Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom -- a field called venomics -- have burgeoned in recent years, leading to important drug discoveries. From a report: In a small room in a building at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the invertebrate keeper, Emma Califf, lifts up a rock in a plastic box. "This is one of our desert hairies," she said, exposing a three-inch-long scorpion, its tail arced over its back. "The largest scorpion in North America." This captive hairy, along with a swarm of inch-long bark scorpions in another box, and two dozen rattlesnakes of varying species and sub- species across the hall, are kept here for the coin of the realm: their venom. Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom -- a field called venomics -- have burgeoned in recent years, and the growing catalog of compounds has led to a number of drug discoveries. As the components of these natural toxins continue to be assayed by evolving technologies, the number of promising molecules is also growing.

"A century ago we thought venom had three or four components, and now we know just one type of venom can have thousands," said Leslie V. Boyer, a professor emeritus of pathology at the University of Arizona. "Things are accelerating because a small number of very good laboratories have been pumping out information that everyone else can now use to make discoveries." She added, "There's a pharmacopoeia out there waiting to be explored." It is a striking case of modern-day scientific alchemy: The most highly evolved of natural poisons on the planet are creating a number of effective medicines with the potential for many more.

One of the most promising venom-derived drugs to date comes from the deadly Fraser Island funnel web spider of Australia, which halts cell death after a heart attack. Blood flow to the heart is reduced after a heart attack, which makes the cell environment more acidic and leads to cell death. The drug, a protein called Hi1A, is scheduled for clinical trials next year. In the lab, it was tested on the cells of beating human hearts. It was found to block their ability to sense acid, "so the death message is blocked, cell death is reduced, and we see improved heart cell survival," said Nathan Palpant, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia who helped make the discovery.

People who have been hospitalised with Covid may be left with difficulties in thinking comparable in magnitude to ageing 20 years, research suggests. From a report: As the pandemic swept the world it became apparent that coronavirus could not only cause immediate health problems but also leave some people with often debilitating symptoms -- a condition known as long Covid. According to one UK study, about a third of patients who experienced symptoms after being hospitalised felt fully recovered a year later, with little improvement for most patients in areas including physical function and cognitive impairment. Now experts have revealed that some patients were left with, on average, a lingering cognitive decline.

David Menon, a professor at Cambridge University and senior author of the study, said the degree of impairment was linked to the severity of illness. "[Covid] does cause problems with a variety of organs in the body, including the brain and our cognitive function and our psychological health," he said. "If you can have a vaccine, and all your doses, you will have less severe illness. So all of these problems are going to be less." Writing in the eClinicalMedicine journal, Menon and colleagues report how they examined the results of cognitive tests performed by 46 patients, on average six months after they were admitted to Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge between March and July 2020. Of this group, 16 received mechanical ventilation.

schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: We'll have to wait at least another month to see the results of the U.S Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) environmental review of SpaceX's Starship program. The FAA has been working for months on that review -- officially known as a programmatic environmental assessment (PEA) -- which is assessing the environmental impacts of Starbase, the South Texas site where SpaceX has been building and testing its huge Starship vehicle. The agency published a draft PEA in September and estimated that the final version would be wrapped up by the end of the year. But the FAA has repeatedly delayed the final PEA, generally by a month at a time, citing the need to analyze the public comments submitted in response to the draft report and discuss next steps with other government agencies. "The FAA plans to release the Final PEA on May 31, 2022. The FAA is finalizing the review of the Final PEA, including responding to comments and ensuring consistency with SpaceX's licensing application," FAA officials wrote in an update. "The FAA is also completing consultation and confirming mitigations for the proposed SpaceX operations. All consultations must be complete before the FAA can issue the Final PEA."

