News: General News

Rare woolly rhino mummies emerge from the permafrost

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 17:05:30 +0000

The new finds confirm the existence of a feature seen in cave art.

Portion of a reproduction of cave paintings in France, showing rhinos (among other species).

For most people, an extinct species is an abstraction, a set of bones they might have seen on display in a museum. For Gennady Boeskorov, they are things he has interacted with directly, studying their fur, their skin, their internal organs—experiencing these animals much as they existed thousands of years ago. Some of the well-preserved Pleistocene animals he has worked with include the mummified remains of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), an extinct form of rabbit (Lepus tanaiticus), and cave lion cubs (Panthera spelaea).

His latest paper also makes it clear that woolly rhinoceroses belong on this list. Boeskorov is a senior researcher at the Diamond and Precious Metals Geology Institute, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as a professor at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. This July, he and his colleagues described the relatively recent discovery of three woolly rhinoceros mummies, one of which is new to science, in a paper published in the journal Doklady Earth Sciences.

Woolly rhinos (Coelodonta antiquitatis) were stocky, long-haired, two-horned denizens that inhabited Eurasia during the Pleistocene, a period that includes the most recent glacial expansion. They coexisted with woolly mammoths, placing second on the list of largest animals in this ecosystem (behind their tusked proboscidean coevals), and shared a similar dense coat of hair to protect against the cold.

We’ve learned a great deal from their bones; we’re learning even more thanks to their mummies. Being able to directly observe their hair and skin, for example, offers more evidence regarding just how well-adapted these animals were to their harsh environment. And the preservation of soft tissue has allowed us to test a hypothesis that was based on a combination of the organization of their skeletons and depictions in cave art.

Woolly rhino fossils are abundant, but their mummies are exceedingly rare. To date, there have only been a handful of nearly complete woolly rhinos (although news of another has been recently announced). The three mummies in this paper all hail from Yakutia—also known as the Sakha Republic—in northeastern Russia, but they are vastly different in age and preservation.

A trio of finds

Sasha is the first complete baby woolly rhino ever discovered. Although missing about half of its body, it is arguably the most well-preserved of the three, maintaining its fluffy little strawberry-blonde head, a couple of legs, and much of its fluffy torso. The loss of its lower half prevents determination of its sex, but Sasha was between 12 and 18 months old when it died, based on its teeth and the sutures within its skull as seen through CT scans.

So Sasha might have still been nursing at the time of death. Wear on its frontal horn—the second horn following the one above its nose—may have been caused by “rubbing against its mother’s belly” as it nursed, scientists suggested in 2015. The mummy was found in 2014 along the banks of a river, and although the cause of death has yet to be determined, sediment in its nasal passages indicate drowning in mud.

By contrast, the newest mummy is missing much of one side of its body, including most of the intestines—the result of predation, according to the authors. The other side, however, preserves skin, some hair, and soft tissues. Nicknamed the “Abyisky rhinoceros” for its discovery in Yakutia’s Abyisky District in 2020, it is estimated to be a juvenile of about 4 to 4.5 years. This mummy was also found along the banks of a river and, just like Sasha, its sex hasn’t been determined.

Clues to its age, however, were found among the animal’s overall height, its skull bones, and the length and characteristics of its nasal horn (the horn that grows right above its nostrils). Like tree rings or the rings found in mammoth tusks, the number of transverse stripes on the outside of nasal horns indicate the animal’s age. The Abyisky mummy has little surviving hair; tufts of it appear in bits and pieces. The manner of death remains a mystery, but arthropod remnants in its hair indicate that its carcass spent time in a small body of fresh water.

Both the oldest at the time of her death and the oldest in terms of discovery, the Kolyma mummy was uncovered in 2007 in a Kolyma gold mine. The position in which her body was found—her legs pressed to her torso and her head stretched upwards—indicates she fell into and was trapped within a confined space. Like the Abyisky mummy, she is well-preserved on one side of her body, but she was not preserved whole. Her horns and legs were found nearby. Her skeletonized head—once joined to the body—was separated when she was excavated from the sediment. Her hair is preserved in tufts.

An udder and nipples are among the anatomical evidence that this is a female. The transverse stripes on her horn, along with teeth, skull, and height, confirm her age at death was approximately 20 years. Spores and pollen within her preserved stomach confirm what was deduced by previous studies of woolly rhino teeth: they enjoyed an herbivorous diet of grasses, shrubs, and numerous other plants.

Over the hump

The skin, hair, and soft tissues preserved in these mummies complement and expand on what we’ve learned over centuries of studying their bones. We know these animals were well-adapted to their cold, arid climate, but the thickness of their skin and the density of their hair offer further evidence. The team in this paper describes how woolly rhino hair changed over time, transitioning from lightly colored and relatively soft to darker, coarser hair as they aged. Arguably, however, this sample size is small, and there is some question about whether hair undergoes chemical changes as a result of being buried for thousands of years. This has been suggested to be the cause of different colors of woolly mammoth hair, for example.

What stands out the most in the new research is an anatomical feature suggested by the woolly rhino’s bone structure but never seen before: a fatty hump on the back of the juvenile Abyisky woolly rhino.

That hump, Boeskorov explained by email, “could serve as an additional reservoir of nutrients.” The team conducted chemical analysis of the hump, and they expect to publish further research about it in the future. As to why it has never been seen before, Boeskorov wonders if the hump may have only developed closer to winter, when fat storage might have been advantageous, or whether it had been a favorite meal for predators.

Adrian Lister, who was not involved in the research, is a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum, London. He was not surprised to learn of the hump, he noted by email, as “we knew from the skeleton and other carcasses (and cave art) that there was a big shoulder hump—maybe this is the first time fat has actually been discovered there, which for sure is a great discovery if so.”

He agrees that it might have served as food storage, but also said that “such structures are generally considered to function as part of the display gestalt of the animal—the very big, heavy shoulder, together with the horns, providing a fearsome sight for a competitor or potential predator!”

Work on the Abyisky woolly rhino is not done. Yet to be studied, Boeskorov noted, is the area of the body that might contain internal organs such as the stomach, which could reveal more about the animal’s diet and environment. He describes being able to work with the Abyisky mummy and others as “very interesting,” as not everyone gets to touch something so ancient and so exquisitely preserved.

Plotnikov echoes this sentiment. He was also not involved in this research but collaborated on research about Sasha that was presented at a conference. He is a freelance paleontologist, and, like Boeskorov, has worked on a variety of Pleistocene mummies. “The feeling of touching something that lived tens of thousands of years ago is indescribable,” he explained by email. “It's mesmerizing.”

But beyond the personal experience, researchers don’t lose track of the scientific value. “Each bone or mummy discovery carries valuable information,” he said. The three mummies described in this paper have so much more to tell us, and future papers promise to reveal some discoveries that are currently in progress. For now, there are many questions yet to be answered, some of which may not be solved by either bones or mummies.

“People take woolly mammoths and rhinos to be ‘fellow travellers’ in the last Ice Age, which they often were,” Lister said, referencing how fossils of both species are often found together. “But intriguingly, there were large areas inhabited by mammoths that woolly rhinos never breached.” Among them, he said, is the Taymyr Peninsula in northeastern Russia. And, he continued, “while mammoths made it across the Bering Strait (probably on multiple occasions) into North America, woolly rhinos never did.” The mystery as to why may be extremely difficult to ascertain.

Doklady Earth Sciences, 2024. DOI: 10.1134/S1028334X24602438

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Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 20:45:38 +0000

New research confirms the rotation of Earth's inner core has been slowing down as part of a decades-long

pattern. How this slowdown might affect our planet remains an open question.

Edward Sotelo/Courtesy USC

Deep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery.

This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves — its rotation speed and direction — has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core’s spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening — and what it means.

Part of the trouble is that Earth’s deep interior is impossible to observe or sample directly. Seismologists have gleaned information about the inner core’s motion by examining how waves from large earthquakes that ping this area behave. Variations between waves of similar strengths that passed through the core at different times enabled scientists to measure changes in the inner core’s position and calculate its spin.

“Differential rotation of the inner core was proposed as a phenomenon in the 1970s and ’80s, but it wasn’t until the ‘90s that seismological evidence was published,” said Dr. Lauren Waszek, a senior lecturer of physical sciences at James Cook University in Australia.

But researchers argued over how to interpret these findings, “primarily due to the challenge of making detailed observations of the inner core, due to its remoteness and limited available data,” Waszek said. As a result, “studies which followed over the next years and decades disagree on the rate of rotation, and also its direction with respect to the mantle,” she added. Some analyses even proposed that the core didn’t rotate at all.

One promising model proposed in 2023 described an inner core that in the past had spun faster than Earth itself, but was now spinning slower. For a while, the scientists reported, the core’s rotation matched Earth’s spin. Then it slowed even more, until the core was moving backward relative to the fluid layers around it.

At the time, some experts cautioned that more data was needed to bolster this conclusion, and now another team of scientists has delivered compelling new evidence for this hypothesis about the inner core’s rotation rate. Research published June 12 in the journal Nature not only confirms the core slowdown, it supports the 2023 proposal that this core deceleration is part of a decades-long pattern of slowing down and speeding up.

Scientists study the inner core to learn how Earth’s deep interior formed and how activity connects across

all the planet’s subsurface layers.

forplayday/iStockphoto/Getty Images

The new findings also confirm that the changes in rotational speed follow a 70-year cycle, said study coauthor Dr. John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“We’ve been arguing about this for 20 years, and I think this nails it,” Vidale said. “I think we’ve ended the debate on whether the inner core moves, and what’s been its pattern for the last couple of decades.”

But not all are convinced that the matter is settled, and how a slowdown of the inner core might affect our planet is still an open question — though some experts say Earth’s magnetic field could come into play.

Magnetic attraction

Buried about 3,220 miles (5,180 kilometers) deep inside Earth, the solid metal inner core is surrounded by a liquid metal outer core. The inner core is made mostly of iron and nickel, and it is estimated to be as hot as the surface of the sun — about 9,800 degrees Fahrenheit (5,400 degrees Celsius).

Earth’s magnetic field yanks at this solid ball of hot metal, making it spin. At the same time, the gravity and flow of the fluid outer core and mantle drag at the core. Over many decades, the push and pull of these forces cause variations in the core’s rotational speed, Vidale said.

The sloshing of metal-rich fluid in the outer core generates electrical currents that power Earth’s magnetic field, which protects our planet from deadly solar radiation. Though the inner core’s direct influence on the magnetic field is unknown, scientists had previously reported in 2023 that a slower-spinning core could potentially affect it and also fractionally shorten the length of a day.

When scientists attempt to “see” all the way through the planet, they are generally tracking two types of seismic waves: pressure waves, or P waves, and shear waves, or S waves. P waves move through all types of matter; S waves only move through solids or extremely viscous liquids, according to the US Geological Survey.

Seismologists noted in the 1880s that S waves generated by earthquakes didn’t pass all the way through Earth, and so they concluded that Earth’s core was molten. But some P waves, after passing through Earth’s core, emerged in unexpected places — a “shadow zone,” as Lehmann called it — creating anomalies that were impossible to explain. Lehmann was the first to suggest that wayward P waves might be interacting with a solid inner core within the liquid outer core, based on data from a massive earthquake in New Zealand in 1929.

By tracking seismic waves from earthquakes that have passed through the Earth’s inner core along similar paths since 1964, the authors of the 2023 study found that the spin followed a 70-year cycle. By the 1970s, the inner core was spinning a little faster than the planet. It slowed around 2008, and from 2008 to 2023 began moving slightly in reverse, relative to the mantle.

Future core spin

For the new study, Vidale and his coauthors observed seismic waves produced by earthquakes in the same locations at different times. They found 121 examples of such earthquakes occurring between 1991 and 2023 in the South Sandwich Islands, an archipelago of volcanic islands in the Atlantic Ocean to the east of South America’s southernmost tip. The researchers also looked at core-penetrating shock waves from Soviet nuclear tests conducted between 1971 and 1974.

When the core turns, Vidale said, that affects the arrival time of the wave. Comparing the timing of seismic signals as they touched the core revealed changes in core rotation over time, confirming the 70-year rotation cycle. According to the researchers’ calculations, the core is just about ready to start speeding up again.

Compared with other seismographic studies of the core that measure individual earthquakes as they pass through the core — regardless of when they occur — using only paired earthquakes reduces the amount of usable data, “making the method more challenging,” Waszek said. However, doing so also enabled scientists to measure changes in the core rotation with greater precision, according to Vidale. If his team’s model is correct, core rotation will start speeding up again in about five to 10 years.

The seismographs also revealed that, during its 70-year cycle, the core’s spin slows and accelerates at different rates, “which is going to need an explanation,” Vidale said. One possibility is that the metal inner core isn’t as solid as expected. If it deforms as it rotates, that could affect the symmetry of its rotational speed, he said.

The team’s calculations also suggest that the core has different rotation rates for forward and backward motion, which adds “an interesting contribution to the discourse,” Waszek said.

But the depth and inaccessibility of the inner core mean that uncertainties remain, she added. As for whether or not the debate about core rotation has truly ended, “we need more data and improved interdisciplinary tools to investigate this further,” Waszek said.

‘Filled with potential’

Changes in core spin — though they can be tracked and measured — are all but imperceptible to people on Earth’s surface, Vidale said. When the core spins more slowly, the mantle speeds up. This shift makes Earth rotate faster, and the length of a day shortens. But such rotational shifts translate to mere thousandths of a second in day length, he said.

“In terms of that effect in a person’s lifetime?” he said. “I can’t imagine it means much.”

Scientists study the inner core to learn how Earth’s deep interior formed and how activity connects across all the planet’s subsurface layers. The mysterious region where the liquid outer core envelops the solid inner core is especially interesting, Vidale added. As a place where liquid and solid meet, this boundary is “filled with potential for activity,” as are the core-mantle boundary and the boundary between mantle and crust.

“We might have volcanoes on the inner core boundary, for example, where solid and fluid are meeting and moving,” he said.

Because the spinning of the inner core affects movement in the outer core, inner core rotation is thought to help power Earth’s magnetic field, though more research is required to unravel its precise role. And there is still much to be learned about the inner core’s overall structure, Waszek said.

“Novel and upcoming methodologies will be central to answering the ongoing questions about Earth’s inner core, including that of rotation.”

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Mice made transparent with a dye used in Doritos

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:40:48 +0000

Matching refractive indexes lets some wavelengths pass cleanly through the skin.

One key challenge in medical imaging is to look past skin and other tissue that are opaque to see internal organs and structures. This is the reason we need things like ultrasonography, magnetic resonance, or X-rays. There are chemical clearing agents that can make tissue transparent, like acrylamide or tetrahydrofuran, but they are almost never used in living organisms because they’re either highly toxic or can dissolve away essential biomolecules.

But now, a team of Stanford University scientists has finally found an agent that can reversibly make skin transparent without damaging it. This agent was tartrazine, a popular yellow-orange food dye called FD&C Yellow 5 that is notably used for coloring Doritos.

Playing with light

We can’t see through the skin because it is a complex tissue comprising aqueous-based components such as cell interiors and other fluids, as well as protein and lipids. The refractive index is a value that indicates how much light slows down (on average, of course) while going through a material compared to going through a vacuum. The refractive index of those aqueous components is low, while the refractive index of the proteins and lipids is high. As a result, light traveling through skin constantly bends as it endlessly crosses the boundary between high and low refractive index materials.

This scatters the light—once it penetrates the skin, it never gets back. What we see is just the light that bounces off the skin’s surface. The trick to making things transparent is mostly about making their refractive index uniform, so light, or at least some part of the spectrum, doesn’t bend all the time and doesn’t get scattered. This is exactly where the Doritos dye came in.

“The most surprising part of this study is that we usually expect dye molecules to make things less transparent,” says Guosong Hong, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and senior author of the paper. “For example, if you mix blue pen ink in water, the more ink you add, the less light can pass through the water. However, in our experiment, when we dissolve tartrazine in an opaque material like muscle or skin, which normally scatters light, the more tartrazine we add, the clearer the material becomes. This goes against what we typically expect with dyes.”

Transparency lotion

Hong’s team simply dissolved the dye in an aqueous solution and created a transparency-inducing lotion of sorts. It worked, because the dye reduced the difference in refractive index between water and lipids in the skin. Then the team started massaging it gently into a bit of polymer gel that emulated the light-scattering properties of tissue. From there, they moved to thinly sliced chicken breasts and to live mice.

The “transparency lotion” needed just a few minutes to start working when applied to a mouse’s skin. Massaged into a shaven scalp, it lets the scientists see the cerebral blood vessels with laser speckle contrast imaging, a technique that normally requires removal of the scalp to work. When applied to the mouse’s abdomen, it made all the internal organs, including the liver, bladder, and small intestine, visible to the naked eye. All that was needed to reverse the effect and make the skin opaque again was washing the lotion off with water.

There were some problems, though. One of them was that tartrazine absorbed most light at wavelengths around 257 and 428 nanometers, which let us see shades of violet and blue. On the other hand, it had minimal absorption above 600 nanometers, which meant that the transparent skin tinted everything red. The second issue was the depth of penetration. The lotion worked well only at spots where the skin was thin, and couldn’t penetrate deep enough where the skin was thicker.

Finally, its formulation was not universal. It relied on finding a chemical that could match the refractive index of lipids when dissolved in water, but the exact composition of the lotion was determined through trial and error. If there’s a lot of mouse-to-mouse variation, it might make it hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution.

Tattoos and needles

The problem of penetrating deeper into thick skin was partially solved by making the application a bit more painful. “Using microneedle patch applicators or subcutaneous injections could help deliver the molecules through thicker layers of skin,” Hong explains. The red tint issue, he suggested, might be handled by testing different dyes. “The research in my lab is currently focused on identifying molecules with sharp absorption in the near-ultraviolet region, minimizing spectral tailing into the visible range to ensure tissue transparency without the presence of a red tone,” Hong said.

“This study has only been conducted on animals. However, if the same technique could be applied to humans, it could offer a variety of benefits in biology, diagnostics, and even cosmetics,” Hong suggests. The benefits he is focusing on include evaluating deep-seated tumors without relying on biopsies, making blood tests less stressful by making locating the veins easier, and even things like improved laser tattoo removals by allowing the pigment beneath the skin to be targeted precisely.

But there is some bad news. Even though the FD&C Yellow 5 dye is widely available, replicating Hong’s results at home and making the transparency lotion on your own is not the brightest idea. “We strongly discourage attempting this on the human skin, as the toxicology of dye molecules in humans, particularly when applied topically, has not been fully evaluated,” Hong says.

