Scientists Set Doomsday Clock Closer To Midnight Than Ever Before (nbcnews.com) 136
"We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality," Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said in a statement, adding that "it's a decision our experts do not take lightly." The Doomsday Clock was created to convey the proximity of catastrophic threats to humanity, serving as a metaphor for public and world leaders, rather than a predictive tool. When it was unveiled in 1947, the clock was set at 7 minutes to midnight, with "midnight" signifying human-caused apocalypse. At the height of the Cold War, it was set at 2 minutes to midnight. In 2020, the Bulletin set the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, the first time it had moved within the two-minute mark. For the next two years, the hands were left unchanged.
Amazon Deepens Healthcare Push With $5 Monthly Subscription (reuters.com) 63
The average Prime member would save about $100 per year with RxPass, John Love, vice president of Amazon Pharmacy, said in an interview. Amazon Prime members in most U.S. states can sign up for the program from Tuesday. The flat $5 charge would be without insurance and on top of the Prime membership fee, which costs $139 per year in the United States.
Exotic Green Comet Not Seen Since Stone Age Returns To Skies Above Earth 50
Comets are balls of primordial dust and ice that swing around the sun in giant elliptical orbits. As they approach the sun, the bodies warm up, turning surface ice into gas and dislodging dust. Together, this creates the cloud or coma which surrounds the comet's hard nucleus and the dusty tail that stretches out behind. Images already taken of comet C/2022 E3 reveal a subtle green glow that is thought to arise from the presence of diatomic carbon -- pairs of carbon atoms that are bound together -- in the head of the comet. The molecule emits green light when excited by the ultraviolet rays in solar radiation.
Since mid-January, the comet has been easier to spot with a telescope or binoculars. It is visible in the northern hemisphere, clouds permitting, as the sky darkens in the evening, below and to the left of the handle of the Plough constellation. It is heading for a fly-by of the pole star, the brightest star in Ursa Minor, next week. The window for spotting the comet does not stay open long. While the best views may be had about February 1 and 2, by the middle of the month the comet will have dimmed again and slipped from view as it hurtles back out into the solar system on its return trip to the Oort cloud.
Earth's Inner Core May Have Started Spinning Other Way (yahoo.com) 84
Seeking to track the inner core's movements, new research published in the journal Nature Geoscience analysed seismic waves from repeating earthquakes over the last six decades. The study's authors, Xiaodong Song and Yi Yang of China's Peking University, said they found that the inner core's rotation "came to near halt around 2009 and then turned in an opposite direction." "We believe the inner core rotates, relative to the Earth's surface, back and forth, like a swing," they told AFP. "One cycle of the swing is about seven decades", meaning it changes direction roughly every 35 years, they added. They said it previously changed direction in the early 1970s, and predicted the next about-face would be in the mid-2040s. The researchers said this rotation roughly lines up with changes in what is called the "length of day" -- small variations in the exact time it takes Earth to rotate on its axis.
Mars Helicopter 'Ingenuity' Completes Its 40th Flight on Mars (space.com) 20
Ingenuity is a technology demonstrator designed to show that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet's thin atmosphere. The helicopter's prime mission covered just five flights, which Ingenuity knocked out shortly after touching down inside Jezero. The chopper then shifted into an extended mission, during which it has been pushing its flight capabilities and serving as a scout for Perseverance. The helicopter's aerial observations help the rover team identify potentially interesting scientific targets and pick the best routes through the rugged landscapes on Jezero's floor.
Astronomers Detect Radio Signal from Most Distant Galaxy Yet (space.com) 18
"The signal is bent by the presence of another massive body, another galaxy, between the target and the observer," says researcher Nirupam Roy, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science. In a statement announcing the discovery, Roy says "This effectively results in the magnification of the signal by a factor of 30, allowing the telescope to pick it up." According to the researchers, these results demonstrate the feasibility of observing faraway galaxies in similar situations with gravitational lensing. It also opens exciting new opportunities for probing the cosmic evolution of stars and galaxies with existing low-frequency radio telescopes.
Their annoncement adds that "The researchers observed the atomic mass of the gas content of this particular galaxy is almost twice the mass of the stars visible to us."
More information from Space.com: The signal was detected at a special and significant wavelength known as the "21-centimeter line" or the "hydrogen line," which is emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms. The detection of the hydrogen line from such a galaxy so far away âS — âS and therefore so early in the universe âS — âS by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India could mean astronomers are ready to begin investigating the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies.
