"Getting sick feels bad in the moment," reports the Washington Post, "and may affect your brain in the longer term." A new study published in Nature Aging adds to growing evidence that severe infections, including flu, herpes and respiratory tract infections, are linked to accelerated brain atrophy and increased risk of dementia years later. It also hints at the biological drivers that may contribute to neurodegenerative disease.

The current research is a "leap beyond previous studies that had already associated infection with susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease" and provides a "useful dataset," said Rudy Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Other recent studies have found that the flu shot and the shingles vaccine reduce the risk of subsequent dementia in those who get them. Severe infections have also been linked to subsequent strokes and heart attacks.
"Big infection, big immune response — not good for the brain," said one of the study's co-authors (Keenan Walker, a tenure-track investigator and the director of the Multimodal Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease Unit at the National Institute on Aging).

And the article also includes this quote from Kristen Funk, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (who studies neuroinflammation in neuroinfectious and neurodegenerative diseases). "They really found that there's a range of infections that are associated with this brain atrophy, associated with this cognitive decline." In turn, most of these infections associated with brain atrophy seem to be risk factors for dementia, according to the researchers' analyses of the UK Biobank data of 495,896 subjects and a Finnish dataset of 273,132 subjects. They found that having a history of infections was associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease years later. The increased risk was even higher for vascular dementia, which is the second-most-common dementia diagnosis after Alzheimer's disease and caused by restriction of blood to the brain...

More-minor infections are not cause for alarm since the data was drawn from patients who had a hospital record of their infections, indicating more-severe cases, experts say.
And speaking of infections, the Post also published an interesting guest column by Dr. Mikkael A. Sekeres, division chief for hematology and medicine professor at the University of Miami's cancer center: A recent report from the American Association for Cancer Research attributed 13 percent of cancer cases worldwide to infections. Some estimates run as high as 20 percent, with particularly high rates of infection-related cancers in developing countries. Infectious agents linked to cancer include bacteria, such as Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), and viruses, such as human papillomavirus (HPV), Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), and hepatitis B and C.

But keep in mind that an exceedingly small percentage of infected people develop cancer...

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an op-ed written by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board: There are government boondoggles, and then there's NASA's Artemis program. More than a half century after Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety. As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. [...]

A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon -- no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required -- at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving. Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs -- including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids -- as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: From dumping iron into the ocean to launching mirrors into space, proposals to cool the planet through 'geoengineering' tend to be controversial -- and sometimes fantastical. A new idea isn't any less far-out, but it may avoid some of the usual pitfalls of strategies to fill the atmosphere with tiny, reflective particles. In a modeling study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that shooting 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6C -- enough to stave off the worst consequences of global warming. The scheme wouldn't be cheap, however: experts estimate it would cost nearly $200 trillion over the remainder of this century -- far more than traditional proposals to use sulfur particles. [...]

The researchers modeled the effects of seven compounds, including sulfur dioxide, as well as particles of diamond, aluminum, and calcite, the primary ingredient in limestone. They evaluated the effects of each particle across 45 years in the model, where each trial took more than a week in real-time on a supercomputer. The results showed diamond particles were best at reflecting radiation while also staying aloft and avoiding clumping. Diamond is also thought to be chemically inert, meaning it would not react to form acid rain, like sulfur. To achieve 1.6C of cooling, 5 million tons of diamond particles would need to be injected into the stratosphere each year. Such a large quantity would require a huge ramp up in synthetic diamond production before high-altitude aircraft could sprinkle the ground-up gems across the stratosphere. At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2,400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100, one study estimates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space News: SpaceX has been awarded contracts for eight launches under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program, the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Oct. 18. The contracts worth $733.5 million span seven missions for the Space Development Agency (SDA) and one for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) projected to launch in 2026. These are part of the NSSL Phase 3 procurement of launch services for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

The NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 program is structured as an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract, a flexible procurement method often used in government contracting. The total value of the Lane 1 contract is estimated at $5.6 billion over five years, with Blue Origin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) selected as the primary vendors to compete for individual task orders. The Space Development Agency is utilizing SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch small satellites into a low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation, a network of satellites designed to enhance military communications and intelligence capabilities. SpaceX has already completed two successful launches for the Tranche 0 portion of SDA's constellation.

