BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Synchron has just released a public demo showing something that used to feel impossible. A man with ALS is now using his iPad with nothing but his brain. No hands. No voice. No eye-tracking. Just thought. The man in the video is named Mark. He's part of Synchron's COMMAND clinical study and has an implant called the Stentrode. It sits inside his brain's blood vessels and picks up his motor intention. Those signals get sent wirelessly to an external decoder, which then tells the iPad what to do. It's all made possible by Apple's new Brain-Computer Interface Human Interface Device protocol, which lets iPadOS treat brain activity like an actual input method.

Apple's built-in Switch Control feature makes the whole thing work on the software side. The iPad even sends back screen context to the BCI decoder to make everything run more smoothly and accurately. [...] Synchron was the first company to start clinical trials with a permanently implanted BCI. The big difference here is that it doesn't require open brain surgery. The device is implanted through the blood vessels, which makes it way more practical for real-world use.

NASA's Lunar Trailblazer mission ended prematurely after losing contact with the satellite just one day post-launch, the agency announced today. Engadget reports: The NASA satellite was part of the IM-2 mission by Intuitive Machines, which took off from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on February 26 at 7:16PM ET. The Lunar Trailblazer successfully separated from the rocket as planned about 48 minutes after launch. Operators in Pasadena, CA established communication with the satellite at 8:13PM ET, but two-way communication was lost the next day and the team was unable to recover the connection. From the limited data ground teams received before the satellite went dark, the craft's solar arrays were not correctly positioned toward the sun, which caused its batteries to drain. "While it was not the outcome we had hoped for, mission experiences like Lunar Trailblazer help us to learn and reduce the risk for future, low-cost small satellites to do innovative science as we prepare for a sustained human presence on the Moon," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator at NASA Headquarters' Science Mission Directorate. "Thank you to the Lunar Trailblazer team for their dedication in working on and learning from this mission through to the end."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy will announce expedited plans this week to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, the first major action by the former Fox News host as the interim NASA administrator. NASA has discussed building a reactor on the lunar surface, but this would set a more definitive timeline -- according to documents obtained by POLITICO -- and come just as the agency faces a massive budget cut. [...] The reactor directive orders the agency to solicit industry proposals for a 100 kilowatt nuclear reactor to launch by 2030, a key consideration for astronauts' return to the lunar surface. NASA previously funded research into a 40 kilowatt reactor for use on the moon, with plans to have a reactor ready for launch by the early 2030s.

The first country to have a reactor could "declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit the United States," the directive states, a sign of the agency's concern about a joint project China and Russia have launched. The directive also orders NASA to designate a leader for the effort and to get industry input within 60 days. The agency is seeking companies able to launch a reactor by 2030 since that's around the time China intends to land its first astronaut on the moon. The nuclear initiative means that NASA will continue to have a hand in nuclear development even after the Pentagon's recent cancellation of a joint program on nuclear-powered rocket engines. "While the budget did not prioritize nuclear propulsion, that wasn't because nuclear propulsion is seen as a non-worthy technology," the NASA official said.

Plastics are a "grave, growing and under-recognised danger" to human and planetary health, a new expert review has warned. From a report: The world is in a "plastics crisis," it concluded, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age and is responsible for at least $1.5 trillion a year in health-related damages. The driver of the crisis is a huge acceleration of plastic production, which has increased by more than 200 times since 1950 and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060.

[...] Plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion tonnes now polluting the entire planet, the review said, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.

"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched a crypto billionaire and five other people to the final frontier on Sunday," reports Space.com: The mission — known as NS-34, because it was the 34th overall flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle — lifted off from the company's West Texas spaceport at 8:43 a.m. EDT (1243 GMT; 7:43 a.m. local time in West Texas).

The highest-profile NS-34 passenger was Justin Sun, a 34-year-old billionaire who founded the blockchain platform Tron. In June 2021, Sun won an auction for a seat aboard the first-ever crewed flight of New Shepard, plunking down $28 million. [Sun was unable to take that flight due to a scheduling conflict, but Blue Origin says "the proceeds from the $28 million bid benefitted 19 space-focused charities"...] The people flying with Sun on Sunday were Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, an Indian-born American real estate investor and adventurer; Turkish businessman and photographer Gökhan Erdem; Deborah Martorell, a journalist and meteorologist from Puerto Rico; Englishman Lionel Pitchford, who has run an orphanage in Nepal for three decades; and American entrepreneur James (J.D.) Russell... All six passengers were spaceflight rookies except Russell, who flew on Blue Origin's NS-28 mission in November 2024.

NS-34 was the 14th human spaceflight to date for New Shepard, which consists of a rocket topped by a crew capsule. Both of these elements are reusable; the rocket comes back to Earth for a vertical, powered touchdown like those performed by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, and the capsule lands softly under parachutes. Each New Shepard flight lasts 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown.
"New Shepard has now flown 75 people into space," Blue Origin said in a statement, "including five people who have flown twice."

Slashdot reader ffkom writes: The air around you mostly consists of nitrogen [78%]. And in that air exist happy little monogamous pairs of two nitrogen atoms per molecule, also known as N2. Researchers from the University of Giessen, Germany, recently managed to synthesize N6 molecules, "the first, to our knowledge, experimentally realized neutral molecular nitrogen allotrope beyond N2 that exhibits unexpected stability."

And these appear to be pretty angry little molecules, as they detonate at more than twice the energy density than good old TNT:

A kiloton of N6 is 1.19×10**7mol, which can release an energy of 2.20×109kcal (9.21terajoules) based on the enthalpy. Considering that the standard kiloton TNT equivalent is 4.184terajoules, N6 can release 2.2 times the energy of TNT of the same weight. On the basis of the documented TNT equivalent based on weight for HMX (1.15) and RDX (1.15), N6 can release 1.9 times the energy of HMX or RDX with the same weight.

In interviews the researchers contemplated the possibility of using N6 as rocket fuel, given its superior energy density and that its reaction product is just N2, so basically air, but no smoke, no CO2 or other potentially harmful substances.

After it began "peering into the distant universe" in 2022, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope "has discovered a rash of 'little red dots'," reports Science magazine. There's "hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation."

"Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole..." The objects, which some astronomers are calling "black hole stars," could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. "The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we've been playing with before," says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy... JWST couldn't resolve the dots into a recognizable shape, which meant they must have been tiny — less than 2% of the diameter of the Milky Way. "It was a mystery ... as to why they were so spatially compact," says Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin. An impossibly dense packing of stars would be needed to explain their brightness. "I was excited," Casey says...

For Mitch Begelman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, the observations are a vindication. Earlier this month, he and a colleague posted a preprint on arXiv reviving a scenario for the formation of hypothetical "quasi-stars" that he and others had proposed 20 years ago. The first generation of stars, they calculated, could have grown to colossal size in the early universe, which was made up almost entirely of hydrogen, the raw material of stars. When a giant star ran out of fuel, they said, its core would have collapsed into a black hole, but the outer envelope of hydrogen was so dense it survived the blast, enclosing the newborn black hole. As the black hole chewed at its shroud of gas, the entire system glowed as a quasi-star larger than the Solar System. "That's what the quasi-star envelope is doing, it's force-feeding the black hole by pushing matter into it," Begelman says.

Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. "We're probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn't know about before," de Graaff says.
"If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST — and the kind of discovery astronomers live for."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

The vehicle "once led the Space Shuttle down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base," The Drive reported in 2022, noting it was won in an auction for $21,061 (beating 18 other bidders). "I just figured the NASA brand combined with Airsteam hip seemed like a can't lose combination," the buyer says now, in a listing for the vehicle on the on the automotive sales site Hemmings.com asking $199,000..

They're touting it as a priceless marketing/publicity prop — "a once in a lifetime opportunity" to own what was once an "onsite command center complete with communications and atmospheric monitoring... Imagine pulling into Burning Man driving this..." The seller points out it's the only custom-built "Airstream" trailer ever sold by NASA. (The others were crushed, except for one donated to the Kennedy museum.) But for this one "Apparently there was some miscommunication when the vehicle was decommissioned. It should have been offered to museums but the sales team did not know what it was.")

"Has only 8240 miles on it as driven from Ohio to California then around the Edwards base."

The seller apparently first tried listing it on eBay in May for $50,000. ("Reserve not met," says that listing page now. "Very well maintained, minor dings on exterior...")

