a Soyuz 2.1b carrying the eighth Lotos-S1 military satellite for the Liana electronic intelligence network.

Saturday, 30 November

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Soyuz 2.1a
• When: Unknown
• Where: Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia
• Why: Roscosmos will launch a Soyuz 2.1a carrying the second Kondor-FKA radar Earth observation satellite for the Russian Ministry of Defense. The satellite will obtain high- and medium-resolution radar information for addressing socio-economic issues of Russia and providing round-the-clock all-weather probing of the Earth’s surface.

• Who: CNSA
• What: Long March 12
• When: 13:20 – 16:00
• Where: Hainan Commercial Launch Site, China
• Why: China will launch the Long March 12 on its first flight. This is a medium-lift launch vehicle being developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. It is capable of putting 10 tonnes of payload into a low Earth orbit or 6 tonnes in a 700 km Sun-synchronous orbit.

Recap

The first launch last week was a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying the TD7 mission to a geosynchronous transfer orbit from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Following the launch, the Falcon 9’s first stage performed a droneship landing.

Next, SpaceX was up against with a Falcon 9 but this time launched 20 Starlink satellites known as Starlink Group 9-12. The first stage of the rocket landed on a droneship, ready for reuse.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 was involved in the third launch of the week, this time carrying the GSAT-N2 communications satellite to a geosynchronous transfer orbit from Florida, US.

The biggest launch last week was SpaceX’s Starship on its sixth test flight. You can see the launch and Super Heavy’s landing below.

Here’s a clip of the landing of Starship.

Finally getting away from SpaceX we got a launch of Roscosmos’ Soyuz 2.1a carrying the Progress MS-29 spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station.

Back to SpaceX again for the next launch, this time we saw a Falcon 9 launch 24 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. The first stage of the rocket performed a landing.

The final launch of the week saw Blue Origin launch its New Shepard rocket to the edge of space and land again carrying several passengers. These included Emily Calandrelli, Sharon Hagle, Marc Hagle, Austin Litteral, James (J.D.) Russell, and Henry (Hank) Wolfond.

That’s it for this week, check in next time.

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“If we go back to the early 1900s, this is when the idea was first proposed that memories are physically stored in some location within the brain,” says Michael R. Williamson, a researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. For a long time, neuroscientists thought that the storage of memory in the brain was the job of engrams, ensembles of neurons that activate during a learning event. But it turned out this wasn’t the whole picture.

Williamson’s research investigated the role astrocytes, non-neuron brain cells, play in the read-and-write operations that go on in our heads. “Over the last 20 years the role of astrocytes has been understood better. We’ve learned that they can activate neurons. The addition we have made to that is showing that there are subsets of astrocytes that are active and involved in storing specific memories,” Williamson says in describing a new study his lab has published.

One consequence of this finding: Astrocytes could be artificially manipulated to suppress or enhance a specific memory, leaving all other memories intact.

Marking star cells

Astrocytes, otherwise known as star cells due to their shape, play various roles in the brain, and many are focused on the health and activity of their neighboring neurons. Williamson’s team started by developing techniques that enabled them to mark chosen ensembles of astrocytes to see when they activate genes (including one named c-Fos) that help neurons reconfigure their connections and are deemed crucial for memory formation. This was based on the idea that the same pathway would be active in neurons and astrocytes.

“In simple terms, we use genetic tools that allow us to inject mice with a drug that artificially makes astrocytes express some other gene or protein of interest when they become active,” says Wookbong Kwon, a biotechnologist at Baylor College and co-author of the study.

Those proteins of interest were mainly fluorescent proteins that make cells fluoresce bright red. This way, the team could spot the astrocytes in mouse brains that became active during learning scenarios. Once the tagging system was in place, Williamson and his colleagues gave their mice a little scare.

“It’s called fear conditioning, and it’s a really simple idea. You take a mouse, put it into a new box, one it’s never seen before. While the mouse explores this new box, we just apply a series of electrical shocks through the floor,” Williamson explains. A mouse treated this way remembers this as an unpleasant experience and associates it with contextual cues like the box’s appearance, the smells and sounds present, and so on.

The tagging system lit up all astrocytes that expressed the c-Fos gene in response to fear conditioning. Williamson’s team inferred that this is where the memory is stored in the mouse’s brain. Knowing that, they could move on to the next question, which was if and how astrocytes and engram neurons interacted during this process.

Modulating engram neurons

“Astrocytes are really bushy,” Williamson says. They have a complex morphology with lots and lots of micro or nanoscale processes that infiltrate the area surrounding them. A single astrocyte can contact roughly 100,000 synapses, and not all of them will be involved in learning events. So the team looked for correlations between astrocytes activated during memory formation and the neurons that were tagged at the same time.

“When we did that, we saw that engram neurons tended to be contacting the astrocytes that are active during the formation of the same memory,” Williamson says. To see how astrocytes’ activity affects neurons, the team artificially stimulated the astrocytes by microinjecting them with a virus engineered to induce the expression of the c-Fos gene. “It directly increased the activity of engram neurons but did not increase the activity of non-engram neurons in contact with the same astrocyte,” Williamson explains.

This way his team established that at least some astrocytes could preferentially communicate with engram neurons. The researchers also noticed that astrocytes involved in memorizing the fear conditioning event had elevated levels of a protein called NFIA, which is known to regulate memory circuits in the hippocampus.

But probably the most striking discovery came when the researchers tested whether the astrocytes involved in memorizing an event also played a role in recalling it later.

Selectively forgetting

The first test to see if astrocytes were involved in recall was to artificially activate them when the mice were in a box that they were not conditioned to fear. It turned out artificial activation of astrocytes that were active during the formation of a fear memory formed in one box caused the mice to freeze even when they were in a different one.

So, the next question was, if you just killed or otherwise disabled an astrocyte ensemble active during a specific memory formation, would it just delete this memory from the brain? To get that done, the team used their genetic tools to selectively delete the NFIA protein in astrocytes that were active when the mice received their electric shocks. “We found that mice froze a lot less when we put them in the boxes they were conditioned to fear. They could not remember. But other memories were intact,” Kwon claims.

The memory was not completely deleted, though. The mice still froze in the boxes they were supposed to freeze in, but they did it for a much shorter time on average. “It looked like their memory was maybe a bit foggy. They were not sure if they were in the right place,” Williamson says.

After figuring out how to suppress a memory, the team also figured out where the “undo” button was and brought it back to normal.

“When we deleted the NFIA protein in astrocytes, the memory was impaired, but the engram neurons were intact. So, the memory was still somewhere there. The mice just couldn’t access it,” Williamson claims. The team brought the memory back by artificially stimulating the engram neurons using the same technique they employed for activating chosen astrocytes. “That caused the neurons involved in this memory trace to be activated for a few hours. This artificial activity allowed the mice to remember it again,” Williamson says.

The team’s vision is that in the distant future this technique can be used in treatments targeting neurons that are overactive in disorders such as PTSD. “We now have a new cellular target that we can evaluate and potentially develop treatments that target the astrocyte component associated with memory,” Williamson claims. But there’s lot more to learn before anything like that becomes possible. “We don’t yet know what signal is released by an astrocyte that acts on the neuron. Another thing is our study was focused on one brain region, which was the hippocampus, but we know that engrams exist throughout the brain in lots of different regions. The next step is to see if astrocytes play the same role in other brain regions that are also critical for memory,” Williamson says.

Nature, 2024.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08170-w

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Physicists including Robert H. Dickle and Fred Hoyle have argued that we are living in a universe that is perfectly fine-tuned for life. Following the anthropic principle, they claimed that the only reason fundamental physical constants have the values we measure is because we wouldn’t exist if those values were any different. There would simply have been no one to measure them.

But now a team of British and Swiss astrophysicists have put that idea to test. “The short answer is no, we are not in the most likely of the universes,” said Daniele Sorini, an astrophysicist at Durham University. “And we are not in the most life-friendly universe, either.” Sorini led a study aimed at establishing how different amounts of the dark energy present in a universe would affect its ability to produce stars. Stars, he assumed, are a necessary condition for intelligent life to appear.

But worry not. While our Universe may not be the best for life, the team says it’s still pretty OK-ish.

Expanding the Drake equation

Back in the 1960s, Frank Drake, an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist, proposed an equation aimed at estimating the number of intelligent civilizations in our Universe. The equation started with stars as a precondition for life and worked its way down in scale from there. How many new stars appear in the Universe per year? How many of the stars are orbited by planets? How many of those planets are habitable? How many of those habitable planets can develop life? Eventually, you’re left with the fraction of planets that host intelligent civilizations.

The problem with the Drake equation was that it wasn’t really supposed to yield a definite number. We couldn’t—and still can’t—know the values for most of its variables, like the fraction of the planets that developed life. So far, we know of only one such planet, and you can’t infer any statistical probabilities when you only have one sample. The equation was meant more as a guide for future researchers, giving them ideas of what to look for in their search for extraterrestrial life.

But even without knowing the actual values of all those variables present in the Drake equation, one thing was certain: The more stars you had at the beginning, the better the odds for life were. So Sorini’s team focused on stars.

“Our work is connected to the Drake equation in that it relies on the same logic,” Sorini said. “The difference is we are not adding to the life side of the equation. We’re adding to the stars’ side of the equation.” His team attempted to identify the basic constituents of a universe that’s good at producing stars.

“By 'constituents,' I mean ordinary matter, the stuff we are made of—the dark matter, which is a weirder, invisible type of matter, and the dark energy, which is what is making the expansion of a universe proceed faster and faster,” Sorinin explained. Of all those constituents, his team found that dark energy has a key influence on the star formation rate.

Into the multiverse

Dark energy accelerates the expansion of the Universe, counteracting gravity and pushing matter further apart. If there's enough dark energy, it would be difficult to form the dark matter web that structures galaxies. “The idea is ‘more dark energy, fewer galaxies—so fewer stars,’” Sorini said.

The effect of dark energy in a universe can be modeled by a number called the cosmological constant. “You could reinterpret it as a form of energy that can make your universe expand faster,” Sorinin said.

(The cosmological constant was originally a number Albert Einstein came up with to fix the fact that his theory of general relativity caused the expansion of what was thought to be a static universe. Einstein later learned that the Universe actually was expanding and declared the cosmological constant his greatest blunder. But the idea eventually managed to make a comeback after it was discovered that the Universe’s expansion is accelerating.)

The cosmological constant was one of the variables Sorini’s team manipulated to determine if we are living in a universe that is maximally efficient at producing stars. Sorini based this work on an idea put forward by Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, back in 1989. “Weinberg proposed that there could be a multiverse of all possible universes, each with a different value of dark energy,” Sorini explained.  Sorini’s team modeled that multiverse composed of thousands upon thousands of possible universes, each complete with a past and future.

Cosmological fluke

To simulate the history of all those universes, Sorini used a slightly modified version of a star formation model he developed back in 2021 with John A. Peacock, a British astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and co-author of the study. It wasn’t the most precise model, but the approximations it suggested produced a universe that was reasonably close to our own. The team validated the results by predicting the stellar mass fraction in the total mass of the Milky Way Galaxy, which we know stands somewhere between 2.2 and 6.6 percent. The model came up with 6.7 percent, which was deemed good enough for the job.

In the next step, Sorini and his colleagues defined a large set of possible universes in which the value of the cosmological constant ranged from a very tiny fraction of the one we observe in our Universe all the way to the value 100,000 times higher than our own.

It turned out our Universe was not the best at producing stars. But it was decent.

“The value of the cosmological constant in the most life-friendly universe would be measured at roughly one-tenth of the value we observe in our own,” Sorini said.

In a universe like that, the fraction of the matter that gets turned into stars would stand at 27 percent. “But we don’t seem to be that far from the optimal value. In our Universe, stars are formed with around 23 percent of the matter,” Sorini said.

The last question the team addressed was how lucky we are to even be here. According to Sorini’s calculations, if all universes in the multiverse are equally likely, the chances of having a cosmological constant at or lower than the value present in our Universe is just 0.5 percent. In other words, we rolled the dice and got a pretty good score, although it could have been a bit better. The odds of getting a cosmological constant at one-tenth of our own or lower were just 0.2 percent.

Things also could have been much worse. The flip side of these odds is that the number of possible universes that are worse than our own vastly exceeds the number of universes that are better.

“That is of course all subject to the assumptions of our model, and the only assumption about life we made was that more stars lead to higher chances for life to appear,” Sorini said. In the future, his team plans to go beyond that idea and make the model more sophisticated by considering more parameters. “For example, we could ask ourselves what the chances are of producing carbons in order to have life as we know it or something like that,” Sorini said.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2024.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae2236

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Welcome to Edition 7.20 of the Rocket Report! This is a super-long version of the newsletter because we did not publish last week, and there is just a ton of launch news of late. Also, I want to note that next week's report will appear a day early, on Wednesday, due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Speaking of which, you all have our thanks for reading and sharing the Rocket Report with others.

On a completely unrelated note, Rocket Lab has had some amazing mission names over the years. But this weekend's "Ice AIS Baby" launch is probably the best. I always appreciate their effort to find non-vanilla names and find a way to stop, collaborate, and listen.

Please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly raises a tidy sum as its ambitions soar. Firefly announced earlier this month that it has completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. This follows a banner year of fundraising in 2023, when Firefly reported investors funneled approximately $300 million into the company at a valuation of $1.5 billion, Ars reports. In a statement, Firefly said the money raised in the Series D round will help the company "expand market reach with its Elytra spacecraft, move to full rate production of its Alpha launch vehicle, and accelerate hardware qualification for new vehicles in development."

A busy period ahead ... Firefly will soon ship its first Blue Ghost lunar lander to Florida for final preparations to launch to the Moon and deliver 10 NASA-sponsored scientific instruments and tech demo experiments to the lunar surface. Firefly also boasts a healthy backlog of missions on its small Alpha rocket. In June, Lockheed Martin announced a deal for as many as 25 Alpha launches through 2029. And there's the Medium Launch Vehicle, a rocket that Firefly and Northrop Grumman hope to launch as soon as 2026.

ABL departs the launch industry. At one point Firefly and ABL Space were competing to develop a credible 1-ton launcher. As Firefly soared this month, however, ABL decided to go in a different direction, turning its focus to missile defense, Ars reports. The founder and president of ABL Space Systems, Dan Piemont, announced the decision on LinkedIn, adding, "We're consolidating our operational footprint and parting ways with some talented members of our team."

Never made it to space ... ABL made its first RS1 launch attempt in January 2023 from Kodiak, Alaska, but a catastrophic fire shortly after liftoff quickly doomed the rocket. A second attempt was precluded in July of this year after an explosion during a static-fire test in Alaska. The company laid off some of its staff in August to control costs. As the company was failing in its efforts to reach orbit, the launch market was also changing, Piemont said. Although not directly mentioning SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket, Piemont said ABL's ability to impact the launch industry has diminished over the last seven years. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ESA provides another funding boost. The European Space Agency has awarded Boost! contract extensions worth 44.2 million euros ($46.3 million) to HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, Orbex, and Rocket Factory Augsburg, European Spaceflight reports. ESA member states adopted the Boost! initiative in late 2019. The primary aim of the initiative is to provide co-funding to support the development of commercial space transportation services. Each of the four companies has won awards of varying amounts in earlier Boost! competitions.

Getting across the finish line ... According to ESA, the new funding awarded through the Boost! contract extensions is aimed at alleviating the pressure in the months before an inaugural flight when costs are high and the potential to generate revenue is limited. While the ESA press release did not disclose the specific amounts awarded to each company, announcements from the companies have revealed that Orbex will receive 5.6 million euros ($5.9 million), Isar Aerospace 15 million euros ($15.7 million), and both Rocket Factory Augsburg and HyImpulse 11.8 million euros each ($12.4 million). (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Oman preparing for its debut launch. The nation on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula is developing a spaceport in the port town of Duqm, with the aim of supporting commercial operations by the year 2030. However, the country's National Aerospace Services Company will attempt an experimental rocket launch in December, The National reports. The port area will allow launches to the south and east over the Arabian Sea.

Seeking a niche in Mideast space ... The National Aerospace Services Company did not specify a date for the launch, nor name the launch vehicle. The firm also said the launch would not be "publicly accessible" and that details about it would only be shared after the fact. The project is part of Oman’s efforts to diversify its economy and secure a competitive edge in the global space industry.

Swedish site launches its 600th rocket. The Esrange Space Center, located 200 km north of the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden, recently hit a significant milestone: It launched its 600th suborbital rocket. The MAPHEUS-15 science rocket reached an altitude of 309 km carrying a payload containing 21 different experiments, the Swedish Space Corporation reports. The payloads were later recovered by helicopter.

Orbital flights coming next? ... "I am very proud of this milestone which shines a light on the many years of international collaboration at Esrange," said Lennart Poromaa, head of Esrange Space Center. "This has been instrumental in achieving hundreds of successful rocket missions, providing invaluable access to space for scientists worldwide." The site was established in 1966 and recently saw the construction of an orbital launch complex for future missions.

Neutron inks multi-launch contract. The launch company said earlier this month it has signed an agreement with an unnamed customer for two Neutron launches beginning in mid-2026. In a release, Rocket Lab characterized the agreement as "the beginning of a productive collaboration" that could allow Neutron to launch the commercial customer's entire constellation. Intended to be reusable, Neutron is targeted to be capable of lifting 13 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

Competition wanted ... "Constellation companies and government satellite operators are desperate for a break in the launch monopoly," Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck said. "They need a reliable rocket from a trusted provider, and one that’s reusable to keep launch costs down and make space more frequently accessible—and Neutron is strongly positioned to be that rocket." With that said, Rocket Lab still has to deliver the booster. It's currently targeting 2025 for this, but as always, bringing new launch vehicles into the world is a difficult and time-consuming process. (submitted by Ken the Bin and Tom Nelson)

Russia is pursuing its own Grasshopper rocket. Like a lot of competitors in the global launch industry, Russia, for a long time, dismissed the prospects of a reusable first stage for a rocket. As late as 2016, an official with the Russian agency that develops strategy for the country's main space corporation, Roscosmos, concluded, "The economic feasibility of reusable launch systems is not obvious." Well, times change as the company is developing its next-generation Amur rocket, Ars reports. Then the Falcon 9 happened.

A good name, apparently ... Similar to what SpaceX did about a dozen years ago, Roscosmos is now planning to develop a prototype vehicle to test the ability to land the Amur rocket's first stage vertically. According to the state-run news agency TASS, constructing this test vehicle will enable the space corporation to solve key challenges. "Next year preparation of an experimental stage of the (Amur) rocket, which everyone is calling 'Grasshopper,' will begin," said Igor Pshenichnikov, the Roscosmos deputy director of the department of future programs. It's not entirely clear why Russia adopted the exact same nickname as SpaceX.

Don't forget Europe has a (much more expensive) hopper, too. The European Space Agency announced that it has awarded two new contracts to ArianeGroup to build a second Themis demonstrator and to refine the design of its Prometheus rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. The two contracts have a combined value of 230 million euros ($241 million). The space agency has already spent hundreds of millions of euros on the project to develop a reusable engine and the Themis test vehicle, dating back more than six years. No tests have yet taken place.

Please build something, at some point ... According to the agency, the funding will enable the development of a second Themis demonstrator, an upgraded Prometheus engine, and the renovation of testing and ground infrastructure. “The contract extensions signed today at ESA’s headquarters in Paris, France, are to further demonstrate and test evolutions of the Prometheus engine and the Themis demonstrator with higher and more hop-tests,” explained an ESA statement. Seems like it's a good deal for ArianeGroup, at least. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Starship completes its sixth flight test. SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight, Ars reports. The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13.

A small burn ... One of the most important new things engineers wanted to test on this flight occurred about 38 minutes after liftoff. That's when Starship reignited one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn to make a slight adjustment to its flight path. The burn lasted only a few seconds, and the impulse was small—just a 48 mph (77 km/hour) change in velocity, or delta-V—but it demonstrated that the ship can safely deorbit itself on future missions. With this achievement, Starship will likely soon be cleared to travel into orbit around Earth and deploy Starlink Internet satellites or conduct in-space refueling experiments, two of the near-term objectives on SpaceX's Starship development roadmap.

Vulcan's third launch slips into 2025. The Space Force is now preparing for a 2025 Vulcan national security launch debut instead of the originally planned 2024 launches, Space News reports. Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, made the disclosure during a conversation with reporters on Thursday. Garrant said ULA’s Vulcan remains on track for certification. The rocket’s second certification launch in October was technically successful, with the payload reaching its intended orbit. However, an anomaly with one of the solid rocket boosters continues to be reviewed.

For now the military flies on Falcons ... The anomaly itself isn’t a showstopper for certification, said Garrant. But the cumulative delays and uncertainties are a concern, he said, "as we aim to maintain assured access to space with two certified providers." Two missions—USSF-106 and USSF-87—are currently waiting in the wings, with payloads ready but no confirmed launch dates. ULA had been targeting a November launch for USSF-106. But with only six weeks left in the year, a 2024 launch window is increasingly unlikely, said Garrant. ULA chief Tory Bruno had been promising to complete two national security launches this year. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

NASA begins stacking Artemis II booster. NASA said ground teams inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida lifted the aft assembly of the rocket's left booster onto the mobile launch platform, marking the beginning of operations to 'stack' the second Space Launch System rocket. Using an overhead crane, teams hoisted the left aft booster assembly—already filled with pre-packed solid propellant—from the VAB transfer aisle, over a catwalk dozens of stories high and then down onto mounting posts on the mobile launcher, Ars reports.

Say goodbye to September ... The Artemis II mission is slated to send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day flight around the far side of the Moon. A NASA spokesperson told Ars it should take around four months to fully stack the SLS rocket for Artemis II. Officially, Artemis II is projected to launch in September of next year, but there's little chance of meeting that schedule due to an issue with Orion's heat shield. It's possible that, within the next month or two, NASA could announce a new target launch date for Artemis II at the end of 2025 or, more likely, in 2026.

