The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is running out of gyroscopes, and when none are left, the instrument will cease to conduct meaningful science.

 

To preserve the telescope, which has been operating in space for nearly three and a half decades, NASA announced Tuesday that it will reduce the Hubble's operations such that it will function on just a single gyroscope. This will limit some scientific operations, and it will take longer to point the telescope to new objects and lock onto them.

 

But in a conference call with space reporters, Hubble officials stressed that the beloved scientific instrument is not going anywhere anytime soon.

 

"I don’t personally see this as a major restriction on its ability to do science," said Mark Clampin, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.

From six to one

The Hubble telescope was launched on NASA's space shuttle in 1990, and since then, the space agency has flown five servicing missions to repair and upgrade the complex instrument. To this day, it offers humanity its best view of the Universe in the visible light range of the spectrum.

 

The last of these servicing missions, flown by space shuttle Atlantis in 2009, performed numerous upgrades, including the replacement of all six gyroscopes that help to orient and point the telescope. However, in the 15 years since then, three of the six gyroscopes have failed. In the last six months, another one, "gyro 3," has increasingly returned faulty data. This has caused Hubble to slip into safe mode multiple times, halting science operations.

 

As a result, the space agency has just two fully functional gyroscopes. One of these, gyro 4, has operated for a total of 142,000 hours. Another, gyro 6, has accumulated 90,000 hours. NASA's plan is to now operate the telescope on a single gyroscope, keeping the second one as a "reserve" option.

 

NASA said operating on a single gyroscope is feasible, with relatively modest implications for observing capabilities. It will be less efficient, requiring more time to point. This will result in a loss of about 12 percent of observation time. The telescope will also be unable to observe objects closer than Mars, including Venus and the Moon.

 

However, by taking this step now, the space agency believes it can extend Hubble's operational lifetime for another decade. The telescope's project manager, Patrick Crouse, said there is a 70 percent chance that Hubble can maintain science operations using a single gyroscope through 2035.

 

"We do not see Hubble as being on its last legs," he said Tuesday.

 

From a scientific standpoint, it is important for Hubble to keep operating. Now that the powerful James Webb Space Telescope is operational, the two instruments are an amazing duo. With Hubble observing in visible light and Webb in the infrared, astronomers can glean valuable new insights about the nature of the Universe.

Another servicing mission? No thanks

In addition to aging science instruments and a decreasing number of gyroscopes, NASA also faces some other challenges regarding the lifetime of the instrument. The telescope has typically operated at an altitude between 615 km and 530 km above the surface of the Earth. However, the telescope will likely fall below 500 km sometime this year. At lower altitudes, some of the telescope's observations are being impacted by other satellites in low-Earth orbit.

 

Clampin said Tuesday that the telescope operators do not forecast that Hubble will re-enter Earth's atmosphere before the mid-2030s. That, combined with the gyroscope limit, would seem to set to firm boundary on Hubble's maximum lifetime remaining.

 

However, in 2022, Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who flew the first fully commercial human mission to orbit aboard Crew Dragon, approached NASA about performing a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. He proposed to fund most of the mission which, at a minimum, would have re-boosted the Hubble Space Telescope by at least 50 km.

 

After NASA and SpaceX conducted a feasibility study late that year it was recommended that the space agency continue investigating the possibility of a commercial mission. At a minimum it could safely re-boost the telescope, but there were also options that including attaching star trackers and external gyroscopes to compensate for the telescope's ailing pointing system.

 

But NASA decided not to pursue the option.

 

"Our position right now is that, after exploring the current commercial capabilities, we are not going to pursue a re-boost straight now," Clampin said Tuesday.

 

Asked about the study, which NASA has declined to release for proprietary reasons, Clampin said, "It was a feasibility study to help us understand some of the issues and challenges that we might have to face," he said. "There were options such as the possibility of doing enhancements by adding gyros to the outside of the telescope, but they were really just notional concepts."

 

NASA has evidently decided that it is safer to let Hubble age out on its own, than take a chance on private hands touching the hallowed telescope. We're about to see how that goes.

Elon Musk is yet again being accused of diverting Tesla resources to his other companies. This time, it's high-end H100 GPU clusters from Nvidia. CNBC's Lora Kolodny reports that while Tesla ordered these pricey computers, emails from Nvidia staff show that Musk instead redirected 12,000 GPUs to be delivered to his social media company X.

 

It's almost unheard of for a profitable automaker to pivot its business into another sector, but that appears to be the plan at Tesla as Musk continues to say that the electric car company is instead destined to be an AI and robotics firm instead.

Does Tesla make cars or AI?

That explains why Musk told investors in April that Tesla had spent $1 billion on GPUs in the first three months of this year, almost as much as it spent on R&D, despite being desperate for new models to add to what is now an old and very limited product lineup that is suffering rapidly declining sales in the US and China.

 

Despite increasing federal scrutiny here in the US, Tesla has reduced the price of its controversial "full-self driving" assist, and the automaker is said to be close to rolling out the feature in China. (Questions remain about how many Chinese Teslas would be able to utilize this feature given that a critical chip was left out of 1.2 million cars built there during the chip shortage.)

 

Perfecting this driver assist would be very valuable to Tesla, which offers FSD as a monthly subscription as an alternative to a one-off payment. The profit margins for subscription software services vastly outstrip the margins Tesla can make selling physical cars, which dropped to just 5.5 percent for Q1 2024. And Tesla says that massive GPU clusters are needed to develop FSD's software.

Isn’t Tesla desperate for Nvidia GPUs?

Tesla has been developing its own in-house supercomputer for AI, called Dojo. But Musk has previously said that computer could be redundant if Tesla could source more H100s. "If they could deliver us enough GPUs, we might not need Dojo, but they can't because they've got so many customers," Musk said during a July 2023 investor day.

 

Which makes his decision to have his other companies jump all the more notable. In December, an internal Nvidia memo seen by CNBC said, "Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead. In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla."

 

X and the affiliated xAi are developing generative AI products like large language models.

Not the first time

This is not the first time that Musk has been accused of diverting resources (and his time) from publicly held Tesla to his other privately owned enterprises. In December 2022, US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Tesla asking Tesla to explain whether Musk was diverting Tesla resources to X (then called Twitter):

 

This use of Tesla employees raises obvious questions about whether Mr. Musk is appropriating resources from a publicly traded firm, Tesla, to benefit his own private company, Twitter. This, of course, would violate Mr. Musk’s legal duty of loyalty to Tesla and trigger questions about the Tesla Board’s responsibility to prevent such actions, and may also run afoul other “anti-tunneling rules that aim to prevent corporate insiders from extracting resources from their firms."

Musk giving time meant (and compensated) for by Tesla to SpaceX, X, and his other ventures was also highlighted as a problem by the plaintiffs in a successful lawsuit to overturn a $56 billion stock compensation package.

 

And last summer, the US Department of Justice opened an investigation into whether Musk used Tesla resources to build a mansion for the CEO in Texas; the probe has since expanded to cover behavior stretching back to 2017.

 

These latest accusations of misuse of Tesla resources come at a time when Musk is asking shareholders to reapprove what is now a $46 billion stock compensation plan.

 

China landed a spacecraft on the Moon this weekend for the fourth time, successfully placing its Chang’e 6 lander in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon.

 

After the landing on Saturday evening (United States time), the autonomous spacecraft will spend about 48 hours collecting samples. It will do so by two different means, drilling to collect material from beneath the ground, as well as using a robotic arm to gather regolith from the surface.

 

Then a part of the spacecraft is due to blast off from the surface of the Moon—likely on Monday evening, US time—before making a return flight to China. If successful, this would be the first time samples have been returned to Earth from the far side of the Moon.

A methodical approach

This is the country's most ambitious lunar mission to date and builds step-wise on China's previous lunar spaceflights. With its Chang'e 3 mission in December 2013, the country successfully landed a small vehicle and rover on the near side of the Moon. Five years later it launched a relay spacecraft, Queqiao 1, and then the Chang'e 4 mission to the far side of the Moon. No country had landed on the far side of the Moon before, where there are no line-of-sight communications with Earth.

 

Then, in December 2020, China landed on the near side of the Moon with the Chang'e 5 mission. This spacecraft ultimately returned 1.7 kg of lunar dust and rocks to Earth, putting China on par with the United States and Soviet Union as the only countries to return samples from the Moon.

 

With its latest mission, Chang'e 6, China has put together elements of its last two lunar spacecraft, returning material from the far-less-explored far side of the Moon. Future robotic missions will focus on surveying the south pole of the Moon in anticipation of human landings.

Geopolitical implications

China has established the goal of an Apollo-like lunar landing of two astronauts on the Moon by 2030, with the eventual aim of building a "research station" at the South Pole. This could happen later in the 2030s as China continues to expand its lunar architecture. Given the country's straightforward approach so far, these timelines are realizable.

 

As this plays out, NASA is leading its own international program back to the Moon. NASA's efforts are messier, uniting a mix of government-only, commercial-led, and semi-private missions back to the Moon. This Artemis Program nominally has a 2026 target for an initial human landing, but no reasonable observer believes this date is real—a more realistic time frame is 2028 to 2032.

 

NASA's plans are considerably more complex but ultimately should be more sustainable, as they offer a mix of government and private investment. And they are more affordable in that they will employ partly or mostly reusable rockets and spacecraft. NASA is seeking to transition to reusable rockets and in-space refueling, which represents a bet on the future of space transportation rather than looking back to what worked during the Apollo era. But it is not clear whether this future of reusable spaceflight is five years away, as NASA hopes, or 20 years away.

 

The most dominant space storyline for the rest of this decade is how this "race" plays out, both in terms of whether China's space program or NASA reach the Moon first, and, just as critically, which of the nations has a more sustainable program. For China, mimicking the achievements of NASA's Apollo Program may be enough. For NASA, it would represent a policy failure.

A lot at stake

Although China's plan has an advantage of simplicity, Greg Autry, the director of space leadership at Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University, told Ars the United States has the right approach in the long run because its commercial and government partnerships are more robust.

 

"China’s human spaceflight program has been slow," said Autry, co-author of Red Moon Rising on the US-China space race. "SpaceX has flown more people to space in the last four years than China has since their program’s first flight over 20 years ago. America has better technology and a better and more diverse collection of launch vehicles and dozens of companies working on solutions to the bottlenecks we face in landers and spacesuits."

 

Another wrinkle in the competition is that China's authoritarian government provides stability and the advantage of long-term planning. NASA is susceptible to changing political priorities. Autry said the United States should stick to the Artemis plan, and leaders in Congress must continue to support NASA and press the agency to move with alacrity.

 

For symbolic reasons, Autry said, the United States needs to land humans back on the Moon before China—even if NASA did so more than five decades ago. "If China wins this race, their model of authoritarian state socialism will gain in appeal and America will look more dysfunctional than ever," he said.

 

A computer controlling the Atlas V rocket's countdown triggered an automatic hold less than four minutes prior to liftoff of Boeing's commercial Starliner spacecraft Saturday, keeping the crew test flight on the ground at least a few more days.

 

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were already aboard the spacecraft when the countdown stopped due to a problem with a ground computer. "Hold. Hold. Hold," a member of Atlas V launch team called out on an audio feed.

 

With the hold, the mission missed an instantaneous launch opportunity at 12:25 pm EDT (16:25 UTC), and later Saturday, NASA announced teams will forego a launch opportunity Sunday. The next chance to send Starliner into orbit will be 10:52 am EDT (14:52 UTC) Wednesday. The mission has one launch opportunity every one-to-two days, when the International Space Station's orbital track moves back into proper alignment with the Atlas V rocket's launch pad in Florida.

 

Wilmore and Williams will take the Starliner spacecraft on its first crew flight into low-Earth orbit. The capsule will dock with the International Space Station around a day after launch, spend at least a week there, then return to a parachute-assisted landing at one of two landing zones in New Mexico or Arizona. Once operational, Boeing's Starliner will join SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule to give NASA two independent human-rated spacecraft for transporting astronauts to and from the space station.

 

It's been a long road to get here with the Starliner spacecraft, and there's more work to do before the capsule's long-delayed first flight with astronauts.

 

Technicians from United Launch Alliance, builder of the Atlas V rocket, will begin troubleshooting the computer glitch at the launch pad Saturday evening, after draining propellant from the launch vehicle. Early indications suggest that a card in one of three computers governing the final minutes of the Atlas V's countdown didn't boot up as quickly as anticipated.

“You can imagine a large rack that is a big computer where the functions of the computer as a controller are broken up separately into individual cards or printed wire circuit boards with their logic devices," said Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO. "They’re all standalone, but together it’s an integrated controller."

The computers are located at the launch pad inside a shelter near the base of the Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. All three computers must be fully functioning in the final phase of the countdown to ensure triple redundancy. At the moment of liftoff, these computers control things like retracting umbilical lines and releasing bolts holding the rocket to its mobile launch platform.

 

Two of the computers activated as the final countdown sequence began at T-minus 4 minutes. A single card in the third computer took about six more seconds to come online, although it did boot up eventually, Bruno said.

 

"Two came up normally and the third one came up, but it was slow to come up, and that tripped a red line," he said.

A disappointment

Wilmore and Williams, both veteran astronauts and former US Navy test pilots, exited the Starliner spacecraft with the help of Boeing's ground team. They returned to NASA crew quarters at the nearby Kennedy Space Center to wait for the next launch attempt.

 

The schedule for the next try will depend on what ULA workers find when they access the computers at the launch pad. Officials initially said they could start another launch countdown early Sunday if they found a simple solution to the computer problem, such as swapping out a faulty card. The computers are networked together, but the architecture is designed with replaceable cards, each responsible for different functions during the countdown, to allow for a quick fix without having to replace the entire unit, Bruno said.

 

 

Later Saturday, NASA announced the launch won't happen Sunday, giving teams additional time to assess the computer issue. The next launch opportunities are Wednesday and Thursday.

 

Bruno said ULA's engineers suspect a hardware problem or a network communication glitch caused the computer issue during Saturday's countdown. That is what ULA's troubleshooting team will try to determine overnight. NASA said officials will share another update Sunday.

 

If it doesn't get off the ground by Thursday, the Starliner test flight could face a longer delay to allow time for ULA to change out limited-life batteries on the Atlas V rocket. Bruno said the battery swap would take about 10 days.

 

Saturday's aborted countdown was the latest in a string of delays for Boeing's Starliner program. The spacecraft's first crew test flight is running seven years behind the schedule Boeing announced when NASA awarded the company a $4.2 billion contract for the crew capsule in 2014. Put another way, Boeing has arrived at this moment nine years after the company originally said the spacecraft could be operational, when the program was first announced in 2010.

 

"Of course, this is emotionally disappointing," said Mike Fincke, a NASA astronaut and a backup to Wilmore and Williams on the crew test flight. "I know Butch and Suni didn't sound disappointed when we heard them on the loops, and it's because it comes back to professionalism."

