An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: People are swallowing hundreds of thousands of microscopic pieces of plastic each time they drink a liter of bottled water, scientists have shown -- a revelation that could have profound implications for human health. A new paper released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found about 240,000 particles in the average liter of bottled water, most of which were "nanoplastics" -- particles measuring less than one micrometer (less than one-seventieth the width of a human hair). [...]

The typical methods for finding microplastics can't be easily applied to finding even smaller particles, but Min co-invented a method that involves aiming two lasers at a sample and observing the resonance of different molecules. Using machine learning, the group was able to identify seven types of plastic molecules in a sample of three types of bottled water. [...] The new study found pieces of PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is what most plastic water bottles are made of, and polyamide, a type of plastic that is present in water filters. The researchers hypothesized that this means plastic is getting into the water both from the bottle and from the filtration process.

Researchers don't yet know how dangerous tiny plastics are for human health. In a large review published in 2019, the World Health Organization said there wasn't enough firm evidence linking microplastics in water to human health, but described an urgent need for further research. In theory, nanoplastics are small enough to make it into a person's blood, liver and brain. And nanoplastics are likely to appear in much larger quantities than microplastics -- in the new research, 90 percent of the plastic particles found in the sample were nanoplastics, and only 10 percent were larger microplastics. Finding a connection between microplastics and health problems in humans is complicated -- there are thousands of types of plastics, and over 10,000 chemicals used to manufacture them. But at a certain point, [...] policymakers and the public need to prepare for the possibility that the tiny plastics in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the clothes we wear have serious and dangerous effects. "You still have a lot of people that, because of marketing, are convinced that bottled water is better," said Sherri Mason, a professor and director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie. "But this is what you're drinking in addition to that H2O."

Some researchers say we've seen a fall in disruptive new discoveries. But we may be entering a golden age of applied science. From a report: 2023 had barely begun when scientists got some jolting news. On Jan. 4, a paper appeared in Nature claiming that disruptive scientific findings have been waning since 1945. Scientists took this as an affront. The New York Times interpreted the study to mean that scientists aren't producing as many "real breakthroughs" or "intellectual leaps" or "pioneering discoveries." That seems paradoxical when each year brings a new crop of exciting findings. In the 12 months following that paper, scientists have listened to the close encounters between supermassive black holes, demonstrated the power of new weight loss drugs and brought to market life-changing gene therapies for sickle cell disease.

What the authors of the January paper measured was a changing pattern in the way papers were cited. They created an index of disruptiveness that measured how much a finding marked a break with the past. A more disruptive paper would be cited by many future papers while previous papers in the same area would be cited less -- presumably because they were rendered obsolete. This pattern, they found, has been on a decades-long decline. One of the authors, Russell Funk of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, said they wanted to measure how new findings shifted attention away from old ways of doing things.

"Science definitely benefits from a cumulative work and studies that come along and refine our existing ideas. But it also benefits from being shaken up every now and then," he said. We're seeing fewer shake-ups now. Funk said he thinks it's related to funding agents taking too few risks. But others say it may only reflect changes in the way scientists cite each other's work. Scientists I talked to said researchers cite papers for many reasons -- including as way to ingratiate themselves with colleagues, mentors or advisers. Papers on techniques get a disproportionate number of citations, as do review articles because they're easier to cite than going back to the original discoveries. Citations in papers are "noisy data" Funk admitted, but there's a lot of it -- millions of papers -- and such data can reveal interesting trends. He agreed, though, that people shouldn't conflate disruption with importance. He gave the example of the LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), which made a big splash in 2016 by detecting gravitational waves, long ago predicted by Einstein. By his definition it was not disruptive.

The BBC checks in on "the pioneers of space exploration — the 24 Nasa astronauts who travelled to the Moon in the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s." Ken Mattingly and Frank Borman died within a few days of each other late last year. Now only eight people who have voyaged beyond the Earth's orbit remain. Who are they, and what are their stories...? There are only four people still alive who have walked on the Moon — Charlie Duke is one of them. He did it aged 36, making him the youngest person to set foot on the lunar surface... Charlie Duke now lives outside San Antonio, Texas, with Dorothy, to whom he has been married for 60 years....

Jim Lovell is one of only three men to have travelled to the Moon twice, and following Frank Borman's death in November 2023, he became the oldest living astronaut....

After leaving Nasa in 1975, [Harrison Schmitt] was elected to the U.S. Senate from his home state of New Mexico, but only served one term. Since then he has worked as a consultant in various industries as well as continuing in academia.
And when confronted by a man claiming Apollo 11 was an elaborate lie, 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin "punched him on the jaw." Despite struggles in later life, he never lost his thirst for adventure and joined expeditions to both the North and South Poles, the latter at the age of 86. While embracing his celebrity, he has remained an advocate for the space programme, especially the need to explore Mars.

"I don't think we should just go there and come back — we did that with Apollo," he says.
Last 93-year-old Buzz Aldrin got married — and thanked his fans for remembering his birthday. "It means a lot and I hope to continue serving a greater cause for many more revolutions around the sun."

Long-time Slashdot readers necro81 writes: The popular vision of Neptune is azure blue. This comes mostly from the publicly released images from Voyager 2's flyby in 1989 — humanity's only visit to this icy giant at the edge of the solar system. But it turns out that view is a bit distorted — the result of color-enhancing choices made by NASA at the time. A new report from Oxford depicts Neptune's blue color as more muted, with a touch of green, not much different than Uranus. The truer-to-life view comes from re-analyzing the Voyager data, combined with ground-based observations going back decades. (Add'l links here, here, and here.)

This is nothing new: most publicity images released by space agencies — of planets, nebulae, or the surface of Mars — have undergone some color-enhancement for visual effect. (They'll also release "true-color" images, which try to best mimic what the human eye would see.) Many images — such as those from the infrared-seeing JWST — need wholesale coloration of their otherwise invisible wavelengths. The new report is a good reminder, though, to remember that scientific cameras are pretty much always black and white; color images come from combining filters in various ways.
Also thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the story.

Tuesday's launch was different. "SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites designed to connect directly to unmodified smartphones..." reports SpaceNews, "after getting a temporary experimental license to start testing the capability in the United States." Six of the 21 Starlink satellites that launched on a Falcon 9 rocket at 10:44 p.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, carry a payload that the company said could provide connectivity for most 4G LTE devices when in range. SpaceX plans to start enabling texting from space this year in partnership with cellular operators, with voice and data connectivity coming in 2025, although the company still needs regulatory permission to provide the services commercially. Initial direct-to-smartphone tests would use cellular spectrum from SpaceX's U.S. mobile partner T-Mobile. SpaceX has also partnered with mobile operators in Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, New Zealand, and Switzerland....

Meanwhile, early-stage ventures AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are closing in on fundraising deals to expand their dedicated direct-to-device constellations. AST SpaceMobile said January 2 it is seeking to secure funds this month from "multiple parties" ahead of launching its first five commercial satellites early this year on a Falcon 9. Lynk Global, which is currently providing intermittent texting and other low-bandwidth services to phones outside cellular networks in parts of the Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, and Palau, plans to raise funds by merging with a shell company run by former professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

The White House has convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, after the Navajo Nation requested a delay due to cultural concerns over the transport of human ashes for burial on the moon. "The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology," said Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren in a statement. "The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations."

If successful, the commercial mission scheduled to launch Monday "will be the first time an American-made spacecraft has landed on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in 1972," notes CNN. Longtime Slashdot reader garyisabusyguy shares the report: The private companies providing these lunar burial services, Celestis and Elysium Space, are just two of several paying customers hitching a ride to the moon on Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine lunar lander. The uncrewed spacecraft is expected to lift off on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Celestis' payload, called Tranquility Flight, includes 66 "memorial capsules" containing "cremated remains and DNA," which will remain on the lunar surface "as a permanent tribute to the intrepid souls who never stopped reaching for the stars," according to the company's website.

"We are aware of the concerns expressed by Mr. Nygren, but do not find them substantive," Celestis CEO Charles Chafer told CNN. "We reject the assertion that our memorial spaceflight mission desecrates the moon," Chafer said. "Just as permanent memorials for deceased are present all over planet Earth and not considered desecration, our memorial on the moon is handled with care and reverence, is a permanent monument that does not intentionally eject flight capsules on the moon. It is a touching and fitting celebration for our participants -- the exact opposite of desecration, it is a celebration." Elysium Space has not responded to CNN's request for a comment, but the company's website describes its "Lunar Memorial" as delivering "a symbolic portion of remains to the surface of the Moon, helping to create the quintessential commemoration." "I've been disappointed that this conversation came up so late in the game," John Thornton, Astrobotic Technology CEO, said. "I would have liked to have had this conversation a long time ago. We announced the first payload manifest of this nature to our mission back in 2015. A second in 2020. We really are trying to do the right thing and I hope we can find a good path forward with Navajo Nation." [...]

Friday's meeting convened by the White House is scheduled to feature representatives from NASA, the FAA, the US Department of Transportation, and the Department of Commerce. But Navajo Nation officials have little hope that they will be able to stop Monday's launch. "Based off of what we're seeing, and NASA are already having their pre-launch briefing, it doesn't look like they have any intention of stopping the launch or removing the remains," Ahasteen said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Consumer Reports has found that plastics retain a "widespread" presence in food despite the health risks, and called on regulators to reassess the safety of plastics that come into contact with food during production. The non-profit consumer group said on Thursday that 84 out of 85 supermarket foods and fast foods it recently tested contained "plasticizers" known as phthalates, a chemical used to make plastic more durable. It also said 79% of food samples in its study contained bisphenol A (BPA), another chemical found in plastic, and other bisphenols, though levels were lower than in tests done in 2009.

