Taking a short nap during the day may help to protect the brain's health as it ages, researchers have suggested after finding that the practice appears to be associated with larger brain volume. From a report: While previous research has suggested long naps could be an early symptom of Alzheimer's disease, other work has revealed that a brief doze can improve people's ability to learn. Now researchers say they have found evidence to suggest napping may help to protect against brain shrinkage. That is of interest, the team say, as brain shrinkage, a process that occurs with age, is accelerated in people with cognitive problems and neurodegenerative diseases, with some research suggesting this may be related to sleep problems.

"In line with these studies, we found an association between habitual daytime napping and larger total brain volume, which could suggest that napping regularly provides some protection against neurodegeneration through compensating for poor sleep," the researchers note. Writing in the journal Sleep Health, researchers at UCL and the University of the Republic in Uruguay report how they drew on data from the UK Biobank study that has collated genetic, lifestyle and health information from 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 at recruitment. The team used data from 35,080 Biobank participants to look at whether a combination of genetic variants that have previously been associated with self-reported habitual daytime napping are also linked to brain volume, cognition and other aspects of brain health.

A new study argues that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is capable of detecting the chemical signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres -- the best hope for finding life on another world. Phys.Org reports: The team simulated atmospheric conditions for five broad types of Earth-like worlds: an ocean world, a volcanically active world, a rocky world during the high bombardment period, a super-Earth, and a world like Earth when life arose. They assumed all these worlds had a surface pressure of less than five Earth atmospheres, and calculated the absorption spectra for several organically produced molecules such as methane, ammonia, and carbon monoxide. These molecules can also be formed by non-biological methods, but they form a good baseline as a proof of concept.

They found that with a reasonably thick atmosphere, the JWST, specifically its NIRSpec G395M/H instrument, could confirm the presence of these molecules within 10 transits of the planet. It would be easiest to do with super-Earths and other worlds with a thick atmosphere, but it is still possible for potentially habitable worlds. Given the number of transits needed, our best shot at detecting biosignatures with JWST would be the close-orbiting worlds of red dwarf stars, such as the Trappist-1 system, which has several potentially habitable Earth-sized planets. Given the overlap between biological and non-biological origins, JWST observations might not be enough to confirm the existence of life, but this study shows that we are very close to that ability.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: If we're going to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming, experts agree, removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential. That's why, over the past few years, projects focused on growing seaweed to suck CO2 from the air and lock it in the sea have attracted attention -- and significant amounts of funding -- from the US government and private companies including Amazon. The problem: farming enough seaweed to meet climate-change goals may not be feasible after all.

A new study, published today in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, estimates that around a million square kilometers of ocean would need to be farmed in order to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the course of a year. It's not easy to come by that amount of space in places where seaweed grows easily, given all the competing uses along the coastlines, like shipping and fishing. To put that into context, between 2.5 and 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide would need to be captured each year, in addition to dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, to meet climate goals, according to the study's authors.

A variety of scientific models suggest we should be removing anything from 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year to 29 billion tons by 2050 in order to prevent global warming levels from rising past 1. 5C. An 2017 report from the UN estimated that we'd need to remove 10 billion tons annually to stop the planet from warming past 2C by the same date. "The industry is getting ahead of the science," says Isabella Arzeno-Soltero, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, who worked on the project. "Our immediate goal was to see if, given optimal conditions, we can actually achieve the scales of carbon harvests that people are talking about. And the answer is no, not really." [...] Their findings suggest that cultivating enough seaweed to reach these targets is beyond the industry's current capacity, although meeting climate goals will require much more than reliance solely on seaweed.

In just a few weeks, a remarkable European probe will be blasted into space in a bid to explore the dark side of the cosmos. From a report:ÂThe $1bn Euclid mission will investigate the universe's two most baffling components: dark energy and dark matter. The former is the name given to a mysterious force that was shown -- in 1998 -- to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, while the latter is a form of matter thought to pervade the cosmos, provide the universe with 80% of its mass, and act as a cosmic glue that holds galaxies together. Both dark energy and dark matter are invisible and astronomers have only been able to infer their existence by measuring their influence on the behaviour of stars and galaxies.

