Hydropower is the world’s biggest source of renewable energy, generating about 16% of the global electricity supply. And it will continue to play a key role as the world looks to meet net-zero targets, not least of all because, like a battery, it can store massive amounts of energy for later and quickly release it in moments of peak demand.

But despite being better for the climate, it’s becoming increasingly clear that renewable energy sources can have a negative impact on the environment. Just 37% of the world’s 246 longest rivers remain free-flowing—without any human-made dams, reservoirs, or other structures controlling how and when the water moves—according to a 2019 Nature study by a group of international researchers led by McGill University and the World Wildlife Fund. Not only can hydropower disrupt local communities, but it can also impact ecosystems, water quality, and biodiversity. One in five fish, for example, that passes through a conventional turbine suffers fatal injuries, according to a team of researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Germany. This can have especially damaging effects on migratory species, like salmon, sturgeon, and eels, whose spawn may have to travel through these dangerous downstream routes to get to the sea.
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Siblings Gia and Abe Schneider, however, are trying to change this. They founded the company Natel Energy in 2009 to make sure that hydropower is rolled out in the most sustainable way possible. The company created what they say is a fish-safe turbine, and their approach is to modernize existing hydropower plants with their turbines to allow fish to pass safely, while also building new, low-impact run-of-river projects that don’t require dams, which make them as minimally disruptive to river systems as possible.

So far, Natel has two operational projects, in Madras, Ore. and Freedom, Maine, with several more in the pipeline; the company is planning to install two more projects this year, one in Virginia and another in Austria.

“My brother and I deeply care that that development happens in a way that supports sustainable outcomes in rivers, because rivers are our lifeblood,” says Gia, the CEO of the Alameda, California-headquartered company.

It’s All About Water

The Schneider siblings both earned engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology around the turn of the 21st century. Afterwards, they took different career paths—Gia worked in finance and energy, and Abe was a mechanical engineer—but they came together in 2009 to found Natel, with their late father, with the aim of creating hydropower systems that help, rather than hurt, ecosystems. It’s an obsession that is personal for them both. Their father, a renewable energy technology inventor, taught them as children about climate change.

Growing up in Texas, Gia recalls as a teenager going on a white water rafting trip with her father to protest a large hydropower project in Canada. As teens the siblings also took regular vacations to fish at a river in Colorado. They noticed that the branch of the river with beaver dams was flourishing, while another branch where the dams were removed by a cattle company, wasn’t. Their theory, says Abe, was that the cattle company removed the dams to improve grazing because they thought the beaver dams drowned the meadows, but in reality the beaver dams created them. This realization that natural dams played a crucial role in maintaining a healthy habitat helped inspire their future approach to hydro planning.

Unlike large hydropower plants, which can have a damaging environmental footprint, Natel wanted to make turbines that would enable rivers to maintain their natural flow as much as possible to protect a healthy ecosystem. The company’s “restoration hydro” design philosophy, which incorporates the concept of biomimicry—learning from and emulating nature to create more sustainable designs—couples a fish-safe turbine with low-impact structures in strategic sites that use and mimic the natural landscape. Restoration hydro project structures might mimic beaver dams, natural log jams, or rock arches, and depending on the river and environment, it might be possible to install turbines without actually damming the river—which would dramatically change the landscape.

In doing so, the goal of restoration hydro is to help restore watershed and ecological function that may have been damaged, whether naturally or by conventional hydropower projects. On top of this, unlike traditional hydropower projects, this design supports groundwater recharge—when water seeps through the earth, replenishing aquifers—reduces flood and drought risks, and improves water quality.

“Every hydro project is also a water project, not just an energy project,” Gia says.

Tackling The Biodiversity And Climate Crisis

In order to be less hazardous to aquatic life, Natel’s fish-safe hydropower turbines have thicker, more steeply slanted blades than normal hydropower turbines. The blunt edges of the blades deflect fish, while their slope reduces the likelihood of a direct impact. Natel says its unique blade design has a greater than 99% fish survival rate.

Gia says that when thinking about tackling climate change, the biodiversity crisis can’t be overlooked. For years, researchers have been looking into how to make hydropower projects less environmentally damaging, with some using screens to prevent fish from entering dams. And in some places large hydropower projects have fallen out of favor. Other sectors of the renewable energy industry are experimenting along these lines as well: wind energy companies are working to make turbines safer for birds, for example, by painting one of the rotor blades black to make it more visible to birds, while there is increasing focus on the negative impact solar farms can have on biodiversity when land is cleared to make way for the panels.

“At the end of the day, we need to get megawatts, and clean megawatts, renewable megawatts, [which] are better than fossil fuel megawatts in the context of climate change,” she says. “But I do think that we have to prioritize biodiversity because when you zoom out to the big picture, we face not just a crisis of climate change as the earth as a whole, we also face a real crisis on biodiversity.”

Environmentally Friendly—And Cost Effective

When the siblings started Natel, they were laser focused on how to make hydropower better for rivers. At the same time, they knew that “nobody on the finance or the energy side is going to want to sacrifice efficiency or cost,” she says. “What we inserted into that equation is that we also wanted it to be fish-safe, and river-connecting, and we were like, ‘we’ll put those design criteria on par with the other constraints, and then use that to drive the engineering process.’”

Natel says the cost of generating power using its turbines is about 4-8 cents per kilowatt-hour, or $40-80 per megawatt-hour (the range in cost depends on the size of the turbine or plant; larger turbines and plants tend to result in some savings). Compare that to typical large hydropower projects in North America where, on average, the cost of new projects built over the past decade was around 8 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Natel’s turbine also eliminates the need for fish screens, reducing both upfront and ongoing costs for things like maintenance, and the compactness of the turbines means that civil works to build plants using Natel turbines are less complex. “It’s about as efficient as any conventional hydro turbine out there, but it’s fish-safe,” says Gia.

The siblings hope that what they’re doing can help demonstrate a more sustainable approach to renewable energy—proving that companies shouldn’t have to choose between what’s good for the environment and what works economically.

There’s a spectator sport quality to the billionaire space race. Pick your favorite rich guy and your favorite rocket—Elon Musk’s Falcon 9, Richard Branson’s VSS Unity, Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard—and start your own cheering section. And while it’s not always easy to root for the fabulously rich to get even more fabulous, there’s something in the space race for all of us. Space tourism, after all, is becoming a growth industry, and as the frequency of flights goes up and the cost comes down, we can all dream of earning our astronaut wings.

But according to a new study published this month in the journal Earth’s Future, all the new joyriding could come at a steep environmental price. The more rockets that get launched, the more black soot gets injected into the upper atmosphere, not to mention pollutants including nitrous oxide, aluminum oxide, hydrochloric acid, and chlorine, as well as water vapor and carbon dioxide. Together, all of that output not only contributes to global warming but also to the depletion of the ozone layer.
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There’s been limited information on the emissions impact of space travel, the study notes. And the sector is largely absent from international climate treaties. The new paper, therefore, “allows us to enter the new era of space tourism with our eyes wide open to the potential impacts,” said co-author Robert Ryan, a research fellow at the University College London’s geography department, in a statement. “The conversation about regulating the environmental impact of the space industry needs to start now so we can minimize harm to the stratospheric ozone layer and climate.”

To conduct their work, the researchers chose 2019—before the three companies began carrying crews to space—as a baseline. In that year, there were 103 space launches worldwide—most by government-run space exploration programs—all of which contributed their own pollutants to the atmosphere. Compared to that, space tourism by Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX is just a blip. Since 2020, Virgin has carried only a single crew of space tourists, SpaceX has carried two, and Blue Origin has carried five, just since last July. But that slow start belies big plans.

Virgin in particular boasts that it ultimately will be launching on a daily basis; Blue Origin is moving more slowly, aiming to double its launches this year over last. SpaceX is more of a mixed bag. It is unlikely to launch as many paying crews due to the $50 million price tag for a ride to Earth orbit aboard its Crew Dragon spacecraft as compared to the $450,000 Virgin charges for their 12-minute suborbital flights. (Blue Origin does not currently disclose what it will charge for tickets when regular flights begin.) But SpaceX’s nine-engine Falcon 9 rocket—which launches the company’s crewed spacecraft—also carries satellite payloads and NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and is the workhorse of the company’s fleet. Since its first flight more than a decade ago, 159 Falcon 9s have been launched. Also part of the SpaceX lineup is the thrice-flown Falcon Heavy rocket, with 27 engines, and its massive 33-engine Super Heavy, which should have its first flight this year. Taken together, the three companies could eventually leave the 103 launches achieved in 2019 in the dust.

Of all of the pollutants the rockets release, it is the black soot that causes the greatest concern. Conventional airplanes and other vehicles create plenty of heat trapping soot of their own, but not nearly as high in the sky as rockets do. When expelled into the upper atmosphere—at altitudes of 50 km (38 mi) or more—black soot is 500 times more efficient at causing warming than it is when emitted by, say, a commercial airliner flying at a mere 11,000 m (35,000 ft.).

“[Black soot] directly injected to the upper atmosphere has a greater climate forcing efficiency than other sources [of pollution],” the authors write. That’s bad news every time a rocket flies but it’s especially bad given the billionaire space race. Just three years of tourism flights at the frequency the companies predict, the authors estimate, could more than double the black soot emissions of the last decade of contemporary rocket launches.

