Hydrogen Truck

Toyota announced today that it will officially develop a hydrogen fuel cell powered electric semi truck.

“It will be quiet, smooth and powerful while emitting nothing but water,” Tak Yokoo, Senior Executive Engineer at Toyota, said in a statement.

Emitting Water

The Japanese carmaker’s North America division will be partnering with Hino USA, a commercial vehicles manufacturer, to produce the “heavy” Class 8 fuel cell truck specifically for the North American market.

The truck itself will be based on the existing Hino XL Series chassis and powered by Toyota’s fuel cell technology.

Toyota is planning to show off the first demonstration vehicle in the first half of 2021, but we still know little about it. The prototype of a prior initiative called Project Portal 2.0 may provide some clues: revealed in 2018, the prototype was a 670 horsepower semi with 1,325 pound-feet of torque and a towing capacity of 80,000 pounds. Its fuel cells gave it a reported range of 300 miles, CNET reports.

Remember Nikola?

It’s a strange time to announce plans for a hydrogen-powered semi. The news comes after Tesla competitor Nikola Motors landed in hot water last month after an investigation revealed that the company may have misled shareholders with its demonstration of its “fuel cell-powered” Nikola One semi truck back in 2018.

The company’s founder later stepped down amidst the scandal with a Ford VP taking over the reigns.

READ MORE: Look out, Nikola: Toyota and Hino partner for fuel cell-powered semi truck [CNET]

More on hydrogen trucks: Founder of Tesla Competitor Nikola Steps Down Amid Fraud Scandal

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Peeling Back

Facebook’s automated anti-nudity filters finally stopped impressionable children from seeing unimaginable filth on their timelines: a pile of onions that was flagged for being inappropriate.

Gaze Seed Company tried to advertise on Facebook using a picture of a pile of onions in a basket to market its seeds, CBC reports, but was blocked by Facebook’s algorithm. The official reason? Facebook’s algorithms decided that the picture was “overtly sexualized.” It’s a funny error, sure, and one that raises questions about the sorts of things these algorithms are into — but at a more basic level, it also illustrates that AI content moderation still isn’t ready for prime time.

Eat Your Veggies

Unfortunately, Gaze Seed Company’s post didn’t clarify what exactly about the onions — which the ad describes as “extremely sweet, mild and large” — or their position was “overtly sexualized” like Facebook claims.

“We got notified the other day that it’s an ‘overtly sexual image’ that they had to ban from the site,” Gaze manager Jackson McLean told CBC. “I guess something about the two round shapes there could be misconstrued as boobs or something, nude in some way.”

Free The Onion

For now, McLean and the company are fighting what must be a bizarre — yet disruptive — algorithmic glitch.

“I just thought it was funny,” McLean told CBC. “You’d have to have a pretty active imagination to look at that and get something sexual out of it.… ‘Overtly sexual,’ as in there’s no way of mistaking it as not sexual.”

“Hopefully an actual human gets to look at the photo to decide that it’s not actually sexual at all,” he added. “It’s just onions.”

READ MORE: This St. John’s seed company’s onions are too sexy for Facebook [CBC]

More on Facebook algorithms: Facebook Needs Humans *And* Algorithms To Filter Hate Speech

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Facebook Algorithm Flags Onions as “Overtly Sexualized”

Blurred Vision

Surfers in Kamchatka, Russia are reporting that the ocean water is leaving them with poisoning-like symptoms, CBS News reports.

“For several weeks now, all surfers have experienced problems with their eyes after returning from the water,” Yekaterina Dyba, a geographer who runs the Snowave Kamchatka surfing school, wrote on social media, as translated by CBS. “White shroud, blurred vision, dryness. Sore throat. Many had nausea, weakness, high fever.”

Various wildlife, including octopuses, fish, and shellfish have also been affected, washing up dead in the thousands on shores. Greenpeace Russia called it an “ecological disaster.”

Phenol Poisoning

According to the region’s acting Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology Aleksei Kumarkov, the presence of petroleum and toxic phenols exceeded safe levels by about four times.

But it’s still unclear what the exact source of pollution is. Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov told the press that authorities are still waiting on test results. Last week, officials blamed the dying sea life on stormy weather, according to CBS.

Russian state media suggests it could’ve been an oil tanker that leaked as it was making its way through the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia.

Search is On

Despite the Defense Ministry denying that any of their ships could’ve been involved, Russian media also didn’t rule out the military being the cause of the contamination.

Russian ecology minister Dmitry Kobylkin announced on Tuesday that there will be two water tests near two military testing sites, citing a “yellow film” on a local river, The Guardian reports.

“Early tomorrow morning there will be inspections of two key test sites that are raising everyone’s concerns,” he said.

READ MORE: Russian surfers say mystery ocean pollution is poisoning them and killing animals [CBS News]

More on water pollution and wildlife: Shark Teeth & Skin Dissolved by Pollution, Scientists Say

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Russian Surfers Say Mysterious Pollution Is Poisoning Them

Field Tests

NASA astronauts have started to test out its brand new spacesuits, which the space agency plans to use for its upcoming crewed Artemis missions to the Moon.

The tests for the still-under-development suit took place underwater at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory Pool at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Space.com reports, so that astronauts can practice bouncing around like they will in the Moon’s lower gravitational pull.

Water Trap

The pool can be altered to mimic both lunar and low-Earth-orbit gravity, but bottom of the pool is covered in a mock lunar surface that makes the test environment look more like a sandy beach than an industrial pool, Space.com reports.

That lets the astronauts practice getting their footing in as realistic a scenario as possible. Astronauts have also been practicing using various tools, sampling the surface, climbing a ladder, and even planting a flag into the ground like Buzz Aldrin did in 1969.

Testing Tests

The underwater tests will not only evaluate the spacesuit, but also help NASA develop better and more specific tests for upcoming lunar missions, NASA extravehicular activity test lead Daren Walsh said in a press release.

“At the same time, we are going to be able to gather valuable feedback on spacewalk tools and procedures that will help inform some of the objectives for the missions,” Walsh added.

READ MORE: The xEMU represents the first new spacesuit that NASA has developed in over 40 years [Space.com]

More on spacesuits: Fashion Magazine Roasts SpaceX’s Dorky Space Suit

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Mylo Ren

A startup called Bolt Threads is using a special kind of fiber made from mycelium, the thread-like roots of mushrooms, to create a vegan leather-like material called “Mylo,” The New York Times reports.

Some of the most prominent clothing brands in the world, including Adidas and Lululemon, announced that they will be partnering with Bolt, investing significant amounts of money in the company to eventually create hundreds of millions of square feet of the special material.

The first Mylo products are set to go on sale some time next year.

Time Bomb

According to Bolt CEO Dan Widmaier, it won’t just be one company producing the unusual material. “We had to convince these industry competitors that this was about tackling a bigger challenge together than any of them could solve alone,” he told the Times.

The fashion industry remains of the most polluting sectors in the world. By growing its material from mycelium, Bolt is hoping to offset some of this environmental impact.

“The truth is, this industry remains an environmental ticking time bomb and is full of outdated technologies,” he added.

Tanning Mushrooms

To make the stuff, Bolt grows mushroom roots over a bed of sawdust for ten days. The resulting web of mycelium can then be tanned, dyed, and finished like leather. The process, according to the company, is significantly faster — and greener — than raising cattle.

According to its makers, “it has a suppleness and warmth that genuinely feels natural,” as Jamie Bainbridge, Bolt’s vice president of product development, told NYT.

Now, the company is hoping interest from big brands will turn it into the fabric of the future.

READ MORE: Fungus May Be Fall’s Hottest Fashion Trend [The New York Times]

More on fashion: A New Battery Can Be Stitched Into Clothes to Power Wearables

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Adidas, Lululemon Say They’ll Make Clothes Out of Mushroom Leather

Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos unveiled plans for its reusable “Amur rocket” this week — a design, planned to be completed by 2016, that borrows heavily from SpaceX’s Falcon 9, as Ars Technica‘s senior space reporter Eric Berger pointed out in a Monday tweet.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk quickly waded into the discourse, throwing some shade at the new design.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but they should really aim for full reusability by 2026,” Musk tweeted. “Larger rocket would also make sense for literal economies of scale. Goal should be to minimize cost per useful ton to orbit or it will at best serve a niche market.”

Russia has clearly decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em with its new design for a reusable booster. Alas, no flights until at least 2026 means it will be at least 15 years behind the Falcon 9. Russia is lucky SpaceX doesn't innovate, hah.
https://t.co/868cMPa3aO pic.twitter.com/NTWQSyfXRp

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) October 5, 2020

Both rockets feature a set of grid fins on top and landing legs at the base. The overall shape of the fairing is also very familiar.

But they do differ in other aspects: the Amur is slimmer in diameter and uses five RD-169 engines instead of the nine Merlin engines on the Falcon 9. Amur will also be designed to burn methane for fuel, while the Falcon 9 uses both liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene.

Just like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stages, Roscosmos is planning to collect first stages on a boat out at sea — sound familiar? — to later reuse them up to ten times.

SpaceX isn’t quite at ten reuses yet, but it’s made significant progress in reusing the first stages and fairings of its Falcon 9 rockets post launch. In August, SpaceX flew the same first stage for the sixth time, and it’s planning to fly the same first stage for the tenth time some time next year. By 2026, Musk’s tweet seems to imply, it will have vastly surpassed the Amur’s planned capabilities.

Rather than focusing on making the Falcon 9 entirely reusable — unlikely at this late stage — the company is betting on its next-generation Starship, which is designed from the ground up to be fully reusable.

SpaceX is now gearing up to start launching the massive Mars-bound rocket, likely what Musk was referencing with “larger rocket,” to a height of 12 miles. The first test flight to orbit is only a few years away, according to Musk.

Starship is designed to eventually carry up to 100 tons of cargo to orbit, dwarfing the Amur rocket’s planned max payload of 10.5 tons.

SpaceX and Roscosmos have had a rocky relationship. Musk and Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin haven’t been above taking pot shots at each other in the past.

Russia is hoping to start testing its rocket in 2026 — an eternity in terms of how quickly the industry has been progressing.

The space corporation is aiming at just $22 million per launch, for about 10.4 tons of cargo — a competitive price point. Developing the rocket is budgeted at just $900 million.

READ MORE: Russian space corporation unveils planned “Amur” rocket—and it looks familiar [Ars Technica]

More on Roscosmos: Russia Wants to Be the First to Shoot a Movie In Space

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Jimmy Neutron

While nations are spending billions to build football field-sized nuclear fusion reactors — the elusive process of harnessing energy from fusing atoms, rather than breaking them apart — a 12 year old kid from Memphis, Tennessee, just became the youngest person to have ever achieved nuclear fusion, according to Guinness World Records.

With just hours left before he turned 13, Jackson Oswalt managed to fuse two deuterium atoms together in a fusion reactor he built — in his family’s house.

DIY Fusion

According to Jackson, he was the only person who worked on the reactor during both the design and production stages.

“The temperature in my fusor varies, but it’s approximately 100 million degrees [Kelvin],” Jackson said in the Guinness World Records video accompanying the announcement.

“I have been able to use electricity to accelerate two atoms of deuterium together so that they fuse together into an atom of helium 3 [isotope], which also releases a neutron which can be used to heat up water and turn a steam engine, which in turn produces electricity,” he explained in the video.

Jackson was inspired by Taylor Wilson, who was the previous record holder at the age of 14.

Some Reservations

Building a DIY fusion reactor — albeit not one that can generate more power than you put into it, a holy grail among energy researchers — is a challenging but achievable task with a thriving online community around it.

“There were a few moments during the project that I had some reservations,” Jackson’s mother admitted. “I would definitely be googling things before he turned on various stages.”

She also added that “he did a great job of explaining it to us.”

READ MORE: Middle school student achieved nuclear fusion in his family playroom [Guinness World Records]

More on fusion: Elon Musk: Fusion Will Probably Be More Expensive Than Wind, Solar

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A team of doctors and engineers have developed a new hydrogel that they say might be able to repair nerve damage more quickly and reliably than any other methods.

The hydrogel is essentially a porous and water-saturated material that can stretch, bend, and — most importantly — propagate neural signals. In animal trials, the team of Nanjing University researchers found that the hydrogel restored lost bodily function and helped the animals heal faster, according to research published Wednesday in the journal ACS NANO. Now, they’re hoping the gel will work in human medicine as well.

When a nerve is damaged, the bioelectric signals sent to and from the brain can get blocked or lost along the way. That can lead to symptoms like pain, reduced motor function or numbness, depending on the location and severity of the injury.

As it stands, nerve damage can be tricky to treat and repair. In order to replace or repair the damaged nerve, doctors either take one from elsewhere in your body to use as a graft or implant an artificial nerve instead. But recovery can be slow and may require follow-up surgeries.

By contrast, the hydrogel restored functionality to rats and toads with nerve injuries in a matter of weeks, according to the research, though it hasn’t been tested on human patients yet.

That healing factor could be sped up even more, the doctors suggest, as the hydrogel becomes even better at conducting electricity when hit by infrared light, potentially making it even more effective as a substitute nerve.

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Blown Away

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson just announced a plan to power every home in the country with wind energy by 2030.

It’s an ambitious project, and one that will require serious investments in new wind turbines over the next decade, Engadget reports. But if it works, it would be a major step forward in meeting the global carbon emissions goals laid out in the 2015 Paris agreement.

Ramping Up

Johnson announced that the U.K. would invest about £160 million ($207 million) that will go toward factories that would develop new turbines as well as floating offshore turbines themselves. In order to power every home in the U.K., those turbines would need to generate about 40 GW of power, Engadget reports. That’s four times the nation’s current wind energy output.

“Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle, the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands,” Johnson announced at the U.K. Conservative party conference.

Reality Check

Unfortunately, a complete transition to wind power by 2030 might be more expensive than Johnson is anticipating. The independent research firm Aurora Energy Research predicts the project will actually cost £50 billion ($64.6 billion) and that the U.K. will need to install, on average, a new turbine every single weekday through the next decade.

Regardless, the U.K. may continue to announce more ambitious climate goals yet, the Financial Times reports, potentially including support for hydrogen transportation or even a ban on gas-burning cars.

READ MORE: The UK wants to power all homes with offshore wind by 2030 [Engadget]

More on wind energy: The UK Will Soon Be Home to the World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm

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UK Pledges to Get 100% of Residential Power From Wind Turbines

MIT scientists just made important progress toward a universal flu vaccine — an inoculation against all influenza viruses at once.

When we’re vaccinated against a flu, our immune system generates antibodies that target a protein on the virus called hemagglutinin (HA). It turns out that the difference between a seasonal flu shot and a universal vaccine could be which part of the HA protein a vaccine targets: the head, which rapidly mutates to cause seasonal strains of the disease, or the stem, which is far more consistent among different flus.

In other words, a vaccine that targets the stem would be able to protect against a wide variety of flu viruses rather than a single mutation.

Unfortunately, the immune system targets that mutated head much more easily than it does the stem due to the geometry of the virus itself, according to the team’s research, which was published Wednesday in the journal Cell Systems. But now, the researchers’ models might have identified a workaround.

“We don’t understand the complete picture yet,” Daniel Lingwood, study coauthor and Harvard Medical School professor, said in a press release, “but for many reasons, the immune system is intrinsically not good at seeing the conserved parts of these proteins, which if effectively targeted would elicit an antibody response that would neutralize multiple influenza types.”

The research showed how antibodies that target the mutated head bind more strongly to their targets than those that attack the stem, so that’s what our immune system prioritizes. But by making a vaccine out of HA stems that are similar but not identical to strains a patient’s immune system has already seen, their immune system might shift focus and make more generalized antibodies instead — a hunch that was verified by preliminary research on mice.

“The reason we’re excited about this work is that it is a small step toward developing a flu shot that you just take once, or a few times, and the resulting antibody response is likely to protect against seasonal flu strains and pandemic strains as well,” study coauthor and MIT chemical engineer Arup Chakraborty said in the press release.

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Squidbot

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a squid robot that can propel itself through the water untethered, just like the real thing.

“Essentially, we recreated all the key features that squids use for high-speed swimming,” Michael T. Tolley, co-author of the paper published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics last month.

“This is the first untethered robot that can generate jet pulses for rapid locomotion like the squid and can achieve these jet pulses by changing its body shape, which improves swimming efficiency,” he added.

Expand Contract

Squids are some of the fastest swimmers in the ocean world. They generate special water jets by sucking in and expelling water through contractions of a muscular sac to propel themselves through the water.

The robot carries its own power source and is made out of a soft acrylic polymer and a few rigid, 3D-printed parts. It can also be outfitted with sensors and a camera for exploring underwater worlds. The intent of soft robotics is to ensure that underwater life is protected from bumps and scrapes.

The team was even able to steer it around a large aquarium among live fish and coral. The next step is to improve the robot’s efficiency by reworking the nozzle that expels the water.

READ MORE: This ‘squidbot’ jets around and takes pics of coral and fish [UC San Diego]

More on underwater robots: A New Deep-Sea Robot Can Shape-Shift Into an Autonomous Submarine

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This Swimming Squid Robot Looks Absolutely Amazing

Under Attack

In a leaked email, Tesla’s vice president of legal and acting general counsel Al Prescott warned workers that an anonymous employee “maliciously sabotaged” part of a factory last month, Bloomberg reports.

“Two weeks ago, our IT and InfoSec teams determined than [sic] an employee had maliciously sabotaged a part of the Factory,” Prescott wrote. Thanks to the team’s “quick actions,” he wrote, further damage was prevented with production “running smoothly again a few hours later.”

Aftermath

Once they were shown “irrefutable evidence, the employee confessed,” according to Prescott’s email. The employee was fired on the spot.

It’s still unclear what the employee’s act of sabotage amounted to.

Bloomberg reports that the local Fremont police department was not contacted or called for assistance.

Trend Piece

The news comes weeks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed his electric car company’s factory in Nevada was the victim of a Russian national cyberattack.

Musk was also recently embroiled in a lawsuit by former Tesla employee Martin Tripp, who allegedly violated trade secrets and computer crime laws. In June 2018, Musk emailed all of Tesla, accusing Tripp of being caught conducting “damaging sabotage to our operations.”

READ MORE: Tesla Alleges Act of Employee Sabotage in New Internal Email [Bloomberg]

More on Tesla: Tesla’s Roof Flies Off While Driving Home From Dealership

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Test Launch

On Tuesday, the Russian military successfully launched a hypersonic nuclear missile.

The Zircon missile, The Associated Press reports, was launched from the White Sea off the coast of Russia and successfully hit its target farther north in the Barents Sea. With the successful launch, which Russian President Vladimir Putin described as a “big event” for Russia, it seems we’ve now entered the era of operational nuclear weapons that fly too quickly to block.

Cruise Control

Last December, Russia announced that the Avangard, a hypersonic launch vehicle that can fly 27 times the speed of sound and evade anti-missile systems, was fully operational.

The brief Russian announcement didn’t mention the Avangard by name, but assuming it was used in the launch, it would seem that there’s now tangible evidence that the world’s first of a new class of weapons working as described.

Victory Lap

For now, details remain scarce. But Putin said in 2019 that the Zircon could travel 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) at nine times the speed of sound, the AP reports.

“Equipping our Armed Forces — the army and the navy — with the latest, truly unparalleled weapon systems will certainly ensure the defense capability of our country in the long term,” Putin said Wednesday.

READ MORE: Russia reports successful test launch of hypersonic missile [The Associated Press]

More on hypersonic weapons: The US Plans to Track Hypersonic Missiles With 1,200 Satellites

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Russia Says It Successfully Tested a Hypersonic Nuke

Blast Zone

The surface of the Moon may be covered in rocks that came from Venus — potentially making it easy to study our hellish planetary neighbor.

Billions of years ago, Yale astronomers theorize, asteroids and comets impacting Venus could have dislodged chunks of the planet’s surface and send them careening through the stars. If they did, CNET reports, then some of these Venusian meteorites may have made their way to Earth or the Moon, giving easier access to samples from a planet where recent findings suggest extraterrestrial life could possibly be hiding.

Bullseye

It’s fairly speculative work, which the authors concede in their research, which was accepted for publication into the Planetary Science Journal. But the two astronomers behind the work suggest it’s worth keeping an eye out, given the possibility of obtaining material from Venus without having to actually go there.

“The Moon offers safe keeping for these ancient rocks,” study coauthor Samuel Cabot said in a press release. “Anything from Venus that landed on Earth is probably buried very deep, due to geological activity. These rocks would be much better preserved on the Moon.”

The Assist

The researchers are counting on more than random luck. They argue that the Earth and Moon’s gravitational pulls would be more than enough to draw in the Venusian meteorites.

“An ancient fragment of Venus would contain a wealth of information,” coauthor Gregory Laughlin said in the release. “Venus’ history is closely tied to important topics in planetary science, including the past influx of asteroids and comets, atmospheric histories of the inner planets, and the abundance of liquid water.”

READ MORE: Bits of Venus may be lurking on the moon, scientists suggest [CNET]

More on Venus: Scientists Speculate About How Life on Venus Could Have Begun

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The Moon Might Be Littered With Ancient Shrapnel From Venus

American astronomer and University of California professor Andrea Ghez just won this year’s Nobel prize in physics for her groundbreaking work on black holes.