 

NASA and Boeing were on the cusp of launching the Starliner test flight May 6, but officials called off the launch attempt due to a valve problem on the Atlas V rocket. Engineers later discovered a helium leak on the Starliner spacecraft's service module, but managers agreed to proceed with the launch Saturday if the leak did not worsen during the countdown.

 

A check of the helium system Saturday morning showed the leak rate had decreased from a prior measurement, and it was no longer a constraint to launch. Instead, a different problem emerged to keep Starliner on Earth.

 

"Everybody is a little disappointed, but you kind of roll your sleeves up and get right back to work," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program.

You’re driving somewhere, eyes on the road, when you start to feel a tingling sensation in your lower abdomen. That extra-large Coke you drank an hour ago has made its way through your kidneys into your bladder. “Time to pull over,” you think, scanning for an exit ramp.

 

To most people, pulling into a highway rest stop is a profoundly mundane experience. But not to neuroscientist Rita Valentino, who has studied how the brain senses, interprets, and acts on the bladder’s signals. She’s fascinated by the brain’s ability to take in sensations from the bladder, combine them with signals from outside of the body, like the sights and sounds of the road, then use that information to act—in this scenario, to find a safe, socially appropriate place to pee. “To me, it’s really an example of one of the beautiful things that the brain does,” she says.

 

Scientists used to think that our bladders were ruled by a relatively straightforward reflex—an “on-off” switch between storing urine and letting it go. “Now we realize it’s much more complex than that,” says Valentino, now director of the division of neuroscience and behavior at the National Institute of Drug Abuse. An intricate network of brain regions that contribute to functions like decision-making, social interactions, and awareness of our body’s internal state, also called interoception, participates in making the call.

 

In addition to being mind-bogglingly complex, the system is also delicate. Scientists estimate, for example, that more than 1 in 10 adults have overactive bladder syndrome—a common constellation of symptoms that includes urinary urgency (the sensation of needing to pee even when the bladder isn’t full), nocturia (the need for frequent nightly bathroom visits) and incontinence. Although existing treatments can improve symptoms for some, they don’t work for many people, says Martin Michel, a pharmacologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, who researches therapies for bladder disorders. Developing better drugs has proven so challenging that all major pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the effort, he adds.

 

Recently, however, a surge of new research is opening the field to fresh hypotheses and treatment approaches. Although therapies for bladder disorders have historically focused on the bladder itself, the new studies point to the brain as another potential target, says Valentino. Combined with studies aimed at explaining why certain groups, such as post-menopausal women, are more prone to bladder problems, the research suggests that we shouldn’t simply accept symptoms like incontinence as inevitable, says Indira Mysorekar, a microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. We’re often told such problems are just part of getting old, particularly for women—“and that’s true to some extent,” she says. But many common issues are avoidable and can be treated successfully, she says: “We don’t have to live with pain or discomfort.”

A delicate balance

The human bladder is, at the most basic level, a stretchy bag. To fill to capacity—a volume of 400 to 500 milliliters (about 2 cups) of urine in most healthy adults—it must undergo one of the most extreme expansions of any organ in the human body, expanding roughly sixfold from its wrinkled, empty state.

 

To stretch that far, the smooth muscle wall that wraps around the bladder, called the detrusor, must relax. Simultaneously, sphincter muscles that surround the bladder’s lower opening, or urethra, must contract, in what scientists call the guarding reflex.

 

 

Filling or full, the bladder spends more than 95 percent of its time in storage mode, allowing us to carry out our daily activities without leaks. At some point—ideally, when we decide it’s time to pee—the organ switches from storage to release mode. For this, the detrusor muscle must contract forcefully to expel urine, while the sphincter muscles surrounding the urethra simultaneously relax to let urine flow out.

 

For a century, physiologists have puzzled over how the body coordinates the switch between storage and release. In the 1920s, a surgeon named Frederick Barrington, of University College London, went looking for the on-off switch in the brainstem, the lowermost part of the brain that connects with the spinal cord.

 

Working with sedated cats, Barrington used an electrified needle to damage slightly different areas in the pons, part of the brainstem that handles vital functions like sleeping and breathing. When the cats recovered, Barrington noticed that some demonstrated a desire to urinate—by scratching, circling, or squatting—but were unable to voluntarily go. Meanwhile, cats with lesions in a different part of the pons seemed to have lost any awareness of the need to urinate, peeing at random times and appearing startled whenever it happened. Clearly, the pons served as an important command center for urinary function, telling the bladder when to release urine.

Beyond Barrington’s nucleus

Barrington’s work laid the foundation for our current understanding of the neural circuitry of bladder control. But we now know there’s much more than the pons involved.

 

As the bladder fills with urine, stretch-sensing cells in the detrusor, as well as in inner layers of the bladder wall, send signals of fullness up the spinal cord to a part of the brainstem called the periaqueductal gray. The signals then travel to a region called the insula, which acts as a kind of sensor: The fuller the bladder becomes, the more neurons in the insula fire off tiny electrical pulses called action potentials.

 

Next, a region of the brain that’s responsible for planning and making decisions—the prefrontal cortex—calculates whether it’s a socially acceptable moment to urinate. If the answer is yes, it sends a signal back to the periaqueductal gray, which in turn sends an all-clear signal to that part of the pons Barrington identified in cats—now aptly called Barrington’s nucleus. The signal goes back down to the bladder, and voila, urination occurs.

 

 

Over the past decade, super-precise tools for mapping how different brain regions connect and interact have made the picture even more elaborate.

 

Valentino and her team have used a technique that can monitor and analyze the electrical activity of neurons across multiple sites within the brain simultaneously to show that neurons located in a part of the brainstem called the locus coeruleus start to fire in a steady, rhythmic pattern when the bladder reaches a certain level of fullness. Wavelike, this activity spreads to the brain’s outer layer, the cortex, and rouses the brain to a more alert state about 30 seconds before urination occurs. Valentino hopes that observations like this could inform treatments for common problems like nocturia and bedwetting, but they also may help to explain something basic that most people have encountered.

 

“I think that’s one of one of the major reasons you wake up when you have to urinate,” Valentino says. “The locus is saying, ‘Stop what you’re doing and focus on this.’”

Learning to hold it

Control over when and where we pee takes time to develop, as anyone who has potty-trained a toddler can attest. At birth, urination is governed not by the brain, but by a spinal reflex that springs into action when the bladder reaches a certain capacity. Only at around age 3 or 4 do the brain regions that govern functions like social awareness and decision-making override the reflex, says Hanneke Verstegen, a neuroscientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

 

It’s not possible to watch how this process unfolds in the brainstems of human infants. But Verstegen and her colleagues are studying a similar process in baby lab mice, which gain voluntary control over urination by about three to five weeks. At that point, the baby mice start to pee in a designated corner—a behavior that’s not unlike that of toilet-trained toddlers, she says. Interestingly, the more primitive, automatic spinal reflex we have as infants never completely disappears: When a spinal cord injury damages the nerves that carry signals between the bladder and brain, the reflex can reemerge, often causing incontinence or other problems that require using a catheter.

 

Spinal cord injuries are just one of the many ways that brain-bladder communication can go awry. As the brain ages, the long, spindly neuronal projections that transmit messages in and between regions that control urination can also lose their integrity and derail normal bladder function—a process that’s often accelerated in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

 

Medical physicist Becky Clarkson of the University of Pittsburgh and her colleagues are using neuroimaging tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which looks at fluctuations in blood oxygen levels to indicate which parts of the brain are active, to understand how the elegant brain mechanisms governing urination break down. “We’re trying out work out what pathways maybe have damage,” she says. “How does the brain normally control the bladder? How does it fail to control the bladder?”

 

Most of the participants in Clarkson’s studies are women over 60, the group of people that has the highest rate of overactive bladder syndrome. Roughly 11 percent of the general population has overactive bladder, but more than 45 percent of post-menopausal women report symptoms.

 

Scientists aren’t sure what causes overactive bladder syndrome, or why it’s so common in older women. Some point to changes in the bladder itself. Mysorekar, for one, has found that during menopause, a proliferation of immune cells form tiny lumps resembling lymph nodes on the female bladder lining. These lesions increase the bladder’s sensitivity to even nominal levels of E. coli, the bacterium that causes most urinary tract infections, she says, causing chronic bladder pain or overactive bladder syndrome.

 

Another major contributor to overactive bladder syndrome in both women and men is detrusor overactivity—erratic contractions of the bladder muscle that send false signals of fullness to the brain. Nearly all existing treatments aim to quiet these spasms: The most prescribed class of medications, antimuscarinic drugs, blocks the activity of acetylcholine, a nerve-signaling chemical that triggers detrusor contractions, for example.

 

If medications don’t work, clinicians often recommend dosing the detrusor with shots of botulinum toxin, also known as Botox, so it doesn’t contract as much. Sometimes, they’ll also deliver electrical current to nerves in the spinal cord through a surgical implant or electrodes placed on the skin, attempting to restore normal activity in the spinal nerves that control the bladder muscle.

 

The problem with all these detrusor-taming treatments is that they can have unwanted side effects—including, in rare cases, impairing the ability to release urine, says Michel. “It’s a very thin line you’re walking—if you do too much, you can no longer expel; if you do too little, you have problems with storage.” Antimuscarinic drugs have been linked to symptoms of cognitive decline, particularly in older people, raising safety concerns. And not everyone with overactive bladder syndrome has an overactive detrusor muscle, prompting some scientists to ask if the problem for some patients lies elsewhere in the body, such as inside the brain.

Home safe

If you’ve ever come home after a long day at work, and—just as you unlocked the front door—felt a sudden, even overwhelming urge to go, you’ve experienced the tight link that scientists have long known exists between the brain and bladder. Called latchkey incontinence, this type of urge doesn’t have anything to do with how full your bladder is. (It’s also different from a physical inability to hold urine in when we sneeze, cough, or jump: That common problem, called stress incontinence, usually occurs due to weak pelvic floor muscles.)

 

Some scientists think that the urgent sensations that characterize overactive bladder syndrome may be conditioned responses like the ones that Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov created in the 1890s when he trained dogs to associate food with the sound of a metronome. For some people, that conditioning could be years of waiting to get home to urinate so they can use their own bathrooms, Clarkson and her team hypothesize. For others, it might arise from a variety of situations and triggers, like the sound of running water. It’s normal if such intense sensations happen occasionally, but if they happen a lot, researchers consider it a potentially worrisome symptom.

 

Women with overactive bladders often have unusual patterns of brain activity, Clarkson and other groups have found. In a typical experiment in Clarkson’s lab, study participants lie flat in an fMRI machine while a catheter infuses fluid into the bladder until they say they are feeling full. A technician removes some fluid, then replaces it, repeating the process multiple times.

 

Using this approach, Clarkson and other researchers have built a model of how the brain controls the bladder, involving regions such as the insula, which processes fullness signals from the bladder, and the prefrontal cortex, which helps determine if it’s an appropriate time and place to pee. Two additional regions, the supplementary motor area and the anterior cingulate cortex, appear to work together to gauge just how urgent the need to urinate is and execute the pelvic floor muscle contractions that help us hold it until a bathroom is found. These areas tend to be more active in some people with overactive bladder syndrome, possibly contributing to the overwhelming sense of urgency even when their bladders are only partly full. “We think that’s almost like a panic station,” Clarkson says. “When you have urgency, you gotta go.”

 

A few years ago, one of Clarkson’s colleagues noted that the intense urges in overactive bladder syndrome are similar to the cravings former smokers feel in certain situations, like a bar where they used to smoke. Intrigued, Clarkson teamed up with smoking-cessation researcher Cynthia Conklin from the University of Pittsburgh, adapting a method from smoking studies to investigate how women with overactive bladder respond to personal triggers. The women were shown photographs of the places that triggered their own urgency, like their front doors or in one case, the entrance to a Target supermarket. Viewing these triggers increased activity in brain regions associated with attention, decision-making, and bladder control, compared to “safe” photos.

 

Certain behavioral therapies seem to help women with overactive bladder syndrome respond more calmly to their urgency triggers, Clarkson says. For example, her team’s preliminary data suggest that mindfulness techniques like a body-scan meditation, which prompts participants to relax from head to toe, can reduce the intensity of the bladder sensations. They also found that a noninvasive form of brain stimulation called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, could ease urgency.

 

Clarkson and her team have also explored how brain activity differs between women who do and don’t respond to treatment with botulinum toxin and pelvic floor muscle therapy, and they are currently investigating whether taking commonly prescribed bladder medications results in changes to the brain.

 

Many older women—and men—are already taking multiple anticholinergic medications, which include the most-prescribed class of bladder drugs, antimuscarinics, by the time they seek treatment for overactive bladder. Given the concerns that taking too many such medications can cause cognitive problems, Clarkson hopes to add non-pharmaceutical treatment options to the menu. “If we can keep people off the drugs, that would be great,” she says.

Causes of overactive bladder

Most researchers agree that the main obstacle to finding more effective treatments for overactive bladder syndrome is that the diagnosis is so muddy: Rather than a single disorder, it’s a loose group of symptoms that can be caused by many different conditions, from Parkinson’s disease to spinal cord injury to diabetes to none of the above. But the cases often get lumped together and talked about as if they were all the same condition, says neuroscientist Aaron Mickle of the Medical College of Wisconsin.

 

Mickle is studying how different conditions affect the bladder lining, the urothelium—a soft, self-renewing layer of tissue that can stretch and flatten to accommodate changes in bladder volume. Although scientists once considered the urothelium a passive barrier that renders the bladder walls leakproof, it’s now clear that it plays a key role in signaling the stretch of the bladder as it fills.

 

One reason that the urothelium is so sensitive is that many of its cells contain multiple types of mechanically activated ion channels—proteins that sit in cell membranes and are literally channels into the cell. When the cell membrane gets stretched, pushed or otherwise deformed, these channels open, allowing positively charged ions to flow inside the cell, explains Kate Poole, a physiologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia and author of a 2022 article in the Annual Review of Physiology  on mechanically activated ion channels in mammals.

 

Sensory neurons that extend into the urothelium contain these force-sensing channels; when the influx of positive ions reaches a certain threshold in these nerves, they communicate directly with nerves in the spine and brain through electrical impulses. Intriguingly, however, non-neuronal cells in the urothelium also contain a variety of mechanically activated ion channels, suggesting that they, too, can signal bladder fullness.

 

In 2023, Mickle used optogenetics—in which the zap of a laser beam remotely activates or deactivates selected cells in animals—to selectively stimulate some of these non-neuronal urothelial cells. That was enough to activate sensory neurons and trigger bladder contractions, the first time this had been done. Eventually, Mickle hopes to develop a wireless optogenetic system that continuously monitors and modifies the activity of specific types of bladder cells in people. (Although the optogenetics technique has so far been used mainly in lab animals, researchers are now exploring its use in humans.)

