Ars Technica - The Scientific Method

How a tiny bit of lacquer grounded new Falcon 9 rockets for a month

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 21:55:56 GMT

Enlarge / Nine Merlin engines power the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. (credit: SpaceX)

NASA and SpaceX confirmed on Wednesday that they are targeting November 14 for the launch of the Crew-1 mission that will carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.

Originally scheduled to launch on Halloween, NASA delayed the launch after an engine issue aborted an October 2 launch attempt of a Falcon 9 rocket, at T-2 seconds, carrying a GPS III satellite for the US Air Force.

During a teleconference with reporters on Wednesday, SpaceX's Hans Koenigsmann explained what happened with the October 2 launch abort and what has been done to address the issue going forward.

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New African genomes: Complicated migrations and strong selection

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 18:49:46 GMT

Enlarge / A building in a Ndebele village, South Africa. The Ndebele-language speakers, currently about a million strong, arrived in South Africa with the Bantu expansion. (credit: DEA / S. VANNINI / Getty Images)

Humanity originated in Africa, and it remained there for tens of thousands of years. To understand our shared genetic history, it's inevitable that we have to look to Africa. Unlike elsewhere on the planet, however, African populations were present throughout our history—they weren't subject to the same sorts of founder effects seen as populations expanded into unoccupied areas. Instead, those populations were scrambled as groups migrated to new areas within the continent.

Sorting out all of this would be a challenge, but it's one that has been made harder by the fact that most genome data comes from people in the industrialized world, leaving the vast populations of Africa poorly sampled. That's starting to change, and a new paper reports on the efforts of a group that has just analyzed over 400 African genomes, many coming from populations that have never participated in genome studies before.

New diversity

New genetic variants arise all the time. As a result, the oldest populations—those in Africa—should have the most novel variations. But identifying these populations can be hard when there are so many; the study mentions that there are over 2,000 ethnolinguistic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and only a small number of those have been sampled. The new study is a huge step forward, with over 400 complete genome sequences from geographically dispersed populations. But even there, it's limited, adding only 50 new ethnolinguistic groups and two vast regions of the continent represented by people from a single country (Zambia for Central Africa and Botswana for Southern Africa).

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Pfizer dashes hope for COVID-19 vaccine data before the election

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 22:49:52 GMT

Enlarge / Albert Bourla, chief executive officer of Pfizer pharmaceutical company, bangs a gavel after ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Thursday afternoon, January 17, 2019 in New York City. (credit: Getty | Drew Angerer)

Pfizer’s chief executive has dashed any lingering hope that we’ll glimpse COVID-19 vaccine data before next week’s election.

The pharmaceutical giant has the speediest clinical-trial design among the frontrunners in the COVID-19 vaccine race. And for weeks, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has dangled the possibility that his company would have results by the end of October—an enticing prospect picked up by President Donald Trump, who has pushed for October vaccine news to bolster his re-election bid.

But in a call with investors Tuesday, Bourla indicated an October release was nearly impossible now. Researchers conducting the over 40,000-person trial have not yet analyzed preliminary data and, even if the data were available tomorrow, an outside panel would need at least a week to analyze any results, Bourla said.

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US grid-battery costs dropped 70% over 3 years

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 19:22:56 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Diana Robinson / Flickr)

In recent years, the cost of solar and wind energy has declined precipitously, which has accelerated the growth of these renewable energy technologies. Increasingly, utilities are now planning for a future grid dominated by solar and wind. That will require changes in grid management and transmission upgrades as well as the addition of storage to smooth out the supply from variable generators.

Grid storage is still pretty early days, but we’re already seeing huge cost reductions as the industry matures. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted this recently, showing that grid-scale battery-project costs in the United States dropped 70 percent in just a few years.

Between 2015 and 2018, average project costs decreased from $2,152 per kilowatt-hour of storage to $625. Costs will need to drop much more for grid batteries to scale, but that’s a huge improvement in a short period of time.

