Do bat ‘nightclubs’ hold the secret to stopping the next pandemic?

Some species of bats are protected against the viruses they carry because they commonly exchange immune genes during seasonal mating swarms, researchers report.

Bats carry some of the deadliest zoonotic diseases that can infect both humans and animals, such as Ebola and COVID-19. The finding of a new study in the journal Cell Genomics could help scientists prevent future pandemics.

“Understanding how bats have evolved viral tolerance may help us learn how humans can better fight emerging diseases,” says Nicole Foley from the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS).

“As genomicists, our work often lays the groundwork for research by scientists who study virus transmission directly. They may be developing vaccines for diseases or monitoring vulnerable animal populations. We all depend on each other to stay ahead of the next pandemic.”

Because bats are often immune to the diseases they carry, Foley and Bill Murphy, a professor in the VMBS’ veterinary integrative biosciences department, believe that studying bats’ disease immunity could hold the key to preventing the next global pandemic.

“Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the prediction and prevention of outbreaks is front of mind for researchers and the public alike,” Foley says. “Several bat species are tolerant of viruses that are detrimental to human health, which means they become reservoirs for disease—they carry the viruses, but crucially they don’t develop symptoms.”

“You can think of swarming behavior like a social gathering… for bats, it’s not unlike going to a club.”

To uncover exactly how bats have evolved tolerance to these deadly viruses, Foley, Murphy, and colleagues mapped the evolutionary tree of Myotis bats, something they knew to be crucial in trying to identify which genes might be involved.

“Myotis bats are the second-largest genus of mammals, with over 140 species,” Foley says. “They’re found almost all over the world and they host a large diversity of viruses.”

To add to the difficulties associated with figuring out relationships among species, Myotis and other bat species also engage in swarming behavior during mating.

“You can think of swarming behavior like a social gathering; there’s lots of flight activity, increased communication, and inter-species mingling; for bats, it’s not unlike going to a club,” Foley says.

Complicating things for the researchers, swarming creates increased numbers of hybrids—individual bats with parents from different species.

“The problem with Myotis bats is that there are so many species, about 130, but they all look very similar,” Foley says. “It can be very hard to distinguish them from each other, and then hybridization makes it even more difficult. If we’re trying to map out how these bats evolved so we can understand their disease immunity, being able to tell who’s who is very important.”

With this in mind, to create a map of the true relationships between Myotis bats, Foley and Murphy first untangled the genetic code for hybridization so they could tell more clearly which species were which.

“We collaborated with researchers from Ireland, France, and Switzerland to sequence the genomes of 60 Myotis bat species,” she says. “That allowed us to figure out which parts of the DNA represented the species’ true evolutionary history and which parts arose from hybridization.”

With that part of the puzzle solved, the researchers were finally able to examine the genetic code more closely to see how it might shed light on disease immunity.

They found that immune genes were some of those most frequently exchanged between species while swarming.

“Swarming behavior has always been a bit of a mystery for researchers,” Foley says. “Now we have a better understanding of why this particular behavior evolved—perhaps to promote hybridization, which helps spread beneficial immune gene variants more widely throughout the population.”

The findings have opened the doors to new questions about the importance of hybridization in evolution.

“Hybridization played a much bigger role in our findings than we anticipated,” Foley says. “These results have led us to wonder to what extent hybridization has obscured genomicists’ knowledge of mammalian evolutionary history, so far.

“Now, we’re hoping to identify other instances where hybridization has occurred among mammals and see what we can learn about how they are related and even how and why genomes are organized the way that they are,” she says.

Source: Texas A&M University

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Chinese rocket engine startup Space Circling secures funding

HELSINKI — Chinese launch firm Space Circling has secured more than 100 million yuan ($13.9 million) in funding to back its work on innovative engines to power commercial space activities.

Space Circling, also known as Shaanxi Tianhui Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd., secured the funding in December last year and announced the Series A funding Feb. 18.

Strategic investors including Changsha Kaifu District Zhongxin High-tech Fund, Mianyang Kefa Fund, Xi’an Fulao Fund, SIRI New Materials and Xi’an Talent Fund participated in the round. The latter is a local government-backed policy guidance fund. Such funds are used to deploy capital to strategic and emerging technologies such as space.

The funding will mainly go towards construction of an industrial base for the company’s rocket engines, including mass production.

Space Circling has been developing its Honglong-1 and Qiaolong-1 kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket engines since it was established in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, in March 2021.

The Qiaolong-1 is a staged combustion, tap-off cycle with two combustion chambers. It has no gas generator in order to simplify its structure, according to Space Circling. It is designed to produce 85 tons of thrust at sea level and able to fit five engines into a 3.35-meter-diameter stage — a standard sizing among Chinese Long March and commercial launch vehicles. Space Circling conducted a successful hotfire test of the engine Jan. 31.

The company aims to be mass-producing the Qiaolong-1 by the end of the year. This is in order to meet the current urgent demand for high-thrust liquid rocket engines in China’s domestic commercial aerospace sector, founder Liu Hongjun told Shaanxi Daily Feb. 18. 

The report did not touch on potential technical hurdles during further development, testing, and mass production phases of the innovative engine which may hinder progress.

