An armored sea robin. Note the legs just in front of the pectoral fins.

Credit: NOAA

Evolution has turned out bizarre and baffling creatures, such as walking fish. It only gets weirder from there. Some of these fish not only walk on the seafloor, but use their leg-like appendages to taste for signs of prey that might be hiding.

Most species of sea robins are bottom-dwellers that both swim and crawl around on “legs” that extend from their pectoral fins. An international team of researchers has now discovered that the legs of the northern sea robin, Prionotus carolinus, double as sensory organs. They are covered in bumps called papillae (similar to those on a human tongue) with taste receptors that detect chemical stimuli coming from buried prey. If they taste something appetizing, they will dig for their next meal.

There is more to this fish than its extraordinary way of hunting. Analysis of P. carolinus genes found that a gene that may date back to the origin of animals controls the formation of both legs and sensory papillae, which hints at how they might have evolved.

“Papillae represent a key evolutionary innovation associated with behavioral niche expansion on the seafloor,” the Harvard University, Stanford University, and Max Planck Institute researchers said in a study recently published in Current Biology.

Just a taste

People had suspected that sea robin legs were actually sensory organs, but there had been no clear demonstration of this. So the research team tested the fish to see if they could differentiate between mussels, capsules of mussel extract, and capsules containing only seawater. Amazingly, the fish dug up every buried mussel or mussel extract capsule, but bypassed the seawater capsules. Further tests found that legs also responded to mechanical cues and other chemicals associated with food.

Then something unexpected happened. When the team caught additional sea robins, the fish did not react to buried food or food extract capsules. They only caught prey that was visible.

Why? They weren’t defective, just a different species of sea robin, Prionotus evolans, which has legs that are used for locomotion and probing visible signs of prey but lack the sensory papillae that help P. carolinus find prey with no visual cues. Their legs are also more rod-shaped, while those of P. carolinus are shovel-shaped for digging.

While the papillae on the legs of P. carolinus are capable of responding to mechanical and chemical stimuli, that’s not due to sensory neurons as the researchers originally assumed. They function like taste buds but do not have the same types of chemosensory cells. Instead, the papillae have dense concentrations of sensory neurons, which only responded to mechanical stimuli when cultured, so they can’t respond to chemical stimuli found in the sea robin’s food. So what was giving these fish the ability to taste their next meal?

Digging deeper

If sensory neurons were not responsible for tasting in P. carolinus, the researchers wondered if other types of sensory cells were behind its chemosensation ability. They turned to the fish’s genes in order to search for a taste receptor that’s very active in the legs. The taste receptor t1r3, which is commonly expressed in oral tastebuds, was found to be the most common receptor in its legs and was active at the tips of the leg papillae.

Looking further into the genetics of P. carolinus also revealed where the sensory legs come from.

Finding out what controls the formation of sensory legs meant growing sea robins from eggs. The research team observed that the legs of sea robins develop from the three pectoral fin rays that are around the stomach area of the fish, then separate from the fin as they continue to develop. Among the most active genes in the developing legs is the transcription factor (a protein that binds to DNA and turns genes on and off) known as tbx3a. When genetically engineered sea robins had tbx3a edited out with CRISPR-Cas9, it resulted in fewer legs, deformed legs, or both.

“Disruption of tbx3a results in upregulation of pectoral fin markers prior to leg separation, indicating that leg rays become more similar to fins in the absence of tbx3a,” the researchers said in a second study, also published in Current Biology.

To see whether genes for sensory legs are a dominant feature, the research team also tried creating sea robin hybrids, crossing species with and without sensory legs. This resulted in offspring with legs that had sensory capabilities, indicating that it’s a genetically dominant trait.

Exactly why sea robins evolved the way they did is still unknown, but the research team came up with a hypothesis. They think the legs of sea robin ancestors were originally intended for locomotion, but they gradually started gaining some sensory utility, allowing the animal to search the visible surface of the seafloor for food. Those fish that needed to search deeper for food developed sensory legs that allowed them to taste and dig for hidden prey.

“Future work will leverage the remarkable biodiversity of sea robins to understand the genetic basis of novel trait formation and diversification in vertebrates,” the team also said in the first study. “Our work represents a basis for understanding how novel traits evolve.”

Current Biology, 2024. DOI:  10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.014, 10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.042

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Sunday, 20 October

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 05:09 - 05:48 UTC
Where: California, US
Why: This mission will see SpaceX launch a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg AFB in California carrying 20 Gen 1 satellites for OneWeb. These satellites are similar to Starlink and provide internet for customers on Earth and airlines. The first stage of the rocket will perform a landing so it can be reused.

Monday, 21 October

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 22:40 - 02:40 UTC
Where: Florida, US
Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 again to launch 23 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. This batch is known as Starlink Group 6-61, and you can use this identifier to track the satellites on apps and websites. The first stage of the rocket will likely perform a landing for reuse.

Tuesday, 22 October

Who: CNSA
What: Long March 6
When: 00:10 UTC
Where: Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China
Why: This rocket will carry an unknown payload into orbit.

Wednesday, 23 October

Who: CNSA
What: Long March 2C
When: 01:05 UTC
Where: Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China
Why: This rocket will carry an unknown payload into orbit.

Thursday, 24 October

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 17:15 UTC
Where: California, US
Why: During this mission, SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch the classified NROL-167 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. This batch of satellites being launched apparently includes 21 satellites and is the fourth of up to six launches. The NRO's Proliferated Architecture constellation will consist of intelligence satellites capable of imaging and relaying data.

Saturday, 26 October

Who: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
What: H3-22S
When: 06:44 - 08:30 UTC
Where: Tanegashima Space Center, Japan
Why: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will launch an H3 rocket carrying the Kirameki 3 X-band comms satellite for the Japanese Ministry of Defense.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was SpaceX's fifth test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster. The mission was notable because the Super Heavy booster was successfully landed when the Mechazilla launch tower caught it.

Starship did land in the Indian Ocean but ultimately fell over.

Next up, SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy carrying NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft from Florida. Europa Clipper is expected to arrive at Jupiter and perform flybys of its moon, Europa, in 2030.

The third mission was also done by SpaceX. This time, it launched a Falcon 9 carrying 23 Starlink satellites designated Starlink Group 10-10. They will operate in a low Earth orbit and provide internet services to customers on Earth. The first stage of the rocket landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. The first stage has previously supported ten missions, including ESA Euclid and four Starlink missions.

The next mission was another Falcon 9 launch, carrying 20 Starlink satellites known as Starlink Group 9-7. The first stage also landed on a droneship. The first stage has been used in 18 missions, including two Transporter and 11 Starlink missions.

We go to China for the fifth launch, where a Long March 6A blasted off carrying the second group of 18 SpaceSail Polar Orbit satellites. The SpaceSail Constellation provides global users with broadband internet services.

The sixth launch also came from China. A Long March 4C was launched from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center carrying the fifth Gaofen 12 Earth observation satellite. It entered its orbit successfully and will help with land surveys, urban planning, road network design, crop yield estimation and disaster relief.

Finally, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 carrying 20 Starlink satellites called Starlink Group 8-19. The first stage landed on a droneship ready for reuse. The first stage has previously been used in 16 missions, including the launch of 8 Starlink missions.

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

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Welcome to Edition 7.16 of the Rocket Report! Even several days later, it remains difficult to process the significance of what SpaceX achieved in South Texas last Sunday. The moment of seeing a rocket fall out of the sky and be captured by two arms felt historic to me, as historic as the company's first drone ship landing in April 2016. What a time to be alive.

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.

Surprise! Rocket Lab adds a last-minute mission. After signing a launch contract less than two months ago, Rocket Lab says it will launch a customer as early as Saturday from New Zealand on board its Electron launch vehicle. Rocket Lab added that the customer for the expedited mission, to be named "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes," is confidential. This is an impressive turnaround in launch times and will allow Rocket Lab to burnish its credentials for the US Space Force, which has prioritized "responsive" launch in recent years.

Rapid turnaround down under ... The basic idea is that if an adversary were to take out assets in space, the military would like to be able to rapidly replace them. "This quick turnaround from contract to launch is not only a showcase of Electron’s capability, but also of the relentless and fast-paced execution by the experienced team behind it that continues to deliver trusted and reliable access to space for our customers," Rocket Lab Chief Executive Peter Beck said in a statement. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Canadian spaceport and rocket firm link up. A Canadian spaceport developer, Maritime Launch Services, says it has partnered with a Canadian rocket firm, Reaction Dynamics. Initially, Reaction Dynamics will attempt a suborbital launch from the Nova Scotia-based spaceport. This first mission will serve as a significant step toward enabling Canada's first-ever orbital launch of a domestically developed rocket, Space Daily reports.

A homegrown effort ... "For the first time, Canada will host its own homegrown rocket technology, launched from a Canadian-built commercial spaceport, offering launch vehicle and satellite customers the opportunity to reach space without leaving Canadian soil," said Stephen Matier, president and CEO of Maritime Launch. Reaction Dynamics is developing the Aurora rocket, which uses hybrid-propulsion technology and is projected to have a payload capacity of 200 kg to low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Joey Schwartz and brianrhurley)

Sirius completes engine test campaign. French launch startup Sirius Space Services said Thursday that it had completed a hot fire test campaign of the thrust chamber for its STAR-1 rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. During the campaign, the prototype completed two 60-second hot fire tests powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The successful completion of the testing validates the design of the STAR-1 thrust chamber. Full-scale engine testing may begin during the second quarter of next year.

A lot of engines needed ... Sirius Space Services is developing a range of three rockets that all use a modular booster system. Sirius 1 will be a two-stage single-stick rocket capable of delivering 175 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. Sirius 13 will feature two strap-on boosters and will have the capacity to deliver 600 kilograms. Finally, the Sirius 15 rocket will feature four boosters and will be capable of carrying payloads of up to 1,000 kilograms. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

SpaceX, California commission lock horns over launch rates. Last week the California Coastal Commission rejected a plan agreed to between SpaceX and the US Space Force to increase the number of launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base to as many as 50 annually, the Los Angeles Times reports. The commission voted 6–4 to block the request to increase from a maximum of 36 launches. In rejecting the plan, some members of the commission cited their concerns about Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX. "We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race," commission Chair Caryl Hart said.

Is this a free speech issue? ... SpaceX responded to the dispute quickly, suing the California commission in federal court on Tuesday, Reuters reports. The company seeks an order that would bar the agency from regulating the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launch program at Vandenberg. The lawsuit claims the commission, which oversees use of land and water within the state’s more than 1,000 miles of coastline, unfairly asserted regulatory powers. Musk’s lawsuit called any consideration of his public statements improper, violating speech rights protected by the US Constitution. (submitted by brianrhurley)

SpaceX launches 100th rocket of the year. SpaceX launched its 100th rocket of the year early Tuesday morning and followed it up with another liftoff just hours later, Space.com reports. SpaceX's centenary mission of the year lifted off from Florida with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 of the company's Starlink Internet satellites aloft.

Mostly Falcon 9s ... The company followed that milestone with another launch two hours later from the opposite US coast. SpaceX's 101st liftoff of 2024 saw 20 more Starlinks soar to space from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The company has already exceeded its previous record for annual launches, 98, set last year. The company's tally in 2023 included 91 Falcon 9s, five Falcon Heavies, and two Starships. This year the mix is similar. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Fifth launch of Starship a massive success. SpaceX accomplished a groundbreaking engineering feat Sunday when it launched the fifth test flight of its gigantic Starship rocket and then caught the booster back at the launch pad in Texas with mechanical arms seven minutes later, Ars reports. This achievement is the first of its kind, and it's crucial for SpaceX's vision of rapidly reusing the Starship rocket, enabling human expeditions to the Moon and Mars, routine access to space for mind-bogglingly massive payloads, and novel capabilities that no other company—or country—seems close to attaining.

Catching a rocket by its tail ... High over the Gulf of Mexico, the first stage of the Starship rocket used its engines to reverse course and head back toward the Texas coastline. After reaching a peak altitude of 59 miles (96 kilometers), the Super Heavy booster began a supersonic descent before reigniting 13 engines for a final braking burn. The rocket then shifted down to just three engines for the fine maneuvering required to position the rocket in a hover over the launch pad. That's when the launch pad's tower, dubbed Mechazilla, ensnared the rocket in its two weight-bearing mechanical arms, colloquially known as "chopsticks." The engines switched off, leaving the booster suspended perhaps 200 feet above the ground. The upper stage of the rocket, Starship, executed what appeared to be a nominal vertical landing into the Indian Ocean as part of its test flight.

Clipper launches on Falcon Heavy. NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft lifted off Monday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, Ars reports, kicking off a $5.2 billion robotic mission to explore one of the most promising locations in the Solar System for finding extraterrestrial life. Delayed several days due to Hurricane Milton, which passed through Central Florida late last week, the launch of Europa Clipper signaled the start of a five-and-a-half- year journey to Jupiter, where the spacecraft will settle into an orbit taking it repeatedly by one of the giant planet's numerous moons.

Exploring oceans, saving money ... There's strong evidence of a global ocean of liquid water below Europa's frozen crust, and Europa Clipper is going there to determine if it has the ingredients for life. “This is an epic mission," said Curt Niebur, Europa Clipper's program scientist at NASA Headquarters. "It’s a chance for us not to explore a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today, right now." The Clipper mission was originally supposed to launch on NASA's Space Launch System rocket, but it had to be moved off that vehicle because vibrations from the solid rocket motors could have damaged the spacecraft. The change to Falcon Heavy also saved the agency $2 billion.

