John Timmer writes via Ars Technica: Over the last few decades, we've gotten much better at observing supernovae as they're happening. Orbiting telescopes can now pick up the high-energy photons emitted and figure out their source, allowing other telescopes to make rapid observations. And some automated survey telescopes have imaged the same parts of the sky night after night, allowing image analysis software to recognize new sources of light. But sometimes, luck still plays a role. So it is with a Hubble image from 2010, where the image happened to also capture a supernova. But, because of gravitational lensing, the single event showed up at three different locations within Hubble's field of view. Thanks to the quirks of how this lensing works, all three of the locations captured different times after the star's explosion, allowing researchers to piece together the time course following the supernova, even though it had been observed over a decade earlier. [...]

By checking that Hubble data against different classes of supernovae that we've imaged in the modern Universe, it was likely to be produced by the explosion of either a red or blue supergiant star. And the detailed properties of the event were a much better fit to a red supergiant, one that was roughly 500 times the size of the Sun at the time of its explosion. The intensity of the light at different wavelengths provides an indication of the explosion's temperature. And the earliest image indicates that it was roughly 100,000 Kelvin, which suggests we were looking at it just six hours after it exploded. The latest lensed image shows that the debris had already cooled to 10,000 K over the eight days between the two different images.

Obviously, there are more recent and closer supernovae that we can study in far more detail if we want to understand the processes that drive a massive star's explosion. If we're able to find more of these lensed supernovae in the distant past, however, we'll be able to infer things about the population of stars that were present much earlier in the Universe's history. At the moment, however, this is only the second one we've found. The authors of the paper describing it make an effort to draw some inferences, but it's clear those will have a higher uncertainty. So, in many ways, this doesn't help us make major advances in understanding the Universe. But as an example of the strange consequences of the forces that govern the Universe's behavior, it's a pretty impressive one. The findings appear in the journal Nature.

A large section of the destroyed space shuttle Challenger has been found buried in sand at the bottom of the Atlantic, more than three decades after the tragedy that killed a schoolteacher and six others. CBC.ca reports: NASA's Kennedy Space Center announced the discovery Thursday. "Of course, the emotions come back, right?" said Michael Ciannilli, a NASA manager who confirmed the remnant's authenticity. When he saw the underwater video footage, "My heart skipped a beat, I must say, and it brought me right back to 1986 ... and what we all went through as a nation." It's one of the biggest pieces of Challenger found in the decades since the accident, according to Ciannilli, and the first remnant to be discovered since two fragments from the left wing washed ashore in 1996.

Divers for a History Channel TV documentary first spotted the piece in March while looking for wreckage of a Second World War plane. NASA verified through video a few months ago that the piece was part of the shuttle that broke apart shortly after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986. All seven on board were killed, including the first schoolteacher bound for space, Christa McAuliffe. The underwater video provided "pretty clear and convincing evidence," said Ciannilli. The piece is more than 4.5 metres by 4.5 metres, and likely bigger because part of it is covered with sand. Because there are square thermal tiles on the piece, it's believed to be from the shuttle's belly, Ciannilli said.

The fragment remains on the ocean floor just off the Florida coast near Cape Canaveral as NASA determines the next step. It remains the property of the U.S. government. The families of all seven Challenger crew members have been notified. "We want to make sure whatever we do, we do the right thing for the legacy of the crew," Ciannilli said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SciTechDaily: ISRIB, a tiny molecule identified by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers can repair the neural and cognitive effects of concussion in mice weeks after the damage, according to a new study. ISRIB blocks the integrated stress response (ISR), a quality control process for protein production that, when activated chronically, can be harmful to cells. The study, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discovered that ISRIB reverses the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on dendritic spines, an area of neurons vital to cognition. The drug-treated mice also showed sustained improvements in working memory.

The authors suggest that TBI triggers a persistent activation of the ISR, which in turn leads to the ongoing proliferation of transient spines that fail to support memory formation. Future experiments will explore whether ISRIB has similar effects on other cell types, brain areas, and cognitive tasks. ISR activation has been implicated in many neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Thus, the researchers believe ISRIB may have therapeutic potential in multiple patient populations. While there was no evidence of the drug's toxicity in mice, clinical trials are currently evaluating the safety and effectiveness of ISRIB in humans.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Queensland, Australia police have used DNA phenotyping for the first time ever in hopes of leading to a breakthrough for a 1982 murder. The department partnered with a U.S.-based company called Parabon NanoLabs to create a profile image of the murder suspect, a Caucasian man with long blonde hair. Police claim that this image was generated using blood samples found at the scene of the murder of a man from 40 years ago; according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this is the first time "investigative genetic genealogy" has been used in Queensland.