Liu is a professor at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shaanxi. The company apparently has local backing as well as experience from, and connections to, the state-owned space industry.

Liu was notably the chief designer for a kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket engine at the Academy of Aerospace Propulsion Technology under CASC, China’s state-owned main space contractor. The engine was developed to help power China’s new-generation launchers which debuted in the 2010s. He also served as deputy chief designer of one of these rockets, namely the Long March 6. 

Liu said in a statement on Space Circling’s webpages that the team aims to, “fundamentally reduce the cost of human access to space and promote the arrival of a new economic era in space,” as well as work hard for the “China Dream,” referencing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s concept of a strong, rejuvenated China.

Space Circling is also apparently planning to develop its own reusable launchers using its engines. The Huilong-1 would have a length of 38 meters, a 3.35-meter-diameter core stage and 2.25-meter-diameter boosters. It is to be capable of lifting five metric tons to sun-synchronous orbit. 

The larger Huilong-2 would be capable of carrying nine tons to geosynchronous transfer orbit or 25 tons to LEO.

Provincial support for space

Shaanxi hosts a number of major state-owned CASC institutes related to rocket and engine development and testing. A number of more recently-established commercial companies have also settled in the area. 

The province has moved to establish strategic laboratories to support companies such as Space Circling. The wider goal is promoting the integration of innovation and industry chains. Assistance includes technical support, talent guarantees and financial assistance.

This approach is far from unique within China. A range of Chinese cities and provinces are currently seeking to foster their own commercial space and other high-end and strategy technologies. Beijing and Shanghai have recently released action plans to support commercial space ecosystems. Beijing’s plans included committing to establish a “Beijing Rocket Street” including a reusable rocket technology innovation center.

Underpinning this, the central government identified the commercial space industry as one of several strategic emerging industries to nurture in December 2023. Supporting this sector could potentially enhance China’s overall space capabilities. It could also boost international ties, national prestige, and China’s influence in the global space arena.

China’s military-civil fusion strategy has helped the transfer of technologies between the military and commercial spheres in both directions. This strategy has helped Chinese commercial space firms in China progress, with assistance from state-owned space giants, following the 2014 central government move to open the sector to private capital.

China is looking to construct one or more low Earth orbit communications megaconstellations of more than 10,000 satellites each in the coming years. Deploying these satellites will require a boost in China’s launch options. 

A number of Chinese commercial firms are racing to develop and test reusable launch vehicles in order to fill this gap in overall national capabilities and earn launch contracts. 

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Do hormones in birth control make gonorrhea worse?

Sex hormones help gonorrhea fight off antimicrobials and antibiotics, according to a new study.

You know that package warning that oral birth control won’t prevent STIs? Well in the case of gonorrhea, the sexually transmitted bacterium that causes the disease can use those hormones to help it resist antibiotic attacks.

Like many bacteria, this bug, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, is equipped with pumps to push the killing chemicals out of its cells. But what’s unique, according to the new study in Nature Communications, is that the hormones of the human urogenital tract actually allow gonorrhea to make and use more of these pumps to fight intrinsic antimicrobials and prescribed antibiotics.

The researchers uncovered the trick while examining a transcription factor—a protein that binds to specific sites on the bacterium’s DNA and slows production of the efflux pumps that protect it.

Led by Duke University graduate student Grace Hooks and her mentor, biochemistry chair Richard Brennan, the study used a variety of approaches to characterize the shape and function of the transcription factor.

What they found is that, unfortunately, this transcription factor, called MtrR, has an affinity for binding to the hormonal steroids progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone and the synthetic hormone ethinyl estradiol. When it binds to a hormone, the transcription factor becomes less effective at suppressing the production of bacterial pumps.

Hooks says the bacterium appears to be able to sense its hormonal environment and wait for the opportune time in the female’s menstrual cycle to ramp up its colonization.

Estrogen rises dramatically in the week before ovulation, and progesterone peaks in the two weeks between ovulation and menstruation. These fluctuations are thought to suppress the immune system, giving sperm and eggs a window of opportunity to survive in the urogenital tract, but that same window also creates a vulnerability to this infection.

“It’s kind of utilizing this sensory system to gauge where it is in this cycle and when it can best colonize,” Hooks says. “It can only survive in the human host, it can’t survive outside. So, it has to really be good at sensing where it is and when’s the best time for colonizing.”

The transcription factor MtrR also helps signal the bacterium to protect itself against reactive oxygen species. “What this one protein does is a dual system to protect Neisseria gonorrhea,” Brennan says.

Gonorrhea has been with humans far longer than there have been antibiotics, appearing in texts as ancient as 2600 BCE and making famous appearances in Julius Caesar’s Roman legions and the Crimean war.

Ancient or not, the Centers for Disease Control considers gonorrhea an urgent public health threat, because it is now resistant to every antibiotic except for one, ceftriaxone. But strains resistant to this antibiotic have been identified recently in Europe and Asia.

Known historically and colloquially as “the clap,” untreated gonorrhea in women can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. It may also be passed from mother to infant during childbirth.

While the infection is more obvious in men, it is less dramatic, as men don’t experience the wider hormonal shifts, nor is their urogenital tract as complicated or deep as a woman’s, Hooks says. But men still carry all the same hormones that the transcription factor latches onto, she adds.