ULA recovers pieces of shattered booster nozzle. When the exhaust nozzle on one of the Vulcan rocket's strap-on boosters failed shortly after liftoff earlier this month, it scattered debris across the beachfront landscape just east of the launch pad on Florida's Space Coast, Ars reports. United Launch Alliance, the company that builds and launches the Vulcan rocket, is investigating the cause of the booster anomaly before resuming Vulcan flights. Despite the nozzle failure, the rocket continued its climb and ended up reaching its planned trajectory heading into deep space.

Not clear what the schedule impacts will be ... The nozzle fell off one of Vulcan's two solid rocket boosters around 37 seconds after taking off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on October 4. A shower of sparks and debris fell away from the Vulcan rocket when the nozzle failed. Julie Arnold, a ULA spokesperson, confirmed to Ars that the company has retrieved some of the debris. "We recovered some small pieces of the GEM 63XL SRB nozzle that were liberated in the vicinity of the launch pad," Arnold said. "The team is inspecting the hardware to aid in the investigation." ULA has not publicly said what impacts there might be on the timeline for the next Vulcan launch, USSF-106, which had been due to occur before the end of this year.

Bloomberg calls for cancellation of the SLS rocket. In an op-ed that is critical of NASA's Artemis Program, billionaire Michael Bloomberg—the founder of Bloomberg News and a former US Presidential candidate—called for cancellation of the Space Launch System rocket. "Each launch will likely cost at least $4 billion, quadruple initial estimates," Bloomberg wrote. "This exceeds private-sector costs many times over, yet it can launch only about once every two years and—unlike SpaceX’s rockets—can’t be reused."

NASA is falling behind ... Bloomberg essentially is calling for the next administration to scrap all elements of the Artemis Program that are not essential to establishing and maintaining a presence on the surface of the Moon. "A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary," he wrote. "A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon—no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required—at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving." None of the arguments that Bloomberg is advancing are new, but it is noteworthy to hear them from such a prominent person who is outside the usual orbit of space policy commentators.

Artemis II likely to be delayed. A new report from the US Government Accountability Office found that NASA's Exploration Ground Systems program—this is, essentially, the office at Kennedy Space Center in Florida responsible for building ground infrastructure to support the Space Launch System rocket and Orion—is in danger of missing its schedule for Artemis II, according to Ars Technica. The new report, published Thursday, finds that the Exploration Ground Systems program had several months of schedule margin in its work toward a September 2025 launch date at the beginning of the year. But now, the program has allocated all of that margin to technical issues experienced during work on the rocket's mobile launcher and pad testing.

Heat shield issue also a concern ... NASA also has yet to provide any additional information on the status of its review of the Orion spacecraft's heat shield. During the Artemis I mission that sent Orion beyond the Moon in late 2022, chunks of charred material cracked and chipped away from Orion's heat shield during reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Once the spacecraft landed, engineers found more than 100 locations where the stresses of reentry damaged the heat shield. To prepare for the Artemis II launch next September, Artemis officials had previously said they planned to begin stacking operations of the rocket in September of this year. But so far, this activity remains on hold pending a decision on the heat shield issue.

Next three launches

Oct. 18: Falcon 9 | Starlink 8-19 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. | 19:31 UTC

Oct. 19: Electron | Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 10:30 UTC

Oct. 20: Falcon 9 | OneWeb no. 20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 05:09 UTC

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by Paul Homewood

16 October 2024 9:00 AM

A recent article in UnHerd by John Rapley, in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, claims that climate change has intensified extreme weather and increased the economic cost of weather disasters.

To quote:

The American economy is ill-prepared for the rising frequency and intensity of such compound weather events. Of the 10 costliest extreme weather events to have ever happened in the U.S., six occurred in the last decade, the result of climate change intensifying weather patterns.

Is there any of evidence of this assertion though?

Far from Hurricane Milton being the storm of the century, as widely alleged in the media, it was no more than a middling Cat 3 storm, a run of the mill event as far as Florida is concerned. In terms of intensity, it ranked only 75th strongest in U.S. recorded history.

It was the third hurricane to hit Florida this year, following Debby and Helene, but there is nothing unusual about this. Moreover, the official record dating back to 1851 provides no evidence of hurricanes becoming more frequent:

Also, the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded in its annual review of hurricanes earlier this year that “there is no strong evidence of century scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes“.

So, if hurricanes are not getting more frequent or powerful, why are economic losses increasing?

Simply because as a society and as individuals, we have more stuff to lose. The population of Florida has exploded over the years, particularly in coastal areas, which are most vulnerable to hurricanes. That means more homes and infrastructure.

And as they become wealthier, people own more assets. They no longer live in wooden cabins, but luxury homes. They own cars, the latest gadgets and designer clothes. On top of that, rising real wages mean that repairing the damage from a hurricane will now cost considerably more than in the past.

A weather disaster that may have cost $500 million 30 years ago could cost a billion now, even when the effects of inflation are allowed for.

Professor Roger Pielke Jr. is one of the leading experts on the cost of disasters, having studied the topic for 30 years or more. A recent peer-reviewed study of his found that when changes in asset values are factored in, what he refers to as “normalised” values, there is no long-term trend in losses from Atlantic hurricanes hitting the U.S.

Katrina stands out as the costliest in recent times, but even that did not compare with the 1926 ‘Miami’ Hurricane, which effectively wiped the city off the map:

Pielke also looked at losses from floods and tornadoes in the U.S., and both show a marked decline in losses.

Another Pielke study analysed global weather losses, of which he reckons 60% are accounted for by U.S. hurricanes! When measured as a percentage of GDP, the long-term trend is down:

Rapley makes the mistake of relying on NOAA’s Billion Dollar Disaster Database, which does not take account of increasing wealth and GDP. Instead, economic losses are only adjusted for CPI.

Indeed, another peer-reviewed paper by Pielke this year has described the NOAA database as flawed and misleading.

America has always been ravaged by hurricanes and other weather disasters. But it now has the resources, technology and money to bounce back from them.

A nation that had to deal with the Miami hurricane or Katrina can surely cope with Milton.

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Meta has fired about two dozen staff in Los Angeles for using their $25 meal credits to buy household items including acne pads, wine glasses, and laundry detergent.

The terminations took place last week, just days before the $1.5 trillion social media company separately began restructuring certain teams across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs, its augmented and virtual reality arm, on Tuesday.

The revamp has included cutting some staff and relocating others, several people familiar with the decisions said, in a sign that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efficiency drive is still under way.

Like most Big Tech companies, Meta offers free food to employees based out of its sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters as a perk. Staff based in smaller offices without a canteen are offered Uber Eats or Grubhub credits, for example, for food to be delivered to the office.

Staff are given daily allowances of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch, and $25 for dinner, with meal credits issued in $25 increments.

Those who were fired were deemed to have abused the food credit system over a long period of time, said one person familiar with the matter. Some had been pooling their money together, they said, while others were getting meals sent home even though the credits were intended for the office.

Those who violated the company rules only on occasion were reprimanded but not terminated, the person added.

In one post on anonymous messaging platform Blind, seen by the Financial Times, one former Meta staffer wrote they had used $25 credits on items such as toothpaste and tea from the pharmacy Rite Aid, adding: “On days where I would not be eating at the office, like if my husband was cooking or if I was grabbing dinner with friends, I figured I ought not to waste the dinner credit.”

The person, who indicated they had a salary of about $400,000 at Meta and worked “nights [and] weekends,” wrote that they had admitted to the oversight when human resources investigated the practice, before later being unexpectedly fired. “It was almost surreal that this was happening,” the person wrote.

Blind verifies that a user works for a particular company but does not require them to disclose their identity.

Meta declined to comment on the firings.

However, the company said of the wider layoffs: “Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy.”

It added: “This includes moving some teams to different locations, and moving some employees to different roles. In situations like this when a role is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for impacted employees.”

Zuckerberg announced about 21,000 job cuts in two rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023, dubbing the latter a “year of efficiency.”

He also canceled low-priority projects in an attempt to boost sluggish growth and alleviate investor concern over his costly bet on the metaverse.

Wall Street has welcomed the cuts together with a renewed focus on artificial intelligence. The company’s shares are now trading around all-time highs of $577 each.

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European Union regulators warned Elon Musk's X platform that it may calculate fines by including revenue from Musk's other companies, including SpaceX, according to a Bloomberg article published today.

X was previously accused of violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of total worldwide annual turnover. That fine would be levied on the "provider" of X, which could be defined to include other Musk-led firms.

Bloomberg writes that "regulators are considering whether sales from SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI and the Boring Company, in addition to revenue generated from the social network, should be included to determine potential fines against X, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because the information isn't public." Bloomberg's report says that Tesla "sales would be exempt from this calculation because it's publicly traded and not under Musk's full control."

"In considering revenue from his other companies, the commission is essentially weighing whether Musk himself should be regarded as the entity to fine as opposed to X itself," Bloomberg's sources say.

Such a move would significantly increase potential fines, particularly given X's struggles in the advertising business. Brazil has already treated Musk-led companies as a single economic group and seized about $2 million from a Starlink bank account to cover X's fines.

Defining “provider”

An EU spokesperson told Ars today that "the provider of X is responsible for complying with the obligations of the DSA. Fines are calculated on the basis of the total worldwide annual turnover of the provider. It is only necessary to definitively identify the provider of a very large online platform at the stage of a final decision."

The EU statement provided to Ars hints at the leeway regulators have in defining "provider."

"The obligations under the DSA are addressed to the provider of the very large online platform or very large online search engine," the EU statement said. "This applies irrespective of whether the entity exercising decisive influence over the platform or search engine is a natural or legal person.

In July, the European Commission announced its preliminary finding that X violated the Digital Services Act because Musk's overhaul of the Twitter verification system deceives users.

X "designs and operates its interface for the 'verified accounts' with the 'Blue checkmark' in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users," the EU regulator said at the time. "Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a 'verified' status, it negatively affects users' ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with. There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the 'verified account' to deceive users."

Musk vowed “very public” court battle

The EU also alleged violations of rules requiring transparency in advertising and access to data for researchers. The process allows X to respond before a final decision, and Musk has vowed to fight any penalties through "a very public battle in court so that the people of Europe can know the truth."

When the preliminary finding was announced, EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton chided Musk for diminishing the importance of blue checkmarks, saying the icons on verified accounts "used to mean trustworthy sources of information." Breton has since resigned.

"After Breton resigned in September, he bequeathed his fining powers to competition and digital boss Margrethe Vestager. Decisions on the penalties and how they are calculated would ultimately lie with Vestager," Bloomberg wrote. The European Commission would have the final say.

"The commission hasn't yet decided whether to penalize X, and the size of any potential fine is still under discussion," Bloomberg wrote, citing its anonymous sources. "Penalties may be avoided if X finds ways to satisfy the watchdog's concerns."

X says SpaceX revenue should be off-limits

Although X faces potential DSA fines, it will avoid penalties under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). The European Commission announced yesterday that X does not "qualify as a gatekeeper in relation to its online social networking service, given that the investigation revealed that X is not an important gateway for business users to reach end users."

But documents related to the DMA probe of X raise the possibility of treating multiple Musk-led companies as a single entity called the "Musk Group" for compliance purposes. In a March 2024 letter to Musk and X Holdings Corp., "the Commission set out its preliminary views on the possible designation of Mr. Elon Musk and the companies that he controls ('the Musk Group') as a gatekeeper," according to a document signed by Breton.

X has argued that it wouldn't make sense to include Musk's other companies in revenue calculations when issuing penalties. "X Holdings Corp. submits that the combined market value of the Musk Group does not accurately reflect X's monetization potential in the Union or its financial capacity," the document said. "In particular, it argues that X and SpaceX provide entirely different services to entirely different users, so that there is no gateway effect, and that the undertakings controlled by Mr. Elon Musk 'do not form one financial front, as the DMA presumes.'"

We contacted X and SpaceX today and will update this article if they provide any comment.

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The birth of a planet starts with a microscopic grain floating in a protoplanetary disk, a swirling cloud of gas and other particles surrounding a young star. How the gas and dust interact has implications for the formation of new worlds.

“Those teeny grains—those are the building blocks of planets,” said Zhe-Yu Daniel Lin, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He describes the shape of the grains as “potatoes.”

It’s hot and breezy in the interstellar cloud, but it's not entirely chaotic. Astronomical observations have found that the grains, instead of tumbling through space, are oriented neatly along their orbital trajectories. To explain how the grains float in formation, new research led by Lin leans on the working principle behind an Earthly object: the badminton shuttle.

Aligning the dust

The badminton shuttle, or "birdie," consists of a weighted cork nose and a conical skirt of feathers. Thanks to its construction, when the shuttle moves, its lighter end will catch more air and let the heftier end lead. If you’ve ever watched or played badminton, you know that the birdie automatically swivels so that the nose always points forward.

With a little assistance in the form of drag from the wispy gas in the disk, protoplanetary grains could be arranging themselves through a similar mechanism—as long as the weight distribution in each fleck is off-center. That requirement isn’t a big lift: Lin’s team calculated that a 1 percent offset in the center of mass is sufficient to cause alignment. Nature usually doesn’t cook up perfectly symmetrical objects, which would allow these bitty birdies of a feather to flock together.

Although the gas is much more sparse than Earth’s atmosphere, it’s substantial enough to generate drag and force the grains to self-order.

