Europe's energy crisis is threatening to slow experiments into the fundamental forces of nature. From a report: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is drafting plans to shut down some of its particle accelerators at periods of peak demand, said Serge Claudet, chair of the center's energy management panel. CERN is also considering how it could idle the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest accelerator, if necessary, Mr. Claudet said. "Our concern is really grid stability, because we do all we can to prevent a blackout in our region," Mr. Claudet said.

The preparations show the far-reaching impact of Moscow's move to transform Europe's dependence on Russian energy supplies into a weapon of economic war. Emergency measures are now on the table after Russian energy giant Gazprom PJSC said Friday it would indefinitely stop natural gas deliveries through the Nord Stream gas pipeline, Russia's main artery for delivering the fuel to Europe, pushing the continent closer to gas rationing as winter approaches. Sweden and Finland on Friday said they would offer funding support to regional electricity producers, saying that Gazprom's move threatened the region's power market and its broader financial stability. The European Union is preparing plans to restructure the market to ease some of the pain.

Hailstones of record size are falling left and right, and hailstorm damage is growing. But there is surprisingly little research to explain why. From a report: On Aug. 1, a team of scientists from Western University in London, Ontario, collected a giant hailstone while chasing a storm in Alberta, about 75 miles north of Calgary. The hailstone measured five inches across and weighed a little more than half a pound -- half the size and one-quarter the heft of Mr. Scott's. So it was not a world record, but a Canadian one. The Canadian hailstone added to the list of regional records set in the past couple of years, including Alabama's in 2018 (5.38 inches long, 0.612 pounds), Colorado's in 2019 (4.83 inches, 0.53 pounds) and Africa's in 2020 (around seven inches long, weight unknown). Australia set a national record in 2020, then set it again in 2021. Texas' record was set in 2021. In 2018, a storm in Argentina produced stones so big that a new class of hail was introduced: gargantuan. Larger than a honeydew melon.

But the record-setting has come with increased hail damage. Although the frequency of reported "hail events" in the United States is at its lowest in a decade, according to a recent report by Verisk, a risk assessment firm, insurance claims on cars, houses and crops damaged by hail reached $16.5 billion in 2021 -- the highest ever. Hail can strip plants to the stem and effectively total small cars. Ten years after the record-setting storm in Vivian, the tin roofs of some buildings are still dented. On Wednesday, a hailstorm killed a toddler in the Catalonia region of Spain. "It's one of the few weather hazards that we don't necessarily build for," said Ian Giammanco, a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. "And it's getting bigger and worse." Although the changing climate probably plays a role in these trends, weather experts say, a more complete explanation might have something to do with the self-stoking interplay of human behavior and scientific discovery. As neighborhoods sprawl into areas that experience heavy hail and greater hail damage, researchers have sought out large hailstones and documented their dimensions, stirring public interest and inviting further study.

Julian Brimelow, the director of the Northern Hail Project, a new collaboration among Canadian organizations to study hail, whose team found the record hailstone in August, said, "It's a pretty exciting time to be doing hail research." The fixation with big hail goes back to at least the 1960s, when Soviet scientists claimed that they could significantly reduce the size of a storm's hailstones by dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere. The method, called cloud seeding, promised to save millions of dollars in crop damage a year. In the 1970s, the United States funded the National Hail Research Experiment to replicate the results of the Soviet experiments, this time by cloud seeding in hailstorms above Northern Colorado. Scientists then collected the largest hailstones they could find to see if it worked. It did not. And a decade of research demonstrated that the Soviet effort probably hadn't worked either. Both countries eventually gave up on the idea, and hailstone research stalled, although cloud seeding to increase rain and snowfall continued -- and continues to this day -- around the world.

China became the first country to approve a needle-free, inhaled version of a Covid-19 vaccine made by Tianjin-based CanSino Biologics, pushing the company's shares up as much as 14.5% Monday morning in Hong Kong. From a report: China's National Medical Products Administration approved CanSino's Ad5-nCoV for emergency use as a booster vaccine, the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sunday. The vaccine is a new version of CanSino's one-shot Covid drug, the first in the world to undergo human testing in March 2020 and which has been used in China, Mexico, Pakistan, Malaysia and Hungary after being rolled out in February 2021. The inhaled version can stimulate cellular immunity and induce mucosal immunity to boost protection without intramuscular injection, CanSino said. Companies are looking into developing inhaled versions of vaccines to stimulate antibodies in nasal and airway tissues to defend against coronavirus. They are needle-free and can be self-administered, broadening their appeal to vaccine-hesitant people and potentially easing pressure on health-care resources.

