An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: We learn it at high school: Release two objects of different masses in the absence of friction forces and they fall down at the same rate in Earth's gravity. What we haven't learned, because it hasn't been directly measured in experiments, is whether antimatter falls down at the same rate as ordinary matter or if it might behave differently. Two new experiments at CERN, ALPHA-g and GBAR, have now started their journey towards answering this question.

After months of round-the-clock work by researchers and engineers to put together the experiments, ALPHA-g and GBAR have received the first beams of antiprotons, marking the beginning of both experiments. ALPHA-g began taking beam on October 30, after receiving the necessary safety approvals. ELENA sent its first beam to GBAR on July 20, and since then the decelerator and GBAR researchers have been trying to perfect the delivery of the beam. The ALPHA-g and GBAR teams are now racing to commission their experiments before CERN's accelerators shut down in a few weeks for a two-year period of maintenance work.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: In the first attempt of its kind, researchers plan to sequence all known species of eukaryotic life -- 66,000 species of animals, plants, fungi, and protozoa -- in a single country, the United Kingdom. The announcement was made here today at the official launch of an even grander $4.7 billion global effort, called the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), to sequence the genomes of all of Earth's known 1.5 million species of eukaryotes within a decade.

The U.K. sequencing effort -- dubbed The Darwin Tree of Life project -- will now become part of the EBP mix. The Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K., says it plans to sequence all known 66,000 species of eukaryotes found within the United Kingdom, except for its overseas territories. Collaborators will include the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Hinxton, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the United Kingdom, and the Natural History Museum in London. Sanger will spend up to 50 million British pounds over 8 years, about 4% of its annual budget, on the first phase of the project, which will focus on developing the processes for sample collection, R&D on sequencing, and computational methods for assembling the genomes. Sanger director Mike Stratton said he expects another 100 million British pounds will be needed over the next 5 to 7 years for the bulk of sample collections and sequencing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On Thursday, Russian officials held a press conference to reveal that they have determined what caused last month's Soyuz mid-flight failure. The culprit: a damaged sensor on one of the rocket's four boosters responsible for stage separation. With the investigation complete, the officials announced that they will move up the date of the next crew launch to the International Space Station. Russian space agency officials confirmed that the faulty sensor, designed to signal stage separation, had caused one of the boosters to improperly separate. This led the first and second stages of the rocket to collide, which then triggered the vehicle's emergency abort system.

Video of the incident, released today by the space agency, shows the accident from the rocket's point of view. In it, the booster in question strikes the core of the rocket, causing a significant jolt, which triggered the abort. According to officials, the afflicted sensor rod was bent slightly during the assembly of the rocket. To check for any handling errors that might have also affected other rockets, Russian officials said that all assembled Soyuz rockets -- and their attached booster pack -- will be taken apart and put together anew.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has run out of fuel, leading the agency to officially end its mission of exploring the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. "Today, we celebrate the end of our Dawn mission -- its incredible technical achievements, the vital science it gave us and the entire team who enabled the spacecraft to make these discoveries," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "The astounding images and data that Dawn collected from Vesta and Ceres are critical to understanding the history and evolution of our solar system," Zurbuchen added. Space.com reports: The $467 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, which are about 330 miles (530 kilometers) and 590 miles (950 km) wide, respectively. Scientists regard these two bodies as leftovers from the solar system's planet-formation period, which explains the mission's name. Dawn arrived at Vesta in July 2011, then scrutinized the object from orbit for 14 months. The probe's work revealed many intriguing details about Vesta. For example, liquid water once flowed across the protoplanet's surface (likely after buried ice was melted by meteorite impacts), and Vesta sports a towering peak near its south pole that's nearly as tall as Mars' famous Olympus Mons volcano. Dawn left Vesta in September 2012.

The mission team concluded that Dawn had run out of hydrazine after the probe missed scheduled communication check-ins yesterday (Oct. 31) and today. Hydrazine is the fuel used by Dawn's pointing thrusters, so the spacecraft can no longer orient itself to study Ceres, relay data to Earth or recharge its solar panels. Dawn will remain in orbit around Ceres for at least 20 years, and probably much longer than that. Mission team members have said there's a greater than 99 percent probability that the probe won't spiral down onto Ceres' frigid, battered surface for at least five more decades. It's been a rough week for space explorers as not only did Dawn run out of fuel, but the Kepler telescope did too and had to be retired.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world's largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents. The experiment, by the National Toxicology Program, found positive but relatively modest evidence that radio waves from some types of cellphones could raise the risk that male rats develop brain cancer. But he cautioned that the exposure levels and durations were far greater than what people typically encounter, and thus cannot "be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience." Moreover, the rat study examined the effects of a radio frequency associated with an early generation of cellphone technology, one that fell out of routine use years ago. Any concerns arising from the study thus would seem to apply mainly to early adopters who used those bygone devices, not to users of current models.

