Medicare said Tuesday it will limit coverage of a $28,000-a-year Alzheimer’s drug whose benefits have been widely questioned, a major development in the nation’s tug-of-war over the fair value of new medicines that offer tantalizing possibilities but come with prohibitive prices.

The initial determination from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services means that patients taking Biogen’s Aduhelm medication will have to be part of research efforts to assess the drug’s effectiveness in slowing the progression of dementia. Medicare’s national coverage determination would become final this spring, following a public comment period and further evaluation by the agency.

The drug has sparked controversy since its approval by the Food and Drug Administration last June, which came against the recommendation of the agency’s outside advisers.

Aduhelm’s initial launch price of $56,000 a year led to an increase of nearly $22 in Medicare’s monthly “Part B” premium for outpatient care, the largest ever in dollar terms but not percentage-wise. Medicare attributed about half of this year’s increase to contingency planning for Aduhelm.

Faced with skepticism over its medication, Biogen recently slashed the price to $28,200, but Medicare enrollees were already on the hook for the $170.10 premium. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has directed Medicare to reassess the premium increase.

In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life and a Maryland hospital said Monday that he’s doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery.

While it’s too soon to know if the operation really will work, it marks a step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center say the transplant showed that a heart from a genetically modified animal can function in the human body without immediate rejection.

The patient, David Bennett, 57, knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work but he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son told The Associated Press.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” Bennett said a day before the surgery, according to a statement provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant, driving scientists to try to figure out how to use animal organs instead. Last year, there were just over 3,800 heart transplants in the U.S., a record number, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system.

“If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the university’s animal-to-human transplant program.

But prior attempts at such transplants — or xenotransplantation — have failed, largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. Notably, in 1984, Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart.

The difference this time: The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection.

“I think you can characterize it as a watershed event,” Dr. David Klassen, UNOS’ chief medical officer, said of the Maryland transplant.

Still, Klassen cautioned that it’s only a first tentative step into exploring whether this time around, xenotransplantation might finally work.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees xenotransplantation experiments, allowed the surgery under what’s called a “compassionate use” emergency authorization, available when a patient with a life-threatening condition has no other options.

Just last September, researchers in New York performed an experiment suggesting these kinds of pigs might offer promise for animal-to-human transplants. Doctors temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a deceased human body and watched it begin to work.

The Maryland transplant takes their experiment to the next level, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led that experiment at NYU Langone Health.

“This is a truly remarkable breakthrough,” he said in a statement. “As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough.”

It will be crucial to share the data gathered from this transplant before opening the option to more patients, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for the first clinical trials under a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“Rushing into animal-to-human transplants without this information would not be advisable,” Maschke said.

The surgery last Friday took seven hours at the Baltimore hospital.

“He realizes the magnitude of what was done and he really realizes the importance of it,” David Bennett Jr. said of his father. “He could not live, or he could last a day, or he could last a couple of days. I mean, we’re in the unknown at this point.”

__

AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed.

When it comes to superstitions, NASA and baseball see the world in different ways. It’s one of baseball’s unwritten rules that when a pitcher is throwing a no-hitter through, say, seven innings, you never, ever mention it out loud. To speak of it is to jinx it, and likelier than not, you’ll get clobbered in the eighth.

NASA, clearly, takes a different approach. In the 13 days since the Christmas morning launch of the James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful and complex cosmic observatory ever built—the space agency has been tossing successful inning after successful inning, getting the telescope unfolded, aligned, and powered-up, and keeping it on course to its destination 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) away from Earth at a gravitationally stable spot called L2, where it will station-keep for the next decade, peering deeper into the universe than any telescope ever has before. The space agency has been none too shy about talking up its successes, even hosting a sort of Webb dashboard, with regular updates on just where in space the telescope is and what milestones it has passed.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Such early, if cautious, enthusiasm is understandable, since the challenges Webb faced before launch were daunting. The $10 billion telescope—which consists principally of an 18-segment, 6.5 m (21.3 ft) mirror and a sun shield the size of a tennis court—had to be folded up small enough to fit in the 5 m (16 ft) payload bay of the Ariane 5 rocket that launched it, then released into space and unfolded in a process that one Webb team leader described as “origami in reverse.” That was never going to be easy. Hundreds of hinges, pulleys, actuators, and more have to work in a perfect synchrony, overcoming 344 so-called “single-point failures”—each a solitary breakdown that, all by itself, could spell the end of the mission.

Far and away, the most challenging step was unfolding the sun shield, a delicate structure that consists of five layers of kapton, a foil-like film—each thinner than a human hair—that protects the mirror from the heat of the sun and allows it to operate at the ultra-cold temperatures necessary to observe space in the infrared wavelength, which is the ability that gives Webb its exquisite visual acuity. That step was successfully completed on Jan. 4, and NASA was ready with a celebratory tweet.

“This is it,” the space agency crowed, “we’ve just wrapped up one of the most challenging steps of our journey to #UnfoldTheUniverse. With all five layers of sunshield tensioning complete, about 75% of our 344 single-point failures have been retired!”

Webb program director Gregory Robinson was no less enthusiastic in a later conversation with TIME, if a little bit more measured. “Certainly, I would say the sunshield deployment and tensioning was probably the single highest risk,” he says. “There are many others, but we came through that one pretty good.”

The next big step came the very next day, when the telescope’s secondary mirror—a much smaller .74 m (2.4 ft.) reflector—was deployed. The mirror is positioned on three seven-meter (25 ft) long struts and will reflect the infrared signatures captured by the main mirror and direct them into the telescope’s instruments.

“The world’s most sophisticated tripod has deployed,” said Lee Feinberg, a Webb project manager, in a statement. “Webb’s secondary mirror had to deploy in microgravity, and in extremely cold temperatures, and it ultimately had to work the first time without error. It also had to deploy, position, and lock itself into place to a tolerance of about one and a half millimeters.”

After the secondary mirror comes the deployment of the main mirror—which is currently still folded like a table with leaves—a process that will begin today or Saturday. Following that will be a much slower, 10-day exercise in which each of the mirror’s 18 hexagonal segments is angled and adjusted in seven different axes—up, down, left, right, in, out and diagonally—to bring the overall mirror into focus. That one will take some patience.

“That’s a slow process,” says Robinson. “It’s almost like watching grass grow—though it’s some pretty grass when it’s done right.”

Still to come online is a suite of onboard sensing instruments, most importantly, the near-infrared camera (NIRCam), the spacecraft’s primary imager; and its mass spectrometer, which will allow Webb to analyze the chemistry not just of objects deep in the universe, but also the atmospheres of exoplanets in our own galaxy, looking for chemical signatures of methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and more, which could provide clues to whether the planets are habitable—or even inhabited.

“A lot of the detail that we don’t get today on the elements of these different planets, Webb will be able to provide,” says Robinson. “That will open some doors and some minds.”

All of this work is taking place while the telescope is tearing through space, more than 1 million km (625,000 mi.) from Earth, about 70% of the way to its L2 destination, which it is set to reach on January 23. Once there, it will take advantage of the delicate gravitational balance of the sun and the Earth and begin orbiting around an invisible point as if it were orbiting a solid body like a planet, always keeping its giant kapron shield facing the sun, ensuring that the mirror remains ultra cold. On-board cryogenic systems will contribute to that natural cooling, bringing some portions of the telescope to temperatures as low as 7 kelvin (-266º C, -447º F)

None of the discoveries Webb could make will come quickly. The telescope’s flight plan calls for it to take a full six months or so after launch before it is fully opened up, booted up and ready to work. For Webb, the landmark moment known as “first light,” when a new telescope opens its eye and begins gazing about at the universe surrounding it, will come in late June or early July.

“We had a big gift on Christmas day,” says Robinson. “Maybe our next big gift will come on the Fourth of July.”

You bring your feverish baby to the hospital in the middle of the night. The nurse asks you to go home to get a flashlight. When the flashlight batteries give out, she resorts to a flickering candle to guide the insertion of an IV needle, delivering malaria medicine, into your baby’s hand.

Maybe you don’t have a baby. Maybe you travel 14 miles a day by public bus to buy fresh fish to sell in your village. Every day, you must sell the fish before your ice melts and your inventory becomes worthless.

In much of Africa, this is the norm. Almost half of the continent’s 1.3 billion population live without electricity, which destroys opportunities for education, jobs and adequate medical care. That’s why the U.N. has set the global goal of providing electricity by 2030 to 600 million people who are currently without it. Achieving that target will require the participation of a range of players: large organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation; development institutions like the World Bank; the governments of African countries; and entrepreneurial minigrid utility companies like Energicity. Together, building on successes of recent years, we should aim to provide 6 million additional people with sustainable electricity in 2022, to put us on a pathway to reaching 600 million by 2030. To do so, all participants need to embrace new strategies over the next 12 months.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The results of fossil-fuel-based, centralized, power-plant strategies of the past 50 years speak for themselves: high levels of pollution and slow rollouts due to high construction and fuel costs. Instead, we need to focus on minigrid-based electricity powered by solar power and batteries, which can provide 24-hour clean energy. And because they are decentralized—with the electricity that each community needs provided by solar farms in the area (optimized through artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technologies) and without long, expensive transmission lines—minigrids are often low-cost and deployable in weeks. Already, Energicity has brought solar-powered electricity to 40,000 people, and our goal for 2022 is to reach 250,000 more, across four countries in West Africa.

With over $10 billion committed—including pledges from organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and from a multitude of governments—bringing green power to 6 million people in 2022 should be achievable. We have some successful models already, like a private-public partnership in Sierra Leone; minigrid companies Energicity, Winch Energy and PowerGen; the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office; and private investors providing equity funding. Together, we expect to bring minigrid-based power to 10% of Sierra Leone’s population in the next 12 months.

One of Energicity’s customers in Sierra Leone is Memenatu, a businesswoman living in the fishing town of Kychom. Without electricity to power a freezer, she bought fish to dry in the sun, so that it would keep as she traveled the 25 miles to sell in Kambia, the district capital. Knowing she did not have enough time to dry many fish in the sun before they spoiled, she bought only 20 at a time, and because dried fish did not sell for very much she made only about $20 on market days. After she got connected to Energicity’s solar minigrid, though, Memenatu could afford to buy and power a freezer—and as a result, her family’s income has increased by some 700%. The frozen fish are much more valuable in the market than dried fish, and she can buy many more each day because freezing is faster than drying.

