America's next president "announced Wednesday he has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman and space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX, to become the next NASA administrator," reports Ars Technica: In a post on X, Isaacman said he was "honored" to receive Trump's nomination. "Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history," Isaacman wrote. "On my last mission to space, my crew and I traveled farther from Earth than anyone in over half a century. I can confidently say this second space age has only just begun...."

"Jared Isaacman will be an outstanding NASA Administrator and leader of the NASA family," said Jim Bridenstine, who led NASA as administrator during Trump's first term in the White House. "Jared's vision for pushing boundaries, paired with his proven track record of success in private industry, positions him as an ideal candidate to lead NASA into a bold new era of exploration and discovery. I urge the Senate to swiftly confirm him." Lori Garver, NASA's deputy administrator during the Obama administration, wrote on X that Isaacman's nomination was "terrific news," adding that "he has the opportunity to build on NASA's amazing accomplishments to pave our way to an even brighter future."

Isaacman, 41, is the founder and CEO of Shift4, a mobile payment processing platform, and co-founded Draken International, which owns a fleet of retired fighter jets to pose as adversaries for military air combat training... Isaacman, an evangelist for the commercial space industry, has criticized some of NASA's decisions on the Artemis program. In several posts on X, he questioned the agency's decision to fund two redundant lunar landers, while not planning for any backup to the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which costs $2.2 billion per copy, not including expenses for ground infrastructure or the Orion spacecraft itself. One of those casualties might be the SLS rocket. The program is managed by NASA, with suppliers spread across the United States and prime contractors working under cost-plus arrangements with the space agency, meaning the government is on the hook to pay for any delays or cost overruns.
If confirmed he'll be the 4th NASA administrator who's actually flown in space, according to the article.

And according to Wikipedia, Isaacman was the commander of Inspiration4, a private spaceflight using SpaceX's Crew Dragon Resilience that launched in 2021. The crew returned to Earth on September 18, 2021, after orbiting at 585 km (364 mi) in altitude. The mission was part of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, to which Isaacman pledged to donate $100 million.
Thanks to Slashdot reader FallOutBoyTonto for sharing the news.

Nature: Millions of research articles are absent from major digital archives. This worrying finding, which Nature reported on earlier this year, was laid bare in a study by Martin Eve, who studies technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. Eve sampled more than seven million articles with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs), a string of characters used to identify and link to specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports. Of these, he found that more than two million were 'missing' from archives -- that is, they were not preserved in major archives that ensure literature can be found in the future.

Eve, who is also a research developer at Crossref, an organization that registers DOIs, carried out the study in an effort to better understand a problem librarians and archivists already knew about -- that although researchers are generating knowledge at an unprecedented rate, it is not necessarily being stored safely for the future. One contributing factor is that not all journals or scholarly societies survive in perpetuity. For example, a 2021 study found that a lack of comprehensive and open archiving meant that 174 open-access journals, covering all major research topics and geographical regions, vanished from the web in the first two decades of this millennium.

A lack of long-term archiving particularly affects institutions in low- and middle-income countries, less-affluent institutions in rich countries and smaller, under-resourced journals worldwide. Yet it's not clear whether researchers, institutions and governments have fully taken the problem on board. [...] At the heart of the problem is a lack of money, infrastructure and expertise to archive digital resources. [...] For institutions that can afford it, one solution is to pay a preservation archive to safeguard content. Examples include Portico, based in New York City, and CLOCKSS, based in Stanford, California, both of which count a raft of publishers and libraries as customers.

India has struck a landmark $715 million deal with 30 global academic publishers to provide nationwide free access to nearly 13,000 research journals. The "One Nation One Subscription" initiative, launching January 2025, will benefit an estimated 18 million students and researchers. The agreement, which surpasses similar arrangements in Germany and the UK, marks a significant shift in India's academic publishing landscape, despite the country's position as the world's third-largest producer of research papers. Science magazine: India's is expected to encompass some 6300 government-funded institutions, which produce almost half the country's research papers. Currently, only about 2300 of these institutions have subscriptions to 8000 journals. Under the new arrangement, "universities that aren't so well funded, and can't afford many journals, will gain," said Aniket Sule of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. Specialist institutes that only subscribe to journals relevant to their field will benefit from accessing work outside their silos, he added. Colleges that want to subscribe to journals not included under this initiative can use their own funds to do so.

Some part of the $715 million will cover the fees some journals charge to publish papers open access, making them immediately free to read by anyone worldwide when published, Madalli told Science. Details of that component have not been worked out yet, but the amount will be calculated based on the country's current spending on these fees, known as article-processing charges (APCs), which are paid by authors or their institutions, Madalli says.

"If NASA establishes a permanent presence on the moon, its astronauts' homes could be made of a new 3D-printable, waterless concrete," writes MIT Technology Review. "Someday, so might yours.

"By accelerating the curing process for more rapid construction, this sulfur-based compound could become just as applicable on our home terrain as it is on lunar soil..." Building a home base on the moon will demand a steep supply of moon-based infrastructure: launch pads, shelter, and radiation blockers. But shipping Earth-based concrete to the lunar surface bears a hefty price tag. Sending just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of material to the moon costs roughly $1.2 million, says Ali Kazemian, a robotic construction researcher at Louisiana State University (LSU). Instead, NASA hopes to create new materials from lunar soil and eventually adapt the same techniques for building on Mars.

Traditional concrete requires large amounts of water, a commodity that will be in short supply on the moon and critically important for life support or scientific research, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. While prior NASA projects have tested compounds that could be used to make "lunarcrete," they're still working to craft the right waterless material.

So LSU researchers are refining the formula, developing a new cement based on sulfur, which they heat until it's molten to bind material without the need for water. In recent work, the team mixed their waterless cement with simulated lunar and Martian soil to create a 3D-printable concrete, which they used to assemble walls and beams. "We need automated construction, and NASA thinks 3D printing is one of the few viable technologies for building lunar infrastructure," says Kazemian.

Beyond circumventing the need for water, the cement can handle wider temperature extremes and cures faster than traditional methods. The group used a pre-made powder for their experiments, but on the moon and Mars, astronauts might extract sulfur from surface soil.
Kazemian and his colleagues recently transferred the technology to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for further testing...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: The rapid increase in satellites and space junk will make low Earth orbit unusable unless companies and countries cooperate and share the data needed to manage that most accessible region of space, experts and industry insiders said. A United Nations panel on space traffic coordination in late October determined that urgent action was necessary and called for a comprehensive shared database of orbital objects as well as an international framework to track and manage them. More than 14,000 satellites including some 3,500 inactive surround the globe in low Earth orbit, showed data from U.S.-based Slingshot Aerospace. Alongside those are about 120 million pieces of debris from launches, collisions and wear-and-tear of which only a few thousand are large enough to track... [T]here is no centralised system that all space-faring nations can leverage and even persuading them to use such a system has many obstacles. Whereas some countries are willing to share data, others fear compromising security, particularly as satellites are often dual-use and include defence purposes. Moreover, enterprises are keen to guard commercial secrets.

In the meantime, the mess multiplies. A Chinese rocket stage exploded in August, adding thousands of fragments of debris to low Earth orbit. In June, a defunct Russian satellite exploded, scattering thousands of shards which forced astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter for an hour... Projections point to tens of thousands more satellites entering orbit in the coming years. The potential financial risk of collisions is likely to be $556 million over five years, based on a modelled scenario with a 3.13% annual collision probability and $111 million in yearly damages, said Montreal-based NorthStar Earth & Space...

[Aarti Holla-Maini, director of the U.N . Office for Outer Space Affairs], said the October panel aimed to bring together public- and private-sector experts to outline steps needed to start work on coordination. It will present its findings at a committee meeting next year. Global cooperation is essential to developing enforceable rules akin to those used by the International Civil Aviation Organization for air traffic, industry experts told Reuters. Such effort would involve the use of existing tools, such as databases, telescopes, radars and other sensors to track objects while improving coverage, early detection and data precision. Yet geopolitical tension and reluctance to share data with nations deemed unfriendly as well as commercial concerns over protecting proprietary information and competitive advantages remain significant barriers. That leaves operators of orbital equipment relying on informal or semi-formal methods of avoiding collisions, such as drawing on data from the U.S. Space Force or groups like the Space Data Association. However, this can involve issues such as accountability and inconsistent data standards.

"The top challenges are speed — as consensus-building takes time — and trust," Holla-Maini said. "Some countries simply can't communicate with others, but the U.N. can facilitate this process. Speed is our biggest enemy, but there's no alternative. It must be done."
Data from Slingshot Aerospace shows a 17% rise in close approaches per satellite over the past year, according to the article. (It adds that SpaceX data "showed Starlink satellites performed nearly 50,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres in the first half of 2024, about double the previous six months...)

The European Space Agency, which has fewer spacecraft than SpaceX, said in 2021 its manoeuvres have increased to three or four times per craft versus a historical average of one."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Most orange cats are boys, a quirk of feline genetics that also explains why almost all calicos and tortoiseshells are girls. Scientists curious about those sex differences—or perhaps just cat lovers—have spent more than 60 years unsuccessfully seeking the gene that causes orange fur and the striking patchwork of colors in calicos and tortoiseshells. Now, two teams have independently found the long-awaited mutation and discovered a protein that influences hair color in a way never seen before in any animal... Using skin samples collected from various cats, the researchers were able to hone in a mutation on the X chromosome that impacts how much of a protein a gene called Arhgap36 produces. Increasing the amount of the Arhgap36 in pigment producing cells called melanocytes activates a molecular pathway that produces a light red pigment.
"Scanning a database of 188 cat genomes, Barsh's team found every single orange, calico, and tortoiseshell cat had the exact same mutation," writes Science magazine. "The group reports the discovery this month on the preprint server bioRxiv. A separate study, also posted to bioRxiv this month, confirms these findings... They also found that skin from calico cats had more Arghap36 RNA in orange regions than in brown or black regions." Arhgap36's inactivation pattern in calicos and tortoiseshells is typical of a gene on the X chromosome, says Carolyn Brown [a University of British Columbia geneticist who was not involved in either study], but it's unusual that a deletion mutation would make a gene more active, not less. "There is probably something special about cats." Experts are thrilled by the two studies. "It's a long-awaited gene," says Leslie Lyons, a feline geneticist at the University of Missouri. The discovery of a new molecular pathway for hair color was unexpected, she says, but she's not surprised how complex the interactions seem to be. "No gene ever stands by itself."

Lyons would like to know where and when the mutation first appeared: There is some evidence, she says, that certain mummified Egyptian cats were orange. Research into cat color has revealed all kinds of phenomena, she says, including how the environment influences gene expression. "Everything you need to know about genetics you can learn from your cat."

"Spacecraft, satellites, and space-based systems all face cybersecurity threats that are becoming increasingly sophisticated and dangerous," reports CNBC.

"With interconnected technologies controlling everything from navigation to anti-ballistic missiles, a security breach could have catastrophic consequences." Critical space infrastructure is susceptible to threats across three key segments: in space, on the ground segment and within the communication links between the two. A break in one can be a cascading failure for all, said Wayne Lonstein, co-founder and CEO at VFT Solutions, and co-author of Cyber-Human Systems, Space Technologies, and Threats. "In many ways, the threats to critical infrastructure on Earth can cause vulnerabilities in space," Lonstein said. "Internet, power, spoofing and so many other vectors that can cause havoc in space," he added. The integration of artificial intelligence into space projects has heightened the risk of sophisticated cyber attacks orchestrated by state actors and individual hackers. AI integration into space exploration allows more decision-making with less human oversight.

For example, NASA is using AI to target scientific specimens for planetary rovers. However, reduced human oversight could make these missions more prone to unexplained and potentially calamitous cyberattacks, said Sylvester Kaczmarek, chief technology officer at OrbiSky Systems, which specializes in the integration of AI, robotics, cybersecurity, and edge computing in aerospace applications. Data poisoning, where attackers feed corrupted data to AI models, is one example of what could go wrong, Kaczmarek said. Another threat, he said, is model inversion, where adversaries reverse-engineer AI models to extract sensitive information, potentially compromising mission integrity. If compromised, AI systems could be used to interfere with or take control of strategically important national space missions...

The U.S. government is tightening up the integrity and security of AI systems in space. The 2023 Cyberspace Solarium Commission report stressed the importance of designating outer space as a critical infrastructure sector, urging enhanced cybersecurity protocols for satellite operators... The rivalry between the U.S. and China includes the new battleground of space. As both nations ramp up their space ambitions and militarized capabilities beyond Earth's atmosphere, the threat of cyberattacks targeting critical orbital assets has become an increasingly pressing concern... Space-based systems increasingly support critical infrastructure back on Earth, and any cyberattacks on these systems could undermine national security and economic interests.

"Polar oceans constitute emission hotspots during the summer," according to a new paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Science Advances. "And including those sea-to-air fluxes in an atmospheric chemistry-climate model "results in a net radiative effect that has far-reaching implications."

The research was led by a team of scientists from Spain's Institute of Marine Sciences and the Blas Cabrera Institute of Physical Chemistry, according to an announcement from the UK's University of East Anglia: Researchers have quantified for the first time the global emissions of a sulfur gas produced by marine life, revealing it cools the climate more than previously thought, especially over the Southern Ocean. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that the oceans not only capture and redistribute the sun's heat, but produce gases that make particles with immediate climatic effects, for example through the brightening of clouds that reflect this heat.

It broadens the climatic impact of marine sulfur because it adds a new compound, methanethiol, that had previously gone unnoticed. Researchers only detected the gas recently, because it used to be notoriously hard to measure and earlier work focussed on warmer oceans, whereas the polar oceans are the emission hotspots...

Their findings represent a major advance on one of the most groundbreaking theories proposed 40 years ago about the role of the ocean in regulating the Earth's climate. This suggested that microscopic plankton living on the surface of the seas produce sulfur in the form of a gas, dimethyl sulphide, that once in the atmosphere, oxidizes and forms small particles called aerosols. Aerosols reflect part of the solar radiation back into space and therefore reduce the heat retained by the Earth. Their cooling effect is magnified when they become involved in making clouds, with an effect opposite to, but of the same magnitude as, that of the well-known warming greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide or methane. The researchers argue that this new work improves our understanding of how the climate of the planet is regulated by adding a previously overlooked component and illustrates the crucial importance of sulfur aerosols. They also highlight the magnitude of the impact of human activity on the climate and that the planet will continue to warm if no action is taken.
The article includes this quote from one of the study's lead authors (Dr. Charel Wohl from the university's Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences). "Climate models have greatly overestimated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds. The work done here partially closes the longstanding knowledge gap between models and observations."

And the university's announcement argues that "With this discovery, scientists can now represent the climate more accurately in models that are used to make predictions of +1.5 degrees C or +2 degrees C warming, a huge contribution to policy making."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

To explain the origins of dark market, a new model of the universe has been proposed by researchers, reports Phys.org.

"Their idea is that dark matter would be produced during a infinitesimally short inflationary phase when the size of the universe quickly expanded exponentially..." Although inflation is mostly accepted by cosmologists as part of the Big Bang picture based on some evidence (though there is meaningful dissent), the driver of inflation is still unknown... [T]o-date research has not considered the possibility that a significant [amount] of dark matter could be produced during the inflationary expansion and not be diluted away. In the paper's WIFI model — Warm Inflation via ultraviolet Freeze-In — dark matter is created through small and rare interactions with particles in a hot, energetic environment. It contains a new mechanism where this production occurs just before the Big Bang, during cosmic inflation, leading to dark matter being formed much earlier than in existing theories...

"The thing that's unique to our model is that dark matter is successfully produced during inflation," said Katherine Freese, Director of the Weinberg Institute of Theoretical Physics and the Texas Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the paper. "In most [other] models, anything that is created during inflation is then 'inflated away' by the exponential expansion of the universe, to the point where there is essentially nothing left." In this new mechanism, all the dark matter that we observe today could have been created during that brief, pre-Big Bang period of inflation. The quantum field driving inflation, the inflation, loses some of its energy to radiation, and this radiation, in turn, produces dark matter particles via the freeze-in mechanism....

The WIFI [Warm Inflation via ultraviolet Freeze-In] model cannot yet be confirmed by observations. But a key part of the scenario, warm inflation, will be tested over the next decade by the so-called cosmic microwave background experiments. Confirming warm inflation would be a significant step for the WIFI model's dark matter production scenario.
"What was before inflation? Physicists have no idea."

The Washington Post reports on tens of thousands of Americans "forced to pay for medication" to prevent the HIV infections, "despite federal requirements guaranteeing free access to treatment...according to multiple studies and interviews with medical professionals, activists and patients." Insurance companies are skirting rules compelling them to pay for pre-exposure prophylaxis treatment, known as PrEP, researchers and HIV advocacy organizations say — leaving patients to shell out hundreds of dollars each year for medication co-pays, doctor visits and screenings required to stay on drugs that reduce the risk of contracting HIV through sex by 99 percent.

Under the Affordable Care Act, commercial insurers must cover certain preventive health services. This is supposed to include at least one form of oral PrEP and related health services, such as regular testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, for people at increased risk of contracting HIV, according to 2021 guidance from the Biden administration. Responding to complaints that patients were still being charged, the Biden administration in October released new guidance instructing private insurers to cover all forms of PrEP without prior authorization, including new long-acting injections.

Nearly a third of a national sample of 325 health coverage plans on government insurance marketplaces did not include PrEP on their lists of covered preventive services, according to the AIDS Institute, a New York-based nonprofit. Between 20 and 30 percent of PrEP users with commercial insurance still had to pay for it despite the coverage mandate, with an average cost of $227 for 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Government regulators have been slow to crack down on insurer violations, activists say, creating a barrier to getting more at-risk Americans on the medication. The CDC estimates that only a third of the more than 1 million people who could benefit from PrEP have received a prescription, according to its most recent data.
The issue appears to be lax enforcement against insurers who break rules, a policy advocate told the newspaper. America's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which enforces regulations for preventive care, "said it takes enforcement seriously and recently found two insurance plans in violation of coverage requirements following consumer complaints."

And the Post spoke to an official at America's Labor Department, who said they were investigating a complaint against a large insurance company, but "said the agency does not have enough staff to conduct proactive investigations and lacks the authority to sue and penalize insurers that break the rules."

Major academic publishers including Elsevier and Springer Nature are grappling with a sophisticated new journal hijacking scam that precisely mimics their websites to deceive researchers.

The fraudulent operation, reported by Retraction Watch, has cloned at least 13 legitimate journals through fake domains, according to Crossref data. The scam, the publication reports, features high-quality website clones that replicate even cookie consent popups. The operation assigns its own DOI prefix to published papers and offers paper-writing and peer review services typical of paper mills.

A million and a half years ago, amid giant storks and the ancestors of antelopes, two extinct relatives of humans walked along the same muddy lakeshore in what is today northern Kenya, new research suggests. From a report: An excavation team uncovered four sets of footprints preserved in the mud at the Turkana Basin, a site that has led to important breakthroughs in understanding human evolution. The discovery, announced on Thursday in a paper in the journal Science, is direct evidence that different kinds of human relatives, with distinct anatomies and gaits, inhabited the same place at the same time, the paper's authors say. It also raises questions about the extent of the species' interactions with each other.

"They might have walked by one another," said Kevin Hatala, an evolutionary anthropologist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh who led the study. "They might have looked up in the distance and seen another member of a closely related species, occupying the same landscape." Based on skeletal remains found in the region, Dr. Hatala's team attributed the footprints to Paranthropus boisei and Homo erectus, two types of hominins, the group consisting of our human lineage and closely related species. Paranthropus boisei had smaller brains along with wide, flat faces and massive teeth and chewing muscles; Homo erectus more closely resembled modern human proportions and are thought to be our direct ancestors.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers from Imperial College London have discovered that a space-returned sample from asteroid Ryugu was rapidly colonized by terrestrial microorganisms, even under stringent contamination control measures. In the study, [...] researchers analyzed sample A0180, a tiny (1 x 0.8 mm) particle collected by the JAXA Hayabusa 2 mission from asteroid Ryugu.

Transported to Earth in a hermetically sealed chamber, the sample was opened in nitrogen in a class 10,000 clean room to prevent contamination. Individual particles were picked with sterilized tools and stored under nitrogen in airtight containers. Before analysis, the sample underwent Nano-X-ray computed tomography and was embedded in an epoxy resin block for scanning electron microscopy. Rods and filaments of organic matter, interpreted as filamentous microorganisms, were observed on the sample's surface. Variations in size and morphology of these structures resembled known terrestrial microbes. Observations showed that the abundance of these filaments changed over time, suggesting the growth and decline of a prokaryote population with a generation time of 5.2 days.

Population statistics indicate that the microorganisms originated from terrestrial contamination during the sample preparation stage rather than being indigenous to the asteroid. Results of the study determined that terrestrial biota had rapidly colonized the extraterrestrial material, even under strict contamination control. Researchers recommend enhanced contamination control procedures for future sample-return missions to prevent microbial colonization and ensure the integrity of extraterrestrial samples. Another factor in gathering contamination-free sampling is that everything used to collect extraterrestrial material originates on a planet awash in microbial life.

A University of Birmingham study reveals that PFAS and microplastics have a synergistic effect that significantly increases their toxicity. "The study's authors exposed water fleas to mixtures of the toxic substances and found they suffered more severe health effects, including lower birth rates, and developmental problems, such as delayed sexual maturity and stunted growth," reports The Guardian. From the report: The enhanced toxic effects raise alarm because PFAS and microplastics are researched and regulated in isolation from one one another, but humans are virtually always exposed to both. The research also showed those fleas previously exposed to chemical pollution were less able to withstand the new exposures. The findings "underscore the critical need to understand the impacts of chemical mixtures on wildlife and human health," wrote the study's authors, who are with the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

Researchers compared a group of water fleas that had never been exposed to pollution with another group that had been exposed to pollution in the past. Water fleas have high sensitivity to chemicals so they are frequently used to study ecological toxicity. Both groups were exposed to bits of PET, a common microplastic, as well as PFOA and PFOS, two of the most common and dangerous PFAS compounds. The mixture reflected conditions common in lakes around the world.

The study's authors found the mixture to be more toxic than PFAS and microplastics in isolation. They attributed about 40% of the increased toxicity to a synergy among the substances that makes them even more dangerous. The authors theorized the synergy has to do with the interplay in the charges of microplastics and PFAS compounds. The remainder of the increased toxicity was attributed to simple addition of their toxic effects. Fleas exposed to the mixture showed a "markedly reduced number of offspring," the authors said. They were also smaller at maturation and showed delayed sexual growth.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Virtual- and augmented-reality setups already modify the way users see and hear the world around them. Add in haptic feedback for a sense of touch and a VR version of Smell-O-Vision, and only one major sense remains: taste. To fill the gap, researchers at the City University of Hong Kong have developed a new interface to simulate taste in virtual and other extended reality (XR). The group previously worked on other systems for wearable interfaces, such as haptic and olfactory feedback. To create a more "immersive VR experience," they turned to adding taste sensations, says Yiming Liu, a coauthor of the group's research paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The lollipop-shaped lickable device can produce nine different flavors: sugar, salt, citric acid, cherry, passion fruit, green tea, milk, durian, and grapefruit. Each flavor is produced by food-grade chemicals embedded in a pocket of agarose gel. When a voltage is applied to the gel, the chemicals are transported to the surface in a liquid that then mixes with saliva on the tongue like a real lollipop. Increase the voltage, and get a stronger flavor. Initially, the researchers tested several methods for simulating taste, including electrostimulating the tongue. The other methods each came with limitations, such as being too bulky or less safe, so the researchers opted for chemical delivery through a process called iontophoresis, which moves chemicals and ions through hydrogels and has a low electrical-power requirement. With a 2-volt maximum, the device is well within the human safety limit of 30 V, which is considered enough to deliver a substantial shock in some situations. Some of the possible applications mentioned by the authors include gustation tests, virtual grocery shopping, and immersive environments for exploring food flavors. However, the current system is limited to one hour of use due to gel depletion and it only supports a handful of flavor channels.

Future development aims to extend operation time, increase flavor complexity, and improve usability, marking the beginning of a new frontier for XR interfaces.

An asteroid named 2024 PT5, recently exhibiting "mini moon" behavior around Earth, may have been a boulder that was blasted off the moon by an impacting, crater-forming asteroid," reports the Associated Press. The 33-foot space rock is expected to pass safely near Earth in January, when it will be closely observed. From the report: While not technically a moon -- NASA stresses it was never captured by Earth's gravity and fully in orbit -- it's "an interesting object" worthy of study. The astrophysicist brothers who identified the asteroid's "mini moon behavior," Raul and Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid, have collaborated with telescopes in the Canary Islands for hundreds of observations so far.

Currently more than 2 million miles (3.5 million kilometers) away, the object is too small and faint to see without a powerful telescope. It will pass as close as 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) of Earth in January, maintaining a safe distance before it zooms farther into the solar system while orbiting the sun, not to return until 2055. That's almost five times farther than the moon. [...] NASA will track the asteroid for more than a week in January using the Goldstone solar system radar antenna in California's Mojave Desert, part of the Deep Space Network.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, according to a sweeping new study. The findings have wide-reaching implications for the nation's health and medical costs as it faces a growing burden of weight-related diseases.

The study reveals the striking rise of obesity rates nationwide since 1990 -- when just over half of adults were overweight or obese -- and shows how more people are becoming overweight or obese at younger ages than in the past. Both conditions can raise the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, and shorten life expectancy.

The study's authors documented increases in the rates of overweight and obesity across ages. They were particularly alarmed by the steep rise among children, more than one in three of whom are now overweight or obese. Without aggressive intervention, they forecast, the number of overweight and obese people will continue to go up -- reaching nearly 260 million people in 2050. Further reading: Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss.

"Scientists have found what seems to be the oldest direct evidence of hot water flowing on Mars during its ancient past," reports Space.com.

"The discovery could further indicate that the Red Planet, despite its arid and desolate appearance today, may have been capable of supporting life long ago." The evidence was delivered to Earth and sealed within the well-known Martian meteorite NWA7034, found in the Sahara Desert in 2011. Due to its black, highly polished appearance, the Martian rock is also known as "Black Beauty." At an estimated 2 billion years old, Black Beauty is the second oldest Martian meteorite ever discovered. However, the Curtin University team discovered something even older within it: a 4.45 billion-year-old zircon grain that harbors the fingerprints of fluids rich in water.

Team member Aaron Cavosie from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences thinks this discovery will open up new avenues to understanding hydrothermal systems associated with the activity of volcanic magma that once ran through Mars. "We used nano-scale geochemistry to detect elemental evidence of hot water on Mars 4.45 billion years ago," Cavosie said in a statement. "Hydrothermal systems were essential for the development of life on Earth, and our findings suggest Mars also had water, a key ingredient for habitable environments, during the earliest history of crust formation...."

[T]his new research implies that water in liquid form may have existed on Mars even earlier than previously expected in the planet's pre-Noachian period.

NBC News reports that a newly identified chemical byproduct "may be present in drinking water in about a third of U.S. homes, a study found."

"Scientists do not yet know whether the byproduct is dangerous. But some are worried that it could have toxic properties because of similarities to other chemicals of concern." The newly identified substance, named "chloronitramide anion," is produced when water is treated with chloramine, a chemical formed by mixing chlorine and ammonia. Chloramine is often used to kill viruses and bacteria in municipal water treatment systems. Researchers said the existence of the byproduct was discovered about 40 years ago, but it was only identified now because analysis techniques have improved, which finally enabled scientists to determine the chemical's structure.

It could take years to figure out whether chloronitramide anion is dangerous — it's never been studied. The researchers reported their findings Thursday in the journal Science, in part to spur research to address safety concerns. The scientists said they have no hard evidence to suggest that the compound represents a danger, but that it bears similarities to other chemicals of concern. They think it deserves scrutiny because it's been detected so widely...

David Reckhow, a research professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved with the study, said the finding was an important step. The ultimate goal, he said, is understanding whether the substance is a hazard; he concurred that it was likely toxic. "It's a pretty small molecule and it can probably for that reason enter into biological systems and into cells. And it is still a reactive molecule," he said. "Those are the kinds of things you worry about."
"It's estimated more than 113 million people drink chloraminated processed water in the U.S.," according to a follow-up article by ABC News.

But they also include this quote from Dr. Stephanie Widmer, a board-certified medical toxicologist and emergency medicine physician. "The reality is that no one really knows too much about this chloronitramide and its impact on human health, and more research needs to be done. These disinfecting chemicals have been giving us clean drinking water for decades, so no reason to fear drinking water as a result of this study." Although ABC News tacks on this sentence.

"The study authors suggest, in general, adding a carbon filter to a sink or a standalone pitcher may be a good option for those concerned."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Greymane for sharing the news.

June, 2023: "Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings."

November, 2024: "The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger." A senior editor at the Atlantic raises the possibility of systemic dishonesty-rewarding incentives where "a study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out," writing that "More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied."

And the suspect isn't just Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. One person deeply affected by all this is Gino's co-author, a business school professor from the University of California at Berkeley — Juliana Schroeder — who launched an audit of all 138 studies conducted by Francesca Gino (called "The Many Coauthors Project"): Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected — and it was one that she herself had helped write... The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino's at Harvard Business School.... If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder's audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino's suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest... But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren't linked to Gino.... Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred...

In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she'd blown the whistle on herself. That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she'd found "an issue" with one more paper that she'd produced with Gino... [Schroeder] said that the source of the error wasn't her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused...

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. "The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth," Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. "It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it...." [Tourish also published a 2019 book decrying "Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research," which the article notes "cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they've encountered fabricated or falsified data."] Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, [Schroeder] said. "The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we'll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility."

"Do you believe that?" I asked.

"On my optimistic days, I believe it."

"Is today an optimistic day?"

"Not really."

Neuralink, the brain chip startup founded by Elon Musk, says it has received approval to launch its first clinical trial in Canada for a device designed to give paralysed individuals the ability to use digital devices simply by thinking. Reuters reports: [T]he Canadian study aims to assess the safety and initial functionality of its implant which enables people with quadriplegia, or paralysis of all four limbs, to control external devices with their thoughts. Canada's University Health Network hospital said in a separate statement that its Toronto facility had been selected to perform the complex neurosurgical procedure. Neuralink has successfully implanted the device in two patients in the United States. One of the patients has been using it to play video games and learn how to design 3D objects.

A team of undergraduate students from the University of Southern California's Rocket Propulsion Lab set multiple amateur spaceflight records with their rocket, Aftershock II. "The student-made missile soared 90,000 feet (27,400 meters) beyond the previous record-holder -- a rocket launched more than 20 years ago," reports Live Science. From the report: The students launched Aftershock II on Oct. 20 from a site in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. The rocket stood about 14 feet (4 meters) tall and weighed 330 pounds (150 kilograms). The rocket broke the sound barrier just two seconds after liftoff and reached its maximum speed roughly 19 seconds after launch, the RPL team wrote in a Nov. 14 paper summarizing the launch. The rocket's engine then burned out, but the craft continued to climb as atmospheric resistance decreased, enabling it to leave Earth's atmosphere 85 seconds after launch and then reach its highest elevation, or apogee, 92 seconds later. At this point, the nose cone separated from the rest of the rocket and deployed a parachute so it could safely reenter the atmosphere and touch down in the desert, where it was collected by the RPL team for analysis.

The rocket's apogee was around 470,000 feet (143,300 m) above Earth's surface, which is "further into space than any non-governmental and non-commercial group has ever flown before," USC representatives wrote in a statement. The previous record of 380,000 feet (115,800 m) was set in 2004 by the GoFast rocket made by the Civilian Space Exploration Team. During the flight, Aftershock II reached a maximum speed of around 3,600 mph (5,800 km/h), or Mach 5.5 -- five and a half times the speed of sound. This was slightly faster than GoFast, which had also held the amateur speed record for 20 years.

But elevation and speed were not the only records Aftershock II broke. "This achievement represents several engineering firsts," Ryan Kraemer, an undergraduate mechanical engineering student at USC and executive engineer of the RPL team who will soon join SpaceX's Starship team, said in the statement. "Aftershock II is distinguished by the most powerful solid-propellant motor ever fired by students and the most powerful composite case motor made by amateurs."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: After asking both SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop cargo landers for its Artemis missions, NASA has announced plans to use those landers to deliver heavy equipment to the Moon. The agency wants Elon Musk's SpaceX to use its Starship cargo lander to deliver a pressurized rover to the Moon "no earlier" than 2032, while Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will be tasked with delivering a lunar surface habitat no sooner than 2033. Both launches will support NASA's Artemis missions, which aim to bring humans back to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years.

Both companies are developing human landing systems for Artemis missions -- SpaceX for Artemis III and Blue Origin for Artemis V. NASA later asked both companies to develop cargo-hauling variants of those landers, capable of carrying 26,000 to 33,000 pounds of equipment and other materials to the Moon. NASA says it will issue proposals to SpaceX and Blue Origin at the beginning of next year.

Space.com's Julian Dossett writes: For twelve years, we've watched Curiosity crawl its way over the rocky surface of Mars, decoding mysteries of the Red Planet and broadcasting back home pictures and data from the strange Martian environment. The Mars rover, built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), has slowly scaled Mount Sharp since 2014. This mountain, officially monikered "Aeolis Mons," was discovered in the 1970s; cut into its alien landscape is the boulder-packed Gediz Vallis channel, which some scientists believe to be an ancient river bed.

Curiosity crossed into Gediz Vallis earlier this year -- and, yesterday, JPL released a real treat for Mars lovers: a 360-degree panorama view of the Gediz Vallis channel. You can play the YouTube video and move your phone around for the nifty interactive feature. Or, if you're using a desktop PC, you can shift the video around with a mouse. The panorama showcases features like Kukenan Butte and Gale Crater Rim, with scientists debating whether water, wind, or landslides shaped the boulder-laden terrain. Another interesting observation is the presence of mysterious sulfur stones with yellow crystals. Scientists are unsure about their origin since such formations on Earth are linked to hot springs and volcanoes -- neither of which are known to exist on Mars.

Curiosity is now heading toward a location called "the boxwork," a mineral-rich area potentially formed by ancient water flows.

Scientists unveiled on Wednesday the first blueprint of human skeletal development as they make progress toward the goal of completing a biological atlas of every cell type in the body to better understand human health and diagnose and treat disease. From a report: The work is part of the ongoing Human Cell Atlas project that was begun in 2016 and involves researchers around the world. The human body comprises roughly 37 trillion cells, with each cell type having a unique function. The researchers aim to have a first draft of the atlas done in the next year or two.

Aviv Regev, founding co-chair of the project and currently executive vice president and head of research and early development at U.S. biotech company Genentech, said the work is important on two levels. "First of all, it's our basic human curiosity. We want to know what we're made of. I think humans have always wanted to know what they're made of. And, in fact, biologists have been mapping cells since the 1600s for that reason," Regev said. "The second and very pragmatic reason is that this is essential for us in order to understand and treat disease. Cells are the basic unit of life, and when things go wrong, they go wrong with our cells, first and foremost," Regev said.

SpaceX's Starship rocket successfully completed its sixth launch today. Not only did it carry the first-ever payload but it also briefly re-lit one of its six Raptor engines about 38 minutes into flight, a crucial milestone for future space missions. Space Magazine reports: SpaceX landed Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, back at the launch tower on the vehicle's most recent flight, which occurred on Oct. 13. The company aimed to repeat that feat -- which the tower achieved with its "chopstick" arms -- today, but the flight data didn't support an attempt. "We tripped a commit criteria," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the company's Flight 6 webcast. So Super Heavy ended up coming down for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico instead, hitting the waves seven minutes after liftoff.

Today's mission aimed to do far more than just bring Super Heavy back to Earth in one piece. SpaceX also wanted to put Starship's upper stage -- a 165-foot-tall (50 m) spacecraft called Starship, or simply "Ship" -- through its paces. The launch sent Ship on the same semi-orbital trajectory that it took on Flight 5, targeting a splashdown in the Indian Ocean off the northwestern coast of Australia about 65 minutes after liftoff. But Ship also achieved some new milestones along the way this time. For example, Flight 6 carried the first-ever Starship payload -- a plush banana onboard Ship, which served as a zero-gravity indicator. (It was not deployed into space.) In addition, Ship briefly re-lit one of its six Raptor engines about 38 minutes into the flight. (Super Heavy also employs Raptors -- a whopping 33 of them.)

This burn helped show that Ship can perform the maneuvers needed to come back to Earth safely during orbital missions. Indeed, Ship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, just like Super Heavy; SpaceX eventually intends to catch it with the chopstick arms as well, and will likely try to do so on a test flight in the near future. Flight 6 also tested modifications to Ship's heat shield, which protects the vehicle during reentry to Earth's atmosphere.

Ranga Dias, a physics professor who made headlines with claims that he had discovered a room-temperature superconductor and then was found to have engaged in research misconduct, is no longer employed by the University of Rochester. WSJ: A spokeswoman for the university confirmed on Monday that Dias is out but declined to comment on the terms of his departure. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Rochester President Sarah Mangelsdorf had called for terminating his position in an August letter to the chair and vice chair of the university's Board of Trustees.

Dias leaves the university after years of accusations that he had misrepresented data in multiple papers. He is a senior author on at least five papers retracted in just over two years. One of those, which identified a material that functioned as a superconductor at room temperature, was pulled by the journal Nature after several co-authors told the journal that Dias had misrepresented information in the paper. Dias didn't respond to requests for comment. He has previously denied manipulating or misrepresenting data.

His departure follows a monthslong university investigation completed in February that was led by three outside experts who reviewed documents and data from Dias's laboratory computers and interviewed Dias and his collaborators. The investigative panel found evidence of misconduct in four papers in which Dias is a senior author and in a grant proposal he submitted to the National Science Foundation. Then-provost David Figlio accepted the conclusions and referred his case to a faculty committee "for potential removal." Dias sued the university in February claiming that the probe into his work was biased and didn't follow university policies.

India plans to build a moon-orbiting space station by 2040 that will support crewed missions to the moon and serve as a hub for scientific research. Space Magazine reports: If all goes according to plan, the lunar space station will be completed around the same time the nation's astronauts land on the moon, with construction of a permanent base on the surface before 2050. The lunar space station appears to be the third and final phase of India's moon exploration efforts. [...]

The lunar space station may be similar to the one India plans to build in Earth orbit, known as the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, or BAS. The development of this station's first module, BAS-1, was greenlit by the Indian government in September. Officials have said the first module will be launched to low Earth orbit by 2028, and the entire station will be operational by 2035.

Dr. Adam Rodman, a Boston-based internal medicine expert, helped design a study testing 50 licensed physicians to see whether ChatGPT improved their diagnoses, reports the New York TImes. The results? "Doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot.

"And, to the researchers' surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors." [ChatGPT-4] scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.

The study showed more than just the chatbot's superior performance. It unveiled doctors' sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one.

And the study illustrated that while doctors are being exposed to the tools of artificial intelligence for their work, few know how to exploit the abilities of chatbots. As a result, they failed to take advantage of A.I. systems' ability to solve complex diagnostic problems and offer explanations for their diagnoses. A.I. systems should be "doctor extenders," Dr. Rodman said, offering valuable second opinions on diagnoses.
"The results were similar across subgroups of different training levels and experience with the chatbot," the study concludes. "These results suggest that access alone to LLMs will not improve overall physician diagnostic reasoning in practice.

"These findings are particularly relevant now that many health systems offer Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant chatbots that physicians can use in clinical settings, often with no to minimal training on how to use these tools."

Nyx is a new reusable space capsule that "safely and affordably carries cargo to and from space stations," according to the web page of its European-based manufacturer, The Exploration Company, "launching from any heavy launcher worldwide."

And the company "just closed a large funding round to further its mission of building Europe's first reusable space capsule," reports TechCrunch — pointing out that right now, "Only two companies currently provide cargo delivery to and from the International Space Station, and both are based in the United States." The $160 million Series B round will fund the continued development of the Nyx spacecraft, which will be capable of carrying 3,000 kilograms of cargo to and from Earth. The company, which was founded three years ago by aerospace engineers Hélène Huby, Sebastien Reichstat, and Pierre Vine, is aiming to conduct Nyx's maiden flight to and from the International Space Station in 2028.

"We are the first company in the world where this is for the first time mainly funded by private investors," Huby said in a recent interview. This is in contrast to SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which she said was "mainly funded by NASA." The new funding, which was led by Balderton Capital and Plural, brings the startup's total funding to date to over $208 million. The Series B also included participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, NGP Capital, and two sovereign European funds, French Tech Souveraineté and DeepTech & Climate Fonds. "We've been able to deliver on promises in the past three years," Huby said. "We've been able to meet our cash target ever quarter ... The investors, they could see that we basically can deliver on time, on cost, on quality."

The startup has made traction with the European Space Agency, which has recognized the need to foster native space launch and transportation capabilities... It's a promising start, but equally promising is the traction The Exploration Company is seeing on the commercial side. Around 90% of the startup's $770 million contract backlog has come from private station developers Vast, Axiom Space, and Starlab, according to recent reporting...

The second sub-scale demonstrator mission, called Mission Possible, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 next year.
TechCrunch quotes Huby as saying "I highly respect what SpaceX has been able to achieve.We are trying to learn as much as possible from that, we are inspired by what they have achieved."

In a CNBC interview, Huby says "It's a big market, and it's growing about a bit more than 10% per year because more nations want to fly their astronauts and more nations want to go to the moon. So there is an increased demand for sending people to stations, sending cargo to stations."

"Join us on our mission to democratize access to space," says a home-page link to the company's recruiting page — with a link further down titled "Book a mission."

A reusable uncrewed spaceplane was unveiled this week for delivering and returning cargo from the Chinese Tiangong space station. It was built by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute (part of the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China). (See YouTube footage here...)

Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: Like the Sierra Space "Dream Chaser" [still under development], the vehicle is to be launched as a payload on a separate launch vehicle, and land horizontally on Earth on a runway. The design is aerodynamically a hybrid, incorporating features of both winged and lifting-body designs. A model of the Haolong will make its debut at the 15th "Airshow China", November 12 to 17 in Zhuhai.
"The China Manned Space Agency shortlisted the spacecraft as one of two proposed affordable cargo spacecraft designs," reports Aviation Week.

Chances of intelligent life emerging in our Universe "and in any hypothetical ones beyond it" can be estimated by a new theoretical model, reports the Royal Astronomical Society.

Since stars are a precondition for the emergence of life, the new research predicts that a typical observer [i.e., intelligent life] should experience a substantially larger density of dark energy than is seen in our own Universe... The approach presented in the paper involves calculating the fraction of ordinary matter converted into stars over the entire history of the Universe, for different dark energy densities. The model predicts this fraction would be approximately 27% in a universe that is most efficient at forming stars, compared to 23% in our own Universe. Dark energy makes the Universe expand faster, balancing gravity's pull and creating a universe where both expansion and structure formation are possible. However, for life to develop, there would need to be regions where matter can clump together to form stars and planets, and it would need to remain stable for billions of years to allow life to evolve.

Crucially, the research suggests that the astrophysics of star formation and the evolution of the large-scale structure of the Universe combine in a subtle way to determine the optimal value of the dark energy density needed for the generation of intelligent life. Professor Lucas Lombriser, Université de Genève and co-author of the study, added: "It will be exciting to employ the model to explore the emergence of life across different universes and see whether some fundamental questions we ask ourselves about our own Universe must be reinterpreted."
The study was funded by the EU's European Research Council, and published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Remember those 43 monkeys that escaped from a U.S. research lab? They've caught 35 of them — but haven't yet caught the other eight.

But even worse... The Independent reports that now another animal escape has led to "reports of two large emus running riot..." The birds' owner, Sam Morace, took to social media to plead with locals for their patience, saying: "For everyone that keeps seeing an emu, yes it is mine. There are 2 of them out." Morace said their two flightless birds broke loose three months ago.... "They are feral and not trained like the ones we have at the house."
This provoked some discussion on Facebook. ("Does nobody learn to lasso anymore?") But Morace responded that you "can't lasso a bird you have to grab them by their feet. Their necks are super long and fragile." In another post Morace detailed efforts to capture their birds. "Local law enforcement has already been at my house, we are trying to get a tranquilizer approved so we can bring them home.

"Thank you for all the concerns and questions. But if the emus were that easy to catch they would be home already.

If you're wondering how the escaped monkeys are doing out in the wild, someone who photographed them earlier this week said they appeared "playful, curious and jumping from tree to tree." The Guardian reports local officials have now "requested that the public avoid using drones near the facility. Earlier in the week, they reported that a drone incident 'spooked' the monkeys, increasing their stress levels and complicating efforts to recapture them."

Their article also notes reports that the facility houses 7,000 monkeys. And this isn't the first time some have escaped... In 2016, 19 monkeys escaped from the same facility, according to the Post and Courier newspaper, but were returned after six hours. Earlier, in 2014, 26 macaques reportedly escaped and were captured within two days. Documents from federal regulators from previous years revealed other incidents at the facility, as reported by the New York Times. One involved a primate escaping while being transported to the medical clinic and subsequently disappearing into the woods. Another involved two monkeys breaking out of their outdoor chain-link enclosure, which reportedly resulted in one monkey being lured back inside and the other dying shortly after being recaptured. In 2017, the Department of Agriculture fined the company more than $12,000 partly due to failures to contain the animals, according to the New York Times.
The Guardian also links to a related read from February: "Plan for US 'mini-city' of 30,000 monkeys for medical research faces backlash." Over the next 20 years, the facility will assemble a mega-troop of about 30,000 long-tailed macaques, a species native to south-east Asia, in vast barn-like structures in Bainbridge, Georgia, which has a human population of just 14,000... But the plan faces fierce opposition, with some Bainbridge residents calling on local authorities to block the construction of the proposed primate manse. "They're an invasive species and 30,000 of them, we'd just be overrun with monkeys," claimed Ted Lee, a local man. "I don't think anybody would want 30,000 monkeys next door," added David Barber, who would live just 400ft from the new facility.

"NASA has emphasized the ISS crew is in no immediate danger," reports Space.com. "The leaking area in the Russian segment of the orbital complex has been ongoing for five years," and "there was a temporary increase in the leak rate that was patched earlier this year..."

Former astronaut Bob Cabana emphasized that troubleshooting is ongoing during a brief livestreamed meeting on Wednesday. But NASA and Roscosmos "don't have a common understanding of what the likely root causes or the severity of the consequences of these leaks." "The Russian position is that the most probable cause of the cracks is high cycling caused by micro-vibrations," Cabana said, referring to flexing of metal and similar components that heat and cool as the ISS orbits in and out of sunlight. "NASA believes the PrK cracks are likely multi-causal — including pressure and mechanical stress, residual stress, material properties and environmental exposures," Cabana continued.

NASA and Russia disagree about whether "continued operations are safe", he added, but the remedy for now is to keep the hatch closed between the U.S. and Russian side as investigations continue.

The two agencies will continue meeting to seek "common understanding of the structural integrity", Cabana pledged, but he did not provide a timeline. Academic and industry experts will also be consulted.

Slashdot reader jjslash brings word that Casio "has reintroduced its iconic calculator watch featuring a retro design with green text on a negative LCD and a classic keypad layout."

TechSpot reports that the watch was based on the Casio Mini personal calculator first released in the early 1970s — even offering a keypad using the original fonts (with numbers separated by grid lines): Even the mode button, colored red, is a nod to the calculator's power indicator. The watches' calculator function can add, subtract, multiply, and divide up to eight digits. As for watch functions, you get dual time, an alarm, stopwatch functionality, and more...

Casio's original personal calculator debuted in 1972, and cost $59.95. It featured a six-digit display, was a quarter the size of its competitors, and cost just a third of rival products. The calculator was an instant hit for Casio, selling a million units in the first 10 months on the market and more than six million units over the span of the series.
Long-time Slashdot reader antdude says "I still wear one! Casio Data Bank 150 model...!"

Share your own vintage calculator memories in the comments...

China's Chang'e-6 mission made history by retrieving the first surface samples from the moon's far side, revealing evidence of volcanic activity spanning 1.4 billion years. Reuters reports: Researchers said on Friday the soil brought back from the Chang'e-6 landing site contained fragments of volcanic rock - basalt - dating to 4.2 billion years ago and to 2.8 billion years ago. This points to a long period of volcanic activity - at least 1.4 billion years - on the far side during the first half of the moon's history, when it was a more dynamic world than it is today. The moon, like Earth, formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Volcanism on the moon, Earth and other planetary bodies involves the eruption of molten rock from the mantle - the layer just under the outer crust - onto the surface. The landing site in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, an impact crater, is an area with the thinnest crust on the moon, helpful for finding evidence of volcanism.

The samples contained various volcanic rock fragments, and the researchers used a method called radioisotope dating to determine their age. Lunar basalt samples previously were obtained from the moon's near side, which perpetually faces Earth, during U.S. Apollo, Soviet Luna and Chinese Chang'e-5 missions. These showed that volcanism on the near side had occurred as long ago as 4.0 billion years ago and continued for at least two billion years, Li said. "The exact timing and duration of lunar volcanism is elusive and maybe varied across different regions. Some small-scale volcanism may have also occurred on the near side as late as about 120 million years ago as recorded by volcanic glass beads from Chang'e-5 samples" collected in 2020, Li said.

The new study also found that the basalt dating to 4.2 billion years ago differed in composition from the basalt dating to 2.8 billion years ago, meaning they originated from different sources of molten rock - magma - in the mantle, Li said. The Chang'e-6 samples, Li said, also differ in composition compared with previously collected lunar samples from the near side.

"NASA has squandered $27 billion on the SLS moon rocket -- $6 billion over budget and 5 years late," writes longtime Slashdot reader schwit1. "The SLS isn't reusable so even if they finished it -- it is already obsolete. It is clear to everyone that the boondoggle has failed but the newest plan is to find a way to blame Trump. There is a big desire for big changes." Futurism reports: According to Ars Technica senior space reporter Eric Berger's insider sources, there's an "at least 50-50" chance that the rocket "will be canceled." "Not Block 1B. Not Block 2," he added, referring to the variant that was used during NASA's uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022 and a more powerful design with a much higher translunar injection payload capacity, respectively. "All of it." To be clear, as Berger himself points out, we're still far "from anything being settled." Nonetheless, the reporter's sources have historically been highly reliable, suggesting the space agency may indeed be getting cold feet about continuing to pour billions of dollars into the non-reusable rocket. [...] "Honestly the people who will ultimately make this decision aren't even in place yet," Berger wrote in a followup tweet, likely referring to the incoming Trump administration. "But there is a big desire for big changes."

Rocket Lab says it has signed the first customer for its Neutron launch vehicle, with a launch planned for mid-2025. SpaceNews reports: The company announced Nov. 12 that it signed a contract with an undisclosed "commercial satellite constellation operator" for two launches of Neutron, one in mid-2026 and the other in 2027, a deal that could lead to additional launches for the same customer. "We see this agreement as an important opportunity that signifies the beginning of a productive collaboration that could see Neutron deploy this particular customer's entire constellation," Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an earnings call Nov. 12 to discuss the company's third quarter financial results. [...]

Beck said Rocket Lab is "deep into the qualification testing" of flight hardware, including vehicle structures and the Archimedes engine, which was hotfired for the first time in August at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. "Our engine test cadence in Mississippi has doubled over the quarter, and we've bought multiple engines to the test stand," he said. Neutron is a key part of the company's ambitions to deploy its own constellation, something that Beck has hinted at in some previous earnings calls. His presentation called that constellation the third pillar for Rocket Lab, after launch services and spacecraft production, both of which support the constellation.

"We're not ready to reveal details on what this constellation or application may be," he said, "but I think it's important to understand the strong foundation we've built up across launch and space systems to enable it in due course." That includes Neutron, with Beck citing SpaceX's use of Falcon 9 to deploy its Starlink constellation. "Everything is irrelevant without a reusable high cadence launch. So, Neutron is really the key to unlocking that."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: What if, rather than scouring the internet, ChatGPT could search all of the DNA on Earth? That future just got a bit closer with Evo, an AI model reported today in Science. The program -- trained on billions of lines of genetic sequences -- can design new proteins and even whole genomes. Previous AIs could only interpret and predict relatively short sections of DNA, and they could only work with groups of nucleotides -- the A, C, G, T alphabet of DNA -- not individual nucleotides. To take things to the next level, researchers trained Evo on 300 billion nucleotides of sequence information.

In a first test, Evo bested other AI models on predicting the impact of mutations on protein performance. The team then had Evo design new versions of the CRISPR genome editor; the best designs were as good at cutting DNA as a commercial version. And in what study author Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford University, calls the "most futuristic and crazy" part of the study, the researchers asked Evo to generate DNA sequences that are long enough to serve as genomes for bacteria -- a step toward AI-designed synthetic genomes.

Much of the work on AI occurs in secret at companies. But the researchers have released Evo publicly so that other researchers can use it, and Hie says the team has no plans to commercialize its creation. "For now, I see this as a research project."

An academic journal has retracted two papers because it determined their authors used unlicensed software. The Register: Elsevier's Ain Shams Engineering Journal withdrew two papers exploring dam failures after complaints from Flow Science, the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based maker of a computational fluid dynamics application called FLOW-3D.

"Following an editorial investigation as a result of a complaint from the software distributor, the authors admitted that the use of professional software, FLOW-3D program for the results published in the article, was made without a license from the developer," a note from the journal's editor-in-chief explains.

"One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that the article does not violate any intellectual property rights of any person or entity and that the use of any software is made under a license or permission from the software owner."

South Korean researchers have developed a "morphing" wheel that can navigate stairs and obstacles up to 1.3 times its radius, potentially revolutionizing mobility devices and robotics.

The wheel, created by the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM), features a chain-based outer hoop and sensor-controlled spoke wires that adjust stiffness based on terrain. Inspired by water droplet mechanics, it transitions between solid and fluid states when encountering impediments.

Public trust in scientists is showing signs of recovery, according to a new Pew Research Center survey, though levels remain below pre-pandemic highs. The October 2024 study, which surveyed 9,593 U.S. adults, reveals that 76% of Americans have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of confidence in scientists' commitment to public interests -- a modest increase from 73% in 2023, but still short of the 87% recorded in early 2020.

The survey -- whose results were released Thursday [PDF] -- also highlights persistent partisan differences, with 88% of Democrats expressing trust in scientists compared to 66% of Republicans. However, Republican trust increased by 5% points since 2023, marking the first uptick since the pandemic's onset. On scientists' policy engagement, Americans remain divided: 51% support scientists' active participation in policy debates concerning scientific matters, while 48% prefer they maintain focus on research and empirical findings.

An anonymous reader writes: JPL in California announced this week a layoff of 325 workers, about 5% of its workforce, the third major layoff imposed this year.

The JPL press release indicates the layoffs are because of NASA budget cutbacks, but does not provide any specificity. The cause centers mostly around NASA's decision to pause its Mars Sample Return project, which JPL was leading. From this report:

This is the third round of layoffs at JPL this year, a reduction spurred primarily by major budgetary cuts to the Mars Sample Return mission, which is managed by JPL. NASA directed $310 million this year to the effort to bring Mars rocks back to Earth, a steep drop from the $822.3 million it spent on the program the previous year.

A new study reveals that late work is judged more negatively than on-time submissions, even if delays are minimal or pre-communicated. "The findings suggest that, while you might be tempted to take the maximum allotted time to put the finishing touches to a report, submission or piece of work, the extra effort might not be appreciated by colleagues if it comes at the expense of punctual delivery," reports The Guardian. From the report: The study surveyed thousands of people in the US and UK, including managers, executives, human resources personnel and others whose jobs included an element of evaluating others. Participants were asked to rate pieces of work, such as advertising flyers, art, business proposals, product pitches, photography and news articles. But first, they were told it was either submitted early, on deadline or late. "Late" work was consistently rated as worse in quality than when people were told the same work was completed early or on time. The difference was equivalent to including an objective shortcoming such as not meeting a word count.

A missed deadline led evaluators to believe an employee had less integrity, and they reported they would be less willing to work with or assign tasks to that person in the future. "Everyone saw the exact same art contest entry, school submission or business proposal, but they couldn't help but use their knowledge of when it came in to guide their evaluation of how good it was," said Maglio, who co-authored the study with David Fang of Stanford University.

Those who eagerly submit work early should be advised that this does not appear to earn a boost in opinion, according to the report in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. It also didn't matter how late the work was submitted, with one day or one week delays viewed just as negatively -- and that remained the case if the employee gave their manager advance warning. The latest study suggests that it is this inability to plan realistically that is frowned on, with factors beyond an employee's control, such as jury duty, not viewed as negatively. "If the reason why you missed the deadline was beyond your control, you as the employee should let your manager know," said Maglio. "That seems to be one of the few instances in which people cut you a break."

Amazon has discontinued its secretive "Encore" project to develop an at-home fertility tracker, resulting in layoffs for around 100 employees. The project, part of Amazon's Grand Challenge division, aimed to launch a device and app that would predict fertility through saliva testing but was ultimately terminated to control costs. CNBC reports: The project was born out of the company's 2020 acquisition of Wisconsin-based startup bluDiagnostics, the sources said. BluDiagnostics was founded in 2015 by Weibel, Katie Brenner and Jodi Schroll, all of whom joined Grand Challenge. The startup had developed a thermometer-like device, called FertilityFinder, to help women track their fertility from home by testing their saliva and measuring two key hormones, estradiol and progesterone. The results of the test were viewable through a corresponding app. Business Insider reported on aspects of the fertility device in 2022, when its codename was Project Tiberius.

The team was working to develop its own saliva collection device and mobile app, which could predict when a user might be in the fertile window. Users could also log their period symptoms, sexual activity and other data to assist with tracking their fertility. There are similar offerings on the market from companies including Inne, Oova, Ava and Mira, along with fertility and ovulation tracking apps such as Flo, Clue and Max Levchin's Glow. Amazon initially aimed to release the product this year, but the timing was pushed out after the team encountered technical issues with the device, one of the people said. It was a costly endeavor and required significant upfront investments for lab research and development, in addition to the high salaries for scientists and engineers, the sources said, adding that the team's weekly overhead was roughly $1.5 million. Amazon didn't comment on the figure. Only one project now remains active within Grand Challenge. Its focus is on health tech, the people said. "We regularly review our businesses to ensure we focus on areas where we can make the biggest difference for customers," said Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan. "Following a recent review, we've decided to discontinue this project within Grand Challenge, and we're working directly with employees whose roles are impacted to support them through the transition and help them find other opportunities within Amazon."

Leading AI systems are solving less than 2% of problems in a new advanced mathematics benchmark, revealing significant limitations in their reasoning capabilities, research group Epoch AI reported this week.

The benchmark, called FrontierMath, consists of hundreds of original research-level mathematics problems developed in collaboration with over 60 mathematicians, including Fields Medalists Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers. While top AI models like GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieve over 90% accuracy on traditional math tests, they struggle with FrontierMath's problems, which span computational number theory to algebraic geometry and require complex reasoning.

"These are extremely challenging. [...] The only way to solve them is by a combination of a semi-expert like a graduate student in a related field, maybe paired with some combination of a modern AI and lots of other algebra packages," Tao said. The problems are designed to be "guessproof," with large numerical answers or complex mathematical objects as solutions, making it nearly impossible to solve without proper mathematical reasoning.

Further reading: New secret math benchmark stumps AI models and PhDs alike.

AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect.

"They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to outer space," said Carlos Lopez de la Osa, from the Transport & Environment campaign group, which has carried out a new study on the solutions to contrails. "The scale of the warming that's associated with them is roughly having a similar impact to that of aviation carbon emissions."

Tweaking the flight paths of a handful of aircraft could reduce contrail warming by more than half by 2040, at a cost of less than $5.1 per flight. Geography and a flight's latitude have a strong influence on whether a contrail is warming. Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution. Seasonality is also important -- the most warming contrails tend to occur in winter. "Planes are already flying around thunderstorms and turbulence areas," Mr Lopez de la Osa said. "We will need to add one more constraint to flight planning, which is avoiding areas of contrail formation."

A new analysis of data from NASA's Voyager 2 mission reveals that the planet Uranus and its five largest moons might harbor subsurface oceans and potential conditions for life. The BBC reports: Much of what we know about them was gathered by Nasa's Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago. But a new analysis shows that Voyager's visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like. [...] So, for 40 years we have had an incorrect view of what Uranus and its five largest moons are normally like, according to Dr William Dunn of University College London. "These results suggest that the Uranian system could be much more exciting than previously thought. There could be moons there that could have the conditions that are necessary for life, they might have oceans below the surface that could be teeming with fish!".

It has been nearly 40 years since Voyager 2 last flew past the icy world and its moons. Nasa has plans to launch a new mission, the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, to go back for a closer look in 10 years' time. According to Nasa's Dr Jamie Jasinski, whose idea it was to re-examine the Voyager 2 data, the mission will need to take his results into account when designing its instruments and planning the scientific survey. "Some of the instruments for the future spacecraft are very much being designed with ideas from what we learned from Voyager 2 when it flew past the system when it was experiencing an abnormal event. So we need to rethink how exactly we are going to design the instruments on the new mission so that we can best capture the science we need to make discoveries." Nasa's Uranus probe is expected to arrive by 2045, which is when scientists hope to find out whether these far-flung icy moons, once thought of as being dead worlds, might have the possibility of being home to life. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The genetic testing company 23andMe announced it will cut 40% of its workforce, or 200 jobs, and halt the work on therapies it was developing. As the BBC notes, the company is fighting for survival after hackers gained access to personal information of millions of its users, causing the stock to crater by more than 70%. All seven of its independent directors also resigned in September, following a protracted negotiation with founder and Chief Executive Anne Wojcicki over her plan to take the company private. The BBC reports: On Tuesday, the company warned investors of "substantial doubt" about its ability to continue operating, as it reported that revenue had fallen to $44 million between July and September compared to $50 million in the same period last year. Losses fell to $59 million from $75 million. The job cuts are expected to lead to one-off costs of $12 million, including severance pay, for the plan that will result in savings of $35 million. "We are taking these difficult but necessary actions as we restructure 23andMe and focus on the long-term success of our core consumer business and research partnerships," Ms Wojcicki said.

The company also said it is considering what to do with the therapies it had in development, including licensing or selling them. 23andMe is a giant of the growing ancestor-tracing industry. It offers genetic testing from DNA, with ancestry breakdown and personalised health insights. Its customers include famous names, from rapper Snoop Dogg to multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett. The company was valued at roughly $3.5 billion when it listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 2021 and its share price peaked at $17.65. But they have since tumbled and are currently trading at less than $5.

SpaceX plans an ambitious in-orbit refueling test between two Starships in March 2025. "The orbital demonstration is a major step for Starship, and a crucial part of SpaceX's capability of delivering NASA's Artemis mission to the Moon," reports Gizmodo. The plans were unveiled during Spaceflight Now's recent interview (source: YouTube) with Kent Chojnacki, the deputy manager for NASA's Human Landing System program. Gizmodo reports: SpaceX is under a $53.2 million contract with NASA, signed in 2020, to use Starship tankers for in-orbit propellant transfer. During its third test flight, SpaceX transferred around 10 metric tons of liquid oxygen from Starship's header tank to its main tank while it was in space. The upcoming demonstration, however, requires a lot more of the launch vehicle. Two Starships will launch to low Earth orbit around three to four weeks apart, the spacecraft will meet and dock in orbit, and one will transfer propellant to another. After the demonstration, the two Starships will undock from one another and deorbit.

"Once you've done that, you've really cracked open the opportunity to move massive amounts of payload and cargo outside of the Earth's sphere," Chojnacki said during the interview. The in-flight propellant transfer tests are set to conclude in the summer. With in-flight refueling, NASA is aiming to develop technologies to "enable long-term cryogenic fluid management, which is essential for establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon and enabling crewed missions to Mars," the space agency stated when the contract was signed.

SpaceX is developing a version of Starship to land humans on the Moon in September 2026 as part of NASA's Artemis 3 mission. To prepare for the Moon mission, SpaceX is expected to launch between eight and 16 propellant tanker Starships into low Earth orbit in rapid succession. Each of the tankers will carry around 100 to 150 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane and will dock with a larger fuel depot. The orbiting depot will then connect with the Human Landing System Starship, filling its massive 1,200-ton fuel tanks. Once refueled, the Starship lander will continue its journey toward the Moon.