Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This is straight out of science fiction. The technology is absolutely incredible..." says a woman who received an AI-powered bionic arm. "I'm just absolutely in awe of the technology and excited about the future prospects this will give me."

The short video clip (produced by the BBC) also features the woman's doctor explaining that "the top section is customized to fit...with electrodes there recording the unique pattern of movement, that then talk to a little computer inside the forearm that then, through AI, build data and record those movements to tell the arm what to do."

A GoFundMe campaign had raised £296,613 (about $378,121 USD) to purchase the bionic arm — and last week the grateful recipient shared a long-awaited status update. "It's here. It fits. It works...! 6 months after I first signed up in the clinic I have my bionic arm. State of the art, tailored to my body, the price of a very nice sports car. 24h in and I'm already putting it to good use. The feeling of freedom is unbeatable. Being able to carry things in 2 hands! Open a bottle! Give my husband a 2 arm hug!

"I wouldn't have been able to do this without you, you believed in me since the very beginning. You stood by me in my darkest hour. THANK YOU."

Recently science author Sam Kean reviewed In a Flight of Starlings, a "slender, uneven collection of essays by Giorgio Parisi about his life in physics, from his student days in Rome to the work that won him a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics."

But the reviewer makes an interesting point: As someone who writes about science history, I have long grumbled about how misleading modern scientific papers are. I understand the need to present scientific findings in a clean, concise way, but the papers also omit all the false starts, blind alleys, broken equipment, and dumb mistakes that beset real scientific research every day. By omitting all the human stuff, the papers fail to explain how science really gets done. Parisi raises a related complaint — that scientific papers omit all sense of intuition. Indeed, the best sections of the book explore the role of intuition in scientific thinking.

He quotes a friend who says that "a good mathematician understands immediately which mathematical statements are true and which are false, whereas a bad mathematician has to try to prove them in order to know." The same applies to science: the early stages of any project are chaotic, and the data can be confusing and even contradictory. Scientists need intuition to cut through the mess and focus on the most promising explanations. Much of this intuition is unconscious and, while still grounded in physical brain processes, remains murky and hard to reconstruct. And for whatever reason, that vagueness makes scientists uncomfortable. "In almost all texts written by scientists," Parisi notes, "these themes are taboo."

So it's refreshing to see a scientist, especially one of Parisi's stature, honestly discuss the fuzzy side of scientific thinking, and not just during the early, groping stages but in the technical phases of a project, too. "The physicist sometimes uses mathematics ungrammatically," he admits, "a license that we grant to poets" as well... In a Flight of Starlings, Parisi writes, "is my attempt to convey to a wide readership something of the beauty, importance, and cultural value of modern science." Does he succeed? At times, yes... Perhaps it's not unlike the hodgepodge of science itself, then...

Recently Ars Technica reported on "another application for SpaceX's Starship architecture that the company is studying," adding that NASA "is on board to lend expertise.

"Though still in a nascent phase of tech development, the effort could result in repurposing Starship into a commercial space station, something NASA has a keen interest in because there are no plans for a government-owned research lab in low-Earth orbit after the International Space Station is decommissioned after 2030." NASA announced last month a new round of agreements with seven commercial companies, including SpaceX. The Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities (CCSC) program is an effort established to advance private sector development of emerging products and services that could be available to customers — including NASA — in approximately five to seven years... NASA passed over SpaceX's bid for a funded space station development agreement in 2021, identifying concerns about SpaceX's plans for scaling its life-support system to enable long-duration missions and SpaceX's plan for a single docking port, among other issues. The space agency isn't providing any funding for the new CCSC effort, which includes the Starship space station concept, but the government will support the industry with technical expertise, including expert assessments, lessons learned, technologies, and data.

Apart from the SpaceX agreement, NASA said it will provide non-financial support to Blue Origin's initiative to develop a crew spacecraft for orbital missions that would launch on the company's New Glenn rocket. The agency also supports Northrop Grumman's development of a human-tended research platform in low-Earth orbit to work alongside the company's planned space station. The other companies NASA picked for unfunded agreements were: Sierra Space's proposal for a crewed version of its Dream Chaser spacecraft, Vast's concept for a privately owned space station, ThinkOrbital's plan to develop welding, cutting, inspection, and additive manufacturing technology for construction work in space, and Special Aerospace Services for collaboration on an autonomous maneuvering unit to assist, or potentially replace, spacewalkers working outside a space station.