Shotwell predicts rapid increase in Starship launches. As SpaceX made its final preparations for the sixth launch of its Starship rocket last week, the company's chief operating officer and president spoke at a financial conference on Friday about various topics, including the future of the massive rocket and the Starlink satellite system. The Starship launch system is about to reach a tipping point, Gwynne Shotwell said, as it moves from an experimental rocket toward operational missions, Ars reports.

Those are lofty goals ... "We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years," Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. "We want to fly it a lot." That lofty goal seems aspirational, not just because of the hardware challenges but also due to the ground systems (SpaceX currently has just one operational launch tower) as well as the difficulty of supplying that much liquid oxygen and methane for such a high flight rate. However, it's worth noting that SpaceX will launch Starship four times this year, twice the number of Falcon Heavy missions. An acceleration of Starship is highly likely.

AST signs launch deals for its BlueBird constellation. During a third-quarter earnings call, AST SpaceMobile revealed new launch agreements with Blue Origin, the Indian Space Research Organization, and SpaceX to launch its large satellites over the course of 2025 and 2026, Spaceflight Now reports. Andrew Johnson, chief financial officer and chief legal officer at AST SpaceMobile, said that the launches "enable us to launch up to approximately 45 Block 2 BlueBird satellites, with options for additional launch vehicles for approximately 60 Block 2 BlueBird satellites."

Glenns and Falcons ... The company's next launch will use India's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle. After that, the company will shift its focus to launching with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which are capable of carrying eight and four Block 2 BlueBird satellites, respectively. The company said its Block 2 constellation will be capable of delivering "peak data transmission speeds up to 120Mbps, supporting voice, full data, and video applications." AST will be competing with SpaceX's Starlink constellation in providing direct-to-cell communications. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

FAA gives SpaceX a green light for South Texas launches. A day after SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the sixth time, the company received good news from the Federal Aviation Administration regarding future launch operations from its Starbase facility in South Texas. In a draft version of what is known as an "Environmental Assessment," the FAA indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. Additionally, the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage, Ars reports.

A final decision is coming next year ... The FAA regulates the launch of rockets from the United States and is responsible for the safety of people and property on the ground. The ongoing environmental review stems from SpaceX's desire to increase the scope of its operations from South Texas and is not yet finalized. Beginning today, the FAA will open a public comment period that will close on January 17. In addition, the FAA will hold five public meetings to solicit feedback from the local community and other stakeholders. A final assessment will likely be issued sometime early next year.

ESA wants a reusable super heavy lift rocket. The European Space Agency has announced that it will commission a study to detail the development of a reusable rocket capable of delivering 60 tons to low-Earth orbit, European Spaceflight reports. The space agency believes it is necessary to have a launch system of this kind to fulfill "critical European space exploration needs beyond LEO, while providing wider space exploitation potentials to answer the growing market opportunities (e.g. mega constellations)."

Studies of studies ... The agency launched its PROTEIN (Preparatory Activities for European Heavy Lift Launcher) initiative in June 2022, aiming to explore the feasibility of developing a European super heavy-lift rocket with a focus on reducing launch costs. ArianeGroup and Rocket Factory Augsburg were selected to lead studies. The European 60T LEO Reusable Launch System Pathfinder initiative seems to build upon the agency’s PROTEIN studies, even though this link is not explicitly stated. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Nov. 22: New Shepard | NS-28 | Launch Site One, Texas | 15:30 UTC

Nov. 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-13 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 03:26 UTC

Nov. 24: Electron | Ice AIS Baby | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 03:55 UTC

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Data from the German federal government shows that the overwhelming majority of those receiving welfare payments, known as citizen’s money in Germany, have a foreign background.

The statistics from the Federal Employment Agency (BA), provided to Welt newspaper, show that of the more than 4 million people who can work but receive social benefits, more than 2.5 million have a migration background, constituting 63.5 percent. This group includes foreigners and those who have a foreign background, which means their parents may have been born abroad.

The cost of providing this social welfare rose to €12.2 billion last year, but in total, Germany spent nearly €50 billion on immigrants and protecting its border last year.

Many of those receiving this money are actually Ukrainians who have been fleeing the war since 2022. They cost German taxpayers €5.8 billion last year while Syrians cost €3.5 billion. Afghans were behind with €1.3 billion.

Not everyone who receives this allowance is unemployed, but they often receive so little money that they are eligible for additional welfare support. In June 2024, 57 percent of citizen’s allowance recipients received this benefit without being unemployed. Critics argue that this pool of labor provides a cheap workforce that employers are exploiting.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party responded to the news, writing: “Our social state is being looted. This is the result of the policy of mass migration, driven by the CDU and the traffic light parties for years. CDU chief Merz stands out with hypocritical criticism of this development, but without the CDU, we wouldn’t be feeding a big city with more than 2.5 million migrants from citizens’ money. It is the CDU that systematically blocks a migration turnaround in all the federal states where it governs.”

As Remix News previously noted, it was reported that nearly 50 percent of welfare recipients are foreign; however, the new data also includes those with a “migration background.” The new figure provides a more accurate view of the makeup of welfare recipients.

The post 63% of All Welfare Recipients in Germany Have a Migration Background appeared first on American Renaissance.

Author: Henry Wolff

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The duck-billed dinosaur Parasaurolophus is distinctive for its prominent crest, which some scientists have suggested served as a kind of resonating chamber to produce low-frequency sounds. Nobody really knows what Parasaurolophus sounded like, however. Hongjun Lin of New York University is trying to change that by constructing his own model of the dinosaur's crest and its acoustical characteristics. Lin has not yet reproduced the call of Parasaurolophus, but he talked about his progress thus far at a virtual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Lin was inspired in part by the dinosaur sounds featured in the Jurassic Park film franchise, which were a combination of sounds from other animals like baby whales and crocodiles. “I’ve been fascinated by giant animals ever since I was a kid. I’d spend hours reading books, watching movies, and imagining what it would be like if dinosaurs were still around today,” he said during a press briefing. “It wasn’t until college that I realized the sounds we hear in movies and shows—while mesmerizing—are completely fabricated using sounds from modern animals. That’s when I decided to dive deeper and explore what dinosaurs might have actually sounded like.”

A skull and partial skeleton of Parasaurolophus were first discovered in 1920 along the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada, and another partial skull was discovered the following year in New Mexico. There are now three known species of Parasaurolophus; the name means "near crested lizard." While no complete skeleton has yet been found, paleontologists have concluded that the adult dinosaur likely stood about 16 feet tall and weighed between 6,000 to 8,000 pounds. Parasaurolophus was an herbivore that could walk on all four legs while foraging for food but may have run on two legs.

It's that distinctive crest that has most fascinated scientists over the last century, particularly its purpose. Past hypotheses have included its use as a snorkel or as a breathing tube while foraging for food; as an air trap to keep water out of the lungs; or as an air reservoir so the dinosaur could remain underwater for longer periods. Other scientists suggested the crest was designed to help move and support the head or perhaps used as a weapon while combating other Parasaurolophus. All of these, plus a few others, have largely been discredited.

A “near-crested lizard”

The most intriguing hypothesis is that the crest served as a resonating chamber, first proposed in 1931 by Swedish paleontologist Carl Wiman, who noted that the crest's structure was similar to that of a swan and thus could have been used for vocalization. Lin stumbled upon a 1981 paper by David Weishampel expanding on the notion, predicting that the dinosaur's calls would have fallen in the frequency range of 55 to 720 Hertz. Weishampel's model treated the crest as an open pipe/closed pipe system. Lin did a bit more research, and a 2013 paper convinced him that Weishampel's model was due for an update.

Lin created a physical setup to empirically test his own mathematical model of what might be happening acoustically inside Parasaurolophus' crest, dubbed the "Linophone," although it is not a perfect anatomical replica of the dinosaur's crest. The setup consisted of two connected open pipes designed to mimic the vibrations of vocal cords. Lin conducted frequency sweeps using a speaker to generate the sounds and recorded the resonance data with microphones at three different locations. An oscilloscope transferred that data back to his computer.

He found that the crest did indeed seem to be useful for resonance, similar to the crests in modern birds. "If I were to guess what this dinosaur sounded like, it would be a brass instrument like a huge trumpet or saxophone," said Lin, based on the simple pipe-like structure of his model. However, the presence of soft tissue-like vocal cords could mean that the sound was closer to that of a clarinet.

Lin is still refining his mathematical model, and he thinks he should be able to extend it to studying other creatures with similar vocal structures."Once we have a working model, we'll move toward using fossil scans" to further improve it, Lin said, although he noted that one challenge is that soft tissue like vocal cords are often poorly preserved. His ultimate goal is to re-create the sound of the Parasaurolophus—and perhaps even design his own accessible plug-in to add dinosaur sounds to his musical compositions.

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James and Rose, the bizarre AI bots who were recently installed as news broadcasters at local Hawaii paper The Garden Island, have been terminated.

Employee retention is always a bit of a problem at local newspapers, and The Garden Island newspaper on the Hawaiian island of Kauai is no exception. Many reporters—usually mainland transplants like myself—would stick around for just a couple years before moving on, and some only lasted months.

After a two-month run, James and Rose have joined our ranks, as their broadcast has been discontinued, according to a representative for The Garden Island’s parent company, Oahu Publications (OPI). The pair were designed by Caledo, an Israeli firm that turns articles into videos where AI hosts discuss the news with one another. The Garden Island’s program was the first of its kind in the United States, and Caledo said at the time that it intended to expand it to hundreds of other local newspapers throughout the country—this is still the aim, according to a spokesperson.

While OPI declined to comment further, and Caledo declared the program a success without elaborating on this particular scenario, it seems likely that a broadly negative public response played into the decision to end James and Rose’s tenure at The Garden Island.

James, a middle-aged Asian man, and Rose, a younger redhead, were never able to figure out how to present the news in a manner that wasn’t deeply off-putting for viewers. Their program, which ran twice a week on Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram, covered topics as varied as a fall pumpkin giveaway and a vigil for a labor massacre—all in the same distant, matter-of-fact tone of beings incapable of comprehending human emotions.

In one particularly stilted exchange about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And how have these free pumpkins impacted the community?” to which James responded, “The free pumpkins have brought joy to many.”

They consistently butchered difficult Hawaiian names and even had surprising struggles with much simpler words. In their final broadcast on November 4, while discussing an air rifle championship, Rose inexplicably replaced the word “rifle” with the word “referee.”

In the polarized months leading up to the election, the pair managed to inspire visceral, bipartisan contempt. Comments under the videos were nearly universally negative.

“This is scary,” reads one Facebook comment from The Maui News, another local Hawaii paper. The nonprofit Hawaii journalism outlet Honolulu Civil Beat used them as a fundraising hook. “You no longer have to imagine a world where local news and information is generated by an algorithm,” wrote Ben Nishimoto, Civil Beat’s vice president of operations and philanthropy, in a September email, referring to the broadcast. “That dystopia is here. And it’s terrifying.”

I never like to root against fellow reporters, but I’ll admit I was also happy to see them go. While James and Rose did not actively supplant any existing newsroom jobs, I was concerned that the effort diverted resources that could be used on traditional media expenses, like human reporters, photographers, and editors.

