Category: Science

Survival strategies used by fire ants, one of the most aggressive, territorial, and venomous ant species, may pave the way to revolutionize robotics, medicine, and engineering.

Fire ants survive floods by temporarily interlinking their legs to create a raft-like structure, allowing them to float collectively to safety as a unified colony and then releasing to resume their individual forms.

Drawing inspiration from this natural process, researchers discovered a method that allows synthetic materials to mimic the ants’ autonomous assembly, reconfiguration, and disassembly in response to environmental changes such as heat, light, or solvents.

For the study, published in Nature Materials, researchers used shape-changing polymer ribbons that can self-assemble, change their volume, and dissemble as needed by using responsive hydrogels, liquid crystal elastomers, or semicrystalline polymers that can bend or twist.

As an undergraduate student, Taylor Ware, now an associate professor in the departments of biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering at Texas A&M University, became captivated by an article about ants. Already interested in materials and research, the discovery that fire ants use ingenious survival strategies during floods sparked his sense of wonder.

“We tend to focus on mimicking the really wonderful things in nature—like butterfly wings. But it’s also maybe worth mimicking some of the things that we don’t find so interesting in nature, that are still wonderfully useful, like the behaviors of fire ants,” he says. “It’s nice to mimic things that are really impressive even if they’re not so loved. You can learn a lot from creatures like that.”

This method allows for creating and manipulating structures in challenging environments, like the human body, without invasive procedures. By using responsive hydrogels, liquid crystal elastomers or semicrystalline polymer ribbons that bend and twist, a solid biomaterial can disassemble into a form that moves like a liquid for injection and then reassemble once it’s in place.

“We already have materials that could change in form, but we thought it would be really cool if many individual particles of materials could work together to form structures like ants do,” Ware says.

“You can see in nature documentaries that ants form bridges, rafts, and other things, but what’s also important is they can let go and go back to being an ant. The reversible shape change of the responsive polymers enables similar behavior in purely synthetic systems.”

Future applied research projects include using injectable biomaterials to help heal tissue. Still, fundamentally, Ware says the team is interested in mimicking behaviors seen in other animal swarms and understanding what happens if the particles can be made to swim before or during their entanglement.

Additional coauthors are from Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the President’s Excellence Fund from Texas A&M funded the work.

Source: Bailey Noah for Texas A&M University

A new study identified 60 alcohol-associated circulating metabolites, which appear to produce counteractive effects on the risk of heart disease.

While past research has indicated that moderate alcohol consumption can lower one’s risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), more recent studies suggest that moderate levels of drinking may be hazardous to heart health.

The new analysis now sheds new insight on this complex relationship between alcohol consumption and the progression of CVD.

Published in the journal BMC Medicine, the study found that alcohol consumption may have counteractive effects on CVD risk, depending on the biological presence of certain circulating metabolites—molecules that are produced during or after a substance is metabolized and studied as biomarkers of many diseases.

The researchers observed a total of 60 alcohol consumption-related metabolites, identifying seven circulating metabolites that link long-term moderate alcohol consumption with an increased risk of CVD, and three circulating metabolites that link this same drinking pattern with a lower risk of CVD.

The findings provide a better understanding of the molecular pathway of long-term alcohol consumption and highlight the need for and direction of further research on these metabolites to inform targeted prevention and treatment of alcohol-related CVD.

“The study findings demonstrate that alcohol consumption may trigger changes of our metabolomic profiles, potentially yielding both beneficial and harmful outcomes,” says Chunyu Liu, assistant professor of biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and co-corresponding/co-senior author of the study along with Jiantao Ma, assistant professor in the Division of Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Science at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “Because the majority of our study participants are moderate alcohol consumers, our findings contribute to the ongoing discussion about the relationship between moderate alcohol drinking and heart health.”

“However, rather than definitively settling that debate, this study underscores the intricate effects of alcohol consumption on cardiovascular health and generates a useful hypothesis for future investigations,” Liu says.

For the study, the researchers examined blood samples to measure the association between the cumulative average consumption over 20 years of beer, wine, and liquor and 211 metabolites among 2,428 Framingham Heart Study Offspring Study participants, who are the children of participants in the long-running Boston University-based Framingham Heart Study. Among the participants, 636 developed CVD over the study period.

