The pigs had been lying dead in the lab for an hour -- no blood was circulating in their bodies, their hearts were still, their brain waves flat. Then a group of Yale scientists pumped a custom-made solution into the dead pigs' bodies with a device similar to a heart-lung machine. From a report: What happened next adds questions to what science considers the wall between life and death. Although the pigs were not considered conscious in any way, their seemingly dead cells revived. Their hearts began to beat as the solution, which the scientists called OrganEx, circulated in veins and arteries. Cells in their organs, including the heart, liver, kidneys and brain, were functioning again, and the animals never got stiff like a typical dead pig. Other pigs, dead for an hour, were treated with ECMO, a machine that pumped blood through their bodies. They became stiff, their organs swelled and became damaged, their blood vessels collapsed, and they had purple spots on their backs where blood pooled. The group reported its results Wednesday in Nature. The researchers say their goals are to one day increase the supply of human organs for transplant by allowing doctors to obtain viable organs long after death. And, they say, they hope their technology might also be used to prevent severe damage to hearts after a devastating heart attack or brains after a major stroke.

Children who grow up in low-income households but who make friends that come from higher-income homes are more likely to have higher salaries in adulthood than those who have fewer such friends. From a report: "There's been a lot of speculation... that the individual's access to social capital, their social networks and the community they live in might matter a lot for a child's chance to rise out of poverty," says Raj Chetty at Harvard University. To find out if that holds up, he and his colleagues analysed anonymised Facebook data belonging to 72.2 million people in the US between the ages of 25 and 44, accounting for 84 per cent of the age group's US population. It is relatively nationally representative of that age group, he says.

The team used a machine-learning algorithm to determine each person's socio-economic status (SES), combining data such as the median income of people who live in the same region, the person's age and sex and the value of their phone model as a proxy for individual income. The median household income was found to be close to $58,000. The researchers then split the individuals into two groups: those who were below the median SES and those who were above. If people made friends randomly, you would expect half of each person's friends to be in each income group. But instead, for people below the median SES, only 38 per cent of their friends were above the median SES. Meanwhile, 70.6 per cent of the friends of people above the median SES were also a part of the same group.

Scientists have discovered dark matter around galaxies that existed about 12 billion years ago, the earliest detection yet of this mysterious substance that dominates the universe. Space.com reports: The findings, achieved by a collaboration led by researchers from Japan's Nagoya University, suggest that dark matter in the early universe is less 'clumpy' than predicted by many current cosmological models. If further work confirms this theory, it could change scientists' understanding of how galaxies evolve and suggest that the fundamental rules governing the cosmos could have been different when the 13.7 billion-year-old universe was just 1.7 billion years old. The key to mapping dark matter in the very early universe the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a sort of fossil radiation left over from the Big Bang that is distributed throughout the entire cosmos. [...]

The team combined lensing distortions of a large sample of ancient galaxies with those of the CMB to detect dark matter dating back to when the universe was just 1.7 billion years old. And this ancient dark matter paints a very different cosmic picture. "For the first time, we were measuring dark matter from almost the earliest moments of the universe," [University of Tokyo assistant professor Yuichi Harikane said in the statement]. "12 billion years ago, things were very different. You see more galaxies that are in the process of formation than at the present; the first galaxy clusters are starting to form as well." These clusters can be comprised of between 100 and 1,000 galaxies bound to large amounts of dark matter by gravity.

"Our finding is still uncertain," Harikane said. "But if it is true, it would suggest that the entire model is flawed as you go further back in time. This is exciting because if the result holds after the uncertainties are reduced, it could suggest an improvement of the model that may provide insight into the nature of dark matter itself." The team will continue to collect data to assess whether the Lambda-CDM model conforms to observations of dark matter in the early universe or if the assumptions behind the model need to be revised.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and their collaborators have used DNA to overcome a nearly insurmountable obstacle to engineer materials that would revolutionize electronics. One possible outcome of such engineered materials could be superconductors, which have zero electrical resistance, allowing electrons to flow unimpeded. That means that they don't lose energy and don't create heat, unlike current means of electrical transmission. Development of a superconductor that could be used widely at room temperature -- instead of at extremely high or low temperatures, as is now possible -- could lead to hyper-fast computers, shrink the size of electronic devices, allow high-speed trains to float on magnets and slash energy use, among other benefits.

