Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., one of the world's biggest grain traders, is injecting carbon dioxide released by its corn plants underground, using commercial-scale technology that's the first of its kind. BNN Bloomberg reports: The company just completed a project with the University of Illinois proving that its methods to capture carbon are safe, according to a Wednesday release. That will aid its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% against a 2019 baseline. In the project, ADM used wells to pump carbon dioxide 6,500 feet underground. The site was able to accept and store 1 million metric tons over three years. That's equivalent to annual emissions from about 1.2 million passenger cars, according to the release. The corn plant in Decatur, Illinois, where the emissions originated from processes the grain into starches and sweeteners, among other products. ADM has another well set to operate until 2022 that could store 5.5 million metric tons of the gas. Together, the two projects have already stored 3.4 million tons.

sciencehabit writes: Using an observatory on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, astronomers have spotted the highest energy light ever, gamma ray photons up to 1.4 petaelectronvolts (PeV). They have traced these extreme photons back to a dozen of their likely sources: powerful factories in the Milky Way Galaxy that accelerate charged particles called cosmic rays. The results are challenging theorists' understanding of what these factories are and how they generate such high-energy light. "The findings are extremely important and impressive," says Petra Huentemeyer, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technological University and spokesperson for a rival gamma ray telescope, the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC) in Mexico. "It's a giant leap toward finally understanding the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays."

Discovered more than 100 years ago, cosmic rays are charged particles, including protons and other atomic nuclei, that have been accelerated nearly to the speed of light. Their sources are poorly understood because interstellar magnetic fields bend them on their path to Earth. However, as cosmic rays rocket away from their sources, they also emit photons, usually about one-tenth as energetic as the cosmic rays themselves, that follow a straight path to Earth. Although Earth's atmosphere blocks this gamma ray light, when the photons slam into air molecules, they create showers of secondary particles and faint blue Cherenkov light that astronomers can look for. China's Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) aims to catch the air showers associated with the highest energy gamma rays, which in turn correspond to the highest energy cosmic rays.

Scientists monitoring the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine have seen a surge in fission reactions in an inaccessible chamber within the complex. They are now investigating whether the problem will stabilise or require a dangerous and difficult intervention to prevent a runaway nuclear reaction. From a report: The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 brought down walls and sealed off many rooms and corridors. Tonnes of fissile material from the interior of a reactor were strewn throughout the facility and the heat it generated melted sand from the reactor walls with concrete and steel to form lava-like and intensely radioactive substances that oozed into lower floors. One chamber, known as subreactor room 305/2, is thought to contain large amounts of this material, but it is inaccessible and hasn't been seen by human or robotic eyes since the disaster.

Now, researchers have seen a spike in neutron emissions from the room, with levels increasing around 40 per cent since the start of 2016. This points to a growing nuclear fission reaction, so researchers are trying to determine if this surge will fizzle out, as previous spikes in other parts of the ruins have done, or whether they will need to find a way to access the room and intervene. Neil Hyatt at the University of Sheffield, UK, who studies nuclear waste disposal, likens the situation to "embers in a barbecue pit" and says "it's a reminder to us that it's not a problem solved, it's a problem stabilised."

One suggestion for why this is happening is that a new structure placed over the ruined reactor in 2016 is causing the plant to dry out. When uranium or plutonium fuel decay radioactively, they emit neutrons, which can promote a fission reaction if the neutrons are captured by another radioactive nuclei. However, large amounts of water slow these neutrons down, preventing them from being captured. The original shelter, which was hurriedly constructed over the reactor in the months following the accident, was riddled with holes that allowed rainwater and birds inside. If the rainwater was helping to suppress reactions in room 305/2, its absence due to the new structure could mean there is no longer enough water in the room to sufficiently slow neutrons down.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: For a number of years the administrative process for giving asteroids names has had a worsening logjam. Important or "interesting" bodies (such as `Oumuamua, the first definitely interstellar object identified) would still get names rapidly assigned, but in the background myriads of unspectacular objects would persist with "names" based on their discovery date like "1981 GD1". Which is adequate for managing databases, but less than satisfactory for most humans.

