Zorro shares a report from Space.com: The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 has successfully rendezvoused with Ryugu, beginning an 18-month stay at the diamond-shaped asteroid. Launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, in 2014, the probe will poke, prod and even impact the asteroid, deploying a small lander and three rovers. It will then blast an artificial crater to analyze material below the asteroid's surface. After that, the probe will head back to Earth, arriving near the end of 2020 with samples in tow.

Hayabusa2 automatically fired its thrusters this morning (June 27) at 9:35 a.m. local Japanese time (8:45 p.m. on June 26 EDT, or 1245 GMT), bringing the probe within a constant 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the asteroid, according to a statement from JAXA. The Hayabusa2 team will have to select the best place for the probe's lander and rovers based on the space rock's spinning-top-like shape and its rotation; the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) asteroid rotates perpendicular to its orbit, completing a full rotation every 7.5 hours.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch the Parker Solar Probe for a seven-year mission to study the sun and its atmosphere. The spacecraft will take off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, traveling up to 430,000 miles per hour towards the star -- that will make it the fastest spacecraft ever. Assuming you're reading this story around the time it's published, you still have time to watch the launch via NASA's livestream. The launch window for the Parker Solar Probe opens at 3:33 a.m. ET Saturday, but the exact launch time is unknown.

The New York Times has published a story about Eugene N. Parker, the professor that the spacecraft was named after. It is the first time that NASA has named a mission for a living person. Here's an excerpt from the report: In a foundational paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Dr. Parker described how charged particles streamed continuously from the sun, like the flow of water spreading outward from a circular fountain. Almost no one believed him. [...] Four years later, Dr. Parker was vindicated when Mariner 2, a NASA spacecraft en route to Venus, measured energetic particles streaming through interplanetary space -- exactly what Dr. Parker had predicted. Scientists now call that stream of particles the solar wind. UPDATE: After several delays, the Sun-chasing probe successfully launched on August 12th at 3:31AM.

An anonymous reader shares a report from the BBC involving glyphosate, the world's most common weedkiller: Chemical giant Monsanto has been ordered to pay $289 million in damages to a man who claimed herbicides containing glyphosate had caused his cancer. In a landmark case, a Californian jury found that Monsanto knew its Roundup and RangerPro weedkillers were dangerous and failed to warn consumers. It's the first lawsuit to go to trial alleging a glyphosate link to cancer. Monsanto denies that glyphosate causes cancer and says it intends to appeal against the ruling.

The claimant in the case, groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, is among more than 5,000 similar plaintiffs across the US. Mr Johnson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2014. His lawyers said he regularly used a form of RangerPro while working at a school in Benicia, California. Jurors found on Friday that the company had acted with "malice" and that its weedkillers contributed "substantially" to Mr Johnson's terminal illness.

Top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency pushed through a measure to review applications for using asbestos in consumer products, and did so over the objections of E.P.A.'s in-house scientists and attorneys, internal agency emails show. From a report: The clash over the proposal exposes the tensions within the E.P.A. over the Trump administration's efforts to roll back environmental rules and rewrite other regulations that industries have long fought. Asbestos, a naturally occurring mineral and known carcinogen, was once common in insulation and fireproofing materials, but today most developed countries ban it. The United States still allows limited use in products including gaskets, roofing materials and sealants. The proposed new rule would create a new process for regulating uses of asbestos, something the E.P.A. is obliged to do under a 2016 amendment to a toxic substances law.

Slashdot reader MyrddinBach shares a report that claims the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle has been solved. The Bermuda Triangle is a loosely-defined region of water between the southernmost tip of Florida, Puerto Rico, and the island of Bermuda to the north. British oceanographers now believe that "rogue waves" are responsible for the disappearance of a number of ships in the region. VICE News reports: So what are rogue waves? Basically, they're abnormally large and unexpected waves in open sea. Dr Simon Boxall, an Oceanographer from the University of Southampton who led the new study, explained on a Channel 5 documentary The Bermuda Triangle Enigma: "there are storms to the South and North, which come together... we've measured waves in excess of 30 meters. The bigger the boat gets, the more damage is done." His team re-created the intense surges of the 30 meter waves by using indoor simulators. Then to see what such a wave would do to a large ship, they built a model of the USS Cyclops, a carrier that went missing in the Bermuda Triangle in 1918 and claimed the lives of 309 people.

