Just over a year after Japan's Hayabusa2 mission returned the first subsurface sample of an asteroid to Earth, scientists have determined that the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu is a pristine remnant from the formation of our solar system. From a report: This was the first material to be returned to Earth from a carbon-rich asteroid. These asteroids can reveal how our cosmic corner of the universe was formed. The organic and hydrated minerals locked within these asteroids could also shed light on the origin of the building blocks of life. Ryugu is a dark, diamond-shaped asteroid that measures about 3,000 feet (1 kilometer) wide. Hayabusa2 collected one sample from the asteroid's surface on February 22, 2019, then fired a copper "bullet" into the asteroid to create a 33-foot wide impact crater. A sample was collected from this crater on July 11, 2019. Then, Hayabusa2 flew by Earth and dropped the sample off in Australia last December.

The C-type, or carbonaceous, asteroid is much darker than scientists originally thought, only reflecting about 2% of the light that hits it, according to one study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. After opening the sample, scientists were surprised to find that the spacecraft collected 5.4 grams from the asteroid -- much more than the single gram they were expecting, said Toru Yada, lead study author and associate senior researcher at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. In the second study, also published Monday in Nature Astronomy, the researchers determined that Ryugu is made of clay and other hydrated minerals, with a number of carbonates and organics inside the sample.

Glaciers across the Himalayas are melting at an extraordinary rate, with new research showing that the vast ice sheets there shrank 10 times faster in the past 40 years than during the previous seven centuries. From a report: Avalanches, flooding and other effects of the accelerating loss of ice imperil residents in India, Nepal and Bhutan and threaten to disrupt agriculture for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia, according to the researchers. And since water from melting glaciers contributes to sea-level rise, glacial ice loss in the Himalayas also adds to the threat of inundation and related problems faced by coastal communities around the world. "This part of the world is changing faster than perhaps anybody realized," said Jonathan Carrivick, a University of Leeds glaciologist and the co-author of a paper detailing the research published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports. "It's not just that the Himalayas are changing really fast, it's that they're changing ever faster."

Scientists have long observed ice loss from large glaciers in New Zealand, Greenland, Patagonia and other parts of the world. But ice loss in the Himalayas is especially rapid, the new study found. The researchers didn't pinpoint a reason but noted that regional climate factors, such as shifts in the South Asian monsoon, may play a role. The new finding comes as there is scientific consensus that ice loss from glaciers and polar ice sheets results from rising global temperatures caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Many peer-reviewed scientific studies have identified human activity as a cause of rising global temperatures. So did a report issued in August by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said "human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s." For the new study, Dr. Carrivick and his colleagues scanned satellite photos of almost 15,000 glaciers in the region for signs of the large ridges of rock and debris that glaciers leave behind as they slowly grind their way through the valleys. Using the locations of these ancient glacial tracks, the scientists estimated the span of ice sheet coverage in previous centuries.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes a report from Futurism: Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created "mini-brains" consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports.

The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity... To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified version of "Pong" with no opponent. A signal is sent to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is, and the neurons from the brain cells send signals back to move the paddle...

Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs and research lead of the project, said that while the mini-brains can't play the game as well as a human, they do learn faster than some AIs.

"The amazing aspect is how quickly it learns, in five minutes, in real time," he told New Scientist. "That's really an amazing thing that biology can do."

While this is certainly some amazing Twitch fodder, the team at Cortical Labs hope to use their findings to develop sophisticated technology using "live biological neurons integrated with traditional silicon computing," according to their website.
There's actually video of the brain cells playing Pong. The chief scientific officer told New Scientist that when the cells are in the game, they actually believe they are the paddle.

"We often refer to them as living in the Matrix."

"Apollo mission planners were really smart. Recognizing that future scientists will have better tools and richer scientific insights, they refrained from opening a portion of the lunar samples returned from the historic Apollo missions," writes Gizmodo.

"One of these sample containers, after sitting untouched for 50 years, is now set to be opened." The sample in question was collected by Gene Cernan in 1972. The Apollo 17 astronaut was working in the Taurus-Littrow Valley when he hammered a 28-inch-long (70 cm) tube into the surface, which he did to collect samples of lunar soil and gas. The lower half of this canister was sealed while Cernan was still on the Moon. Back on Earth, the canister was placed in yet another vacuum chamber for good measure. Known as the 73001 Apollo sample container, it remains untouched to this very day.