It might not come as a surprise to learn that Lin is a badminton player. "The experience of playing badminton is really the thing that kick-started the idea and led me to ask the right questions," he said.

Previous explanations attribute the dust alignment to the magnetic influence of the central star, the physics of which can be complicated and not always intuitive. The beauty of the proposed birdie mechanism is its simplicity. “It’s a very good first step,” said Bing Ren, an astronomer at France’s Côte d'Azur Observatory who wasn’t involved in the study.

Still, the birdie-alignment hypothesis is just that—a hypothesis. To confirm whether it holds water, scientists will need to throw their full observational arsenal at protoplanetary disks, such as viewing them at different wavelengths, to sniff out the finer details of particle-gas interactions.

Tracing invisible gas

Real-life protoplanetary disks are likely more complicated than a uniform squadron of space potatoes suspended in thin air. Ren suspects that the grains come in various shapes, sizes, and speeds. Nevertheless, he says Lin’s study is a good foundation for computer models of interstellar clouds, onto which scientists can tack layers of complexity.

The new research points a way forward for probing protoplanetary disks, particularly gas behavior. Given that the grains trace the gas direction, studying dust organization using existing tools like polarized light can allow scientists to map a disk’s aerodynamic flow. Essentially, these grains are tiny flags that signal where the wind blows.

As granular as the details are, the dust alignment is a small but key step in a grand journey of particle-to-planet progression. The nitty-gritty of a particle’s conduct will determine its fate for millions of years—perhaps the primordial seed will hoover up hydrogen and helium to become a gas giant or amass dust to transform into a terrestrial world like Earth. It all starts with it flailing or keeping steady amid a sea of other specks.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2024. DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stae2248 (About DOIs)

Shi En Kim is a DC-based freelance journalist who writes about health, the environment, technology, and the physical sciences. She and three other journalists founded Sequencer Magazine in early 2024. Occasionally, she creates art to accompany her writings or does it simply for fun. Follow her on Twitter at @goes_by_kim, or see more of her work on her personal website.

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However, the director of the famous Will Smith starrer I, Robot movie, Alex Proyas, feels those ideas were not all that original at all and that they have been copied from his film.

In case you may not have followed, Tesla recently held its "We, Robot" event, during which it unveiled several futuristic-looking additions to its lineup, including Robovan, Robotaxi (also called the Cybercab), and the Optimus robot.

After the event, the Australian director published some side-by-side images of Tesla products and some of the elements in his film trying to draw attention to the apparent resemblance of the products:

Proyas also posted the image on Instagram with the caption, "Anyone think I have a legal case?" although it is likely he did it casually to be humorous and is not actually looking for pointers for taking Elon Musk to court over these alleged inspirations.

In the post, though, he seemed to take digs at Musk, stating that "Elon Musk, on the other hand, has a not so talented design team who watched a lot of movies, including I, Robot, it seems," but Proyas, in contrast, worked with a "very talented design team."

Some netizens, however, pointed out that Proyas' film itself was probably drawing inspiration from 1927's Metropolis:

Curiously, the Tesla event title name seemingly drew inspiration from I, Robot itself, and thus it can be said that both the movie and the Tesla products borrowed a bit from the original Issac Asimov novel.

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The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.

Ignorant but confident

The basic setup of the experiment is very straightforward. The researchers developed a scenario where an ongoing water shortage was forcing a school district to consider closing one of its schools and merging its students into another existing school. They then wrote an article that described the situation and contained seven different pieces of information: three that favored merging, three that disfavored it, and one that was neutral. Just over half of the control group that read the full article favored merging the two schools.

The experimental groups were given an edited version of the article, one where all the facts in favor of one of the options were deleted. In other words, some of them read a version containing three facts favoring merging plus one neutral bit of information; others read three facts that favored keeping both schools open plus the neutral info.

After reading, half of the experimental group was given a survey that asked them whether they had enough information to make a decision, their confidence in that decision, and whether they would expect most people to agree with their choice. Statistically, it was impossible to distinguish these people from those in the control group. They believed that they had received all the information needed to make a decision and felt as strongly as the control group that most people would agree with the decision they made. Those who had received the pro-merger version of the article were even more confident than the controls in their decision.

The obvious difference was the decisions they made. In the group that had read the article biased in favor of merging the schools, nearly 90 percent favored the merger. In the group that had read the article that was biased by including only information in favor of keeping the schools separate, less than a quarter favored the merger.

The other half of the experimental population wasn't given the survey immediately. Instead, they were given the article that they hadn't read—the one that favored the opposite position of the article that they were initially given. You can view this group as doing the same reading as the control group, just doing so successively rather than in a single go. In any case, this group's responses looked a lot like the control's, with people roughly evenly split between merger and separation. And they became less confident in their decision.

It’s not too late to change your mind

There is one bit of good news about this. When initially forming hypotheses about the behavior they expected to see, Gehlbach, Robinson, and Fletcher suggested that people would remain committed to their initial opinions even after being exposed to a more complete picture. However, there was no evidence of this sort of stubbornness in these experiments. Instead, once people were given all the potential pros and cons of the options, they acted as if they had that information the whole time.

But that shouldn't obscure the fact that there's a strong cognitive bias at play here. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," Gehlbach, Robinson, and Fletcher.

This is especially problematic in the current media environment. Many outlets have been created with the clear intent of exposing their viewers to only a partial view of the facts—or, in a number of cases, the apparent intent of spreading misinformation. The new work clearly indicates that these efforts can have a powerful effect on beliefs, even if accurate information is available from various sources.

PLOS ONE, 2024. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310216  (About DOIs).

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During the flybys, the spacecraft will use a powerful suite of nine science instruments (cameras, spectrometers, radars, and others) that will work in sync. The ultimate goal? Determine whether Europa has what it needs to support life.

You can rewatch the launch on NASA's social media channels:

Scientists predict a salty ocean lies beneath Europa’s icy surface which has more water than Earth’s oceans combined.

The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet. Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to:

• Determine the thickness of Europa’s icy shell, and understand how Europa’s ocean interacts with the surface
• Investigate the composition of Europa’s ocean to determine if it has the ingredients to permit and sustain life
• Study how Europa’s surface features formed and locate any signs of recent activity, such as sliding crust plates or plumes that are venting water into space

Per Everyday Astronaut’s statistics, Europa Clipper marks SpaceX’s 400th launch. However, the company won't celebrate the successful mission by recovering the reusable rocket boosters. The reason is simple—Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission with solar arrays spanning more than 100 feet (30 meters), and it will travel 1.8 billion miles from Earth. This means the performance needed to launch the spacecraft didn’t allow the fuel margin required to land the boosters.

While the core booster was brand new, the side boosters flew for the sixth and last time. This is only the second mission on which the rocket was fully expended. Until now, the first and only such mission was Viasat-3 in May 2023.

Anyway, SpaceX engineers have nothing to cry for after they achieved an incredible mid-air catch of the Super Heavy booster on Sunday, followed by a strong start to the new week with Europa Clipper’s success.

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On October 10, 2018, Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf of Mexico—a pillar of American air superiority—found itself under aerial attack. Hurricane Michael, first spotted as a Category 2 storm off the Florida coast, unexpectedly hulked up to a Category 5. Sustained winds of 155 miles per hour whipped into the base, flinging power poles, flipping F-22s, and totaling more than 200 buildings. The sole saving grace: Despite sitting on a peninsula, Tyndall avoided flood damage. Michael’s 9- to 14-foot storm surge swamped other parts of Florida. Tyndall’s main defense was luck.

That $5 billion disaster at Tyndall was just one of a mounting number of extreme-weather events that convinced the US Department of Defense that it needed new ideas to protect the 1,700 coastal bases it’s responsible for globally. As hurricanes Helene and Milton have just shown, beachfront residents face compounding threats from climate change, and the Pentagon is no exception. Rising oceans are chewing away the shore. Stronger storms are more capable of flooding land.

In response, Tyndall will later this month test a new way to protect shorelines from intensified waves and storm surges: a prototype artificial reef, designed by a team led by Rutgers University scientists. The 50-meter-wide array, made up of three chevron-shaped structures each weighing about 46,000 pounds, can take 70 percent of the oomph out of waves, according to tests. But this isn’t your grandaddy’s seawall. It’s specifically designed to be colonized by oysters, some of nature’s most effective wave-killers.

If researchers can optimize these creatures to work in tandem with new artificial structures placed at sea, they believe the resulting barriers can take 90 percent of the energy out of waves. David Bushek, who directs the Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory at Rutgers, swears he’s not hoping for a megastorm to come and show what his team’s unit is made of. But he’s not not hoping for one. “Models are always imperfect. They’re always a replica of something,” he says. “They’re not the real thing.”

Playing defense Reefense

The project is one of three being developed under a $67.6 million program launched by the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Cheekily called Reefense, the initiative is the Pentagon’s effort to test if “hybrid” reefs, combining manmade structures with oysters or corals, can perform as well as a good ol’ seawall. DARPA chose three research teams, all led by US universities, in 2022. After two years of intensive research and development, their prototypes are starting to go into the water, with Rutgers’ first up.

Today, the Pentagon protects its coastal assets much as civilians do: by hardening them. Common approaches involve armoring the shore with retaining walls or arranging heavy objects, like rocks or concrete blocks, in long rows. But hardscape structures come with tradeoffs. They deflect rather than absorb wave energy, so protecting one’s own shoreline means exposing someone else’s. They’re also static: As sea levels rise and storms get stronger, it’s getting easier for water to surmount these structures. This wears them down faster and demands constant, expensive repairs.

In recent decades, a new idea has emerged: using nature as infrastructure. Restoring coastal habitats like marshes and mangroves, it turns out, helps hold off waves and storms. “Instead of armoring, you’re using nature’s natural capacity to absorb wave energy,” says Donna Marie Bilkovic, a professor at the Virginia Institute for Marine Science. DARPA is particularly interested in two creatures whose numbers have been decimated by humans but which are terrific wave-breakers when allowed to thrive: oysters and corals.

Oysters are effective wave-killers because of how they grow. The bivalves pile onto each other in large, sturdy mounds. The resulting structure, unlike a smooth seawall, is replete with nooks, crannies, and convolutions. When a wave strikes, its energy gets diffused into these gaps, and further spent on the jagged, complex surfaces of the oysters. Also unlike a seawall, an oyster wall can grow. Oysters have been shown to be capable of building vertically at a rate that matches sea-level rise—which suggests they’ll retain some protective value against higher tides and stronger storms.

Today hundreds of human-tended oyster reefs, particularly on America’s Atlantic coast, use these principles to protect the shore. They take diverse approaches; some look much like natural reefs, while others have an artificial component. Some cultivate oysters for food, with coastal protection a nice co-benefit; others are built specifically to preserve shorelines. What’s missing amid all this experimentation, says Bilkovic, is systematic performance data—the kind that could validate which approaches are most effective and cost-effective. “Right now the innovation is outpacing the science,” she says. “We need to have some type of systematic monitoring of projects, so we can better understand where the techniques work the best. There just isn’t funding, frankly.”

Hybrid deployments

Rather than wait for the data needed to engineer the perfect reef, DARPA wants to rapidly innovate them through a burst of R&D. Reefense has given awardees five years to deploy hybrid reefs that take up to 90 percent of the energy out of waves, without costing significantly more than traditional solutions. The manmade component should block waves immediately. But it should be quickly enhanced by organisms that build, in months or years, a living structure that would take nature decades.

The Rutgers team has built its prototype out of 788 interlocked concrete modules, each 2 feet wide and ranging in height from 1 to 2 feet tall. They have a scalloped appearance, with shelves jutting in all directions. Internally, all these shelves are connected by holes.

A DARPA-funded team will install sea barriers, made of hundreds of concrete modules, near a Florida military base. The scalloped shape should not only dissipate wave energy but invite oysters to build their own structures.

What this means is that when a wave strikes this structure, it smashes into the internal geometry, swirls around, and exits with less energy. This effect alone weakens the wave by 70 percent, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers, which tested a scale model in a wave simulator in Mississippi. But the effect should only improve as oysters colonize the structure. Bushek and his team have tried to design the shelves with the right hardness, texture, and shading to entice them.

But the reef’s value would be diminished if, say, disease were to wipe the mollusks out. This is why DARPA has tasked Rutgers with also engineering oysters resistant to dermo, a protozoan that’s dogged Atlantic oysters for decades. DARPA prohibited them using genetic-modification techniques. But thanks to recent advances in genomics, the Rutgers team can rapidly identify individual oysters with disease-resistant traits. It exposes these oysters to dermo in a lab, and crossbreeds the survivors, producing hardier mollusks. Traditionally it takes about three years to breed a generation of oysters for better disease resistance; Bushek says his team has done it in one.

The tropics are a different story

Oysters may suit the DoD’s needs in temperate waters, but for bases in tropical climates, it’s coral that builds the best seawalls. Hawaii, for instance, enjoys the protection of “fringing” coral reefs that extend offshore for hundreds of yards in a gentle slope along the seabed. The colossal, complex, and porous character of this surface exhausts wave energy over long distances, says Ben Jones, an oceanographer for the Applied Research Laboratory at the University of Hawaii—and head of the university’s Reefense project. He said it’s not unusual to see ocean swells of 6 to 8 feet way offshore, while the water at the seashore laps gently.

A Marine base in Hawaii will test out a new approach to coastal protection inspired by local coral reefs: A forward barrier will take the first blows of the waves, and a scattering of pyramids will further weaken waves before they get to shore.

