An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Atomic-scale imaging emerged in the mid-1950s and has been advancing rapidly ever since -- so much so, that back in 2008, physicists successfully used an electron microscope to image a single hydrogen atom. Five years later, scientists were able to peer inside a hydrogen atom using a "quantum microscope," resulting in the first direct observation of electron orbitals. And now we have the first X-ray taken of a single atom, courtesy of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois-Chicago, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

"Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays one cannot tell what they are made of," said co-author Saw-Wai Hla, a physicist at Ohio University and Argonne National Laboratory. "We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom at a time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state. Once we are able to do that, we can trace the materials down to [the] ultimate limit of just one atom. This will have a great impact on environmental and medical sciences." [...] Hla has been working for the last 12 years to develop an X-ray version of STM: synchrotron X-ray-scanning tunneling microscopy, or SX-STM, which would enable scientists to identify the type of atom and its chemical state. X-ray imaging methods like synchrotron radiation are widely used across myriad disciplines, including art and archaeology. But the smallest amount to date that can be X-rayed is an attogram, or roughly 10,000 atoms. That's because the X-ray emission of a single atom is just too weak to be detected -- until now.

SX-STM combines conventional synchrotron radiation with quantum tunneling. It replaces the conventional X-ray detector used in most synchrotron radiation experiments with a different kind of detector: a sharp metal tip placed extremely close to the sample, the better to collect electrons pushed into an excited state by the X-rays. With Hla et al.'s method, X-rays hit the sample and excite the core electrons, which then tunnel to the detector tip. The photoabsorption of the core electrons serves as a kind of elemental fingerprint for identifying the type of atoms in a material. The team tested their method at the XTIP beam line at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source, using an iron atom and a terbium atom (inserted into supramolecules, which served as hosts). And that's not all. "We have detected the chemical states of individual atoms as well," said Hla. "By comparing the chemical states of an iron atom and a terbium atom inside respective molecular hosts, we find that the terbium atom, a rare-earth metal, is rather isolated and does not change its chemical state, while the iron atom strongly interacts with its surrounding." Also, Hla's team has developed another technique called X-ray-excited resonance tunneling (X-ERT), which will allow them to detect the orientation of the orbital of a single molecule on a material surface.

In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements, or sources of energy. Nature: The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15-16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability.

Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students. Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11-18-year-olds in India's schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) -- the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks -- released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.

Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. "Anybody who's trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it," says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. "It's that fundamental to biology." The periodic table explains how life's building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and "is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists."

A SpaceX capsule carrying a former NASA astronaut and three paying customers returned from the International Space Station, marking the conclusion of a historic weeklong mission for the crew. From a report: The Crew Dragon spacecraft departed the space station Tuesday morning and the crew spent nearly 12 hours in orbit as the capsule maneuvered back toward Earth. After a fiery reentry, the Crew Dragon and passengers made a safe splashdown off the coast of Panama City, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico at 11:04 p.m. ET. This mission, dubbed Axiom Mission 2, or AX-2, launched from Florida on May 21. AX-2 was put together by the Houston-based company Axiom Space and marked the second all-private mission to the orbiting outpost, meaning solely commercial companies, rather than a government agency, have been leading the mission.

This mission was also a milestone in the history of spaceflight as stem cell researcher Rayyanah Barnawi became the first woman from Saudi Arabia to travel to space. The AX-2 mission is one in a lineup of commercial missions designed to spur private sector participation in spaceflight -- particularly in low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station orbits. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, 63, led the AX-2 crew. Whitson, now an Axiom Space employee, also became the first woman to command a private spaceflight. One of the three paying customers joining Whitson was John Shoffner, an American who made his fortune in the international telecom business and founded the hardware company Dura-Line Corp. Saudi Arabia also paid to fly two of its citizens: Barnawi and Ali AlQarni, a fighter pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force.

