A new fire station in Germany that was destroyed in a fire, causing millions of euros in damage, did not have a fire alarm system.

The fire broke out early Wednesday morning at the Stadtallendorf fire station in Hesse and destroyed the equipment hall and almost a dozen emergency vehicles, according to local media.

Initial estimates put the damage at between €20 million and €24 million. No one was injured.

Local officials told the German news agency dpa that no fire alarm system was installed in the building because experts had considered it not necessary — much to the astonishment of many observers now that the station has burned down.

The fire broke out on an emergency vehicle belonging to the fire department, which contained lithium-ion batteries and an external power connection.

The station opened less than a year ago, local media reported.

“I believe that what has happened will make many people think and act,” about improving fire protection requirements at fire stations, Norbert Fischer, the head of the State Fire Brigade Association of the state of Hesse, said.

Precisely because there is a lot of technology in fire stations and batteries are being charged, it would make sense to equip them with fire alarm systems, Fischer said, noting it was unclear whether such a system could have prevented the worst in Stadtallendorf.

“This fire spread at breakneck speed," he said.

Source

Fungi can be enigmatic organisms. Mushrooms or other structures may be visible above the soil, but beneath lurks a complex network of filaments, or hyphae, known as the mycelium. It is even possible for fungi to communicate through the mycelium—despite having no brain.

Other brainless life-forms (such as slime molds) have surprising ways of navigating their surroundings and surviving through communication. Wanting to see whether fungi could recognize food in different arrangements, researchers from Tohoku University and Nagaoka College in Japan observed how the mycelial network of Phanerochaete velutina, a fungus that feeds off dead wood, grew on and around wood blocks arranged in different shapes.

The way the mycelial network spread out, along with its wood decay activity, differed based on the wood block arrangements. This suggests communication because the fungi appeared to find where the most nutrients were and grow in those areas.

“[Our work] suggests that fungal mycelia may be capable of processing information about spatial locations within their network and adaptively altering their behavior,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Fungal Ecology.

Making a connection

To see how P. velutina would respond to specific arrangements of dead wood, the researchers soaked wood blocks and incubated them with the fungus on agar, giving it a chance to colonize. They then placed the wood blocks, which were colonized with fungus, in plates of damp soil that each had nine blocks arranged in either a circle or an X. They were then allowed to incubate for 116 days.

Because the soil layer was so thin, most hyphae, which usually grow and spread underground by releasing spores, were easily seen, giving the researchers an opportunity to observe where connections were being made in the mycelium. Early hyphal coverage was not too different between the X and circle formations. Later, each showed a strong hyphal network, which makes up the mycelium, but there were differences between them.

While the hyphal network was pretty evenly distributed around the circle, there were differences between the inner and outer blocks in the X arrangement. Levels of decay activity were determined by weighing the blocks before and after the incubation period, and decay was pretty even throughout the circle, but especially evident on the four outermost blocks of the X. The researchers suggest that there were more hyphal connections on those blocks for a reason.

“The outermost four blocks, which had a greater degree of connection, may have served as “outposts” for foraging and absorbing water and nutrients from the soil, facilitated by their greater hyphal connections,” they said in the same study.

Talk to me

Fungal mycelium experiences what’s called acropetal growth, meaning it grows outward in all directions from the center. Consistent with this, the hyphae started out growing outward from each block. But over time, the hyphae shifted to growing in the direction that would get them the most nutrients.

Why did it change? Here is where the team thinks communication comes in. Previous studies found electrical signals are transmitted through hyphae. These signals sync up after the hyphae connect into one huge mycelium, much like the signals transmitted among neurons in organisms with brains. Materials such as nutrients are also transferred throughout the network.

In these experiments, nutrients were equally distributed throughout the wood blocks and soil. Despite this, the strongest hyphal connections to the soil were on the blocks at the ends of the X, and why this happened is still a mystery. According to researcher Yu Fukasawa, the fungi possibly found areas richer in nutrients than others, and more connections offer more channels for signals and nutrients to travel through the entire mycelium.

“It’s possible that they prioritize outward growth to expand their colony and disregard the center, even when nutrients are still available there,” he told Ars Technica. “My hypothesis is that they are transmitting information across the mycelial network via electric potential.”

Throughout the circle formation, hyphal connections and decomposition activity were relatively equal from block to block, but a shift away from acropetal growth was also observed in the circle configuration. It seems that there must have been no need to form more connections around specific blocks because resources in the circle were just about equal for the fungi.

Some fungi are capable of processes that appear to mirror certain aspects of brain function. The research team argues that P. velutina showed signs of basal cognition, or cognition at the cellular level in brained organisms. This relates to sensory functions (finding nutrients) and the processing of information (sending signals about where those nutrients are throughout the mycelium). More research on when and why they send these signals still needs to be done.

Does this mean fungi have a way of thinking? Though a network of fungi can function like the neurons of a brain in some senses, they do not literally think. Let’s just hope that keeps them from plotting world domination.

Fungal Ecology, 2024.  DOI: 10.1016/j.funeco.2024.101387

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Sunday, 3 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 21:57 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch 23 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. These satellites will be known as Starlink Group 6-77, and this identifier can be used to find the satellites when they're in orbit using tracking apps like ISS Detector.

Monday, 4 November

• Who: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
• What: H3-22S
• When:06:48 - 08:30 UTC
• Where: Tanegashima Space Center, Japan
• Why: Mitsubishi will launch an H3 rocket carrying the Kirameki 3 communications satellite, which will be operated by the DSN Corporation. These satellites have been built for use by the Japanese Ministry of Defense.

• Who: Rocket Lab
• What: Electron
• When: 10:30 UTC
• Where: Mahia, New Zealand
• Why: Rocket Lab will launch an Electron rocket with an unknown payload for a commercial firm into a Syn-synchronous orbit. The mission will be named "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes". It's unclear who the satellite is made by, but it could be for E-Space.

• Who: Glavkosmos
• What: Soyuz 2.1b
• When: 23:18 UTC
• Where: Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia
• Why: Glavkosmos will launch a Soyuz 2.1b rocket carrying the first two Ionosfera-M heliogeophysical satellites and 53 small sats. The Ionosfera constellation will consist of four ionospheric and magnetospheric research satellites developed by Roskosmos for a project called Ionozond.

Tuesday, 5 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 02:29 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying Dragon 2 on a cargo mission to the International Space Station. The flight is part of NASA's Commercial Resupply Services program.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Starlink
• When: 07:46 - 11:46 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 20 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. The group of satellites will include 13 direct-to-cell (DTC) Starlink satellites. This batch is known as Starlink Group 9-10.

Thursday, 7 November

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 22:53 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying 23 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. It will be known as Starlink Group 6-69.

Saturday, 9 November

• Who: China
• What: Long March 2D
• When: Unknown
• Where: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China
• Why: This mission will orbit four Piesat synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites for the Hangtian Hongu constellation to orbit. These satellites will fly in a unique formation as they collect imagery and data from the Earth's surface, this formation will boost stability, compared to similar satellites.

Recap

• The first launch last week was a Long March 2F Y19 carrying the Shenzhou 19 mission to the Chinese Space Station. Aboard Shenzhou 19 were Cai Xuzhe, Song Lingdong, and Wang Haoze.

• Next up we got the launch of a Falcon 9 from SpaceX, it was carrying 20 Starlink satellites marked as Group 9-9. The first stage of the rocket landed ready for reuse.

• The final launch was another Falcon 9, this time carrying 23 Starlink satellites known as Group 10-13. The first stage of the rocket landed on a droneship for reuse.

That's all for this week; check in next time!

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Aerial LiDAR, or light detection and ranging equipment, penetrated dense forest cover from above in the Mexican

state of Campeche to reveal ancient Maya buildings, plazas and agricultural terraces.

Courtesy Luke Auld-Thomas

CNN  — 

 

For more than 1,000 years, dense forests in the Mexican state of Campeche concealed the region’s ancient human history.

 

Scientists called Campeche an archaeological “blank spot” in the Maya Lowlands, an area spanning what is now Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and southeastern Mexico, and which the Maya inhabited from about 1000 BC to AD 1500.

 

But part of that region is blank no longer. Archaeologists have found thousands of never-before-seen Maya structures as well as a large city that they named Valeriana after a nearby lagoon, the researchers reported Monday in the journal Antiquity.

 

The sleuthing that led to the discovery took place from nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away, using aerial LiDAR — light detection and ranging equipment — that penetrated eastern Campeche’s thick forest cover from above, pinging the surface with lasers and revealing what lay beneath the leafy canopy. Encompassing about 47 square miles (122 square kilometers), the LiDAR scans were collected in 2013 for a forest survey by The Nature Conservancy of Mexico.

 

Like other large capital cities from Maya sites, Valeriana had a reservoir, a ball court, temple pyramids and a broad road connecting enclosed plazas. In total, the researchers identified 6,764 structures in Valeriana and in other rural and urban settlements of varying sizes. The density of the settlements in the area rivals that of other known locations in the Maya Lowlands, and archaeologists had suspected that numerous Maya ruins were hidden in

Campeche since at least the 1940s, the scientists reported.

 

“On the one hand it was surprising; you see it and you’re struck by it. On the other hand, it actually confirmed what I expected to find,” said lead study author and archaeologist Luke Auld-Thomas, who conducted the research as a doctoral candidate in the department of anthropology at Tulane University.

 

“My own sense of this part of the Maya Lowlands, based on what I know of my archaeology, is that if you could throw darts at it, you would find urban areas,” Auld-Thomas said. “And so it was gratifying and exciting to see that that was actually the case.”

Interconnected cities

LiDAR survey data reveals ancient Maya buildings (inset, center)

clustered on a hilltop, while a satellite image (far left and right)

shows modern agriculture and roadbuilding underway in the valleys below.

Courtesy Luke Auld-Thomas

Campeche is sandwiched between two relatively well-explored areas — the northern Yucatán and the southern Maya Lowlands — but archaeologists previously all but ignored it, said study coauthor Marcello Canuto, a professor in Tulane’s department of anthropology.

