"In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer," reports the New York Times [alternate URL here. But in addition, the researchers also sent a message between their two black holes, the Times reports, "through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.

"Physicists described the achievement as another small step in the effort to understand the relation between gravity, which shapes the universe, and quantum mechanics, which governs the subatomic realm of particles....

Quanta magazine reports: The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or "qubits," stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. The team, led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology, implemented the novel "wormhole teleportation protocol" using Google's quantum computer, a device called Sycamore housed at Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, California. With this first-of-its-kind "quantum gravity experiment on a chip," as Spiropulu described it, she and her team beat a competing group of physicists who aim to do wormhole teleportation with IBM and Quantinuum's quantum computers.

When Spiropulu saw the key signature indicating that qubits were passing through the wormhole, she said, "I was shaken."

The experiment can be seen as evidence for the holographic principle, a sweeping hypothesis about how the two pillars of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, fit together.... The holographic principle, ascendant since the 1990s, posits a mathematical equivalence or "duality" between the two frameworks. It says the bendy space-time continuum described by general relativity is really a quantum system of particles in disguise. Space-time and gravity emerge from quantum effects much as a 3D hologram projects out of a 2D pattern. Indeed, the new experiment confirms that quantum effects, of the type that we can control in a quantum computer, can give rise to a phenomenon that we expect to see in relativity — a wormhole....

To be clear, unlike an ordinary hologram, the wormhole isn't something we can see. While it can be considered "a filament of real space-time," according to co-author Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University, lead developer of the wormhole teleportation protocol, it's not part of the same reality that we and the Sycamore computer inhabit. The holographic principle says that the two realities — the one with the wormhole and the one with the qubits — are alternate versions of the same physics, but how to conceptualize this kind of duality remains mysterious. Opinions will differ about the fundamental implications of the result. Crucially, the holographic wormhole in the experiment consists of a different kind of space-time than the space-time of our own universe. It's debatable whether the experiment furthers the hypothesis that the space-time we inhabit is also holographic, patterned by quantum bits.

"I think it is true that gravity in our universe is emergent from some quantum [bits] in the same way that this little baby one-dimensional wormhole is emergent" from the Sycamore chip, Jafferis said. "Of course we don't know that for sure. We're trying to understand it."
Here's how principal investigator Spiropulu summarizes their experiment. "We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole yet is sufficiently small to implement on today's quantum hardware."

"Maintenance of the software that's used for the hardest physics calculations rests almost entirely with a retiree," reports Quanta magazine, saying the situation "reveals the problematic incentive structure of academia." Particle physicists use some of the longest equations in all of science. To look for signs of new elementary particles in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, for example, they draw thousands of pictures called Feynman diagrams that depict possible collision outcomes, each one encoding a complicated formula that can be millions of terms long. Summing formulas like these with pen and paper is impossible; even adding them with computers is a challenge. The algebra rules we learn in school are fast enough for homework, but for particle physics they are woefully inefficient.

Programs called computer algebra systems strive to handle these tasks. And if you want to solve the biggest equations in the world, for 33 years one program has stood out: FORM. Developed by the Dutch particle physicist Jos Vermaseren, FORM is a key part of the infrastructure of particle physics, necessary for the hardest calculations. However, as with surprisingly many essential pieces of digital infrastructure, FORM's maintenance rests largely on one person: Vermaseren himself. And at 73, Vermaseren has begun to step back from FORM development. Due to the incentive structure of academia, which prizes published papers, not software tools, no successor has emerged. If the situation does not change, particle physics may be forced to slow down dramatically...

Without ongoing development, FORM will get less and less usable — only able to interact with older computer code, and not aligned with how today's students learn to program. Experienced users will stick with it, but younger researchers will adopt alternative computer algebra programs like Mathematica that are more user-friendly but orders of magnitude slower. In practice, many of these physicists will decide that certain problems are off-limits — too difficult to handle. So particle physics will stall, with only a few people able to work on the hardest calculations.

In April, Vermaseren is holding a summit of FORM users to plan for the future. They will discuss how to keep FORM alive: how to maintain and extend it, and how to show a new generation of students just how much it can do. With luck, hard work and funding, they may preserve one of the most powerful tools in physics.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader g01d4 for submitting the story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, a Texas-based company announced that it had successfully deployed the largest-ever commercial communications satellite in low-Earth orbit. This BlueWalker 3 demonstration satellite measures nearly 65 square meters, or about one-third the size of a tennis court. Designed and developed by AST SpaceMobile, the expansive BlueWalker 3 satellite is intended to demonstrate the ability of standard mobile phones to directly connect to the Internet via satellite. Large satellites are necessary to connect to mobile devices without a ground-based antenna. [...] Since BlueWalker3's launch in September, astronomers have been tracking the satellite, and their alarm was heightened following its antenna deployment last month. According to the International Astronomical Union, post-deployment measurements showed that BlueWalker 3 had an apparent visual magnitude of around 1 at its brightest, which is nearly as bright as Antares and Spica, the 15th and 16th brightest stars in the night sky.

For a few years, astronomers have been expressing concerns about megaconstellations, such as SpaceX's Starlink satellites. While these are more numerous -- there are more than 3,000 Starlink satellites in orbit -- they are much smaller and far less bright than the kinds of satellites AST plans to launch. Eventually, AST plans to launch a constellation of 168 large satellites to provide "substantial" global coverage, a company spokesperson said. Even one is enough for astronomers, however. "BlueWalker 3 is a big shift in the constellation satellite issue and should give us all reason to pause," said Piero Benvenuti, a director at the International Astronomical Union.

The organization of astronomers is also concerned about the potential for radio interference from these "cell phone towers in space." They will transmit strong radio waves at frequencies currently reserved for terrestrial cell phone communications but are not subject to the same radio quiet zone restrictions that ground-based cellular networks are. This could severely impact radio astronomy research -- which was used to discover cosmic microwave background radiation, for example -- as well as work in related fields. Astronomers currently build their radio astronomy observatories in remote areas, far from cell tower interference. They are worried that these large, radio-wave transmitting satellites will interfere in unpopulated areas. "We are eager to use the newest technologies and strategies to mitigate possible impacts to astronomy," AST said in a statement to Ars. "We are actively working with industry experts on the latest innovations, including next-generation anti-reflective materials. We are also engaged with NASA and certain working groups within the astronomy community to participate in advanced industry solutions, including potential operational interventions."

AST is "committed to avoiding broadcasts inside or adjacent to the National Radio Quiet Zone in the United States [...] as well as additional radioastronomy locations," adds Ars.

Scientists hoping to harness nuclear fusion -- the same energy source that powers the Sun and other stars -- have confirmed that magnetic fields can enhance the energy output of their experiments, reports a new study. The results suggest that magnets may play a key role in the development of this futuristic form of power, which could theoretically provide a virtually limitless supply of clean energy. Motherboard reports: Fusion power is generated by the immense energy released as atoms in extreme environments merge together to create new configurations. The Sun, and all the stars in the night sky, are fueled by this explosive process, which occurs in their cores at incredibly high temperatures and pressures. Scientists have spent roughly a century unraveling the mechanics of nuclear fusion in nature, and trying to artificially replicate this starry mojo in laboratories. Now, a team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is a fusion experiment based at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has reported that the magnetic fields can boost the temperature of the fusion "hot spot" in experiments by 40 percent and more than triple its energy output, which is "approaching what is required for fusion ignition" according to a study published this month in Physical Review Letters.

"The magnetic field comes in and acts kind of like an insulator," said John Moody, a senior scientist at the NIF who led the study, in a call with Motherboard. "You have what we call the hot spot. It's millions of degrees, and around it is just room temperature. All that heat wants to flow out because heat always goes from the hot to the cold and the magnetic field prevents that from happening." "When we go in and we put the magnetic field on this hotspot, and we insulate it, now that heat stays in there, and so we're able to get the hot spot to a higher temperature," he continued. "You get more [fusion] reactions as you go up in temperature, and that's why we see this improvement in the reactivity."

