An artist's rendering of the BepiColombo mission, a joint ESA/JAXA project, which will take two spacecraft to the harsh environment of Mercury. (credit: ESA)

This week the European Space Agency posted a slightly ominous note regarding its BepiColombo spacecraft, which consists of two orbiters bound for Mercury.

The online news release cited a "glitch" with the spacecraft that is impairing its ability to generate thrust. The problem was first noted on April 26, when the spacecraft's primary propulsion system was scheduled to undertake an orbital maneuver. Not enough electrical power was delivered to the solar-electric propulsion system at the time.

According to the space agency, a team involving its own engineers and those of its industrial partners began working on the issue. By May 7 they had made some progress, restoring the spacecraft's thrust to about 90 percent of its original level. But this is not full thrust, and the root cause of the problem is still poorly understood.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt)

The North Carolina State Senate on Wednesday voted 30–15, along party lines, in favor of a Republican bill that would make it illegal for people in the state to wear a mask in public for health reasons. The bill is now moving to the House, where it could potentially see changes.

The proposed ban on health-based masking is part of a larger bill otherwise aimed at increasing penalties for people wearing masks to conceal their identity while committing a crime or impeding traffic. The bill was largely spurred by recent protests on university and college campuses across the country, including North Carolina-based schools, against the war in Gaza. In recent months, there have been demonstrations in Raleigh and Durham that have blocked roadways, as well as clashes on the nearby campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Some demonstrators were seen wearing masks in those events.

But the bill, House Bill 237, goes a step further by making it illegal to wear a mask in public for health and safety reasons, either to protect the wearer, those around them, or both. Specifically, the bill repeals a 2020 legal exemption enacted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed for public health-based masking for the first time in decades.

Enlarge (credit: Tommy Gilligan/USMA PAO/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

University of Rochester linguist Andrew Bray started out studying the evolution of the trademark sports jargon used in hockey for his master's thesis. For instance, a hockey arena is a "barn," while the puck is a "biscuit." When he would tell people about the project, however, they kept asking if he was trying to determine why American hockey players sound like "fake Canadians." Intrigued, Bray decided to shift his research focus to find out if hockey players did indeed have distinctively Canadian speech patterns and, if so, why this might be the case.

He discovered that US hockey players borrow certain aspects of the Canadian English accent, particularly when it comes to hockey jargon. But they don't follow the typical rules of pronunciation. In short, "American hockey players are not trying to shift their speech to sound more Canadian," Bray said during a press briefing. "They're trying to sound more like a hockey player. That's why it's most evident in hockey-specific terms."

It's a concept known as a "linguistic persona," a means of communicating how one identifies—in this case, as a hockey player— through speech. Bray gave a talk about his research today at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Ottawa, Canada, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association.

Enlarge / A child cools off under a water sprinkler. (credit: Getty | JASON SOUTH)

In 1989, a city in Utah upgraded its drinking water system, putting in a whole new system and repurposing the old one to supply cheap untreated water for irrigating lawns and putting out fires. That meant that the treated water suitable for drinking flowed from new spigots, while untreated water gushed from the old ones. Decades went by with no apparent confusion; residents seemed clear on the two different water sources. But, according to an investigation report published recently by state and county health officials, that local knowledge got diluted as new residents moved into the area. And last summer, the confusion over the conduits led to an outbreak of life-threatening illnesses among children.

In July and August of 2023, state and local health officials identified 13 children infected with Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157:H7. The children ranged in age from 1 to 15, with a median age of 4. Children are generally at high risk of severe infections with this pathogen, along with older people and those with compromised immune systems. Of the 13 infected children, seven were hospitalized and two developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a life-threatening complication that can lead to kidney failure.

Preliminary genetic analyses of STEC O157:H7 from two of the children suggested that the children's infections were linked to a common source. So, health officials quickly developed a questionnaire to narrow down the potential source. It soon became clear that the irrigation water—aka untreated, pressurized, municipal irrigation water (UPMIW)—was a commonality among the children. Twelve of 13 infected children reported exposure to it in some form: Two said they drank it; five played with UPMIW hoses; three used the water for inflatable water toys; two used it for a water table; and one ran through sprinklers. None reported eating fruits or vegetables from home (noncommercial) gardens irrigated with the UPMIW.

Enlarge / The International Space Station as seen from 69 km away. (credit: HEO on X)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 16, and today's image comes from an on-demand satellite imagery company named HEO. Only this image is not of the Earth, but rather the International Space Station.

