The Guardian reports: Scientists have successfully developed a revolutionary cancer treatment that lights up and wipes out microscopic cancer cells, in a breakthrough that could enable surgeons to more effectively target and destroy the disease in patients.

A European team of engineers, physicists, neurosurgeons, biologists and immunologists from the UK, Poland and Sweden joined forces to design the new form of photoimmunotherapy. Experts believe it is destined to become the world's fifth major cancer treatment after surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. The light-activated therapy forces cancer cells to glow in the dark, helping surgeons remove more of the tumours compared with existing techniques — and then kills off remaining cells within minutes once the surgery is complete. In a world-first trial in mice with glioblastoma, one of the most common and aggressive types of brain cancer, scans revealed the novel treatment lit up even the tiniest cancer cells to help surgeons remove them — and then wiped out those left over. Trials of the new form of photoimmunotherapy, led by the Institute of Cancer Research, London, also showed the treatment triggered an immune response that could prime the immune system to target cancer cells in future, suggesting it could prevent glioblastoma coming back after surgery....

The therapy combines a special fluorescent dye with a cancer-targeting compound. In the trial in mice, the combination was shown to dramatically improve the visibility of cancer cells during surgery and, when later activated by near-infrared light, to trigger an anti-tumour effect.

Earlier this week China's giant Sky Eye telescope detected signals it thought could be from an alien civilizations.

But now there's an update from LiveScience: Dan Werthimer, a Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher at the University of Berkeley, California and a coauthor on the research project which first spotted the signals, told Live Science that the narrow-band radio signals he and his fellow researchers found "are from [human] radio interference, and not from extraterrestrials....

"The big problem, and the problem in this particular case, is that we're looking for signals from extraterrestrials, but what we find is a zillion signals from terrestrials," Werthimer told Live Science. "They're very weak signals, but the cryogenic receivers on the telescopes are super sensitive and can pick up signals from cell phones, television, radar and satellites — and there are more and more satellites in the sky every day. If you're kind of new in the game, and you don't know all these different ways that interference can get into your data and corrupt it, it's pretty easy to get excited...."

The recent false alarm is one of several instances in which alien-hunting scientists have been misled by noise from human activity. In 2019, astronomers spotted a signal beamed to Earth from Proxima Centauri — the nearest star system to our sun (sitting roughly 4.2 light-years away) and home to at least one potentially habitable planet. The signal was a narrow-band radio wave typically associated with human-made objects, which led scientists to entertain the thrilling possibility that it came from alien technology. Studies released two years later, however, suggested that the signal was most likely produced by malfunctioning human equipment, Live Science previously reported. Similarly, another famous set of signals once supposed to have come from aliens, detected between 2011 and 2014, turned out to have actually been made by scientists microwaving their lunches.
Werthimer tells the New York Times unequivocally that "These signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from E.T."

But the Times also got a comment from Paul Horowitz, an emeritus professor of physics at Harvard who created his own alien-listening campaign called Project Meta, funded by the Planetary Society. Those who endure profess not to be discouraged by the Great Silence, as it is called, from out there. They've always been in the search for the long run, they say. "The Great Silence is hardly unexpected," said Dr. Horowitz, including because only a fraction of a percent of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way have been surveyed. Nobody ever said that detecting that rain of alien radio signals would be easy.
Even Dan Werthimer concedes to LiveScience, "I think it'd be very strange if we're the only ones. If you look at the numbers, there's a trillion planets in the galaxy — five times more planets than there are stars. A lot of them are little dinky planets like Earth. Many of them have liquid water, so intelligent life, while not as common as bacterial life, could still be fairly common."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 writes: Ancient DNA from bubonic plague victims buried in cemeteries on the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia has helped solve an enduring mystery, pinpointing an area in northern Kyrgyzstan as the launching point for the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people in the mid-14th century.

The Black Death was the deadliest pandemic on record. It may have killed 50% to 60% of the population in parts of Western Europe and 50% in the Middle East, combining for about 50-60 million deaths, Slavin said. An "unaccountable number" of people also died in the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia, Slavin added.

Researchers said on Wednesday they retrieved ancient DNA traces of the Yersinia pestis plague bacterium from the teeth of three women buried in a medieval Nestorian Christian community in the Chu Valley near Lake Issyk Kul in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains who perished in 1338-1339. The earliest deaths documented elsewhere in the pandemic were in 1346.

