An anonymous reader quotes a report from Harvard Medical School: Scientists have designed an AI tool that can rapidly decode a brain tumor's DNA to determine its molecular identity during surgery -- critical information that under the current approach can take a few days and up to a few weeks. Knowing a tumor's molecular type enables neurosurgeons to make decisions such as how much brain tissue to remove and whether to place tumor-killing drugs directly into the brain -- while the patient is still on the operating table. A report on the work, led by Harvard Medical School researchers, is published July 7 in the journal Med.

The tool, called CHARM (Cryosection Histopathology Assessment and Review Machine), is freely available to other researchers. It still has to be clinically validated through testing in real-world settings and cleared by the FDA before deployment in hospitals, the research team said. [...] CHARM was developed using 2,334 brain tumor samples from 1,524 people with glioma from three different patient populations. When tested on a never-before-seen set of brain samples, the tool distinguished tumors with specific molecular mutations at 93 percent accuracy and successfully classified three major types of gliomas with distinct molecular features that carry different prognoses and respond differently to treatments.

Going a step further, the tool successfully captured visual characteristics of the tissue surrounding the malignant cells. It was capable of spotting telltale areas with greater cellular density and more cell death within samples, both of which signal more aggressive glioma types. The tool was also able to pinpoint clinically important molecular alterations in a subset of low-grade gliomas, a subtype of glioma that is less aggressive and therefore less likely to invade surrounding tissue. Each of these changes also signals different propensity for growth, spread, and treatment response. The tool further connected the appearance of the cells -- the shape of their nuclei, the presence of edema around the cells -- with the molecular profile of the tumor. This means that the algorithm can pinpoint how a cell's appearance relates to the molecular type of a tumor.

An artificial-intelligence tool has shown promise at helping doctors fight aggressive brain tumors by identifying characteristics that help guide surgery. From a report: The tool -- called the Cryosection Histopathology Assessment and Review Machine, or CHARM -- studies images to quickly pick out the genetic profile of a kind of tumor called glioma, a process that currently takes days or weeks, said Kun-Hsing Yu, senior author of a report released Friday in the journal Med. Surgeons use detailed diagnoses to guide them while they operate, Yu said, and the ability to get them rapidly could improve patients' outcomes and spare them from multiple surgeries. While glioma varies in severity, an aggressive form called glioblastoma can lead to death in less than six months if untreated. Only 17% of people with glioblastoma survive their second year after being diagnosed, according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.

Surgeons use information about the genetic profile of a glioma tumor when deciding how much tissue to remove from a patient's brain, as well as whether to implant wafers coated in a cancer-fighting drug. Getting that information, however, currently requires time-consuming testing. Yu and his team of researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to do the work by showing it pictures of samples gathered during brain surgery, and then checking its work against those patients' diagnoses. CHARM learned to match or outperform other AI systems at identifying the genetic profile of a tumor.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The FDA on Thursday granted traditional approval to an Alzheimer's drug for the first time in more than two decades. Now, the question becomes how many people will be able to access the drug, which is targeted at patients in the early stages of the debilitating disease. Medicare has said that it will reimburse the drug's costs -- more than $26,000 annually -- only for beneficiaries enrolled in a nationwide registry that tracks patient side effects and outcomes over time. Patient advocacy groups and some clinicians fear this means that few of the hundreds of thousands of Alzheimer's patients eligible for the treatment will be able to access it.

The agency previously granted Leqembi, developed and manufactured by Eisai and Biogen, accelerated approval before evaluating late-stage clinical trial data earlier this year. The drug moderately slowed trial participants' cognitive decline compared to a placebo, according to the data, but had potentially serious side effects, including brain swelling and bleeding. Under accelerated approval, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it would cover Leqembi only for those participating in a randomized clinical trial, of which none were enrolling. Medicare's coverage determination was contrary to the Veterans Health Administration, which said it would cover the drug for its beneficiaries without restriction.

Roughly 6.7 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer's, and there are few treatments for the disease. Aduhelm, a drug from Biogen that received accelerated approval in 2021, works similarly to Leqembi by targeting proteins thought to be one of the causes of the disease. But both drugs have received little uptake due to Medicare coverage restrictions, and patient and caregiver concerns over the evidence of its modest benefits. There are five existing treatments for Alzheimer's that treat some of the disease's symptoms, but do not slow progression of the disease.

Stephen Clark writes via Ars Technica: When India's ambassador to the US signed up his country to the Artemis Accords last month, it signaled the world's most populous nation -- with a growing prowess in spaceflight -- could be turning toward the United States as a partner in space exploration. India became the 27th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles among like-minded nations guiding a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The accords cover the international registration of human-made space objects, the open release of scientific data, and an agreement for nations not to claim territory on the Moon or other planetary bodies, among other tenets.

Details about future cooperation between the US and India remain scarce. Nelson plans to travel to India later this year for meetings and discussions with Indian space officials. One objective of Nelson's trip will be to hammer out broad objectives for a "strategic framework" for human spaceflight cooperation. Despite the name of the Artemis Accords, there's no guarantee that India will play a significant role in NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars. "There's no implication of a signatory to the Artemis accords also being part of the Artemis program," Nelson told Ars.

But none of the other 26 signatories to the Artemis Accords -- a list that includes European space powers and Japan -- has their own human spaceflight program. India is developing a human-rated spacecraft called Gaganyaan that could be ready to fly people into low-Earth orbit in 2025, several years later than originally planned. "The fact that they are a nation that intends in the future to fly own their own astronauts, is that significant? The answer is yes," Nelson said. "I think it's of significance that a major country that's not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory." "I've described India as a sleeping giant and one that is quickly awakening," Gold told Ars. "India is absolutely vital to global space development, and Artemis in particular, since the country is active with lunar programs, Martian programs, and now even human spaceflight." "Where India might fit into the Artemis program is still to be determined," writes Clark. "The partnership between the US and India in space could take a step forward next year with the flight of an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston before a flight opportunity to the space station in low-Earth orbit."

India's space program has "held closer ties with Russia in the past," notes Clark. "Russia provided upper-stage engines for India's GSLV Mk.II rocket until India developed its own engine for the job. And four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media."

"Despite India's overture toward a closer relationship with NASA, the Asian power remains linked with Russia," adds Clark. "India still imports significant amounts of Russian oil and has not officially condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Virtual reality (VR) headsets are now being used on hospital wards to help keep patients calm during procedures. A trial at Kidderminster Hospital saw soothing sounds and visuals from them used to cut stress and anxiety. In one case, VR was used in place of sedation when a tube was inserted into a child's vein for blood sampling, staff said.

The Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust says they are now a permanent feature in its hospitals. Dawn Forbes, a nurse specialist, used the technology ahead of a blood test and MRI scan for a patient with a phobia of needles. She said it enabled a cannula to be placed "quickly without causing any pain or distress."