The signal from the star-forming galaxy SDSSJ0826+5630 was emitted when our 13.8 billion-year-old galaxy was just 4.9 billion years old.... Galaxies emit electromagnetic radiation, or light, across a wide range of radio wavelengths, but thus far 21-cm-wavelength radio waves have only been seen from nearby and thus more recent galactic sources.
"It's the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years," lead author and McGill University Department of Physics Post-Doctoral cosmologist Arnab Chakraborty, said of the breakthrough in a statement...
The team's research is detailed in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Rodney Brooks Reviews 5-Year-Old Predictions, Makes New Ones on Crypto, Metaverse, Robots, AI (msn.com) 48
People have been "trained by Moore's Law" to expect technologies to continue improving at ever-faster rates, Brooks told me.... That tempts people, even experts, to underestimate how difficult it may be to reach a chosen goal, whether self-aware robots or living on Mars. "They don't understand how hard it might have been to get there," he told me, "so they assume that it will keep getting better and better...."
This year, 14 of his original predictions are deemed accurate, whether because they happened within the time frame he projected or failed to happen before the deadline he set. Among them are driverless package delivery services in a major U.S. city, which he predicted wouldn't happen before 2023; it hasn't happened yet. On space travel and space tourism, he predicted a suborbital launch of humans by a private company would happen by 2018; Virgin Atlantic beat the deadline with such a flight on Dec. 13, 2018. He conjectured that space flights with a few handfuls of paying customers wouldn't happen before 2020; regular flights at a rate of more than once a week not before 2022 (though perhaps by 2026); and the transport of two paying customers around the moon no earlier than 2020.
All those deadlines have passed, making the predictions accurate. Only three flights with paying customers happened in 2022, showing there's "a long way to go to get to sub-weekly flights," Brooks observes.
"My current belief is that things will go, overall, even slower than I thought five years ago," Brooks writes. "That is not to say that there has not been great progress in all three fields, but it has not been as overwhelmingly inevitable as the tech zeitgeist thought on January 1st, 2018." (For example, Brooks writes that self-driving taxis are "decades away from profitability".)
And this year he's also graced us with new predictions responding to current hype:
- "The metaverse ain't going anywhere, despite the tens of billions of dollars poured in. If anything like the metaverse succeeds it will from a new small player, a small team, that is not yoked down by an existing behemoth."
- " Crypto, as in all the currencies out there now, are going to fade away and lose their remaining value. Crypto may rise again but it needs a new set of algorithms and capability for scaling. The most likely path is that existing national currencies will morph into crypto currency as contactless payment become common in more and more countries. It may lead to one of the existing national currencies becoming much more accessible world wide.
- "No car company is going to produce a humanoid robot that will change manufacturing at all. Dexterity is a long way off, and innovations in manufacturing will take very different functional and process forms, perhaps hardly seeming at all like a robot from popular imagination."
- " Large language models may find a niche, but they are not the foundation for generally intelligent systems. Their novelty will wear off as people try to build real scalable systems with them and find it very difficult to deliver on the hype."
- "There will be human drivers on our roads for decades to come."
And Brooks had this to say about ChatGPT. "People are making the same mistake that they have made again and again and again, completely misjudging some new AI demo as the sign that everything in the world has changed. It hasn't."
93-Year-Old Retired Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Marries His 'Longtime Love' (cnn.com) 52
The former astronaut announced his nuptials on Twitter.... "We were joined in holy matrimony in a small private ceremony in Los Angeles & are as excited as eloping teenagers...." Aldin also thanked fans for their birthday wishes in another Friday tweet. "It means a lot and I hope to continue serving a greater cause for many more revolutions around the sun," he wrote.
Light Pollution Rapidly Reducing Number of Stars Visible To Naked Eye, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 39
"If these trends continue, eventually it will be very difficult to see anything at all in the sky, even the brightest constellations. Orion's belt will start to disappear at some point," said Dr Christopher Kyba, of the German Research Centre for Geoscience and first author of the research. The team write that the glow produced by artificial lighting grew exponentially over the 20th century with population growth, new technologies, and expansion of towns and cities. However the impact of a shift to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in recent years is unclear. Satellites that can measure skyglow have limited resolution and cannot detect some wavelengths of light emitted by LEDs.