 

Other groups are investigating as drug targets the force-sensing channels in bladder cells, as well as other channels that open in response to various nerve-signaling chemicals and hormones. These include a group of force-sensing propeller-shaped proteins called Piezo channels that play an important role in bladder sensation. In 2020, a study published in Nature  showed that in addition to other profound deficits, such as difficulty walking, people with a rare mutation that affects one type of these channels, called Piezo2, struggle to sense their bladders filling. Some must pee on a set schedule or physically push down on their bladders to urinate.

 

 

Some scientists hope to target Piezo2 channels to treat a variety of bladder disorders. One advantage of targeting such channels, says Poole, is that they’re “inherently druggable,” meaning that researchers can often find small molecules that will switch them on or off even if they normally respond to mechanical stimuli.

 

But there’s also a downside: Like other ion channels that researchers have tried to target in the bladder, Piezo2 channels can be found all over the body, including in the lungs, joints, and heart. Consequently, any drug that affects the channels in the bladder will likely hit other parts of the body, causing safety issues. Michel points to a clinical trial for a drug that worked on another type of ion channels in the bladder—ones that let potassium ions into cells—but had to be discontinued because it turned out to cause liver problems.

 

There is at least one way to overcome that obstacle, at least in theory: gene therapies that specifically target bladder tissue because they’ve been directly injected into the detrusor muscle or have been infused via catheter into the urethra. In 2023, scientists published preliminary but encouraging data from a clinical trial with 67 patients of a genetic therapy that targets the bladder’s potassium channels.

 

Although scientists who focus on the bladder and urinary tract have traditionally worked separately from those researching the spinal cord and brain, these long-siloed fields are starting to link up and collaborate, putting more pieces of the brain-bladder puzzle together. Mickle, for example, has recently teamed up with a neuroimaging lab that will help him observe how a mouse’s brain responds to optogenetic stimulation of its urothelial cells.

 

In the past, “we never focused on the brain,” Valentino says. But the new research, she says, “is allowing us to think more about these other targets.”

 

 

Did the massive scale of death in the Americas following colonial contact in the 1500s affect atmospheric CO₂ levels? That’s a question scientists have debated over the last 30 years, ever since they noticed a sharp drop in CO₂ around the year 1610 in air preserved in Antarctic ice.

 

That drop in atmospheric CO₂ levels is the only significant decline in recent millennia, and scientists suggested that it was caused by reforestation in the Americas, which resulted from their depopulation via pandemics unleashed by early European contact. It is so distinct that it was proposed as a candidate for the marker of the beginning of a new geological epoch—the “Anthropocene.”

 

But the record from that ice core, taken at Law Dome in East Antarctica, shows that CO₂ starts declining a bit late to match European contact, and it plummets over just 90 years, which is too drastic for feasible rates of vegetation regrowth. A different ice core, drilled in the West Antarctic, showed a more gradual decline starting earlier, but lacked the fine detail of the Law Dome ice.

 

Which one was right? Beyond the historical interest, it matters because it is a real-world, continent-scale test of reforestation’s effectiveness at removing CO₂ from the atmosphere.

 

In a recent study, Amy King of the British Antarctic Survey and colleagues set out to test if the Law Dome data is a true reflection of atmospheric CO₂ decline, using a new ice core drilled on the “Skytrain Ice Rise” in West Antarctica.

Precious tiny bubbles

In 2018, scientists and engineers from the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Cambridge drilled the ice core, a cylinder of ice 651 meters long by 10 centimeters in diameter (2,136 feet by 4 inches), from the surface down to the bedrock. The ice contains bubbles of air that got trapped as snow fell, forming tiny capsules of past atmospheres.

 

The project’s main aim was to investigate ice from the time about 125,000 years ago when the climate was about as warm as it is today. But King and colleagues realized that the younger portion of ice could shed light on the 1610 CO₂ decline.

 

“Given the resolution of what we could obtain with Skytrain Ice Rise, we predicted that, if the drop was real in the atmosphere as in Law Dome, we should see the drop in Skytrain, too,” said Thomas Bauska of the British Antarctic Survey, a co-author of the new study.

 

The ice core was cut into 80-centimeter (31-inch) lengths, put into insulated boxes, and shipped to the UK, all the while held at -20°C (-4°F) to prevent it from melting and releasing its precious cargo of air from millennia ago. “That's one thing that keeps us up at night, especially as gas people,” said Bauska.

 

In the UK they took a series of samples across 31 depth intervals spanning the period from 1454 to 1688 CE: “We went in and sliced and diced our ice core as much as we could,” said Bauska. They sent the samples, still refrigerated, off to Oregon State University where the CO₂ levels were measured.

 

The results didn’t show a sharp drop of CO₂—instead, they showed a gentler CO₂ decline of about 8 ppm over 157 years between 1516 and 1670 CE, matching the other West Antarctic ice core.

 

“We didn't see the drop,” said Bauska, “so we had to say, OK, is our understanding of how smooth the records are accurate?”

 

To test if the Skytrain ice record is too blurry to show a sharp 1610 drop, they analyzed the levels of methane in the ice. Because methane is much less soluble in water than CO₂, they were able to melt continuously along the ice core to liberate the methane and get a more detailed graph of its concentration than was possible for CO₂. If the atmospheric signal was blurred in Skytrain, it should have smoothed the methane record. But it didn’t.

 

“We didn't see that really smoothed out methane record,” said Bauska, “which then told us the CO₂ record couldn't have been that smoothed.”

 

In other words, the gentler Skytrain CO₂ signal is real, not an artifact.

 

Does this mean the sharp drop at 1610 in the Law Dome data is an artifact? It looks that way, but Bauska was cautious, saying, “the jury will still be out until we actually get either re-measurements of the Law Dome, or another ice core drilled with a similarly high accumulation.”

Disease, population collapse, reforestation

Scientists estimate that about 60 million people inhabited the Americas before European contact. There’s archaeological evidence for numerous cities and settlements, such as miles of now-overgrown urban sprawl that was recently mapped in Amazonian Ecuador, or the city of Cahokia in Illinois, which is estimated to have been larger than London was at that time, or Llanos de Mojos in Bolivia. The Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana also described seeing cities in the Amazon in 1542.

 

Even today in overgrown parts of the Amazon, vegetation carries the imprint of past occupation in an overabundance of cultivated species such as Brazil Nut trees.

 

A century after the first European contact, some 56 million people had died according to one widely cited estimate. “What we're looking at here is first contact, and [then] 100 years when 90 percent of the population, basically, dies,” said Professor Mark Maslin of University College London, who was not involved in King’s study. They succumbed to wave after wave of pandemics, as smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, and cholera spread through populations with no natural immunity. People who survived one disease outbreak died in the next. With too few people to work them, cities and farms were abandoned and overgrown.

 

King, Bauska, and colleagues used a carbon cycle model to test estimates of the scale of land abandonment to see if they could reproduce the CO₂ decline observed in the new ice core. The new data does now support large-scale abandonment: “It does seem to agree with those high-end scenarios,” said Bauska.

 

The smoother decline of CO₂: “actually makes much more sense in the Earth system,” said Maslin.

A lack of ground data?

The study shows reforestation is a feasible explanation for the CO₂ decline. Yet evidence for reforestation at that time is lacking in the central Amazon region, according to Professor Mark Bush of the Florida Institute of Technology, who also was not involved in the King et al study.

 

Bush has spent years documenting the influence Indigenous people had on Amazon forests over the last 1,000 years or so, as recorded by pollen and charcoal that settled in lake sediments. His team now has 23 “high quality” sediment records from lakes in the Amazon region, nine of which were described in a paper published in 2021.

 

“So far, those 23 sites, none of them have given us a rising [forest cover] after 1400,” Bush said. Instead, his data points to an earlier period of abandonment between about 1000 and 1200 CE. Its cause remains a mystery, but it was a time of conflict: “There's a lot more evidence of fighting, and there's more cracked skulls and defensive structures showing up at that time,” said Bush.

 

This matters because it’s hard to explain the CO₂ decline without extensive reforestation in the Amazon, because growth in the Amazon locks away much more carbon than it does in Mexico, the Andes, and other drier environments. With forestation there, “you don't change the carbon budget worth a bean,” Bush remarked.

 

Maslin agrees that there probably weren't that many people living in the central Amazon basin: “If you look at the empires, they are not sitting in the middle of the Amazon basin. They are the Incas, the Aztecs, those big empires which are [in areas that are] partly forested, partly savanna,” he said.

 

As for Francisco de Orellana’s reports of cities in the Amazon, Bush thinks he may have lied to save his skin: “they were trying to get in the good graces of the Spanish court, having just deserted,” he said. But that’s not universally accepted; the authors of the paper describing pre-Columbian urban sprawl in Amazonian Ecuador say explicitly: “Orellana did not lie.”

Scaling to net zero

The new study “gives us a real scaling of how much impact [reforestation] would have,” said Maslin.

 

If reproduced today, the eight parts-per-million CO₂ reduction recorded in the Skytrain ice core would only unwind about four years of CO₂ increase in our atmosphere. “It's quite sobering to think that we had an 8 ppm drop, and we potentially had population decreases in the new world of up to 90 percent,” said Bauska.

 

Even if the CO₂ decline is puny compared to modern emissions, the Skytrain record’s implications for reforestation are large: “incredibly important when we talk about net zero,” Maslin said. That’s because some sectors of the economy are hard to decarbonize, “and that's where the reforestation, the rewilding, maybe even direct air capture comes in—to actually get the ‘net’ of net zero,” said Maslin.

 

“I think that reforestation is a very valuable tool in the conservation toolkit so long as it's the right kind of tree,” said Bush, but: “the better solution is to stop producing carbon.”

 

Bauska agrees: “We need to preserve what we have in terms of forest and land carbon stocks, but the main thing is to curb emissions.”

 

Nature Communications, 2024.  DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45894-9

 

Fritz Haber: good guy or bad guy? He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his part in developing the Haber-Bosch process, a method for generating ammonia using the nitrogen gas in air. The technique freed agriculture from the constraint of needing to source guano or manure for nitrogen fertilizer and is widely credited for saving millions from starvation. About half of the world’s current food supply relies on fertilizers made using it, and about half of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies can be traced back to it.

 

But it also allowed farmers to use this newly abundant synthetic nitrogen fertilizer with abandon. This has accentuated agriculture’s role as a significant contributor to global warming because the emissions that result from these fertilizers is a greenhouse gas—one that has a warming potential almost 300 times greater than that of carbon dioxide and remains in the atmosphere for 100 years. Microbes in soil convert nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide, and the more nitrogen fertilizer they have to work with, the more nitrous oxide they make.

Agriculture also leaks plenty of the excess nitrogen into waterways in the form of nitrate, generating algal blooms that create low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ where no marine life can live.

 

One way to reduce nitrogen emissions from farms would be to simply use fertilizer more efficiently. But—as we’ve seen with fossil fuels (and antibiotics and plastics)—when humans have a miraculous substance on our hands, we just can’t seem to use it at levels that minimize its impact. We instead seem compelled to throw around as much of the stuff as we can. But even if we were to start using less fertilizer now, we are past time to choose a single technique to curb greenhouse gas emissions; we need to put them all into action.

 

Denitrifying bacteria reduces levels of nitrous oxide in soil by converting it to the molecular form of nitrogen found in air. They use it as an oxidizer for respiration under conditions with low or no oxygen. So adding these nitrogen-respiring bacteria to soil could help decrease nitrous oxide emissions.

 

Modifying the microbiome of soil is just as hard as modifying the microbiome in our bodies. So instead of trying to promote the growth of any denitrifying bacteria that might happen to already be in soil, researchers decided to grow them externally and then add them in. Their source was partially treated sewage, called digestate, that was destined as organic fertilizer anyway. Keeping the digestate in oxygen-free conditions enriched their levels of one strain of nitrogen-respiring bacteria.

 

The researchers homed in on this particular strain because it has the enzyme needed to break down nitrous oxide, but not the enzymes used to make it from other nitrogen compounds. And although it is not the fastest, most efficient strain at nitrogen respiration, it won because it is the most tenacious: It grows to high concentrations even when oxygen is present, and it works well in soil.

 

When this digestate was mixed into soil, fertilizer-induced emissions were reduced by 50–95 percent, depending on the pH and organic carbon content of the soils. The effect lasted over the entire growing season. The presence of the added nitrogen-respiring bacteria did not seem to affect the indigenous microbiota already present in the soil, and the added bacteria did not carry genes for antibiotic resistance or pathogenicity, which is obviously essential if they are to be used in farming. What hasn’t been tested yet, however, is whether the presence of these bacteria influence the growth of crops.

 

Using mathematical modeling of future emissions, the researchers concluded that adding these bacteria to soil could reduce nitrous oxide emissions by 60 percent, and if they are added to all liquid manure systems in Europe, Europe could reduce its anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions by 3 to 4 percent.

 

Nature, 2024.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07464-3

 

 

 

Good morning. It's June 1, and today's photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's a banger.

 

This telescope, launched 18 months ago now, had as one of its express goals to deliver insights about the early Universe. The most straightforward way of doing so is to collect the faintest, most distant light that has spent the longest time traveling to reach Earth.

 

In some eye-opening new results, the telescope has found and confirmed the discovery of a very bright galaxy that existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang. Based on their observations, astronomers believe the galaxy is 1,600 light-years across and has a mass several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun.

 

The galaxy may not have the catchiest name—it's JADES-GS-z14-0, after the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey program—but in every other way, it's a remarkable find.

 

“All of these observations, together, tell us that JADES-GS-z14-0 is not like the types of galaxies that have been predicted by theoretical models and computer simulations to exist in the very early universe," the astronomers said. "Its discovery has profound implications for the predicted number of bright galaxies we see in the early universe."

 

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA)

 

 

Almost 1,500 genes have been implicated in intellectual disabilities; yet for most people with such disabilities, genetic causes remain unknown. Perhaps this is in part because geneticists have been focusing on the wrong stretches of DNA when they go searching. To rectify this, Ernest Turro—a biostatistician who focuses on genetics, genomics, and molecular diagnostics—used whole genome sequencing data from the 100,000 Genomes Project to search for areas associated with intellectual disabilities.

 

His lab found a genetic association that is the most common one yet to be associated with neurodevelopmental abnormality. And the gene they identified doesn’t even make a protein.

Trouble with the spliceosome

Most genes include instructions for how to make proteins. That’s true. And yet human genes are not arranged linearly—or rather, they are arranged linearly, but not contiguously. A gene containing the instructions for which amino acids to string together to make a particular protein—hemoglobin, insulin, serotonin, albumin, estrogen, whatever protein you like—is modular. It contains part of the amino acid sequence, then it has a chunk of DNA that is largely irrelevant to that sequence, then a bit more of the protein’s sequence, then another chunk of random DNA, back and forth until the end of the protein. It’s as if each of these prose paragraphs were separated by a string of unrelated letters (but not a meaningful paragraph from a different article).

 

In order to read this piece through coherently, you’d have to take out the letters interspersed between its paragraphs. And that’s exactly what happens with genes. In order to read the gene through coherently, the cell has machinery that splices out the intervening sequences and links up the protein-making instructions into a continuous whole. (This doesn’t happen in the DNA itself; it happens to an RNA copy of the gene.) The cell’s machinery is obviously called the spliceosome.

 

There are about a hundred proteins that comprise the spliceosome. But the gene just found to be so strongly associated with neurodevelopmental disorders doesn’t encode any of them. Rather, it encodes one of five RNA molecules that are also part of the spliceosome complex and interact with the RNAs that are being spliced. Mutations in this gene were found to be associated with a syndrome with symptoms that include intellectual disability, seizures, short stature, neurodevelopmental delay, drooling, motor delay, hypotonia (low muscle tone), and microcephaly (having a small head).

Supporting data

The researchers buttressed their finding by examining three other databases; in all of them, they found more people with the syndrome who had mutations in this same gene. The mutations occur in a remarkably conserved region of the genome, suggesting that it is very important. Most of the mutations were new in the affected people—i.e. not inherited from their parents—but there was one case of one particular mutation in the gene that was inherited. Based on this, the researchers concluded that this particular variant may cause a less severe disorder than the other mutations.

 

Many studies that look for genes associated with diseases have focused on searching catalogs of protein coding genes. These results suggest that we could have been missing important mutations because of this focus.

 

Nature Medicine, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41591-024-03085-5

 

Welcome to Edition 6.46 of the Rocket Report! It looks like we will be covering the crew test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and the fourth test flight of SpaceX's giant Starship rocket over the next week. All of this is happening as SpaceX keeps up its cadence of flying multiple Starlink missions per week. The real stars are the Ars copy editors helping make sure our stories don't use the wrong names.

 

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

 

 

Another North Korean launch failure. North Korea's latest attempt to launch a rocket with a military reconnaissance satellite ended in failure due to the midair explosion of the rocket during the first-stage flight this week, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reports. Video captured by the Japanese news organization NHK appears to show the North Korean rocket disappearing in a fireball shortly after liftoff Monday night from a launch pad on the country's northwest coast. North Korean officials acknowledged the launch failure and said the rocket was carrying a small reconnaissance satellite named Malligyong-1-1.

 

Russia's role? ... Experts initially thought the pending North Korean launch, which was known ahead of time from international airspace warning notices, would use the same Chŏllima 1 rocket used on three flights last year. But North Korean statements following the launch Monday indicated the rocket used a new propulsion system burning a petroleum-based fuel, presumably kerosene, with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. The Chŏllima 1 rocket design used a toxic mixture of hypergolic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide as propellants. If North Korea's statement is true, this would be a notable leap in the country's rocket technology and begs the question of whether Russia played a significant role in the launch. Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged more Russian support for North Korea's rocket program in a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (submitted by Ken the Bin and Jay500001)

 

Rocket Lab deploys small NASA climate satellite. Rocket Lab is in the midst of back-to-back launches for NASA, carrying identical climate research satellites into different orbits to study heat loss to space in Earth’s polar regions. The Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) satellites are each about the size of a shoebox, and NASA says data from PREFIRE will improve computer models that researchers use to predict how Earth’s ice, seas, and weather will change in a warming world. "The difference between the amount of heat Earth absorbs at the tropics and that radiated out from the Arctic and Antarctic is a key influence on the planet’s temperature, helping to drive dynamic systems of climate and weather," NASA said in a statement.

 

Twice in a week... NASA selected Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle to deliver the two PREFIRE satellites into orbit on two dedicated rides rather than launching at a lower cost on a rideshare mission. This is because scientists want the satellites flying at the proper alignment to ensure they fly over the poles several hours apart, providing the data needed to measure how the rate at which heat radiates from the polar regions changes over time. The first PREFIRE launch occurred on May 25, and the next one is slated for May 31. Both launches will take off from Rocket Lab's base in New Zealand. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

A rocket launch comes to Rizhao. China has diversified its launch sector over the last decade to include new families of small satellite launchers and new spaceports. One of these relatively new small rockets, the solid-fueled Ceres 1, took off Wednesday from a floating launch pad positioned about 2 miles (3 km) off the coast of Rizhao, a city of roughly 3 million people in China's Shandong province. The Ceres 1 rocket, developed by a quasi-commercial company called Galactic Energy, has previously flown from land-based launch pads and a sea-borne platform, but this mission originated from a location remarkably close to shore, with the skyline of a major metropolitan area as a backdrop.

 

Range safety ... There's no obvious orbital mechanics reason to position the rocket's floating launch platform so near a major Chinese city, other than perhaps to gain a logistical advantage by launching close to port. The Ceres 1 rocket has a fairly good reliability record—11 successes in 12 flights—but for safety reasons, there's no Western spaceport that would allow members of the public (not to mention a few million) to get so close to a rocket launch. For decades, Chinese rockets have routinely dropped rocket boosters containing toxic propellant on farms and villages downrange from the country's inland spaceports.

 

Avio test-fires Vega C rocket motor. The European Space Agency says a successful test firing of a redesigned Vega C solid rocket motor is a major step toward returning the rocket to flight by the end of the year, Space News reports. Avio, the prime contractor for the Vega C, conducted a static-fire test of the redesigned Zefiro-40 motor on May 28 at a company test facility in Italy. The motor, used as the second stage of the Vega C, fired for 94 seconds, as expected. The Zefiro-40 motor was implicated in the failure of the second Vega C rocket in December 2022, which an investigation blamed on faulty carbon-carbon material used in the motor’s nozzle.

 

The long road to flight ... Avio found a new supplier for the carbon-carbon material, but the nozzle failed in a static fire test in June 2023. This prompted Avio to redesign the nozzle itself, according to Space News. This fall, Avio plans a second static test-firing of the Zefiro-40 motor ahead of the Vega C rocket's return to flight mission at the end of the year. The grounding of the Vega C rocket and delays with Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket have left the continent largely without independent access to space, forcing ESA to move some payloads to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. One more flight of the basic version of the Vega rocket, which doesn't use the Zefiro-40 motor, is planned for September. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

 

Indian startup celebrates suborbital launch. Agnikul Cosmos, a space tech startup, successfully launched a single-stage rocket Thursday on a test flight to gather data for a future rocket to place small satellites into low-Earth orbit, the Times of India reported. The suborbital technology demonstrator for the Agnibaan rocket lifted off from a private launch pad at the Indian space agency's government-owned Satish Dhawan Space Center and was supposed to fly to an altitude of approximately 20 kilometers. In a post on X, Agnikul Cosmos said it successfully completed the flight. "All the mission objectives of this controlled vertical ascent flight were met and performance was nominal," the company said. "The vehicle was completely designed in-house and was powered by the world’s first single piece 3D-printed engine, and also happens to be India’s first flight with a semi-cryo engine."

 

Precursor to an orbital launch ... The semi-cryogenic engine burns a mix of jet fuel and super-cold liquid oxygen propellants, and is similar to the seven 5,600-pound thrust engines Agnikul Cosmos plans to cluster on its orbital-class Agnibaan rocket. The privately developed Agnibaan will be capable of putting a payload of about 220 pounds (100 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. Agnikul says it plans to launch the first orbital mission by the end of 2025.

 

 

Starliner launch on track for Saturday. Senior managers from NASA and Boeing plan to launch the first crew test flight of the Starliner spacecraft on an Atlas V rocket as soon as June 1, following several weeks of detailed analysis of a helium leak and a "design vulnerability" with the ship's propulsion system, Ars reports. Extensive data reviews since the first Starliner launch attempt on May 6 settled on a likely cause of the leak, which officials described as small and stable. During these reviews, engineers also built confidence that even if the leak worsened, it would not add any unacceptable risk for the Starliner test flight to the International Space Station, officials said.

 

Flight rationale ... During a flight test readiness review Wednesday, top space agency officials agreed to proceed with the Starliner launch attempt on Saturday. Engineers developed a workaround to overcome the small chance (a special case that would require multiple failures) that a design flaw discovered during testing in recent weeks could prevent the Starliner spacecraft from completing a deorbit burn to head for landing at the end of the test flight. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will be the first crew members to launch on Boeing's Starliner, and they flew to NASA's Kennedy Space Center this week to prepare for their weekend liftoff.

 

ESA's EarthCARE rides on Falcon 9. The European Space Agency's latest Earth-observing satellite, EarthCARE, launched Tuesday from California on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Spaceflight Now reports. EarthCARE was originally slated to launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket before ESA lost access to Soyuz following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Europe's Vega C rocket, which could have also launched EarthCARE, has been grounded since 2022 due to a design problem with its second-stage motor. This meant EarthCARE, like several other European space missions, had to launch on a SpaceX rocket or else wait a year or more for a ride on Vega C or Ariane 6.

 

Clouds and aerosols ... With four laser and radar instruments provided by European and Japanese institutions, the 800 million euro ($870 million) EarthCARE mission will measure how clouds and aerosol particles at different altitudes in Earth's atmosphere influence the climate, the BBC reports. From an altitude of 400 miles (250 km), EarthCARE will take pictures of cloud cover, measure their altitudes, and peer into clouds to determine how much water they are carrying, and how it is precipitating as rain, hail, and snow. A radiometer will sense how much of the energy falling on to Earth from the Sub is being reflected to radiate back into space. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

 

Competitors cry foul over SpaceX's dominance. Leaders from several small launch companies vying to compete with SpaceX had particularly harsh language for the world's leading launch company in a story published this week by The New York Times. In the story, the founders of Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Phantom Space—each at very different stages in their rocket programs—appeared to accuse SpaceX of anti-competitive behavior. However, none of these companies currently have a rocket that can compete one on one with SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9. In fact, only Rocket Lab has an operational rocket at all. Its light-class Electron rocket competes with the Falcon 9 in the small satellite launch market. SpaceX aggregates numerous small satellites on rideshare missions, while the Electron is designed to give these same types of payloads a dedicated ride to orbit.

 

Not speaking for all ... The co-founder of another small launch startup, ABL Space Systems, took a more nuanced view of SpaceX. "As a founder of a launch company, I disagreed with the thrust of this NYT article," Dan Piemont wrote on X. "I admire SpaceX and welcome their success." It is well worth reading Piemont's entire post, which is too long to cover here in its entirety. Piemont shares his thoughts on SpaceX's pricing strategy for its small satellite rideshare missions (some have accused SpaceX of intentionally under-cutting competitors' prices) and the importance for the US government to have access to multiple launch providers. Also, read Elon Musk's response to Piemont, in which he writes: "To the best of my knowledge, none of the rideshare missions have lost money." (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

 

 

Starship next week. SpaceX is targeting June 5 for the next flight of its massive Starship rocket, pending regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, Ars reports. The highly anticipated test flight—the fourth in a program to bring Starship to operational readiness and make progress toward its eventual reuse—will seek to demonstrate the ability of the Super Heavy first stage to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and for the Starship upper stage to make a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere before it falls into the Indian Ocean. This mission will carry no payloads as SpaceX seeks additional flight data about the performance of the complex Starship vehicle.

 

What happened in March? … As part of its announcement of the flight date, SpaceX provided some information about its learnings from the most recent flight test, Flight 3, which launched on March 14, 2024. During that flight, blockage in a filter where liquid oxygen flows into the Raptor engines caused some of them to shut down early during an attempt to steer the Super Heavy booster toward a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The first stage lost control during the final descent. The Starship upper stage reached its planned trajectory on the March test flight, but it lost the ability to control its attitude during a coast phase in space. This prevented SpaceX from conducting a restart test of a Raptor engine in space and led to the ship's uncontrolled reentry into the atmosphere, where it broke apart and burned up over the Indian Ocean.

Next three launches

May 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-64 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 22:43 UTC

June 1: Electron | PREFIRE 2 | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 03:00 UTC

June 1: Atlas V | Starliner Crew Flight Test | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 16:25 UTC

 

Another dairy farm worker in Michigan has been infected with avian influenza virus, state and federal health officials reported Thursday.

 

The case marks the third time the outbreak of bird flu in milking cows is known to have spilled over to a human. The dairy farm worker in Michigan, like the others, had close contact with H5N1-infected dairy cows, suggesting another case of cow-to-human transmission.

 

But the case reported today is notable for being the first one involving respiratory symptoms. In the first two cases, the dairy workers (one in Texas, the other in Michigan) reported only eye infections (conjunctivitis). This third case—also in Michigan but from a different farm—reported upper respiratory symptoms, including cough, congestion, and sore throat, as well as eye discomfort and watery discharge, but not conjunctivitis. The worker was given an antiviral (Tamiflu) and is said to be recovering. No other workers on the farm have shown symptoms, and the worker's household contacts are being monitored.

 

In a statement Thursday, the chief medical executive for Michigan's health department, Natasha Bagdasarian, explained that the latest case appeared to have a different exposure than the previous case in the state.

 

"With the first case in Michigan, eye symptoms occurred after a direct splash of infected milk to the eye," Bagdasarian said. "With this [new] case, respiratory symptoms occurred after direct exposure to an infected cow. Neither individual was wearing full personal protective equipment (PPE)." Bagdasarian added that the state has "not seen signs of sustained human-to-human transmission, and the current health risk to the general public remains low."

 

In a call with journalists Thursday afternoon, Nirav Shah, principal deputy director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emphasized that respiratory symptoms are the norm for influenza virus infections in humans, including H5 infections. Though the respiratory symptoms are not surprising, he added that they do pose more risk than a person with an eye infection. "Simply put, someone who's coughing may be more likely to transmit the virus than someone who has an eye infection, like conjunctivitis," Shah said.

 

Between 2003 and April 2024, the World Health Organization documented 889 human cases of H5N1 in 23 countries, leading to 463 deaths, which indicates a 52 percent case fatality report.

 

But, since the current global outbreak of H5N1 in wild birds began to flare in 2021 and spread to other species, officials documented only 28 H5N1 infections in humans as of April, according to a joint report last month from the WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the World Organization for Animal Health. The report does not include the two latest cases from Michigan, both reported this month. Nearly all of the reported cases had documented exposures to infected animals.

 

At least eight of the 28 earlier cases were deadly, according to WHO data. China reported two cases between 2021 and 2024, one of whom died, and the other was hospitalized with severe pneumonia. In Cambodia, five of 11 cases were fatal. Vietnam reported two cases, one of which was fatal; and India reported a single fatal case. But the joint report notes that all of the cases reported in the US and Europe in recent years have been asymptomatic or mild.

 

"The variation in disease outcome of H5N1 patients is likely due to a number of factors, including, virus genotype, viral load in the infectious material they were exposed to, underlying health conditions, duration of exposure, personal protective equipment used at the time of exposure and route of transmission," the report concludes.

