The scientific community is reeling after NASA gutted funding for a key Venus mission that was "poised to answer some of the biggest questions about the planet and its volcanic activity," reports The Verge. From the report: This month saw the announcement of one of the most exciting findings about Venus in decades: the first direct evidence of an active volcano there. [...] This finding is "mind-blowing," Venus scientist Darby Dyar told The Verge, opening up possibilities to learn about Venus' geology and atmosphere as well as whether the planet was once habitable. But in the space science community, the excitement about this finding is being overshadowed by the "soft cancellation" of a key NASA Venus mission, which Dyar is also deputy principal investigator for and which had been set to launch in 2028.

The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission was one of three missions set to explore Venus in the next few years, kicking off NASA's "decade of Venus" and seeing a return to the study of our planetary neighbor, which scientists have been calling for for years. But at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held recently in Houston, Texas, VERITAS principal investigator Sue Smrekar announced that the mission's funding had been completely gutted, leaving the mission in a state of precarious limbo.

This came as a surprise to many of the conference attendees, who were soon tweeting their support for the mission using the hashtag #SaveVERITAS. The Planetary Society also put out a statement describing the delay of the mission's launch by at least three years as "uncalled-for" and calling on NASA to commit to launching by 2029. NASA has cited problems with another mission, Psyche, as the reason for delaying VERITAS by at least three years. Both Psyche and VERITAS are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the NASA / Caltech research center that is responsible for building robotic spacecraft such as the Mars rovers. JPL had problems meeting its requirements for the Psyche mission, which aims to visit a metal asteroid, and missed its launch date last year. An independent review into the missed launch found it was due to, among other problems, workforce issues at JPL. Budget cuts and cancellations aren't uncommon, but the situation with VERITAS is different because it "had already been selected by NASA to be part of its Discovery Program," adds the Verge. "Historically, once a mission has been selected by NASA, those working on it can be confident that funding will be available. If a delay happens -- as is not uncommon in large, complex missions -- then a lower level of funding is typically made available to keep the basic essentials in place, called bridge funding, until full funding can be restored."

Although the team asked NASA for bridge funding to maintain mission essentials, "virtually all of their funding has been cut, leaving them with a tiny $1.5 million per year," says the report. "This is a highly unusual situation for a selected mission because delaying and restarting missions is so expensive."

The UK government will defy scientific doubts to place a massive bet on technology to capture and store carbon dioxide in undersea caverns, to enable an expansion of oil and gas in the North Sea. From a report: Grant Shapps, the energy and net zero secretary, on Thursday unveiled the "powering up Britain" strategy, with carbon capture and storage (CCS) at its heart, during a visit to a nuclear fusion development facility in Oxford. Shapps said the continued production of oil and gas in the North Sea was still necessary, and that the UK had a geological advantage in being able to store most of the carbon likely to be produced in Europe for the next 250 years in the large caverns underneath the North Sea. "Unless you can explain how we can transition [to net zero] without oil and gas, we need oil and gas," he said. "I am very keen that we fill those cavities with storing carbon. I think there are huge opportunities for us to do that."

Shapps pointed to the $24.7bn the government is planning to spend over 20 years on developing CCS, which he said would generate new jobs and make the UK a world leader in the technology. Among the 1,000 pages of proposals to be published on Thursday will be boosts for offshore wind, hydrogen, heat pumps and electric vehicles. A green finance strategy, to be set out by the chancellor of the exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, will be aimed at mobilising private-sector money for investments in green industry, and there will be a consultation on carbon border taxes, aimed at penalising the import of high-carbon goods from overseas. But the plans contain no new government spending, and campaigners said they missed out key elements, such as a comprehensive programme of home insulation and a full lifting of the ban on new onshore wind turbines in England.

