Science

7-million-pounds-of-meat-recalled-amid-deadly-outbreak

7 million pounds of meat recalled amid deadly outbreak

CDC, deaths, health, Infectious disease, listeria, Listeria monocytogenes, Meat, outbreak, recall, Science, USDA / /

7 million pounds across 71 products —

Authorities worry that the contaminated meats are still sitting in people’s fridges.

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Shelves sit empty where Boar's Head meats are usually displayed at a Safeway store on July 31, 2024, in San Anselmo, California.

Enlarge / Shelves sit empty where Boar’s Head meats are usually displayed at a Safeway store on July 31, 2024, in San Anselmo, California.

Over 7 million pounds of Boar’s Head brand deli meats are being recalled amid a bacterial outbreak that has killed two people. The outbreak, which began in late May, has sickened a total of 34 people across 13 states, leading to 33 hospitalizations, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

On June 26, Boar’s Head recalled 207,528 pounds of products, including liverwurst, beef bologna, ham, salami, and “heat and eat” bacon. On Tuesday, the Jarratt, Virginia-based company expanded the recall to include about 7 million additional pounds of meat, including 71 different products sold on the Boar’s Head and Old Country brand labels. The products were sold nationwide.

The meats may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, a foodborne pathogen that is particularly dangerous to pregnant people, people over the age of 65, and people with compromised immune systems. Infections during pregnancy can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery, or a life-threatening infection in newborns. For others who develop invasive illness, the fatality rate is nearly 16 percent. Symptoms of listeriosis can include fever, muscle aches, headache, stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance, and convulsions that are sometimes preceded by diarrhea or other gastrointestinal symptoms.

The problem was discovered when the Maryland Department of Health—working with the Baltimore City Health Department—collected an unopened liverwurst product from a retail store and found that it was positive for L. monocytogenes. In later testing, the strain in the liverwurst was linked to those isolated from people sickened in the outbreak.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, six of the 34 known cases were identified in Maryland, and 12 were identified in New York. The other 11 states have only reported one or two cases each. However, the CDC expects the true number of infections to be much higher, given that many people recover without medical care and, even if people did seek care, health care providers do not routinely test for L. monocytogenes in people with mild gastrointestinal illnesses.

In the outbreak so far, there has been one case in a pregnant person, who recovered and remained pregnant. The two deaths occurred in New Jersey and Illinois.

In a statement on the company’s website, Boar’s Head said that it learned from the USDA on Monday night that L. monocytogenes strain in the liverwurst linked to the multistate outbreak. “Out of an abundance of caution, we decided to immediately and voluntarily expand our recall to include all items produced at the Jarratt facility. We have also decided to pause ready-to-eat operations at this facility until further notice. As a company that prioritizes safety and quality, we believe it is the right thing to do.”

The USDA said it is “concerned that some product may be in consumers’ refrigerators and in retail deli cases.” The USDA, the company, and CDC warn people not to eat the recalled products. Instead, they should either be thrown away or returned to the store where they were purchased for a full refund. And if you’ve purchased one of the recalled products, the USDA also advises you to thoroughly clean your fridge to prevent cross-contamination.

7 million pounds of meat recalled amid deadly outbreak Read More »

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How Kepler’s 400-year-old sunspot sketches helped solve a modern mystery

astronomy, astrophysics, Johannes Kepler, Physics, Science, solar physics, sun spots / /
A naked-eye sunspot group on 11 May 2024

Enlarge / A naked-eye sunspot group on May 11, 2024. There are typically 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots observed in ~11-year solar cycles.

E. T. H. Teague

A team of Japanese and Belgian astronomers has re-examined the sunspot drawings made by 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler with modern analytical techniques. By doing so, they resolved a long-standing mystery about solar cycles during that period, according to a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Precisely who first observed sunspots was a matter of heated debate in the early 17th century. We now know that ancient Chinese astronomers between 364 and 28 BCE observed these features and included them in their official records. A Benedictine monk in 807 thought he’d observed Mercury passing in front of the Sun when, in reality, he had witnessed a sunspot; similar mistaken interpretations were also common in the 12th century. (An English monk made the first known drawings of sunspots in December 1128.)

English astronomer Thomas Harriot made the first telescope observations of sunspots in late 1610 and recorded them in his notebooks, as did Galileo around the same time, although the latter did not publish a scientific paper on sunspots (accompanied by sketches) until 1613. Galileo also argued that the spots were not, as some believed, solar satellites but more like clouds in the atmosphere or the surface of the Sun. But he was not the first to suggest this; that credit belongs to Dutch astronomer Johannes Fabricus, who published his scientific treatise on sunspots in 1611.

Kepler read that particular treatise and admired it, having made his sunspot observations using a camera obscura in 1607 (published in a 1609 treatise), which he initially thought was a transit of Mercury. He retracted that report in 1618, concluding that he had actually seen a group of sunspots. Kepler made his solar drawings based on observations conducted both in his own house and in the workshop of court mechanic Justus Burgi in Prague.  In the first case, he reported “a small spot in the size of a small fly”; in the second, “a small spot of deep darkness toward the center… in size and appearance like a thin flea.”

The earliest datable sunspot drawings based on Kepler's solar observations with camera obscura in May 1607.

Enlarge / The earliest datable sunspot drawings based on Kepler’s solar observations with camera obscura in May 1607.

Public domain

The long-standing debate that is the subject of this latest paper concerns the period from around 1645 to 1715, during which there were very few recorded observations of sunspots despite the best efforts of astronomers. This was a unique event in astronomical history. Despite only observing some 59 sunspots during this time—compared to between 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots over a similar time span in our current age—astronomers were nonetheless able to determine that sunspots seemed to occur in 11-year cycles.

