NASA is demonstrating laser communications on multiple missions -- showcasing the benefits infrared light can have for science and exploration missions transmitting terabytes of important data. NASA: The International Space Station is getting a "flashy" technology demonstration this November. The ILLUMA-T (Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) payload is launching to the International Space Station to demonstrate how missions in low Earth orbit can benefit from laser communications. Laser communications uses invisible infrared light to send and receive information at higher data rates, providing spacecraft with the capability to send more data back to Earth in a single transmission and expediting discoveries for researchers.

Managed by NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, ILLUMA-T is completing NASA's first bi-directional, end-to-end laser communications relay by working with the agency's LCRD (Laser Communications Relay Demonstration). LCRD launched in December 2021 and is currently demonstrating the benefits of laser communications from geosynchronous orbit by transmitting data between two ground stations on Earth in a series of experiments. Some of LCRD's experiments include studying atmospheric impact on laser signals, confirming LCRD's ability to work with multiple users, testing network capabilities like delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) over laser links, and investigating improved navigation capabilities.

Demand for climate-warming fuels like coal, oil and natural gas will likely peak before 2030, evidence of the accelerating global shift to energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gasses, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)'s World Energy Outlook. From a report: "The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it's unstoppable. It's not a question of 'if', it's just a matter of 'how soon' -- and the sooner the better for all of us," said Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, in a statement. The agency represents countries that make up more than 80% of global energy consumption. The annual IEA report estimates that in 2030 there will be 10 times as many electric vehicles on the road worldwide and 50% of the cars sold in the United States will be electric. The agency says solar panels installed across the globe will generate more electricity at the end of the decade than the U.S. power system produces now. And the report projects that renewable energy will supply 50% of the world's electricity needs, up from about 30% now.

But the report warns the pace of the transition will have to quicken considerably in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and avoid some of the worst case scenarios in a changing climate. The IEA's outlook lays out a strategy for meeting that goal that includes tripling renewable energy, doubling energy efficiency measures and slashing methane emissions from fossil fuel operations by 75% by 2030. Methane has more than 25 times the climate-warming potential of carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Climate and anti-fossil fuel groups say the IEA's methane strategy should be even more aggressive.

Companies including Nestle, Unilever, Mahindra Group and Volvo Cars are urging political leaders to agree a timeline at the upcoming U.N. climate summit to phase out fossil fuels. From a report: The 131 companies, which have nearly $1 trillion in global annual revenues, wrote in a letter published on Monday that attendees at the COP28 summit must commit to reach 100% decarbonised power systems by 2035 for richer economies, and help developing countries financially so they can ditch fossil fuels by 2040 at the latest. "Our businesses are feeling the impacts and cost of increasing extreme weather events resulting from climate change," the companies wrote in the letter, which was coordinated by the non-profit We Mean Business Coalition, which is pushing for greater climate action globally.

"To decarbonise the global energy system, we need to ramp up clean energy as fast as we phase out the use and production of fossil fuels," they wrote. The letter's 131 signatories, which include Bayer, Heineken, IKEA and Iberdrola, span a range of sectors and include multinationals and small and medium-sized businesses. Companies are increasingly committing to their own timelines for reducing their emissions, but many acknowledge that their ability to slow planet-warming CO2 emissions is contingent on faster action from governments.

Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, research indicates. The implications for sea level rise are "dire," scientists say, and mean some coastal cities may have to be abandoned. From a report: The ice sheet of west Antarctica would push up the oceans by 5 metres if lost completely. Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting. The analysis shows the rate of melting of the floating ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea will be three times faster this century compared with the previous century, even if the world meets the most ambitious Paris agreement target of keeping global heating below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Losing the floating ice shelves means the glacial ice sheets on land are freed to slide more rapidly into the ocean. Many millions of people live in coastal cities that are vulnerable to sea level rise, from New York to Mumbai to Shanghai, and more than a third of the global population lives within 62 miles (100km) of the coast. The climate crisis is driving sea level rise by the melting of ice sheets and glaciers and the thermal expansion of sea water. The biggest uncertainty in future sea level rise is what will happen in Antarctica, the scientists say, making planning to adapt to the rise very hard. Researchers said translation of the new findings on ice melting into specific estimates of sea level rise was urgently needed.

"It's not every day that you get to update the firmware on a device that was produced in the 1970s," writes Hackaday, "and rarely is said device well beyond the boundaries of our solar system.

"This is however exactly what the JPL team in charge of the Voyager 1 & 2 missions are facing, as they are in the process of sending fresh firmware patches over to these amazing feats of engineering."

From NASA's announcement: One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft's antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft... In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction [almost 1 degree] before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings... While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost — akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally — the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can't know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won't happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. "This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don't have a playbook," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "But they continue to come up with creative solutions."
But that's not the only issue: The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch, and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2...

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally... The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn't determine the cause and thus aren't sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

"This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible," said JPL's Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. "These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they're sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe."
Since their launch in 1977, NASA's two Voyager probes have travelled more than 12 billion miles (each!), and are still sending back data from beyond our solar system.

"No roof, no solar power. That has been the dispiriting equation shutting out roughly half of all Americans from plugging into the sun," writes the Washington Post's "Climate Coach" column.

"But signing up for solar soon might be as easy as subscribing to Netflix." Scores of new small solar farms that sell clean, local electricity directly to customers are popping up. The setup, dubbed "community solar," is designed to bring solar power to people who don't own their own homes or can't install panels — often at prices below retail electricity rates...

At least 22 states have passed legislation encouraging independent community solar projects, but developers are just beginning to expand. Most existing projects are booked. At the moment, community solar projects in the United States generate enough electricity to power about 918,000 homes — less than 1 percent of total households, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a nonprofit trade group. But as more states join, and the Environmental Protection Agency's "Solar for All" program pours billions into federal solar power grants, more Americans will get the chance...

While projects exist in most states, they are highly concentrated: More than half are in Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York. These might be on a condo roof, or on open land like the 10-MW Fresno community solar farm, on a city-owned plot surrounded by agricultural land. Most are small: 2 megawatts of capacity on average, about enough to power 200 to 400 homes... The renewable energy marketplace EnergySage and the nonprofit Solar United Neighbors connect customers to community solar projects in their region. People generally receive monthly credits for electricity produced by their share of solar panels. These are subtracted from their total electricity bill or credited on future bills... Subscribers on average save about 10 percent on their utility bill (the range is 5 percent to 15 percent).

These economics are propelling the industry to record heights. Between 2016 and 2019, community solar capacity more than quadrupled to 1.4 gigawatts. By the end of this year, energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates, there will be 6 GW of community solar. And the Energy Department wants to see community solar reach 5 million households by 2025. "The economics are strongly on the side of doing this," says Dan Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's now cheaper to build new solar than to operate old fossil [fuel plants]. ... We're at the takeoff point."
The article notes "solar for renters" saves about $100 per year for the average ratepayer (while rooftop solar arrays may save homeowners over $1,000 annually). But according to the article, the arrangement still "reflects a new reality...

"Solar energy prices are falling as private and public money, and new laws, are fueling a massive expansion of small-scale community solar projects."

"A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry," reports Ars Technica.

The move comes "following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners." Navigator CO2 on Friday said developing its carbon capture and storage (CCS) project called Heartland Greenway had been "challenging" because of the unpredictable nature of regulatory and government processes in South Dakota and Iowa. Navigator's decision to scrap its flagship $3.1 billion project — one of the biggest of its kind in the US — is a blow for a fledgling industry... It also represents a setback for the carbon-intensive corn ethanol refining industry, a pillar of the rural Midwestern economy which is targeting industry-scale CCS as a way to reduce emissions...

The project faced opposition from local landowners, who expressed concerns about safety and property seizures, and some environmentalists who describe CO2 pipelines as dangerous and a way to prop up the fossil fuels industry, which already has a network of such infrastructure. Addressing the decision by Navigator, the Coalition To Stop CO2 Pipelines said it "celebrates this victory," but added: "we also know that the tax incentives made available by the federal government for carbon capture, transport and storage likely mean another entity will pick up Navigator's project, or find a different route through Illinois."
The article cites one analyst at energy research firm Wood Mackenzie who believes this cancellation could benefit rival carbon-capture companies like Summit Carbon Solutions, which is planning an even larger network of CO2 pipelines throughout the Midwest, and could try to sign deals with Navigator's former customers.

