An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here): The American patrol satellite had the targets in its sights: two recently launched Chinese spacecraft flying through one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in space. Like any good tactical fighter, the American spacecraft, known as USA 270, approached from behind, so that the sun would be at its back, illuminating the quarry.

But then one of the Chinese satellites countered by slowing down. As USA 270 zipped by, the Chinese satellite dropped in behind its American pursuer, like Maverick's signature "hit-the-brakes" move in the movie "Top Gun." The positions reversed, U.S. officials controlling their spacecraft from Earth were forced to plot their next move. The encounter some 22,000 miles above Earth in 2022 was never acknowledged publicly by the Pentagon or Beijing. Happening out of sight and little noticed except by space and defense specialists, this kind of orbital skirmishing has become so common that defense officials now refer to it as "dogfighting..."

Much of the "dogfighting" activity in space is simply for spying, defense analysts say, with specifics largely classified — snapping photos of each other's satellites to learn what kind of systems are on board and their capabilities. They monitor the signals and data emitted by satellites, listening to communications between space and the ground. Many can even jam those signals or interfere with orbiting craft that provide missile warnings, spy or relay critical information to troops... Traditionally, once a satellite was in orbit, it largely stayed on a fixed path, its operators reluctant to burn precious fuel. But now, the Pentagon and its adversaries, notably China and Russia, are launching satellites designed to fly in more dynamic ways that resemble aircraft — banking hard, slowing down, speeding up, even flying in tandem.

"Traditionally satellites weren't designed to fight, and they weren't designed to protect themselves in a fight," said Clinton Clark, the chief growth officer of ExoAnalytic Solutions, a company that monitors activity in space. "That is all changing now."
"Unlike dogfights between fighter jets, the jockeying-for-position encounters in orbit take place over several hours, even days," the article points out.

But it also notes that recently Germany's defense minister "complained about a Russian satellite that had been flying close to a commercial communications satellite used by the German military. 'They can jam, blind, manipulate or kinetically disrupt satellites,' he said."

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second). That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home, a pair of galaxies named the "Cosmic Owl," at 3,000 times the speed of sound at sea level here on Earth. If that isn't astounding enough, the black hole is pushing forward a literal galaxy-sized "bow-shock" of matter in front of it, while simultaneously dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind it, within which gas is accumulating and triggering star formation. "It boggles the mind!" discovery team leader Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University told Space.com. "The forces that are needed to dislodge such a massive black hole from its home are enormous. And yet, it was predicted that such escapes should occur!"

"This is the only black hole that has been found far away from its former home," van Dokkum said. "That made it the best candidate [for a] runaway supermassive black hole, but what was missing was confirmation. All we really had was a streak that was difficult to explain in any other way. With the JWST, we have now confirmed that there is indeed a black hole at the tip of the streak, and that it is speeding away from its former host."

The research is currently available as a pre-peer-reviewed paper on arXiv.

More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious -- and also potentially more toxic, a study has found. From a report: Sterre ter Haar, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and other researchers at the institution created a method to compare multiple studies on plants' responses to increased CO2 levels. The results, she said, were a shock: although crop yields increase, they become less nutrient-dense. While zinc levels in particular drop, lead levels increase.

"Seeing how dramatic some of the nutritional changes were, and how this differed across plants, was a big surprise," she told the Guardian. "We aren't seeing a simple dilution effect but rather a complete shift in the composition of our foods... This also raises the question of whether we should adjust our diets in some way, or how we grow or produce our food."

While scientists have been looking at the effects of more CO2 in the atmosphere on plants for a decade, their work has been difficult to compare. The new research established a baseline measurement derived from the observation that the gas appears to have a linear effect on growth, meaning that if the CO2 level doubles, so does the effect on nutrients. This made it possible to compare almost 60,000 measurements across 32 nutrients and 43 crops, including rice, potatoes, tomatoes and wheat.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A new study adds to the growing body of evidence that swearing can help us unleash our inner strength, improving physical performance, it seems, by helping people break through certain psychological barriers. [...] [Psychology researcher Richard Stephens of Keele University in the UK] and his colleagues at Keele and the University of Alabama wanted to test whether swearing could not only improve physical performance, as they had done in previous research, but also see whether it does so by changing a person's psychology in the moment, especially when it comes to letting go of inhibitions.