"Scientists at the Florida Aquarium have made a breakthrough in the race to save Caribbean coral," reports CNN.

"For the first time, marine biologists have successfully reproduced elkhorn coral, a critical species, using aquarium technology. It's a historic step forward, and one they hope could help revitalize Caribbean ecosystems and could pay humans back by offering extra protection from the fury of hurricanes." Elkhorn coral once dominated the Caribbean. But, just as other vital coral ecosystems are degrading around the world, elkhorn are now rarely seen alive in the wild. This species — so important because it provides the building blocks for reefs to flourish — has been until now notoriously difficult to grow in aquariums. Which is why scientists were thrilled when they saw their reproductive experiment was a success. "When it finally happened, the first sense is just sheer relief." said Keri O'Neil, the senior scientist that oversees the Tampa aquarium's spawning lab. "This is a critical step to preventing elkhorn coral from going extinct in the state of Florida...."

Elkhorn marks the aquarium's 14th species spawned inside the Apollo Beach lab, but the team ranks it as its most important yet. O'Neil estimates there are only about 300 elkhorn coral left in the Florida Keys Reef Tract — but the spawning experiment produced thousands of baby coral. She expects up to 100 of them could survive into adulthood.... The Florida Aquarium's news comes after scientists reported in early August that the Great Barrier Reef was showing the largest extent of coral cover in 36 years.

But the outlook for coral around the world is grim — studies have shown that the climate crisis could kill all of Earth's coral reefs by the end of the century. Elkhorn coral was listed as federally threatened under the US Endangered Species Act in 2006 after scientists found that disease cut the population by 97% since the 1980s. And ocean warming is its largest threat. As ocean temperature rises, coral expels the symbiotic algae that lives inside it and produces nutrients. This is the process of coral bleaching, and it typically ends in death for the coral.

"They're dying around the world," O'Neil told CNN. "We are at a point now where they may never be the same. You can't have the ocean running a fever every summer and not expect there to be impacts."
But the lab's senior scientist also emphasized to CNN that "There is hope for coral reefs. Don't give up hope. It's all not lost.

"However, we need to make serious changes in our behavior to save this planet."

With 8.8 million pounds of thrust, NASA's SLS would've been the most powerful rocket ever launched into space, notes the Orlando Sentinel.

But instead on Saturday morning, "NASA scrubbed its second attempt to launch the Artemis I mission into lunar orbit..." reports CNET. "During a press conference later in the day, Jim Free, an associate administrator at NASA Headquarters, said we shouldn't expect to see a third attempt within this launch period, which culminates Tuesday." (Though the mission manager the next launch attempt could be as late as mid-October.)

"This time, the culprit was a liquid hydrogen leak that showed up while the team was loading the rocket's core stage...." According to the space agency, the leak occurred "while loading the propellant into the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket" and that "multiple troubleshooting efforts to address the area of the leak, by reseating a seal in the quick disconnect where liquid hydrogen is fed into the rocket, did not fix the issue."

This is the second time the Artemis I mission has been delayed. Liftoff attempt No. 1 was scheduled for Monday, but launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson had to call a scrub then as well, because of an unyielding problem with what's known as an engine bleed test. (This process is meant to allow the engines to chill to the right temperature by releasing a small amount of the fuel).

"We were unable to get the engines within the thermal conditions required to commit to launch," Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin said during a press conference on Tuesday. "In combination with that, we also had a bent valve issue on the core stage, and it was at that point that the team decided to knock off the launch attempt for that day."

CNN reports: Eating a lot of ultraprocessed foods significantly increases men's risk of colorectal cancer and can lead to heart disease and early death in both men and women, according to two new, large-scale studies of people in the United States and Italy published Wednesday in British medical journal The BMJ. Ultraprocessed foods include prepackaged soups, sauces, frozen pizza, ready-to-eat meals and pleasure foods such as hot dogs, sausages, french fries, sodas, store-bought cookies, cakes, candies, doughnuts, ice cream and many more....

