An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent decades, NASA has sent large spacecraft -- Galileo and Cassini, respectively -- to fly around Jupiter and Venus to explore the dozens of moons that exist in those planetary systems. The spacecraft investigated all manner of intriguing moons, from little radiation-saturated hellholes to a world covered in volcanoes. But the most consistently interesting discovery made by these probes was that Jupiter and Venus are surrounded by small and large moons covered in ice, possessing large water oceans below, or both. This was exciting because where there is water in its liquid state, there is the possibility of life.

In response to these discoveries, NASA is planning to launch a mission to Europa, an ice-encrusted moon in the Jovian system, as early as 2024. Another mission may launch to Saturn's moon Titan a few years later, where there are oceans of liquid methane on the surface. And just last month, the European Space Agency launched a spacecraft, Juice, to explore several icy moons at Jupiter. Now, NASA may need to add the moons of Uranus to its exploration hit list. Besides being known for its funny name and its brilliant cyan shade, Uranus has at least 27 moons. And they're pretty intriguing, too. The space agency has only ever flown one spacecraft, Voyager 2, by the seventh planet in our Solar System. The Voyager spacecraft flew by Uranus a long time ago, in 1985. But in light of the discoveries made by the Cassini, Dawn, and New Horizons spacecraft, scientists have been revisiting the data collected by Voyager in addition to the data obtained by ground-based telescopes. This has led NASA scientists to conclude that four of Uranus' largest moons -- Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon -- probably contain water oceans below their icy crusts. These oceans are likely dozens of kilometers deep and probably fairly salty in being sandwiched between the upper ice and inner rock core.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Fast-rising fungal attacks on the world's most important crops threaten the planet's future food supply, scientists have said, warning that failing to tackle fungal pathogens could lead to a "global health catastrophe." Fungi are already by far the biggest destroyer of crops. They are highly resilient, travel long distances on the wind and can feast on large fields of a single crop. They are also extremely adaptable and many have developed resistance to common fungicides. The impact of fungal disease is expected to worsen, the researchers say, as the climate crisis results in temperatures rising and fungal infections moving steadily polewards. Since the 1990s, fungal pathogens have been moving to higher latitudes at a rate of about 7km a year. Wheat stem rust infections, normally found in the tropics, have already been reported in England and Ireland. Higher temperatures also drive the emergence of new variants of the fungal pathogens, while more extreme storms can spread their spores further afield, the scientists say.

The scientists said there was also a risk that global heating would increase the heat tolerance of fungi, raising the possibility of them hopping hosts to infect warm-blooded animals and humans. The warning, issued in an article in the scientific journal Nature, said growers already lost between 10% and 23% of their crops to fungal disease. Across the five most important crops -- rice, wheat, maize, soya beans and potatoes -- infections cause annual losses that could feed hundreds of millions of people. Fungi made up the top six in a recent list of pests and pathogens with the biggest impact. Fungi are incredibly resilient, the researchers say, remaining viable in soil for up to 40 years, and their airborne spores can travel between continents.

Fungicides are widely used but the pathogens are well equipped to rapidly evolve resistance to treatments that target only a single cellular process. Existing fungicides and conventional breeding for disease resistance are no longer enough, the researchers say. One solution is planting seed mixtures that carry a range of genes that are resistant to fungal infection, rather than monocultures of a single strain. In 2022, about a quarter of wheat in Denmark was grown in this way. Technology may also help, the scientists say, with drones and artificial intelligence allowing earlier detection and control of outbreaks. New pesticides are being developed, with a team at the University of Exeter recently discovering compounds that could lead to chemicals that target several biological processes within the fungi, making resistance much harder to develop. The approach has already been shown to be useful against fungi infecting wheat, rice, corn and bananas. "While that storyline is science fiction, we are warning that we could see a global health catastrophe caused by the rapid global spread of fungal infections," said Sarah Gurr, professor at the University of Exeter and co-author of the report. "The imminent threat here is not about zombies, but about global starvation."

An experimental Alzheimer's medication slowed declines in patients' ability to think clearly and perform daily tasks by more than a third in a large clinical trial, drugmaker Eli Lilly said Wednesday. From a report: Based on the results, in people with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease, Lilly said it plans to file for approval from the US Food and Drug Administration by the end of June. The medicine, donanemab, works by removing plaque buildups in the brain known as amyloid that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. However, there were some side effects reported; there were three deaths in the trial among people taking the drug, two of which were attributed to adverse events such as brain swelling or microhemorrhages, known as amyloid-related imaging abnormalities or ARIA. The trial was run in more than 1,700 patients for 18 months.

"For every medicine, for every disease, there are potential risks and potential benefits," said Lilly's chief scientific and medical officer, Dr. Daniel Skovronsky. But he noted that almost half of the participants taking the drug, 47%, showed no decline on a key measure of cognition over the course of a year, compared with 29% of people taking a placebo. That's "the kind of efficacy that's never been seen before in Alzheimer's disease," Skovronsky said. Alzheimer's affects more than 6 million Americans, with an estimated 1.7 million to 2 million people over 65 in the early stages of the disease, according to Lilly. Drug development for Alzheimer's has been riddled with failures, but Lilly's drug is among a new group showing promise. The first, Eisai and Biogen's Leqembi, received accelerated FDA approval in January.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water vapor around a distant rocky planet located 26 light-years away. "The water vapor could indicate the presence of an atmosphere around the extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, a discovery that could be important for our search for habitable worlds outside the solar system," reports Space.com. "However, the scientists behind the discovery caution that this water vapor could be coming from the world's host star rather than the planet itself." From the report: The exoplanet, designated GJ 486 b, orbits a red dwarf star located 26 light-years away in the Virgo constellation. Although it has three times the mass of Earth, it is less than a third the size of our planet. GJ 486 b takes less than 1.5 Earth days to orbit its star and is probably tidally locked to the red dwarf, meaning it perpetually shows the same face to its star.

Red dwarfs like the parent star of GJ 486 b are the most common form of stars in the cosmos, meaning that statistically speaking, rocky exoplanets are most likely to be found orbiting such a stellar object. Red dwarf stars are also cooler than other types of stars, meaning that a planet must orbit them tightly to remain warm enough to host liquid water, a vital element needed for life. But, red dwarfs also emit violent and powerful ultraviolet and X-ray radiation when they are young that would blast away the atmospheres of planets that are too close, potentially making those exoplanets very inhospitable to life.

That means astronomers are currently keen to discover if a rocky planet in such a harsh environment could manage to both form an atmosphere and then hang on to it long enough for life to take hold, a process that took around a billion years on Earth. [...] Even though GJ 486 b's host star is cooler than the sun, water vapor could still concentrate in starspots. If that is the case, this could create a signal that mimics a planetary atmosphere. If there is an atmosphere around GJ 486 b, then radiation from its red dwarf parent star will constantly erode it, meaning it has to be replenished by steam from the exoplanet's interior ejected by volcanic activity. The research appears in a paper on arXiv while it awaits publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read more about it via NASA.

Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material. From a report: The removal makes "a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education," says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials. The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India's 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a "content rationalization" process.

NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was "irrelevant" in the "present context.") NCERT officials declined to answer questions about the decision to make the removal permanent. They referred ScienceInsider to India's Ministry of Education, which had not provided comment as this story went to press.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Some recall bright lights at the end of a tunnel, feeling the presence of loved ones or floating above their body after a near-death experience. Now, scientists say they have captured "conscious-like" brain activity in dying patients in findings that give new insights into the process of death. The study used data from four patients who had died in hospital while their brains were being monitored using EEG recordings because they had previously suffered suspected seizures. All four of the patients were comatose and unresponsive and had been deemed beyond medical help. With their families' permission, life support had been withdrawn and they had subsequently suffered cardiac arrest and died.

The scientists retrospectively analyzed the brain activity data in the moments after life support was withdrawn until the patients' deaths. Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness. The activity was detected in the so-called hot zone, an area in the back of the brain linked to conscious brain activity. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies. The other two patients did not display the same increase in heart rate or brain activity, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists said it was impossible to know exactly what the brain activity might correspond to as a subjective experience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures coarse, colorful snapshots of the brain in action. While this specialized type of magnetic resonance imaging has transformed cognitive neuroscience, it isn't a mind-reading machine: neuroscientists can't look at a brain scan and tell what someone was seeing, hearing or thinking in the scanner. But gradually scientists are pushing against that fundamental barrier to translate internal experiences into words using brain imaging. This technology could help people who can't speak or otherwise outwardly communicate such as those who have suffered strokes or are living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Current brain-computer interfaces require the implantation of devices in the brain, but neuroscientists hope to use non-invasive techniques such as fMRI to decipher internal speech without the need for surgery.

Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy. "There's a lot more information in brain data than we initially thought," said Jerry Tang, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study's lead author, during a press briefing. The research, published on Monday in Nature Communications, is what Tang describes as "a proof of concept that language can be decoded from noninvasive recordings of brain activity."

The decoder technology is in its infancy. It must be trained extensively for each person who uses it, and it doesn't construct an exact transcript of the words they heard or imagined. But it is still a notable advance. Researchers now know that the AI language system, an early relative of the model behind ChatGPT, can help make informed guesses about the words that evoked brain activity just by looking at fMRI brain scans. While current technological limitations prevent the decoder from being widely used, for good or ill, the authors emphasize the need to enact proactive policies that protect the privacy of one's internal mental processes. [...] The model misses a lot about the stories it decodes. It struggles with grammatical features such as pronouns. It can't decipher proper nouns such as names and places, and sometimes it just gets things wrong altogether. But it achieves a high level of accuracy, compared with past methods. Between 72 and 82 percent of the time in the stories, the decoder was more accurate at decoding their meaning than would be expected from random chance. Here's an example of what one study participant heard, as transcribed in the paper: "i got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness." The model went on to decode: "i just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass i stood on my toes and peered out i didn't see anything and looked up again i saw nothing."

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

The number of known mountains in Earth's oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science. From a report: Just as mountains tower over Earth's surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity. That's in part because their craggy walls -- formed from volcanic activity -- provide a plethora of habitats. Seamounts also promote upwelling of nutrient-rich water, which distributes beneficial compounds like nitrates and phosphates throughout the water column. They're like "stirring rods in the ocean," says David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

More than 24,600 seamounts have been previously mapped. One common way of finding these hidden mountains is to ping the seafloor with sonar. But that's an expensive, time-intensive process that requires a ship. Only about 20 percent of the ocean has been mapped that way, says Scripps earth scientist Julie Gevorgian. "There are a lot of gaps." So Gevorgian, Sandwell and their colleagues turned to satellite observations, which provide global coverage of the world's oceans, to take a census of seamounts. The team pored over satellite measurements of the height of the sea surface. The researchers looked for centimeter-scale bumps caused by the gravitational influence of a seamount. Because rock is denser than water, the presence of a seamount slightly changes the Earth's gravitational field at that spot. "There's an extra gravitational attraction," Sandwell says, that causes water to pile up above the seamount.

An anonymous reader shared this report from IEEE Spectrum: Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world's first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one Hertz. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting in into living plant material.

"It was very curiosity-driven," says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. "We thought: 'Can we do it? Let's do it, let's put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality...'"

Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood's pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte. Of the 60,000 species, the team chose balsa wood for its strength, even when one of the components of its structure — lignin — was largely removed to make more room for conducting materials. To remove much of the lignin, pieces of balsa wood were treated with heat and chemicals for five hours. Then, the remaining cellulose-based structure was coated with a conducting polymer...

Since the pores inside wood are made for transporting water, the PEDOT:PSS solution readily spread through the tubes. Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging of the result revealed that the polymer decorated the insides of the tube structures. The resulting wood chunks conducted electricity along their fibers.

The Boston Globe reports on a 25-person startup pursuing an unusual solution to the problem of space junk: "Imagine if every car we ever created was just left on the road," said aerospace entrepreneur Jeromy Grimmett. "That's what we're doing in space." Grimmett's tiny company, Rogue Space Systems Corp., has devised a daring solution. It's building "orbots" — satellites with robotic arms that can fly right up to a disabled satellite and fix it. Or these orbots could use their arms to collect orbiting rubble left behind by hundreds of previous launches — dangerous junk that's become a hazard to celestial navigation...

