Category: Science

WASHINGTON — Scout Space, a five-year-old startup developing satellite safety technologies, announced Jan. 18 that Philip Hover-Smoot, its former chief counsel, is stepping up as chief executive officer. 

Co-founder Eric Ingram, previously the company’s CEO, transitions to chairman and chief strategy officer.

Hover-Smoot, a veteran space and defense executive, joined Scout Space last October. As CEO, his goal is to steer the 20-person startup toward commercialization after years of focusing on technical research and development projects, including several funded by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force.

“We are at an inflection point,” Hover-Smoot told SpaceNews. 

Scout Space has landed a number of research and study contracts and “now we need to refocus on execution, on growing and scaling and making sure that we’re delivering on the promises we’ve made to the U.S. government by ramping up execution and growth.”

The company’s long-term goal is to produce sensing payloads and software that give spacecraft eyes to enable better navigation and avoid threats.

“Up to this point Scout has been doing early stage and mid stage SBIRs,” which are Small Business Innovation Research projects. The plan for the near future is to “demonstrate real capabilities,” he said. The company is working on two payloads that it hopes to launch to orbit in upcoming rideshare missions. 

“There are a number of things that we’re looking at doing with the U.S. government and that is likely to be most of our revenue in the next 12 to 24 months,” Hover-Smoot said. 

Scout Space is pursuing commercial opportunities but its current dependence on military contracts is “just a reflection of the reality that the new space market hasn’t really evolved as quickly as we all would have liked,” he added. “Everyone would love to go build gigantic constellations, and we would love to sell to the commercial market, it just hasn’t materialized yet.” 

Related

Researchers have found a virus that can kill dormant bacteria.

The discovery could help fight germs that can’t be treated with antibiotics alone.

In nature, most bacteria live on the bare minimum. If they experience nutrient deficiency or stress, they shut down their metabolism in a controlled manner and go into a resting state. In this stand-by mode, certain metabolic processes still take place that enable the microbes to perceive their environment and react to stimuli, but growth and division are suspended.

This also protects bacteria from, say, antibiotics or from viruses that prey exclusively on bacteria. Such bacteria-infecting viruses, known as phages, are considered a possible alternative to antibiotics that are no longer (sufficiently) effective due to drug resistance.

Until now, expert consensus held that phages successfully infect bacteria only when the latter are growing.

Researchers at ETH Zurich asked themselves whether evolution might have produced bacteriophages that specialize in dormant bacteria and could be used to target them. They began their search in 2018.

Now, a new study published in Nature Communications shows that such phages, though rare, do indeed exist.

Compost heap discovery

When Alexander Harms, a professor at ETH Zurich, and his team at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel began their project in 2018, they assumed that within the first year, they would be able to isolate around 20 different phages that attack dormant bacteria. But this wasn’t the case: it wasn’t until 2019 that Harms’ doctoral student Enea Maffei isolated a new, previously unknown virus.

Found in rotting plant material from a cemetery near Riehen (Canton of Basel-Stadt), this virus can infect and destroy dormant bacteria.

“This is the first phage described in the literature that has been shown to attack bacteria in a dormant state,” Maffei says.

“In view of the huge number of bacteriophages, however, I was always convinced that evolution must have produced some that can crack into dormant bacteria,” Harms says. The researchers named their new phage Paride.

Taking sleeping bacteria by surprise

The virus the researchers found infects Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium commonly found in many environments. Various strains colonize bodies of water, plants, the soil—and people. In the human body, certain strains can cause serious respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, which can be fatal.

“We’re just at the beginning. The one thing we know for sure is that we know almost nothing.”

How the new phage takes dormant P. aeruginosa germs by surprise, however, is not yet clear to the researchers. They suspect that the virus uses a specific molecular key to awaken the bacteria, and then hijacks the cell’s multiplication machinery for its own reproduction. However, the researchers have not yet been able to clarify exactly how this works.

They thus aim to elucidate the genes or molecules that underlie this awakening mechanism. Based on this, they could develop substances in a test tube that take over the wake-up process. Such a substance could then be combined with a suitable antibiotic that completely eliminates the bacteria.

“But we’re just at the beginning. The one thing we know for sure is that we know almost nothing,” Harms says.

