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Yesterday — 23 February 2025Science – Ars Technica

In war against DEI in science, researchers see collateral damage

When he realized that Senate Republicans were characterizing his federally funded research project as one of many they considered ideological and of questionable scientific value, Darren Lipomi, chair of the chemical engineering department at the University of Rochester, was incensed. The work, he complained on social media, was aimed at helping “throat cancer patients recover from radiation therapy faster.” And yet, he noted on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and X, his project was among nearly 3,500 National Science Foundation grants recently described by the likes of Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican and chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, as “woke DEI” research. These projects, Cruz argued, were driven by “Neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda,” and “far-left ideologies.”

“Needless to say,” Lipomi wrote of his research, “this project is not espousing class warfare.”

The list of grants was compiled by a group of Senate Republicans last fall and released to the public earlier this month, and while the NSF does not appear to have taken any action in response to the complaints, the list’s existence is adding to an atmosphere of confusion and worry among researchers in the early days of President Donald J. Trump’s second administration. Lipomi, for his part, described the situation as absurd. Others described it as chilling.

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Flashy exotic birds can actually glow in the dark

23 February 2025 at 12:20

Found in the forests of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Eastern Australia, birds of paradise are famous for flashy feathers and unusually shaped ornaments, which set the standard for haute couture among birds. Many use these feathers for flamboyant mating displays in which they shape-shift into otherworldly forms.

As if this didn’t attract enough attention, we’ve now learned that they also glow in the dark.

Biofluorescent organisms are everywhere, from mushrooms to fish to reptiles and amphibians, but few birds have been identified as having glowing feathers. This is why biologist Rene Martin of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln wanted to investigate. She and her team studied a treasure trove of specimens at the American Museum of Natural History, which have been collected since the 1800s, and found that 37 of the 45 known species of birds of paradise have feathers that fluoresce.

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Before yesterdayScience – Ars Technica

The seemingly indestructible fists of the mantis shrimp can take a punch

22 February 2025 at 12:00

The mantis shrimp comes equipped with its own weapons. It has claws that look like permanently clenched fists that are known as dactyl clubs. But when it smashes the shells of its prey, these fists come out of it undamaged.

When throwing punches, mantis shrimp can strike at the speed of a .22 caliber bullet (about 1,316 kmph or 818 mph)—one of the fastest movements in the animal kingdom. That generates a force over a thousand times their body weight. However, unleashing that much energy can backfire because the shockwaves it produces could seriously damage an animal’s soft tissue. None of that seems to affect the mantis shrimp. Now we finally know why.

When a team of researchers from Northwestern University studied the dactyl clubs of one mantis shrimp species, they found that they have layered structures that selectively block sound waves, acting as protective gear against vibrations that could otherwise harm the shrimp. These types of structures, known as phononic mechanisms, filter out sound waves that could otherwise cause nerve and soft tissue trauma.

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German startup to attempt the first orbital launch from Western Europe

21 February 2025 at 23:38

Isar Aerospace, a German startup founded seven years ago, is positioned to become the first in a new generation of European launch companies to reach orbit with a privately funded rocket.

The company announced Friday that the first stage of its Spectrum rocket recently completed a 30-second test-firing on a launch pad in the northernmost reaches of mainland Europe. The nine-engine booster ignited on a launch pad at Andøya Spaceport in Norway on February 14.

The milestone follows a similar test-firing of the Spectrum rocket's second stage last year. With these two accomplishments, Isar Aerospace says its launch vehicle is qualified for flight.

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Researchers figure out how to get fresh lithium into batteries

21 February 2025 at 21:33

As the owner of a 3-year-old laptop, I feel the finite lifespan of lithium batteries acutely. It's still a great machine, but the cost of a battery replacement would take me a significant way down the path of upgrading to a newer, even greater machine. If only there were some way to just plug it in overnight and come back to a rejuvenated battery.

While that sounds like science fiction, a team of Chinese researchers has identified a chemical that can deliver fresh lithium to well-used batteries, extending their life. Unfortunately, getting it to work requires that the battery has been constructed with this refresh in mind. Plus it hasn't been tested with the sort of lithium chemistry that is commonly used in consumer electronics.

Finding the right chemistry

The degradation of battery performance is largely a matter of its key components gradually dropping out of use within the battery. Through repeated cyclings, bits of electrodes fragment and lose contact with the conductors that collect current, while lithium can end up in electrically isolated complexes. There's no obvious way to re-mobilize these lost materials, so the battery's capacity drops. Eventually, the only way to get more capacity is to recycle the internals into a completely new battery.

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“Bouncing” winds damaged Houston skyscrapers in 2024

21 February 2025 at 20:32

On May 16, 2024, a powerful derecho swept through Houston, killing seven people and causing significant damage to several of the city's towering skyscrapers. Those buildings were constructed to withstand much stronger hurricane-force winds up to 67 meters per second, as one would get with a Category 4 hurricane. The derecho's winds peaked at 40 meters per second, well below that threshold. And when Hurricane Beryl hit Houston that July with roughly comparable wind speeds of 36 meters per second, the damage wasn't nearly so severe. Why would that be the case?

Engineers at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami think they've found the answer, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Built Environment. "We show that a type of highly localized strong winds called ‘downbursts,’ which were generated during the May derecho, can significantly impact tall buildings and facades due to their unique characteristics in comparison to hurricanes,” said co-author Amal Elawady. This is particularly the case for skyscrapers that are close together, creating a "wind-channeling" interference effect that increases pressure on walls and windows.

One might assume that hurricanes and derechos are similar in that they both produce markedly intense winds, but the origin and characteristics of those winds are very different, per the authors. Hurricanes are vast tropical storms that form over warm ocean waters and affect large areas, usually lasting for several days, accompanied by heavy rains, storm surges, waves, and yes, high winds. By contrast, derechos and downbursts are much more localized convective systems, producing hurricane-force winds but over a much smaller area and shorter period of time.

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Rocket Report: SpaceX lands in the Bahamas; ULA tests modified booster

21 February 2025 at 12:00

Welcome to Edition 7.32 of the Rocket Report! It's true that the US space program has always been political. Domestic and global politics have driven nearly all of the US government's decisions on major space issues, most notably President John F. Kennedy's challenge to land astronauts on the Moon amid intense Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The Nixon administration's decision to end the Apollo program and focus on building a reusable Space Shuttle was a political move. More than 30 years later, the Clinton administration ordered a reevaluation NASA's plans for a massive space station in low-Earth orbit. In the post-Cold War zeitgeist of the 1990s, this resulted in Russia's inclusion in the International Space Station program. Flawed or not, these decisions were backstopped with some level of reasoning, debate, and national consensus-building. Today, the politics of space seem personal, small, and mean-spirited. Thankfully, there's a lot of launch action next week that might thrust us out of the abyss, even just for a moment.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.

Rocket Lab launches for the 60th time. It's safe to say Rocket Lab is an established player in the launch business. The company launched its 60th Electron rocket Tuesday from New Zealand, Space News reports. It was the second Electron launch of the year, coming just 10 days after Rocket Lab's previous mission. The payload was a new-generation small electro-optical reconnaissance satellite for BlackSky. Rocket Lab has not disclosed a projected number of Electron launches for the year beyond estimating it will be more than the 16 Electron missions in 2024. The company said on its launch webcast that the next Electron launch was planned from New Zealand in "a few short weeks."

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Study: Cuttlefish adapt camouflage displays when hunting prey

20 February 2025 at 20:41

Crafty cuttlefish employ several different camouflaging displays while hunting their prey, according to a new paper published in the journal Ecology, including mimicking benign ocean objects like a leaf or coral, or flashing dark stripes down their bodies. And individual cuttlefish seem to choose different preferred hunting displays for different environments.

It's well-known that cuttlefish and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin thanks to that skin's unique structure. As previously reported, squid skin is translucent and features an outer layer of pigment cells called chromatophores that control light absorption. Each chromatophore is attached to muscle fibers that line the skin's surface, and those fibers, in turn, are connected to a nerve fiber. It's a simple matter to stimulate those nerves with electrical pulses, causing the muscles to contract. And because the muscles are pulling in different directions, the cell expands, along with the pigmented areas, changing the color. When the cell shrinks, so do the pigmented areas.

Underneath the chromatophores, there is a separate layer of iridophores. Unlike the chromatophores, the iridophores aren't pigment-based but are an example of structural color, similar to the crystals in the wings of a butterfly, except a squid's iridophores are dynamic rather than static. They can be tuned to reflect different wavelengths of light. A 2012 paper suggested that this dynamically tunable structural color of the iridophores is linked to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. The two layers work together to generate the unique optical properties of squid skin.

