Nasa's Orion capsule reached the moon on Monday, whipping around the back side and passing within 80 miles of the surface on its way to a record-breaking lunar orbit. From a report: The close approach occurred as the crew capsule and its three test dummies were on the far side of the moon. Because of the half-hour communication blackout, flight controllers in Houston did not know if the critical engine firing went well until the capsule emerged from behind the moon, more than 232,000 miles from Earth.

It's the first time a capsule has visited the moon since Nasa's Apollo program 50 years ago, and represented a huge milestone in the $4.1bn test flight that began last Wednesday after Orion launched into space atop the massive Artemis rocket. Orion's flight path took it over the landing sites of Apollo 11, 12 and 14 -- humankind's first three lunar touchdowns. The moon loomed ever larger in the video beamed back earlier in the morning, as the capsule closed the final few thousand miles since blasting off last Wednesday from Florida's Kennedy Space Center, atop the most powerful rocket ever built by Nasa. "This is one of those days that you've been thinking about and talking about for a long, long time," flight director Zeb Scoville said while waiting to resume contact. As the capsule swung out from behind the moon, onboard cameras sent back a picture of Earth, a blue dot surrounded by blackness.

As warming waters devastate coral around the world, the sea's stunningly colorful reefs have been remarkably resilient. But pollution, mass tourism and overfishing put them at risk. From a report: The vast majority of the world's coral reefs are likely to be severely damaged in the coming decades if the planet keeps warming at its current rate. But the wildly colorful coral reefs in the waters outside the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh, where the annual United Nations climate conference is taking place, are an anomaly: They can tolerate the heat, and perhaps even thrive in it, making them some of the only reefs in the world that have a chance of surviving climate change. There is a limit to how much they can take, however.

Mass tourism at Egypt's beach resorts, overfishing, overdevelopment, pollution, occasional failures of the sewage system, sediment from construction and oil spills from tankers or terminals have put them at risk, according to marine biologists who study the Red Sea. "If not the last, this could be one of the last coral refuges worldwide," said Dr. Mahmoud Hanafy, a marine biology professor at the Suez Canal University in Egypt. "Protection of this reef is not a national responsibility or a national task. It's a global task." The exquisite beauty of the more than 200 species of coral, living in crystal clear waters of the northern Red Sea in temperatures that can top 85 degrees Fahrenheit, has made the area a scuba diver's paradise. Throughout the two-week climate meeting, conference attendees -- including John Kerry, the United States climate envoy -- took a break from the conference halls to experience the corals for themselves.

Funding for scientific research has become risk-averse, favoring established researchers pursuing incremental discoveries, critics say. From a report: In August President Biden signed into law a massive boost to scientific research: roughly $200 billion, when fully funded, over the next several years. The bipartisan law's premise is straightforward. In the long run economic growth depends on innovation, which in turn flows from how much we spend on research and development. The problem with that premise is the U.S. already spends plenty on R&D, about 3% of gross domestic product in recent years. That exceeds the peaks of the early 1960s during the space race. But the fruits of that effort have been elusive. Total factor productivity, the best metric for innovation's contribution to growth, grew just 0.5% a year over the past decade, half its rate of the 1960s. Other evidence suggests breakthroughs, such as new drug discoveries, are becoming more expensive and time-consuming, and researchers spend ever more years acquiring training and experience before achieving novel discoveries. In other words, the U.S. is getting progressively less bang for its scientific buck.

Patrick Collison, the Irish-born co-founder of payments technology company Stripe, has spent a lot of the past five years pondering the problem of declining scientific productivity. One popular theory he rejects: the most important discoveries have been made and new insights are more incremental and difficult. That might be true of individual fields, such as physics, but can't be true generally, he argues. "Every discovery opens up new frontiers and new questions and new possible avenues of investigation," he said in an interview. "The surface area of our knowledge is continually expanding. Just like we are not exhausting the creative possibilities of the English language, because words can be combined in an infinite number of ways, it does not seem to me we are running out of possibilities of discovery in computer science."

Research inputs -- dollars and hours spent -- are a lousy measure of innovation, he added. It doesn't require more resources to make a hit movie or bestselling novel than a dud. The most innovative companies aren't necessarily the biggest spenders. Tesla's R&D spending in the past three years is 13% of that of General Motors and Ford Motor combined. Yet Tesla's market value is more than five times its two rivals.' Clearly, scientific productivity has something to do with how research is done, not how much. One culprit, in the view of Mr. Collison and many others, is that the institutions that fund science have become process-oriented, narrow-minded and risk-averse. Wary of failure, they favor established researchers pursuing narrowly focused, incremental ideas over younger scientists with more heterodox agendas.

The BBC reports: Leprosy bacteria may hold the secret to safely repairing and regenerating the body, researchers at the University of Edinburgh say. Animal experiments have uncovered the bacteria's remarkable ability to almost double the size of livers by stimulating healthy growth.

It is a sneakily selfish act that gives the bacteria more tissue to infect. But working out how they do it could lead to new age-defying therapies, the scientists say....

The bacterium that causes [leprosy], Mycobacterium leprae, has other, unusual properties, including the ability to perform "biological alchemy", converting one type of bodily tissue into another, which are fascinating scientists. So the researchers turned to another animals that catches the disease — armadillos. The experiments, which were performed in the US, showed the infection heads to the armoured animals' livers, where it performed a controlled hijacking of the organ to reprogram it for its own purpose.... You might expect such growth to be defective or even cancerous — but detailed analysis showed it was both healthy and functional, complete with the usual array of blood vessels and bile ducts.

"It is kind of mind-blowing," Prof Rambukkana said. "How do they do that? There is no cell therapy that can do that."
The bacteria appears to be "rewinding the developmental clock" on the liver cells, the BBC writes, transforming them into a younger, faster-growing state. "The hope is the approach can be harnessed for repairing the livers of people waiting for a transplant — or even to reverse some of the damage caused by ageing elsewhere in the body."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for submitting the story!

"With new COVID variants and subvariants evolving faster and faster, each chipping away at the effectiveness of the leading vaccines, the hunt is on for a new kind of vaccine," reports the Daily Beast, "one that works equally well on current and future forms of the novel coronavirus.

"Now researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland think they've found a new approach to vaccine design that could lead them to a long-lasting jab. As a bonus, it also might work on other coronaviruses, not just the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19." The NIH team reported its findings in a peer-reviewed study that appeared in the journal Cell Host & Microbe earlier this month.

The key to the NIH's potential vaccine design is a part of the virus called the "spine helix." It's a coil-shaped structure inside the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect our cells. Lots of current vaccines target the spike protein. But none of them specifically target the spine helix. And yet, there are good reasons to focus on that part of the pathogen. Whereas many regions of the spike protein tend to change a lot as the virus mutates, the spine helix doesn't.

That gives scientists "hope that an antibody targeting this region will be more durable and broadly effective," Joshua Tan, the lead scientist on the NIH team, told The Daily Beast....

A vaccine that binds the spine helix in SARS-CoV-2 should hold up for a long time. And it should also work on all the other coronaviruses that also include the spine helix — and there are dozens of them, including several such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS that have already made the leap from animal populations and caused outbreaks in people....

Maybe a spine-helix jab is in our future. Or maybe not. Either way, it's encouraging that scientists are making incremental progress toward a more universal coronavirus vaccine. One that could work for many years on a wide array of related viruses.

hardaker writes: I wrote up the results from studying graphs of CO2 measurement data during a trip I took from Sacramento, California to London to attend the IETF-115 conference. Since CO2 is considered to be a potential proxy for measuring exposure to airborne viruses, it provided me with a rough guess about how safe (or not) I was at various points of my travel.

TL;DR: big conference rooms: good, busses: bad, everything else: in between.
"Numbers alone do not effectively measure risk absolutely," the page concludes. "You must combine numbers with logic and common sense. Airlines with good filtering systems are likely ok. But do aim the fans at you with maximum air flow..."

"Hallways and crowded coffee tables are where we need to worry the most. Unfortunately, the masking policy at IETF-115 was sort of backward: in the rooms the circulation was quite good, but in all my graphs you can see a spike as I wandered from one room to another, and this is where masking policies were more lax allowing participants to remove their masks."