The private rocket companies push back at this, especially Bezos’s Blue Origin, which uses liquid hydrogen and oxygen as its fuel and thus produces less-damaging exhaust. “New Shepard’s engine is fueled by highly efficient and clean liquid oxygen and hydrogen. During flight, the only byproduct of New Shepard’s engine combustion is water vapor with no carbon emissions,” said a company spokesperson in an email to TIME. Water vapor, however, does have a greenhouse gas impact.

It’s not just the warming effect of tourism flights that worries the researchers; so too does the damage to the ozone layer. The 1987 Montreal Protocol, phasing out the use of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, has long been seen as one of the environmental movement’s great success stories. But rocket exhaust does the ozone no favors.

Even at the 2019 rate of launches, the researchers predict an increase in ozone loss of 8.5 parts per billion, or 10% of the ozone recovery achieved by the Montreal accords, by the end of this decade. Add the billionaire rocketeers into the mix, and the loss jumps to 13 parts per billion—or 16% of what was recovered by Montreal. “The only part of the atmosphere showing strong ozone recovery post-Montreal Protocol is the upper stratosphere, and that is exactly where the impact of rocket emissions will hit hardest,” said Ryan in his statement. “We weren’t expecting to see ozone changes of this magnitude, threatening the progress of ozone recovery.”

The greatest loss in ozone is in the spring in the Arctic—stripping away part of the Earth’s shield against dangerous ultraviolet rays from space, and harming humans and the underlying ecosystem. The rocket-related damage is due not just to the exhaust put out by the engines, but to reentry and incineration of the second stage of multi-stage rockets. In this case, Virgin and Blue Origin are blameless, since their rockets are entirely reusable. It is SpaceX and other orbital launchers with expendable stages that do this part of the ozone damage. And they do a lot of it indeed: in the stratosphere of the high northern latitudes, reentry incineration of space debris accounts for 51% of rocket-related ozone loss.

The billionaire space race was never going to come cheap—those head-spinning ticket prices alone prove that. But increasingly it seems that it’s not just the tourists who are paying the freight; it’s the environment—and thus the rest of us—too.

It’s not easy to get from North Lincoln Avenue to the Lake of Death. North Lincoln Avenue is in Pittsburgh; the Lake of Death is on the moon—meaning there’s a tidy 385,000 km (over 239,000 mi.) between them. But before the end of the year, that gap should close—thanks to a modest company in a modest building just a third of a mile northwest of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Heinz Field, tucked humbly between a Wendy’s and a McDonald’s.

The building is the headquarters of Astrobotic, which—if all goes according to plan—will launch its Pittsburgh-made Peregrine spacecraft from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in the fourth quarter of this year, landing it in the Lake of Death, high in the north lunar hemisphere. It would mark the first time the U.S. has put metal on the moon since the soft touchdown of Apollo 17, just shy of 50 years ago.
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The moon has been on NASA’s mind a lot lately. The space agency is promising that its Artemis program will have astronauts back on the lunar surface by the middle of this decade. Unlike the Apollo crews and their brief flags-and-footprints visits, however, the Artemis crews will ultimately be establishing a long-term presence at fixed lunar bases. But well-supplied bases don’t build and equip themselves—and they don’t come cheap, especially considering NASA’s always tight budget.

Enter the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. In 2018, the space agency established CLPS to outsource the delivery of cargo and rovers to the lunar surface to the private sector—much the way NASA’s commercial crew program outsourced the delivery of astronauts to the International Space Station to SpaceX and Boeing. The CLPS companies are contracted to build spacecraft that can do jobs as diverse as scouting for water ice deposits on the moon that can be used for drinking, breathable air, and rocket fuel; studying the radiation of the lunar environment to determine the hazard levels for long-duration crews; and ferrying up power-generating solar panels as well as construction material for lunar greenhouses and even habitats. International and other commercial partners could also pay for the privilege of flying their own payloads aboard the CLPS missions, sweetening the financial pot for the companies. Plus, CLPS contractors own the rights to any ships they design, allowing them to build more for the private sector, should any other customers beyond NASA come calling.

Fourteen companies, including giants like Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, and Blue Origin have been selected for CLPS contracts, but it is little Astrobotic that is set to be first out of the gate. It is an improbable pick. Never mind SpaceX and its 12,000 employees, or Lockheed Martin with its 114,000. At last count Astrobotic had just 169 workers (though they boast that they have 11 new jobs opening soon). But the 15-year-old company is doing a lot with a little.

Sealed inside a clean-room in its unassuming headquarters is the company’s Peregrine lander, 1.9 m (6.2 ft.) tall and 2.6 m (8.5 ft.) wide, stuffed with a suite of 24 instruments and other payloads from five different countries, including 11 different experiments from NASA—all of which will operate autonomously or be run by controllers back on Earth. Also on board are five mini-rovers from the Mexican space agency—each measuring just 12 centimeters (4.7 in) across—meant to test how semi-autonomous machines can coordinate their work on another world; a radiation sensor from the German space agency; and a rover the size of a microwave oven built and designed by students from nearby Carnegie Mellon University.

All of this has at once put Astrobotic—and Pittsburgh—very much on the cosmic map. “We’ve been called the spearhead of Artemis,” says Astrobotic director of marketing Alivia Chapla of the company’s first-in-line position. “This mission is bringing America back to the moon.”

Humble Beginnings

Astrobotic’s upcoming landing on the moon has its roots in a time the company failed to do just that. In 2007, Google announced it was offering a prize of $30 million to the first private company that could build and launch a rover capable of landing softly on the lunar surface, driving at least 500 meters, and sending back pictures and video of its travels. The so-called Google X-Prize was intended to stimulate invention and competition in the private sector. While it ended in 2018 without a winner, it still made its mark—giving rise to multiple small companies that outlasted the prize itself, including Astrobotic, which began with just 18 employees.

“We started with the X-Prize, and while nobody ended up winning, it did help us prove our chops,” says John Thornton, Astrobotic CEO. “It gave us the time and the runway to build up our lunar payload delivery side.”

What earned Astrobotic not only inclusion in the CLPS program but the honor of going first is the nimbleness and capability of the Peregrine and the speed with which the company has built it. The spacecraft, which is compact compared to the rovers NASA sends to Mars, nonetheless has enough room on board for its two dozen different payloads. In addition to the German, Mexican, and Carnegie Mellon contributions, the 11 NASA instruments include a neutron spectrometer to search for evidence of water ice on or near the surface; a flux magnetometer to study energy and particle pathways moving throughout the lunar environment; a near-infrared spectrometer that will search for methane and carbon dioxide near the surface that, like water ice, could be used for fuel and breathable air; and a laser reflector, similar to the ones left on the moon by Apollo astronauts, off of which astronomers on Earth can bounce laser beams to precisely measure the distance between the Earth and the moon, and even study such phenomena as moonquakes.

Fitting all of the cargo—to say nothing of the electronics and other mechanical guts of the ship—into so relatively small a chassis was, says Victoria Dulla, project manager for Peregrine’s electrical systems team, a little like playing a game of Tetris. If laid end to end, the harnesses that hold all of the ship’s wiring in place would stretch over a mile. “People would walk by my desk and ask, ‘Why are you drawing lines all over your screen all day?’” she says. “I got to grow the design from start to finish and it really has been a dream for the past three years.”

Designing and building the spacecraft has been one thing. Actually flying it to the moon will be another matter, and Peregrine’s trip to the lunar surface will be a comparatively patient and poky one. In the Apollo days, astronauts traveled an as-the-crow flies route to the moon, with the powerful upper stage of the Saturn V rocket blasting them out of Earth orbit on a direct moonward trajectory, delivering them to their destination in just three days. For uncrewed spacecraft without as prodigious a rocket as the Saturn V, things are slower.

Peregrine will launch atop United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket and, once it separates from the rocket, will spend the better part of a month flying, first in a long, looping Earth orbit and then swinging out far enough to enter an equally swooping lunar orbit before slowly approaching the moon closer and closer, until it finally descends and lands. The Lake of Death—or Lacus Mortis, as it is known to astronomers—was chosen in part because of intriguing surface features that are nothing more or less exotic than caves, carved out by ancient volcanic activity. In addition to water ice on the lunar surface, caves are perhaps the second most prized lunar features, since they may provide spots for early astronauts to build sealed habitats, protected from dangerous radiation coming from space. A species that long ago lived as cave people on Earth could repeat those humble beginnings on the moon.

“There’s one cave in particular that has been discovered by ground penetrating radar [from lunar orbit] that could fit the city of Philadelphia inside,” says Thornton. “The water gets all the attention but I think the caves are just as big a discovery because it’s where we’re going to settle.”

For all of the work the Astrobotic crew is putting into Peregrine, the new spacecraft will not last long on the moon’s surface. Its lifespan is expected to be just two weeks—or one lunar day—before the Lake of Death is plunged into the cold and darkness of the two-week lunar night, during which temperatures plummet to as low as -130°C, (-208°F), blacking out the spacecraft’s solar panels, freezing its delicate innards, and, in effect, leaving it a derelict bit of once-prized space junk. Spacecraft like the 45-year-old Voyagers do survive the deep cold of deep space with the help of nuclear-fueled radiothermal generators, but it is the rare mission that carries them, mostly because of the dangers inherent in launching radioactive material.

“It’s potentially a dirty bomb if something goes wrong,” says Thornton. “There’s a ton of regulation and controls around that kind of launch, so it’s very difficult for a private company to do.” Peregrine, powered only by its solar panels, will thus live a short, but, Astrobotic hopes, productive life.