But the time has come to open this vessel and investigate its precious cargo, according to a European Space Agency press release. The hope is that lunar gases might be present inside, specifically hydrogen, helium, and other light gases. Analysis of these gases could further our understanding of lunar geology and shed new light on how to best store future samples, whether they be gathered on asteroids, the Moon, or Mars.

Like I said, Apollo mission planners were really clever — but they didn't exactly explain how future scientists were supposed to extract the presumed gases from the vacuum-sealed container. That task is now the responsibility of the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program (ANGSA), which manages these untouched treasures. In this case, ANGSA tasked the European Space Agency, among several other institutions, to figure out a way to safely release this trapped gas, marking the first time that ESA has been involved in the opening of samples returned from the Apollo program...

The ANGSA consortium spent the past 16 months working on the problem, and the solution, dubbed the "Apollo can opener," is now ready to rock.
Sometime in the next few weeks the gas will finally be decanted into multiple containers, and then sent to specialized labs around the world.

"As it seeks answers about the cosmos and what they mean for Earth's origins, NASA on Friday announced a slew of discoveries about Jupiter," reports the Washington Post

"And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road."

The Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system's biggest planet — in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet's ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft's travels around one of its moons.

But it's not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.

The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter — space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter's moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.
Launched in 2011, became the eighth spacecraft to ever reach Jupiter in 2016, "and the first to probe below the giant planet's thick gas cover.

"It fought Jupiter's extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels."

"A growing body of preliminary research suggests the COVID vaccines used in most of the world offer almost no defense against becoming infected by the highly contagious omicron variant," reports the New York Times. (Emphasis added, because they stress that "All vaccines still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from omicron, which is the most crucial goal.")

"But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have initial success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world." The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of omicron, early research shows. And because most countries have built their inoculation programs around these vaccines, the gap could have a profound impact on the course of the pandemic. A global surge of infections in a world where billions of people remain unvaccinated not only threatens the health of vulnerable individuals but also increases the opportunity for the emergence of yet more variants.

The disparity in the ability of countries to weather the pandemic will almost certainly deepen.... Most evidence so far is based on laboratory experiments, which do not capture the full range of the body's immune response, and not from tracking the effect on real-world populations. The results are striking, however. The Pfizer and Moderna shots use the new mRNA technology, which has consistently offered the best protection against infection with every variant. All of the other vaccines are based on older methods of triggering an immune response. The Chinese vaccines Sinopharm and Sinovac — which make up almost half of all shots delivered globally — offer almost zero protection from omicron infection. The great majority of people in China have received these shots, which are also widely used in low- and middle-income countries such as Mexico and Brazil.

A preliminary effectiveness study in Britain found that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine showed no ability to stop Omicron infection six months after vaccination. Ninety percent of vaccinated people in India received this shot, under the brand name Covishield; it has also been widely used across much of sub-Saharan Africa, where Covax, the global Covid vaccine program, has distributed 67 million doses of it to 44 countries. Researchers predict that Russia's Sputnik vaccine, which is also being used in Africa and Latin America, will show similarly dismal rates of protection against Omicron. Demand for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been surging in Africa, because its single-shot delivery regimen makes it easy to deliver in low-resource settings. But it too has shown a negligible ability to block Omicron infection.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would have vast applications, offering insights into basic biology and revealing promising new drug targets. Now, after nearly 50 years, researchers have shown that artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software can churn out accurate protein structures by the thousands—an advance that realizes Anfinsen's dream and is Science's 2021 Breakthrough of the Year.

Protein structures could once be determined only through painstaking lab analyses. But they can now be calculated, quickly, for tens of thousands of proteins, and for complexes of interacting proteins. "This is a sea change for structural biology," says Gaetano Montelione, a structural biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. David Baker, a University of Washington, Seattle, computational biochemist who led one of the prediction projects, adds that with the bounty of readily available structures, "All areas of computational and molecular biology will be transformed."

The mosquitofish threatens native fish populations in Australia — including two of the most criticially endangered, reports the New York Times. And in various parts of the world, "For decades scientists have been trying to figure out how to control it, without damaging the surrounding ecosystem.

But in a new lab experiment, "the mosquitofish may have finally met its match: A menacing fish-shaped robot." It's "their worst nightmare," said Giovanni Polverino, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia and the lead author of a paper published Thursday in iScience, in which scientists designed a simulacrum of the fish's natural predator, the largemouth bass, to strike at the mosquitofish, scaring it away from its prey. The robot not only freaked the mosquitofish out, but scarred them with such lasting anxiety that their reproduction rates dropped; evidence that could have long term implications for the species' viability, according to the paper. "You don't need to kill them," Dr. Polverino said. Instead, he said, "we can basically inject fear into the system, and the fear kills them slowly...."

[S]cientists say there is a long way to go before the robot could be released into the wild. "It's an important proof of concept," said Peter Klimley, a marine biologist and a recently retired professor from the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. But he questioned the feasibility of introducing the creature into a real-world environment.

"This study won't be a solution to the problem," Dr. Polverino said, adding that the next phase of their project would involve testing the robots in a larger, outdoor, freshwater pool. He said the robot should be thought of as a tool that can reveal a pest's weaknesses. "We've built a sort of vulnerability profile," Dr. Polverino said, that could help biologists and others to reimagine how to control invasive species. "This fear," he added, "has a collateral effect."
Their robot fish uses a built-in camera to differentiate between mosquitofish and the native tadpoles it's trying to protect.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for the link!

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Think search and rescue animal, and you're likely to picture a dog in an orange vest. But a Tanzanian nonprofit wants you to imagine something else: the African giant pouched rat. Donna Kean and her colleagues at APOPO, a nonprofit that trains pouched rats to save lives, have spent the past 2 decades working with the curious animals (Cricetomys ansorgei) to sniff out tuberculosis and track down land mines. Now, they're moving on to search and rescue.

Science caught up with Kean to chat about the new project, known as RescueRats. Topics include, just how to train a rat, what advantages they have over dogs, and whether people would be freaked out about a rodent coming to save them.

"What do astronomers eat for breakfast on the day that their $10 billion telescope launches into space?" asks the New York Times. "Their fingernails."

The worst-case scenario is "You work for years and it all goes up in a puff of smoke," they're told by Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona: Dr. Rieke admits her fingers will be crossed on the morning of December 24 when she tunes in for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. For 20 years, she has been working to design and build an ultrasensitive infrared camera that will live aboard the spacecraft. The Webb is the vaunted bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers expect that it will pierce a dark curtain of ignorance and supposition about the early days of the universe, and allow them to snoop on nearby exoplanets.

After $10 billion and years of delays, the telescope is finally scheduled to lift off from a European launch site in French Guiana on its way to a point a million miles on the other side of the moon... [T]here is plenty to be anxious about. The Ariane 5 rocket that is carrying the spacecraft has seldom failed to deliver its payloads to orbit. But even if it survives the launch, the telescope will have a long way to go. Over the following month it will have to execute a series of maneuvers with 344 "single points of failure" in order to unfurl its big golden mirror and deploy five thin layers of a giant plastic sunscreen that will keep the telescope and its instruments in the cold and dark. Engineers and astronomers call this interval six months of high anxiety because there is no prospect of any human or robotic intervention or rescue should something go wrong.

But if all those steps succeed, what astronomers see through that telescope could change everything. They hope to spot the first stars and galaxies emerging from the primordial fog when the universe was only 100 million years or so old, in short the first steps out of the big bang toward the cozy light show we inhabit today.
Tod Lauer, an astronomer at NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, remembers the launch of the original Hubble Space Telescope — and told the Times that astronomers had to trust their colleagues in rocket and spacecraft engineering to get it right.

"Someone who knows how to fly a $10 billion spacecraft on a precision trajectory is not going to be impressed by an astronomer, who never took an engineering course in his life, cowering behind his laptop watching the launch," Dr. Lauer said. "You feel admiration and empathy for those people, and try to act worthy of the incredible gift that they are bringing to world."

On Friday the manufacturer of the rocket carrying the teescope tweeted an update. "Target launch date is December 24 at 12:20 am UTC," and confirmed it again on Saturday...