A new publication from the "Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature", combines what used to be several steps into one stage. So now one can easily find that "1981 GD1" has the name "Rutherford", to commemorate one of the major scientists of the 20th century.

No doubt there will be complaints of an over-concentration on figures from Classical legend (22 of 179 names assigned), but eventually that mine will play out. Professional and amateur astronomers (34 and 30 names) are, unsurprisingly, the largest groups commemorated. Other scientists get a good showing (16, Rutherford included), along with memorials to teachers, observatories and universities. One architect and one astronaut (there isn't a bar on memorialising living persons) also get mentions, and modest numbers of sports stars, musicians and other cultural figures pad out the list. Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese contributors have a significant input to this batch, along with a number of South American contributions and a fair number from smaller countries (Paul Erdos, for example, in the {dead+ white+ mathematical eccentrics} category). And one entry which I can only class as a joke — 1990 QX19 gets a name which should have been used years ago. Obviously you'll need to RTFA to see the joke, but RTFA-ing is an un-Slashdot activity.

Future numbers of the Bulletin will publish new batches of assigned names, and work away on the backlog. You still need to be the discoverer of a "small body" to submit a name proposal, but that step of the process is also under review. With about 22,000 of the currently-recognised million-plus objects with well-characterised orbits, there is no realistic prospect of running out any time soon — they are being found faster than they get named. But eventually you too could name a pathetic little mudball for someone you despise. Won't that be fun?

Implantable miniaturized medical devices that wirelessly transmit data "are transforming healthcare and improving the quality of life for millions of people," writes Columbia University, noting the devices are "widely used to monitor and map biological signals, to support and enhance physiological functions, and to treat diseases."

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares the university's newest announcement: These devices could be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature, blood pressure, glucose, and respiration for both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. To date, conventional implanted electronics have been highly volume-inefficient — they generally require multiple chips, packaging, wires, and external transducers, and batteries are often needed for energy storage... Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have built what they say is the world's smallest single-chip system, consuming a total volume of less than 0.1 mm cubed. The system is as small as a dust mite and visible only under a microscope...

"We wanted to see how far we could push the limits on how small a functioning chip we could make," said the study's leader Ken Shepard, Lau Family professor of electrical engineering and professor of biomedical engineering. "This is a new idea of 'chip as system' — this is a chip that alone, with nothing else, is a complete functioning electronic system. This should be revolutionary for developing wireless, miniaturized implantable medical devices that can sense different things, be used in clinical applications, and eventually approved for human use...."

The chip, which is the entire implantable/injectable mote with no additional packaging, was fabricated at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company with additional process modifications performed in the Columbia Nano Initiative cleanroom and the City University of New York Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) Nanofabrication Facility. Shepard commented, "This is a nice example of 'more than Moore' technology—we introduced new materials onto standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor to provide new function. In this case, we added piezoelectric materials directly onto the integrated circuit to transducer acoustic energy to electrical energy...." The team's goal is to develop chips that can be injected into the body with a hypodermic needle and then communicate back out of the body using ultrasound, providing information about something they measure locally.

The current devices measure body temperature, but there are many more possibilities the team is working on.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes the Guardian: A new study that checked American women's breast milk for PFAS contamination detected the toxic chemical in all 50 samples tested, and at levels nearly 2,000 times higher than the level some public health advocates advise is safe for drinking water. The findings "are cause for concern" and highlight a potential threat to newborns' health, the study's authors say. "The study shows that PFAS contamination of breast milk is likely universal in the US, and that these harmful chemicals are contaminating what should be nature's perfect food," said Erika Schreder, a co-author and science director with Toxic Free Future, a Seattle-based non-profit that pushes industry to find alternatives to the chemicals.

PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like food packaging, clothing and carpeting water and stain resistant. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. They are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. The peer-reviewed study, published on Thursday in the Environmental Science and Technology journal, found PFAS at levels in milk ranging from 50 parts per trillion (ppt) to more than 1,850ppt.

There are no standards for PFAS in breast milk, but the public health advocacy organization Environmental Working Group puts its advisory target for drinking water at 1ppt, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, within the Department of Health and Human Services, recommends as little as 14ppt in children's drinking water.

Slashdot reader boudie2 writes: Maritime Launch Services has secured financing it says will allow it to begin construction on a spaceport facility this fall and get its first launch off the ground in 2022. The first Cyclone 4M medium-class launch vehicle would take off in 2023.

The company wants to construct a rocket-launching site in Canso, Nova Scotia to send satellites into orbit for use in near-earth imaging, communications and scientific experiments. President and CEO Steve Matier stated the company has been approached by small satellite launchers, and MLS is considering hosting one of them for a first flight to orbit from the launch site as the facility scales up its operations. The company is expecting additional funding for the project will be secured through equity, debt and launch contracts.

Space startup Rocket Lab "lost a pair of satellites as the second stage of one of its Electron rockets failed to make it to orbit Saturday," reports CNET: After a successful liftoff from the company's New Zealand launch facility, something went wrong after the first stage booster separated from the smaller second stage carrying two satellites for Earth imaging company BlackSky. A live feed from the second stage showed that after it separated, it appeared to go into an uncontrolled tumble.

Commentators on the company's livestream reported that telemetry from the second stage had been lost and later the Rocket Lab Twitter feed confirmed the mission failure.

"An issue was experienced during today's launch, resulting in the loss of the mission," the company tweeted. "We are deeply sorry to our launch customers BlackSky and Spaceflight. The issue occurred shortly after stage two ignition..."

Rocket Lab reported that the booster made a successful parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific and a specially modified ship was en route to try to recover it.
"Rocket Lab has mostly been successful so far, with 17 of its missions reaching orbit," writes Engadget. Or, as CNET puts it, "This is the third failure out of 20 Rocket Lab launches and the second loss of mission in the past year."

In a statement, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said "We will learn from this, and we'll be back on the pad again."

"As a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences..." reports Lise Eliot in a recent article on The Conversation. "[T]here's no denying the decades of actual data, which show that brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals' brain measures across the population."

Bloomberg follows up: In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so few women went into science because, well, they just weren't inherently good at it. "Issues of intrinsic aptitude," Summers said, such as "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" kept many women out of the field... "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong," Summers said back in 2005. Well, sixteen years later, it appears his wish came true.

In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years' worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women. Men's brains were on average about 11% larger than women's — as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren't any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren't better at math or worse at language processing, either.

In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don't seem to appear.
"Another way to think about it is every individual brain is a mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself," Eliot's original article had stated.

"Or, to use a computer analogy, gendered behavior comes from running different software on the same basic hardware."

Long-time Slashdot reader jhylkema writes: Just 12 people account for the lion's share of anti-vaccination propaganda posted to three of the leading social media outlets, according to a study from a London-based group opposed to online hate and disinformation. A study (PDF file) conducted by the Centre for the Countering of Digital Hate identified the "Disinformation Dozen" people, including RFK Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Sherri Tenpenny... In its study, the group blasts the social media companies for allowing their platforms to be abused and calls for them to be de-platformed.

"Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who... are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines," the study said in its introduction. "Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies."
Some misinformation spreaders complain they're being censored, NPR reports, adding that "After this story published on Thursday, Facebook said it had taken down more of the accounts run by these 12 individuals."

But the study concludes anti-vaccine misinformation has already spread to an audience of 59 million followers. And yet "Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen...

"Analysis of anti-vaccine content posted to Facebook over 689,000 times in the last two months shows that up to 73 percent of that content originates with members of the Disinformation Dozen of leading online anti-vaxxers."

Which country will shoot the first movie in outer space? Russia is now "in a race with the United States to claim the achievement," reports NBC News.

36-year-old actress Yulia Peresild and 37-year-old director Klim Shepenko will complete Russia's cosmonaut-training program, ultimately taking two of the three seats aboard the October launch of Russia's Soyuz mission to the International Space Station: The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced Thursday that it had selected its crew to headline the film, which will be called "Challenge..."