This image does not factor in any environmental characteristics, such as tattoos, facial hair, and scars, and cannot determine the age or body mass of the suspect. However, Queensland investigators have published the image online and are offering a $500,000 reward and indemnity from prosecution to anyone who might have information about the suspect. The image is a vague rendering of a man that does not provide any more information than the sketch that the department already has of the suspect. This further perpetuates the hyper-surveillance of any man who resembles the image. Parabon NanoLabs has already been criticized by criminal justice and privacy experts for disseminating images that implicate too broad a pool of suspects.

The Queensland police department said that the DNA sample from the case generated a genealogy tree of "15,000 'linked' individuals" and they have not been able to find a close match yet. Instead of facing the possibility that DNA phenotyping may not be an effective tool for narrowing down a suspect, the police department's strategy is to ask the public for their DNA samples. Criminologist Xanthe Mallett said in a press release that to help police find a match, people can "opt-in" to share their own DNA samples with investigators through DNA services such as Family Tree and GEDMatch. "Many members of the public that see this generated image will be unaware that it's a digital approximation, that age, weight, hairstyle, and face shape may be very different, and that accuracy of skin/hair/eye color is approximate," said Callie Schroeder, the Global Privacy Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

On Thursday morning, NASA sent a giant inflatable device to space and then brought it back down from orbit, splashing in the ocean near Hawaii. From a report: You might think of it as a bouncy castle from space, although the people in charge of the mission would prefer you did not. "I would say that would be inaccurate," Neil Cheatwood, principal investigator for the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator, or LOFTID for short, said of the comparison during an interview. LOFTID may sound like just an amusing trick, but the $93 million project demonstrates an intriguing technology that could help NASA in its goal of getting people safely to the surface of Mars someday. The agency has landed a series of robotic spacecraft on Mars, but the current approaches only work for payloads weighing up to about 1.5 tons -- about the bulk of a small car. That is inadequate for the larger landers, carrying 20 tons or more, that are needed for people and the supplies they will need to survive on the red planet.

A more accurate description of the device might be that it is a saucer, 20 feet wide when inflated. It is made of layers of fabric that can survive falling into the atmosphere at 18,000 miles per hour and temperatures close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, an inflatable heat shield shares a key characteristic with a bouncy castle: Uninflated, it can be folded and packed tightly. LOFTID fit in a cylinder a bit over four feet wide and one and a half feet high. For a traditional rigid heat shield, there is no way to cram something 20 feet in diameter into a rocket that is not that wide. A larger surface like LOFTID's generates much more air friction -- essentially it is a better brake as it slices through the upper atmosphere, and the greater drag allows heavier payloads to be slowed down. For future Mars missions, the inflatable heat shield would be combined with other systems like parachutes and retrorockets to guide the lander en route to a soft landing.

Rocket designers with China's main launch vehicle institute have scrapped plans for an expendable super heavy-lift launcher in favor of a design featuring a reusable first stage. SpaceNews reports: A new model of a Long March 9 rocket featuring grid fins and no side boosters recently went on display at the ongoing Zhuhai Airshow in southern China, prompting speculation that the long-standing plan of an expendable rocket had been dropped. Liu Bing, director of the general design department at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), later confirmed the new direction in an interview with China Central Television Nov. 7.

The new, current plan for the rocket will be a three-stage, 108-meter-high, 10-meter-diameter and 4,180 metric ton rocket capable of delivering 150 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO), 50 tons to lunar transfer orbit (LTO), or 35 tons to Mars transfer orbit. The rocket is scheduled to be ready for test flight around 2030. Liu told CCTV however that the design has not been finalized and will likely see changes as the team selects the optimal pathway, while committing to the goal of constantly breaking through technological challenges and increasing its launching power.