In the north, Maya sites such as Chichén Itzá are highly visible. “They’re very easy to recognize on the landscape, and there was ready accessibility,” Canuto said. Sites from the southern Maya Lowlands were also familiar to archaeologists as a source of Maya hieroglyphs, texts and altars — “the kinds of things that have been long-sought by scholars,” Canuto said.

For decades, Campeche was not easily reachable or known for its artifacts. But this new study and other LiDAR-driven investigations are changing that.

“This is a new dawn for all of us, because we can now see where we would never have been able to see,” Canuto said.

The new LiDAR scans also highlight the connections between Maya settlements and hint at the complexity of Maya cities regardless of their size, said Carlos Morales-Aguilar, a landscape archaeologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the research. Morales-Aguilar’s work on Maya settlements in Guatemala aligns closely with the new findings, he told CNN in an email.

“Dense settlement patterns indicate that the Maya were highly organized in managing their landscapes, with extensive networks of roads or causeways, residential areas, agricultural terraces, and defensive structures,” he said. The Antiquity study further indicates that the Maya adapted their infrastructure to fit the natural landscape, “utilizing sinkholes, ridges, and depressions as part of their urban planning and water management strategies.”

“These findings challenge the traditional view that Maya cities — including their hinterland — were isolated city-states or regional kingdoms,” Morales-Aguilar said. Instead, they paint a picture “of a vast, interconnected network of urban and rural areas that spanned across their territories throughout their occupation history.”

‘The LiDAR revolution’

As LiDAR scans reveal more of these formerly hidden cities, the data will reshape earlier interpretations of the scale and diversity of Maya settlements, “which is a good thing!” said Tomás Gallareta Cervera, an assistant professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at Kenyon College in Ohio who was not involved in the study.

“LiDAR analysis has pushed urbanism and settlement pattern studies forward in unprecedented ways; some even call it the LiDAR revolution,” Gallareta Cervera said in an email. “Archaeologists now have a new framework to research how these ancient people adapted and thrived in their environment for thousands of years. And that is very exciting!”

While these remnants of Maya culture have persisted for millennia, locating and studying the full extent of Maya settlements — which could include more major cities — will be critical for preserving the future of these ancient sites, according to Auld-Thomas.

“We have yet to really wrap our heads around what that means for our understanding of these places as environments and how to care for them and protect them,” he said. “It’s important to understand that these are places that have always been peopled to varying degrees, and that people have an important place in their conservation.”

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.

Source

EU citizens should start stockpiling three days’ worth of goods in order to be ready for various potential disasters, including a nuclear conflict, a report on the bloc’s civilian and military preparedness has warned.

Published on Wednesday by former Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, the initiative is part of the EU’s push to make the bloc more resilient in the face of supposedly mounting threats, ranging from natural disasters to a major military conflict.

The report encourages EU households to stockpile “basic self-sufficiency” goods that would last for at least 72 hours for fear of potential shortages in case of “armed aggression through conventional means” or other hostile activities such as “cyberattacks or the use of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.”

Brussels had tasked Finland’s former president earlier this year with assessing the EU’s security needs following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, “responding in particular to Russia’s intensifying hybrid operations.”

“One click can switch off power grids and plunge whole cities into the dark,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the presentation of the report.

The document also calls on the EU to boost its defense and spend around 20% of its common budget, currently worth around €1 trillion ($1.08 trillion) over seven years, on security and crisis preparedness.

“Member States should strengthen their cooperation on European defense, jointly investing more to close long-standing gaps in our military and defense industrial readiness,” Niinisto said, reiterating the EU’s commitment to provide aid for Ukraine in the long term.

The bloc also needs to establish an anti-sabotage network to fend off threats through greater information sharing, Finland’s former leader said, citing rising concerns over perceived threats from Russia.

“Given the increasing use of sabotage by hostile third countries, notably Russia, it is an area where internal security and military security are very much interlinked,” the report noted.

Niinisto also urged to “strengthen EU intelligence structures step-by-step towards a fully-fledged EU service for intelligence cooperation.”

The report comes amid Western warnings regarding Russia’s alleged plans to attack Western Europe if it secures a victory over Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the claims as “nonsense.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has similarly described the allegations as “horror stories,” and suggested they had been made up by Western leaders to distract people’s attention from problems in their own countries.

Source

Many species of bats use echolocation to avoid obstacles like tree branches and hunt small insects as they fly through the dark. But it turns out echolocation for bats is much more than just a short-range obstacle-avoidance and prey-targeting system. A recent study shows that one species of bats can stitch together thousands upon thousands of sound signatures into acoustic maps they use to successfully navigate several kilometers over their hunting grounds. The maps work even if the bats are completely blindfolded.

Blindfolded bats

“What echolocating bats do is they emit sounds, ultrasonic or not, and use the characteristics of the reflected echo to sense objects they have in front of them. We wanted to know if they use it for large-scale navigation. Most people think, 'Of course they do,' but the reality is we didn’t know that,” says Aya Goldshtein, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. Goldshtein collaborated with scientists at Tel Aviv University on a study of how a species of bats called Kuhl’s pipistrelle navigate in their natural environment.

There were several reasons that navigation via echolocation wasn’t obvious at all. For starters, echolocation is hopelessly limited when it comes to range. Bats can use it to sense objects that are at most a few dozen meters away. It’s a tool closer to an ultrasonic parking sensor in a car than to a long-distance sonar in a submarine. It is also not omnidirectional. The cone of coverage bats get from echolocation is usually a maximum of 120 degrees, although they can modulate it to an extent, depending on the shape of their mouths.

On top of that bats have other senses that, in theory, should work better for navigating during long flights. Some bats have surprisingly good vision, sharp senses of smell, and can even sense Earth’s magnetic field, which is famously used for navigation by birds. To isolate echolocation as a potential navigation tool, Goldshtein’s team first had to find the right bat species. They went for Kuhl’s pipistrelle bats.

“They are very small, weigh around 6 grams, have relatively poor sight, fly very low above the ground, and their echolocation abilities are excellent,” Goldshtein said. Her team caught 76 of those bats and divided them into groups with various levels of temporary sensory deprivation. The bats in the first group could fly with all their senses at their disposal. The second group was blindfolded; the third was deprived of sight and smell; and the fourth had to fly without sight, smell, or the ability to sense the magnetic field. (This was done by fitting the bats with magnets that created a local field more potent than the Earth’s.) All bats were radio-tagged to precisely track their position in near real time, taken a few kilometers away from their roost and released in an open field.

The idea was to see if they could get back to the roost. It turned out they all could. They flew around for a few minutes to figure out where they were, and then headed back home.

That’s highly suggestive, but Goldshtein’s team could not pinpoint the exact role echolocation played during navigation. That could have possibly been answered by depriving a fifth group of echolocation, but the bats simply refused to fly without it. So, that’s where things got a bit more high-tech.

Sounding out a landscape

The first step was to build a precise 3D map of the entire Hula Valley in Israel, where the experiment took place. “We started with an airplane fitted with Lidar. Then, we used drones to do high-resolution scans of the terrain and compare those with Lidar results,” Goldshtein explains. When the valley’s topography was successfully captured by a series of Lidar point clouds, the team simulated the echoes bats would receive when flying over the landscape.

“The bats’ homing range was divided into separate spatial cells. Then, in the simulation, we emitted echolocation sounds and measured the reflected echoes at each spatial cell in the entire area to see how complex the signal is,” Goldshtein says. Next, the team used a Shannon entropy equation to simplify those signals down to a single value the team called an echoic entropy. More complex terrain features like orchards or riverbanks had high echoic entropy, while less complex places like fields or roads had low echoic entropy.

Finally, the team used a measure called the Kullback-Leibler divergence distance to see how similar the echoic signal is across various types of landscape features. Did echolocation provide enough information to tell one orchard from another or distinguish between specific points along the bank of the same river? It turned out it did.

The purpose of all this tech was to figure out how the world looked, or perhaps how it sounded, from a bat’s perspective when perceived through echolocation alone. “It doesn’t mean this is how bats do that. This was our way to analyze and understand how they do it,” Goldshtein says. The last piece of the puzzle was to check what echoes the bats received along their travels between the field where they were released to the roost.

Bat maps

To evaluate the route each bat took to get back to the roost, the team used their simulations to measure the echoic entropy it experienced along the way. The field where the bats were released was a low echoic entropy area, so during those first few minutes when they were flying around they were likely just looking for some more distinct, higher entropy landmarks to figure out where they were. Once they were oriented, they started flying to the roost, but not in a straight line. They meandered a bit, and the groups with higher sensory deprivation tended to meander more.

The meandering, researchers suspect, was due to trouble the bats had with maintaining the steady path relying on echolocation alone. When they were detecting distinctive landmarks like a specific orchard, they corrected the course. Repeating the process eventually brought them to their roost.

But could this be landmark-based navigation? Or perhaps simple beaconing, where an animal locks onto something like a distant light and moves toward it?

The researchers argue in favor of cognitive acoustic maps. “I think if echolocation wasn’t such a limited sensory modality, we couldn’t reach a conclusion about the bats using cognitive acoustic maps,” Goldshtein says. The distance between landmarks the bats used to correct their flight path was significantly longer than echolocation’s sensing range. Yet they knew which direction the roost was relative to one landmark, even when the next landmark on the way was acoustically invisible. You can’t do that without having the area mapped.

“It would be really interesting to understand how other bats do that, to compare between species,” Goldshtein says. There are bats that fly over a thousand meters above the ground, so they simply can’t sense any landmarks using echolocation. Other species hunt over sea, which, as per this team’s simulations, would be just one huge low-entropy area. “We are just starting. That’s why I do not study only navigation but also housing, foraging, and other aspects of their behavior. I think we still don’t know enough about bats in general,” Goldshtein claims.

Science, 2024.  DOI: 10.1126/science.adn6269

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Humans who think they can multitask while sitting at the wheel of a moving car continue to be a problem—one that claimed more than 3,300 lives in 2022, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The problem is almost entirely down to our smartphones—while we know they're distracting, too many drivers just can't help checking that email when they shouldn't. Now a new online tool provides an easy way to grasp just how much of the road we can miss while playing with that phone.

The distracted driving tool was developed by Quanta, a "context-based insurance provider," which wants to raise awareness of the problem. "Quanata’s technology aims to create a future where risk-informed choices enable safer drivers and better lives. We recognize that a lot of the danger on our roads is caused by distracted driving and we want to help minimize that," said Jim Ryan, SVP of business development at Quanta.

The tests include preparing a text message while your car drives at 70 mph and then a comparison of reaction times at 70 mph when concentrating on the task of driving versus trying to assemble an order in a fast food app.

The texting example is particularly good at getting the point across, at least to me—my times averaged about 14 seconds to complete the task. Had I been behind the wheel of an actual car at that speed, I would have traveled more than 1,400 feet (426 m) with my eyes on the phone during that period. Not good!

Of course, the people behind the distracted driving simulator recognize that this is mostly an awareness-raising tool—for academics studying the topic, we have things like the $80 million National Advanced Driving Simulator, which can pitch, yaw, roll, tilt, and move about inside a large hangar-like room in Coralsville, Iowa.

"While this simulator can’t provide a complete picture of the dangers of distracted driving, our hope is to help illustrate how dangerous it is to glance down at your phone—and remind everyone how that time can add up when you’re behind the wheel," Ryan said.

Thankfully, the solution to distracted driving is rather simple—at least conceptually. Just keep your eyes on the road, and save the phone use for when you're parked.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, 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.

ESA selects four companies for reusable launch. The European Space Agency announced this week the selection of Rocket Factory Augsburg, The Exploration Company, ArianeGroup, and Isar Aerospace to develop reusable rocket technology, European Spaceflight reports. The four awardees are divided into two initiatives focused on the development of reusable rocket technology: the Technologies for High-thrust Reusable Space Transportation (THRUST!) project and the Boosters for European Space Transportation (BEST!) project. The awarded companies will now begin contract negotiations with ESA to further develop and test their solutions.

The best thrust anywhere ... The THRUST! initiative aims to push forward the development of European liquid propulsion systems, and Rocket Factory Augsburg and The Exploration were selected to develop projects under this initiative. The BEST! project was launched to stimulate the development of future reusable rocket first stages or boosters, and ArianeGroup and Isar Aerospace were chosen for this. Europe has a number of initiatives now aimed at developing a reusable rocket, but it seems doubtful that a European rocket will launch into orbit in the 2020s and successfully return to Earth. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

UK startup pursues fully reusable rocket. Astron Systems intends to develop a fully reusable two-stage rocket to transport about 360 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, Space News reports. Founded in 2021 and located at the Harwell Science Campus in England, Astron is one of 12 startups in the fall 2024 class of the TechStars Space Accelerator. "We have a vision for the future in-orbit economy being this big thriving thing," Astron co-founder Eddie Brown said. "Small satellites are the beating heart of the in-orbit economy today. There are a lot of customers that are crying out for better launch solutions."

But they have a ways to go ... The company seeks to build a methane-liquid oxygen rocket, but clearly it is starting small. Astron Systems has raised more than $600,000 to date, including private investment, grants from Innovate UK and ESA, and backing from Techstars Space. The company's initial work is with pump technology and a torch igniter. The company’s optimistic forecast calls for a test launch in late 2027. We'll pencil that date in rather than putting it down in ink, if that's OK. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Avio to build rocket motors for US military. Arlington-headquartered Avio USA was incorporated in April 2022. At the time, Italy-based Avio stated that the wholly owned subsidiary would be used to “explore business opportunities in the US market.” By 2023, the company revealed that it had identified “a significant production capacity gap relative to the substantial acceleration in demand requirements” in the area of tactical propulsion. This week the Italian rocket maker said it had begun design work on its first US-based solid rocket motor production facility, European Spaceflight reports.

Demand is rising ... Avio USA is evaluating a number of possible locations in multiple US states for the several-hundred-acre production facility. A decision on the location of the facility is expected in the first half of 2025. “We are seeing significant demand for our capabilities from our current customers in multiple product lines, and this facility will be critical in creating our production capacity so we can meet the needs of our current and future customers as an independent supplier,” said Avio USA CEO James Syring. Avio will join several US startups in a hurry to ramp up solid rocket motors for missiles as the conflict in Ukraine continues. In the immortal words of Megadeth: Peace Sells ... but Who's Buying? (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ULA assessing fairing issues. A little more than a year ago, a snippet of video that wasn't supposed to go public made its way onto United Launch Alliance's live broadcast of an Atlas V rocket launch carrying three classified surveillance satellites for the US Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office. The public saw video of the clamshell-like payload fairing falling away from the Atlas V rocket as it fired downrange from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 10, 2023. It wasn't pretty. Numerous chunks of material, possibly insulation from the inner wall of the payload shroud's two shells, fell off the fairing, Ars reports.

Issue still being looked at ... We have heard murmurings about fairing issues on the Atlas V for a while now, but United Launch Alliance and Space Force officials have been tight-lipped. More than a year later, however, the company acknowledges it is still investigating the issue. A ULA spokesperson said the company continues to review data related to the fairing debris and will share information upon completion of the investigation. "We are working very closely with our customers and suppliers on the observations in advance of future launches to improve our capabilities," the spokesperson said. "We have integrated some corrective actions and additional inspections of the hardware." Payload fairing debris could pose a risk to sensitive components on the spacecraft that the shroud is supposed to protect.

China launches next space station crew. A Long March 2F rocket topped with the Shenzhou 19 crew spacecraft lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Tuesday carrying a crew of three Chinese astronauts, Space.com reports. Aboard were commander Cai Xuzhe, 48, who was a member of the Shenzhou 14 mission, and rookie astronauts Song Lingdong, 34, a former air force pilot, and Wang Haoze, also 34, a spaceflight engineer. About six hours after the launch, the Shenzhou 19 spacecraft docked with the Tiangong space station.

Keeping the station on track ... The astronaut trio is set to spend six months in orbit aboard Tiangong, conducting various experiments and embarking on several extravehicular activities, or spacewalks. Shenzhou 19 is the 33rd spaceflight mission under China's human spaceflight program. These missions include uncrewed test flights, crewed missions, launching Tiangong modules and smaller space lab precursor missions, next-generation crew spacecraft test flights, and Tianzhou cargo and refueling missions. China intends to keep Tiangong, which has about 20 percent of the mass of the International Space Station, flying for at least a decade. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Firefly's CEO to work "maniacally" to scale the company. Firefly’s previous CEO was in the job for less than two years before a shock exit in July after reported allegations of an inappropriate employee relationship. Now the company has a new top boss, Jason Kim, who left his job as chief executive of satellite-making subsidiary Millennium for Firefly. “I’m thrilled to be here," Kim told CNBC in an interview. "I’m going to work maniacally to support this team so that we can achieve all of our visionary ideas."

It starts with the engines ... Kim is looking to fly more Alpha rockets and bring the Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV) online in 2026. Kim sees Firefly as having a key advantage—"an engine that works"—in its Reaver engines that power the Alpha rockets. And for MLV, Kim said Firefly took that “great engine technology” and “scaled it up to become Miranda, so you’re not starting from scratch” with a new engine. "We’re making huge strides on MLV," Kim added. "We’ve had 50 Miranda engine tests already." Although Alpha may not be reusable, the company has purposely designed the MLV for reusability. “We’re closer to how SpaceX tackled [rocket reuse],” Kim said. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

US Senator wants FAA to move faster. The Federal Aviation Administration must make "immediate changes" to the regulatory framework governing launch and re-entry, according to Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), a senior authorizer and appropriator who oversees the space sector, Payload reports. "Across the commercial space industry, concerns are abundant in every stage of FAA’s Office of Space Transportation of both its formal licensing process and its information pre-application review," Moran wrote in a letter to FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker.

More funding may help ... Referencing possible delays with NASA's Artemis program, Moran called on the FAA to rapidly increase transparency and accountability, saying that America's leadership in space depends on faster action. "It is irrational to think it often takes more time to complete licensing evaluations than actual rocket development and testing," Moran wrote. The chief of the FAA's space division, Kelvin Coleman, has previously said Congress could fix the issues with more funding. The  FAA’s Office of Space Transportation has an annual budget of $42 million.

Europe moves to address geo-return concerns in launch. In its most basic form, the European Space Agency's geo-return policy ensures that companies in member states receive contracts proportional to their country’s financial contributions to ESA. While the policy does foster greater contributions to the agency, it can also add complexity to programs, requiring supply chains to be spread across multiple European countries. For commercial launch companies, this is almost certain to add cost to a public-private partnership with ESA.

No constraints ... Now, European Spaceflight reports, ESA seeks to exempt a commercial launch competition from this geo-return policy. The program aims to incentivize the development of a diversified European commercial launch services market. ESA Director of Space Transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen said, "There will be no constraints on geo-return in this request for proposals." This would seem to be a positive step forward for private launch companies in Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and elsewhere. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

What are the next steps for Starship? In a feature, Ars explores the roadmap for SpaceX and the Starship rocket over the next three to five years and the path toward landing NASA astronauts on the Moon. The capture of a Super Heavy booster on October 13 at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas brings the company closer to such a higher flight rate. SpaceX proved its titanic booster does not need cumbersome landing legs and can eliminate days of processing time otherwise needed to move a landed rocket back to the launch site. Less mass and shorter turnarounds are huge wins for Starship.

A long road ahead ... Among the key milestones are: an in-flight relight of a Raptor engine, returning a Starship upper stage to land, reflying a Super Heavy booster, performing one or more in-flight refueling demonstrations, flying a long-duration mission around the Moon (probably 100 days or longer), landing an uncrewed version of Starship on the Moon, and, finally, landing humans as part of the Artemis program. If all goes well, it should be possible for NASA to fulfill the initial promise of the Artemis program and land two astronauts on the surface of the Moon in 2028. This is two years later than NASA’s current goal of September 2026 but would still represent a herculean task by SpaceX and the space agency. If there are significant setbacks, such as failed tower catches or mishaps during fueling in space, the program will doubtlessly face more delays.

New Glenn first stage rolls to the launch site. Blue Origin took another significant step toward the launch of its large New Glenn rocket on Tuesday night by rolling the first stage of the vehicle to a launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Ars reports. Moving the rocket to the launch site is a key sign that the first stage is almost ready for its much-anticipated debut. Development of the New Glenn rocket would bring a third commercial heavy-lift rocket into the US market, after SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and Starship vehicles. It would send another clear signal that the future of rocketry in the United States is commercially driven rather than government-led.

So when New Glenn? ... The rocket must still undergo two key milestones: completing a wet dress rehearsal in which the vehicle will be fully fueled and its ground systems tested, followed by a hot-fire test during which the first stage's seven BE-4 rocket engines will be ignited for several seconds. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has been pushing the company hard to launch New Glenn for the first time this year, and the schedule is getting tight. Blue Origin already had to stand down from an October launch attempt and delay the launch of a small Mars-bound payload for NASA called ESCAPADE. Ars estimates the rocket will launch no earlier than early- to mid-December if all goes well.

Next three launches

Nov. 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-77 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. | 20:57 UTC

Nov. 4: H3 | Kirameki 3 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 05:48 UTC

Nov. 4: Electron | Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes| Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 09:30 UTC

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of October): 4,832 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Earlier this month the Big Four accounting and consulting firm terminated dozens of U.S. staffers for simultaneously taking more than one online training class — which count toward required annual professional education credits — with the firm determining it was an “ethical breach” to “watch two at a time,” even as one person that was let go said they were not warned against the practice, The Financial Times reported. 

Given the demands CPAs face — often, they serve on understaffed teams due to a shortage of accounting talent, while also needing to obtain continuing professional education credits in order to maintain their certified public accounting licenses — some experts were not surprised to hear about the multi-tasking practice.  

“If firms are trying to maintain the same book of business with diminished bandwidth, naturally CPAs are going to deprioritize things that are not addressing their client work, with their CPE requirements being an easy one,” said Omar Roubi, an accounting instructor at the University of Colorado Denver and director of education and content at LumiQ, a podcasting app for CPAs. “Accountants have to do the same amount of work with less resources, with time being one of them.” 

A spokesperson for EY emailed a statement to CFO Dive confirming firings occurred, but declined to comment further on the record. “At EY, our core values of integrity and ethics are at the forefront of everything we do. Appropriate disciplinary action will be taken on any violation of our Code of Conduct and/or US Learning Policy.  EY US has terminated individuals who, after thorough investigation, were found to have violated our Global Code of Conduct and US Learning Policy,” the statement said. 

In an unrelated matter this week, but one where EY also took a tough ethical stand, the firm resigned as Super Micro Computer’s  registered public accounting firm, saying it had questions about whether the company was “committed to integrity and ethical values,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.  

The U.S. firings also come roughly two years after EY faced financial repercussions from a test-taking scandal. In 2022, the SEC fined EY $100 million for cheating by its auditors on ethics exams and for withholding evidence of wrongdoing from the agency’s enforcement division, CFO Dive previously reported.

Having been penalized before on a similar matter might have made EY more sensitive to such issues and led to its recent strong response to the online test taking, Daniel Tinkelman, a professor of accounting at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, said in an emailed response to questions.

If the matter involved CPE courses, Tinkelman said an employer like EY might have had no choice but to take action as states often require test takers to self report and certify that they spent a certain number of hours in the training. 

While Tinkelman said people often spend fewer hours on self-study courses than they report, in the past it would have been harder to catch with old-fashioned paper-based self-study programs, where no one could prove you were simultaneously taking two courses at one time. But nowadays online courses can typically be tracked and audited, Tinkelman said.

If that was the case,“it is a provably false statement made to fake compliance with state license requirements. An employer who becomes aware of this sort of intentional violation of rules would seem to me to have a duty to act in some way,” Tinkelman said. “Also, if people claimed to have worked 16 hours, and put in for overtime, when they only worked 6, that’s claiming unearned pay, and no employer is likely to sympathize with that.”

Roubi discussed whether EY’s firing of the employees was a fitting response to the online training situation with his ethics students, and the group came out supportive of EY’s action, he said. EY needed to terminate the employees to send a message both inside and outside of the firm that it values “a culture of learning and ethical behavior,” he said the group decided. However, Roubi himself said he felt the company might have gone too far. 

“I do think this is an overreach because I imagine these staff personnel were viewing multiple webinars at once in order to get their CPE done in the most efficient manner in order to focus on their client work,” he said. “I don’t personally believe the punishment fits the crime, unless it comes to light that these employees had a track record of this kind of behavior.” 

Going forward, Roubi is also hopeful that companies will make it clear to employees if taking training courses simultaneously is prohibited, if they do not already do so. 

Source

Boeing 's latest offer would raise wages 38% over four years, or a compounded increase of about 43%, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said Thursday.

Boeing in a statement Thursday said the company was also offering a $12,000 contract ratification bonus, up from $7,000 offered previously. Additionally, the company said it would increase its contribution to employee 401(k) plans.

About 33,000 IAM members have been on strike for seven weeks, shutting down production of most Boeing airline jets including the company's best-seller, the 737 Max.

The strike began Sept. 13 when more than 94% of workers voting rejected an offer of 25% over four years. Last week, 64% shot down a proposal that would have raised general wages 35% over four years.

The union originally demanded 40% in raises over three years and restoration of traditional pensions, which were frozen for then-current workers and not extended to those hired after January 2014. Workers on picked lines in the Seattle area have stressed pensions, but the company based in Arlington, Virginia, is unwilling to bend on the issue.

Boeing has said that average annual pay for machinists is currently $75,608.

The last Boeing strike, in 2008, lasted eight weeks and cost the company about $100 million daily in deferred revenue. A 1995 strike lasted 10 weeks.

Source

The case involved a post made on what was then known as Twitter during United Auto Workers organizing efforts at a Tesla facility in Fremont, California. The post was made years before Musk bought the platform, now known as X, in 2022.

On May 20, 2018, Musk tweeted: "Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare."

The National Labor Relations Board said it was an illegal threat. After Tesla appealed, three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld that decision, as well as a related NLRB order that Tesla rehire a fired employee, with back pay.

But Tesla sought a rehearing, and the full 5th Circuit later threw out the earlier decision and voted to hear the matter again. In an opinion dated Friday, the judges split 9-8 in favor of Tesla and Musk.

"We hold that Musk's tweets are constitutionally protected speech and do not fall into the categories of unprotected communication like obscenity and perjury," the unsigned opinion said.

The majority also found the NLRB must reconsider its order that the fired employee be reinstated, saying there was no proof that the person who fired the worker acted out of ill will toward the union.

The 11-page opinion was followed by a 30-page dissent on behalf of eight judges, written by Judge James Dennis.

"Relevant here, the Supreme Court has consistently held that the First Amendment does not protect threatening, coercive employer speech to employees in the labor organization election context— the precise category of speech Musk disseminated via Twitter," Dennis wrote.

He also argued that the attitude of the supervisor who fired the worker was not relevant to whether he should be reinstated. The worker, Dennis wrote, "was fired for declining to divulge information about protected union activities during an interrogation."

The ruling sent the case back to the NLRB for further action. It was not immediately clear if there would be an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The union didn't respond to a question from The Associated Press asking about its next move. But on Tuesday night, President Shawn Fain cited the case in an online address to rally union members to vote and take part in the electoral process.

Musk, he said, has poured millions into Republican Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

"It's no coincidence that Elon Musk is one of the most anti-union auto CEOs in history, and he is buying elections to rig the law in his favor," Fain said. "That's what happens when the billionaire class makes the rules. And that's what happens when working class people stay on the sidelines."

Source

Boeing's latest offer included a 35% pay raise over four years. The union initially wanted 40% wage boosts across three years and demanded that the company restore a traditional pension plan that was frozen 10 years ago.

The work stoppage has ceased production of Boeing's bestselling jetliners.

Following the news, National Association of Manufacturers President and CEO Jay Timmons released the following statement:

The broader impact of this ongoing work stoppage is being seen across the aerospace sector as manufacturers within the supply chain are being forced to furlough employees and shutter operations. That’s why we’re urging union leadership to head back to the table and find a solution to end this prolonged strike and why we thank Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su for her continued engagement.

We’re looking at a cost of more than $3.7 billion to the regional economy after 45 days, according to NAM calculations. It is critical that an agreement be reached so we can protect Americans from the consequences of supply chain disruptions and strengthen the manufacturing industry. Preventing even greater damage to the broader economy means ensuring that Boeing is strong and operational.

Source

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of September): 4,292 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

There are many factors fueling the growth of 3D printing in the construction industry. It reduces the construction time; a home that could take months to build can be constructed within days or weeks with a 3D printer. Compared to traditional methods, 3D printing also reduces the amount of material that ends up as waste during construction. These advantages lead to reduced labor and material costs, making 3D printing an attractive choice for construction companies.

A team of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, however, claims to have developed a robotic construction method that is even better than 3D printing. They call it impact printing, and instead of typical construction materials, it uses Earth-based materials such as sand, silt, clay, and gravel to make homes. According to the researchers, impact printing is less carbon-intensive and much more sustainable and affordable than 3D printing.

This is because Earth-based materials are abundant, recyclable, available at low costs, and can even be excavated at the construction site. “We developed a robotic tool and a method that could take common material, which is the excavated material on construction sites, and turn it back into usable building products, at low cost and efficiently, with significantly less CO₂ than existing industrialized building methods, including 3D printing,” said Lauren Vasey, one of the researchers and an SNSF Bridge Fellow at ETH Zurich.

How does impact printing work?

Excavated materials can’t be used directly for construction. So before beginning the impact printing process, researchers prepare a mix of Earth-based materials that has a balance of fine and coarse particles, ensuring both ease of use and structural strength. Fine materials like clay act as a binder, helping the particles stick together, while coarser materials like sand or gravel make the mix more stable and strong. This optimized mix is designed such that it can move easily through the robotic system without getting stuck or causing blockages.

Impact printed structures can be produced in a central facility.

