Cleaner skies over South Asia that resulted from pandemic lockdowns last year likely affected the timing of snowmelt in the Indus River basin of Pakistan and India, researchers reported on Monday. From a report: The lockdowns cut emissions of soot and other pollutants, as people drove less and the generation of electricity, largely from coal, was reduced. That meant less soot was deposited on snow, where it absorbs sunlight, emits heat and causes faster melting. The cleaner snow in 2020 reflected more sunlight and did not melt as fast, the researchers said. In all, that delayed runoff into the Indus River of more than than one and a half cubic miles of melt water, they calculated, similar to the volume of some of the largest reservoirs in the United States. More than 300 million people depend on the Indus for water, much of which starts as snow in the high peaks of the Karakoram and other mountain ranges.

Timing of melt water runoff in the spring and summer can be crucial for managing water supplies over time. In many parts of the world, climate change has affected this timing, with warmer temperatures and a shift to more rain and less snow causing more snow to melt sooner. Slower runoff can thus be beneficial, helping managers of reservoirs store more water and maintain a steady flow over the year. Ned Bair, a snow hydrologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the lead researcher, said that while they could not prove conclusively that the pandemic was the reason for the timing delay, "it seems unlikely that anything else would have led to that." India imposed a nationwide lockdown in late March last year that continued through early May. Several studies showed rapid improvements in air quality in that period, particularly in and around Delhi, which is notorious for having some of the most unhealthy air in the world.

Americans who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can safely do many outdoor activities without wearing a mask, according to updated guidance Tuesday from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, health officials said vaccinated people should continue to wear a mask indoors and at crowded outdoor events, such as concerts, parades and sports events. From a report: "There are many situations where fully vaccinated people do not need to wear a mask, particularly if they are outdoors," said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky during a press briefing. "If you are fully vaccinated and want to attend a small outdoor gathering with people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated or dine at an outdoor restaurant with friends form multiple households, the science shows -- if you're vaccinated -- you can do so safely unmasked."

The CDC released a graphic to help people make decisions about when to wear a mask both outdoors and indoors. For fully vaccinated people, the CDC says these outdoor activities are safe without a mask: Walk, run or bike outdoors with members of your household. Attend a small, outdoor gathering with fully vaccinated family and friends. Attend a small, outdoor gathering with fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Dine at an outdoor restaurant with friends from multiple households.

"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office against NASA on Monday, challenging the space agency's award of a nearly $3 billion moon lander contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX earlier this month," reports CNBC. In response, Musk teased on Twitter that Bezos couldn't "get it up (to orbit)." From the report: SpaceX, in a competition against Blue Origin and Leidos' subsidiary Dynetics, was awarded $2.89 billion for NASA's Human Landing System program. The HLS program is focused on building a lunar lander that can carry astronauts to the moon's surface under NASA's Artemis missions. For HLS, SpaceX bid a variation of its Starship rocket, prototypes of which the company has been testing at its facility in Texas. NASA was previously expected to choose two of the three teams to competitively build lunar landers, making the sole selection of SpaceX a surprise given the agency's prior goals for the program to continue to be a competition.

Blue Origin decried the award as "flawed" in a statement to CNBC, saying that NASA "moved the goalposts at the last minute." "In NASA's own words, it has made a 'high risk' selection. Their decision eliminates opportunities for competition, significantly narrows the supply base, and not only delays, but also endangers America's return to the Moon. Because of that, we've filed a protest with the GAO," Blue Origin said. Blue Origin revealed that NASA evaluated the company's HLS proposal to cost $5.99 billion, or roughly twice that of SpaceX. The company argued in its protest filing that NASA's cost for funding both proposals would have been under $9 billion -- or near how much the agency spent for SpaceX and Boeing to develop competing astronaut capsules under the Commercial Crew program.

First, Bezos' company said NASA did not give SpaceX's competitors an opportunity to "meaningfully compete" after "the agency's requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding" for the HLS program. Second and third, Blue Origin said that NASA's acquisition was flawed under the agency's acquisition rules and its evaluation of the company's proposal "unreasonable." Fourth, the company asserted that NASA "improperly and disparately" evaluated SpaceX's proposal. And finally, Blue Origin said that NASA's evaluation of the proposals changed the weight it gave to key criteria, making price "the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations."

Millions of Americans are not getting the second doses of their Covid-19 vaccines, and their ranks are growing. From a report: More than five million people, or nearly 8 percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, have missed their second doses, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more than double the rate among people who got inoculated in the first several weeks of the nationwide vaccine campaign. Even as the country wrestles with the problem of millions of people who are wary about getting vaccinated at all, local health authorities are confronting an emerging challenge of ensuring that those who do get inoculated are doing so fully. The reasons vary for why people are missing their second shots. In interviews, some said they feared the side effects, which can include flulike symptoms. Others said they felt that they were sufficiently protected with a single shot.

Those attitudes were expected, but another hurdle has been surprisingly prevalent. A number of vaccine providers have canceled second-dose appointments because they ran out of supply or didn't have the right brand in stock. Walgreens, one of the biggest vaccine providers, sent some people who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to get their second doses at pharmacies that only had the other vaccine on hand. Several Walgreens customers said in interviews that they scrambled, in some cases with help from pharmacy staff, to find somewhere to get the correct second dose. Others, presumably, simply gave up. From the outset, public health experts worried that it would be difficult to get everyone to return for a second shot three or four weeks after the first dose. It is no surprise that, as vaccines are rolled out more broadly, the numbers of those skipping their second dose have gone up.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The Biden administration is preparing to send up to 60 million AstraZeneca doses to countries in need over the next several months, once a federal safety review is conducted, according to two senior Biden administration officials. The company has produced about 10 million doses of the vaccine for the U.S. but the FDA has not yet authorized their use. The agency is still examining the doses to ensure they meet the necessary quality control standards. An additional 50 million doses are in production, one of the senior officials said.

It is unclear where the U.S. will send the AstraZeneca doses and whether it will send them through COVAX or directly to individual countries. The administration's decision to commit the doses was first reported by the Associated Press. It comes on the heels of the Biden administration's announcement that it will send India raw materials and components to manufacture Covishield, a version of the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by the country's Serum Institute. Those materials were already wrapped up in contracts held by the U.S. But the administration decided over the weekend to divert pending orders of vaccine supplies such as filters to India, and to ship additional drugs, test kits and personal protective equipment. The administration has not yet decided whether to send India AstraZeneca doses directly.

Hmmmmmm writes: China plans to launch its next robot lunar lander in 2024, and it will carry equipment manufactured by scientists from France, Sweden, Italy, and Russia, Hu Hao, the program's chief designer, told the Xinhua News Agency on Saturday. The country aims to position the lander, named Chang'e 6, near the lunar south pole where it will collect samples, per the official Xinhua News Agency.

The Chang'e 6 lander is part of China's ongoing mission to successfully return moon samples back home "for comprehensive analysis and research," Hu said at a conference, Associated Press reported.

For the 2024 mission, The China National Space Administration has invited scientists from around the world to take part in the program, offering to transport solicited payloads into space. So far, four payloads designed by the international scientists have been preliminarily chosen, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

"NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter continues to set records, flying faster and farther on Sunday, April 25, 2021 than in any tests it went through on Earth," reports NASA: The helicopter took off at 1:31 a.m. EDT (4:31 a.m. PDT), or 12:33 p.m. local Mars time, rising 16 feet (5 meters) — the same altitude as its second flight. Then it zipped downrange 164 feet (50 meters), almost half the length of a football field, reaching a top speed of 6.6 feet per second (2 meters per second). [Roughly 4.5 miles an hour.]

After data came back from Mars starting at 10:16 a.m. EDT (7:16 a.m. PDT), Ingenuity's team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California was ecstatic to see the helicopter soaring out of view. They're already digging through a trove of information gathered during this third flight that will inform not just additional Ingenuity flights but possible Mars rotorcraft in the future. "Today's flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing," said Dave Lavery, the project's program executive for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions."
NASA's chief pilot for the Mars helicopter calls this flight a big step "in which Ingenuity will begin to experience freedom in the sky," according to CNN.

From the sky Ingenuity snapped a photo of its own shadow on Mars, and earlier sent back the very first aerial color image — taken 17 feet (5.2-metre) above the surface of Mars by Ingenuity's high-resolution color camera with a 4208-by-3120-pixel sensor.

HealthDay reports: There's no evidence of genetic damage in the children of parents who were exposed to radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Ukraine, researchers say.

Several previous studies have examined the risks across generations of radiation exposure from events such as this, but have yielded inconclusive results. In this study, the investigators analyzed the genomes of 130 children and parents from families where one or both parents were exposed to radiation due to the Chernobyl accident, and where children were conceived afterward and born between 1987 and 2002.

There was no increase in gene changes in reproductive cells of study participants, and rates of new germline mutations were similar to those in the general population, according to a team led by Meredith Yeager of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in Rockville, Md.

Technology/space pundit Robert Cringely writes that SpaceX's winning bid on NASA's Artemis lunar lander contract was helped by its flexibility in how it would be paid — made possibly by SpaceX's cushy financial position.

But he believes that's part of a larger story about SpaceX's "steadily crushing its competitors by building a hyper-efficient space ecosystem where the other guys are just building rockets," arguing that SpaceX has already won the global war of ISPs "at a net cost of ZERO dollars," if not a negative net cost, while realizing a dream of a satellite internet service that for 30 years has eluded investors like Bill Gates:

SpaceX making a profit where one would not normally exist comes thanks to U.S. residents who pay telephone and Internet bills. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been socking-away for a decade about $1.8 billion per year from you and me, saving-up to pay for expansions of rural telephony and broadband. There is now about $16 billion in this federal kitty and the FCC is starting to spend it with telephone and internet service providers, paying them to extend broadband and voice services to remote rural users who are presently underserved or unserved completely. All of this is both perfectly legal and even a good idea. Everybody wins. But circumstances are turning out to indicate that SpaceX is probably winning more than anyone else... So far SpaceX has won auctions for service in parts of 35 states for a total of $885 million... SpaceX just bid for potential customers in places where other companies typically didn't even bother to bid. They took the obvious remote customers and apparently won't be over-charging them or the government, either...

There is no FCC rule saying Comcast couldn't sub-contract...difficult customers to Starlink... Instead of earning $885 million of those FCC subsidies, Starlink is more likely to gain half of the full $9.2 billion — money that can be used for any purpose including financing that Artemis lander. But remember that satellites are a global resource. If SpaceX launches 4000 or 12,000 Starlink satellites to serve the USA, they'll also serve anywhere else the satellites overfly, even North Korea. The same level of service Starlink offers in Omaha will be available in Vietnam or on tankers in the Pacific ocean.

Once Starlink becomes effectively the dominant ISP in America, it will also become the dominant ISP in the world. And all at no cost to SpaceX since the expansion will have been financed from our phone bills.
Cringely cites estimates that 40,000 satellites would be enough to serve every Internet user on Earth, as well as IoT devices and even future as-yet-uninvented network services.

He also asks whether this might ultimately make it harder for China to censor the internet — and whether Apple might attempt a competing satellite-to-phone network, possibly using technology from Samsung.

NASA has tweeted a video showing the arrival of four astronauts from three countries on the International Space Station early Satuday morning.

CNN describes the significance to their arrival — and what the astronauts will do during their six-month stay in space: This mission, dubbed Crew-2, marks the third-ever crewed flight for Elon Musk's company and the first to make use of a previously flown, privately-owned rocket booster and spacecraft... On Saturday morning, the capsule slowly aligned itself and moved in to dock directly with one of the space station's ports.

The crew consists of NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide with Japan's JAXA space agency.

A prime focus of the astronauts' mission will be research with "tissue chips," or "small models of human organs containing multiple cell types that behave much the same as they do in the body" and that NASA hopes will advance the development of drugs and vaccines, according to the space agency. That work will build on years of studying biological and other scientific phenomena aboard the ISS, where the microgravity environment can give scientists a better fundamental understanding of how something works.

Kimbrough, McArthur, Pesquet, and Hoshide joined seven astronauts already on board the station, four of whom arrived on a different SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in November. That brings the space station's current total of personnel to 11 — one of the largest crews the ISS has ever hosted. But that number will quickly drop back down to seven when four of the astronauts who'd been on board hitch a ride home from the station on April 28.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Science Magazine blog, written by Derek Lowe: Excellent news today: we have word of the most effective malaria vaccine yet discovered. A year-long trial in Burkina Faso has shown 77% efficacy, which is by far the record, and which opens the way to potentially relieving a nearly incalculable burden of disease and human suffering.

This new vaccine (R21) uses a circumsporozoite protein (CSP) antigen -- that's a highly conserved protein of the parasite, involved in several functions as the parasite makes the move from mosquito to human and into different human tissues such as the salivary glands. This has been a vaccine ingredient before, such as in the RTS,S vaccine (the first one ever licensed), but R21 has a much higher proportion of CSP assembled into a virus-like particle. It also uses the exact same adjuvant from Novavax (Matrix-M) that they are using in their coronavirus vaccine -- you can't keep a good adjuvant down, and this Chilean-soapbark-based one seems to really kick the immune system up under all circumstances.

The higher-adjuvant cohort showed 77% vaccine efficacy, and the lower-adjuvant one showed 74% with (as you'd expect) overlapping confidence intervals. The first group had significantly higher antibody levels, though, and they're currently doing an additional year of follow-up to see how long the protection lasts and if these doses differentiate themselves. The antibody levels at the one-year mark in both groups were significantly higher than with the RTS,S vaccine, and in particular, antibodies against the repeat section in the middle of the circumsporozite protein seemed to correlate strongly with protection. No safety problems so far. The team is now planning a larger Phase III at five different African site, with varying seasonality and malaria loads.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel on Friday recommended the U.S. resume using the Johnson and Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, saying the benefits outweighed the risk. CNBC reports: The recommendation, which was adopted 10-4 with one abstention, by the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, will pave the way for U.S. regulators to lift their recommended pause on using the J&J shot as early as this weekend. The committee, an outside panel of experts that advises the CDC, decided to postpone a decision on the vaccine last week while officials continued to investigate cases of six women, ages 18 to 48, who developed cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, or CVST, in combination with low blood platelets within about two weeks of receiving the shot.

The Food and Drug Administration and CDC on April 13 asked states to temporarily halt using J&J's vaccine "out of an abundance of caution" following reports of the rare blood clots. Within hours of the warning, more than a dozen states as well as some national pharmacies halted inoculations with J&J's vaccine, some replacing scheduled appointments with either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. Rare blood clots with low platelets are occurring at a rate of 7 per 1 million vaccinations in women ages 18 to 49 for the J&J shot and 0.9 per 1 million in women age 50 and older, according to a slide presented at the CDC panel meeting. CDC has confirmed 15 cases total of rare blood clot conditions, which includes 12 women who developed blood clots in the brain. Three women have died and 7 remained hospitalized, according to the slides. There are no confirmed cases in men, though officials have said they are reviewing potential additional cases.

A CDC model presented at the meeting showed not resuming the use of J&J's vaccine would delay immunizing all adults intending to get the shots by 14 days. J&J executives told the committee the benefits of its vaccine still outweighed its risks, adding that the shots would prevent deaths and hospitalizations. They suggested a new warning label for the vaccine that explains the risk of blood clots.

What do you call a collection of black holes? The question has taken on an urgency among astronomers inspired by the recent news of dozens of black holes buzzing around the center of a nearby cluster of stars. The New York Times: In the last few years, instruments like the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors have recorded space-time vibrations from the collisions of black holes, making it clear beyond doubt that these monstrous concentrations of nothingness not only exist but are ubiquitous. Astronomers anticipate spotting a great number of these Einsteinian creatures when the next generation of gravitational-wave antennas are deployed. What will they call them? There are gaggles of geese, pods of whales and murders of crows. What term would do justice to the special nature of black holes? A mass? A colander? A scream?

Jocelyn Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University, and colleagues are developing an international project called the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, that will be able to detect collisions between all sizes of black holes throughout the universe. She was trying to run a Zoom meeting of the group recently "when one of the members said his daughter was wondering what you call a collective of black holes -- and then the meeting fell apart, with everyone trying to up one another," she said in an email. "Each time I saw a suggestion, I had to stop and giggle like a loon, which egged us all on more." The question was crowdsourced on Twitter recently as part of what NASA has begun calling black hole week (April 12-16). Among the many candidates so far: A crush. A mosh pit. A silence. A speckle. A hive. An enigma. Or a favorite of mine for of its connection to my youth: an Albert Hall of black holes.

SpaceX has another successful human space launch to its credit, after a good takeoff and orbital delivery of its Crew Dragon spacecraft on Friday morning. From a report: The Dragon took off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 5:49 AM EDT (2:49 AM EDT). On board were four astronauts, including NASA's Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as JAXA's Akihiko Hoshide and the ESA's Thomas Pesquet. This was Spacex's second official astronaut delivery mission for NASA, after its Crew-1 operation last year.

SpaceX has characterized the use of re-flown elements as arguably even safer than using new ones, with CEO Elon Musk noting that you wouldn't want to be on the "first flight of an airplane when it comes out of the factory" during a conversation with Xprize's Peter Diamandis on Thursday evening. Now that the Crew Dragon is in its target transfer orbit, it'll be making its way to rendezvous with the Space Station, which will take just under 24 hours. It'll be docking with the station early tomorrow morning, attaching to a docking port that was just cleared earlier this month when SpaceX's other Crew Dragon relocated to another port on the ISS earlier this month.

The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth's axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said. New submitter DickHodgman shares a report: In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions. The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995 and that the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995. Since 1980, the position of the poles has moved about 4 metres in distance.

NASA successfully carried out a second flight on Mars on Thursday of its mini helicopter Ingenuity, a 52-second sortie that saw it climb to a height of 16 feet. Phys.Org reports: "So far, the engineering telemetry we have received and analyzed tell us that the flight met expectations," said Bob Balaram, Ingenuity's chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. "We have two flights of Mars under our belts, which means that there is still a lot to learn during this month of Ingenuity," Balaram said in a statement. The US space agency conducted the first flight of the four pound (1.8 kilogram) rotorcraft on Monday, the first powered flight ever on another planet. That time Ingenuity rose to a height of 10 feet and then touched down after 39.1 seconds.

For the second flight, which lasted 51.9 seconds, Ingenuity climbed to 16 feet, hovered briefly, tilted and then accelerated sideways for seven feet. "The helicopter came to a stop, hovered in place, and made turns to point its camera in different directions," said Havard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot. "Then it headed back to the center of the airfield to land. "It sounds simple, but there are many unknowns regarding how to fly a helicopter on Mars."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The world's nuclear powers have detonated more than 500 nukes in the atmosphere. These explosions were tests, shows of force to rival nations, and proof that countries such as Russia, France, and the U.S. had mastered the science of the bomb. The world's honey has suffered for it. According to a new study published in Nature Communications, honey in the United States is full of fallout lingering from those atmospheric nuclear tests.

For the study, researchers collected honey samples from more than 100 hives and soil samples from 110 locations across the Eastern United States. The scientists found elevated levels of cesium in both the soil and honey samples. "While most of the radiation produced by a nuclear weapon detonation decays within the first few days, one of the longest-lived and more abundant fission products is [cesium] , which has a radioactive half-life of 30.2 years," the study said. Previous research after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster identified elevated levels of cesium in European honey and pollen. The good news is that, according to researchers, most of this honey is probably safe for humans to consume. "While the concentrations of [cesium] we report in honey today are below the...dietary threshold level of concern observed by many countries, and not evidently dangerous for human consumption, the widespread residual radiation...is surprising given that nearly 2 half-lives have elapsed since most of the bomb production of [cesium]," they said. Interestingly, the researchers "also found an inverse relationship between the amount of potassium naturally occurring in soil and the amount of fallout found in honey," the report says. "Southern states contained three times the amount of fallout that the northern states did. Southern soil doesn't contain much potassium while soil in the north is rich with the stuff. While this honey is probably safe for human consumption, it may not be for the bees who generate it."

William Robinson shares a report: The growing list of "firsts" for Perseverance, NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet's thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian day, or sol, since the mission landed Feb. 18. While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact -- isolating and storing oxygen on Mars to help power rockets that could lift astronauts off the planet's surface. Such devices also might one day provide breathable air for astronauts themselves. MOXIE is an exploration technology investigation -- as is the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) weather station -- and is sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for STMD. "MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars. Oxygen isn't just the stuff we breathe. Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home." For rockets or astronauts, oxygen is key, said MOXIE's principal investigator, Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory.

In a follow-up to a story previously reported, Slashdot reader Turkinolith shares a report from Teslarati: In the latest trials and tribulations of a SpaceX Starlink competitor that went bankrupt after spending $3 billion to launch just 74 small internet satellites, it appears that OneWeb knowingly misled both media and US regulators over a claimed 'near-miss' with a Starlink satellite. Back on April 9th, OneWeb went public with claims that SpaceX had mishandled its response to a routine satellite collision avoidance warning from the US military, which monitors the location of satellites and space debris. According to OneWeb government affairs chief Chris McLaughlin, SpaceX disabled an automated system designed to detect and automatically command Starlink satellite collision avoidance maneuvers to let OneWeb move its satellite instead. McLaughlin also stated that "Coordination is the issue -- it is not sufficient to say 'I've got an automated system.'" He also recently criticized the maneuverability of Starlink satellites, claiming that "Starlink's engineers said they couldn't do anything to avoid a collision and switched off the collision avoidance system so OneWeb could maneuver around the Starlink satellite without interference." As it turns out, OneWeb's "near-miss" appears to have been a farce and the company scrambled to promise to retract those statements in an April 20th meeting with the FCC and SpaceX.

In an apparent attempt to capitalize on vague fears of "space debris" and satellite collisions, OneWeb -- or perhaps just McLaughlin -- took it upon itself to consciously misconstrue a routine, professional process of collision-avoidance coordination between OneWeb and SpaceX. McLaughlin ran a gauntlet of media outlets to drag SpaceX through the mud and criticize both the company's technology and response, ultimately claiming that SpaceX's Starlink satellite was incapable of maneuvering out of the way. Instead, according to a precise, evidenced timeline of events presented by SpaceX to the FCC, the coordination was routine, uneventful, and entirely successful. OneWeb itself explicitly asked SpaceX to disable its autonomous collision avoidance software and allow the company to maneuver its own satellite out of the way after SpaceX made it clear that the Starlink spacecraft could also manage the task. The event was neither "urgent" or a "close call," as OneWeb and media outlets later claimed. SpaceX says it has been coordinating similar avoidance maneuvers with OneWeb since March 2020.

Most damningly, SpaceX says that immediately after OneWeb disseminated misleading quotes about the event to the media, "OneWeb met with [FCC] staff and Commissioners [to demand that] unilateral conditions [be] placed on SpaceX's operations." Those conditions could have actually made coordination harder, "demonstrating more of a concern with limiting [OneWeb's] competitors than with a genuine concern for space safety." Crucially, despite lobbying to restrict its competitors, "OneWeb [has] argued forcefully that [it] should be exempt from Commission rules for orbital debris mitigation due to their status as non-U.S. operators." In simple terms, OneWeb is trying to exploit the FCC to suppress its competition while letting it roam free of the exact same regulations.

In what may be the largest interspecies communication effort in history, scientists plan to use machine learning to try to decode what Sperm whales say to one another. National Geographic reports: [Sperm whales "speak" in clicks, which they make in rhythmic series called codas. Shane Gero, a Canadian biologist, had been tracking sperm whales off the Caribbean island nation of Dominica for over thirteen years, using underwater recorders to capture codas from hundreds of whales.] On Monday, a team of scientists announced that they have embarked on a five-year odyssey to build on Gero's work with a cutting-edge research project to try to decipher what sperm whales are saying to one another. Such an attempt would have seemed folly even just a few years ago. But this effort won't rely solely on Gero. The team includes experts in linguistics, robotics, machine learning, and camera engineering. They will lean heavily on advances in artificial intelligence, which can now translate one human language to another without help from a Rosetta Stone, or key. The quest, dubbed Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), is likely the largest interspecies communication effort in history.

Already, these scientists have been at work building specialized video and audio recording devices. They aim to capture millions of whale codas and analyze them. The hope is to expose the underlying architecture of whale chatter: What units make up whale communication? Is there grammar, syntax, or anything analogous to words and sentences? These experts will track how whales behave when making, or hearing, clicks. And using breakthroughs in natural language processing -- the branch of artificial intelligence that helps Alexa and Siri respond to voice commands -- researchers will attempt to interpret this information. Nothing like this has ever been attempted. [T]he goal isn't to get whales to understand humans. It's to understand what sperm whales say to one another as they go about their lives in the wild.