As subtropical storm Nicole moved across the Atlantic Ocean toward Florida on Monday afternoon, NASA confirmed that its Artemis I mission would remain at the launch pad along the state's east coast. Ars Technica reports: The risks to these large and costly vehicles are non-zero, however, and appear to be rising as Nicole starts to strengthen. The space agency's primary concern from tropical systems is winds. Much of the rocket's structure is pretty robust, such as its tank-like solid rocket boosters. But there are sensitive elements prone to damage from debris and wearing effects due to high winds inside a tropical system. According to the SLS rocket's chief engineer, John Blevins, the rocket can withstand wind gusts up to 74.1 knots. Knots are a term used in meteorology and maritime navigation and are equal to 1 nautical mile per hour. In this case, the SLS rocket can withstand gusts up to 85 mph, or 137 km/h. Wind "gusts" are different from sustained winds. These are short-term bursts of wind, as opposed to sustained winds over one minute or longer.

On Monday, at the time NASA announced its decision to remain at the launch pad as Nicole approached Florida, there was just a 4 percent chance of such winds at Kennedy Space Center. NASA, therefore, was willing to take a calculated risk by staying at the pad. One reason for remaining outside was, somewhat ironically, wear and tear. The process of rolling the Artemis I mission four miles back and forth, between the Vehicle Assembly Building and launch pad, puts a lot of stress on the vehicle. When it computes risk factors for the Artemis I launch vehicle, NASA has a certain budget for rollouts. The rocket has now been out to the pad on four separate occasions since this spring. While NASA has not confirmed this, according to a source, NASA has just one remaining roll in its budget. This does not mean the rocket will fall apart with additional roundtrips, it's just that additional movements would incrementally increase the risk of damage.

NASA may also simply not have had time to move inside the protective confines of the Vehicle Assembly Building. It takes a couple of days to prep the rocket to roll back. By Monday, it may have already been too late because to roll back before Nicole's arrival would probably have meant doing so no later than Tuesday night. Asked whether NASA really had no choice but to remain at the pad, a spokesperson for the agency, Rachel Kraft, was non-committal. "The team reviewed the forecast and determined the rocket will remain at the pad," she said on Monday. The problem for NASA is that Nicole is now expected to transition into a tropical storm and come ashore just south of Kennedy Space Center as a Category 1 hurricane. "The corresponding odds for hurricane-force winds -- at or above the safety limit established by NASA for its rocket -- are now up to 10 percent," reports Ars. "This is higher than the forecast that prompted a rollback during Ian."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Draconian licensing rules and a lack of public funding are holding back the emerging field of psychedelic medicine in the UK, leading scientists have warned after the release of groundbreaking results on the use of psilocybin to treat depression. The latest clinical trial found that a single dose of the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, combined with psychotherapy, helped alleviate depression in nearly a third of patients with severe depression. The finding follows other promising results suggesting that psychedelic drugs could be used in treating conditions including anxiety, PTSD, addiction and anorexia.

However, Prof David Nutt, the former government drug adviser and director of the neuropsychopharmacology research unit at Imperial College London, said that unless regulations and attitudes changed, potential treatments would remain "in limbo" at an experimental stage and available only to those who could pay for them in private clinics. "Patients are being denied access because of the regulations," he said. "The research is really hampered by the legal status."

Despite what some are hailing as a "psychedelic renaissance," Nutt said there had been minimal public funding for research in this area, besides a grant he received from the Medical Research Council to study psilocybin and funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research for a trial published last week. "I don't think there's any other funding. It's all philanthropists and private sector funding," he said. "It reflects the fact that we still see illegal drugs as drugs to be banned." He said basic scientific research was vital for the development of new potential treatments. "This isn't just some public groundswell of hippy resurrection," he said. "The science has driven the clinical work."

When it comes to getting into the groove on the dancefloor, it really is all about the bass, researchers have found. From a report: Scientists say when very low frequency (VLF) sound was introduced during a live electronic music event, gig-goers moved more even though they could not hear the frequencies. "This is real world -- real electronic music dance concert -- validation that the bass really does make people dance more, and this isn't just something that comes from our conscious awareness," said Dr Daniel Cameron, a neuroscientist and first author of the work from McMaster University in Canada. Cameron and colleagues note that previous studies suggested music that induces dance has more low frequency sound, and that low pitches help people to move in time to music.

