"When Robert Wood came to Harvard University 17 years ago, he wanted to design an insect-sized robot that could fly," reports the Boston Globe. And finally Last month, technology from Wood's "RoboBee" project was commercialized for the first time, "spinning out as a surgical-robot startup backed by venture capital firm 1955 Capital.

"RoboBee was funded by $10 million in grants from the National Science Foundation. Its evolution into a company says a lot about how schools like Harvard are doing more to encourage entrepreneurship." The RoboBee first took flight in 2012, connected to a tether that provided a power supply. In 2019, it became the lightest object to take off and fly on its own.... When it takes off, its little wings flap about 150 times per second, but a slowed-down video of the wings resembles a human treading water. Many wonder what tiny, flying robots that weigh less than one-tenth of a gram might be useful for. Pollinating crops? Surveillance? Wood said he never paid too much attention to that.

"It's never really been about, 'Oh, I'm going to start a company based upon this,'" he said. But that changed recently, he said, mostly because of a growing push at Harvard to move research from its labs into the real world.... Wood was connected to venture capitalist and Harvard alum Andrew Chung by the school's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences dean, Frank Doyle, during the pandemic. The managing partner of 1955 Capital said he's been investing in surgical-robotics companies for the past decade. "The one key thing that we have been dreaming about is how we can make the robotic arms a lot smaller," Chung said. "Not necessarily what other VCs might be thinking, which is maybe 15 to 20 percent smaller. We're thinking 90 percent smaller."

Chung noticed how the RoboBee was designed and manufactured — Wood got his inspiration from origami and children's-book layering and folding techniques — and thought it could help make better small-scale surgical robots. "Thinking about how to shrink these devices to insect size or smaller opens up a whole range of possibilities that even surgeons haven't quite imagined," Chung said. For now, the startup is called Project 1985, a reference to the year the first robotic-assisted surgery took place. The company will initially focus on neurosurgery, urology, and lung surgery. Wood will serve as an advisor.

NASA's plans for a presence on the moon "will allow the program to practice how to live in space sustainably," writes the Washington Post. "It will allow scientists to tap into the moon's considerable scientific value to learn more about how Earth was formed. And perhaps, it would also serve as a steppingstone to Mars and other deep-space destinations years in the future."

First, unlike in the 1960s — we now know that the moon has water. Water is not only key to sustaining human life, but its component parts — hydrogen and oxygen — can be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a gas station in space. That could be critical for long-duration missions, allowing spacecraft to refuel on the moon instead of lugging all the fuel from Earth. And since the moon's gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, it is a relatively easy springboard to other points of the solar system.
NASA is also considering building a nuclear reactor on the moon: It's one of several initiatives NASA has begun under its Artemis program, designed to help astronauts stay for extended periods when they'll need power, transportation and the ability to use the moon's resources.... The effort is still very much in its nascent stages, and the funding NASA would need for the long term has not materialized in full.... A sustainable presence, despite the rosy predictions coming from the top echelons of the agency, is still years away, and the technical challenges are immense.

But NASA has begun developing the technologies that would be needed to sustain astronauts on the surface for extended periods. In June of last year, the agency and the Energy Department awarded contracts, worth $5 million each, to three companies to develop nuclear power systems that could be ready to launch by the end of the decade for a test on the moon. The systems would generate 40 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power six or seven American households, and last about 10 years....

NASA is also looking to build solar farms, using arrays that point vertically and catch the angle of the sun over the horizon. And it's exploring how best to exploit what are called "in situ resources" — meaning those that already exist, such as the regolith.
The article even broaches the idea of "a lunar economy that would help sustain a permanent presence."

"Say hello to ionocaloric cooling: a new way to lower the mercury that has the potential to replace existing methods with something that is safer and friendlier to the planet," writes ScienceAlert.