Among the 60 drinking-related metabolites, 13 metabolites had a stronger association with alcohol consumption in women than in men, perhaps due to women’s generally smaller body size and likely higher blood alcohol concentration after consuming the same amount of alcohol as men.

The results also showed that consumption of different types of alcohol was linked to different metabolomic responses, with beer consumption generating a slightly weaker association overall than wine and liquor. In roughly two-thirds of the 60 metabolites, higher plasma levels were detected in participants who consumed greater amounts of alcohol.

Branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) were among the metabolites that were not associated with alcohol consumption.

The researchers then calculated two alcohol consumption-associated metabolite scores, which had opposite associations with the development of CVD.

“While our study presents intriguing findings, validation through state-of-the-art methods and large and diverse study populations is crucial,” Ma says. “To enhance reliability, we aim to conduct larger-scale research involving a more diverse racial and ethnic background, as the current study participants are all white.

“In addition, we will expand our study to integrate with other molecular markers such as genetic information to illustrate the complex relationships between alcohol consumption, metabolite features, and cardiovascular risk.”

Source: Tufts University

Major cities on the US Atlantic coast are sinking, in some cases as much as 5 millimeters per year, a new study shows.

The research from Virginia Tech and the US Geological Survey confirms the decline at the ocean’s edge well outpaces global sea level rise.

Particularly hard hit population centers such as New York City and Long Island, Baltimore, Virginia Beach, and Norfolk are seeing areas of rapid “subsidence,” or sinking land, alongside more slowly sinking or relatively stable ground, increasing the risk to roadways, runways, building foundations, rail lines, and pipelines.

“Continuous unmitigated subsidence on the US East Coast should cause concern,” says lead author Leonard Ohenhen, a graduate student working with Manoochehr Shirzaei, associate proifessor at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation Lab. “This is particularly in areas with a high population and property density and a historical complacency toward infrastructure maintenance.”

Shirzaei and his research team pulled together a vast collection of data points measured by space-based radar satellites and used this highly accurate information to build digital terrain maps that show exactly where sinking landscapes present risks to the health of vital infrastructure.

Using the publicly available satellite imagery, Shirzaei and Ohenhen measured millions of occurrences of land subsidence spanning multiple years. They then created some of the world’s first high resolution depictions of the land subsidence.

These groundbreaking new maps show that a large area of the East Coast is sinking at least 2 mm per year, with several areas along the mid-Atlantic coast of up to 3,700 square kilometers, or more than 1,400 square miles, sinking more than 5 mm per year, more than the current 4 mm per year global rate of sea level rise.

“We measured subsidence rates of 2 mm per year affecting more than 2 million people and 800,000 properties on the East Coast,” Shirzaei says. “We know to some extent that the land is sinking. Through this study, we highlight that sinking of the land is not an intangible threat. It affects you and I and everyone, it may be gradual, but the impacts are real.”

In several cities along the East Coast, multiple critical infrastructures such as roads, railways, airports, and levees are affected by differing subsidence rates.

“Here, the problem is not just that the land is sinking. The problem is that the hotspots of sinking land intersect directly with population and infrastructure hubs,” says Ohenhen. “For example, significant areas of critical infrastructure in New York, including JFK and LaGuardia airports and its runways, along with the railway systems, are affected by subsidence rates exceeding 2 mm per year. The effects of these right now and into the future are potential damage to infrastructure and increased flood risks.”

For the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers measured how much the land along the East Coast has sunk and which areas, populations, and critical infrastructure within 100 km (about 62 miles) of the coast are at risk of land subsidence. Subsidence can undermine building foundations; damage roads, gas, and water lines; cause building collapse; and exacerbate coastal flooding—especially when paired with sea level rise caused by climate change.

“This information is needed. No one else is providing it,” says coauthor Patrick Barnard, a research geologist with the USGS. “Shirzaei and his Virginia Tech team stepped into that niche with his technical expertise and is providing something extremely valuable.”

Source: Virginia Tech

A new study links cigarette smoke exposure to an exponentially higher rate of bladder cancer in Scottish terriers.

By assessing individual dogs and studying their medical history, scientists are beginning to untangle the question of who gets cancer and why, and how best to detect, treat, and prevent it.

