"Given that too many schools don't teach calculus, chemistry and physics, CalTech is allowing potential undergraduates to demonstrate their ability in these fields by using Khan Academy," writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423. Los Angeles Times reports: One of Caltech's alternative paths is taking Khan Academy's free, online classes and scoring 90% or higher on a certification test. Sal Khan, academy founder, said Caltech's action is a "huge deal" for equitable access to college. While Caltech is small -- only 2,400 students, about 40% of them undergraduates -- Khan said he hoped its prestigious reputation would encourage other institutions to examine their admission barriers and find creative solutions to ease them. The Pasadena-based institute, with a 3% admission rate last year, boasts 46 Nobel laureates and cutting-edge research in such fields as earthquake engineering, behavioral genetics, geochemistry, quantum information and aerospace. "You have one of the most academically rigorous schools on the planet that has arguably one of the highest bars for admission, saying that an alternative pathway that is free and accessible to anyone is now a means to meeting their requirements," said Khan, whose nonprofit offers free courses, test prep and tutoring to more than 152 million users. [...]

The impetus for the policy change began in February, when Pallie, the admissions director, and two Caltech colleagues attended a workshop on equity hosted by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling. They were particularly struck by one speaker, Melodie Baker of Just Equations, a nonprofit that seeks to widen math opportunities. As Baker pointed out the lack of access to calculus for many students, Pallie and her team began to question Caltech's admission requirement for the course, along with physics and chemistry. Pallie and Jared Leadbetter, a professor of environmental microbiology who heads the faculty admissions committee, began to look into potential course alternatives. Pallie connected with Khan's team, which started a second nonprofit, Schoolhouse.world, during the pandemic in 2020 to offer free tutoring. Peer tutors on the platform certify they are qualified for their jobs by scoring at least 90% on the course exam and videotaping themselves explaining how they solved each problem on it. The video helps ensure that the students actually took the exam themselves and understand the material. That video feature gave Caltech assurances about the integrity of the alternative path.

Under the new process, students would take a calculus, physics or chemistry class offered by Khan Academy and use the Schoolhouse platform to certify their mastery of the content as tutors do with a 90% score or better on the exam and a videotaped explanation of their reasoning. Proof of certification is required within one week of the application deadline, which is in November for early action and January for regular decisions. Pallie and Leadbetter also wanted to test whether the Khan Academy courses are sufficiently rigorous. Several Caltech undergraduates took the courses to assess whether all concepts were covered in enough breadth and depth to pass the campus placement exams in those subjects. Miranda, a rising Caltech junior studying mechanical engineering, took the calculus course and gave it a thumbs-up, although she added that students would probably want to use additional textbooks and other study materials to deepen their preparation for Caltech.

Hot on the heels of its lunar landing success, India is readying to blast a probe even deeper into space to study the sun. From a report: The country's first solar observation mission, named Aditya-L1, is set to be launched from India's main spaceport on Sriharikota, an island off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, at 11:50 a.m. local time on Saturday. The spacecraft is scheduled to spend 125 days traveling 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) to its destination, a point in space where objects stay put and consume less fuel.

While arriving there would be an impressive achievement for ISRO, the Indian space agency, Aditya-L1 would have gone just a fraction of the 150 million km between Earth and the sun. For ISRO, success would be another major feat after India became the first country to land a spacecraft close to the lunar south pole in August. India has more ambitious projects in the works. A human spaceflight program aims to launch astronauts into orbit for the first time possibly by 2025, ISRO Chairman S Somanath said in an interview with news agency Asian News International. ISRO and NASA plan to cooperate on sending astronauts to the International Space Station and India is in discussions with Japan to work together on a mission.

The centenary of the Great Kanto earthquake brings angst, and lessons for the world. From a report: Every year on September 1st, Japan's ministers trek by foot to the prime minister's office to take part in a crisis simulation. Across the country, local officials and schoolchildren drill for disasters. The date marks the Great Kanto earthquake, a 7.9-magnitude tremor that struck near the capital back in 1923. The ensuing disaster killed at least 105,000 people, including around 70,000 in Tokyo itself, destroyed 370,000 homes and changed the course of Japanese history.

This year's centenary of the disaster has occasioned much commemoration -- and angst. What will happen when the next Big One hits? Seismologists cannot predict earthquakes, but their statistical models, which are based on past patterns, can estimate the likelihood of one. The city government's experts reckon there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7 or higher quake hitting the capital within the next 30 years. Far fewer people will probably die than during the disaster in 1923, thanks to better technology and planning: the worst case foresees some 6,000 deaths in the city. But millions of lives will be upended.

Another, similarly likely scenario could be much worse. A Nankai Trough earthquake, envisaged south of Kansai, Japan's industrial heartland, could trigger a tsunami; as many as 323,000 might be killed, according to an official estimate. Japan's approach to the risks of such catastrophes offers insights for a warming world facing more frequent disasters. Quakes of this size could "challenge the survival of Japan as a state" and send economic shock waves around the globe, says Fukuwa Nobuo of Nagoya University. After the next Tokyo quake, recovering basic city functions could take weeks and rebuilding the capital could take years; direct damage alone could run to as much as $75bn. One piece of research estimates that gdp would dip by 11% following a Nankai earthquake.

Researchers in China have found evidence suggesting that 930,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern humans suffered a massive population crash. They point to a drastic change to the climate that occurred around that time as the cause. The New York Times: Our ancestors remained at low numbers -- fewer than 1,280 breeding individuals -- during a period known as a bottleneck. It lasted for over 100,000 years before the population rebounded. "About 98.7 percent of human ancestors were lost at the beginning of the bottleneck, thus threatening our ancestors with extinction," the scientists wrote. Their study was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

If the research holds up, it will have provocative implications. It raises the possibility that a climate-driven bottleneck helped split early humans into two evolutionary lineages -- one that eventually gave rise to Neanderthals, the other to modern humans. But outside experts said they were skeptical of the novel statistical methods that the researchers used for the study. "It is a bit like inferring the size of a stone that falls into the middle of the large lake from only the ripples that arrive at the shore some minutes later," said Stephan Schiffels, a population geneticist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recommended easing restrictions on marijuana, a department spokesperson said on Wednesday, following a review request from the Biden Administration last year. Reuters reports: The scheduling recommendation for marijuana was provided to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) on Tuesday as part of President Biden's directive to HHS, the spokesperson said. "As part of this process, HHS conducted a scientific and medical evaluation for consideration by DEA. DEA has the final authority to schedule or reschedule a drug under the Controlled Substances Act. DEA will now initiate its review," a DEA spokesperson said.

Marijuana is currently classified as a schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, meaning it has a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use, along with drugs like heroin and LSD. HHS is recommending reclassifying marijuana to say it has a moderate to low potential for dependence and a lower abuse potential, which would put it in a class with ketamine and testosterone. "If marijuana classification were to ease at the federal level, that could allow major stock exchanges to list businesses that are in the cannabis trade, and potentially allow foreign companies to begin selling their products in the United States," notes Reuters.

While marijuana remains illegal on the federal level, nearly 40 U.S. states have legalized it in some form. According to a survey last year from the Pew Research Center, "an overwhelming share of U.S. adults (88%) say either that marijuana should be legal for medical and recreational use by adults (59%) or that it should be legal for medical use only (30%)."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NASA officials sounded an alarm Tuesday about the agency's Deep Space Network, a collection of antennas in California, Spain, and Australia used to maintain contact with missions scattered across the Solar System. Everything from NASA's Artemis missions to the Moon to the Voyager probes in interstellar space rely on the Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive commands and transmit data back to Earth. Suzanne Dodd, who oversees the DSN in her position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to highlight the network's importance by showing gorgeous images from missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Perseverance rover on Mars. "All these images, and all these great visuals for the public, and all the science for the scientists come down through the Deep Space Network," Dodd said Tuesday in a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's Science Committee.