And, of course, the bacteria must thrive in both men and women to be a successful STI. “Neisseria gonorrhoeae is an obligate human pathogen,” Brennan says. “We don’t know where it is the rest of the time.”

When Hooks presented some of her data in a laboratory meeting, fellow graduate student Emily Cannistraci from the next-door Schumacher laboratory asked if the synthetic hormone ethinyl estradiol, which is found in many oral contraceptives for women, would have a similar effect. Hooks checked, and it certainly did.

The takeaway is not only the package warning that oral birth control won’t prevent STIs, but in this case, it might even make them worse.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the US Department of Energy.

Source: Duke University

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Ingenuity Mars helicopter mission ends after 72 flights

Updated 6:45 p.m. Eastern with comments from press briefing.

WASHINGTON — NASA has declared the end of the mission for the Ingenuity Mars helicopter after 72 flights, exceeding even the most optimistic expectations.

NASA announced Jan. 25 that at least one of Ingenuity’s rotor blades sustained damage on its most recent flight Jan. 18. On that flight, contact between the helicopter and the Perseverance Mars rover was interrupted during the helicopter’s descent, but restored the following day.

“It is bittersweet that I must announce that Ingenuity, the little helicopter that could,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a video message on social media, “has now taken its last flight on Mars.”

The Jan. 18 flight was intended to be a simple up-and-down flight to determine the helicopter’s location after it executed an emergency landing on its previous flight Jan. 6. The helicopter ascended to its planned altitude of 12 meters and hovered for 4.5 seconds before beginning its descent at a speed of one meter per second. Contact was interrupted when Ingenuity was about one meter above the surface.

While Ingenuity is upright and in communication with controllers, images it returned showed damage to the tip of one of its rotor blades. “We’re investigating the possibility that the blade struck the ground,” Nelson said. NASA said in a statement it was still studying what caused the loss of communications and how the helicopter landed.

An image returned by Ingenuity after its 72nd flight included a shadow of one of its rotors, showing damage to the blade sustained on the flight. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In a call with reporters, Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said about 25% of the rotor blade was lost, rendering Ingenuity unflyable. He said given the speed of the rotors — about 2,500 rpm — it is likely other blades were also damaged at landing, something the project team hopes to confirm with additional images. No other major subsystems on the helicopter show signs of damage.

“Whether or not the blade strike occurred, which led to the communications loss, or there was a communications loss and a power brownout which then led to the rotor strike, we will never know,” he said, because of a loss of data during the incident, but added that the project team would try to piece together their best guess of what happened with the data they do get.

One possibility is that the featureless terrain that Ingenuity was flying over may have confused the helicopter’s navigation system. Such systems work by tracking features on the surface and correlating them, throwing out spurious ones. “The danger is when you run out of features, you don’t have very many to navigate on. You’re not able to establish what that consensus is and you end up tracking the wrong kinds of features,” said Håvard Grip, the “pilot emeritus” for Ingenuity, on the call.

In such a scenario, he said, the helicopter may think it’s moving horizontally away from its target landing site and overcorrects. “It’s likely it made an aggressive maneuver to try and correct that upon landing, and that would have accounted for sideways motion and tilted the helicopter,” he said. That could either have caused a blade to strike the ground or to lose power before landing.

History and legacy

Ingenuity was included on the Mars 2020 mission with the Perseverance rover as a technology demonstration, with plans to perform no more than five flights over one month. The inclusion of Ingenuity was originally controversial because of concerns by scientists that helicopter operations would detract from the rover’s mission.

Ingenuity made its first flight on Mars in April 2021, two months after the Perseverance landing. Those flights went so well that NASA decided to extend Ingenuity’s mission beyond the planned five flights. Ingenuity was repurposed into an aerial scout for Perseverance. Over its 72 flights Ingenuity traveled about 17 kilometers and spent more than two hours in the air.

The success of Ingenuity helped alter plans for NASA’s efforts to return samples from Mars being collected by Perseverance. NASA announced in July 2022 that it would fly two helicopters based on Ingenuity on a future Sample Retrieval Lander mission in place of a rover that would have been provided by the European Space Agency. The helicopters would be used to pick up a cache of samples left by Perseverance on the Martian surface and bring them to the lander if that rover is not able to directly deliver other samples it has collected to the lander.

“Ingenuity absolutely shattered our paradigm of exploration in introducing this new dimension of aerial mobility,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, on the call.

It also vindicated a strategy of flying technology demonstrations along with science missions on a “do-no-harm” basis that can feed forward into future missions. Another example is the Deep Space Optical Communications payload on the Psyche mission that successfully streamed a high-definition video to Earth from a distance of 31 million kilometers last month.

“These missions lay the foundation for a bright future,” said Laurie Leshin, director of JPL, on the call. “It’s so critically important that we continue to look for places, look for opportunities, to fly these things, to get that flight experience.”

“People love these demos. They love to see how we can push the boundaries,” she added.

NASA donated a prototype of Ingenuity, used for ground tests, to the National Air and Space Museum last month. Tzanetos said then that the experience flying Ingenuity was helping the design of the helicopters planned for Mars Sample Return, such as improved atmospheric and thermal modeling.

“We had all imagined while working on Ingenuity that our kids’ generation or our grandchildren’s generation were then going to build the second version,” he said at the Dec. 15 event where NASA donated the Ingenuity model to the museum. “We never imagined that, while Ingenuity was still flying, we would be working on the next version of helicopters for Mars.”


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Heavy metals may bring on early menopause

Middle-aged women with elevated levels of heavy metals are more likely to have depleted ovarian function and egg reserves, which may lead to earlier menopause and its negative health effects, a new study shows.

Researchers reviewed data on hundreds of women approaching menopause and found that the presence of cadmium, mercury, and arsenic in their urine was connected to low levels of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH).

The heavy metals are commonly found in drinking water, air pollution, and some foods, notably seafood and rice. The metals are considered endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can cause infertility, cancers, and other diseases.

AMH measures ovarian reserve, or the number of eggs available for fertilization or menstruation. Menopause is the time of life when hormone depletion ends monthly menstruation and sets off many changes to women’s health and wellness.

The observed magnitude of associations between heavy metals and AMH was stronger than the association between smoking and AMH, which is a known risk factor for depleted ovarian reserve, according to the study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

“Widespread exposure to toxins in heavy metals may have a big impact on health problems linked to earlier aging of the ovaries in middle-aged women, such as hot flashes, bone weakening, and osteoporosis, higher chances of heart disease, and cognitive decline,” says study author Sung Kyun Park, associate professor of epidemiology and environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

“Our study linked heavy metal exposure to lower levels of anti-Müllerian hormone in middle-aged women. AMH tells us roughly how many eggs are left in a woman’s ovaries. It’s like a biological clock for the ovaries that can hint at health risks in middle age and later in life.”

Using data from the longitudinal Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, Park and colleagues reviewed 2,252 repeated measurements of AMH in 549 women within 10 years after their final menstrual period. The women in the study were ages 45 to 56 and ethnically diverse: 45% white, 21% Black, 15% Chinese, and 19% Japanese.

“Given that heavy metals are widespread in the general population and urinary metal concentrations measured in our study were comparable to the general female population across the United States, the potential adverse effects of heavy metals on ovarian function should be of significant public health concern,” Park says.

Prior research offers toxicological evidence that heavy metals may negatively affect reproductive health. Only a few studies have explored associations of cadmium and lead with AMH, reporting that cadmium may alter AMH concentrations in pregnant women and premenopausal women ages 30 to 45. The new study focused on perimenopausal women.

This information may enable researchers to address adverse health outcomes known to be associated with metals and with reproductive hormone changes such as premature menopause, bone loss, and osteoporosis, increased risks of cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and vasomotor symptoms, according to the study authors.

“We see this significant public health concern, which may also have implications for women of all ages,” Park says.

The researchers say their findings require further investigation, particularly in a younger population, to fully understand the role of heavy metals as potential ovarian toxicants that diminish ovarian reserves.

Additional coauthors are from the University of Michigan and the University of California, Davis.

Source: University of Michigan

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New species hints at greater lamprey diversity

Researchers have discovered two potential new species of lamprey fish in California waters, according to a new study.

The findings suggest that the ancient animal has far more diversity in California than once thought, which could have implications for managing these jawless fish. Lamprey species play a key role in the food chain as well as improving water quality and adding nutrients to waterways.

“We found diversity that has never been reported,” says Grace Auringer, a PhD candidate in the Genomic Variation Lab at the University of California, Davis, and lead author of the study in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management. “We found two groups of fish in Napa River and Alameda Creek that are very genetically different from other samples along the West Coast.”

The study found that of the eight known species in the state, some that were thought to be separate species likely are not. It recommends additional research to further define the new species. “This is a really understudied group of fish,” Auringer says.

Boneless and jawless

Lampreys are boneless, jawless fish with eel-like bodies that date back over 350 million years, says Matthew “Mac” Campbell, a research affiliate in the lab.

Larval stages last from three to nine years, with lampreys ranging from the size of a fingernail to about 6 inches long, and one species is not discernible from the next. At that stage they are filter feeders. As they age, some lampreys become parasitic and suck blood and flesh out of prey via a circle of sharp teeth while others stop feeding entirely, likely living off stored energy. Some adult lampreys are migratory, and others are not.

The lab’s research focused on 19 areas in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Basin, San Francisco Bay, and Klamath River basin and sought to do three things: identify the species in each area, determine if current classifications accurately reflect the diversity of lamprey in California, and compare the distribution of lamprey to other native fish.

Staff from water and conservation districts, state agencies, and utilities visited watersheds, clipped small pieces of lamprey fins and preserved them in ethanol for analysis at UC Davis. The researchers also received archived tissue samples from the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

Lampreys’ remarkable diversity

The scientists isolated a specific mitochondrial gene—cytochrome b—from those samples. Using a short section of DNA, they were able to identify the species type and the evolutionary relationships of the samples based on shared or divergent DNA sequences.

“The amount of diversity that we saw is quite remarkable,” Auringer says. “This opens up endless possibilities for future study.”

Lamprey populations have long been thought to be declining in the West, and the eight documented lamprey species—in the Lampetra and Entosphenus genera—in California are listed as species of special concern. “I think it’s very important to identify and learn about these unique populations before we lose them,” she says.