During the mission, Barnawi led stem cell research suited for the microgravity environment aboard the space station. The orbiting laboratory has long been a key venue for various scientific experiments, as the lack of gravity can give researchers a better fundamental understanding of the topic at hand. Barnawi and AlQarni also engaged in outreach projects, including testing out a kite in microgravity and capturing video for viewers back home. The AX-2 crew spent about eight days working alongside astronauts representing NASA, Russia's Roscomos space agency and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency aboard the space station, though they operated on different schedules. The AX-2 crew worked through a lineup of more than 20 investigations and science projects -- including stem cell and other biomedical research. "Late tonight, at 11:02 pm local time in California (06:02 UTC Wednesday), SpaceX has a chance to reach 200 successful launches [of the Falcon 9 rocket] with a Starlink mission lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base," reports Ars Technica. "Such a performance is in uncharted territory for any orbital rocket, ever. [...] SpaceX is setting itself up to double the record for the number of consecutive successes by an orbital rocket."

You can view a livestream of the launch here.

Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has begun her 11-year prison sentence after being convicted of four counts of fraud. The BBC reports: She will serve her term in a minimum-security prison in Texas. Holmes reported to the federal facility in Bryan, Texas, which holds between 500 and 700 inmates at any given time, on Tuesday. It is about 100 miles (160km) north of Houston, her hometown. Her arrival at the facility was confirmed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which declined to give any more details about her confinement, citing privacy concerns.

There, the woman once billed as the world's youngest self-made billionaire might work alongside other inmates for between 12 cents (10p) and $1.15 (93p) an hour - much of which will go towards her court-mandated restitution payments. [...] The Texas prison camp where Holmes will serve time is a sprawling 37-acre facility. Most inmates there have been convicted of non-violent crimes, low-level drug dealing or white-collar offenses. According to the facility's handbook, life largely revolves around work and extracurricular activities that include foreign language, computer literacy or business courses.

Holmes had fought to stay out of prison while her legal appeal works its way through the courts. She argued a delay would allow her to raise "substantial questions" about the case that could warrant a new trial. Her defense team also argued that she should remain free to care for her children, one who is nearly two and the other three months old. The Wall Street Journal reported the prison has facilities where inmates can host gatherings and where children can play. Holmes and other mothers are allowed to hold their children in their lap and breastfeed their infants, according to official Bureau of Prison guidelines.

CERN: The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 marked a significant milestone in particle physics. Since then, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been diligently investigating the properties of this unique particle and searching to establish the different ways in which it is produced and decays into other particles. At the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) conference last week, ATLAS and CMS report how they teamed up to find the first evidence of the rare process in which the Higgs boson decays into a Z boson, the electrically neutral carrier of the weak force, and a photon, the carrier of the electromagnetic force. This Higgs boson decay could provide indirect evidence of the existence of particles beyond those predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

The decay of the Higgs boson into a Z boson and a photon is similar to that of a decay into two photons. In these processes, the Higgs boson does not decay directly into these pairs of particles. Instead, the decays proceed via an intermediate "loop" of "virtual" particles that pop in and out of existence and cannot be directly detected. These virtual particles could include new, as yet undiscovered particles that interact with the Higgs boson. The Standard Model predicts that, if the Higgs boson has a mass of around 125 billion electronvolts, approximately 0.15% of Higgs bosons will decay into a Z boson and a photon. But some theories that extend the Standard Model predict a different decay rate. Measuring the decay rate therefore provides valuable insights into both physics beyond the Standard Model and the nature of the Higgs boson.

A German startup has secured initial funding to develop a revolutionary fusion energy machine that it hopes can provide a future source of abundant, emissions-free power. From a report: Proxima Fusion, incorporated in January, aims to build a complex device known as a stellarator and is the latest company to join the emerging fusion industry's effort to generate electricity by fusing atoms. Although the amount of funding is small at only $7.5mn, it is significant as Proxima is the first fusion company to spin out of Germany's revered Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. The institute is the home of the world's most advanced existing stellarator in Greifswald, in eastern Germany, built by government-funded scientists over the past 27 years using supercomputers and advanced engineering.