"We cannot say we understand the universe if the nature of these dark components remains a mystery," said astrophysicist Prof Andy Taylor of Edinburgh University. "That is why Euclid is so important." Taylor added that UK scientists had played a key role in designing and building the probe. For example, one of its two main instruments, the craft's Vis imager, was mostly built in the UK. "We thought what would be the biggest, most fundamentally important project we could do?" Taylor said. "The answer was Euclid, which has now been designed, built and is ready for launch." Euclid was intended to be launched last year on a Russian Soyuz rocket. However, after the invasion of Ukraine, the European Space Agency ended its cooperation with the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, and instead signed a deal to use a Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk's SpaceX company.

An anonymous reader shares a report: GPS is now a mainstay of daily life, helping us with navigation, tracking, mapping, and timing across a broad spectrum of applications. But it does have a few shortcomings, most notably not being able to pass through buildings, rocks, or water. That's why Japanese researchers have developed an alternative wireless navigation system that relies on cosmic rays, or muons, instead of radio waves, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. The team has conducted its first successful test, and the system could one day be used by search and rescue teams, for example, to guide robots underwater or to help autonomous vehicles navigate underground.

"Cosmic-ray muons fall equally across the Earth and always travel at the same speed regardless of what matter they traverse, penetrating even kilometers of rock," said co-author Hiroyuki Tanaka of Muographix at the University of Tokyo in Japan. "Now, by using muons, we have developed a new kind of GPS, which we have called the muometric positioning system (muPS), which works underground, indoors and underwater."

Universe Today reports: The best hope for finding life on another world isn't listening for coded messages or traveling to distant stars, it's detecting the chemical signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres. This long hoped-for achievement is often thought to be beyond our current observatories, but a new study argues that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could pull it off.

Most of the exoplanets we've discovered so far have been found by the transit method. This is where a planet passes in front of its star from our point of view. Even though we can't observe the planet directly, we can see the star's brightness dip by a fraction of a percent. As we watch stars over time, we can find a regular pattern of brightness dips, indicating the presence of a planet. The star dips in brightness because the planet blocks some of the starlight. But if the planet also has an atmosphere, there is a small amount of light that will pass through the atmosphere before reaching us. Depending on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, certain wavelengths will be absorbed, forming absorption spectra within the spectra of the starlight.

We have long been able to identify atoms and molecules by their absorption and emission spectra, so in principle, we can determine a planet's atmospheric composition with the transit method... We have done this with a few exoplanets, such as detecting the presence of water and organic compounds, but these were done for large gas planets with thick atmospheres. We haven't been able to do this with rocky Earth-like worlds. Our telescopes just aren't sensitive enough for that.

But this new study shows that the JWST could detect certain chemical biosignatures depending on their abundance in the atmosphere.
Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam writes that "The signature I like to imagine detecting is actually industrial pollution. Chemicals that aren't created by any known geological process and indicate not just life, but life smart enough to have advanced technology (but stupid enough to pollute their own air supply)."

An anonymous reader quotes this report from the Washington Post: In a new study released in Nature this week, researchers state that Earth formed within just 3 million years. That's notably faster than previous estimates placing the timeline up to 100 million years.... "We can also predict that if other planets formed ... by the same mechanism, then the ingredients required for life such as water, should be present on other planets and other systems, so there's a greater chance that we have water worlds elsewhere in the galaxy," said Isaac Onyett, lead author of the study and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Copenhagen.

The authors assert that this rapid genesis occurred through a theory called pebble accretion. The general idea, according to co-author and cosmochemist Martin Bizzarro, is that planets are born in a disk of dust and gas. When they reach a certain size, they rapidly attract those pebbles like a vacuum cleaner. Some of those pebbles are icy and could provide a water supply to Earth, thought of as pebble snow. This would have led to an early version of our planet, known as proto-Earth, that is approximately half the size of our present-day planet. (Our current rendition of Earth likely formed after a larger impact about 100 million years later, which also led to the formation of our moon....)

The team determined the time scale of Earth's formation by looking at silicon isotopes from more than 60 meteorites and planetary bodies in the vicinity of Earth, which represent the rubble leftover after planet formation... By analyzing the silicon compositions in samples of different ages, Onyett said they can piece together a time sequence of what was happening in the disk of dust before Earth formed. They found that, as the samples increased in age, the composition of the asteroids changed toward the composition of the cosmic dust that was being accumulated by Earth. "That's very strong evidence that this dust was also being swept up as it was drifting inwards towards the Sun," said Onyett. "It would have been swept up by Earth as it was growing by accretion."