Inspired by this effect, Jones and a team of researchers are designing an array that they’ll deploy near a US Marine Corps base in Oahu whose shoreline is rapidly receding. While the final design isn’t set yet, the broad strokes are: It will feature two 50-meter-wide barriers laid in rows, backed by 20 pyramid-like obstacles. All of these are hollow, thin-walled structures with sloping profiles and lots of big holes. Waves that crash into them will lose energy by crawling up the sides, but two design aspects of the structure—the width of the holes and the thinness of the walls—will generate turbulence in the water, causing it to spin off more energy as heat.

The manmade structures in Hawaii will be studded with concrete domes meant to encourage coral colonization. Though at grave risk from global warming, coral reefs are thought to provide coastal-protection benefits worth billions of dollars.

In the team’s full vision, the units are bolstered by about a thousand small coral colonies. Jones’ group plans to cover the structures with concrete modules that are about 20 inches in diameter. These have grooves and crevices that offer perfect shelters for coral larvae. The team will initially implant them with lab-bred coral. But they’re also experimenting with enticements, like light and sound, that help attract coral larvae from the wild—the better to build a wall that nature, not the Pentagon, will tend.

A third Reefense team, led by scientists at the University of Miami, takes its inspiration from a different sort of coral. Its design has a three-tiered structure. The foundation is made of long, hexagonal logs punctured with large holes; atop it is a dense layer with smaller holes—“imagine a sponge made of concrete,” says Andrew Baker, director of the university’s Coral Reef Futures Lab and the Reefense team lead.

The team thinks these artificial components will soak up plenty of wave energy—but it’s a crest of elkhorn coral at the top that will finish the job. Native to Florida, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean, elkhorn like to build dense reefs in shallow-water areas with high-intensity waves. They don’t mind getting whacked by water because it helps them harvest food; this whacking keeps wave energy from getting to shore.

Disease has ravaged Florida’s elkhorn populations in recent decades, and now ocean heat waves are dealing further damage. But their critical condition has also motivated policymakers to pursue options to save this iconic state species—including Baker’s, which is to develop an elkhorn more rugged against disease, higher temperatures, and nastier waves. Under Reefense, Baker says, his lab has developed elkhorn with 1.5° to 2° Celsius more heat tolerance than their ancestors. They also claim to have boosted the heat thresholds of symbiotic algae—an existentially important occupant of any healthy reef—and cross-bred local elkhorn with those from Honduras, where reefs have mysteriously withstood scorching waters.

An unexpected permitting issue, though, will force the Miami team to exit Reefense in 2025, without building the test unit it hoped to deploy near a Florida naval base. The federal permitting authority wanted a pot of money set aside to uninstall the structure if needed; DARPA felt it couldn’t do that in a timely way, according to Baker. (DARPA told WIRED every Reefense project has unique permitting challenges, so the Miami team’s fate doesn’t necessarily speak to anything broader. Representatives for the other two Reefense projects said Baker’s issue hasn’t come up for them.)

Though his team’s work with Reefense is coming to a premature end, Baker says, he’s confident their innovations will get deployed elsewhere. He’s been working with Key Biscayne, an island village near Miami whose shorelines have been chewed up by storms. Roland Samimy, the village’s chief resilience and sustainability officer, says they spend millions of dollars every few years importing sand for their rapidly receding beaches. He’s eager to see if a hybrid structure, like the University of Miami design, could offer protection at far lower cost. “People are realizing their manmade structures aren’t as resilient as nature is,” he says.

Not just DARPA

By no means is DARPA the only one experimenting in these areas. Around the world, there are efforts tackling various pieces of the puzzle, like breeding coral for greater heat resistance, or combining coral and oysters with artificial reefs, or designing low-carbon concrete that makes building these structures less environmentally damaging. Bilkovic, of the Virginia Institute for Marine Science, says Reefense will be a success if it demonstrates better ways of doing things than the prevailing methods—and has the data to back this up. “I’m looking forward to seeing what their findings are,” she says. “They’re systematically assessing the effectiveness of the project. Those lessons learned can be translated to other areas, and if the techniques are effective and work well, they can easily be translated to other regions.”

As for DARPA, though the Reefense prototypes are just starting to go in the water, the work is just beginning. All of these first-generation units will be scrutinized—both by the research teams and independent government auditors—to see whether their real-world performance matches what was in the models. Reefense is scheduled to conclude with a final report to the DoD in 2027. It won’t have a “winner” per se; as the Pentagon has bases around the world, it’s likely these three projects will all produce learnings that are relevant elsewhere.

Although their client has the largest military budget in the world, the three Reefense teams have been asked to keep an eye on the economics. DARPA has asked that project costs “not greatly exceed” those of conventional solutions, and tasked government monitors with checking the teams’ math. Catherine Campbell, Reefense’s program manager at DARPA, says affordability doesn’t just make it more likely the Pentagon will employ the technology—but that civilians can, too.

“This isn’t something bespoke for the military… we need to be in line with those kinds of cost metrics [in the civilian sector],” Campbell said in an email. “And that gives it potential for commercialization.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

For a molecule of RNA, the world is a dangerous place. Unlike DNA, which can persist for millions of years in its remarkably stable, double-stranded form, RNA isn’t built to last—not even within the cell that made it. Unless it’s protectively tethered to a larger molecule, RNA can degrade in minutes or less. And outside a cell? Forget about it. Voracious, RNA-destroying enzymes are everywhere, secreted by all forms of life as a defense against viruses that spell out their genetic identity in RNA code.

There is one way RNA can survive outside a cell unscathed: in a tiny, protective bubble. For decades, researchers have noticed cells releasing these bubbles of cell membrane, called extracellular vesicles (EVs), packed with degraded RNA, proteins, and other molecules. But these sacs were considered little more than trash bags that whisk broken-down molecular junk out of a cell during routine decluttering.

Then, in the early 2000s, experiments led by Hadi Valadi, a molecular biologist at the University of Gothenburg, revealed that the RNA inside some EVs didn’t look like trash. The cocktail of RNA sequences was considerably different from those found inside the cell, and these sequences were intact and functional. When Valadi’s team exposed human cells to EVs from mouse cells, they were shocked to observe the human cells take in the RNA messages and “read” them to create functional proteins they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make.

Valadi concluded that cells were packaging strands of RNA into the vesicles specifically to communicate with one another. “If I have been outside and see that it’s raining,” he said, “I can tell you: If you go out, take an umbrella with you.” In a similar way, he suggested, a cell could warn its neighbors about exposure to a pathogen or noxious chemical before they encountered the danger themselves.

Since then, a wealth of evidence has emerged supporting this theory, enabled by improvements in sequencing technology that allow scientists to detect and decode increasingly small RNA segments. Since Valadi published his experiments, other researchers have also seen EVs filled with complex RNA combinations. These RNA sequences can contain detailed information about the cell that authored them and trigger specific effects in recipient cells. The findings have led some researchers to suggest that RNA may be a molecular lingua franca that transcends traditional taxonomic boundaries and can therefore encode messages that remain intelligible across the tree of life.

In 2024, new studies have exposed additional layers of this story, showing, for example, that along with bacteria and eukaryotic cells, archaea also exchange vesicle-bound RNA, which confirms that the phenomenon is universal to all three domains of life. Another study has expanded our understanding of cross-kingdom cellular communication by showing that plants and infecting fungi can use packets of havoc-wreaking RNA as a form of coevolutionary information warfare: An enemy cell reads the RNA and builds self-harming proteins with its own molecular machinery.

“I’ve been in awe of what RNA can do,” said Amy Buck, an RNA biologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved with the new research. For her, understanding RNA as a means of communication “goes beyond appreciating the sophistication and the dynamic nature of RNA within the cell.” Transmitting information beyond the cell may be one of its innate roles.

Time-Sensitive Delivery

The microbiologist Susanne Erdmann studies viral infections in Haloferax volcanii, a single-celled organism that thrives in unbelievably salty environments such as the Dead Sea or the Great Salt Lake. Single-celled bacteria are known to exchange EVs widely, but H. volcanii is not a bacterium—it’s an archaean, a member of the third evolutionary branch of life, which features cells built differently from bacteria or eukaryotes like us.

Because EVs are the same size and density as the virus particles Erdmann’s team studies at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany, they “always pop up when you isolate and purify viruses,” she said. Eventually, her group got curious and decided to peek at what’s inside.

“I was expecting DNA,” Erdmann recalled, following reports that other archaeal species pack DNA into EVs. Instead, her lab found a whole smorgasbord of RNA—specifically noncoding RNAs, mysterious stretches of nucleotides with no known function in archaea. These noncoding RNA sequences were much more abundant in the EVs than in the archaeal cells themselves. “It was the first time that we found RNA in EVs in archaea,” she said.

Erdmann wondered if there was a purpose to the archaean EVs. A cell can spontaneously make vesicles when its membrane pinches in on itself to form a little bubble that then detaches. However, other mechanisms involve more active and deliberate processes, similar to the ones that move molecules around inside the cell. Erdmann’s group identified an archaeal protein that was essential for producing RNA-containing EVs.

That suggested to her that the RNA wasn’t ending up in the EVs by chance, and that the process wasn’t just waste disposal. “It’s very likely that [archaea] use them for cell-to-cell communication,” she said. “Why else would you invest so much energy in throwing out random RNA in vesicles?”

Erdmann isn’t sure why the Haloferax microbes pack their vesicles with RNA while other archaeal species prefer DNA. But she suspects it has to do with how time sensitive the molecular message is. “RNA is a different language than DNA,” she said, and it serves a fundamentally different purpose both inside and outside cells.

An organism’s DNA should be stable and relatively unchanging over the course of its life. It may pick up spontaneous mutations or even extra genes, but it takes generations of natural selection for temporary changes in DNA sequences to take hold in a population. RNA, on the other hand, is constantly in flux, responding to dynamic conditions inside and outside the cell. RNA signals don’t last long, but they don’t need to, since they can so quickly become irrelevant.

As a message, RNA is transient. This is a feature, not a bug: It can have only short-term effects on other cells before it degrades. And since the RNA inside a cell is constantly changing, “the message that you can send to your neighboring cell” can also change very quickly, Erdmann said. In that sense, it’s more like a quick text message or email meant to communicate timely information than, say, runes etched in stone or a formal memo on letterhead.

While it seems that neighboring archaea are taking up and internalizing EVs from their fellow cells, it’s not clear yet whether the messages affect them. Erdmann is also already wondering what happens to these vesicles in the wild, where many different organisms could be within earshot of the messages they carry.

“How many other different organisms in the same environment could take up this message?” she asked. “And do they just eat it and use the RNA as food, or do they actually detect the signal?”

While that may still be a mystery for Haloferax, other researchers have demonstrated that cells across species, kingdoms and even domains of life can send and receive remarkably pointed molecular missives.

Biological Cross Talk

Although RNA is short-lived, it has revealed itself to be a shape-shifting molecular marvel. It’s best known for helping cells produce new proteins by copying DNA instructions (as messenger RNA, or mRNA) and delivering them to the ribosome for construction. However, its flexible backbone lets RNA fold into a number of shapes that can impact cell biology. It can act as an enzyme to accelerate chemical reactions within cells. It can bind to DNA to activate or silence the expression of genes. And competing strands of RNA can tangle up mRNA instructions in a process called RNA interference that prevents the production of new proteins.

As researchers increasingly appreciate the ways RNA changes cell activity, they’ve studied strategies to use this mutable little molecule as an experimental tool, a disease treatment, and even the basis for the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine. All of these applications require transferring RNA into cells, but it seems that evolution has beaten us to it: EVs transmit RNA even to cells that may not want to get the message.

About 10 years ago, the molecular geneticist Hailing Jin and her lab at the University of California, Riverside discovered that two organisms from different kingdoms—a plant and a fungus—exchange RNA as a form of warfare. Jin was studying Botrytis cinerea, a fuzzy gray mold that ravages crops such as strawberries and tomatoes, when she saw it swap RNA with the plant Arabidopsis (thale-cress) during infection. The Botrytis fungus delivered RNA that interfered with the plant’s ability to fight the infection. Later work showed that the plant cells could respond with their own volley of RNA that damaged the fungus.

In this “coevolutionary arms race,” as Jin described it, both organisms used EVs as vehicles for these delicate but damaging RNA messages. Previously, scientists interested in host-pathogen dynamics mainly focused on proteins and metabolites, Jin said, because those molecules can be easier to study. But it makes sense for organisms to have multiple ways of resisting environmental challenges, she said, including using RNA to interact with distant evolutionary relatives.

Over the past decade, more scientists have discovered examples of cross-kingdom RNA exchange as an offensive strategy during infection. Parasitic worms living in mouse intestines release RNA in EVs that shut down the host’s defensive immune proteins. Bacteria can shoot messages to human cells that tamp down antibacterial immune responses. The fungus Candida albicans has even learned to twist a message from human EVs to its own advantage: It uses human RNA to promote its own growth.

Cross-kingdom correspondence isn’t always hate mail. These interactions have also been seen in friendly (or neutral) relationships, Jin said. For example, bacteria that live symbiotically in the roots of legumes send RNA messages to promote nodulation—the growth of little bumps where the bacteria live and fix nitrogen for the plant.

How can RNA from one branch of the tree of life be understood by organisms on another? It’s a common language, Buck said. RNA has most likely been around since the very beginning of life. While organisms have evolved and diversified, their RNA-reading machinery has largely stayed the same. “RNA already has a meaning in every cell,” Buck said. “And it’s a pretty simple code.”