And, in the end, it might not even work. “The human skin is significantly thicker than mouse skin, with the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of the epidermis, serving as a substantial barrier that prevents effective delivery of molecules into the dermis,” Hong explains

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adm6869

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SpaceX to launch Galileo satellites, enhancing navigation for smartphones - TWIRL #181

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 20:38:01 +0000

We have lots coming up This Week in Rocket Launches, the most interesting missions will be performed by SpaceX and China. One of the SpaceX missions this week will see the launch of two Galileo satellites which will improve navigation services for the devices that connect to these sats. The interesting Chinese mission will see the launch of some BeiDou navigation satellites. Many smartphones support the BeiDou and Galileo constellations so many readers will benefit directly from these launches and get better location information on their phones.

Sunday, 15 September

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 22:59 UTC
Where: Florida, US
Why: SpaceX will use this mission to launch two Galileo satellites, designated FM26 & FM32, for Europe. The Galileo satellites will join the Galileo constellation which provides similar services to America's GPS constellation. These sats were supposed to launch on an Ariane rocket but got transferred to a Russian Soyuz and then ultimately transferred again to SpaceX. The first stage of the Falcon 9 will probably attempt to land for reuse.

Monday, 16 September

Who: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
What: H-IIA 202
When: 05:24 - 05:25 UTC
Where: Tanegashima, Japan
Why: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will launch an H-IIA rocket carrying the IGS-Radar 8 recon satellite for the Japanese Ministry of Defense. The satellite will be operated by the Cabinet Satellite Information Center and serve the country's national defense and perform civil natural disaster monitoring.

Who: Rocket Lab
What: Electron
When: 23:02 UTC
Where: Mahia, New Zealand
Why: Rocket Lab will launch an Electron rocket carrying Kinéis satellites. Kinéis 6 - 10 will be part of a constellation of 25 satellites that will provide Internet of Things communications.

Tuesday, 17 September

Who: Roscosmos
What: Angara 1.2
When: 07:00 - 09:00 UTC
Where: Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia
Why: The payload of this mission is unknown but it's speculated to be a Kosmos military satellite.

Wednesday, 18 September

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 14:20 UTC
Where: California, US
Why: SpaceX will use its Falcon 9 to launch 21 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. This group is known as Starlink Group 9-17; you can use this identifier to find these satellites in orbit on apps like ISS Detector once they have launched. The group will include 13 direct-to-cell Starlink sats and the first stage of the rocket should perform a landing.

Thursday, 19 September

Who: CNSA
What: Long March 3B/E
When: 01:00 UTC
Where: China
Why: This Long March rocket will launch two BeiDou navigation satellites for the Chinese government. Most modern phones come with support for BeiDou satellites and they help pinpoint you on apps like Google Maps. These satellites will be placed in a medium Earth orbit.

Friday, 20 September

Who: CNSA
What: Long March 2D
When: 04:10 UTC
Where: Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China
Why: This Long March will be carrying an unknown payload.

Recap

The first mission we got this week was SpaceX's Polaris Dawn, a crewed mission where the astronauts spend time in orbit around the Earth before coming back home. The mission launched successfully and the first stage of the rocket performed a successful landing for reuse.

Next, LandSpace launched the ZhuQue-3 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. It successfully performed a landing after going up 10 km. Developing rockets that can take off and land is beneficial for private companies as they can reduce costs by reusing rockets.

The third mission saw Russia launch a Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS). It carried two cosmonauts, Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, and one NASA astronaut, Don Pettit.

Next, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying the BlueBird 1 - 5 satellites for AST SpaceMobile. The first stage of the Falcon 9 successfully landed so it can be reused.

The final launch of the week was another Falcon 9, this time carrying Starlink satellites. This group is called Starlink Group 9-6 and the first stage of the Falcon 9 landed successfully.

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

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A single peptide helps starfish get rid of a limb when attacked

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 20:36:20 +0000

A signaling molecule that's so potent injected animals may drop more than one limb.

Hal Beral

For many creatures, having a limb caught in a predator’s mouth is usually a death sentence. Not starfish, though—they can detach the limb and leave the predator something to chew on while they crawl away. But how can they pull this off?

Starfish and some other animals (including lizards and salamanders) are capable of autonomy (shedding a limb when attacked). The biology behind this phenomenon in starfish was largely unknown until now. An international team of researchers led by Maurice Elphick, professor of Animal Physiology and Neuroscience at Queen Mary University of London, have found that a neurohormone released by starfish is largely responsible for detaching limbs that end up in a predator’s jaws.

So how does this neurohormone (specifically a neuropeptide) let the starfish get away? When a starfish is under stress from a predatory attack, this hormone is secreted, stimulating a muscle at the base of the animal’s arm that allows the arm to break off.

The researchers confirmed this neuropeptide “acts as an autotomy-promoting factor in starfish and such it is the first neuropeptide to be identified as a regulator of autotomy in animals,” as they said in a study recently published in Current Biology.

Holding on

Elphick’s team studied how the neuropeptide known as ArSK/CCK1 facilitates autonomy in the European Starfish, Asterias rubens. ArSK/CCK1 is already known to inhibit feeding behavior in A. rubens by causing the stomach to contract, and muscle contraction plays a role in limb loss. The researchers found that its ability to trigger contractions goes beyond feeding.

Starfish underwent an experiment that simulated conditions where a predator’s jaw clamped down on one arm. Clamps were placed on one of three sections on a single arm, either on the end, middle, or at the site in the base where autotomy is known to occur, also known as the autotomy plane. The starfish were then suspended by these clamps above a glass bowl of seawater. During the first part of the experiment, the starfish were left to react naturally, but during the second part, they were injected with ArSK/CCK1.

Without the injection, autotomy was seen mostly in animals that had arms that were clamped closest to the autotomy plane. There was not nearly as much of a reaction from starfish when the arms were clamped in the middle or end.

In the second half of the experiment, the clamping used before was combined with an injection of ArSK/CCK1. For comparison, some were injected with the related neuropeptide ArSK/CCK2. A staggering 85 percent of ArSK/CCK1-injected animals that were clamped in the middle of the arm or closer to the autotomy plane exhibited autonomy, and some autotomized additional arms. This only happened in about 27 percent of those injected with ArSK/CCK2.

Letting go

While ArSK/CCK1 proved to be the most effective chemical trigger for autotomy, its activity in the autotomy plane depends on certain aspects of a starfish’s anatomy.

Like all echinoderms, starfish have endoskeletons built of tiny bones, or ossicles, linked by muscles and collagen fibers that allow the animals to change posture and move. Two exclusive features only found in the autotomy plane allow this structure to break. Under the skin of the autotomy plane, there is a region where bundles of collagen fibers are positioned far apart to make breakage easier. The second of these features is a band of muscle close to the region of collagen bundles. Known as the tourniquet muscle, this muscle is responsible for the constriction that allows an arm in danger to fall off.

Analyzing starfish arm tissue while it was undergoing autotomy gave the scientists a new perspective on this process. Right after a starfish has its arm seized by a predator, ArSK/CCK1 tells nerves in the tourniquet muscle to start constricting in the region right by the autonomy plane. While this is happening, the collagen in the body wall in that region softens and breaks, and so do the muscles and ligaments that hold together ossicles. It is now thought that ArSK/CCK1 is also involved in the softening of this tissue that prepares it for breakage.

After starfish autotomize a limb, that limb eventually regenerates. The same happens in other animals that can use autotomy to their advantage (such as lizards, which also grow their tails back). In the future, finding out why some animals have the ability to regenerate may tell us why we either never evolved it or some of our ancestors lost the ability. Elphick acknowledged that there might still be other unidentified factors working together with ArSK/CCK1, but further insight could someday give us a clearer picture of this process.

“Autotomy is a key adaptation for survival that has evolved in several animal taxa,” the research team said in the same study, “[and] the findings of this study provide a seminal insight into the neural mechanisms that control this remarkable biological process,”

Current Biology, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.003

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Evidence of “snowball Earth” found in ancient rocks

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 08:46:58 +0000

An outcrop in Scotland has material from when the Earth went into a deep freeze.

Artist's conception of the state of the Earth during its global glaciations.

NASA

Earth has gone through many geologic phases, but it did have one striking period of stasis: Our planet experienced a tropical environment where algae and single-celled organisms flourished for almost 2 billion years. Then things changed drastically as the planet was plunged into a deep freeze.

It was previously unclear when Earth became a gargantuan freezer. Now, University College London researchers have found evidence in an outcrop of rocks in Scotland, known as the Port Askaig Formation, that show evidence of the transition from a tropical Earth to a frozen one 717 million years ago. This marks the onset of the Sturtian glaciation and would be the first of two "snowball Earth" events during which much of the planet’s surface was covered in ice. It is thought that multicellular life began to emerge after Earth thawed.

Found in the Scottish islands known as the Garvellachs, this outcrop within the Port Askaig Formation is unique because it offers the first conclusive evidence of when a tropical Earth froze over—underlying layers that are a timeline from a warmer era to a frigid one. Other rocks that formed during the same time period in other parts of the world lack this transitional evidence because ancient glaciers most likely scraped it off.

“The Port Askaig preserves a relatively complete record of the global “Sturtian glaciation,” the researchers said in a study recently published in the Journal of the Geological Society.

In my snowball era

Underneath the rocks that formed during the Sturtian glaciation is a deep layer of carbonate rocks known as the Garb Eileach Formation. These were dated to the warm, tropical Tonian period, which started 1 billion years ago and lasted until 717 million years ago, when the cold took over. The youngest rocks in this formation are evidence of the transition to the first “snowball Earth.”

Why did Earth endure such a big chill to begin with? A sudden decrease in solar radiation probably led to an especially long winter that set off a (if you’ll pardon the pun) snowball effect. With less radiation, more ice forms, and more ice makes the planet more reflective, meaning it sends more sunlight back into space and causes the planet to continue cooling, allowing even more ice to form.

To find out when this global chill began, the research team collected 11 sandstone samples from the Garvellach Islands to analyze zircons in the sandstone. Zircons are especially useful in dating rock formations because they are often as old as the rock they are in, making some of them the oldest minerals on Earth. They also resist being chemically degraded. What is especially important about zircons is that they contain uranium, which decays into lead over long periods. The amount of uranium that has changed to lead can tell us the amount of time that has passed since the zircon’s formation.

Just a phase

Using both laser ablation (a type of laser imaging that reveals how elements and isotopes are distributed in a sample) and plasma mass spectrometry, the researchers determined the uranium-lead ratio. The time it had taken for the uranium to become lead was in line with their estimates, which were based on previous studies that had estimated, but not confirmed, the time of onset for the Sturtian glaciation.

Another thing that the outcrop’s zircons told the researchers is that the Sturtian glaciation lasted around 58 million years. It was closely followed by the Marinoan glaciation, thought to have lasted another 16 million years, and both these “snowball Earth” phases make up what is known as the Cryogenic period. The rocks containing these zircons were probably deposited by a moving glacier as the supercontinent Rodinia (which preceded the more famous Pangaea) was breaking apart.

The Port Askaig Formation is now, as the scientists say in the same study, “one of the thickest (up to 1.1 km) and most complete records of Cryogenic glaciation.”

Because glaciers did not scrape this formation away, a record of when Earth started to warm up again is also preserved. The zircon crystals that formed during the Sturtian glaciation gradually disappear in younger rocks until they are replaced by zircons formed after the ice began to melt. So not only is there evidence of the beginning of the deep freeze, but also evidence for the thaw that began around 635 million years ago.

As the ice melted, complex multicellular life began to burst onto the scene during the Ediacaran period. There could be several reasons for this. Hypotheses suggest that the temperature of the seawater rose, an influx of sunlight sparked photosynthesis, and there was a greater availability of nutrients than before.

The scientists involved in the Port Askaig study think that any life that survived the Cryogenian period faced an immense challenge once the ice began to melt. These organisms had been used to perpetual cold for millions of years, and now they faced the struggle of adapting as soon as possible—or perishing.

What about those that survived? They ended up being the ancestors of all animals that ever existed, and that includes us.

Journal of the Geological Society, 2024. DOI: 10.1144/jgs2024-02

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A landslide triggered a 650-foot mega-tsunami in Greenland. Then came something inexplicable

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 02:16:32 +0000

It started with a melting glacier that set off a huge landslide, which triggered a 650-foot high mega-tsunami in Greenland last September. Then came something inexplicable: a mysterious vibration that shook the planet for nine days.

Over the past year, dozens of scientists across the world have been trying to figure out what this signal was.

Now they have an answer, according to a new study in the journal Science, and it provides yet another warning that the Arctic is entering “uncharted waters” as humans push global temperatures ever upwards.

Some seismologists thought their instruments were broken when they started picking up vibrations through the ground back in September, said Stephen Hicks, a study co-author and a seismologist at University College London.

It wasn’t the rich orchestra of high pitches and rumbles you might expect with an earthquake, but more of a monotonous hum, he told CNN. Earthquake signals tend to last for minutes; this one lasted for nine days.

He was baffled, it was “completely unprecedented,” he said.

Seismologists traced the signal to eastern Greenland, but couldn’t pin down a specific location. So they contacted colleagues in Denmark, who had received reports of a landslide-triggered tsunami in a remote part of the region called Dickson Fjord.

The result was a nearly year-long collaboration between 68 scientists across 15 countries, who combed through seismic, satellite and on-the-ground data, as well as simulations of tsunami waves to solve the puzzle.

The mountain in Dickson Fjord, eastern Greenland, in August 12, 2023 before the landslide.

Søren Rysgaard

The mountain after the landslide, on September 19, 2023

Danish Army

What happened is called a “cascading hazard,” Svennevig said, and it all started with human-caused climate change.

For years, the glacier at the base of a huge mountain towering nearly 4,000 feet above Dickson Fjord had been melting, as many glaciers are in the rapidly warming Arctic.

As the glacier thinned, the mountain became increasingly unstable before it eventually collapsed on September 16 last year, sending enough rock and debris tumbling into the water to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The subsequent mega-tsunami — one of the highest in recent history — set off a wave which became trapped in the bendy, narrow fjord for more than a week, sloshing back and forth every 90 seconds.

The phenomenon, called a “seiche,” refers to the rhythmic movement of a wave in an enclosed space, similar to water splashing backwards and forwards in a bathtub or cup. One of the scientists even tried (and failed) to recreate the impact in their own bathtub.

While seiches are well-known, scientists previously had no idea they could last so long.

“Had I suggested a year ago that a seiche could persist for nine days, people would shake their heads and say that’s impossible,” said Svennevig, who likened the discovery to suddenly finding a new color in a rainbow.

It was this seiche that created the seismic energy in the Earth’s crust, the scientists found.

It is maybe the first time scientists have directly observed the impact of climate change “on the ground beneath our feet,” said Hicks. And no place was immune; the signal traveled from Greenland to Antarctica in about an hour, he added.

No one was injured in the tsunami, although it washed away centuries-old cultural heritage sites and damaged an empty military base. But this stretch of water is on a commonly used cruise ship route. If one had been there at the time, “the consequences would have been devastating,” the study’s authors wrote.

Eastern Greenland had never experienced a landslide and tsunami like this before, Svennevig said. It shows new areas of the Arctic are “coming online” for these kinds of climate events, he added.

As the Arctic continues to warm — over the past few decades, the region has warmed four times faster than the rest of the world — landslide-triggered mega-tsunamis may become more common and with deadly consequences.

In June 2017, a tsunami in northwest Greenland killed four people and washed away houses. The threat goes beyond Greenland, Svennevig said; similar-shaped fjords exist in other regions, including Alaska, parts of Canada and Norway.

What happened in Greenland last September “once again demonstrates the ongoing destabilization of large mountain slopes in the Arctic due to amplified climate warming,” said Paula Snook, a landslide geologist at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences who was not involved in the study.

Recent rock avalanches in the Arctic as well as in Alpine regions, are “an alarming signal,” she told CNN. “We are thawing ground which has been in a cold, frozen state for many thousands of years.”

There’s still a lot of research to be done on rock avalanches, which are also affected by natural processes, cautioned Lena Rubensdotter, a researcher at the Geological Survey of Norway, who was also not involved in the study.

However, she added, it’s “logical to assume that we will see more frequent rock collapses in permafrost slopes as the climate warms in Arctic regions.”

The discovery of natural phenomena behaving in seemingly unnatural ways highlights how this part of the world is changing in unexpected ways, Svennevig said.

“It’s a sign that climate change is pushing these systems into uncharted waters.”

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How to View the ‘Comet of the Century’ C/2023 A3

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:43:39 +0000

September will see the appearance of C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, that has traveled for tens of thousands of years through the solar system.

C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS and considered “the comet of the century,” will appear in all its splendor in our sky during September and October 2024. Due to its characteristics, astronomers believe it will be exceptionally bright, similar to Halley’s comet in 1986 or NEOWISE in 2020.

Comets like C/2023 A3 are balls of frozen gases, rocks, and dust that orbit the sun. They are often spectacular because of two physical phenomena that occur during their journey.

The first is the tail, which stretches out from the nucleus of the comet as it gets closer to the star that it’s orbiting. Solar radiation from the star—in our case the sun—vaporizes some of the comet’s frozen material, blowing gas and dust away from the nucleus that then reflects the star’s light. As a comet gets closer to its star, it’s tail grows in size because of the increase in solar radiation.

The second phenomena is the comet’s coma. This is an envelope of sublimated ice that forms a kind of atmosphere around the nucleus as it approaches its star, again because of solar radiation. This also enhances the comet’s brightness.

What Is the Best Day to See the Comet?

C/2023 A3 will shine in the northern hemisphere sky from September 27 and will remain visible until the last week of October. During this period, the comet will reach its minimum distance from the sun, before beginning its journey back out of the solar system.

According to the specialized blog Cometography, the day when C/2023 A3 will shine the brightest will be October 2. The comet’s tail will be long and spectacular at this point due to its proximity to the sun.

Tsuchinshan–ATLAS will be positioned between the orbits of Mercury and Venus when it is most visible,

but will be closer to Earth than those two planets.

Cometografía

At What Time Will the Comet Be Visible?

Because of its proximity to the sun, the comet will behave similarly to Mercury and Venus: It will be seen near the horizon, in the path of the sun, and just before sunrise. An appropriate window to admire it will be between 5 am and 7 am from September 27 onwards. The timing and position will be similar across the northern hemisphere.

As October progresses, the comet will elevate its position in relation to the horizon and at the same time lose brightness. Since Tsuchinshan–ATLAS is a long-orbiting body and comes from the Oort cloud, beyond the edge of the solar system, it will not appear again in our skies for tens of thousands of years.

A simulation of the sky on September 27, in Mexico City at 6 am. The comet should appear for a couple of

hours in the east, where the sun rises.

Jorge Garay/TheSkyLive

How Best to View the Comet

To observe any astronomical event in the sky, NASA recommends following three basic tips: Avoid places with high light pollution, such as cities; look for elevated sites to get a better perspective; and arrive well sheltered at the observation point.

If all goes well during the comet's journey, it will be visible to the naked eye. It will not look like a small star, but like a large body with a long tail that will not move during sunrise.

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The Bird Flu Outbreak Takes a Mysterious Turn

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:41:12 +0000

US health officials say they don’t know how a patient in Missouri contracted bird flu.

This year in the United States, 14 people have tested positive for avian influenza, or bird flu. Nine of those became infected after coming into contact with poultry, and four got the virus from exposure to dairy cows. The source of the remaining, most recent case remains a mystery.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the case on September 6. Initially detected by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, it is the first known case of human bird flu in the country with no known exposure to a sick or infected animal. On Thursday, health officials said they hadn’t determined how the person acquired the virus.

“Right now, evidence points to this being a one-off case,” said Nirav Shah, the CDC’s principal deputy director, during a news briefing.

Yet the case is troubling, because it raises the possibility of an alternate source of transmission, either from a person or an unknown source. Health officials say there is no evidence of person-to-person spread at this time. The CDC says its surveillance system has not picked up any unusual flu activity in the country, and the risk to the general public remains low.

“Our influenza surveillance system is designed to find needles in haystacks,” Shah said in the briefing. “In this case, we found such a needle, but we don’t know how it got there.”

The Missouri case is the first to be detected through the country’s national flu surveillance system as opposed to targeted testing of animals. This year, the H5N1 flu virus has been responsible for wiping out poultry flocks across the country and infecting 200 dairy herds in 14 states—the latest in California. It is increasingly spilling over to other mammals, including foxes, mice, raccoons, and domestic cats. With more animals harboring the virus, there is greater potential for human infection.

It’s not known whether that happened in the Missouri case, but it is one avenue health officials say they are investigating.

“Regardless of the source, it’s concerning, because it suggests that there’s a lot of the virus out there,” says David Boyd, a virologist at UC Santa Cruz who studies influenza. “This indicates that there is widespread transmission among animal sources.”

On August 22, an adult patient was hospitalized in Missouri for reasons related to underlying medical conditions and happened to also test positive for influenza. The patient’s specimen was then sent to the Missouri State Public Health Laboratory, which determined that it didn’t match the currently circulating seasonal flu viruses.

That triggered additional testing by the CDC, which last week confirmed it was a type of bird flu, or H5. The agency was conducting additional testing to determine the virus subtype—the “N” part of H5N1. On Thursday, health officials said the patient had a very low concentration of viral genetic material and, because of this, they have not been able to generate a full genome, including the N part of the virus. However, their data shows that the specimen is closely related to the H5 virus circulating in dairy cows.

Having a full genome sequence of the virus can be helpful in making an epidemiological link to an animal source. Because viruses change and mutate when they are transmitted to new hosts, the genetic sequence of the virus can give clues about where it’s been. Scientists would also be able to use a full genome sequence to identify potential genetic mutations that could make human-to-human transmission more likely.

The patient has since recovered and has been discharged. Hospital staff and state epidemiologists conducted contact tracing of potentially exposed individuals, and no additional cases have been identified.

Missouri’s health department says there has been no increase in emergency room visits for flu and no increase in lab-confirmed human flu cases in the state. Bird flu outbreaks in cattle have not been reported in Missouri, but outbreaks have been reported in commercial and backyard poultry flocks this year. Wild birds in the state have also tested positive for bird flu.

Health officials are considering several potential routes of exposure, including contact with wild or agricultural animals, consumption of milk or undercooked meat, household travel, and attendance at public gatherings. Shah says the CDC’s investigation is also looking into the use of bird feeders, recent yard work, gardening, and lawn mowing.

Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist and influenza researcher at Columbia University, says that this case being identified underscores the importance of the country’s influenza surveillance. “But the fact that this case was found fortuitously and took several weeks to identify shows that our surveillance system still needs to be more agile and systematic,” he says.

The US has limited capacity for bird flu testing, but that could soon get a boost. On Thursday, the CDC also announced that it is partnering with five commercial laboratories and has awarded them an initial $5 million to start developing their own bird flu tests.

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Rocket Report: China leaps into rocket reuse; 19 people are currently in orbit

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:40:05 +0000

Launch startups in China and Europe are borrowing ideas and rhetoric from SpaceX.

Welcome to Edition 7.11 of the Rocket Report! Outside of companies owned by American billionaires, the most imminent advancements in reusable rockets are coming from China's quasi-commercial launch industry. This industry is no longer nascent. After initially relying on solid-fueled rocket motors apparently derived from Chinese military missiles, China's privately funded launch firms are testing larger launchers, with varying degrees of success, and now performing hop tests reminiscent of SpaceX's Grasshopper and F9R Dev1 programs more than a decade ago.

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.

Landspace hops closer to a reusable rocket. Chinese private space startup Landspace has completed a 10-kilometer (33,000-foot) vertical takeoff and vertical landing test on its Zhuque-3 (ZQ-3) reusable rocket testbed, including a mid-flight engine reignition at near supersonic conditions, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The 18.3-meter (60-foot) vehicle took off from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, ascended to 10,002 meters, and then made a vertical descent and achieved an on-target propulsive landing 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) from the launch pad. Notably, the rocket's methane-fueled variable-thrust engine intentionally shutdown in flight, then reignited for descent, as engines would operate on future full-scale booster flybacks. The test booster used grid fins and cold gas thrusters to control itself when its main engine was dormant, according to Landspace.

"All indicators met the expected design" ... Landspace hailed the test as a major milestone in the company's road to flying its next rocket, the Zhuque-3, as soon as next year. With nine methane-fueled main engines, the Zhuque-3 will initially be able to deliver 21 metric tons (46,300 pounds) of payload into low-Earth orbit with its booster flying in expendable mode. In 2026, Landspace aims to begin recovering Zhuque-3 first-stage boosters for reuse. Landspace is one of several Chinese companies working seriously on reusable rocket designs. Another Chinese firm, Deep Blue Aerospace, says it plans a 100-kilometer (62-mile) suborbital test of a reusable booster soon, ahead of the first flight of its medium-class Nebula-1 rocket next year. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Isar Aerospace sets low bar for success on first launch. Daniel Metzler, CEO of German launch startup Isar Aerospace, stated that the first flight of the Spectrum rocket would be a success if it didn’t destroy the launch site, European Spaceflight reports. During an interview at the Handelsblatt innovation conference, Metzler was asked what he would consider a successful inaugural flight of Spectrum. “For me, the first flight will be a success if we don’t blow up the launch site,” explained Metzler. “That would probably be the thing that would set us back the most in terms of technology and time.” This tempering of expectations sounds remarkably similar to statements made by Elon Musk about SpaceX's first flight of the Starship rocket last year.

In the catbird seat? ... Isar Aerospace could be in a position to become the first in a new crop of European commercial launch companies to attempt its first orbital flight. Another German company, Rocket Factory Augsburg, recently gave up on a possible launch this year after the booster for its first launch caught fire and collapsed during a test at a launch site in Scotland. Isar plans to launch its two-stage Spectrum rocket, designed to carry up to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of payload into low-Earth orbit, from Andøya Spaceport in Norway. Isar hasn't publicized any schedule for the first flight of Spectrum, but there are indications the publicity-shy company is testing hardware at the Norwegian spaceport. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

FAA to introduce new orbital debris rules. The Federal Aviation Administration is moving ahead with efforts to develop rules for the disposal of upper stages as another Centaur upper stage breaks apart in orbit, Space News reports. The FAA released draft regulations on the matter for public comment one year ago, and the head of the agency's commercial spaceflight division recently said the rules are a "high priority for our organization." The rules would direct launch operators to dispose of upper stages in one of five ways, from controlled reentries to placement in graveyard or “disposal” orbits not commonly used by operational satellites. One change the FAA might make to the draft rules is to reduce the required timeline for an uncontrolled reentry of a disposed upper stage from no more than 25 years to a shorter timeline. “We got a lot of comments that said it should be a lot less,” said Kelvin Coleman, head of the FAA's commercial spaceflight office. “We’re taking that into consideration.”

Upper stages are a problem ... Several recent breakups involving spent upper stages in orbit have highlighted the concern that dead rocket bodies could create unnecessary space junk. Last month, the upper stage from a Chinese Long March 6A disintegrated in low-Earth orbit, creating at least 300 pieces of space debris. More recently, a Centaur upper stage from a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket broke apart in a much higher orbit, resulting in more than 40 pieces of debris. This was the fourth time one of ULA's Centaur upper stages has broken up since 2018. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

South Korea aspires to have a reusable rocket. The chief of South Korea’s newly established space agency recently unveiled a set of ambitious mid- and long-term projects, including developing a partially reusable rocket capable of sending 1 kilogram of payload to low-Earth orbit for less than $1,000 by the mid-2030s, Space News reports. Yoon Young-bin, administrator of the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA), didn't offer many details about the new rocket, but he has previously said South Korea planned to develop a small reusable launcher with the capability to send up to 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of payload into orbit.

Can it be done? ... South Korea's plan to develop a light-class partially reusable rocket runs counter to the strategies of nearly every other launch company in the world, which see little economic benefit in reusing boosters for a small orbital-class rocket. Rocket Lab is the only company experimenting with a small reusable booster on its light-class Electron rocket, but officials there are more focused on developing a much larger medium-class partially reusable launch vehicle. Yoon's target of launching a kilogram of payload for $1,000—less than the per-kilogram cost for launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9—on such a small rocket seems a little dubious. Most officials in the launch segment agree it's easier to realize such low costs by aggregating many payloads on a more powerful rocket. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

bluShift test-fires rocket engine in Maine. The small startup rocket company bluShift Aerospace test-fired its newest engine on September 6 on a test stand at an airport in Brunswick, Maine, Maine Public Broadcasting reports. The hybrid rocket engine burns nontoxic, carbon-neutral, bio-derived solid fuel, according to bluShift. Called the Modular Adaptable Rocket Engine for Vehicle Launch (MAREVL), the engine burned for approximately 60 seconds. This was the longest firing by the MAREVL engine, following a previous 20-second burn that reached a peak power setting of 20,000 pounds of thrust. "Tonight’s test represents a major leap toward commercialization of bluShift’s suborbital launch services and represents our unshakable belief that we can bring a more earth-friendly and cost-effective approach to space launch," said Sascha Deri, bluShift's founder and CEO, in a statement.

Aiming for suborbital flights ... Earlier this year, bluShift Aerospace raised $2.3 million from private investors and the Small Business Administration, adding to nearly $4 million in investment the company attracted in earlier rounds, Mainebiz reported in June. bluShift is a modest company, with only about a dozen employees, and it has taken 10 years from its founding in 2014 to achieve a full-duration hot-fire test of its main engine. The company aspires to launch a commercial suborbital rocket next year and eventually wants to field a small satellite launcher. (submitted by Jenming)

SpaceX launches record-setting astronaut mission. A Falcon 9 rocket streaked into the black predawn sky above Florida on Tuesday, carrying four people on the most ambitious private human spaceflight to date, Ars reports. The crew of the Polaris Dawn mission, led by a billionaire pilot named Jared Isaacman, soared to an orbit stretching to an altitude of some 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), higher than any human has flown since the last Apollo mission returned from the Moon in 1972. The five-day flight involves science experiments investigating human health in space, tests of a Starlink terminal on the Dragon spacecraft, public outreach events, and most significantly, the first purely private spacewalk in history.

Walking in the sky ... This spacewalk occurred early Thursday, when Isaacman and one of his crewmates, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, opened the Dragon spacecraft's forward hatch, floated through the opening, and peered out into the blackness of space. Two other crew members, Scott "Kidd" Poteet and Anna Menon, remained inside Dragon. The capsule doesn't have a separate airlock, so the entire spacecraft was depressurized for the excursion, and all four commercial astronauts wore a newly designed SpaceX-built spacesuit to protect them from the vacuum of space. One of the major goals of the spacewalk was to demonstrate the functionality and mobility of the suit.

Soyuz crew launched to the International Space Station. A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, launching to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz ferry ship for a six-month tour of duty, CBS News reports. Space station veteran Donald Pettit, NASA's oldest active-duty astronaut at 69, Soyuz commander Aleksey Ovchinin, and cosmonaut Ivan Vagner blasted off atop a Soyuz-2.1a rocket and reached the space station a little more than three hours later. They will replace two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut who have lived on the station since March and are due to return to Earth later this month.

A human spaceflight record ... The launch boosted the total number of people in orbit at one time to a record 19, flying on four different spacecraft: nine aboard the space station, four aboard the Polaris Dawn Crew Dragon, three aboard China's space station, and three aboard the Soyuz. The previous record was 17 people in orbit at one time, a mark that was set for just one day in May 2023. Pettit, who first flew to the space station in 2002, remarked in a preflight interview on the changes he's observed in human spaceflight since then. "I think space is a hopping place right now," he said. "It is starting to open up like the Wild West, and I think we are going to see an incredible expansion of humans living and working in an orbital environment."

Starship grounded until no earlier than November. The Federal Aviation Administration doesn't expect to approve a launch license for the next test flight of the Starship rocket until at least late November, Ars reports. This is more than two months later than the mid-September timeframe the FAA previously targeted for a decision on a launch license. SpaceX says the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the next launch—the fifth full-scale test flight of the Starship program—have been ready to launch since the first week of August. In a sharply worded statement released Tuesday, SpaceX blamed the regulatory delay on "issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd." SpaceX has been fined by the Environmental Protection Agency for environmental violations at the Starship launch site in Texas, which the company denies.

FAA pushes back … One day later, the FAA issued its own statement on the matter. The federal regulator, which is responsible for ensuring launch companies don't endanger public safety and don't unnecessarily damage the environment, said SpaceX already has a Starship launch license it could use for the next flight if the company employed the same vehicle configuration and mission profile. But SpaceX follows an iterative development cycle, with each test flight building on the prior mission. There are modifications to both the rocket and the profile for the next flight, including SpaceX's first attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster back on the launch pad in Texas. This "triggered a more in-depth review" by the FAA, the agency said. "In addition, SpaceX submitted new information in mid-August detailing how the environmental impact of Flight 5 will cover a larger area than previously reviewed. This requires the FAA to consult with other agencies."

NASA pulls Mars probes off New Glenn's first flight. NASA and Blue Origin say that they have agreed to delay the launch of the ESCAPADE mission to Mars until at least spring of 2025, Ars reports. Forced to make a call on whether to fuel the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft, NASA decided not to. Although the two spacecraft were otherwise ready for launch, it was not clear Blue Origin's first heavy-lift New Glenn rocket would be similarly ready to go. Blue Origin appears to have worked with some urgency this year to prepare the massive rocket for its initial launch. However, when the company missed a key target of hot firing the rocket's upper stage by the end of August, NASA delayed fueling of the ESCAPADE mission. Now, with the closing of a Mars launch window next month, NASA will not fuel the spacecraft until next spring, at the earliest.

Blue Origin's pivot … Blue Origin will now pivot to launching a prototype of its Blue Ring transfer vehicle on the debut launch of New Glenn, with the intent of testing the electronics, avionics, and other systems on the vehicle. Blue Origin is targeting the first half of November for this launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This test flight will also serve as the first of three "certification" flights for New Glenn, which will allow the vehicle to become eligible to carry national security payloads for the US Space Force.

Europa Clipper cleared for final launch preps. NASA officials met Monday and approved plans to fuel the Europa Clipper spacecraft for liftoff as soon as October 10 to begin a nearly $5.2 billion flagship mission to explore Jupiter's most enigmatic icy moon. For a while earlier this summer, it looked like Europa Clipper might miss its launch window this year. In May, engineers raised concerns that transistors installed throughout the spacecraft might be susceptible to damage from radiation, an omnipresent threat for any probe whipping its way around Jupiter. Further reviews indicated the spacecraft's transistors can withstand radiation doses around Jupiter without any changes to Europa Clipper's mission profile.

Falcon Heavy ready and waiting ... Europa Clipper will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This will be the first flight of a Falcon Heavy with a payload heading for another planet. Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for Solar System exploration, and at some 6 metric tons (13,000 pounds), it will require the full power of the Falcon Heavy to begin its journey toward Jupiter. This means all three Falcon Heavy first stage boosters will drop into the Atlantic Ocean and won't be recovered.

Next three launches

Sept. 13: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-6 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 01:45 UTC

Sept. 15: Falcon 9 | Galileo FOC FM26 & FM32 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 22:57 UTC

Sept. 16: Electron | Kinéis Killed The RadIOT Star | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 23:02 UTC

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Meet the winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:26:42 +0000

The award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures.

Curiosity is the driving force behind all science, which may explain why so many scientists sometimes find themselves going in some decidedly eccentric research directions. Did you hear about the WWII plan to train pigeons as missile guidance systems? How about experiments on the swimming ability of a dead rainbow trout or that time biologists tried to startle cows by popping paper bags by their heads? These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2024 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit.

Viewers can tune in for the usual 24/7 lectures, as well as the premiere of a "non-opera" featuring various songs about water, in keeping with the evening's theme. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel prizes.

Peace

Citation: B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.

This entertaining 1960 paper by American psychologist B.F. Skinner is kind of a personal memoir relating "the history of a crackpot idea, born on the wrong side of the tracks intellectually speaking but eventually vindicated in a sort of middle class respectability." Project Pigeon was a World War II research program at the Naval Research Laboratory with the objective of training pigeons to serve as missile guidance systems. At the time, in the early 1940s, the machinery required to guide Pelican missiles was so bulky that there wasn't much room left for actual explosives—hence the name, since it resembled a pelican "whose beak can hold more than its belly can."

Skinner reasoned that pigeons could be a cheaper, more compact solution since the birds are especially good at responding to patterns. (He dismissed the ethical questions as a "peacetime luxury," given the high global stakes of WWII.) His lab devised a novel harnessing system for the birds, positioned them vertically above a translucent plastic plate (screen), and trained them to "peck" at a projected image of a target somewhere along the New Jersey coast on the screen—a camera obscura effect. "The guiding signal was picked up from the point of contact of screen and beak," Skinner wrote. Eventually, they created a version that used three pigeons to make the system more robust—just in case a pigeon got distracted at a key moment or something.