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Trump admin. fires USDA staff working on bird flu, immediately backpedals

By: Beth Mole
19 February 2025 at 20:10

Over the weekend, the Trump administration fired several frontline responders to the ongoing H5N1 bird flu outbreak—then quickly backpedaled, rescinding those terminations and attempting to reinstate the critical staff.

The termination letters went out to employees at the US Department of Agriculture, one of the agencies leading the federal response to the outbreak that continues to plague US dairy farms and ravage poultry operations, affecting over 160 million birds and sending egg prices soaring. As the virus continues to spread, infectious disease experts fear it could evolve to spread among humans and cause more severe disease. So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented 68 cases in humans, one of which was fatal.

Prior to Trump taking office, health experts had criticized the country's response to H5N1 for lack of transparency at times, sluggishness, inadequate testing, and its inability to halt transmission among dairy farms, which was once considered containable. To date, 972 herds across 17 states have been infected since last March, including 36 herds in the last 30 days.

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Scientists unlock vital clue to strange quirk of static electricity

19 February 2025 at 19:47
Scientists can now explain the prevailing unpredictability of contact electrification, unveiling order from what has long been considered chaos.

Static electricity—specifically the triboelectric effect, aka contact electrification—is ubiquitous in our daily lives, found in such things as a balloon rubbed against one's hair or styrofoam packing peanuts sticking to a cat's fur (as well as human skin, glass tabletops, and just about anywhere you don't want packing peanuts to be). The most basic physics is well understood, but long-standing mysteries remain, most notably how different materials exchange positive and negative charges—sometimes ordering themselves into a predictable series, but sometimes appearing completely random.

Now scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have identified a critical factor explaining that inherent unpredictability: It's the contact history of given materials that controls how they exchange charges in contact electrification. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

Johan Carl Wilcke published the first so-called "triboelectric series" in 1757 to describe the tendency of different materials to self-order based on how they develop a positive or negative charge. A material toward the bottom of the list, like hair, will acquire a more negative charge when it comes into contact with a material near the top of the list, like a rubber balloon.

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Microsoft demonstrates working qubits based on exotic physics

19 February 2025 at 16:32

On Wednesday, Microsoft released an update on its efforts to build quantum computing hardware based on the physics of quasiparticles that have largely been the domain of theorists. The information coincides with the release of a paper in Nature that provides evidence that Microsoft's hardware can actually measure the behavior of a specific hypothesized quasiparticle.

Separately from that, the company announced that it has built hardware that uses these quasiparticles as the foundation for a new type of qubit, one that Microsoft is betting will allow it to overcome the advantages of companies that have been producing qubits for years.

The zero mode

Quasiparticles are collections of particles (and, in some cases, field lines) that can be described mathematically as if they were a single particle with properties that are distinct from their constituents. The best-known of these are probably the Cooper pairs that electrons form in superconducting materials.

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3D map of exoplanet atmosphere shows wacky climate

18 February 2025 at 19:04

Astronomers have detected over 5,800 confirmed exoplanets. One extreme class is ultra-hot Jupiters, of particular interest because they can provide a unique window into planetary atmospheric dynamics. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, astronomers have mapped the 3D structure of the layered atmosphere of one such ultra-hot Jupiter-size exoplanet, revealing powerful winds that create intricate weather patterns across that atmosphere. A companion paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics reported on the unexpected identification of titanium in the exoplanet's atmosphere as well.

As previously reported, thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" around stars could be consistent with anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock.

Like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), Kepler identifies planets using the transit method. This works for systems in which the planets orbit in a plane that takes them between their host star and Earth. As this occurs, the planet blocks a small fraction of the starlight that we see from Earth (or nearby orbits). If these dips in light occur with regularity, they're diagnostic of something orbiting the star.

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Can public trust in science survive a second battering?

Public trust in science has been in the spotlight in recent years: After the US presidential election in November, one Wall Street Journal headline declared that "Science Lost America’s Trust.” Another publication called 2024 “the year of distrust in science.”

