Science – Page 8

Survivors mark 20th anniversary of deadly 2004 tsunami

Science / Tim Belzer / November 24, 2024

In the wee hours of December 26, 2004, a massive 9.2 earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean, generating an equally massive tsunami that caused unprecedented devastation to 14 countries and killing more than 230,000. Twenty years later, National Geographic has revisited one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history with a new documentary: Tsunami: Race Against Time. The four-part series offers an in-depth account of the tsunami’s destructive path, told from the perspectives of those who survived, as well as the scientists, journalists, doctors, nurses, and everyday heroes who worked to save as many as possible.

Geophysicist Barry Hirshorn—now with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego—was on duty at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii that day (3 PM on Christmas Day local time). His pager went off, indicating that seismic waves had set off a seismometer in Australia, and Hirshorn rushed to the control room to locate the quake’s epicenter with his colleague, Stuart Weinstein.

They initially pegged the quake at 8.5 magnitude. (It was later upgraded to 8.9 and subsequently to a whopping 9.2 to 9.3 magnitude.) But despite its strength, they initially did not think the quake would generate a tsunami, at least in the Pacific. And such events were incredibly rare in the Indian Ocean.

Hirshorn and Weinstein also lacked any real-time sea level data that would have told them that a massive amount of water had been displaced by the movement of two key tectonic plates (the India and Burma plates). Four hours later, the first tsunami waves hit Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, leaving a path of destruction and death in their wake.

Geophysicist Barry Hirshorn on the lack of an tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean. Credit: National Geographic

What sets this new documentary apart is the emphasis on the survivors’ harrowing stories. Veteran surfer David Lines, for example, was living in Banda Aceh at the time with his wife Nurma. They managed to outrun the tsunami by car, but Nurma lost 30 family members. Journalist and videographer Denny Montgomery faced a similar situation, racing against time to rescue his mother. Zenny Suryawan watched his family get swept away by the tsunami, surviving by clinging to debris. A young mother in Khao Lan was separated from her infant son and had nearly given up hope when she finally found him alive at a nearby hospital.

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What delusions can tell us about the cognitive nature of belief

cognitive dissonance, Mental Health, Science, syndication / Rejus Almole / November 24, 2024

Natalie also recalled other beliefs, including that she was dead (known as Cotard delusion), which she did not share with clinicians at the time. She noted that she entertained this idea due to the failure of other explanations to account for her strange experiences and an idea from a television show.

Natalie said she eventually dismissed this idea as implausible while still holding other delusional ideas. This suggests that belief evaluation may involve different thresholds for different delusions. It also highlights the private nature of some delusions.

Across all of her delusions, Natalie described her active involvement in trying to explain and manage her experiences. She reported considering different explanations and testing these by seeking further information. For example, she asked questions of the people she thought were her in-laws. This suggests a surprisingly similar approach to how we typically form beliefs.

Natalie recalled the influence of television and movies on her ideas. She also recalled how she elaborated on her delusions, once formed, based on information in her surroundings.

These features challenge theories that delusions simply arise from anomalous sensory data. They instead highlight the role of the individual’s search for meaning and social context, as well as the subsequent impact of delusions on perception and thinking.

Implications

As a case study, Natalie’s experiences are not necessarily representative of all people who experience delusions or postpartum psychosis. However, Natalie’s case presents informative features that theories of delusions need to account for.

In particular, Natalie’s personalized insights highlight the critical role of the individual in actively trying to understand their experiences and bestow meaning. This is opposed to just passively accepting beliefs in response to anomalous sensory data or neuropsychological deficits. This suggests psychological therapies may be useful in treating psychosis, in combination with other treatments, in some cases.

More generally, Natalie’s account reveals commonalities between delusions and ordinary beliefs and supports the view that delusions can be understood in terms of cognitive processes across the stages of normal belief formation that we identified.

While there remain challenges in investigating delusions, further study may offer insights into the underpinnings of everyday belief and, in turn, of ourselves.

Michael Connors, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry, UNSW Sydney, and Peter W Halligan, Hon Professor of Neuropsychology, Cardiff University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Tweaking non-neural brain cells can cause memories to fade

astrocytes, Biology, memory, neurobiology, neurons, Neuroscience, Science / Paul Patrick / November 23, 2024

Neurons and a second cell type called an astrocyte collaborate to hold memories.

Astrocytes (labelled in black) sit within a field of neurons. Credit: Ed Reschke

“If we go back to the early 1900s, this is when the idea was first proposed that memories are physically stored in some location within the brain,” says Michael R. Williamson, a researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. For a long time, neuroscientists thought that the storage of memory in the brain was the job of engrams, ensembles of neurons that activate during a learning event. But it turned out this wasn’t the whole picture.

Williamson’s research investigated the role astrocytes, non-neuron brain cells, play in the read-and-write operations that go on in our heads. “Over the last 20 years the role of astrocytes has been understood better. We’ve learned that they can activate neurons. The addition we have made to that is showing that there are subsets of astrocytes that are active and involved in storing specific memories,” Williamson says in describing a new study his lab has published.

One consequence of this finding: Astrocytes could be artificially manipulated to suppress or enhance a specific memory, leaving all other memories intact.

Marking star cells

Astrocytes, otherwise known as star cells due to their shape, play various roles in the brain, and many are focused on the health and activity of their neighboring neurons. Williamson’s team started by developing techniques that enabled them to mark chosen ensembles of astrocytes to see when they activate genes (including one named c-Fos) that help neurons reconfigure their connections and are deemed crucial for memory formation. This was based on the idea that the same pathway would be active in neurons and astrocytes.

“In simple terms, we use genetic tools that allow us to inject mice with a drug that artificially makes astrocytes express some other gene or protein of interest when they become active,” says Wookbong Kwon, a biotechnologist at Baylor College and co-author of the study.

Those proteins of interest were mainly fluorescent proteins that make cells fluoresce bright red. This way, the team could spot the astrocytes in mouse brains that became active during learning scenarios. Once the tagging system was in place, Williamson and his colleagues gave their mice a little scare.

“It’s called fear conditioning, and it’s a really simple idea. You take a mouse, put it into a new box, one it’s never seen before. While the mouse explores this new box, we just apply a series of electrical shocks through the floor,” Williamson explains. A mouse treated this way remembers this as an unpleasant experience and associates it with contextual cues like the box’s appearance, the smells and sounds present, and so on.

The tagging system lit up all astrocytes that expressed the c-Fos gene in response to fear conditioning. Williamson’s team inferred that this is where the memory is stored in the mouse’s brain. Knowing that, they could move on to the next question, which was if and how astrocytes and engram neurons interacted during this process.

Modulating engram neurons

“Astrocytes are really bushy,” Williamson says. They have a complex morphology with lots and lots of micro or nanoscale processes that infiltrate the area surrounding them. A single astrocyte can contact roughly 100,000 synapses, and not all of them will be involved in learning events. So the team looked for correlations between astrocytes activated during memory formation and the neurons that were tagged at the same time.

“When we did that, we saw that engram neurons tended to be contacting the astrocytes that are active during the formation of the same memory,” Williamson says. To see how astrocytes’ activity affects neurons, the team artificially stimulated the astrocytes by microinjecting them with a virus engineered to induce the expression of the c-Fos gene. “It directly increased the activity of engram neurons but did not increase the activity of non-engram neurons in contact with the same astrocyte,” Williamson explains.

This way his team established that at least some astrocytes could preferentially communicate with engram neurons. The researchers also noticed that astrocytes involved in memorizing the fear conditioning event had elevated levels of a protein called NFIA, which is known to regulate memory circuits in the hippocampus.

But probably the most striking discovery came when the researchers tested whether the astrocytes involved in memorizing an event also played a role in recalling it later.

Selectively forgetting

The first test to see if astrocytes were involved in recall was to artificially activate them when the mice were in a box that they were not conditioned to fear. It turned out artificial activation of astrocytes that were active during the formation of a fear memory formed in one box caused the mice to freeze even when they were in a different one.

So, the next question was, if you just killed or otherwise disabled an astrocyte ensemble active during a specific memory formation, would it just delete this memory from the brain? To get that done, the team used their genetic tools to selectively delete the NFIA protein in astrocytes that were active when the mice received their electric shocks. “We found that mice froze a lot less when we put them in the boxes they were conditioned to fear. They could not remember. But other memories were intact,” Kwon claims.

The memory was not completely deleted, though. The mice still froze in the boxes they were supposed to freeze in, but they did it for a much shorter time on average. “It looked like their memory was maybe a bit foggy. They were not sure if they were in the right place,” Williamson says.

After figuring out how to suppress a memory, the team also figured out where the “undo” button was and brought it back to normal.

“When we deleted the NFIA protein in astrocytes, the memory was impaired, but the engram neurons were intact. So, the memory was still somewhere there. The mice just couldn’t access it,” Williamson claims. The team brought the memory back by artificially stimulating the engram neurons using the same technique they employed for activating chosen astrocytes. “That caused the neurons involved in this memory trace to be activated for a few hours. This artificial activity allowed the mice to remember it again,” Williamson says.

The team’s vision is that in the distant future this technique can be used in treatments targeting neurons that are overactive in disorders such as PTSD. “We now have a new cellular target that we can evaluate and potentially develop treatments that target the astrocyte component associated with memory,” Williamson claims. But there’s lot more to learn before anything like that becomes possible. “We don’t yet know what signal is released by an astrocyte that acts on the neuron. Another thing is our study was focused on one brain region, which was the hippocampus, but we know that engrams exist throughout the brain in lots of different regions. The next step is to see if astrocytes play the same role in other brain regions that are also critical for memory,” Williamson says.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08170-w

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

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Rocket Report: Next Vulcan launch slips into 2025; Starship gets a green light

rocket report, Science, Space / Rejus Almole / November 23, 2024

All the news that’s fit to lift

“Constellation companies and government satellite operators are desperate.”

NASA Astronaut Don Pettit captured this photo of the sixth Starship launch from the International Space Station on Tuesday. Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

Welcome to Edition 7.20 of the Rocket Report! This is a super-long version of the newsletter because we did not publish last week, and there is just a ton of launch news of late. Also, I want to note that next week’s report will appear a day early, on Wednesday, due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Speaking of which, you all have our thanks for reading and sharing the Rocket Report with others.

On a completely unrelated note, Rocket Lab has had some amazing mission names over the years. But this weekend’s “Ice AIS Baby” launch is probably the best. I always appreciate their effort to find non-vanilla names and find a way to stop, collaborate, and listen.

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.

Firefly raises a tidy sum as its ambitions soar. Firefly announced earlier this month that it has completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. This follows a banner year of fundraising in 2023, when Firefly reported investors funneled approximately $300 million into the company at a valuation of $1.5 billion, Ars reports. In a statement, Firefly said the money raised in the Series D round will help the company “expand market reach with its Elytra spacecraft, move to full rate production of its Alpha launch vehicle, and accelerate hardware qualification for new vehicles in development.”

A busy period ahead … Firefly will soon ship its first Blue Ghost lunar lander to Florida for final preparations to launch to the Moon and deliver 10 NASA-sponsored scientific instruments and tech demo experiments to the lunar surface. Firefly also boasts a healthy backlog of missions on its small Alpha rocket. In June, Lockheed Martin announced a deal for as many as 25 Alpha launches through 2029. And there’s the Medium Launch Vehicle, a rocket that Firefly and Northrop Grumman hope to launch as soon as 2026.

ABL departs the launch industry. At one point Firefly and ABL Space were competing to develop a credible 1-ton launcher. As Firefly soared this month, however, ABL decided to go in a different direction, turning its focus to missile defense, Ars reports. The founder and president of ABL Space Systems, Dan Piemont, announced the decision on LinkedIn, adding, “We’re consolidating our operational footprint and parting ways with some talented members of our team.”

Never made it to space … ABL made its first RS1 launch attempt in January 2023 from Kodiak, Alaska, but a catastrophic fire shortly after liftoff quickly doomed the rocket. A second attempt was precluded in July of this year after an explosion during a static-fire test in Alaska. The company laid off some of its staff in August to control costs. As the company was failing in its efforts to reach orbit, the launch market was also changing, Piemont said. Although not directly mentioning SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket, Piemont said ABL’s ability to impact the launch industry has diminished over the last seven years. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

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ESA provides another funding boost. The European Space Agency has awarded Boost! contract extensions worth 44.2 million euros ($46.3 million) to HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, Orbex, and Rocket Factory Augsburg, European Spaceflight reports. ESA member states adopted the Boost! initiative in late 2019. The primary aim of the initiative is to provide co-funding to support the development of commercial space transportation services. Each of the four companies has won awards of varying amounts in earlier Boost! competitions.

Getting across the finish line … According to ESA, the new funding awarded through the Boost! contract extensions is aimed at alleviating the pressure in the months before an inaugural flight when costs are high and the potential to generate revenue is limited. While the ESA press release did not disclose the specific amounts awarded to each company, announcements from the companies have revealed that Orbex will receive 5.6 million euros ($5.9 million), Isar Aerospace 15 million euros ($15.7 million), and both Rocket Factory Augsburg and HyImpulse 11.8 million euros each ($12.4 million). (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Oman preparing for its debut launch. The nation on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula is developing a spaceport in the port town of Duqm, with the aim of supporting commercial operations by the year 2030. However, the country’s National Aerospace Services Company will attempt an experimental rocket launch in December, The National reports. The port area will allow launches to the south and east over the Arabian Sea.

Seeking a niche in Mideast space … The National Aerospace Services Company did not specify a date for the launch, nor name the launch vehicle. The firm also said the launch would not be “publicly accessible” and that details about it would only be shared after the fact. The project is part of Oman’s efforts to diversify its economy and secure a competitive edge in the global space industry.

Swedish site launches its 600th rocket. The Esrange Space Center, located 200 km north of the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden, recently hit a significant milestone: It launched its 600th suborbital rocket. The MAPHEUS-15 science rocket reached an altitude of 309 km carrying a payload containing 21 different experiments, the Swedish Space Corporation reports. The payloads were later recovered by helicopter.

Orbital flights coming next? … “I am very proud of this milestone which shines a light on the many years of international collaboration at Esrange,” said Lennart Poromaa, head of Esrange Space Center. “This has been instrumental in achieving hundreds of successful rocket missions, providing invaluable access to space for scientists worldwide.” The site was established in 1966 and recently saw the construction of an orbital launch complex for future missions.

Neutron inks multi-launch contract. The launch company said earlier this month it has signed an agreement with an unnamed customer for two Neutron launches beginning in mid-2026. In a release, Rocket Lab characterized the agreement as “the beginning of a productive collaboration” that could allow Neutron to launch the commercial customer’s entire constellation. Intended to be reusable, Neutron is targeted to be capable of lifting 13 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

Competition wanted … “Constellation companies and government satellite operators are desperate for a break in the launch monopoly,” Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck said. “They need a reliable rocket from a trusted provider, and one that’s reusable to keep launch costs down and make space more frequently accessible—and Neutron is strongly positioned to be that rocket.” With that said, Rocket Lab still has to deliver the booster. It’s currently targeting 2025 for this, but as always, bringing new launch vehicles into the world is a difficult and time-consuming process. (submitted by Ken the Bin and Tom Nelson)

Russia is pursuing its own Grasshopper rocket. Like a lot of competitors in the global launch industry, Russia, for a long time, dismissed the prospects of a reusable first stage for a rocket. As late as 2016, an official with the Russian agency that develops strategy for the country’s main space corporation, Roscosmos, concluded, “The economic feasibility of reusable launch systems is not obvious.” Well, times change as the company is developing its next-generation Amur rocket, Ars reports. Then the Falcon 9 happened.

A good name, apparently … Similar to what SpaceX did about a dozen years ago, Roscosmos is now planning to develop a prototype vehicle to test the ability to land the Amur rocket’s first stage vertically. According to the state-run news agency TASS, constructing this test vehicle will enable the space corporation to solve key challenges. “Next year preparation of an experimental stage of the (Amur) rocket, which everyone is calling ‘Grasshopper,’ will begin,” said Igor Pshenichnikov, the Roscosmos deputy director of the department of future programs. It’s not entirely clear why Russia adopted the exact same nickname as SpaceX.

Don’t forget Europe has a (much more expensive) hopper, too. The European Space Agency announced that it has awarded two new contracts to ArianeGroup to build a second Themis demonstrator and to refine the design of its Prometheus rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. The two contracts have a combined value of 230 million euros ($241 million). The space agency has already spent hundreds of millions of euros on the project to develop a reusable engine and the Themis test vehicle, dating back more than six years. No tests have yet taken place.

Please build something, at some point … According to the agency, the funding will enable the development of a second Themis demonstrator, an upgraded Prometheus engine, and the renovation of testing and ground infrastructure. “The contract extensions signed today at ESA’s headquarters in Paris, France, are to further demonstrate and test evolutions of the Prometheus engine and the Themis demonstrator with higher and more hop-tests,” explained an ESA statement. Seems like it’s a good deal for ArianeGroup, at least. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Starship completes its sixth flight test. SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight, Ars reports. The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13.

A small burn … One of the most important new things engineers wanted to test on this flight occurred about 38 minutes after liftoff. That’s when Starship reignited one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn to make a slight adjustment to its flight path. The burn lasted only a few seconds, and the impulse was small—just a 48 mph (77 km/hour) change in velocity, or delta-V—but it demonstrated that the ship can safely deorbit itself on future missions. With this achievement, Starship will likely soon be cleared to travel into orbit around Earth and deploy Starlink Internet satellites or conduct in-space refueling experiments, two of the near-term objectives on SpaceX’s Starship development roadmap.

Vulcan’s third launch slips into 2025. The Space Force is now preparing for a 2025 Vulcan national security launch debut instead of the originally planned 2024 launches, Space News reports. Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, made the disclosure during a conversation with reporters on Thursday. Garrant said ULA’s Vulcan remains on track for certification. The rocket’s second certification launch in October was technically successful, with the payload reaching its intended orbit. However, an anomaly with one of the solid rocket boosters continues to be reviewed.

For now the military flies on Falcons … The anomaly itself isn’t a showstopper for certification, said Garrant. But the cumulative delays and uncertainties are a concern, he said, “as we aim to maintain assured access to space with two certified providers.” Two missions—USSF-106 and USSF-87—are currently waiting in the wings, with payloads ready but no confirmed launch dates. ULA had been targeting a November launch for USSF-106. But with only six weeks left in the year, a 2024 launch window is increasingly unlikely, said Garrant. ULA chief Tory Bruno had been promising to complete two national security launches this year. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

NASA begins stacking Artemis II booster. NASA said ground teams inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida lifted the aft assembly of the rocket’s left booster onto the mobile launch platform, marking the beginning of operations to ‘stack’ the second Space Launch System rocket. Using an overhead crane, teams hoisted the left aft booster assembly—already filled with pre-packed solid propellant—from the VAB transfer aisle, over a catwalk dozens of stories high and then down onto mounting posts on the mobile launcher, Ars reports.

Say goodbye to September … The Artemis II mission is slated to send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day flight around the far side of the Moon. A NASA spokesperson told Ars it should take around four months to fully stack the SLS rocket for Artemis II. Officially, Artemis II is projected to launch in September of next year, but there’s little chance of meeting that schedule due to an issue with Orion’s heat shield. It’s possible that, within the next month or two, NASA could announce a new target launch date for Artemis II at the end of 2025 or, more likely, in 2026.

Shotwell predicts rapid increase in Starship launches. As SpaceX made its final preparations for the sixth launch of its Starship rocket last week, the company’s chief operating officer and president spoke at a financial conference on Friday about various topics, including the future of the massive rocket and the Starlink satellite system. The Starship launch system is about to reach a tipping point, Gwynne Shotwell said, as it moves from an experimental rocket toward operational missions, Ars reports.

Those are lofty goals … “We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. “We want to fly it a lot.” That lofty goal seems aspirational, not just because of the hardware challenges but also due to the ground systems (SpaceX currently has just one operational launch tower) as well as the difficulty of supplying that much liquid oxygen and methane for such a high flight rate. However, it’s worth noting that SpaceX will launch Starship four times this year, twice the number of Falcon Heavy missions. An acceleration of Starship is highly likely.

AST signs launch deals for its BlueBird constellation. During a third-quarter earnings call, AST SpaceMobile revealed new launch agreements with Blue Origin, the Indian Space Research Organization, and SpaceX to launch its large satellites over the course of 2025 and 2026, Spaceflight Now reports. Andrew Johnson, chief financial officer and chief legal officer at AST SpaceMobile, said that the launches “enable us to launch up to approximately 45 Block 2 BlueBird satellites, with options for additional launch vehicles for approximately 60 Block 2 BlueBird satellites.”

Glenns and Falcons … The company’s next launch will use India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle. After that, the company will shift its focus to launching with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which are capable of carrying eight and four Block 2 BlueBird satellites, respectively. The company said its Block 2 constellation will be capable of delivering “peak data transmission speeds up to 120Mbps, supporting voice, full data, and video applications.” AST will be competing with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation in providing direct-to-cell communications. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

FAA gives SpaceX a green light for South Texas launches. A day after SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the sixth time, the company received good news from the Federal Aviation Administration regarding future launch operations from its Starbase facility in South Texas. In a draft version of what is known as an “Environmental Assessment,” the FAA indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. Additionally, the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage, Ars reports.

A final decision is coming next year … The FAA regulates the launch of rockets from the United States and is responsible for the safety of people and property on the ground. The ongoing environmental review stems from SpaceX’s desire to increase the scope of its operations from South Texas and is not yet finalized. Beginning today, the FAA will open a public comment period that will close on January 17. In addition, the FAA will hold five public meetings to solicit feedback from the local community and other stakeholders. A final assessment will likely be issued sometime early next year.

ESA wants a reusable super heavy lift rocket. The European Space Agency has announced that it will commission a study to detail the development of a reusable rocket capable of delivering 60 tons to low-Earth orbit, European Spaceflight reports. The space agency believes it is necessary to have a launch system of this kind to fulfill “critical European space exploration needs beyond LEO, while providing wider space exploitation potentials to answer the growing market opportunities (e.g. mega constellations).”

Studies of studies … The agency launched its PROTEIN (Preparatory Activities for European Heavy Lift Launcher) initiative in June 2022, aiming to explore the feasibility of developing a European super heavy-lift rocket with a focus on reducing launch costs. ArianeGroup and Rocket Factory Augsburg were selected to lead studies. The European 60T LEO Reusable Launch System Pathfinder initiative seems to build upon the agency’s PROTEIN studies, even though this link is not explicitly stated. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Nov. 22: New Shepard | NS-28 | Launch Site One, Texas | 15: 30 UTC

Nov. 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-13 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 03: 26 UTC

Nov. 24: Electron | Ice AIS Baby | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 03: 55 UTC

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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Ancient fish-trapping network supported the rise of Maya civilization

aerial archaeology, ancient people did stuff, Archaeology, fisheries, indigenous americans, Maya, Pre-Columbian civilizations, Science / Tim Belzer / November 22, 2024

Harrison-Buck and her colleagues calculated that at its peak, the system could have produced enough fish each year to feed around 15,000 people. That’s based on modern estimates of how many kilograms of fish people eat every year, combined with measurements of how many kilograms of fish people in Zambia harvest with similar traps. Of course, people at Crooked Tree would have needed to preserve the fish somehow, probably by salting, drying, or smoking them.

“Fisheries were more than capable of supporting year-round sedentarism and the emergence of complex society characteristic of Pre-Columbian Maya civilization in this area,” write Harrison-Buck and her colleagues.

When we think about the Maya economy, we think of canal networks and ditched or terraced fields. In just one patch of what’s now Guatemala, a lidar survey revealed that Maya farmers drained thousands of acres of swampy wetland and built raised fields for maize, crossed by a grid of irrigation canals. To feed the ancient city of Holmul, the Maya turned a swamp into a breadbasket. But at least some of their precursors may have made it big on fish, not grain. The common feature, though, is an absolute lack of any chill whatsoever when it came to re-engineering whole landscapes to produce food.

This Google Earth image shows the area containing the ancient fishery.

Infrastructure built to last and last

From the ground, the channels that funneled fish into nearby ponds are nearly invisible today. But from above, especially during the dry season, they stand in stark contrast to the land around them, because vegetation grows rich and green in the moist soil at the base of the channels, even while everything around it dries up. That made aerial photography the perfect way to map them.

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Our Universe is not fine-tuned for life, but it’s still kind of OK

astronomy, cosmology, dark energy, Dark Matter, drake equation, Science, Star formation / Mike M. / November 22, 2024

Inspired by the Drake equation, researchers optimize a model universe for life.

Physicists including Robert H. Dickle and Fred Hoyle have argued that we are living in a universe that is perfectly fine-tuned for life. Following the anthropic principle, they claimed that the only reason fundamental physical constants have the values we measure is because we wouldn’t exist if those values were any different. There would simply have been no one to measure them.

But now a team of British and Swiss astrophysicists have put that idea to test. “The short answer is no, we are not in the most likely of the universes,” said Daniele Sorini, an astrophysicist at Durham University. “And we are not in the most life-friendly universe, either.” Sorini led a study aimed at establishing how different amounts of the dark energy present in a universe would affect its ability to produce stars. Stars, he assumed, are a necessary condition for intelligent life to appear.

But worry not. While our Universe may not be the best for life, the team says it’s still pretty OK-ish.

Expanding the Drake equation

Back in the 1960s, Frank Drake, an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist, proposed an equation aimed at estimating the number of intelligent civilizations in our Universe. The equation started with stars as a precondition for life and worked its way down in scale from there. How many new stars appear in the Universe per year? How many of the stars are orbited by planets? How many of those planets are habitable? How many of those habitable planets can develop life? Eventually, you’re left with the fraction of planets that host intelligent civilizations.

The problem with the Drake equation was that it wasn’t really supposed to yield a definite number. We couldn’t—and still can’t—know the values for most of its variables, like the fraction of the planets that developed life. So far, we know of only one such planet, and you can’t infer any statistical probabilities when you only have one sample. The equation was meant more as a guide for future researchers, giving them ideas of what to look for in their search for extraterrestrial life.

But even without knowing the actual values of all those variables present in the Drake equation, one thing was certain: The more stars you had at the beginning, the better the odds for life were. So Sorini’s team focused on stars.

“Our work is connected to the Drake equation in that it relies on the same logic,” Sorini said. “The difference is we are not adding to the life side of the equation. We’re adding to the stars’ side of the equation.” His team attempted to identify the basic constituents of a universe that’s good at producing stars.

“By ‘constituents,’ I mean ordinary matter, the stuff we are made of—the dark matter, which is a weirder, invisible type of matter, and the dark energy, which is what is making the expansion of a universe proceed faster and faster,” Sorinin explained. Of all those constituents, his team found that dark energy has a key influence on the star formation rate.

Into the multiverse

Dark energy accelerates the expansion of the Universe, counteracting gravity and pushing matter further apart. If there’s enough dark energy, it would be difficult to form the dark matter web that structures galaxies. “The idea is ‘more dark energy, fewer galaxies—so fewer stars,’” Sorini said.

The effect of dark energy in a universe can be modeled by a number called the cosmological constant. “You could reinterpret it as a form of energy that can make your universe expand faster,” Sorinin said.

(The cosmological constant was originally a number Albert Einstein came up with to fix the fact that his theory of general relativity caused the expansion of what was thought to be a static universe. Einstein later learned that the Universe actually was expanding and declared the cosmological constant his greatest blunder. But the idea eventually managed to make a comeback after it was discovered that the Universe’s expansion is accelerating.)

The cosmological constant was one of the variables Sorini’s team manipulated to determine if we are living in a universe that is maximally efficient at producing stars. Sorini based this work on an idea put forward by Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, back in 1989. “Weinberg proposed that there could be a multiverse of all possible universes, each with a different value of dark energy,” Sorini explained. Sorini’s team modeled that multiverse composed of thousands upon thousands of possible universes, each complete with a past and future.

Cosmological fluke

To simulate the history of all those universes, Sorini used a slightly modified version of a star formation model he developed back in 2021 with John A. Peacock, a British astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and co-author of the study. It wasn’t the most precise model, but the approximations it suggested produced a universe that was reasonably close to our own. The team validated the results by predicting the stellar mass fraction in the total mass of the Milky Way Galaxy, which we know stands somewhere between 2.2 and 6.6 percent. The model came up with 6.7 percent, which was deemed good enough for the job.

In the next step, Sorini and his colleagues defined a large set of possible universes in which the value of the cosmological constant ranged from a very tiny fraction of the one we observe in our Universe all the way to the value 100,000 times higher than our own.

It turned out our Universe was not the best at producing stars. But it was decent.

“The value of the cosmological constant in the most life-friendly universe would be measured at roughly one-tenth of the value we observe in our own,” Sorini said.

In a universe like that, the fraction of the matter that gets turned into stars would stand at 27 percent. “But we don’t seem to be that far from the optimal value. In our Universe, stars are formed with around 23 percent of the matter,” Sorini said.

The last question the team addressed was how lucky we are to even be here. According to Sorini’s calculations, if all universes in the multiverse are equally likely, the chances of having a cosmological constant at or lower than the value present in our Universe is just 0.5 percent. In other words, we rolled the dice and got a pretty good score, although it could have been a bit better. The odds of getting a cosmological constant at one-tenth of our own or lower were just 0.2 percent.

Things also could have been much worse. The flip side of these odds is that the number of possible universes that are worse than our own vastly exceeds the number of universes that are better.

“That is of course all subject to the assumptions of our model, and the only assumption about life we made was that more stars lead to higher chances for life to appear,” Sorini said. In the future, his team plans to go beyond that idea and make the model more sophisticated by considering more parameters. “For example, we could ask ourselves what the chances are of producing carbons in order to have life as we know it or something like that,” Sorini said.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae2236

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

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A former Orion manager has surprisingly credible plans to fly European astronauts

Europe, Science, Space, the exploration company / Rejus Almole / November 22, 2024

She found herself wanting to build something more modern. Looking across the Atlantic, she drew inspiration from what SpaceX was doing with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. She watched humans launch into space aboard Crew Dragon and saw that same vehicle fly again and again. “I have a huge admiration for what SpaceX has done,” she said.

Huby also saw opportunity in that company’s success. SpaceX is the only provider of crew transportation in the Western world. It’s likely that Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will never become a serious competitor. India’s human spaceflight program is making some progress, but it’s unclear whether the Gaganyaan vehicle will serve non-Indian customers.

The opportunity she saw was to provide an alternative to SpaceX based in Europe. This would yield 100 percent of the market in Europe and offer an option to countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and other nations interested in going to space.

“I know it’s super hard, and I know it was crazy,” Huby said. “But I wanted to try.”

Starting small

She founded The Exploration Company in August 2021 with $50,000 in the bank and a small team of four people. Three years later, the company has 200 employees and recently announced that it had raised $160 million in Series B funding. It marked the first time that two European sovereign funds, French Tech and Germany-based DTCF, invested together. The news even scored a congratulatory post on LinkedIn from French President Emmanuel Macron, who wrote, “The history of space continues to be written in Europeans.”

To date, then, Huby has raised nearly $230 million. Her company has already flown a mission, the “Bikini” reentry demonstrator, on the debut flight of the Ariane 6 rocket this last summer. The small capsule was intended to demonstrate the company’s reentry technology. Unfortunately, the rocket’s upper stage failed on its deorbit burn, so the Bikini capsule remains stuck in space.

Still, the company is already hard at work on a second demonstration vehicle, about 2.5 meters in diameter, that will have more than a dozen customers on board. The spacecraft for this demonstration flight, named Mission Possible, is fully assembled, Huby said, and it will launch on SpaceX’s Transporter 14 mission next summer, likely in July. This mission was developed in 2.5 years at a cost of $20 million, plus $10 million for the launch.

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Russian ballistic missile attack on Ukraine portends new era of warfare

ICBM, IRBM, Military, missile, russia, Science, Space, Ukraine / Rejus Almole / November 22, 2024

The Oreshnik missiles strike their targets at speeds of up to Mach 10, or 2.5 to 3 kilometers per second, Putin said. “The existing air defense systems around the world, including those being developed by the US in Europe, are unable to intercept such missiles.”

A global war?

In perhaps the most chilling part of his remarks, Putin said the conflict in Ukraine is “taking on global dimensions” and said Russia is entitled to use missiles against Western countries supplying weapons for Ukraine to use against Russian targets.

“In the event of escalation, we will respond decisively and in kind,” Putin said. “I advise the ruling elites of those countries planning to use their military forces against Russia to seriously consider this.”

The change in nuclear doctrine authorized by Putin earlier this week also lowers the threshold for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons to counter a conventional attack that threatens Russian “territorial integrity.”

This seems to have already happened. Ukraine launched an offensive into Russia’s Kursk region in August, taking control of more than 1,000 square kilometers of Russian land. Russian forces, assisted by North Korean troops, are staging a counteroffensive to try to retake the territory.

Singh called Russia’s invitation of North Korean troops “escalatory” and said Putin could “choose to end this war today.”

US officials say Russian forces are suffering some 1,200 deaths or injuries per day in the war. In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that US intelligence sources estimated that a million Ukrainians and Russians had been killed or wounded in the war.

The UN Human Rights Office most recently reported that 11,973 civilians have been killed, including 622 children, since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.

“We warned Russia back in 2022 not to do this, and they did it anyways, so there are consequences for that,” Singh said. “But we don’t want to see this escalate into a wider regional conflict. We don’t seek war with Russia.”

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Surgeons remove 2.5-inch hairball from teen with rare Rapunzel syndrome

abdominal pain, hair, health, NEJM, rapunzel syndrome, Science, stomach / Mike M. / November 21, 2024

Hair is resistant to digestion and isn’t easily moved through the digestive system. As such, it often gets lodged in folds of the gastric lining, denatures, and then traps food and gunk to form a mass. Over time, it will continue to collect material, growing into a thick, matted wad.

Of all the bezoars, trichobezoars are the most common. But none of them are particularly easy to spot. On CT scans, bezoars can be indistinguishable from food in the stomach unless there’s an oral contrast material. To look for a possible bezoar in the teen, her doctors ordered an esophagogastroduodenoscopy, in which a scope is put down into the stomach through the mouth. With that, they got a clear shot of the problem: a trichobezoar. (The image is here, but a warning: it’s graphic).

Tangled tail

But this trichobezoar was particularly rare; hair from the mottled mat had dangled down from the stomach and into the small bowel, which is an extremely uncommon condition called Rapunzel syndrome, named after the fairy-tale character who lets down her long hair. It carries a host of complications beyond acute abdominal pain, including perforation of the stomach and intestines, and acute pancreatitis. The only resolution is surgical removal. In the teen’s case, the trichobezoar came out during surgery using a gastrostomy tube. Surgeons recovered a hairball about 2.5 inches wide, along with the dangling hair that reached into the small intestine.

For any patient with a trichobezoar, the most important next step is to address any psychiatric disorders that might underlie hair-eating behavior. Hair eating is often linked to a condition called trichotillomania, a repetitive behavior disorder marked by hair pulling. Sometimes, the disorder can be diagnosed by signs of hair loss—bald patches, irritated scalp areas, or hair at different growth stages. But, for the most part, it’s an extremely difficult condition to diagnose as patients have substantial shame and embarrassment about the condition and will often go to great lengths to hide it.

Another possibility is that the teen had pica, a disorder marked by persistent eating of nonfood, nonnutritive substances. Intriguingly, the teen noted that she had pica as a toddler. But doctors were skeptical that pica could explain her condition given that hair was the only nonfood material in the bezoar.

The teen’s doctors would have liked to get to the bottom of her condition and referred her to a psychiatrist after she successfully recovered from surgery. But unfortunately, she did not return for follow-up care and told her doctors she would instead see a hypnotherapist that her friends recommended.

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We’re closer to re-creating the sounds of Parasaurolophus

acoustics, dinosaurs, paleontology, Science / Kris Guyer / November 21, 2024

The duck-billed dinosaur Parasaurolophus is distinctive for its prominent crest, which some scientists have suggested served as a kind of resonating chamber to produce low-frequency sounds. Nobody really knows what Parasaurolophus sounded like, however. Hongjun Lin of New York University is trying to change that by constructing his own model of the dinosaur’s crest and its acoustical characteristics. Lin has not yet reproduced the call of Parasaurolophus, but he talked about his progress thus far at a virtual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Lin was inspired in part by the dinosaur sounds featured in the Jurassic Park film franchise, which were a combination of sounds from other animals like baby whales and crocodiles. “I’ve been fascinated by giant animals ever since I was a kid. I’d spend hours reading books, watching movies, and imagining what it would be like if dinosaurs were still around today,” he said during a press briefing. “It wasn’t until college that I realized the sounds we hear in movies and shows—while mesmerizing—are completely fabricated using sounds from modern animals. That’s when I decided to dive deeper and explore what dinosaurs might have actually sounded like.”

A skull and partial skeleton of Parasaurolophus were first discovered in 1920 along the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada, and another partial skull was discovered the following year in New Mexico. There are now three known species of Parasaurolophus; the name means “near crested lizard.” While no complete skeleton has yet been found, paleontologists have concluded that the adult dinosaur likely stood about 16 feet tall and weighed between 6,000 to 8,000 pounds. Parasaurolophus was an herbivore that could walk on all four legs while foraging for food but may have run on two legs.

It’s that distinctive crest that has most fascinated scientists over the last century, particularly its purpose. Past hypotheses have included its use as a snorkel or as a breathing tube while foraging for food; as an air trap to keep water out of the lungs; or as an air reservoir so the dinosaur could remain underwater for longer periods. Other scientists suggested the crest was designed to help move and support the head or perhaps used as a weapon while combating other Parasaurolophus. All of these, plus a few others, have largely been discredited.

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NASA is stacking the Artemis II rocket, implying a simple heat shield fix

artemis, artemis II, human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center, NASA, orion, Science, Space, space launch system, vehicle assembly building / Tim Belzer / November 21, 2024

A good sign

The readiness of the Orion crew capsule, where the four Artemis II astronauts will live during their voyage around the Moon, is driving NASA’s schedule for the mission. Officially, Artemis II is projected to launch in September of next year, but there’s little chance of meeting that schedule.

At the beginning of this year, NASA officials ruled out any opportunity to launch Artemis II in 2024 due to several technical issues with the Orion spacecraft. Several of these issues are now resolved, but NASA has not released any meaningful updates on the most significant problem.

This problem involves the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield. During atmospheric reentry at the end of the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022, the Orion capsule’s heat shield eroded and cracked in unexpected ways, prompting investigations by NASA engineers and an independent panel.

NASA’s Orion heat shield inquiry ran for nearly two years. The investigation has wrapped up, two NASA officials said last month, but they declined to discuss any details of the root cause of the heat shield issue or the actions required to resolve the problem on Artemis II.

These corrective options ranged from doing nothing to changing the Orion spacecraft’s reentry angle to mitigate heating or physically modifying the Artemis II heat shield. In the latter scenario, NASA would have to disassemble the Orion spacecraft, which is already put together and is undergoing environmental testing at Kennedy Space Center. This would likely delay the Artemis II launch by a couple of years.

In August, NASA’s top human exploration official told Ars that the agency would hold off on stacking the SLS rocket until engineers had a good handle on the heat shield problem. There are limits to how long the solid rocket boosters can remain stacked vertically. The joints connecting each segment of the rocket motors are certified for one year. This clock doesn’t actually start ticking until NASA stacks the next booster segments on top of the lowermost segments.

However, NASA waived this rule on Artemis I when the boosters were stacked nearly two years before the successful launch.

A NASA spokesperson told Ars on Wednesday that the agency had nothing new to share on the Orion heat shield or what changes, if any, are required for the Artemis II mission. This information should be released before the end of the year, she said. At the same time, NASA could announce a new target launch date for Artemis II at the end of 2025, or more likely in 2026.

But because NASA gave the “go” for SLS stacking now, it seems safe to rule out any major hardware changes on the Orion heat shield for Artemis II.

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Study: Yes, tapping on frescoes can reveal defects

acoustics, art conservation, Science / Paul Patrick / November 21, 2024

The US Capitol building in Washington, DC, is adorned with multiple lavish murals created in the 19th century by Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. These include panels in the Senate first-floor corridors, Room H-144, and the rotunda. The crowning glory is The Apotheosis of Washington on the dome of the rotunda, 180 feet above the floor.

Brumidi worked in various mediums, including frescoes. Among the issues facing conservators charged with maintaining the Capitol building frescoes is delamination. Artists apply dry pigments to wet plaster to create a fresco, and a good fresco can last for centuries. Over time, though, the decorative plaster layers can separate from the underlying masonry, introducing air gaps. Knowing precisely where such delaminated areas are, and their exact shape, is crucial to conservation efforts, yet the damage might not be obvious to the naked eye.

Acoustician Nicholas Gangemi is part of a research group led by Joseph Vignola at the Catholic University of America that has been using laser Doppler vibrometry to pinpoint delaminated areas of the Capitol building frescoes. It’s a non-invasive method that zaps the frescoes with sound waves and measures the vibrational signatures that reflect back to learn about the structural conditions. This in turn enables conservators to make very precise repairs to preserve the frescoes for future generations.

It’s an alternative to the traditional technique of gently knocking on the plaster with knuckles or small mallets, listening to the resulting sounds to determine where delamination has occurred. Once separation occurs, the delaminated part of the fresco acts a bit like the head of a drum; tapping on it produces a distinctive acoustic signature.

But the method is highly subjective. It takes years of experience to become proficient at this method, and there are only a small number of people who can truly be deemed experts. “We really wanted to put that experience and knowledge into an inexperienced person’s hands,” Gangemi said during a press briefing at a virtual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. So he and his colleagues decided to put the traditional knocking method to the test.

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