An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US government will pay Moderna $176 million to develop an mRNA vaccine against a pandemic influenza -- an award given as the highly pathogenic bird flu virus H5N1 continues to spread widely among US dairy cattle. The funding flows through BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, as part of a new Rapid Response Partnership Vehicle (RRPV) Consortium. The program is intended to set up partnerships with industry to help the country better prepare for pandemic threats and develop medical countermeasures, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a press announcement Tuesday.

In its own announcement on Tuesday, Moderna noted that it began a Phase 1/2 trial of a pandemic influenza virus vaccine last year, which included versions targeting H5 and H7 varieties of bird flu viruses. The company said it expects to release the results of that trial this year and that those results will direct the design of a Phase 3 trial, anticipated to begin in 2025. The funding deal will support late-stage development of a "pre-pandemic vaccine against H5 influenza virus," Moderna said. But, the deal also includes options for additional vaccine development in case other public health threats arise.

US health officials have said previously that they were in talks with Moderna and Pfizer about the development of a pandemic bird flu vaccine. The future vaccine will be in addition to standard protein-based bird flu vaccines that are already developed. In recent weeks, the health department has said it is working to manufacture 4.8 million vials of H5 influenza vaccine in the coming months. The plans come three months into the H5N1 dairy outbreak, which is very far from the initial hopes of containment. [...] The more the virus expands its footprint across US dairy farms, adapts to its newfound mammalian host, and comes in contact with humans, the more and more chances it has to leap to humans and gain the ability to spread among us. "The award made today is part of our longstanding commitment to strengthen our preparedness for pandemic influenza," said Dawn O'Connell, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response. "Adding this technology to our pandemic flu toolkit enhances our ability to be nimble and quick against the circulating strains and their potential variants."

In a separate article, Ars Technica reports on a small study in Texas that suggests human cases are going undetected on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has spread in cows.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: People who regularly eat processed red meat, like hot dogs, bacon, sausage, salami and bologna, have a greater risk of developing dementia later in life. That was the conclusion of preliminary research presented this week at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference. The study tracked more than 130,000 adults in the United States for up to 43 years. During that period, 11,173 people developed dementia. Those who consumed about two servings of processed red meat per week had a 14 percent greater risk of developing dementia compared to those who ate fewer than three servings per month. Eating unprocessed red meat, like steak or pork chops, did not significantly increase the risk for dementia, though people who ate it every day were more likely to report that they felt their cognition had declined than those who ate red meat less often. (The results of the study have not yet been published in a journal.) There have been several studies published in the past few years that have found an association between ultraprocessed foods and cognitive decline. The report notes a study of more than 10,000 middle-aged adults in Brazil, which found that "people who consumed 20 percent or more of their daily calories from ultraprocessed foods experienced more rapid cognitive decline, particularly on tests of executive functioning, over the course of eight years."

Physicists have been exploring the theoretical possibility of warp drives, which could propel spaceships faster than light by compressing spacetime. A new study published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics simulates the gravitational waves such a drive might emit if it failed, showing potential detectable signals by future high-frequency instruments and advancing our understanding of exotic spacetimes. Phys.Org reports: The results are fascinating. The collapsing warp drive generates a distinct burst of gravitational waves, a ripple in spacetime that could be detectable by gravitational wave detectors that normally target black hole and neutron star mergers. Unlike the chirps from merging astrophysical objects, this signal would be a short, high-frequency burst, and so current detectors wouldn't pick it up. However, future higher-frequency instruments might, and although no such instruments have yet been funded, the technology to build them exists. This raises the possibility of using these signals to search for evidence of warp drive technology, even if we can't build it ourselves.

