Eric Schmidt is funding a nonprofit that's focused on building an artificial intelligence-powered assistant for the laboratory, with the lofty goal of overhauling the scientific research process. From a report: The nonprofit, Future House, plans to develop AI tools that can analyze and summarize research papers as well as respond to scientific questions using large language models -- the same technology that supports popular AI chatbots. But Future House also intends to go a step further. The "AI scientist," as Future House refers to it, will one day be able to sift through thousands of scientific papers and independently compose hypotheses at greater speed and scale than humans, Chief Executive Officer Sam Rodriques said.

A growing number of businesses and investors are focusing on AI's potential applications in science, including uncovering new medicines and therapies. While Future House aims to make breakthroughs of its own, it believes the scientific process itself can be transformed by having AI generate a hypothesis, conduct experiments and reach conclusions -- even though some existing AI tools have been prone to errors and bias. Rodriques acknowledged the risks of AI being applied in science. "It's not just inaccuracy that you need to worry about," he said. There are also concerns that "people can use them to come up with weapons and things like that." Future House will "have an obligation" to make sure there's safeguards in place," he added.

David L. Chandler reports via MIT News: In recent years, some researchers have been puzzled upon finding that water in their experiments, which was held in a sponge-like material known as a hydrogel, was evaporating at a higher rate than could be explained by the amount of heat, or thermal energy, that the water was receiving. And the excess has been significant -- a doubling, or even a tripling or more, of the theoretical maximum rate. After carrying out a series of new experiments and simulations, and reexamining some of the results from various groups that claimed to have exceeded the thermal limit, a team of researchers at MIT has reached a startling conclusion: Under certain conditions, at the interface where water meets air, light can directly bring about evaporation without the need for heat, and it actually does so even more efficiently than heat. In these experiments, the water was held in a hydrogel material, but the researchers suggest that the phenomenon may occur under other conditions as well.

The phenomenon might play a role in the formation and evolution of fog and clouds, and thus would be important to incorporate into climate models to improve their accuracy, the researchers say. And it might play an important part in many industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination of water, perhaps enabling alternatives to the step of converting sunlight to heat first. The new findings come as a surprise because water itself does not absorb light to any significant degree. That's why you can see clearly through many feet of clean water to the surface below. The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

Researchers at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus have found that rats posses an imagination. Phys.Org reports: A team from the Lee and Harris labs developed a novel system combining virtual reality and a brain-machine interface to probe a rat's inner thoughts. They found that, like humans, animals can think about places and objects that aren't right in front of them, using their thoughts to imagine walking to a location or moving a remote object to a specific spot. Like humans, when rodents experience places and events, specific neural activity patterns are activated in the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for spatial memory. The new study finds rats can voluntarily generate these same activity patterns and do so to recall remote locations distant from their current position.

This ability to imagine locations away from one's current position is fundamental to remembering past events and imagining possible future scenarios. Therefore, the new work shows that animals, like humans, possess a form of imagination, according to the study's authors. [...] The team found that rats can precisely and flexibly control their hippocampal activity, in the same way humans likely do. The animals are also able to sustain this hippocampal activity, holding their thoughts on a given location for many seconds -- a timeframe similar to the one at which humans relive past events or imagine new scenarios.

"The stunning thing is how rats learn to think about that place, and no other place, for a very long period of time, based on our, perhaps naive, notion of the attention span of a rat," Harris says. The research also shows that BMI can be used to probe hippocampal activity, providing a novel system for studying this important brain region. Because BMI is increasingly used in prosthetics, this new work also opens up the possibility of designing novel prosthetic devices based on the same principles, according to the authors. The study has been published in the journal Science.

In response to studies that relate high rates of female attrition from biomedical research fields to the obligations of motherhood, researchers concerned about inclusivity are now debating the issue of weekend conference duties. Nature: Because published findings are often old news in the rapidly changing biomedical fields, in-person conferences offer a crucial opportunity for scientists to stay current on trends that shape projects and funding outcomes. Yet fields often expect rock-star-like travel schedules on an economy-class budget in addition to long, irregular weekday hours at the laboratory. This is why early-career scientists with children say that they must seek alternative childcare or risk being scooped or excluded from a collaboration simply because they missed a weekend conference.

International meetings are often scheduled over weekends because that's the only time venues have availability. Few cities have both suitable venues and enough hotel space to welcome 21,000 people from around the world, and even meetings for 3,000 researchers must be booked many years in advance. Because local businesses and regional associations tend to book venues during the working week, large meetings that span three to five days often need to start or end over a weekend. Women who continue to break the glass ceiling in biomedicine are now pitching this timing as an example of unnecessary conflict between work and family.