Credit: Michael Lyrenmann / Gramazio Kohler Research / ETH Zurich

The next step is to prepare a digital blueprint. Similar to a 3D printer, the robotic impact printing system also requires a digital model to guide the production of a structure. Once this digital blueprint is ready and uploaded to the system, the robotic tool is mounted on a mobile platform for use at a construction site. Then, the mix of Earth-based materials is put into a large volumetric hopper attached to the robotic tool. 

When the hopper is filled, the system begins moving and performing the necessary processes—extruding, cutting, and spraying the material—to build structures as specified in the digital model. This process continues until the structure is completed.

The construction process works quite differently from the typical building-grade 3D printing. There, the materials on their own are too weak to support a structure. Additives like cement are needed to double the yield stresses (the stress the material can endure before it begins to deform permanently) tolerated by the final structure.

The robotic tool used for impact printing deposits the construction material at high velocity (reaching 32 feet/10 meters per second) in a controlled manner. The high-velocity impact that results facilitates strong bonding between layers of Earth-based materials—even before any binding material is added. “Our material already has a higher strength and stiffness (>28 kPa). Therefore, we have a head start on the strength gain of the material, and we are relying less on additives to enhance the material properties,” Vasey said.

The researchers successfully created 6.5-foot-tall (2 meters) walls using this approach. Each of these structures is strong enough to support another structure of similar weight without relying on a chemical additive like cement. “With our system, if you are printing a 2-meter-high structure, you can already start with the material in a state to withstand 2 meters of load,” Vasey added. But it’s not the right material if you need to build much higher. “Our material has about 2 megapascals compressive strength, [which] is lower than typical concrete, but this is completely fine for building walls, and load bearing behavior up to two stories,” she told Ars.

Impact printing is good for our planet

3D printing reduces labor costs for companies and promises to make housing more affordable. But it’s not necessarily sustainable or environmentally friendly. It relies on cement as an additive, a construction material that is alone responsible for nearly 8 percent of global CO₂ emissions. Moreover, due to the use of additives, 3D-printed structures are generally not recyclable.

“3D printing can allow you to save some material because you can place material directly where it’s needed. However, at the same time, usually, you have a large proportion of mortars, additives, and accelerators in the material mix, which all make the CO₂ per volume very high,” Vasey explained.

This isn’t the case with structures constructed using impact printing, as the method doesn’t require additives like cement and uses naturally occurring, less carbon-intensive materials. However, the researchers currently use 1 to 2 percent of a mineral stabilizer, which is less harmful and more recyclable than cement. “But in the future, we don’t want to use any additives or stabilizers at all. Our method could be completely circular, meaning that the parts could be deconstructed and reused in future buildings without going to landfill,” Vasey told Ars Technica.

Vasey and her colleagues now plan to commercialize this technology. They hope to enter the market once they have a prefabrication facility, a factory where parts will be made, ready to be sold and transported to the construction site. “This is because the prefabricated method is close to being technologically ready. We expect that we could incorporate as a start-up in the next year and that a product would be on the market in about three years," Vasey said.

Circular Economy and Sustainability, 2024. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-39675-5_9 (About DOIs)

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of September): 4,292 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology fell to number 14 on the latest US News and World Report Rankings. 

It held the top spot for years, but dipped to third place in 2023 and saw its ranking freefall in 2024, prompting the principal Dr. Ann Bonitatibus to stand down earlier this month. 

Worried parents have said that the alarming drop is the result of an 'equity'-focused admissions policy, which prioritizes equality of outcome rather than opportunity.

The policy aims to increase the number of black and Latino children at the school by axing standard tests in favor of a review process. Critics have said it has lowered academic standards and led to a reduction in Asian-American students. 

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology fell to number 14 on the latest US News and World Report Rankings

It had frequently been a top contender in the rankings but has been declining, prompting the principal Dr. Ann Bonitatibus, seen here, to stand down earlier this month

Asra Nomani, a former Thomas Jefferson parent, had previously hailed the departure of Bonitatibus as being a 'win' for the school. 

The journalist and author has been a vocal critic of the school leadership, the decline in the school's rankings and the reduction in the number of National Merit semifinalists. 

Speaking with DailyMail.com, she said: 'The decline of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology from No. 1 to No. 14 is emblematic of the dumbing down of America by activist school boards and administrators from northern Virginia to Massachusetts, Michigan and beyond, weaponizing the once well-intended concept of ‘equity’ to destroy academic excellence, merit and the American Dream.'

Nomani, a first generation American-Indian Muslim, added: 'To restore TJ’s excellence, it’s time to move from DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—to MEI—merit, excellence, and intelligence, restoring values of equality, fairness and achievement. 

'This is about affirming diversity while re-committing to high standards that reward hard work and intellectual ambition, so TJ—and America—can once again be a beacon of excellence. '

Srilekha Palle, whose child attends the school, told Fox News: 'What is a big deal if it falls down to 100, 1,000? 

'If you have that kind of attitude, then what are we teaching our kids? I think it is purely a reflection on leadership changes and leadership failure.'

Glenn Miller, whose son graduated from TJ two years ago, spoke with Fairfax Times and criticized the board for the change in policy. 

He said: 'It hurts the county. It hurts the reputation of the county. It hurts the county as a place that attracts people to move here.'

Asra Nomani, found of the Coalition for TJ, a parent organization had previously said the departure Bonitatibus was a win for the school

Miller said he was concerned that by prioritizing racial equity, they might detract from essential educational improvements. 

Dr. Andrew Hayes, president of the TJ Alumni Action Group, who advocated for a more equitable admissions process told Fox the rankings were an 'artificial measurement'. 

Hayes said: '14 is amazing. I think people who are complaining about that are spoiled or have pretty unrealistic expectations.'

Fairfax County Public Schools have also denied there being any link between the drop in rankings and the admissions policy. 

They pointed out that the school is still number one in the state of Virginia and the greater DC area. 

Thomas Jefferson's admissions policy is subject to an ongoing court battle. A federal judge initially ruled the equitable admissions policy discriminatory.

An appeals court reversed that ruling, with the Supreme Court subsequently declining to hear the case.  

Supporters of 'equitable' admissions processes say they give children more likely to be disadvantaged a fairer chance of getting a great education.

They highlight how many students who get into Thomas Jefferson have parents who can afford tutors or have the time to hothouse them.

Critics say the new policy lowers standards across the board to give an artificial impression of 'equity.'

They say equity-focused admissions are also unfair to children of all ethnicities from poorer backgrounds who have worked hard to meet TJ's formerly-rigorous standards.  

Source

October 28, 2024 at 7:26 p.m. EDT

Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)

While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.

Source

Following the mixed success that saw Boeing's Starliner capsule reach the International Space Station, but return empty, the Wall Street Journal reports that the company's entire space division might be on the block. 

According to the report, the rumblings are in the early stages, and a deal isn't close, but Boeing's new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, has been clear with his intentions to narrow the company's focus. In a memo to employees this month, Ortberg said Boeing needs to "focus our resources on performing and innovating in the areas that are core to who we are." And that renewed focus just might not include the company's space division.

While SpaceX has replaced Boeing as NASA's preferred partner, Blue Origin, the commercial space operation owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, could be a potential suitor. Boeing reportedly met with Blue Origin before Ortberg came aboard. The company is already priming its New Glenn rockets to compete with SpaceX for upcoming missions from NASA and other third parties. 

According to Jalopnik, Ortberg confirmed Boeing's discussions with Blue Origin. Blue Origin already does some business with NASA, including work on the Artemis lunar lander program.

Last month, Ortberg fired Ted Colbert, the now former president and CEO of Boeing's space and defense business, Boeing Defense, Space & Security. COO Steve Parker temporarily replaced him. 

Another piece that could leave Boeing's hangar is United Launch Alliance, a joint venture with Lockheed Martin specializing in national security launches. The venture has reportedly spent the last year looking for a buyer. 

While Boeing has been integral to NASA missions since Neil Armstrong took that small step, the next big leap might be taken by Blue Origin.

Source

Under the agreement, CEZ will acquire a 20% share in Rolls-Royce SMR for which it will pay several billion Czech crowns (hundreds of millions of dollars).

CEZ plans to build the first small modular reactor at the existing Temelin nuclear plant in the first half of the 2030s.

The partnership is expected to result in up to 3 GW energy sources installed in the Czech Republic. CEZ will also participate in other projects by Rolls-Royce SMR in Europe and around the world.

The Czech state has an almost 70% stake in the company.

“It’s an important moment for ensuring energy security of the Czech Republic,” Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said.

A power plant using a small modular reactor by the British company should produce 470 MW for 60 years, CEZ said in a statement.

Small modular reactors are a type of nuclear reactor that can generate up to roughly one-third the amount of power of a traditional reactor. Developers say small reactors will be built faster and at a lower cost than large power reactors, scaling to fit the needs of a particular location.

The Czech Republic relies on six nuclear reactors to generate more than a third of its electricity and plans to rely on nuclear power and renewable resources after deciding to phase out coal for energy generation by 2033 to reduce carbon emissions.

CEZ is expected to sign a contract by March with South Korea’s KHNP to build at least two nuclear reactors in Czechia.

Source

It’s Halloween. You’ve just finished trick-or-treating and it’s time to assess the haul. You likely have a favorite, whether it’s chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, those gummy clusters with Nerds on them, or something else.

For some people, including me, one piece stands out—the Snickers bar, especially if it’s full-size. The combination of nougat, caramel, and peanuts coated in milk chocolate makes Snickers a popular candy treat.

As a food engineer studying candy and ice cream at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I now look at candy in a whole different way than I did as a kid. Back then, it was all about shoveling it in as fast as I could.

Now, as a scientist who has made a career studying and writing books about confections, I have a very different take on candy. I have no trouble sacrificing a piece for the microscope or the texture analyzer to better understand how all the components add up. I don’t work for, own stock in, or receive funding from Mars Wrigley, the company that makes Snickers bars. But in my work, I do study the different components that make up lots of popular candy bars. Snickers has many of the most common elements you’ll find in your Halloween candy.

Let’s look at the elements of a Snickers bar as an example of candy science. As with almost everything, once you get into it, each component is more complex than you might think.

Snickers bars contain a layer of nougat, a layer of caramel mixed with peanuts, and a chocolate coating.

Credit: istarif/iStock via Getty Images

Airy nougat

Let’s start with the nougat. The nougat in a Snickers bar is a slightly aerated candy with small sugar crystals distributed throughout.

One of the ingredients in the nougat is egg white, a protein that helps stabilize the air bubbles that provide a light texture. Often, nougats like this are made by whipping sugar and egg whites together. The egg whites coat the air bubbles created during whipping, which gives the nougat its aerated texture.

A boiled sugar syrup is then slowly mixed into the egg white sugar mixture, after which a melted fat is added. Since fat can cause air bubbles to collapse, this step has to be done last and very carefully.

The final ingredient added before cooling is powdered sugar to provide seeds for the sugar crystallization in the batch. The presence of small sugar crystals makes the nougat “short”—pull it apart between your fingers and it breaks cleanly with no stretch.

Chewy caramel

On top of the nougat layer is a band of chewy caramel. The chewiness of the caramel contrasts the nougat’s light, airy texture, which provides contrast to each bite.

Caramel stands out from other candies as it contains a dairy ingredient, such as cream or evaporated milk. During cooking, the milk proteins react with some of the sugars in a complex series of reactions called Maillard browning, which imparts the brown color and caramelly flavor.

Maillard browning starts with proteins and certain sugars. The end products of these reactions include melanoidins, which are brown coloring compounds, and a variety of flavors. The specific flavor molecules depend on the starting materials and the conditions, such as temperature and water content.

Commercial caramel, like that in the Snickers bar, is cooked up to about 240-245° Fahrenheit (115-118° Celsius), to control the water content. Cook to too high a temperature and the caramel gets too hard, but if the cook temperature is too low, the caramel will flow right off the nougat. In a Snickers bar, the caramel needs to be slightly chewy so the peanuts stick to it.

Chocolate coating

To make chocolate, raw cocoa beans are harvested from cacao pods and then fermented for several days. After the fermented beans are dried, they are roasted to develop the chocolate flavor. As in caramel, the Maillard browning reaction is an important contributor to the flavor of chocolate.

The milk chocolate coating on the Snickers bar happens through a process called enrobing. The naked bar, arranged on a wire mesh conveyor, passes through a curtain of tempered liquid chocolate, covering all sides with a thin layer. Tempering the chocolate coating makes it glossy and gives it a well-defined snap.

The enrobing process in action.

The flow of the tempered chocolate needs to be controlled precisely to give a coating of the desired thickness without leading to tails at the bottom of the candy bar.

The Snickers bar

When done right, the result is a delicious Snickers bar, a popular Halloween—or anytime—candy.

With about 15 million bars made each day, getting every detail just right requires a lot of scientific understanding and engineering precision.

Richard Hartel is professor of food science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of September): 4,292 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

Zettabytes—that’s 10²¹ bytes—of data are currently generated every year. All of those cat videos have to be stored somewhere, and DNA is a great storage medium; it has amazing data density and is stable over millennia.

To date, people have encoded information into DNA the same way nature has, by linking the four nucleotide bases comprising DNA—A, T,  C, and G—into a particular genetic sequence. Making these sequences is time-consuming and expensive, though, and the longer your sequence, the higher chance there is that errors will creep in.

But DNA has an added layer of information encoded on top of the nucleotide sequence, known as epigenetics. These are chemical modifications to the nucleotides, specifically altering a C when it comes before a G. In cells, these modifications function kind of like stage directions; they can tell the cell when to use a particular DNA sequence without altering the “text” of the sequence itself. A new paper in Nature describes using epigenetics to store information in DNA without needing to synthesize new DNA sequences every time.

Typesetting with DNA

The technique uses a long strand of DNA with a set sequence—the template—and a bunch of shorter, premade DNA molecules that can base pair with specific spots on the template—the bricks. Some of the bricks contain epigenetically modified Cs, and some don’t. When a modified brick base pairs with its designated spots on the template, it acts as a signal for an enzyme to modify that spot on the template DNA strand as well, “printing” the epigenetic information onto it without any new DNA synthesis—kind of like setting movable type.

This works because the modified site (a CG) will base pair with a GC on its opposite strand. But since that opposite strand runs in the other orientation, it will also look like a CG to the enzymes that make the modification.

The developers of the system call each of these potentially modifiable spots on the template an epi-bit, with the modified version corresponding to a 1 in a conventional computer bit and the unmodified version corresponding to a 0. Because no synthesis is required, multiple bits can be written simultaneously. To read the information, the scientists rigged the system so that 1s fluoresce and 0s don’t. The fluorescence, along with the sequences of bases, was read as the DNA was passed through a tiny pore.

Pictures in a meta-genome

Using this system, Zhang et al. created five DNA templates and 175 bricks to record 350 bits at a time. Using a collection of tagged template molecules, the researchers could store and read roughly 275,000 bits, including a color picture of a panda’s face and a rubbing of a tiger from the Han dynasty, which ruled China from 202 BCE to 220 CE.

They then had 60 student volunteers “with diverse academic backgrounds” store texts of their choice in epi-bits using a simple kit in a classroom. Twelve of the 15 stored texts were read successfully.

We’re not quite ready for your cat videos yet, though. There are still errors in the printing and reading steps, and since these modifications don’t survive when DNA is copied, making additional versions of the stored information may get complicated. Plus, the stability of these modifications under different storage conditions remains unknown, although the authors note that their epi-bits stayed stable at temperatures of up to 95o° C.

But once these and a few other problems are solved—and the technology is scaled up, further optimized and automated, and/or tweaked to accommodate other types of epigenetic modifications—it will be a clever and novel way to harness natural data storage methods for our needs.

Nature, 2024.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08040-5

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of September): 4,292 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

What you need to know

• In a recent interview, Linux Kernel lead developer Linus Torvalds claimed that AI is 90% marketing and 10% reality.
• The developer says he ignores advances in the AI landscape because "the whole tech industry around AI is in a very bad position."
• Interestingly, he envisions a future where AI gains broad adoption and is integrated across companies for everyday use.

If the past few months are anything to go by, speculation is brewing about the trajectory of generative AI in the tech world. This can be attributed to OpenAI's recent financial troubles, placing it on the verge of bankruptcy with projections of $5 billion in losses within the next 12 months. The ChatGPT maker got an extended lifeline through a $6.6 billion round of funding from investors, including Microsoft and NVIDIA, pushing its market cap to $157 billion. However, concerns about AI's future and difficulty establishing a clear path to profitability abound.

Is AI but a fad? Your guess could be as good as mine, but the Linux Kernel lead developer, Linus Torvalds, recently shared some interesting insights about the topic in an interview at the Open Source Summit in Vienna (via Tom's Hardware).

If you read enough science fiction, you've probably stumbled on the concept of an emergent artificial intelligence that breaks free of its constraints by modifying its own code. Given that fictional grounding, it's not surprising that AI researchers and companies have also invested significant attention to the idea of AI systems that can improve themselves—or at least design their own improved successors.

Those efforts have shown some moderate success in recent months, leading some toward dreams of a Kurzweilian "singularity" moment in which self-improving AI does a fast takeoff toward superintelligence. But the research also highlights some inherent limitations that might prevent the kind of recursive AI explosion that sci-fi authors and AI visionaries have dreamed of.

In the self-improvement lab

Mathematician I.J. Good was one of the first to propose the idea of a self-improving machine.

Credit: Semantic Scholar

The concept of a self-improving AI goes back at least to British mathematician I.J. Good, who wrote in 1965 of an "intelligence explosion" that could lead to an "ultraintelligent machine." More recently, in 2007, LessWrong founder and AI thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term "Seed AI" to describe "an AI designed for self-understanding, self-modification, and recursive self-improvement." OpenAI's Sam Altman blogged about the same idea in 2015, saying that such self-improving AIs were "still somewhat far away" but also "probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity" (a position that conveniently hypes the potential value and importance of Altman's own company).

While the concept is simpler to describe than to pull off, researchers have shown some success in the difficult task of actually creating this kind of self-reinforcing AI. For the most part, though, these efforts focus on using an LLM itself to help design and train a "better" successor model rather than editing the model's internal weights or underlying code in real time. In a way, it's just a continuation of the age-old technological practice of using tools to build better tools or using computer chips to design better chips.

In a February paper, for instance, Meta researchers proposed a "self-rewarding language model" designed to create its own new reward function for a subsequent model. The research was proposed in part as an effort to potentially leapfrog "human preferences, which may... be bottlenecked by human performance level."

By asking an LLM to effectively serve as its own judge, the Meta researchers were able to iterate new models that performed better on AlpacaEval's automated, head-to-head battles with other LLMs. "Fine-tuning Llama 2 70B on three iterations of our approach yields a model that outperforms many existing systems on the AlpacaEval 2.0 leaderboard, including Claude 2, Gemini Pro, and GPT-4 0613," the researchers wrote.

Taking a different angle on a similar idea in a June paper, Anthropic researchers looked at LLM models that were provided with a mock-up of their own reward function as part of their training curriculum. The researchers found that "a small but non-negligible" number of these iterative training tests quickly jumped to "rewriting their own reward function" for the next version, even in the face of "harmlessness training" meant to rein in that kind of behavior. This also sometimes extended to "writ[ing] test code to ensure this tampering is not caught," a behavior that might set off alarm bells for some science fiction fans out there.

A diagram outlining the "self-improvement pipeline" for a Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP).

Credit: Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation

Then there's research that asks existing language models to write self-improving code themselves. In August, a team of researchers tried using GPT-4 to help create a "self-taught optimizer" for various algorithmic coding exercises. The researchers started with a seed "improver" function in Python—focused on increasing the efficiency of an algorithmic task it's given. They then ran that function on the improver function itself, with the goal of creating an "improved improver" as measured by a carefully crafted "meta-utility" function.