Consumer Reports said none of the phthalate levels it found exceeded limits set by U.S. and European regulators. It also said there was no level of phthalates that scientists confirm is safe, but that does not guarantee the safety of foods you eat. Phthalates and bisphenols can disrupt the production and regulation of estrogen and other hormones, potentially boosting the risk of birth defects, cancer, diabetes, infertility, neurodevelopmental disorders, obesity and other health problems. Among tested supermarket foods, Annie's Organic Cheesy Ravioli contained the most phthalates in nanograms per serving, 53,579, followed by Del Monte sliced peaches and Chicken of the Sea pink salmon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: Last week border officials in the Punjab region of India revealed they intercepted 107 drug-carrying drones sent by smuggling gangs last year over the border from Pakistan, the highest number on record. Most were carrying heroin or opium from Pakistan to be dropped and received by collaborators in the Punjab, notorious for having India's worst levels of opiate addiction. Last year the head of a police narcotics unit in Lahore, a city in Pakistan which borders the Punjab, was dismissed after he was suspected of running a drug trafficking gang sending drones over to India. But the use of cheap flying robots instead of humans to smuggle drugs across borders is a worldwide phenomenon. [...]

[D]rones will likely become an everyday part of drug dealing too, according to Peter Warren Singer, author of multiple books on national security and a Fellow at think tank New America, with legit medicines due to be delivered by drone in the U.S. later this year and maybe in the U.K. too. "We are just scraping the surface of what is possible, as drone deliveries become more and more common in the commercial world, it will be the same with delivery of illicit goods. In our book, Burn-In, we explain how a future city will see drones zipping about delivering everything from groceries and burritos to drugs, both prescribed by a doctor or bought off a dealer. Drones have traditionally been used by governments and corporations for what are known as the "3 D's" jobs that are too dull, dirty, or dangerous for humans. For criminals, it is the same, except add in another D: Dependable. A drone doesn't steal the product and can't be arrested or snitch if caught."

Liam O'Shea, senior research fellow for organized crime and policing at defense and security thinktank RUSI, said drones were at the moment of limited value to wholesale traffickers and organized criminal gangs because of their range and the weight they can carry. "It makes sense that smugglers would seek to use drones. They are cheap and easy to acquire. They also lower the risks involved in some transactions, as smugglers do not have to be physically present during transactions. They offer opportunities for smuggling in areas where previous routes were too risky, such as prisons and over securitized borders. "I expect them to be of greater value to smaller players and distributors dealing with smaller quantities. Wholesale drug traffickers will still need to use routes that facilitate smuggling at higher volume or using drones to make multiple trips, which entails risks of detection. That may well change as improvements in technology improve drones' carrying capacity and crime groups are better able to access drones with greater capacity."

As the number of bees and other pollinators falls, field pansies are adapting by fertilizing their own seeds, a new study found. From a report: Every spring, trillions of flowers mate with the help of bees and other animals. They lure the pollinators to their flowers with flashy colors and nectar. As the animals travel from flower to flower, they take pollen with them, which can fertilize the seeds of other plants. A new study suggests that humans are quickly altering this annual rite of spring. As toxic pesticides and vanishing habitats have driven down the populations of bees and other pollinators, some flowers have evolved to fertilize their own seeds more often, rather than those of other plants.

Scientists said they were surprised by the speed of the changes, which occurred in just 20 generations. "That's rapid evolution," said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France who led the research. Dr. Cheptou was inspired to carry out the study when it became clear that bees and other pollinators were in a drastic decline. Would flowers that depend on pollinators for sex, he wondered, find another way to reproduce? The study focused on a weedy plant called the field pansy, whose white, yellow and purple flowers are common in fields and on roadsides across Europe. Field pansies typically use bumblebees to sexually reproduce. But they can also use their own pollen to fertilize their own seeds, a process called selfing.

Selfing is more convenient than sex, since a flower does not have to wait for a bee to drop by. But a selfing flower can use only its own genes to produce new seeds. Sexual reproduction allows flowers to mix their DNA, creating new combinations that may make them better prepared for diseases, droughts and other challenges that future generations may face. To track the evolution of field pansies in recent decades, Dr. Cheptou and his colleagues took advantage of a cache of seeds that France's National Botanical Conservatories collected in the 1990s and early 2000s. The researchers compared these old flowers with new ones from across the French countryside. After growing the new and old seeds side by side in the lab under identical conditions, they discovered that selfing had increased 27 percent since the 1990s.

NASA's Juno spacecraft made its closest flyby yet of Io, one of Jupiter's largest moons, sending back images of "sharp cliffs, edgy mountain peaks, lakes of pooled lava and even a volcanic plume," reports the New York Times. From the report: The Juno spacecraft, designed to study the origin and evolution of Jupiter, arrived at the planet in 2016. NASA extended the mission in 2021, and the orbiter has since captured photos of the Jovian moons Ganymede, Europa and most recently Io. [...] Juno conducted a number of more distant observations of Io in recent years. Its latest flyby occurred on Dec. 30, when the spacecraft came within 932 miles of the moon. The images captured during this visit were made with an instrument called JunoCam and are in visible wavelengths. They are some of the highest resolution views of Io's global structure. The mission's managers shared six images of Io on the mission's website, and members of the public have since uploaded digitally enhanced versions that highlight features on Io's surface.

Mission scientists are already at work analyzing these images, searching for differences across Io's surface to learn how often its volcanoes erupt, how bright and hot those eruptions are and how the resulting lava flows. According to Dr. Bolton, the team will also compare Juno's images to older views of the Jovian moon to determine what has changed on Io over a variety of encounters. And they'll get a second set of data to work with in a month, when Juno completes another close flyby of the explosive world on Feb. 3.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Marking a significant advancement in medical science, the world's first partial heart transplant has achieved the expected outcome after over a year of research efforts. Carried out by Duke Health, the patient, a young individual, now exhibits functioning valves and arteries that are growing in tandem with the transplant, as initially expected by the medical team. In spring 2022, doctors carried out the procedure on a baby who needed a new heart valve. Before, they used non-living valves, which didn't grow with the child. This meant the child needed frequent replacements, and the surgeries had a 50 percent chance of being deadly. The new procedure avoids these problems, according to the team.

Babies with serious heart valve problems face a tough challenge because there aren't any implants that can grow with them. So, these babies end up needing new implants over and over until they're big enough for an adult-sized valve. It's a problem that doesn't have a solution yet. Duke Health doctors, leading a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, discovered that the innovative valve collection method used in the partial heart transplant resulted in two properly functioning valves and arteries that are growing along with the child, resembling natural blood vessels. "This publication is proof that this technology works, this idea works, and can be used to help other children," said Joseph W. Turek, first author of the study and Duke's chief of pediatric cardiac surgery, in a statement. The research also notes that the new procedure requires less immunosuppressant medication, reducing potential long-term side effects.

It also facilitates a "domino transplant" method, where one donor heart benefits multiple patients, potentially doubling the number of hearts available for children with heart disease by utilizing previously unused hearts and valves.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: ChatGPT is still no House, MD. While the chatty AI bot has previously underwhelmed with its attempts to diagnose challenging medical cases -- with an accuracy rate of 39 percent in an analysis last year -- a study out this week in JAMA Pediatrics suggests the fourth version of the large language model is especially bad with kids. It had an accuracy rate of just 17 percent when diagnosing pediatric medical cases. The low success rate suggests human pediatricians won't be out of jobs any time soon, in case that was a concern. As the authors put it: "[T]his study underscores the invaluable role that clinical experience holds." But it also identifies the critical weaknesses that led to ChatGPT's high error rate and ways to transform it into a useful tool in clinical care. With so much interest and experimentation with AI chatbots, many pediatricians and other doctors see their integration into clinical care as inevitable. [...]

For ChatGPT's test, the researchers pasted the relevant text of the medical cases into the prompt, and then two qualified physician-researchers scored the AI-generated answers as correct, incorrect, or "did not fully capture the diagnosis." In the latter case, ChatGPT came up with a clinically related condition that was too broad or unspecific to be considered the correct diagnosis. For instance, ChatGPT diagnosed one child's case as caused by a branchial cleft cyst -- a lump in the neck or below the collarbone -- when the correct diagnosis was Branchio-oto-renal syndrome, a genetic condition that causes the abnormal development of tissue in the neck, and malformations in the ears and kidneys. One of the signs of the condition is the formation of branchial cleft cysts. Overall, ChatGPT got the right answer in just 17 of the 100 cases. It was plainly wrong in 72 cases, and did not fully capture the diagnosis of the remaining 11 cases. Among the 83 wrong diagnoses, 47 (57 percent) were in the same organ system.

Among the failures, researchers noted that ChatGPT appeared to struggle with spotting known relationships between conditions that an experienced physician would hopefully pick up on. For example, it didn't make the connection between autism and scurvy (Vitamin C deficiency) in one medical case. Neuropsychiatric conditions, such as autism, can lead to restricted diets, and that in turn can lead to vitamin deficiencies. As such, neuropsychiatric conditions are notable risk factors for the development of vitamin deficiencies in kids living in high-income countries, and clinicians should be on the lookout for them. ChatGPT, meanwhile, came up with the diagnosis of a rare autoimmune condition. Though the chatbot struggled in this test, the researchers suggest it could improve by being specifically and selectively trained on accurate and trustworthy medical literature -- not stuff on the Internet, which can include inaccurate information and misinformation. They also suggest chatbots could improve with more real-time access to medical data, allowing the models to refine their accuracy, described as "tuning."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Los Angeles Times: The former Westside Pavilion, a long shuttered indoor mall, will be transformed into a UCLA biomedical research center aimed at tackling such towering challenges as curing cancer and preventing global pandemics, officials announced Wednesday. The sprawling three-story structure will be known as the UCLA Research Park and will house two multidisciplinary centers focusing on immunology and immunotherapy as well as quantum science and engineering. Establishment of the public-private research center is a coup for Southern California that "will cement California's global, economic, scientific and technical dominance into the 22nd century and beyond," said Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The former owners of the mall, Hudson Pacific Properties Inc. and Macerich, said Wednesday that they sold the property to the Regents of the University of California for $700 million. By purchasing the former shopping center, UCLA saved several years of potential toil to build such a facility on campus. UCLA is the most-applied-to university in the nation, but its Westwood home is among the smallest of the nine UC undergraduate campuses, leaving it limited room for growth. The former mall sits on prime real estate in the heart of the Westside at Pico Boulevard and Overland Avenue, about two miles from the UCLA campus. The mall was owned by commercial developers who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to dramatically remake the old shopping center into an office complex intended to appeal to technology firms, which signed some of the biggest office leases in L.A.'s Silicon Beach before the pandemic.

Google agreed to become the sole tenant and began paying rent last year yet never moved in. The interior is mostly unfinished, but is ready for UCLA to build out to its specifications in a process Newsom said would take about 40 months. The UCLA Research Park "will serve as a state of the art hub of research and innovation that will bring together academics, corporate partners, government agencies and startups to explore new areas of inquiry and achieve breakthroughs that serve the common good," UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said. In addition to flexible work areas, the former mall's 12-screen multiplex movie theater may be converted into lecture halls or performance spaces offering programming across the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences, the chancellor's office said. One tenant of the research park will be the new California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy.

The research publisher Science announced today that all of its journals will begin using commercial software that automates the process of detecting improperly manipulated images. From a report: The move comes many years into our awareness that the transition to digital data and publishing has made it comically easy to commit research fraud by altering images. While the move is a significant first step, it's important to recognize the software's limitations. While it will catch some of the most egregious cases of image manipulation, enterprising fraudsters can easily avoid being caught if they know how the software operates. Which, unfortunately, we feel compelled to describe (and, to be fair, the company that has developed the software does so on its website).

Much of the image-based fraud we've seen arises from a dilemma faced by many scientists: It's not a problem to run experiments, but the data they generate often isn't the data you want. Maybe only the controls work, or maybe the experiments produce data that is indistinguishable from controls. For the unethical, this doesn't pose a problem since nobody other than you knows what images come from which samples. It's relatively simple to present images of real data as something they're not. To make this concrete, we can look at data from a procedure called a western blot, which uses antibodies to identify specific proteins from a complex mixture that has been separated according to protein size. Typical western blot data looks like the image at right, with the darkness of the bands representing proteins that are present at different levels in different conditions.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from The Guardian: Scientists have discovered an entirely new class of antibiotic that appears to kill one of three bacteria considered to pose the greatest threat to human health because of their extensive drug-resistance. Zosurabalpin defeated highly drug-resistant strains of Carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (Crab) in mouse models of pneumonia and sepsis, and was being tested in human trials. Crab is classified as a priority 1 critical pathogen by the World Health Organization, alongside two other drug-resistant forms of bacteria -- Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacteriaceae.

Antibiotic-resistant infections pose an urgent threat to human health -- particularly those caused by a large group of bacteria known as Gram-negative bacteria, which are protected by an outer shell containing a substance called lipopolysaccharide (LPS). "LPS allows bacteria to live in harsh environments, and it also allows them to evade attack by our immune system," said Dr Michael Lobritz, the global head of infectious diseases at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development in Basel Switzerland, which developed the new drug. No new antibiotic for Gram-negative bacteria have been approved in more than 50 years.

Roche had previously identified Zosurabalpin as capable of blocking the growth of A baumannii but it was not clear how it worked, or if it would be effective in animals with Crab-related infections. Through a series of experiments published in Nature, Prof Daniel Kahne at Harvard University in Cambridge, US, and colleagues showed that the drug prevented LPS from being transported to the outer membrane of the bacterium, killing it. They also found that Zosurabalpin considerably reduced levels of bacteria in mice with Crab-induced pneumonia and prevented the death of those with Crab-related sepsis. While [Lobritz] stressed that this molecule alone would not solve the public health threat of antimicrobial resistant infections, the discovery could lay the foundations for future efforts to drug the same transport system in other bacteria.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Technology Networks: At about the size of a pinkie nail, the jellyfish species Cladonema can regenerate an amputated tentacle in two to three days -- but how? Regenerating functional tissue across species, including salamanders and insects, relies on the ability to form a blastema, a clump of undifferentiated cells that can repair damage and grow into the missing appendage. Jellyfish, along with other cnidarians such as corals and sea anemones, exhibit high regeneration abilities, but how they form the critical blastema has remained a mystery until now.

A research team based in Japan has revealed that stem-like proliferative cells -- which are actively growing and dividing but not yet differentiating into specific cell types -- appear at the site of injury and help form the blastema. "Importantly, these stem-like proliferative cells in blastema are different from the resident stem cells localized in the tentacle," said corresponding author Yuichiro Nakajima, lecturer in the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo. "Repair-specific proliferative cells mainly contribute to the epithelium -- the thin outer layer -- of the newly formed tentacle."

The resident stem cells that exist in and near the tentacle are responsible for generating all cellular lineages during homeostasis and regeneration, meaning they maintain and repair whatever cells are needed during the jellyfish's lifetime, according to Nakajima. Repair-specific proliferative cells only appear at the time of injury. "Together, resident stem cells and repair-specific proliferative cells allow rapid regeneration of the functional tentacle within a few days," Nakajima said, noting that jellyfish use their tentacles to hunt and feed. [...] The cellular origins of the repair-specific proliferative cells observed in the blastema remain unclear, though, and the researchers say the currently available tools to investigate the origins are too limited to elucidate the source of those cells or to identify other, different stem-like cells. "It would be essential to introduce genetic tools that allow the tracing of specific cell lineages and the manipulation in Cladonema," Nakajima said. "Ultimately, understanding blastema formation mechanisms in regenerative animals, including jellyfish, may help us identify cellular and molecular components that improve our own regenerative abilities."

The findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to a new study [published in Nature Human Behavior], the human brain has two separate ways of processing numbers of things: one system for quantities of four or fewer, and another system for five and up. Presented with four or fewer objects, humans can usually identify the sum at first glance, without counting. And we're almost always right. This ability is known as "subitizing," a term coined by psychologists last century, and it's different from both counting and estimating. It refers to an uncanny sense of immediately knowing how many things you're looking at, with no tallying or guessing required.

While we can easily subitize quantities up to four, however, the ability disappears when we're looking at five or more things. If asked to instantly quantify a group of seven apples, for example, we tend to hesitate and estimate, taking slightly longer to respond and still providing less precise answers. Since our subitizing skills vanish so abruptly for quantities larger than four, some researchers have suspected our brains use two distinct processing methods, specialized for either small or large quantities. "However, this idea has been disputed up to now," says co-author Florian Mormann, a cognitive neurophysiologist from the Department of Epileptology at the University Hospital Bonn. "It could also be that our brain always makes an estimate but the error rates for smaller numbers of things are so low that they simply go unnoticed."

Previous research involving some of the new study's authors showed that human brains have neurons responsible for each number, with certain nerve cells firing selectively in response to certain quantities. Some neurons fire mainly when a person sees two of something, they found, while others show a similar affinity for their own number of visual elements. Yet many of these neurons also fire in response to slightly smaller or larger numbers, the researchers note, with a weaker reaction for quantities further removed from their numerical focus. "A brain cell for a number of 'seven' elements thus also fires for six and eight elements but more weakly," says neurobiologist Andreas Nieder from the University of Tubingen. "The same cell is still activated but even less so for five or nine elements."

This kind of "numerical distance effect" also occurs in monkeys, as Nieder has shown in previous research. Among humans, however, it typically happens only when we see five or more things, hinting at some undiscovered difference in the way we identify smaller numbers. "There seems to be an additional mechanism for numbers of around less than five elements that makes these neurons more precise," Nieder says. Neurons responsible for lower numbers are able to inhibit other neurons responsible for adjacent numbers, the study's authors report, thus limiting any mixed signals about the quantity in question. When a trio-specializing neuron fires, for example, it also inhibits the neurons that typically fire in response to groups of two or four things. Neurons for the number five and beyond apparently lack this mechanism.

India launched its first satellite on Monday to study black holes as it seeks to deepen its space exploration efforts ahead of an ambitious crewed mission next year. From a report: The spacecraft, named X-ray Polarimeter Satellite, was propelled into an orbit of 350 kilometers from an island near India's main spaceport of Sriharikota, off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, according to S. Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The satellite, weighing about 470 kilograms, will carry out research on X-rays emanating from around 50 celestial objects with the help of two payloads built by ISRO and a Bengaluru-based research institute.

NASA launched a similar mission, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, in 2021 to answer questions such as why black holes spin and build on the findings of its flagship telescope Chandra X-ray Observatory that blasted off more than two decades ago. China's National Space Administration launched the country's first X-ray space telescope to observe black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts in 2017.

"This year has been a major turning point in American health care," reports USA Today, "and patients can anticipate several major developments in the new year," including the beginning of a CRISPR "revolution" and "a new reckoning with drug prices that could change the landscape of the U.S. health care system for decades to come." Health care officials expect 2024 to bring a wave of innovation and change in medicine, treatment and public health... Many think 2024 could be the year more people have the tools to follow through on New Year's resolutions about weight loss. If they can afford them and manage to stick with them, people can turn to a new generation of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, also called GLP-1s, which offer the potential for substantial weight loss...