Rogue Space aims to catch up fast, with help from Small Business Technology Transfer funds from the SpaceWERX Orbital Prime initiative. Created by the U.S. Space Force, Orbital Prime seeks to build up U.S. private-sector firms that can protect national security by maintaining military satellites and clearing hazardous space debris.
Its first 10-pound, proof-of-concept satellite will launch later this year, the article points out, "to test sensors and software to confirm the system can identify and track other satellites." But "the real excitement will begin later this year" when the company launches a prototype that's four times larger that will "use maneuvering thrusters to test the extremely precise navigation needed to approach a satellite."

And then in late 2024 or early 2025 the company will launch its 660-pound satellite "with robotic arms for fixing other satellites or for dragging debris to a lower orbit, where it will fall back to Earth."

The Associated Press reports that "water may be more widespread and recent on Mars than previously thought, based on observations of Martian sand dunes by China's rover." A paper published in Science suggests thin films of water appeared on sand dunes sometime between 1.4 million years ago and as recently as 400,000 years ago — or perhaps even sooner: The finding highlights new, potentially fertile areas in the warmer regions of Mars where conditions might be suitable for life to exist, though more study is needed...

Before the Zhurong rover fell silent, it observed salt-rich dunes with cracks and crusts, which researchers said likely were mixed with melting morning frost or snow as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago... Conditions during that period were similar to now on Mars, with rivers and lakes dried up and no longer flowing as they did billions of years earlier...

The rover did not directly detect any water in the form of frost or ice. But Qin said computer simulations and observations by other spacecraft at Mars indicate that even nowadays at certain times of year, conditions could be suitable for water to appear... Small pockets of water from thawing frost or snow, mixed with salt, likely resulted in the small cracks, hard crusty surfaces, loose particles and other dune features like depressions and ridges, the Chinese scientists said.
Space.com explains exactly how the discovery was confirmed: The laser-induced breakdown spectrometer (MarSCoDe) instrument onboard the rover zapped sand grains into millimeter-sized particles. Their chemical makeup revealed hydrated minerals like sulfates, silica, iron oxide and chlorides... Researchers say water vapor traveled from Martian poles to lower latitudes like Zhurong's spot a few million years ago, when the planet's polar ice caps released high amounts of water vapor, thanks to a different tilt that had Mars' poles pointed more directly toward the sun. Frigid temperatures on the wobbling planet condensed the drifting vapor and dropped it as snow far from the poles, according to the latest study.

Mars' tilt changes over a 124,000-year cycle, so "this offers a replenishing mechanism for vapor in the atmosphere to form frost or snow at low latitudes where the Zhurong rover has landed," Qin told Space.com. But "no water ice was detected by any instrument on the Zhurong rover." Instead, in the same way that salting roads on Earth melts icy patches during storms, salts in Martian sand dunes warmed the fallen snow and thawed it enough to form saltwater. The process also formed minerals such as silica and ferric oxides, which Zhurong spotted, researchers say. The saltwater, however, didn't stay around for long. Temperatures on Mars swing wildly and spike in the mornings between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., so the saltwater evaporated and left behind salt and other newly formed minerals that later seeped between the dune's sand grains, cementing them to form a crust, according to the study...

"The phenomenon was documented at one site, but it should be applicable to a fairly large fraction of Mars' surface at similar latitudes," Manasvi Lingam, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the Florida Institute of Technology who wasn't involved in the new research, told Space.com.
Since the rover found water activity on (and in) salty Martian dunes, the researchers now suggest future missions search for salt-tolerant microbes , and are raising the possibility of "extant life on Mars."

"Earth's magnetic environment is filled with a symphony of sound that we cannot hear," NASA wrote this month. When solar winds approach earth, "it causes the magnetic field lines and plasma around Earth to vibrate like the plucked strings of a harp, producing ultralow-frequency waves... a cacophonous operetta portraying the dramatic relationship between Earth and the Sun."

So NASA is now announcing "a new NASA-funded citizen science project called HARP — or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas " that has "turned those once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes..." Or, as the Washington Post puts it, "NASA wants your help listening in on the universe."

From NASA's news release: In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth's magnetic "harp" — its magnetosphere — as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth's magnetosphere. "THEMIS can sample the whole harp," said Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist at the Space Science Institute in Colorado. "And it's been out there a long time, so it has collected a lot of data."