UV-Emitting Nail Polish Dryers Damage DNA and Cause Mutations In Cells, Study Finds (phys.org) 77
Using three different cell lines -- adult human skin keratinocytes, human foreskin fibroblasts, and mouse embryonic fibroblasts -- the researchers found that the use of these UV emitting devices for just one 20-minute session led to between 20 and 30 percent cell death, while three consecutive 20-minute exposures caused between 65 and 70 percent of the exposed cells to die. Exposure to the UV light also caused mitochondrial and DNA damage in the remaining cells and resulted in mutations with patterns that can be observed in skin cancer in humans. [...] The researchers caution that while the results show the harmful effects of the repeated use of these devices on human cells, a long-term epidemiological study would be required before stating conclusively that using these machines leads to an increased risk of skin cancers. However, the results of the study were clear: The chronic use of these nail polish drying machines is damaging to human cells. "We saw multiple things: first, we saw that DNA gets damaged," said Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of bioengineering as well as cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, and corresponding author of the study published in Nature Communications. "We also saw that some of the DNA damage does not get repaired over time, and it does lead to mutations after every exposure with a UV-nail polish dryer. Lastly, we saw that exposure may cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which may also result in additional mutations. We looked at patients with skin cancers, and we see the exact same patterns of mutations in these patients that were seen in the irradiated cells."
"Our experimental results and the prior evidence strongly suggest that radiation emitted by UV-nail polish dryers may cause cancers of the hand and that UV-nail polish dryers, similar to tanning beds, may increase the risk of early-onset skin cancer," add the researchers. "Nevertheless, future large-scale epidemiological studies are warranted to accurately quantify the risk for skin cancer of the hand in people regularly using UV-nail polish dryers. It is likely that such studies will take at least a decade to complete and to subsequently inform the general public."
Greenland Temperatures Hottest In 1,000 Years, Scientists Report (cnn.com) 114
The report's authors said human-caused climate change played a significant role in the dramatic rise in temperatures in the critical Arctic region, where melting ice has a considerable global impact. "Greenland is the largest contributor currently to sea level rise," Maria Horhold, lead author of the study and a glaciologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute, told CNN. "And if we keep on going with the carbon emissions as we do right now, then by 2100, Greenland will have contributed up to 50 centimeters to sea level rise and this will affect millions of people who live in coastal areas." Weather stations along the edge of the Greenland ice sheet have detected that its coastal regions are warming, but scientists' understanding of the effects of rising temperatures there had been limited due to the lack of long-term observations.
70% of Drugs Advertised On TV Are of 'Low Therapeutic Value,' Study Finds (arstechnica.com) 107
For the new study, researchers led by Aaron Kesselheim, who leads Harvard's Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), looked at monthly lists of the top-advertised drugs on TV in the US between 2015 and 2021. They also looked up therapeutic value ratings for those drugs from independent health assessment agencies in Canada, France, and Germany. The value ratings were based on drugs' therapeutic benefit, safety profile, and strength of evidence, as compared with existing drugs. Any drug rated "moderate" or above was classified as a "high value" drug for the study. For drugs with multiple ratings, the study authors used the most favorable rating, which they note could overestimate the proportion of higher-benefit drugs.
Of the top advertised drugs, 73 had at least one value rating. Collectively, pharmaceutical companies spent $22.3 billion on advertising for those 73 drugs between 2015 and 2021. Even with the generous ratings, 53 of the 73 drugs (roughly 73 percent) were categorized as low-benefit. Collectively, these low-benefit drugs accounted for $15.9 billion of the ad spending. The top three low-benefit drugs by dollar amount were Dulaglutide (type 2 diabetes), Varenicline (smoking cessation), and Tofacitinib (rheumatoid arthritis). The outlook for change is bleak, the authors note. "Policy makers and regulators could consider limiting direct-to-consumer advertising to drugs with high therapeutic or public health value or requiring standardized disclosure of comparative effectiveness and safety data," Kesselheim and his colleagues concluded, "but policy changes would likely require industry cooperation or face constitutional challenge." The report notes that the U.S. is "one of only two countries that allows direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertisements, such as TV commercials." The other is New Zealand.
Scientists Are Getting Eerily Good at Using WiFi to 'See' People Through Walls in Detail (vice.com) 41
Eating One US Fish Is Equivalent To Drinking a Month's Worth of Contaminated Water, Study Finds 117
To find out PFAS contamination in locally caught fish, a team of researchers analyzed more than 500 samples from rivers and lakes across the United States between 2013 and 2015. The median level of PFAS in the fish was 9,500 nanograms per kilogram, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Research. Nearly three quarters of the detected "forever chemicals" were PFOS, one of the most common and hazardous of the thousands of forms of PFAS. Eating just one freshwater fish equalled drinking water with PFOS at 48 parts per trillion for a month, the researchers calculated. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency lowered the level of PFOS in drinking water it considers safe to 0.02 parts per trillion. The total PFAS level in the freshwater fish was 278 times higher than what has been found in commercially sold fish, the study said. "This study is important because it provides the first evidence for widespread transfer of PFAS directly from fish to humans," said David Andrews, a senior scientist at the non-profit Environmental Working Group, which led research. He's calling for much more stringent regulation to bring an end to all non-essential uses of PFAS.
The new findings appear in the journal Environmental Research.
Lab-Grown Alternatives Aim To Cut Palm Oil Dependence (bbc.com) 59
Palm oil remains the world's most-produced vegetable oil, accounting for 40% of the total, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). [...] The widely-documented problem with this usage is that this demand for palm oil has led to significant deforestation in areas where oil palm trees can grow -- low-lying, hot, wet areas near the equator. The use of this land for palm oil cultivation, 85% of which is in Indonesia and Malaysia, has increased almost nine-fold from 3.3 million hectares (eight million acres) in 1970 to 28.7 million hectares in 2020. In financial terms, one report valued the worldwide palm oil industry at $62.3 billion in 2021. And such is the continuing growth in demand, this figure is expected to increase to $75.7 billion by 2028.
To try to reduce the world's reliance on palm oil, Ms Ticku, who was formerly an investment banker, and her co-founders set up C16 Biosciences in New York City in 2018. Backed by multi-million dollar funding from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the company has spent the past four years developing and finessing their product, which is called Palmless. They grow a strain of yeast that naturally produces an oil with very similar properties to palm, which they harvest. The yeast is fed on sugars from sugar cane plants grown on land already used for arable farming. "Our process takes less than seven days from start to finish," says a spokeswoman for C16 Biosciences. "For a traditional oil palm tree, the oil wouldn't be ready to harvest until years after the seed is planted, and most trees don't reach peak production until seven years later." She adds that the company is now "actively collaborating on partnerships in the beauty and home categories -- for example, moisturizers, nourishing oils, soaps and cancels". "[And] we plan to enter into food in 2024." Chris Chuck, professor of bioprocess engineering at the University of Bath, leads another team that has created its own yeast-sourced alternative. "After hundreds of generations of yeast, and years of trial and error, they arrived at a unique strain called metschnikowia pulcherrima, or MP for short," reports the BBC. "MP is said to be hardy and not fussy what it eats. It can be fed on grass and food waste. And at the point of harvesting, its cells are full of oil. Even the leftover yeast cell biomass need not go to waste. It can be used for other products, for example creating a substitute for soya protein."
Prof Chuck says the aim is for the oil to be as sustainable as possible. "In the best case scenarios we've modeled," he says, "it could be even just a couple of percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from palm oil grown in Indonesia or Malaysia."
High-Powered Lasers Can Be Used To Steer Lightning Strikes 57
["The experiment was performed on Santis Mountain, in northeast Switzerland," adds The Washington Post. "A 407-foot (124-meter) communications tower there, equipped with a lightning rod, is struck roughly a hundred times a year."] The design ionizes nitrogen and oxygen molecules, releasing electrons and creating a plasma that conducts electricity. As the laser fires at a very quick 1,000 pulses per second, it's considerably more likely to intercept lightning as it forms. In the test, conducted between June and September 2021, lightning followed the beam for nearly 197 feet before hitting the rod. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Photonics. A video of the work has also been published on YouTube.
Human Waste Safe for Growing Vegetables, Researchers Say (yahoo.com) 83
In terms of safety, the researchers screened human waste for 310 chemicals, from pharmaceuticals to insect repellents, and found that only 6.5% of these were above the limit for detection and at low concentrations. "In general, the risk for human health of pharmaceutical compounds entering the food system by means of fecal compost use, seems low," the authors concluded. While they detected two pharmaceutical products in edible parts of cabbages, the painkiller ibuprofen and the anticonvulsant drug carbamazepine, the concentrations were markedly low. This means that more than half a million cabbage heads would need to be eaten to accumulate a dose equivalent to one carbamazepine pill, they said.