The two newly discovered lamprey species from the research are part of the Lampetra genus, adding more complexity to the lamprey story in the state.

Knowing the exact species can help refine management practices and protect the populations, as well as support ecosystems and the food web. For some Indigenous peoples, lampreys are both culturally significant and a source of nutrition.

Lamprey larvae filter and feed on algae and other organic matter, helping to improve water quality, maintain streambeds, and cycle nutrients throughout the system. The migrating adults transport nutrients after spawning. And birds, fish, and some aquatic mammals feed on juvenile and adult lampreys.

“Healthy trout streams in California often have lamprey, so conservation measures benefiting lamprey also benefit trout,” says Amanda “Mandi” Finger, the Genetic Variation Lab’s associate director.

The research highlights the need for more study, including genomic sequencing, to better understand and define the new potential lamprey species and the rest of the population.

“Maintaining lamprey species complexity and fostering resilience cannot begin without an understanding of their underlying genetic diversity,” the paper says.

The California Sea Grant College Program Project and the California Department of Water Resources funded the work.

Source: UC Davis

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Orbital Spectrum Clash

The United Nations-run quadrennial conference wrapped up Dec. 15 after four grueling weeks of treaty-level negotiations, establishing new global rules for how radio spectrum bands — the lifeblood of communications — should be divvied up among competing interests.

Against the growing dominance of non-geostationary-orbiting constellations like the 5,200 and counting Starlink broadband satellites SpaceX has deployed in low Earth orbit since 2019, the conference had a strong space focus this time around.

WRC-23 resolutions included rules for keeping large non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) networks in check, including limits on how closely satellites must stick to the orbital positions they have registered with regulators.

Satellites in geostationary orbit (GSO) must stay within 0.5 degrees of an assigned orbital slot under long-standing rules governed by the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations’ spectrum enforcer, but NGSO spacecraft did not have a similar limitation before WRC-23.

In addition, WRC-23 approved studies for the technical and regulatory provisions needed to protect radio astronomy from NGSO-caused interference. Measures to prevent NGSO services in countries that have not authorized them were also put on the agenda for WRC-27.

John Janka, Viasat’s global chief of government affairs and regulatory officer Credit: Viasat

“One of the main risks that WRC-23 averted is that megaconstellation operators no longer will be able to expand their systems at the expense of everyone else,” said John Janka, global chief of government affairs and regulatory officer for GSO broadband provider Viasat.

While there were many pro-NGSO resolutions — such as a worldwide regulatory framework for providing NGSO Ka-band connectivity to planes, boats, and other terminals on the move — established GSO operators pointed to pushback against their competition at the conference.

“There was a broad anti-NGSO sentiment,” said Hazem Moakkit, vice president of spectrum strategy at GSO operator Intelsat, after returning from weeks of WRC-23 talks.

For Janka, GSO versus NGSO is a false narrative that draws attention away from what he sees as overconsumption of spectrum and orbits by a handful of megaconstellations — namely SpaceX, which plans to grow what is already the world’s largest constellation by six times.

Eutelsat of France operates the second-largest NGSO network with more than 630 OneWeb satellites.

Meanwhile, Amazon intends to start mass deployments this year for an NGSO constellation of more than 3,200 satellites.

GSO operators have a broader vantage point with satellites that are much farther away from Earth and need fewer of them to achieve global coverage. Viasat and Intelsat have around 70 satellites between them, but they must still share spectrum with the NGSO spacecraft flying below.

“No one bought the claims that megaconstellations from a few countries are more important than the countless national and regional satellite systems on which the rest of the world long has relied,” Janka said.

“Instead, there was a resounding recognition of the need to ensure equitable access to space and a clear signal that countries intend to protect their sovereign and national interests and ensure that the many space-based services on which they rely are not threatened and in fact are accommodated.”

NGSO players hail WRC-23 success

Amazon and other NGSO advocates see things very differently.

“I would say these outcomes at WRC23 for NGSOs were favorable,” said Julie Zoller, Project Kuiper’s head of global regulatory affairs.

She said orbital tolerance limits for NGSO satellites, for instance, were very generous.

Unlike GSO, NGSO satellites are not spread out across a single ring 35,786 kilometers directly above the equator to match the Earth’s rotation, and so their new position tolerances are based on how close they are to an approved altitude, rather than degrees of longitude along the geostationary arc.

WRC-23 put this limit at 70 kilometers above or below an assigned orbital slot while the rest of the NGSO constellation is being deployed, and 30 kilometers thereafter.

Project Kuiper’s planned and declared orbital tolerance is a maximum of nine kilometers above and below their assigned altitude.

Hybrid GSO and NGSO operator SES also disagreed that there was a general pushback against non-geostationary systems at the conference.

There is “value in agreeing on a solid basis for harmonized GSO and NGSO operations to foster a thriving and sustainable space environment,” SES director of spectrum management and development Anna Marklund said, and “we think WRC-23 accomplished this.”

WRC-23 allocated more radio waves to inter satellite links, used by constellations such as Amazon’s proposed Project Kuiper network to reduce broadband latency. Credit: Amazon Project Kuiper

But the space industry’s most divisive WRC-23 issue by far was a proposal to review Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) limits, affecting how strong NGSO signals should be to avoid disrupting geostationary satellites. The outcome of that depends on who you ask.

Regulatory text approved at WRC23 states that technical EPFD studies can be presented at WRC-27 without regulatory consequences.

For Viasat and other GSO operators concerned about the potential for interference, this means proposals for changing EPFD limits cannot be debated until the following conference in 2031.

However, others still see opportunities for EPFD changes as soon as WRC-27.

“The door has not closed,” Zoller said. “Having the results of studies reported to WRC-27 is not the same as an agenda item,” she added, “but, at every conference, administrations make the decisions on what they want to propose,” drawing from multiple inputs.

.One way EPFD changes could still end up on the WRC-27 agenda is if preliminary studies show a dire need for them, according to Katherine Gizinski, CEO of space consultancy firm River Advisers.

“It will certainly be interesting to see how the next four years play out,” Gizinski said.

SpaceX sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission Dec. 14 to urge the U.S. regulator to “make clear the intention of WRC-23 that the radio regulations can be updated in 2027,” and to correct parties the company says are misrepresenting the record to delay updates.

The FCC was still reviewing the letter as of early January.

Even putting EPFD limits up for study risks curtailing GSO investments and innovation because it would destabilize a regulatory regime that has been in place for more than a decade, according to Janka of Viasat.

“The advancement of technology enables more efficient use of spectrum [and] enables more sharing,” Project Kuiper’s Zoller countered.

“How do you think we went from analog to digital TV? You can’t take that kind of approach and say everything has to stay the same forever [and] we can’t advance technology.”

Terrestrial frienemies

A push from representatives of the terrestrial telecoms market for access to more space frequencies was largely kept at bay, according to Gizinski of River Advisers, and the satellite sector obtained most of the protections it sought at WRC-23 in spectrum bands at risk.

“Going into the conference, there was great concern about the risks to [fixed satellite service] allocations,” she said, “which was addressed early and definitively.”

GSO and NGSO players noted growing acknowledgment among countries that network convergence and partnerships between terrestrial telcos and satellite operators are part of the new paradigm, which Gizinski said seems to have positively impacted the negotiations.

EchoStar Corp. senior vice president for regulatory affairs Jennifer Manner at WRC-23 in Dubai. Credit: EchoStar

Jennifer Manner, senior vice president for regulatory affairs at GSO operator EchoStar Corp, highlighted increasing recognition of satellites’ role in extending terrestrial network coverage.

Multiple items were added to the agenda for WRC-27 that address a need for more frequencies to be allocated for satellite-based services, she said, in addition to allocations of terrestrial wireless spectrum to support connectivity from space directly to mass market devices.

Other space items on the agenda for 2027 include the allocation of radio frequencies for lunar communications.

Of the 20 items approved in Dubai for debate at WRC-27, 15 are related to space.

Of course, the risk that satellite operators could lose critical frequencies to terrestrial telcos hungry for more bandwidth on the ground still hangs over future conferences.

And with EPFD remaining a hot topic, there will likely also be plenty of space infighting at WRC-27 as NGSO newcomers stake their claims for the industry’s future direction.

“NGSO and GSO share the same bands in many cases, but GSO is considerably installed over decades while NGSO is coming to its prime,” said Elisabeth Neasmith, senior director for regulatory issues at GSO operator Telesat, which is moving into NGSO operations with the low-Earth-orbit Lightspeed constellation it aims to begin deploying in mid-2026.

“As sharing conditions get defined, fear of the unknown is replaced with education and experience, and the ‘new’ is no longer so new, the apparent friction should subside.”


This article first appeared in the January 2024 issue of SpaceNews magazine.

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Warm caregiving in childhood protects heart health later

Receiving consistent warmth from a caregiver during childhood protects heart health later in life, according to a new study.

Previous research has established that childhood experience with abuse, neglect, and substance use in the home can worsen a person’s heart health throughout their life.

The findings of the new study, published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, are the first to frame adversity and protective factors across a large group when it comes to cardiovascular health over time, the researchers say.

Given that cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of death in the United States, with Black adults more than twice as likely to die from CVD than white adults, the study cohort included individuals identifying as Black and white.

“We know that mitigating risk factors for cardiovascular disease must begin in childhood,” says lead author Robin Ortiz, professor in the pediatrics and population health department at New York University Langone.

“At the same time, our findings show that adversity in early childhood does not equal destiny. While adverse childhood family environments were associated with lower odds of cardiovascular health in adulthood, our findings suggest that supportive and, importantly, stable caregiving may have a stronger influence on later heart health than early adversity.”

The team of researchers analyzed a sample of more than 2,000 enrollees in the CARDIA study, a long-term study of cardiovascular disease risk beginning in young adulthood which has been following more than 5,000 Black and white adults for over 35 years to help researchers understand which early life factors raise the risk of CVD later in life.

The investigators analyzed data from this group at baseline, at which time the cohort averaged 25 years of age, and data that followed up at seven and 20 year intervals. Using scales measuring adversity in childhood including child abuse and caregiver warmth, they found that each additional unit score of overall family environment adversity and then child abuse specifically, was associated with a 3.6% and 12.8% lower odds of ideal cardiovascular health (CVH), respectively, while each additional unit score of caregiver warmth, specifically, was associated with 11.7% higher odds of cardiovascular health. CVH score was rated according to a scale of seven health metrics defined by the American Heart Association, including diet, smoking, physical activity, weight, lipids, blood pressure, and fasting glucose.

