Category: Science

NEW DELHI, India — India will aim to put astronauts on the moon by 2040 and construct a space station in the middle of the next decade, the government said Tuesday.

The announcement follows a high-level meeting chaired by India Prime Minister Narendra Modi to assess progress of India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight mission.

“Prime Minister directed that India should now aim for new and ambitious goals, including setting up ‘Bharatiya Antariksha Station’ (Indian Space Station) by 2035 and sending first Indian to the moon by 2040,” the government said in a statement.

The statement comes as India works towards developing independent human spaceflight capabilities and a first crewed flight in 2025.

NASA meanwhile is currently targeting December 2025 for launching a crewed landing mission to the lunar south pole as part of its Artemis program. China has announced its goal of landing two astronauts on the moon before 2030.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is currently preparing for its uncrewed Flight Test Vehicle Abort Mission-1 (TV-D1). The short duration flight is set to launch from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the morning of Oct. 21, India Standard Time, or late Eastern Oct. 20. 

The mission will test the Crew Escape System. This will fire to separate the crew module from a single stage test vehicle. The crew module will have a parachute-assisted descent to the sea around 10 kilometers off the coast of Sriharikota.

Dogs prefer food over toys, according to a new study that suggests man’s best friend is as treat-obsessed as we all thought.

As reported in the study in the journal Animals, nine out of 10 dogs chose food over toys. The study allowed dogs to pick their favorite snack and favorite toy, then put them head to head in an experiment simulating a training experience. Most dogs responded more strongly to the edible reward.

“I was surprised, but nobody’s looked at how dogs will work for toys versus food before,” says Nicole Dorey, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Florida.

The researchers recruited 10 pet dogs from the local area. Each dog was shown six food items—including treats, cheese, carrots, and hot dogs—and six toys, such as a tennis ball, a squeak toy, a plastic bone, or a stuffed animal. Each dog then had a chance to choose their favorite snack and favorite toy.

In another set of experiments, the dogs had to work harder and harder for their reward. