NASA's Ingenuity helicopter completed its fourth and most ambitious test flight across Mars on Friday. CNET reports: NASA JPL tweeted "Success," saying Ingenuity went father and faster than ever before. NASA also shared a nifty image from one of the Perseverance rover's cameras showing the helicopter in flight in the distance. Ingenuity had originally been scheduled for a fourth flight on Thursday, but a known glitch prevented the rotorcraft from switching into flight mode. The chopper remained safe and healthy and ready for the redo.

The plan for the latest test was to fly the helicopter to an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters), collect images of the landscape below, hover and then head back to its takeoff spot. The flight path was set to take it 436 feet (133 meters) downrange and last 117 seconds. It takes time to send the data back from Mars, but NASA is expecting to receive a bounty of photos snapped by the helicopter during the flight. This will help prove the rotorcraft's potential for use as a scout that can assist surface vehicles like rovers as they explore from the ground. NASA said the plucky chopper already "has met or surpassed all of its technical objectives." That gave the helicopter team license to try the more daring fourth flight to push its capabilities in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

Astronomers reconstructed a space rock's path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. From a report: On the morning of June 2, 2018, an asteroid was seen careening toward us at 38,000 miles per hour. It was going to impact Earth, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Astronomers were beside themselves with excitement. Five feet long and weighing about the same as an adult African elephant, this space rock posed no threat. But the early detection of this asteroid, only the second to be spotted in space before hitting land, was a good test of our ability to spot larger, more dangerous asteroids. Moreover, it afforded scientists the chance to study the asteroid before its obliteration, quickly narrow down the impact site and obtain some of the most pristine, least weathered meteorite samples around. Later that day, a fireball almost as bright as the sun illuminated Botswana's darkened sky before exploding 17 miles above ground with the force of 200 tons of TNT. Fragments fell like extraterrestrial buckshot into a national park larger than the Netherlands.

Immediately, Botswanan scientists and guides joined with international meteorite experts to hunt for the asteroid's wreckage. As of November 2020, the team has found 24 individual meteorites. And thanks to the telltale geology of these rocky leftovers, observations of their path to Earth and the memories of a dead NASA spacecraft, scientists were able to unspool the history of this asteroid with breathtaking detail. As reported earlier this month in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Botswana's off-world visitor was once part of Vesta, a gigantic ramshackle asteroid forged at the dawn of the solar system. About 22 million years ago, another asteroid crashed into one of its lonely hills, leaving a modest crater and sending countless shards of Vesta on a space odyssey. One of them was the object that fell over southern Africa in 2018, an explosive end to a lonely journey. 'It is such an amazing thing to be in possession of such a rare specimen with so much history attached to it," said Mohutsiwa Gabadirwe, a geologist and curator at the Botswana Geoscience Institute who is a co-author.

Named 2018 LA, the asteroid was first seen by the Catalina Sky Survey, a trio of telescopes north of Tucson, Ariz. Additional telescopes, like the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, saw it too, allowing scientists to tentatively map out an impact site in southern Africa. Peter Jenniskens, a meteorite expert at the SETI Institute and study author, said that the initial search area was a 1,400-square-mile patch in Botswana. Hoping to shrink it down, he visited local businesses with Oliver Moses of the Okavango Research Institute. They located security camera footage at a hotel and gas stations that had recorded the fireball, allowing them to more precisely pinpoint the fall site: a (still-sizable) spot within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. This was a surreal place to go meteorite hunting. Bat-eared foxes and warthogs strolled past, lions stealthily stalked and slaughtered giraffes while leopards lounged in trees. Wardens from Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks protected the search party in case a fanged predator got too close for comfort. The meteorites also looked a lot like animal poop, meaning the team were frequently bamboozled by coprological impostors. 'It was a totally unusual experience for all of us,' said Mr. Gabadirwe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists from Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have pieced together a timeline of how brain and body size evolved in mammals over the last 150 million years. The findings, published in Science Advances, show that brain size relative to body size -- long considered an indicator of animal intelligence -- has not followed a stable scale over evolutionary time. The international team of 22 scientists, including biologists, evolutionary statisticians, and anthropologists, compared the brain mass of 1400 living and extinct mammals. For the 107 fossils examined -- among them ancient whales and the most ancient Old World monkey skull ever found -- they used endocranial volume data from skulls instead of brain mass data. The brain measurements were then analyzed along with body size to compare the scale of brain size to body size over deep evolutionary time.

According to the study, "big-brained" humans, dolphins, and elephants, for example, attained their proportions in different ways. Elephants increased in body size, but surprisingly, even more in brain size. Dolphins, on the other hand, generally decreased their body size while increasing brain size. Great apes showed a wide variety of body sizes, with a general trend towards increases in brain and body size. In comparison, ancestral hominins, which represent the human line, showed a relative decrease in body size and increase in brain size compared to great apes. The authors say that these complex patterns urge a re-evaluation of the deeply rooted paradigm that comparing brain size to body size for any species provides a measure of the species' intelligence. The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Artem S. Tashkinov shares a report from Ars Technica: Health regulators in Brazil say that doses of Russia's Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine contain a cold-causing virus capable of replicating in human cells. The unintended presence of the virus in the vaccine can "lead to infections in humans and can cause damage and death, especially in people with low immunity and respiratory problems, among other health problems," Brazil's Health Regulatory Agency, Anvisa, said Wednesday in a translated statement. Russia has unequivocally denied the claim, lobbed legal threats at Anvisa, and accused the respected regulators of being politically motivated to reject the vaccine. Still, Brazil's findings raise serious questions about the quality and safety of the vaccine, which is now being used in many countries. The findings also support concerns of Slovak regulators, who said earlier this month that batches of Sputnik V they received did not "have the same characteristics and properties" as the Sputnik V vaccine that was described in a peer-reviewed publication and found to be 91.6 percent effective.

Moreover, quality-control issues weren't the end of Anvisa's concerns. In an overall evaluation of the Russian vaccine, Brazil's regulators found its safety and efficacy were based on insufficient, limited, and sometimes faulty data and analyses. "Flaws... were identified in all stages of clinical studies," Anvisa said. The agency also reported that its inspectors who traveled to Russia to assess the vaccine's production were barred from vaccine facilities at Gamaleya Institute, which developed Sputnik V. Russia touts that "the safety and efficacy of Sputnik V has been confirmed by 61 regulators in countries where the vaccine has been authorized." However, Brazil's regulators said that of the 51 countries it contacted, only 14 were using the vaccine, and most of those countries did not have a tradition of vigilant drug-safety monitoring.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization have dropped to minuscule levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading also stop the flu. Influenza viruses are transmitted in much the same way as SARS-CoV-2, but they are less effective at jumping from host to host. As Scientific American reported last fall, the drop-off in flu numbers was both swift and universal. Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low. "There's just no flu circulating," says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades. The U.S. saw about 600 deaths from influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season. In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago.

Because each year's flu vaccine is based on strains that have been circulating during the past year, it is unclear how next year's vaccine will fare, should the typical patterns of the disease return. [...] Public health experts are grateful for the reprieve. Some are also worried about a lost immune response, however. If influenza subsides for several years, today's toddlers could miss a chance to have an early-age response imprinted on their immune system. That could be good or bad, depending on what strains circulate during the rest of their life. For now, future flu transmission remains a roll of the dice.

schwit1 shares a report from Threatpost: Quick-response (QR) codes used by a COVID-19 contact-tracing program were hijacked by a man who simply slapped up scam QR codes on top to redirect users to an anti-vaccination website, according to local police. He now faces two counts of "obstructing operations carried out relative to COVID-19 under the Emergency Management Act," the South Australia Police said in a statement announcing the arrest. His arrest may just be a drop in the bucket: Reports of other anti-vax campaigners doing the same thing abound. Law enforcement added an additional warning to would-be QR code scammers: "Any person found to be tampering or obstructing with business QR codes will likely face arrest and court penalty of up to $10,000." The police said no personal data was breached, but the incident highlights that truly all an attacker needs is a printer and a pack of Avery labels to do real damage.

In this case, the QR codes were being used by the South Australian government's official CovidSafe app to access a device's camera, scan the code and collect real-time location data to be used for contact tracing in case of a COVID-19 outbreak, ABC News Australia reported. That's a lot of personal data linked to a single QR code just waiting to be stolen. "In this instance, people who scanned the illegitimate QR code were redirected to a website distributing misinformation from the anti-vaxxer community," Bill Harrod, vice president of public sector at Ivanti, told Threatpost. "While this is concerning, the outcome could have been far more perilous."

Today, Blue Origin revealed that it will be selling the first tickets for rides on its space tourism rocket called New Shepard. According to CNBC, the first ticket (or tickets?) will go on sale starting next week, on Wednesday, May 5. From the report: Blue Origin did not reveal how much tickets will cost, only saying that more details will come on May 5 to those who submit their name and email on a form on the company's website. "Sign up to learn how you can buy the very first seat on New Shepard," according to the company's website. The announcement's video features Bezos going out to the capsule of New Shepard after the company's test flight earlier this month. It shows him driving across the Texas desert, the remote location of the New Shepard launch facility -- notably at the wheel of a Rivian R1T electric truck, which is emblazoned with Blue Origin's signature feather.

New Shepard is designed to carrying as many as six people at a time on a ride past the edge of space, with the capsules on previous test flights reaching an altitude of more than 340,000 feet (or more than 100 km). The capsule, which has massive windows to give passengers a view, spends as much as 10 minutes in zero gravity before returning to Earth. The rocket launches vertically, with the booster detaching and returning to land at a concrete pad nearby. The capsule's return is slowed down by a set of parachutes, before softly landing in the desert.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Coming on the heels of the Neuralink announcement earlier this month -- complete with video showing a monkey playing Pong with its mind, thanks to a wireless brain implant -- researchers with the BrainGate Consortium have successfully demonstrated a high-bandwidth wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) in two tetraplegic human subjects. The researchers described their work in a recent paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering. As for the latest Neuralink breakthrough, Ars Science Editor John Timmer wrote last week that most of the individual pieces of Neuralink's feat have been done before -- in some cases, a decade before (BrainGate is among those earlier pioneers). But the company has taken two important steps toward its realization of a commercial BCI: miniaturizing the device and getting it to communicate wirelessly, which is harder than it sounds.

According to [John Simeral of Brown University, a member of the BrainGate consortium and lead author of the new paper], the BrainGate wireless system makes the opposite tradeoff -- higher bandwidth and fidelity -- because it wants all the finer details of the data for its ongoing research. In that regard, it complements the Utrecht and Neuralink systems in the BCI space. The new BrainGate system is based on the so-called Brown Wireless Device (BWD) designed by Arto Nurmikko, and it replaces the cables with a small transmitter that weighs about 1.5 ounces. The transmitter sits atop the user's head and connects wirelessly to an implant electrode array inside the motor cortex.

There were two participants in the clinical trial -- a 35-year-old man and a 65-year-old man -- both of whom were paralyzed by spinal cord injuries. They were able to continuously use the BCI for a full 24 hours, even as they slept, yielding continuous data over that time period. (The medical-grade battery lasts for 36 hours.) "We can learn more about the neural signals that way because we can record over long periods of time," said Simeral. "And we can also begin to learn a little bit about how people actually will use the system, given the freedom to do so." His team was encouraged by the fact that one of its study participants often asked if they could leave the wireless transmitters on a little longer. He has a head tracker he can use as a fallback, but several nights a week, he would choose to use the wireless BrainGate system because he liked it. "Right now, we typically decode or interpret the spiking activity from networks of neurons," said Simeral. "There are other encoding mechanisms that have been studied in the brain that have to do with how the oscillations in the brain are related to these spiking signals. There's information in the different oscillation frequencies that might relate to, for example, sleep state, attention state, other phenomenon that we care about. Without a continuous recording, you've surrendered the ability to learn about any of those. Learning how this all happens in the human brain in the home as people are behaving and having different thoughts requires having a broadband system recording from the human brain."

"The ability to potentially have individuals with disability using these systems at home on demand, I think is a great step forward," said Simeral. "More broadly, going forward, having more players in the field, having more funding, is important. I see nothing but great things from all of these interactions. For our own work, we see things on the horizon that were impossible five years ago, when there was essentially nobody in the corporate world interested in this space. So I think it's a very promising time."

According to a new study from the CDC, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were 94 percent effective in preventing hospitalization for COVID-19 among people age 65 and older. The Hill reports: The study provides new evidence on the benefits of vaccination, and builds on results from the clinical trials by adding real-world evidence from 417 hospitalized adults in 14 states from January to March. "This multisite U.S. evaluation under real-world conditions suggests that vaccination provided protection against COVID-19-associated hospitalization among adults aged [65 and older]," the study states.

The 94 percent efficacy rate was for people who were fully vaccinated, meaning they were at least two weeks past their second dose. For people who were only partially vaccinated, meaning they were more than two weeks past the first dose but less than two weeks past the second dose, effectiveness was 64 percent. Notably, no significant effectiveness was found for people who were less than 14 days past their first dose, highlighting that it takes some time for protection to kick in and that people should not disregard precautions right away. The results show that as vaccinations spread, hospitalizations and deaths are set to decline, the CDC said.

An astronaut who flew on one of the most famous space missions of all time has died. From a report: Michael Collins, 90, was part of the three-member crew on Apollo 11, the first lunar landing mission in 1969. Unlike Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, he never walked on the moon. Collins stayed behind and piloted the command module as it circled above. Because of that, Collins is often called the 'forgotten astronaut'. Collins had been battling cancer. In a statement released by his family, "He spent his final days peacefully, with his family by his side. Mike always faced the challenges of life with grace and humility, and faced this, his final challenge in the same way."

NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said the nation lost a true pioneer, "NASA mourns the loss of this accomplished pilot and astronaut, a friend of all who seek to push the envelope of human potential. Whether his work was behind the scenes or on full view, his legacy will always be as one of the leaders who took America's first steps into the cosmos. And his spirit will go with us as we venture toward farther horizons." When Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon and uttered the famous phrase, "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed," Collins was in orbit, 60 miles above, just as busy, and just as excited, telling the team back in Houston he was listening to communications with his comrades, and it was "fantastic." Aldrin and Armstrong were on the lunar surface just under 22 hours. The world was transfixed. Seeing them bunny-hop along, take pictures and collect lunar samples during their single, short moonwalk. All the while, Collins circled the moon. Looking down at the barren lunar landscape and peering back at the Earth. "The thing I remember most is the view of planet Earth from a great distance," he said later. "Tiny. Very shiny. Blue and white. Bright. Beautiful. Serene and fragile."

Maya Wei-Haas writes via National Geographic: Standing among patches of muddy snow on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland, I bent down to pick up a piece of the planet that should have been hidden miles below my feet. On that chilly February day, I was out with a pair of geologists to see an exposed section of Earth's mantle. While this layer of rock is usually found between the planet's crust and core, a segment peeks out of the scrubby Maryland forest, offering scientists a rare chance to study Earth's innards up close. Even more intriguing, the rock's unusual chemical makeup suggests that this piece of mantle, along with chunks of lower crust scattered around Baltimore, was once part of the seafloor of a now-vanished ocean.

Over the roughly 490 million years since their formation, these hunks of Earth were smashed by shifting tectonic plates and broiled by searing hot fluids rushing through cracks, altering both their composition and sheen. Mantle rock is generally full of sparkly green crystals of the mineral olivine, but the rock in my hand was surprisingly unremarkable to look at: mottled yellow-brown stone occasionally flecked with black. Because of this geologic clobbering, scientists have struggled for more than a century to determine the precise origins of this series of rocks. Now, Guice and his colleagues have applied a fresh eye and state-of-the-art chemical analyses to the set of rocky exposures in Baltimore. Their work shows that the seemingly bland series of stones once lurked underneath the ancient Iapetus Ocean.

More than half a billion years ago, this ocean spanned some 3,000 to 5,000 miles, cutting through what is now the United States' eastern seaboard. Much of the land where the Appalachian mountains now stand was on one side of the ocean, and parts of the modern East Coast were on the other. "It's a huge ocean between them, and we've got a little bit of that ocean smooshed in Baltimore," says Guice, lead author of a recent study describing the find in the journal Geosphere.

kackle writes: I just received an email telling me that "Popular Science" magazine is no more. That is, it is to be delivered to readers from now on only via ones and zeros. I can't say I had a subscription since its beginnings in 1872, but I did learn much from the rag and will sincerely miss it. "Today, we're unveiling our biggest change in my tenure: Popular Science is now a fully digital magazine," writes Editor-in-Chief Corinne Iozzio. In addition to "redesigned" and "reimagined stories" made especially for mobile devices, Iozzio notes that their various apps "include an archive of 15-plus years of back issues..."

"The mediums may change, but even after all these evolutions and iterations, our core belief remains as fixed and focused as it was in 1872: Embracing science and tech means living in the realm of possibility."

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.