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

A Rutgers-led study using advanced computational modeling reveals that expanding solar power by just 15% could reduce U.S. carbon emissions by over 8.5 million metric tons annually, with the greatest benefits concentrated in specific regions like California, Texas, and the Southwest. The study has been published in Science Advances. From the report: The study quantified both immediate and delayed emissions reductions resulting from added solar generation. For example, the researchers found that in California, a 15% increase in solar power at noon was associated with a reduction of 147.18 metric tons of CO2 in the region in the first hour and 16.08 metric tons eight hours later.

The researchers said their methods provide a more nuanced understanding of system-level impacts from solar expansion than previous studies, pinpointing where the benefits of increased solar energy adoption could best be realized. In some areas, such as California, Florida, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, Texas and the Southwest, small increases in solar were estimated to deliver large CO2 reductions, while in others, such as New England, the central U.S., and Tennessee, impacts were found to be minimal -- even at much larger increases in solar generation.

In addition, the researchers said their study demonstrates the significant spillover effects solar adoption has on neighboring regions, highlighting the value of coordinated clean energy efforts. For example, a 15% increase in solar capacity in California was associated with a reduction of 913 and 1,942 metric tons of CO2 emissions per day in the northwest and southwest regions, respectively. "It was rewarding to see how advanced computational modeling can uncover not just the immediate, but also the delayed and far-reaching spillover effects of solar energy adoption," said the lead author Arpita Biswas, an assistant professor with the Department of Computer Science at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. "From a computer science perspective, this study demonstrates the power of harnessing large-scale, high-resolution energy data to generate actionable insights. For policymakers and investors, it offers a roadmap for targeting solar investments where emissions reductions are most impactful and where solar energy infrastructure can yield the highest returns."

A new paper from Bangor University outlines the "bizarre phenomenon" known as the transparency paradox: that transparency is needed to foster public trust in science, but being transparent about science, medicine and government can also reduce trust. The paper argues that while openness in science is intended to build trust, it can backfire when revealing uncomfortable truths. Philosopher Byron Hyde and author of the study suggests that public trust could be improved not by sugarcoating reality, but by educating people to expect imperfection and understand how science actually works. Phys.org reports: The study revealed that, while transparency about good news increases trust, transparency about bad news, such as conflicts of interest or failed experiments, decreases it. Therefore, one possible solution to the paradox, and a way to increase public trust, is to lie (which Hyde points out is unethical and ultimately unsustainable), by for example making sure bad news is hidden and that there is always only good news to report.

Instead, he suggests that a better way forward would be to tackle the root cause of the problem, which he argues is the public overidealising science. People still overwhelmingly believe in the 'storybook image' of a scientist who makes no mistakes, which creates unrealistic expectations. Hyde is calling for a renewed effort to teach the public about scientific norms, which would be done through science education and communication to eliminate the "naive" view of science as infallible. "... most people know that global temperatures are rising, but very few people know how we know that," says Hyde. "Not enough people know that science 'infers to the best explanation' and doesn't definitively 'prove' anything. Too many people think that scientists should be free from biases or conflicts of interest when, in fact, neither of these are possible. If we want the public to trust science to the extent that it's trustworthy, we need to make sure they understand it first."

The study has been published in the journal Theory and Society.

India's national university ranking will start penalizing institutions if a sizable number of papers published by their researchers are retracted -- a first for an institutional ranking system. Nature: The move is an attempt by the government to address the country's growing number of retractions due to misconduct. Many retractions correct honest mistakes in the literature, but others arise because of misconduct.

India has had more papers retracted than any country apart from China and the United States, according to an analysis of the public database maintained by Retraction Watch of retractions over the past three decades. But whereas less than 1 paper is retracted for every 1,000 papers published in the United States, more than 3 are retracted for every 1,000 published in China, and the figure is 2 per 1,000 in India. The majority in India and China are withdrawn because of misconduct or research-integrity concerns.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers have created a microphone that listens with light instead of sound. Unlike traditional microphones, this visual microphone captures tiny vibrations on the surfaces of objects caused by sound waves and turns them into audible signals. In the journal Optics Express, the researchers describe the new approach, which applies single-pixel imaging to sound detection for the first time. Using an optical setup without any expensive components, they demonstrate that the technique can recover sound by using the vibrations on the surfaces of everyday objects such as leaves and pieces of paper. [...]

To demonstrate the new visual microphone, the researchers tested its ability to reconstruct Chinese and English pronunciations of numbers as well as a segment from Beethoven's Fur Elise. They used a paper card and a leaf as vibration targets, placing them 0.5 meters away from the objects while a nearby speaker played the audio. The system was able to successfully reconstruct clear and intelligible audio, with the paper card producing better results than the leaf. Low-frequency sounds (1 kHz) showed slight distortion that improved when a signal processing filter was applied. Tests of the system's data rate showed it produced 4 MB/s, a rate sufficiently low to minimize storage demands and allow for long-term recording. "Currently, this technology still only exists in the laboratory and can be used in special scenarios where traditional microphones fail to work," said research team leader Xu-Ri Yao from Beijing Institute of Technology in China. "We aim to expand the system into other vibration measurement applications, including human pulse and heart rate detection, leveraging its multifunctional information sensing capabilities."

fjo3 shares a report from the Associated Press: The Trump administration announced it is launching a new program that will allow Americans to share personal health data and medical records across health systems and apps run by private tech companies, promising that will make it easier to access health records and monitor wellness. More than 60 companies, including major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple as well as health care giants like UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, have agreed to share patient data in the system. The initiative will focus on diabetes and weight management, conversational artificial intelligence that helps patients, and digital tools such as QR codes and apps that register patients for check-ins or track medications.

Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who will be in charge of maintaining the system, have said patients will need to opt in for the sharing of their medical records and data, which will be kept secure. Those officials said patients will benefit from a system that lets them quickly call up their own records without the hallmark difficulties, such as requiring the use of fax machines to share documents, that have prevented them from doing so in the past.

Popular weight loss and fitness subscription service Noom, which has signed onto the initiative, will be able to pull medical records after the system's expected launch early next year. That might include labs or medical tests that the app could use to develop an AI-driven analysis of what might help users lose weight, CEO Geoff Cook told The Associated Press. Apps and health systems will also have access to their competitors' information, too. Noom would be able to access a person's data from Apple Health, for example. "Right now you have a lot of siloed data," Cook said.

Brazil has launched a massive program to release millions of laboratory-bred mosquitoes engineered to carry Wolbachia bacteria, which prevents them from transmitting dengue virus. The initiative aims to protect 140 million Brazilians across 40 municipalities over the next decade.

The approach has already demonstrated significant results in Niteroi, where officials documented a roughly 90% drop in dengue cases when comparing the 10 years prior to the modified mosquitoes' introduction to the five years afterward. Nearly all mosquitoes in the city now carry the Wolbachia bacteria. Cases of chikungunya and Zika also fell by over 96% and 99% respectively.

The World Mosquito Program operates high-tech breeding facilities, including one in Rio de Janeiro that produces mosquitoes by the millions. A new factory in Curitiba will produce 5 billion mosquitoes in its first year. The Wolbachia bacteria, naturally present in roughly half of all insect species, creates conditions where dengue virus cannot replicate inside mosquitoes, effectively breaking the transmission cycle when these modified insects bite humans.

The world's "oldest baby" has been born in the US from an embryo that was frozen in 1994, it has been reported. The Guardian: Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on 26 July in Ohio to Lindsey and Tim Pierce, using an "adopted" embryo from Linda Archerd, 62, from more than 30 years ago.

In the early 1990s, Archerd and her then husband decided to try in vitro fertilisation (IVF) after struggling to become pregnant. In 1994 four embryos resulted: one was transferred to Archerd and resulted in the birth of a daughter, who is now 30 and mother to a 10-year-old. The other embryos were cryopreserved and stored.

"We didn't go into it thinking we would break any records," Lindsey told the MIT Technology Review, which first reported the story. "We just wanted to have a baby."

A Nature survey of more than 1,100 physicists reveals fundamental disagreements about quantum mechanics' relationship to reality, despite the theory's century-long track record as one of science's most successful frameworks. The survey, conducted to mark quantum mechanics' 100th anniversary, found 36% of researchers favor the Copenhagen interpretation while 17% prefer epistemic approaches that treat quantum states as information rather than physical reality.

Another 15% support the many-worlds interpretation. Researchers split evenly on whether a boundary exists between quantum and classical worlds -- 45% said yes, 45% said no. When asked about the wavefunction's nature, 47% called it a mathematical tool while 36% considered it a representation of physical reality. Only 24% of respondents expressed confidence their chosen interpretation was correct, with others viewing their preference as merely adequate or useful in certain circumstances.

The survey contacted over 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, plus attendees of a centenary meeting on Heligoland island. Despite quantum mechanics enabling technologies from computer chips to medical imaging, physicists remain divided on the physical reality underlying the mathematics.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom. [...]

Scientists have long known that peacock feathers also exhibit "structural color" -- nature's pigment-free way to create dazzling hues. Ordered microstructures within the feathers reflect light at specific frequencies, leading to their vivid blues and greens and iridescence. But Florida Polytechnic University physicist Nathan Dawson and his colleagues wanted to go a step further and see whether those microstructures could also function as a laser cavity. After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers' eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths. Surprisingly, differently colored parts of the eyespots emitted the same wavelengths of laser light, even though each region would presumably vary in its microstructure.

Just because peacock feathers emit laser light doesn't mean the birds are somehow using this emission. But there are still ramifications, Dawson says. He suggests that looking for laser light in biomaterials could help identify arrays of regular microstructures within them. In medicine, for example, certain foreign objects -- viruses with distinct geometric shapes, perhaps -- could be classified and identified based on their ability to be lasers, he says. The work also demonstrates how biological materials could one day yield lasers that could be put safely into the human body to emit light for biosensing, medical imaging, and therapeutics. "I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans," Dawson says, "some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process."

India launched the $1.5 billion NISAR radar imaging satellite on Wednesday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, marking the first joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation. The satellite uses dual radar frequencies -- NASA's L-band and ISRO's S-band -- to detect Earth surface changes as small as one centimeter from its 747-kilometer orbit.

NISAR will map the entire planet every 12 days using a 240-kilometer-wide radar swath, providing data for climate monitoring and disaster response that will be freely available to users worldwide.

Longtime Slashdot reader ndsurvivor shares a report from MIT: MIT physicists have performed an idealized version of one of the most famous experiments in quantum physics. Their findings demonstrate, with atomic-level precision, the dual yet evasive nature of light. They also happen to confirm that Albert Einstein was wrong about this particular quantum scenario. The experiment in question is the double-slit experiment, which was first performed in 1801 by the British scholar Thomas Young to show how light behaves as a wave. Today, with the formulation of quantum mechanics, the double-slit experiment is now known for its surprisingly simple demonstration of a head-scratching reality: that light exists as both a particle and a wave. Stranger still, this duality cannot be simultaneously observed. Seeing light in the form of particles instantly obscures its wave-like nature, and vice versa.

[...] Now, MIT physicists have performed the most "idealized" version of the double-slit experiment to date. Their version strips down the experiment to its quantum essentials. They used individual atoms as slits, and used weak beams of light so that each atom scattered at most one photon. By preparing the atoms in different quantum states, they were able to modify what information the atoms obtained about the path of the photons. The researchers thus confirmed the predictions of quantum theory: The more information was obtained about the path (i.e. the particle nature) of light, the lower the visibility of the interference pattern was. They demonstrated what Einstein got wrong. Whenever an atom is "rustled" by a passing photon, the wave interference is diminished. "Einstein and Bohr would have never thought that this is possible, to perform such an experiment with single atoms and single photons," says Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics and leader of the MIT team. "What we have done is an idealized Gedanken experiment." Their results appear in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Promising Phase 3 trial results from Apnimed suggest a potential game-changing oral pill for sleep apnea could offer a simpler, more tolerable alternative for keeping airways open during sleep. The New York Times reports: For decades, the primary treatment for sleep apnea has been continuous positive airway pressure (or CPAP). Before bed, those with the condition put on a face mask that is connected to a CPAP machine, which keeps the airway open by forcing air into it. The machines are effective, but many find them so noisy, cumbersome or uncomfortable that they end up abandoning them. Now, a more appealing option may be on the way, according to a news release from Apnimed, a pharmaceutical company focused on treating sleep apnea. On Wednesday, the company announced a second round of positive Phase 3 clinical trial results for a first-of-its-kind oral pill that can be taken just before bedtime to help keep a person's airway open.

The full results have not yet been released, or published in a peer-reviewed journal. But the findings build on past, similarly positive conclusions from trials and studies. Sleep experts say that what they're seeing in reports so far makes them think the pill could be a game changer. Dr. Phyllis Zee, a sleep doctor and researcher at Northwestern Medicine who was not involved with the trial, said that if approved, the drug could transform the lives of many. That includes not only those who can't tolerate CPAP machines, but also those who can't -- or prefer not to -- use other interventions, such as other types of oral devices or weight loss medications. (Excess weight is a risk factor for sleep apnea.)