We have discovered a lot in this universe. Planets that orbit stars at right angles. Forbidden worlds that have cheated death. Space explosions that defy explanation. Yet the cosmos continues to surprise us. The latest spectacle, observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, is an agglomeration of nearly 150 free-floating objects amid the Orion Nebula, not far in mass from Jupiter. From a report: Dozens of these worlds are even orbiting each other. The scientists who discovered them have called them Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs, and the reason for their appearance is a complete mystery. "There's something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation -- or both," said Samuel Pearson, a scientist at the European Space Agency who worked on the observations that were shared on Monday, which have not yet been peer reviewed. "They shouldn't exist."

The Orion Nebula is a region of star formation 1,350 light-years from Earth, located in the belt of the northern hemisphere constellation of Orion. It has long been studied by astronomers, but the scientists involved in the new Webb telescope study of the area, also released on Monday, say the new images are "by far" the best views yet. "We have better than Hubble resolution but now in the infrared," said Mark McCaughrean, a senior adviser for science and exploration at the ESA. He said the latest observations revealed reams of star formation and fledgling planetary systems in a manner never seen before.

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, who together identified a chemical tweak to messenger RNA, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. Their work enabled potent Covid vaccines to be made in less than a year, averting tens of millions of deaths and helping the world recover from the worst pandemic in a century. From a report: The approach to mRNA the two researchers developed has been used in Covid shots that have since been administered billions of times globally and has transformed vaccine technology, laying the foundation for inoculations that may one day protect against a number of deadly diseases like cancer. The slow and methodical research that made the Covid shots possible has now run up against a powerful anti-vaccine movement, especially in the United States. Skeptics have seized in part on the vaccines' rapid development -- among the most impressive feats of modern medical science -- to undermine the public's trust in them.

But the breakthroughs behind the shots unfolded little by little over decades, including at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Weissman runs a lab. [...] The mRNA work was especially frustrating, she said, because it was met with indifference and a lack of funds. She said she was motivated by more than not being called a quitter; as the work progressed, she saw small signs that her project could lead to better vaccines. "You don't persevere and repeat and repeat just to say, 'I am not giving up,'" she said.

Researchers from several U.S. institutions are collaborating "to develop and test an implantable device able to sense signs of the kind of inflammation associated with cancer," reports CBS News, "and delivery therapy when needed." Northwestern said the implant could significantly improve outcomes for patients with ovarian, pancreatic and other difficult-to-treat cancers — potentially cutting cancer-related deaths in the U.S. in half. "Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we'll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time," said Rice University bioengineer Omid Veiseh. "This kind of 'closed-loop therapy' has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it's revolutionary."
The project and team are named THOR, an acronym for "targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation..." explains an announcement from Johns Hopkins. "THOR's proposed implant, or 'hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator,' goes by the acronym HAMMR..."

The project will take five and a half years, and includes funding for a first-phase clinical trial treating recurrent ovarian cancer slated to begin in the fourth year. The research is funded by America's newly-established Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), according to a statement from the agency, representing its "commitment to supporting Cancer Moonshot goals of decreasing cancer deaths and improving the quality of life for patients..."

And they're also funding two more projects: The Synthetic Programmable bacteria for Immune-directed Killing in tumor Environments (SPIKEs) project, led by a team at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, aims to develop an inexpensive and safe therapy using bacteria specifically selected for tumor-targeting. Through SPIKEs, researchers intend to engineer bacteria that can recruit and regulate tumor-targeting immune cells, boosting the body's ability to fight off cancer without side-effects from traditional medications. Up to $19 million is allocated towards SPIKEs.

An additional project, with up to $50 million in potential funding inclusive of options, seeks to map cancer cell biomarkers to drastically improve multi-cancer early detection (MCED) and streamline clinical intervention when tumors are still small. Led by the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, the Cancer and Organ Degradome Atlas (CODA) project aims to understand the cellular profiles unique to diseased cancer cells. The CODA platform intends to develop a suite of biosensor tools that can reliably recognize a range of cancer-specific markers and, ultimately, produce a highly precise, accurate, and cost-effective MCED test that can identify common cancers when they are most treatable.
In a statement, ARPA-H's director said that "With these awards, we hope to see crucial advancements in patient-tailored therapies, better and earlier tumor detection methods, and cell therapies that can help the immune system target cancer cells for destruction."