Little known outside the world of plasma physics, a stellarator is an alternative to the better known tokamak device, pioneered by Soviet scientists in the 1950s. Both use huge magnets to suspend a floating mass of hydrogen plasma as it is heated to extreme temperatures so the atomic nuclei fuse releasing energy. Until recently nearly all funding of so-called magnetic confinement fusion has been channelled into tokamaks such as the Joint European Torus in Oxford, England, or the Sparc device being built by the Bill Gates-backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts.

China sent three astronauts to its now fully operational space station as part of crew rotation on Tuesday in the fifth manned mission to the Chinese space outpost since 2021, state media reported. From a report: The spacecraft, Shenzhou-16, or "Divine Vessel," and its three passengers lifted off atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert in northwest China at 9:31 a.m. The astronauts on Shenzhou-16 will replace the three-member crew of the Shenzhou-15, who arrived at the space station late in November. The station, comprising three modules, was completed at the end of last year after 11 crewed and uncrewed missions since April 2021, beginning with the launch of the first and biggest module -- the station's main living quarters. China has already announced plans to expand its permanently inhabited space outpost, with the next module slated to dock with the current T-shaped space station to create a cross-shaped structure.

The Mars helicopter 'Ingenuity' recently completed its 47th, 48th, and 49th flight, NASA reports on the blog for its Mars rover 'Perseverance'. That rover is making a "long ascent" up the delta in Mars' Jezero crater, "an area where scientists surmise that, billions of years ago, a river once flowed into a lake.

On its 47th flight, Ingenuity attempted "tactical and scientific scouting" for the rover, but "just narrowly missing the main area of interest." But then... Ingenuity's 48th flight produced a treasure trove of aerial images showing the exact area of interest at a resolution several orders of magnitude better than anything prior. All of these images were downlinked to Earth and provided to rover planners and scientists a full two weeks before the rover would reach this area... [T]he team chose to send the helicopter farther up the delta rather than perform additional scouting flights in the region... The Guidance Navigation and Control team once again managed to push the flight envelope with a 16-meter vertical popup at the end of the flight. At the peak, Ingenuity snapped the highest suborbital picture taken of the Martian surface since landing...

That downlink was the last time the team would hear from the helicopter for an agonizingly long time. Eager to continue up the delta, the team tried and failed to uplink the instructions for Flight 50 several times. Sol after sol, the helicopter remained elusive. Each time, the downlinked telemetry from the Helicopter Base Station (HBS) on the rover would come back showing no radio sign of the helicopter... When the rover emerged from the communications shadow on its way to Foel Drygarn and the helicopter was still nowhere to be found, the situation began to generate some unease... In more than 700 sols operating the helicopter on Mars, not once had we ever experienced a total radio blackout. Even in the worst communications environments, we had always seen some indication of activity...

Finally, on Sol 761, nearly a week after our first missed check-in, our communications team observed a single, lonely radio ACK (radio acknowledgement) at 9:44 LMST (Local Mean Solar Time), exactly the time when we'd expect to see the helicopter wakeup. Another single ACK at the same time on Sol 762 confirmed that the helicopter was indeed alive, which came as a welcome relief for the team. Ultimately, this first-of-its-kind communications blackout was a result of two factors. First, the topology between the rover and the helicopter was very challenging for the radio used by Ingenuity. In addition to the aforementioned communications shadow, a moderate ridge located just to the southeast of the Flight 49 landing site separated the helicopter from the rover's operational area. The impact of this ridge would only abate once the rover had gotten uncomfortably close to the helicopter. Second, the HBS antenna is located on the right side of the rover, low enough to the deck to see significant occlusion effects from various part of the rover...

Relying on the helicopter's onboard preflight checks to ensure vehicle safety and banking on solid communications from the rover's imminent proximity, the team uplinked the flight plan. As commanded, Ingenuity woke up and executed its 50th flight on the red planet, covering over 300 meters and setting a new altitude record of 18 m.