For the study, published in the Veterinary Journal, researchers tracked a cohort of 120 Scottish terriers over a three-year period. They found that dogs exposed to cigarette smoke were six times more likely to develop bladder cancer than those that were not.

“Cancer is a combination of what you are born with—your genetics—and what you are exposed to—your environment,” says Deborah Knapp, a professor of comparative oncology and professor of veterinary medicine at Purdue University. “In this case, we studied these dogs for years at a time, and then we went back and asked, ‘What was different between those that developed cancer and those that did not develop cancer? What were the risk factors?’”

Scottish terriers develop bladder cancer at a rate 20 times higher than that of other dog breeds. And when Scotties and other dogs develop bladder cancer, it is often an aggressive form similar to muscle invasive bladder cancer in humans.

Knapp’s team studied 120 Scotties, assessing their health, environment, food, activity, locations, and anything they could think of that might affect their cancer risk. The goal was both to figure out what could prevent a heartbreaking and often fatal cancer in this breed, but also to use that information to see what might affect cancer in other dogs and even humans.

Dogs make an excellent study species because they live alongside humans, sharing food, bedding, housing, atmosphere, and almost everything else.

“We know that Scotties’ genetics play a huge role in making them vulnerable to cancer,” Knapp says. That strong genetic signal tied to cancer helps researchers isolate other factors that affect the likelihood of any dog, or human, getting cancer, and to do so with smaller numbers of dogs.

“If we were to do this study with mixed breeds of dogs, it would take hundreds and hundreds of dogs to uncover this same risk, which is probably there, just more difficult to discern because those dogs are not already inclined genetically to get bladder cancer.”

The researchers, with the help of Purdue alumna, veterinarian, and Scottish terrier breed champion Marcia Dawson, wanted to study cancer in Scotties to help the dogs themselves and for what that research might reveal about canine and human risk factors overall.

When a dog (or human) is exposed to tobacco smoke, either by breathing it or by licking clothes saturated with the scent, their body takes up the chemicals in the smoke and eliminates them through the urine.

This leads to cancer in the urinary tract, but also offers a way to assess smoke exposure. The researchers analyzed the dogs’ urine for a nicotine metabolite, cotinine, and its presence indicated the dog had been exposed to significant amounts of tobacco smoke.

Any time tobacco smoke is present in the same room as a dog, the dog breathes in the smoke. However, some dogs also had cotinine in their urine when their owners did not smoke. In that case, the dog could have been exposed away from the home. Or it may be that their owners visited places where others were smoking and returned home with smoke on their clothes.

“If someone goes out to a smoky concert or party, then comes home and their dog hops up on their lap to snuggle with them, the dog can be exposed to the particulate material in smoke through the person’s clothing,” Knapp says.

The results are not all black and white. Not all the dogs who were around smokers got cancer, and some dogs who were not around the smoke still got cancer. This is also true in humans. Half of human bladder cancer is due to smoking, but not all smokers develop bladder cancer. This discovery gives the researchers the opportunity to study how the combined effects of the genetics inherited from the parents plus environmental exposures lead to cancer.

Knapp stresses that this discovery is a new one. Dog owners, who almost universally want the best for their dog and wish their dog would live to be 100, certainly did not knowingly put their dogs at risk of cancer by smoking around them. However, with this new information, they may be able to better protect their pets going forward.

In another interesting finding, the researchers did not uncover a link between lawn chemicals and bladder cancer, which had been found in previous studies. “That’s likely because we are working with pet owners who are aware of the risk of lawn chemicals, so they took precautions to keep the dogs safe, like not treating parts of the lawn where the dog tends to be or keeping the dogs off the lawn for longer,” Knapp says. “That is encouraging! People love their pets. There are people taking steps to keep their dogs healthier.”

That new and encouraging result means there are further things humans can do to protect dogs. They can reduce the amount of smoke around the dog by quitting smoking or by smoking outside away from the dog and changing clothes before they come back inside from a smoky environment and snuggling their dog.

“What we hope pet owners will take from this is that if they can reduce the exposure of their dogs to smoke, that can help the dogs’ health,” Knapp says. “We hope they stop smoking altogether, both for their health and so they will continue to be around for their dogs, but any steps to keep smoke from the dogs will help.”

The National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, the Scottish Terrier Club of America, and gifts made to Purdue University for canine bladder cancer research funded the work.