Some of that may be due to legitimate concerns: Public health officials have been criticized for their lack of transparency during critical moments, including the COVID-19 pandemic. And experts have noted the influence of political factors. For instance, the first Trump administration repeatedly undermined scientists—a trend repeating in his second term so far.

But what does the research say about where public trust in science, doctors, and health care institutions actually stands? In recent years, researchers have been increasingly looking into quantifying these sentiments. And indeed, multiple surveys and studies have reported the COVID-19 pandemic correlated with a decline in trust in the years following the initial outbreak. This decrease, though, seems to be waning as new research shows a clearer picture of trust across time. One 2024 study suggests Trump’s attacks on science during his first term did not have the significant impact many experts feared—and may have even boosted confidence among certain segments of the population.

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Turning the Moon into a fuel depot will take a lot of power

17 February 2025 at 21:33

If humanity is ever to spread out into the Solar System, we're going to need to find a way to put fuel into rockets somewhere other than the cozy confines of a launchpad on Earth. One option for that is in low-Earth orbit, which has the advantage of being located very close to said launch pads. But it has the considerable disadvantage of requiring a lot of energy to escape Earth's gravity—it takes a lot of fuel to put substantially less fuel into orbit.

One alternative is to produce fuel on the Moon. We know there is hydrogen and oxygen present, and the Moon's gravity is far easier to overcome, meaning more of what we produce there can be used to send things deeper into the Solar System. But there is a tradeoff: Any fuel-production infrastructure will likely need to be built on Earth and sent to the Moon.

How much infrastructure is that going to involve? A study released today by PNAS evaluates the energy costs of producing oxygen on the Moon and finds that they're substantial: about 24 kWh per kilogram. This doesn't sound bad until you start considering how many kilograms we're going to eventually need.

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Despite court orders, climate and energy programs stalled by Trump freeze

President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal funding shows little sign of thawing for climate, energy and environmental justice programs.

Despite two federal court orders directing the administration to resume distributing federal grants and loans, at least $19 billion in Environmental Protection Agency funding to thousands of state and local governments and nonprofits remained on hold as of Feb. 14, said environmental and legal advocates who are tracking the issue.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has vowed to seek return of an additional $20 billion the agency invested last year in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, calling for a Department of Justice investigation into what he characterized as a “scheme… purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”

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Moon rocks reveal hidden lunar history

16 February 2025 at 12:03

In the summer of 2024, a robotic mission landed for the first time on the far side of the Moon. The Chinese Chang’e-6 lander planted a flag, dug up more than four pounds of rock and soil, and brought it back home—an accomplishment widely lauded as a technological tour de force.

That mission, and the 2020 Chang’e-5 robotic mission before it, are the first to return lunar rocks to Earth since the 1970s. Together they are building on what scientists learned from Apollo-era missions, helping to unravel mysteries about how the Moon was formed and why it looks the way it does today, and providing clues about our solar system’s history.

But big puzzles remain, such as why the far side of the Moon—the half that always faces away from Earth—is so radically different from the near side. And what is behind the surprising finding that lunar volcanoes may have been active much more recently than previously thought? “The more we look at the Moon, the more we’ve discovered—and the more we realize how little we know,” says Clive R. Neal, a geologist at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in lunar exploration.

China’s 2024 Chang’e-6 robotic lander mission brought more than four pounds of rocks from the far side of the Moon back to Earth. Credit: CNSA / CAS

With NASA planning to send astronauts back to the Moon’s surface in 2027 for the first time since 1972, geologists are excited about what rocks they might find there and the scientific secrets those samples could reveal—along with what resources could be mined for a future Moon base, or for renewable energy back home on Earth.

Origin story

The samples brought home from the Moon in the 1970s by the Apollo missions and the Soviet Union’s Luna missions cleared up quite a lot about the Moon’s history. Because the lunar samples shared strong similarities with Earth rocks, this added weight to the idea that the Moon was formed when a Mars-sized object called Theia collided with the proto-Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

Debris from the impact was thrown into orbit around Earth and eventually coalesced into the Moon. In its early days, the Moon was entirely molten. As the magma ocean cooled over hundreds of millions of years, the Moon formed a crust and a mantle below. Giant pools of lava filled impact craters and settled into the lunar lowlands, or maria (Latin for “seas”), while highlands and volcanic domes loomed above them. Eventually, the volcanism died out.