Better together

To test the efficacy of the Paride phage, the researchers paired it with an antibiotic called meropenem. This disrupts cell wall synthesis and so it interferes only with cellular processes that don’t damage the phages. The antibiotic has no effect on dormant bacteria, as these don’t synthesize a new cell wall.

When tested in cell culture dishes, the virus was able to kill 99% of all dormant bacteria but left 1% alive. Only the combination of Paride phages and meropenem was able to eradicate the bacterial culture completely, even though the latter had no detectable effect on its own.

In a further experiment together with Nina Khanna, a doctor at Basel University Hospital, Maffei tested this combination on mice with a chronic infection. Neither the phage nor the antibiotic alone worked particularly well in the mice, but the interaction between phages and antibiotics proved to be very effective in living organisms as well.

“This shows that our discovery is not just a laboratory artifact, but could also be clinically relevant,” Maffei says.

Can phages replace antibiotics?

Experts have been discussing phage therapy intensively for many years. Researchers and physicians hope that one day they will be able to use phages to replace antibiotics that have become ineffective. However, broad applications are still lacking, as there have not been any comprehensive studies.

“What we have at present is mostly individual case studies,” Harms says.

Studies by researchers at the Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels showed that the treatment improved the condition of three-quarters of patients and that it was able to eliminate the bacteria in 61%. However, this also means that in four out of 10 patients, the germs could not be removed with phage therapy, even though the bacteria in question were phage-sensitive in the lab.

“This may be because many bacteria in the body are in a dormant state, especially in the case of chronic infections, and so phages can’t penetrate them,” Harms says. Dormant bacteria could also play an important role in infections with non-resistant strains.

“In the case of infections, that means it would be important to know the physiological state of the bacteria in question. Then the right phages, combined with antibiotics, could be used in a targeted manner. However, you need to know exactly how a phage attacks a bacterium before you can select the right phages for a particular treatment. This hasn’t happened yet because we still know too little about the phages,” Harms explains.

That’s why in the years ahead, the researchers will investigate precisely how the new phage brings bacteria out of deep sleep, infects them, and makes them susceptible to antibiotics.

An SNSF Starting Grant to Alexander Harms and NCCR AntiResist funded the work.

Source: ETH Zurich

I could step back to the founding of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. A. E. Douglass, the lab’s founder, invented the technique of “crossdating.” As climate varies from year to year, it induces synchronous growth patterns among all the trees of a given species and location.

For example, in the Southwest, where rainfall strongly affects growth, trees form a wide ring during wet years and a narrow ring in dry years. As climate varies from year to year, it leads to the formation of a time-specific synchronous barcode of growth among trees.

Crossdating is the process of matching those growth barcodes. It ensures that the calendar year of every ring is correctly identified, as sometimes trees don’t form a ring the whole way around their circumference. If you sample the tree at a place where it didn’t form a ring, you wouldn’t know if you just did simple ring counts. But by sampling a whole bunch of trees and comparing the growth patterns, you’d immediately know if the ring was missed.

The foundational idea behind bringing tree-ring techniques to the marine system is understanding if we can crossdate these fish to build chronologies going back multiple decades; integrate chronologies across different fish species; and compare chronologies with environmental data like ocean temperature and salinity to tell us how fish respond to climate variability in the world’s oceans.

With these fish otoliths, we have a shortcut to develop exactly dated, well-replicated histories of fish growth in marine systems and study how it relates to variability in climate. It can also help disentangle the effects of humans on marine systems.

Two insect-like robots, a mini-bug and a water strider, are the smallest, lightest, and fastest fully functional micro-robots ever known to be created.

Such miniature robots could someday be used for work in areas such as artificial pollination, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, micro-fabrication, or robotic-assisted surgery.

The mini-bug weighs in at eight milligrams while the water strider weighs 55 milligrams. Both can move at about six millimeters a second.

“That is fast compared to other micro-robots at this scale although it still lags behind their biological relatives,” says Conor Trygstad, a PhD student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University and lead author of the study published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

An ant typically weighs up to five milligrams and can move at almost a meter per second.

The key to the tiny robots is their tiny actuators that make the robots move. Trygstad used a new fabrication technique to miniaturize the actuator down to less than a milligram, the smallest ever known to have been made.

“The actuators are the smallest and fastest ever developed for micro-robotics,” says Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia, associate professor in engineering in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, who led the project.

The actuator uses a material called a shape memory alloy that is able to change shapes when it’s heated. It is called “shape memory” because it remembers and then returns to its original shape. Unlike a typical motor that would move a robot, these alloys don’t have any moving parts or spinning components.

“They’re very mechanically sound,” says Trygstad. “The development of the very lightweight actuator opens up new realms in micro-robotics.”

Shape memory alloys are not generally used for large-scale robotic movement because they are too slow. In the case of the new robots, however, the actuators are made of two tiny shape memory alloy wires that are 1/1000 of an inch in diameter. With a small amount of current, the wires can be heated up and cooled easily, allowing the robots to flap their fins or move their feet at up to 40 times per second. In preliminary tests, the actuator was also able to lift more than 150 times its own weight.

Compared to other technologies used to make robots move, the SMA technology also requires only a very small amount of electricity or heat to make them move.

“The SMA system requires a lot less sophisticated systems to power them,” Trygstad says.

Trygstad, an avid fly fisherman, has long observed water striders and would like to further study their movements. While the water strider robot does a flat flapping motion to move itself, the natural insect does a more efficient rowing motion with its legs, which is one of the reasons that the real thing can move much faster.

The researchers would like to copy another insect and develop a water strider-type robot that can move across the top of the water surface as well as just under it. They are also working to use tiny batteries or catalytic combustion to make their robots fully autonomous and untethered from a power supply.

Source: Washington State

The known harms of opioid addiction and overdose may be just the beginning of opioids’ known risks, a new study suggests.

Prescribed opioids also may have cardiovascular consequences, researchers report.

“Beyond the harms of opioids that we are more aware of, there are others we are still uncovering,” says Minhee Sung, instructor of medicine (general medicine and addiction medicine) at Yale University School of Medicine and first author of the study.

Clinicians sometimes prescribe opioids to treat moderate-to-severe pain, including for chronic pain—which is a condition affecting over 50 million Americans. It is especially prevalent among those 65 and older—affecting as much as 60 to 75% of this population.

“Chronic pain is one of the most common conditions that older adults experience,” says Sung. The large number of patients who might be prescribed opioids focuses added concerns about their use, especially in a population that is at increased risk for heart issues.

Building on a line of work to understand prescribed opioid-related harms, in their latest study, this team led by Sung analyzed data from the Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS). They focused on approximately 50,000 patients, 30% of whom had received prescribed opioids, over a three-year period. Those who had received prescribed opioids were significantly more likely to later develop cardiovascular disease (CVD), the researchers found. The researchers also found that higher doses were associated with a higher risk of CVD.

“This is highly relevant for a huge number of the American population as so many patients are of older age, experience chronic pain, have taken opioids, or are already at risk for cardiovascular disease,” says Sung.

The study’s cohort included patients receiving prescribed opioids for both short- [less than 90 days] and long-term [90 days or more] durations, ranging from three to 23 days for most patients. In future studies, “we are interested in learning more about how taking prescribed opioids over time impacts risk of cardiovascular disease and learning more about the mechanisms driving these risks,” says E. Jennifer Edelman, professor of medicine (general medicine) and the study’s senior author.

“More work is needed to understand whether it is related to the prescribed opioids themselves or exposures that often co-occur with prescribed opioids.”

As awareness of the dangers of opioids grows, clinicians should use caution when treating patients with chronic pain, says Sung. However, they should also consider the risks of abruptly discontinuing the drugs, especially given the limited availability of other effective pain management options.

“In response to the opioid epidemic and increased scrutiny about opioid prescriptions, many clinicians have suddenly stopped prescribing opioids for people who have depended on them for a long time or seriously suffer with chronic pain without offering alternative solutions to treat their pain,” she says.

Research shows that this sudden cessation can cause significant psychological stress and increased risk of suicide.

Sung advises patients who are older than 65, have diabetes, or have other risk factors for cardiovascular disease to have conversations with their provider about their pain management plan.

“If you are already at greater risk for cardiovascular disease, talk to your doctor about other ways to treat your pain,” she says. Options include non-pharmacologic treatments for pain such as physical therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic pain.

The research appears in the Journal of Pain.

Source: Yale University

Researchers have discovered a unique isopod, a form of crustacean, that has been identified as a new species of the genus Booralana from the deep waters of the Bahamas.

The finding, detailed in the journal Zootaxa, is another example that discovery of life in the oceans is far from complete. By uncovering the creature’s role in deep-sea ecosystems, scientists may be able to better understand ocean biodiversity.

Isopods are found ubiquitously across all major ecosystems on earth. Many, like this new species, are only a few centimeters long. They evolved more than 300 million years ago. In the deep seas, they are mostly scavengers, and are important recyclers of energy.

Yet, there is evidence they can attack living vertebrates such as sharks. Isopods can also live several years without eating. This creature, Booraland nickorum, appears to exhibit similar traits since its discovery at over 500 meters (about 1640.42 feet) in Bahamian waters.

“This work highlights the cryptic diversity of this group and underscores how little we know about deep-sea ecosystems in the Bahamas,” says Oliver Shipley, a research assistant professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) at Stony Brook University.

Shipley believes marine researchers are only scratching the surface on what these deep-sea ecosystems contain in terms of marine life, and that this latest finding suggests “a potentially hidden ‘treasure chest’ of unrecognized biodiversity in these waters.”

In 2019, Shipley worked closely with OceanX and the Cape Eleuthera Institute on research that explored deep waters in the Exuma Sound. This region had initially been the focus of Shipley’s MS research, beginning in 2013.

The 2019-20 expedition was one of several taking place in the Sound aimed at documenting deep-sea biodiversity in its previously unexplored areas. During the expedition, the research team recovered specimens for genetic sequencing, and in the process discovered the new isopod, Booralana nickorum.

For Shipley and colleagues, this is the second new species of isopod discovered as part of long-term project in the Bahamas’ Exuma Sound. The project has largely aimed to examine patterns of biodiversity and food web structure. The other isopod, Bathynomus maxeyorum, was formally described in 2016.

Prior to this discovery, it was believed that only a single species of Booralana existed in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, Booralana tricarinata. The new species, B. nickorum, can be distinguished by several morphological features associated with the pleotelson, or “tail.”

“The Caribbean houses many deep-sea ecosystems that could be considered pristine, mostly hidden from anthropogenic exploitation, such as deep-sea fisheries and mining,” explains Shipley.

“Therefore, they provide a baseline from which to compare exploitation effects occurring in less pristine regions. However, these systems are not immune from the increasing impacts of climate changes and pollution, so it is critical that we understand the full extent of the biodiversity supported by these deep-sea environments.”

Additional coauthors are from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Source: Stony Brook University

Wastewater surveillance is a potent tool in understanding COVID-19 transmission within school settings, according to a new study.

The research in PLOS Global Public Health establishes the pivotal role of wastewater analysis in managing the public health response to COVID-19 at schools.

The study focused on a middle and high school campus in Jefferson County, New York, serving 600 students and compared results from wastewater surveillance to COVID-19 case trends. The surveillance demonstrated high levels of sensitivity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) in wastewater surveillance.

While the specificity of wastewater surveillance at the school was observed to be lower, the strong correlation between the amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA recovered in wastewater and COVID-19 cases highlighted its potential in understanding transmission risk within the school.

“By analyzing wastewater samples, we observed a robust correlation between SARS-CoV-2 RNA levels and the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases within the school, providing critical insights into potential transmission,” says research team member Haley Kappus-Kron, an epidemiologist at the CDC Foundation.

The study acknowledges the limitations of a one-day lead time of wastewater surveillance to predict clinical COVID-19 cases.

“The practicality of wastewater surveillance as an early warning tool heavily relies on timely reporting and swift actions following a positive sample,” says Kappus-Kron. “Nevertheless, in the absence of mass asymptomatic testing, wastewater surveillance presents an appealing and cost-effective approach to understand disease trends within school environments.”

While wastewater surveillance would not prevent all transmission, its role in understanding the extent of transmission could be critical in ensuring schools stay open as much as possible during a public health emergency due to an infectious disease. Applying wastewater surveillance in schools could potentially prevent unnecessary school closures and keep children in school longer.

“Wastewater surveillance will probably work for most infectious diseases, including the next public health emergency threat. With wastewater surveillance in schools, we may be able to keep the schools open longer and respond specifically to outbreaks rather than implement broad closures,” says epidemiologist David Larsen, professor and chair of public health in the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics at Syracuse University, who led the research team.

At outset of COVID in 2020, Larsen led an interdisciplinary team of experts in coordination with the New York State Department of Health to create a wastewater surveillance system throughout New York state.