In 2023, mental health issues became among the nation's most deadly, costly and pervasive health crises... The dearth of remedies has also paved the way for an unsuspecting class of drugs: psychedelics. MDMA, a party drug commonly known as "ecstasy," could win approval for legal distribution in 2024, as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Another psychedelic, a ketamine derivative eskatemine, sold as Spravato, was approved in 2019 to treat depression, but it is being treated like a conventional therapy that must be dosed regularly, not like a psychedelic that provides a long-lasting learning experience, said Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University. MDMA (midomafetamine capsules) would be different, as the first true psychedelic to win FDA approval.

In a late-stage trial of patients with moderate or severe post-traumatic stress disorder, close to 90% showed clinically significant improvements four months after three treatments with MDMA and more than 70% no longer met the criteria for having the disorder, which represented "really impressive results," according to Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Psilocybin, known colloquially as "magic mushrooms," is also working its way through the federal approval process, but it likely won't come up before officials for another year, Johnson said. Psychedelics are something to keep an eye on in the future, as they're being used to treat an array of mental health issues: eskatimine for depression, MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for addiction. Johnson said his research suggests that psychedelics will probably have a generalizable benefit across many mental health challenges in the years to come.
2024 will also be the first year America's drug-makers face new limits on how much they can increase prices for drugs covered by the federal health insurance program Medicare.

"Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren has asked NASA to delay a scheduled launch to the Moon that could include cremated remains," reports Arizona Public Radio station KNAU: Nygren says he recently learned of the January 8 launch of the Vulcan Centaur carrying the Peregrine Mission One. The lander will carry some payloads from a company known to provide memorial services by shipping human cremated remains to the Moon. Nygren wants the launch delayed and the tribe consulted immediately. He noted the Moon is sacred to numerous Indigenous cultures and that depositing human remains on it is "tantamount to desecration."

NASA previously came under fire after the ashes of former geologist and planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker were sent to the Moon in 1998. Then-Navajo Nation President Albert Hale said the action was a gross insensitivity to the beliefs of many Native Americans. NASA later apologized and promised to consult with tribes before authorizing any similar missions in the future.

What would happen if we built a concert venue in near-Earth orbit? A science policy journalist explores the question in the Washington Post: Forget U2 in the Las Vegas Sphere. Take me to a real concert in the round, where I can float 360 degrees around the stage, watching a guitarist shred from the perspective of a fly and inventing dance moves that Earth's gravity would forbid.

Before you dismiss this as a hallucination, consider that we're on the cusp of a new era of space travel. Engineer and space architect Ariel Ekblaw, founder of MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, says that within a decade, a trip off the planet could become as accessible as a first-class airline ticket — and that, in 15 or 20 years, we can expect space hotels in near-Earth orbit. She's betting on it, having founded a nonprofit to design spherical, modular habitats that can assemble themselves in space so as to be lightweight and compact at launch, much like the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA vaulted into deep space two years ago.

"The first era of space travel was about survival," she told me as I recently toured her lab. "We're transitioning now to build spaces that are friendlier and more welcoming so that people can thrive in space as opposed to just survive." There's no reason, Ekblaw said, that a concert hall can't be one of those structures.
The article ultimately calls this "an impulse for space travel I can get behind: curiosity about who we are and what more we can create when we reach beyond Earth. This is the realm of not just scientists and engineers but of all kinds of dreamers. It's a rendition of space exploration that can engage anyone to imagine what's possible."

As the year comes to a close, "one constant, reliable source of awe and beauty is the sky over our head..." writes astronomer Phil Plait in Scientific America

"And every year we see new things, or old things in new ways, and I've been set the wonderful task of selecting my favorites and relaying them and their import to you." End-of-year lists, especially those displaying astronomical imagery, tend to be splashy and colorful. That's understandable, but what they sometimes miss are the more subtle photographs, those that hide momentous discoveries in minor visual details or offer fresh perspectives on familiar objects. They may not leap off the page, but they still have an impact. That's what I've kept in mind while sorting through this year's celestial treasure trove. This gallery is by no means complete, but it shows what I think are some of the most interesting astronomical portraits to have emerged in 2023.

No gallery such as this would be complete without something from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), our newest infrared eye on the sky. This monster observatory has already brought so many small revolutions to astronomy that picking one from the past year is no small task. Should it be a baby star throwing an immense tantrum or a massive old star shedding material at colossal rates before it inevitably explodes as a supernova? Or should it be a map of a mind-stomping 100,000 galaxies?

Well, how about something very, very different — such as the skeletal structure of a nearby galaxy's intricate web of dust [also displayed at the top of Scientiic American's article]...? [I]t has a beautiful spiral structure and shows the effects of a smaller galaxy colliding with it. In the phenomenally sharp and decidedly eerie false-color view from JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument, we see countless clouds of cosmic dust in a skeletonlike pattern. Each of these clouds is made up of small grains of rocky and sooty carbon-based molecules expelled by dying stars...

Astronomers captured this image to better understand how stars are born in stellar nurseries and how they evolve over time.

"[F]or years it was written off," writes CNN. " 'The economics were just way out,' said Martin Soltau, CEO of the UK-based company Space Solar.

"That may now be changing as the cost of launching satellites falls sharply, solar and robotics technology advances swiftly, and the need for abundant clean energy to replace planet-heating fossil fuels becomes more urgent." There's a "nexus of different technologies coming together right now just when we need it," said Craig Underwood, emeritus professor of spacecraft engineering at the University of Surrey in the U.K. The problem is, these technologies would need to be deployed at a scale unlike anything ever done before... "The big stumbling block has been simply the sheer cost of putting a power station into orbit." Over the last decade, that has begun to change as companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin started developing reusable rockets. Today's launch costs at around $1,500 per kilogram are about 30 times less than in the Space Shuttle era of the early 1980s.

And while launching thousands of tons of material into space sounds like it would have a huge carbon footprint, space solar would likely have a footprint at least comparable to terrestrial solar per unit of energy, if not a smaller, because of its increased efficiency as sunlight is available nearly constantly, said Mamatha Maheshwarappa, payload systems lead at UK Space Agency. Some experts go further. Underwood said the carbon footprint of space-based solar would be around half that of a terrestrial solar farm producing the same power, even with the rocket launch...

There is still a huge gulf between concept and commercialization. We know how to build a satellite, and we know how to build a solar array, Maheshwarappa said. "What we don't know is how to build something this big in space..." Scientists also need to figure out how to use AI and robotics to construct and maintain these structures in space. "The enabling technologies are still in a very low technology readiness," Maheshwarappa said. Then there's regulating this new energy system, to ensure the satellites are built sustainably, there's no debris risk, and they have an end-of-life plan, as well as to determine where rectenna sites should be located. Public buy-in could be another huge obstacle, Maheshwarappa said. There can be an instinctive fear when it comes to beaming power from space.

But such fears are unfounded, according to some experts. The energy density at the center of the rectenna would be about a quarter of the midday sun. "It is no different than standing in front of a heat lamp," Hajimiri said.
The article argues that governments and companies around the world "believe there is huge promise in space-based solar to help meet burgeoning demand for abundant, clean energy and tackle the climate crisis." And they cite several specific examples:

• In 2020 the U.S. Naval Research Lab launched a module on an orbital test vehicle, to test solar hardware in space conditions.

• This year Caltech electrical engineering professor led a team that successfully launched a 30-centimeter prototype equipped with transmitters — and successfully beamed detectable energy down to earth.

• In June the U.K. government announced over $5 million in funding to universities and tech companies "to drive forward innovation" in the space-based solar sector.

• The U.S. Air Force Research Lab plans to launch a small demonstrator in 2025.

• Europe's its Solaris program aims to prove "the technical and political viability of space-based solar, in preparation for a possible decision in 2025 to launch a full development program."

• One Chinese spacecraft designer and manufacturer hopes to send a solar satellite into low orbit in 2028 and high orbit by 2030, according to a 2022 South China Morning News report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Researchers have developed a new, lightweight foam made from carbon nanotubes that, when used as a helmet liner, absorbed the kinetic energy caused by an impact almost 30 times better than liners currently used in US military helmets. The foam could prevent or significantly reduce the likelihood of concussion in military personnel and sportspeople. Among sportspeople and military vets, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the major causes of permanent disability and death. Injury statistics show that the majority of TBIs, of which concussion is a subtype, are associated with oblique impacts, which subject the brain to a combination of linear and rotational kinetic energy forces and cause shearing of the delicate brain tissue.

To improve their effectiveness, helmets worn by military personnel and sportspeople must employ a liner material that limits both. This is where researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison come in. Determined to prevent -- or lessen the effect of -- TBIs caused by knocks to the body and head, they've developed a new lightweight foam material for use as a helmet liner. For the current study, Thevamaran built upon his previous research into vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) foams -- carefully arranged layers of carbon cylinders one atom thick -- and their exceptional shock-absorbing capabilities. Current helmets attempt to reduce rotational motion by allowing a sliding motion between the wearer's head and the helmet during impact. However, the researchers say this movement doesn't dissipate energy in shear and can jam when severely compressed following a blow. Instead, their novel foam doesn't rely on sliding layers.

VACNT foam sidesteps this shortcoming via its unique deformation mechanism. Under compression, the VACNTs undergo collective sequentially progressive buckling, from increased compliance at low shear strain levels to a stiffening response at high strain levels. The formed compression buckles unfold completely, enabling the VACNT foam to accommodate large shear strains before returning to a near initial state when the load is removed. The researchers found that at 25% precompression, the foam exhibited almost 30 times higher energy dissipation in shear -- up to 50% shear strain -- than polyurethane-based elastomeric foams of similar density. The study has been published in the journal Experimental Mechanics.

SpaceX on Thursday launched two rockets into orbit, only three hours apart, bringing its total number of launches to 98 in 2023. Space.com reports: The first SpaceX mission to take to the skies Thursday (Dec. 28) was a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the U.S. military's secretive X-37B space plane, designed mission USSF-52. That blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:07 p.m. EST (0107 GMT on Dec. 29). This marked the second Falcon Heavy flight of 2023. Second up on the launch docket for Thursday, hours later, was a Falcon 9 liftoff carrying 23 SpaceX Starlink units to low Earth orbit from nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This launch took place at 11:01 p.m. EST (0401 GMT on Dec. 29). This was SpaceX's 98th and final launch of 2023, and the 96th flight for a Falcon 9 rocket this year.

SpaceX's 97th launch overall for this year marked the seventh flight for X-37B, but the first time the space plane hitched a lift atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. The X-37B/Falcon Heavy launch had been scrubbed several times previously due to bad weather and an issue with ground equipment. The launch of 23 Starlink broadband satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida that capped off 2023 was also the 96th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket during this year. SpaceX's next launch is targeted for Jan. 2, 2024 and will see a further 21 Starlink satellites lift to orbit to join the over 5,500 internet supplying units currently orbiting Earth.

In 2021, Philips pulled its popular sleep apnea machines and ventilators off the shelves after discovering that an industrial foam built into the devices to reduce noise could release toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients. "But as Philips publicly pledged to send out replacements, supervisors inside the company's headquarters near Pittsburgh were quietly racing to manage a new crisis that threatened the massive recall and posed risks to patients all over again," reports ProPublica. "Tests by independent laboratories retained by Philips had found that a different foam used by the company -- material fitted inside the millions of replacement machines -- was also emitting dangerous chemicals, including formaldehyde, a known carcinogen."

"Though Philips has said the machines are safe, ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained test results and other internal records that reveal for the first time how scientists working for the company grew increasingly alarmed and how infighting broke out as the new threat reached the highest levels of the Pittsburgh operation. The findings also underscore an unchecked pattern of corporate secrecy that began long before Philips decided to use the new foam." From the report: The company had previously failed to disclose complaints about the original foam in its profitable breathing machines, a polyester-based polyurethane material that was found to degrade in heat and humidity. Former patients and others have described hundreds of deaths and thousands of cases of cancer in government reports. After the introduction of the new foam in 2021, this one made of silicone, the company again held back details about the problem from the public even as it sent out replacement machines with the new material to customers around the world.

One of the devices was the DreamStation 2, a newly released continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine promoted as one of the company's primary replacements. Federal regulators were alerted to the concern more than two years ago but said in a news release at the time that the company was carrying out additional tests on the foam and that patients should keep using their replacements until more details were available. The Food and Drug Administration has not provided new information on the test results since then, and it is still unclear whether the material is safe. That leaves millions of people in the United States alone caught in the middle, including those with sleep apnea, which causes breathing to stop and start through the night and can lead to heart attacks, strokes and sudden death.

The new foam isn't the only problem: An internal investigation at Philips launched in the months after the recall found that water was condensing in the circuitry of the DreamStation 2, creating a new series of safety risks. "Loss of therapy, thermal events, and shock hazards," the investigation concluded. The FDA issued an alert about overheating last month, warning that the devices could produce "fire, smoke, burns, and other signs of overheating" and advising patients to keep the machines away from carpet, fabric and "other flammable materials." Philips has said that customers could continue using the devices if they followed safety instructions. ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Naomi Kresge: In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of scientists from all over the world banded together in an open-source effort to develop an antiviral that would be available for all. They could never have anticipated the many roadblocks they would face along the way, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which made refugees out of a group of Kyiv chemists who were doing important work for the project. The group, which called itself Covid Moonshot, hasn't given up on its effort to introduce a more affordable, patent-free treatment for the virus. Their open-source Covid antiviral, now funded by Wellcome, is on track to be ready for human testing within the next year and a half, according to Annette von Delft, a University of Oxford scientist and one of the Moonshot group's leaders. More early discovery work on a range of potential inhibitors for other viruses is also still going on and being funded by a US government grant.

"It's a bit like a proof of concept," von Delft says, for bringing a patent-free experimental drug into the clinic, a model that could be repurposed as a tool to fight neglected tropical diseases or antimicrobial resistance, or prepare for future pandemics. "Can we come up with a strategic model that can help those kinds of compounds with less of a business case along?" Of course, there was definitely a business case for a Covid antiviral, and some of the biggest drugmakers rushed to develop them. In 2022, Pfizer Inc.'s Paxlovid was one of the world's best-selling medicines with $18.9 billion in revenue. Demand has since cratered for the pill, which needs to be given shortly after infection and can't be taken alongside a number of other commonly prescribed medicines. Analysts expect the Paxlovid revenue to plunge just shy of $1 billion this year.

However, there is still a need for a better Covid antiviral, particularly in countries where access to the Pfizer pill is limited, according to von Delft. Covid cases have surged again this holiday season, with the rise of a new variant called JN.1 reminding us that the virus is still changing to evade the immunity we've built up so far. Just before Christmas, UK authorities said about one in every 24 people in England and Scotland had the disease. An accessible antiviral could help people return to work more quickly, and it could also be tested as a potential treatment for long Covid. "We know from experience in viral disease that there will be resistance variants evolving over time," von Delft said. "We'll need more than one."

Andy Maxwell reports via TorrentFreak: As the crew of Artemis 2 prepare to become the first humans to fly to the moon since 1972, the possibilities of space travel are once again igniting imaginations globally. More than 92% of internet users who want to learn more about this historic mission and the program in general are statistically likely to use Google search. Behind the scenes, however, the ability to find relevant content is under attack. Blundering DMCA takedown notices sent by a company calling itself DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. claim to protect the rights of an OnlyFans/Instagram model working under the name 'Artemis'. Instead, keyword-based systems that fail to discriminate between copyright-infringing content and that referencing the word Artemis in any other context, are flooding towards Google. They contain demands to completely deindex non-infringing, unrelated content, produced by innocent third parties all over the world.

A recent deindexing demand dated December 13, 2022, lists DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. of Canada as the sender. The name of the content owner is redacted but the notice itself states that the company represents a content creator performing under the name Artemis. The notice demands the removal of 3,617 URLs from Google search. If successful, those URLs would be completely unfindable by more than 92% of the world's population who use that search engine. [...] At least 9 of the first 20 URLs in the notice demand the removal of non-infringing articles and news reports referencing the Artemis space program. None have anything to do with the content the sender claims to protect. [...]

Theories as to who might own and/or operate DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. aren't hard to find but the company does exist and is registered as a corporate entity in Canada. Registered at the same address is a company with remarkably similar details. BranditScan is a corporate entity operating in exactly the same market offering similar if not identical services. BranditScan has sent DMCA takedown notices to Google under three different notifier accounts.

Following policy adjustments by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in January, more foreign-born workers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields are able to live and work permanently in the United States. "The jump comes after USCIS in January 2022 tweaked its guidance criteria relating to two visa categories available to STEM workers," reports Science Magazine. "One is the O-1A, a temporary visa for 'aliens of extraordinary ability' that often paves the way to a green card. The second, which bestows a green card on those with advanced STEM degrees, governs a subset of an EB-2 (employment-based) visa." From the report: The USCIS data, reported exclusively by ScienceInsider, show that the number of O-1A visas awarded in the first year of the revised guidance jumped by almost 30%, to 4570, and held steady in fiscal year 2023, which ended on 30 September. Similarly, the number of STEM EB-2 visas approved in 2022 after a "national interest" waiver shot up by 55% over 2021, to 70,240, and stayed at that level this year. "I'm seeing more aspiring and early-stage startup founders believe there's a way forward for them," says Silicon Valley immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn. She predicts the policy changes will result in "new technology startups that would not have otherwise been created."

President Joe Biden has long sought to make it easier for foreign-born STEM workers to remain in the country and use their talent to spur the U.S. economy. But under the terms of a 1990 law, only 140,000 employment-based green cards may be issued annually, and no more than 7% of those can go to citizens of any one country. The ceiling is well below the demand. And the country quotas have created decades-long queues for scientists and high-tech entrepreneurs born in India and China. The 2022 guidance doesn't alter those limits on employment-based green cards but clarifies the visa process for foreign-born scientists pending any significant changes to the 1990 law. The O-1A work visa, which can be renewed indefinitely, was designed to accelerate the path to a green card for foreign-born high-tech entrepreneurs.

Although there is no cap on the number of O-1A visas awarded, foreign-born scientists have largely ignored this option because it wasn't clear what metrics USCIS would use to assess their application. The 2022 guidance on O-1As removed that uncertainty by listing eight criteria -- including awards, peer-reviewed publications, and reviewing the work of other scientistsâ"and stipulating that applicants need to satisfy at least three of them. The second visa policy change affects those with advanced STEM degrees seeking the national interest waiver for an EB-2. Under the normal process of obtaining such a visa, the Department of Labor requires employers to first satisfy rules meant to protect U.S. workers from foreign competition, for example, by showing that the company has failed to find a qualified domestic worker and that the job will pay the prevailing wage. That time-consuming exercise can be waived if visa applicants can prove they are doing "exceptional" work of "substantial merit and national importance." But once again, the standard for determining whether the labor-force requirements can be waived was vague, so relatively few STEM workers chose that route. The 2022 USCIS guidance not only specifies criteria, which closely track those for the nonimmigrant, O-1A visa, but also allows scientists to sponsor themselves.

Scientists discovered a way to break apart the membranes of cancer cells by stimulating aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light. Slashdot reader Baron_Yam shares a report from ScienceAlert: The research team from Rice University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas, says the new approach is a marked improvement over another kind of cancer-killing molecular machine previously developed, called Feringa-type motors, which could also break the structures of problematic cells. "It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers," says chemist James Tour from Rice University. "They are more than one million times faster in their mechanical motion than the former Feringa-type motors, and they can be activated with near-infrared light rather than visible light."

In tests on cultured, lab-grown cancer cells, the molecular jackhammer method scored a 99 percent hit rate at destroying the cells. The approach was also tested on mice with melanoma tumors, and half the animals became cancer-free. The structure and chemical properties of aminocyanine molecules mean they stay in sync with the right stimulus -- such as near-infrared light. When in motion, the electrons inside the molecules form what's known as plasmons, collectively vibrating entities that drive movement across the whole of the molecule. The plasmons have an arm on one side, helping to connect the molecules to the cancer cell membranes while the movements of the vibrations bash them apart. It's still early days for the research, but these initial findings are very promising. The research has been published in Nature Chemistry.

AstroForge, a private company, wants to mine a space rock, but it doesn't want the competition to find out which one. From a report: For generations, Western space missions have largely occurred out in the open. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the verge of a new era in which private interests override such openness, with big money potentially on the line. Sometime in the coming year, a spacecraft from AstroForge, an American asteroid-mining firm, may be launched on a mission to a rocky object near Earth's orbit. If successful, it will be the first wholly commercial deep-space mission beyond the moon. AstroForge, however, is keeping its target asteroid secret.

The secret space-rock mission is the latest in an emerging trend that astronomers and other experts do not welcome: commercial space missions conducted covertly. Such missions highlight gaps in the regulation of spaceflight as well as concerns about whether exploring the cosmos will continue to benefit all humankind. "I'm very much not in favor of having stuff swirling around the inner solar system without anyone knowing where it is," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. "It seems like a bad precedent to set." But for AstroForge, the calculation is simple: If it reveals the destination, a competitor may grab the asteroid's valuable metals for itself. "Announcing which asteroid we are targeting opens up risk that another entity could seize that asteroid," said Matt Gialich, AstroForge's chief executive.

From the depths of the Amazon rainforest to the deserts of Antarctica, huge questions remain unanswered about life on Earth. The Guardian asked leading scientists and conservationists: what is the one thing you would like to know about the planet that remains a mystery? TLDR, the questions/wishes are:1. How many species are there on Earth?
2. I'd go back 540m years to see the 'biological big bang'
3. Could some of the smallest life forms help avert climate crisis?
4. What is the full biodiversity of the Amazon or Congo basin rainforests?
5. How do animals influence the functioning of Earth?
6. What will happen to the Gulf Stream?
7. Do universal rules govern how plants and animals evolve?
8. How many humans could Earth support?
9. Which species will adapt to the climate crisis -- and which will not?

Abstract of a paper published on the American Psychological Association: People are frequently invited to join others for fun social activities. They may be invited to lunch, to attend a sporting event, to watch the season finale of a television show, and so forth. Invitees -- those who are on the receiving ends of invitations -- sometimes accept invitations from inviters -- those who extend invitations -- but other times, invitees decline. Unfortunately, saying no can be hard, leading invitees to accept invitations when they would rather not. The present work sheds light on one factor that makes it so hard to decline invitations.

We demonstrate that invitees overestimate the negative ramifications that arise in the eyes of inviters following an invitation decline. Invitees have exaggerated concerns about how much the decline will anger the inviter, signal that the invitee does not care about the inviter, make the inviter unlikely to offer another invitation in the future, and so forth. We also demonstrate that this asymmetry emerges in part because invitees exaggerate the degree to which inviters focus on the decline itself, as opposed to the thoughts ran through the invitee's head before deciding. Indeed, across multiple studies, we find support for this process through mediation and moderation, while simultaneously finding evidence against multiple alternative accounts. We conclude with a discussion of the contributions and limitations of this research, along with directions for future work.

"It's like visiting an old friend for the holidays," according to this article: Approaching his 86th birthday, Donald Knuth — Stanford's beloved computer science guru — honored what's become a long-standing tradition. He gave a December "Christmas lecture" that's also streamed online for all of his fans...

More than 60 years ago, back in 1962, a 24-year-old Donald Knuth first started writing The Art of Computer Programming — a comprehensive analysis of algorithms which, here in 2023, he's still trying to finish. And 30 years ago Knuth also began making rare live appearances each December in front of audiences of Stanford students...

Recently Stanford uploaded several decades of Knuth's past Christmas lectures, along with a series of 22 videos of Knuth from 1985 titled "the 'Aha' Sessions'" (courses in mathematical problem-solving). There are also two different sets of five videos from 1981 showing Knuth introducing his newly-created typesetting system TeX. There are even 12 videos from 1982 of what Knuth calls "an intensive course about the internal details."

And on Dec. 6, wearing his traditional brown holiday sweater, Knuth gave yet another live demonstration of the beautifully clear precision that's made him famous.

"The age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago when a city-size asteroid struck a shallow sea off the coast of what is now Mexico," writes CNN.

"But exactly how the mass extinction of 75% of the species on Earth unfolded in the years that followed the cataclysmic impact has remained unclear." Previous research suggested that sulfur released during the impact, which left the 112-mile-wide (180-kilometer-wide) Chicxulub crater, and soot from wildfires triggered a global winter, and temperatures plunged. However, a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests that fine dust made from pulverized rock thrown up into Earth's atmosphere in the wake of the impact likely played a greater role. This dust blocked the sun to an extent that plants were unable to photosynthesize, a biological process critical for life, for almost two years afterward.

"Photosynthesis shutting down for almost two years after impact caused severe challenges (for life)," said lead study author and planetary scientist Cem Berk Senel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "It collapsed the food web, creating a chain reaction of extinctions."

To reach their findings, scientists developed a new computer model to simulate the global climate after the asteroid strike. The model was based on published information on Earth's climate at that point in time, as well as new data from sediment samples taken from the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota that captured a 20-year period during the aftermath of the strike.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: If you've ever seen a cow staring vacantly across a field, or a pig rolling around in its own filth, you might not think there's a lot going on in their head. You wouldn't be alone. People haven't given much credence to the intelligence of farm animals, and neither have scientists. But that's starting to change.

A growing field of research is showing that—when it comes to the minds of goats, cows, and other livestock—we may have been missing something big. Studies published over the past few years have shown that pigs show signs of empathy, goats rival dogs in some tests of social intelligence, and cows can be potty trained.

Much of this work is being carried out at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Dummerstorf, Germany, one of the world's leading centers for investigating the minds of creatures that often end up on our dinner plate. From cows making friends to goats exhibiting signs of altruism, farm animals are upending popular—and scientific—conceptions of what's going on in their minds.

The work may not just rewrite our thinking about livestock, it might also change how we treat them. As Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at FBN told says, 'If we don't understand how these animals think, then we won't understand what they need. And if we don't understand what they need, we can't design better environments for them.'

The New Yorker looks at 41-year-old Amabel Holland, an autistic board-game designer who "thinks about the world in terms of systems," and realized you could make a board game about almost anything, "and, when you did, its rules could both mirror and analyze the subject on which it was based."

They've since designed more than 60 games, and the article notes that Holland's work, "which is part of a larger turn toward complexity in the industry, often tackles historical and social subjects — death, religion, misinformation — using surprising 'mechanics,' or building blocks of game play, to immerse players in an experience." "With every game, you build a certain model of the world," Reiner Knizia, a former mathematician who's designed more than eight hundred games, told me. Several of his games illustrate market forces: in Modern Art, for instance, you play as auctioneers and buyers, hoping to buy low and sell high. Knizia is a traditional game designer inasmuch as he aims to "bring enjoyment to the people." But Amabel sometimes aims for the opposite of enjoyment... This Guilty Land, from 2018, is about the struggle to end slavery."
Holland says their games are "meant to evoke frustration" — specifically to communicate how difficult it can be to actually achieve political progress.

Thanks to Slashdot reader silverjacket for sharing the article.

Scientists have developed a vibrating pill that, when swallowed before eating, can create a feeling of fullness. The Guardian reports: The research, which has yet to be carried out in humans, shows that after 30 minutes of activity by the Vibes pill, pigs ate on average almost 40% less food in the following half hour than they did without the device, and gained weight more slowly. The Vibes name is an acronym derived from the pill's full title -- Vibrating Ingestible BioElectronic Stimulator. The work in pigs suggests the vibrations activate stretch receptors in the stomach, simulating the presence of food. This results in signals being sent to the hypothalamus in the brain via the vagus nerve, increasing levels of various hormones that give rise to a feeling of fullness and decreasing those that result in feelings of hunger.

"We envision the Vibes pill being ingested on a relatively empty stomach 20 to 30 min before anticipated meals to trigger the desired sensation of satiety early in the meal,â the team write, adding that when produced at scale, the cost of the pills is expected to be in the cents to one dollar range. The vibrations, which are powered by a battery encased in the swallowed capsule, can be triggered when stomach acid dissolves a membrane around the pill, or by a timer. The researchers say the pills, which are about the size of a large vitamin tablet, offer a non-invasive, temporary therapy, without the need for weight-loss surgery, and exit the body with other solid waste -- meaning in humans they are flushed down the toilet. However they suggest it could be possible to develop pills that are implanted, or stay in the stomach, to reduce the need for people to repeatedly take them, should they require continuing therapy. Further reading: Man Reports PillCam Stuck In His Gut For Over 12 Weeks

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: From empty glasses of sherry on the mantelpiece to sooty footprints leading to the bedroom door, evidence of Santa's existence is clearly irrefutable. Yet most children will begin to question it at some point -- and many parents anticipate this moment with dread. Now psychologists have identified the average age when Santa skepticism creeps in, and which children are at greatest risk of harboring negative feelings when it does.

While most adults have fallen for the myth that Santa doesn't exist, many children still believe -- even if the idea of a single individual visiting the homes of billions of children in a single night is at odds with their wider reasoning skills. Dr Candice Mills, a psychologist at the University of Texas in Dallas, US, and a Santa sceptic, said: "Children typically begin to distinguish fantasy from reality during the preschool years, but their belief in the existence of a singular magical Santa Claus often continues into middle childhood." [...] To better understand this shift from belief to disbelief and children's experiences of it, Mills and her colleagues interviewed 48 six- to 15-year-olds who had stopped believing in Santa and 44 of their parents, plus a further 383 adults.

The research, which has not yet been peer reviewed, found that for most children, disbelief crept in gradually about the age of eight -- although some three- or four-year-olds had convinced themselves that Santa wasn't real, while other children believed in him until they were 15 or 16. In many cases, it was testimony from other disbelievers that finally crushed their faith. Mills said: "They may have had some skepticism based on logical reasoning -- like how can Santa Claus really get around the world in one night? -- but what pushes them over the edge is a classmate at school saying he's not real."

An anonymous reader shares a report: It may be the season of loving and giving, but doctors have warned against embracing this spirit too enthusiastically -- at least where sexual relations are concerned. They have discovered that the Christmas period is associated with a significantly increased risk of penile fractures -- a medical emergency in which the erection-producing regions of the penis snap, usually as a result of forceful bending during over-enthusiastic sexual intercourse. "This injury tends to occur during wild sex -- particularly in positions where you're not in direct eye contact [with your partner], such as the reverse cowgirl," said Dr Nikolaos Pyrgides, a urologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, who led the research.

The fractures are often heralded by an audible crack, followed by severe pain, rapid loss of erection and severe swelling and bruising. "When [patients] present to their doctor their penis often looks like an eggplant," Pyrgides said. Suspecting that the intimacy and euphoria of the festive season might be a risk factor for this type of injury, Pyrgides and his colleagues examined hospital data for 3,421 men who sustained penile fractures in Germany between 2005 and 2021. The study -- the first to explore seasonal patterns for this type of injury -- found that such injuries were indeed more common over Christmas. In fact, "if every day was like Christmas, 43% more penile fractures would have occurred in Germany from 2005 on," Pyrgides said. The research, which was published in the British Journal of Urology International, also found the risk increased at weekends and over the summer holidays. However, New Year's Eve was not associated with an increased incidence of penis injuries.

In 2005, the reclassification of pseudoephedrine to behind-the-counter status led to widespread use of oral phenylephrine in OTC decongestants, despite evidence of its ineffectiveness. Randy Hatton, a clinical professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida, and his colleague worked to bring this issue to the FDA's attention, revealing loopholes in the regulatory process for older OTC drugs. Hatton writes in an opinion piece for Scientific American: Before the FDA required that drugs had to be proven effective, it determined whether OTC drugs were effective through expert panels that reviewed existing data. These OTC monographs establish what older OTC ingredients can be marketed without FDA approval. The oral decongestant monograph panel reviewed a few published studies and multiple unpublished studies for phenylephrine. Of the unpublished studies, only four studies showed oral phenylephrine was effective, while seven showed it was no better than placebo. We requested copies of all evidence used by the nasal decongestant review panel via a Freedom of Information Act request and performed a systematic review and meta-analysis ourselves. [...]

The FDA has multiple regulatory processes for different types of medicinal compounds. People are perhaps most familiar with the New Drug Application process, which leads to clinical trials for prescription drug approvals. However, many OTC or nonprescription drugs are regulated differently. In fact, a law passed in 1951, the Durham-Humphrey Amendment to the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, created the categories of prescription and nonprescription drugs. In 1962, the act was amended again so that drugs had to be shown to be effective, hence the requirement for well-done clinical trials. But what about the drugs that were approved before 1962? This is the loophole that some OTC drugs fall through. For prescription drugs, FDA tried to address pre-1962 approvals through a review of over 3,000 prescription drugs. Most of those drugs have now been reviewed and addressed, but there are still unapproved prescription drugs on the market today, such as an extended-release form of oral nitroglycerin. For nonprescription drugs, FDA established the OTC monograph process 10 years after the 1962 amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which required products not proven effective to be reconsidered. FDA formed advisory panels grouping hundreds of ingredients into 26 categories based on the products' uses. After gathering all available information, both published and unpublished, from manufacturers, the advisory panels issued final reports to FDA about whether these ingredients were GRASE (generally recognized as safe and effective), not GRASE, or inconclusive. GRASE ingredients can be used in nonprescription drugs without FDA approval if the use matches the monograph. "The oral phenylephrine example shows that FDA needs more funding to look at these old drugs," concludes Hatton. "We need public funds to support independent researchers who want to examine these products objectively. The government should be able to spend millions to save consumers billions on ineffective products. Companies that market these products have no incentive to prove they don't work. Nonprescription drugs must be effective -- not just safe."

During a meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Kamala Harris said an international astronaut will land on the Moon during one of NASA's Artemis missions. "Today, in recognition of the essential role that our allies and partners play in the Artemis program, I am proud to announce that alongside American astronauts, we intend to land an international astronaut on the surface of the Moon by the end of the decade," Harris said. Ars Technica reports: Although the National Space Council is useful in aggregating disparate interests across the US government to help form more cohesive space policies, public meetings like the one Wednesday can seem perfunctory. Harris departed the stage soon after her speech, and other government officials read from prepared remarks during the rest of the event. Nevertheless, Harris' announcement highlighted the role the space program plays in elevating the soft power of the United States. It was widely assumed an international astronaut would eventually land on the Moon with NASA. Harris put a deadline on achieving this goal.

NASA has long included astronauts from its international partners on human spaceflight missions, dating back to the ninth flight of the space shuttle in 1983, when West German astronaut Ulf Merbold joined five Americans on a flight to low-Earth orbit. This was seen by US government officials as a way to foster closer relations with like-minded countries. The inclusion of foreign astronauts on US missions also repays partner nations who make financial commitments to US-led space projects with a high-profile flight opportunity for one of their citizens.

Among the international partners contributing to Artemis, it seems most likely a European astronaut would get the first slot for a landing with NASA. ESA funded the development of the service modules used on NASA's Orion spacecraft, which will ferry astronauts from Earth to the Moon and back. These modules provide power and propulsion for Orion. ESA is also developing refueling and communications infrastructure for the Gateway mini-space station to be constructed in orbit around the Moon.

A Japanese astronaut might also have a shot at getting a seat on an Artemis landing. Japan's government has committed to providing the life-support system for the Gateway's international habitation module, along with resupply services to deliver cargo to Gateway. Japan is also interested in building a pressurized rover for astronauts to drive across the lunar surface. In recognition of Japan's contributions, NASA last year committed to flying a Japanese astronaut aboard Gateway. Canada is building a robotic arm for Gateway, but a Canadian astronaut already has a seat on NASA's first crewed Artemis mission, albeit without a trip to the lunar surface.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Los Angeles Times: It was the late 1980s when Gary Mund felt his pinky tremble. At first it seemed like a random occurrence, but pretty quickly he realized something was seriously wrong. Within two years, Mund -- a crew worker with the Eastern Municipal Water District in Riverside County -- was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The illness would eventually consume much of his life, clouding his speech, zapping most of his motor skills and taking away his ability to work and drive. "It sucks," said Mund, 69. He speaks tersely, because every word is a hard-won battle. "I was told the herbicide wouldn't hurt you."

The herbicide is paraquat, an extremely powerful weed killer that Mund sprayed on vegetation as part of his job from about 1980 to 1985. Mund contends the product is responsible for his disease, but the manufacturer denies there is a causal link between the chemical and Parkinson's. Paraquat is manufactured by Syngenta, a Swiss-based company owned by the Chinese government. The chemical is banned in at least 58 countries -- including China and Switzerland -- due to its toxicity, yet it continues to be a popular herbicide in California and other parts of the United States. But research suggests the chemical may cross the blood-brain barrier in a manner that triggers Parkinson's disease, a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder that affects movement. Now, Mund is among thousands of workers suing Syngenta seeking damages and hoping to see the chemical banned.

Since 2017, more than 3,600 lawsuits have been filed in state and federal courts seeking damages from exposure to paraquat products, according to Syngenta's 2022 financial report (PDF). [...] Paraquat is 28 times more toxic than another controversial herbicide, Roundup, according to a report from the Pesticide Action Network. (Roundup has been banned in several parts of California, including a 2019 moratorium by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors forbidding its use by county departments.) Paraquat also has other known health effects. It is listed as "highly toxic" on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's website, which says that "one small sip can be fatal and there is no antidote." The EPA is currently reviewing paraquat's approval status. However, both the EPA and Syngenta cited a 2020 U.S. government Agricultural Health Study that found there is no clear link between paraquat exposure and Parkinson's disease. A 2021 review of reviews similarly found that there is no causal relationship.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments. This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.

The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions. Blue Origin's capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company's nonprofit.

For Tuesday's return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin's remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 am CST (16:42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers). The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin's capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight. Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.

NASA has successfully beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video from a record-setting 19 million miles away. The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, as it is called, is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming HD video from deep space to enable future human missions beyond Earth orbit. From a NASA press release: The [15-second test] video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system's maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent "live" to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time.

The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA's Psyche mission on Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet's greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.

Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche's orbital path, Palomar's telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater's heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. There's also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online. "Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections," said Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL. "In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL's DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology -- everyone loves Taters."