 

For now, the CDC emphasizes that the risk for the general public remains low. However, the cases in farm workers highlight the risk to those who have exposure to animals, particularly dairy farm workers. The recent US cases tell us "that direct exposure to infected livestock poses a risk to humans, and that PPE is an important tool in preventing spread among individuals who work on dairy and poultry farms," Michigan's Bagdasarian said. To date, the CDC reports that over 40 people in the US have been tested for H5N1, and over 350 people have been monitored, including 220 currently under monitoring in Michigan. To date, four people have tested positive for H5N1 in the US, the three dairy farm workers connected to the dairy cow outbreak, as well as a 2022 case in a Colorado farm worker exposed to infected poultry.

 

The US Department of Agriculture reports H5N1 infections in at least 66 herds across nine states.

 

In the case that the virus gains the ability to spread among humans, the US health department is working to manufacture 4.8 million doses of well-matched H5 influenza vaccines, which should be ready later this summer, officials noted in the press briefing today. For now, officials declined to discuss how vaccines would be distributed or prioritized in the event of a human outbreak.

The US government is nearing an agreement to bankroll a late-stage trial of Moderna’s mRNA pandemic bird flu vaccine, hoping to bolster its pandemic jab stockpile as an H5N1 outbreak spreads through egg farms and among cattle herds.

 

The federal funding from the government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, known as BARDA, could come as early as next month, according to people close to the discussions.

 

It is expected to total several tens of millions of dollars and could be accompanied by a commitment to procure doses if the phase-three trials are successful, they said.

 

Talks between the government and Pfizer over supporting the development of its mRNA vaccine targeting the H5 family of viruses are also ongoing. Pfizer, like Moderna, played a pivotal role in supplying mRNA vaccines for Washington’s jab rollout during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Bird flu has been detected on poultry farms in 48 states and in dairy cow herds across nine states as part of one of the worst outbreaks in recent history, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has also reported two cases affecting dairy workers in recent months, adding to concerns of the virus spreading in human populations.

 

US health authorities continue to classify the public health risk from bird flu as low, but their efforts to build up and diversify the pandemic vaccine stockpile have gathered pace. Federal health officials said last week that the government was moving ahead with plans to fill 4.8 million vials from its existing portfolio of protein-based bird flu vaccines and was in discussions with Moderna and Pfizer.

 

The possibility of contributing to the US pandemic vaccine stockpile also represents a commercial opportunity for the mRNA vaccine makers, whose market valuations have fallen significantly from pandemic highs. Moderna’s share price is up nearly 37 percent since the start of April.

 

Moderna has completed dosing of a mid-stage trial of its H5 pandemic flu vaccine, with interim data expected soon. Pfizer said in a statement on Wednesday that it “would be prepared to deploy the company’s capabilities to develop a vaccine for strategic stockpiles,” confirming that it had launched a phase-one trial for a pandemic flu vaccine last December.

 

Applications for BARDA grant funding for an mRNA-based pandemic flu vaccine closed in December last year, according to a project proposal seen by the Financial Times. But the bird flu outbreak has increased the urgency of talks, with federal officials acknowledging that the speed with which mRNA vaccines were designed and deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic showed their value compared with more traditional vaccine technology.

 

The jabs from GSK, Sanofi, and CSL Seqirus, which make up the US government’s existing pandemic vaccine portfolio, provide immunity to the current strain of bird flu, according to laboratory testing, but rely on a more time-intensive manufacturing process using egg- and cell-based cultures.

 

The US health department, Moderna, and Pfizer declined to comment on the potential funding.

 

In 2007, a geoscientist at Penn State named Terry Engelder calculated that Pennsylvania could be sitting on more than 50 trillion cubic feet of accessible natural gas deposits. Engelder later revised his calculation upward, to 489 trillion cubic feet, enough to meet U.S. natural gas demand for 18 years. These massive numbers set off the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, leading to drilling across the state. Since the rush began, there have been 13,000 unconventional wells drilled in Pennsylvania.

 

Now, a new “astounding” calculation has caught the attention of the gas industry: A study from researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory shows the wastewater produced by Pennsylvania’s unconventional wells could contain enough lithium to meet 38 to 40 percent of current domestic consumption. Lithium is a critical mineral that’s an “essential component” of many clean energy technologies, including batteries for electric vehicles. 

 

The study used chemical and production compliance data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to estimate that approximately 1,160 metric tons of lithium per year could be extracted from this produced water, which is a combination of fluids used for fracking and water from natural formations underground that returns to the surface during the drilling process. The lithium in Pennsylvania’s produced water likely comes from ancient volcanoes that were erupting at the time the natural gas deposits were being formed. This volcanic ash contained lithium that eventually seeped into the water underground.

 

“The researcher community in the U.S. is really working hard to find the materials and methods that will enable us to meet our climate goals and decarbonize the economy,” said Justin Mackey, the study’s lead investigator. “Sometimes you might be surprised where that material actually comes from.” 

 

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade group dedicated to the Marcellus Shale formation, the natural gas deposit beneath Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and New York, reacted to the news with enthusiasm. “This scientific analysis by one of the leading energy laboratories in the world shows once again how abundant Pennsylvania natural gas can enhance America’s energy, environmental and national security,” the coalition said in a statement. 

 

The United States currently relies on imports from Argentina, Chile and China to fully meet its lithium needs, and the demand for lithium is expected to rise dramatically as the clean energy transition accelerates. 

 

Mackey, a research geochemist at the National Energy Technology Laboratory, said he had focused on lithium because it is a strategic material for the American economy and defense industries and because it has insecure supply chains. “We’re reliant on foreign entities like China and Chile and Australia to source these raw materials, but they’re critical to our economies,” he said. “And more importantly, they’re critical to decarbonizing the U.S. automotive fleet.”

 

He said the researchers were “shocked” that the highest concentrations of lithium found in the Marcellus “are comparable to lithium brine, to water that is actually being mined for lithium.” 

 

“I think having more domestic sources of lithium is definitely a positive thing, especially if you don’t have to create a mine to exploit the resource,” Mackey said. Unconventional drilling waste is likely to be produced in large quantities for the foreseeable future, he said, and if remediating this waste safely could also be made economically valuable, that could be beneficial for the environment as well.

 

 

But other experts are skeptical about the potential benefits of the study’s findings, questioning the economic feasibility of extracting lithium from wastewater at scale and what kind of impacts this processing could have on the environment and public health.

 

“There’s a lot of unanswered questions. It’s a little early, I think, to get too excited. It’s certainly something that needs to be looked at,” if only because of America’s reliance on lithium imports, said John Quigley, a fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and a former secretary of the Pennsylvania DEP and the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. 

 

The costs of extracting lithium in this way are unknown, Quigley said, and that includes the costs of surmounting potential logistical challenges of processing and transporting wastewater that comes from well pads across hundreds of miles of land. 

 

So far there is one Pennsylvania company, Eureka Resources in Lycoming County, working on lithium extraction from produced water. In 2023, the company announced it had successfully extracted “97 percent pure lithium carbonate” from wastewater and plans to incorporate the process at its three Pennsylvania facilities within the next two years. 

 

Even if the process of extracting lithium proved to be cost-effective, Quigley said, it should not be used as a justification to keep drilling, though it was “inevitable” that the industry would try to use the finding that way. “It’s still not a reason to continue to drill, because it’s a waste product from fossil fuel extraction,” he said. “The economy has to be carbon free by 2050.” 

 

Extracting lithium doesn’t solve the ongoing problem of what to do with the highly toxic wastewater produced by fracking, which contains salts, metals and radioactive elements. “There’s no way to clean this stuff up,” Quigley said. “You might be able to get something beneficial out of it. But you still have really nasty wastewater that you’ve got to get rid of.”

 

Quigley was reminded of previous claims made about the economic usefulness of the oil and gas industry’s wastewater in Pennsylvania. Spreading wastewater from conventional drilling on roadways to suppress dust was once considered “a beneficial reuse,” but now faces scrutiny for the risks it poses to the environment and human health, including water contamination and harm to aquatic wildlife. “That has proven to be a sham,” Quigley said. “Some beneficial reuses turned out not to be so beneficial.”

 

“You might be able to get something beneficial out of it. But you still have really nasty wastewater that you’ve got to get rid of.”

 

Shannon Smith, the executive director of FracTracker, a nonprofit based in Pennsylvania that analyzes the impacts of oil and gas development, wondered how the industry might use this finding to expand their operations in the state. 

 

“I live in Pennsylvania, and we’ve been burned over and over and over by the industry,” Smith said. “Being so deeply embedded in this world, I know that when something sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.”

 

“On the one hand, it seems like common sense. If they’re producing this dangerous waste, they should be obligated to at least make use of it how they can,” she said. But she worried if the U.S. became dependent on the Marcellus for 40 percent of its lithium supply, it would perpetuate fracking in Pennsylvania. Real climate solutions need to include a pathway to transition completely away from fossil fuels, she said. 

 

Smith also questioned whether Pennsylvania’s regulators were up to the task of monitoring another extractive industry. “The most common sense interventions are not being taken to protect our health,” she said. “So why on earth would we trust them to manage a new lithium economy?”

 

Because water production from typical wells in the Marcellus declines by 80 percent within the first two years of operation, the study concluded that extracting the volumes of lithium described in this analysis “would require continuous addition of new Marcellus wells to supplant older, less productive wells.” The study pointed to “underdeveloped” north-central Pennsylvania as a place where some of those new wells could be drilled; this region “has some of the highest lithium concentrations included in our analysis.”

 

Mackey and one of his co-authors, Barbara Kutchko, said the finding was only a beginning step toward understanding how to help the country meet its lithium needs, and the costs and benefits as well as economic and technological considerations of extracting lithium from produced water still need to be studied in greater depth. 

 

Quigley was cautious about speculating on what this finding could mean for Pennsylvania’s future. “I’ve seen too many stampedes that have ended up causing environmental and public health damage as well as economic losses,” he said. “People need to take a deep breath. It’s an intriguing finding. It needs a lot more work before it’s real.” Quigley said other clean energy technologies that do not rely on lithium are being developed, and while lithium ion batteries are seen as “state of the art” now, that may not be the case forever. 

 

As Pennsylvania looks ahead, he worries that the lessons of the past have not been learned. The history of energy extraction in Pennsylvania is marked by long-term, unintended consequences triggered by the rapid adoption of new technologies, from the lingering aftereffects of coal mining in the 19th and 20th centuries to more recent harm caused by fracking in the 21st. 

 

“A stampede toward lithium at all costs is not a smart move for the country,” he said. “And certainly not for Pennsylvania.”

 

Kiley Bense covers climate change and the environment with a focus on Pennsylvania, politics, energy, and public health. She has reported on the effects of the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, the expansion of the American plastics industry, and the intersection of climate change and culture. Her previous work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the Believer, and Sierra Magazine, and she holds master’s degrees in journalism and creative writing from Columbia University. She is based in Pennsylvania.

 

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

 

 

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, confirmed Wednesday that it has lost communication with its Akatsuki spacecraft in orbit around Venus.

 

In its update, the space agency said it failed to establish communications in late April after the spacecraft had difficulty maintaining its attitude. This likely means there is some sort of thruster issue on the spacecraft that is preventing it from being able to orient itself back toward Earth.

 

"Since then, we have implemented various measures to restore service, but communication has not yet been restored," the agency stated. "We are currently working on restoring communication." JAXA added that it will announce further actions, if any, as soon as they've been decided upon.

 

The potential loss of the Akatsuki spacecraft, a relatively small 320 kg probe with a mass a little larger than a consumer dishwasher, would be notable for a couple of reasons. First, it would mark the end of a plucky mission that overcame a significant failure a decade ago to enter orbit around Venus. Second, it would mean losing humanity's only spacecraft presently orbiting Venus.

A failure to orbit

The Akatsuki mission was launched aboard an H2-A rocket in 2010 and was Japan's first interplanetary mission in more than a decade after the country's failed Nozomi mission to Mars. After it reached orbit, however, the spacecraft's main engine failed to lower its orbit successfully. The engine burned for about three minutes instead of 12, leaving the spacecraft in an orbit around the Sun rather than Venus.

 

Over time, the Japanese mission planners developed a new option for entering orbit around the planet. The main engine did not work, so to reduce the spacecraft's mass, they tossed 65 kg of oxidizer overboard. With the craft's reduced mass, the operators planned to use Akatsuki's four hydrazine-powered attitude control thrusters to insert the vehicle into an elliptical orbit around Venus.

 

Ultimately, the plan worked. The spacecraft was placed into a 10-day orbit around the planet, with a closest approach of about 400 km. This allowed scientists to begin taking data in 2016 about the planet and its atmosphere. In 2018, the mission's lifetime was extended, and it has continued to collect data until this spring.

Only eyes on Venus

Akatsuki is presently the only operational spacecraft at Venus. There are two solar orbiters, one built by NASA and the other by the European Space Agency, that intermittently fly by Venus for gravitational assists, but they are not studying the planet in a meaningful way. Aside from this, we are blind to the happenings of the planet closest to Earth in our Solar System.

 

Half a dozen missions are under development, but none of them have a firm launch date later this decade.

 

 

 

Good morning. It's May 29, and today's photo comes from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is, you guessed it, in orbit around Mars.

 

The image shows an area of sand dunes on Mars in the springtime, when carbon dioxide frost is sublimating into the air. According to NASA, the pattern of dark spots is due to the fact that the sublimation process is not uniform.

 

Captured by the HiRISE camera on board the spacecraft, this image has been color-enhanced to draw out some of these features. The image scale is 50 cm per pixel.

 

This orbiter is a pretty amazing little spacecraft, as it's been flying around Mars since March 2006 and operating for nearly two decades. NASA is looking into commercial options for a replacement, as the spacecraft performs both essential observation functions and serves as a communications relay.

 

Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

 

Dinosaurs were once assumed to have been ectothermic, or cold-blooded, an idea that makes sense given that they were reptiles. While scientists had previously discovered evidence of dinosaur species that were warm-blooded, though what could have triggered this adaptation remained unknown. A team of researchers now think that dinosaurs that already had some cold tolerance evolved endothermy, or warm-bloodedness, to adapt when they migrated to regions with cooler temperatures. They also think they’ve found a possible reason for the trek.

 

Using the Mesozoic fossil record, evolutionary trees, climate models, and geography, plus factoring in a drastic climate change event that caused global warming, the team found that theropods (predators and bird ancestors such as velociraptor and T. rex) and ornithischians (such as triceratops and stegosaurus) must have made their way to colder regions during the Early Jurassic. Lower temperatures are thought to have selected for species that were partly adapted to endothermy.

 

“The early invasion of cool niches… [suggests] an early attainment of homeothermic (possibly endothermic) physiology in [certain species], enabling them to colonize and persist in even extreme latitudes since the Early Jurassic,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Current Biology.

Hot real estate

During the Mesozoic Era, which lasted from 230 to 66 million years ago, proto-dinosaurs known as dinosauromorphs began to diversify in hot and dry climates. Early sauropods, ornithischians, and theropods all tended to stay in these regions.