According to the company, which is headquartered in Australia, one of its cameras imaged the space station at a distance of 69.06 km away, over the Indian Ocean. HEO flies its sensors as hosted payloads on satellites in Earth orbit. However, HEO's focus is not on Earth; it's on other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit to assess their status and identify anomalous behavior.

Enlarge / Wegovy is an injectable prescription weight-loss medicine that has helped people with obesity. (credit: Getty | Michael Siluk)

A large, long-term trial of the weight-loss medication Wegovy (semaglutide) found that people tended to lose weight over the first 65 weeks on the drug—about one year and three months—but then hit a plateau or "set point." But that early weight loss was generally maintained for up to four years while people continued taking the weekly injections.

The findings, published Monday in Nature Medicine, come from a fresh analysis of data from the SELECT trial, which was designed to look at the drug's effects on cardiovascular health. The trial—a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial—specifically enrolled people with existing cardiovascular disease who also were overweight or obese but did not have diabetes. In all, the trial included 17,604 people from 41 countries. Seventy-two percent of them were male, 84 percent were white, and the average age was about 62 years old.

Last year, researchers published the trial's primary results, which showed that semaglutide reduced participants' risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular-related deaths by 20 percent over the span of a little over three years.

Enlarge / Top: a look through the past 2,000 years of summertime temperatures, showing that 2023 is considerably warmer than anything earlier. Bottom: a bell curve of the typical temperatures, showing that the hot outliers are all recent years. (credit: Esper, Torbenson, and Büntgen)

Starting in June of last year, global temperatures went from very hot to extreme. Every single month since June, the globe has experienced the hottest temperatures for that month on record—that's 11 months in a row now, enough to ensure that 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will likely be similarly extreme.

There's been nothing like this in the temperature record, and it acts as an unmistakable indication of human-driven warming. But how unusual is that warming compared to what nature has thrown at us in the past? While it's not possible to provide a comprehensive answer to that question, three European researchers (Jan Esper, Max Torbenson, and Ulf Büntgen) have provided a partial answer: the Northern Hemisphere hasn't seen anything like this in over 2,000 years.

Tracking past temperatures

Current temperature records are based on a global network of data-gathering hardware. But, as you move back in time, gaps in that network go from rare to ever more common. Moving backward from 1900, the network shrinks to just a few dozen land-based thermometers, almost all of them in Europe.

Enlarge / A view looking down at Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Boeing is taking a few extra days to resolve a small helium leak on the Starliner spacecraft slated to ferry two NASA astronauts on a test flight to the International Space Station, officials said Tuesday.

This means the first crew launch of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, running years behind schedule and more than $1.4 billion over budget, won't happen before next Tuesday, May 21, at 4:43 pm EDT (20:43 UTC). Meeting this schedule assumes engineers can get comfortable with the helium leak. Officials from Boeing and NASA, which manages Boeing's multibillion-dollar Starliner commercial crew contract, previously targeted Friday, May 17, for the spacecraft's first launch with astronauts onboard.

Boeing's ground team traced the leak to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster on the spacecraft's service module.

Enlarge / A glass of fresh raw milk in the hand of a farmer. (credit: Getty | Pierre Crom)

To drink raw milk at any time is to flirt with dangerous germs. But, amid an unprecedented outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in US dairy cows, the risks have ratcheted up considerably. Health experts have stepped up warnings against drinking raw milk during the outbreak, the scope of which is still unknown.

Yet, raw milk enthusiasts are undaunted by the heightened risk. The California-based Raw Milk Institute called the warnings "clearly fearmongering." The institute's founder, Mark McAfee, told the Los Angeles Times this weekend that his customers are, in fact, specifically requesting raw milk from H5N1-infected cows. According to McAfee, his customers believe, without evidence, that directly drinking high levels of the avian influenza virus will give them immunity to the deadly pathogen.

Expert Michael Payne told the LA Times that the idea amounts to "playing Russian roulette with your health." Payne, a researcher and dairy outreach coordinator at the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at UC Davis, added, "Deliberately trying to infect yourself with a known pathogen flies in the face of all medical knowledge and common sense."

Enlarge / The business end of the Vulcan rocket performed flawlessly during its debut launch in January 2024. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

It has been nearly four years since the US Air Force made its selections for companies to launch military payloads during the mid-2020s. The military chose United Launch Alliance, and its Vulcan rocket, to launch 60 percent of these missions; and it chose SpaceX, with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, to launch 40 percent.