Despite the lack of NASA funding, the new collaboration announcement with SpaceX laid out — in broad strokes, at least — one of the directions SpaceX may want to take Starship. NASA said it will work with SpaceX on an "integrated low-Earth orbit architecture" that includes the Starship vehicle and other SpaceX programs, including the Dragon crew capsule and Starlink broadband network.
The artice links to a recent NASA document detailing SpaceX's space station concept. Phil McAlister, who heads NASA's commercial spaceflight division, says its size and reduced cost "could have a far-reaching impact on the sustainable development of the low-Earth orbit) economy...

"Adding increased confidence is the company's plan to self-fund Starship development from its launch and satellite enterprises."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone for sharing the article.

"Scientists in Japan may be at the start of a truly monumental accomplishment: a vaccine that can slow or delay the progression of Alzheimer's disease," reports Gizmodo: In preliminary research released this week, the vaccine appeared to reduce inflammation and other important biomarkers in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's-like illness, while also improving their awareness.

More research will be needed before this vaccine can be tested in humans, however. The experimental vaccine is being developed primarily by scientists from Juntendo University in Japan.

It's intended to work by training the immune system to go after certain senescent cells, aging cells that no longer divide to make more of themselves, but instead stick around in the body. These cells aren't necessarily harmful, and some play a vital role in healing and other life functions. But they've also been linked to a variety of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's. The vaccine specifically targets senescent cells that produce high levels of something called senescence-associated glycoprotein, or SAGP. Other research has suggested that people with Alzheimer's tend to have brains filled with these cells in particular.

The team tested their vaccine on mice bred to have brains that develop the same sort of gradual destruction seen in humans with Alzheimer's.

"NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2," according to a mission update posted Friday: The agency's Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar "shout" more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory.
"Had the Earth-based signals not reached Voyager 2, the spacecraft is already programmed to reorient itself multiple times a year to keep its antenna pointing in our planet's direction," CNN points out. "The next reset was already scheduled for October 15. But the team didn't want to wait that long..."

After controllers sent the wrong command to the 46-year-old spacecraft, Voyager 2's antenna needed to be shifted "a mere 2 degrees," notes The Associated Press:

Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft — 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away — and still in contact. As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

As detailed in a paper published in Cell Chemical Biology, researchers have developed a "cancer-killing pill" capable of destroying solid tumors while leaving healthy cells unaffected. The new drug has been in development for 20 years and is now undergoing pre-clinical research in the U.S.. Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist and freelance writer on science and pharmaceutical topics, writes about the new paper via Science Magazine: It's about a molecule designated AOH1996, which seems to have a unique mode of action in tumor cells, one that might make it more more selective for those as compared to normal ones. The key target here is a protein called PCNA (from its old name of "proliferating cell nuclear antigen"). [...] The current molecule is a traditional direct small molecule binder that is selective for caPCNA over the regular type, which is a very attractive advantage to explore. The team behind it has been working on it for several years now to validate that mechanism, and the new paper linked first above is their report of going all the way into animal models. AOH1996 is a very unremarkable-looking molecule - to be honest, it looks like the sort of stuff that you used to see in old combinatorial chemistry libraries in the late 90s and early 2000s, a couple of aryl-rich groups strung together with amide bonds. It's certainly not going to be the most soluble stuff in the world, but they seem to have been able to formulate it. But I'm definitely not going to make fun of any chemical structure that works! [...]

The new paper shows preclinical toxicity testing in two species (mice and dogs), which is what you need to get to human trials. It seems to pass those very well, with no signs of trouble at 6x the effective dose in either species. And if you were throwing DSBs all over the place in normal tissues, believe me, you'd see tox. It is clean in an Ames test, for example. As for efficacy, in cell assays the concentration needed for 50% growth inhibition across 70 different cancer cell lines averaged around 300nM, while it showed no toxic effects on various non-cancer lines up to 10 micromolar (at least a 30x window). The affected cells show cell-cycle arrest, replication stress, apoptosis, and so on. And application of AOH1996 along with other known chemotherapy agents made the cells much more sensitive to those, presumably because they couldn't deal with those on top of the problems that AOH1996 was already causing.

It also shows growth arrest in xenograft tumors in mouse models, with a no-effect dose at least six times its effective dose, and combination therapy with a topoisomerase inhibitor showed even more significant effects. The compound has entered a Phase I trial in humans on the basis of the above data, and I very much look forward to seeing it advance to Phase II, where it will doubtless be used in combination with several existing therapies. I hope that human cancers will prove vulnerable to this new mode of attack in the clinic, and that they are not able to mutate around it with new forms of caPCNA too quickly, either. The comparison with the peptide agent mentioned above will be especially interesting, too. There's only one way to find out - good luck to everyone involved!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: The Environmental Protection Agency approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency's own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. Federal law requires the EPA to conduct safety reviews before allowing new chemical products onto the market. If the agency finds that a substance causes unreasonable risk to health or the environment, the EPA is not allowed to approve it without first finding ways to reduce that risk. But the agency did not do that in this case. Instead, the EPA decided its scientists were overstating the risks and gave Chevron the go-ahead to make the new boat fuel ingredient at its refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Though the substance can poison air and contaminate water, EPA officials mandated no remedies other than requiring workers to wear gloves, records show.

ProPublica and the Guardian in February reported on the risks of other new plastic-based Chevron fuels that were also approved under an EPA program that the agency had touted as a "climate-friendly" way to boost alternatives to petroleum-based fuels. That story was based on an EPA consent order, a legally binding document the agency issues to address risks to health or the environment. In the Chevron consent order, the highest noted risk came from a jet fuel that was expected to create air pollution so toxic that 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer. In February, ProPublica and the Guardian asked the EPA for its scientists' risk assessment, which underpinned the consent order. The agency declined to provide it, so ProPublica requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. The 203-page risk assessment revealed that, for the boat fuel ingredient, there was a far higher risk that was not in the consent order. EPA scientists included figures that made it possible for ProPublica to calculate the lifetime cancer risk from breathing air pollution that comes from a boat engine burning the fuel. That calculation, which was confirmed by the EPA, came out to 1.3 in 1, meaning every person exposed to it over the course of a full lifetime would be expected to get cancer.

Another serious cancer risk associated with the boat fuel ingredient that was documented in the risk assessment was also missing from the consent order. For every 100 people who ate fish raised in water contaminated with that same product over a lifetime, seven would be expected to develop cancer -- a risk that's 70,000 times what the agency usually considers acceptable. When asked why it didn't include those sky-high risks in the consent order, the EPA acknowledged having made a mistake. This information "was inadvertently not included in the consent order," an agency spokesperson said in an email. [...] The risk assessment makes it clear that cancer is not the only problem. Some of the new fuels pose additional risks to infants, the document said, but the EPA didn't quantify the effects or do anything to limit those harms, and the agency wouldn't answer questions about them. Some of these newly approved toxic chemicals are expected to persist in nature and accumulate in living things, the risk assessment said. That combination is supposed to trigger additional restrictions under EPA policy, including prohibitions on releasing the chemicals into water. Yet the agency lists the risk from eating fish contaminated with several of the compounds, suggesting they are expected to get into water. When asked about this, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency's testing protocols for persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity are "unsuitable for complex mixtures" and contended that these substances are similar to existing petroleum-based fuels. The EPA did address the concerns in June when it proposed a rule that "would require companies to contact the agency before making any of 18 fuels and related compounds listed in the Chevron consent order," notes ProPublica. "The EPA would then have the option of requiring tests to ensure that the oil used to create the new fuels doesn't contain unsafe contaminants often found in plastic, including certain flame retardants, heavy metals, dioxins and PFAS. If approved, the rule will require Chevron to undergo such a review before producing the fuels, according to the EPA."

South Korean experts said on Thursday they would set up a committee to verify claims that a room temperature superconductor has been discovered, which has driven investor frenzy as well as peer skepticism since. From a report: The Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics, a group of experts, said in a statement on Thursday it had asked Quantum Energy Research Centre to submit samples in order to verify its researchers' findings of a room-temperature superconductor material, made public last month on a website showing research before formal publication. "There has been a lot of controversy over the authenticity of the reported results at home and abroad, and other claims are being added without being peer-reviewed," the group said.

"Based on data from the two archived papers and the video made public, the materials ... cannot be called room temperature superconductors at this point," it added. Superconductors, substances with no electrical resistance, are considered valuable as they can allow electrical currents to pass through without losing energy. But the handful of materials discovered so far only exhibit superconductivity at extremely high temperatures and pressures, making them impractical for widespread use.

India has confirmed that an object that washed up on a Western Australian beach recently was from one of its rockets. The BBC reports: The giant metal dome was found at Green Head beach, about 250km (155 miles) north of Perth, in mid-July -- prompting speculation about its origins. India's space agency spokesman told the BBC on Monday it was from one of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles (PSLV). Sudhir Kumar added that it would be up to Australia to decide what to do with the object. He did not comment further. His comments came after the Australian Space Agency (ASA) on Wednesday said that the object was "most likely" the third stage of a PSLV, which are used by India to launch satellites into orbit.

The ASA said it was working with India's space agency to "determine next steps, including considering obligations under the United Nations space treaties." According to the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, countries are required to return any "foreign" space objects found in their territory to the owners. Western Australia has already indicated it would be happy to keep it. The state's premier, Roger Cook, suggested to local media that the object could be stored in the state museum alongside debris from Nasa's Skylab station, which was discovered in 1979. Locals said they might be interested in turning it into a local tourist attraction, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Rains that pummelled Beijing in recent days were the heaviest since records began 140 years ago, the city's weather service has said, as China faced accusations that it had undermined key climate talks with other countries. From a report: Storm Doksuri, a former super typhoon, swept northwards over China after hitting southern Fujian province last week, following its battering of the Philippines. The average rainfall for the entire month of July was dumped on Beijing in just 40 hours, with heavy rains pummelling the capital and surrounding areas since Saturday.

"The maximum [amount] of rainfall recorded during this storm, which was 744.8 millimetres, occurred at the Wangjiayuan reservoir in Changping," the Beijing Meteorological Service said, adding it was the "heaviest rainfall in 140 years." The extreme weather comes as China's foreign ministry denied reports that it obstructed discussions on tackling climate change at G20 meetings in India last week, calling the accusations "completely inconsistent with the facts."

An asteroid-hunting algorithm called HelioLinc3D has spotted a potentially hazardous 600-foot-long space rock that's currently about 4 astronomical units from Earth. The asteroid is 2022 SF289 and "swings by Earth on the opposite side of its orbit, classifying it as a potentially hazardous asteroid (or PHA)," reports Gizmodo. From the report: "Potentially hazardous" merely means there is some chance the object could impact Earth, and thus it is worth keeping an eye on. What's significant about 2022 SF289 is not that it is hazardous, but that it was spotted by a new algorithm called HelioLinc3D. The recent asteroid spotting demonstrated that the algorithm can detect near-Earth asteroids with fewer observations than traditional methods. Because the Rubin Observatory is not yet up and running, HelioLinc3D was tested using the University of Hawaii's ATLAS survey.

"By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer," said Ari Heinze, a scientist and researcher at the Rubin Observatory and the University of Washington, and the principal developer of the new algorithm, in a university release. "This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years, when HelioLinc3D will be discovering an object like this every night," said Mario Juric, a scientist at the Rubin Observatory, director of the DiRAC Institute, astronomer at the University of Washington, and leader of the team behind HelioLinc3D, in the same release.

"From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advancement in algorithms as much as in new, large, telescopes," Juric added. The Rubin Observatory is now expected to commence its observations in early 2025, though we'll have to wait and see if that timeline sticks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: President Joe Biden has determined that Colorado Springs will be the permanent headquarters of U.S. Space Command, reversing a Trump administration decision to move the facility to Alabama, the Pentagon announced Monday. The decision will only intensify a bitter parochial battle on Capitol Hill, as members of the Colorado and Alabama delegations have spent months accusing each other of playing politics on the future of the four-star command.

The command was reestablished in 2019 and given temporary headquarters in Colorado while the Air Force evaluated a list of possible permanent sites. With an eye on Russia and China, its job is to oversee the military's operations of space assets and the defense of satellites. Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Biden notified the Department of Defense on Monday that he had made the decision, after speaking with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and weighing the input of senior military leaders. "Locating Headquarters U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs ultimately ensures peak readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period," Ryder said in a statement. "It will also enable the command to most effectively plan, execute and integrate military spacepower into multi-domain global operations in order to deter aggression and defend national interests." Austin, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and U.S. Space Command chief Gen. James Dickinson all support Biden's decision, Ryder added.