The New York Times reports that a "squadron of young scientists and an army of volunteers" are "waging an all-out war on a creature that threatens the health of more people than any other on earth: the mosquito." They are testing new insecticides and ingenious new ways to deliver them. They are peering in windows at night, watching for the mosquitoes that home in on sleeping people. They are collecting blood — from babies, from moto-taxi drivers, from goat herders and from their goats — to track the parasites the mosquitoes carry. But Eric Ochomo, the entomologist leading this effort on the front lines of global public health, stood recently in the swampy grass, laptop in hand, and acknowledged a grim reality: "It seems as though the mosquitoes are winning."

Less than a decade ago, it was the humans who appeared to have gained the clear edge in the fight — more than a century old — against the mosquito. But over the past few years, that progress has not only stalled, it has reversed. The insecticides used since the 1970s, to spray in houses and on bed nets to protect sleeping children, have become far less effective; mosquitoes have evolved to survive them. After declining to a historic low in 2015, malaria cases and deaths are rising... This past summer, the United States saw its first locally transmitted cases of malaria in 20 years, with nine cases reported, in Texas, Florida and Maryland. "The situation has become challenging in new ways in places that have historically had these mosquitoes, and also at the same time other places are going to face new threats because of climate and environmental factors," Ochomo said...

Malaria has killed more people than any other disease over the course of human history. Until this century, the battle against the parasite was badly one-sided. Then, between 2000 and 2015, malaria cases dropped by one-third worldwide, and mortality decreased by nearly half, because of widespread use of insecticides inside homes, insecticide-coated bed nets and better treatments. Clinical trials showed promise for malaria vaccines that might protect the children who make up the bulk of malaria deaths. That success lured new investment and talk of wiping the disease out altogether.

But malaria deaths, which fell to a historic low of about 575,000 in 2019, rose significantly over the next two years and stood at 620,000 in 2021, the last year for which there is global data.
Thanks to antdude (Slashdot reader #79,039) for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Scientists have witnessed brain patterns in dying patients that may correlate to commonly reported "near-death" experiences (NDEs) such as lucid visions, out-of-body sensations, a review of one's own life, and other "dimensions of reality," reports a new study. The results offer the first comprehensive evidence that patient recollections and brain waves point to universal elements of NDEs. During an expansive multi-year study led by Sam Parnia, an intensive care doctor and an associate professor in the department of medicine at NYU Langone Health, researchers observed 567 patients in 25 hospitals around the world as they underwent cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after suffering cardiac arrest, most of which were fatal.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) brain signals captured from dozens of the patients revealed that episodes of heightened consciousness occurred up to an hour after cardiac arrest. Though most of the patients in the study were sadly not resuscitated by CPR, 53 patients were brought back to life. Of the survivors, 11 patients reported a sense of awareness during CPR and six reported a near-death experience. Parnia and his colleagues suggest that the transition from life to death can trigger a state of disinhibition in the brain that "appears to facilitate lucid understanding of new dimensions of reality -- including people's deeper consciousness -- all memories, thoughts, intentions and actions towards others from a moral and ethical perspective," a finding with profound implications for CPR research, end-of-life care, and consciousness, among other fields, according to a new study published in Resuscitation. [...]

"One of the things that was unique about this project is that this was the first time ever where scientists had put together a method to examine for signs of lucidity and consciousness in people as they're being revived by looking for brain markers, or brain signatures of consciousness, using an EEG device as well as a brain oxygen monitor," Parnia explained. "Most doctors are taught and believe that the brain dies after about five or 10 minutes of oxygen deprivation," Parnia said. "One of the key points that comes out of this study is that that is actually not true. Although the brain flatlines after the heart stops, and that happens within seconds, it doesn't mean that it's permanently damaged and [has] died. It's just hibernating. What we were able to show is that actually, the brain can respond and restore function again, even after an hour later, which opens up a whole window of opportunity for doctors to start new treatments." Indeed, the study reports that "near-normal/physiological EEG activity (delta, theta, alpha, beta rhythms) consistent with consciousness and a possible resumption of a network-level of cognitive and neuronal activity emerged up to 35-60 minutes into CPR. This is the first report of biomarkers of consciousness during CA/CPR."

