Within hours of NASA announcing its decision to fly the Artemis II mission aboard an Orion spacecraft with an unmodified heat shield, critics assailed the space agency, saying it had made the wrong decision.
"Expediency won over safety and good materials science and engineering. Sad day for NASA," Ed Pope, an expert in advanced materials and heat shields, wrote on LinkedIn.
There is a lot riding on NASA's decision, as the Artemis II mission involves four astronauts and the space agency's first crewed mission into deep space in more than 50 years.
On Friday, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would begin a nationwide testing program for the presence of the H5N1 flu virus, also known as the bird flu. Testing will focus on pre-pasteurized milk at dairy processing facilities (pasteurization inactivates the virus), but the order that's launching the program will require anybody involved with milk production before then to provide samples to the USDA on request. That includes "any entity responsible for a dairy farm, bulk milk transporter, bulk milk transfer station, or dairy processing facility."
The ultimate goal is to identify individual herds where the virus is circulating and use the agency's existing powers to do contact tracing and restrict the movement of cattle, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the virus from US herds.
A bovine disease vector
At the time of publication, the CDC had identified 58 cases of humans infected by the H5N1 flu virus, over half of them in California. All but two have come about due to contact with agriculture, either cattle (35 cases) or poultry (21). The virus's genetic material has appeared in the milk supply and, although pasteurization should eliminate any intact infectious virus, raw milk is notable for not undergoing pasteurization, which has led to at least one recall when the virus made its way into raw milk. And we know the virus can spread to other species if they drink milk from infected cows.
Lizards are ancient creatures. They were around before the dinosaurs and persisted long after dinosaurs went extinct. Weβve now found they are 35 million years older than we thought they were.
Cryptovaranoides microlanius was a tiny lizard that skittered around what is now southern England during the late Triassic, around 205 million years ago. It likely snapped up insects in its razor teeth (its name means βhidden lizard, small butcherβ). But it wasnβt always considered a lizard. Previously, a group of researchers who studied the first fossil of the creature, or holotype, concluded that it was an archosaur, part of a group that includes the extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs along with extant crocodilians and birds.
Now, another research team from the University of Bristol has analyzed that fossil and determined that Cryptovaranoides is not an archosaur but a lepidosaur, part of a larger order of reptiles that includes squamates, the reptile group that encompasses modern snakes and lizards. It is now also the oldest known squamate.
Welcome to Edition 7.22 of the Rocket Report! The big news is the Trump administration's announcement that commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman would be put forward as the nominee to serve as the next NASA Administrator. Isaacman has flown to space twice, and demonstrated that he takes spaceflight seriously. More background on Isaacman, and possible changes, can be found here.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Orbex pauses launch site work in Sutherland, Scotland. Small-launch vehicle developer Orbex will halt work on its own launch site in northern Scotland and instead use a rival facility in the Shetland Islands, Space News reports. Orbex announced December 4 that it would "pause" construction of Sutherland Spaceport in Scotland and instead use the SaxaVord Spaceport on the island of Unst in the Shetlands for its Prime launch vehicle. Orbex had been linked to Spaceport Sutherland since the UK Space Agency announced in 2018 it selected the site for a vertical launch complex.
Two spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency launched on top of an Indian rocket Thursday, kicking off a mission to test novel formation flying technologies and observe a rarely seen slice of the Sun's ethereal corona.
ESA's Proba-3 mission is purely experimental. The satellites are loaded with sophisticated sensors and ranging instruments to allow the two spacecraft to orbit the Earth in lockstep with one another. Proba-3 will attempt to achieve millimeter-scale precision, several orders of magnitude better than the requirements for a spacecraft closing in for docking at the International Space Station.
"In a nutshell, itβs an experiment in space to demonstrate a new concept, a new technology that is technically challenging," said Damien Galano, Proba-3's project manager.
Most drones on the market are rotary-wing quadcopters, which can conveniently land and take off almost anywhere. The problem is they are less energy-efficient than fixed-wing aircraft, which can fly greater distances and stay airborne for longer but need a runway, a dedicated launcher, or at least a good old-fashioned throw to get to the skies.
The key challenge in attaching legs to drones was that they significantly increased mass and complexity. State-of-the-art robotic legs were designed for robots walking on the ground and were too bulky and heavy to even think about using on a flying machine. So, Shinβs team started their work by taking a closer look at what the leg mass budget looked like in various species of birds.
