A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life and streaked away from Cape Canaveral early Sunday carrying the first in a powerful new generation of GPS navigation satellites into orbit. It was the California rocket builder's 21st launch this year and its first Pentagon-sanctioned national security mission. From a report: Propelled by 1.2 million pounds of thrust from its nine first stage engines, the 229-foot-tall rocket lifted off at 8:51 a.m. EST (GMT-5), climbing straight away from launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It was the 20th major rocket launch from Florida this year, the busiest pace since 1998. The launching came five days late because of a last-minute problem with first stage propellant temperatures Tuesday and stormy weather Thursday. High winds forced another 24-hour delay Saturday, but conditions were ideal Sunday and the rocket put on a spectacular show as it raced away to the northeast through a cloudless sky.

Vice President Mike Pence, chairman of the newly reconstituted National Space Council, was on hand for Tuesday's initial launch try but flew back to Washington after touring SpaceX facilities at the Kennedy Space Center. "The most important thing is that we get that rocket up safely and securely and it achieves its mission," Pence told spaceport workers. "I know this bird is going to fly and when it flies, it's going to make a difference for the security and prosperity of the American people." Pence has taken an active role in directing the Trump administration's revised national space policy, calling for establishment of a military "Space Force," increased commercial development in low-Earth orbit and continued NASA development of a huge new rocket and spacecraft to carry astronauts back to the moon.

Reader Beeftopia shares a report: Research published in a major medical journal concludes that a parachute is no more effective than an empty backpack at protecting you from harm if you have to jump from an aircraft. But before you leap to any rash conclusions, you had better hear the whole story. The gold standard for medical research is a study that randomly assigns volunteers to try an intervention or to go without one and be part of a control group. For some reason, nobody has ever done a randomized controlled trial of parachutes. In fact, medical researchers often use the parachute example when they argue they don't need to do a study because they're so sure they already know something works. Cardiologist Robert Yeh, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, got a wicked idea one day. He and his colleagues would actually attempt the parachute study to make a few choice points about the potential pitfalls of research shortcuts.

They started by talking to their seatmates on airliners. [...] In all, 23 people agreed to be randomly given either a backpack or a parachute and then to jump from a biplane on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts or from a helicopter in Michigan. Relying on two locations and only two kinds of aircraft gave the researchers quite a skewed sample. But this sort of problem crops up frequently in studies, which was part of the point Yeh and his team were trying to make. Still, photos taken during the experiment show the volunteers were only too happy to take part. The drop in the study was about 2 feet total, because the biplane and helicopter were parked. Nobody suffered any injuries. Surprise, surprise. So it's technically true that parachutes offered no better protection for these jumpers than the backpacks.

The catch is shifting northward as water temperatures rise, forcing crews to retool their boats and rework their businesses. From a report: Aboard the Stanley K and the Oracle, two 58-foot vessels, Buck Laukitis and his crews chase halibut across the Bering Sea worth $5 a pound at the docks. As sea temperatures rise, and Arctic ice retreats the fish appear to be avoiding warming waters, migrating northward where they cost more to reach, federal fisheries biologists say. Twice this past fall, the Oracle sailed 800 miles north from the seaport of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, before finding the halibut that a decade ago lived several hundred miles closer to home. Each voyage took twice as long and yielded half as many fish. "It keeps me up at night," he says. "I woke up at three in the morning. I couldn't sleep thinking about where the fish are going."

Across the continent from Mr. Laukitis in Rhode Island, black sea bass have moved in with the warming waters. The bulk once lived roughly 700 miles south off North Carolina. Now they are a staple catch in Point Judith, R.I., along with the summer flounder that also have begun appearing. [...] The impact of climate change has a price, and for fishing-boat owners in sea ports, that means following the catch. The northward movement of fish around the world is disrupting some fishing grounds and revitalizing others -- and fishing businesses are trying to adapt their operations.

The impact of temperature on oceans is varied. As the atmosphere warmed in recent decades, oceans absorbed heat unevenly, causing marine hot spots that can last months, scientists say. Spikes of warmer water affect fisheries differently depending on ocean currents, ocean depth and seafloor topography. Higher temperatures mean less dissolved oxygen in the water while increasing a fish's demand for oxygen by speeding up its metabolism. Warming water may also favor predators or drive off species on which commercial fish feed. All told, warming ocean temperatures are pushing hundreds of marine species outside of their traditional ranges, ocean scientists say.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft passed Pluto in 2015. But now it's getting strange readings while approaching its next destination, the Ultima Thule asteroid.

Popular Mechanics reports: Ultima Thule appears to not have a light curve, which is perplexing scientists... Asteroids like Ultima Thule reflect sunlight -- that's why they're bright spots instead of dark spots -- but the amount of light they reflect depends on how much of their surface is facing the Sun. The bigger their surface area, the brighter they become. Small asteroids like Ultima Thule aren't perfectly round, which means how much of their surface is facing the Sun changes as they rotate....

Ultima Thule isn't changing its brightness at all. New Horizons has been watching Ultima Thule for three months and hasn't spotted any brightness change, which is really odd. Ultima Thule is definitely not spherical -- astronomers determined that a year ago -- so why doesn't its brightness change?
One theory is that the New Horizon's probe is perfectly aligned with the asteroid's axis of rotation, so it's only seeing Ultima Thule's north (or south) pole. Another is that the asteroid is surrounded by dust clouds that "even out" its light curve. But that usually only happens when asteroids are near the sun and heating up, whereas Ultima Thule "is cold and dark and shouldn't have any dust...."

"Fortunately, we might not have to wait long for an answer to this problem. New Horizons will fly by Ultima Thule on January 1, and should give us high-resolution photos of the entire system," the article concludes. "With any luck, those photos will solve the mystery."

chalsall (Slashdot reader #185), writes: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2^82,589,933-1, having 24,862,048 digits. A computer volunteered by Patrick Laroche from Ocala, Florida made the find on December 7, 2018.

GIMPS has been on amazing lucky streak, finding triple the expected number of new Mersenne primes -- a dozen in the last fifteen years.
"This anomaly is not necessarily evidence that existing theories on the distribution of Mersenne primes is incorrect," notes GIMPS. "However, if the trend continues it may be worth further investigation. " They also report that the newly-discovered prime number "is more than one and a half million digits larger than the previous record prime number" -- and it's one of just 51 known Mersenne prime numbers ever discovered. "GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 17..."

Patrick Laroche is one of thousands of volunteers using GIMPS' free software to hunt for prime numbers -- and is now eligible for a $3,000 "research discovery award," the group writes at mersenne.org. "GIMPS' next major goal is to win the $150,000 award administered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation offered for finding a 100 million digit prime number" -- of which $50,000 will be awarded to the discoverer, with another $50,000 going to a 501(c)(3) mathematics-related charity selected by GIMPS, and $50,000 retained by GIMPS to cover expenses and fund other awards.

schwit1 shared an interesting article from Bloomberg: Though genetic tests are frequently marketed as family-friendly entertainment, they sometimes wind up surfacing life-altering surprises. And when those surprises show up in someone's test results, the first move is often a call to customer service.... At 23andMe, those types of calls are so frequent that preparing for them is integrated into the company's months-long training program.... "We always try to steer the conversation toward the data, tell them that this is science," said Kent Hillyer, head of customer care for the genetic-testing firm 23andMe...

Lindsay Grove, a customer-care representative at 23andMe, still remembers one call in particular years later, a dad who took the test only to find out that his child was not, in fact, his child. At first, like most, he was just trying to figure out whether the results were accurate. So Grove explained the science behind the data. The customer then became somber and quiet. He questioned whether he should talk to his wife, and, if he did, how.... "That process of figuring out what to do next is very difficult for customers...."

Such emotional calls can take a toll on employees, too. That's perhaps inevitable when technology interfaces with such sensitive, personal information.... At 23andMe, Hillyer often encourages representatives to go for a walk after an intense call, or cracks open a bottle of wine to help them decompress. "We kind of do these internal therapy sessions,'' he said. "Here, maybe more so than most places, you have to be really supportive of each other."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Just in time for the winter solstice, scientists may have figured out how short days can lead to dark moods. Two recent studies suggest the culprit is a brain circuit that connects special light-sensing cells in the retina with brain areas that affect whether you are happy or sad. When these cells detect shorter days, they appear to use this pathway to send signals to the brain that can make a person feel glum or even depressed. The research effort began in the early 2000s, when [Samer Hattar, an author of the mouse study and chief of the section on light and circadian rhythms at the National Institute of Mental Health] and David Berson, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University, were studying cells in the retina. At the time, most scientists thought that when light struck the retina, only two kinds of cells responded: rods and cones. But Hattar and Berson thought there were other light-sensitive cells that hadn't been identified. The skeptics stopped laughing when the team discovered a third kind of photoreceptor that contained a light-sensitive substance called melanopsin not found in rods and cones. These receptors responded to light but weren't part of the visual system.

[Jerome Sanes, a professor at neuroscience at Brown University, and his team] team put young adults in an MRI machine and measured their brain activity as they were exposed to different levels of light. This allowed the team to identify brain areas that seemed to be receiving signals from the photoreceptors Hattar and Berson had discovered. Two of these areas were in the front of the brain. "It's interesting because these areas seem to be the areas that have been shown in many studies to be involved in depression and other affective disorders," Sanes says. The areas also appeared to be part of the same circuit found in mice. The finding needs to be confirmed. But Hattar is pretty confident that this circuit explains the link between light exposure and mood.

dmoberhaus shares a report from Motherboard: A team of Japanese researchers from Keio University in Tokyo have demonstrated that an amoeba is capable of generating approximate solutions to a remarkably difficult math problem known as the "traveling salesman problem." The traveling salesman problem goes like this: Given an arbitrary number of cities and the distances between them, what is the shortest route a salesman can take that visits each city and returns to the salesman's city of origin. As these Japanese researchers demonstrated, a certain type of amoeba can be used to calculate nearly optimal solutions to the traveling salesman problem for up to eight cities. Even more remarkably, the amount of time it takes the amoeba to reach these nearly optimal solutions grows linearly, even though the number of possible solutions increases exponentially. The reason this amoeba is considered especially useful in biological computing is because it can extend various regions of its body to find the most efficient way to a food source and hates light.

To turn this natural feeding mechanism into a computer, the Japanese researcher placed the amoeba on a special plate that had 64 channels that it could extend its body into. This plate is then placed on top of a nutrient rich medium. The amoeba tries to extend its body to cover as much of the plate as possible and soak up the nutrients. Yet each channel in the plate can be illuminated, which causes the light-averse amoeba to retract from that channel. To model the traveling salesman problem, each of the 64 channels on the plate was assigned a city code between A and H, in addition to a number from 1 to 8 that indicates the order of the cities. To guide the amoeba toward a solution to the traveling salesman problem, the researchers used a neural network that would incorporate data about the amoeba's current position and distance between the cities to light up certain channels. The neural network was designed such that cities with greater distances between them are more likely to be illuminated than channels that are not. When the algorithm manipulates the chip that the amoeba is on it is basically coaxing it into taking forms that represent approximate solutions to the traveling salesman problem.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The stunning Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars is filled with ice all year round owing to a trapped layer of cold Martian air that keeps the water frozen. The 50-mile-wide crater contains 530 cubic miles of water ice, as much as Great Bear Lake in northern Canada, and in the centre of the crater the ice is more than a mile thick. Images beamed back from the red planet show that the lip around the impact crater rises high above the surrounding plain. When thin Martian air then passes over the crater, it becomes trapped and cools to form an insulating layer that prevents the ice from melting. The latest picture is a composite of five strip-like images taken from the European Space Agency's Mars Express probe, which swung into orbit around the planet on Christmas Day 2003. On the same day, the orbiter released the Beagle 2 lander, a British probe built on a shoestring budget, which touched down but failed to fully open on the surface. Mars Express photographed the Korolev crater with its high-resolution stereo camera, an instrument that can pick out features 10 metres wide, or as small as 2 metres when used in super-resolution mode.

Privately funded space startups are changing China's space industry, helping it become a space power on par with the United States. "2018 is shaping up to be the first year in which more rockets reach Earth orbit from China than from any other country," reports MIT Technology Review. "As of mid-December, China had made 35 successful launches, as against 30 for the U.S."

"As American and Russian space programs struggle with uncertain budgets, China is expanding its efforts on every front: communications and reconnaissance satellites; a navigation and positioning constellation to rival America's GPS; a human spaceflight program; and ambitious space-science and robotic exploration projects. All of these are enabled by a menagerie of new rockets with advanced capabilities." Here's an excerpt from the report summarizing some of China's space ambitions: In 2014, the Chinese government decided to allow private investment in space-related industry. Landspace began with a few dozen people. It now has over 200 employees at a manufacturing base in Huzhou in eastern China and at assembly and testing facilities in X'ian, a central Chinese city. The company plans to work incrementally, beginning with nano-satellites -- devices weighing between 1 and 10 kilograms (2 to 22 pounds) -- then moving to larger cargoes and, eventually, into human spaceflight. In September 2018, iSpace launched three nanosatellites on a brief suborbital flight, becoming the first Chinese space startup to successfully get beyond Earth's atmosphere. Another company, LinkSpace, plans to launch a vertical takeoff, vertical landing rocket in 2020. Landspace, OneSpace, iSpace, LinkSpace, and ExPace (which fashions itself as a startup though it's a subsidiary of a state-owned enterprise) are the leaders of a bevy of lesser-known Chinese launch startups.

These launch companies are operating hand in hand with a number of new, privately funded Chinese companies that are focused on doing things in space, rather than on getting there. Spacety and Commsat, among others, are planning large constellations of small imagery and communication satellites. Such constellations -- whether Chinese or American -- are transforming aspects of the way space is used. By making low-resolution satellite imagery much cheaper to gather (among other novel applications for small satellites), they are catalyzing an era of more nimble commercial, scientific, and military experimentation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: An extraordinarily promising new technique using ultrasound to clear the toxic protein clumps thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease is moving to the first phase of human trials next year. The innovative treatment has proven successful across several animal tests and presents an exciting, drug-free way to potentially battle dementia. The ultrasound treatment was first developed back in 2015 at the University of Queensland. The initial research was working to find a way to use ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier with the goal of helping dementia-battling antibodies better reach their target in the brain. However, early experiments with mice surprisingly revealed the targeted ultrasound waves worked to clear toxic amyloid protein plaques from the brain without any additional therapeutic drugs. The new announcement regarding the upcoming move to human trials is underpinned by a large funding injection from the Australian government helping accelerate the treatment's development. The first stage is a phase 1 safety trial, kicking off later in 2019, to explore the safety profile of the treatment in human subjects suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News: Now, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have genetically modified a common houseplant -- pothos ivy or devil's ivy -- to remove chloroform and benzene from the air around it. The modified plants express a mammalian protein, called 2E1, that transforms these compounds into molecules that the plants can then use to support their own growth. Small molecules like chloroform, which is present in small amounts in chlorinated water, or benzene, which is a component of gasoline, build up in our homes when we shower or boil water, or when we store cars or lawn mowers in attached garages. These compounds are too small to be captured by even HEPA air filters and exposure to each has been linked to cancer. Findings from the new study were published recently in Environmental Science & Technology.

In September, a nonprofit deployed a multimillion-dollar floating structure designed to corral plastic debris littering the Pacific Ocean. But, according to CBS News, the 2,000-foot-long structure hasn't picked up any plastic waste. Slashdot reader pgmrdlm shares the report: A floating device sent to corral a swirling island of trash in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii has not swept up any plastic waste. But the young innovator behind the project said Monday that a fix was in the works. Boyan Slat, 24, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, said the speed of the solar-powered barrier isn't allowing it to hold on to the plastic it catches. The plastic barrier with a tapered 10-foot-deep screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch, while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it. The garbage patch isn't an island and it's even difficult to see with the naked eye, "60 Minutes" reported in September -- it's a vast soup of floating debris, much of it tiny and below the surface.

India successfully squeezed a seventh launch into the year Wednesday, using an upgraded version of the country's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle to place a massive communications satellite into orbit for the Indian Air Force. From a report: That communications satellite, called the GSAT-7A, weighs nearly 5,000 lbs. (2250 kilograms) and will allow the Indian Air Force to manage all of its space communications itself, rather than paying for satellite services. "This mission, both in the launch vehicle as well as the satellite, there are so many firsts," K. Sivan, chair of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said. [...] Today's was India's last scheduled launch for 2018, although the country is eyeing two launches in January 2019, including of its second moon mission, Chandrayaan 2.

Two of 2018's best statistics from the Royal Statistical Society are about the environment. "The winning international statistic of the year was 90.5% -- the proportion of plastic waste that has never been recycled," reports the BBC. "And in the UK category, the top stat was 27.8% -- the highest percentage of all electricity which was generated by solar power." From the report: A panel of judges picked the two winners, along with several highly commended statistics, from more than 200 nominations. Entries for 2018 were submitted earlier this year. Judges on the panel included Dame Jil Matheson, former national statistician -- the top adviser to the government on official statistics, as well as RSS president Sir David Spiegelhalter, BBC home editor Mark Easton and the Guardian's U.S. data editor Mona Chalabi.

The environment and plastic waste has repeatedly made headlines in 2018, and "single-use" -- referring to plastic waste -- was named the word of the year. Other highly commended statistics include:

$1.3 billion: the amount lost from the value of Snapchat within a day after Kylie Jenner tweeted: "Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?"
85.9%: the proportion of British trains that ran on time -- the lowest for more than a decade
40%: the percentage of Russian men who do not live to the age of 65
64,946: the number of measles cases in Europe from November 2017 to October 2018
82%: the percentage of all British retail shopping that is still in-store rather than online
16.7%: the percentage reduction of the number of Jaffa Cakes in the McVities' Christmas tube
6.4%: the percentage of female executive directors within FTSE 250 companies

A new study published in the journal Icarus found that Saturn is losing its signature rings at a "worst-case scenario" rate, and the bands could disappear completely within 100 million years. USA Today reports: The rings are being pulled into the planet "by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of Saturn's magnetic field," NASA said. The phenomenon is called "ring rain," and it drains enough water from rings to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every 30 minutes, said James O'Donoghue of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years," O'Donoghue said in a statement. "But add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn's equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live. We are lucky to be around to see Saturn's ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers from Austria, Italy and Sweden has successfully demonstrated teleportation using on-demand photons from quantum dots. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group explains how they accomplished this feat and how it applies to future quantum communications networks. Scientists and many others are very interested in developing truly quantum communications networks -- it is believed that such networks will be safe from hacking or eavesdropping due to their very nature. But, as the researchers with this new effort point out, there are still some problems standing in the way. One of these is the difficulty in amplifying quantum signals. One way to get around this problem, they note, is to generate photons on-demand as part of a quantum repeater -- this helps to effectively handle the high clock rates. In this new effort, they have done just that, using semiconductor quantum dots.

Prior work surrounding the possibility of using semiconductor quantum dots has shown that it is a feasible way to demonstrate teleportation, but only under certain conditions, none of which allowed for on-demand applications. Because of that, they have not been considered a push-button technology. In this new effort, the researchers overcame this problem by creating quantum dots that were highly symmetrical using an etching method to create the hole pairs in which the quantum dots develop. The process they used was called a XX (biexciton)--X (exciton) cascade. They then employed a dual-pulsed excitation scheme to populate the desired XX state (after two pairs shed photons, they retained their entanglement). Doing so allowed for the production of on-demand single photons suitable for use in teleportation. The dual pulsed excitation scheme was critical to the process, the team notes, because it minimized re-excitation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is raising a $500 million round of fundraising to help build its massive satellite internet project, called Starlink. "The new funding puts SpaceX's valuation at $30.5 billion," reports CNBC. "The report says the capital comes from existing shareholders as well as new investor Baillie Gifford, a Scottish investment firm." From the report: Starlink -- a name SpaceX filed to trademark last year -- is an ambition unmatched by any current satellite network. The company is attempting to build its own constellation of 4,425 broadband satellites, with another 7,518 satellites to come after. SpaceX will begin launching the constellation in 2019. The system will be operational once at least 800 satellites are deployed. Starlink would offer broadband speeds comparable to fiber optic networks.The satellites would provide direct-to-consumer wireless connections, rather the present system's redistribution of signals, transforming a traditionally high-cost, low reliability service.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We seem to be on the cusp of a revolution in storage. Various technologies have been demonstrated that have speed approaching that of current RAM chips but can hold on to the memory when the power shuts off -- all without the long-term degradation that flash experiences. Some of these, like phase-change memory and Intel's Optane, have even made it to market. But, so far at least, issues with price and capacity have kept them from widespread adoption. But that hasn't discouraged researchers from continuing to look for the next greatest thing. In this week's edition, a joint NIST-Purdue University team has used a material that can form atomically thin sheets to make a new form of resistance-based memory. This material can be written in nanoseconds and hold on to that memory without power. The memory appears to work via a fundamentally different mechanism from previous resistance-RAM technologies, but there's a small hitch: we're not actually sure how it works. The two mechanisms used to change the resistance have been reported in the journal Nature Materials.

Rick Zeman writes: Astronomers in Hawaii have discovered the furthest object in our solar system, a dwarf planet aptly named "Farout." This planet is 100 times farther than Earth is from the sun (120 AU from the sun) and is thought to be composed of ice. The object is so far away that researchers estimate it probably takes more than 1,000 years to make one trip around the sun. For reference, Pluto is 34 AU away and takes about 248 years to orbit the sun. Eris, the next most distance object know, is 96 AU from the sun.