The study also delves into the energy dynamics of the collapsing warp drive. The process emits a wave of negative energy matter, followed by alternating positive and negative waves. This complex dance results in a net increase in the overall energy of the system, and in principle could provide another signature of the collapse if the outgoing waves interacted with normal matter.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: With thousands of species at risk of extinction, scientists have devised a radical plan: a vault filled with preserved samples of our planet's most important and at-risk creatures located on the moon. An international team of experts says threats from climate change and habitat loss have outpaced our ability to protect species in their natural habitats, necessitating urgent action. A biorepository of preserved cells, and the crucial DNA within them, could be used to enhance genetic diversity in small populations of critically endangered species, or to clone and create new individuals in the worst-case scenario of extinction.

The proposed lunar biorepository, as described in the journal BioScience, would be beyond the reach of climate breakdown, geopolitical events or other Earth-based disasters. The moon's naturally frigid environment means samples would remain frozen year-round without the need for human involvement or an energy source. By taking advantage of deep craters near the polar regions that are never exposed to sunlight, the moon is one of few places that can provide the ultra-low temperature of -196C necessary to preserve the samples in a way suitable for future cloning. [...] Besides those facing the imminent risk of extinction, the proposed repository would prioritize species with important functions in their environment and food webs. Through careful selection, those housed could be used to re-establish an extinct population on Earth or even to terraform another planet. Dr Mary Hagedorn of the Smithsonian's national zoo and conservation biology institute and the proposal's lead author believes the biorepository proposal will come to fruition, although perhaps not in our lifetime: "We know how to do this and can do this and will do this, but it may take decades to finally achieve," she said.

The report says the next steps "will be to develop packaging for the cryopreserved samples that can withstand the conditions of space, and to work out the logistics of transporting samples to the moon."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A recent meeting of the American Society for Nutrition in Chicago was presented with an observational study of more than 500,000 people in the US. It found that those who ate the most UPFs (ultra-processed foods ) had a roughly 10% greater chance of dying early, even accounting for their body-mass index and overall quality of diet. In recent years, lots of other observational studies have shown a similar link - but that's not the same as proving that how food is processed causes health problems, or pinning down which aspect of those processes might be to blame.

So how could we get to the truth about ultra-processed food?

The kind of study needed to prove definitively that UPFs cause health problems would be extremely complex, suggests Dr Nerys Astbury, a senior researcher in diet and obesity at Oxford University. It would need to compare a large number of people on two diets -- one high in UPFs and one low in UPFs, but matched exactly for calorie and macronutrient content. This would be fiendishly difficult to actually do. Participants would need to be kept under lock and key so their food intake could be tightly managed. The study would also need to enrol people with similar diets as a starting point.

It would be extremely challenging logistically. And to counter the possibility that people who eat fewer UPFs might just have healthier lifestyles such as through taking more exercise or getting more sleep, the participants of the groups would need to have very similar habits. "It would be expensive research, but you could see changes from the diets relatively quickly," Dr Astbury says. Funding for this type of research could also be hard to come by. There might be accusations of conflicts of interest, since researchers motivated to run these kind of trials may have an idea of what they want the conclusions to be before they started.

A decade ago, the Gates Foundation announced it will cease covering open-access publishing costs for its grantees from 2025. This shift, following a decade of support for free access to research, sparked concerns in the scientific community. Experts fear the move could undermine the open-access model, which aims to make taxpayer-funded studies freely available. The decision also marked a significant change in the foundation's approach to disseminating research findings, potentially impacting global access to critical scientific information. So where do we go from here? From a report: [The Gates Foundation] notes that open access in its current form has resulted in "some unsavory publishing practices," including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills -- people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them. "Last year was a really pivotal year in scholarly publishing since lots of people who were really pushing gold open access for many years are now thinking, 'Oh, what beast have we created?'" says James Butcher, an independent publishing consultant in Liverpool, England, who writes the newsletter Journalology. "It plays into the hands of the big corporates because it's all about scale."

Gold OA creates incentives for journals to publish as many papers as possible to make more money. Some publishers, often referred to as gray OA publishers, have been criticized for exploiting the gold OA model to churn out high volumes of low-quality studies. Butcher says that because subscription- based publishers traditionally couldn't increase revenues by publishing more papers, they tended to keep volumes fairly level. In contrast, Johan Rooryck, a French linguistics researcher at Leiden University and a proponent of open access, points to a "very rapid rise" in gold OA journals and papers in the past decade. The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts -- near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited -- and then publish in whichever journals they like.

Scientists have developed a blood test that accurately identifies Alzheimer's disease in patients with memory issues 90% of the time (source may be paywalled; alternative source), significantly outperforming standard diagnostic methods. The findings have been published in the journal JAMA. The New York Times reports: The new study used a blood test that focuses on a form of a protein called tau that sprouts into tangles in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. Measuring that form, called ptau-217, was found to give the most accurate assessment of Alzheimer's pathology in a comparison of various Alzheimer's blood tests that will also be presented at the Alzheimer's Association conference. Tau is more closely linked to cognitive decline than amyloid, and tau tangles form later than amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's patients. The test in the study also tracks amyloid. Tests like this are available in the United States for use by doctors, not consumers.

The study included about 1,200 patients with mild memory problems. About 500 of them visited primary care physicians; the rest sought specialist care at memory clinics. Dr. Sebastian Palmqvist, an associate professor of neurology at Lund University who led the study with [Dr. Oskar Hansson, a professor of clinical memory research at Lund University in Sweden and the senior author of the study], said that first, about 300 patients in each group were given the blood test, and results were compared with spinal taps or PET scans. Then the researchers wanted to see how the blood test compared with the judgment of doctors after they administered cognitive tests and CT scans. "We started asking both the primary care physicians and our own dementia specialists: After the standard evaluation, do you think your patient has Alzheimer's disease?" Dr. Palmqvist said.

In evaluations of about 200 patients, primary care doctors who thought patients had Alzheimer's were wrong 36 percent of the time. And when they thought patients did not have Alzheimer's, they were wrong 41 percent of the time. Memory specialists who evaluated about 400 patients did somewhat better -- they were wrong 25 percent of the time when they thought patients had Alzheimer's and wrong 29 percent of the time when they thought patients didn't. The blood test was wrong only about 10 percent of the time. The blood test's accuracy was highest with patients who had already progressed to dementia and was slightly lower with patients in a pre-dementia stage called mild cognitive impairment, Dr. Palmqvist said. It was not very accurate with the earliest stage, called subjective cognitive decline, when patients begin to perceive their memory to be failing. Dr. Hansson said that lower accuracy probably occurred because many people with subjective cognitive decline do not turn out to have Alzheimer's.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Meta's machine-learning model for detecting prompt injection attacks -- special prompts to make neural networks behave inappropriately -- is itself vulnerable to, you guessed it, prompt injection attacks. Prompt-Guard-86M, introduced by Meta last week in conjunction with its Llama 3.1 generative model, is intended "to help developers detect and respond to prompt injection and jailbreak inputs," the social network giant said. Large language models (LLMs) are trained with massive amounts of text and other data, and may parrot it on demand, which isn't ideal if the material is dangerous, dubious, or includes personal info. So makers of AI models build filtering mechanisms called "guardrails" to catch queries and responses that may cause harm, such as those revealing sensitive training data on demand, for example. Those using AI models have made it a sport to circumvent guardrails using prompt injection -- inputs designed to make an LLM ignore its internal system prompts that guide its output -- or jailbreaks -- input designed to make a model ignore safeguards. [...]

It turns out Meta's Prompt-Guard-86M classifier model can be asked to "Ignore previous instructions" if you just add spaces between the letters and omit punctuation. Aman Priyanshu, a bug hunter with enterprise AI application security shop Robust Intelligence, recently found the safety bypass when analyzing the embedding weight differences between Meta's Prompt-Guard-86M model and Redmond's base model, microsoft/mdeberta-v3-base. "The bypass involves inserting character-wise spaces between all English alphabet characters in a given prompt," explained Priyanshu in a GitHub Issues post submitted to the Prompt-Guard repo on Thursday. "This simple transformation effectively renders the classifier unable to detect potentially harmful content." "Whatever nasty question you'd like to ask right, all you have to do is remove punctuation and add spaces between every letter," Hyrum Anderson, CTO at Robust Intelligence, told The Register. "It's very simple and it works. And not just a little bit. It went from something like less than 3 percent to nearly a 100 percent attack success rate."

Scientists say the drying Great Salt Lake in Utah is now becoming a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate to warm, according to a new study. From a report: Due largely to water diversions by farmers and Utah's booming population growth, the Great Salt Lake has shrunk by almost half in recent years. Scientists spent seven months in 2020 sampling emissions coming off the dried saline lake bed. Canada's Royal Ontario Museum published the study on Thursday in the journal One Earth. [...]

The researchers found that the drying lake bed emitted 4.1 million tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which would translate to a 7% increase in Utah's human-caused emissions. According to scientists, 4 million tons of CO2 is roughly equivalent to the total annual emissions of 140 commercial planes. The Great Salt Lake is the largest saline lake left in the Western Hemisphere. The study occurred during one of the most notorious dry stretches of the West's mega drought, which had lasted two decades at the time of the study.

CNET visits a leading-edge company making an implantable brain-computer-interface that's "experimenting with ChatGPT integration..." We previously covered Synchron's unique approach to implanting its brain-computer-interface (BCI) without the need for open brain surgery. Now the company has integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT into its software, something it says is a world's first for a BCI company...

Typing out messages word by word with the help of a BCI is still time consuming. The addition of AI is seen as a way to make communication faster and easier by taking in the relevant context, like what was last said in a conversation, and anticipating answers a person might want to respond with, providing them with a menu of possible options. Now, instead of typing out each word, answers can be filled in with a single "click." There's a refresh button in case none of the AI answers are right... [ALS patient Mark, one of 10 people in the world testing Synchron's brain implant in a clinical trial] has noticed the AI getting better at providing answers that are more in line with things he might say. "Every once in a while it'll drop an f-bomb, which I tend to do occasionally," he says with a laugh.

Synchron CEO Tom Oxley tells me the company has been experimenting with different AI models for about a year, but the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o in May raised some interesting new possibilities. The "o" in ChatGPT-4o stands for "omni," representative of the fact that this latest version is capable of taking in text, audio and visual inputs all at once to inform its outputs... Oxley envisions the future of BCIs as... having large language models like ChatGPT take in relevant context in the form of text, audio and visuals to provide relevant prompts that users can select with their BCI... Synchron's BCI is expected to cost between $50,000 and $100,000, comparable with the cost of other implanted medical devices like cardiac pacemakers or cochlear implants.
CNET has also released a video — titled "What It's Like Using a Brain Implant With ChatGPT."

"Lenacapavir is not a new drug," reports NPR. "It's been approved by the FDA in the United States for multi-drug resistant HIV treatment since 2022."

But instead of treating HIV, what if it were used for preventing infections? The treatment consists of a twice-yearly injection... Early trial results were released in June and generated great excitement, indicating 100% efficacy. On Wednesday, July 24, the full peer-reviewed results were released at the AIDS 2024 conference, confirming the preliminary data... This treatment offers an alternative to the current standard of core for HIV prevention efforts for over a decade: taking a pill like Truvada every day...

Any eventual approval and widespread use would come with challenges... Lenacapavir's cost as HIV treatment in the United States in 2023 was $42,250 per new patient per year. Oral PrEP options, on the other hand, can cost less than $4 a month. "The biggest gap in prevention isn't medication, it's accessing medications," says Dr. Philip Grant, clinical associate professor and director of the HIV clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Activists across Uganda and South Africa have urged Gilead Sciences to license lenacapavir to the Medicines Patent Pool — a United Nations-backed organization that partners with governments, industry and other organizations to license medications. This would allow for manufacturing of generic versions of the drug at a fraction of the cost... [A] group of Médecins Sans Frontières activists gathered at AIDS 2024 and called for an "immediate global action to break Gilead's monopoly on lenacapavir."
In a statement Gilead said they couldn't set a price because the drug had not yet been approved — but that Gilead "is committed to access pricing for high-incidence, resource-limited countries." Gilead will ensure dedicated supply of lenacapavir for HIV prevention in the countries where the need is greatest until voluntary licensing partners are able to supply high-quality, low-cost versions of lenacapavir.â