The most significant factor Biden weighed in making the decision was the impact such a move would have on the military's ability to confront the changing threat from space, according to a senior administration official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. Keeping the headquarters at Colorado Springs "maintains operational readiness and ensures no disruption to its mission or to its personnel," according to the official. The command is set to achieve "full operational capability" this month, the official said. A move to Alabama, by contrast, would have forced the command to transition to a new headquarters in the mid-2020s, and the new site would not have been open until the early to mid-2030s, the official said. "The president found that risk unacceptable, especially given the challenges we may face in the space domain during this critical time period," according to the official.

Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist and freelance writer on science and pharmaceutical topics, comments on the latest developments around last week's remarkable claim of a well-above-room-temperature superconducting material at ambient pressure, dubbed LK-99. Here's an excerpt from his post: As of this morning, there are (as yet not really verified) reports of replication from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. At least, a video has been posted showed what could be a sample of LK-99 levitating over a magnet due to the Meissner effect, and in different orientations relative to the magnet itself. That's important, because a (merely!) paramagnetic material can levitate in a sufficiently strong field (as can diamagnetic materials like water droplets and frogs), but these can come back to a particular orientation like a compass needle. Superconductors are "perfect diamagnets," excluding all magnetic fields, and that's a big difference. The "Meissner effect" that everyone has been hearing about so much is observed when a material first becomes superconductive at the right temperature and expels whatever magnetic fields were penetrating it at the time. All this said, we're having to take the video on the statements of whoever made/released it, and there are other possible explanations for the it that do not involve room-temperature superconductivity. I will be very happy if this is a real replication, but I'm not taking the day off yet to celebrate just based on this.

And even though I'm usually more of an experimental-results guy than a theory guy, two other new preprints interest me greatly. One is from a team (PDF) at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, and the other (PDF) is from Sinead Griffin at Lawrence Berkeley. Both start from the reported X-ray structural data of LK-99 and look at its predicted behavior via density functional theory (DFT) calculations. And they come to very similar conclusions: it could work. This is quite important, because this could mean that we don't need to postulate completely new physics to explain something like LK-99 - if you'd given the starting data to someone as a blind test, they would have come back after the DFT runs saying "You know, this looks like it could be a really good superconductor..." [...]

I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory. Not that there's anything wrong with new physics (!), but it sets a much, much higher bar if you have to invoke something in that range. I await more replication data, and with more than just social media videos backing them up. This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

Nasa engineers hope to re-establish contact with the Voyager 2 spacecraft after sending a faulty command that severed communications with the far-flung probe. From a report: The spacecraft is one of a pair that launched in 1977 to capture images of Jupiter and Saturn, but continued on a journey into interstellar space to become the farthest human-made objects from Earth. The space agency lost contact with Voyager 2, which is now more than 12bn miles away, when mission staff accidentally beamed the wrong command to the distant spacecraft more than a week ago.

The command caused the probe to tilt its antenna away from Earth, and although the direction it is pointing in changed by only 2%, the shift was enough for engineers operating receivers on Earth to lose touch with it. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, were launched within a couple of weeks of one another to explore the planets and moons of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 is still in contact with Earth and nearly 15bn miles away. In 2012, it became the first probe to enter interstellar space and is now the most distant spacecraft ever built. Voyager 2 hurtled into interstellar space in 2018 after discovering a new moon around Jupiter, 10 moons around Uranus and five around Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to study all four of the solar system's giant planets at close range.

Amazon is rolling out its virtual health clinic service nationwide, the company announced Tuesday. From a report: The e-retailer launched the service, called Amazon Clinic, last November, touting it as a virtual platform for users to connect with health-care providers to treat common conditions like sinus infections, acne, and migraines. Users select their condition, choose a provider, then answer a brief questionnaire. Depending on where they live, users can choose to connect with a clinician over video or text message. Amazon does not provide the telemedicine services itself, but instead provides Amazon Clinic as a platform to connect telemedicine partners with patients. Current partners include Curai Health, Hello Alpha, SteadyMD and Wheel.