July 3 was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. From a report: The average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), surpassing the August 2016 record of 16.92C (62.46F) as heatwaves sizzled around the world. The southern U.S. has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks. In China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 35C (95F). North Africa has seen temperatures near 50C (122F). And even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine's Vernadsky Research Base in the white continent's Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 8.7C (47.6F).

JoeRobe writes: After 63 days of agonizing silence, NASA's Martian chopper finally phoned home. The Ingenuity helicopter reestablished communication with mission control on June 28, officially logging its 52nd flight as a success, NASA recently announced. The space agency lost contact with Ingenuity as the helicopter was descending towards the surface of the Red Planet following its most recent flight on April 26.

The reason behind the communication drop was that a hill was inconveniently positioned between Ingenuity and its rover pal Perseverance, preventing the Martian pair from communicating with one another. Ingenuity relies on Perseverance to deliver its messages to Earth, using shiny antennas to exchange data at about 100 kilobits per second. The data is routed from the Ingenuity-facing antenna to the rover's main computer before being transferred to Earth by way of an orbiting spacecraft.

According to the Financial Times, Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin has announced plans to expand its operations to "Europe and beyond." Engadget reports: Part of this growth hinges on finding a site for an international launch facility -- the company has already put down roots in Texas, Washington, Florida and Alabama -- but the new location hasn't been chosen yet. It's also actively looking for fresh acquisitions and partnerships outside of the US in areas such as manufacturing and software.

Though Blue Origin was the first to launch, land and reuse a rocket successfully, it has fallen behind its rival due to hold-ups with building its launchers. Blue Origin's plans for a more global footprint might help them catch up with SpaceX's progress. Amazon's Project Kuiper also plans to use Blue Origin's rocket New Glenn for at least 12 launches between 2024 and 2029 after a few years of delays. "We're looking for anything we can do to acquire, to scale up to better serve our customers," Bob Smith, Blue Origin CEO, said. "It's not a function of size -- rather how much it accelerates our road map of what we're trying to get done."

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough by observing the early universe in extreme slow motion, confirming Einstein's theory of an expanding universe. The research is published in Nature Astronomy. Phys.Org reports: Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant -- and hence ancient -- universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as "clocks." "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney. "If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second -- but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag."

Professor Lewis and his collaborator, Dr. Brendon Brewer from the University of Auckland, used observed data from nearly 200 quasars -- hyperactive supermassive black holes at the centers of early galaxies -- to analyze this time dilation. Previously, astronomers have confirmed this slow-motion universe back to about half the age of the universe using supernovae -- massive exploding stars -- as "standard clocks." But while supernovae are exceedingly bright, they are difficult to observe at the immense distances needed to peer into the early universe. By observing quasars, this time horizon has been rolled back to just a tenth the age of the universe, confirming that the universe appears to speed up as it ages.

Professor Lewis worked with astro-statistician Dr. Brewer to examine details of 190 quasars observed over two decades. Combining the observations taken at different colors (or wavelengths) -- green light, red light and into the infrared -- they were able to standardize the "ticking" of each quasar. Through the application of Bayesian analysis, they found the expansion of the universe imprinted on each quasar's ticking. "With these exquisite data, we were able to chart the tick of the quasar clocks, revealing the influence of expanding space," Professor Lewis said. These results further confirm Einstein's picture of an expanding universe but contrast earlier studies that had failed to identify the time dilation of distant quasars.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Ariane 5 rocket has had a long run, with nearly three decades of service launching satellites and spacecraft. Over that time, the iconic rocket, with a liquid hydrogen-fueled core stage and solid rocket boosters, has come to symbolize Europe's guaranteed access to space. But now, the road is coming to an end for the Ariane 5. As soon as Tuesday evening, the final Ariane 5 rocket will lift off from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. A 90-minute launch window opens at 5:30 pm ET (21:30 UTC). The launch will be webcast on ESA TV. And after this? Europe's space agency faces some difficult questions.

A new article in the Washington Post reports that even internally, "Space Force officials are still debating its priorities, analysts say: Is it to support warfighters on the ground? Or should it focus primarily on protecting assets in space? Or both?"

In April, the Washington Post reported that space would likely be a key part of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and one possible Space Force counter-measure would "ensure that the United States avoids 'operational surprise,' by keeping track of other countries' satellites and movements in space while also being able to 'identify behaviors that become irresponsible or even hostile.'"

To address the possibility of enemies shooting down satellites, the Space Force is also "pivoting, relying on constellations of small satellites that can be easily replaced and, to an increasing degree, maneuver." That's just one example of how the Space Force intends to ensure the U.S. maintains "space superiority," as its leaders often say, to protect the satellites the Defense Department relies on for warnings of incoming missiles, steering precision-guided munitions and surveilling both friendly and hostile forces. It also could deter conflict in space — why strike a satellite if there are backups that would easily carry on the mission...?

[Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the commander of the 45th Space Wing] gave a tour of some of the roles the Space Force could play, offering a glimpse into its future. Soldiers and Marines already pre-position supplies and equipment on the ground, he said. Could the Space Force start storing supplies in space and then fly them to hot spots on Earth as well? "In theory, we could have huge racks of stuff in orbit and then somebody can call those in, saying. 'I need X, Y, Z delivered to me now on this random island.' And then, boom, they shoot out and they parachute in and they land with GPS assistance," he said. "It's a fascinating thought exercise for emergency response — you know if a type of tidal wave or tsunami comes in and wipes out a whole area."

The military is also working to harness solar energy in space, and then beam it to ground stations. Could the Space Force use that technology to beam power to remote areas to support soldiers on the ground? Another idea: If the cadence of launches really does double or triple and the costs continue to come down, could the Space Force start using rockets to deliver cargo across the globe at a moment's notice? Soon there could be commercial space stations floating around in orbit. "Can we lease a room?" Purdy said. "Can we lease a module?"
A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believes the U.S. Space Force is misunderstood — at least partly because much of what it does is classified. "We fundamentally need to normalize the classification," he tells the Washington Post, "so we can have a conversation with the public, with the American people."

"The first drug fully generated by artificial intelligence entered clinical trials with human patients this week," reports CNBC: Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based biotech startup with more than $400 million in funding, created the drug, INS018_055, as a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic disease that causes scarring in the lungs. The condition, which has increased in prevalence in recent decades, currently affects about 100,000 people in the U.S. and can lead to death within two to five years if untreated, according to the National Institutes of Health.

"It is the first fully generative AI drug to reach human clinical trials, and specifically Phase II trials with patients," Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, told CNBC. "While there are other AI-designed drugs in trials, ours is the first drug with both a novel AI-discovered target and a novel AI-generated design...."

"When this company was launched, we were focused on algorithms — developing the technology that could discover and design new molecules," Zhavoronkov said. "I never imagined in those early days that I would be taking my own AI drugs into clinical trials with patients. But we realized that in order to validate our AI platform, we needed to not only design a new drug for a new target, but bring it into clinical trials to prove that our technology worked."
"The company has two other drugs partially generated by AI in the clinical stage..."