It's all based on the idea that melting absorbs heats. "The landscape of refrigerants is an unsolved problem," says mechanical engineer Drew Lilley, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "No one has successfully developed an alternative solution that makes stuff cold, works efficiently, is safe, and doesn't hurt the environment. We think the ionocaloric cycle has the potential to meet all those goals if realized appropriately...."

A current running through the system would move the ions in it, shifting the material's melting point to change temperature. The team also ran experiments using a salt made with iodine and sodium, to melt ethylene carbonate. This common organic solvent is also used in lithium-ion batteries, and is produced using carbon dioxide as an input. That could make the system not just GWP [global warming potential] zero, but GWP negative.

A temperature shift of 25 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit) was measured through the application of less than a single volt of charge in the experiment, a result that exceeds what other caloric technologies have managed to achieve so far.... "Now, it's time for experimentation to test different combinations of materials and techniques to meet the engineering challenges," says mechanical engineer Ravi Prasher, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

"In Boston labs, old, blind mice have regained their eyesight, developed smarter, younger brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue," reports CNN: On the flip side, young mice have prematurely aged, with devastating results to nearly every tissue in their bodies. The experiments show aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven "forwards and backwards at will," said anti-aging expert David Sinclair, a professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. Our bodies hold a backup copy of our youth that can be triggered to regenerate, said Sinclair, the senior author of a new paper showcasing the work of his lab and international scientists.

The combined experiments, published for the first time Thursday in the journal Cell, challenge the scientific belief aging is the result of genetic mutations that undermine our DNA, creating a junkyard of damaged cellular tissue that can lead to deterioration, disease and death. "It's not junk, it's not damage that causes us to get old," said Sinclair, who described the work last year at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. "We believe it's a loss of information — a loss in the cell's ability to read its original DNA so it forgets how to function — in much the same way an old computer may develop corrupted software. I call it the information theory of aging."

Jae-Hyun Yang, a genetics research fellow in the Sinclair Lab who coauthored the paper, said he expects the findings "will transform the way we view the process of aging and the way we approach the treatment of diseases associated with aging."
While Sinclair is now testing "genetic resets" in primates, the article warns that "decades could pass before any anti-aging clinical trials in humans begin, get analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for federal approval."

But Sinclair suggests damage could probably also be repaired through healthy behaviors like exercise and sufficient sleep, social support and lower stress levels, eating less often and focusing on plants.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader 192_kbps for sharing the story.

It was meant to be the first-ever orbital mission to take off from the United Kingdom — carried by a Virgin Orbit rocket launched from a private jumbo jet Monday over the Atlantic ocean, according to the BBC.

But instead "at an altitude of approximately 180km (111 miles), the upper stage experienced an anomaly which 'prematurely ended' the first burn. The company said this event ended the mission, with the rocket components and payload falling back to Earth within the approved safety corridor.,,,"

At this point the unmanned rocket became "a slow moving fireball in the sky," astrodynamics lecturer Marco Langbroek told Gizmodo in an email. The rocket's hellish descent was captured on video, revealing the unfortunate journey back from space. Ramón López, an observer at the Spanish Meteor Network, caught the rocket reentering Earth's atmosphere from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa. He released the footage on YouTube, as well as on Twitter.
Earlier this week Space.com noted that four previous Virgin Orbit missions have all been successful, deploying a total of 33 satellites into orbit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. "I am very worried," says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and was not involved in the research. "If we're now in a situation where the experts are not able to determine what's true or not, we lose the middleman that we desperately need to guide us through complicated topics," she adds. Researchers are divided over the implications for science. The chatbot, ChatGPT, creates realistic and intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts. It is a 'large language model', a system based on neural networks that learn to perform a task by digesting huge amounts of existing human-generated text. Software company OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California, released the tool on November 30, and it is free to use.

Since its release, researchers have been grappling with the ethical issues surrounding its use, because much of its output can be difficult to distinguish from human-written text. Scientists have published a preprint2 and an editorial3 written by ChatGPT. Now, a group led by Catherine Gao at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, has used ChatGPT to generate artificial research-paper abstracts to test whether scientists can spot them. The researchers asked the chatbot to write 50 medical-research abstracts based on a selection published in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The BMJ, The Lancet and Nature Medicine. They then compared these with the original abstracts by running them through a plagiarism detector and an AI-output detector, and they asked a group of medical researchers to spot the fabricated abstracts.