Reconstructing the pathogen's genome showed that this strain not only gave rise to the one that caused the Black Death that mauled Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa but also to most plague strains existing today.

"Our finding that the Black Death originated in Central Asia in the 1330s puts centuries-old debates to rest," said historian Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Europe's much-anticipated next-generation rocket, which has a roughly comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020. The Ariane 6 rocket has subsequently been delayed a few times, but before this week the European Space Agency had been holding to a debut launch date before the end of this year. However, during a BBC interview on Monday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said the rocket would not fly until sometime in 2023.

The source said an issue with the "cryogenic connection system" had been a critical item requiring a lot of focus for development efforts and a driver of delays. However, that test was recently completed, with the cryogenic lines carrying liquefied hydrogen and oxygen to the Ariane 6 rocket right up until liftoff, demonstrating a successful release at the correct moment. Due to development issues, other critical tests have been long-delayed as well, such as a hot-fire test of the rocket's second stage, which features a single Vinci engine. The official said he expected the second stage test to occur soon at Lampoldshausen, Germany.

As is often the case, European Space Agency officials and the rocket's developer, Ariane Group, are also struggling to complete ground systems and flight software. "It's the ground systems coming together with the launcher, and they need to talk to each other in a very accurate way," the official said. "This is a source of challenge in every launcher development." The official declined to provide a new, specific launch target for Ariane 6's debut flight. (A separate source has told Ars the working date is no earlier than April 2023). The new launch target is expected to be revealed on July 13 during a joint news conference with European space officials. Meanwhile, SpaceX set a new reuse record after one of its Falcon 9 rockets launched for the 13th time today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Physicists have created a system of two connected time crystals, which are strange quantum systems that are stuck in an endless loop to which the normal laws of thermodynamics do not apply. By connecting two time crystals together, the physicists hope to use the technology to eventually build a new kind of quantum computer. "It is a rare privilege to explore a completely novel phase of matter," Samuli Autti, the lead scientist on the project from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email. [...]

In the new study, Autti and his team used "magnons" to build their time crystal. Magnons are "quasiparticles," which emerge in the collective state of a group of atoms. In this case, the team of physicists took helium-3 -- a helium atom with two protons but only one neutron -- and cooled it to within a ten-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. At that temperature, the helium-3 transformed into a Bose-Einstein condensate, where all the atoms share a common quantum state and work in concert with each other. In that condensate, all the spins of the electrons in the helium-3 linked up and worked together, generating waves of magnetic energy, the magnons. These waves sloshed back and forth forever, making them a time crystal. Autti's team took two groups of magnons, each one operating as its own time crystal, and brought them close enough to influence each other. The combined system of magnons acted as one time crystal with two different states.

Autti's team hopes that their experiments can clarify the relationship between quantum and classical physics. Their goal is to build time crystals that interact with their environments without the quantum states disintegrating, allowing the time crystal to keep running while it is used for something else. It wouldn't mean free energy -- the motion associated with a time crystal doesn't have kinetic energy in the usual sense, but it could be used for quantum computing. Having two states is important, because that is the basis for computation. In classical computer systems, the basic unit of information is a bit, which can take either a 0 or 1 state, while in quantum computing, each "qubit" can be in more than one place at the same time, allowing for much more computing power. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Chinese bank depositors planning a protest about their frozen funds saw their health code mysteriously turn red and were stopped from traveling to the site of a rally, confirming fears that China's vast COVID-tracking system could be weaponized as a powerful tool to stifle dissent. Motherboard reports: A red health code designated the would-be protesters as suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients, limiting their movement and access to public transportation. Their rallies in the central Henan province this week were thwarted as some were forced into quarantine and others detained by police. A 38-year-old software engineer was among hundreds who could not access their savings at four rural banks since mid-April. She had planned to travel from her home in Jiangxi province to Zhengzhou, Henan's capital city, to join a group petition this week to demand her money back. But her health code turned from green to red shortly after she bought a train ticket on Sunday. She said a nucleic test for COVID she took the night before came back negative and her hometown has not reported any infection recently.

"Henan authorities targeted the health code of bank depositors in order to stop us from defending our rights," she told VICE World News, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid government reprisal. She eventually managed to reach Zhengzhou using her green health code on a different app, but was daunted by the sight of police officers out in force. More than 200 bank depositors from all over the country saw their health codes turned red over the past week, which effectively foiled a planned protest outside the Henan branch of China's banking regulator. Chinese activists and dissidents have reported similar experiences in the past, but the latest crackdown appears to be the most brazen example of how the authorities could exploit the supposed COVID-19 measure for political purposes.

Having bright colours and greenery in our cities can make people happier and calmer, according to an unusual experiment involving virtual reality headsets. From a report: A team of researchers at the University of Lille, in France, used VR to test how volunteers reacted to variations of a minimalist concrete, glass and metal urban landscape. The 36 participants walked on the spot in a laboratory wearing a VR headset with eye trackers, and researchers tweaked their surroundings, adding combinations of vegetation, as well as bright yellow and pink colours, and contrasting, angular patterns on the path.

By tracking their blink rate, the researchers learned about what the volunteers were most interested in. The participants then filled out a questionnaire about their experience. The researchers found that the volunteers walked more slowly and their heart rate increased when they saw green vegetation in their urban setting. They also kept their heads higher, looking forward and around, instead of towards the ground. While adding and taking away colour didn't make quite as much of a difference for the participants, they were more curious and alert when colourful patterns were added to the ground they were virtually stepping on, according to the study. According to Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell, a professor of cognitive psychology at the university and the lead author on this study, the results demonstrated that the urban experience had been made more pleasurable.

The member countries of the World Trade Organization agreed Friday on a narrow measure aimed at boosting the supplies of Covid-19 vaccines in developing countries, wrapping up a bitter fight over corporate patent rights governing critical medical products during a pandemic. WSJ: The compromise measure on intellectual property rights will make it easier for companies in developing nations such as South Africa to manufacture and export a patented Covid-19 vaccine -- under limited circumstances -- without a consent from the patent holder if they have the approval of their own governments. Meeting for the first time in nearly five years, trade ministers from more than 100 countries also agreed on measures to reduce fisheries subsidies to protect fish stocks and pledged to minimize export restrictions on food items amid shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine. An existing ban on the collection of customs duty on digitally-transmitted products like music and movies was continued, to the relief of U.S. officials who had feared a possible change in the status quo would harm U.S. businesses.

A retracted paper highlights chemistry's history of trying to avoid the expensive, toxic -- but necessary -- catalyst. From a report: It's hard to find a place on Earth untouched by palladium. The silvery-white metal is a key part of catalytic converters in the world's 1.4 billion cars, which spew specks of palladium into the atmosphere. Mining and other sources add to this pollution. As a result, traces of palladium show up in some of the most remote spots on Earth, from Antarctica to the top of the Greenland ice sheet. Palladium is also practically indispensable for making drugs. That's because catalysts with palladium atoms at their core have an unmatched ability to help stitch together carbon --carbon bonds. This kind of chemical reaction is key to building organic molecules, especially those used in medications.

"Every pharmaceutical we produce at some point or another has a palladium-catalysed step in it," says Per-Ola Norrby, a pharmaceutical researcher at drug giant AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. Palladium-catalysed reactions are so valuable that, in 2010, their discoverers shared a Nobel prize. But despite its versatility, chemists are trying to move away from palladium. The metal is more expensive than gold, and molecules that contain palladium can also be extremely toxic to humans and wildlife. Chemical manufacturers have to separate out all traces of palladium from their products and carefully dispose of the hazardous waste, which adds extra expense. Thomas Fuchb, a medicinal chemist at the life-sciences company Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, gives the example of a reaction to make 3 kilograms of a drug molecule for which the ingredients cost US$250,000. The palladium catalyst alone adds $100,000; purifying it out of the product another $30,000.

Finding less-toxic alternatives to the metal could help to reduce environmental harm from palladium waste and move the chemicals industry towards 'greener' reactions, says Tianning Diao, an organometallic chemist at New York University. Researchers hope to swap palladium for more common metals, such as iron and nickel, or invent metal-free catalysts that sidestep the issue altogether. Several times in the past two decades, researchers have reported finding palladium-free catalysts. But in what has become a recurring pattern for the field, each heralded discovery turned out to be a mistake.

Keeping people out of rip currents is more about reading human behavior than reading warning signs. From a report: Worldwide, rips cause hundreds of drownings and necessitate tens of thousands of rescues every year. In Australia, where 85 percent of the population lives within an hour's drive of the coast, rips cause more fatalities than floods, cyclones, and shark attacks combined. In 1938, one of the country's most popular beaches, Sydney's Bondi Beach, was the site of an infamous rip-current tragedy: within minutes, roughly 200 swimmers were swept away by a rip, leaving 35 people unconscious and five dead. More often, however, rips take one life at a time, garnering little media attention. For many casual beach visitors, the toll of rip currents goes unnoticed. [...] Although almost three-quarters of beach users said they knew what a rip current is, only 54 percent could correctly define it. In addition, only half of the people she surveyed remembered seeing either the warning signs or the colored flags denoting surf conditions that were posted on or near the main access point to each beach. An even smaller percentage could recall what color the flags had been -- green for calm, yellow for moderate, or red for dangerous conditions. "I was genuinely shocked," Locknick says.

[...] Part of the challenge of preventing rip-related drownings stems from the lack of a simple method to escape them. Rip currents form when waves pile water near the shoreline. The water then gushes back out to sea, taking the path of least resistance. It might flow along channels carved in between sandbars or next to solid structures, such as jetties or rocky headlands. These types of rips can stick around year after year. Others are more erratic, creating fleeting bursts of seaward-flowing water on smooth, open beaches. People often mislabel rip currents as undertows or rip tides. Rip currents are not caused by tides, however, and undertows are a different, weaker current, formed when water pushed onto the beach moves back offshore along the seabed. Some telltale signs of a rip include a streak of churned-up, sandy water or a dark, flat gap between breaking waves.

It's not surprising that rip currents are often misunderstood by the public because, for decades, beach-safety experts also had an oversimplified perception of their mechanics. In some of the earliest research on rips in the mid-20th century, American scientists watched sticks, pieces of kelp, and volleyballs float out to sea and described lanes of flowing water extending more than 300 meters offshore. This work formed the basis for the popular view of rip currents as jets flowing perpendicular to the beach, shooting out past the surf. To escape the river of current, experts recommended that bathers swim parallel to the beach -- a message once broadcast through education campaigns and warning signs in the United States and Australia. As it turns out, that approach may not always work.

A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world's biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight. Then came a long hangover. From a report: Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. "It's a bit disappointing," allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. "I thought we would discover supersymmetry," the leading extension of the standard model.

It's too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of upgrades, the LHC is now powering up for the third of five planned runs, and some new particle could emerge in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second. In fact, the LHC should run for another 16 years, and with further upgrades should collect 16 times as much data as it already has. All those data could reveal subtle signs of novel particles and phenomena. Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. "If they don't find anything, this field is dead," says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King's College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. "It's going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out."

China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery. From a report: The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye -- the world's largest radio telescope -- differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley. It isn't clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China's science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.
UPDATE (6/18/2022):A co-author on the research project which first spotted the signals has now said the signals came from human radio interference, "and not from extraterrestrial."

There are no environmental showstoppers in SpaceX's plans to launch a giant new rocket to orbit from South Texas, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday. From a report: An environmental assessment by the agency has concluded that SpaceX's plans for orbital launches will have "no significant impact" on the region along the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas. But the F.A.A. is also requiring the company to undertake more than 75 actions to minimize the impact on the surrounding areas as it begins flights of Starship, a vehicle that is central to NASA's plans to return to the moon as well as the vision of Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, to colonize Mars. The actions Mr. Musk's company must take include earlier notice of launches, monitoring of vegetation and wildlife by a biologist, coordination with state and federal agencies to remove launch debris from sensitive habitats and adjustment of lighting to lessen impact on wildlife and a nearby beach. The mitigation measures required by the F.A.A. also restrict closures of a highway that passes the SpaceX site during launches so that people can visit the nearby beach, park and wildlife refuge. The agency said the highway could not be closed on 18 holidays and not on more than five weekends a year.

Astronomers have unveiled the most detailed survey of the Milky Way, revealing thousands of "starquakes" and stellar DNA, and helping to identify the most habitable corners of our home galaxy. From a report: The observations from the European Space Agency's Gaia probe cover almost two billion stars -- about 1% of the total number in the galaxy -- and are allowing astronomers to reconstruct our home galaxy's structure and find out how it has evolved over billions of years. Previous surveys by Gaia, a robotic spacecraft launched in 2013, have pinpointed the motion of the stars in our home galaxy in exquisite detail. By rewinding these movements astronomers can model how our galaxy has morphed over time. The latest observations add details of chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colours, masses and ages based on spectroscopy, where starlight is split into different wavelengths.

These measurements unexpectedly revealed thousands of starquakes, cataclysmic tsunami-like events on the surface of stars. "Starquakes teach us a lot about stars -- notably, their internal workings," said Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration. "Gaia is opening a goldmine for asteroseismology of massive stars." Dr George Seabroke, senior research associate at Mullard space science laboratory at University College London, said: "If you can see these stars changing in brightness halfway across the Milky Way, if you were anywhere near them, it would be like the sun changing shape in front of your eyes." Gaia is fitted with a 1bn pixel camera -- the largest ever in space -- complete with more than 100 electronic detectors. The latest dataset represents the largest chemical map of the galaxy to date, cataloguing the composition of six million stars, ten times the number measured in previous ground-based catalogues.

The particle collider at CERN will soon restart. From a report: In April, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva, once again fired up their cosmic gun, the Large Hadron Collider. After a three-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, the collider has resumed shooting protons -- the naked guts of hydrogen atoms -- around its 17-mile electromagnetic underground racetrack. In early July, the collider will begin crashing these particles together to create sparks of primordial energy. And so the great game of hunting for the secret of the universe is about to be on again, amid new developments and the refreshed hopes of particle physicists. Even before its renovation, the collider had been producing hints that nature could be hiding something spectacular. Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College London who conducts an experiment at CERN, described data from his previous runs as "the most exciting set of results I've seen in my professional lifetime."

A decade ago, CERN physicists made global headlines with the discovery of the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle, which imparts mass to all the other particles in the universe. What is left to find? Almost everything, optimistic physicists say. When the CERN collider was first turned on in 2010, the universe was up for grabs. The machine, the biggest and most powerful ever built, was designed to find the Higgs boson. That particle is the keystone of the Standard Model, a set of equations that explains everything scientists have been able to measure about the subatomic world. But there are deeper questions about the universe that the Standard Model does not explain: Where did the universe come from? Why is it made of matter rather than antimatter? What is the "dark matter" that suffuses the cosmos? How does the Higgs particle itself have mass? Physicists hoped that some answers would materialize in 2010 when the large collider was first turned on. Nothing showed up except the Higgs -- in particular, no new particle that might explain the nature of dark matter. Frustratingly, the Standard Model remained unshaken.

"All appeared to be going smoothly," reports CBS News, "when, about a minute before the second stage engine was expected to shut down, an onboard 'rocketcam' showed a flash in the engine's exhaust plume.

"The camera view them showed what appeared to be a tumble before video from the rocket cut off...." California-based Astra on Sunday launched two shoebox-size NASA satellites from Cape Canaveral in a modest mission to improve hurricane forecasts, but the second stage of the company's low-cost booster malfunctioned before reaching orbit and the payloads were lost.

"The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit," Astra tweeted. "We have shared our regrets with @NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data analysis."

It was the seventh launch of Astra's small "Venture-class" rocket and the company's fifth failure. Sunday's launch was the first of three planned for NASA to launch six small CubeSats, two at a time, into three orbital planes. Given the somewhat risky nature of relying on tiny shoebox-size CubeSats and a rocket with a very short track record, the $40 million project requires just four satellites and two successful launches to meet mission objectives. The NASA contract calls for the final two flights by the end of July. Whether Astra can meet that schedule given Sunday's failure is not yet known.

"Although today's launch with @Astra did not go as planned, the mission offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities," tweeted NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen.... After Sunday's failure, he tweeted: "Even though we are disappointed right now, we know: There is value in taking risks in our overall NASA Science portfolio because innovation is required for us to lead."

On June 4 a 10-minute Blue Origin flight (using a reusable rocket and capsule) carried six more people on a visit to suborbital space, reports Space.com — the fifth human spaceflight mission for the Jeff Bezos-founded company, and the second one this year. But GeekWire points out that civil production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha had his seat funded by the Crypto Space Agency — that is, funded entirely by the NFT community through mint proceeds — after he was the winner of its lottery for a ride to space.

And they're not the only crypto community buying rides into space. CNET reports on MoonDAO: Over 8,000 people "minted" a "Ticket to Space" NFT on the Ethereum blockchain for free (plus a small transaction or "gas" fee), and...one of those NFT holders plus several alternates will be chosen at random for one of the seats to space. MoonDAO's members will also vote on a specific person from a list of predetermined nominees to gift the second ticket to. The two astronauts could fly as soon as the next Blue Origin launch in the coming weeks, but no target date has been announced....

"Our mission is to decentralize access to space research and exploration," co-founder Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz told me during an interview on stage at the DAODenver conference in February. In addition to sending people on a short trip to space, MoonDAO is also using funds from its treasury — it's raised millions worth of cryptocurrency through a crowdfunding platform called Juicebox — for community projects that include designing a small rocket and satellite. In other words, the ultimate vision is to build an organization something like SpaceX, but that's run as a community cooperative rather than in the traditional top-down corporate structure.

"We definitely need more capital to get to the level of competing directly with Virgin Galactic or SpaceX," Moncada-Larrotiz said via Discord direct message on May 26. "It's for sure a long term project and I think it'll be a matter of building the right type of organization where builders are free to just focus on making awesome things in a collaborative environment."
Unfortunately, MoonDAO's drawing Saturday experienced technical glitches, and after a two-hour livestream — no winner was chosen.

They promised a winner would be chosen by Sunday.

"If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy," notes an announcement from the University of California at Berkeley. "The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible.

"Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object's strong gravitational field — so-called gravitational microlensing." The team, led by graduate student Casey Lam and Jessica Lu, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy, estimates that the mass of the invisible compact object is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun. Because astronomers think that the leftover remnant of a dead star must be heavier than 2.2 solar masses in order to collapse to a black hole, the UC Berkeley researchers caution that the object could be a neutron star instead of a black hole. Neutron stars are also dense, highly compact objects, but their gravity is balanced by internal neutron pressure, which prevents further collapse to a black hole.

Whether a black hole or a neutron star, the object is the first dark stellar remnant — a stellar "ghost" — discovered wandering through the galaxy unpaired with another star.

"This is the first free-floating black hole or neutron star discovered with gravitational microlensing," Lu said. "With microlensing, we're able to probe these lonely, compact objects and weigh them. I think we have opened a new window onto these dark objects, which can't be seen any other way...." The analysis by Lam, Lu and their international team has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The analysis includes four other microlensing events that the team concluded were not caused by a black hole, though two were likely caused by a white dwarf or a neutron star.

The team also concluded that the likely population of black holes in the galaxy is 200 million — about what most theorists predicted.

Notably, a competing team from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore analyzed the same microlensing event and claims that the mass of the compact object is closer to 7.1 solar masses and indisputably a black hole. A paper describing the analysis by the STScI team, led by Kailash Sahu, has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal....

The astrometric data came from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.... While surveys like these discover about 2,000 stars brightened by microlensing each year in the Milky Way galaxy, the addition of astrometric data is what allowed the two teams to determine the mass of the compact object and its distance from Earth.

Four months ago, NASA's Mars rover Perseverance picked up a "pet rock," tucked inside its left front wheel, that's been riding along ever since. Space.com reports: So far, its ridden across 5.3 miles (8.5 kilometers) with the Perseverance rover as it drives across its Jezero Crater home on Mars.

Perseverance has carried the rock north across its landing site, named for the famed late science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, and then west across a region called "Kodiak," the remains of a former delta at Jezero. The rover is currently in the midst of what NASA calls its Delta Front Campaign and may have drilled into its first sedimentary Mars rock, Ravanis wrote.

"Perseverance's pet rock is now a long way from home," Ravanis wrote. "It's possible that the rock may fall out at some point along our future ascent of the crater rim. If it does so, it will land amongst rocks that we expect to be very different from itself."

If that happens, a future Martian geologist might be a bit confused to find the rock so out of place, Ravanis added.

In 2003, the Human Genome Project finished sequencing every bit of human DNA, remembers MIT News.

"Now, over two decades later, MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and colleagues have gone beyond the sequence to present the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells." The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.

The data are available for other scientists to use. "It's a big resource in the way the human genome is a big resource, in that you can go in and do discovery-based research," says Weissman, who is also a member of the Whitehead Institute and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute....

"I think this dataset is going to enable all sorts of analyses that we haven't even thought up yet by people who come from other parts of biology, and suddenly they just have this available to draw on," says former Weissman Lab postdoc Tom Norman, a co-senior author of the paper.
The announcement credits the single-sequencing tool Perturb-seq and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing which introduced genetic changes into cells and then captured information about which RNAs expressed (uses single-cell RNA sequencing).

The researchers scaled the method to the entire genome using human blood cancer cell lines and noncancerous cells derived from the retina, ultimately using Perturb-seq across more than 2.5 million cells.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the news.