"There's an invisible monster on the loose," NASA wrote on Thursday, "barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. " This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy... Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut...

The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to... Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole... Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a new stunning image of ice giant Uranus, with almost all its faint dusty rings on display," reports CNN: The image is representative of the telescope's significant sensitivity, NASA said, as the fainter rings have only been captured previously by the Voyager 2 spacecraft and the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii. Uranus has 13 known rings, with 11 of them visible in the new Webb image. Nine rings are classified as the main rings, while the other two are harder to capture due to their dusty makeup and were not discovered until the Voyager 2 mission's flyby in 1986.

Two other, faint outer rings not shown in this latest image were discovered in 2007 from images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and scientists hope Webb will capture them in the future.... "The JWST gives us the ability to look at both Uranus and Neptune in a completely new way because we have never had a telescope of this size that looks in the infrared," said Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney, a postdoctoral research scientist and solar system ambassador for the Webb space telescope at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The infrared can show us new depths and features that are difficult to see from the ground with the atmosphere in the way and invisible to telescopes that look in visible light like Hubble."
"When Voyager 2 looked at Uranus, its camera showed an almost featureless blue-green ball in visible wavelengths," NASA explains. "With the infrared wavelengths and extra sensitivity of Webb we see more detail, showing how dynamic the atmosphere of Uranus really is." On the right side of the planet there's an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus — it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanish in the fall; these Webb data will help scientists understand the currently mysterious mechanism. Webb revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap. The sensitivity and longer wavelengths of Webb's NIRCam may be why we can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature when it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory....

This was only a short, 12-minute exposure image of Uranus with just two filters. It is just the tip of the iceberg of what Webb can do when observing this mysterious planet.

The search for life beyond Earth "follows the water," reports the Economist (since water is vital for earth's lifeforms, and the laws of chemistry are universal). "For most of the space age that insight led scientists to Mars." But... More and more, though, planetary scientists are following the water to other places — and in particular to the so-called "icy moons" that orbit Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, the solar system's quartet of giant gas planets. Many of those moons are either known or suspected to have oceans beneath their icy shells, kept liquid by gravitational squeezing from the planets they orbit.

On April 13th, if all goes well, a new spacecraft will blast off from French Guiana en route to Jupiter with the aim of investigating some of those watery moons up close. The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (given the slightly contrived acronym "JUICE ") will slingshot once around Venus and three times around Earth before arriving at Jupiter in 2031.... JUICE will investigate three of the so-called Galilean moons — Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, all of which are thought to have subsurface oceans. (The fourth, Io, is arid, and so not of interest.)

Ganymede is the probe's primary target. Despite being a moon, it is bigger than the planet Mercury. Its subsurface ocean may contain more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The probe's cameras will add much more detail to the existing, low-resolution maps of Ganymede's surface. An ice-penetrating radar will scan several kilometres below the ground. A magnetometer will take advantage of the fact that Ganymede, apparently uniquely among the solar system's moons, has a weak magnetic field that interacts with the much bigger field generated by Jupiter itself. The subtleties of that magnetic field were an early clue for the existence of an ocean, hinting at the presence of a large chunk of conductive fluid — such as salty water — beneath the surface. Better readings of the magnetic field will help scientists estimate just how big the ocean is....

Nor is JUICE the only probe on its way to Jupiter. Next year NASA will launch Europa Clipper, focused, as its name suggests, on Europa. Despite its later launch, it will take a quicker route to Jupiter, arriving a few months before JUICE . And, because there are limits to what can be discerned from orbit, both NASA and the Europeans are sketching plans for future landers that would descend to the surface of such moons to sample the seawater directly.

SpaceX plans to carry out a launch rehearsal next week of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, and its first test flight possibly the following week, the private space company said Thursday. Phys.Org reports: SpaceX published photos of the massive Starship, which is designed to eventually send astronauts to the Moon and beyond, on its launchpad at the company's base in Texas. "Starship fully stacked at Starbase," SpaceX said in a tweet. "Team is working towards a launch rehearsal next week followed by Starship's first integrated flight test ~ week later pending regulatory approval."

SpaceX will need a green light from the Federal Aviation Administration before being allowed to carry out the orbital test launch. SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster of Starship in February. The 230-foot (69-meter) Super Heavy booster was anchored to the ground during the test-firing, called a static fire, to prevent it from lifting off.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Millions of lives could be saved by a groundbreaking set of new vaccines for a range of conditions including cancer, experts have said. A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that jabs for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030. Studies into these vaccinations are also showing "tremendous promise", with some researchers saying 15 years' worth of progress has been "unspooled" in 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the Covid jab.

Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer such treatments for "all sorts of disease areas" in as little as five years. The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumor types. Burton said: "We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world."

He also said that multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection -- allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) -- while mRNA therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs. Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that triggers the body's immune response against disease. Burton said :"I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology." But scientists warn that the accelerated progress, which has surged "by an order of magnitude" in the past three years, will be wasted if a high level of investment is not maintained.

A NASA instrument to provide unprecedented resolution of monitoring major air pollutants -- down to four square miles -- lifted off on its way to geostationary orbit at 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality from space. From a report: "The TEMPO mission is about more than just studying pollution -- it's about improving life on Earth for all. By monitoring the effects of everything from rush-hour traffic to pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, NASA data will help improve air quality across North America and protect our planet," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. [...] From a fixed geostationary orbit above the equator, TEMPO will be the first space-based instrument to measure air quality over North America hourly during the daytime and at spatial regions of several square miles -- far better than existing limits of about 100 square miles in the U.S. TEMPO data will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution, including studies of rush hour pollution, the potential for improved air quality alerts, the effects of lightning on ozone, the movement of pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, and even the effects of fertilizer application.

TEMPO's observations will dramatically improve the scientific data record on air pollution -- including ozone, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde -- not only over the continental United States, but also Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and part of the island of Hispaniola. "Our TEMPO slogan is 'It's about time,' which hints at TEMPO's ability to provide hourly air pollution data," said Xiong Liu, deputy principal investigator for TEMPO at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "After working on the TEMPO for more than 10 years, it is about time to launch TEMPO to produce real TEMPO data and start the new era of air quality monitoring over North America."

China has invited Venezuela to join its lunar research station project as the country works to gain partners for the endeavor. SpaceNews reports: Venezuela would be the first country to join China and Russia in the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which is planned to be constructed in the early 2030s using super heavy-lift launch vehicles. The launches will follow smaller, precursor missions later this decade. Marglad Bencomo, executive director of the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities (ABAE), visited China's new, national Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) March 30 to discuss cooperation and exchanges. She was met by Wu Yanhua, former deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and now executive vice chairman of DSEL. The two sides exchanged in-depth views on international cooperation in the field of deep space exploration, according to a DSEL statement.

Bencomo said that Venezuela was willing to sign a China-Venezuela Memorandum of Understanding as soon as possible to jointly promote the construction of international lunar research stations, according to the DSEL statement. ABAE has been invited to attend an international forum hosted by DSEL during China's national "space day," held annually on April 24 since 2016, potentially providing a platform for signing an MOU. China and Russia presented a roadmap for the joint ILRS in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2021 and opened the project to interested parties.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Embryos made from stem cells -- instead of a sperm and egg -- have been created from monkey cells for the first time. When researchers put these "synthetic embryos" into the uteruses of adult monkeys, some showed the initial signs of pregnancy. It's the furthest scientists have ever been able to take lab-grown embryos in primates -- and the work hints that it may one day be possible to generate fetuses this way. The team behind the research, Zhen Liu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai and his colleagues, started with embryonic stem cells originally taken from macaque monkey embryos. These cells have been grown in labs for multiple generations and, given the right conditions, have the potential to develop into pretty much any type of body cell, including those that make up organs, blood, and nervous system.

The team used a set of lab conditions, which they tweaked and improved, to encourage embryonic stem cells to develop further. Over several days, the cells began developing in a very similar way to embryos. The resulting blobs of cells are called blastoids, because they look like early embryos, which are called blastocysts. After the blastoids had been growing in a dish for seven days, the researchers put them through a series of tests to figure out how similar they were to typical embryos. In one test, the team separated the individual cells in the blastoids and checked to see which genes were expressed in each one. The team analyzed over 6,000 individual cells this way.