German astronomer Gustav Spörer noted the steep decline in 1887 and 1889 papers, and his British colleagues, Edward and Annie Maunder, expanded on that work to study how the latitudes of sunspots changed over time. That period became known as the “Maunder Minimum.” Spörer also came up with “Spörer’s law,” which holds that spots at the start of a cycle appear at higher latitudes in the Sun’s northern hemisphere, moving to successively lower latitudes in the southern hemisphere as the cycle runs its course until a new cycle of sunspots begins in the higher latitudes.

But precisely how the solar cycle transitioned to the Maunder Minimum has been far from clear. Reconstructions based on tree rings have produced conflicting data. For instance, one such reconstruction concluded that the gradual transition was preceded either by an extremely short solar cycle of about five years or an extremely long solar cycle of about 16 years. Another tree ring reconstruction concluded the solar cycle would have been of normal 11-year duration.

Independent observational records can help resolve the discrepancy. That’s why Hisashi Hayakawa of Nagoya University in Japan and co-authors turned to Kepler’s drawings of sunspots for additional insight, which predate existing telescopic observations by several years.

How Kepler’s 400-year-old sunspot sketches helped solve a modern mystery Read More »

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Webb confirms: Big, bright galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang

astronomy, cosmology, galaxies, galaxy formation, Science, Webb telescope / /

They grow up so fast —

Structure of galaxy rules out early, bright objects were supermassive black holes.

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Image of a field of stars and galaxies.

Enlarge / Some of the galaxies in the JADES images.

One of the things that the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do was look at some of the earliest objects in the Universe. And it has already succeeded spectacularly, imaging galaxies as they existed just 250 million years after the Big Bang. But these galaxies were small, compact, and similar in scope to what we’d consider a dwarf galaxy today, which made it difficult to determine what was producing their light: stars or an actively feeding supermassive black hole at their core.

This week, Nature is publishing confirmation that some additional galaxies we’ve imaged also date back to just 300 million years after the Big Bang. Critically, one of them is bright and relatively large, allowing us to infer that most of its light was coming from a halo of stars surrounding its core, rather than originating in the same area as the central black hole. The finding implies that it formed through a continuing burst of star formation that started just 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Age checks

The galaxies at issue here were first imaged during the JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) imaging program, which includes part of the area imaged for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Initially, old galaxies were identified by using a combination of filters on one of Webb’s infrared imaging cameras.

Most of the Universe is made of hydrogen, and figuring out the age of early galaxies involves looking for the most energetic transitions of hydrogen’s electron, called the Lyman series. These transitions produce photons that are in the UV area of the spectrum. But the redshift of light that’s traveled for billions of years will shift these photons into the infrared area of the spectrum, which is what Webb was designed to detect.

What this looks like in practice is that hydrogen-dominated material will emit a broad range of light right up to the highest energy Lyman transition. Above that energy, photons will be sparse (they may still be produced by things like processes that accelerate particles). This point in the energy spectrum is called the “Lyman break,” and its location on the spectrum will change based on how distant the source is—the greater the distance to the source, the deeper into the infrared the break will appear.

Initial surveys checked for the Lyman break using filters on Webb’s cameras that cut off different areas of the IR spectrum. Researchers looked for objects that showed up at low energies but disappeared when a filter that selected for higher-energy infrared photons was swapped in. The difference in energies between the photons allowed through by the two filters can provide a rough estimate of where the Lyman break must be.

Locating the Lyman break requires imaging with a spectrograph, which can sample the full spectrum of near-infrared light. Fortunately, Webb has one of those, too. The newly published study involved turning the NIRSpec onto three early galaxies found in the JADES images.

Too many, too soon

The researchers involved in the analysis only ended up with data from two of these galaxies. NIRSpec doesn’t gather as much light as one of Webb’s cameras can, and so the faintest of the three just didn’t produce enough data to enable analysis. The other two, however, produced very clear data that placed the galaxies at a redshift measure roughly z = 14, which means we’re seeing them as they looked 300 million years after the Big Bang. Both show sharp Lyman breaks, with the amount of light dropping gradually as you move further into the lower-energy part of the spectrum.

There’s a slight hint of emissions from heavily ionized carbon atoms in one of the galaxies, but no sign of any other specific elements beyond hydrogen.

One of the two galaxies was quite compact, so similar to the other galaxies of this age that we’d confirmed previously. But the other, JADES-GS-ZZ14-0, was quite distinct. For starters, it’s extremely bright, being the third most luminous distant galaxy out of hundreds we’ve imaged so far. And it’s big enough that it’s not possible for all its light to be originating from the core. That rules out the possibility that what we’re looking at is a blurred view of an active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole feeding on material.

Instead, much of the light we’re looking at seems to have originated in the stars of JADES-GS-ZZ14-0. Most of those stars are young, and there seems to be very little of the dust that characterizes modern galaxies. The researchers estimate that star formation started at least 100 million years earlier (meaning just 200 million years after the Big Bang) and continued at a rapid pace in the intervening time.

Combined with earlier data, the researchers write that this confirms that “bright and massive galaxies existed already only 300 [million years] after the Big Bang, and their number density is more than ten times higher than extrapolations based on pre-JWST observations.” In other words, there were a lot more galaxies around in the early Universe than we thought, which could pose some problems for our understanding of the Universe’s contents and their evolution.

Meanwhile, the early discovery of the extremely bright galaxy implies that there are a number of similar ones out there awaiting our discovery. This means there’s going to be a lot of demand for time on NIRSpec in the coming years.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07860-9  (About DOIs).

Webb confirms: Big, bright galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang Read More »

with-a-landmark-launch,-the-pentagon-is-finally-free-of-russian-rocket-engines

With a landmark launch, the Pentagon is finally free of Russian rocket engines

atlas v, cape canaveral, launch, military space, rd-180, russia, Science, Space, space force, united launch alliance, US Space Force, ussf-51 / /
Liftoff of ULA's Atlas V rocket on the US Space Force's USSF-51 mission.

Enlarge / Liftoff of ULA’s Atlas V rocket on the US Space Force’s USSF-51 mission.

United Launch Alliance delivered a classified US military payload to orbit Tuesday for the last time with an Atlas V rocket, ending the Pentagon’s use of Russian rocket engines as national security missions transition to all-American launchers.

The Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6: 45 am EDT (10: 45 UTC) Tuesday, propelled by a Russian-made RD-180 engine and five strap-on solid-fueled boosters in its most powerful configuration. This was the 101st launch of an Atlas V rocket since its debut in 2002, and the 58th and final Atlas V mission with a US national security payload since 2007.

The US Space Force’s Space Systems Command confirmed a successful conclusion to the mission, code-named USSF-51, on Tuesday afternoon. The rocket’s Centaur upper stage released the top secret USSF-51 payload about seven hours after liftoff, likely in a high-altitude geostationary orbit over the equator. The military did not publicize the exact specifications of the rocket’s target orbit.

“What a fantastic launch and a fitting conclusion for our last national security space Atlas V (launch),” said Walt Lauderdale, USSF-51 mission director at Space Systems Command, in a post-launch press release. “When we look back at how well Atlas V met our needs since our first launch in 2007, it illustrates the hard work and dedication from our nation’s industrial base. Together, we made it happen, and because of teams like this, we have the most successful and thriving launch industry in the world, bar none.”

RD-180’s long goodbye

The launch Tuesday morning was the end of an era born in the 1990s when US government policy allowed Lockheed Martin, the original developer of the Atlas V, to use Russian rocket engines during its first stage. There was a widespread sentiment in the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union that the United States and other Western nations should partner with Russia to keep the country’s aerospace workers employed and prevent “rogue states” like Iran or North Korea from hiring them.

At the time, the Pentagon was procuring new rockets to replace legacy versions of the Atlas, Delta, and Titan rocket families, which had been in service since the late 1950s or early 1960s.

A cluster of solid rocket boosters surround the RD-180 main engine as the Atlas V launcher climbs away from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin the USSF-51 mission.

Enlarge / A cluster of solid rocket boosters surround the RD-180 main engine as the Atlas V launcher climbs away from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin the USSF-51 mission.

Ultimately, the Air Force chose Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V and Boeing’s Delta IV rocket for development in 1998. The Atlas V, with its Russian main engine, was somewhat less expensive than the Delta IV and the more successful of the two designs. After Tuesday’s launch, 15 more Atlas V rockets are booked to fly payloads for commercial customers and NASA, mainly for Amazon’s Kuiper network and Boeing’s Starliner crew spacecraft. The 45th and final Delta IV launch occurred in April.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin merged their rocket divisions in 2006 to form a 50-50 joint venture named United Launch Alliance, which became the sole contractor certified to carry large US military satellites to orbit until SpaceX started launching national security missions in 2018.

SpaceX filed a lawsuit in 2014 to protest the Air Force’s decision to award ULA a multibillion-dollar sole-source contract for 36 Atlas V and Delta IV rocket booster cores. The litigation started soon after Russia’s military occupation and annexation of Crimea, which prompted US government sanctions on prominent Russian government officials, including Dmitry Rogozin, then Russia’s deputy prime minister and later the head of Russia’s space agency.

Rogozin, known for his bellicose but usually toothless rhetoric, threatened to halt exports of RD-180 engines for US military missions on the Atlas V. That didn’t happen until Russia finally stopped engine exports to the United States in 2022, following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At that point, ULA already had all the engines it needed to fly out all of its remaining Atlas V rockets. This export ban had a larger effect on Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, which also used Russian engines, forcing the development of a brand new first stage booster with US engines.

The SpaceX lawsuit, Russia’s initial military incursions into Ukraine in 2014, and the resulting sanctions marked the beginning of the end for the Atlas V rocket and ULA’s use of the Russian RD-180 engine. The dual-nozzle RD-180, made by a Russian company named NPO Energomash, consumes kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants and generates 860,000 pounds of thrust at full throttle.

With a landmark launch, the Pentagon is finally free of Russian rocket engines Read More »

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SpaceX moving Dragon splashdowns to Pacific to solve falling debris problem

commercial crew, dragon, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, spacex / /
A Crew Dragon spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station in 2022. The section of the spacecraft on the left is the pressurized capsule, while the rear section, at right, is the trunk.

Enlarge / A Crew Dragon spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station in 2022. The section of the spacecraft on the left is the pressurized capsule, while the rear section, at right, is the trunk.

NASA

Sometime next year, SpaceX will begin returning its Dragon crew and cargo capsules to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean and end recoveries of the spacecraft off the coast of Florida.

This will allow SpaceX to make changes to the way it brings Dragons back to Earth and eliminate the risk, however tiny, that a piece of debris from the ship’s trunk section might fall on someone and cause damage, injury, or death.

“After five years of splashing down off the coast of Florida, we’ve decided to shift Dragon recovery operations back to the West Coast,” said Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management.

Public safety

In the past couple of years, landowners have discovered debris from several Dragon missions on their property, and the fragments all came from the spacecraft’s trunk, an unpressurized section mounted behind the capsule as it carries astronauts or cargo on flights to and from the International Space Station.

SpaceX returned its first 21 Dragon cargo missions to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. When an upgraded human-rated version of Dragon started flying in 2019, SpaceX moved splashdowns to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico to be closer to the company’s refurbishment and launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The benefits of landing near Florida included a faster handover of astronauts and time-sensitive cargo back to NASA and shorter turnaround times between missions.

The old version of Dragon, known as Dragon 1, separated its trunk after the deorbit burn, allowing the trunk to fall into the Pacific. With the new version of Dragon, called Dragon 2, SpaceX changed the reentry profile to jettison the trunk before the deorbit burn. This meant that the trunk remained in orbit after each Dragon mission, while the capsule reentered the atmosphere on a guided trajectory. The trunk, which is made of composite materials and lacks a propulsion system, usually takes a few weeks or a few months to fall back into the atmosphere and doesn’t have control of where or when it reenters.

Air resistance from the rarefied upper atmosphere gradually slows the trunk’s velocity enough to drop it out of orbit, and the amount of aerodynamic drag the trunk sees is largely determined by fluctuations in solar activity.

SpaceX and NASA, which funded a large portion of the Dragon spacecraft’s development, initially determined the trunk would entirely burn up when it reentered the atmosphere and would pose no threat of surviving reentry and causing injuries or damaging property. However, that turned out to not be the case.

In May, a 90-pound chunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that departed the International Space Station fell on the property of a “glamping” resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared to be from the same Dragon mission.

These events followed the discovery in April of another nearly 90-pound piece of debris from a Dragon capsule on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. SpaceX and NASA later determined the debris fell from orbit in February, and earlier this month, SpaceX employees came to the farm to retrieve the wreckage, according to CBC.

Pieces of a Dragon spacecraft also fell over Colorado last year, and a farmer in Australia found debris from a Dragon capsule on his land in 2022.

SpaceX moving Dragon splashdowns to Pacific to solve falling debris problem Read More »

air-pollution-makes-it-harder-for-bees-to-smell-flowers

Air pollution makes it harder for bees to smell flowers

air pollution, bees, pollination, pollinators, Science, syndication / /

protect the pollinators —

Contaminants can alter plant odors and warp insects’ senses, disrupting the process of pollination.

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Scientists are uncovering various ways that air pollution can interfere with the ability of insects to pollinate plants.

Scientists are uncovering various ways that air pollution can interfere with the ability of insects to pollinate plants.

In the summers of 2018 and 2019, ecologist James Ryalls and his colleagues would go out to a field near Reading in southern England to stare at the insects buzzing around black mustard plants. Each time a bee, hoverfly, moth, butterfly, or other insect tried to get at the pollen or nectar in the small yellow flowers, they’d make a note.

It was part of an unusual experiment. Some patches of mustard plants were surrounded by pipes that released ozone and nitrogen oxides—polluting gases produced around power plants and conventional cars. Other plots had pipes releasing normal air.

The results startled the scientists. Plants smothered by pollutants were visited by up to 70 percent fewer insects overall, and their flowers received 90 percent fewer visits compared with those in unpolluted plots. The concentrations of pollutants were well below what US regulators consider safe. “We didn’t expect it to be quite as dramatic as that,” says study coauthor Robbie Girling, an entomologist at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and a visiting professor at the University of Reading.

A growing body of research suggests that pollution can disrupt insect attraction to plants—at a time when many insect populations are already suffering deep declines due to agricultural chemicals, habitat loss, and climate change. Around 75 percent of wild flowering plants and around 35 percent of food crops rely on animals to move pollen around, so that plants can fertilize one another and form seeds. Even the black mustard plants used in the experiment, which can self-fertilize, exhibited a drop of 14 percent to 31 percent in successful pollination as measured by the number of seedpods, seeds per pod, and seedpod weight from plants engulfed by dirty air.

Scientists are still working out how strong and widespread these effects of pollution are, and how they operate. They’re learning that pollution may have a surprising diversity of effects, from changing the scents that draw insects to flowers to warping the creatures’ ability to smell, learn, and remember.

This research is still young, says Jeff Riffell, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. “We’re only touching the tip of the iceberg, if you will, in terms of how these effects are influencing these pollinators.”

Altered scents

Insects often rely on smell to get around. As they buzz about in their neighborhoods, they learn to associate flowers that are good sources of nectar and pollen with their scents. Although some species, like honeybees, also use directions from their hive mates and visual landmarks like trees to navigate, even they critically depend on the sense of smell for sniffing out favorite flowers from afar. Nocturnal pollinators such as moths are particularly talented smellers. “They can smell these patches of flowers from a kilometer away,” Riffell says.

One of the effects of pollution—and what Girling suspects was largely responsible for the pollination declines at the England site—is how it perturbs these flowery aromas. Each fragrance is a unique blend of dozens of compounds that are chemically reactive and degrade in the air. Gases such as ozone or nitrogen oxide will quickly react with these molecules and cause odors to vanish even faster than usual. “For very reactive scents, the plume can only travel a third of the distance than it should actually travel when there is no pollution,” says atmospheric scientist Jose D. Fuentes of Penn State University, who has simulated the influence of ozone on floral scent compounds.

And if some compounds degrade faster than others, the bouquet of scents that insects associate with particular plants transforms, potentially rendering them unrecognizable. Girling and his colleagues observed this in experiments in a wind tunnel into which they delivered ozone. The tunnel was also outfitted with a device that steadily released a synthetic blend of floral odors (an actual flower would have wilted, says coauthor Ben Langford, an atmospheric chemist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology). Using chemical detectors, the team watched the flowery scent plume shorten and narrow as ozone ate away at the edges, with some compounds dropping off entirely as others persisted.

The scientists had trained honeybees to detect the original flowery scent by exposing them to the odor, then giving them sugar water—until they automatically stuck out their tongue-like proboscises to taste it upon smelling the scent. But when bees were tested with ozonated odor representing the edges of the scent plume, either 6 or 12 meters away from the source, only 32 percent and 10 percent, respectively, stuck out their proboscises. The bee is “sniffing a completely different odor at that point,” Langford says.

Researchers also have observed that striped cucumber beetles and buff-tailed bumblebees struggle to recognize their host plants above certain levels of ozone. Some of the most dramatic observations are at night, when extremely reactive pollutants called nitrate radicals accumulate. Riffell and colleagues recently found that about 50 percent fewer tobacco hornworm moths were attracted to the pale evening primrose when the plant’s aroma was altered by these pollutants, and white-lined sphinx moths didn’t recognize the scent at all. This reduced the number of seeds and fruits by 28 percent, the team found in outdoor pollination experiments. “It’s having a really big effect on the plant’s ability to produce seeds,” Riffell says.

Air pollution makes it harder for bees to smell flowers Read More »

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Although it’s not final, SpaceX just got good news from the FAA on Starbase

FAA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship / /

A superfluity of Starships —

“SpaceX has dramatically reduced the duration of operations.”

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The Super Heavy booster for Flight 5 of Starship undergoes a static fire test earlier this month.

Enlarge / The Super Heavy booster for Flight 5 of Starship undergoes a static fire test earlier this month.

SpaceX

After SpaceX decided to launch orbital missions of its Starship rocket from Texas about five years ago, the company had to undergo a federal environmental review of the site to ensure it was safe to do so.

As a part of this multi-year process, the Federal Aviation Administration completed a Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment in June 2022. Following that review, SpaceX received approval to conduct up to five Starship launches from South Texas annually.

SpaceX has since launched Starship four times from its launch site in South Texas, known as Starbase, and is planning a fifth launch within the next two months. However, as it continues to test Starship and make plans for regular flights, SpaceX will need a higher flight rate. This is especially true as the company is unlikely to activate additional launch pads for Starship in Florida until at least 2026.

To that end, SpaceX has asked the FAA for permission for up to 25 flights a year from South Texas, as well as the capability to land both the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster stage back at the launch site. On Monday, the FAA signaled that it is inclined to grant permission for this.

A solid step for SpaceX

The federal agency released a 154-page “Draft Tiered Environmental Assessment” for an increased cadence of Starship launches from South Texas. In conclusion, the document stated: “The FAA has concluded that the modification of SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, consistent with the data contained in the 2022 PEA, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action.”

Effectively, then, the FAA is saying that its extensive 2022 analysis of Starship activities on the environment, wildlife, local communities, and more was sufficient to account for SpaceX’s proposed modifications.

This is not the final word. In the parlance of the FAA, this is just milestone No. 3 in the seven-part process that results in a final determination. Up next are a series of public meetings, both in person in South Texas and online, during the month of August. The public comment period will then close on August 29.

Although the process is not yet complete, this document indicates the current thinking of federal regulators, who appear inclined to be permissive of an increased scope of activities. This is no small finding, as SpaceX is not only seeking to launch more rockets, but also to land them back at Starbase, as well as significantly increase the thrust of the vehicles.

SpaceX asked the FAA—which has federal authority to regulate such activities in order to protect life and property on the ground—for 25 annual launches and 50 total landings, 25 for Starship and 25 for Super Heavy. The company is also seeking to conduct up to 90 seconds of daytime Starship static fire tests, and 70 seconds of daytime Super Heavy static fire tests a year.

Bigger rockets, more propellant

SpaceX also is developing more powerful variants of its rocket, and the launch of these vehicles would also be permitted. Under the environmental assessment completed in 2022, SpaceX’s plans called for a 50-meter-tall Starship and a 71-meter-tall Super Heavy booster stage. Its upgraded Starship would be 70 meters tall, atop an 80-meter boost stage, for a total stack height of 150 meters.

The company is contemplating a far greater thrust for each of the vehicles, more than doubling Starship’s thrust to 6.5 million pounds and substantially increasing Super Heavy’s thrust to 2.3 million pounds. A bigger, more powerful launch system will require more than 1,500 tons of liquid oxygen and methane propellant.

Upgrade plans for Starship and Super Heavy.

Enlarge / Upgrade plans for Starship and Super Heavy.

FAA

One change that may have helped sell this increased flight rate is that SpaceX is not seeking any additional increases in road closures of State Highway 4, which leads from Brownsville to Boca Chica Beach. This road passes right by the launch site and is closed during launches and static fire tests. SpaceX has moved much of its pre-launch testing to a new location nearby that does not require road closures.

“SpaceX has dramatically reduced the duration of operations and the number of access restrictions through engineering analysis and improvements,” the FAA draft document states. “There has been an 85% reduction in the number of access restrictions from Flight 1 to Flight 3. Additionally, a majority of the testing that required access restrictions has been moved to SpaceX’s Massey’s Test Site, approximately 4 miles away.”

After the public comment period, the FAA will prepare a final environmental assessment and render a decision on the request.

Although it’s not final, SpaceX just got good news from the FAA on Starbase Read More »

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Are you a workaholic? Here’s how to spot the signs

Science, syndication, workaholic / /

bad for business —

Psychologists now view an out-of-control compulsion to work as an addiction.

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Man works late in dimly lit cubicle amid a dark office space

An accountant who fills out spreadsheets at the beach, a dog groomer who always has time for one more client, a basketball player who shoots free throws to the point of exhaustion.

Every profession has its share of hard chargers and overachievers. But for some workers—perhaps more than ever in our always-on, always-connected world—the drive to send one more email, clip one more poodle, sink one more shot becomes all-consuming.

Workaholism is a common feature of the modern workplace. A recent review gauging its pervasiveness across occupational fields and cultures found that roughly 15 percent of workers qualify as workaholics. That adds up to millions of overextended employees around the world who don’t know when—or how, or why—to quit.

Whether driven by ambition, a penchant for perfectionism, or the small rush of completing a task, they work past any semblance of reason. A healthy work ethic can cross the line into an addiction, a shift with far-reaching consequences, says Toon Taris, a behavioral scientist and work researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

“Workaholism” is a word that gets thrown around loosely and sometimes glibly, says Taris, but the actual affliction is more common, more complex, and more dangerous than many people realize.

What workaholism is—and isn’t

Psychologists and employment researchers have tinkered with measures and definitions of workaholism for decades, and today the picture is coming into focus. In a major shift, workaholism is now viewed as an addiction with its own set of risk factors and consequences, says Taris, who, with occupational health scientist Jan de Jonge of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, explored the phenomenon in the 2024 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

Taris stresses that the “workaholic” label doesn’t apply to people who put in long hours because they love their jobs. Those people are considered engaged workers, he says. “That’s fine. No problems there.” People who temporarily put themselves through the grinder to advance their careers or keep up on car or house payments don’t count, either. Workaholism is in a different category from capitalism.

The growing consensus is that true workaholism encompasses four dimensions: motivations, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, says Malissa Clark, an industrial/organizational psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. In 2020, Clark and colleagues proposed in the Journal of Applied Psychology  that, in sum, workaholism involves an inner compulsion to work, having persistent thoughts about work, experiencing negative feelings when not working, and working beyond what is reasonably expected.

Some personality types are especially likely to fall into the work trap. Perfectionists, extroverts, and people with type A (ambitious, aggressive, and impatient) personalities are prone to workaholism, Clark and coauthors found in a 2016 meta-analysis. They had expected people with low self-esteem to be at risk, but that link was nowhere to be found. Workaholics may put themselves through the wringer, but it’s not necessarily out of a sense of inadequacy or self-loathing.

Are you a workaholic? Here’s how to spot the signs Read More »

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It’s not just us: Other animals change their social habits in old age

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out to pasture —

Long-term studies reveal what elderly deer, sheep, and macaques are up to in their later years.

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A Rhesus macaque on a Buddhist stupa in the Swayambhunath temple complex in Kathmandu, Nepal

Enlarge / As female macaques age, the size of their social network shrinks.

Walnut was born on June 3, 1995, at the start of what would become an unusually hot summer, on an island called Rum (pronounced room), the largest of the Small Isles off the west coast of Scotland. We know this because since 1974, researchers have diligently recorded the births of red deer like her, and caught, weighed and marked every calf they could get their hands on—about 9 out of every 10.

Near the cottage in Kilmory on the northern side of the island where the researchers are based, there has been no hunting since the project began, which allowed the deer to relax and get used to human observers. Walnut was a regular there, grazing the invariably short-clipped grass in this popular spot. “She would always just be there in the group, with her sisters and their families,” says biologist Alison Morris, who has lived on Rum for more than 23 years and studies the deer year-round.

Walnut raised 14 offspring, the last one in 2013, when she was 18 years old. In her later years, Morris recalls, Walnut would spend most of her time away from the herd, usually with Vanity, another female (called a hind) of the same age who had never calved. “They were often seen affectionately grooming each other, and after Walnut died of old age in October 2016, at the age of 21—quite extraordinary for a hind—Vanity spent most of her time alone. She died two years later, at the grand age of 23.”

Are old hinds left behind?

Such a shift in social life is common in aging red deer females, says ecologist Gregory Albery, now at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, who spent months on the island studying the deer during his PhD training. (Males roam around more and associate less consistently with others, so they are harder to study.) “Older females tend to be observed in the company of fewer others. That was easy to establish,” he says. “The more difficult question to answer has been why we are seeing this pattern, and what it means.”

The first question one should ask, Albery says, is whether individual deer alter their behavior to associate with fewer others as they age, or whether individuals that associate with fewer others tend to live to an older age. This is the kind of question that many researchers are unable to answer when simply comparing individuals of different ages. But long-term studies like the one at Rum can do so through long-term tracking of populations. Forty times a year, the deer are censused by fieldworkers like Morris who recognize the deer on sight and meticulously note where they are and with whom.

When they accounted for the age and survival of the deer in their analysis, Albery and colleagues found that the link between age and number of associates remained solid: Social connections do, indeed, decrease as individuals age. Might this be because many of the older deer’s friends have died? On the contrary, Albery and colleagues found that older deer who had recently lost friends tended to hang out with others more often.

So why do old hinds have fewer contacts? Part of the explanation may be that they don’t range as widely as they grow older. Studying the deer for a couple of months would not have exposed this trend, says Albery: It was only revealed by tracking the same individuals through time. “Deer with a larger home range generally live longer,” he explains, so an analysis at any single point in time would show larger ranges for older deer and suggest that home ranges expand with age. Tracking individuals through time reveals the opposite is true. “Their home ranges decrease in size as they age,” Albery says.

It is unlikely that older deer move around less because they are concentrating on the core of their favorite habitat, says Albery. The center of their range shifts with age, and they are observed more often in taller and probably less nutritious vegetation, away from the most popular spots. This indicates there might be some kind of competitive exclusion going on: Perhaps more energetic, younger deer with offspring to feed are colonizing the best grazing patches.

On the other hand, older deer may also have different preferences. “Perhaps the longer grasses are easier to eat when your incisors are too worn to clip the short grass everyone else is after,” Albery says. Plus the deer don’t have to bend over as far to reach the longer grass.

A recent study by Albery and colleagues in Nature Ecology & Evolution  found that older deer reduce their contacts more than you’d expect if their shrinking range was the only cause. That suggests the behavior may have evolved for a reason—one that Albery prosaically summarizes as, “Deer shit where they eat.”

Gastrointestinal worms are rampant on the island. And though the deer do not get infected through direct contact with others, being at the same place at the same time probably does increase their risk of ingesting eggs or larvae in the still-warm droppings of one of their associates.

“Younger animals need to put themselves out there to make friends, but perhaps when you’re older and you already have some, the risk of disease just isn’t worth it,” says study coauthor Josh Firth, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oxford.

In addition, says ecologist Daniel Nussey of the University of Edinburgh, another coauthor, “there are indications that the immune system of aging deer is less effective in suppressing worm infections, so they might be more likely to die from them.”

It’s not just us: Other animals change their social habits in old age Read More »

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SpaceX roars back to orbit barely two weeks after in-flight anomaly

falcon 9, Science, Space, spacex / /

Look who’s back, back again —

“It was incredible to see how quickly the team was able to identify the cause of the mishap.”

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The Starlink 10-9 mission lifts off early Saturday morning from Florida.

Enlarge / The Starlink 10-9 mission lifts off early Saturday morning from Florida.

SpaceX webcast

Early on Saturday morning, at 1: 45 am local time, a Falcon 9 rocket soared into orbit from its launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

By some measures this was an extremely routine mission—it was, after all, SpaceX’s 73rd launch of this calendar year. And like many other Falcon 9 launches this year, the “Starlink 10-9” mission carried 23 of the broadband internet satellites into orbit. However, after a rare failure earlier this month, this particular Falcon 9 rocket was making a return-to-flight for the company, and attempting to get the world’s most active booster back into service.

And by all measures, it performed. The first stage booster, B-1069, made its 17th flight into orbit before landing on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Then, a little more than an hour after liftoff, the rocket’s second stage released its payload into a good orbit, from which the Starlink spacecraft will use their on-board thrusters to reach operational altitudes in the coming weeks.

A crack in the sense line

The Falcon 9 rocket only failed a little more than 15 days ago, during a Starlink launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 7: 35 pm PDT (02: 35 UTC) on July 11. During that mission, just a few minutes after stage separation, an unusual buildup of ice was observed on the Merlin vacuum engine that powers the second stage of the vehicle.

According to the company, the Merlin vacuum engine successfully completed its first burn after the second stage separated. However, during this time a liquid oxygen leak developed near the engine—which led to the buildup of ice observed during the webcast.

Engineers and technicians were quickly able to pinpoint the cause of the leak, a crack in a “sense line” for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s liquid oxygen system. “This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line,” the company said in an update published prior to Saturday morning’s launch.

This leak excessively cooled the engine, and caused a lower amount of igniter fluid to be available prior to re-lighting the Merlin for its second burn to circularize the rocket’s orbit before releasing the Starlink satellites. This caused a hard start of the Merlin engine. Ultimately the satellites were released into a lower orbit, where they burnt up in Earth’s atmosphere within days.

The sense line that failed is redundant, SpaceX said. It is not used by the flight safety system, and can be covered by alternate sensors already present on the engine. In the near term, the sense line will be removed from the second stage engine for Falcon 9 launches.

During a news briefing Thursday, SpaceX director Sarah Walker said this sense line was installed based on a customer requirement for another mission. The only difference between this component and other commonly flown sense lines is that it has two connections rather than one, she said. This may have made it a bit more susceptible to vibration, leading to a small crack.

Getting back fast

SpaceX identified the cause of the failure within hours of the anomaly, and worked the Federal Aviation Administration to come to a rapid resolution. On Thursday, the launch company received permission to return to flight.

“It was incredible to see how quickly the team was able to identify the cause of the mishap, and then the associated corrective actions to ensure success,” Walker said.

Before the failure on the night of July 11th, SpaceX had not experienced a mission failure in the previous 297 launches of the Falcon 9 rocket, dating back to the Amos-6 launch pad explosion in September 2016. The short interval between the failure earlier this month, and Saturday’s return to flight, appears to be unprecedented in spaceflight history.

The company now plans to launch two more Starlink missions on the Falcon 9 rocket this weekend, one from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, as well as Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It then has three additional missions before a critical astronaut flight for NASA, Crew-9, that could occur as soon as August 18.

For this reason, NASA was involved in the investigation of the second stage failure. Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said SpaceX did an “extraordinary job” in identifying the root cause of the failure, and then rapidly looking at its Dragon spacecraft and first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket to ensure there were no other sensors that could cause similar problems.

SpaceX roars back to orbit barely two weeks after in-flight anomaly Read More »

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People are overdosing on off-brand weight-loss drugs, FDA warns

diabetes, fda, GLP-1, health, Science, semaglutide, weight loss / /

Dosage disarray —

Bad math and unclear directions are behind overdoses of up to 20 times the normal amount.

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Wegovy is an injectable prescription weight-loss medicine that has helped people with obesity.

Enlarge / Wegovy is an injectable prescription weight-loss medicine that has helped people with obesity.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved two injectable versions of the blockbuster weight-loss and diabetes drug, semaglutide (Wegovy and Ozempic). Both come in pre-filled pens with pre-set doses, clear instructions, and information about overdoses. But, given the drugs’ daunting prices and supply shortages, many patients are turning to imitations—and those don’t always come with the same safety guardrails.

In an alert Friday, the FDA warned that people are overdosing on off-brand injections of semaglutide, which are dispensed from compounding pharmacies in a variety of concentrations, labeled with various units of measurement, administered with improperly sized syringes, and prescribed with bad dosage math. The errors are leading some patients to take up to 20 times the amount of intended semaglutide, the FDA reports.

Though the agency doesn’t offer a tally of overdose cases that have been reported, it suggests it has received multiple reports of people sickened by dosing errors, with some requiring hospitalizations. Semaglutide overdoses cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, acute pancreatitis, and gallstones, the agency reports.

Bad math

In typical situations, compounding pharmacies provide personalized formulations of FDA-approved drugs, for instance, if a patient is allergic to a specific ingredient, requires a special dosage, or needs a liquid version of a drug instead of a pill form. But, when commercially available drugs are in short supply—as semaglutide drugs currently are—then compound pharmacies can legally step in to make their own versions if certain conditions are met. However, these imitations are not FDA-approved and, as such, don’t come with the same safety, quality, and effectiveness assurances as approved drugs.

In the warning Friday, the FDA said that some patients received confusing instructions from compounding pharmacies, which indicated they inject themselves with a certain number of “units” of semaglutide—the volume of which may vary depending on the concentration—rather than milligrams or milliliters. In other instances, patients received U-100 (1-milliliter) syringes to administer 0.05-milliliter doses of the drug, or five units. The relatively large syringe size compared with the dose led some patients to administer 50 units instead of five.

The figure demonstrates how syringe size could lead some to an incorrect dosage.

Enlarge / The figure demonstrates how syringe size could lead some to an incorrect dosage.

FDA-approved semaglutide drugs, meanwhile, are dosed in milligrams and come in standardized concentrations. The agency received several reports of health care providers incorrectly converting from milligrams to units or milliliters, leading them to calculate the wrong dosages. With these math errors, some patients administered five to 10 times more semaglutide than intended.

“FDA recognizes the substantial consumer interest in using compounded semaglutide products for weight loss,” the agency wrote. “However, compounded drugs pose a higher risk to patients than FDA-approved drugs.” The agency urged patients and prescribers to only use compounded versions when absolutely necessary.

People are overdosing on off-brand weight-loss drugs, FDA warns Read More »

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Rocket Report: ABL loses its second booster; Falcon 9 cleared for return to flight

Science, Space / /
NASA's SLS rocket core stage for Artemis II is moved to the VAB.

Enlarge / NASA’s SLS rocket core stage for Artemis II is moved to the VAB.

NASA/Ben Smegelsky

Welcome to Edition 7.04 of the Rocket Report! Probably the most striking news this week came from ABL, which said in a terse social media statement that it had lost its second RS1 rocket during pre-flight testing. This is unfortunate, since the company had been so careful and meticulous in working toward this second launch attempt. It’s a reminder of how demanding this industry remains.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

ABL loses rocket after static fire test. ABL Space Systems said Monday that its next rocket had suffered “irrecoverable” damage during preparations for launch. “After a pre-flight static fire test on Friday, a residual pad fire caused irrecoverable damage to RS1,” the company said on the social media site X. “The team is investigating root cause and will provide updates as the investigation progresses.” As of the writing of this report three days later, the company has not posted any additional information.

Not particularly promising … This is a serious setback for the launch company, which attempted the debut flight of its RS1 vehicle 18 months ago and had been preparing for this second attempt for a long time. The California-based company had been keeping a low profile and had not made a social media posting since May. The RS1 vehicle is advertised as having a lift capacity of 1.35 metric tons at a price of $12 million. During ABL’s initial launch attempt in January 2023, an anomaly in the rocket caused all nine of the RS1’s first-stage engines to shut down. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Point-to-point company test-fires engine. A space transportation startup with visions of high-speed point-to-point travel has started tests of the engine that will power their vehicle, Space News reports. Frontier Aerospace test-fired its Mjölnir engine on July 18, its chairman, Alex Tai, said during a panel discussion at the Farnborough International Airshow. Mjölnir is a full-flow staged combustion engine. The firing lasted less than a second but demonstrated the startup of the turbopumps and successful ignition.

Starting with a smaller version … The company plans to do longer engine burns as part of the testing program. The version of Mjölnir currently being tested produces less than 3,000 pounds-force of thrust. New Frontier plans to use a much more powerful version of the engine on a vehicle called the Intercontinental Rocketliner, a suborbital vehicle intended to carry 100 people on high-speed flights around the planet at hypersonic speeds. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

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Ursa Major invests in Ohio. Ursa Major will buy several industrial 3D printers and hire 15 new employees for a research and development center in Youngstown, Ohio, focused on additive manufacturing, Payload reports. The Colorado-based rocket engine maker will contribute $10.5 million in capital investment alongside a $4 million grant from JobsOhio, a privately funded economic development nonprofit. The expansion of a small existing facility will enable the company to step up its development of solid rocket motors—a top priority for the Department of Defense.

The war needs what it needs … In April, Ursa won a contract of undisclosed value from the Navy to develop a lower-cost manufacturing approach for the standardized solid rocket motors used across a range of missiles. The US supply chains for those motors—mainly provided by Northrop Grumman and L3Harris—have been stressed by US support for Ukraine’s defense against Russian invaders. In November, Ursa raised $138 million to support its push into solid rocket motor manufacturing in a round that reportedly valued the company at $750 million.

Rocket Report: ABL loses its second booster; Falcon 9 cleared for return to flight Read More »