Birger Schmitz, an astrogeologist at Lund University who was not involved in the research, said these results are "very compelling" and could shift how we think about our planet's formation... Most importantly, he said the results show there is nothing special about our water-carrying planet. "It is just a very ordinary planet in our galaxy. This is important in our attempts to understand how common higher forms of life are in the universe."
While scientists agree pebble accretion does explain the formation of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, some still argue that rocky planets like Earth were instead formed through larger and larger asteroid collisions...

"California startup Varda Space Industries launched its first test mission on June 12," reports CNN, "successfully sending a 200-pound (90-kilogram) capsule designed to carry drug research into Earth's orbit.

"The experiment, conducted in microgravity by simple onboard machines, aims to test whether it would be possible to manufacture pharmaceuticals in space remotely." Research has already established that protein crystals grown in a weightless environment can result in more perfect structures compared with those grown on Earth. These space-formed crystals could potentially then be used to create better-performing drugs that the human body can more easily absorb.
"Its research, company officials hope, could lead to better, more effective drugs — and hefty profits," CNN reported earlier this week: "It's not as sexy a human-interest story as tourism when it comes to commercialization of the cosmos," said Will Bruey, Varda's CEO and cofounder. "But the bet that we're making at Varda is that manufacturing is actually the next big industry that gets commercialized." Varda launched its first test mission Monday aboard a SpaceX rocket, which took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California just after 2:30 pm PT. The company then confirmed in a tweet that its satellite successfully separated from the rocket...

If successful, Varda hopes to scale its business rapidly, sending regular flights of satellites into orbit stuffed with experiments on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. Eventually, the firm hopes that research will yield a golden ticket drug, one that proves to be better when manufactured in space and can return royalties to Varda for years to come... Founded less than three years ago, Varda has gone from an idea to a company with more than $100 million in seed funding and grants, a 68,000-square-foot factory, and a satellite in space. Its workforce has grown to nearly 100 employees...

One day, the company hopes Varda flights will be so common that its capsules will blaze across the night sky every evening, like shooting stars to those on the ground who catch a glimpse. From there, Varda could even look to develop a research platform on a private space station, where pharma researchers could travel themselves.

Researchers at Stanford University found that among the pollutants emitted from gas stoves is benzene, which is linked to cancer. "Levels of benzene can reach higher than those found in secondhand tobacco smoke and the benzene pollution can spread throughout a home," reports NPR. From the report: Stanford scientists measured benzene from gas stoves in 87 California and Colorado homes in 2022 for the paper published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. They found both natural gas and propane stoves "emitted detectable and repeatable levels of benzene that in some homes raised indoor benzene concentrations above well-established health benchmarks." The risks of benzene have long been known. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the chemical is linked to leukemia and other blood cell cancers.

"Benzene forms in flames and other high-temperature environments, such as the flares found in oil fields and refineries. We now know that benzene also forms in the flames of gas stoves in our homes," said Rob Jackson in a statement. He's the study's senior author and a Stanford professor of earth sciences. With one burner on high or the oven at 350 degrees, the researchers found benzene levels in a house can be worse than average levels for second-hand tobacco smoke. And they found the toxin doesn't just stay in the kitchen, it can migrate to other places, such as bedrooms. "Good ventilation helps reduce pollutant concentrations, but we found that exhaust fans were often ineffective at eliminating benzene exposure," Jackson said. He says this is the first paper to analyze benzene emissions when a stove or oven is in use.

Researchers also tested whether cooking food - pan-frying salmon or bacon - emits benzene but found all the pollution came from the gas and not the food. That's important because the gas industry often deflects concern about pollution from its fuel, to breathing problems that can be triggered by cooking fumes. There are no studies out there that say cooking with gas will make someone sick. This is all about increasing risks for certain illnesses.