Gilead is developing a robust direct voluntary licensing program to expedite access to those versions of lenacapavir in high-incidence, resource-limited countries. We are moving with urgency to negotiate these contracts.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: The BBC are reporting sharks have tested positive for cocaine. Thirteen sharpnose sharks which were captured off the coast near Rio de Janeiro. They were tested for the drug in liver and muscle tissue samples — and returned positive results at concentrations as much as 100 times higher than previously reported for other aquatic creatures.

The research was published in Science of the Total Environment. The little-known "sharpnose" sharks were examined because they spend their entire lives in coastal waters. This makes them more likely to be exposed to drugs from human activities than the more cinematic species starring in "Cocaine Shark" or "Cocaine Sharks", two recent productions on the subject featuring hammerheads and tiger sharks (the "trash cans of the sea").

The likeliest source is effluent from drug processing labs inland, though the snorting population of Rio may have added their contribution into the sewers too...

Whether cocaine is changing the behaviour of the sharks is not known. Perhaps it would affect their aim with their head-mount lasers, bringing closer their conquest of the land with it's tasty, tasty humans. Hollywood, hopefully, as the answers.

"Scientists working with NASA's Perseverance rover state emphatically that they are not claiming to have discovered life on Mars," writes the New York Times.

"But many would regard a rock that the rover just finished studying as 'Most Likely to Contain Fossilized Microbial Martians'..." The rover has drilled and stashed a piece of the rock, which scientists hope can be brought back to Earth in the coming years for closer analysis and more definitive answers. "What we are saying is that we have a potential biosignature on Mars," said Kathryn Stack Morgan, the mission's deputy project scientist. She describes a biosignature as a structure, composition or texture in a rock that could have a biological origin.

The rock, which scientists named Cheyava Falls, possesses features that are reminiscent of what microbes might have left behind when this area was warm and wet several billion years ago, part of an ancient river delta. The scientists clarified that they did not spot anything that they thought might be actual fossilized organisms... Within the rock, Perseverance's instruments detected organic compounds, which would provide the building blocks for life as we know it. The rover also found veins of calcium sulfate — mineral deposits that appear to have been deposited by flowing water. Liquid water is another key ingredient for life. Perseverance also spotted small off-white splotches, about 1 millimeter in size, that have black rings around them, like miniature leopard spots. The black rings contain iron phosphate.

The chemical reactions that created the leopard spots could also have provided energy for microbes to live on.
"One of the key parts of Perseverance's mission is to drill samples of interesting rocks for a future mission to bring samples back to Earth for scientists to study with state-of-the-art instruments in their laboratories," the article points out. And while exactly how those rocks would be return has yet to be determined, deputy project scientist Morgan tells the Times, "I think this sample comes to the top of the list."

Longtime Slashdot reader Randseed writes: Boeing Starliner is apparently still stuck at the ISS, six weeks longer than planned due to engine troubles. The root cause seems to be overheating. NASA is still hopeful that they can bring the two astronauts back on the Starliner, but if not apparently there is a SpaceX Dragon craft docked at the station that can get them home. This is another in a long list of high profile failures by Boeing. This comes after a series of failures in their popular commercial aircraft including undocumented flight system modifications causing crashes of the 737 MAX, doors blowing out in mid-flight, and parts falling off the aircraft. The latter decimated a Toyota in a populated area."I think we're starting to close in on those final pieces of flight rationale to make sure that we can come home safely, and that's our primary focus right now," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program.