Scientists working on NASA's James Webb Telescope have reached an important milestone, completely aligning the space observatory's massive mirrors. New Atlas reports: The achievement means the team can now move ahead with configuring the onboard instruments and prepare them to begin capturing sharp and in-focus images of the cosmos. Back in January, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) finished deploying its set of 18 mirrors, which it will use to direct light from cosmic objects onto its instruments to capture images. But to do so, the mirrors had to be precisely aligned over a three-month period in order to focus that light correctly. In March, the mirrors were brought into alignment with the telescope's primary imaging instrument, the Near-Infrared Camera, enabling it to focus and snap a crystal-clear image of a bright star. The team then continued aligning the mirrors with the JWST's remaining instruments, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph, Mid-Infrared Instrument, and Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph -- a task that is now complete.

The team confirmed the mirrors were aligned and directing light onto the JWST's four instruments by capturing a set of test images covering the telescope's full-field of view [...]. The scientists say the optical performance of the telescope continues to exceed even their most optimistic expectations. With the mirrors now in position (save for some slight periodic adjustments here and there), the scientists are now turning their attention to commissioning of the science instruments. The unique lenses, masks, filters and other gear that make these highly sophisticated instruments tick will need to be precisely configured over the next two months, to ready the telescope for the start of its science operations in the middle of the year.

After nearly three years of preparation, small satellite launch company Rocket Lab has successfully caught one of its rockets in mid-air today, after launching the vehicle to space from New Zealand. The Verge reports: But by catching and reusing its rockets after flight, Rocket Lab hopes to cut down on the manufacturing cost associated with building an entirely new rocket for each of its missions. The goal is similar to that of SpaceX, which has become famous for landing and reusing its rockets post-flight. Rocket Lab also claims that recovering and reusing its rockets could also help speed up its flight cadence. "By bringing one back, it just saves a tremendous amount of time where you don't have to build a whole new rocket from scratch," Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, tells The Verge. "So we'll obviously see some good cost savings, but I think the most important thing for us right now is just getting the vehicles back into the production line."

When Electron launches to space, computers on board the vehicle guide the booster back through Earth's atmosphere, maneuvering it in just the right way so that it stays intact during the fall to the ground. Once the rocket reaches an altitude of about 8.3 miles up, it deploys a drogue parachute to slow its fall, followed by a main parachute. As the rocket leisurely floats down toward the ocean, that's when the helicopter will arrive and attempt to capture the line of the parachute with a dangling hook, avoiding a splashdown in salty seawater. UPDATE 4:08PM PST: Rocket Lab confirmed the helicopter catch. The summary and headline have been updated to reflect the successful mission.

You can view the livestream of the launch here.

Extreme weather due to the climate crisis is expected to increasingly make some Australian homes "uninsurable," with a new report suggesting up to one in 25 households will struggle to be covered by 2030. From a report: The analysis by the Climate Council, using data from consultants Climate Valuation, mapped the 10 electorates across the country considered most at risk of becoming uninsurable due to flood, fire and other extreme weather risk. The most at-risk areas were mostly found to be in flood and cyclone-prone areas of Queensland and in parts of Victoria built over flood plains near major rivers. "Uninsurable" is defined in the report as an area where the required type of insurance product was expected to be not available, or only available at such high cost that no one could afford it.

NASA and the German Aerospace Center are permanently shutting down the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a telescope on an aeroplane that has been scrutinized for years for its high cost and low scientific output. From a report: Since 2014, the observatory has made hundreds of flights above the water vapour in Earth's atmosphere to get an unobscured view of celestial objects and to gather data at infrared wavelengths. SOFIA has measured magnetic fields in galaxies1, spotted water on sunlit portions of the Moon2 and detected the first type of ion that formed in the Universe, helium hydride3. But it costs NASA around $85 million a year to operate, which is nearly as much as the operational expenses for the Hubble Space Telescope. On 28 April, NASA and the German Aerospace Center, the two partners in SOFIA, announced that they will close down the observatory by 30 September.

Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips. From a report: The researcher, Satrajit Chatterjee, led a team of scientists in challenging the celebrated research paper, which appeared last year in the scientific journal Nature and said computers were able to design certain parts of a computer chip faster and better than human beings. Dr. Chatterjee, 43, was fired in March, shortly after Google told his team that it would not publish a paper that rebutted some of the claims made in Nature, said four people familiar with the situation who were not permitted to speak openly on the matter. Google confirmed in a written statement that Dr. Chatterjee had been "terminated with cause." Google declined to elaborate about Dr. Chatterjee's dismissal, but it offered a full-throated defense of the research he criticized and of its unwillingness to publish his assessment.