"Last week's collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is sending aftershocks through the scientific community," writes Science magazine: An undergraduate physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who founded FTX and quickly became a billionaire, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried began to back philanthropic organizations that supported a wide variety of science-related causes, most designed to improve human well-being. Now, with FTX in bankruptcy and under investigation for misuse of investors' money, his formerly flush foundations are suddenly strapped for cash and much of that work is at risk. One foundation, the Future Fund, was just launched in February. But by the end of June, its officials reported awarding 262 grants and "investments" totaling $132 million.

It's unclear how much of that money has been distributed. But on 10 November, five senior Future Fund officials resigned and announced in a statement, "We are devastated to say that it looks likely that there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor...."

Just what will happen to awards the Future Fund and the similar FTX Foundation have already made remains unclear. FTX owes billions of dollars to creditors and is now being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, according to The Wall Street Journal. Writing in an online forum hosted by the Center for Effective Altruism, to which the Future Fund pledged nearly $14 million, Molly Kovite, legal operations manager for the Open Philanthropy foundation, noted that FTX's creditors could try to "claw back" their investments during bankruptcy proceedings. If grantees received awards after 11 August, which is 90 days prior to the bankruptcy filing, "the bankruptcy process will probably ask you, at some point, to pay all or part of that money back" she predicts.

That has grantees wondering how they will pay the bills. "Everyone is obviously really worried," Morrison says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for submitting the article.

"Get ready: Neurotechnology is coming to the workplace," claims IEEE Spectrum: Neural sensors are now reliable and affordable enough to support commercial pilot projects that extract productivity-enhancing data from workers' brains.

These projects aren't confined to specialized workplaces; they're also happening in offices, factories, farms, and airports. The companies and people behind these neurotech devices are certain that they will improve our lives. But there are serious questions about whether work should be organized around certain functions of the brain, rather than the person as a whole.

To be clear, the kind of neurotech that's currently available is nowhere close to reading minds. Sensors detect electrical activity across different areas of the brain, and the patterns in that activity can be broadly correlated with different feelings or physiological responses, such as stress, focus, or a reaction to external stimuli. These data can be exploited to make workers more efficient — and, proponents of the technology say, to make them happier. Two of the most interesting innovators in this field are the Israel-based startup InnerEye, which aims to give workers superhuman abilities, and Emotiv, a Silicon Valley neurotech company that's bringing a brain-tracking wearable to office workers, including those working remotely....

EEG has recently broken out of clinics and labs and has entered the consumer marketplace. This move has been driven by a new class of "dry" electrodes that can operate without conductive gel, a substantial reduction in the number of electrodes necessary to collect useful data, and advances in artificial intelligence that make it far easier to interpret the data. Some EEG headsets are even available directly to consumers for a few hundred dollars.

Having trouble falling asleep, a writer for Vulture pondered a study from February in the Journal of Sleep Research that "runs refreshingly counter to common sleep-and-screens wisdom." For years, science and conventional wisdom have stated unequivocally that looking at a device — like a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or television — before bed is akin to lighting years of your natural life on fire, then letting the flames consume your children, your community, and the very concept of human progress....

Specifically interested in the use of "entertainment media" (streaming services, video games, podcasts) before bed, [the new February study's] researchers asked a group of 58 adults to keep a sleep diary and found that, if participants consumed entertainment media in the hour before bed, the habit was associated with an earlier bedtime as well as more sleep overall (though the benefits diminished if participants binged for longer than an hour or multitasked on their phones). Essentially, these researchers explored screen use before bed as a form of relaxation rather than a form of self-harm, which is exactly how I and probably 5 billion other people use it — as a way of distracting our minds from the onslaught of material reality just before we drift off to temporary oblivion.
Vulture's writer interviews Dr. Morgan Ellithorpe, one of the authors of the Journal of Sleep Research study and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware who specializes in media psychology. Dr. Ellithorpe is a proponent of intentional media use as a way to relieve stress, but she tells me that, in her research, she's found that the worst types of media to absorb before bed are those that have no "stopping point" — Instagram, TikTok, shows designed to be binge-watched. If you intend to binge a show, that might be fine: "Making a plan and sticking to it seems to matter," she says. We agree that humans are famously bad at that, and that's where the problems begin. The solution, Dr. Ellithorpe says, is figuring out why we're on our screens and if that reason is "meaningful." Are we turning to a screen in order to recover from an eventful day? Because we want something to talk about with our friends? Because we're seeking, as she puts it, a moment of "hedonic enjoyment"? The key is that you must be able to recognize when that need is fulfilled. Then "you're likely to have a good experience, and you won't need to force yourself to stop. But it takes practice."