Nose cone of NIST glide bomb showing the three-pigeon guidance system.

American Psychological Association/B.F. Skinner Foundation

There was understandably a great deal of skepticism about the viability of using pigeons for missile guidance; at one point, Skinner lamented, his team "realized that a pigeon was more easily controlled than a physical scientist serving on a committee." But Skinner's team persisted, and in 1944, they finally got the chance to demonstrate Project Pigeon for a committee of top scientists and show that the birds' behavior could be controlled. The sample pigeon behaved perfectly. "But the spectacle of a living pigeon carrying out its assignment, no matter how beautifully, simply reminded the committee of how utterly fantastic our proposal was." Apparently, there was much "restrained merriment."

Even though this novel homing device was resistant to jamming, could react to a wide variety of target practice, needed no scarce materials, and was so simple to make that production could start in 30 days, the committee nixed the project. (By this point, as we now know, military focus had shifted to the Manhattan Project.) Skinner was left with "a loftful of curiously useless equipment and a few dozen pigeons with a strange interest in a feature of the New Jersey coast." But vindication came in the early 1950s when the project was briefly revived as Project ORCON at the Naval Research Laboratory, which refined the general idea and led to the development of a Pick-off Display Converter for radar operators. Skinner himself never lost faith in this particular "crackpot idea."

Botany

Citation: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.

In 2013, botanists discovered an unusual plant growing in the rainforests of southern Chile, dubbed Boquila trifoliolata. This woody vine had the unusual ability to mimic the leaves of up to three different host plants. What was the secret to this complex mimicry of not just the shape of other plant leaves but also their color, leaf orientation, and vein patterns, among other characteristics? One possibility was the release of chemical volatile signals; another was horizontal gene transfer between the host plant and the Boquila vine. Or perhaps it was the result of plant vision.

White and Yamashita conducted experiments with B. trifoliolata vines and artificial Wisteria vines. They concluded that volatile signaling and horizontal gene transfer were unlikely since B. trifoliolata were able to mimic the artificial leaves even when they weren't in direct contact. A plant vision system is thus a promising explanation and grounds for further experiments, they wrote, particularly in light of recent research showing that plants can not only communicate via chemical volatiles but can also perceive sound. We welcome our new plant overlords.

Anatomy

Citation: Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, and Roman Hossein Khonsari, for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the Northern Hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.

The question of nature versus nurture looms large when it comes to hereditary traits, even if we're talking about what seems like a relatively trivial trait—say, hair whorls on humans and whether the whorls are oriented clockwise or counter-clockwise. This is apparently an area of active research, with several studies linking hair whorls to all kinds of physical and cognitive traits, including whether one is left- or right-handed or even gay (although the authors note that these have since been "invalidated"). Willems et al. wanted to learn more about the possible geographic effects on hair whorls as a "vortex phenomenon."

Hair whorl on the head of a one-year-old girl

NoJhan/CC BY-SA 2.5

So they conducted a retrospective study of hair whorls in children from three different groups: a Northern Hemisphere general population (Paris, France), a Southern Hemisphere general population (Santiago, Chile), and 74 same-sex twins (37 pairs) born in Paris. The results: Twins had hair whorls that rotated in the same direction, indicating a strong genetic influence. And the researchers found that hair whorls in children from the Southern hemisphere were oriented counterclockwise more frequently than in children from the Northern hemisphere, indicating possible environmental factors, although the team could not rule out genetic effects from specific population characteristics.

We can't help but indulge in a bit of side-eye at the paper's odd insistence that "further investigation" is warranted to determine if one of those environmental factors could be the Coriolis force, specifically citing the long-debunked myth that water swirls clockwise down the drain in the Southern Hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. At least the authors admit there is unlikely to be any "straightforward link" to the orientation of hair whorls.

Medicine

Citation: Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects.

We're all familiar with often long list of possible side effects that inevitably accompany commercials for various medications. Surely the best possible treatment for a condition should be free of side effects, right? Especially since the expectation of side effects can increase the likelihood that one will experience them—the so-called "nocebo effect." Schenk et al. beg to differ, arguing that some mild side effects might actually lead to better treatment outcomes, based on recent research into active placebos. These are drugs that can have a noticeable effect on patients without addressing their primary symptoms; it's been shown that active placebos actually have larger placebo effects than inert placebos, which could influence the conclusions of randomized clinical trials.

Schenk et al. tested their hypothesis by recruiting 77 healthy people for a clinical trial, divided into two randomized groups. The participants were told they would receive fentanyl nasal sprays, followed by the application of heat-related pain using a thermode. They were told the nasal spray could produce a mild burning sensation in the nose as a side effect. Unbeknownst to the particulates, the nasal sprays did not contain fentanyl. One version was neutral, and another contained capsaicin to produce a mild burning pseudo-side effect. The results showed that placebo nasal sprays with a fake side effect reduced pain more than the placebo nasal spray with no side effect—simply because participants expected a burning sensation and thus assumed the spray was working.

Physics

Citation: James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.

Liao has been studying the physics of swimming fish for over a decade, but his most novel experimental approach is undoubtedly found in a 2006 paper on passive propulsion in vortex wakes. Liao and his co-authors wanted to explore how fish might reduce their energy expenditure while swimming by harnessing energy from swirling vortices—essentially body surfing. They chose rainbow trout as a good subject for experiments since these fish are known to be good at minimizing their energy expenditure, based on Liao's prior work showing that the trout alter their swimming motion to synchronize with incoming wakes.

The twist: This time, they wanted to specifically show that fish can swim upstream without expending any mechanical energy of their own. So Liao et al. used a dead rainbow trout that had ceased to be. And voila! The dead fish exhibited "unnervingly similar kinematics to a live fish, with the exception that it cannot put on the brakes," Liao wrote in a 2022 primer. They also extended the experiments to include test runs with rigid foil with similar results. In short, "a fish or foil can extract sufficient energy from a vortical stream to overcome its own drag, implying that a flapping body can follow another wake-producing body, even at a distance, without expensing any energy," Liao et al. concluded.

Physiology

Citation: Ryo Okabe, Toyofumi F. Chen-Yoshikawa, Yosuke Yoneyama, Yuhei Yokoyama, Satona Tanaka, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Wendy L. Thompson, Gokul Kannan, Eiji Kobayashi, Hiroshi Date, and Takanori Takebe, for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.

This is perhaps one of the more unusual research developments to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated assortment of ventilators and artificial lungs to assist patients' breathing and prevent respiratory failure. Okabe et al. took their inspiration from the humble loach, a freshwater bottom-dwelling fish found throughout Eurasia and northern Africa. The loach (along with sea cucumbers) employs intestinal breathing (i.e., through the anus) rather than gills to survive under hypoxic conditions, thanks to having lots of capillary vessels in its intestine. The technical term is enteral ventilation via anus (EVA).

But would such a novel breathing method work in mammals? The team thought it might be possible and undertook experiments with mice and micro-pigs to test that hypothesis. The experiments involved intra-anally administering oxygen gas or a liquid oxygenated perfluorocarbon to the unfortunate rodents and porcines. Yes, they gave the animals enemas. They then induced respiratory failure and evaluated the effectiveness of the intra-anal treatment.

The result: Both treatments were pretty darned effective at staving off respiratory failure with no major complications. The authors think this could work in human patients, too. We're suddenly feeling particularly motivated to keep up with our COVID boosters and mask up in crowded public spaces.

"I can breathe through my anus! Can you?"

Manoel Jr./CC BY-SA 2.0

Probability

Citation: František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann, and many colleagues, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side that it started.

Flipping a coin is a time-honored practice that many consider to be the epitome of a chance event—hence our reliance on a coin flip to fairly decide certain outcomes, such as which of the Wright brothers got to attempt the first flight in 1903 or who got first pick in the 1979 NBA draft, resulting in Magic Johnson playing for the Los Angeles Lakers rather than the Chicago Bulls. A physicist will tell you that a coin toss isn't random but purely deterministic under classical Newtonian mechanics, with the perceived randomness arising from small fluctuations in initial conditions like starting position, upward force, and angular momentum, for example.

The standard model of coin flipping predicts a 50/50 chance of a coin landing either heads or tails, i.e., there is no heads-tails bias. But in 2007, a Stanford statistician named Persi Diaconis proposed that the act of flipping a coin introduces a small wobble—a change in the direction of the axis of rotation throughout the coin's trajectory that causes a coin to spend more time in the air with the initial side facing up. So there should be a slight same-side bias, such that there should be a 51 percent chance that a coin lands on the same side as it started.

Bartoš et al. wanted to test the Diaconis model. There have been many prior coin-tossing experiments, from Count de Buffon in the 18th century to the 40,000 coin flips collected in a 2009 experiment specifically designed to test Diaconis's hypothesis. (The results were ambiguous.) Bartoš et al. surpassed them all, collecting a total of 350,757 coin flips by 48 people (all but three of the authors), all recorded on video for posterity.

That data confirmed Diaconis's prediction of a slight same-side bias. Nor did they find any trace of a heads/tail bias. The group proposed future research to determine whether "wobble tossers" have a more pronounced same-side bias than stable tossers but acknowledged that "the effort required to test this... appears to be excessive, as it would involve detailed analysis of high-speed camera recordings for individual flips." There's only so much tedium one can endure for science.

Standford statistician Persi Diaconis proposed a same-side bias in coin-flipping in 2007.

Persi Diaconis, 2007

Chemistry

Citation: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.

Active matter is matter that is composed of interacting agents able to extract energy from their environment and turn it into mechanical force. It's a major area of research in many different fields and is of particular interest for applications such as powering micrometers, self-cleaning polluted water, and improving the successful fertilization rate of sperm. Prior research has focused on particles, but Heeremans et al. wanted to learn more about the hydrodynamic properties of larger active polymers with an eye toward figuring out how to separate active polymers based on their activity. (Separation is typically achieved based on size.)

Fortunately, a handy analog exists in nature: T. tubifex worms, whose many segments are roughly akin to the chain-like structure of large polymers. The worms were placed in a specially designed channel inspired by the hexagonal pillar arrays used in chemistry to sort large polymers, scaled up to the size of Tubifex worms. The apparatus was mounted on a light-emitting diode panel for a uniform light background. The worms were divided into high- and low-activity groups, achieved by exposing the low-activity group to ethanol to basically get them drunk. The ethanol mixture also contained a blue dye to better differentiate between low-activity (blue) worms and high-activity (red) worms. The sober worms naturally made it to the end of the channel before their drunken counterparts, offering proof-of-principle that flow through a structured space is a reliable method for sorting active polymers by length and activity.

Demography

Citation: Saul Justin Newman, for detective work in discovering that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.

Human mortality is an inescapable reality, but there are always a few especially hardy people who manage to live past 100. There is a longstanding body of research around the clustering of such people into so-called geographic "Blue Zones," usually attributed to such predictors as strong social connections, high vegetable intake, and certain genetic markers. But Newman noted some troubling indicators inconsistent with the established consensus—remarkable longevity associated instead with poverty, low per capita incomes, and higher crime rates, for example, in Italy, England, and France—and decided to delve a little deeper into the demographic data.

While some might argue that errors in demographic data simply could not happen, Newman found a staggering number of errors in the data for every blue zone. For instance, in 1997, there were 30,000 Italians claiming a pension while turning out to be dead. In Costa Rica, 42 percent of citizens over the age of 99 were found to have "misstated" their age in the 2000 census, shrinking the blue zone in that region after error correction so much that the estimated life expectancy plummeted to the bottom of the pack. And in 2010, more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians turned out to be missing, imaginary, dead, or the result of clerical errors, amounting to an error rate of 82 percent. "If equivalent rates of fake data were discovered in any other field... a major scandal would ensue," Newman wrote. "In demography, however, such revelations seem to barely mention citation."

Biology

Citation: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow to explore how and when cows spew their milk.

Dairy farmers are well acquainted with cows that tend to "hold up" their milk at the start of milking as opposed to cows that readily "let down" their milk. In 1941, Ely and Petersen wanted to learn more about the physiological processes at play in the ejection of milk from a cow's udders. And they found a novel way to test the effect of fright on said ejection of milk: They placed a cat on a cow's back as the mechanical milker was being attached and then exploded paper bags every ten seconds for two minutes. Apparently, the paper bags alone were alarming enough since "the cat was later dispensed with as unnecessary," the authors observed. They also tested the effects of injecting adrenalin on a cow's ejection of milk.

Ely and Petersen concluded that the act of "letting down" the milk was best explained as a conditioned reflex due to high intra-glandular pressure caused by oxytocin in the blood. This caused the alveoli and duct muscles to contract, releasing the milk. "Holding up" the milk was due to the presence of adrenalin in the blood, which prevents those muscular contractions so you don't get the high intra-glandular pressure. Perhaps the adrenalin injections were sufficient to reach that second conclusion with no need for a cat or paper bags, but where's the fun in that?

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Two private astronauts took a spacewalk Thursday morning—yes, it was historic

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 18:27:47 +0000

"Today’s success represents a giant leap forward for the commercial space industry."

Jared Isaacman emerges from the Dragon spacecraft on Thursday morning.

SpaceX webcast

The Polaris Dawn mission took a firm step into the future on Thursday morning when two private citizens, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, briefly ventured outside their Dragon spacecraft.

Although each only spent about eight minutes outside the capsule, the spacewalk was unquestionably a major success for SpaceX and the four astronauts flying in orbit. This marked the first time that a private company, SpaceX, conducted a spacewalk. Funded by Isaacman, the mission spurred a frenetic two-year period of spacesuit development, testing, and simulations by the California company to reach Thursday's remarkably smooth operations.

Isaacman emerged from Dragon at 6:52 am ET (10:52 UTC) as the spacecraft passed near Australia on the planet below. A billionaire, entrepreneur, and avid pilot, Isaacman paused for just a moment as he stood on the edge of eternity and looked back at Earth.

"Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world," he said.

How it unfolded

After nearly two weeks of weather delays, the Polaris Dawn mission launched early on Tuesday morning aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The crew, Isaacman, pilot Scott "Kidd" Poteet, and SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, cruised to an altitude above 1,400 km on the mission's first day before returning to a lower altitude in preparation for Thursday morning's spacewalk.

Just a couple of hours after the launch, the crew began a pre-breathe process to begin acclimating their bodies to a lower pressure. At the beginning of cabin depressurization on Thursday morning, the cabin pressure was 8.6 psi, slightly higher than the air pressure at the base camp at Mount Everest. (Sea-level pressure on Earth is 14.7 psi.) At this point, the four astronauts were breathing pure oxygen through their suits.

Depressurization of the Dragon spacecraft, which does not have an airlock, took about 30 minutes. By the time the Dragon's cabin was in a vacuum, the pressure inside the astronauts's suits was about 5 psi, which is slightly less than the summit of Mount Everest. At this point, Isaacman moved to manually open the hatch and climb upward into space.

Connected to Dragon by an umbilical providing oxygen and thermal control, Isaacman purposefully ran through a series of tests of the spacesuit's mobility. He tested hand and body movements and the ability to use tools. With just a minute left before he had to come back inside Dragon, Isaacman again took stock of his surroundings. Below, Earth was disappearing into darkness as Dragon soared over New Zealand.

With the Earth in shadow below, Sarah Gillis took her stroll outside.

SpaceX webcast

"It's gorgeous," he said.

After Isaacman climbed back down inside, he was followed by Gillis, a SpaceX engineer who worked on spacesuits among other programs at the company. She performed a similar battery of tests. Like Isaacman, Gillis extended most of her body outside Dragon, with only her lower legs still inside the spacecraft. At 30 years old, she is the youngest person to walk in space.

By 7:58 am ET, it was all over. The entire spacewalk, from cabin depressurization to the operations by Isaacman and Gillis to the re-pressurization of Dragon, had taken just 1 hour and 46 minutes.

"Today’s success represents a giant leap forward for the commercial space industry and NASA's long-term goal to build a vibrant US space economy," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement after the spacewalk concluded.

What’s the big deal?

One might reasonably ask why this is such a big deal. After all, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk back in 1965. He spent 12 minutes outside his Voshkod spacecraft. Since that time, 263 people from dozens of countries have performed spacewalks. In 2001, NASA astronauts Susan Helms and James Voss performed a spacewalk that lasted 8 hours and 56 minutes.

In some sense, then, Isaacman and Gillis were trodding a well-worn path that dates back nearly six decades.

And yet, it does matter—quite a lot.

Something similar could be asked about the Falcon 9 rocket's debut launch in 2010. Before then, nations, and even some large private contractors funded by governments, had built medium-lift rockets. In its earliest iteration, the Falcon 9 was just another rocket flying into orbit. But here's the difference. Fourteen years later, the privately developed Falcon 9 has revolutionized the launch industry by demonstrating rapid reusability. It will launch more than 100 times this year, something no government or company has ever done before.

Now imagine where SpaceX and this spacesuit could be 14 years from today. The first Falcon 9 rocket has gone through four major revisions, more than doubling its payload capacity. So, too, will this spacesuit. It's not too difficult to imagine a world in which dozens of people launch on Starship and take similar spacewalks in orbit. Future versions of these spacesuits will almost certainly walk on the Moon, and one day, Mars.

That's why this is not overblown. These tentative and brief spacewalks potentially represent a critical step in humanity's expansion into the Solar System. And it happened this morning.

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The 2024 VW Golf GTI is the last of its kind with a manual transmission

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 02:04:01 +0000

Get the manual while you can.

"They won't make them like this much longer" is a pretty hackneyed aphorism, but it certainly applies to the Volkswagen Golf GTI. The Mk 8 Golf is due for a mid-life refresh next year, and when that happens, VW will be simplifying things by dropping the manual transmission option. That means model year 2024 is the final chance anyone will have to buy a GTI with three pedals. Yes, it has some flaws, but it's also small and nimble, both attributes lacking in so much of what the automotive industry has to offer these days.

We've been a bit deficient in not reviewing the Mk 8 Golf GTI until now. I reviewed the more expensive, more powerful Golf R in 2022, but the last GTI we drove was the outgoing Mk 7 car in mid-2020. That time, we were only able to source a GTI with the two-pedal, dual-clutch gearbox, a transmission I felt didn't quite suit the engine it was mated to. On the other hand, I was effusive about the old GTI's infotainment, calling it "one of the best systems on the market." Well, it was 2020, remember.

Under the hood, you'll find yet another version of VW Group's venerable EA888 four-cylinder engine, here with a turbocharger and direct injection. It generates 241 hp (180 kW) and 273 lb-ft (370 Nm), with that peak torque arriving at just 1,750 rpm. This sends its power to the front wheels via a seven-speed DSG or the soon-to-be-retired six-speed manual.

For this review, we tested both the DSG and manual transmission versions of the GTI.

Jonathan Gitlin
I don't know if generations of Golf styling is exactly like Star Trek movies, but I do usually prefer the even numbers...

Jonathan Gitlin
VW decided to drop the three-door Golf body style when it introduced the Mk 8 Golf.

Jonathan Gitlin
There's 19.9 cubic feet (563 L) of cargo space with the seats in use, or 34.5 cubic feet (977 L) with the rear seats folded flat.

Jonathan Gitlin

You can blame enlightened Europe for the six-speed's demise. Over there, buyers prefer the two-pedal version by a massive margin, which even the high take rate for three-pedal GTIs in the US and Canada couldn't make up for. (This is, of course, contrary to popular wisdom, which has it that all Europeans shun auto 'boxes as a matter of course.) On top of that, getting the six-speed to comply with incoming Euro 7 emissions regulations proved to be just too much, according to VW, so it decided to drop the option.

Here in the US, both transmissions are rated at a combined 27 mpg (8.7 L/100 km), with the DSG getting the edge in city driving (24 mpg/9.8 L/100 km) and the manual beating it slightly for highway (34 mpg/6.9 L/100 km). In practice, I saw as high as 36 mpg (6.5 L/100 km) on highway trips with the three-pedal GTI.

A smarter GTI

A more modern electronic architecture was one of the improvements to the Golf from Mk 7 to Mk 8. On the plus side, it enables some clever vehicle dynamics control via the torque-sensing limited slip differential, the GTI's stability and traction control, and the adaptive dampers, if fitted. Very keen drivers might prefer a mechanical limited slip diff, but in day-to-day driving, you'd never have an issue with the Mk 8 GTI's electronic version.

The new electronics meant a big tech upgrade for the interior, too. Out went the physical analog gauges, which were replaced by a 10.25-inch digital display with various different user-configurable views. A move to capacitive control panels instead of discrete buttons adds an extra level of minimalism to VW's traditionally spartan approach to cabin design, but they're far too easy to activate by mistake.

I assume this problem would ease with familiarity and time, but it apparently needs longer than the couple of weeks I've spent driving Golfs this year. And no amount of muscle memory will change the fact that the temperature and volume controls are not backlit, so they're impossible to see at night.

There are also new infotainment systems running VW's current MIB III system. It's an 8-inch touchscreen in the base car or a 10-inch version in the other trims, with ChatGPT arriving this month via update. While I don't love the GTI's bright red infotainment UI, it's not objectionable, though I wouldn't call this one class-leading. Realistically, most drivers will spend their time in Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, either wired via USB-C or wirelessly, for the 10-inch system.

Get the 380

There are three different trim levels to choose from, starting with the $31,965 Golf GTI S all the way up to the $40,505 Golf GTI Autobahn. In the past, the manual GTI was slightly cheaper than the DSG version, but for model year 2024, you'll pay a few hundred dollars more, depending on trim. That's because VW is fitting all three-pedal GTIs with the "380" package, which also includes the adaptive dampers as standard, as well as 19-inch alloy wheels and summer tires.

And you should pick that option. The DSG can feel a little sluggish while shifting at times, something we criticized the previous car for, too. Changing gears yourself, with your leg and your arm working the pedal, the lever is undoubtedly slower still, but it also gives the turbo time to spool again, and since you're an active participant in the process, it's not like you notice any delay.

It's not the best manual gearshift in the world, or even on sale today—a Mazda MX-5 review is more likely to feature cliches about the stickshift's "rifle bolt action" than this Golf. And it's a real shame that the knob at the end of the stick doesn't still resemble an actual golf ball, although it is dimpled in places. But it's also such a refreshing rarity to have a car where you need to drive with both feet. To put it another way, the DSG car didn't make me take the long route home after going to Cars and Coffee, but the manual did.

This is what the interior looks like for the S and SE 380.

Volkswagen
This is the Autobahn interior with leather seats. I appreciate their ventilation, but I prefer the tartan ones.

Jonathan Gitlin
VW calls this a golf ball gearstick. There are some dimples, but they're on the bit you can't see in this photo.

Volkswagen
I adore the glossy black alloy wheels that come standard with the GTI 380.

Volkswagen

I would also not bother breaking the bank for the Autobahn version. The head-up display is nice to have, as are ventilated front seats and a heated rear bench seat. But I don't much like the leather seats, particularly when the Golf S and SE come with the far more appropriate, far cooler gray and black "Scalepaper" tartan fabric instead.

Spending time with the GTI was something of a refreshing tonic, which is as much a damning indictment on the state of the new vehicle market in 2024 as it is the Golf's charms and merits. The UI really does annoy me, and I think it represents a step back in usability, but not enough to overcome the right-sized packaging of this hot hatch or the level of driver engagement it still provides compared to increasingly anesthetized compact crossovers.

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Old Easter Island genomes show no sign of a population collapse

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 02:02:58 +0000

Native American DNA in the genomes dates to roughly when Rapa Nui was settled.

Rapa Nui, often referred to as Easter Island, is one of the most remote populated islands in the world. It's so distant that Europeans didn't stumble onto it until centuries after they had started exploring the Pacific. When they arrived, though, they found that the relatively small island supported a population of thousands, one that had built imposing monumental statues called moai. Arguments over how this population got there and what happened once it did have gone on ever since.

Some of these arguments, such as the idea that the island's indigenous people had traveled there from South America, have since been put to rest. Genomes from people native to the island show that its original population was part of the Polynesian expansion across the Pacific. But others, such as the role of ecological collapse in limiting the island's population and altering its culture, continue to be debated.

Researchers have now obtained genome sequence from the remains of 15 Rapa Nui natives who predate European contact. And they indicate that the population of the island appears to have grown slowly and steadily, without any sign of a bottleneck that could be associated with an ecological collapse. And roughly 10 percent of the genomes appear to have a Native American source that likely dates from roughly the same time that the island was settled.

Out of the museum

The remains that provided these genomes weren't found on Rapa Nui, at least not recently. Instead, they reside at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in France, having been obtained at some uncertain point in the past. Their presence there is a point of contention for the indigenous people of Rapa Nui, but the researchers behind the new work had the cooperation of the islanders in this project, having worked with them extensively. The researchers' description of these interactions could be viewed as a model for how this sort of work should be done:

Throughout the course of the study, we met with representatives of the Rapanui community on the island, the Comisión de Desarrollo Rapa Nui and the Comisión Asesora de Monumentos Nacionales, where we presented our research goals and ongoing results. Both commissions voted in favor of us continuing with the research... We presented the research project in public talks, a short video and radio interviews on the island, giving us the opportunity to inquire about the questions that are most relevant to the Rapanui community. These discussions have informed the research topics we investigated in this work.

Given the questionable record-keeping at various points in the past, one of the goals of this work was simply to determine whether these remains truly had originated on Rapa Nui. That was unambiguously true. All comparisons with genomes of modern populations show that all 15 of these genomes have a Polynesian origin and are most closely related to modern residents of Rapa Nui. "The confirmation of the origin of these individuals through genomic analyses will inform repatriation efforts led by the Rapa Nui Repatriation Program (Ka Haka Hoki Mai Te Mana Tupuna)," the authors suggest.

A second question was whether the remains predate European contact. The researchers attempted to perform carbon dating, but it produced dates that made no sense. Some of the remains had dates that were potentially after they had been collected, according to museum records. And all of them were from the 1800s, well after European contact and introduced diseases had shrunk the native population and mixed in DNA from non-Polynesians. Yet none of the genomes showed more than one percent European ancestry, a fraction low enough to be ascribed to a spurious statistical fluke.

So the precise date these individuals lived is uncertain. But the genetic data clearly indicates that they were born prior to the arrival of Europeans. They can therefore tell us about what the population was experiencing in the period between Rapa Nui's settlement and the arrival of colonial powers.

Back from the Americas

While these genomes showed no sign of European ancestry, they were not fully Polynesian. Instead, roughly 10 percent of the genome appeared to be derived from a Native American population. This is the highest percentage seen in any Polynesian population, including some that show hints of Native American contact that dates to before Europeans arrived on the scene.

Isolating these DNA sequences and comparing them to populations from across the world showed that the group most closely related to the one who contributed to the Rapa Nui population presently resides in the central Andes region of South America. That's in contrast to the earlier results, which suggested the contact was with populations further north in South America.

That finding is consistent with the analysis of the present-day population of Rapa Nui, which suggests that some of the South American DNA on the island predates the arrival of Europeans. Of course, a lot of similar DNA arrived after European contact, so that analysis would always be tenuous. An earlier study of DNA from five sets of pre-contact remains had suggested there was no Native American DNA present. But the small number of samples there, combined with less total DNA sequence per sample, meant that it just wasn't sensitive enough to pick up the signal found using 15 sets of remains.

When did this contact happen? Without the carbon dating, it's harder to tell, but it's not impossible. Over time, exchanges between chromosomes during germ cell formation will progressively scramble the Native American DNA, breaking it into ever-smaller pieces. So the average size of each contiguous stretch of Native American DNA hints at how long ago the DNA entered the Rapa Nui population. The challenge is that the people whose remains are being analyzed lived at different times in the past.

Still, it's possible to get an estimate. The researchers found that the Native American DNA arrived at Rapa Nui somewhere between 17 and 32 generations prior to the life of the individuals represented by these remains. That places the estimate roughly between 1246 and 1425 CE, which is similar to the estimated date of the settling of the island, thought to be around 1250 CE.

That's consistent with a range of scenarios, including that the Polynesian settlers of Rapa Nui engaged in back-and-forth trade with South America around the time of its settlement. Alternately, that exchange took place earlier in the Polynesian expansion, and the initial settlers included an unusually high fraction of Native American contribution. Finally, Rapa Nui might have potentially been settled by a group that had reached South America but turned around and went directly to Rapa Nui. It's not clear how we'll sort that out.

No sign of collapse

Another thing we can do with multiple genomes is estimate the population size. When populations are small, they lose genetic diversity, and people are more likely to have offspring with someone they're related to. This latter event leads to individuals with chromosome pairs where both copies have identical regions because they were inherited from a recent common ancestor. The frequency and size of these identical-by-descent copies indicate the population size.

Based on these 15 sets of remains, the Rapa Nui population's identical-by-descent regions don't look like those in small, isolated populations that we've studied. In fact, they're similar to those in the present-day Indigenous Rapa Nui population, which is expanding after a severe contraction following the disease and abuse that occurred following European contact.

The researchers used software to create a model of the historic population based on these identical-by-descent segments. These suggest that the population did experience a single bottleneck, but it occurred as the population first arrived at Rapa Nui. Models with a second bottleneck caused by a later ecological collapse simply didn't fit the data. Instead, the best fit was a model in which the population expanded slowly and steadily after the initial arrival of the Polynesians

That population never got close to the 15,000-individual population typically considered the starting point for a collapse. In fact, the effective population, which represents the total individuals in a population that is producing offspring, never gets above 1,000, which is consistent with the 3,000 total individuals estimated to have been present when Europeans arrived.

Overall, the work seems to pretty conclusively answer two of the biggest questions about the settling of Rapa Nui. The biggest uncertainty is that we don't have accurate dates for when the people who carried these genomes lived. It's not entirely clear how the handling of these remains interfered with the carbon dating, but getting good information about when these people lived or obtaining more genomes from individuals who can be confidently dated is likely to be key in reducing those remaining uncertainties.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4 (About DOIs).

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Breadfruit Is Here to Save the World

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 17:31:24 +0000

This calorie-rich, nutrient-dense, and climate-resilient crop has the power to step in for more common staples that can’t handle global warming.

Warming temperatures are making farming much more difficult in the tropics. Food systems across island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific are particularly vulnerable, being hit hard by a combination of heat waves, droughts, and unseasonal rain. And the impact of climate change in these areas is likely to increase significantly in the next decade, especially for farmers of the most common staples like corn, wheat, and soy.

But there is one crop that loves the heat and is not easily discouraged by swings in the weather. It is called breadfruit, and it is undergoing a quiet revival in its Pacific island and Caribbean homelands, where people are hoping that the tree, and its produce, will thrive in a climate-changed future.

“There’s not really a climate that is too hot for breadfruit,” says Russell Fielding, a geographer at Coastal Carolina University. One of the highest-yielding food plants in the world, breadfruit is a large-leafed evergreen of the jackfruit family that produces an abundance of knobbly fruits that can be used in a dazzling variety of different dishes.

The range of where these trees can grow is steadily expanding as temperatures rise worldwide, and owing to their wide-spreading root system, breadfruit trees are virtually indestructible. They survive hurricanes, Fielding says, and can also grow near salty or brackish water, a big plus as ocean levels continue to inch up. They also stabilize and enrich even the most degraded soils. A big tree will sequester 1.3 tons of carbon by the time it is mature, according to calculations made by the Trees That Feed Foundation, an Illinois-based nonprofit that provides breadfruit trees to help feed people and create jobs across the tropics.

“People are beginning to recognize breadfruit’s incredible potential,” Fielding says. “It is one of the most productive trees in terms of calories per year per unit area. One breadfruit tree could easily supply all the fruit that one family needs.”

If you’ve seen the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, you’ll already be familiar with breadfruit. These were the fruit trees being transported during the merchant ship’s fateful journey. But if you haven’t been on a remote Pacific island lately, or in the Caribbean, chances are you’ve never eaten the spiky soccer-ball-size green fruit with a creamy pulp. Breadfruit has a short shelf life and is rarely exported out of tropical countries.

Originating in the Pacific and once a staple in Tahiti, Hawaii, and Jamaica, breadfruit gradually fell out of favor, replaced in these regions by a standard Western diet high in processed foods, saturated fats, and refined carbohydrates. Breadfruit’s taste is bland, a cross between mashed potatoes and sourdough bread; its gooey consistency when ripe has been likened to wallpaper paste. Yet despite these uninspiring qualities, some believe it’s the next big superfood.

Diane Ragone has been personally obsessed with the humble fruit since the 1980s. She is director emeritus of the Breadfruit Institute, a research and advocacy group based on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. For one thing, she says, breadfruit is far more nutritious than staples like rice and corn, being rich in micronutrients and vitamins. It’s also relatively high in protein, she says; a Samoan variety called Ma’afala even surpasses soybeans for protein content.

Breadfruit grows quickly, is incredibly prolific, and doesn’t need fertilizers or other agrochemical inputs. And the fact that it doesn’t have a strong flavor of its own makes it a great partner for many other foods. The starchy fruit can be added to soups, stews, salads, tamales, puddings, and pies. It’s being made into a growing number of commercial products as well, including vodka in the Virgin Islands, chips in Jamaica, crackers in Barbados, and tostones (a Caribbean fritter) in the Dominican Republic.

Breadfruit on sale in the Dominican Republic.

Photograph: Raquel De Jesus

“There are a billion hungry people on this planet,” Ragone says. “Eighty percent of them live in the tropics, where breadfruit thrives.” Unlike field crops, which have to be replanted every year, these hardy trees produce fruit for decades—well over 400 pounds of fruit a year per tree, making it one of the highest-yielding food crops on Earth.

Breadfruit can also help to restore degraded environments, Ragone says. She has seen entire hillsides in the South Pacific carpeted with broad-leafed breadfruit trees under which there were lush understory gardens replete with bananas, avocado, taro, ginger, and yams. “Just think, with agroforestry groves like these, you could transform a bare hillside into a garden that could feed people and last for centuries.” In particular, this is her vision for Haiti, a largely deforested country. Such a transformation of its hillsides “could happen easily in five to 10 years,” she says.

Mary McLaughlin, chair and founder of the Trees That Feed Foundation—the leading supplier of breadfruit trees to the world—shares a similar vision. Along with Jamaica, McLaughlin’s country of birth, Haiti was where the foundation first started distributing trees. Breadfruit has been grown there since its introduction to the Caribbean by the notorious Captain Bligh, who was in command of the Bounty when the mutiny occurred. (He survived and embarked upon a second breadfruit-transporting expedition in 1793.) The British were looking for a crop that could be quickly and cheaply grown and fed to their slaves, and so the trees spread throughout the Caribbean. But its reputation as a lowly slave food eventually led to breadfruit being all but ignored by locals, who let the abundant fruits drop and rot on the ground or fed them to their pigs.

McLaughlin and her husband Mike were appalled by the waste of this nutritional powerhouse in Haiti, the poorest—and hungriest—nation in the Western hemisphere. So Mike designed a solar dehydrator to dry breadfruit, which can then be ground into flour. With help from Trees That Feed, Pierre Moïse Louis, an agronomist, set up Haiti’s first breadfruit mill near the town of Jeremie. Local farming cooperatives were formed to supply the mill with fruit.

“The success we are seeing in Haiti is amazing,” says Mary McLaughlin. “We have women vendors taking these products and selling them. It’s creating income for people who had none.”

People like 52-year-old Orieuse Jean Jules, who is now the proud owner of an orchard of 74 trees from which she derives a steady income. Jules says the trees have fed her family, empowered her as a woman, and put her children through school. “It has made such a huge difference in my life,” she says.

Like other Caribbean countries, Haiti imports more than 80 percent of its food. Fabrice Leclercq, a UN adviser in the country, says that breadfruit flour can help the island replace some of its costly wheat imports. He also hopes the flour will find a lucrative market in the US, where consumers seek gluten-free alternatives for use in bread and baked goods.

With Leclercq’s help, tons of breadfruit flour are being supplied every month to Haitian schools, where it is used in soups, as well as in healthy snacks and baked goods like konparets, a dense Haitian sweet bun. Breadfruit has also helped sustain Haitian families during trying times. “After the terrible earthquake of 2021, we were able to feed a large number of people with preserved breadfruit from our large warehouses,” Louis says.

Breadfruit is creating economic opportunities on other islands as well. Marisol Villalobos Rivera is CEO and cofounder with her husband of the breadfruit startup Amasar in Puerto Rico, where the fruit is called pana (a variant of the Spanish word for bread, which in Puerto Rico also refers to a best friend, someone you can count on).

“Puerto Ricans are breadfruit pioneers,” Villalobos Rivera says. “We are teaching the Dominican Republic and others how we eat breadfruit and process it into different foods.” Rivera has developed a number of breadfruit products, including an award-winning pancake and waffle mix that is selling well on the island and is now being exported to the US.