Inhaling polluted air increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, the first study of its kind in India has found. Research conducted in Delhi and the southern city of Chennai found that inhaling air with high amounts of PM2.5 particles led to high blood sugar levels and increased type 2 diabetes incidence. From a report: When inhaled, PM2.5 particles -- which are 30 times thinner than a strand of hair -- can enter the bloodstream and cause several respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The study [PDF] is part of ongoing research into chronic diseases in India that began in 2010. It is the first to focus on the link between exposure to ambient PM2.5 and type 2 diabetes in India, one of the worst countries in the world for air pollution. The average annual PM2.5 levels in Delhi was 82-100ug/m3 and in Chennai was 30-40ug/m3, according to the study, many times the WHO limits of 5ug/m3. Indiaâ(TM)s national air quality standards are 40ug/m3.

There is also a high burden of non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in India; 11.4% of the population -- 101 million people -- are living with diabetes, and about 136 million are pre-diabetic, according to a paper published in the Lancet in June. The average diabetes prevalence in the European Union was 6.2% in 2019, and 8.6% in the UK in 2016. The Lancet study found India's diabetes prevalence to be higher than previous estimations and showed a higher number of diabetics in urban than rural India.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Peru's Kimberly Garcia set a world record in her gold-medal winning turn at the women's 20 kilometer race walk event at the Pan American Games this weekend. Until she didn't. Once the race was over, organizers determined there was a serious "measuring problem" with the track, making the race times of Garcia, fellow medal winners Glenda Morejon of Ecuador and Peru's Evelyn Inga, and their competitors null and void. The athletes guessed the track had been drawn up roughly 3 kilometers (about 1.9 miles) shorter than it was supposed to be. Garcia crossed the finish line in 1 hour, 12 minutes and 26 seconds. The world record of 1 hour, 23 minutes and 49 seconds is held by China's Jiayu Yang. The athletes suspected something was amiss mid-race, according to the Associated Press.

The Santiago 2023 Corporation, the group in charge of the 2023 Pan American Games, placed the blame on the Pan American Athletics Association, which reportedly chose the person who measured the race course. In a statement following the race, Santiago 2023 said the official who measured the course "did not take accurate measurements of the route the athletes took during the race." The group continued, "We deeply regret the inconvenience for the athletes, their coaches, the public and the attending press, but this situation cannot be attributed to the Organizing Committee."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But when it comes to tackling a tricky task, researchers have found that getting angry can also be a powerful motivator. The experiments suggest people who are angry perform better on a set of challenging tasks than those who are emotionally neutral. "These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success," said Dr Heather Lench, the first author of the study.

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PDF), details how researchers at Texas A&M University conducted experiments involving more than 1,000 people, and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 people, to explore the possible impact of anger on people in various circumstances. In one experiment, students were shown images previously found to elicit anger, desire, amusement, sadness or no particular emotion at all. Participants were subsequently asked to solve a series of anagrams. The results reveal that for a challenging set of anagrams, those who were angry did better than those in the other possible emotional states -- although no difference was seen for easy anagrams.

The researchers say one explanation could be down to a link between anger and greater persistence, with the team finding those who were angry spent more time on the difficult set of anagrams. In another experiment, participants who were angry did better at dodging flags in a skiing video game than those who were neutral or sad, and were on a par with those who felt amusement or desire. "This pattern could indicate that general physical arousal had a benefit for game scores, as this would be greater in anger, amused, and desire conditions compared to the sad and neutral conditions," the researchers write. However, no such differences in performance was found when it came to an easier video game.

The group behind the radical open-access initiative Plan S has announced its next big plan to shake up research publishing -- and this one could be bolder than the first. From a report: It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work. The group of influential funding agencies, called cOAlition S, has over the past five years already caused upheaval in the scholarly publishing world by pressuring more journals to allow immediate open-access publishing. Its new proposal, prepared by a working group of publishing specialists and released on 31 October, puts forward an even broader transformation in the dissemination of research.

It outlines a future "community-based" and "scholar-led" open-research communication system in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. Publishers would become service providers, paid to conduct processes such as copy-editing, typesetting and handling manuscript submissions.

[...] If the vision comes to pass, it would mark a revolution in science publishing. Each element has already been endorsed and trialled on a small scale. But as a whole, the proposal "is describing a system that is completely different from today's mainstream forms of scholarly communication," says Andrea Chiarelli, a consultant at Research Consulting in Nottingham, UK. cOAlition S is launching a six-month process, co-led by Research Consulting, to collect feedback from members of the global research community on whether the plan will meet their needs.

Around 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid caused a mass extinction event, killing three-quarters of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. A new study suggests that fine silicate dust from the asteroid, which remained in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, played a more significant role in causing the impact winter and extinction than previously thought. Phys.Org reports: Fine silicate dust from pulverized rock would have stayed in the atmosphere for 15 years, dropping global temperatures by up to 15 degrees Celsius, researchers said in a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] For the study, the international team of researchers was able to measure dust particles thought to be from right after the asteroid struck. The particles were found at the Tanis fossil site in the US state of North Dakota.

Though 3,000 kilometers (1,865 miles) away from the crater, the site has preserved a number of remarkable finds believed to be dated from directly after the asteroid impact in sediment layers of an ancient lake. The dust particles were around 0.8 to 8.0 -- micrometers -- just the right size to stick around in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, the researchers said.

Entering this data into climate models similar to those used for current-day Earth, the researchers determined that dust likely played a far greater role in the mass extinction than had previously been thought. Out of all the material that was shot into the atmosphere by the asteroid, they estimated that it was 75 percent dust, 24 percent sulfur and one percent soot. The dust particles "totally shut down photosynthesis" in plants for at least a year, causing a "catastrophic collapse" of life, [said Ozgur Karatekin, a researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications. Under the new agreement, 23andMe will provide GSK with one year of access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research, 23andMe said in a statement Monday. The genetic-testing company will also provide data-analysis services to GSK.

23andMe is best known for its DNA-testing kits that give customers ancestry and health information. But the DNA it collects is also valuable, including for scientific research. With information from more than 14 million customers, the only data sets that rival the size of the 23andMe library belong to Ancestry.com and the Chinese government. The idea for drugmakers is to comb the data for hints about genetic pathways that might be at the root of disease, which could significantly speed up the long, slow process of drug development. GSK and 23andMe have already taken one potential medication to clinical trials: a cancer drug that works to block CD96, a protein that helps modulate the body's immune responses. It entered that testing phase in four years, compared to an industry average of about seven years. Overall, the partnership between GSK and 23andMe has produced more than 50 new drug targets, according to the statement.

The new agreement changes some components of the collaboration. Any discoveries GSK makes with the 23andMe data will now be solely owned by the British pharmaceutical giant, while the genetic-testing company will be eligible for royalties on some projects. In the past, the two companies pursued new drug targets jointly. GSK's new deal with 23andMe is also non-exclusive, leaving the genetic-testing company free to license its database to other drugmakers.

The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers to ditch 26 over-the-counter eye drop products found at big retailers -- including CVS, Rite Aid, and Target -- due to a risk of infection. Consumers should not buy any of the products and should immediately stop using them if they've already purchased them. From a report: The products include Target's branded Up & Up Dry Eye Relief Lubricant Eye Drops and Up & Up Extreme Relief Dry Eye, as well as Lubricant Eye Drops and Lubricant Gel Drops branded by CVS Health and Rite Aid. The warning also includes eye drop products branded as Rugby and Leader (both from Cardinal Health) and Velocity Pharma. A full list can be found here, as can links to report adverse events.

In an advisory posted Friday, the FDA reported that no infections or adverse events have been linked to the products so far. But the agency said it "found insanitary conditions in the manufacturing facility and positive bacterial test results from environmental sampling of critical drug production areas in the facility."

An anonymous reader shares a report: PFAS stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," a family of upwards of 15,000 or more human-made and incredibly durable chemical compounds that have been used in countless industrial and consumer applications for decades. Firefighting foams, waterproof hiking boots, raincoats, nonstick frying pans, dental floss, lipstick, and even the ink used to label packaging -- all can contain PFAS. The compounds are ubiquitous in drinking water and soil, even migrating to Arctic sea ice. PFAS are called forever chemicals because once present in the environment, they do not degrade or break down. They accumulate, are transferred throughout the watershed, and ultimately persist. The quest to reduce the amount of PFAS in the environment is what led me to an industrial park in a southern suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The jar of PFAS concentrate in my hand is part of a demonstration arranged by my hosts, Revive Environmental, during a tour of the company's PFAS destruction site, one of the first in the country to operate commercially and at scale. A few yards in front of me sits the company's PFAS "Annihilator" in a white shipping container.