Using a "recently refurbished" telescope array, SETI scientists performed 541 hours of additional observations — and found 35 new "Fast Radio Bursts" (or FRBs). SciTechDaily reports: All 35 FRBs were found in the lower part of the frequency spectrum, each with its unique energy signature. "This work is exciting because it provides both confirmation of known FRB properties and the discovery of some new ones," said the SETI Institute's Dr. Sofia Sheikh, NSF MPS-Ascend Postdoctoral Fellow and lead author. "We're narrowing down the source of FRBs, for example, to extreme objects such as magnetars, but no existing model can explain all of the properties that have been observed so far. It has been wonderful to be part of the first FRB study done with the Allen Telescope Array — this work proves that new telescopes with unique capabilities, like the Allen Telescope Array, can provide a new angle on outstanding mysteries in FRB science."

The detailed findings, recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), showcase the intriguing behaviors of FRBs. These mysterious signals exhibit downward frequency drifting, a connection between their bandwidth and center frequency, and changes in burst duration over time. The team also observed something that had never been reported before: there was a noticeable drop in the center frequency of bursts over the two months of observation, revealing an unexpected cosmic slide-whistle...

No clear pattern was found, highlighting the unpredictability of these celestial phenomena.
SETI says its Allen Telescope Array (or ATA) was custom-built for SETI searches, "thanks to the interest and benevolence of many donors, including technologists Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) and Nathan Myhrvold (former Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft)." The Allen Telescope Array offers SETI scientists access to an instrument seven days a week, and permits the search of several different targets (usually nearby star systems) simultaneously. This can result in a speed-up of SETI searches by a factor of at least 100.

A system of lagoons has been discovered in Argentina hosting a rare range of microbial communities previously unknown to scientists. The microbial communities form giant mounds of rock as they grow — like corals building a reef millimeter by millimeter. And the University of Colorado points out that "the communities could also provide scientists with an unprecedented look at how life may have arisen on Mars, which resembled Earth billions of years ago."

"If life ever evolved on Mars to the level of fossils, it would have been like this," said geologist Brian Hynek, a professor in the department of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, who helped document the ecosystem. "Understanding these modern communities on Earth could inform us about what we should look for as we search for similar features in the Martian rocks."
more details from CNN: Stromatolites are layered rocks created by the growth of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, through photosynthesis. The structures are considered to be one of the oldest ecosystems on Earth, according to NASA, representing the earliest fossil evidence for life on our planet from at least 3.5 billion years ago. "These are certainly akin to some of the earliest macrofossils on our planet, and in really a rare type of environment on modern Earth," said Hynek...

While the stromatolites are in an environment containing oxygen, Hynek said he believes the layers farther down in the rock have little to no access to oxygen and are actively formed by microbes using anoxygenic photosynthesis. This would make the structures similar to the ones found on ancient Earth... "We've identified more than 600 ancient lakes on Mars; there may have even been an ocean. So, it was a lot more Earth-like early on," he said.

Of the 15,000 satellites humans have sent into space, "just over half are still functioning," reports CNN. "The rest, after running out of fuel and ending their serviceable life, have either burned up in the atmosphere or are still orbiting the planet as useless hunks of metal" — scattering "an aura of space junk around the planet."

"One way to start tackling the problem would be to stop producing more junk — by refueling satellites rather than decommissioning them once they run out of power." "Right now you can't refuel a satellite on orbit," says Daniel Faber, CEO of Orbit Fab. But his Colorado-based company wants to change that... "The lack of fuel creates a whole paradigm where people design their spacecraft missions around moving as little as possible. That means that we can't have tow trucks in orbit to get rid of any debris that happens to be left. We can't have repairs and maintenance, we can't upgrade anything. We can't inspect anything if it breaks. There are so many things we can't do and we operate in a very constrained way. That's the solution we're trying to deliver...."

Orbit Fab has no plans to address the existing fleet of satellites. Instead, it wants to focus on those that have yet to launch, and equip them with a standardized port — called RAFTI, for Rapid Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface — which would dramatically simplify the refueling operation, keeping the price tag down. "What we're looking at doing is creating a low-cost architecture," says Faber. "There's no commercially available fuel port for refueling a satellite in orbit yet. For all the big aspirations we have about a bustling space economy, really, what we're working on is the gas cap — we are a gas cap company." Orbit Fab, which advertises itself with the tagline "gas stations in space," is working on a system that includes the fuel port, refueling shuttles — which would deliver the fuel to a satellite in need — and refueling tankers, or orbital gas stations, which the shuttles could pick up the fuel from. It has advertised a price of $20 million for on-orbit delivery of hydrazine, the most common satellite propellant.

In 2018, the company launched two testbeds to the International Space Station to test the interfaces, the pumps and the plumbing. In 2021 it launched Tanker-001 Tenzing, a fuel depot demonstrator that informed the design of the current hardware. The next launch is now scheduled for 2024. "We are delivering fuel in geostationary orbit for a mission that is being undertaken by the Air Force Research Lab," says Faber. "At the moment, they're treating it as a demonstration, but it's getting a lot of interest from across the US government, from people that realize the value of refueling." Orbit Fab's first private customer will be Astroscale, a Japanese satellite servicing company that has developed the first satellite designed for refueling. Called LEXI, it will mount RAFTI ports and is currently scheduled to launch in 2026.

According to Simone D'Amico, an associate professor of astronautics at Stanford University, who's not affiliated with Orbit Fab, on-orbit servicing is one of the keys to ensuring a safe and sustainable development of space... "The development of space infrastructure and the proliferation of space assets is reaching a critical volume that is not sustainable anymore without a change of paradigm."
"In 10 or 15 years, we'd like to be building refineries in orbit," CEO Faber tells CNN, "processing material that is launched from the ground into a range of chemicals that people want to buy: air and water for commercial space stations, 3D printer feedstock minerals to grow plants. We want to be the industrial chemical supplier to the emerging commercial space industry."

The Washington Post reports that America's largest pharmacy chains have "handed over Americans' prescription records to police and government investigators without a warrant, a congressional investigation found, raising concerns about threats to medical privacy." Though some of the chains require their lawyers to review law enforcement requests, three of the largest — CVS Health, Kroger and Rite Aid, with a combined 60,000 locations nationwide — said they allow pharmacy staff members to hand over customers' medical records in the store... Pharmacies' records hold some of the most intimate details of their customers' personal lives, including years-old medical conditions and the prescriptions they take for mental health and birth control. Because the chains often share records across all locations, a pharmacy in one state can access a person's medical history from states with more-restrictive laws. Carly Zubrzycki, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut law school, wrote last year that this could link a person's out-of-state medical care via a "digital trail" back to their home state...

In briefings, officials with eight American pharmacy giants — Walgreens Boots Alliance, CVS, Walmart, Rite Aid, Kroger, Cigna, Optum Rx and Amazon Pharmacy — told congressional investigators that they required only a subpoena, not a warrant, to share the records.

A subpoena can be issued by a government agency and, unlike a court order or warrant, does not require a judge's approval. To obtain a warrant, law enforcement must convince a judge that the information is vital to investigate a crime. Officials with CVS, Kroger and Rite Aid said they instruct their pharmacy staff members to process law enforcement requests on the spot, saying the staff members face "extreme pressure to immediately respond," the lawmakers' letter said. The eight pharmacy giants told congressional investigators that they collectively received tens of thousands of legal demands every year, and that most were in connection with civil lawsuits. It's unclear how many were related to law enforcement demands, or how many requests were fulfilled.

Only one of the companies, Amazon, said it notified customers when law enforcement demanded its pharmacy records unless there was a legal prohibition, such as a "gag order," preventing it from doing so, the lawmakers said...

Most investigative requests come with a directive requiring the company to keep them confidential, a CVS spokeswoman said; for those that don't, the company considers "on a case-by-case basis whether it's appropriate to notify the individual."
The article points out that Americans "can request the companies tell them if they've ever disclosed their data...but very few people do.

"CVS, which has more than 40,000 pharmacists and 10,000 stores in the United States, said it received a 'single-digit number' of such consumer requests last year, the letter states."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Scientists have long viewed Saturn's moon Enceladus, which harbors an ocean beneath its thick, icy shell, as one of the best places to search for life beyond Earth. Now, a new analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017, has uncovered intriguing evidence that further supports the idea of Enceladus as a habitable ocean world.

Enceladus initially captured the attention of scientists in 2005 because plumes of ice grains and water vapor were observed rising through cracks in the moon's ice shell and releasing into space. The spacecraft flew through the plumes and "sampled" them, with data suggesting the presence of organic compounds within the plumes, some of which are key for life. The latest data analysis of Cassini's flybys of Enceladus revealed the detection of a molecule called hydrogen cyanide that's toxic to humans but crucial to processes driving the origin of life. What's more, the team also found evidence to support that Enceladus' ocean has organic compounds that provide a source of chemical energy that could potentially be used as powerful fuel for any form of life...

The combination of these elements together suggested a process called methanogenesis, or the metabolic creation of methane, may be at play on Enceladus. Scientists suspect methanogenesis may have also played out on early Earth, contributing to the origin of life. But the new research indicates more varied and powerful chemical energy sources are occurring within Enceladus' ocean... Now, the study authors want to investigate how diluted the organic compounds are within the subsurface ocean because the dilution of these compounds could determine whether Enceladus could support life. In the future, astronomers hope to send a dedicated mission to investigate Enceladus, which could provide a definitive answer as to whether life exists in the ocean world.
"Our work provides further evidence that Enceladus is host to some of the most important molecules for both creating the building blocks of life and for sustaining that life through metabolic reactions," accoding to one of the study's lead authors.

"Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now have an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved."