Following months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he would resign as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in studies he supervised going back decades. From a report: The review, conducted by an outside panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claim involving Dr. Tessier-Lavigne's work -- that an important 2009 Alzheimer's study was the subject of an investigation that found falsified data and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had covered it up. The panel concluded that the claim, published in February by The Stanford Daily, the campus newspaper, "appear to be mistaken" and that there was no evidence of falsified data, or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had otherwise engaged in fraud.

But the review also stated that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had "multiple problems" and "fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process," especially for a paper of such potential consequences. As a result of the review, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said he would retract a 1999 paper that appeared in the journal Cell and two others that appeared in Science in 2001. Two other papers published in Nature, including the 2009 Alzheimer's study, would also undergo what was described as comprehensive correction. Stanford is known for its leadership in scientific research, and even though the claims involved work published before Dr. Tessier-Lavigne's arrival at the university in 2016, the allegations reflected poorly on the university's integrity.

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Jerusalem Post: A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University has produced 'green' hydrogen -- hydrogen that is produced without polluting carbon dioxide emissions but is still highly efficient, the university said. The TAU team produced hydrogen using a water-based gel to attach the enzyme to the electrode and a biocatalyst. Over 90% of the electrons introduced into the system were deposited in the hydrogen without any secondary processes.

"Hydrogen is very rare in the atmosphere, although it is produced by enzymes in microscopic organisms, which receive the energy from photosynthesis processes," explained Itzhak Grinberg, a doctoral student who helped lead the project. "In the lab, we 'electrify' those enzymes. That is, an electrode provides the energy instead of the Sun." However, the challenge is that the enzyme generally "runs away" from the electric charge when making hydrogen in a lab. The hydrogel holds the enzyme in place. "The material of the gel itself is known, but our innovation is to use it to produce hydrogen," said Prof. Iftach Yacoby of TAU's School of Plant Sciences and Food Security, who oversaw the project. "We soaked the electrode in the gel, which contained an enzyme for producing hydrogen called hydrogenase. The gel holds the enzyme for a long time, even under the electric voltage, and makes it possible to produce hydrogen with great efficiency and at environmental conditions favorable to the enzyme -- for example, in salt water, in contrast to electrolysis, which requires distilled water."

The team also tested the gel with two other enzymes and proved that the hydrogenase could attach different enzymes to the electrode. "Today, 'green' hydrogen is produced primarily through electrolysis, which requires precious and rare metals such as platinum along with water distillation, which makes the green hydrogen up to 15 times more expensive than the polluting 'grey' one," said doctoral student Oren Ben-Zvi, who co-led the experiment. Therefore, the hope is that in the future, TAU's method could be commercially implemented to lower the cost of green hydrogen production and hence enable its use in more industries and agriculture, thereby reducing CO2 emissions and making the planet healthier. Their research was published in the journal Carbon Energy.

An experimental drug can slow progression of Alzheimer's disease in those who start taking it when the disease is still in its early stages. Nature: The drug, a monoclonal antibody called donanemab, does not improve symptoms. But among people who started taking it at the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, 47% had no disease progression on some measures after one year, compared with 29% who took a placebo. The drug does not provide as much benefit to people at later stages or those with a common genetic variation that raises the risk of the disease.

The results are "very encouraging," says neurologist Reisa Sperling at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, particularly because they are similar to those of a similar drug called lecanemab. "It makes me feel we are on the right track." Donanemab's manufacturer Eli Lilly, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, presented the results of the 1,736-person trial today at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC) in Amsterdam, and published them1 in JAMA. The company released partial results in May, but researchers still had questions about the drug's safety and efficacy in certain groups.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The four astronauts assigned to soar beyond the far side of the Moon on NASA's Artemis II mission settled into their seats inside a drab classroom last month at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was one in a series of noteworthy moments for the four-person crew since NASA revealed the names of the astronauts who will be the first people to fly around the Moon since 1972. There was the fanfare of the crew's unveiling to the public in April and an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. There will, of course, be great anticipation as the astronauts close in on their launch date, currently projected for late 2024 or 2025. But many of the crew's days over the next 18 months will be spent in classrooms, on airplanes, or in simulators, with instructors dispensing knowledge they deem crucial for the success of the Artemis II mission. In the simulator, the training team will throw malfunctions and anomalies at the astronauts to test their ability to resolve a failure that -- if it happened in space -- could cut the mission short or, in a worst-case scenario, kill them.

"In order to do those things, what knowledge do we have to impart to them? What skills do we have to teach them?" said Jacki Mahaffey, NASA's leading training officer for the Artemis II mission. "Overall, our goal is we've got a little bit in the classroom, but the more that we can get the crew in front of the displays in the vehicle mockups and really kind of immersed in that environment, the sooner, the better. Commander Reid Wiseman and his crewmates -- pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen -- were named to the Artemis II crew on April 3. Much of their time over the next two-and-a-half months was devoted to making a public relations tour, giving interviews, going to NASA centers around the country, visiting Capitol Hill, and meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Mahaffey said they also got a pre-training pep talk from Charlie Duke, who walked on the Moon on the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972. NASA hasn't trained a crew to fly to the Moon since Apollo 17 at the end of 1972, the last time astronauts walked on the lunar surface.

eGenesis has started transplanting gene-edited pigs' hearts into infant baboons -- and humans may be next. From a report: The baby baboon is wearing a mesh gown and appears to be sitting upright. "This little lady ... looks pretty philosophical, I would say," says Eli Katz, who is showing me the image over a Zoom call. This baboon is the first to receive a heart transplant from a young gene-edited pig as part of a study that should pave the way for similar transplants in human babies, says Katz, chief medical officer at the biotech company eGenesis. The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a technique that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to make around 70 edits to a pig's genome. These edits should allow the organs to be successfully transplanted into people, the team says. As soon as next year, eGenesis hopes to transplant pig hearts into babies with serious heart defects. The goal is to buy them more time to wait for a human heart.

Before that happens, the team at eGenesis will practice on 12 infant baboons. Two such surgeries have been performed so far. Neither animal survived beyond a matter of days. But the company is optimistic, as are others in the field. Many recipients of the first liver transplants didn't survive either -- but thousands of people have since benefited from such transplants, says Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who has worked with rival company United Therapeutics. Babies born with heart conditions represent "a great population to be focusing on," he says, "because so many of them die." Over 100,000 people in the US alone are waiting for an organ transplant. Every day, around 17 of them die. Researchers are exploring multiple options, including the possibility of bioprinting organs or growing new ones inside people's bodies. Transplanting animal organs is another potential alternative to help meet the need.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered yet another astounding discovery," reports CNN, "spying an active supermassive black hole deeper into the universe than has ever been recorded." The black hole lies within CEERS 1019 — an extremely old galaxy likely formed 570 million years after the big bang — making it more than 13 billion years old. And scientists were perplexed to find just how small the celestial object's central black hole measures. "This black hole clocks in at about 9 million solar masses," according to a NASA news release. A solar mass is a unit equivalent to the mass of the sun in our home solar system — which is about 333,000 times larger than the Earth. That's "far less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes," according to NASA. "Those behemoths typically contain more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun — and they are easier to detect because they are much brighter."

The ability to bring such a dim, distant black hole into focus is a key feature of the Webb telescope, which uses highly sensitive instruments to detect otherwise invisible light...

The relative smallness of the black hole at CEER 1019's center is a mystery for scientists. It's not yet clear how such a small black hole formed in the early days of the universe, which was known to produce much larger gravity wells.
NASA's announcement emphasized the power of the James Webb Space Telescope. "Not only could the team untangle which emissions in the spectrum are from the black hole and which are from its host galaxy, they could also pinpoint how much gas the black hole is ingesting and determine its galaxy's star-formation rate."

The survey also recorded evidence of eleven new galaxies — which are still "churning out new stars," according to NASA. A member of the team says these new galaxies, "along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, might change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history."

The University of Southampton has an announcement. Slashdot reader pyroclast shared this report from ScienceDaily: Today an international team of researchers has chosen the location which best represents the beginnings of what could be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene.

A GSSP is an internationally agreed-upon reference point to show the start of a new geological period or epoch in layers of rock that have built up through the ages. It's been proposed by some geologists that we are now living in the Anthropocene — a new geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the world's climate and environment. The concept has significant implications for how we consider our impact on the planet. But there is disagreement in the scientific community about when the Anthropocene began, how it is evidenced and whether human influence has been substantial enough to constitute a new geological age, which usually span millions of years. To help answer these questions, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) set up the Anthropocene Working Group.

"The sediments found at the bottom of Crawford Lake provide an exquisite record of recent environmental change over the last millennia," says Dr Simon Turner, Secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group from UCL. "Seasonal changes in water chemistry and ecology have created annual layers that can be sampled for multiple markers of historical human activity. It is this ability to precisely record and store this information as a geological archive that can be matched to historical global environmental changes which make sites such as Crawford Lake so important...."

Professor Andrew Cundy, Chair in Environmental Radiochemistry at the University of Southampton and member of the Anthropocene Working Group, explains: "The presence of plutonium gives us a stark indicator of when humanity became such a dominant force that it could leave a unique global 'fingerprint' on our planet. In nature, plutonium is only present in trace amounts. But in the early-1950s, when the first hydrogen bomb tests took place, we see an unprecedented increase and then spike in the levels of plutonium in core samples from around the world. We then see a decline in plutonium from the mid-1960s onwards when the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty came into effect."

Other geological indicators of human activity include high levels of ash from coal-fired power stations, high concentrations of heavy metals, such as lead, and the presence of plastic fibres and fragments. These coincide with 'The Great Acceleration' — a dramatic surge across a range of human activity, from transportation to energy use, starting in the mid-20th century and continuing today.
"Evidence from the sites will now be presented to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which will decide next year whether to ratify the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch."

There's an ongoing study (started in 2004) that examines the effects of alcohol (and other common substances) on mood, performance, and behavior. Started by Dr. Andrea King, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, its latest result is a study called "Holding your liquor: Comparison of alcohol-induced psychomotor impairment in drinkers with and without alcohol use disorder." They found that drinkers with alcohol use disorder (or AUD, traditionally known as alcoholism) displayed less impairment on fine motor and cognitive tasks than light or heavy social drinkers after consuming a standard intoxicating dose — equivalent to four to five drinks that produce breathalyzer readings of 0.08-0.09%, i.e., the threshold for drunk driving." Yet when those drinkers with AUD consumed a higher amount akin to their usual drinking habits — equivalent to seven to eight drinks and breathalyzer readings of 0.13% — they showed significant impairment on those same tasks, more than double their impairment at the standard intoxicating dose that did not return to baseline performance three hours after drinking.

"There's a lot of thinking that when experienced drinkers (those with AUD) consume alcohol, they are tolerant to its impairing effects," said Andrea King, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at UChicago and senior author of the study. "We supported that a bit, but with a lot of nuances. When they drank alcohol in our study at a dose similar to their usual drinking pattern, we saw significant impairments on both the fine motor and cognitive tests that was even more impairment than a light drinker gets at the intoxicating dose..."

While they did show less overall alcohol impairment on the motor and cognitive tests, at the 30-minute interval they had similar slowing on the fine motor test as the light drinkers. They also recovered quicker to their baseline levels, supporting the notion that they had more tolerance and can "hold their liquor" better than people who don't drink as much. However, people with AUD do not often stop drinking at four or five drinks and engage in high intensity drinking. Thus, a subset of the drinkers with AUD in the study participated in a separate session where they drank a beverage more consistent with their regular drinking habits, equivalent to about seven or eight drinks. At this higher dose of alcohol, they showed more than double the amount of mental and motor impairment than after they had the standard intoxicating dose. They also never got back to their baseline level of performance, even after three hours. Their level of impairment even exceeded that of the light drinkers who consumed the standard dose, suggesting that the physical effects of the alcohol add up the more someone drinks, experienced or not.

"I was surprised at how much impairment that group had to that larger dose, because while it's 50% more than the first dose, we're seeing more than double the impairment," King said.
More than 140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use in the U.S. each year, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and 30% of traffic fatalities still involve alcohol intoxication. "I'm hoping we can educate people who are experienced high-intensity drinkers who think that they're holding their liquor or that they're tolerant and won't experience accidents or injury from drinking," said Dr. King.