The hot spots in the NIF's fusion experiments are created by shooting nearly 200 lasers at a tiny pellet of fuel made of heavier isotopes (or versions) of hydrogen, such as deuterium and tritium. These laser blasts generate X-rays that make the small capsule implode, producing the kinds of extreme pressures and temperatures that are necessary for the isotopes to fuse together and release their enormous stores of energy. NIF has already brought their experiments to the brink of ignition, which is the point at which fusion reactions become self-sustaining in plasmas. The energy yields created by these experiments are completely outweighed by the energy that it takes to make these self-sustaining reactions in the plasmas in the first place. Still, achieving ignition is an important step toward creating a possible "breakeven" system that produces more energy output than input. Moody and his colleagues developed their magnetized experiment at NIF by wrapping a coil around a version of the pellet made with specialized metals.

The Viking 1 lander arrived on the Martian surface 46 years ago to investigate the planet. It dropped down into what was thought to be an ancient outflow channel. Now, a team of researchers believes they've found evidence of an ancient megatsunami that swept across the planet billions of years ago, less than 600 miles from where Viking landed. Gizmodo reports: In a new paper published today in Scientific Reports, a team identified a 68-mile-wide impact crater in Mars' northern lowlands that they suspect is leftover from an asteroid strike in the planet's ancient past. "The simulation clearly shows that the megatsunami was enormous, with an initial height of approximately 250 meters, and highly turbulent," said Alexis Rodriguez, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute and lead author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. "Furthermore, our modeling shows some radically different behavior of the megatsunami to what we are accustomed to imagining."

Rodriguez's team studied maps of the Martian surface and found the large crater, now named Pohl. Based on Pohl's position on previously dated rocks, the team believes the crater is about 3.4 billion years old -- an extraordinarily long time ago, shortly after the first signs of life we know of appeared on Earth. According to the research team's models, the asteroid impact could have been so intense that material from the seafloor may have dislodged and been carried in the water's debris flows. Based on the size of the crater, the team believes the impacting asteroid could have been 1.86 miles wide or 6 miles wide, depending on the amount of ground resistance the asteroid encountered. The impact could have released between 500,000 megatons and 13 million megatons of TNT energy (for comparison, the Tsar Bomba nuclear test was about 57 megatons of TNT energy.) "A clear next step is to propose a landing site to investigate these deposits in detail to understand the ocean's evolution and potential habitability," Rodriguez said. "First, we would need a detailed geologic mapping of the area to reconstruct the stratigraphy. Then, we need to connect the surface modification history to specific processes through numerical modeling and analog studies, including identifying possible mud volcanoes and glacier landforms."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Motility -- the scientific term for being able to move independently -- is one of the most important features for living organisms on Earth. But where cells' ability to move came from has been a mystery for many scientists. However, new research in which scientists created the world's smallest moving organism provides one idea of how cell motility came to be. As the authors write in their paper, "motility is observed in various phyla and arguably one of the major determinants of survival." According to the paper, cell motility is believed to originate from small movements of housekeeping proteins that are transmitted to a cell, but the proposed process hasn't been experimentally demonstrated. Their study is thus a way to test out this theory.

In this experiment, the researchers genetically engineered a synthetic bacterium named JCVI-syn-3b, or syn-3, which is non-motile. To reconstitute syn-3, the group introduced seven genes that code for proteins that are likely involved in the swimming motion of Spiroplasma bacteria. Spiroplasma is a small bacteria known to "swim" by essentially switching around its cytoskeleton. The proteins introduced evolved from the bacterial actin protein MreB. Actin are multi-functional proteins that are often responsible for motility in cells. In an email to Motherboard, Miyata confirmed that prior to this experiment, nobody had succeeded in making a motile minimal synthetic bacterium. By introducing the proteins responsible for motility in Spiroplasma into syn-3, the researchers were able to make the previously non-motile bacteria swim, as evident in a video published on the University's YouTube account.

The researchers also wanted to see how the expression of different combinations of the motility genes would affect the genetically engineered bacteria to swim. In doing so, they found that the expression of only two proteins was necessary for promoting motility in syn-3, likely indicating that many of the proteins were redundant and demonstrating a minimal system for motility. "To the best of our knowledge, the motility system comprising only two actin superfamily proteins is the smallest system established till date," the authors write. "Therefore, we may call this a 'minimal motile cell.'" Although this study is primarily a proof of concept, it gives scientists a better understanding of how cell motility could have potentially originated and evolved. "In addition to the sheer novelty of creating such a smol swimmer, the new study sheds light on the origin of movement in the first mobile lifeforms that arose on Earth," adds Motherboard. "For instance, Miyata said that the actin protein MreB is not involved in the motility of many other bacterial species, which confirms that there are multiple different evolutionary pathways that led to microbial movement."

The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The brains of teenagers who lived through the Covid pandemic show signs of premature aging, research suggests. The researchers compared MRI scans of 81 teens in the US taken before the pandemic, between November 2016 and November 2019, with those of 82 teens collected between October 2020 and March 2022, during the pandemic but after lockdowns were lifted. After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence -- such as thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala -- were greater in the post-lockdown group than in the pre-pandemic group, suggesting such processes had sped up. In other words, their brains had aged faster.

"Brain age difference was about three years -- we hadn't expected that large an increase given that the lockdown was less than a year [long]," said Ian Gotlib, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and first author of the study. Writing in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the team report that the participants -- a representative sample of adolescents in the Bay Area in California -- originally agreed to take part in a study looking at the impact of early life stress on mental health across puberty. As a result, participants were also assessed for symptoms of depression and anxiety. The post-lockdown group self-reported greater mental health difficulties, including more severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and internalizing problems. "Deterioration in mental health is accompanied by physical changes in the brain for teens, likely due to the stress of the pandemic," said Gotlib.

"In older adults, these brain changes are often association with reduced cognitive functioning. It's not clear yet what they mean in adolescents. But this is the first demonstration that difficulties in mental health during the pandemic are accompanied by what seem to be stress-related changes in brain structure."

Five years ago, a study describing a precipitous decline in sperm counts sparked extreme concerns that humanity was on the path to extinction. Now a new study shows that sperm counts have fallen further and the rate of decline is speeding up, raising fears of a looming global fertility crisis. From a report: The initial study, published in July 2017, revealed that sperm counts -- the number of sperm in a single ejaculate -- plummeted by more than 50 percent among men in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand between 1973 and 2011. Since then, a team led by the same researchers has explored what has happened in the last 10 years. In a new meta-analysis, which appeared in the journal Human Reproduction Update, researchers analyzed studies of semen samples published between 2014 and 2019 and added this to their previous data. The newer studies have a more global perspective and involved semen samples from 14,233 men, including some from South and Central America, Africa, and Asia. The upshot: Not only has the decline in total sperm counts continued -- reaching a drop of 62 percent -- but the decline per year has doubled since 2000. The 2017 report also revealed that sperm concentration (the number of sperm per milliliter of semen) dropped by an average of 1.6 percent per year, totaling more than a 52 percent among men in these regions over the previous four decades.

Andrew Tarantola writes via Engadget: It's been six years since Tesla, SpaceX (and now Twitter) CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain-control interfaces (BCI) startup, Neuralink. It's been three years since the company first demonstrated its "sewing machine-like" implantation robot, two years since the company stuck its technology into the heads of pigs -- and just over 19 months since they did the same to primates, an effort that allegedly killed 15 out of 23 test subjects. After a month-long delay in October, Neuralink held its third "show and tell" event on Wednesday where CEO Elon Musk announced, "we think probably in about six months, we should be able to have a Neuralink installed in a human."

Neuralink has seen tumultuous times in the previous April 2021 status update: The company's co-founder, Max Hodak, quietly quit just after that event, though he said was still a "huge cheerleader" for Neuralink's success. That show of confidence was subsequently shattered this past August after Musk reportedly approached Neuralink's main rival, Synchron, as an investment opportunity. Earlier in February, Neuralink confirmed that monkeys had died during prototype testing of its BCI implants at the University of California, Davis Primate Center but rejected accusations by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine of animal cruelty. Musk responded indirectly to those charges on Wednesday. "Before we would even think of putting a device in an animal, we do everything possible we with rigorous benchtop testing, We're not cavalier about putting these devices into animals," he said. "We're extremely careful and we always want the device, whenever we do the implant -- whether into a sheep, pig or monkey -- to be confirmatory, not exploratory."

Neuralink is still working towards gaining FDA approval for its implant, though the company was awarded the agency's Breakthrough Device Designation in July 2020. This program allows patients and caregivers more "timely access" to promising treatments and medical devices by fast tracking their development and regulatory testing. As of September, 2022 the FDA has granted that designation to 728 medical devices. The FDA has also updated its best practices guidance regarding clinical and nonclinical BCI testing in 2021. "The field of implanted BCI devices is progressing rapidly from fundamental neuroscience discoveries to translational applications and market access," the agency asserted in its May guidance. "Implanted BCI devices have the potential to bring benefit to people with severe disabilities by increasing their ability to interact with their environment, and consequently, providing new independence in daily life."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two miniscule simulated black holes -- those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape -- in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time. It was a "baby wormhole," according to Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, a co-author of the research published in the journal Nature. But scientists are a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a portal, she said.

"Experimentally, for me, I will tell you that it's very, very far away. People come to me and they ask me, 'Can you put your dog in the wormhole?' So, no," Spiropulu told reporters during a video briefing. "...That's a huge leap." [...] Spiropulu said the researchers found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole but was small enough to implement on existing quantum hardware. The researchers said no rupture of space and time was created in physical space in the experiment, though a traversable wormhole appeared to have emerged based on quantum information teleported using quantum codes on the quantum processor. "There's a difference between something being possible in principle and possible in reality," added physicist and study co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, America's particle physics and accelerator laboratory. "So don't hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. But you have to start somewhere. And I think to me it's just exciting that we're able to get our hands on this at all."

"It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. So that's what we can say at this point -- that we have something that in terms of the properties we look at, it looks like a wormhole," Lykken said.

Longtime Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone shares a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with a colleague from Syngenta Jealott's Hill International Research Centre in the U.K., has developed a way to synthesize cocaine using a tobacco plant. The group describes how they synthesized the notorious drug and possible uses for their process in their paper published in Journal of the American Chemical Society.

In studying the coca plant, the researchers discovered that the cocaine that winds up in its leaves is not produced by elements in the plant converting 4-(1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinyl)-3-oxobutanoic acid to hyoscyamine, as has been thought. They found that it is instead produced by the two enzymes, EnMT4 and EnCYP81AN15. To prove their discovery, the group genetically engineered a tobacco plant to produce the two enzymes in its leaves, which resulted in the production of small amounts of cocaine (with assistance from a substance also produced in the plant called ornithine, which is similar to the precursor in the coca plant). [...] Not mentioned in the paper is the possibility of synthesizing the two enzymes produced by both the coca and engineered tobacco plant as a more direct way to synthesize cocaine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The first drug to slow the destruction of the brain in Alzheimer's has been heralded as momentous and historic. The research breakthrough ends decades of failure and shows a new era of drugs to treat Alzheimer's -- the most common form of dementia -- is possible. Yet the medicine, lecanemab, has only a small effect and its impact on people's daily lives is debated. And the drug works in the early stages of the disease, so most would miss out without a revolution in spotting it. [...] Lecanemab is an antibody -- like those the body makes to attack viruses or bacteria -- that has been engineered to tell the immune system to clear amyloid from the brain. Amyloid is a protein that clumps together in the spaces between neurons in the brain and forms distinctive plaques that are one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's.

The large-scale trial involved 1,795 volunteers with early stage Alzheimer's. Infusions of lecanemab were given every fortnight. The results, presented at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer's Disease conference in San Francisco and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, are not a miracle cure. The disease continued to rob people of their brain power, but that decline was slowed by around a quarter over the course of the 18 months of treatment. The data is already being assessed by regulators in the US who will soon decide whether lecanemab can be approved for wider use. The developers -- the pharmaceutical companies Eisai and Biogen -- plan to begin the approval process in other countries next year.

There is debate among scientists and doctors about the "real world" impact of lecanemab. The slower decline with the drug was noticed using ratings of a person's symptoms. It's an 18-point scale, ranging from normal through to severe dementia. Those getting the drug were 0.45 points better off. [Prof Tara Spires-Jones, from the University of Edinburgh] said that was a "small effect" on the disease, but "even though it is not dramatic, I would take it." Dr Susan Kohlhaas, from Alzheimer's Research UK, said it was a "modest effect... but it gives us a little bit of a foothold" and the next generation of drugs would be better. There are also risks. Brain scans showed a risk of brain bleeds (17% of participants) and brain swelling (13%). Overall, 7% of people given the drug had to stop because of side effects. A crucial question is what happens after the 18 months of the trial, and the answers are still speculation. [Dr Elizabeth Coulthard, who treats patients at North Bristol NHS Trust] says that people have, on average, six years of living independently once mild cognitive impairment starts. Slow that decline by a quarter and it could equate to an extra 19 months of independent life, "but we don't know that yet", she says. It is even scientifically plausible that the effectiveness could be greater in longer trials.

Two minerals that have never been seen before on Earth have been discovered inside a massive meteorite in Somalia. They could hold important clues to how asteroids form. Live Science reports: The two brand new minerals were found inside a single 2.5 ounce (70 gram) slice taken from the 16.5 ton (15 metric tons) El Ali meteorite, which was found in 2020. Scientists named the minerals elaliite after the meteor and elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton(opens in new tab), the managing director of the Arizona State University Interplanetary Initiative and principal investigator of NASA's upcoming Psyche mission, which will send a probe to investigate the mineral-rich Psyche asteroid for evidence of how our solar system's planets formed.

The researchers classified El Ali as an Iron IAB complex meteorite, a type made of meteoric iron flecked with tiny chunks of silicates. While investigating the meteorite slice, details of the new minerals caught the scientists' attention. By comparing the minerals with versions of them that had been previously synthesized in a lab, they were able to rapidly identify them as newly recorded in nature. The researchers plan to investigate the meteorites further in order to understand the conditions under which their parent asteroid formed. The team is also looking into material science applications of the minerals. However, future scientific insights from the El Ali meteorite could be in peril. The meteorite has now been moved to China in search of a potential buyer, which could limit researchers' access to the space rock for investigation. "Whenever you find a new mineral, it means that the actual geological conditions, the chemistry of the rock, was different than what's been found before," Chris Herd, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta, said in a statement. "That's what makes this exciting: In this particular meteorite you have two officially described minerals that are new to science."

Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Wednesday at China's space station for the first in-orbit crew rotation in Chinese space history, launching operation of the second inhabited outpost in low-Earth orbit after the NASA-led International Space Station. Reuters reports: The spacecraft Shenzhou-15, or "Divine Vessel", and its three passengers lifted off atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre at 11:08 p.m. (1508 GMT) on Tuesday in sub-freezing temperatures in the Gobi Desert in northwest China, according to state television. Shenzhou-15 was the last of 11 missions, including three previous crewed missions, needed to assemble the "Celestial Palace", as the multi-module station is known in Chinese. The first mission was launched in April 2021.

The spacecraft docked with the station more than six hours after the launch, and the three Shenzhou-15 astronauts were greeted with warm hugs from the previous Shenzhou crew from whom they were taking over. The Shenzhou-14 crew, who arrived in early June, will return to Earth after a one-week handover that will establish the station's ability to temporarily sustain six astronauts, another record for China's space program. The Shenzhou-15 mission offered the nation a rare moment to celebrate, at a time of widespread unhappiness over China's zero-COVID policies, while its economy cools amid uncertainties at home and abroad.

Tall as a 20-story building, a rocket carrying the Shenzhou 15 mission roared into the night sky of the Gobi Desert on Tuesday, carrying three astronauts toward a rendezvous with China's just-completed space station. From a report: The rocket launch was a split-screen event for China, the latest in a long series of technological achievements for the country, even as many of its citizens have been angrily lashing out in the streets against stringent pandemic controls.The air shook as the huge white rocket leaped into a starry, bitterly cold night sky shortly before the setting of a waxing crescent moon. The expedition to the new space station is a milestone for China's rapidly advancing space program. It is the first time a team of three astronauts already aboard the Tiangong outpost will be met by a crew arriving from Earth. The Chinese space station will now be continuously occupied, like the International Space Station, another marker laid down by China in its race to catch up with the United States and surpass it as the dominant power in space.

With a sustained presence in low-Earth orbit aboard Tiangong, Chinese space officials are preparing to put astronauts on the moon, which NASA also intends to revisit before the end of the decade as part of its Artemis program. "It will not take a long time; we can achieve the goal of manned moon landing," Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China's crewed space program, said in an interview at the launch center. China has been developing a lunar lander, he added, without giving a date when it might be used. The launch of Shenzhou 15 comes less than two weeks after NASA finally launched its Artemis I mission following many delays. That flight has put its uncrewed Orion capsule into orbit around the moon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The US space agency's Orion capsule has reached a key milestone on its demonstration mission around the Moon. On Monday, it moved some 430,000km (270,000 miles) beyond the Earth -- the furthest any spacecraft designed to carry humans has travelled. The ship is uncrewed on this occasion, but if it completes the current flight without incident, astronauts will be on the next outing in two years' time. [...] The previous record for the most distant point reached by a human-rated spacecraft was set by the Apollo-13 mission in April 1970. It went out to 400,171km (248,655 miles) from Earth as its crew fought to navigate their way home following an explosion in their capsule's service module. Monday's milestone marks the middle point of the mission. "This halfway point teaches us to number our days so that we can get a heart of wisdom," said Mike Sarafin, Nasa's Artemis mission manager.

"The halfway point affords us an opportunity to step back and then look at what our margins are and where we could be a little smarter to buy down risk and understand the spacecraft's performance for crewed flight on the very next mission."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) says a team of researchers fabricated the results of an experiment, led by one of its astronauts, that sought to simulate daily life on board the International Space Station (ISS). JAXA stated that it would subject astronaut Satoshi Furukawa to disciplinary action over data tampering, Japanese media reported. The experiment in question, conducted between 2016 and 2017, involved 40 participants who were confined to closed environments to simulate what astronauts experience during spaceflight.

The participants spent about two weeks at a facility in Tsukuba, a city northeast of Tokyo, after which time their stress levels and mental well-being were to be assessed by the overseeing researchers. Or at least, that was the plan. Instead, the two researchers responsible for conducting the interviews fabricated the data, compiling psychological assessments without actually having done the interviews and rewriting the diagnosis of the participants, according to NHK World-Japan. The researchers also claimed that three of them had conducted the interviews, when in fact it was just the two.

JAXA began investigating the results of the research in November 2020 upon noticing that something wasn't quite right with the data, and subsequently suspending the 190 million yen ($1.4 million) experiment. The researchers involved claimed that they were too busy to dedicate enough time towards the data gathering for the experiment, according to to JAXA vice president Hiroshi Sasaki and as reported in Kyoto News. The Japanese space agency will reprimand 58-year-old astronaut Furukawa, who was overseeing the experiment as project supervisor. However, since Furukawa was not personally involved in fabricating the data, his upcoming mission to the ISS in 2023 will not be affected. JAXA also stated that it would look into returning the grant it had received from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for the experiment.

"The powerful Webb telescope doesn't need to take pretty pictures to revolutionize our grasp of the cosmos," notes Mashable.

It's "a game changer," says one of the researchers. They're part of what the Webb telescope's web site calls "an international team numbering in the hundreds" that "independently analysed data from four of the Webb telescope's finely calibrated instrument modes." And their ground-breaking first results? The James Webb Space Telescope "just scored another first: a molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world's skies."

The European Space Agency's page for the telescope explains why revealing a "broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints" is so groundbreaking: While Webb and other space telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have previously revealed isolated ingredients of this heated planet's atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds.... The telescope's array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, a "hot Saturn" (a planet about as massive as Saturn but in an orbit tighter than Mercury) orbiting a star some 700 light-years away.... Webb's exquisitely sensitive instruments have provided a profile of WASP-39 b's atmospheric constituents and identified a plethora of contents, including water, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium and potassium.
Earlier Mashable explained that the researchers "wait for planets to travel in front of their bright stars. This starlight passes through the exoplanet's atmosphere, then through space, and ultimately into instruments called spectrographs aboard Webb... essentially hi-tech prisms, which separate the light into a rainbow of colors. Here's the big trick: Certain molecules, like water, in the atmosphere absorb specific types, or colors, of light."

From the Webb Telescope's site: The findings bode well for the capability of Webb's instruments to conduct the broad range of investigations of exoplanets — planets around other stars — hoped for by the science community. That includes probing the atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system.... Among the unprecedented revelations is the first detection in an exoplanet atmosphere of sulphur dioxide, a molecule produced from chemical reactions triggered by high-energy light from the planet's parent star.... "This is the first time we have seen concrete evidence of photochemistry — chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light — on exoplanets," said Shang-Min Tsai, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of the paper explaining the origin of sulphur dioxide in WASP-39 b's atmosphere. "I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres...."

This led to another first: scientists applying computer models of photochemistry to data that require such physics to be fully explained. The resulting improvements in modelling will help build the technological know-how needed to interpret potential signs of habitability in the future.... The planet's proximity to its host star — eight times closer than Mercury is to our Sun — also makes it a laboratory for studying the effects of radiation from host stars on exoplanets. Better knowledge of the star-planet connection should bring a deeper understanding of how these processes affect the diversity of planets observed in the galaxy.

Other atmospheric constituents detected by the Webb telescope include sodium (Na), potassium (K), and water vapour (H2O), confirming previous space- and ground-based telescope observations as well as finding additional fingerprints of water, at these longer wavelengths, that haven't been seen before. Webb also saw carbon dioxide (CO2) at higher resolution, providing twice as much data as reported from its previous observations....

By precisely revealing the details of an exoplanet atmosphere, the Webb telescope's instruments performed well beyond scientists' expectations — and promise a new phase of exploration of the broad variety of exoplanets in the galaxy. "We are going to be able to see the big picture of exoplanet atmospheres," said Laura Flagg, a researcher at Cornell University and a member of the international team. "It is incredibly exciting to know that everything is going to be rewritten. That is one of the best parts of being a scientist."
Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.

"News from Mars," CNN reported Friday. "Not just that water was there, perhaps millions of years ago, but also these organic compounds."

In an interview with the head of Earth Sciences collections at the UK's Natural History Musem, CNN asked the million-dollar question. "How much more likely, if you believe so, that that makes it that there was life on Mars at some time." A: So what we've found with data that's come back from the Rover and has been studied over the last few months is that we see igneous rocks -- so these are rocks that have been formed through volcanic processes -- which have also been affected by the action of liquid water.

And that's really really interesting and exciting, because liquid water is one of the key ingredients you need for life to start. So if you've got the chances of life ever being on Mars, you'd need to have somewhere that had liquid water for at least a period of time. And we've got good evidence for that.

Now that's combined with the fact that we're seeing, using instruments like SHERLOCK, which is an instrument that I'm involved with, also the presence of organic molecules. And organic molecules are chemical molecules made of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sometimes bits of sulfur, sometimes bits of phosphorous, and maybe some added-up things. And those are really really important, because you need organic molecules for life to start.

And the other thing that's really interesting about organic molecules is they can actually be sort of fossil chemical evidence of potential past life.

"Rice University researchers have engineered a key light-activated nanomaterial for the hydrogen economy," the University announced this week.

"Using only inexpensive raw materials, a team from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc. and Princeton University's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment created a scalable catalyst that needs only the power of light to convert ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel...." The research follows government and industry investment to create infrastructure and markets for carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel that will not contribute to greenhouse warming. Liquid ammonia is easy to transport and packs a lot of energy, with one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms per molecule. The new catalyst breaks those molecules into hydrogen gas, a clean-burning fuel, and nitrogen gas, the largest component of Earth's atmosphere. And unlike traditional catalysts, it doesn't require heat. Instead, it harvests energy from light, either sunlight or energy-stingy LEDs....

"This discovery paves the way for sustainable, low-cost hydrogen that could be produced locally rather than in massive centralized plants," said Peter Nordlander, also a Rice co-author.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story (via Phys.org.