So simple, in fact, that a recipient cell can open and interpret the message before realizing it could be dangerous, the way we might instinctively click a link in an email before noticing the sender’s suspicious address. Indeed, earlier this year, Jin’s lab showed that Arabidopsis plant cells can send seemingly innocuous RNA instructions that have a surprise impact on an enemy fungus. In experiments, Jin’s team saw the Botrytis fungus read the invading mRNA along with its own molecules and unwittingly create proteins that damaged its infectious abilities.

It’s almost as if the plants were creating a “pseudo-virus,” Jin said—little packets of RNA that infect a cell and then use that cell’s machinery to churn out proteins.

“This is a pretty powerful mechanism,” she said. “One mRNA can be translated into many, many copies of proteins … It’s much more effective than transporting the protein itself.”

To her knowledge, Jin said, this is the first time she’s seen evidence of organisms across kingdoms exchanging mRNA messages and reading them into proteins. But she thinks it’s likely to be seen in lots of other systems, once people start looking for it.

The field feels young, Buck said, which is exciting. There’s still a lot to learn: for example, whether the other molecules packaged in EVs help deliver the RNA message. “It’s a fun challenge to unravel all of that,” she said. “We should be inspired with how incredibly powerful and dynamic RNA is, and how we’re still discovering all the ways that it shapes and regulates life.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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SpaceX has made history once again. The Flight 5 Super Heavy Booster 12 rocket was safely and soundly caught by the Mechazilla (launch tower) Chopsticks on landing. The catch was made around T+ 6:49 seconds.

This is a historic moment in spaceflight history as I mentioned above, no government or private space agency has ever tried it before. Interestingly, SpaceX did it in the first attempt. The world was not expecting this outcome until the last moments.

The live stream of the Starship Flight 5 launch is still underway as of this writing. The 2nd stage Starship (Ship 30) spacecraft is still cruising in space and SpaceX aims to land it in the Indian Ocean like the Flight 4 launch test.

The great thing about the landing catch was that the Super Heavy booster was perfectly caught by the Chopsticks. The pins installed on the forward section perfectly aligned and anchored with the Chopstick connecting points on both the left and right arms. The booster didn’t hang on the grid fins.

The Raptor engines are getting cooled down with the chilled liquid gases (liquid oxygen and methane) as they endured the atmospheric entry and landing burn.

SpaceX has achieved a major milestone in large spacecraft and rocket booster reusability. The successful catch has saved the majority of the Super Heavy booster and we will surely see it back on the launch pad in the near future.

Flight 6 Starship is already prepared to perform a test, it’s just a matter of time before SpaceX obtains regulatory approval for the next launch. Flight 6 if happens before Christmas, will be the 4th Starship flight launch test in 2024 and the 2nd landing test.

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By Rupa Subramanya

October 9, 2024

If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.” 

A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.

“In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in actual scientists—that is, people with degrees in the hard sciences from major universities who regularly receive money to conduct actual scientific research—using their credentials to parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist left,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the Senate committee, said in the report.

The report, titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report. 

What’s more, that’s a feature—not a bug—of the new grant-making process. Biden’s 2021 Scientific Integrity Task Force released a report in January 2022, stating that “activities counter to [DEIA] values are disruptive to the conduct of science.” 

“DEIA” expands the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion to include “accessibility.”  

“Many policy decisions are ‘science-informed,’ meaning that factors in addition to science shape decision-making,” the Biden task force wrote. “These factors may include financial, budget, institutional, cultural, legal, or equity considerations that may outweigh scientific factors alone.” Going forward, the task force said, such “considerations” should play an important role in NSF grant decisions. 

An NSF spokesperson did not specifically address the committee’s report when I reached out. But they said the “NSF’s merit review process has two criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts—and is the global gold standard for evaluating scientific proposals.” Their statement continued, “NSF will continue to emphasize the importance of the broader impacts criterion in the merit review process.”

The GOP members’ report said it searched for grant applications that used a variety of terms associated with social justice, gender, race, environmental justice, and individuals belonging to underrepresented groups. Some of the grant applications that received funding showed up in more than one category. 

The overall 10 percent figure identified by the GOP report masks how quickly the number of such grants have increased. In 2021, before the Biden task force report came out, they were less than 1 percent of the total number of grants. By 2022, that number had risen to more than 16 percent, and was at 27 percent between January and April 2024.

The Republicans’ report highlighted several specific grants that illustrate how DEI is changing the nature of NSF-funded research: 

Shirin Vossoughi, an associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University, is co-principal investigator for a $1,034,751 2023 NSF grant for a project entitled “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” The project’s abstract says that current teaching practices reproduce “inequitable” structures in the teaching of STEM subjects and “perpetuate racial inequalities” within STEM contexts. Her public writing, such as in a co-authored 2020 op-ed, argues that all American institutions, including STEM education, are “permeated” by the “ideology of white supremacy.” Vossoughi could not immediately be reached for comment.

Marwa Elshakry, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, together with Jamil Sbitan, a PhD student in history, received more than $15,000 in 2023 to identify how “hegemonic narratives have sought to obfuscate not only the contemporary existence of non-normative sexual experiences in certain national contexts, but also aimed to bury any historical traces of non-normative forms of gender and sexuality.” Vossoughi, Elshakry, and Sbitan were among several grant recipients that the report called out for their support of campus protests against Israel and its conduct of the war against Hamas. “The relationship between DEI NSF funding and the chaos on college campuses is not merely a matter of correlation,” the report notes. “. . . several NSF grant recipients awarded funding for a DEI grant either supported these encampments or joined anti semitic demonstrations.” Elshakry is on leave this semester and could not immediately be reached for comment. Sbitan also could not be reached for comment. 

A 2023 NSF grant for $323,684 to Stephen Secules, assistant professor in the College of Education & Computing at Florida International University, intends to “transform engineering classrooms towards racial equity.” Secules has also been critical of the fact that “engineering professors are not engaging as active change agents for racial equity.” Secules could not be reached for comment.

The NSF provided a total of $569,851 split among Florida International University, Colorado State University, and University of Minnesota for a project to examine “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”

And the University of Georgia received $644,642 to “identify systemic racism in mathematics teacher education.”

This shift in emphasis of NSF grants is happening at the same time the American public says its faith in the scientific community is declining.

Pew Research Center data from 2023, for instance, found that 27 percent of Americans say that they have “not too much” or “no” confidence in scientists to act in the public interest, as compared to only 12 percent in April 2020 at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The Republicans’ report argues that it’s not just the public’s trust that is at issue—it’s also the quality of the science that NSF grants produce. 

“These [DEI] grants both crowd out other kinds of research that could advance understanding of the physical world and advance a deeply divisive philosophy antithetical to the tenets of empirical scientific research,” the report said.

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Sunday, 13 October

Who: SpaceX
What: Starship
When: 12:00 - 13:07 UTC
Where: Texas, US
Why: SpaceX will launch Starship on its fifth suborbital test flight, the mission is designated IFT-5. SpaceX will use this mission to re-attempt the first-ever controlled re-entry of Starship. Starship will try to land in the southern Indian Ocean, west of Australia, while the Super Heavy booster will try to land at the launch tower.

Who: Blue Origin
What: New Shepard
When: 13:00 - 16:00 UTC
Where: Texas, US
Why: Blue Origin will launch its New Shepard suborbital rocket as part of an uncrewed mission. This is a little bit unusual before, as New Shepard launches are known for their crewed launches to the edge of space for paying customers. The rocket will fly with tech upgrades to improve its performance and reusability.
Some of the 12 payloads include new nav systems for New Shepard and New Glenn, LIDAR sensors for the Lunar Permanence program, and ultra-wide proximity operations sensors as part of NASA's TechFlights grant. The mission is NS-27.

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon Heavy
When: 16:12 UTC
Where: Florida, US
Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the Europa Clipper mission for NASA. The Europa Clipper space probe will study Jupiter's moon, Europa, by doing flybys while in Jupiter's orbit. It will carry nine science instruments and use them to study Europa's icy surface and its subsurface ocean to see whether the moon can support life. Europa Clipper is NASA's biggest-ever planetary exploration spacecraft with a span of 30 meters when its solar arrays are extended. The spacecraft will do a flyby gravity assist of Mars with its closest approach in February 2025. It will then use the Earth to get a gravity assist in December 2026, and then it will enter Jupiter orbit on April 11, 2030, with 45 orbits planned.

Monday, 14 October

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 05:48 - 09:48 UTC
Where: Florida, US
Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch 22 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. This batch of satellites is known as Starlink Group 10-10. You can use this identifier to find the satellites in orbit using various satellite tracking services. The first stage of the Falcon 9 should perform a landing too.

Tuesday, 15 October

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 08:03 UTC
Where: California, US
Why: The first launch on Tuesday will be another Falcon 9 from SpaceX. This batch of 20 satellites will be known as Starlink Group 9-7 and will contain 13 direct-to-cell Starlink satellites. Like the previous launch, these satellites will go into a low Earth orbit, and the first stage of the Falcon 9 will perform a landing.

Recap

The first mission we got last was the launch of a Falcon 9 by SpaceX carrying the European Space Agency's Hera mission. The Hera mission will study the Didymos binary asteroid system previously hit by NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft.

The second and final launch was a Long March 3B from China, which launched the WHG-03 high-orbit internet services from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The satellite entered its orbit successfully.

That's all for this week; check back next time.

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Welcome to Edition 7.15 of the Rocket Report! It's a big week for big rockets, with SpaceX potentially launching its next Starship test flight and a Falcon Heavy rocket with NASA's Europa Clipper mission this weekend. And a week ago, United Launch Alliance flew its second Vulcan rocket, which lost one of its booster nozzles in midair and amazingly kept going to achieve a successful mission. Are you not entertained?

PLD Space is aiming high. Spanish launch provider PLD Space has revealed a family of new rockets that it plans to introduce beyond its Miura 5 rocket, which is expected to make its inaugural flight in 2025, European Spaceflight reports. The company also revealed that it was working on a crew capsule called Lince (Spanish for Lynx). PLD Space introduced its Miura Next, Miura Next Heavy, and Miura Next Super Heavy launch vehicles, designed in single stick, triple core, and quintuple core configurations with reusable boosters. At the high end of the rocket family's performance, the Miura Next Super Heavy could deliver up to 53 metric tons (nearly 117,000 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit. The Lince capsule could become Europe's first human-rated crew transportation spacecraft.

Still a year away from reaching space ... These are lofty ambitions for a company that has yet to launch anything to space, but it's good to think big. PLD Space launched a high-altitude test flight of its Miura 1 rocket last year, but it didn't cross the boundary of space. The first launch campaign for Miura 5, PLD Space's orbital-class rocket sized for small satellites, is on course to begin by the end of 2025, the company said. The Miura Next family would begin flying by 2030, followed by the heavier rockets a few years later. In April, PLD Space said it had raised 120 million euros ($131 million) from private investors and the Spanish government. This is probably enough to get Miura 5 to the launch pad, but PLD Space will need a lot of technical and financing successes to bring its follow-on vehicles online. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Impulse Space wins Space Force contract. Fresh on the heels of a massive funding round, Impulse Space has landed a $34.5 million contract from the Space Force for two ultra-mobile spacecraft missions, TechCrunch reports. Under the Space Force’s Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) program, the two missions will demonstrate how highly maneuverable spacecraft can help the military rapidly respond to threats in space. Both missions will use Impulse's Mira orbital transfer vehicle, which can host experiments and payloads while moving into different orbits around the Earth.

Looking for an advantage ... Mira completed its first test flight earlier this year. The payloads on the two Space Force demonstration flights will perform space domain awareness missions, the military service said in a statement. The first mission, called Victus Surgo, will combine the Mira transfer vehicle with Impulse's higher-power Helios cryogenic methane-fueled kick stage on its first use in orbit. Helios will boost Mira into a high-altitude geostationary transfer orbit after launching on a Falcon 9 rocket. The second mission, called Victus Salo, will send a second Mira spacecraft into low-Earth orbit on a SpaceX rideshare mission. Impulse was founded by rocket scientist Tom Mueller, who was a founding employee at SpaceX before leaving in 2020. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

The launch campaign begins for Vega C's return to flight. Days after a crucial test-firing of its redesigned second stage motor, a European Vega C rocket is now being stacked on its launch pad in French Guiana for a return to flight mission scheduled for December 3. Photos released by the French space agency, CNES, show the Vega C's solid-fueled first stage moving into position on the launch pad. The Vega C launcher is an upgraded version of the Vega rocket that completed its career with a successful launch in September.

A lot of t(h)rust ... Vega C made a successful debut in July 2022, then failed on its second flight five months later, destroying a pair of high-value commercial Earth-imaging satellites owned by Airbus. Engineers traced the failure to the second stage motor's nozzle, prompting a redesign that grounded the Vega C rocket for two years. There is a queue of European space missions waiting for launch on Vega C, and first to go will be the Sentinel 1C radar imaging satellite for the European Commission's flagship Copernicus program.

Australian launch company rehearses countdown. Gilmour Space still thinks it has a chance to conduct the maiden launch of its Eris rocket sometime this year, despite no launch license from the Australian Space Agency (ASA), having to go hunting for more money, and a wet dress rehearsal throwing up issues that will take several weeks to fix, Space & Defense Tech and Security News reports. Gilmour's Eris rocket, capable of hauling cargoes up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to orbit, would become the first homegrown Australian-built orbital-class rocket.