Eighty-eight participants, aged 18 to 65, all in good enough shape to exert themselves physically, were recruited at a university campus to participate in the first experiment. They each selected a pair of words based on the following prompts: a swear word you might utter after bumping your head, and a neutral word you might use to describe a table. Then, they undertook a chair push-up, which involves sitting in a chair and, holding each side of the seat, using your arms to lift your entire body weight (bottom off the chair, feet off the floor). [...]

Both experiments suggested that swearing offers an advantage in physical performance, with participants achieving longer chair push-up hold times as they repeated their foul-mouthed mantras. Scores for positive emotion, humor, distraction, and novelty were also elevated in the swearing tests, which suggests invoking their favorite four-letter word might enable people to transition into more action-oriented states, and perhaps actually enjoy their workout more. The research is published in American Psychologist.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Every other week, it seems, a new Chinese launch company pops up with a rocket design and a plan to reach orbit within a few years. For a long time, the majority of these companies revealed designs that looked a lot like SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The first of these copy cats, the medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket built by LandSpace, launched earlier this month. Its primary mission was nominal, but the Zhuque-3 rocket failed its landing attempt, which is understandable for a first flight. Doubtless there will be more Chinese Falcon 9-like rockets making their debut in the near future. However, over the last year, there has been a distinct change in announcements from China when it comes to new launch technology. Just as SpaceX is seeking to transition from its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket -- which has now been flying for a decade and a half -- to the fully reusable Starship design, so too are Chinese companies modifying their visions.

The trend began with the Chinese government. In November 2024 the government announced a significant shift in the design of its super-heavy lift rocket, the Long March 9. Instead of the previous design, a fully expendable rocket with three stages and solid rocket boosters strapped to the sides, the country's state-owned rocket maker revealed a vehicle that mimicked SpaceX's fully reusable Starship. Around the same time, a Chinese launch firm named Cosmoleap announced plans to develop a fully reusable "Leap" rocket within the next few years. An animated video that accompanied the funding announcement indicated that the company seeks to emulate the tower catch-with-chopsticks methodology that SpaceX has successfully employed.

But wait, there's more. In June a company called Astronstone said it too was developing a stainless steel, methane-fueled rocket that would also use a chopstick-style system for first stage recovery. Astronstone didn't even pretend to not copy SpaceX, saying it was "fully aligning its technical approach with Elon Musk's SpaceX." And then, on Friday, the state-aligned China.com reported that a company called "Beijing Leading Rocket Technology" took things a step further. It has named its vehicle "Starship-1," adding that the new rocket will have enhancements from AI and is billed as a "fully reusable AI rocket."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) community is grieving after the "shocking" shooting death of the director of its plasma science and fusion center, according to officials. Nuno FG Loureiro, 47, had been shot multiple times at his home in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline on Monday night when police said they received a call to investigate. Emergency responders brought Loureiro to a hospital, and the award-winning scientist was pronounced dead there Tuesday morning, the Norfolk county district attorney's office said in a statement.

The Boston Globe reported speaking with a neighbor of Loureiro who heard gunshots, found the academic lying on his back in the foyer of their building and then called for help alongside the victim's wife. The statement from the Norfolk district attorney's office said an investigation into Loureiro's slaying remained ongoing later Tuesday. But the agency did not immediately release any details about a possible suspect or motive in the killing, which gained widespread attention across academic circles, the US and in Loureiro's native Portugal.

