An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The seven astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station sheltered inside their respective spacecraft, a Crew Dragon and Soyuz, on Monday morning as the orbiting laboratory passed through an unexpected debris field. This was not a pre-planned collision avoidance maneuver in low Earth orbit, in which the station would use onboard propulsion to move away. Rather, the situation required the astronauts to quickly take shelter. Had there been a collision during the conjunction, the two spacecraft would have been able to detach from the space station and make an emergency return to Earth. Ultimately that was not necessary, and the astronauts reemerged into the space station later Monday. However, as the crew on board the station prepared for their sleep schedule, Mission Control in Houston asked them to keep as many of the hatches onboard the space station closed for the time being, in case of an unexpected collision during subsequent orbits.

It appears likely that the debris field that had alarmed flight controllers on Monday was caused by an anti-satellite test performed by Russia's military early on Monday. [...] It appears that Russia launched a surface-to-space Nudol missile on Monday, between 02:00 and 05:00 UTC, from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the northern part of the country. The missile then struck an older satellite, Cosmos 1408. Launched in 1982, the satellite had been slowly losing altitude and was a little more than 450 km above the Earth. This is a large satellite, with a mass of about 2,000 kg. As of Monday afternoon, US Space Command said it was already tracking more than 1,000 pieces of new debris. Although the satellite's altitude is higher than the International Space Station, which is about 400 km above the surface, a kinetic impact would spread a large cloud of debris. Satellite expert Jonathan McDowell believes the Cosmos 1408 satellite is the likely candidate for the space station's ongoing debris event.

During a daily briefing today, US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said the test had created more than 1,500 pieces of trackable debris and hundreds of thousands of pieces of un-trackable debris. "The Russian Federation recklessly conducted a destructive satellite test of a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites," Price said. "This test will significantly increase the risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station as well as to other human spaceflight activities. Russia's dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long-term sustainability of outer space."

Heavy rain and flooding in Aswan, Egypt, have driven drifts of scorpions to seek shelter in people's homes. From a report: Three people died and more than 400 were hospitalised across the governorate to receive anti-venom treatment after being stung by the panicking arachnids, according to state-run media. However, acting Health Minister Khalid Abdel-Ghafar said in a statement that no deaths were reported from the stings. The Ministry of Health has reassured the public that it holds a large enough stock of anti-venom, noting that 3,350 doses were available in Aswan. The downpours and subsequent floods have also forced local authorities to suspend schools on Sunday, Governor Ashraf Attia said.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels. The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases -- rather than requires -- energy, was reported Nov. 8 in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The scientists were excited to find that the addition of ammonia to a metal catalyst containing the platinum-like element ruthenium spontaneously produced nitrogen, which means that no added energy was required. Instead, this process can be harnessed to produce electricity, with protons and nitrogen gas as byproducts. In addition, the metal complex can be recycled through exposure to oxygen and used repeatedly, all a much cleaner process than using carbon-based fuels. "We figured out that, not only are we making nitrogen, we are making it under conditions that are completely unprecedented," says Berry, who is the Lester McNall Professor of Chemistry and focuses his research efforts on transition metal chemistry. "To be able to complete the ammonia-to-nitrogen reaction under ambient conditions -- and get energy -- is a pretty big deal."

Ammonia has been burned as a fuel source for many years. During World War II, it was used in automobiles, and scientists today are considering ways to burn it in engines as a replacement for gasoline, particularly in the maritime industry. However, burning ammonia releases toxic nitrogen oxide gases. The new reaction avoids those toxic byproducts. If the reaction were housed in a fuel cell where ammonia and ruthenium react at an electrode surface, it could cleanly produce electricity without the need for a catalytic converter.

alaskana98 writes: In a recent GQ magazine interview with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Department of Defense's "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)," he claims that the much publicized "Tic-Tac" UAPs observed by the U.S. Navy have been flying in our skies for many decades: "I have in my possession official U.S. government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac [seen by the Nimitz pilots in 2004] being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory."

He then goes on to state that he's even heard from pilots who suffered real-world health issues as a consequence of getting too close to the objects: "I've got to be careful, I can't speak too specifically, but one might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, "Lue, it's really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days." Well, that's a sign of radiation. That's not a sunburn; it's a radiation burn."

