CNN's national security analyst interviewed a U.S. intelligence officer who worked on the newly-released Defense report debunking UFO sightings — physicist Sean Kirkpatrick. He tells CNN "about two to five percent" of UFO reports are "truly anomalous."

But CNN adds that "he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth..." This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That's because, in 1947, a U.S. military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico. A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the U.S. government had covered up the evidence.

Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret. At the same time, the U.S. military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities.

Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft...

Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the U.S. military. Kirkpatrick says that's the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the U.S. government's policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.
The pattern keeps repeating. "Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the U.S. government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the U.S. or of benign civilian drones and balloons." ("What's more likely?" asked Kirkpatrick. "The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that's being commercialized down in Florida that you didn't know about, or we have extraterrestrials?")

But the greatest irony may be that "stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who'd heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft. And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people... [F]or decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there's a U.S. government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government."

Science magazine "has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene — our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age — and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene.

"Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity's influence on the planet became overwhelming." The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning — though not unexpected — rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade... [S]ome felt the proposed marker of the epoch — some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada's Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s — isn't definitive enough. Others questioned whether it's even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity's broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World?
Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, said "It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration." Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an "epoch" categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation.... The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again...

Even if it is not formally recognized by geologists, the Anthropocene is here to stay. It is used in art exhibits, journal titles, and endless books... And others have advanced the view that it can remain an informal geologic term, calling it the "Anthropocene event...."
From the New York Times: Geoscientists don't deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century. Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

That's why several experts who have voiced skepticism about enshrining the Anthropocene emphasized that the vote against it shouldn't be read as a referendum among scientists on the broad state of the Earth. "This was a narrow, technical matter for geologists, for the most part," said one of those skeptics, Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "This has nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet," Dr. Ellis said. "The evidence just keeps growing."

Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, is the opposite of a skeptic: She helped lead some of the research to support ratifying the new epoch. "We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale," Dr. McCarthy said. "And behaving accordingly is our only path forward."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Washington Post: A much-debated theory holds that 4 billion years ago, give or take, long before the appearance of dinosaurs or even bacteria, the primordial soup contained only the possibility of life. Then a molecule called RNA took a dramatic step into the future: It made a copy of itself. Then the copy made a copy, and over the course of many millions of years, RNA begot DNA and proteins, all of which came together to form a cell, the smallest unit of life able to survive on its own.

Now, in an important advance supporting this RNA World theory, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., have carried out a small but essential part of the story. In test tubes, they developed an RNA molecule that was able to make accurate copies of a different type of RNA. The work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gets them closer to the grand goal of growing an RNA molecule that makes accurate copies of itself.

"Then it would be alive," said Gerald Joyce, president of Salk and one of the authors of the new paper. "So, this is the road to how life can arise in a laboratory or, in principle, anywhere in the universe...."

John Chaput, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California at Irvine who did not participate in the study, called the crossing of that threshold by the Salk team "monumental," adding that "at first, I looked on it as a little bit jaw-dropping. ... It's super-neat."
The Post adds that "the scenario they tested probably mimics one of the earliest stirrings of evolution." And Michael Kay, a professor of biochemistry at University of Utah, says the new paper has given the RNA World theory "key evidence" to show "it is plausible and reasonable." He added that the RNA copier developed at Salk will "provide a valuable tool for people wanting to do directed evolution experiments."

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this article from Live Science: Manufacturers will no longer use harmful "forever chemicals" in food packaging products in the U.S., according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In a statement released February 28, the agency declared that grease-proofing materials that contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) will not be used in new food packaging sold in the U.S. These include PFAS used in fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, takeout boxes and pet food bags. The FDA's announcement marks the completion of a voluntary phase-out of the materials by U.S. food packaging manufacturers.

This action will eliminate the "major source of dietary exposure to PFAS," Jim Jones, deputy commissioner for human foods at the FDA, said in an associated statement. Companies told the FDA that it could take up to 18 months to completely exhaust the market supply of these products following their final date of sale. However, most of the affected manufacturers phased out the products faster than they initially predicted, the agency noted...

The FDA's new announcement marks a "huge win for the public," Graham Peaslee, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame who studies PFAS, told The Washington Post.

Remember Avi Loeb, the Harvard professor who claims fragments of alien technology turned up in a high-speed meteor he retrieved from the waters off of Papua, New Guinea?

"Reanalysis of seismic data now suggests Loeb may have been looking for the meteor remnants in the wrong place," writes the Washington Post: The analysis, led by seismologist Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University, contends that sound waves purportedly from the meteor exploding in the atmosphere, and cited by Loeb as helping to locate the meteor's debris field, were most likely from a truck driving on a road near the seismometer.
"Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck," reads the headline on an announcement from Johns Hopkins University. "The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments," Fernando says in the announcement. "Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place." Using data from stations in Australia and Palau designed to detect sound waves from nuclear testing, Fernando's team identified a more likely location for the meteor, more than 100 miles from the area initially investigated. They concluded the materials recovered from the ocean bottom were tiny, ordinary meteorites — or particles produced from other meteorites hitting Earth's surface mixed with terrestrial contamination.
"There are hundreds of signals that look just like this on that seismometer in Papua New Guinea in the days before and the days after," Fernando told the Washington Post.

But the newspaper adds that "Loeb, however, stands his ground." "The seismic data is completely irrelevant to the location of the meteor," Loeb told The Washington Post. He said his team based its search coordinates primarily on satellite data from the United States military. A three-year analysis by the United States Space Command supported the hypothesis that the meteor's extreme velocity indicated an origin outside our solar system, Loeb said...

[Fernando] said his team believes the purported velocity of the meteor is the result of a measurement error by a sensor. "We think the most likely case is it's a natural meteor from within our solar system," he said.

In any case, Loeb is not done with the search. When he gets sufficient funding, he told The Post, he's going back to the Pacific in search of larger pieces of whatever splashed into the sea.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: The Earth just observed its warmest February, setting a monthly record for the ninth time in a row, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Wednesday.

The unrelenting and exceptional global warmth — fueled by a combination of human-caused warming and the El Niño climate pattern — has spanned both land and ocean areas since June. It has scientists worried about the planet crossing a critical climate threshold and prospects for an active Atlantic hurricane season. The month's average global air temperature of 13.5 degrees Celsius (56.3 degrees Fahrenheit) was 0.12 degrees (0.22 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the previous warmest February in 2016.

The warmth of the last 12-month period is unprecedented in modern records, coming in at 1.56 degrees (2.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial levels... Scientists fear that tipping points, such as those that could lead to catastrophic sea level rises or the collapse of critical ocean circulations, will become more likely to be reached if the Earth's temperature remains near or above that threshold for multiple years.
Axios adds: This is significant, since these 12 months exceeded the Paris Agreement's 1.5-degree target for a full year. However, the pact is aimed at averting multiple decades above that level, meaning the target hasn't yet been officially breached. Europe was especially warm compared to average during February, along with central and northwest North America, much of South America, Africa and western Australia, Copernicus found.
The Washington Post notes that in the United States, "more than 200 locations in the Midwest and Northeast set records for winter warmth."

They also quote a weather historian who posted on social media that "We are witnessing something extraordinary and unprecedented. Several thousands of records pulverized all over the world in a matter of hours, with margins never seen before."

Space.com describes it as "a nearly 3-ton leftover tossed overboard from the International Space Station" — which crashed back to earth today. One satellite tracker claims to have filmed it passing over the Netherlands...

"A couple minutes later reentry and it would have reached Fort Meyers" in Florida, posted astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But instead it re-entered the earth's atmosphere "over the Gulf of Mexico between Cancun and Cuba," Friday afternoon. "This was within the previous prediction window but a little to the northeast of the 'most likely' part of the path."

From Space.com: The multi-ton Exposed Pallet 9 (EP9) was jettisoned from the space station back in March 2021. At the time, it was reported to be the most massive object ever tossed overboard from the International Space Station. Disposing of used or unnecessary equipment in such a way is common practice aboard the space station, as the objects typically burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere.

Ahead of EP9's reentry, the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, National Warning Center 1 in Bonn, Germany issued this information... "The object is battery packs from the International Space Station. Luminous phenomena or the perception of a sonic boom are possible...." EP9 is loaded with old Nickel-Hydrogen batteries, NASA explained at the time it was jettisoned, also explaining that EP9 has the approximate mass of a large SUV and predicting it would re-enter Earth's atmosphere in two-to-four years.
"A large space object reenters the atmosphere in a natural way approximately once per week," the European Space Agency points out, "with the majority of the associated fragments burning up before reaching the ground.

"Most spacecraft, launch vehicles and operational hardware are designed to limit the risks associated with a reentry."

Astronomers have observed a distant planet that could be entirely covered in a deep water ocean, in findings that advance the search for habitable conditions beyond Earth. From a report: The observations, by Nasa's James Webb space telescope (JWST), revealed water vapour and chemical signatures of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the exoplanet, which is twice Earth's radius and about 70 light years away. This chemical mix is consistent with a water world where the ocean would span the entire surface, and a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, according to researchers from the University of Cambridge, although they do not envisage a balmy, inviting seascape. "The ocean could be upwards of 100 degrees [Celsius] or more," said Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, who led the analysis. At high atmospheric pressure, an ocean this hot could still be liquid, "but it's not clear if it would be habitable," he added.

This interpretation is favoured in a paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, but is disputed by a Canadian team that made additional observations of the same exoplanet, which is known as TOI-270 d. They detected the same atmospheric chemicals but argue the planet would be too hot for liquid water -- possibly 4,000C -- and instead would feature a rocky surface topped by an incredibly dense atmosphere of hydrogen and water vapour. Whichever view wins out, these latest observations showcase the stunning insights James Webb is giving into the nature of planets beyond our solar system. The telescope captures the starlight that has been filtered through the atmospheres of orbiting planets to give detailed breakdowns of the chemical elements present. From this, astronomers can build up a picture of conditions at a planet's surface -- and the likelihood of life being able to survive there.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the 1960s, secret test flights of advanced government spy planes generated U.F.O. sightings. More recently, government and commercial drones, new kinds of satellites and errant weather balloons have led to a renaissance in unusual observations. But, according to a new report, none of these sightings were of alien spacecraft. The new congressionally mandated Pentagon report found no evidence that the government was covering up knowledge of extraterrestrial technology and said there was no evidence that any U.F.O. sightings represented alien visitation to Earth.

The 63-page document is the most sweeping rebuttal the Pentagon has issued in recent years to counter claims that it has information on extraterrestrial visits or technology. But amid widespread distrust of the government, the report is unlikely to calm a growing obsession with aliens. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Defense Department spokesman, said the Pentagon approached the report with an open mind and no preconceived notions, but simply found no evidence to back up claims of secret programs, hidden alien technology or anything else extraterrestrial. The new report suggests that the public's belief that the government is hiding what it knows will probably continue. The report adds: Nevertheless the public is unlikely to be swayed. Many people dismiss the government's claims that nothing interesting is going on in Pentagon videos that appear to show strange objects, citing accounts by Navy pilots that they observed objects whose movements cannot be easily explained. The new report notes that in the past, particularly in the 1950s, there was interest in U.F.O.s, but today the attention on unexplained sightings is greater than ever before. Politico adds: The Pentagon has disclosed that the government once considered a program to recover and reverse-engineer any captured alien spacecraft, an effort that never came to fruition but fueled conspiracy theories about a cover-up.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Doctors have warned of potentially life-threatening effects from plastic pollution after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics. Researchers in Naples examined fatty plaques removed from the blood vessels of patients with arterial disease and found that more than half had deposits contaminated with tiny particles of polyethylene or polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Those whose plaques contained microplastics or nanoplastics were nearly five times more likely to suffer a stroke, heart attack or death from any cause over the following 34 months, compared with those whose plaques were free from plastic contamination. The findings do not prove that plastic particles drive strokes and heart attacks -- people who are more exposed to the pollution may be at greater risk for other reasons -- but research on animals and human cells suggests the particles may be to blame. [...]

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the doctors describe how they analyzed fatty plaques removed from 304 patients with atherosclerosis affecting the carotid arteries. The carotid arteries are the main blood vessels that supply blood to the neck, face and brain. The disease causes a build-up of plaque in the arteries, which substantially raises the risk of stroke. The plaques can be removed by a procedure called carotid endarterectomy. Lab tests on the extracted plaques revealed polyethylene in 150 patients and polyvinyl chloride in 31, alongside signs of inflammation. On examination under an electron microscope, the researchers spotted jagged foreign particles in the fatty deposits, most less than a thousandth of a millimeter across. The doctors followed 257 of the patients for an average of 34 months after they had carotid plaques removed. Those who had plastic particles in their plaques were 4.5 times more likely to have a stroke or heart attack, or to die from any cause, than those whose plaques were free from plastic pollution. "People must become aware of the risks we are taking with our lifestyle," said Dr Raffaele Marfella, first author on the study at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Naples. "I hope the alarm message from our study will raise the consciousness of citizens, especially governments, to finally become aware of the importance of the health of our planet. To put it in a slogan that can unite the need for health for humans and the planet, plastic-free is healthy for the heart and the Earth."

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a "Pale Blue Dot," hasn't sent usable data from interstellar space in months. From a report: When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that -- and much more. Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, proving along the way that Earth and all of humanity could be squished into a single pixel in a photograph, a "pale blue dot," as the astronomer Carl Sagan called it. It stretched a four-year mission into the present day, embarking on the deepest journey ever into space. Now, it may have bid its final farewell to that faraway dot.

Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object in space, hasn't sent coherent data to Earth since November. NASA has been trying to diagnose what the Voyager mission's project manager, Suzanne Dodd, called the "most serious issue" the robotic probe has faced since she took the job in 2010. The spacecraft encountered a glitch in one of its computers that has eliminated its ability to send engineering and science data back to Earth. The loss of Voyager 1 would cap decades of scientific breakthroughs and signal the beginning of the end for a mission that has given shape to humanity's most distant ambition and inspired generations to look to the skies.

A washing-machine-sized satellite is to "name and shame" the worst methane polluters in the oil and gas industry. From a report: MethaneSat will provide the first near-comprehensive global view of leaks of the potent greenhouse gas from the oil and gas sector, and all of the data will be made public. It will provide high-resolution data over wider areas than existing satellites. Methane, also called natural gas, is responsible for 30% of the global heating driving the climate crisis. Leaks from the fossil fuel industry are a major source of human-caused emissions and stemming these is the fastest single way to curb temperature rises.

MethaneSat was developed by the Environmental Defense Fund, a US NGO, in partnership with the New Zealand Space Agency and cost $88m to build and launch. Earlier EDF measurements from planes show methane emissions were 60% higher than calculated estimates published by US authorities and elsewhere. More than 150 countries have signed a global methane pledge to cut their emissions of the gas by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Some oil and gas companies have made similar pledges, and new regulations to limit methane leaks are being worked on in the US, EU, Japan and South Korea.

The EDF's senior vice-president, Mark Brownstein, said: "MethaneSat is a tool for accountability . I'm sure many people think this could be used to name and shame companies who are poor emissions performers, and that's true. But [it] can [also] help document progress that leading companies are making in reducing their emissions." The oil and gas industry knows how to stop leaks and the cost of doing so is usually very modest, said Steven Hamburg, the EDF's chief scientist and MethaneSat project leader: "Some call it low hanging fruit. I like to call it fruit lying on the ground."

A new report warns that a boom in computer chip manufacturing in the US could fuel demand for dirty energy, despite companies' environmental claims. The solution for manufacturers, surprisingly, might be to act more like other big tech companies chasing climate goals. From a report: New semiconductor factories being built in the US by four of the biggest manufacturers -- Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Micron -- could use more than twice as much electricity as the city of Seattle once they're operational. These companies claim to run on renewable energy, but according to an analysis by nonprofit Stand.earth, that's not entirely true. Semiconductors happen to make up a big chunk of a device's carbon footprint. And unless companies turn to clean energy, they could wind up driving up greenhouse gas emissions as domestic chip manufacturing makes a comeback.

The CHIPS and Science Act, which passed in 2022, set aside $52.7 billion in funding for domestic chip manufacturing. Now, the four companies scrutinized in the report have plans to build megafactories in Arizona, Ohio, Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and New York. Each of those megafactories alone could use as much electricity as a medium-sized town, according to the report. Cumulatively, nine facilities could eventually add 2.1 gigawatts in new electricity demand. "We're not slowing down on any of our sustainability commitments, even with our recently announced investments," Intel said in an email.

Andrew Jones reports via SpaceNews: The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) plans to launch four-meter and five-meter-diameter reusable rockets for the first time in 2025 and 2026 respectively, Wang Wei, a deputy to the National People's Congress, told China News Service March 4. The reports do not clearly identify the two rockets. CASC is known to be developing a new, 5.0m-diameter crew launch vehicle, known as the Long March 10. A single stick version would be used to launch a new-generation crew spacecraft to low Earth orbit and could potentially fly in 2025. A three-core variant will launch the "Mengzhou" crew spacecraft into trans-lunar orbit.

The rocket is key to China's plans to put astronauts on the moon before 2030. The Long March 10 lunar variant will be 92 meters long and be able to launch 27 tons into trans-lunar orbit. The 4.0-meter-diameter launcher could be a rocket earlier proposed by CASC's Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). That rocket would be able to launch up to 6,500 kg of payload to 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). It would notably use engines developed by the commercial engine maker Jiuzhou Yunjian.

CASC's first move to develop a reusable rocket centered on making a recoverable version of the Long March 8. That plan appears to have been abandoned. SAST also plans to debut the 3.8m-diameter Long March 12 later this year from a new commercial launch site. While the Long March 10 has specific, defined uses for lunar and human spaceflight, the second reusable rocket would appear to be in competition with China's commercial rocket companies. While this suggests duplication of effort, it also fits into a national strategy to develop reusable rockets and support commercial ecosystems. The moves would greatly boost China's options for launch and access to space. It would also provide new capacity needed to help construction planned low Earth orbit megaconstellations.

The loss of Arctic sea ice has long been a graphic measure of human-caused climate change, with wrenching images of suffering polar bears illustrating a worsening planetary crisis. Now, new research has found that Arctic Ocean sea ice is shrinking even faster than previously thought -- and that the Arctic may start to see its first "ice-free" days within the current decade. From a report: That troubling milestone could occur before the end of the decade or sometime in the 2030s -- as many as 10 years earlier than previous projections, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. The study defines "ice-free" as when the Arctic Ocean has less than 1 million square kilometers, or 386,000 square miles, of ice.

By midcentury -- 2035 to 2067 -- the Arctic could see consistent ice-free conditions in September, the month when sea ice concentrations are typically at their minimum, the study found. The precise timing of such losses depends on how soon humanity is able to reduce fossil fuel emissions that are contributing to global warming. Under a high-emission scenario in which fossil fuel use continues unabated, the Arctic would be ice-free between the months of May and January by 2100, the study says. Even under a low-emission scenario, the Arctic would still be ice-free between August and October by that same year.

In an update on CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Blue Origin said it was aiming to send an uncrewed lander to the surface of the moon in the next 12 to 16 months. A crewed version is expected to follow. GeekWire reports: "We're expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today," [said John Couluris, senior vice president for lunar permanence at Blue Origin]. "I understand I'm saying that publicly, but that's what our team is aiming towards." Couluris was referring to a pathfinder version of Blue Origin's nearly three-story-tall Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander, which is taking shape at Blue Origin's production facility in Huntsville, Ala. The Pathfinder Mission would demonstrate the MK1's capabilities -- including its hydrogen-fueled BE-7 engine, its precision landing system and its ability to deliver up to 3 tons of payload anywhere on the moon.

Blue Origin envisions building multiple cargo landers, as well as a crewed version of the Blue Moon lander that could transport NASA astronauts to and from the lunar surface. The MK1 cargo lander is designed for a single launch and delivery, but the crewed lander would be reusable. "We'll launch them to lunar orbit, and we'll leave them there," Couluris explained. "And we'll refuel them in orbit, so that multiple astronauts can use the same vehicle back and forth."

The Pathfinder Mission would be funded by Blue Origin, but NASA is providing support for other Blue Moon missions. Blue Origin's $3.4 billion contract with NASA calls for the crewed lander to be available for the Artemis 5 moon mission by 2029, with an uncrewed test flight as part of the buildup. The in-space refueling operation would make use of a cislunar transporter, built by Lockheed Martin, that could travel between low Earth orbit and lunar orbit with supplies. "We are now building with NASA the infrastructure to ensure lunar permanency," Couluris said. NASA is providing funding for the Blue Moon landing system as an alternative to SpaceX's Starship system, which is under development at SpaceX's Starbase in South Texas. The crewed Starship lunar lander is scheduled to come into play for Artemis 3, a milestone landing mission that's currently scheduled for 2026. [...]

Blue Origin plans to send the MK1 lander to the moon on its reusable New Glenn rocket, which is also under development. A couple of weeks ago, a pathfinder version of that rocket was raised on a Florida launch pad for the first time, and it's currently going through a series of cryogenic tanking tests. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, who was brought over to the company from Amazon last year to accelerate work on New Glenn, said in a LinkedIn post that he's "looking forward to bringing this heavy-lift capacity to our customers later this year." One of the early launches is tasked with sending a pair of NASA probes to Mars.

The Washington Post shares some surprising news from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, a 44-year-old nonprofit which works on government energy policies and produces its own research and analysis.

The group "has rated the pollution from vehicles for decades," according to the article — but "says the winning car this year is the Toyota Prius Prime SE, a plug-in hybrid that can go 44 miles on electricity before switching to hybrid." "It's the shape of the body, the technology within it, and the overall weight," said Peter Huether, senior research associate for transportation at ACEEE. "And all different types of Priuses are very efficient...." [T]he Prius Prime also won out in 2020 and 2022. But with more and more electric vehicles on the market, the staying power of the plug-in hybrid is surprising.

The analysis shows that simply running on electricity is not enough to guarantee that a car is "green" — its weight, battery size and overall efficiency matter, too. While a gigantic electric truck weighing thousands of pounds might be better than a gas truck of the same size, both will be outmatched by a smaller, efficient gas vehicle. And the more huge vehicles there are on the road, the harder it will be for the United States to meet its goal of zeroing out emissions by 2050.

The GreenerCars report analyzes 1,200 cars available in 2024, assessing both the carbon dioxide emissions of the vehicle while it's on the road and the emissions of manufacturing the car and battery. It also assesses the impact of pollutants beyond carbon dioxide, including nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter — all of which can harm human health. The Toyota Prius Prime received a score of 71, followed by several all-electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf and Mini Cooper SE with scores in the high 60s. The Toyota RAV4 Prime, a plug-in hybrid SUV with 42 miles in range, got a score of 64. One gas hybrid, the Hyundai Elantra Blue, made the list as well — thanks to an efficient design and good mileage.

At the bottom of the list were large gas-guzzling trucks such as the Ford F-150 Raptor R, with scores in the 20s. So was one electric car: the Hummer EV, which weighs 9,000 pounds and scored a 29... The Prius Prime outranked its competitors, Huether said, because of its small battery — which lowers the emissions and pollution associated with manufacturing — and its high efficiency. The vehicle's battery is less than one-tenth the size of the battery on the monstrous Hummer EV.

Microsoft built two datacenters west of Phoenix, with plans for seven more (serving, among other companies, OpenAI). "Microsoft has been adding data centers at a stupendous rate, spending more than $10 billion on cloud-computing capacity in every quarter of late," writes the Atlantic. "One semiconductor analyst called this "the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen."

But is this part of a concerning trend? Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. That might be a burden in the best of times. As of 2023, it seemed absurd. Phoenix had just endured its hottest summer ever, with 55 days of temperatures above 110 degrees. The weather strained electrical grids and compounded the effects of the worst drought the region has faced in more than a millennium. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower throughout the region, has been dwindling. Farmers have already had to fallow fields, and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year... [T]here were dozens of other facilities I could visit in the area, including those run by Apple, Amazon, Meta, and, soon, Google. Not too far from California, and with plenty of cheap land, Greater Phoenix is among the fastest-growing hubs in the U.S. for data centers....

Microsoft, the biggest tech firm on the planet, has made ambitious plans to tackle climate change. In 2020, it pledged to be carbon-negative (removing more carbon than it emits each year) and water-positive (replenishing more clean water than it consumes) by the end of the decade. But the company also made an all-encompassing commitment to OpenAI, the most important maker of large-scale AI models. In so doing, it helped kick off a global race to build and deploy one of the world's most resource-intensive digital technologies. Microsoft operates more than 300 data centers around the world, and in 2021 declared itself "on pace to build between 50 and 100 new datacenters each year for the foreseeable future...."

Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year... that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers' electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden... [T]ensions over data centers' water use are cropping up not just in Arizona but also in Oregon, Uruguay, and England, among other places in the world.
The article points out that Microsoft "is transitioning some data centers, including those in Arizona, to designs that use less or no water, cooling themselves instead with giant fans." And an analysis (commissioned by Microsoft) on the impact of one building said it would use about 56 million gallons of drinking water each year, equivalent to the amount used by 670 families, according to the article. "In other words, a campus of servers pumping out ChatGPT replies from the Arizona desert is not about to make anyone go thirsty."

It completed the most precise landing ever on the moon — albeit upside-down. And then it faced a "lunar night" lasting about two weeks where temperatures drop to -270 degrees Fahrenheit, reports the Times of India.

But then, "Despite not being designed for the extreme temperatures, SLIM surprised scientists by coming back to life after the two-week-long lunar night." More from Space.com: The lander woke up on February 26 during extremely hot temperatures of 212 Fahrenheit (100 Celsius) in its region and has been making contact here and there with Earth in the days since. Most recently, SLIM attempted observations with its multiband spectroscopic camera, but "it did not work properly," JAXA officials wrote. "This seems to be due to the effects of overnight," the update continued, referring to the frigid two-week-long lunar night that SLIM experienced before the sun shone near Shioli crater again. "But we will continue to investigate based on the data we have obtained for the next opportunity...."
"We received so much support for our operations after the lunar night," the agency posted on social media — adding "thank you!"

The Times of India reports that "JAXA officially announced SLIM's return to a dormant state on March 1, sharing an image of the lunar surface captured by the probe."

Above the photo, JAXA posted this hopeful message. "Although the probability of a failure increases with the repeated severe temperature cycles, SLIM operation will attempt to resume when the sun rises (late March). #GoodAfterMoon."

And Space.com notes that "Despite all, SLIM has met both main and extended mission objectives: Landing precisely on the moon, deploying two tiny rovers and conducting science with its navigation camera and its spectroscopic camera, particularly searching for signs of olivine on the surface."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Space.com writes that NASA's plan to return samples from Mars to the earth "is facing major challenges, according to a new report.

"Design, cost and scheduling are all significant obstacles, an audit report of NASA's Mars Sample Return (MSR) Program by the agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) finds..." It involves landing on Mars to collect samples taken by the Perseverance rover and launching those samples to rendezvous with an orbiter, which will haul them to Earth. Perseverance is already on Mars, snagging and storing samples. But the program still needs to build a Sample Retrieval Lander and an Earth Return Orbiter, the latter being developed and funded by the European Space Agency. The Mars Sample Return program is one of the most technically complex, operationally demanding and ambitious robotic science missions ever undertaken by NASA, according to the OIG report.

The report notes design, architecture and schedule issues with the Capture Containment and Return System. These design issues resulted in adding about $200 million to the budget and one year of lost schedule... There is concern that, due to the number and significance of cost increase indicators so far, the $7.4 billion estimate is "premature and may be insufficient," the report finds. Now, the complexity... could drive costs to between $8 billion to $11 billion, the OIG report notes, citing a September 2023 Independent Review Board report. Notably, a July 2020 estimate listed costs of $2.5 to $3 billion.

These new figures indicate significant financial challenges and uncertainties... Issues include inflation, supply chain problems and increases in funding requests for specific program components.