"NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission is mapping the prevalence of key minerals in the planet's dust-producing deserts — information that will advance our understanding of airborne dust's effects on climate," NASA announced this week.

"But EMIT has demonstrated another crucial capability: detecting the presence of methane, a potent greenhouse gas." In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 "super-emitters" in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates. "Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming. This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed — quickly," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

"The International Space Station and NASA's more than two dozen satellites and instruments in space have long been invaluable in determining changes to the Earth's climate. EMIT is proving to be a critical tool in our toolbox to measure this potent greenhouse gas — and stop it at the source...."

"These results are exceptional, and they demonstrate the value of pairing global-scale perspective with the resolution required to identify methane point sources, down to the facility scale," said David Thompson, EMIT's instrument scientist and a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. "It's a unique capability that will raise the bar on efforts to attribute methane sources and mitigate emissions from human activities."

Relative to carbon dioxide, methane makes up a fraction of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, but it's estimated to be 80 times more effective, ton for ton, at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the 20 years after release. Moreover, where carbon dioxide lingers for centuries, methane persists for about a decade, meaning that if emissions are reduced, the atmosphere will respond in a similar timeframe, leading to slower near-term warming.... "Some of the plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen — unlike anything that has ever been observed from space," said Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL leading the EMIT methane effort. "What we've found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations."

For example, the instrument detected a plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin. One of the largest oilfields in the world, the Permian spans parts of southeastern New Mexico and western Texas. In Turkmenistan, EMIT identified 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar. Blowing to the west, some plumes stretch more than 20 miles (32 kilometers).... With wide, repeated coverage from its vantage point on the space station, EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters — some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown.

"As it continues to survey the planet, EMIT will observe places in which no one thought to look for greenhouse-gas emitters before, and it will find plumes that no one expects," said Robert Green, EMIT's principal investigator at JPL.

The mission of NASA's robotic lander InSight "is nearing an end as dust obscures its solar panels," reports CNN. "In a matter of weeks, the lander won't be able to send a beep to show it's OK anymore."

"Before it bids farewell, though, the spacecraft still has some surprises in store." When Mars rumbled beneath InSight's feet on December 24, NASA scientists thought it was just another marsquake. The magnitude 4 quake was actually caused by a space rock slamming into the Martian surface a couple thousand miles away. The meteoroid left quite a crater on the red planet, and it revealed glimmering chunks of ice in an entirely unexpected place — near the warm Martian equator.
The chunks of ice — the size of boulders — "were found buried closer to the warm Martian equator than any ice that has ever been detected on the planet," CNN explained earlier this week. The article also adds that ice below the surface of Mars "could be used for drinking water, rocket propellant and even growing crops and plants by future astronauts. And the fact that the ice was found so near the equator, the warmest region on Mars, might make it an ideal place to land crewed missions to the red planet." Interestingly, they note that scientists only realized it was a meteoroid strike (and not an earthquake) when "Before and after photos captured from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling Mars since 2006, spotted a new crater this past February." A crater that was 492 feet (150 meters) across and 70 feet (21 meters) deep... When scientists connected the dots from both missions, they realized it was one of the largest meteoroid strikes on Mars since NASA began studying the red planet.... The journal Science published two new studies describing the impact and its effects on Thursday....

"The image of the impact was unlike any I had seen before, with the massive crater, the exposed ice, and the dramatic blast zone preserved in the Martian dust," said Liliya Posiolova, orbital science operations lead for the orbiter at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, in a statement....

Researchers estimated the meteoroid, the name for a space rock before it hits the ground, was about 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters). While this would have been small enough to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, the same can't be said for Mars, which has a thin atmosphere only 1% as dense as Earth's.... Some of the material blasted out of the crater landed as far as 23 miles (37 kilometers) away.

Teams at NASA also captured sound from the impact, so you can listen to what it sounds like when a space rock hits Mars. The images captured by the orbiter, along with seismic data recorded by InSight, make the impact one of the largest craters in our solar system ever observed as it was created.

CNN reports: Knowing you have higher than normal blood pressure — and taking medications daily to treat it — may be one key to avoiding dementia in later life, a new study found.

Scientists already know that having high blood pressure, particularly between ages 40 and 65, increases the risk of developing dementia in later life, said study coauthor Ruth Peters, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, via email. But she added that research has been less clear on whether lowering blood pressure in older adults would reduce that risk. "What is so exciting about our study is that the data shows that those people who were taking the blood pressure lowering medication had a lower risk of a dementia diagnosis than those taking a matching placebo," said Peters, who is also a senior research scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia, a nonprofit research organization....

The study, published this week in the European Heart Journal, combined data from five large randomized, double-blinded clinical trials of more than 28,000 older adults with an average age of 69 from 20 countries. All had a history of hypertension. Each of the clinical trials compared people taking blood pressure medications with people taking a matching placebo pill and followed them for an average of 4.3 years.

Pooling the data, Peters and her team found that a drop of about 10 mm/Hg on the systolic and 4 mm/Hg on the diastolic blood pressure readings at 12 months significantly lowered the risk of a dementia diagnosis. In addition, there was a broad linear relationship: As blood pressure dropped, so did cognitive risk, which held true until at least 100 mm/Hg systolic and 70 mm/Hg diastolic, the study said. There was also no sign that blood pressure medications may harm blood flow into the brain at later ages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Bumble bees play, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London published in Animal Behavior. It is the first time that object play behavior has been shown in an insect, adding to mounting evidence that bees may experience positive "feelings." The team of researchers set up numerous experiments to test their hypothesis, which showed that bumble bees went out of their way to roll wooden balls repeatedly despite there being no apparent incentive for doing so. The study also found that younger bees rolled more balls than older bees, mirroring human behavior of young children and other juvenile mammals and birds being the most playful, and that male bees rolled them for longer than their female counterparts.

The study followed 45 bumble bees in an arena and gave them the options of walking through an unobstructed path to reach a feeding area or deviating from this path into the areas with wooden balls. Individual bees rolled balls between 1 and, impressively, 117 times over the experiment. The repeated behavior suggested that ball-rolling was rewarding. This was supported by a further experiment where another 42 bees were given access to two colored chambers, one always containing movable balls and one without any objects. When tested and given a choice between the two chambers, neither containing balls, bees showed a preference for the color of the chamber previously associated with the wooden balls. The set-up of the experiments removed any notion that the bees were moving the balls for any greater purpose other than play. Rolling balls did not contribute to survival strategies, such as gaining food, clearing clutter, or mating and was done under stress-free conditions. [...] The new research showed the bees rolling balls repeatedly without being trained and without receiving any food for doing so -- it was voluntary and spontaneous -- therefore akin to play behavior as seen in other animals. Study first-author, Samadi Galpayage, Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University of London says that "it is certainly mind-blowing, at times amusing, to watch bumble bees show something like play. They approach and manipulate these 'toys' again and again. It goes to show, once more, that despite their little size and tiny brains, they are more than small robotic beings."

"They may actually experience some kind of positive emotional states, even if rudimentary, like other larger fluffy, or not so fluffy, animals do. This sort of finding has implications to our understanding of sentience and welfare of insects and will, hopefully, encourage us to respect and protect life on Earth ever more."

Technology allows sperm to be frozen longer than legal 50-year limit but poses medical and ethical questions. From a report: A change of law has paved the way for more babies to be born from sperm frozen up to 50 years ago, but experts say there is no scientific reason why sperm hundreds of years old cannot be used. This week, a boy was born using sperm frozen in 1996, collected when his father was diagnosed, aged 21, with Hodgkin lymphoma, in case his treatment caused infertility. Described as a "miracle" by his now 47-year-old father, Peter Hickles, the baby is close to holding the record for the longest gap between sperm collection and birth -- he was beaten by a baby born in the US using a 27-year-old sample.

When Hickles' sperm was frozen, he thought it would only be viable for 10 years. Although experts say the technology for freezing sperm has been around for decades, prior to a law change in the summer, gametes (eggs and sperm) could only be stored for 10 years, with occasional exceptions made for people with fertility problems. This has now been extended to 55 years, but Allan Pacey, a professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield, said there was no medical reason for this limit. "The legal 55-year limit has nothing to do with the shelf life of sperm, or for any other scientific reasons. It's more to do with what parliamentarians felt was right for society. But since frozen sperm are effectively in suspended animation, once they are frozen I don't see why they couldn't be kept for hundreds of years if the law allowed it."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2008, the United States embassy in Beijing installed an air-quality monitor and started tweeting out its findings every hour. Since then, these monitors have popped up in more than 50 embassies in countries and cities around the globe. Something unexpected happened in each of the cities in which the monitors appeared. Researchers found that, overall, air quality improved in the cities where embassies were tweeting out air-quality data. "We were surprised," Akshaya Jha, assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the paper's authors, told Ars. According to the World Health Organization, in 2019, more than 90 percent of the world's population lived in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. Further, according to Jha's paper, this phenomenon tends to be worse in low- and middle-income countries. However, air-quality monitoring in those countries is quite rare.

Work on this research began around a year ago. Jha's team wanted to look at something completely different: the impacts that improvements in air pollution had on hazard pay among embassy workers. However, when the team began studying the literature, they couldn't find good information on reductions in air pollution relative to when embassies started their monitoring in many locations. As such, they began looking into it themselves. To study this, they used satellite data to look at air pollution in 466 cities in 136 countries, of which 50 cities across 36 countries received the air-quality monitors by 2020. They looked at the air pollution in all of these cities in the years before and after the monitors were installed, using the years prior to installation and the cities that did not receive monitors as controls. The research found that the cities that had a US embassy that set up one of these monitors and tweeted out air-quality data saw a decrease of PM2.5 particulates to the tune of 2 to 4 micrograms per cubic meter -- compared to their air quality before getting the monitor and to other similar cities that do not have a monitor.

NASA obligated $2.04 billion to SpaceX in fiscal year 2022, which ended last month, according to new federal procurement data. For the first time, the amount paid by the space agency to SpaceX exceeds that paid to Boeing, which has long been the leading hardware provider to NASA. Boeing received $1.72 billion during the most recent fiscal year, based on data first reported by Aviation Week's Irene Klotz. Ars Technica reports: The California Institute of Technology, which manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory field center for NASA, remains the agency's No. 1 contractor, with $2.68 billion in funding. The academic institution is responsible for operating the California-based NASA field center and distributing funding for myriad robotic spacecraft missions such as Mars Perseverance and the Europa Clipper. On the one hand, the ascension of SpaceX to the No. 2 spot on NASA's contractor list represents a major shakeup in the order of things. For a long time, NASA's human spaceflight and exploration programs were dominated by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aerojet, Northrop Grumman, and a handful of other traditional defense aerospace contractors.

However, it should come as no surprise that a company that has recently delivered the most services -- and, arguably, value -- to NASA should start to receive a large share of its contract awards. This has been most notable with SpaceX's performance on Commercial Crew, NASA's program to buy transportation services from private companies to bring its astronauts to and from the International Space Station. NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to develop their spacecraft, paying Boeing about 60 percent more. At the time, it was widely believed that the traditional contractor, with this additional money, would deliver services sooner. But it was SpaceX that first flew crew to the space station in May 2020, and the company has since launched five operational missions to the orbiting laboratory. [...] Much of the funding increase for SpaceX in 2022, an increase of about $400 million over the previous year, appears to be driven by contracts for the Human Landing System as part of the Artemis Moon Program and the purchase of additional Crew Dragon missions to the space station. (Individual contracts can be found within the Federal Procurement Data System).

Europe has more natural gas than it knows what to do with. So much, in fact, that spot prices briefly went negative earlier this week. From a report: For months, officials have warned of an energy crisis this winter as Russia -- once the region's biggest supplier of natural gas -- slashed supplies in retaliation for sanctions Europe imposed over its invasion of Ukraine. Now, EU gas storage facilities are close to full, tankers carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) are lining up at ports, unable to unload their cargoes, and prices are tumbling. The price of benchmark European natural gas futures has dropped 20% since last Thursday, and by more than 70% since hitting a record high in late August. On Monday, Dutch gas spot prices for delivery within an hour -- which reflect real time European market conditions -- dipped below 0 Euro, according to data from the Intercontinental Exchange.

Prices turned negative because of an "oversupplied grid," Tomas Marzec-Manser, head of gas analytics at the Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), told CNN Business. It is a hugely surprising turn of events for Europe, where households and businesses have been clobbered by eye-watering rises in the price of one of its most important energy sources over the past year. Massimo Di Odoardo, vice president of gas and LNG research at Wood Mackenzie, says unseasonably mild weather is largely responsible for the dramatic change in fortune. "In countries like Italy, Spain, France, we're seeing temperatures and [gas] consumption closer to August and early September [levels]," he told CNN Business. "Even in countries in the Nordics, the UK and Germany, consumption is way below the average for this time of the year," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists with the University of Chicago have discovered a way to create a material that can be made like a plastic, but conducts electricity more like a metal. The research, published Oct. 26 in Nature, shows how to make a kind of material in which the molecular fragments are jumbled and disordered, but can still conduct electricity extremely well. "In principle, this opens up the design of a whole new class of materials that conduct electricity, are easy to shape, and are very robust in everyday conditions," said John Anderson, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago and the senior author on the study. "Essentially, it suggests new possibilities for an extremely important technological group of materials," said Jiaze Xie (Ph.D. '22, now at Princeton), the first author on the paper.

[...] Xie began experimenting with some materials discovered years ago, but largely ignored. He strung nickel atoms like pearls into a string of of molecular beads made of carbon and sulfur, and began testing. To the scientists' astonishment, the material easily and strongly conducted electricity. What's more, it was very stable. "We heated it, chilled it, exposed it to air and humidity, and even dripped acid and base on it, and nothing happened," said Xie. That is enormously helpful for a device that has to function in the real world. But to the scientists, the most striking thing was that the molecular structure of the material was disordered. "From a fundamental picture, that should not be able to be a metal," said Anderson. "There isn't a solid theory to explain this."

Xie, Anderson, and their lab worked with other scientists around the university to try to understand how the material can conduct electricity. After tests, simulations, and theoretical work, they think that the material forms layers, like sheets in a lasagna. Even if the sheets rotate sideways, no longer forming a neat lasagna stack, electrons can still move horizontally or vertically -- as long as the pieces touch. The end result is unprecedented for a conductive material. "It's almost like conductive Play-Doh -- you can smush it into place and it conducts electricity," Anderson said. The scientists are excited because the discovery suggests a fundamentally new design principle for electronics technology. Conductors are so important that virtually any new development opens up new lines for technology, they explained. The report says the new material "can be made at room temperatures" and "can also be used where the need for a device or pieces of the device to withstand heat, acid or alkalinity, or humidity has previously limited engineers' options to develop new technology."

Xie added: "We think we can make it 2D or 3D, make it porous, or even introduce other functions by adding different linkers or nodes."

One of Earth's toughest microbes could survive on Mars, lying dormant beneath the surface, for 280 million years, new research has shown. The findings increase the probability that microbial life could still exist on the Red Planet. Space.com reports: Deinococcus radiodurans, nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium," is one of the world's toughest microbes, capable of surviving in radiation strong enough to kill any other known life-form. Experiments have now shown that if Conan the Bacterium or a similar microbe existed on Mars, it could survive 33 feet (10 meters) beneath the surface, frozen and dried out, for 280 million years. In a study led by Michael Daly, who is a professor of pathology at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland and a member of the National Academies' Committee on Planetary Protection, scientists tested half a dozen microbes and fungi -- all "extremophiles" able to live in environments where other organisms die -- to see how long they could survive in an environment that simulated the mid-latitudes of Mars. During the experiments, organisms faced temperatures as low as minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 63 degrees Celsius) and exposure to ultraviolet light, gamma rays and high-energy protons mimicking the constant bombardment of Mars by solar ultraviolet light and cosmic radiation sleeting down from space.

After the bacteria and fungi had been exposed to various radiation levels in the experiment, Daly's team measured how much manganese antioxidants had accumulated in the cells of the microbes. Manganese antioxidants form as a result of radiation exposure, and the more that form, the more radiation the microbes can resist. Conan the Bacterium was the clear winner. The researchers found that Conan the Bacterium could absorb as much as 28,000 times more radiation than what a human can survive. This measurement allowed Daly's team to estimate how long the microbe could survive at different depths on Mars. Previous experiments, in which Conan the Bacterium had been suspended in liquid water and subjected to radiation like that found on Mars, had indicated that the microbe could survive below the surface of Mars for 1.2 million years.

However, the new tests, in which the microbe was frozen and dried out to mimic the cold and dry conditions on Mars, suggested that Conan the Bacterium would be able to survive 280 million years on Mars if buried at a depth of 33 feet. This lifespan is reduced to 1.5 million years if buried just 4 inches (10 centimeters) below the surface, and just a few hours on the surface, which is bathed in ultraviolet light. [...] The research also determined why Conan the Bacterium is so resistant to radiation. The scientists found that chromosomes and plasmids, which carry genetic information, in the microbe's cells are linked together, which keeps these structures aligned and prevents irradiated cells from breaking down until they can be repaired. "Although Deinococcus radiodurans buried in the Martian subsurface could not survive dormant for the estimated 2 to 2.5 billion years since flowing water disappeared on Mars, such Martian environments are regularly altered and melted by meteorite impacts," he said in a statement. "We suggest that periodic melting could allow intermittent repopulation and dispersal."

The findings were detailed in the journal Astrobiology.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Swarming bees produce so much electricity that they may affect local weather, new research suggests. The finding, which researchers made by measuring the electrical fields around honeybee (apis mellifera) hives, reveals that bees can produce as much atmospheric electricity as a thunderstorm. This can play an important role in steering dust to shape unpredictable weather patterns; and their impact may even need to be included in future climate models.

Insects' tiny bodies can pick up positive charge while they forage -- either from the friction of air molecules against their rapidly beating wings (honeybees can flap their wings more than 230 times a second) or from landing onto electrically charged surfaces. But the effects of these tiny charges were previously assumed to be on a small scale. Now, a new study, published Oct. 24 in the journal iScience, shows that insects can generate a shocking amount of electricity.

To test whether honeybees produce sizable changes in the electric field of our atmosphere, the researchers placed an electric field monitor and a camera near the site of several honeybee colonies. In the 3 minutes that the insects flooded into the air, the researchers found that the potential gradient above the hives increased to 100 volts per meter. In other swarming events, the scientists measured the effect as high as 1,000 volts per meter, making the charge density of a large honeybee swarm roughly six times greater than electrified dust storms and eight times greater than a stormcloud. The scientists also found that denser insect clouds meant bigger electrical fields -- an observation that enabled them to model other swarming insects such as locusts and butterflies.

Atmospheric levels of all three greenhouse gases have reached record highs, according to a study by the World Meteorological Organization, which scientists say means the world is "heading in the wrong direction." From a report: The WMO found there was the biggest year-on-year jump in methane concentrations in 2020 and 2021 since systematic measurements began almost 40 years ago. Methane levels have risen rapidly in recent years, puzzling scientists. Some blamed it on an increase in fracking in the US but this came into doubt as industrial emissions were not showing a similarly sharp rise.

Now the theory is that the methane rise could be caused by activities of microbes in wetlands, rice paddies and the guts of ruminants. Rising temperatures have caused the ideal conditions for microbial methane production, as they enjoy warm, damp areas. Carbon dioxide levels are also soaring, with the jump from 2020 to 2021 larger than the annual growth rate over the past decade. Measurements from WMO's global atmosphere watch network stations show these levels continue to rise. These greenhouse gases cause global heating, with the warming effect rising by 50% between 1990 and 2021. Carbon dioxide comprised about 80% of this increase. According to the WMO, carbon dioxide concentrations in 2021 were 415.7 parts per million, methane was 1908 parts per billion (ppb) and nitrous oxide was 334.5 ppb. These are respectively 149%, 262% and 124% of pre-industrial levels.

Longtime Slashdot reader Tablizer shares a report from CNN: The hunt for planets that could harbor life may have just narrowed dramatically. Scientists had long hoped and theorized that the most common type of star in our universe -- called an M dwarf -- could host nearby planets with atmospheres, potentially rich with carbon and perfect for the creation of life. But in a new study of a world orbiting an M dwarf 66 light-years from Earth, researchers found no indication such a planet could hold onto an atmosphere at all. Without a carbon-rich atmosphere, it's unlikely a planet would be hospitable to living things. Carbon molecules are, after all, considered the building blocks of life. And the findings don't bode well for other types of planets orbiting M dwarfs, said study coauthor Michelle Hill, a planetary scientist and a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside.

"The pressure from the star's radiation is immense, enough to blow a planet's atmosphere away," Hill said in a post on the university's website. M dwarf stars are known to be volatile, sputtering out solar flares and raining radiation on nearby celestial bodies. But for years, the hope had been that fairly large planets orbiting near M dwarfs could be in a Goldilocks environment, close enough to their small star to keep warm and large enough to cling onto its atmosphere. The nearby M dwarf, however, could be too intense to keep the atmosphere intact, according to the new study, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A similar phenomenon happens in our solar system: Earth's atmosphere also deteriorates because of outbursts from its nearby star, the sun. The difference is that Earth has enough volcanic activity and other gas-emitting activity to replace the atmospheric loss and make it barely detectable, according to the research. However, the M dwarf planet examined in the study, GJ 1252b, "could have 700 times more carbon than Earth has, and it still wouldn't have an atmosphere. It would build up initially, but then taper off and erode away," said study coauthor and UC Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane, in a news release.

Health-threatening fungi are spreading in geographic range due to climate change, while some fungal diseases spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to authors of a newly released World Health Organization report. From a report: On Tuesday the WHO published its first ever list of fungal priority pathogens, cataloguing 19 organisms that experts identified as being of the greatest threat to public health. "Currently, fungal infections receive less than 1.5% of all infectious disease research funding," the report found, suggesting the true health burden of fungi is unknown, while "most treatment guidelines are informed by limited evidence and expert opinion."

The WHO's assistant director general of antimicrobial resistance, Dr Hanan Balkhy, said in a statement: "Emerging from the shadows of the bacterial antimicrobial resistance pandemic, invasive fungal diseases are growing ever more resistant to treatments, becoming an ever more pressing public health concern worldwide." Dr Justin Beardsley, of the University of Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute, who led a group commissioned by the WHO, said historical research underspending was out of step with the "huge burden of disease" of fungal infections. "They're causing as many deaths as tuberculosis, and more than malaria," he said.

NASA's independent study to delve into the mysteries surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena kicked off today. CNN reports: The group will include experts across numerous disciplines -- including astrobiology, data science, oceanography, genetics, policy and planetary science -- as well as retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, a former fighter pilot and test pilot and retired US Navy captain. The space agency, which first announced it was forming the group in June, previously revealed that the team would be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, who is president of the Simons Foundation in New York City.

The new group won't necessarily seek to determine exactly what the UAPs, which have been seen moving through restricted military airspace over the past several decades, are. Rather, the team will look to hash out exactly how it's best for NASA to approach further study of the phenomenon. The space agency has already noted that the limited number of observations of UAPs has made it difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events. "Without access to an extensive set of data, it is nearly impossible to verify or explain any observation, thus the focus of the study is to inform NASA what possible data could be collected in the future to scientifically discern the nature of UAP," according to a NASA news release.

This study, expected to last about nine months, will also be entirely unclassified and within the public domain. "Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA," Zurbuchen said in a Friday statement. "Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies. Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable." Specifically, the team will look for data on "events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena -- from a scientific perspective," the agency said. Unidentified aerial phenomena are of interest, NASA said, from a security and safety perspective. There was no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, NASA emphasized during the initial announcement in June.

U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday, offering the most definitive indictment yet of the pandemic's impact on millions of schoolchildren. The New York Times reports: In math, the results were especially devastating, representing the steepest declines ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation's report card, which tests a broad sampling of fourth and eighth graders and dates to the early 1990s. In the test's first results since the pandemic began, math scores for eighth graders fell in nearly every state. A meager 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient, down from 34 percent in 2019. Fourth graders fared only slightly better, with declines in 41 states. Just 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, down from 41 percent.

Reading scores also declined in more than half the states, continuing a downward trend that had begun even before the pandemic. No state showed sizable improvement in reading. And only about one in three students met proficiency standards, a designation that means students have demonstrated competency and are on track for future success. And for the country's most vulnerable students, the pandemic has left them even further behind. The drops in their test scores were often more pronounced, and their climbs to proficiency are now that much more daunting.

A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fibre-optic cable -- enough bandwidth to download 230 million photographs in that time, and more traffic than travels through the entire internet's backbone network per second. From a report: Asbjorn Arvad Jorgensen at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues have used a photonic chip -- a technology that allows optical components to be built onto computer chips -- to divide a stream of data into thousands of separate channels and transmit them all at once over 7.9 kilometres.

First, the team split the data stream into 37 sections, each of which was sent down a separate core of the fibre-optic cable. Next, each of these channels was split into 223 data chunks that existed in individual slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. This "frequency comb" of equidistant spikes of light across the spectrum allowed data to be transmitted in different colours at the same time without interfering with each other, massively increasing the capacity of each core. Although data transfer rates of up to 10.66 petabits per second have been achieved before using bulky equipment, this research sets a record for transmission using a single computer chip as a light source. The technology could enable the creation of simple, single chips that can send vastly more data than existing models, slashing energy costs and increasing bandwidth. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41566-022-01082-z

Kids who play video games have better memory and better control over their motor skills than kids who don't, according to a new study looking at adolescent brain function. From a report: Video games might not be responsible for those differences -- the study can't say what the causes are -- but the findings add to a bigger body of work showing gamers have better performance on some tests of brain function. That lends support to efforts to develop games that can treat cognitive problems. "This study adds to our growing understanding of the associations between playing video games and brain development," said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a statement.

The study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which launched in 2018 and is tracking brain development in thousands of children in the United States as they grow into adulthood. Participants periodically go through a battery of assessments, including brain imaging, cognitive tasks, mental health screenings, physical health exams, and other tests. To study video games and cognition, the research team on this new study pulled from the first set of assessments in the ABCD study. It included data on 2,217 children who were nine and 10 years old. The ABCD study asked participants how many hours of video games they played on a typical weekday or weekend day. The research team divided the group into video gamers (kids who played at least 21 hours per week) and non-video gamers (kids who played no video games per week). Kids who only played occasionally weren't included in the study. Then, the research team looked at the kids' performance on tests that measure attention, impulse control, and memory.

It's the tale of a company manufacuring precision card-shuffling machines for casinos — and a gang of hustlers who used a hidden video camera to film the shuffler's insides. "The images, transmitted to an accomplice outside in the casino parking lot, were played back in slow motion to figure out the sequence of cards in the deck," remembers the BBC, "which was then communicated back to the gamblers inside. The casino lost millions of dollars before the gang were finally caught."

So the company turned for help to a mathematician/magician: The executives were determined not to be hacked again. They had developed a prototype of a sophisticated new shuffling machine, this time enclosed in an opaque box. Their engineers assured them that the machine would sufficiently randomise a deck of cards with one pass through the device, reducing the time between hands while also beating card-counters and crooked dealers. But they needed to be sure that their machine properly shuffled the deck. They needed Persi Diaconis.

Diaconis, a magician-turned-mathematician at Stanford University, is regarded as the world's foremost expert on the mathematics of card shuffling. Throughout the surprisingly large scholarly literature on the topic, his name keeps popping up like the ace of spades in a magician's sleight-of-hand trick. So, when the company executives contacted him and offered to let him see the inner workings of their machine — a literal "black box" — he couldn't believe his luck. With his collaborator Susan Holmes, a statistician at Stanford, Diaconis travelled to the company's Las Vegas showroom to examine a prototype of their new machine.

The pair soon discovered a flaw. Although the mechanical shuffling action appeared random, the mathematicians noticed that the resulting deck still had rising and falling sequences, which meant that they could make predictions about the card order. To prove this to the company executives, Diaconis and Holmes devised a simple technique for guessing which card would be turned over next. If the first card flipped was the five of hearts, say, they guessed that the next card was the six of hearts, on the assumption that the sequence was rising. If the next card was actually lower — a four of hearts, for instance — this meant they were in a falling sequence, and their next guess was the three of hearts. With this simple strategy, the mathematicians were able to correctly guess nine or 10 cards per deck — one-fifth of the total — enough to double or triple the advantage of a competent card-counter....

The executives were horrified. "We are not pleased with your conclusions," they wrote to Diaconis, "but we believe them and that's what we hired you for." The company quietly shelved the prototype and switched to a different machine.
The article also explains why seven shuffles "is just as close to random as can be" — rendering further shuffling largely ineffective.

Researchers at Cardiff University have identified a peculiar twisting motion in the orbits of two colliding black holes, an exotic phenomenon predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity. Phys.Org reports: Their study, which is published in Nature and led by Professor Mark Hannam, Dr. Charlie Hoy and Dr. Jonathan Thompson, reports that this is the first time this effect, known as precession, has been seen in black holes, where the twisting is 10 billion times faster than in previous observations. The binary black hole system was found through gravitational waves in early 2020 in the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors. One of the black holes, 40 times bigger than our Sun, is likely the fastest spinning black hole to be found through gravitational waves. And unlike all previous observations, the rapidly revolving black hole distorted space and time so much that the binary's entire orbit wobbled back and forth. This form of precession is specific to Einstein's theory of general relativity. These results confirm its existence in the most extreme physical event we can observe, the collision of two black holes.

In the fastest example previously measured from orbiting neutron stars called binary pulsars, it took over 75 years for the orbit to precess. The black-hole binary in this study, colloquially known as GW200129 (named after the date it was observed, January 29, 2020), precesses several times every second -- an effect 10 billion times stronger than measured previously. "So far most black holes we've found with gravitational waves have been spinning fairly slowly," said Dr. Charlie Hoy, a researcher at Cardiff University during this study, and now at the University of Portsmouth. "The larger black hole in this binary, which was about 40 times more massive than the Sun, was spinning almost as fast as physically possible. Our current models of how binaries form suggest this one was extremely rare, maybe a one in a thousand event. Or it could be a sign that our models need to change."