Portugal's minster of foreign affairs announced Loureiro's death in a public hearing Tuesday, as CNN reported. Separately, MIT president Sally Kornbluth issued a university-wide letter expressing "great sadness" over the death of Loureiro, whose survivors include his wife. "This shocking loss for our community comes in a period of disturbing violence in many other places," said Kornbluth's letter, released after a weekend marred by deadly mass shootings at Brown University in Rhode Island -- about 50 miles away from MIT -- as well as on Australia's Bondi Beach. The letter concluded by providing a list of mental health resources, saying: "It's entirely natural to feel the need for comfort and support."

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Politico: The Senate on Wednesday approved Jared Isaacman for the top job at NASA -- an unprecedented comeback after President Donald Trump yanked his nomination this spring. Senators confirmed the billionaire private astronaut in a 67-30 vote. Trump renominated Isaacman for NASA administrator in November, after pulling his original nomination in May. He cited Isaacman's relationship with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, with whom Trump had just had a falling out, as the rationale for his decision. Isaacman's surprise rebound followed months of political jockeying and help from high-profile figures in Trump's orbit. [...] Isaacman garnered backing from lawmakers during his hearing by confirming his support for NASA's Artemis moon-landing mission, a key prerogative for Capitol Hill. He also committed to instilling urgency at the space agency, citing China's space ambitions.

A comprehensive database built by scientists in Switzerland and Norway has catalogued 16,000 chemicals linked to plastic materials, and the findings paint a troubling picture of what Americans are actually eating when they prepare food in their kitchens. Of those 16,000 chemicals, more than 5,400 are considered hazardous to human health by government and industry standards, while just 161 are classified as not hazardous. The remaining 10,700-plus chemicals simply don't have enough data to determine their safety.

The chemicals enter food through multiple pathways. Black plastic utensils and trays often contain brominated flame retardants because they're made from recycled electronic waste. Nonstick pans and compostable plates frequently contain PFAS. One California study found phthalates in three-quarters of tested foods, and a Consumer Reports analysis last year detected BPA or similar chemicals in 79% of foods tested. According to CDC data, more than 90% of Americans have measurable levels of these chemicals in their bodies. A 10-fold increase in maternal levels of brominated flame retardants is associated with a 3.7-point IQ drop in children.

A new Arctic Report Card recap shows how the Arctic has transformed in just 20 years, warming about twice as fast as the global average and losing most of its oldest sea ice. It's also triggering cascading impacts from "Atlantification" to permafrost-driven "rusting rivers" and more destructive storms. Scientific American reports: The first Arctic Report Card was released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2006. Since then the region has warmed twice as fast as the global average. About 95 percent of the oldest, thickest sea ice is gone -- "the sliver that remains is collected in an area north of Greenland. Even the central Arctic Ocean is becoming warmer and saltier, causing more ice melt and changing how much heat is released into the atmosphere in a way that affects weather patterns around the world. Those are just some of the stark changes 20 years have wrought. The findings were highlighted in the 2025 Arctic Report Card, released on Tuesday.

The Arctic Ocean is undergoing what scientists are calling "Atlantification" -- a process where warm, salty water from the Atlantic flows north, changing how waters of different temperatures and densities are layered in the Arctic, disrupting ecosystems and altering how heat moves from the water to the air. [...] The Arctic is simply becoming wetter, with more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. June snow cover over the entire Arctic is half of what it was 60 years ago, the report found. Permafrost also continues to thaw, releasing once trapped carbon into the atmosphere and disgorging iron and other elements that have turned rivers and streams orange. These "rusting rivers," found in more than 200 watersheds, are more acidic than normal and have elevated levels of toxic metals that endanger local ecosystems. And as the permafrost thaws, the tundra of the Arctic biome is shrinking, and the boreal forest biome is creeping northward, disrupting ecosystems.

For decades, Parkinson's disease research has overwhelmingly focused on genetics -- more than half of all research dollars in the past two decades flowed toward genomic studies -- but a growing body of evidence now points to something far more mundane as a primary culprit: contaminated drinking water.

A landmark study by epidemiologist Sam Goldman compared Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where trichloroethylene (TCE) had contaminated the water supply for approximately 35 years, against those at Camp Pendleton in California, which has clean water. Marines exposed to TCE at Lejeune were 70% more likely to develop Parkinson's.

The latest research suggests only 10 to 15 percent of Parkinson's cases can be fully explained by genetics. Parkinson's rates in the US have doubled in the past 30 years -- a pattern inconsistent with an inherited genetic disease. The EPA moved to ban TCE in December 2024. The Trump administration moved to undo the ban in January.

"A SpaceX executive says a satellite deployed from a Chinese rocket risked colliding with a Starlink satellite," reports PC Magazine: On Friday, company VP for Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, tweeted about the incident and blamed a lack of coordination from the Chinese launch provider CAS Space. "When satellite operators do not share ephemeris for their satellites, dangerously close approaches can occur in space," he wrote, referring to the publication of predicted orbital positions for such satellites...

[I]t looks like one of the satellites veered relatively close to a Starlink sat that's been in service for over two years. "As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter (656 feet) close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude," Nicolls wrote... "Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators — this needs to change," he added.
Chinese launch provider CAS Space told PCMag that "As a launch service provider, our responsibility ends once the satellites are deployed, meaning we do not have control over the satellites' maneuvers."

And the article also cites astronomer/satellite tracking expert Jonathan McDowell, who had tweeted that CAS Space's response "seems reasonable." (In an email to PC Magazine, he'd said "Two days after launch is beyond the window usually used for predicting launch related risks."

But "The coordination that Nicolls cited is becoming more and more important," notes Space.com, since "Earth orbit is getting more and more crowded." In 2020, for example, fewer than 3,400 functional satellites were whizzing around our planet. Just five years later, that number has soared to about 13,000, and more spacecraft are going up all the time. Most of them belong to SpaceX. The company currently operates nearly 9,300 Starlink satellites, more than 3,000 of which have launched this year alone.

Starlink satellites avoid potential collisions autonomously, maneuvering themselves away from conjunctions predicted by available tracking data. And this sort of evasive action is quite common: Starlink spacecraft performed about 145,000 avoidance maneuvers in the first six months of 2025, which works out to around four maneuvers per satellite per month. That's an impressive record. But many other spacecraft aren't quite so capable, and even Starlink satellites can be blindsided by spacecraft whose operators don't share their trajectory data, as Nicolls noted.

And even a single collision — between two satellites, or involving pieces of space junk, which are plentiful in Earth orbit as well — could spawn a huge cloud of debris, which could cause further collisions. Indeed, the nightmare scenario, known as the Kessler syndrome, is a debris cascade that makes it difficult or impossible to operate satellites in parts of the final frontier.

Cadmium zinc telluride (CZT), a hard-to-manufacture semiconductor produced by only a handful of companies, is enabling a quiet revolution in medical imaging, science, and security by delivering faster scans, lower radiation doses, and far more precise X-ray and gamma-ray detection. "You get beautiful pictures from this scanner," says Dr Kshama Wechalekar, head of nuclear medicine and PET. "It's an amazing feat of engineering and physics." The BBC reports: Kromek is one of just a few firms in the world that can make CZT. You may never have heard of the stuff but, in Dr Wechalekar's words, it is enabling a "revolution" in medical imaging. This wonder material has many other uses, such as in X-ray telescopes, radiation detectors and airport security scanners. And it is increasingly sought-after. Investigations of patients' lungs performed by Dr Wechalekar and her colleagues involve looking for the presence of many tiny blood clots in people with long Covid, or a larger clot known as a pulmonary embolism, for example.

The 1-million-pound scanner works by detecting gamma rays emitted by a radioactive substance that is injected into patients' bodies. But the scanner's sensitivity means less of this substance is needed than before: "We can reduce doses about 30%," says Dr Wechalekar. While CZT-based scanners are not new in general, large, whole-body scanners such as this one are a relatively recent innovation. CZT itself has been around for decades but it is notoriously difficult to manufacture. "It has taken a long time for it to develop into an industrial-scale production process," says Arnab Basu, founding chief executive of Kromek.

