Scientists have discovered a huge "extragalactic structure" hidden behind the Milky Way in a mysterious area of the sky known as the "zone of avoidance" because it is obscured by our own galaxy's opaque bulge, according to a new preprint study. Motherboard reports: The discovery of the structure, which appears to be a large galaxy cluster, helps to fill in this shadowy part of our cosmic map, which may as well be labeled "here be space dragons" because it is so unclear what exists there. The star stuff that makes up our galaxy, the Milky Way, is distributed inside a thin plane that orbits around a central bulge that contains a supermassive black hole. The galactic plane and bulge are packed with stars, dust, and gas that block our view of whatever is on the other side. Though scientists have been able to use different wavelengths to peer through the zone of avoidance (ZoA), a region that obscures 10 to 20 percent of the sky, most of this region still remains out of view.

Now, a team led by Daniela Galdeano, an astronomer at the National University of San Juan in Argentina, report the discovery of "a new galaxy cluster, VVVGCl-B J181435-381432, behind the Milky Way bulge," which helps to complete "the picture of the large scale structure in this still little explored area of the sky," according to a study posted this week on the preprint server arxiv. [...] Galdeano and her colleagues were able to spot this cluster within the ZoA using the VVV Survey, a project that scans the Milky Way bulge at infrared wavelengths using the European Southern Observatory's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) in Paranal, Chile. Whereas the galactic plane blocks out almost all visible light in the zone, longer wavelengths of light, including in the infrared band, are able to travel through the Milky Way's haze to reach telescopes on Earth.

To zoom in on the tantalizing region, the researchers used a near-infrared instrument called FLAMINGOS-2, which is on the Gemini South telescope in Chile, to identify measurements called "redshifts" that can be used to estimate the distance and velocities of its objects in space. The results exposed new details about five galaxies some three billion light years away, which the researchers think are part of a much bigger cluster. The team estimated that the cluster contains about 58 galaxies, but it will take more observations to be sure of its mass and contents.

A new experiment has shown that zapping clouds with electrical charge can alter droplet sizes in fog or, potentially, help a constipated cloud to rain. From a report: Last year Giles Harrison, from the University of Reading, and colleagues from the University of Bath, spent many early mornings chasing fogs in the Somerset Levels, flying uncrewed aircraft into the gloop and releasing charge. Their findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, showed that when either positive or negative charge was emitted, the fog formed more water droplets.

The findings could be put to good use in dry regions of the world, such as the Middle East and north Africa, as a means of encouraging clouds to release their rain. Cloud droplets are larger than fog droplets and so more likely to collide, and Harrison and his colleagues believe that adding electrical charge to a cloud could help droplets to stick together and become more weighty.

As an added bonus, cleanup after rare earth extraction would be much easier. From a report: A variety of modern technologies, including permanent magnets that have been used in everything from earbuds to wind turbines, rely on rare earth elements. While the metals aren't actually especially rare, they don't occur at high concentrations in the Earth's crust. As such, extracting them is expensive and tends to produce a lot of environmental damage, meaning that most of the supply comes from a small number of countries (see the chart here), leaving the supply at risk of political fights. So the potential to get much more out of existing rare earth mines is obviously very appealing. And the method described in a paper released on Monday seems to offer it all: more metal per ore, much lower cost, and far less worry about mining waste.

Many of the best rare earth deposits occur in places where nature has concentrated the elements for us. These tend to be sediments formed from materials where the rare earth elements will react or interact with the sediment, coming out of solution and gradually building up the concentration in the ore. The usual method of extracting the elements from these ores essentially involves reversing that process. An ion-rich solution is pumped through the ore, and these ions displace the rare earths, allowing them to leach out of the ore. Typically, the solution used is ammonium sulfate. The production of ammonium sulfate has its own energy and materials costs, and it leaves the material behind in the ore, which may require an environmental cleanup afterward. And the process isn't very selective; lots of other, cheaper metals, like aluminum and calcium, also come out of the ore and need to be separated from the desired products.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A senior NASA official said this week that SpaceX has done "very well" in working toward the development of a vehicle to land humans on the surface of the Moon, taking steps to address two of the space agency's biggest concerns. NASA selected SpaceX and Starship for its Human Landing System in April 2021. In some ways, this was the riskiest choice of NASA's options because Starship is a very large and technically advanced vehicle. However, because of the company's self-investment of billions of dollars into the project, SpaceX submitted the lowest bid, and from its previous work with SpaceX, NASA had confidence that the company would ultimately deliver.

