TIME - Science

mRNA Technology Gave Us the First COVID-19 Vaccines. It Could Also Upend the Drug Industry

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 10:10:41 GMT

“No!” The doctor snapped. “Look at me!”

I had been staring her in the eyes, as she had ordered, but when a doctor on my other side began jabbing me with a needle, I started to turn my head. “Don’t look at it,” the first doctor said. I obeyed.

This was in early August in New Orleans, where I had signed up to be a participant in the clinical trial for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. It was a blind study, which meant I was not supposed to know whether I had gotten the placebo or the real vaccine. I asked the doctor if I would really been able to tell by looking at the syringe. “Probably not,” she answered, “but we want to be careful. This is very important to get right.”

I became a vaccine guinea pig because, in addition to wanting to be useful, I had a deep interest in the wondrous new roles now being played by RNA, the genetic material that is at the heart of new types of vaccines, cancer treatments and gene-editing tools. I was writing a book on the Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna. She was a pioneer in determining the structure of RNA, which helped her and her doctoral adviser figure out how it could be the origin of all life on this planet. Then she and a colleague invented an RNA-guided gene-editing tool, which won them the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The tool is based on a system that bacteria use to fight viruses. Bacteria develop clustered repeated sequences in their DNA, known as CRISPRs, that can remember dangerous viruses and then deploy RNA-guided scissors to destroy them. In other words, it’s an immune system that can adapt itself to fight each new wave of viruses—just what we humans need. Now, with the recently approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and a similar one from Moderna being slowly rolled out across the U.S. and Europe, RNA has been deployed to make a whole new type of vaccine that will, when it reaches enough people, change the course of the pandemic.

Dina Litovsky—Redux for TIME Drs. Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, Co-founders, BioNTech. In January 2020, before many in the Western world were paying attention to a new virus spreading in China, Dr. Ugur Sahin was convinced it would spur a pandemic. Sahin, who in 2008 co-founded the German biotech company BioNTech with his wife Dr. Ozlem Tureci, went to work on a vaccine and by March called his contact at Pfizer, a much larger pharmaceutical company with which BioNTech had previously worked on an influenza vaccine using mRNA. Less than a year later, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine became the first ever mRNA vaccine available for widespread use. Even so, Sahin, BioNTech’s CEO, and Tureci, its chief medical officer, maintain that BioNTech is not an mRNA company but rather an immunotherapy company. Much of the couple’s work—both at BioNTech and at their previous venture, Ganymed—has focused on treating cancer. But it is mRNA, and the COVID-19 vaccine made possible by the technology, that has pushed the famously hardworking couple into the limelight—and helped them become one of the richest pairs in Germany, though they reportedly still bicycle to work and live in a modest apartment near their office.

Up until last year, vaccines had not changed very much, at least in concept, for more than two centuries. Most have been modeled on the discovery made in 1796 by the English doctor Edward Jenner, who noticed that many milkmaids were immune to smallpox. They had all been infected by a form of pox that afflicts cows but is relatively harmless to humans, and Jenner surmised that the cowpox had given them immunity to smallpox. So he took some pus from a cowpox blister, rubbed it into scratches he made in the arm of his gardener’s 8-year-old son and then (this was in the days before bioethics panels) exposed the kid to smallpox. He didn’t become ill.

Before then, inoculations were done by giving patients a small dose of the actual smallpox virus, hoping that they would get a mild case and then be immune. Jenner’s great advance was to use a related but relatively harmless virus. Ever since, vaccinations have been based on the idea of exposing a patient to a safe facsimile of a dangerous virus or other germ. This is intended to kick the person’s adaptive immune system into gear. When it works, the body produces antibodies that will, sometimes for many years, fend off any infection if the real germ attacks.

One approach is to inject a safely weakened version of the virus. These can be good teachers, because they look very much like the real thing. The body responds by making antibodies for fighting them, and the immunity can last a lifetime. Albert Sabin used this approach for the oral polio vaccine in the 1950s, and that’s the way we now fend off measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox.

At the same time Sabin was trying to develop a vaccine based on a weakened polio virus, Jonas Salk succeeded with a safer approach: using a killed or inactivated virus. This type of vaccine can still teach a person’s immune system how to fight off the live virus but is less likely to cause serious side effects. Two Chinese companies, Sinopharm and Sinovac, have used this approach to develop vaccines for COVID-19 that are now in limited use in China, the UAE and Indonesia.

Another traditional approach is to inject a subunit of the virus, such as one of the proteins that are on the virus’s coat. The immune system will then remember these, allowing the body to mount a quick and robust response when it encounters the actual virus. The vaccine against the hepatitis B virus, for example, works this way. Using only a fragment of the virus means that they are safer to inject into a patient and easier to produce, but they are often not as good at producing long-term immunity. The Maryland-based biotech Novavax is in late-stage clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine using this approach, and it is the basis for one of the two vaccines already being rolled out in Russia.

The plague year of 2020 will be remembered as the time when these traditional vaccines were supplanted by something fundamentally new: genetic vaccines, which deliver a gene or piece of genetic code into human cells. The genetic instructions then cause the cells to produce, on their own, safe components of the target virus in order to stimulate the patient’s immune system.

For SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—the target component is its spike protein, which studs the outer envelope of the virus and enables it to infiltrate human cells. One method for doing this is by inserting the desired gene, using a technique known as recombinant DNA, into a harmless virus that can deliver the gene into human cells. To make a COVID vaccine, a gene that contains instructions for building part of a coronavirus spike protein is edited into the DNA of a weakened virus like an adenovirus, which can cause the common cold. The idea is that the re-engineered adenovirus will worm its way into human cells, where the new gene will cause the cells to make lots of these spike proteins. As a result, the person’s immune system will be primed to respond rapidly if the real coronavirus strikes.

This approach led to one of the earliest COVID vaccine candidates, developed at the aptly named Jenner Institute of the University of Oxford. Scientists there engineered the spike-protein gene into an adenovirus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees, but is relatively harmless in humans.

The lead researcher at Oxford is Sarah Gilbert. She worked on developing a vaccine for Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) using the same chimp adenovirus. That epidemic waned before her vaccine could be deployed, but it gave her a head start when COVID-19 struck. She already knew that the chimp adenovirus had successfully delivered into humans the gene for the spike protein of MERS. As soon as the Chinese published the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus in January 2020, she began engineering its spike-protein gene into the chimp virus, waking each day at 4 a.m.

Her 21-year-old triplets, all of whom were studying biochemistry, volunteered to be early testers, getting the vaccine and seeing if they developed the desired antibodies. (They did.) Trials in monkeys conducted at a Montana primate center in March also produced promising results.

Bill Gates, whose foundation provided much of the funding, pushed Oxford to team up with a major company that could test, manufacture and distribute the vaccine. So Oxford forged a partnership with AstraZeneca, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company. Unfortunately, the clinical trials turned out to be sloppy, with the wrong doses given to some participants, which led to delays. Britain authorized it for emergency use at the end of December, and the U.S. is likely to do so in the next two months.

Johnson & Johnson is testing a similar vaccine that uses a human adenovirus, rather than a chimpanzee one, as the delivery mechanism to carry a gene that codes for making part of the spike protein. It’s a method that has shown promise in the past, but it could have the disadvantage that humans who have already been exposed to that adenovirus may have some immunity to it. Results from its clinical trial are expected later this month.

In addition, two other vaccines based on genetically engineered adenoviruses are now in limited distribution: one made by CanSino Biologics and being used on the military in China and another named Sputnik V from the Russian ministry of health.

There is another way to get genetic material into a human cell and cause it to produce the components of a dangerous virus, such as the spike proteins, that can stimulate the immune system. Instead of engineering the gene for the component into an adenovirus, you can simply inject the genetic code for the component into humans as DNA or RNA.

Let’s start with DNA vaccines. Researchers at Inovio Pharmaceuticals and a handful of other companies in 2020 created a little circle of DNA that coded for parts of the coronavirus spike protein. The idea was that if it could get inside the nucleus of a cell, the DNA could very efficiently churn out instructions for the production of the spike-protein parts, which serve to train the immune system to react to the real thing.

The big challenge facing a DNA vaccine is delivery. How can you get the little ring of DNA not only into a human cell but into the nucleus of the cell? Injecting a lot of the DNA vaccine into a patient’s arm will cause some of the DNA to get into cells, but it’s not very efficient.

Some of the developers of DNA vaccines, including Inovio, tried to facilitate the delivery into human cells through a method called electroporation, which delivers electrical shock pulses to the patient at the site of the injection. That opens pores in the cell membranes and allows the DNA to get in. The electric pulse guns have lots of tiny needles and are unnerving to behold. It’s not hard to see why this technique is unpopular, especially with those on the receiving end. So far, no easy and reliable delivery mechanism has been developed for getting DNA vaccines into the nucleus of human cells.

That leads us to the molecule that has proven victorious in the COVID vaccine race and deserves the title of TIME magazine’s Molecule of the Year: RNA. Its sibling DNA is more famous. But like many famous siblings, DNA doesn’t do much work. It mainly stays bunkered down in the nucleus of our cells, protecting the information it encodes. RNA, on the other hand, actually goes out and gets things done. The genes encoded by our DNA are transcribed into snippets of RNA that venture out from the nucleus of our cells into the protein-manufacturing region. There, this messenger RNA (mRNA) oversees the assembly of the specified protein. In other words, instead of just sitting at home curating information, it makes real products.

Scientists including Sydney Brenner at Cambridge and James Watson at Harvard first identified and isolated mRNA molecules in 1961. But it was hard to harness them to do our bidding, because the body’s immune system often destroyed the mRNA that researchers engineered and attempted to introduce into the body. Then in 2005, a pair of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, showed how to tweak a synthetic mRNA molecule so it could get into human cells without being attacked by the body’s immune system.

Cody O’Loughlin—The New York Times/ReduxStéphane Bancel, CEO, Moderna. Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was first tested in humans less than three months after news of the novel virus broke. But that lightning-fast development process belies the years of work that got Moderna to where it is today. The startup was founded in 2010 with the belief that mRNA technology, then still fairly new, could help treat any number of ailments. CEO Stéphane Bancel, pictured above, joined a year later. Moderna wasn’t originally focused on vaccines, but over time, its scientists began working toward vaccines against several infectious diseases as well as some forms of cancer. That experience came in handy when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, leaving the world clamoring for a vaccine that could fight the deadly virus—and fast. Bancel’s company took the challenge in stride, using its mRNA platform to develop a vaccine around 95% effective at protecting against COVID-19 disease in less than a year.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit a year ago, two innovative young pharmaceutical companies decided to try to harness this role played by messenger RNA: the German company BioNTech, which formed a partnership with the U.S. company Pfizer; and Moderna, based in Cambridge, Mass. Their mission was to engineer messenger RNA carrying the code letters to make part of the coronavirus spike protein—a string that begins CCUCGGCGGGCA … —and to deploy it in human cells.

BioNTech was founded in 2008 by the husband-and-wife team of Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, who met when they were training to be doctors in Germany in the early 1990s. Both were from Turkish immigrant families, and they shared a passion for medical research, so much so that they spent part of their wedding day working in the lab. They founded BioNTech with the goal of creating therapies that stimulate the immune system to fight cancerous cells. It also soon became a leader in devising medicines that use mRNA in vaccines against viruses.

In January 2020, Sahin read an article in the medical journal Lancet about a new coronavirus in China. After discussing it with his wife over breakfast, he sent an email to the other members of the BioNTech board saying that it was wrong to believe that this virus would come and go as easily as MERS and SARS. “This time it is different,” he told them.

BioNTech launched a crash project to devise a vaccine based on RNA sequences, which Sahin was able to write within days, that would cause human cells to make versions of the coronavirus’s spike protein. Once it looked promising, Sahin called Kathrin Jansen, the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer. The two companies had been working together since 2018 to develop flu vaccines using mRNA technology, and he asked her whether Pfizer would want to enter a similar partnership for a COVID vaccine. “I was just about to call you and propose the same thing,” Jansen replied. The deal was signed in March.

By then, a similar mRNA vaccine was being developed by Moderna, a much smaller company with only 800 employees. Its chair and co-founder, Noubar Afeyan, a Beirut-born Armenian who immigrated to the U.S., had become fascinated by mRNA in 2010, when he heard a pitch from a group of Harvard and MIT researchers. Together they formed Moderna, which initially focused on using mRNA to try to develop personalized cancer treatments, but soon began experimenting with using the technique to make vaccines against viruses.

In January 2020, Afeyan took one of his daughters to a restaurant near his office in Cambridge to celebrate her birthday. In the middle of the meal, he got an urgent text message from the CEO of his company, Stéphane Bancel, in Switzerland. So he rushed outside in the freezing temperature, forgetting to grab his coat, to call him back.

Bancel said that he wanted to launch a project to use mRNA to attempt a vaccine against the new coronavirus. At that point, Moderna had more than 20 drugs in development but none had even reached the final stage of clinical trials. Nevertheless, Afeyan instantly authorized him to start work. “Don’t worry about the board,” he said. “Just get moving.” Lacking Pfizer’s resources, Moderna had to depend on funding from the U.S. government. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was supportive. “Go for it,” he declared. “Whatever it costs, don’t worry about it.”

It took Bancel and his Moderna team only two days to create the RNA sequences that would produce the spike protein, and 41 days later, it shipped the first box of vials to the National Institutes of Health to begin early trials. Afeyan keeps a picture of that box on his cell phone.

An mRNA vaccine has certain advantages over a DNA vaccine, which has to use a re-engineered virus or other delivery mechanism to make it through the membrane that protects the nucleus of a cell. The RNA does not need to get into the nucleus. It simply needs to be delivered into the more-accessible outer region of cells, the cytoplasm, which is where proteins are constructed.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines do so by encapsulating the mRNA in tiny oily capsules, known as lipid nanoparticles. Moderna had been working for 10 years to improve its nanoparticles. This gave it one advantage over Pfizer-BioNTech: its particles were more stable and did not have to be stored at extremely low temperatures.

Dina Litovsky—Redux for TIMEKatalin Kariko, Senior vice president, BioNTech. In 1995, after years of struggle, Hungarian-born Katalin Kariko was pushed off the path to full professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work on mRNA, molecules she believed could fundamentally change the way humans treat disease, had stalled. Then, in 1997, she met and began working with immunologist Drew Weissman. In 2005, they published a study describing a modified form of artificial mRNA—a discovery, they argued, that opened the door to mRNA’s use in vaccines and other therapies. Eventually, Kariko and Weissman licensed their technology to the German company BioNTech, where Kariko, shown here in a portrait shot by a photographer working remotely, is now a senior vice president. Her patience paid off this year. The mRNA-based Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, which Kariko helped develop, has been shown to be 95% effective at preventing COVID-19.

By November, the results of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna late-stage trials came back with resounding findings: both vaccines were more than 90% effective. A few weeks later, with COVID-19 once again surging throughout much of the world, they received emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and became the vanguard of the biotech effort to beat back the pandemic.

The ability to code messenger RNA to do our bidding will transform medicine. As with the COVID vaccines, we can instruct mRNA to cause our cells to make antigens—molecules that stimulate our immune system—that could protect us against many viruses, bacteria, or other pathogens that cause infectious disease. In addition, mRNA could in the future be used, as BioNTech and Moderna are pioneering, to fight cancer. Harnessing a process called immunotherapy, the mRNA can be coded to produce molecules that will cause the body’s immune system to identify and kill cancer cells.

RNA can also be engineered, as Jennifer Doudna and others discovered, to target genes for editing. Using the CRISPR system adapted from bacteria, RNA can guide scissors-like enzymes to specific sequences of DNA in order to eliminate or edit a gene. This technique has already been used in trials to cure sickle cell anemia. Now it is also being used in the war against COVID. Doudna and others have created RNA-guided enzymes that can directly detect SARS-CoV-2 and eventually could be used to destroy it.

More controversially, CRISPR could be used to create “designer babies” with inheritable genetic changes. In 2018, a young Chinese doctor used CRISPR to engineer twin girls so they did not have the receptor for the virus that causes AIDS. There was an immediate outburst of awe and then shock. The doctor was denounced, and there were calls for an international moratorium on inheritable gene edits. But in the wake of the pandemic, RNA-guided genetic editing to make our species less receptive to viruses may someday begin to seem more acceptable.

Throughout human history, we have been subjected to wave after wave of viral and bacterial plagues. One of the earliest known was the Babylon flu epidemic around 1200 B.C. The plague of Athens in 429 B.C. killed close to 100,000 people, the Antonine plague in the 2nd century killed 5 million, the plague of Justinian in the 6th century killed 50 million, and the Black Death of the 14th century took almost 200 million lives, close to half of Europe’s population.

The COVID-19 pandemic that killed more than 1.8 million people in 2020 will not be the final plague. However, thanks to the new RNA technology, our defenses against most future plagues are likely to be immensely faster and more effective. As new viruses come along, or as the current coronavirus mutates, researchers can quickly recode a vaccine’s mRNA to target the new threats. “It was a bad day for viruses,” Moderna’s chair Afeyan says about the Sunday when he got the first word of his company’s clinical trial results. “There was a sudden shift in the evolutionary balance between what human technology can do and what viruses can do. We may never have a pandemic again.”

The invention of easily reprogrammable RNA vaccines was a lightning-fast triumph of human ingenuity, but it was based on decades of curiosity-driven research into one of the most fundamental aspects of life on planet earth: how genes are transcribed into RNA that tell cells what proteins to assemble. Likewise, CRISPR gene-editing technology came from understanding the way that bacteria use snippets of RNA to guide enzymes to destroy viruses. Great inventions come from understanding basic science. Nature is beautiful that way.

Isaacson, a former editor of TIME, is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, to be published in March. After the Pfizer vaccine was approved, he opted to remain in the clinical trial and has not yet been “unblinded.”

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

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 10:00:00 GMT

There are very few things that Ángel León hasn’t done with the fruits of the sea.

In 2008, as a young, unknown chef, he took a loin from one fish and attached it to the loin of another, using collagen to bind the two proteins together. He called them hybrids and served them to unsuspecting diners at Aponiente, his restaurant in the southern Spanish port town of El Puerto de Santa María, just across the bay from Cádiz. He discovered that fish eyes, cooked at 55°C in a thermal circulator until the gelatin collapsed, made excellent thickening agents for umami-rich sauces. Next he found that micro-algae could sequester the impurities of cloudy kitchen stocks the same way an egg white does in classical French cooking. In the years since, León has used sea bass to make mortadella; mussels to make blood sausage; moray eel skin to mimic crispy pigskins; boiled hake to fashion fettuccine noodles; and various parts of a tuna’s head to create a towering, gelatinous, fall-apart osso buco.

It is these creations, and the relentless curiosity behind them, that have helped turn León into one of most influential chefs in the world. The Spaniards call him the Chef del Mar, a man singularly dedicated to the sea and its bounty. But Aponiente isn’t anything like other gilded seafood temples around the world. You won’t find Norwegian lobster there. Or Scottish langoustines. Or Hokkaido uni. In fact, unless you’re an Andalusian fisherman it’s unlikely you’ll know most of the species León serves to his guests.

That’s because León isn’t interested in plucking from the sea its most celebrated creatures. He wants to go deeper to find something you didn’t know existed: “What’s more hedonistic, eating something no one on the face of the earth has ever tried, or eating another f-cking spoon of caviar?” Jellyfish, sea worms, a bounty of sea “vegetables” foraged from the ocean floor: all have found their way onto his menu.

But for León, hedonism is beside the point. Everything that he does communicates an unshakable -commitment to honoring the ocean. He thinks about the sea the way a physicist or an astronomer thinks about the sky: as an infinitely discoverable space, where the right mix of curiosity and discipline can yield solutions to some of the most pressing problems of the 21st century. In his wide-eyed enthusiasm and boyish curiosity and fierce marine mania, he comes across as a mixture of Captain Nemo and Willy Wonka.

Follow León long enough, and you’ll learn that his venture ever deeper into the abyss isn’t a gastro free-for-all but part of a very specific dream that’s been taking shape in his head for years. A dream that extends well beyond the walls of his restaurant and into the coastal plains of Cádiz. In this dream, he sees men with long wooden brooms scraping the surface of the marshes, piling up coarse salt crystals in little white hills that shimmer in the Andalusian sun. He sees the region’s vast network of estuaries overflowing with flora and fauna—tiny, candy-sweet white shrimp, edible seaweeds like marine mesclun mix, sea bream and mackerel in dense silver schools. He sees a series of mills, stone-built and sea-powered, grinding through grains for the region’s daily bread. A wind-swept, sun-kissed saltwater economy, like the one that once made Cádiz a center of the world.

Founded by the Phoenicians in 1100 B.C., Cádiz is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in -Europe. Over the course of three millennia, many of the world’s greatest empires have settled here, attracted by the strategic location: a narrow appendage of land at the edge of the Iberian Peninsula, just beyond the mouth of the Mediterranean. The Romans, Visigoths and Muslims all had their Cádiz years, -fueling their empires with the wealth of this teeming water world. But it wasn’t until the Age of Exploration, when the city served as the launchpad for Spain’s greatest ambitions, including the second and fourth voyages of Columbus to the -Americas, that Cádiz became one of Spain’s wealthiest cities.

Those days have long passed. After Spain lost its American colonies in the 19th century, Cádiz never recovered. Today, it has the highest rate of unemployment of any region in Western Europe. León wants to fix that, to help rebuild the robust sea economy that defined Cádiz’s most storied years. His career has been a slow, steady fight to do just that.

Juan Martín, center, of Aponiente works on the seagrass fields planted near León’s restaurant

But now, he believes he’s discovered the centerpiece of his ambitious dream: fields of rice stretched out for miles of paddies, the feathery stalks -protruding from the sea itself. Scientists have long identified seagrasses as one of the most vital ecosystems in the fight against climate change, but what few knew is that those blades of grass also contain clusters of small, edible grains with massive potential. Of all the dreams León has chased in this quiet corner of southern Spain, this is the one he plans to build his future around. This, more than the Franken-fish or mussel sausage, is the one that could help rebuild his beloved region and, with any luck, even change the way we feed the world.

“The sea saved me,” León told me one morning in 2019 aboard his 26-ft. fishing boat, Yodo. The sun had just peeked above the horizon as we made our way past the tip of Cádiz, its church spires and mosque domes casting a silhouette of the city’s multi-layered history.

“I was a terrible student. Couldn’t sit still, always in trouble,” he said. “But when my dad took me out here on his boat, everything changed.”

León was born and raised in Cádiz, along with two older sisters and his younger brother Carlos, who helps manage Aponiente. Their dad kept a small fishing boat, and after school and on weekends, he would take his two sons out fishing in the Bay of Cádiz. Ángel León Lara, a hematologist, had high expectations, and often clashed with his son over his terrestrial troubles. “But once we were out on the water, we weren’t father and son,” says León. “We were friends.”

His brother Carlos saw a different sibling out on the water: “The boat is where the barrier between father and son broke down. We’d smoke a joint, tell stories, things that friends did.” Ángel couldn’t sit still long enough to be in a classroom, Carlos told me, but he was captive to the sea. “Most kids are scared to touch creatures from the sea. But Ángel would smell them, touch them, rub their scales, poke their eyes.”

León’s success at sea only served to underscore his struggles on land. His hyperactivity made him a menace in the classroom; he went to five high schools and barely graduated. He enrolled in a hotel school in Seville, where he studied cooking for three years and began to find his footing on terra firma. In 1996, he moved to France to cook at Le Chapon Fin, a Bordeaux institution that opened in 1825.

León remained quiet as we passed fishing boats and jetties on the outskirts of Cádiz, an espresso pinched between his fingertips. Since those early days with his dad, he’s rarely missed a sunrise on the water. His first goal when he fires up Yodo is to get out—out of cell-phone range, out of reach of his restaurant team and his family. “The truth is,” he said, staring- at my notebook, “I like to come out here alone.”

When we hit the open seas, the spell of silence was broken. “Turn left and you hit the Mediterranean, turn right and you’re in the Atlantic,” said León. “Two totally different worlds.” This nexus of two great bodies of water, where two vastly different ecosystems mix into a special cocktail of ocean life, continues to be a chief source of inspiration for León.

León in the marine plankton lab with its director Carlos Unamunzaga, left

León turned on the fish tracker and showed me the schools of fish swimming some 20 m below us. He opened up the bait storage in the rear of the boat, grabbed a squid the size of his hand and worked it onto a giant hook. He rolled another cigarette, put it to his lips and sank into his chair.

“Some days I don’t even fish. I come out here to clear my head. I used to be a -psychopath—-I’d go way out into the ocean on my own. But now I have a family to think about.” León and his wife Marta, who runs the more casual Taberna del Chef del Mar down the road from Aponiente, have a 5-year-old boy, Ángel. “Easily the best dish I’ve ever helped create.”

France taught León discipline—how to clarify a stock, how to debone a quail, how to cook 14 hours a day without complaining. Afterward, he bounced around, cooking in Seville, Toledo, Buenos Aires, preparing to start his own venture.

Back then, El Bulli, on the coast of Catalonia, was known as the best restaurant in the world, and its virtuoso leader, Ferran Adrià, was busy rewriting the rules for fine dining. By the time El Bulli closed in 2011, a generation of disciples had dispersed across the country, spreading the gospel of technical, modernist cuisine that shaped Spain into the gastronomic center of the world for the first decade of the 21st century.

While León is one of the few prominent chefs in the country who did not emerge from the El Bulli system, he carries within him the restaurant’s most enduring legacy: the need to question all conventions. When he opened Aponiente in 2007, León set out to change the way people thought about the ocean. Not just through a radical reimagining of what to do with familiar fish, but by looking for ingredients nobody had ever tasted. He built his menu around pesca de descarte, trash fish: pandora, krill, sea bream, mackerel, moray eel. But in León’s mind, these are some of the most noble and delicious creatures in the sea. He did this as much for the culinary challenge as for a growing streak of environmentalism.

For the first three years, people stopped by, read the menus and turned around. They didn’t -understand what this strange restaurant was trying to do. León found himself teetering on the edge of ruin.

He remembers a talk with Adrià in those early years that helped him trudge on. “Nobody understands me,” he said to the famous chef. “Perfect,” said Adrià. “That’s because you’re pushing the vanguard.”

Nothing was biting aboard Yodo. We were waiting for the tidal bulge, that moment before the tide turns when gravity and inertia cancel each other out—eight minutes of equilibrium that, according to León, is when fish are most active: “If we’re going to catch anything today, it will be then.”

When it hit, León cast his rod off the back edge of the boat and set the line, then ran inside and used the radar to try to position the boat -directly in the middle of what looked like a smudge on the screen. “This is where the action is.”

We sat in silence, waiting for the action, but the action never came and slowly the boat began to be sucked back toward the coastline. The tide had turned.

In 2010, after years of serving just a handful of guests a day, Aponiente won its first Michelin star, a recognition that León says “helped change everything.” In 2014, it won a second star, and suddenly people began to travel to Cádiz specifically to eat at the restaurant. By the time it received its third Michelin star in 2017, Aponiente had gained a strong international presence. León used the growing platform to sharpen his message, working with universities on sustainability projects, organizing events with chefs and academics to discuss the fragility of our ocean ecosystems, developing commercial products like sea bacon, made from the discarded bellies of sea bream and smoked over pineapple.

For all his success, León is not your typical celebrity chef. He rarely leaves his hometown, eschewing the international circuit in favor of long mornings on the water and long evenings in the lab. His clipped-consonant Spanish and small-town humility are more befitting of a fisherman.

“He’s carving out his own path in the food world,” said Cristina Jolonch, one of Spain’s most respected food critics, but “it’s his defense of the sea that -matters most.” León is aware of that. “The day that I have nothing more to offer beyond being a good cook, Aponiente will no longer make sense.”

Every year in January, León and his R&D team travel by train to Madrid Fusion, the food world’s pre-eminent culinary conference, to dazzle auditoriums of journalists and chefs with their latest discoveries. In 2009, he unveiled an edible form of phytoplankton, now used in kitchens across the world. In 2011, León announced the first line of seafood–based charcuterie, using discarded fish parts to make mortadella and blood sausage and chorizo, all dead ringers for the real thing. In 2016, the auditorium went dark as León emerged on the stage with a special cocktail filled with luz de mar, bioluminescent bits found in the bellies of tiny crabs that glowed like a galaxy of stars as he swirled his gin and tonic.

In 2018, León and his team decided to take a different approach. He explained: “We turned the sea upside down. We wanted to really look at the ocean floor to see what secrets it held.” What they found in the murky depths was a vast and varied garden of ocean flora: roots, fruits, leaves. León has a tendency to liken everything he finds underwater to a terrestrial analog, and soon his menus were brimming with sea pears, sea tomatoes, sea artichokes. The so-called vegetables didn’t have the same impact as sparkling crab guts or fish-belly bacon, but León knew he needed to keep his focus on the ocean floor.

That’s how he found something he had been staring at all along. León remembered as a kid in Cádiz seeing vast fields of rice along the fringes of the bay. As he talked to his team, he realized that what he -recalled as rice was actually Zostera marina, eelgrass that grows in coastline meadows around the world.

Juan Martín, Aponiente’s resident biologist who has worked with León for years, knew the plant well. “I had been studying seagrasses for 15 years—but always from the standpoint of the ecosystem. It never occurred to me or anyone else studying it that it was edible.” That is, until León showed up one day at Aponiente with a printout of a 1973 article in Science documenting the diet of the Seri, hunters and gatherers of Sonora, Mexico, who have eaten eelgrass for generations. Like many grains, it required an elaborate process of threshing, winnowing, toasting and pulverizing before being cooked into a slurry with water. The Seri ate the bland paste with condiments to punch up the flavor: honey or, preferably, sea-turtle oil.

León on his boat, Yodo, in the early morning of Dec. 15

León’s R&D team set out to study the plant in detail, signing an agreement with the University of Cádiz to partner on the research. “Zostera had been gathered and consumed before, but it had never been cultivated,” said Martín. “That’s a whole different proposition.” They worked with the university to define the ideal growing conditions: water current, temperature, salinity, depth, sunlight.

In the summer of 2019, León and a small crew of cooks and scientists waded out into an estuary a few miles east of the restaurant and pulled bushels of eelgrass from the ocean bed. In total, they collected 50 kg of grains, more than enough to run nutritional analysis and experiments in the kitchen.

“When we first started this process, so many things could have gone wrong,” said David Chamorro, the head of R&D at Aponiente. But one by one, the variables fell in their favor: a perennial plant with exponential growth and a stout nutritional profile, including a payload of fiber and omega-3 fats—and gluten-free.

As for the taste? “For a year, we were working on this grain and we had no clue how it tasted,” said León. “I was nervous. What if it tastes like sh-t? The day I ate it, I was relieved.”

I first tasted eelgrass on a rainy afternoon in late 2019 in the upstairs research laboratory of Aponiente. Downstairs, the staff cooked and served what would turn out to be the final meal before the COVID-19 pandemic kept the restaurant closed throughout the spring of 2020 until it reopened in July. Zostera grains look more like amaranth or a chia seed than rice—a short, pellet-like grain with a dark complexion. León boiled it like pasta, passed me a spoonful, then watched me closely as I processed. The first thing you notice is the texture: taut-skinned and compact, each grain pops on your tongue like an orb of caviar. It tasted like the love child of rice and quinoa with a gentle saline undertow.

I asked León about the ideas the grain inspired in the kitchen, but he didn’t seem ready to talk. Chamorro, for his part, was positively giddy about the possibilities: pressing the grain to make oil, fermenting it into sake, grinding it into flour. “Imagine if we gave 10 kilos of flour to the 10 best bakers in Spain. The types of breads we’d see—and all of them gluten-free.”

But before the world sees eelgrass baguettes and eelgrass wine, it will first need to see more eelgrass. Having partnered with Esteros Lubimar, a fisheries company based out of Cádiz, León and his team have drawn up an ambitious plan for domesticating eelgrass. Rather than starting from seed, a process that requires patience that León doesn’t have, they are harvesting eelgrass from different coastal areas around Spain and transplanting it to the Bay of Cádiz.

If all goes according to plan, they will harvest 12 acres of eelgrass in the summer of 2021. León and team will use most of those seeds (about 22,000 kg) to expand the eelgrass significantly in 2022–2023, and he will keep about 3,000 kg to cook with at the restaurant and experiment with in the lab.

With more than 5,000 hectares of estuaries and abandoned salt beds strewn across the region, if León and team have their way, Cádiz could soon be home to one of the largest eelgrass meadows on the planet.

From top left, clockwise: A plankton rice dish at Aponiente; León performs Luz del Mar, mixing two proteins to get fluorescence; a halophyte plant at the restaurant lab; León performs the Sal viva technique

The only thing less sexy than grass is grass that grows in water. When Robert Orth, professor of biological sciences at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, started researching seagrass in 1969, he found it a very lonely field: “You could literally count the number of papers published by scientists on one hand.” According to Orth, people either think seagrass is gross, a nuisance—or that it doesn’t exist at all. “Seagrasses are the ugly duckling of the environmental movement,” he says. “They’re not colorful like coral or beautiful like mangroves.”

But there is something extraordinary about seagrasses: they are the only plants that flower fully submerged in salt water. They have all the equipment of a terrestrial plant—roots, stems, rhizomes, leaves, flowers, seeds—but they thrive in under-water environments. Seagrasses like Zostera marina are eco-system engineers: the meadows they form along coastlines represent some of the most biodiverse areas in the ocean, playing host to fauna (like seahorses, bay scallops and sea turtles) that would struggle to survive without seagrass.

But anthropogenic forces—climate change, pollution, coastal development—have threatened eelgrass meadows across the world. As León and team refine the conditions for large-scale cultivation, they hope to facilitate its growth along coastlines around the world—Asia, North America and, above all, across the Straits of Gibraltar in Africa—turning millions of hectares into a source of food, protection against erosion and a weapon against climate change.

“In terms of the ecological importance of seagrasses, it’s impossible to say too much about them,” said Jeanine Olsen, professor emeritus at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “They don’t have the poster-child appeal of coral reefs, but they are just as important in terms of -productivity, biodiversity, carbon sequestration and habitat.”

For all the talk about the Amazon being Mother Nature’s lungs, rain forests are only the fifth most efficient carbon sink on the planet. Seagrass meadows are second only to tundra in their ability to sequester carbon, absorbing carbon up 35 times faster than the same area of tropical rain forest.

But, like many of our best tools for combatting rising temperatures, seagrass meadows have been dying off at an alarming rate over the past several decades, thanks to a combination of rising water temperatures and increased human activity along coastlines. The lack of awareness has only accelerated the decline.

In 2006, Orth and more than a dozen scientists published a paper in BioScience on the alarming decline in seagrasses around the world: “Salt marshes, mangroves and coral reefs receive threefold to 100-fold more media attention than seagrass eco-systems, although the services provided by seagrasses, together with algal beds, deliver a value at least twice as high as the next most valuable habitat.”

It appears Orth and his colleagues’ message got out. In the years since, the field has grown precipitously, with more money and more research. Restoration projects are under way all over the world, including one in the coastal lagoons along Virginia’s eastern shore, overseen by Orth, that has regenerated more than 3,500 hectares of seagrass meadows.

Up until this article, León’s project has been a closely guarded secret. Not even the local Spanish marine biologists know what’s happening. I spoke and exchanged emails with half a dozen of the top seagrass experts around the world, and each responded with their own version of surprise. None more than Carlos Duarte, whose broad base of marine expertise has brought him from the tropics to the North Pole, from dense coastal ecosystems to the unknown depths of the “dark ocean.”

León in the sea rice plantation

What León is doing is unprecedented, Duarte told me on the phone from Mallorca. I had just shared the news with him. “This will be the first eelgrass that will be domesticated,” he finally said, more to himself than to me. “They will be pioneers.” Then, after another pause. “It’s a big achievement.”

Duarte knows the area and the conditions well, and though he stressed that the yield for eelgrass tends to be low, he said it—along with other factors like taste and nutrition—can be improved through genetic selection. “The things that have gone wrong with traditional agriculture won’t be affected in the sea. No fertilizers, no pesticides, no insects,” he says. “It will be by default a green sustainable crop. You’re not taking an exotic species and bringing it here. You’re taking one of the jewels of the Bay of Cádiz and just making more of it.”

But there’s another side to the equation that wasn’t part of any seagrass scientist’s -environmental -calculations: the water itself. Nearly 97% of all water on earth is salt water. For all our brains and ambition, humans have never figured out much to do with salt water. We use it to cool thermo-electric power plants. We use it in some forms of mining. Most of our efforts and resources have been focused on turning salt water into fresh water, but desalinization remains expensive.

Just 1% of all water on earth is readily available fresh water, and the planet is growing thirstier by the day. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, humans will need to increase agricultural output by 60% to feed the nearly 10 billion people expected to live on earth by 2050. But just as our demand for fresh water has never been greater, our supplies have never been in more doubt. Climate models predict that rest of the 21st century will be a roller coaster of historic droughts and historic floods, jeopardizing the world’s food supplies. Finding a way to use salt water in agriculture would dramatically alter the calculus for feeding the planet.

The Dutch have taken the lead in saltwater agriculture. Government funded efforts to introduce salt-water-receptive genes to traditional vegetables like potatoes, tomatoes and carrots show promise. For the Chinese, the world’s largest consumers and growers of rice, saltwater rice has been the holy grail for nearly four decades. Yuan Longping, the agronomist who first developed high-yield hybrid rice back in the 1970s, has been trying to crack the code since the early 1980s. In 2018, Yuan and his team successfully grew salt-water rice in the desert flats outside of Dubai, achieving more than double the average global rice yield.

But they did this through decades of crossbreeding, and by diluting salt water with fresh water. What León is after is something different altogether: a -native plant, capable of delivering immense nutritional and ecological benefits, grown directly in ocean beds.

Rice may be the world’s top source of calories, but it also requires two increasingly scarce resources: land and fresh water. And the cocktail of gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide—created during rice cultivation has been found to contribute to climate change. León’s sea rice, by contrast, has a similar yield as terrestrial rice but can grow in any temperate coastal area in the world, all the while sequestering excess carbon.

A few of the experts I spoke with expressed concerns about the logistical challenges of cultivating Zostera marina. “Eelgrass is a complex problem,” Orth told me. “You have to have all the right conditions: light, temperature, current.”

The challenges aren’t lost on Juan Martín, but Martín points out that the estuaries where they’ll be planting the eelgrass give the team full control of the elements. León and team have also been working with geneticists in the hopes of improving some of the core characteristics of Zostera.

“Rice has the advantage of 7,000 years of genetic modifications,” said Martín. “In very little time, we could make huge improvements.”

León’s Aponiente restaurant, in a centuries-old mill, surrounded by the estuary where he will cultivate his underwater garden

León is thinking ahead. Not just to a supercharged version of his saltwater rice, but he and his team have discussed the possibility of isolating the saline genes in Zostera marina to crossbreed with other staples: corn, lentils, lettuce.

“It’s not just the rice,” said León. “It’s the dream of having an underwater garden for human beings.”

“This is where we’ll plant the rice, out there in the distance,” said León, pointing from the second-floor terrace of the old mill that houses Aponiente to the sunbaked estuaries below. “The waters will be packed with life: shrimp, oysters, sea bream. Next year, the guests won’t start their meals in the restaurant, but right on the water, catching the first bites of their meal.”

He gave me this tour over FaceTime in the early summer. It was supposed to be in person, the two of us taking in the young eelgrass meadows he hoped to plant in the late spring, but then COVID-19 crushed Spain and the country shut down until late June. León had his shirt off, a cigarette pinched by the boyish smile that had all but disappeared. The restaurant was slated to open the following day, and he had just done a final tasting for a menu nine months in the making. The unifying concept would be an edible interpretation of the tidal marshes. There would be emerald puddles of plankton butter and marine bone marrow and burrata forged from sea snails. For León, the star of the season was the gusana del mar, a species of sea worm.

Despite concerns from his staff and partners, León has insisted the worm be a central part of the menu. After a dozen different experiments, he settled on a grilled sea-bream cheek with a rich herby fish broth and a crunchy sea-worm garnish.

But even as he talked me through the details of the final menu, I could tell his mind was elsewhere. He sounded relieved when I asked about the plants. “It’s finally happening,” he says. “On July 17, we have our crews going out to collect Zostera from Galicia and Cantabria. We should have it all planted by the early fall.”

With the meadow finally taking shape in his mind, he had a new problem to worry about: “What am I going to cook with 22,000 kg of sea rice?” he asked, his wide-eyed grin swaddled by a cloud of smoke. “This whole process has been like giving birth, and the cook in me died somewhere along the way. I had too much fear, too much respect for every f-cking grain.”

He had come back inside now, taking a seat at a long table inside the office he had renovated during the lockdown. Behind him, on a long white wall, a local artist had mounted the heads of the major species of fish in the Bay of Cádiz, 35 in total. It had the effect of making León look like a cartoonish hero, with an army of sea creatures at his back.

“Imagine making a mochi made from ground Zostera flour and pulverized shrimp … Or playing with textures of al dente Zostera pasta … Serve it in two rounds: first the husk, then the grain itself … We can harvest it early, when the seeds are like baby favas, and use it like spring peas but with the flavor of the sea …” León kept going, ticking through half a dozen other ideas before taking a breath.

León likes to say that he’s just a simple cook. It doesn’t read as false modesty as much as an expression of his abiding disbelief that a pirate–mouthed kid from one of Spain’s poorest regions who barely graduated high school could find himself in a position to do things no one else ever has. But there he was, on the brink of another breakthrough.

He explained: “How much do we miss from scientists who have spent their entire lives studying one thing? Sometimes you spend all day staring through a microscope and you don’t look up long enough to remember that you’re hungry.”

As he was talking, he began to run his hand over the heads of the sea creatures hanging from his wall: mackerel, squid, dogfish. He settled on the spotted snout of the mounted moray eel—the same species fishermen since the dawn of time have given back to the sea but with which León had built a career fashioning crispy chicharróns and soufflé “potatoes” and suckling pig of the sea.

“You need the science, but you als

E.U. Regulators Approve Drawing up To Six Doses From BioNTech-Pfizer Vaccine Vials

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 11:59:51 GMT

(BRUSSELS) — The European Union’s drug agency on Friday approved doctors drawing up to six doses from each vial of the coronavirus vaccine made by BioNTech-Pfizer, a move that could speed up the pace of vaccinations in the 27-nation bloc.

The European Medicines Agency said its human medicines committee recommended updating the product information for the vaccine to clarify that each vial contains six doses instead of the five that were advised when it originally greenlighted the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Dec. 21.

German Health Ministry spokesman Hanno Kautz told reporters in Berlin that the change would come into effect immediately, boosting available doses of the vaccine by 20%.

Many doctors across the EU have already been drawing six doses of the vaccine from each vial, a practice that is already permitted in the United States, Britain and elsewhere.

Pharmaceutical companies regularly put more vaccine than necessary into vials so minimum dosage can be ensured even if there is some spillage.

The news came shortly after the EU’s executive arm said it had secured 300 million extra doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the new agreement to buy more doses will double the amount ordered by the 27-nation bloc.

The EU commission later detailed in a statement that it offered to member states to purchase an additional 200 million doses of the vaccine, with the option to acquire another 100 million doses.

“This would enable the EU to purchase up to 600 million doses of this vaccine, which is already being used across the EU. The additional doses will be delivered starting in the second quarter of 2021,” the EU said. Von der Leyen said 75 million of the extra doses would be available during the second quarter, with the rest being delivered throughout 2021.

Combined with a contract with Moderna for its vaccine, the EU now has the capacity to vaccinate 380 million people, Von der Leyen said, more than 80% of the EU’s population.

The EU has sealed six vaccine contracts for up to 2 billion doses, with Moderna, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-GSK, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Pfizer-BioNTech and CureVac. But only the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have been approved for use so far in the 27-nation bloc.

Von der Leyen’s announcement came amid growing criticism, notably in Germany, about the decision to let the commission handle vaccine purchases for all EU member nations. Vaccination programs in the EU have gotten off to a slow start, and some EU members have been quick to blame the European Commission for a perceived failure to deliver the right number of doses.

The EU has defended its strategy, insisting that vaccination programs have just started and that large deliveries are foreseen for around April.

“We were faced with a situation where we had huge demand, but the production capacity had not kept pace with that as yet. Now, we have a positive step forward,” von der Leyen said.

Amid reports that some EU countries tried to secure separate deals with vaccine manufacturers, von der Leyen also made clear that such negotiations would violate the agreement accepted by all the bloc’s members.

“We have all agreed, legally binding, that there would be no parallel negotiations, no parallel contract,” she said. “So the framework we are all working in is a framework of 27. Together we are negotiating, together we are procuring and together we are bringing forward this vaccination process.”

___

Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands. Frank Jordans contributed from Berlin.

2020 Ties With 2016 for Warmest Year Ever Recorded

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 09:05:48 GMT

For a year of dubious superlatives, 2020 has left the planet one last parting gift. On 8 Jan., the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which tracks global climate trends announced that not only had 2020 tied with 2016 for the hottest year on record, it also capped the warmest decade on record. For Europeans, there was an extra bonus: the region just had its hottest year ever. If there was ever any doubt that the world is heating up due to increased fossil fuel emissions, they have been effectively quashed.

In a year already defined by the record melting of Greenland’s glaciers, near-record levels of shrinking Arctic sea ice, wildfires blazing across Siberia, and the hottest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, the latest findings shouldn’t be surprising, says senior C3S scientist Freja Vamborg. “Inevitably if you have an upward trend, which we have been seeing for some time now, well, at some point you are going to bypass annual records and eventually decadal ones as well. As long as we are don’t reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are the main driver behind this increase, then we will continue breaking these records.”

Nor should anyone be letting out a sigh of relief for the fact that we only tied 2016 for hottest year. The year 2016 was marked by a particularly strong El Niño event, a weather pattern that generally contributes to warmer temperatures. 2020, by contrast, was dominated by a La Niña weather cycle, which actually lowered temperatures in the Pacific. “In general, the expectation is that if you have El Niño, you get a warming like in 2016, and with a La Niña, you tend to have a cooling effect over a large portion of the globe,” says Vamborg. In this case, the cooler pacific temperatures were countered by unusual spikes further north: the biggest leaps in temperature deviation from the 1981-2010 average were in the Arctic, where temperatures surpassed 6°C for the year as a whole, and more than 8°C in some regions in some months. Western Siberia experienced an exceptionally warm winter and spring, conditions that precipitated the summer’s unprecedented wildfires.

Europe’s record-breaking year started out with an unusually warm winter (December 2019-February 2020) that exceeded the previous 2016 extreme by almost 1.4°C. That’s perilously close to the 1.5°C warming goal set by the Paris Climate Accords as the maximum amount of warming the world should experience. Of course the Paris figure is meant to be an average over time, not a one off. Still, says Vamborg, record breaking months, years and decades bring us ever closer. “As the rising temperature trend continues, we will at some point have years that hit 1.5, then pass 1.6 and eventually that target will be reached. And the only way to stop that that is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and quickly, because indeed we are marching in that direction.”

Global Warming Already Baked In Will Blow Past Climate Goals, a New Study Says

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 04:23:57 GMT

The amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit climate change, a new study finds.

But it’s not game over because, while that amount of warming may be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study’s authors say.

For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied.

But Monday’s study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates that a bit differently and now figures the carbon pollution already put in the air will push global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times.

Previous estimates, including those accepted by international science panels, were about a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than that amount of committed warming.

International climate agreements set goals of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, with the more ambitious goal of limiting it to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) added in Paris in 2015. The world has already warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).

“You’ve got some … global warming inertia that’s going to cause the climate system to keep warming, and that’s essentially what we’re calculating,” said study co-author Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Think about the climate system like the Titanic. It’s hard to turn the ship when you see the icebergs.”

Dessler and colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Nanjing University in China calculated committed warming to take into account that the world has warmed at different rates in different places and that places that haven’t warmed as fast are destined to catch up.

Places such as the Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica are a bit cooler, and that difference creates low-lying clouds that reflect more sun away from earth, keeping these places cooler. But this situation can’t keep going indefinitely because physics dictates that cooler locations will warm up more and when they do, the clouds will dwindle and more heating will occur, Dessler said.

Previous studies were based on the cooler spots staying that way, but Dessler and colleagues say that’s not likely.

Outside experts said the work is based on compelling reasoning, but want more research to show that it’s true. Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the new work fits better with climate models than observational data.

Just because the world is bound to get more warming than international goals, that doesn’t mean all is lost in the fight against global warming, said Dessler, who cautioned against what he called “climate doomers.”

If the world gets to net zero carbon emissions soon, 2 degrees of global warming could be delayed enough so that it won’t happen for centuries, giving society time to adapt or even come up with technological fixes, he said.

“If we don’t, we’re going to blow through (climate goals) in a few decades,” Dessler said. “It’s really the rate of warming that makes climate change so terrible. If we got a few degrees over 100,000 years, that would not be that big a deal. We can deal with that. But a few degrees over 100 years is really bad.”

2020 Was a Year of Climate Extremes. What Can We Expect in 2021?

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 12:00:02 GMT

2020 was a year of extreme weather around the world. Hot and dry conditions drove record-setting wildfires through vast areas of Australia, California and Brazil and Siberia. A record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season landed a double blow of two hugely destructive storms in Central America. Long-running droughts have destroyed agricultural output and helped to push millions into hunger in Zimbabwe and Madagascar. A super-cyclone unleashed massive floods on India and Bangladesh.

And overall, 2020 may end up the hottest year on record—despite a La Niña event, the ocean-atmospheric phenomenon which normally temporarily cools things down.

Though it’s historically been difficult to say if single weather events were directly caused by climate change, scientists have proven that many of the events that took place in 2020 would have been far less likely, or even impossible, without changes to the climate that are being driven by the warming of the Earth.

Thanks to increasing levels of heat-absorbing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global average temperatures last year were 1.15°C over the pre-industrial era. Depending on how quickly we can reduce our emissions of these gases, the global average temperature increase is expected to be anywhere between 1.5°C and 5°C by 2100. While emissions dipped briefly during the first COVID-19 lockdowns, they have now rebounded to close to 2019 levels.

A rise of a few degrees may not sound like much, but it has huge implications for the weather we’ll see in the coming years, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA focused on the links between climate change and extreme weather. “It’s a number that is describing really profound and vast changes in the climate system that we feel mostly through individual weather events and through extreme events.”

It’s impossible to know if 2021 will be as record-breaking as 2021, but it’s highly likely that more extremes are on the way. “From one year to the next, there’s still a lot of random variation superimposed on top of the long term trends,” Swain says. “While 2020 may have been a particularly extreme year in contrast to individual years in the past, scientifically and looking forward, what’s more meaningful is that 2020 was not really an aberration.”

Here’s what to expect from the climate next year—and what is likely to happen with the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the changes.

Hurricanes and storms

2020’s Atlantic hurricane season saw a record number of 30 named storms, including 13 hurricanes. In September, Hurricane Sally battered Florida and Alabama, cutting power to more than half a million homes. In November, Hurricanes Eta and Iota hit Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and other Central American countries in close succession, submerging towns, destroying infrastructure and farmlands, and killing dozens across the region.

Climate scientists aren’t sure if climate change will cause an increase in the number of hurricanes generally. But climate change is affecting the characteristics of hurricanes and making them more destructive. They are likely to be more intense, carrying higher wind speeds and heavier rains, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This year’s very active hurricane season was in part driven by La Niña, the ocean-atmospheric phenomenon, a counterpart to El Niño, which results in temporarily lower ocean surface temperatures across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and atmospheric changes, creating favorable conditions for hurricanes.

Early predictions for the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season published by meteorologists at Colorado State University suggest there is a 6 in 10 chance that the season will be very strong or above average.

High temperatures, wildfires and droughts

Globally, 2020 is currently tied with 2016 as the warmest year on record. Even if it takes second place, that is remarkable given the occurrence of La Niña this year, which tends to lower temperatures, and the fact that 2016 was an El Niño year, when temperatures are generally warmer.

There is reason to believe that 2021 may be slightly cooler, says Swain, since La Niña conditions are expected to continue through to March. “It may be that some of the cooling effect of this La Niña will be felt a little bit more next year than this year. But it’ll still be quite likely to be among the top five warmest years on record, because we just aren’t really seeing we just aren’t really seeing any of the kinds of cooler years that we saw even 30 or 40 years ago anymore.”

La Niña doesn’t affect the whole of the U.S. in the same way. It tends to lower winter temperatures in the northwest of the country, and increase them in the southeast. In its outlook for winter, up to the end of February, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted below average precipitation and a worsening of drought conditions across many southern states.

We are likely to see more episodes of extreme heat than we are used to in the coming years, scientists say, because they have been made far more likely on a warming planet. Studies found that climate change made Europe’s 2019 heatwave up to 100 times more likely, for example.

When high temperatures combine with dry conditions, strong winds and an abundance of vegetation as fuel, wildfires become highly likely. In January, Australia’s record-breaking temperatures and prolonged droughts drove bushfires burned more than 27 million acres across the country, and destroyed thousands of homes. California’s 2020 wildfires burned more than 4 million acres by October, double the state’s previous record.