Perhaps most bizarre is a revelation that those who got closest to the UAPs experienced a form of time dilation: "'You know, Lue, it's really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes' worth of fuel. How is that possible?' Well, there's a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with warping of space time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space time relative to the vehicle and the environment."

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- but if these claims can be corroborated with evidence it would suggest that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of information that has yet to be revealed on these things. Perhaps the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) will drive future efforts to get a better idea (PDF) of what this phenomenon actually is.

Last month 49-year-old Glen de Vries travelled with William Shatner into space with two other crewmembers on Blue Origin's sub-orbital capsule.

Today NBC News announced de Vries "was one of two men killed Thursday in a plane crash in New Jersey, officials said." Glen de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, New Jersey, died following the small aircraft crash shortly before 3 p.m. in Hampton Township, according to New Jersey State Police...

De Vries co-founded software company Medidata Solutions, which specializes in management of electronic data from clinical trials. He also served as a trustee for Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "We will truly miss Glen, but his dreams — which we share — live on: we will pursue progress in life sciences & healthcare as passionately as he did," Medidat said in a statement.
Newsweek reports that upon his return to earth, de Vries told a Pittsburgh TV station that space travel "is something we need to make accessible in an equitable way, to as many people on the planet as possible." In a tweet on Friday, Blue Origin wrote, "We are devastated to hear of the sudden passing of Glen de Vries."

"He brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates," the tweet continued. "His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired."

Scientists have identified what appears to be a small chunk of the moon that is tracking the Earth's orbit around the Sun. From a report: The asteroid, named Kamo'oalewa, was discovered in 2016 but until now relatively little has been known about it. New observations suggest it could be a fragment from the moon that was thrown into space by an ancient lunar collision. Kamo'oalewa is one of Earth's quasi-satellites, a category of asteroid that orbits the Sun, but remains relatively close to the planet -- in this case about 9m miles away.

Despite being close in astronomical terms, the asteroid is about the size of a ferris wheel and about 4m times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye. Consequently, the Earth's most powerful telescopes are needed to make observations. Using the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in southern Arizona, astronomers found the spectrum of reflected light from Kamo'oalewa closely matched lunar rocks from Nasa's Apollo missions, suggesting it originated from the moon. They had initially compared the light with that reflected off other near-Earth asteroids, but drawn a blank. "I looked through every near-Earth asteroid spectrum we had access to, and nothing matched," said Ben Sharkey, a PhD student at the University of Arizona and the paper's lead author.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Scientific American: A diamond that formed deep in the earth's mantle contains a mineral never seen before in nature. The discovery is a rare glimpse into the deep mantle and may help reveal new information about the structure of the planet at depths of more than 660 kilometers. This, in turn, can help geologists better understand how the mantle controls the earth's plate tectonics.

The mineral, calcium silicate perovskite, only forms under the incredibly high pressures that occur deep in the earth. The newly identified sample likely formed between 660 and 900 km below the planet's surface, says mineralogist Oliver Tschauner of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Though the mineral had previously been synthesized in the laboratory using 20 gigapascals of pressure (almost 200,000 times atmospheric pressure), it had immediately reverted to a different form when it was removed from that artificial high-pressure environment. So researchers had assumed it would be impossible to retrieve naturally occurring calcium silicate perovskite from the mantle. "The chances, we thought, of finding it were so low that we never really actively looked for it," Tschauner says.

So it was a surprise when he and his colleagues, analyzing imperfections in a diamond from Orapa, Botswana, found three minuscule specks of calcium silicate perovskite. Calcium silicate is found in other forms, including wollastonite in the crust and breyite in the middle and lower regions of the mantle. But this version had a telltale cubic crystal structure that marked it as different from those versions of the mineral. Tschauner and his colleagues named the new mineral "davemaoite," after geologist Ho-Kwang "Dave" Mao, who carried out some of the pioneering experiments in using diamonds as presses to experimentally generate mantlelike pressures on the earth's surface. They announced the discovery on Thursday in Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from International Business Times: US scientists have developed a new form of drug that promotes the regeneration of cells and reversed paralysis in mice with spinal injuries, allowing them to walk again within four weeks of treatment. The research was published in the journal Science on Thursday, and the team of Northwestern University scientists behind it hope to approach the Food and Drug Administration as early as next year to propose human trials. [Northwestern's Samuel Stupp, who led the study, and his team] used nanofibers to mimic the architecture of the "extracellular matrix" -- a naturally occurring network of molecules surrounding tissue that is responsible for supporting cells. Each fiber is about 10,000 times narrower than a human hair, and they are made up of hundreds of thousands of bioactive molecules called peptides that transmit signals to promote nerve regeneration. The therapy was injected as a gel into tissue surrounding the spinal cords of lab mice 24 hours after an incision was made in their spines.

