SpaceX has launched the world's first wood-paneled satellite into space "to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars," reports the BBC. From the report: Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue. Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

"Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it," Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. "Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood," Prof Murata said. "A wooden satellite should be feasible, too." If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope. Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth. You can watch the launch on YouTube.

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole in the early Universe devouring matter at over 40 times the Eddington limit. ScienceAlert reports: Led by astronomer Hyewon Suh of Gemini Observatory and NSF's NOIRLab, a team of researchers used JWST to take follow-up observations of a smattering of galaxies identified by the Chandra X-ray Observatory that were bright in X-rays but dim in other wavelengths. When they got to LID-568, they were having trouble identifying its distance across space-time. The galaxy was very faint and very hard to see; but, using the integral field spectrograph on JWST's NIRSpec instrument, the team homed in on the galaxy's exact position. LID-568's far-off location is surprising. Although the object is faint from our position in the Universe, its distance means it must be incredibly intrinsically bright. Detailed observations revealed powerful outflows from the supermassive black hole, a signature of accretion as some of the material is being diverted and blasted into space.

A painstaking analysis of the data revealed that the supermassive black hole is a relatively small one, as supermassive black holes go; just 7.2 million times the mass of the Sun. And the amount of light being produced by the material around the disk was much, much higher than a black hole of this mass should be capable of producing. It suggests an accretion rate some 40 times higher than the Eddington limit. At this rate, the period of super-Eddington accretion should be extremely brief, which means Suh and her team were extremely lucky to catch it in action. And we expect that LID-568 will become a popular observation target for black hole scientists, allowing us a rare glimpse into super-Eddington processes. The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

The clash between law's need for finality and science's evolving nature is creating serious justice problems, an opinion piece on Scientific American argued on Monday. Two recent cases highlight this: Robert Roberson faces execution based on now-discredited shaken baby syndrome science, while the Menendez brothers' life sentences are being questioned due to improved understanding of childhood trauma's effects on violence.

Scientific understanding in criminal justice has repeatedly proven wrong. Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 based on invalidated arson science. The FBI found errors in 90% of their reviewed hair analysis cases. Courts still accept bite mark evidence despite experts failing to distinguish human from animal bites. The legal system fails in two critical ways, the story argues: Judges don't properly screen out bad science despite their "gatekeeper" role established in Daubert v. Merrell Dow, and courts resist reopening cases when scientific understanding changes.

While some states like Texas and California have laws allowing appeals based on updated science, implementation remains weak. Roberson has spent 20 years on death row and the Menendez brothers 28 years in prison while courts drag their feet on reviewing their cases with current scientific knowledge. The piece argues that constitutional due process requires allowing convicts to challenge their cases when the science underlying their convictions proves faulty. The system can reform by enforcing stricter scientific evidence standards and creating clear paths to challenge convictions based on outdated science.

Our bodies divest themselves of 60 billion cells every day through a natural process called "apoptosis". So Stanford medicine researchers are developing a new approach to cancer therapy that could "trick cancer cells into disposing of themselves," according to announcement from Stanford's medical school: Their method accomplishes this by artificially bringing together two proteins in such a way that the new compound switches on a set of cell death genes... One of these proteins, BCL6, when mutated, drives the blood cancer known as diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma... [It] sits on DNA near apoptosis-promoting genes and keeps them switched off, helping the cancer cells retain their signature immortality.

The researchers developed a molecule that tethers BCL6 to a protein known as CDK9, which acts as an enzyme that catalyzes gene activation, in this case, switching on the set of apoptosis genes that BCL6 normally keeps off. "The idea is, Can you turn a cancer dependency into a cancer-killing signal?" asked Nathanael Gray, PhD, co-senior author with Crabtree, the Krishnan-Shah Family Professor and a chemical and systems biology professor. "You take something that the cancer is addicted to for its survival and you flip the script and make that be the very thing that kills it...."

When the team tested the molecule in diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells in the lab, they found that it indeed killed the cancer cells with high potency. They also tested the molecule in healthy mice and found no obvious toxic side effects, even though the molecule killed off a specific category of of the animals' healthy B cells, a kind of immune cell, which also depend on BCL6. They're now testing the compound in mice with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma to gauge its ability to kill cancer in a living animal. Because the technique relies on the cells' natural supply of BCL6 and CDK9 proteins, it seems to be very specific for the lymphoma cells — the BCL6 protein is found only in this kind of lymphoma cell and in one specific kind of B cell. The researchers tested the molecule in 859 different kinds of cancer cells in the lab; the chimeric compound killed only diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells.
Scientists have been trying to shut down cancer-driving proteins, one of the researchers says, but instead, "we're trying to use them to turn signaling on that, we hope, will prove beneficial for treatment."

The two researchers have co-founded the biotech startup Shenandoah Therapeutics, which "aims to further test this molecule and a similar, previously developed molecule," according to the article, "in hopes of gathering enough pre-clinical data to support launching clinical trials of the compounds.

"They also plan to build similar molecules that could target other cancer-driving proteins..."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from the blog Interesting Engineering: A team of students made history this month by performing Europe's first rocket hop test.

Those who have followed SpaceX's trajectory will know hop tests are a vital stepping stone for a reusable rocket program, as they allow engineers to test their rocket's landing capabilities.

Impressively, no private company or space agency in Europe had ever performed a rocket hop test before. Essentially, a group of students performed one of the most important rocket tests in the history of European rocketry.

However, the remarkable nature of this story doesn't end there. Amazingly, the whole thing was almost derailed by a piece of cheese. A slice of Gruyère the team strapped to their rocket's landing legs almost caused the rocket to spin out of control.

Thankfully, disaster was averted, and the historic hopper didn't end up as rocket de-Brie.

Slashdot reader samleecole shared this report from 404 Media: Northwell Health, New York State's largest healthcare provider, recently launched a large language model tool that it is encouraging doctors and clinicians to use for translation, sensitive patient data, and has suggested it can be used for diagnostic purposes, 404 Media has learned. Northwell Health has more than 85,000 employees.

An internal presentation and employee chats obtained by 404 Media shows how healthcare professionals are using LLMs and chatbots to edit writing, make hiring decisions, do administrative tasks, and handle patient data. In the presentation given in August, Rebecca Kaul, senior vice president and chief of digital innovation and transformation at Northwell, along with a senior engineer, discussed the launch of the tool, called AI Hub, and gave a demonstration of how clinicians and researchers—or anyone with a Northwell email address—can use it... AI Hub can be used for "clinical or clinical adjacent" tasks, as well as answering questions about hospital policies and billing, writing job descriptions and editing writing, and summarizing electronic medical record excerpts and inputting patients' personally identifying and protected health information.

The demonstration also showed potential capabilities that included "detect pancreas cancer," and "parse HL7," a health data standard used to share electronic health records.

The leaked presentation shows that hospitals are increasingly using AI and LLMs to streamlining administrative tasks, and shows that some are experimenting with or at least considering how LLMs would be used in clinical settings or in interactions with patients.

Somewhere off in interstellar space, 15.4 billion miles away from Earth, NASA's 47-year-old Voyager "recently went quiet," reports Mashable.

The probe "shut off its main radio transmitter for communicating with mission control..." Voyager's problem began on October 16, when flight controllers sent the robotic explorer a somewhat routine command to turn on a heater. Two days later, when NASA expected to receive a response from the spacecraft, the team learned something tripped Voyager's fault protection system, which turned off its X-band transmitter. By October 19, communication had altogether stopped.

The flight team was not optimistic. However, Voyager 1 was equipped with a backup that relies on a different, albeit significantly fainter, frequency. No one knew if the second radio transmitter could still work, given the aging spacecraft's extreme distance.

Days later, engineers with the Deep Space Network, a system of three enormous radio dish arrays on Earth, found the signal whispering back over the S-band transmitter. The device hadn't been used since 1981, according to NASA.

"The team is now working to gather information that will help them figure out what happened and return Voyager 1 to normal operations," NASA said in a recent mission update.
It's been more than 12 years since Voyager entered interstellar space, the article points out. And interstellar space "is a high-radiation environment that nothing human-made has ever flown in before.

"That means the only thing the teams running the old probes can count on are surprises."

Long-time Slashdot reader yet-another-lobbyist writes: Phys.org has an article on the recent discovery of super stretchy nanofibers in natural spider silk! The thinnest natural spider silk nanofibrils ever seen are only a few molecular layers thin, about 5 nm. They are too thin to be seen even with a very powerful optical microscope. Researchers used atomic force microscopy (AFM) not only to visualize them, but also to probe their stretchiness and strength.