"Black Swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives," begins a 2021 paper by a computer science professor at the University of California.

Now the Washington Post revisits that exploration of the possibility that "magnetic fields unleashed by a solar superstorm rip through Earth's magnetosphere, sending currents surging through human infrastructure." A widespread internet outage could, indeed, be brought on by a strong solar storm hitting Earth — a rare but very real event that has not yet happened in the digital age, experts say. When a solar storm known as the Carrington Event struck in 1859, telegraph lines sparked, operators were electrocuted and the northern lights descended to latitudes as low as Jamaica. A 1989 solar storm took out the Quebec power grid for hours. And in 2012, a storm just missed Earth.

As the sun, which has roughly 11-year cycles, enters a particularly active period known as the "solar maximum" in 2025, some are worried our interconnected world is not prepared.

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a computer science professor at University of California at Irvine whose paper "Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse" has played a role in popularizing the term, started thinking about internet resilience when the coronavirus began to spread, and she realized how unprepared we were for a pandemic. Research on widespread internet failure was scant. "We've never experienced one of the extreme case events, and we don't know how our infrastructure would respond to it," Jyothi said. "Our failure testing doesn't even include such scenarios."

She notes that a severe solar storm is likely to affect large-scale infrastructure such as submarine communication cables, which could interrupt long-distance connectivity. If you have not lost power, you might have access to, say, a government website hosted locally, but reaching bigger websites, which could have data stored all over the place, might not be possible. The northern latitudes are also especially vulnerable to solar storms, and that's where a lot of internet infrastructure is concentrated. "This is not taken into account in our infrastructure deployment today at all," she said. Such outages could last for months, depending on the scale and how long it takes to repair the damage. The economic impact of just one day of lost connectivity in the United States alone is estimated to be more than $11 billion, according to the internet watcher NetBlocks.

Still, Jyothi says she has felt bad for using the term "internet apocalypse" in her paper. There's not much ordinary people can do to prepare for such a phenomenon; it falls on governments and companies. And the paper "just got too much attention," she said.
"Astrophysicists estimate the likelihood of a solar storm of sufficient strength to cause catastrophic disruption occurring within the next decade to be 1.6 to 12%," the paper concludes. (It also notes that the U.S. has a higher risk for a disconnection than Asia.)

"Paying attention to this threat and planning defenses against it, like our preliminary effort in this paper, is critical for the long-term resilience of the Internet."

"The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope launched at 11:12 a.m. ET Saturday," reports CNN, "aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

CNN is calling it "a mission designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe." The 1.2-meter-diameter (4-foot-diameter) telescope has set off on a monthlong journey to its orbital destination of the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth and also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope... After arriving at orbit, Euclid will spend two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying one-third of the sky for the next six years. Euclid's primary goal is to observe the "dark side" of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.

In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe's expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery. Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye... Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe, observing billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years...

The telescope's image quality will be four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys. Euclid's wide perspective can also record data from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what Webb's camera can capture. During its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, creating a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy's shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid's ability to see in near-infrared light could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.

In May 2027, Euclid will be joined in orbit by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two missions will overlap in their study of cosmic acceleration as they both create three-dimensional maps of the universe...Roman will study one-twentieth of the sky in infrared light, allowing for much more depth and precision. The Roman telescope will peer back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, picking out fainter galaxies than Euclid can see.
CNN points out that "While primarily an ESA mission, the telescope includes contributions from NASA and more than 2,000 scientists across 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan."

And they also note this statement from Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery."

From NASA's announcement: Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe...

Less concentrated mass, like clumps of dark matter, can create more subtle effects. By studying these smaller distortions, Roman and Euclid will each create a 3D dark matter map... Tallying up the universe's dark matter across cosmic time will help scientists better understand the push-and-pull feeding into cosmic acceleration.
SpaceX tweeted footage of the telescope's takeoff, and the successful landing of their Falcon 9's first stage on a droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas.

theodp writes: In The Man Who Broke Bowling, GQ's Eric Wills profiles professional bowler Jason Belmonte, whose two-handed bowling technique made him both an outcast as well as one of bowling's greatest, changing the sport forever. Unlike the rest of us, a 7-year-old Belmonte was unconvinced by the taunts used to prompt kids into switching from bowling two-handed to one-handed ("It was, Come on, you're a big boy now. It's time to bowl properly," Belmonte recalls). As a result, Belmonte was able to develop a 600-rpm throw when most pro bowlers averaged 350-400, imparting a spin that "sends the pins into concussion protocol." Wills writes:

"When he first alighted on the professional bowling scene, Belmonte resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which he uses two fingers (and no thumb) on his right hand, palms the front of the ball with his left, and then, on his approach, which is marked by a distinctive shuffle step, rocks the ball back before launching it with a liquid, athletic whip, his delivery producing an eye-popping hook, his ball striking the pins like a mini mortar explosion. Not everyone welcomed his arrival. He's been called a cheat, told to go back to his native Australia; a PBA Hall of Famer once called the two-hander a 'cancer to an already diseased sport.'

If you're interested in more on the technical aspects of bowling -- Belmonte's installed a tracking system in his parent's bowling center back in Australia that generates reams of data he can sift through to find areas for improvement -- Wikipedia goes into some of the physics of bowling balls.

According to new findings published in the journal Science, astronomers have detected high-energy neutrinos (also known as "ghost particles") coming from within our Milky Way galaxy. Space.com reports: High-energy neutrinos are known to originate from galaxies beyond the Milky Way. But researchers have long suspected that our own galaxy is a source as well. For example, when cosmic rays -- atomic nuclei moving at nearly the speed of light -- strike dust and gas, they generate both gamma rays and high-energy neutrinos. Previous research has detected gamma rays from the Milky Way's plane, so scientists have expected high-energy neutrinos from there as well. There have been hints of such emission, but confirmation has proven elusive to date. The new study took another look, using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. IceCube is embedded within a gigaton (1 billion tons) of ice, making it the first gigaton neutrino detector ever built. IceCube encompasses 0.24 cubic miles (1 cubic kilometer) of Antarctic ice holding more than 5,000 light sensors. These devices watch for the unique flashes of light that result from the rare instances in which neutrinos do smash into atoms.

The research team focused on the plane of the Milky Way, the dense region of the galaxy that lies along the Milky Way's equator. They studied 10 years of IceCube data, analyzing 60,000 neutrinos -- 30 times more than prior neutrino scans of the galactic plane had looked at. [...] This work identified high-energy neutrinos that likely came from the Milky Way's galactic plane. "This observation of high-energy neutrinos opens up an entirely new window to study the properties of our host galaxy," study co-author Mirco Huennefeld, an astroparticle physicist at TU Dortmund University in Germany, told Space.com. "I think it's exciting to see the young field of neutrino astronomy develop with such an increasing pace," Huennefeld added. "It took decades to envision a neutrino telescope such as IceCube, and just in the last few years, we saw an accumulation of exciting observations, including the first evidence of extragalactic sources. Now, with these results, we have achieved a new milestone in neutrino astronomy."