Two of NASA's biggest technological development concerns were the new Raptor rocket engine and the transfer and storage of liquid oxygen and methane propellant in orbit, said Mark Kirasich, NASA's deputy associate administrator who oversees the development of Artemis missions to the Moon. During a subcommittee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council on Monday, however, Kirasich said SpaceX has made substantial progress in both areas. The Raptor rocket engine is crucial to Starship's success. Thirty-three of these Raptor 2 engines power the Super Heavy booster that serves as the vehicle's first stage, and six more are used by the Starship upper stage. For a successful lunar mission, these engines will need to re-light successfully on the surface of the Moon to carry astronauts back to orbit inside Starship. If the engines fail, the astronauts will probably die.

"SpaceX has moved very quickly on development," Kirasich said about Raptor. "We've seen them manufacture what was called Raptor 1.0. They have since upgraded to Raptor 2.0 that first of all increases performance and thrust and secondly reduces the amount of parts, reducing the amount of time to manufacture and test. They build these things very fast. Their goal was seven engines a week, and they hit that about a quarter ago. So they are now building seven engines a week."

CVS and Walgreens have agreed to pay more than $10 billion in a landmark settlement to resolve opioid-crisis lawsuits brought by states, cities and other governments. From a report: The two largest U.S. drugstore chains said they reached a framework to settle the collection of lawsuits brought by governments and Native American tribes blaming pharmacies for helping fuel the nation's opioid epidemic. Under the proposed deal, CVS would pay $4.9 billion to states and municipalities and $130 million to tribes over the next 10 years starting in 2023. The company said the agreement isn't an admission of guilt and that it would continue to defend against any litigation that the settlement doesn't resolve.

Walgreens said it has offered to pay up to $4.79 billion to states over 15 years and about $155 million to tribes. It also expects to pay up to $753.5 million in attorneys fees over six years. The company said the settlement wasn't an admission of wrongdoing. Each state, local government and tribe still must decide whether to participate in the settlement. Plaintiffs' attorneys appointed to lead the negotiations said they encouraged governments and tribes to join the settlement, which they said holds the pharmacies accountable. CVS Chief Executive Karen Lynch, on a call with analysts, said the settlement is in the "best interests of all parties and helps put a decades-old issue behind us." CVS has been in a separate legal battle with its insurers over whether they should cover some of the liability the company faces for the opioid lawsuits.

Black holes have properties characteristic of quantum particles, a new study reveals, suggesting that the puzzling cosmic objects can be at the same time small and big, heavy and light, or dead and alive, just like the legendary Schrodinger's cat. Space.com reports: The new study, based on computer modeling, aimed to find the elusive connection between the mind-boggling time-warping physics of supermassive objects such as black holes and the principles guiding the behavior of the tiniest subatomic particles. The study team developed a mathematical framework that placed a simulated quantum particle just outside a giant simulated black hole. The simulation revealed that the black hole showed signs of quantum superposition, the ability to exist in multiple states at once -- in this case, to be at the same time both massive and not massive at all.

The best known example of quantum superposition is the legendary SchrÃdinger's cat, a thought experiment designed by early 20th century physicist Erwin Schrodinger to demonstrate some of the key issues with quantum physics. According to quantum theories, subatomic particles exist in multiple states simultaneously until they interact with the external world. This interaction, which could be the simple act of being measured or observed, throws the particle into one of the possible states. Schrodinger, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, intended the experiment to demonstrate the absurdity of quantum theory, as it would suggest that a cat locked in a box can be at the same time dead and alive based on the random behavior of atoms, until an observer breaks the superposition. However, as it turned out, while a cat in a box could be dead regardless of the observer's actions, a quantum particle may indeed exist in a double state. And the new study indicates that a black hole does as well. The new study was published online in the journal Physical Review Letters on Friday.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, the world's most-powerful active rocket, lifted off for the first time in more than three years on Monday from Florida's Cape Canaveral, with Elon Musk's company sending a group of satellites into orbit for the U.S. Space Force. From a report: The rocket system, representing three Falcon 9 boosters strapped side-by-side, lifted off at a SpaceX launch pad. The rocket's two side boosters were due to land in synchrony on adjacent concrete slabs along Florida's east coast roughly eight minutes after liftoff.