Even the original article is available without a paywall. Mechanical tests of molecularly thin materials — pretty cool!
The doctoral candidate's advisor thought it would be impossible to perform the measurements, according to the article, which quotes him as saying "It's actually kind of crazy to think that it's even possible.... We humans think we're so great and we can invent things, but if you just take a step outside, you find so many things that are more exciting."

That advisor — long term spider-silk researcher of Hannes Schniepp (also a co-author on the paper) — adds that the tip of the needle was so sharp, its end was only a few atoms thick. "You would not see the end of it in the best optical microscope. It will just disappear because it's so small that you can't even see it. It's probably one of the highest developed technologies on the planet." If humans find a way to replicate the structure of spider silk, it could be manufactured for use in practical applications. "You could make a super bungee cord from it," said Schniepp. "Or a shield around a structure where you have something incoming at high velocity and you need to absorb a lot of energy. Things like that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson's disease and other health dangers. In a October 31 letter (PDF) to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a "highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities". The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter (PDF) to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October.

The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson's and other "life threatening diseases" as well as "grave impacts on the environment". "Health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson's disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson's, non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues," they wrote. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure were "well documented" and that it was "irresponsible" for the EPA to continue to allow its use. "I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat," Booker said. The EPA has long maintained that there is no "clear link" between paraquat exposure and Parkinson's disease, though the agency does have a number of restrictions on use of the chemical due to its acute toxicity. The agency issued a draft report earlier this year affirming its position. Still, the agency said at that time that it would be reviewing more scientific studies and would issue a final report by January 17, 2025.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new global inventory has catalogued air pollution from space activities from 2020 to 2022. The inventory includes time, position and pollution from 446 launchers as they ascended and the tracks of re-entries as objects are heated to extreme temperatures and break up or burn up in the upper atmosphere. It catalogues the pollution from 63,000 tons of rocket propellants used in 2022 and from 3,622 objects, including rocket parts and satellites, that re-entered the atmosphere between 2020 and 2023, amounting to about 12,000 tons. [...]

Types of launch pollutants depend on the propellent but can include particles of soot and aluminum oxides as well as nitrogen oxides, chlorine and water vapour and carbon dioxide. Extreme heat on re-entry causes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen to combine to form more nitrogen oxides and also produces tiny metal-oxide particles as the objects break and burn up. Soot emitted high in the atmosphere can persist for several years, with a resulting climate warming impact that is up to 500 times greater than the same amount of soot from aviation or ground-level sources. Aluminum oxide particles, nitrogen oxides and chloride can consume the ozone in the stratosphere that protects us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. These can remain in the atmosphere for decades. Dr Connor Barker, of the UCL team, said: "Many rocket manufacturers and space agencies keep this information tightly controlled. We had to be creative about the different sources we consulted, from launch live streams on YouTube to online databases maintained by space enthusiasts in their spare time."

Australian mathematicians have proven the famous "infinite monkey theorem" impossible within the universe's lifespan. The theorem suggests monkeys typing randomly would eventually produce Shakespeare's complete works. Scientists Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta calculated that even 200,000 chimpanzees typing one character per second until the universe's heat death would fail to reproduce Shakespeare's writings.

A single chimp has only a 5% chance of typing "bananas" in its lifetime, with more complex phrases facing astronomically lower odds. "This finding places the theorem among other probability puzzles and paradoxes... where using the idea of infinite resources gives results that don't match up with what we get when we consider the constraints of our universe," Associate Prof Woodcock was quoted as saying by BBC.

A new study suggests Uranus' moon Miranda may harbor a vast subsurface ocean, challenging previous assumptions about its frozen state and positioning it as a potential ocean world alongside other icy moons. Phys.Org reports: Among the moons in the solar system, Miranda stands out. The few images Voyager 2 captured in 1986 show Miranda's southern hemisphere (the only part we've seen) is a Frankenstein-like hodgepodge of grooved terrain quartered off by rough scarps and cratered areas, like squares on a quilt. Most researchers suspect these bizarre structures are the result of tidal forces and heating within the moon. Caleb Strom, a graduate student at the University of North Dakota who worked with Nordheim and Alex Patthoff of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, revisited the Voyager 2 images. The team set out to explain Miranda's enigmatic geology by reverse engineering the surface features, working backward to uncover what the moon's interior structure must have been to shape the moon's geology in response to tidal forcing.