While GPT-3.5 and Mixtral failed to improve their own improver function in this way, GPT-4 showed modest improvements in its seed improver over successive generations. In a very small number of cases (less than 0.5 percent) the improver function even turned off a "sandbox" flag intended to limit its capabilities, highlighting the potential for a self-reinforcing AI to modify any built-in safeguards.

"Since the language models themselves are not altered, this is not full recursive self-improvement," the researchers noted. "Nonetheless, it demonstrates that a modern language model, GPT-4 in our experiments, is capable of writing code that can call itself to improve itself."

High risk, high reward

These examples really just scratch the surface of what is becoming a large research focus on self-improvement across the AI space. Google Deepmind, Microsoft, and Apple have published similar papers looking at the concept, alongside multiple academic labs. On the PR side, Microsoft's Satya Nadella recently talked up the "recursiveness... of using AI to build AI tools to build better AI."

All that research has some observers nervous about the potential for self-coding AI systems that quickly outpace both our intelligence and our abilities to control them. Responding to Anthropic's research in AI newsletter Artificiality, Dave Edwards highlighted the concern:

For hundreds of years, the capacity for self-improvement has been fundamental to our understanding of what it is to be human, our capacity for self-determination and to create meaning as individuals and as collectives. What does it mean, then, if humans might no longer be the only self-improving beings or things in the world? How will we make sense of the dissolution of that understanding of our exceptionalism?

Based on the research so far, though, we might not be as close to that kind of exponential "AI takeoff" as some observers think. In a February post, Nvidia Senior Research Manager Jim Fan highlighted that self-reinforcing models in research settings generally hit a "saturation" point after three iterations. After that, rather than zooming toward superintelligence, they tend to start showing diminishing returns with each successive model.

Self-taught AIs can show amazing results in situations where the best answer is clear, such as board games. But asking a generalized LLM to judge and improve itself can run into problems of subjectiveness when it comes to evaluating the kind of abstract reasoning that defines much of human intelligence. "I haven't yet seen a compelling demo of LLM self-bootstrapping that is nearly as good as AlphaZero, which masters Go, Chess, and Shogi from scratch by nothing but self-play," he wrote.

Many observers also feel that self-improving LLMs won't be able to truly break past a performance plateau without new sources of information beyond their initial training data. Some researchers hope that AIs will be able to create their own useful synthetic training data to get past this kind of limitation. But some research suggests AI models trained on such synthetic data show "irreversible defects" in a process that's being dubbed "model collapse" (others think that synthetic data risk has been significantly overblown, since synthetic data has been key to training newer models such as Llama 3 and Phi-3).

Given the results so far, the quest for what I.J. Good called "the last invention that man need ever make" will definitely continue apace. At this point, though, it's hard to tell if we're truly on the verge of an AI that spins out of control in a self-improving loop. Instead, we might simply continue to see new AI tools being used to refine future AI tools in ways that range from mundane to transformative.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of September): 4,292 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

The stupefying and stupendous capture of a Starship rocket earlier this month by two mechanical arms marked a significant step forward in SpaceX’s efforts to forever alter humanity’s relationship with the heavens.

Yet as remarkable as the rocket catch was, it represents but a single step on a long path. SpaceX seeks to make launch cheap, frequent, and reliable with Starship, and the company is working toward a day when rockets are routinely caught by the launch tower, set back on a launch mount, refueled, and flown again within hours. SpaceX says these efforts will one day culminate in Starships landing on the Moon and Mars.

Critics of the Starship architecture say it is inefficient because of the mass refueling that must occur in low-Earth orbit for the spacecraft to travel anywhere. For example, fully topping off a Starship that can land humans on the Moon and return them to lunar orbit may take a dozen or more tanker flights. But this only seems stupidly impractical under the old space paradigm, in which launch is expensive, scarce, and unreliable. Such criticism seems less salient if we imagine SpaceX reaching the point of launching a dozen Starships a week or more in a few years.

The capture of a Super Heavy booster on October 13 at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas brings us closer to such a higher flight rate. It validated the wild concept of a launch tower that not only supports a rocket before liftoff but then has the wherewithal to grab it minutes later. Even two years ago, this idea sounded outlandish, but no longer. SpaceX proved its titanic booster does not need cumbersome landing legs and can eliminate days of processing time otherwise needed to move a landed rocket back to the launch site. Less mass and shorter turnarounds are huge wins for Starship.

So what’s next?

Here’s our best attempt to piece together the milestones and major goals of the Starship program over the next several years before it unlocks the capability to land humans on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis Program and begins flying demonstration missions to Mars. For fun, we’ve also included some estimated dates for each of these milestones. These represent our best guesses, and they’re almost certainly wrong.

In-flight Raptor re-light (late 2024, early 2025)

To date, the Starship upper stage of the Super Heavy rocket has yet to fly an orbital trajectory. Instead, the second stage was lost during the first three flights before making a controlled reentry into the Indian Ocean on the fourth and fifth test flights of the vehicle, including the launch earlier this month.

The primary reason Starship has not gone into orbit and made multiple flights around the planet is that SpaceX (and the Federal Aviation Administration) want to be sure the vehicle is brought back to Earth safely and landed in a remote area of an ocean. Starship is very large, and chunks of the vehicle falling onto land, especially populated land, would be catastrophic. To make a controlled reentry, SpaceX must demonstrate the ability to relight the rocket’s Raptor engines in space for a precise deorbit burn.

During Starship’s third test flight in March 2024, SpaceX initially planned to conduct an in-flight relight of one or more of the Raptor engines, but this attempt was aborted as the vehicle spun out of control. On the last two test flights, SpaceX has not attempted a Raptor test as the engineering teams focused on improving the reentry capabilities of the second stage.

However, SpaceX may try to ignite one or more Raptor engines during the sixth test flight, or shortly thereafter. Successfully doing so would allow the company to begin flying orbital missions with Starship and likely open the way for Starlink launches, possibly as early as the first half of next year. These will be larger Starlink satellites that can only fit within Starship’s capacious payload and will provide direct-to-cell Internet capability.

SpaceX has already test-fired the Starship upper stage for this sixth test flight (known as Ship 31), and last week it rolled the Super Heavy first stage (Booster 13) to the launch site for a static fire test. From a hardware and regulatory standpoint, a launch of this test flight in November is very possible.

Return a Starship to terra firma (mid- to late 2025)

On the fifth test flight this month, SpaceX demonstrated the ability to land a Starship upper stage in a targeted area of the Indian Ocean. We know this because the company had a camera on a pre-positioned buoy track the rocket’s reentry and then subsequently released the footage.

The ability to precisely land Starship opens up the possibility of bringing a Starship back to land. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has mentioned “catching” a Starship in the first half of 2025, presumably with a tower in South Texas. (The company is not close to completing launch-and-catch towers anywhere else in the world). However, the regulatory issues surrounding the catch of a Starship at the Starbase facility in South Texas are, to put it mildly, interesting.

Unlike the Super Heavy booster, which flies over the Gulf of Mexico and only receives a green light to return to the coastal launch site seconds before a landing attempt, Starship would necessarily fly over Mexico (likely not far from the populous city of Monterrey) and Texas on its track to Starbase. You want to be quite sure big pieces of your spacecraft aren’t falling off when returning over land.

For this reason, SpaceX may attempt to vertically land Starship elsewhere first. There have been rumors about a partnership with Australia, and one source told Ars that SpaceX was scouting the Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year. Such locations would allow for a safer return of Starship to land. However, such an approach would also necessitate landing legs.

In the future, SpaceX will undoubtedly build multiple versions of Starship. The “tankers” used to deliver propellant to a large depot in low-Earth orbit won’t have legs because they will fly back to Texas or Florida to be caught by towers. But to land on the Moon or Mars, SpaceX will eventually need to add legs to the vehicle.

The question is whether SpaceX will undertake this leg-development project now to enable landing tests or push it back and navigate the regulatory thicket to enable Starship catches in South Texas. It’s possible that no final decision has been made yet.

HLS prop-transfer demo (late 2025)

This is the next big milestone for NASA, which is eager to see the development of a Starship “Human Landing System” to facilitate its Artemis plan for the Moon. Publicly, the space agency is holding to a September 2026 date to land its first Artemis crew on the lunar surface. To reach that date, NASA officials have previously told Ars that SpaceX needs to fly a propellant-transfer test during the first quarter of 2025.

We don’t expect that to happen, as a lot of preparatory work needs to be completed before this test can occur.

For the propellant transfer demonstration, SpaceX will launch a Starship “target” into low-Earth orbit to be followed closely by a Starship “chaser.” The vehicles will then rendezvous in space, dock, and in an unprecedented space ballet, the chaser vehicle will transfer a significant amount of cryogenic propellant into the target vehicle. Finally, the ships will undock, and each will perform a deorbit burn.

Pulling off this demonstration mission will presumably require the completion of a second launch tower in South Texas for the chaser launch. In addition, SpaceX must build and test docking mechanisms, quick-disconnects, navigation sensors, and hot gas thrusters.

SpaceX works fast and has undoubtedly been pushing forward in many of these areas in the background. However, the company does not yet have a firm date for the test. Two sources told Ars that the company is targeting “next year” for the test, so optimistically, we're perhaps a year away from what will certainly be must-see TV. Regardless of the test outcome, it's probable that SpaceX will perform multiple versions of this test to optimize procedures.

Re-fly a Super Heavy first stage (early 2026)

SpaceX has now recovered the booster stage of its Starship rocket, and there can be no question that engineers are retrieving incredibly valuable data about the vehicle’s performance and the wear and tear on the hardware. This booster will not fly again, but one of the first stages caught in the coming months may very well fly a second time.

After this rocket catch this month, Musk commented on his social network, X, that there was a “good chance that Starship achieves full stack reusability in 2025, which is the critical breakthrough needed to make life multiplanetary.” This implies the company wants to re-fly both a booster and upper stage next year, but the timeline seems optimistic, especially for the Starship upper stage.