Researchers have discovered one of the most massive black holes ever discovered, clocking in at around 32.7 billion times the mass of the sun. It's located in a galaxy at the center of a massive cluster named Abell 1201, some 2.7 billion light-years away. ScienceAlert reports: The new figure exceeds previous estimates by at least 7 billion solar masses, demonstrating the power of curved light for measuring masses with precision. One way we can find these black holes is looking for an effect called gravitational lensing. This occurs when space-time itself is warped by mass; imagine space-time as a rubber sheet, and the mass as a heavy weight on it. Any light traveling through that region of space-time has to travel along a curved path, and that can look very interesting to an observer watching from afar. [...]

The central galaxy, or brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) of Abell 1201, is a large, diffuse elliptical galaxy well-known as a strong gravitational lens. A galaxy far beyond the BCG appears alongside it as an elongated smear, like an eyebrow closely wrapped around its outskirts. This smear was discovered in 2003; in 2017, astronomers found a second, fainter smear, even closer to the galactic center. This implies, astronomers proposed, the presence of a very large black hole at the center of the BCG, but the data available was not detailed enough to resolve the central mass, or reveal more about what was in there.

[Researchers] not only had access to more recent observations, but devised the tools to understand them. They conducted hundreds of thousands of simulations of light moving through the Universe, altering the mass of the black hole at the galaxy's center, looking for results that replicate the lensing we observe with Abell 1021 BCG. All but one of their models preferred a massive black hole at the center of the galaxy; and the best fit for the mass of that black hole was 32.7 billion times the mass of the Sun. That pushes it well into ultramassive territory, black holes more massive than 10 billion Suns, and close to the theoretical upper limit for black hole masses of 50 billion Suns. The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Virgin Orbit is ceasing operations "for the foreseeable future" after failing to secure a funding lifeline, CEO Dan Hart told employees during an all-hands meeting Thursday afternoon. The company will lay off nearly all of its workforce. CNBC reports: "Unfortunately, we've not been able to secure the funding to provide a clear path for this company," Hart said, according to audio of the 5 p.m. ET meeting obtained by CNBC. "We have no choice but to implement immediate, dramatic and extremely painful changes," Hart said, audibly choking up on the call. He added this would be "probably the hardest all-hands that we've ever done in my life."

The company will eliminate all but 100 positions, amounting to about 90% of the workforce, Hart said, noting the layoffs will affect every team and department. In a securities filing, the company said the layoffs constituted 675 positions, or approximately 85%. "This company, this team -- all of you -- mean a hell of a lot to me. And I have not, and will not, stop supporting you, whether you're here on the journey or if you're elsewhere," Hart said. Virgin Orbit will "provide a severance package for every departing" employee, Hart said, with a cash payment, extension of benefits, and support in finding a new position -- with a "direct pipeline" set up with sister company Virgin Galactic for hiring.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: What does a stressed plant sound like? A bit like bubble-wrap being popped. Researchers in Israel report in the journal Cell on March 30 that tomato and tobacco plants that are stressed -- from dehydration or having their stems severed -- emit sounds that are comparable in volume to normal human conversation. The frequency of these noises is too high for our ears to detect, but they can probably be heard by insects, other mammals, and possibly other plants. "Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don't hear, and those sounds carry information," says senior author Lilach Hadany, an evolutionary biologist and theoretician at Tel Aviv University. "There are animals that can hear these sounds, so there is the possibility that a lot of acoustic interaction is occurring."

The researchers used microphones to record healthy and stressed tomato and tobacco plants, first in a soundproofed acoustic chamber and then in a noisier greenhouse environment. They stressed the plants via two methods: by not watering them for several days and by cutting their stems. After recording the plants, the researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to differentiate between unstressed plants, thirsty plants, and cut plants. The team found that stressed plants emit more sounds than unstressed plants. The plant sounds resemble pops or clicks, and a single stressed plant emits around 30-50 of these clicks per hour at seemingly random intervals, but unstressed plants emit far fewer sounds. "When tomatoes are not stressed at all, they are very quiet," says Hadany.