 

Sauropods (such as brontosaurus and diplodocus) would become the only dinosaur groups to bask in the heat—the fossil record shows that sauropods tended to stay in warmer areas, even if there was less food. This suggests the need for sunlight and heat associated with ectothermy. They might have been capable of surviving in colder temperatures but not adapted enough to make it for long, according to one hypothesis.

 

It's also possible that living in cooler areas meant too much competition with other types of dinosaurs, as the theropods and ornithiscians did end up moving into these cooler areas.

Almost apocalypse

Beyond the ecological opportunities that may have drawn dinosaurs to the cooler territories, it’s possible they were driven away from the warm ones. Around 183 million years ago, there was a perturbation in the carbon cycle, along with extreme volcanism that belched out massive amounts of methane, sulfur dioxide, and mercury. Life on Earth suffered through scorching heat, acid rain, and wildfires. Known as the Early Jurassic Jenkyns Event, the researchers now think that these disruptions pushed theropod and ornithischian dinosaurs to cooler climates because temperatures in warmer zones went above the optimal temperatures for their survival.

 

The theropods and ornithischians that escaped the effects of the Jenkyns event may have had a key adaptation to cooler climes; many dinosaurs from these groups are now thought to have been feathered. Feathers can be used to both trap and release heat, which would have allowed feathered dinosaurs to regulate their body temperature in more diverse climates. Modern birds use their feathers the same way.

 

Dinosaur species with feathers or special structures that improved heat management could have been homeothermic, which means they would have been able to maintain their body temperature with metabolic activity or even endothermic.

 

Beyond the dinosaurs that migrated to high latitudes and adapted to a drop in temperature, endothermy might have led to the rise of new species and lineages of dinosaurs. It could have contributed to the rise of Avialae, the clade that includes birds—the only actual dinosaurs still around—and traces all the way back to their earliest ancestors.

 

“[Our findings] provide novel insights into the origin of avian endothermy, suggesting that this evolutionary trajectory within theropods… likely started in the latest Early Jurassic,” the researchers said in the same study.

 

That really is something to think about next time a sparrow flies by.

 

Current Biology, 2024.  DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.04.051

 

European car manufacturers are currently tripping over themselves to figure out how personal transport and "last mile" solutions will look in the years to come. The solutions are always electric, and they're also tiny. What most companies (bar Citroen, Renault, and Fiat) seem to have forgotten is that we've had an answer to this problem all along: the microcar.

 

The microcar is a singular little thing—its job is to frugally take one person (or maybe two people) where they need to go while taking up as little space as possible. A few have broken their way into the public consciousness—Top Gear made a global megastar of Peel's cars, BMW's Isetta remains a design icon, and the Messerschmitt KR200 is just plain cool—but where did these tiny wonders come from? And do they have a future?

 

Well, without the microcar's predecessors, we may not have the modern motorcar as we know it. Sort of.

 

Let's roll back to the genesis of the car: the Mercedes-Benz Patent Motorwagen. While not a microcar by any means (though it seats only two people and has a tiny engine and only three wheels), it got plenty of people thinking.

 

While Karl Benz was inventing the car and his wife was road-tripping it in 1885, a French inventor named Léon Bollée put his thinking cap on. He was 15 at the time, but it gave him time to be with his thoughts. At that age, he had a keen brain—one that invented a pedal boat of sorts. Bollée was smart, to say the least—he built calculators to help his father's business, one of which won an award at the 1889 Paris Exposition and went on to be patented all over the world.

 

In 1895, Bollée and his father created "La Novelle," a steam-powered trike, and in the same year, Bollée created a gasoline-powered… thing as well. A year later, Bollée founded Léon Bollée Automobiles to mass-produce his tiny cars, dubbing them "Voiturette"—a mashup of the French for automobile (voiture) and the suffix you throw on a word to make it small (ette). Small car, basically.

 

A few years later, Renault (maker of tiny hatchbacks and the gloriously silly Avantime and popularizer of the people carrier in Europe) became a car manufacturer with the release of its descriptively named Voiturette. Louis Renault's small mechanical wonder was built in 1898, and the first was sold on Christmas Eve of the same year to a friend of Louis' father—he liked the fuel economy from its one-cylinder De Dion-Bouton 273 cc 1.75 hp (1.3 kW) engine and the fact that it could get around town with ease.

 

That same night, the story goes, Renault sold a further twelve cars. Over its mere five-year production run, the first Renault went from open-top two-seater to a four-seat covered wagon capable of over 35 mph (56 km/h). Bear in mind that less than a century earlier, Stephenson's Rocket and its almost 30 mph (48 km/h) top speed caused great concern about whether human physiology could withstand such speeds. 35 mph was quite the achievement.

 

Voiturettes and their less "ette" siblings were very successful, but they were a bit too much for some people. That's where the cyclecar came in.

 

First appearing around 1910, cyclecars took small engines—single cylinders, V-twins, the odd four-pot—and attached them to simple, lightweight four-wheeled bodies. To be a cyclecar, a vehicle had to have a gearbox and clutch. A huge industry popped up around them, and for good reason—regular cars were expensive to tax and run, whereas a cyclecar wasn't.

 

A formal decision by the Federation International des Clubs Moto Cycliste gave the cyclecar a classification. Small cyclecars could weigh no more than 331 lbs (150 kg) and have an engine no bigger than 0.75 L. Its tires could have a minimum 55 mm section. Large cyclecars could weigh up to 772 lbs (350 kg) and have a 1.1 L motor, and the smallest section tire it could wear was 60 mm.

 

To say the cyclecar was a hit is something of an understatement. Small manufacturers popped up all over the world to make teeny tiny cars to move the masses gently around their respective countries. They had twee names like Dudley Bug (only 100 made), the Wooler Mule, Izaro, and Cyklonetka. People could move around without getting covered in horse waste, and they weren't charged an arm and a leg for the privilege.

 

As time passed, bigger, more practical, faster cars became more affordable. Henry Ford saw how a cow went in one end of a meatpacking plant and came out the other in bits, then figured out how to mass-produce cars for a fraction of the cost of his competitors. All of a sudden, the cyclecar seemed a bit out of style. Why would consumers pay for a small, wobbly handmade thing from a shed when they could have a Ford Model T, an Austin 7, or a number of others? Almost as quickly as the cyclecar arrived, it was gone. Still, a decade in the limelight is better than nothing at all.

 

Of the many that hopped on the bandwagon at the time, few survived, and if they did, they aren't household names. The UK's Morgan Motor Company managed to make it through—were it not for HFS Morgan's desire to get around the Malvern Hills cheaply, his Three Wheeled Runabout might not have kick-started over a century of quirky British sports cars (a version of which you can still buy today in the Super Three—it's not particularly affordable or practical, but it is fun).

The conditions were ripe for a bubble

The cyclecar was gone but not forgotten. In the middle of the 20th century, war struck, and when it was over, things weren't rosy for those who remained. Economies were trashed, the populace had no money, and nations were rebuilding. The knock-on effect was that, once again, people needed a way to get around on a budget. Meet the darlings of the '50s and '60s: Bubblecars—so named because they looked like little bubbles as they went along.

 

Germany's efforts were many, and some manufacturers who had previously made airplanes found themselves with time on their hands after the war, which is why the Messerschmitt KR175 and Heinkel Kabine have potentially familiar names.

 

Messerschmitt's efforts were sweet things. "KR" stands for "Kebineroller," basically a scooter with a cabin, and the KR200, a follow-up to the cute but flawed KR175, took the world by storm in its own way. It was cheap, at 2,500 DM (about $6,972 today), and over 12,000 were built in its first year (over 41,000 were produced during its near-decade-long run). Its tiny 191 cc 10 hp (7.5 kW) motor gave it a top speed of 56 mph (90 km/h), and hydraulic shocks gave it an oddly smooth ride. Well, as smooth as a 507 lb (230 kg) tube on wheels could be.

 

BMW's front-opening Isetta is perhaps the most famous of the era, though it started out as an Iso instead of a BMW. The Iso Isetta came with a tiny 236 cc 9.5 hp (7 kW) motorcycle engine and looked like a happy little egg. It was made because Iso's owner thought it would be a good idea to get into the tiny car game after making refrigerators, tiny trucks, and scooters. It was a comparative hit in its home territory, but when the Fiat 500c came along and people lost interest in the tiny egg, Iso wanted to work on its Rivolta sports car, so the firm went looking for licensing deals. And boy, did it find them—versions of the Iso Isetta ended up in France, Argentina, Brazil, and Germany.

 

The German Isetta isn't a like-for-like copy of the original. BMW is a German company, so it decided to reengineer much of the vehicle—it had a new engine, for one thing—to make it a touch more palatable for its market. Over its life, it was revised, fettled, and even extended to add extra seats and wheels to make it a family car in the form of the BMW 600. There was a British version of the BMW Isetta, which swapped things around to make it more digestible for the tea-drinking market. The British car came in RHD three-wheeled flavor (other Isettas had two tiny rear wheels), which boosted its popularity thanks to legislation that meant a motorcycle license was all you needed to drive cars with the wrong number of wheels. Very, very technically, it was a motorcycle—just one with a steering wheel (see also: Reliant Robin).

 

While modern microcars aren't as big a deal as they were in the days of yore, you can still find plenty of them if you know where to look. Rural France is often a treasure trove of microcars, as is Spain, where you'll be dazzled by tiny Axiams, Ligiers (yes, the same Ligier as used to race in Formula 1), and more. A delve into their respective websites is a thing of joy. Modern microcars come with exciting wheels, spoilers, rear diffusers, touchscreens, decent sound systems, and other modern conveniences to ensure that your up-to-20-hp motor is as indistinguishable from a regular motor as possible… to a point. A quadricycle's crash regulations aren't as stringent as those for a "proper" car, and you won't find yourself cooing at material quality. For not much money, at age 16, who cares about plastic trim, anyway?

 

Cities like London and Paris can be good hunting grounds, too. Big cities tend to favor the likes of the electric Renault Twizy and Citroen Ami (the latter is a "light" quadricycle, which can irk other road users because it doesn't go exactly 30 mph).

 

The French pair are wonderful examples of the breed. The Twizy went out of production in 2023, but it enjoyed an 11-year run all over Europe. A bizarre pod with outboard wheels, it could seat two people in tandem (a cargo version ditched the rear chair in favor of a load bay), and it had doors that opened upward. It also didn't have windows as standard—there were optional plastic sheets that zipped up for rainy climes. It had over 50 miles (80 km) of range, which made it perfect for city living.

 

Citroen's Ami is still available for sale and is a masterwork of clever cheapness. Its front and rear panels are the same, but with clear lamps up front and red lights at the back. Its doors are the same, too, which means one opens the normal way and the other in "suicide" style. It comes with a USB port for charging your phone, a very noisy fan to demist the windshield, and a hole in the dash to pop a Bluetooth speaker in if you want to listen to something other than the road as you drive. Retailing at less than $11,500 in the UK, it's not cheaper than a used hatchback, but its tiny 5.5 kWh battery will take you to the store and back, so long as there aren't any hills and the supermarket isn't more than a 40-mile (64 km) round trip. The Ami is unrelentingly cool in a cheap and cheerful sense, and it brings joy to anyone who sees one.

 

From the dawn of the motorcar to today, the microcar has fought on. Whether as a cheap means of getting the masses around or as a way to village-hop in rural France, there always seems to be a place for them, even though they're not as popular as they used to be. More microcars will come in time—electrification allows for small batteries with decent punch, and more relaxed crash regulations mean design teams can stretch their fingers in more interesting ways.

 

And, hey, who doesn't like the idea of whirring around town at 28 mph in a tiny plastic Citroen box? Last-mile transportation could still be fun enough to take the long way home.

 

 

In early August 2023, a beekeeper near the port of Savannah, Georgia, noticed some odd activity around his hives. Something was hunting his honeybees. It was a flying insect bigger than a yellowjacket, mostly black with bright yellow legs. The creature would hover at the hive entrance, capture a honeybee in flight, and butcher it before darting off with the bee’s thorax, the meatiest bit.

 

“He’d only been keeping bees since March… but he knew enough to know that something wasn’t right with this thing,” says Lewis Bartlett, an evolutionary ecologist and honeybee expert at the University of Georgia, who helped to investigate. Bartlett had seen these honeybee hunters before, during his PhD studies in England a decade earlier. The dreaded yellow-legged hornet had arrived in North America.

 

With origins in Afghanistan, eastern China, and Indonesia, the yellow-legged hornet, Vespa velutina, has expanded during the last two decades into South Korea, Japan, and Europe. When the hornet invades new territory, it preys on honeybees, bumblebees, and other vulnerable insects. One yellow-legged hornet can kill up to dozens of honeybees in a single day. It can decimate colonies through intimidation by deterring honeybees from foraging. “They’re not to be messed with,” says honeybee researcher Gard Otis, professor emeritus at the University of Guelph in Canada.

 

The yellow-legged hornet is so destructive that it was the first insect to land on the European Union’s blacklist of invasive species. In Portugal, honey production in some regions of the country has slumped by more than 35 percent since the hornet’s arrival. French beekeepers have reported 30 percent to 80 percent of honeybee colonies exterminated in some locales, costing the French economy an estimated $33 million annually.

 

 

All that destruction may be linked to a single, multi-mated queen that arrived at the port of Bordeaux, France, in a shipment of bonsai pots from China before 2004. During her first spring, she established a nest, reared workers, and laid eggs. By fall, hundreds of new mated queens likely exited and found overwintering sites, restarting the cycle in the spring. The hornet’s fortitude—it is the Diana Nyad of invasive social wasps—allowed it to surge across France’s borders into Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland in only two decades, hurtling onward by as much as 100 kilometers a year.

Suspected stowaway

As the hornet fanned out across Europe, scientists in North America wondered when it might arrive on their side of the Atlantic. Queens sometimes overwinter in crates and containers, allowing them to stow away on ships and be transported long distances. In 2013, researchers cautioned that a yellow-legged hornet invasion at any one point along the US East Coast would have the potential to spread across the country.

 

After the first sighting last summer, Georgia’s agricultural commissioner urged people to report hornets and nests, and warned that the yellow-legged hornet could threaten the state’s $73 billion agriculture industry. American farmers grow more than 100 different crops, including apples, blueberries, and watermelons, that depend on pollinators. Georgia mass-produces honeybees and ships them north to jumpstart spring crops, like Maine blueberries, before local pollinators have awakened.

 

 

Less than two weeks after the first hornet was spotted, scientists found a nest in a tree 25 meters off the ground. In a night operation, while the hornets idled, a tree surgeon climbed to the nest, sprayed it with insecticide, and cut it down. Just a quarter of the full nest was the size of a human torso, and the Georgia Department of Agriculture displayed a chunk, still wrapped around the branch, at a press conference—warning that this was larger than those seen in Europe.