Mike Wall writes via Space.com: OSIRIS-REx's asteroid-sample canister just creaked open for the first time in more than seven years. Scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston lifted the canister's outer lid on Tuesday (Sept. 26), two days after OSIRIS-REx's return capsule landed in the desert of northern Utah. "Scientists gasped as the lid was lifted," NASA's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division, which is based at JSC, wrote Tuesday in a post on X (formerly Twitter). The operation revealed "dark powder and sand-sized particles on the inside of the lid and base," they added.

That powder once resided on the surface of an asteroid named Bennu, the focus of the OSIRIS-REx mission. OSIRIS-REx launched toward the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) Bennu in September 2016, arrived in December 2018 and snagged a hefty sample from the space rock in October 2020 using its Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM. The asteroid material landed in Utah inside OSIRIS-REx's return capsule on Sunday (Sept. 24), then made its way to Houston by plane on Monday (Sept. 25). It will be stored and curated at JSC, where the team will oversee its distribution to scientists around the world.

Researchers will study the sample for decades to come, seeking insights about the the solar system's formation and early evolution, as well as the role that carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in seeding Earth with the building blocks of life. But that work isn't ready to begin; the ARES team hasn't even accessed the main asteroid sample yet. Doing so requires disassembly of the TAGSAM apparatus, an intricate operation that will take considerable time.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine demanding an "honest" debate over the cost of net zero in a report full of errors that even a schoolboy would be embarrassed about. Then imagine getting coverage of your report in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. Sound impossible? Well, let me tell you how Civitas, one of the thinktanks housed at 55 Tufton Street in London, did exactly that, and nearly got away with it. On Wednesday, Civitas published a pamphlet on net zero by Ewen Stewart, whose consultancy, Walbrook Economics, works on "the interaction of macroeconomics, politics and capital markets." Stewart is also a climate sceptic, having written in 2021 that human-caused warming is a "contested theory." Along with Civitas, 55 Tufton Street also houses the climate-sceptic lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation and its campaigning arm Net Zero Watch. These groups previously attempted to spark an "honest debate about the cost of net-zero" in 2020.

The Civitas report claims to offer a "realistic" $5.5tn estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and says "the government need to be honest with the British people." This estimate is much higher than the figure produced by the government's official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of $1.71tn by 2050. Note the difference between Civitas's "costs" and the CCC's "net investments." The CCC also found that reaching net zero would generate savings in the form of lower fossil fuel bills worth $1.34tn, resulting in a net cost of $0.37tn. In his report for Civitas, Stewart adopts the well-worn climate-sceptic tactic of simply ignoring these savings. He also ignores what the Office for Budget Responsibility has called the potentially "catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences" of unmitigated climate change. The report was timed to follow hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak's big climate speech, in which he called for an "honest" approach to net zero that ends "unacceptable costs."

Last month, India became the first country to put a spacecraft near the lunar south pole -- breaking China's record for the southernmost lunar landing. Now, the so-called father of China's lunar exploration program, Ouyang Ziyuan, said claims about the accomplishment are overstated. Time reports: Ziyuan [...] told the Chinese-language Science Times newspaper that the Chandrayaan-3 landing site, at 69 degrees south latitude, was nowhere close to the pole, defined as between 88.5 and 90 degrees. On Earth, 69 degrees south would be within the Antarctic Circle, but the lunar version of the circle is much closer to the pole.

"It's wrong!" he said of claims for an Indian polar landing. "The landing site of Chandrayaan-3 is not at the lunar south pole, not in the lunar south pole region, nor is it near the lunar south pole region." The Chandrayaan-3 was 619 kilometers (385 miles) distant from the polar region, Ouyang said.

Astronomers have captured the first direct evidence of a black hole spinning, providing new insights into the universe's most enigmatic objects. From a report: The observations focus on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the neighbouring Messier 87 galaxy, whose shadow was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. Like many supermassive black holes, M87 features powerful jets that are launched from the poles at close to the speed of light into intergalactic space. Scientists have predicted that the rotation of a black hole powers these cosmic jets, but until now direct evidence was elusive.

"After the success of black hole imaging in this galaxy with the Event Horizon Telescope, whether this black hole is spinning or not has been a central concern among scientists," said Dr Kazuhiro Hada, of the national astronomical observatory of Japan and co-author. "Now anticipation has turned into certainty. This monster black hole is indeed spinning." M87 is located 55m light years from the Earth and harbours a black hole 6.5bn times more massive than the Sun. Just beyond the black hole is an accretion disk of gas and dust, swirling on the precipice of the cosmic sinkhole. Some of this material is destined to fall into the black hole, disappearing for ever. But a fraction will be ejected out from the poles of the black hole at more than 99.99% of the speed of light. The paper: Precessing jet nozzle connecting to a spinning black hole in M87 (Nature).

Jude Karabus writes via The Register: NASA has confirmed it will ask American companies to duke it out for the opportunity to deorbit the International Space Station -- quietly releasing a request for proposals last week. The specs, which appeared on U.S. government e-procurement portal SAM.gov, are for a vehicle the agency has dubbed the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), which will be focused on the space station's final deorbit activity. According to NASA, it will be a "new spacecraft design or modification to an existing spacecraft" that must function on its first flight (yep, important that), as well as have "sufficient redundancy and anomaly recovery capability to continue the critical deorbit burn."

NASA is getting in well ahead of the 2030 deadline, by which time the agency is hoping to have "seamlessly transitioned" to commercially owned and operated platforms in low Earth orbit (LEO). The vehicle will take years to develop, test, and certify. The request for proposals (RFP) is a confirmation that the agency is going to go with the second option it floated in March, saying a private contractor would cut costs down from a predicted $1 billion.

Many readers shared this report: Antimatter just lost a little more pizazz. Physicists know that for every fundamental particle in nature there is an antiparticle -- an evil twin of identical mass but endowed with equal and opposite characteristics like charge and spin. When these twins meet, they obliterate each other, releasing a flash of energy on contact. In science fiction, antiparticles provide the power for warp drives. Some physicists have speculated that antiparticles are being repelled by gravity or even traveling backward in time.

A new experiment at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, brings some of that speculation back down to Earth. In a gravitational field, it turns out, antiparticles fall just like the rest of us. "The bottom line is that there's no free lunch, and we're not going to be able to levitate using antimatter," said Joel Fajans of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Fajans was part of an international team known as ALPHA, the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus collaboration, which is based at CERN and led by Jeffrey Hangst, a particle physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Dr. Fajans and his colleagues assembled about 100 hundred anti-atoms of hydrogen and suspended them in a magnetic field. When the field was slowly ramped down, the anti-hydrogen atoms drifted down like maple leaves in October and at the same rate of downward acceleration, or g force, as regular atoms: about 32 feet per second per second. They published their result on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Few physicists were surprised by the result. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, all forms of matter and energy respond equally to gravity.

Stanford's president and a high-profile physicist are among those taken down by a growing wave of volunteers who expose faulty or fraudulent research papers. WSJ: An award-winning Harvard Business School professor and researcher spent years exploring the reasons people lie and cheat. A trio of behavioral scientists examining a handful of her academic papers concluded her own findings were drawn from falsified data. It was a routine takedown for the three scientists -- Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn -- who have gained academic renown for debunking published studies built on faulty or fraudulent data. They use tips, number crunching and gut instincts to uncover deception. Over the past decade, they have come to their own finding: Numbers don't lie but people do.

"Once you see the pattern across many different papers, it becomes like a one in quadrillion chance that there's some benign explanation," said Simmons, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the trio who report their work on a blog called Data Colada. Simmons and his two colleagues are among a growing number of scientists in various fields around the world who moonlight as data detectives, sifting through studies published in scholarly journals for evidence of fraud. At least 5,500 faulty papers were retracted in 2022, compared with 119 in 2002, according to Retraction Watch, a website that keeps a tally. The jump largely reflects the investigative work of the Data Colada scientists and many other academic volunteers, said Dr. Ivan Oransky, the site's co-founder. Their discoveries have led to embarrassing retractions, upended careers and retaliatory lawsuits.

Neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down last month as president of Stanford University, following years of criticism about data in his published studies. Posts on PubPeer, a website where scientists dissect published studies, triggered scrutiny by the Stanford Daily. A university investigation followed, and three studies he co-wrote were retracted. Stanford concluded that although Tessier-Lavigne didn't personally engage in research misconduct or know about misconduct by others, he "failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record."

