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."

The exoplanet 8 Ursae Minoris b should not exist. It orbits its host star at just half the Earth-Sun distance, and by all indications, the star should have gone through a phase in which it bloated up enough to engulf that entire orbit and then some. Yet 8 Ursae Minoris b definitely appears to exist. From a report: There is a handful of potential explanations, none of them especially likely. The people who discovered the planet are suggesting that it survived because its host star got distracted by swallowing a white dwarf instead. 8 Ursae Minoris b was discovered using the radial velocity method, which watches for changes in a star's light that occur as planets tug the star back and forth as they orbit. This tugging creates a blue shift in the light when the planet is pulling the star in the direction of Earth and a red shift when the star is pulled away from Earth.

But the planet is unlikely to be tugging the star directly toward Earth, so we tend to only measure the component of the star's motion that's in our direction. We'd see the same apparent motion of the star if a light planet's orbit was oriented directly toward Earth or a very heavy planet that has a relatively skewed orbit. At best, radial velocity measurements give us an estimate of the minimum mass of the planet; it could potentially be larger. So we know that, at minimum, 8 Ursae Minoris b is a big planet, at over 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter. It also resides close to its host star, completing a full orbit in just 93 days. That places it at half an Astronomical Unit (AU, the typical distance between Earth and the Sun) from its star.

Observations also hint at a second body orbiting the star at least five AU. The evidence for that is weak given the current data, but it may have a significant role in shaping the system. On its own, there's nothing especially unusual about the 8 Ursae Minoris exosolar system. Where things get weird is when you consider the star at the center of the system.

Four volunteers will spend the next 378 days in a simulation of Mars, facing harsh, realistic challenges in tight quarters under NASA's watchful eye in preparation for a real-life mission to the red planet. From a report: Research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu were locked into the virtual planet at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Sunday as part of the first of a three-year-long simulation study by the space agency. "The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely," Grace Douglas, the mission's principal investigator at NASA, said during a briefing.

Nasa 3D-printed the 1,700-square-foot facility, dubbed Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog -- or CHAPEA. It will be the longest analog mission in the agency's history. The habitat -- named Mars Dune Alpha -- will feature a kitchen, private crew quarters, and two bathrooms, with medical, work, and recreation areas. The crew will be expected to carry out "mission activities," like collecting geological samples, exercising, and practicing personal hygiene and health care, with minimal contact with their family and loved ones, according to NASA. To capture the true essence of life on our neighboring planet, the crew must work through "environmental stressors," including limits on resources, periods of isolation, and equipment failures.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Five cases of malaria have been confirmed in Florida and Texas, the first time the potentially fatal mosquito-borne disease has been locally acquired in the United States in 20 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday. The four Florida cases, along with one in Texas, have been diagnosed over a period of two months, the agency said. The state of Florida said that its first case was diagnosed on May 26 in Sarasota County, while officials in Texas said on June 23 that a Texas resident who worked outdoors in Cameron County had been diagnosed with the disease.

The CDC said in an alert released Monday that malaria is considered a medical emergency, and that anyone with symptoms should be "urgently evaluated." However, the CDC said that risk of malaria remains low in the United States, and that most cases are acquired when people travel outside of the country. Fully 95% of malaria infections are acquired in Africa, the health agency said. Malaria is caused by five species of a parasite carried by certain female mosquitoes. Symptoms include fever, chills, headache, muscle pain and fatigue. Nausea, diarrhea and vomiting may also appear. Malaria can cause life-threatening damage, including kidney failure, seizures and coma.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A cleaner at a college in New York state accidentally destroyed decades of research by turning off a freezer in order to mute "annoying alarm" sounds. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, is suing the cleaner's employer, alleging improper training. According to a lawsuit filed in the New York supreme court in Rensselaer county earlier this month, the university is seeking more than $1m in damages, the Times Union newspaper reported. "People's behavior and negligence caused all this," Michael Ginsberg, an attorney for RPI, told the Times Union. "Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research."

The cleaner, who is not named in the lawsuit, was employed by Daigle Cleaning Systems and worked at RPI for several months in 2020, when the incident occurred. The lab freezer contained several cultures that were part of a research project on photosynthesis headed by the biology and chemistry professor KV Lakshmi, the BBC reported. The cultures were usually stored at -112F (-80C). On September 14, 2020, days before the freezer was unplugged, an alarm indicated that the freezer temperature was fluctuating, the lawsuit says, adding that the specimens in the freezer were still viable at that point. Covid restrictions at the time meant repairs could not be made for a week. Lab officials took precautions to preserve the cultures and explain the alarm, posting a sign explaining where the noise was coming from and how to mute it. Lakshmi also installed a lock box on the freezer's outlet and socket to stop anyone unplugging it.

But on September 17, the Daigle Cleaning Systems employee turned off the circuit breaker, causing the temperature of the freezer to rise. The next day, lab officials discovered the samples were unsalvageable. "[A] majority of specimens were compromised, destroyed and rendered unsalvageable demolishing more than 20 years of research," the lawsuit says. In an interview with university officials, the cleaner said he thought he was turning the circuit breaker on after hearing the alarms. "At the end of the interview, he still did not appear to believe he had done anything wrong but was just trying to help," the lawsuit says, saying the cleaner made an "error" when reading the panel.

Carl Zimmer writes in The New York Times: In its first week, a fertilized human egg develops into a hollow ball of 200 cells and then implants itself on the wall of the uterus. Over the next three weeks, it divides into the distinct tissues of a human body. And those crucial few weeks remain, for the most part, a black box. "We know the basics, but the very fine details we just don't know," said Jacob Hanna, a developmental biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Dr. Hanna and a number of other biologists are trying to uncover those details by creating models of human embryos in the lab. They are coaxing stem cells to organize themselves into clumps that take on some of the crucial hallmarks of real embryos.

This month, Dr. Hanna's team in Israel, as well as groups in Britain, the United States and China, released reports on these experiments. The studies, while not yet published in scientific journals, have attracted keen interest from other scientists, who have been hoping for years that such advances could finally shed light on some of the mysteries of early human development. Ethicists have long cautioned that the advent of embryo models would further complicate the already complicated regulation of this research. But the scientists behind the new work were quick to stress that they had not created real embryos and that their clusters of stem cells could never give rise to a human being. "We do it to save lives, not create it," said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology, who led another effort. [...]

If scientists can create close, reliable models of embryos, they will be able to run large-scale experiments to test potential causes of pregnancy failures, such as viral infections and genetic mutations. The models could lead to other medical advances too, noted Insoo Hyun, a member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics who was not involved in the new studies. "Once you get the embryo models in place and you can rely on them, that can be an interesting way to screen drugs that women take when they're pregnant," he said. "That would be an enormous benefit." Dr. Hanna [...] also saw a possibility of using embryo models as a new form of stem-cell treatment for diseases such as cancer.

shilly writes: John B. Goodenough, professor at The University of Texas at Austin who is known around the world for the development of the lithium-ion battery, died Sunday at the age of 100. Goodenough was a dedicated public servant, a sought-after mentor and a brilliant yet humble inventor. His discovery led to the wireless revolution and put electronic devices in the hands of people worldwide. In 2019, Goodenough made national and international headlines after being awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his battery work, an award many of his fans considered a long time coming, especially as he became the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize.

"John's legacy as a brilliant scientist is immeasurable -- his discoveries improved the lives of billions of people around the world," said UT Austin President Jay Hartzell. "He was a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career, and he never ceased searching for innovative energy-storage solutions. John's work and commitment to our mission are the ultimate reflection of our aspiration as Longhorns -- that what starts here changes the world -- and he will be greatly missed among our UT community." Goodenough served as a faculty member in the Cockrell School of Engineering for 37 years, holding the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair of Engineering and faculty positions in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Throughout his tenure, his research continued to focus on battery materials and address fundamental solid-state science and engineering problems to create the next generation of rechargeable batteries.

An ancient Nevada lakebed could become a vast source of the lithium used in electric car batteries, reports the Associated Press. But "NASA says the same site — flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere — is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead." At the space agency's request, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has agreed to withdraw 36 square miles (92 square kilometers) of the eastern Nevada terrain from its inventory of federal lands open to potential mineral exploration and mining. NASA says the long, flat piece of land above the untapped lithium deposit in Nevada's Railroad Valley has been used for nearly three decades to get measurements just right to keep satellites and their applications functioning properly. "No other location in the United States is suitable for this purpose," the Bureau of Land Management concluded in April after receiving NASA's input on the tract 250 miles (400 kilometers) northeast of Las Vegas...

In Railroad Valley, satellite calculations are critical to gathering information beamed from space with widespread applications from weather forecasting to national security, agricultural outlooks and natural disasters, according to NASA, which said the satellites "provide vital and often time-critical information touching every aspect of life on Earth." That increasingly includes certifying measurements related to climate change. Thus the Nevada desert paradox, critics say. Although lithium is the main ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles key to reducing greenhouse gases, in this case the metal is buried beneath land NASA says must remain undisturbed to certify the accuracy of satellites monitoring Earth's warming atmosphere...

The area's unchanged nature has allowed NASA to establish a long record of images of the undisturbed topography to assist precise measurement of distances using the travel time of radio signals and assure "absolute radiometric calibration" of sensors on board satellites. "Activities that stand to disrupt the surface integrity of Railroad Valley would risk making the site unusable," Jeremy Eggers, a spokesman for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told The Associated Press.
One company with most of the mining rights says the tract's withdrawal will put more than half the site's value out of reach, according to the article.

But the Associated Press got a supportive quote for the move from the satellite imaging company Planet Labs, which has relied on NASA's site to calibrate more than 250 of its satellites since 2016. "As our nation becomes ever more impacted by an evolving and changing environment, it is critical to have reliable and accurate data and imagery of our planet."

The "BepiColombo" mission, a joint European-Japanese effort, "has recently completed its third of six planned flybys of Mercury, capturing dozens of images in the process," reports the Byte: At its closest, the spacecraft soared within just 150 miles of Mercury. This occurred on the night side of the planet, however, too dark for optimal imaging. Instead, the first and nearest image was taken 12 minutes after the closest approach, at the still impressive proximity of some 1,100 miles above the surface.
Now the ESA has spliced together 217 images from that flyby into a short video, which culminates with a zoomed-in closeup of Mercury's cratered surface. And the music in that video had a little help from AI, reports Phys.org: Music was composed for the sequence by ILÄ (formerly known as Anil Sebastian), with the assistance of AI tools developed by the Machine Intelligence for Musical Audio group, University of Sheffield.

Music from the previous two flyby movies — composed by Maison Mercury Jones' creative director ILÄ and Ingmar Kamalagharan — was given to the AI tool to suggest seeds for the new composition, which ILÄ then chose from to edit and weave together with other elements into the new piece.

The team at the University of Sheffield has developed an Artificial Musical Intelligence (AMI), a large-scale general-purpose deep neural network that can be personalized to individual musicians and use cases. The project with the University of Sheffield is aimed at exploring the boundaries of the ethics of AI creativity, while also emphasizing the essential contributions of the (human) composer.
From the ESA's announcement: BepiColombo's next Mercury flyby will take place on 5 September 2024, but there is plenty of work to occupy the teams in the meantime... BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module will complete over 15 000 hours of solar electric propulsion operations over its lifetime, which together with nine planetary flybys in total — one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury — will guide the spacecraft towards Mercury orbit.

The ESA-led Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter modules will separate into complementary orbits around the planet, and their main science mission will begin in early 2026.
One spaceflight blog notes the propulsive energy required for an eventual entry into the orbit of Mercury "is greater than that of a mission to fly by Pluto.

"Only one other spacecraft has orbited Mercury, and that was NASA's MESSENGER probe, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015."