The lowest level of radiation in the federal study was equal to the maximum exposure that federal regulations allow for cellphone users. That level of exposure rarely occurs in typical cellphone use, the toxicology agency said. The highest level was four times higher than the permitted maximum. The rodents in the studies were exposed to radiation nine hours a day for two years -- far longer even than heavy users of cellphones. For the rats, the exposures started before birth and continued until they were about 2 years old. Some 2 to 3 percent of the male rats exposed to the radiation developed malignant gliomas, a deadly brain cancer, compared to none in a control group that received no radiation. Many epidemiologists see no overall rise in the incidence of gliomas in the human population. "The study also found that about 5 to 7 percent of the male rats exposed to the highest level of radiation developed certain heart tumors, called schwannomas, compared to none in the control group," the NYT reports.

It's worth nothing that the rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz, the frequency used in the second generation of cellphones that prevailed in the 90s, when the study was first conceived. For comparison, fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) phones employ much higher frequencies, which are "far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats," the NYT reports.

Astronomers on Wednesday reported new telescope observations of the environment around the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, named Sagittarius A*, pronounced "a-star," and they transformed the data into a lively animation. From a report: The video is positively ghostly. Clumps of gas swirl around the black hole, traveling at about 30 percent of the speed of light. Astronomers collected the data for the visualization using an instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, located in the deserts of northern Chile. The instrument, appropriately named GRAVITY, detected flares of infrared radiation coming from the disk surrounding Sagittarius A*. The researchers believe the bursts originated very close to the black hole, in an incredibly tumultuous region known as the innermost stable orbit. Here, cosmic material is slung around violently, but it remains far away enough that it can circle the black hole safely without getting sucked into the darkness.

If the thought of orbiting a monstrous, star-gobbling black hole spooks you, don't worry. Earth, located about two-thirds out from the center of the Milky Way, is at a very safe distance. The planet is in no danger of being consumed and wiped off the face of the universe. But, like everything else in the galaxy, it has long been subject to the black hole's whims. When black holes belch radiation out into space, the outflow can heat surrounding gas so much that it prevents it from cooling. If cosmic dust can't cool, it can't condense to form individual, brand-new stars, including ones like our sun. Scientists suspect that the fates of galaxies -- whether they produce new stars or stop altogether -- rests with the supermassive black holes at their centers.

schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk flew to the Seattle area in June for meetings with engineers leading a satellite launch project crucial to his space company's growth. Within hours of landing, Musk had fired at least seven members of the program's senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites. Known for pushing aggressive deadlines, Musk quickly brought in new managers from SpaceX headquarters in California to replace a number of the managers he fired. Their mandate: Launch SpaceX's first batch of U.S.-made satellites by the middle of next year, the sources said.

The management shakeup followed in-fighting over pressure from Musk to speed up satellite testing schedules, one of the sources said. SpaceX's spokeswoman Eva Behrend offered no comment on the matter. Culture was also a challenge for recent hires, a second source said. A number of the managers had been hired from nearby technology giant Microsoft, where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk's famously short deadlines. "Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites," one of the sources said. "Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Scientists have found further evidence that the gut, or more specifically the appendix, might play a role in the development of Parkinson's disease. The international team of scientists reviewed two datasets, including a large registry from Sweden, and found that removal of the appendix was associated with a decreased risk of developing Parkinson's disease. They also found that the human appendix contains clumps of a protein called alpha-synuclein in a form associated with the disease. There's more work to be done, and the authors are not advocating that people preemptively remove their appendixes, but they hope that the research could provide a pathway towards treatment.

The study found that of the 1,144,745 Swedes who did not have appendectomies, 1,608 had Parkinson's, but of the 551,003 who had, only 644 had Parkinson's. This is amounts to a 16.9% decrease in the odds of acquiring the disease -- but in absolutes, that's the difference between an 0.14 percent chance of acquiring the disease for those who hadn't gotten their appendix removed versus an 0.11 percent chance for those who had. The effect was also stronger in those living in rural areas, according to the study published today in Science Translational Medicine. The researchers also found that for those who had appendectomies at least 30 years before developing Parkinson's, the procedure was associated with a 3.6-year delay in disease onset. The appendix samples contained alpha-synuclein proteins and shortened and mis-folded alpha-synucleins like the ones found in people with Parkinson's disease. Professor Viviane Labrie from the Cancer of Neurodegenerative Science at the Van Andel Research Institute in Michigan suggests that the alpha-synucleins "can travel up the nerve that connects the G.I. tract to the brain." She added: "If it were to enter the brain, it can seed and spread from there and have neurotoxic effects that could eventually lead to Parkinson's disease."

Doctors in Switzerland have used an electrical device to help three paralyzed men walk again. The device was inserted around the men's spines to boost the signals from their brains to their legs. The study has been published in the journal Nature. The BBC reports: The first patient to be treated was 30-year-old Swiss man David M'zee, who suffered a severe spinal injury seven years ago in a sporting accident. David's doctor said he would never walk again. However, thanks to an electrical implant developed by a team at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), he can walk more than half a mile with the implant turned on. Two other men have also managed to walk again, to varying degrees. Gertan Oskan, a 35-year-old engineer from the Netherlands, was knocked over by a car seven years ago. His doctors told him on his birthday that he would be paralyzed for life. He is now beginning to regain some movement. Sebastian Tobler, a 48-year-old man from Germany, was a keen cyclist who loved being out in the countryside before he was knocked off his bike. Now he's back on a specially adapted bike that is powered mostly by his hands -- but also partly by his legs.

Scientists are warning that if human beings continue to mine the world's wildernesses for resources and convert them into cities and farms at the pace of the previous century, the planet's few remaining wild places could disappear in decades. From a report: Today, more than 77 percent of land on earth, excluding Antarctica, has been modified by human industry, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, up from just 15 percent a century ago. The study, led by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, paints the first global picture of the threat to the world's remaining wildernesses -- and the image is bleak. "We're on a threshold where whole systems could collapse and the consequences of that would be catastrophic," said James R. Allan, one of the study's authors. In the study, Mr. Allan and his colleagues urged the participants of a United Nations conference on biological diversity, scheduled for next month in Egypt, to protect all of the world's remaining wilderness areas. "We cannot afford to lose more," he said. "We must save it in its entirety."

Engineers are building a prototype of a robotic factory that will create water, oxygen, and fuel on the surface of Mars. From a report: The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they'd started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. The plant produces water, oxygen, and rocket fuel using local resources, and it will methodically build up all the necessary supplies for the next Mars mission, set to arrive in another two years. This robot factory isn't science fiction: It's being developed jointly by multiple teams across NASA. One of them is the Swamp Works Lab at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, where I am a team lead. Officially, it's known as an in situ resource utilization (ISRU) system, but we like to call it a dust-to-thrust factory, because it turns simple dust into rocket fuel. This technology will one day allow humans to live and work on Mars -- and return to Earth to tell the story.

But why synthesize stuff on Mars instead of just shipping it there from Earth? NASA invokes the "gear-ratio problem." By some estimates, to ship a single kilogram of fuel from Earth to Mars, today's rockets need to burn 225 kilograms of fuel in transit -- launching into low Earth orbit, shooting off toward Mars, slowing down to get into Mars orbit, and finally slowing to a safe landing on the surface of Mars. We'd start with 226 kg and end with 1 kg, which makes for a 226:1 gear ratio. And the ratio stays the same no matter what we ship. We would need 225 tons of fuel to send a ton of water, a ton of oxygen, or a ton of machinery. The only way to get around that harsh arithmetic is by making our water, oxygen, and fuel on-site. Different research and engineering groups at NASA have been working on different parts of this problem. More recently, our Swamp Works team began integrating many separate working modules in order to demonstrate the entire closed-loop system. It's still just a prototype, but it shows all the pieces that are necessary to make our dust-to-thrust factory a reality. And although the long-term plan is going to Mars, as an intermediate step NASA is focusing its attention on the moon. Most of the equipment will be tried out and fine-tuned on the lunar surface first, helping to reduce the risk over sending it all straight to Mars.

The world's oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday. From a report: Over the past quarter-century, the Earth's oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought, said Laure Resplandy, a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the startling study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The difference represents an enormous amount of additional energy, originating from the sun and trapped by the Earth's atmosphere -- more than 8 times the world's energy consumption, year after year.

In the scientific realm, the new findings help to resolve long-running doubts about the rate of the warming of the oceans before 2007, when reliable measurements from devices called "Argo floats" were put to use worldwide. Before that, different types of temperature records -- and an overall lack of them -- contributed to murkiness about how quickly the oceans were heating up. The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within the Earth's climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming itself is more advanced than scientists thought.

"We thought that we got away with not a lot of warming in both the ocean and the atmosphere for the amount of CO2 that we emitted," said Resplandy, who published the work with experts from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and several other institutions in the U.S., China, France and Germany. "But we were wrong. The planet warmed more than we thought. It was hidden from us just because we didn't sample it right. But it was there. It was in the ocean already." Wednesday's study also could have important policy implications. If ocean temperatures are rising more rapidly than previously calculated, that could leave nations even less time to dramatically cut the world's emissions of carbon dioxide, in hopes of limiting global warming to the ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Updated on November 14 at 14:40 GMT: Scientists Acknowledge Key Errors in Study of How Fast the Oceans Are Warming.

Applehu Akbar shares a report from Hawaii News Now: After years of legal wrangling and protests, the Thirty Meter Telescope got a green light Tuesday from the state Supreme Court. In a 4-to-1 decision, the state's highest court ruled in favor of the telescope's construction atop Mauna Kea, effectively ending all legal avenues for contesting the controversial project unless the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the case. In a statement, TMT International Observatory Board of Governors Chairman Henry Yang said the body is "grateful" for the ruling and "committed to being good stewards on the mountain." Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar adds: "Green anti-science organizations, such as Deep Green Resistance and Sierra Club, have been trying to stop TMT construction for years, in an expanded version of an earlier campaign to halt the construction of large research telescopes in southeastern Arizona. As in Arizona, their excuse was at first endangered species on the construction site, and subsequently native rights.

"TMT is an advanced world-class telescope designed to investigate and answer some of the most fundamental questions regarding our universe, including the formation of stars and galaxies after the Big Bang and how the universe evolved to its present form. Native Hawaiians will also be included in other direct benefits from the TMT," the court wrote. "Thus, use of the land by TMT is consistent with conservation and in furtherance of the self-sufficiency of the state."

ewhac writes: NASA today announced that it is retiring the Kepler telescope after nearly ten years of service -- double its initial mission life. In that time, Kepler discovered over 2,600 exoplanets, most of which are between the size of Earth and Neptune, sparking an entirely new field of astronomical research, and revealing for the first time just how common exo-planetary systems are. With its fuel supply exhausted, Kepler is no longer able to maneuver or reorient itself to make observations. NASA has elected to decommission the spacecraft and leave it in its current, safe orbit away from Earth.

dmoberhaus writes: In one of the strangest system admin tales of all time, one IT guy details how a new MRI machine managed to disable every single iPhone, Apple watch and iPad in a medical facility while leaving the rest of the devices untouched. Eric Woolridge, a system administrator at Morris Hospital in Illinois, said in a detailed post on the r/sysadmin subreddit that helium was to blame for the malfunctioning iPhones. "[T]he MRI installation involves supercooling the giant magnet in the machine by boiling off liquid helium," reports Motherboard. "This evaporated helium is usually pumped out of the facility through a vent, but this vent was leaking the helium into the rest of the facility. In all, about 120 liters of helium (or about 90,000 cubic meters in its gaseous state) was pumped out of the MRI room and an untold amount leaked into the rest of the hospital."

In a blog post, iFixit notes that helium atoms can wreak havoc on MEMS silicon chips. "MEMS are microelectromechanical systems that are used for gyroscopes and accelerometers in phones, and helium atoms are small enough to mess up the way these systems function," reports Motherboard. What's odd is that Android phones were not affected. Apparently, the reason "is because Apple recently defected from traditional quartz-based clocks in its phones in favor of clocks that are also made of MEMS silicon," reports Motherboard. "Given that clocks are the most critical device in any computer and are necessary to make the CPU function, their disruption with helium atoms is enough to crash the device."

Artem Tashkinov shares a report: The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else. Many scientists believe the world has begun a sixth mass extinction, the first to be caused by a species -- Homo sapiens. Other recent analyses have revealed that humankind has destroyed 83% of all mammals and half of plants since the dawn of civilisation and that, even if the destruction were to end now, it would take 5-7 million years for the natural world to recover. Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF, said: "We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it."

The head of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said air pollution is the "new tobacco" that is killing 7 million people a year and harming billions more. "The world has turned the corner on tobacco. Now it must do the same for the 'new tobacco' -- the toxic air that billions breathe every day," said Tedros. "No one, rich or poor, can escape air pollution. It is a silent public health emergency." The Guardian reports: "Despite this epidemic of needless, preventable deaths and disability, a smog of complacency pervades the planet," Tedros said, in an article for the Guardian. "This is a defining moment and we must scale up action to urgently respond to this challenge." The WHO is hosting its first global conference on air pollution and health in Geneva next week, including a high-level action day at which nations and cities are expected to make new commitments to cut air pollution.

Tedros said: "A clean and healthy environment is the single most important precondition for ensuring good health. By cleaning up the air we breathe, we can prevent or at least reduce some of the greatest health risks." The WHO is working with health professionals not only to help their patients, but also to give them the skills and evidence to advocate for health in policy decisions such as moving away from fossil-fuel-powered energy and transport. "No person, group, city, country or region can solve the problem alone," he said. "We need strong commitments and actions from everyone."

Wenyao Xu and Feng Lin, assistant professors of Computer Science and Engineering at University at Buffalo and The State University of New York, write: Our team has been working with collaborators at other institutions for years, and has invented a new type of biometric that is both uniquely tied to a single human being and can be reset if needed. When a person looks at a photograph or hears a piece of music, her brain responds in ways that researchers or medical professionals can measure with electrical sensors placed on her scalp. We have discovered that every person's brain responds differently to an external stimulus, so even if two people look at the same photograph, readings of their brain activity will be different. This process is automatic and unconscious, so a person can't control what brain response happens. And every time a person sees a photo of a particular celebrity, their brain reacts the same way -- though differently from everyone else's.

We realized that this presents an opportunity for a unique combination that can serve as what we call a "brain password." It's not just a physical attribute of their body, like a fingerprint or the pattern of blood vessels in their retina. Instead, it's a mix of the person's unique biological brain structure and their involuntary memory that determines how it responds to a particular stimulus.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The concept seems simple: you just suck in some air from the atmosphere, compress it using electrically-driven compressors and store the energy in the form of pressurised air. When you need that energy you just let the air out and pass it through a machine that takes the energy from the air and turns an electrical generator. Compressed air energy storage (or CAES), to give it its full name, can involve storing air in steel tanks or in much less expensive containments deep underwater. In some cases, high pressure air can be stored in caverns deep underground, either excavated directly out of hard rock or formed in large salt deposits by so-called "solution mining", where water is pumped in and salty water comes out. Such salt caverns are often used to store natural gas. Compressed air could easily deliver the required scale of storage, but it remains grossly undervalued by policymakers, funding bodies and the energy industry itself. This has stunted the development of the technology and means it is likely that much more expensive and less effective solutions will instead be adopted.

In what is referred to as the "Moral Machine Experiment", a survey of more than two million people from nearly every country on the planet, people preferred to save humans over animals, young over old, and more people over fewer. From a report: Since 2016, scientists have posed this scenario to folks around the world through the "Moral Machine," an online platform hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that gauges how humans respond to ethical decisions made by artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the team behind the Moral Machine released responses from more than two million people spanning 233 countries, dependencies and territories. They found a few universal decisions -- for instance, respondents preferred to save a person over an animal, and young people over older people -- but other responses differed by regional cultures and economic status.

The study's findings offer clues on how to ethically program driverless vehicles based on regional preferences, but the study also highlights underlying diversity issues in the tech industry -- namely that it leaves out voices in the developing world. The Moral Machine uses a quiz to give participants randomly generated sets of 13 questions. Each scenario has two choices: You save the car's passengers or you save the pedestrians. However, the characteristics of the passengers and pedestrians varied randomly -- including by gender, age, social status and physical fitness. What they found: The researchers identified three relatively universal preferences. On average, people wanted: to spare human lives over animals, save more lives over fewer, prioritize young people over old ones. When respondents' preferences did differ, they were highly correlated to cultural and economic differences between countries. For instance, people who were more tolerant of illegal jaywalking tended to be from countries with weaker governance, nations who had a large cultural distance from the U.S. and places that do not value individualism as highly. These distinct cultural preferences could dictate whether a jaywalking pedestrian deserves the same protection as pedestrians crossing the road legally in the event they're hit by a self-driving car. Further reading: The study; and MIT Technology Review.