One such superconductor was first proposed more than 50 years ago by Stanford physicist William A. Little. [...] One possible way to realize Little's idea for a superconductor is to modify lattices of carbon nanotubes, hollow cylinders of carbon so tiny they must be measured in nanometers -- billionths of a meter. But there was a huge challenge: controlling chemical reactions along the nanotubes so that the lattice could be assembled as precisely as needed and function as intended.

[Edward H. Egelman, Ph.D., of UVA's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics] and his collaborators found an answer in the very building blocks of life. They took DNA, the genetic material that tells living cells how to operate, and used it to guide a chemical reaction that would overcome the great barrier to Little's superconductor. In short, they used chemistry to perform astonishingly precise structural engineering -- construction at the level of individual molecules. The result was a lattice of carbon nanotubes assembled as needed for Little's room-temperature superconductor. [...] The lattice they built has not been tested for superconductivity, for now, but it offers proof of principle and has great potential for the future, the researchers say. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

Solid state drives use far less power than hard disc drives. But a new study unexpectedly reveals that their lifetime carbon footprint is much higher than their hard disc cousins, raising difficult questions for the computer industry. From a report: The benefits of SSDs over HDDs are legion. They are smaller, mechanically simpler, faster to read and write data than their hard disc cousins. They are also more energy efficient. So with many computer manufacturers and datacenter operators looking to reduce their carbon footprints, it's easy to imagine that all this makes the choice of memory easy. But all is not as it seems, say Swamit Tannu at University of Wisconsin in Madison and Prashant Nair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. SSDs have a dirty secret. Tannu and Nair have measured the carbon footprint per gigabyte of these devices across their entire lifetimes and, unexpectedly, it turns out that SSDs are significantly dirtier. "Compared to SSDs, the embodied [carbon] cost of HDDs is at least an order of magnitude lower," say the researchers.

Tannu and Nair come to their conclusion by adding up the amount of carbon emitted throughout the estimated 10-year lifespans of these devices. This includes the carbon emitted during manufacture, during operation, for transportation and for disposal. The carbon emitted during operation is straightforward to calculate. To read and write data, HDDs consume 4.2 Watts versus 1.3W for SSDs. The researchers calculate that a 1 terabyte HDD emits the equivalent of 159 kilograms of carbon dioxide during a 10-year operating lifespan. By comparison, a 1 terabyte SSD emits just 49.2 kg over 10 years. But SSDs are significantly more carbon intensive to manufacture. That's because the chip fabrication facilities for SSDs operate at extreme temperatures and pressures that are energy intensive to maintain. And bigger memories require more chips, which increases the footprint accordingly. All this adds up to a significant carbon footprint for SSD manufacture.

Tannu and Nair calculate that manufacturing a 1 terabyte SSD emits the equivalent of 320 kg of carbon dioxide. By comparison, a similar HDD emits just 40 kg. So the lifetime footprint for a 1 terabyte SSD is 369.2 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent versus 199 kg for an HDD. So HDDs are much cleaner. That's a counterintuitive result with important implications. At the very least, it suggests that computer manufacturers and cloud data storage operators should reconsider the way they use SSDs and HDDs. For example, almost 40 per cent of the carbon footprint of a desktop computer comes from its SSD, compared to just 4 per cent from the CPU and 11 per cent from the GPU.

Stem cell researchers in Israel have created synthetic mouse embryos without using a sperm or egg, then grown them in an artificial womb for eight days, a development that opens a window into a fascinating, potentially fraught realm of science that could one day be used to create replacement organs for humans. The Washington Post reports: The objective, scientists involved with the research said, is not to create mice or babies outside the womb, but to jump-start the understanding of how organs develop in embryos and to use that knowledge to develop new ways to heal people. From a clump of embryonic stem cells, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science created synthetic embryos that closely resembled real mouse embryos, with rudimentary beating hearts, blood circulation, folded brain tissue and intestinal tracts. The mouse embryos grew in an artificial womb and stopped developing after eight days, about a third of a mouse pregnancy.

The research, published Monday in the journal Cell, is far from growing a mouse, much less a human, outside the womb. It was a proof of concept that a complete synthetic embryo could be assembled from embryonic stem cells, and while the researchers were successful, it was a highly error-prone process, with only a small fraction of embryos going on to develop the beginnings of a beating heart and other organs. Although the synthetic mouse embryos bore a close resemblance to natural mouse embryos, they were not exactly the same and did not implant or result in pregnancies in real mice, according to Jacob Hanna, the stem cell scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science who led the work.

The research, like other recent studies, puts the possibility of a complete human synthetic embryo on the horizon, several researchers said, making it necessary to continue a societal discussion about how these entities should be handled. Last year, the International Society for Stem Cell Research relaxed a historical "14-day rule" that said researchers could grow natural embryos for only 14 days in the laboratory, allowing researchers to seek approval for longer studies. Human embryo models are banned from being implanted into a uterus.

If time feels tighter than ever of late, blame it on the revolution. On 29 June this year, Earth racked up an unusual record: its shortest day since the 1960s, when scientists began measuring the planet's rotation with high-precision atomic clocks. From a report: Broadly speaking, Earth completes one full turn on its axis every 24 hours. That single spin marks out a day and drives the cycle of sunrise and sunset that has shaped patterns of life for billions of years. But the curtains fell early on 29 June, with midnight arriving 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected. The past few years have seen a flurry of records fall, with shorter days being notched up ever more frequently. In 2020, the Earth turned out 28 of the shortest days in the past 50 years, with the shortest of those, on 19 July, shaving 1.47 milliseconds off the 86,400 seconds that make up 24 hours. The 29 June record came close to being broken again last month, when 26 July came in 1.5 milliseconds short.

So is the world speeding up? Over the longer term -- the geological timescales that compress the rise and fall of the dinosaurs into the blink of an eye -- the Earth is actually spinning more slowly than it used to. Wind the clock back 1.4bn years and a day would pass in less than 19 hours. On average, then, Earth days are getting longer rather than shorter, by about one 74,000th of a second each year. The moon is mostly to blame for the effect: the gravitational tug slightly distorts the planet, producing tidal friction that steadily slows the Earth's rotation. To keep clocks in line with the planet's spin, the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations body, has taken to adding occasional leap seconds in June or December -- most recently in 2016 -- effectively stopping the clocks for a second so that the Earth can catch up. The first leap second was added in 1972. The next opportunity is in December 2022, although with Earth spinning so fast of late, it is unlikely to be needed.

Live and high-resolution images of a patient's internal organs are already possible with ultrasound imaging technology. But currently the technology "requires bulky and specialized equipment available only in hospitals and doctor's offices," explains an annoncement from MIT.

Now a new design by MIT engineers "might make the technology as wearable and accessible as buying Band-Aids at the pharmacy." In a paper appearing today in Science, the engineers present the design for a new ultrasound sticker — a stamp-sized device that sticks to skin and can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of internal organs for 48 hours.

The researchers applied the stickers to volunteers and showed the devices produced live, high-resolution images of major blood vessels and deeper organs such as the heart, lungs, and stomach. The stickers maintained a strong adhesion and captured changes in underlying organs as volunteers performed various activities, including sitting, standing, jogging, and biking....

From the stickers' images, the team was able to observe the changing diameter of major blood vessels when seated versus standing. The stickers also captured details of deeper organs, such as how the heart changes shape as it exerts during exercise. The researchers were also able to watch the stomach distend, then shrink back as volunteers drank then later passed juice out of their system. And as some volunteers lifted weights, the team could detect bright patterns in underlying muscles, signaling temporary microdamage.

"With imaging, we might be able to capture the moment in a workout before overuse, and stop before muscles become sore," says Chen. "We do not know when that moment might be yet, but now we can provide imaging data that experts can interpret."
They're already envisioning other possibilities: If the devices can be made to operate wirelessly — a goal the team is currently working toward — the ultrasound stickers could be made into wearable imaging products that patients could take home from a doctor's office or even buy at a pharmacy. "We envision a few patches adhered to different locations on the body, and the patches would communicate with your cellphone, where AI algorithms would analyze the images on demand," says the study's senior author, Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at MIT.

"We believe we've opened a new era of wearable imaging: With a few patches on your body, you could see your internal organs."

"Lunar scientists think they've found the hottest places on the Moon," reports Live Science, "as well as some 200 'Goldilocks' zones that are always near the average temperature in San Francisco."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: The moon has wild temperature fluctuations, with parts of the moon heating up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) during the day and dropping to minus 280 F (minus 173 C) at night. But the newly analyzed 200 shaded lunar pits are always always 63 F (17 C), meaning they're perfect for humans to shelter from the extreme temperatures. They could also shield astronauts from the dangers of the solar wind, micrometeorites and cosmic rays.

Some of those pits may lead to similarly warm caves. These partially-shaded pits and dark caves could be ideal for a lunar base, scientists say.

"Surviving the lunar night is incredibly difficult because it requires a lot of energy, but being in these pits and caves almost entirely removes that requirement," Tyler Horvath, a doctoral student in planetary science at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author on the NASA-funded research published online July 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, told Live Science.

"Two new studies provide more evidence that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a Wuhan, China market where live animals were sold," reports the Associated Press, "further bolstering the theory that the virus emerged in the wild rather than escaping from a Chinese lab."

CNN reports: "All eight COVID-19 cases detected prior to 20 December were from the western side of the market, where mammal species were also sold," the [first] study says. The proximity to five stalls that sold live or recently butchered animals was predictive of human cases... The "extraordinary" pattern that emerged from mapping these cases was very clear, said another co-author, Michael Worobey, department head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

The researchers mapped the earliest cases that had no connection to the market, Worobey noted, and those people lived or worked in close proximity to the market. "This is an indication that the virus started spreading in people who worked at the market but then started that spread ... into the surrounding local community as vendors went into local shops, infected people who worked in those shops," Worobey said.

The other study takes a molecular approach and seems to determine when the first coronavirus infections crossed from animals to humans.... The researchers suggest that the first animal-to-human transmission probably happened around November 18, 2019, and it came from lineage B. They found the lineage B type only in people who had a direct connection to the Huanan market.
"All this evidence tells us the same thing: It points right to this particular market in the middle of Wuhan," said Kristian Andersen a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research and coauthor of one of the studies. The AP quotes Andersen as saying "I was quite convinced of the lab leak myself until we dove into this very carefully and looked at it much closer." Andersen said they found case clusters inside the market, too, "and that clustering is very, very specifically in the parts of the market" where they now know people were selling wildlife, such as raccoon dogs, that are susceptible to infection with the coronavirus.... Matthew Aliota, a researcher in the college of veterinary medicine at the University of Minnesota, said in his mind the pair of studies "kind of puts to rest, hopefully, the lab leak hypothesis."

"Both of these two studies really provide compelling evidence for the natural origin hypothesis," said Aliota, who wasn't involved in either study. Since sampling an animal that was at the market is impossible, "this is maybe as close to a smoking gun as you could get."
CNN notes that Worobey also had initially thought the lab leak had been a possibility, but now says the epidemiological preponderance of cases linked to the market is "not a mirage. It's a real thing.

"It's just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade." To reduce the chances of future pandemics, the researchers hope they can determine exactly what animal may have first become infected and how.

"The raw ingredients for a zoonotic virus with pandemic potential are still lurking in the wild," said Joel Wertheim, an associate adjunct professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He believes the world needs to do a much better job doing surveillance and monitoring animals and other potential threats to human health.

The 25-ton core stage of a Long March 5B rocket "reentered Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean this afternoon," reports Space.com, citing an announcement on Twitter from the U.S. Space Command. Mission managers didn't screw anything up; this end-of-life scenario is built into the Long March 5B's design, to the consternation of exploration advocates and much of the broader spaceflight community. This disposal strategy is reckless, critics say, given that the big rocket doesn't burn up completely upon reentry.

Indeed, 5.5 tons to 9.9 tons (5 to 9 metric tons) of the Long March 5B likely survived all the way to the ground today, experts with The Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies have estimated. And it's possible that falling rocket chunks caused some injuries or infrastructure damage today, given where the Long March 5B reentered. One observer appeared to capture the rocket's breakup from Kuching, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, for example, posting video of the dramatic event on Twitter. "The video from Kuching implies it was high in the atmosphere at that time — any debris would land hundreds of km further along track, near Sibu, Bintulu or even Brunei," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said via Twitter today. It's "unlikely but not impossible" that one or more chunks hit a population center, he added in another tweet....

"What really should have happened is, there should have been some fuel left on board for this to be a controlled reentry," Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the California-based tracking company LeoLabs, said Thursday (July 28) during a Long March 5B reentry discussion that The Aerospace Corporation livestreamed on Twitter. "That would be the responsible thing to do...."

This was the third uncontrolled fall for a Long March 5B core stage to date.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also released a critical statement today pointing out that China "did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth." All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property.

Newsweek reports that "A huge piece of space debris appears to have fallen from the sky and landed on a sheep farm in Australia." On July 9, locals across the Snowy Mountains in southern New South Wales heard a bang, ABC Australia reported. It was heard for miles, by those as far away as Albury, Wagga Wagga and Canberra.... Sheep farmer Mick Miners then came across a strange, charred object on his ranch, south of Jindabyne, on July 25. "I didn't know what to think, I had no idea what it was," Miners told ABC Australia.

He found the 10 foot chunk of metal wedged into the ground in a remote part of his sheep paddock.

He was not the only one. His neighbor, Jock Wallace also found some strange debris in the area. "I didn't hear the bang, but my daughters said it was very loud," Wallace told ABC. "I think it's a concern, it's just fallen out of the sky. If it landed on your house it would make a hell of a mess."

Serial numbers were noted on the charred, pieces of debris. Australian National University College of Science astrophysicist Brad Tucker told ABC News that the debris is likely from the trunk section of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The spacecraft launched in 2020, and the debris may have fallen as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.

Tucker told ABC that is may have been the largest piece of space debris to fall in Australia for decades — the last time was in 1979, when NASA's Skylab space station fell in Western Australia.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader 192_kbps for sharing the article!

Nokia Oyj will provide equipment to connect AST SpaceMobile Inc. satellites to the global telecommunications network, creating a crucial link in a planned space-based broadband network designed to work with standard mobile phones, the companies said in a statement Thursday. Bloomberg reports: In addition to AirScale base stations, Espoo, Finland-based Nokia will provide its NetAct network management systems and technical support, the companies said. Terms of the five-year deal with Austin, Texas-based AST SpaceMobile weren't disclosed. AST's BlueWalker 3 test satellite, an array of antennas that measures 693 square feet (64 square meters), is planned for launch in early to mid-September. Eventually the network will consist of 168 satellites, the company told investors in a March 31 filing.

With BlueWalker 3 aloft, AST plans to conduct testing on five continents in coordination with mobile network operators such as Vodafone Group Plc, Rakuten Mobile and Orange SA. AST and Nokia said the network is intended to offer connections to people and places without digital services. "Connectivity should be considered an essential service like water, electricity or gas," said Tommi Uitto, Nokia's president of mobile services. "Everyone should be able to have access to universal broadband services that will ensure that no one is left behind." Unlike the offerings from Elon Musk's SpaceX or OneWeb and Eutelsat, which recently announced plans to merge in the hopes of becoming a stronger competitor, is that SpaceMobile's service is designed to connect to "standard, unmodified cellular phones without the requirement of special software, ground terminals or hardware," says the company in its annual filing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: A single chemical could be responsible for whether people go bald or not, a new study has found. In the UK, approximately two thirds of men will face male pattern baldness. The study says the discovery of the chemical could "not only treat baldness, but ultimately speed wound healing." In the study published in the Biophysical Journal, study co-author Qixuan Wang said: "In science fiction when characters heal quickly from injuries, the idea is that stem cells allowed it. In real life, our new research gets us closer to understanding stem cell behavior, so that we can control it and promote wound healing."

The team looked at hair follicles as these are the only human organ that regenerates regularly and automatically, and discovered that a type of protein called TGF-beta controls how the stem cells in hair follicles divide and why some can die off. Wang explained: "TGF-beta has two opposite roles. It helps activate some hair follicle cells to produce new life, and later, it helps orchestrate apoptosis, the process of cell death. Even when a hair follicle kills itself, it never kills its stem cell reservoir. When the surviving stem cells receive the signal to regenerate, they divide, make new cell and develop into a new follicle." However, the scientists found that when a hair follicle dies, the stem cell reservoir still remains. "When the surviving stem cells receive the signal to regenerate, they divide, make new cells and develop into a new follicle," Wang said. The study authors added that it may be possible to stimulate hair growth by activating follicle stem cells, but more research on the subject needs to be done.

A study of 39,000 video gamers has found "little to no evidence" time spent playing affects their wellbeing. From a report: The average player would have to play for 10 hours more than usual per day to notice any difference, it found. And the reasons for playing were far more likely to have an impact. Well-being was measured by asking about life satisfaction and levels of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and frustration. The results contradict a 2020 study.

Conducted by the same department at the Oxford Internet Institute -- but with a much smaller group of players -- the 2020 study had suggested that those who played for longer were happier. "Common sense says if you have more free time to play video games, you're probably a happier person," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, who worked on both studies. "But contrary to what we might think about games being good or bad for us, we found [in this latest study] pretty conclusive evidence that how much you play doesn't really have any bearing whatsoever on changes in well-being. "If players were playing because they wanted to, rather than because they felt compelled to, they had to, they tended to feel better."

The heat that demolished records in Britain last week, bringing temperatures as high as 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit to a country unaccustomed to scorching summers, would have been "extremely unlikely" without the influence of human-caused climate change, a new scientific report issued Thursday has found. From a report: Heat of last week's intensity is still highly unusual for Britain, even at current levels of global warming, said Mariam Zachariah, a research associate at Imperial College London and lead author of the new report. The chances of seeing the daytime highs that some parts of the country recorded last week were 1-in-1,000 in any given year, she and her colleagues found.

Still, Dr. Zachariah said, those temperatures were at least 10 times as likely as they would have been in a world without greenhouse-gas emissions, and at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. "It's still a rare event today," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and another author of the report. "It would have been an extremely unlikely event without climate change." Severe heat has become more frequent and intense across most regions of the world, and scientists have little doubt that global warming is a key driver. As the burning of fossil fuels causes average global temperatures to rise, the range of possible temperatures shifts upward, too, making blistering highs more likely. This means every heat wave is now made worse, to some extent, by changes in planetary chemistry caused by greenhouse-gas emissions.

Russian space officials have informed U.S. counterparts that Moscow would like to keep flying its cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) until their own orbital outpost is built and operational, a senior NASA official told Reuters on Wednesday. Reuters reports: Taken together with remarks from a senior Russian space official published on Wednesday, the latest indications are that Russia is still at least six years away from ending an orbital collaboration with the United States that dates back more than two decades.

A schism in the ISS program seemed to be closer at hand on Tuesday, when Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed director-general of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, surprised NASA by announcing that Moscow intended to withdraw from the space station partnership "after 2024." Kathy Lueders, NASA's space operations chief, said in an interview that Russian officials later on Tuesday told the U.S. space agency that Roscosmos wished to remain in the partnership as Russia works to get its planned orbital outpost, named ROSS, up and running. "We're not getting any indication at any working level that anything's changed," Lueders told Reuters on Wednesday, adding that NASA's relations with Roscosmos remain "business as usual."

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to take custody of the samples Perseverance has been patiently collecting and return them safely to Earth, and they'll need the help of two more helicopters. IFLScience reports: NASA and the ESA are collaborating on putting a lander on Mars that is capable of taking off again and making a rendezvous with an orbiter which will then bring the cargo back to Earth. Rather than collect its own samples, the return mission will take over those collected by Perseverance, and the biggest change to the plans lies in how that transfer will occur. The project has not got funding yet but the space agencies are refining their plans. In a quest for the backing they need new details have been announced, along with a return date -- 2033 -- only slightly further off than 1969 was when Kennedy promised a Moon landing "before this decade is out."

Previously the Sample Return Lander was planned to carry a Sample Fetch Rover and its associated second lander. Instead, NASA and the ESA are now proposing to equip the lander with two helicopters based on the phenomenally successful Ingenuity. They will be able to traverse the gap between the Mars Ascent Vehicle and where Perseverance left them much more quickly and having two offers redundancy if one fails. There's also a possibility that Perseverance could deliver the samples directly to the Mars Ascent Vehicle if it is still operating when the ascent vehicle lands.

If everything goes to plan the Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will launch in 2027 and 2028 respectively. Although delays are common for space missions, the fact Ingenuity has continued to operate -- and even set records for its flights -- well beyond its anticipated mission time has increased the sample return team's optimism.

New submitter know-nothing cunt shares a report from The Register: Scientists from Rice University in Texas have used a dead spider as an actuator at the end of a robot arm -- a feat they claim has initiated the field of "necrobotics." "Humans have relied on biotic materials -- non-living materials derived from living organisms -- since their early ancestors wore animal hides as clothing and used bones for tools," the authors state in an article titled Necrobotics: Biotic Materials as Ready-to-Use Actuators. The article, published by Advanced Science, also notes that evolution has perfected many designs that could be useful in robots, and that spiders have proven especially interesting. Spiders' legs "do not have antagonistic muscle pairs; instead, they have only flexor muscles that contract their legs inwards, and hemolymph (i.e., blood) pressure generated in the prosoma (the part of the body connected to the legs) extends their legs outwards."

The authors had a hunch that if they could generate and control a force equivalent to blood pressure, they could make a dead spider's legs move in and out, allowing them to grip objects and release them again. So they killed a wolf spider "through exposure to freezing temperature (approximately -4C) for a period of 5-7 days" and then used a syringe to inject the spider's prosoma with glue. By leaving the syringe in place and pumping in or withdrawing glue, the researchers were able to make the spider's legs contract and grip. The article claims that's a vastly easier way to make a gripper than with conventional robotic techniques that require all sorts of tedious fabrication and design efforts. "The necrobotic gripper is capable of grasping objects with irregular geometries and up to 130 percent of its own mass," the article notes.

AI has deciphered the structure of virtually every protein known to science, paving the way for the development of new medicines or technologies to tackle global challenges such as famine or pollution. From a report: Proteins are the building blocks of life. Formed of chains of amino acids, folded up into complex shapes, their 3D structure largely determines their function. Once you know how a protein folds up, you can start to understand how it works, and how to change its behaviour. Although DNA provides the instructions for making the chain of amino acids, predicting how they interact to form a 3D shape was more tricky and, until recently, scientists had only deciphered a fraction of the 200m or so proteins known to science. In November 2020, the AI group DeepMind announced it had developed a program called AlphaFold that could rapidly predict this information using an algorithm. Since then, it has been crunching through the genetic codes of every organism that has had its genome sequenced, and predicting the structures of the hundreds of millions of proteins they collectively contain.

Last year, DeepMind published the protein structures for 20 species â" including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans -- on an open database. Now it has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200m proteins. "Essentially, you can think of it as covering the entire protein universe. It includes predictive structures for plants, bacteria, animals, and many other organisms, opening up huge new opportunities for AlphaFold to have an impact on important issues, such as sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases," said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's founder and chief executive. Scientists are already using some of its earlier predictions to help develop new medicines.