"NASA has released a huge new report that astronomers are calling Hubble's magnum opus," reports New Atlas.

"Analyzing 30 years of data from the famous space telescope, the new study makes the most precise measurement yet of how fast the universe is expanding." Astronomers have known for the better part of a century that the universe is expanding, thanks to the observation that galaxies are moving away from us — and the farther away they are, the faster they're traveling. The speed at which they're moving, relative to their distance from Earth, is a figure called the Hubble constant, and measuring this value was one of the primary missions of the space telescope of the same name.

To measure the Hubble constant, astronomers study distances to objects whose brightness is known well — that way, the dimmer it appears, the farther away it is. For relatively close objects within our galaxy or in nearby ones, this role is filled by Cepheids, a class of stars that pulse in a predictable pattern. For greater distances, astronomers use what are called Type Ia supernovae — cosmic explosions with a well-defined peak brightness....

For the new study, a team of scientists has now gathered and analyzed the most comprehensive catalog of these objects so far, to make the most precise measurement of the Hubble constant yet. This was done by studying 42 galaxies that contained both Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae, as imaged by the Hubble telescope over the last 30 years.

"This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it," said Adam Riess, lead scientist of the team. "This is likely Hubble's magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble's life to even double this sample size."
The article points out that these detailed real-world observations of the Hubble "constant" now show a small discrepancy, which suggests "new physics could be at work."

And it's the new James Webb Space Telescope that will now be studying these same phenomena at an even higher resolution.

"Made In Space, Redwire, and Bigelow, move over," writes long-time Slashdot reader Dr. Crash. "There's yet another 3D printing in space group — and it's not a startup." Mitsubishi Electric just went public with a UV-sensitive resin specially made to print in zero-G and in a hard vacuum — as in outside the airlock.

The polymer is tuned to harden with solar ultraviolet light, so no UV lasers needed (saving power and launch weight).

Their first goal? Printing cubesat parabolic dishes in orbit, so a 300mm cubesat could have what looks like a one-meter dish antenna — or anything else that can be freeform-printed.
This "photopolymerization" technology "specifically addresses the challenge of equipping small, inexpensive spacecraft buses with large structures, such as high-gain antenna reflectors," according to Mitsubishi's announcement — arguing that it also ultimately "enables on-orbit fabrication of structures that greatly exceed the dimensions of launch vehicle fairings."

Boeing's Starliner successfully docked to the International Space Station Friday night for the first time.

And right now, Boeing is beginning the official hatch-opening ceremon, in which the space station astronauts already on the ISS "open the hatch to the vehicle and retrieve some cargo that's packed inside," explains the Verge: NASA tasked Boeing with conducting an uncrewed flight demonstration of Starliner to show that the capsule can hit all of the major milestones it'll need to hit when it is carrying passengers... This mission is called OFT-2 since it's technically a do-over of a mission that Boeing attempted back in 2019, called OFT. During that flight, Starliner launched to space as planned, but a software glitch prevented the capsule from getting in the right orbit it needed to reach to rendezvous with the ISS. Boeing had to bring the vehicle home early, and the company never demonstrated Starliner's ability to dock with the ISS....

Using a series of sensors, the capsule autonomously guided itself onto an open docking port on the space station.... Docking occurred a little over an hour behind schedule, due to some issues with Starliner's graphics and docking ring, which were resolved ahead of the docking....

[Thursday] At 6:54PM ET, Starliner successfully launched to space on top of an Atlas V rocket, built and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Once Starliner separated from the Atlas V, it had to fire its own thrusters to insert itself into the proper orbit for reaching the space station. However, after that maneuver took place, Boeing and NASA revealed that two of the 12 thrusters Starliner uses for the procedure failed and cut off too early. The capsule's flight control system was able to kick in and rerouted to a working thruster, which helped get Starliner into a stable orbit.... Today, Boeing revealed that a drop in chamber pressure had caused the early cutoff of the thruster, but that system behaved normally during follow-up burns of the thrusters. And with redundancies on the spacecraft, the issue "does not pose a risk to the rest of the flight test," according to Boeing.

Boeing also noted today that the Starliner team is investigating some weird behavior of a "thermal cooling loop" but said that temperatures are stable on the spacecraft.
From the space station, NASA astronaut Bob Hines said the achievement "marks a great milestone towards providing additional commercial access to low Earth orbit, sustaining the ISS and enabling NASA's goal of returning humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars.

"Great accomplishments in human spaceflight are long remembered by history. Today will be no different."

A long-time Slashdot reader shares this schedule (EST): 5/20, 3:30 pm — Starliner docking with ISS.
5/21, 11:30 am — Safety checks completed. Hatches opened.
5/24, 12:00 pm — Starliner loading completed. Hatched closed.
5/25, 2:00 pm — Starliner undocking from ISS.
5/25, 5:45 pm — Coverage of Starliner landing begins.

Again, the streams will be broadcast at NASA Television. I don't know about any of you, but I know what I'm doing this weekend.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Some 5400 years ago, about the time humans were inventing writing, an alerce tree (Fitzroya cupressoides) may have started to grow in the coastal mountains of present-day Chile. Sheltered in a cool, damp ravine, it avoided fires and logging that claimed many others of its kind, and it grew into a grizzled giant more than 4 meters across. Much of the trunk died, part of the crown fell away, and the tree became festooned with mosses, lichens, and even other trees that took root in its crevices. Now, the tree -- known as the Alerce Milenario or Gran Abuelo (great-grandfather) tree -- might claim a new and extraordinary title: the oldest living individual on Earth.

Using a combination of computer models and traditional methods for calculating tree age, Jonathan Barichivich, a Chilean environmental scientist who works at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris, has estimated that the Alerce Milenario is probably more than 5000 years old. That would make it at least 1 century senior to the current record holder: Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in eastern California with 4853 years' worth of annual growth rings under its gnarled bark. (Some clonal trees that originate from a common root systems, such as that of the Utah-based aspen colony known as "Pando," are thought to be older, but dendrochronologists tend to focus on individual trunks with countable rings.) Many dendrochronologists are likely to be skeptical of Barichivich's claim, which has not yet been published, because it does not involve a full count of tree growth rings. But at least some experts are open to the possibility. "I fully trust the analysis that Jonathan has made," says Harald Bugmann, a dendrochronologist at ETH Zurich. "It sounds like a very smart approach."

Chinese engineers will take the ideas of a research paper and turn it into the world's largest 3D-printed project. Popular Mechanics: Within two years, officials behind this project want to fully automate the unmanned construction of a 590-foot-tall dam on the Tibetan Plateau to build the Yangqu hydropower plant -- completely with robots. The paper, published last month in the Journal of Tsinghua University (Science and Technology), laid out the plans for the dam, as first reported in the South China Morning Post. Researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing explain the backbone of automation for the planned Yellow River dam that will eventually offer nearly five billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. (It's worth noting that China's Three Gorges Dam -- a hydroelectric gravity dam spanning the Yangtze River -- is the world's largest power station in terms of energy output.) But it's hard to tell what's more ambitious: the fact that the researchers plan to turn a dam site into effectively a massive 3D-printing project, or that through every step of the process the project eliminates human workers as they go fully robotic.

In the dam-"printing" process, machinery will deliver construction materials to the worksite -- the exact location needed, eliminating human error, they say -- and then unmanned bulldozers, pavers, and rollers will form the dam layer by layer. Sensors on the rollers will keep the artificial intelligence (AI) system informed about the firmness and stability of each of the 3D-printed layers until it reaches 590 feet in height, about the same height as the Shasta Dam in California and shorter than the Hoover Dam's 726 feet. With the largest existing 3D-printed structures rising about 20 feet tall -- from houses in China to an office building in Dubai -- the exploration of 3D-printed projects continues to expand. Already we've seen a 1,640-foot-long retention wall in China, housing and office buildings across the globe, and now the U.S. Army has plans for barracks at Fort Bliss in Texas.

An ancient forest has been found at the bottom of a giant sinkhole in China, with trees up to 40 metres (130ft) tall. From a report: Scientists believe it could contain undiscovered plant and animal species. Cave explorers in the Guangxi region of southern China alerted scientists when they found the sinkhole, which had a primitive forest inside. Among 30 sinkholes in Leye County this is the largest, at 306 metres long, 150 metres wide and 192 metres deep. Zhang Yuanhai, a senior engineer at the Institute of Karst Geology of the China Geological Survey, told the state news agency Xinhua that the site had three caves in its walls and a well-preserved primitive forest at the bottom. Scientists trekked for hours to reach the base of the sinkhole to see what it contained. Chen Lixin, who led the expedition team, said that as well as the trees there was dense undergrowth on the floor that came up to his shoulders.

Two satellites recently exchanged more than 200 gigabits of data over a distance of about 60 miles (100 kilometers) using laser communication in space. Gizmodo reports: Satellites generally don't communicate directly with each other. Instead, they use radio signals to transfer data down to a ground station on Earth, which then relays this data to another satellite. Optical terminals between satellites are considered to be faster and more secure. CACI International -- the company that developed the optical terminals for the space lasers -- announced the achievement on Tuesday in a press release. The two satellites, named Able and Baker, were launched last summer by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its Blackjack project. DARPA is seeking to build a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit for the purpose of supporting military operations.

The two satellites successfully pulled off the 40-minute laser communications experiment on April 14, during which time Able and Baker used CACI's CrossBeam free-space optical terminals. Infrared lasers transmit data by encoding the message into an optical signal, which is then carried to a receiver. The experiment, known as Mandrake 2, was funded by the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Mandrake 2 launched on June 30, 2021 as an early risk-reduction flight for DARPA's Blackjack constellation project. The Blackjack constellation aims to deploy an initial batch of 20 small satellites in low Earth orbit, which will connect with each other to form a mesh network in space.

The idea is not to rival commercial satellite constellations such as SpaceX's Starlink, but rather to have a government-owned constellation that the military can use to connect to its bases, sensors, and weapons across the world. The SDA is planning to launch the 20 satellites this fall and then launch an additional 126 satellites by 2024, according to SpaceNews. The agency is seeking to create a full constellation that would include somewhere between 300 and 500 satellites in low Earth orbit. The satellites are being developed by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and York Space.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: In 1958, a combine carrying a full load of freshly harvested crops might weigh 8,800 pounds (4000 kg). Today, a fully loaded combine can clock in at 80,000 pounds (36,000 kg). The story of increasingly large farm vehicles isn't necessarily bad. The invention of these huge machines -- along with advances like new fertilizers and genetically modified crops -- mean that today's farmers can grow far more food than ever before. But there's reason to worry that equipment manufacturers have begun pushing the envelope too far. In a paper published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS, researchers show that farm equipment has grown so large that its heft can damage the soil that lies more than 20 inches (0.5 m) below the surface.

It's been obvious for a long time that the weight of farm vehicles driving over fields causes the upper layers of soil to compact. Engineers have mitigated this by putting progressively bigger tires on heavier farm vehicles. They've also used more flexible materials that make it possible to inflate the tires to lower pressure. Those changes increase the amount of surface area contact between the vehicle and the ground. These measures have enabled engineers to build larger and larger vehicles without increasing the amount of contact stress on the upper layers of soil.

It's not just the upper layers of soil that farmers need to worry about. In their analysis, the researchers found that "subsoil stresses under farm vehicles have affected progressively deeper soil layers over the past six decades." In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, farm vehicles weren't heavy enough to compress soil below the level that's tilled each year. But that's no longer the case. Pressure from tractors, combines, and other pieces of equipment "has now penetrated deeper into the subsoil, thus potentially affecting untilled crop root zones," the authors write. Those layers of subsoil may be hidden from view, but they play an important role in what happens at the surface. The researchers say the consequences can combine to result in "a persistent decline in crop yields." This isn't a niche problem either. According to the researchers, "The fraction of arable land that is presently at high risk of subsoil compaction is about 20% of global cropland area, concentrated in mechanized regions in Europe, North America, South America, and Australia."

They say the issue could be addressed if "future agricultural vehicles [are] designed with intrinsic soil mechanical limits in mind to avoid chronic soil compaction."

The engineering team with NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is trying to solve a mystery: The interstellar explorer is operating normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, along with gathering and returning science data. But readouts from the probe's attitude articulation and control system (AACS) don't reflect what's actually happening onboard. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports: The AACS controls the 45-year-old spacecraft's orientation. Among other tasks, it keeps Voyager 1's high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth, enabling it to send data home. All signs suggest the AACS is still working, but the telemetry data it's returning is invalid. For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in. The issue hasn't triggered any onboard fault protection systems, which are designed to put the spacecraft into "safe mode" -- a state where only essential operations are carried out, giving engineers time to diagnose an issue. Voyager 1's signal hasn't weakened, either, which suggests the high-gain antenna remains in its prescribed orientation with Earth.

The team will continue to monitor the signal closely as they continue to determine whether the invalid data is coming directly from the AACS or another system involved in producing and sending telemetry data. Until the nature of the issue is better understood, the team cannot anticipate whether this might affect how long the spacecraft can collect and transmit science data. Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes light 20 hours and 33 minutes to travel that difference. That means it takes roughly two days to send a message to Voyager 1 and get a response -- a delay the mission team is well accustomed to.

The American Institute of Physics reports via Phys.Org: In Physics of Fluids, researchers from the University of Nicosia in Cyprus assessed the potential impact of a rocket launch on atmospheric pollution by investigating the heat and mass transfer and rapid mixing of the combustion byproducts for altitudes up to 67 kilometers into the atmosphere. The team modeled the exhaust gases and developing plume at several altitudes along a typical trajectory of a standard present-day rocket. They did this as a prototypical example of a two-stage rocket to transport people and payloads into Earth's orbit and beyond.

The researchers found the production of thermal nitrogen oxides (NOx), components of the combustion exhaust, can remain high up to altitudes with an ambient atmospheric pressure above or even slightly below the nozzles' exit pressure, i.e., below an altitude of approximately 10 km. At the same time, the emitted mass of carbon dioxide as the rocket climbs 1 kilometer in altitude in the mesosphere is equivalent to that contained in 26 cubic kilometers of atmospheric air at the same altitude. They found the impact on the atmosphere locally and momentarily in the mesosphere can be significant. While air currents will gradually transport and mix the exhaust CO2 throughout the atmosphere, eventually bringing the CO2 back down to its naturally occurring levels, the time scale over which this happens is not clear.

The scientists believe a certain number of rocket launches might still exist above which mesospheric carbon dioxide could accumulate over time, thus increasing the naturally occurring levels and affecting our climate. Their results suggest that in the worst-case scenario, sufficient NOx could be produced over the time it takes the rocket to reach an altitude of 10 kilometers to pollute over 2 cubic kilometers of atmospheric air with a NOx concentration that, according to the World Health Organization, would be at a level hazardous to human health.

The winner of this year's MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is commercializing a new water desalination technology. MIT News reports: Nona Desalination says it has developed a device capable of producing enough drinking water for 10 people at half the cost and with 1/10th the power of other water desalination devices. The device is roughly the size and weight of a case of bottled water and is powered by a small solar panel. The traditional approach for water desalination relies on a power-intensive process called reverse osmosis. In contrast, Nona uses a technology developed in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics that removes salt and bacteria from seawater using an electrical current.

"Because we can do all this at super low pressure, we don't need the high-pressure pump [used in reverse osmosis], so we don't need a lot of electricity," says Crawford, who co-founded the company with MIT Research Scientist Junghyo Yoon. "Our device runs on less power than a cell phone charger." The company has already developed a small prototype that produces clean drinking water. With its winnings, Nona will build more prototypes to give to early customers. The company plans to sell its first units to sailors before moving into the emergency preparedness space in the U.S., which it estimates to be a $5 billion industry. From there, it hopes to scale globally to help with disaster relief. The technology could also possibly be used for hydrogen production, oil and gas separation, and more.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has expressed concern about an unusual outbreak of monkeypox in the United Kingdom, suggesting there appears to be at least some undetected transmission of the virus there and warning of the possibility that the outbreak could spread beyond U.K. borders. From a report: "We do have a level of concern that this is very different than what we typically think of from monkeypox. And I think we have some concern that there could be spread outside the U.K associated with this," Jennifer McQuiston, a senior CDC official, told STAT in an interview.

Seven confirmed and one probable case of monkeypox have been discovered in the U.K. since early May -- an unusually large number given that human monkeypox cases are uncommon, and are especially rare outside West and Central Africa. While one of the cases had recently traveled to Nigeria, where monkeypox is endemic, the others appear to have contracted the virus in the U.K. None of the people infected domestically has any known connections with the traveler and the timing of the onset of the cases suggest he was not the source of those infections. Further reading: Spain, Portugal report monkeypox cases, raising specter of wider outbreak.

During his lifetime, Einstein resisted the attempts to commercialise his identity. Now someone makes more than $12 million a year on image licensing. Even the law that allows this profiteering is contentious. Can an heir inherit rights that did not yet exist during the originator's lifetime? More on this on a long read from The Guardian.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers in China revealed they have developed a contact lens that can sense an increase in pressure within the eye and release an anti-glaucoma drug should the pressure exceed a certain level. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team describe how they created the device using an upper and lower lens, with a snowflake-shaped pressure sensor and wireless power transfer device sandwiched between them around the rim of the lenses. The arrangement appears to give the effect of the wearer having golden irises. However, the team say the design allows the necessary components to be included in the device without blocking the wearer's view or irritating the eye.

When the pressure inside the eye increases, the gap between the upper and lower lenses decreases. This is detected by the pressure sensor by means of a cantilever. The sensor then sends a signal to the wireless system which subsequently triggers the release of an anti-glaucoma drug, from a hydrogel attached to an electrode, and enables it to cross the cornea of the eye. The drug, brimonidine, acts to reduce the pressure within the eye. The study reveals that the contact lenses have so far been tested on pigs' eyes and on the eyes of living rabbits -- albeit with smaller-sized lenses -- although trials have yet to be carried out in humans. The researchers note the lenses are not only soft and minimally invasive but are also battery-free, adding that the approach could be expanded to help tackle other eye diseases. "We can now imagine that a glaucoma sufferer wearing these contact lenses will not only receive real-time information about the pressures within the eye, since the contact lens has built-in wireless capacity and can easily communicate with an app on your smartphone, but also receive, for example, pressure-relieving drugs when needed," said Prof Zubair Ahmed from the Institute of Inflammation and Aging at the University of Birmingham. "The materials required to create such contact lenses are inexpensive and soon could be mass-produced," he added.

After scandals in which doctors let unsupervised assistants operate on patients, South Korea is becoming one of the first to require cameras in operating rooms. The New York Times reports: Ethicists and medical officials, including those at the American College of Surgeons, have cautioned that surveilling surgeons to deter malpractice may undermine trust in doctors, hurt morale, violate patient privacy and discourage physicians from taking risks to save lives. The Korea Medical Association, which is opposed to the new mandate, has lobbied to limit its impact. But supporters of the law said the move would help protect patients, build the public's trust in doctors and provide victims of medical malpractice with evidence to use in court.

"People are dying in operating rooms," said An Gi-jong, an advocate for patients. "We can't rely on doctors to solve problems on their own anymore." About five patients have died from ghost surgeries in the past eight years, he said. They include Kwon Dae-hee, a college student in Seoul who died of a hemorrhage in 2016 after jawline surgery. His mother, Lee Na-geum, who obtained footage of his operation and reviewed it hundreds of times, found evidence that the operation had been botched because parts of it had been conducted by an unsupervised nursing assistant. Ms. Lee, 62, who has held a public vigil denouncing ghost surgeries since her son's death, said in an interview: "Once the cameras are installed, your lies will be exposed if you're a ghost doctor. Cameras reveal truth." [...]

Under the new law, hospitals performing surgeries on unconscious patients must install video cameras in their operating rooms. If a patient or a relative requests that a surgery be filmed, the hospital must comply. Doctors can refuse for certain reasons, such as if a delay in the operation would put the patient's life at risk, or if the filming would significantly impede residents' training. The recorded footage can be viewed for criminal investigations, prosecutions, trials, medical disputes or mediation.

Two senior U.S. defense intelligence officials said on Tuesday the Pentagon is committed to determining the origins of what it calls "unidentified aerial phenomena" -- commonly termed UFOs -- but acknowledged many remain beyond the government's ability to explain. From a report: The two officials, Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, appeared before a House of Representatives intelligence subcommittee for the first public U.S. congressional hearing on the subject in a half century. It came 11 months after a government report documented more than 140 cases of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, that U.S. military pilots had observed since 2004. Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, said the number of UAPs officially cataloged by a newly formed Pentagon task force has grown to 400 cases. Both officials chose their words carefully in describing the task force's work, including the question of possible extraterrestrial origins, which Bray said defense and intelligence analysts had not ruled out. Bray did say that "we have no material, we have detected no emanations, within the UAP task force that would suggest it is anything non-terrestrial in origin."

A doctor can't tell if somebody is Black, Asian, or white, just by looking at their X-rays. But a computer can, according to a surprising new paper by an international team of scientists, including researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. From a report: The study found that an artificial intelligence program trained to read X-rays and CT scans could predict a person's race with 90 percent accuracy. But the scientists who conducted the study say they have no idea how the computer figures it out. "When my graduate students showed me some of the results that were in this paper, I actually thought it must be a mistake," said Marzyeh Ghassemi, an MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and coauthor of the paper, which was published Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet Digital Health. "I honestly thought my students were crazy when they told me."

At a time when AI software is increasingly used to help doctors make diagnostic decisions, the research raises the unsettling prospect that AI-based diagnostic systems could unintentionally generate racially biased results. For example, an AI (with access to X-rays) could automatically recommend a particular course of treatment for all Black patients, whether or not it's best for a specific person. Meanwhile, the patient's human physician wouldn't know that the AI based its diagnosis on racial data.

After traveling 300 miles on the underbelly of the Perseverance rover, the "Ingenuity" helicopter has made 28 different flights over the surface of Mars, reports the Washington Post, staying aloft for a total of nearly one hour, flying 4.3 miles with a maximum speed of 12.3 miles per hour and a top altitude of 39 feet. "It's traversed craters, taken photos of regions that would be hard to reach on the ground, and served as a surprisingly resilient scout that has adapted to the changing Martian atmosphere and survived its harsh dust storms and frigid nights.

"Now the engineers and scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are worried that their four-pound, solar-powered drone on Mars, may be nearing the end of its life." Winter is setting in on Mars. The dust is kicking up, coating Ingenuity's solar panels and preventing it from fully charging its six lithium-ion batteries. This month, for the first time since it landed on Mars more than a year ago, Ingenuity missed a planned communications session with Perseverance, the Mars rover that it relies on to send data and receive commands from Earth. Will a dust-coated Ingenuity survive a Martian winter where temperatures routinely plunge below minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit? And if it doesn't, how should the world remember the little helicopter that cost $80 million to develop and more than five years to design and build? Those closest to the project say that as time winds down for Ingenuity, it's hard to overstate its achievements....

"We built it as an experiment," Lori Glaze, the director of NASA's planetary science division, told The Washington Post. "So it didn't necessarily have the flight-qualified parts that we use on the big missions like Perseverance." Some, such as components from smartphones, were even bought off-the-shelf, so "there were chances that they might not perform in the environment as we expected. And so there was a risk that it wasn't going to work.... What happened was, and this is really key, after Ingenuity performed so well on those first five flights, the science team from Perseverance came to us and said, 'You know what, we want this helicopter to keep operating to help us in our exploration and achieving our science goals,' " Glaze said.

So NASA decided to keep flying....

On April 29, it took its last flight to date, No. 28, a quarter-of-a-mile jaunt that lasted two-and-a-half minutes. Now NASA wonders if that will be the last one. The space agency thinks the helicopter's inability to fully charge its batteries caused the helicopter to enter a low-power state. When it went dormant, the helicopter's onboard clock reset, the way household clocks do after a power outage. So the next day, as the sun rose and began to charge the batteries, the helicopter was out of sync with the rover: "Essentially, when Ingenuity thought it was time to contact Perseverance, the rover's base station wasn't listening," NASA wrote.

Then NASA did something extraordinary: Mission controllers commanded Perseverance to spend almost all of May 5 listening for the helicopter.

Finally, little Ingenuity phoned home.

The radio link, NASA said, "was stable," the helicopter was healthy, and the battery was charging at 41 percent.

But, as NASA warned, "one radio communications session does not mean Ingenuity is out of the woods. The increased (light-reducing) dust in the air means charging the helicopter's batteries to a level that would allow important components (like the clock and heaters) to remain energized through the night presents a significant challenge."

Maybe Ingenuity will fly again. Maybe not.

"At this point, I can't tell you what's going to happen next," Glaze said. "We're still working on trying to find a way to fly it again. But Perseverance is the primary mission, so that we need to start setting our expectations appropriately."
For Ingenuity's "Wright Brothers moment" — when it flew for the first time on another planet — it was actually carrying a postage-sized bit of fabric from the Wright Brothers original 1903 aircraft.

Biopharmaceutical company MindMed has announced the first topline data from a novel Phase 2 trial testing high doses of LSD as a treatment for anxiety. The results indicate one to two LSD sessions can generate rapid and sustained reductions to anxiety, however, significantly larger trials will be needed to validate these findings. New Atlas reports: This new trial was conducted at University Hospital Basel in Switzerland. The trial was randomized, and placebo-controlled with a crossover design enrolling 46 participants. The participants completed two high-dose (200-microgram) LSD sessions, six weeks apart. The primary endpoint was a reduction in anxiety 16 weeks after the second LSD session, as measured on a scale called STAI (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), a common test used to quantify anxiety.

The data revealed by MindMed indicates 65 percent (13 out of 20) patients in the LSD group demonstrated a clinically significant reduction in STAI scores of more than 30 percent. Only nine percent of the placebo group (two out of 22) showed similar clinical improvements. The results indicate the treatment was generally safe with only mild adverse effects reported by most subjects. The announcement did report one serious adverse treatment event during an LSD session described as "acute transient anxiety and delusions." This subject required sedatives but no long-term adverse effects were noted. [...] MindMed is now beginning a Phase 2b trial to expand on these findings and further explore LSD as a treatment for anxiety disorders.

Virgin Orbit is assembling a fleet of modified 747 jets, the company announced Tuesday, ordering two new modified cargo airframes to help launch more rockets into space. CNBC reports: The company is acquiring the two additional airframes through L3Harris, which will modify the jets to carry and launch Virgin Orbit's rockets. Virgin expects to take delivery of the first of the planes next year. Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said the delivery timing of the second plane will be "driven more by market demand" for launches. The deal "unleashes us in a few ways," he said. "It eliminates one of the key chokepoints that we have in the system," Hart told CNBC. It also will help the company keep launches going in case one of their aircraft is undergoing maintenance, which will open up "all sorts of possibilities for supporting different customers in different places," he added.

Virgin Orbit has a single aircraft, a customized Boeing 747-400 called "Cosmic Girl," which has flown four missions of Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket to date. Through a method known as air launch, the company's aircraft carries its rockets to about 45,000 feet of altitude and drops them just before they fire their engines and accelerate into space -- a method the company touts as more flexible than ground-based systems. [...] Virgin Orbit's new 747s will also feature an improved layout, with L3Harris modifying the aircraft to carry up to two LauncherOne rockets, as well as all of the company's ground support equipment, to a launch site.