A team of researchers has detected a trio of near-Earth asteroids in the inner solar system, one of which is the largest found since 2014 that poses a potential risk to the planet. The asteroids remained undetected until now because they occupy a region of the sky hidden by the Sun's glare. Gizmodo reports: Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are two types of near-Earth objects that space agencies like to keep track of. Despite the scary-sounding names, none of them pose any imminent threat to us. Currently, there are 1,454 NEAs that have a non-zero probability of impacting Earth in the next 100 years. You can find a complete list of NEOs at NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies.

The three near-Earth asteroids were found using the Dark Energy Camera in Chile. The camera took deep-field images close to Earth's horizon during twilight, to combat the Sun's glare and atmospheric distortions. The team's results are published in The Astronomical Journal. Two of the recently observed asteroids have orbits that safely skirt Earth, but one of the rocks -- a 0.93-mile-wide (1.5-kilometer) asteroid dubbed 2022 AP7 -- has an orbit that may eventually put it on a collision course with Earth. To be perfectly clear: The asteroid is not currently barreling toward Earth, but its path could bring it close enough one day that NASA will want to keep tabs on it.

The third and final module has arrived at China's Tiangong space station. Space.com reports: The Mengtian module launched to Earth orbit atop a Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket from Wenchang, south China, at 3:37 a.m. EDT (0737 GMT and 3:37 p.m Beijing time) on Monday (Oct. 31), according to the state-run outlet Xinhua News. Mengtian arrived at Tiangong as planned about 13 hours after liftoff, according to the China Manned Space Agency. The launch marked China's ninth space station-related mission since sending the Tianhe core module into orbit in April last year.

Mengtian, whose name means "Dreaming of the Heavens," is a 58.7-foot-long (17.9 meters) and roughly 48,500-pound (22 metric tons) spacecraft designed mainly to host an array of science racks and experiments. Equipment installed on board Mengtian will be used for experiments related to microgravity, fluid physics, materials science, combustion science, fundamental physics and more. The docking of Mengtian with Tiangong marks the end of the space station's assembly phase and the start of full operations, Chinese space officials have said. Mengtian's arrival allows China to realize a vision for a space station approved way back in 1992.

The Tiangong space station consists of Tianhe, Mengtian and a module called Wentian. The T-shaped Tiangong will host three astronauts for six months at a time, or six crew members for a brief time during crew handovers. Tiangong's first crew handover is expected before the end of the year when the ongoing Shenzhou 14 mission astronauts welcome aboard the new Shenzhou 15 crew, who will launch on a Long March 2F rocket from the Gobi Desert. Ahead of this, China will launch the Tianzhou 5 cargo mission to Tiangong in November to deliver supplies to support the new crew expedition. [...] The space station will also support a powerful survey space telescope named Xuntian that China plans to launch as soon as late 2023. The Hubble-class observatory will operate in a similar orbit to that of Tiangong, meaning it will be able to dock at the station for refueling, upgrades and repairs. Meanwhile, China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, said earlier this year that Tiangong could be opened to tourism in the future.

According to Russian telegram channels, the former World Chess Champion, Antoly Karpov, was "rushed to the hospital with multiple head injuries in which he was placed in an induced coma," reports ChessBase. "Karpov was put on a ventilator now, and has been diagnosed with cerebral edema, fractures of the right parietal and right temporal bones, multiple head hematomas, and traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage." From the report: On a few things none of the reports still in circulation disagree: the 12th World Champion and current member of Duma, Anatoly Karpov, 71, was found on the ground outside of the Duma, and unresponsive. His blood alcohol levels were very elevated, and he was rushed to the hospital into intensive care. Some early reports claimed he was the victim of an assault and in induced coma. This was later reiterated by other outlets such as Marca from Spain.

The source of this, according to Tass, Andrei Kovalev, chairman of the All-Russian Movement of Entrepreneurs, announced in his Telegram channel that Karpov was in intensive care after an attack by unknown people and put into an artificial coma. However Karpov's assistant denied this and said he was fine, had no injuries and was in stable condition. Which begs the question, how fine can he be if there is a need to reassure others he is in 'stable condition'. Since Russian media is under very tight control by the Russian State, it is impossible to know where the truth really lies. Developing...

Far from being an abstract mathematical curiosity, knot theory has driven many findings in math and beyond. Quanta magazine: Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson -- later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) -- was captivated by the rings' beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated.

Although this Victorian-era idea may now sound ridiculous, it was not a frivolous investigation. This vortex theory had a lot to recommend it: The sheer diversity of knots, each slightly different, seemed to mirror the different properties of the many chemical elements. The stability of vortex rings might also provide the permanence that atoms required. Vortex theory gained traction in the scientific community and inspired Tait to begin tabulating all knots, creating what he hoped would be equivalent to a table of elements. Of course, atoms are not knots, and there is no ether. By the late 1880s Thomson was gradually abandoning his vortex theory, but by then Tait was captivated by the mathematical elegance of his knots, and he continued his tabulation project. In the process, he established the mathematical field of knot theory.

We are all familiar with knots -- they keep shoes on our feet, boats secured to docks, and mountain climbers off the rocks below. But those knots are not exactly what mathematicians (including Tait) would call a knot. Although a tangled extension cord may appear knotted, it's always possible to disentangle it. To get a mathematical knot, you must plug together the free ends of the cord to form a closed loop. Because the strands of a knot are flexible like string, mathematicians view knot theory as a subfield of topology, the study of malleable shapes. Sometimes it is possible to untangle a knot so it becomes a simple circle, which we call the "unknot." But more often, untangling a knot is impossible.

The Jerusalem Post reports that "Certain star clusters do not seem to be following current understandings of Isaac Newton's laws of gravity, according to new research published on Wednesday." (Specifically open star clusters, formed when thousands of stars are born in a gas cloud within a short time period.)

The researchers examined data on each stars' velocity, direction of motion and age using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission that allowed them to count the stars accurately for the very first time. The results? As the clusters dissolve, the stars accumulate on two "tidal tails:" one pulled behind the cluster and the other pushed forward. "According to Newton's laws of gravity, it's a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up," explains Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars. However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail...."

When the researchers looked at the data, they found that it did not fit Newton's law of gravity and instead fit better with an alternate theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).

"Put simply, according to MOND, stars can leave a cluster through two different doors," explained Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics. "One leads to the rear tidal tail, the other to the front. However, the first is much narrower than the second — so it's less likely that a star will leave the cluster through it. Newton's theory of gravity, on the other hand, predicts that both doors should be the same width...."

The simulations also coincided with the Gaia data in terms of how long the star clusters typically survive, which is much shorter than would be expected according to Newton's laws....

The MOND theory is controversial as modifications to Newton's laws of gravity would have far-reaching consequences for other areas of physics as well, although they would solve many problems facing cosmology.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story!

Dr. Bik is a microbiologist who has worked at Stanford University and for the Dutch National Institute for Health who is "blessed" with "what I'm told is a better-than-average ability to spot repeating patterns," according to their new Op-Ed in the New York Times.

In 2014 they'd spotted the same photo "being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments...." Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another's work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. If scientific papers contain errors or — much worse — fraudulent data and fabricated imagery, other researchers are likely to waste time and grant money chasing theories based on made-up results.....

But were those duplicated images just an isolated case? With little clue about how big this would get, I began searching for suspicious figures in biomedical journals.... By day I went to my job in a lab at Stanford University, but I was soon spending every evening and most weekends looking for suspicious images. In 2016, I published an analysis of 20,621 peer-reviewed papers, discovering problematic images in no fewer than one in 25. Half of these appeared to have been manipulated deliberately — rotated, flipped, stretched or otherwise photoshopped. With a sense of unease about how much bad science might be in journals, I quit my full-time job in 2019 so that I could devote myself to finding and reporting more cases of scientific fraud.

Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I've reported 2,500 of these to their journals' editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public....

Unfortunately, many scientific journals and academic institutions are slow to respond to evidence of image manipulation — if they take action at all. So far, my work has resulted in 956 corrections and 923 retractions, but a majority of the papers I have reported to the journals remain unaddressed.
Manipulated images "raise questions about an entire line of research, which means potentially millions of dollars of wasted grant money and years of false hope for patients." Part of the problem is that despite "peer review" at scientific journals, "peer review is unpaid and undervalued, and the system is based on a trusting, non-adversarial relationship. Peer review is not set up to detect fraud."