Slashdot reader silverjacket writes: Researchers at Oxford and elsewhere developed a method that figures out the most likely number and size of dimension in which to format a string of bits, with applications to interpreting messages from extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), if we were to receive them.
The new method "looks at every possible combination of dimension number and size," according to Science News: The researchers also measure each possible configuration's global order by seeing how much an image compression algorithm can shrink it without losing information — mathematically, randomness is less compressible than regular patterns...
Hector Zeni [one of the creators of this method] "notes that in Carl Saganâ(TM)s sci-fi novel Contact, the characters spend a lot of time figuring out that a message received from aliens is in three dimensions (specifically a video). âoeIf you have our tools, you would solve that problem in seconds and with no human intervention.â An algorithm that pieces together smaller algorithmic components in order to explain or predict data — this new method is just one way to do it — may also help us one day achieve artificial general intelligence, Zenil says. Such automated approaches don't depend on human assumptions about the signal. That opens the door to discovering forms of intelligence that might think differently from our own.

Finland's University of Jyväskylä has an announcement: an experiment performed in its accelerator lab "has succeeded in producing a previously unknown atomic nucleus."

Dubbed "190-Astatine," it's made from 85 protons and 105 neutrons.. The nucleus is the lightest isotope of astatine discovered to date. Astatine is a fast-decaying, and therefore rare element. It has been estimated that in the Earth's crust, there is no more than one tablespoon of astatine...

The new isotope was produced in the fusion of 84Sr beam particles and silver target atoms. The isotope was detected among the products by using the detectors of RITU recoil separator... "The studies of new nuclei are important for understanding the structure of atomic nuclei and the limits of known matter," says Doctoral Researcher Henna Kokkonen from the Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä.

An anonymous reader shared this report from USA Today: A new study reinforces the importance of lowering cholesterol in people at risk for, but who haven't had a heart attack or stroke. The study looked at a statin alternative, called bempedoic acid, and found that as it reduced levels of LDL cholesterol, it also lowered the risk for heart attack, stroke and death.

Researchers are quick to say bempedoic acid shouldn't be used instead of statins. It's far more expensive and doesn't have the decades-long track record of safety and effectiveness. But for people who can't tolerate statins or a high enough dose to bring their cholesterol levels down adequately, the new study suggests it's important to find alternatives, and that bempedoic acid can be at least part of the solution.

Motherboard reports: Scientists are currently searching for the submerged remains of an interstellar object that crashed into the skies near Papua New Guinea in January 2014 and probably sprinkled material from another star system into the Pacific Ocean, according to an onboard diary by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who is leading the expedition. The effort, which kicked off on June 14, aims to recover what is left of the otherworldly fireball using a deep-sea magnetic sled.

The team has already turned up "anomalous" magnetic spherules, steel shards, curious wires, and heaps of volcanic ash, but has not identified anything that is unambiguously extraterrestrial — or interstellar — at this point. However, Loeb is optimistic that the crew will identify pieces of Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1), the mysterious half-ton object that struck Earth nearly a decade ago, which he thinks could be an artifact, or "technosignature," from an alien civilization...

The fireball that sparked the hunt smashed into the atmosphere on January 8, 2014, and was detected by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which keeps track of extraterrestrial impacts using a network of sensors around the world. Years later, Loeb and his student, Amir Siraj, concluded that the meteor's high velocity at impact suggested that it was interstellar in origin, a hypothesis that was ultimately supported by the United States Space Command using classified sensor data.
Today Loeb posted on Medium that "by now, we have 25 spherules from the site of the first recognized interstellar meteor," with a cumulative weight of about 30 milligrams — estimated to be one part in ten million of the original fireball's mass: The success of the Interstellar Expedition constitutes the first opportunity for astronomers to learn about interstellar space by using a microscope rather than a telescope. It opens the door for a new branch of observational astronomy.
Updates about the expedition are running on the Mega Screen in New York's Times Square, Motherboard reports. And Loeb writes that "If further analysis of the 50 milligrams retrieved from IM1's site will inform us that IM1's composition requires a technological origin, we will know that we are not alone."