2023 was always going to be a hot year, given that warmer El NiΓ±o conditions were superimposed on the long-term trend of climate change driven by our greenhouse gas emissions. But it's not clear anybody was expecting the striking string of hot months that allowed the year to easily eclipse any previous year on record. As the warmth has continued at record levels even after the El NiΓ±o faded, it's an event that seems to demand an explanation.
On Thursday, a group of German scientistsβHelge Goessling, Thomas Rackow, and Thomas Jungβreleased a paper that attempts to provide one. They present data that suggests the Earth is absorbing more incoming sunlight than it has in the past, largely due to reduced cloud cover.
Balancing the numbers on radiation
Years with strong El NiΓ±o conditions tend to break records. But the 2023 El NiΓ±o was relatively mild. The effects of the phenomenon are also directly felt in the tropical Pacific, yet ocean temperatures set records in the Atlantic and contributed to a massive retreat in ice near Antarctica. So, there are clearly limits to what can be attributed to El NiΓ±o. Other influences that have been considered include the injection of water vapor into the stratosphere by the Hunga Tonga eruption, and a reduction in sulfur emissions due to new rules governing international shipping. 2023 also corresponds to a peak in the most recent solar cycle.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday his intent to nominate entrepreneur and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman as the next administrator of NASA.
For those unfamiliar with Isaacman, who at just 16 years old founded a payment processing company in his parents' basement that ultimately became a major player in online payments, it may seem an odd choice. However, those inside the space community welcomed the news, with figures across the political spectrum hailing Isaacman's nomination variously as "terrific," "ideal," and "inspiring."
This statement from Isaac Arthur, president of the National Space Society, is characteristic of the response: "Jared is a remarkable individual and a perfect pick for NASA Administrator. He brings a wealth of experience in entrepreneurial enterprise as well as unique knowledge in working with both NASA and SpaceX, a perfect combination as we enter a new era of increased cooperation between NASA and commercial spaceflight."
A 3D-printable EEG electrode e-tattoo. Credit: University of Texas at Austin.
Epidermal electronics attached to the skin via temporary tattoos (e-tattoos) have been around for more than a decade, but they have their limitations, most notably that they don't function well on curved and/or hairy surfaces. Scientists have now developed special conductive inks that can be printed right onto a person's scalp to measure brain waves, even if they have hair. According to a new paper published in the journal Cell Biomaterials, this could one day enable mobile EEG monitoring outside a clinical setting, among other potential applications.
EEGs are a well-established, non-invasive method for recording the electrical activity of the brain, a crucial diagnostic tool for monitoring such conditions as epilepsy, sleep disorders, and brain injuries. It's also an important tool in many aspects of neuroscience research, including the ongoing development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). But there are issues. Subjects must wear uncomfortable caps that aren't designed to handle the variation in people's' head shapes, so a clinician must painstakingly map out the electrode positions on a given patient's headβa time-consuming process. And the gel used to apply the electrodes dries out and loses conductivity within a couple of hours, limiting how long one can make recordings.
By contrast, e-tattoos connect to skin without adhesives, are practically unnoticeable, and are typically attached via temporary tattoo, allowing electrical measurements (and other measurements, such as temperature and strain) using ultra-thin polymers with embedded circuit elements. They can measure heartbeats on the chest (ECG), muscle contractions in the leg (EMG), stress levels, and alpha waves through the forehead (EEG), for example.
In 2013, researchers reported an eye-opening case of a healthy pregnant woman with a puzzling prenatal test result. A routine genetic screen using cell-free DNAβa highly accurate blood testβsuggested her fetus had an extra copy of chromosome 13 (Patau syndrome) and only one copy of chromosome 18. These results are devastating; both conditions can cause severe abnormalities. Those with Patau syndrome often only survive a few days or weeks after birth. But, when doctors looked at scans and did additional pregnancy testing, all they found was a healthy fetus developing normally. The woman carried on with her uncomplicated pregnancy and gave birth to a healthy baby.
The alarming genetic results may have been written off as a freak testing flub. But soon after giving birth, the otherwise healthy 37-year-old mother of two reported severe pelvic pain. Imaging revealed what looked like multiple bone tumors, and she was subsequently diagnosed with metastatic small cell carcinoma of vaginal origin. Tragically, she has since died.
