Launched in 2004, the ESA's Rosetta space probe spent 10 years flying to the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67p), circled it for two years, and then culminated its mission with a controlled hard landing. Now video artist Christian Stangl and composer Wolfgang Stangl have teamed up to create The Comet, a 3 minute 25 second movie made from digitally-enhanced footage derived from the images the ESA released from the mission. "Watch the beauty of an active alien body, far out in the depths of our solar system."

Syfy Wire calls it "a moving and stunning tribute to this mission... The comet is as alien a place as we have in the solar system."

They also link to the ESA's trippy related video "Ambition" from 2014.

An anonymous reader quotes Space.com: India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter attempted to drop a lander named Vikram near the lunar south pole yesterday afternoon (Sept. 6), but mission controllers lost contact with the descending craft when it was just 1.3 miles (2.1 kilometers) above the gray dirt. As of early Saturday morning (Sept. 7), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) still had not officially declared Vikram dead. But comments by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi leave little room for optimism...

But Chandrayaan-2's journey isn't over yet, because the orbiter is still going strong. In fact, its yearlong moon mission has barely begun; the spacecraft slipped into lunar orbit just last month. Since then, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter has been studying Earth's natural satellite with eight different science instruments, from an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers). The probe's data should eventually allow researchers to compile detailed maps of the lunar surface, revealing key insights about the moon's elemental composition, formation and evolution, ISRO officials have said.

Some of these maps will attempt to assess the moon's stores of water ice. A decade ago, Chandrayaan-2's predecessor, the orbiter Chandrayaan-1, showed that water is widespread across the lunar surface, especially at the poles... Vikram was supposed to deploy a rover named Pragyan, which would have mapped out the elemental composition of the landing site, potentially providing up-close information about ice in the area.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A doctor in India has performed a series of five percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures on patients who were 20 miles away from him. The feat was pulled off using a precision vascular robot developed by Corindus. The results of the surgeries, which were successful, have just been published in EClinicalMedicine, a spin-off of medical journal The Lancet. During the remote procedures, Dr. Tejas Patel, Chairman and Chief Interventional Cardiologist of the Apex Heart Institute in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, used Corindus' CorPath GRX robot and a hardwired internet connection, manipulating the robot with a set of joysticks and a video monitor. Corindus has performed several remote test cases in the U.S. since, but Dr. Patel's procedure marked a major milestone in medicine. "Remote procedures have the potential to transform how we deliver care when treating the most time-sensitive illnesses such as heart attack and stroke," says Mark Toland, President and Chief Executive Officer of Corindus Vascular Robotics. "The success of this study paves the way for large-scale, long-distance telerobotic platforms across the globe, and its publication in Lancet's EClinicalMedicine demonstrates the transformative nature of telerobotics. While remote robotic procedures are still in the early stages of development, it is clear we are on track to expand patients' access to care, while reducing their time to treatment."

According to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE, the "chatter" from multiple bird species can be a useful cue to squirrels and other animals that there is no imminent threat in the area. Phys.Org reports: To test this hypothesis, the researchers observed the behavior of 54 wild Eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) in public parks and residential areas in Ohio in response to threat, which they simulated by playing back a recording of the call of a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), a common predator of both squirrels and small birds. They followed the predator's call with a playback of either multi-species songbird bird chatter or ambient sounds lacking bird calls and monitored the behavior of each squirrel for 3 minutes.

The researchers found that all squirrels showed an increase in predator vigilance behaviors, such as freezing, looking up, or fleeing, after they heard the hawk's call. However, squirrels that were played bird chatter afterwards performed fewer vigilance behaviors and returned to normal levels of watchfulness more quickly than squirrels that did not hear bird calls after the hawk's call. This suggests that the squirrels are able to tap into the casual chatter of many bird species as an indicator of safety, allowing them to quickly return to getting on with normal behaviors like foraging rather than remaining on high alert after a threat has passed. "We knew that squirrels eavesdropped on the alarm calls of some bird species, but we were excited to find that they also eavesdrop on non-alarm sounds that indicate the birds feel relatively safe," the authors said. "Perhaps in some circumstances, cues of safety could be as important as cues of danger."

Medical experts and federal health officials on Friday warned the public about the dangers of vaping and discouraged using the devices as the number of people with a severe lung illness linked to vaping has more than doubled to 450 possible cases in 33 states. The New York Times reports: The number of deaths linked to vaping rose to four from two on Friday. The Indiana Department of Health announced the third death, saying only that the victim was older than 18. Hours later, officials in Minnesota confirmed that a fourth person had died. The patient, who was 65, had a history of lung disease, but state officials said his acute lung injury was linked to vaping illicit T.H.C. products.The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health was investigating a possible fifth death, saying on Friday afternoon that the fatality was associated with the use of e-cigarettes, also known as vaping. "There is clearly an epidemic that begs for an urgent response," Dr. David C. Christiani of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health wrote in an editorial published on Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The editorial called on doctors to discourage their patients from using e-cigarettes and for a broader effort to increase public awareness about "the harmful effects of vaping." Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoed that call in a briefing. "While this investigation is ongoing, people should consider not using e-cigarette products," said Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, who is leading the C.D.C.'s investigation into the illness.

India's first soft landing on the Moon today appears to have ended in failure after the country's robotic Vikram lander seemingly crashed into the lunar surface during its powered descent to the ground. The Verge reports: India would have become the fourth country to land a spacecraft intact on the Moon. But for now, only the United States, Russia, and China hold that title. The Vikram lander was a critical part of India's Chandrayaan-2 mission -- a project aimed at learning more about the unexplored and highly intriguing south pole of the Moon. Numerous lunar spacecraft have gathered enough evidence about this region to suggest that significant amounts of water ice might be hiding on the south pole, likely in frigid craters that are in permanent shadow. India's goal with Chandrayaan-2 was to land vehicles in this region to get a better understanding of the area's composition and learn just how much water ice might be lurking there.

Vikram was carrying a rover called Pragyan, and together the two vehicles were meant to explore the south pole region in up-close detail using a series of instruments, including a seismometer to measure lunar quakes and X-rays to help figure out the composition of the dirt (and potential water ice). But just a few minutes before Vikram was scheduled to touch down on the Moon, data of the lander from inside India's mission control center showed the vehicle to be slightly off course. When Vikram was about 1.3 miles (2.1 kilometers) above the surface, India lost communication with the lander. India has yet to give official confirmation on whether or not the lander did, indeed, crash.

It's a big day for India's highly audacious Chandrayaan-2 mission. From a report: The nation will attempt to land its lunar orbit on the moon's surface shortly as it inches closer to become the fourth in the world to complete a successful lunar landing. ISRO, India's equivalent of NASA, is live streaming the landing on its website, and YouTube channel. The landing is scheduled for between 1pm and 2pm Pacific Time (4pm to 5pm Eastern Time; 8pm to 9pm GMT). ISRO launched its 142 feet tall spacecraft from the the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on July 15. The spacecraft consists of an orbiter, a lander named Vikram (named after Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India's space program), and a six-wheeled rover named Pragyaan (Sanskrit for "wisdom"). Earlier this week, the lander that carried the rover detached from the orbiter. The mission's budget is just $141 million, significantly lower than those of other countries, and less than half of the recently released blockbuster "Avengers: Endgame."

According to a new study, those who drink more than two glasses of soda or any soft drink per day have a high risk of dying. From a report: Experts studied more than 450,000 people from 10 European countries for up to 19 years and found that those who had more than two glasses of soda per day had a higher risk of dying than people who drank less than one glass per month. The study, published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, stated that men or women who drank two or more glasses a day of sugar-sweetened soft drinks had a higher risk of dying from digestive disorders, while those who drank the same amount of diet drinks had higher risks of dying from cardiovascular disease. The findings note that none of the subjects had cancer, diabetes, heart disease or stroke prior to the study.

pacopico writes: Aerospace technology has gotten better. The price of rocket launches has come down. So much so that a group of space friends in Silicon Valley now think it's possible to create their own settlement on the moon for less than $3 billion. They've formed a non-profit called the Open Lunar Foundation that looks to begin launching probes to the lunar surface and then to start work on a habitat. The idea is to build a settlement in the spirit of open-source technology where data and hardware designs can be shared and where policies around the settlement are shaped by people all over the world rather than a particular nation state or billionaire. So far the team is small and working off a few million dollars, but there's an all-star cast of advisors, including former astronauts, NASA heads and aerospace execs.

hackingbear writes: A team of researchers at China's Zhejiang University were able to create a gel that makes tooth enamel repair itself, they wrote in the science journal Science Advances, a development that could spell the end of fillings as an (unreliable) method to repair cavities which are one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in humans. The gel succeeded in making the enamel repair itself within only 48 hours. Though it now only manages to generate a layer of about 3 micrometres -- about 400 times thinner than undamaged enamel, the researcher says the gel could be repeatedly applied to build up this repair layer. The team is now testing the gel in mice and hopes to later test it in people.

A reader shares a report form Space.com: There's a puzzling mystery going on in the universe. Measurements of the rate of cosmic expansion using different methods keep turning up disagreeing results. The situation has been called a "crisis." The problem centers on what's known as the Hubble constant. Named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble, this unit describes how fast the universe is expanding at different distances from Earth. Using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Planck satellite, scientists estimate the rate to be 46,200 mph per million light-years (or, using cosmologists' units, 67.4 kilometers/second per megaparsec). But calculations using pulsating stars called Cepheids suggest it is 50,400 mph per million light-years (73.4 km/s/Mpc). If the first number is right, it means scientists have been measuring distances to faraway objects in the universe wrong for many decades. But if the second is correct, then researchers might have to accept the existence of exotic, new physics. Astronomers, understandably, are pretty worked up about this discrepancy. In April, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirmed that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang.

"We are measuring something fundamentally different," said Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University. "One is a measurement of how fast the universe is expanding today, as we see it. The other is a prediction based on the physics of the early universe and on measurements of how fast it ought to be expanding. If these values don't agree, there becomes a very strong likelihood that we're missing something in the cosmological model that connects the two eras."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Chicago Tribune: Plastic debris makes up about 80% of the litter on Great Lakes shorelines. Nearly 22 million pounds enter the Great Lakes each year -- more than half of which pours into Lake Michigan, according to estimates calculated by the Rochester Institute of Technology. Regardless of size, as plastics linger in the water, they continue to break down from exposure to sunlight and abrasive waves. Microplastics have been observed in the guts of many Lake Michigan fish, in drinking water and even in beer. Perhaps the most worrisome aspect is that the impact of microplastics on human health remains unclear. Plastics are known to attract industrial contaminants already in the water, like PCBs, while expelling their own chemical additives intended to make them durable, including flame retardants.

While there are still more questions than answers about potential health consequences, one thing is clear: Southern Lake Michigan is a hot spot for plastics. Once plastics enter the lake, they follow lake currents, potentially migrating to other states but largely remaining trapped at the southern end. What goes into Lake Michigan typically stays there. While water from the other Great Lakes moves downstream, Lake Michigan's only major outflow is the Chicago River (and the water it intermittently exchanges with Lake Huron at the Straits of Mackinac). As a result, a drop of water that enters Lake Michigan stays for about 62 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A study published last year found that around 85% of fish caught from three major Lake Michigan tributaries -- the Milwaukee, St. Joseph and Muskegon rivers -- had microplastics in their digestive tracts.

"In the sample size of 74 fish representing 11 species, the invasive round goby had the highest concentrations, possibly from eating filter-feeding quagga mussels, which scientists suspect may be accumulating microplastics," the Chicago Tribune reports. "While detecting microplastics in the guts of Lake Michigan fish is significant, scientists are now studying if these pollutants build up or are excreted by the fish."

Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that uses porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), to suck water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and then release it as liquid water. Science Magazine reports: One recent market report predicted that sales of MOFs for applications including storing and detecting gases will balloon to $410 million annually over the next 5 years, up from $70 million this year. "Ten years ago, MOFs showed promise for a lot of applications," says Omar Farha, a MOF chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Now, that promise has become a reality." One application is Yaghi's, which he hopes will help provide drinking water for the estimated one-third of the world's population living in water-stressed regions. Yaghi and his colleagues first developed a zirconium-based MOF in 2014 that could harvest and release water. But at $160 per kilogram, zirconium is too expensive for bulk use. So, last year, his team came up with an alternative called MOF-303, based on aluminum, which costs just $3 per kilogram. In the desert of Arizona, Yaghi and his team placed their MOF in a small, clear plastic container. They kept it open to the air at night, allowing the MOF to absorb water vapor. They then closed the container and exposed the MOF to sunlight, which drove liquid water from it -- but the harvest was only about 0.2 liters per kilogram of MOF per day.

At last week's meeting of the American Chemical Society and in the 27 August issue of ACS Central Science, Yaghi reported that his team has devised a new and far more productive water harvester. By exploiting MOF-303's ability to fill and empty its pores in just minutes, the team can make the new device complete dozens of cycles daily. Supported by a solar panel to power a fan and heater, which speed the cycles, the device produces up to 1.3 liters of water per kilogram of MOF per day from desert air. Yaghi expects further improvements to boost that number to 8 to 10 liters per day. Last year, he formed a company called Water Harvesting that this fall plans to release a microwave-size device able to provide up to 8 liters per day. The company promises a scaled-up version next year that will produce 22,500 liters per day, enough to supply a small village. "We're making water mobile," Yaghi says. "It's like taking a wired phone and making a wireless phone."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Embattled lab-testing startup uBiome Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday and put its assets up for sale after suspending testing of its clinical products. The San Francisco-based company filed for chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., and said it has lined up an $8 million bankruptcy loan to keep its business open while it looks for a buyer. The company, which is under federal investigation for its billing practices, laid off around half of its global workforce in July.

UBiome had been trying to build a business on testing patients' microbiomes based on emerging science that suggests microorganisms in the gut and other parts of the body can play a role in health. The startup had raised $83 million in a financing round from investors that included 8VC and Y Combinator. But the company has suspended the two lab tests for which it was billing insurance companies. Some of the companies had already largely or completely stopped paying claims. UBiome co-founders Jessica Richman and Zac Apte, who were earlier suspended from their positions as co-chief executives, resigned from the company's board. In June, the board appointed Curtis Solsvig of restructuring firm Goldin Associates as acting CEO.

sciencehabit writes: Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code. "This is pretty solid stuff," says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages -- those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example -- move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've spent much time thinking about the political divide in the United States, you've hopefully noted how bloody weird it is. Somehow, just about every topic that people want to argue about splits into two camps. If you visualize the vast array of topics you could have an opinion about as a switchboard full of toggles, it seems improbable that so many people in each camp should have nearly identical switchboards, but they do. This can even extend to factual issues, like science -- one camp typically does not accept that climate change is real and human-caused. How in the world do we end up with these opinion sets? And why does something like climate change start an inter-camp argument, while other things like the physics behind airplane design enjoy universal acceptance?

One obvious way to explain these opinions is to look for underlying principles that connect them. Maybe it's ideologically consistent to oppose both tax increases and extensive government oversight of pesticide products. But can you really draw a straight line from small-government philosophy to immigration attitudes? Or military funding? A new study by a Cornell team led by Michael Macy approaches these questions with inspiration from an experiment involving, of all things, downloading indie music. That study set up separate "worlds" in which participants checked out new music with the aid of information about which songs other people in their experimental world were choosing. It showed that the songs that were "hits" weren't always the same -- there was a significant role for chance, as a song that got trending early in the experiment had a leg up.

Michigan is poised to become the first US state to ban online and retail sales of flavored e-cigarettes. From a report: The ban, which would last six months, comes at the direction of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer from the state's Department of Health and Human Services, according to a statement Wednesday. "Companies selling vaping products are using candy flavors to hook children on nicotine and misleading claims to promote the belief that these products are safe. That ends today," Whitmer said. The ban also covers the marketing of vaping products with words like clean, safe and healthy. Whitmer also ordered the Michigan Department of Transportation to enforce a statute that already exists, barring the advertisement of vaping products on billboards.

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday took action to avoid a collision with a SpaceX broadband satellite after a bug in SpaceX's on-call paging system prevented the company from getting a crucial update. Ars Technica reports: "For the first time ever, ESA has performed a 'collision avoidance maneuver' to protect one of its satellites from colliding with a 'mega constellation,'" the ESA said on Twitter. The "mega constellation" ESA referred to is SpaceX's Starlink broadband system, which is in the early stages of deployment but could eventually include nearly 12,000 satellites. Action had to be taken because the ESA's Aeolus satellite and a Starlink satellite were on a course that carried more than a 1-in-10,000 chance of a collision. According to the ESA, the Earth-observation satellite Aeolus "fired its thrusters, moving it off a collision course with a SpaceX satellite in their Starlink constellation." "SpaceX explained in a statement today that it didn't initially take action because of early estimates that the risk of collision was much lower than it turned out to be," the report adds. "SpaceX said it would have coordinated with ESA to avoid a collision once the estimates got worse, if only the paging-system bug hadn't prevented SpaceX from getting an update on the collision probability. SpaceX said it is trying to fix the bug to prevent such mishaps in the future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People who regularly consume soft drinks have a higher risk of an early death, researchers have found, with the trend seen for both sugared and artificially sweetened drinks. While experts say the study cannot prove soft drinks are a driver of an increased risk of death, they say the work -- which is the largest study of its kind -- supports recent public health efforts to reduce consumption of soft drinks, such as the UK's sugar tax. Writing in the journal Jama Internal Medicine, Dr Neil Murphy, a co-author of the research from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and colleagues report how they analyzed data from more than 450,000 people, 70% of whom were women, across 10 European countries including the UK. Participants had an average age of just over 50, and those with health conditions such as cancer, heart disease or diabetes at the outset were not included in the analysis. Individuals joined the study between 1992 and 2000 and were then followed up for an average of 16 years, during which time more than 41,600 deaths were recorded.

When participants signed up they were asked a number of questions about aspects of their lifestyle such as exercise, smoking and weight as well as diet and nutrition -- including their average consumption of drinks such as fizzy drinks, fruit squash and energy drinks. Fruit juice consumption was not included. The results show 9.3% of those who drank less than one glass of soft drink a month died during the study, compared with 11.5% of those who drank two or more 250ml glasses a day. The team say that once factors such as body mass index, diet, physical activity, smoking and education were taken into account, that translates to a 17% higher risk of death among those consuming two glasses a day compared with those drinking less than one glass a month.

Scientists have developed a fingerprint of Earth from space that could one day help identify other habitable worlds light-years from our own. From a report: If researchers find a planet that matched Earth's fingerprint -- which shows what Earth would look like in infrared if seen by an alien civilization -- out there in the universe, it could indicate they've found a habitable world. The fingerprint -- detailed in a new study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society -- was created by using data collected by the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment onboard the SCISAT satellite. That data specifically looks at the composition of Earth's atmosphere as sunlight passes through it, revealing methane, ozone and other molecules that could indicate life.