However, it was not clear this impact of low frequencies would be seen in the real world, or when such sounds are not consciously detectable. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team report how they set up an electronic music concert by the Canadian duo Orphx at McMaster and asked attenders to wear motion-capture headbands before turning on and off specialised VLF speakers every 2.5 minutes during the 55-minute performance. Results from 43 attenders who agreed to wear a headband revealed they moved 11.8% more, on average, when the VLF speakers were turned on. Cameron noted this meant people danced more vigorously, or with more exaggerated movements. At the end of the concert, 51 attenders completed a questionnaire that asked whether they could feel the music in their body, and whether the bodily sensations affected their compulsion to move.

A total lunar eclipse is happening Tuesday, and it might be a good time to catch a peek, because the next one isn't for three years. From a report: The initial phase of the eclipse begins at 3:02 a.m. ET, according to NASA. The partial eclipse then begins at 4:09 a.m. ET, when to the naked eye, it looks like a bite is being taken out of the moon. The lunar disk enters totality at 5:17 a.m. ET and will last for about an hour and a half. People in North America, Central America, Colombia, and western Venezuela and Peru will be able to see the eclipse in totality. Those in Alaska and Hawaii will be able to see all stages of the eclipse. For the best view, it is best to be in a dark area with little light pollution.

A juvenile bar-tailed godwit -- known only by its satellite tag number 234684 -- has flown 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania without stopping, appearing to set a new world record for marathon bird flights. From a report: The five-month-old bird set off from Alaska on 13 October and satellite data appeared to show it did not stop during its marathon flight which took 11 days and one hour. Tagged in Alaska, the bar-tailed godwit, Limosa lapponica, flew at least 13,560km (8,435 miles) before touching down at Ansons Bay in north-east Tasmania.

The previous record was held by an adult male of the same species -- 4BBRW -- that flew 13,000km (8,100 miles) last year, beating his own previous record of 12,000km the year before. According to a Facebook post from the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre in New Zealand, 4BBRW's record had been "blown out of the water by this young upstart." Scientists track the bird using a 5G satellite tag attached to its lower back. According to data from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology's bird tracking project, the migratory bird took a route to the west of Hawaii, continuing over open ocean and flying over the Pacific island nation of Kiribati on 19 October.

Almost but not quite in time for Halloween, astronomers announced on Friday that they had discovered the closest known black hole. It is a biggie, a shell of yawning emptiness 10 times as massive as the sun, orbiting as far from its own star as the Earth is from ours. From a report: Not to worry, however: This black hole is 1,600 light-years away, in the constellation Ophiuchus; the next nearest known black hole is about 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. What sets this new black hole apart from the 20 or so others already identified in our Milky Way galaxy, besides its proximity, is that it isn't doing anything -- not drawing the nearby star to its doom, not gravitationally consuming everything nearby. Rather, the black hole is dormant, a silent killer waiting for the currents of space to feed it.

Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has been searching for such hidden demons for four years. He found this black hole by scrutinizing data from the European Space Agency's GAIA spacecraft, which has been tracking with exquisite precision the positions, motions and other properties of millions of stars in the Milky Way. Dr. El-Badry and his team detected a star, virtually identical to our sun, that was jittering strangely, as if under the gravitational influence of an invisible companion.

To investigate further, the researchers commandeered the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which could measure the speed and period of this wobble and thus determine the relative masses of the objects involved. The technique is identical to the process by which astronomers analyze the wobbles of stars to detect the presence of orbiting exoplanets -- except this time the quarry was far bigger. Their results and subsequent calculations were consistent with a black hole of 10 solar masses being circled by a star similar to our own. They named it Gaia BH1.

Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say. From a report: Tiny amounts -- equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls -- are being tested to see how it performs inside the body. The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate. But the ultimate goal is to manufacture vital, but ultra-rare, blood groups that are hard to get hold of. These are necessary for people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.

If the blood is not a precise match then the body starts to reject it and the treatment fails. This level of tissue-matching goes beyond the well-known A, B, AB and O blood groups. Prof Ashley Toye, from the University of Bristol, said some groups were "really, really rare" and there "might only be 10 people in the country" able to donate. At the moment, there are only three units of the "Bombay" blood group -- first identified in India -- in stock across the whole of the UK.

China launched the final module for its space station last Monday. But this also meant that a massive booster rocket re-entered the earth's atmosphere, notes the Washington Post — "for the fourth time in less than three years."