According to Universe Today, China may utilize lunar caves as potential habitats for astronauts on the Moon, offering defense against hazards like radiation, meteorites, and temperature variations. From the report: Different teams of scientists from different countries and agencies have studied the idea of using lava tubes as shelter. At a recent conference in China, Zhang Chongfeng from the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology presented a study into the underground world of lava tubes. Chinese researchers did fieldwork in Chinese lava tubes to understand how to use them on the Moon. According to Zhang, there's enough similarity between lunar and Earthly lava tubes for one to be an analogue of the other. It starts with their two types of entrances, vertical and sloped. Both worlds have both types.

Most of what we've found on the Moon are vertical-opening tubes, but that may be because of our overhead view. The openings are called skylights, where the ceiling has collapsed and left a debris accumulation on the floor of the tube directly below it. Entering through these requires either flight or some type of vertical lift equipment. Sloped entrances make entry and exit much easier. It's possible that rovers could simply drive into them, though some debris would probably need to be cleared. According to Zhang, this is the preferred entrance that makes exploration easier. China is prioritizing lunar lava tubes at Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) and Mare Fecunditatis (Sea of Fecundity) for exploration.

China is planning a robotic system that can explore caves like the one in Mare Tranquillitatis. The primary probe will have either wheels or feet and will be built to adapt to challenging terrain and to overcome obstacles. It'll also have a scientific payload. Auxiliary vehicles can separate from the main probe to perform more reconnaissance and help with communications and "energy support." They could be diversified so the mission can meet different challenges. They might include multi-legged crawling probes, rolling probes, and even bouncing probes. These auxiliary vehicles would also have science instruments to study the lunar dust, radiation, and the presence of water ice in the tubes. China is also planning a flight-capable robot that could find its way through lava tubes autonomously using microwave and laser radars. "China's future plan, after successful exploration, is a crewed base," the report adds. "It would be a long-term underground research base in one of the lunar lava tubes, with a support center for energy and communication at the tube's entrance. The terrain would be landscaped, and the base would include both residential and research facilities inside the tube."

"[R]egardless of when they start, China seems committed to the idea. Ding Lieyun, a top scientist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, told the China Science Daily that 'Eventually, building habitation beyond the Earth is essential not only for all humanity's quest for space exploration but also for China's strategic needs as a space power.'"

Michelle Butterfield writes via Global News: A team of scientists, led by a Japanese pharmaceutical startup, are getting set to start human trials on a new drug that has successfully grown new teeth in animal test subjects. Toregem Biopharma is slated to begin clinical trials in July of next year after it succeeded growing new teeth in mice five years ago, the Japan Times reports. Dr. Katsu Takahashi, a lead researcher on the project and head of the dentistry and oral surgery department at the Medical Research Institute Kitano Hospital, says "the idea of growing new teeth is every dentist's dream."

In his research, which he's been conducting at Kyoto University since 2005, Takahashi learned of a particular gene in mice that affects the growth of their teeth. The antibody for this gene, USAG-1, can help stimulate tooth growth if it is suppressed -- and scientists have since worked to develop a "neutralizing antibody medicine" that is able to block USAG-1. Now, his team has been testing the theory that "blocking" this protein could grow more teeth. After their successful tests on mice, the team went on to perform similarly positive trials on ferrets -- animals who have a similar dental pattern to humans.

Now, testing will turn to healthy adult humans and, if all goes well, the team plans to hold a clinical trial for the drug from 2025 for children between two and six years old with anodontia -- a rare genetic disorder that results in the absence of six or more baby and/or adult teeth. According to the Japan Times, the children involved in the clinical trial will be injected with one dose of the drug to see if it induces teeth growth. If successful, the medicine could be available for regulatory approval by 2030.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will replace CEO Bob Smith with outgoing Amazon executive Dave Limp, CNBC has learned. Smith is retiring effective Dec. 4 and will remain with the company until Jan. 2 for the CEO transition, according to notes to Blue Origin staff written by Smith and Bezos that were obtained by CNBC.