Water-stressed plants began emitting noises before they were visibly dehydrated, and the frequency of sounds peaked after five days with no water before decreasing again as the plants dried up completely. The types of sound emitted differed with the cause of stress. The machine-learning algorithm was able to accurately differentiate between dehydration and stress from cutting and could also discern whether the sounds came from a tomato or tobacco plant. Although the study focused on tomato and tobacco plants because of their ease to grow and standardize in the laboratory, the research team also recorded a variety of other plant species. "We found that many plants -- corn, wheat, grape, and cactus plants, for example -- emit sounds when they are stressed," says Hadany. The researchers suggest that these noises "might be due to the formation and bursting of air bubbles in the plant's vascular system, a process called cavitation," reports Phys.Org. It's unclear if the plants are producing these sounds in order to communicate with other organisms.

Researchers have developed a novel fuel cell implant for type 1 diabetes that can successfully produce and release insulin when triggered. New Atlas reports: The fuel cell itself, which resembles a teabag that's slightly larger than a fingernail, is covered in a nonwoven fabric and coated with alginate, an algae-derived product used widely in biomedicine because of its high degree of biocompatibility. When implanted under the skin, the cell's alginate soaks up body fluid, allowing glucose to permeate the surface and flow into the power center. Inside the cell, the team developed a copper-based nanoparticle anode that splits glucose into gluconic acid and a proton to generate an electric current. "Many people, especially in the Western industrialized nations, consume more carbohydrates than they need in everyday life," [Martin Fussenegger from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich] said. "This gave us the idea of using this excess metabolic energy to produce electricity to power biomedical devices.

The fuel cell was then coupled with an insulin capsule featuring the team's beta cells, which could be triggered to secrete insulin via electric current from the implant. Overall, the two components provide a self-regulating circuit. When the fuel cell powered by glucose senses excess blood sugar, it powers up. This then stimulates the beta cells to produce and secrete insulin. As blood sugar levels dip, it trips a threshold sensor in the fuel cell, so it powers down, in turn stopping the insulin production and release. This self-sustained circuit could also produce enough power to communicate with a device such as a smartphone, which allows for monitoring and adjusting, and even has potential for remote access for medical intervention. The study was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The U.S., Soviet Union, and Japan have all sent robots to the moon over the past 50 years. Now, a group of college students is joining in by building a shoebox-sized rover that they plan to launch in May, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The lunar rover, called Iris, will be the first privately-made American robot to explore the surface of the moon, according to the project's website. But that's not all -- it would also be the first student-built rover, and the smallest and lightest one yet. Around 300 students from Carnegie Mellon University have all pitched in on the project.

Iris is tiny and weighs 2 kgs (4.4 lbs) -- but the design is deliberately small. The rover will fly on a private rocket carrying 14 payloads to the moon, which includes Iris, projects for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as some humans. The project involved around 300 students, who will also control and operate Moonshot Mission Control, the control center for Iris based in CMU's campus in Pittsburgh. Iris will spend a total of 50 hours on the moon's surface before it runs out of battery, after which it will be left on the moon. It has two cameras that will help it capture images of dust on the moon's surface.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A mammoth meatball has been created by a cultivated meat company, resurrecting the flesh of the long-extinct animals. The project aims to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells, without the slaughter of animals, and to highlight the link between large-scale livestock production and the destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis.

The mammoth meatball was produced by Vow, an Australian company, which is taking a different approach to cultured meat. There are scores of companies working on replacements for conventional meat, such as chicken, pork and beef. But Vow is aiming to mix and match cells from unconventional species to create new kinds of meat. The company has already investigated the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish. The first cultivated meat to be sold to diners will be Japanese quail, which the company expects will be in restaurants in Singapore this year. [...]

Vow worked with Prof Ernst Wolvetang, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, to create the mammoth muscle protein. His team took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavor, and filled in the few gaps using elephant DNA. This sequence was placed in myoblast stem cells from a sheep, which replicated to grow to the 20 billion cells subsequently used by the company to grow the mammoth meat. "It was ridiculously easy and fast," said Wolvetang. "We did this in a couple of weeks." Initially, the idea was to produce dodo meat, he said, but the DNA sequences needed do not exist. Tim Noakesmith, cofounder of Vow, said: "We chose the woolly mammoth because it's a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change." Bas Korsten at creative agency Wunderman Thompson added: "Our aim is to start a conversation about how we eat, and what the future alternatives can look and taste like. Cultured meat is meat, but not as we know it."