Although the findings suggest that the newfound neutrinos come from our galaxy, IceCube currently is not sensitive enough to pinpoint their sources. They may emerge in a diffuse manner, or a significant number of them might come from specific points in the sky, Huennefeld said. In the coming years, IceCube will get detector upgrades "that will further enhance its sensitivity, allowing us to obtain a clearer picture of the Milky Way in neutrinos in the near future," Huennefeld said. "Answering these questions will have implications on our understanding of cosmic rays and their origin, and also in general on the inferred properties of our host galaxy."

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues. From a report: A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain's neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest -- and declared Chalmers the winner. What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

"It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof," says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn't the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: "There's been a lot of progress in the field." Consciousness is everything that a person experiences -- what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says. Despite a vast effort, researchers still don't understand how our brains produce it, however. "It started off as a very big philosophical mystery," Chalmers adds. "But over the years, it's gradually been transmuting into, if not a 'scientific' mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically."

[...] The goal was to set up a series of 'adversarial' experiments to test various hypotheses of consciousness by getting rival researchers to collaborate on the studies' design. "If their predictions didn't come true, this would be a serious challenge for their theories," Chalmers says. The findings from one of the experiments -- which involved several researchers, including Koch and Chalmers -- were revealed on Friday at the ASSC meeting. It tested two of the leading hypotheses: integrated information theory (IIT) and global network workspace theory (GNWT). IIT proposes that consciousness is a 'structure' in the brain formed by a specific type of neuronal connectivity that is active for as long as a certain experience, such as looking at an image, is occurring. This structure is thought to be found in the posterior cortex, at the back of the brain. GNWT, by contrast, suggests that consciousness arises when information is broadcast to areas of the brain through an interconnected network. The transmission, according to the theory, happens at the beginning and end of an experience and involves the prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain.

Supermassive black holes all over the universe are merging, a fate that will eventually come for the black hole at the center of our galaxy. From a report: These mysterious cosmic structures at the heart of nearly every galaxy consume light and matter and are impossible to glimpse with traditional telescopes. But now, for the first time, astrophysicists have gathered knowledge directly from these titans, in the form of gravitational waves that ripple through space and time. What they learned suggests that the population of massive black hole pairs that are merging numbers in the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps even millions.

The gravitational waves from these mergers are all contributing to an underlying background hum of the universe that researchers can detect from Earth. The findings, from a collaboration of more than 100 scientists, help confirm what will one day happen to the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center, known as Sagittarius A*, as it crashes into the black hole at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. "The Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, and in about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are set to merge," said Joseph Simon, a University of Colorado, Boulder, astrophysicist and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or Nanograv, which helped lead the new work with support from the National Science Foundation.

That merger, he said, will eventually result in the black hole at the center of Andromeda and Sagittarius A* sinking into the center of the newly combined galaxy and forming what is known as a binary system. The results were announced in a series of papers published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Before now, we didn't even know if supermassive black holes merged, and now we have evidence that hundreds of thousands of them are merging," said Chiara Mingarelli, a Yale University astrophysicist and a member of Nanograv. The new work could answer questions such as how these black holes grow, and how often their host galaxies merge, the researchers said. Further reading: The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find.

It is showtime for Virgin Galactic. The spaceflight company founded by billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson almost two decades ago launched its long-awaited first commercial spaceflight, called "Galactic 01," on Thursday. From a report: Taking off from Spaceport America in New Mexico, the company's spacecraft is being flown by a pair of pilots and carries four passengers: A Virgin Galactic trainer, to oversee the mission from inside the cabin, and its first trio of paying customers. The three paying passengers are members of the Italian Air Force, and the flight carries 13 research payloads onboard. Virgin Galactic's start to commercial service comes after years of delays and setbacks. If "Galactic 01" is successful, the company plans to fly its second mission as soon as August and then aims to begin flying its spacecraft, VSS Unity, once a month.

One of the world's most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body, Reuters reported Thursday, citing two sources with knowledge of the process, pitting it against the food industry and regulators. From the report: Aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars' Extra chewing gum and some Snapple drinks, will be listed in July as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer research arm, the sources said. The IARC ruling, finalised earlier this month after a meeting of the group's external experts, is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence.

It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization's Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators. However, similar IARC rulings in the past for different substances have raised concerns among consumers about their use, led to lawsuits, and pressured manufacturers to recreate recipes and swap to alternatives. That has led to criticism that the IARC's assessments can be confusing to the public.

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Science: NASA said in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky. The project had previously seen challenges. For example, transistor modules in the electrical inverters kept failing and "blowing up" in testing, Sean Clark, the project's principal investigator told Popular Science in January. That problem was solved, Clark said.

The problem that led them to scrap the plan to fly the aircraft stemmed from motors that power the propellers. Clark said today that analysis of the issue is ongoing. "As we got into the detailed analysis and airworthiness assessment of the motors themselves, we found that there were some potential failure modes with the motors mechanically, under flight loads, that we hadn't seen on the ground," he said. "We've got a great design in progress to fix it, it's just [that] it would take too long for us to go through and implement that."

NASA said that the reason behind permanently scrubbing the flight is safety and time. "Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system that we determined to pose an unacceptable risk to the pilot's safety, and the safety of personnel on the ground, during ground tests," Bradley Flick, the director of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in the call. "Mitigation of that failure would take the project well beyond its planned end at the end of this fiscal year, so NASA has decided to end the project on time without taking the vehicle to flight."

The exoplanet 8 Ursae Minoris b should not exist. It orbits its host star at just half the Earth-Sun distance, and by all indications, the star should have gone through a phase in which it bloated up enough to engulf that entire orbit and then some. Yet 8 Ursae Minoris b definitely appears to exist. From a report: There is a handful of potential explanations, none of them especially likely. The people who discovered the planet are suggesting that it survived because its host star got distracted by swallowing a white dwarf instead. 8 Ursae Minoris b was discovered using the radial velocity method, which watches for changes in a star's light that occur as planets tug the star back and forth as they orbit. This tugging creates a blue shift in the light when the planet is pulling the star in the direction of Earth and a red shift when the star is pulled away from Earth.

But the planet is unlikely to be tugging the star directly toward Earth, so we tend to only measure the component of the star's motion that's in our direction. We'd see the same apparent motion of the star if a light planet's orbit was oriented directly toward Earth or a very heavy planet that has a relatively skewed orbit. At best, radial velocity measurements give us an estimate of the minimum mass of the planet; it could potentially be larger. So we know that, at minimum, 8 Ursae Minoris b is a big planet, at over 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter. It also resides close to its host star, completing a full orbit in just 93 days. That places it at half an Astronomical Unit (AU, the typical distance between Earth and the Sun) from its star.