[...] The newly formed CZT, a semiconductor, can detect tiny photon particles in X-rays and gamma rays with incredible precision -- like a highly specialized version of the light-sensing, silicon-based image sensor in your smartphone camera. Whenever a high energy photon strikes the CZT, it mobilizes an electron and this electrical signal can be used to make an image. Earlier scanner technology used a two-step process, which was not as precise. "It's digital," says Dr Basu. "It's a single conversion step. It retains all the important information such as timing, the energy of the X-ray that is hitting the CZT detector -- you can create color, or spectroscopic images."

schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: perm from a donor who unknowingly carried a cancer-causing gene has been used to conceive nearly 200 babies across Europe, an investigation by 14 European public service broadcasters, including CBS News' partner network BBC News, has revealed. Some children conceived using the sperm have already died from cancer, and the vast majority of those who inherited the gene will develop cancer in their lifetimes, geneticists said. The man carrying the gene passed screening checks before he became a donor at the European Sperm Bank when he was a student in 2005. His sperm has been used by women trying to conceive for 17 years across multiple countries.

The cancer-causing mutation occurred in the donor's TP53 gene -- which prevents cells in the body from turning cancerous -- before his birth, according to the investigation. It causes Li Fraumeni syndrome, which gives affected people a 90% chance of developing cancers, particularly during childhood, as well as breast cancer in later life. Up to 20% of the donor's sperm contained the mutated TP53 gene. Any children conceived with affected sperm will have the dangerous mutation in every cell of their body. The affected donor sperm was discovered when doctors seeing children with cancers linked to sperm donation raised concerns at this year's European Society of Human Genetics.

At the time, 23 children with the genetic mutation had been discovered, out of 67 children linked to the donor. Ten of those children with the mutation had already been diagnosed with cancer. Freedom of Information requests submitted by journalists across multiple countries revealed at least 197 children were affected, though it is not known how many inherited the genetic mutation. More affected children could be discovered as more data becomes available.

NASA has lost contact with its MAVEN Mars orbiter after it passed behind Mars. When it remerged from behind the planet, the spacecraft never resumed communications. SpaceNews reports: MAVEN launched in November 2013 and entered orbit around Mars in September 2014. The spacecraft's primary science mission is to study the planet's upper atmosphere and interactions with the solar wind, including how the atmosphere escapes into space. That is intended to help scientists understand how the planet changes from early in its history, when it had a much thicker atmosphere and was warm enough to support liquid water on its surface.

MAVEN additionally serves as a communications relay, using a UHF antenna to link the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on the Martian surface with the Deep Space Network. NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft also serve as communications relays for the rovers, but are both significantly older than MAVEN. The spacecraft has suffered some technical problems in the past, notably with its inertial measurement units (IMUs) used for navigation. In 2022, MAVEN switched to an "all-stellar" navigation system to minimize the use of the IMUs.

MAVEN has enough propellant to maintain its orbit through at least the end of the decade. NASA's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, though, zeroed out funding for MAVEN, which cost $22.6 million to operate in 2024. MAVEN was one of several missions "operating well past the end of prime mission" the proposal would terminate, despite MAVEN's role as a communications relay.

alternative_right quotes a report from Phys.org: To teach robots how to become tomato pickers, Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga, Graduate School of Engineering, programmed them to evaluate the ease of harvesting for each tomato before attempting to pick it. Fujinaga's new model uses image recognition paired with statistical analysis to evaluate the optimal approach direction for each fruit. The system involves image processing/vision of the fruit, its stems, and whether it is concealed behind another part of the plant. These factors inform robot control decisions and help it choose the best approach.

The model represents a shift in focus from the traditional 'detection/recognition' model to what Fujinaga calls a 'harvest-ease estimation.' "This moves beyond simply asking 'can a robot pick a tomato?' to thinking about 'how likely is a successful pick?', which is more meaningful for real-world farming," he explained. When tested, Fujinaga's new model demonstrated an 81% success rate, far above predictions. Notably, about a quarter of the successes were tomatoes that were successfully harvested from the right or left side that had previously failed to be harvested by a front approach. This suggested that the robot changed its approach direction when it initially struggled to pick the fruit. "This is expected to usher in a new form of agriculture where robots and humans collaborate," said Fujinaga. "Robots will automatically harvest tomatoes that are easy to pick, while humans will handle the more challenging fruits."