 

“Savannah, Georgia, is primo climate for these guys,” says Otis. It’s a lush, subtropical paradise, giving the insect a long growing season—and a rich hunting ground.

 

For the next several months, Bartlett helped the state agricultural researchers set traps and follow individual hornets to find other nests. By the end of 2023, they’d removed four more. “We think we’ve discovered them at a very early stage, which is why pursuing eradication is very, very plausible,” Bartlett said in November. If not, Georgia and its neighbors could get caught in an endless—and costly—game of whack-a-mole.

Social wasps: Invasive global predators

The yellow-legged hornet and other social wasps, like the common yellowjacket, the German yellowjacket, and the western yellowjacket, have successfully invaded every continent except Antarctica. They’ve been introduced to new areas by global trade, sometimes more than once over several decades.

 

The hornets live in colonies of individuals organized into groups that divvy up the labor of reproduction, foraging, and caregiving. These behaviors, and the insects’ nearly omnivorous appetites, make them among the most successful invaders of new habitats and fiercest aggressors of native fauna. In their endemic ranges, these wasps are eaten by skunks, squirrels, bears, or snagged in flight by kingbirds and tanagers, or attacked by other predatory wasps. But in the absence of predators, their toll can be enormous.

 

In New Zealand’s Nelson Lakes National Park, the beech forests are thick with invasive yellowjackets by early autumn. They sip the sugary secretions of scale insects living on the trees, and will fight the bellbirds, tui, silvereyes, and other birds for it, even slaughtering nest-bound chicks. The densities of the yellowjacket nests—up to 40 nests per hectare and 370 wasps per square meter of tree trunk—are among the world’s highest.

 

“When you walk through the forest, you should smell the sweetness of the honeydew and hear the birds,” says invasive species biologist Phil Lester of Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, coauthor of a review of management strategies for invasive social wasps in the 2019 Annual Review of Entomology. “But with the wasp, you don’t hear the birdsong, you don’t smell the honeydew.”

 

In Hawaii, the western yellowjacket has had dramatic impacts on the island ecosystem. Genetic studies show that the original population came from the Pacific Northwest or Northern California, possibly in a shipment of Christmas trees. It hunts native bees and drains the nectar from the wispy red flowers of the ‘ōhi’a lehua tree, stealing food from other pollinators and curtailing seed production.

 

“They eat everything,” says ecologist Erin Wilson-Rankin of the University of California, Riverside, who has been studying invasive social wasps for nearly 20 years. “They don’t specialize. They’ll eat caterpillars, aphids, flies, the whole gamut of arthropods.”

Controversial tools

People have tried just about everything to get rid of wasps: fire, boiling water, electricity, traps, poison, and brute force. While many poisons do work, they can also harm native insects and other animals. New Zealand has suppressed yellowjacket populations in highly trafficked areas with a selective poison bait called Vespex, but they reinvade elsewhere.

 

Nest destruction can kill hundreds of wasps at once, but it’s dangerous: Yellowjackets can squirt venom into an attacker’s eyes, and stings can be painful or life-threatening. Reiner Jahn, a hornet-buster and research assistant for a local landscape conservation association in Germany, describes the pain of a yellow-legged hornet sting as “digging a hot rusty knife into your flesh.”

 

 

Another approach to managing invasive species is biological control: A different species, often a natural enemy, is transplanted into the ecosystem to take on the role of contract killer. It can do the trick, but the long history of this strategy going awry (think harlequin ladybirds, cannibal snails, small Asian mongoose, cane toads) gives pause.

 

Cajoling foreign predators to take root in new places is another bother. In New Zealand, for example, the government recently approved the release of a non-native hoverfly and beetle to target invasive wasps. In Europe, both species hitch a ride into the hornet nests, feasting on the juvenile hornet grubs and decimating the next generation. But the imported insect predators had to have their seasonal cycles flipped before they could be released in the Southern Hemisphere. After some setbacks, scientists released about 20 hoverflies into the wild on the northern end of the South Island in mid-May.

 

Lester has other ideas: Silencing some of the wasps’ essential genes could reverse their spread. A handful of genetic control technologies are being tested globally to target invasive or harmful insects. For example, the biotechnology company Oxitec aims to combat the spread of dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases by releasing gene-edited male mosquitoes that produce female offspring that die young. (It’s the females that bite and spread disease.) Other researchers are using CRISPR gene editing on a range of agricultural pests to reduce pesticide use and save crops.

 

In 2020, an international group of researchers, including Lester and Wilson-Rankin, sequenced the genomes of three invasive social wasps: the common yellowjacket, the German yellowjacket, and the western yellowjacket. Lester then zeroed in on a gene called ocnus that’s involved in sperm development, with the goal of making sterile males.

 

Like many insect pests, common yellowjackets are haplodiploid, which means that fertilized eggs become female wasps (with two copies of each chromosome), and unfertilized eggs produce males (with only one copy of each chromosome). If a queen mates with a sterile male, the eggs laid would produce only male wasps. Without female worker wasps, the nest would fail. But Lester’s modeling has shown that it would take decades for the mutation to spread across the South Island wasp population. So he continues to look for new genetic targets that might snuff out New Zealand’s invasive wasps more quickly.

 

Many people are unsettled by the idea of releasing genetically modified organisms into the wild, even if it’s to save native species, but the approach carries advantages. The impact would be precise; it wouldn’t poison other animals or insects. It would disperse over large distances and into remote areas. It would also be self-perpetuating, so people wouldn’t have to climb long ladders in protective suits to cut down enormous nests full of angry wasps.

Nest busting

On a hot afternoon in mid-September, Jahn, the German hornet-buster, pulls up to the Metropolitan International School in Viernheim, an industrial town east of the Rhine River. Kids run and jump in the playground, until a teacher ushers them away. High in a tree overhanging the soccer field is a caramel-colored, beach-ball-sized yellow-legged hornet’s nest.

 

“The kids can’t play soccer. I had to close the field because it is too dangerous,” says Oliver Wagner, the school’s facility manager.

 

A whiff of revenge hangs in the air as Jahn and his crew set up. Each is a beekeeper who has lost colonies to yellow-legged hornets or knows someone who has. Jahn extends a telescopic pole fitted with a spray nozzle into the branches. He jabs the nest and blows in a fine powder called diatomaceous earth as chunks of the nest tumble to the ground. Hornets stream out like the air escaping from a punctured balloon.

 

Dusted with the white powder and unable to fly, the inch-long yellow-legged hornets wander through the grass and across the tarp. The crew picks through the nest debris and they tweeze the larger hornets into specimen bottles. When a nest is attacked—whether by a predator or a human—the queen may try to escape, Jahn explains. Find her, and the work is done. This time, she’s unaccounted for.

 

The trick to stopping a yellow-legged hornet invasion is to find the nests and destroy them before hundreds of new queens fly out in the fall to establish their own nests. European Union member states must, by law, control the hornet’s spread, but Germany has strict rules that protect pollinator and native insects and limit what beekeepers and hornet-busters can do. Diatomaceous earth, often used in homes to kill cockroaches and centipedes, has become Jahn’s go-to solution. It sticks to the hornet’s exoskeletons and dries them out but doesn’t spread to other insects.

 

In all of 2023, Jahn destroyed 160 yellow-legged hornet’s nests in his home state of Hesse and 80 in a neighboring state, most brought to his attention by beekeepers. After a few years of nest-busting, he’s given up beekeeping (there’s no more time), and he no longer believes that the yellow-legged hornet can be eradicated in Germany—the country may have waited too long to start removing nests. Still, he says, “it’s easier to do something now than wait until next year.” But by mid-May this year, he’d already fielded calls for 19 new nests, compared with only two by late May last year.

 

Back in Georgia, Bartlett has tracked down the source of the captured yellow-legged hornets. His genetic analysis shows that a single queen arrived from southern China, the Korean peninsula, or Japan in late 2022. He believes the hornets captured last year were the first American-born generation founded by the stowaway queen. Now, the second generation has emerged. “We have been finding queens a little further out than we had hoped. But nothing near the distances they see in Europe,” says Bartlett. As of the end of April, the state had trapped and destroyed 21 queens.

 

Bartlett sees the work as his duty to protect the beekeeping industry, but his hope is that the hornet won’t define his scientific career. Still, he knows he can’t relent. “If we don’t get rid of them, there is very little chance that I’m not going to become the yellow-legged hornet expert in the US.”

 

Hannah Hoag is a science journalist in Toronto. She has written for the Atlantic, Biographic, Nature, Science, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and more.

 

When the Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos Monteiro coined the term “ultra-processed foods” 15 years ago, he established what he calls a “new paradigm” for assessing the impact of diet on health.

 

Monteiro had noticed that although Brazilian households were spending less on sugar and oil, obesity rates were going up. The paradox could be explained by increased consumption of food that had undergone high levels of processing, such as the addition of preservatives and flavorings or the removal or addition of nutrients.

 

But health authorities and food companies resisted the link, Monteiro tells the FT. “[These are] people who spent their whole life thinking that the only link between diet and health is the nutrient content of foods ... Food is more than nutrients.”

 

Monteiro’s food classification system, “Nova,” assessed not only the nutritional content of foods but also the processes they undergo before reaching our plates. The system laid the groundwork for two decades of scientific research linking the consumption of UPFs to obesity, cancer, and diabetes.

 

Studies of UPFs show that these processes create food—from snack bars to breakfast cereals to ready meals—that encourages overeating but may leave the eater undernourished. A recipe might, for example, contain a level of carbohydrate and fat that triggers the brain’s reward system, meaning you have to consume more to sustain the pleasure of eating it.

 

In 2019, American metabolic scientist Kevin Hall carried out a randomized study comparing people who ate an unprocessed diet with those who followed a UPF diet over two weeks. Hall found that the subjects who ate the ultra-processed diet consumed around 500 more calories per day, more fat and carbohydrates, less protein—and gained weight.

 

 

The rising concern about the health impact of UPFs has recast the debate around food and public health, giving rise to books, policy campaigns, and academic papers. It also presents the most concrete challenge yet to the business model of the food industry, for whom UPFs are extremely profitable.

 

The industry has responded with a ferocious campaign against regulation. In part it has used the same lobbying playbook as its fight against labeling and taxation of “junk food” high in calories: big spending to influence policymakers.

 

FT analysis of US lobbying data from non-profit Open Secrets found that food and soft drinks-related companies spent $106 million on lobbying in 2023, almost twice as much as the tobacco and alcohol industries combined. Last year’s spend was 21 percent higher than in 2020, with the increase driven largely by lobbying relating to food processing as well as sugar.

 

In an echo of tactics employed by cigarette companies, the food industry has also attempted to stave off regulation by casting doubt on the research of scientists like Monteiro.

 

“The strategy I see the food industry using is deny, denounce, and delay,” says Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and a consultant for companies on the multisensory experience of food and drink.

 

So far the strategy has proved successful. Just a handful of countries, including Belgium, Israel, and Brazil, currently refer to UPFs in their dietary guidelines. But as the weight of evidence about UPFs grows, public health experts say the only question now is how, if at all, it is translated into regulation.

 

“There’s scientific agreement on the science,” says Jean Adams, professor of dietary public health at the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. “It’s how to interpret that to make a policy that people aren’t sure of.”

 

The food industry, dominated by global conglomerates such as Nestlé, PepsiCo, Mars, and Kraft Heinz, likes to project itself as committed to public health. “Our strategy is all about nutrition, health, and wellness,” Paul Bulcke, the chair of Nestlé, told investors at the company’s annual meeting in April.

 

Innovations in processing over the 20th century not only made food more affordable and accessible, the industry’s advocates note, but also created beneficial products like sugar-free sweeteners and protein-enriched milk.

 

Food processing has allowed the reformulation of recipes to add whole grains and fiber to food while reducing sugar, salt, and saturated fat, said Nestlé in a statement. “We should not lose sight of the vital role it plays in providing safe, nutritious, high-quality, and affordable products all over the world.”

 

In a statement, PepsiCo said it aimed to “improve the core nutritional profile of our products” and use more diverse ingredients in order to “meet many dietary needs and preferences.” Kraft Heinz did not respond to request for comment.

 

Yet, as researchers have learned more about the link between UPFs and poor health outcomes, companies have remained largely silent about these risks, leaving trade bodies that advocate on their behalf to argue loudly against the validity of the research.

 

The UK’s Food & Drink Federation argues there is no legal definition of processed or ultra-processed food and that consumers struggle to understand the difference. A spokesperson said: “Our concern about the concept of ultra-processed food is that it’s not linked to current government dietary guidance nor food safety regulations, which are underpinned by rigorous science and assessed by expert, independent committees.”

 

David Chavern, president of the US’s Consumer Brands Association, says food companies were “trying to bring rationality to the debate.” The research, Chavern says, has an “anti-corporate wrapper around it” and creates a false sense that companies are hiding something from consumers. “The industry views itself as incredibly transparent. There is extensive disclosure about ingredients on packaging,” he adds.

 

For decades, the industry has been quietly pouring money into the world’s leading food and nutritional sciences departments.

 

Researchers studying human nutrition at the UK’s Reading University, for example, received 262,832 pounds in research funding from food giant Mars between 2018 and 2023, according to a recent freedom of information request. PepsiCo provided 61,756 pounds to the researchers over the same period.

 

“We work with the food industry so that we can do more research that has an immediate impact on people’s diet and health,” says Robert Van de Noort, vice-chancellor of the University of Reading. “We want our work to be on the shelves of the supermarket, not just the library.” A Mars spokesperson said the funding was to support a diverse range of science projects, largely supporting Reading’s facility for cocoa research, while PepsiCo said it had funded research into shelf life and product quality, among other things.

 

Anna Gilmore, co-director of the Centre for 21st Century Public Health at the University of Bath, say the ties with scientists help the industry to “manufacture doubt” by funding analysis that exonerates companies or suggests the case against them is not proven.

 

A 2018 review of studies that criticized Monteiro’s Nova system found that the authors overwhelmingly had connections to the UPF industry.

 

Scientists at the US government’s Agricultural Research Service led another study demonstrating it is possible to build a healthy diet with 91 percent of the calories coming from UPFs. The authors had connections to the soy industry, sauces and flavoring company McCormick, and Atkins diet food owner Simply Good Foods.

 

Regulatory bodies also have some of these corporate links. A review of conflicts of interest in UK food regulation found that nine of the 15 members of the government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition had received funding from the UPF industry.

 

The SACN concluded last summer that there were “uncertainties around the quality of evidence available” on UPFs, as studies were mainly observational, and that “confounding” factors like energy intake, body mass index, smoking, and socioeconomic status may not have been factored in.

 

“The resistance and counter-attacks are not a surprise,” says Tim Lang, a professor at City University’s Centre for Food Policy who co-led the review. An “epidemiological transition” driven by the food industry has been taking place for decades, he says, in which countries switch away from simple, whole-food diets as they become wealthier.