"The Phase 3 Lane 1 construct allows us to execute launch services more quickly for risk-tolerant payloads, putting more capabilities in orbit faster to support national security," said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space at the Space Force. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket has yet to perform its first launch and will need to complete at least two successful flights to qualify for NSSL certification, while ULA's Vulcan Centaur, which has completed two flights, is still awaiting final certification for the program.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement. The company, Heliospect Genomics, has worked with more than a dozen couples undergoing IVF, according to undercover video footage. The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have helped some parents select future children based on genetic predictions of intelligence. Managers boasted their methods could produce a gain of more than six IQ points. [...]

The footage appears to show experimental genetic selection techniques being advertised to prospective parents. A Heliospect employee, who has been helping the company recruit clients, outlined how couples could rank up to 100 embryos based on "IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants," including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness. The startup says its prediction tools were built using data provided by UK Biobank, a taxpayer-funded store of genetic material donated by half a million British volunteers, which aims to only share data for projects that are "in the public interest".

Selecting embryos on the basis of predicted high IQ is not permitted under UK law. While it is legal in the US, where embryology is more loosely regulated, IQ screening is not yet commercially available there. Asked for comment, managers at Heliospect said the company, which is incorporated in the US, operated within all applicable law and regulations. They said Heliospect was in "stealth mode" before a planned public launch and was still developing its service. They added that clients who screened fewer embryos were charged about $4,000, and that pricing on launch would be in line with competitors. Leading geneticists and bioethicists said the project raised a host of moral and medical issues.

In a press release today, the FCC said it is requiring all mobile phones sold in the U.S. to be compatible with hearing aids. TechCrunch reports: The FCC has not yet issued a specific timeline for compliance, only noting that the rules will be fully in effect "after a transition period." The rules discourage handset makers from instituting proprietary Bluetooth coupling, which could limit device compatibility with over-the-counter hearing aids. Under the new rules, companies will be required to note on their website if a given handset is compatible with hearing aids. Two years ago, the FDA announced that hearing aids would no longer require a prescription. The agency also recently approved Apple AirPods as hearing aids.

A new study counters the widely held belief that standing desks are good for your health, discovering that it does not reduce the risk of diseases such as stroke and heart failure. In fact, it "found that being on your feet for more than two hours a day may increase the risk of developing problems such as deep vein thrombosis and varicose veins," reports The Guardian. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. From the report: To establish if standing provided any health benefits, the researchers studied data from 83,013 adults who are part of the UK Biobank health records database. These people did not have heart disease at the start of the study and wore devices on their wrists to track movement. The team found that for every extra 30 minutes spent standing beyond two hours, the risk of circulatory disease increased by 11%. Standing was not found to reduce the risk of heart conditions such as stroke, heart failure and coronary heart disease, the researchers said. "The key takeaway is that standing for too long will not offset an otherwise sedentary lifestyle and could be risky for some people in terms of circulatory health," said Dr Matthew Ahmadi, of the University of Sydney's faculty of medicine and health. "We found that standing more does not improve cardiovascular health over the long-term and increases the risk of circulatory issues."

New research challenges assumptions about decision-making, revealing people tend to believe they have sufficient information regardless of actual data at hand. A study by Gehlbach, Robinson, and Fletcher, published earlier this month, found participants consistently overestimated their knowledge when given partial information on a hypothetical school merger scenario.

Nearly 90% favored merger when presented pro-merger facts, while only 25% did when given opposing data. However, opinions shifted when full information was provided, suggesting malleability of views despite initial overconfidence. Researchers caution this bias could be exploited in today's fractured media landscape, where partial or misleading information often circulates unchecked.

In a rather critical analysis of the 2024 Economics Nobel, commentator Noah Smith has questioned the prize's shift back to "big-think" theories. He argues that Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's (the winner of the 2024 Economics Nobel) influential work on institutions and development, while intriguing, lacks robust empirical validation. From his blog: The science prizes rely very heavily on external validity to determine who gets the prize -- your theory or your invention has to work, basically. If it doesn't, you can be the biggest genius in the world, but you'll never get a Nobel. The physicist Ed Witten won a Fields Medal, which is even harder to get than a Nobel, for the math he invented for string theory. But he'll almost certainly never get a Physics Nobel, because string theory can't be empirically tested.

The Econ Nobel is different. Traditionally, it's given to economists whose ideas are most influential within the economics profession. If a whole bunch of other economists do research that follows up on your research, or which uses theoretical or empirical techniques you pioneered, you get an Econ Nobel. Your theory doesn't have to be validated, your specific empirical findings can already have been overturned by the time the prize is awarded, but if you were influential, you get the prize.

