Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

Last week, Tesla announced a program for California-based owners of its home battery products. Sign up with the company, and you'd become part of what the company calls a "virtual power plant." You would be able to use your battery to keep the grid stable during periods of high demand and be well-compensated for the electrons.

While this may conjure images of Powerwall batteries across the state sending electricity to the grid during a crisis, that doesn't appear to be what's happening here. Instead, the batteries will be taking part in a utility's program that's designed to reduce demand, which the utility company will presumably do by using the battery to supply some of the demand inside the battery owner's house. It's a clever way for homeowners to take advantage of a program that's otherwise limited to commercial users.

It's an emergency

Tesla's announcement of the program says that it will be part of Pacific Gas and Electric Company's (PG&E, a California utility) Emergency Load Reduction Program, which we'll focus on in the next section. At the moment, we'll look at what participants will end up doing.

Enlarge / Packages of Juul e-cigarettes are displayed for sale in the Brazil Outlet shop on June 22, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. (credit: Getty | Mario Tama)

With its business going up in smoke, e-cigarette giant Juul filed an emergency motion Monday to halt the Food and Drug Administration's decision to deny the company authorization to market any of its products in the US, effectively forcing it out of business.

The decision was leaked to The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, June 22, and the regulator publicly announced the decision Thursday. On Friday, a panel of federal appeals court judges granted Juul a temporary administrative stay, allowing the company to continue to sell its products while the court reviews Juul's emergency petition to halt the FDA's decision. Juul had until noon Monday to submit its petition. The administrative stay is not based on the merits of Juul's argument in any way, the judges noted.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that in addition to fighting the FDA denial, Juul is also considering filing for bankruptcy. The report cited unnamed people familiar with the matter. Juul did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment regarding a possible bankruptcy filing.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

When you read a sentence like this one, your past experience tells you that it’s written by a thinking, feeling human. And, in this case, there is indeed a human typing these words: [Hi, there!] But these days, some sentences that appear remarkably humanlike are actually generated by artificial intelligence systems trained on massive amounts of human text.

People are so accustomed to assuming that fluent language comes from a thinking, feeling human that evidence to the contrary can be difficult to wrap your head around. How are people likely to navigate this relatively uncharted territory? Because of a persistent tendency to associate fluent expression with fluent thought, it is natural—but potentially misleading—to think that if an AI model can express itself fluently, that means it thinks and feels just like humans do.

Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that a former Google engineer recently claimed that Google’s AI system LaMDA has a sense of self because it can eloquently generate text about its purported feelings. This event and the subsequent media coverage led to a number of rightly skeptical articles and posts about the claim that computational models of human language are sentient, meaning capable of thinking and feeling and experiencing.

Enlarge / NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here in a closeup taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

This week, the US House of Representatives will release a detailed blueprint of its budget for Commerce, Justice, Science, and related agencies, including information about NASA's budget. The House proposes to provide 25.446 billion for NASA for fiscal year 2023, which is $1.4 billion more than what NASA received this year but $527 million less than what the agency asked for.

In advance of its release, Ars obtained a copy of the 208-page budget blueprint, which represents the opening salvo in the process of funding the federal government. The Senate must still release its budget blueprint later this summer, and then the House and Senate must reconcile their budgets. This may not happen until the fall or winter, after the start of the new fiscal year on October 1, 2022. (Update: The document has now been released).

However, the preliminary document nonetheless provides some sense of lawmaker priorities. And in general, the House budget writers appear to largely support NASA's activities, including the Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon this decade.

Enlarge / The bacteria, Ca. Thiomargarita magnifica, discovered in the French Caribbean mangroves is a member of the genus Thiomargarita. (credit: Tomas Tyml)

Clinging to sunken debris in shallow, marine mangrove forests in the French Caribbean, tiny thread-like organisms—perfectly visible to the naked eye—have earned the title of the largest bacteria ever known.

Measuring around a centimeter long, they are roughly the size and shape of a human eyelash, batting away the competition at 5,000 times the size of garden-variety bacteria and 50 times the size of bacteria previously considered giant. In human terms, this is akin to coming across a person as tall as Mount Everest.

Olivier Gros, a biologist at the University of the Antilles, discovered the prokaryotes in 2009, noticing them gently swaying in the sulfur-rich waters among the mangroves in the Guadeloupe archipelago. The bacteria clung to the leaves, branches, oyster shells, and bottles that sunk into the tropical swamp, Gros said in a press briefing.

Enlarge / One of two solar arrays on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is successfully deployed in JPL’s storied High Bay 2 clean room. The twin arrays will power the spacecraft and its science instruments during a mission to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

On Friday, NASA held a press call to announce that its planned mission to the asteroid Psyche, planned for launch this autumn, was on indefinite hold. While the spacecraft itself is ready and has been delivered to the Kennedy Space Center, there has been a delay in validating the software that will run the mission as it operates in remote areas of the Solar System.