Impressive as Peregrine is, it is not the only lunar spacecraft Astrobotic is building for NASA. The company has won a total of $350 million in contract awards from the space agency and nearly $200 million of that funding is going to build another, larger ship the company plans to launch in 2023 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Dubbed the Griffin lander, after the mythical four-legged flying creature, the spacecraft measures 3.7 m (12 ft) in width and length and stands 2.4 m (8 ft.) tall. It is headed for the south lunar pole where water ice is known to exist in permanently shadowed craters, and where astronauts could also set up base camps. Unlike Peregrine, with its suite of two dozen instruments, Griffin will carry just one very important piece of cargo: NASA’s 450 kg (nearly 1,000 lb.) VIPER rover, a machine about the size of a golf cart, equipped with instruments to go looking—and even drilling—for water ice.

“This giant rover is being sent aboard our Griffin lunar lander,” says Chapla, “and this Griffin lander is the largest lunar lander that’s been built since the Apollo program’s lunar module.”

The Space Dividend

What Astrobotic accomplishes on the moon, it hopes to match—or at least complement—with what it accomplishes at home in Pittsburgh. The company is opening what it has dubbed its Moonshot Museum adjacent to its headquarters, in partnership with the existing Carnegie Science Center and planetarium. The new facility will not only include familiar space museum exhibits, but will also feature a large window looking into the clean room where Peregrine now sits and where Griffin will soon be. Astrobiotic is also joining hands with academic researchers from the University of Pittsburgh to seed the development of new software for lunar landers as well as Earth-orbiting satellites. At least 40 local contractors and subcontractors are participating in the development of Peregrine and Griffin, spawning a sort of mini-version of Florida’s famed space coast in a formerly sooty steel city.

“I like to call us the blue collar space company,” says Chapla, “because we built this through hard work and grit and have turned Pittsburgh into a new center for space innovation.”

Peregrine and Griffin are not alone in the CLPS lineup. NASA so far has six CLPS missions scheduled for 2022 and 2023, with the overall program, running through 2028, budgeted at $2.6 billion. Indeed, late this year, not long after Peregrine launches, Houston-based Intuitive Machines plans to launch its own spacecraft with its own collection of NASA science instruments to a spot between the moon’s Sea of Serenity and Sea of Crises in the lunar northeast.

Whether NASA will indeed succeed in getting humans back onto the moon’s surface in the mid-2020s is impossible to say. But the infrastructure and experiments needed to make landings on—and the ultimate settlement of—the moon possible are already set to fly. And first out of the chute will be Pittsburgh’s Peregrine—a homegrown machine from an unlikely place, getting ready to make an industrial city’s mark on another world.

(SYLHET, Bangladesh)—Scientists say climate change is a factor behind the erratic and early rains that triggered unprecedented floods in Bangladesh and northeastern India, killing scores and making lives miserable for millions of others.

Although the region is no stranger to flooding, it typically takes place later in the year when monsoon rains are well underway.

This year’s torrential rainfall lashed the area as early as March. It may take much longer to determine the extent to which climate change played a role in the floods, but scientists say that it has made the monsoon — a seasonable change in weather usually associated with strong rains — more variable over the past decades. This means that much of the rain expected to fall in a year is arriving in a space of weeks.
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The northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya received nearly three times its average June rainfall in just the first three weeks of the month, and neighboring Assam received twice its monthly average in the same period. Several rivers, including one of Asia’s largest, flow downstream from the two states into the Bay of Bengal in low-lying Bangladesh, a densely populated delta nation.

With more rainfall predicted over the next five days, Bangladesh’s Flood Forecast and Warning Centre warned Tuesday that water levels would remain dangerously high in the country’s northern regions.

The pattern of monsoons, vital for the agrarian economies of India and Bangladesh, has been shifting since the 1950s, with longer dry spells interspersed with heavy rain, said Roxy Matthew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, adding that extreme rainfall events were also projected to increase.

Until now, floods in northeastern Bangladesh were rare while Assam state, famed for its tea cultivation, usually coped with floods later in the year during the usual monsoon season. The sheer volume of early rain this year that lashed the region in just a few weeks makes the current floods an “unprecedented” situation, said Anjal Prakash, a research director at India’s Bharti Institute of Public Policy, who has contributed to U.N.-sponsored study on global warming.

“This is something that we have never heard of and never seen,” he said.

Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina gave a similarly grim assessment Wednesday.

“We haven’t faced a crisis like this for a long time. Infrastructure must be constructed to cope with such disasters,” she told a news conference in Dhaka. “The water coming from Meghalaya and Assam has affected the Sylhet region” in northeastern Bangladesh, she said, adding that there is no quick respite for the country.

Hasina said that floodwaters would recede soon from the northeast, but they would likely hit the country’s southern region soon on the way to the Bay of Bengal.

“We should prepare to face it,” she said. “We live in a region where flooding happens quite often, which we have to bear in mind. We must prepare for that.”

A total of 42 people have died in Bangladesh since May 17 while Indian authorities reported that flood deaths have risen to 78 in Assam state, with 17 others killed in landslides.

Hundreds of thousands are displaced and millions in the region have been forced to scramble to makeshift evacuation centers.

Some, like Mohammad Rashiq Ahamed, a shop owner in the hardest-hit city of Sylhet, have worriedly returned home with their families to see what can be salvaged. Wading through knee-deep water, he said that he was worried about floodwaters rising again. “The weather is changing … there can be another disaster, at any time.”

He is one of about 3.5 million Bangladeshis who face the same predicament each year when rivers flood, according to a 2015 analysis by the World Bank Institute.

The country of 160 million is considered one of the most vulnerable to climate change and the poor are disproportionately impacted.

Mohammad Arfanuzzaman, a climate change expert at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said that catastrophic floods like the one this year could have wide-ranging impacts, from farmers losing their crops and being trapped in a cycle of debt to children not being able to go to school and at increased risk to disease.

“Poor people are suffering a lot from the ongoing flooding,” he said.

___

Ghosal reported from New Delhi. Associated Press writers Julhas Alam from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Victoria Milko in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

In some ways, the last place you’d want to put the James Webb Space Telescope is, well, in space. If you owned a $10 billion car, you wouldn’t leave it out in a hail storm, and while there’s no hail in space, there are plenty of micrometeoroids—high speed debris no bigger than a dust grain but moving so fast they can pack a true destructive wallop. Every day, millions of such fragments rain down on Earth, but they incinerate in the atmosphere long before they reach the ground. The Webb, parked in a spot in space 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) from Earth, has no such protection. And as NASA and others have reported in the past week, its mirror—the heart of the space telescope—has already been dinged five times by tiny space flecks, the most recent of which has done real, but correctable, damage.
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The Webb’s mirror is an exquisite piece of engineering. Measuring 6.5 m (21 ft., 4 in.) across, it’s made up of 18 hexagonal segments, each of which can be moved along seven different axes to allow controllers to focus the overall instrument. Together, the segments, made of beryllium, have an area of 25 sq. meters (269 sq. ft.). All of them are covered with reflective gold, but in a film so thin that if it were peeled off and tamped down into a sphere, it would measure no bigger than a golf ball. Meanwhile, the beryllium is so smoothly polished that if it were expanded to the size of the United States, its biggest imperfection would be 7.6 cm (3 in.). That’s a heck of a piece of hardware to leave exposed to the space elements. But if you’re going to do your work where Webb does, it’s a risk you have to take.

What makes the recent micrometeoroid hit especially troubling is that while NASA scientists simulated such collisions on the ground, the impact that occurred is bigger than the ones they modeled. “With Webb’s mirror exposed to space, we expected that occasional micrometeoroid impacts would gracefully degrade telescope performance over time,” Lee Feinberg, a Webb telescope optical manager, said in a statement. “This one…is larger than our degradation predictions assumed.”

That does not remotely mean that the telescope is seriously damaged before it can even go about its work. The position of the mirror segments can be moved in increments measured in nanometers—or billionths of a meter—allowing a damaged segment to be precisely refocused to cancel out the effect of the ding. Ground crews have already adjusted the damaged segment accordingly, keeping the telescope on track to release its first images to the public on July 12.

Webb does have ways to defend itself. NASA can often forecast the approach of micrometeoroid showers and the telescope can be moved to position its mirror away from the direction of the incoming debris. But there is no denying the certainty that over the decade or so the telescope is set to be operating it will be tattooed again and again by high speed dust and grains. There is no denying either, however, that in that same decade, the Webb should return magnificent science too. Space is a dangerous place to do business—but it’s a very rich one as well.

This story originally appeared in TIME Space, our weekly newsletter covering all things space. You can sign up here.

Climate change affects everyone, but especially children. Their small bodies—and the fact that they grow so rapidly, starting from the time they’re in utero—make them more vulnerable to toxins, pollution, and other climate-change fallout. Over their lifetimes, kids also face greater exposure to the damage of climate change than adults.

A new scientific review article published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows just how dangerous climate-related threats are to children’s health. The researchers analyzed data about the specific effects of a rapidly warming planet and found that climate change, driven in large part by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, harms children’s mental and physical health from the time they are in the womb through childhood—with potentially lifelong effects. These dangers threaten many aspects of children’s health, from the development of their lungs, to their intellectual ability, to their mental health. Socially and economically disadvantaged children are especially affected, but all children are at risk. “It’s not just polar bears on melting icebergs,” says study co-author Frederica Perera, director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health. “There is direct harm, now, to children’s health—and certainly their future is being jeopardized in a major way.”
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Policies that shift countries away from fossil fuels to renewable, more efficient sources of energy are likely to improve kids’ health, the study authors say. Health professionals should also acknowledge and learn about the health risks of climate change to better help their young patients. “We know how to do it; we know alternatives, and they’re working in different countries,” Perera says. “We just have to speed the process up…and put into effect the solutions we know work.”