Source: Purdue University

As more states require employers to list compensation on job ads, a trending strategy to use very wide pay ranges could potentially harm recruitment, according to a new study.

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that participants in three different experiments were more likely to respond negatively to job ads with very wide pay ranges, viewing those employers as less trustworthy.

Prior surveys have found that most people report they would trust organizations that include pay ranges in their postings more than those that do not, but as this study indicates, the way potential pay is presented also matters.

“It’s not just a choice between including a pay range or not—how compensation information is communicated matters, and at least in this study, having a very wide range might send a negative signal to potential applicants,” says study author Kristine Kuhn, a Washington State University Carson College of Business researcher.

How the ad explained the wide pay range also had an effect. In one of the experiments, participants were even less attracted to the organization if a very wide pay range included a statement that the offer amount would depend on the candidate’s qualifications.

On the other hand, a more seemingly objective explanation that the offer would depend on the candidate’s geographic location tended to improve impressions of the employer.

Historically, most job postings in the US did not include numerical pay information, but in recent years several states, including Washington, California, Colorado, and New York, have enacted transparency legislation requiring many recruiters to list pay ranges—in part because there is evidence it increases equity.

Seeing an emerging trend in job postings with large pay ranges, Kuhn set up three experiments with different groups of participants to test the effect of this practice. In each experiment, some participants saw ads with wide salary ranges, such as a gap of $50,000 or more between the low and high point, while others saw ads with a narrower gap of around $10,000. The candidates then responded to questions about their perceptions of the organization posting the ad.

Participants in the initial experiment were college students; the second experiment surveyed 350 college graduates using an online panel, and the third experiment involved 245 participants with recent job search experience. Across all three experiments, on average ads with larger pay ranges evoked less favorable impressions of the employers than the narrower ranges.

In the last experiment which had an ad with a very large pay range of $58,100-$152,500, the participants provided written answers about how they viewed the employer. This revealed a high level of cynicism among some who called the wide pay range “dishonest,” “disingenuous,” and “ludicrous.”

As one participant put it: “The large range implies that they tend to devalue their employees. I doubt they would actually offer anyone applying for this position a salary at the top range, regardless of credentials.”

There were some outliers, however, who viewed the large range as a positive, seeing the high top number as showing possible “room for growth without needing a promotion to another job.”

Ideally, advertising a pay range should streamline the recruiting process, Kuhn says, so the recruiter and applicant on are on the same page. However, some organizations, especially smaller ones, may not have well-defined job structures, so the large pay ranges in job ads may indicate they want to tailor the position to the candidates who respond.

“There probably is a goldilocks area of a just right pay range where it gives the employer some flexibility without sending negative signals to prospective applicants,” says Kuhn. “Also, while from a legal standpoint they may be required to advertise an expected pay range, employers and job candidates can still negotiate.”

Source: Washington State University

People who received gentle electric currents on the back of their heads learned to maneuver a robotic surgery tool in virtual reality and then in a real setting much more easily than people who didn’t receive those nudges, a new study shows.

The findings offer the first glimpse of how stimulating a specific part of the brain called the cerebellum could help health care professionals take what they learn in virtual reality to real operating rooms, a much-needed transition in a field that increasingly relies on digital simulation training, says author and Johns Hopkins University roboticist Jeremy D. Brown.

“It was really cool that we were actually able to influence behavior using this setup…”

“Training in virtual reality is not the same as training in a real setting, and we’ve shown with previous research that it can be difficult to transfer a skill learned in a simulation into the real world,” says Brown, an associate professor of mechanical engineering.

“It’s very hard to claim statistical exactness, but we concluded people in the study were able to transfer skills from virtual reality to the real world much more easily when they had this stimulation.”

The work appears in Nature Scientific Reports.

Participants drove a surgical needle through three small holes, first in a virtual simulation and then in a real scenario using the da Vinci Research Kit, an open-source research robot. The exercises mimicked moves needed during surgical procedures on organs in the belly, the researchers say.

Participants received a subtle flow of electricity through electrodes or small pads placed on their scalps meant to stimulate their brain’s cerebellum. While half the group received steady flows of electricity during the entire test, the rest of the participants received a brief stimulation only at the beginning and nothing at all for the rest of the tests.

People who received the steady currents showed a notable boost in dexterity. None of them had prior training in surgery or robotics.

“The group that didn’t receive stimulation struggled a bit more to apply the skills they learned in virtual reality to the actual robot, especially the most complex moves involving quick motions,” says Guido Caccianiga, a former Johns Hopkins roboticist, now at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, who designed and led the experiments. “The groups that received brain stimulation were better at those tasks.”

Noninvasive brain stimulation is a way to influence certain parts of the brain from outside the body, and scientists have shown how it can benefit motor learning in rehabilitation therapy, the researchers say. With their work, the team is taking the research to a new level by testing how stimulating the brain can help surgeons gain skills they might need in real-world situations, says coauthor Gabriela Cantarero, a former assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Johns Hopkins.

“It was really cool that we were actually able to influence behavior using this setup, where we could really quantify every little aspect of people’s movements, deviations, and errors,” Cantarero says.

Robotic surgery systems provide significant benefits for clinicians by enhancing human skill. They can help surgeons minimize hand tremors and perform fine and precise tasks with enhanced vision.

Besides influencing how surgeons of the future might learn new skills, this type of brain stimulation also offers promise for skill acquisition in other industries that rely on virtual reality training, particularly work in robotics.

Even outside of virtual reality, the stimulation can also likely help people learn more generally, the researchers say.

“What if we could show that with brain stimulation you can learn new skills in half the time?” Caccianiga says. “That’s a huge margin on the costs because you’d be training people faster; you could save a lot of resources to train more surgeons or engineers who will deal with these technologies frequently in the future.”

Additional authors are from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

Researchers have used light and chlorine to eradicate low-concentration methane from air.

The result gets us closer to being able to remove greenhouse gases from livestock housing, biogas production plants, and wastewater treatment plants to benefit the climate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has determined that reducing methane gas emissions will immediately reduce the rise in global temperatures. The gas is up to 85 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO₂, and more than half of it is emitted by human sources, with cattle and fossil fuel production accounting for the largest share.

A unique new method developed by a researchers from the University of Copenhagen and spin-out company Ambient Carbon has succeeded in removing methane from air.

“A large part of our methane emissions comes from millions of low-concentration point sources like cattle and pig barns. In practice, methane from these sources has been impossible to concentrate into higher levels or remove. But our new result proves that it is possible using the reaction chamber that we’ve have built,” says Matthew Stanley Johnson, an atmospheric chemistry professor who led the study.

Earlier, Johnson presented the research results at COP 28 in Dubai via an online connection and in Washington DC at the National Academy of Sciences, which advises the US government on science and technology.

How does it work?

Methane can be burnt off from air if its concentration exceeds 4%. But most human-caused emissions are below 0.1% and therefore unable to be burned.

To remove methane from air, the researchers built a reaction chamber that, to the uninitiated, looks like an elongated metal box with heaps of hoses and measuring instruments. Inside the box, a chain reaction of chemical compounds takes place, which ends up breaking down the methane and removing a large portion of the gas from air.

“In the scientific study, we’ve proven that our reaction chamber can eliminate 58% of methane from air. And, since submitting the study, we have improved our results in the laboratory so that the reaction chamber is now at 88%,” says Matthew Stanley Johnson.

The researchers built a reaction chamber and devised a method that simulates and greatly accelerates methane’s natural degradation process.

They dubbed the method the Methane Eradication Photochemical System (MEPS) and it degrades methane 100 million times faster than in nature.

The method works by introducing chlorine molecules into a reaction chamber with methane gas. The researchers then shine UV light onto the chlorine molecules. The light’s energy causes the molecules to split and form two chlorine atoms.

The chlorine atoms then steal a hydrogen atom from the methane, which then falls apart and decomposes. The chlorine product (hydrochloric acid) is captured and subsequently recycled in the chamber.

The methane turns into carbon dioxide (CO₂) and carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H₂) in the same way as the natural process does in the atmosphere.

Chlorine is key to the discovery. Using chlorine and the energy from light, researchers can remove methane from air much more efficiently than the way it happens in the atmosphere, where the process typically takes 10-12 years.

“Methane decomposes at a snail’s pace because the gas isn’t especially happy about reacting with other things in the atmosphere. However, we’ve discovered that, with the help of light and chlorine, we can trigger a reaction and break down the methane roughly 100 million times faster than in nature,” explains Johnson.