But Ghez, who’s only the fourth woman ever to receive the coveted prize, isn’t taking the award too seriously. When asked what would happen if one were to fall into a black hole, she had a grim answer.

“So if you were to think about falling into a black hole feet first, the first thing that would happen is that the pull of gravity is so much stronger in your feet than your head that you would actually be torn apart,” she told Agence France-Presse.

“We wouldn’t feel anything because we wouldn’t exist, we wouldn’t survive it, we would be broken down into our fundamental pieces,” she added. “I would not want to do this.”

Ghez shares the prize this year with Reinhard Genzel, astrophysicist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Ghez and her team recently celebrated 25 years of studying the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*, using the Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Thanks to the telescope’s detailed resolution, her work enabled us to follow the orbits of stars circling the black hole despite a massive shroud of interstellar gas and dust blocking our view. Her research gave us the most robust evidence that what’s lurking at the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole.

“What Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel did was one of the coolest things ever — revealing stars in the center of our galaxy orbiting a black hole too small to see with a telescope,” Peter Fisher, professor and head of MIT’s Department of Physics, said in a statement.

Every day studying black holes, Ghez says, is a mind-bender.

“It’s very hard to conceptualize a black hole,” Ghez told AFP. “The laws of physics are so different near a black hole than here on Earth, that the things that we’re looking for, we don’t have an intuition for.”

READ MORE: Nobel-Prize Winning Black Hole Researcher Holds a Map of Stars in Her Mind [AFP]

More on Sagittarius A*: Astronomers Detect “Bullets” of Gas Shooting Out of Our Galactic Center

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Nobel Prize Winner on Falling Into a Black Hole: “I Would Not Want To”

Universe 2.0

Before the Big Bang, when our universe began to rapidly expand, there may have been a previous universe whose place we took.

Sir Roger Penrose, a University of Oxford mathematician and physicist who just won the Nobel Prize for work in the field of black holes, suggested that our universe was not the first to exist, The Telegraph reports. And, he added, it won’t be the last either.

“The Big Bang was not the beginning,” Penrose said, according to the paper. “There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.”

Hard Reboot

In Penrose’s view, a universe will continue to expand until all of its matter eventually decays. And then, in its place, a new one will begin.

“We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon,” he said, according to The Telegraph.

Hawking Points

The proof of his idea are what Penrose calls Hawking Points: the corpses of black holes from before the Big Bang that outlived their own universes but are now at the end of their lifespans, leaking radiation as they fade into nothing.

“So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation,” Penrose added, “and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points.”

READ MORE: An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang, and can still be observed today, says Nobel winner [The Telegraph]

More on Penrose: You Could Generate Power By Dangling Crap Into a Black Hole

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Physicist: There Were Other Universes Before the Big Bang

Global Rebalancing

While politicians reject climate initiatives like the Green New Deal for their aggressive ambition, it turns out that it’s within our means as a species to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half — and still provide a pleasant quality of life to every human on Earth.

New research found that, if we fixed inefficiencies and structural inequalities in global society, 10 billion people could enjoy a “decent” quality of life while only using as much energy as much as we did back in the 1960s, Earther reports, all of which could be provided by renewables. In other words, the researchers claim that slowing climate change is both possible and feasible.

Shifting Priorities

For much of the world, this quality-of-life-rebalancing would be an improvement, according to the research, which was published Tuesday in the journal Global Environmental Change. But for wealthy nations and especially the U.S., it would mean living in smaller homes and eating vastly less meat.

“We still get Duolingo, we still get laptops and internet, you can still… watch TV,” study coauthor Julia Steinberger, a sustainability researcher at the University of Leeds and University of Lausanne, told Earther.

Cleaning Up

Such changes are possible, but Steinberger says they would take a major cultural shift away from rampant consumerism in developed nations.

“There may be lower working times because we’re not working more hours to create more stuff for ever-expanding markets or to consume more,” Steinberger told Earther. “There may be more time for families, for leisure, for the things that, for many people, are what really matter.”

READ MORE: We Can Use Less Energy and Still Have Good Lives [Gizmodo]

More on carbon emissions: The Richest One Percent Emits Twice as Much Carbon as Half the World

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We Could Cut Energy use in Half and Still Give 10 Billion People “Decent” Lives

Crewed Space

China just showed off a rocket that could send astronauts to the Moon — but when that will happen is still a huge question mark.

The rocket features three massive stages, including a central core, reminiscent of the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy and SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, as Space.com points out.