But Dodd doesn't take a starry-eyed view of the challenges operating the Deep Space Network. She said there are currently around 40 missions that rely on the DSN's antennas to stay in communication with controllers and scientists back on Earth. Another 40-plus missions will join the roster over the next decade or so, and many of the 40 missions currently using time on the network will likely still be operating over that time. "We have more missions coming than we currently are flying," Dodd said. "We're nearly doubling the load on the DSN. A lot of those are either lunar exploration or Artemis missions, and a lot of Artemis precursor missions with commercial vendors. So the load is increasing, and it's very stressful to us." "It's oversubscribed, yet it's vital to anything the agency wants to do," she said.

Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer who is now an executive at Google, sits on the committee Dodd met with Tuesday. After hearing from Dodd and other NASA managers, Cerf said: "The deep space communications system is in deep -- well, let me use a better word, deficit. There's a four-letter word that occurs to me, too." Because astronauts are involved, the Artemis missions will come with unique requirements on the DSN. "We're not going to have bits of data. We're going to have gigabits of data," said Philip Baldwin, acting director of the network services division at JPL. "I don't want 1080p for video resolution. I want 8K video." Each of the three stations on the Deep Space Network has a 70-meter (230-foot) dish antenna, the largest antennas in the world for deep space communications. Each location also has at least three 112-foot (34-meter) antennas. The oldest of the large antennas in California entered service in 1966, then was enlarged to its 70-meter diameter in 1988. "We have reached a really critical point on the DSN's aging infrastructure," said Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of NASA's astrophysics division.

Some of the world's leading astronomical observatories have reported cyberattacks that have resulted in temporary shutdowns. Space.com reports: The National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab, reported that a cybersecurity incident that occurred on Aug. 1 has prompted the lab to temporarily halt operations at its Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii and Gemini South Telescope in Chile. Other, smaller telescopes on Cerro Tololo in Chile were also affected. "Our staff are working with cybersecurity experts to get all the impacted telescopes and our website back online as soon as possible and are encouraged by the progress made thus far," NOIRLab wrote in a statement on its website on Aug. 24.

It's unclear exactly what the nature of the cyberattacks were or from where they originated. NOIRLab points out that because the investigation is still ongoing, the organization will be cautious about what information it shares about the intrusions. The cyberattacks on NOIRLab's facilities occurred just days before the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) issued a bulletin (PDF) advising American space companies and research organizations about the threat of cyberattacks and espionage.

Foreign spies and hackers "recognize the importance of the commercial space industry to the U.S. economy and national security, including the growing dependence of critical infrastructure on space-based assets," the bulletin stated. "They see US space-related innovation and assets as potential threats as well as valuable opportunities to acquire vital technologies and expertise."

The word "funga" should be used alongside flora and fauna when discussing conservation issues to reflect the importance of fungi to ecosystem health, a UN body has said. From a report: The secretariat of the UN convention on biological diversity (UNCBD) said it was time that fungi were "recognised and protected on an equal footing with animals and plants in legal conservation frameworks."

"Whenever referring to the macroscopic diversity of life on Earth, we should use 'flora, fauna and funga,' and 'animal, plants and fungi,'" it said in an Instagram post. Mycologists, mostly from Latin America, established the term "funga" five years ago. It refers to the levels of diversity of fungi in any given place, and is analogous to "flora and fauna," which refer to plants and animals. Unlike flora and fauna, it is not a Latin term but was chosen because it is morphologically similar. "Just like mycelium, mycologically inclusive language will spread unseen but profound [sic], permeating public consciousness (and policy) to acknowledge fungi's vital role in the grand web of life on and in Earth," it said.

SonicSpike shares a report from NASA: In 2023, NASA is sending a technology demonstration known as the Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) to the space station. Together, ILLUMA-T and the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which launched in December 2021, will complete NASA's first two-way, end-to-end laser relay system. With ILLUMA-T, NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program office will demonstrate the power of laser communications from the space station. Using invisible infrared light, laser communications systems send and receive information at higher data rates. With higher data rates, missions can send more images and videos back to Earth in a single transmission. Once installed on the space station, ILLUMA-T will showcase the benefits higher data rates could have for missions in low Earth orbit.

"Laser communications offer missions more flexibility and an expedited way to get data back from space," said Badri Younes, former deputy associate administrator for NASA's SCaN program. "We are integrating this technology on demonstrations near Earth, at the Moon, and in deep space." In addition to higher data rates, laser systems are lighter and use less power -- a key benefit when designing spacecraft. ILLUMA-T is approximately the size of a standard refrigerator and will be secured to an external module on the space station to conduct its demonstration with LCRD. Currently, LCRD is showcasing the benefits of a laser relay in geosynchronous orbit -- 22,000 miles from Earth -- by beaming data between two ground stations and conducting experiments to further refine NASA's laser capabilities. "Once ILLUMA-T is on the space station, the terminal will send high-resolution data, including pictures and videos to LCRD at a rate of 1.2 gigabits-per-second," said Matt Magsamen, deputy project manager for ILLUMA-T. "Then, the data will be sent from LCRD to ground stations in Hawaii and California. This demonstration will show how laser communications can benefit missions in low Earth orbit."

ILLUMA-T is launching as a payload on SpaceX's 29th Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA. In the first two weeks after its launch, ILLUMA-T will be removed from the Dragon spacecraft's trunk for installation on the station's Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility (JEM-EF), also known as "Kibo" -- meaning "hope" in Japanese. NASA's Laser Communications Roadmap. Following the payload's installation, the ILLUMA-T team will perform preliminary testing and in-orbit checkouts. Once completed, the team will make a pass for the payload's first light -- a critical milestone where the mission transmits its first beam of laser light through its optical telescope to LCRD. Once first light is achieved, data transmission and laser communications experiments will begin and continue throughout the duration of the planned mission.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year -- which was quite the surprise to the woman's team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms. A close study of the extracted worm made clear why the diagnosis was so hard to pin down: the roundworm was one known to infect snakes -- specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived -- as well as the pythons' mammalian prey. The woman is thought to be the first reported human to ever have an infection with this snake-adapted worm, and it is the first time the worm has been found burrowing through a mammalian brain. [...]

Subsequent examination determined the roundworm was Ophidascaris robertsi based on its red color and morphological features. Genetic testing confirmed the identification. The woman went on ivermectin again and another anti-parasitic drug, albendazole. Months later, her lung and liver lesions improved, and her neuropsychiatric symptoms persisted but were improved. The doctors believe the woman became infected after foraging for warrigal greens (aka New Zealand spinach) around a lake near her home that was inhabited by carpet pythons. Usually, O. robertsi adults inhabit the snakes' esophagus and stomach and release their eggs in the snakes' feces. From there, the eggs are picked up by small mammals that the snakes feed upon. The larvae develop and establish in the small mammals, growing quite long despite the small size of the animals, and the worm's life cycle is complete when the snake eats the infected prey.

Doctors hypothesize the woman picked up the eggs meant for small mammals as she foraged, ingesting them either by not fully washing or cooking the greens or by not properly washing her hands or kitchen equipment. In retrospect, the progression of her symptoms suggests an initial foodborne infection, followed by worm larva migrating from her gastrointestinal tract to multiple organs. The prednisolone, an immunosuppressive drug, may have inadvertently helped the worm migrate and get into the central nervous system. Kennedy, a co-author of the report on the woman's case, stressed the importance of washing any foods foraged or taken from a garden. She also emphasized proper kitchen safety and hand washing.

Cigarette smoking and other uses of tobacco shave an average of 2.2 years off lifespans globally. But merely breathing -- if the air is polluted -- is more damaging to human health. From a report: That is the conclusion of a report published Tuesday by the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute, which identified air pollution as the world's top threat to public health, responsible for reducing average life expectancy by 2.3 years worldwide. China, once the poster child for smog-filled skies, has been a surprise success story. Between 2013 and 2021, the world's second-largest economy improved overall air quality by more than 40% while the average lifespan of residents increased by more than two years, according to the report.

By contrast, four countries in South Asia -- India, Bangladesh Nepal and Pakistan -- accounted for more than half of the total years of life lost globally due to pollution in the atmosphere over the same eight years. India alone was responsible for nearly 60% of the growth in air pollution across the globe during that time. If India were to meet World Health Organization guidelines for particulate pollution, the life expectancy for residents of capital city New Delhi would increase by 12 years. An increase in wildfires in places such as California and Canada has renewed attention on the dangers of polluted air. Around 350 cities globally suffer the same level of dangerous haze that enveloped New York City in June at least once a year, according to calculations from environmental think tank Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which aggregates data from dozens of official government sources.

Scientists have genetically engineered a hummingbird bobtail squid to remove its pigment, creating an almost completely transparent animal with only its three hearts and brain showing when light hits it at the right angle. According to NPR, "The see-through squid are offering scientists a new way to study the biology of a creature that is intact and moving freely." From the report: The see-through version is made possible by a gene editing technology called CRISPR, which became popular nearly a decade ago. [Scientists Caroline Albertin and Joshua Rosenthal at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.] thought they might be able to use CRISPR to create a special squid for research. They focused on the hummingbird bobtail squid because it is small, a prodigious breeder, and thrives in lab aquariums, including one at the lab in Woods Hole. Albertin and Rosenthal wanted to use CRISPR to create a bobtail squid without any pigment, an albino. And they knew that in other squid, pigment depends on the presence of a gene called TDO.

"So we tried to knock out TDO," Albertin says, "and nothing happened." It turned out that bobtail squid have a second gene that also affects pigment. "When we targeted that gene, lo and behold we were able to get albinos," Albertin says. Because even unaltered squid have clear blood, thin skin, and no bones, the albinos are all but transparent unless light hits them at just the right angle. Early on, Albertin and Rosenthal realized these animals would be of interest to brain scientists. So they contacted Ivan Soltesz at Stanford and Cristopher Niell at the University of Oregon. "We said, 'Hey, you guys, we have this incredible animal, want to look at its brain," Rosenthal says. "They jumped on it."

Soltesz and Niell inserted a fluorescent dye into an area of the brain that processes visual information. The dye glows when it's near brain cells that are active. Then the scientists projected images onto a screen in front of the squid. And the brain areas involved in vision began to glow, something that would have been impossible to see in a squid with pigment. Because it suggests that her see-through squid will help scientists understand not only cephalopods, but all living creatures. The findings have been published in the journal Current Biology.

Physicists have observed neutrinos originating "from the sun, cosmic rays, supernovae and other cosmic objects, as well as particle accelerators and nuclear reactors," writes Phys.org. But one remaining goal was observing neutrinos inside "collider" particle accelerators (which direct two particle beams).

It's now been accomplished using neutrino detectors located at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland by two distinct research collaborations:

- FASER (Forward Search Experiment)
- SND (Scattering and Neutrino Detector)@LHC

Phys.org argues the two achievements "could open important new avenues for experimental particle physics research. " The results of their two studies were recently published in Physical Review Letters. "Neutrinos are produced very abundantly in proton colliders such as the LHC," Cristovao Vilela, part of the SND@LHC Collaboration, told Phys.org. "However, up to now, these neutrinos had never been directly observed. The very weak interaction of neutrinos with other particles makes their detection very challenging and because of this they are the least well studied particles in the Standard Model of particle physics...."

"Particle colliders have existed for over 50 years, and have detected every known particle except for neutrinos," Jonathan Lee Feng, co-spokesperson of the FASER Collaboration, told Phys.org. "At the same time, every time neutrinos have been discovered from a new source, whether it is a nuclear reactor, the sun, the Earth, or supernovae, we have learned something extremely important about the universe. As part of our recent work, we set out to detect neutrinos produced at a particle collider for the first time...

"Because these neutrinos have high fluxes and high energies, which makes them far more likely to interact, we were able to detect 153 of them with a very small, inexpensive detector that was built in a very short time," Feng explained. "Previously, particle physics was thought to be divided into two parts: high energy experiments, which were required to study heavy particles, like top quarks and Higgs bosons, and high intensity experiments, which were required to study neutrinos. This work has shown that high energy experiments can also study neutrinos, and so has brought together the high-energy and high-intensity frontiers."

The neutrinos detected by Feng and the rest of the FASER collaboration have the highest energy ever recorded in a laboratory environment.... Cristovao Vilela, part of the SND@LHC Collaboration, said "The observation of collider neutrinos opens the door to novel measurements which will help us understand some of the more fundamental puzzles of the Standard Model of particle physics, such as why there are three generations of matter particles (fermions) that seem to be exact copies of each other in all aspects except for their mass. Furthermore, our detector is placed in a location which is a blind spot for the larger LHC experiments. Because of this, our measurements will also contribute to a better understanding of the structure of colliding protons."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: One thing most cats seem to have in common is a deep love of tuna. That's an odd predilection for a creature that evolved in the desert, with nary a fish in sight. Now scientists think they've nailed down the biology behind this curious craving.

In a series of experiments researchers showed for the first time that cats contain the necessary molecular machinery on their taste buds to detect umami--the savory, deep flavor of various meats, and one of the five basic tastes in addition to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. In taste tests, the cats gravitated towards bowls of water laced with compounds present at high levels in umami foods. Indeed, umami appears to be the primary flavor that attracts cats--no surprise for an obligate carnivore.

But the team found something more remarkable: The felines showed a particular preference for bowls containing histidine and inosine monophosphate — compounds found at particularly high levels in tuna. "It was one of the most preferred combinations," says one of the scientists. "It really seems to hit that umami sweet spot."

The work doesn't just explain why cats have a particular hankering for tuna. It could help manufacturers develop more palatable meals for our finicky friends and even medications that they won't spit across the room.

Exactly why cats evolved a taste for tuna--or any kind of fish--remains a mystery. It may have been a taste they developed over time. As far back as 1500 B.C.E., cats are depicted eating fish in the art of Ancient Egypt. And by the Middle Ages, felines in some Middle Eastern ports were consuming large quantities of fish — including tuna — likely because they were feasting on the scraps left by fishers. In both cases, cats that evolved a taste for fish — and perhaps tuna in particular — may have had an advantage over their comrades who stuck solely to rodents and birds.

For SpaceX's 11th crewed mission — its eighth flight for NASA — "A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying four astronauts will arrive at the International Space Station early Sunday," reports Space.com, "and you can watch it all live online in a free livestream." The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance is scheduled to reach the International Space Station at 8:39 a.m. EDT (1239 GMT), where it will dock itself to a space-facing port on the outpost's U.S.-built Harmony module.

The docking will mark the end of a nearly 30-hour journey for the capsule's four-person crew, which launched in the wee hours of Saturday from NASA's Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida... "SpaceX, thanks for the ride, it was awesome," Crew-7 commander Jasmin Moghbeli of NASA said after the crew reached orbit. "Go Crew-7, awesome ride." SpaceX's Crew-7 mission for NASA is ferrying Moghbeli to the ISS with a truly international crew: pilot Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency; and mission specialists Konstantin Borisov of Russia's Roscosmos agency and Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The quartet is the first all-international crew, with members from four different agencies and countries, to fly on the same Dragon capsule...

The Crew-7 astronauts are beginning a six-month expedition to the space station and will relieve the four astronauts of NASA's Crew-6 mission, who are due to return shortly after Moghbeli and her crew arrive.
SpaceX has created a "follow Dragon" web page with graphics tracking the capsule's progress to the Space Station...

Kitty Oppenheimer: Can you explain quantum mechanics to me?

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Well, this glass, this drink, this counter top, uhh.. our bodies, all of it. It's mostly empty space. Groupings of tiny energy waves bound together.

Kitty Oppenheimer: By what?

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Forces of attraction strong enough to convince us [that] matter is solid, to stop my body passing through yours.

— IMDB quote from Oppenheimer


Flash forward to 2023, where Mario Barbatti is a theoretical chemist and physicist researching light and molecule interactions. He's also a professor of chemistry at Aix Marseille University in France. Writing this week for Aeon, Barbatti argues that "there are no empty spaces within the atom.

"The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science." It is unclear who created this myth, but it is sure that Carl Sagan, in his classic TV series Cosmos (1980), was crucial in popularising it. After wondering how small the nuclei are compared with the atom, Sagan concluded that "[M]ost of the mass of an atom is in its nucleus; the electrons are by comparison just clouds of moving fluff. Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing." I still remember how deeply these words spoke to me when I heard them as a kid in the early 1980s. Today, as a professional theoretical chemist, I know that Sagan's statements failed to recognise some fundamental features of atoms and molecules...

Misconceptions feeding the idea of the empty atom can be dismantled by carefully interpreting quantum theory, which describes the physics of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum theory, the building blocks of matter — like electrons, nuclei and the molecules they form — can be portrayed either as waves or particles. Leave them to evolve by themselves without human interference, and they act like delocalised waves in the shape of continuous clouds. On the other hand, when we attempt to observe these systems, they appear to be localised particles, something like bullets in the classical realm. But accepting the quantum predictions that nuclei and electrons fill space as continuous clouds has a daring conceptual price: it implies that these particles do not vibrate, spin or orbit. They inhabit a motionless microcosmos where time only occasionally plays a role...

A molecule is a static object without any internal motion. The quantum clouds of all nuclei and electrons remain absolutely still for a molecule with a well-defined energy. Time is irrelevant... Time, however, comes into play when a molecule collides with another one, triggering a chemical reaction. Then, a storm strikes. The quantum steadiness bursts when the sections of the electronic cloud pour from one molecule upon another. The clouds mix, reshape, merge, and split. The nuclear clouds rearrange to accommodate themselves within the new electronic configuration, sometimes even migrating between molecules. For a fraction of a picosecond (10-12 seconds or a billionth of a millisecond), the tempest rages and reshapes the molecular landscape until stillness is restored in the newly formed compounds.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a new perspective on sunspots (those dark, cool areas where the sun's magnetic field is particularly strong, and which often launch solar flares).

"NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has given us a sneak peek of an intriguing patch of the sun that's not yet visible from Earth," reports Space.com: Perseverance photographs the sun daily with its Mastcam-Z camera system to gauge the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere. Such an effort captured a big sunspot moving across the solar disk late last week and over the weekend, as SpaceWeather.com reported. "Because Mars is orbiting over the far side of the sun, Perseverance can see approaching sunspots more than a week before we do," SpaceWeather.com wrote in a post highlighting the sunspot photos. "Consider this your one-week warning: A big sunspot is coming...."

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that hit Earth can affect satellite navigation and disrupt power grids, among other things, so tracking the movement of sunspots is more than just of academic interest.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Most research shows that over-the-counter fish oil supplements don't offer cardiovascular benefits, but that hasn't stopped marketers from touting them for heart health, a new study shows.

The sale of fish oil supplements is a multibillion-dollar industry, and many people take fish oil capsules daily, believing the omega-3 fatty acids they contain are good for their overall health, particularly for their heart. While it's true people who eat seafood regularly are less likely to die of heart disease, studies have not shown that taking fish oil as a supplement offers the same benefit. Even so, fish oil marketers continue to make health claims that imply a wide range of benefits, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA Cardiology.

The researchers analyzed labels from more than 2,000 fish oil supplements that made health claims. They found more than 80 percent used what is known as a "structure and function claim," which is a general description that describes the role of omega-3 fatty acids in the body — such as "promotes heart health" or "supports heart, mind and mood." Cardiovascular health claims, which accounted for 62 percent, were most common.

Fish oil contains two omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA, found naturally in fatty fish such as salmon. Higher levels of these omega-3s have been associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, but the observational findings are based on omega-3 levels in the diet, not from supplement use, some experts say. Two recent large clinical trials showed that over-the-counter fish oil supplements do not improve cardiovascular outcomes. But the vagueness of the wording used by fish oil marketers could lead to misinformation about the role of the dietary supplement, said Ann Marie Navar, associate professor of cardiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who was senior author of the study.
Navar says in the article "It is true that omega-3 fatty acids are present in the brain and are important for all sorts of brain functions.

"What has not been consistently shown with high-quality trials is that taking more of it in the form of a fish oil supplement leads to improved performance or prevention of disease."

A European study reveals that around 90% of eco-friendly paper straws contain "forever chemicals" called PFAS, which do not easily break down and can accumulate in the body, potentially causing health issues. New Atlas reports: "Forever chemicals" is the colloquial name given to a class of more than 12,000 chemicals, more formally known as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), that barely break down in the environment or in our bodies. Hence, the "forever" part. [...] The researchers tested 39 different brands of straws made from paper, glass, bamboo, stainless steel, and plastic, and analyzed them for 29 different PFAS compounds. The majority of brands tested (69%) contained PFAS, with 18 different PFAS detected in total. Paper straws were most likely to contain PFAS, with the chemicals detected in 90% of the brands tested, albeit in highly variable concentrations. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a compound linked to high cholesterol, a reduced immune response, thyroid disease and increased kidney and testicular cancer, was most frequently detected. PFOA has been banned globally since 2020. Also detected were trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) and trifluoromethanesulfonic acid (TFMS), ultra-short-chain PFAS that are highly water-soluble and so might leach out of straws into drinks.

Bamboo straws fared only slightly better than paper ones, with PFAS found in 80% of brands tested. The chemicals were found in 75% of plastic straws and 40% of glass brands. PFAS were not detected in any of the steel straws tested. The PFAS concentrations were low and, the researchers say, pose a small risk to human health. However, the problem with PFAS is that they're bioaccumulative, meaning they can build up over time because they're absorbed but not excreted. The researchers say that while the study did not determine whether PFAS were added to the straws or were the result of contamination -- for example, from the soil in which the plant-based materials are grown -- the presence of the chemicals in almost every brand of paper straw means it's likely that, in some cases, PFAS were used as a water-repellent coating. The study also did not examine whether PFAS leached out of the straws into the liquid they were sitting in. To be safe, the researchers suggest people start using stainless steel straws, or ditch straws altogether. The study was published in the journal Food Additives and Contaminants.

SpaceX says it successfully test-fired the booster for its next Starship launch, although that liftoff may still be weeks away. SpaceNews reports: SpaceX fired the Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster designated Booster 9 in a static-fire test at its Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas, at approximately 1:35 p.m. Eastern Aug. 25. SpaceX said it conducted a "full duration" firing, which appeared to last about five to six seconds. SpaceX later stated that all 33 engines successfully ignited, although two shut down prematurely. "Congratulations to the SpaceX team on this exciting milestone!"

The company did not state if that performance was sufficient for it to proceed with a launch attempt, but it was better than an earlier test of the same booster Aug. 6. That test ended early, after the engines fired for less than three seconds, with four of the Raptors shutting down prematurely. If SpaceX is satisfied with the outcome of the test, it is likely one of the final technical milestones before it is ready for a second integrated Starship/Super Heavy launch. The first, April 20, failed four minutes after liftoff when several Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster shut down and vehicle later lost control and tumbled.