Without plate tectonics or weather, the only things left to alter the Moon’s cold, dead surface were meteorites. A lot of the Apollo-era samples were found to have formed from the heat and pressure of impacts around 3.9 billion years ago, suggesting that they were the result of a short period of intense pummeling by space rocks called the Late Heavy Bombardment.

But research since the 1970s has refined or changed this picture. Higher-resolution orbital images have revealed plenty of large impact craters that seem far older than 3.9 billion years, for example. And meteorites found on Earth, thought to have been ejected from various areas of the Moon during big impacts, have been found to span a huge range of ages.

All this work together suggests that the asteroid bombardment didn’t happen in one dramatic spike but rather over an extended period lasting from perhaps 4.2 billion to 3.4 billion years ago. In this scenario, the Apollo samples dated to 3.9 billion years likely all came from just one huge impact that spewed rock over a very wide area that happened to include the Apollo-era landing sites.

The Moon: Dead or alive

Greater mysteries surround volcanism on the Moon. “The canonical thing I learned in school was that the Moon had been geologically dead for billions of years,” says Samuel Lawrence, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The long-held theory was that a small body like the Moon should have lost its heat to space relatively quickly—and a frigid, extinguished Moon shouldn’t have widespread volcanic activity. Apollo-era samples suggested that most of this volcanism stopped 3 billion years ago or earlier, supporting the theory. But research over the past two decades has overturned that view.

This geologic map of the Moon released in 2022 by China is the most detailed global map yet published and includes information gleaned from the 2020 Chang’e-5 mission. Credit: J. JI ET AL / THE 1:2,500,000-SCALE GEOLOGIC MAP OF THE GLOBAL MOON 2022.

In 2014, Lawrence and colleagues posited that some patches of irregular terrain in the middle of the dark plains, or mare, spotted by the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter were the result of volcanism that kept going until less than 100 million years ago. “That is totally, totally surprising,” says cosmochemist Qing-Zhu Yin of the University of California, Davis.

The latest sample-return missions added more concrete evidence for recent volcanism. In 2020, the Chang’e-5 robotic mission landed in Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms) — a spot picked in part because it looked geologically young given how few craters had accumulated there. Sure enough, the volcanic rocks brought home by that mission were found to be 2 billion years old, the youngest ever retrieved from the Moon. “That was big news,” says planetary geoscientist Jim Head of Brown University, who worked on NASA’s Apollo missions.

On top of this, when researchers trawled through thousands of glass beads found in the Chang’e-5 soil samples, most of which are thought to have been created by impacts, they identified three that were volcanic—and only 120 million years old. This finding was published just last year and still needs to be verified, but if such recent dates hold up, they suggest that the Moon might still be capable of producing deep magma even today, Yin says.

All this indicates that the Moon might not have cooled as fast as everyone thought it did. It’s also possible that some of the younger volcanism could have been powered by radioactive elements underground, which can generate enough heat to form magma and are known to be prevalent in certain patches of the Moon. This could explain the 120-million-year-old volcanic glass beads, for example. But not all the early volcanism can be explained this way: The Chang’e-5 volcanic rocks, along with some 2.8-billion-year-old volcanic rock brought back from the far side by Chang’e-6, came from source rocks not enriched with these elements.

“It throws up more questions than it answers,” Neal says. “It’s job security for people like me — we now have new questions to address.”

Lunar exploration ahead

Untangling these mysteries is challenging with so much of the Moon unexplored: While about 850 pounds of Moon rock and soil have now been brought back to Earth, it has all been from just a handful of sites.

Chang’e-6 expanded this picture by bringing back the first samples from the Moon’s far side, taken from the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the satellite’s largest, deepest and oldest impact crater. Researchers are keen to use these samples to start determining why the far side is so dramatically different from the near side. The questions that remain unanswered are why the far side has a thicker crust and is nearly devoid of mare from ancient lava oceans when compared with the near side.

NASA’s Artemis III mission, planned for 2027 (though that could change), aims to break more new ground by landing astronauts near the Moon’s south pole—in a spot that is more representative of the Moon’s typical geology than the Apollo sites—and bring home a bonanza of 150 to 180 pounds of samples.