In what appeared perhaps counterintuitive to the research team, exposure to the greatest amount of caregiver warmth and greatest amount of child abuse, taken together, was associated with the lowest CVH scores. Meanwhile, exposure to the greatest amount of caregiver warmth and lowest amount of child abuse, taken together, was associated with the highest CVH scores. All findings remained consistent over 20 years of follow-up.

Exposure to caregiver warmth in childhood was associated with greatest CVH (highest scores) in adults. However, what was most unique about the findings, according to Ortiz, was that of all adults with high levels of child abuse exposure, those who also reported high levels of caregiver warmth exposure had lower CVH scores than those with high child abuse but low levels of caregiver warmth exposure. This, Ortiz interprets, suggests that while having a supportive caregiver is crucial to a life course of health, the stability and consistency of that support and warmth in childhood is just as important of a predictor of later life CVH.

Individuals who have experienced both abuse and warmth in childhood might face the inability to predict the presence of support overall in their childhood environment, Ortiz says. Individuals who are exposed to only or mostly caregiver warmth (and no, or limited abuse) are able to predict and ultimately depend on a sense of support, safety, and perhaps, physiological balance.

The findings further suggest that an unpredictable or unstable relational environment might be associated with poor health later in life, while stable or predictable support in childhood may optimize physiology and behavior to result in greater CVH later in life.

When stratifying the results by income in adulthood, the findings were more nuanced. The investigators found that the relationship between childhood adversity and CVH only stood out among those who had higher socioeconomic levels in adulthood (greater than $35,000 annually). Adverse family environments were associated with lower CVH across income levels between $35,000 to $74,000 annually, as well as with income greater than $75,000 annually, but no significant relationship between CVH and annual income less than $25,000 or between $25,00 to $34,000.

Prior studies in the field have shown that once in adulthood, it may be more difficult for people facing economic challenges to attain high levels of CVH for those with and without childhood adversity as measured in this study.

“However, for individuals in adulthood right now with higher incomes, we are able to see this relationship emerge showing how important those early environmental risk factors really are,” she says.

The hope, says Ortiz, is that this study offers insight into how supporting healthy, both supportive and stable, caregiving relationships in childhood can offer greater attainment of CVH at a population level. Future research will also focus more heavily on the complex relationship between CVH and economic hardship at different points of the life course.

“We have to address healthy caregiver relationships as well as address socioeconomic hardship,” says Ortiz. “We need policies and programs that support both caregivers and children in order to achieve greater health equity.”

Funding for the study was provided by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in collaboration with numerous institutions supporting The CARDIA Study, as well as funding in support of authors’ time including the Endocrine Society, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program, and the National Institute on Aging.

Additional coauthors are from NYU Langone, Ohio University State College of Medicine, Northwestern University, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and UCLA.

Source: NYU

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Office of Space Commerce starts commercial pathfinder project for civil space traffic coordination system

WASHINGTON — The Office of Space Commerce has selected three companies to participate in a pathfinder program that could lead to the incorporation of commercial data into its space traffic coordination system.

The office announced Jan. 19 that placed orders with COMSPOC, LeoLabs and Slingshot Aerospace for data and services related to objects in low Earth orbit. The orders are part of what the office calls a Consolidated Pathfinder project to test how the office can incorporate commercial space situational awareness (SSA) data.

The Office of Space Commerce is charged with establishing a civil space traffic coordination system, which it calls the Traffic Coordination System for Space or TraCSS. It is designed to take over from the Defense Department responsibilities for tracking space objects and providing warnings of potential conjunctions to government and commercial satellite operators.

“Through this pathfinder, and others to follow, we are working diligently toward incorporating commercial capabilities into TraCSS,” Rich DalBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, said in a statement. “The Office of Space Commerce has always championed the government’s use of commercial space capabilities, and it is a core enabler of our own SSA program.”

Two of the companies will provide both catalogs of objects they track in low Earth orbit — LeoLabs using its network of radars and Slingshot with its group of optical telescopes — as well as related services. The third company, COMSPOC, will provide orbit determination services. A fourth company, yet to be selected, will provide data integrity services.

“We will be providing them the entire catalog, plus our expertise and insight, so they can then move to incorporate commercial data into the ultimate TraCSS system,” Kate Maliga, vice president of government affairs at LeoLabs, said in an interview. The company will also provide TraCSS with the conjunction data messages, or warnings of potential close approaches, it generates from its catalog.

Mike Wasson, vice president and general manager of COMSPOC, said his company will take the catalog data from LeoLabs and Slingshot and combine it. “We will fuse those different data sources through our orbit determination processes to create an accurate state of objects in low Earth orbit,” he said. While not a part of the current project, he said COMSPOC would be able to combine that data with additional sources using different phenomenologies, like passive radar or space-based sensors.

The Office of Space Commerce said last year it planned to conduct a series of pathfinders with industry to examine how to best incorporate commercial data into TraCSS. These tests will take place in a part of TraCSS called HORIZON, which officials described last year as a “sandbox” to do testing while not affecting operational systems.