The Annihilator represents just one of several technologies now vying to break down and destroy PFAS. These span the gamut from established processes like electrochemical oxidation and supercritical water oxidation to emerging techniques relying on ultraviolet light, plasma, ultrasound, or catalyst-driven thermal processes. Some are deployed in field tests. Other companies are actively running pilot programs, many with various divisions of the US Department of Defense and other government agencies. And many other technologies are still undergoing laboratory research. There's good reason for this. Not only are PFAS everywhere around us; they're also in us. Humans can't break down PFAS, and our bodies struggle to clear them from our systems. Studies suggest they're in my blood and yours -- the majority of Americans,' in fact -- and they have been linked to increased risks of kidney and testicular cancer, decreased infant birthweights, and high blood pressure. And that's only what we know about now: researchers continue to grapple with the full impacts of PFAS on human and environmental health.

Wikipedia defines LIGO as "a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves." (It stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — that is, measuring the interference caused by superimposed waves.)

Now Science Alert reports: A technique for squeezing light in the arms of LIGO's interferometer has allowed its measurements to cross the quantum barrier.

For LIGO, it's a bold new realm of sensitivity, giving the gravitational wave detector the ability to find 60% more dead star mergers than the rate of its previous run, which was around one or two detections every week or so... "Now that we have surpassed this quantum limit, we can do a lot more astronomy," says physicist Lee McCuller of Caltech...

LIGO's sensitivity was already absolutely jaw-dropping. The interferometer works by detecting ripples in space-time that are generated by colliding black holes and neutron stars, millions of billions to light-years away. These cause gravitational waves, like ripples in a pond. We can't feel them; but they can be detected in miniscule deviations in the path of light down a long, long tunnel. These deviations are incredibly small, down to trillions of times smaller than a human hair. But once you get into subatomic scales — the quantum realm — LIGO's abilities are hobbled. That's because, on those unimaginably small scales, particles randomly pop in and out of space, creating a constant background hiss of quantum noise that's louder than any signal.

Frequency-dependent squeezing is a way of amplifying the signals to be 'louder' than the quantum noise... If you pinch a property of light, such as amplitude (or power), other properties, such as frequency, can be measured more accurately... [T]he light can be squeezed in multiple ways to amplify the frequency of the gravitational waves the scientists are looking for... "We've known for a while how to write down the equations to make this work, but it was not clear that we could actually make it work until now. It's like science fiction," says physicist Rana Adhikari of Caltech...

This means we're likely to see a significant uptick in the number of black hole and neutron star collisions we observe out there in the wider Universe.

Are face masks effective in stopping virus transmissions? CBS News re-visited the question Sunday on its news show 60 Minutes by sending their chief medical correspondent to interview Linsey Marr, a professor who specializes in aerosol science at Virginia Tech University.

Here's a transcript from an excerpt posted on YouTube: 60 Minutes: Is there any doubt in your mind that masks prevent the person who's wearing it from getting Covid — or at least, are helpful?

Professor Marr: I would say they are very helpful in reducing the chances that the person will get Covid. Because it's reducing the amount of virus that you would inhale from the air around you.

It's not going to guarantee that it's going to protect you, because are masks are not 100% effective — we talk about N-95's being 95% efficient at filtering out particles, if they're properly fitted and everything, and so that's in an ideal world. But even so, if you — instead of breathing in 100 virsues, I'm breathing in 20, because my mask was 80% effective? That's a huge reduction, and that greatly reduces the chance that I'm going to become infected.
On the CBS News web site, they highlight this excerpt from the interview: Early in the pandemic, some guidance from health professionals suggested that wearing a mask might actually lead to infection: A person might encounter a contaminated mask and then touch their eyes, nose, or mouth. But research in the ensuing years has shown that fear to be misplaced. "There wasn't any evidence really that that happens," Marr said.

Marr said her team aerosolized the coronavirus, pulled it through a mask, and then examined how much virus survived on the mask. The study reported some viral particle remained on some cloth masks, but no virus survived on the N95s or surgical masks. Marr's team also touched artificial skin to masks and looked at how many virus particles transferred to the artificial skin. No infectious virus transferred.

"I hope the study kind of shows that it's something we don't need to worry about as much as we were told," Marr said.
CBS gave their video interview the headline "Face mask effectiveness: What we know now" — and asked professor Marr for a definitive answer: 60 Minutes: There was a lot of controversy over whether or not masks worked at all. Were you able to show that they worked scientifically?

Professor Marr: We were able to show that they block particles that are the same size as those that carry the virus... What happens is the virus is being carried in the air, and it's not just going straight through those holes. It has to weave around all these layers of fibers in there. As the air is going around the curves, the virus may crash into one of those fibers, and so then it's trapped, or maybe it comes up close to the fiber and brushes against it. And the really small particles, like the virus by itself if it were by itself, would be small enough that it undergoes these random motions, because it's getting bounced around by the gas molecules, and it ends up crashing into the fibers of the mask too.

So there was accumulating evidence — and there had been kind of a handful of papers before that, too, showing the same thing. That masks — even cloth masks — do something.

"Scientists recently fired up the world's smallest particle accelerator for the first time," reports Space.com.

"The tiny technological triumph, which is around the size of a small coin, could open the door to a wide range of applications, including using the teensy particle accelerators inside human patients." The new machine, known as a nanophotonic electron accelerator (NEA), consists of a small microchip that houses an even smaller vacuum tube made up of thousands of individual "pillars." Researchers can accelerate electrons by firing mini laser beams at these pillars. The main acceleration tube is approximately 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeter) long, which is 54 million times shorter than the 16.8-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring that makes up CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland — the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator... The inside of the tiny tunnel is only around 225 nanometers wide. For context, human hairs are 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers thick, according to the National Nanotechnology Institute.

In a new study, published Oct. 18 in the journal Nature, researchers from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany used the tiny contraption to accelerate electrons from an energy value of 28.4âkiloelectron volts to 40.7âkeV, which is an increase of around 43%. It is the first time that a nanophotonic electron accelerator, which was first proposed in 2015, has been successfully fired, the researchers wrote in a statement...

"For the first time, we really can speak about a particle accelerator on a [micro]chip," study co-author Roy Shiloh, a physicist at FAU, said in the statement.
What they accomplished "was demonstrated almost simultaneously by colleagues at Stanford University," according to the researchers' statement. "Their results are currently under review, but can be viewed on a repository. The two teams are working together on the realization of the 'Accelerator on a chip' in a project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation" in 2015.

A new study found that adult ADHD "may take a toll on the brain and is linked to a higher likelihood of developing dementia," reports the Washington Post: A study published in JAMA Network Open reported that being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult is associated with a 2.77-fold increased risk of dementia.

The study only showed an association and doesn't tell us whether ADHD is a direct cause of cognitive decline. But the results suggest that "if you do have attention-deficit disorder, you're going to have more trouble with normal brain aging," said Sandra Black, a cognitive neurologist at Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto who was not involved in the study. "It adds another risk factor...."

Notably, of the 730 participants with adult ADHD, 13.2 percent (96 participants) were diagnosed with dementia. In contrast, of the 108,388 participants without adult ADHD, just 7 percent (7,630 participants) developed dementia. Intriguingly, adults with ADHD who were taking a psychostimulant medication such as Ritalin or Adderall did not have an increased risk of developing dementia compared with those not taking medication. Only 22.3 percent of people with ADHD had taken a psychostimulant medication at any point.
The Post also notes the work of Sara Becker, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Calgary. "In a 2023 systematic review, Becker and her colleagues identified only seven previous studies investigating the link between ADHD and neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia, most of which found that adult ADHD conferred a higher dementia risk."
The research highlights the importance of seeking care — and the need for more research. Treatment with psychostimulant medications may attenuate the risk, said Stephen Levine, a professor at the University of Haifa's School of Public Health in Israel and the lead author of the study. Lifestyle changes, such as better sleep and staying socially engaged, can also lower risk for dementia....

A 2020 landmark study by the Lancet Commission highlighted 12 modifiable factors for dementia that, if addressed, could mitigate the risk of dementia by up to 40 percent. Some of these factors are hearing loss, excessive alcohol intake and smoking.
Other lifestyle changes that lower your risk of demential include keeping up your physical activity, and eating a Mediterranean diet, the Post reports (citing cognitive neurologist Sandra Black).

An estimated 3 percent of adults have ADHD.

Abner Li reports via 9to5Google: Google today detailed its research into audioplethysmography (APG) that adds heart rate sensing capabilities to active noise canceling (ANC) headphones and earbuds "with a simple software upgrade." Google says the "ear canal [is] an ideal location for health sensing" given that the deep ear artery "forms an intricate network of smaller vessels that extensively permeate the auditory canal."

This audioplethysmography approach works by "sending a low intensity ultrasound probing signal through an ANC headphone's speakers. This signal triggers echoes, which are received via on-board feedback microphones. We observe that the tiny ear canal skin displacement and heartbeat vibrations modulate these ultrasound echoes." A model that Google created works to process that feedback into a heart rate reading, as well as heart rate variability (HRV) measurement. This technique works even with music playing and "bad earbuds seals." However, it was impacted by body motion, and Google countered with a multi-tone approach that serves as a calibration tool to "find the best frequency that measures heart rate, and use only the best frequency to get high-quality pulse waveform."

Google performed two sets of studies with 153 people that found APG "achieves consistently accurate heart rate (3.21% median error across participants in all activity scenarios) and heart rate variability (2.70% median error in inter-beat interval) measurements." Compared to existing HR sensors, it's not impacted by skin tones. Ear canal size and "sub-optimal seal conditions" also do not impact accuracy. Google believes this is a better approach than putting traditional photoplethysmograms (PPG) and electrocardiograms (ECG) sensors, as well as a microcontroller, in headphones/earbuds: "this sensor mounting paradigm inevitably adds cost, weight, power consumption, acoustic design complexity, and form factor challenges to hearables, constituting a strong barrier to its wide adoption."

Jeff Foust reports via SpaceNews: The governments of Australia and the United States have signed an agreement that could allow American rockets to launch from Australian spaceports, although it is unclear how much demand there is for them. The U.S. State Department announced Oct. 26 that the two countries signed a technology safeguards agreement (TSA) regarding space launches from Australia. The agreement provides the "legal and technical framework" for American launches from Australian facilities while protecting sensitive technologies.

The TSA is required to allow the export of U.S.-built launch vehicles to Australia. Industry officials in Australia said the agreement will allow spaceport projects there to sign long-awaited deals to host launches by American companies. [...] The precise demand for Australian launch sites from American launch companies remains unclear. The ELA statement included an illustration of four small launch vehicles from ABL Space Systems, Astra, Phantom Space and Vaya Space, as well as Rocket Lab's Neutron medium-lift rocket. "We hear regularly from both the U.S. government and industry of their demand for this capability in Australia," said Jeremy Hallett, executive chairman of the Space Industry Association of Australia, in a statement. "This agreement removes the blockage stopping this demand being met by Australian space industry and we look forward to the new business opportunities that will emerge for the industry."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KOMO News: A groundbreaking medical procedure for those with kidney stones will soon be offered at the University of Washington after more than two decades of research. It will also give astronauts the go ahead they need from NASA to travel to Mars. It's a groundbreaking procedure to get rid of painful stones while you're awake, no anesthesia needed. "This has the potential to be game changing," said Dr. Kennedy Hall with UW Medicine. Still being run through clinical trials at UW Medicine, the procedure called burst wave lithotripsy uses an ultrasound wand and soundwaves to break apart the kidney stone. Ultrasonic propulsion is then used to move the stone fragments out, potentially giving patients relief in 10 minutes or less.

This technology is also making it possible for astronauts to travel to Mars, since astronauts are at a greater risk for developing kidney stones during space travel. It's so important to NASA, the space agency has been funding the research for the last 10 years. "They could potentially use this technology while there, to help break a stone or push it to where they could help stay on their mission and not have to come back to land," said Harper. The research has been published in the Journal of Urology.

Efforts to curb emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas commonly produced as a by-product of refrigerant manufacture might be falling short, and it seems eastern China is a major culprit. Nature: The hydrofluorocarbon gas, HFC-23, is around 14,700 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at warming the globe and has long been the subject of national and international climate-change mitigation efforts. Those efforts gained new traction nearly a decade ago when China and India -- the world's largest producers of the chemical -- agreed to dial down its emissions. New research, however, confirms that emissions continued to rise in subsequent years, and an analysis of data from atmospheric-monitoring stations suggests that factories in eastern China are responsible for nearly half of the total.

The rogue emissions are one of several air-pollution sources under discussion at the latest meeting of the Montreal Protocol, held in Nairobi, Kenya, this week. Signed in 1987, the Montreal Protocol is generally considered the most effective international environmental treaty in history, having halted the destruction of the ozone layer while also slowing down global warming. But scientists have often played a role, scanning the atmosphere for chemicals, such as ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), that governments have agreed to phase out. "Science has been instrumental in evaluating compliance under the treaty," says Megan Lickley, a climate scientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.