Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper.

 

They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, with their remains neatly tidied away.

 

Originally, scientists thought those were the only two ways an animal cell could die, by accident or by that neat-and-tidy version. But over the past couple of decades, researchers have racked up many more novel cellular death scenarios, some specific to certain cell types or situations. Understanding this panoply of death modes could help scientists save good cells and kill bad ones, leading to treatments for infections, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

 

“There’s lots and lots of different flavors here,” says Michael Overholtzer, a cell biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He estimates that there are now more than 20 different names to describe cell death varieties.

 

Here, Knowable Magazine profiles a handful of classic and new modes by which cells kick the bucket.

 

Unplanned cell death: Necrosis

Lots of bad things can happen to cells: They get injured or burned, poisoned or starved of oxygen, infected by microbes or otherwise diseased. When a cell dies by accident, it’s called necrosis.

 

There are several necrosis types, none of them pretty: In the case of gangrene, when cells are starved for blood, cells rot away. In other instances, dying cells liquefy, sometimes turning into yellow goop. Lung cells damaged by tuberculosis turn smushy and white — the technical name for this type, “caseous” necrosis, literally means “cheese-like.”

 

Any form of death other than necrosis is considered “programmed,” meaning it’s carried out intentionally by the cell because it’s damaged or has outlived its usefulness.

A good, clean death: Apoptosis

The two main categories of programmed cell death are “silent and violent,” says Thirumala-Devi Kanneganti, an immunologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Apoptosis, first named in 1972, is the original silent type: It’s a neat, clean form of cell death that doesn’t wake the immune system.

 

That’s handy when cells are damaged or have served out their purpose. Apoptosis allows tadpoles to discard tail cells when they become frogs, for example, or human embryos to dispose of the webbing between developing fingers.

 

The cell shrinks and detaches from its neighbors. Genetic material in the nucleus breaks into pieces that scrunch together, and the nucleus itself fragments. The membrane bubbles and blisters, and the cell disintegrates. Other cells gobble up the bits, keeping the tissue tidy.

 

Red flags: Necroptosis and pyroptosis

These are the violent kinds, and they helped expand the cell death repertoire beyond apoptosis and necrosis. They’re often engaged when cells have been hijacked by viruses or other infectious agents. Rather than be reduced to virus factories, they kill themselves. These cells go down waving big red flags, in the form of chemicals they release to alert the immune system to come in and save their neighbors.

 

In a 1998 study, a team disabled the ability of cells grown in dishes to undergo apoptosis, and the cells still died. But they did it in a messy way that came to be called necroptosis for its mix of apoptosis and necrosis features. As with necrosis, the cells and their organelles swell up and then the outer membrane ruptures. Necroptosis is a handy backup mechanism because some infectious agents can disable apoptosis.

 

Then there’s pyroptosis, first observed in 1992 among white blood cells infected with dysentery bacteria and christened in 2001. This is “the screaming, alarm-ringing pro-inflammatory death of a potentially dangerous cell,” the namers wrote. As with necroptosis, cells swell up. They activate enzymes that poke holes in the cell membrane, so their contents leak out, calling up an immune response.

 

Whether from pyroptosis or necroptosis, that immune response is needed to activate the body’s defenses against infection, such as the fever that cooks invaders, says Kanneganti, who coauthored an article about molecules involved in cell death in the 2020 Annual Review of Immunology. But if too many cells die or the immune system gets stuck in the “on” position, that can lead to ongoing inflammation or autoimmune disease.

Mix and match: PANoptosis

Immune cells, too, may need to die in the case of infection, inflammation or even cancer. As Kanneganti’s group investigated this process, they noticed an alternate mode of death that incorporated elements of apoptosis, necroptosis and pyroptosis. Using the first letter of each classic type, they dubbed it PANoptosis. Since then, researchers have found this hybrid death method in other kinds of cells, too.

 

In PANoptosis, the cell assembles a big protein machine called the PANoptosome. This activates enzymes to puncture the cell’s membranes. As it dies, the cell releases red-flag molecules that tell other immune cells there’s a problem.

 

Why do cells need so many ways to achieve the same fatal end? Cells probably evolved these different options during an arms race with disease-causing microbes, Kanneganti surmises. The microbes, aiming to survive, may try to turn off cell death. But if the cell has a wide menu of death mechanisms, it can commit suicide in another manner, sacrificing itself to thwart the pathogen.

Kamikaze killing: NETosis

Immune cells may sacrifice themselves even more dramatically, in a kamikaze action that takes out surrounding pathogens too. This sensational act is the purview of white blood cells called neutrophils, which patrol areas of infection and swallow invaders.

 

But sometimes the infectious agents are too large, or too numerous, to devour. The neutrophils switch tactics and vomit their own DNA over the pathogen, ensnaring the invaders in a kind of genomic net. It’s called NETosis (for neutrophil extracellular traps). Other cells then dispose of the entangled pathogens.

 

On occasion, the net-throwing cell is already dying or dead as this takes place, making it a zombie cell committing one final, altruistic act, says immunologist Ben Croker, who studies the phenomenon at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.

Death metal: Cuproptosis and ferroptosis

While cancer cells seem ominous, they are, in fact, quite vulnerable to death, says Todd Golub, a cancer biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The key,” he adds, “is to find the right triggers.”

 

Golub’s group found a trigger in drugs that ferry copper into cells. The team is still working out how that makes the cells croak in a process they christened cuproptosis in 2022.

 

Iron, too, can be deadly to cancer cells, as chemical biologist Brent Stockwell at Columbia University in New York discovered. In addition to tumors, normal cells in the brain, liver and kidneys appear to be particularly susceptible to this form of cell death, which he named ferroptosis in 2012. Researchers have also observed ferroptosis in a wide range of organisms, even yeast and plants, says Stockwell, who cowrote a description of the key features of ferroptosis in the 2019 Annual Review of Cancer Biology.

 

Stockwell and other researchers are working to identify drugs or special diets that would activate ferroptosis to combat cancer, or block it to protect cells from dying in diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Eat me: Entosis

Overholtzer, while studying breast cancer cells in the early 2000s, noticed something weird: cancer cells burrowing into other cells. He and his lab supervisor dubbed the phenomenon entosis in 2007.

 

The invading cell winds up enclosed in a big, membranous bubble. It may starve and undergo apoptosis, or be killed by the surrounding cell. Then the outer cell digests its remains.

 

But sometimes, weirdly, it survives and pops out of the cell to live independently again. Noting this, some researchers have proposed that entosis gives cancer cells a way to temporarily hide out from the immune system or cancer drugs.

 

There’s still plenty to learn about cell deaths, and there are probably death modes still awaiting discovery, Golub speculates.

 

Ultimately, the study of life requires the investigation of cell death. As the Japanese author Haruki Murakami wrote, “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”

 

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

 

Knowable Magazine, 2024. DOI: 10.1146/knowable-092324-1 (About DOIs)

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are ready for launch Saturday from Florida's Space Coast aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, heading for a five-month expedition on the International Space Station.

 

The two-man crew is set for liftoff on top of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at 1:17 pm EDT (17:17 UTC). The weather forecast is a little iffy, with a 55 percent chance of favorable conditions for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. You can watch the launch on NASA's YouTube livestream, embedded here.

 

Empty seats

This will be SpaceX's 15th crew mission since 2020, and SpaceX's 10th astronaut launch for NASA, but Saturday's launch is unusual in a couple of ways.

 

“All of our missions have unique challenges and this one, I think, will be memorable for a lot of us," said Ken Bowersox, NASA's associate administrator for space operations.

 

First, only two people will ride into orbit on SpaceX's Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft, rather than the usual complement of four astronauts. This mission, known as Crew-9, originally included Hague, Gorbunov, commander Zena Cardman, and NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson.

 

But the troubled test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft threw a wrench into NASA's plans. The Starliner mission launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Boeing's spacecraft reached the space station, but thruster failures and helium leaks plagued the mission, and NASA officials decided last month it was too risky to being the crew back to Earth on Starliner.

 

NASA selected SpaceX and Boeing for multibillion-dollar commercial crew contracts in 2014, with each company responsible for developing human-rated spaceships to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX flew astronauts for the first time in 2020, and Boeing reached the same milestone with the test flight that launched in June.

 

Ultimately, the Starliner spacecraft safely returned to Earth on September 6 with a successful landing in New Mexico. But it left Wilmore and Williams behind on the space station with the lab's long-term crew of seven astronauts and cosmonauts. The space station crew rigged two temporary seats with foam inside a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the outpost, where the Starliner astronauts would ride home if they needed to evacuate the complex in an emergency.

 

This is a temporary measure to allow the Dragon spacecraft to return to Earth with six people instead of the usual four. NASA officials decided to remove two of the astronauts from the next SpaceX crew mission to free up normal seats for Wilmore and Williams to ride home in February, when Crew-9 was already slated to end its mission.

 

The decision to fly the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without its crew had several second order effects on space station operations. Managers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston had to decide who to bump from the Crew-9 mission, and who to keep on the crew.

 

Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov ended up keeping their seats on the Crew-9 flight. Hague originally trained as the pilot on Crew-9, and now he will take Zena Cardman's place as commander. Hague, a 49-year-old Space Force colonel, is a veteran of one long-duration mission on the International Space Station, and also experienced a rare in-flight launch abort in 2018 due to a failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket.

 

NASA announced the original astronaut assignments for the Crew-9 mission in January. Cardman, a 36-year-old geobiologist, would have been the first rookie astronaut without test pilot experience to command a NASA spaceflight. Three-time space shuttle flier Stephanie Wilson, 58, was the other astronaut removed from the Crew-9 mission.

 

The decision on who to fly on Crew-9 was a "really close call," said Bowersox, who oversees NASA's spaceflight operations directorate. "They were thinking very hard about flying Zena, but in this situation, it made sense to have somebody who had at least one flight under their belt."

 

Gorbunov, a 34-year-old Russian aerospace engineer making his first flight to space, will take the pilot's seat in the Crew Dragon spacecraft, although he remains officially designated a mission specialist. His remaining presence on the crew was preordained because of an international agreement between NASA and Russia's space agency that provides seats for Russian cosmonauts on US crew missions and US astronauts on Russian Soyuz flights to the space station.

 

Bowersox said NASA will reassign Cardman and Wilson to future flights.

 

Operational flexibility

This will also be the first launch of astronauts from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX's busiest launch pad. SpaceX has outfitted the launch pad with the equipment necessary to support launches of human spaceflight missions on the Crew Dragon spacecraft, including a more than 200-foot-tall tower and a crew access arm to allow astronauts to board spaceships on top of Falcon 9 rockets.

 

SLC-40 was previously based on a "clean pad" architecture, without any structures to service or access Falcon 9 rockets while they were vertical on the pad. SpaceX also installed slide chutes to give astronauts and ground crews an emergency escape route away from the launch pad in an emergency.

 

SpaceX constructed the crew tower last year and had it ready for the launch of a Dragon cargo mission to the space station in March. Saturday's launch will demonstrate the pad's ability to support SpaceX astronaut missions, which have previously all departed from Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, a few miles north of SLC-40.

 

Bringing human spaceflight launch capability online at SLC-40 gives SpaceX and NASA additional flexibility in their scheduling. For example, LC-39A remains the only launch pad configured to support flights of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX is now preparing LC-39A for a Falcon Heavy launch October 10 with NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which only has a window of a few weeks to depart Earth this year and reach its destination at Jupiter in 2030.

 

With SLC-40 now certified for astronaut launches, SpaceX and NASA teams are able to support the Crew-9 and Europa Clipper missions without worrying about scheduling conflicts.

 

Earlier this week, Hague and Gorbunov participated in a launch day dress rehearsal, when they had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with SLC-40. The launch pad has the same capabilities as LC-39A, but with a slightly different layout. SpaceX also test-fired the Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday evening, before lowering the rocket horizontal and moving it back into a hangar for safekeeping as the outer bands of Hurricane Helene moved through Central Florida.

 

Inside the hangar, SpaceX technicians discovered sooty exhaust from the Falcon 9's engines accumulated on the outside of the Dragon spacecraft during the test-firing. Ground teams wiped the soot off of the craft's solar arrays and heat shield, then repainted portions of the capsule's radiators around the edge of Dragon's trunk section.

 

"It's important that the radiators radiate heat in the proper way to space, so we had to put some some new paint on to get that back to the right emissivity and the right reflectivity and absorptivity of the solar radiation that hit those panels so it will reject the heat properly," said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX's vice president of build and flight reliability.

 

Gerstenmaier also outlined a new backup ability for the Crew Dragon spacecraft to safely splash down even if all of its parachutes fail to deploy on final descent back to Earth. This involves using the capsule's eight powerful SuperDraco thrusters, normally only used in the unlikely instance of a launch abort, to fire for a few seconds and slow Dragon's speed for a safe splashdown.

 

“The way it works is, in the case where all the parachutes totally fail, this essentially fires the thrusters at the very end," Gerstenmaier said. "That essentially gives the crew a chance to land safely, and essentially escape the vehicle. So it's not used in any partial conditions. We can land with one chute out. We can land with other failures in the chute system. But this is only in the case where all four parachutes just do not operate."

 

When SpaceX first designed the Crew Dragon spacecraft more than a decade ago, the company wanted to use the SuperDraco thrusters to enable the capsule to perform propulsive helicopter-like landings. Eventually, SpaceX and NASA agreed to change to a more conventional parachute-assisted splashdown.

 

The SuperDracos remained on the Crew Dragon spacecraft to push the capsule away from its Falcon 9 rocket during a catastrophic launch failure. The eight high-thrust engines burn hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants that combust when making contact with one another.

 

The backup option has been activated for some previous commercial Crew Dragon missions, according to Gerstenmaier. The capability "provides a tolerable landing for the crew," he added. "So it's a true deep, deep contingency. I think our philosophy is, rather than have a system that you don't use, even though it's not maybe fully certified, it gives the crew a chance to escape a really, really bad situation.”

 

Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager, said the emergency propulsive landing capability will be enabled for the return of the Crew-8 mission, which has been at the space station since March. With the arrival of Hague and Gorbunov on Crew-9—and the extension of Wilmore and Williams' mission—the Crew-8 mission is slated to depart the space station and splash down in early October.

US space officials do not like to talk about the perils of flying astronauts on the aging International Space Station, elements of which are now more than a quarter of a century old.

 

However, a new report confirms that NASA managers responsible for operating the space station are seriously concerned about a small Russian part of the station, essentially a tunnel that connects a larger module to a docking port, which is leaking.

 

Russian and US officials have known that this small PrK module, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module, has been leaking since September 2019. A new report, published Thursday by NASA's inspector general, provides details not previously released by the space agency that underline the severity of the problem.

New details about the leak

For example, in February of this year NASA identified an increase in the leak rate from less than 1 pound of atmosphere a day to 2.4 pounds a day, and in April this rate increased to 3.7 pounds a day. Despite years of investigation, neither Russian nor US officials have identified the underlying cause of the leak.

 

"Although the root cause of the leak remains unknown, both agencies have narrowed their focus to internal and external welds," the report, signed by Deputy Inspector General George A. Scott, states.

 

The plan to mitigate the risk is to keep the hatch on the Zvezda module leading to the PrK tunnel closed. Eventually, if the leak worsens further, this hatch might need to be closed permanently, reducing the number of Russian docking ports on the space station from four to three.

 

Publicly, NASA has sought to minimize concerns about the cracking issue because it remains, to date, confined to the PrK tunnel and has not spread to other parts of the station. Nevertheless, Ars reported in June that the cracking issue has reached the highest level of concern on the space agency's 5x5 "risk matrix" to classify the likelihood and consequence of risks to spaceflight activities. The Russian leaks are now classified as a "5" both in terms of high likelihood and high consequence.

 

At the time, NASA would not comment on, or confirm, the space agency's concerns about the risk matrix rating. However, the new report confirms the agency's concerns.

 

"In May and June 2024, ISS Program and Roscosmos officials met to discuss heightened concerns with the increased leak rate," the inspector general's report states. "The ISS Program subsequently elevated the Service Module Transfer Tunnel leak risk to the highest level of risk in its risk management system. According to NASA, Roscosmos is confident they will be able to monitor and close the hatch to the Service Module prior to the leak rate reaching an untenable level. However, NASA and Roscosmos have not reached an agreement on the point at which the leak rate is untenable."

An uncertain future in low-Earth orbit

The report comes as NASA is considering the future of the space station. The US space agency and Russia have an agreement to continue flying the station through 2028, and NASA would like to extend operations to 2030. NASA had anticipated that it would agree to this extension more than a year ago, but as of yet no agreement has been finalized.

 

Once the station reaches the end of its life, NASA intends to transition its activities in low-Earth orbit onto private space stations, and it has funded initial development work by Axiom Space, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, and Voyager Space. Northrop has since dropped out of the competition—determining that it would not be a profitable business. There is general uncertainty as to whether any of the private space station operators will be ready in 2030.

 

NASA's other potential option is extending the life of the space station beyond 2030, but this would require a lot of work to ensure the space station's structure remains viable and yet another extension agreement with Russia. The US partnership with that nation has been severely strained by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

 

"Extending the ISS past 2030 will require significant funding to operate and maintain the station, acceptance of increased risk stemming from its components and aging structures, and assurances of continued support from NASA’s international partners," the new report states. "Further complicating matters is the likelihood that NASA may continue to face a flat or reduced budget, inflation, and supply chain challenges."

 

Welcome to Edition 7.13 of the Rocket Report! While regulators hold up the next flight of the world's largest rocket, there's a lot of news this week in the small launch sector—some good, some bad. Meanwhile, Hurricane Helene has delayed the launch of the next crew to the International Space Station.

 

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.

A Chinese rocket narrowly misses a landing. A Chinese space startup conducted what it called a "high-altitude" test flight of its Nebula-1 rocket on Sunday, launching the vehicle to an altitude of about 5 kilometers or so before attempting to land it back at the Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia. The test flight went well for about two and a half minutes before the vehicle experienced a problem just before landing and erupted into a fireball, Ars reports. The company said it learned a lot from the test, completing 10 of its 11 major objectives. It plans to attempt another high-altitude test flight as early as November. Deep Blue Aerospace is one of several Chinese aerospace startups seeking to emulate the success that US-based SpaceX has had with vertical takeoff and vertical landing of rockets.

 

The video is amazing ... This is not the first vertical rocket landing test by a Chinese company, but what sets Deep Blue Aerospace apart from its competitors is its transparency. Within hours the company released a detailed statement about the test flight, its objectives, and a preliminary review of what went wrong. In addition to this statement, the company released images and video—including that from nearby drones—that included the fiery landing attempt and its aftermath.

 

Russia's "super weapon" failed spectacularly. Late last week, Russia's military planned to launch a Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on a test flight from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Imagery captured over the weekend from commercial satellites suggests the missile exploded before or during launch, Ars reports. This is at least the second time an RS-28 Sarmat missile has failed in less than two years, dealing a blow to the country's nuclear forces days after the head of the Russian legislature issued a veiled threat to use the missile against Europe if Western allies approved Ukraine's use of long-range weapons against Russia.

 

The secret is out ... Before the rise of the commercial space industry, knowledge of an accident like this one would be restricted to a small number of government officials. Commercial satellite imagery collected by Maxar and Planet show before-and-after views of the Sarmat missile silo at Plesetsk, a military base about 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow. The view from one of Maxar's imaging satellites Saturday revealed unmistakable damage at the launch site, with a large crater centered on the opening to the underground silo. The crater is roughly 200 feet (62 meters) wide, according to George Barros, a Russia and geospatial intelligence analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. "Extensive damage in and around the launch pad can be seen which suggests that the missile exploded shortly after ignition or launch," Barros wrote on X.

 

Wall Street pessimistic about Virgin Galactic. Morgan Stanley has significantly reduced its price target for Virgin Galactic, reflecting a more pessimistic outlook on the company's future, Investing.com reports. The investment bank slashed its target for the stock from $35 per share, citing ongoing challenges and a lack of near-term catalysts for the stock. The drastic price target adjustment comes amid Virgin Galactic's commercial flight hiatus, which is expected to last until approximately 2026, when the company aims to have its next-generation Delta-class spaceships ready to fly to suborbital space.

 

At a crossroads ... Virgin Galactic went public through a SPAC merger in 2019, but the company's stock price has been on a precipitous decline. Year to date, Virgin Galactic's stock price has fallen more than 87 percent and currently sits at roughly $6, not far off from Morgan Stanley's price target. Virgin Galactic doesn't have many near-term prospects for revenue after retiring its VSS Unity spaceplane in June.

 

Isar Aerospace confirms hot-fire testing is underway. German rocket builder Isar Aerospace is “currently performing hot fire tests of the first and second stages” that will be used for the inaugural flight of its Spectrum rocket, European Spaceflight reports. Founded in 2018, Isar's two-stage Spectrum rocket is designed to deliver payloads of up to 1,000 kilograms in low-Earth orbit. Isar has kept quiet about its technical progress, but a company spokesperson said all components for the first Spectrum rocket have arrived at Andøya Spaceport in Norway and "final preparations for the first test flight of Spectrum are in full swing."

 

Launch by the end of the year? ... European Spaceflight reported Isar's spokesperson did not specify a schedule for the first flight of the Spectrum rocket, but at a space conference earlier this month, the company's chief operating officer said teams were targeting the launch before the end of this year. Isar has a shot at becoming the first of a new wave of European launch startups to make an orbital launch attempt after another German company, Rocket Factory Augsburg, suffered a setback during hotfire testing in Scotland. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Firefly wins NASA launch contract. Firefly Aerospace won a contract to launch QuickSounder, a prototype for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s next generation of environmental satellites in low-Earth orbit, Space News reports. NASA awarded the contract to Texas-based Firefly on behalf of NOAA through the Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract. Through VADR, NASA awards fixed-price contracts for launches of small satellites. This is pretty big news for Firefly, and it's the company's first VADR launch contract award from NASA. Previously, NASA awarded VADR launch contracts to SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, and Phantom Space.

 

Paving the way ... The QuickSounder mission is the first project in NOAA's Near Earth Orbit Network and will be a pathfinder for future polar-orbiting weather satellites. Southwest Research Institute is building the spacecraft, which will host NOAA’s Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder Engineering Development Unit. The launch of the QuickSounder mission is scheduled for no earlier than February 2026. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

 

Japan backs Interstellar. The Japanese government has approved a small business innovation grant worth 4.63 billion yen ($32 million) to Interstellar Technologies, Payload reports. The SBIR grant is part of a Japanese government directive to achieve 30 domestic rocket launches per year by the early 2030s. While Japan already has domestic launch capabilities through Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the demand to get to space in the region far outstrips supply. The new grant follows a similar 2 billion yen ($13.8 million) SBIR award Japan's government approved for Interstellar last year. These awards are essentially seed funding to help the company develop its small satellite launcher, named the Zero. Interstellar has also found some success raising private capital, most recently a $21 million fundraising round announced in August.

 

Zeroing in on launch ... Interstellar has previously said it plans to launch the first Zero rocket in 2025, although the company hasn't provided any recent schedule updates. The two-stage Zero rocket will stand 105 feet (32 meters) tall with liquid-fueled engines burning methane and liquid oxygen. Zero's payload capacity will be approximately 1,760 pounds (800 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit, or 550 pounds (250 kilograms) to a Sun-synchronous polar orbit. Japan hosts a smaller number of launch startups than the United States, China, and even Europe, but the funding from the Japanese government suggests leaders there recognize the sector as a strategic asset. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

A new tenant in the Amazon. The French space agency CNES has selected reusable rocket developer MaiaSpace to use the former Soyuz launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, after operations of the Russian rocket ceased following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of ArianeGroup, is developing a two-stage rocket called Maia to deliver payloads of up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit in expendable mode. The rocket's first stage is designed for recovery and reuse, which will cut Maia's payload capacity. MaiaSpace targets its first launch of the Maia rocket in late 2025.

 

Time to get moving ... MaiaSpace CEO Yohann Leroy said in a statement that the company will invest several tens of millions of euros to modify the disused Soyuz launch pad for the Maia rocket. “The reuse of already existing launch pad infrastructures is perfectly in line with MaiaSpace’s approach to minimize as much as possible its environmental footprint, on Earth and in space,” Leroy said. “In addition, such a cost-effective solution will contribute to optimizing the level of its capital expenditures and therefore MaiaSpace’s business viability." Another European launch startup, Spain's PLD Space, plans to base its small satellite launcher at a separate launch pad at the Guiana Space Center, which is also home to Europe's legacy Ariane and Vega rocket families.

SpaceX's next crew mission readied for launch. NASA and SpaceX pushed ahead with planned prelaunch activities at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida Tuesday, even as the date of liftoff for the Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station was delayed due to expected impacts from Hurricane Helene, Spaceflight Now reports. The two-man crew for the Crew-9 mission—NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksander Gorbunov—put on their spacesuits and climbed inside SpaceX's Crew Dragon Freedom atop a Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday for a launch day dress rehearsal. After they exited the spacecraft, SpaceX's launch team loaded propellant into the Falcon 9 and fired its main engines for several seconds for a prelaunch hot-fire test.

 

Waiting on Helene ... After Tuesday's activities, SpaceX lowered the Falcon 9 rocket horizontally and moved it back inside a hangar for safekeeping as Hurricane Helene approached Florida's Gulf Coast. While the worst of the hurricane will be well west of Cape Canaveral, heavy rain and gusty winds are possible along the Space Coast. Once the storm passes, SpaceX will roll the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon spacecraft back to the launch pad, raise the vehicle vertically, and prepare for a launch opportunity as soon as Saturday. Hague and Gorbunov are the only two crew members on this mission. NASA removed two other astronauts from the flight to make room for the Dragon capsule to bring home astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who flew to the station on Boeing's troubled Starliner spacecraft and remained in orbit after officials decided to return Starliner to Earth uncrewed. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Japanese spysat soars from Tanegashima. Japan launched the classified IGS-Radar 8 satellite early Thursday with the second-to-last H-IIA rocket, Space News reports. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries managed the launch from Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan. MHI confirmed a successful conclusion to the launch with deployment of the IGS-Radar 8 satellite in Sun-synchronous orbit. This new spacecraft will join a fleet of optical and radar reconnaissance satellites operated by Japan's Cabinet Satellite Information Center.

 

Nearing retirement ... This was the 49th flight of Japan's H-IIA rocket, a medium-lift launcher in service since 2001. There is just one H-IIA rocket left to fly, and it should launch later this year with a satellite to monitor greenhouse gases from space. The H-IIA has been a success for Japan, with just one failure on its record. It is being replaced by the H3 rocket, which has now launched three times—twice successfully. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

FAA-SpaceX dispute simmers. The clash between SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration escalated this week, with Elon Musk calling for the head of the federal regulator to resign after he defended the FAA's oversight and fines levied against the commercial launch company, Ars reports. The FAA has said it doesn't expect to determine whether to approve a launch license for SpaceX's next Starship test flight until late November, two months later than the agency previously communicated to Musk's launch company. And the FAA announced $633,000 in fines against SpaceX last week for alleged violations of its launch license during two Falcon 9 rocket flights last year. Michael Whitaker, the FAA administrator, discussed the hold-up in Starship launch approvals in a congressional hearing this week. SpaceX responded by saying all of Whitaker's statements were inaccurate.

 

Shotwell weighs in … Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has suggested a political motive for the FAA's scrutiny of SpaceX. Musk has endorsed former President Donald Trump in this year's presidential election. "America is being smothered by legions of regulators, often inept & politically-driven," Musk wrote on X, his social media platform, referring to the FAA. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, took a different tone in a hearing with Texas lawmakers in Austin this week. “We are not afraid of regulation," she said. "It helps keep businesses thriving as well as the community safe... All I'm saying is, as this business grows, you will probably enhance the regulatory environment, and there's just a caution that you really want to make sure that regulation doesn't impede progress."

 

Blue Origin test-fires its upper stage. Twenty days after it rolled out to Blue Origin's launch site in Florida, the second stage of the massive New Glenn rocket underwent a successful hot-fire test on Monday, Ars reports. The second stage—known as GS2 for Glenn stage 2—ignited for 15 seconds as part of the "risk reduction" hot-fire test, the company said. The two BE-3U engines, fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen and each producing 173,000 pounds of thrust, burned with a nearly transparent flame that approached a temperature of 6,000° Fahrenheit. This marked the first time that Blue Origin, a space company founded by Jeff Bezos more than two decades ago, has integrated and fired an orbital rocket stage. After the test, Blue Origin said it is still tracking toward a November launch of the New Glenn rocket.

 

Much to do … With this important milestone behind them, Blue Origin engineers have a lot of work to do if the company wants to keep its November launch date. Crucially, the company must complete assembly of the first stage and then roll this vehicle out from its assembly building a couple of miles to Launch Complex-36, along the Atlantic Ocean. Then, the first and second stages will be mated. This is a complex endeavor, and as it will be the first time technicians and engineers from Blue Origin attempt the procedure, they will undoubtedly find some issues that need to be addressed. After the vehicles are integrated, the combined stack is due to undergo a short hot-fire test. Following a review of this data, the company is expected to launch the vehicle.

 

NASA is ready to buy Vulcans. United Launch Alliance is free to compete for NASA contracts with its new Vulcan rocket after a successful test flight earlier this year, ending a period where SpaceX was the only company competing for rights to launch the agency's large science missions, Ars reports. For several years, ULA was unable to bid for NASA launch contracts after the company sold all of its remaining Atlas V rockets to other customers, primarily for Amazon's Project Kuiper Internet network. ULA could not submit its new Vulcan rocket, which will replace the Atlas V, for NASA to consider in future launch contracts until the Vulcan completed at least one successful flight. That happened in January.

 

Pending certification ... NASA has not yet formally certified the Vulcan rocket to launch one of the agency's science missions, but that would not stop NASA from selecting Vulcan for a contract. Some of NASA's next big science missions up for launch contract awards include the nuclear-powered Dragonfly mission to explore Saturn's moon Titan and an asteroid-hunting telescope named NEO Surveyor. The second Vulcan flight next month will move ULA's rocket toward certification by the Space Force and NASA.

 

SpaceX recovers pieces from last Starship flight. While it waits for FAA approval to launch the next Starship test flight, SpaceX has retrieved wreckage of the Super Heavy booster from the last Starship mission out of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the San Antonio Express-News reports. SpaceX didn't reveal its plans ahead of time. A group of filmmakers and space enthusiasts noticed a 260-foot offshore services vessel, the HOS Ridgewind, was positioned over the location where the Super Heavy booster splashed down after launch June 6. This was the first time one of these enormous boosters survived descent and accomplished a soft splashdown in the water, clearing the way for SpaceX to try to return the rocket to land on the next flight.

 

From the deep ... Elon Musk posted a photo on X of a large section of the Super Heavy booster being raised from the Gulf of Mexico, appearing like a twisted mythological Kraken or leviathan. Or, as Musk wrote, "like the ruins of a futuristic, long-dead civilization." Many of the booster's 33 Raptor engines are still attached to the bottom part of the rocket, which the vessel transported back to the Port of Brownsville. SpaceX's motivation for retrieving the hardware from the ocean floor remains unclear.

Next three launches

Sept. 27: Long March 2D | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 10:35 UTC

Sept. 28: Falcon 9 | Crew-9 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:17 UTC

Sept. 30: Falcon 9 | OneWeb-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 06:49 UTC

Scientists at the University of Washington have re-created the distinctive spiral shapes of shark intestines in 3D-printed pipes in order to study the unique fluid flow inside the spirals. Their prototypes kept fluids flowing in one preferred direction with no need for flaps to control that flow and performed significantly better than so-called "Tesla valves," particularly when made of soft polymers, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

As we've reported previously, in 1920, Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla designed and patented what he called a "valvular conduit": a pipe whose internal design ensures that fluid will flow in one preferred direction, with no need for moving parts, making it ideal for microfluidics applications, among other uses. The key to Tesla's ingenious valve design is a set of interconnected, asymmetric, tear-shaped loops.

 

In his patent application, Tesla described this series of 11 flow-control segments as being made of "enlargements, recessions, projections, baffles, or buckets which, while offering virtually no resistance to the passage of fluid in one direction, other than surface friction, constitute an almost impassable barrier to its flow in the opposite direction." And because it achieves this with no moving parts, a Tesla valve is much more resistant to the wear and tear of frequent operation.

 

Tesla claimed that water would flow through his valve 200 times slower in one direction than another, which may have been an exaggeration. A team of scientists at New York University built a working Tesla valve in 2021, in accordance with the inventor's design, and tested that claim by measuring the flow of water through the valve in both directions at various pressures. The scientists found the water only flowed about two times slower in the nonpreferred direction.

 

Flow rate proved to be a critical factor. The valve offered very little resistance at slow flow rates, but once that rate increased above a certain threshold, the valve's resistance would increase as well, generating turbulent flows in the reverse direction, thereby "plugging" the pipe with vortices and disruptive currents. So it actually works more like a switch and can also help smooth out pulsing flows, akin to how AC/DC converters turn alternating currents into direct currents. That may even have been Tesla's original intent in designing the valve, given that his biggest claim to fame is inventing both the AC motor and an AC/DC converter.

It helps to be a shark

The Tesla valve also provides a useful model for how food moves through the digestive system of many species of shark. In 2020, Japanese researchers reconstructed micrographs of histological sections from a species of catshark into a three-dimensional model, offering a tantalizing glimpse of the anatomy of a scroll-type spiral intestine. The following year, scientists took CT scans of shark intestines and concluded that the intestines are naturally occurring Tesla valves.

 

That's where the work of UW postdoc Ido Levin and his co-authors comes in. They had questions about the 2021 research in particular. "Flow asymmetry in a pipe with no moving flaps has tremendous technological potential, but the mechanism was puzzling,” said Levin. “It was not clear which parts of the shark’s intestinal structure contributed to the asymmetry and which served only to increase the surface area for nutrient uptake.”

 

Levin et al. 3D-printed several pipes with an internal helical structure mimicking that of shark intestines, varying certain geometrical parameters like the number of turns or the pitch angle of the helix. It was admittedly an idealized structure, so the team was delighted when the first batch, made from rigid materials, produced the hoped-for flow asymmetry. After further fine-tuning of the parameters, the rigid printed pipes produced flow asymmetries that matched or exceeded Tesla valves.

But the researchers weren't done yet. "[Prior work] showed that if you connect these intestines in the same direction as a digestive tract, you get a faster flow of fluid than if you connect them the other way around. We thought this was very interesting from a physics perspective," said Levin last year while presenting preliminary results at the 67th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting. "One of the theorems in physics actually states that if you take a pipe, and you flow fluid very slowly through it, you have the same flow if you invert it. So we were very surprised to see experiments that contradict the theory. But then you remember that the intestines are not made out of steel—they’re made of something soft, so while fluid flows through the pipe, it deforms it.”

 

That gave Levin et al. the idea to try making their pipes out of soft deformable polymers—the softest commercially available ones that could also be used for 3D printing. That batch of pipes performed seven times better on flow asymmetry than any prior measurements of Tesla valves. And since actual shark intestines are about 100 times softer than the polymers they used, the team thinks they can achieve even better performance, perhaps with hydrogels when they become more widely available as 3D printing continues to evolve. The biggest challenge, per the authors, is finding soft materials that can withstand high deformations.

 

Finally, because the pipes are three-dimensional, they can accommodate larger fluid volumes, opening up applications in larger commercial devices. “Chemists were already motivated to develop polymers that are simultaneously soft, strong and printable,” said co-author Alshakim Nelson, whose expertise lies in developing new types of polymers. “The potential use of these polymers to control flow in applications ranging from engineering to medicine strengthens that motivation.”

 

PNAS, 2024. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2406481121 (About DOIs).

 

Battery-electric vehicles accounted for 8 percent of new vehicle sales in June and July of this year and should be above 8 percent for September, according to estimates from S&P Global Mobility. While growth has slowed from the 50 percent year over year we experienced in 2023, the trend is still positive, with market share increasing from 7 percent in the first three months of the year. That also has to be seen in the wider context of overall new vehicle sales, which are expected to drop by 12 percent this month.

 

"New vehicle sales remain stuck in neutral," said Chris Hopson, principal analyst at S&P Global Mobility. "The overall tenor of the auto demand environment remains one of consistent, but unmotivated volume levels as consumers in the market continue to be pressured by high interest rates and slow-to-recede vehicle prices, which are translating to high monthly payments."

 

The rapid growth of BEV sales in the US was, until recently, mostly a tale about Tesla. During the pandemic, it flourished, as car buyers could order their Tesla online, and the automaker displayed far more flexibility over supply-chain hiccups than its legacy rivals. Sales soared, but not as much as the share price.

 

But ambitious goals for the end of internal combustion engine sales in Europe and the US started looking shakier last year. In 2024, that turned into full-blown EV pessimism from across the industry.

 

General Motors was one of the first to get cold feet. Technical problems slowed the launches of new BEVs from Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC, and in late January, GM announced that it was shifting some resources away from BEVs and toward a new range of plug-in hybrids despite having previously abandoned its innovative and efficient PHEV powertrain technology.

 

Similarly, Ford also started to back away from BEVs, despite nearly doubling sales. Last month, the Blue Oval shuffled its product plans again, canceling some battery factories and a three-row electric SUV in favor of more hybrids.

 

And there has been big opposition from the very people expected to sell these new vehicles to consumers, with car dealers lobbying the White House successfully to soften impending fuel efficiency regulations.

 

Tesla has had the most torrid time of it, with a drop in sales that has seen its US BEV market share fall below 50 percent for the first time. An aging product lineup and the behavior of CEO Elon Musk have done much to erode Tesla's brand, particularly in the nation's largest market for electric vehicles.

 

However, even with Tesla's sales slump and some general month-to-month volatility, there are enough new BEVs arriving in showrooms, including the competitively priced Chevrolet Equinox and the long-awaited Volkswagen ID. Buzz, that S&P Global Mobility says that BEV sales are expected to grow throughout the rest of 2024.

 

Everyone loves to watch hummingbirds—tiny, brightly colored blurs that dart about, hovering at flowers and pugnaciously defending their ownership of a feeder.

 

But to the scientists who study them, hummingbirds offer much more than an entertaining spectacle. Their small size and blazing metabolism mean they live life on a knife-edge, sometimes needing to shut down their bodies almost completely just to conserve enough energy to survive the night—or to migrate thousands of miles, at times across open ocean.

 

Their nectar-rich diet leads to blood-sugar levels that would put a person in a coma. And their zipping, zooming flight sometimes generates g-forces high enough to make a fighter pilot black out. The more researchers look, the more surprises lurk within those tiny bodies, the smallest in the avian world.

 

“They’re the only bird in the world that can fly upside down and backwards,” says Holly Ernest, a conservation ecologist with the University of Wyoming. “They drink pure sugar and don’t die of diabetes.”

 

Ernest is one of a small number of researchers studying how hummingbirds cope with the extreme demands of their lifestyles. Here’s some of what scientists have learned about the unique adaptations of hummingbirds.

Put in the work

For years, most researchers had assumed that hummingbirds spent only about 30 percent of their day engaged in the energy-intensive business of flitting from flower to flower and guzzling nectar, while resting most of the other time. But when physiological ecologist Anusha Shankar looked closely, she found they’re often working a lot harder than that.

 

Shankar, now of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Hyderabad, India, tried to figure out how broad-billed hummingbirds in Southern Arizona spend their days. Using a mix of experimental methods, she measured the birds’ metabolic rate during various activities and estimated their total daily energy expenditure. Adding in previous published data, Shankar was able to calculate the per-minute energy cost of perching, flying and hovering—basically a bird’s three options for spending time.

 

She then inferred how much time the birds must have spent feeding versus perching over the course of a day.

 

“We ended up finding that it’s super variable,” Shankar says. During the early part of the summer when flowers are abundant, birds could meet their daily energy needs with as little as a few hours of feeding, spending as much as 70 percent of the day just perching, she found. But when flowers became scarcer after the arrival of the summer monsoon rains, birds at one site perched just 20 percent of the time and used the rest of the day for feeding.

 

“That’s 13 hours a day!” Shankar says. “There’s no way I can spend 13 hours a day running. I don’t know how they do it.”

Seriously chill

Hummingbirds have a trick to help them eke out their energy reserves: When a bird is in danger of running out of energy, it may go torpid at night, dropping its body temperature nearly to that of the surrounding air—sometimes just a few degrees above freezing. While in torpor, the bird appears almost comatose, unable to respond quickly to stimuli, and breathing only intermittently. The strategy can save up to 95 percent of hourly metabolic costs during cold nights, Shankar has calculated. That can be essential after days when a bird has fed less than usual, such as after a thunderstorm. It also helps birds save energy to pack on fat before migration.

 

Shankar is now studying which parts of their physiology hummingbirds prioritize during torpor, by looking to see which gene products they can’t do without. “If you’re a hummingbird functioning at 10 percent of your normal metabolism, what is that 10 percent that’s keeping you alive?” she asks.

 

One set of genes that the birds seem to leave untouched are those responsible for their internal clock. “It’s important for them to do things at the right time when they’re in torpor,” Shankar says. To be ready to meet the day, for example, the birds begin to rouse from their torpor about an hour before sunrise, well before visible light cues.

Deal with the sugar

To fuel their sky-high metabolic rate, hummingbirds suck down about 80 percent of their body weight in nectar each day. That’s the equivalent of a 150-pound person drinking nearly a hundred 20-ounce Cokes daily—and nectar is often much sweeter than a soda.

 

The human gut is incapable of absorbing sugar that fast, which is one reason why consuming too much soda or Halloween candy upsets the stomach, says Ken Welch, a comparative physiologist at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. Hummingbirds cope with the onslaught by having leaky guts so that sugars can enter the bloodstream between gut cells instead of only through them. This gets sugar out of the gut quickly, before it can cause upset. That rapid transport, and probably other adaptations as well, allows hummingbirds to reach blood sugar levels as much as six times higher than those seen in people, Welch says.

 

That much sugar in the blood leads to serious physiological problems in people. It causes more sugar molecules to glom onto body proteins, a process known as glycation; in the long run, excess glycation causes many of the complications of diabetes, such as nerve damage. It’s still unclear how hummingbirds avoid the problems of glycation, Welch says, but clues are beginning to emerge. One study, for example, found that bird proteins contain fewer of the amino acids most prone to glycation than mammal proteins, and those that remain are often tucked deep within the protein where they’re less exposed to circulating sugars.

Other, as yet unknown strategies to cope with high blood sugar may one day yield practical benefits for managing diabetes in people. “There could be a gold mine in the genome of the hummingbird,” says Welch.

Do a metabolic flip

By the end of its nightly fast, a hummingbird has nearly depleted its sugar stores—which poses an opposite metabolic challenge. “How does it wake up and fly?” Welch asks. “There’s nothing but fat available to burn.”

 

Hummingbirds have evolved to be remarkably nimble at switching their metabolism from sugar-burning to fat-burning, he has found. “This requires an enormous shift in the biochemical pathways that are involved,” Welch says—and it happens in mere minutes, far more quickly than other organisms can manage. “If we could have that kind of control over our fuel use, we’d love that.”

Save water—or not

Sugar isn’t the only challenge posed by a nectar-rich diet. After all, nectar is mostly water—and birds that drink in so much liquid must get rid of most of it, without losing electrolytes. As a result, hummingbird kidneys are highly adapted to recapture electrolytes before they are excreted. “They pee almost distilled water,” says Carlos Martinez del Rio, an ecophysiologist now retired from the University of Wyoming.

 

But that brings a further problem: If a hummingbird kept producing dilute urine overnight, it would die of dehydration before morning. To avoid that, hummingbirds shut down their kidneys every night. “They go into what, in a human, would be considered acute renal failure,” says Martinez del Rio. “Hummingbirds have to do this, or they would piss themselves to death.”

Fly high—gradually

The metabolic demands on a hummingbird are tough enough at sea level. But many species live at high elevations, where thin air contains less oxygen and offers less resistance to push against when hovering. Consider the giant hummingbird, the world’s largest, which can live in the Andes Mountains at elevations over 14,000 feet—higher than many helicopters can fly. To cope with these conditions, the birds have evolved more hemoglobin-rich blood, says Jessie Williamson, an ornithologist at Cornell University.

 

But some of the birds face an even steeper challenge, as Williamson found. Giant hummingbirds are large enough that researchers can attach satellite tracking tags, as well as smaller geolocators. So Williamson and her colleagues decided to fit the birds with trackers. After thousands of hours spent trying to capture birds with netting, the researchers managed to attach trackers to 57 birds using custom-made harnesses of elastic jewelry cord.

 

Though they recovered tracking data from only eight birds, even that tiny sample had a big surprise: Some of the birds lived in the high Andes year-round, while others—which turned out to be a separate, hitherto unrecognized species—migrate to the Andes annually from breeding grounds along the coast of Chile. That means they face not only the obvious challenges of a long migration—a round trip of roughly 5,000 miles—but also the need to adapt to thinner air as they travel.

 

Their secret? Do it gradually. “It looks a lot like how human mountaineers summit something like Mount Everest, with bursts of climbing and pauses to acclimatize,” Williamson says. “The journey takes months.”

 

As tracking technology becomes lighter and cheaper, researchers like Williamson hope to follow smaller hummingbird species as well. That, together with other progress in research technology, may offer plenty of new surprises about the biology of these tiny, amazing birds.

 

Bob Holmes is a science writer based in Edmonton, Canada, and a special contributor for Knowable Magazine.

 

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

 

Knowable Magazine, 2024. DOI: 10.1146/knowable-092524-1 (About DOIs)

 

New York is facing an unusual boom in mosquitoes toting the deadly eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) virus, which has already led to one rare death in the state and a declaration of an "imminent threat" by officials.

 

While the state's surveillance system typically picks up EEE-positive mosquitoes in two or three counties each year, this year there have been 15 affected counties, which are scattered all across New York, State Health Commissioner James McDonald said this week.

 

"Eastern equine encephalitis is different this year," McDonald said, noting the deadly nature of the infection, which has a mortality rate of between 30 and 50 percent. "Mosquitoes, once a nuisance, are now a threat," McDonald added. "I urge all New Yorkers to prevent mosquito bites by using insect repellents, wearing long-sleeved clothing, and removing free-standing water near their homes. Fall is officially here, but mosquitoes will be around until we see multiple nights of below-freezing temperatures."

 

On Monday, McDonald issued a Declaration of an Imminent Threat to Public Health for EEE, and Governor Kathy Hochul announced statewide actions to prevent infections. At the same time as the declaration, the officials reported the death of a New Yorker who developed EEE. The case, which was confirmed in Ulster County on September 20, is the state's first EEE case since 2015.

 

The disease is very rare in New York. Between 1971 and 2024, there were only 12 cases of EEE reported in the state; seven cases were fatal.

Rare but deadly

EEE is generally rare in the US, with an average of only 11 cases reported per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus lurks in wild birds and spreads to people and other animals via mosquitoes. The virus is particularly deadly in horses—as its name suggests—with mortality rates up to 90 percent. In people, most bites from a mosquito carrying the EEE virus do not lead to EEE. In fact, the CDC estimates that only about 4–5 percent of infected people develop the disease; most remain asymptomatic.

 

Fo those who develop EEE, the virus travels from the mosquito bite into the lymph system and spreads from there to cause a systemic infection. Initial symptoms are unspecific, including fever, headache, malaise, chills, joint pain, nausea, and vomiting. This can progress to inflammation of the brain and neurological symptoms, including altered mental state and seizures. Children under the age of 15 and adults over the age of 50 are most at risk.

 

The CDC estimates that about 30 percent of people who develop severe EEE die of the disease. But, with small numbers of cases over time, the reported mortality rates can vary. In Massachusetts, for instance, about 50 percent of the cases have been fatal. Among those who survive neuro-invasive disease, many are left severely disabled, and some die within a few years due to complications. There is no vaccine for EEE and no specific treatments.

Overall numbers

While New York seems to be experiencing an unusual surge of EEE-positive mosquitoes, the country as a whole is not necessarily seeing an uptick in cases. Only 10 cases from six states have been reported to the CDC this year. That count does not include the New York case, which would bring the total to 11, around the country's average number of cases per year.

 

In addition to New York, the states that have reported cases are Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. Most cases have been in the Northeast, where cases are typically reported between mid-June and early October before freezing temperatures kill off mosquito populations.

 

The death in New York is at least the second EEE death this year. In August, New Hampshire's health department reported the death of an EEE case, and local media reports identified the person as a previously healthy 41-year-old man from Hampstead.

 

EEE gained attention last month when a small town in Massachusetts urged residents to follow an evening curfew to avoid mosquito bites.  The move came after the state announced its first EEE case this year (the state's case count is now at four) and declared a "critical risk level" in four communities.

 

Between 2003 and 2023, the highest tally of cases in a year was in 2019, when states reported 38 EEE cases.

 

Software fixes are now responsible for more than 1 in 5 automotive recalls. That's the key finding from a decade's worth of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall data, according to an analysis from the law firm DeMayo Law. While that's a sign of growing inconvenience for drivers, the silver lining is that a software patch is usually a much quicker fix than something requiring hardware replacement.

 

"Our analysis suggests we're witnessing a shift in how automotive recalls are handled. The growing number of software-related recalls, coupled with the ability to address issues remotely, could revolutionize the recall process for both manufacturers and vehicle owners," said a spokesperson for DeMayo Law.

 

In 2014, 34 of 277 automotive recalls were software fixes. The percentage of software recalls floated around 12–13 percent (apart from a spike in 2015) before growing steadily from 2020. In 2021, 16 percent of automotive recalls (61 out of 380) were for software. In 2022, almost 22 percent of recalls were software fixes (76 out of 348), and last year topped 23 percent (82 out of 356).

 

Leading the way was Chrysler, with 82 different software recalls since 2014. Ford (66 recalls) and Mercedes-Benz (60) are the two runner-ups. Meanwhile, Tesla ranks only eighth, with 26 software recalls since 2014, which puts it on par with Hyundai (25) and Kia (25).

 

Electrical systems were the most common problem area, which makes sense—this is also the second-most common hardware fix recall and would probably be the top if it were not for the massive Takata airbag recall, which has affected more than 100 million cars worldwide.

 

The other common systems affected by recalls requiring software remedies were related to backover prevention—whether that be reversing cameras, collision warnings, or automatic emergency braking—airbags, powertrains, and exterior lighting.

 

It should be noted that not all recalls involving a software fix are to solve a software problem. Take the recent Jaguar I-Pace recall, which was triggered by battery fires caused by battery cells damaged during assembly. Jaguar's fix? A software update that sets a new, lower limit to the storage capacity of the battery pack, preventing it from fully charging to 100 percent.

 

While many older vehicles from legacy OEMs require a trip to the dealer to be patched, more and more new models can be updated over the air, meaning that owners can have the recall performed from the comfort of their own parking space, provided they have connectivity. Even this isn't hassle-free, though, as some Rivian owners found out to their dismay late last year when an update broke some infotainment screens.

Expect this to become more common

To hear carmakers tell it, customers see their smartphone and games console and want that kind of entertainment built into their next car. (Whether that's true is up for debate, however.) Software competency is a new battleground between global automakers, and the fear of Chinese brands is strong despite an impending ban on Chinese-connected car software, which looks likely to be put into effect in a couple of years.

 

So, it's highly likely the trend of fixing product flaws with software will only escalate, particularly with the introduction of software-defined vehicles. This represents a clean-sheet approach to designing a car, with a handful of powerful computers replacing tens of dozens of black boxes, each with a single function. Which is great when it all works, but it's a headache when there are problems.

 

The H5N1 bird flu appears to be stampeding through dairy farms in California, the country's largest milk producer. Over the weekend, the total number of confirmed infected cow herds stunningly doubled, going from 17 last Thursday to 34 Monday morning, according to state and federal officials.

 

With the new tally, California now ranks second among all affected states for having the most herds with avian influenza. Only Colorado, which has adopted bulk milk-tank surveillance, has more, with 64 herds confirmed. California's high ranking is despite the fact that it only reported its first three infected herds on August 30, while the dairy outbreak was first confirmed on March 25 and thought to have begun late last year.

 

To date, 232 herds in 14 states have been infected with the bird flu.

 

In an announcement last week, California officials said the batch of herds that tested positive were "targeted for testing due to elevated risks from their recent connections with the initial affected premises." They called the positive results "not unexpected" and reported that they fit with the state's plans of finding infections as early as possible. "Early detection provides the opportunity to work with farms to quickly implement enhanced biosecurity, cow care, and employee protection."

 

When the state's first infected herds were announced, California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross touted the state's preparations and readiness. "Our extensive experience with [highly pathogenic avian influenza] in poultry has given us ample preparation and expertise to address this incident," Ross said. She further assured dairy farmers that they are approaching the outbreak with the "utmost urgency."

Troubling transmission

The news comes as public health experts are concerned about a puzzling case of H5 bird flu in a person in Missouri, who had underlying medical conditions but no known exposure to animals. The case is the 14th human infection amid the dairy cow outbreak this year. All of the 13 prior infections were in farmworkers known to be exposed to infected animals: nine in poultry workers and four in dairy workers. But Missouri has not reported H5N1 in dairy herds and hasn't had recent outbreaks in poultry facilities, either.

 

While the Missouri case has recovered, health officials are stumped about how that person became infected. In a press briefing earlier this month, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested the case could be a "one-off." But, the CDC has reported that another person in the household with the Missouri case fell ill at the same time, suggesting a possible common exposure to the virus. That household contact was not tested for flu and has also since recovered. The CDC is now conducting serological testing to see if the household member has developed antibodies against the bird flu, indicating a previous infection.

 

The CDC has also reported that a health care worker who interacted with the patient fell ill, but tested negative for flu. On Friday, the CDC reported that a second health care worker became ill with a mild respiratory illness after interacting with the Missouri case but was not tested for flu and recovered before the investigation began. The CDC will offer serological testing for that health care worker, too.

 

While there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission yet, health experts fear that there is not enough testing—of case contacts, animals, or farmworkers—and transmission is going unseen. As the wily influenza virus spreads across the country to new mammalian species, it gains new opportunities to adapt to humans and cause more severe disease. Influenza experts have long feared that the virus has pandemic potential.

 

A Chinese space startup conducted what it called a "high-altitude" test flight of its Nebula-1 rocket on Sunday, launching the vehicle to an altitude of about 5 km or so before attempting to land it back at the Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia.

 

The test flight went well for about two and a half minutes before the vehicle experienced a problem just before landing and erupted into a fireball.

 

This is not the first vertical rocket landing test by a Chinese company, but what sets Deep Blue Aerospace apart from its competitors is its transparency. Within hours the company released a detailed statement about the test flight, its objectives, and a preliminary review of what went wrong.

 

In addition to this statement, the company released images and video—including that from nearby drones—that included the fiery landing attempt and its aftermath. This is some of the most incredible rocket footage I've ever seen and a welcome new trend toward transparency from Chinese space companies.

 

The company said it learned a lot from the test, completing 10 of its 11 major objectives. It plans to attempt another high-altitude test flight as early as November.

 

Deep Blue Aerospace is one of several Chinese aerospace startups—including Linkspace, iSpace, Galactic Energy, and Space Pioneer, among others—seeking to emulate the success that US-based SpaceX has had with vertical take-off and vertical landing of rockets. These experiments mimic the groundbreaking experiments SpaceX performed with its Grasshopper test vehicle more than a decade ago at the company's engine test site in McGregor, Texas.

 

Deep Blue's Nebula-1 rocket has a diameter of 3.35 meters (11 feet) which is slightly smaller than SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket (12 feet in diameter). It will be powered by kerosene-liquid oxygen fueled engines, similar to the Falcon 9. Given the setback this weekend, an orbital test flight of Nebula-1 is unlikely to occur before sometime in 2025.

 

Whereas SpaceX conducted its vertical landing tests after the Falcon 9 had begun launching customers into orbit, Deep Blue Aerospace is testing prior to orbital launches in an attempt to begin landing its first stages from the very beginning. Given what we've seen so far, it should be fun to watch.

 

Our planet is choking on plastics. Some of the worst offenders, which can take decades to degrade in landfills, are polypropylene—which is used for things such as food packaging and bumpers—and polyethylene, found in plastic bags, bottles, toys, and even mulch.

 

Polypropylene and polyethylene can be recycled, but the process can be difficult and often produces large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane. They are both polyolefins, which are the products of polymerizing ethylene and propylene, raw materials that are mainly derived from fossil fuels. The bonds of polyolefins are also notoriously hard to break.

 

Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have come up with a method of recycling these polymers that uses catalysts that easily break their bonds, converting them into propylene and isobutylene, which are gasses at room temperature. Those gasses can then be recycled into new plastics.

 

“Because polypropylene and polyethylene are among the most difficult and expensive plastics to separate from each other in a mixed waste stream, it is crucial that [a recycling] process apply to both polyolefins,” the research team said in a study recently published in Science.

Breaking it down

The recycling process the team used is known as isomerizing ethenolysis, which relies on a catalyst to break down olefin polymer chains into their small molecules. Polyethylene and polypropylene bonds are highly resistant to chemical reactions because both of these polyolefins have long chains of single carbon-carbon bonds. Most polymers have at least one carbon-carbon double bond, which is much easier to break.

 

While isomerizing ethenolysis had been tried by the same researchers before, the previous catalysts were expensive metals that did not remain pure long enough to convert all of the plastic into gas. Using sodium on alumina followed by tungsten oxide on silica proved much more economical and effective, even though the high temperatures required for the reaction added a bit to the cost

 

In both plastics, exposure to sodium on alumina broke each polymer chain into shorter polymer chains and created breakable carbon-carbon double bonds at the ends. The chains continued to break over and over. Both then underwent a second process known as olefin metathesis. They were exposed to a stream of ethylene gas flowing into a reaction chamber while being introduced to tungsten oxide on silica, which resulted in the breakage of the carbon-carbon bonds.

 

The reaction breaks all the carbon-carbon bonds in polyethylene and polypropylene, with the carbon atoms released during the breaking of these bonds ending up attached to molecules of ethylene.“The ethylene is critical to this reaction, as it is a co-reactant,” researcher R.J. Conk, one of the authors of the study, told Ars Technica. “The broken links then react with ethylene, which removes the links from the chain. Without ethylene, the reaction cannot occur.”

 

The entire chain is catalyzed until polyethylene is fully converted to propylene, and polypropylene is converted to a mixture of propylene and isobutylene.

 

This method has high selectivity—meaning it produces a large amount of the desired product. That means propylene derived from polyethylene, and both propylene and isobutylene derived from polypropylene. Both of these chemicals are in high demand, since propylene is an important raw material for the chemical industry, while isobutylene is a frequently used monomer in many different polymers, including synthetic rubber and a gasoline additive.

Mixing it up

Because plastics are often mixed at recycling centers, the researchers wanted to see what would happen if polypropylene and polyethylene underwent isomerizing ethenolysis together. The reaction was successful, converting the mixture into propylene and isobutylene, with slightly more propylene than isobutylene.

 

Mixtures also typically include contaminants in the form of additional plastics. So the team also wanted to see whether the reaction would still work if there were contaminants. So they experimented with plastic objects that would otherwise be thrown away, including a centrifuge and a bread bag, both of which contained traces of other polymers besides polypropylene and polyethylene. The reaction yielded only slightly less propylene and isobutylene than it did with unadulterated versions of the polyolefins.

 

Another test involved introducing different plastics, such as PET and PVC, to polypropylene and polyethylene to see if that would make a difference. These did lower the yield significantly. If this approach is going to be successful, then all but the slightest traces of contaminants will have to be removed from polypropylene and polyethylene products before they are recycled.

 

While this recycling method sounds like it could prevent tons upon tons of waste, it will need to be scaled up enormously for this to happen. When the research team increased the scale of the experiment, it produced the same yield, which looks promising for the future. Still, we’ll need to build considerable infrastructure before this could make a dent in our plastic waste.

 

“We hope that the work described…will lead to practical methods for…[producing] new polymers,” the researchers said in the same study. “By doing so, the demand for production of these essential commodity chemicals starting from fossil carbon sources and the associated greenhouse gas emissions could be greatly reduced.”

 

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adq731

As power utilities and industrial companies seek to use more renewable energy, the market for grid-scale batteries is expanding rapidly. Alternatives to lithium-ion technology may provide environmental, labor, and safety benefits. And these new chemistries can work in markets like the electric grid and industrial applications that lithium doesn't address well.

 

“I think the market for longer-duration storage is just now emerging,” said Mark Higgins, chief commercial officer and president of North America at Redflow. “We have a lot of… very rapid scale-up in the types of projects that we’re working on and the size of projects that we’re working on. We’ve deployed about 270 projects around the world. Most of them have been small off-grid or remote-grid systems. What we’re seeing today is much more grid-connected types of projects.”

 

“Demand… seems to be increasing every day,” said Giovanni Damato, president of CMBlu Energy. Media projections of growth in this space are huge. “We're really excited about the opportunity to… just be able to play in that space and provide as much capacity as possible.”

 

New industrial markets are also becoming active. Chemical plants, steel plants, and metal processing plants have not been able to deploy renewable energy well so far due to batteries’ fire hazards, said Mukesh Chatter, co-founder and CEO of Alsym Energy. “When you already are generating a lot of heat in these plants and there’s a risk of fire to begin with, you don’t want to deploy any battery that’s flammable.”

 

Chatter said that the definition of long-duration energy storage is not agreed upon by industry organizations. Still, there are a number of potential contenders developing storage for this market. Here, we’ll look at Redflow, CMBlu Energy, and BASF Stationary Energy Storage.

Zinc-bromine batteries

Redflow has been manufacturing zinc-bromine flow batteries since 2010, Higgins said. These batteries do not require the critical minerals that lithium-ion batteries need, which are sometimes from parts of the world that have unsafe labor practices or geopolitical risks. The minerals for these zinc-bromine batteries are affordable and easy to obtain.

 

Flow batteries contain liquid or gaseous electrolytes that flow through cells from tanks, according to the International Flow Battery Forum website:

 

The interconversion of energy between electrical and stored chemical energy takes place in the electrochemical cell. This consists of two half cells separated by a porous or an ion-exchange membrane. The battery can be constructed of low-cost and readily available materials, such as thermoplastics and carbon-based materials. Many parts of the battery can be recycled. Electrolytes can be recovered and reused, leading to low cost of ownership.

Building these can be quite different from other batteries. “I would say that our manufacturing process is much more akin to… an automotive manufacturing process than to [an] electronics manufacturing process… like [a] lithium-ion battery,” Higgins said. “Essentially, it is assembling batteries that are made out of plastic tanks, pumps, fans, [and] tubing. It’s a flow battery, so it’s a liquid that flows through the system that goes through an electrical stack that has cells in it, which is where most of Redflow’s intellectual property resides. The rest of the battery is all… parts that we can obtain just about anywhere.”

 

The charging and discharging happen inside an electrical stack. In the stack, zinc is plated onto a carbon surface during the charging process. It is then dissolved into the liquid during the discharging process, Higgins said.

 

The zinc-bromine electrolyte is derived from an industrial chemical that has been used in the oil and gas sector for a long time, Higgins added.

 

This battery cannot catch fire, and all of its parts are recyclable, Higgins told Ars. “You don’t have any of the toxic materials that you do in a lithium-ion battery.” The electrolyte liquid can be reused in other batteries. If it’s contaminated, it can be used by the oil and gas industry. If the battery leaks, the contents can be neutralized quickly and are subsequently not hazardous.

 

“Right now, we manufacture our batteries in Thailand,” Higgins said. “The process and wages are all fair wages and we follow all relevant environmental and labor standards.” The largest sources of bromine come from the Dead Sea or within the United States. The zinc comes from Northern Europe, the United States, or Canada.

 

The batteries typically use an annual maintenance program to replace components that wear out or fail, something that’s not possible with many other battery types. Higgins estimated that two to four years down the road, this technology will be “completely competitive with lithium-ion” from a cost perspective. Some government grants have helped with the commercialization process.

Redox-flow batteries go Blu

A second company, CMBlu Energy, is now starting to take commercial orders for its Organic SolidFlow batteries, Damato, its president, told Ars. It has already deployed several smaller systems in Europe. And it recently announced that it is partnering with Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory to study how these batteries can be used in microgrids.

 

Organic SolidFlow batteries are redox-flow batteries with a twist, Damato said. They have stationary solids in their tanks, which increases their energy-storage capacity compared to conventional flow batteries. They use organic (carbon-based) polymers that hold and transfer charge, which can be sourced from anywhere. This means that they do not require any materials that come from conflict countries that have unsafe working conditions.

 

The batteries are designed in modular units that are around the same size as standing desks at their highest position, Damato said, with four battery stacks connected in series. The modules contain storage tanks and cell stacks. Each cell in the stack has a membrane that separates its two electrodes. The number of cells in a stack can be customized. A module weighs around two tons and supplies power for five to 10 hours.

 

Thermal runaway is a non-issue with this redox-flow battery because of its inherent chemistry and the fact that it uses an aqueous solution, Damato said.

 

For maintenance, CMBlu Energy recommends regular visual inspections, including checking the pumps and valves and looking for leaks—the maintenance requirements are relatively minimal. Some of the performance monitoring for leaks is automated, along with data collection on pressure and temperature. The electrolyte needs to be rejuvenated approximately every 10 years, depending on the environmental conditions of the installation.

 

Since the batteries are made of plastic, they can be recycled similarly to other plastics. Damato said this is cost-effective. The support structures and copper wiring are also recyclable, as are the solid and liquid electrolytes.

Sulfur-sodium batteries are hot

A third company, BASF SES, is selling a battery made by Japanese manufacturer NGK Insulators, the NAS Battery, that has sulfur as the positive electrode and sodium as the negative one. The electrolyte is a beta-alumina ceramic tube. While the battery discharges, the sulfur is reduced to polysulfide, and the sodium is oxidized; this process is reversed during charging. When the battery is in use, it runs at around 300° C, with both the sodium and the sulfur in their liquid state.

 

According to Justin Williams, senior account executive at Trevi Communications, “Beta-alumina solid electrolyte (BASE) is sodium polyaluminate. The material has a specific crystal structure [that] enables very fast ion transport. It is used as an ion conductor with high selectivity.”

 

There have been over 250 projects utilizing these batteries, according to Caroline Brannock, senior battery technology sales manager at BASF SES.

 

The batteries are packaged in 20-foot-long shipping containers that has six modules that collectively provide 1.45 megawatt-hours, Brannock said. The shipping containers are usually used in groups of four.

 

This technology does not make use of any of the critical minerals that are problematic in lithium-ion batteries. In addition to sodium and sulfur, NGK Insulators uses oxygen, steel, carbon, and silica-based materials, all of which are inexpensive and widely available. Brannock said the details of how these are combined during manufacturing is confidential.

 

The safety tests for the NAS Battery included short-circuiting the modules, putting the modules in fires, and submerging them, none of which caused leakage or fires in the modules. Lighting an individual cell on fire resulted in similarly safe results. A drop test showed that only the enclosure was damaged, and no fire or leaks occurred.

 

“When we're talking about climate resiliency, the battery can withstand a great deal,” Brannock said. She mentioned that it tolerates heat and cold as well as high-salinity environments. The container also gives it a layer of protection.

 

In Japan, NGK Insulators partners with companies that recycle end-of-life batteries. Installations outside Japan are only just reaching end-of-life, and the company is currently identifying local recycling partners.

 

Kat Friedrich is a former mechanical engineer who started out as an applied mathematics, engineering, and physics major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has completed a graduate degree focusing on science and environmental journalism and has edited seven news publications, two of which she co-founded. She is the editor-in-chief of the energy magazine Solar Today. 

 

Global temperature records go back less than two centuries. But that doesn't mean we have no idea what the world was doing before we started building thermometers. There are various things—tree rings, isotope ratios, and more—that register temperatures in the past. Using these temperature proxies, we've managed to reconstruct thousands of years of our planet's climate.

 

But going back further is difficult. Fewer proxies get preserved over longer times, and samples get rarer. By the time we go back past a million years, it's difficult to find enough proxies from around the globe and the same time period to reconstruct a global temperature. There are a few exceptions, like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a burst of sudden warming about 55 million years ago, but few events that old are nearly as well understood.

 

Now, researchers have used a combination of proxy records and climate models to reconstruct the Earth's climate for the last half-billion years, providing a global record of temperatures stretching all the way back to near the Cambrian explosion of complex life. The record shows that, with one apparent exception, carbon dioxide and global temperatures have been tightly linked. Which is somewhat surprising, given the other changes the Earth has experienced over this time.

Past climates

The work done here by an international team involves a combination of proxy data and climate models. While there are a number of land-based proxies, they tend to come with very large uncertainties. So, the researchers focused on a single type of proxy: the ratio of oxygen isotopes found in the shells of sea organisms. There are some questions regarding the accuracy of these, as using them requires that the ratio of these isotopes in the oceans has remained constant over time.

 

To compensate for that, the researchers used two methods of converting these proxies into temperatures. One method assumed that oxygen isotope ratios in seawater have remained constant; the second method used a slow, constant change over the time period covered.

 

Climate models provide a way of converting these proxies, which typically come from a single geographic location, to a global temperature. By using details like the continental configuration and carbon dioxide levels, the models can estimate which reasonable global temperatures are consistent with the proxy data, meaning a specific temperature at a specific location on the globe. The researchers used an ensemble of climate models so that the results weren't dependent on any particular implementation of atmospheric physics.

 

The results, which the researchers call PhanDA, estimate global temperatures over the last 485 million years, going back to the end of the Cambrian, the period that saw the diversification of the major groups of present-day animal life.

 

So, what does PhanDA look like? One key feature is that it overlaps with the Cenozoic, which started with the mass extinction that ended all non-avian dinosaur lineages. We've got a better history of the Cenozoic climates, so these provide an important test of whether PhanDA's temperatures match those obtained independently. The consistency between them is an important validation of the new work.

 

Overall, the researchers find that the global mean temperature has likely varied from a low of about 11° C, seen in the recent glacial periods, up to a high of 36° C, seen about 90 million years ago, though similar extremes were seen during the PETM. Other major climate events, such as the warming produced in the wake of the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, showed up in the record. There are both long periods of warming trends (such as one that covered most of the Mesozoic) alternating with cooling (which has dominated the present Cenozoic). The researchers suggest these are driven by the assembly and breakup of supercontinents.

 

More of this period was spent in warm greenhouse climates (41 percent of the period) than in icehouse climates (31 percent). The researchers found that most of the difference between these climates occur in the polar regions. Changes do occur in the tropics, but they're considerably smaller in magnitude. So, during an icehouse period, the difference between equatorial regions and high latitudes is on the order of 30° to 50° C. By contrast, during hothouse periods, the equator-to-pole difference tended to be on the order of 15° to 25° C.

Heating the globe

One thing that is clear from comparing this record with carbon dioxide is that there's a close correlation between the two. There are some exceptions, but the two tend to move in parallel throughout this entire period. The big exception is in the Cretaceous (a period dominated by dinosaurs), which saw a hothouse climate develop, while carbon dioxide levels appeared to remain flat. We've known about this discrepancy for a while but don't have a good explanation for it; the new research doesn't really change that situation.

 

The strong correlation between carbon dioxide and temperatures is also somewhat surprising because we know there's been an additional significant climate influence over this period: the Sun. As the Sun has been warming up as it ages, the amount of energy reaching the Earth from the Sun should have increased by 4.2 percent over the period covered by this study. So, there should be an additional warming trend superimposed over the fluctuations in carbon dioxide. But the study doesn't see it.

 

The researchers suggest a couple of other factors that might offset this trend. For example, the fraction of the planet covered by oceans has trended downward during this same period, although there have been significant fluctuations over time. Since the oceans absorb more sunlight, that may partly offset the Sun heating up. Similarly, the ecosystems present early in the period covered by this study might have produced more methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So, in contrast to the confusion about the Cretaceous hothouse, we seem to have a lot of potential explanations for this oddity.

 

Two findings in this study may have implications for our future climate. The first is a measure of the long-term sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of carbon dioxide. They come up with a value of about 8° C of warming for the doubling. And that's... a lot. It's important to remember that this is a separate measure from the IPCC's estimation of the climate's sensitivity to CO₂ (which is 2–5° C). Here, any slow-acting feedbacks have millions of years to influence the climate. And this work's estimate also includes the unknown influences described above (other greenhouse gases, solar changes, etc.).

 

Beyond all the information produced by this work, the most important thing is that the researchers made it easy to build on. All the data and software have been made available to the research community, and the software has been structured to make it easy to incorporate additional proxy data into the analysis. So, as researchers get additional estimates of past temperatures from anywhere around the globe, they can be plugged into this work to potentially refine the picture painted by this one paper.

 

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adk3705  (About DOIs).

 

A United Nations report released Thursday proposes having the international body oversee the first truly global effort for monitoring and governing artificial intelligence.

 

The report, produced by the UN secretary general’s High Level Advisory Body on AI, recommends the creation of a body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to gather up-to-date information on AI and its risks.

 

The report calls for a new policy dialog on AI so that the UN’s 193 members can discuss risks and agree upon actions. It further recommends that the UN take steps to empower poorer nations, especially those in the global south, to benefit from AI and contribute to its governance. These should include, it says, creating an AI fund to back projects in these nations, establishing AI standards and data-sharing systems, and creating resources such as training to help nations with AI governance. Some of the report’s recommendations could be facilitated by the Global Digital Compact, an existing plan to address digital and data divides between nations. It finally suggests creating an AI office within the UN dedicated to coordinating existing efforts within the UN to meet the report’s goals.

 

“You’ve got an international community that agrees there are both harms and risks as well as opportunities presented by AI,” says Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who served on the UN advisory body at the recommendation of the White House and State Department.

 

The remarkable abilities demonstrated by large language models and chatbots in recent years have sparked hopes of a revolution in economic productivity but have also prompted some experts to warn that AI may be developing too rapidly and could soon become difficult to control. Not long after ChatGPT appeared, many scientists and entrepreneurs signed a letter calling for a six-month pause on the technology’s development so that the risks could be assessed.

 

More immediate concerns include the potential for AI to automate disinformation, generate deepfake video and audio, replace workers en masse, and exacerbate societal algorithmic bias on an industrial scale. “There is a sense of urgency, and people feel we need to work together,” Nelson says.

 

The UN proposals reflect high interest among policymakers worldwide in regulating AI to mitigate these risks. But it also comes as major powers—especially the United States and China—jostle to lead in a technology that promises to have huge economic, scientific, and military benefits, and as these nations stake out their own visions for how it should be used and controlled.

 

In March, the United States introduced a resolution to the UN calling on member states to embrace the development of “safe, secure, and trustworthy AI.” In July, China introduced a resolution of its own that emphasized cooperation in the development of AI and making the technology widely available. All UN member states signed both agreements.

 

“AI is part of US-China competition, so there is only so much that they are going to agree on,” says Joshua Meltzer, an expert at the Brookings Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank. Key differences, he says, include what norms and values should be embodied by AI and protections around privacy and personal data.

 

Differences between wealthy nations’ views on AI is already causing market fissures. The EU has introduced sweeping AI regulations with data usage controls that have prompted some US companies to limit the availability of their products there.

 

The hands-off approach adopted by the US government has led California to propose its own AI rules. Earlier versions of these regulations were criticized by AI companies based there as too onerous, for example in how they would require firms to report their activities to the government, resulting in the rules being watered down.

 

Meltzer adds that AI is evolving at such a rapid pace that the UN will not be able to manage global cooperation alone. “There is clearly an important role for the UN when it comes to AI governance, but it needs to be part of a distributed kind of architecture,” with individual nations also working on it directly, he says. “You’ve got a fast-evolving technology, and the UN is clearly not set up to handle that.”

 

The UN report seeks to establish common ground between member states by emphasizing the importance of human rights. “Anchoring the analysis in terms of human rights is very compelling,” says Chris Russell, a professor at Oxford University in the UK who studies international AI governance. “It gives the work a strong basis in international law, a very broad remit, and a focus on concrete harms as they occur to people.”

 

Russell adds that there is a great deal of duplication in the work governments are doing to evaluate AI with a view to regulation. The US and UK governments have separate bodies working on probing AI models for misbehavior, for example. The UN’s efforts might avoid further redundancy. “Working internationally and pooling our efforts makes a lot of sense,” he says.

 

Although governments may see AI as a way to gain a strategic edge, many scientists are aligned in their concerns about AI. Earlier this week, a group of prominent academics from the West and China issued a joint call for more collaboration on AI safety following a conference on the subject held in Vienna, Austria.

 

Nelson, the advisory body member, says she believes government leaders can work together across important issues, too. But she says much will depend on how the UN and its member states chose to follow through on the blueprint for cooperation. “The devil will be in the details of implementation,” she says.

 

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

 

Welcome to Edition 7.12 of the Rocket Report! For once, a week with not all that much launch news. Among the highlights were Eutelsat's surprise announcement of a deal with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, SpaceX's ongoing war with the FAA, and Europe identifying a straightforward solution to the upper stage problem on Ariane 6's debut launch earlier this summer.

 

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.

Small launch vehicles still talking a big game. Despite stiff competition from SpaceX rideshare services and some high-profile failures, ventures are still pursuing small launch vehicles that they argue can fill niches in the market, Space News reports. Launch providers speaking at World Space Business Week said they can deliver satellites when and where customers want rather than waiting for the next available rideshare launch from SpaceX.

 

Same old story ... For example: "We offer flexibility," said Miguel Belló Mora, executive chairman of Orbex, a small launch vehicle developer based in the United Kingdom. "We can’t compete on price per kilo." We wish these small launch companies well, but this is the same kind of talk that has been around for years. The reality is that the small launch business has small margins and is extremely demanding. It also doesn't engender confidence that most of these companies are still not close to having an operational rocket. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Iran launches Qaem-100 rocket again. After an initial failure in 2023, Iran has now successfully launched the small, solid rocket Qaem-100 for a second time, Al Mayadeen reports. Iran successfully launched the domestically produced Chamran 1 satellite into a 550-km orbit on Saturday, according to state media.

Purpose of launches is questioned ... Iranian officials said the primary mission of Chamran 1 is to test hardware and software systems, specifically to demonstrate orbital maneuvering capabilities in terms of altitude and phase. Western governments, including the United States, have consistently cautioned Iran against conducting such launches, claiming the technology used could be repurposed for ballistic missiles. (submitted by MarkW98 and Ken the Bin)

 

French firm acquires Australian launch site. French rocket builder Sirius Space Services has signed an agreement with Equatorial Launch Australia to secure a launch facility at the company’s Arnhem Space Centre in Australia, European Spaceflight reports. The company will reside at Arnhem Space Centre’s Launch Complex Number 3, which the company has renamed “Le Mans.” Sirius said the flexibility to access a wide range of orbital inclinations was a crucial factor in its decision to select a location halfway around the globe.

 

Going up from down under ... Sirius Space was founded in 2020 and is developing a range of three rockets that will be capable of delivering payloads of between 175 and 1,100 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. Construction of the Le Mans launch complex will begin in October 2024, with the company aiming to have the facility operational by the second half of 2025. The first launch of Sirius 1 on a ballistic flight will be conducted from the facility in 2026. The company’s larger Sirius 13 and Sirius 15 rockets will then both be debuted from the facility in 2027. Sirius also plans to launch from the Guiana Space Centre. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Eutelsat turns to Japan for launch needs. In a somewhat surprising announcement this week, Eutelsat said Wednesday it had signed a contract with Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for multiple H3 rocket launches starting in 2027, Space News reports. Eutelsat spokesperson Katie Dowd said the agreement is focused on launches for the company’s upcoming satellites in geostationary orbit but declined to provide more information. The operator already has launches mostly covered for deploying its next-generation OneWeb broadband satellites in low-Earth orbit, CEO Eva Berneke recently told the publication.

 

Eutelsat could be hedging its bets ... A large French satellite operator, Eutelsat merged with OneWeb in 2023. Notably, the previously announced launch contracts for OneWeb include 3D-printing company Relativity Space’s Terran R vehicle and Europe’s next-generation launcher Ariane 6, which have both experienced development delays. There is also some question as to whether the Ariane 6 rocket will have capacity given its existing manifest, including Project Kuiper launches for Amazon. Regardless, it's a big win for Mitsubishi, which has struggled to find commercial success with the new H3 booster. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

European officials complain about SpaceX some more. Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël recently gave an interview to the French publication Les Echos that has been shared by European Spaceflight. It sounds like the once-dominant commercial satellite launch firm, which has been run over by the SpaceX steamroller, is tired of being asked about the SpaceX steamroller. Israël said Europeans should "stop just comparing SpaceX and Elon Musk with Arianespace."

 

Why? ... His reasoning for this was that SpaceX is not just a launch company but one that controls a broader value chain that includes satellite manufacturing and operation through Starlink. “He competes against the entire space industry on his own,” said Israël. In order to compete with SpaceX, he explained, “the entire European space sector must be united and ambitious.” Israël identified Europe’s planned Iris² satellite constellation as a key project to ensure future competitiveness. “Our hopes rest on the Iris² constellation promoted by the European Commission,” he said. The future of this project, however, appears to be uncertain, especially after the sudden departure of Thierry Breton from the European Commission this week. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

 

After fine, Musk escalates feud with the FAA. The Federal Aviation Administration alleged Tuesday that SpaceX violated its launch license requirements on two occasions last year by using an unauthorized launch control center and fuel farm at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Ars reports. The regulator seeks to fine SpaceX $633,009 for the alleged violations, which occurred during a Falcon 9 launch and a Falcon Heavy launch last year. Combined, the proposed fines make up the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the FAA's commercial spaceflight division.

 

Probably only the beginning of a battle ... Hours later, Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, vowed to sue the FAA, calling the proposed penalties an example of "lawfare" against his company. "SpaceX will be filing suit against the FAA for regulatory overreach," Musk posted on X, his social media platform. The FAA rarely imposes fines on commercial space companies. The agency oversees the licensing of commercial launch and reentry operations by US companies and is responsible for ensuring spaceflight activities do not endanger the uninvolved public or go against US national security and foreign policy interests.

 

Upgraded Long March 8 rocket nears its debut. China completed a launch site rehearsal for a new, improved version of its medium-lift Long March 8 rocket this month, Space.com reports. Teams at the new Hainan commercial space launch site conducted tests with the first Long March 8A rocket, including integration with the launch pad and fueling. The new launcher is now set to fly for the first time around December.

 

More room for more satellites ... The liquid-fueled, two-stage rocket boasts an increased payload capacity and enhanced mission adaptability and will provide crucial support for large-scale satellite constellation deployment. The new Long March 8A achieves this greater lifting power, about 7.7 metric tons to Sun-synchronous orbit, with upgraded second-stage engines that use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The new variant also features a payload fairing measuring 17 feet (5.2 meters) in diameter, allowing it to carry more volume and thus more satellites into orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Ariane 6 issue diagnosed as software problem. A little more than two months ago, Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket made a largely successful debut. However, a malfunction on the upper stage prevented the Vinci engine from completing a third burn to steer back into Earth's atmosphere for a targeted, destructive reentry. Now, after an analysis of the entire mission profile, the European Space Agency has concluded there are no "showstoppers" that will delay a second flight of the vehicle. A second flight could occur before the end of this year.

 

According to the space agency ... "The investigations included analyzing why re-ignition of the upper stage Auxiliary Propulsion Unit (APU) did not occur as planned at the beginning of the long coasting phase of Ariane 6’s inaugural mission. Analysis shows that one temperature measurement exceeded a pre-defined limit and that the flight software correctly triggered a shutdown, entering the long coasting phase without the APU thrust and so degrading the proceeding of the demo phase. As a consequence, the third ignition sequence of the Vinci engine was not ordered by the flight software." (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Spanish startup wins large engine contract. The European Space Agency has awarded Spain’s Pangea Aerospace a contract to design a powerful rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. ESA published a call for its Very High Thrust rocket engine initiative in late 2023 under its Future Launchers Preparatory Program, and the high-thrust engine could be used to power future European heavy and super-heavy rockets. The engine proposed by Pangea is called Kronos, and its initial specifications call for a reusable full-flow staged-combustion rocket engine. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

 

Taking a very big step up ... Pangea will be the prime contractor responsible for the core propulsion technology, while Safran and Sabca will provide propulsion subsystems. The goal is to design an engine capable of producing 2 MN of thrust, which is significantly more powerful than any engine designed and built by Pangea to date. The new engine would be in a similar class to that of the US Space Shuttle or SpaceX's Raptor engine. (submitted by Leika, EllPeaTea, and Ken the Bin)

Next three launches

Sept. 20: Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 09:45 UTC

Sept. 20: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-17 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 13:50 UTC

Sept. 26: Falcon 9 | Crew-9 mission | Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, Fla. | 18:05 UTC