No one has yet to taste the mammoth meatball, notes the report. "We haven't seen this protein for thousands of years," said Wolvetang. "So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies."

Lockheed Martin has created a spinoff devoted to lunar infrastructure, Crescent Space, whose first project is a Moon-to-Earth satellite network. Engadget reports: Parsec, as it's called, uses a constellation of small lunar satellites to provide a non-stop connection between astronauts, their equipment and the people back home. The system will also provide navigation help. The technology should help explorers keep in touch, and assist with spacecraft course changes. As Lockheed Martin explains, though, it could prove vital to those on lunar soil. Parsec's nodes create a lunar equivalent to GPS, giving astronauts their exact positions and directions back to base. A rover crew might know how to return home without driving into a dangerous crater, for instance.

Crescent's first Parsec nodes should be operational by 2025, with Lockheed Martin providing the satellites. And before you ask: yes, the company is clearly hoping for some big customers. CEO Joe Landon (formerly a Lockheed Martin Space VP) claims Crescent is "well positioned" to support NASA's Artemis Moon landings and other exploratory missions.

Clancy William James writes via The Conversation: We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs. Two colliding neutron stars -- each the super-dense core of an exploded star -- produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a "supramassive" neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole. Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory -- an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of the fast radio burst -- vanished almost four years ago. In a few months, we might get another chance to find out if we are correct. [...]

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has found two binary neutron star mergers. Crucially, the second, known as GW190425, occurred when a new FRB-hunting telescope called CHIME was also operational. However, being new, it took CHIME two years to release its first batch of data. When it did so, [Alexandra Moroianu, a masters student at the University of Western Australia and lead author of the study] quickly identified a fast radio burst called FRB 20190425A which occurred only two and a half hours after GW190425. Exciting as this was, there was a problem -- only one of LIGO's two detectors was working at the time, making it very uncertain where exactly GW190425 had come from. In fact, there was a 5% chance this could just be a coincidence. Worse, the Fermi satellite, which could have detected gamma rays from the merger -- the "smoking gun" confirming the origin of GW190425 -- was blocked by Earth at the time. [...]

LIGO and two other gravitational wave detectors, Virgo and KAGRA, will turn back on in May this year, and be more sensitive than ever, while CHIME and other radio telescopes are ready to immediately detect any FRBs from neutron star mergers. In a few months, we may find out if we've made a key breakthrough -- or if it was just a flash in the pan.

For the first time, scientists may have discovered indirect evidence that large amounts of invisible dark matter surround black holes. The discovery, if confirmed, could represent a major breakthrough in dark matter research. Space.com reports: Dark matter makes up around 85% of all matter in the universe, but it is almost completely invisible to astronomers. This is because, unlike the matter that comprises stars, planets and everything else around us, dark matter doesn't interact with light and can't be seen. Fortunately, dark matter does interact gravitationally, enabling researchers to infer the presence of dark matter by looking at its gravitational effects on ordinary matter "proxies." In the new research, a team of scientists from The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) used stars orbiting black holes in binary systems as these proxies.

The team watched as the orbits of two stars decayed, or slightly slowed, by about 1 millisecond per year while moving around their companion black holes, designated A0620-00 and XTE J1118+480. The team concluded that the slow-down was the result of dark matter surrounding the black holes which generated significant friction and a drag on the stars as they whipped around their high-mass partners.

