schwit1 shares a report from EurekAlert: A nitrogen doped carbon-coated nickel anode can catalyze an essential reaction in hydrogen fuel cells at a fraction of the cost of the precious metals currently used, Cornell University researchers have found. The new discovery could accelerate the widespread use of hydrogen fuel cells, which hold great promise as efficient, clean energy sources for vehicles and other applications. It's one of a string of discoveries for the Hector D. Abruna lab in their ongoing search for active, inexpensive, durable catalysts for use in alkaline fuel cells.

Recent experiments with nonprecious-metal HOR electrocatalysts needed to overcome two major challenges, the researchers wrote: low intrinsic activity from too strong a hydrogen binding energy, and poor durability due to rapid passivation from metal oxide formation. To overcome these challenges, the researchers designed a nickel-based electrocatalyst with a 2 nanometer shell made of nitrogen-doped carbon. Their hydrogen fuel cell has an anode (where hydrogen is oxidized) catalyst consisting of a solid nickel core surrounded by the carbon shell. When paired with a cobalt-manganese cathode (where oxygen is reduced), the resulting completely precious-metal-free hydrogen fuel cell outputs more than 200 milliwatts per square centimeter.

The presence of nickel oxide species on the surface of the nickel electrode slows the hydrogen oxidation reaction dramatically, Abruna said. The nitrogen-doped carbon coating serves as a protection layer and enhances the HOR kinetics, making the reaction quicker and much more efficient. In addition, the presence of the graphene coating on the nickel electrode prevents the formation of nickel oxides -- resulting in electrodes with dramatically enhanced lifetimes. These electrodes are also much more tolerant to carbon monoxide, which rapidly poisons platinum. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

InfiniteZero shares a report from Space.com: Last Wednesday (March 23), NASA astronaut Raja Chari and the European Space Agency's Matthias Maurer spent nearly seven hours outside the International Space Station, performing a variety of maintenance work. Amazingly, astrophotographer Sebastian Voltmer managed to capture a snapshot of the spacewalk action from the ground -- and from Maurer's hometown of Sankt Wendel, Germany, no less. "I feel like I just made a once-in-a-lifetime image," Voltmer wrote at SpaceWeather.com, which featured the photo in its online gallery.

Existence of volcanoes makes idea that dwarf planet is inert ball of ice look increasingly improbable. From a report: Strung out in the icy reaches of our solar system, two peaks that tower over the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto have perplexed planetary scientists for years. Some speculated it could be an ice volcano, spewing out not lava but vast quantities of icy slush -- yet no cauldron-like caldera could be seen. Now a full analysis of images and topographical data suggests it is not one ice volcano but a merger of many -- some up to 7,000 metres tall and about 10-150km across. Their discovery has reignited another debate: what could be keeping Pluto warm enough to support volcanic activity? Sitting at the southern edge of a vast heart-shaped ice sheet, these unusual surface features were initially spotted when Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft flew past in July 2015, providing the first close-up images of the icy former planet and its moons.

"We were instantly intrigued by this area because it was so different and striking-looking," said Dr Kelsi Singer, a New Horizons co-investigator and deputy project scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "There are these giant broad mounds, and then this hummocky-like, undulating texture superimposed on top; and even on top of that there's a smaller bouldery kind of texture." At the time, an ice volcano seemed like the least-weird explanation for these features -- there were no impact craters from asteroids or meteors nearby, suggesting these features had been erased by relatively recent geological events; and no evidence of plate tectonics -- a key contributor to mountain formation on Earth.

SpaceX has ended production of new Crew Dragon astronaut capsules, a company executive told Reuters, as Elon Musk's space transportation company heaps resources on its next-generation spaceship program. From the report: Capping the fleet at four Crew Dragons adds more urgency to the development of the astronaut capsule's eventual successor, Starship, SpaceX's moon and Mars rocket. Starship's debut launch has been delayed for months by engine development hurdles and regulatory reviews. It also poses new challenges as the company learns how to maintain a fleet and quickly fix unexpected problems without holding up a busy schedule of astronaut missions.

"We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we'll be refurbishing," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters, confirming the plan to end Crew Dragon manufacturing. She added that SpaceX would retain the capability to build more capsules if a need arises in the future, but contended that "fleet management is key." Musk's business model is underpinned by reusable spacecraft, so it was inevitable the company would cease production at some point. But the timing was not known, nor was his strategy of using the existing fleet for its full backlog of missions. "Crew Dragon has flown five crews of government and private astronauts to space since 2020, when it flew its first pair of NASA astronauts and became the U.S. space agency's primary ride for getting humans to and from the International Space Station," notes Reuters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: One of the first products made using a novel animal-free egg white is now available in the United States. The unique macarons are the first to be made with an egg white protein that comes from engineered yeast, designed to be indistinguishable from what is found in chicken eggs. The Every Company, founded in 2014 under the name Clara Foods, is one of several food technology companies working to create real animal-free proteins using a method called precision fermentation. The idea behind the process is to break down certain animal products, such as milk and eggs, to their molecular components and then use microorganisms to produce those components. Earlier this year the first cow-free dairy milk using this method hit supermarket shelves in the United States. That product was created using whey proteins from engineered fungus, while other companies are working on similar dairy products using engineered yeast to produce the desired milk proteins.

The Every Company has spent the last few years focusing on using the same technique to produce chicken-free egg whites, working with engineered yeast to produce proteins found in egg whites. The company has not disclosed the specific combination of proteins used to create its final egg white product, however it is likely ovalbumin -- the primary protein component in egg whites -- plays a strong role in the recipe. Arturo Elizondo, CEO of Every Company, said the new egg white product functions exactly like a chicken-derived egg white. It whips, aerates and bakes in ways identical to traditional egg whites, and the company has teamed up with San Francisco-based bakery Chantal Guillon to launch the product in a line of iconic French macarons. The chicken-free egg white is the third animal-free product created by the Every Company. Its first fully commercialized product was an animal-free pepsin, launched in early 2021.

Particles of light called photons can be trapped inside mirrors to form a gas with unusual properties, New Scientist reports. From the report: A gas made of particles of light, or photons, becomes easier to compress the more you squash it. This strange property could prove useful in making highly sensitive sensors. While gases are normally made from atoms or molecules, it is possible to create a gas of photons by trapping them with lasers. But a gas made this way doesn't have a uniform density -- researchers say it isn't homogeneous, or pure -- making it difficult to study properly. Now Julian Schmitt at the University of Bonn, Germany, and his colleagues have made a homogeneous photon gas for the first time by trapping photons between two nanoscale mirrors. They then moved one of the mirrors to measure the compressibility of the photon gas and derive basic properties about it. "We can consider the system to be like an air pump, but it's not filled with air, it's filled with light," says Schmitt. "We compress it and look at how it responds. In this way, we can learn about very fundamental properties." Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abm2543.

Covid-19 patients who have been hospitalised should also be routinely tested for flu, researchers have said. The call was made after the publication of a paper in the medical journal the Lancet that revealed having both conditions more than doubles the risk of a patient dying. From a report: Scientists also discovered that individuals who had contracted both Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, and influenza viruses were more than four times more likely to require ventilation support and 2.4 times more likely to die than if they just had Covid-19. "We found that the combination of Covid-19 and flu viruses is particularly dangerous," said Professor Kenneth Baillie of Edinburgh University. "We expect that Covid-19 will circulate with flu, increasing the chance of co-infections. That is why we should change our testing strategy for Covid-19 patients in hospital and test for flu much more widely."

The study looked at more than 305,000 hospitalised patients with Covid-19 and involved researchers from Edinburgh University, Liverpool University, Imperial College London and Leiden University in the Netherlands. A total of 6,965 patients were found to have had Covid-19, while 227 also had the influenza virus. These individuals experienced significantly more severe outcomes, researchers found. "We were surprised that the risk of death more than doubled when people were infected by both flu and Covid-19 viruses," said Professor Calum Semple of Liverpool University. "It is now very important that people get fully vaccinated and boosted against both viruses, and not leave it until it is too late."

On Saturday CNBC published a remarkable headline. "Stem cells may finally offer a cure for Type 1 diabetes." There are 537 million people around the world living with diabetes. And that number is growing.... But over the past 20 years, significant advancements in stem cell research and therapies have revealed promising methods of creating new insulin-making cells, which are needed to cure Type 1 diabetes. Biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals recently began a clinical trial where it plans to treat 17 participants who have Type 1 diabetes with new insulin-making cells derived from stem cells. The first patient in the trial, Brian Shelton, has had positive results. After 150 days, Shelton was able to reduce the amount of insulin he injects by 92%.

Other global companies are also working to cure diabetes, such as ViaCyte, CRISPR, and Novo Nordisk, one of the biggest insulin manufacturers in the world.
In CNBC's 20-minute video, a VP/disease area executive from Vertex Pharmaceuticals explains that diabetes is "one of the few diseases where a single cell type is destroyed or missing" — the pancreas cell that produces insulin. So they're exploring "the idea that if you could create those cells and replace them, you can really address the underlying causal biology of the disease directly."

CNBC also spoke to Brian Shelton, the trial's first patient, who's been a Type 1 diabetic for 44 years, and whose pancreas suddenly started producing insulin again. "Now my body does it all on its own," Shelton says. The news was especially surprising, CNBC reports, because "as the first person in the trial, Shelton received only half of the anticipated dose to ensure it was safe."

One researcher they spoke to even predicts that biological solutions will compete with "ongoing efforts to use nanotechnology to miniaturize all the hardware necessary to do this," and that within the next 3 to 5 years patients will finally have the option of "something that is really Cadillac." And Aaron Kowalski, CEO of the nonprofit Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, tells CNBC, "I am fully convinced that I will walk away from my insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor in my lifetime, and I would be disappointed if it wasn't in this decade."

CNBC's report concludes, "For diabetics who want a cure that requires no additional treatment, it may no longer be a question of if, but a matter of when."

Science magazine explores how actual scientists feel about Twitter: "I like that there's a low bar to entry [on Twitter] — I can put something out and see how other scientists are thinking of a problem, people who have a different skill set than mine," says biostatistician Natalie Dean of Emory University, whose Twitter account has some 138,000 followers. But the pandemic has also helped demonstrate the limitations of social media. It can be difficult, for example, for scientists to be heard over the cacophony of messages on Twitter — some 500 million each day. And although some scientists have used the platform to elevate their online presence, that has rarely translated into concrete professional rewards....

[A]s the pandemic exploded and researchers sought to pump out information to each other and an eager public, many saw advantages to Twitter. Its vast reach became a draw: more than 200 million active daily users, including an estimated one-quarter of U.S. adults, according to the Pew Research Center. This allows scientists to use a single platform to share research findings with both peers and the public and to foster open discussions... One result is that the platform has carried posts about a majority of the total COVID-19 literature — about 51% of journal articles on pandemic research had been mentioned in at least one tweet through May 2021, according to a report by the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). That exceeds the number cited in scholarly articles or mentioned in several other communications venues, including news stories, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs, and policy documents. And it's well above the level before the pandemic, when studies found that just 10% to 30% of papers on any scientific topic got a mention on Twitter....

But an emerging body of research about tweeting suggests that, overall, scientists often struggle to be heard on social media. One study, for example, found tweets containing links to scholarly papers typically get little engagement. Of 1.1 million such tweets about papers published before the pandemic, half drew no clicks, and an additional 22% attracted just one or two, according to a 2021 paper in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
An information scientist at the University of Ottawa tells the magazine that "We are really not at the point where we want to get, which is, ideally, seeing the impact of research on the greater good of society."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the story...

Heath workers worry Russia's invasion of Ukraine "threatens to upend decades of progress against infectious diseases throughout the region," reports the New York Times, "sparking new epidemics that will be nearly impossible to control." Ukraine has alarmingly high numbers of people living with HIV and hepatitis C and dangerously low levels of vaccination against measles, polio and COVID-19. Overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions for refugees are breeding grounds for cholera and other diarrheal diseases, not to mention respiratory plagues like COVID-19, pneumonia and tuberculosis.... Ukraine and the surrounding region also make up a world epicenter of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, a form of the disease impervious to the most powerful medications. The Ukrainian health ministry in recent years had made progress in bringing these epidemics under control, including a 21% drop in new HIV infections and a 36% decline in TB diagnoses since 2010. But health officials now fear that delays in diagnosis and treatment interruptions during the war may allow these pathogens to flourish again, with consequences that ripple for years.

"Last year, we were working to differentiate between different TB mutations," Iana Terleeva, who heads tuberculosis programs for Ukraine's Ministry of Health, said in a statement. "Now instead, we are trying to differentiate between aerial shelling, raids and other military hardware." The fighting also has damaged health facilities throughout the country and spawned a refugee crisis, imperiling thousands of people with chronic conditions like diabetes and cancer who depend on continuing care....

Only about 80% of Ukrainian children were immunized against polio in 2021, and the country had detected a few polio cases even before the war began. The vaccination coverage for measles in Ukraine is likewise too low to prevent outbreaks. These are the ingredients of a public health calamity, many experts fear.

The WHO and other organizations are deploying medical teams and shipping supplies, vaccines and drugs to Ukraine and to neighboring countries. But the aid may never reach areas of active conflict.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: Alarming levels of dangerous chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) were discovered in food packaging at a number of well-known fast-food and fast-casual restaurants and grocery store chains, a new report found. The highest levels of indicators for PFAS were found in food packaging from Nathan's Famous, Cava, Arby's, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Stop & Shop, Sweetgreen, McDonald's and Taco Bell according to an investigation released Thursday by Consumer Reports.

The Consumer Reports investigation collected 118 food packaging products sold by 24 companies in the tristate area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It tested those products for organic fluorine -- a marker for PFAS. Researchers then sent samples of products with the highest levels to an independent laboratory that could perform more specific tests, said Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist for advocacy at Consumer Reports. Regulatory limits for how much PFAS food packaging should contain can vary greatly. In the US, there are no federal limits, leaving action up to the states. Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington have passed bills banning intentional use of PFAS in food packaging, but haven't yet specified a limit, according to Consumer Reports. In January 2023, a new law in California will set the limit at less than 100 ppm (parts per million).

The Consumer Reports investigation found the highest indicators for PFAS -- 876 ppm and 618 ppm -- in two types of bags for sides at Nathan's Famous restaurants. High indicators of PFAS (in the 500s) were also found in a Chick-fil-A sandwich wrapper and in fiber bowls at Cava, a Mediterranean restaurant chain. Indicator levels in the 300s and 400s were found in a bag of cookies at Arby's, bamboo paper plates at Stop & Shop, and in a bag for both cookies and French toast sticks at Burger King. Levels of PFAS indicators in the 200s were found in a Sweetgreen paper bag for focaccia, additional items at Cava, and in bags for french fries, cookies and Chicken McNuggets at McDonald's. However, all of the companies listed had additional food packaging that tested at levels below 200 ppm. Four companies -- Arby's, Nathan's Famous, McDonald's and Stop & Shop -- also sold food in packaging that had no detectable levels of PFAS, the report said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Half of all women getting 3D mammograms will experience a false positive over a decade of annual screening, a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open found. False positives -- when a mammogram is flagged as abnormal, but there is no cancer -- have always been a problem. But 3D mammography has been aggressively marketed by hospitals, doctors and some patient groups for its ability to provide higher image quality images -- and previous studies have found they result in fewer false positives.

The researchers analyzed data from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium on 3 million screening mammograms for more than 900,000 women ages 40-79. The screenings were performed between 2005 and 2018 at 126 radiology facilities. Researchers estimate over 10 years of getting 3D mammograms, 50% of women will experience at least one false-positive recall compared to 56% of women screened with 2D digital mammograms. Women with dense breasts or who were younger, as well as those who screened every year compared to once every two years, had a higher chance of a false positive. "Whenever you're called back for an additional workup, it's very stressful because women think they may have cancer," Diana Miglioretti, a lead author and professor and division chief of biostatistics at UC Davis Department of Public Health Sciences, told Axios.

"Often it may take days to even weeks to get that resolved," she said. "The main thing is we want to alleviate women's anxiety over these false positives and understand they are very common."

Last week, after reporting from the Guardian on mortality rates among children, the CDC corrected a "coding logic error" that had inadvertently added more than 72,000 Covid deaths of all ages to the data tracker, one of the most publicly accessible sources for Covid data. The Guardian reports: The agency briefly noted the change in a footnote, although the note did not explain how the error occurred or how long it was in effect. A total of 72,277 deaths in all age groups reported across 26 states were removed from the tracker "because CDC's algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not Covid-19-related," Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the agency, told the Guardian. The problem stemmed from two questions the CDC asks of states and jurisdictions when they report fatalities, according to a source familiar with the issue.

One data field asks if a person died "from illness/complications of illness," and the field next to this asks for the date of death. When the answer is yes, then the date of death should be provided. But a problem apparently arose if a respondent included the date of death in this field even when the answer was "no" or "unknown." The CDC's system assumed that if a date was provided, then the "no" or "unknown" answer was an error, and the system switched the answer to "yes." This resulted in an overcount of deaths due to Covid in the demographic breakdown, and the error, once discovered, was corrected last week. The CDC did not answer a question on how long the coding error was in effect.

"Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported," said Reed. The death counts in the data tracker are "real-time and subject to change," Reed noted, while numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, a center within the CDC, are "the most complete source of death data," despite lags in reporting, because the process includes a review of death certificates.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs now spreading the conspiracy theory that Moderna created Covid. New York Times reporter Paul Mozur: Hard to believe they don't see the credibility they lose amplifying this stuff. Takeaway is still no sign the wolf warrior approach has been reconsidered. [...] It underscores how the CAC quashes rumors it doesn't like, but let's those of political expediency flourish within China.

A review of 26 studies finds benefits of music on mental health are similar to those of exercise and weight loss. From a report: "Music," wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, "has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation." A new analysis has empirically confirmed something that rings true for many music lovers -- that singing, playing or listening to music can improve wellbeing and quality of life. A review of 26 studies conducted across several countries including Australia, the UK and the US has found that music may provide a clinically significant boost to mental health. Seven of the studies involved music therapy, 10 looked at the effect of listening to music, eight examined singing and one studied the effect of gospel music. The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, confirmed "music interventions are linked to meaningful improvements in wellbeing," as measured quantitatively via standardised quality-of-life survey data. The effects were similar whether participants sang, played or listened to music.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: If you've ever eaten okra, then you'll know that the stuff can be pretty gooey. According to new research, that quality could allow a compound from the plant to be used in a less toxic method of removing microplastics from drinking water. [...] After some experimentation, it was found that polysaccharides from okra paired with those from fenugreek worked best at removing microplastics from seawater, while those same okra polysaccharides paired with those from tamarind were best for use on freshwater.

All in all, depending on factors such as the ratio of the polysaccharides and the water source, the plant-based flocculants performed either as well as or better than polyacrylamide. And importantly, they could be used in existing water treatment plants, without any alterations to the facilities or processes. The scientists are now investigating how well other combinations of plant-derived polysaccharides will work on specific types of plastic microparticles, in water from a variety of sources. The findings have been reported via EurekAlert. The American Chemical Society Meeting Newsroom channel on YouTube also produced a video about the research.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: When he was 25, materials scientist Ernesto Di Maio developed a yeast allergy and broke out in hives whenever he ate pizza, which was somewhat embarrassing for a son of Naples, Italy. "My wife loves pizza, and this sometimes creates tension on the night menu," he says. Now, Di Maio can look forward to carefree dinners, for he and his colleagues have invented a yeast-free method of leavening pizza dough.

In a classically prepared pizza, as with most bread, yeast ferments and releases carbon dioxide to give the dough a foamlike consistency. Baking then drives off the water and locks in the airy texture. Di Maio's team at the University of Naples Federico II (UNINA) thought it might be able to produce the same effect in a different way: by infusing the dough with gas at high pressure and releasing the pressure during baking, adapting a method they'd developed to manufacture polyurethane. "The aim was to try to make the same texture that we love so much in pizza without a chemical agent," says co-author and UNINA materials scientist Rossana Pasquino. [...] The end result: "We tried it, and it was nice and crusty and soft," Di Maio says. Alessio Cappelli, a food technologist at the University of Florence, says the paper is "interesting," but he wonders whether the method will be widely used in practice, given that baker's yeast is so cheap and easy. "It looks like an innovation just for the sake of it," he says.

The study has been published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

An international team of researchers analyzing the sounds captured by the Perseverance rover has determined the speed of sound on Mars. Phys.org reports: Baptiste Chide, with Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a presentation (PDF) at this year's 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outlining the findings by the team. [...] Chide reported that the team has used data from the microphone to measure the speed of sound on Mars. This was done by measuring the amount of time it took for sounds emanating from laser blasts from Perseverance to return to the rover's microphone. The laser blasts were used to vaporize nearby rocks to learn more about their composition. They found sound to be traveling on Mars at approximately 240 m/s. But they also found that different frequencies of sound travel at different speeds on Mars. The speed increases by approximately 10 m/s above 400 Hz. This finding suggests that communication would be extremely difficult on Mars with different parts of speech arriving to listeners at different times, making conversations sound garbled.

Chide says the microphone also allowed for measuring temperature on Mar's surface in and around the rover. This is because sound travels at different speeds depending on temperature. By measuring sound speed every time Perseverance fired its laser, the researchers were able to calculate rapid temperature changes. Chide also noted that the research team plans to continue monitoring and analyzing sounds from Mars over the course of a year to learn more about fluctuations during different events on the planet, such as during the winter months or when dust storms kick up.

NASA plans to encourage the development of another commercial vehicle that can land its Artemis astronauts on the moon. Space.com reports: In April 2021, NASA picked SpaceX to build the first crewed lunar lander for the agency's Artemis program, which is working to put astronauts on the moon in the mid-2020s and establish a sustainable human presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor by the end of the decade. But SpaceX apparently won't have the moon-landing market cornered: NASA announced today (March 23) that it plans to support the development of a second privately built crewed lunar lander.

"This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe," Lisa Watson-Morgan, program manager for the Human Landing System Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said in a statement today. "We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in their landers to the surface of the moon under NASA's guidance before we ask for services, which could result in multiple experienced providers in the market," Watson-Morgan added. [...] Congress is "committed to ensuring that we have more than one lander to choose [from] for future missions," [NASA Administrator Bill Nelson] said during a news conference today, citing conversations he's had with people on Capitol Hill over the past year. "We're expecting to have both Congress support and that of the Biden administration," Nelson said. "And we're expecting to get this competition started in the fiscal year [20]23 budget."

Exact funding amounts and other details should be coming next week when the White House releases its 2023 federal budget request, he added. "So what we're doing today is a bit of a preview," Nelson said. "I think you'll find it's an indication that there are good things to come for this agency and, if we're right, good things to come for all of humanity." NASA plans to release a draft request for proposals (RFP) for the second moon lander by the end of the month and a final RFP later this spring, agency officials said. If all goes according to plan, NASA will pick the builder of the new vehicle in early 2023. That craft will have the ability to dock with Gateway, the small moon-orbiting space station that NASA plans to build, and take people and scientific gear from there to the surface (and back). This newly announced competition will be open to all American companies except SpaceX. But Elon Musk's company will have the opportunity to negotiate the terms of its existing contract to perform additional lunar development work, NASA officials said during today's news conference.

Abnormally hot air has hit both of the world's poles at once, while the extent of Arctic sea ice appears to have been historically low this winter. From a report: Temperature records were broken in Antarctica as warm air swept unusually far into the heart of the continent. Concordia station, which is high above sea level and has an annual average temperature of -50C, reached an all-time high of -12.2C on 18 March, beating the -13.7C record set in December 2016. Another research station, Vostok, also saw record high temperatures. "The Antarctic [heat] is really extreme. I haven't seen anything like that. Colleagues haven't seen anything this extreme," says Walt Meier at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. A band of westerly winds around Antarctica usually isolates the continent from other weather systems. But in the past week, an "atmospheric river" of hot air, originating in the mid-latitudes, travelled down from Tasmania and South Australia, breaching those winds to travel far across the ice, says John Turner at the British Antarctic Survey.

Although such events aren't unprecedented, the temperatures this time are very high. Turner says while it is undoubtedly an "extreme event," he thinks the Antarctic heat looks like natural variability rather than climate change. Past research by Turner has found no discernible trend in extreme temperatures in Antarctica, where the hole in the ozone layer appears to have cancelled out the impact of global warming so far. The recent highs won't have any consequences such as impacts on landing strips for scientists stationed on the continent either, says Ted Scambos at the University of Colorado, Boulder, because most have already departed ahead of the Antarctic winter and those remaining are hunkered down with supplies. The record temperatures come shortly after Antarctic sea ice declined to a record low minimum extent, at 1.92 million square kilometres on 25 February. "It was quite a lot lower than anything else in the 40-plus year record," says Scambos.