The Garden Island was severely underresourced—for much of my time working there, I was one of only two reporters covering an island of 73,000. The paper was purchased earlier this year by the conglomerate Carpenter Media Group, which controls more than 100 local outlets throughout North America.

Caledo, while declining to disclose how much it was paid, said that new ads embedded in the broadcasts would offset the cost of the program. However, it does not appear as though OPI was able to sell a single ad on the videos.

James and Rose began every broadcast by announcing that the program was sponsored by Longs Drugs, a Hawaii local subsidiary of CVS. But Longs Drugs reported that it had a preexisting sponsorship agreement with OPI and that it had not been notified its logo would be used in the AI videos. “We have since asked that they run all Longs logo usage by us moving forward,” Amy Thibault, a CVS spokesperson, says. No other embedded advertisements appeared on the broadcasts.

Over its run, the tech did see some minor improvements. James began his tenure as lead anchor, at which point he was unable to blink and his hands were constantly vibrating. He was demoted to second anchor in mid-October, where he began blinking more regularly and his odd hand vibration was replaced by a single emphatic gesture.

But this proved to be too little too late. I wish James and Rose the best of luck in their future endeavors—it’s a tough job market out there.

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A federal jury awarded $12.69 million on Nov. 8 to a former IT employee for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan after finding that it refused her religious accommodation request to be exempted from a 2021 COVID-19 vaccine mandate and then fired her because of her religion, according to court documents (Domski v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan).

In a letter requesting the accommodation, the employee, who is Catholic, explained that she has a “sincere personal religious belief that human life begins at conception,” that the “COVID vaccines were either developed or tested using fetal cells that originated in abortions,” and that “abortion is murder and a sin against God,” the complaint alleged. The letter also cited portions of the Bible in support.

BCBSM rejected the request, then allegedly placed the employee on unpaid leave and ultimately fired her, the complaint said. She sued it for religious discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act. After the verdict, BCBSM told the Catholic News Agency it had “designed an accommodation process that complied with state and federal law,” “respected the sincerely held religious beliefs of its employees,” and was reviewing its legal options, CNA reported.

Dive Insight:

The jury verdict and award hit on a theme playing out in recent cases: Employers risk costly litigation if they fail to carefully consider each religious accommodation request on an individual basis and if they make blanket assumptions about the legitimacy or sincerity of an employee’s religious beliefs.

For example, in January, a Michigan health system agreed to pay $50,000 to settle a religious discrimination lawsuit by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The health system had a policy requiring employees to receive annual flu shots, and the lawsuit alleged that it outright rejected a job applicant’s religious request to be exempted from the policy without properly considering the request.

According to the EEOC, the health system allegedly determined that his religious beliefs, as articulated in his application, were insufficient, without explaining why or giving him a chance to supplement his request, the agency alleged.

An August ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals highlights what may be an under-the-radar issue for many employers: An accommodation request can still be religious in nature even if it is based partly on secular reasons.

In that case, a surgical nurse and a pharmacy technician for a Wisconsin health system requested religious exemptions from the hospital’s COVID vaccine mandate. In their requests, they explained that they objected to the vaccine based on their Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the human body. But they also expressed concern over the vaccine’s safety and potentially harmful effects.

The hospital rejected their requests and terminated their employment. They sued, and in a 2-1 ruling, the 7th Circuit said they stated a failure-to-accommodate claim under Title VII. It reversed a lower court ruling dismissing the lawsuit.

Under Title VII, the controlling inquiry is “whether the employee plausibly based her vaccination exemption request at least in part on an aspect of her religious belief or practice,” the two majority judges wrote.

In the BCBSM case, after the insurer imposed its COVID vaccine mandate, its director of employee and labor relations allegedly told management he doubted the validity of any religious accommodation request, the complaint said. Later, during an HR meeting, he allegedly directed staff to conduct the religious accommodation interviews like “mini depositions,” with the goal of pressuring employees to get vaccinated, the complaint said.

BCBSM claimed the IT employee didn’t “meet the criteria for an exemption due to a sincerely held religious belief, practice or observance” and denied her request.

Although it could have offered her multiple accommodations, including wearing a mask and periodic testing for COVID, it allegedly refused to engage with her in any meaningful dialogue to discover which accommodations were possible. Instead, it followed a “one-size-fits-all” approach to handling religious accommodation requests, the complaint alleged.

The jury award included $315,000 in back pay, $1.375 million in front pay, $1 million in noneconomic damages, and $10 million in punitive damages. 

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The U.S. Department of Defense will have to face a lawsuit alleging that a supervisor forced a school psychologist at a military base in Okinawa, Japan, to take a breathalyzer test before returning to work because the worker suffers from alcoholism, a district court judge ruled Nov. 14 (Gamon v. Austin). 

“Conditioning Plaintiff’s return to work upon the taking of a breathalyzer test constituted a change to a term or condition of employment. If he refused to take the test, presumably he would not be permitted back to work. That is enough to make out a claim,” U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled in the order denying the defense department’s request to dismiss the claim. “Plaintiff has successfully pleaded that his supervisor’s purpose in ordering the breathalyzer was not a legitimate workplace inquiry, but to discriminate against him because of his alcoholism.” 

The supervisor allegedly also wrongfully disclosed the worker’s “history involving alcohol abuse” in front of his colleagues, in violation of the Rehabilitation Act, according to the order.

Dive Insight:

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits employers of federal workers and certain federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating against those workers on the basis of disability, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Workers with alcohol addiction can qualify as individuals with a disability, the U.S. Department of Labor specifies. 

After his supervisor allegedly disclosed his history with alcoholism to his peers, the worker “felt compelled to involuntarily elaborate to all three individuals additional private medical information, including that he had been sober since his DUI and was in active recovery with the support of Alcoholics Anonymous and other medical-based treatments,” according to the complaint. 

Qualified workers with disabilities who are in recovery from a substance use disorder “cannot be denied employment, demoted, fired, paid less, harassed, or otherwise treated differently in the terms, conditions, and privileges of [their] employment based on that disability if [they] are no longer engaged in the illegal use of drugs,” DOL said.

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The world is full of feel-bad news. Here’s something to feel good about: Automatic emergency braking is one of the great car safety-tech success stories.

Auto-braking systems, called AEB for short, use sensors including cameras, radar, and lidar to sense when a crash is about to happen and warn drivers—then automatically apply the brakes if drivers don’t respond. It’s a handy thing to have in those vital few moments before your car careens into the back of another. One industry group estimates that US automakers' move to install AEB on most cars—something they did voluntarily, in cooperation with road safety advocates—will prevent 42,000 crashes and 20,000 injuries by 2025.

A new report from AAA finds these emergency braking systems are getting even better—and challenges automakers to perfect them at even higher speeds.

AAA researchers tested three model year 2018 and 2017 vehicles versus three model year 2024 vehicles, and found the AEB systems in the newer cars were twice as likely as the old systems to avoid collisions at speeds up to 35 miles per hour. In fact, the new systems avoided all of the tested collisions at speeds between 12 and 35 mph. The majority of the newer cars avoided hitting a non-moving target at 45 mph, too.

The systems “are headed the right way,” says Greg Brannon, the director of automotive research at AAA.

Now new regulations will require AEB systems to get even more intelligent. Earlier this year, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which crafts the country’s road safety rules, announced that by 2029, it will require all cars to be able to stop and avoid contact with any vehicle in front of them at even faster speeds: 62 mph. The Feds will also require automakers to build AEB systems that can detect pedestrians in the daytime and at night. And automakers will have to build tech that applies brakes automatically at speeds up to 45 mph when it senses an imminent collision with a person, and 90 mph when it senses one with a car.

The rule will require automakers to build systems that can operate at highway speeds. As a result, it should do more good; according to the NHTSA, if manufacturers deploy auto-braking systems that work at higher speeds, it would save at least 360 lives each year and prevent 24,000 injuries.

But no story can be all good news. Auto industry officials argue that meeting that 2029 target will be really very hard. “That’s practically impossible with available technology,” John Bozzella, the president and CEO of the auto industry lobbying group the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, wrote earlier this year in a letter to Congress. The government estimated that installing more advanced AEB systems on its cars would cost an additional $350 per vehicle. The auto lobbying group estimates prices could range up to $4,200 per car instead, and it has filed a petition to request changes to the final federal rules.

In response to WIRED’s questions, a spokesperson for NHTSA said that more advanced AEB systems “will significantly reduce injury or property damage and the associated costs from these crashes.” The spokesperson said the agency “is working expeditiously” to reply to the group’s petition.

Auto safety experts say that if automakers (and the suppliers who build their technology) pull off more advanced automatic emergency braking, they’ll have to walk a tightrope: developing tech that avoids crashes without ballooning costs. They’ll also have to avoid false positives or “phantom braking,” which incorrectly identify nonhazards as hazards and throw on the brakes for no apparent reason. These can frustrate and annoy drivers—and at higher speeds, give them serious cases of whiplash.

“That is a really big concern: That as you increase the number of situations in which the system has to operate, you have more of these false warnings,” says David Kidd, a senior research scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), an insurance-industry-funded scientific and educational organization.

Otherwise, drivers will get mad. “The mainstream manufacturers have to be a little careful because they don’t want to create customer dissatisfaction by making the system too twitchy,” says Brannon, at AAA. Tesla drivers, for example, have proven very tolerant of “beta testing” and quirks. Your average driver, maybe less so.

Based on its own research, IIHS has pushed automakers to install AEB systems able to operate at faster speeds on their cars. Kidd says IIHS research suggests there have been no systemic, industry-wide issues with safety and automatic emergency braking. Fewer and fewer drivers seem to be turning off their AEB systems out of annoyance. (The new rules make it so drivers can’t turn them off.) But US regulators have investigated a handful of automakers, including General Motors and Honda, for automatic emergency braking issues that have reportedly injured more than 100 people, though automakers have reportedly fixed the issue.

New complexities

Getting cars to fast-brake at even higher speeds will require a series of tech advances, experts say. AEB works by bringing in data from sensors. That information is then turned over to automakers’ custom-tuned classification systems, which are trained to recognize certain situations and road users—that’s a stopped car in the middle of the road up ahead or there’s a person walking across the road up there—and intervene.

So to get AEB to work in higher-speed situations, the tech will have to “see” further down the road. Most of today’s new cars come loaded up with sensors, including cameras and radar, which can collect vital data. But the auto industry trade group argues that the Feds have underestimated the amount of new hardware—including, possibly, more expensive lidar units—that will have to be added to cars.

Brake-makers will have to tinker with components to allow quicker stops, which will require the pressurized fluid that moves through a brake’s hydraulic lines to go even faster. Allowing cars to detect hazards at further distances could require different types of hardware, including sometimes-expensive sensors. “Some vehicles might just need a software update, and some might not have the right sensor suite,” says Bhavana Chakraborty, an engineering director at Bosch, an automotive supplier that builds safety systems. Those without the right hardware will need updates “across the board,” she says, to get to the levels of safety demanded by the federal government.

Bosch and other suppliers advise automakers how to use the systems they build, but manufacturers are ultimately in charge of the other AEB secret sauce: algorithms. Each automaker “tunes” its safety system, using its own calculations to determine how and when its vehicles will automatically avoid collisions.