Looking ahead

A 40-foot shipping container will soon arrive at the chemistry department. When it does, it will become a larger prototype of the reaction chamber that the researchers built in the laboratory. It will be a “methane cleaner” which, in principle, will be able to be connected to the ventilation system in a livestock barn.

“Today’s livestock farms are high-tech facilities where ammonia is already removed from air. As such, removing methane through existing air purification systems is an obvious solution,” explains Johnson.

The same applies to biogas and wastewater treatment plants, which are some of the largest human-made sources of methane emissions in Denmark after cattle production.

As a preliminary investigation for this study, the researchers traveled around the country measuring how much methane leaks from cattle stalls, wastewater treatment plants and biogas plants. In several places, the researchers were able to document that a large amount of methane leaks into the atmosphere from these plants.

“For example, Denmark is a pioneer when it comes to producing biogas. But if just a few percent of the methane from this process escapes, it counteracts any climate gains,” concludes Johnson.

The research has just been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The research was conducted in collaboration between the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, Arla, Skov, and the UCPH spin-out company Ambient Carbon, started and now headed by Professor Matthew Stanley Johnson. The company was started to develop MEPS (Methane Eradication Photochemical System) technology and make it available to society.

Funding for the research came via a grant from Innovation Fund Denmark for the PERMA project, a part of AgriFoodTure.

Source: University of Copenhagen

HELSINKI — China launched three low Earth orbit broadband test satellites Friday, completing a record-breaking year for launches globally.

A Long March 2C rocket lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 7:13 p.m. Dec. 29 (0013 UTC, Dec. 30). The China Aerospace Science and Technology Group (CASC) confirmed launch success and revealed the passengers to be three satellite Internet technology test satellites. 

U.S. Space Force space domain awareness later tracked three objects in roughly 930 by 940-kilometer orbits with an inclination of 50 degrees.

The satellites were developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a major spacecraft maker under CASC, China’s state-owned main space contractor. 

Previous Chinese satellite internet test satellites launched in 2023 have also been developed by CASC’s Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) and the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites (IAMCAS) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). 

The missions are believed to be part of China’s national Guowang LEO broadband megaconstellation project. Meanwhile the first satellite for another Chinese megaconstellation rolled off assembly lines earlier this week.

The mission was China’s 67th orbital launch of 2023. This number eclipsed its previous national record of 64, achieved in 2022. 

2023 breakdown

CASC had targeted launching more than 60 times this year, aiming to put more than 200 spacecraft into orbit. Despite suffering no launch failures it has fallen someway short, with commercial space actors accounting for 17 of the 67 launches. Only one launch, a Ceres-1 rocket from startup Galactic Energy, failed.

CASC continued to rely heavily on launches of its older, hypergolic Long March 2, 3 and 4 series rockets across 2023, with an expected Long March 5B launch not taking place. With China completing its Tiangong space station with two module launches in 2022, coupled with a larger number of 2023 launches being of light-lift solid rockets, China’s tonnage to orbit was likely well down on 2022. 

CASC was hit by the development in recent days that its chairman, Wu Yansheng, has had his seat on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a major consultative body, revoked. Chinese media also reported that Wang Changqing, deputy manager of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC)—another state-owned enterprise engaged in space activities— lost his seat. It is currently unclear what this means for the individuals and their respective enterprises.

Major Chinese launches in 2023 included the Shenzhou-16 and 17 crewed missions to Tiangong, the launch of remote sensing assets to geostationary orbits, the launch of the country’s first commercial liquid launchers, and a third flight of its secretive, experimental spaceplane.

There were 222 launch attempts across 2023, eclipsing the previous record of 186 in 2022. China trailed behind only the United States, which conducted 116 launches, a number which includes Rocket Lab Electron launches from New Zealand. SpaceX accounted for 98 of these, falling just short of a planned 100 launches.

Major missions in 2023 included NASA’s Psyche metal world explorer, SpaceX’s first orbital Starship launch attempts, India’s historic Chandrayaan-3 moon landing, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) and Euclid space telescope, Russia’s failed Luna 25 mission and Japan’s launch of its SLIM lunar lander.

Spaceplane mysteries

One of the final SpaceX missions saw the U.S. Space Force X-37B spaceplane, which is estimated to have entered a highly elliptical, high inclination orbit, and to a much higher altitude than its six previous missions.