In 1972 — half a century ago — Charles Moss Duke walked on the moon.

Now 86 years old, he's ready for America to get back to exploring the moon, reports the Associated Press: Duke said he does not begrudge NASA for ending the Apollo program to focus on space shuttles, the international space station and other missions in more remote parts of space. But he looks forward to future missions that build off of what he and others have learned from their time on the moon, which called "a great platform for science."

Duke also noted that he's encouraged by the commercial partnerships that have developed around space exploration, like Space X and Blue Origin [and the companies he describes in their video as "the others"]. Those options, he said, "make space available for more people and more science and engineering and unmanned stuff."

"That compliment is going to be really important in the future," Duke went on.
The article notes the first of NASA's huge Space Launch System rockets is scheduled to blast off later this year, "with crewed flights planned subsequently." In the video interview, Duke adds that "With Artemis, NASA is going to be focused on deep space, to the moon and beyond, and I'm excited about that..."

"The more people we get into space, and can see the beauty of the earth — and the incredible emotion that you [feel] when you see the earth hung in the blackness of space — it's going to affect a lot of people."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Inverse: It only took 25 years of development, 17 years of construction, eight launch delays, and five months of alignments, but finally, the James Webb Space Telescope is almost ready for prime time. New photos released by the European Space Agency — and an accompanying video from NASA — show images of stars taken by a fully aligned space telescope, instruments and all.

The image shows snapshots from each of Webb's three imaging instruments, plus its spectrograph and guidance sensor. The images show a field of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a galaxy near the Milky Way about 158,000 light-years away. If it orbits our galaxy, it would be, by far, the largest satellite galaxy. But there's a chance it's just passing through or slowly merging with our galaxy.

Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, is turning to cloud-seeding to increase rainfall. Interesting Engineering reports: The country initiated the first phase of its cloud-seeding operation in areas above the capital Riyadh, al-Qassim, and Hail on Tuesday, according to Arab News. The weather modification technique is being executed as part of an effort to increase the country's yearly rainfall, which does not exceed 100 millimeters a year, by 10 to 20 percent. Cloud-seeding is a technique that involves introducing chemicals to clouds, like small particles of silver iodide, to induce more rain from a cloud. This causes water droplets to congregate around them, and the water particles clash with one another, growing larger and increasing the likelihood of rainfall.

Ayman Ghulam, head of the National Center of Meteorology and supervisor of the cloud-seeding program, said the program's operations room opened on Monday at the center's headquarters in Riyadh, and the first flights took place in the capital's vicinity, according to Gulf News. He stated that they met their objectives in terms of the results and timeliness of the seeding operations. The center will provide quarterly updates on developments. The program will track cloud formations across the country to find the optimal locations for seeding efforts, which would use "environmentally friendly" materials to increase precipitation in targeted areas. The cloud seeding initiative, according to Gluham, is one of the "promising ways" of preserving water balance in a safe, adaptable, and cost-effective manner.

New pictures from the Ingenuity helicopter offer a fresh perspective of the wreckage left behind when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars last year, NASA said on Wednesday. The Verge reports: Launched in 2020, the Perseverance rover successfully landed on the Red Planet in 2021, with the mission of finding ancient signs of life on Mars. The rover carried the Ingenuity helicopter onboard -- an experimental project that scientists on Earth hoped would be able to see sights that the rover couldn't. Perseverance went through a grueling process known as the seven minutes of terror to descend onto the Martian surface. As it entered the atmosphere, a heat shield helped protect the rover from the blistering heat of reentry and slowed it down dramatically. After that, the massive parachute deployed out of the backshell (a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle), slowing it down even more. At that point, the backshell and parachute separated from Perseverance and let the descent stage take over, using rocket thrusters and a "sky crane" to gently lower the rover to a smooth landing.