There are millions like her, for whom there’s a clear solution forward, one that brings needed access to electricity to those who lack it, while building up infrastructure that will help reduce human contributions to global climate change. We just need everyone involved, from foundations to climate consultants to national governments to private investors, to not only commit to the distributed solar-energy approach, but also, in 2022, to act on it.

This essay is part of a series on concrete goals the world should aim for in 2022 in order to put us on track to avert climate change-related disaster. Read the rest here.

It took Bill Nelson 35 years to go from low-Earth orbit to 300 E. St. in Washington, D.C. Low-Earth orbit is where Nelson, then a U.S. representative from Florida, spent six days as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Columbia, from Jan. 12 to Jan. 18, 1986. He returned to Earth and eventually made his way to the U.S. Senate, serving from 2001 to 2019, and spending much of his tenure promoting one of his home state’s highest-profile industries—space—distinguishing himself as perhaps NASA’s most dogged legislative champion. In 2021, he was tapped to run the space show himself, when President Joe Biden appointed him NASA’s fourteenth Administrator, placing him in charge of the space agency’s sprawling, multi-state—and multi-planet—operation.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Nelson’s cosmic remit is a big one, and he recently spoke with TIME about the job, as well as the U.S.’s present—and, much more important, long-term—ambitions in space.

NASA just completed a very good year—most spectacularly with the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars, the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the completed construction of the new Space Launch System [SLS] moon rocket. To what do you attribute the space agency’s banner 2021?

NASA is like the little engine that could—”I think I can, I think I can.” And that’s attributable to the extraordinary workforce. For the last nine years in a row, NASA has been named the best place to work in the federal government. Employees get mentoring from their elders and management and through an extensive internship program. Thirty percent of our interns go on to work for the agency. Go anywhere in the world, and next to the New York Yankees’ logo, it’s the NASA logo that is the most recognized and appreciated. It’s a way for the U.S. government to project soft power and to work not only with our natural allies like the European Space Agency, but our one-time mortal enemy, Russia.

That early space race with the then-Soviet Union was actually a very bracing thing for both countries, driving technological innovation. Could you envision a similar race with China in the 2020s—and could space eventually be a venue for Sino-American detente as it was with the U.S. and Russia?

Yes to the first question, and maybe to the second. Competition is good. It brings out the greatest efficiencies and the ultimate use of the talents that we have. As to a detente with China, that’s just a qualified yes because there is nothing thus far to indicate that China is in any way willing to be less secretive about their space program and the military aspects of their space program.

That secretiveness extends to China’s space budget. Beijing claims its space program is funded at just $8 billion a year, but most people consider that an extreme lowball because their space program is embedded in their military, and their military budget is not disclosed. With enough money and enough will, could China beat the U.S. back to the moon?

Not if I have anything to say about it, and not if Joe Biden has anything to say about it.

And yet the plans to have American boots on the lunar surface have already slipped from 2024 to 2025 at the very earliest. Part of the problem is that NASA’s funding allows for only one launch per year of the SLS moon rocket. Back in the Apollo era, we launched nine crewed moon missions from just 1968 to 1972.

For a sustained landing program we’ve got to have more money. That’s in the 2023 budget. But you have to be patient too. Our 1986 shuttle flight scrubbed four times on the launch pad, only to have a flawless six-day mission on the fifth try. Then just days after we landed, Challenger launched and blew up. So in other words, it is ingrained in me to take your time and do it right.

The commercial sector is playing an increasing role in space—launching astronauts to low-Earth orbit, tourists to suborbital space and even looking at crewed missions to the moon and Mars. Could you ever see a time when there is no need for a government-run space agency?

I’m going to answer your question with an example. Look at the extraordinary commercial activity of the world airline industry that started with government investment into designing, testing, and building airplanes. In reality, on any cutting-edge new technologies, the government needs to be sowing the seed corn to ensure it will produce a plentiful crop. Look at the pharmaceutical industry. What about this miracle of COVID vaccines? That didn’t just happen, right? I was glad there was government investment in that.

Does that idea apply to the International Space Station too? The station has been in continuous operation for more than 20 years and is expensive to maintain. How much longer do you see it operating and will the U.S. get out of the space station business after that?

It’s the intent of Congress, in coordination with NASA, to keep the space station running until 2030. Then what we are doing is encouraging industry to get involved with commercial space stations, so that we bring manufacturing, research and production off the face of the Earth. That is happening and that will accelerate and so eventually what NASA wants to do is turn that over to the commercial sector, so that NASA can concentrate on exploring the heavens.

Exploring the heavens gets us to politics. One of the things that’s kept us from returning to the moon for the last 50 years is a lack of continuity, with every new presidential administration tossing out the past one’s plans for NASA and implementing its own.

Yes, in order for a space program to be successful It has to be a multi-administration effort. It’s like building an aircraft carrier; that takes about 12 years and spans many administrations. So the space program has to be the same way.

Is that even possible in our polarized times? You were in Congress for 30 years; what do you miss least about it?

The inability to get along and therefore get things done, because of excessive partisanship and huge ideological rigidity. That’s not the way it was when I was a young congressman. And that’s not the way it was when I came into the Senate—even after that disputed [2000] election with 537 votes [in Florida], Republicans and Democrats got along, and they could still today because they’re all wonderful people. But they are listening to small cliques, extreme views, which is eliminating that very necessary middle ground.

Don’t you hate it,” says Jon the Robot, gesturing with tiny articulated arms at an expectant crowd, “when you’re trying to solve inverse kinematics equations to pick up a cup and then you get ‘Error 453, no solution found’?” The crowd laughs. “Don’t you hate that?”

An experiment billed as a comedy act, Jon is the brainchild of Naomi Fitter, an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. The tiny android performs when a handler (who must also hold the mic) presses a button, then tells the same jokes in the same order, like a grizzled veteran comic at a down-market Vegas casino.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But the robot’s act is more human than it might first appear. Jon is learning how to respond to its audience—it can now vary the timing of its delivery based on the length of the audience’s laughter, and append different responses to jokes based on the level of noise in the room. It can deliver one line if a joke gets a roar of laughter (“Please tell the booking agents how funny that joke was”) and another if there are crickets (“Sorry about that. I think I got caught in a loop. Please tell the booking agents that you like me … that you like me … that you like me”).

The prospect of an AI that understands why we are laughing, and that can generate its own genuinely funny material, is sort of a holy grail for a subset of AI researchers. Artificial intelligence can diagnose tumors, read maps and play games, often faster and with more accuracy than humans can.

For the moment, however, linguistic humor is still primarily a people thing. Jon can work blue, with a whole bit on robot dating that involves cryptic texts, encrypted text, and the eggplant emoji—but only because a human has written and programmed a set list for it. Finding a way to teach machines to be funny on their own would be a major breakthrough—one that could fundamentally reshape the way we relate to the devices around us. To understand a person’s humor is to know what they like, how they think and how they see the world. An AI that understands all that has the power to do a lot more than just crack jokes.

The first step is to attempt to break down the nuts and bolts of human humor. Machines learn by taking vast amounts of data and feeding it through algorithms—in other words, formulas or detailed sets of instructions—in search of patterns or unique features. This process works when it comes to, say, identifying the difference between photos of dogs and photos of cars, but it can effectively destroy a joke, deconstructing it in a painfully unfunny operation. “Explanations are to jokes what autopsies are to bodies: if the subject isn’t already dead, it soon will be,” wrote University College Dublin associate professor Tony Veale in his recent book Your Wit Is My Command: Building AIs With a Sense of Humor.

Humans have vast mental libraries of cultural references and linguistic nuances to draw upon when hearing or telling a joke. AI has access only to the information that humans choose to give it, which means that if we want an AI to make us laugh, we have to be clear about the kind of humor we want to teach it.

Read more: An Artificial Intelligence Helped Write This Play. It May Contain Racism

One theory of humor is that the degree to which we find something funny matches the degree to which a joke’s punch line deviates from the listener’s unconscious expectation. Thomas Winters, a doctoral student in artificial intelligence at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, uses this one as a case study: Two fish are in a tank. Says one to the other: “You man the guns, I’ll drive.”

“In the beginning, you see this aquarium, this water tank. But then you hear ‘You man the guns, I’ll drive,’ and you’re like, Well, aquariums generally don’t have weaponry or wheels or drivability,” Winters says, in a heroic effort to parse the mechanics of a fish joke. “This mental jump from one interpretation to another one is something that most jokes or things we find funny have.”

Following a formula is something AI is exceptionally good at. So are a lot of successful comedy writers.

Joe Toplyn broke into comedy in the 1980s, when a friend from the Harvard Lampoon tipped him off that a writing job was opening up at David Letterman’s late-night show. He sent in some jokes—a bit about a periscope–enabled refrigerator made it onto the air—and landed the job. He spent the better part of the next two decades writing for comedy and talk shows, racking up four Emmy awards and head-writer credits at both The Late Show With David Letterman and The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.

In 2014 Toplyn published Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV: How to Write Monologue Jokes, Desk Pieces, Sketches, Parodies, Audience Pieces, Remotes, and Other Short-Form Comedy. The book is a distillation of a course he taught in New York City after scrutinizing decades of monologues and reverse engineering the most successful jokes.

Toplyn isn’t precious about comedy writing: it’s a job, one that a person can learn to do well if given the right inputs. The jokes that got the biggest laughs for Leno and Letterman follow identifiable formulas populated with “handles”—people, places, things and other references—each with a variety of related associations that can be combined to form a punch line. Given enough time and data, he realized, a computer could potentially learn to make these jokes too.

Earlier this year, at the International Conference on Computational Creativity, Toplyn presented a research paper outlining Witscript, a joke–generation system trained on a data set of TV–monologue jokes that detects keywords in entered text and creates a relevant punch line. Unlike other forms of robot comedy, the system—which Toplyn has patented—can generate contextually relevant jokes on the spot in response to a user’s text. A chatbot or voice assistant enabled with the software can respond with humor to users’ queries (when appropriate) without derailing the interaction.

Toplyn sees Witscript as an extension of the work he did for decades in late-night TV: making people laugh, and therefore making them feel less alone.

“That’s basically the goal,” Toplyn says. “It’s to make chatbots more humanlike, so people will be less lonely.”

Very few professionals love the idea that a computer can reliably do their jobs. Comedy writers are no different. When Winters posted a joke—writing software prototype to a Reddit forum for stand-up comics, he got some colorfully worded responses insisting that no machine could replicate the nuance of human comedy.

Toplyn counters that critics overlook how much communication follows simple formulas, even the funny kind. “Rodney Dangerfield: ‘I get no respect.’ That’s a formula. Or Jeff Foxworthy: ‘You may be a redneck if.’ There are plenty of formulas in comedy, and some of them are right on the surface,” Toplyn says.

There are, obviously, people who do not laugh at the comedy of Jeff Foxworthy, or the light topical banter of a late-night talk show. A separate camp argues that the better use of artificial intelligence in comedy and the arts is as sort of an infinite idea generator freed from the blinders and biases of human thinking, one that can toss up endless themes and potential associations that human writers and performers can run with themselves.

Read more: Artificial Intelligence Has a Problem With Gender and Racial Bias. Here’s How to Solve It

Piotr Mirowski was working as a search engineer at Bing when he noticed the similarities between his day job and his personal passion, improv. The principle of search engineering is to teach the computer how to identify the best result for a given query. In improv, Mirowski says, performers are also trained to follow their instincts and do what feels best in that scene. It’s not always perfect, and the results sometimes have a hilarious absurdity, as anyone who has started typing a Google query with the predictive search feature on knows. Mirowski co-founded Improbotics, an international improv troupe that works alongside an AI that tosses out prompts and lines that human performers have to work into the show.

“I don’t think it’s really possible to build a true AI-based comedy that relies on understanding the emotions of another person or the context,” he says. “What we can do is to bring that into life ourselves.”

Improv comedians often draw upon cues shouted out from the audience. An AI can draw upon ideas from all over the world and across history. The goal isn’t to build a thing that will make the laughs for us, Mirowski says, but instead one that can help humans find new things to laugh about. As with any new technology, its power will come from the way users choose to interact with it, with results that no one may yet have imagined.

“I see what we’re doing as kind of like building the electric guitar. It’s not very clear how to play it or what it’s going to do, and it sounds really weird and distorted and there are enough acoustic guitars anyway,” says Kory Mathewson, Improbotics co-founder and cast member and a Montreal-based research scientist with DeepMind. “Then Jimi Hendrix gets an electric guitar, and it’s like, ‘Oh. That’s what this is about.’”

On the flip side, of course, a tool with the power to influence and entertain can also be used to exploit. Understanding someone’s sense of humor is a window into how they see the world, what their preferences are, maybe even where they are vulnerable. It’s not a power that people are entirely comfortable with computers having.

In one 2019 study, researchers recruited pairs of people who already knew each other as friends, romantic partners or family members. They gave participants a list of jokes and asked them to choose which ones their friend or partner would find funny, based on a limited sample of the person’s responses to other jokes. They had computers guess the same thing, based on the same data, then showed the list to the buddy so that they could verify which gags they liked. The machines predicted people’s favorite jokes more accurately than their friends or partners did.

The computers performed better than humans at guessing which jokes a participant would like in a second experiment as well. But in this one, people liked the recommended jokes less if they thought they came from a machine. They didn’t trust them. Other studies have also found that people rate humor as one of the tasks they trust humans with far more than AI, along with writing news articles, composing songs and driving trucks (all of which AI has some success in doing). Jokes are about a shared view of the world, a willingness to violate the same norms and laugh at the same things. We know what it means when a friend sends something along and says, “I thought you’d find this funny.” What’s a robot getting at when it does the same thing? And who ultimately benefits if its humor wins us over?

There’s a common saying that robots should do the jobs that are too dirty, dangerous or dull for humans. Comedy can be all of those things, but we still want it for ourselves.

As for Jon the Robot, its live appearances have so far been limited to a series of pre-pandemic shows. The act is not at the point where it might threaten the livelihood of Netflix-special-level comedians—yet. Before powering down, Jon always signs off with the same line: “If you like me, please book me and help me take your jobs.”

A cup of tea in 2006 changed genetic engineering forever.

Jill Banfield, a University of California at Berkeley ecosystem scientist and 1999 MacArthur Foundation fellow, had become curious in 2006 about mysterious repeating DNA sequences that were common in microbes that live in some of the planet’s most extreme environments, such as deep-sea heat vents, acid mines and geysers. She just needed a biochemist to help explain what the sequences known as Crispr/Cas9 were, and ideally somebody local.

The best scientist-location tool available to the highly decorated PhD researcher—a web search—recommended a Berkeley RNA specialist named Jennifer Doudna. The two met for tea at a campus lunch spot. Doudna hadn’t heard of Crispr, a kind of microbial immune system, and was intrigued. So much so that over the next few years she would go on to solve the sequence’s structure, which turned out to be something of a miraculous cut-and-paste tool for DNA. The discovery heralded a new era of genomics that is revolutionizing science and multiple industries and earned Doudna half the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Now, 15 years after their initial meeting, Banfield, Doudna and a large team of co-authors have published a paper that takes a major step toward solving the thorny problem of how to study and alter genomes of microbes living in complicated real-world environments, such as the gut microbiome or soil. The complexity of microbial communities has been a major obstacle to discovering technologies that can prevent diseases and improve agriculture. It’s a critical step toward curbing methane, a harmful greenhouse gas that is emitted during rice production.

The work is a part of the Innovative Genomics Institute, a consortium Doudna founded to develop uses for Crispr and other genetic engineering techniques to solve problems in health, food production and elsewhere. The IGI in July received a $3 million gift from an anonymous donor to pursue climate work, and Banfield’s research on microbial ecosystems is fundamental to that push.

Read more: How Gene Editing Could Save Coral Reefs

Soil is “the most difficult ecosystem on the planet to study,” Banfield said. “It’s the most complex. It really was the Holy Grail to be able to get any insights into soil microbial communities.”

Much of the IGI’s climate work is focused on the science of rice, a major source of calories for more than half the world. Beyond the primary problem of ensuring people have enough, rice also presents a significant climate challenge. The crop is grown in flooded fields. That water cuts off oxygen to the soil, which allows methane-producing microbes to thrive: Rice production is responsible for as much as 34 million tons of methane a year, or about 2% of greenhouse-gas emissions. China and India make up half that total.

Rice fields are like smokestacks for soil methane, and to shut down those emissions, scientists first need to understand the microbes. The trouble has been that culturing microbial communities and tinkering with them in a lab with traditional tools “could take years or might fail altogether,” IGI authors write. Their new paper demonstrates that using a Crispr-based system can “accelerate this process to weeks.”

Shutting down the rice methane spigot might require any of several alterations, either to the plants themselves or the microbial network into which the roots grow. Engineered solutions might range from introducing microbes that can eat methane in oxygen-free conditions to just flat-out eliminating specific organisms from the soil, the way antibiotics kill disease-causing bacteria.

“This is all very blue-sky at the present time,” Banfield said. “First, we want to understand the pieces and how they fit together.”

Read more: Seeding the Ocean: Inside a Michelin-Starred Chef’s Revolutionary Quest to Harvest Rice From the Sea

Pamela Ronald is a University of California at Davis professor who has studied rice her entire career and written a book on the future of food. More than a decade ago she and a colleague identified the gene used to develop flood-tolerant rice that’s now grown by more than 6 million farmers in India and Bangladesh.

There are more than 130,000 kinds of rice. Lurking in those genomes may be overlooked evolutionary skills that scientists could graft into agricultural varieties, for heat resistance, nutrition or disease prevention. Ronald’s lab is looking for changes that, combined with Banfield’s microbial communities, could lead to lower-emission crops. An even greater challenge awaits in the digestive tracts of cattle and other ruminants, which are responsible for more than 5% of global emissions.

The agricultural sector has plenty of options to cut emissions in the meantime, while Banfield, Ronald, Doudna and others genetically engineer new possibilities.

Growing more rice in the same acreage leads to lower emissions; every 1% gain in yield also cuts methane emissions by about 1%. Flooding rice fields less often can cut emissions by up to half. Farmers who can control water flow to fields nimbly have found alternating wet and dry periods during the growing season can cut emissions much more. (Dry periods can cause more nitrous-oxide emissions, alas, another potent greenhouse gas). Other promising techniques include plowing rice straw back into fields in the off-season, and seeding fields with biochar, a kind of charcoal, to encourage greater carbon storage in soil.

Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, welcomes progress toward a high-ambition, high-reward genetic-engineering breakthrough in concert with proven real-world techniques—the topic of a policy paper he issued in November.

“It’s entirely a practical challenge,” he said. “How do you actually make this stuff happen? What are the incentives to make this happen? The practical challenges are real but that doesn’t mean you can’t get around them.”

With Crispr comes the promise that practical challenges can be surmounted at the molecular level. Perhaps even over tea.

(BEIJING) — China is calling on the United States to protect a Chinese space station and its three-member crew after Beijing complained that satellites launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX nearly struck the station.

A foreign ministry spokesman accused Washington on Tuesday of ignoring its treaty obligations to protect the safety of the Tiangong station’s three-member crew following the July 1 and Oct. 21 incidents.

The Tiangong performed “evasive maneuvers” to “prevent a potential collision” with Starlink satellites launched by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the government said in a Dec. 6 complaint to the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

The United States should “take immediate measures to prevent such incidents from happening again,” said the spokesman, Zhao Lijian.

Zhao accused Washington of failing to carry out its obligations to “protect the safety of astronauts” under a 1967 treaty on the peaceful use of space.

The first module of the Tiangong was launched in April. Its first crew returned to Earth in September following a 90-day mission. The second crew of two men and one woman arrived Oct. 16 for a six-month mission.

Most people don’t notice when a branch of government has a very good year. What constitutes high times at the Department of Commerce? What makes them pop the Champagne corks over at the Office of Management and Budget? But NASA is different. When your job is to build rockets, light the fuse and send machines and humans into space, folks tend to notice if things go well—or don’t.

For that reason, as NASA closes out 2021, people both inside and outside the agency are celebrating what easily has been one of the most successful years for space since the golden era of the 1960s and 1970s, when it sometimes seemed NASA did almost nothing but succeed. The media haven’t always touted all of the most noteworthy accomplishments—due at least partly to the headline-grabbing 2021 that the billionaire boys’ club of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have had getting their own space hardware off the ground. But NASA’s accomplishments have been there all the same.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Here are just some of the points NASA has put on the board this past year:

The James Webb Space Telescope

Never mind the familiar T-minus 10-second countdown. When the engines lit on the Ariane V rocket carrying the James Webb Space Telescope to space at 7:20 AM ET on the morning of Dec. 25, it was the culmination of 25 years of effort and no less than $9.5 billion in R&D and construction costs. But if the Webb works as advertised, the cosmic payoff will be orders of magnitude greater than the terrestrial expenditure.

The telescope’s main mirror is a complex, 18-segment assemblage of gold and beryllium hexagons, measuring 6.5 m (21.3 ft) across, compared to the Hubble Space telescope’s smaller—2.4 m (7.9 ft)—single-piece, circular design. The new approach was necessitated by the very different kind of work the Webb will do. Hubble sees in the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths, while Webb is designed to see in the infrared.

That is a very big deal, since infrared is the wavelength in which the oldest signals from the deepest regions of the universe stream to us. The farther away a signal source is, the longer the light has been traveling to reach us, so the image we see is not the star or other formation as it appears today, but as it appeared long ago. Hubble can see about 13.4 billion years into the past—just 400 million years after the Big Bang that began the universe. Webb will be able to see an additional 200 million years back—to the time when the first stars were flickering on and the first galaxies were forming. That is a door to cosmic history that has always been closed to us. On Christmas, NASA kicked it open.

The Perseverance Rover and the Ingenuity Helicopter

Landing metal on Mars has always been one of the most daunting challenges a space agency can face, with the long history of missions to the Red Planet littered with near misses, hard crashes and serial failures. But on Feb. 18, 2021, NASA hit it big, when the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, carrying along the little drone-sized Ingenuity helicopter. Long ago, Jezero crater was Jezero lake, teeming with water and fed by an inflowing river. For that reason, it is seen as a prime site to look for signs of ancient—or even extant—life.

So far, Perseverance has driven 2.83 km (1.76 mi)—which counts as a lot, given the slow and painstaking way commands must be pre-written and loaded into the rover’s memory before it can move so much as an inch—drilling rocks, investigating geologic formations, and gathering samples of soil, which it is packing into titanium tubes that will be brought back to Earth by a future mission.

The Ingenuity helicopter, meantime, has just completed its 17th flight—far more than the original five it was scheduled to fly early in the mission as a mere proof of principle that an aircraft could operate on another planet. To date, the little chopper has spent a total of 30 minutes and 48 seconds airborne, covering a collective 3.5 km (2.2 mi), flown as high as 12 m (40 ft) and reached speeds as great as 16 km/h (10 mph).

There is no telling how long Ingenuity will last, and as for Perseverance? Well, think all the way back to 2012. That’s when Perseverance’s sister rover, Curiosity, landed in Mars’s Gale Crater. After more than 3,300 Martian sols, or days (which is about the same length as an Earth day), Curiosity is still chugging. Perseverance, if all goes to plan, can do the same.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)

Hollywood is making much hay this season with Don’t Look Up, an improbably comic story about a comet on a planet-killing collision course with Earth. The movie plays for dark laughs—and earns them—but there is nothing remotely funny about the hard existential fact that we live in a shooting gallery of a solar system, and there is a lot of deadly ordnance out there that could spell the end of us as surely as a cosmic crack-up 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs.

On Nov. 21, 2021, NASA began taking matters in hand, launching the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft to see if it might be possible to deflect an asteroid or comet that was taking a bead on our planet before it could actually reach us. The spacecraft’s target is the asteroid Didymos—which poses no threat to Earth—a 780 m (2,559 ft) rock that circles the sun from just outside our planet’s orbit to just outside of Mars’s. Didymos is itself circled by a 160 m (525 ft.) moonlet named Dimorphos. When DART reaches the Didymos system, it will deliberately crash into Dimorphos, and astronomers will then measure the degree to which the speed and direction of the moonlet’s orbit changes. Should the mission succeed in changing Dimorphos’s path significantly, it will represent a first, critical test of what could one day become a robust planetary defense system. And that day could come none too soon; just ask the dinosaurs.

The Journeys of Lucy

Not every asteroid wishes Earth ill. Indeed most are harmless and some are priceless—4 billion year old artifacts of the primordial material that created the solar system. Get up close to those rocks and you open a geological portal in time. Some of the most intriguing of these cosmic relics are Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, two swarms of rocks—one of which precedes Jupiter in its orbit around the sun and one of which trails it—which are locked-in-time remains of the building blocks of the outer planets.

There are a total of about 4,800 Trojan asteroids, and on Oct. 16, 2021, NASA launched a spacecraft named Lucy (after the primordial Australopithecus fossil that represents one of humanity’s oldest ancestors) that will explore at least seven of them—plus one asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter—marking the greatest number of objects in independent orbits around the sun ever reconnoitered by a single spacecraft.

Lucy’s mission will be long and circuitous, taking 12 years to complete. As the spacecraft orbits the sun, it will make periodic flybys of Earth for gravity assists and trajectory corrections that will slingshot it first to the leading swarm of Trojans and then to the trailing one. The 821 kg (1,810 kg) spacecraft is equipped with a suite of instruments that will allow it to study multiple features of the asteroids, including their surface geology, their color and chemical composition, their densities and interiors, and any rings or moonlets that may circle the main masses. If there are secrets locked in the rocks, Lucy should reveal them.

Super Rocket Ready to Fly

When plans for NASA’s newest, biggest moon rocket were first released, Shrek 2 was topping the box office, Eminem was leading the charts and the first iPhone was still three years away. It was early 2004, and then-President George W. Bush announced plans to build a 21st century version of the Saturn V moon rocket—called the Ares V—that would return Americans to the moon by 2014. It was an exciting plan but, like so much else in NASA’s start-stop return to the lunar surface, a doomed one. The rocket was scrapped in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama, who cited cost overruns and missed deadlines. But under pressure from Congress, Ares V was revived with a new name—the Space Launch System (SLS)—which would have its first flight by 2016.

That year came and went, as did later promised targets. But now, at last, the SLS is set to fly. This year, the towering 98 m (322-ft.) tall rocket was finally stacked and assembled in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center, in preparation for an initial, uncrewed test flight in March. The vehicle’s propulsion system uses proven legacy hardware—four space shuttle main engines, and two shuttle-era solid rocket boosters. When all six engines are lit, they will produce a staggering 4 million kg (8.8 million lbs) of thrust, easily exceeding the Saturn V’s 3.4 million kg (7.5 million lbs), making SLS the most powerful rocket ever launched. If all goes to plan, that first mission, dubbed Artemis 1, will make an uncrewed flight around the far side of the moon; Artemis 2, flying the same profile, but this time carrying astronauts, will follow in 2024. Artemis 3, which will land on the moon, could come as early as 2025. The SLS, 17 years in the making and the planning, is at last having its moment.

There were other triumphs in NASA’s big year as well—quieter ones perhaps, but triumphs all the same: In December, the space agency’s Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to touch the corona of the sun; in May, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft began its journey back to Earth, bringing home samples from the asteroid Bennu; throughout 2021, the Juno spacecraft continued its years-long study of Jupiter, which it began orbiting in 2016. As we head into 2022, the deep-pocketed likes of Musk and Branson and Bezos will continue to stake their claims in the increasingly competitive race to space, and grab media attention as they do. But NASA, a government agency that pays government wages, remains—as it has been for generations—the biggest, if not always the flashiest, player in the global space game. The year just past offered yet more proof.

The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope rocketed away Saturday on a high-stakes quest to behold light from the first stars and galaxies and scour the universe for hints of life.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope soared from French Guiana on South America’s northeastern coast, riding a European Ariane rocket into the Christmas morning sky.

The $10 billion observatory hurtled toward its destination 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away, or more than four times beyond the moon. It will take a month to get there and another five months before its infrared eyes are ready to start scanning the cosmos.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

First, the telescope’s enormous mirror and sunshield need to unfurl; they were folded origami-style to fit into the rocket’s nose cone. Otherwise, the observatory won’t be able to peer back in time 13.7 billion years as anticipated, within a mere 100 million years of the universe-forming Big Bang.

“It’s going to give us a better understanding of our universe and our place in it: who we are, what we are, the search that’s eternal,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said earlier this week.

But he cautioned: “When you want a big reward, you have to usually take a big risk.”

Intended as a successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, the long-delayed James Webb is named after NASA’s administrator during the 1960s. NASA partnered with the European and Canadian space agencies to build and launch the new 7-ton telescope, with thousands of people from 29 countries working on it since the 1990s.

With the launch falling on Christmas and a global surge in COVID-19 cases, there were fewer spectators at the French Guiana launch site than expected. Nelson bowed out along with a congressional delegation and many contractors who worked on the telescope.

Around the world, astronomers had eagerly waited to see Webb finally taking flight after years of setbacks. Last-minute technical snags bumped the launch nearly a week, then gusty wind pushed it to Christmas. Inside Launch Control, there was a smattering of Santa hats.

“We launch for humanity this morning,” Arianespace CEO Stephane Israel said minutes before liftoff. “After Webb, we will never see the skies in quite the same way.”

The telescope’s showpiece: a gold-plated mirror more than 21 feet (6.5 meters) across.

Protecting the observatory is a wispy, five-layered sunshield, vital for keeping the light-gathering mirror and heat-sensing infrared detectors at subzero temperatures. At 70 feet by 46 feet (21 meters by 14 meters), it’s the size of a tennis court.

If all goes well, the sunshield will be opened three days after liftoff, taking at least five days to unfold and lock into place. Next, the mirror segments should open up like the leaves of a drop-leaf table, 12 days or so into the flight.

In all, hundreds of release mechanisms need to work — perfectly — in order for the telescope to succeed. “Like nothing we’ve done before,” said NASA program director Greg Robinson.

Retired astronaut-astronomer Steven Hawley is more stressed over Webb than he was for Hubble, which he released into orbit from space shuttle Discovery in 1990. That’s because Webb will be too far away for rescuing, as was necessary when Hubble turned out to have blurry vision from a defective mirror.

Spacewalking repairs by astronauts transformed Hubble into a beloved marvel that has revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the universe, casting its eyes as far back as 13.4 billion years. It’s now up to Webb to draw even closer to the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, its infrared vision keener and more far-reaching than Hubble’s is in the shorter visible and ultraviolet wavelengths.

NASA is shooting for 10 years of operational life from Webb. Engineers deliberately left the fuel tank accessible for a top-off by visiting spacecraft, if and when such technology becomes available.

When he released Hubble, “I never would have believed that it would still be going strong almost 32 years later,” Hawley, now professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, said in an email. “I hope that in 32 years we’ll be able to say that JWST did as well.”

Want a good, solid, rollicking laugh? Contemplate the end of the world—the whole existential shebang: the annihilation of civilization, the extinction of all species, the death of the entire Earthly biomass. Funny, right? Actually, yes—and arch and ironic and dark and smart, at least in the hands of Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice), whose new film Don’t Look Up was released in theaters on Dec. 10 and is set to begin streaming on Netflix Dec. 24.

The premise of the film is equal parts broad, plausible and utterly terrifying. A comet measuring up to 9 km (5.6 mi.) across is discovered by Ph.D candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), while she is conducting routine telescopic surveys searching for supernovae. Kudos and back-slaps from her colleagues follow—find a comet, after all, and you get to give it your name. But the good times stop when her adviser, Dr. Randall Mindy ((Leonardo DiCaprio), crunches the trajectory numbers and determines that Comet Dibiasky—which is about the same size as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago—is on course to collide with Earth in a planet-killing crack-up exactly six months and 14 days later.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Mindy and Dibiasky bring the matter to the attention of the potty-mouthed, chain-smoking, deliciously corrupt President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her pampered son and chief of staff Jason (Jonah Hill).

“I hear there’s a comet or an asteroid you don’t like the look of,” says Orlean, who is preoccupied with the upcoming midterms and her most recent Supreme Court nominee, who turns out to have been a former soft-core porn star. “What’s the ask here?”

“I’m so booored,” moans Jason, as Dr. Mindy tries to explain the science.

Rebuffed by the White House, the astronomers take their case to a morning cable show, The Daily Rip, but can’t get their message heard through the hosts’ incessant happy talk. The public responds with equal parts denial, conspiracy mongering and instant meme-making, declaring Dibiasky crazy and Dr. Mindy an AILF, with A standing for astronomer and ILF standing for, well, ILF. The president, meantime, is persuaded by Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), a Jobsian-Muskian-Zuckerbergian head of a technology company named Bash, that there is money to be made mining the comet for precious metals, distracting her from the more pressing business of just blowing the thing up.

For the planet and all life on it, the clock is ticking and there are mortal decisions to be made—decisions a frivolous, fractious, distracted humanity does not appear up to handling. There is an undertow of grimness to the story, one that could have dragged it under entirely if not for a hilariously absurd final scene. But the grim is there all the same—and that is very much the filmmakers’ apparent intent.

How real-life scientists monitor threats in the skies

Don’t Look Up is being widely seen as a climate change parable, with the same delay, debate and politicization of a simple, binary, life-or-death issue preventing the world from taking action. A strike from space is death by gunshot while climate change is a slow, global poisoning, but the result—the end of days—is the same. The key solutions for climate change are well-known by now—switching over from fossil fuels to clean renewables and retrofitting cities and other vulnerable places for the floods, wildfires, hurricanes and more that are increasingly resulting from the warming already baked into the system. It’s long-term planetary therapy as opposed to a fast cure. The solutions to the threat of incoming ordnance from space are less commonly discussed but could be equally and—more important, immediately—effective.

NASA, as Don’t Look Up reveals, already has a wonderfully named Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), whose remit is to scan the skies to discover and catalogue potentially menacing space rocks long before they can reach Earth, and help the government coordinate a response, either by deflecting or destroying the object. In the case of comets, there might be only so much time to muster a defense. Agglomerations of ice and rock that come barrelling towards us from beyond the orbit of Pluto, comets whip around the sun and then fly back out—moving at speeds that can top 70 km/sec (156,000 mph). They are not easily visible until they draw as close as the orbit of Jupiter, where outflowing energy from the sun fires them up and gives them their signature tail. Depending upon the size of the comet, the six months the world has to act in Don’t Look Up is not off the mark. Asteroids—which have little ice, no tails, and are not much more than space rubble—ply a smaller, less sweeping path around the sun and move more slowly than a comet. A rock that was discovered today might not intersect with the orbit of Earth—and threaten the planet—for a century.

“Our strategy is to find the population of objects out there of significant size, so we know where they all are,” says NASA’s planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson, who vetted an early draft of the Don’t Look Up screenplay more than two years ago. “Once we do that, it will give us decades of warning and we will then have the time to use whatever technology is available.”

When it comes to asteroids, just what constitutes “significant size” is something of a judgment call. In 2013, a 20 m. (66 ft.) asteroid exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia as the drag of the atmosphere essentially ripped the rock apart before it could reach the ground. The blast damaged 7,200 buildings and injured about 1,500 people—though claimed no lives. That was scary but survivable. The asteroids that concern the PDCO most—and get the majority of their attention—are those measuring 140 meters or more.

“You work out the numbers from a sort of actuarial point of view,” says Amy Mainzer, professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona and a consultant on the film. “And 140 meters was the threshold that can cause a lot of damage.”

It’s not just size that makes a space rock a menace. It’s location, too. For a sufficiently large projectile to go from what NASA straightforwardly calls a near-Earth object (NEO) to a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) it must also intersect Earth’s orbit no further than 7.5 million km (4.65 million mi.) from the planet. That’s a whole lot of acreage by any common measure, but on the cosmic scale it’s a relatively near miss. Since 1998, when Congress began allocating funds to look for NEOs, NASA and astronomers from around the world have found 90% to 95% of the 1,000 or so one-kilometer or larger objects that are thought to be out there, but just 30% to 40% of the estimated 25,000 asteroids zipping about that are 140 meters or larger.

“It’s a really hard problem because the objects are small,” says Mainzer. “I mean, well, in astronomy terms they’re small. If one hits the Earth, it’s big.”

How to actually protect the Earth from an object hurtling toward it

What to do with an asteroid or comet of sufficient size that is on a death plunge toward our planet is another matter entirely. Nobody is really going to break up and mine the object—that plot turn was a cinematic confection for Don’t Look Up—especially a comet that gives Earth not years or decades to prepare, but months. Destroying it with explosives—and yes, even nuclear ones—is not off of the menu of options if time was short and the object was huge. But that would present problems of its own, since the giant rock would not be vaporized, but rather, shattered into a lot of smaller rocks.

“It’s hard to predict where all of those pieces are going,” says Johnson, “and it’s difficult to make sure that you’ve broken it into pieces small enough that Earth’s atmosphere can deal with it.” Still, if it’s duck a lot of small objects or go the way of life on Earth after the great collision 65 million years ago, there’s little doubt what humanity would do. “The dinosaurs,” says Johnson, “didn’t have a space program.”

Asteroids, which give us much more time to act, could be dealt with not by destruction, but deflection—slowing them down or altering their path just enough that they fly wide of Earth. On November 24, 2021, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft that will attempt to prove that this concept works. Its target is the asteroid Didymos (which poses no threat to Earth), a 780-meter rock that circles the sun in a path that takes it from just outside Earth’s orbit to just outside Mars’s. Didymos is itself orbited by a 160-meter moonlet named Dimorphos. When DART arrives at the Didymos system, it will deliberately crash into Dimorphos and scientists will then determine how much the speed and direction of its orbit have changed around its parent body.

It’s a small test on a small rock and does not mean the Earth is anywhere near having a robust planetary defense system in place, but as a proof-of-concept experiment showing that deflection can work, it’s an important first step. To help find asteroids that, unlike Didymos, might in fact pose a risk to us, NASA also plans to launch the Near Earth Object Surveyor spacecraft, which will go aloft in 2026, scanning the skies in our planetary neighborhood looking for anything suspicious. None of these solutions is perfect; all of them, however, can be of help.

Unlike climate change, which is the handiwork of humans, planetary bombardment is simply a risk of living in a busy, buzzing solar system. But like climate change, it is a problem we can mitigate—and even solve, provided we decide to take the necessary steps. In Hollywood’s latest yarn of the apocalypse, humanity plays dice with its very existence. In the world off the screen, we can choose differently.

French Guiana does not often get the chance to be the center of the world, to say nothing of the universe—or at least humanity’s understanding of it. But on Dec. 24, at 7:20 AM ET, the small, forested country on the forehead of South America is set to be at the center of things indeed, when a European Space Agency Ariane V rocket is expected to lift off with a payload that represents $9.5 billion worth of hardware and 25 years of work, and on which the next generation of research into the origin of the cosmos depends. The spacecraft entrusted to the Ariane 5 that morning will be the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s—and the entire astronomical community’s—follow-on to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, which has widely been considered the greatest space observatory ever built—until now, at least.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The Hubble’s work is most powerfully captured in the vast album of dazzling photos it’s sent back in the 31 years it has been flying. But those pictures also reveal its sole shortcoming: Hubble sees in the ultraviolet and visible spectrums, allowing it to peer approximately 13.4 billion years back in time—or just 400 million years after the Big Bang (because light from the cosmos can take a heck of a long time to reach us, looking up at the night sky is effectively looking into the past). A lot happened in those missing early years—galaxies began to form, stars began to flicker on—but the expanding universe and the great distance the light from that epoch is traveling to reach us cause its wavelength to stretch from the visible spectrum and into the infrared, to which Hubble and human eyes are blind.

The infrared, however, is exactly the band in which the Webb was designed to see, pushing its sensitivity another 200 million years back, to 13.6 billion years ago, or just 200 million years after the Big Bang. That comparatively small improvement is enormously significant, opening the door to the universe’s babyhood—a period in which it matured spectacularly quickly.

“The difference between what Hubble and Webb will see is not like comparing someone who’s 70 years old to somebody who’s 71 years old,” says Scott Friedman, commissioning scientist for the Webb team. “It’s like comparing a baby who’s one day told to a baby who’s one year old, and that’s a huge difference.”

Webb had to overcome a lot of hurdles to get as far as it’s come. First proposed in 1995 with a predicted price tag of $500 million and a hoped-for launch date of 2007, it has repeatedly blown past budget limits and deadlines. The telescope had a near-death experience in 2012 when Congress threatened to pull funding, but the last-minute delivery of the mirror persuaded lawmakers to stay their hand, and Webb survived. There have been some last-minute delays, too—it was previously set to launch Dec. 22—and takeoff could be pushed back further still.

Before the telescope can begin its work, it will face technological hurdles, too. Unlike the Hubble, which flies in a snug Earth orbit barely 545 km (338 mi.) above the ground, Webb will have to travel 1.6 million km (one million mi.) from the planet, where it will station-keep in what’s known as a Lagrange point—a spot in space where the gravity of the Earth and the sun cancel each other out, allowing objects to circle around the invisible point as if they were orbiting a solid body like a planet. Also unlike the Hubble, which was small enough to fit comfortably inside a space shuttle’s cargo bay, the Webb is far too big to fit fully extended inside even the biggest rocket now flying, and will thus have to be folded multiple times, loaded aboard the Ariane and then unfold once in space.

“It’s like an origami object,” said Alphonso Stewart, the Webb deployment systems team leader, during a November NASA press conference. “Only we’ll do origami in reverse.”

Very much like the Hubble, however, the Webb promises to make astronomical history, kicking open the door to portions of the cosmos that until now have remained unseen, and revealing secrets about the birth of the universe that were once not just unknown, but unknowable. “There are all of these things that lurk out there that we haven’t even imagined,” says Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist. “That is one of the things that makes it really, really exciting.”

It’s quiet now in mission control at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Baltimore campus of Johns Hopkins University. As mission controls go, this is a small one—a dozen seats at a dozen consoles in a glassed-in room for the lead controllers, and at least an equal number in an auxiliary room. But on Dec. 23, the day before launch, the room will fill with astronomers and engineers preparing for the 12-hour shifts they’ll be working once the Webb goes into operation. The first and biggest job they’ll have to do is the one of unfolding. Never mind simple reverse origami, this is a process that will take a full six months before the telescope is at last in place, deployed and ready to go about its work.

The JWST is especially complex due to the designs required for it to peer into the infrared. It’s easy to tell at a glance what the Hubble does, simply because it looks like a telescope—a metallic tube with a wide aperture at one end to admit light and a main mirror inside to gather up inflowing photons. The traditional tube shape serves as a shield, blocking out extraneous light that would flood and obscure the target image. The Webb is a different telescopic beast entirely. Observing in the infrared, it needs protection not from light but heat, which would ruin its vision as surely as light would Hubble’s. For that reason, the JWST has no housing at all. Its mirror flies open in space, atop a sun shield that protects it from solar radiation and the hundreds of degrees of heat to which the hardware would otherwise be exposed.

All by itself, the mirror is an extraordinary piece of engineering. Hubble’s mirror, which measures 2.4 m (7.9 ft) across, is a single, circular piece of highly milled and polished glass that, like the telescope itself, looks exactly like what it is. Webb’s is much more complex—a far larger 6.5 m (21.3 ft) across, and assembled from 18 separate hexagonal segments. The segments are made of beryllium—a metal that functions like glass but can be more highly shaped and polished—and covered in a thin layer of gold for reflectivity. NASA is fond of pointing out that while the gold covers the entire 25 sq. m (269 sq. ft) of the mirror, it is applied in such a thin layer that if it were peeled off and tamped down, it would be little bigger than a golf ball. The beryllium, meanwhile, is polished so smoothly that if it were expanded to the size of the United States, its biggest imperfection would be just a meter high. Each of the mirror segments can move in seven different directions—up, down, left, right, in, out and a diagonal tilt—to focus and refine the infrared energy being captured across the entire mirror surface.

“We have such a large primary mirror because what we want to do is look deep into the universe, so you need a bigger photon bucket,” says NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen.

That bucket has to stay cold—one reason the telescope is not in Earth orbit, where it would have to contend with the constant day-night-hot-cold cycle satellites experience as they circle the globe. But the sun still shines at the Lagrange points, and that’s where the Webb’s sunshield comes in. Roughly diamond shaped and as big as a tennis court, the shield is made of five layers of kapton, a foil-like film as thin as a human hair. On the outer layer, the side exposed directly to the sun, the temperature will be about 110º C (230º F, 383 Kelvin). On the inner layer, closest to the mirror, it will be -237º C (-394º F, 36 Kelvin).

“[The sunshield] is going to be irradiated by 200,000 watts of solar radiation and it should allow only about .02 watts through,” said Mike Menzel, the Webb team’s systems engineer, at the NASA press conference. “So if we’re suntan lotion, that would have an SPF of 10 million.” And both the mirror and the sunshield—plus the power-providing solar panel, the onboard computer, the maneuvering system and more—have to fold up small enough to fit into the Ariane 5’s payload bay, which measures less than 5 m (16 ft) across. The engineers designed the telescope so it is indeed neatly stowable, but the unstowing—and unfolding—is another job entirely.

Friedman’s role as the commissioning scientist means he is responsible for opening up and configuring the telescope over the course of the mission’s first six months. He and the rest of his team will have to work exceedingly carefully and exceedingly well. By the engineers’ calculations, the telescope’s unfurling process has a staggering 344 so-called “single point failures”—each involving a hinge, actuator, pulley or other system or procedure that, if it goes awry, could all by itself spell the end of the mission. Just one single point failure is a high-stakes thing with which to fly. More than one can be exponentially worse; 344 of them is flat-out hair-raising.

“There is some redundancy built into the system of release mechanisms,” said Friedman during a recent walkabout with TIME in the mission control building. “They have multiple wires in and only one has to work right. But one way or another, all of the releases do have to fire.”

“Many of these things are actuators that do have back-up systems,” says Zurbuchen. “But make no mistake, I could easily imagine things that we have no fallback on.”

Assuming none of those single point failures does, in fact, fail, there is much the James Webb Space Telescope could do and discover over the decade of work it has ahead of it. The ability to look as far back in time as the Webb can will raise the curtain on a whole range of astronomical objects and phenomena. For starters, it might be able to glimpse, or at least get close to, the universe’s literal let-there-be-light moment—peering back to the point when stars first began to form among the dust and gas clouds that made up all there was to the cosmos just after the Big Bang. Only at that point did the infant universe become illuminated, as the stars acquired enough mass to ignite their fusion engines and begin to burn their hydrogen fuel.

“There was a period of time when the universe wasn’t able to form stars or galaxies yet, so there wasn’t any light yet,” says Pontoppidan. “Then you form galaxies and they form stars and that happens about 100 million years after the Big Bang, but we don’t know for sure.”

Those early stars were not like those that populate the modern-day cosmos. They were huge, for starters—300 times more massive than our sun—and relatively short-lived. But that was a good thing: When the stellar behemoths exploded in massive supernovas, they helped generate the heavy elements that made our modern, elemementally complex universe possible.

Webb could also contribute to the study of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by collisions of massive objects. The first gravitational waves were detected in 2015, proving a theory that Albert Einstein first promulgated a century earlier. Those waves, and others that have been detected since, were caused by pairs of black holes or neutron stars colliding—cosmic crack-ups that would also have produced massive amounts of heat and other radiative energy. If those emissions left infrared signatures, Webb should detect them.

Closer to home, the new telescope will conduct observations within our own galaxy, studying the atmospheres of exoplanets—planets circling other stars—looking for signs of biology. Most of the more than 4,000 exoplanets discovered so far were spotted by using the so-called transit method: When an orbiting planet passes in front of its parent star, it blocks a tiny bit of starlight, a change that can be detected by observatories like the Kepler Space Telescope. The amount of dimming gives you a good estimate of the planet’s diameter, and the frequency with which that little flicker repeats tells you how fast the planet is orbiting. But that’s all you can get from the transit method. With Webb, scientists will be able to analyze starlight as it passes through—and gets distorted by—a given planet’s atmosphere. The precise nature of that distortion can reveal the makeup of the atmosphere’s chemistry, including the presence of oxygen, carbon, methane and other elements and compounds that are requirements for—and perhaps fingerprints of—life as we know it. The JWST can conduct similar chemistry measurements on planets and moons with atmospheres in our own solar system, such as Titan, the great, gaseous satellite of Saturn.

“[Webb] won’t find new planets, so much as it will characterize those we already know,” says Pontoppidan, “in particular, smaller exoplanets with rocky surfaces and maybe relatively temperate temperatures.”

For all its potential, Webb is not expected to have anywhere near the lifespan of the venerable Hubble, which launched when the Soviet Union was still a going concern. One risk is that it’s far more vulnerable. Hubble is a closed system, with its metal body shielding the delicate instruments inside from micrometeorites and other threats. Webb has no such protection, and both its mirror and sun shield are expected to get regularly dinged. Webb engineers are surprisingly sanguine about that fact, since NASA has conducted hypervelocity simulations, firing micrometeorite-like ordnance at mirror material, and has found the damage to be minimal.

“Luckily for us, the micrometeorites will put nice little well-defined bullet holes in [the mirror],” said Webb project manager Bill Ochs at the NASA press conference. That, he says, will detract a little bit from the overall mirror’s light collecting area, but not enough to make a meaningful difference. As for the sun shield, its five layers help a lot. Ochs says that micrometeorites are likely to disintegrate on impact with the first layer and may go on to strike the second, but puncturing all five is not likely.

Webb faces other operational challenges, however. Hubble has been kept alive in part through maintenance and servicing runs done by astronauts. Webb’s great distance from Earth makes that kind of house call impossible. What’s more, in order to remain stable at its gravity-balanced Lagrange point, Webb needs a thruster system, and a thruster system requires fuel. The telescope will launch with a full tank, but that will be only enough to keep it operating for a minimum of five years and a maximum of 10. In theory, a refill ought to be possible, and the telescope is actually equipped with a docking target to accommodate an incoming spacecraft that could conduct a refueling and extend the JWST’s life. It’s an appealing idea, especially considering the telescope’s dizzying price tag. That spacecraft, however, does not yet exist, though it could within the next decade.

“At this moment in time, we’re putting tunnel vision focus on getting this launched,” says Zurbuchen. “There is nothing to refuel if it doesn’t deploy. But I think refueling is not out of the realm of possibility, especially considering technological progress.”

No matter how long Webb lives, it will fly for only the tiniest blink of time compared to the age of the cosmos it will be studying. But it will help us learn much in those exceedingly fleeting years. The universe has long kept parts of its earliest epoch hidden from us—but no more. The Webb, says Pontoppidan, will be nothing less than “a discovery machine.”

Few things signal something’s gone haywire on the planet quite like frozen land on fire. Now scientists have determined that Arctic fires, even milder ones, can reshape a landscape for decades, in ways that may make it even harder to keep global heating from eclipsing international goals.

It’s mostly rising temperatures that are thawing out frozen Arctic ground but northern blazes — already increasing — are now understood to play a disproportionate role, according to a study published last week in the journal One Earth.

Previous research has shown that higher temperatures, drier soil and more lightning storms will lead to more fires. That work, with the new paper, mean that “in the future we might expect to see an outsized influence on thaw from the fires that will likely increase,” said Róisín Commane, a Columbia University assistant professor who studies atmospheric composition and wasn’t involved in the new study.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The paper might help explain small increases in methane and CO₂ from Alaska’s North Slope seen over the past 40 years, she said, but there’s been no massive increase yet from abrupt permafrost melt — a longstanding concern among researchers.

When frozen ground melts, it can destabilize the earth above it so much that the ground subsides or collapses, leaving behind a landscape of what scientists call thermokarst. The terrain can take on the appearance of large, round, shallow pits, sometimes abutting so closely that scientists monitoring them have to step carefully along narrow strips between them.

Read more: A Climate Change-Induced Landslide Is Wreaking Havoc on Denali National Park

Aerial images of these landscapes can be striking or beautiful as long as you don’t think about why they’ve grown by about 60% in the Alaskan Arctic between 1950 and 2015. Most of that is from air temperatures rising at twice the global average. By analyzing 70 years of satellite and overflight images, and applying a machine-learning model, scientists have determined that northwestern Alaskan fires have a lasting effect. They burned just 3.4% of the area but are responsible for 10.5% of thermokarst in Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve, the area under study.

Global warming is making fire conditions more common near the top of the world, and the study’s results are likely applicable to the uptick in fires elsewhere around the Arctic rim. In the period right after a fire, thermokarst rates are dozens of times higher than normal. After 40 years, the rate was still twice as high, returning to normal perhaps only after about eight decades.

“That’s the main take-home message about this project,” said Yaping Chen, lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the College of William and Mary, who conducted the work as a University of Illinois PhD candidate. “Many people think that an ecosystem will always recover. There is actually a threshold point after which the ecosystem may never recover.”

When dead biomass freezes, hungry microbes can’t feast on it and release carbon dioxide in the process. But that’s what happens when the thaw comes. Or worse, thermokarst pits can flood, forming lakes that cut off oxygen to the ground. That makes the land swampy and attracts microbes that produce methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂.

Permafrost is chock full of carbon and it sits underneath 20% of the world’s land, holding twice as much as the atmosphere. Scientists don’t have maps as detailed as they’d like of where all the permafrost is. Remote sensing can only penetrate so far down the surface, so they have to make assumptions about how much permafrost there is based on the kind of land in an area.

Ultimately, they’d like to know when, how much and how fast permafrost will release more heat-trapping gases, according to a major UN climate-science assessment published in August. This would help them make estimates of the rate and extent of global warming more precise. How thermokarst transforms landscapes, releasing more CO₂ or methane in the process, isn’t captured well in climate models now.

“I like to think of it as a 10% effect,” said David Lawrence, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who wasn’t involved in the study. Permafrost melt “is going to make climate change about 10% harder to combat. We have to reduce emissions by 10% more to get to the same targets, or we’re going to get 10% more warming. That number could rise to 20%, but I don’t think it’s going to be 50%.”

Eric Roston writes the Climate Report newsletter about the impact of global warming.

To contact the author of this story: Eric Roston in New York at eroston@bloomberg.net

Football star and TV celebrity Michael Strahan hurtled toward space with Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Saturday, sharing the ride with the daughter of America’s first astronaut.

The co-host of ABC’s “Good Morning America” and former New York Giant had a football with him as Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket blasted off from West Texas on the planned 10-minute flight. Carrying the two VIP guests and four paying customers, the capsule aimed for an altitude of about 66 miles (106 kilometers).

It was expected to be five minutes and 50 miles (187 kilometers) shorter than Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight from Cape Canaveral on May 5, 1961. His eldest daughter, Laura Shepard Churchley, took along a tiny piece of his Freedom 7 capsule as well as mementos from his Apollo 14 moonshot and golf balls in honor of her dad, who smacked some on the lunar surface.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Bezos — who saw the six off from the launch and landing complex near Van Horn — named his company’s New Shepard rocket after him.

Strahan packed his Super Bowl ring and his newly retired No. 92 jersey for the ride. Bezos also put a football aboard that will go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

This is Blue Origin’s third passenger flight. Bezos, who founded Amazon six years before Blue Origin, was on the debut launch in July. The second, in October, included actor William Shatner — Captain James Kirk of TV’s original “Star Trek.”

The reusable, automated capsule was especially crowded this time. Instead of four, there were six flying.

Blue Origin originally targeted Thursday for the launch, but high wind forced a delay.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

When rain—not snow—fell on the highest point of Greenland’s ice sheet this August for the first time in recorded history, it was considered a worrying anomaly related to the regions’ changing climate. Now, a new study led by Canada’s University of Manitoba and co-authored by scientists at the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that it’s not an outlier but a harbinger of things to come. More rain than snow will start falling in the Arctic, according to the report which was published in the journal Nature Communications on Nov. 30, and the transition is likely to occur decades earlier than previously thought. Projections from the latest models show an anticipated steep increase in Arctic precipitation—mostly rain—starting as early as 2050, instead of 2070 as the original modeling showed. The shift is occurring due to rapid warming, sea ice loss, and changes in weather patterns caused by increasing global temperatures.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Some of the ramifications of increased rainfall are more obvious than others: in the Arctic, there will be a reduction in snow cover, increased permafrost melt and higher incidences of flooding in river basins. Long term, reduced snow cover contributes to the albedo effect, in which dark terrain absorbs more of the sun’s heat, further increasing warming via an ongoing feedback loop. Thawing permafrost releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas that also contributes to continued global warming in another feedback loop.

“The fact that we’re getting rainfall on the summit of Greenland right now, and that we’re maybe going to get more rainfall into the future—it kind of staggers me,” says lead researcher Michelle McCrystall, a postdoctoral fellow in University of Manitoba’s Centre for Earth Observation Science. “If we continue the trajectory, a lot of issues might happen even faster than what we’ve projected.”

Read more: Why a Warming Arctic Has the U.S. Coast Guard Worried About the Rest of the Country

Meanwhile, the report notes, increased rainfall affects soil moisture and groundwater, upsetting the underground fungal networks that support arctic flora as well as the animals, like wild caribou, reindeer, and muskoxen, that depend upon it for survival in harsh winter conditions. Lichen, for example, can feed grazing animals all winter long when grasses are hard to find, but it depends on a delicate ecosystem easily disrupted by excess moisture. Rain in cold conditions could be equally devastating if it freezes into layers of ice and prevents animals from foraging for food. “The issue facing us today is that the Arctic is changing so fast that Arctic wildlife might not be able to adapt,” said Mark Serreze, co-author of the study and director of the NSIDC. “It’s not just a problem for the reindeer, caribou and musk ox, but for the people of the north that depend on them as well.”

Of course, there is an alternative to the nightmare scenario of a North Pole without reindeer. The paper’s research team notes that if we can keep the planet from warming more than 1.5°C since pre-industrial levels, we have a chance of keeping the rain at bay. But current policies presently in place around the world are projected to result in about 2.7 degrees of warming, according to the Carbon Action Tracker. “The new models couldn’t be clearer,” says co-author professor James Screen of the department of mathematics and Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. “Unless global warming is stopped, the future Arctic will be wetter; once-frozen seas will be open water, rain will replace snow.” And the Arctic as we know it will never be the same again.

BERLIN — Scientists from the United States and Europe announced plans Tuesday to create the biggest map of underground fungal networks, arguing they are an important but overlooked piece in the puzzle of how to tackle climate change.

By working with local communities around the world the researchers said they will collect 10,000 DNA samples to determine how the vast networks that fungi create in the soil are changing as a result of human activity — including global warming.

“Fungi are invisible ecosystem engineers, and their loss has gone largely unnoticed by the public,” said Toby Kiers, a professor of evolutionary biology at Amsterdam’s Free University and co-founder of the non-profit Society for the Protection of Underground Networks that’s spearheading the effort.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“New research and climate models are providing irrefutable evidence that the Earth’s survival is linked to the underground,” she said.

Experts agree that tracking how fungal networks, also known as mycelia, are affected by climate change is important for protecting them — and ensure they can contribute to nature’s own mechanisms for removing carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, from the air.

Fungi can do this by providing nutrients that allow plants to grow faster, for example, or by storing carbon in the trillions of miles of root-like mass they themselves weave underground.

But Karina Engelbrecht Clemmensen, a fungal expert at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences not involved in the project, caution that while having better fungi maps would be useful for future conservation efforts, it was unclear how the researchers planned to go about that vast challenge.

“This is not trivial on a global scale,” she said.

Clemmensen and others also noted that many fungi don’t provide any benefits to plants or grow as underground networks, yet their role in climate change also merits investigation.

Some fungi actually produce carbon dioxide as they break down organic matter for food — potentially contributing to global warming if they release more CO2 into the atmosphere than they capture.

“When you talk about carbon cycles you really want to start thinking carefully about decomposers,” said Anne Pringle, a professor of botany and bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “A massive and coordinated effort to collect biodiversity data on a global scale is badly needed and will be very welcome”, she added, saying “there are good reasons to include all kinds of fungi in that effort.”

The impact that a hotter planet will have on the spread of harmful species likewise needs to be considered.

“When you’re talking about food security in a changing climate, you really want to think about fungal diseases and how they might become more or less prevalent on the planet,” said Pringle, who isn’t involved with the new project.

Kiers said the group, whose efforts are supported by a $3.5 million donation from the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, chose to focus its mapping project on mycorrhizal fungal networks because of the crucial symbiotic relationship they have with plants.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A panel of U.S. health advisers on Tuesday narrowly backed a closely watched COVID-19 pill from Merck, setting the stage for a likely authorization of the first drug that Americans could take at home to treat the coronavirus.

A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel voted 13-10 that the drug’s benefits outweigh its risks, including potential birth defects if used during pregnancy. The recommendation came after hours of debate about the drug’s modest benefits and potential safety issues. Experts backing the treatment stressed that it should not be used by anyone who is pregnant and called on FDA to recommend extra precautions before the drug is prescribed, including pregnancy tests for women of child-bearing age.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The vote specifically backed the drug for adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who face the greatest risks, including older people and those with conditions like obesity and asthma. Most experts also said the drug shouldn’t be used in vaccinated patients, who weren’t part of the study and haven’t been shown to benefit. The FDA isn’t bound by the panel’s recommendation and is expected to make its own decision before year’s end. The pill is already authorized in the U.K.

The drug, molnupiravir, could provide a much-needed weapon against the virus as colder weather pushes case counts higher and U.S. officials brace for the arrival of the new omicron variant. Merck hasn’t specifically tested its drug against the new variant but said it should have some potency based on its effectiveness against other strains of coronavirus. But that uncertainty frustrated many panelists as they grappled with whether to back the treatment for millions of Americans.

“With no data saying it works with new variants I really think we need to be careful about saying that this is the way to go,” said Dr. David Hardy of Charles Drew University School of Medicine and Science, who ultimately voted to back the drug.

The panel’s narrow-but-positive recommendation came despite new data from Merck that paint a less compelling picture of the drug’s effectiveness than just a few weeks earlier. Last week, Merck said final study results showed molnupiravir reduced hospitalization and death by 30% among adults infected with the coronavirus, when compared with adults taking a placebo. That effect was significantly less than the 50% reduction it first announced based on incomplete results.

That smaller-than-expected benefit amplified experts’ concerns about the drug’s toxicity for fetuses. FDA scientists told the panelists earlier Tuesday that company studies in rats showed the drug caused toxicity and birth defects when given at very high doses. Taken together, FDA staffers concluded the data “suggest that molnupiravir may cause fetal harm when administered to pregnant individuals.”

FDA is weighing a blanket restriction against any use in pregnant women or allowing it in rare cases. Some panelists said the option should be left open for pregnant mothers who have high-risk COVID-19 and may have few other treatment options. Dr. Janet Cragan, who backed the drug, said that even with tight restrictions some pregnant women would inevitably take the drug. “I don’t think you can ethically tell a woman with COVID-19 that she can’t have the drug if she’s decided that’s what she needs,” a panel member and staffer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I think the final decision has to come down to the individual woman and her provider.”

Merck’s drug uses a novel approach to fight COVID-19: It inserts tiny errors into the coronavirus’ genetic code to stop it from reproducing. That genetic effect has raised concerns that the drug could spur more virulent strains of the virus. But FDA regulators said Tuesday that risk is theoretical and seems unlikely.

While Merck and its partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics were the first to submit their COVID-19 pill to the FDA, rival drugmaker Pfizer is close behind with its own pill under review. Pfizer’s drug is part of a decades-old family of antiviral pills known as protease inhibitors, a standard treatment for HIV and hepatitis C. They work differently than Merck’s pill and haven’t been linked to the kind of mutation concerns raised with Merck’s drug.

Pfizer said this week that its drug shouldn’t be affected by the omicron variant’s mutations. The U.S. government has agreed to purchase 10 million treatment courses of Pfizer’s drug, if it’s authorized. That’s more than three times the government’s purchase agreement with Merck for 3.1 million courses of molnupiravir. Both drugs require patients to take multiple pills, twice a day for five days.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

(LOS ANGELES) — NASA launched a spacecraft Tuesday night on a mission to smash into an asteroid and test whether it would be possible to knock a speeding space rock off course if one were to threaten Earth.

The DART spacecraft, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a $330 million project with echoes of the Bruce Willis movie “Armageddon.”

If all goes well, the boxy, 1,200-pound (540-kilogram) craft will slam head-on into Dimorphos, an asteroid 525 feet (160 meters) across, at 15,000 mph (24,139 kph) next September.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“This isn’t going to destroy the asteroid. It’s just going to give it a small nudge,” said mission official Nancy Chabot of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the project.

Read more: Earth Has a Second Moon—For Another 300 Years, At Least

Dimorphos orbits a much larger asteroid called Didymos. The pair are no danger to Earth but offer scientists a better way to measure the effectiveness of a collision than a single asteroid flying through space.

Dimorphos completes one orbit of Didymos every 11 hours, 55 minutes. DART’s goal is a crash that will slow Dimorphos down and cause it to fall closer toward the bigger asteroid, shaving 10 minutes off its orbit.

The change in the orbital period will be measured by telescopes on Earth. The minimum change for the mission to be considered a success is 73 seconds.

The DART technique could prove useful for altering the course of an asteroid years or decades before it bears down on Earth with the potential for catastrophe.

A small nudge “would add up to a big change in its future position, and then the asteroid and the Earth wouldn’t be on a collision course,” Chabot said.

Scientists constantly search for asteroids and plot their courses to determine whether they could hit the planet.

“Although there isn’t a currently known asteroid that’s on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,” said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA. “The key to planetary defense is finding them well before they are an impact threat.”

Read more: A Comet May Have Exploded Over Chile 12,000 Years Ago—and it Could Happen Again

DART will take 10 months to reach the asteroid pair. The collision will occur about 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth.

Ten days beforehand, DART will release a tiny observation spacecraft supplied by the Italian space agency that will follow it.

DART will stream video until it is destroyed on impact. Three minutes later, the trailing craft will make images of the impact site and material that is ejected.

As you tuck into your Thanksgiving dinner, the kick-off event (at least for Americans) of the holiday season, spare a thought for the planet’s carbon waistline.

Food production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for more than a third of emissions worldwide — and a new study has given fresh insight into how small changes in the diet can have a big impact on food-related emissions. And even if it doesn’t inspire you to forgo the turkey and trimmings, it serves as a good reminder that a post-holiday pause on overindulgence might be just the kind of thanks Mother Earth might appreciate most, not to mention your own body’s health.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Research published in the scientific journal PLOS One found that diets limiting meat, dairy and processed food were not only good for health, but for the planet as well. Previous studies only looked at broad food groups, but this one assessed the greenhouse gas emissions of 3,233 different foods consumed by a cohort of 212 adult volunteers in the U.K. over three 24-hour periods.

The report found that people whose intake of saturated fats, carbohydrates, and sodium met levels recommended by the World Health Organization had lower greenhouse gas emissions than people who exceeded recommended levels of those nutrients.

Meat, unsurprisingly, was the biggest health and climate culprit. Meat eaters’ diets clocked 59% higher emissions compared to vegetarians, and men’s diets overall contributed 41% higher emissions than women’s, largely because of their greater meat intake.

Read more: Counting Your Carbon Footprint One Meal at a Time

But before you skip the turkey in favor of pie, the report’s authors note that desserts don’t get a free pass either. “It’s not that confectionery is any worse than other dietary components, it’s that we eat so much of it that it all adds up to a high impact,” says the report’s lead author Darren Greenwood at the University of Leeds’ School of Medicine in the U.K. “Whilst other foods, like vegetables, contribute to a healthy balanced diet, sweets have very little nutritional benefit. So it is an unnecessary impact on the environment.”

The report’s findings support a focus on plant-based foods, both for personal decisions on diet and nutrition, and for public policy. But that doesn’t mean a plate of Brussels sprouts for Christmas dinner. It’s about being more thoughtful in your food choices, and conscious of how they are consumed, says Greenwood. “We can all do our bit by buying local produce, grown in season. Maybe this year buy less, but better quality, food. Don’t cook more than you’ll eat and try not to waste any leftovers. That way we can enjoy the holiday and treat ourselves—think of it as a gift to our children for the future.”

They will thank you for it. Eventually.

One of my favorite bar signs is the one that promises “Free beer tomorrow.” That’s how I’ve always thought of nuclear fusion—a (theoretically) cheap, pollution-free and inexhaustible energy source, the promise of which has pretty much been a decade away ever since the technology was first tested 70 years ago.

When “nuclear energy” is discussed, it’s almost always in reference to nuclear fission, which generates energy by splitting atoms—and is the source of power for nuclear weapons and all of the nuclear generators in operation today.

Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, occurs when two positively charged nuclei merge. It’s the same kind of reaction that powers our sun—sparked by the star’s massive size, heat and gravitational fields. To recreate that reaction on earth requires heating gasses to more than 100 million degrees Celsius and holding them in place with lasers or powerful magnets. That heat and compression overcomes the forces that would otherwise keep the positively-charged nuclei apart, and they fuse together. That fusion releases energy, and if maintained, the ongoing reaction creates more energy than it consumes.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate Is Everything newsletter. To sign up, click here.

Electricity generated through fusion has no emissions, minimal waste, and there is no risk of out-of-control meltdowns like Chernobyl. The fuel, derived from helium or hydrogen, is cheap and plentiful.

That’s the theory.

In practice, no one really knows. Forcing two nuclei to merge takes enormous amounts of heat and energy, and in the rare instances where it has worked, the energy produced has more often than not been less than the amount required to launch, and maintain, the fusion action in the first place. In order to generate power, the reaction would need to be self-perpetuating. For the scientists pursuing the atomic equivalent of tomorrow’s free beer, launching a self-sustaining fusion reaction is still tantalizingly out of reach.

But it is getting closer.

New advances in 3D printing (necessary for manufacturing equipment with hollow cavities), supercomputing (to calculate mass and energy), and material sciences (super thin, super-powerful magnetic tape) have led to a number of essential breakthroughs in recent months. In August, scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory set a record for nuclear fusion energy production, even if the blast lasted a fraction of a second. Meanwhile, the mounting urgency of the climate crisis, which is caused by fossil fuel emissions, has sparked investor interest in green alternatives. On Nov. 5, fusion start-up Helion Energy announced that it had raised $500 million in its most recent fundraising round, the largest ever for a private fusion firm. The company expects to achieve net positive electrical generation by 2024. “Modern advancements in electronics enable us to do fusion decades sooner than previously imagined,” David Kirtley, the CEO and founder of Helion Energy said in an email.

Read More: A New Generation of Nuclear Reactors Could Hold the Key to a Green Future

All told, some 35 fusion-focused start-ups have raised nearly $2 billion in private investments, according to the 2021 Global Fusion Industry Survey, published jointly by the U.K. Atomic Energy Agency and the Fusion Industry Association.

“Fusion was always 10 years to forever away. It was about science; it was about research,” says Jane Hotchkiss, a 30-year veteran of the renewable energy industry, who now heads up Energy for the Common Good, an NGO that advocates for the development and use of fusion technology as a clean energy solution. “Now that we have a new generation of commercially focused physicists and engineers racing to put it into practical use, there is hope for the future.”

Unlike solar or wind power, which require both battery backup and electrical grid adaptations to account for variations in energy supply (think cloudy/windless days), fusion power plants could be easily swapped in for existing coal- or gas-burning plants with little adjustment to the larger grid, because they can run continuously. The immense power generated could also be used to produce green hydrogen, an emissions-free, energy-dense fuel that could help decarbonize shipping, aviation and transport.

Read More: Planes, Trains and Automobiles Are Cutting Emissions. Will Big Ships Do It Too?

The problem is the distance between what it could do, and what it is currently doing— which is mostly making promises about what will happen tomorrow.

The technological challenges of creating what is essentially a sun in a bottle still requires major investment, beyond even what venture capitalists are willing to commit, says Hotchkiss. “Fusion is the planet’s moon shot to climate change solutions. We have to stop treating it like a scientific research project and treat it like a future commercial product.” That means government buy-in as well.

That is starting to happen: The U.K. government has already invested $250 million in a fusion reactor that it hopes will start generating power by 2040. And ITER, a $25 billion multinational fusion project in France, is due to begin operations in 2025. Meanwhile, the U.N. climate conference in Glasgow earlier this month served as a kind of coming out party for fusion: for the first time, the technology was granted center stage at a roundtable discussion held on the last day, and a fusion exhibit at the Glasgow Science Center invited non-delegates to learn more.

Attention couldn’t be coming soon enough, says Hotchkiss. According to the International Energy Agency, the projected energy produced by renewables in 2022 is only enough to meet half of global demand. The rest will have to be met by traditional fossil fuel sources. “It’s time to take fusion seriously. It offers too many solutions for what is wrong with energy today.” That free beer is meeting its due date.