There's now two million subscribers to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, with CEO Elon Musk announcing Thursday that it has "achieved breakeven cash flow..."

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from CNBC: Musk did not specify whether that milestone was hit on an operating basis or for a specified time period. Earlier this year, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink "had a cash flow positive quarter" in 2022, and the overall SpaceX company reportedly turned a profit in the first quarter of 2023.

SpaceX's valuation has soared to about $150 billion, with Starlink seen as a key economic driver of the company's goals. Two years ago, Musk emphasized that making Starlink "financially viable" required crossing "through a deep chasm of negative cash flow."

Musk has discussed spinning off Starlink to take it public through an initial public offering once the business was "in a smooth sailing situation." But timing of a Starlink IPO remains uncertain. Last year, Musk told employees that taking the business public wasn't likely until 2025 or later.

"Slabs of material from an ancient extraterrestrial planet are hidden deep within the Earth," argues a new scientific theory (as described by CNN).

"Scientists widely agree that an ancient planet likely smashed into Earth as it was forming billions of years ago, spewing debris that coalesced into the moon that decorates our night sky today." But then whatever happened to that planet? No leftover fragments from a hypothetical planet "Theia" have ever been found in our solar system.

But the new theory "suggests that remnants of the ancient planet remain partially intact, buried beneath our feet." If the theory is correct, it would not only provide additional details to fill out the giant-impact hypothesis but also answer a lingering question for geophysicists. They were already aware that there are two massive, distinct blobs that are embedded deep within the Earth. The masses — called large low-velocity provinces, or LLVPs — were first detected in the 1980s. One lies beneath Africa and another below the Pacific Ocean.
The study's lead author (Dr. Qian Yuan, a geophysicist and postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology) first proposed the idea for a paper three times in 2021 — and was rejected each time. But "then he came across scientists who did just the type of research Yuan needed." Their work, which assigned a certain size to Theia and speed of impact in the modeling, suggested that the ancient planet's collision likely did not entirely melt Earth's mantle, allowing the remnants of Theia to cool and form solid structures instead of blending together in Earth's inner stew... If Theia were a certain size and consistency, and struck the Earth at a specific speed, the models showed it could, in fact, leave behind massive hunks of its guts within Earth's mantle and also spawn the debris that would go on to create our moon...

The study Yuan published this week includes coauthors from a variety of disciplines across a range of institutions, including Arizona State, Caltech, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and NASA's Ames Research Center.

Scientists recently noticed that the chemical fingerprint of meteor particles was starting to change.

And last month Purdue University announced that "The Space Age is leaving fingerprints on one of the most remote parts of the planet — the stratosphere — which has potential implications for climate, the ozone layer and the continued habitability of Earth." Using tools hitched to the nose cone of their research planes and sampling more than 11 miles above the planet's surface, researchers have discovered significant amounts of metals in aerosols in the atmosphere, likely from increasingly frequent launches and returns of spacecraft and satellites. That mass of metal is changing atmospheric chemistry in ways that may impact Earth's atmosphere and ozone layer...

Led by Dan Murphy, an adjunct professor in Purdue's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the team detected more than 20 elements in ratios that mirror those used in spacecraft alloys. They found that the mass of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead from spacecraft reentry far exceeded those metals found in natural cosmic dust. Nearly 10% of large sulfuric acid particles — the particles that help protect and buffer the ozone layer — contained aluminum and other spacecraft metals.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

Ars Technica reports: In three-and-a-half years of service, one of SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 boosters stands apart from the rest of the company's rocket inventory. This booster, designated with the serial number B1058, has now flown 18 times.

For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit. This ended a nine-year gap in America's capability to launch astronauts into low-Earth orbit and was the first time a commercial spacecraft achieved this feat... Over the course of its flights to space and back, that white paint has darkened to a charcoal color. Soot from the rocket's exhaust has accumulated, bit by bit, on the 15-story-tall cylinder-shaped booster. The red NASA worm logo is now barely visible.

On Friday night, this rocket launched for the 18th time, breaking a tie at 17 flights with another Falcon 9 booster in SpaceX's fleet... It fired three engines for a braking burn to slow for reentry, then ignited a single engine and extended four carbon-fiber landing legs to settle onto a floating platform holding position near the Bahamas. The drone ship will return the rocket to Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX will refurbish the vehicle for a 19th flight.
Other interesting statistics from the article:

• This single booster rocket has launched 846 satellites into space. (Astrophysicist/spaceflight tracker Jonathan McDowell calculates there are now over 5,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.)

• A SpaceX official told Ars Technica the company might extend the limit on Falcon 9 booster flights beyond 20 for Starlink satellites.

• Friday's launch became the 79th launch so far in 2023 of a Falcon rocket, with SpaceX aiming for a total of 100 by the end of December, and 144 in 2023 (an average of one flight every two-and-a-half days).

• Since 2016, SpaceX has now had 249 consecutive successful launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets

"Software that controls your body should always respect your freedom," warns the program manager of the Free Software Foundation: In July, users of the proprietary software app LibreLink, who live in the UK and use Apple devices, found that the app they depend on to monitor their blood sugar was not working anymore after the developer Abbott pushed an update for the app... Despite what its name may suggest, there is nothing libre about the LibreLink app. It's proprietary software, which means users must depend on the company to keep it running and to distribute it. With free software, [a user] would have had the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software himself, or he could have leaned on a community of developers and users to share and fix the software, and the old version of the software would have been available to revert the update...

Two months later, with Apple's update to iOS 17, users of the FreeStyle LibreLink and Libre 2 apps had reason again to fear that the software they rely on wouldn't work after updating their iPhones. This time, users all over the world were affected. In September, Abbott warned Apple users: "As part of the upcoming iOS 17 release, Apple is introducing StandBy Mode and Assistive Access Mode ... this release may impact your experience with the FreeStyle Libre 2 app, the FreeStyle LibreLink app, or the FreeStyle LibreLinkUp app. We recommend that you disable automatic operating system updates on the smartphone using the mentioned apps." This warning was made because StandBy Mode would sometimes prohibit time-sensitive notifications such as glucose alarms, and the Assistive Access Mode would impact sensor activation and alarm setting modification in the app...

And a scenario where a company abandons service or updates to its users is not merely theoretical. This is the bitter reality faced by users of eye implants produced by Second Sight Medical Products since the company decided to abandon the technology in 2020 when facing the prospect of bankruptcy. [">According to IEEE Spectrum], Terry Byland, whose sight has been dependent on the first-generation Argus implant since 2004, says of his experience, "As long as nothing goes wrong, I'm fine. But if something does go wrong with it, well, I'm screwed. Because there's no way of getting it fixed." That's what also happened to Barbara Campbell, whose retinal implant suddenly stopped working when she was on a subway...

It's up to us advocates of free software to inform the people around us of the issues with proprietary software in medical aids. Let's encourage our friends, parents, and grandparents to ask their doctor about the software in their medical devices and to choose and insist upon free software over proprietary software.

During a close flyby of the asteroid Dinkinesh, NASA's Lucy spacecraft discovered a mini moon a mere one-tenth-of-a-mile (220 meters) in size. For comparison, Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. The Associated Press reports: NASA sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter. Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids now stands at 11. Dinkinesh means "you are marvelous" in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It's also the Amharic name for Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia in the 1970s, for which the spacecraft is named.

Jeff Foust reports via SpaceNews: A NASA official opened the door to keeping the International Space Station in operation beyond 2030 if commercial space stations are not yet ready to take over by the end of the decade. Speaking at the Beyond Earth Symposium here Nov. 2, Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said it was "not mandatory" to retire the ISS as currently planned at the end of the decade depending on the progress companies are making on commercial stations. "The timeline is flexible," he said of that transition from the ISS to commercial stations. "It's not mandatory that we stop flying the ISS in 2030. But, it is our full intention to switch to new platforms when they're available." [...]

Bowersox acknowledged that schedule depends on the readiness of those commercial stations. "When it happens is going to depend a lot the maturity of the market," he said, which includes both the status of commercial stations and non-NASA customers for them. He made it clear that NASA does not expect to be the only customer for commercial stations. NASA's current requirements for those stations anticipate having two astronauts at a time on them, less than the ISS. "We looked at what we thought would be reasonable and what would actually give us a cost savings," he said of that requirement. "My biggest concern is if we get too far ahead of where the market and NASA has to carry the full cost of the platforms for longer, and we transition too quickly," he said. That could force NASA to move money from current ISS utilization to support those stations. "If we have a badly managed transition, we could find ourselves getting weak in those areas."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth's rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds — pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it's hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world's timekeepers.

"Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy," said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world's clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: "I get a bazillion emails." On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime. The proposal from Levine may face opposition from vested interests and strong opinions in the international community -- notably, the Russians and the Vatican. "The head of the IBWM (or BIPM in French) said in November 2022 that Russia opposed the dropping of leap seconds because it wanted to wait until 2040," reports Ars Technica. "The nation's satellite positioning system, GLONASS, was built with leap seconds in mind, and reworking the system would seemingly be taxing."

"There's also the Vatican, which has concerned itself with astronomy since at least the Gregorian Calendar, and may also oppose the removal of leap seconds. The Rev. Paul Gabor, astrophysicist and vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Arizona, has been quoted and cited as opposing the deeper separation of human and planetary time. Keeping proper time, Gabor wrote his 2017 book The Science of Time, is 'one of the oldest missions of astronomy.'"

"In the current Leap Second Debate, there are rational arguments, focused on practical considerations, and there is a certain unspoken unease, emerging from the symbolic substrata of the issues involved," Gabor writes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Ken Mattingly, who orbited the moon and commanded a pair of NASA shuttle missions, but who was remembered as well for the flight he didn't make -- the near-disastrous mission of Apollo 13 -- died on Tuesday in Arlington, Va. He was 87. His death was confirmed by Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokeswoman. She did not specify the cause or say whether he died at home in Arlington or in a hospital there. Mr. Mattingly, a former Navy jet pilot with a degree in aeronautical engineering, joined NASA in 1966. But his first spaceflight didn't come until April 1972, when the space agency launched Apollo 16, the next-to-last manned mission to the moon. Piloting the spacecraft's command module in orbit while holding the rank of lieutenant commander, he took extensive photos of the moon's terrain and conducted experiments while Cmdr.John W. Young of the Navy and Lt. Col. Charles M. Duke Jr. of the Air Force, having descended in the lunar lander, collected rock and soil samples from highlands near the crater known as Descartes.

While the three astronauts were en route back to Earth, Commander Mattingly stepped outside the spacecraft -- which he had named Casper for the resemblance, as least in a child's eye, between an astronaut in a bulky spacesuit and the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. Maneuvering along handrails while connected to the spacecraft by a tether, he retrieved two attached canisters of film with photos of the moon that he had taken from inside the capsule for analysis back on Earth. When the Apollo program ended, Commander Mattingly headed the astronaut support office for the shuttle program, designed to ferry astronauts to and from an eventual Earth-orbiting International Space Station. In the summer of 1982, he commanded the fourth and final Earth-orbiting test flight of the shuttle Columbia, which completed 112 orbits. He was also the commander of the first space shuttle flight conducted for the Department of Defense, a classified January 1985 mission aboard Discovery.

All those achievements came after he had been scrubbed at virtually the last moment from the flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970. He was to have orbited the moon in the command module while Cmdr.James A. LovellJr. of the Navy and Fred W. Haise Jr. explored the lunar surface. But NASA removed Commander Mattingly from the crew in the final days before launching, when blood tests determined that he had recently been exposed to German measles from training with Colonel Duke, the backup lunar module pilot, who in turn had contracted it from his proximity to an infected child at a neighborhood party. Commander Mattingly was the only one of the Apollo 13 crewmen who were found to lack antibodies against the illness. His backup, John L. Swigert Jr., became the command module pilot, leaving Commander Mattingly to watch the progress ofthe flight from mission control. [...] After his Apollo and space shuttle flights, Mr. Mattingly continued to work for NASA in the 1980s. He retired from the space agency and the Navy as a rear admiral and went on to work for aerospace companies.

A top scientist has proposed a new way to reconcile the two different ways that our clocks keep time. Meet -- wait for it -- the leap minute. From a report: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth's rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds -- pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it's hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world's timekeepers.

"Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy," said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world's clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: "I get a bazillion emails." On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime.

Eric Schmidt is funding a nonprofit that's focused on building an artificial intelligence-powered assistant for the laboratory, with the lofty goal of overhauling the scientific research process. From a report: The nonprofit, Future House, plans to develop AI tools that can analyze and summarize research papers as well as respond to scientific questions using large language models -- the same technology that supports popular AI chatbots. But Future House also intends to go a step further. The "AI scientist," as Future House refers to it, will one day be able to sift through thousands of scientific papers and independently compose hypotheses at greater speed and scale than humans, Chief Executive Officer Sam Rodriques said.

A growing number of businesses and investors are focusing on AI's potential applications in science, including uncovering new medicines and therapies. While Future House aims to make breakthroughs of its own, it believes the scientific process itself can be transformed by having AI generate a hypothesis, conduct experiments and reach conclusions -- even though some existing AI tools have been prone to errors and bias. Rodriques acknowledged the risks of AI being applied in science. "It's not just inaccuracy that you need to worry about," he said. There are also concerns that "people can use them to come up with weapons and things like that." Future House will "have an obligation" to make sure there's safeguards in place," he added.

David L. Chandler reports via MIT News: In recent years, some researchers have been puzzled upon finding that water in their experiments, which was held in a sponge-like material known as a hydrogel, was evaporating at a higher rate than could be explained by the amount of heat, or thermal energy, that the water was receiving. And the excess has been significant -- a doubling, or even a tripling or more, of the theoretical maximum rate. After carrying out a series of new experiments and simulations, and reexamining some of the results from various groups that claimed to have exceeded the thermal limit, a team of researchers at MIT has reached a startling conclusion: Under certain conditions, at the interface where water meets air, light can directly bring about evaporation without the need for heat, and it actually does so even more efficiently than heat. In these experiments, the water was held in a hydrogel material, but the researchers suggest that the phenomenon may occur under other conditions as well.

The phenomenon might play a role in the formation and evolution of fog and clouds, and thus would be important to incorporate into climate models to improve their accuracy, the researchers say. And it might play an important part in many industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination of water, perhaps enabling alternatives to the step of converting sunlight to heat first. The new findings come as a surprise because water itself does not absorb light to any significant degree. That's why you can see clearly through many feet of clean water to the surface below. The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

Researchers at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus have found that rats posses an imagination. Phys.Org reports: A team from the Lee and Harris labs developed a novel system combining virtual reality and a brain-machine interface to probe a rat's inner thoughts. They found that, like humans, animals can think about places and objects that aren't right in front of them, using their thoughts to imagine walking to a location or moving a remote object to a specific spot. Like humans, when rodents experience places and events, specific neural activity patterns are activated in the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for spatial memory. The new study finds rats can voluntarily generate these same activity patterns and do so to recall remote locations distant from their current position.

This ability to imagine locations away from one's current position is fundamental to remembering past events and imagining possible future scenarios. Therefore, the new work shows that animals, like humans, possess a form of imagination, according to the study's authors. [...] The team found that rats can precisely and flexibly control their hippocampal activity, in the same way humans likely do. The animals are also able to sustain this hippocampal activity, holding their thoughts on a given location for many seconds -- a timeframe similar to the one at which humans relive past events or imagine new scenarios.

"The stunning thing is how rats learn to think about that place, and no other place, for a very long period of time, based on our, perhaps naive, notion of the attention span of a rat," Harris says. The research also shows that BMI can be used to probe hippocampal activity, providing a novel system for studying this important brain region. Because BMI is increasingly used in prosthetics, this new work also opens up the possibility of designing novel prosthetic devices based on the same principles, according to the authors. The study has been published in the journal Science.

In response to studies that relate high rates of female attrition from biomedical research fields to the obligations of motherhood, researchers concerned about inclusivity are now debating the issue of weekend conference duties. Nature: Because published findings are often old news in the rapidly changing biomedical fields, in-person conferences offer a crucial opportunity for scientists to stay current on trends that shape projects and funding outcomes. Yet fields often expect rock-star-like travel schedules on an economy-class budget in addition to long, irregular weekday hours at the laboratory. This is why early-career scientists with children say that they must seek alternative childcare or risk being scooped or excluded from a collaboration simply because they missed a weekend conference.

International meetings are often scheduled over weekends because that's the only time venues have availability. Few cities have both suitable venues and enough hotel space to welcome 21,000 people from around the world, and even meetings for 3,000 researchers must be booked many years in advance. Because local businesses and regional associations tend to book venues during the working week, large meetings that span three to five days often need to start or end over a weekend. Women who continue to break the glass ceiling in biomedicine are now pitching this timing as an example of unnecessary conflict between work and family.

Inhaling polluted air increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, the first study of its kind in India has found. Research conducted in Delhi and the southern city of Chennai found that inhaling air with high amounts of PM2.5 particles led to high blood sugar levels and increased type 2 diabetes incidence. From a report: When inhaled, PM2.5 particles -- which are 30 times thinner than a strand of hair -- can enter the bloodstream and cause several respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The study [PDF] is part of ongoing research into chronic diseases in India that began in 2010. It is the first to focus on the link between exposure to ambient PM2.5 and type 2 diabetes in India, one of the worst countries in the world for air pollution. The average annual PM2.5 levels in Delhi was 82-100ug/m3 and in Chennai was 30-40ug/m3, according to the study, many times the WHO limits of 5ug/m3. Indiaâ(TM)s national air quality standards are 40ug/m3.

There is also a high burden of non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in India; 11.4% of the population -- 101 million people -- are living with diabetes, and about 136 million are pre-diabetic, according to a paper published in the Lancet in June. The average diabetes prevalence in the European Union was 6.2% in 2019, and 8.6% in the UK in 2016. The Lancet study found India's diabetes prevalence to be higher than previous estimations and showed a higher number of diabetics in urban than rural India.