Here are three big threats that stem from climate change and threaten all children around the world, according to the new research.

Polluted air

Air pollution affects children’s health in many ways. Through exposure to polluted air, children breathe in fine particulate matter created when cars, factories, and other sources burn fossil fuels. Air-pollution exposure to the fetus during a mother’s pregnancy has also been linked to low birth weight, premature births and stillbirths; scientists hypothesize that may be because air pollution can result in inflammation that makes it hard for nutrition to get to the fetus, says Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a pediatrician and interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (who was not involved in the new study). “Particulate pollution is a source of infant death, including stillbirth and death in infancy,” says Bernstein. Air pollution can also harm children’s lung growth and functioning, and put them at higher risk for conditions like respiratory infections, bronchitis and asthma.

Other research suggests that air pollution can adversely affect children’s minds starting in utero. An expecting mother’s exposure to air pollution particles “can be directly toxic to the developing brain” of her fetus, says Perera. “They are able to traverse the placenta.” One research review published in Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology in 2020 includes numerous studies that link exposure to air pollution to lower cognitive function in children. Other research has found associations between exposure to pollution and symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Pollutants also contribute to climate change—which, in turn, increases air pollution by fueling many of the conditions that cause wildfires, including heat and drought. And higher temperatures are thought to contribute to the development of ozone, a pollutant that harms the lungs and worsens conditions like asthma.

Less nutritious food

Climate change is undermining one of the central building blocks for growing children: healthy food. Extreme weather events that destroy food crops, including drought, flooding, and higher temperatures, are becoming more common. These can drive up the price of food and make it scarcer. Even when children have enough food, they still may not have adequate nutrients; emerging research shows that high carbon dioxide levels may make food less nutritious.

Getting enough calories and essential nutrients is central to ensuring kids grow up healthy. If kids are under-nourished, “their brains don’t develop normally,” says Bernstein. “It affects every organ.”

Global hunger is already very common and experts predict it will get worse. In 2021, about 193 million people were acutely food insecure—which the United Nations defines as food inadequacy that endangers lives or livelihoods—and about 26 million children were suffering from wasting, a condition in which kids don’t have enough weight for their height, according to the World Food Programme.

More trauma

A world altered by climate change is more dangerous for children. Famines, drought, and extreme weather events are becoming more common as a result of climate change, as are the violent interpersonal conflicts that such disasters tend to generate; for instance, climate change-driven drought is thought to have contributed to the outbreak of the 2011 war in Syria. On a hotter planet, children are more likely to be exposed to trauma, including displacement; globally, about 2.4 million children were displaced by natural disasters alone in 2021, according to UNICEF.

Living through major trauma as a child is thought to increase risk for both mental illnesses like depression as well as physical conditions such as cancer, asthma, and stroke. Stress in expecting mothers can also harm their fetus’ cognitive development.

“If your house gets burned down or flooded by a hurricane, if you’re impoverished because your family’s livelihood has been destroyed by drought—these are adverse childhood events,” says Bernstein, “and they can accumulate and exact harms across the lifespan.”

Human beings may be a savage species when we want to be, but we’re also an exceedingly moral one, with a highly evolved sense of right and wrong, good and bad, crime and consequences. Few things illustrate this better than our practice of third-party punishment: meting out penalties against malefactors who have done us no personal harm. The entire criminal and civil justice system is built around judges and juries punishing offenders who have wronged not them, but another.

An instinct for third-party punishment appears early in life—think of preschoolers tattling on classmates who have broken a rule or taken a toy from someone else—but just how early has been unclear. Now, a study published in June in Nature Human Behavior offers an answer. According to research led by investigators from Osaka University and Otsuma Women’s University, in Japan, third-party punishment behavior may begin in babies as young as 8 months old. The researchers say it’s evidence that morality may be innate.
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Since it is impossible to know what’s going on in a pre-verbal baby’s head by asking them, the study involved familiarizing 24 8-month-old babies with a simple video game, in which anthropomorphized shapes—squares with eyes drawn onto them—move about a screen interacting with one another. Where the babies’ own eyes moved was recorded by a gaze-tracking device, and as the babies watched the shapes move, they learned an important feature of the game: if they let their gaze linger on one figure for long enough, a square without eyes would fall from the top of the screen and crush it.

Once the babies had learned that feature of the video game, the researchers made things more complex. Now, as the babies watched, one of the squares with eyes would occasionally misbehave, colliding with another one and squashing it against the edge of the screen. After several such incidents, the babies started to respond, with roughly 75% of them directing their gaze at the wrongdoer and holding it there until the crushing square would fall from the sky and destroy it—effectively administering a penalty for its misbehavior.

“The results were surprising,” said lead author Yasushiro Kanakogi in a statement that accompanied the study’s release. “We found that preverbal infants chose to punish the antisocial aggressor by increasing their gaze toward the aggressor.”

That, at least, is what the study suggested, but there were other possible interpretations. Suppose, for example, the babies were not trying to punish the aggressor, but rather their gaze was simply drawn to it because it was the most active square on the screen. To test that theory, the investigators trained another 24 babies of the same age on a game in which a square would still fall on the aggressor, but it would fall slowly and harmlessly, without crushing—or punishing—it. When the same test was run under those conditions, the babies stared much less predictably at the wrongdoer, with the number who directed their eyes that way falling to the 50% or lower range.

Similar lower results were achieved when the researchers re-ran variations on the study two more times with two more groups of 24 babies each. In one trial, gazing at the wrongdoer caused the crushing square to fall only half the time—making the punishment less reliable. In another, the eyes were removed from the character squares, making them less anthropomorphic. In both of those trials too, the babies’ gazed much less frequently at the malefactor after it misbehaved. Finally, recruiting yet a fifth group of babies, the researchers re-ran the original experiment, with anthropomorphized squares getting crushed every time the babies gazed at them. The babies reacted accordingly, with the frequency of gazing at a misbehaving character rebounding to the levels in the first experiment. The babies, it seemed, did not always like what they saw and were acting as judge and jury to set a wrong right.

The results, the researchers believe, point to the likelihood that third-party punishment is less learned than it is evolved, a part of a universal moral grammar with which many psychologists and ethicists believe human beings are born.

“The observation of this behavior in very young children indicates that humans may have acquired behavioral tendencies toward moral behavior during the course of evolution,” Kanakogi said in a statement. “Specifically, the punishment of antisocial behavior may have evolved as an important element of human cooperation.”

China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery.

The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye — the world’s largest radio telescope — differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.
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It isn’t clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.

In September 2020, Sky Eye, which is located in China’s southwestern Guizhou province and has a diameter of 500 meters (1,640 feet), officially launched a search for extraterrestrial life. The team detected two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal in 2022 from observation data of exoplanet targets, Zhang said, according to the report.

China’s Sky Eye is extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in the search for alien civilizations, Zhang is reported to have said.

The suspicious signals could, however, also be some kind of radio interference and requires further investigation, he added.

Calls by Bloomberg News to the Science and Technology Daily weren’t answered.

The man who captained the first mission to orbit the moon was not, truth be told, terribly impressed by what he experienced. Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, which circled the moon 10 times on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1968, was candid when we chatted one day back in 2015. We met in his private airplane hangar in Billings, Montana, and I asked Borman, now 94, if, living out in big sky country, he doesn’t sometimes gaze up at the full moon at night and think, “I was there. I called that home.”

“Nah,” Borman responded with a wave. “I’ve tried that once or twice because people always tell me I should feel like that, but it just doesn’t work.”
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This week, Borman might regard the moon with the same nonchalance, but the rest of us will be seeing it with different, more enchanted eyes—at least from moonrise on Sunday, June 19, to moonset on Wednesday, June 22. That’s when the sky will be decorated by the much-anticipated Strawberry Supermoon.

The moon was born in violence 4.5 billion years ago, when a planetesimal the size of Mars collided with Earth, sending a vast belt of debris into space. The belt coalesced into a cloud, and the cloud into a moon, which drifted back to a stable orbit averaging 382,000 km (roughly 238,000 mi.) from Earth. From there, the now peaceable moon helps stabilize our seasons and regulates our tides, circling the planet once every 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes.

But the moon’s orbit isn’t perfect. Irregular and egg-shaped, it can be as far as 406,000 km (252,000 mi) from Earth and as close as 357,000 km (222,000 mi). At its closest approach, or perigee, the moon appears 30% larger and 17% brighter than it usually does. And when that perigee happens to coincide with a full moon, as it will next week, that’s when you get the dazzling phenomenon known as a supermoon.

There is a full moon every month, of course, but supermoons are rarer, happening three to four times a year, from May to August. The upcoming Strawberry Moon does not get its name from the color the moon will appear to be. The popular Blood Moons happen during a lunar eclipse—when the Earth moves between the moon and the sun—and the moon does appear reddish. This occurs because the Earth’s atmosphere scatters blue wavelengths of sunlight streaming through it, allowing only red to pass through, which turns the moon a faint scarlet. A Strawberry Moon, meanwhile, will be the same color as the moon ordinarily appears; only its size and luminosity will change.