The findings are published in Smart Agricultural Technology.

A major scientific report published Tuesday argues that sending astronauts to Mars is justified by the quest to find life and conduct research that robots alone can't achieve. "We're searching for life on Mars," said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report. "The answer to the question 'are we alone' is always going to be 'maybe,' unless it becomes yes." Ars Technica reports: The report, two years in the making and encompassing more than 200 pages, was published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Essentially, the committee co-chaired by Newman and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, was asked to identify the highest-priority science objectives for the first human missions to Mars. [...] "There's no turning back," Newman said. "Everyone is inspired by this because it's becoming real. We can get there. Decades ago, we didn't have the technologies. This would have been a study report."

The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. [...] The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms.

Notably, the report also addresses the issue of planetary protection, a principle that aims to protect both celestial bodies (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. [...] In recent years, NASA has been working with the International Committee on Space Research to design a plan in which human landings might occur in some areas of the planet, while other parts of Mars are left in "pristine" condition. The committee said this work should be prioritized to reach a resolution that will further the design of human missions to Mars. "NASA should continue to collaborate on the evolution of planetary protection guidelines, with the goal of enabling human explorers to perform research in regions that could possibly support, or even harbor, life," the report states.

In February, a six-month-old baby named KJ Muldoon became the first person ever to receive a CRISPR gene-editing treatment customized specifically for his unique genetic mutation, a milestone that researchers say marks a turning point in how medicine might approach the thousands of rare diseases that collectively affect 30 million Americans. Muldoon was born with a type of urea-cycle disorder that gives patients roughly a 50% chance of surviving infancy and typically requires a liver transplant; he is now a healthy 1-year-old who recently took his first steps.

The treatment's significance extends beyond one child. Scientists at UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia are now planning clinical trials that would use Muldoon's therapy as a template, tweaking the molecular "address" in the CRISPR system to target different mutations in other children with urea-cycle disorders. Last month, FDA officials Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad announced a new drug pathway designed to accelerate approvals for such personalized treatments -- a framework inspired in large part by Muldoon's case. Current gene-editing delivery mechanisms limit treatments to disorders in the blood and liver. Many families will still go without bespoke therapies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has formally retracted a sweeping scientific paper published in 2000 that became a key defense for Monsanto's claim that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate don't cause cancer. Martin van den Berg, the journal's editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the retraction that he had taken the step because of "serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented."

The paper, titled Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans, concluded that Monsanto's glyphosate-based weed killers posed no health risks to humans -- no cancer risks, no reproductive risks, no adverse effects on development of endocrine systems in people or animals. Regulators around the world have cited the paper as evidence of the safety of glyphosate herbicides, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in this assessment (PDF). [...]

In explaining the decision to retract the 25-year-old research paper, Van den Berg wrote: "Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors." He noted that the paper's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate were solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, ignoring other outside, published research. "The retraction of this study is a long time coming," said Brent Wisner, one of the lead lawyers in the Roundup litigation and a key player in getting the internal documents revealed to the public. Wisner said the study was the "quintessential example of how companies like Monsanto could fundamentally undermine the peer-review process through ghostwriting, cherrypicking unpublished studies, and biased interpretations."

"This garbage ghostwritten study finally got the fate it deserved,â Wisner added. "Hopefully, journals will now be more vigilant in protecting the impartiality of science on which so many people depend."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Since online genealogy services began operating, millions of people have sent them saliva samples in hopes of learning about their family roots and discovering far-flung relatives. These services also appeal to law enforcement authorities, who have used them to solve cold case murders and to investigate crimes like the 2022 killing of four University of Idaho students. Crime-scene DNA submitted to genealogy sites has helped investigators identify suspects and human remains by first identifying relatives.