The ChatGPT-generated abstracts sailed through the plagiarism checker: the median originality score was 100%, which indicates that no plagiarism was detected. The AI-output detector spotted 66% the generated abstracts. But the human reviewers didn't do much better: they correctly identified only 68% of the generated abstracts and 86% of the genuine abstracts. They incorrectly identified 32% of the generated abstracts as being real and 14% of the genuine abstracts as being generated. Wachter says that, if scientists can't determine whether research is true, there could be "dire consequences". As well as being problematic for researchers, who could be pulled down flawed routes of investigation, because the research they are reading has been fabricated, there are "implications for society at large because scientific research plays such a huge role in our society". For example, it could mean that research-informed policy decisions are incorrect, she adds. On the contrary, Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey, says: "It is unlikely that any serious scientist will use ChatGPT to generate abstracts." He adds that whether generated abstracts can be detected is "irrelevant."

"The question is whether the tool can generate an abstract that is accurate and compelling. It can't, and so the upside of using ChatGPT is minuscule, and the downside is significant," he says.

Becky Ferreira writes via Motherboard: You may not realize it in your day-to-day life, but we are all enveloped by a giant "superbubble" that was blown into space by the explosive deaths of a dozen-odd stars. Known as the Local Bubble, this structure extends for about 1,000 light years around the solar system, and is one of countless similar bubbles in our galaxy that are produced by the fallout of supernovas. Cosmic superbubbles have remained fairly mysterious for decades, but recent astronomical advances have finally exposed key details about their evolution and structure. Just within the past few years, researchers have mapped the geometry of the Local Bubble in three dimensions and demonstrated that its surface is an active site of star birth, because it captures gas and dust as it expands into space.

Now, a team of scientists has added another layer to our evolving picture of the Local Bubble by charting the magnetic field of the structure, which is thought to play a major role in star formation. Astronomers led by Theo O'Neill, who conducted the new research during a summer research program at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), presented "the first-ever 3D map of a magnetic field over a superbubble" on Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society's 241st annual meeting in Seattle, Washington. The team also unveiled detailed visualizations of their new map, bringing the Local Bubble into sharper focus.

"We think that the entire interstellar medium is really full of all these bubbles that are driven by various forms of feedback from, especially, really massive stars, where they're outputting energy in some form or another into the space between the stars," said O'Neill, who just received an undergraduate degree in astronomy-physics and statistics from the University of Virginia, in a joint call with their mentor Alyssa Goodman, an astronomer at CfA who co-authored the new research. [...] "Now that we have this map, there's a lot of cool science that can be done both by us, but hopefully by other people as well," O'Neill said. "Since stars are clustered, it's not as if the Sun is super special, and is in the Local Bubble because we're just lucky. We know that the interstellar medium is full of bubbles like this, and there's actually a lot of them nearby our own Local Bubble." "One cool next step will be looking at places where the Local Bubble is nearby other feedback bubbles," they concluded. "What happens when these bubbles interact, and how does that drive start formation in general, and the overall long-term evolution of galactic structures?"

The rate of people dying from cancer in the United States has continuously declined over the past three decades, according to a new report from the American Cancer Society. CNN reports: The US cancer death rate has fallen 33% since 1991, which corresponds to an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted, according to the report, published Thursday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The rate of lives lost to cancer continued to shrink in the most recent year for which data is available, between 2019 and 2020, by 1.5%. The 33% decline in cancer mortality is "truly formidable," said Karen Knudsen, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society. The report attributes this steady progress to improvements in cancer treatment, drops in smoking and increases in early detection.

