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.

What if we glimpsed alien life for the first time by peering through a natural telescope made by the Sun's gravity? This wild idea, known as a solar gravitational lens (SGL) mission, may sound like an Einsteinian fever dream, but scientists have now found that it is "feasible with technologies that are either extant or in active development," according to a new study. Motherboard reports: Researchers led by Henry Helvajian, senior scientist in the Physical Sciences Laboratories at the nonprofit research center The Aerospace Corporation, have now shared the initial results of this ongoing NIAC study on the preprint server arxiv, which have not been peer-reviewed. Though the team cautioned that the mission would need to overcome several technical challenges, it could ultimately answer one of humanity's most fundamental questions: Are we alone in the universe?

"The SGL offers capabilities that are unmatched by any planned or conceivable optical instrument," according to the study, which was co-authored by Slava Turyshev, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator of the NIAC mission concept. "With its unique optical properties, the SGL can be used to obtain detailed, high resolution images of Earth-like exoplanets as far as 100 light years from Earth, with measurement durations lasting months, or at most a few years." "Of particular interest is the possibility of using the SGL to obtain images of high spatial and spectral resolution of a yet-to-be-identified, potentially life-bearing exoplanet in another solar system in our Galactic neighborhood," the researchers added. "The direct high-resolution images of an exoplanet obtained with the SGL could lead to insight on the on-going biological processes on the target exoplanet and find signs of habitability."

The focal point of the Sun's gravitational lens is located all the way out in interstellar space, some 550 and 900 times the distance that Earth orbits our star, which is much farther than any spacecraft has ventured beyond our planet. Helvajian and his colleagues envision their mission as consisting of a one-meter telescope that is accompanied by a sunshade and propelled by solar sails that produce thrust by capturing solar radiation, in a somewhat analogous fashion to wind-propelled sails. Even if they were able to overcome the technical hurdles involved with this concept -- which include the development of more reliable solar sails and long-duration navigation and communications systems -- the team estimated that it would take at least 25 to 30 years for a spacecraft to reach this far-flung location, in the best case scenario. That said, if a telescope were able to spot alien life, arguably the biggest breakthrough in science, it would be well worth the long wait.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The oldest patient yet has been cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant for leukaemia, researchers reported on Wednesday. While the transplant was planned to treat the now-66-year-old's leukaemia, the doctors also sought a donor who was naturally resistant to the virus that causes AIDS, a mechanism that first worked to cure the "Berlin patient," Timothy Ray Brown, in 2007.

The latest patient, the fourth to be cured in this way, is known as the "City of Hope" patient after the U.S. facility in Duarte, California, where he was treated, because he does not want to be identified. As well as being the oldest, the patient has also had HIV the longest, having been diagnosed in 1988 with what he described as a "death sentence" that killed many of his friends. He has been on antiretroviral therapy (ART) to control his condition for more than 30 years. [...] Scientists think the process works because the donor individual's stem cells have a specific, rare genetic mutation which means they lack the receptors used by HIV to infect cells. "Scientists think the process works because the donor individual's stem cells have a specific, rare genetic mutation which means they lack the receptors used by HIV to infect cells," adds Reuters.

"After the transplant three and a half years ago, which followed chemotherapy, the City of Hope patient stopped taking ART in March 2021. He has now been in remission from both HIV and leukaemia for more than a year, the team said."

Researchers in Spain also presented a case of a 59-year-old woman who is considered to be in a state of viral remission. "She has now maintained a fully suppressed viral load for over 15 years," reports NBC News. "Unlike the handful of people either cured or possibly cured by stem cell transplants, however, she still harbors virus that is capable of producing viable new copies of itself. Her body has actually controlled the virus more efficiently with the passing years, according to Dr. Juan Ambrosioni, an HIV physician in the Barcelona clinic."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Energy, mass, velocity. These three variables make up Einstein's iconic equation E=MC2. But how did Einstein know about these concepts in the first place? A precursor step to understanding physics is identifying relevant variables. Without the concept of energy, mass, and velocity, not even Einstein could discover relativity. But can such variables be discovered automatically? Doing so could greatly accelerate scientific discovery. This is the question that researchers at Columbia Engineering posed to a new AI program. The program was designed to observe physical phenomena through a video camera, then try to search for the minimal set of fundamental variables that fully describe the observed dynamics. The study was published on July 25 in Nature Computational Science.

The researchers began by feeding the system raw video footage of phenomena for which they already knew the answer. For example, they fed a video of a swinging double pendulum known to have exactly four "state variables" -- the angle and angular velocity of each of the two arms. After a few hours of analysis, the AI produced the answer: 4.7. The researchers then proceeded to visualize the actual variables that the program identified. Extracting the variables themselves was not easy, since the program cannot describe them in any intuitive way that would be understandable to humans. After some probing, it appeared that two of the variables the program chose loosely corresponded to the angles of the arms, but the other two remain a mystery. "We tried correlating the other variables with anything and everything we could think of: angular and linear velocities, kinetic and potential energy, and various combinations of known quantities," explained Boyuan Chen Ph.D., now an assistant professor at Duke University, who led the work. "But nothing seemed to match perfectly." The team was confident that the AI had found a valid set of four variables, since it was making good predictions, "but we don't yet understand the mathematical language it is speaking," he explained.

After validating a number of other physical systems with known solutions, the researchers fed videos of systems for which they did not know the explicit answer. The first videos featured an "air dancer" undulating in front of a local used car lot. After a few hours of analysis, the program returned eight variables. A video of a lava lamp also produced eight variables. They then fed a video clip of flames from a holiday fireplace loop, and the program returned 24 variables. A particularly interesting question was whether the set of variable was unique for every system, or whether a different set was produced each time the program was restarted. "I always wondered, if we ever met an intelligent alien race, would they have discovered the same physics laws as we have, or might they describe the universe in a different way?" said Hod Lipson, director of the Creative Machines Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

"Perhaps some phenomena seem enigmatically complex because we are trying to understand them using the wrong set of variables. In the experiments, the number of variables was the same each time the AI restarted, but the specific variables were different each time. So yes, there are alternative ways to describe the universe and it is quite possible that our choices aren't perfect."

Scientists have found more than 30 potentially new species living at the bottom of the sea. From a report: Researchers from the UK's Natural History Museum used a remotely operated vehicle to collect specimens from the abyssal plains of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the central Pacific. Previously, creatures from this area had been studied only from photographs. The study, published in the journal Zookeys, found there is a high species diversity of larger organisms in the abyss. Of the 55 specimens recovered, 48 were of different species. The animals found include segmented worms, invertebrates from the same family as centipedes, marine animals from the same family as jellyfish, and different types of coral. Thirty-six specimens were found at more than 4,800 metres deep, two were collected on a seamount slope at 4,125 metres, and 17 were found at between 3,095 and 3,562 metres deep.

Russia has announced that it will officially end its international collaboration with NASA around operation of the International Space Station (ISS) as of 2024, according to the AP. From a report: Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, also announced plans to construct its own orbital station, which build and operate independently of the U.S. The ISS was originally intended to be decommissioned sometime around 2024, but NASSA shifted its official retirement date to 2030. Roscosmos and NASA set an agreement earlier in July to still continue to exchange rides for American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts aboard each other's respective launch vehicles -- Russia's Soyuz and SpaceX's Crew Dragon -- on four upcoming missions to rotate the station's crew.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: China's latest launch of a huge rocket is, once again, raising alarm that the debris will crash into the Earth's surface in an uncertain location and at great speed. On Sunday afternoon local time, the Long March 5B blasted off from the Wenchang launch site on the southern island province of Hainan, carrying a solar-powered new lab, the Wentian experiment module, to be added to China's Tiangong Space Station. But the size of the heavy-lift rocket -- it stands 53.6 meters (176 feet) tall and weighs 837,500 kilograms (more than 1.8 million pounds) -- and the risky design of its launch process have led experts to fear that some debris from its core stage could fail to burn up as it reenters Earth's atmosphere.

As with two previous launches, the rocket shed its empty 23-ton first stage in orbit, meaning that it will continue to loop the Earth over coming days as it gradually comes closer to landing. This flight path is difficult to predict because of fluctuations in the atmosphere caused by changes in solar activity. Although experts consider the chances of debris hitting an inhabited area very low, many also believe China is taking an unnecessary risk. After the core stage of the last launch fell into the Indian Ocean, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said China was "failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris," including minimizing risks during reentry and being transparent about operations. China rejects accusations of irresponsibility. In response to concerns about last year's launch, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the likelihood of damage was "extremely low."

Many scientists agree with China that the odds of debris causing serious damage are tiny. An article published in the journal Nature Astronomy this month put the chance that, under current launch practices, someone would die or be injured from parts of a rocket making an uncontrolled reentry at 1 in 10 over the next decade. But many believe launch designs like the Long March 5B's are an unnecessary risk. "Launch providers have access to technologies and mission designs today that could eliminate the need for most uncontrolled re-entries," the authors wrote. They proposed global safety standards mandating controlled reentry.
UPDATE: It crashed into the Indian Ocean.