These tests revealed close similarities between the stem-cell-derived embryos and conventional monkey embryos. Some of the blastoids were grown for longer -- up to 17 days. These structures looked very much like typical embryos, the researchers say, although other scientists not involved in the study say more evidence is needed to prove just how similar they are. The only way to find out how embryo-like these blastoids really are is to test whether they can develop in a monkey's uterus. So the team put between eight and 10 seven-day-old blastoids into the uteruses of each of eight adult monkeys. The researchers then monitored the transferred blastoids for three weeks. The researchers believe that in three of these monkeys, the blastoids successfully implanted in the uterus and appeared to generate a yolk sac -- one of the very first signs of pregnancy. These monkeys also had elevated levels of pregnancy hormones. In other words, they would have had a positive pregnancy test. But within 20 days of transfer, the monkey blastoids stopped developing and seemed to come apart, say Liu and colleagues, who published their results in the journal Cell Stem Cell. The results suggest that blastoids still aren't perfect replicas of normal embryos. "That might be because a typical embryo is generated from an egg, which is then fertilized by sperm," reports MIT Technology Review. "A blastoid made from stem cells might express genes in the same way as a normal embryo, but it may be missing something crucial that normally comes from an egg."

"There's also a chance that the team might have seen more progress if the experiment had been done in more monkeys. After all, of the 484 blastoids that were developing at day seven, only five survived to day 17."

In a new study, scientists found that it's possible for people to form false memories of an event within seconds of it occurring. This almost-immediate misremembering seems to be shaped by our expectations of what should happen, the team says. Gizmodo reports: "This study is unique in two ways, in our opinion. First, it explores memory for events that basically just happened, between 0.3 and 3 seconds ago. Intuitively, we would think that these memories are pretty reliable," lead author Marte Otten, a neuroscientist at the University of Amsterdam, told Gizmodo in an email. "As a second unique feature, we explicitly asked people whether they thought their memories are reliable -- so how confident are they about their response?" To do this, they recruited hundreds of volunteers over a series of four experiments to complete a task: They would look at certain letters and then be asked to recall one highlighted letter right after. However, the scientists used letters that were sometimes reversed in orientation, so the volunteers had to remember whether their selection was mirrored or not. They also focused on the volunteers who were highly confident about their choices during the task.

Overall, the participants regularly misremembered the letters, but in a specific way. People were generally good at remembering when a typical letter was shown, with their inaccuracy rates hovering around 10%. But they were substantially worse at remembering a mirrored letter, with inaccuracy rates up to 40% in some experiments. And, interestingly enough, their memory got worse the longer they had to wait before recalling it. When they were asked to recall what they saw a half second later, for instance, they were wrong less than 20% of the time, but when they were asked three seconds later, the rate rose as high as 30%.

According to Otten, the findings -- published Wednesday in PLOS One -- indicate that our memory starts being shaped almost immediately by our preconceptions. People expect to see a regular letter, and don't get easily fooled into misremembering a mirrored letter. But when the unexpected happens, we might often still default to our missed prediction. This bias doesn't seem to kick in instantaneously, though, since people's short-term memory was better when they had to be especially quick on their feet. "It is only when memory becomes less reliable through the passage of a tiny bit of time, or the addition of extra visual information, that internal expectations about the world start playing a role," Otten said.

Virgin Orbit, founded by Richard Branson, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday after the satellite launching business struggled to secure long-term funding following a failed launch in January. From a report: The filing comes less than two years after Virgin Orbit first went public at a valuation of roughly $3 billion. But the January mishap left the company scrambling for new funding and forced it to halt operations. "We believe that the Chapter 11 process represents the best path forward to identify and finalize an efficient and value-maximizing sale," Virgin Orbit Chief Executive Dan Hart said in a statement. The company, which was spun off from space tourism firm Virgin Galactic in 2017, sends satellites into orbit using rockets launched from a modified Boeing 747 plane. The Long Beach, California-based company lodged the filing seeking a sale of its assets in a Delaware court days after announcing the layoff of roughly 85% of its 750 employees. Virgin Orbit listed assets of about $243 million and total debt at $153.5 million as of Sept. 30. The company went public in December 2021 through a blank-check merger, raising $255 million less than expected.

One of mathematics' most intriguing visual mysteries has finally been solved -- thanks to a hobbyist in England. From a report: The conundrum: is there a shape that can be arranged in a tile formation, interlocking with itself ad infinitum, without the resulting pattern repeating over and over again? In nature and on our bathroom walls, we typically see tile patterns that repeat in "a very predictable, regular way," says Dr Craig Kaplan, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. What mathematicians were interested in were shapes that "guaranteed non-periodicity" -- in other words, there was no way to tile them so that the overall pattern created a repeating grid. Such a shape would be known as an aperiodic monotile, or "einstein" shape, meaning, in roughly translated German, "one shape" (and conveniently echoing the name of a certain theoretical physicist).

"There's been a thread of beautiful mathematics over the last 60 years or so searching for ever smaller sets of shapes that do this," Kaplan says. "The first example of an aperiodic set of shapes had over 20,000 shapes in it. And of course, mathematicians worked to get that number down over time. And the furthest we got was in the 1970s," when the Nobel-prize winning physicist Roger Penrose found pairs of shapes that fit the bill. Now, mathematicians appear to have found what they were looking for: a 13-sided shape they call "the hat." The discovery was largely the work of David Smith of the East Riding of Yorkshire, who had a longstanding interest in the question and investigated the problem using an online geometry platform. Once he'd found an intriguing shape, he told the New York Times, he would cut it out of cardstock and see how he could fit the first 32 pieces together. "I am quite persistent but I suppose I did have a bit of luck," Smith told the Guardian in an email.

Patients diagnosed with conditions like anxiety and sleep disorders have become caught in the crosshairs of America's opioid crisis, as secret policies mandated by a national opioid settlement have turned filling legitimate prescriptions into a major headache. Bloomberg reports: In July, limits went into effect that flag and sometimes block pharmacies' orders of controlled substances such as Adderall and Xanax when they exceed a certain threshold. The requirement stems from a 2021 settlement with the US's three largest drug distributors -- AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. But pharmacists said it curtails their ability to fill prescriptions for many different types of controlled substances -- not just opioids. Independent pharmacists said the rules force them come up with creative workarounds. Sometimes, they must send patients on frustrating journeys to find pharmacies that haven't yet exceeded their caps in order to buy prescribed medicines. It's unclear how the thresholds are impacting major chain pharmacies.

The Drug Enforcement Administration regulates the manufacturing, distribution and sale of controlled substances, which can be dangerous when used improperly. Drugmakers and wholesalers were always supposed to keep an eye out for suspicious purchases and have long had systems to catch, report and halt these orders. The prescription opioid crisis, enabled by irresponsible drug company marketing and prescribing, led to a slew of lawsuits and tighter regulations on many parts of the health system, including monitoring of suspicious orders. One major settlement required the three largest distributors to set thresholds on orders of controlled substances starting last July.

The "suspicious order" terminology is a bit of a misnomer, pharmacists said. The orders themselves aren't suspicious, it's just that the pharmacy has exceeded its limit for a specific drug over a certain time period. Any order that puts the pharmacy over its limit can be stopped. As a result, patients with legitimate prescriptions get caught up in the dragnet. Adding to the confusion, the limits themselves are secret. Drug wholesalers are barred by the settlement agreement from telling pharmacists what the thresholds are, how they're determined or when the pharmacy is getting close to hitting them. The exact limit for each pharmacy is kept secret in order to prevent pharmacists from gaming the system, according to Krista Tongring, leader of the DEA compliance practice at Guidepost Solutions and a former agency attorney. The purpose, she said, is to keep pharmacies from manipulating "their ordering patterns so as to get around the thresholds." According to a Cardinal Health document, limits are "calculated on a daily, monthly, and quarterly basis," reports Bloomberg. "But without more detailed information, it's impossible for pharmacists to predict when they are going to have to turn patients away."

"Pharmacies can request increases to their thresholds, but those take time to adjudicate, leaving patients scrambling to find their daily medicines elsewhere in the meantime."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Scientists have discovered "unexpected physics" by opening up "slits" in time, a new study reports, achieving a longstanding dream that can help to probe the behavior of light and pioneer advanced optical technologies. The mind-boggling approach is a time-based variation on the famous double-slit experiment, first performed by Thomas Young in 1801, which opened a window into the weird probabilistic world of quantum mechanics by revealing the dual nature of light as both a particle and a wave. The new temporal version of this test offered a glimpse of the mysterious physics that occur at ultrafast timescales, which may inform the development of quantum computing systems, among other next-generation applications.

In the original version of the double-slit experiment, light passes through two slits that are spatially separated on an opaque screen. A detector on the other side of the screen records the pattern of the light waves that emerges from the slits. These experiments show that the light waves change direction and interfere with each other after going through the slits, demonstrating that light behaves as both a wave and particle. This insight is one of the most important milestones in our ongoing journey into the quantum world, and it has since been repeated with other entities, such as electrons, exposing the trippy phenomena that occurs at the small scales of atoms.

Now, scientists led by Romain Tirole, a PhD student studying nanophotonics at Imperial College London, have created a "temporal analogue of Young's slit experiment" by firing a beam of light at a special metamaterial called Indium Tin Oxide, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Physics. Metamaterials are artificial creations endowed with superpowers that are not found in nature. For instance, the Indium Tin Oxide used in the new study can change its properties in mere femtoseconds, a unit equal to a millionth of a billionth of a second. This incredible variability allows light waves to interact with the metamaterial at key moments in ultrafast succession, called "time slits," which produces a time-based diffraction pattern that is analogous to the results returned in the spatial version of the experiment. [...] In other words, the super-speedy changeability of Indium Tin Oxide finally made a time slit experiment possible, after many years of eluding scientists. To bring this vision to reality, Tirole and his colleagues used lasers to switch the reflectance of the material on and off at high speeds.

Chemicals that were banned after they punched a hole in Earth's ozone layer are still building up at an alarming rate in our atmosphere, according to research published today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The chemicals were once widely used in air conditioning and refrigeration but were supposed to be phased out globally by 2010. From a report: Scientists were surprised to find that concentrations of several types of those chemicals have climbed since then, reaching a record high in 2020. The culprit could be alternative refrigerants that were meant to replace the ozone-depleting substances, the new research suggests. An even bigger problem? Researchers can't find where all the chemicals are leaking from. The ozone layer has managed to make a remarkable recovery over the past few decades. If emissions continue to climb, however, it could counteract some of that progress and exacerbate climate change.

Cruising at a depth of 8,336 meters (over 27,000 feet) just above the seabed, a young snailfish has become the deepest fish ever filmed by scientists during a probe into the abyss of the northern Pacific Ocean. From a report: Scientists from University of Western Australia and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology released footage of the snailfish on Sunday filmed last September by sea robots in deep trenches off Japan. Along with the filming the deepest snailfish, the scientists physically caught two other specimens at 8,022 meters and set another record for the deepest catch. Previously, the deepest snailfish ever spotted was at 7,703 meters in 2008, while scientists had never been able to collect fish from anywhere below 8,000 meters. "What is significant is that it shows how far a particular type of fish will descend in the ocean," said marine biologist Alan Jamieson, founder of the Minderoo-UWA Deep Sea Research Centre, who led the expedition. Scientists are filming in the trenches off Japan as part of a 10-year study into the deepest fish populations in the world. Snailfish are members of Liparidae family, and while most snailfish live in shallow water, others survive at some of the greatest depths ever recorded, Jamieson said.

A Canadian astronaut and three NASA veterans, including one of the world's most experienced female spacewalkers, will fly around the moon next year in the first piloted voyage beyond Earth orbit since the Apollo program ended 50 years ago, the space agency announced Monday. From a report: NASA's Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover will join Canadian rookie Jeremy Hansen aboard an Orion crew capsule for the Artemis program's second fight, the first carrying a crew bound for the moon. The Artemis 2 mission is intended to pave the way toward the first moon landing -- Artemis 3 -- in the 2025-26 timeframe. Wiseman, Koch and Glover are all veterans of long-duration stays aboard the International Space Station while Hansen will be making his first space flight. Navy Capt. Wiseman, 47, a widowed father of two, is a veteran F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot who holds a master's in systems engineering. He launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2014 and spent 165 days aboard the space station, then served as chief astronaut after his return to Earth.

Koch, 44, holds a master's in electrical engineering who has experience in Antarctic research. She also launched aboard a Soyuz and spent nearly a full year aboard the lab in 2019-20, venturing outside for six spacewalks, including three all-female excursions. With 42 hours and 15 minutes of EVA time, she ranks third on the list of most experienced female spacewalkers. Glover, 46, is a Navy captain, a father of four and one of only a half dozen African Americans in NASA's astronaut corps. He launched to the station aboard the first operational SpaceX Crew Dragon mission in 2021-22, logging 168 days in orbit. Glover is a veteran test pilot with more than 3,000 hours of flight time and more than 400 carrier landings. Hansen, a 47-year-old colonel in the Canadian armed forces and father of three, is a veteran F-18 fighter pilot. He will be the ninth Canadian to fly in space and the first to venture beyond Earth orbit.

America's Department of Defense "is gearing up for a future conflict in space," reports the Wall Street Journal, "as China and Russia deploy missiles and lasers that can take out satellites and disrupt military and civilian communications." The White House this month proposed a $30 billion annual budget for the U.S. Space Force, almost $4 billion more than last year and a bigger jump than for other services including the Air Force and the Navy.... A key aim of a stand-alone force was to plan, equip and defend U.S. interests in space for all of the services and focus attention on the emerging threats. For the first time, the spending request also includes plans for simulators and other equipment to train Guardians, as Space Force members are known, for potential battle....

Just as it is on Earth, China is the Pentagon's big worry in space. In unveiling a defense strategy late last year, the Biden administration cast China as the greatest danger to U.S. security. In space, the threats from China range from ground-launched missiles or lasers that could destroy or disable U.S. satellites, to jamming and other cyber interference and attacks in space, said Pentagon officials. China has invested heavily in its space program, with a crewed orbiting station, developing ground-based missiles and lasers as well as more surveillance capabilities. This is part of its broader military aims of denying adversaries access to space-based assets.

China is "testing on-orbit satellite systems which could be weaponized as they have already shown the capability to physically control and move other satellites," Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, told a congressional hearing this month. "There's nothing we can do in space that's of any value if the networks that process the information and data are vulnerable to attack," Gen. Saltzman said. A central part of the Space Force's next tranche of military contracts for rocket launches is protecting them from attacks by China and other adversaries. The hope is to make satellites tougher to approach by adversaries' equipment as well as less susceptible to lasers and jamming from space or the ground, said Space Force leaders.
The article also notes the US Defense Department "is moving away from a small number of school bus-size satellites to a planned constellation of hundreds of smaller ones.

"The larger number of targets makes any one satellite less crucial to the network but also requires changes in the capabilities of the satellites themselves, the rockets that put them into orbit and the communications systems they host."

"Researchers have 'hacked' the earliest stages of photosynthesis," according to a new announcement from the University of Cambridge.

CNET reports: Scientists have studied photosynthesis in plants for centuries, but an international team believes they've unlocked new secrets in nature's great machine that could revolutionize sustainable fuels and fight climate change. The team says they've determined it's possible to extract an electrical charge at the best possible point in photosynthesis. This means harvesting the maximum amount of electrons from the process for potential use in power grids and some types of batteries. It could also improve the development of biofuels. While it's still early days, the findings, reported in the journal Nature, could reduce greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and provide insights to improve photovoltaic solar panels.

The key breakthrough came when researchers observed the process of photosynthesis at ultrafast timescales. "We can take photos at different times which allow us to watch changes in the sample really, really quickly — a million billion times faster than your iPhone," Dr. Tomi Baikie, from the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told CNET....

Previous demonstrations connected cyanobacteria, algae and other plants to electrodes to create so-called bio-photoelectrochemical cells that tap into the photosynthetic process to generate electricity. Baikie said they were surprised to discover a previously unknown pathway of energy flow at the beginning of the process that could enable extracting the charge in a more efficient way.

It was 10 times brighter than any previously detected, reports the BBC, noting it illuminated much of the galaxy.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv describes a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) whose light arrived late last year as one of the strongest ever observed. GRB 221009A was detected on October 9 last year (yes, that number is a date), so 5 and a bit months from event to papers published is remarkably quick, and I anticipate that there will be a lot more papers on it in the future. Stand-out points are :


- it lasted for more than ten hours after detection (a space x-ray telescope had time to orbit out of the Earth's shadow and observe it)
- it could (briefly) be observed by amateur astronomers.
- it is also one of the closest gamma-ray bursts seen and is among the most energetic and luminous bursts.


It's redshift is given as z= 0.151, which Wikipedia translates as occurring 1.9 billion years ago, at a distance of 2.4 billion light-years from Earth.

Observations have been made of the burst in radio telescopes (many sites, continuing), optical (1 site ; analysis of HST imaging is still in work), ultraviolet (1 space telescope), x-ray (2 space telescopes) and gamma ray (1 sapce telescope) — over a range of 1,000,000,000,000,000-fold (10^15) in wavelength. It's brightness is such that radio observatories are expected to continue to detect it for "years to come".

The model of the source is of several (3~10) Earth-masses of material ejected from (whatever, probably a compact body (neutron star or black dwarf) merger) and impacting the interstellar medium at relativistic speeds (Lorentz factor 9, velocity >99.2% of c). The absolute brightness of the burst is high (about 10^43 J) and it is made to seem brighter by being close, and also by the energy being emitted in a narrow jet ("beamed"), which we happen to be near the axis of.

General news sites are starting to notice the reports, including the hilarious acronym of "BOAT — Brightest Of All Time". Obviously, with observations having only occurred for about 50 years. we're likely to see something else as bright within the next 50 years.

The brightness of the x-rays from this GRB is such that the x-rays scattered from dust in our galaxy creates halos around the source — which are bright enough to see, and to tell us things about the dust in our galaxy (which is generally very hard to see). Those images are more photogenic than the normal imagery for GRBs — which is nothing — so you'll see them a lot.

"SpaceX has its first commercial cargo contract to the lunar surface," says Jaret Matthews, the founder of the tiny startup Astrolab which makes a moon rover the size of a Jeep Wrangler. The New York Times reports: On Friday, Astrolab announced that it had signed an agreement with SpaceX for its Flexible Logistics and Exploration Rover, or FLEX, to be a payload on an uncrewed Starship cargo mission that is to take off as early as mid-2026...." SpaceX, which did not respond to requests for comment, has yet to announce that it is planning this commercial Starship mission to the moon's surface, headed to the south polar region. Astrolab would be just one of the customers sharing the voluminous cargo compartment of the Starship flight, Mr. Matthews said.

Mr. Matthews, an engineer who previously worked at SpaceX and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, founded Astrolab less than four years ago. Located a stone's throw from SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., it has about 20 full-time employees, he said.... Mr. Matthews declined to say how much it would cost to get FLEX to the moon or how much money Astrolab has raised. He said Astrolab would make money by lifting and deploying cargo for customers on the lunar surface. That could include scientific instruments. In the future, the rover could help build lunar infrastructure. "Essentially providing what I like to call last-mile mobility on the moon," Mr. Matthews said. "You can kind of think of it like being U.P.S. for the moon. And in this analogy, Starship is the container ship crossing the ocean, and we're the local distribution solution...."

Mr. Matthews said Astrolab already had several signed agreements for payloads. That appears to be part of the expanding potential market for [SpaceX's] Starship.... For NASA, Starship is how its astronauts will land on the moon during the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2025. Before that, SpaceX is to conduct an uncrewed flight to demonstrate the capability of spacecraft to get to the moon and set down there in one piece. If those schedules hold, the commercial cargo mission with the Astrolab rover could take place the next year....

Farther into the future, the company has even grander visions. "Ultimately our goal is to have a fleet of rovers both on the moon and Mars," Mr. Matthews said. "And I really think I see these vehicles as the catalysts ultimately for the off-Earth economy."