Dr. Ellithorpe cites several studies for me to review — on gratification, mood-management theory, selective exposure, and self-determination theory — all of which, to various extents, grapple with the notion that human beings can make decisions to use media for purposeful things. "There's this push now to realize that people aren't a monolith, and media uses that seem bad for some people can actually be really good for other people." Although many researchers like Dr. Ellithorpe and her cohort are onboard with this push, she admits that "the movement has not filtered out to the public yet. So the public is still on this kick of 'Oh, media's bad.'"

And that's a huge part of the issue. "We sabotage ourselves when it comes to benefiting from media because we've been taught in our society to feel guilty for spending leisure time with media," Dr. Ellithorpe says. "The research in this area suggests that people who want to use media to recover from stress, if they then feel bad about doing so, they don't actually get the benefit from the media use."

But even Dr. Ellithorpe is prone to unintentional sleep moralizing, saying she is often "bad" and "on her phone two seconds before I turn off the light." She recommends watching a "low-challenge show" before bed and, like Dr. Kennedy, cites Stranger Things specifically as a dangerous pre-bed content choice because "you have to keep track of all the characters, remember what happened three seasons ago, and it's emotionally charged. It might be difficult afterward to come down from that and go to bed." In the end, she suggests watching whatever you want as long as it doesn't delay your bedtime.

The Guardian notes that "While leap seconds pass by unnoticed for most people, they can cause problems for a range of systems that require an exact, uninterrupted flow of time, such as satellite navigation, software, telecommunication, trade and even space travel."

So now Nature magazine reports that "The practice of adding 'leap seconds' to official clocks to keep them in sync with Earth's rotation will be put on hold from 2035, the world's foremost metrology body has decided." The decision was made by representatives from governments worldwide at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November. It means that from 2035, or possibly earlier, astronomical time (known as UT1) will be allowed to diverge by more than one second from coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks. Since 1972, whenever the two time systems have drifted apart by more than 0.9 seconds, a leap second has been added....

Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Google are among the tech companies that have called for leap seconds to be scrapped. The CGPM — which also oversees the international system of units (SI) — has proposed that no leap second should be added for at least a century, allowing UT1 and UTC to slide out of sync by about 1 minute. But it plans to consult with other international organizations and decide by 2026 on what upper limit, if any, to put on how much they be allowed to diverge....

Although in the long term Earth's rotation slows due to the pull of the Moon, a speed-up since 2020 has also made the issue more pressing, because for the first time, a leap second might need to be removed, rather than added. UTC has only ever had to slow a beat to wait for Earth, not skip ahead to catch up with it. "It's kind of being described as a Y2K issue, because it's just something that we've never had to deal with," said Elizabeth Donley, who leads the Time and Frequency division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado.

For the first time, America's Food and Drug Administration has "approved a treatment that can delay the onset of Type 1 diabetes," reports ABC News: Teplizumab, a monoclonal antibody that will be marketed under the brand name Tzield from pharmaceutical companies ProventionBio and Sanofi, is administered through intravenous infusion. The injection was shown in clinical trials to delay onset of insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes for patients with autoantibody markers of early risk by over two years, with hopes for some that it can delay onset even longer.... Tzield was approved to delay the onset of stage 3 Type 1 diabetes in adults and children ages 8 and up who currently have stage 2 Type 1 diabetes.

The medication is thought to slow down the body's attack on its own insulin-producing cells and thus give people more time before they become dependent on pharmaceutical insulin. Tzield is not suitable for people with insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes, people who are pre-Type 2 diabetics or those with type 2 diabetes. "This approval is a watershed moment for the treatment and prevention of type 1 diabetes," said Dr. Mark S. Anderson, director of the University of California San Francisco Diabetes Center. "Until now, the only real therapy for patients has been a lifetime of insulin replacement. This new therapy targets and helps to halt the autoimmune process that leads to the loss of insulin...."