Isao writes: It (apparently) has been known that blue light damages eyes and accelerates macular degeneration. A new article on Phys.org may have identified how this happens. It seems that unlike other light colors, blue causes a necessary molecule (retinal) to permanently kill photoreceptor cells. "The researcher found that a molecule called alpha Tocopherol, a Vitamin E derivative and a natural antioxidant in the eye and body, stops the cells from dying," reports Phys.org. "However, as a person ages or the immune system is suppressed, people lose the ability to fight against the attack by retinal and blue light." The authors will continue their research and recommend filtering and blue-light reduction in the meantime. The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Life-saving pacemakers manufactured by Medtronic don't rely on encryption to safeguard firmware updates, a failing that makes it possible for hackers to remotely install malicious wares that threaten patients' lives, security researchers said Thursday. At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researchers Billy Rios and Jonathan Butts said they first alerted medical device maker Medtronic to the hacking vulnerabilities in January 2017. So far, they said, the proof-of-concept attacks they developed still work. The duo on Thursday demonstrated one hack that compromised a CareLink 2090 programmer, a device doctors use to control pacemakers after they're implanted in patients. Because updates for the programmer aren't delivered over an encrypted HTTPS connection and firmware isn't digitally signed, the researchers were able to force it to run malicious firmware that would be hard for most doctors to detect. From there, the researchers said, the compromised machine could cause implanted pacemakers to make life-threatening changes in therapies, such as increasing the number of shocks delivered to patients. Rios and Butts were also able to use a $200 HackRF software-defined radio to hack a Medtronic-made insulin pump and make it withhold a scheduled dose of insulin. Medtronic has released a page that lists all the security advisories they have issued on the pacemakers and insulin pumps.

Facing criticism from fellow scientists, the researcher behind the world's largest effort to edit human embryos with CRISPR is vowing to continue his efforts to develop what he calls "IVF gene therapy." MIT Technology Review: Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, drew global headlines last August when he reported successfully repairing a genetic mutation in dozens of human embryos, which were later destroyed as part of the experiment. The laboratory findings on early-stage embryos, he said, had brought the eventual birth of the first genetically modified humans "much closer" to reality. The breakthrough drew wide attention, including from critics who quickly pounced, calling it biologically implausible and potentially the result of careless errors and artifacts. Today, those critics are getting an unusual hearing in the journal Nature, which is publishing two critiques of the Oregon research as well as a lengthy reply from Mitalipov and 31 of his coworkers in South Korea, China, and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. The scientific sparring centers on CRISPR's well-known tendency to introduce unseen damage into a cell's DNA.

[...] Mitalipov remains intent on proving that CRISPR can work safely on embryos. In an interview, Mitalipov said he believes it will take five to 10 years before the process is ready to attempt in an IVF center. The revolutionary medical technology being pursued is a way to adjust an embryo's DNA to remove disease risks. It is sometimes called germline gene editing because any DNA fixes a baby is born with would then be passed down to future generations through that person's germ cells, the egg or sperm. For its initial research, the Oregon team recruited women around Portland and paid them $5,000 each to undergo an egg retrieval. With those eggs the team created more than 160 embryos for CRISPR experiments. Mitalipov said his Oregon center continues to obtain eggs in an ongoing effort to confirm his results and extend them in new directions.

Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday laid out details for President Donald Trump's proposed new branch of the U.S. military responsible for protecting national security in outer space. From a report: In a speech at the Pentagon, Pence said the new Space Force would be established by 2020. "As President Trump has said, in his words, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space -- we must have American dominance in space. And so we will," Pence said. "Space is, in his words, a war-fighting domain just like land and air and sea." He added, "History proves that peace only comes through strength, and in the realm of outer space, the United States Space Force will be that strength in the years ahead." The Space Force would ultimately become the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces and would be equal to the other five, Pence said. The Department of Defense has prepared a report laying out the phases of creating the new branch, which will ultimately have to be reviewed and approved by Congress.

In T-minus three days, NASA will launch a car-sized spacecraft to investigate our Sun's scorching hot atmosphere. "The vehicle is the Parker Solar Probe, and it's set to launch at 3:33AM ET on Saturday, August 11th, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. "It'll be riding on a Delta IV Heavy rocket made by the United Launch Alliance, which will send the probe zooming toward the inner Solar System," reports The Verge. "Just six weeks after launch, Parker will do a flyby of Venus to alter its route slightly, and then six weeks later, the vehicle will be in the corona. Over the course of seven years, Parker will do 24 orbits around the star, as well as six more Venus flybys so that it can get even closer to the Sun's surface over time." From the report: NASA has long wanted to send a vehicle to the Sun's atmosphere, but such a mission has been considered impossible until the last few decades. This region of space, known as the corona, is filled with tiny, energetic particles that can reach above 3 million degrees Fahrenheit. Any vehicle that ventures near this region must have sophisticated protection to keep from melting. But thanks to advancements in carbon manufacturing and other key areas of engineering, NASA has been able to create a vehicle with a state-of-the-art heat shield and other crucial cooling systems. The result: the spacecraft will stay at room temperature in some of the hottest places in the Solar System.

The Sun's corona is actually 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun, and no one understands why. The region gets so hot that chunks of the corona actually accelerate and break away from the immense pull of the Sun at supersonic speeds. These so-called solar winds shoot highly energized particles out in all directions, which then slam into surrounding planets. Parker is tasked with investigating the mechanics of the breakaway effect and why the atmosphere is so much hotter than its source.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Plenty of prominent scientists have Wikipedia pages. But while checking to see if someone specific has a Wikipedia page is a quick Google search away, figuring out who should be on Wikipedia but isn't -- and then writing an entry for him or her -- is much trickier. For example, you may or may not have heard of Christina Economos. She doesn't have a Wikipedia page about her, although she's a professor at Tufts University and the New Balance Chair in childhood nutrition. But while she lacks a Wikipedia page, she does have a very short stub describing who she is professionally on a website made by a company called Primer. That little blurb, which could one day grow into a full-blown Wiki entry, was created by an AI system dubbed Quicksilver. The idea behind the project is to use AI as a jumping off point. Humans can use it to help them write Wikipedia pages for scientists who don't have them, but deserve to. For example, on Economos' Primer page, there's a link to an article from CBS Boston that mentions her -- a good potential source for a human Wikipedia editor who may want to write an entry for her.

Primer launched officially last year and uses AI to read information and generate reports; part of its focus is doing the kind of work an intelligence analyst might do. Artificial intelligence generally needs data to learn from, and so for this project, Primer used around 30,000 existing scientist Wikipedia pages to train their machine learning systems. Then they fed 200,000 names and related employment information into their AI system. Those names came from the listed authors of scientific papers focused on computer science and biomedical research provided to Primer from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. If you're curious to see a sample, you can head on over to this page, which has 100 examples of AI-generated Wikipedia blurbs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A vicious species of tick originating from Eastern Asia has invaded the U.S. and is rapidly sweeping the Eastern Seaboard, state and federal officials warn. The tick, the Asian longhorned tick (or Haemaphysalis longicornis), has the potential to transmit an assortment of nasty diseases to humans, including an emerging virus that kills up to 30 percent of victims. So far, the tick hasn't been found carrying any diseases in the U.S. It currently poses the largest threat to livestock, pets, and wild animals; the ticks can attack en masse and drain young animals of blood so quickly that they die -- an execution method called exsanguination.

Key to the tick's explosive spread and bloody blitzes is that its invasive populations tend to reproduce asexually, that is, without mating. Females drop up to 2,000 eggs over the course of two or three weeks, quickly giving rise to a ravenous army of clones. In one U.S. population studied so far, experts encountered a massive swarm of the ticks in a single paddock, totaling well into the thousands. They speculated that the population might have a ratio of about one male to 400 females. Yesterday, August 7, Maryland became the eighth state to report the presence of the tick. It followed a similar announcement last Friday, August 3, from Pennsylvania. Other affected states include New York, Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tech Xplore: Engineers at Caltech have developed a new control algorithm that enables a single drone to herd an entire flock of birds away from the airspace of an airport. The algorithm is presented in a study in IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Herding relies on the ability to manage a flock as a single, contained entity -- keeping it together while shifting its direction of travel. Each bird in a flock reacts to changes in the behavior of the birds nearest to it. Effective herding requires an external threat -- in this case, the drone -- to position itself in such a way that it encourages birds along the edge of a flock to make course changes that then affect the birds nearest to them, who affect birds farther into the flock, and so on, until the entire flock changes course. The positioning has to be precise, however: if the external threat gets too zealous and rushes at the flock, the birds will panic and act individually, not collectively.

To teach the drone to herd autonomously, Soon-Jo Chung, an associate professor of aerospace, and his colleagues [...] studied and derived a mathematical model of flocking dynamics to describe how flocks build and maintain formations, how they respond to threats along the edge of the flock, and how they then communicate that threat through the flock. Their work improves on algorithms designed for herding sheep, which only needed to work in two dimensions, instead of three. Once they were able to generate a mathematical description of flocking behaviors, the researchers reverse engineered it to see exactly how approaching external threats would be responded to by flocks, and then used that information to create a new herding algorithm that produces ideal flight paths for incoming drones to move the flock away from a protected airspace without dispersing it. The team tested the algorithm on a flock of birds near a field in Korea and found that a single drone could keep a flock of dozens of birds out of a designated airspace. The effectiveness of the algorithm is only limited by the number and size of the incoming birds.

Virtual reality is a modern-day beacon of escapism -- a way to fully immerse yourself in other worlds -- and it's seeing unprecedented applications. The market, no surprise, is exploding, with some industry groups estimating a $60 billion global market by 2022. As business booms, however, people who are using the tech are reporting a growing number of physical side effects -- like VR arm, but worse: eye strain, dizziness, headaches, nausea, and even dissociative experiences. From a report: VR companies recommend that people take frequent breaks and moderate their VR time when they're first starting out. "As you become accustomed to the virtual reality experience, you can begin increasing the amount of time you use Daydream View," reads one line of the health and safety information included with Google's VR platform. But what happens when it's your job to build these escapist technologies? The potential health risks for everyday consumers are compounded for those who make VR products for a living.

When VR bigwig Jeremy Bailenson founded Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in 2003, two items were even more important than the VR equipment he was using: "We had to keep a bucket in the lab and a mop nearby," Bailenson says. Today, he institutes a strict 20-minute limit on headset time for people in his lab. These health effects produce unique challenges for VR developers. "We have to understand not just the good but also the downsides of this technology. There a lot of questions we need to answer," Bailenson says. "The whole point of VR is it takes you out of your space, but you can't be doing that for many hours a day."

[...] Suddenly rotating around a virtual environment using handled controllers or quickly looking left and right in the VR space without any concomitant physical movement in the real world tend to physically affect Jonathan Yomayuza, VR technical director at the Emblematic Group, a creative firm based in Southern California. [...] The feeling Yomayuza describes is common among people who work with or use VR.

Women who suffer from heart attacks may be at a higher risk of death in the emergency room if they see a male physician rather than a female one, a new study suggests. The study doesn't jump to conclusions, but doctors and cardiologists have a few theories. There could be a systematic bias where male physicians are not listening to female patients' complaints as readily as [those of] a man, or there could be a bias that favors men in the medical literature, leading to misdiagnoses in women. It may also be that female doctors do a better job than their male counterparts. "In the new study everyone was more likely to survive if they saw a female physician, and a study published last year [...] indicated all patients of female physicians had lower mortality and hospital readmission rates," reports Scientific American. From the report: Heart disease is the number-one killer of both men and women, but the latter are significantly less likely to survive heart attacks. According to 2016 American Heart Association statement, 26 percent of women will die within a year of a heart attack compared with just 19 percent of men. The gap widens with time: By five years after a heart attack almost half of women die, compared with 36 percent of men. The reason has eluded researchers for years, but the authors of the new study point to the disparity in male and female representation in emergency doctors as a potential source of answers. The researchers analyzed a Florida Agency for Health Care Administration database containing every heart attack case from every ER in the state (excluding Veterans Affairs hospitals) between 1991 and 2010.

The researchers divided 500,000-plus cases into four categories: male doctors treating men; male doctors treating women; female doctors treating men; and female doctors treating women. "All of those are statistically indistinguishable except for male doctor -- female patient," says Brad Greenwood, an author on the study and a data scientist at the University of Minnesota. If a heart attack patient is a woman and her emergency physician is a man, he says, her risk of death suddenly rises by about 12 percent. Put another way, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time overall -- but the research team found women with heart attacks will die about 12.4 percent of the time if their cases are handled by male doctors. This means approximately one out of every 66 women with heart attacks dies in the emergency room if she sees a male doctor rather than a female one.

Five years ago, researchers set out to replicate experiments from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers. Now, due to various challenges relating to a lack of funding and expertise, the project only expects to complete just 18 studies. Science Magazine reports: The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CP) began in October 2013 as an open effort to test replicability after two drug companies reported they had trouble reproducing many cancer studies. The work was a collaboration with Science Exchange, a company based in Palo Alto, California, that found contract labs to reproduce a few key experiments from each paper. Funding included a $1.3 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, enough for about $25,000 per study. Experiments were expected to take 1 year.

Costs rose and delays ensued as organizers realized they needed more information and materials from the original authors; a decision to have the proposed replications peer reviewed also added time. Organizers whittled the list of papers to 37 in late 2015, then to 29 by January 2017. In the past few months, they decided to discontinue 38% or 11 of the ongoing replications, Errington says. (Elizabeth Iorns, president of Science Exchange, says total costs for the 18 completed studies averaged about $60,000, including two high-priced "outliers.") One reason for cutting off some replications was that it was taking too long to troubleshoot or optimize experiments to get meaningful results... So far, the project has published replication results for 10 of the 18 studies. "Five were mostly repeatable, three were inconclusive, and two studies were negative, but the original findings have been confirmed by other labs," reports Science Magazine. "In fact, many of the initial 50 papers have been confirmed by other groups, as some of the RP:CB's critics have pointed out."

Europe's heatwave -- which led to wildfires in Greece and Sweden, droughts in central and northern parts, and made the normally green UK look brown from space -- is forcing nuclear plants to shut down or curtail the amount of power they produce, local media reports. From a report: French utility EDF shut four reactors at three power plants on Saturday, Swedish utility Vattenfall shut one of two reactors at a power plant earlier last week, and nuclear plants in Finland, Germany, and Switzerland have cut back the amount of power they produce. Thermal power plants, such as nuclear or coal, use high-temperature steam to turn turbines, which convert heat energy into electricity. In the process, the steam's temperature falls, so it can no longer be used to move the turbine again. [...] Europe's heatwave, however, hasn't just increased air temperatures but also water temperatures.

SpaceX successfully launched one of its used Falcon 9 rockets from Cape Canaveral tonight at 1:18AM ET, deploying the Merah Putih communications satellite just over half an hour later. This marks the first time that SpaceX reused one of its new powerful Block 5 boosters -- the final upgrade of the Falcon 9 that is supposed to be able to go to space and back up to 100 times. "The Falcon 9's first stage booster also performed another successful landing on one of the company's drone ships in the Atlantic, becoming the 28th booster that SpaceX has ever recorded," The Verge adds. From the report: For this mission, SpaceX is using the very first Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket it's flown, a vehicle that sent up a large communications satellite for Bangladesh in May from Florida. The vehicle landed on one of SpaceX's drone ships after the flight, and the company has since done inspection and refurbishment on the vehicle over the last three months to get it ready for flight again. Eventually, SpaceX hopes to do as little refurbishment on these Block 5 vehicles as possible, if any at all. Limiting the amount of inspection and tweaking needed between re-flights could significantly up the cost savings that SpaceX gets from reusing its rockets. Less money is needed if fewer people and materials are needed to turn around the rockets each time. Ultimately, SpaceX hopes to fly each Block 5 vehicle a total of 10 times before any refurbishment is needed. As for the satellite, it will reportedly provide telecommunications services to parts of Indonesia and South Asia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: What we do in the next 10-20 years will determine whether our planet remains hospitable to human life or slides down an irreversible path to what scientists in a major new study call "Hothouse Earth" conditions. Hothouse Earth is an apocalyptic nightmare where the global average temperatures is 4 to 5 degrees Celsius higher (with regions like the Arctic averaging 10 degrees C higher) than today, according to the study, "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene," published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sea levels would eventually be 10-60 meters higher as much of the world's ice melts. In these conditions, large parts of the Earth would be uninhabitable. Cutting carbon emissions to limit climate change to 2 degrees C, as proposed in the Paris climate agreement, won't be enough to avoid a "Hothouse Earth," said co-author Johan Rockstrom, executive director of Stockholm Resilience Centre. The reality is that global temperatures aren't driven by human emissions of carbon alone, says Rockstrom -- natural systems such as forests and oceans also play a major role. If global warming reaches 2 degrees C it could trigger a feedback, or "tipping element," in one or more of our natural systems and drive further warming, Rockstrom told Motherboard. To put that into perspective, the recent heat waves and wildfires are being linked to climate change that has raised the global average temperature 1 degree C. The researchers conclude the study on a more uplifting note, saying: "We have the knowledge and ability to act. This is within our control." There are three main areas of action that need to be taken within the next two decades. "The top priority in the coming decade is to aggressively cut carbon emissions and decarbonize our energy systems as quickly as possible," reports Motherboard. "The second priority is to halt deforestation and conversion of nature areas into agricultural production. Forests and other natural areas currently absorb 25 percent of our carbon emissions and this needs to grow." The third action is "to continue to develop technologies to pull carbon from the atmosphere and safely store it for thousands of years." While this last action can be costly, we're starting to see some companies give it a try. A startup called Climeworks recently inaugurated the first system that captures CO2 from the air and converts the emissions into stone, thus ensuring they don't escape back into the atmosphere for the next millions of years.

From a research paper [PDF]: Many workers care about more than financial compensation in their job. Nonmonetary incentives often matter, too. A firm's mission and the design of one's job can create meaning and purpose for employees. As a result, firms will have reason to care about meaning of work. We believe economists can usefully contribute to the debate about the implications of meaningful work. We are not arguing that financial compensation is unimportant. Lazear (in this volume) provides an excel- lent review of monetary incentives in certain organizations. But we believe that in order to manage modern organizations and understand the future of work, studying workers' nonmonetary motives will be crucial.