Science – Page 24

A candy engineer explains the science behind the Snickers bar

Biology, candy, Food science, health, Science, syndication / Tim Belzer / October 29, 2024

It’s Halloween. You’ve just finished trick-or-treating and it’s time to assess the haul. You likely have a favorite, whether it’s chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, those gummy clusters with Nerds on them, or something else.

For some people, including me, one piece stands out—the Snickers bar, especially if it’s full-size. The combination of nougat, caramel, and peanuts coated in milk chocolate makes Snickers a popular candy treat.

As a food engineer studying candy and ice cream at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I now look at candy in a whole different way than I did as a kid. Back then, it was all about shoveling it in as fast as I could.

Now, as a scientist who has made a career studying and writing books about confections, I have a very different take on candy. I have no trouble sacrificing a piece for the microscope or the texture analyzer to better understand how all the components add up. I don’t work for, own stock in, or receive funding from Mars Wrigley, the company that makes Snickers bars. But in my work, I do study the different components that make up lots of popular candy bars. Snickers has many of the most common elements you’ll find in your Halloween candy.

Let’s look at the elements of a Snickers bar as an example of candy science. As with almost everything, once you get into it, each component is more complex than you might think.

Snickers bars contain a layer of nougat, a layer of caramel mixed with peanuts, and a chocolate coating. Credit: istarif/iStock via Getty Images

Airy nougat

Let’s start with the nougat. The nougat in a Snickers bar is a slightly aerated candy with small sugar crystals distributed throughout.

One of the ingredients in the nougat is egg white, a protein that helps stabilize the air bubbles that provide a light texture. Often, nougats like this are made by whipping sugar and egg whites together. The egg whites coat the air bubbles created during whipping, which gives the nougat its aerated texture.

A boiled sugar syrup is then slowly mixed into the egg white sugar mixture, after which a melted fat is added. Since fat can cause air bubbles to collapse, this step has to be done last and very carefully.

A candy engineer explains the science behind the Snickers bar Read More »

How can you write data to DNA without changing the base sequence?

biochemistry, Biology, DNA storage, epigenetics, Science, Storage / Tim Belzer / October 29, 2024

The developers of the system call each of these potentially modifiable spots on the template an epi-bit, with the modified version corresponding to a 1 in a conventional computer bit and the unmodified version corresponding to a 0. Because no synthesis is required, multiple bits can be written simultaneously. To read the information, the scientists rigged the system so that 1s fluoresce and 0s don’t. The fluorescence, along with the sequences of bases, was read as the DNA was passed through a tiny pore.

Pictures in a meta-genome

Using this system, Zhang et al. created five DNA templates and 175 bricks to record 350 bits at a time. Using a collection of tagged template molecules, the researchers could store and read roughly 275,000 bits, including a color picture of a panda’s face and a rubbing of a tiger from the Han dynasty, which ruled China from 202 BCE to 220 CE.

They then had 60 student volunteers “with diverse academic backgrounds” store texts of their choice in epi-bits using a simple kit in a classroom. Twelve of the 15 stored texts were read successfully.

We’re not quite ready for your cat videos yet, though. There are still errors in the printing and reading steps, and since these modifications don’t survive when DNA is copied, making additional versions of the stored information may get complicated. Plus, the stability of these modifications under different storage conditions remains unknown, although the authors note that their epi-bits stayed stable at temperatures of up to 95o° C.

But once these and a few other problems are solved—and the technology is scaled up, further optimized and automated, and/or tweaked to accommodate other types of epigenetic modifications—it will be a clever and novel way to harness natural data storage methods for our needs.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08040-5

How can you write data to DNA without changing the base sequence? Read More »

Lidar mapping reveals mountainous medieval cities along the Silk Road

ancient cities, Archeology, LiDAR, Science, Silk Road / Tim Belzer / October 28, 2024

The city of Tugunbulak, which stretched beyond the forest inspector’s house, had powerful walls enclosing the area of 120 hectares, nearly five times larger than the Tashbulak site. With those walls, there was a dense architecture with hundreds of buildings, streets, palaces, plazas—even industrial facilities the Frachetti’s team suspects were used to produce iron or steel.

To put that in perspective, the medieval walls of Siena, one of the foremost cities in Italy during that time, surrounded an area of 105 hectares at the peak of its power. Genoa, another crown jewel among Italian medieval cities, between the 6th and 11th centuries, had walls protecting just 20 hectares, an area bumped up to around 50 hectares by the time of Frederic Barbarossa’s invasion between 1155 and 1158 CE.

Tugunbulak was a monster of a city. But what did it look like?

A city of iron?

“If you looked at Tugunbulak from the outside you would have seen these kind of rocky walls. They appear to have been made in a technology called rammed earth. The builders would take mud and press it into something almost like cement—a very high labor, very dense, very defensive and fortified material,” Frachetti says. Rammed earth was a dominant building technique used in the early stages of Tugunbulak’s development. “The later phase in the site, we see some stone architecture foundations with mud brick on the top. They used local resources and building techniques that were popular in the region,” Frachetti explains.

According to the team, the main contribution of the city to the Silk Road trade was iron, as the surrounding mountains are particularly rich in iron ore. One of the still unanswered questions was about the way Tugunbulak’s people lived and worked. Were they skillful blacksmiths forging iron and perhaps even steel in their mountainous city? Did at least some of its inhabitants live the lives of nomads, visiting the city only periodically to trade on market days or did they live there permanently? “We’d like to know how extensive was the industry there—what level of production were they actually doing?” Franchetti says. He suggested that a shifting, seasonal population that most likely lived in yurts spread outside of the walls was more likely in the smaller Tashbulak, considering it lacked residential suburbs. “Tugunbulak must have been a far more organized political entity. Their power and their influence must have been significant in the broader economy of the Silk Road,” Frachetti claims.

Lidar mapping reveals mountainous medieval cities along the Silk Road Read More »

NASA’s oldest active astronaut is also one of the most curious humans

don pettit, NASA, Science, Space / Rejus Almole / October 28, 2024

For his most recent trip to the International Space Station, in lieu of bringing coffee or some other beverage in his “personal drink bag” allotment for the stay, NASA astronaut Don Pettit asked instead for a couple of bags of unflavored gelatin.

This was not for cooking purposes but rather to perform scientific experiments. How many of us would give up coffee for science?

Well, Donald Roy Pettit is not like most of us.

At the age of 69, Pettit is NASA’s oldest active astronaut and began his third long-duration stay on the space station last month. A lifelong tinkerer and gifted science communicator, he already is performing wonders up there, and we’ll get to his current activities in a moment. But just so you understand who we’re dealing with, the thing to know about Pettit is that he is insatiably curious, and wants to share the wonder of science and the natural world with others.

Here’s just one small example. During his last six-month increment in orbit, from late 2011 to the middle of 2012, Pettit had some Lego blocks he’d been using for student demonstrations. After the final one, he asked if he could use the Legos for a science experiment. He turned them into a belts-and-rollers-type Van de Graaff generator and produced groundbreaking work in electric fluids. This research was published in Physical Review Letters after Pettit returned to Earth. Most of us probably could not even spell Van de Graaff generator, and this dude is up there, in space, building them out of toys.

The way Pettit, a chemical engineer by training, explains things is that he has the “programmatic” scientific research he does for NASA, and then there’s everything else, often done during his limited free time.

“This is well-planned, well thought out, peer-reviewed, and uplinked to station with the supplies needed,” he said of programmatic research. “And then you have what I call science of opportunity. This is science which comes to mind while you are there, simply because you are there, and you can do it because you can. The scientific disciplines that I’ve dabbled in on the International Space Station include fluid physics, classic physics, chemistry, biology, plant growth, and Earth observations.”

Wafers of water ice. Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

NASA’s oldest active astronaut is also one of the most curious humans Read More »

Pizza place accidentally spiked dough with THC, sickening dozens

edibles, health, pizza, poisoning, Science, THC / Rejus Almole / October 28, 2024

In a statement on its website, Yeti’s co-owner Cale Ryan said that police testing “confirmed that pizza had been sold with dough mistakenly prepared with Delta-9-contaminated oil. The oil accidentally used in the product originated from a shared storage space in the on-site cooperative commercial kitchen.”

Oil jug with no label

Over the weekend, Ryan explained further to the Wisconsin State Journal that when Famous Yeti’s ran out of olive oil for its pizza dough, one of the cooks went across the hall to borrow some. “It’s not normal to do, but you borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor,” Ryan said. “We went over to borrow some oil and grabbed the wrong one.” The contamination affected one batch of dough, which makes 60 pizzas, he said.

According to the health department, the oil the cook took “was in a clear plastic jug that looks like other cooking oils. There was a label on the cap that had manufacturer’s information, use by date, and noted it contained Delta-9 cannabis. The operator did not notice the label on the cap. There was no additional labeling on the body of the bottle.” The health department said it doesn’t know what dosages ended up in the pizza.

THC exposure can cause dizziness, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, nausea, vomiting, anxiety, panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations, short-term memory impacts, time distortion, and sleepiness. “Keep in mind each person’s reaction may be different, and the concentration of THC in the pizza can vary by piece,” the health department cautioned.

In a letter posted to Facebook Friday, Ryan apologized and took full responsibility for the contamination. “We put people and families at risk and frightened and confused children and parents. … I am incredibly sorry that I allowed us to act this irresponsibly and ended up hurting the people who have made Yetis [sic] the wonderful place it has been.”

According to America’s Poison Centers, cannabis edible exposures have been increasing among children and teens since at least 2019. Much like what happened at Yeti’s, the trend in accidental poisonings can be blamed on poor labeling and cannabis products that resemble common foods, including candies. To date, Poison Centers have tracked nearly 7,000 exposures in children this year. “While edible cannabis does not typically result in serious problems for adults, children have more severe reactions and are more likely to require medical attention” the poison centers say. In children, severe reactions to cannabis can include slowed breathing, seizure, and coma.

Pizza place accidentally spiked dough with THC, sickening dozens Read More »

Graphene-enhanced ceramic tiles make striking art

chemistry, graphene, materials science, Science, science and art / Paul Patrick / October 28, 2024

In recent years, materials scientists experimenting with ceramics have started adding an oxidized form of graphene to the mix to produce ceramics that are tougher, more durable, and more resistant to fracture, among other desirable properties. Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a new method that uses ultrasound to more evenly distribute graphene oxide (GO) in ceramics, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Omega. And as a bonus, they collaborated with an artist who used the resulting ceramic tiles to create a unique art exhibit at the NUS Museum—a striking merger of science and art.

As reported previously, graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super capacitors, antennas, water filters, transistors, solar cells, and touchscreens, just to name a few.

In 2021, scientists found that this wonder material might also provide a solution to the fading of colors of many artistic masterpieces. For instance, several of Georgia O’Keeffe’s oil paintings housed in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have developed tiny pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil-based masterpieces across all time periods, including works by Rembrandt.

Van Gogh’s Sunflower series has been fading over the last century due to constant exposure to light. A 2011 study found that chromium in the chrome yellow Van Gogh favored reacted strongly with other compounds like barium and sulfur when exposed to sunlight. A 2016 study pointed the finger at the sulfates, which absorb in the UV spectrum, leading to degradation.

Even contemporary art materials are prone to irreversible color changes from exposure to light and oxidizing agents, among other hazards. That’s why there has been recent work on the use of nanomaterials for conservation of artworks. Graphene has a number of properties that make it attractive for art-conservation purposes. The one-atom-thick material is transparent, adheres easily to various substrates, and serves as an excellent barrier against oxygen, gases (corrosive or otherwise), and moisture. It’s also hydrophobic and is an excellent absorber of UV light.

Graphene-enhanced ceramic tiles make striking art Read More »

A how-to for ethical geoengineering research

carbon capture, carbon dioxide removal, climate change, Earth science, Geoengineering, research ethics, Science, solar radiation management / Tim Belzer / October 26, 2024

Holistic climate justice: The guidelines recognize that geoengineering won’t affect just those people currently residing on Earth, but on future generations as well. Some methods, like stratospheric aerosols, don’t eliminate the risks caused by warming, but shift them onto future generations, who will face sudden and potentially dramatic warming if the geoengineering is ever stopped. Others may cause regional differences in either benefits or warming, shifting consequences to different populations.

Special attention should be paid to those who have historically been on the wrong side of environmental problems in the past. And harms to nature need to be considered as well.

Inclusive public participation: The research shouldn’t be approached as simply a scientific process; instead, any affected communities should be included in the process, and informed consent should be obtained from them. There should be ongoing public engagement with those communities and adapt to their cultural values.

Transparency: The public needs to be aware of who’s funding any geoengineering research and ensure that whoever’s providing the money doesn’t influence decisions regarding the design of the research. Those decisions, and the considerations behind them, should also be made clear to the public.

Informed governance: Any experiments have to conform to laws ranging from local to international. Any research programs should be approved by an independent body before any work starts. All the parties involved—and this could include the funders, the institutions, and outside contractors—should be held accountable to governments, public institutions, and those who will potentially be impacted by the work.

If you think this will make pursuing this research considerably more complicated, you are absolutely correct. But again, even tests of these approaches could have serious environmental consequences. And many of these things represent best practices for any research with potential public consequences; the fact that they haven’t always been pursued is not an excuse to continue to avoid doing them.

A how-to for ethical geoengineering research Read More »

If you thought Astra was going to go away quietly, you were wrong

astra, rocket 4, Science, Space / Tim Belzer / October 26, 2024

On Wednesday morning, a surprising email popped into my inbox with the following subject line: “Astra announces Department of Defense contract valued up to $44 Million.”

I had to read it a second time to make sure I got it right. Astra, the launch company? Astra, whose valuation went from $2.6 billion to $25 million after a series of launch failures? Astra, the company that was taken private in July at 50 cents a share?

Yes, it was that Astra.

This was curious, indeed. To get some answers, I spoke with the cofounder of Astra, Chris Kemp, who remains the company’s chief executive.

“If I have learned anything, it’s that you just don’t give up,” Kemp said. “You know, if you give up easily, this is not the place to be. Fortunately, I am surrounded by a team that has chosen not to give up.”

Rocket 4 becomes more real

I’ll be frank: When Kemp and his co-founder, Adam London, took Astra private this summer, I never expected to hear from the company again. Astra certainly was not the first launch company to fail, and it won’t be the last. But it is the first to seemingly resurrect itself in such a dramatic way.

To be clear, Astra is not back yet. The company remains in the phase of building and testing rocket stages and engines and does not have a launch vehicle ready to go. Its new booster, Rocket 4, will launch no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2025, Kemp said. (That date should probably be viewed with some skepticism).

The company has previously discussed Rocket 4, which is intended to carry 600 kg to low-Earth orbit, as far back as August 2022. But at the time, most of the launch industry, including this reporter, shrugged and moved along. After all, the company’s smaller vehicle, Rocket 3, failed on five of its seven orbital launch attempts. The general sentiment was that the new rocket would never fly.

However, even as Astra’s finances worsened and the company had to stave off bankruptcy by being taken private, not everyone dismissed the vision. In April 2023, the US Space Force awarded a task order for Rocket 4 to launch the STP-S29B mission. That was interesting, but it was just a single data point. Then came this week’s announcement that the US Department of Defense’s “Defense Innovation Unit” had awarded a grant worth up to $44 million to Astra for a “tactically responsive launch system.”

If you thought Astra was going to go away quietly, you were wrong Read More »

Study: DNA corroborates “Well-man” tale from Norse saga

ancient DNA, Archaeology, forensic archaeology, Norse history, Norse mythology, Norse sagas, paleogenomics, Science / Mike M. / October 26, 2024

The results: The Well-man was indeed male, between 30 and 40, with blue eyes and blond or light-brown hair, and his ancestry was traced to southern Norway, most likely present-day Vest-Agder. This is interesting because King Sverre’s men were from central Norway, and it had long been assumed that the dead body thrown into the well was part of that army. It was the invading Baglers who hailed from southern Norway. The authors are careful to note that one cannot definitively conclude that therefore the Well-man was a Bagler, but it’s certainly possible that the Baglers tossed one of their own dead into the well.

As for whether the action was a form of 12th-century biological warfare intended to poison the well, the authors weren’t able to identify any pathogens in their analysis. But that might be because of the strict decontamination procedures that were used to prepare the tooth samples, which may have also removed traces of any pathogen DNA. So they could not conclude one way or another whether the Well-man had been infected with a deadly pathogen at the time of his death.

Seven well-man teeth recovered from excavation — Seven Well-man teeth recovered from the excavation. Credit: Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research

“It was a compromise between removing surface contamination of the people who have touched the tooth and then removing some of the possible pathogens. There are lots of ethical considerations,” said co-author Martin Ellegaard, also of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “We need to consider what kind of tests we’re doing now because it will limit what we can do in the future.”

The fact that the Well-man hailed from southern Norway indicates that the distinctive genetic drift observed in southern Norway populations already existed during King Sverre’s reign. “This has implications for our understanding of Norwegian populations, insofar as it implies that this region must have been relatively isolated not only since that time, but also at least for a few hundred years beforehand and perhaps longer,” the authors concluded. Future research sequencing more ancient Norwegian DNA would shed further light on this finding—perhaps even the remains of the Norwegian Saint Olaf, believed to be buried near Trondheim Cathedral.

iScience, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.111076 (About DOIs).

Study: DNA corroborates “Well-man” tale from Norse saga Read More »

Rocket Report: Sneak peek at the business end of New Glenn; France to fly FROG

astra, blue origin, china, Commercial space, launch, new glenn, new shepard, rocket report, Science, Space, starship, united launch alliance, vulcan / Kris Guyer / October 26, 2024

“The vehicle’s max design gimbal condition is during ascent when it has to fight high-altitude winds.”

Blue Origin’s first New Glenn rocket, with seven BE-4 engines installed inside the company’s production facility near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: Blue Origin

Welcome to Edition 7.17 of the Rocket Report! Next week marks 10 years since one of the more spectacular launch failures of this century. On October 28, 2014, an Antares rocket, then operated by Orbital Sciences, suffered an engine failure six seconds after liftoff from Virginia and crashed back onto the pad in a fiery twilight explosion. I was there and won’t forget seeing the rocket falter just above the pad, being shaken by the deafening blast, and then running for cover. The Antares rocket is often an afterthought in the space industry, but it has an interesting backstory touching on international geopolitics, space history, and novel engineering. Now, Northrop Grumman and Firefly Aerospace are developing a new version of Antares.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Astra gets a lifeline from DOD. Astra, the launch startup that was taken private again earlier this year for a sliver of its former value, has landed a new contract with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to support the development of a next-gen launch system for time-sensitive space missions, TechCrunch reports. The contract, which the DIU awarded under its Novel Responsive Space Delivery (NRSD) program, has a maximum value of $44 million. The money will go toward the continued development of Astra’s Launch System 2, designed to perform rapid, ultra-low-cost launches.

Guarantees? … It wasn’t clear from the initial reporting how much money DIU is actually committing to Astra, which said the contract will fund continued development of Launch System 2. Launch System 2 includes a small-class launch vehicle with a similarly basic name, Rocket 4, and mobile ground infrastructure designed to be rapidly set up at austere spaceports. Adam London, founder and chief technology officer at Astra, said the contract award is a “major vote of confidence” in the company. If Astra can capitalize on the opportunity, this would be quite a remarkable turnaround. After going public at an initial valuation of $2.1 billion, or $12.90 per share, Astra endured multiple launch failures with its previous rocket and risked bankruptcy before the company’s co-founders, Chris Kemp and Adam London, took the company private again this year at a price of just $0.50 per share. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin debuts a new New Shepard. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture successfully sent a brand-new New Shepard rocket ship on an uncrewed shakedown cruise Wednesday, with the aim of increasing the company’s capacity to take people on suborbital space trips, GeekWire reports. The capsule, dubbed RSS Karman Line, carried payloads instead of people when it lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. But if all the data collected during the 10-minute certification flight checks out, it won’t be long before crews climb aboard for similar flights.

Now there are two … With this week’s flight, Blue Origin now has two human-rated suborbital capsules in its fleet, along with two boosters. This should allow the company to ramp up the pace of its human missions, which have historically flown at a cadence of about one flight every two to three months. The new capsule, named for the internationally recognized boundary of space 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth, features upgrades to improve performance and ease reusability. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

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China has a new space tourism company. Chinese launch startup Deep Blue Aerospace targets providing suborbital tourism flights starting in 2027, Space News reports. The company was already developing a partially reusable orbital rocket named Nebula-1 for satellite launches and recently lost a reusable booster test vehicle during a low-altitude test flight. While Deep Blue moves forward with more Nebula-1 testing before its first orbital launch, the firm is now selling tickets for rides to suborbital space on a six-person capsule. The first two tickets were expected to be sold Thursday in a promotional livestream event.

Architectural considerations … Deep Blue has a shot at becoming China’s first space tourism company and one of only a handful in the world, joining US-based Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic in the market for suborbital flights. Deep Blue’s design will be a single-stage reusable rocket and crew capsule, similar to Blue Origin’s New Shepard, capable of flying above the Kármán line and providing up to 10 minutes of microgravity experience for its passengers before returning to the ground. A ticket, presumably for a round trip, will cost about $210,000. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

France’s space agency aims to launch a FROG. French space agency CNES will begin flight testing a small reusable rocket demonstrator called FROG-H in 2025, European Spaceflight reports. FROG is a French acronym that translates to Rocket for GNC demonstration, and its purpose is to test landing algorithms for reusable launch vehicles. CNES manages the program in partnership with French nonprofits and universities. At 11.8 feet (3.6 meters) tall, FROG is the smallest launch vehicle prototype at CNES, which says it will test concepts and technologies at small scale before incorporating them into Europe’s larger vertical takeoff/vertical landing test rockets like Callisto and Themis. Eventually, the idea is for all this work to lead to a reusable European orbital-class rocket.

Building on experience … CNES flew a jet-powered demonstrator named FROG-T on five test flights beginning in May 2019, reaching a maximum altitude of about 100 feet (30 meters). FROG-H will be powered by a hydrogen peroxide rocket engine developed by the Łukasiewicz Institute of Aviation in Poland under a European Space Agency contract. The first flights of FROG-H are scheduled for early 2025. The structure of the FROG project seeks to “break free from traditional development methods” by turning to “teams of enthusiasts” to rapidly develop and test solutions through an experimental approach, CNES says on its website. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Falcon 9 sweeps NSSL awards. The US Space Force’s Space Systems Command announced on October 18 it has ordered nine launches from SpaceX in the first batch of dozens of missions the military will buy in a new phase of competition for lucrative national security launch contracts, Ars reports. The parameters of the competition limited the bidders to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA). SpaceX won both task orders for a combined value of $733.5 million, or roughly $81.5 million per mission. Six of the nine missions will launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, beginning as soon as late 2025. The other three will launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Head-to-head … This was the first set of contract awards by the Space Force’s National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 procurement round and represents one of the first head-to-head competitions between SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and ULA’s Vulcan rocket. The nine launches were divided into two separate orders, and SpaceX won both. The missions will deploy payloads for the National Reconnaissance Office and the Space Development Agency. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

SpaceX continues deploying NRO megaconstellation. SpaceX launched more surveillance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office Thursday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, Spaceflight Now reports. While the secretive spy satellite agency did not identify the number or exact purpose of the satellites, the Falcon 9 likely deployed around 20 spacecraft believed to be based on SpaceX’s Starshield satellite bus, a derivative of the Starlink spacecraft platform, with participation from Northrop Grumman. These satellites host classified sensors for the NRO. This is the fourth SpaceX launch for the NRO’s new satellite fleet, which seeks to augment the agency’s bespoke multibillion-dollar spy satellites with a network of smaller, cheaper, more agile platforms in low-Earth orbit.

The century mark … This mission, officially designated NROL-167, was the 100th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket this year and the 105th SpaceX launch overall in 2024. The NRO has not said how many satellites will make up its fleet when completed, but the intelligence agency says it will be the US government’s largest satellite constellation in history. By the end of the year, the NRO expects to have 100 or more of these satellites in orbit, allowing the agency to transition from a demonstration mode to an operational mode to deliver intelligence data to military and government users. Many more launches are expected through 2028. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ULA is stacking its third Vulcan rocket. United Launch Alliance has started assembling its next Vulcan rocket—the first destined to launch a US military payload—as the Space Force prepares to certify it to loft the Pentagon’s most precious national security satellites, Ars reports. Space Force officials expect to approve ULA’s Vulcan rocket for military missions without requiring another test flight, despite an unusual problem on the rocket’s second demonstration flight earlier this month, when one of Vulcan’s two strap-on solid-fueled boosters lost its nozzle shortly after liftoff.

Pending certification … Despite the nozzle failure, the Vulcan rocket continued climbing into space and eventually reached its planned injection orbit, and the Space Force and ULA declared the test flight a success. Still, engineers want to understand what caused the nozzle to break apart and decide on corrective actions before the Space Force clears the Vulcan rocket to launch a critical national security payload. This could take a little longer than expected due to the booster problem, but Space Force officials still hope to certify the Vulcan rocket in time to support a national security launch by the end of the year.

Blue Origin’s first New Glenn has all its engines. Blue Origin published a photo Thursday on X showing all seven first-stage BE-4 engines installed on the base of the company’s first New Glenn rocket. This is a notable milestone as Blue Origin proceeds toward the first launch of the heavy-lifter, possibly before the end of the year. But there’s a lot of work for Blue Origin to accomplish before then. These steps include rolling the rocket to the launch pad, running through propellant loading tests and practice countdowns, and then test-firing all seven BE-4 engines on the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Seven for seven … The BE-4 engines will consume methane fuel mixed with liquid oxygen for the first few minutes of the New Glenn flight, generating more than 3.8 million pounds of combined thrust. The seven BE-4s on New Glenn are similar to the BE-4 engines that fly two at a time on ULA’s Vulcan rocket. Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, said three of the seven engines on the New Glenn first stage have thrust vector control capability to provide steering during launch, reentry, and landing on the company’s offshore recovery vessel. “That gimbal capability, along with the landing gear and Reaction Control System thrusters, are key to making our booster fully reusable,” Limp wrote on X. “Fun fact: The vehicle’s max design gimbal condition is during ascent when it has to fight high-altitude winds.”

Next Super Heavy booster test-fired in Texas. SpaceX fired up the Raptor engines on its next Super Heavy booster, numbered Booster 13, Thursday evening at the company’s launch site in South Texas. This happened just 11 days after SpaceX launched and caught the Super Heavy booster on the previous Starship test flight and signals SpaceX could be ready for the next Starship test flight sometime in November. SpaceX has already test-fired the Starship upper stage for the next flight.

Great expectations … We expect the next Starship flight, which will be program’s sixth full-scale demo mission, will include another booster catch back at the launch tower at Starbase, Texas. SpaceX may also attempt to reignite a Raptor engine on the Starship upper stage while it is in space, demonstrating the capability to steer itself back into the atmosphere on future flights. So far, SpaceX has only launched Starships on long, arcing suborbital trajectories that carry the vehicle halfway around the world before reentry. In order to actually launch a Starship into a stable orbit around Earth, SpaceX will want to show it can bring the vehicle back so it doesn’t reenter the atmosphere in an uncontrolled manner. An uncontrolled reentry of a large spacecraft like Starship could pose a public safety risk.

Next three launches

Oct. 26: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-8 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21: 47 UTC

Oct. 29: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-9 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 11: 30 UTC

Oct. 30: H3 | Kirameki 3 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 06: 46 UTC

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Google’s DeepMind is building an AI to keep us from hating each other

AI, consensus, DeepBrain, ethics, Google, Habermas, Politics, Science / Tim Belzer / October 26, 2024

The AI did better than professional mediators at getting people to reach agreement.

Image of two older men arguing on a park bench.

An unprecedented 80 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, think the country is deeply divided over its most important values ahead of the November elections. The general public’s polarization now encompasses issues like immigration, health care, identity politics, transgender rights, or whether we should support Ukraine. Fly across the Atlantic and you’ll see the same thing happening in the European Union and the UK.

To try to reverse this trend, Google’s DeepMind built an AI system designed to aid people in resolving conflicts. It’s called the Habermas Machine after Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher who argued that an agreement in a public sphere can always be reached when rational people engage in discussions as equals, with mutual respect and perfect communication.

But is DeepMind’s Nobel Prize-winning ingenuity really enough to solve our political conflicts the same way they solved chess or StarCraft or predicting protein structures? Is it even the right tool?

Philosopher in the machine

One of the cornerstone ideas in Habermas’ philosophy is that the reason why people can’t agree with each other is fundamentally procedural and does not lie in the problem under discussion itself. There are no irreconcilable issues—it’s just the mechanisms we use for discussion are flawed. If we could create an ideal communication system, Habermas argued, we could work every problem out.

“Now, of course, Habermas has been dramatically criticized for this being a very exotic view of the world. But our Habermas Machine is an attempt to do exactly that. We tried to rethink how people might deliberate and use modern technology to facilitate it,” says Christopher Summerfield, a professor of cognitive science at Oxford University and a former DeepMind staff scientist who worked on the Habermas Machine.

The Habermas Machine relies on what’s called the caucus mediation principle. This is where a mediator, in this case the AI, sits through private meetings with all the discussion participants individually, takes their statements on the issue at hand, and then gets back to them with a group statement, trying to get everyone to agree with it. DeepMind’s mediating AI plays into one of the strengths of LLMs, which is the ability to briefly summarize a long body of text in a very short time. The difference here is that instead of summarizing one piece of text provided by one user, the Habermas Machine summarizes multiple texts provided by multiple users, trying to extract the shared ideas and find common ground in all of them.

But it has more tricks up its sleeve than simply processing text. At a technical level, the Habermas Machine is a system of two large language models. The first is the generative model based on the slightly fine-tuned Chinchilla, a somewhat dated LLM introduced by DeepMind back in 2022. Its job is to generate multiple candidates for a group statement based on statements submitted by the discussion participants. The second component in the Habermas Machine is a reward model that analyzes individual participants’ statements and uses them to predict how likely each individual is to agree with the candidate group statements proposed by the generative model.

Once that’s done, the candidate group statement with the highest predicted acceptance score is presented to the participants. Then, the participants write their critiques of this group statement, feed those critiques back into the system which generates updated group’s statements and repeats the process. The cycle goes on till the group statement is acceptable to everyone.

Once the AI was ready, DeepMind’s team started a fairly large testing campaign that involved over five thousand people discussing issues such as “should the voting age be lowered to 16?” or “should the British National Health Service be privatized?” Here, the Habermas Machine outperformed human mediators.

Scientific diligence

Most of the first batch of participants were sourced through a crowdsourcing research platform. They were divided into groups of five, and each team was assigned a topic to discuss, chosen from a list of over 5,000 statements about important issues in British politics. There were also control groups working with human mediators. In the caucus mediation process, those human mediators achieved a 44 percent acceptance rate for their handcrafted group statements. The AI scored 56 percent. Participants usually found the AI group statements to be better written as well.

But the testing didn’t end there. Because people you can find on crowdsourcing research platforms are unlikely to be representative of the British population, DeepMind also used a more carefully selected group of participants. They partnered with the Sortition Foundation, which specializes in organizing citizen assemblies in the UK, and assembled a group of 200 people representative of British society when it comes to age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status etc. The assembly was divided into groups of three that deliberated over the same nine questions. And the Habermas Machine worked just as well.

The agreement rate for the statement “we should be trying to reduce the number of people in prison” rose from a pre-discussion 60 percent agreement to 75 percent. The support for the more divisive idea of making it easier for asylum seekers to enter the country went from 39 percent at the start to 51 percent at the end of discussion, which allowed it to achieve majority support. The same thing happened with the problem of encouraging national pride, which started with 42 percent support and ended at 57 percent. The views held by the people in the assembly converged on five out of nine questions. Agreement was not reached on issues like Brexit, where participants were particularly entrenched in their starting positions. Still, in most cases, they left the experiment less divided than they were coming in. But there were some question marks.

The questions were not selected entirely at random. They were vetted, as the team wrote in their paper, to “minimize the risk of provoking offensive commentary.” But isn’t that just an elegant way of saying, ‘We carefully chose issues unlikely to make people dig in and throw insults at each other so our results could look better?’

Conflicting values

“One example of the things we excluded is the issue of transgender rights,” Summerfield told Ars. “This, for a lot of people, has become a matter of cultural identity. Now clearly that’s a topic which we can all have different views on, but we wanted to err on the side of caution and make sure we didn’t make our participants feel unsafe. We didn’t want anyone to come out of the experiment feeling that their basic fundamental view of the world had been dramatically challenged.”

The problem is that when your aim is to make people less divided, you need to know where the division lines are drawn. And those lines, if Gallup polls are to be trusted, are not only drawn between issues like whether the voting age should be 16 or 18 or 21. They are drawn between conflicting values. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart argued that, for the right side of the US’s political spectrum, the only division line that matters today is “woke” versus “not woke.”

Summerfield and the rest of the Habermas Machine team excluded the question about transgender rights because they believed participants’ well-being should take precedence over the benefit of testing their AI’s performance on more divisive issues. They excluded other questions as well like the problem of climate change.

Here, the reason Summerfield gave was that climate change is a part of an objective reality—it either exists or it doesn’t, and we know it does. It’s not a matter of opinion you can discuss. That’s scientifically accurate. But when the goal is fixing politics, scientific accuracy isn’t necessarily the end state.

If major political parties are to accept the Habermas Machine as the mediator, it has to be universally perceived as impartial. But at least some of the people behind AIs are arguing that an AI can’t be impartial. After OpenAI released the ChatGPT in 2022, Elon Musk posted a tweet, the first of many, where he argued against what he called the “woke” AI. “The danger of training AI to be woke—in other words, lie—is deadly,” Musk wrote. Eleven months later, he announced Grok, his own AI system marketed as “anti-woke.” Over 200 million of his followers were introduced to the idea that there were “woke AIs” that had to be countered by building “anti-woke AIs”—a world where the AI was no longer an agnostic machine but a tool pushing the political agendas of its creators.

Playing pigeons’ games

“I personally think Musk is right that there have been some tests which have shown that the responses of language models tend to favor more progressive and more libertarian views,” Summerfield says. “But it’s interesting to note that those experiments have been usually run by forcing the language model to respond to multiple-choice questions. You ask ‘is there too much immigration’ for example, and the answers are either yes or no. This way the model is kind of forced to take an opinion.”

He said that if you use the same queries as open-ended questions, the responses you get are, for the large part, neutral and balanced. “So, although there have been papers that express the same view as Musk, in practice, I think it’s absolutely untrue,” Summerfield claims.

Does it even matter?

Summerfield did what you would expect a scientist to do: He dismissed Musk’s claims as based on a selective reading of the evidence. That’s usually checkmate in the world of science. But in the world politics, being correct is not what matters the most. Musk was short, catchy, and easy to share and remember. Trying to counter that by discussing methodology in some papers nobody read was a bit like playing chess with a pigeon.

At the same time, Summerfield had his own ideas about AI that others might consider dystopian. “If politicians want to know what the general public thinks today, they might run a poll. But people’s opinions are nuanced, and our tool allows for aggregation of opinions, potentially many opinions, in the highly dimensional space of language itself,” he says. While his idea is that the Habermas Machine can potentially find useful points of political consensus, nothing is stopping it from also being used to craft speeches optimized to win over as many people as possible.

That may be in keeping with Habermas’ philosophy, though. If you look past the myriads of abstract concepts ever-present in German idealism, it offers a pretty bleak view of the world. “The system,” driven by power and money of corporations and corrupt politicians, is out to colonize “the lifeworld,” roughly equivalent to the private sphere we share with our families, friends, and communities. The way you get things done in “the lifeworld” is through seeking consensus, and the Habermas Machine, according to DeepMind, is meant to help with that. The way you get things done in “the system,” on the other hand, is through succeeding—playing it like a game and doing whatever it takes to win with no holds barred, and Habermas Machine apparently can help with that, too.

The DeepMind team reached out to Habermas to get him involved in the project. They wanted to know what he’d have to say about the AI system bearing his name. But Habermas has never got back to them. “Apparently, he doesn’t use emails,” Summerfield says.

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adq2852

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Astronaut hospitalized after returning from 235-day space mission

crew dragon, Crew-8, dragon, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, spacex / Rejus Almole / October 25, 2024

NASA said Friday one its astronauts is in a hospital in Florida for medical observation after a “normal” predawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico inside a SpaceX capsule.

The mission’s other three crew members were cleared to return to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston after their own medical evaluations, NASA said.

The hospitalized astronaut “is in stable condition and under observation as a precautionary measure,” a NASA spokesperson said in a statement. The agency did not identify the astronaut or provide any more details about their condition, citing medical privacy protections.

Strapped into their seats onside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft, the four-person crew splashed down just south of Pensacola, Florida, at 3: 29 am EDT (07: 29 UTC) Friday, wrapping up a 235-day mission in low-Earth orbit.

NASA extended their stay at the International Space Station earlier this year to accommodate schedule changes caused by the troubled test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, then to wait for better weather conditions in SpaceX’s recovery zones near Florida.

Commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, mission specialist Jeanette Epps, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin were inside SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft for reentry and splashdown. NASA said one of its astronauts “experienced a medical issue” after the splashdown, and all four crew members were flown to Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola for medical evaluation.

Three of the crew members were later released and departed Pensacola on a NASA business jet to fly back to Houston, according to NASA. The unidentified astronaut remains at Ascension.

“We’re grateful to Ascension Sacred Heart for its support during this time, and we are proud of our team for its quick action to ensure the safety of our crew members,” the NASA spokesperson said. “NASA will provide additional information as it becomes available.”

Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, left, NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, second from left, Matthew Dominick, second from right, and Jeanette Epps, right are seen inside the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft shortly after splashdown Friday morning. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

This mission, named Crew-8, was SpaceX’s eighth operational crew rotation flight to the space station under a multibillion-dollar commercial crew contract with NASA. This was the first flight to space for Dominick, Epps, and Grebenkin, and the third space mission for Barratt.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, released a photo of Grebenkin standing in Pensacola a few hours after splashdown. “After the space mission and splashdown, cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin feels great!” Roscosmos posted on its Telegram channel.

Adapting to Earth

This is not the first time an astronaut has been hospitalized after returning to Earth, but it is uncommon. South Korean astronaut Yi So-yeon was hospitalized for back pain after experiencing higher-than-expected g-forces during reentry in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2008.

Three NASA astronauts were hospitalized in Hawaii after splashing down at the end of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission in 1975. The astronauts suffered lung irritation after breathing in toxic vapors from the Apollo spacecraft’s thrusters in the final moments before splashdown.

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