sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: On April 25, the European Space Agency released a data set gathered by the Gaia satellite containing the motions, and much more, of 1.3 billion stars. Astronomers have immediately sifted the data for fast-moving stars. They are prized as forensic tools: When rewound, their trajectories point back to the violent events that launched them. Last week, one team reported the discovery of three white dwarfs -- the dying embers of sunlike stars -- hurtling through the galaxy at thousands of kilometers per second, perhaps flung out from supernovae explosions. Another group reported more than two dozen fast-moving stars, some apparently kicked out by our galaxy's central black hole. And a third has confirmed that a star blazing through the outskirts of the Milky Way actually hails from another galaxy altogether, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The flood of discoveries has sent astronomers racing to their telescopes to check and classify the swift objects, says Harvard University astronomer James Guillochon. The findings have been reported in the journal Science.

States are reportedly turning to nitrogen gas to carry out the death penalty. "Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi have authorized nitrogen for executions and are developing protocols to use it, which represents a leap into the unknown," reports The New York Times. "There is no scientific data on executing people with nitrogen, leading some experts to question whether states, in trying to solve old problems, may create new ones." Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an excerpt from a report via The New York Times: What little is known about human death by nitrogen comes from industrial and medical accidents and its use in suicide. In accidents, when people have been exposed to high levels of nitrogen and little air in an enclosed space, they have died quickly. In some cases co-workers who rushed in to rescue them also collapsed and died. Nitrogen itself is not poisonous, but someone who inhales it, with no air, will pass out quickly, probably in less than a minute, and die soon after -- from lack of oxygen. The same is true of other physiologically inert gases, including helium and argon, which kill only by replacing oxygen.

Death from nitrogen is thought to be painless. It should prevent the condition that causes feelings of suffocation: the buildup of carbon dioxide from not being able to exhale. Humans are highly sensitive to carbon dioxide -- too much brings on the panicky feeling of not being able to breathe. Somewhat surprisingly, the lack of oxygen doesn't trigger that same reflex. Someone breathing pure nitrogen can still exhale carbon dioxide and therefore should not have the sensation of smothering.

Subscription music service Tidal has been accused of faking the streaming numbers for Kanye West and Beyonce. "Kanye West's 'The Life of Pablo,' which was the first album to go platinum primarily from streaming, and Beyonce's platinum record 'Lemonade' were released exclusively on Tidal for periods in 2016," reports Quartz. "By placing their albums on the fledgling platform, which was relaunched in 2015, both artists risked losing big paychecks." From the report: West's album was said to have been streamed 250 million times in the first 10 days on the service. And Beyonce's record was reportedly played 306 million times in 15 days. While it's not hard to believe Bey and Yeezy could hit those numbers, they rang false to some, as Tidal said it had 3 million members then. However, according to an in-depth investigation by Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv (DN), Tidal has reportedly manipulated those streaming numbers, to potentially make the company appear more profitable or increase royalty payments to the artists at the expense of others on the service. This is something Tidal vigorously denies and says the DN report is part of a "smear campaign."

The DN's report investigated streaming numbers since 2017, when it reportedly obtained a hard drive of internal Tidal data with more than 1.5 billion of rows of user play logs. Those logs were from two periods -- from late January to early March, and mid April to early May -- totaling 65 days in 2016. Its reporters tracked down subscribers from the logs, and presented them with their apparent listening history, which the users said didn't add up. "We have through advanced statistical analysis determined that there has in fact been a manipulation of the data at particular times. The manipulation appears targeted towards a very specific set of track IDs, related to two distinct albums," found the researchers (pdf) at NTNU's Center for Cyber and Information Security. "The manipulation likely originates from within the streaming service itself."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The search for extraterrestrial life, in general, has continued over the past decades, of course, carried out by academic institutions around the world, by people like Tarter, one of the field's best-known seti researchers (and the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the protagonist in Contact, Carl Sagan's 1985 classic science-fiction novel). But they wouldn't get any help from the feds. "[Senator Bryan] made it clear to the administration that if they came back with seti in their budget again, it wouldn't be good for the NASA budget," Tarter says now. "So we instantly became the four-letter S-word that you couldn't say at headquarters anymore, and that has stuck for quite a while."

That could soon change. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives recently proposed legislation for NASA's future that includes some intriguing language. The space agency, the bill recommends, should spend $10 million on the "search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions" per year, for the next two fiscal years. The House bill -- should it survive a vote in the House and passage in the Senate -- can only make recommendations for how agencies should use federal funding. But for seti researchers like Tarter, the fact that it even exists is thrilling. It's the first time congressional lawmakers have proposed using federal cash to fund seti in 25 years.