Testing of one of her tumors found that the cancerous cells had an increased number of chromosome 13 relative to chromosome 18. Her prenatal test had picked up her deadly cancer.
A tethered mosquito approaches the web in the path of release of the cone, and triggers web release response. Credit: S.I. Han and T.A. Blackledge, 2024.
Ray spiders deploy an unusual strategy to capture prey in their webs. They essentially pull it back into a cone shape and release it when prey approaches, trapping said prey in the sticky silken threads. A few years ago, scientists noticed that they could get the spiders to release their webs just by snapping their fingers nearby, suggesting that the spiders relied at least in part on sound vibrations to know when to strike. Evidence for that hypothesis has now been confirmed in a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
Most spider orb webs are static: the spiders weave them and fix them in place and then wait for prey to fly into the webs. That causes the silk threads to vibrate, alerting the spider that dinner is served. There are some species that actively actuate their webs, however, per the authors.
For instance, the triangle weaver spring-loads its triangular web once an insect has made contact so that the threads wrap around the prey in fractions of a second. Bolas spiders seem to detect prey in their vicinity through auditory cues, throwing a line of silk with a sticky end at passing moths to catch them. Ogre-faced spiders also seem to be able to hear potential prey, striking backward with a small silk net held in their front legs. It's a more proactive hunting strategy than merely waiting for prey to fly into a web.
Between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago, people in Alaska kept reinventing dogs with mixed results.
The dogs that share our homes today are the descendants of a single group of wolves that lived in Siberia about 23,000 years ago. But for thousands of years after that split, the line between wolf and dog wasnβt quite clear-cut. A recent study shows that long after dogs had spread into Eurasia and the Americas, people living in what is now Alaska still spent time withβand fedβa bizarre mix of dogs, wolves, dog-wolf hybrids, and even some coyotes.
We just canβt stop feeding the wildlife
University of Arizona archaeologist FranΓ§ois LanoΓ« and his colleagues studied 111 sets of bones from dogs and wolves from archaeological sites across the Alaskan interior. The oldest bones came from wolves that roamed whatβs now Alaska long before people set foot there, and the most recent came from modern, wild Alaskan wolves. In between, the researchers worked with the remains of both wolves and dogs (and even a couple of coyotes) that span a swath of time from about 1,000 to around 14,000 years ago. And it turns out that even the wolves were tangled up in the lives of nearby humans.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday he has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman and space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX, to become the next NASA administrator.
"I am delighted to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)," Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. "Jared will drive NASAβs mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology, and exploration."
In a post on X, Isaacman said he was "honored" to receive Trump's nomination.
By some measures, AI systems are now competitive with traditional computing methods for generating weather forecasts. Because their training penalizes errors, however, the forecasts tend to get "blurry"βas you move further ahead in time, the models make fewer specific predictions since those are more likely to be wrong. As a result, you start to see things like storm tracks broadening and the storms themselves losing clearly defined edges.
But using AI is still extremely tempting because the alternative is a computational atmospheric circulation model, which is extremely compute-intensive. Still, it's highly successful, with the ensemble model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts considered the best in class.
In a paper being released today, Google's DeepMind claims its new AI system manages to outperform the European model on forecasts out to at least a week and often beyond. DeepMind's system, called GenCast, merges some computational approaches used by atmospheric scientists with a diffusion model, commonly used in generative AI. The result is a system that maintains high resolution while cutting the computational cost significantly.
In late September, seagrass ecologist Alyssa Novak pulled on her neoprene wetsuit, pressed her snorkel mask against her face, and jumped off an oyster farming boat into the shallow waters of Pleasant Bay, an estuary in the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. Through her mask she gazed toward the sandy seabed, about 3 feet below the surface at low tide, where she was about to plant an experimental underwater garden of eelgrass.
Naturally occurring meadows of eelgrassβthe most common type of seagrass found along the East Coast of the United Statesβare vanishing. Like seagrasses around the world, they have been plagued for decades by dredging, disease, and nutrient pollution from wastewater and agricultural runoff. The nutrient overloads have fueled algal blooms and clouded coastal waters with sediments, blocking out sunlight the marine plants need to make food through photosynthesis and suffocating them.
The United Nations Environment Program reports more than 20 of the worldβs 72 seagrass species are on the decline. As a result, an estimated 7 percent of these habitats are lost each year.