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Trump admin’s pandemic surrender draws impassioned response from WHO

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 17:41:20 GMT

Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program Director Michael Ryan (L) speaks past Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during a daily press briefing on COVID-19 virus at the WHO headquarters in Geneva on March 9, 2020. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI )

Top officials at the World Health Organization on Monday appeared at times exasperated, flabbergasted, and wearied as they confronted comments by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows suggesting that the United States has given up trying to control the spread of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said in a CNN interview Sunday. Instead we will focus on “vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation areas,” he said. The comments spurred widespread uproar, which Meadows tried to quell Monday. But his clarification only reinforced his earlier comments.

“I mean, when we look at this, we’re going to defeat the virus. We’re not going to control it. We will try to contain it as best we can,” he told reporters outside the White House yesterday. He again emphasized the need for therapeutics and vaccines.

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Smaller, more efficient tokamak could follow in ITER’s fusion footsteps

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 10:45:07 GMT

Enlarge / The magnetic fields inside a tokamak. (credit: Jong-Kyu Park, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory)

Depending on who you ask, fusion power is either already here (but no one will purchase my sekrit design!), never going to happen (so stop wasting money!), or a difficult problem that might be a partial solution to an even more difficult problem. The last, being the view of scientists who actually work in the field, is often lost in all the noise.

Out of this fog of discussion, a passel of papers emerged recently, all focused on a proposed fusion project: the SPARC tokamak. One of the surprising things about SPARC is its size. Coming in at just over 3m across, SPARC will be smaller than currently operating tokamaks, like JET, which is nearly 6m across. ITER, currently under construction in France, is over 12m across. Yet SPARC and ITER are projected to have about the same performance. Both are expected to produce more energy from fusion than the direct input energy, though neither is expected to produce useful power.

So why the difference? And what does this latest batch of papers tell us about the design?

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Water found in new locations on the Moon, may be trapped in glass

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 20:39:07 GMT

Enlarge / The instrument used to detect the water flies on a 747. (credit: NASA/Jim Ross)

Despite its proximity to a very blue planet, the Earth's Moon appeared to be completely dry, with samples returned by the Apollo missions being nearly devoid of water. But in recent years, a number of studies have turned up what appears to be water in some locations on the Moon, although the evidence wasn't always decisive.

Today, NASA is announcing that it has used an airborne observatory to spot clear indications of water in unexpected places. But the water may be in a form that makes accessing it much harder. Separately, an analysis of spots where water could be easier to reach indicates that there's more potential reservoirs than we'd previously suspected.

Up in the air

With no atmosphere and low gravity, the Moon can't hang on to water on its surface. The first time that sunlight heats lunar water up, it will form a vapor and eventually escape into space. But there are regions on the Moon, primarily near the poles, that are permanently shadowed. There, temperatures remain perpetually low, and ice can survive indefinitely. And, to test this possibility, NASA crashed some hardware into a shady area near the Moon's south pole and found water vapor amidst the debris.

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Santas scrooged by Trump admin after bizarre vaccine deal goes south

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 17:27:52 GMT

Enlarge / Even Santas are not safe during the pandemic. (credit: Getty | Kristy O'Connor)

The Department of Health and Human Services has abandoned a deal to vaccinate Santa Claus performers as part of a $250-million taxpayer-funded public relations blitz, The Wall Street Journal reports.

According to the nixed Santa plan, performers would have received special early access to a future vaccine against the pandemic coronavirus. In exchange, the Santa Clauses, Mrs. Clauses, and accompanying elves would have promoted the vaccine to the public and participated in regional holiday events organized by the Trump administration.

Beginning to look a lot like chaos

The deal was reportedly gifted from the troubled mind of Michael Caputo, the HHS spokesperson installed by the White House in April. Caputo had no background in health when he took the position. Instead, he was reportedly placed in the department as a way for the Trump administration to assert more control over HHS Secretary Alex Azar. Caputo is a Trump loyalist, protégé of Roger Stone, and former Moscow-based political adviser who worked on public relations for Vladimir Putin.

