Science – Page 7

Flashy exotic birds can actually glow in the dark

Biology, bioluminescence, birds, feathers, Fluorescence, Science / Mike M. / February 24, 2025

Found in the forests of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Eastern Australia, birds of paradise are famous for flashy feathers and unusually shaped ornaments, which set the standard for haute couture among birds. Many use these feathers for flamboyant mating displays in which they shape-shift into otherworldly forms.

As if this didn’t attract enough attention, we’ve now learned that they also glow in the dark.

Biofluorescent organisms are everywhere, from mushrooms to fish to reptiles and amphibians, but few birds have been identified as having glowing feathers. This is why biologist Rene Martin of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln wanted to investigate. She and her team studied a treasure trove of specimens at the American Museum of Natural History, which have been collected since the 1800s, and found that 37 of the 45 known species of birds of paradise have feathers that fluoresce.

The glow factor of birds of paradise is apparently important for mating displays. Despite biofluorescence being especially prominent in males, attracting a mate might not be all it is useful for, as these birds might also use it to signal to each other in other ways and sometimes even for camouflage among the light and shadows.

“The current very limited number of studies reporting fluorescence in birds suggests this phenomenon has not been thoroughly investigated,” the researchers said in a study that was recently published in Royal Society Open Science.

Glow-up

How do they get that glow? Biofluorescence is a phenomenon that happens when shorter, high-energy wavelengths of light, meaning UV, violet, and blue, are absorbed by an organism. The energy then gets re-emitted at longer, lower-energy wavelengths—greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. The feathers of birds of paradise contain fluorophores, molecules that undergo biofluorescence. Specialized filters in the light-sensitive cells of their eyes make their visual system more sensitive to biofluorescence.

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The seemingly indestructible fists of the mantis shrimp can take a punch

Biomechanics, Mantis shrimp, materials science, Science / Rejus Almole / February 22, 2025

To find out how much force a mantis shrimp’s dactyl clubs can possibly withstand, the researchers tested live shrimp by having them strike a piezoelectric sensor like they would smash a shell. They also fired ultrasonic and hypersonic lasers at pieces of dactyl clubs from their specimens so they could see how the clubs defended against sound waves.

By tracking how sound waves propagated on the surface of the dactyl club, the researchers could determine which regions of the club diffused the most waves. It was the second layer, the impact surface, that handled the highest levels of stress. The periodic surface was almost as effective. Together, they made the dactyl clubs nearly immune to the stresses they generate.

There are few other examples that the protective structures of the mantis shrimp can be compared to. On the prey side, evidence has been found that the scales on some moths’ wings absorb sound waves from predatory bats to keep them from echolocation to find them.

Understanding how mantis shrimp defend themselves from extreme force could inspire new technology. The structures in their dactyl clubs could influence the designs of military and athletic protective gear in the future.

“Shrimp impacts contain frequencies in the ultrasonic range, which has led to shrimp-inspired solutions that point to ultrasonic filtering as a key [protective] mechanism,” the team said in the same study.

Maybe someday, a new bike helmet model might have been inspired by a creature that is no more than seven inches long but literally doesn’t crack under pressure.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adq7100

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German startup to attempt the first orbital launch from Western Europe

Commercial space, Europe, germany, isar aerospace, launch, Norway, Science, Space, spectrum rocket / Kris Guyer / February 21, 2025

The nine-engine first stage for Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket lights up on the launch pad on February 14. Credit: Isar Aerospace

Isar builds almost all of its rockets in-house, including Spectrum’s Aquila engines.

“The flight will be the first integrated test of tens of thousands of components,” said Josef Fleischmann, Isar’s co-founder and chief technical officer. “Regardless of how far we get, this first test flight will hopefully generate an enormous amount of data and experience which we can apply to future missions.”

Isar is the first European startup to reach this point in development. “Reaching this milestone is a huge success in itself,” Meltzer said in a statement. “And while Spectrum is ready for its first test flight, launch vehicles for flights two and three are already in production.”

Another Bavarian company, Rocket Factory Augsburg, destroyed its first booster during a test-firing on its launch pad in Scotland last year, ceding the frontrunner mantle to Isar. RFA received its launch license from the UK government last month and aims to deliver its second booster to the launch site for hot-fire testing and a launch attempt later this year.

There’s an appetite within the European launch industry for new companies to compete with Arianespace, the continent’s sole operational launch services provider backed by substantial government support. Delays in developing the Ariane 6 rocket and several failures of Europe’s smaller Vega launcher forced European satellite operators to look abroad, primarily to SpaceX, to launch their payloads.

The European Space Agency is organizing the European Launcher Challenge, a competition that will set aside some of the agency’s satellites for launch opportunities with a new crop of startups. Isar is one of the top contenders in the competition to win money from ESA. The agency expects to award funding to multiple European launch providers after releasing a final solicitation later this year.

The first flight of the Spectrum rocket will attempt to reach a polar orbit, flying north from Andøya Spaceport. Located at approximately 69 degrees north latitude, the spaceport is poised to become the world’s northernmost orbital launch site.

Because the inaugural launch of the Spectrum rocket is a test flight, it won’t carry any customer payloads, an Isar spokesperson told Ars.

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Researchers figure out how to get fresh lithium into batteries

batteries, chemistry, materials science, Science / Mike M. / February 21, 2025

In their testing, they use a couple of unusual electrode materials, such as a chromium oxide (Cr₈O₂₁) and an organic polymer (a sulfurized polyacrylonitrile). Both of these have significant weight advantages over the typical materials used in today’s batteries, although the resulting batteries typically lasted less than 500 cycles before dropping to 80 percent of their original capacity.

But the striking experiment came when they used LiSO₂CF₃ to rejuvenate a battery that had been manufactured as normal but had lost capacity due to heavy use. Treating a lithium-iron phosphate battery that had lost 15 percent of its original capacity restored almost all of what was lost, allowing it to hold over 99 percent of its original charge. They also ran a battery for repeated cycles with rejuvenation every few thousand cycles. At just short of 12,000 cycles, it still could be restored to 96 percent of its original capacity.

Before you get too excited, there are a couple of things worth noting about lithium-iron phosphate cells. The first is that, relative to their charge capacity, they’re a bit heavy, so they tend to be used in large, stationary batteries like the ones in grid-scale storage. They’re also long-lived on their own; with careful management, they can take over 8,000 cycles before they drop to 80 percent of their initial capacity. It’s not clear whether similar rejuvenation is possible in the battery chemistries typically used for the sorts of devices that most of us own.

The final caution is that the battery needs to be modified so that fresh electrolytes can be pumped in and the gases released by the breakdown of the LiSO₂CF₃ removed. It’s safest if this sort of access is built into the battery from the start, rather than provided by modifying it much later, as was done here. And the piping needed would put a small dent in the battery’s capacity per volume if so.

All that said, the treatment demonstrated here would replenish even a well-managed battery closer to its original capacity. And it would largely restore the capacity of something that hadn’t been carefully managed. And that would allow us to get far more out of the initial expense of battery manufacturing. Meaning it might make sense for batteries destined for a large storage facility, where lots of them could potentially be treated at the same time.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08465-y (About DOIs).

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“Bouncing” winds damaged Houston skyscrapers in 2024

architecture, climate change, derecho, hurricanes, Science / Rejus Almole / February 21, 2025

“Bouncing” winds

Damage sustained by the Chevron Building Auditorium during the derecho: a) damaged side of the building, b) global damage view, c) & d) localized glass damage. Credit: Padgett et al., 2024

Elawady decided to investigate why the Houston derecho’s structural damage was so much more extensive than one might expect. He and his colleagues analyzed the impact of the derecho on five of the city’s most notable buildings: The Chevron Building Auditorium, the CenterPoint Energy Plaza, the El Paso Energy Building, the RRI Energy Plaza, and the Wedge International Tower.

The Chevron Building Auditorium, for instance, suffered significant damage to its cladding and shattered glass windows, mostly on the side facing another skyscraper: the Chevron Corporation Tower. The CenterPoint Energy Plaza’s damage to its double-skin facade was concentrated on one corner that had two tall buildings facing it, as was the damage to two corners of the El Paso Energy building. This suggested a wind-channeling effect might have played a role in that damage.

Next Elawady et al. conducted wind tunnel experiments at the FIU Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure’s “Wall of Wind” facility to determine how the winds may have specifically caused the observed damage. They placed a revolving miniature tall building in the tunnel and blasted it with wind speeds of up to 70 meters per second while placing an identical mini-model at increasing distances from the first to mimic possible interference from nearby buildings.

The results confirmed the team’s working hypothesis. “When strong winds move through a city, they can bounce due to interference between tall buildings. This increases pressure on walls and windows, making damage more severe than if the buildings were isolated,” said co-author Omar Metwally, a graduate student at FIU. For example, in the case of the Chevron Building Auditorium, the channeling effects intensified the damage, particularly at higher elevations.

“On top of this, downbursts create intense, localized forces which can exceed typical design values for hurricanes, especially on the lower floors of tall buildings,” Metwally added. The problem is only likely to worsen because of accelerating climate change. Glass facades seem to be particularly vulnerable to this kind of wind damage, and the authors suggest current design and construction guidelines for such elements should be re-evaluated as a result of their findings.

Frontiers in Built Environment, 2025. DOI: 10.3389/fbuil.2024.1514523 (About DOIs).

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Study: Cuttlefish adapt camouflage displays when hunting prey

animal behavior, Biology, cuttlefish, marine animals, Science / Rejus Almole / February 20, 2025

Crafty cuttlefish employ several different camouflaging displays while hunting their prey, according to a new paper published in the journal Ecology, including mimicking benign ocean objects like a leaf or coral, or flashing dark stripes down their bodies. And individual cuttlefish seem to choose different preferred hunting displays for different environments.

It’s well-known that cuttlefish and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin thanks to that skin’s unique structure. As previously reported, squid skin is translucent and features an outer layer of pigment cells called chromatophores that control light absorption. Each chromatophore is attached to muscle fibers that line the skin’s surface, and those fibers, in turn, are connected to a nerve fiber. It’s a simple matter to stimulate those nerves with electrical pulses, causing the muscles to contract. And because the muscles are pulling in different directions, the cell expands, along with the pigmented areas, changing the color. When the cell shrinks, so do the pigmented areas.

Underneath the chromatophores, there is a separate layer of iridophores. Unlike the chromatophores, the iridophores aren’t pigment-based but are an example of structural color, similar to the crystals in the wings of a butterfly, except a squid’s iridophores are dynamic rather than static. They can be tuned to reflect different wavelengths of light. A 2012 paper suggested that this dynamically tunable structural color of the iridophores is linked to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. The two layers work together to generate the unique optical properties of squid skin.

And then there are leucophores, which are similar to the iridophores, except they scatter the full spectrum of light, so they appear white. They contain reflectin proteins that typically clump together into nanoparticles so that light scatters instead of being absorbed or directly transmitted. Leucophores are mostly found in cuttlefish and octopuses, but there are some female squid of the genus Sepioteuthis that have leucophores that they can “tune” to only scatter certain wavelengths of light. If the cells allow light through with little scattering, they’ll seem more transparent, while the cells become opaque and more apparent by scattering a lot more light.

Scientists learned in 2023 that the process by which cuttlefish generate their camouflage patterns is significantly more complex than scientists previously thought. Specifically, cuttlefish readily adapted their skin patterns to match different backgrounds, whether natural or artificial. And the creatures didn’t follow the same transitional pathway every time, often pausing in between. That means that contrary to prior assumptions, feedback seems to be critical to the process, and the cuttlefish were correcting their patterns to match the backgrounds better.

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Trump admin. fires USDA staff working on bird flu, immediately backpedals

agriculture, bird flu, dairy, H5N1, health, outbreak, poultry, Science, USDA / Kris Guyer / February 19, 2025

Over the weekend, the Trump administration fired several frontline responders to the ongoing H5N1 bird flu outbreak—then quickly backpedaled, rescinding those terminations and attempting to reinstate the critical staff.

The termination letters went out to employees at the US Department of Agriculture, one of the agencies leading the federal response to the outbreak that continues to plague US dairy farms and ravage poultry operations, affecting over 160 million birds and sending egg prices soaring. As the virus continues to spread, infectious disease experts fear it could evolve to spread among humans and cause more severe disease. So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented 68 cases in humans, one of which was fatal.

Prior to Trump taking office, health experts had criticized the country’s response to H5N1 for lack of transparency at times, sluggishness, inadequate testing, and its inability to halt transmission among dairy farms, which was once considered containable. To date, 972 herds across 17 states have been infected since last March, including 36 herds in the last 30 days.

In a statement to Ars Technica, a USDA spokesperson said that the agency views the response to the outbreak of H5N1—a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI)—as a priority. As such, the agency had protected some positions from staff cuts by granting exemptions, which went to veterinarians, animal health technicians, and others. But not all were exempted, and some were fired.

“Although several positions supporting HPAI were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,” the spokesperson said.

The USDA did not respond to Ars Technica’s questions regarding how many employees working on the outbreak were fired, how many of those terminations were rescinded, or how many employees have been reinstated since the weekend.

The cuts are part of a larger, brutal effort by the Trump administration to slash federal agencies, and the cuts have imperiled other critical government and public services. In recent days, several agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, among others, have been gutted. At CDC, cuts devastated the agency’s premier disease detectives program—the Epidemic Intelligence Service—members of which are critical to responding to outbreaks and other health emergencies.

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Scientists unlock vital clue to strange quirk of static electricity

electromagnetism, Physics, Science, static electricity, triboelectric effect / Mike M. / February 19, 2025

Scientists can now explain the prevailing unpredictability of contact electrification, unveiling order from what has long been considered chaos.

Static electricity—specifically the triboelectric effect, aka contact electrification—is ubiquitous in our daily lives, found in such things as a balloon rubbed against one’s hair or styrofoam packing peanuts sticking to a cat’s fur (as well as human skin, glass tabletops, and just about anywhere you don’t want packing peanuts to be). The most basic physics is well understood, but long-standing mysteries remain, most notably how different materials exchange positive and negative charges—sometimes ordering themselves into a predictable series, but sometimes appearing completely random.

Now scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have identified a critical factor explaining that inherent unpredictability: It’s the contact history of given materials that controls how they exchange charges in contact electrification. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

Johan Carl Wilcke published the first so-called “triboelectric series” in 1757 to describe the tendency of different materials to self-order based on how they develop a positive or negative charge. A material toward the bottom of the list, like hair, will acquire a more negative charge when it comes into contact with a material near the top of the list, like a rubber balloon.

The issue with all these lists is that they are inconsistent and unpredictable—sometimes the same scientists don’t get the same ordering results twice when repeating experiments—largely because there are so many confounding factors that can come into play. “Understanding how insulating materials exchanged charge seemed like a total mess for a very long time,” said co-author Scott Waitukaitis of ISTA. “The experiments are wildly unpredictable and can sometimes seem completely random.”

A cellulose material’s charge sign, for instance, can depend on whether its curvature is concave or convex. Two materials can exchange charge from positive (A) to negative (B), but that exchange can reverse over time, with B being positive and A being negative. And then there are “triangles”: Sometimes one material (A) gains a positive charge when rubbed up against another material (B), but B will gain a positive charge when rubbed against a third material (C), and C, in turn, will gain positive charge when in contact with A. Even identical materials can sometimes exchange charge upon contact.

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Microsoft demonstrates working qubits based on exotic physics

Apple, Computer science, Majorana, Physics, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, quasiparticles, Science / Kris Guyer / February 19, 2025

Microsoft’s first entry into quantum hardware comes in the form of Majorana 1, a processor with eight of these qubits.

Given that some of its competitors have hardware that supports over 1,000 qubits, why does the company feel it can still be competitive? Nayak described three key features of the hardware that he feels will eventually give Microsoft an advantage.

The first has to do with the fundamental physics that governs the energy needed to break apart one of the Cooper pairs in the topological superconductor, which could destroy the information held in the qubit. There are a number of ways to potentially increase this energy, from lowering the temperature to making the indium arsenide wire longer. As things currently stand, Nayak said that small changes in any of these can lead to a large boost in the energy gap, making it relatively easy to boost the system’s stability.

Another key feature, he argued, is that the hardware is relatively small. He estimated that it should be possible to place a million qubits on a single chip. “Even if you put in margin for control structures and wiring and fan out, it’s still a few centimeters by a few centimeters,” Nayak said. “That was one of the guiding principles of our qubits.” So unlike some other technologies, the topological qubits won’t require anyone to figure out how to link separate processors into a single quantum system.

Finally, all the measurements that control the system run through the quantum dot, and controlling that is relatively simple. “Our qubits are voltage-controlled,” Nayak told Ars. “What we’re doing is just turning on and off coupling of quantum dots to qubits to topological nano wires. That’s a digital signal that we’re sending, and we can generate those digital signals with a cryogenic controller. So we actually put classical control down in the cold.”

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3D map of exoplanet atmosphere shows wacky climate

astronomy, astrophysics, exoplanet atmospheres, exoplanets, Science, spectroscopy / Tim Belzer / February 18, 2025

Last year, astronomers discovered an unusual Earth-size exoplanet they believe has a hemisphere of molten lava, with its other hemisphere tidally locked in perpetual darkness. And at about the same time, a different group discovered a rare small, cold exoplanet with a massive outer companion 100 times the mass of Jupiter.

Meet Tylos

The different layers of the atmosphere on WASP-121b.

This latest research relied on observational data collected by the European South Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope, specifically, a spectroscopic instrument called ESPRESSO that can process light collected from the four largest VLT telescope units into one signal. The target exoplanet, WASP-121b—aka Tylos—is located in the Puppis constellation about 900 light-years from Earth. One year on Tylos is equivalent to just 30 hours on Earth, thanks to the exoplanet’s close proximity to its host star. Since one side is always facing the star, it is always scorching, while the exoplanet’s other side is significantly colder.

Those extreme temperature contrasts make it challenging to figure out how energy is distributed in the atmospheric system, and mapping out the 3D structure can help, particularly with determining the vertical circulation patterns that are not easily replicated in our current crop of global circulation models, per the authors. For their analysis, they combined archival ESPRESSO data collected on November 30, 2018, with new data collected on September 23, 2023. They focused on three distinct chemical signatures to probe the deep atmosphere (iron), mid-atmosphere (sodium), and shallow atmosphere (hydrogen).

“What we found was surprising: A jet stream rotates material around the planet’s equator, while a separate flow at lower levels of the atmosphere moves gas from the hot side to the cooler side. This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet,” said Julia Victoria Seidel of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, as well as the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France. “This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works—not just on Earth, but on all planets. It feels like something out of science fiction.”

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08664-1

Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2025. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202452405 (About DOIs).

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Can public trust in science survive a second battering?

Science, science education, syndication, trust in science / Mike M. / February 18, 2025

Public trust in science has shown a certain resiliency, but it is being tested like never before.

Public trust in science has been in the spotlight in recent years: After the US presidential election in November, one Wall Street Journal headline declared that “Science Lost America’s Trust.” Another publication called 2024 “the year of distrust in science.”

Some of that may be due to legitimate concerns: Public health officials have been criticized for their lack of transparency during critical moments, including the COVID-19 pandemic. And experts have noted the influence of political factors. For instance, the first Trump administration repeatedly undermined scientists—a trend repeating in his second term so far.

But what does the research say about where public trust in science, doctors, and health care institutions actually stands? In recent years, researchers have been increasingly looking into quantifying these sentiments. And indeed, multiple surveys and studies have reported the COVID-19 pandemic correlated with a decline in trust in the years following the initial outbreak. This decrease, though, seems to be waning as new research shows a clearer picture of trust across time. One 2024 study suggests Trump’s attacks on science during his first term did not have the significant impact many experts feared—and may have even boosted confidence among certain segments of the population.

Overall confidence in scientific institutions has slightly rebounded since the pandemic, some research suggests, with that trust remaining strong across countries. Despite the uptick, there appears to be a still widening divide particularly between political factions, with Democrats showing higher levels of trust and Republicans showing lower levels, a polarization that became more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What we’re seeing now, several years later, is how deep those divisions really are,” said Cary Funk, who previously led science and society research at the Pew Research Center and has written reports on public trust in science. Funk is now a senior adviser for public engagement at the Aspen Institute Science and Society Program.

Political and economic entities have weaponized certain scientific topics, such as climate change, as well as the mistrust in science to advance their own interests, said Gabriele Contessa, a philosopher of science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In the future, that weaponization might engender mistrust related to other issues, he added. It remains to be seen what effect a second Trump term may have on confidence in science. Already, Trump issued a communications freeze on Department of Health and Human Services officials and paused federal grants, a move that was ultimately rescinded but still unleashed a flurry of chaos and confusion throughout academic circles.

“To have people like Donald Trump, who clearly do not trust reputable scientific sources and often trust instead disreputable or at least questionable scientific sources, is actually a very, very strong concern,” Contessa said.

Who will act in the public’s best interest?

In the winter of 2021, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of around 14,500 adults in the US, asking about their regard for different groups of individuals, including religious leaders, police officers, and medical scientists. The proportion of the survey takers who said they had a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest, the researchers found, decreased from 39 percent in November 2020 to 29 percent just one year later. In October 2023, at the lowest point since the pandemic began, only 23 percent reported a great deal of confidence in scientists. A analysis conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research reported a comparable decline: In 2018, 48 percent of respondents reported a great deal of confidence in scientists; in 2022, it was down to just 39 percent.

But years later, a new survey conducted in October 2024 suggested that the dip in trust may have been temporary. An update to the Pew survey that sought input from almost 10,000 adults in the US shows a slow recovery: Compared to the 23 percent, now 26 percent report having a great deal of confidence.

Similarly, a 2024 study examining attitudes toward scientific expertise during a 63-year period found that Trump and Republican attacks on science, in general, did not actually sway public trust when comparing responses in 2016 to those from 2020. And a recent international survey that asked nearly 72,000 individuals in 68 countries their thoughts on scientists revealed that most people trust scientists and want them to be a part of the policy making process.

“There are still lots of people who have at least a kind of soft inclination to have confidence or trust in scientists, to act in the interests of the public,” said Funk. “And so majorities of Americans, majorities even of Republicans, have that view.”

But while public trust in general seems to be resilient, that finding becomes more complex on closer inspection. Confidence can remain high and increase for some groups, while simultaneously declining in others. The same study that looked at Trump’s influence on trust during his first administration, for instance, found that some polarization grew stronger on both ends of the spectrum. “Twelve percent of USA adults became more skeptical of scientific expertise in response to Trump’s dismissal of science, but 20 percent increased their trust in scientific expertise during the same period,” the study noted. Meanwhile, the neutral middle shrank: In 2016, 76 percent reported that they had no strong opinions on their trust in science. In 2020, that plunged to 29 percent.

The COVID-19 pandemic also seems to have had a pronounced effect on that gap: Consistently, research conducted after the pandemic shows that people with conservative ideologies distrust science more than those who are left-leaning. Overall, Republicans’ confidence in science fell 23 points from 2018 to 2022, dropping by half. Another recent poll shows declining confidence, specifically in Republican individuals, in health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. This distrust was likely driven by the politicization of pandemic policies, such as masking, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns, according to commentaries from experts.

The international survey of individuals in 68 countries did not find a relationship between trust in science and political orientation. Rod Abhari, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University who studies the role of digital media on trust, told Undark this suggests that conservative skepticism toward science is not rooted in ideology but is instead a consequence of deliberate politicization by corporations and Republican pundits. “Republican politicians have successfully mobilized the conspiracy and resistance to scientists—and not just scientists, but government agencies that represent science and medicine and nutrition,” he added.

“Prior to the outbreak,” said Funk, “views of something like medical researchers, medical doctors, medical scientists, were not particularly divided by politics.”

Second time around

So, what does this research mean for a second Trump term?

One thing that experts have noticed is that rather than distrusting specific types of scientists, such as climate change researchers, conservatives have begun to lump scientists across specialties and have more distrust of scientists in general, said Funk.

Going forward, Abhari predicted, “the scope of what science is politicized will expand” beyond hot-button topics like climate change. “I think it’ll become more existential, where science funding in general will become on the chopping block,” he said in mid-January. With the recent temporary suspensions on research grant reviews and payments for researchers and talk of mass layoffs and budget cuts at the National Science Foundation, scientists are already worried about how science funding will be affected.

This weaponization of science has contributed and will continue to lead to eroding trust, said Contessa. Already, topics like the effects of gas stoves on health have been weaponized by entities with political and economic motivation like the gas production companies, he pointed out. “It shows you really any topic, anything” can be used to sow skepticism in scientists, he said.

Many experts emphasize strategies to strengthen overall trust, close the partisan gap, and avoid further politicization of science.

Christine Marizzi, who leads a science education effort in Harlem for a nonprofit organization called BioBus, highlights the need for community engagement to make science more visible and accessible to improve scientists’ credibility among communities.

Ultimately, Abhari said, scientists need to be outspoken about the politicization of science to be able to regain individuals’ trust. This “will feel uncomfortable because science has typically tried to brand itself as being apolitical, but I think it’s no longer possible,” Abhari said. “It’s sort of the political reality of the situation.”

The increasing polarization in public trust is concerning, said Funk. So “it’s an important time to be making efforts to widen trust in science.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Turning the Moon into a fuel depot will take a lot of power

chemistry, oxygen, oxygen production, Science, Space, Space exploration / Tim Belzer / February 17, 2025

Getting oxygen from regolith takes 24 kWh per kilogram, and we’d need tonnes.

Without adjustments for relativity, clocks here and on the Moon would rapidly diverge. Credit: NASA

If humanity is ever to spread out into the Solar System, we’re going to need to find a way to put fuel into rockets somewhere other than the cozy confines of a launchpad on Earth. One option for that is in low-Earth orbit, which has the advantage of being located very close to said launch pads. But it has the considerable disadvantage of requiring a lot of energy to escape Earth’s gravity—it takes a lot of fuel to put substantially less fuel into orbit.

One alternative is to produce fuel on the Moon. We know there is hydrogen and oxygen present, and the Moon’s gravity is far easier to overcome, meaning more of what we produce there can be used to send things deeper into the Solar System. But there is a tradeoff: any fuel production infrastructure will likely need to be built on Earth and sent to the Moon.

How much infrastructure is that going to involve? A study released today by PNAS evaluates the energy costs of producing oxygen on the Moon, and finds that they’re substantial: about 24 kWh per kilogram. This doesn’t sound bad until you start considering how many kilograms we’re going to eventually need.

Free the oxygen!

The math that makes refueling from the Moon appealing is pretty simple. “As a rule of thumb,” write the authors of the new study on the topic, “rockets launched from Earth destined for [Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1] must burn ~25 kg of propellant to transport one kg of payload, whereas rockets launched from the Moon to [Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1] would burn only ~four kg of propellant to transport one kg of payload.” Departing from the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point for locations deeper into the Solar System also requires less energy than leaving low-Earth orbit, meaning the fuel we get there is ultimately more useful, at least from an exploration perspective.

But, of course, you need to make the fuel there in the first place. The obvious choice for that is water, which can be split to produce hydrogen and oxygen. We know there is water on the Moon, but we don’t yet know how much, and whether it’s concentrated into large deposits. Given that uncertainty, people have also looked at other materials that we know are present in abundance on the Moon’s surface.

And there’s probably nothing more abundant on that surface than regolith, the dust left over from constant tiny impacts that have, over time, eroded lunar rocks. The regolith is composed of a variety of minerals, many of which contain oxygen, typically the heavier component of rocket fuel. And a variety of people have figured out the chemistry involved in separating oxygen from these minerals on the scale needed for rocket fuel production.

But knowing the chemistry is different from knowing what sort of infrastructure is needed to get that chemistry done at a meaningful scale. To get a sense of this, the researchers decided to focus on isolating oxygen from a mineral called ilmenite, or FeTiO₃. It’s not the easiest way to get oxygen—iron oxides win out there—but it’s well understood. Someone actually patented oxygen production from ilmenite back in the 1970s, and two hardware prototypes have been developed, one of which may be sent to the Moon on a future NASA mission.

The researchers propose a system that would harvest regolith, partly purify the ilmenite, then combine it with hydrogen at high temperatures, which would strip the oxygen out as water, leaving behind purified iron and titanium (both of which may be useful to have). The resulting water would then be split to feed the hydrogen back into the system, while the oxygen can be sent off for use in rockets.

(This wouldn’t solve the issue of what that oxygen will ultimately oxidize to power a rocket. But oxygen is typically the heavier component of rocket fuel combinations—typically about 80 percent of the mass—and so the bigger challenge to get to a fuel depot.)

Obviously, this process will require a lot of infrastructure, like harvesters, separators, high-temperature reaction chambers, and more. But the researchers focus on a single element: how much power will it suck down?

More power!

To get their numbers, the researchers made a few simplifying assumptions. These include assuming that it’s possible to purify ilmenite from raw regolith and that it will be present in particles small enough that about half the material present will participate in chemical reactions. They ignored both the potential to get even more oxygen from the iron and titanium oxides present, as well as the potential for contamination from problematic materials like hydrogen sulfide or hydrochloric acid.

The team found that almost all of the energy is consumed at three steps in the process: the high-temperature hydrogen reaction that produces water (55 percent), splitting the water afterwards (38 percent), and converting the resulting oxygen to its liquid form (five percent). The typical total usage, depending on factors like the concentration of ilmenite in the regolith, worked out to be about 24 kW-hr for each kilogram of liquid oxygen.

Obviously, the numbers are sensitive to how efficiently you can do things like heat the reaction mix. (It might be possible to do this heating with concentrated solar, avoiding the use of electricity for this entirely, but the authors didn’t analyze that.) But it was also sensitive to less obvious efficiencies. For example, a better separation of the ilmenite from the rest of the regolith means you’re using less energy to heat contaminants. So, while the energetic cost of that separation is small, it pays off to do it effectively.

Based on orbital observations, the researchers map out the areas where ilmenite is present at high enough concentrations for this approach to make sense. These include some of the mares on the near side of the Moon, so they’re easy to get to.

A map of the lunar surface with locations highlighted in color. — A map of the lunar surface, with areas with high ilmenite concentrations shown in blue. Credit: Leger, et. al.

On its own, 24 kWh doesn’t seem like a lot of power. The problem is that we will need a lot of kilograms. The researchers estimate that getting an empty SpaceX Starship from the lunar surface to the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point takes 80 tonnes of liquid oxygen. And a fully fueled starship can hold over 500 tonnes of liquid oxygen.

We can compare that to something like the solar array on the International Space Station, which has a capacity of about 100 kW. That means it could power the production of about four kilograms of oxygen an hour. At that rate, it’ll take a bit over 10 days to produce a tonne, and a bit more than two years to get enough oxygen to get an empty Starship to the Lagrange Point—assuming 24-7 production. Being on the near side, they will only produce for half the time, given the lunar day.

Obviously, we can build larger arrays than that, but it boosts the amount of material that needs to be sent to the Moon from Earth. It may potentially make more sense to use nuclear power. While that would likely involve more infrastructure than solar arrays, it would allow the facilities to run around the clock, thus getting more production from everything else we’ve shipped from Earth.

This paper isn’t meant to be the final word on the possibilities for lunar-based refueling; it’s simply an early attempt to put hard numbers on what ultimately might be the best way to explore our Solar System. Still, it provides some perspective on just how much effort we’ll need to make before that sort of exploration becomes possible.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2306146122 (About DOIs).

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

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