You could argue that this is appropriate for what Thomas Kuhn would call a "pre-paradigmatic" science -- a field that's still looking for a set of basic concepts and tools. But it's been 55 years since they started giving the prize, and that seems like an awfully long time for a field to still be tooling up. Meanwhile, making "influence within the economics profession" the criterion for successful research seems a little too much like a popularity contest. It's how you end up with prizes like the one in 2004, which was given to some macroeconomic theorists whose theory said that recessions are caused by technological slowdowns and that mass unemployment is a voluntary vacation.

In recent years, that looked like it might be changing. Often, the prize was given to empirical economists associated with the so-called "credibility revolution" -- basically, quasi-experiments. Those cases include Goldin in 2023, Card/Angrist/Imbens in 2021, and Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer in 2019. And when it was given to theorists, they tended to be game theorists whose theories are very predictive of real-world outcomes -- Milgrom/Wilson in 2020, Hart/Holmstrom in 2016, Tirole in 2014, and Roth/Shapley in 2012. Even when the prize was given to macro -- a field where validity is much harder to establish -- it was given to economists whose theories have seen immediate application to pressing problems of the day, such as Bernanke/Diamond/Dybvig in 2022 and Nordhaus in 2018. In other words, the recent Nobels have made it seem like economics might be becoming more like a natural science, where practical applications and external validity are the ultimate arbiter of the value of research, rather than cultural influence within the economics profession. But this year's prize seems like a step away from that, and back toward the sort of big-think that used to be more popular in the prize's early years.

The Euclid mission has revealed the first part of a 3D map of the universe, showcasing 14 million galaxies and tens of millions of stars with unprecedented detail. "The Euclid mission, launched in 2023 and run by the European Space Agency (Esa) with contributions from Nasa, sent its first snapshots in November of that year and in May 2024," reports The Guardian. "The goal of Euclid is to enable the creation of a 3D map in time and space of the universe, in an attempt to elucidate its evolution and, as a result, shed light on the mysterious phenomena of dark energy and dark matter that together make up 95% of the universe." From the report: The newly released data is a mosaic of 208 gigapixels and covers 1% of what will be the final map. The completed map is expected to involve six years of observations and will take in a third of the sky, with observations expected to capture billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light years. [...] Images released by Esa highlight the area of the sky covered by the new mosaic, together with the mosaic itself and zoomed-in views within it.

Esa said regions of light blue that can be seen in the mosaic were galactic cirrus clouds that sit between stars in the Milky Way. These wispy clouds, composed of gas and dust, reflect optical light, allowing them to be captured by the mission's super-sensitive visible light camera. Zoom in on the mosaic further and other features can be seen, including the spiral galaxy NGC 2188 and the galaxy cluster Abell 3381. In a view zoomed in 600 times relative to the original mosaic, a distant swirling galaxy is visible in incredible detail.

A new study reveals that the human sense of smell is far more sensitive than previously thought, capable of distinguishing odors and their sequences within just 60 milliseconds. CNN reports: In a single sniff, the human sense of smell can distinguish odors within a fraction of a second, working at a level of sensitivity that is "on par" with how our brains perceive color, "refuting the widely held belief that olfaction is our slow sense," a new study finds. Humans also can discern between various sequences of odors -- distinguishing a sequence of "A" before "B" from sequence "B" before "A" -- when the interval between odorant A and odorant B is merely 60 milliseconds, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior. [...]

The new findings challenge previous research in which the timing it took to discriminate between odor sequences was around 1,200 milliseconds, Dr. Dmitry Rinberg, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Langone Health in New York, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Nature Human Behavior. "The timing of individual notes in music is essential for conveying meaning and beauty in a melody, and the human ear is very sensitive to this. However, temporal sensitivity is not limited to hearing: our sense of smell can also perceive small temporal changes in odor presentations," he wrote. "Similar to how timing affects the perception of notes in a melody, the timing of individual components in a complex odor mixture that reaches the nose may be crucial for our perception of the olfactory world."

The ability to tell apart odors within a single sniff might be an important way in which animals detect both what a smell is and where it might be in space, said Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the new study. "The demonstration that humans can tell apart smells as they change within a sniff is a powerful demonstration that timing is important for smell across species, and therefore is a general principle underlying olfactory function. In addition, this study sheds important light on the mysterious mechanisms that support human odor perception," Datta wrote in an email. "The study of human olfaction has historically lagged that of vision and hearing, because as humans we think of ourselves as visual creatures that largely use speech to communicate," he said, adding that the new study helps "fill a critical gap in our understanding of how we as humans smell."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neuroscience News: Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder -- also known as ADHD -- is typically thought of as a childhood condition. But more adults are realizing that their struggles with attention, focus and restlessness could in fact be undiagnosed ADHD, thanks in large part to trending social media videos racking up millions of views. A new national survey of 1,000 American adults commissioned by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine finds that 25% of adults now suspect they may have undiagnosed ADHD. But what worries mental health experts is that only 13% of survey respondents have shared their suspicions with their doctor. That's raising concerns about the consequences of self-diagnosis leading to incorrect treatment.

"Anxiety, depression and ADHD -- all these things can look a lot alike, but the wrong treatment can make things worse instead of helping that person feel better and improving their functioning," said psychologist Justin Barterian, PhD, clinical assistant professor in Ohio State's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health. An estimated 4.4% of people ages 18 to 44 have ADHD, and some people aren't diagnosed until they're older, Barterian said. "There's definitely more awareness of how it can continue to affect folks into adulthood and a lot of people who are realizing, once their kids have been diagnosed, that they fit these symptoms as well, given that it's a genetic disorder," Barterian said. The survey found that younger adults are more likely to believe they have undiagnosed ADHD than older generations, and they're also more likely to do something about it. Barterian said that should include seeing a medical professional, usually their primary care provider, to receive a referral to a mental health expert to be thoroughly evaluated, accurately diagnosed and effectively treated.

NASA's Europa Clipper mission lifted off successfully on Monday, marking the agency's first mission to Jupiter in over a decade. The $5.2 billion spacecraft aims to investigate whether Europa, Jupiter's fourth-largest moon, could harbor conditions suitable for life. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:06 p.m. Eastern time, lifting the Europa Clipper spacecraft into orbit around Earth.

Europa Clipper, NASA's largest-ever interplanetary craft, weighs 12,500 pounds and boasts solar panels spanning 100 feet. Its nine scientific instruments will study Europa's surface and interior in unprecedented detail. After a 1.8 billion-mile journey, the spacecraft will reach Jupiter in April 2030. It will then conduct 49 flybys of Europa over four years, coming within 16 miles of the moon's surface.

Scientists believe Europa's subsurface ocean could contain twice as much water as Earth's oceans. The mission will measure ocean depth, analyze surface compounds, and map Europa's magnetic field to gather clues about its internal composition. Instruments will search for warm spots indicating thin ice, potential cryovolcanoes, and plumes of water vapor. The spacecraft will also attempt to identify carbon-based molecules that could serve as building blocks for life. "Europa is certainly the most likely place for life beyond Earth in our solar system," Robert Pappalardo, Europa Clipper project scientist, told the New York Times.

Early this morning SpaceX successfully launched its Starship rocket on its fifth test flight. But more importantly, CNBC points out, SpaceX "made a dramatic first catch of the rocket's more than 20-story tall booster."

Watch the footage here. It's pretty exciting... The achievement marks a major milestone toward SpaceX's goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system... The rocket's "Super Heavy" booster returned to land on the arms of the company's launch tower nearly seven minutes after launch.

"Are you kidding me?" SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the company's webcast. "What we just saw, that looked like magic," Huot added...

Starship separated and continued on to space, traveling halfway around the Earth before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean as intended to complete the test. There were no people on board the fifth Starship flight. The company's leadership has said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew...

With the booster catch, SpaceX has surpassed the fourth test flight's milestones... The company sees the ambitious catch approach as critical to its goal of making the rocket fully reusable. "SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success," the company wrote on its website.

NASA confirmed that it's working with international partners and standards organizations to create a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) for future lunar exploration. This time standard will account for relativity and be scalable for other celestial bodies, supporting long-term missions like Artemis and commercial space activities. From the report: The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how scientists calculate Earth's globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Exactly where at the Moon is still to be determined, since current analysis indicates that atomic clocks placed at the Moon's surface will appear to 'tick' faster by microseconds per day. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. NASA and its partners are currently researching which mathematical models will be best for establishing a lunar time.

To put these numbers into perspective, a hummingbird's wings flap about 50 times per second. Each flap is about .02 seconds, or 20,000 microseconds. So, while 56 microseconds may seem miniscule, when discussing distances in space, tiny bits of time add up. "For something traveling at the speed of light, 56 microseconds is enough time to travel the distance of approximately 168 football fields," said Cheryl Gramling, lead on lunar position, navigation, timing, and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "If someone is orbiting the Moon, an observer on Earth who isn't compensating for the effects of relativity over a day would think that the orbiting astronaut is approximately 168 football fields away from where the astronaut really is."