That delay has pushed mission readiness past the point where the mission's launch window closes due to changes in the alignment of the bodies Psyche will pass on its journey to the asteroid of the same name. NASA is saying that a mission review will evaluate all options ranging from cancellation to simply delaying the mission until the next time a window opens. Problematically, Psyche's launch included a ride-along for a separate asteroid mission called Janus that has its own launch windows, so the review will need to include NASA's entire Discovery Mission program more broadly.

Psyche out

The asteroid Psyche is an unusual body in the Solar System. It's the former core of an object that was large enough to form a core of metallic elements; collisions have since stripped away the outer layers of this body, leaving behind something that's nearly entirely metal. Accordingly, visiting Psyche provides the opportunity to improve our understanding of the formation of everything from present-day asteroids to the bodies that merged to form the planets.

Enlarge / Much of the heart is composed of muscle cells like the ones shown here. (credit: Ed Reschke)

Earlier this year, news broke of the first experimental xenotransplantation: A human patient with heart disease received a heart from a pig that had been genetically engineered to avoid rejection. While initially successful, the experiment ended two months later when the transplant failed, leading to the death of the patient. At the time, the team didn't disclose any details regarding what went wrong. But this week saw the publication of a research paper that goes through everything that happened to prepare for the transplant and the weeks following.

Critically, this includes the eventual failure of the transplant, which was triggered by the death of many of the muscle cells in the transplanted heart. But the reason for that death isn't clear, and the typical signs of rejection by the immune system weren't present. So, we're going to have to wait a while to understand what went wrong.

A solid start

Overall, the paper paints a picture of organ recipient David Bennett as a patient who was on the verge of death when the transplant took place. He was an obvious candidate for a heart transplant and was only kept alive through the use of a device that helped oxygenate his blood outside his body. But the patient had what the researchers refer to as "poor adherence to treatment," which led four different transplant programs to deny him a human heart transplant. At that point, he and his family agreed to participate in the experimental xenotransplant program.

Enlarge / A fully stacked Starship and Super Heavy rocket are seen in February, 2022, during fit checks on the orbital launch tower. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

It has been a long time since SpaceX launched a rocket from South Texas. After a flurry of seven Starship prototype test flights from August 2020 through May 2021, the company has not flown from its launch pads near Boca Chica Beach.

There are good reasons for this hiatus and good reasons to believe it may soon change as SpaceX makes progress toward an orbital launch attempt from South Texas later this year.

The seven launches of a full-scale Starship prototype gradually pushed the envelope, beginning with two 150-meter hops before moving to flights as high as 12.5 km to demonstrate a belly-flop maneuver that will be needed during the vehicle's return through Earth's atmosphere. The flight test program culminated with a successful soft-landing of Starship after a 10 km flight.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket first stage launches for the 13th time on June 17, 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Welcome to Edition 4.47 of the Rocket Report! It has been a big week for NASA, with the near completion of its wet-dress rehearsal test for the Space Launch System rocket. Assuming final preparations go well, this sets up a huge launch in a couple of months that we will be following with great interest.

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.

South Korea successfully launches its own rocket. The three-stage Nuri rocket, built by the government’s Korea Aerospace Research Institute with hundreds of local companies, ​blasted off from the Naro Space Center in Goheung​ on Tuesday, The New York Times reports. Seventy minutes after the​ liftoff, South Korea announced that ​Nuri had succeeded in its mission of ​thrusting a ​357-pound ​working ​satellite, as well as a 162-kg dummy satellite​, into orbit ​435 miles above the Earth.

Enlarge / A COVID-19 testing tent stands in Times Square on April 27, 2022, in New York City. (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt)

Omicron coronavirus subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 are now accounting for an estimated 35 percent of US cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The subvariants are on a course to reach dominance at a faster clip than the subvariants before them, including the current reigning subvariant, BA.2.12.1, which is now in decline.

The pair—which share the same mutations in their SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins but have differences elsewhere in their genomes—are expected to reach dominance "in a few weeks," Dr. Shishi Luo tells Ars. Luo is the head of infectious diseases at Helix, a California-based population genomics and viral surveillance company that works with the CDC to help track emerging coronavirus variants nationwide.

It's unclear exactly what's ahead in this latest phase of the pandemic. What we know of the two subvariants so far is mixed.

Enlarge / An Aeroflot Boeing 777-300ER aircraft is preparing to land at Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, in the Russian Federation in June 2022. (credit: SOPA Images | Getty)

An Airbus A320-232 with the tail number YU-APH made its first flight on December 13, 2005. Since then, the aircraft has clocked millions of miles, flying routes for Air Deccan, Kingfisher Airlines, Bingo Airways, and Syphax Airlines before being taken over by Air Serbia, the Eastern European country’s national flag carrier, in 2014.

For eight years, YU-APH flew without any issues—until it landed at 10:37 pm on May 25, 2022, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. It had flown in from Belgrade and was due to take off again on a late-night return within the hour. But there was a problem: The pilot had reported an issue with the plane’s engine casing that needed to be fixed. The supplier of the broken part, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace, reportedly refused to fix the problem, citing sanctions against Russia resulting from its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The plane was stuck. (Collins Aerospace did not respond to a request for comment.)

Enlarge / Scott Atlas, a White House adviser, used his position to advocate for allowing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to spread and tried to block testing for it, which would further that goal. (credit: MANDEL NGAN / Getty Images)

While one congressional committee seems to be grabbing all the headlines recently, other investigations of the Trump administration have continued in the background. One of them is trying to determine how the US's response to the coronavirus pandemic went so wrong that the country ended up with over a million deaths and one of the worst per-capita death rates in the world. In its own words, the committee's goal is "to ensure the American people receive a full accounting of what went wrong and to determine what corrective steps are necessary to ensure our nation is better prepared for any future public health crisis."

In its latest report, released on Tuesday, the committee details the White House career of Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no infectious disease experience. Atlas' hiring by the White House was expected to be so controversial that he was initially instructed to hide his staff ID from the actual government public health experts. Yet he quickly became a driving force for the adoption of policies that would achieve herd immunity by allowing most of the US population to be infected—even as other officials denied that this was the policy.

How’d this guy get here?

Atlas' lack of relevant expertise raises questions as to why he was hired in the first place. The new report details that he wasn't shy about voicing his opinions about the pandemic response, making multiple TV appearances to complain about the policies advocated by actual public health experts. He also directly reached out to a senior government official, calling the US's response “a massive overreaction” to a virus he estimated “would cause about 10,000 deaths.”

Enlarge / A diver with the Return to Antikythera project carefully excavates an artifact. (credit: Nikos Giannoulakis/Return to Antikythera)

The so-called Antikythera mechanism, recovered from the wreckage of an ancient cargo ship off the coast of Antikythera Island in Greece, might be the world's oldest analog computer. The mystery surrounding its purpose and origin continues to fascinate scientists and enthusiasts alike to this day. But it's not the only treasure salvaged from that Antikythera wreck. An ongoing underwater archaeological project most recently recovered a large marble head of a bearded male figure believed to be part of a statue of Hercules. Divers also recovered a marble plinth with the lower legs of another statue, two human teeth, and several pieces of the cargo ship's equipment.

As we've previously reported, in 1900, a Greek sponge diver named Elias Stadiatis discovered the wreck, which was apparently surrounded by rotting corpses on the sea floor. The captain, Dimitrios Kondos, didn't believe Elias at first and thought the nitrogen in his breathing mix had affected the diver's senses. So Kondos dove down to the site himself, emerging with an arm from a bronze statue. 

Kondos and his crew had recovered all kinds of artifacts from the shipwreck by mid-1901, including 36 marble sculptures (representing Hercules, Ulysses, Diomedes, Hermes, and Apollo, among others); a bronze statue dubbed "The Philosopher" (circa 340 BCE); a bronze lyre; pieces of glasswork; and three marble horse statues. Along with the Antikythera mechanism, these precious artifacts are now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Enlarge / Mint and menthol pods for Juul Labs Inc. e-cigarettes are displayed for sale at a store in Princeton, Illinois, in September 2019. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The Food and Drug Administration is reportedly preparing to deny authorization of Juul's tobacco- and menthol-flavored products, effectively forcing the e-cigarette giant out of the US market, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

In their reporting, the Journal cited unnamed people familiar with the matter, who also said the FDA could announce its denial as early as today, Wednesday, June 22.

If the report is accurate, the move will come on the heels of an FDA announcement on Tuesday that the regulator is working on plans to establish a maximum nicotine level for cigarettes and other combusted tobacco products. It's a move aimed at making the products less appealing to youth, less addictive, and less deadly.

Enlarge / She may work hard, but she's likely to get less credit for it. (credit: Qi Yang)

In science, the ultimate measure of academic worth is the number of papers published where you're credited as an author. There are subtleties that matter—where you are in the list of authors and whether others cite your publications. But it's hard for those factors to overcome the weight of raw numbers. Other things, like grants and promotions, also matter a great deal. But success in those areas often depends on a large publication list.

That's why a publication released on Wednesday by Nature is significant: It describes data that indicate that women are systematically left off the list of authors of scientific publications. The gap between participation and publication continues even after various factors of career advancement are considered. And it goes a long way toward explaining why science has a problem called a "leaky pipeline," where women drop out of research at higher rates at each stage of their careers.

Making the team

It's pretty easy to crunch the data and see that women are underrepresented in author lists attached to scientific papers. But figuring out why is a significant challenge. It could result from women being historically underrepresented in some fields, discrimination, or differences in effort and commitment. Figuring out which factor(s) contribute is challenging because it involves identifying an invisible population: the people who should be on the author list but aren't.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Anadolu Agency)

A vaccine-derived version of poliovirus has repeatedly surfaced in London sewage over the past several months, suggesting there may be cryptic, or hidden, spread among some unvaccinated people, UK health officials announced Wednesday.

No cases of polio have been reported so far, nor have there been any identified cases of paralysis. But sewage sampling in one London treatment plant has repeatedly detected closely related vaccine-derived polioviruses between February and May. This suggests "it is likely there has been some spread between closely-linked individuals in North and East London and that they are now shedding the type 2 poliovirus strain in their feces," the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.

Though the current situation raises alarm, the agency notes that it's otherwise common to see a small number of vaccine-like polioviruses pop up in sewage from time to time, usually from people who have recently been vaccinated out of the country. This is because many countries use oral polio vaccines that include weakened (attenuated) polioviruses, which can still replicate in the intestines and thus be present in stool. They can also spread to others via poor hygiene and sanitation (i.e. unwashed hands and food or water contaminated by sewage), which can become very concerning amid poor vaccination rates.

Enlarge / Reading science news can get people to accept climate science, but the effect is brief. (credit: Getty Images)

For decades, the scientific community has been nearly unanimous: Climate change is real, it's our doing, and its consequences are likely to be severe. Yet even as it gets more difficult to avoid some of its effects, poll after poll shows that the public hasn't gotten the message. There's very little recognition of how strong the scientific consensus is, and there is a lot of uncertainty about whether it's our doing—and none of the polling numbers seem to shift very quickly.

Over these same decades, there have been plenty of studies looking at why this might be. Many of them have found ways to shift the opinions of study subjects—methods that have undoubtedly been adopted by communications professionals. Yet the poll numbers have remained stubborn. Misinformation campaigns and political polarization have both been blamed, but the evidence for these factors making a difference is far from clear.

A new study offers an additional hint as to why. While polarization and misinformation both play roles in how the public interprets climate science, the biggest problem may be that the public has a very short memory, and anything people learn about climate science tends to be forgotten by a week later.

Enlarge / A graphic representation of the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment in orbit near the Moon. (credit: NASA)

NASA and Rocket Lab are gearing up to fly a novel mission to lunar orbit that in many ways serves as the vanguard of what is to come as the space agency and US companies ramp up exploration and development of the Moon.

The space agency is financially supporting the privately built satellite, named CAPSTONE, with a $13.7 million grant. It is scheduled to launch on an Electron rocket as early as Saturday from New Zealand. Developed by a Colorado-based company named Advanced Space, the spacecraft itself is modestly sized, just a 12U cubesat with a mass of around 25 kg. It could fit comfortably inside a mini-refrigerator.

The mission's scientific aims are also modest—primarily, the demonstration of a new system of autonomous navigation around and near the Moon. This Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System, or CAPS, is important because there is a lack of fixed tracking assets near the Moon, especially as the cislunar environment becomes more crowded during the coming decade.

Enlarge / A box of Paxlovid, the Pfizer antiviral drug. (credit: Getty | Europa Press News)

Pfizer's antiviral pill Paxlovid is among the most treasured tools for hammering COVID-19; it can knock back the relative risk of hospitalization and death by 89 percent in unvaccinated patients at high risk of severe disease. But, as use of the convenient drug has grown in the US, so have troubling reports of rebound cases—people who took the pill early in their infection, began feeling better, and even tested negative but then slid back into symptoms and tested positive again days later.

It's still unclear just how common the phenomenon is, but it certainly happens in some proportion of Paxlovid-treated patients. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even issued a health alert over the rebound reports.

But, amid the rising awareness, it has also become clear that patients who have not been treated with Paxlovid can also rebound. In fact, in Pfizer's clinical trials of Paxlovid, researchers noted that about 1 percent to 2 percent of both treatment and placebo groups had rebounds.

Enlarge / NASA's Space Launch System rocket, reflected in the turn basin at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, rolls out for a fourth attempt at a wet dress rehearsal on June 6, 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

NASA tried three times during the month of April to complete a critical fueling test of its large Space Launch System rocket. And three times, due to about half a dozen technical problems, the space agency failed.

And so NASA made the difficult decision to roll the large rocket back into the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs, adding a couple of months of delays to a program already years behind schedule. After this work was complete in early June, NASA rolled the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft back out to the launch pad for a fourth try.

The painful decision turned out to be the correct one. Over the course of more than 14 hours on Monday, NASA largely succeeded in completing this fueling test, loading hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen into the first and second stages of the SLS rocket.