The use of public records and family-tree building is crucial to this technique, and its main tool has been the genealogy site Ancestry, which has vast amounts of individual DNA profiles and public records. More than 1,400 cases have been solved with the help of so-called genetic genealogy investigations, most of them with help from Ancestry. But a recent step taken by the site is now deterring many police agencies from employing this crime-solving technique.

In August, Ancestry revised the terms and conditions on its site to make it clear that its services were off-limits "for law enforcement purposes" without a legal order or warrant, which can be hard to get, because of privacy concerns. This followed the addition last year to the terms and conditions that the services could not be used for "judicial proceedings." Investigators say the implications are dire and will result in crucial criminal cases slowing or stalling entirely, denying answers to grieving families. "Everyone who does this work has depended on the records database that Ancestry controls," said David Gurney, who runs Ramapo College's Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center in New Jersey. "Without it, casework is going to be a lot slower, and there will be some cases that can't be resolved at all."

What triggered that Airbus emergency software recall? The BBC reports that Airbus's initial investigation into an aircraft's sudden drop in altitude linked it "to a malfunction in one of the aircraft's computers that controls moving parts on the aircraft's wings and tail." But that malfunction "seems to have been triggered by cosmic radiation bombarding the Earth on the day of the flight..."

The BBC believes radiation from space "could become a growing problem as ever more microchips run our lives." What Airbus says occurred on that JetBlue flight from Cancun to New Jersey was a phenomenon called a single-event upset, or bit flip. As the BBC has previously reported, these computer errors occur when high-speed subatomic particles from outer space, such as protons, smash into atoms in our planet's atmosphere. This can cause a cascade of particles to rain down through our atmosphere, like throwing marbles across a table. In rare cases, those fast-moving neutrons can strike computer electronics and disrupt tiny bits of data stored in the computer's memory, switching that bit — often represented as a 0 or 1 — from one state to another. "That can cause your electronics to behave in ways you weren't expecting," says Matthew Owens, professor of space physics at the University of Reading in the UK. Satellites are particularly affected by this phenomenon, he says. "For space hardware we see this quite frequently."

This is because the neutron flux — a measure of neutron radiation — rises the higher up in the atmosphere you go, increasing the chance of a strike hitting sensitive parts of the computer equipment on board. Aircraft are more vulnerable to this problem than computer equipment on the ground, although bit flips do occur at ground level, too. The increasing reliance of computers in fly-by-wire systems in aircraft, which use electronics rather than mechanical systems to control the plane in the air, also mean the risk posed by bit flips when they do occur is higher... Airbus told the BBC that it tested multiple scenarios when attempting to determine what happened to the 30 October 2025 JetBlue flight. In this case also, the company ruled out various possibilities except that of a bit flip. It is hard to attribute the incident to this for sure, however, because careering neutrons leave no trace of their activity behind, says Owens...

[Airbus's software update] works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight... As computer chips have become smaller, they have also become more vulnerable to bit flips because the energy required to corrupt tiny packets of data has got lower over time. Plus, more and more microchips are being loaded into products and vehicles, potentially increasing the chance that a bit flip could cause havoc. If nothing else, the JetBlue incident will focus minds across many industries on the risk posed to our modern, microchip-dependent lives from cosmic radiation that originates far beyond our planet.
Airbus said their analysis revealed "intense solar radiation" could corrupt data "critical to the functioning of flight control." But that explanation "has left some space weather scientists scratching their heads," adds the BBC.

Space.com explains: Solar radiation levels on Oct. 30 were unremarkable and nowhere near levels that could affect aircraft electronics, Clive Dyer, a space weather and radiation expert at University of Surrey in the U.K., told Space.com. Instead, Dyer, who has studied effects of solar radiation on aircraft electronics for decades, thinks the onboard computer of the affected jet could have been struck by a cosmic ray, a stream of high-energy particles from a distant star explosion that may have travelled millions of years before reaching Earth. "[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit," Dyer said. "They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out."