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are leading efforts to curb the sale of compounded GLP-1 medications. Lilly has issued hundreds of cease-and-desist letters to entities selling compounded tirzepatide, following the end of its FDA-declared shortage. Novo Nordisk, whose semaglutide drugs remain in shortage, is taking a different approach. The company published a peer-reviewed study in Pharmaceutical Research, highlighting quality concerns in compounded semaglutide samples, including lower-than-claimed strength and banned ingredients. These actions signal a broader industry pushback against compounders who entered the market during drug shortages. Wired adds: With mounting evidence that GLP-1s like tirzepatide are an effective treatment for other ailments beyond obesity and diabetes -- including addiction and Parkinson's disease -- demand is only expected to increase. It remains to be seen whether the pharmaceutical companies will be able to keep pace with the demand or if the meds will go back into shortage and compounders will be able to bound back into the market.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Imagine three people huddled in a circle so when one speaks, only one other hears. Scientists have created a device that works like that, ensuring sound waves ripple in one direction only. The device, developed by scientists at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, is made up of a disk-shaped cavity with three equally-spaced ports that can each send or receive sound. In an inactive state, sound transmitted from port 1 is audible to ports 2 and 3 at equal volumes. Sound waves bounce back to port 1 as an echo as well. When the system is running, however, only port 2 hears port 1's sounds.

The trick is to blow swirling air into the cavity at a specific speed and intensity, which allows the sound waves to synchronize in a repeating pattern. That not only guides the sound waves in a single direction, but gives more energy to those oscillations so they don't dissipate. It's kind of like a roundabout for sound. The scientists say their technique may inform the design of future communications technologies. New metamaterials could be made to manipulate not just sound waves but potentially electromagnetic waves too. "This concept of loss-compensated non-reciprocal wave propagation is, in our view, an important result that can also be transferred to other systems," says senior researcher Nicolas Noiray. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

The oldest human on record, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to the age of 122. What are the odds that the rest of us get there, too? Not high, barring a transformative medical breakthrough, according to research published this week in the journal Nature Aging. From a report: The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest: Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Data from the United States was also included, though the country's life expectancy is lower.

The researchers found that while average life expectancies increased during that time in all of the locations, the rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong, where life expectancy did not decelerate. The data suggests that after decades of life expectancy marching upward thanks to medical and technological advancements, humans could be closing in on the limits of what's possible for average life span. "We're basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we're going to live," said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, who led the study. He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years -- approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women -- an average age that several countries are already close to achieving.

In a rare disclosure, the U.S. Space Force announced that its secretive X-37B spaceplane will execute a series of maneuvers before returning back to Earth. SpaceNews reports: The reusable spacecraft, which has been in orbit since December 28, 2023, will perform aerobraking maneuvers to alter its trajectory around Earth, the Space Force said Oct. 10. This technique involves making multiple passes through the planet's upper atmosphere, using atmospheric drag to modify the vehicle's orbit while conserving fuel. These maneuvers also are intended to showcase responsible space operations, the Space Force said. The aerobraking enables the spaceplane to change orbits and comply with space debris mitigation rules by safely discarding the service module.

The X-37B, manufactured by Boeing, is jointly operated by the U.S. Space Force and the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. Since its launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the spaceplane has been conducting radiation effect experiments and testing space domain awareness technologies in a highly elliptical orbit. [...] After completing its aerobraking maneuvers, the X-37B will resume its testing and experimentation objectives. Once these are accomplished, the vehicle will de-orbit and return to Earth, utilizing its autonomous landing system to touch down horizontally like a conventional aircraft. The Space Force has not disclosed the expected duration of the current mission.

Any breach of what climate scientists agree is the safer limit on global warming would result in "irreversible consequences" for the planet, said a major academic study published on Wednesday. From a eport: Even temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius before bringing temperatures back down -- a scenario known as an "overshoot" -- could cause sea level rises and other disastrous repercussions that might last millenia. This "does away with the notion that overshoot delivers a similar climate outcome" to a future where more was done earlier to curb global warming, said Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, who led the study co-authored by 30 scientists.

The findings, three years in the making, are urgent, as the goal of capping global temperature rises at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is slipping out of reach. Emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases must nearly halve by 2030 if the world is to reach 1.5C -- the more ambitious target enshrined in the 2015 Paris climate accord.