The Consolidated Pathfinder project is slated to last about six months. The Office of Space Commerce said it is planning a separate pathfinder project, called Improved Satellite Owner/Operator Ephemeris, that will incorporate satellite position data provided directly by the operators of satellites.

The ultimate goal of TraCSS is to establish a system that takes in data from multiple sources, including commercial providers and the Defense Department as well as potentially other partners, to provide civil space traffic coordination services. The office has a mandate to provide a basic safety service free of charge to satellite operators, while companies are able to charge for more advanced services.

An ongoing challenge is determining what is included in a free basic service and what are more advanced services that companies can charge for. “We have been talking with them and to a lot of the stakeholders,” said Maliga, who noted that LeoLabs currently provides premium services to about 70% of LEO satellite operators.

“We’ll see when it becomes operational,” she said of the division of basic and advanced services, “but we definitely think it’s moving in the right direction.”

The Office of Space Commerce is taking an iterative approach to TraCSS, one that Sandra Magnus, chief engineer for the program, called “crawl, walk, run” in a presentation last July. An initial Phase 1.0 is set to be ready as soon as September, with updates on a quarterly basis through September 2025.

DalBello said at the AMOS Conference in Hawaii in September that his office got off to a slow start because of a lack of funding and personnel, which has improved after the office secured $70 million for fiscal year 2023, with $88 million requested for 2024. Much of that funding will go towards purchases of commercial infrastructure, data and services, he said then.

Wasson, though, said he thinks the Office of Space Commerce could move faster by making greater use of commercial capabilities. “They could turn the switch and we could be producing what they need for Space Policy Directive 3 in a matter of days,” he said. Space Policy Directive 3 instructed the Commerce Department in 2018 to establish a civil space traffic coordination system.

He said he was concerned that the momentum built up developing TraCSS could be lost if there is a change in administrations after the 2024 elections, unless there was a system already in operation before then.

“What we’re going to be doing with our commercial partners is continuing to advocate that after this pathfinder that they don’t shut things down,” he said. “They can keep this as a funded effort and we start adding on additional features to make this a viable solution in 2024.”

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Tianzhou-7 reaches Tiangong in China’s first space station mission of 2024

HELSINKI — The Tianzhou-7 cargo spacecraft docked at China’s Tiangong space station Wednesday to resupply the orbital outpost.

A Long March 7 rocket lifted off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan island at 9:27 a.m. Eastern (1427 UTC) Jan. 17. Tianzhou-7 separated from the launcher and entered its predetermined orbit 10 minutes later, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced.

Tianzhou-7 docked at Tiangong just over three hours later, at 12:46 (1746 UTC), according to CMSEO. The Shenzhou-17 crew aboard the space station will later enter the Tianzhou 7 cargo spacecraft and carry out cargo transfer and other related work. 

The launch was the first to Tiangong in 2024. China completed the space station in late 2022 and has been sending regular, three person crews to Tiangong for roughly six-month-long missions. Each mission includes a handover, during which time there are briefly six astronauts aboard.

China plans to launch three further missions to Tiangong in 2024. These will be the Shenzhou 18 and 19 crewed missions and the Tianzhou-8 mission. The latter will fly roughly eight months from now. 

Tianzhou-7 carries 260 items of cargo, with a total mass of around 5.6 tons. Of this around 2.4 tons are supplies for the astronauts, including fresh fruit and vegetable and gift packages related to the incoming Year of the Dragon.

60 science units include an experiment focused on human bone cells and another carrying anaerobic archaea which will look at viability and methane production of early terrestrial life in a simulated cosmic environment.

CMSEO plans to send a Tianzhou spacecraft to Tiangong once every eight months. This is up from the original plan of once every six months, thanks to improvements in the capacity of the Tianzhou spacecraft. 

The automated docking was not as fast as the two-hour launch-to-docking performed by Tianzhou-5 in 2022, but the three-hour Tianzhou-7 docking was fuel and technology intensive.

CMSEO is also fostering low-cost cargo alternatives to supply Tiangong. The agency issued a call for proposals in May 2023 and selected four proposals in September to advance to a detailed design study phase.

While all selected cargo spacecraft proposals came from state-owned entities, it is understood that commercial launch vehicles are involved in plans to launch these spacecraft, rather than relying solely on Long March rockets.

The Kinetica-2 launcher being developed by CAS Space is understood to be the launcher for a proposal from the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites (IAMCAS) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). CAS Space is a CAS spinoff. 

Additionally, the Gravity-1 solid rocket launched by Orienspace from the Yellow Sea last week included a self-developed low-cost cargo spacecraft, according to the company. This was partly as a mass simulator to verify the rocket’s performance.

China aims to operate Tiangong for at least a decade. A co-orbiting space telescope with a roughly two-meter-diameter aperture is set to launch in 2025. “Xuntian” will be able to dock with Tiangong for maintenance, repairs and possibly upgrades.

The country is also planning to expand Tiangong with a multipurpose module. This will allow further full-sized modules to dock with the orbital outpost. The lifespan could also be extended, keeping it in orbit long after the International Space Station is expected to be deorbited.

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