There’s little we know about the unnamed rocket so far. It’s designed to carry a 27 ton spacecraft into trans-lunar injection and will weigh three times as much as China’s current largest rocket, the Long March 5, on the launch pad.

Race to the Moon

It’s part of a larger global trend of renewed interest in exploring space beyond Earth’s orbit.

“The world is seeing a new wave of lunar exploration, crewed or uncrewed,” Zhou Yanfei, deputy general designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told Chinese media. “International cooperation projects in crewed lunar exploration are intertwined and influencing each other.”

While the country has been excelling at sending unmanned probes to the Moon in recent years, sending humans into trans-lunar orbit is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Baby Steps

We don’t know when China is aiming to launch such a rocket or when it will take on its first test flights. The country will also still need a lander, according to Zhou.

Before China is ready to take humans to the Moon, it will largely focus on establishing a presence in low-Earth orbit. The first components of the country’s space station are set to launch some time next year.

The country is also working on SpaceX Falcon-9 style rockets that are capable of vertical take off and landing.

READ MORE: China is building a new rocket to fly its astronauts on the moon [Space.com]

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China Reveals Rocket to Send Astronauts to Moon

Each of the different pharmaceutical companies working toward a COVID-19 vaccine has a slightly different definition for success.

The differences are small, Wired reports, and the FDA will also have controls in place to make sure it doesn’t approve a vaccine that doesn’t actually work. But the discrepancy risks introducing new confusion and doubts over what it actually means to have a successful vaccine — and whether the first one to be deemed a “success” is actually the one that’ll help the most people.

A robust phase III clinical trial, the final stage of testing before the FDA can approve a new pharmaceutical, takes tens of thousands of participants. But the way the statistics work out, Wired reports, Pfizer could declare its trial a success even if six of its participants take the vaccine and still catch COVID-19.

That’s not a warning sign that the vaccine doesn’t work, per se, but rather suggests that it’s possible for a pharmaceutical company to declare victory without enough evidence to say the vaccine does work.

“What you’d like, in this very small number of events, going to the planetary population, is to have the most confidence you possibly can,” Eric Topol, a molecular medicine expert at the Scripps Research Institute who’s been serving as a watchdog for ongoing vaccine trials, told Wired. “That would be suppressing the worst events, sickness that requires a hospitalization and anything worse than that.”

“What if those 26 events are headaches and sore throats? Would that give you great confidence we have an effective vaccine? It sure wouldn’t give me confidence,” Topol added.

Thankfully, nine drugmakers pledged to not push their vaccines until they’ve completed a robust clinical trial despite President Trump’s push to grant them an emergency authorization before tests are complete.

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Pharma Companies Never Agreed What Makes a “Successful” COVID-19 Vaccine Trial

Nuclear Thermal Propulsion

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just handed out a $14 million dollar contract to develop and test a nuclear thermal space propulsion system (NTP), Space.com reports.

The concept is simple: an on-board reactor generates heat, which is then pushed through a nozzle to produce thrust.

The contract, to a company called Gryphon Technologies, is meant to support DARPA’s Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program — essentially a project investigating whether the extreme temperatures produced by nuclear reactions can be used as a propulsion system.

Covering the Distance

“A successfully demonstrated NTP system will provide a leap-ahead in space propulsion capability, allowing agile and rapid transit over vast distances as compared to present propulsion approaches,” Gryphon chief engineer Tabitha Dodsonsaid in a statement.

According to DARPA, an NTP system offers both 10,000 times the thrust-to-weight ratio compared to electric propulsion and two to five times the efficiency of chemical propulsion.

The agency is hoping nuclear thermal propulsion will allow the US to keep up with “maintaining space domain awareness in cislunar space.”

Game Changer

NASA is eyeing a similar system for propelling its own spacecraft. Last year, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine called NTP a potential “game changer” for the agency, with the potential to revolutionize space travel and enable trips to and the eventual settlement on Mars.

Such a propulsion system could even allow for the generation of artificial gravity during such long trips through outer space, according to NASA research dating back to 2014, to address the health concerns surrounding long-term exposure to zero gravity.

READ MORE: US military eyes nuclear thermal rocket for missions in Earth-moon space [Space.com]

More on nuclear propulsion: Nuclear Propulsion Could Be ‘Game-Changer’ for Space Exploration

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DARPA Is Considering a Nuclear Rocket for Moon Missions