Who wants to be an astronaut? If the answer is you, there's a reality TV show, appropriately titled "Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?", that you ought to apply for. From a report: The Discovery Channel is seeking to cast about 10 would-be astronauts to compete during the series' eight-episode run next year for a seat on a real-life trip to the International Space Station, followed by live coverage of the launch of the winner on a SpaceX rocket. "We'd like a diverse group of people that each have their own story, why they want to go to space, why they're worthy of going to space, what their back story is," said Jay Peterson, president of Boat Rocker Studios, Unscripted, one of the companies producing the show for Discovery. That person will not be the only amateur astronaut destined for the space station next year. So many tourism and entertainment efforts are preparing trips there that it could begin to look more like a soundstage for television shows and a hotel for the wealthy than an orbiting research laboratory.

Many who work in the business of space believe that is a good thing, even if trips to orbit will remain out of reach of all but the wealthiest passengers in the near term. "This is a real inflection point, I think, with human spaceflight," Phil McAlister, NASA's director of commercial spaceflight development, said during a news conference this month announcing that the agency had signed an agreement with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, to fly the first mission of private astronauts to the space station. "I'm very bullish on the tourism market and the tourism activity," Mr. McAlister said. "I think more people that are going to fly, they're going to want to do more things in space." Although the International Space Station may stay up in orbit at least until 2028, in the future it will not be only space station. Russian space authorities last month declared their intention to leave the I.S.S. in the coming years and build a station of their own. A Chinese orbital outpost is expected to come online in the next year or two.

So, what would it feel like to fall into a black hole? From a report: "Well, at the moment you crossed the horizon, you wouldn't feel anything -- there would be nothing dramatic," Peter Galison, co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, says over the phone. Huh. Doesn't sound too bad. "But inevitably, you would be pulled towards the centre," he continues. "There's no going back; everything that falls into a black hole just keeps falling; there's no resisting that pull and things don't end well."

Ah. Go on. "Physicists have an expression called 'spaghettification' because if you were falling in feet first, your feet would be more attracted towards the centre than your head, and your sides would be pushed towards your middle and this process would extend and compress you." Right. So, terrifying, then. Especially when Galison adds with cosmic understatement: "In the long term that's not a good survival event." We are talking about his documentary film, Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, four years in the making and available on Netflix from 1 June, which follows two scientific collaborations to understand the most mysterious objects in the universe. Among the highlights is being a fly on the wall as the late Stephen Hawking tries to figure them out.

It is Hawking's voice, that instantly recognisable computer speech synthesiser, that opens the film: "A black hole is stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers. It's a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Once you are over the edge, there's no way back." City-sized black holes form when certain stars run out of fuel to burn and collapse under the force of their own gravity. Supermassive black holes -- millions or billions of times bigger than our sun -- are found at the centre of almost every galaxy including our own, the Milky Way.

Researchers from University of Copenhagen have investigated what happened to a specific kind of plasma -- the first matter ever to be present -- during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Their findings provide a piece of the puzzle to the evolution of the universe, as we know it today. Phys.org reports: "We have studied a substance called quark-gluon plasma that was the only matter, which existed during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Our results tell us a unique story of how the plasma evolved in the early stage of the universe," explains You Zhou, associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. "First, the plasma that consisted of quarks and gluons was separated by the hot expansion of the universe. Then the pieces of quark reformed into so-called hadrons. A hadron with three quarks makes a proton, which is part of atomic cores. These cores are the building blocks that constitutes Earth, ourselves and the universe that surrounds us," he adds.

The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) was present in the first 0.000001 second of Big Bang, and thereafter, it disappeared due to the expansion. But by using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, researchers were able to recreate this, the first matter in history, and trace back what happened to it. "In addition to using the Large Hadron Collider, the researchers also developed an algorithm that is able to analyze the collective expansion of more produced particles at once than ever possible before. Their results show that the QGP used to be a fluent liquid form and that it distinguishes itself from other matter by constantly changing its shape over time.

"For a long time, researchers thought that the plasma was a form of gas, but our analysis confirm the latest milestone measurement, where the Hadron Collider showed that QGP was fluent and had a smooth soft texture like water. The new details we provide show that the plasma has changed its shape over time, which is quite surprising and different from any other matter we know and what we would have expected," says You Zhou. Even though this might seem like a small detail, it brings physicists one step closer to solving the puzzle of the Big Bang and how the universe developed in the first microsecond, he elaborates. The study has been published in the journal Physics Letters B.