What’s next

Even the US Feds’ 2029 rules don’t fulfill all road safety advocates’ dreams. The regulations don’t require safety systems to recognize bicyclists, though some automakers are already building that into theirs voluntarily. And unlike European vehicles, US AEB systems won’t undergo tests that determine how well they work when they’re turning. The European New Car Assessment Program started testing AEB for turning effectiveness last year, and has for several years required automakers to build systems that totally avoid crashes at higher speeds. Some automakers are already building systems that pass these tests, says Kidd, the IIHS scientist—a good sign that they’ll be able to pull it off on US roads too.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that these will make the roads safer,” Kidd says. A good news story after all.

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The sixth flight of SpaceX's giant Starship rocket, set for takeoff on Tuesday from South Texas, will test the vehicle's limits in new ways.

Most importantly, SpaceX will attempt to briefly reignite one of Starship's six Raptor engines in space. SpaceX tried this on Starship's third launch in March but aborted the engine restart after the rocket lost roll control during the flight's coast phase.

A successful engine relight demonstration would pave the way for future Starships to ascend into stable, sustainable orbits. It's essential to test the Raptor engine's ability to reignite in space for a deorbit burn to steer Starship out of orbit toward an atmospheric reentry.

On Tuesday's test flight, Starship will follow the same suborbital trajectory as the rocket's previous mission on October 13. This means Starship's Raptor engines will accelerate the vehicle to a velocity just shy of the speed required to reach low-Earth orbit. Without any more maneuvers, gravity will naturally pull the rocket back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean for a controlled splashdown in the open sea.

This arcing suborbital trajectory provides a backstop of sorts to bring Starship to a remote location in the ocean, even if there's a problem with reigniting the Raptor engine.

The second change SpaceX will introduce on this test flight involves the vehicle's heat shield. These modifications will allow engineers to gather data before future attempts to return Starship to land at SpaceX's Starbase launch site in South Texas.

Perhaps as soon as next year, SpaceX wants to bring Starship back to Starbase to be caught by mechanical arms on the launch tower, similar to the way the company recovered the rocket's Super Heavy booster for the first time last month. Eventually, SpaceX aims to rapidly reuse Super Heavy boosters and Starships.

"The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles," SpaceX wrote on its mission overview page.

SpaceX installed catch fittings on the Super Heavy booster to allow it to be captured by the launch tower's catch arms. The ship will need similar fittings jutting out from its heat shield.

"The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles," SpaceX said.

By the light of day

One other significant difference with Tuesday's test flight will be the time of launch. Starship's 30-minute launch window opens at 4 pm CST (21:00 UTC), whereas all five of the rocket's previous test flights took off in the morning.

This change means Starship will reenter the atmosphere in daylight, providing better conditions for visual observations, SpaceX said. Previous Starship descents over the Indian Ocean occurred at night. The most recent test flight last month ended with an on-target soft splashdown.

The rest of Starship's flight profile will mimic the previous launch. The Super Heavy booster's 33 liquid-fueled Raptor engines will propel the 397-foot-tall (121-meter) stainless steel launch vehicle off the pad with more than 16 million pounds of thrust, twice the power generated by NASA's Apollo-era Saturn V rocket.

Heading east from Starbase, the rocket will gulp more than 40,000 pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants every second. It will exceed the speed of sound after about one minute and then rocket through the stratosphere before shutting down most of the booster's 33 engines in preparation for staging.

The Super Heavy booster will separate from the ship around 2 minutes and 39 seconds after liftoff, just as six Raptor engines ignite on the Starship upper stage. After this "hot-staging" maneuver, the booster will flip around to fly tail first, then fire 13 of its engines to reverse course and thrust itself back toward Starbase at supersonic speed.

If all goes according to plan, the booster will slow its dive toward the ground with another burn of its Raptor engines. This final landing burn should carefully guide the booster in between the launch tower's arms as they close for the catch.

Remarkably, SpaceX succeeded in catching the Super Heavy booster on its first try last month, but there was room for improvement. For example, a piece of stainless steel metal from one of the booster's chines, or small aerodynamic protuberances, stripped away from the rocket during its descent.

"Hardware upgrades for this flight add additional redundancy to booster propulsion systems, increase structural strength at key areas, and shorten the timeline to offload propellants from the booster following a successful catch," SpaceX said. "Mission designers also updated software controls and commit criteria for the booster’s launch and return."

In space, Starship will coast about a third of the way around the world before attempting the Raptor engine relight about 38 minutes into the flight. After this short burn, the ship will reorient itself to point its heat shield into the flow of super-heated plasma for reentry.

The flight should end about 65 minutes after launch, when the ship will maneuver from a belly-down orientation to a vertical position. Its Raptor engines will ignite one more time to put on the brakes for a controlled splashdown.

A turning point for Starship

This demo mission, if successful, will transition SpaceX's mega-rocket from an early-stage experimental program into something more mature. This is the last flight of the first-generation version of Starship, known as V1, and it comes five weeks after the most recent test flight.

SpaceX seeks to fly Starships as many as 25 times next year, so cutting down the turnaround time between flights is fundamental to the company's plans. Making Starship capable of sustained orbital operations—something the in-space engine relight should enable—is a prerequisite for launching Starlink satellites or refueling Starships in orbit.

Launching Starlinks on Starships is important for SpaceX to expand its global broadband network with larger, more powerful satellites too big to fit on the Falcon 9 rocket. And in-orbit refueling is required to support the ambitions of NASA and SpaceX to send Starships to the Moon and Mars, first with cargo and then with people.

Starship V2, which will debut on the seventh test flight, has larger propellant tanks, an upgraded heat shield, and redesigned forward flaps. It will be slightly taller than Starship V1.

President-elect Donald Trump, who SpaceX founder Elon Musk supported in this year's election, plans to travel to South Texas to witness Tuesday's launch, according to multiple media reports citing sources familiar with Trump's schedule.

In his victory speech on election night, Trump veered into the topic of Starship for several minutes, recalling the experience of watching the first catch of the Super Heavy booster last month. "It was a beautiful thing to see," Trump said.

Now, Musk is co-chairing Trump's Department of Government Efficiency chartered to reduce wasteful government spending. Starship, among other SpaceX programs, will likely become big winners as the Trump administration develops its space policy.

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Emergent gravity is a bold idea.

It claims that the force of gravity is a mere illusion, more akin to friction or heat—a property that emerges from some deeper physical interaction. This emergent gravity idea might hold the key to rewriting one of the fundamental forces of nature—and it could explain the mysterious nature of dark matter.

But in the years since its original proposal, it has not held up well to either experiment or further theoretical inquiry. Emergent gravity may not be a right answer. But it is a clever one, and it's still worth considering, as it may hold the seeds of a greater understanding.

Emergency situation

To understand what emergent gravity means, we first have to clarify what gravity is supposed to be emerging from and what the word “emergent” even means.

Emergence is an old concept that appears and reappears in many contexts, from physics to philosophy to art. In physics especially, emergence refers to a clear but slightly uncomfortable fact: Despite our deep understanding of the innermost workings of nature at the subatomic scale, we often can’t use that knowledge to describe most of the systems we actually care about.

One way to view nature is as a vast hierarchy. At the “bottom” of the hierarchy are the quantum fields, which we use quantum field theory to understand. On top of that are all the myriad subatomic and atomic interactions, also governed by quantum mechanics. Above that is chemistry, where the quantum starts mattering less. And on top of all that, far, far removed from quantum fields, are all the wonderful branches of science and their various tools that describe all manner of phenomena: astrophysics, oceanography, geology, sociology, and so on.

It’s technically true that “underneath” everything—say the circulation of a great ocean gyre or the formation of a newborn star or the panic that sets in when you come across a bear in the woods—is quantum field theory. But good luck using quantum field theory to describe those systems. That’s because these higher-order systems are emergent—they have new properties, new laws, and new behaviors that emerge from countless interactions operating at deeper levels.

Most of that time, we can't ever hope to make connections between lower and higher layers, and some physicists and philosophers argue that it might just be impossible to do so consistently. But in some cases, we can tie together low-level principles with higher-order emergent behavior. The best example of this is the relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics.

Thermodynamics is the study of familiar everyday properties of systems like temperature, pressure, volume, entropy, and all their friends. We have examples of relationships between these properties, like the ideal gas law. Amazingly, you can derive, test, and use the ideal gas law while having no idea what a “gas” is made of (atoms and molecules) and what those components of the gas are doing (bouncing around a lot). So we don’t need a connection between those properties and any underlying rules.

But in an amazing feat of 19th-century physics that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime, we made exactly that connection. Through a set of techniques known as statistical mechanics, we can take the behaviors of individual gas molecules—their kinetic energy and momentum, for example—and use those to derive the emergent properties of temperature, pressure, and entropy of a gas that consists of a whole bunch of molecules working together.

Here, temperature is emergent. An individual molecule doesn’t have a temperature. It only has momentum and kinetic energy. But properties like temperature and relationships like the ideal gas law emerge out of all these fundamental properties.

From the abyss, gravity emerges

So what does gravity have to do with any of this?

The roots of the idea that gravity might be emergent go all the way back to the funky '70s, when physicists like the famed Stephen Hawking and the should-be-more-famed Jacob Bekenstein discovered that black holes aren’t entirely, totally, 100 percent black. Instead, they give off a minute amount of radiation. Specifically, this radiation is thermal, meaning that the radiation has the same properties as any other generic hot thing in the Universe. This means the rules of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics should apply to black holes.

But black holes are objects of pure gravity. They are a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. They are places where gravity becomes so extreme that nothing can escape. They are punctures in space itself. They are most definitely not like any other generic hot thing in the Universe.

So perhaps nature is giving us a clue. Maybe there is a deeper connection between the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of gravity. And it could be that if thermodynamics is really an emergent property of some deeper set of physics, then maybe (just maybe, but let’s roll with this and see where it goes) the fact that black holes look kind of like warm glowing objects is telling us that gravity is also an emergent property of some deeper physics.

The nature of that “deeper physics” was anybody’s guess. In 2009, Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde guessed that the deeper physics might be some quantum information encoded on the surface of the Universe. This isn’t just some random idea plucked out of the Hat of Magical Physics; it's grounded in the very real observation that a black hole’s surface is much more important than its volume.

Specifically, when information—which, for our purposes, we can take to be the total description of every property of matter and radiation—enters a black hole (in the form of infalling matter or radiation or your worst enemy), the surface of a black hole grows proportionally. To be clear, so does the volume, but not proportionally to the amount of information.

This simple relationship unlocked an entire line of research centered on holography, the idea that the physics of our Universe, especially that of gravity, might actually take place on the surface of the cosmos. Indeed, the surface might be all there is, with the four dimensions of spacetime manifesting from various quantum interactions happening on that boundary.

Verlinde combined this holographic approach with the concept of black hole thermodynamics to rewrite Newton’s laws, and eventually general relativity, in terms of statistical relationships that give rise to gravity, making it an emergent force.

Now, as my email inbox can attest, any random crank can reassemble the laws of gravity by substituting variables in the equations, and by that metric, Verlinde’s work wasn’t all that impressive. But it’s a completely different ball game to take your own ideas seriously and develop a complete theory of physics, one that matches up with known observations and is capable of saying something new and surprising about the Universe.