Using computer simulations of the black hole systems, the team applied a widely held model in cosmology called the dark matter dynamical friction model, which predicts a specific loss of momentum on objects interacting gravitationally with dark matter. The simulations revealed that the observed rates of orbital decay matched the predictions of the friction model. The observed rate of orbital decay is around 50 times greater than the theoretical estimation of about 0.02 milliseconds of orbital decay per year for binary systems lacking dark matter. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Slashdot reader votsalo shares a report from the Guardian: Tiny glass beads strewn across the moon's surface contain potentially billions of tons of water that could be extracted and used by astronauts on future lunar missions, researchers say. The discovery is thought to be one of the most important breakthroughs yet for space agencies that have set their sights on building bases on the moon, as it means there could be a highly accessible source of not only water but also hydrogen and oxygen. "This is one of the most exciting discoveries we've made," said Mahesh Anand, a professor of planetary science and exploration at the Open University. "With this finding, the potential for exploring the moon in a sustainable manner is higher than it's ever been."

Anand and a team of Chinese scientists analyzed fine glass beads from lunar soil samples returned to Earth in December 2020 by the Chinese Chang'e-5 mission. The beads, which measure less than a millimeter across, form when meteoroids slam into the moon and send up showers of molten droplets. These then solidify and become mixed into the moon dust. Tests on the glass particles revealed that together they contain substantial quantities of water, amounting to between 300m and 270 billion tons across the entire moon's surface. "This is going to open up new avenues which many of us have been thinking about," said Anand. "If you can extract the water and concentrate it in significant quantities, it's up to you how you utilize it."

The latest research, published in Nature Geoscience, points to fine glass beads as the source of that surface water. Unlike frozen water lurking in permanently shaded craters, this should be far easier to extract by humans or robots working on the moon. "It's not that you can shake the material and water starts dripping out, but there's evidence that when the temperature of this material goes above 100C, it will start to come out and can be harvested," Anand said. The water appears to form when high-energy particles streaming from the sun -- the so-called solar wind -- strike the molten droplets. The solar wind contains hydrogen nuclei, which combine with oxygen in the droplets to produce water or hydroxyl ions. The water then becomes locked in the beads, but it can be released by heating the material. Further tests on the material showed the water diffuses in and out of the beads on the timeframe of a few years, confirming an active water cycle on the moon. According to Prof Sen Hu, a senior co-author of the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, such impact glasses could store and release water on other airless rocks in the solar system.

It's one of America's best hospitals — a nonprofit "academic medical center" called the Cleveland Clinic. And this week it installed an IBM-managed quantum computer to accelerate healthcare research (according to an announcement from IBM). IBM is calling it "the first quantum computer in the world to be uniquely dedicated to healthcare research."

The clinic's CEO said the technology "holds tremendous promise in revolutionizing healthcare and expediting progress toward new cares, cures and solutions for patients." IBM's CEO added that "By combining the power of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and other next-generation technologies with Cleveland Clinic's world-renowned leadership in healthcare and life sciences, we hope to ignite a new era of accelerated discovery."

em>Inside HPC points out that "IBM Quantum System One" is part of a larger biomedical research program applying high-performance computing, AI, and quantum computing, with IBM and the Cleveland Clinic "collaborating closely on a robust portfolio of projects with these advanced technologies to generate and analyze massive amounts of data to enhance research." The Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator has generated multiple projects that leverage the latest in quantum computing, AI and hybrid cloud to help expedite discoveries in biomedical research. These include:

- Development of quantum computing pipelines to screen and optimize drugs targeted to specific proteins;

- Improvement of a quantum-enhanced prediction model for cardiovascular risk following non-cardiac surgery;

- Application of artificial intelligence to search genome sequencing findings and large drug-target databases to find effective, existing drugs that could help patients with Alzheimer's and other diseases.


The Discovery Accelerator also serves as the technology foundation for Cleveland Clinic's Global Center for Pathogen & Human Health Research, part of the Cleveland Innovation District. The center, supported by a $500 million investment from the State of Ohio, Jobs Ohio and Cleveland Clinic, brings together a team focused on studying, preparing and protecting against emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases. Through the Discovery Accelerator, researchers are leveraging advanced computational technology to expedite critical research into treatments and vaccines.