In their report, researchers from the American Cancer Society also pointed to HPV vaccinations as connected to reductions in cancer deaths. HPV, or human papillomavirus, infections can cause cervical cancer and other cancer types, and vaccination has been linked with a decrease in new cervical cancer cases. Among women in their early 20s, there was a 65% drop in cervical cancer rates from 2012 through 2019, "which totally follows the time when HPV vaccines were put into use," said Dr. William Dahut, the society's chief scientific officer. "There are other cancers that are HPV-related -- whether that's head and neck cancers or anal cancers -- so there's optimism this will have importance beyond this," he said. The lifetime probability of being diagnosed with any invasive cancer is estimated to be 40.9% for men and 39.1% for women in the US, according to the new report.

The new report includes data from national programs and registries, including those at the National Cancer Institute, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries. Data showed that the US cancer death rate rose during most of the 20th century, largely due to an increase in lung cancer deaths related to smoking. Then, as smoking rates fell and improvements in early detection and treatments for some cancers increased, there was a decline in the cancer death rate from its peak in 1991. Since then, the pace of the decline has slowly accelerated. The new report found that the five-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined has increased from 49% for diagnoses in the mid-1970s to 68% for diagnoses during 2012-18. The cancer types that now have the highest survival rates are thyroid at 98%, prostate at 97%, testis at 95% and melanoma at 94%, according to the report. Current survival rates are lowest for cancers of the pancreas, at 12%. The report does have some bad news: new cases of breast, uterine and prostate cancer have been "of concern" and rising in the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Decades of research by scientists at Exxon accurately predicted how much global warming would occur from burning fossil fuels, according to a new study in the journal Science. The findings clash with an enormously successful campaign that Exxon spearheaded and funded for more than 30 years which cast doubt on human-driven climate change and the science underpinning it. That narrative helped delay federal and international action on climate change, even as the impacts of climate change worsened.

Over the last few years, journalists and researchers revealed that Exxon did in-house research that showed it knew that human-caused climate change is real. The new study looked at Exxon's research and compared it to the warming that has actually happened. Researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research analyzed Exxon's climate studies from 1977 to 2003. The researchers show the company, now called ExxonMobil, produced climate research that was at least as accurate as work by independent academics and governments -- and occasionally surpassed it. That's important because ExxonMobil and the broader fossil fuel industry face lawsuits nationwide claiming they misled the public on the harmful effects of their products. "The bottom line is we found that they were modeling and predicting global warming with, frankly, shocking levels of skill and accuracy, especially for a company that then spent the next couple of decades denying that very climate science," says lead author Geoffrey Supran, who now is an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami.

"Specifically, what we've done is to actually put a number for the first time on what Exxon knew, which is that the burning of their fossil fuel products would heat the planet by something like 0.2 [degrees] Celsius every single decade," Supran says.

The report notes that ExxonMobil "faces more than 20 lawsuits brought by states and local governments for damages caused by climate change." These new findings could provide more evidence for those cases as they progress through the courts, says Karen Sokol, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

"What Exxon scientists found and what they communicated to company executives was nothing short of horrifying," says Sokol. "Imagine that world and the different trajectory that consumers, investors and policymakers would have taken when we still had time, versus now when we're entrenched in a fossil fuel based economy that's getting increasingly expensive and difficult to exit," says Sokol.

Fossil fuel companies should be forced to "take back" the carbon dioxide emitted from their products, handing them direct responsibility for cleaning up the climate, a group of scientists has argued. From a report: The principle that the producer of pollution should pay for its clean-up is established around the world, but has never been applied to the climate crisis. Yet technology to capture and store carbon dioxide underground is advancing, and is now technically feasible, according to Myles Allen, a professor of geosystems science at the University of Oxford.

"The technology exists -- what has always been lacking is effective policy," he said. "The failure has been policy, not technology -- we know how to do this." The companies that profit from extracting fossil fuels -- oil, gas and coal producers around the world -- should be paying for an equivalent quantity of carbon dioxide to be stored geologically as a condition of being allowed to operate, he argued.

