An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Millions of Atlantic salmon could have their faces stored in digital databases to track their health and single out those posing threats to their marine surroundings. And before you ask if fish have faces, they do: A company in Norway has developed a 3D scanner that can tell salmon apart based on the distinct pattern of spots around their eyes, mouth and gills. Fish-farming giant Cermaq Group AS wants to roll out the technology at salmon pens along Norway's fjord-etched coastline, betting it can prevent the spread of epidemics like sea lice that infect hundreds of millions of farmed fish and cost the global industry upwards of $1 billion each year.

Cargill wants to apply facial recognition to aqua farms, and Cermaq, operator of over 200 salmon and trout farms in Norway, Canada and Chile, is already doing tests on the iFarm design with its Norwegian technology partner BioSort AS. It'll look a lot like existing fish farms, with networks of 160-meter (525-foot) circular nets that are typically 35 meters deep and home to up to 200,000 salmon. The difference is that iFarms would be equipped with camera scanners at the water surface. On any given day, about 40,000 salmon in each pen will rise to above water for a gulp of air, something their bladders need to regulate buoyancy. Each time a salmon does this, typically every four days, it would go through a funnel fitted with sensors that would screen its face and body so records can be kept on each fish. If the machines pick up on abnormalities like lice or skin ulcers, the infected fish can be quarantined for medical treatment.

Economist Paul Romer, a co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, uses the programming language Python for his research, according to Quartz. Romer reportedly tried using Wolfram Mathematica to make his work transparent, but it didn't work so he converted to a Jupyter notebook instead. From the report: Romer believes in making research transparent. He argues that openness and clarity about methodology is important for scientific research to gain trust. As Romer explained in an April 2018 blog post, in an effort to make his own work transparent, he tried to use Mathematica to share one of his studies in a way that anyone could explore every detail of his data and methods. It didn't work. He says that Mathematica's owner, Wolfram Research, made it too difficult to share his work in a way that didn't require other people to use the proprietary software, too. Readers also could not see all of the code he used for his equations.

Instead of using Mathematica, Romer discovered that he could use a Jupyter notebook for sharing his research. Jupyter notebooks are web applications that allow programmers and researchers to share documents that include code, charts, equations, and data. Jupyter notebooks allow for code written in dozens of programming languages. For his research, Romer used Python -- the most popular language for data science and statistics. Importantly, unlike notebooks made from Mathematica, Jupyter notebooks are open source, which means that anyone can look at all of the code that created them. This allows for truly transparent research. In a compelling story for The Atlantic, James Somers argued that Jupyter notebooks may replace the traditional research paper typically shared as a PDF.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Gene editing to correct faulty DNA in human embryos has taken a step closer to becoming a reality, with scientists showing it is possible to correct genetic problems in mice before they are born. Researchers used a form of the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 to introduce a mutation into a gene that would otherwise cause lethal liver failure in mice. While the approach has previously been shown to work in mice after birth, the latest study showed it was also possible to make the all-important tweak before they were born. Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, a team of researchers in the US report how they conducted a series of experiments to explore the use of gene editing in mouse fetuses using a modified form of Crispr that can alter single "base pairs" -- the molecules that couple up to form the rungs of the DNA double helix -- but only cuts one strand of DNA when making a change.

After showing it was possible to make a change at a particular spot in the DNA of liver cells in mouse fetuses, the team focused on a condition known as hereditary tyrosinemia type 1. This is a genetic disease that prevents the body from breaking down an amino acid called tyrosine as it should, and can cause death if left untreated. The team took mice with a genetic mutation that produced a similar condition to hereditary tyrosinemia type 1 and bred them, with the mothers kept on a drug called nitisione. The team then injected 26 of the fetuses with a virus carrying the genetic instructions for making the gene-editing tool, and 27 of them with the same virus but without information for the tool. After birth the baby mice no longer received the drug, and the team watched what happened. "In the non-treated mice, they all died by 21 days of life," said Dr William Peranteau, a pediatric and fetal surgeon at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who co-led the study. "However, those that had been treated were able to survive until the end of the study at three months, and looked very similar to another group that had not been injected with anything and were kept on the drug. No gene editing was seen in the mothers who had given birth to the mice.

The Hubble Space Telescope is operating with only essential functions after it lost one of the gyroscopes needed to point the spacecraft. From a report: The observatory, described as one of the most important scientific instruments ever created, was placed in "safe mode" over the weekend, while scientists try to fix the problem. Hubble had been operating with four of its six gyroscopes when one of them failed on Friday. The telescope was launched in 1990. After the gyro failure at the weekend, controllers tried to switch on a different one, but that was found to be malfunctioning. That leaves Hubble with only two fully functional gyros. At any given time, Hubble needs three of its gyroscopes to work for optimal efficiency.

The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a report that says global temperatures are heading towards 3 degrees C, and that the original goal of keeping the rise under 1.5 degrees C will require "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society." While the window of opportunity is not yet closed, the prospect looks unlikely and hugely expensive. BBC reports: The critical 33-page Summary for Policymakers certainly bears the hallmarks of difficult negotiations between climate researchers determined to stick to what their studies have shown and political representatives more concerned with economies and living standards. Despite the inevitable compromises, there are some key messages that come through loud and and clear. "The first is that limiting warming to 1.5C brings a lot of benefits compared with limiting it to 2 degrees. It really reduces the impacts of climate change in very important ways," said Prof Jim Skea, who is a co-chair of the IPCC. "The second is the unprecedented nature of the changes that are required if we are to limit warming to 1.5C -- changes to energy systems, changes to the way we manage land, changes to the way we move around with transportation."

"Scientists might want to write in capital letters, 'ACT NOW IDIOTS,' but they need to say that with facts and numbers," said Kaisa Kosonen, from Greenpeace, who was an observer at the negotiations. "And they have." The researchers have used these facts and numbers to paint a picture of the world with a dangerous fever, caused by humans. We used to think if we could keep warming below 2 degrees this century then the changes we would experience would be manageable. Not any more. This new study says that going past 1.5C is dicing with the planet's liveability. And the 1.5C temperature "guard rail" could be exceeded in just 12 years in 2030. We can stay below it but it will require urgent, large-scale changes from governments and individuals, plus we will have to invest a massive pile of cash every year, around 2.5% of global GDP, for two decades. Even then, we will still need machines, trees and plants to capture carbon from the air that we can then store deep underground. Forever! In order to get to 1.5C, the report says the following will be necessary: Global emissions of CO2 need to decline by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030; Renewables are estimated to provide up to 85% of global electricity by 2050; Coal is expected to reduce to close to zero; Up to 7 million sq km of land will be needed for energy crops (a bit less than the size of Australia); and Global net zero emissions by 2050. As if this wasn't demanding enough, the report says that to limit warming to 1.5C, it will involve "annual average investment needs in the energy system of around $2.4 trillion" between 2016 and 2035.

If the planet reaches 2C of warming, coral reefs would be almost entirely wiped out and global sea-levels will rise around 10 centimeters more. "There are also significant impacts on ocean temperatures and acidity, and the ability to grow crops like rice, maize and wheat," reports The Guardian.

Further reading: Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040.

schwit1 shares a report from France 24: NASA has announced the first crewed flight by a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) is expected to take place in June 2019. It will be the first manned U.S. launch to the orbiting research laboratory since the space shuttle program was retired in 2011, forcing U.S. astronauts to hitch costly rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. A flight on Boeing spacecraft is set to follow in August 2019. The timetable for both launches has already been postponed several times, but NASA said Thursday it would now be providing monthly updates on deadlines. Both missions are considered tests: the two astronauts transported in each flight will spend two weeks aboard the orbiting ISS before returning to Earth. SpaceX will carry out an uncrewed test in January 2019, and Boeing in March 2019.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In a lab just south of San Francisco I am looking at two blown-up images of microscope slides on a computer screen, side by side. The slides are the same cross-sections of mouse knees from a six-month-old and an 18-month-old animal. The older mouse's image has a splattering of little yellow dots, the younger barely any. That staining indicates the presence of so-called senescent cells -- "zombie cells" that are damaged and that, as a defense against cancer, have ceased to divide but are also resistant to dying. They are known to accumulate with age, as the immune system can no longer clear them, and as a result of exposure to cell-damaging agents such as radiation and chemotherapy. And they have been identified as a cause of aging in mice, at least partially responsible for most age-related diseases. Seeing the slides, it makes me worried about my own knees. "Tell us about it," says Pedro Beltran who heads the biology department at Unity Biotechnology, a 90 person-strong company trying to halt, slow or reverse age-associated diseases in humans by killing senescent cells.

Developing therapies to kill senescent cells is a burgeoning part of the wider quest to defeat aging and keep people healthier longer. Unity, which was founded in 2011, has received more than $385m in funding to date including investment from big tech names such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. It went public this May and is valued at more than $700m. Its first drug entered early clinical trials in June, aimed at treating osteoarthritis. Other startups with zombie cells in their sights include Seattle-based Oisin Biotechnologies which was founded in 2016 and has raised around $4m; Senolytic Therapeutics whose scientific development is based in Spain and which was established last September (it won't disclose its financing other than to say it has a first round, which will allow it to reach clinical trials); and Cleara Biotech, formed this June backed by $3m in funding and based in the Netherlands. In addition, Scottish company CellAge, also founded in 2016, has raised about $100,000 to date, partly through a crowdfunding campaign. The report goes on to detail Unity's plan to kill senescent cells. Their method is to target the biological pathways senescent cells use to resist the normal death of aging cells. "The company's approach is to find small molecules (so called 'senolytics') that can do this," reports The Guardian. "But because small molecules, by their nature, can get everywhere in the body, the approach is prone to unwanted side-effects." As a result, the company has turned to localized treatment.

Meanwhile, Oisin is trying to kill all a person's zombie cells in one go. "The idea is to load the body with nanoparticles that insert a 'suicide gene' into every cell," reports The Guardian. "It only triggers if a cell has a lot of particular protein (p16) that acts as a marker of zombie cells, albeit imperfectly." It plans to test this method on late-stage cancer patients next year.

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts -- and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it's as weird as it sounds. It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields.

The researchers behind the new system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds together, even across the web.... For now it's very slow and not fully reliable, and this work has yet to be peer-reviewed by the neuroscience community, but it's a glimpse at some fanciful ways we could be getting our thoughts across to each other in the future -- maybe even pooling mental resources to try and tackle major problems. "Our results raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a 'social network' of connected brains," writes the team.

It seems like everyone's curious about how the Apple Watch 4 detects falls. The Washington Post reports: In the interest of science, I've tried jumping off ledges and throwing myself onto furniture. The thing never went off. (The feature is on by default only for people older than 65, but I turned mine on.) It's possible, even likely, that the Watch could tell I was faking.

What's important is actual falls, not stunts. Apple says it studied the falls of 2,500 people of varying ages. Yet the company hasn't said how often it catches real falls or sets off false alarms. This isn't like claiming the "best camera ever" on a smartphone -- if Apple wants us to think of its products as life aids, it ought to show us the data. Even better: peer-reviewed studies. Apple's disclaimer says: "Apple Watch cannot detect all falls. The more physically active you are, the more likely you are to trigger Fall Detection due to high impact activity that can appear to be a fall."
But there's now also a new video by the Wall Street Journal that tests the watch's fall-detecting capabilities with a professional stuntwoman. Hot Hardware reports: The Wall Street Journal found that the Apple Watch did a very good job of detecting a serious fall while ignoring insignificant or outright fake falls. The stunt double performed a series of falls that are similar to falls in the slides that Apple showed in its keynote explaining the feature. In the testing, the watch was able to identify those falls and offer to call emergency services.

The most interesting part is that even though the stunt woman pulled some serious fake falls, complete with Hollywood-style tumbling down a hill, the Apple Watch was able to figure out if the fall was fake and didn't offer to call emergency services.
The Journal's reporter credits the watch's gyroscope and accelerometer, which can monitor numerous factors including both speed and wrist trajectory. Their conclusion?

"Turns out the Apple Watch really does know when you're just playing around."

Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: One of the key assumptions of Relativity — both Special and General — is that the speed of light is a constant in all non-accelerating reference frames. As a key assumption, it is also one of the things that gets the kooks, wingnuts and fanatics all riled up, because they have proven that it's wrong, though those pesky scientists refuse to listen to their spittle-flecked presentations.

Back in the real world, real scientists also wonder if the assumption is justified, then try to work out how to test it. One idea for performing this test has just been published — that of using the gravitational lensing of distant supernovae to try to interrogate the speed of light in the distant past.

When a (relatively) nearby galaxy lenses a (relatively) distant galaxy, it is common for multiple images to be formed. If a supernova occurs in the distant galaxy, then supernova images will be seen in the different images, but typically at different times (on Earth) because the light paths from different images are of different lengths, and were of different lengths in the past.

The Chinese-Polish team of authors have studied the possibilities of making such observations and suggest that the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, "a wide-field survey reflecting telescope with an 8.4-meter primary mirror, currently under construction, that will photograph the entire available sky every few nights") should detect several thousand gravitationally-lensed distant quasars, and so yield around 50 gravitationally-lensed distant supernovas per year. This is estimated to "produce robust constraints on the speed of light at the level of delta-c/c;= 0.005" (half a percent) in a decade of operations.

Which will shut the wingnuts, lunatics and kooks up. Not.At.All.

NASA has switched its Curiosity rover over to its backup computer system after the main system started experiencing errors last month. "Many NASA spacecraft and surface missions have redundant systems built-in," reports ExtremeTech. "Once they've launched from Earth, there's no way to repair damage to critical systems, so it makes sense to double-up on the vital components. That includes Curiosity's computers, which were designed specifically for the harsh environment on Mars." From the report: The rover has a pair of identical brains running a 5-watt RAD750 CPU. This chip is part of the PowerPC 750 family, but it has been custom designed to survive high-radiation environments as you'd find on Mars or in deep space. These radiation-hardened CPUs cost $200,000 each, and NASA equipped the rover with two of them. Each computer also has 256 kB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory. They run identical VxWorks real-time operating systems. When Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, it used the "Side-A" computer. However, just a year later in 2013 (Sol 200), the computer failed due to corrupted memory. The rover got stuck in a bootloop, which prevented it from processing commands and drained the batteries. NASA executed a swap to Side-B so engineers could perform remote diagnostics on Side-A. In the following months, NASA confirmed that part of Side-A's memory was unusable and quarantined it. They kept Curiosity on Side-B, though. With Side-B experiencing problems preventing the rover from storing key science and engineering data, NASA switched Curiosity back to Side-A while it investigates the problem, which it can only do when the other computer is active. "NASA hasn't said how much of Side-A's RAM is bad, and it only had 256MB to start, but the team does intend to move Curiosity operations back to Side-B if possible," the report adds. "For now, the mission is functioning normally on Side-A."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A new study argues that we have Neanderthals to thank for helping us cope with the viral tides we encountered as we marched around the globe. Stanford University researchers have identified DNA sequences that evolved in our ancient cousins can produce antivirus proteins, which more than likely gave some human populations the edge they needed to survive. Roughly 1 percent of our genome's coding was written in Neanderthal populations. But this is a broad average -- many families with African ancestry have zero, for instance, while other populations boast as much as 2 percent or more. So the question is how much of this difference comes down to the random drift of DNA being passed on around the globe, and how much is due to natural selection giving those with Neanderthal genes an advantage?

To build a case one way or another, the Stanford researchers put together a list of just over 4,500 virus-interacting proteins (VIP) made by our genome. These were all matched against a database of Neanderthal DNA that could be found in modern East Asian and European human populations, providing 152 VIP genes shared by both groups of human. Interestingly, all of these VIP genes were of a variety that interacted with RNA viruses -- pathogens that include influenza A, hepatitis C, and HIV. This isn't to say these viruses were problems for ancient humans, but rather that similar RNA viruses were more than likely prevalent enough to shape our evolution. The discovery supports a view of genetic exchange described as the 'poison-antidote' model.

From a report: For the first time, an international team of researchers has used a quantum computer to create artificial life -- a simulation of living organisms that scientists can use to understand life at the level of whole populations all the way down to cellular interactions. With the quantum computer, individual living organisms represented at a microscopic level with superconducting qubits were made to "mate," interact with their environment, and "die" to model some of the major factors that influence evolution. The new research, published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, is a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics, a theory of physics that describes the universe in terms of the interactions between subatomic particles. Modeling quantum artificial life is a new approach to one of the most vexing questions in science: How does life emerge from inert matter, such as the "primordial soup" of organic molecules that once existed on Earth?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A research arm of the U.S. military is exploring the possibility of deploying insects to make plants more resilient by altering their genes. Some experts say the work may be seen as a potential biological weapon. In an opinion paper published Thursday in the journal Science, the authors say the U.S. needs to provide greater justification for the peace-time purpose of its Insect Allies project to avoid being perceived as hostile to other countries. Other experts expressed ethical and security concerns with the research, which seeks to transmit protective traits to crops already growing in the field. That would mark a departure from the current widely used procedure of genetically modifying seeds for crops such as corn and soy, before they grow into plants.

The military research agency says its goal is to protect the nation's food supply from threats like drought, crop disease and bioterrorism by using insects to infect plants with viruses that protect against such dangers. The State Department said the project is for peaceful purposes and does not violate the Biological Weapons Convention. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said its scientists are part of the research, which is being conducted in contained labs. The technology could work in different ways. In the first phase, aphids -- tiny bugs that feed by sucking sap from plants -- infected plants with a virus that temporarily brought about a trait. But researchers are also trying to see if viruses can alter the plant's genes themselves to be resistant to dangers throughout the plant's life.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin aerospace company is planning to send "several metric tons" of unspecified cargo to the Moon in the next five years. The company reportedly signed a letter of intent with Germany aerospace companies OHB Space Systems and Security and MT Aerospace at the 69th annual International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Germany on Tuesday. The OHB dubbed the lunar project the "Blue Moon" mission in a press release. Motherboard reports: It's not clear exactly what cargo the Blue Moon mission would transport, but it likely includes infrastructure designed to start private business on the Moon: The IAC also detailed the launch of the "Moon Race," a competition between Blue Origin, Airbus Air and Space, and other space agencies around the world to develop technology that will bring companies around the world to the Moon. According to a press release, the competition could involve manufacturing products and technology, manufacturing energy sources for humans to survive, getting access to water and sustaining biological life, such as plant or agricultural life -- all on the Moon. Blue Origin said in a press release that both the Blue Moon mission and Moon Race are in line with its goal to "land large payloads on the Moon that can access and utilize the resources found there."

According to a study published in the journal Molecules, researchers found that six common artificial sweeteners approved by the FDA and 10 sport supplements that contained them were found to be toxic to the digestive gut microbes of mice. CNBC reports: Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore tested the toxicity of aspartame, sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame, and acesulfame potassium-k. They observed that when exposed to only 1 milligram per milliliter of the artificial sweeteners, the bacteria found in the digestive system became toxic. According to the study, the gut microbial system "plays a key role in human metabolism," and artificial sweeteners can "affect host health, such as inducing glucose intolerance." Additionally, some of the effects of the new FDA-approved sweeteners, such as neotame, are still unknown.

However, the study found that mice treated with the artificial sweetener neotame had different metabolic patterns than those not treated, and several important genes found in the human gut had decreased. Additionally, concentrations of several fatty acids, lipids and cholesterol were higher in mice treated with neotame than in those not. Because of the widespread use of artificial sweeteners in drinks and foods, many people consume them without knowing it.

Last month when Boeing and SpaceX announced the first astronauts who will fly on their commercial crew spacecraft, several newspapers across the U.S. began publishing an op-ed that criticized the process by which Boeing competitor SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rocket. "The first op-ed appeared in a Memphis newspaper a week before the commercial crew announcement," reports Ars Technica. "In recent weeks, copies of the op-ed have also appeared in the Houston Chronicle, various Alabama newspapers, Albuquerque Journal, Florida Today, and The Washington Times." Ars Technica reports: All of these op-eds were bylined by "retired spacecraft operator" Richard Hagar, who worked for NASA during the Apollo program and now lives in Tennessee. (Based upon his limited social media postings, Hagar appears to be more interested in conservative politics than in space these days). Each op-ed cites Hagar's work on NASA's recovery from the Apollo 1 fire and the hard lessons NASA learned that day about human spaceflight. The pieces then pivot to arguing that SpaceX's load-and-go fueling process -- in which the crew will board the Dragon spacecraft on top of the Falcon 9 rocket before it is fueled -- ignores the lessons that Hagar's generation learned during Apollo.

"It's concerning to learn that some of the newer private space ventures launching today don't appreciate the same safety standards we learned to emphasize on Apollo," the op-ed states. "I suppose for Mr. Musk, inexperience is replacing the abundant safety protocols drilled into us after witnessing the Apollo 1 disaster. Astronaut safety is NASA's number one priority on any space mission. There is no reason it should not be for private space travel, but commercial space companies like SpaceX play by different rules."

There are some factual inaccuracies here. For one thing, SpaceX does play by the same rules as Boeing for commercial crew -- astronaut safety rules that NASA itself wrote. Moreover, NASA has already provisionally cleared load-and-go for Falcon 9 launches that will send the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds. In fact, based upon our research, at least four of the six op-eds that we located were submitted by two people with gmail.com addresses. Their names were Josh Brevik and Casey Murray. Further research revealed that two people with these names worked as "associates" at a Washington, DC-based public relations firm named Law Media Group or LMG. LMG's website says they are a 15-year-old firm that "develops and executes public-, Hill-, and agency-facing issue advocacy campaigns that shift the narrative in a changing world." The SourceWatch website more bluntly "calls LMG a 'secretive Washington DC public affairs firm' with a history of placing op-eds, and it seeks to mask the op-eds' financial sponsors," reports Ars.

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: CNN reports on a new font that is purposely designed to more easily help students recall academic materials they read. From the report: "Australian researchers say their new font, called Sans Forgetica, could be the tool to help people retain information. The typeface, which slants to the side and has gaps in the middle, is not easy on the eyes. But according to the team at RMIT University in Australia who conceived Sans Forgetica, it has the perfect combination of 'obstruction' needed to recall information. The multidisciplinary team of typographic design specialists and psychologists said they designed Sans Forgetica using the learning principle called 'desirable difficulty.' The principle means that when obstruction is added to the learning process, people are required to make a little more effort and end up having better memory retention.

With normal fonts 'readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created,' RMIT senior lecturer Janneke Blijlevens said in a statement. Conversely, if a font is too difficult, memory is not retained. 'Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention,' she said. To get to that sweet spot, the researchers tested various fonts with roughly 400 Australian university students in a laboratory and an online experiment 'where fonts with a range of obstructions were tested to determine which led to the best memory retention,' RMIT said. 'Sans Forgetica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention,' RMIT said."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Swiss company Climeworks has announced the opening of a new plant in Italy that will collect carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air and pair it with renewably-made hydrogen (H2) to make methane fuel that would add little or no CO2 to the atmosphere. The plant in Troia, Italy, was completed in July and went into operation this week as part of a research program funded by the European Union. The new Italian plant will be run for more than 4,000 hours over the next 17 months (that's just under eight hours a day) in order to demonstrate the viability of fuel production as a potential revenue source for carbon capture. Gebald said that pure, captured CO2 could even be processed into jet fuel. When that fuel is burned, he said, it would again create CO2 that could be captured at an arbitrary Direct Air Capture plant and turned back into jet fuel.

The plant consists of three air collectors that are more energy efficient than Climeworks' first ambient air collector. "The plant will filter up to 150 tons of CO2 from ambient air per year," Climeworks said in a press statement. "Simultaneously, an alkaline electrolyser (1.2 MW) locally generates 240 cubic meters of renewable hydrogen per hour by making use of excess on-site photovoltaic energy." A catalyst then combines the CO2 and the hydrogen into methane gas in a reactor built by a French company called Atmostat. The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel natural gas lorries," Climeworks says. As Ars notes, Climeworks' previous carbon-capture plant "captured carbon out of ambient air using a filter of base amines that would bind with more acidic CO2." The carbon that was captured was then sent to a greenhouse to speed plant growth.

"The second was based in Iceland at a geothermal plant that released some volcanic CO2," reports Ars. "Climeworks' small plant captures that carbon and injects it back into the ground, where mineral reactions help the CO2 bind with basalt, essentially storing the gas as a rock."

About 8,000 light-years away, a giant planet circles an aging star, marching once around its sun in a single Earth-year. But that planet, called Kepler 1625b, might not be traveling completely alone. From a report: Scientists now suspect the planet's skies are filled by an orbiting mega-moon, a stunningly large world the size of Neptune that may be the first moon spotted outside our solar system. Early hints of its existence surfaced in July 2017, when scientists tentatively announced that they'd found some evidence of an orbital companion for Kepler 1625b. But it wasn't until the Hubble Space Telescope aimed its eye at the faraway star a year ago that scientists were able to gather enough data to build the case for the so-called exomoon's presence. Now, the two scientists behind the discovery are hoping for independent confirmation of their finding to really shore up the extraordinary claim.

"I'm confident that we've done a thorough job vetting this thing, but I also anticipate there will be things other folks come up with that we might not have considered," says Columbia University's Alex Teachey, who reports the purported alien moon this week in the journal Science Advances. "Whether those other ideas are fatal to the moon hypothesis or not, that remains to be seen." For now, MIT's Sara Seager says she's reserving judgment. "Exomoons are one of the key items remaining on exoplanet researchers' wish list," Seager says. "It's exciting to see the hunt for the first exomoon continue ... and with what would be a shockingly large moon, about the size and mass of Neptune."