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With turbopump issues "sorted out,” BE-4 rocket engine moves into production

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 15:03:36 GMT

Enlarge / A BE-4 rocket engine undergoes tests in West Texas. (credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin appears to have solved some development issues related to the turbopumps in its powerful BE-4 rocket engine.

United Launch Alliance Chief Executive Tory Bruno said Friday that the problem was "sorted out," and that the full-scale, flight-configured BE-4 engine is now accumulating a lot of time on the test stand. Bruno made his comments about one hour into The Space Show with David Livingston.

Bruno's company, ULA, is buying the BE-4 engine to provide thrust for the first stage of its upcoming Vulcan-Centaur rocket. This booster may make its debut next year, although ULA is still awaiting delivery of BE-4s for the first flight. Two of these large engines—each providing about 25-percent more thrust than the RS-25s used on the Space Shuttle—will power each Vulcan rocket.

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Besides the "Big One,” closer faults could also shake Portland

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 13:00:04 GMT

Enlarge / It may not look like much, but that red line marks the Gales Creek fault. (credit: Horst et al./BSSA)

Coastal denizens of the US Pacific Northwest are (or should be!) familiar with the significance of “the Big One”—a major earthquake just off the coast that will occur someday. The tectonic plate boundary, where oceanic crust slides downward beneath the North American continent, is capable of producing major shaking and an incredibly dangerous tsunami. This hasn’t happened in centuries, leading to a false sense of security, but the evidence is there for events deeper in the past.

But the plate boundary itself isn’t the only source of seismic danger. Near Portland, for example, there are a number of smaller active faults. There have even been moderate earthquakes in recent years to serve as reminders. In 1993, a magnitude 5.7 quake just 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of the city caused around $30 million in damage. Here, too, seismologists can look deeper into the past. And it shows that much bigger earthquakes are possible.

Forensic seismology

Today, we measure and quantify earthquakes with seismometers, but it’s possible to find physical evidence that testifies to past earthquakes. Paleoseismology relies on the fact that some things move during an earthquake, displacing their position. In the right situation, you can even see about how much the fault moved and put a date on each event. That allows for a rough estimate of earthquake magnitude, as well as the average time between major earthquakes. (Note that this does not mean we can predict the date of the next one. Earthquakes are not clockwork events.)

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Huge COVID study finds remdesivir doesn’t work—FDA grants approval anyway

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 19:38:27 GMT

Enlarge / A vial of Remdesivir during a press conference about the start of a study with severely COVID-19 patients in Hamburg, Germany on April 8, 2020. (credit: Getty | Ulrich Perrey)

The US Food and Drug Administration on Thursday issued a full approval of the antiviral drug remdesivir for treating COVID-19—just days after a massive, global study concluded that the drug provides no benefit.

“The FDA is committed to expediting the development and availability of COVID-19 treatments during this unprecedented public health emergency,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a statement. “Today’s approval is supported by data from multiple clinical trials that the agency has rigorously assessed and represents an important scientific milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Early results

The FDA made its decision based on three clinical trials on remdesivir, a repurposed experimental antiviral drug brand-named Veklury. One was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial run by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It included 1,062 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, 541 of which received remdesivir. The trial concluded that remdesivir shortened the median recovery time from the infection from 15 days to 10 days. The researchers running the trial defined “recovery” of a patient as either a patient being discharged from the hospital—regardless if the patient still had lingering symptoms that limited activities or required supplemental oxygen to be taken at home—or a patient remaining in the hospital but no longer requiring medical care, such as if they were kept in the hospital for infection-control reasons.

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A typical teenager’s stroll: Carrying a baby and dodging mammoths

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 16:30:23 GMT

What could make you walk miles across a landscape full of Ice Age predators, all alone except for the toddler you’re carrying? Archaeologists recently discovered a long trail of footprints left behind by someone brave enough—or desperate enough—to undertake the journey.

Sometime between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, a rather small person, probably a young teen or a short adult woman, walked quickly across the Pleistocene landscape. Mammoths and a giant ground sloth crossed the tracks in the travelers’ wake, trampling some of the footprints. People at ancient White Sands usually moved in groups, which often included a mix of ages and genders, based on the other trackways at the site. But for some reason, this person set out alone—almost.

The person’s gait is uneven, as if they were carrying a load on their left hip. And three spots along the northbound trail reveal what that load must have been: a toddler, probably around three years old. The child’s small feet left their own tracks when their guardian set them down just long enough to rest or switch arms.

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Rocket Report: Bank doubles value of SpaceX, Russia won’t talk Amur anymore

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 11:00:08 GMT

Enlarge / Hot fire test of integrated second stage for ABL Space System's RS1 rocket. (credit: ABL Space Systems)

Welcome to Edition 3.21 of the Rocket Report. As of Friday morning, there are just 70 days left until January 1. This means that if your rocket company is planning a launch in 2020, you have just 10 weeks left. No pressure!

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.

China reveals five-year plan for commercial space. The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. outlined plans for developing launch services, satellite constellations, and a reusable spaceplane at the 6th China International Commercial Aerospace Forum, which opened on Monday in Wuhan, Hubei Province, SpaceNews reports. The group plans to double the number of launches of its Kuaizhou-series rockets (which deliver small satellites into orbit) by 2023 and lead the world in solid-rocket technology by 2025.

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Better than the Scoville scale? Chili-shaped device can rate pepper hotness

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 22:04:26 GMT

Enlarge / There could soon be an easier way to tell how hot that chili pepper is. (credit: Azman Mohamad / EyeEm via Getty Images)

Capsaicin is the compound responsible for determining just how hot a variety of chili pepper will be; the higher the capsaicin levels, the hotter the pepper. There are several methods for quantifying just how much capsaicin is present in a pepper—its "pungency"—but they are either too time-consuming, too costly, or require special instruments, making them less than ideal for widespread use.

Now a team of scientists from Prince of Songkla University in Thailand has developed a simple, portable sensor device that can connect to a smartphone to show how much capsaicin is contained in a given chili pepper sample, according to a new paper in the journal ACS Applied Nano Materials. Bonus: the device is whimsically shaped just like a red-hot chili pepper.

An American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville invented his eponymous Scoville scale for assessing the relative hotness of chili peppers back in 1912. That testing process involves dissolving a precise amount of dried pepper in alcohol so as to extract the capsaicinoids. The capsaicinoids are then diluted in sugar water. A panel of five trained tasters then tastes multiple samples with decreasing concentrations of capsaicinoids until at least three of them can no longer detect the heat in a given sample. The hotness of the pepper is then rated according to its Scoville heat units (SHU).

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Sacklers—who made $11 billion off opioid crisis—to pay $225 million in damages

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 20:55:40 GMT

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

The infamous megarich Sackler family will pay $235 million in civil penalties as part of a controversial $8.3 billion settlement with the US Department of Justice.

Members of the Sackler family own and formerly directed Purdue Pharma, which introduced the powerful opioid painkiller OxyContin in 1996. Throughout the years, Purdue and members of the Sackler family have been accused of using aggressive, misleading marketing tactics to push the highly addictive opioid painkiller on doctors and patients, which helped spark a massive nationwide epidemic of opioid abuse and overdose. So far, nearly 450,000 people have died from opioid overdoses in the United States during the past two decades, and the epidemic is still ongoing.

As part of the settlement with the federal government, Purdue will plead guilty to one count of defrauding the United States and two counts of violating the anti-kickback statute. Between 2009 and 2017, Purdue paid two doctors via the company’s doctor speaker program to increase opioid prescriptions to patients, according to the Justice Department. In 2016, the company also paid an electronic medical records company to install prompts and alerts in its software that would refer, recommend, and set up ordering for Purdue’s opioid drugs for patients.

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Senior space officials met to "war game” Biden administration space policy

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 11:43:56 GMT

Enlarge / US Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a public memorial service for former astronaut and US Senator John Glenn at Ohio State University on December 17, 2016. (credit: Paul Vernon/AFP via Getty Images)

On Tuesday about a dozen space officials met virtually to simulate how a National Space Council might operate during a Joe Biden administration, should the Democratic Party nominee win the 2020 presidential election.

The American Foreign Policy Council convened what it characterized as a "closed-door" and "scenario-based simulation" to understand how the Biden administration would think through important space events. Invitations were sent to officials in the aerospace industry whom the Biden administration might call upon as advisers or to fill key leadership roles. The event was not organized at the behest of the Biden campaign.

Invitations from the non-profit organization to would-be participants explained that they would be assigned various roles to play, such as NASA administrator and the head of other agencies such as the Department of Defense and Department of Commerce. The participants would then act as a "National Space Council" to war-game scenarios.

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NASA reaches out and touches an asteroid 320 million kilometers away

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 22:27:15 GMT

OSIRIS-REx collects samples from asteroid Bennu.

NASA scientists confirmed Wednesday that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully made contact with an asteroid a day earlier, touching the surface for six seconds and collecting dust and pebbles from its surface.

The spacecraft's performance at the asteroid Bennu, which is only about as wide as the Empire State Building is tall, was remarkable. Because the asteroid is so small, its gravity is negligible, which complicates orbital maneuvering by the spacecraft around what is, essentially, a rubble pile.

Despite these challenges, at a distance of 320 million kilometers on Tuesday, NASA engineers and scientists programmed a spacecraft to autonomously touch down within a single meter of its target area.

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Trial to deliberately infect people with coronavirus draws mixed reaction

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 19:55:19 GMT

Enlarge / Woman receives an experimental COVID-19 vaccine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA, on September 04, 2020, as part of a clinical trial. (credit: Getty | Boston Globe)

Researchers in the United Kingdom plan to begin intentionally infecting a small batch of healthy young people with the novel coronavirus in January as part of a first “human challenge trial,” according to an announcement Monday.

The plan has not yet been approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which regulates clinical trials in the UK, and outside experts have had mixed reactions to the announcement so far.

Nevertheless, the UK government is planning to invest $43.4 million (33.6 million pounds) in the trials. Researchers meanwhile are preparing to recruit an initial 30 to 50 people, aged 18 to 30, who have no underlying health conditions. Those conditions include diabetes, heart disease, or obesity, all of which would put them at greater risk of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and the disease it causes, COVID-19.

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Does paper recycling benefit the climate? It depends

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 17:24:03 GMT

Enlarge (credit: John Lambert Pearson / Flickr)

For many people, the most familiar way to “go green” or “be eco-friendly” is probably paper recycling. (And perhaps its aging office cousin: “Consider a tree before you print this email.”) There are many ways to evaluate the environmental benefits of such actions, and one of those is greenhouse gas emissions. So how does paper recycling stack up in this regard?

That’s a more interesting question than it may seem, namely because of the way paper products are made. Processing pulp to make paper is typically powered by “black liquor”—a byproduct organic sludge with some useful properties. Burning it for heat and electricity to run the mill is approximately carbon neutral, since the carbon you emit into the air started out in the air (before a temporary stint as tree stuff). So if your recycling process generates CO₂ as it makes new paper, recycling could end up increasing emissions.

A new study led by Stijn van Ewijk at Yale University tries to do the math on this, using practical scenarios for the next few decades. Namely, they calculate whether increasing paper recycling would make it easier or harder to hit emissions targets that would halt global warming at 2°C.

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The secret of how the Venus flytrap "remembers” when it captures prey

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 18:00:09 GMT

Scientists genetically altered a Venus flytrap so that it glows green in response to outside stimulation, yielding important clues about how the plant's short-term "memory" works.

Scientists are continuing to tease out the mechanisms by which the Venus flytrap can tell when it has captured a tasty insect as prey as opposed to an inedible object (or just a false alarm). There is evidence that the carnivorous plant has something akin to a short-term "memory," and a team of Japanese scientists has found evidence that the mechanism for this memory lies in changes in calcium concentrations in its leaves, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature Plants.

The Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

Back in 2016, a team of German scientists discovered that the Venus flytrap can actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The scientists zapped the leaves of test plants with mechano-electric pulses of different intensities and measured the responses. It turns out that the plant detects that first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes.

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