IHTFISP shares a report from Phys.Org: A quartet of mathematicians from Yorkshire University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Waterloo and the University of Arkansas has discovered a 2D geometric shape that does not repeat itself when tiled. David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig Kaplan and Chaim Goodman-Strauss have written a paper describing how they discovered the unique shape and possible uses for it. Their full paper is available on the arXiv preprint server. [...]

The shape has 13 sides and the team refers to it simply as "the hat." They found it by first paring down possibilities using a computer and then by studying the resulting smaller sets by hand. Once they had what they believed was a good possibility, they tested it using a combinatorial software program -- and followed that up by proving the shape was aperiodic using a geometric incommensurability argument. The researchers close by suggesting that the most likely application of the hat is in the arts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: In an unusual move, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has quietly begun a new competition for the contract to run the United States's sole dedicated particle physics laboratory. Announced in January, the rebid comes 1 year after Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), which is managed in part by the University of Chicago (UChicago), failed an annual DOE performance review and 9 months after it named a new director. DOE would not comment, but observers say its frustrations include cost increases and delays in a gargantuan new neutrino experiment.

"I don't think it's surprising at all given the department's evaluation of [Fermilab's] performance," says James Decker, a physicist and consultant with Decker, Garman, Sullivan & Associates, LLC, who served as principal deputy director of DOE's Office of Science from 1973 to 2007. Although Fermilab passed its 2022 performance evaluation, the one for fiscal year 2021 was "one of the most scathing I have seen," Decker says.

DOE has already solicited letters of interest and will issue a request for formal proposals this summer. It intends to award the new contract by the end of the next fiscal year, 30 September 2024, and transfer control of the lab, which employs 2100 staff and has an annual budget of $614 million, on January 1, 2025. UChicago hopes to win the contract again, says Paul Alivisatos, president of the university, who is also chair of FRA's board of directors and a former director of DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "We absolutely will be bidding to continue." [...] How many parties will bid on the contract remains unclear. Managing the lab requires very specific technical expertise but pays $5 million per year, at most. "I don't think that there are too many organizations that could really compete for this contract," Decker says. If just UChicago or URA bid on the new contract, they'll need a new partner, multiple observers say, perhaps one with expertise in huge construction projects. DOE is sure to insist that something changes.

Dozens of the world's largest natural history museums revealed on Thursday a survey of everything in their collections. The global inventory is made up of 1.1 billion objects that range from dinosaur skulls to pollen grains to mosquitoes. The New York Times reports: The survey's organizers, who described the effort in the journal Science, said they hoped the survey would help museums join forces to answer pressing questions, such as how quickly species are becoming extinct and how climate change is altering the natural world. "It gives us intelligence now to start thinking about things that museums can do together that we wouldn't have conceived of before," said Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington and one of the leaders of the project. "It's the argument for networking the global museum."

Scientists had created smaller inventory databases before. But the new effort, which included 73 museums in 28 countries, was unparalleled, experts said. The survey revealed important gaps in the world's collections. Relatively few objects come from the regions around the earth's poles, which are especially vulnerable to the impact of global warming, for example. Insects, the most diverse group of animal species, were also underrepresented.

"The analysis is at a global scale that no one else has managed," said Emily Meineke, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the survey. Dr. Meineke said that this survey of large institutions also laid the groundwork for surveys of smaller ones, which might hold even more surprises. "Once these methods are applied down the line to smaller collections, the results are likely to give us a truer picture of biodiversity globally," she said.

British satellite company OneWeb is gearing up for the launch of its final batch of internet satellites, completing a constellation in low Earth orbit despite some hiccups along the way. Gizmodo reports: India's heaviest launch vehicle LVM-3 will carry 36 OneWeb satellites, with liftoff slated for Sunday at 11:30 p.m. ET, according to OneWeb. The launch will take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, marking OneWeb's second deployment from India. You can watch the launch at the livestream [here].

OneWeb has been building an internet constellation in low Earth orbit since 2020, and it currently consists of 579 functioning satellites, according to statistics kept by Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. The addition of 36 new units will raise the population of the constellation to 615, completing the first orbital shell. The company had originally planned on building a 648-unit constellation, but it says this final launch will cap it off and allow for global coverage.