The rover had closed to a mere 80 meters by the time the helicopter lifted off in the Martian afternoon Sun.
And Flight 51 happened 9 days later...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: Japan and JAXA, the country's space administration, have spent decades trying to make it possible to beam solar energy from space. In 2015, the nation made a breakthrough when JAXA scientists successfully beamed 1.8 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power an electric kettle, more than 50 meters to a wireless receiver. Now, Japan is poised to bring the technology one step closer to reality.

Nikkei reports a Japanese public-private partnership will attempt to beam solar energy from space as early as 2025. The project, led by Naoki Shinohara, a Kyoto University professor who has been working on space-based solar energy since 2009, will attempt to deploy a series of small satellites in orbit. Those will then try to beam the solar energy the arrays collect to ground-based receiving stations hundreds of miles away.
Orbital solar arrays "represent a potentially unlimited renewable energy supply," the article points out -- running 24 hours a day.

"Planetary scientists now know how thick the Martian crust is," reports ScienceNews, "thanks to the strongest Marsquake ever observed." On average, the crust is between 42 and 56 kilometers thick [26 to 34 miles], researchers report in a paper to appear in Geophysical Research Letters. That's roughly 70 percent thicker than the average continental crust on Earth.

The measurement was based on data from NASA's InSight lander, a stationary seismometer that recorded waves rippling through Mars' interior for four Earth years. Last May, the entire planet shook with a magnitude 4.7 quake that lasted more than six hours. "We were really fortunate that we got this quake," says seismologist Doyeon Kim of ETH Zurich.

InSight recorded seismic waves from the quake that circled Mars up to three times. That let Kim and colleagues infer the crust thickness over the whole planet. Not only is the crust thicker than that of the Earth and the moon, but it's also inconsistent across the Red Planet, the team found. And that might explain a known north-south elevation difference on Mars.

Last month Japanese startup ispace tried to become the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon — but in the crucial final moments lost contact with its vehicle.

Now the Associated Press reports that company officials are revealing what happened: while trying to land, their vehicle went into free-fall. Company officials blame a software issue, plus a decision in December to change the touchdown location to a crater. The crater's steep sides apparently confused the onboard software, and the 7-foot (2-meter) spacecraft went into a free-fall from less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) up, slamming into the lunar surface. The estimated speed at impact was more than 300 feet (100 meters) per second, said the company's chief technology officer, Ryo Ujiie.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the crash site the next day as it flew overhead, revealing a field of debris as well as lunar soil hurled aside by the impact. Computer simulations done in advance of the landing attempt did not incorporate the terrain of the new landing site, Ujiie said.

CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada said the company is still on track to attempt another moon landing in 2024, and that all the lessons learned will be incorporated into the next try. A third landing attempt is planned for 2025.

The Guardian reports that a supermassive black hole discovered at the center of an ancient galaxy "is five times larger than expected for the number of stars it contains, astronomers say." Researchers spotted the immense black hole in a galaxy known as GS-9209 that lies 25bn light-years from Earth, making it one of the most distant to have been observed and recorded. The team at Edinburgh University used the James Webb space telescope (JWST) to observe the galaxy and reveal fresh details about its composition and history. Dr Adam Carnall, who led the effort, said the telescope — the most powerful ever built — showed how galaxies were growing "larger and earlier" than astronomers expected in the first billion years of the universe...

Carnall said the "very massive black hole" at the centre of GS-9209 was a "big surprise" that lent weight to the theory that such enormous black holes are responsible for shutting down star formation in early galaxies. "The evidence we see for the supermassive black hole was really unexpected," said Carnall. "This is the kind of detail we'd never have been able to see without JWST."

"An independent report looking into the development of NASA's new moon rocket has found significant cost overruns and delays that could harm the agency's plans to put astronauts back on the moon," reports Space.com.