The US-based study examined the diets of over 200,000 men and women for up to 28 years and found a link between ultraprocessed foods and colorectal cancer — the third most diagnosed cancer in the US — in men, but not women. Processed and ultraprocessed meats, such as ham, bacon, salami, hotdogs, beef jerkey and corned beef, have long been associated with a higher risk of bowel cancer in both men and women, according to the World Health Organization, American Cancer Society and the American Institute for Cancer Research. The new study, however, found that all types of ultraprocessed foods played a role to some degree.

"We found that men in the highest quintile of ultraprocessed food consumption, compared those in the lowest quintile, had a 29% higher risk of developing colorectal cancer," said co-senior author Fang Fang Zhang, a cancer epidemiologist and chair of the division of nutrition epidemiology and data science at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. That association remained even after researchers took into account a person's body mass index or dietary quality....

The study did find that eating a "higher consumption of ultraprocessed dairy foods — such as yogurt — was associated with a lower risk of colorectal cancer in women," Zhang said. "Some ultraprocessed foods are healthier, such as whole-grain foods that contain little or no added sugars, and yogurt and dairy foods...."

[O]verly processed foods are often high in added sugars and salt, low in dietary fiber, and full of chemical additives, such as artificial colors, flavors or stabilizers.
CNN ultimately got this advice from Dr. Robin Mendelsohn, a gastroenterologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City (who was not involved in the study).

"While some ultraprocessed foods may be considered healthier than others, in general, we would recommend staying away from ultra-processed foods completely and focus on healthy unprocessed foods — fruits, vegetables, legumes."

Long-time Slashdot reader swell shared Scientific American's report on the quest for neuromorphic chips: The human brain is an amazing computing machine. Weighing only three pounds or so, it can process information a thousand times faster than the fastest supercomputer, store a thousand times more information than a powerful laptop, and do it all using no more energy than a 20-watt lightbulb. Researchers are trying to replicate this success using soft, flexible organic materials that can operate like biological neurons and someday might even be able to interconnect with them. Eventually, soft "neuromorphic" computer chips could be implanted directly into the brain, allowing people to control an artificial arm or a computer monitor simply by thinking about it.

Like real neurons — but unlike conventional computer chips — these new devices can send and receive both chemical and electrical signals. "Your brain works with chemicals, with neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. Our materials are able to interact electrochemically with them," says Alberto Salleo, a materials scientist at Stanford University who wrote about the potential for organic neuromorphic devices in the 2021 Annual Review of Materials Research. Salleo and other researchers have created electronic devices using these soft organic materials that can act like transistors (which amplify and switch electrical signals) and memory cells (which store information) and other basic electronic components.

The work grows out of an increasing interest in neuromorphic computer circuits that mimic how human neural connections, or synapses, work. These circuits, whether made of silicon, metal or organic materials, work less like those in digital computers and more like the networks of neurons in the human brain.... An individual neuron receives signals from many other neurons, and all these signals together add up to affect the electrical state of the receiving neuron. In effect, each neuron serves as both a calculating device — integrating the value of all the signals it has received — and a memory device: storing the value of all of those combined signals as an infinitely variable analog value, rather than the zero-or-one of digital computers.

On Friday, the family of astronomer Frank Drake announced that he passed away peacefully at 92 in his California home, near the site of his final academic position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ars Technica reports: Drake made a number of contributions to radio astronomy, including serving as director of the Arecibo radio telescope facility. But Drake is probably best known for an equation that bears his name and his subsequent involvement in SETI efforts. His equation was the first significant attempt to estimate the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life. [...] His most prominent contribution in this area was the formulation of what's now known as the Drake equation. It's purportedly a calculation -- plug in the probabilities of a handful of things like the frequency of exoplanets around stars and the probability of life forming spontaneously, and out would pop the overall number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. [...]

Drake first presented his equation in 1961, and he maintained an interest in the question of extraterrestrial life throughout his career. While at Arecibo, he was involved in a project that beamed a message from that facility to a cluster of stars. He also helped craft two messages sent with our first hardware that was expected to leave the Solar System: a plaque on Pioneer 10 and 11 and gold records placed on the Voyager probes. He was also involved with the SETI institute and served on its board of trustees.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: More than a billion miles away from Earth, on the ice giants of Neptune and Uranus, diamonds are forever. This isn't cosmic poetry, but a reasonable scientific conclusion: We know that under extreme pressures and high temperatures miles beneath a planet's surface, hydrocarbons are pummeled into a crystalline bling coveted by the affianced. But on far-flung Neptune and Uranus, the Universe's diamond-making process is a bit more curious. Since the 1970s, scientists believed that diamonds might actually rain down toward the mostly slushy planets' rocky interiors -- a diamond rain, if you will. In 2017, researchers in Germany and California found a way to replicate those planetary conditions, fabricating teeny tiny diamonds called nanodiamonds in the lab using polystyrene (aka Styrofoam). Five years later and they're back at it again, this time using some good ol' polyethylene terephthalate (PET), according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. The research has implications not only for our understanding of space, but paves a path toward creating nanodiamonds that are used in a range of contexts out of waste plastic.

So, why in the world are we making diamonds out of the same plastic that things like food containers and water bottles are made of? There's a good reason for this, Dominik Kraus, a scientist at the German research laboratory Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and lead author of the study, said in an email. When Kraus and his colleagues first attempted making nanodiamonds with polystyrene -- which contains the same elements of carbon and hydrogen found on Neptune and Uranus -- they did so by bombarding the material with the Linac Coherent Light Source, a high-powered X-ray laser at the SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory in California. This process rapidly heated the polystyrene to 5,000 Kelvin (around 8,540 degrees Fahrenheit) and compressed it by 150 gigapascals, similar to conditions found about 6,000 miles into the interior of the icy planets. While the researchers were able to make the microscopic bling with two quick hits from the laser, they later realized one vital chemical ingredient was missing: oxygen. So they turned to PET, which has a good balance of not only carbon and hydrogen but also oxygen, making it a closer chemical proxy to the ice giants than polystyrene.

"The chemistry at these conditions is very complex and modeling extremely difficult. 'Anything can happen' is a typical phrase when discussing such scenarios with theorists," said Kraus. "Indeed, there were some predictions showing that the presence of oxygen is helping [carbon separate from hydrogen] and diamond formation, but also ideas that it may be the other way around." To put the theoretical pedal to the metal, Kraus and his colleagues took a piece of PET, put it through the same 2017 experimental motions, but also included something called small angle X-ray diffraction to see how quickly and how large the diamonds grow. "We found that the presence of oxygen enhances diamond formation instead of preventing it, making 'diamond rain' inside those planets a more likely scenario," said Kraus. "We [also] see that diamonds grow larger for higher pressures and with progressing time in the experiments." They were also able to squeeze out a lot of tiny diamonds from just one shot of X-ray, on the order of a few billion crystallites (or a few micrograms if you're talking total weight). But Kraus said this isn't enough, at least right now, for application purposes like diamond quantum sensors, which are used to detect magnetic flow, or chemical catalysts, which need a couple of milligrams at minimum. However, it could eventually be scaled up to serve those purposes, and be the first step to a more ritzy way of plastic recycling. Kraus and his team also believe they found more evidence for superionic water, a bizarre type of water that acts like a weird cross between solid and liquid. "Kraus said that the finding that nanodiamonds indeed form inside ice giants makes it more likely for the conditions for superionic water to arise," reports Motherboard.

Kraus said: "[O]ur experiments show that carbon is separating from hydrogen and oxygen allowing pure water regions to form inside the planets. Thus, by making diamond precipitation a more realistic scenario inside those planets, also the formation of superionic water becomes more likely."

A federal judge on Thursday tentatively declined to overturn the jury conviction of disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy. That leaves the former Silicon Valley star a step closer to serving prison time. Politico reports: U.S. District Judge Edward Davila won't make that decision final until Oct. 17, when he is scheduled to sentence Holmes in the same San Jose, California, courtroom where a jury found her guilty of duping investors in her much-hyped blood-testing startup. Holmes, 38, faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, plus restitution, for lying to investors about a Theranos technology she hailed as a revolution in healthcare but which in practice produced dangerously inaccurate results.

Cannabis users are often depicted as lazy "stoners" whose life ambitions span little further than lying on the sofa eating crisps. But research from the University of Cambridge challenges this stereotype, showing that regular users appear no more likely to lack motivation compared with non-users. From a report: The research also found no difference in motivation for rewards, pleasure taken from rewards, or the brain's response when seeking rewards, compared with non-users. "We're so used to seeing 'lazy stoners' on our screens that we don't stop to ask whether they're an accurate representation," said Martine Skumlien, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and the research's first author. "Our work implies that ... people who use cannabis are no more likely to lack motivation or be lazier than people who don't."

Skumlien said smoking cannabis could be associated with other downsides, but that the stoner stereotype is "stigmatising" and could make messages around harm reduction less effective. "We need to be honest and frank about what are and are not the harmful consequences of drug use," she added. Cannabis is the third most commonly used controlled substance worldwide, after alcohol and nicotine, with a 2018 NHS report finding that almost one in five (19%) of 15-year-olds in England had used cannabis in the previous 12 months.

The world's largest offshore wind farm is now fully operational, 55 miles off the coast of Yorkshire. The Hornsea 2 project can generate enough electricity to power about 1.3 million homes - that's enough for a city the size of Manchester. From a report: A decade ago renewables made up just 11% of the UK's energy mix. By 2021 it was 40%, with offshore wind the largest component. Hornsea 2 is part of a huge wind farm development by energy firm Orsted. "The UK is one of the world leaders in offshore wind," Patrick Harnett, programme director for the Hornsea 2 wind farm told BBC News. "This is very exciting after five years of work to have full commercial operations at the world's largest offshore wind farm."

Stefanie Waldek reports via Space.com: Led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is a small instrument on the Perseverance rover that's designed to transform carbon dioxide, which comprises some 96% of the atmosphere on Mars, into breathable oxygen. Oxygen, of course, is crucial for a human mission to Mars. Since February 2021, the device has run seven times, each time producing about 0.2 ounces (6 grams) of oxygen per hour. That's on par with the abilities of small trees here on Earth.

MOXIE has now operated in a variety of conditions on Mars, both day and night, through all four seasons. The researchers expect that a version of the instrument approximately 100 times larger than MOXIE could potentially create breathable oxygen for future astronauts who visit the Red Planet. If explorers can't make their own oxygen on Mars, supplies from Earth would take up valuable mass on a spacecraft. Furthermore, MOXIE's products could also be used as an ingredient for rocket fuel -- pretty crucial to ensuring the mission isn't one-way. A rocket would need 33 to 50 tons (30 to 45 metric tons) of liquid oxygen propellant in order to launch humans off Mars. "This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission," MOXIE deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former NASA astronaut, said in a statement. "It's historic in that sense."

The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

A new study looks at interactions between microscopic neurons in salamanders to understand how the "arrow of time" is biologically generated. Motherboard reports: The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends to move from order to disorder, a process known as entropy that defines the arrow of time. A stronger arrow of time means it would be harder for a system to go back to a more ordered state. "Everything that we perceive as a difference between the past and the future stems fundamentally from that one principle about the universe," said Christopher Lynn, the lead author of the study. Lynn said that his motivation for the study was "to understand how the arrows of time we see in life" fit into this larger idea of entropy on the scale of the entire universe.

Using previously done research on salamanders, Lynne and colleagues at City University of New York and Princeton examined how the arrow of time is represented in interactions between the amphibians' neurons in response to watching a movie. Their research is soon to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. On one hand, it's somewhat obvious that an arrow of time would be biologically produced. "To be alive, almost, you have to have an arrow of time because you develop from a baby to an adult, and you're constantly moving and taking in stimuli," Lynne said. Indeed, entropy here is irreversible -- you cannot go back. What the team found was anything but intuitive, however.

Lynne and colleagues looked at a separate 2015 study where researchers had salamanders watch two different movies. One depicted a scene of fish swimming around, similar to what a salamander might experience in everyday life. As in the real world, the video had a clear arrow of time -- that is, if you watched it in reverse, it would look different than if you played it forwards. The other video contained only a gray screen with a black, horizontal bar in the middle of the screen, which moved quickly up and down in a random, jittery way. This video didn't have an obvious arrow of time. A major question for the researchers was if they could pick out signs of "local irreversibility" in interactions between small groups of retinal neurons in response to this stimulus. Would interactions with irreversibility -- they would look different if played in reverse, having an "arrow of time" -- present in simpler or more complex interactions between neurons? "You can go look at a system and you can ask: are the more complicated interactions strongly producing the arrow of time, or is it the simpler dynamics?" said Lynn.

The researchers found that the interactions between simple pairs of neurons primarily determined the arrow of time, no matter which movie the salamanders watched. In fact, the authors found a stronger arrow of time for the neurons when salamanders watched the video with the gray screen and black bar -- in other words, the video without an arrow of time in its content elicited a greater arrow of time in the neurons. "We naively thought that if the stimulus has a stronger arrow of time, that would show up on your retina," said Lynn. "But it was the opposite. So that's why it was surprising to us." While the researchers can't say for sure why this is, Lynn said that it might be because salamanders are more used to seeing something like the fish movie, and processing the more artificial movie took greater energy. In a more disordered system, which would have a greater arrow of time, more energy is consumed. "Being alive will still define an arrow of time," Lynne said, no matter the stimulus.

Scientists should commit acts of civil disobedience to show the public how seriously they regard the threat posed by the climate crisis, a group of leading scientists has argued. From a report: "Civil disobedience by scientists has the potential to cut through the myriad complexities and confusion surrounding the climate crisis," the researchers wrote in an article, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change on Monday.

"When those with expertise and knowledge are willing to convey their concerns in a more uncompromising manner ... this affords them particular effectiveness as a communicative act. This is the insight of Greta Thunberg when she calls on us to âact as you would in a crisis.'" In recent months, scientists have shown themselves increasingly willing to take part in direct actions to bring attention to the climate crisis. A "scientists rebellion" mobilised more than 1,000 scientists in 25 countries in April, while in the UK a number of scientists were arrested for gluing scientific papers -- and their hands -- on to the glass facade of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized the first redesign of coronavirus vaccines since they were rolled out in late 2020, setting up millions of Americans to receive new booster doses targeting Omicron subvariants as soon as next week. From a report: The agency cleared two options aimed at the BA.5 variant of Omicron that is now dominant: one made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for use in people as young as 12, and the other by Moderna, for those 18 and older. The doses can be given at least two months since people last received a booster dose or completed their initial series of vaccinations.

Biden administration officials have argued that even as researchers work to understand how protective the new shots might be, inoculating Americans again in the coming weeks could help curb the persistently high number of infections and deaths. "As we head into fall and begin to spend more time indoors, we strongly encourage anyone who is eligible to consider receiving a booster dose," Dr. Robert M. Califf, the F.D.A. commissioner, said in a statement on Wednesday. He added that the vaccine would "provide better protection against currently circulating variants."

A critical system aboard the probe was sending garbled data about its status. Engineers have fixed the issue but are still seeking the root cause. NASA reports: Engineers have repaired an issue affecting data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft. Earlier this year, the probe's attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which keeps Voyager 1's antenna pointed at Earth, began sending garbled information about its health and activities to mission controllers, despite operating normally. The rest of the probe also appeared healthy as it continued to gather and return science data. The team has since located the source of the garbled information: The AACS had started sending the telemetry data through an onboard computer known to have stopped working years ago, and the computer corrupted the information.

Suzanne Dodd, Voyager's project manager, said that when they suspected this was the issue, they opted to try a low-risk solution: commanding the AACS to resume sending the data to the right computer. Engineers don't yet know why the AACS started routing telemetry data to the incorrect computer, but it likely received a faulty command generated by another onboard computer. If that's the case, it would indicate there is an issue somewhere else on the spacecraft. The team will continue to search for that underlying issue, but they don't think it is a threat to the long-term health of Voyager 1.

NASA delayed the debut launch of its new massive rocket due to an issue with one of its engines, dealing a temporary blow to the space agency's plan to return to the lunar surface. From a report: With Vice President Kamala Harris in attendance at Florida's Kennedy Space Center and a global audience watching online, the uncrewed Artemis I mission was called off at 8:34 a.m., one minute after its originally scheduled liftoff time. The launch missed its window after controllers were unable to resolve a temperature problem with one of the rocket's four main engines. The rocket and space capsule are in "a safe and stable configuration," NASA said Monday in a statement, adding that engineers were continuing to gather data.

The earliest available opportunity to try again is on Sept. 2, NASA said in a webcast while announcing the scrubbed launch. No decision has been made on rescheduling. Official confirmation of the delay came after the space agency spent the early morning hours investigating issues including a potential crack in material in the main body of the rocket as well as the temperature issue, officials said earlier Monday. Those came after engineers examined and resolved a suspected leak affecting the hydrogen tanking process.

Long-time Slashdot reader Beeftopia writes: All living cells power themselves by coaxing protons from one side of a membrane to the other. A place where this occurs naturally outside of cells are alkaline hydrothermal vents on the deep seafloor, inside highly porous rock formations that are almost like mineralized sponges. "Carbon and energy metabolism are driven by proton gradients, exactly what the vents provided for free," wrote biochemist Nick Lane. In Lane's view, metabolism came first, and genetic information emerged naturally from it rather than the other way around.
Quanta magazine asks Lane the big question: How did these first proto-cells become independent from the proton gradients they got for free in the hydrothermal vents? LANE: We've shown that theoretically, if you introduce random sequences of RNA and assume that the nucleotides in there can polymerize, you get little chains of nucleotides. Let's say seven or eight random letters long, with no information encoded in there whatsoever.... [H]ydrophobic amino acids are more likely to interact with hydrophobic bases. So you have a random sequence of RNA that generates a nonrandom peptide. And that nonrandom peptide could by chance have some function in a growing proto-cell. It could make the cell grow better or grow worse; it could help the RNA replicate itself; it could bind to cofactors. Then you have selection for that peptide and the RNA sequence that gave rise to it.

Although it's a very rudimentary system, this means we've just entered the world of genes, information and natural selection.
Quanta summarizes Lane's next idea: that these vent environments "favored the beginnings of what we call the Krebs cycle, the metabolic process that derives energy from carbohydrates, fats and proteins." Lane himself has said that metabolism "conjures genes into existence."

But if genes are conjured into existence by metabolism, then what else might be true? Lane ultimately concludes that cancer may be a metabolic disease rather than a "genomic" one: LANE: About 10 years ago, the cancer community was amazed by the discovery that in some cancers, mutations can lead to parts of the Krebs cycle running backward. It came as quite a shock because the Krebs cycle is usually taught as only spinning forward to generate energy. But it turns out that while a cancer cell does need energy, what it really needs even more is carbon-based building blocks for growth. So the whole field of oncology began to see this reversal of the Krebs cycle as a kind of metabolic rewiring that helps cancer cells grow....

[C]ancers aren't caused simply by some genetically deterministic mutation that forces cells to go on growing without stopping. Metabolism is important too, for providing a permissive environment for growth. Growth comes before genes in this sense.
Or, as Slashdot reader Beeftopia puts it, "In Lane's view, metabolism came first, and genetic information emerged naturally from it rather than the other way around. Lane believes that the implications of this reversal touch almost every big mystery in biology, including the nature of cancer and aging."

Long-time Slashdot reader Dr_Ish writes: It is not too common for the world of academic philosophy to be changed by a new discovery, or innovation. Perhaps the last time this happened in a major way can be traced back to Turing's famous (1950) "Computational Machinery and Intelligence" paper "Mind," where Turing proposed that computational systems could exhibit mind-like properties. However, it appears to be in the process of happening again.

In a series of recent papers and a book that was published last week, philosopher Prof. Paco Calvo from the University of Murcia, has made a compelling case that plants exhibit cognitive properties, such as memory, planning, intelligence and perhaps even numerical abilities... His book, Calvo, P. with Lawrence, N. "Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence was published in the UK last week. It will appear in North America in March next year.
From the Guardian's review of the book: Calvo writes that intelligence is "not quite as special as we like to think". He argues that it's time to accept that other organisms, even drastically different ones, may be capable of it....

In the course of his book, Calvo describes many experiments that reveal plants' remarkable range, including the way they communicate with others nearby using "chemical talk", a language encoded in about 1,700 volatile organic compounds.... Other studies show that some plants retain a memory of where the sun will rise, in order to turn their leaves towards the first rays. They store this knowledge — an internal model of what the sun is going to do — for several days, even when kept in total darkness. The conclusion must be that they constantly collect information, processing and retaining it in order to "make predictions, learn, and even plan ahead".