Enlarge / Vials with COVID-19 Vaccine labels showing logos of pharmaceutical company Pfizer and German biotechnology company BioNTech. (credit: Getty | Photonews)

A committee of independent advisors for the Food and Drug Administration has voted unanimously (18 to 0) in favor of authorizing a booster dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people aged 65 and older, as well as people at high risk based on an underlying medical condition and/or occupational exposure (e.g., healthcare workers). The booster doses are recommended to be given at least six months after completion of the primary two doses.

If the FDA moves forward with the advisory committee's recommendation—which it likely will—boosters will be offered to those two groups based on an Emergency Use Authorization.

Prior to voting in favor of authorization for the two groups, the committee rejected the idea of approving boosters for all people ages 16 and up with a resounding vote of 16 to 2 against.

Enlarge / Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion in 1054 CE (credit: NASA/ESA/J. Hester & A. Loll (Arizona State University)

In August 1181, astronomers in China and Japan witnessed a bright "guest star" in the night sky that we now know to have been a supernova—one of just a handful of recorded supernovae in our Milky Way that were visible to the naked eye. It shone brightly for a full six months before it disappeared. Astronomers haven't been able to identify the remnant of the source for SN 1181 for centuries, and that detail is crucial to determine which class the supernova belongs to. Now, an international team of astronomers think they have pinpointed that source as one of the hottest stars in the galaxy within the Pa30 nebula, according to a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

As we've written previously, there are two types of known supernova, depending on the mass of the original star. An iron-core collapse supernova occurs with massive stars (greater than ten solar masses), which collapse so violently that it causes a huge, catastrophic explosion. The temperatures and pressures become so high that the carbon in the star's core begins to fuse. This halts the core's collapse, at least temporarily, and this process continues, over and over, with progressively heavier atomic nuclei. When the fuel finally runs out entirely, the (by then) iron core collapses into a black hole or a neutron star.

Then there is a thermonuclear supernova. Smaller stars (up to about eight solar masses) gradually cool to become dense cores of ash known as white dwarfs. If a white dwarf that has run out of nuclear fuel is part of a binary system, it can siphon off matter from its partner, adding to its mass until its core reaches high enough temperatures for carbon fusion to occur. 

Enlarge / SpaceX's Booster 4 is lifted onto its orbital launch mount in South Texas. (credit: Elon Musk/Twitter)

The Federal Aviation Administration released a draft environmental review of SpaceX's plans for orbital launches from South Texas on Friday, kicking off a 30-day public comment period.

The long-awaited procedural step is the first of several regulatory hurdles that SpaceX must clear before obtaining final permission to launch its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage from a site near Boca Chica, Texas. Such a launch likely remains months away, but it now appears that the feds will ultimately greenlight South Texas for orbital launches. That seemed far from assured before today.

The document, formally called a Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment, evaluates the potential environmental impacts of SpaceX’s Starship program, including launch and reentry. It also reviews debris recovery, the integration tower and other launch-related construction, and local road closures between Brownsville and Boca Chica beach.

Enlarge / Some of the massive volcanic deposits that are part of the Siberian Traps. (credit: MIT)

The end-Permian mass extinction was a big deal. It was the largest mass extinction event ever and occurred 252 million years ago. A whopping 90 percent of all marine species and around 70 percent of their terrestrial kin were killed off.

Over the years, there have been numerous efforts to look into this massive, world-changing event. The end-Permian mass extinction was coincident with mass eruptions in the Siberian Traps, and some potential scenarios include volcanism driving acid rain, volcanism triggering the burning of coal (which released greenhouses gases into the atmosphere), and a reduction in the availability of oxygen in the ocean, among others. However, a new paper relies on previously unused data and modeling to dig into the matter.

In all, the study found that 36,000 gigatons of carbon—mostly from volcanic sources—were released into the atmosphere over a relatively short span of 15,000 years. This period also saw the global average temperature rise a staggering amount, from 25ºC to 40ºC. While researchers previously explored volcanism and carbon as potential causes for the massive extinction, this work provides more insight into the event, said Wolfram Kürschner, a geologist at the University of Oslo and one of the authors of the paper.

Enlarge / Inspiration4 reflected in the shores of the St. Johns River on the space coast of Florida. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann / Ars Technica)

Welcome to Edition 4.16 of the Rocket Report! We've experienced an inspiring week of spaceflight thanks to the launch of the Inspiration4 mission on Wednesday, but there is much more happening around the world when it comes to launch.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic delays next flight. The space tourism company said Friday that it was delaying the next flight of its VSS Unity vehicle to no earlier than mid-October. As a reason, Virgin Galactic said, "During preparation for the Unity 23 test flight, a third-party supplier recently flagged a potential manufacturing defect in a component of the flight control actuation system that they supply to Virgin Galactic."