The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So the HARP team sped them up to convert them to sound waves. By using an interactive tool developed by the team, you can listen to these waves and pick out interesting features you hear in the sounds... Preliminary investigations with HARP have already started revealing unexpected features, such as what the team calls a "reverse harp" — frequencies changing in the opposite way than what scientists anticipated...

"Data sonification provides human beings with an opportunity to appreciate the naturally occurring music of the cosmos," said Robert Alexander, a HARP team member from Auralab Technologies in Michigan. "We're hearing sounds that are literally out of this world, and for me that's the next best thing to floating in a spacesuit."

To start exploring these sounds, visit the HARP website.
"Think listening to years' worth of wave patterns is a job for artificial intelligence? Think again," writes the Washington Post. In a news release, HARP team member Martin Archer of Imperial College London says humans are often better at listening than machines. "The human sense of hearing is an amazing tool," Archer says. "We're essentially trained from birth to recognize patterns and pick out different sound sources. We can innately do some pretty crazy analysis that outperforms even some of our most advanced computer algorithms."

Yesterday, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the My Health, My Data bill into law, requiring companies to receive a user's explicit consent before they can collect, share, or sell their health data. When the law comes into effect in March 2024, users will have the right to withdraw consent at any time and have their data deleted. The Verge reports: The law should help shield users' health data from the companies and organizations not included under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which prevents certain medical providers from disclosing "individually identifiable" health information without consent. The HIPAA Privacy Rule doesn't cover many of the health apps and sites that collect medical data, allowing them to freely collect and sell this information to advertisers.

Under Washington's new law, which comes into effect in March 2024, medical apps and sites must ask a user for permission to collect their health data in a nondeceptive manner that "openly communicates a consumer's freely given, informed, opt-in, voluntary, specific, and unambiguous written consent." The site and apps must also disclose what kind of data they plan to collect and if they plan to sell it. Additionally, the bill will block medical providers from using geofencing to collect location information about the patients that visit the facility.

The European Space Agency appears to have a slight problem: a critical antenna is jammed on their Jupiter-bound spacecraft launched two weeks ago. From the Associated Press: The 52-foot (16-meter) radar antenna on Juice unfolded only one-third of the way following liftoff, according to the space agency. Engineers suspect a tiny pin may be protruding. Flight controllers in Germany plan to fire the spacecraft's engine in hopes of shaking the pin loose. If that doesn't work, they said they have plenty of time to solve the problem.

Juice, short for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, won't reach the giant planet until 2031. It's taking a roundabout path to get there, including gravity-assist flybys of Earth and our moon, and Venus. The radar antenna is needed to peer beneath the icy crust of three Jupiter moons suspected of harboring underground oceans and possibly life, a major goal of the nearly $1.8 billion mission. Its targets include Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.

Longtime Slashdot reader canux writes: In an effort to continue to power Voyager 2's five on-board scientific instruments, NASA engineers have devised a software update that disables the probe's electrical supply safety system [to redirect the power to them]. "Although the spacecraft's voltage will not be tightly regulated as a result, even after more than 45 years in flight, the electrical systems on both probes remain relatively stable, minimizing the need for a safety net," according to NASA JPL. "The engineering team is also able to monitor the voltage and respond if it fluctuates too much. If the new approach works well for Voyager 2, the team may implement it on Voyager 1 as well."

The Voyager probes each contain a Multihundred-Watt Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator for their power which use Plutonium-238 to generate heat to produce electricity with a thermocouple. Plutonium-238 has a half-life of a little over 87 years which means that Voyager 2 has seen a greater than 25% reduction in its power output since it was launched.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A research team has turned the bodies of dead mice into vivid 3D maps of anatomy, with tissues, nerves, and vessels highlighted in color. The technique, which renders the corpses transparent and then exposes them to fluorescent antibodies that label distinct cell types, could help everything from drug development to understanding the spread of cancer, its creators and other scientists say. The developers, at the Helmholtz Munich research institute, call their technique wildDISCO -- wild because it can work on any "wild type," or normal, mice, and DISCO for 3D imaging of solvent-cleared organs. Building on their previous success at making mouse bodies transparent, the new technique removes cholesterol from the bodies so that a vast array of existing antibodies can penetrate deep into the animals.