"Ridiculous, seemingly arbitrary price markups are a defining characteristic of the $4-trillion U.S. healthcare system — and a key reason Americans pay more for treatment than anyone else in the world," writes a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

"But to see price hikes of as much as 675% being imposed in real time, automatically, by a hospital's computer system still takes your breath away."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes their report: I got to view this for myself after a former operating-room nurse at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas shared with me screenshots of the facility's electronic health record system.... What they show are price hikes ranging from 575% to 675% being automatically generated by the hospital's software. The eye-popping increases are so routine, apparently, the software even displays the formula it uses to convert reasonable medical costs to billed amounts that are much, much higher. For example, one screenshot is for sutures — that is, medical thread, a.k.a. stitches. Scripps' system put the basic "cost per unit" at $19.30. But the system said the "computed charge per unit" was $149.58. This is how much the patient and his or her insurer would be billed.

The system helpfully included a formula for reaching this amount: "$149.58 = $19.30 + ($19.30 x 675%)."

You read that right. Scripps' automated system took the actual cost of sutures, imposed an apparently preset 675% markup and produced a billed amount that was orders of magnitude higher than the true price. This is separate from any additional charges for the doctor, anesthesiologist, X-rays or hospital facilities.

Call it institutionalized price gouging. And it's apparently widespread because the same or similar software is used by other hospitals nationwide, including UCLA, and around the world... Healthcare providers routinely ignore the actual cost of treatment when calculating bills and instead cook up nonsensical figures to push reimbursement from insurers higher. For the millions of people without health insurance, those sky-high prices are what they're stuck with (although most hospitals, including Scripps, typically will offer discounts in such circumstances).

A long and strikingly critical article that reviews the state of the Russian space program was published in the state-aligned newspaper MK this week. This article was written by Dmitry Popov, who has worked at the publication since 1992. Ars Technica reports: The article, translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, is titled "The Space Program Is Rotting from Within." It begins with the declaration that Russia's space program has a shortage of competent and highly qualified staff, obsolete facilities and technology, and "systemic leadership weakness." And that's just the opening paragraph. Popov goes on to state that Russian space companies are delinquent on promised deliveries for hundreds of contracts. For example, the Khrunichev Center agreed to deliver 10 booster cores for the Angara A5 rocket five years ago. The first five cores were delivered only in March of this year, and the other five are not yet completed. [...] Popov said Roscosmos is struggling even to build its mainstay vehicles, the Soyuz rockets and Progress spacecraft. Consider a recent docking issue with the Progress vehicle, which carries supplies to the Russian segment of the International Space Station.

Popov further expressed concern about reliance on Germany to help fuel the Soyuz rocket and the Soyuz spacecraft that launches humans. The issue is that vernier thrusters on the Soyuz boosters and in the de-orbit engines of the Soyuz-MS spacecraft use a special grade of highly refined hydrogen peroxide. Production of this hydrogen peroxide in Russia, however, depends on deliveries of chemicals produced by a German company called Evonik Resource Efficiency GmbH. These deliveries are subject to limitation by international sanctions against the Russian Federation. "That is, the West can stop Russian space launches with a single keystroke," Popov wrote.

The article also discusses the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a spaceport in eastern Russia that has been a priority for President Vladimir Putin. However this project, under Rogozin's stewardship, has been beset by construction delays and corruption, such as embezzlement. Of the nearly 1,200 structures planned for construction at the spaceport, only about 200 have been completed, Popov wrote. Construction has yet to begin on more than 40 percent of them. Already, the planned launch of Angara A5 rockets from Vostochny has been delayed from 2021 to 2023, as criminal investigations continue. Popov then turns to Russia's so-called Moon program, which requires development of the Oryol, or "Eagle," spacecraft to fly cosmonauts into deep space. This vehicle was intended to both replace the Soyuz for transporting cosmonauts to the International Space Station and to form part of the lunar program. But aside from that, everything is going swell with Russia's Moon program.

Popov also criticizes Rogozin for over-promising on Russian launch efficiency and under-delivering. For example, Roscosmos said there would be 44 space launches in 2019, and 25 were conducted. In 2020, 40 launches were planned and just 17 conducted. This year, Russia has conducted fewer than half of its planned 47 launches. Roscosmos, therefore, has decided to no longer publish its planned number of launches. The overall portrait Popov paints of Roscosmos is that of a wasteful, increasingly decrepit enterprise where almost no money is being invested into the present or future. Instead, the focus seems to be providing high-paying jobs for a handful of technocrats, whose salaries are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Meanwhile, the average monthly wages for technical specialists who build the country's rockets and spacecraft range from $500 to $1,000 a month.

Necklaces and accessories claiming to "protect" people from 5G mobile networks have been found to be radioactive. The BBC reports: The Dutch authority for nuclear safety and radiation protection (ANVS) issued a warning about ten products it found gave off harmful ionizing radiation. It urged people not to use the products, which could cause harm with long-term wear. [...] The products identified included an "Energy Armor" sleeping mask, bracelet and necklace. A bracelet for children, branded Magnetix Wellness, was also found to be emitting radiation.

"Don't wear it any more, put it away safely and wait for the return instructions," the ANVS said in a statement. "The sellers in the Netherlands known to the ANVS have been told that the sale is prohibited and must be stopped immediately, and that they must inform their customers about this." The ANVS has published a full list of the products it identified as radioactive on its website. Further reading: Worried About 5G's Health Effects? Don't Be

Soccer games that make you sit on the edge of your seat may be a thing of the past, according to new scientific research. From a report: After analyzing 26 years worth of European soccer matches, in 11 major European soccer leagues, scientists have determined the games have become more predictable over time -- and the home field advantage has vanished. The work appears in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Taha Yasseri is a computational social scientist at University College Dublin and a soccer fan (though he'd say football). "I realized that I might be able to use network science and network analysis methods to make predictions about the results of football matches," Yasseri said. So, he built a computer model and analyzed nearly 88,000 European soccer matches. He found that stronger teams beat their weaker rivals more often as the years went by.

"Football is so exciting because, you know, there is always a possibility for the weaker teams to win. But, unfortunately, pouring money into the sport and not regulating the wealth or income of the clubs might take that away from the fans," Yasseri postulated. He found that financial inequality among teams also went up over time. He compares it to gentrification -- but in sports. Better teams win more games and rake in more riches. Then, they buy even better players and win more games. "As a football fan, that's really hard for me to take," Yasseri lamented.

There is at present "no evidence" that the Omicron coronavirus variant is any less severe than the Delta strain, according to early findings from researchers at Imperial College London, which also highlighted the elevated risk of reinfection posed by Omicron and the need for booster shots to combat it. From a report: The research, based on UK infection data, casts doubt on the hopes of some experts that a change in the virulence of the new variant would ease the pressure on health systems despite Omicron's high levels of infectiousness. "The study finds no evidence of Omicron having lower severity than Delta, judged by either the proportion of people testing positive who report symptoms, or by the proportion of cases seeking hospital care after infection," said the research team, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease modeller and government science adviser. However, they cautioned that hospitalisation data "remains very limited at this time." The study said data suggested "at most, limited changes in severity compared with Delta." Early reports from medics in South Africa's Gauteng province, the centre of the Omicron outbreak there, had raised hopes that the variant's mutations might have led to a change in the virus' biology causing it to be less severe.

The first ever millipede with more than 1,000 legs been discovered in Western Australia. From a report: The species, which is the first "true" millipede, has 1,306 legs and was found up to 60 metres underground in a mining area in the Eastern Goldfields region of WA. Researchers have named the new species Eumillipes persephone, in reference to the Greek goddess of the underworld, Persephone. It breaks the previous record set by Illacme plenipes, which is found in central California and has up to 750 legs.

A team of researchers discovered the millipede while conducting a subterranean environmental impact assessment. Dr Bruno Buzatto, a biologist at Bennelongia Environmental Consultants, described the find as "incredibly lucky." "These animals were so unique," Buzatto said. "As soon as I realised how long they were ... I realised they had to be something completely different." The species has a long, thread-like body comprising up to 330 segments, with short legs and a cone-shaped head. Like other animals that live in constant darkness, it is blind and pale.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday voted to recommend Americans choose to receive one of the other two authorized COVID-19 vaccines over Johnson & Johnson's shot, due to rare but sometimes fatal cases of blood clotting. The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization voted unanimously to make the recommendation in favor of the vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech over the J&J shot. The regulator still needs to sign off on the guidance.

Fewer Americans have received the J&J shot than the other two vaccines by a significant margin. Out of more than 200 million fully vaccinated people in the United States, around 16 million received J&J's vaccine, according to CDC data. [...] Members of the panel also said J&J's vaccine is less effective in preventing COVID-19 than the other two authorized vaccines. In a presentation to the committee, a leading J&J vaccine scientist said the vaccine generates a strong and long-lasting immune response with just a single shot.

An anonymous reader writes: Burning fossil fuels kills more than 1 million people ever year, according to a new study that examined the worldwide health effects of fine particulate pollution, also known as PM2.5. Coal, which produces sooty, particulate-laden pollution, is responsible for half of those deaths, while natural gas and oil are responsible for the other half. Some 80 percent of premature deaths due to fossil fuel combustion takes place in South Asia or East Asia, the report said. Because fine particulate pollution can be so easily inhaled and swept into the bloodstream, it is responsible for a range of diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, COPD, lung cancer, and stroke. More recently, researchers have found links between PM2.5 and other, less obvious diseases like kidney failure and Parkinson's. People who have experienced long-term exposure to PM2.5 are also at greater risk of hospitalization if they fall ill with COVID.

The researchers gathered monthly pollution and source data from 1970 to 2017 and ran it through a global air-quality model in conjunction with satellite data. The result was a global map of outdoor PM2.5 with a resolution of about 1 km^2. From there, they estimated the average outdoor exposure for people living in various parts of the world. The study was coordinated by the nonprofit Health Effects Institute, and its coauthors were Randall Martin, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at Washington University, and Michael Brauer, a professor of population and public health at the University of British Columbia. In regions like South Asia and East Asia and some Eastern and Central European countries, coal causes a majority of the premature deaths that result from fossil fuel combustion. That's due in part to those regions' reliance on coal and because their regulations are typically not as stringent as elsewhere. In regions like North America and Western Europe, which are less reliant on coal, oil and natural gas cause the majority of deaths from fossil fuel-related particulate pollution. Even in the US, a country with relatively stringent clean air laws, fine particulate pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for about 20,000 deaths annually, according to the study.

How many red and blue beads can you string together without making a big evenly spaced sequence of the same color? Using a semi-structured pattern of squashed circles, a mathematician shattered the previous record for how long you can keep stringing beads. From a report: The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is "not only wrong but spectacularly wrong," as Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal put it. The new paper shows how to create much longer disordered strings of colored beads than mathematicians had thought possible, extending a line of work from the 1940s that has found applications in many areas of computer science. The conjecture, formulated about 17 years ago by Ron Graham, one of the leading discrete mathematicians of the past half-century, concerns how many red and blue beads you can string together without creating any long sequences of evenly spaced beads of a single color. (You get to decide what "long" means for each color.) This problem is one of the oldest in Ramsey theory, which asks how large various mathematical objects can grow before pockets of order must emerge. The bead-stringing question is easy to state but deceptively difficult: For long strings there are just too many bead arrangements to try one by one.

Scientists have discovered a world-historic discovery on Mars: "significant amounts of water" are hiding inside the Red Planet's Valles Marineris, its version of our grand canyon system, according to a recent press release from the European Space Agency (ESA). And up to 40% of material near the surface of the canyon could be water molecules. Interesting Engineering reports: The newly discovered volume of water is hiding under the surface of Mars, and was detected by the Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission in its first stage under the guidance of the ESA-Roscosmos project dubbed ExoMars. Signs of water were picked up by the orbiter's Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument, which is designed to survey the Red Planet's landscape and map the presence and concentration of hydrogen hiding in Mars' soil. It works like this: while high-energy cosmic rays plunge into the surface, the soil emits neutrons. And wet soil emits fewer neutrons than dry soil, which enables scientists to analyze and assess the water content of soil, hidden beneath its ancient surface. "FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system: assuming the hydrogen we see is bound into water molecules, as much as 40% of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water," said Igor Mitrofanov, the Russian Academy of Science's lead investigator of the Space Research Institute, in the ESA press release.

"The reservoir is large, not too deep below ground, & could be easily exploitable for future explorers," read a tweet on the announcement from ExoMars. That sounds basically great! But it's too soon for Musk to pack up his bags and fly to the site, since much work is left to be done. A study accompanying the announcement, published in the journal Icarus, shows that neutron detection doesn't distinguish between ice and water molecules. This means geochemists need to enter the scientific fray to reveal more details. But several features of the canyon, including its topology, have led the researchers to speculate that the water is probably in solid form (ice). But it could also be a mixture of solid and liquid.

"We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water -- far more water than we expected," said Alexey Malakhov, co-author of the study, in the ESA release. "This is very much like Earth's permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures." So while we don't yet know the specific form of water is lying under Mars' vast system of canyons, the first human mission to Mars may consider exploring this area a major priority.