With Tuesday's announcement, users in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., can access Amazon Clinic via video visits. Due to regulatory issues, message-based chat on Amazon Clinic is only available in 34 states. Nworah Ayogu, the chief medical officer and general manager of Amazon Clinic, told CNBC in an interview that the company vets the quality of each provider and their internal operations to determine "they have stood up as a provider group." The e-commerce giant also makes sure the provider groups are staffed across all 50 states "to be able to deliver care in a timely response," Ayogu added.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope has released its first test images. New Scientist reports: Euclid launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 1 July and took about a month to reach its final orbit about four times as far from Earth as the moon. While it sailed to its destination, researchers on Earth were hard at work turning on and calibrating its two cameras. The telescope's first images show that both cameras are working as expected, peering into the universe in both visible and infrared light. These images show an area of the sky about one-quarter the area of the full moon, but over the course of its six-year mission Euclid is expected to observe an area about 300,000 times larger, covering about a third of the entire sky.

"We see just a few galaxies here, produced with minimum system tuning," said Giuseppe Racca, Euclid's project manager at ESA, in a statement. "The fully calibrated Euclid will ultimately observe billions of galaxies to create the biggest ever 3D map of the sky." Once the instruments are fully calibrated, which is expected to take a few months, Euclid will begin mapping. The ultimate goal is to figure out the distribution of matter in the universe, measuring how it clumps and moves, which will give scientists unprecedented insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

"Astronomers have detected water vapor swirling close to a nearby star," reports CNN, "indicating that the planets forming around it might someday be able to support life." The young planetary system, known as PDS 70, is 370 light-years away... Circling it are two known gas giant planets, and researchers recently determined that one of them, PDS 70b, may share its orbit with a third "sibling" planet that is forming there...

Two different disks of gas and dust — the ingredients necessary to form both stars and planets — surround the star. The inner and outer disks are separated by a gap spanning 5 billion miles (8 billion kilometers). The gas giants are in the gap, where they orbit the star. The Webb telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument detected the signature of water vapor in the inner disk, less than 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the star. Astronomers believe that inner disk is where small, rocky planets similar to those in our solar system could form if PDS 70 is anything like our solar system...

"We've seen water in other disks, but not so close in and in a system where planets are currently assembling. We couldn't make this type of measurement before Webb," said lead study author Giulia Perotti, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, in a statement... No planets have been found forming in the inner disk, but all the ingredients necessary have been detected. The presence of water vapor suggests the planets could contain water in some form. Only time will tell whether the planets form — and if they are potentially habitable for life.

"This week, social media has been aflutter over a claim for a new superconductor that works not only well above room temperatures, but also at ambient pressure," writes Science magazine. If true, the discovery would be one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics and could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids. However, the two related papers, posted to the arXiv preprint server by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea's Quantum Energy Research Centre and colleagues on 22 July, are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical... "They come off as real amateurs," says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They don't know much about superconductivity and the way they've presented some of the data is fishy." On the other hand, he says, researchers at Argonne and elsewhere are already trying to replicate the experiment. "People here are taking it seriously and trying to grow this stuff." Nadya Mason, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign says, "I appreciate that the authors took appropriate data and were clear about their fabrication techniques." Still, she cautions, "The data seems a bit sloppy...."

What are the reasons for skepticism? There are several, Norman says. First, the undoped material, lead apatite, isn't a metal but rather a nonconducting mineral. And that's an unpromising starting point for making a superconductor. What's more, lead and copper atoms have similar electronic structures, so substituting copper atoms for some of the lead atoms shouldn't greatly affect the electrical properties of the material, Norman says. "You have a rock, and you should still end up with a rock." On top of that, lead atoms are very heavy, which should suppress the vibrations and make it harder for electrons to pair, Norman explains.

The papers don't provide a solid explanation of the physics at play. But the researchers speculate that within their material, the doping slightly distorts long, naturally occurring chains of lead atoms... [Mason] notes that Lee and Kim also suggest that a kind of undulation of charge might exist in the chains and that similar charge patterns have been seen in high-temperature superconductors. "Maybe this material really just hits the sweet spot of a strongly interacting unconventional superconductor," she says.

The big question will be whether anybody can reproduce the observations...
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

"NASA took a significant step Tuesday toward allowing humans on the moon to 'live off the land,'" reports the Washington Post.

