In a new study published in the journal Science of Learning, researchers showed that small amounts of electrical stimulation through specially designed ear pieces improved the adult participants’ abilities to recognize foreign language tones — an effect that lasted after the stimulation was halted.
“Humans are excellent perceptual learners,” the paper’s introduction reads. “Yet, a notable and well-documented exception is the acquisition of non-native speech categories in adulthood.”
By stimulating the vagus nerve using the ear pieces, the group was better able to better identify and distinguish between four different Mandarin tones, as Inverse reports.
That’s impressive, because differentiating between those four common tones is extremely hard for native English speakers who are not used to tonal languages.
Overall, they saw an improvement of 13 percent in distinguishing an easier-to-tell-apart pair of Mandarin tones when compared to those who didn’t receive brain stimulation — although the effect was almost imperceptible more difficult tones.
“Showing that non-invasive peripheral nerve stimulation can make language learning easier potentially opens the door to improving cognitive performance across a wide range of domains,” Fernando Llanos, a postdoc researcher at the University of Pittsburg’s Sound Brain Lab and lead author on the study, said in a statement.
The same effect could be generalized to learning sound patterns of other languages according to the researchers.
“In general, people tend to get discouraged by how hard language learning can be, but if you could give someone 13 percent to 15 percent better results after their first session, maybe they’d be more likely to want to continue,” said Matthew Leonard, an assistant professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco and co-author of the study.
The researchers are now investigating if extending the learning sessions with stimulation could enhance the effect for the more-difficult-to-distinguish tones.
However, these treatments tend to be far more invasive when compared to the non-invasive ear pieces used during this particular study.
“We’re showing robust learning effects in a completely non-invasive and safe way, which potentially makes the technology scalable to a broader array of consumer and medical applications, such as rehabilitation after stroke,” senior author Bharath Chandrasekaran, professor and vice chair of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said in the statement.
A new NASA simulation shows the ghostly ultraviolet flashes of Mars’ “nightglow” — greenish hues in the Martian night sky.
The stunning video comes courtesy of the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph on board NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft, which launched back in 2013.
The observations were detailed in a new paper appearing the journal Space Physics this week.
To the MAVEN team’s surprise, they found that the Martian atmosphere pulsed exactly three times every night, but only during spring and fall on the Red Planet. The new analysis also showed unexpected waves and spirals over the planet’s poles during winter.
We’ve known about Mars’ “nightglow” phenomenon for a number of years now. Scientists have observed faint glows, likely the result of nitric oxide emissions.
Here’s how it works. On the day side of Mars, UV light from the Sun breaks down carbon dioxide and nitrogen molecules.
The resulting particles are then circulated by high-altitude winds from the day side to the night side, where they fall to lower altitudes. CO2 and nitrogen particles then recombine, creating energy, which is then released in the form of UV light.
“The ultraviolet glow comes mostly from an altitude of about 70 kilometers (approximately 40 miles), with the brightest spot about a thousand kilometers (approximately 600 miles) across, and is as bright in the ultraviolet as Earth’s northern lights,” Zac Milby, student researcher at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and co-author of the new study, said in a NASA statement.
“Unfortunately, the composition of Mars’ atmosphere means that these bright spots emit no light at visible wavelengths that would allow them to be seen by future Mars astronauts,” he added.
The team is hoping to examine the phenomenon from an entirely new perspective next by looking at just above the edge of the planet, where they’re hoping to get a more detailed look at vertical wind patterns and seasonal changes.
In order to establish a base on Mars, settlers will be forced to survive extremely harsh conditions and an onslaught of cosmic radiation. To do that, they may end up hiding underground in caverns called lava tubes.
Scientists have long suggested that hiding out in lava tubes might be the key to building safe lunar or Mars bases. But they knew very little about the tubes themselves. Now, thanks to research published last month in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, scientists at the European Space Agency and several research universities believe that these underground caverns are likely large enough to fit and shelter functional Mars bases.
Secret Tunnel
According to the research, the lava tubes on Mars and the Moon are considerably larger than here on Earth. Enough so that they believe future settlements or research outposts could be safely nestled away inside.
The researchers compared signs of subterranean collapse on each of the three worlds’ surfaces to the size of known lava tubes on Earth. Since the collapses on Mars were larger, they conclude that the tubes are as well.
District 13
Despite their larger size, the researchers believe that the lava tubes are surprisingly stable, meaning settlers wouldn’t have to worry about them collapsing around them.
“Lava tubes could provide stable shields from cosmic and solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts which are often happening on the surfaces of planetary bodies,” European Space Agency researcher Francesco Sauro said in a press release. “Moreover, they have great potential for providing an environment in which temperatures do not vary from day- to night-time.”
In fact, the tweet raised the question of whether Trump had accidentally confused SpaceX’s Starship with last month’s Crew Dragon spacecraft flight to the space station, which was much more closely coordinated with NASA.
The categorically false claim drew widespread ire from the space exploration community, with news outlets like Space.com and Business Insider stating the obvious: NASA never “closed” and it was never “dead.”
In fact, many of its recent successes are due to decades of hard work long preceding both Trump and in some cases even the Obama administration.
In a searing reply on Twitter, veteran NASA astronaut Scott Kelly also entered the fray: “Great leaders take blame and pass along credit.”
Many others in the space community piled on.
“The Starship test the president is retweeting has nothing to do with NASA; it’s a private effort by SpaceX,” tweeted Jeff Foust, a senior writer for SpaceNews.
“Curious where all the NASA employees came from if they agency has been closed for so long,” tweetedThe Verge senior science reporter Loren Grush.
“This does a disservice to the nearly 17,000 dedicated women and men of NASA,” former SpaceX employee Phil Larson wrote.
SpaceX’s recent success returning astronauts safely inside its Crew Dragon passenger spacecraft dates back to the establishment of the Commercial Cargo Program in 2006, about a decade prior to Trump’s election. The program’s development grew substantially during Obama’s first term.
NASA’s recent launch of its Perseverance rover, destined for Mars, also builds on decades of work, with development of its instruments dating back to 2013, as Space.com points out.
To his credit, Trump did attempt to increase NASA’s budget over the last few years, although it’s still unclear how much the agency will end up getting from Congress next year.
In just six short months, if all goes well, NASA’s Perseverance rover will touch down on the surface of Mars — where, hidden in its belly, will be a payload that could change space exploration forever.
Like something out of a James Bond movie, a spring-loaded arm will flip a four pound helicopter, called Ingenuity, out of a compartment beneath the rover’s debris shield. As it swings down, the copter — or “rotorcraft” — will deploy two of its spring-loaded landing legs and fire a pyrotechnic charge to release two more.
From that point on, Ingenuity will be on its own, tethered to Perseverance via only a wireless communications link. And if the tiny rotorcraft succeeds in flying, its creators say, it will be a watershed moment in the history of planetary exploration.
Not only would it be the first time that humankind has flown an aircraft beyond the Earth, but it could also be the harbinger of future missions that could soar over alien landscapes instead of crawling across them like bugs.
From that point on, Ingenuity will be on its own, tethered to Perseverance via only a wireless communications link. And if the tiny rotorcraft succeeds in flying, its creators say, it will be a watershed moment in the history of planetary exploration.
Not only would it be the first time that humankind has flown an aircraft beyond the Earth, but it could also be the harbinger of future missions that could soar over alien landscapes instead of crawling across them like bugs.
“The helicopter really gives you a lot of mobility to go to places — up ditches, down canyons, even [potentially] up mountains where you couldn’t actually go with the rover,” said Josh Ravich, a mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who worked on Ingenuity, in an interview with Futurism.
That hype extends through NASA’s broad network of advocates, alumni and contractors. Mike Hirschberg, the executive director of the nonprofit Vertical Flight Society, says that a cadre of aerospace enthusiasts have been agitating for off-world flight experiments for decades.
“I always thought that Mars would be explored by airplanes,” said Hirschberg, who has previously done work for both NASA and DARPA. “So it was a nice surprise to hear that [NASA] had picked the helicopter.”
At the same time, the mission presents staggering challenges. Mars’ atmosphere is only about one percent the density of Earth’s, and its gravity is markedly lower as well — differences that made a true apples-to-apples test of the conditions the rotorcraft will face on Mars effectively impossible.
In other words, Ravich and his collaborators are hopeful that Ingenuity will fly, but they’re also fully cognizant that it could fail. Perseverance is still priority number one.
“I think we’ve done a lot and we’re fairly confident, but this is a tech demonstration mission,” Ravich said. “So ultimately, we’ve accepted a bit higher risk.”
The project — Ravich calls it a “once-in-a-lifetime mission” — is the result of decades of research and setbacks.
Its lineage traces back at least as far as 1999, when a team of aerospace engineering students from the University of Maryland won an award for their Martian Autonomous Rotary-wing Vehicle (MARV) — a design that shows striking similarities with the Ingenuity rotorcraft now headed to Mars, with two-bladed coaxial rotors lifting a square fuselage.
MARV. Credit: University of Michigan
Hirschberg also pointed to inroads made in 2002, when Aurora Flight Sciences flew its MarsFlyer, a glider designed to take pictures of the Martian surface, 100,000 feet above the Oregon coast by dropping it from a high-altitude balloon. It spent 90 minutes following a pre-programmed flight path, landing without any damage at the same airport from which it was launched.
Despite their flying prowess, gliders only have a single chance to soar over the Martian landscape. Airplanes could take off and land more than once — but ultimately, Mars’ lack of infrastructure doomed that concept as well.
“There aren’t a any runways on Mars,” Hirschberg said with a chuckle. “So vertical takeoff is pretty much your only option.”
In 2014, engineers at JPL began with a six-inch tall proof of concept, designed to prove that it was possible to actually get off the ground in the Martian atmosphere.
But when they actually tried to flying it inside a chamber designed to simulate Mars’ harsh conditions with a thin atmosphere and a tether to crudely simulate the planet’s low gravity, things didn’t go as planned.
An early prototype. Credit: NASA/JPL
“That model was capable of being joysticked by an operator, and the story goes that the operator, a fairly experienced drone pilot, tried to control the model one direction and it went in the other,” Ravich recalled.
Just like the end product, early prototypes sported two counter-rotating sets of blades, stacked on top of each other. The payload was tucked into a simulated, squared off fuselage below.
It’s a design that’s a far cry from the quadcopter drones we’re used to here back on Earth — but that’s mostly due to size constraints on board Perseverance, according to Ravich.
The engineers soon realized that the vibration of the super-fast blades blades required to generate lift in Mars’ thin atmosphere, which spin at nearly the speed of sound, were making conventional flight nearly impossible.
Later videos from 2014, as featured in a New York Times write-up, showed an engineering model bounce around aimlessly. The engineers had achieved lift, but were unable to gain any sense of control over the vehicle.
Credit: NASA/JPL
By adding mass and stiffening up the blades, the engineers managed to get it under control during flight tests in May 2016, but only by programming a computer to fly it autonomously — which was a necessity anyway, due to the 300 million or so miles between the operator and Ingenuity.
Next, they had to make the rotorcraft rugged enough to actually survive on Mars’ extreme temperature swings. The team put a purpose-built environmental test unit through its paces, simulating the freezing temperatures of Mars at night, which dip down to a frosty -284 degrees Fahrenheit — enough to wreak havoc on electronics.
“Actually, the majority of the energy on the helicopter goes to staying warm overnight,” Ravich said. “Because it’s so cold there and to keep mass down, we don’t have like a parka on the vehicle.”
Those temperature swings, on top of unpredictable weather patterns, make picking a good time to fly on Mars a difficult task in itself. Once Ingenuity’s ready to fly next spring, the team at JPL will have to find a balance point “between when the wind starts picking up versus how much time you’ve had to charge from the Sun,” according to Ravich.
But once the Ingenuity team gets the all clear, it’s planning to fly the little helicopter up to five times over just 30 days. The first flight attempt will take it up just a few feet for up to 30 seconds. The fifth and final flight — if preceding flights are considered a success — will bring it up to 15 feet into the air and take it 500 feet away from its starting position and back again to land.
JPL engineers working on the flight model. Credit: NASA/JPL
Ingenuity is only the start. If it succeeds, the next step could be to scale up the next rotorcraft headed for Mars with more mass, bigger batteries, and more powerful solar panels. Key upgrades could allow future aircraft to cover much longer distances, exploring even more of the Martian surface below.
For now, any such mission is speculative. But the inertia of the Ingenuity team’s vision for interplanetary rotorcraft mission is already carrying forward. As soon as 2026, NASA is planning to send a unique-looking flyer called Dragonfly to the surface of Titan — Saturn’s largest moon — to scout for signs of life.
Dragonfly features four sets of two double rotors, like two quadcopters stacked on top of each other. Like Ingenuity, it’s designed for vertical takeoff and landing — but its planned flights are far more ambitious.
The Dragonfly team is planning to fly the washing machine-sized drone a number of times, covering a distance of up to five miles (eight kilometers) at a time. It will also sample the surrounding areas and look for evidence of past liquid water.
In some ways, the challenges the two crafts will face couldn’t be more different. Ingenuity has to battle with an extremely thin atmosphere, while Dragonfly has to lug itself through a thick soup of nitrogen — Titan’s atmosphere is four times as dense as Earth’s, with twice the atmospheric pressure. Despite the dense atmosphere, surface gravity is only roughly a seventh of that on Earth, similar to that on the Moon. In other words, its flight algorithms will be forged by simulations and test chambers — just like Ingenuity.
For decades, NASA has been a pioneer in exploring the worlds of our solar system, from Apollo astronauts blasting across the Moon’s surface in Lunar Roving Vehicles to probes touring the outer planets and landers scanning the desert-like geographical features of Mars.
But flight on Mars could change all that forever. Its size may be unassuming, but Ingenuity’s first tiny hops could set the stage for something far bigger.
Astronomers have discovered that a gigantic wall of poisonous clouds is sweeping across the surface of Venus every few days — and has been doing so for decades, ScienceAlert reports. It’s so massive, in fact, it reaches far beyond the planet’s equator to both the north and south mid latitudes at altitudes of around 50 kilometers.
“If this happened on Earth, this would be a frontal surface at the scale of the planet,” said astrophysicist Pedro Machado at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Portugal, co-author of a paper about the research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in May, in a statement. “And that’s incredible.”
The study, led by the Japanese space agency JAXA, suggests this wave has been traveling around Venus since at least 1983 at about 328 kilometers per hour.
Venus is kept at a blistering 465 degrees Celsius near the region where these cloud patterns were observed thanks to an extreme greenhouse effect. Most of Venus’s atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide with sulfuric acid raining down from the skies.
Yet many other aspects of Venus’s atmosphere remain a mystery — and the observation of this massive wave could could help build a fuller understanding in the future.
“We would have finally found a wave transporting momentum and energy from the deep atmosphere and dissipating before arriving at the top of the clouds,” explained Javier Peralta, an astrophysicist at JAXA and lead author of the study, in the statement.
“It would therefore be depositing momentum precisely at the level where we observe the fastest winds of the so-called atmospheric super-rotation of Venus, whose mechanisms have been a long-time mystery,” he added.
The exact mechanisms of this tidal wave are still not entirely understood. It’s an entirely new meteorological phenomenon, according to the researchers, that has never been seen on any other planet.
It turns out that the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel is a major pain for geneticists. Because some genes have names similar to calendar dates, the program automatically reformats and totally messes up the datasets.
It’s a surprisingly common problem that can have a serious impact on published research, The Verge reports. Because Microsoft isn’t about to update its software to cater specifically to geneticists, scientists ended up changing the names of 27 human genes — such as MARCH1 — over roughly the course of a year and just published new naming guidelines.
Saving Time
Excel can be particularly aggressive about automatically reformatting data. And since these errors need to be corrected twice — by the scientist conducting the research and again by anyone who loads the same data and accidentally triggers Excel to autoformat — some slip through the cracks. According to a 2016 study in the journal Genome Biology spotted by The Verge, about 20 percent of 3,597 genetics papers contained Excel errors.
“It’s really, really annoying,” Quadrams Institute biologist Dezs? Módos told The Verge. “It’s a widespread tool and if you are a bit computationally illiterate you will use it. During my PhD studies I did as well!”
New Rules
With the new guidelines in hand, scientists should hopefully be able to avoid naming new genes anything that might trip up Excel. For instance, MARCH1 is now MARCHF1, and SEPT1 is now SEPTIN1.
Thankfully, the changes were welcomed by annoyed geneticists, The Verge reports, so hopefully the scourge of overeager spreadsheet software will finally be lifted from the field.
A team of U.K. scientists has a provocative plan to prevent suicides: lace drinking water supplies with the psychoactive drug lithium, which is often prescribed as a mood stabilizer.
At first bluff, it sounds like a profound medical overreach. But Vice reports that the idea has recently picked up some steam within scientific circles.
It’s also worth noting that some water already naturally contains low amounts of lithium. And in research published last week in The British Journal of Psychiatry, scientists from a cohort of U.K. universities identified a link that naturally-present lithium and lower suicide rates.
Therefore, they suggest, more lives could be saved by putting the drug in high-risk communities’ water supplies.
“In these unprecedented times of COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent increase in the incidence of mental health conditions, accessing ways to improve community mental health and reduce the incidence of anxiety, depression and suicide is ever more important,” Anjum Memon, lead author and epidemiology chair at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, said in a press release.
But the only way to further test this idea gets into extremely thorny territory. Vice reports that the scientists behind the study suggest conducting “randomized community trials” that would basically entail quietly putting lithium in the water supply of some communities with high rates of mental health conditions or deaths by suicide.
That’s a difficult sell: Vice reports that scientists still don’t even know the ideal blood-lithium concentration at which the suggested suicide-shielding effects take place.
And that’s without getting into the medical ethics of the proposal, which bring the collective good into tension with individual medical autonomy.
Astronomers have a new trick in the hunt for habitable exoplanets, and it involves using the Moon as a gigantic mirror.
Basically, NASA and ESA scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture light that reflected off the Moon after it had traveled through the Earth’s atmosphere, Space.com reports. By studying that reflection of our habitable atmosphere, the scientists suspect they could search for the same chemical signatures in distant exoplanets, indicating the possibility of alien life.
Fresh Air
Typically, when scientists use the term “Earth-like” exoplanet, they’re referring to a world that’s rocky, roughly the same size as our own, and about the right distance from its host star to have a livable temperature. But it’s much harder to tell if these exoplanets actually have atmospheres or are otherwise remotely hospitable.
“One of NASA’s major goals is to identify planets that could support life,” Hubble scientist Allison Youngblood said in a press release. “But how would we know a habitable or an uninhabited planet if we saw one?”
Planet B
That’s why Youngblood’s study, published Thursday in The Astronomical Journal, is so important.
This particular study measured the amount of ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere. Spotting that same chemical signature emanating from an exoplanet would suggest that it may have an oxygen-rich and UV-blocking atmosphere just like ours.
San Francisco-based startup Formant has developed tech that lets you remotely control a Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog from the comfort of your living room, CNET reports, right inside your browser. All you need is a stable internet connection.
The demonstration is mostly a way to showcase software that lets you control a variety of robots, from underwater drones to automated guided vehicles.
“Spot’s fantastic because it’s the first robot that can reliably navigate the world in a non-structured environment,” Jeff Linnell, CEO of Formant, told CNET.
Going for a Stroll
CNET reporter Lexy Savvides walked the robot dog from a mile away in her living room, using a PlayStation controller to steer it through a park in San Francisco. A human handler stayed by its side the entire time.
The robot dog went on sale for a cool $74,500 earlier this year and has been put to use at oil rigs, construction sites, and even hospitals during the ongoing pandemic.
To get a shot at controlling a robot dog for yourself, you’ll have to fill out a form on Formant’s website. The company is looking to test its software out on kids and others, who aren’t particularly into technology, according to CNET.
Scientists at CERN just saw the Higgs boson do something odd — as it decayed, it appeared to break down into an unexpected combination of particles.
This is the first time that they saw the Higgs boson — the particle believed to grant mass to other elementary particles — break down into a pair of muons, according to research shared this week at a high energy physics conference. The discovery further reinforces the Standard Model of physics, which has long been challenged by new particle discoveries.
Playing God
One of the best ways for physicists to study the Higgs boson is to observe how it dies. Typically, they’ve seen it decay into comparatively-heavy particles, but muons are far lighter and interact less with the field given off by the Higgs boson.
“[Our CERN team] is proud to have achieved this sensitivity to the decay of Higgs bosons to muons, and to show the first experimental evidence for this process,” CERN spokesperson Roberto Carlin said in a press release.
Next-Gen
Muons are second-generation particles. While atoms are made of first-generation particles like electrons, higher-generations only exist in high-energy environments — like a particle physics lab — and quickly decay. This is the first time scientists have seen the Higgs boson interact with any second-generation particles.
“The Higgs boson seems to interact also with second-generation particles in agreement with the prediction of the Standard Model, a result that will be further refined with the data we expect to collect in the next run,” Carlin said.
A bizarreclass of exoplanets called hot super-Earths can appear particularly bright on sky surveys.
Astronomers had previously assumed that was because the light was reflecting off vast oceans of lava and glass on their surface, but a team of MIT scientists thinks the brightness comes from a totally-different but equally-weird phenomenon. Their research, published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal, suggests instead that the planets are so bright thanks to reflective clouds formed in a metal-rich atmosphere.
World Building
The lava ocean hypothesis was fairly well-accepted, but there was no experimental evidence to back it up. So the MIT team tried it out: They built miniatures of the exoplanets by melting rocks in the lab and seeing how bright the lava and glass was. The verdict? Not enough.
“We still have so much to understand about these lava-ocean planets,” MIT graduate student Zahra Essack who worked on the research, said in a press release. “We thought of them as just glowing balls of rock, but these planets may have complex systems of surface and atmospheric processes that are quite exotic, and not anything we’ve ever seen before.”
Creative Thinking
The experiment didn’t result in new proof for the metal-rich clouds. But it suggests that there has to be something else behind the exoplanets’ unusual luminosity, and the atmosphere seems like a good place to look.
“We’re not 100 percent sure what these planets are made of,” Essack said in the release, “so we’re narrowing the parameter space and guiding future studies toward all these other potential options.”
According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the electric car company is “highly likely” to produce a smaller version of its long-awaited Cybertruck for the European market, as Electrek reports.
When asked if there will be a smaller version for the EU on Twitter Tuesday morning, Musk responded “highly likely down the road.”
Scaled Down
One Twitter user suggested that “reducing width is more important than reducing length, at least when it comes to cities,” on Twitter, which Musk replied to with “true.”
The news comes after Tesla decided not to shrink the Cybertruck by three percent in May after Musk sat down with chief designer Franz von Holzhausen.
It’s still unclear how big a European Cybertruck will end up being — let alone if or when such a vehicle will ever roll off the lot.
Everything is Bigger in Texas
What is clear, as Electrek points out, is that the American pickup market dwarfs truck sales in Europe. Without a major market, it’s less likely Tesla will attempt to scale down the Cybertruck for the EU market.
“We’re really, fundamentally making this truck as a North American ass-kicker, basically,” Musk told Automotive News in an interview earlier this week. “The goal is to kick the most amount of ass possible with this truck.”
As of right now, over 200,000 people have signed up to reserve a Cybertruck, according to Musk — a number that may be subject to change, but still shows a healthy appetite for such a vehicle in the US.
For cosmologist Katie Mack, understanding that the ways that the universe might die provides a sense of comfort and connection with everything around her.
Mack, a researcher at North Carolina State University, told BBC News that studying the ways the universe could theoretically end at any moment — or the distant future — gave her a strange sense of peace.
“There’s something about acknowledging the impermanence of existence that is just a little bit freeing,” Mack told BBC News.
All Connected
Mack argues that many people may feel that the universe is happening elsewhere. To them, everyday life isn’t really tethered to the goings-on of the cosmos.
“It kind-of made it personal, this idea that the whole universe has these processes going on all the time, but in principle they could happen to me: I’m in the universe, and I don’t have any protection from this stuff,” Mack told BBC News.
Mack added that with her new book, “The End of Everything,” she’s trying to “share that terror a little bit, which seems mean, but to help people have that more personal connection with what’s going on in the universe.”
Distant Future
Whether it’s heat death, vacuum decay, or any of the other theoretical ways that our universe could go bye-bye, Mack says that any of these scenarios are likely far into the future, if they happen at all.
“It’s probably not going to happen in the next, you know, trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of years and so on,” Mack told BBC News. “But, technically, it could happen at any time.”
Russian officials claim to have developed a coronavirus vaccine that’s 100 percent effective, and officials say they’re trying it out on themselves and their family — but, worryingly, there’s no publicly-available evidence to suggest that it actually works.
Russia’s state-operated research facility, the Gamaleya Research Institute, says it’s ready for a phase 3 clinical trial that it wants to conduct on doctors and teachers, Quartz reports. Unfortunately, the World Health Organization (WHO) doesn’t seem to have data suggesting the experimental vaccine is that far along.
The Gamaleya Research Institute filed a small phase 1 study, but never published any results. Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, told a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates that the researchers want to begin a phase 3 trial in that country, but also that Russia wants to begin mass inoculation in September or October.
If the vaccine is approved for use — something CNN reports that the Gamaleya Institute hopes will happen by mid-August — Russia plans to distribute it to healthcare workers on the front lines.
Even if the vaccine flew through the earlier phases of clinical research, as Dmitriev claimed, a properly-conducted phase 3 clinical trial takes months.
WHO spokesperson Margaret Ann Harris told Quartz that the organization was aware that a Russian vaccine was entering phase 3, but didn’t elaborate on previous results or safety concerns.
But the lack of publicly available safety and efficacy data hasn’t stopped Russian officials from making extremely bold, questionable claims about the research.
“Based on Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials, we also show that 100 percent of about 100 people generated a very high level of antibodies,” Dmitriev told The National.
Dmitriev added that he and his parents already took the vaccine. Project director Alexander Ginsburg told CNN he injected himself with the vaccine as well.
In a news conference, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley gave a first person account of what it’s like to come screaming back through the Earth’s atmosphere inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Behnken described the riveting events leading up to the splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, with up to four times the Earth’s gravitational force being exerted on their bodies.
“You can hear that rumble outside the vehicle,” he said. “And as the vehicle tries to control, you feel alittle bit of that shimmy in your body.”
“It doesn’t sound like a machine, it sounds like an animal coming through the atmosphere with all the puffs coming out of the thrusters and the atmosphere noise,” he added.
The NASA astronauts completed SpaceX and NASA’s Demo-2 mission on Sunday afternoon, marking the first time a for-profit group has successfully launched human astronauts into orbit inside a commercial spacecraft.
And it sounds like the mission went by without a hitch.
“We’re almost kind of speechless as far as how well the vehicle did and how well the mission went,” Hurley said during the conference.
Hurley said that he anticipated challenges with the vehicle during the mission, noting that there were plenty of issues with NASA’s retired Space Shuttle.
“The mission went just like the simulators, from start to finish, all the way,” he said. “There really were no surprises.”
Even while screaming through the atmosphere, “the vehicle was rock solid,” even when parachutes deployed.
Behnken described the separation events from the space capsule’s trunk section and parachute firings “very much like getting hit in the back of the chair with a baseball bat.”
“It was just a great relief at that point for both of us,” Behnken said referring to seeing water of the Atlantic splashing up against the water after landing.
“The pizza was waiting when we made it on board,” he added.
Hurley also addressed the fact that more than a dozen of private boaters showed up after splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico to greet the astronauts.
“We appreciate the folks wanting to participate in the event, but there are some safety aspects we’ll have to take a look at,” Hurley said. “It can’t happen like it did before.”
Hurley also addressed reports that the pair made prank calls while waiting inside the spacecraft.
“There was a real reason for it,” he said. “We wanted to get a test objective out of the way which was to call the core station at Hawthorne.”
But after being put on standby, the pair decided to call others as well.
“‘Hi this is Bob and Doug, we’re in the ocean,'” Hurley recalled saying. The pair also called their wives, who were together nearby.
Aside from several spacewalks, the pair had a fairly conventional stay on board the International Space Station — relatively speaking. Behnken gave an account how he told his son over the satellite phone, from on board the space station, how to take care of the family’s new puppy.
“To just share in that journey, that odyssey, that endeavor — as we named our ship — was just one of the true honors of my entire life,” Hurley said, noting the historical significance of the mission.
SpaceX has successfully flown its massive SN5 Starship prototype at its Boca Chica, Texas testing grounds to a planned height of 150 meters, or roughly 500 feet.
“Mars is looking real,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted in response to the news.
And it was quite the sight — a livestream showed the gigantic cylindrical stainless steel structure float up into the air, leaving a massive dust cloud behind. It then smoothly made its return journey downward.
“This looks simultaneously cool as hell and fucking ridiculous,” tweetedArs Technica senior space reporter Eric Berger.
LAUNCH! Starship SN5 has launched on a 150 meter test hop at SpaceX Boca Chica.
Under the power of Raptor SN27, SN5 has conducted what looks like a successful flight!
It’s a big milestone in SpaceX’s efforts to build a rocket capable of ferrying up to 100 passengers (or 100 tons of cargo) to the Moon and even Mars.
The massive fuel tank, the company’s sixth full-scale testing prototype, lifted off the ground, with only one of the company’s next-generation Raptor rocket engines roaring below.
Just so we're clear, SpaceX built a Mars rocket out of rolls of steel, in tents, in South Texas, in weeks. And the first time they flew it, it made a smooth launch, a controlled flight, and safely landed. This is truly remarkable.
Despite today’s success, the SpaceX team still has a long way to go. The final version is designed to hold six Raptor engines and sport a massive nosecone on top. During today’s test, SN5 had a simulated payload mounted to the top of it to compensate for future payloads.
Long Time Coming
An earlier attempt on Monday had to be scrubbed. “Scrubbed for the day,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter yesterday from the Boca Chica control room. “A Raptor turbopump spin start valve didn’t open, triggering an automatic abort.”
The SN5 prototype successfully completed a static fire test on July 30 leading up to today’s first hop.
A scaled-down version called “Starhopper” flew to 150 meters during a successful attempt in August 2019. “One day Starship will land on the rusty sands of Mars,” Musk quipped on Twitter at the time.
And now, we get to watch the event not from a shaky camera set up miles away by onlookers — but in crispy high definition video, courtesy of SpaceX, recorded by drones surveying the incredible event and even inside the giant rocket itself.
Inside Look
The internal view even shows the self-stabilizing Raptor engine pumping out thrust by burning liquid methane and oxygen.
The video also shows side thrusters firing, ensuring that the water tower-like structure stays upright during flight.
Spider Legs
Towards the end of SpaceX’s video, Starship’s six stubby and telescopic legs can be seen swinging out from inside the chassis, ensuring the prototype can securely make its landing.
SpaceX has changed the design of the vehicle’s landing legs during development. Early versions, as shown in renders, resembled those found on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters, extending from the rocket’s sides.
The leg design shown off in today’s video, however, differs greatly from Falcon 9’s, flipping down from attachment points inside Starship’s fuselage. They’re designed to allow landings on uneven ground — including the lunar and Martian surface.
“We’re working on new legs,” Musk wrote in a June tweet. “Wider stance & able to auto-level. Important for leaning into wind or landing on rocky & pitted surfaces.”
A team of scientists was studying how new exoplanets could form around black holes when they ran into a serious problem: figuring out what to call the class of theoretical worlds.
But fret not. They now have a name, ScienceAlert reports, and that dubious name is “blanet.”
Blanet Nine
The actual process, according to the Kagoshima University scientists behind the research submitted to The Astrophysical Journal for peer review last week, would be fairly similar to how regular planets form around stars, just under more extreme conditions.
As dust and gas whirl around a black hole, it could gradually clump together to form a new world — just so long as it’s far enough away to not get gobbled up by the black hole’s gravitational pull.
Blanet Of The Bapes
Though the processes of blanet and planet formation are fairly similar, the end results can be extremely different.
For instance, the research found that blanets could theoretically grow to be anywhere between 20 and 3,000 times more massive than Earth, which Science Alert notes is the highest possible mass a world can reach before it stops being a pla- sorry, a blanet, and is instead classified as a brown dwarf.
Astronomers have observed an unusual exoplanet, some 150 light-years from Earth, that’s far more dense for its size and age than thought possible. The discovery could force scientists to rethink how planets are formed.
The planet, dubbed K2-25b, orbits a young M dwarf star — the most common type of star in our galaxy — in the Hyades cluster, better known as the Taurus constellation. The planet orbits its star in just 3.5 Earth days.
And yet, scientists say, the planet packs 25 times the mass of Earth into a package smaller than Neptune, which has a diameter only about four times that of Earth. In other words, it’s really, really dense.
Chungus Planet
Conventional theories suggest that giant planets first form an ice-rock core of five to ten Earth masses, before shrouding themselves in a thick layer of gas, hundreds of times the mass of Earth, like Jupiter.
But K2-25b breaks this mold. “K2-25b is unusual,” Gudmundur Stefansson, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, and lead author of the paper, which was recently accepted into The Astronomical Journal, said in a statement. “The planet is dense for its size and age, in contrast to other young, sub-Neptune-sized planets that orbit close to their host star.”
“K2-25b, with the measurements in hand, seems to have a dense core, either rocky or water-rich, with a thin envelope,” he added.
Fair Diffuse
The discovery was made using highly sensitive telescopes that used an “Engineered Diffuser” — a $500 piece of equipment anybody can buy. This diffuser allows light from faraway stars to be spread over more pixels, giving observations more detail and precision.
In other words, thanks to the diffuser, smaller diameter telescopes can be used to make far more precise measurements of stars that otherwise would’ve required much larger telescopes.