But there's other problems. Most of my fellow detectives remain anonymous, operating under pseudonyms such as Smut Clyde or Cheshire. Criticizing other scientists' work is often not well received, and concerns about negative career consequences can prevent scientists from speaking out. Image problems I have reported under my full name have resulted in hateful messages, angry videos on social media sites and two lawsuit threats....

Things could be about to get even worse. Artificial intelligence might help detect duplicated data in research, but it can also be used to generate fake data. It is easy nowadays to produce fabricated photos or videos of events that never happened, and A.I.-generated images might have already started to poison the scientific literature. As A.I. technology develops, it will become significantly harder to distinguish fake from real.

Science needs to get serious about research fraud.
Among their proposed solutions? "Journals should pay the data detectives who find fatal errors or misconduct in published papers, similar to how tech companies pay bounties to computer security experts who find bugs in software."

NBC News reports: A global helium shortage has doctors worried about one of the natural gas's most essential, and perhaps unexpected, uses: MRIs.

Strange as it sounds, the lighter-than-air element that gives balloons their buoyancy also powers the vital medical diagnostic machines. An MRI can't function without some 2,000 liters of ultra-cold liquid helium keeping its magnets cool enough to work. But helium — a nonrenewable element found deep within the Earth's crust — is running low, leaving hospitals wondering how to plan for a future with a much scarcer supply.... [F]our of five major U.S. helium suppliers are rationing the element, said Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting. These suppliers are prioritizing the health care industry by reducing helium allotments to less essential customers.

Hospitals haven't canceled patients' MRIs or shut down machines yet. They have seen helium costs rise at an alarming rate, though — possibly up to 30%, guessed Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting. But without an end in sight for the helium shortage, the future of MRI remains uncertain.... The problem is that no other element is cold enough for the MRI. "There's no alternative," said Donna Craft, a regional construction manager for Premier Inc. who contracts with helium suppliers for some 4,000 hospitals. "Without helium, MRIs would have to shut down...."

GE and Siemens are both developing MRIs requiring less liquid helium. Siemens recently introduced one requiring just 0.7 liters, and, according to Panagiotelis, GE rolled out a machine that's "1.4 times more efficient than previous models." These technologies aren't widely available, though, and replacing the country's 12,000 MRI machines — each weighing up to 50,000 pounds — is anything but a quick fix. Meanwhile, hospitals keep installing additional conventional MRI machines to meet demand for diagnostic scans.
The article notes some scientists are already shutting down research projects that require helium.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Wildbear for submitting the article!

"NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission is mapping the prevalence of key minerals in the planet's dust-producing deserts — information that will advance our understanding of airborne dust's effects on climate," NASA announced this week.

"But EMIT has demonstrated another crucial capability: detecting the presence of methane, a potent greenhouse gas." In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 "super-emitters" in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates. "Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming. This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed — quickly," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

"The International Space Station and NASA's more than two dozen satellites and instruments in space have long been invaluable in determining changes to the Earth's climate. EMIT is proving to be a critical tool in our toolbox to measure this potent greenhouse gas — and stop it at the source...."

"These results are exceptional, and they demonstrate the value of pairing global-scale perspective with the resolution required to identify methane point sources, down to the facility scale," said David Thompson, EMIT's instrument scientist and a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. "It's a unique capability that will raise the bar on efforts to attribute methane sources and mitigate emissions from human activities."

Relative to carbon dioxide, methane makes up a fraction of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, but it's estimated to be 80 times more effective, ton for ton, at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the 20 years after release. Moreover, where carbon dioxide lingers for centuries, methane persists for about a decade, meaning that if emissions are reduced, the atmosphere will respond in a similar timeframe, leading to slower near-term warming.... "Some of the plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen — unlike anything that has ever been observed from space," said Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL leading the EMIT methane effort. "What we've found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations."

For example, the instrument detected a plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin. One of the largest oilfields in the world, the Permian spans parts of southeastern New Mexico and western Texas. In Turkmenistan, EMIT identified 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar. Blowing to the west, some plumes stretch more than 20 miles (32 kilometers).... With wide, repeated coverage from its vantage point on the space station, EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters — some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown.

"As it continues to survey the planet, EMIT will observe places in which no one thought to look for greenhouse-gas emitters before, and it will find plumes that no one expects," said Robert Green, EMIT's principal investigator at JPL.

The mission of NASA's robotic lander InSight "is nearing an end as dust obscures its solar panels," reports CNN. "In a matter of weeks, the lander won't be able to send a beep to show it's OK anymore."

"Before it bids farewell, though, the spacecraft still has some surprises in store." When Mars rumbled beneath InSight's feet on December 24, NASA scientists thought it was just another marsquake. The magnitude 4 quake was actually caused by a space rock slamming into the Martian surface a couple thousand miles away. The meteoroid left quite a crater on the red planet, and it revealed glimmering chunks of ice in an entirely unexpected place — near the warm Martian equator.
The chunks of ice — the size of boulders — "were found buried closer to the warm Martian equator than any ice that has ever been detected on the planet," CNN explained earlier this week. The article also adds that ice below the surface of Mars "could be used for drinking water, rocket propellant and even growing crops and plants by future astronauts. And the fact that the ice was found so near the equator, the warmest region on Mars, might make it an ideal place to land crewed missions to the red planet." Interestingly, they note that scientists only realized it was a meteoroid strike (and not an earthquake) when "Before and after photos captured from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling Mars since 2006, spotted a new crater this past February." A crater that was 492 feet (150 meters) across and 70 feet (21 meters) deep... When scientists connected the dots from both missions, they realized it was one of the largest meteoroid strikes on Mars since NASA began studying the red planet.... The journal Science published two new studies describing the impact and its effects on Thursday....

"The image of the impact was unlike any I had seen before, with the massive crater, the exposed ice, and the dramatic blast zone preserved in the Martian dust," said Liliya Posiolova, orbital science operations lead for the orbiter at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, in a statement....

Researchers estimated the meteoroid, the name for a space rock before it hits the ground, was about 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters). While this would have been small enough to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, the same can't be said for Mars, which has a thin atmosphere only 1% as dense as Earth's.... Some of the material blasted out of the crater landed as far as 23 miles (37 kilometers) away.

Teams at NASA also captured sound from the impact, so you can listen to what it sounds like when a space rock hits Mars. The images captured by the orbiter, along with seismic data recorded by InSight, make the impact one of the largest craters in our solar system ever observed as it was created.

CNN reports: Knowing you have higher than normal blood pressure — and taking medications daily to treat it — may be one key to avoiding dementia in later life, a new study found.

Scientists already know that having high blood pressure, particularly between ages 40 and 65, increases the risk of developing dementia in later life, said study coauthor Ruth Peters, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, via email. But she added that research has been less clear on whether lowering blood pressure in older adults would reduce that risk. "What is so exciting about our study is that the data shows that those people who were taking the blood pressure lowering medication had a lower risk of a dementia diagnosis than those taking a matching placebo," said Peters, who is also a senior research scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia, a nonprofit research organization....

The study, published this week in the European Heart Journal, combined data from five large randomized, double-blinded clinical trials of more than 28,000 older adults with an average age of 69 from 20 countries. All had a history of hypertension. Each of the clinical trials compared people taking blood pressure medications with people taking a matching placebo pill and followed them for an average of 4.3 years.

Pooling the data, Peters and her team found that a drop of about 10 mm/Hg on the systolic and 4 mm/Hg on the diastolic blood pressure readings at 12 months significantly lowered the risk of a dementia diagnosis. In addition, there was a broad linear relationship: As blood pressure dropped, so did cognitive risk, which held true until at least 100 mm/Hg systolic and 70 mm/Hg diastolic, the study said. There was also no sign that blood pressure medications may harm blood flow into the brain at later ages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Bumble bees play, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London published in Animal Behavior. It is the first time that object play behavior has been shown in an insect, adding to mounting evidence that bees may experience positive "feelings." The team of researchers set up numerous experiments to test their hypothesis, which showed that bumble bees went out of their way to roll wooden balls repeatedly despite there being no apparent incentive for doing so. The study also found that younger bees rolled more balls than older bees, mirroring human behavior of young children and other juvenile mammals and birds being the most playful, and that male bees rolled them for longer than their female counterparts.