"Our prime option is to complete the mission," Stich said. "There are a lot of good reasons to complete this mission and bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. Starliner was designed, as a spacecraft, to have the crew in the cockpit."

joshuark shares a report from The Verge: NASA researchers have successfully tested laser communications in space by streaming 4K video footage originating from an airplane in the sky to the International Space Station and back. The feat demonstrates that the space agency could provide live coverage of a Moon landing during the Artemis missions and bodes well for the development of optical communications that could connect humans to Mars and beyond. NASA normally uses radio waves to send data and talk between the surface to space but says that laser communications using infrared light can transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than radios. "ISS astronauts, cosmonauts, and unwelcomed commercial space-flight visitors can now watch their favorite porn in real-time, adding some life to a boring zero-G existence," adds joshuark. "Ralph Kramden, when contacted by Ouiji board, simply spelled out 'Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!'"

Air pollution breathed in during childhood is one of the factors in adult lung health, according to a new study. From a report: The origins of the study date back to 1992 when researchers began investigating the effects of air pollution on groups of children in California. Some of these children are now in their 40s. Dr Erika Garcia and colleagues from the University of Southern California decided to see how they were getting on. More than 1,300 people replied and filled in detailed questionnaires on their income, lifestyle (including smoking), homes and health. This was matched against their childhood health and the local air pollution when they were growing up.

The first finding was that people with higher childhood exposures to particle pollution and nitrogen dioxide had a higher likelihood of bronchitic symptoms as an adult. This relationship was strongest for those who had developed asthma and lung problems as children, meaning these people had a vulnerability that continued into adulthood. The second finding was unexpected: a relationship existed between childhood air pollution and adult bronchitic symptoms for people who did not have lung problems as children. This suggests the damage from air pollution in childhood may only manifest in adult life. Garcia said: "This was surprising. We thought air pollutant effects on childhood asthma or bronchitic symptoms would be a major pathway by which childhood air pollution exposure affects adult respiratory health."

Google DeepMind has announced that its AI systems, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, have achieved silver medal performance at the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), solving four out of six problems and scoring 28 out of 42 possible points in a significant breakthrough for AI in mathematical reasoning. This marks the first time an AI system has reached such a high level of performance in this prestigious competition, which has long been considered a benchmark for advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities in machine learning.

AlphaProof, a system that combines a pre-trained language model with reinforcement learning techniques, demonstrated its new capability by solving two algebra problems and one number theory problem, including the competition's most challenging question. Meanwhile, AlphaGeometry 2 successfully tackled a complex geometry problem, Google wrote in a blog post. The systems' solutions were formally verified and scored by prominent mathematicians, including Fields Medal winner Prof Sir Timothy Gowers and IMO Problem Selection Committee Chair Dr Joseph Myers, lending credibility to the achievement.

The development of these AI systems represents a significant step forward in bridging the gap between natural language processing and formal mathematical reasoning, the company argued. By fine-tuning a version of Google's Gemini model to translate natural language problem statements into formal mathematical language, the researchers created a vast library of formalized problems, enabling AlphaProof to train on millions of mathematical challenges across various difficulty levels and topic areas. While the systems' performance is impressive, challenges remain, particularly in the field of combinatorics where both AI models were unable to solve the given problems. Researchers at Google DeepMind continue to investigate these limitations, the company said, aiming to further improve the systems' capabilities across all areas of mathematics.

A NASA committee determined that the Chandra X-ray Observatory would have to cease operations under the proposed budget cuts in NASA's 2025 budget. The committee reviewed various options but found that only shutting down Chandra fit within the proposed budget, although alternatives could keep the observatory running with limited capabilities. SpaceNews reports: NASA established the Operations Paradigm Change Review (OPCR) committee this spring to look at ways of reducing the costs of operating Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope as part of broader efforts to deal with a billion-dollar shortfall in agency science funding. The fiscal year 2025 budget proposal included a 40% cut in Chandra's budget, with further reductions through 2029, while cutting Hubble's budget by 10% in 2025. Astronomers strongly opposed the proposed cuts, particularly for Chandra. They argued that the reductions would effectively shut down the telescope, a conclusion backed by Patrick Slane, director of the Chandra X-Ray Center, in an open letter shortly after the release of the budget proposal.