Studies have shown that 75% of people with these diagnostic markers usually become insulin-dependent within five years and nearly 100% at some point in their lifetime.
ABC News also shares this quote from Dr. John Sharretts, director of the Division of Diabetes, Lipid Disorders, and Obesity in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "The drug's potential to delay clinical diagnosis of type 1 diabetes may provide patients with months to years without the burdens of disease."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Triple threat. Tripledemic. A viral perfect storm. These frightening phrases have dominated recent headlines as some health officials, clinicians, and scientists forecast that SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) could surge at the same time in Northern Hemisphere locales that have relaxed masking, social distancing, and other COVID-19 precautions. But a growing body of epidemiological and laboratory evidence offers some reassurance: SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses often "interfere" with each other. Although waves of each virus may stress emergency rooms and intensive care units, the small clique of researchers who study these viral collisions say there is little chance the trio will peak together and collectively crash hospital systems the way COVID-19 did at the pandemic's start.

"Flu and other respiratory viruses and SARS-CoV-2 just don't get along very well together," says virologist Richard Webby, an influenza researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. "It's unlikely that they will circulate widely at the same time." "One virus tends to bully the others," adds epidemiologist Ben Cowling at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. During the surge of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 in Hong Kong in March, Cowling found that other respiratory viruses "disappeared ... and they came back again in April." When a respiratory virus sweeps through a community, interferons can broadly raise the body's defenses and temporarily erect a populationwide immune barrier against subsequent viruses that target the respiratory system. "Basically, every virus triggers the interferon response to some extent, and every virus is susceptible to it," says immunologist Ellen Foxman at Yale University, who has been exploring interference between SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in a laboratory model of the human airway. Rhinoviruses, which cause common colds, can trip up influenza A (the most prevalent flu virus). RSV can bump rhinoviruses and human metapneumoviruses. Influenza A can thwart its distant cousin influenza B. "There are a lot of major health implications from viral interference," says Guy Boivin, a virologist at Laval University who co-authored a review (PDF) on viral interference earlier this year.

Now, viral interference researchers are closely watching the newest respiratory virus to circle the globe. "What interactions could SARS-CoV-2 have with other viruses?" Murcia asks. "To this day, there are no robust epidemiological data." For one thing, the widespread social distancing and mask wearing in many countries meant there was little chance to see interference in action. "There was almost no circulation of other respiratory viruses during the first 3 years of the pandemic," Boivin says. Also, SARS-CoV-2 has many defenses against interferons, including preventing their production, which might affect its interactions with other viruses. Still, Foxman has published evidence that, in her organoid model, rhinovirus can interfere with SARS-CoV-2. And Boivin's team has reported (PDF) that influenza A and SARS-CoV-2 each can block the other in cell studies.

A new map of the universe displays for the first time the span of the entire known cosmos with pinpoint accuracy and sweeping beauty. Phys.Org reports: Created by Johns Hopkins University astronomers with data mined over two decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the map allows the public to experience data previously only accessible to scientists. The interactive map, which depicts the actual position and real colors of 200,000 galaxies, is available online, where it can also be downloaded for free.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to capture the night sky through a telescope based in New Mexico. Night after night for years, the telescope aimed at slightly different locations to capture this unusually broad perspective. The map, which [map creator Brice Manard] assembled with the help of former Johns Hopkins computer science student Nikita Shtarkman, visualizes a slice of the universe, or about 200,000 galaxies -- each dot on the map is a galaxy and each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. The Milky Way is simply one of these dots, the one at the very bottom of the map.

The expansion of the universe contributes to make this map even more colorful. The farther an object, the redder it appears. The top of the map reveals the first flash of radiation emitted soon after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. "In this map, we are just a speck at the very bottom, just one pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way which has billions of stars and planets," Manard says. "We are used to seeing astronomical pictures showing one galaxy here, one galaxy there or perhaps a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale." For those interested, Johns Hopkins University published a video about the map on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Say hello to ronnagrams and quettameters: International scientists gathered in France voted on Friday for new metric prefixes to express the world's largest and smallest measurements, prompted by an ever-growing amount of data. It marks the first time in more than three decades that new prefixes have been added to the International System of Units (SI), the agreed global standard for the metric system. Joining the ranks of well-known prefixes like kilo and milli are ronna and quetta for the largest numbers -- and ronto and quecto for the smallest.