As in Haiti, breadfruit helped isolated islanders survive after Hurricane Maria destroyed most of their field crops in 2017. “We were eating breadfruit before we were eating locally grown plantains,” Villalobos Rivera says. “The ability of breadfruit trees to adapt is just amazing. I dream that one day we’ll cover the entire Caribbean with breadfruit trees. It’s our turn now to have food security and food sovereignty.”

Harvesting fruit in the Manua Islands. Breadfruit trees can

grow to over 20 meters.

Photograph: Diane Ragone

This year the government of the Dominican Republic is donating an estimated 500,000 breadfruit trees to farmers. Meanwhile the Jamaican Forestry Department has just initiated a program for growing breadfruit in urban areas as a food source. In Africa, breadfruit is being planted in Uganda, where agronomist Espaineto Kamya is helping to introduce it into forestry plantations there.

Breadfruit has also seen a dramatic rise in production in Hawaii and other islands in the Pacific in recent years, according to Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, a professor of indigenous crops and cropping systems at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. But he says that more research needs to be done on the over 400 varieties of the tree and their responses to different climate conditions, so that farmers can decide which will be best suited to their locations as the climate changes.

But this, he believes, would be much more efficient than generating climate-adapted versions of existing staples. “In the US, we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on corn research to make corn more tolerant to higher temperatures, but breadfruit is already adapted to higher temperatures, and many of the same products could be made from it,” Lincoln says. He would like to see “food forests”—like the ones grown in ancient Hawaii, with breadfruit at their center—become the agriculture of the future throughout the global south.

“Growing breadfruit can help shift our food system away from large-scale monoculture to diversified production and more home- and community-based food production.” All you need is a tree, Lincoln says, and then enough fruit to feed a family will follow, at virtually no extra effort. “While most people don’t have the time to farm in their backyards, everyone can take one hour and plant a breadfruit tree.”

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The World’s Biggest Bitcoin Mine Is Rattling This Texas Oil Town

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 17:28:58 +0000

A cash-strapped city in rural Texas will soon be home to the world’s largest bitcoin mine. Local protesters are “raising hell.”

On a good day, the stretch of highway from Dallas to Corsicana takes an hour to drive. The route passes gleaming white water towers that stand over single-story towns, cowboy churches, and DW’s Adult Video, a porno pitstop that still—if the billboard can be believed—does a roaring trade in DVDs.

Corsicana, the seat of Navarro County, is best known for kicking off the Texas oil boom in 1894, when a 1,000-foot well meant to alleviate a water shortage instead turned up an oil field that extended for miles. In the century to follow, tens of millions of barrels of oil were pulled from the city—and Corsicana got rich.

Today, only one or two thousand barrels are extracted each year. Almost a sixth of the 24,000 people who live in Corsicana are below the poverty line, well above the national average. The city’s roads are potholed. Several neighborhoods are lined with broken wooden shacks and overgrown trees that weigh down the power lines. Even the leafy boulevard of the historical district, which has a few nice stores and a coffee shop, is pocked with boarded-up units.

But on a 265-acre parcel of land about 10 miles out of town, construction is underway on a gigantic bitcoin mining facility. It belongs to Riot Platforms, a publicly listed crypto mining company, which intends to grow it into the largest in the world.

The oil fields are drying up. In Riot’s high temple of cryptographic computation, local officials think they’ve found a stopgap. Some Corsicana residents aren’t so sure. They see the facility as a blot on the landscape that threatens their property values, vulnerable energy grid, and quiet rural lifestyle. And they're fighting back.

My first morning in Corsicana, I met Jackie Sawicky in the packed parking lot of the Russell Stover candy factory a couple of miles out of town. Workers filed into the entrance of the squat but expansive plant, some in overalls and safety boots. In the distance, the tapered smokestack of the nearby glass manufacturing plant scraped the clouds.

Sawicky, who is in her mid-forties, is the founder of the Texas Coalition Against Cryptomining, formerly the Concerned Citizens of Navarro, a protest group established in 2022 with the intention of blocking Riot’s construction. When we met, she was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an orange bitcoin logo, struck through with a red diagonal line.

Sawicky grew up in the Dallas suburbs, where she lived for most of her adult life, selling herbs and flowers at the farmer’s market. In 2018, she and her husband moved to a tiny municipality outside of Corsicana—about 12 miles away from the Riot mine—to escape the hubbub and find a plot large enough to start a permaculture farm and grow her own food. “We wanted peace and quiet and to be out in nature,” says Sawicky.

Jackie Sawicky speaks to attendees at a meeting held by the Texas Coalition Against Cryptomining in Corsicana, Texas.

PHOTOGRAPH: BRITTANY HALLBERG

In April 2022, Sawicky happened across a Facebook livestream hosted by the Corsicana city government, announcing plans for the Riot mine. The pitch was to expand the local tax base and bring jobs to people in the area. “This will spur economic growth, which will benefit all of us who live here,” says John Boswell, economic development director for both Corsicana and Navarro County.

Sawicky wasn’t sold. Horrified at Riot’s vision, Sawicky spun up a Facebook group to coordinate a protest campaign. Within a week, hundreds of people had joined. Though TCAC has only a handful of members who attend every monthly Zoom meetup and scheduled protest, the online group now has 800 participants. For Sawicky, TCAC has practically become a full-time job; she never got around to developing a full-fledged farm.

As we rumbled around Corsicana in Sawicky’s truck—bright red, with a chipped windshield and a footwell scattered with papers and other detritus—she entered into a long and winding criticism of Navarro County’s flirtation with the bitcoin mining industry. Sawicky frequently lurches from one thought to the next, or gets lost in a tangent, a trait she attributes partly to ADHD and partly to the depth of her anger. “One of my sayings is that anger is a renewable resource,” she says.

“As a certified hippie and lifelong environmentalist, it was the stupidest, most disgusting waste of energy I’d ever heard of,” says Sawicky. But in Republican Navarro County, where environmental arguments hold little sway, Sawicky focuses her campaigning on the potential for the Riot facility to produce disruptive noise, pull from local water resources, and strain the power grid.

That strain is potentially immense. Bitcoin mining is a process whereby computers race to solve a mathematical puzzle; the victor ends up with a handful of newly minted bitcoin. The level of competition among miners today means that large fleets of specialized, energy-guzzling hardware are required to stand a chance. The construction of the Corsicana facility will proceed in phases, but in April, Riot began to bring computers online for the first time. Once complete, it will draw up to one gigawatt of energy in any given moment, enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes.

Texas governor Greg Abbott invited bitcoin miners onto the state grid in 2021, the same year that China instituted a nationwide ban. He did so hoping they would act as a failsafe of sorts: When demand was low they would pull from renewable energy sources—thus improving the profitability of wind and solar plants and incentivizing new development—and in periods of high demand they would switch off in exchange for a fee, under an arrangement known as demand response. Separately, mining companies could further temper shortfalls in supply by selling bulk-purchased energy back to the grid.

But Abbott’s embrace of the bitcoin industry has attracted a flood of miners eager to plug into a grid that is not equipped to accommodate them. Though reliable data is in short supply, the US is now arguably home to the greatest proportion of bitcoin mining activity anywhere in the world, and Texas likely accounts for the largest share of any state. To meet the influx of both bitcoin mining and AI-related data centers, the Texas grid will need to almost double in capacity in the coming six years—from 85 to 150 gigawatts—Pablo Vegas, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, operator of the state grid, told the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee in June.

Bitcoin miners are taking advantage of grid stabilization schemes paid for by Texans to prop up their otherwise scarcely profitable businesses, argues Ed Hirs, energy fellow at the University of Houston, who describes them as a “tapeworm” on the grid. In August 2023, when a Texas heatwave led to a surge in energy demand, Riot said it earned $31.7 million through grid stabilization programs versus around $9 million from mining. “The average consumer is directly subsidizing the bitcoin miners under their everyday purchase contract,” says Hirs.

Industry advocates argue that in fact bitcoin miners are uniquely positioned to stave off blackouts. It is impossible for Riot to contribute to destabilizing the grid, argues Brian Morgenstern, head of public policy at Riot, because its facilities immediately switch off whenever demand is high; other industrial facilities can’t always be so flexible. “We are not the cause of supply and demand being out of balance, because we are the most flexible load on the grid,” he says.

By incentivizing investment in new power sources, Morgenstern claims, mining will create an abundance that propels energy prices downward over time. “We should all be for energy abundance, because the economy of the future demands it,” says Morgenstern. “I think the scarcity mindset of trying to ration power and take it away from something that you don’t like is misguided.”

As for concerns about noise—which have cropped up repeatedly in Texas and beyond, as bitcoin mining companies put down roots in the US countryside—Morgenstern says Riot has built its Corsicana facility to support a new and far quieter type of cooling system: liquid immersion. Rather than use large, noisy fans to air-cool equipment, the company will dunk its computers into tanks of nonconductive liquid. “You wouldn’t even be able to hear anything from the street adjacent to the facility,” he claims.

Liquid immersion is being put into action elsewhere in the world, and Riot has already deployed the technology on a smaller scale in another Texas facility. But it is still widely considered experimental in the field of data center design. If built out to its full capacity, the Riot facility would represent the largest ever implementation of liquid immersion, experts say, and complications could force the company to resort to older, louder methods of cooling—a risk Riot acknowledges in its public filings. “You are not entirely sure what the issues are going to be at a massive scale,” says Jim Cooper, global director for water optimization at engineering consultancy firm Arcadis.

In November, Sawicky took to the speaker’s podium at a Corsicana City Council meeting: “I’m here to talk about Riot Platforms,” she said.

For the next three minutes, Sawicky harangued the council, who sat behind a desk on an elevated platform garlanded with pumpkins and other autumn decorations, criticizing their decision not to hold a public meeting on the facility’s arrival. “We are demanding y’all actually do what you should have done six months ago: Do a public town hall with the company so folks can ask questions,” said Sawicky, brandishing a petition.

Sawicky continued beyond her allotted time, drawing frustrated bangs of the gavel from the adjudicating councilmember. Relenting, Sawicky handed the petition to then city councilwoman Susan Hale, who leaned forward in her chair and threw the papers over the end of the desk. “Thank you, Miss Hale, for showing the people of Corsicana exactly who you are,” responded Sawicky as she stooped to gather up the petition, now splayed across the floor.

“I am not privy to what the background was, but there had been other things that had happened prior to that between the two of them,” claims Connie Standridge, the outgoing city manager. “It was a very personal action. It was certainly not endorsed or planned by the city.” In any case, says Standridge, it would not make sense for the Corsicana government to hold a public meeting, because the mine sits outside city limits.

Sawicky frequently finds herself in confrontations like this one. In June, police removed her from a meet-and-greet hosted by Riot for recording without permission, the company says. In public city council meetings, Sawicky regularly criticizes the Corsicana government’s engagement with Riot. In another instance, Sawicky ended up in a shouting match with a member of the local press, which she says is not critical enough of Riot.

Monica Vickery, mother to Jackie Sawicky, holds a sign

outside Riot's Corsicana facility as part of a protest

organized by the Texas Coalition Against Cryptomining

and the environmental activist group Greenpeace.

Photograph: Brittany Hallberg/Greenpeace

The previous October, Sawicky organized a weeklong protest alongside environmental activist group Greenpeace and brandished various anti-bitcoin signs at anyone who entered the Riot facility. Only a few other people turned out in support, leaving Sawicky dejected: “I could not have been more disappointed and disgusted by my fellow humans,” she said, when we first spoke earlier in the year.

Sawicky is unapologetically brash; she has given up on artfulness and guile, she claims, in favor of brute force. “I am obnoxious. I am in your face,” she says. Her methods have led even close allies to question her. “I love her to death. [But] she has an unfortunate knack for alienating people,” says John Blewitt, a friend of Sawicky who attends TCAC events infrequently. But Sawicky insists that “raising hell” is what it takes to provoke a response.

Though Standridge says the petition incident was not a reflection of the city’s attitude toward Sawicky, other local officials are open in their feelings about TCAC. “The protesters sit right there in the front row and heckle the whole time. Just like children, they won’t hardly let them speak,” says David Brewer, a commissioner in the Navarro County Commissioners Court, referring to the meet-and-greets held by Riot. “I know that nobody in the county and city government is paying any attention to them.”

But a few counties away, near the town of Granbury, a large bitcoin mine is already causing some of the problems that Sawicky predicts are in store for the residents of Navarro County, should her warnings be ignored.

When I pulled into Cheryl Shadden’s driveway on a Thursday afternoon, she was bending over a plant bed bookended by two large flowering shrubs that framed the porch of her home. She turned to greet me, revealing on the front of her T-shirt, like Sawicky, a slogan in capital letters that read: “STOP BITCOIN!!” As I swung open the car door, I was met with the noise: part hum and part rush of wind.

In 2022, the bitcoin mining company Compute North set up a facility adjacent to Shadden’s property, leasing the land from the operator of a gas power plant already on the site. Toward the end of 2023, Shadden claims, the noise spilling from the mine became unbearable. “It’s like you’ve been invaded by aliens,” she says.

Shadden, a nurse anesthetist, has lived for 27 years in a modest bungalow on a plot of land in Granbury, in Hood County, made up of multiple fields and meadows separated by mesh fences. With her lives a full menagerie of animals, including cats, birds, horses, and a pack of enormous Great Pyrenees dogs.

Signs erected by Cheryl Shadden at the edge of her property near Granbury, Texas.

PHOTOGRAPH: JOEL KHALILI

Cheryl Shadden in her back yard, pointing toward the bitcoin mine adjacent to her property.

PHOTOGRAPH: JOEL KHALILI

On the day I visited, the whirring of the fans from the mine did not breach Shadden’s walls; a phone app placed the outside sound at roughly 70 decibels, similar to a vacuum cleaner. But on some days, Shadden and other locals say, the noise is far worse. When the facility is at its loudest, some have to leave the vicinity. “My heart almost starts beating out of my chest,” says Chip Joslin, incoming commissioner for neighboring Somervell County.

Shadden attributes a range of health issues to the noise exposure, including an inability to sleep, nausea, and a ringing in her ears. At the end of June, Shadden was diagnosed with tinnitus and sensorineural hearing loss, a type of damage that can be caused by both aging and noise exposure. Other local residents report similar issues: “First it was the ear-ringing, then it went downhill after that. I have headaches now and high blood pressure … Listening to it makes me sick—actually sick,” says Geraldine Lathers, who lives in a neighborhood of bungalows adjacent to the facility.

The mine, which is three times smaller by maximum power consumption than the Corsicana facility, was acquired in January by Marathon Digital Holdings, another of the largest publicly listed crypto mining companies. A local constable, John Shirley, claims the company has violated state noise ordinances, which prohibit noise levels above 85 decibels. Marathon acknowledges the noise complaints but claims to have been unaware of the issues before acquiring the facility and, though the company declined to provide WIRED with its own sound readings, denies having violated state laws.

In July, the manager of the Marathon facility faced a criminal trial, charged by the State of Texas with disorderly conduct on the basis of Shirley’s sound readings. He was ultimately acquitted by the jury after a sound expert testified that the readings had been taken with improperly calibrated equipment.

Marathon also disputes the idea that noise from its facility has led to health problems. “There is no evidence that data centers cause these issues,” says Jayson Browder, senior vice president of government affairs at Marathon.

However, to address the complaints, Marathon has promised to reconfigure the facility to extend an existing sound barrier made of metal and acoustic-dampening material, and switch half the site to liquid immersion by the end of the year. In the meantime, Marathon claims it has cut the number of machines in operation. “We are not the builders of the site. While we didn’t create this problem, it’s one that we have inherited and recognize is now our responsibility to address,” says Ellie Atherton, director of communications at Marathon.

Until the noise issues are resolved, Shadden vows to wage “redneck warfare” against Marathon. That involves pressuring the company to expedite the promised alterations, staging protests, and petitioning local officials to investigate. If that doesn’t work, she plans to file a civil lawsuit against Marathon. “People ask what one person is going to do. But that’s not how I think,” says Shadden.

I followed Shadden through the calf-deep wildflower meadow at the back of her property to the road she shares with the bitcoin mine. Picking up on my fear of snakes from my bandy-legged gait, she said over her shoulder: “Don’t worry, the dogs will get them.”

Shadden had mounted signs made of corrugated aluminum on the roadside gates, on which she had spray-painted “BITCOIN SUX” and “NO BITCOIN NOISE” in block capitals. On the other side of the road, behind a privacy fence, a fleet of tens of thousands of computers churned away.

Before I left Granbury, I stopped by another parcel of land a few hundred meters away. Nick and Virginia Browning have lived near Granbury for 30 years. Their two-story house with deep-blue wooden panels and white-framed windows sits at the end of a winding gravel track that cuts through fields on either side. When I arrived, they were on a pair of rocking chairs on the porch, an electric fan rotating between them.

Nick and Virginia Browning outside their house near Granbury, Texas.

PHOTOGRAPH: JOEL KHALILI

Before the bitcoin mine arrived, the Brownings say, doves used to congregate in their yard, and they got regular visits from foxes, coyotes, and groups of deer. Now, they have few animal visitors, and the noise makes it difficult to sleep. “We’ve forgotten what peace and quiet sounds like,” says Virginia.

“I thought I’d die in peace right here,” says Nick, “but now it don’t look like it.”

Back in Navarro County, not much can be seen of the Riot facility from the road; it slopes downhill and is bordered by a white-brick and metal fence. Aside from a few hangar-style structures, which house the mining hardware already in operation, it looks like a construction site. Heavy-duty vehicles and workers in protective equipment pass through the front gates.

Currently operating at around 10 percent capacity, the facility produces a slight whirring sound, audible only from immediately outside the fence. Compared to Granbury, far fewer residential properties are located in the immediate surrounds.

Still, some residents claim the mine has disrupted their lives. Gerald Woods, who is elderly and in poor health, is trying to sell his property—a small wooden cabin about 500 meters away from the facility—to move closer to his doctor. But he is struggling to find a buyer who will offer a suitable price. “Nobody don’t want it, because they are scared of [the mine],” he says. At a meet-and-greet event held by Riot, two other residents complained of light and noise coming from the facility, which the company attributed to construction activity.