This site should provide fresh geological insights, along with more information about lunar water. In 2018, scientists analyzing orbital mapping data confirmed that there is water ice at the poles—but in what form no one yet knows. “Is it frost on the surface? Is it discrete patches underneath the surface? Is it absorbed onto mineral grains? Is it baked into the regolith like cement?” says NASA’s Juliane Gross, who is helping to develop the plans for lunar sample collection and curation for the Artemis science team. “We don’t know.”

What the Artemis astronauts find could inform ongoing projects spearheaded by China and the United States to establish permanent bases on the Moon, which could benefit from the south pole’s water. “That’s stuff you can breathe, that’s stuff you can drink, it’s rocket fuel,” Lawrence says.

Lunar quarry

In addition to water ice, other potentially mineable resources on the Moon have garnered attention, particularly helium-3. This stable isotope of helium is far more plentiful on the Moon than on Earth and could be an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion (if physicists can get that process to work). Commercial enterprises seeking to mine the Moon have popped up, including Seattle-based Interlune, which plans to bring helium-3 back to Earth in the 2030s, followed by other resources such as rare earth elements needed for technologies like batteries. But when lunar mining will be a reality—considering the logistics, the economics and the legal concerns—is an open question, Lawrence says.

While some people find the idea of mining the pristine Moon distasteful, there could be side benefits for mining on Earth, Neal says. With polar temperatures around -230° C (-380° F), lunar mining would have to be done without fluids. Developing the technologies needed for fluid-free mining could mitigate environmental concerns about wastewater and tailing fluids from mining on Earth. “Just think how you could revolutionize mining on this planet,” he says.

But first, researchers need to simply find out more about the Moon, its history, its geology and the possibility of extracting resources—and that requires up-close exploration, which is sure to bring more surprises. “Once you’re on the ground, you’re like, oh … what’s this?” Gross says. She’s hoping the astronauts can bring home a large haul. “The more they return, the more we can do.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

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AI used to design a multi-step enzyme that can digest some plastics

14 February 2025 at 16:47

Enzymes are amazing catalysts. These proteins are made of nothing more than a handful of Earth-abundant elements, and they promote a vast array of reactions, convert chemical energy to physical motion, and act with remarkable specificity. In many cases, we have struggled to find non-enzymatic catalysts that can drive some of the same chemical reactions.

Unfortunately, there isn't an enzyme for many reactions we would sorely like to catalyze—things like digesting plastics or incorporating carbon dioxide into more complex molecules. We've had a few successes using directed evolution to create useful variations of existing enzymes, but efforts to broaden the scope of what enzymes can do have been limited.

With the advent of AI-driven protein design, however, we can now potentially design things that are unlike anything found in nature. A new paper today describes a success in making a brand-new enzyme with the potential to digest plastics. But it also shows how even a simple enzyme may have an extremely complex mechanism—and one that's hard to tackle, even with the latest AI tools.

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From 900 miles away, the US government recorded audio of the Titan sub implosion

12 February 2025 at 21:44

Thanks to being an incompressible medium, water transmits vibrations both farther and faster than the air. (Here's a good video explainer on the subject.) This fact helps to explain how a US government-owned "moored passive acoustic recorder" was able to hear and record the 2023 implosion of the doomed Titan submersible—even though the recorder was 900 miles away from the dive site.

That implosion, during an attempted dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, killed five people, including Stockton Rush, the CEO of the company that built and operated the Titan.

The implosion audio was just released publicly by the US Coast Guard's Titan Marine Board of Investigation, which has been investigating the disaster in enormous detail. As part of that investigation, the Coast Guard obtained the audio from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), part of the US Department of Commerce.

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Seafloor detector picks up record neutrino while under construction

12 February 2025 at 17:25

On Wednesday, a team of researchers announced that they got extremely lucky. The team is building a detector on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea that can identify those rare occasions when a neutrino happens to interact with the seawater nearby. And while the detector was only 10 percent of the size it will be on completion, it managed to pick up the most energetic neutrino ever detected.

For context, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider, accelerates protons to an energy of 7 Tera-electronVolts (TeV). The neutrino that was detected had an energy of at least 60 Peta-electronVolts, possibly hitting 230 PeV. That also blew away the previous records, which were in the neighborhood of 10 PeV.

Attempts to trace back the neutrino to a source make it clear that it originated outside our galaxy, although there are a number of candidate sources in the more distant Universe.

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