In Verlinde’s formulation, spacetime itself has thermodynamic properties like entropy. Normally, the entropy of spacetime is completely swamped by everything occupying spacetime. It’s only when you go far away from everything that the densities of matter drop enough that the entropic nature of spacetime, and hence of gravity, starts to become apparent. And in those conditions, Verlinde discovered a slight deviation from the predictions of normal gravity. Specifically, both Newton and Einstein predict that the strength of gravity diminished inversely proportional to the distance squared. Verlinde’s emergent gravity suggests that, in extremely low-density environments, gravity is merely inversely proportional to the distance.

That’s interesting. That’s something we can test.

Several years after his original formulation, Verlinde discovered that if the Universe is filled with dark energy (which all observations suggest it is), then this leaves behind a “residue” in the structure of spacetime that adds an additional attractive component to gravity. Most interestingly, in high-density environments like the Solar System, this residue goes away, meaning we won’t be able to detect it based on local observations. As before, only in low-density environments, like in interstellar space, does this additional attractive component become apparent. Since a wealth of observations suggest there are some extra gravitational interactions happening at galactic scales and above, this started to look like an enticing solution for the problem of dark matter.

If it’s interesting, it’s probably wrong

Ideas can be beautiful, elegant, captivating… and dead wrong. Nature is the ultimate arbiter of ideas in physics, so it’s always up to the evidence to determine which theories we embrace and which we discard.

Our currently accepted paradigm for explaining the large-scale behavior of the Universe is rooted in general relativity, which has been put through its paces with over a century of successful experimental tests. Yet mysteries abound in the Universe, such as the apparent need for matter that’s invisible to us, known as dark matter, to explain the behaviors of stars and galaxies.

Can emergent gravity do any better?

While the question is simple, answering it is not easy. It’s one thing to devise a new conception of gravity. It’s entirely another to calculate accurate predictions for complex situations such as the motions of stars in a galaxy. So accepting the predictive power of emergent gravity means (a) trusting the theoretical calculations that lead to a prediction and (b) devising strong observational tests of those calculations.

The results of these endeavors have been decidedly mixed. The first examples of dark matter were described in the rotation rates of stars within galaxies and the motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters—stars orbit far too quickly, and the galaxies have far too high velocities given the amount of visible matter that is available to keep everything together. Initial tests of emergent gravity found that it could explain galaxy rotation curves but didn’t do any better than the usual dark matter approach. In other tests, it just outright didn’t work. Further tests within galaxy cluster environments found that emergent gravity got the matter density wrong by up to a factor of six.

In defense of emergent gravity, however, those tests used predictions from the theory that are, at best, approximations of what gravity “actually” does. It could be that a more accurate, robust mathematical description would yield better predictions that would end up agreeing with these observations.

In the end, these are pretty limited tests. There’s a lot more to the Universe that dark matter can explain, like the growth of large structures over cosmic time or the fluctuations in the appearance of the cosmic microwave background. Any theory that hopes to replace dark matter must run the full gamut, not just limit itself to galaxies and clusters. So far, nobody has attempted to approach these larger questions through the lens of emergent gravity.

On the theoretical front, emergent gravity has run into issues as well. The journey from vanilla general relativity to emergent gravity takes more than a few assumptions, leaps of faith, detours, and approximations. We don’t know if the holographic approach to physics is valid. We don’t know if the relationship between thermodynamics and black holes is nothing more than a coincidence. We don’t know the underlying quantum physics that might give rise to gravity in this picture.

In this regard, other theorists have come forward, arguing that the assumptions that underly emergent gravity (namely that surfaces obey thermodynamics) are flawed and are not compatible with general relativity. And since the whole point of emergent gravity is to make a theory that recapitulates relativity except in regions where we haven’t tested it yet, this could grind the entire emergent program to a halt.

Is emergent gravity a dead idea? Right now, it seems likely that it is. But is emergent gravity a bad idea? Absolutely not.

Ideas like emergent gravity are at—or even beyond—the cutting edge of physics. We know that we lack a complete understanding of gravity, and we know that we are surrounded by tantalizing hints of what may come next. And all things being equal, emergent gravity is a worthy concept that combines several different innovative threads into a novel view of our Universe. Some of the criticisms it faces are valid, and its lack of ability to confront observations is troubling. But these tests and criticisms are good things. Experiments only fail when we don’t learn anything new and when we don’t challenge ourselves.

Like explorers facing an unknown land, we don’t know which directions lead to lush forests and which lead to barren deserts. We can only discover new physics by taking bold plunges into the dark. Even if emergent gravity turns out to be a blind alley, it may contain the seeds that will later germinate into a more fruitful theory.

The only way to push forward in our progress to understand the Universe is to create these ideas ourselves. In other words, we can’t just sit around waiting for new physics to… emerge.

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Spooky season has come and gone, but those Halloween revelers who took in a haunted house during the season might just have boosted their immune systems by doing so, according to a new paper published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

As previously reported, fear is typically viewed as a negative emotion, an adverse reaction to keep us on our toes with regard to potential dangers in our environment. But human beings also tend to seek out scary movies, horror novels, or haunted houses—and not just during the Halloween season. This tendency has been dubbed "recreational fear" in the academic literature: a "mixed emotional experience of fear and enjoyment."

Co-author Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University, author of Why Horror Seduces, specializes in studying recreational fear. For instance, Clasen has examined the dominant personality traits of horror fans. (They tend to score high on openness to experience, also called intellect imagination.) In 2019 we reported on his investigation of two different fear-regulation strategies employed by subjects participating in a Danish haunted house: "adrenaline junkies," who lean into the fear, and "white-knucklers," who try to tamp down their fear.

Clasen followed that up with a 2020 study based on analysis of data gleaned from a 2017 experiment at the annual Dystopia haunted house in Vejle, Denmark, a commercial attraction with 42 thematically connected rooms, providing an immersive, live-action horror experience. Housed in an old fish factory and run by a group of horror enthusiasts, as many as 300 volunteers pitch in for the entire month of October each year. It's highly theatrical, with AV effects, elaborate set designs, and live actors in full makeup and costumes. Visitors encounter zombies, killer clowns, and a bloody butcher in a pig mask wielding a chainsaw, among other recreational horrors.

The Aarhus researchers strapped heart-rate monitors onto the participants who volunteered for the study and outfitted several of the haunted-house rooms with infrared cameras. That way they could measure heart rates and also track posture and facial expressions. Participants completed questionnaires before and after their haunted house experience.

Those results were consistent with Clasen's hypothesis that there is a sweet spot between too much fear and not enough fear, between predictability and unpredictability, "where you feel you have a certain amount of control over the situation, but there’s still a degree of unpredictability," Clasen told Ars in 2019. When Clasen's team plotted the relationship between levels of self-reported fear and enjoyment by participants in the experiment, the data showed an inverted U-shape—a Goldilocks zone for maximum enjoyment. There was a similar U-shaped trend in the data for participants' heart-rate signatures.

An immunity boost?

For this latest study, Clasen and his co-authors went back to the haunted house and recruited a new pool of volunteers between September and November 2023. The methodology was largely the same, except this time they drew blood from participants before, immediately after, and three days after their trip through the haunted house to measure levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a significant marker of immune response, as well as the development of immune cells in the blood. A total of 113 volunteers made the final cut.

Researchers interested in studying "recreational fear" have found haunted house attractions to be an invaluable real-world "laboratory."

Credit: Vimeo/APA

The results: Clasen et al. found no significant change in the prevalence of low-grade inflammation among the participants. However, after experiencing the haunted house, many participants showed a marked decrease in hs-CRP, particularly if they already had low-grade inflammation prior to the experience. Age, sex, and daily medication use did not affect hs-CRP levels.

As for white blood cells (leukocytes), their numbers decreased in the aftermath of the haunted house, "supporting the hypothesis that inflammation attenuates in response to fear in a recreational setting," the authors wrote. In short, "It looks like it might be beneficial for physical health to be chased by a guy with a chainsaw," Clasen jokingly told Ars.

These findings come with numerous caveats, most notably the fact that numerous other factors can affect the high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) test used in the experiment. While the team did exclude any volunteers who showed symptoms of bacterial or viral infection, among other conditions, they did not have information on participants' workout regimes, alcohol consumption, smoking, diet, or stress, all of which could also have impacted those three days of measurements, as could psychiatric conditions like depression and anxiety. There was a marginally higher incidence of low-grade inflammation in the study group compared to prior studies.

The authors also did not collect information about race, ethnicity, or economic status of the participants. Nor was it possible to include a control group in the experiment, introducing a certain degree of uncertainty as to whether the measured inflammatory response was solely due to the fear-inducing events or to natural fluctuations over time.

Still, "These findings suggest fear in a recreational setting might positively impact the immune system," the authors concluded. "Future research should explore the adrenergic system's role and confirm the persistence of these effects."

DOI: Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 2024. 10.1016/j.bbi.2024.10.036  (About DOIs).

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The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court’s ruling against a worker who charged her employer, the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corp., with discrimination and retaliation after she was passed over for at least four promotions (Glaesener v. Port Authority of New York & New Jersey; Port Authority Trans-Hudson).

The worker, a Black woman, lost out on two roles to White men and two to the same person, another Black woman. The 3rd Circuit found no evidence of discrimination, noting that while one worker had been at the employer for less time, he had more experience in the areas the role demanded. 

The court similarly dismissed the worker’s argument that she had been retaliated against when she was given a “subjective” lower interview score. “Poor interview performance is a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for employment decisions,” the 3rd Circuit said. “Thus, employers may use interviews so long as they assess relevant criteria and are not ‘entirely subjective.’”

Dive Insight:

The court made several observations about the interview process that shielded the employer from the worker’s claims.

The interview questions were job-related, for one, touching on interviewees’ technical knowledge, general competency and communications skills. There was no evidence the interviewers “injected their own additional subjective criteria into the evaluation process,” the court said; on the contrary, it found candidates were asked the same questions and ranked according to the same criteria. 

In addition, the court noted that in one interview, the worker had a score of only 18, compared with the successful candidate’s score of 44. During the interview, the worker cried, was “emotional” and “very flustered” and even “slapped the table a few times out of maybe frustration,” the court noted, referencing documents the Port Authority submitted in its defense upon the worker’s appeal. 

Those documents show there were three interviewers for that role, all of whom testified to the lower court and at least one of whom — the executive HR business partner — submitted typed notes. All three portrayed the worker as nervous and uncomfortable during the interview. 

“[The worker] claims that the interviewers’ notes omitted some detail, but nothing casts doubt on their explanation that the successful candidate did far better,” the 3rd Circuit wrote.

Attorneys have long emphasized the importance of documentation when it comes to HR compliance — and when it comes to successful documentation, the more objective, detailed and specific, the better, they’ve said. 

Court documents show that in the Port Authority case, the HR interviewer documented specifically what the worker did and said during the interview. For example, in noting that the worker’s answers lacked “cohesion and organization,” she noted that the worker “kept stopping in the middle of her sentences and would ask the question again” during the interview.

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Few people are fond of earwigs, with their menacing abdominal pincers—whether they’re skittering across your floor, getting comfy in the folds of your camping tent, or minding their own business.

Scientists, too, have given them short shrift compared with the seemingly endless attention they have lavished on social insects like ants and bees.

Yet, there are a handful of exceptions. Some researchers have made conscious career decisions to dig into the hidden, underground world where earwigs reside, and have found the creatures to be surprisingly interesting and social, if still not exactly endearing.

Work in the 1990s and early 2000s focused on earwig courtship. These often intricate performances of attraction and repulsion—in which pincers and antennae play prominent roles—can last hours, and the mating itself as long as 20 hours, at least in one Papua New Guinea species, Tagalina papua. The females usually decide when they’ve had enough, though males of some species use their pincers to restrain the object of their desire.

Males of the bone-house earwig Marava arachidis (often found in bone meal plants and slaughterhouses) are particularly coercive, says entomologist Yoshitaka Kamimura of Keio University in Japan, who has studied earwig mating for 25 years. “They bite the female’s antennae and use a little hook on their genitalia to lock them inside her reproductive tract.”

Size matters

Female earwigs collect sperm in one or more internal pouches and can use it to fertilize multiple broods, so they don’t need to mate again. The only thing most males can do is add their own sperm, but Kamimura has seen males of the pale-legged earwig Euborellia pallipes remove the sperm of other males using an elongated part of their peculiar penis.

It’s better if females can prevent this from happening, because they can be particular about the males they mate with. This may explain why, in some species, male and  female genitalia have increased in size as part of a kind of evolutionary arms race in which males benefit from access to the pouch and females benefit from keeping them out. In the bristly earwig Echinosoma horridum, the male’s genitalia are nearly as long as the rest of his body, and the female’s genitalia almost four times as long as the rest of hers.

Fascinating though they are, the amorous adventures of earwigs weren’t what first caught Kamimura’s attention. Rather, he was intrigued by the female’s dedication to her offspring. “When I was a student, I accidentally disturbed an earwig caring for her eggs in our backyard,” he recalls. “She ran away but returned the next day. I was very interested, and I started to rear them.”

Grow your own earwigs

The care that female earwigs provide to their eggs has also become the focus of study in Europe, where a surge of lab research on European earwigs—Forficula auricularia—was kick-started almost 20 years ago by entomologist Mathias Kölliker at the University of Basel, Switzerland. “Getting them to breed continuously over multiple generations was a big challenge,” he recalls. “The females did lay eggs, but they didn’t develop, and never hatched.”

It turned out that the eggs, which are laid in late fall and hatch in January, need the winter cold to start their development. So the scientists figured out a lab regimen that would chill but not kill the eggs. “That took us about two years,” says Kölliker.

In 2009, Kölliker hired entomologist Joël Meunier, who continues to study earwigs at the University of Tours in France and wrote an overview of the biology and social life of earwigs for the Annual Review of Entomology. Earwigs are high maintenance, he says. “If you work with fruit flies, you can breed 10 generations in a few months, but earwigs take much longer.… And they’re all kept in separate petri dishes—thousands of them—that we have to open twice a week to replace the food.

“I think this is one of the reasons few people work on them. But they’re very fascinating.”

Fending off males

The female’s careful egg grooming has at least two important functions. First, she uses a small brush on her mouthparts to remove the spores of fungi that can kill the eggs. Secondly, as Kölliker, Meunier, and colleagues found, she applies water-repellent hydrocarbons to keep them from drying out.

Males that attempt to approach the nest are aggressively chased away, and with good reason, says Meunier. “Once, when we were in the field in Italy to collect earwigs, we found a male and a female together with a clutch of eggs. We were quite excited: 'Wow, biparental care, cool!' So we brought them to the lab. But what we actually observed was that the female was very stressed out, showing a lot of aggression towards the male, while the clutch size was continuously decreasing.”

Males, it turns out, love to snack on eggs, even ones that they fathered. To chase them off, females raise their abdomens to show off their pincers. If that’s not enough, they can use the pincers to hurt the male—even to cut him in half. (Scary as they look, the pincers can’t harm people at all, Meunier says.)

Earwigs can also spray each other with defensive secretions that may have antimicrobial properties, too. “They often use those secretions when meeting others,” says Meunier. “Maybe it also prevents the spread of disease.”

As far as scientists know, these secretions are harmless to humans. But because they contain quinone derivatives, which are also found in substances like henna, they have some quirky side effects. “When you get a lot of it on your hands,” Meunier says, “they’ll turn blue, like a bruise, and these marks can last all week.”

The secretions smell quite pleasant, says Kölliker. “When I had a visitor in the lab, I would sometimes pick up an earwig and hold it under their nose. It’s a very nice odor, actually, kind of an earthy smell.” Kölliker’s cat was less appreciative when he tried it on her: “She immediately backed off,” he says.

Overbearing moms

Surprisingly, Meunier’s recent work suggests that earwig offspring may pay a price for their mom’s protectiveness. In European earwigs and several other species, although the nymphs that emerge from eggs can feed on their own after a couple of days, mothers usually stay with them for a few weeks after they hatch. Yet, at least in the lab, that does not seem to enhance the nymphs’ chances of survival.

“In the best case, the mother’s presence doesn’t change a thing,” says Meunier. “At worst, nymphs that grow up with their mother are less likely to reach adulthood and will become smaller adults.” It’s unclear why. But things may be different in the wild, where male earwigs or predators like spiders pose threats, making it safer to stay with mom.

The mother herself seems to benefit. Meunier has observed that as soon as the nymphs emerge, they eat the parasitic mites that often bother breeding females. And once they start foraging on their own, the feces they leave all over the nest may be food for their mother and help her to produce a second brood. The nymphs also feast on each other’s feces, sometimes straight from the source.

The voracious nymphs don’t stop there: They regularly eat each other, and nymphs of the hump earwig Anechura harmandi will almost always eat their mother. “It occurs in every family,” Meunier says, “and it helps the nymphs grow.”

Let’s get together

With all this aggression and cannibalism, you’d expect adult earwigs not actively seeking mates to avoid each other, and in many species, they do. Yet European earwigs regularly group together by the hundreds, sometimes mixing things up with other earwig species.

Recent work from Meunier’s lab showed that European earwigs that grew up in groups are more likely to look for company as adults than those reared in isolation, and females removed from these groups can get so stressed they are more likely to succumb to fungal infections.

“We have no idea why,” says Meunier. “Maybe it’s healthier to live together. Or maybe they just like company.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

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If you had seen the news about the fifth flight test, you would have probably heard of the Super Heavy booster being caught by "chopstick" arms after launch. The upper stage of the rocket also did a controlled entry and "high accuracy splashdown at the target area in the Indian Ocean."

In the sixth flight test, SpaceX will try to catch the booster again with the chopsticks, reignite a Raptor engine while in space, and test heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean.

For the upcoming flight, SpaceX has introduced some hardware upgrades that add redundancy to booster propulsion systems and increase structural strength in key areas. It will also be able to offload propellants from the booster quicker following a successful catch. SpaceX also revealed that its mission designers updated the software controls and commit criteria for the booster's launch and return.

Commenting on improvements coming to the seventh test flight and beyond, SpaceX said:

"Future ships, starting with the vehicle planned for the seventh flight test, will fly with significant upgrades including redesigned forward flaps, larger propellant tanks, and the latest generation tiles and secondary thermal protection layers as we continue to iterate towards a fully reusable heat shield. Learnings from this and subsequent flight tests will continue to make the entire Starship system more reliable as we close in on full and rapid reusability."

For SpaceX, getting Starship ready fairly soon is important because it's the bedrock of the company's plans for getting to Mars, and some of the technology will be used by NASA's Artemis missions to the Moon this decade.

SpaceX plans to start a live webcast 30 minutes before liftoff on SpaceX.com and X @SpaceX. You can also tune in on TV with the new X TV app. As a test flight, the schedule could change, so keep this in mind to avoid disappointment.

Source: SpaceX

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Last year we reported on preliminary research suggesting that ancient Egyptians may have used hallucinogens in their religious rituals, based on the presence of a few key chemical signatures taken from a ceremonial mug. Now those researchers have extended their analysis and fully identified the chemical components of those samples, confirming those preliminary findings, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

There is ample evidence that humans in many cultures throughout history used various hallucinogenic substances in religious ceremonies or shamanic rituals. That includes not just ancient Egypt but also ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya, Inca, and Aztec cultures. The Urarina people who live in the Peruvian Amazon Basin still use a psychoactive brew called ayahuasca in their rituals, and Westerners seeking their own brand of enlightenment have also been known to participate.

Last year, David Tanasi, of the University of South Florida, posted a preprint on his preliminary analysis of a ceremonial mug decorated with the head of Bes, a popular deity believed to confer protection on households, especially mothers and children. So unlike most other Egyptian deities, images of Bes were quite common in Egyptian homes. There were even special chambers built to honor Bes and his wife, Beset, at the Saqqara site near Cairo, which Egyptologists think could have been used for fertility or healing rituals, although their exact purpose is not certain (Bes was an ancient Egyptian deity of protection, fertility, healing, and purification). The mug is part of the collection of the Tampa Museum of Art.

Archaeologists have long speculated about the purpose of such mugs and what kinds of substances they once held. Scholars have suggested they held sacred water, milk, wine, beer, kohl, perfume, or medicinal potions, but few have been tested for traces of organic compounds. One 2004 study looked for residues of animal proteins in 23 Bes vases, but the DNA analysis turned up just four positive results due to protein degradation and other challenges.

After collecting sample residues from the vessel, Tanasi applied various techniques—including proteomic and genetic analyses and synchrotron radiation-based Fourier-transform infrared microspectroscopy—to characterize the residues. Among the more intriguing results of Tanasi's 2023 analysis was the presence of Syrian rue (Peganum harmala), whose seeds are known to have hallucinogenic properties that can induce dream-like visions, per the authors, thanks to its production of the alkaloids harmine and harmaline.

There were also traces of blue water lily (Nymphaea cerulea), which contains a psychoactive alkaloid that acts as a sedative; it's one of several candidate plants that scholars believe might be the fruit of the lotus tree described in Homer's Odyssey. Both were known to the Egyptians. In addition, he identified traces of a fermented alcoholic concoction containing yeasts, wheat, sesame seeds, fruit (possibly grapes), honey, and, um, "human fluids": possibly breast milk, oral or vaginal mucus, and blood. (The traces of human skin were dismissed as likely contamination.)

Mysterious mugs

Since then Tanasi has expanded his analysis, resulting in this latest paper. Along with co-authors from the University of Trieste and the University of Milan in Italy, he conducted additional chemical and DNA analysis of a pulverized sample scraped from the interior of the Bes mug. Tanasi also created a 3D scan of the Bes mug in Sketchfab, primarily for public outreach purposes, although this also allowed him to calculate how much liquid the mug could hold (about 90 ml).

In addition to confirming the previously identified components, Tanasi and his co-authors were able to identify traces of pine nuts or Mediterranean pine oil; licorice; tartaric acid salts that were likely part of the aforementioned alcoholic concoction; and traces of spider flowers (specifically Cleome gynandra or Cleome chrysantha) known to have medicinal properties—including inducing labor. This is consistent with people visiting Bes chambers to confirm successful pregnancies, and the presence of hallucinogens may have induced dream-like visions in that ritualistic context.