Their article cites specifically "increases in costs related to contracts awarded to Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman for SLS's propulsion systems," citing a 50-page report published Thursday by NASA's Inspector General: Altogether, the four contracts for the rocket's booster and engine were initially projected to cost $7 billion over a span of 14 years, but are now projected to cost at least $13.1 billion over nearly 25 years. "NASA continues to experience significant scope growth, cost increases, and schedule delays on its booster and RS-25 engine contracts, resulting in approximately $6 billion in cost increases and over 6 years in schedule delays above NASA's original projections," the report found.

These significant increases were caused by a variety of long-standing, interrelated management issues impacting both the SLS development campaign and the wider Artemis program, the report notes, including "some of which represent potential violations of federal contracting requirements." The use of heritage RS-25 engines and boosters from the space shuttle and Constellation programs for the new SLS rocket was intended to bring significant cost and schedule savings over developing new systems. But the "complexity of developing, updating, and integrating new systems along with heritage components proved to be much greater than anticipated," according to the report.

To remedy this, the report makes a number of recommendations to NASA management to increase transparency, accountability and affordability of the SLS booster and engine contracts, including switching from "cost-plus" awards towards a fixed-price contract structure. However, the assessment still finds the enormous cost of SLS hard to manage for NASA and damaging to its long term "Moon to Mars" plans. "Without greater attention to these important safeguards, NASA and its contracts will continue to exceed planned cost and schedule, resulting in a reduced availability of funds, delayed launches, and the erosion of the public's trust in the Agency's ability to responsibly spend taxpayer money and meet mission goals and objectives — including returning humans safely to the moon and onward to Mars."
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared the article along with a YouTube video with excerpts from recently released high-resolution video of the rocket's last launch.

After three years of upgrades, the gravitational-wave detector known as LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, has resumed searching for colliding black holes and other cosmic cataclysms. "The improvements should allow the facility to pick up signals from colliding black holes every two to three days, compared with once a week or so during its previous run in 2019-20," reports Nature. From the report: The Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy, which has undergone its own $9-million upgrade, was meant to join in, but technical issues are forcing its team to extend its shutdown and perform further maintenance. "Our expectation is we'll be able to restart by the end of summer or early autumn," says Virgo spokesperson Gianluca Gemme, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Genoa.

KAGRA, a gravitational-wave detector located under Mount Ikenoyama, Japan, is also restarting on 24 May. Its technology, although more advanced -- it was inaugurated in 2020 -- is being fine-tuned, and its sensitivity is still lower than LIGO's was in 2015. Principal investigator Takaaki Kajita, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Tokyo, says that KAGRA will join LIGO's run for a month and then shut down again for another period of commissioning. At that point, the team will cool the interferometer's four main mirrors to 20 kelvin, Kajita says -- a feature that sets KAGRA apart from the other detectors that will serve as the model for next-generation observatories.

In upgrades carried out before the 2019-20 run, LIGO and Virgo tackled some of this noise with a technique called light squeezing. This approach deals with inherent noise caused by the fact that light is made of individual particles: when the beams arrive at the sensor, each individual photon can arrive slightly too early or too late, which means that the laser waves don't overlap and cancel out perfectly even in the absence of gravitational waves. "It's like dropping a bucket of BBs [lead pellets]: it's going to make a loud hiss, but they all hit randomly," physicist Lee McCuller explained while showing a prototype of the LIGO interferometers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Light squeezing injects an auxiliary laser beam into the interferometer that reduces that effect. "Its photons arrive more regularly, with less noise," said McCuller, who is now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Neuralink, a neurotech startup co-founded by Elon Musk, has received FDA approval for its first in-human clinical study to test its brain implant called the Link. The implant aims to help patients with severe paralysis regain the ability to control external technologies using neural signals, potentially allowing them to communicate through mind-controlled cursors and typing. CNBC reports: "This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people," the company wrote in a tweet. The FDA and Neuralink did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. The extent of the approved trial is not known. Neuralink said in a tweet that patient recruitment for its clinical trial is not open yet.