Allen is a co-author, along with four other scientists from Oxford, the US and the Netherlands, of a paper published on Thursday in the journal Environmental Research Letters that sets out how such an "extended producer responsibility" could work. Under a "carbon takeback obligation," all fossil fuels extracted or imported into a nation or group of nations would be offset by storing underground an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that generated by that fuel. Phased in over time, it could be used to store 100% of emissions by 2050, to help the world reach net zero.

NASA's Webb telescope has discovered an exoplanet, which is any planet that is outside of our solar system, for the first time, the agency announced Wednesday. From a report: The planet, called LHS 475 b, is nearly the same size as Earth, having 99% of our planet's diameter, scientists said. However, it is several hundred degrees hotter than Earth and completes its orbit around its star in two days. LHS 475 b is in the constellation Octans and is 41 light-years away, which is relatively nearby. Scientists are still trying to determine if the planet has an atmosphere. It's possible LHS 475 b has no atmosphere or one made completely out of carbon dioxide, but one option can be totally eliminated.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russia said on Wednesday it would launch another Soyuz spacecraft next month to bring home two cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut from the International Space Station after their original capsule was struck by a micrometeoroid and started leaking last month. The leak came from a tiny puncture -- less than 1 millimeter wide -- on the external cooling system of the Soyuz MS-22 capsule, one of two return capsules docked to the ISS that can bring crew members home.

Russia said a new capsule, Soyuz MS-23, would be sent up on Feb. 20 to replace the damaged Soyuz MS-22, which will be brought back to Earth empty. "Having analyzed the condition of the spacecraft, thermal calculations and technical documentation, it has been concluded that the MS-22 must be landed without a crew on board," said Yuri Borisov, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and U.S. astronaut Francisco Rubio had been due to end their mission in March but will now extend it by a few more months and return aboard the MS-23.

"They are ready to go with whatever decision we give them," Joel Montalbano, NASA's ISS program manager, told a news conference. "I may have to fly some more ice cream to reward them," he added. The MS-23, which had been due to take up three new crew in March, will instead depart from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as an unmanned rescue mission next month. If there is an emergency in the meantime, Roscosmos said it will look at whether the MS-22 spacecraft can be used to rescue the crew. In this scenario, temperatures in the capsule could reach unhealthy levels of 30-40 degrees Celsius (86-104 degrees Fahrenheit). "In case of an emergency, when the crew will have a real threat to life on the station, then probably the danger of staying on the station can be higher than going down in an unhealthy Soyuz," Sergei Krikalev, Russia's chief of crewed space programs, said.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physics mystery has come to an end, with a resolution about as shocking as "the butler did it." For a decade, physicists have pondered why nuclear reactors pump out fewer particles called neutrinos than predicted. Some suggested the elusive bits of matter might be morphing into weirder, undetectable "sterile" neutrinos. Instead, new results pin down what other experiments had suggested: that theorists overestimated how many neutrinos a reactor should produce. [...]

In a reactor's core, uranium and plutonium nuclei split in a chain reaction, and the antineutrinos come from the radioactive "beta decay" of the lighter nuclei left behind. In such decay, a neutron in a nucleus changes into a proton while emitting an electron and an electron antineutrino. To predict the total flux of antineutrinos, physicists had to account for the amounts and decays of myriad different nuclei. That accounting pointed to a shortfall, but in 2017, physicists from the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China called it into question. They studied antineutrinos from six commercial reactors, burning fuel with 4% uranium-235 atoms, which can sustain a chain reaction, and 96% uranium-238 atoms, which can't. As the uranium-235 is consumed, neutrons from its fission convert uranium-238 into plutonium-239, which also sustains a chain reaction. Daya Bay physicists found the antineutrino deficit shrank as the amount of uranium-235 fell, suggesting theorists had overestimated the flux of antineutrinos originating from uranium-235.

Now, physicists working at a small research reactor in France have confirmed that suspicion. The reactor at the Laue-Langevin Institute (ILL) produces copious neutrons for studies of materials. It also uses fuel containing 93% uranium-235. So, by studying the antineutrinos from it, researchers working with a neutrino detector called STEREO could measure the flux of antineutrinos from uranium-235 alone. The detector consists of six identical oil-filled segments lined up like teeth and spanning a distance of 9 to 11 meters from the reactor's core. Rarely, a proton in the oil will absorb an electron antineutrino to turn into a neutron while ejecting a positron -- sort of the reverse of beta decay. As the positron streaks through the oil, it produces light in proportion to the energy of the original neutrino. STEREO researchers showed the spectrum of energies of electron antineutrinos remained the same as distance from the core increased. That observation clashes with the idea that some are morphing into sterile neutrinos, because lower energy neutrinos should morph faster than higher energy ones, changing the spectrum as the neutrinos advance. STEREO researchers also showed the total flux of antineutrinos from uranium-235 was lower than the one used in theorists' models, as they report today in Nature. Taken together, the observations put an end to the reactor antineutrino deficit as evidence for a 1-eV sterile neutrino, says David Lhuillier, a neutrino physicist at France's Atomic Energy Commission and spokesperson for the 26-member STEREO team. "Can it be explained by a sterile neutrino of mass around 1 eV? The answer is no."

Other experiments -- such as one called PROSPECT at Oak Ridge National Laboratory -- had reached similar conclusions, Lhuillier notes.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Moderna is considering raising the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by over 400 percent -- from $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose -- according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The plan, if realized, would match the previously announced price hike for Pfizer-BioNTech's rival COVID-19 vaccine. The Journal spoke with Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Monday, who said of the 400 percent price hike: "I would think this type of pricing is consistent with the value."

Until now, the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have been purchased by the government and offered to Americans for free. In the latest federal contract from July, Moderna's updated booster shot cost the government $26 per dose, up from $15-$16 per dose in earlier supply contracts, the Journal notes. Similarly, the government paid a little over $30 per dose for Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine this past summer, up from $19.50 per dose in contracts from 2020. But now that the federal government is backing away from distributing the vaccines, their makers are moving to the commercial market -- with price adjustments. Financial analysts had previously anticipated Pfizer would set the commercial price for its vaccine at just $50 per dose but were taken aback in October when Pfizer announced plans of a price between $110 and $130. Analysts then anticipated that Pfizer's price would push Moderna and other vaccine makers to follow suit, which appears to be happening now.

New medicines need not be tested in animals to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, according to legislation signed by President Joe Biden in late December 2022. Science Magazine reports: "This is huge," says Tamara Drake, director of research and regulatory policy at the Center for a Humane Economy, a nonprofit animal welfare organization and key driver of the legislation. "It's a win for industry. It's a win for patients in need of cures." In place of the 1938 stipulation that potential drugs be tested for safety and efficacy in animals, the law allows FDA to promote a drug or biologic -- a larger molecule such as an antibody -- to human trials after either animal or nonanimal tests. Drake's group and the nonprofit Animal Wellness Action, among others that pushed for changes, argue that in clearing drugs for human trials the agency should rely more heavily on computer modeling, "organ chips," and other nonanimal methods that have been developed over the past 10 to 15 years.

But pro-research groups are downplaying the law, saying it signals a slow turning of the tide -- not a tsunami that will remake the drug approval process overnight. Jim Newman, communications director at Americans for Medical Progress, which advocates for animal research, argues non-animal technologies are still "in their infancy" and won't be able to replace animal models for "many, many years." FDA still retains tremendous discretion to require animal tests, he notes, and he doesn't expect the agency to change tack anytime soon. In order for a drug to be approved in the United States, FDA typically requires toxicity tests on one rodent species such as a mouse or rat and one nonrodent species such as a monkey or dog. Companies use tens of thousands of animals for such tests each year. Yet more than nine in 10 drugs that enter human clinical trials fail because they are unsafe or ineffective, providing grist to those who argue that animal experiments are a waste of time, money, and lives. [...]