On April 19th, Ingenuity took photographs that captured the remains of Perseverance's parachute and the rover's protective backshell, a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle that carried the parachute and helped protect the rover on its way to the surface. Strewn around the site were debris from where the two crashed into the surface after separating from the rover. The backshell ended up hitting the ground at about 78 miles per hour, according to NASA. From the pictures, it appears that the parachute, the lines connecting the parachute to the spacecraft, and the coating on the outside of the backshell all survived the trip to the surface, NASA says, though more analysis of the pictures will happen in the coming weeks.

From sociable labradors to aggressive pitbulls, when it comes to canine behaviour there are no end of stereotypes. But research suggests such traits may have less to do with breed than previously thought. From a report: Modern dog breeds began to emerge in the Victorian era and are often physically distinct -- for example, great danes are huge and chihuahuas tiny. But it has often been thought breed can predict behaviour, too. Now researchers say there's little sign that's the case. Dr Elinor Karlsson of the University of Massachusetts Umass Chan medical school, a co-author of the study, said research revealed a huge diversity of behaviours within each breed.

"Even if the average is different, you've still got a really good chance of getting a dog that doesn't match what people say that breed is supposed to be," she said. Writing in the journal Science, the US researchers report how they analysed survey responses relating to the physical traits and behaviour of 18,385 pet dogs, almost half of which were purebred, with genetic data analysed for 2,155 of them. Analysis of the survey results for purebred dogs suggested about 9% of behavioural variation was explained by breed.

Atmospheric analog to ocean's acoustic channel could be used to monitor eruptions and bombs. From a report: About 1 kilometer under the sea lies a sound tunnel that carries the cries of whales and the clamor of submarines across great distances. Ever since scientists discovered this Sound Fixing and Ranging (SOFAR) channel in the 1940s, they've suspected a similar conduit exists in the atmosphere. But few have bothered to look for it, aside from one top-secret Cold War operation. Now, by listening to distant rocket launches with solar-powered balloons, researchers say they have finally detected hints of an aerial sound channel, although it does not seem to function as simply or reliably as the ocean SOFAR. If confirmed, the atmospheric SOFAR may pave the way for a network of aerial receivers that could help researchers detect remote explosions from volcanoes, bombs, and other sources that emit infrasound -- acoustic waves below the frequency of human hearing. "It would help enormously to have those [detectors] up there," says William Wilcock, a marine seismologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. Although seismic sensors in the ground pick up most of the planet's biggest bangs, "some areas of the Earth are covered very well and others aren't."

In the ocean, the SOFAR channel is bounded by layers of warmer, lighter water above and cooler, denser water below. Sound waves, which travel at their slowest at this depth, get trapped inside the channel, bouncing off the surrounding layers like a bowling ball guided by bumpers. Researchers rely on the SOFAR channel to monitor earthquakes and eruptions under the sea floor -- and even to measure ocean temperatures rising from global warming. After geophysicist Maurice Ewing discovered the SOFAR channel in 1944, he set out to find an analogous layer in the sky. At an altitude of between 10 and 20 kilometers is the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere (where weather occurs), and the stratosphere. Like the marine SOFAR, the tropopause represents a cold region, where sound waves should travel slower and farther. An acoustic waveguide in the atmosphere, Ewing reasoned, would allow the U.S. Air Force to listen for nuclear weapon tests detonated by the Soviet Union. He instigated a top-secret experiment, code-named Project Mogul, that sent up hot air balloons equipped with infrasound microphones.