Although the large Vulcan rocket was still in development at the time, it was expected to take flight within the next year or so. Upon making the award, an Air Force official said the military believed Vulcan would soon be ready to take flight. United Launch Alliance was developing the Vulcan rocket in order to no longer be reliant on RD-180 engines that are built in Russia and used by its Atlas V rocket.

"I am very confident with the selection that we have made today," William Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said at the time. "We have a very low-risk path to get off the RD-180 engines."

Enlarge / Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820. Toxocology analysis of the composer's locks of hair showed high levels of lead. (credit: Beethoven-Haus Bonn)

Last year, researchers sequenced the genome of famed composer Ludwig van Beethoven for the first time, based on authenticated locks of hair. The same team has now analyzed two of the locks for toxic substances and found extremely high levels of lead, as well as arsenic and mercury, according to a recent letter published in the journal Clinical Chemistry.

“It definitely shows Beethoven was exposed to high concentrations of lead,” Paul Janetto, co-author and director of the Mayo Clinic's Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, told The New York Times. “These are the highest values in hair I’ve ever seen. We get samples from around the world, and these values are an order of magnitude higher.” That said, the authors concluded that the lead exposure was not sufficient to actually kill the composer, although Beethoven very likely did suffer adverse health effects because of it.

As previously reported, Beethoven was plagued throughout his life by myriad health problems. The composer began losing his hearing in his mid- to late 20s, experiencing tinnitus and the loss of high-tone frequencies in particular. He claimed the onset began with a fit in 1798 induced by a quarrel with a singer. By his mid-40s, he was functionally deaf and unable to perform public concerts, although he could still compose music.

Enlarge / An illustration depicts a NASA spacecraft approaching the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. Though there are no plans to mine Psyche, such asteroids are being eyed for their valuable resources (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

In April 2023, a satellite the size of a microwave launched to space. Its goal: to get ready to mine asteroids. While the mission, courtesy of a company called AstroForge, ran into problems, it’s part of a new wave of would-be asteroid miners hoping to cash in on cosmic resources.

Potential applications of space-mined material abound: Asteroids contain metals like platinum and cobalt, which are used in electronics and electric vehicle batteries, respectively. Although there are plenty of these materials on Earth, they can be more concentrated on asteroids than mountainsides, making them easier to scrape out. And scraping in space, advocates say, could cut down on the damaging impacts that mining has on this planet. Space-resource advocates also want to explore the potential of other substances. What if space ice could be used for spacecraft and rocket propellant? Space dirt for housing structures for astronauts and radiation shielding?

Previous companies have rocketed toward similar goals before but went bust about a half-decade ago. In the years since that first cohort left the stage, though, “the field has exploded in interest,” said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.

Enlarge / All galaxies have large amounts of gas that influence their star-formation rates. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and J. Lee (NOIRLab))

Galaxies pass gas—in the case of galaxy NGC 4383, so much so that its gas outflow is 20,000 light-years across and more massive than 50 million Suns.

Yet even an outflow of this immensity was difficult to detect until now. Observing what these outflows are made of and how they are structured demands high-resolution instruments that can only see gas from galaxies that are relatively close, so information on them has been limited. Which is unfortunate, since gaseous outflows ejected from galaxies can tell us more about their star formation cycles.

The MAUVE (MUSE and ALMA Unveiling the Virgo Environment) program is now changing things. MAUVE’s mission is to understand how the outflows of galaxies in the Virgo cluster affect star formation. NGC 4383 stood out to astronomer Adam Watts, of the University of Australia and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), and his team because its outflow is so enormous.

Enlarge / Pink lights appear in the sky above College Station, Texas. (credit: ZoeAnn Bailey)

After a night of stunning auroras across much of the United States and Europe on Friday, a severe geomagnetic storm is likely to continue through at least Sunday, forecasters said.

The Space Weather Prediction Center at the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Prediction Center observed that 'Extreme' G5 conditions were ongoing as of Saturday morning due to heightened Solar activity.

"The threat of additional strong flares and CMEs (coronal mass ejections) will remain until the large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster rotates out of view over the next several days," the agency posted in an update on the social media site X on Saturday morning.

Enlarge / Galaxy rotation has long perplexed scientists. (credit: NASA/James Webb Telescope)

One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up. Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton’s law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the Solar System.

To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity is needed. This is why the idea of an invisible substance called dark matter was first proposed. But nobody has ever seen the stuff. And there are no particles in the hugely successful Standard Model of particle physics that could be the dark matter—it must be something quite exotic.