The team decided to wait a day because humans who receive devastating spinal injuries from car accidents, gunshots and so on also experience delays in getting treatment. Four weeks later, mice who received the treatment regained their ability to walk almost as well as before the injury. Those left untreated did not. The mice were then put down to examine the impacts of the therapy on the cellular level, and the team found dramatic improvements to the spinal cords. The severed extensions of neurons called axons regenerated, and scar tissue that can act as a physical barrier to regeneration was significantly diminished. What's more, an insulating layer of axons called myelin that is important in transmitting electric signals had reformed, blood vessels that deliver nutrients to injured cells had formed, and more motor neurons survived.

A key discovery by the team was that creating a certain mutation in the molecules intensified their collective motion and heightened their efficacy. This is because receptors in neurons are naturally in constant motion, Stupp explained, and increasing the motion of the therapeutic molecules within the nanofibers helps connect them more effectively with their moving targets. The researchers in fact tested two versions of the treatment -- one with the mutation and one without -- and found that mice that received the modified version regained more function. The gel developed by the scientists is the first of its kind, but could usher in a new generation of medicines known as "supramolecular drugs," because the therapy is an assembly of many molecules rather than a single molecule, said Stupp. According to the team, it is safe because the materials biodegrade within a matter of weeks and become nutrients for cells. Stupp said he hopes to rapidly move direct to human studies next without the need for further animal testing, such as on primates.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours after it launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Fox Business reports: NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, will spend six months at the ISS conducting scientific research and monitoring the space station. The launch was supposed to occur nearly two weeks ago, but was delayed by bad weather and an undisclosed medical problem with a crew member. Wednesday's launch carried the 600th person to ever reach orbit and comes just days after SpaceX returned four astronauts to Earth on Monday, bringing an end to a 200-day mission at the space station.

AI systems being developed to diagnose skin cancer run the risk of being less accurate for people with dark skin, research suggests. From a report: The potential of AI has led to developments in healthcare, with some studies suggesting image recognition technology based on machine learning algorithms can classify skin cancers as successfully as human experts. NHS trusts have begun exploring AI to help dermatologists triage patients with skin lesions. But researchers say more needs to be done to ensure the technology benefits all patients, after finding that few freely available image databases that could be used to develop or "train" AI systems for skin cancer diagnosis contain information on ethnicity or skin type. Those that do have very few images of people with dark skin.

Dr David Wen, first author of the study from the University of Oxford, said: "You could have a situation where the regulatory authorities say that because this algorithm has only been trained on images in fair-skinned people, you're only allowed to use it for fair-skinned individuals, and therefore that could lead to certain populations being excluded from algorithms that are approved for clinical use. Alternatively, if the regulators are a bit more relaxed and say: 'OK, you can use it [on all patients]', the algorithms may not perform as accurately on populations who don't have that many images involved in training." That could bring other problems including risking avoidable surgery, missing treatable cancers and causing unnecessary anxiety, the team said.

The use of whole genome sequencing could save the NHS millions of pounds, a study suggests, after it found a quarter of people with rare illnesses received a diagnosis for their condition through the technology. From a report: In some cases, the findings have provided reassurance for families that they have not passed their condition on to their children, while in others they have inspired life-changing treatments. Though individually uncommon, rare inherited diseases affect about 6% of the UK population, or roughly 3 million people. Traditionally, geneticists searched for the abnormalities underpinning such conditions by looking at the person's chromosomes through a microscope, but this is no good at spotting tiny, but often highly significant changes, such as single letter substitutions in the genetic code. Because of this, "many of the people who have a rare disease either live very long diagnostic odysseys to get an answer for why they are like they are, or they do not get an answer in their entire lifetime," said Prof Sir Mark Caulfield at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), a former chief scientist at Genomics England. In 2013, the UK government launched the 100,000 Genomes Project to investigate whether WGS -- which involves reading through the entire 3bn pairs of letters in the human genome -- could help doctors better understand the cause of patients' symptoms, and identify other family members who may be at risk. Five years later, NHS England became the first national health care system in the world to offer WGS to people with undiagnosed rare diseases and cancer as part of routine care.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A University of Arizona-led effort to reconstruct Earth's climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change and how far out of bounds human activity has pushed the climate system. The study, published this week in Nature, had three main findings:

1.) It verified that the main drivers of climate change since the last ice age are rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the retreat of the ice sheets.
2.) It suggests a general warming trend over the last 10,000 years, settling a decade-long debate about whether this period trended warmer or cooler in the paleoclimatology community.
3.) The magnitude and rate warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes over the last 24,000 years.