New submitter ole_timer shares a report from Wired: TikTok to Huawei routers to DJI drones, rising tensions between China and the US have made Americans -- and the US government -- increasingly wary of Chinese-owned technologies. But thanks to the complexity of the hardware supply chain, encryption chips sold by the subsidiary of a company specifically flagged in warnings from the US Department of Commerce for its ties to the Chinese military have found their way into the storage hardware of military and intelligence networks across the West. In July of 2021, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security added the Hangzhou, China-based encryption chip manufacturer Hualan Microelectronics, also known as Sage Microelectronics, to its so-called "Entity List," a vaguely named trade restrictions list that highlights companies "acting contrary to the foreign policy interests of the United States." Specifically, the bureau noted that Hualan had been added to the list for "acquiring and ... attempting to acquire US-origin items in support of military modernization for [China's] People's Liberation Army."

Yet nearly two years later, Hualan -- and in particular its subsidiary known as Initio, a company originally headquartered in Taiwan that it acquired in 2016 -- still supplies encryption microcontroller chips to Western manufacturers of encrypted hard drives, including several that list as customers on their websites Western governments' aerospace, military, and intelligence agencies: NASA, NATO, and the US and UK militaries. Federal procurement records show that US government agencies from the Federal Aviation Administration to the Drug Enforcement Administration to the US Navy have bought encrypted hard drives that use the chips, too. The disconnect between the Commerce Department's warnings and Western government customers means that chips sold by Hualan's subsidiary have ended up deep inside sensitive Western information networks, perhaps due to the ambiguity of their Initio branding and its Taiwanese origin prior to 2016. The chip vendor's Chinese ownership has raised fears among security researchers and China-focused national security analysts that they could have a hidden backdoor that would allow China's government to stealthily decrypt Western agencies' secrets. And while no such backdoor has been found, security researchers warn that if one did exist, it would be virtually impossible to detect it.

"If a company is on the Entity List with a specific warning like this one, it's because the US government says this company is actively supporting another country's military development," says Dakota Cary, a China-focused research fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC-based think tank. "It's saying you should not be purchasing from them, not just because the money you're spending is going to a company that will use those proceeds in the furtherance of another country's military objectives, but because you can't trust the product." [...] The mere fact that so many Western government agencies are buying products that include chips sold by the subsidiary of a company on the Commerce Department's trade restrictions list points to the complexities of navigating the computing hardware supply chain, says the Atlantic Council's Cary. "At minimum, it's a real oversight. Organizations that should be prioritizing this level of security are apparently not able to do so, or are making mistakes that have allowed for these products to get into their environments," he says. "It seems very significant. And it's probably not a one-off mistake."

Globally, outdoor air pollution is second only to tobacco as greatest cause of lung and respiratory cancers. From a report: This year marks a decade since the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) gathered in Lyon, France, to unanimously declare that air pollution caused cancer in humans. Air pollution was classified as a type 1 carcinogen, the most certain category possible. This was mainly based on more than 20 years of research in particle pollution and lung cancer. The number of research studies has almost doubled since the IARC meeting in Lyon, with even more evidence on lung cancer in never-smokers, but governmental action to reduce air pollution has not kept up.

Globally, outdoor air pollution is second only to tobacco as the greatest cause of lung and respiratory cancers. This holds true in almost all parts of the world, with a notable exception of low-income countries where people (especially women and children) also breathe smoke in their homes from cooking on open fires. In the past 10 years new studies have linked air pollution to other cancers, including breast and bladder cancer. These have also been associated with nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant from diesel traffic that is being targeted by low emissions zones in many cities. There is emerging evidence of links to childhood leukaemia too. For those people with lung cancer, smokers and never-smokers, their prognosis and survival appears to be reduced if they live in a polluted area. Research includes a recent study of more than a quarter of a million people with lung cancer in Pennsylvania. This raises questions about the impact of air pollution on the way that cancer progresses and how it may change the effectiveness of chemotherapy.

The pitch for vertical farming had all the promise of a modern venture capital dream: a new way to grow crops that would use robots and artificial intelligence to conserve water, combat food insecurity and save the environment. But after firms poured billions of dollars into these startups, pushing valuations into the stratosphere, the industry is now facing a harsh new reality: funding is drying up, profits remain elusive, and creditors are circling. From a report: AeroFarms last week became the latest, most high-profile example of the challenges facing the business, filing for bankruptcy after building a massive new facility in Virginia that drained its cash, according to court papers. Its collapse comes on the heels of lettuce grower Kalera seeking court protection in April. And in May, publicly traded AppHarvest, which operates high-tech greenhouses, received a notice of default from one of its investors, according to a regulatory filing. The company contests the default notice, but if it can't reach an agreement with its creditors, the firm warned it could become "bankrupt or insolvent."