Space rocks that fell to Earth within the last century contain the five bases that store information in DNA and RNA, scientists report April 26 in Nature Communications. Science News reports: These "nucleobases" -- adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil -- combine with sugars and phosphates to make up the genetic code of all life on Earth. Whether these basic ingredients for life first came from space or instead formed in a warm soup of earthly chemistry is still not known. But the discovery adds to evidence that suggests life's precursors originally came from space, the researchers say. Scientists have detected bits of adenine, guanine and other organic compounds in meteorites since the 1960s. Researchers have also seen hints of uracil, but cytosine and thymine remained elusive, until now.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Is polio making a comeback? The world has spent billions of dollars over the last 15 years in an effort to wipe out the virus through vaccination efforts -- with encouraging results. Rates plunged from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to just several dozen by 2016. But in recent years, polio incidence has started to inch back up. The reason has to do with the type of vaccine used in many parts of the world, primarily in low- and middle-income countries. While the United States and other Western countries inject an inactivated virus that poses no risk of spread and are now polio-free, other countries rely on an oral vaccine. It's cheap, it's easy to administer and two or more doses confer lifelong immunity. But it's made with living, weakened virus. And that poses a problem.

Those who've been immunized with live virus can shed it in their stool, which can then spread through sewage in places with poor sanitation. If the virus stays weak, it can even expose the unvaccinated to polio and give them immunity. But if it mutates and regains virulence, someone who isn't vaccinated can become sick with vaccine-derived polio after contact with the contaminated wastewater. And now countries that had previously eradicated polio in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia are seeing new outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio.

One reason for this rise in cases, say polio experts, is that gaps in immunization in recent years have created more opportunities for the unvaccinated to become infected. "Vaccination campaigns have been certainly affected by the pandemic," says Raul Andino, a virologist at University of California, San Francisco. [...] The composition of the oral vaccine has also been a factor. In 2016, eyeing an uptick in vaccine-derived polio, global health officials altered the composition of the oral vaccine. Previously, the vaccine protected against all three types of wild polio -- the virus that circulates naturally in the environment. Then they withdrew one of those types -- the one that was leading to most of the vaccine-derived cases but whose wild form had been successfully eradicated. Only there was a development that hadn't been anticipated. Vaccine-derived poliovirus of that type was still in circulation from earlier iterations of the oral vaccine -- and now with the reformulated vaccine, increasing numbers of people who were no longer vaccinated against it. So there was further spread. Thankfully, a new kind of vaccine being rolled out is showing promise. "The novel vaccine still contains a weakened version of the virus, but it's been hobbled even further," reports NPR.

"The researchers tweaked the virus so that it has to accumulate more mutations to become virulent and has a harder time amassing those mutations. For example, they've altered the polymerase, one of the key enzymes responsible for introducing mutations, reducing its ability to mix and match genes from different viruses."

MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin loudspeaker that can turn any surface into an active audio source. MIT News reports: This thin-film loudspeaker produces sound with minimal distortion while using a fraction of the energy required by a traditional loudspeaker. The hand-sized loudspeaker the team demonstrated, which weighs about as much as a dime, can generate high-quality sound no matter what surface the film is bonded to. To achieve these properties, the researchers pioneered a deceptively simple fabrication technique, which requires only three basic steps and can be scaled up to produce ultrathin loudspeakers large enough to cover the inside of an automobile or to wallpaper a room.

A typical loudspeaker found in headphones or an audio system uses electric current inputs that pass through a coil of wire that generates a magnetic field, which moves a speaker membrane, that moves the air above it, that makes the sound we hear. By contrast, the new loudspeaker simplifies the speaker design by using a thin film of a shaped piezoelectric material that moves when voltage is applied over it, which moves the air above it and generates sound. [...]

They tested their thin-film loudspeaker by mounting it to a wall 30 centimeters from a microphone to measure the sound pressure level, recorded in decibels. When 25 volts of electricity were passed through the device at 1 kilohertz (a rate of 1,000 cycles per second), the speaker produced high-quality sound at conversational levels of 66 decibels. At 10 kilohertz, the sound pressure level increased to 86 decibels, about the same volume level as city traffic. The energy-efficient device only requires about 100 milliwatts of power per square meter of speaker area. By contrast, an average home speaker might consume more than 1 watt of power to generate similar sound pressure at a comparable distance. The researchers showed the speaker in action, playing "We Are the Champions" by Queen. You can listen to it here.

Fibre-optic cable is being laid across the globe at great expense to speed up people's internet connections, but researchers claim that the copper telephone wire already in use across the country can achieve data rates three times higher than currently seen at a fraction of the price, at least over short distances. New Scientist: Their technique to boost speeds may help to ease the transition to nationwide fibre optic, and may also be of use in countries that use similar twisted-pair copper wire. Ergin Dinc at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues say that twisted pairs of copper wire, of the type used for decades as telephone lines and now repurposed for broadband internet, can support a frequency fives times higher than is currently used, which would dramatically improve data transmission rates. Above that limit, the researchers found that the wire essentially acts as an aerial and transforms any signal sent along it into radio waves that dissipate before reaching their destination. "These cables are actually very old, invented by Alexander Graham Bell, and since then no one has looked into the theoretical limits," says Dinc. He and his colleagues say that their findings may allow houses near fibre-optic cables to achieve higher speeds than they currently enjoy without the expense of running fibre all the way to their home. Fibre-optic cables carry groups of photons to represent data, and huge numbers of these groups can be sent along the line one after another without waiting for the first to arrive. Fibre connections in use today typically operate at 1 gigabit per second, but theoretical speeds could be many thousands of times higher.

vm shares a report from Space.com: SpaceX is among companies that might replace services of NASA's aging space telecoms constellation that has kept the International Space Station connected to Earth for decades. For years, NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation has served as the main link between the International Space Station and Earth, providing astronauts with constant connection to ground control as well as the ability to engage with the public and stay in touch with their loved ones. The American space agency, however, plans to retire the six aging satellites in the next decade and hand over their task to commercial companies. This month, the agency announced partnerships with six commercial satellite operators including SpaceX, U.K. company Inmarsat, American Viasat and Switzerland-based SES, to demonstrate how they could take care of NASA's space communication needs in the future. "We don't plan to launch any new TDRS satellites in the future," Eli Naffah, the manager of NASA's Commercial Services Project, who oversees the partnership with the commercial companies, told Space.com. "The plan is to allow the constellation to basically [reach the end of its life]. At some point later in this decade, we are going to have some diminished capability and the plan is for the [commercial companies] to come up with a different way of providing communication services to our missions."

"Back in the 1980s, when we developed TDRS, there really wasn't an ability on the commercial side to be able to provide this service," Naffah said. "But since then, the industry has far outpaced NASA's investment in this area. There's a lot of infrastructure, both on the ground and in orbit that is capable of providing these types of services to a spacecraft. [...] Hopefully, we can achieve some cost efficiencies in buying commercial services, get out of the business of operating networks, and really put more focus on science and exploration." According to Naffah, NASA will invest $278 million into the project over the next five years, with the agency's industry partners contributing a total of about $1.5 billion.

The common perception that nearly everyone in America seemed to have acquired the Omicron variant last winter may not have been far from the truth. By February 2022, nearly 60 percent of the population had been infected with the coronavirus, almost double the proportion seen in December 2021, according to data released on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The New York Times reports: "By February 2022, evidence of previous Covid-19 infections substantially increased among every age group," Dr. Kristie Clarke, the agency researcher who led the study, said at a news briefing. Infections rose most sharply during the Omicron surge among children and adolescents, perhaps because many people in those age groups were still unvaccinated. The increase was smallest among adults 65 or older, who have the highest rate of vaccination and may be the most likely to take precautions. The new research suggests that three out of four children and adolescents in the United States had been infected with the coronavirus by February 2022, compared with one-third of older adults.

While some studies suggest that prior infection offers a weaker shield against the virus than vaccines do, the resulting antibodies should provide a reasonable degree of protection against severe illness, at least in the short term. "We still do not know how long infection-induced immunity will last," Dr. Clarke said. The gains in population-wide immunity may explain why the new surge that is roaring through China and many countries in Europe has been muted in the United States so far. The findings may offer some comfort to parents who have been waiting anxiously for a vaccine to be approved for the youngest children. Many of those children now seem to have acquired at least some immunity. Even so, Dr. Clarke urged parents to immunize children who qualify as soon as regulators approve a vaccine for them, regardless of any prior infection.