NASA awarded several contracts "to build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy, and even lay a high-voltage power line over half a mile..." Instead of going to the moon and returning home, as was done during the Apollo era of the 1960s and early '70s, NASA intends to build a sustainable presence focusing on the lunar South Pole, where there is water in the form of ice. The contracts awarded Tuesday are some of the first steps the agency is taking toward developing the technologies that would allow humans to live for extended periods of time on the moon and in deep space. Materials on the moon must be used to extract the necessities such as water, fuel and metal for construction, said Prasun Desai, NASA's acting associate administrator for space technology. "We're trying to start that technology development to make that a reality in the future," he said.

The largest award, $34.7 million, went to billionaire Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin space venture, which has been working on a project since 2021 called Blue Alchemist to build solar cells and transmission wire out of the moon's regolith — rocks and dirt. In a blog post this year, Blue Origin said it developed a reactor that reaches temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees and uses an electrical current to separate iron, silicon and aluminum from oxygen in the regolith. The testing, using a lunar regolith simulant, has created silicon pure enough to make solar cells to be used on the lunar surface, the company said. [NASA says it could also be used to make wires.] The oxygen could be used for humans to breathe. "To make long-term presence on the moon viable, we need abundant electrical power," the company wrote in the post. "We can make power systems on the moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth."

The award is another indication that Blue Origin is trying to position itself as a key player in helping NASA build a permanent presence on and around the moon as part of the Artemis program... The company said it is developing a solar-powered storage tank to keep propellants at 20 degrees Kelvin, or about minus-423 degrees Fahrenheit, so spacecraft can refuel in space instead of returning to Earth between missions.
Other winners cited in the article:

• Zeno Power, which "intends to use nuclear energy to provide power on the moon," received a $15 million contract (partnering with Blue Origin).

• Astrobotic — which plans to launch a lander to the moon this year — got a $34.6 million contract "to build a power line that would transmit electricity from a lunar lander's solar arrays to a rover. It ultimately intends to build a larger power source using solar arrays on the moon's surface."

• Redwire won a $12.9 million contract "to help build roads and landing pads on the moon. It would use a microwave emitter to melt the regolith and transform treacherous rocky landscapes into smooth, solid surfaces, said Mike Gold, Redwire's chief growth officer."

The technologies — which include in-space 3D printing — "will expand industry capabilities for a sustained human presence on the Moon," NASA said in a statement.

The U.S. space agency will contribute a total of $150 million, with each company contributing at least 10-25% of the total cost (based on their size). "Partnering with the commercial space industry lets us at NASA harness the strength of American innovation and ingenuity," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The technologies that NASA is investing in today have the potential to be the foundation of future exploration."

"Our partnerships with industry could be a cornerstone of humanity's return to the Moon under Artemis," said acting associate administrator Desai. "By creating new opportunities for streamlined awards, we hope to push crucial technologies over the finish line so they can be used in future missions.

"These innovative partnerships will help advance capabilities that will enable sustainable exploration on the Moon."

"For years scientists have believed that when it comes to weight gain, all calories are created equal," the Washington Post reported last month.

"But an intriguing new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that's not true. The body appears to react differently to calories ingested from high-fiber whole foods vs. ultra-processed junk foods." The reason? Cheap processed foods are more quickly absorbed in your upper gastrointestinal tract, which means more calories for your body and fewer for your gut microbiome, which is located near the end of your digestive tract. But when we eat high-fiber foods, they aren't absorbed as easily, so they make the full journey down your digestive tract to your large intestine, where the trillions of bacteria that make up your gut microbiome are waiting. By eating a fiber-rich diet, you are not just feeding yourself, but also your intestinal microbes, which, the new research shows, effectively reduces your calorie intake.

The study reveals that inside all of us, our gut microbes are in a tug of war with our bodies for calories, said Karen D. Corbin, an investigator at the AdventHealth Translational Research Institute of Metabolism and Diabetes in Orlando and the lead author of the study.
The closely-tracked study participants ate foods "like crispy puffed rice cereal, white bread, American cheese, ground beef, cheese puffs, vanilla wafers, cold cuts and other processed meats, and sugary snacks and fruit juices." Then they switched to the "microbiome enhancer diet," with foods like "oats, beans, lentils, chickpeas, brown rice, quinoa and other whole grains" (plus fruits, nuts and vegetables).

Despite getting "the same amount of calories and similar amounts of protein, fat and carbohydrates," the Post reports that "On average, they lost 217 calories a day on the fiber-rich diet, about 116 more calories than they lost on the processed-food diet."