The change was voted on by scientists and government representatives from across the world attending the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures, which governs the SI and meets roughly every four years at Versailles Palace, west of Paris. The prefixes make it easier to express large amounts -- for example, always referring to a kilometer as 1,000 meters or a millimeter as one thousandth of a meter would quickly become cumbersome. Since the SI was established in 1960, scientific need has led to a growing number of prefixes. The last time was in 1991, when chemists wanting to express vast molecular quantities spurred the addition of zetta and yotta.

The new prefixes can simplify how we talk about some pretty big objects. "If we think about mass, instead of distance, the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams," which is a six followed by 27 zeroes, [sad Richard Brown, the head of metrology at the UK's National Physical Laboratory]. "Jupiter, that's about two quettagrams," he added -- a two followed by 30 zeros. Brown said he had the idea for the update when he saw media reports using unsanctioned prefixes for data storage such as brontobytes and hellabytes. Google in particular has been using hella for bytes since 2010. "Those were terms that were unofficially in circulation, so it was clear that the SI had to do something," he said.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced Friday in a federal court to 135 months, more than 11 years in prison following her conviction on four counts of criminal fraud. The court found she deceived investors, including News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and a host of other luminaries, about the efficacy of Theranos' blood-testing technology. CNBC reports: Holmes cried while speaking to the court ahead of her sentencing. "I loved Theranos. It was my life's work," Holmes said. "My team meant the world to me. I am devastated by my failings. I'm so so sorry. I gave everything I had to build my company." Her defense team argued she should face a maximum sentence of 18 months, according to court filings.

The Wall Street Journal first broke the story of how Theranos' blood-testing technology was struggling to meet expectations in 2015. Whistleblowers and other witnesses came forth to provide detailed accounts of how Holmes and former operating chief Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani deceived patients, partners, investors and employees about the company's progress and the capabilities of its technology. "Thank you for having me. Thank you for the courtesy and respect you have shown me," she said Friday. "I have felt deep pain for what people went through because I failed them. To investors, patients, I am sorry." Prosecutors sought a 15 year sentence for the pregnant 38-year-old former billionaire and Silicon Valley celebrity. Developing...

What happens when old atomic bombs are retired? Last month, the Biden administration announced its intention to withdraw the nation's most powerful weapon from the U.S. nuclear arsenal. From a report: The bomb is called the B83. It is a hydrogen bomb that debuted in 1983 -- a time when President Reagan was denouncing Russia as "an evil empire." The government made 660 of the deadly weapons, which were to be delivered by fast bombers. The B83 was 12 feet long, had fins and packed an explosive force roughly 80 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Its job was to obliterate hardened military sites and command bunkers, including Moscow's.

What now for the B83? How many still exist is a federal secret, but not the weapon's likely fate, which may surprise anyone who assumes that getting rid of a nuclear weapon means that it vanishes from the face of the earth. Typically, nuclear arms retired from the U.S. arsenal are not melted down, pulverized, crushed, buried or otherwise destroyed. Instead, they are painstakingly disassembled, and their parts, including their deadly plutonium cores, are kept in a maze of bunkers and warehouses across the United States. Any individual facility within this gargantuan complex can act as a kind of used-parts superstore from which new weapons can -- and do -- emerge.

India launched its first rocket developed by a startup into space on Friday, with the aim of testing the company's technology that will be used to design three orbital vehicles. From a report: The Vikram-S rocket, developed by Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace, took off at 11:30 a.m. local time from Sriharikota, an island near Chennai in southeastern India. The rocket reached an altitude of 89.5 kilometers (56 miles) and all systems worked as planned, Pawan Goenka, head of an industry space body said.

"It's a major step forward to India developing its own space ecosystem and emerging as a front-line nation in space," Space Minister Jitendra Singh said. Built in just two years, the sub-orbital validated the pressure, temperature and vibration in Skyroot's orbital vehicles, with the first of the series, Vikram I, scheduled to launch next year. It carried a payload from two Indian aerospace startups and a non-profit space research laboratory in Armenia.