Enlarge / A 1729 Stradivari known as the "Solomon, Ex-Lambert" on display at Christie's in New York in March 2007. (credit: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

Along with Andrea Amati and Andrea Guarneri, Antonio Stradivari dominated the so-called Golden Age of Violins (roughly 1660 to 1750), and the instruments they crafted remain the gold standard today in terms of acoustic quality. World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma has long favored a Stradivarius instrument, as does violinist Joshua Bell. But scientists have been arguing for years about precisely why these instruments have such superior sound. A recent paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie confirms a theory dating back to 2006: the secret lies in the chemicals used to soak the wood, most notably borax, zinc, copper, alum, and lime water.

I've written extensively about this topic in the past. The (perceived) unique sound can't just be due to the instrument's geometry, although Stradivari's geometrical approach did give us the violin's signature shape. One hypothesis is that Stradivari may have used Alpine spruce that grew during a period of uncommonly cold weather, which caused the annual growth rings to be closer together, making the wood abnormally dense. Another prevailing theory has to do with the varnish: namely, that Stradivari used an ingenious cocktail of honey, egg whites, and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees—or perhaps salts or other chemicals.

Then again, the difference may be all in our heads. A player's instrument preference is highly subjective, and there's some evidence of so-called "psychoacoustics" at play: that is, we've become so awed by the name Stradivarius that it influences how we evaluate or respond to the sound of one of Stradivari's instruments.

Enlarge / PURDUE PHARMA, STAMFORD, Conn. - 2019/09/12: Members of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and Truth Pharm staged a protest outside Purdue Pharma headquarters over the recent, controversial opioid settlement. (credit: Getty | Erik McGregor)

The Department of Justice is fighting to strip the billionaire Sackler family of the sweeping legal immunity granted as part of a controversial $4.5 billion opioid settlement.

The department filed a motion late Wednesday to block the implementation of the settlement until appeals can be heard in a higher court. Attorneys for the department argued that some aspects of the deal could go into effect quickly, complicating the appeal, according to NPR. Along with the DOJ, Connecticut, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Washington state are also preparing to fight the settlement.

The Justice Department also requested an expedited hearing within the next two weeks.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jeff Greenberg)

A hospital system in Arkansas is making it a bit more difficult for staff to receive a religious exemption from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The hospital is now requiring staff to also swear off extremely common medicines, such as Tylenol, Tums, and even Preparation H, to get the exemption.

The move was prompted when Conway Regional Health System noted an unusual uptick in vaccine exemption requests that cited the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the vaccines.

"This was significantly disproportionate to what we've seen with the influenza vaccine," Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, told Becker's Hospital Review in an interview Wednesday.

Enlarge / Pope Francis speaking to journalists as he returned to the Vatican on September 15, 2021. (credit: Vatican)

Pope Francis, well-known for his freewheeling conversations with journalists aboard the papal plane, yesterday called out COVID-19 vaccine resistance within church ranks as he flew home from Hungary and Slovakia. And he went straight to the top.

"Even in the College of Cardinals, there are a few 'deniers' ['negazionisti'] and one of them, poor man, is hospitalized with the virus," Francis told journalists on the flight, according to a translation of his Italian remarks.

Then he added, "Mah, ironia della vita…"

Enlarge / The Stella Vita hits the road. (credit: Solar Team Eindhoven)

The creators of a new “self-sustaining house on wheels” are hoping their strange-looking project will help spark interest in solar vehicles. The vehicle, called the Stella Vita, was made by Eindhoven University of Technology students.

Solar Team Eindhoven's 22 members previously created a smaller solar-powered family car called the Stella Lux. According to Tijn Ter Horst, a member of the team and a mechanical engineering student at the university, the Stella Lux was energy-positive. “She could power other electric vehicles because she had so much energy left,” Ter Horst told Ars.

After producing the Stella Lux, the team began brainstorming future projects and came up with the idea of a home-like vehicle powered entirely by the Sun. In March, the students started constructing a tear-shaped solar mobile home, and they recently completed the project.

Enlarge / A Lockheed Martin concept for a lunar lander. (credit: Lockheed Martin)

NASA is moving ahead with plans to bring competition into the development of landers for its Artemis Moon program. This week, the space agency said it had selected five US companies to conduct additional work toward refining lunar lander concepts to take astronauts down to the Moon's surface later this decade.

The combined value of the fixed-price awards is $146 million, and the work is to be completed during the next 15 months. The winning companies are:

• Blue Origin Federation of Kent, Washington, $25.6 million
• Dynetics of Huntsville, Alabama, $40.8 million
• Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $35.2 million
• Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia, $34.8 million
• SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $9.4 million

According to NASA, each of these companies will further develop lander design concepts and evaluate the landers' performance, design, mission assurance requirements, and more. The companies will also mitigate lunar lander risks by conducting critical component tests and advancing the maturity of key technologies.

Enlarge / PALM BAY, FLORIDA, 2021/07/29: A woman arrives at a treatment tent outside the emergency department at Palm Bay Hospital. (credit: Getty | SOPA images)

The current surge of the COVID-19 cases driven by the hypertransmissible delta variant is straining hospitals across the US, particularly in the South. Twenty-five percent of hospital intensive care units around the country are now above 95 percent full. That percentage is up from 20 percent in July and just 10 percent in June, according to data tracking by The New York Times.

The spike in critical care follows a surge in cases and hospitalizations. Average new daily cases in the country skyrocketed from around 12,000 a day in late June to the 150,000 or so in mid-September. Hospitalizations have likewise risen, shooting up from an average of nearly 17,000 a day at the start of July to around 100,000 now. Though cases and hospitalizations are starting to plateau or decline slightly, they are still extremely high. Deaths, meanwhile, are increasing. In the past two weeks, deaths have increased 40 percent to the current average of nearly 1,900 per day.

Most of the cases and nearly all of the hospitalizations and deaths remain among the unvaccinated. Around 60,000 people in the US have died of COVID-19 since the start of July. With highly effective vaccines freely available, nearly all of the current deaths are preventable.

Enlarge / GreenGT's prototype hydrogen-powered racer. (credit: Dhananjay Khadilkar)

Around 400 meters from the buzz of the paddock during this year's 24 Hours of Le Mans stood a tent with two racing cars and a mobile fueling station. Every now and then, people wearing blue T-shirts bearing the logo of "Mission H24" would walk by the cars to attend meetings in a motor home sitting next to the tent.

One of those people was François Granet of the Franco-Swiss company GreenGT. He appeared particularly thrilled because, on the eve of the start of this year's race, the ACO (Automobile Club de l'Ouest), which organizes the 24 Hours of Le Mans, announced a new category of race cars at the Le Mans event for 2025: hydrogen-electric prototypes. The company's forerunners were stationed in that tent.

Creating a category

GreenGT is developing the hydrogen fuel cell powertrain for these cars, which will be designed around a chassis built by Oreca and Red Bull Technologies. "In partnership with ACO, we are helping define the sporting and technical regulations for the new category," Granet said.

Enlarge / Health care workers don protective equipment before working with Ebola patients. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

A large international research group released a paper today suggesting that Ebola viruses can emerge from five years of dormancy to trigger a new outbreak of infections. While this isn't the first instance in which Ebola re-emerged from a previously infected individual, the new results extend the timeframe of risk substantially.

At present, we have little idea how and where the virus persists in the human body. But there are now tens of thousands of people who have survived previous infections, so it's an area where more research is urgently needed.

A re-outbreak

The African nation of Guinea experienced a small Ebola outbreak that started in January of 2021 when a nurse fell ill. Due to a misdiagnosis, she was not immediately isolated, allowing the virus to spread. Fortunately, a major outbreak that occurred in the same region from 2013 to 2016 resulted in the local health authorities obtaining sophisticated diagnostic equipment, including the real-time RT-PCR machines that are used for COVID-19 testing. This ultimately allowed the authorities to determine that Ebola was the cause of her illness, identify 15 additional cases, and take measures that brought the outbreak to a halt. In all, 12 of the 16 infected died.

Enlarge / Back in 2017, the first season of the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why sparked controversy about suicide contagion. Four years later, a new UCLA study offers guidance for Hollywood on how to best handle such topics going forward. (credit: Netflix)

When 13 Reasons Why debuted on Netflix on March 31, 2017, it was initially met with mostly rave reviews from critics and viewers alike. Viewers appreciated the show's frank and sensitive handling of such complex topics as suicide, bullying, rape, and depression. Within weeks, however, mental health professionals began voicing strong objections to the YA-targeted show's treatment of suicide in particular—these professionals believed the depiction could trigger suicidal thoughts or actions in vulnerable teens.

It's well known that high-profile suicides can sometimes influence copycats, but the issue is less clear when it comes to fictional stories. Throughout the last four years, multiple, often contradictory studies on that very topic have since appeared. Some of the studies show negative impacts, while others show beneficial effects in young people who watched 13 Reasons Why.

The series aired its fourth and final season last year, but 13 Reasons Why continues to inspire research on the potential impact (positive or negative) of fictional stories on teen mental health. A new study available today from researchers affiliated with UCLA's Center for Scholars and Storytellers focuses specifically on the show's third season, and it shows that series like 13 Reasons Why can have a positive impact on teen mental health as long as the issues are depicted accurately and with empathy.

Enlarge / Crew Dragon and its Falcon 9 rocket are ready to go for the Inspiration4 mission. (credit: SpaceX)

There has been a minor kerfuffle in the space community over the last few weeks about what to call the Inspiration4 mission that is set to launch this evening from Florida on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who paid for and will lead the three-day mission, preferred that it be deemed the "world's first all-civilian spaceflight to orbit." But that's not actually accurate. According to Harvard University's Jonathan McDowell, there have previously been 15 all-civilian orbital flights, beginning with the Soyuz TMA-3 mission in 2003. The most recent civilian flight was SpaceX's Crew-2 mission. The definition of "civilian" is "a person not in the armed services."

Technically, then, Inspiration4 is the first orbital spaceflight with an "all private" crew—people who are neither in the military nor professional astronauts for a civil space agency. But regardless of semantics, this mission is different.

Enlarge / Climate change is increasing the incidence of extreme rainfall, ensuring that more people are going to directly notice its effects. (credit: SYLVAIN THOMAS / Getty Images)

This year has seen a huge number of climate-related disasters, from hurricanes to drought and from fires to floods. In the middle of the chaos, the IPCC dropped the first installment of its latest climate report, mapping out how our current choices will shape the planet's future. All of this would seem to make now a great time to check in on public views of climate change.

Unfortunately, one of the best sources of such check-ins, the Pew Research Center, did its most recent polling on the topic way back in February. The survey of industrialized economies shows a strong and growing worry that climate change will affect people personally and a willingness to make changes to avoid the worst of its impacts. Still, because of the timing, it's likely that opinion has shifted even further since.

Around the world

Pew surveyed people in 17 different industrialized economies in North America, Europe, and around the Pacific Rim. Obviously left out are the developing economies, which may have the most impact on the trajectory of the future climate, as well as China. But the survey does provide some perspective on public opinion in the countries that are actively pursuing policies intended to address their carbon emissions.

Enlarge / The Vinland Map purports to be a 15th-century map with a pre-Columbian depiction of the North American Coast. A new analysis has confirmed that the map is, in fact, a modern-day forgery. (credit: Yale University)

Scholars have questioned the authenticity of a purported 15th-century map housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library since it was first unveiled to the public in 1965. About the size of a placemat, the Vinland Map is an intriguing document because, in addition to Africa, Asia, and Europe, the map depicts a section of the North American coastline identified as "Vinlandia Insula" just southwest of Greenland. This suggested that Norsemen may have been the first Europeans to discover the Americas, well before the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.

That would have major historical significance, if proven. But evidence that the map is a hoax has been steadily accumulating, particularly over the last few years. And the latest scientific analysis has definitively put an end to the controversy once and for all: the inks used to draw the map are of modern origin.

"The Vinland Map is a fake," said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke. "There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest."

Enlarge / A hailstorm at a location like this could be really problematic. (credit: Barcroft Media / Contributor)

Solar panels have a love-hate relationship with nature.They need to be placed in exposed locations that get a lot of sunlight, but cloudy weather obviously reduces their production. Less obviously, more extreme weather—from snowstorms to hurricanes—can damage or even break solar hardware altogether. New research performed by Sandia National Laboratories and published in Applied Energy showcases how weather events can reduce the amount of energy produced by the United States’ solar farms.

To study this relationship, the researchers deployed a machine-learning algorithm on large sets of data from private solar farms. “This was a huge, collaborative effort,” Thushara Gunda, one of the paper’s authors and a researcher with Sandia, told Ars. Going forward, Gunda wants to expand this research to look into other extreme weather events and renewables such as wind, geothermal, and marine energy. Her team is in the early stages of this work, she said.

The team hopes that this research could be used to inform decisions about solar operations in the future. This is particularly true as climate change increases the frequency of extreme weather events, potentially causing more issues that impact solar production. “We do recognize that with the shift to renewable energy, there is an increased dependence on local environmental conditions,” Gunda said.

Enlarge / A health care worker administers a COVID-19 test to a child at the Austin Regional Clinic drive-thru vaccination and testing site in Austin, Texas, US, on Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

COVID-19 cases in children have risen 30-fold since late June and are now at record highs, with nearly 500,000 new child cases reported in the past two weeks, according to the latest data released by the American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday. Pediatric cases have "increased exponentially," the AAP said in a statement.

The rise coincides with a dramatic surge in overall COVID-19 transmission driven by the hypertransmissible delta variant. But with more adults vaccinated, children are getting hit harder in this wave than ever before, and they make up a larger and larger share of the cases.

At this point, the US has recorded 5.3 million cumulative cases in children, accounting for 15.5 percent of total cases in the pandemic. That percentage has risen steadily during the current surge, up from 14.2 percent at the end of June.