Linus Torvalds has said he bought a Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux for his daughter. Now ZDNet shares some trivia from the history of "the most well-known Linux laptop," citing a presentation by Barton George, Dell Technologies' Developer Community manager, at the Linux/open-source conference All Things Open: First, however, you should know that Dell has supported Linux desktops and laptops since the middle 2000s. In 2006, Michael Dell told me that Dell would be the first major PC vendor to release and support desktop Linux — and this proved to be a success. Barton George explained that Dell had always done great volume with these computers. Not volume, like the Windows machines, of course, but enough that Dell has always offered Linux-based — primarily Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) powered — workstations.

Still, none of these machines really appealed to developers... George announced on his personal blog what Dell was planning, and his traffic went from 60 views a day to 15,000. Then, as now, there's a lot of interest in laptops that come with Linux ready to go... Dell got together with Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, to make sure all the drivers were in place for a top-notch Ubuntu Linux developer desktop experience. Indeed, the name 'Project Sputnik' is a nod to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO. A decade before the project itself, Shuttleworth had spent eight days orbiting the Earth in a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. George and the crew decided "Soyuz" didn't have an inspiring ring to it, so the company went with "Sputnik" instead.

George continued: "We announced a beta program for the machine with a 10% off offer. We thought, well, we'll probably get 300 people. Instead, we got 6,000. This is where senior management said OK, you've got something real."

An anonymous reader shared this report from SciTechDaily: Since the 1980s, researchers have observed significant periods of unrest in a region of California's Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains characterized by swarms of earthquakes as well as the ground inflating and rising by almost half an inch per year during these periods. The activity is concerning because the area, called the Long Valley Caldera, sits atop a massive dormant supervolcano... What is behind the increased activity in the last few decades? Could it be that the area is preparing to erupt again? Or could the uptick in activity actually be a sign that the risk of a massive eruption is decreasing?

To answer these questions, Caltech researchers have created the most detailed underground images to date of the Long Valley Caldera, reaching depths up to 10 kilometers within the Earth's crust. These high-resolution images reveal the structure of the earth beneath the caldera and show that the recent seismic activity is a result of fluids and gases being released as the area cools off and settles down.

The work was conducted in the laboratory of Zhongwen Zhan (PhD '14), professor of geophysics. A paper describing the research was published on October 18 in the journal Science Advances. "We don't think the region is gearing up for another supervolcanic eruption, but the cooling process may release enough gas and liquid to cause earthquakes and small eruptions," says Zhan. "For example, in May 1980, there were four magnitude 6 earthquakes in the region alone."

Nearly two dozen species are being taken off America's endangered species list, reports CBS News, "because they are extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday." Most of the species were listed under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s or 1980s and were very low in numbers or likely already extinct at the time of listing. In the years since, "rigorous reviews of the best available science" have been conducted to determine whether the animals are extinct. "Federal protection came too late to reverse these species' decline, and it's a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it's too late," Service Director Martha Williams said. Scientists in 2019 warned that worldwide, 1 million species of plants and animals were at risk of extinction.

There are more than 1,300 species listed as either endangered or threatened in the United States under the Endangered Species Act. The 21 species being removed include one mammal, 10 types of birds, two species of fish and eight types of mussels. Eight of the 21 species were found in Hawaii.
From the agency's announcement: The 21 species extinctions highlight the importance of the Endangered Species Act and efforts to conserve species before declines become irreversible. The circumstances of each also underscore how human activity can drive species decline and extinction by contributing to habitat loss, overuse, and the introduction of invasive species and diseases...

The Endangered Species Act has been highly effective and credited with saving 99% of listed species from extinction. Thus far, more than 100 species of plants and animals have been delisted based on recovery or reclassified from endangered to threatened based on improved conservation status, and hundreds more species are stable or improving thanks to the collaborative actions of Tribes, federal agencies, state and local governments, conservation organizations and private citizens.
An official from the agency said in the announcement "The ultimate goal is to recover these species, so they no longer need the Act's protection."