There are different methods for reconstructing past temperatures. The team combined two independent datasets -- temperature data from marine sediments and computer simulations of climate -- to create a more complete picture of the past. The researchers looked at the chemical signatures of marine sediments to get information about past temperatures. Because temperature changes over time can affect the chemistry of a long-dead animal's shell, paleoclimatologists can use those measurements to estimate temperature in an area. It's not a perfect thermometer, but it's a starting point. Computer-simulated climate models, on the other hand, provide temperature information based on scientists' best understanding of the physics of the climate system, which also isn't perfect. The team decided to combine the methods to harness the strengths of each. This is called data assimilation and is also commonly used in weather forecasting. [...] Now, the team is working on using their method to investigate climate changes even farther in the past.

nickwinlund77 shares a report from SciTechDaily: Since the first observation of merging black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015, astronomers have been repeatedly surprised by their large masses. Though they emit no light, black hole mergers are observed through their emission of gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Physicists originally expected that black holes would have masses less than about 40 times that of the Sun, because merging black holes arise from massive stars, which can't hold themselves together if they get too big. The LIGO and Virgo observatories, however, have found many black holes with masses greater than that of 50 suns, with some as massive as 100 suns. Numerous formation scenarios have been proposed to produce such large black holes, but no single scenario has been able to explain the diversity of black hole mergers observed so far, and there is no agreement on which combination of formation scenarios is physically viable. This new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is the first to show that both large and small black hole masses can result from a single pathway, wherein the black holes gain mass from the expansion of the universe itself.

Astronomers typically model black holes inside a universe that cannot expand. "It's an assumption that simplifies Einstein's equations because a universe that doesn't grow has much less to keep track of," said Kevin Croker, a professor at the UH Mnoa Department of Physics and Astronomy. "There is a trade-off though: predictions may only be reasonable for a limited amount of time." Because the individual events detectable by LIGO-Virgo only last a few seconds, when analyzing any single event, this simplification is sensible. But these same mergers are potentially billions of years in the making. During the time between the formation of a pair of black holes and their eventual merger, the universe grows profoundly. If the more subtle aspects of Einstein's theory are carefully considered, then a startling possibility emerges: the masses of black holes could grow in lockstep with the universe, a phenomenon that Croker and his team call cosmological coupling. The most well-known example of cosmologically-coupled material is light itself, which loses energy as the universe grows. "We thought to consider the opposite effect," said research co-author and UH Manoa Physics and Astronomy Professor Duncan Farrah. "What would LIGO -- Virgo observe if black holes were cosmologically coupled and gained energy without needing to consume other stars or gas?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have shown how a fatty acid found in palm oil can encourage the spread of cancer, in work that could pave the way for new treatments. The study, on mice, found that palmitic acid promoted metastasis in mouth and skin cancers. In future, this process could be targeted with drugs or carefully designed eating plans, but the team behind the work cautioned against patients putting themselves on diets in the absence of clinical trials. The study adds to emerging evidence that diet can be used to enhance existing cancer treatments because certain nutrients are disproportionately relied on by tumor cells, or are required at critical stages such as metastasis.

The study built on previous work by the same team showing that, within a tumor, just a small subset of cells have the capacity to spread by traveling out of the tumor, reaching other organs and colonizing them. These specialized cancer cells appeared to rely particularly heavily on fatty acids and the latest work narrowed this down to palmitic acid, which is found in palm oil -- but also in a wide variety of foods such as butter and olive oil. The study, published in Nature, found that when palmitic acid was supplemented into the diet of mice, mouth and skin cancers were more likely to spread. Other fatty acids called oleic acid and linoleic acid -- omega-9 and omega-6 fats found in foods such as olive oil and flaxseeds -- did not show the same effect. Neither of the fatty acids tested increased the risk of developing cancer in the first place. The study suggested that exposure to palmitic acid caused changes to the function of genes in cancer cells that allowed them to sense fatty acids and consume them more efficiently. The presence of palmitic acid also appeared to send cancer cells into a "regenerative state" allowing them to form signaling networks beyond the tumor, which is known to be a crucial step towards spreading.

Camel Pilot writes: SpinLaunch is developing a launch system that uses kinetic energy as a cheap method to launch a projectile into orbit. They propose using a vacuum-sealed centrifuge spinning the projectile at near escape velocity speeds and releasing into orbit. A rocket engine would still be used to maneuver and position the satellite. They have built a 1/10th scale prototype in the New Mexican desert and have already launched test objects 10s of thousands of feet.

In a recent interview, CEO Jonathan Yaney said: "I find that the more audacious and crazy the project is, the better off you are just working on it -- rather than being out there talking about it. We had to prove to ourselves that we could actually pull this off."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Unsealed emails reveal the role baby-powder maker Johnson & Johnson played in a report that an industry group submitted to U.S. regulators deciding whether to keep warnings off talc-based products linked to cancer. The emails -- unsealed in the state of Mississippi's lawsuit against J&J over its refusal to add a safety warning -- show J&J and its talc supplier chose the scientists hired by their trade association, the Personal Care Products Council, to write the 2009 report assessing talc-based powders' health risks. They also show the researchers changed the final version of their report at the companies' behest. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it relied in part on the report in its decision to forgo a warning for the product.

The emails among executives of J&J and Rio Tinto Minerals, its supplier at the time, provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of dealings between companies and their industry group that successfully fended off a cancer warning on talc-based powders for nearly 40 years. Now, almost 39,000 users and their families are suing J&J, most claiming their ovarian cancers and those of loved ones were linked to asbestos, the potent carcinogen in the products pulled from U.S. and Canadian shelves in May 2020. Dependence on industry data creates a situation that's ripe for lobbyists to exert pressure on the FDA. The unsealed emails pull back the curtain on how such efforts get launched, who pays for them, and who has a hand in delivering the final product to regulators.

While the practice of companies having a say in industry group submissions to the FDA isn't new or illegal, the emails reveal just how involved J&J got in a report meant to assess product safety -- down to selecting individual scientists to produce it and having them write an executive summary. J&J denied any wrongdoing in its decision not to acknowledge its input to the report that the PCPC lobbying group sent to the FDA. [...] FDA officials acknowledged they weighed the PCPC's response to the citizens' petitions demanding a warning for talc-based powders before finding there was "inconclusive evidence" the mineral caused ovarian and other forms of cancer. "The FDA reviewed and considered all of the information submitted to us in the two petitions, the comments received in response to the petitions, and additional scientific information," said Tara Rabin, a spokeswoman.

Astronomers have detected a record number of gravitational waves, in a discovery they say will shed light on the evolution of the universe, and the life and death of stars. From a report: An international team of scientists have made 35 new observations of gravitational waves, which brings the total number of detections since 2015 to 90. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, created by massive cosmic events -- such as pairs of black holes smashing together -- up to billions of light years away. Waves from these cataclysmic collisions were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) observatory in the US and the Virgo instrument in Italy between November 2019 and March 2020. The first detection of gravitational waves, announced in 2016, confirmed a prediction Albert Einstein made a century earlier based on his general theory of relativity. Monash University researcher Shanika Galaudage, a collaborator in the Australian branch of the project known as OzGrav, described gravitational waves as a game-changing "new window into the universe."

"Another space agency, about one-tenth the size of NASA, is thinking outside of the planet-sized box in its search for Martian life," reports CNET: With its Martian Moons Exploration mission (or MMX), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, later this decade will touch down on a world no spacecraft has visited before: Phobos, one of Mars' mystifying moons. Scientists at JAXA, and other astronomers, hypothesize that on this curious moon they may find signs of ancient microbes that were catapulted off the surface of Mars and flung across the cosmos. The remains of these unwitting spacefaring organisms have been untouched for millions of years and, soon, could be plucked from Phobos' face and returned to Earth.