Now, that requirement is gone. In eliminating it, Congress seems to have responded to the emergence of nonanimal methods and growing public sentiment against animal research. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), who both call animal research inefficient and inhumane, introduced the changes, which the Senate passed by unanimous consent in September 2022. In December, Biden signed them into law as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which funds the government through this fiscal year. [...] Still, it remains unclear just how much the new law will change things at FDA. Although the legislation allows the agency to clear a drug for human trials without animal testing, it doesn't require that it do so. What's more, FDA's toxicologists are famously conservative, preferring animal tests in part because they allow examination of a potential drug's toxic effects in every organ after the animal is euthanized.

A federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves as concerns about indoor pollution linked to childhood asthma rise, Bloomberg first reported. CNN reports: A US Consumer Product Safety commissioner told Bloomberg gas stove usage is a "hidden hazard." "Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned," agency commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. said in a Bloomberg interview. The report said the agency plans "to take action" to address the indoor pollution caused by stoves.

The CPSC has been considering action on gas stoves for months.Trumka recommended in October that the CPSC seek public comment on the hazards associated with gas stoves. The pollutants have been linked to asthma and worsening respiratory conditions. A December 2022 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that indoor gas stove usage is associated with an increased risk of current asthma among children. The study found that almost 13% of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use. Trumka told Bloomberg the agency plans to open public comment on gas stove hazards.

Options besides a ban include "setting standards on emissions from the appliances." In a statement to CNN, the CPSC said the agency has not proposed any regulatory action on gas stoves at this time, and any regulatory action would "involve a lengthy process." "Agency staff plans to start gathering data and perspectives from the public on potential hazards associated with gas stoves, and proposed solutions to those hazards later this year," the commission said in a statement. "Commission staff also continues to work with voluntary standards organizations to examine gas stove emissions and address potential hazards."

Britain's attempt to become the first European nation to launch satellites into space ended in bitter disappointment early on Tuesday when Virgin Orbit said its rocket had suffered an anomaly that prevented it from reaching orbit. From a report: The "horizontal launch" mission had left from the coastal town of Newquay in southwest England, with Virgin's LauncherOne rocket carried under the wing of a modified Boeing 747 called "Cosmic Girl", and later released over the Atlantic Ocean. "We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit," the company said. "We are evaluating the information." The failure deals a further blow to European space ambitions after an Italian-built Vega-C rocket mission failed after lift-off from French Guiana in late December.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A small biotech company claims it has used a technology called reprogramming to rejuvenate old mice and extend their lives, a result suggesting that one day older people could have their biological clocks turned back with an injection -- literally becoming younger. The life-extension claim in rodents, made by Rejuvenate Bio, a San Diego biotech company, appears in a preprint paper on the website BioRxiv and hasn't been peer reviewed.

Noah Davidsohn, chief scientific officer of Rejuvenate, says the company used gene therapy to add three powerful reprogramming genes to the bodies of mice that were equivalent in age to human 77-year-olds. After the treatment, their remaining life span was doubled, the company says. Treated mice lived another 18 weeks, on average, while control mice died in nine weeks. Overall, the treated mice lived about 7% longer. Although the increase in lifespan was modest, the company says the research provides a demonstration of age reversal in an animal. "This is a powerful technology, and here is the proof of concept," says Davidsohn. "I wanted to show that it's actually something we can do in our elderly population."

Scientists not connected to the company called the study an exciting landmark but cautioned that whole-body rejuvenation using gene therapy remains a poorly understood concept with huge risks. "It's a beautiful intellectual exercise, but I would shy away from doing anything remotely similar to a person," says Vittorio Sebastiano, a professor at Stanford University. One risk is that the powerful programming process can cause cancer. Such an effect is often seen in mice. Even so, the chance that reprogramming could be an elixir of youth has led to a research and investment boom. One company, Altos Labs, says it has raised over $3 billion. "Far more information will be needed to learn exactly what changes the reprogramming genes cause in the mice, and researchers say other groups will need to repeat the experiment before they are convinced," adds the report.