No [brain-computer interface, or BCI] company has managed to clinch the FDA's final seal of approval. But by receiving the go-ahead for a study with human patients, Neuralink is one step closer to market. Neuralink's BCI will require patients to undergo invasive brain surgery. Its system centers around the Link, a small circular implant that processes and translates neural signals. The Link is connected to a series of thin, flexible threads inserted directly into the brain tissue where they detect neural signals. Patients with Neuralink devices will learn to control it using the Neuralink app. Patients will then be able to control external mice and keyboards through a Bluetooth connection, according to the company's website.

The two Koreas are elevating a space race aimed at modernizing how each country monitors the other's improving military firepower. From a report: As hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough have dimmed in recent years, North and South Korea have grown more antagonistic toward one another and upped their displays of military might. They have traded missile tests. Pyongyang has sent drones that flew over downtown Seoul. South Korea has sharpened security and defense ties with the U.S. and Japan. The rise in tensions has elevated the importance -- and need -- for spy-satellite technology that neither country now has. South Korea cleared a significant technological marker on Thursday, launching multiple commercial satellites aboard a homegrown rocket for the first time. North Korea's Kim Jong Un regime stands poised to soon fly its first military reconnaissance satellite.

Nuri, South Korea's three-stage liquid-fuel rocket, blasted off at 6:24 p.m. local time Thursday from the Naro Space Center in Goheung, a city on the country's southern coast. The 200-ton rocket launched into space and deployed eight satellites into orbit about 342 miles above Earth, about 13 minutes after liftoff. Seoul has the clear technological advantage, weapons analysts say, though Pyongyang has been quick to advance its sanctioned missile program to develop long-range rockets that can carry satellites. Both nations remain years away from having a full-fledged network of spy satellites. But attaining the technology would allow the countries to identify military targets to precisely launch strikes during potential conflict without relying on their allies' satellite technology for information. In North Korea's case, space-based satellite technology is essential for its nuclear strategy. Having eyes in the sky would serve as an additional asset to launching nuclear strikes with better accuracy, said Yang Uk, a military expert at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Seoul. Should the technology progress enough, North Korea could potentially identify nuclear strike targets in the U.S., he added.

Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug. From a report: The AI helped narrow down thousands of potential chemicals to a handful that could be tested in the laboratory. The result was a potent, experimental antibiotic called abaucin, which will need further tests before being used. The researchers in Canada and the US say AI has the power to massively accelerate the discovery of new drugs. It is the latest example of how the tools of artificial intelligence can be a revolutionary force in science and medicine.

Antibiotics kill bacteria. However, there has been a lack of new drugs for decades and bacteria are becoming harder to treat, as they evolve resistance to the ones we have. More than a million people a year are estimated to die from infections that resist treatment with antibiotics. The researchers focused on one of the most problematic species of bacteria - Acinetobacter baumannii, which can infect wounds and cause pneumonia. You may not have heard of it, but it is one of the three superbugs the World Health Organization has identified as a "critical" threat.

"Researchers have induced hibernation in a non-hibernating species (rats) with ultrasound, indicating the potential to do the same in humans with applications for medical trauma and spaceflight," writes longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. The research has been published in the journal Nature Metabolism. From a report: "Ultrasound is the only available energy form that can noninvasively focus on any location within the brain with high precision and without ionizing radiation," Hong Chen, a medical ultrasound researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of the paper, told The Daily Beast in an email. "We were curious whether ultrasound could noninvasively turn on the switch to induce the torpor-like state"

Torpor is a state in which mammals reduce their metabolism and body temperature, and essentially slows down their entire system in order to conserve as much energy as possible. The authors write that the state is controlled by the central nervous system. So the idea goes that targeting the hypothalamus, which controls the nervous system, could potentially induce hibernation. It should be noted that while mice enter such a state during periods of extreme cold, rats do not. The team developed an ultrasound emitter and mounted them on the heads of mice. They then triggered 10-second pulses of ultrasound on the hypothalamus, which caused an immediate drop in the creatures' body temperature by an average of 6 degrees Fahrenheit, heart rate, and oxygen consumption. The team was also able to automate their device so it would blast the mices' brains with ultrasound whenever their body temperature rose, allowing them to safely maintain the torpor-like state for up to 24 hours. Within two hours after the experiment, the animals were able to fully recover.