This has led to the rival idea that the galactic discrepancies are caused instead by a breakdown of Newton’s laws. The most successful such idea is known as Milgromian dynamics or Mond, proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982. But our recent research shows this theory is in trouble.

Enlarge (credit: NASA Goddard/ASU)

Our Moon may appear to shine peacefully in the night sky, but billions of years ago, it was given a facial by volcanic turmoil.

One question that has gone unanswered for decades is why there are more titanium-rich volcanic rocks, such as ilmenite, on the near side as opposed to the far side. Now a team of researchers at Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory are proposing a possible explanation for that.

The lunar surface was once flooded by a bubbling magma ocean, and after the magma ocean had hardened, there was an enormous impact on the far side. Heat from this impact spread to the near side and made the crust unstable, causing sheets of heavier and denser minerals on the surface to gradually sink deep into the mantle. These melted again and were belched out by volcanoes. Lava from these eruptions (more of which happened on the near side) ended up in what are now titanium-rich flows of volcanic rock. In other words, the Moon’s old face vanished, only to resurface.

Enlarge / The Space Launch System rocket lifts off on the Artemis I mission. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA is looking for ways to get rock samples back from Mars for less than the $11 billion the agency would need under its own plan, so last month, officials put out a call to industry to propose ideas.

Boeing is the first company to release details about how it would attempt a Mars Sample Return mission. Its study involves a single flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the super heavy-lift launcher designed to send astronauts to the Moon on NASA's Artemis missions.

Jim Green, NASA's former chief scientist and longtime head of the agency's planetary science division, presented Boeing's concept Wednesday at the Humans to Mars summit, an annual event sponsored primarily by traditional space companies. Boeing is the lead contractor for the SLS core stage and upper stage and has pitched the SLS, primarily a crew launch vehicle, as a rocket for military satellites and deep space probes.

Enlarge / Opal Sandy (center), who was born completely deaf because of a rare genetic condition, can now hear unaided for the first time after receiving gene therapy at 11 months old. She is shown with her mother, father, and sister at their home in Eynsham, Oxfordshire, on May 7, 2024. (credit: Getty | Andrew Matthews)

There are few things more heartwarming than videos of children with deafness gaining the ability to hear, showing them happily turning their heads at the sound of their parents' voices and joyfully bobbing to newly discovered music. Thanks to recent advances in gene therapy, more kids are getting those sweet and triumphant moments—with no hearing aids or cochlear implants needed.

At the annual conference of the American Society for Gene & Cell Therapy held in Baltimore this week, researchers showed many of those videos to their audiences of experts. On Wednesday, Larry Lustig, an otolaryngologist at Columbia University, presented clinical trial data of two children with profound deafness—the most severe type of deafness—who are now able to hear at normal levels after receiving an experimental gene therapy. One of the children was 11 months old at the time of the treatment, marking her as the youngest child in the world to date to receive gene therapy for genetic deafness.

On Thursday, Yilai Shu, an otolaryngologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, provided a one-year progress report on six children who were treated in the first in-human trial of gene therapy for genetic deafness. Five of the six had their hearing restored.

Enlarge / UNSW Sydney engineers developed a new way to make cold brew coffee in under three minutes without sacrificing taste. (credit: University of New South Wales, Sydney)

Diehard fans of cold-brew coffee put in a lot of time and effort for their preferred caffeinated beverage. But engineers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, figured out a nifty hack. They rejiggered an existing espresso machine to accommodate an ultrasonic transducer to administer ultrasonic pulses, thereby reducing the brewing time from 12 to 24 hours to just under three minutes, according to a new paper published in the journal Ultrasonics Sonochemistry.

As previously reported, rather than pouring boiling or near-boiling water over coffee grounds and steeping for a few minutes, the cold-brew method involves mixing coffee grounds with room-temperature water and letting the mixture steep for anywhere from several hours to two days. Then it is strained through a sieve to filter out all the sludge-like solids, followed by filtering. This can be done at home in a Mason jar, or you can get fancy and use a French press or a more elaborate Toddy system. It's not necessarily served cold (although it can be)—just brewed cold.

The result is coffee that tastes less bitter than traditionally brewed coffee. “There’s nothing like it,” co-author Francisco Trujillo of UNSW Sydney told New Scientist. “The flavor is nice, the aroma is nice and the mouthfeel is more viscous and there’s less bitterness than a regular espresso shot. And it has a level of acidity that people seem to like. It’s now my favorite way to drink coffee.”