"wildDISCO is a game changer -- it allows us to see the hidden highways and byways in the body," says Muzlifah Haniffa, a dermatologist and immunologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Newcastle University's Biosciences Institute who was not involved in the research. The method should let scientists map a mouse at the cellular level and explore previously hidden links between tissues, like neural connections between organs, says neuroscientist Ali Erturk, director of Helmholtz Munich, who led the work, posted recently as a preprint. His group in Germany has already posted eye-catching videos of "flying" through the 3D anatomy of a mouse with different tissues labeled.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they'd designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs. The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos—and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a "robot."

The startup company that developed the robot, Overture Life, says its device is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today. Right now, IVF labs are multimillion-dollar affairs staffed by trained embryologists who earn upwards of $125,000 a year to delicately handle sperm and eggs using ultra-thin hollow needles under a microscope. But some startups say the entire process could be carried out automatically, or nearly so. Overture, for instance, has filed a patent application describing a "biochip" for an IVF lab in miniature, complete with hidden reservoirs containing growth fluids, and tiny channels for sperm to wiggle through.

"Think of a box where sperm and eggs go in, and an embryo comes out five days later," says Santiago Munne, the prize-winning geneticist who is chief innovation officer at the Spanish company. He believes that if IVF could be carried out inside a desktop instrument, patients might never need to visit a specialized clinic, where a single attempt at getting pregnant can cost $20,000 in the US. Instead, he says, a patient's eggs might be fed directly into an automated fertility system at a gynecologist's office. "It has to be cheaper. And if any doctor could do it, it would be," says Munne.

Japanese startup ispace assumed failure in its attempt to make the first private moon landing on Tuesday as engineers struggled to regain contact with the company's Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lander long after it was due for a lunar touchdown. From a report: "We lost the communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said on a company live stream, as mission control engineers in Tokyo continued to try regaining contact with the lander. The M1 lander appeared set to touch down around 12:40 p.m. Eastern time (1640 GMT Tuesday) after coming as close as 295 feet from the lunar surface, a live animation of the lander's telemtry showed.

NASA has developed a new superalloy called GRX-810 that could lead to stronger, more durable parts for airplanes and spacecraft. SciTechDaily reports: GRX-810 is an oxide dispersion strengthened alloy. In other words, tiny particles containing oxygen atoms spread throughout the alloy enhance its strength. Such alloys are excellent candidates to build aerospace parts for high-temperature applications, like those inside aircraft and rocket engines, because they can withstand harsher conditions before reaching their breaking points. Current state-of-the-art 3D printed superalloys can withstand temperatures up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Compared to those, GRX-810 is twice as strong, over 1,000 times more durable, and twice as resistant to oxidation.

"This new alloy is a major achievement," said Dale Hopkins, deputy project manager of NASA's Transformational Tools and Technologies project. "In the very near future, it may well be one of the most successful technology patents NASA Glenn has ever produced." GRX-810 was developed under NASA's Transformational Tools and Technologies project, with support from the agency's Game Changing Development Program. The peer-reviewed paper has been published in the journal Nature.

According to new research published last month in PLOS ONE, moths are more efficient pollinators at night than day-flying pollinators such as bees. Phys.Org reports: Studying 10 sites in the South East of England throughout July 2021, [researchers from the University of Sussex] found that 83% of insect visits to bramble flowers were made during the day. While the moths made fewer visits during the shorter summer nights, notching up only 15% of the visits, they were able to pollinate the flowers more quickly. As a result, the researchers concluded that moths are more efficient pollinators than day-flying insects such as bees, which are traditionally thought of as "hard-working." While day-flying insects have more time available to transfer pollen, moths were making an important contribution during the short hours of darkness.

Professor Fiona Mathews, Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Sussex and co-author this latest research, says, "Bees are undoubtedly important, but our work has shown that moths pollinate flowers at a faster rate than day-flying insects. Sadly, many moths are in serious decline in Britain, affecting not just pollination but also food supplies for many other species ranging from bats to birds. Our work shows that simple steps, such as allowing patches of bramble to flower, can provide important food sources for moths, and we will be rewarded with a crop of blackberries. Everyone's a winner!"