The OPCR concurred. "The committee agreed that the continuation of a scientifically viable Chandra mission is not possible within the funding guidance," said Rob Kennicutt, an astronomer from the University of Arizona and Texas A&M University who served on the review committee, in a July 23 presentation at a meeting of the Astrophysics Advisory Committee, or APAC. "This is a serious threat to the observatory." Shutting down Chandra was one of four options presented to the OPCR by the Chandra team and the only one, he said, that fit within NASA's proposed budget profile. Three others would keep Chandra going with reduced capabilities and with budgets higher than what NASA proposed but below current levels. "We think it's possible to run Chandra for less money" than today, he said, "but more than what they were given."

"Despite its domestic space program faltering even before sanctions due to its invasion of Ukraine, and at least one very public failure on a less ambitious project, Russia has announced it will begin construction of a Russian-only replacement for the ISS and place it in a more difficult-to-access polar orbit," writes longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. "Russia is motivated by military and political demands to achieve this, but whether it has the means or not seems uncertain at best." Reuters reports: Russia is aiming to create the four-module core of its planned new orbital space station by 2030, its Roscosmos space agency said on Tuesday. The head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, signed off on the timetable with the directors of 19 enterprises involved in creating the new station. The agency confirmed plans to launch an initial scientific and energy module in 2027. It said three more modules would be added by 2030 and a further two between 2031 and 2033. [...]

Apart from the design and manufacture of the modules, Roscomos said the schedule approved by Borisov includes flight-testing a new-generation crewed spacecraft and building rockets and ground-based infrastructure. The new station will enable Russia to "solve problems of scientific and technological development, national economy and national security that are not available on the Russian segment of the ISS due to technological limitations and the terms of international agreements," it said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A team of Australian scientists is genetically engineering a common fly species so that it can eat more of humanity's organic waste while producing ingredients for making everything from lubricants and biofuels to high-grade animal feeds. Black soldier flies are already being used commercially to consume organic waste, including food waste, but tweaking their genetics could widen the range of waste their larvae consume while, in the process, producing fatty compounds and enzymes. In a scientific paper, the team based at Sydney's Macquarie University outlined their hopes for the flies and how they could also cut the amount of planet-warming methane produced when organic waste breaks down.

"We are heading towards a climate disaster, and landfill waste releases methane. We need to get that to zero," Dr Kate Tepper, a lead author of the paper, said. Dr Maciej Maselko runs an animal synthetic biology lab at Macquarie University where Tepper has already started engineering the flies. Maselko said insects would be the "next frontier" in dealing with the planet's waste management problem, which weighs in at about 1 billion tons a year in food waste alone. Black soldier flies are found in all continents except Antarctica. "If you've got a compost bin, then you've probably got some," Maselko said. The fly larvae can eat double their body weight a day and, like other insects, their larvae are used for animal feed. Maselko said the flies could already do the job of consuming waste faster than microbes. The university team has created a spin-off company, EntoZyme, to commercialize their work and hopes to have the first genetically engineered flies for use in waste facilities by the end of the year. [...]

Creating a suite of genetically engineered flies would see them also produce enzymes used in animal feeds, textiles and pharmaceuticals, and fatty compounds that can be used to make biofuels and lubricants. Another proposed use is for some flies to be able to consume contaminated waste, which would then leave behind their poo that could be used as fertilizer. Tepper said flies can be engineered to deal with pollutants in several ways, including by breaking pollutants down into less toxic or inorganic compounds, evaporating them into the air or accumulating some pollutants into their bodies that can then be separated, leaving clean organic waste behind. The research has been published in the journal Communications Biology.