An artificial-intelligence tool has shown promise at helping doctors fight aggressive brain tumors by identifying characteristics that help guide surgery. From a report: The tool -- called the Cryosection Histopathology Assessment and Review Machine, or CHARM -- studies images to quickly pick out the genetic profile of a kind of tumor called glioma, a process that currently takes days or weeks, said Kun-Hsing Yu, senior author of a report released Friday in the journal Med. Surgeons use detailed diagnoses to guide them while they operate, Yu said, and the ability to get them rapidly could improve patients' outcomes and spare them from multiple surgeries. While glioma varies in severity, an aggressive form called glioblastoma can lead to death in less than six months if untreated. Only 17% of people with glioblastoma survive their second year after being diagnosed, according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.

Surgeons use information about the genetic profile of a glioma tumor when deciding how much tissue to remove from a patient's brain, as well as whether to implant wafers coated in a cancer-fighting drug. Getting that information, however, currently requires time-consuming testing. Yu and his team of researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to do the work by showing it pictures of samples gathered during brain surgery, and then checking its work against those patients' diagnoses. CHARM learned to match or outperform other AI systems at identifying the genetic profile of a tumor.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The FDA on Thursday granted traditional approval to an Alzheimer's drug for the first time in more than two decades. Now, the question becomes how many people will be able to access the drug, which is targeted at patients in the early stages of the debilitating disease. Medicare has said that it will reimburse the drug's costs -- more than $26,000 annually -- only for beneficiaries enrolled in a nationwide registry that tracks patient side effects and outcomes over time. Patient advocacy groups and some clinicians fear this means that few of the hundreds of thousands of Alzheimer's patients eligible for the treatment will be able to access it.

The agency previously granted Leqembi, developed and manufactured by Eisai and Biogen, accelerated approval before evaluating late-stage clinical trial data earlier this year. The drug moderately slowed trial participants' cognitive decline compared to a placebo, according to the data, but had potentially serious side effects, including brain swelling and bleeding. Under accelerated approval, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it would cover Leqembi only for those participating in a randomized clinical trial, of which none were enrolling. Medicare's coverage determination was contrary to the Veterans Health Administration, which said it would cover the drug for its beneficiaries without restriction.

Roughly 6.7 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer's, and there are few treatments for the disease. Aduhelm, a drug from Biogen that received accelerated approval in 2021, works similarly to Leqembi by targeting proteins thought to be one of the causes of the disease. But both drugs have received little uptake due to Medicare coverage restrictions, and patient and caregiver concerns over the evidence of its modest benefits. There are five existing treatments for Alzheimer's that treat some of the disease's symptoms, but do not slow progression of the disease.

Stephen Clark writes via Ars Technica: When India's ambassador to the US signed up his country to the Artemis Accords last month, it signaled the world's most populous nation -- with a growing prowess in spaceflight -- could be turning toward the United States as a partner in space exploration. India became the 27th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles among like-minded nations guiding a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The accords cover the international registration of human-made space objects, the open release of scientific data, and an agreement for nations not to claim territory on the Moon or other planetary bodies, among other tenets.

Details about future cooperation between the US and India remain scarce. Nelson plans to travel to India later this year for meetings and discussions with Indian space officials. One objective of Nelson's trip will be to hammer out broad objectives for a "strategic framework" for human spaceflight cooperation. Despite the name of the Artemis Accords, there's no guarantee that India will play a significant role in NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars. "There's no implication of a signatory to the Artemis accords also being part of the Artemis program," Nelson told Ars.

But none of the other 26 signatories to the Artemis Accords -- a list that includes European space powers and Japan -- has their own human spaceflight program. India is developing a human-rated spacecraft called Gaganyaan that could be ready to fly people into low-Earth orbit in 2025, several years later than originally planned. "The fact that they are a nation that intends in the future to fly own their own astronauts, is that significant? The answer is yes," Nelson said. "I think it's of significance that a major country that's not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory." "I've described India as a sleeping giant and one that is quickly awakening," Gold told Ars. "India is absolutely vital to global space development, and Artemis in particular, since the country is active with lunar programs, Martian programs, and now even human spaceflight." "Where India might fit into the Artemis program is still to be determined," writes Clark. "The partnership between the US and India in space could take a step forward next year with the flight of an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston before a flight opportunity to the space station in low-Earth orbit."

India's space program has "held closer ties with Russia in the past," notes Clark. "Russia provided upper-stage engines for India's GSLV Mk.II rocket until India developed its own engine for the job. And four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media."

"Despite India's overture toward a closer relationship with NASA, the Asian power remains linked with Russia," adds Clark. "India still imports significant amounts of Russian oil and has not officially condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Virtual reality (VR) headsets are now being used on hospital wards to help keep patients calm during procedures. A trial at Kidderminster Hospital saw soothing sounds and visuals from them used to cut stress and anxiety. In one case, VR was used in place of sedation when a tube was inserted into a child's vein for blood sampling, staff said.

The Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust says they are now a permanent feature in its hospitals. Dawn Forbes, a nurse specialist, used the technology ahead of a blood test and MRI scan for a patient with a phobia of needles. She said it enabled a cannula to be placed "quickly without causing any pain or distress."

July 3 was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. From a report: The average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), surpassing the August 2016 record of 16.92C (62.46F) as heatwaves sizzled around the world. The southern U.S. has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks. In China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 35C (95F). North Africa has seen temperatures near 50C (122F). And even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine's Vernadsky Research Base in the white continent's Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 8.7C (47.6F).

JoeRobe writes: After 63 days of agonizing silence, NASA's Martian chopper finally phoned home. The Ingenuity helicopter reestablished communication with mission control on June 28, officially logging its 52nd flight as a success, NASA recently announced. The space agency lost contact with Ingenuity as the helicopter was descending towards the surface of the Red Planet following its most recent flight on April 26.

The reason behind the communication drop was that a hill was inconveniently positioned between Ingenuity and its rover pal Perseverance, preventing the Martian pair from communicating with one another. Ingenuity relies on Perseverance to deliver its messages to Earth, using shiny antennas to exchange data at about 100 kilobits per second. The data is routed from the Ingenuity-facing antenna to the rover's main computer before being transferred to Earth by way of an orbiting spacecraft.

According to the Financial Times, Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin has announced plans to expand its operations to "Europe and beyond." Engadget reports: Part of this growth hinges on finding a site for an international launch facility -- the company has already put down roots in Texas, Washington, Florida and Alabama -- but the new location hasn't been chosen yet. It's also actively looking for fresh acquisitions and partnerships outside of the US in areas such as manufacturing and software.

Though Blue Origin was the first to launch, land and reuse a rocket successfully, it has fallen behind its rival due to hold-ups with building its launchers. Blue Origin's plans for a more global footprint might help them catch up with SpaceX's progress. Amazon's Project Kuiper also plans to use Blue Origin's rocket New Glenn for at least 12 launches between 2024 and 2029 after a few years of delays. "We're looking for anything we can do to acquire, to scale up to better serve our customers," Bob Smith, Blue Origin CEO, said. "It's not a function of size -- rather how much it accelerates our road map of what we're trying to get done."

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough by observing the early universe in extreme slow motion, confirming Einstein's theory of an expanding universe. The research is published in Nature Astronomy. Phys.Org reports: Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant -- and hence ancient -- universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as "clocks." "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney. "If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second -- but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag."

Professor Lewis and his collaborator, Dr. Brendon Brewer from the University of Auckland, used observed data from nearly 200 quasars -- hyperactive supermassive black holes at the centers of early galaxies -- to analyze this time dilation. Previously, astronomers have confirmed this slow-motion universe back to about half the age of the universe using supernovae -- massive exploding stars -- as "standard clocks." But while supernovae are exceedingly bright, they are difficult to observe at the immense distances needed to peer into the early universe. By observing quasars, this time horizon has been rolled back to just a tenth the age of the universe, confirming that the universe appears to speed up as it ages.

Professor Lewis worked with astro-statistician Dr. Brewer to examine details of 190 quasars observed over two decades. Combining the observations taken at different colors (or wavelengths) -- green light, red light and into the infrared -- they were able to standardize the "ticking" of each quasar. Through the application of Bayesian analysis, they found the expansion of the universe imprinted on each quasar's ticking. "With these exquisite data, we were able to chart the tick of the quasar clocks, revealing the influence of expanding space," Professor Lewis said. These results further confirm Einstein's picture of an expanding universe but contrast earlier studies that had failed to identify the time dilation of distant quasars.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Ariane 5 rocket has had a long run, with nearly three decades of service launching satellites and spacecraft. Over that time, the iconic rocket, with a liquid hydrogen-fueled core stage and solid rocket boosters, has come to symbolize Europe's guaranteed access to space. But now, the road is coming to an end for the Ariane 5. As soon as Tuesday evening, the final Ariane 5 rocket will lift off from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. A 90-minute launch window opens at 5:30 pm ET (21:30 UTC). The launch will be webcast on ESA TV. And after this? Europe's space agency faces some difficult questions.

A new article in the Washington Post reports that even internally, "Space Force officials are still debating its priorities, analysts say: Is it to support warfighters on the ground? Or should it focus primarily on protecting assets in space? Or both?"

In April, the Washington Post reported that space would likely be a key part of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and one possible Space Force counter-measure would "ensure that the United States avoids 'operational surprise,' by keeping track of other countries' satellites and movements in space while also being able to 'identify behaviors that become irresponsible or even hostile.'"

To address the possibility of enemies shooting down satellites, the Space Force is also "pivoting, relying on constellations of small satellites that can be easily replaced and, to an increasing degree, maneuver." That's just one example of how the Space Force intends to ensure the U.S. maintains "space superiority," as its leaders often say, to protect the satellites the Defense Department relies on for warnings of incoming missiles, steering precision-guided munitions and surveilling both friendly and hostile forces. It also could deter conflict in space — why strike a satellite if there are backups that would easily carry on the mission...?

[Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the commander of the 45th Space Wing] gave a tour of some of the roles the Space Force could play, offering a glimpse into its future. Soldiers and Marines already pre-position supplies and equipment on the ground, he said. Could the Space Force start storing supplies in space and then fly them to hot spots on Earth as well? "In theory, we could have huge racks of stuff in orbit and then somebody can call those in, saying. 'I need X, Y, Z delivered to me now on this random island.' And then, boom, they shoot out and they parachute in and they land with GPS assistance," he said. "It's a fascinating thought exercise for emergency response — you know if a type of tidal wave or tsunami comes in and wipes out a whole area."

The military is also working to harness solar energy in space, and then beam it to ground stations. Could the Space Force use that technology to beam power to remote areas to support soldiers on the ground? Another idea: If the cadence of launches really does double or triple and the costs continue to come down, could the Space Force start using rockets to deliver cargo across the globe at a moment's notice? Soon there could be commercial space stations floating around in orbit. "Can we lease a room?" Purdy said. "Can we lease a module?"
A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believes the U.S. Space Force is misunderstood — at least partly because much of what it does is classified. "We fundamentally need to normalize the classification," he tells the Washington Post, "so we can have a conversation with the public, with the American people."

"The first drug fully generated by artificial intelligence entered clinical trials with human patients this week," reports CNBC: Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based biotech startup with more than $400 million in funding, created the drug, INS018_055, as a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic disease that causes scarring in the lungs. The condition, which has increased in prevalence in recent decades, currently affects about 100,000 people in the U.S. and can lead to death within two to five years if untreated, according to the National Institutes of Health.

"It is the first fully generative AI drug to reach human clinical trials, and specifically Phase II trials with patients," Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, told CNBC. "While there are other AI-designed drugs in trials, ours is the first drug with both a novel AI-discovered target and a novel AI-generated design...."

"When this company was launched, we were focused on algorithms — developing the technology that could discover and design new molecules," Zhavoronkov said. "I never imagined in those early days that I would be taking my own AI drugs into clinical trials with patients. But we realized that in order to validate our AI platform, we needed to not only design a new drug for a new target, but bring it into clinical trials to prove that our technology worked."
"The company has two other drugs partially generated by AI in the clinical stage..."

"Black Swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives," begins a 2021 paper by a computer science professor at the University of California.

Now the Washington Post revisits that exploration of the possibility that "magnetic fields unleashed by a solar superstorm rip through Earth's magnetosphere, sending currents surging through human infrastructure." A widespread internet outage could, indeed, be brought on by a strong solar storm hitting Earth — a rare but very real event that has not yet happened in the digital age, experts say. When a solar storm known as the Carrington Event struck in 1859, telegraph lines sparked, operators were electrocuted and the northern lights descended to latitudes as low as Jamaica. A 1989 solar storm took out the Quebec power grid for hours. And in 2012, a storm just missed Earth.

As the sun, which has roughly 11-year cycles, enters a particularly active period known as the "solar maximum" in 2025, some are worried our interconnected world is not prepared.

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a computer science professor at University of California at Irvine whose paper "Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse" has played a role in popularizing the term, started thinking about internet resilience when the coronavirus began to spread, and she realized how unprepared we were for a pandemic. Research on widespread internet failure was scant. "We've never experienced one of the extreme case events, and we don't know how our infrastructure would respond to it," Jyothi said. "Our failure testing doesn't even include such scenarios."

She notes that a severe solar storm is likely to affect large-scale infrastructure such as submarine communication cables, which could interrupt long-distance connectivity. If you have not lost power, you might have access to, say, a government website hosted locally, but reaching bigger websites, which could have data stored all over the place, might not be possible. The northern latitudes are also especially vulnerable to solar storms, and that's where a lot of internet infrastructure is concentrated. "This is not taken into account in our infrastructure deployment today at all," she said. Such outages could last for months, depending on the scale and how long it takes to repair the damage. The economic impact of just one day of lost connectivity in the United States alone is estimated to be more than $11 billion, according to the internet watcher NetBlocks.

Still, Jyothi says she has felt bad for using the term "internet apocalypse" in her paper. There's not much ordinary people can do to prepare for such a phenomenon; it falls on governments and companies. And the paper "just got too much attention," she said.
"Astrophysicists estimate the likelihood of a solar storm of sufficient strength to cause catastrophic disruption occurring within the next decade to be 1.6 to 12%," the paper concludes. (It also notes that the U.S. has a higher risk for a disconnection than Asia.)

"Paying attention to this threat and planning defenses against it, like our preliminary effort in this paper, is critical for the long-term resilience of the Internet."

"The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope launched at 11:12 a.m. ET Saturday," reports CNN, "aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

CNN is calling it "a mission designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe." The 1.2-meter-diameter (4-foot-diameter) telescope has set off on a monthlong journey to its orbital destination of the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth and also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope... After arriving at orbit, Euclid will spend two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying one-third of the sky for the next six years. Euclid's primary goal is to observe the "dark side" of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.

In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe's expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery. Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye... Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe, observing billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years...

The telescope's image quality will be four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys. Euclid's wide perspective can also record data from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what Webb's camera can capture. During its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, creating a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy's shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid's ability to see in near-infrared light could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.

In May 2027, Euclid will be joined in orbit by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two missions will overlap in their study of cosmic acceleration as they both create three-dimensional maps of the universe...Roman will study one-twentieth of the sky in infrared light, allowing for much more depth and precision. The Roman telescope will peer back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, picking out fainter galaxies than Euclid can see.
CNN points out that "While primarily an ESA mission, the telescope includes contributions from NASA and more than 2,000 scientists across 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan."

And they also note this statement from Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery."

From NASA's announcement: Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe...

Less concentrated mass, like clumps of dark matter, can create more subtle effects. By studying these smaller distortions, Roman and Euclid will each create a 3D dark matter map... Tallying up the universe's dark matter across cosmic time will help scientists better understand the push-and-pull feeding into cosmic acceleration.
SpaceX tweeted footage of the telescope's takeoff, and the successful landing of their Falcon 9's first stage on a droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas.

theodp writes: In The Man Who Broke Bowling, GQ's Eric Wills profiles professional bowler Jason Belmonte, whose two-handed bowling technique made him both an outcast as well as one of bowling's greatest, changing the sport forever. Unlike the rest of us, a 7-year-old Belmonte was unconvinced by the taunts used to prompt kids into switching from bowling two-handed to one-handed ("It was, Come on, you're a big boy now. It's time to bowl properly," Belmonte recalls). As a result, Belmonte was able to develop a 600-rpm throw when most pro bowlers averaged 350-400, imparting a spin that "sends the pins into concussion protocol." Wills writes:

"When he first alighted on the professional bowling scene, Belmonte resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which he uses two fingers (and no thumb) on his right hand, palms the front of the ball with his left, and then, on his approach, which is marked by a distinctive shuffle step, rocks the ball back before launching it with a liquid, athletic whip, his delivery producing an eye-popping hook, his ball striking the pins like a mini mortar explosion. Not everyone welcomed his arrival. He's been called a cheat, told to go back to his native Australia; a PBA Hall of Famer once called the two-hander a 'cancer to an already diseased sport.'

If you're interested in more on the technical aspects of bowling -- Belmonte's installed a tracking system in his parent's bowling center back in Australia that generates reams of data he can sift through to find areas for improvement -- Wikipedia goes into some of the physics of bowling balls.

According to new findings published in the journal Science, astronomers have detected high-energy neutrinos (also known as "ghost particles") coming from within our Milky Way galaxy. Space.com reports: High-energy neutrinos are known to originate from galaxies beyond the Milky Way. But researchers have long suspected that our own galaxy is a source as well. For example, when cosmic rays -- atomic nuclei moving at nearly the speed of light -- strike dust and gas, they generate both gamma rays and high-energy neutrinos. Previous research has detected gamma rays from the Milky Way's plane, so scientists have expected high-energy neutrinos from there as well. There have been hints of such emission, but confirmation has proven elusive to date. The new study took another look, using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. IceCube is embedded within a gigaton (1 billion tons) of ice, making it the first gigaton neutrino detector ever built. IceCube encompasses 0.24 cubic miles (1 cubic kilometer) of Antarctic ice holding more than 5,000 light sensors. These devices watch for the unique flashes of light that result from the rare instances in which neutrinos do smash into atoms.

The research team focused on the plane of the Milky Way, the dense region of the galaxy that lies along the Milky Way's equator. They studied 10 years of IceCube data, analyzing 60,000 neutrinos -- 30 times more than prior neutrino scans of the galactic plane had looked at. [...] This work identified high-energy neutrinos that likely came from the Milky Way's galactic plane. "This observation of high-energy neutrinos opens up an entirely new window to study the properties of our host galaxy," study co-author Mirco Huennefeld, an astroparticle physicist at TU Dortmund University in Germany, told Space.com. "I think it's exciting to see the young field of neutrino astronomy develop with such an increasing pace," Huennefeld added. "It took decades to envision a neutrino telescope such as IceCube, and just in the last few years, we saw an accumulation of exciting observations, including the first evidence of extragalactic sources. Now, with these results, we have achieved a new milestone in neutrino astronomy."

Although the findings suggest that the newfound neutrinos come from our galaxy, IceCube currently is not sensitive enough to pinpoint their sources. They may emerge in a diffuse manner, or a significant number of them might come from specific points in the sky, Huennefeld said. In the coming years, IceCube will get detector upgrades "that will further enhance its sensitivity, allowing us to obtain a clearer picture of the Milky Way in neutrinos in the near future," Huennefeld said. "Answering these questions will have implications on our understanding of cosmic rays and their origin, and also in general on the inferred properties of our host galaxy."

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues. From a report: A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain's neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest -- and declared Chalmers the winner. What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

"It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof," says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn't the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: "There's been a lot of progress in the field." Consciousness is everything that a person experiences -- what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says. Despite a vast effort, researchers still don't understand how our brains produce it, however. "It started off as a very big philosophical mystery," Chalmers adds. "But over the years, it's gradually been transmuting into, if not a 'scientific' mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically."

[...] The goal was to set up a series of 'adversarial' experiments to test various hypotheses of consciousness by getting rival researchers to collaborate on the studies' design. "If their predictions didn't come true, this would be a serious challenge for their theories," Chalmers says. The findings from one of the experiments -- which involved several researchers, including Koch and Chalmers -- were revealed on Friday at the ASSC meeting. It tested two of the leading hypotheses: integrated information theory (IIT) and global network workspace theory (GNWT). IIT proposes that consciousness is a 'structure' in the brain formed by a specific type of neuronal connectivity that is active for as long as a certain experience, such as looking at an image, is occurring. This structure is thought to be found in the posterior cortex, at the back of the brain. GNWT, by contrast, suggests that consciousness arises when information is broadcast to areas of the brain through an interconnected network. The transmission, according to the theory, happens at the beginning and end of an experience and involves the prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain.

Supermassive black holes all over the universe are merging, a fate that will eventually come for the black hole at the center of our galaxy. From a report: These mysterious cosmic structures at the heart of nearly every galaxy consume light and matter and are impossible to glimpse with traditional telescopes. But now, for the first time, astrophysicists have gathered knowledge directly from these titans, in the form of gravitational waves that ripple through space and time. What they learned suggests that the population of massive black hole pairs that are merging numbers in the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps even millions.

The gravitational waves from these mergers are all contributing to an underlying background hum of the universe that researchers can detect from Earth. The findings, from a collaboration of more than 100 scientists, help confirm what will one day happen to the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center, known as Sagittarius A*, as it crashes into the black hole at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. "The Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, and in about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are set to merge," said Joseph Simon, a University of Colorado, Boulder, astrophysicist and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or Nanograv, which helped lead the new work with support from the National Science Foundation.

That merger, he said, will eventually result in the black hole at the center of Andromeda and Sagittarius A* sinking into the center of the newly combined galaxy and forming what is known as a binary system. The results were announced in a series of papers published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Before now, we didn't even know if supermassive black holes merged, and now we have evidence that hundreds of thousands of them are merging," said Chiara Mingarelli, a Yale University astrophysicist and a member of Nanograv. The new work could answer questions such as how these black holes grow, and how often their host galaxies merge, the researchers said. Further reading: The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find.

It is showtime for Virgin Galactic. The spaceflight company founded by billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson almost two decades ago launched its long-awaited first commercial spaceflight, called "Galactic 01," on Thursday. From a report: Taking off from Spaceport America in New Mexico, the company's spacecraft is being flown by a pair of pilots and carries four passengers: A Virgin Galactic trainer, to oversee the mission from inside the cabin, and its first trio of paying customers. The three paying passengers are members of the Italian Air Force, and the flight carries 13 research payloads onboard. Virgin Galactic's start to commercial service comes after years of delays and setbacks. If "Galactic 01" is successful, the company plans to fly its second mission as soon as August and then aims to begin flying its spacecraft, VSS Unity, once a month.

One of the world's most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body, Reuters reported Thursday, citing two sources with knowledge of the process, pitting it against the food industry and regulators. From the report: Aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars' Extra chewing gum and some Snapple drinks, will be listed in July as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer research arm, the sources said. The IARC ruling, finalised earlier this month after a meeting of the group's external experts, is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence.

It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization's Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators. However, similar IARC rulings in the past for different substances have raised concerns among consumers about their use, led to lawsuits, and pressured manufacturers to recreate recipes and swap to alternatives. That has led to criticism that the IARC's assessments can be confusing to the public.

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Science: NASA said in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky. The project had previously seen challenges. For example, transistor modules in the electrical inverters kept failing and "blowing up" in testing, Sean Clark, the project's principal investigator told Popular Science in January. That problem was solved, Clark said.

The problem that led them to scrap the plan to fly the aircraft stemmed from motors that power the propellers. Clark said today that analysis of the issue is ongoing. "As we got into the detailed analysis and airworthiness assessment of the motors themselves, we found that there were some potential failure modes with the motors mechanically, under flight loads, that we hadn't seen on the ground," he said. "We've got a great design in progress to fix it, it's just [that] it would take too long for us to go through and implement that."

NASA said that the reason behind permanently scrubbing the flight is safety and time. "Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system that we determined to pose an unacceptable risk to the pilot's safety, and the safety of personnel on the ground, during ground tests," Bradley Flick, the director of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in the call. "Mitigation of that failure would take the project well beyond its planned end at the end of this fiscal year, so NASA has decided to end the project on time without taking the vehicle to flight."