"We really were in a hype cycle," said Vonnie Estes, vice president of innovation for the International Fresh Produce Association. Venture capitalists entered the scene in a frenzy, likening these companies to software firms, and expecting comparable returns. "There was a lot of money that rushed in without really understanding that this is actually just farming." Industry experts still say that indoor farming is a crucial piece of agriculture's future, especially as climate change spurs more destructive wildfires and floods. Nonetheless, the ability of vertical farms to carve out meaningful market share on a national scale could be years away, they note.

Researchers have discovered high concentrations of phosphorus in ice crystals emitted from Saturn's moon Enceladus, enhancing its potential to support life. The findings, based on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, suggest that Enceladus may possess the necessary elements for life. Reuters reports: The discovery was based on data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the first to orbit Saturn, during its 13-year landmark exploration of the gaseous giant planet, its rings and its moons from 2004 to 2017. The same team previously confirmed that Enceladus' ice grains contain a rich assortment of minerals and complex organic compounds, including the ingredients for amino acids, associated with life as scientists know it. But phosphorus, the least abundant of six chemical elements considered necessary to all living things -- the others are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur -- was still missing from the equation until now.

"It's the first time this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth," the study's lead author, Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the Free University in Berlin, said in a JPL press release. [...] One notable aspect of the latest Enceladus discovery was geochemical modeling by the study's co-authors in Europe and Japan showing that phosphorus exists in concentrations at least 100 times that of Earth's oceans, bound water-soluble forms of phosphate compounds. "This key ingredient could be abundant enough to potentially support life in Enceladus' ocean," said co-investigator Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. "This is a stunning discovery for astrobiology." "Whether life could have originated in Enceladus' ocean remains an open question," Glein said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, in a groundbreaking advance that sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm. Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage. However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries. The structures do not have a beating heart or the beginnings of a brain, but include cells that would typically go on to form the placenta, yolk sac and the embryo itself.

There is no near-term prospect of the synthetic embryos being used clinically. It would be illegal to implant them into a patient's womb, and it is not yet clear whether these structures have the potential to continue maturing beyond the earliest stages of development. The motivation for the work is for scientists to understand the "black box" period of development that is so called because scientists are only allowed to cultivate embryos in the lab up to a legal limit of 14 days. They then pick up the course of development much further along by looking at pregnancy scans and embryos donated for research. The full details of the latest work, from the Cambridge-Caltech lab, are yet to be published in a journal paper. But, speaking at the conference, Zernicka-Goetz described cultivating the embryos to a stage just beyond the equivalent of 14 days of development for a natural embryo.

The model structures, each grown from a single embryonic stem cell, reached the beginning of a developmental milestone known as gastrulation, when the embryo transforms from being a continuous sheet of cells to forming distinct cell lines and setting up the basic axes of the body. At this stage, the embryo does not yet have a beating heart, gut or beginnings of a brain, but the model showed the presence of primordial cells that are the precursor cells of egg and sperm. "Our human model is the first three-lineage human embryo model that specifies amnion and germ cells, precursor cells of egg and sperm," Zernicka-Goetz told the Guardian before the talk. "It's beautiful and created entirely from embryonic stem cells."

Google Lens, the company's computer vision-powered app that scans objects and brings up relevant information, is now able to search for skin conditions, like moles and rashes. "Uploading a picture or photo through Lens will kick off a search for visual matches, which will also work for other physical maladies that you might not be sure how to describe with words (like a bump on the lip, a line on nails or hair loss)," reports TechCrunch. From the report: It's a step short of the AI-driven app Google launched in 2021 to diagnose skin, hair and nail conditions. That app, which debuted first in the E.U., faced barriers to entry in the U.S., where it would have had to have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. (Google declined to seek approval.) Still, the Lens feature might be useful for folks deciding whether to seek medical attention or over-the-counter treatments. Lens integration with Google Bard is also coming soon. "Users will be able to include images in their Bard prompts and Lens will work behind the scenes to help Bard make sense of what's being shown," reports TechCrunch.