Science – Page 32

Starship is about to launch on its fifth flight, and this time there’s a catch

Commercial space, launch, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, texas / Paul Patrick / October 13, 2024

“We landed with half a centimeter accuracy in the ocean, so we think we have a reasonable chance to come back to the tower,” Gerstenmaier said.

Launch playbook

The Starship upper stage, meanwhile, will light six Raptor engines to accelerate to nearly orbital velocity, giving the rocket enough oomph to coast halfway around the world before falling back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

This is a similar trajectory to the one Starship flew in June, when it survived a fiery reentry for a controlled splashdown. It was the first time SpaceX completed an end-to-end Starship test flight. Onboard cameras showed fragments of the heat shield falling off Starship when it reentered the atmosphere, but the vehicle maintained control and reignited its Raptor engines, flipped from a horizontal to a vertical orientation, and settled into the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia.

After analyzing the results from the June mission, SpaceX engineers decided to rework the heat shield for the next Starship vehicle. The company said its technicians spent more than 12,000 hours replacing the entire thermal protection system with new-generation tiles, a backup ablative layer, and additional protections between the ship’s flap structures.

From start to finish, Sunday’s test flight should last approximately 1 hour and 5 minutes.

This diagram illustrates the path the Super Heavy booster will take to return to the launch pad in Texas, while the Starship upper stage continues the climb to space. Credit: SpaceX

Here’s an overview of the key events during Sunday’s flight:

• T+00: 00: 02: Liftoff

• T+00: 01: 02: Maximum aerodynamic pressure

• T+00: 02: 33: Super Heavy MECO (most engines cut off)

• T+00: 02: 41: Stage separation and ignition of Starship engines

• T+00: 02: 48: Super Heavy boost-back burn start

• T+00: 03: 41: Super Heavy boost-back burn shutdown

• T+00: 03: 43: Hot staging ring jettison

• T+00: 06: 08: Super Heavy is subsonic

• T+00: 06: 33: Super Heavy landing burn start

• T+00: 06: 56: Super Heavy landing burn shutdown and catch attempt

• T+00: 08: 27: Starship engine cutoff

• T+00: 48: 03: Starship reentry

• T+01: 02: 34: Starship is transonic

• T+01: 03: 43: Starship is subsonic

• T+01: 05: 15: Starship landing flip

• T+01: 05: 20: Starship landing burn

• T+01: 05: 34: Starship splashdown in Indian Ocean

SpaceX officials hope to see Starship’s heat shield stay intact as it dips into the atmosphere, when temperatures will reach 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius), hot enough to melt aluminum, the metal used to build many launch vehicles. SpaceX chose stainless steel for Starship because it strong at cryogenic temperatures—the rocket consumes super-cold fuel and oxidizer—and has a higher melting point than aluminum.

Starship is about to launch on its fifth flight, and this time there’s a catch Read More »

Why a diabetes drug fell short of anticancer hopes

cancer treatment, experimental drugs, health, metformin, pharmaceutical research, Science, syndication / Tim Belzer / October 12, 2024

Studies suggested it could treat cancer, but the clinical trials were a bust.

Multi-pipettes

Pamela Goodwin has received hundreds of emails from patients asking if they should take a cheap, readily available drug, metformin, to treat their cancer.

It’s a fair question: Metformin, commonly used to treat diabetes, has been investigated for treating a range of cancer types in thousands of studies on laboratory cells, animals, and people. But Goodwin, an epidemiologist and medical oncologist treating breast cancer at the University of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, advises against it. No gold-standard trials have proved that metformin helps treat breast cancer—and her recent research suggests it doesn’t.

Metformin’s development was inspired by centuries of use of French lilac, or goat’s rue (Galega officinalis), for diabetes-like symptoms. In 1918, researchers discovered that a compound from the herb lowers blood sugar. Metformin, a chemical relative of that compound, has been a top type 2 diabetes treatment in the United States since it was approved in 1994. It’s cheap—less than a dollar per dose—and readily available, with few side effects. Today, more than 150 million people worldwide take the stuff.

Illustration of French lilac plant. — The French lilac, *Galega officinalis*, has been used medicinally since medieval times, including for symptoms associated with diabetes. Investigations of the plant’s chemical galegine led to the development of metformin, a related molecule synthesized in the lab. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Metformin has a variety of effects, such as improving immune function and the body’s responses to insulin, which in turn regulates blood sugar. It can also slow growth of cancer cells in the lab. Many of these benefits seem to stem from metformin’s action in the cell’s powerhouses, the mitochondria, where it slows the production of energy and limits the generation of damaging chemicals called free radicals.

Researchers have considered metformin for treating a plethora of conditions, from glaucoma to polycystic ovary syndrome to pimples. “It really has a reputation of being a potential wonder drug,” says Michael Pollak, an oncologist and researcher at McGill University in Montreal. “There’s still a lot of work to be done on metformin.” (Pollak consults for biotechnology companies interested in metformin analogs as medicines.)

But the latest research has convinced Pollak and some others that treatment of cancers should be taken off the list.

More studies, but no proof

One of the first hints linking metformin to anticancer effects came in a short note in the British Medical Journal in 2005. Researchers analyzed medical records of almost 12,000 people from the Tayside region of Scotland who were newly diagnosed with diabetes between 1993 and 2001. Of those, more than 900 went on to develop cancer. Interestingly, those who’d taken metformin at some point during the study period were 23 percent less likely to have received a later cancer diagnosis.

This finding fueled further research on people with diabetes taking metformin and the risk for breast cancer, liver cancer, ovarian and endometrial cancer, and other types. The authors of a 2013 analysis, covering more than 1 million patients in 41 observational studies like the original one, concluded that metformin “might be associated with a significant reduction in the risk of cancer.” But such associations are not proof.

Researchers went on to explore the link in studies with cells in dishes and in lab animals, finding that metformin slowed growth of blood, breast, endometrial, lung, liver, stomach, and thyroid cancer cells. It also seemed to make cancer cells extra sensitive to chemotherapy drugs. In one mouse study, scientists grafted human breast, prostate, or lung cancer cells into the animals and treated them with either standard chemotherapy drugs, metformin, or a combination of both. The combination worked best, preventing tumor growth and prolonging relapse.

These findings made sense to researchers. Metformin treats metabolic problems in diabetes, and cancer has also been linked to metabolic issues such as obesity. Even before the 2005 British Medical Journal study, Goodwin had noticed that breast cancer patients with high insulin did worse than those with normal insulin levels.

That logic, plus the promising data, led scientists to conduct a number of randomized controlled trials—the gold-standard experiment in medicine. Researchers would enroll people with cancer and split them into two groups. One group would get standard cancer therapy plus metformin; the other group would get standard therapy plus a placebo, a pill containing no medication.

And metformin flopped, big time. While a number of studies are ongoing, trials for two types of cancer recently reported no benefit overall from metformin. In June 2024, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, researchers reported a Canadian trial with 407 men with low-risk prostate cancer. The enrollees had been diagnosed within six months before starting the trial and had decided to monitor their cancer without starting immediate treatment. Half took metformin and half took a placebo. After biopsies at 18 and 36 months to test whether their disease had progressed, there was no difference between the two groups.

A larger British and Swiss trial including nearly 1,900 patients with newly diagnosed or relapsed prostate cancer that had spread to other body parts was reported at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in September. This trial also found that metformin plus standard treatment, compared to standard treatment alone, did not improve overall prostate cancer survival in the study population.

A multinational study of breast cancer helmed by Goodwin also led to disappointment. The researchers enrolled more than 3,600 patients between 2010 and 2013; these patients had been diagnosed about a year before enrollment and had already undergone chemotherapy and surgery. In addition to standard cancer treatment, half received metformin and half received a placebo.

By 2016, it was clear that metformin wasn’t doing anything to enhance survival for about 1,100 participants with a particular cancer subtype. When the study wrapped in 2020, the researchers analyzed the rest of the patients, counting how many were alive and free of breast or any other form of cancer. Metformin made no difference in those results, or to survival overall, the team reported in 2022.

Fatal flaws in the research

In retrospect, researchers think they know why earlier studies oversold metformin’s potential. Many of the studies that examined medical records had a crucial flaw, says Samy Suissa, a pharmacoepidemiologist at McGill.

Here’s what happens: Researchers sift through old medical records to see if someone ever took metformin. Then they compare cancer rates among people who took the drug at any point to those who never took it. But you have to be alive to take metformin. Anyone who died, of cancer or other causes, before having a chance at a metformin prescription is left out of the calculations. This skews the results; it’s called the “immortal time bias.” It makes any drug, metformin or otherwise, look like it helps patients to survive because it can only be taken by people who are alive, says Suissa.

Plus, scientists are more likely to publish studies that show metformin is promising than ones where it makes no difference, skewing the scientific literature.

As for those studies of cells in dishes and of lab animals, many experiments used much higher doses of metformin than are used in people. Too much metformin risks a buildup of lactate, a byproduct of low oxygen metabolism that acidifies the blood and can be fatal.

Researchers still suspect metformin might treat specific subgroups of cancer. For example, the authors of the prostate cancer trial presented in Barcelona suggested that metformin might help patients whose cancer has spread to other tissues or multiple sites in their bones. And Goodwin saw a hint in her trial that it might help women whose cancers contain a certain version of a cell-growth gene called ERBB2. But it would require another trial, focused on women with that particular cancer, to prove it.

And there are now better treatments for those patients than there were more than a decade ago when Goodwin started her study, reducing the opportunity to test metformin. Goodwin doesn’t currently have the funding to follow up on this theory.

It may also be that the clinical trials recruited patients with cancers that were too far along. “I always thought we were asking too much of metformin,” says Victoria Bae-Jump, a gynecological oncologist at the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center in Chapel Hill. “Maybe it just needs to be earlier in the pathway of growth.” Bae-Jump is now testing metformin in women who have early-stage endometrial cancer or a precursor to it.

Others are investigating metformin for people who have precancerous lesions in their mouths. “The idea would be to keep them from progressing, or reverse the tissues to be more normal,” says Frank Ondrey, a head and neck cancer surgeon at the Masonic Cancer Center of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In a small, uncontrolled study of 23 people, metformin halved lesion size in four of them. Ondrey is involved in two ongoing studies, one a randomized, controlled trial, to further test metformin in people with precancerous lesions; these should yield results within a few years.

Subdued expectations

Metformin is also being tested for other conditions such as dementia and a genetic disorder called fragile X syndrome. And perhaps the ultimate potential use for metformin is to slow aging itself. “I think it’s much easier to treat aging and prevent cancer than to treat cancer,” says Nir Barzilai, a geroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and president of the nonprofit Academy for Health & Lifespan Research. Through its enhancement of insulin action and metabolism plus its minimization of free radical production, metformin influences all the key hallmarks of aging, such as problems with DNA, mitochondria and stem cells, says Barzilai.

He and colleagues are gathering funds for a randomized, controlled trial of metformin in 3,000 people age 65 through 79 who are showing signs of age-related disease already. The trial will test whether fewer people taking metformin die over six years. Barzilai, who is 68, says he is confident in metformin’s anti-aging ability and already takes the drug himself.

Others, mindful of what happened with cancer, are more circumspect. Pollak says that many of the studies in other areas of medicine are too small to prove metformin works, and Suissa notes that some of the studies finding benefits in populations taking metformin, including for longevity, have the same problems the oh-so-promising early cancer research did.

In short, Suissa says, “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens.

Why a diabetes drug fell short of anticancer hopes Read More »

Rare bear meat at gathering gives 10 people a scare—and parasitic worms

bear, CDC, health, infectious diseases, Meat, outbreak, parasite, Science, trichinella, trichinellosis / Rejus Almole / October 12, 2024

If you’re going to eat a bear, make sure it’s not rare.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that once the beast has been subdued, all danger has passed. But you might still be in for a scare. The animal’s flesh can be riddled with encased worm larvae, which, upon being eaten, will gladly reproduce in your innards and let their offspring roam the rest of your person, including invading your brain and heart. To defeat these savage squirmers, all one must do is cook the meat to at least 165° Fahrenheit.

But that simple solution continues to be ignored, according to a report today in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In this week’s issue, health officials in North Carolina report that rare bear meat was served at a November 23 gathering, where at least 22 people ate the meat and at least 10 developed symptoms of a worm infection. Of the 10, six were kids and teens between the ages of 10 and 18.

The infection is from the roundworm Trichinella, which causes trichinellosis. While the infection is rarely fatal, the nematodes tend to burrow out of the bowels and meander through the body, embedding in whatever muscle tissue they come across. A telltale sign of an infection in people is facial swelling, caused when the larvae take harbor in the muscles of the face and around the eyes. Of the 10 ill people in North Carolina, nine had facial swelling.

Local health officials were onto the outbreak when one person developed flu-like symptoms and puzzling facial swelling. They then traced it back to the gathering. The report doesn’t specify what kind of gathering it was but noted that 34 attendees in total were surveyed, from which they found the 22 people who ate the rare meat. The 10 people found with symptoms are technically considered only “probable” cases because the infections were never diagnostically confirmed. To confirm a trichinellosis infection, researchers need blood samples taken after the person recovers to look for antibodies against the parasite. None of the 10 people returned for blood draws.

Rare bear meat at gathering gives 10 people a scare—and parasitic worms Read More »

Rocket Report: ULA investigating SRB anomaly; Europa Clipper is ready to fly

rocket report, Science, Space / Mike M. / October 12, 2024

US Space Force payloads will ride on the first flight of Impulse Space’s cryogenic space tug.

Impulse Space is assembling its first methane-fueled Deneb engine, a 15,000-pound-thrust power plant that will propel the company’s Helios space tug. Credit: Impulse Space

Welcome to Edition 7.15 of the Rocket Report! It’s a big week for big rockets, with SpaceX potentially launching its next Starship test flight and a Falcon Heavy rocket with NASA’s Europa Clipper mission this weekend. And a week ago, United Launch Alliance flew its second Vulcan rocket, which lost one of its booster nozzles in midair and amazingly kept going to achieve a successful mission. Are you not entertained?

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.

PLD Space is aiming high. Spanish launch provider PLD Space has revealed a family of new rockets that it plans to introduce beyond its Miura 5 rocket, which is expected to make its inaugural flight in 2025, European Spaceflight reports. The company also revealed that it was working on a crew capsule called Lince (Spanish for Lynx). PLD Space introduced its Miura Next, Miura Next Heavy, and Miura Next Super Heavy launch vehicles, designed in single stick, triple core, and quintuple core configurations with reusable boosters. At the high end of the rocket family’s performance, the Miura Next Super Heavy could deliver up to 53 metric tons (nearly 117,000 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit. The Lince capsule could become Europe’s first human-rated crew transportation spacecraft.

Still a year away from reaching space … These are lofty ambitions for a company that has yet to launch anything to space, but it’s good to think big. PLD Space launched a high-altitude test flight of its Miura 1 rocket last year, but it didn’t cross the boundary of space. The first launch campaign for Miura 5, PLD Space’s orbital-class rocket sized for small satellites, is on course to begin by the end of 2025, the company said. The Miura Next family would begin flying by 2030, followed by the heavier rockets a few years later. In April, PLD Space said it had raised 120 million euros ($131 million) from private investors and the Spanish government. This is probably enough to get Miura 5 to the launch pad, but PLD Space will need a lot of technical and financing successes to bring its follow-on vehicles online. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Impulse Space wins Space Force contract. Fresh on the heels of a massive funding round, Impulse Space has landed a $34.5 million contract from the Space Force for two ultra-mobile spacecraft missions, TechCrunch reports. Under the Space Force’s Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) program, the two missions will demonstrate how highly maneuverable spacecraft can help the military rapidly respond to threats in space. Both missions will use Impulse’s Mira orbital transfer vehicle, which can host experiments and payloads while moving into different orbits around the Earth.

Looking for an advantage … Mira completed its first test flight earlier this year. The payloads on the two Space Force demonstration flights will perform space domain awareness missions, the military service said in a statement. The first mission, called Victus Surgo, will combine the Mira transfer vehicle with Impulse’s higher-power Helios cryogenic methane-fueled kick stage on its first use in orbit. Helios will boost Mira into a high-altitude geostationary transfer orbit after launching on a Falcon 9 rocket. The second mission, called Victus Salo, will send a second Mira spacecraft into low-Earth orbit on a SpaceX rideshare mission. Impulse was founded by rocket scientist Tom Mueller, who was a founding employee at SpaceX before leaving in 2020. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

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The launch campaign begins for Vega C’s return to flight. Days after a crucial test-firing of its redesigned second stage motor, a European Vega C rocket is now being stacked on its launch pad in French Guiana for a return to flight mission scheduled for December 3. Photos released by the French space agency, CNES, show the Vega C’s solid-fueled first stage moving into position on the launch pad. The Vega C launcher is an upgraded version of the Vega rocket that completed its career with a successful launch in September.

A lot of t(h)rust … Vega C made a successful debut in July 2022, then failed on its second flight five months later, destroying a pair of high-value commercial Earth-imaging satellites owned by Airbus. Engineers traced the failure to the second stage motor’s nozzle, prompting a redesign that grounded the Vega C rocket for two years. There is a queue of European space missions waiting for launch on Vega C, and first to go will be the Sentinel 1C radar imaging satellite for the European Commission’s flagship Copernicus program.

Australian launch company rehearses countdown. Gilmour Space still thinks it has a chance to conduct the maiden launch of its Eris rocket sometime this year, despite no launch license from the Australian Space Agency (ASA), having to go hunting for more money, and a wet dress rehearsal throwing up issues that will take several weeks to fix, Space & Defense Tech and Security News reports. Gilmour’s Eris rocket, capable of hauling cargoes up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to orbit, would become the first homegrown Australian-built orbital-class rocket.

WDR … The Australian Space Agency has worked on Gilmour’s launch license for around two years, but has yet to give the company the green light to fly the Eris rocket, despite approving licenses for two companies operating privately owned launch ranges elsewhere in Australia. At the beginning of the year, Gilmour targeted a first launch of the Eris rocket in March, but there were delays in getting the vehicle to the launch pad. The rocket went vertical for the first time in April to begin a series of ground tests, culminating in the launch rehearsal at the end of September, in which the company loaded propellants into the rocket and ran the countdown to T-10 seconds. The test uncovered valve and software issues Gilmour must fix before it can fly Eris. (submitted by mryall)

Falcon 9 launches European asteroid mission. The European Space Agency’s Hera mission lifted off Monday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, heading into the Solar System to investigate an asteroid smashed by NASA two years ago, Ars reports. It will take two years for Hera to travel to asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos, a binary pair, and survey the aftermath of the impact by NASA’s DART spacecraft on Dimorphos in September 2022. DART was NASA’s first planetary defense experiment, demonstrating how a kinetic impactor could knock an asteroid off course if it was on a path to hit Earth. Fortunately, these two asteroids are harmless, but DART proved a spacecraft could deflect an asteroid, if necessary. Coming in at high speed, DART got only a fleeting glimpse of Didymos and Dimorphos, so Hera will take more precise measurements of the asteroids’ interior structure, mass, and orbit to determine exactly how effective DART was.

Falcon soars again … The liftoff Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was the first flight of a Falcon 9 in nine days, since an upper stage anomaly steered the rocket off its intended reentry corridor after an otherwise successful launch. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Falcon 9 while SpaceX investigated the problem, but the regulator approved the launch of Hera because the Falcon 9’s upper stage won’t come back to Earth. Instead, it departed into deep space along with the Hera asteroid probe. As of Thursday, all other commercial Falcon 9 missions remain grounded. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Emiratis go with Japan. A UAE mission to travel to the asteroid belt reached a milestone on Wednesday, when an agreement was signed to provide services for the 2028 launch of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Explorer spacecraft, The National reports. Emirati officials selected the Japanese H3 rocket from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to launch the asteroid explorer. The UAE is a repeat customer for MHI, which also launched the Emirati Hope spacecraft toward Mars in 2020. The mission will see the Mohammed Bin Rashid Explorer perform close flybys of six asteroids to gather data before landing on a seventh asteroid, Justitia.

H3 racking up wins … Japan’s new H3 rocket is taking a slice of the international commercial launch market after achieving back-to-back successful flights this year. The H3, which replaces Japan’s workhorse H-IIA rocket, is primarily intended to ensure Japanese autonomous access to space for national security missions, scientific probes, and resupply flights to the International Space Station. But, somewhat surprisingly, the H3 now has several customers outside of Japan, including the UAE, Eutelsat, and Inmarsat. Perhaps some satellite operators, eager for someone to compete with SpaceX in the launch business, are turning to the H3 as an alternative to United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket, or Blue Origin’s New Glenn. All of these rockets are under pressure to launch numerous payloads for their domestic governments and Amazon’s Kuiper megaconstellation.

China launches mystery satellite. China launched a new communications satellite toward geostationary orbit Thursday, although its precise role remains undisclosed, Space News reports. The satellite lifted off aboard a Long March 3B rocket, and China’s leading state-owned aerospace contractor identified the payload as High orbit Internet satellite-03 (Weixing Hulianwan Gaogui-03). This is the third satellite in this series, following launches in February and August. The lack of publicly available information raises speculation about its potential uses, which could include military applications.

Shortfall … This was China’s 47th space launch of the year, well short of the 100 missions Chinese officials originally projected for 2024. This launch rate is on pace to come close to China’s numbers the last three years. Around 30 of these 100 projected launches were supposed to be with rockets from Chinese commercial startups. China’s commercial launch industry encountered a setback in June, when a rocket broke free of its restraints during a first stage static fire test, sending the fully fueled booster on an uncontrolled flight near populated areas before a fiery crash to the ground.

Vulcan’s second flight was successful but not perfect. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, under contract for dozens of flights for the US military and Amazon’s Kuiper broadband network, lifted off from Florida on its second test flight October 4, suffered an anomaly with one of its strap-on boosters, and still achieved a successful mission, Ars reports. This test flight, known as Cert-2, was the second certification mission for the new Vulcan rocket, a milestone that paves the way for the Space Force to clear ULA’s new rocket to begin launching national security satellites in the coming months.

Anomalous plume … What happened 37 seconds after launch was startling and impressive. The exhaust nozzle from one of Vulcan’s two strap-on solid rocket boosters failed and fell off the vehicle, creating a shower of sparks and debris. The launcher visibly tilted along its axis due to asymmetrical thrust from the twin boosters, but Vulcan’s guidance system corrected its trajectory, and the rocket’s BE-4 engines vectored their exhaust to keep the rocket on course. The engines burned somewhat longer than planned to make up for the shortfall in power from the damaged booster, and the rocket still reached its target orbit. However, ULA and Northrop Grumman, the booster manufacturer, must determine what happened with the nozzle before Vulcan can fly again. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Starship could launch this weekend. We may not have to wait as long as we thought for the next test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket. The world’s most powerful launcher could fly again from South Texas as soon as Sunday, assuming the Federal Aviation Administration grants approval, Ars reports. The last public statement released from the FAA suggested the agency didn’t expect to determine whether to approve a commercial launch license for SpaceX’s next Starship test flight before late November. There’s some optimism at SpaceX that the FAA might issue a launch license much sooner, perhaps in time for Starship to fly this weekend.

Going for the catch … “The fifth flight test of Starship will aim to take another step towards full and rapid reusability,” SpaceX wrote in an update posted on its website. “The primary objectives will be attempting the first ever return to launch site and catch of the Super Heavy booster and another Starship reentry and landing burn, aiming for an on-target splashdown of Starship in the Indian Ocean.” For the Starship upper stage, this means it will follow pretty much the same trajectory as the last test flight in June. But the most exciting thing about the next flight is the attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster, which will come back to the launch site in Texas at supersonic speed before braking to a hover over the launch pad. Then, mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” will try to grapple the rocket in midair.

Europa Clipper is ready to fly. As soon as this weekend, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will lift off from Kennedy Space Center, carrying NASA’s $4.25 billion Europa Clipper spacecraft, Ars reports. This mission is unlikely to definitively answer the question of whether life exists in the liquid water ocean below the icy crust of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, but it will tell us whether it could, and it will answer so many more questions. The best part is the unknown wonders it will discover. We cannot begin to guess at those, but we can be certain that if all goes well, Clipper will be a thrilling and breathtaking mission. Europa Clipper will zip by Europa 49 times in the early 2030s, probing the frozen world with a sophisticated suite of instruments to yield the best-ever data about any moon of another planet.

Delayed for weather … The launch of Europa Clipper was supposed to happen Thursday, but NASA and SpaceX suspended launch preparations earlier this week as Hurricane Milton approached Florida. The spacecraft is already attached to the Falcon Heavy rocket inside SpaceX’s hangar. Once teams are cleared to return to the space center for work after the storm, they will ready Falcon Heavy to roll to the launch pad. NASA says the launch is currently targeted for no earlier than Sunday.

Next three launches

Oct. 13: Starship/Super Heavy | Flight 5 | Starbase, Texas | 12: 00 UTC

Oct. 13: New Shepard | NS-27 uncrewed flight | Launch Site One, Texas | 13: 00 UTC

Oct. 13: Falcon Heavy | Europa Clipper | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 16: 12 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.

Rocket Report: ULA investigating SRB anomaly; Europa Clipper is ready to fly Read More »

Over 86% of surveyed health care providers are short on IV fluids

baxter, fda, health, Helene, HHS, hospital, IV fluid, Science, shortage, surgeries / Kris Guyer / October 11, 2024

Trucks and Gatorade

Federal officials, meanwhile, are working with Baxter to help support increasing supplies, setting up temporary imports, and expediting consideration of any shelf-life extension requests.

In a letter earlier this week, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told health care leaders that the department is “working tirelessly to mitigate the sterile solutions supply chain disruptions” and, beyond the current crisis, is also working to diversify the supply chain so it is less reliant on a single plant.

For now, though, “HHS is encouraging all providers and health systems, regardless of whether they have experienced a disruption in their supply, to take measures to conserve these critical products,” the letter read. Some hospitals have already reported giving patients Gatorade and Pedialyte to conserve IV fluid supplies.

In one bright spot in the current disruptions, fears that Hurricane Milton would disrupt another IV fluid manufacturing plant in Florida were not realized this week. B. Braun Medical’s manufacturing site in Daytona Beach was not seriously impacted by the storm, the company announced, and production resumed normally Friday. Prior to the storm, with the help of the federal government, B. Braun reportedly moved more than 60 truckloads of IV fluid inventory north of Florida for safekeeping. That inventory will be returned to the Daytona facility, according to reporting by the Associated Press.

Over 86% of surveyed health care providers are short on IV fluids Read More »

Climate change boosted Milton’s landfall strength from Category 2 to 3

atmospheric science, climate change, Earth science, Hurricane Milton, hurricanes, meteorology, Science, tropical cyclones / Kris Guyer / October 11, 2024

Using this simulated data set, called IRIS, the researchers selected for those storms that made landfall along a track similar to that of Milton. Using these, they show that the warming climate has boosted the frequency of storms of Milton’s intensity by 40 percent. Correspondingly, the maximum wind speeds of similar storms have been boosted by about 10 percent. In Milton’s case, that means that, in the absence of climate change, it was likely to have made landfall as a Category 2 storm, rather than the Category 3 it actually was.

Rainfall

The lack of full meteorological data caused a problem when it came to analyzing Milton’s rainfall. The researchers ended up having to analyze rainfall more generally. They took four data sets that do track rainfall across these regions and tracked the link between extreme rainfall and the warming climate to estimate how much more often extreme events occur in a world that is now 1.3° C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times.

They focus on instances of extreme one-day rainfall within the June to November period, looking specifically at 1-in-10-year and 1-in-100-year events. Both of these produced similar results, suggesting that heavy one-day rainfalls are about twice as likely in today’s climates, and the most extreme of these are between 20 and 30 percent more intense.

These results came from three of the four data sets used, which produced largely similar results. The fourth dataset they used suggested a far stronger effect of climate change, but since it wasn’t consistent with the rest, these results weren’t used.

As with the Helene analysis, it’s worth noting that this work represents a specific snapshot in time along a long-term warming trajectory. In other words, it’s looking at the impact of 1.3° C of warming at a time when our emissions are nearly at the point where they commit us to at least 1.5° C of warming. And that will tilt the scales further in favor of extreme weather events like this.

Climate change boosted Milton’s landfall strength from Category 2 to 3 Read More »

Remains of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine found on Everest

Andrew Irvine, exploration, Mount Everest, mountaineering, Science / Paul Patrick / October 11, 2024

In 2019, a NatGeo expedition attempted to locate Irvine’s body (lost for over 95 years) and hopefully retrieve the man’s camera, based on Holzel’s conclusions. They failed, although the expedition was filmed and became a gripping 2020 documentary, Lost on Everest. Chin’s expedition took up the mantle for the hunt for Irvine’s remains this year.

In September, Chin’s team found a 1933 oxygen canister as they were descending Central Rongbuk Glacier, most likely from the 1933 expedition that found Irvine’s ice axe on the northeast ridge. The canister had fallen off the mountain, and the team reasoned that it probably fell farther than a body would have, so Irvine’s remains could be just a few hundred yards up the glacier. So they targeted their search to that area.

Eventually, they spotted a boot emerging from the melting ice: old cracked leather with studded soles and steel hobnails consistent with 1920s climbing gear. Inside was the sock. “It was actually [expedition member] Erich [Roepke] who spotted something and was like, ‘Hey, what’s that?,’” Chin told National Geographic. “I think it literally melted out a week before we found it. I lifted up the sock and there’s a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched onto it. We were all literally running around in circles dropping F-bombs.”

The partial remains are now in the custody of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association. Official confirmation that this is, indeed, Irvine must await the DNA results. “But I mean, dude—there’s a label on it,” Chin said. “Any expedition to Everest follows in the shadow of Irvine and Mallory. We certainly did. And sometimes in life the greatest discoveries occur when you aren’t even looking. This was a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground, and we just hope this can finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large.”

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Breakdancers at risk for “headspin hole,” doctors warn

British Medical Journal, medicine, Science, sports medicine / Tim Belzer / October 10, 2024

Breakdancing has become a global phenomenon since it first emerged in the 1970s, even making its debut as an official event at this year’s Summer Olympics. But hardcore breakers are prone to injury (sprains, strains, tendonitis), including a bizarre condition known as “headspin hole” or “breakdance bulge”—a protruding lump on the scalp caused by repeatedly performing the power move known as a headspin. A new paper published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) describes one such case that required surgery to redress.

According to the authors, there are very few published papers about the phenomenon; they cite two in particular. A 2009 German study of 106 breakdancers found that 60.4 percent of them experienced overuse injuries to the scalp because of headspins, with 31.1 percent of those cases reporting hair loss, 23.6 percent developing head bumps, and 36.8 percent experiencing scalp inflammation. A 2023 study of 142 breakdancers reported those who practiced headspins more than three times a week were much more likely to suffer hair loss.

So when a male breakdancer in his early 30s sought treatment for a pronounced bump on top of his head, Mikkal Bundgaard Skotting and Christian Baastrup Søndergaard of Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark seized the opportunity to describe the clinical case study in detail, taking an MRI, surgically removing the growth, and analyzing the removed mass.

The man in question had been breakdancing for 19 years, incorporating various forms of headspins into his training regimen. He usually trained five days a week for 90 minutes at a time, with headspins applying pressure to the top of his head in two- to seven-minute intervals. In the last five years, he noticed a marked increase in the size of the bump on his head and increased tenderness. The MRI showed considerable thickening of the surrounding skin, tissue, and skull.

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In a rare disclosure, the Pentagon provides an update on the X-37B spaceplane

Boeing, military space, Science, Space, space force, spaceplane, Uncategorized, X-37b / Kris Guyer / October 10, 2024

“When it’s close to the Earth, it’s close enough to the atmosphere to turn where it is,” she said. “Which means our adversaries don’t know—and that happens on the far side of the Earth from our adversaries—where it’s going to come up next. And we know that that drives them nuts. And I’m really glad about that.”

Breaking the silence

The Pentagon rarely releases an update on the X-37B spaceplane in the middle of a mission. During previous flights, military officials typically provided some basic information about the mission before its launch, then went silent until the X-37B returned for landing. The military keeps specifics about the spaceplane’s activities in orbit a secret.

This made the Space Force’s announcement Thursday somewhat of a surprise. When the seventh flight of the X-37B launched, there were indications that the spacecraft would soar into a much higher orbit than it did on any of its six prior missions.

In February, a sleuthing satellite tracking hobbyist spotted the X-37B in orbit by observing sunlight reflected off of the spacecraft as it flew thousands of miles above Earth. Follow-up detections confirmed the discovery, allowing amateur observers to estimate that the X-37B was flying in a highly elliptical orbit ranging between roughly 300 and 38,600 miles in altitude (186-by-23,985 miles). The orbit was inclined 59.1 degrees to the equator.

On its previous missions, the X-37B was confined to low-Earth orbit a few hundred miles above the planet. When it became apparent that the latest mission was cruising at a significantly higher altitude, analysts and space enthusiasts speculated on what the secret spaceplane was doing and how it would come back to Earth. A direct reentry into the atmosphere from the spaceplane’s elliptical orbit would expose the craft’s heat shield to hotter temperatures than any of its previous returns.

Now, we have an answer to the latter question.

As for what it’s doing up there, the Space Force said the spaceplane on this mission has “conducted radiation effect experiments and has been testing space domain awareness technologies in a highly elliptical orbit.” The orbit brings the X-37B through the Van Allen radiation belts and crosses several orbital regimes populated by US and foreign communications, navigation, and surveillance satellites.

Military officials have said previous X-37B flights have tested a Hall-effect ion thruster and tested other experimental space technologies without elaborating on their details. X-37Bs have also secretly deployed small military satellites in orbit.

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Rapid analysis finds climate change’s fingerprint on Hurricane Helene

atmospheric science, climate change, Earth science, hurricane helene, hurricanes, meteorology, Rainfall, Science / Rejus Almole / October 9, 2024

The researchers identified two distinct events associated with Helene’s landfall. The first was its actual landfall along the Florida coast. The second was the intense rainfall on the North Carolina/Tennessee border. This rainfall came against a backdrop of previous heavy rain caused by a stalled cold front meeting moisture brought north by the fringes of the hurricane. These two regions were examined separately.

A changed climate

In these two regions, the influence of climate change is estimated to have caused a 10 percent increase in the intensity of the rainfall. That may not seem like much, but it adds up. Over both a two- and three-day window centered on the point of maximal rainfall, climate change is estimated to have increased rainfall along the Florida Coast by 40 percent. For the southern Appalachians, the boost in rainfall is estimated to have been 70 percent.

The probability of storms with the wind intensity of Helene hitting land near where it did is about a once-in-130-year event in the IRIS dataset. Climate change has altered that so it’s now expected to return about once every 50 years. The high sea surface temperatures that helped fuel Helene are estimated to have been made as much as 500 times more likely by our changed climate.

Overall, the researchers estimate that rain events like Helene’s landfall should now be expected about once every seven years, although the uncertainty is large (running from three to 25 years). For the Appalachian region, where rainfall events this severe don’t appear in our records, they are likely to now be a once-in-every-70-years event thanks to climate warming (with an uncertainty of between 20 and 3,000 years).

“Together, these findings show that climate change is enhancing conditions conducive to the most powerful hurricanes like Helene, with more intense rainfall totals and wind speeds,” the researchers behind the work conclude.

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Drug makers can’t make knockoff weight-loss drugs anymore—and they’re mad

compounding pharmacy, fda, GLP-1, health, lilly, outsourcing facility, Science, semaglutide, Tirzepatide, weight loss / Paul Patrick / October 9, 2024

Compounding pharmacies are suing the Food and Drug Administration so they can keep making imitation versions of popular—and lucrative—tirzepatide drugs, namely knockoffs of Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss.

Generally, compounding pharmacies make customized formulations of drugs for patients with specific needs, like when a patient has an allergy to a filler ingredient or if a child needs a liquid version of a drug that normally comes as a capsule. But larger compounding operations are also legally allowed to make imitations of branded drugs if those drugs are in short supply, acting as a stopgap for patients.

Tirzepatide has certainly been in short supply in recent years. Given the high prevalence of diabetes and obesity in America and the drug’s effectiveness, demand for tirzepatide and other drugs in the new GLP-1 class have skyrocketed, and many patients have struggled to fill prescriptions. The FDA placed tirzepatide on its drug shortage list in December of 2022—and that’s where it remained until last week.

On October 2, the FDA announced that the tirzepatide shortage had been resolved and that the nation’s supply of GLP-1 drugs was stabilizing, though other drugs in the class, including semaglutide, remain in short supply.

“FDA confirmed with the drug’s manufacturer [Eli Lilly] that their stated product availability and manufacturing capacity can meet the present and projected national demand,” the agency said in its announcement. However, it cautioned that patients and prescribers “may still see intermittent localized supply disruptions” as the drugs move through the supply chain.

End of an era

With the resolution, compounding pharmacies are no longer able to produce tirzepatide. And the FDA highlighted the point to the drug makers, writing in bold that the agency “reminds compounders of the legal restrictions on making copies of FDA-approved drugs.”

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Octopus suckers inspire new tech for gripping objects underwater

adhesives, Biology, biomimicry, cephalopods, materials science, octopuses, Science / Rejus Almole / October 9, 2024

Over the last few years, Virginia Tech scientists have been looking to the octopus for inspiration to design technologies that can better grip a wide variety of objects in underwater environments. Their latest breakthrough is a special switchable adhesive modeled after the shape of the animal’s suckers, according to a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science.

“I am fascinated with how an octopus in one moment can hold something strongly, then release it instantly. It does this underwater, on objects that are rough, curved, and irregular—that is quite a feat,” said co-author and research group leader Michael Bartlett. “We’re now closer than ever to replicating the incredible ability of an octopus to grip and manipulate objects with precision, opening up new possibilities for exploration and manipulation of wet or underwater environments.”

As previously reported, there are several examples in nature of efficient ways to latch onto objects in underwater environments, per the authors. Mussels, for instance, secrete adhesive proteins to attach themselves to wet surfaces, while frogs have uniquely structured toe pads that create capillary and hydrodynamic forces for adhesion. But cephalopods like the octopus have an added advantage: The adhesion supplied by their grippers can be quickly and easily reversed, so the creatures can adapt to changing conditions, attaching to wet and dry surfaces.

From a mechanical engineering standpoint, the octopus has an active, pressure-driven system for adhesion. The sucker’s wide outer rim creates a seal with the object via a pressure differential between the chamber and the surrounding medium. Then muscles (serving as actuators) contract and relax the cupped area behind the rim to add or release pressure as needed.

There have been several attempts to mimic cephalopods when designing soft robotic grippers, for example. Back in 2022, Bartlett and his colleagues wanted to go one step further and recreate not just the switchable adhesion but also the integrated sensing and control. The result was Octa-Glove, a wearable system for gripping underwater objects that mimicked the arm of an octopus.

Improving the Octa-Glove

Grabbing and releasing underwater objects of different sizes and shapes with an octopus-inspired adhesive. Credit: Chanhong Lee and Michael Bartlett

For the adhesion, they designed silicone stalks capped with a pneumatically controlled membrane, mimicking the structure of octopus suckers. These adhesive elements were then integrated with an array of LIDAR optical proximity sensors and a micro-control for the real-time detection of objects. When the sensors detect an object, the adhesion turns on, mimicking the octopus’s nervous and muscular systems. The team used a neoprene wetsuit glove as a base for the wearable glove, incorporating the adhesive elements and sensors in each finger, with flexible pneumatic tubes inserted at the base of the adhesive elements.

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