Again, it’s impossible to know if 2021 will beat the new records set in 2020. But it’s clear that increased wildfires are a part of our future. A group of California-based scientists, including Swain, found that since the early 1980’s, climate change had doubled the frequency of days with extreme fire weather in Autumn in the state. Previous studies have shown that fire seasons are getting longer as the world heats up.

Arctic melting

2020 was the second biggest year for Arctic ice melting after 2012—which is considered an outlier because of a destructive late-season cyclone. Worryingly, scientists say 2020’s sea ice melt followed a similar trajectory to 2012, without any such storm. And this was the first year since records began that Arctic sea ice had not started to freeze over by late October.

The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, with a one degree rise in the average yearly temperature every decade for the last 40 years. As a result, scientists say we are likely to see increasingly faster melting and slower freezing each year. By 2035, a study published this August in Nature Climate Change found, it is likely that the Arctic ocean will be ice-free in summer.

Carbon emissions

When it comes to the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the changes we are seeing in our climate, 2020 has been an anomaly. Global emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, reached a new peak in 2019 – though they were just slightly above 2018 levels, raising hopes that emissions were levelling off. But this year they are expected to fall by up to 7% as a result of the drops in activity during the first COVID-19 lockdowns in March and April.

Coincidentally, 7% is the amount by which the U.N. says we’d need to cut carbon emissions every year for the next decade in order to keep in line with the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global average temperatures from increasing more than 1.5°C over the pre-industrial era.

But we shouldn’t expect the reductions to hold in 2021, says Glen Peters, research director at the Oslo-based Center for International Climate Research. “A few months ago, I would have expected that it would take a few years to slowly edge back to 2019 levels. And hopefully, during that time, emissions reductions would start to take effect,” he says. “But now, the monthly data suggests that emissions have almost come back to 2019 levels now.”

With governments likely to spend large amounts of money to get economies going again, Peters says emissions are likely to bounce back quite strongly. He expects emissions in 2021 to be roughly the same as in 2019.

But the nature of recovery packages that governments roll out will be decisive to the trajectory of emissions—and climate change—longer-term. If these packages are green, and include lots of stimulus for renewable energies like solar, for example, they’ll give you a spike in emissions next year to build all the solar, and you would reap the benefits in the years later,” Peters says. “It’s a question of whether the recovery packages set future reductions in motion.”

Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 20:11:09 GMT

When he was two years old, Ben stopped seeing out of his left eye. His mother took him to the doctor and soon discovered he had retinal cancer in both eyes. After chemotherapy and radiation failed, surgeons removed both his eyes. For Ben, vision was gone forever.

But by the time he was seven years old, he had devised a technique for decoding the world around him: he clicked with his mouth and listened for the returning echoes. This method enabled Ben to determine the locations of open doorways, people, parked cars, garbage cans, and so on. He was echolocating: bouncing his sound waves off objects in the environment and catching the reflections to build a mental model of his surroundings.

Echolocation may sound like an improbable feat for a human, but thousands of blind people have perfected this skill, just like Ben did. The phenomenon has been written about since at least the 1940s, when the word “echolocation” was first coined in a Science article titled “Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats, and Radar.”

How could blindness give rise to the stunning ability to understand the surroundings with one’s ears? The answer lies in a gift bestowed on the brain by evolution: tremendous adaptability.

Whenever we learn something new, pick up a new skill, or modify our habits, the physical structure of our brain changes. Neurons, the cells responsible for rapidly processing information in the brain, are interconnected by the thousands—but like friendships in a community, the connections between them constantly change: strengthening, weakening, and finding new partners. The field of neuroscience calls this phenomenon “brain plasticity,” referring to the ability of the brain, like plastic, to assume new shapes and hold them. More recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest that the brain’s brand of flexibility is far more nuanced than holding onto a shape, though. To capture this, we refer to the brain’s plasticity as “livewiring” to spotlight how this vast system of 86 billion neurons and 0.2 quadrillion connections rewires itself every moment of your life.

Neuroscience used to think that different parts of the brain were predetermined to perform specific functions. But more recent discoveries have upended the old paradigm. One part of the brain may initially be assigned a specific task; for instance, the back of our brain is called the “visual cortex” because it usually handles sight. But that territory can be reassigned to a different task. There is nothing special about neurons in the visual cortex: they are simply neurons that happen to be involved in processing shapes or colors in people who have functioning eyes. But in the sightless, these same neurons can rewire themselves to process other types of information.

Mother Nature imbued our brains with flexibility to adapt to circumstances. Just as sharp teeth and fast legs are useful for survival, so is the brain’s ability to reconfigure. The brain’s livewiring allows for learning, memory, and the ability to develop new skills.

In Ben’s case, his brain’s flexible wiring repurposed his visual cortex for processing sound. As a result, Ben had more neurons available to deal with auditory information, and this increased processing power allowed Ben to interpret soundwaves in shocking detail. Ben’s super-hearing demonstrates a more general rule: the more brain territory a particular sense has, the better it performs.

Recent decades have yielded several revelations about livewiring, but perhaps the biggest surprise is its rapidity. Brain circuits reorganize not only in the newly blind, but also in the sighted who have temporary blindness. In one study, sighted participants intensively learned how to read Braille. Half the participants were blindfolded throughout the experience. At the end of the five days, the participants who wore blindfolds could distinguish subtle differences between Braille characters much better than the participants who didn’t wear blindfolds. Even more remarkably, the blindfolded participants showed activation in visual brain regions in response to touch and sound. When activity in the visual cortex was temporarily disrupted, the Braille-reading advantage of the blindfolded participants went away. In other words, the blindfolded participants performed better on the touch-related task because their visual cortex had been recruited to help. After the blindfold was removed, the visual cortex returned to normal within a day, no longer responding to touch and sound.

But such changes don’t have to take five days; that just happened to be when the measurement took place. When blindfolded participants are continuously measured, touch-related activity shows up in the visual cortex in about an hour.

What does brain flexibility and rapid cortical takeover have to do with dreaming? Perhaps more than previously thought. Ben clearly benefited from the redistribution of his visual cortex to other senses because he had permanently lost his eyes, but what about the participants in the blindfold experiments? If our loss of a sense is only temporary, then the rapid conquest of brain territory may not be so helpful.

And this, we propose, is why we dream.

In the ceaseless competition for brain territory, the visual system has a unique problem: due to the planet’s rotation, all animals are cast into darkness for an average of 12 out of every 24 hours. (Of course, this refers to the vast majority of evolutionary time, not to our present electrified world.) Our ancestors effectively were unwitting participants in the blindfold experiment, every night of their entire lives.

So how did the visual cortex of our ancestors’ brains defend its territory, in the absence of input from the eyes?

We suggest that the brain preserves the territory of the visual cortex by keeping it active at night. In our “defensive activation theory,” dream sleep exists to keep neurons in the visual cortex active, thereby combating a takeover by the neighboring senses. In this view, dreams are primarily visual precisely because this is the only sense that is disadvantaged by darkness. Thus, only the visual cortex is vulnerable in a way that warrants internally-generated activity to preserve its territory.

In humans, sleep is punctuated by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep every 90 minutes. This is when most dreaming occurs. (Although some forms of dreaming can occur during non-REM sleep, such dreams are abstract and lack the visual vividness of REM dreams.)

REM sleep is triggered by a specialized set of neurons that pump activity straight into the brain’s visual cortex, causing us to experience vision even though our eyes are closed. This activity in the visual cortex is presumably why dreams are pictorial and filmic. (The dream-stoking circuitry also paralyzes your muscles during REM sleep so that your brain can simulate a visual experience without moving the body at the same time.) The anatomical precision of these circuits suggests that dream sleep is biologically important—such precise and universal circuitry rarely evolves without an important function behind it.

The defensive activation theory makes some clear predictions about dreaming. For example, because brain flexibility diminishes with age, the fraction of sleep spent in REM should also decrease across the lifespan. And that’s exactly what happens: in humans, REM accounts for half of an infant’s sleep time, but the percentage decreases steadily to about 18% in the elderly. REM sleep appears to become less necessary as the brain becomes less flexible.

Of course, this relationship is not sufficient to prove the defensive activation theory. To test it on a deeper level, we broadened our investigation to animals other than humans. The defensive activation theory makes a specific prediction: the more flexible an animal’s brain, the more REM sleep it should have to defend its visual system during sleep. To this end, we examined the extent to which the brains of 25 species of primates are “pre-programmed” versus flexible at birth. How might we measure this? We looked at the time it takes animals of each species to develop. How long do they take to wean from their mothers? How quickly do they learn to walk? How many years until they reach adolescence? The more rapid an animal’s development, the more pre-programmed (that is, less flexible) the brain.

As predicted, we found that species with more flexible brains spend more time in REM sleep each night. Although these two measures—brain flexibility and REM sleep—would seem at first to be unrelated, they are in fact linked.

As a side note, two of the primate species we looked at were nocturnal. But this does not change the hypothesis: whenever an animal sleeps, whether at night or during the day, the visual cortex is at risk of takeover by the other senses. Nocturnal primates, equipped with strong night vision, employ their vision throughout the night as they seek food and avoid predation. When they subsequently sleep during the day, their closed eyes allow no visual input, and thus, their visual cortex requires defense.

Dream circuitry is so fundamentally important that it is found even in people who are born blind. However, those who are born blind (or who become blind early in life) don’t experience visual imagery in their dreams; instead, they have other sensory experiences, such as feeling their way around a rearranged living room or hearing strange dogs barking. This is because other senses have taken over their visual cortex. In other words, blind and sighted people alike experience activity in the same region of their brain during dreams; they differ only in the senses that are processed there. Interestingly, people who become blind after the age of seven have more visual content in their dreams than those who become blind at younger ages. This, too, is consistent with the defensive activation theory: brains become less flexible as we age, so if one loses sight at an older age, the non-visual senses cannot fully conquer the visual cortex.

If dreams are visual hallucinations triggered by a lack of visual input, we might expect to find similar visual hallucinations in people who are slowly deprived of visual input while awake. In fact, this is precisely what happens in people with eye degeneration, patients confined to a tank-respirator, and prisoners in solitary confinement. In all of these cases, people see things that are not there.

We developed our defensive activation theory to explain visual hallucinations during extended periods of darkness, but it may represent a more general principle: the brain has evolved specific circuitry to generate activity that compensates for periods of deprivation. This might occur in several scenarios: when deprivation is regular and predictable (e.g., dreams during sleep), when there is damage to the sensory input pathway (e.g., tinnitus or phantom limb syndrome), and when deprivation is unpredictable (e.g., hallucinations induced by sensory deprivation). In this sense, hallucinations during deprivation may in fact be a feature of the system rather than a bug.

We’re now pursuing a systematic comparison between a variety of species across the animal kingdom. So far, the evidence has been encouraging. Some mammals are born immature, unable to regulate their own temperature, acquire food, or defend themselves (think kittens, puppies, and ferrets). Others are born mature, emerging from the womb with teeth, fur, open eyes, and the abilities to regulate their temperature, walk within an hour of birth, and eat solid food (think guinea pigs, sheep, and giraffes). The immature animals have up to 8 times more REM sleep than those born mature. Why? Because when a newborn brain is highly flexible, the system requires more effort to defend the visual system during sleep.

Since the dawn of communication, dreams have perplexed philosophers, priests, and poets. What do dreams mean? Do they portend the future? In recent decades, dreams have come under the gaze of neuroscientists as one of the field’s central unsolved mysteries. Do they serve a more practical, functional purpose? We suggest that dream sleep exists, at least in part, to prevent the other senses from taking over the brain’s visual cortex when it goes unused. Dreams are the counterbalance against too much flexibility. Thus, although dreams have long been the subject of song and story, they may be better understood as the strange lovechild of brain plasticity and the rotation of the planet.

For more information:

Eagleman DM (2020). Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. New York: Pantheon.
Eagleman DM, Vaughn DA (2020). The defensive activation theory: dreaming as a mechanism to prevent takeover of the visual cortex.

Belarus and Argentina Start Vaccinations With Russian Shots

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 15:33:40 GMT

(MOSCOW) — Belarus and Argentina launched mass coronavirus vaccinations with the Russian-developed Sputnik V shot on Tuesday, becoming the first countries outside Russia to roll out the vaccine, which has faced criticism over the speed with which it was approved.

The first batch of Sputnik V arrived in the former Soviet republic of Belarus on Tuesday, according to a joint statement by the Belarusian Health Ministry, the Russian Health Ministry and the Russian Direct Investment Fund that bankrolled development of the jab.

“A new stage starts in Belarus today with mass vaccinations against COVID-19. Medical staff, teachers, and those who come into contact a lot of people due to their jobs will be the first to get vaccinated. Vaccination will be entirely voluntary,” Belarus Health Minister Dmitry Pinevich was quoted in the statement as saying.

Hours later, a similar campaign kicked off in South America as Argentine medical workers began receiving the vaccine and officials insisted it was safe. President Alberto Fernández called it the largest vaccination campaign in the country’s modern history.

Teachers, those with complicating medical conditions and people over 60 were to be next in line in Argentina, which so far has received 300,000 doses, which also will be free and voluntary.

Argentina, a country of 45 million people, has recorded nearly 1.6 million infections with the new coronavirus and almost 43,000 deaths.

Belarus conducted its own trial of Sputnik V among 100 volunteers and gave the shot regulatory approval on Dec. 21, two days before Argentina did.

Russia has been widely criticized for giving the domestically developed Sputnik V regulatory approval in August after the vaccine only had been tested on a few dozen people. An advanced study among tens of thousand started shortly after the vaccine received the Russian government’s go-ahead.

Despite warnings to wait for the results of the study, Russian authorities started offering it to people in high-risk groups — such as medical workers and teachers — within weeks of approval. This month, mass vaccinations with Sputnik V started in Russia, even though it is still undergoing the late-stage trial.

Belarus has reported nearly 190,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and about 1,400 deaths since the start of the pandemic, but many in the Eastern European nation of 9.4 million people suspect that authorities are manipulating statistics to hide the true scope of the country’s outbreak.

President Alexander Lukashenko, who has faced months of demands by protesters to step down after an August election they say was fraudulent, has cavalierly dismissed the coronavirus. He shrugged off the fears and national lockdowns the new virus had caused as “psychosis” and advised citizens to avoid catching it by driving tractors in the field, drinking vodka and visiting saunas.

His attitude has angered many Belarusians, adding to the public dismay over his authoritarian style and helping to fuel months of post-election protests.

Opposition figures say Lukashenko’s government has allowed COVID-19 to run rampant in jails where it has detained thousands of protesters.

___

Almudena Calatrava reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Pfizer and BioNTech To Supply U.S. With Additional 100m Doses of Vaccine

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 13:01:54 GMT

(WASHINGTON) — Pfizer and BioNTech will supply the U.S. with an additional 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine under a new agreement.

The drugmakers said Wednesday that they expect to deliver all the doses by July 31.

Pfizer already has a contract to supply the government with 100 million doses of its vaccine.

Pfizer’s vaccine was the first to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration and initial shipments went to states last week. It has now been joined by a vaccine from Moderna, which was developed in closer cooperation with scientists from the National Institutes of Health.

The Chang’e 5 Capsule Returns to Earth Carrying Moon Rocks in the Latest Breakthrough for ...

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 02:41:35 GMT

BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese lunar capsule returned to Earth on Thursday with the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the moon in more than 40 years.

The capsule of the Chang’e 5 probe landed in the Siziwang district of the Inner Mongolia region, state media reported shortly after 2 a.m. (1800 GMT). The capsule earlier separated from its orbiter module and performed a bounce off Earth’s atmosphere to reduce its speed before passing through and floating to the ground on parachutes.

Two of the Chang’e 5’s four modules set down on the moon on Dec. 1 and collected about 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of samples by scooping them from the surface and by drilling 2 meters (about 6 feet) into the moon’s crust.

The samples were deposited in a sealed container that was carried back to the return module by an ascent vehicle.

The successful mission was the latest breakthrough for China’s increasingly ambitious space program that includes a robotic mission to Mars and plans for a permanent orbiting space station.

Recovery crews had prepared helicopters and off-road vehicles to home in on signals emitted by the lunar spacecraft and locate it in the darkness shrouding the vast snow-covered region in China’s far north, long used as a landing site for China’s Shenzhou crewed spaceships.

The spacecraft’s return marked the first time scientists have obtained fresh samples of lunar rocks since the former Soviet Union’s Luna 24 robot probe in 1976.

The newly collected rocks are thought to be billions of years younger than those obtained earlier by the U.S. and former Soviet Union, offering new insights into the history of the moon and other bodies in the solar system. They come from a part of the moon known as the Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, near a site called the Mons Rumker that was believed to have been volcanic in ancient times.

As with the 382 kilograms (842 pounds) of lunar samples brought back by U.S. astronauts from 1969 to 1972, they will be analyzed for age and composition and are expected to be shared with other countries.

The age of the samples will help fill in a gap in knowledge about the history of the moon between roughly 1 billion and three billion years ago, Brad Jolliff, director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in an email. They may also yield clues as to the availability of economically useful resources on the moon such as concentrated hydrogen and oxygen, Jolliff said.

“These samples will be a treasure trove!” Jolliff wrote. “My hat is off to our Chinese colleagues for pulling off a very difficult mission; the science that will flow from analysis of the returned samples will be a legacy that will last for many, many years, and hopefully will involve the international community of scientists.”

Chang’e 5 blasted off from a launch base in China’s southern island province of Hainan on Nov. 23 and appeared to have completed its highly technically sophisticated mission without a hitch.

It marked China’s third successful lunar landing but the only one to lift off again from the moon. Its predecessor, Chang’e 4, became the first probe to land on the moon’s little-explored far side and continues to send back data on conditions that could affect a future extended stay by humans on the moon.

The moon has been a particular focus of the Chinese space program, which says it plans to land humans there and possibly construct a permanent base. No timeline or other details have been announced.

China also has joined the effort to explore Mars. In July, it launched the Tianwen 1 probe, which was carrying a lander and a robot rover to search for water.

In 2003, China became the third country to send an astronaut into orbit on its own after the Soviet Union and the United States and its space program has proceeded more cautiously than the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1960s, which was marked by fatalities and launch failures. By taking incremental steps, China appears on the path toward building a program that can sustain steady progress.

“They have read, and admired the (U.S. lunar program) Apollo playbook, but learned format as well,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chines space program at the U.S. Naval War College. “Better to go slow and set up infrastructure for the future than to do it quickly and end up with little that allows you to continue.”

The latest flight includes collaboration with the European Space Agency, which is helping to monitor the mission. Amid concerns over the Chinese space program’s secrecy and close military connections, the U.S. forbids cooperation between NASA and the CNSA unless Congress gives its approval. That has prevented China from taking part in the International Space Station, something it has sought to compensate for with the launching of an experimental space station and plans to complete a permanent orbiting outpost within the next two years.

SpaceX Launched Its Starship on the Highest Test Flight Yet. It Crash-Landed

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 04:46:35 GMT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX launched its shiny, bullet-shaped, straight-out-of-science fiction Starship several miles into the air from a remote corner of Texas on Wednesday, but the 6 1/2-minute test flight ended in an explosive fireball at touchdown.

It was the highest and most elaborate flight yet for the rocketship that Elon Musk says could carry people to Mars in as little as six years. Despite the catastrophic finale, he was thrilled.

“Mars, here we come!!” he tweeted.

Mars, here we come!!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2020

This latest prototype — the first one equipped with a nose cone, body flaps and three engines — was shooting for an altitude of up to eight miles (12.5 kilometers). That’s almost 100 times higher than previous hops and skimming the stratosphere.

Starship seemed to hit the mark or at least come close. There was no immediate word from SpaceX on how high it went.

The full-scale, stainless steel model — 160 feet (50 meters) tall and 30 feet (9 meters) in diameter — soared out over the Gulf of Mexico. After about five minutes, it flipped sideways as planned and descended in a free-fall back to the southeastern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. The Raptor engines reignited for braking and the rocket tilted back upright. When it touched down, however, the rocketship became engulfed in flames and ruptured, parts scattering.

The entire flight — as dramatic and flashy as it gets, even by SpaceX standards — lasted six minutes and 42 seconds. SpaceX broadcast the sunset demo live on its website; repeated delays over the past week and a last-second engine abort Tuesday heightened the excitement among space fans.

Musk called it a “successful ascent” and said the body flaps precisely guided the rocket to the landing point. The fuel tank pressure was low, however, when the engines reignited for touchdown, which caused Starship to come down too fast.

“But we got all the data we needed!” he tweeted.

Musk had kept expectations low, cautioning earlier this week there was “probably” 1-in-3 chance of complete success.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who founded the Blue Origin rocket company, offered swift congratulations.

“Anybody who knows how hard this stuff is is impressed by today’s Starship test.”

Two lower, shorter SpaceX test flights earlier this year from Boca Chica, Texas — a quiet coastal village before SpaceX moved in — used more rudimentary versions of Starship. Essentially cylindrical cans and single Raptor engines, these early vehicles reached altitudes of 490 feet (150 meters). An even earlier model, the short and squat Starhopper, made a tiny tethered hop in 2019, followed by two increasingly higher climbs.

Wednesday’s test followed SpaceX’s latest space station supply run for NASA by three days, and the private company’s second astronaut flight by less than a month from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

Starship is actually the upper stage of Musk’s envisioned moon- and Mars-ships. It will launch atop a mega booster still in development known as the Super Heavy. The entire vehicle will tower 394 feet (120 meters) — 31 feet (9.4 meters) taller than NASA’s Saturn V rocket that hurled men to the moon a half-century ago.

SpaceX intends to use Starship to put massive satellites into orbit around Earth, besides delivering people and cargo to the moon and Mars. Earlier this year, SpaceX was one of three prime contractors chosen by NASA to develop lunar landers capable of getting astronauts on the moon by 2024.

Right before Wednesday’s launch, NASA announced the 18 U.S. astronauts who will train for the Artemis moon-landing program.

While accepting an award in Berlin last week, Musk said he’s “highly confident” of a human flight to Mars in six years — “if we get lucky, maybe four years.” But Musk is the first to admit his timelines can be overly optimistic.

Why Chuck Yeager Claimed He Had No "Right Stuff”

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 17:19:16 GMT

Frank Borman did not expect to hear a congratulations from Chuck Yeager one day in 1962—and that’s just as well because he didn’t get one. It wasn’t a surprise that Yeager wouldn’t extend much courtesy to the likes of Borman. There were rules, after all, and there was a hierarchy after all, and Yeager, who on Dec. 7 died at the age of 97, was then the commander of the flight school at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where test pilots were trained. Borman was just one more young Air Force officer who had scrapped and competed to be assigned to so coveted a billet as learning under Yeager—the first person to break the sound barrier, a feat he’d accomplished 15 years earlier.

At the time, a lot of Yeager’s officers were being seduced away by NASA, which promised them the chance not just to fly jets through the atmosphere, but rocket ships high above it. Neither man could know in 1962 what history had in store for Borman—that he would become not just any astronaut, but a figure on the space age’s Mt. Rushmore, commanding Apollo 8 in 1968, the first mission to orbit the moon. All they knew, as Borman told me in a conversation in 2015, was that he was one more young defector from Yeager’s flying family—and that would not make for an easy audience with his commander.

“Colonel,” Borman said when he presented himself before Yeager, who was seated at his desk going through paperwork, “I just got some good news.”

“What’s that?” Yeager said, looking up with only passing interest.

“I was just selected to go to NASA and join the astronaut corps.”

Yeager said nothing at first, merely nodding. Then, at last, he spoke. “Well Borman,” he said, “You can kiss your Air Force career goodbye.” Then he looked back down at his work.

If Yeager was gruff, and he was; if he was unsentimental, and he was; if he was brusque and dismissive and impossible to rattle but easy to annoy—and he was—there was almost no other way he could be. You don’t fly 64 combat missions in World War II—shooting down 13 German planes, including five in one day to earn the honorific of “flying ace”—without a tough hide. You don’t get shot down over France, suffering leg and head wounds, and elude capture by the German Army by hiking across the Pyrenees with French partisans, making it to neutral Spain and eventually returning to England, by being easily moved. And you don’t return to battle during the Vietnam War, at age 43 flying 127 missions, if you are easily unsettled by such existential matters as injury and death.

All of that was true of Yeager, and all of that would have been enough to earn him his own spot on aviation’s more modest Rushmore. But it was on Oct. 14, 1947 when Yeager truly chiseled his name in history, flying a Bell X-1 aircraft 13,000 m (43,000 ft.) above the Mojave desert, gunning his jet to nearly 1,125 km/hr (700 mph), thereby exceeding the speed of sound and producing the first sonic boom ever created by human beings.

The achievement was more than just the stuff of record-setting. At the time, nobody knew if challenging the sound barrier meant that the sound barrier would slap back, ripping to pieces any plane that tried to defy it. It didn’t, and shortly after his historic flight, Yeager spoke almost indifferently about the experience, pronouncing it “nice,” and adding that it was “just like riding a fast car.”

It was inevitable that the astronauts who trained under Yeager would eclipse their one-time mentor. What was flying an airplane compared to circling—and walking on—the moon, after all? Mention the name Yeager to school children in the 1960s and they’d look back at you blankly. But mention names like Glenn and Armstrong and Shepard and Lovell and Aldrin and Grissom and, yes, Borman? That would get a reaction.

It wasn’t until 1979, when Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff was released, and 1983 when the movie followed, that the world became reacquainted with Yeager. Wolfe understood what pilots understood: that it didn’t matter where a man ( they were all men then) flew his machines, or what kinds of machines they were. Aircraft or spacecraft—either way it was thousands or even millions of pounds of explosive, high-speed hardware controlled by a comparative fly-weight bit of human. The stakes were mortal, the whole exercise was madness, but that was what made it worth doing.

Wolfe fell all over himself applauding Yeager, calling him “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.” But Yeager did not think much of all that. Never mind that he flew a total of 341 different kinds of planes in his life; never mind that he not only broke the sound barrier the first time but many times after, at much higher speeds. Never mind that in 2002, at age 79, he flew an F-15 jet at a speed of more than 1,600 k/h (1,000 mph) just because he could. None of that, Yeager believed, was the result of any kind of natural “stuff”—right or not. It was practice; it was work; it was nothing more.

“There’s no such thing as a natural born pilot,” he told Borman and the other young hot-rodders who came to learn at his knee. “If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you can use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.”

Yeager used lots of airplanes the next day over the course of his near-century-long life. And he taught uncounted other pilots to do the same. Honor his claim that he had no right stuff—and let’s hope he’d honor our belief that, yeah, he actually did.

2020 Marks the Point When Human-Made Materials Outweigh All the Living Things on Earth, a New ...

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 16:07:07 GMT

In a startling sign of the impact that humans are having on our planet, a study published Dec. 9 estimates that 2020 marks the point when human-made materials outweigh the total mass of Earth’s living biomass.

Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science found that the total mass of human-made materials—such as concrete, steel and asphalt—has increased rapidly since 1900, when it made up the equivalent of just 3% of the mass of living biomass—plants, animals and microorganisms. As humans have constructed more buildings, roads, structures and objects over the last 120 years, the mass of human-produced materials has grown from less than 0.1 teratonnes to roughly 1 teratonne (1 trillion tonnes), the study, published in the journal Nature estimates.

Meanwhile, humans have been steadily reducing the amount of plant biomass on Earth through thousands of years of land-use, like cutting down trees to plant fields and raise livestock. Today, according to the study, all the living plants on Earth weigh roughly 1 teratonne, half of what they did when the agricultural revolution began 12,000 years ago. Plants account for 90% of the Earth’s living biomass, per the study.

To produce their estimates, scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science integrated a vast number of existing datasets. For the biomass side of the calculation they used data from a 2018 study, in which some of the same researchers collated data to find the mass of all living things on Earth and how it was distributed. That study found that humans themselves make up less than 0.01% of the world’s living biomass. To estimate the weight of human-made materials, they relied largely on the work of Vienna’s Institute of Social Ecology and University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences which for years have been collating data from national statistics bureaus, industry groups and other research in the field of material-flow analysis.

Ron Milo, one of the authors of the recent study, tells TIME that, though there is a large margin for error in the data given its “gigantic” scale, his team can say with 95% confidence that the “tipping point” where human-made materials outweigh living biomass takes place in the six years before or after 2020, with this year as the most likely date.

There is no sign that humans are slowing the expansion of our footprint on the planet, the study says. The rate at which new human-made materials are created began to speed up in the 1950’s, as a post-war construction boom took hold. Production has accelerated ever since, with the mass of human-made materials on earth doubling every 20 years for the last century.

For the last five years, humans have produced on average 30 gigatonnes (30 billion tonnes) of material every year. Another way to look at it: every week, we produce more than the equivalent of the body weight of every person in the world. If current trends continue, human-produced materials will weigh triple the total mass of living biomass by 2040, according to the study.

Milo says these findings are further evidence that we are living through a new geological era in which human activity is the dominant force shaping Earth’s climate and environment, which scientists have dubbed the Anthropocene. “Some people think that humanity is just one species out of many, and that we’re tiny and the world is huge. But our impact is not tiny,” Milo says. “Having a number really quantifies that.”

He hopes that the study—published at a time when governments, businesses and communities around the world are re-evaluating their contribution to environmental problems—will be a wake-up call. “It’s not that we should stop making things, but we need to be aware of the impact we are having and think about how we’re consuming natural resources. Our decisions, our policymaking could affect the rate at which human made materials become double or triple the mass of living things.”

The World Is Headed for 3 Degrees of Warming This Century, U.N. ...

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 10:37:40 GMT

Dense U.N. reports may not make onto anyone’s must read list for the holidays, so think of the United Nations Environment Program’s 2020 Emissions Gap survey as a warning letter from Santa, on behalf of the planet.

The report, released today, is published at the end of every year and measures national commitments to reduce emissions against what science says is needed to limit global warming to an increase of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the goal set out by the 2015 Paris Agreement. This year, we are still firmly on the naughty list, as we have been for the past five years: Despite a brief dip in carbon dioxide emissions caused by the pandemic, the world is still heading for a temperature rise of 3.2 °C this century.

But there is an opportunity to turn that looming lump of coal in our future—a global climate catastrophe—into a gift, if governments turn their post-Covid recovery plans green. Think of it as the ultimate sendoff for 2020, turning the horrors of the past year into a vaccine for a new, more resilient era where the planet is protected along with the humans that live on it.

The report looks at what global emissions will look like in 2030 if countries fully implement their climate promises. So far, “we are not even close to where we should be,” says Anne Olhoff, Head of Strategy, Climate Planning and Policy at UNEP, and the report’s lead author. Even before the forecast temperature rise, 2020 is on track to be one of the warmest on record, with wildfires, droughts, storms and glacier melt intensifying.

On Dec. 2, Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization announced that 2020’s global temperature is set to reach 1.2 °C above the pre-industrial levels, and that there is 20% chance of the global average temperature temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2024. That is the milestone the Paris Accords were established to avoid. Backed by almost every country on earth, the global compact called for keeping the global temperature from rising no more than 2°C, with a goal of 1.5 °C. Anything more than that represents an existential risk for many low-lying island states as sea levels rise.

In a Dec. 2 speech marking the release of the U.N. State of the Climate report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres listed extreme-weather events that occurred over the past year, including wild fires and the record active Atlantic hurricane season that were linked to climate change. He also cited the bleaching of coral reefs and reductions in biodiversity, saying that “humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back, and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.”

A rise of 3.2°C is almost impossible to comprehend, says Olhoff. “You have to keep in mind, these are global averages. A rise of 3.2 may mean two degrees in Denmark, but it could mean seven degrees in central Africa. It will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable. The increase in extreme weather events, the impact of melting of ice sheets, will be enormous.”

In order to slow that temperature rise, nations need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 6% a year through 2030. That is roughly on par with the reductions as a result of this year’s global shutdown over the Covid-19 pandemic, when factories closed and people around the world stopped flying, shopping and commuting. “We would need to see something of a similar magnitude every year to get on track to the Paris goals,” says Olhoff. “But we need to do it in a way where we are not shutting down economies, where it won’t hurt people like it’s done this year.” In fact, this year’s suffering won’t count for much at all unless it is backed by long term structural changes to the way the world consumes energy and uses fossil fuels.

Which is why it is vital that post-Covid recovery plans focus as much on reducing carbon emissions as they do economic growth. According to the report, a green pandemic recovery could cut around 25% off the greenhouse emissions predicted for 2030 and put the world on the 2°C path (even more reductions would be required to achieve the 1.5°C goal).

That means governments need to support zero-emissions technologies and infrastructure, reduce or eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, ban new coal plants, and promote nature-based solutions such as large-scale landscape restoration and reforestation, all as an essential part of their recovery plans. According to Olhoff, fiscal investments into global recovery plans are worth 12% of global GDP this year. “That money can only be spent once,” she says. If the investments are not green, “there’s a big risk that they will commit us to an even more fossil fuel-based future that will be very difficult to break out of.”

So far, few recovery plans include the kind of green commitments that will make a difference. Olhoff is still optimistic that there is room for change. “A lot of these investments are just announced, they are not implemented yet, so there is still the opportunity to make them greener.” That’s where believing in Santa, or, say, an enlightened leadership from all nations, comes in. At least this year, according to the report, there has been a big increase in the number of countries, including large emitters, that have announced commitments to net zero emissions targets before or around the middle of the century. Of course, says Olhoff, “It doesn’t help if you just announce that you will be climate neutral in 2050. You have to back it up with climate action now and with much stronger climate commitments for 2030.” Santa’s watching.

Chinese Spacecraft Lifts Off From Moon Carrying Lunar Rocks

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 08:10:47 GMT

(BEIJING) — A Chinese spacecraft lifted off from the moon Thursday night with a load of lunar rocks, the first stage of its return to Earth, the government space agency reported.

Chang’e 5, the third Chinese spacecraft to land on the moon and the first to take off from it again, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for Beijing’s space program, which also has a orbiter and rover headed to Mars.

The Chang’e 5 touched down Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the moon’s near side. Its mission: collect about 2 kilograms (4 pounds) of lunar rocks and bring them back to Earth, the first return of samples since Soviet spacecraft did so in the 1970s. Earlier, the U.S. Apollo astronauts brought back hundreds of pounds of moon rocks.

The landing site is near a formation called the Mons Rumker and may contain rocks billions of years younger than those retrieved earlier.

The ascent vehicle lifted off from the moon shortly after 11 p.m. Beijing time Thursday (1500 GMT) and was due to rendezvous with a return vehicle in lunar orbit, then transfer the samples to a capsule, according to the China National Space Administration. The moon rocks and debris were sealed inside a special canister to avoid contamination.

It wasn’t clear when the linkup would occur. After the transfer, the ascent module would be ejected and the capsule would remain in lunar orbit for about a week, awaiting the optimal time to make the trip back to Earth.

Chinese officials have said the capsule with the samples is due to land on Earth around the middle of the month. Touchdown is planned for the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where China’s astronauts have made their return in Shenzhou spacecraft.

Chang’e 5’s lander, which remained on the moon, was capable of scooping samples from the surface and drilling 2 meters (about 6 feet).

While retrieving samples was its main task, the lander also was equipped to extensively photograph the area, map conditions below the surface with ground penetrating radar and analyze the lunar soil for minerals and water content.

Right before the ascent vehicle lifted off, the lander unfurled what the space administration called the first free-standing Chinese flag on the moon. The agency posted an image — apparently taken from the lander — of the ascend vehicle firing its engines as it took off.

Chang’e 5 has revived talk of China one day sending astronauts to the moon and possibly building a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects.

China launched its first temporary orbiting laboratory in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022, possibly to be serviced by a reusable space plane.

While China is boosting cooperation with the European Space Agency and others, interactions with NASA are severely limited by U.S. concerns over the secretive nature and close military links of the Chinese program.

China Says Its Moon Probe Is Preparing to Return Rock Samples to Earth

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 07:29:03 GMT

BEIJING — China said Thursday its latest lunar probe has finished taking samples of the moon’s surface and sealed them within the spacecraft for return to Earth, the first time such a mission has been attempted by any country in more than 40 years.

The Chang’e 5, the third Chinese probe to land on the moon, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for Beijing’s space program, which also has a probe en route to Mars carrying a robot rover.

The Chang’e 5 touched down Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the moon’s near side, on a mission to return lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since 1976.

The probe “has completed sampling on the moon, and the samples have been sealed within the spacecraft,” the China National Space Administration said in a statement.

Plans call for the upper stage of the probe known as the ascender to be launched back into lunar orbit to transfer the samples to a capsule for return to Earth. The timing off its return was not immediately clear and the lander can last up to one moon day, or 14 Earth days, before plummeting temperatures would make it inoperable.

Chang’e is equipped to both scoop samples from the surface and drill 2 meters (more than 6 feet) to retrieve materials that could provide clues into the history of the moon, Earth other planets and space features.

While retrieving samples is its main task, the lander is also equipped to extensively photograph the area surrounding its landing site, map conditions below the surface with ground penetrating radar and analyze the lunar soil for minerals and water content.

Chang’e 5’s return module is supposed to touch down around the middle of December on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where China’s crewed Shenzhou spacecraft have made their returns since China first put a man in space in 2003, becoming only the third country do so after Russia and the United States.

Chang’e 5 has revived talk of China one day sending a crewed mission to the moon and possibly building a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects.

China also launched Its first temporary orbiting laboratory in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022, possibly to be serviced by a reusable space plane.

While China is boosting cooperation with the European Space Agency and others, interactions with NASA are severely limited by concerns over the secretive nature and close military links of the Chinese program.

China Is Poised to Bring Home Moon Samples in Its Most Ambitious Lunar Mission Yet

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:55:54 GMT

The moon’s Ocean of Storms was once a busy place. Back in 1967, the U.S. successfully landed its Surveyor 3 spacecraft in the vast plain in the northern lunar hemisphere; little more than two years later, the Apollo 12 crew returned, touching down within 200 meters (656 ft.) of the Surveyor and collecting more than 34 kg (75 lbs.) of lunar rock and soil to bring back to Earth. But things have been quiet in the Ocean of Storms since—until now.

Nearly 50 years after the U.S. abandoned its lunar dreams, China’s Chang’e 5 spacecraft is set for a Dec. 1 landing in NASA’s long-ago stomping grounds, attempting to become the first country to return any samples from the moon since the Soviet Union’s robotic Luna 24 spacecraft retrieved 170 grams (6 oz.) of lunar soil in 1976. If Beijing succeeds—and its lunar endeavors to date suggest it will—it could portend big things for a country that has fast become one of the world’s leading space powers.

It was at 4:30 a.m. local time on Nov. 24 that Chang’e 5 lifted off aboard a 20-story tall Long March 5 rocket—a launch that was broadcast live across China, “leaving many spectators…in awe and excitement as the gigantic booster thundered skyward,” the China National Space Administration’s official announcement read. That sort of success has been true of all of China’s recent lunar missions. In 2007 and 2010, Chang’e 1 and Chang’e 2 successfully executed lunar orbital missions. In 2013, Chang’e 3 landed on the moon and deployed a small rover. And in 2019 Chang’e 4 did the same, becoming the first spacecraft to touch down on the far side of the moon.

Chang’e 5 will be a landing mission too—but an order of magnitude more difficult than its predecessors. The 8.2 metric ton spacecraft is actually a four-part ship: an orbiter, a lander, an ascent stage and a reentry capsule. On Nov. 28, after a four-day translunar journey, the entire assembly entered an eight-hour elliptical orbit around the moon. It later conducted an engine burn to lower itself into a circular 200 km (120 mile) orbit—about twice the altitude at which the Apollo spacecraft used to fly.

The lander and the ascent stage have since separated from the rest of the craft and the plan for Dec. 1 involves an extensive engine burn that will bring them to a soft touchdown touch down near Mons Rümker, a volcanic formation in the Ocean of Storms that features relatively young and pristine soil—with relatively the key word. The scarcity of craters on the formation suggest that the area is about 2 billion years old, less than half of the moon’s estimated 4.5 billion year-old age.

The lander will spend less than two weeks there, excavating as deep as two meters (about 6.5 ft.) below the surface, and collecting up to 2 kg (about 4.4 lbs.) of rock and soil. Those samples will then be packed into to the ascent vehicle, which will lift off and rendezvous with the orbital segment still circling the moon. The samples will then be transferred to the re-entry vehicle which will separate from the orbiter and peel off for Earth, aiming for a landing in Inner Mongolia sometime in mid-December.

In some ways the final stage of the mission—the reentry through Earth’s atmosphere—will be the most hair-raising. Spacecraft that are orbiting the Earth fly at about 28,200 km/h (17,500 mph) and can more or less ease back into the atmosphere by tapping the brakes and slowing their speed. Spacecraft returning from the moon slam into the atmosphere at a much faster 40,200 km/h and must fly in a sort of roller coaster trajectory as they descend, bleeding off speed and g-forces if they are going to survive the intense heat of reentry.

If Chang’e 5 indeed succeeds in that final step, it will open the door to robotic, sample-return mission from Mars—and, eventually, crewed missions to the moon. Pei Zhaoyu, deputy director of China’s Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, sees the robotic lunar program continuing even after taikonauts—or China’s astronauts—reach the moon. “I think future exploration activities on the moon are most likely to be carried out in a human-machine combination,” he said in a press statement before the launch.

The exact nature of those future missions might be uncertain at the moment, but the likelihood that they will take place is much less so. China—like the U.S. in the 1960s—has made a commitment to the moon. And like the U.S. in the 1960s, it seems determined to make good on it.

For Much of the U.S., Good Weather Will Allow for an Outdoor (and Safer) Thanksgiving

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 15:58:12 GMT

Public-health officials have for weeks been urging Americans to avoid gathering for Thanksgiving this year, lest the holiday turn into a national super-spreading event. But for those who still plan on getting together, experts say an outdoor get-together is far safer than prolonged time indoors, where it’s easier for the virus that causes COVID-19 to spread. Whether an outdoor Thanksgiving is really feasible, however, largely depends on, well, the weather.

Good news: a look at the Thanksgiving Day forecast reveals that, for most of the U.S., temperatures will be above normal and the skies will be clear.

“When it comes to Thanksgiving weather, most of the country will have lucked out,” says John Homenuk, a meteorologist at New York Metro Weather, via email. “Warmer than normal air and calm conditions are expected from the Plains states to the Great Lakes and Tennessee Valley. Cooler, but mostly pleasant weather is also expected in the Pacific Northwest down the West Coast to the Desert Southwest. Outdoor activities should at least be possible in many of these regions, but especially the Central U.S. and Ohio Valley, where temperatures are expected to be several degrees warmer than normal.”

Homenuk also sent along this map, which shows expected temperatures across the U.S. in terms of how far above or below normal they’re expected to be for this time of year:

However, an outdoor Thanksgiving may be less of an option across much of the U.S. East Coast, which is likely in for some wet weather. “Areas like Philadelphia, New York City and Boston are likely to be dealing with showers and dreary conditions throughout the morning and early afternoon,” says Homenuk. “Some clearing is possible later in the day if a cold front can sweep through quickly enough.”

Even with this weather forecast in mind, it’s still safer to avoid gathering this year with anybody you don’t already live with (and no, getting a single COVID-19 test can’t guarantee a safe Thanksgiving). But if you’re committed to having people over or heading somewhere else despite the risks, it’s looking like turkey al fresco will be a viable option for many.

Still, it’s wise to keep the guest list as short as possible and ensure everybody stays masked and distanced as much as possible; it’s especially important to keep people apart while they’re masks-down and eating. One other suggestion: rather than inviting a bunch of people over for an all-day hang and dinner, have a smaller group over for a distanced outdoor hangout for part of the day, then do dinner with your immediate household later.

China Launches a Mission to Bring Back Material From the Moon

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 01:37:30 GMT

WENCHANG, China — China launched an ambitious mission on Tuesday to bring back rocks and debris from the moon’s surface for the first time in more than 40 years — an undertaking that could boost human understanding of the moon and of the solar system more generally.

Chang’e 5 — named for the Chinese moon goddess — is the country’s boldest lunar mission yet. If successful, it would be a major advance for China’s space program, and some experts say it could pave the way for bringing samples back from Mars or even a crewed lunar mission.

The four modules of the Chang’e 5 spacecraft blasted off at just after 4:30 a.m. Tuesday (2030 GMT Monday, 3:30 p.m. EST Monday) atop a massive Long March-5Y rocket from the Wenchang launch center along the coast of the southern island province of Hainan.

Minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s first and second stages and slipped into Earth-moon transfer orbit. About an hour later, Chang’e 5 opened its solar panels to provide its independent power source.

Spacecraft typically take three days to reach the moon.

The launch was carried live by national broadcaster CCTV which then switched to computer animation to show its progress into outer space.

The mission’s key task is to drill 2 meters (almost 7 feet) beneath the moon’s surface and scoop up about 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of rocks and other debris to be brought back to Earth, according to NASA. That would offer the first opportunity for scientists to study newly obtained lunar material since the American and Russian missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Chang’e 5 lander’s time on the moon is scheduled to be short and sweet. It can only stay one lunar daytime, or about 14 Earth days, because it lacks the radioisotope heating units to withstand the moon’s freezing nights.

The lander will dig for materials with its drill and robotic arm and transfer them to what’s called an ascender, which will lift off from the moon and dock with the service capsule. The materials will then be moved to the return capsule to be hauled back to Earth.

The technical complexity of Chang’e 5, with its four components, makes it “remarkable in many ways,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a space expert at the U.S. Naval War College.

“China is showing itself capable of developing and successfully carrying out sustained high-tech programs, important for regional influence and potentially global partnerships,” she said.

In particular, the ability to collect samples from space is growing in value, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Other countries planning to retrieve material from asteroids or even Mars may look to China’s experience, he said.

While the mission is “indeed challenging,” McDowell said China has already landed twice on the moon with its Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4 missions, and showed with a 2014 Chang’e 5 test mission that it can navigate back to Earth, re-enter and land a capsule. All that’s left is to show it can collect samples and take off again from the moon.

“As a result of this, I’m pretty optimistic that China can pull this off,” he said.

The mission is among China’s boldest since it first put a man in space in 2003, becoming only the third nation to do so after the U.S. and Russia.

Chang’e 5 and future lunar missions aim to “provide better technical support for future scientific and exploration activities,” Pei Zhaoyu, mission spokesperson and deputy director of the Chinese National Space Administration’s Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center told reporters at a Monday briefing.

“Scientific needs and technical and economic conditions” would determine whether China decides to send a crewed mission to the moon, said Pei, whose comments were embargoed until after the launch. “I think future exploration activities on the moon are most likely to be carried out in a human-machine combination.”

While many of China’s crewed spaceflight achievements, including building an experimental space station and conducting a spacewalk, reproduce those of other countries from years past, the CNSA is now moving into new territory.

Chang’e 4 — which made the first soft landing on the moon’s relatively unexplored far side almost two years ago — is currently collecting full measurements of radiation exposure from the lunar surface, information vital for any country that plans to send astronauts to the moon.

China in July became one of three countries to have launched a mission to Mars, in China’s case an orbiter and a rover that will search for signs of water on the red planet. The CNSA says the spacecraft Tianwen 1 is on course to arrive at Mars around February.

China has increasingly engaged with foreign countries on missions, and the European Space Agency will be providing important ground station information for Chang’e 5.

U.S. law, however, still prevents most collaborations with NASA, excluding China from partnering with the International Space Station. That has prompted China to start work on its own space station and launch its own programs that have put it in a steady competition with Japan and India, among Asian nations seeking to notch new achievements in space.

China’s space program has progressed cautiously, with relatively few setbacks in recent years. The rocket being used for the current launch failed on a previous launch attempt, but has since performed without a glitch, including launching Chang’e 4.

“China works very incrementally, developing building blocks for long-term use for a variety of missions,” Freese-Johnson said. China’s one-party authoritarian system also allows for “prolonged political will that is often difficult in democracies,” she said.

While the U.S. has followed China’s successes closely, it’s unlikely to expand cooperation with China in space amid political suspicions, a sharpening military rivalry and accusations of Chinese theft of technology, experts say.

“A change in U.S. policy regarding space cooperation is unlikely to get much government attention in the near future,” Johnson-Freese said.

Exclusive: Pfizer CEO Discusses Submitting the First COVID-19 Vaccine Clearance Request to the FDA

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 11:45:37 GMT

On Friday, Pfizer CEO and chairman Albert Bourla announced that the company has filed a request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine, making it the first to do so. In a discussion on TIME 100 Talks, Bourla says that if the FDA authorizes the vaccine, the company will be ready “within hours” from receiving the green light to start distributing the vaccine. Pfizer has been manufacturing doses even while safety and efficacy tests were ongoing, in order to avoid delays in shipping once authorized.

According to Bourla, Pfizer is on “on track” to deliver the 50 million doses promised to the U.S. government by the end of the year, with 1.3 billion doses through next year.

In an in-depth conversation about the journey the company has taken in developing its vaccine, Bourla admitted that, throughout the process, he wasn’t always sure that having a safe and effective vaccine ready for FDA review in less than a year was possible. “Conviction is a part of it, so I was always telling [our teams] that we will make it, and we will make it by October, and if not us, then who?” he says. “But I knew that it was an extremely risky suggestion, I knew it was going to be difficult, and the stars needed to be aligned all the way to the end.”

Pfizer capitalized on a partnership begun in 2018 with German company BioNTech, which was founded by a husband-and-wife team of scientists with expertise in a genetic technology called mRNA. The platform is fast and flexible for developing vaccines, since it only requires knowing the genetic sequence of the virus the vaccine will target, rather than growing and manipulating the virus in question.

Still, no mRNA-based vaccine against an infectious disease had ever been approved, so Pfizer and BioNTech began exploring whether influenza might be the first. Instead, when the pandemic hit a year later, the teams shifted their attention to SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, with surprising success. Bourla says the partnership is built on a mutual focus on advancing science, and that the two companies began work, including sharing confidential information, before signing a formal contract, since those agreements can take months. “In fact, we are still finalizing the contractual obligations we have that we need to sign with them,” says Bourla. “It’s the perfect relationship for me. Ugur [Sahin, BioNTech’s co-founder and chief executive] is a wonderful human being, and a great scientist. He shares the same passion [as I do] about saving lives and I’m very optimistic that not only will we do very well together bringing a COVID-19 vaccine to the world, but later hopefully a flu vaccine.”

Bourla also believes the success of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, as well as that of Massachusetts-based biotech Moderna (which also has an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine candidate, shown to be 94.5% effective) validates the mRNA platform, and makes it a serious contender for future vaccines and drugs against emerging infectious diseases. That validity of mRNA vaccines will be further tested once their efficacy can be compared to those of other vaccines that use the more proven methods of relying on weakened cold viruses to deliver viral material to the immune system, or selected fragments of viral proteins.

While he expressed concern about the skepticism and mistrust that many American have expressed about the COVID-19 vaccines, mostly because they were developed so quickly, Bourla says he hopes the completion of the election and the magnitude of the efficacy and safety data start to reassure people. “The problem is that this vaccine, and the pandemic in general, became the focal point of political debate,” he says. “It was discussed in political rather than scientific terms. We reached an unthinkable point that wearing a mask is a political statement, which I think is wrong. Wearing a mask is something you need to do because science is telling you to do it.”

He noted that in an effort to reassure the public about the scientific integrity of the vaccine development and testing process, vaccine makers in the pharmaceutical industry came together in an unprecedented show of support against political pressure by pledging to stick to scientific standards and nothing else. “Myself, I released a lot of letters saying I will never succumb to any political pressure,” he says. “The only pressure we feel at Pfizer is the pressure 7 billion people around the world are giving us for a solution to this pandemic.”

Vaccine makers are a little less united on the question of whether they should profit from a pandemic shot. While some have said they will price their vaccines so they don’t profit from them, Bourla says Pfizer is making its vaccine available on a non-for-profit basis only for lower-income countries receiving vaccines through the World Health Organization vaccine distribution coalition run by GAVI. “We have elected for developed countries, to give [the vaccine] at a very low price [around $19.50]. We believe the price allows governments all over the world to give the vaccine free to their citizens,” he says. “If you think about the economic value of a vaccine—I’m not speaking about the human value because there is no way to measure human life—I think the millions of jobs that will not be lost, that hopefully will come back, and the billions in economic value that a successful vaccine will enable—I think it’s not appropriate to discuss if we sell it at $19.50 per dose.”

Bourla would not speculate on how long the FDA might take to decide on the company’s EUA request, but given the urgency of the pandemic, that decision could come soon. The agency will likely take into consideration the fact that the vaccine’s 95% effectiveness is in protecting against COVID-19 disease—not preventing infection from the virus. But with cases of COVID-19 continuing to surge around the world, stalling the virus and preventing people from getting sick would be a welcome advantage. More studies will also explore whether people who don’t become sick because they are vaccinated are less likely to spread infection; if that’s the case then the vaccines will be even more critical for controlling the pandemic.

“I hope the same time next year, we will be in a very, very different place,” he says. “When you have vaccine protection that is that high, 95% for example”—the effectiveness level Pfizer’s vaccine has shown in studies—”it takes less time to be able to develop protection through a vaccination scheme. So I truly believe the light at the end of the tunnel is not only real but it is bright and is coming. We need to be patient.”