The world's first vaccine to treat deadly cancerous brain tumors can potentially give patients years of extra life, a global clinical trial has concluded. The Guardian reports: A senior NHS doctor who was one of the trial's chief investigators said the evidence showed DCVax had resulted in "astonishing" enhanced survival for patients. One patient in the 331-person multicenter global study lived for more than eight years after receiving DCVax. In Britain, 53-year-old Nigel French is still alive seven years after having it. If approved by medical regulators, DCVax would be the first new treatment in 17 years for newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients and the first in 27 years for people in whom it had returned. "The total results are astonishing," said Prof Keyoumars Ashkan, a neurosurgeon at King's College hospital in London who was the European chief investigator of the trial. "The final results of this phase three trial... offer fresh hope to patients battling with glioblastoma."

Trial researchers found that newly diagnosed patients who had the vaccine survived for 19.3 months on average, compared with 16.5 months for those who received a placebo. Participants with recurrent glioblastoma who had had DCVax lived on average for 13.2 months after receiving it, compared with just 7.8 months for those who did not. Overall 13% of people who received it lived for at least five years after diagnosis, while just 5.7% of those in the control group did so, according to the results of the trial, which were published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology.

The vaccine is a form of immunotherapy, in which the body's immune system is programmed to track down and attack the tumor. It is the first developed to tackle brain tumors. "The vaccine works by stimulating the patient's own immune system to fight against the patient's tumor. It provides a personalized solution, working with a patient's immune system, which is the most intelligent system known to man," said Ashkan. "The vaccine is produced by combining proteins from a patient's own tumor with their white blood cells. This educates the white cells to recognize the tumor. "When the vaccine is administered, these educated white blood cells then help the rest of the patient's immune system recognize the tumor as something it needs to fight against and destroy. Almost like training a sniffer dog."

The US Food and Drug Administration has given a safety clearance to lab-grown meat for the first time. From a report: Upside Foods, a California-based company that makes meat from cultured chicken cells, will be able to begin selling its products once its facilities have been inspected by the US Department of Agriculture. The agency said it had evaluated the information submitted by Upside Foods and it had "no further questions at this time about the firm's safety conclusion."

"Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, and seafood in the production of food, with these products expected to be ready for the U.S. market in the near future," Dr. Robert M. Califf, the FDA's commissioner of food and drugs and Susan T. Mayne, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), said in a statement.

A super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river is running under the ice sheet. That could be bad news for sea-level rise. From a report: For all its treacherousness and general inclination to kill you, Antarctica's icy surface is fairly tranquil: vast stretches of miles-thick whiteness, with not a plant or animal to speak of. But way below the surface, where that ice meets land, things get wild. What scientists used to think was a ho-hum subglacial environment is in fact humming with hydrological activity, recent research is revealing, with major implications for global sea-level rise. Researchers just found that, at the base of Antarctica's ice, an area the size of Germany and France combined is feeding meltwater into a super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river running to the sea. "Thirty years ago, we thought the whole of the ice pretty much was frozen to the bed," says Imperial College London glaciologist Martin Siegert, coauthor of a new paper in Nature Geoscience describing the finding. "Now we're in a position that we've just never been in before, to understand the whole of the Antarctic ice sheet."

Antarctica's ice is divided into two main components: the ice sheet that sits on land, and the ice shelf that extends off the coast, floating on seawater. Where the two meet -- where the ice lifts off the bed and starts touching the ocean -- is known as the grounding line. But the underside of all that ice is obscured. To find out what's going on below, some scientists have hiked across glaciers while dragging ground-penetrating radar units on sleds -- the pings travel through thousands of feet of ice and bounce off the underlying seawater, so the researchers can build detailed maps of what used to be hidden. Others are setting off explosions, then analyzing the seismic waves that come back to the surface to indicate whether there's land or water below. Still others are lowering torpedo-shaped robots through boreholes to get unprecedented imagery of the underside of the floating ice shelf. Up in the sky, satellites can measure minute changes in surface elevation, which indicates the features below -- a swell, for instance, might betray a subglacial lake.