History may offer some better clues for what to expect. A little more than 15 months passed between the first time SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 rocket in December 2015 and the eventual reuse of a first stage in March 2017. The urgency is greater with Starship, and the company has vastly more resources to hand. At the same time, Super Heavy is a massively larger vehicle and more complex than the Falcon 9 rocket. I would expect SpaceX to take its time with fully testing a boost stage before putting it back on a launch tower, thereby limiting risks to its ground-based infrastructure.

SpaceX is also rapidly iterating on the design of its boosters, so the vehicles it lands today may not be ones it wants to re-fly, preferring to use improved models. For these reasons, a Super Heavy re-flight is probably at least a year away.

Ground systems and LOX

We're not putting a date on this one, as it will happen gradually over time. However, preparing the way for frequent Starship launches represents a significant hurdle over the next couple of years.

Musk has said that, initially, SpaceX plans to build two launch towers in South Texas and two in Florida. Presumably, this is the baseline ground infrastructure needed to support the Artemis Program and the multiple refueling flights needed to enable lunar touchdowns. SpaceX still has plenty of paperwork to process for this, in the form of working with the US Space Force in Florida and clearing environmental reviews with the Federal Aviation Administration to construct these four towers and reach a high cadence of launches.

Another major but unappreciated issue is commodities. At liftoff, the Super Heavy booster alone carries a mass of 7.5 million pounds (3,400 metric tons) of cryogenic propellant. Starship requires about a third as much. That sounds like a lot because it is. Liquid oxygen comprises a significant majority of this, and each launch puts a serious dent into the US production of liquid oxygen, which is used by various customers, including hospitals.

Put another way, launching four Starship rockets in a single day would consume all of the nation’s liquid oxygen capacity for that day. Accordingly, SpaceX must find a way to scale production of liquid oxygen, and ensure a tremendous supply to both South Texas and its future Starship launch facilities in Florida.

Long-duration flight test (late 2026)

NASA has consistently had this milestone on its Human Landing System schedule since the first versions of the timeline were released in August 2021. (At the time, the propellant transfer test was due to occur in the fourth quarter of 2022 and the long-duration flight test about six months later, so we’re running about three years behind).

Although the space agency has provided few details, this long-duration test is probably intended to demonstrate the ability of a Starship vehicle to loiter near the Moon.

This is necessary because, as part of the initial Artemis missions, NASA’s astronauts will launch inside an Orion spacecraft and rendezvous with Starship in lunar orbit days later. Due to potential weather and technical launch delays for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, Starship is required to be able to loiter in lunar orbit for up to 100 days while waiting for the arrival of a crew. During this time, the ship must autonomously remain in a habitable condition and prevent significant boil-off of its liquid oxygen and methane propellants.

NASA and SpaceX will likely finalize the design of the “lunar” Starship vehicle after this flight test.

Uncrewed lunar landing (early-to-mid 2027)

This will be the most critical test of Starship before a lunar landing can take place. During this flight, a fully fueled Starship will depart from low-Earth orbit and travel to the Moon. There, after a certain period of time, it will be cleared to attempt a vertical landing near the South Pole of the Moon.

There are multiple challenges with such a landing, but one of the most significant is the potential for tipping. Starship needs a fairly flat surface to ensure that the vehicle does not topple over. (One source indicated to Ars that the lunar surface must be within 1.5 degrees of being perfectly flat). This mission will likely carry cargo that will be offloaded to test the “elevator” that astronauts will ride inside down to the surface of the Moon.

After a few days on the surface, Starship will enter the most critical part of its mission, the ascent off the lunar surface. The Apollo Lunar Module used storable, hypergolic propellants, Aerozine 50 and Nitrogen tetroxide, that did not need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures like methane and liquid oxygen. The challenge for Starship is that it must launch from the surface of the Moon without a tower or any ground support equipment. This will be the acid test for Starship’s viability as a lunar lander.

Depending on the level of success enjoyed by this test flight, SpaceX and NASA may feel the need to repeat it before the Artemis III lunar landing mission.

Crewed landing (September 2028)

If all goes well, it should be possible for NASA to fulfill the initial promise of the Artemis Program and land two astronauts on the surface of the Moon in 2028. This is two years later than NASA’s current goal of September 2026 but would still represent a herculean task by SpaceX and the space agency. If there are significant setbacks, such as failed tower catches or mishaps during fueling in space, the program will doubtlessly face more delays.

Naturally, some people might wonder why SpaceX and NASA are putting so much effort into a complex lunar lander when the Lunar Module developed and used in the 1960s was much simpler. It’s a fair question. The answer is this: Like the rest of the hardware used during the Apollo program, the mighty Saturn V rocket and the Apollo spacecraft, the Lunar Module was expended after a single use. It quickly became unaffordable for the United States to fly Apollo missions.

A top-level goal for NASA is to return to the Moon sustainably. Reuse of key elements of the architecture is essential for this. Moreover, the Apollo program lacked the capacity to deliver large pieces of hardware to the Moon. Even if the Lunar Module had been repurposed for cargo only, its maximum capacity was about 5 tons. An expendable Starship could carry an astonishing 200 tons inside its payload fairing to the lunar surface.

If we get this right, the United States really could have an amazing lunar program. But it will require a lot of hard work up front. Fortunately, Musk has turned all of the resources at SpaceX loose on this project. For the first time in the company’s history—during the entirety of which Musk has been ruthlessly cost-efficient—SpaceX is no longer constrained by funding. There is a long path yet to unlock the potential of Starship, but the engineers at SpaceX are going as fast as anyone can.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of September): 4,292 news posts

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend  

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration continues to believe that slivered onions from a single supplier are the likely source of contamination, McDonald's said in a statement. It said it will resume selling the Quarter Pounder at affected restaurants —- without slivered onions — in the coming week.

As of Friday, the outbreak had expanded to at least 75 people sick in 13 states, federal health officials said. A total of 22 people had been hospitalized, and two developed a dangerous kidney disease complication, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. One person has died in Colorado.

Early information analyzed by the FDA showed that uncooked slivered onions used on the burgers "are a likely source of contamination," the agency said. McDonald's has confirmed that Taylor Farms, a California-based produce company, was the supplier of the fresh onions used in the restaurants involved in the outbreak, and that they had come from a facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

McDonald's pulled the Quarter Pounder burger from menus in several states — mostly in the Midwest and Mountain states — when the outbreak was announced Tuesday. McDonald's said Friday that slivered onions from the Colorado Springs facility were distributed to approximately 900 of its restaurants, including some in transportation hubs like airports.

The company said it removed slivered onions sourced from that facility from its supply chain on Tuesday. McDonald's said it has decided to stop sourcing onions from Taylor Farms' Colorado Springs facility "indefinitely."

Health officials are investigating an E. coli outbreak that has sickened people in 13 states.AP Digital Embed

The 900 McDonald's restaurants that normally received slivered onions from Taylor Farms' Colorado Springs facility will resume sales of Quarter Pounders without slivered onions, McDonald's said.

Testing by the Colorado Department of Agriculture ruled out beef patties as the source of the outbreak, McDonald's said.

The department of agriculture received multiple lots of fresh and frozen beef patties collected from various Colorado McDonald's locations associated with the E. coli investigation. All samples were found to be negative for E. coli, the department said.

Taylor Farms said Friday that it had preemptively recalled yellow onions sent to its customers from its Colorado facility and continues to work with the CDC and the FDA as they investigate.

While it remains unclear if the recalled onions were the source of the outbreak, several other fast-food restaurants — including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC and Burger King — pulled onions from some menus in certain areas this week.

Colorado had the most illnesses reported as of Friday, with 26 cases. At least 13 people were sickened in Montana, 11 in Nebraska, 5 each in New Mexico and Utah, 4 each in Missouri and Wyoming, two in Michigan and one each in Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, Wisconsin and Washington, the CDC reported.

McDonald's said Friday it didn't pull the Quarter Pounder from any additional restaurants and noted that some cases in states outside the original region were tied to travel.

The CDC said some people who got sick reported traveling to other states before their symptoms started. At least three people said they ate at McDonald's during their travel. Illnesses were reported between Sept. 27 and Oct. 11.

The outbreak involves infections with E. coli 0157:H7, a type of bacteria that produces a dangerous toxin. It causes about 74,000 infections in the U.S. annually, leading to more than 2,000 hospitalizations and 61 deaths each year, according to CDC.

Symptoms of E. coli poisoning can occur quickly, within a day or two of eating contaminated food. They typically include fever, vomiting, diarrhea or bloody diarrhea and signs of dehydration — little or no peeing, increased thirst and dizziness. The infection is especially dangerous for children younger than 5, people who are elderly, pregnant or who have weakened immune systems.

Source

Employee council chief Daniela Cavallo said at a meeting with Volkswagen workers at the company's Wolfsburg headquarters that management also plans cuts at other sites, and pledged to resist the plans, German news agency dpa reported. She said that “all German VW plants are affected by these plans. None is safe."

The company didn't give details of its plans. But chief personnel officer Gunnar Kilian said in a statement that “the fact is that the situation is serious and the responsibility of the negotiating partners is enormous,” dpa reported.

Volkswagen said in early September that auto industry headwinds mean it can’t rule out plant closures in its home country, and must drop a job protection pledge in force since 1994 that would have barred layoffs through 2029. CEO Oliver Blume cited new competitors entering European markets, Germany’s deteriorating position as a manufacturing location and the need to “act decisively.”

“Without comprehensive measures to restore competitiveness, we will not be able to afford significant future investments,” Kilian said Monday. He added that management will stick to the principle of discussing Volkswagen's future with its internal negotiating partners first.

Pay negotiations between Volkswagen and the union are due to resume on Wednesday.

European automakers are facing increased competition from inexpensive Chinese electric cars. Volkswagen said last month that the company’s half-year results indicated it would not achieve its target of 10 billion euros ($10.8 billion) in cost savings by 2026.

Volkswagen has some 120,000 employees in Germany, where it has 10 plants — six of them in the northern state of Lower Saxony, including Wolfsburg.

The IG Metall industrial union sharply criticized VW's reported closure plans. “We expect that, instead of cutback fantasies, sustainable concepts for the future be sketched out by Volkswagen and its management at the negotiating table,” regional union leader Thorsten Gröger said.

Source