"Their experience with alcohol only goes so far, and excessive drinkers account for most of the burden of alcohol-related accidents and injury in society. This is preventable with education and treatment."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader WankerWeasel for sharing the article.

Wikipedia notes that "Today, the Moon has no active volcanoes even though a significant amount of magma may persist under the lunar surface."

But this week the New York Times reports that "The rocks beneath an ancient volcano on the moon's far side remain surprisingly warm, scientists have revealed using data from orbiting Chinese spacecraft." The findings, which appeared last week in the journal Nature, help explain what happened long ago beneath an odd part of the moon. The study also highlights the scientific potential of data gathered by China's space program, and how researchers in the United States have to circumvent obstacles to use that data...

The Chinese orbiters both had microwave instruments, common on many Earth-orbiting weather satellites but rare on interplanetary spacecraft. The data from Chang'e-1 and Chang'e-2 thus provided a different view of the moon, measuring the flow of heat up to 15 feet below the surface — and proved ideal for investigating the oddity... At Compton-Belkovich, the heat flow was as high as 180 milliwatts per square meter, or about 20 times the average for the highlands of the moon's far side. That measure corresponds to a temperature of minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit about six feet below the surface, or about 90 degrees warmer than elsewhere. "This one stuck out, as it was just glowing hot compared to anywhere else on the moon," said Matthew Siegler, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., and who led the research...

"Now we need the geologists to figure out how you can produce that kind of feature on the moon without water, without plate tectonics," Dr. Siegler said.
Universe Today believes this could help scientists better understand the moon's past. "What makes this finding unique is the source of the hotspot isn't active volcanism, such as molten lava, but from radioactive elements within the now-solidified rock that was once molten lava billions of years ago."

Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Our universe could be twice as old as current estimates, according to a new study that challenges the dominant cosmological model and sheds new light on the so-called "impossible early galaxy problem." "Our newly-devised model stretches the galaxy formation time by a several billion years, making the universe 26.7 billion years old, and not 13.7 as previously estimated," says author Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor of physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa.

For years, astronomers and physicists have calculated the age of our universe by measuring the time elapsed since the Big Bang and by studying the oldest stars based on the redshift of light coming from distant galaxies. In 2021, thanks to new techniques and advances in technology, the age of our universe was thus estimated at 13.797 billion years using the Lambda-CDM concordance model. However, many scientists have been puzzled by the existence of stars like the Methuselah that appear to be older than the estimated age of our universe and by the discovery of early galaxies in an advanced state of evolution made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope. These galaxies, existing a mere 300 million years or so after the Big Bang, appear to have a level of maturity and mass typically associated with billions of years of cosmic evolution. Furthermore, they're surprisingly small in size, adding another layer of mystery to the equation.

Zwicky's tired light theory proposes that the redshift of light from distant galaxies is due to the gradual loss of energy by photons over vast cosmic distances. However, it was seen to conflict with observations. Yet Gupta found that "by allowing this theory to coexist with the expanding universe, it becomes possible to reinterpret the redshift as a hybrid phenomenon, rather than purely due to expansion." In addition to Zwicky's tired light theory, Gupta introduces the idea of evolving "coupling constants," as hypothesized by Paul Dirac. Coupling constants are fundamental physical constants that govern the interactions between particles. According to Dirac, these constants might have varied over time. By allowing them to evolve, the timeframe for the formation of early galaxies observed by the Webb telescope at high redshifts can be extended from a few hundred million years to several billion years. This provides a more feasible explanation for the advanced level of development and mass observed in these ancient galaxies. The research has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Congress will pour billions more dollars into the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its associated architecture, even as NASA science missions remain vulnerable to cuts. TechCrunch reports: Both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees recommend earmarking around $25 billion for NASA for the next fiscal year (FY 24), which is in line with the amount of funding the agency received this year (FY 23). However, both branches of Congress recommend increasing the portion of that funding that would go toward the Artemis program and its transportation cornerstones, SLS and the Orion crew capsule. Those programs would receive $7.9 billion per the House bill or $7.74 billion per the Senate bill, an increase of about $440 million from FY 2023 levels. Meanwhile, science missions are looking at cuts of around that same amount, with the House recommending a budget of $7.38 billion versus $7.79 billion in FY 2023.