This one came down in the Pacific Ocean shortly after 6 a.m. Friday, and "there were no initial reports of damage or injuries. "But its return to Earth highlighted a tension among space faring nations over China's practice of letting its spent rockets tumble back to Earth after days in orbit." While the chances are low of any one person getting hit by the returning space debris, several of the tracks the rocket possibly could have taken passed over a large swath of the Earth's populated areas. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has repeatedly condemned China for the practice. In a statement Friday morning, he said: "It is critical that all spacefaring nations are responsible and transparent in their space activities and follow established best practices, especially, for the uncontrolled reentry of a large rocket body debris — debris that could very well result in major damage or loss of life."

China is alone among space-faring nations in allowing the unplanned return of its boosters, instead of ditching them at sea, as most others do, or returning them to a soft landing, like Space X. "The technology exists to prevent this," said Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant in the chief engineer's office at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit that drew possible tracks for the rocket's return. The rest of the world doesn't "deliberately launch things this big and intend them to fall wherever. We haven't done that for 50 years."

As of Wednesday, the [research nonprofit] Aerospace Corporation's calculations had the stage possibly landing over areas of land where 88 percent of the world's population lives. And so the possibility of casualties, Muelhaupt said, was between one in 230 to one in 1,000. That risk far exceeds the internationally recognized standard that says a reentering space object should not have greater than a one in 10,000 chance of causing injury.

The Chinese rocket stage is massive — weighing 22 metric tons and measuring as long as a pair of 53-foot semitrailers parked end to end, Muelhaupt said. He estimated that between 10 and 40 percent of the booster would survive reentry.

CNET reports on how research in Antarctica "could change astronomy forever": About 47 million light-years from where you're sitting, the center of a black-hole-laden galaxy named NGC 1068 is spitting out streams of enigmatic particles. These "neutrinos" are also known as the elusive "ghost particles" that haunt our universe but leave little trace of their existence.... Nestled into about 1 billion tons of ice, more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) beneath Antarctica, lies the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. A neutrino hunter, you might call it. When any neutrinos transfer their party to the frigid continent, IceCube stands ready.

In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 "high-energy neutrino emissions" coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. "Neutrino astronomy," scientists call it.

It'd be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot.

Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet's atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube's first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056. With this newfound neutrino source, we're entering a new era of the particle's story. In fact, according to the research team, it's likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can't tell....

Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn't even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe's backstage. They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we're unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place.... Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space.
The team says their data can provide information on two great unsolved mysteries in astronomy: why black holes emit sporadic blasts of light, and neutrinos' suspected role in the origin of cosmic rays.

The Washington Post reports: Psilocybin, the active hallucinogen found in psychedelic mushrooms — also known as "magic mushrooms" — can effectively alleviate a severe bout of depression when administered in a single dose and combined with talk therapy, a new clinical study found.

Adults with depression who were administered a single 25-miligram dose of psilocybin were more likely to experience significant improvements in their mental health — both immediately and for up to three months — than others who were randomly assigned smaller doses of the same drug, said the peer-reviewed study, which was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine....

The trial's findings could be an encouraging sign for the 16 million Americans estimated each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have depression, many of whom struggle to find treatments that work for them. Its authors hope the study — which was relatively small, with just 79 participants receiving the 25 mg dose — will pave the way for eventual regulatory approval of psilocybin by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a drug against depression....

Notwithstanding the headaches, nausea and dizziness reported by many as adverse side effects, most of the adults enjoyed the experience.
The Post got an interesting reponse from James Rucker, a consultant psychiatrist at King's College London who worked on the trial. He said there's something about the psychedelic experience that leads to a rapid resolution of depression symptoms, adding "We don't really know what that is at the moment, but it's very different to standard antidepressants...."

"What people forget about psychedelics is that they were being used as medicines prior to 1971 when they essentially got caught up in the drugs war," Rucker added. "We're just picking up the baton of history."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Shmoodling for submitting the story.

The Associated Press reports that Pfizer's updated COVID-19 booster "significantly revved up adults' virus-fighting antibodies, the company said Friday, releasing early findings from a rigorous study of the new shots." Booster doses tweaked to target the most common omicron strain rolled out in early September, and the Food and Drug Administration said the latest data should spur more Americans to get one — especially before another expected wave of cases as people travel for Thanksgiving. Pfizer said people 55 and older who got the omicron-targeting booster had four-fold higher antibody levels than those given an extra dose of the original vaccine....

A month after receiving the new booster, antibody levels in people 55 and older had jumped 13 times higher than before the extra dose. Younger adults saw a 9.5-fold jump, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said. It had been about 11 months since the study participants' last vaccination....