The study followed 45 bumble bees in an arena and gave them the options of walking through an unobstructed path to reach a feeding area or deviating from this path into the areas with wooden balls. Individual bees rolled balls between 1 and, impressively, 117 times over the experiment. The repeated behavior suggested that ball-rolling was rewarding. This was supported by a further experiment where another 42 bees were given access to two colored chambers, one always containing movable balls and one without any objects. When tested and given a choice between the two chambers, neither containing balls, bees showed a preference for the color of the chamber previously associated with the wooden balls. The set-up of the experiments removed any notion that the bees were moving the balls for any greater purpose other than play. Rolling balls did not contribute to survival strategies, such as gaining food, clearing clutter, or mating and was done under stress-free conditions. [...] The new research showed the bees rolling balls repeatedly without being trained and without receiving any food for doing so -- it was voluntary and spontaneous -- therefore akin to play behavior as seen in other animals. Study first-author, Samadi Galpayage, Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University of London says that "it is certainly mind-blowing, at times amusing, to watch bumble bees show something like play. They approach and manipulate these 'toys' again and again. It goes to show, once more, that despite their little size and tiny brains, they are more than small robotic beings."

"They may actually experience some kind of positive emotional states, even if rudimentary, like other larger fluffy, or not so fluffy, animals do. This sort of finding has implications to our understanding of sentience and welfare of insects and will, hopefully, encourage us to respect and protect life on Earth ever more."

Technology allows sperm to be frozen longer than legal 50-year limit but poses medical and ethical questions. From a report: A change of law has paved the way for more babies to be born from sperm frozen up to 50 years ago, but experts say there is no scientific reason why sperm hundreds of years old cannot be used. This week, a boy was born using sperm frozen in 1996, collected when his father was diagnosed, aged 21, with Hodgkin lymphoma, in case his treatment caused infertility. Described as a "miracle" by his now 47-year-old father, Peter Hickles, the baby is close to holding the record for the longest gap between sperm collection and birth -- he was beaten by a baby born in the US using a 27-year-old sample.

When Hickles' sperm was frozen, he thought it would only be viable for 10 years. Although experts say the technology for freezing sperm has been around for decades, prior to a law change in the summer, gametes (eggs and sperm) could only be stored for 10 years, with occasional exceptions made for people with fertility problems. This has now been extended to 55 years, but Allan Pacey, a professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield, said there was no medical reason for this limit. "The legal 55-year limit has nothing to do with the shelf life of sperm, or for any other scientific reasons. It's more to do with what parliamentarians felt was right for society. But since frozen sperm are effectively in suspended animation, once they are frozen I don't see why they couldn't be kept for hundreds of years if the law allowed it."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2008, the United States embassy in Beijing installed an air-quality monitor and started tweeting out its findings every hour. Since then, these monitors have popped up in more than 50 embassies in countries and cities around the globe. Something unexpected happened in each of the cities in which the monitors appeared. Researchers found that, overall, air quality improved in the cities where embassies were tweeting out air-quality data. "We were surprised," Akshaya Jha, assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the paper's authors, told Ars. According to the World Health Organization, in 2019, more than 90 percent of the world's population lived in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. Further, according to Jha's paper, this phenomenon tends to be worse in low- and middle-income countries. However, air-quality monitoring in those countries is quite rare.

Work on this research began around a year ago. Jha's team wanted to look at something completely different: the impacts that improvements in air pollution had on hazard pay among embassy workers. However, when the team began studying the literature, they couldn't find good information on reductions in air pollution relative to when embassies started their monitoring in many locations. As such, they began looking into it themselves. To study this, they used satellite data to look at air pollution in 466 cities in 136 countries, of which 50 cities across 36 countries received the air-quality monitors by 2020. They looked at the air pollution in all of these cities in the years before and after the monitors were installed, using the years prior to installation and the cities that did not receive monitors as controls. The research found that the cities that had a US embassy that set up one of these monitors and tweeted out air-quality data saw a decrease of PM2.5 particulates to the tune of 2 to 4 micrograms per cubic meter -- compared to their air quality before getting the monitor and to other similar cities that do not have a monitor.