Overall, NASA received $25.4 billion in funding for FY '23, with $2.6 billion earmarked toward SLS, $1.34 billion to Orion, and $1.48 to the Human Landing System contract programs. Science programs -- which include the Mars Sample Return mission and Earth science missions -- received $7.8 billion overall.

Researchers have discovered that samples of the Ryugu asteroid gathered in 2019 contain grains of stardust. NPR reports: The dust, which came from distant stars and drifted through space for millions or billions of years, could provide clues about how the solar system formed, according to Ann Nguyen, a cosmochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Stars forged nearly all of the elements of the Universe. Many of the atoms that make up our bodies were themselves made inside of the core of a star somewhere else. That's because the high pressures and temperatures can fuse lightweight atomic nuclei into heavier elements. "The core is extremely hot, and then you go out in the atmosphere, it's cool enough so that gas can form and aggregate into tiny grains," Nguyen says.

Think of these little grains as cosmic dust motes. Sometimes the star that formed these grains would explode, blowing them across the galaxy like dandelion seeds. Other times they would drift away on their own -- traveling on the stellar wind into deep space. "Probably a lot of them do get destroyed," Nguyen says, "but some of them survive and they make it to our region of the universe where our solar system formed." The stardust swirled and clumped and eventually became part of the sun, and the planets, and even us. That idea led the astronomer Carl Sagan to famously remark that "We're made of star-stuff." [...]

Nguyen says the grains look different than the material from our own solar system, because different stars leave different nuclear signatures in the atoms. "It kind of lights up like a Christmas tree light," she says. "Their isotopic signatures are just so different than the material that formed in our solar system or got homogenized in the solar system." Nguyen says that the stardust grains provide some clues about the types of stars that contributed to our solar system. It also shows that exploding stars, or supernovae, probably contributed more of the dust than researchers had previously believed. But above all, she says, these tiny grains are a reminder of the way in which we fit into the vast cosmos. "It just shows us how rich our Universe is," she says. "These materials all played a part in our life here on Earth." The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Constant buzzing and ringing in the ears without any input from the external environment can seriously impair quality of life for the 10 percent of the U.S. population with severe tinnitus. A combination treatment using sound and electrical stimulation may now give hope to sufferers. One cause of tinnitus is probably overactivity of the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) in the brain stem. This is where acoustic signals are processed with other sensory stimuli. So the whistling and ringing in the ears caused by tinnitus is not purely a disease of the brain's auditory system. Up to 80 percent of people with the condition have the so-called somatic form, in which the disturbing noises are generated or altered by head or neck movements. In a recent clinical trial, Susan Shore of the University of Michigan and her colleagues used a new procedure to significantly alleviate the symptoms of tinnitus. "I think the study represents hope for all sufferers," says tinnitus expert Berthold Langguth of the University of Regensburg in Germany, who was not involved with the research.

Shore's team developed a "bisensory" treatment consisting of an in-ear headphone and two externally attached electrodes that delivered a combination of acoustic and electric stimuli to reduce activity in the DCN. The level of stimulation was individualized to each person's tinnitus. The study involved 99 people with somatic tinnitus, each of whom were given a prototype device for home treatment over the course of the study. Participants in the experimental group underwent the procedure for 30 minutes daily for six weeks during the study's first phase. Those in the control group also attached the electrodes near their ear and on their neck, but the electrical impulse was absent -- they received a purely acoustic treatment. Because the electrical impulses were not perceptible, none of the participants knew who belonged to which group.

After a six-week break, which was the second phase of the study, the protocol shifted for phase three: each of the two groups received the opposite treatment for another six weeks. After the first phase, the tinnitus in the experimental group was already reduced significantly, and the treatment provided meaningful clinical benefits. The participants' tinnitus was perceived as only half as loud on average after phase one. Even during the treatment break, the situation continued to improve. The effect lasted up to 36 weeks. "In my estimation, this is a very promising procedure," Langguth says. Shore now wants to move the new method quickly through the approval process and then onto the market.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) disagrees with the World Health Organization's recent assessment that aspartame possibly causes cancer in humans. "Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives in the human food supply. FDA scientists do not have safety concerns when aspartame is used under the approved conditions," an agency spokesperson said. CNBC reports: The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a WHO body, found a possible link between aspartame and a type of liver cancer called hepatocellular carcinoma after reviewing three large human studies in the U.S. and Europe. Dr. Mary Schubauer-Berigan, a senior official at IARC, emphasized that the WHO classification of aspartame as a possible carcinogen is based on limited evidence. Schubauer-Berigan acknowledged during a news conference with journalists Wednesday that the studies could contain flaws that skewed the results. She said the classification should be viewed as a call to conduct more research into whether aspartame can cause cancer in humans. "This shouldn't really be taken as a direct statement that indicates that there is a known cancer hazard from consuming aspartame," Schubauer-Berigan said.

The FDA spokesperson said the classification of aspartame as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" does not mean the sugar substitute is actually linked to cancer. Health Canada and the European Food Safety Authority have also concluded that aspartame is safe at the current permitted levels, the spokesperson said. A separate body of international scientists called the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives said Thursday that the evidence of an association between aspartame and cancer in humans is not convincing. JECFA is an international group made up of scientists from the WHO and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. JECFA makes recommendations about how much of a product people can safely consume. The organization maintained its recommendation that it is safe for a person to consume 40 milligrams of aspartame per kilogram of body weight daily during their lifetime. An adult who weighs 70 kilograms, or 154 pounds, would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks.

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department told the WHO in an August 2022 letter that JECFA is better suited to provide public health recommendations about the safety of aspartame in food. This is because JECFA reviews all available data, both public and private proprietary information, whereas the IARC only looks at public data. "Thus, an IARC review of aspartame, by comparison, would be incomplete and its conclusion could be confusing to consumers," Mara Burr, who heads the HHS office of multilateral relations, wrote in the letter. The FDA has a slightly higher recommendation than JECFA and says it is safe for a person to consume 50 milligrams of aspartame per kilogram of body weight daily during their lifetime. A person who weighs 132 pounds would have to consume 75 packets of aspartame per day to reach this limit.

The US Senate has slashed the budget for NASA's ambitious mission to return soil and rock samples from Mars' surface. From a report: NASA had asked for $949 million to support its Mars Sample Return mission, or MSR, in fiscal year 2024. In its proposed budget for the space agency, released Thursday, the Senate offered just $300 million and threatened to take that amount away. "The Committee has significant concerns about the technical challenges facing MSR and potential further impacts on confirmed missions, even before MSR has completed preliminary design review," stated the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee in its report on the budget.

The committee report, obtained by Ars, noted that Congress has spent $1.739 billion on the Mars Sample Return mission to date but that the public launch date -- currently 2028 -- is expected to slip, and cost overruns threaten other NASA science missions. Further, the report states that the $300 million allocated to the Mars mission will be rescinded if NASA cannot provide Congress with a guarantee that the mission's overall costs will not exceed $5.3 billion. In that case, most of the $300 million would be reallocated to the Artemis program to land humans on the Moon.

Temperatures are sizzling across Europe this week amid an intense and prolonged period of heat. And it's only just begun. From a report: Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Poland are all facing a major heatwave with air temperatures expected to climb to 48C on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia -- potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe. An anticyclone -- a high-pressure area -- named Cerberus (named after the monster from Dante's Inferno) coming from the south will cause temperatures to rise above 40C across much of Italy. This comes after a spring and early summer full of storms and floods.

The highest temperature in European history was broken on 11 August 2021, when a temperature of 48.8C was recorded in Floridia, an Italian town in the Sicilian province of Syracuse. That record may be broken again in the coming days. The animation below uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission's radiometer instrument and shows the land surface temperature across Italy between 9 and 10 July. As the image clearly shows, in some cities the surface of the land exceeded 45C, including Rome, Naples, Taranto and Foggia. Along the east slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, many temperatures were recorded as over 50C.

The color of the ocean has changed significantly over the last 20 years and human-caused climate change is likely responsible, according to a new study. From a report: More than 56% of the world's oceans have changed color to an extent that cannot be explained by natural variability, said a team of researchers, led by scientists from the National Oceanography Center in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, in a statement. Tropical oceans close to the equator in particular have become greener in the past two decades, reflecting changes in their ecosystems, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The color of the ocean is derived from the materials found in its upper layers.

For example, a deep blue sea will have very little life in it, whereas a green color means there are ecosystems there, based on phytoplankton, plant-like microbes which contain chlorophyll. The phytoplankton form the basis of a food web which supports larger organisms such as krill, fish, seabirds and marine mammals. It's not clear exactly how these ecosystems are changing, said study co-author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, senior research scientist in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the Center for Global Change Science. While some areas are likely to have less phytoplankton, others will have more -- and it's likely all parts of the ocean will see changes in the types of phytoplankton present. Ocean ecosystems are finely balanced and any change in the phytoplankton will send ripples across the food chain.

An Indian spacecraft blazed its way to the far side of the moon Friday in a follow-up mission to its failed effort nearly four years ago to land a rover softly on the lunar surface, the country's space agency said. From a report: Chandrayaan-3, the word for "moon craft" in Sanskrit, took off from a launch pad in Sriharikota in southern India with an orbiter, a lander and a rover, in a demonstration of India's emerging space technology. The spacecraft is set to embark on a journey lasting slightly over a month before landing on the moon's surface later in August. Applause and cheers swept through mission control at Satish Dhawan Space Center, where the Indian Space Research Organization's engineers and scientists celebrated as they monitored the launch of the spacecraft. Thousands of Indians cheered outside the mission control center and waved the national flag as they watched the spacecraft rise into the sky.

"Congratulations India. Chandrayaan-3 has started its journey towards the moon," ISRO Director Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said shortly after the launch. A successful landing would make India the fourth country -- after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China -- to achieve the feat. The six-wheeled lander and rover module of Chandrayaan-3 is configured with payloads that would provide data to the scientific community on the properties of lunar soil and rocks, including chemical and elemental compositions, said Dr. Jitendra Singh, junior minister for Science and Technology. India's previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon's little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019. It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander that crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A World Health Organization agency declared on Thursday that aspartame, an artificial sweetener widely used in diet drinks and low-sugar foods, could possibly cause cancer. A second W.H.O. committee, though, held steady on its assessment of a safe level of aspartame consumption. By some calculations using the panel's standard, a person weighing 150 pounds could avoid a risk of cancer but still drink about a dozen cans of diet soda a day. The declaration by a W.H.O. agency of a cancer risk associated with aspartame reflects the first time the prominent international body has weighed in publicly on the effects of the nearly ubiquitous artificial sweetener. Aspartame has been a contentious ingredient for decades.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, or I.A.R.C., said it based its conclusion that aspartame was a possible carcinogen on limited evidence from three observational studies of humans that the agency said linked consumption of artificially sweetened beverages to an increase in cases of liver cancer -- at levels far below a dozen cans a day. It cautioned that the results could potentially be skewed toward the profile of people who drink higher amounts of diet drinks and called for further study. Still, people who consume high amounts of aspartame should consider switching to water or other unsweetened drinks, said Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the W.H.O. Department of Nutrition and Food Safety. But, he added: "Our results do not indicate that occasional consumption should pose a risk to most."

An Ohio plastic surgeon lost her medical license after the state medical board investigated her for livestreaming operations on TikTok and surgical complications reported by patients. From a report: The State Medical Board of Ohio voted at a hearing on Wednesday to permanently revoke Dr. Katharine Roxanne Grawe's medical license and to fine her $4,500 "based on her failure to meet standard of care." At the hearing, doctors on the board said that Dr. Grawe, known online as "Dr. Roxy," had previously been cautioned about protecting patient privacy on social media. They also spoke about her treatment of three unnamed patients who had reported complications from procedures, including one whose surgery Dr. Grawe had broadcast a part of on social media.

Dr. Jonathan B. Feibel, vice president of the medical board, recommended that Dr. Grawe's license be revoked because of the "life altering, reckless treatment" provided to those patients. "These outcomes were not normal complications like those that exist in the routine practice of medicine, but were rather caused by recklessness and disregard for the rules governing the practice of medicine in Ohio," he said.