"Sebastiano says the life-extension effect reported by Rejuvenate could be due to changes in a single organ or group of cells, rather than a general mouse-wide rejuvenation effect. Among other shortfalls in its research, Rejuvenate did not carefully document which and how many cells were changed by the genetic treatment."

Britain has conducted its first orbital space launch from UK soil on Monday evening, making it the privately-owned Virgin Orbit's first international launch. Deutsche Welle reports: Dubbed "Start Me Up," as in the Rolling Stones song, the rocket is carrying nine small satellites now making their way into space. The repurposed Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 aircraft took off from Cornwall in southwestern England at around 10:15 pm local time (2215 GMT) before releasing the rocket around an hour into flight over the Atlantic Ocean, toward the south of Ireland. The nine satellites the rocket will bring into orbit will be used for both civil and defense purposes. The plane, meanwhile, should make its way back to Cornwall.

The commercial satellite launch, described by Virgin Orbit as "history-making," is not only the first in the UK but in the whole of Western Europe, according to the UK Space Agency. Though the UK has produced satellites in the past, they were sent to spaceports abroad to be launched into space. Ian Annett, deputy chief executive at the UK Space Agency, said, "This is the start of a new era for the UK in terms of launch capabilities." He added that the UK had ambitions for being ''the hub of European launches." Virgin Orbit has previously launched four similar missions from California.

UPDATE: According to the Guardian, the historic space mission "ended in bitter disappointment" after the rocket carrying the first satellites "failed to reach orbit and was lost."

"To date, about 500 people have been put in cryogenic stasis after legal death," writes a Bloomberg Opinion technology columnist, "with the majority of them in the U.S.

"But a few thousand more, including Emil Kendziorra, are on waiting lists, wearing bracelets or necklaces with instructions for emergency responders. " Kendziorra, 36, runs Berlin-based Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH, one of the first cryonics businesses in Europe to join a market dominated by American firms organizations like The Alcor Life Extension Foundation and The Cryonics Institute. The former cancer doctor has several hundred people on his firm's waiting list. They skew to their late 30s, male and tend to work in technology. Patients can choose to have their entire body preserved and held upside down in a four-person dewars, a thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen, or just preserve their brain, which is cheaper.

Kendziorra says cryopreservation overall has become less expensive over the past few decades on an inflation-adjusted basis, a claim that he bases on historic prices published by his peers, who he says are making a collective effort to bring down costs. That could be critical to shifting cryonics from a fringe pursuit to something a little more mainstream, especially since it is no longer just for billionaires like PayPal Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel (who has reportedly signed up with Alcor). Kendziorra, for instance, has made cryonics just another monthly subscription by capitalizing on insurance, he told me during a Twitter Spaces discussion on cryonics last month. His customers pay a 25-euro ($26.54) monthly fee to Tomorrow Biostasis, and they also make the company the beneficiary of a minimum 100,000-euro life insurance payout upon their legal death. Kendziorra says that covers the full cost of cryonics including the biggest outlay: maintenance over the next century or so.

All told, most of his customers are paying about 50 euros a month for both the company's subscription fee and the life insurance policy for the option of a long sleep at death. Of course, most companies don't survive for more than a century, so Tomorrow Biostasis also partners with a non-profit group in Switzerland to carry out the storage of customers on its behalf.... The domain itself is largely funded by wealthy individuals including CEOs of tech companies, angel investors and scientists, Kendziorra says, adding that for them to invest in his own firm, their primary motivation shouldn't be "monetary" but rather to help further the field.

The mechanics all sound sensible, but that still leaves the question of whether cryonics will work, medically speaking. Doctors and scientists have used words like quackery, pseudoscience and outright fraud to describe the field. Clive Cohen, a neuroscientist from Kings College London, has called it a "hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology." The Association of Cryobiology has compared it to turning a hamburger back into a cow.