The desert planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune is plausible, says Alexander Farnsworth, a climate modeler at the University of Bristol in England. According to Science News, the world would be a harsh place for humans to live, and they probably wouldn't have to worry about getting eaten by extraterrestrial helminths. From the report: For their Arrakis climate simulation, which you can explore at the website Climate Archive, Farnsworth and colleagues started with the well-known physics that drive weather and climate on Earth. Using our planet as a starting point makes sense, Farnsworth says, partly because Herbert drew inspiration for Arrakis from "some sort of semi-science of looking at dune systems on the Earth itself." The team then added nuggets of information about the planet from details in Herbert's novels and in the Dune Encyclopedia. According to that intel, the fictional planet's atmosphere is similar to Earth's with a couple of notable differences. Arrakis has less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than Earth -- about 350 parts per million on the desert planet compared with 417 parts per million on Earth. But Dune has far more ozone in its lower atmosphere: 0.5 percent of the gases in the atmosphere compared to Earth's 0.000001 percent.

All that extra ozone is crucial for understanding the planet. Ozone is a powerful greenhouse gas, about 65 times as potent at warming the atmosphere as carbon dioxide is, when measured over a 20-year period. "Arrakis would certainly have a much warmer atmosphere, even though it has less CO2 than Earth today," Farnsworth says. In addition to warming the planet, so much ozone in the lower atmosphere could be bad news. "For humans, that would be incredibly toxic, I think, almost fatal if you were to live under such conditions," Farnsworth says. People on Arrakis would probably have to rely on technology to scrub ozone from the air. Of course, ozone in the upper atmosphere could help shield Arrakis from harmful radiation from its star, Canopus. (Canopus is a real star also known as Alpha Carinae. It's visible in the Southern Hemisphere and is the second brightest star in the sky. Unfortunately for Dune fans, it isn't known to have planets.) If Arrakis were real, it would be located about as far from Canopus as Pluto is from the sun, Farnsworth says. But Canopus is a large white star calculated to be about 7,200 degrees Celsius. "That's significantly hotter than the sun," which runs about 2,000 degrees cooler, Farnsworth says. But "there's a lot of supposition and assumptions they made in here, and whether those are accurate numbers or not, I can't say."

The climate simulation revealed that Arrakis probably wouldn't be exactly as Herbert described it. For instance, in one throwaway line, the author described polar ice caps receding in the summer heat. But Farnsworth and colleagues say it would be far too hot at the poles, about 70Â C during the summer, for ice caps to exist at all. Plus, there would be too little precipitation to replenish the ice in the winter. High clouds and other processes would warm the atmosphere at the poles and keep it warmer than lower latitudes, especially in the summertime. Although Herbert's novels have people living in the midlatitudes and close to the poles, the extreme summer heat and bone-chilling -40C to -75C temperatures in the winters would make those regions nearly unlivable without technology, Farnsworth says. Temperatures in Arrakis' tropical latitudes would be relatively more pleasant at 45C in the warmest months and about 15C in colder months. On Earth, high humidity in the tropics makes it far warmer than at the poles. But on Arrakis, "most of the atmospheric moisture was essentially removed from the tropics," making even the scorching summers more tolerable. The poles are where clouds and the paltry amount of moisture gather and heat the atmosphere. But the tropics on Arrakis pose their own challenges. Hurricane force winds would regularly sandblast inhabitants and build dunes up to 250 meters tall, the researchers calculate. It doesn't mean people couldn't live on Arrakis, just that they'd need technology and lots of off-world support to bring in food and water, Farnsworth says. "I'd say it's a very livable world, just a very inhospitable world."

Nikon is working with NASA to make a mirrorless camera that astronauts will use during the agency's incoming Artemis III mission to document their return to the Moon. From a report: On Thursday, NASA announced that it had entered a Space Act agreement with Nikon to develop the Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC), a camera system designed to capture imagery in low light and survive the harsh lunar environment. The crewed Artemis III mission -- which will launch "no earlier than September 2026" -- aims to explore the lunar south pole, a region of the Moon that contains water ice within permanently shadowed craters.

That makes it an area of scientific interest, but the extreme lighting and temperature conditions pose particular technical challenges for operating equipment within the lunar south pole region. Nikon's full-frame Z9 flagship has already been used in thermal, vacuum, and radiation testing before the agreement, with a modified version of the camera forming the base of the HULC system alongside Nikkor lenses. The HULC design also implements thermal blankets designed by NASA to protect the camera from dust and extreme temperatures and modified electrical components to minimize potential issues caused by radiation. A custom grip with modified buttons has been used to make it easier for suited crew members to operate the camera system while wearing gloves.

Eating ultraprocessed foods raises the risk of developing or dying from dozens of adverse health conditions, according to a new review of 45 meta-analyses on almost 10 million people. From a report: "We found consistent evidence linking higher intakes of ultra-processed foods with over 70% of the 45 different health outcomes we assessed," said senior author Wolfgang Marx, a senior research fellow at the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, in an email. A higher intake was considered about one serving or about 10% more ultraprocessed foods per day, said Heinz Freisling, a scientist in the nutrition and metabolism branch of the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, in an email.

"This proportion can be regarded as 'baseline' and for people consuming more than this baseline, the risk might increase," said Freisling, who was not involved in the study. Researchers graded each study as having credible or strong, highly suggestive, suggestive, weak or no evidence. All the studies in the review were published in the past three years, and none was funded by companies involved in the production of ultraprocessed foods, the authors said. "Strong evidence shows that a higher intake of ultra-processed foods was associated with approximately 50% higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death and common mental disorders," said lead author Dr. Melissa Lane, a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin, in an email. Cardiovascular disease encompasses heart attacks, stroke, clogged arteries and peripheral artery disease. The study: Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses (BMJ)

Astronomers are investigating a star system 100 light-years away with six sub-Neptune planets in near-perfect orbital resonance, piquing the interest of scientists searching for alien technology, or technosignatures. Space.com reports: To be clear, no such evidence was found in the system, dubbed HD 110067. However, the researchers say they're not done looking yet. HD 11067 remains an interesting target for similar observations in the future. In our own tiny pocket of the cosmos, radio waves from satellites and telescopes beaming out in the plane of our solar system, meaning that if somebody outside our solar system watched Earth cross the face of our sun, they'd maybe be able to pick up a signal that coincides with the planet's transit.

HD 110067 is viewed edge on from Earth, so we are seeing the six planets in the plane of their system -- a view that gives us an excellent chance of picking up such a signal if there exists one, study co-author Steve Croft, a radio astronomer working with the life-searching Breakthrough Listen program at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com "Our technology in our own solar system has spread outside the habitable zone," Croft told Space.com. So technology-friendly civilization in HD 110067, if any, may have communication relays set up on multiple planets in the system, he said. "Even if it is a negative result, that still tells us something."

When HD 110067's discovery was announced, Croft and his team used the world's largest fully steerable telescope, the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, and searched the system for signs of alien technology. The researchers looked for signals that were continuously present when the telescope was pointed at the system and absent when directed away, the smoking gun of technosignatures local to HD 110067. But such signals are difficult to distinguish from natural sources of radio waves and humankind's own technological signals, such as radio waves beaming from cell phones connected to Wi-Fi, SpaceX's Starlink satellite network in low Earth orbit. This creates a haystack of signals in which researchers look for a needle of a potential extraterrestrial signal, said Croft. "I should add we don't know if there are needles in the haystack," he said. "We don't really know what the needles look like." The research has been published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS.

Over the past four centuries quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own. An excerpt from an Aeon article: In their native ranges, these multi-nest colonies can grow to a few hundred metres across, limited by physical barriers or other ant colonies. This turns the landscape to a patchwork of separate groups, with each chemically distinct society fighting or avoiding others at their borders. Species and colonies coexist, without any prevailing over the others. However, for the 'anonymous societies' of unicolonial ants, as they're known, transporting a small number of queens and workers to a new place can cause the relatively stable arrangement of groups to break down. As new nests are created, colonies bud and spread without ever drawing boundaries because workers treat all others of their own kind as allies. What was once a patchwork of complex relationships becomes a simplified, and unified, social system. The relative genetic homogeneity of the small founder population, replicated across a growing network of nests, ensures that members of unicolonial species tolerate each other. Spared the cost of fighting one another, these ants can live in denser populations, spreading across the land as a plant might, and turning their energies to capturing food and competing with other species. Chemical badges keep unicolonial ant societies together, but also allow those societies to rapidly expand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Microplastics have been found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing fetuses. The scientists analyzed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels. [...] Prof Matthew Campen, at the University of New Mexico, US, who led the research, said: "If we are seeing effects on placentas, then all mammalian life on this planet could be impacted. That's not good." He said the growing concentration of microplastics in human tissue could explain puzzling increases in some health problems, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), colon cancer in people under 50, and declining sperm counts. A 2021 study found people with IBD had 50% more microplastics in their feces. Campen said he was deeply concerned by the growing global production of plastics because it meant the problem of microplastics in the environment "is only getting worse."

The research, published in the Toxicological Sciences journal, found microplastics in all the placenta samples tested, with concentrations ranging from 6.5 to 790 micrograms per gram of tissue. PVC and nylon were the most common plastics detected, after polyethylene. The microplastics were analyzed by using chemicals and a centrifuge to separate them from the tissue, then heating them and analyzing the characteristic chemical signature of each plastic. The same technique was used by scientists at the Capital Medical University in Beijing, China, to detect microplastics in human artery samples. The concentration of microplastics in placentas was especially troubling, Campen said. The tissue grows for only eight months, as it starts to form about a month into pregnancy. "Other organs of your body are accumulating over much longer periods of time," he added.

Robin George Andrews writes via The New York Times: In 2022, when NASA's $325 million spacecraft crashed into an asteroid named Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour, cheers and applause erupted back on Earth. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission deliberately targeted Dimorphos to change its orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos as a dress rehearsal of sorts for thwarting a deadly space rock that might someday head toward Earth. The world's first-ever planetary defense experiment was deemed a triumph: The asteroid's orbit shrank by 33 minutes, far above the minimum threshold of 73 seconds. But what the DART team didn't realize then was just how bizarrely Dimorphos responded to that punch. A new study, published on Monday in Nature Astronomy, has concluded that DART hit Dimorphos so hard that the asteroid changed shape.

Simulations of the impact suggest that the spacecraft's death did not excavate a normal, bowl-shaped crater. Instead, it left behind something that resembles a dent. And although the artificial impact blasted millions of tons of rock into space, plenty splashed back onto its sides like tremendous tidal waves. It widened Dimorphos, transforming it from a squat orb into a flat-topped oval -- like an M&M candy. That the asteroid acted like a fluid comes down to its peculiar composition. It's not a solid contiguous rock, but more like "a pile of sand," said Sabina Raducan, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and the study's lead author. And a low-density asteroid barely held together by its own gravity was never going to respond in a straightforward manner when a van-size spacecraft flew into its face.

Dimorphos's response is "completely outside of the realm of physics as we understand it" in our day-to-day lives, said Cristina Thomas, the lead of the mission's observations working group at Northern Arizona University who was not involved with the study. And "this has overarching implications for planetary defense." DART showed that a tiny spacecraft can deflect an asteroid. But the study indicates that crashing a similarly disjointed space rock too forcefully risks fragmenting it, which, in a real asteroid emergency, could create multiple Earthbound asteroids. Planetary defense, as a concept, clearly works. "We know we can do it," said Federica Spoto, an asteroid dynamics researcher at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, who was not involved with the new study. "But we have to do it right."

In 2019 a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched an Israeli spacecraft carrying a 30-million page archive of human civilization to the moon. Unfortunately, that spacecraft crashed. But thanks to this week's moon landing by the Odysseus, there's now a 30-million page "Lunar Library" on the moon — according to a Medium post by the Arch Mission Foundation.

"This historic moment secures humanity's cultural heritage and knowledge in an indestructible archive built to last for up to billions of years." Etched onto thin sheets of nickel, called NanoFiche, the Lunar Library is practically indestructible and can withstand the harsh conditions of space... Some of the notable content includes:


The Wikipedia. The entire English Wikipedia containing over 6 million articles on every branch of knowledge.
Project Gutenberg. Portions of Project Gutenberg's library of over 70,000 free eBooks containing some of our most treasured literature.
The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project archive of over 7,000 human languages and The Panlex datasets.
Selections from the Internet Archive's collections of books and important documents and data sets.
The SETI Institute's Earthling Project, featuring a musical compilation of 10,000 vocal submissions representing humanity united
The Arch Lunar Art Archive containing a collection of works from global contemporary and digital artists in 2022, recorded as NFTs.
David Copperfield's Magic Secrets — the secrets to all his greatest illusions — including how he will make the Moon disappear in the near future.
The Arch Mission Primer — which teaches a million concepts with images and words in 5 languages.
The Arch Mission Private Library — containing millions of pages as well as books, documents and articles on every subject, including a broad range of fiction and non-fiction, textbooks, periodicals, audio recordings, videos, historical documents, software sourcecode, data sets, and more.
The Arch Mission Vaults — private collections, including collections from our advisors and partners, and a collection of important texts and images from all the world's religions including the great religions and indigenous religions from around the world, collections of books, photos, and a collection of music by leading recording artists, and much more content that may be revealed in the future...


We also want to recognize our esteemed advisors, and our many content partners and collections including the Wikimedia Foundation, the Long Now Foundation, The SETI Institute Earthling Project, the Arch Lunar Art Archive project, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the many donors who helped make the Lunar Library possible through their generous contributions. This accomplishment would not have happened without the collaborative support of so many...

We will continue to send backups of our important knowledge and cultural heritage — placing them on the surface of the Earth, in caves and deep underground bunkers and mines, and around the solar system as well. This is a mission that continues as long as humanity endures, and perhaps even long after we are gone, as a gift for whoever comes next.
Space.com has a nice rundown of the other new payloads that just landed on the moon. Some highlights:

• "Cloud computing startup Lonestar's Independence payload is a lunar data center test mission for data storage and transmission from the lunar surface."
• LRA is a small hemisphere of light-reflectors built to servce as a precision landmark to "allow spacecraft to ping it with lasers to help them determine their precise distance..."
• ROLSES is a radio spectrometer for measuring the electron density near the lunar surface, "and how it may affect radio observatories, as well as observing solar and planetary radio waves and other phenomena."
• "Artist Jeff Koons is sending 125 miniature stainless steel Moon Phase sculptures, each honoring significant human achievements across cultures and history, to be displayed on the moon in a cube. "

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Dr. Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of 'decisive contributions' to cancer research," reports CNN.

Their profile of the oncologist from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu's research "has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual's tumor." It's a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer...

The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body's immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells. Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system... These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don't work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body's immune system against cancer...

Wu's research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what's called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system's T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack. With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used "tour de force lab work" to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize. "If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it's pretty pointless," Lendahl added...

By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient's unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells... Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system's cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided "proof of principle" that a vaccine can be targeted to a person's specific tumor, Lendahl said.

A follow-up by Wu's team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control... Since then, Wu's team, other groups of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Moderna and BioNTech, have further developed this field of research, with trials underway for vaccines that treat pancreatic and lung cancer as well as melanoma.
"All the trials underway are small-scale, typically involving a handful of patients with later-stage disease and a high tolerance for safety risks," adds CNN.

"To show that these type of cancer vaccines work, much larger randomized control trials are needed."

The Guardian reports: The Covid death toll in the U.S. is likely at least 16% higher than the official tally, according to a new study, and researchers believe the cause of the undercounting goes beyond overloaded health systems to a lack of awareness of Covid and low levels of testing.

The second year of the pandemic also had nearly as many uncounted excess deaths as the first, the study found.

More than 1.1 million Americans have died from Covid, according to official records. But the actual number is assuredly higher, given the high rates of excess deaths. Demographers wanted to know how many could be attributed to Covid, and they drilled down to data at the county level to discover patterns in geography and time. There were 1.2 million excess deaths from natural causes — excluding deaths from accidents, firearms, suicide and overdoses — between March 2020 and August 2022, the researchers estimated, and about 163,000 of those deaths were not attributed to Covid in any way — but most of them should have been, the researchers say... "The mortality that's not considered Covid starts a little bit before the Covid surges officially start and crests a little bit sooner," said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, associate professor in the department of sociology and the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and one of the study's authors. That indicates some people didn't realize their illness was Covid, due to a lack of awareness about its prevalence and low levels of testing. There was also a rise in out-of-hospital deaths — in homes and nursing homes, for instance — which makes ascertaining the cause of death more difficult...

"[W]e find over the first 30 months of the pandemic that serious gaps remained in surveillance," said Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health and sociology at Boston University and one of the study's authors. "Even though we got a lot better at testing for Covid, we were still missing a lot of official Covid deaths" in the U.S., said Jennifer Dowd, professor of demography and population health at University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research. The phenomenon "underscores how badly the U.S. fared as the pandemic continued," Wrigley-Field said. "It does profoundly reflect failures in the public health system."
One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) — as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.

On Wednesday afternoon "a European Space Agency satellite reentered Earth's atmosphere over the North Pacific Ocean..." reports CNN, "and there have been no reports of damage, according to the agency." The agency's Space Debris Office, along with an international surveillance network, monitored and tracked the Earth-observing ERS-2 satellite throughout February to make predictions about the reentry, which occurred at 12:17 p.m. ET Wednesday. The ESA provided continuous live updates on its website. At around 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface, the satellite broke apart due to atmospheric drag, and the majority of the fragments were expected to burn up in the atmosphere.

The agency said it was possible that some fragments could reach the planet's surface, but the pieces didn't contain any harmful substances and likely fell into the ocean... The ERS-2 satellite had an estimated mass of 5,057 pounds (2,294 kilograms) after depleting its fuel, according to the agency. "Uncontrolled Atmospheric reentry has long been a common method for disposing of space objects at the end of their mission," said Tim Flohrer, head of the agency's Space Debris Office, in a statement. "We see objects similar in size or larger to ERS-2 reentering the atmosphere multiple times each year."

The Earth-observing ERS-2 satellite first launched on April 21, 1995, and it was the most sophisticated satellite of its kind at the time to be developed and launched by Europe... In 2011, the agency decided to end the satellite's operations and deorbit it, rather than adding to the swirl of space junk orbiting the planet. The satellite executed 66 deorbiting maneuvers in July and August of 2011 before the mission officially concluded later that year on September 11. The maneuvers burned through the rest of the satellite's fuel and decreased its altitude, setting ERS-2's orbit on a trajectory to slowly spiral closer to Earth and reenter the atmosphere within 15 years.

The chances of an individual person being injured by space debris each year are less than 1 in 100 billion, about 1.5 million times lower than the risk of being killed in an accident at home, according to the agency.

On Thursday, the Odysseus Moon lander made history by becoming the first ever privately built and operated robot to complete a soft lunar touchdown. While the lander is "alive and well," the CEO of Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which built and flew the lander, said it tipped over during its final descent, coming up to rest propped up sideways on a rock. The BBC reports: Its owner, Texan firm Intuitive Machines, says Odysseus has plenty of power and is communicating with Earth. Controllers are trying to retrieve pictures from the robot. Steve Altemus, the CEO and co-founder of IM, said it wasn't totally clear what happened but the data suggested the robot caught a foot on the surface and then fell because it still had some lateral motion at the moment of landing. All the scientific instruments that planned to take observations on the Moon are on the side of Odysseus that should still allow them to do some work. The only payload likely on the "wrong side" of the lander, pointing down at the lunar surface, is an art project.

"We're hopeful to get pictures and really do an assessment of the structure and assessment of all the external equipment," Mr Altemus told reporters. "So far, we have quite a bit of operational capability even though we're tipped over. And so that's really exciting for us, and we are continuing the surface operations mission as a result of it." The robot had been directed to a cratered terrain near the Moon's south pole, and the IM team believes it got very close to the targeted site - perhaps within a couple of kilometers. A US space agency satellite called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will search for Odysseus in the coming days.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Air pollution from traffic is linked to some of the more severe forms of dementia, and could be a significant cause of the condition among those who are not already genetically predisposed to it, research suggests. Research carried out in Atlanta, Georgia, found that people with higher exposure to traffic-related fine particulate matter air pollution were more likely to have high amounts of the amyloid plaques in their brains that are associated with Alzheimer's. The findings, which will alarm anyone living in a town or city, but particularly those living near busy roads, add to the harms already known to be caused by road traffic pollution, ranging from climate change to respiratory diseases.

A team of researchers from Atlanta's Emory University set out to specifically investigate the effects on people's brains of exposure the type of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5. This consists of particles of less than 2.5 microns in diameter -- about a hundredth the thickness of a human hair -- suspended in the air, and is known to penetrate deep into living tissue, including crossing the blood-brain barrier. Traffic-related PM2.5 concentrations are a major source of ambient pollution in the metro-Atlanta area, and also in urban centers across the planet. [...] "We found that donors who lived in areas with high concentrations of traffic-related air pollution exposure, in particular PM2.5 exposure, had higher levels of Alzheimer's disease neuropathology in their brain," said Anke Huels, an assistant professor at Emory University in Atlanta, who was the lead author on the study. "In particular, we looked at a score that is used to evaluate evaluate amyloid plaques in the brain, in autopsy samples, and we showed that donors who live in areas with higher levels of air pollution, and also higher levels of amyloid plaques in their brain."

There was a positive relationship between exposure to high levels of PM2.5 and levels of amyloid plaques in the brains of the subjects the team examined. They found that people with a 1 ug/m3 higher PM2.5 exposure in the year before death were nearly twice as likely to have higher levels of amyloid plaques in their brains, while those with higher exposure in the three years before death were 87% more likely to have higher levels of plaques. Huels and her team also investigated whether having the main gene variant associated with Alzheimer's disease, ApoE4, had any effect on the relationship between air pollution and signs of Alzheimer's in the brain. "We found that the association between In air pollution and severity of Alzheimer's disease was stronger among those who did not carry an ApoE4 allele, those who did not have that strong genetic risk for Alzheimer disease," Huels said. "Which kind of suggests that environmental exposures like air pollution may explain some of the Alzheimer's risk in people whose risk cannot be explained by genetic risk factor." The findings have been published in the online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Three top-tier X-class solar flares launched off the sun between Wednesday and Thursday. The first two occurred seven hours apart, coming in at X1.9 and X1.6 magnitude respectively. The third, the most powerful of the current 11-year "solar cycle," ranked an impressive X6.3. From a report: Solar flares, or bursts of radiation, are ranked on a scale that goes from A, B and C to M and X, in increasing order of intensity. They usually originate from sunspots, or bruiselike discolorations on the surface of the sun. Sunspots are most common near the height of the 11-year solar cycle. The current cycle, number 25, is expected to reach its peak this year. The more sunspots, the more opportunities for solar flares.

Solar flares and accompanying coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, can influence "space weather" across the solar system, and even here on Earth. CMEs are slower shock waves of magnetic energy from the sun. Flares can reach Earth in minutes, but CMEs usually take at least a day. All three of the X-class solar flares disrupted shortwave radio communications on Earth. But the first two flares did not release a CME; the verdict is still out regarding whether the third flare did. High-frequency radio waves propagate by bouncing off electrons in Earth's ionosphere. That's a layer of Earth's atmosphere between 50 and 600 miles above the ground.

When a solar flare occurs, that radiation travels toward Earth at the speed of light. It can ionize additional particles in the lower ionosphere. Radio waves sent from devices below it then impact that extra-ionized layer and lose energy, and aren't able to be bent by ions at the top of the ionosphere. That means signals can't travel very far, and radio blackouts are possible. Three back-to-back radio blackouts occurred in response to the trio of flares, but primarily over the Pacific and Indian oceans. They were rated "R3" or greater on a 1 through 5 scale. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, that results in a "wide area blackout of [high frequency] radio communication, [and] loss of radio contact for about an hour on sunlit side of Earth." Low-frequency navigation signals, like those used on aircraft traveling overseas, can be degraded too.

The first privately built spacecraft has successfully landed on the lunar surface on Thursday. "We can confirm, without a doubt, that our equipment is on the surface of the moon," said Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that operated the Odysseus spacecraft. "Welcome to the moon." From a report: As it approached the surface of the moon, Odysseus lost contact with NASA, resulting in several anxious minutes for those who worked on the joint project. But after approximately 15 minutes of searching, officials confirmed that they were once again receiving signals from the spacecraft. "A commercial lander named Odysseus, powered by a company called Intuitive Machines, launched up on a Space X rocket, carrying a bounty of NASA scientific instruments and bearing the dream of a new adventure, a new adventure in science, innovation and American leadership, well, all of that aced the landing of a lifetime," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said after contact had been reestablished. "Today for the first time in more than a half century, the U.S. has returned to the moon."

Altemus had estimated that Odysseus had an 80% chance of successfully landing on the moon, citing previous failed attempts as an advantage. "We've stood on the shoulders of everybody who's tried before us," Altemus said. It was the first American mission to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 and the first private spacecraft ever to make a soft landing there. While it was a private mission, NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to deliver six instruments to the moon. And the U.S. space agency provided streaming video of the landing.