Pets could be subjected to gene editing under a new UK government act, the RSPCA has warned. From a report: The animal charity has said that the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act applies to all vertebrate animals, not only farmed animals, and that it could lead to cats and dogs being gene-edited to include extreme features. The law allows the creation and marketing of "precision-bred" or genome-edited plants and vertebrate animals in England. The government said it would allow farmers to grow crops that are drought- and disease-resistant, reduce the use of fertilisers and pesticides, and help breed animals that are protected from catching harmful diseases.

The UK environment secretary, Therese Coffey, described the act, which received royal assent on Thursday, as a "Brexit freedom," but the RSPCA said it could have dire consequences for animal welfare. David Bowles, the head of campaigns and public affairs at the RSPCA, criticised what he described as an "ill-judged policy." He said the charity had tried to get the government to include an exemption for pets, but was "sadly ignored." He added: "Gene editing could be a huge step backwards for animals. We do not believe this act should include animals, whether they are farm, pet or wildlife. Invasive procedures are needed to create each line of gene-edited mammals, there is no history of use for this powerful technology, and it can cause unintended changes to the genome, with unpredictable effects. The RSPCA has serious animal welfare and ethical concerns about this."

Scientists have come up with a simple explanation for the strange movements of our solar system's first known visitor from another star. NPR reports: Now, though, in the journal Nature, two researchers say the answer might be the release of hydrogen from trapped reserves inside water-rich ice. That was the notion of Jennifer Bergner, an astrochemist with the University of California, Berkeley, who recalls that she initially didn't spend much time thinking about 'Oumuamua when it was first discovered. "It's not that closely related to my field. So I was like, this is a really intriguing object, but sort of moved on with my life," she says. Then she happened to attend a seminar that featured Cornell University's Darryl Seligman, who described the object's weirdness and what might account for it. One possibility he'd considered was that it was composed entirely of hydrogen ice. Others have suggested it might instead be composed of nitrogen ice.

Bergner wondered if it could just be a water-rich comet that got exposed to a lot of cosmic radiation. That radiation would release the hydrogen from the water. Then, if that hydrogen got trapped inside the ice, it could be released when the object approached the sun and began to warm up. Astronomers who observed 'Oumuamua weren't looking for that kind of hydrogen outgassing and, even if they had been, the amounts involved could have been undetectable from Earth. She teamed up with Seligman to start investigating what happens when water ice gets hit with radiation. They also did calculations to see if the object was large enough to store enough trapped hydrogen to account for the observed acceleration. And they looked to see how the structure of water ice would react to getting warmed, to see if small shifts could allow trapped gas to escape.

It turns out, this actually could account for the observed acceleration, says Bergner, who notes that the kind of "amorphous" water ice found in space has a kind of "fluffy" structure that contains empty pockets where gas can collect. As this water ice warms up, its structure begins to rearrange, she says, and "you lose your pockets for hiding hydrogen. You can form channels or cracks within the water ice as parts of it are sort of compacting." As the pockets collapse and these cracks form, the trapped hydrogen would leak out into space, giving the object a push, she says.

Longtime Slashdot reader destinyland shares a report from Space.com: The Relativity Space rocket, called Terran 1, lifted off from Launch Complex 16 at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 8:25 p.m. EST (0025 GMT on March 23), kicking off a test flight called "Good Luck, Have Fun" (GLHF). Terran 1 performed well initially. For example, it survived Max-Q -- the part of flight during which the structural loads are highest on a rocket -- and its first and second stages separated successfully. But something went wrong shortly thereafter, at around three minutes into the flight, when the rocket failed to reach orbit.

"No one's ever attempted to launch a 3D-printed rocket into orbit, and, while we didn't make it all the way today, we gathered enough data to show that flying 3D-printed rockets is viable," Relativity Space's Arwa Tizani Kelly said during the company's launch webcast on Wednesday night. "We just completed a major step in proving to the world that 3D-printed rockets are structurally viable," she added.