WDR ... The Australian Space Agency has worked on Gilmour's launch license for around two years, but has yet to give the company the green light to fly the Eris rocket, despite approving licenses for two companies operating privately owned launch ranges elsewhere in Australia. At the beginning of the year, Gilmour targeted a first launch of the Eris rocket in March, but there were delays in getting the vehicle to the launch pad. The rocket went vertical for the first time in April to begin a series of ground tests, culminating in the launch rehearsal at the end of September, in which the company loaded propellants into the rocket and ran the countdown to T-10 seconds. The test uncovered valve and software issues Gilmour must fix before it can fly Eris. (submitted by mryall)

Falcon 9 launches European asteroid mission. The European Space Agency's Hera mission lifted off Monday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, heading into the Solar System to investigate an asteroid smashed by NASA two years ago, Ars reports. It will take two years for Hera to travel to asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos, a binary pair, and survey the aftermath of the impact by NASA's DART spacecraft on Dimorphos in September 2022. DART was NASA's first planetary defense experiment, demonstrating how a kinetic impactor could knock an asteroid off course if it was on a path to hit Earth. Fortunately, these two asteroids are harmless, but DART proved a spacecraft could deflect an asteroid, if necessary. Coming in at high speed, DART got only a fleeting glimpse of Didymos and Dimorphos, so Hera will take more precise measurements of the asteroids' interior structure, mass, and orbit to determine exactly how effective DART was.

Falcon soars again ... The liftoff Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was the first flight of a Falcon 9 in nine days, since an upper stage anomaly steered the rocket off its intended reentry corridor after an otherwise successful launch. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Falcon 9 while SpaceX investigated the problem, but the regulator approved the launch of Hera because the Falcon 9's upper stage won't come back to Earth. Instead, it departed into deep space along with the Hera asteroid probe. As of Thursday, all other commercial Falcon 9 missions remain grounded. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Emiratis go with Japan. A UAE mission to travel to the asteroid belt reached a milestone on Wednesday, when an agreement was signed to provide services for the 2028 launch of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Explorer spacecraft, The National reports. Emirati officials selected the Japanese H3 rocket from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to launch the asteroid explorer. The UAE is a repeat customer for MHI, which also launched the Emirati Hope spacecraft toward Mars in 2020. The mission will see the Mohammed Bin Rashid Explorer perform close flybys of six asteroids to gather data before landing on a seventh asteroid, Justitia.

H3 racking up wins ... Japan's new H3 rocket is taking a slice of the international commercial launch market after achieving back-to-back successful flights this year. The H3, which replaces Japan's workhorse H-IIA rocket, is primarily intended to ensure Japanese autonomous access to space for national security missions, scientific probes, and resupply flights to the International Space Station. But, somewhat surprisingly, the H3 now has several customers outside of Japan, including the UAE, Eutelsat, and Inmarsat. Perhaps some satellite operators, eager for someone to compete with SpaceX in the launch business, are turning to the H3 as an alternative to United Launch Alliance's Vulcan, Europe's Ariane 6 rocket, or Blue Origin's New Glenn. All of these rockets are under pressure to launch numerous payloads for their domestic governments and Amazon's Kuiper megaconstellation.

China launches mystery satellite. China launched a new communications satellite toward geostationary orbit Thursday, although its precise role remains undisclosed, Space News reports. The satellite lifted off aboard a Long March 3B rocket, and China's leading state-owned aerospace contractor identified the payload as High orbit Internet satellite-03 (Weixing Hulianwan Gaogui-03). This is the third satellite in this series, following launches in February and August. The lack of publicly available information raises speculation about its potential uses, which could include military applications.

Shortfall ... This was China's 47th space launch of the year, well short of the 100 missions Chinese officials originally projected for 2024. This launch rate is on pace to come close to China's numbers the last three years. Around 30 of these 100 projected launches were supposed to be with rockets from Chinese commercial startups. China's commercial launch industry encountered a setback in June, when a rocket broke free of its restraints during a first stage static fire test, sending the fully fueled booster on an uncontrolled flight near populated areas before a fiery crash to the ground.

Vulcan's second flight was successful but not perfect. United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, under contract for dozens of flights for the US military and Amazon's Kuiper broadband network, lifted off from Florida on its second test flight October 4, suffered an anomaly with one of its strap-on boosters, and still achieved a successful mission, Ars reports. This test flight, known as Cert-2, was the second certification mission for the new Vulcan rocket, a milestone that paves the way for the Space Force to clear ULA's new rocket to begin launching national security satellites in the coming months.

Anomalous plume … What happened 37 seconds after launch was startling and impressive. The exhaust nozzle from one of Vulcan's two strap-on solid rocket boosters failed and fell off the vehicle, creating a shower of sparks and debris. The launcher visibly tilted along its axis due to asymmetrical thrust from the twin boosters, but Vulcan's guidance system corrected its trajectory, and the rocket's BE-4 engines vectored their exhaust to keep the rocket on course. The engines burned somewhat longer than planned to make up for the shortfall in power from the damaged booster, and the rocket still reached its target orbit. However, ULA and Northrop Grumman, the booster manufacturer, must determine what happened with the nozzle before Vulcan can fly again. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Starship could launch this weekend. We may not have to wait as long as we thought for the next test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket. The world's most powerful launcher could fly again from South Texas as soon as Sunday, assuming the Federal Aviation Administration grants approval, Ars reports. The last public statement released from the FAA suggested the agency didn't expect to determine whether to approve a commercial launch license for SpaceX's next Starship test flight before late November. There's some optimism at SpaceX that the FAA might issue a launch license much sooner, perhaps in time for Starship to fly this weekend.

Going for the catch … "The fifth flight test of Starship will aim to take another step towards full and rapid reusability," SpaceX wrote in an update posted on its website. "The primary objectives will be attempting the first ever return to launch site and catch of the Super Heavy booster and another Starship reentry and landing burn, aiming for an on-target splashdown of Starship in the Indian Ocean." For the Starship upper stage, this means it will follow pretty much the same trajectory as the last test flight in June. But the most exciting thing about the next flight is the attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster, which will come back to the launch site in Texas at supersonic speed before braking to a hover over the launch pad. Then, mechanical arms, or "chopsticks," will try to grapple the rocket in midair.

Europa Clipper is ready to fly. As soon as this weekend, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will lift off from Kennedy Space Center, carrying NASA's $4.25 billion Europa Clipper spacecraft, Ars reports. This mission is unlikely to definitively answer the question of whether life exists in the liquid water ocean below the icy crust of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, but it will tell us whether it could, and it will answer so many more questions. The best part is the unknown wonders it will discover. We cannot begin to guess at those, but we can be certain that if all goes well, Clipper will be a thrilling and breathtaking mission. Europa Clipper will zip by Europa 49 times in the early 2030s, probing the frozen world with a sophisticated suite of instruments to yield the best-ever data about any moon of another planet.

Delayed for weather ... The launch of Europa Clipper was supposed to happen Thursday, but NASA and SpaceX suspended launch preparations earlier this week as Hurricane Milton approached Florida. The spacecraft is already attached to the Falcon Heavy rocket inside SpaceX's hangar. Once teams are cleared to return to the space center for work after the storm, they will ready Falcon Heavy to roll to the launch pad. NASA says the launch is currently targeted for no earlier than Sunday.

Next three launches

Oct. 13: Starship/Super Heavy | Flight 5 | Starbase, Texas | 12:00 UTC

Oct. 13: New Shepard | NS-27 uncrewed flight | Launch Site One, Texas | 13:00 UTC

Oct. 13: Falcon Heavy | Europa Clipper | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 16:12 UTC

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After more than nine months in an unusual, highly elliptical orbit, the US military's X-37B spaceplane will soon begin dipping its wings into Earth's atmosphere to lower its altitude before eventually coming back to Earth for a runway landing, the Space Force said Thursday.

The aerobraking maneuvers will use a series of passes through the uppermost fringes of the atmosphere to gradually reduce its speed with aerodynamic drag while expending minimal fuel. In orbital mechanics, this reduction in velocity will bring the apogee, or high point, of the X-37B's orbit closer to Earth.

Bleeding energy

The Space Force called the aerobraking a "novel space maneuver" and said its purpose was to allow the X-37B to "safely dispose of its service module components in accordance with recognized standards for space debris mitigation."

While the reusable Boeing-built X-37B spaceplane is designed to land like an aircraft on a runway, the service module, mounted to the rear of the vehicle, carries additional payloads. At the end of the mission, the X-37B jettisons the disposable service module before reentry. The Space Force doesn't want this section of the spacecraft to remain in its current high-altitude orbit and become a piece of space junk.

"Once the aerobrake maneuver is complete, the X-37B will resume its test and experimentation objectives until they are accomplished, at which time the vehicle will deorbit and execute a safe return as it has during its six previous missions," the Space Force said.

The Space Force has identified mobility in orbit as a key focus for its next-generation space missions. This would allow satellites to more freely move between altitudes and orbital inclinations than they can today. Commanders don't want a spacecraft's movements to be constrained by the amount of fuel it carries, allowing satellites to "maneuver without regret."

Space Force leaders have discussed in-orbit refueling, more efficient propulsion technologies, and other ways to achieve this end. Aerobraking is another way to lower a spacecraft's orbit without using precious propellant.

"This first-of-a-kind maneuver from the X-37B is an incredibly important milestone for the United States Space Force as we seek to expand our aptitude and ability to perform in this challenging domain," said Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force's chief of space operations.

Officials did not say when the X-37B spaceplane, also called the Orbital Test Vehicle, will end its mission, which began on December 28 with a launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The Space Force also didn't say what orbit the X-37B will end up in after the aerobraking maneuvers, but the spaceplane will presumably settle into a low-Earth orbit, where all of its previous missions flew.

There are two X-37Bs in the Pentagon's inventory. The spaceplanes have solar arrays to generate electricity and enough fuel to remain in orbit for years. The longest X-37B flight to date lasted more than 908 days. The vehicles have payload bay doors that open in space, revealing a cargo bay about the size of a pickup truck bed. The spacecraft measures 29 feet (9 meters) long, about a quarter the length of a NASA space shuttle orbiter. It is not designed to carry people.

An X-37B spaceplane with its payload bay doors open, revealing a solar array folded inside.

Credit: Boeing

NASA has used aerobraking at Mars to reshape the orbits of its scientific probes surveying the red planet. In 2014, the European Space Agency executed a series of aerobraking maneuvers at Venus with its Venus Express spacecraft. Precise navigation is crucial for aerobraking—coming in too high won't produce enough air resistance to bleed off velocity, while dipping too low could cause the spacecraft to reenter the atmosphere.

The Space Force said it is leveraging experience from civilian science missions to carry out the X-37B's aerobraking maneuvers.

It seems like military officials have been planning this kind of maneuver with the X-37B for at least several years. In 2019, former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the spaceplane can fly in an orbit that "looks like an egg," presumably referring to an elliptical orbit like the one the current mission is flying.

"When it’s close to the Earth, it’s close enough to the atmosphere to turn where it is," she said. "Which means our adversaries don’t know—and that happens on the far side of the Earth from our adversaries—where it’s going to come up next. And we know that that drives them nuts. And I’m really glad about that."

Breaking the silence

The Pentagon rarely releases an update on the X-37B spaceplane in the middle of a mission. During previous flights, military officials typically provided some basic information about the mission before its launch, then went silent until the X-37B returned for landing. The military keeps specifics about the spaceplane's activities in orbit a secret.

This made the Space Force's announcement Thursday somewhat of a surprise. When the seventh flight of the X-37B launched, there were indications that the spacecraft would soar into a much higher orbit than it did on any of its six prior missions.

In February, a sleuthing satellite tracking hobbyist spotted the X-37B in orbit by observing sunlight reflected off of the spacecraft as it flew thousands of miles above Earth. Follow-up detections confirmed the discovery, allowing amateur observers to estimate that the X-37B was flying in a highly elliptical orbit ranging between roughly 300 and 38,600 miles in altitude (186-by-23,985 miles). The orbit was inclined 59.1 degrees to the equator.

On its previous missions, the X-37B was confined to low-Earth orbit a few hundred miles above the planet. When it became apparent that the latest mission was cruising at a significantly higher altitude, analysts and space enthusiasts speculated on what the secret spaceplane was doing and how it would come back to Earth. A direct reentry into the atmosphere from the spaceplane's elliptical orbit would expose the craft's heat shield to hotter temperatures than any of its previous returns.

Now, we have an answer to the latter question.

As for what it's doing up there, the Space Force said the spaceplane on this mission has "conducted radiation effect experiments and has been testing space domain awareness technologies in a highly elliptical orbit." The orbit brings the X-37B through the Van Allen radiation belts and crosses several orbital regimes populated by US and foreign communications, navigation, and surveillance satellites.

Military officials have said previous X-37B flights have tested a Hall-effect ion thruster and tested other experimental space technologies without elaborating on their details. X-37Bs have also secretly deployed small military satellites in orbit.

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Google has been at the forefront of AI research, but has been forced on the defensive as it tackles competitive pressure from Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI and mounting regulatory scrutiny from the U.S Department of Justice.

On Wednesday, Demis Hassabis – co-founder of Google's AI unit DeepMind – and colleague John Jumper were awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry, alongside U.S. biochemist David Baker, for their work decoding the structures of microscopic proteins.

Former Google researcher Geoffrey Hinton, meanwhile, won the Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday, alongside U.S. scientist John Hopfield, for earlier discoveries in machine learning that paved the way for the AI boom.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, a computer scientist and advisor on AI to the United Nations, told Reuters that, while the recipients’ work deserved recognition, the lack of a Nobel prize for mathematics or computer science had distorted the outcome.