Observations also hint at a second body orbiting the star at least five AU. The evidence for that is weak given the current data, but it may have a significant role in shaping the system. On its own, there's nothing especially unusual about the 8 Ursae Minoris exosolar system. Where things get weird is when you consider the star at the center of the system.

Four volunteers will spend the next 378 days in a simulation of Mars, facing harsh, realistic challenges in tight quarters under NASA's watchful eye in preparation for a real-life mission to the red planet. From a report: Research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu were locked into the virtual planet at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Sunday as part of the first of a three-year-long simulation study by the space agency. "The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely," Grace Douglas, the mission's principal investigator at NASA, said during a briefing.

Nasa 3D-printed the 1,700-square-foot facility, dubbed Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog -- or CHAPEA. It will be the longest analog mission in the agency's history. The habitat -- named Mars Dune Alpha -- will feature a kitchen, private crew quarters, and two bathrooms, with medical, work, and recreation areas. The crew will be expected to carry out "mission activities," like collecting geological samples, exercising, and practicing personal hygiene and health care, with minimal contact with their family and loved ones, according to NASA. To capture the true essence of life on our neighboring planet, the crew must work through "environmental stressors," including limits on resources, periods of isolation, and equipment failures.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Five cases of malaria have been confirmed in Florida and Texas, the first time the potentially fatal mosquito-borne disease has been locally acquired in the United States in 20 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday. The four Florida cases, along with one in Texas, have been diagnosed over a period of two months, the agency said. The state of Florida said that its first case was diagnosed on May 26 in Sarasota County, while officials in Texas said on June 23 that a Texas resident who worked outdoors in Cameron County had been diagnosed with the disease.

The CDC said in an alert released Monday that malaria is considered a medical emergency, and that anyone with symptoms should be "urgently evaluated." However, the CDC said that risk of malaria remains low in the United States, and that most cases are acquired when people travel outside of the country. Fully 95% of malaria infections are acquired in Africa, the health agency said. Malaria is caused by five species of a parasite carried by certain female mosquitoes. Symptoms include fever, chills, headache, muscle pain and fatigue. Nausea, diarrhea and vomiting may also appear. Malaria can cause life-threatening damage, including kidney failure, seizures and coma.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A cleaner at a college in New York state accidentally destroyed decades of research by turning off a freezer in order to mute "annoying alarm" sounds. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, is suing the cleaner's employer, alleging improper training. According to a lawsuit filed in the New York supreme court in Rensselaer county earlier this month, the university is seeking more than $1m in damages, the Times Union newspaper reported. "People's behavior and negligence caused all this," Michael Ginsberg, an attorney for RPI, told the Times Union. "Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research."

The cleaner, who is not named in the lawsuit, was employed by Daigle Cleaning Systems and worked at RPI for several months in 2020, when the incident occurred. The lab freezer contained several cultures that were part of a research project on photosynthesis headed by the biology and chemistry professor KV Lakshmi, the BBC reported. The cultures were usually stored at -112F (-80C). On September 14, 2020, days before the freezer was unplugged, an alarm indicated that the freezer temperature was fluctuating, the lawsuit says, adding that the specimens in the freezer were still viable at that point. Covid restrictions at the time meant repairs could not be made for a week. Lab officials took precautions to preserve the cultures and explain the alarm, posting a sign explaining where the noise was coming from and how to mute it. Lakshmi also installed a lock box on the freezer's outlet and socket to stop anyone unplugging it.

But on September 17, the Daigle Cleaning Systems employee turned off the circuit breaker, causing the temperature of the freezer to rise. The next day, lab officials discovered the samples were unsalvageable. "[A] majority of specimens were compromised, destroyed and rendered unsalvageable demolishing more than 20 years of research," the lawsuit says. In an interview with university officials, the cleaner said he thought he was turning the circuit breaker on after hearing the alarms. "At the end of the interview, he still did not appear to believe he had done anything wrong but was just trying to help," the lawsuit says, saying the cleaner made an "error" when reading the panel.

Carl Zimmer writes in The New York Times: In its first week, a fertilized human egg develops into a hollow ball of 200 cells and then implants itself on the wall of the uterus. Over the next three weeks, it divides into the distinct tissues of a human body. And those crucial few weeks remain, for the most part, a black box. "We know the basics, but the very fine details we just don't know," said Jacob Hanna, a developmental biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Dr. Hanna and a number of other biologists are trying to uncover those details by creating models of human embryos in the lab. They are coaxing stem cells to organize themselves into clumps that take on some of the crucial hallmarks of real embryos.

This month, Dr. Hanna's team in Israel, as well as groups in Britain, the United States and China, released reports on these experiments. The studies, while not yet published in scientific journals, have attracted keen interest from other scientists, who have been hoping for years that such advances could finally shed light on some of the mysteries of early human development. Ethicists have long cautioned that the advent of embryo models would further complicate the already complicated regulation of this research. But the scientists behind the new work were quick to stress that they had not created real embryos and that their clusters of stem cells could never give rise to a human being. "We do it to save lives, not create it," said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology, who led another effort. [...]

If scientists can create close, reliable models of embryos, they will be able to run large-scale experiments to test potential causes of pregnancy failures, such as viral infections and genetic mutations. The models could lead to other medical advances too, noted Insoo Hyun, a member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics who was not involved in the new studies. "Once you get the embryo models in place and you can rely on them, that can be an interesting way to screen drugs that women take when they're pregnant," he said. "That would be an enormous benefit." Dr. Hanna [...] also saw a possibility of using embryo models as a new form of stem-cell treatment for diseases such as cancer.

shilly writes: John B. Goodenough, professor at The University of Texas at Austin who is known around the world for the development of the lithium-ion battery, died Sunday at the age of 100. Goodenough was a dedicated public servant, a sought-after mentor and a brilliant yet humble inventor. His discovery led to the wireless revolution and put electronic devices in the hands of people worldwide. In 2019, Goodenough made national and international headlines after being awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his battery work, an award many of his fans considered a long time coming, especially as he became the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize.

"John's legacy as a brilliant scientist is immeasurable -- his discoveries improved the lives of billions of people around the world," said UT Austin President Jay Hartzell. "He was a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career, and he never ceased searching for innovative energy-storage solutions. John's work and commitment to our mission are the ultimate reflection of our aspiration as Longhorns -- that what starts here changes the world -- and he will be greatly missed among our UT community." Goodenough served as a faculty member in the Cockrell School of Engineering for 37 years, holding the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair of Engineering and faculty positions in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Throughout his tenure, his research continued to focus on battery materials and address fundamental solid-state science and engineering problems to create the next generation of rechargeable batteries.