Buckeye, Arizona, is eyeing 'crazy' ideas to keep growing, including piping water hundreds of miles uphill from Mexico. From a report: Arizona, stressed by years of drought, has declared its housebuilding boom will have to be curbed due to a lack of water but one of its fastest-growing cities is refusing to give up its relentless march into the desert -- even if it requires constructing a pipeline that would bring water across the border from Mexico. The population of Buckeye, located 35 miles west of Phoenix, has doubled over the past decade to just under 120,000 and it is now priming itself to eventually become one of the largest cities in the US west. The city's boundaries are vast -- covering an area stretching out into the Sonoran Desert that would encompass two New York Cities -- and so are its ambitions.

Buckeye expects to one day contain as many as 1.5 million people, rivaling or even surpassing Phoenix -- the sixth largest city in the US that uses roughly 2bn gallons of water a day -- by sprawling out the tendrils of suburbia, with its neat lawns, snaking roads and large homes, into the baking desert. Arizona's challenging water situation appears a major barrier to such hopes, however. In June, the state announced that new uses of its groundwater have essentially hit a limit, placing restrictions on house building, just a few months after the state lost a fifth of its water allocation from the ailing Colorado River.

There isn't enough water beneath Buckeye to support homes not already being built, Arizona's water department has said. But the city is embarking upon an extraordinary scramble to find water from other sources -- by recycling it, purchasing it or importing it -- to maintain the sort of hurtling growth that continues to propel the US west even in an era of climate crisis. "Personally, my view is that we are still full steam ahead," said Eric Orsborn, Buckeye's ebullient mayor. Orsborn said he understands the state has to be "really careful" with water resources but that the city is exploring "options to keep us going and allow us to continue to grow at the rate that we want to grow."

Tereza Pultarova reports via Space.com: Light pollution is a growing threat to astronomy, but a new streetlamp technology could restore clear views of the night sky. [...] A study published earlier this year found that stars are disappearing from the sky at an average rate of 10% per year. This trend affects even the world's most remote observatories. Germany-based startup StealthTransit recently tested a solution to this growing issue. "Unfortunately, this problem haunts almost all observatories today," Vlad Pashkovsky, StealthTransit's founder and CEO, told Space.com in an email. "Modern telescopes are highly sensitive and feel the impact of outdoor lighting of cities located at the distance of 50 or even 200 kilometers [30 to 120 miles]. This means that virtually every observatory on Earth either already needs, or will need in the future 10 years, protection from the light of large cities."

StealthTransit's solution relies on three components: A simple device that makes LED lights flicker at a very high frequency that is imperceptible to the human eye, a GPS receiver, and a specially designed shutter on the telescope's camera that can blink in sync with the LED lights. The GPS technology guides the telescope's shutter to open only during the fleeting moments when the LED lights are switched off. The experiments, conducted at an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, showed that the technology, dubbed the DarkSkyProtector, could reduce unwanted sky glow in astronomical images by 94%. "We can say that the telescope was seeing almost a dark sky at this time," Pashkovsky said. "The important thing about our technology is that it makes all kinds of lights astronomy-friendly, including outdoor advertising and indoor lighting in apartments, offices and stores."

The technology could filter out lights from nearby towns and villages as well as those surrounding the observatory itself. It might sound impractical to refit an entire town with devices that allow lamps to blink, but Pashkovsky said that most existing LED lights can operate in the blinking mode and that new lamps designed specifically with sky protection in mind would be no costlier than existing LED technology. The most expensive element of the DarkSkyProtector system is the telescope shutter, which needs to be lightweight and agile enough to blink about 150 times per second. StealthTransit tested the prototype shutter on a 24-inch-wide (60 centimeters) telescope and hopes to make the technology available for larger telescopes. Although StealthTransit's technology is not yet ready for commercial use, Pashkovsky said, the firm hopes to have a product fit for the world's best telescopes in five to seven years.

The government of India said on Tuesday that it plans to put an astronaut on the moon by 2040 and build an Earth-orbiting space station by 2035. Space.com reports: On Aug. 23, India became just the fourth nation ever to soft-land a spacecraft -- its Chandrayaan-3 lander-rover duo -- on the surface of the moon. In a recent meeting with the Indian government department that manages the country's space program, Prime Minister Narendra Modi "directed that India should now aim for new and ambitious goals," according to an official statement. India's future moon exploration efforts will include a series of additional robotic Chandrayaan missions, a new launch pad and a heavy-lift launch vehicle, the statement added.

India's delayed Gaganyaan human spaceflight program, now aiming to fly three astronauts to low Earth orbit in 2025, will feature 20 major tests, including three uncrewed missions to test the launch vehicle over the course of the remainder of this year and all of next. [...] By the middle of the 2030s, India hopes to have a 20-ton space station in a fixed orbit 248 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, with capabilities to host astronauts for 15 to 20 days at a time, K. Sivan, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), has previously said.

Further down the pipeline of missions, ISRO is planning a Venus orbiter called Shukrayaan-1 to study the surface of that hellishly hot planet. The payloads for that mission are currently being developed, current ISRO chairman S. Somanath had said last month. A second orbiter mission to Mars is also on the books, according to the latest statement. The nation's first, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), was launched in 2013 and studied the Red Planet's atmosphere for eight years before it lost contact with Earth in April 2022. The follow-up mission, Mars Orbiter Mission 2 or MOM 2, will likely include cameras to study the planet's crust and may also include a lander, although many of the mission plans are yet to be finalized.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On May 4, 2022, NASA's InSight lander detected the largest quake yet recorded on Mars, one with a 4.7 magnitude -- fairly modest by Earth standards but strong for our planetary neighbor. Given Mars lacks the geological process called plate tectonics that generates earthquakes on our planet, scientists suspected a meteorite impact had caused this marsquake. But a search for an impact crater came up empty, leading scientists to conclude that this quake was caused by tectonic activity -- rumbling in the planet's interior -- and giving them a deeper understanding about what makes Mars shake, rattle and roll.

"We concluded that the largest marsquake seen by InSight was tectonic, not an impact. This is important as it shows the faults on Mars can host hefty marsquakes," said planetary scientist Ben Fernando of the University of Oxford in England, lead author of the research published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "We really thought that this event might be an impact." "This represents a significant step forward in our understanding of Martian seismic activity and takes us one step closer to better unraveling the planet's tectonic processes," added Imperial College London planetary scientist and study co-author Constantinos Charalambous, co-chair of InSight's Geology Working Group.

NASA retired InSight in 2022 after four years of operations. In all, InSight's seismometer instrument detected 1,319 marsquakes. Earth's crust - its outermost layer - is divided into immense plates that continually shift, triggering quakes. The Martian crust is a single solid plate. But that does not mean all is quiet on the Martian front. "There are still faults that are active on Mars. The planet is still slowly shrinking and cooling, and there is still motion within the crust even though there are no active plate tectonic processes going on anymore. These faults can trigger quakes," Fernando said.

Michael Kan reports via PCMag: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has announced a new spacecraft that promises to help humanity build and maintain projects in outer space. The company today debuted Blue Ring, a so-called "space platform" that can orbit Earth, but also travel around the Moon, with the goal of providing delivery and logistics support to other space projects. To do so, Blue Ring functions as a maneuverable platform that can host, transport, and refuel other spacecraft. In addition, it can relay data while also offering an "in-space" cloud computing capability, according to Blue Origin's announcement.

Other rockets, particularly those from rival SpaceX, can already send satellites up into predictable orbits around Earth. In contrast, Blue Ring is designed to serve customers for more "dynamic" space projects at varying orbits, Blue Origin Lars Hoffman VP tells Aviation Week. "It has a lot of capability and a lot of energy. It is a platform that has versatility across multiple missions and multiple customers on any given launch," Hoffman says.

The company adds that Blue Ring can travel with payloads of over 6,600 pounds. According to Aviation Week, Blue Origin is eyeing 2025 as a realistic launch date for the spacecraft, which has already received some interest from customers. Hoffman also says Blue Ring will be "launch-vehicle agnostic," allowing it to fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket or Blue Origin's own New Glenn, which is aiming to be used in its first mission next year.

This week Bloomberg explored so-called "zombie viruses" — that is, long-dormant microbes which they call "yet another risk that climate change poses to public health" as ground that's been frozen for "milleniums" suddenly starts thawing — for example, in the Arctic, which they write is warming "faster than any other area on earth." With the planet already 1.2C warmer than pre-industrial times, scientists are predicting the Arctic could be ice-free in summers by 2030s. Concerns that the hotter climate will release trapped greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere as the region's permafrost melts have been well-documented, but dormant pathogens are a lesser explored danger. Last year, virologist Jean-Michel Claverie's team published research showing they'd extracted multiple ancient viruses from the Siberian permafrost, all of which remained infectious...

Ways in which this could present a threat are still emerging. A heat wave in Siberia in the summer of 2016 activated anthrax spores, leading to dozens of infections, killing a child and thousands of reindeer. In July this year, a separate team of scientists published findings showing that even multicellular organisms could survive permafrost conditions in an inactive metabolic state, called cryptobiosis. They successfully reanimated a 46,000-year-old roundworm from the Siberian permafrost, just by re-hydrating it...

Claverie first showed "live" viruses could be extracted from the Siberian permafrost and successfully revived in 2014. For safety reasons his research focused only on viruses capable of infecting amoebas, which are far enough removed from the human species to avoid any risk of inadvertent contamination. But he felt the scale of the public health threat the findings indicated had been under-appreciated or mistakenly considered a rarity. So, in 2019, his team proceeded to isolate 13 new viruses, including one frozen under a lake more than 48,500 years ago, from seven different ancient Siberian permafrost samples — evidence to their ubiquity. Publishing the findings in a 2022 study, he emphasized that a viral infection from an unknown, ancient pathogen in humans, animals or plants could have potentially "disastrous" effects.

"50,000 years back in time takes us to when Neanderthal disappeared from the region," he says. "If Neanderthals died of an unknown viral disease and this virus resurfaces, it could be a danger to us."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phys.org: If global temperatures increase by 1 degrees Celsius (C) or more than current levels, each year billions of people will be exposed to heat and humidity so extreme they will be unable to naturally cool themselves, according to interdisciplinary research from the Penn State College of Health and Human Development, Purdue University College of Sciences and Purdue Institute for a Sustainable Future... Humans can only withstand certain combinations of heat and humidity before their bodies begin to experience heat-related health problems, such as heat stroke or heart attack. As climate change pushes temperatures higher around the world, billions of people could be pushed beyond these limits...

Results of the study indicate that if global temperatures increase by 2 degreesC above pre-industrial levels, the 2.2 billion residents of Pakistan and India's Indus River Valley, the one billion people living in eastern China and the 800 million residents of sub-Saharan Africa will annually experience many hours of heat that surpass human tolerance... Troublingly, researchers said, these regions are also in lower-to-middle income nations, so many of the affected people may not have access to air conditioning or any effective way to mitigate the negative health effects of the heat.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared the Washington Post's speculation about the possibility of a gigantic solar storm leaving millions without phone or internet access, and requiring months or years of rebuilding: The odds are low that in any given year a storm big enough to cause effects this widespread will happen. And the severity of those impacts will depend on many factors, including the state of our planet's magnetic field on that day. But it's a near certainty that some form of this catastrophe will happen someday, says Ian Cohen, a chief scientist who studies heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr remains skeptical. "I've only heard of two major events in the last 1300 years, one estimated to be between A. D. 744 and A. D. 993, and the other being the Carrington Event in 1859.

But efforts are being made to improve our readiness, reports the Washington Post: To get ahead of this threat, a loose federation of U.S. and international government agencies, and hundreds of scientists affiliated with those bodies, have begun working on how to make predictions about what our Sun might do. And a small but growing cadre of scientists argue that artificial intelligence will be an essential component of efforts to give us advance notice of such a storm...

At present, no warning system is capable of giving us more than a few hours' notice of a devastating solar storm. If it's moving fast enough, it could be as little as 15 minutes. The most useful sentinel — a sun-orbiting satellite launched by the U.S. in 2015 — is much closer to Earth than the sun, so that by the time a fast-moving storm crosses its path, an hour or less is all the warning we get. The European Space Agency has proposed a system to help give earlier warning by putting a satellite dubbed Vigil into orbit around the Sun, positioned roughly the same distance from the Earth as the Earth is from the Sun. It could potentially give us up to five hours of warning about an incoming solar storm-enough time to do the main thing that can help preserve electronics: Switch them all off.

But what if there were a way to predict this better, by analyzing the data we've got? That's the idea behind a new, AI-powered model recently unveiled by scientists at the Frontier Development Lab — a public-private partnership that includes NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The model uses deep learning, a type of AI, to examine the flow of the solar wind, the usually calm stream of particles that flow outward from our sun and through the solar system to well beyond the orbit of Pluto. Using observations of that solar wind, the model can predict the "geomagnetic disturbance" an incoming solar storm observed by sun-orbiting satellites would cause at any given point on Earth, the researchers involved say. This model can predict just how big the flux of the Earth's magnetic field will be when the solar storm arrives, and thus how big the induced currents in power lines and undersea internet cables will be...

Already, the first primitive ancestor of future AI-based solar-weather alert systems is live. The DstLive system, which debuted on the web in December 2022, uses machine learning to take data about the state of Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind and translate both into a single measure for the entire planet, known as DST. Think of it as the Richter scale, but for solar storms. This number is intended to give us an idea of how intense a storm's impact will be on earth, an hour to six hours in advance.

Unfortunately, we may not know how useful such systems are until we live through a major solar storm.

More than 40% of Antarctica's ice shelves have shrunk since 1997 with almost half showing "no sign of recovery," a study has found, linking the change to the climate breakdown. From a report: Scientists at the University of Leeds have calculated that 67tn tonnes of ice was lost in the west while 59tn tonnes was added to the east between 1997 and 2021, resulting in a net loss of 7.5tn tonnes. Warm water on the western side of Antarctica has been melting ice, whereas in the east, ice shelves have either stayed the same or grown as the water is colder there. The ice shelves sit at the end of glaciers and slow their rate of flow into the sea. When they shrink, glaciers release larger amounts of freshwater into the sea which can disrupt the currents of the Southern Ocean.

Dr Benjamin Davison, an expert in Earth observation and the study's lead, said: "There is a mixed picture of ice-shelf deterioration, and this is to do with the ocean temperature and ocean currents around Antarctica. The western half is exposed to warm water, which can rapidly erode the ice shelves from below, whereas much of east Antarctica is currently protected from nearby warm water by a band of cold water at the coast." Scientists measured year-by-year changes to the ice using satellites that can see through the thick cloud during long polar nights.

Is the asteroid Psyche really a hunk of mostly metal? Is the object, which is nearly as wide as Massachusetts, the core of a baby planet whose rocky outer layers were knocked off during a cataclysmic collision in the early days of the solar system? Right now, all that astronomers can say is maybe, maybe not. NASA launched a spacecraft on Friday morning, also named Psyche, on a journey to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to find out. From a report: "We're really going to see a kind of new object, which means that a lot of our ideas are going to be proven wrong," said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University who serves as the mission's principal investigator.

Being proven wrong, she added, "is, I think, the most exciting thing in science." That voyage in search of answers kicked off Friday at 10:19 a.m. Eastern time. Falcon Heavy, the largest of SpaceX's operational rockets, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending the massive spacecraft on a journey that will last about six years and travel billions of miles. Friday's flight overcame early, unfavorable weather forecasts for a seemingly flawless flight. About eight minutes into the flight, the rocket's upper stage entered a 45-minute coasting period during which it will prepare to deploy the spacecraft on its flight away from Earth. The asteroid named Psyche has long been a curious enigma. Spotted in 1852 by Annibale de Gasparis, an Italian astronomer, it is named for the Greek goddess of the soul, and it was just the 16th asteroid to be discovered. In the early observations, it was, like the other asteroids, a starlike point of light that moved in an orbit around the sun, and not much more.