"The Nobel prize committee doesn't want to miss out on this AI stuff, so it's very creative of them to push Geoffrey through the physics route," she said. "I would argue both are dubious, but nonetheless worthy of a Nobel prize in terms of the science they’ve done. So how else are you going to reward them?"

Noah Giansiracusa, an associate maths professor at Bentley University and author of "How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News", also argued that Hinton’s win was questionable.

"What he did was phenomenal, but was it physics? I don't think so. Even if there's inspiration from physics, they're not developing a new theory in physics or solving a longstanding problem in physics."

The Nobel prize categories for achievements in medicine or physiology, physics, chemistry, literature and peace were laid down in the will of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895. The prize for economics is a later addition established with an endowment from the Swedish central bank in 1968.

DOMINANCE

Regulators in the U.S. are currently circling Google for a potential break-up, which could force it to divest parts of its business, such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system, which some argue allow it to maintain an illegal monopoly in online search.

The profits derived from its leading position have allowed Google and other Big Tech companies to outpace traditional academia in publishing groundbreaking AI research.

Hinton himself has expressed some regrets about his life's work, quitting Google last year so that he could speak freely about the dangers of AI, and warning that computers could become smarter than people far sooner than previously expected.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, he said: "I wish I had a sort of simple recipe that if you do this, everything's going to be okay, but I don't, in particular with respect to the existential threat of these things getting out of control and taking over.”

When he quit Google in 2023 over his AI concerns, Hinton said the company itself acted very responsibly.

For some, this week’s Nobel prize wins underscore how hard it is becoming for traditional academia to compete. Giansiracusa told Reuters there was a need for greater public investment in research.

"So much of Big Tech is not oriented towards the next deep-learning breakthrough, but making money by pushing chatbots or putting ads all over the internet," he said. "There are pockets of innovation, but much of it is very unscientific."

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Commander Gray poses for a photo with her shipmates. Credit: Facebook

According to local authorities, distress calls were received by Samoan police shortly before 7 pm on Saturday night. Small boats were dispatched to warn that the ship was absorbing water and that its crew would likely require evacuation. By 5 am on Sunday, all those onboard had been rescued.

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On Wednesday, the Nobel Committee announced that it had awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to researchers who pioneered major breakthroughs in computational chemistry. These include two researchers at Google's DeepMind in acknowledgment of their role in developing AI software that could take a raw protein sequence and use it to predict the three-dimensional structure the protein would adopt in cells. Separately, the University of Washington's David Baker was honored for developing software that could design entirely new proteins with specific structures.

The award makes for a bit of a theme for this year, as yesterday's Physics prize honored AI developments. In that case, the connection to physics seemed a bit tenuous, but here, there should be little question that the developments solved major problems in biochemistry.

Understanding protein structure

DeepMind, represented by Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, had developed AIs that managed to master games as diverse as chess and StarCraft. But it was always working on more significant problems in parallel, and in 2020, it surprised many people by announcing that it had tackled one of the biggest computational challenges in existence: the prediction of protein structures.

Chemically, proteins are a linear string of amino acids linked together, with living creatures typically having the choice of 20 different amino acids for each position along the string. Most of those 20 have distinctive chemical properties: some are acidic, others basic; some may be negatively charged, others positively charged, and still others neutral, etc. These properties allow different areas of the string to interact with each other, causing it to fold up into a complex three-dimensional structure. That structure is essential for the protein's function.

Typically, figuring out the structure involves laborious biochemistry to purify the protein, followed by a number of imaging techniques to determine where each of its atoms resides. But in theory, all of that should be predictable since the structure is just the product of chemistry and physics. Since any amino acid could potentially interact with any other on the chain, however, the complexity of making predictions rises very rapidly with the length of the protein. Extend it out past a dozen amino acids long, and it could quickly humble the most powerful supercomputers.

A lot of work over the years went into trying to figure out computational shortcuts. DeepMind, by contrast, did what it did best and put an AI on the case. For protein folding, the AI was trained on two large existing data sets. One included every protein structure that had been solved through lab work, allowing it to extract general principles for how different amino acids typically interact. The second was the sequence of every protein we've determined, allowing it to identify proteins related through evolution and determine what sorts of flexibility can be tolerated in a given structure.

The net result is software that produced reasonable structural predictions, easily beating every other software package we'd developed in a regular computational challenge. DeepMind has since used it to generate predictions for most of the existing protein-coding genes in the databases (it still struggles with excessively long ones) and has continued to upgrade the software. The predictions aren't perfect, and some appear to stumble badly, but when the alternative is simply a string of amino acids and a shrug, this represents a major advance.

Rolling our own

The University of Washington's David Baker had also tried to tackle the protein-folding problem for a number of years, taking some distinct approaches to it. The Rosetta software developed by his group was adapted to operate as a distributed computing project (Rosetta@home) and later served as the basis of a protein-folding game called Foldit. When DeepMind announced its AlphaFold software, he was part of a group that quickly adopted some of its principles into a version they called RosettaFold.

But his group has also tackled a second question: Can we use the ability to predict protein structures to essentially do the converse of figuring out the structure of natural proteins? In other words, can we design proteins that don't exist in the natural world to fold up into specific structures?

Over the last few years, those questions have clearly been answered with a "yes." It sometimes feels like I receive monthly mailings about the latest breakthroughs coming out of the Baker lab, and a number of them seem significant. For example, the lab has developed systems that can take a target protein and suggest the amino acid sequence of an antibody that will stick to them. The lab has also developed software that can take a protein with a known structure and design other proteins that will interact with and inhibit them.

These targeted inhibitors have the potential to inhibit proteins that are mutated in genetic diseases or provide a rapid response to emerging pathogens. They might not always be the best or fastest way of achieving those things, but the more options we have, the better. And they're just a narrow snapshot of all the projects that appear to be going on in the lab.

Given that science is a massively collaborative endeavor and that the Nobel Prize is limited to honoring three individuals each year, there will always be arguments over whether some worthy contributors were left out. But in this case, there's unlikely to be much argument over whether the achievements were worthy of the attention.

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The icy surface of Europa could hide life below.

Credit: NASA

I really hate to be the bearer of such bad news, but you and I will not live forever, dear reader.

We may hope to draw breath for a few decades yet, perhaps. But that's not long enough to descry any worlds circling other stars in a meaningful way. Those mysterious orbs are too distant, both in space and time; the vastness of this galaxy is too great, the beat of a human life too short against the slow rhythm of cosmic time. We space enjoyers must therefore be content with what lies in our backyard.

If you are of a certain age, say half a century old or less, you may feel as though you missed the golden age of space exploration, when humanity first walked into that backyard. The Baby Boomers, who were born in time to not only see what the lunar surface looked like but to watch humans walk upon it in real time, were truly lucky.

What an era that was! Before then, everything but the Sun and Moon were dots in the nighttime sky. In 1962, Mariner 2 revealed Venus for the first time. Mariner 4 flew by Mars a couple of years later. Then there were the Voyagers, which passed by Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1980 and 1981, Uranus in 1986, and Neptune in 1989. And don't forget the Viking landers in the mid-1970s, which proved the non-existence of little green men on Mars. The Boomers got to see all of this, unwrapping the Solar System, one greatest hit at a time.

But if you weren't there, don’t despair. In the last decade or so, we’ve started to open some wild new frontiers. A decade ago, Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft provided unparalleled images of a comet, and then its tiny Philae lander flew down to the surface and revealed a winter-like wonderland. The next year, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto and its moon Charon and revealed all manner of wonders, including—for real—ice volcanoes.

And these recent treats are but appetizers for the greatest undiscovered world in our Solar System left to be explored, a place that harbors dark mysteries we can presently only blindly stab at with blunt knives. I am speaking, of course, of Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa. Beneath a thick sheet of ice lies a vast, warm ocean. Scientists believe conditions at the bottom of this immense global sea are not unlike those near hydrothermal vents on the seabed of Earth’s oceans, where life on our planet may have originated. We can only guess at basic questions, like how thick is the ice? How deep is the ocean? What secrets are there to be plumbed in its dark depths? Could marine life really exist there?

The magic of this moment is that we are finally going. If you wanted to be alive for a real mission of discovery to an unknown but tantalizing world, this is it.

As soon as this weekend, a Falcon Heavy rocket will lift off, carrying the $4.25 billion Europa Clipper spacecraft. This mission is unlikely to definitively answer the question of whether life exists in the oceans below, but it will tell us whether it could, and it will answer so many more questions about the icy moon. The best part is the unknown wonders it will discover. We cannot begin to guess at those, but we can be certain that if all goes well, Clipper will be a thrilling and breathtaking mission.

And it very nearly did not happen. That's the story I want to tell here.

It all began decades ago

After the two Voyager flybys in 1979, NASA sent a dedicated probe named Galileo to Jupiter in the 1990s. This spacecraft made several passes by Europa during its nearly eight years in orbit around Jupiter, and data from this mission indicated the likely presence of a water ocean beneath the moon's icy surface. In the nearly three decades since then, planetary scientists have had little more to go on than these tantalizing clues. They've desperately wanted to know more.

Almost immediately after the first Europa data from Galileo beamed back to Earth in 1996, the administrator of NASA at the time, Dan Goldin, asked scientists at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California whether a small mission dedicated to the study of Europa was possible. Fitting within Goldin's ethos of "faster, better, and cheaper," he wanted a design for a spacecraft carrying just 27 kg of scientific instruments to Europa, about the same mass as a suitcase than can be checked on to an airplane.

"That was the beginning of a Europa orbiter concept," said science writer David Brown, author of The Mission, which tells the definitive story of the Europa Clipper mission.

The original science objectives outlined during the development of this orbiter mission—to investigate the composition of Europa’s ice shell and ocean, the world's geology, and to search for and characterize any plumes emanating from the ocean below—remain more or less the same with Clipper. However, as often happens with deep space missions, the budget doubled. NASA's chief of science at the turn of the century, astrophysicist Ed Weiler, killed the nascent Europa program.

But scientists were still interested. In 2003, the National Research Council published its first "decadal survey," a process by which the scientific community outlines research priorities for NASA. Over the years, these decadal surveys have become influential tools for guiding NASA policy. In this first survey, scientists recommended that NASA establish a "large-class" mission to study Europa. 

The NASA administrator at the time, Sean O'Keefe, sought to develop a new generation of spacecraft powered by nuclear reactors as part of what he called Project Prometheus. He believed that a mission with Europa as its main target offered a perfect test case for the technology, and thus, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was born. This was a highly ambitious mission. A typical spacecraft uses on the order of a few hundred watts of power. This probe, powered by a nuclear reactor, would have had on the order of 100,000 watts of power.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was audacious in other ways, such as using a landing component to directly sample Europa's ice. Unfortunately, the mission also became insanely expensive, with a budget blasting past $20 billion. When O'Keefe was replaced by a new administrator in 2005, Mike Griffin, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was put on ice.

Galileo sparked an incredible amount of interest in Europa. First, NASA tried a fast, cheap mission. Then the agency worked on the most ambitious spacecraft concept ever put forward. Both failed. A decade was lost.

A new champion emerges

In 2000, a conservative Texas attorney named John Culberson won election to the US House of Representatives for the first time. For a time, he focused on local issues, such as freeway construction in the greater Houston area. However, after the cancellation of the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, he was furious.

Most people in Congress, to the extent they care about NASA, do so for parochial interests and local jobs. For Culberson, that meant Johnson Space Center, which was located in a district adjacent to his. But Culberson was also deeply interested in planetary exploration, and he wanted to be associated with NASA's first mission to find life on another world. So he became an advocate of funding for a NASA center on the opposite side of the country, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which led the agency's robotic exploration efforts.

As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Culberson began to tuck funding into NASA's budget for the ongoing study of a Europa orbiter.

During this period, as a science reporter for the Houston Chronicle, I began to bump into Culberson at various events around town. He was both a conservative Christian politician and a life-long science geek. Skeptic that I am, I wondered if his interest in science was an act to ingratiate himself with constituents, given that the Houston area has a large biomedical community. Eventually, however, I began to realize it was totally genuine. He is fascinated by the Solar System and wants to know more about its origin and whether it harbors life on worlds other than Earth. We bonded over this mutual interest.

In the meantime, there were more furtive starts on a Europa mission. In 2007, NASA began studying mission concepts for Europa and Ganymede in the Jovian system, as well as the moons Titan and Enceladus around Saturn. Working with international partners two years later, NASA eventually down-selected to a combination mission in which the US space agency built an orbiter for Europa and the European Space Agency one for Ganymede (eventually, this European mission did launch, as JUICE, in 2023). NASA's part was known as the Jupiter Europa Orbiter.

However, a year later, new NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was looking for ways to cut the agency's budget. By now, you probably know what was about to happen. Sure enough, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter's budget was ballooning to above $3 billion. And there was another problem—Mars became ascendant in the agency's exploration interests.

"For the first time in 20 years, Mars was brought into competition with the outer planets," Brown said. "The top endorsement in a painful budget environment was a Mars Sample Return. As a result, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter died."

Once again, Culberson was not happy. But this time, he would soon be in a position to do something about it.

Going behind the curtain

In 2012, NASA initiated a new series of studies to yet again define a Europa mission. The leading contender that emerged from this process was a spacecraft capable of making multiple flybys of the Jovian moon, and this became known as the Europa Clipper. Scientists realized it was impractical to build an orbiter because the spacecraft would have a short lifetime due to constant exposure to the intense radiation emanating from Jupiter. By making dozens of flybys, Clipper could swoop into the inner Jovian system, gather data from Europa, and then transmit it back to Earth when the spacecraft was further from Jupiter's harsh radiation environment.

Starting in fiscal year 2013, Culberson began adding money to NASA's budget specifically for the development of a Clipper mission, even though NASA had not committed to starting a program.

"We're only going to have one chance at this in our lifetimes," he told me that year, explaining his effort to essentially force NASA to green-light a Europa mission after nearly two decades of dithering. "We've got one shot. I want to make sure you and I are here to see those first tube worms and lobsters on Europa."

NASA could not afford to ignore Culberson, who was no longer a junior Congressman. In December 2013, U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, said he would not run for re-election in 2014, leaving Culberson as the odds-on favorite to replace him as chairman of an appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA. Effectively, this gave Culberson control over the agency's purse strings.

In January 2015, that happened. Now chairman of the all-important budget subcommittee, Culberson began making periodic trips to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. To the mortification of NASA's senior leaders and communications officials, Culberson decided to invite me to come along for sessions that would last a day or two. There were no restrictions. I got to sit in on all the meetings, hear the discussions, and even participate at times. Even better, at Culberson's insistence, it was all on the record.

Let me explain how rare an opportunity this is. Typically, journalists learn about space exploration by interviewing sources, attending press conferences, and reading scientific papers. But to be in the room where it happened? That just does not happen. But Culberson was inviting me behind the curtain into detailed discussions where the mission planners and leadership at the NASA facility in California explained what they were doing, why they were doing it, and where they needed political help. It was eye-opening for me to see how these kinds of missions got done and see power in action.

During these meetings, Culberson—universally referred to as "Mr. Chairman" during these visits—would make suggestions and push the scientists to be bold in their design and instrument choices. He would always ask how much funding they needed and then deliver that during the next budget cycle. All of this was happening, more or less, because Culberson felt Clipper was important for the nation.

Eventually, NASA leadership bowed to the inevitable and made a formal commitment to the Clipper mission. No longer did Culberson have to include language in budget requests such as "NASA shall fund" the Clipper, as the agency was on board. By the time Culberson lost re-election in 2018—a midterm election when Democrats gained seats in response to the unpopular first term of former President Donald Trump—Clipper was far enough along to be secure.

A lot of people bear responsibility for creating Clipper concepts and keeping the idea alive at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at NASA's headquarters in Washington D.C., Brown said. These include scientists and leaders such as Charles Elachi, Karla Clark, Bob Pappalardo, Louise Proctor, and Curt Niebur. But Culberson stands alone for getting the mission done.

“Without John Culberson, none of this would have ever happened," Brown said. "If you want to boil it down to dollars and cents, he’s the man who paid for this thing and got it far enough down the road that it was going to fly."

What Clipper will do

Clipper's launch on a fully expendable Falcon Heavy rocket, unfortunately, only marks the end of the beginning for the mission. It will take 5.5 years for the spacecraft to reach the Jupiter system. During that time, the spacecraft will traverse a mind-bending 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers).

Once it arrives at Jupiter, the spacecraft will make 80 orbits of Jupiter, including 49 flybys of Europa. On some of these passes, the spacecraft will come to within 15 miles (25 km) of the moon's surface, providing us an incredible view of the ice and any plumes.

Plumes, of course, would be incredibly exciting because they would offer direct evidence of what the subsurface ocean is like. There is some piecemeal evidence from Galileo, as well as observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, that such plumes may be breaking through ice through fissures. But we just don't know for sure.

Clipper is the largest spacecraft humans have ever launched into deep space. It never got that nuclear power source, so it has massive solar arrays that are 45 feet (14 meters) long and 15 feet (4.5 meters) tall. You could comfortably play a game of pick-up basketball on a court that size.

The spacecraft carries a sophisticated suite of instruments, including a powerful ice-penetrating radar that will study the interface between the icy crust and ocean and possibly identify pond or lake-like features there.

Although this is not a life-detection mission, scientists could get really lucky and find the signatures of life in a plume or on the surface. In all likelihood, however, they will simply characterize the world and its ocean, with the intent of coming back in the (distant) future with a lander to make in-situ measurements and possibly detect life.

Most exciting of all, however, is that Clipper truly is flying into the unknown. This is a mission of pure discovery to one of the most exciting worlds near Earth. Whenever we explore a new place in space, nature always surprises us. "We have always uncovered things that we could not imagine," Bonnie Buratti, the deputy project scientist for Clipper, said during a recent briefing. Indeed.

Europa has many secrets, and we're finally coming for them.

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Many people may be surprised to learn the proper procedure for taking a blood pressure reading—because of how different it is from what happens during their doctor's appointments.

According to the American Heart Association and other medical experts, getting an accurate reading requires following a strict set of preparations: You must not eat, drink, exercise, or smoke within 30 minutes of a reading. You must have an empty bladder. You must sit straight up in a chair with back support. Your legs must be uncrossed and your feet must be flat on the ground. The arm to be measured must be rested on a flat surface so that it is at the same level as your heart, not lower, not higher. You must sit calmly, without talking for five minutes to relax before the reading. When it's time, an appropriately sized cuff should be wrapped around your bare upper arm, right above the elbow; it should never be wrapped over clothing. At least two readings should be taken, with the average recorded. Ideally, readings should be taken in both arms, with the highest readings recorded.

Credit: American Heart Association

Deviations from this protocol have the potential to significantly alter your blood pressure reading—and your blood pressure category. For instance, putting the blood pressure cuff over clothing can raise your reading as much as 50 mm Hg. That's enough to make someone with early stage hypertension seem as if they're in a hypertensive crisis, at imminent risk of a stroke or heart attack. If you have to pee, the reading can be 15 mm Hg higher. Talking can raise it by 10 mm Hg.

And, according to a new study in JAMA Internal Medicine, the all-too-common practice of having your arm in a position lower than your heart can raise your systolic blood pressure reading (the upper number) between 4- and 10-mm Hg. While those numbers may not seem dramatic, they're enough to push some patients over the edges of blood pressure categories. And these inaccurate readings are thought to happen often enough that they may lead to significant overdiagnosis of hypertension. In fact, the authors of the new study—led by researchers at Johns Hopkins—estimate that as many as 54 million people in the US may be misclassified as having hypertension simply because of the way their arm is positioned during readings.

Not using the correct arm position "has the potential to lead to substantial hypertension overdiagnosis, unnecessary patient follow-ups, and overtreatment," the authors conclude.

The study echoes previous data on inaccuracies from incorrect arm positions, but goes further by investigating the most common incorrect arm positions and using a gold-standard trial design.

For the study, researchers took blood pressure readings from 133 people with a mean age of 57 years. Each person had their blood pressure measured in four arm positions—with all other blood pressure reading preparations and positioning aligned with recommendations. The four arm positions were: one, with their arm properly resting on a desk (desk 1); two, with their arm incorrectly resting in their lap; three, with their arm incorrectly down at their side; and four, with their arm properly resting on a desk (desk 2). For each position, blood pressure readings were taken in triplicate, for a total of 12 readings from each person.

Under pressure

Before participants took readings in any of the positions, the researchers had them simulate walking into a doctor's appointment. They walked for two minutes and then sat calmly in position for five minutes before taking the three readings. Before moving onto the next position, they got up and walked again and sat for another five minutes. The participants were also randomized into groups that took the first three readings (desk 1, lap, side) in different orders, with all groups ending on desk 2.

The researchers then compared the differences between desk 1 and desk 2 to differences between lap and desk 1 and side and desk 1 for each participant. The desk 1-desk 2 differences captured intrinsic variability of blood pressure reading within each participant. The comparisons to lap-desk 1 and side-desk 1 captured changes based on the improper arm positions.

In all, there was little difference in the desk 1-desk 2 comparison, with participants having a mean difference of -0.21 mm Hg in systolic blood pressure and 0.09 in diastolic. But, the improper arm positions had significant effects on the readings. Lap arm position resulted in a mean increase of 4 mm Hg in both systolic and diastolic readings. Side arm position led to systolic readings that were 6.5 mm Hg higher and diastolic readings that were 4 mm Hg higher. For those with high blood pressure readings—about 36 percent of the participants—the wrong arm position caused yet higher readings, with systolic readings about 9 mm Hg higher than desk readings.

The authors speculate that simple physiological mechanisms likely explain the increase in blood pressure when the arm is lower than the heart—more gravitational pull, compensatory constriction of blood vessels, and muscle contraction may lead to higher pressure. As for why health care providers are known to sometimes use these wrong arm positions, it may be a lack of awareness, training, equipment, and/or resources.

The authors of the study call for more training and education about proper blood pressure measurements, which are essential for appropriate management of hypertension and prevention of cardiovascular disease.

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Comb jellies, technically known as ctenophores, are one of the weirdest creatures on Earth. They appeared in the seas over half a billion years ago and have maintained to the present day the comb-like rows of cilia they used to move around. Their transparent bodies and internal bioluminescence give them looks that rival gaming computers. But there’s something that makes them even weirder.

When a comb jelly is injured, it can regenerate at an amazing rate. But it can also attach a body part of another injured comb jelly and integrate it near-seamlessly into its own body. (Those who have played Elden Ring can enjoy comparisons to Godrick The Grafted.)

“I’ve been observing ctenophores for a long time, so it was easy to spot an unusually large specimen. Some of the anatomical features were doubled, so I realized what I’m looking at is actually two individuals that have fused together,” said Kei Jokura, a marine researcher at the University of Exeter and lead author of a recent Current Biology paper on the integration of fused ctenophores.

Following an early Brooklynite

Jokura found his unusually large comb jelly, an individual belonging to the species, in a seawater retention tank where a population of these creatures is maintained for research purposes. It had two aboral ends—the part of a ctenophore body located opposite the oral end where the mouth is—and two apical organs the animal uses for sensing its environment.

Since Jokura’s first guess was that the strange creature he found was in fact two ctenophores fused with each other, he assembled the research team and started doing first experiments, like poking it on one of its lobes to see if the other would react to the stimuli. It did.

“At first, I thought that we discovered something entirely new. That nobody knows that ctenophores can fuse with each other. But then, we started doing literature surveys and found a paper published by B.R Coonfield in 1937 where he showed the results of grafting experiments done with ctenophores,” Jokura said.

Coonfield, a scholar at the Department of Biology at Brooklyn College, performed those experiments to prove that ctenophores possessed a special kind of symmetry in their anatomical features.

Coonfield used grafting, a technique used mainly in botany to merge two different plants into one, to see if the anatomy of ctenophores was indeed symmetrical. He didn’t think too much about their ability to survive the grafting, merely making a note that it occurred. Jokura, on the other hand, made it the main focus of his work.

Synchronizing comb jellies

First, Jokura and his team selected 10 pairs of healthy-looking ctenophores, cut them, and held them close together. “The individuals were immobilized, with little room for movement and a small gap between them. Gradually, we saw that gap closing, and finally, the individuals came into contact with each other,” Jokura said.

First, the comb jellies merged their membranes and epidermal parts, which constitute a two-cell-deep barrier protecting the inside of the animal from the environment. Once this was complete, their nervous systems started to merge, too. “The nerves got connected and electrical coupling happened. The muscle contractions started to synchronize. After 30 minutes, they were synchronized [to] 50 percent. After two hours, they were synchronized completely,” Jokura explained.

But not every system in these comb jellies merged seamlessly. “The pooping time depends on the individual, as each individual has its own metabolism that dictates when you want to poop,” Jokura said. The digestive systems in a fused comb jelly kept working seemingly independently of each other, with food going to either one or the other mouth and the waste being extracted from two separate anuses at different times.

Nine out of 10 pairs merged successfully and survived, and Jokura’s team documented the whole process on a time-lapse shot at one frame per second. “I think the most likely reason this 10th pair did not survive was the regeneration system was dysfunctional in either one or both individuals,” Jokura said.

The million-dollar question, though, was why ctenophores could fuse like that in the first place.

Evolution of fusion

From a purely mechanistic physiology standpoint, ctenophores can perform this grafting because they are relatively simple organisms. “Let’s take the nerve net. There was a Science paper last year that showed ctenophores had neurons but did not have synapses. I think this lack of synapses makes the merging process easier, makes the electrical coupling easier,” said Jokura.

Ctenophores can do without synapses because their neurons fuse together during development and share a continuous membrane called syncytium. It’s possible that the ability to integrate distinct cells and integrate distinct tissues shares an underlying mechanism.

Another reason fusion works is that the allorecognition system, which lets the organism tell self from non-self, is either very weak or non-existent in ctenophores. In humans, this system is active enough that transplanted organs are often rejected. Ctenophores are one of the earliest known multicellular organisms and perhaps come from a time before allorecognition systems started to appear.

The second option is that they evolved this ability as some kind of weird survival strategy. Badly injured ctenophores merging into one huge, super-scary ctenophore monster sounds like something straight out of a B-horror movie. Sadly, it’s highly unlikely that this is the case here.

“In the wild, they live separately from other ctenophores and they don’t constantly bump into each other unless there is something like a strong current or something external,” said Marianna Rodriguez-Santiago, a neuroscientist at Colorado State University and co-author of the paper.

So far, it’s too early to tell if the comb jelly fusion trick is a bug or a feature. “We’re not sure which is true. We are currently stuck with 'it could be either one,'” said Rodriguez-Santiago.

Current Biology, 2024.  DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.07.084

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