A group of Redditors came together in a bid to archive over 85 million scientific papers from the website Sci-Hub and make an open-source library that cannot be taken down. Interesting Engineering reports: Over the last decade or so, Sci-Hub, often referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science," has been giving free access to a huge database of scientific papers that would otherwise be locked behind a paywall. Unsurprisingly, the website has been the target of multiple lawsuits, as well as an investigation from the United States Department of Justice. The site's Twitter account was also recently suspended under Twitter's counterfeit policy, and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, reported that the FBI gained access to her Apple accounts.

Now, Redditors from a subreddit called DataHoarder, which is aimed at archiving knowledge in the digital space, have come together to try to save the numerous papers available on the website. In a post on May 13, the moderators of r/DataHoarder, stated that "it's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science. We are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many." This will be no easy task. Sci-Hub is home to over 85 million papers, totaling a staggering 77TB of data. The group of Redditors is currently recruiting for its archiving efforts and its stated goal is to have approximately 8,500 individuals torrenting the papers in order to download the entire library. Once that task is complete, the Redditors aim to release all of the downloaded data via a new "uncensorable" open-source website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Now that Jeff Bezos's space flight company Blue Origin has lost a multibillion contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Congress is prepping the ground for Bezos to win a contract anyway, ordering NASA to make not one but two awards. The order would come through the Endless Frontier Act, a bill to beef up resources for science and technology research that's being debated on the Senate floor this week. An amendment was added to that legislation by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., to hand over $10 billion to NASA -- money that most likely would go to Blue Origin, a company that's headquartered in Cantwell's home state.

Cantwell's amendment is no sure bet though: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a last-minute amendment Monday to eliminate the $10 billion. "It does not make a lot of sense to me that we would provide billions of dollars to a company owned by the wealthiest guy in America," Sanders told The Intercept Tuesday. Cantwell's measure wouldn't rescind the grant to SpaceX but would create an additional contract that Bezos's company would be in line to win. A third company, Dynetics, had also bid for the moonshot, but the author of the new amendment offers a strong suggestion of which company it's likely to benefit. The measure has been attached to the Endless Frontier Act as part of a manager's amendment and authorizes $10.032 billion through the year 2026 for the moon program. Authorization alone does not fund the program, and Congress would still need to appropriate the money, or the executive would need to find other appropriated funds.

Scientists have shed light on why everyday sounds such as chewing, drinking and breathing can be so maddening to some people that it drives them to despair. From a report: Now, brain scans performed by researchers at Newcastle University have revealed that people with misophonia have stronger connectivity between the part of the brain that processes sounds and the part of the so-called premotor cortex which handles mouth and throat muscle movements. When people with misophonia were played a "trigger sound," the scans showed that the brain region involved in mouth and throat movement was overactivated compared with a control group of volunteers who did not have the condition.

"What we are suggesting is that in misophonia the trigger sound activates the motor area even though the person is only listening to the sound," said Dr Sukhbinder Kumar, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University. "It makes them feel like the sounds are intruding into them." Kumar and his colleagues believe that trigger sounds activate what is called the brain's mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons are thought to fire when a person performs an action, but also when they see others make particular movements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A team of scientists announced Monday that they had partially restored the sight of a blind man by building light-catching proteins in one of his eyes. Their report, which appeared in the journal Nature Medicine, is the first published study to describe the successful use of this treatment. The procedure is a far cry from full vision. The volunteer, a 58-year-old man who lives in France, had to wear special goggles that gave him the ghostly perception of objects in a narrow field of view. But the authors of the report say that the trial -- the result of 13 years of work -- is a proof of concept for more effective treatments to come.

The scientists are taking advantage of proteins derived from algae and other microbes that can make any nerve cell sensitive to light. In the early 2000s, neuroscientists figured out how to install some of these proteins into the brain cells of mice and other lab animals by injecting viruses carrying their genes. The viruses infected certain types of brain cells, which then used the new gene to build light-sensitive channels. Originally, researchers developed this technique, called optogenetics, as a way to probe the workings of the brain. By inserting a tiny light into the animal's brain, they could switch a certain type of brain cell on or off with the flick of a switch. The method has enabled them to discover the circuitry underlying many kinds of behavior.

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: Yuan Longping, a Chinese scientist who developed higher-yield rice varieties that helped feed people around the world, died Saturday at a hospital in the southern city of Changsha, the Xinhua News agency reported. He was 90.

Yuan spent his life researching rice and was a household name in China, known by the nickname "Father of Hybrid Rice." Worldwide, a fifth of all rice now comes from species created by hybrid rice following Yuan's breakthrough discoveries, according to the website of the World Food Prize, which he won in 2004...

It was in the 1970s when Yuan achieved the breakthroughs that would make him a household name. He developed a hybrid strain of rice that recorded an annual yield 20% higher than existing varieties — meaning it could feed an extra 70 million people a year, according to Xinhua...

Yuan and his team worked with dozens of countries around the world to address issues of food security as well as malnutrition.

The space-news web site NASASpaceFlight writes: While organic compounds have been confirmed on the Martian surface and near-surface areas since 2018, new Earth-based experiments point to a potentially tantalizing series of signatures from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument that could indicate the presence of organic salts at the rover's Gale Crater location. What's more, the new research from a team led by J. M. T. Lewis, an organic geochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, points to further potential evidence that organic salts might be prevalent across the Martian terrain. The hard part is conclusively detecting them.

For decades, scientists theorized that organic compounds were almost certainly to have been preserved to some detectable degree in the Martian surface environment. In 2018, Curiosity's instruments allowed Eigenbrode et al. to conclusively prove that they were in fact there. In turn, if organic compounds were present at one time, their by-products — organic salts — would still be around as well, even given the harsh radiation environment of Mars compared to Earth.

While organic compounds and organic salts can form from the presence of microbial life, they can also form from geologic processes. Though not confirmed, organic salts would be further evidence that organic matter once existed on Mars' surface, and, if they are still present, could support hypothetical microbial life on Mars today, as some life on Earth uses organic salt as food/energy.

"Decades of research have consistently shown that extroverts have a significant happiness edge over introverts," writes Harvard professor/PhD social scientist Arthur C. Brooks. Extroverts "report higher levels of general well-being as well as more frequent moments of joy."

"COVID-19, however, has given us extroverts our comeuppance..." Research published in March in the scientific journal PLOS One studied the impact of the pandemic on people with various personality characteristics. The authors found that mood worsened for extroverts but improved for introverts... In ordinary times, American introverts are like cats living in Dogland: underappreciated, uncomfortable, and slightly out of place. A side effect of shutting down the world was to turn it into Catland, at least for a little while. That gave the introverts a chance to lord their solitary comfort over the rest of us, for once...

But the temporary shift has also created a kind of social-science field experiment, highlighting all the ways in which introverts and extroverts can learn from each other. If we take the lessons to heart, we can all benefit...

Extroversion is highly rewarded in American society, and predicts a significant edge in earning power — on average, extroverts make about $12,000 more per year than introverts. Extroverts attain other advantages in the workplace as well, such as promotions to leadership positions and high performance evaluations. Some resent these patterns, and believe they show a lack of cultural depth. In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain lists the many advances made by introverts — from the theory of gravity to Google — and argues that admiring and rewarding extroversion is not just unfair, but hinders progress...

The pandemic's pause in life's rhythms has left society's dogs in a state of social withdrawal, explaining the current happiness inversion. But it also presents an opportunity for extroverts to cultivate more real friendships like introverts have... Beyond the specifics of introversion and extroversion, there is one important lesson in all this: Watching and learning from people very different from you is a great way to learn to be happier.

Each group can teach the other a lesson that can improve all of our well-being.
The article argues that while extroverts "should work on deep friendships, which introverts tend to have more of," introverts "should focus more on the future, like extroverts do."

"60 seconds of rocket burn, straight into space," Virgin Galactic tweeted today, sharing a video of their historic launch.

CNN reports: Virgin Galactic's rocket-powered plane, carrying two pilots, soared into the upper atmosphere on its third mission to reach space Saturday morning. The success cues up Virgin Galactic to begin launching paying customers within the next year as the company works to finish its testing campaign at its new headquarters in New Mexico.

Spaceplane VSS Unity reached an altitude of 55.45 miles, according to the company. The U.S. government recognizes the 50-mile mark as the edge of space. The company tweeted Saturday morning that the spaceflight carried technology experiments for NASA's Flight Opportunities Program...

Saturday's flight comes after Virgin Galactic's last spaceflight attempt ended abruptly when the rocket engine that powers the space plane, called VSS Unity, failed to ignite, setting the company's testing schedule back by months. Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson in 2004, has spent years pledging to take groups of customers on brief, scenic flights to suborbital space. But the company has faced a series of complications and delays, including a 2014 test flight crash that left one pilot dead.

Nonetheless, Virgin Galactic has already sold tickets for $200,000 to $250,000 to more than 600 people.
The company said it also collected data "to be used for the final two verification reports that are required as part of the current FAA commercial reusable spacecraft operator's license." Virgin Galactic's CEO called it "a major step forward for both Virgin Galactic and human spaceflight in New Mexico. Space travel is a bold and adventurous endeavor, and I am incredibly proud of our talented team for making the dream of private space travel a reality."

In fact, this was the first ever spaceflight from Spaceport America, New Mexico, making it the third U.S. state to launch humans into space. New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham said proudly in the company's statement that "After so many years and so much hard work, New Mexico has finally reached the stars." To commemorate the moment, the flight carried New Mexico's traditional green chile seeds, and featured the Zia Sun Symbol from the state flag on the outside of the spaceship. "The crew experienced extraordinary views of the bright, blue-rimmed curvature of the earth against the blackness of space," reads the statement from Virgin Galactic, adding that New Mexico's White Sands National Park "sparkled brilliantly below."

And pilot-in-command CJ Sturckow now becomes the first person ever to have flown to space from three different states.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: India's information technology (IT) ministry has written to all social media companies asking them to take down any content that refers to an "Indian variant" of the coronavirus, according to a letter issued on Friday which was seen by Reuters.

The World Health Organization said on May 11 that the coronavirus variant B.1.617, first identified in India last year, was being classified as a variant of global concern.

The Indian government a day later issued a statement saying media reports using the term "Indian Variant" were without any basis, saying the WHO had classified the variant as just B.1.617.

In a letter to social media companies on Friday, the IT ministry asked the companies to "remove all the content" that names or implies "Indian variant" of the coronavirus.

"This is completely FALSE. There is no such variant of Covid-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO has not associated the term 'Indian Variant' with the B.1.617 variant of the coronavirus in any of its reports," stated the letter, which is not public.

A senior Indian government source told Reuters the notice was issued to send a message "loud and clear" that such mentions of "Indian variant" spread miscommunication and hurt the country's image.

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: On 27 June 1918, two young German soldiers—one age 18, the other 17—died in Berlin from a new influenza strain that had emerged earlier that year. Their lungs ended up in the collection of the Berlin Museum of Medical History, where they rested, fixed in formalin, for 100 years. Now, researchers have managed to sequence large parts of the virus that infected the two men, giving a glimpse into the early days of the most devastating pandemic of the 20th century. The partial genomes hold some tantalizing clues that the infamous flu strain may have adapted to humans between the pandemic's first and second waves.

The researchers also managed to sequence an entire genome of the pathogen from a young woman who died in Munich at an unknown time in 1918. It is only the third full genome of the virus that caused that pandemic and the first from outside North America, the authors write in a preprint posted on bioRxiv.

"It's absolutely fantastic work," says Hendrik Poinar, who runs an ancient DNA lab at McMaster University. "The researchers have made reviving RNA viruses from archival material an achievable goal. Not long ago this was, like much ancient DNA work, a fantasy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: In a national effort to get through to horny but vaccine-hesitant Americans, the White House announced Friday that it is joining forces with dating apps to encourage people to get their COVID-19 vaccines so that they can go forth and fuck freely this summer. Vaccinated users on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Badoo will have access to some premium features for free. OkCupid, Chispa, BLK, and Match are giving out a free "Boost" to those who've been vaccinated so that their profiles are more likely to be seen first. Plenty of Fish is also offering free credits to vaccinated members for its livestreaming feature.

The dating apps will add badges or stickers that users can include on their profile to indicate that they've been vaccinated, as well as filters so that you only swipe on fellow vaccinated people. There will also be in-app links to find your closest vaccination site. "People who display their vaccination status are 14% more likely to get a match," White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt said at a press conference, citing research from OkCupid. "We have finally found the one thing that makes us all more attractive." The new features are expected to launch on the apps in the next few weeks.

mnemotronic writes: Igor Gamow, inventor of the "Gamow bag," a portable hyperbaric chamber for treatment of altitude or Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), has died. He is credited or co-credited with other inventions, including prosthetics for amputees. His career at the University of Colorado in Boulder was marred by accusations from multiple sources of sexual predation. He is one of only three tenured professors ever to be fired by CU Boulder since its founding in 1876.

New submitter StellarThoughts writes: Scientists analyzed the second ever known interstellar object, a comet known as 2I/Borisov, and found some very unlikely results. Molecules of nickel and iron were being vaporized and drifting from the surface. Typically, nickel and iron vaporize when comets streak near the sun or aim directly for it, reaching temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And instead, this comet was a toasty -135 degrees F.

Comparing data with 20 other comets of varying chemical composition within the solar system, they spewed nickel and iron much like 2I/Borisov. Scientists have a few theories, including: "One possibility is that harsh ultraviolet light from the sun might break apart nickel-containing molecules in the comets." Scientists believe these traces were missed for so long because of the supposed unlikelihood of gaseous metals at such a low temperature.

Scientific research findings that are probably wrong gain far more attention than robust results, according to academics who suspect that the bar for publication may be lower for papers with grabbier conclusions. From a report: Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time. The finding -- which is itself not exempt from the need for scrutiny -- has led the authors to suspect that more interesting papers are waved through more easily by reviewers and journal editors and, once published, attract more attention.

[...] The study in Science Advances is the latest to highlight the "replication crisis" where results, mostly in social science and medicine, fail to hold up when other researchers try to repeat experiments. Following an influential paper in 2005 titled Why most published research findings are false, three major projects have found replication rates as low as 39% in psychology journals, 61% in economics journals, and 62% in social science studies published in the Nature and Science, two of the most prestigious journals in the world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Does riding an electric bike to work count as exercise, and not just a mode of transportation? It can, if you ride right, according to a pragmatic new study comparing the physiological effects of e-bikes and standard road bicycles during a simulated commute. The study, which involved riders new to e-cycling, found that most could complete their commutes faster and with less effort on e-bikes than standard bicycles, while elevating their breathing and heart rates enough to get a meaningful workout. But the benefits varied and depended, to some extent, on how people's bikes were adjusted and how they adjusted to the bikes. The findings have particular relevance at the moment, as pandemic restrictions loosen and offices reopen, and many of us consider options other than packed trains to move ourselves from our homes to elsewhere.

So, for the new study, which was published in March in the Translational Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, researchers at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, decided to ask inexperienced cyclists to faux commute. To do so, they recruited 30 local men and women, aged 19 to 61, and invited them to the physiology lab to check their fitness levels, along with their current attitudes about e-bikes and commuting. Then, they equipped each volunteer with a standard road bike and an e-bike and asked them to commute on each bike at their preferred pace for three miles, a distance the scientists considered typical for bike commutes in America. The cyclists pedaled around a flat loop course, once on the road bikes and twice with the e-bike. On one of these rides, their bike was set to a low level of pedal assistance, and on the other, the oomph was upped until the motor sent more than 200 watts of power to the pedals. Throughout, the commuters wore timers, heart rate monitors and facial masks to measure their oxygen consumption.

Afterward, to no one's surprise, the scientists found that the motorized bikes were zippy. On e-bikes, at either assistance level, riders covered the three miles several minutes faster than on the standard bike -- about 11 or 12 minutes on an e-bike, on average, compared to about 14 minutes on a regular bike. They also reported that riding the e-bike felt easier. Even so, their heart rates and respiration generally rose enough for those commutes to qualify as moderate exercise, based on standard physiological benchmarks, the scientists decided, and should, over time, contribute to health and fitness. But the cyclists' results were not all uniform or constructive. A few riders' efforts, especially when they used the higher assistance setting on the e-bikes, were too physiologically mild to count as moderate exercise. Almost everyone also burned about 30 percent fewer calories while e-biking than road riding -- 344 to 422 calories, on average, on an e-bike, versus 505 calories on a regular bike -- which may be a consideration if someone is hoping to use bike commuting to help drop weight.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Much as a smoke detector gives only a vague idea of where a fire is, current methods to detect smuggled nuclear materials are slow and imprecise. But a new technique that images nuclear materials based on the neutrons and gamma rays they shed can locate these dangers in record time, scientists report. The new technique -- neutron-gamma emission tomography (NGET) detection -- relies on detectors that emit light when struck by either a neutron or a gamma ray and measure the time of arrival with nanosecond precision. Suppose two detectors sit face to face, separated by 1 meter or so, and that a nucleus decays and emits a neutron that hits one detector and a gamma ray that hits the other. The difference in the arrival times, when accounting for the detailed physics of the nuclear decay process, defines a fuzzy, somewhat spherical shell in space in which the nucleus could have been. Timing many neutron-gamma ray pairs with several detectors produces a set of probability shells that should intersect at a point -- the location of the source. The ability to pinpoint a source may offer a "paradigm shift" in nuclear safeguards, the researchers say. NGET detectors might also be shrunk to fit on a drone. That offers "a really fascinating possibility" of quickly mapping radiological contamination at disaster sites like Fukushima or Chernobyl, they say. The findings appear in the journal Science Advances.

Coronavirus infections continue to plummet across the U.S. From a report: The U.S. averaged about 30,000 cases per day over the past week. The progress is happening remarkably fast, and across the board. It was just last week that average daily cases dropped below 40,000, for the first time in months. This week's figures are a 20% improvement over last week. 39 states saw their caseloads improve over the past week. Alabama showed an increase in new cases, although the state had some unusual reporting glitches this week. Technically, cases also increased in Washington, D.C., but it's no cause for alarm: The District has fewer new cases per day (about 48, on average) than any state.