The moniker “Strawberry Moon” is instead a linguistic gift from the Algonquin Native American tribe, who named the supermoon that occurs in June after the brief strawberry harvesting season that happens at the same time of year. Whatever it’s called, the upcoming supermoon will be at its closest, fullest, and brightest at 7:52 AM ET on Tuesday, June 21. Given the season and the tilt of the Earth, the Strawberry Moon will never climb terribly high in the sky, rising a maximum of 23 degrees above the horizon on Wednesday morning—or about a quarter of the way above ground level. The best viewing then, is away from tall buildings or stands of trees, in open country or on relatively clear land.

There’s no telling if Borman will be watching next week, but not every astronaut who orbited or touched the moon returned to Earth as unmoved as he did. Dave Scott, the commander of Apollo 15, once told me of the welcome-home barbecue his neighborhood threw him when he returned from the moon in 1971. He recalls standing in his backyard with a beer, gazing up at the moon and thinking how surreal it seemed that just a week earlier he had been there. His Houston lawn was beneath his feet now, but seven days earlier it had been the soil of the moon beneath his boots, dirtying his uniform, and in the very air he breathed when he climbed back inside his spacecraft and shucked the bulky, dusty pressure suit.

Scott got to cross that quarter million mile distance between here and there. The rest of us never will—but as a species we long to. That’s why the little shard of moon on display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., that people are permitted to touch, has been rubbed smooth in the decades it’s been in place. That’s why we gaze up at a full moon with such fascination—so close to us on a cosmic scale but so far away in all other respects. And that’s why we’ll be enchanted all the more this weekend when the moon nudges a tantalizing bit closer, hovering in the sky just 357,657 km (222,238 mi) away. It’s a huge distance to travel, but to us, however briefly, it will seem like an arm’s reach.

NASA has spent more than 60 years flying UFOs. Every spacecraft that ever visited the moon, landed on Mars, buzzed by Jupiter, orbited Saturn, or reconnoitered Pluto would be a decidedly unidentified flying object to any alien intelligence that might encounter it. There may be no such intelligence beyond Earth in our solar system. But in interstellar space? That’s another question. That’s why the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, which left the solar system in 2012 and 2018 respectively, carry golden records on their sides etched with coded sounds and pictures from Earth—a message in a bottle to any civilization that might one day encounter the ships and want to learn more about the curious species that launched them.
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UFOs—or UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), as they’re more decorously called today—have frequently been in the news lately. As I reported, just last month, the House Intelligence Committee’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation subcommittee conducted public hearings on more than 140 sightings by military pilots over the past 20 years of UAPs flying in all manner of inexplicable ways: bobbing, weaving, hovering, diving, changing direction with head-snapping speed that would produce potentially deadly g-forces to any living being—or at least any living human being—inside.

“Look at that thing, dude!” one pilot shouted in a declassified recording made during a 2015 sighting. “Oh my gosh. There’s a whole fleet of them. They’re going against the wind! The wind’s 120 knots [135 mph] west!”

A version of this story first appeared in the TIME SPACE newsletter. To sign up, click here.

The Congressional hearing followed the release last year of a similar Department of Defense study of UAPs, and both Congress and the Pentagon came to the same conclusion, which was basically: beats me. The objects could be natural phenomena misinterpreted by the pilots and their equipment; they could be new technology developed by Russia, China, or another high technology power; and yes, they could, in theory at least, be extraterrestrial in origin.

“UAPs are unexplained, it’s true,” Congressman and committee chairman Andre Carson (D., Ind.) said in his opening statement during the House hearings. “But they are real.”

Now, there’s a third government agency getting involved in the effort to explain UAPs: NASA itself. As the space agency announced this week, it’s launching its own investigation, beginning in the fall, to get to the bottom of the UAP mystery. The effort will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, former chair of the astrophysics department at Princeton University. Budgeted at a bargain rate of just $100,000, the study will run for nine months, analyze all available video data and first-hand accounts amassed so far, and consult both military and civilian experts for their analysis of the evidence. The space agency is open to any and all interpretations of the data—though it is setting a high bar for at least one.

“There is no evidence,” NASA said in its release, “[that] UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin.”

But absence of evidence, of course, is not evidence of absence, and NASA officials acknowledge that anything is possible and that they will follow the findings, wherever they might point.

“NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also,” associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement. ”We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what we do.”

That is indeed what NASA does—and it’s high time it brought those skills to the UAP mystery. After six decades of building and flying machines it can very much explain, the space agency will at last turn its eye to ones the world can’t.

Nobody would have known if I had touched Neil Armstrong’s moon-walking suit back in 2018. I wasn’t supposed to touch it—indeed, I was forbidden to touch it—but boy, I could have.

I was in the restoration lab at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy extension outside of Washington, D.C., and the suit was being mounted on a new mannequin-like armature that would help support and preserve it for display in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing the following year. At one moment, I was left alone—just the suit and me in the middle of the room—and I knelt down to examine the boots that had taken those celebrated small steps half a century earlier. The temptation to reach out and graze one of them with a finger was overwhelming, but I couldn’t do it. The suit had the feel of a religious artifact; touching it felt like a desecration.
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Twelve such suits that were used by moonwalkers are at large around the world, and soon there will be more—not in museums, but in actual service during spacewalks outside of the International Space Station (ISS) as well as on the moon, and eventually Mars. This week, as NASA and others report, the space agency awarded contracts worth a maximum combined $3.5 billion to Houston-based Axiom Aerospace and North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace to compete to develop the next generation of so called Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs)—NASA-speak for spacesuits. One or both companies could produce suits that meet NASA’s approval and go into service. Either way, the contracts come just in time (or by some measures, years too late).

The suits currently used for spacewalks aboard the ISS are as old as the station itself—which is to say more than two decades—and they’re showing signs of dangerous wear. In March, for instance, there was a small water leak in one suit during a spacewalk that could have threatened astronaut Matthias Maurer with drowning in space, as almost happened to Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano in 2013 when a more serious leak caused his helmet to fill partway with water.

The new suits will weigh 158 kg (350 lbs) on Earth—but nothing at all in the zero-G environment outside the space station, and 26 kg (just over 57 lbs.) on the surface of the moon. They will likely come in two versions. The lunar variety will be equipped with a more flexible design that will facilitate walking, and the inevitable falling and getting back up that are required to get about on the moon. The type used on spacewalks outside the ISS will not require the same flexibility.

“The requirements set for a low-Earth-orbit suit on space station and a suit on the lunar surface [are] not significantly different, particularly for the life support system,” Lara Kearney, manager of the spacesuit program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center told Spaceflight Now. “The differences really come in the pressure garment [the innermost layer of the suit]—the difference in being in zero gravity on space station versus having to walk on the moon, where you need all of the mobility.”

Any suit that will be worn on the moon also has to be more rugged than a spacewalking suit, to resist damage from the powder-fine, abrasive dust that covers the lunar surface. That’s especially so since 21st century explorers will be spending far more time on the moon than the maximum three days the Apollo crews spent.

NASA is laying out the seed money for the suits, but as with so much else in the increasingly privatized space sector, it will not own them. Rather, it will be for Axiom and Collins to design them, build them, and then lease them to the space agency, and any other paying customers with eyes on spacewalking or reaching other worlds. The next great step on the surface of the moon will, in a sense, be taken in a rented tux. As for when that will actually happen, NASA says the big moment could occur as early as 2025.

This story originally appeared in TIME Space, our weekly newsletter covering all things space. You can sign up here.

The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shot past a key milestone—more than 50% higher than pre-industrial times—and is at levels not seen since millions of years ago when Earth was a hothouse ocean-inundated planet, federal scientists announced Friday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its long-time monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, averaged 421 parts per million of carbon dioxide for the month of May, which is when the crucial greenhouse gas hits its yearly high. Before the industrial revolution in the late 19th century carbon dioxide levels were at 280 parts per million, scientists said, so humans have significantly changed the atmosphere. Some activists and scientists want a level of 350 parts per million. Industrial carbon dioxide emissions come from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
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Levels of the gas continue to rise, when they need to be falling, scientists say. This year’s carbon dioxide level is nearly 1.9 ppm more than a year ago, a slightly bigger jump than from May 2020 to May 2021.

“The world is trying to reduce emissions, and you just don’t see it. In other words, if you’re measuring the atmosphere, you’re not seeing anything happening right now in terms of change,” said NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans, who tracks global greenhouse gas emissions for the agency.

Outside scientists said the numbers show a severe climate change problem.

“Humanity has to make more serious efforts and see a rapid decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, or else the impacts of climate change will only continue to worsen,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of environment at the University of Michigan.

University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles said without cuts in carbon pollution “we will see ever more damaging levels of climate change, more heat waves, more flooding, more droughts, more large storms and higher sea levels.”

The slowdown from the pandemic did cut global carbon emissions a bit in 2020, but they rebounded last year. Both changes were small compared to how much carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere each year, especially considering that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere hundreds to a thousand years, Tans said.

The world puts about 10 billion metric tons of carbon in the air each year, much of it gets drawn down by oceans and plants. That’s why May is the peak for global carbon dioxide emissions. Plants in the northern hemisphere start sucking up more carbon dioxide in the summer as they grow.