"At this point, we are 100 percent certain that psychotropic substances were used for 'incubation rituals' connected with the cult of Bes," Tanasi told Ars. "Incubation rituals are religious practices where people sleep in a sacred space to receive a dream from a deity that may provide healing or an oracle. In the Greek cult of Asklepios, god of medicine, sick worshippers had to spend the night in the sanctuary and wait to be visited by the god curing them during their dreams. Those dreams were triggered by drugs (pharmaka) dispensed by the priests. So, our research confirms an earlier practice that has later comparisons in several other cultures."

Performing similar analysis on other examples of Bes vases would further enhance our understanding of the purpose of these intriguing artifacts, and Tanasi hopes to do just that with Bes mugs belonging to the Allan Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, which were produced with the same mold used to cast the Tampa mug. Then he could determine whether there was just one recipe for the ritual potion or several.

Scientific Reports, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-78721-8  (About DOIs).

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Sources told Faber that the funding, which should close early next week, is a combination of $5 billion expected from sovereign funds in the Middle East and $1 billion from other investors, some of whom may want to re-up their investments.

The money will be used to acquire 100,000 Nvidia chips, per sources familiar with the situation. Tesla’s Full Self Driving is expected to rely on the new Memphis supercomputer.

Musk’s AI startup, which he announced in July 2023, seeks to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website. Last November, xAI released a chatbot called Grok, which the company said was modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The chatbot debuted with two months of training and had real-time knowledge of the internet, the company claimed at the time.

With Grok, xAI aims to directly compete with companies including ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which Musk helped start before a conflict with co-founder Sam Altman led him to depart the project in 2018. It will also be vying with Google’s Bard technology and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.

Now that Donald Trump is president-elect, Musk is beginning to actively work with the new administration on its approach to AI and tech more broadly, as part of Trump’s inner circle in recent weeks.

Trump plans to repeal President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, according to his campaign platform, stating that it “hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology” and that “in its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”

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We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with surprising precision to reach a Froot Loop treat.

As expected, rats housed in enriched environments—complete with toys, space, and companions—learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.

After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs—featuring ratproof wiring, indestructible tires, and ergonomic driving levers—are akin to a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.

As a neuroscientist who advocates for housing and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, I’ve found it amusing to see how far we’ve strayed from my lab practices with this project. Rats typically prefer dirt, sticks, and rocks over plastic objects. Now, we had them driving cars.

But humans didn’t evolve to drive either. Although our ancient ancestors didn’t have cars, they had flexible brains that enabled them to acquire new skills—fire, language, stone tools, and agriculture. And some time after the invention of the wheel, humans made cars.

Although cars made for rats are far from anything they would encounter in the wild, we believed that driving represented an interesting way to study how rodents acquire new skills. Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before their vehicle hit the road. Why was that?

The New Destination of Joy

Concepts from introductory psychology textbooks took on a new, hands-on dimension in our rodent driving laboratory. Building on foundational learning approaches such as operant conditioning, which reinforces targeted behavior through strategic incentives, we trained the rats step-by-step in their driver’s ed programs.

Initially, they learned basic movements, such as climbing into the car and pressing a lever. But with practice, these simple actions evolved into more complex behaviors, such as steering the car toward a specific destination.

The rats also taught me something profound one morning during the pandemic.

It was the summer of 2020, a period marked by emotional isolation for almost everyone on the planet, even laboratory rats. When I walked into the lab, I noticed something unusual: The three driving-trained rats eagerly ran to the side of the cage, jumping up like my dog does when asked if he wants to take a walk.

Had the rats always done this and I just hadn’t noticed? Were they just eager for a Froot Loop, or anticipating the drive itself? Whatever the case, they appeared to be feeling something positive—perhaps excitement and anticipation.

Behaviors associated with positive experiences are associated with joy in humans, but what about rats? Was I seeing something akin to joy in a rat? Maybe so, considering that neuroscience research is increasingly suggesting that joy and positive emotions play a critical role in the health of both human and nonhuman animals.

With that, my team and I shifted focus from topics such as how chronic stress influences brains to how positive events—and anticipation for these events—shape neural functions.

Working with postdoctoral fellow Kitty Hartvigsen, I designed a new protocol that used waiting periods to ramp up anticipation before a positive event. Bringing Pavlovian conditioning into the mix, rats had to wait 15 minutes after a Lego block was placed in their cage before they received a Froot Loop. They also had to wait in their transport cage for a few minutes before entering Rat Park, their play area. We also added challenges, such as making them shell sunflower seeds before eating.

This became our Wait for It research program. We dubbed this new line of study UPERs—unpredictable positive experience responses—where rats were trained to wait for rewards. In contrast, control rats received their rewards immediately. After about a month of training, we expose the rats to different tests to determine how waiting for positive experiences affects how they learn and behave. We’re currently peering into their brains to map the neural footprint of extended positive experiences.

Preliminary results suggest that rats required to wait for their rewards show signs of shifting from a pessimistic cognitive style to an optimistic one in a test designed to measure rodent optimism. They performed better on cognitive tasks and were bolder in their problem-solving strategies. We linked this program to our lab’s broader interest in behaviorceuticals, a term I coined to suggest that experiences can alter brain chemistry similarly to pharmaceuticals.

This research provides further support of how anticipation can reinforce behavior. Previous work with lab rats has shown that rats pressing a bar for cocaine—a stimulant that increases dopamine activation—already experience a surge of dopamine as they anticipate a dose of cocaine.

The Tale of Rat Tails

It wasn’t just the effects of anticipation on rat behavior that caught our attention. One day, a student noticed something strange: One of the rats in the group trained to expect positive experiences had its tail straight up with a crook at the end, resembling the handle of an old-fashioned umbrella.

I had never seen this in my decades of working with rats. Reviewing the video footage, we found that the rats trained to anticipate positive experiences were more likely to hold their tails high than untrained rats. But what, exactly, did this mean?

Curious, I posted a picture of the behavior on social media. Fellow neuroscientists identified this as a gentler form of what’s called Straub tail, typically seen in rats given the opioid morphine. This S-shaped curl is also linked to dopamine. When dopamine is blocked, the Straub tail behavior subsides.

Natural forms of opiates and dopamine—key players in brain pathways that diminish pain and enhance reward—seem to be telltale ingredients of the elevated tails in our anticipation training program. Observing tail posture in rats adds a new layer to our understanding of rat emotional expression, reminding us that emotions are expressed throughout the entire body.

While we can’t directly ask rats whether they like to drive, we devised a behavioral test to assess their motivation to drive. This time, instead of only giving rats the option of driving to the Froot Loop Tree, they could also make a shorter journey on foot—or paw, in this case.

Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination. This response suggests that the rats enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination.

Rat Lessons on Enjoying the Journey

We’re not the only team investigating positive emotions in animals.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp famously tickled rats, demonstrating their capacity for joy.

Research has also shown that desirable low-stress rat environments retune their brains’ reward circuits, such as the nucleus accumbens. When animals are housed in their favored environments, the area of the nucleus accumbens that responds to appetitive experiences expands. Alternatively, when rats are housed in stressful contexts, the fear-generating zones of their nucleus accumbens expand. It is as if the brain is a piano the environment can tune.

Neuroscientist Curt Richter also made the case for rats having hope. In a study that wouldn’t be permitted today, rats swam in glass cylinders filled with water, eventually drowning from exhaustion if they weren’t rescued. Lab rats frequently handled by humans swam for hours to days. Wild rats gave up after just a few minutes. If the wild rats were briefly rescued, however, their survival time extended dramatically, sometimes by days. It seemed that being rescued gave the rats hope and spurred them on.

The driving rats project has opened new and unexpected doors in my behavioral neuroscience research lab. While it’s vital to study negative emotions such as fear and stress, positive experiences also shape the brain in significant ways.

As animals—human or otherwise—navigate the unpredictability of life, anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life’s rewards. In a world of immediate gratification, these rats offer insights into the neural principles guiding everyday behavior. Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating, and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain. That’s a lesson my lab rats have taught me well.

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Nearly a year after its approval, the first medical treatment that uses the Nobel Prize–winning technology Crispr is now being given to patients.

Called Casgevy, the gene-editing treatment is for people with sickle cell disease and a related blood disorder called beta thalassemia. UK regulators approved the treatment in November 2023, followed by the US and Europe in December. Vertex, the pharmaceutical company that markets Casgevy, announced in a November 5 earnings call that the first person to receive Casgevy outside of a clinical trial was dosed in the third quarter of this year. The company reported $2 million in revenue from that patient. (Casgevy debuted with a price tag of $2.2 million in the US.)

“Cagevy has been enthusiastically received by patients, physicians, and policymakers, and the launch is gathering momentum across all regions,” Stuart Arbuckle, Vertex’s chief operating officer, said on the earnings call. He added that additional patients are accessing the treatment commercially.

When WIRED followed up with Vertex via email, spokesperson Eleanor Celeste declined to provide the exact number of patients that have received Casgevy. However, the company says 40 patients have undergone cell collections in anticipation of receiving the treatment, up from 20 patients last quarter.

In sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia, patients don’t produce healthy hemoglobin, the substance in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen throughout the body. Errors in the hemoglobin gene are to blame. As a result, people with sickle cell have hard, crescent-shaped red blood cells that stick together and block blood flow, causing extreme bouts of pain. These pain crises can last for hours or days and can land patients in the hospital. In beta thalassemia, the body doesn’t make enough hemoglobin, which leads to anemia. People with severe beta thalassemia need regular blood transfusions every several weeks throughout their lifetime.

Casgevy works by using Crispr to modify a person’s own cells so that they produce a healthy type of hemoglobin.

The delay in patients receiving Casgevy is not necessarily unexpected, as the treatment is complex to administer and only certain hospitals are able to perform the procedure. On last week’s earnings call, Arbuckle said 45 treatment centers are now authorized to administer Casgevy, and Vertex expects that number to grow to approximately 75 around the world.

The treatment is made by collecting a patient’s own blood-forming stem cells and sending them to a lab to be edited. Before receiving an infusion of the cells, patients must undergo chemotherapy to prepare their bone marrow for the new cells. Once the edited cells are infused, they travel to the marrow, where they start to make new red blood cells with healthy hemoglobin.

In clinical trials, Casgevy greatly reduced or eliminated debilitating pain crises in people with sickle cell disease, and it allowed most people with beta thalassemia to end blood transfusions. For some patients, it amounts to a functional cure.

Vertex estimates that around 35,000 sickle cell and beta thalassemia patients across the US and Europe could benefit from Casgevy. The company is investing in additional manufacturing capacity for the treatment, and in September it obtained approval for a third manufacturing facility, Arbuckle said.

For some patients, a major hurdle for patients interested in getting Casgevy remains the need to undergo chemotherapy, which can cause infertility. Another hurdle is the long and arduous process of cell collection and staying in the hospital for weeks after receiving the edited cells. The first Crispr medicine may be here, but just how popular it will be with patients remains to be seen.

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