There's nothing quite like a deep dive into the shallow, vomitous puddles of children's splash pads. Even toeing the edge is enough to have one longing for the unsettling warmth of a kiddie pool. But the brave souls at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done it, wading into 25 years' worth of records on gastrointestinal outbreaks linked to the wellsprings of fecal pathogens. And they unsurprisingly found enough retch-inducing results to make any modern-day John Snows want to start removing some water handles.
Between 1997 and 2022, splash pads across the country were linked to at least 60 outbreaks, with the largest sickening over 2,000 water frolickers in one go. In all, the outbreaks led to at least 10,611 illnesses, 152 hospitalizations, and 99 emergency department visits. People, mostly children, were sickened with pathogens including Cryptosporidium, Camplyobacter jejuni, Giardia duodenalis, Salmonella, Shigella, and norovirus, according to the analysis, published Tuesday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The tallies of outbreaks and illnesses are likely undercounts, given reporting delays and missed connections.
Though previous outbreak-based studies have provided bursts of data, the new analysis is the first to provide a comprehensive catalog of all the documented outbreaks since splash pads erupted in the 1990s. Together, they provide a clear, stomach-churning explanation of how the outbreaks keep happening. Basically, small children go into the watery playgrounds while they're sick and spread their germs.
On April 15, 2019, the world watched in transfixed horror as a fire ravaged the famed Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, collapsing the spire and melting the lead roof. After years of painstaking restoration costing around $740 million, the cathedral reopens to the public this weekend. The December issue of National Geographic features an exclusive look inside the restored cathedral, accompanied by striking photographs by Paris-based photographer and visual artist Tomas van Houtryve.
For several hours, it seemed as if the flames would utterly destroy the 800-year-old cathedral. But after a long night of work by more than 400 Paris firefighters, the fire finally began to cool and attention began to shift to what could be salvaged and rebuilt. French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to restore Notre Dame to its former glory and set a five-year deadline. The COVID-19 pandemic caused some delays, but France nearly met that deadline regardless.
Those reconstruction efforts were helped by the fact that, a few years before the fire, scientist Andrew Tallon had used laser scanning to create precisely detailed maps of the interior and exterior of the cathedralβan invaluable aid as Paris rebuilds this landmark structure. French acousticians had also made detailed measurements of Notre Dame's "soundscape" that were instrumental in helping architects factor acoustics into their reconstruction plans. The resulting model even enabled Brian FG Katz, research director of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Sorbonne University, to create a virtual reality version of Notre Dame with all the acoustical parameters in place.
There's a common popular science demonstration involving "soap boats," in which liquid soap poured onto the surface of water creates a propulsive flow driven by gradients in surface tension. But it doesn't last very long since the soapy surfactants rapidly saturate the water surface, eliminating that surface tension. Using ethanol to create similar "cocktail boats" can significantly extend the effect because the alcohol evaporates rather than saturating the water.
That simple classroom demonstration could also be used to propel tiny robotic devices across liquid surfaces to carry out various environmental or industrial tasks, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv. The authors also exploited the so-called "Cheerios effect" as a means of self-assembly to create clusters of tiny ethanol-powered robots.
As previously reported, those who love their Cheerios for breakfast are well acquainted with how those last few tasty little "O"s tend to clump together in the bowl: either drifting to the center or to the outer edges. The "Cheerios effect is found throughout nature, such as in grains of pollen (or, alternatively, mosquito eggs or beetles) floating on top of a pond; small coins floating in a bowl of water; or fire ants clumping together to form life-saving rafts during floods. A 2005 paper in the American Journal of Physics outlined the underlying physics, identifying the culprit as a combination of buoyancy, surface tension, and the so-called "meniscus effect."
Bird flu has landed on a California farm that shuns virus-killing pasteurization, leading to a second recall of raw milk and a suspension of operations at the company, Raw Farm in Fresno County.
According to a November 27 alert by the California health department, officials in Santa Clara County found evidence of bird flu virus in retail samples of a batch of Raw Farm's milk, which has been recalled. It is the second time that retail testing has turned up positive results for the company and spurred a recall. The first contaminated batch was reported on November 24. The two recalled batches are those with lot codes 20241109 ("Best By" date of November 27, 2024) and 20241119 (Best By date of December 7, 2024).
In an email to Ars on Monday, Raw Farm CEO Mark McAfee said that none of the company's cows are visibly sick but that it appears that asymptomatic cows are shedding the avian influenza virus.
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