NOAA said carbon dioxide levels are now about the same as 4.1 to 4.5 million years ago in the Pliocene era, when temperatures were 7 degrees (3.9 degrees Celsius) hotter and sea levels were 16 to 82 feet (5 to 25 meters) higher than now. South Florida, for example, was completely under water. These are conditions that human civilization has never known.

The reason it was much warmer and seas were higher millions of years ago at the same carbon dioxide level as now is that in the past the natural increase in carbon dioxide levels was far more gradual. With carbon sticking in the air hundreds of years, temperatures heated up over longer periods of time and stayed there. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melted over time, raising sea levels tremendously and making Earth darker and reflecting less heat off the planet, Tans and Overpeck said.

Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography calculated levels a bit differently based on time and averaging, and put the May average at 420.8 ppm, slightly lower than NOAA’s figure.

(NEW DELHI, India)—The devastating heat wave that has baked India and Pakistan in recent months was made more likely by climate change and is a glimpse of the region’s future, international scientists said in a study released Monday.

The World Weather Attribution group analyzed historical weather data that suggested early, long heat waves that impact a massive geographical area are rare, once-a-century events. But the current level of global warming, caused by human-caused climate change, has made those heat waves 30 times more likely.

If global heating increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) more than pre-industrial levels, then heat waves like this could occur twice in a century and up to once every five years, said Arpita Mondal, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, who was part of the study.
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“This is a sign of things to come,” Mondal said.

The results are conservative: An analysis published last week by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office said the heat wave was probably made 100 times more likely by climate change, with such scorching temperatures likely to reoccur every three years.

The World Weather Attribution analysis is different as it is trying to calculate how specific aspects of the heat wave, such as the length and the region impacted, were made more likely by global warming. “The real result is probably somewhere between ours and the (U.K.) Met Office result for how much climate change increased this event,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College of London, who was also a part of the study.

What is certain, though, is the devastation the heat wave has wreaked. Indian cities and Pakistan consistently saw temperatures above 45C (113F) in the past weeks. In Pakistan, scorching temperatures over 50C (122F) were recorded in some places like Jacobabad and Dadu. Parts of the Indian capital New Delhi saw temperatures reaching 49C (120F) this month.

India sweltered through the hottest March in the country since records began in 1901 and April was the warmest on record in Pakistan and parts of India. The effects have been cascading and widespread: A glacier burst in Pakistan, sending floods downstream; the early heat scorched wheat crops in India, forcing it to ban exports to nations reeling from food shortages due to Russia’s war in Ukraine; it also resulted in an early spike in electricity demand in India that depleted coal reserves, resulting in acute power shortages affecting millions.

Then there is the impact on human health. At least 90 people have died in the two nations, but the region’s insufficient death registration means that this is likely an undercount. South Asia is the most affected by heat stress, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of a dataset published Columbia University’s climate school. India alone is home to more than a third of the world’s population that lives in areas where extreme heat is rising.

Experts agree the heat wave underscores the need for the world to not just combat climate change by cutting down greenhouse gas emissions, but to also adapt to its harmful impacts as quickly as possible. Children and the elderly are most at risk from heat stress, but its impact is also inordinately bigger for the poor who may not have access to cooling or water and often live in crowded slums that are hotter than leafier, wealthier neighborhoods.

Rahman Ali, 42, a ragpicker in an eastern suburb of the Indian capital New Delhi earns less than $3 a day by collecting waste from people’s homes and sorting it to salvage whatever can be sold. It’s backbreaking work and his tin-roofed home in the crowded slum offers little respite from the heat.

“What can we do? If I don’t work…we won’t eat,” said the father of two.

Some Indian cities have tried to find solutions. The western city of Ahmedabad was the first in South Asia to design a heat wave plan for its population of over 8.4 million, all the way back in 2013. The plan includes an early warning system that tells health workers and residents to prepare for heat waves, empowers administrations to keep parks open so that people can shade and provides information to schools so they’re able to tweak their schedules.

The city has also been trying to “cool” roofs by experimenting with various materials absorb heat differently. Their aim is to build roofs that’ll reflect the sun and bring down indoor temperatures by using white, reflective paint or cheaper materials like dried grass, said Dr. Dileep Mavalankar, who heads the Indian Institute of Public Health in western Indian city Gandhinagar and helped design the 2013 plan.

Most Indian cities are less prepared and India’s federal government is now working with 130 cities in 23 heat wave-prone states for them to develop similar plans. Earlier this month, the federal government also asked states to sensitize health workers on managing heat-related illnesses and ensure that ice packs, oral rehydration salts, and cooling appliances in hospitals were available.

But Mavalankar, who wasn’t part of the study, pointed to the lack of government warnings in newspapers or TV for most Indian cities and said that local administrations had just not “woken up to the heat.”

The House Intelligence Committee’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation subcommittee would like to make one thing very clear: They did not spend 90 minutes this morning conducting public hearings into the existence of UFOs. Yes, they were discussing unidentified objects, and yes those objects were seen to be flying, but the term for them today is “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP)—which means exactly the same thing but carries less whiff of tin foil hat conspiracies than the old UFO designation did.

Whatever the objects are called, Congress appeared determined to take them seriously. “UAP reports have been around for decades and yet we haven’t had an orderly way for them to be reported—without stigma—and to be investigated,” said Congressman Adam Schiff, (D, Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, in his remarks. “That needs to change.”
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The hearings this morning were the first of their kind since 1970, after the Air Force terminated Project Blue Book, its own 22-year investigation into unidentified flying objects. Then, as now, the purpose of the open forum was to give public attention—and provide public answers—to a mystery that sparks fascination, confusion, and popular anxiety in equal measure.

Chaired by Congressman Andre Carson (D, Ind.), today’s session followed the June 2021 declassification of 144 different observations, including video evidence, by Naval and other military aviators of objects that were flying in all manner of inexplicable ways—bobbing, weaving, changing directions with a speed and nimbleness no existing technology could manage. None produced any detectable exhaust. Some turned with a head-snapping suddenness that would have produced potentially deadly g-forces to any human who might be aboard. Others appeared to dive into the ocean.

“UAPs are unexplained, it’s true,” Carson said in his opening statement. “But they are real.”

The hearings took place in two parts—one morning session open to the public, and a classified afternoon session behind closed doors. Called as witnesses in the public portion were Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, and Scott Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence.

The committee explored four possible explanations for the objects. They could be nothing at all—just errors in sensors or other instruments, though some of those sensors are human pilots themselves, who swear by what they’ve seen. They could be new weapons systems or other technology being tested by foreign adversaries such as Russia or China—both of which are known to be working on hypersonic systems capable of flying at five times the speed of sound or faster. It’s also possible the phenomena are so-called blue-on-blue sightings—American pilots spotting classified American technology. And, of course, they could, in theory, be of extraterrestrial origin.

Bray was quick to dismiss—or at least minimize—the blue-on-blue explanation. “We’ve established relationships with organizations and entities that are potentially flying or developing platforms … and our goal is to continue,” he said. “We have a process to deconflict activities to ensure that we are not potentially reporting on something that may be a development platform.”

Certainly, it seems logical that if the military were both testing new technology and sending aviators up for routine surveillance and training flights, it would make sure to keep them out of each other’s way. But while there haven’t been any collisions between UAPs and pilots, there have been at least 11 near-misses, Bray said.

The possibility of mere instrumentation malfunctions—video cameras or other sensors simply ginning up UAP ghosts—was also quickly dismissed, at least in some cases.

“There could be some [sightings] that are a meteorological phenomenon or something like that, that may not be a physical object?” asked Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D, IL).

“I can say with certainty that a number of these are physical objects,” answered Bray.

That brought the hearing to the most tantalizing possibility—that the objects are of extraterrestrial origin. “No one knows whether there’s extraterrestrial life,” said Congressman Peter Welch (D, VT). “It’s a big universe and it would be pretty presumptuous to have a hard and fast conclusion. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that there is some exploration coming here.”

In response, Moultrie was clear that that is an idea the Department of Defense is not ruling out and that it will be candid if it finds any evidence to support an extraterrestrial explanation. “There are elements in our government that are engaged and looking for life in other places,” he said. “Our goal is not to potentially cover up something if we find something; it’s to understand what may be out there [and] examine what it may mean for us from a defense perspective.” In such a case, he said, “transparency actually is very important for public consumption.”

That left the final possibility of hostile powers testing offensive technology, and on that score the committee was not nearly so transparent. The members did not even address the possibility in any detail. Only Welch mused about the chance that the UAPs could be foreign surveillance drones, and if so, “that has to be analyzed and stopped,” he said. But he did not ask Bray or Moultrie to comment on that scenario. Krishnamoorthi inquired whether any wreckage was recovered from any of the objects either on the ground or underwater. Bray deferred the question to the later closed testimony.

It was never likely that a 90-minute public hearing would solve decades of speculation about the origin of UAPs—and whatever is disclosed in the committee’s classified session will be released in its own sweet time, if at all. Still, the lawmakers conceded that answers are needed and that today was at least an important first step. “It is one of the first times,” Carson said, “that we can agree in a bipartisan manner.”

You’d think it would be hard to overlook an object with a mass four million times greater than the sun. But when that object is a supermassive black hole like Sagittarius A*, the giant object astronomers have long believed sits at the center of our galaxy, it is, by definition, impossible to see. Black holes, after all, are collapsed objects with a gravitational pull so great that not even light can escape.

All the same, this morning, at a National Press Club even in Washington, D.C., representatives of a team of 300 astronomers from 80 institutes around the world, released the first ever image of Sagittarius A*—or, more specifically, of the super-heated matter swirling around it and destined to be swallowed by it.
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The image, which somewhat resembles a fuzzy orange doughnut, was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a necklace of 11 radio telescopes arrayed around the world operating together as one massive observatory. The black hole captured by the EHT, said University of Arizona astronomer Feryal Ozel during the unveiling, is “the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.”

That “gentle” descriptor is true only to a point. Black holes are violent objects, shredding and swallowing stars and other matter whole. Indeed, the EHT gets its name from the so-called event horizon surrounding a black hole—or, the point at which the gravity of the object grows so great that anything near it falls inside, never to be seen again. Black holes can be so small and the objects they swallow so large that, as Sheperd Doeleman, the director of the EHT put it to the Washington Post in an interview before the image was released: “Imagine sucking an elephant through a straw.”

Astronomers believe supermassive black holes like Sagittarius A* sit at the center of nearly all galaxies, providing a sort of gravitational and structural pivot point around which the galaxy slowly rotates. It is currently unclear whether supermassive black holes form first and galaxies then take shape around them, or the galaxies form first and the supermassive black hole coalesces at their center. Either way, what keeps us safe from Sagittarius A*’s ravenous gravitational appetite is simple distance: the supermassive object sits a comfortable 27,000 light years from Earth.

Sagittarius A* gets its name from the spot in the constellation Sagittarius from which, in 1933, engineer Karl Jansky first detected a powerful radio signal streaming toward Earth. As the science of black holes matured over the decades that followed, astronomers began to suspect that just such a body could be the source of the energy Jansky spotted.

Supermassive black holes are, as their name suggests, vastly larger than ordinary black holes, which are the remains of smaller collapsed stars—those with a mass about 20 times that of our sun. Our galaxy is thought to be dotted with up to 100 million of these stellar-mass black holes. The supermassive variety is a far less common species.

Sagittarius A* is only the second supermassive black hole ever to be imaged. The first, Messier 87, was captured by the EHT in 2019 and it is an absolute beast. Located 53 million light years from Earth, it is estimated to be about 1,500 larger than Sagittarius A*.

That size differential is important to scientists since it’s long been assumed that supermassive black holes exist in a whole range of different masses. This belief then raised the question about whether the physics of the objects would be the same regardless of their size. Now we have a chance to match them up against each other.

“Despite being 1,500 times smaller than M87*, the new images of Sagittarius A* look remarkably similar to those of M87*,” Avery Broderick, a professor at the University of Waterloo, who is a part of the EHT team, said in a statement. “Nobody knew for sure if enormous black holes and relatively smaller ones would share much in common, but now we have two unique black holes to compare, so we can better understand how black holes of different sizes eat, how they grow, and how they shape the galaxy around them.”

The more the EHT scans the sky, the more supermassive black holes it is likely to discover, and the deeper our understanding of these mysterious objects is likely to become. It was for Albert Einstein in the early part of the 20th century to first posit the theories of gravity that gave rise to the idea of black holes. It is for his scientific heirs in the 21st century to take the objects’ pictures—and unravel their secrets.

The Apollo astronauts faced a lot of challenges in their time on the moon, but having enough to eat was not among them. The longest any of the crews spent on the surface was the three days logged by Apollo 17 in 1972, and even in the astronauts’ tiny lunar module, there was enough room for the shrink-wrapped, pre-packaged provisions they’d need for such a brief camping trip. The next time around, though, things will be different.

As part of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return American astronauts to the moon after a half-century hiatus, crews won’t be coming just to visit, but to stay, establishing a long-term presence in permanent lunar bases. That means not carrying all of the crews’ food along, but growing at least some of it on-site—using the moon’s regolith, or soil, itself as a growth medium inside lunar greenhouses.
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The question, though, is whether the dry, sharp, glassy, soil, bathed for epochs by cosmic radiation and solar wind, can support plant growth anything like the rich, loamy soil of Earth. The answer, according to a new study published in Communications Biology, is maybe. For the first time, researchers attempted to grow plants in lunar soil brought back by the Apollo crews. And it turns out that success depends on where exactly on the moon you do your planting.

The concept of extraterrestrial farming was widely popularized in Andy Weir’s book The Martian, in which a marooned astronaut grows potatoes in Martian soil, using human waste as a fertilizer—but Weir is by no means the first person to come up with the idea of tilling alien soil.

“This concept of growing crops and other plants in soil or regolith from the moon or from Mars has been around longer than I’ve been alive, so it’s hardly a new concept,” he tells TIME. Maybe not, but until now, the idea had never been attempted.

The new research, carried out by a team of two horticulturists and one geologist from the University of Florida, was a long time in the making. The scientists applied to NASA three times over the past 11 years for small samples of soil brought back by some or all of the six Apollo landing missions. They were refused twice. It was not until the third time, about 18 months ago, that the space agency finally agreed.

“With NASA prepping themselves to go back to the moon for longer excursions, it became much more relevant that we understand how resources that are in situ on the moon can be used to further exploration,” said horticulturist and lead author of the paper Anna-Lisa Paul, at a May 11 press conference announcing the release of the results.

Still, the space agency did not turn over much of its soil. All told, NASA agreed to lend the researchers just a collective 12 gm (0.42 oz) of soil, gathered by the crews of Apollos 11, 12, and 17. The six Apollo landing missions brought back a total of just 382 kg (842 lb.) of lunar rocks and soil—which sounds like a lot but actually makes the material exceedingly rare. “These samples are precious natural treasures,” said Paul.

Their small sample made for a decidedly modest crop. The researchers did their planting in plastic plates with thimble-sized wells that are more commonly used to grow cell cultures. Each well got a gram of soil—or about a teaspoon—with four wells apiece for each of the three Apollo missions. A final four wells were filled with a simulated lunar soil made mostly of fine, earthly volcanic ash, to be used as a control. The plant the researchers chose was the thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), selected both because of its hardiness and because its genome has been fully sequenced.

“We know an awful lot about this plant from every nucleotide in its genome to what genes are expressed in different nutrient conditions,” said horticulturist and co-author Rob Ferl at the press event. “So there’s a huge database.” That basic knowledge would make it possible to determine exactly what was allowing the plant to thrive—or preventing it from doing so—within the medium of the lunar soil.

Once the seeds were sown, the plants were irrigated and placed in clear, ventilated terrarium boxes under growth lights. Within 48 to 60 hours, all of the seeds in all of the mini-pots began to germinate—but with very different results depending upon the soil used.

Far and away, the best results were obtained in the terrestrial volcanic soil, with the plants sprouting quickly and growing broad, healthy leaves. The seeds grown in the lunar soil were a very different matter. While all of them did sprout and all of the root systems grew to fill their tiny wells, on the whole, the plants were smaller and grew more slowly than the control plants. Many of the leaves also exhibited black and red discoloration indicative of metabolic stress and overall ill-health.

In general, it was the Apollo 11 plants that grew the most poorly, followed by Apollo 12 and finally Apollo 17, which, relatively speaking, produced a bumper crop of Arabidopsis thaliana. The reason, the researchers concluded, has to do with the age of the soil. The older—or more mature—lunar regolith is, the longer it’s been exposed to cosmic energy and solar wind, and the greater the micrometeorite bombardment is that produces the glassy shards in the soil.

Apollo 11’s Sea of Tranquility site is older geologically speaking than Apollo 12’s Ocean of Storms soil, which experienced more-recent lava flows than Tranquility. And both are more mature than Apollo 17’s Taurus-Littrow site, a mountainous region whose surface was shaped by meteorite and asteroid bombardment more recently in geological time.

“What we found was that the regoliths that were more mature were indeed more toxic to the plants, or at least they presented a more toxic response,” said Paul.

Genetic studies of the plants proved that point further. Over 1,000 genes in the Arabidopsis thaliana can be activated to help the plant respond to stress. In the Apollo 11 samples, 465 such genes responded to the challenges posed by the alien soil. For Apollos 12 and 17, the numbers were 235 and 113 respectively. In other words, the thale cress’s DNA had to fight harder to adapt to the foreign soil gathered during the Apollo 11 mission. That’s bad news for future farming in the Sea of Tranquility, the Ocean of Storms, and even Taurus-Littrow, but potentially good news for future lunar crews overall.

“What we could simply do in the absence of other constraining factors, is land and establish a habitat on a lunar surface that is significantly younger than the Apollo 11, 12, and 17 sites,” said geologist and co-author Stephen Elardo. Sites covered by immature lava flows would be especially promising, says Elardo. “If you look at lava flow areas here on Earth—look at Hawaii for example, look at Iceland—those areas are quite green.”

So does this mean a future in which astronauts can indeed live off the lunar land? Weir, for one, thinks so. “If you’re talking about a further future where you have actual lunar colonists, then I would say yes, because shipping food there is prohibitively expensive,” he says.

Lunar agriculture of course, must await lunar landings, and with the Artemis program nowhere near ready to meet its original goal of having boots back on the moon by 2024, the most that NASA can promise is that the missions will fly sometime in this decade. Whenever that promise is fulfilled, the new study does bring the future explorers one small step closer to being able not just to visit the moon, but to call it home.

The frequency and duration of droughts will continue to increase due to human-caused climate change, with water scarcity already affecting billions of people across the world, the United Nations warned in a report Wednesday.

The U.N. desertification agency, which is currently hosting a conference of parties in Abidjan in Ivory Coast, estimates that roughly one third of the world’s population—2.3 billion people—is already facing water scarcity, with that number expected to double by 2050.

Although no region is spared from drought, the report noted that Africa is the hardest hit continent, with the Americas, India and Australia also highlighted as areas of particular current and future concern.
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The ongoing debilitating drought in the east and Horn of Africa was highlighted as one of the “dramatic consequences” of climate change by the U.N. agency. The continent suffered 134 recorded droughts in the past century, with over half occurring in east Africa.

“We used to be able to grow enough tomatoes that we could stay fed for 8 months,” said Kenyan farmer Kheira Osman Yusuf, whose crops have been without rain for over a year. “We used to have luscious mango trees and papaya trees.” She added that food sources have become incredibly scarce and the drinking water supply has also greatly suffered. She explained they sometimes had to resort to drinking from the livestock reservoir, running the risk of getting sick from contamination.

The agency’s lead scientist Barron Orr told the Associated Press that the world needs to be more proactive rather than reactive when it comes to dealing with drought-related disasters. Orr said the next step for hardest-hit Africa is to “direct investments to build resilience, so as to bounce back from drought.”

India saw a drought-related shrink of 5% to its gross domestic product between 1998 and 2017 and Australia’s agricultural productivity slumped 18% between 2002 and 2010 due to drought. The country can also expect more wildfires like those in late 2019 and early 2020 which were spurred by a lack of rainfall, the report warned.

The same is true for the Amazon, the U.N. said, with three droughts occurring since the turn of the century and triggering forest fires, with climate change and deforestation also to blame. The agency estimates that 16% of the region’s remaining forests will burn by 2050 if deforestation continues at its current rate.

But with the right adaptation measures, water scarcity across the globe can be limited, the report said. It suggests smarter agricultural techniques which use less water while producing more food, drought action plans and greater investment in soil health, new technologies and early warning systems can all help curtail food and water shortages.

“We need to steer towards the solutions rather than continuing with destructive actions,” Ibrahim Thiaw, the executive secretary of the desertification agency, said. “We must build and rebuild our landscapes better, mimicking nature wherever possible and creating functional ecological systems.”

The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted.

With human-made climate change continuing, there’s a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday.
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The odds are inching up along with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40% and a decade ago it was only 10%.

The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93% chance that the world will set a record for hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there’s a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going.

“We’re going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report.

These forecasts are big picture global and regional climate predictions on a yearly and seasonal time scale based on long term averages and state of the art computer simulations. They are different than increasingly accurate weather forecasts that predict how hot or wet a certain day will be in specific places.

But even if the world hits that mark of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times — the globe has already warmed about 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s — that’s not quite the same as the global threshold first set by international negotiators in the 2015 Paris agreement. In 2018, a major United Nations science report predicted dramatic and dangerous effects on people and the world if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees.

The global 1.5 degree threshold is about the world being that warm not for one year, but over a 20- or 30- year time period, several scientists said. This is not what the report predicts. Meteorologists can only tell if Earth hits that average mark years, maybe a decade or two, after it is actually reached there because it is a long term average, Hermanson said.

“This is a warning of what will be just average in a few years,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams.

The prediction makes sense given how warm the world already is and an additional tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) is expected because of human-caused climate change in the next five years, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams. Add to that the likelihood of a strong El Nino — the natural periodic warming of parts of the Pacific that alter world weather — which could toss another couple tenths of a degree on top temporarily and the world gets to 1.5 degrees.

The world is in the second straight year of a La Nina, the opposite of El Nino, which has a slight global cooling effect but isn’t enough to counter the overall warming of heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists said. The five-year forecast says that La Nina is likely to end late this year or in 2023.

The greenhouse effect from fossil fuels is like putting global temperatures on a rising escalator. El Nino, La Nina and a handful of other natural weather variations are like taking steps up or down on that escalator, scientists said.

On a regional scale, the Arctic will still be warming during the winter at rate three times more than the globe on average. While the American Southwest and southwestern Europe are likely to be drier than normal the next five years, wetter than normal conditions are expected for Africa’s often arid Sahel region, northern Europe, northeast Brazil and Australia, the report predicted.

The global team has been making these predictions informally for a decade and formally for about five years, with greater than 90% accuracy, Hermanson said.

NASA top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said the figures in this report are “a little warmer” than what the U.S. NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration use. He also had doubts about skill level on long-term regional predictions.

“Regardless of what is predicted here, we are very likely to exceed 1.5 degrees C in the next decade or so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are committed to this in the long term — or that working to reduce further change is not worthwhile,” Schmidt said in an email.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to extend its reach—not just around the world, but into space. For that we have Dmitry Rogozin—an intemperate man in what demands to be a temperate business—to blame. Much of the world came to know Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, back in 2014, when he was deputy prime minister, and Russia had launched its first incursion into Ukraine, seizing Crimea. Then, as now, the U.S. imposed sanctions and then, as now, the Russians cried foul. But Rogozin went a step further.

At the time, the space shuttle had been retired, and the U.S. was dependent on hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Rogozin took to Twitter to tie the sanctions and America’s humbling dependence on the Soyuz together. “After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline,” he famously tweeted in April 2014.
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Things have only gotten worse now that Rogozin runs Roscosmos and Russia is deep in a much bloodier and uglier war across the breadth of Ukraine.

The ISS stays aloft in part thanks to regular reboosts from the engine of a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the Russian end of the station. In March, Rogozin threatened to hold the station hostage again. “The Russian segment ensures that the station’s orbit is corrected … including to avoid space debris,” he wrote on the messaging app Telegram. Along with the message he published a map showing that the ISS passes over only a small portion of Russia in its orbits, but does pass regularly over the U.S. and Europe—where a falling station could theoretically crash. “The populations of other countries, especially those led by the ‘dogs of war’, should think about the price of the sanctions against Roscosmos,” he wrote.

This week, as Live Science reports, Rogozin spoke out yet again, this time threatening to abandon Russia’s space station partnership with the U.S. entirely. In a statement to the government-owned Rossiya-24 TV channel, Rogozin said: “The decision has already been made.” He did not say exactly when the breach would happen—only that it would—and that Moscow would give Washington a year’s notice of when it intends to abandon the outpost, “in accordance with our obligations.”

Some of this is just bluster. The Biden Administration and NASA have both signaled their hope to keep the aging station aloft until 2030, which would extend the original agreement among the 15 international partners who operate it to decommission it in 2024. Russia has not yet signaled its agreement with the extension to 2030. This means that if it announced in 2023 its intent to pull out in a year, it would simply be sticking to the original 2024 timeline.

What’s more, while it’s true that the station depends on the Soyuz for its periodic reboosts, an American spacecraft could do just as well and NASA is already testing the ability of a U.S. Cygnus cargo vessel to do the job. The biggest danger from Rogozin’s latest threat is not to the station itself, but to the international comity that has kept the giant outpost flying for the past 24 years. The great project has succeeded all this time not thanks just to cool heads, but to good will. Rogozin, again, is demonstrating neither.

This story originally appeared in TIME Space, our weekly newsletter covering all things space. You can sign up here.

Children who begin identifying as transgender at a young age tend to retain that identity at least for several years, a study published Wednesday suggests.

The research involved 317 youngsters who were 3 to 12 years old when they were recruited to the study. Five years later, at the study’s end, 94% were living as transgender and almost two-thirds were using either puberty-blocking medication or sex hormones to medically transition.

Most children in the study were from white, high-income families who supported their transitions. On average, the kids began identifying as transgender at around age 6.

It’s unknown whether similar results would be found among youngsters from less advantaged backgrounds or those who begin identifying as transgender as teenagers. The study was published online in Pediatrics.
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Politicians seeking to outlaw or criminalize medical treatment for transgender youth have cited evidence suggesting many change children their minds or “retransition.”

Some doctors say that’s why transgender medication or surgery shouldn’t be offered until affected kids reach adulthood, but rigorous research on the numbers is lacking. The Pediatrics study is one of the largest to look at the issue, although not all kids had started treatment and none had transgender surgery.

The study is “incredibly timely … and sorely needed,’’ said Coleen Williams, a psychologist who works with Boston Children’s Hospital’s Gender Multispecialty Service, a clinic that treats transgender kids.

“If you’re in the trenches doing this work day-in and day-out with trans kiddos and their families, this is what we see,’’ said Williams, who was not involved in the study. “A majority of transgender youth and kids who make a social transition remain living in their affirmed gender.”

Families were recruited to participate in the study from social media groups for trans kids, camps, conferences and word of mouth in about 40 states.

Kristina Olson, a Princeton University psychologist who led the study, said a few of the children transitioned back briefly during the study but by the end, most had returned to a transgender identity.

“It suggests that our model of thinking about people as they’re either X or Y, they’re either cisgender or transgender … is kind of an antiquated way of thinking about gender,” Olson said.

She noted that when the study began, in 2013, “nonbinary” wasn’t a common term and the children studied used male or female pronouns. That may change as the researchers follow them through their teen years. The youngsters were around age 12 on average when the study ended.

The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a nonprofit group of health professionals who are concerned about medical transition risks for minors, said other evidence shows high numbers of kids outgrow transgender identities by puberty or adulthood. Some researchers point to flaws in that data.

Dr. William Malone, an advisor to the group, said the new study appears to reinforce concerns “that early social gender transition may cement a young person’s transgender identity, and lead minors on the path to eventual medicalization, with all its inherent risks and uncertainties.’’