When an asteroid collides with a planet, the planet unleashes a mighty sneeze of dust and rock. The faster the asteroid smashes into the surface, the bigger the sneeze... [I]f the asteroid impact is powerful enough, the sneeze will fling dust and rock into space... Just like a human sneeze contains microbes, the material ejected by a planet may also contain microscopic life — or the remnants of it. If the asteroid death blast doesn't melt the rock and the microbes to mere atoms, there's a chance they can float into the cosmos... Mars is scarred by impacts from drifter asteroids that slammed into the surface over the planet's life. If these impacts were to hit in just the right spot, at just the right angle and just the right time, there's a chance the ejected material would make it to Phobos, Mars' curious, potato-shaped moon. Phobos has the closest orbit of any known moon to its parent body, circling the red planet at a distance of just 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), about the same as the distance between Tokyo and Honolulu....

Phobos is practically hugging Mars, and moves around the planet so quickly that if you were to observe it from the surface, you'd be able to see it rise and set twice every Martian day. Its proximity to the red planet has led JAXA scientists and engineers to speculate about the potential for finding the remnants of Martian microbes on the moon's surface. "If Martian life once existed and was widespread elsewhere on Mars, the chance that its dead remains exist also on Phobos is, in my opinion, relatively high," says Ryuki Hyodo, a planetary scientist at JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science... It's possible, JAXA believes, that Phobos could be a satellite cemetery, unwittingly holding molecular evidence of long-dead microorganisms....

With a planned sample return date of 2029, MMX would be the first time samples have been returned from the Martian sphere. While the space agency estimates just 0.1% of Phobos' soil likely originated on Mars, there's a chance MMX could bring back the first samples of the red planet to Earth.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared this report from the New York Times about a "particularly unusual" star about 150 light-years away that's orbited by three planets: What's unusual is the inclinations of the outer two planets, HD 3167 c and d. Whereas in our solar system all the planets orbit in the same flat plane around the sun, these two are in polar orbits. That is, they go above and below their star's poles, rather than around the equator as Earth and the other planets in our system do.

Now scientists have discovered the system is even weirder than they thought. Researchers measured the orbit of the innermost planet, HD 3167 b, for the first time — and it doesn't match the other two. It instead orbits in the star's flat plane, like planets in our solar system, and perpendicular to HD 3167 c and d. This star system is the first one known to act like this...

The unusual configuration of HD 3167 highlights just how weird and wonderful other stars and their planets can be. "It puts in perspective again what we think we know about the formation of planetary systems," said Vincent Bourrier from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who led the discovery published last month in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"Planets can evolve in really, really different ways."

So how exactly did the universe come into existence? "A recent astronomical measurement recorded in a laboratory at the South Pole is causing scientists to revisit their theories..." writes Don Lincoln, a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: In the intervening decades [since 1929], observations have only strengthened the case for the Big Bang theory, but they have also made it clear that the theory is incomplete. For instance, in its earliest incarnation, the Big Bang couldn't explain why the universe was so uniform. Astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere who looked deep into space see the same thing on average as ones that live in the Southern Hemisphere. Traditional Big Bang theory predicts that there should be small differences in temperature, clumpiness of large clusters of galaxies and other properties. But both sides look the same.

However, in 1980, physicist Alan Guth proposed an extension to the theory that could reconcile some of the inconsistencies between theory and observation, including the unexpected uniformity. His extension is called cosmic inflation theory and it claims that in the first moments of the birth of the universe it expanded faster than the speed of light.... However, if inflation is true, we should be able to prove it. Although the universe was once glowing hot, the expansion of the universe has cooled it off and that glow has morphed into microwaves that astronomers have been able to detect since 1964. This relic of the Big Bang is called the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. Inflation theory predicts that the microwaves of the CMB should be polarized...

The CMB can be polarized in two ways: B-modes, which are swirly patterns, and E-modes, which are more of a straight-line pattern. And, if inflation theory is correct, we'd expect to see some mix of B-modes and E-modes, while if it isn't correct — in other words, if the expansion of the universe did not happen as quickly as the theory suggests — researchers should only see E-modes... Astronomers used a telescope facility called BICEP-3 (short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) to study the CMB and its polarization. The telescope's South Pole location, with its altitude of nearly two miles above sea level and incredibly dry air, is an ideal place to conduct this kind of research. BICEP-3 scientists combined their data with measurements at other facilities and found no indication of B-modes originating from the CMB. If B-modes are present in the CMB, they are very small.

So, does that mean that the theory of inflation must be thrown out? No, although the data has disproved some of the simpler theories of inflation, it isn't sensitive enough to rule out the more complex versions. Still, the failure to observe CMB B-modes is unsettling, causing some scientists to go back to the drawing board.