As the world moves beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, schools may consider integrating wastewater surveillance into their emergency preparedness plans. The study advocates for school-specific plans that include access points, laboratory contacts, and protocols for effective wastewater sampling and analysis, especially during public health emergencies.

Source: Syracuse University

WASHINGTON — Members of a key congressional committee expressed disappointment over the latest delay in NASA’s plans to return humans to the moon but showed little interest in making major changes to that program.

At a Jan. 17 hearing of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, a NASA official explained the agency’s decision to delay its next two Artemis missions by nearly a year, with watchdogs and a former NASA administrator offering some skepticism about that revised schedule.

NASA announced Jan. 9 that it was delaying Artemis 2, the first crewed flight of the Space Launch System and Orion, from late 2024 to no earlier than September 2025 to provide more time to address issues with the Orion spacecraft. That, in turn, delayed Artemis 3, the first crewed lunar landing of the overall effort, to no earlier than September 2026.

“We have adjusted the Artemis 2 schedule based on crew safety,” said Catherine Koerner, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development. The delay provides sufficient time, she argued, to address the issues identified last week. “There is margin built into that schedule for us to complete all of that necessary testing.”

Other witnesses said that delay seemed reasonable. “The Artemis circumlunar mission is, I think, very doable on the timescale that NASA has said,” said Mike Griffin, who was NASA administrator from 2005 to 2009.

However, Griffin and others were not convinced that Artemis 3 could launch as soon as September 2026. “I don’t think Artemis 3, the landing mission, is at all realistically scheduled,” he said.

“NASA will continue to be challenged on the schedule front, particularly with the Artemis 3 mission,” said George Scott, acting NASA inspector general. “Based on lessons learned from Artemis 2, I think the agency will be better positioned to come up with a more realistic launch date for Artemis 3.”

William Russell, director of contracting and national security acquisitions at the Government Accountability Office, said a span of just one year between Artemis 2 and 3 was not realistic. “Artemis 3 is more complicated, so there’s not a lot of time, and as you saw with Artemis 1, there are things that are going to happen that you need to learn, that you need to investigate,” he said. “One year is not a lot of time to do that learning.”

Russell, in his testimony, referenced a GAO report from last November that projected that Artemis 3 might be delayed until 2027 based on the time needed to develop the Human Landing System lander, if that effort follows the average of other major NASA projects.

Members of the community, while disappointed in the delay, avoided sharp criticism of NASA. “I stand behind NASA in prioritizing safety for Artemis and look forward to gaining further insight into the delays and any related costs,” said Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.), ranking member of the space subcommittee.

Members did push NASA to provide more transparency into cost and schedules for Artemis, following on recommendations made by the GAO and inspector general. “NASA is at an inflection point,” said Russell, because the agency is setting cost and schedule baselines for many key Artemis projects. “We’ll see in the coming 12 to 18 months whether the projects can adhere to those baselines.”

There seemed to be little interest among the committee members, though, to make wholesale changes in Artemis. Griffin, in his testimony, said he opposed the current architecture NASA has developed for returning humans to the moon. “In my judgement, the Artemis program is excessively complex, unrealistically priced, compromises crew safety, poses very high mission risk of completion and is highly unlikely to be completed in a timely manner even if successful,” he said. “We need to restart it, not keep it on track.”

In his prepared testimony, he outlined an alternative approach that echoed what NASA was pursuing under the Constellation program when he was administrator. That architecture involves two launches of SLS Block 2 rockets, one carrying a lunar lander and transfer stage and the other a crewed Orion spacecraft and transfer stage. The two would dock in low lunar orbit to transfer astronauts to the lander, spending a week on the surface before returning to Orion for the trip home.

None of the committee members, though, showed any obvious interest in Griffin’s alternative architecture, and did not ask him or the other witnesses questions about it.

The committee “has long maintained its bipartisan support for Artemis and NASA’s moon to Mars efforts, and I don’t see that changing in any way,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), ranking member of the full committee.

“I’m confident that I speak for everyone on this committee when I say we all support Artemis,” said Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), chair of the full committee, in his opening remarks. “But, this committee’s support of Artemis means asking detailed questions of NASA and providing oversight of the agency’s proposals.”

He added that Artemis, and NASA’s overall human exploration efforts, will be addressed in a NASA authorization bill he expects the committee to take up this spring.

Related