The study's authors were also able to replicate the experiment in rats -- another creature that doesn't hibernate -- for up to 12 hours and found similar results. However, the rats' body temperature dropped by an average 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 6, which is partly due to the fact that they don't naturally hibernate. However, it does show that they can entire a torpor-like state with the right technique. Of course, further research is needed to determine whether it's effective on humans. Chen added that the team hopes to eventually move the technique to human trials. They might be able to prove that blasting ultrasound on the brain is a great way to get us to rest like the bears do.

A new SETI project has begun, where a coded message was beamed from Europe's Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe to Earth and received by three radio telescopes, "kicking off a global effort to decipher the cryptic signal," reports Space.com. From the report: That effort is A Sign in Space, a multiweek project led by Daniela de Paulis, the current artist in residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. "Throughout history, humanity has searched for meaning in powerful and transformative phenomena," de Paulis said in a statement.

"Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind," she added. "A Sign in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines."

The Green Bank Observatory is one of the three scopes that listened for the Trace Gas Orbiter's signal today, along with the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in northern Italy, which is managed by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. Researchers at each of those facilities will now process the signal and make it available to their colleagues around the world and to the public at large. The project team wants folks from a range of backgrounds to study the signal and try their hand at deciphering it. You can learn more about the project, and submit your own ideas about the message, here. There are also workshops available you can attend that discuss the societal implications of detecting a "technosignature" from advanced alien life, among other topics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Gert-Jan Oskam was living in China in 2011 when he was in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the hips down. Now, with a combination of devices, scientists have given him control over his lower body again. "For 12 years I've been trying to get back my feet," Mr. Oskam said in a press briefing on Tuesday. "Now I have learned how to walk normal, natural." In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a "digital bridge" between Mr. Oskam's brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off. "We've captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement," Gregoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who helped lead the research, said at the press briefing.

In the new study, the brain-spine interface, as the researchers called it, took advantage of an artificial intelligence thought decoder to read Mr. Oskam's intentions -- detectable as electrical signals in his brain -- and match them to muscle movements. The etiology of natural movement, from thought to intention to action, was preserved. The only addition, as Dr. Courtine described it, was the digital bridge spanning the injured parts of the spine. [...] To achieve this result, the researchers first implanted electrodes in Mr. Oskam's skull and spine. The team then used a machine-learning program to observe which parts of the brain lit up as he tried to move different parts of his body. This thought decoder was able to match the activity of certain electrodes with particular intentions: One configuration lit up whenever Mr. Oskam tried to move his ankles, another when he tried to move his hips.

Then the researchers used another algorithm to connect the brain implant to the spinal implant, which was set to send electrical signals to different parts of his body, sparking movement. The algorithm was able to account for slight variations in the direction and speed of each muscle contraction and relaxation. And, because the signals between the brain and spine were sent every 300 milliseconds, Mr. Oskam could quickly adjust his strategy based on what was working and what wasn't. Within the first treatment session he could twist his hip muscles. Over the next few months, the researchers fine-tuned the brain-spine interface to better fit basic actions like walking and standing. Mr. Oskam gained a somewhat healthy-looking gait and was able to traverse steps and ramps with relative ease, even after months without treatment. Moreover, after a year in treatment, he began noticing clear improvements in his movement without the aid of the brain-spine interface. The researchers documented these improvements in weight-bearing, balancing and walking tests. Now, Mr. Oskam can walk in a limited way around his house, get in and out of a car and stand at a bar for a drink. For the first time, he said, he feels like he is the one in control.