He also shared an email that responded to his online diaries: I had a heart attack four weeks ago and am now in rehab. I read your IM1 diary every day and it always gives me new courage to face life. There are still so many things to discover and I want to live long enough to see some of them. I wish you and your team all the best.

"Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings," writes the New York Times. The Harvard Crimson student newspaper has the details: At least four papers authored by Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino contain fraudulent data, three business school professors allege... The professors wrote that they first contacted Harvard Business School in fall 2021 with concerns of academic misconduct by Gino. "Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data," the three wrote in a blog post last week. "Perhaps dozens."
Their allegations appear in several blog posts on a blog called Data Colada — the first of which offers this update: As you can see on her Harvard home page (.htm), Gino has gone on "administrative leave", and the name of her chaired position at Harvard Business School is no longer listed... We have learned (from knowledgeable sources outside of Harvard) that a few days ago Harvard requested that three of the four papers in our report be retracted. A fourth paper, discussed in today's post, had already been retracted, but we understand that Harvard requested the retraction notice be amended to include mention of this (additional) fraud.
The business professors concluded there was fraud based on a quirk of Microsoft's Excel files: A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files that Excel combines to produce a single spreadsheet. (If curious or incredulous, run any .xlsx file in your computer through the program you use for unzipping files; you will find a bunch of files organized in folder.) For instance, one file in that bundle has all the numeric values that appear on a spreadsheet, another has all the character entries, another the formatting information (e.g., Calibri vs. Cambria font), etc.

Most relevant to us is a file called calcChain.xml. CalcChain tells Excel in which order to carry out the calculations in the spreadsheet. It tells Excel something like "First solve the formula in cell A1, then the one in A2, then B1, etc." CalcChain is short for 'calculation chain'. The image below shows how, when one unzips the posted Excel file, one can navigate to this calcChain.xml file. CalcChain is so useful here because it will tell you whether a cell (or row) containing a formula has been moved, and where it has been moved to. That means that we can use calcChain to go back and see what this spreadsheet may have looked like back in 2010, before it was tampered with...!

We used calcChain to see whether there is evidence that the rows that were out of sequence, and that showed huge effects on the key dependent variables, had been manually tampered with. And there is.
In addition, a second blog post notes that one study on honesty had also asked college students what year they were in school — and somehow 35 had all replied with a non-answer, giving as their year in school "Harvard." And suspiciously, all but one of these 35 entries were especially likely to confirm the authors' hypothesis. "This strongly suggests that these 'Harvard' observations were altered to produce the desired effect."

The New York Times points out that this paper "has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings."

3M will pay $10.3 billion to settle lawsuits over contamination of drinking water with PFAS, a class of chemicals known as "forever chemicals" that have been linked to health problems. NPR reports: The deal would compensate water providers for pollution with per- and polyfluorinated substances, known collectively as PFAS -- a broad class of chemicals used in nonstick, water- and grease-resistant products such as clothing and cookware. Described as "forever chemicals" because they don't degrade naturally in the environment, PFAS have been linked to a variety of health problems, including liver and immune-system damage and some cancers.

The compounds have been detected at varying levels in drinking water around the nation. The Environmental Protection Agency in March proposed strict limits on two common types, PFOA and PFOS, and said it wanted to regulate four others. Water providers would be responsible for monitoring their systems for the chemicals. The agreement would settle a case that was scheduled for trial earlier this month involving a claim by Stuart, Florida, one of about 300 communities that have filed similar suits against companies that produced firefighting foam or the PFAS it contained.

3M chairman Mike Roman said the deal was "an important step forward" that builds on the company's decision in 2020 to phase out PFOA and PFOS and its investments in "state-of-the-art water filtration technology in our chemical manufacturing operations." The company, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, will halt all PFAS production by the end of 2025, he said. The settlement will be paid over 13 years and could reach as high as $12.5 billion, depending on how many public water systems detect PFAS during testing that EPA has required in the next three years, said Dallas-based attorney Scott Summy, one of the lead attorneys for those suing 3M and other manufacturers. The payment will help cover costs of filtering PFAS from systems where it's been detected and testing others, he said.