A potential new cure for baldness has been discovered using a drug originally intended to treat osteoporosis. BBC reports: Researchers found the drug had a dramatic effect on hair follicles in the lab, stimulating them to grow. It contains a compound which targets a protein that acts as a brake on hair growth and plays a role in baldness. Project leader Dr Nathan Hawkshaw told the BBC a clinical trial would be needed to see if the treatment was effective and safe in people. Only two drugs are currently available to treat balding (androgenetic alopecia): minoxidil, for men and women, and finasteride, for men only. Neither is available on the NHS, the national healthcare system for England, and both have side-effects and are not always very effective, so patients often resort to hair transplantation surgery instead.

The idea is simple, if you ask biologist George Church. He wants to live to 130 in the body of a 22-year-old. From a report: The world's most influential synthetic biologist is behind a new company that plans to rejuvenate dogs using gene therapy. If it works, he plans to try the same approach in people, and he might be one of the first volunteers. The stealth startup Rejuvenate Bio, cofounded by George Church of Harvard Medical School, thinks dogs aren't just man's best friend but also the best way to bring age-defeating treatments to market. The company, which has carried out preliminary tests on beagles, claims it will make animals "younger" by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.

Its age-reversal plans build on tantalizing clues seen in simple organisms like worms and flies. Tweaking their genes can increase their life spans by double or better. Other research has shown that giving old mice blood transfusions from young ones can restore some biomarkers to youthful levels. "We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we'll move on to humans," Church told the podcaster Rob Reid earlier this year. The company's efforts to keep its activities out of the press make it unclear how many dogs it has treated so far. In a document provided by a West Coast veterinarian, dated last June, Rejuvenate said its gene therapy had been tested on four beagles with Tufts Veterinary School in Boston. It is unclear whether wider tests are under way.

However, from public documents, a patent application filed by Harvard, interviews with investors and dog breeders, and public comments made by the founders, MIT Technology Review assembled a portrait of a life-extension startup pursuing a longevity long shot through the $72-billion-a-year US pet industry. "Dogs are a market in and of themselves," Church said during an event in Boston last week. "It's not just a big organism close to humans. It's something people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We'll do dog trials, and that'll be a product, and that'll pay for scaling up in human trials."

Researchers at Skidmore College conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 60 Skidmore students and found that two spaces at the end of a period slightly improved the processing of text during reading. Ars Technica reports the findings: Previous cognitive science research has been divided on the issue. Some research has suggested closer spacing of the beginning of a new sentence may allow a reader to capture more characters in their parafoveal vision -- the area of the retina just outside the area of focus, or fovea -- and thus start processing the information sooner (though experimental evidence of that was not very strong). Other prior research has inferred that an extra space prevents lateral interference in processing text, making it easier for the reader to identify the word in focus. But no prior research found by [study authors] Johnson, Bui, and Schmitt actually measured reader performance with each typographic scheme.

First, they divided their group of 60 research subjects by way of a keyboard task -- the subjects typed text dictated to them into a computer and were sorted into "one-spacers" (39 regularly put a single space between sentences) and "two-spacers" (21 hit that space bar twice consistently after a period). Every student subject used but a single space after each comma. Having identified subjects' proclivities, the researchers then gave them 21 paragraphs to read (including one practice paragraph) on a computer screen and tracked their eye movement as they read using an Eyelink 1000 video-based eye tracking system. [...] The "one-spacers" were, as a group, slower readers across the board (by about 10 words per minute), and they showed statistically insignificant variation across all four spacing practices. And "two-spacers" saw a three-percent increase in reading speed for paragraphs in their own favored spacing scheme. The controversial part of the study has to do with the 14 point Courier New font that the researchers presented to the students. "Courier New is a fixed-width font that resembles typewritten text -- used by hardly anyone for documents," reports Ars. "Even the APA suggests using 12 point Times Roman, a proportional-width font. Fixed-width fonts make a double-space more pronounced."

According to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gravitational tugs from the planets Jupiter and Venus gradually affect Earth's climate and life forms. The phenomenon occurs every 405,000 years and has been going on for at least 215 million years. USA Today reports: Jupiter and Venus are such strong influences because of their size and proximity. Venus is the nearest planet to us -- at its farthest, only about 162 million miles -- and roughly similar in mass. Jupiter is much farther away, but is the Solar System's largest planet. The study says that every 405,000 years, due to wobbles in our orbit caused by the gravitational pulls of the two planets, seasonal differences here on Earth become more intense. Summers are hotter and winters colder; dry times drier, wet times wetter. At the height of the cycle, more rain falls in the tropics, allowing lakes there to fill up. This compares to the other end of the cycle, when seasonal rains in the tropics "are less and lakes have much less of a tendency to become as full," [study lead author Dennis] Kent said. The results showed that the 405,000-year cycle is the most regular astronomical pattern linked to the Earth's annual turn around the sun, he said. Right now, we are in the middle of the cycle, as the most recent peak was around 200,000 years ago.

Loren Chorley writes: After reading about a new surge in the trend for citizen science (also known as community science, civic science or networked science), I was intrigued by the idea and wondered if there are websites that do this in a crowd sourced and open sourced manner. I know sites like YouTube allow people to show off their scientific experiments, but they don't facilitate uploading all their data or linking studies together to draw more advanced conclusions, or making methodologies like you'd see in academia straight forward and available through a simple interface. What about rating of experiments for peer review, revisions and refinement, requirement lists, step-by-step instructions for repeatability, ease of access, and simple language for people who don't find academia accessible? Does something like this exist already? Do you, Slashdot, think this is something useful, or that people are interested in? Or would the potential for fraud and misinformation be too great?

In preparation for a crewed mission into orbit, NASA safety advisers are warning that the super-cold propellant SpaceX uses in their Falcon 9 rockets could be "a potential safety risk." When SpaceX is about to launch a rocket, they load it up with propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks. "At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff -- while astronauts are aboard," reports Chicago Tribune. "An accident, or a spark, during this maneuver, known as 'load-and-go,' could set off an explosion." From the report: One watchdog group labeled load-and-go a "potential safety risk." A NASA advisory group warned in a letter that the method was "contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years." The fueling issue is emerging as a point of tension between the safety-obsessed space agency and the maverick company run by Musk, a tech entrepreneur who is well known for his flair for the dramatic and for pushing boundaries of rocket science. The concerns from some at NASA are shared by others. John Mulholland, who oversees Boeing's contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and once worked on the space shuttle, said load-and-go fueling was rejected by NASA in the past because "we never could get comfortable with the safety risks that you would take with that approach. When you're loading densified propellants, it is not an inherently stable situation."

Greg Autry, a business professor at the University of Southern California, said the load-and-go procedures were a heated issue when he served on Trump's NASA transition team. "NASA is supposed to be a risk-taking organization," he said. "But every time we would mention accepting risk in human spaceflight, the NASA people would say, 'But, oh, you have to remember the scar tissue' -- and they were talking about the two shuttle disasters. They seemed to have become victims of the past and unwilling to try anything new, because of that scar tissue."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Alan Turing is rightly famed for his contributions to computer science. But one of his key concepts -- an autonomous system that can generate complex behavior from a few simple rules -- also has applications in unexpected places, like animal behavior. One area where Turing himself applied the concept is in chemistry, and he published a paper describing how a single chemical reaction could create complex patterns like stripes if certain conditions are met. It took us decades to figure out how to actually implement Turing's ideas about chemistry, but we've managed to create a number of reactions that display the behaviors he described. And now, a team of Chinese researchers has figured out how to use them to make something practical: a highly efficient desalination membrane.

To make this a true Turing-style system, the researchers dissolved a large molecule in water. This had the effect of making the water more viscous, which slowed the diffusion of the activator. In addition, the molecule was chosen so that the activator would stick to it, slowing things down even further. The end result was a system similar to the ones defined over a half-century ago. Imaging of the features show that rather than simply thickening the membrane, the membrane retained the same width in these areas; instead, it bulged out to form the structures. That's critical, as the amount of surface area exposed to a salt solution should influence how much water gets through the membrane. In fact, the researchers confirmed that more water was purified when the new membranes were used (the version with the stripes outperformed the dotted one). Unfortunately, the researchers don't compare this system to commercially available membranes. The report has been published in the journal Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: For the first time since humans have been monitoring, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have exceeded 410 parts per million averaged across an entire month (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), a threshold that pushes the planet ever closer to warming beyond levels that scientists and the international community have deemed "safe." The reading from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii finds that concentrations of the climate-warming gas averaged above 410 parts per million throughout April. The first time readings crossed 410 at all occurred on April 18, 2017, or just about a year ago. Carbon dioxide concentrations -- whose "greenhouse gas effect" traps heat and drives climate change -- were around 280 parts per million circa 1880, at the dawn of the industrial revolution. They're now 46 percent higher. According to Scripps Institute of Oceanography, this amount is the highest in at least the past 800,000 years. "We keep burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide keeps building up in the air," said Scripps scientist Ralph Keeling, who maintains the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth. "It's essentially as simple as that."

Long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior quotes Live Science: The CEO of a biomedical startup who sparked controversy when he injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience in February has died, according to an email sent to Live Science. Aaron Traywick, the CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, was found dead at 11:30 a.m. ET on Sunday (April 29) in a spa room in Washington, D.C., according to a statement provided to Live Science by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia. Traywick was 28 years old. According to the website News2Share.com, Traywick was found in a flotation tank. Flotation tanks are soundproof pods filled with body-temperature saltwater that are used to promote "sensory deprivation."
Vice News reports that Traywick had "lost touch" with co-workers at his company more than four weeks ago, adding that "Disagreements over the company's direction and philosophical differences over how to best distribute its creations split the small startup."

MIT Technology Review reports that Traywick, "who had no formal medical training, was also planning to test an experimental lung cancer treatment that supposedly involved the gene-editing tool CRISPR. The therapy was to be offered at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles over the U.S. border... An employee at the Tijuana clinic, International BioCare Hospital & Wellness Center, confirmed in a phone interview that doctors there were working with Traywick to set up the trial but won't be moving forward with it after his death...

"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."

"This is a big day. We're going back to Mars," said one NASA official, presiding over this morning's launch of the first Mars surface craft to lift off since 2011. CNN reports: The Atlas V 401 rocket also carried two suitcase-size spacecraft, designed to orbit Mars, as it blasted into the dark and cloudy sky, which turned bright gold for seconds as the rocket ascended in a plume of smoke... After a six-month journey, if it all goes as planned, InSight -- whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- will touch down just north of the Martian equator on November 26, joining five other NASA spacecraft operating on and above Mars.

The 790-pound (358-kilogram) probe will then begin its two-year science mission to seek the "fingerprints" of the processes that formed the rocky planets of the solar system. It will measure the planet's "vital signs: 'its "pulse' (seismology), 'temperature' (heat flow) and 'reflexes' (precision tracking)," according to NASA. The explorer doesn't have wheels, so it can't roll around gathering up dirt to study. But it does have a 7.8-foot-long (2.4-meter) robotic arm. The arm will place a seismometer on the ground to detect "marsquakes" (think earthquakes, but on Mars, of course). InSight also will burrow 10 to 16 feet into the crust of Mars, going 15 times deeper than any previous Martian mission, according to NASA.
The rocket is carrying two briefcase-sized satellites (named Wall-E and Eva) which will demonstrate that cubesats can survey journeys to other planets.

Two microchips have also been affixed to the lander carrying the names of 2.4 million space enthusiasts -- including William Shatner.

Yale physicists have uncovered hints of a time crystal, a form of matter that "ticks" when exposed to an electromagnetic pulse, in a child's toy. The discovery means there are now new puzzles to solve, in terms of how time crystals form in the first place. Yale News reports: Ordinary crystals such as salt or quartz are examples of three-dimensional, ordered spatial crystals. Their atoms are arranged in a repeating system, something scientists have known for a century. Time crystals, first identified in 2016, are different. Their atoms spin periodically, first in one direction and then in another, as a pulsating force is used to flip them. That's the "ticking." In addition, the ticking in a time crystal is locked at a particular frequency, even when the pulse flips are imperfect.

Monoammonium phosphate (MAP) crystals are considered so easy to grow that they are sometimes included in crystal growing kits aimed at youngsters. It would be unusual to find a time crystal signature inside a MAP crystal, [Yale Physics professor Sean Barrett] explained, because time crystals were thought to form in crystals with more internal "disorder." The researchers used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to look for a DTC signature -- and quickly found it. Another unexpected thing happened, as well. "We realized that just finding the DTC signature didn't necessarily prove that the system had a quantum memory of how it came to be," said Yale graduate student Robert Blum, a co-author on the studies. "This spurred us to try a time crystal 'echo,' which revealed the hidden coherence, or quantum order, within the system," added Rovny, also a Yale graduate student and lead author of the studies. The findings are described in a pair of studies, one in the journal Physical Review Letters and the other in the journal Physical Review B.

lod123 shares a report from Threatpost: Nearly a half-million pacemakers are up for a firmware update to address potentially life-threatening vulnerabilities. Abbott (formerly St. Jude Medical) has released another upgrade to the firmware installed on certain implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillator (CRT-D) devices -- a.k.a., pacemakers. About 465,000 patients are affected. The update will strengthen the devices' protection against unauthorized access, as the provider said in a statement on its website: "It is intended to prevent anyone other than your doctor from changing your device settings." The update comes after 2016 claims by researchers that the then-St. Jude's cardiac implant ecosystem was rife with cybersecurity flaws that could result in "catastrophic results."

An anonymous reader writes: "Amazon, but for Crispr." It's a notion that may sound far-fetched -- but it's exactly what Synthego, a Silicon Valley biotech startup, wants to be. Synthego's first product let scientists order a custom Crispr kit and have it delivered within a week; in the next few weeks, the startup will add custom Crispr'd human cell lines to its on-demand offerings, which will help scientists working on potentially life-saving medicines. Crispr, as this WIRED guide explains, "is a new class of molecular tools that scientists can use to precisely target and cut any kind of genetic material." It's revolutionizing biology -- but neither of Synthego's founders is a biologist. Turns out, in the ever-expanding industry around genome engineering, that's hardly a disqualifier.

Across the country, companies are trying to snag a seat on the fast-moving Crispr train. There's Inscripta, which is gunning to be the Apple of gene-editing by building the biological equivalent of the personal computer. In theory, that hardware will make gene editing as easy as pushing a button. And then there's Twist Biosciences, which can print out a powerful Crispr guide (the tool that identifies the bits of genetic code a scientist is hoping to target) on a single semiconductor chip -- the Intel of genome engineering, if you will. As Megan Molteni writes, "all these analogies to the computing industry are more than just wordplay." Rather, they offer a language for understanding the complex world of Crispr. "Crispr is making biology more programmable than ever before," Molteni writes. "And the biotech execs staking their claims in Crispr's backend systems have read their Silicon Valley history. They're betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language."

An amateur mathematician has made the first breakthrough in more than 60 years towards solving a well-known maths problem. From a report: Aubrey de Grey, who is more widely known as a maverick biologist intent on extending the human lifespan, has taken the academic world by surprise after announcing a new solution to the so-called Hadwiger-Nelson problem. The problem sounds deceptively simple, but despite some professionals spending years trying to crack it, progress has stalled since shortly after the puzzle was first posed in 1950. "Literally, this is the first progress in more than 60 years," said Gil Kalai, a mathematician at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The problem is as follows. Imagine a collection of dots connected by lines. The dots can be arranged any way at all, the only rule is that all the connecting lines must be of equal length. For instance, in a square the diagonal would not be joined up, but the outer edges would be. Now, colour in all the dots so that no two connected points have the same colour. How many colours are required. For a square, the answer would be two. But the Hadwiger-Nelson problem asks what the minimum would be for any configuration -- even one that extends across a plane of infinite size.

A combination of cement, water and ground rock or sand, on the surface concrete might seem crushingly mundane. Yet it has defined construction in recent centuries and with it, in part, modernity. From a report: But do we need to re-evaluate our concrete habit for our sakes and the planet's? Production of cement is disastrous for our biosphere, while the degradation of many concrete buildings has some construction experts predicting a colossal headache in the future. There are myriad proposed solutions, such as changing the way we make concrete, creating sustainable alternatives or doing away with it altogether. But would we want to live in a world without concrete? And what would that world look like?

"We make more concrete than anything else, any other product, apart from clean water," says Paul Fennell, professor of clean energy at Imperial College London. One 2015 report estimates that each year approximately three tons of concrete are used for every person on Earth -- roughly, 22 billion tons. To put that in context, a recent study estimated that 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced, ever. Manufacturing cement, concrete's binding agent, is energy-intensive, Fennell says. Ordinary Portland cement -- the most common form in concrete -- is produced by baking lime in a kiln and emits approximately one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of cement. Concrete production is responsible for approximately 5% of global man-made CO2 emissions, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy say they have successfully tested a new type of nuclear reactor that could one day provide juice to colonies on other worlds. The reactor can power several homes and appears able to operate in harsh environments. The new reactor uses more-conventional uranium fuel. Using a "core" about the size of a paper towel roll, the reactor can turn pistons that can run a generator. The generator can put out about 10 kilowatts of electrical power -- enough to run a few small homes. Scientists believe it could run continuously for a decade or so, making deep space travel a lot simpler. They also gave it a catchy acronym: KRUSTY, which stands for Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY.

To see if it actually worked, scientists tested KRUSTY out in the Nevada desert on America's old nuclear test range. They put KRUSTY through its paces, culminating in a 28-hour test at full power. The team also simulated failures in KRUSTY's reactor components to show it wouldn't result in a meltdown on Mars. KRUSTY may find its way onto future space probes. Researchers say they might use an ensemble of four or five of the reactors to power colonies on the moon (which has 14-day nights, when the sun isn't available) or Mars.