An ancient Nevada lakebed could become a vast source of the lithium used in electric car batteries, reports the Associated Press. But "NASA says the same site — flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere — is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead." At the space agency's request, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has agreed to withdraw 36 square miles (92 square kilometers) of the eastern Nevada terrain from its inventory of federal lands open to potential mineral exploration and mining. NASA says the long, flat piece of land above the untapped lithium deposit in Nevada's Railroad Valley has been used for nearly three decades to get measurements just right to keep satellites and their applications functioning properly. "No other location in the United States is suitable for this purpose," the Bureau of Land Management concluded in April after receiving NASA's input on the tract 250 miles (400 kilometers) northeast of Las Vegas...

In Railroad Valley, satellite calculations are critical to gathering information beamed from space with widespread applications from weather forecasting to national security, agricultural outlooks and natural disasters, according to NASA, which said the satellites "provide vital and often time-critical information touching every aspect of life on Earth." That increasingly includes certifying measurements related to climate change. Thus the Nevada desert paradox, critics say. Although lithium is the main ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles key to reducing greenhouse gases, in this case the metal is buried beneath land NASA says must remain undisturbed to certify the accuracy of satellites monitoring Earth's warming atmosphere...

The area's unchanged nature has allowed NASA to establish a long record of images of the undisturbed topography to assist precise measurement of distances using the travel time of radio signals and assure "absolute radiometric calibration" of sensors on board satellites. "Activities that stand to disrupt the surface integrity of Railroad Valley would risk making the site unusable," Jeremy Eggers, a spokesman for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told The Associated Press.
One company with most of the mining rights says the tract's withdrawal will put more than half the site's value out of reach, according to the article.

But the Associated Press got a supportive quote for the move from the satellite imaging company Planet Labs, which has relied on NASA's site to calibrate more than 250 of its satellites since 2016. "As our nation becomes ever more impacted by an evolving and changing environment, it is critical to have reliable and accurate data and imagery of our planet."

The "BepiColombo" mission, a joint European-Japanese effort, "has recently completed its third of six planned flybys of Mercury, capturing dozens of images in the process," reports the Byte: At its closest, the spacecraft soared within just 150 miles of Mercury. This occurred on the night side of the planet, however, too dark for optimal imaging. Instead, the first and nearest image was taken 12 minutes after the closest approach, at the still impressive proximity of some 1,100 miles above the surface.
Now the ESA has spliced together 217 images from that flyby into a short video, which culminates with a zoomed-in closeup of Mercury's cratered surface. And the music in that video had a little help from AI, reports Phys.org: Music was composed for the sequence by ILÄ (formerly known as Anil Sebastian), with the assistance of AI tools developed by the Machine Intelligence for Musical Audio group, University of Sheffield.

Music from the previous two flyby movies — composed by Maison Mercury Jones' creative director ILÄ and Ingmar Kamalagharan — was given to the AI tool to suggest seeds for the new composition, which ILÄ then chose from to edit and weave together with other elements into the new piece.

The team at the University of Sheffield has developed an Artificial Musical Intelligence (AMI), a large-scale general-purpose deep neural network that can be personalized to individual musicians and use cases. The project with the University of Sheffield is aimed at exploring the boundaries of the ethics of AI creativity, while also emphasizing the essential contributions of the (human) composer.
From the ESA's announcement: BepiColombo's next Mercury flyby will take place on 5 September 2024, but there is plenty of work to occupy the teams in the meantime... BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module will complete over 15 000 hours of solar electric propulsion operations over its lifetime, which together with nine planetary flybys in total — one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury — will guide the spacecraft towards Mercury orbit.

The ESA-led Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter modules will separate into complementary orbits around the planet, and their main science mission will begin in early 2026.
One spaceflight blog notes the propulsive energy required for an eventual entry into the orbit of Mercury "is greater than that of a mission to fly by Pluto.

"Only one other spacecraft has orbited Mercury, and that was NASA's MESSENGER probe, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015."

Slashdot reader silverjacket writes: Researchers at Oxford and elsewhere developed a method that figures out the most likely number and size of dimension in which to format a string of bits, with applications to interpreting messages from extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), if we were to receive them.
The new method "looks at every possible combination of dimension number and size," according to Science News: The researchers also measure each possible configuration's global order by seeing how much an image compression algorithm can shrink it without losing information — mathematically, randomness is less compressible than regular patterns...
Hector Zeni [one of the creators of this method] "notes that in Carl Saganâ(TM)s sci-fi novel Contact, the characters spend a lot of time figuring out that a message received from aliens is in three dimensions (specifically a video). âoeIf you have our tools, you would solve that problem in seconds and with no human intervention.â An algorithm that pieces together smaller algorithmic components in order to explain or predict data — this new method is just one way to do it — may also help us one day achieve artificial general intelligence, Zenil says. Such automated approaches don't depend on human assumptions about the signal. That opens the door to discovering forms of intelligence that might think differently from our own.

Finland's University of Jyväskylä has an announcement: an experiment performed in its accelerator lab "has succeeded in producing a previously unknown atomic nucleus."

Dubbed "190-Astatine," it's made from 85 protons and 105 neutrons.. The nucleus is the lightest isotope of astatine discovered to date. Astatine is a fast-decaying, and therefore rare element. It has been estimated that in the Earth's crust, there is no more than one tablespoon of astatine...

The new isotope was produced in the fusion of 84Sr beam particles and silver target atoms. The isotope was detected among the products by using the detectors of RITU recoil separator... "The studies of new nuclei are important for understanding the structure of atomic nuclei and the limits of known matter," says Doctoral Researcher Henna Kokkonen from the Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä.

An anonymous reader shared this report from USA Today: A new study reinforces the importance of lowering cholesterol in people at risk for, but who haven't had a heart attack or stroke. The study looked at a statin alternative, called bempedoic acid, and found that as it reduced levels of LDL cholesterol, it also lowered the risk for heart attack, stroke and death.

Researchers are quick to say bempedoic acid shouldn't be used instead of statins. It's far more expensive and doesn't have the decades-long track record of safety and effectiveness. But for people who can't tolerate statins or a high enough dose to bring their cholesterol levels down adequately, the new study suggests it's important to find alternatives, and that bempedoic acid can be at least part of the solution.

Motherboard reports: Scientists are currently searching for the submerged remains of an interstellar object that crashed into the skies near Papua New Guinea in January 2014 and probably sprinkled material from another star system into the Pacific Ocean, according to an onboard diary by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who is leading the expedition. The effort, which kicked off on June 14, aims to recover what is left of the otherworldly fireball using a deep-sea magnetic sled.

The team has already turned up "anomalous" magnetic spherules, steel shards, curious wires, and heaps of volcanic ash, but has not identified anything that is unambiguously extraterrestrial — or interstellar — at this point. However, Loeb is optimistic that the crew will identify pieces of Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1), the mysterious half-ton object that struck Earth nearly a decade ago, which he thinks could be an artifact, or "technosignature," from an alien civilization...

The fireball that sparked the hunt smashed into the atmosphere on January 8, 2014, and was detected by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which keeps track of extraterrestrial impacts using a network of sensors around the world. Years later, Loeb and his student, Amir Siraj, concluded that the meteor's high velocity at impact suggested that it was interstellar in origin, a hypothesis that was ultimately supported by the United States Space Command using classified sensor data.
Today Loeb posted on Medium that "by now, we have 25 spherules from the site of the first recognized interstellar meteor," with a cumulative weight of about 30 milligrams — estimated to be one part in ten million of the original fireball's mass: The success of the Interstellar Expedition constitutes the first opportunity for astronomers to learn about interstellar space by using a microscope rather than a telescope. It opens the door for a new branch of observational astronomy.
Updates about the expedition are running on the Mega Screen in New York's Times Square, Motherboard reports. And Loeb writes that "If further analysis of the 50 milligrams retrieved from IM1's site will inform us that IM1's composition requires a technological origin, we will know that we are not alone."

He also shared an email that responded to his online diaries: I had a heart attack four weeks ago and am now in rehab. I read your IM1 diary every day and it always gives me new courage to face life. There are still so many things to discover and I want to live long enough to see some of them. I wish you and your team all the best.

"Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings," writes the New York Times. The Harvard Crimson student newspaper has the details: At least four papers authored by Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino contain fraudulent data, three business school professors allege... The professors wrote that they first contacted Harvard Business School in fall 2021 with concerns of academic misconduct by Gino. "Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data," the three wrote in a blog post last week. "Perhaps dozens."
Their allegations appear in several blog posts on a blog called Data Colada — the first of which offers this update: As you can see on her Harvard home page (.htm), Gino has gone on "administrative leave", and the name of her chaired position at Harvard Business School is no longer listed... We have learned (from knowledgeable sources outside of Harvard) that a few days ago Harvard requested that three of the four papers in our report be retracted. A fourth paper, discussed in today's post, had already been retracted, but we understand that Harvard requested the retraction notice be amended to include mention of this (additional) fraud.
The business professors concluded there was fraud based on a quirk of Microsoft's Excel files: A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files that Excel combines to produce a single spreadsheet. (If curious or incredulous, run any .xlsx file in your computer through the program you use for unzipping files; you will find a bunch of files organized in folder.) For instance, one file in that bundle has all the numeric values that appear on a spreadsheet, another has all the character entries, another the formatting information (e.g., Calibri vs. Cambria font), etc.

Most relevant to us is a file called calcChain.xml. CalcChain tells Excel in which order to carry out the calculations in the spreadsheet. It tells Excel something like "First solve the formula in cell A1, then the one in A2, then B1, etc." CalcChain is short for 'calculation chain'. The image below shows how, when one unzips the posted Excel file, one can navigate to this calcChain.xml file. CalcChain is so useful here because it will tell you whether a cell (or row) containing a formula has been moved, and where it has been moved to. That means that we can use calcChain to go back and see what this spreadsheet may have looked like back in 2010, before it was tampered with...!

We used calcChain to see whether there is evidence that the rows that were out of sequence, and that showed huge effects on the key dependent variables, had been manually tampered with. And there is.
In addition, a second blog post notes that one study on honesty had also asked college students what year they were in school — and somehow 35 had all replied with a non-answer, giving as their year in school "Harvard." And suspiciously, all but one of these 35 entries were especially likely to confirm the authors' hypothesis. "This strongly suggests that these 'Harvard' observations were altered to produce the desired effect."

The New York Times points out that this paper "has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings."

3M will pay $10.3 billion to settle lawsuits over contamination of drinking water with PFAS, a class of chemicals known as "forever chemicals" that have been linked to health problems. NPR reports: The deal would compensate water providers for pollution with per- and polyfluorinated substances, known collectively as PFAS -- a broad class of chemicals used in nonstick, water- and grease-resistant products such as clothing and cookware. Described as "forever chemicals" because they don't degrade naturally in the environment, PFAS have been linked to a variety of health problems, including liver and immune-system damage and some cancers.

The compounds have been detected at varying levels in drinking water around the nation. The Environmental Protection Agency in March proposed strict limits on two common types, PFOA and PFOS, and said it wanted to regulate four others. Water providers would be responsible for monitoring their systems for the chemicals. The agreement would settle a case that was scheduled for trial earlier this month involving a claim by Stuart, Florida, one of about 300 communities that have filed similar suits against companies that produced firefighting foam or the PFAS it contained.

3M chairman Mike Roman said the deal was "an important step forward" that builds on the company's decision in 2020 to phase out PFOA and PFOS and its investments in "state-of-the-art water filtration technology in our chemical manufacturing operations." The company, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, will halt all PFAS production by the end of 2025, he said. The settlement will be paid over 13 years and could reach as high as $12.5 billion, depending on how many public water systems detect PFAS during testing that EPA has required in the next three years, said Dallas-based attorney Scott Summy, one of the lead attorneys for those suing 3M and other manufacturers. The payment will help cover costs of filtering PFAS from systems where it's been detected and testing others, he said.

American retailers see opportunities in the primary-care business. From a report: With his long white coat, stethoscope, genially soothing manner and wonky eagerness to discuss "population health management" and "patient-centred" medicine, Ronald Searcy seems the Platonic ideal of a primary-care doctor. The most unusual thing about him is where he works: a compact facility complete with examination rooms, dentist's office, phlebotomy lab and X-ray room tucked into a Walmart in north-west Arkansas. Since 2019, Walmart has opened 32 of these "health centres" in five states; by the end of next year it plans to more than double that number, and expand into two more states. Walmart is not the only big company expanding its medical offerings.

[...] What do these companies see in the medical business? The answer, befitting America's Byzantine and rent-filled health-care system, is both simple and complex. The simple answer is money. Americans spend a stunning amount of it on health: roughly 18% of GDP in 2021, far exceeding the rich-country average of about 10% and more than double the ratio of some, such as South Korea, with healthier and longer-lived populations. Americans' spending is forecast to rise by 5.4% per year over the next eight years, outpacing economic growth and accounting for almost 20% of GDP by 2031. The bulk of that spending will come from Medicaid and Medicare, federal programmes that cover health-care costs for, respectively, poor people and over-65s. The complex part reflects changes in how insurers, including Medicaid and Medicare, pay for coverage; as well as changes in how consumers are willing to get it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Microsoft researchers have made a controversial claim that they have seen evidence of an elusive particle that could solve some of the biggest headaches in quantum computing, but some experts are questioning the discovery. Quantum computers process information using quantum bits, or qubits, but current iterations can be prone to error. "What the field needs is a new kind of qubit," says Chetan Nayak at Microsoft Quantum. He and his colleagues say they have taken a significant step towards building qubits from quasiparticles, which are not true particles but collective vibrations that can emerge when particles like electrons act together. The quasiparticles in question are called Majorana zero modes, which act as their own antiparticle and have a charge and energy that equate to zero. That makes them resilient to disturbances -- so they could make unprecedentedly reliable qubits -- but also makes them notoriously hard to find. The Microsoft researchers say devices they built exhibited behaviors consistent with Majorana zero modes. The main components of each device were an extremely thin semiconducting wire and a piece of superconducting aluminum.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has claimed to have found Majorana zero modes. A 2018 paper by a different group of researchers at the company was retracted from the scientific journal Nature in 2021 after it didn't hold up to scrutiny. At the time, Sergey Frolovat the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and his colleagues found that imperfections in the semiconductor wire could produce quantum effects easily mistaken for Majorana zero modes. "To see Majorana zero modes, the wire must be like a very long, very even road with no bumps. If there is any disorder in the wire, electrons can get stuck on these imperfections and assume quantum states that mimic Majorana zero modes," says Frolov. In the new experiment, the team used a more complex test called the topological gap protocol. To pass the test, a device must simultaneously show signatures of Majorana zero modes at each end of the wire, and also show that the electrons are in an energy range where a special kind of superconductivity emerges. "Rather than look for one particular simple signature of Majorana zero modes, we looked for a mosaic of signatures," says Nayak. The researchers tested this protocol on hundreds of computer simulations of devices, which considered any impurities in the wires, before using it on experimental data. Nayak says they calculated that for any device that passed the topological gap protocol, the probability of there not actually being a Majorana zero mode within it was less than 8 per cent.