Limp joins Blue Origin at a key phase of the company's multiple space projects. Blue needs to ramp production of its BE-4 rocket engines, return its space tourism rocket New Shepard to flight, and launch its next-generation New Glenn rocket for the first time -- as well as deliver on a recently-won NASA contract for a crewed lunar lander.

In a statement to CNBC, a Blue Origin spokesperson praised Limp as "a proven innovator with a customer-first mindset" who has "extensive experience in the high-tech industry and growing highly complex organizations." Amazon announced last month that Limp would be stepping down later this year. As Amazon's devices and services chief, Limp oversaw Amazon's Alexa, Echo and Ring units, as well as some of its more experimental divisions like Zoox autonomous vehicles, and the Project Kuiper internet satellite business.

OSIRIS-REx weighs 4,650 pounds (or 2,110 kg). On September 8th of 2016, NASA first launched the spacecraft on its 3.8-billion mile mission to land on an asteroid and retrieve a sample.

That sample has just returned.

Throughout Sunday morning, NASA tweeted historic updates from the sample's landing site in Utah. "We've spotted the #OSIRISREx capsule on the ground," they announced about 80 minutes ago (including a 23-second video clip). "The parachute has separated, and the helicopters are arriving at the site. We're ready to recover that sample!"

UPI notes that the capsule "reached temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit during reentry, so protective masks and gloves are required to handle it," describing its payload as "a 250-gram dust sample."

15 minutes later NASA shared footage of "the first persons to come into contact with this hardware since it was on the other side of the solar system." A recovery team approached the capsule to perform an environmental safety sweep confirming there were no hazardous gas.

"The impossible became possible," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. The Guardian reports he confirmed the capsule "brought something extraordinary — the largest asteroid sample ever received on Earth.

"It's going to help scientists investigate planet formation, it's going to improve our understanding of the asteroids that could possibly impact the earth and it will deepen our understanding of the origin of our solar system and its formation."

"This mission proves that NASA does big things, things that have inspired us, things that unite us...

"The mission continues with incredible science and analysis to come. But I want to thank you all, for everybody that made this Osiris-Rex mission possible."

Professor Neil Bowles of the University of Oxford, one of the scientists who will study the sample, told the Guardian that he was excited to see the sample heading to the clean room at Johnson Space Center. "So much new science to come!"

And that 4,650-pound spacecraft is still hurtling through space. 20 minutes after delivering its sample, the craft " fired its engines to divert past Earth toward its new mission to asteroid Apophis," NASA reports. The name of its new mission? OSIRIS-APEX. Roughly 1,000 feet wide, Apophis will come within 20,000 miles of Earth — less than one-tenth the distance between Earth and the Moon — in 2029. OSIRIS-APEX is scheduled to enter orbit of Apophis soon after the asteroid's close approach of Earth to see how the encounter affected the asteroid's orbit, spin rate, and surface.

Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies — which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. "Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK," explains the ceremony web page, promising that "a gaggle of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel winners." As co-founder Marc Abrahams says on his LinkedIn profile, "All these things celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

You can watch this year's entire goofy webcast online. (At 50 minutes there's a jaw-droppingly weird music video about running on water...) Slashdot reader Thorfinn.au shares this summary of this year's winning research: CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et al.

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for 1968 experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

"As the sun rose on Friday over the lunar plateau where India's Vikram lander and Pragyan rover sit, the robotic explorers remained silent," writes the New York Times: The Indian Space Research Organization, India's equivalent of NASA, said on Friday that mission controllers on the ground had sent a wake-up message to Vikram. The lander, as expected, did not reply. Efforts will continue over the next few days, but this could well be the conclusion of Chandrayaan-3, India's first successful space mission to the surface of another world...

The hope was that when sunlight again warmed the solar panels, the spacecraft would recharge and revive. But that was wishful thinking. Neither Vikram nor Pragyan were designed to survive a long, frigid lunar night when temperatures plunge to more than a hundred degrees below zero, far colder than the electronic components were designed for. The spacecraft designers could have added heaters or used more resilient components, but that would have added cost, weight and complexity...