Riot is intent on snuffing out neighborly disputes early, partly because money is on the line. In March, in response to public pushback, commissioners in Navarro County delayed a vote on a tax abatement worth $6 million over 10 years to Riot. Up to 100 people had been in touch to object to an abatement, says Brewer, the commissioner. Whether Riot ultimately receives the tax discount could determine whether the company chooses to build out its Corsicana facility to full capacity or allocates funds elsewhere, says Morgenstern.

The authority to withhold an abatement is one of very few levers available to local officials to influence mining companies. Operators must abide by a handful of regulations imposed by state and federal bodies, like the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. But in unincorporated areas of the county, outside of city limits, few rules apply. “In rural areas, you can do almost what you want to do,” says Boswell, the economic development director for Corsicana.

The daunting task for protest groups like TCAC is to raise sufficient support for state-level intervention, made all the more difficult by the political climate in rural Texas. “It's very, very, very deep red MAGA country,” says Sawicky. Despite having previously dismissed bitcoin as a “scam” in his campaign for reelection in 2024, presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised to turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet.”

A few miles away from the Marathon mine lives Sawicky’s sister, Demetra Conrad, a council member for the city of Glen Rose. The sisters rarely see eye-to-eye on political issues: Sawicky considers herself a liberal progressive, whereas Conrad describes herself as a “constitutional conservative, bordering on libertarian.” Yet they find common ground in a shared animus for the bitcoin mining industry. “It goes against the fiber of my being—it makes me want to vomit,” says Conrad. “But the state government has to step in.”

Not all parts of Texas are affected equally, says Conrad, making it challenging for small municipalities to make themselves heard. “It is very difficult to get the state to prioritize the issue,” she says.

Toward the end of my day with Sawicky, we sat in the back corner of a coffee shop, a few hundred meters away from Petroleum Park, which marks the site of the first oil well in Corsicana. She sifted through a wedge of papers, retrieved through public records requests, in search of details she might use as ammunition against the new industry in town. “I can’t quit.” she says. “I am compelled.”

She’ll continue her fight somewhere other than Corsicana. Embittered partly by political rifts and partly by the burden of taking on Riot, Sawicky plans to move away. “We’re not going to be in Texas much longer,” she says. “I don’t want to turn 45 in Texas.”

Instead, she’ll pursue her campaign against Riot from afar—and widen her scope. She has joined the National Coalition Against Cryptomining, a protest group that backs a nationwide ban on crypto mining. “When we leave things up to each state, it’s like playing whack-a-mole,” says Sawicky. “We need a big federal law.”

Other Navarro County residents will stay, awaiting the incursion of yet another technology that will transform their landscape. A century ago it was oil. Now it’s bitcoin.

“What am I going to do about it?” says Wayne Brooks, who mans a general store three-and-a-half miles from the Riot facility. “You can’t stop progress.”

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The Cost of Lightning

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 17:18:13 +0000

Exactly how climate change will impact lightning isn’t clear, but governments, public bodies, and the military are prepping for stormier weather.

It was the terrible prospect of lightning one day striking the historic windmill that troubled Andrew Farrell. A bolt five times hotter than the surface of the sun instantly turning moisture in one of the mill’s timbers to steam, exploding it. What if a raging fire then engulfed the 160-year-old building? Perhaps most troublingly, he couldn’t shake the thought that this nightmare might be getting more likely with every passing year—because of climate change.

So Farrell of the Broads Authority, a British public body, decided to get a lightning-protection system installed on Mutton’s Mill, a 19th-century windmill that stands on the flat, wide wetland landscape in eastern England known as the Norfolk Broads.

“These mills stick out as perfect conductors into the sky,” says Farrell. Inside Mutton’s Mill is a rare waterwheel, once used to drain the marshes here for agricultural purposes. The mill itself is a protected historical building measuring 23 meters tall, including its sails. Thousands have been spent on restoring it in recent years.

Now, hooked conducting rods on the ends of the mill’s four sail arms are in place, ready to seize an angry lightning bolt and transmit it harmlessly down to rods buried in the nearby marsh. Farrell is confident this could save the historic structure. Though he adds: “You know, if it gets struck, it’ll probably scare the bejesus out of the owl that hangs out up there.”

According to the UK’s Royal Meteorological Society, for every degree of atmospheric warming, the air can hold about 7 percent more moisture. Warmer, wetter air means a greater risk of thunderstorms and, therefore, lightning strikes, the Society adds. Farrell says that, anecdotally, he has already noticed rising electrical storm activity in Norfolk. Scientists remain uncertain over the extent to which lightning might increase in frequency around the world. But organizations are already taking the threat seriously—and quietly moving to protect buildings and critical infrastructure from future strikes.

Based on information found in online documents, among the bodies currently weighing up the risks is Scottish Water, which has contemplated lightning strikes at biogas sites potentially becoming more likely—such incidents could harm workers or members of the public. The International Civil Aviation Organization has, for its part, considered the possibility of more frequent lightning causing disruption to flight schedules, damaging aircraft, or incapacitating radar towers. Network Rail in the UK also discusses the threat to signaling and electrical equipment on the railways in a presentation document.

And in a 2021 report, National Grid Electricity Transmission, the company that maintains the high-voltage power network in England and Wales, said it had already gathered “evidence that lightning strikes around our assets are increasing in some areas.” While the system is largely resilient at present, the report adds, “consideration of the impact of increased lightning will be required in the future.”

The US Department of Defense also cares about lightning, says Caroline Baxter, a senior adviser at the Council on Strategic Risks. “Something that has gone underappreciated is the risk that military installations face from the effects of climate change—including things like lightning,” she says, noting that some states particularly prone to lightning, such as Louisiana and Georgia, also happen to be home to major military bases.

In 2019, lightning damaged a runway at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Offutt is the headquarters of US Strategic Command—the organization responsible for nuclear deterrence and global strike capabilities. Baxter highlights a 2021 executive order from President Biden, which mentioned the need to assess climate risks to US military installations. “The clarity that comes with getting a direct order has, I think, paved the way for a lot of movement,” she says.

Referring to aviation in general, Jasenka Rakas at UC Berkeley, who has studied the impact of lightning on US airports, says via email: “We are expecting more lightning and significant impacts on aviation.”

Lightning strikes are often portrayed as freak incidents. But they happen all the time—about 3 million times every day, globally. The cost of damage and disruption caused by lightning is not insignificant. In June, the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) in the US noted that the value of lightning-related insurance claims rose more than 30 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year, totalling $1.27 billion. The rise was largely due to higher inflation and construction costs, but Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for Triple-I added, in an email to WIRED: “We are certainly seeing more storms, which could be a result of climate change.”

The cost of a lightning strike to individual businesses could be “astronomical,” says Tim Harger, executive director at the US nonprofit the Lightning Protection Institute (LPI). He mentions the case of a New Jersey furniture business that was struck by lightning some years ago. “They lost about a million dollars of inventory,” he says.

The LPI recommends that building owners commission an assessment of their lightning risk and consider installation of a lightning protection system that meets current standards, if necessary.

It’s important to note that scientists aren’t sure whether climate change will definitely boost the global frequency of lightning strikes in the coming decades. But some modeling studies do suggest such a trend may be unfolding. In 2014, David Romps—now at UC Berkeley—and colleagues published a study that forecasted the potential increase in lightning strikes in the continental US due to climate change. “It found a substantial increase—a 50 percent increase over the century,” he says.

However, he cautions that this projection was based on “proxies” for lightning—in this case, an increase in storms and, therefore, a likely increase in lightning associated with those storms. One of the problems that comes up when you try to study lightning frequency is the fact that lightning detection systems around the US and elsewhere are always changing.

That network of detectors is gradually getting better, which means that it is possible to detect more lightning. But that also makes it hard to compare detection results from today to those from 10 years ago. And even if you had a stable instrument for reliably detecting lightning across a wide area, it remains difficult to weigh up all the factors that influence lightning incidence and determine whether a warming world really will push up the frequency of strikes. Some projections actually indicate a decrease in lightning by the year 2100. Though, separately, rising incidence of lightning has been noticed in the Arctic during the last four years.

Still, it is logical that owners of important structures want to protect them from electrical storms, adds Romps: “They probably want to protect those buildings anyway, but the expectation of more lightning is just an additional impetus to do so.”

Another study, published last year, found that climate change could drive a noticeable rise in the incidence of lightning-ignited wildfires. “Globally, we obtained a clear increase,” says Francisco Pérez-Invernón at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain. “For example, in the western coast of America it is quite clear there will be an increase in lightning and a decrease in precipitation.”

That means more dry wood around and more lightning strikes potentially sparking fires. The study also suggested that the risk of lightning-ignited wildfires would rise in the Mediterranean; in Siberia, on the other hand, where wildfires can be massive, there was no overall upward trend.

Pérez-Invernón notes that a specific kind of lightning, called long-continuing-current lightning, is most worrisome in terms of fire ignition, because these flashes can last for tens or even hundreds of milliseconds, depositing huge amounts of energy into combustible trees, for example. It is very difficult to measure this type of lightning, he adds, which means that our understanding of even its current prevalence is pretty murky.

“A single strike can carry 300 million volts of electricity—that’s massive,” says Kimberly Loehr, a lightning protection and communications consultant. Lightning is strong enough to explode bricks or send power surges down electrical lines, potentially damaging plugged-in devices. With the rise of home automation systems, electric vehicles, and wind turbines—the latest at-risk windmills—we have a lot more assets out there that could succumb to a strike, she notes.

Plus, fire protection systems such as sprinklers and smoke alarms may be less useful if your roof gets struck by lightning. People don’t typically have such technology in their attics, says Loehr.

The principle behind lightning protection is that of a Faraday cage, says Roy Westwick, president of the Association of Technical Lightning and Access Specialists in the UK. A system of metal rods and connectors straddle a building and convey the electricity delivered by a lightning strike away from the structure itself or other vulnerable materials. “You’d have a number of routes down to an earth electrode or a ring conductor in the ground,” says Westwick, adding that surge protection for any internal electrical systems is an important additional consideration.

Lightning protection is “a no brainer—use it,” says Mitchell Guthrie, former chair of the US National Fire Protection Association’s Committee on Lightning Protection.

At least Mutton’s Mill, in wildest Norfolk, ought to be safe from now on. “I feel better about it,” says Farrell. “These mills are an iconic part of the Broads landscape. Just as they would be in Holland. If we lost them, where would we be? Those things are irreplaceable heritage.”

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SpaceX says regulators will keep Starship grounded until at least November

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 02:30:54 +0000

SpaceX blames the regulatory delay on "issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd."

The Federal Aviation Administration has signaled to SpaceX that it won't approve a launch license for the next test flight of the Starship rocket until at least late November, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

This is more than two months later than the mid-September timeframe the FAA previously targeted for determining whether to approve a launch license for the next Starship flight. SpaceX says the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the next launch—the fifth full-scale test flight of the Starship program—have been ready to launch since the first week of August.

"The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air," SpaceX said in a statement.

"Environmental regulations and mitigations serve a noble purpose, stemming from common-sense safeguards to enable progress while preventing undue impact to the environment," SpaceX said. "However, with the licensing process being drawn out for Flight 5, we find ourselves delayed for unreasonable and exasperating reasons."

Hurry up and wait

In the last few weeks, technicians at the Starship launch site in South Texas have continued upgrading the structure of the launch pad to enable the catch. The Super Heavy booster, as long as and wider than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, will descend vertically on the power of its Raptor engines and slow to a near-hover, allowing two mechanical catch arms to close and capture the stainless steel booster over the launch mount.

This will be the first time SpaceX has tried a mid-air catch of a rocket. Like the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, the Super Heavy booster is designed for reusability. But SpaceX aims to recover the booster directly back at the launch pad, rather than on an offshore landing platform hundreds of miles away.

"It's understandable that such a unique operation would require additional time to analyze from a licensing perspective," SpaceX said. "Unfortunately, instead of focusing resources on critical safety analysis and collaborating on rational safeguards to protect both the public and the environment, the licensing process has been repeatedly derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd."

SpaceX said the delays in regulatory approvals for the next Starship test flight have been driven by "false and misleading reporting, built on bad-faith hysterics from online detractors or special interest groups who have presented poorly constructed science as fact."

SpaceX has decried regulatory hurdles before. Last year, company officials called for the FAA to double its licensing staff for reviewing applications for commercial launch and reentry applications. Congress approved an increase in funding for the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to $42 million for fiscal year 2024. In the last year, the FAA's space office has added approximately 35 workers, bringing the total staffing level to 158 employees, said Kelvin Coleman, the FAA's associate administrator for space transportation, in a hearing Tuesday before the House Space and Aeronautics subcommittee.

"In the president's budget request for '25, we are looking for additional staffing that we will need to continue to keep pace with the demand for our products and services that we're seeing," Coleman said.

Tuesday's update from SpaceX was the most aggressive statement the company has released about the FAA's slow processing of launch license applications, and it touched on a deeper complaint than the FAA's lack of resources for oversight of commercial space activities. The company suggested the hold-up for launching Starship's next test flight isn't SpaceX's technical readiness or even that an understaffed FAA is overwhelmed with regulating a fast-growing commercial launch industry.

Instead, SpaceX wrote in a statement to the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics that licensing delays are caused by bureaucratic sluggishness, a lack of transparency, poor methodologies, and regulatory inefficiency and duplication. As an example, SpaceX cited roadblocks with its ongoing application for a launch license for the fifth Starship test flight.

"This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis," SpaceX said. "The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing."

One of the environmental issues involves SpaceX's discharge of water into the environment around the Starship launch pad in Texas. The pad uses water to cool a steel flame deflector that sits under the 33 main engines of Starship's Super Heavy booster. SpaceX says fines levied against it this year by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency were "entirely tied to disagreements over paperwork" and not any dumping of pollutants in water from the launch pad into the environment around the Starship launch site.

On the next flight, the Super Heavy booster will follow a different trajectory than it flew on the previous Starship mission in June. This means a stainless steel ring that jettisons from the top of the booster, called the hot-staging ring, will fall in a different location in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from the rocket's launch and landing site. This change, which SpaceX calls "marginal," prompted the FAA to approve a 60-day consultation with the National Marine Fisheries Service to reassess the impact of the hot-staging ring on marine wildlife.

"This single issue, which was already exhaustively analyzed, could indefinitely delay launch without addressing any plausible impact to the environment," SpaceX said.

The fourth full-scale test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket took off June 6 from Starbase, the company's privately owned spaceport near Brownsville, Texas.

The trajectory of the Super Heavy booster returning to land back onshore in Texas, rather than off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico as it did in June, will expose a larger area to a sonic boom. This prompted the FAA to approve another 60-day consultation with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to look at the sonic boom's effect on animals.

"This will be a singularly novel operation in the history of rocketry," SpaceX wrote of the upcoming recovery attempt for the Super Heavy booster. "SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success."

The role of the FAA in regulating commercial space launches and reentry operations is to ensure an errant rocket or spacecraft doesn't threaten public safety. The agency also requires launch companies to maintain insurance to protect against third-party claims for damages. SpaceX said it "accepts no compromises when it comes to ensuring public safety."

The FAA is also charged with ensuring commercial launch and reentry operations adhere with the US government's national security and foreign policy interests. SpaceX officials have raised concerns that delays in Starship test flights caused by regulatory reviews are detrimental to national goals, like returning astronauts to the Moon for NASA's Artemis program. NASA has selected SpaceX's Starship vehicle as the human-rated lander to ferry astronauts between lunar orbit and the Moon's south pole for the first two Artemis crew landings, expected some time later this decade.

The early-stage test flights of Starship are important for proving the rocket's reliability and testing more complex technologies, such as in-space refueling, required to make the Artemis lunar landings possible. China aims to land its astronauts on the Moon by 2030, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wants US astronauts to return to the lunar surface first.

"We certainly understand and appreciate the importance of beating China to the Moon," Coleman told lawmakers Tuesday. "We just had a conversation recently with NASA leadership where that was reemphasized. Our commitment, certainly, is to support this industry and our nation in getting to the Moon before China."

The FAA's workload for reviewing launch license applications has grown significantly in the past several years, primarily due to the increasing launch rate of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Since last October, the FAA has overseen 130 commercial launch and reentry operations, more than triple the number of licensed operations in 2020, Coleman said in his testimony to the House subcommittee Tuesday.

This has led some analysts to suggest the FAA prioritize license applications for nationally important programs like Artemis.

"Prioritization has only come into play as the amount of work that we are faced with is being challenged by the availability of resources that we have to do that work," Coleman said. "We certainly take a look at national security concerns. We take a look at our civil space exploration concerns."

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Polaris Dawn takes to the skies, setting the stage for a daring private spacewalk

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:34:36 +0000

Weather had confounded the launch attempt for nearly two weeks.

A Falcon 9 rocket streaked into the black predawn sky above Florida on Tuesday, carrying four people on the most ambitious private human spaceflight to date.

The crew of the Polaris Dawn mission, led by a billionaire pilot named Jared Isaacman, were injected into an orbit intended to reach an apogee of 1,200 km and a perigee of 190 km. They plan to raise Crew Dragon's orbit to an apogee of 1,400 km near the end of the first day of flight.

Shortly after the mission's launch, Isaacman thanked the flight controllers, engineers, and technicians at SpaceX that made the privately funded trip possible. "We wouldn't be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back at SpaceX," he said.

At its planned heights, the mission will mark the furthest any human has traveled from Earth since the era of Apollo missions to the Moon more than five decades ago. The crew will collect biological data to study the effects of radiation at their altitude, which is more intense that far from Earth's atmosphere.

Then the Dragon vehicle, named Resilience and making its third flight to space, will descend toward a more circular orbit about 700 km above the Earth's surface. From here, likely on the third day of the mission, each of the crew members—Isaacman, Scott "Kidd" Poteet, Anna Menon, and Sarah Gillis—will don their spacesuits and the air inside the cabin will be vented into space.

Taking a stroll in space

First Isaacman, and then Gillis, will then each briefly climb out of the spacecraft to have a look around. This moment, if it occurs as planned, would be historic as the first private spacewalk. Equally important is that Isaacman's initiative has accelerated SpaceX's timeline to develop spacesuits for future missions. This is version 1.0 of a suit that could one day be used by hundreds or even thousands of astronauts walking on the surface of the Moon and Mars.

The spacewalk is the centerpiece of the Polaris Dawn mission, but the crew members will also conduct plenty of science experiments as well as test Starlink-based communications in space.

Dependent on weather conditions back on Earth, the mission is slated to last for a maximum of five days, before the crew returns to the planet and splashes down in the waters around Florida, either in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.

