"A Boston study published this month suggests people who tend to be optimistic are likelier than others to live to be 85 years old or more," reports NPR: That finding was independent of other factors thought to influence life's length -- such as "socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors," the researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say... The study included 69,744 women and 1,429 men. Both groups completed survey measures to assess their level of optimism, as well as their overall health and health habits such as diet, smoking and alcohol use.

In the survey, study participants were asked if they agreed with statements such as "in uncertain times I usually expect the best" or "I usually expect to succeed in things that I do." Health outcomes from women in the study were tracked for 10 years, while the men's health was followed for 30 years. Researchers found that the most optimistic men and women demonstrated, on average, an 11-15% longer lifespan, and had far greater odds of reaching 85 years old, compared to the least optimistic group.

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: China's Yutu-2 rover, launched as part of the Chang'e 4 mission, is the first-ever robot to explore the far side of the moon. Since landing in January, it's snapped gorgeous views of the lunar surface and made one unexpected discovery. Now, it's made another surprising find: an unusual substance with a "gel-like" appearance hidden inside a crater...

Three days into day 8, a member of the Chang'e 4 team was reviewing images taken during by the rover and noticed a strangely colored material, distinct from the gray soil around it. So, the team instead turned its attention toward the substance and sent the rover towards the crater for a better look. The Yutu-2 "drive diary" says the team commanded the rover to point its spectrometer, a device which can evaluate the composition of materials, towards the unusual substance. The team didn't indicate what the substance might be and they haven't shared an image of the weird material. The team did, however, share an image of the rover heading for the crater to have a gander at what's inside.

I know you're thinking aliens but Andrew Jones, a journalist reporting on the Chinese space program, wrote that one possible explanation is that the gel-like substance is melted glass, created after a meteor strike.

schwit1 quotes Space.com: A recent paper, published to the preprint journal arXiv on July 29, has found a way to build an almost-steady wormhole, one that does collapse but slowly enough to send messages — and potentially even things — down it before it tears itself apart. All you need are a couple of black holes and a few infinitely long cosmic strings.

"An Air Force X-37B spaceplane just completed its 718th day in orbit, making it the longest mission yet for a secretive military test program," reports CNN: The US military has launched five uncrewed X-37B spaceplanes into orbit over the past decade, and each flight has been longer than its predecessor...

What is known is that the military is using the planes to develop reusable spaceflight technology. Officials don't necessarily want to reuse the same X-37B plane multiple times, but the Air Force designed the craft to try out new navigation systems as well as methods for reentering the Earth's atmosphere and for landing safely back on terra firma. The X-37B is also popular among space fans because of its unique design. The planes, which look like miniature space shuttles, launch into orbit atop powerful rockets and then break away to carry out their mission. When their duties are complete, they swoop back toward Earth and touch down horizontally on a runway, like a commercial airplane or space shuttle orbiter coming in for landing...

The current X-37B plane in orbit, called OTV-5, was launched to space in September 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The previous flight, for OTV-4, was 718 days long and ended in May 2017.

durini called our attention to some surprising results from research with NASA-developed software: A new study indicates that some exoplanets may have better conditions for life to thrive than Earth itself has. "This is a surprising conclusion," said lead researcher Dr. Stephanie Olson, "it shows us that conditions on some exoplanets with favourable ocean circulation patterns could be better suited to support life that is more abundant or more active than life on Earth....

"Our work has been aimed at identifying the exoplanet oceans which have the greatest capacity to host globally abundant and active life. Life in Earth's oceans depends on upwelling (upward flow) which returns nutrients from the dark depths of the ocean to the sunlit portions of the ocean where photosynthetic life lives. More upwelling means more nutrient resupply, which means more biological activity. These are the conditions we need to look for on exoplanets.... We found that higher atmospheric density, slower rotation rates, and the presence of continents all yield higher upwelling rates. A further implication is that Earth might not be optimally habitableâ"and life elsewhere may enjoy a planet that is even more hospitable than our own.

In 2017 several scientists co-signed a wager at the Aspen Center for Physics that a black hole wouldn't be discovered between 55 and 130 solar masses.

They may have lost, reports the Atlantic: Black-hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors recently picked up the signal of an unexpectedly enormous black hole, one with a mass that was thought to be physically impossible. "The prediction is no black holes, not even a few" in this mass range, wrote Stan Woosley, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in an email. "But of course we know nature often finds a way...."

Whereas most of the colliding black holes that wiggle LIGO's and Virgo's instruments probably originated as pairs of isolated stars (binary star systems being common in the cosmos), MIT's Carl Rodriguez and his co-signers argued that a fraction of the detected collisions occur in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters. The black holes swing around in one another's gravity, and sometimes they catch one another and merge, like big fish swallowing smaller ones in a pond. Inside a globular cluster, a 50-solar-mass black hole could merge with a 30-solar-mass one, for instance, and then the resulting giant could merge again. This second-generation merger is what LIGO/Virgo might have detected -- "a lucky catch of the big fish in the pond.

"A type of intermittent fasting that calls for eating nothing one day, and then whatever a person wants the next, can be done safely for several months and comes with a number of health benefits, a study has found."

An anonymous reader quotes Today.com: Alternate day fasting improved cardiovascular markers, reducing blood pressure and heart rate after four weeks, researchers reported in Cell Metabolism on Tuesday. People who followed the plan for six months also had lower levels of LDL "bad" cholesterol and triglycerides compared to those who ate normally. Overall, they ate about 37% fewer calories, lost weight and had an "improved fat distribution," reducing the fat in their trunk and abdomen by about 14% on average.

Researchers saw no adverse effects from alternate day fasting even after six months, concluding the strategy seems to be as beneficial as daily calorie restriction, but easier to stick with.

Humans can easily tolerate skipping food for an entire day, said Dr. Thomas Pieber, one of the study authors and chair of the department of internal medicine at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. "The truth is that our organism is ready to fast for much longer," Pieber told TODAY. "Ten thousand or 100,000 years ago, we didn't have breakfast, lunch and dinner and some cake in-between with our coffee. You just have to train your organism to get adjusted to that short-term fasting and after a few days, most people can adjust...."

One reason fasting may be so beneficial for the human body is that it can activate autophagy, a mechanism that helps to regenerate cells, Pieber said. The first two weeks can be a challenge, but hunger or the lightheadedness that can come with not eating for an entire day actually wasn't a big issue for the participants after a while, Pieber noted. People often feel "very energetic" on fasting days, he added.

Wave723 shared this article from September's issue of IEEE Spectrum about an usual project by a leading group of cognitive biologists and computer scientists: Dubbed the Interspecies Internet, the project aims to provide intelligent animals such as elephants, dolphins, magpies, and great apes with a means to communicate among each other and with people online.

And through artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other digital technologies, researchers hope to crack the code of all the chirps, yips, growls, and whistles that underpin animal communication.

Oh, and musician Peter Gabriel is involved. "We can use data analysis and technology tools to give non-humans a lot more choice and control," the former Genesis frontman, dressed in his signature Nehru-style collar shirt and loose, open waistcoat, told IEEE Spectrum at the inaugural Interspecies Internet Workshop, held [in July] in Cambridge, Mass. "This will be integral to changing our relationship with the natural world."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes Science Alert: Among the 100,000 most cited scientists between 1996 to 2017, there's a stealthy pocket of researchers who represent "extreme self-citations and 'citation farms' (relatively small clusters of authors massively citing each other's papers)," explain the authors of the new study, led by physician turned meta-researcher John Ioannidis from Stanford University.

Ioannidis helps to run Stanford's meta-research innovation centre, called Metrics, which looks at identifying and solving systemic problems in scientific research. One of those problems, Ioannidis says, is how self-citations compromise the reliability of citation metrics as a whole, especially at the hands of extreme self-citers and their associated clusters. "I think that self-citation farms are far more common than we believe," Ioannidis told Nature. "Those with greater than 25 percent self-citation are not necessarily engaging in unethical behaviour, but closer scrutiny may be needed."

Greg Nichols reporting for ZDNet: A company that makes propulsion systems for small satellites, Orbion Space Technology, has announced $9.2M in Series A funding. The round was led by Material Impact, a venture firm focused on translating early stage materials technologies into products and companies. Orbion has developed a very Star Trek-sounding technology that may prove to be a crucial component of an emerging New Space industry, the first-ever Hall-effect plasma thrusters for small satellites, dubbed the Aurora system. The company plans to use the capital from this round to support mass production of its thrusters.

Hall-effect plasma thrusters are a type of ion drive in which a propellant is accelerated by an electric field. The technology has been around since the 1960s, and Hall-effect thrusters were in use on Soviet satellites between 1972 and 1990. What's new is the size of the thrusters, as well as the size of the satellites they power, which are variously dubbed smallsats, microsatellites, or nanosatellites. As components and sensing technology has gotten smaller, and with the diversity of computing and sensing components available off-the-shelf, this new breed of satellite is cheap to build and lightweight, further reducing payload costs. That's opening up the possibility of launching communications and satellite arrays to companies and organizations that have never had that option.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have created a flock of sheep that carry the gene for a lethal inherited brain disorder in humans. The condition, Batten disease, usually starts in childhood and is invariably fatal, often within a few years of diagnosis. The project, which is designed to test treatments for the disease, is based at Edinburgh University's Roslin Institute, where cloning techniques were used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996. The scientists acknowledge that the approach could be controversial as it involves creating animals programmed to die, but stress that their aim is to alleviate human suffering.

There are several types of Batten disease, said project leader Tom Wishart. "One of the more rapid types is CLN1, and that's what we have recreated in our sheep." The Roslin scientists used the gene-editing technique Crispr-Cas9 to create the faulty CLN1 gene in the sheep. "We collected sheep embryos from the abattoir," Wishart said. "Then we fertilized them and added Crispr reagents to alter their genetic structure before implanting the embryos into a surrogate sheep's uterus." Three sheep were born that each possessed two copies of the CLN1 gene with the same mutation found in affected humans. They began to show many symptoms of Batten disease, including changes in behavior and brain size. Other sheep were engineered to carry only a single copy of the gene. "These are symptomless carriers, like the parents of Batten disease children," said Wishart. "From these we can breed sheep that have two faulty copies of the CLN1 gene. These will go on to develop a disease like those children, and will be the ones to test our therapies."

Researchers report they've adapted CRISPR and combined it with other tools to cut and splice large genome fragments with ease. The study, conducted by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K., has been published in this week's issue of Science. Science Magazine reports: The tried and true tools of genetic engineering simply can't handle long stretches of DNA. Restriction enzymes, the standard tool for cutting DNA, can snip chunks of genetic material and join the ends to form small circular segments that can be moved out of one cell and into another. (Stretches of linear DNA don't survive long before other enzymes, called endonucleases, destroy them.) But the circles can accommodate at most a couple of hundred thousand bases, and synthetic biologists often want to move large segments of chromosomes containing multiple genes, which can be millions of bases long or more. "You can't get very large pieces of DNA in and out of cells," says Jason Chin, a synthetic biologist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K. What's more, those cutting and pasting tools can't be targeted precisely, and they leave unwanted DNA at the splicing sites -- the equivalent of genetic scars. The errors build up as more changes are made. Another problem is that traditional editing tools can't faithfully glue large segments together. These issues can be a deal-breaker when biologists want to make hundreds or thousands of changes to an organism's genome, says Chang Liu, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, Irvine.

Now, Chin and his MRC colleagues report they have solved these problems. First, the team adapted CRISPR to precisely excise long stretches of DNA without leaving scars. They then altered another well-known tool, an enzyme called lambda red recombinase, so it could glue the ends of the original chromosome -- minus the removed portion -- back together, as well as fuse the ends of the removed portion. Both circular strands of DNA are protected from endonucleases. The technique can create different circular chromosome pairs in other cells, and researchers can then swap chromosomes at will, eventually inserting whatever chunk they choose into the original genome. "Now, I can make a series of changes in one segment and then another and combine them together. That's a big deal," Liu says.

Americans throw out a lot more food than they expect they will, food waste that is likely driven in part by ambiguous date labels on packages, a new study has found. From a report: "People eat a lot less of their refrigerated food than they expect to, and they're likely throwing out perfectly good food because they misunderstand labels," said Brian Roe, the study's senior author and a professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at The Ohio State University.

This is the first study to offer a data-driven glimpse into the refrigerators of American homes, and provides an important framework for efforts to decrease food waste, Roe said. It was published online this month in the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling. Survey participants expected to eat 97 percent of the meat in their refrigerators but really finished only about half. They thought they'd eat 94 percent of their vegetables, but consumed just 44 percent. They projected they'd eat about 71 percent of the fruit and 84 percent of the dairy, but finished off just 40 percent and 42 percent, respectively.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Now, for the first time, Penn Engineers have developed a way to repair metal at room temperature. They call their technique "healing" because of its similarity to the way bones heal, recruiting raw material and energy from an external source. The study was conducted by James Pikul, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and Zakaria Hsain, a graduate student in his lab. Beyond the energy costs associated with the current process of repairing metal by melting it to a more pliable form, there are some metal components where such a repair strategy is not even an option. For example, melting removes the intricate internal structure of metallic foams, which are metals made with internal pockets of air. This arrangement of struts and gaps reduces the material's weight while maintaining its overall strength.

To heal metal foams, which generally have better structural properties than polymers, Pikul and Hsain started by finding a way for them to "sense" where they had been damaged. Rather than encapsulating additional chemicals used in repair, the researchers realized that they could use the breaking of a polymer layer as a kind of chemical signal. Pikul and Hsain used chemical vapor deposition to evenly coat each strut of the nickel foam with a layer of Parylene D, a chemically inert and stretchy polymer. Because this material's damage tolerance is slightly lower than that of nickel, it breaks first as the sample is damaged, revealing the metal underneath. The researchers could then use electroplating to build new nickel struts only on the exposed nickel where they were needed. "Pikul and Hsain healed three types of damage in their experiments on centimeter-scale samples of their polymer-coated nickel foam: samples with cracks, samples that had been pulled apart until they were connected by just a few struts, and samples that had been cleaved in two," the report adds.

"Healing the damage took about four hours, and because electroplating acts on all of the exposed nickel at once, the time it takes to heal damage is independent of the sample's size."

The study was published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

President Donald Trump announced Thursday the official establishment of the U.S. military's Space Command. CNN reports: Space Command will become the 11th combatant command, joining the ranks of U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, and U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees Special Operations Forces. The command will initially consist of just 287 personnel and its final location has yet to be determined. Its responsibilities will be transferred primarily from U.S. Strategic Command. The command's establishment comes as the U.S. has grown increasingly concerned about threats to its satellites, which are critical to military operations and commercial business.

While the command's establishment has received broad support, Trump also spoke Thursday about the creation of a U.S. Space Force, a military branch his administration wants to see established under the Department of the Air Force, similar to how the Marine Corps sits under the Department of the Navy. Space Command "will soon be followed -- very importantly -- by the establishment of the United States Space Force as the sixth branch of the United States Armed Forces," Trump said, adding that the Space Force will "organize, train and equip warriors to support Space Command's mission." NPR notes that the Space Command was first established by the Air Force in 1985.

"As the Cold War was heating up, it was meant to coordinate missile defense and surveillance efforts," reports Engadget. "But by 2002, military focus had shifted to terrorism, and Space Command was merged into the unified Strategic Command. It was refocussed to the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan."

The iconic chart of elements has served chemistry well for 150 years. But it's not the only option out there, and scientists are pushing its limits. From a report: The heaviest naturally occurring element on the table is uranium, with the atomic number 92 (because it has 92 protons in its nucleus). But the periodic table contains still more; the heaviest so far is element 118, oganesson, a "super-heavy" element with 118 protons and a half-life of half a millisecond. It was first synthesized in 2002 by Yuri Oganessian and an intercontinental Russian-American team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, north of Moscow. Starting in 2020, scientists will attempt to synthesize elements 119 and 120, with a newly inaugurated Superheavy Element Factory and an experimental apparatus that is 100 times more sensitive. They hope to reach the "island of stability," a fabled region of the periodic table populated by superheavy elements with greater longevity.

Like Pandora's box, the discovery of superheavy elements presents tricky questions, Dr. Oganessian said. Will these elements behave the way the periodic table predicts? So far, only some deviations in behavior are expected. But as the atomic numbers go up, deviations will increase rapidly, challenging the periodic table's schematic integrity. Will the periodic table hold up? Or as Pekka Pyykko, a computational chemist at the University of Helsinki, put it in the title of a 2016 paper: "Is the Periodic Table All Right ('PT OK')?" Probably, with modifications, he concluded. Dr. Pyykko formulated a periodic table that chemically classifies the elements up to atomic number 172. Dr. Pyykko noted, however, that the probability of finding the heaviest of superheavy elements is less than hitting a golf ball in Tokyo and making a hole-in-one on the top of Mount Fuji. If scientists get lucky, the resulting super-superheavy elements might even have nuclei with exotic shapes, like a doughnut. Further reading: Why the Periodic Table of Elements Is More Important Than Ever.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Now, researchers have used carbon nanotubes to make a general purpose, RISC-V-compliant processor that handles 32-bit instructions and does 16-bit memory addressing. Performance is nothing to write home about, but the processor successfully executed a variation of the traditional programming demo, "Hello world!" It's an impressive bit of work, but not all of the researchers' solutions are likely to lead to high-performance processors. The new processor was made by a collaboration between MIT researchers and scientists at Analog Devices, Inc., who figured out a way to work around all the issue with carbon nanotubes.

The key insight by the researchers behind the new chip was that certain logical functions are less sensitive to metallic nanotubes than others. So they modified an open source RISC design tool to take this information into account. The result was a chip design that had none of the gates that were most sensitive to metallic carbon nanotubes. The resulting chip, which the team is calling the RV16X-NANO, was designed to handle the 32-bit-long instructions of the RISC-V architecture. Memory addressing was limited to 16-bits, and the functional units include instruction fetching, decoding, registers, execution units, and write back to memory. Overall, over 14,000 individual transistors were used for the RV16X-NANO, and the manipulations of the carbon nanotubes to make them resulted in a 100% yield. In other words, every single one of those 14,000 gates worked. It was also what's considered a 3D chip, in that the metal contacts below the nanotube layer were used for routing signals among the different transistors, while a separate layer of metal contacts layered above the nanotubes was used to supply power within the chip. The report has been published in the journal Nature.

The CEO and cofounder of Whole Foods has some concerns about the plant-based "meat" craze. John Mackey told CNBC on Wednesday that plant-based meat substitutes are good for the environment but not for your health, echoing concerns that have been raised by dietitians and nutritionists in recent weeks. From a report: "If you look at the ingredients, they are super-highly processed foods," Mackey told CNBC. "I don't think eating highly processed foods is healthy. I think people thrive on eating whole foods." He added: "As for health, I will not endorse that, and that is about as big a criticism that I will do in public." Mackey also said plant-based meats were a better for the environment than traditional meat, which usually consumes large amounts of water for production.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: North Carolina is aggressively going after the vaping industry for what the state sees as its role in getting kids hooked on nicotine. On Tuesday, State Attorney General Josh Stein announced that his office would be filing lawsuits against eight e-cigarette companies, arguing that each purposefully targeted underage customers. The lawsuits follow a similar one filed by Stein's office against the vaping giant Juul in May. According to Stein, the eight named companies -- Beard Vape, Direct eLiquid, Electric Lotus, Electric Tobacconist, Eonsmoke, Juice Man, Tinted Brew, and VapeCo -- all ran afoul of the state's Unfair or Deceptive Trade Practices Act. They're alleged to have used colorful labeling and sweet flavors in their products to knowingly entice kids into buying them. They're also accused of failing to take even meager steps to prevent children from getting their hands on these products, such as instituting age verification checks on their websites. "One look at their marketing materials demonstrates just how egregious their sales tactics are -- with flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear, unicorn, and graham cracker, they're clearly targeting young people," Stein said. "To teenagers, the health and addiction risks of vaping are simply too high. That is why my office is asking the court to protect our kids by shutting down these operations in our state."

A lawsuit filed last week in Chicago accuses e-cigarette maker Juul Labs and Philip Morris USA of similar misconduct, such as illegally marketing nicotine-delivery devices to minors and deceiving consumers about the risks of vaping.

SpaceX launched its sub-scale Starship 'hopper' spacecraft on a brief unpiloted up-and-down test flight at the company's Boca Chica, Texas, test facility Tuesday, a dramatic demonstration of rocket technology intended to pave the way to a new, more powerful heavy lift booster and, eventually, crew-carrying interplanetary spacecraft. Spaceflight Now reports: Running a day late because of a last-second technical glitch, the squat Starhopper's powerful methane-fueled Raptor engine thundered to life at 6:02 p.m. EDT, pushing the stubby test vehicle straight up into a clear blue sky atop a jet of flame and a churning cloud of exhaust. The spacecraft, shaped a bit like R2-D2 from the "Star Wars" movies, appeared to reach its FAA-approved 492-foot (150 meter) altitude limit, moved sideways and slowly descended to touchdown on a nearby landing pad. The approximately one-minute flight was the rocket's second "untethered" test following a July jump to an altitude of about 65 feet.

The hardware SpaceX is testing is intended for a fully reusable two-stage vehicle featuring a powerful first stage, dubbed the Super Heavy Rocket, and the winged Starship. The hopper is a sub-scale version of the Starship's propulsion system, the first to utilize a SpaceX-designed Raptor engine burning cryogenic methane with liquid oxygen. SpaceX says the new booster-Starship system eventually will replace the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets as well as the Cargo and Crew Dragon capsules used to deliver supplies and, eventually, astronauts to the International Space Station. In other SpaceX news, the company's Dragon supply ship successfully departed the ISS and returned to Earth Tuesday to conclude its third round-trip flight to the orbiting research outpost, bringing home a spacesuit, mice and numerous experiments.