After first mapping the various surface features like cracks, ridges and Miranda's unique trapezoidal coronae, the team developed a computer model to test several possible structures of the moon's interior, matching the predicted stress patterns to the actual surface geology. The setup that produced the best match between predicted stress patterns and observed surface features required the existence of vast ocean beneath Miranda's icy surface some 100-500 million years ago. This subsurface ocean was at least 62 miles (100 kilometers) deep, according to the study, and hidden beneath an icy crust no more than 19 miles (30 kilometers) thick. Given Miranda has a radius of just 146 miles (235 kilometers), the ocean would have filled almost half of the moon's body. "That result was a big surprise to the team," Strom said.

Key to creating that ocean, the researchers believe, were tidal forces between Miranda and nearby moons. These regular gravitational tugs can be amplified by orbital resonances -- a configuration where each moon's period around a planet is an exact integer of the others' periods. Jupiter's moons Io and Europa, for example, have a 2:1 resonance: For every two orbits Io makes around Jupiter, Europa makes exactly one, leading to tidal forces that are known to sustain an ocean beneath Europa's surface. These orbital configurations and the resulting tidal forces deform the moons like rubber balls, leading to friction and heat that keeps interiors warm. This also creates stresses that crack the surface, creating a rich tapestry of geologic features. Numerical simulations have suggested that Miranda and its neighboring moons likely had such a resonance in the past, offering a potential mechanism that could have warmed Miranda's interior to produce and maintain a subsurface ocean.

At some point, the moons' orbital ballet desynchronized, slowing the heating process so that the moon's insides started to cool and solidify. But the team doesn't think Miranda's interior has fully frozen yet. If the ocean had completely frozen, Nordheim explained, it would have expanded and caused certain telltale cracks on the surface, which aren't there. This suggests that Miranda is still cooling -- and may have an ocean beneath its surface even now. Miranda's modern-day ocean is probably relatively thin, Strom noted. "But the suggestion of an ocean inside one of the most distant moons in the solar system is remarkable," he said. Miranda wasn't predicted to have an ocean. With its small size and old age, scientists thought it would likely be a frozen ball of ice. Any leftover heat from its formation was assumed to have dissipated long ago. But as Patthoff pointed out, predictions about ice moons can be wrong, as evidenced by Saturn's moon Enceladus. The study has been published in The Planetary Science Journal.

A new study examining a large sample of privately insured patients with obesity found that use of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy as anti-obesity medications more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. During that same period, there was a 25.6% decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery to treat obesity. From a report: The study, by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Brown School of Public Health, is published in JAMA Network Open. "Our study provides one of the first national estimates of the decline in utilization of bariatric metabolic surgery among privately insured patients corresponding to the rising use of blockbuster GLP-1 RA drugs," said senior author Thomas C. Tsai, a metabolic bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Using a national sample of medical insurance claims data from more than 17 million privately insured adults, the researchers identified patients with a diagnosis of obesity without diabetes in 2022-2023. The study found a sharp increase in the share of patients who received glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1 RAs, during the study period, with GLP-1 RA use increasing 132.6% from the last six months of 2022 to the last six months of 2023 (from 1.89 to 4.41 patients per 1,000 patients).

Meanwhile, there was a 25.6% decrease in use of bariatric metabolic surgery during the same period (from 0.22 to 0.16 patients per 1,000 patients). Among the sample of patients with obesity, 94.7% received neither form of treatment during the study period (while 5% received GLP-1 RAs and 0.3% received surgery). Compared to patients who were prescribed GLP-1 RAs, patients who underwent surgery tended to be more medically complex.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the European Space Agency: White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background (PNG). This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort. On June 7, 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project 'A Sign in Space.' After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.

US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open. Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Associated Press: Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near "human level robustness and accuracy." But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text -- known in the industry as hallucinations -- can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

The full extent of the problem is difficult to discern, but researchers and engineers said they frequently have come across Whisper's hallucinations in their work. A University of Michigan researcher conducting a study of public meetings, for example, said he found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected, before he started trying to improve the model. A machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper. The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study by computer scientists uncovered 187 hallucinations in more than 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined. That trend would lead to tens of thousands of faulty transcriptions over millions of recordings, researchers said. Further reading: AI Tool Cuts Unexpected Deaths In Hospital By 26%, Canadian Study Finds