China also launched its own reusable spaceplane earlier in December. The pair of missions are symbolic of the US and China being the leading space actors and geopolitical tensions between the two extending to space.

The Chinese spaceplane was reported by some media to have released six satellites into orbit. However, those reports appeared to have misrepresented the fact that a total of six objects, including the spaceplane, had been tracked in orbit, rather than the spaceplane had released objects. Amateur spacecraft trackers suggested that one of the objects other than the spaceplane were transmitting signals. The spaceplane has previously deployed small payloads into orbit during its two earlier missions.

However the five other objects were likely the Long March 2F upper stage and four pieces of debris typically associated with Long March 2F launches. One of the spacecraft trackers provided an update Dec. 22, suggesting that a minor timing issue has led the trackers to mistake signals sent by a group of Chinese Yaogan reconnaissance satellites as being emitted by a piece of debris associated with the spaceplane.

Related

One of the most common forms of gut bacteria may be to blame for osteoporosis, researchers say.

Osteoporosis—dubbed the “silent disease”—affects more than a third of all women ages 50 and older and more than 200 million people worldwide. Fractures can lead to disability or even death.

Osteoporosis is expected to cost patients and the US health care system more than $25 billion annually by 2025.

A new study in Nature Communications links the disease to the presence of Bacterioides vulgatus, one of the most abundant gut bacteria in the human microbiome.

The study found that these bacteria suppressed the gut’s production of valeric acid, a short-chain fatty acid that enhances bone density and reduces the breaking down of tissue in bones or bone resorption. Excessive bone resorption can make bones brittle and lead to osteoporosis.

“We did a screening of the entire gut microbiome and found that the bacteria lowered the amount of valeric acid in human circulation,” says senior author Hong-Wen Deng, who leads the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Genomics at Tulane University School of Medicine.

“So, the logic is, if we can target these bacteria and increase valeric acid, we can increase bone density and prevent osteoporosis.”

For the study, researchers analyzed the gut bacteria of more than 500 peri- and post-menopausal women in China and further confirmed the link between B. vulgatus and a loss of bone density in a smaller cohort of non-Hispanic White women in the United States.

They then tested the findings in a small animal model, where mice that were given an increase of B. vulgatus in the gut showed poorer bone micro-structure. Mice that received valeric acid supplements, however, saw reduced bone resorption and stronger bones overall.

The next step is investigating whether B. vulgatus can be suppressed naturally or if a virus can be designed to target the bacteria, Deng says.

He also hopes to study the effects of valeric acid supplements on humans to determine the effects of various dosages.

“This study established that the gut microbiome is important for our bone health and getting a healthy microbiome composition is important,” Deng says. “Now that we’ve identified a target in B. vulgatus, we want to lower its abundance.”

Source: Tulane University

The economy in 2023 reminds me of Rocky Balboa, the boxer with a strong chin from the Rocky films who, despite getting hit over and over, keeps moving forward.

A year ago, the consensus prediction among investors and professional forecasters was slower growth and higher unemployment. Inflation was still above 6%, the Federal Reserve increased interest rates to one of the highest rates in 40 years, and the stock market ended 2022 in the red. Many observers says a “soft landing” was a pipe dream and a recession inevitable.

The year 2023 brought its own set of challenges. To name a few, a debt ceiling standoff started in January and continued until May, bringing the government dizzyingly close to default and causing a ratings downgrade. In March, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank started a crisis that, had it not been contained by a historic expansion of deposit guarantees, would have spread through the system and taken down the economy. A war broke out in Gaza. A large-scale auto workers strike temporarily shut down large parts of the sector. And the economy of China, a major trading partner, decelerated.

Given all this, it is remarkable how good the numbers look right now. Inflation has steadily fallen to around 3% and is now within striking distance of the 2% target. The most recent gross domestic product, or GDP, report shows a robust 3% year-on-year growth rate, the unemployment rate remains at 3.7%, and the stock market has made a roaring comeback. The numbers look stronger than those of other major advanced economies, such as the eurozone, the United Kingdom, Japan, or Canada.

However, it is too early for a victory parade. The fight against inflation is not over, monetary policy has long and variable lags, and, even in a strong economy, many people are struggling. But, thus far, it is hard to imagine a softer landing than 2023.