 

“It is what the food industry has celebrated and trumpeted. And now they are hoist by their own petard. All the things they claimed as success are now flaws,” he says.

 

It is a similar story in the US, where the Kevin Hall study prompted the US government to review the effects of UPFs on public health for potential inclusion in the next round of national dietary guidelines. A lobbyist at a prominent food trade group in Washington tells the FT that keeping UPFs out of these guidelines is the group’s key objective.

 

Current advice in the US is based on individual nutrients, which means companies can formulate foods to meet requirements. Food served in the subsidized US National School Lunch Program, for example, includes processed foods like Kraft Heinz’s Lunchables and PepsiCo’s Walking Tacos.

 

 

“My guess is they won’t say there is strong evidence,” says Aviva Musicus, science director at the US Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit health-advocacy group. Because the studies used the Nova classification and are based on prospective cohort studies, she notes, they do not show definitive causality.

 

In addition, nine out of 20 members of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee advising on the guidelines had conflicts of interest with food, pharmaceutical, or weight-loss companies or industry groups, according to another non-profit, US Right To Know.

 

One panel member, Fatima Cody Stanford, received tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees in 2022 from manufacturers of obesity drugs, including Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, according to public disclosures.

 

Stanford did not respond to a request for comment, but the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion noted that all candidates for the panel are vetted thoroughly for conflicts of interest.

 

In 2023, PepsiCo spent millions of dollars lobbying the US government. According to one disclosure from last July, the Doritos and Tostitos maker spent $1.27 million on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) purchasing restrictions, the upcoming dietary guidelines, sweeteners, and food labeling, among other issues.

 

Where legislation is passed that has a direct impact on food multinationals, they have often fought back in the courts. In Mexico, companies including Kellogg’s and Nestlé have sued the government over the introduction of front-of-package warning labels and other restrictions including the use of children’s characters in marketing.

 

The labels—black octagons that warn about excess of sugars, sodium, trans fat, saturated fat, and calories in products—were rolled out in 2020. A handful of the lawsuits were accepted by the Mexican Supreme Court and are still being fought.

 

Nestlé said it “supported front-of-pack labeling that helps consumers make informed choices” including government-endorsed labels such as Nutri-Score in some European countries or the traffic light system in the UK.

 

The industry has also successfully framed the issue as one of personal choice. In Brazil, where legislators are considering the inclusion of UPFs in a group of products that would attract a higher excise tax, the industry has argued that regulation could limit consumer options and make food more expensive.

 

It’s a resonant charge in a country where hunger is a major issue, says Paula Johns, co-founder and director of public health advocate ACT Promoção da Saúde (ACT Health Promotion).

 

Manufacturers also argue that the harm caused by their products is a result of a lack of personal willpower or failure to exercise, says Bath University’s Gilmore, and “nothing to do with industry or its UPF products that overwhelm our internal systems that regulate appetite.”

 

Even in public health circles there is little agreement about what shape regulation of UPFs should take.

 

The chief concern among public health experts is that guidance telling people to avoid UPFs risks stigmatizing those reliant on packaged food due to socio-economic circumstances. Some also share the industry’s criticism that the definition is too broad to draw a clear causal line between exposure to UPFs and their effects.

 

The evidence on UPFs points to a “staggering range of health outcomes,” says Cambridge’s Adams. “If you’re going to ask people to eat more minimally processed food, you need to ask how do we support people to cook at home themselves.”

 

“Ultra-processed” is not necessarily a useful term for regulation that requires “real nuance,” said Chris van Tulleken, author of the book Ultra-Processed People, at a recent House of Lords committee hearing. Existing legislation targeting high-fat, sugar, or salt (HFSS) foods would also ensnare many UPFs, he noted.

 

But it was “a very powerful way of describing our terrible diet,” he added. “We have great evidence that there is a single pattern of diet that drives harm—and it is an industrialized, American diet produced by transnational food corporations.”

 

It is in the food industry’s interest to conflate UPFs and HFSS foods, says University of London’s Smith. “We have a definition that works, [they say]—HFSS... That way they can reduce and reformulate, but still use all the UPF ingredients.”

 

What the food companies really fear, he says, is that UPF ingredients such as additives and stabilizers will be targeted for labeling. “Once we start interfering with those, they will be prevented from making food that makes us eat more,” he adds.

 

It is clear that the public is now much more aware of UPFs, and concerned about them. Two-thirds of Europeans now believe that ultra-processed foods are unhealthy and will cause health problems in later life, according to a February survey of 10,000 people in 17 countries, and 40 percent do not trust that the authorities are regulating them well enough. Research by Mintel in the UK has found that 70 percent of UK adults try to avoid ultra-processed foods.

 

“I don’t think even Carlos Monteiro in his wildest dreams expected the public discourse to get so attuned,” says Lang at City University. “The public is running with it. The genie is out of the bottle.”

 

Corporate affairs professionals say food companies are overwhelmed by the level of public concern about UPFs and are scrambling to find an effective way to counter it.

 

“The industry needs to at least try and find a common position it can defend itself from,” says a former food and drinks lobbyist in the UK. “If it doesn’t, this kind of emotional reaction is likely to gather ground, at which point it will be very difficult to stop all of this.”

 

Welcome to Edition 6.45 of the Rocket Report! The most interesting news in launch this week, to me, is that Firefly is potentially up for sale. That makes two of the handful of US companies with operational rockets, Firefly and United Launch Alliance, actively on offer. I'll be fascinated to see what the valuations of each end up being if/when sales go through.

 

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

 

 

Firefly may be up for sale. Firefly Aerospace investors are considering a sale that could value the closely held rocket and Moon lander maker at about $1.5 billion, Bloomberg reports. The rocket company's primary owner, AE Industrial Partners, is working with an adviser on "strategic options" for Firefly. Neither AE nor Firefly commented to Bloomberg about the potential sale. AE invested $75 million into Texas-based Firefly as part of a series B financing round in 2022. The firm made a subsequent investment in its Series C round in November 2023.

 

Launches and landers ... Now more than a decade old and with a history of financial struggles, Firefly has emerged as one of the apparent winners in the small launch race in the United States. The company's Alpha rocket has now launched four times since its unsuccessful debut in September 2021, and it is due to fly a Venture Class Launch Services 2 mission for NASA in the coming weeks. Firefly also aims to launch its Blue Ghost spacecraft to the moon later this year and is working on an orbital transfer vehicle.

 

Blue Origin makes successful return to flight. With retired Air Force captain and test pilot Ed Dwight as the headline passenger, Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft returned to flight on Sunday morning. An African American, Dwight was one of 26 pilots the Air Force recommended to NASA for the third class of astronauts in 1963, but the agency didn't select him. It took another 20 years for America's first Black astronaut, Guion Bluford, to fly in space in 1983. At the age of 90, Dwight finally entered the record books Sunday, becoming the oldest person to reach space. “I thought I didn’t need it in my life," Dwight said after Sunday's fight. "But I lied!"

 

One chute down ... This was the seventh time Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has flown people to suborbital space, and the 25th flight overall of the company's fleet of New Shepard rockets. It was the first time Blue Origin had launched people in nearly two years, resuming suborbital service after a rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. In December, Blue Origin launched another uncrewed suborbital research mission to set the stage for the resumption of human missions Sunday. There was one issue with the flight, as only two of the capsule's three parachutes deployed. It's unclear how long it will take to address this problem.

 

RFA tests first stage of its rocket. German launch startup Rocket Factory Augsburg announced Sunday that it had begun the hot-fire campaign for the first stage of its RFA One rocket. "We hot-fired a total of four Helix engines, igniting one by one at four-second intervals," the company said on the social media site X. "All engines ran simultaneously for 8 seconds with a total hot-fire duration of 20 seconds. The test ran flawlessly through start-up, steady-state, and shutdown." It's a great step forward for the launch company.

 

Targeting a test flight this year, but ... The test occurred at the SaxaVord Spaceport in the United Kingdom. The RFA One vehicle is powered by nine Helix engines and will have a payload capacity of 1.6 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. The company is targeting a debut launch later this year, but I'm fairly skeptical of that. By way of comparison, SpaceX began test firing its Falcon 9 first stage in 2008, with a full-duration test firing of all nine engines in November of that year. But the rocket did not make its debut flight until June 2010.

 

China expanding commercial spaceport. China is planning new phases of expansion for its new commercial spaceport to support an expected surge in launch and commercial space activity, Space News reports. Construction of the second of two launch pads at Hainan Commercial Launch Site could be completed by the end of May. The first, completed in December and dedicated to the Long March 8 rocket, could host its first launch before the end of June.

 

Fulfilling a mega-need ... However this appears to be just the beginning, as the spaceport could have a total of 10 pads serving both liquid and solid rockets. The reason for the dramatic expansion appears to be increasing access to space and allowing China to achieve a launch rate needed to build a pair of low-Earth orbit megaconstellations, each over 10,000 satellites strong. It is also a further sign of China’s commitment to establishing a thriving commercial space sector. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

A spaceport in the Dominican Republic? The Dominican Republic has kicked off a study into the feasibility of setting up a commercial spaceport near the equator, Space News reports. Florida-based Launch on Demand, a launch licensing and technical services specialist, announced a contract May 22 to lead the six-month study with the country's National Intelligence Directorate. The study will focus on the Oviedo area to the south of the island nation.

 

Go south, young man ... The study will examine vertical lift capacity for orbital and suborbital missions, which could enable the country to improve critical satellite monitoring and surveillance capabilities to address illegal migration, drug trafficking, and environmental damage. The Caribbean nation is located at a latitude between 17 and 20 degrees, significantly to the south of Cape Canaveral, at 28.4 degrees.

 

 

Starliner launch delayed until early June. On Wednesday evening, NASA said the earliest Starliner launch opportunity will be Saturday, June 1, with additional launch opportunities June 2, June 5, and June 6. But there's still work to do before NASA gives the green light for the Starliner launch, which has been struggling with a stubborn leak of helium from the capsule's propulsion system, Ars reports. The mission will be the first crewed flight by Starliner and is due to launch on an Atlas V rocket.

 

It's always the valves ... "Work continues to assess Starliner performance and redundancy following the discovery of a small helium leak in the spacecraft’s service module," NASA said late Wednesday. "As part of this work, and unrelated to the current leak, which remains stable, teams are in the process of completing a follow-on propulsion system assessment to understand potential helium system impacts on some Starliner return scenarios." A separate problem with a pressure regulation valve on the spacecraft's United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket prompted officials to scrub a launch attempt on May 6. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Ariane 6 debut timeline set. The Ariane 6 Launcher Task Force published a new update this week that provided some key status updates on the vehicle's path toward launch, European Spaceflight reports. The most recent milestone on the road to the Ariane 6 debut was reached on May 16, when the flight’s various payloads arrived at the Guiana Space Centre, ready for integration. The rocket’s completed upper composite, consisting of the launcher adapter, the payloads, and the fairing, will be completed and ready for transportation to the launch pad for stacking in June.

 

Flying high in July? ... On June 18, the Ariane 6 rocket's wet dress rehearsal will be conducted. This process involves filling and draining both the core and upper stage propellant tanks and is the last major milestone before the rocket’s first launch attempt. According to this week's update, the date for the debut flight has been narrowed down to sometime in the first two weeks of July. A tentative date for the first launch attempt will be announced at the ILA airshow in Berlin during the week of June 5. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

 

Falcon 9 launches next-gen spysats. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday launched an undisclosed number of small spacecraft into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office, Space News reports. The classified mission, designated NROL-146, was SpaceX’s 52nd launch of the year and the Falcon 9’s fifth launch for the NRO. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

 

Sorry, no details ... NROL-146 is the agency’s first deployment of a new imaging satellite constellation built by SpaceX and Northrop Grumman. The NRO has not disclosed how many satellites were launched on this mission or the projected size of the new constellation. Agency officials previously said six launches are planned in 2024 for the NRO’s proliferated architecture of small satellites. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

 

Fourth test flight focused on Starship reentry. After three test flights, SpaceX has shown that the world's most powerful rocket can reach space. Now, engineers must demonstrate the company's next-generation Starship vehicle can get back home. This will be the central objective for the fourth Starship test flight, which could happen as soon as early June, Ars reports. Based on some of the latest road closure requests, it's possible SpaceX may attempt to launch Starship on June 1.

 

Some like it hot ... For this upcoming flight, SpaceX officials would like to see the Super Heavy booster for the next test flight, named Booster 11, make a controlled pinpoint splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from Starbase. Halfway around the world, the Starship upper stage, known as Ship 29, will try to survive the blistering reentry back into Earth's atmosphere. Starship is dressed in about 18,000 hexagonal heat-absorbing ceramic tiles to protect its stainless-steel structure during reentry, when temperatures peak at about 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). SpaceX is eager to collect data on how these tiles will perform and what condition they will be in for re-flights.

 

SpaceX Florida plans for Starship become clearer. Recently, both the US Federal Aviation Administration and the US Space Force have initiated "Environmental Impact Statement" projects for launch pads in Florida, LC-39A and SLC-37, for potential use as Starship launch facilities. On the one hand, these environmental reviews often take a while and could cloud Elon Musk's goal of having Starship launch sites in Florida ready for service by the end of 2025, Ars reports. "A couple of years would not be a surprise," said George Nield, an aerospace industry consultant and former head of the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

 

Much work to do ... Another way to look at the recent FAA and Space Force announcements of pending environmental reviews is that SpaceX finally appears to be cementing its plans to launch Starship from Florida. These plans have changed quite a bit in the last five years. The result of these reviews will help SpaceX finalize its plans to launch Starship vehicles from both its existing facility in South Texas and one or more launch pads in Florida. In a long feature, Ars explores the work SpaceX has yet to do to deliver on its Starship project—and the role Florida will play in that.

Next three launches

May 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-63 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 02:13 UTC

May 25: Electron | Ready, Aim, PREFIRE | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 07:15 UTC

May 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-60 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 11:30 UTC

 

 

 

Good morning. It's May 24, and today's photo comes from the European Space Agency's new Euclid space telescope.

 

Launched in July 2023, the mission is intended to create a giant map of the Universe, across more than one-third of the nighttime sky. Its big-ticket goal is to help scientists better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which account for the vast majority of the mass in the Universe—but about which we know almost nothing.

 

On Thursday the mission's operators released five images, each of which was taken shortly after the instrument's launch. The image in this post features the Messier 78 object, a star nursery wrapped in interstellar gas some 1,300 light-years from Earth.

 

According to the European scientists, "Euclid peered deep into this nursery using its infrared camera, exposing hidden regions of star formation for the first time, mapping its complex filaments of gas and dust in unprecedented detail, and uncovering newly formed stars and planets. Euclid’s instruments can detect objects just a few times the mass of Jupiter, and its infrared ‘eyes’ reveal over 300,000 new objects in this field of view alone."

 

It's fabulous.

 

Source: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi