An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The lung damage in some people who have become ill after vaping nicotine or marijuana products resembles a chemical burn, doctors from the Mayo Clinic reported on Wednesday. Their findings are based on samples of lung tissue from 17 patients around the country whose biopsy specimens were sent to Mayo to be examined under the microscope by experts in lung pathology. Two samples came from patients who died. The findings were published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine and involved samples from 13 men and four women whose ages ranged from 19 to 67. About 70 percent had a history of vaping marijuana or cannabis oils. Eleven were in Arizona, five in Minnesota and one in Florida.

Medical investigators have been unable to identify exactly what is causing the lung damage, or even how many harmful substances are involved. They do not know whether the source is the liquids being vaped, or a toxin released from the materials used to make vaping devices. It is also unclear whether some devices used in vaping may be defective. But Dr. Brandon T. Larsen, a surgical pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz, said the Mayo researchers saw no signs of oil accumulating in the lung tissue. Instead, they saw many immune cells called macrophages with what he described as "the fine, foamy-looking appearance that is characteristic of chemical injuries." "So maybe we need to look more closely at the chemical compounds, and not just oils, but the chemical constituents, to figure out which ones are injurious," Dr. Larsen said. "All 17 of our cases show a pattern of injury in the lung that looks like a toxic chemical exposure, a toxic chemical fume exposure, or a chemical burn injury," said Dr. Brandon T. Larsen, a surgical pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. "To be honest, they look like the kind of change you would expect to see in an unfortunate worker in an industrial accident where a big barrel of toxic chemicals spills, and that person is exposed to toxic fumes and there is a chemical burn in the airways."

Dr. Larsen likened the injuries to those seen in people exposed to poisons like mustard gas, a chemical weapon used in World War I.

Most of the plastic bottles washing up on the rocky shores of Inaccessible Island, aptly named for its sheer cliffs rising from the middle of the South Atlantic, probably come from Chinese merchant ships, a study published this week said. From a report: The study offers fresh evidence that the vast garbage patches floating in the middle of oceans, which have sparked much consumer hand-wringing in recent years, are less the product of people dumping single-use plastics in waterways or on land, than they are the result of merchant marine vessels tossing their waste overboard by the ton. The authors of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, collected thousands of pieces of waste during visits to the tiny island in 1984, 2009 and again in 2018. The island is located roughly midway between Argentina and South Africa in the South Atlantic gyre, a vast whirlpool of currents that has created what has come to be known as an oceanic garbage patch. While initial inspections of the trash washing up on the island showed labels indicating it had come from South America, some 2,000 miles (3,000 kilometers) to the west, by 2018 three-quarters of the garbage appeared to originate from Asia, mostly China. Many of the plastic bottles had been crushed with their tops screwed on tight, as is customary on board ships to save space, said report author Peter Ryan, director of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings "erode public trust," critics said. From a report: Public health officials for years have urged Americans to limit consumption of red meat and processed meats because of concerns that these foods are linked to heart disease, cancer and other ills. But on Monday, in a remarkable turnabout, an international collaboration of researchers produced a series of analyses concluding that the advice, a bedrock of almost all dietary guidelines, is not backed by good scientific evidence. If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers concluded. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits. "The certainty of evidence for these risk reductions was low to very low," said Bradley Johnston, an epidemiologist at Dalhousie University in Canada and leader of the group publishing the new research in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The new analyses are among the largest such evaluations ever attempted and may influence future dietary recommendations. In many ways, they raise uncomfortable questions about dietary advice and nutritional research, and what sort of standards these studies should be held to. Already they have been met with fierce criticism by public health researchers. The American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other groups have savaged the findings and the journal that published them.

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Babies in the womb have extra lizard-like muscles in their hands that most will lose before they are born, medical scans reveal. They are probably one of the oldest, albeit fleeting, remnants of evolution seen in humans yet, biologists say, in the journal Development. They date them as 250 million years old -- a relic from when reptiles transitioned to mammals. It is unclear why the human body makes and then deletes them before birth. The biologists say the developmental step may be what makes thumbs dextrous. Thumbs, unlike other digits, retain an extra muscle.

The biologists are planning more work looking at other parts of the human body in detail. They have already studied the feet and know extra muscles develop and disappear there too while babies grow in the womb. Monkeys and apes still have these muscles and use them to climb and manipulate objects with their feet. Lead author Dr Rui Diogo, from the Howard University, said: "Some of the things we are losing, it's not that we are getting better humans and more progress. No. We are really losing things that will make super-humans. "Super-humans would be keeping those muscles because you would be able to move all your digits, including your feet, as thumbs. "We lost them because we do not need them." Dr Sergio Almecija, an anthropologist who studies ape and human evolution, at the American Museum of Natural History, said the findings provided a deeper appreciation of human development but raised many questions.

"The novelty of this study is that it allows us to visualize -- with precision -- when exactly during our development some structures appear and/or disappear," he said. "The important question for me now is, 'What else are we missing? What will we find when all the human body is inspected at this detail during its development?" 'What is causing certain structure to disappear and then to appear again? We can now see how it happens but what about the why?"

Aerospace startup Relativity Space -- the company that aims to launch the first fully 3D-printed rocket to orbit -- says it has raised all of the money it needs to launch its first mission and then enter commercial operations as early as 2021. After raising $140 million in its latest funding round, Relativity says its total funding now equals $185 million, which is enough money to carry the company through its first flights over the next couple of years. The Verge reports: Started by former engineers at Blue Origin and SpaceX, Relativity has grand ambitions to create all of its vehicles -- from the engines to the fuselage -- using 3D printing almost exclusively. The goal is to overhaul how rockets have been built for the last 50 years by taking people out of the manufacturing process and automating almost everything. By building rockets this way, Relativity claims it can drastically cut down costs by requiring fewer parts per rocket. Eventually, the company hopes to replicate this 3D-printing process on another world, like Mars, creating a rocket that can take off from the planet and return to Earth.

Right now, the company is focusing on its first rocket, the Terran 1, a small- to medium-sized vehicle being built with Relativity's specialized Stargate 3D printers in Los Angeles. Relativity says these updated printers could eventually create a Terran 1 rocket in less than 60 days from raw material. "Those are actually twice the print size of the prior version, and we have several of those already up and operational," says [Relativity Space CEO Tim Ellis] of the updated printers. Designed to stand about 100 feet tall, the Terran 1 rocket will be able to carry up to 2,755 pounds (1,250 kilograms) of payload, which is just 6 percent of the capacity of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. However, the company says it has increased the size of the vehicle's nose cone, or payload fairing, making it able to hold twice the volume as originally planned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: According to Bloomberg, top Russian geneticists held a "secret meeting" this summer with government health officials in Moscow to debate a bid by a scientist there, Denis Rebrikov, to create babies genetically modified with the gene-editing technology CRISPR. The first such children were born in China last year as part of a project to make HIV-resistant humans. That undertaking was halted amid pointed criticism of its ethical failings and a criminal investigation. The question now is whether Russia will grab the CRISPR baton where China dropped it. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russia's leader, declined to give Bloomberg a position, saying gene editing is not "a presidential issue."

However, Bloomberg reports that the Moscow gene-editing conclave was attended by pediatric endocrinologist Maria Vorontsova, who is Putin's eldest daughter (although this has never publicly confirmed by the Kremlin). Second-hand reports have Vorontsova saying she doesn't think scientific progress can be slowed but that it should be controlled -- or instance, by limiting production of CRISPR babies to "state" institutions. Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova told Bloomberg that "an ethics committee will deal with this very complicated issue." MIT notes that Putin has in the past likened [CRISPR] technology to a nuclear bomb and cited the possibility of creating soldiers who feel no pain. According to Bloomberg, Putin last year directed $2 billion to be spent on genetic research that he said will "determine the future of the whole world."

A new telescope will seek out planets that resemble Earth from a height of around 125,000 feet, using special optical technology that will filter out light from the stars they orbit to provide a better view. From a report: The telescope is the product of UMass Lowell, and took off on Tuesday morning from Fort Sumner, New Mexico aboard a helium balloon roughly the size of an entire football field. The balloon had to be that big to carry the telescope, which itself weighs around 1,500 lbs, and measures 14 feet long by 3 feet wide. The so-called 'PICTURE-C' telescope will operate at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere for a clear view, and it's a reusable piece of equipment that will stay aloft for several hours at at time before being decoupled and making its way back via parachute-assisted descent.

Ten hospitals -- three in Alabama and seven in Australia -- have been hit with paralyzing ransomware attacks that are affecting their ability to take new patients, it was widely reported on Tuesday. Ars Technica reports: All three hospitals that make up the DCH Health System in Alabama were closed to new patients on Tuesday as officials there coped with an attack that paralyzed the health network's computer system. The hospitals -- DCH Regional Medical Center in Tuscaloosa, Northport Medical Center, and Fayette Medical Center -- are turning away "all but the most critical new patients" at the time this post was going live. Local ambulances were being instructed to take patients to other hospitals when possible. Patients coming to DCH emergency rooms faced the possibility of being transferred to another hospital once they were stabilized.

"A criminal is limiting our ability to use our computer systems in exchange for an as-yet unknown payment," DCH representatives wrote in a release. "Our hospitals have implemented our emergency procedures to ensure safe and efficient operations in the event technology dependent on computers is not available." At least seven hospitals in Australia, meanwhile, were also feeling the effects of a ransomware attack that struck on Monday. The hospitals in Gippsland and southwest Victoria said they were rescheduling some patient services as they responded to a "cyber health incident." According to news reports, hospital computer systems remained locked down at seven hospitals on Tuesday more than 24 hours after the attack struck. "An official said it would take weeks to secure and restore damaged networks," reports Ars Technica. "The official said there was no indication that patient records had been accessed."

A powerful disaster-inducing geomagnetic storm is an inevitability in the near future, likely causing blackouts, satellite failures, and more. From a report: Unlike other threats to our planet, such as supervolcanoes or asteroids, the time frame for a cataclysmic geomagnetic storm -- caused by eruptions from our sun playing havoc with Earth's magnetic field -- is comparatively short. It could happen in the next decade -- or in the next century. All we know is, based on previous events, our planet will almost definitely be hit relatively soon, probably within 100 years. Geomagnetic storms are caused by sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, resulting in calamities to which our modern technological society is becoming ever more susceptible.

Most experts regard the Carrington Event, a so-called superstorm that occurred in September 1859, as the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record. But new data suggest that a later storm in May 1921 may have equaled or even eclipsed the Carrington Event in intensity, causing at least three major fires in the U.S., Canada and Sweden -- and highlighting the damaging effects these storms can have on Earth today. In a paper published in the journal Space Weather, Jeffrey Love of the U.S. Geological Survey and his colleagues reexamined the intensity of the 1921 event, known as the New York Railroad Storm, in greater detail than ever before.

Although different measures of intensity exist, geomagnetic storms are often rated on an index called disturbance storm time (Dst) -- a way of gauging global magnetic activity by averaging out values for the strength of Earth's magnetic field measured at multiple locations. Our planet's baseline Dst level is about -20 nanoteslas (nT), with a "superstorm" condition defined as occurring when levels fall below -250 nT. Studies of the very limited magnetic data from the Carrington Event peg its intensity at anywhere from -850 to -1,050 nT. According to Love's study, the 1921 storm, however, came in at about -907 nT. "The 1921 storm could have been more intense than the 1859 storm," Love says. "Prior to our paper, [the 1921 storm] was understood to be intense, but how intense wasn't really clear."

Lucas123 writes: Like Apple and Intel, Amazon is piloting an in-house program for employees that in addition to healthcare insurance affords workers access to telemedicine and at-home visits from a contracted provider. While growing in popularity, in-house healthcare programs, which even include corporate clinics, are seen by some as an example of the growth in fragmented care or mimicking corporate care during the industrial era when factories had worksite clinics to get employees back to work faster. "[Corporate-based virtual healthcare programs, like Amazon's] is yet one more example of fragmented care," says Cynthia Burghard, a research director with IDC's Health Insights. "Back in the day, manufacturers had worksite clinics to take care of workers injured on the job mostly so they could get back to work sooner. The difference with what Amazon is doing compared to what the [Deloitte] survey shows is that the Amazon offering is disconnected to other care providers rather than under the supervision of an employee's providers." [The Deloitte survey found that 66% of physicians said telemedicine improved patient care access and 52% said it boosted patient satisfaction.]

Vik Panda, lead of operations for French sleep company Dreem, had this to say: "The news is that Jeff Bezos' company, and others like it, don't need anyone's permission to start building and paying for their own parallel healthcare systems, little by little. If Amazon replaces the existing health care system bit by bit, and employees of self-insured companies migrate to this new digital health system, do we all get to come along?" Amazon Care, Panda said, represents a wake-up call for providers, payers and employers because telehealth is not just about video chats with a doctor or wearable fitness trackers. "...It's a new operating system for health, and big technology companies are not going to wait for everyone else to figure it out."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: So there's a British woman who's been in the news recently for diagnosing herself with a sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation. She sleeps in a $500 EMF-blocking sack and has reportedly stayed in the sack, from time to time, for 30-hour stretches. The woman -- 70-year-old Rosi Gladwell of Totnes, Devon -- helps lead a small advocacy group on the issue of EMF-related health issues, and she even got the mayor of the Spanish village where she now lives to look into ways to limit Wi-Fi access for residents. She fears that the introduction of 5G mobile networks will kill her. Now seems like a good time to remind readers that there is no evidence to support the idea of "electromagnetic hypersensitivity." The World Health Organization calls it "idiopathic environmental intolerance with attribution to electromagnetic fields," or IEI-EMF.

Since diagnosing herself years ago, Gladwell has taken to sleeping in a sack woven with silver and copper and wraps herself in a protective sheet, according to several British news outlets. (You can find similar on Amazon.) She says that exposures to Wi-Fi and other EMF make her weak, short of breath, and give her pins-and-needle feelings in her face. She spends much of her time in a remote Spanish vacation home where her exposure to EMF is reduced. Still, Gladwell is holding firm in her thinking. Two years ago, she even reportedly got the mayor of the Spanish village Polopos to consider limiting the village's Wi-Fi access. "I am immensely impressed with our local mayor and how seriously he is taking this," Gladwell told the Olive Press at the time. "When talking about the dangers of Wi-Fi technology, he came up with the idea of limiting the hours of access in the village by putting timer switches on the routers in the school, Town Hall, and doctor's surgery." It's unclear if the town enacted the restrictions.

The team behind a pioneering biological experiment sent to the lunar far side has released an image showing two green leaves grown on the moon. From a report: The experiment began shortly after China's Chang'e-4 spacecraft made the first ever landing on the far side of the moon, on 3 January this year. Cotton, arabidopsis and potato seeds, and fruit-fly eggs and yeast were all aboard the 2.6-kilogram mini biosphere, but only the cotton produced positive results. Image processing has now shown that two cotton leaves had grown -- rather than just one as initially thought -- in what was the first biological growth experiment on the moon. All the species died with the onset of the first lunar night, with no power to protect the canister from temperatures that reached as low as minus 190 degrees Celsius. The cotton leaves were dead within one lunar daytime, or around 14 and a half Earth days. The experiment continued until May, however, in order to test the longevity of the apparatus. The Chang'e-4 lander and rover meanwhile have just started their tenth lunar daytime in Von Karman crater.

Elon Musk has laid out an ambitious future for his spaceship project, the effort to deliver people to the moon and Mars. Marina Koren, writing for The Atlantic: The whole thing felt like an Apple event. The weeks of anticipation and breathless guesses from fans and critics. Onstage, the greatest-hits reel highlighting the company's beloved products over the years. A grand walk-through of the next product's features: the sleek design, the impressive specs, simulations of how it's going to work. A man with a mic, both salesman and visionary, looking out at the crowd. It is strange to compare the unveiling of a spaceship to the annual release of a smartphone, but this is the reality Elon Musk has conjured with SpaceX, and in a relatively short amount of time.

Musk gave a talk about SpaceX's prototype spaceship, Starship, on Saturday night in Boca Chica, Texas, a small coastal town not far from the U.S.-Mexico border, which SpaceX picked to house this ambitious project just a few years ago. The vessel, roomy enough to fit 100 passengers, will be shot into orbit by a massive, reusable rocket, which the company is also building and which could be as powerful as the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo astronauts. Starship has multiple missions; it is supposed to shuttle people on swift journeys to different cities on Earth, as well as carry them on long-haul flights to the moon and Mars.

The event came 11 years after SpaceX reached orbit for the first time with the earliest version of its Falcon rockets. Since then, the company has flown rockets to orbit over and over again, then landed the accompanying boosters upright on the ground and reused them, an industry first for orbital missions. The company has launched commercial satellites, government spy missions, and cargo to the International Space Station. It shot a Tesla toward Mars and sprinkled internet satellites around Earth. Musk founded SpaceX to someday send people to Mars, and he has said for years that he will make space travel as easy as hopping on a plane. As he stood in front of a gleaming steel spaceship, it was tempting to start believing him. "It's really gonna be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back," Musk said.

Thelasko quotes the BBC: Astronomers have discovered a giant planet that, they say, should not exist, according to current theories. The Jupiter-like world is unusually large compared with its host star, contradicting a widely held idea about the way planets form.

The star, which lies 284 trillion km away, is an M-type red dwarf - the most common type in our galaxy. An international team of astronomers has reported its findings in the journal Science.... The distant star has a mass that's, at most, 270 times larger than the planet. For comparison, the Sun is about 1,050 times more massive than Jupiter.

The finding challenges the widely held idea of planet formation known as core accretion. "Usually we think of giant planets starting life as an icy-core, orbiting far out in a disc of gas surrounding the young star, and then growing rapidly by attracting gas on to itself," said Prof Peter Wheatley, from the University of Warwick, UK, who was not involved with the latest study.. "But the authors argue that the discs around small stars don't provide enough material for this to work. Instead, they consider it more likely that the planet formed suddenly when part of the disc collapsed due to its own gravity."

An anonymous reader quotes Nature: The race to engineer the next-generation banana is on. The Colombian government confirmed last month that a banana-killing fungus has invaded the Americas -- the source of much of the world's banana supply. The invasion has given new urgency to efforts to create fruit that can withstand the scourge.

Scientists are using a mix of approaches to save the banana. A team in Australia has inserted a gene from wild bananas into the top commercial variety -- known as the Cavendish -- and are currently testing these modified bananas in field trials. Researchers are also turning to the powerful, precise gene-editing tool CRISPR to boost the Cavendish's resilience against the fungus, known as Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4). Breeding TR4 resistance into the Cavendish using conventional methods isn't possible because the variety is sterile and propagated by cloning. So the only way to save the Cavendish may be to tweak its genome, says Randy Ploetz, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida in Homestead. The variety accounts for 99% of global banana shipments...

[T]he fungus is a tough opponent. It can't be killed with fungicides, and it can linger in soil for up to 30 years. That has helped TR4 slowly spread around the world, probably by hitching rides on contaminated equipment or in soil. The strain began destroying banana crops in the 1990s in Asia before invading Australia and countries in the Middle East and Africa. Now TR4 is in the Americas, and researchers say that the Cavendish could become virtually extinct in the next several decades unless they can modify it to resist the fungus.

An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk is speaking live right now on SpaceX's YouTube channel, promising an update on his plans for "Starship". Dressed entirely in black -- and joking about the wind -- he first thanked the SpaceX team, as well as its suppliers, for an "incredible vehicle....the most inspiring thing I've ever seen" and then promised tonight's speech would "inspire the public and get people excited about our future in space." In addition to solving earth's problems, he said, "We also need things that make us glad to be alive...and be fired up about the future... Space exploration is one of those things."

He also says it's possible for us to become a space-faring civilization, "being out there among the stars," adding "We're faced with a choice. Which future do you want?" Looking back over the history of SpaceX, he describes their goal of creating a rapidly reusable -- and fully reusable -- rocket, and traces their progress on a long-term goal "to make space travel like air travel." (He calls earth "a deep gravity well" with a thick atmosphere, adding "this is a tough but not impossible thing.")

But is he preparing a bigger announcement?
UPDATE (9/29/2019): Summarizing the event, The Los Angeles Times reported that "A prototype of SpaceX's Starship Mars spaceship could reach orbit in less than six months and fly humans next year... Musk did not give an updated timeline for when Starship -- essentially a second-stage rocket and lander -- would go to Mars. SpaceX has said its 'aspirational goal' is to send cargo missions to the Red Planet in 2022."

GeekWire added that SpaceX is also "working on technologies to convert carbon dioxide from Mars' atmosphere and water ice extracted from Martian soil into methane and oxygen, which are the propellants for Starship's Raptor engines."

"In response to a question, Musk said the tunneling technologies being pioneered by another one of his ventures, the Boring Company, could come in handy for building underground habitats Mars. And he acknowledged that Tesla's electric-vehicle technology could be applied to Mars rovers as well. 'Teslas will work on Mars...because electric cars don't need air."

"Electric flight is becoming a tantalizingly close reality for shorter-range service," writes ZDNet. "But increasing passenger carrying capacity and flight times to economically accommodate longer routes will require a major rethink of crucial components."

pgmrdlm quotes their report: GE is partnering with the NASA Advanced Air Vehicles Program on a new generation of inverter using GE's silicon Carbide technology. The project aims to deliver a next gen inverter that provides significantly increased power density over existing technology but is small enough to support electric flight."We're essentially packing 1 MW of power into the size of a compact suitcase that will convert enough electric power to enable hybrid-electric propulsion architectures for commercial airplanes,"says Konrad Weeber, Chief Engineer of Electric Power at GE Research. "We have successfully built and demonstrated inverters at ground level that meet the power, size and efficiency requirements of electric flight. The next step is to build and demonstrate one that is altitude ready...."

GE makes an ideal development partner for NASA because it's a vertically-integrated, one stop shop. GE designs everything from chips to system level architecture, which makes optimizing a final design to conserve space and weight much more practical over cobbling together a system from multiple contractors.

NASA engineers want to create a rocket engine powered by nuclear fusion. "A nuclear rocket engine would be twice as efficient as the chemical engines powering rockets today," reports Wired. "But despite their conceptual simplicity, small-scale fission reactors are challenging to build and risky to operate because they produce toxic waste. Space travel is dangerous enough without having to worry about a nuclear meltdown. But for future human missions to the moon and Mars, NASA believes such risks may be necessary." From the report: At the center of NASA's nuclear rocket program is Bill Emrich, the man who literally wrote the book on nuclear propulsion. "You can do chemical propulsion to Mars, but it's really hard," says Emrich. "Going further than the moon is much better with nuclear propulsion." Emrich has been researching nuclear propulsion since the early '90s, but his work has taken on a sense of urgency as the Trump administration pushes NASA to put boots on the moon ASAP in preparation for a journey to Mars. Although you don't need a nuclear engine to get to the moon, it would be an invaluable testing ground for the technology, which will almost certainly be used on any crewed mission to Mars.

Let's get one thing clear: A nuclear engine won't hoist a rocket into orbit. That's too risky; if a rocket with a hot nuclear reactor blew up on the launch pad, you could end up with a Chernobyl-scale disaster. Instead, a regular chemically propelled rocket would hoist a nuclear-powered spacecraft into orbit, which would only then fire up its nuclear reactor. The massive amount of energy produced by these reactors could be used to sustain human outposts on other worlds and cut the travel time to Mars in half. [...] But before a nuclear rocket engine gets its first flight, NASA needs to overhaul its regulations for launching nuclear materials. In August, the White House issued a memo that tasked NASA with developing safety protocols for operating nuclear reactors in space. Once they're adopted by NASA, the stage will be set for the first flight of a nuclear engine as soon as 2024. This coincides with Trump's deadline to return American astronauts to the moon; maybe this time they'll be hitching a ride on a nuclear rocket.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Million-year-old ice buried deep in Antarctica could hold crucial information about the planet's past and help climate predictions. And scientists with the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) are a step closer to unearthing it. On Monday, they unveiled a drill designed to reach three kilometers below the surface of the frozen continent. The ice, believed to be up to 1.5m years old, is the target of several international research projects.

"What we're embarking on over the next few years is to solve one of the last great problems in climate science," glaciologist Tas van Ommen said. "We'll see in the ice, tiny bubbles that are trapped between snowflakes in the ice as it gets buried," van Ommen said. "These tiny bubbles are time capsules of past atmosphere. "We want to get that ice, analyze those time capsules and understand what [carbon dioxide] did in that period around one million years ago when the climate was changing." About 1 million years ago the Earth shifted from a 40,000-year ice age cycle to a 100,000-year cycle, van Ommen said. "[Carbon dioxide] is tied up in that change and it changes the rate at which ice ages have worked in the past," he added. "We need to understand if the CO2 we put in the atmosphere will have long-term consequences for the Earth in the future." According to the report, the drilling is expected to begin in 2021 and take four years to complete.

While fecal transplants have proven to be quite successful, researchers are now experimenting with swapping vaginal fluids to improve health. "If [vaginal microbiota transplants (VMTs)] work as researchers hypothesize, they could rub out many common problems at once," reports Ars Technica. "And based on what we know of vaginas, they could be far less messy than transplants involving poop." From the report: The basic idea behind VMTs is identical to that of poop transplants, aka fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs), which have been around for centuries. Generally, FMTs aim to use microbe-laden bodily products -- in this case excrement -- to introduce or restore rich, complex microbial communities into the innards of ailing recipients. In healthy human intestines, thriving microbial inhabitants are involved in everything from cycling hormones and influencing immune responses to protecting from pathogenic germs, not to mention helping extract nutrients from food. When these communities die off, get out of balance (a condition generally called dysbiosis), or become overrun by disease-causing germs, our health can wane. That's where FMTs come in.

Modern FMT recipients now take in the goods by piping them into their bowels, gulping them in capsules, or injecting them in enemas. And researchers are looking into using FMTs to treat a range of conditions including obesity, food allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, depression and multiple sclerosis. But despite the fact that the medicine has come a long way from serving poopy soup, researchers are still straining to squeeze out all of FMTs potential. So far, the only condition for which there's firm evidence that FMTs are effective is recalcitrant Clostridium difficile infections, which cause severe diarrhea -- echoing the centuries-old uses of FMTs. [...] Vaginal microbiota transplants, on the other hand, may not face such onerous hurdles. Based on what researchers have gathered so far, the microbial communities of a healthy vagina are relatively simple compared with that of the gut, and they play key roles in health.