FDA Vaccine Advisers 'Disappointed' and 'Angry' That Early Data About New Covid-19 Booster Shot Wasn't Presented For Review Last Year (cnn.com) 168
The pharmaceutical company Moderna didn't present a set of infection data on the company's new Covid-19 booster during meetings last year when [FDA] advisers discussed whether the shot should be authorized and made available to the public
That data suggested the possibility that the updated booster might not be any more effective at preventing Covid-19 infections than the original shots. The data was early and had many limitations, but several advisers told CNN that they were concerned about a lack of transparency.
Specifically, Moderna hid data on actual infection rates among patients who were administered the original booster and those who got the bivalent vaccine. The data showed that the original booster resulted in slightly fewer infections than the bivalent version - though CNN points out that "the primary purpose of the study was not to study infection rates but to do immunogenicity analyses, taking blood from participants and examining their antibody responses to the vaccine."
CNN reports that Moderna "shared the infection data with the FDA and posted the study manuscript before the agency's panel meeting in June," but with an FDA spokesperson complaining that they received the preprint less than a day prior to the advisory committee meeting, and "therefore not provided in an adequate timeframe for it to be included in the agency's meeting materials..."
1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected. Among those who got the updated bivalent vaccine -- the one that scientists hoped would work better -- a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected.
Both versions of the shot were found to be safe. This infection data was far from complete. The number of study subjects who became infected was very small, and both the patients and the researchers were aware of who was getting the original shot and who was getting the new booster.... [S]ix FDA and CDC advisers interviewed by CNN said that this infection data wouldn't have changed how they voted, because the data had such limitations, but it still should have been presented to them.
Research released by the New England Journal of Medicine found that "boosting with new bivalent mRNA vaccines targeting both the BA.4-BA.5 variant and the D614G strain did not elicit a discernibly superior virus-neutralizing peak antibody response as compared with boosting with the original monovalent vaccines. Limitations of our study include the small sample size and follow-up period of our groups. We also note that the between-group comparisons were not controlled for factors such as age, vaccine type, and health status, which may have had an effect on antibody responses. These findings may be indicative of immunologic imprinting, although follow-up studies are needed to determine whether antibody responses will deviate over time, including after the administration of a second bivalent booster."
Watch SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Launch - the First of Its Five Missions This Year (youtube.com) 31
"Nearly five years have passed since the massive Falcon Heavy rocket made its successful debut launch in February 2018," writes Ars Technica.
"Since then, however, SpaceX's heavy lift rocket has flown just three additional times." Why? It's partly because there is simply not all that much demand for a heavy lift rocket. Another factor is that SpaceX has increased the performance of its Falcon 9 rocket so much that it can complete a lot of the missions originally manifested on the Falcon Heavy. However the main reason for the low cadence has been due to a lack of readiness of payloads for the new rocket, particularly from the US Department of Defense. But now this trickle of Falcon Heavy launches may turn into a flood. [Sunday's launch is the first of potentially five launches this year]
SpaceX completed a hot fire test of the rocket on Tuesday, and declared that the vehicle was ready for liftoff. The rocket will use a brand new core stage, and side-mounted boosters that have flown into space one time, as side-mounted boosters on the USSF-44 Falcon Heavy mission that launched on November 1 2022.
What's it carrying? Space.com writes: The main payload is a military communications satellite called Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM 2, which the Falcon Heavy will send to geostationary orbit, about 22,200 miles (35,700 kilometers) above Earth. Also flying Saturday is a rideshare spacecraft called Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE)-3A, a payload adapter that can hold up to six small satellites, according to EverydayAstronaut.com. LDPE-3A will carry five Space Force payloads on USSF-67. Among them are "two operational prototypes for enhanced situational awareness and an operational prototype crypto/interface encryption payload providing secure space-to-ground communications capability," Space Force officials said in an emailed statement on Friday....
If all goes according to plan, the two side boosters will come back to Earth shortly after liftoff on Sunday, making vertical touchdowns at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The central booster will not return, instead ditching into the Atlantic Ocean....
USSF-67 is part of a busy week for SpaceX. The company also plans to launch 51 of its Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit atop a Falcon 9 on Thursday, January 19.