Very little is known about the plot, which in many ways seems secondary to the spectacle. When Russia announced the project last year, Konstantin Ernst, the head of Russia's Channel One — which is working with Roscosmos on the film — said that it would not be a science fiction film, but a realistic depiction of near-term space travel. "It's a movie about how a person in no way connected with space exploration, due to various reasons and personal debt, ends up a month later in orbit," Ernst said in a September 2020 interview. "That's all I can tell you...."

The decision to fill the October Soyuz flight with a movie crew comes at an uncertain time for Russia's space program... In October, NASA paid for its final flight aboard Soyuz... Russia is now left to look for other means to help subsidize launch costs. One of those obvious sources — beyond funding from the state television network Channel One — is space tourism. Another Soyuz will launch in December, and rather than fill those seats with Russian cosmonauts, Moscow announced Thursday that two Japanese space tourists will take the ride.

China just successfully landed its first rover on Mars, becoming only the second nation to do so. Space.com reports: The Tianwen-1 mission, China's first interplanetary endeavor, reached the surface of the Red Planet Friday (May 14) at approximately 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT), though Chinese space officials have not yet confirmed the exact time and location of touchdown. Tianwen-1 (which translates to "Heavenly Questions") arrived in Mars' orbit in February after launching to the Red Planet on a Long March 5 rocket in July 2020. After circling the Red Planet for more than three months, the Tianwen-1 lander, with the rover attached, separated from the orbiter to begin its plunge toward the planet's surface. Once the lander and rover entered Mars' atmosphere, the spacecraft endured a similar procedure to the "seven minutes of terror" that NASA's Mars rovers have experienced when attempting soft landings on Mars.

A heat shield protected the spacecraft during the fiery descent, after which the mission safely parachuted down to the Utopia Planitia region, a plain inside of an enormous impact basin in the planet's northern hemisphere. Much like during NASA's Perseverance rover landing, Tianwen-1's landing platform fired some small, downward-facing rocket engines to slow down during the last few seconds of its descent. China's Mars rover, called Zhurong after an ancient fire god in Chinese mythology, will part ways with the lander by driving down a foldable ramp. Once it has deployed, the rover is expected to spend at least 90 Mars days (or about 93 Earth days; a day on Mars lasts about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth) roving around on Mars to study the planet's composition and look for signs of water ice. Utopia Planitia is believed to contain vast amounts of water ice beneath the surface. It's also where NASA's Viking 2 mission touched down in 1976.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting. The team's research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when given oxygen gas or an oxygen-rich liquid through their rectums, in a process similar to an enema. While fish like loaches and catfish use a similar method to gain additional oxygen in the natural world, this doesn't appear to be an evolutionary adaptation for mammals. In other words, mammalian bodies can't naturally do this, but with a little push from modern science, it becomes possible. Previous research has seen oxygen injected directly into mammalian bloodstreams, prolonging the lives of rabbits, but the rectal approach to the low-oxygen problem is novel.

The experiment, while disturbing, was designed to find new ways to save the lives of people whose lungs are failing. These treatments prolonged the animals' survival in a low-oxygen setting by staving off respiratory failure. Mice were given both the gas and liquid oxygen delivery methods, while the rats and pigs only received the liquid treatment. In a lab-controlled hypoxic setting (a chamber that was 9.5% oxygenated), mice without the supplemental oxygenation died after about 11 minutes. With the treatment, three-quarters of the tested mice survived for nearly an hour in the same lethal conditions. ScienceAlert adds these details: Initially, their research subjects were mice, who were thankfully anesthetized for the next part. The researchers developed an oxygen ventilation system to be inserted anally; they induced hypoxia via tracheal intubation, and compared mice ventilated intestinally to control mice who received no ventilation. Of the control mice, not a single one survived longer than 11 minutes. This was in marked contrast to the mice receiving intestinal oxygen, 75 percent of which survived for 50 minutes.

According to a new study conducted by researchers at MIT, being corrected online just makes the original posters more toxic and obnoxious. From a report: Basically, the new thinking is that correcting fake news, disinformation, and horrible tweets at all is bad and makes everything worse. This is a "perverse downstream consequence for debunking," and is the exact title of MIT research published in the '2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.' The core takeaway is that "being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content."

The MIT researchers' work is actually a continuation of their study into the effects of social media. This recent experiment started because the team had previously discovered something interesting about how people behave online. "In a recent paper published in Nature, we found that a simple accuracy nudge -- asking people to judge the accuracy of a random headline -- improved the quality of the news they shared afterward (by shifting their attention towards the concept of accuracy)," David Rand, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper told Motherboard in an email. "In the current study, we wanted to see whether a similar effect would happen if people who shared false news were directly corrected," he said. "Direct correction could be an even more powerful accuracy prime -- or, it could backfire by making people feel defensive or focusing their attention on social factors (eg embarrassment) rather than accuracy."

The Indian government has told doctors to look out for signs of mucormycosis or "black fungus" in COVID-19 patients as hospitals report a rise in cases of the rare but potentially fatal infection. From a report: The state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said at the weekend that doctors treating COVID-19 patients, diabetics and those with compromised immune systems should watch for early symptoms including sinus pain or nasal blockage on one side of the face, one-sided headache, swelling or numbness, toothache and loosening of teeth.

The disease, which can lead to blackening or discolouration over the nose, blurred or double vision, chest pain, breathing difficulties and coughing blood, is strongly linked to diabetes. And diabetes can in turn be exacerbated by steroids such as dexamethasone, used to treat severe COVID-19. "There have been cases reported in several other countries - including the UK, U.S., France, Austria, Brazil and Mexico, but the volume is much bigger in India," said David Denning, a professor at Britain's Manchester University and an expert at the Global Action Fund for Fungal Infections (GAFFI) charity. Further reading about the 'black fungus': BBC; NPR, the New York Times, and the Guardian.

In a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists -- including the world's foremost coronavirus researcher -- are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China's laboratories and agencies to "open their records" to independent analysis.

UPDATE:The New York Times points out that at least one of the signers, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, told them explicitly that "I think it is more likely than not that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from an animal reservoir rather than a lab." And the Times notes that "Unlike other recent statements, the new letter did not come down in favor of one scenario or another."

But Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, still points out to the Times that "the letter suggests a false equivalence between the lab escape and natural origin scenarios. To this day, no credible evidence has been presented to support the lab leak hypothesis, which remains grounded in speculation."

China is all set to attempt its first landing on another planet. After months in orbit around Mars, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft will deposit a rover called Zhurong on the surface of Mars. If successful, China will become the second country in history to explore the Martian surface with a rover. From a report: Tianwen-1 arrived at Mars on February 10, marking the arrival of China's first independent interplanetary mission. Since then, Tianwen-1 has been making close approaches to Mars every 49 hours as it flies in an elliptical orbit around the planet, each time taking high-resolution images of the landing site in Utopia Planitia, a vast plain that may once have been covered by an ancient Martian ocean. Chinese officials have said the landing attempt would take place in mid-to-late May, and a report on Twitter quoted Ye Peijian of the China Association for Science and Technology saying the landing will take place on May 14 at 7:11 p.m. ET. This aligns with estimates from amateur radio astronomers tracking the spacecraft.

Mission scientists have been analyzing the topography and geology of Utopia Planitia to guide the spacecraft's landing attempt, and if they decide not to attempt a landing on May 14, they will have additional opportunities on May 16 and May 18. Named for an ancient Chinese fire god, the 529-pound Zhurong rover is similar in size to NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on the red planet in 2004 and sent back exciting images and data about the planet's surface conditions. China's rover could make additional important discoveries concerning water and past habitability on the planet, paving the way for future human missions to Mars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN Business: For decades, ExxonMobil has deployed Big Tobacco-like propaganda to downplay the gravity of the climate crisis, shift blame onto consumers and protect its own interests, according to a Harvard University study published Thursday. The peer-reviewed study found that Exxon (XOM) publicly equates demand for energy to an indefinite need for fossil fuels, casting the company as merely a passive supplier working to meet that demand. The study used machine learning and algorithms to uncover trends in more than 200 public and internal Exxon documents between 1972 and 2019. "These patterns mimic the tobacco industry's documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations -- which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms -- and onto consumers," the study concludes. "ExxonMobil has used language to subtly yet systematically frame public discourse."