Weather constraints for these splashdown zones are fairly strict, and an added complication of Polaris Dawn is that the winds and sea states must be accurately forecast five days in advance. If meteorologists don't have full confidence in the splashdown weather, the mission does not launch. The Dragon spacecraft carries a finite amount of food and consumables, so the vehicle has a limited lifetime during a free-flying mission such as this one.

Waiting a while to go into space

These weather constraints have bedeviled Isaacman and his crew for two weeks. The mission was originally due to launch early on the morning of August 27, but it had to be scrubbed for a day due to issue with a ground systems helium leak. Since addressing the problem, SpaceX has been looking for good launch and landing weather. The waters around Florida have been unsettled, and the pattern has only recently begun to improve.

Finally, on Monday, SpaceX forecasters were confident about splashdown conditions this weekend. And so the concern turned to launch site weather, with storms moving through on Monday afternoon. SpaceX had to pass up the first opportunity early Tuesday due to some nearby rain showers. However, nearly two hours later, skies were clearing some over the pad. At 5:23 am ET, not long before dawn, it was time for Polaris Dawn to fly.

And so the rocket, making its fourth flight to space, did just that. This was, quite remarkably, SpaceX's 88th launch of the year, keeping the company on pace to beat its own record of most annual launches by any country or company, ever. Now, more history awaits in the coming days.

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NASA will proceed with final preps to launch Europa Clipper next month

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 07:12:33 +0000

After a four-month review, NASA says suspect transistors on Europa Clipper are good to go.

The main body of NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft is reflected in one of the mission's deployable solar array wings during testing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA/Frank Michaux

For a while earlier this summer, it looked like NASA's flagship mission to study Jupiter's icy moon Europa might miss its launch window this year.

In May, engineers raised concerns that transistors installed throughout the spacecraft might be susceptible to damage from radiation, an omnipresent threat for any probe whipping its way around Jupiter. The transistors are embedded in the spacecraft's circuitry and are responsible for approximately 200 unique applications, many of which are critical to keeping the mission operating as it orbits Jupiter and repeatedly zooms by Europa, interrogating the frozen moon with nine science instruments.

The transistors on the Europa Clipper spacecraft are already installed, and removing them for inspections or replacement would delay the mission's launch until late next year. Europa Clipper has a 21-day launch window beginning October 10 to begin its journey into the outer solar system.

After four months of testing similar transistors on the ground, engineers determined the transistors on Europa Clipper could withstand the extreme radiation the spacecraft would encounter around Jupiter, without any changes to the mission's flight plan or trajectory.

“One big challenge was analyzing how those transistors on the spacecraft would handle the radiation environment at Jupiter," said Jordan Evans, Europa Clipper's project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "After extensive testing and analysis of the transistors, the Europa Clipper project and I, personally, have high confidence we can complete the original mission for exploring Europa as planned.”

Senior NASA officials decided Monday that they agreed with the assessment of Europa Clipper's team at JPL.

“It is wonderful to be here with incredibly good news," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. "We’re all extremely happy here. Extremely hot off the press, we did just put the Europa Clipper mission through a key milestone review ... the last big review before we really get into that launch fever, and we’re really happy to say that they unequivocally passed that review today."

With approval from NASA headquarters, teams preparing Europa Clipper for launch at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will begin loading approximately 3 metric tons (6,600 pounds) of propellant into the spacecraft later this week. That's roughly half of the total weight of the Europa Clipper spacecraft, the largest probe NASA has ever built for planetary exploration. Then, NASA and SpaceX technicians will enclose the probe inside its launcher fairing and connect it with a Falcon Heavy rocket for liftoff next month.

“I am thrilled to say that we are confident that our beautiful spacecraft and capable team are ready for launch, operations, and our full science mission at Europa," said Laurie Leshin, center director at JPL.

This is a rad mission

After setting off from Florida's Space Coast next month, Europa Clipper will reach Mars in February 2025 for a gravity assist flyby to gain speed on the journey to Jupiter. A subsequent flyby with Earth in December 2026 will bend the path of Europa Clipper to intercept Jupiter's orbit in April 2030, when the probe will fire its engine to slow down for capture by the giant planet's immense gravity field.

Then, Europa Clipper will set itself up on a trajectory to fly by Europa 49 times over about four years, coming as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) from the moon's icy surface. The instruments aboard Europa Clipper will map most of the moon's icy crust and search for signs that Europa's subsurface ocean of liquid water might be habitable for life. If scientists are lucky, the spacecraft could also fly through plumes erupting from Europa's surface, and these eruptions might contain pristine materials from the ocean under its icy shell. If that happens, Europa Clipper's instruments will get a taste of the chemistry of Europa's ocean.

“This is an epic mission," said Curt Niebur, Europa Clipper's program scientist at NASA Headquaters. "It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today, right now."

Europa, about 90 percent the size of Earth's Moon, circles Jupiter in the outer edge of the planet's radiation belts, where charged particles can zap the electronics of any spacecraft that dares to transit the region.

The most sensitive electronics on Europa Clipper are mounted inside a vault with walls of aluminum-zinc alloy to shield the components from Jupiter's radiation. Many of the transistors on the spacecraft are located within this vault, but others are built into science instruments located on the outer edges of the spacecraft.

The transistors have a self-healing property known as annealing, allowing them to recover much of their capacity after exposure to intense radiation. For most of Europa Clipper's orbit around Jupiter, the spacecraft flies in a more benign radiation environment, allowing time for the transistors to repair themselves between close flybys of Europa, where the radiation is worst. The only change mission managers will make on Europa Clipper will be to adjust heater settings around some of the suspect transistors on two instruments outside of the vault. Warmer temperatures allow the components to self-heal more efficiently.

“These are metal oxide field effect transistors, so think of them as electronic switches where you apply a voltage, and you can close an electronic switch," Evans said.

"In some cases, the switch just basically goes on permanently, and if that switch was turning on a little 1-watt decontamination heater, well then that's really not a big deal to the mission," Evans said. "But if that circuit is telling the spacecraft that it needs to go into safe mode, that's a little bigger deal. It's a much bigger deal. So we analyzed every one of those circuits and how robust and tolerant they are to degraded transistors, and determined that we had sufficient margin in every one of those circuits to accomplish this flagship mission with confidence.”

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Crispr-Enhanced Viruses Are Being Deployed Against UTIs

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 07:10:42 +0000

With antibiotics losing their effectiveness, one company is turning to gene editing and bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria—to combat infections.

The global rise in antibiotic resistance is making bacterial infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, and death. Once considered miracle drugs, antibiotics are now losing their effectiveness against ever-evolving bacteria. One company is aiming to treat infections with a different strategy: arming tiny viruses called bacteriophages with Crispr.

Known as phages for short, these viruses naturally infect and kill bacteria. Locus Biosciences of North Carolina is adding the gene-editing tool Crispr to the phages’ armory to boost their killing ability. The company is testing the approach against urinary tract infections, or UTIs, caused by E. coli bacteria. Results from a small trial published in August suggest the experimental treatment has promise, but larger studies will be needed to confirm its benefits.

Phages exist everywhere that bacteria do, including sewers and soil, and there are thousands of different types. Whereas antibiotics kill bacteria indiscriminately—including the beneficial kind—phages have evolved to be selective in the strains or species of bacteria they target. This makes them an attractive alternative for treating infections.

In fact, phages were discovered more than 100 years ago and were used as medical treatments for a range of different infections in the early 20th century. But with the advent of antibiotics, phages fell out of use, except in the former Soviet Union, where antibiotics were not as accessible. Phage preparations were difficult to prepare, and scientists were skeptical about how well they worked.

Bacteriophages under magnification.

Photograph: Locus Biosciences

Researchers are once again interested in phage therapy as the threat of antibiotic resistance grows. Often used in cases of chronic or life-threatening infections when antibiotics fail, scientists comb through collections of phages searching for ones that best match the problematic bacteria living inside a patient.

Locus’s therapy is actually a cocktail of six phages. The company used artificial intelligence to predict a combination that would be effective against E. coli. Three of the phages are “lytic,” meaning work by infecting E. coli cells and causing them to burst open. The other three are engineered to contain Crispr to enhance their effectiveness. Once inside their target cells, these phages use the Crispr system to home in on a crucial site in the E. coli genome and start degrading the bacteria’s DNA.

Some phages are really good at getting into bacterial cells but not good at killing them. “That’s where gene editing comes in,” explains Paul Garofolo, CEO of Locus. He says the therapy is meant to “reach into the human body and remove a targeted bacterial species without touching anything else.”

In a Phase 2 trial, 16 women received a three-day course of the phage cocktail, along with Bactrim, a commonly prescribed antibiotic for UTIs. Within four hours of the first treatment, levels of E. coli in the urine rapidly declined, and were maintained through the end of the 10-day study period. By that time, UTI symptoms in all of the participants had cleared up, and levels of E. coli were low enough in 14 out of 16 women that they were considered cured.

The findings were reported August 9 in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, is co-developing the therapy.

UTIs are incredibly common, and roughly half of women will have a UTI in their lifetime. More than 80 percent of infections are caused by E. coli, and in a 2022 report, the World Health Organization found that one in five UTI infections caused by E. coli showed reduced susceptibility to standard antibiotics like ampicillin, co-trimoxazole, and fluoroquinolones.

While phage therapy is common in the Republic of Georgia and Poland, it is not licensed in the US. However, it is used experimentally in certain cases with permission from the US Food and Drug Administration. A major challenge with commercializing phage therapy is that it’s often personalized to individual patients and thus difficult to scale. Finding the right phage for treatment can take time, and then batches of phages need to be grown and purified. But using a fixed cocktail like Locus’s would mean the therapy could be more easily scaled.

And there’s another potential benefit. “The Crispr-enhanced phages allow for degradation of the bacterial genome and would bypass several mechanisms by which bacteria can become resistant to phage,” says Saima Aslam, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who studies phages but is not involved in the development of the Locus therapy. “Theoretically, this may prevent regrowth of phage-resistant bacteria and thus lead to more effective treatment.”

Photograph: Locus Biosciences

Phillippe Zimmern, a professor of urology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, says it’s an interesting approach, but administering the therapy is not exactly convenient for patients. In the trial, the phage cocktail was given via a catheter that’s inserted into the bladder through the urethra, which would likely be uncomfortable for patients with UTIs. Participants also had to come to an outpatient clinic to receive the treatment three days in a row. “Yes, antibiotic resistance is a big problem,” Zimmern says. “But they have to give some thought as to how doable this is and how accepted it will be by patients.”

Garofolo says the company intends to work on more user-friendly formulations and dosing, which could include a pill or drinkable liquid. But he notes that the phage therapy is intended for patients with recurrent UTIs, not a first-time infection.

The current study also did not have a control arm, so Zimmern says it’s hard to know how much of the treatment’s efficacy is due to the phage cocktail or the antibiotic, Bactrim. In their paper, the authors say 11 of the 14 patients’ E. coli was resistant to Bactrim at the start of the study, showing that the engineered phage cocktail had an added benefit. There’s evidence that antibiotics may work synergistically with phages, so Garofolo says the two together could be more beneficial than the phage therapy on its own.

Locus is now beginning the second part of the trial, which will include a control group that will receive just the Bactrim and an experimental group that will get Bactrim plus the phage cocktail. That study will include up to 288 participants.

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SpaceX sets a new timeline for the Mars colony. First Starships to launch in 2026

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 18:00:34 +0000

It has been a while since we last heard the specifics about Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars. With the biggest space rocket in history, Starship, launching its first test mission around the Earth, it is the right time to bring that topic back into the spotlight, though.

Elon Musk announced that the first Starships to Mars will launch in two years during the minimum-energy transfer window between Earth and Mars that occurs roughly every two years (the upcoming one begins in October of this year):

“These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.

“Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metaphorically, on one planet.”

The founder and CEO of SpaceX thinks that making life multiplanetary—his long-term goal—is fundamentally just a cost per ton to Mars problem: It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”

SpaceX is currently preparing for the fifth flight of Starship. The June last test mission (ITF-4) was a huge success, with both Starship and the Super Heavy booster landing vertically for the very first time.

The goal for the upcoming ITF-5 mission is even more ambitious, though. It seems SpaceX is all-in for the historic Super Heavy landing at the launch tower. It is supposed to use its “chopsticks” to catch the giant booster in the air, hoping that this procedure will make the future recovery and reuse of SpaceX rockets much quicker.

The Starship was initially announced in 2016. Known as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) at the time, it aimed for the first uncrewed missions in 2022 and the first astronauts on Mars in 2024. Given Musk’s track record of unrealistic timelines, one can’t be surprised that the timeline had to be adjuste. Nott many will be surprised if the currently announced timeline sees its own correction in the future.

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Boeing Starliner has completed its lonely return to Earth

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 18:31:56 +0000

Boeing’s malfunctioning spacecraft completes its mission without the astronauts it took to space.

The Boeing Starliner spacecraft successfully completed its uncrewed flight back to Earth, NASA announced overnight. The return ended the Starliner’s most recent flight test months later than intended and leaves its original crew, NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, aboard the International Space Station until next year.

The Starliner touched down right on time at 12:01 AM ET at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, according to NASA. Officials at the agency hailed its successful descent:

“I am extremely proud of the work our collective team put into this entire flight test, and we are pleased to see Starliner’s safe return,” said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Even though it was necessary to return the spacecraft uncrewed, NASA and Boeing learned an incredible amount about Starliner in the most extreme environment possible.”

“This was an important test flight for NASA in setting us up for future missions on the Starliner system,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program said in NASA’s release.

The Starliner originally launched despite helium leaks that NASA found to be within acceptible limits. NASA then delayed the return flight after finding more leaks and issues with Starliner’s reaction control thrusters. Astronauts Wilmore and Williams are expected to return aboard a SpaceX dragon capsule when NASA’s Crew-9 mission ends in early 2025.

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SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission set to break records with crewed launch - TWIRL #180

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 18:30:29 +0000

This Week in Rocket Launches (TWIRL) we have a pretty interesting week coming up with not one, but two crewed missions. The first will be SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission which keeps being delayed and is now scheduled for Monday. The second one will be done by Roscosmos where two cosmonauts and one astronaut will blast off to the International Space Station (ISS).

Monday, 9 September

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 07:38 - 11:10 UTC
Where: Florida, US
Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 rocket to launch the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Polaris Dawn mission. The mission will try to fly at the highest Earth orbit ever of 1,400 km. After seven orbits, it'll drop to an altitude of 700 km and the astronauts will perform a spacewalk. The astronauts aboard are mission commander Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon. The spacewalk will last two hours and test SpaceX's Starlink laser-based communication. The mission will perform 35 experiments over five days before the crew returns to Earth.

Wednesday, 11 September

Who: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
What: H-IIA 202
When: 04:00 - 06:00 UTC
Where: Tanegashima, Japan
Why: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will launch an H-IIA rocket carrying the IGS-Radar 8 recon satellite for the Japanese Ministry of Defense. The satellite will be operated by the Cabinet Satellite Information Center and serve the country's national defense and perform civil natural disaster monitoring.

Who: Roscosmos
What: Soyuz 2.1a
When: 16:22 UTC
Where: Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
Why: Roscosmos will launch a crewed Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station with cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner, and NASA astronaut Donald Pettit aboard. The capsule will remain at the station for about six months and act as an escape pod if needed.

Thursday, 12 September

Who: SpaceX
What: Falcon 9
When: 08:52 UTC
Where: Florida, US
Why: SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying the first set of BlueBird Block 1 satellites for AST SpaceMobile. These satellites are capable of providing direct-to-cell satellite broadband service meaning they can connect directly to smartphones on Earth.

Friday, 13 September

Who: Galactic Energy
What: Ceres 1
When: 04:30 UTC
Where: Jiuquan, China
Why: Galactic Energy's mission will be called "On Your Shoulders" but the payload is not known.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was a Long March 4B carrying the second group of Yaogan 43 satellites. The satellites will be used for testing new technology.

On 5 September, we got the final launch of the Vega rocket. It carried the Copernicus Sentinel 2C Earth observation satellite to a Sun-synchronous orbit from French Guiana. Vega has been superseded by the Vega C rocket.

Next was a Falcon 9 launch from SpaceX carrying more Starlink satellites into space. These will join the Starlink constellation and provide internet service to customers on Earth.

On Thursday, China launched a Long March 6 rocket carrying 10 Geely 03 satellites. They will provide satellite communication services for global users and 24-hour coverage across 90% of the planet.

Finally, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 on the NROL-113 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. It launched new imaging satellites that will make up the NRO's Proliferated Architecture, a constellation of intelligence satellites. There were 21 satellites expected to be launched on this mission. The first stag of the rocket also performed a landing.

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

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Person in Missouri caught H5 bird flu without animal contact

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 07:53:49 +0000

The person recovered, and Missouri officials say risk to public is still low.

A person in Missouri with no reported exposure to animals was confirmed to have been infected with H5-type bird flu, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (MDHSS) announced late Friday.

MDHSS reported that the person, who has underlying medical conditions, was hospitalized on August 22 and tested positive for an influenza A virus. Further testing at the state's public health laboratory indicated that the influenza A virus was an H5-type bird flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now confirmed that finding and is carrying out further testing to determine if it is the H5N1 strain currently causing a widespread outbreak among US dairy cows.

It remains unclear if the person's bird flu infection was the cause of the hospitalization or if the infection was discovered incidentally. The person has since recovered and was discharged from the hospital. In its announcement, MDHSS said no other information about the patient will be released to protect the person's privacy.

The report marks the 15th human case of an H5-type bird flu infection in the country since 2022. But, the case stands out—and is quickly generating alarm online—because the man reported no contact with animals. All 14 of the previous cases occurred in farmworkers who had contact with either dairy cows or poultry that were known to be infected with H5N1.

The finding in a person without such an exposure raises the possibility that the H5N1 virus is spreading from person to person, undetected, or is spreading via an undetected animal source.

But, while the case raises concern, some infectious disease experts are cautious not to sound the alarm without more data on the case and potential exposures.

"[U]ntil such data is collected and analyzed, my level of alarm is only mildly heightened," Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and founding associate director of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at the CDC, said online.

"I am encouraged that this case was detected through existing surveillance systems, which bodes well for our ability to identify any additional cases in the future," she added. "Federal, state, and local health officials maintained flu surveillance through the summer months in response to the H5 situation, and that was definitely the right move."

But Rivers, like many of her colleagues, has long worried about H5N1's potential to jump to humans and spark a pandemic.

To date, H5N1 is known to have infected 197 herds in 14 states. Missouri has not reported infected herds, but has reported infected poultry farms.

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