The new data "reassures us that this was a good decision to move to this bivalent vaccine," FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks told The Associated Press. "Right now is the time for people to consider going out and get the updated" booster.... The updated doses are combination shots, tailored to offer a boost of protection against both the original coronavirus strain and the dominant BA.5 strain.

The first crewed launch of Boeing's Starliner has been delayed again, this time being pushed back to April 2023 from an earlier planned launch date of February. The Register reports: The change came with little announcement from NASA, which tweeted out the new date as a scheduling update without any additional details. In an accompanying blog post, NASA said the change was being made to eliminate conflicts between "visiting spacecraft traffic at the space station," but the agency didn't elaborate much beyond that.

Starliner has been a drag on Boeing since the company unveiled the capsule in 2010. According to Boeing's Q3 2022 filing, Starliner has lost the company $883 million since 2019. That was the year Starliner made its first attempt at an uncrewed launch and docking with the International Space Station, which failed due to a pair of software errors that left it unable to dock and saw it returned to Earth early under less-than-ideal circumstances. Attempts at a second launch in 2021 also failed when 13 of the Calamity Capsule's propulsion system valves failed pre-flight checks. Starliner only made it to the ISS for the first time this past May, but even that launch wasn't without issues as two of the craft's 12 thrusters failed once in orbit.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Space tourism company Virgin Galactic released its third-quarter financial results on Thursday. As one might imagine of a spaceflight company that has not flown since June 2021, the financials are pretty disastrous. The company reported revenue of less than $1 million against losses of more than $146 million. After a long period of downtime, Virgin Galactic officials said the company is close to completing "modifications" of its VMS Eve carrier aircraft and VSS Unity spacecraft.

The company expects to complete a glide flight of Unity, which is released from Eve at altitude, in early 2023. After that point, the company will conduct a powered test flight, likely with its own employees on board, before a research flight for the Italian Air Force. And after that, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said, the company remains on track to begin flying commercial passengers -- people who bought their seats, some more than a decade ago -- in the second quarter of 2023. As with most schedules in spaceflight, that timeline seems pretty optimistic.

This is all well and good, but the return of VSS Unity will not bring Virgin Galactic close to profitability. At an optimal cadence, the company believes it can fly Eve and Unity once a month. This would still leave the company hundreds of millions of dollars in the red on an annual basis. For this reason, the company has always been betting its future on iterations of its spaceship capable of higher flight rates. The ultimate goal is a "Delta" class of spaceship with a turnaround time of one week. With a fleet of Delta ships, Colglazier has told investors, the company can meet a profitable flight rate of 400 missions a year. But the Delta ships are unlikely to be ready for test flights before at least 2025, and commercial service would not begin until a year after that.

Anne Trafton writes via MIT News: Neural networks, a type of computing system loosely modeled on the organization of the human brain, form the basis of many artificial intelligence systems for applications such speech recognition, computer vision, and medical image analysis. In the field of neuroscience, researchers often use neural networks to try to model the same kind of tasks that the brain performs, in hopes that the models could suggest new hypotheses regarding how the brain itself performs those tasks. However, a group of researchers at MIT is urging that more caution should be taken when interpreting these models.

In an analysis of more than 11,000 neural networks that were trained to simulate the function of grid cells -- key components of the brain's navigation system -- the researchers found that neural networks only produced grid-cell-like activity when they were given very specific constraints that are not found in biological systems. "What this suggests is that in order to obtain a result with grid cells, the researchers training the models needed to bake in those results with specific, biologically implausible implementation choices," says Rylan Schaeffer, a former senior research associate at MIT. Without those constraints, the MIT team found that very few neural networks generated grid-cell-like activity, suggesting that these models do not necessarily generate useful predictions of how the brain works. Mikail Khona, an MIT graduate student in physics, is also an author. "When you use deep learning models, they can be a powerful tool, but one has to be very circumspect in interpreting them and in determining whether they are truly making de novo predictions, or even shedding light on what it is that the brain is optimizing," says Ila Fiete, the senior author of the paper and professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.

"Deep learning models will give us insight about the brain, but only after you inject a lot of biological knowledge into the model," adds Mikail Khona, an MIT graduate student in physics who is also an author. "If you use the correct constraints, then the models can give you a brain-like solution."