The mission's science observations included a temperature probe deployed from Vikram that pushed into the lunar soil. The probe recorded a sharp drop, from about 120 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface to 10 degrees just three inches down. Lunar soil is a poor conductor of heat. The poor heat conduction could be a boon for future astronauts; an underground outpost would be well-insulated from the enormous temperature swings at the surface. Another instrument on Vikram, a seismometer, detected on Aug. 26 what appeared to be a moonquake... The Pragyan measurement suggests that concentrations of sulfur might be higher in the polar regions. Sulfur is a useful element in technologies like solar cells and batteries, as well as in fertilizer and concrete.

Before it went to sleep earlier this month, Vikram made a small final move, firing its engines to rise about 16 inches above the surface before softly landing again. The hop shifted Vikram's position by 12 to 16 inches, ISRO said. "Hoping for a successful awakening for another set of assignments!" ISRO posted on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, on Sept. 2. "Else, it will forever stay there as India's lunar ambassador."
"Efforts to establish contact will continue," ISRO tweeted yesterday...

In 2020 Serbian scientists were gifted China's "Fire-Eye" labs, remembers the Washington Post. The sophisticated portable labs "excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors."

Although some of them were temporary, "scores" of the portable labs "were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. But it adds that now those same labs "are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China's intentions." Some analysts perceive China's largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world. That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said. Amid the pandemic, Fire-Eye labs would proliferate quickly, spreading to four continents and more than 20 countries, from Canada and Latvia to Saudi Arabia, and from Ethiopia and South Africa to Australia. Several, like the one in Belgrade, now function as permanent genetic-testing centers...

BGI Group, the Shenzhen-based company that makes Fire-Eye labs, said it has no access to genetic information collected by the lab it helped create in Serbia. But U.S. officials note that BGI was picked by Beijing to build and operate the China National GeneBank, a vast and growing government-owned repository that now includes genetic data drawn from millions of people around the world. The Pentagon last year officially listed BGI as one of several "Chinese military companies" operating in the United States, and a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment linked the company to the Beijing-directed global effort to obtain even more human DNA, including from the United States. The U.S. government also has blacklisted Chinese subsidiaries of BGI for allegedly helping analyze genetic material gathered inside China to assist government crackdowns on the country's ethnic and religious minorities...

Beijing's drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet has occasionally stirred controversy, particularly after a 2021 Reuters series about aspects of the project. Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes. Genetic-based weapons are regarded by experts as a distant prospect, at best, and some of the discussion appears to have been prompted by official paranoia about whether the United States and other countries are exploring such weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials believe China's global effort is mostly about beating the West economically, not militarily. There is no public evidence that Chinese companies have used foreign DNA for reasons other than scientific research. China has announced plans to become the world's leader in biotechnology by 2035, and it regards genetic information — sometimes called "the new gold" — as a crucial ingredient in a scientific revolution that could produce thousands of new drugs and cures...

U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that they have limited insight into how BGI handles DNA information acquired overseas, including whether genetic data from the Fire-Eye labs ultimately end up in the computers of China's military or intelligence services... Chinese law makes clear that any information collected using BGI's machines can be accessed by the Chinese government. A national intelligence law enacted in 2017 stipulates that Chinese firms and citizens are legally bound to share proprietary information acquired in foreign countries whenever requested.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article

The prestigious Lasker Awards were given this week to scientists making advances in the diagnosis of eye disease, the prediction of cellular protein structure and the intricacies of the immune system. The awards, closely watched by researchers in biomedical fields, often foreshadow Nobel Prizes. The New York Times adds: The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award was given to a team of three scientists, led by James G. Fujimoto, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped invent optical coherence tomography. The technology can detect conditions like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy earlier than previous methods, preventing blindness. O.C.T. now is commonly used in ophthalmology offices, where the patient simply rests a chin and forehead against an instrument for a brief scan.

The method, invented in 1991, offers a staggering amount of detail about the retina, a layer of tissue at the back of the eye critical to vision. "It's not much thicker than a strand of hair, but it has 10 internal layers," said Dr. David Huang, an ophthalmologist at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University who helped to invent the method. Before O.C.T., an ophthalmologist could dilate a patient's eyes with eye drops to enlarge the pupil, and then use a magnifying lens and special light to examine the retina. An O.C.T. scan "can measure the thickness of the retina, the fluid pockets in it and the abnormal blood vessel growth," detecting small lesions that have not yet caused symptoms, Dr. Huang added.