Not all researchers in the field are convinced.Henry Leggat the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues recently published a set of calculations showing that this test can be fooled by impurities in the wires. "The topological gap protocol as currently implemented is certainly not loophole free," he says. Frolov says that a few details imply that what seem to be Majorana zero modes would be revealed as an effect of disorder if the experiment were repeated with even more sensitive measurements. These include small differences between measurements for the left and right edges of the wire, as well as the measurements of electrons' energies -- the same energies can be indicative of emerging Majorana zero modes or of dirt trapping the electrons. Anton Akhmerovat the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands says that for him, the new experiment is not viable evidence that Majorana zero modes have been detected until another team of researchers reproduces it. But this may be difficult as some details of how Microsoft's devices were manufactured have not been published on account of being trade secrets, he says.

The average test scores for 13-year-old students in the U.S. have decreased in reading and math since 2020, reaching the lowest levels in decades, with more significant declines in math. NPR reports: The average scores, from tests given last fall, declined 4 points in reading and 9 points in math, compared with tests given in the 2019-2020 school year, and are the lowest in decades. The declines in reading were more pronounced for lower performing students, but dropped across all percentiles. The math scores were even more disappointing. On a scale of 500 points, the declines ranged from 6 to 8 points for middle and high performing students, to 12 to 14 points for low performing students.

The math results also showed widening gaps based on gender and race. Scores decreased by 11 points for female students over 2020 results, compared with a 7-point decrease for male students. Among Black students, math scores declined 13 points, while white students had a 6-point drop. Compared with the 35-point gap between Black and white students in 2020, the disparity widened to 42 points.

While the scores show a drop from the pre-pandemic years, the results also show that there are other factors at work. The decline is even more substantial when compared with scores of a decade ago: The average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics. The Education Department says plans are underway to address the learning loss. [...] The latest results are from the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment, traditionally administered every four years by the National Center for Education Statistics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer "lab-grown" meat to the nation's restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves. The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn't come from slaughtered animals -- what's now being referred to as "cell-cultivated" or "cultured" meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates. The companies received approvals for federal inspections required to sell meat and poultry in the U.S. The action came months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deemed that products from both companies are safe to eat. A manufacturing company called Joinn Biologics, which works with Good Meat, was also cleared to make the products.

Cultivated meat is grown in steel tanks, using cells that come from a living animal, a fertilized egg or a special bank of stored cells. In Upside's case, it comes out in large sheets that are then formed into shapes like chicken cutlets and sausages. Good Meat, which already sells cultivated meat in Singapore, the first country to allow it, turns masses of chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat and satays. But don't look for this novel meat in U.S. grocery stores anytime soon. Cultivated chicken is much more expensive than meat from whole, farmed birds and cannot yet be produced on the scale of traditional meat, said Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt:Meat Lab at University of California Berkeley. The companies plan to serve the new food first in exclusive restaurants: Upside has partnered with a San Francisco restaurant called Bar Crenn, while Good Meat dishes will be served at a Washington, D.C., restaurant run by chef and owner Jose Andres.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Adults ages 19 to 64 in the United States should be screened for anxiety disorders, according to a new recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force released Tuesday. The final recommendation, published in the medical journal JAMA, marks the first time the USPSTF has made a final recommendation on screening for anxiety disorders in adults, including those who are pregnant and postpartum. The task force found "insufficient evidence" to screen for anxiety in older adults. The USPSTF, a group of independent medical experts whose recommendations help guide doctors' decisions and influence insurance plans, also continues to recommend that all adults be screened for major depressive disorder, including those who are pregnant or postpartum and older adults. The recommendation is consistent with the task force's 2016 recommendation on depression screenings.

While rates of clinical depression had been rising steadily in the United States, they jumped significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic. In general, about 1 in 6 adults will have depression at some time in their life, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And although depression and anxiety are different conditions, they commonly can happen together -- and such screening recommendations can help clinicians identify which patients may need treatment for both conditions or one versus the other. "Anxiety disorders are common, and they can really impact people's quality of life, and what the task force found is that screening for anxiety disorders in the general adult population can lead to identifying these conditions early and then, if those people who are identified get linked up with appropriate care, they will benefit," said Dr. Michael Silverstein, vice chair of the USPSTF and director of the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute at Brown University. "So it really is extremely good news for the delivery of preventive services for the American public," he said. "We also found that in the older adult population, which is defined as age 65 and older, that the task force really needs more evidence to weigh the risks and benefits of screening for anxiety disorders. And for that older adult population, we're calling for urgent new research."

USPSTF researchers noted in their anxiety screening recommendation statement that most people with anxiety disorders don't receive treatment within the first year of symptoms, if ever -- showing a need for more robust screening. "Only 11% of US adults with an anxiety disorder started treatment within the first year of onset; the median time to treatment initiation was 23 years," the researchers wrote. "A US study of 965 primary care patients found that only 41% of patients with an anxiety disorder were receiving treatment for their disorder." Once the new screening recommendations are practiced in the real world, the results may reveal that anxiety disorders are much more prevalent than previously thought, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, who was not involved in the recommendation statements. "Anxiety has been way under the radar for a long time, and so I think it's good that they are recommending for the broad population to be screened. When we start screening for anxiety, we're going to find a lot more of it than we thought we had," he said.

"I think it's an opportunity for us to get our hands around this crisis before we have a mental health emergency," Benjamin added. "So we definitely have to do more. We know as a nation, we have under-invested in mental health. We have not put as much money into mental health. We have not been treating mental health at the same level as physical health. And we know that people who need mental health services are really struggling to find providers to care for them."

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."