The Harvard study described "propaganda tactics of the fossil fuels industry" aimed at downplaying the climate crisis. For example, the authors said that after the 1999 merger of Exxon and Mobil, the companies began saying in public documents such as paid "advertorials" that "climate change was a 'risk,' rather than a reality." Prior to the merger, "risk" of climate change was only mentioned once in Exxon's public communications, the study said. From 2000 and beyond, it appeared 46 times, the study found, adding that no other term was more associated with climate change in the company's public statements. The study notes that "this scientific hedging strategy" was repeatedly used by the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

Moreover, the study found that Exxon has framed the debate around consumer energy "demand" to build a "fossil fuel savior" framework that "downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in and individualizes responsibility." [Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard research associate and one of the study's authors] told CNN Business this strategy is "effectively gaslighting the public into thinking there is no alternative, making the blame pill that Exxon is feeding the public easier to swallow." Supran said it's "certainly true" that modern society continues to rely mostly on fossil fuels, but added that Exxon's decades-long "disinformation" campaign is a central reason why it still does. "We are passively guilty, born into a fossil fuel society," he said. "But companies like Exxon are actively guilty for working to keep society the way it is."

schwit1 shares a report from New Atlas: UCF researchers say they've trapped a sustained explosive detonation, fixed in place, for the first time, channeling its enormous power into thrust in a new oblique wave detonation engine that could propel an aircraft up to 17 times the speed of sound, potentially beating the scramjet as a hypersonic propulsion method. [...] Rotating detonation engines, in which the shockwaves from one detonation are tuned to trigger further detonations within a ring-shaped channel, were thought of as impossible to build right up until researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) went ahead and demonstrated a prototype last year in sustained operation. Due for testing in a rocket launch by around 2025, rotating detonation engines should be more efficient than pulse detonation engines simply because the combustion chamber doesn't need to be cleared out between detonations.

Now, another team from UCF, including some of the same researchers that built the rotating detonation engine last year, says it's managed a world-first demonstration of an elusive third type of detonation engine that could out-punch them all, theoretically opening up a pathway to aircraft flying at speeds up to 13,000 mph (21,000 km/h), or 17 times the speedThe UCF team claims it has successfully stabilized a detonation wave under hypersonic flow conditions, keeping it in place rather than having it move upstream (where it could cause the fuel source to explode) or downstream (where it would lose its explosive advantage and fizzle out into a deflagration). [...] Where a detonation typically lasts only a matter of micro- or milliseconds, the UCF team managed to sustain this one experimentally until the fuel was turned off after around three seconds. That's long enough to prove the device works [...]. The paper is open-access at PNAS.

The 1949 letter by the physicist and Nobel laureate discusses bees, birds and whether new physics principles could come from studying animal senses. Phys.Org reports: The previously unpublished letter was shared with researchers by Judith Davys -- Einstein had addressed it to her late husband, radar researcher Glyn Davys. RMIT's Associate Professor Adrian Dyer has published significant studies into bees and is the lead author of the new paper on Einstein's letter, published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A. Dyer said the letter shows how Einstein envisaged new discoveries could come from studying animals. "Seven decades after Einstein proposed new physics might come from animal sensory perception, we're seeing discoveries that push our understanding about navigation and the fundamental principles of physics," he said.

The letter also proves Einstein met with Nobel laurate Karl von Frisch, who was a leading bee and animal sensory researcher. In April 1949, von Frisch presented his research on how honeybees navigate more effectively using the polarization patterns of light scattered from the sky. The day after Einstein attended von Frisch's lecture, the two researchers shared a private meeting. Although this meeting wasn't formally documented, the recently discovered letter from Einstein provides insight into what they might have talked about.

"It is thinkable that the investigation of the behavior of migratory birds and carrier pigeons may someday lead to the understanding of some physical process which is not yet known," Einstein wrote. Professor Andrew Greentree, a theoretical physicist at RMIT, said Einstein also suggested that for bees to extend our knowledge of physics, new types of behavior would need to be observed. "Remarkably, it is clear through his writing that Einstein envisaged new discoveries could come from studying animals' behaviors," Greentree said.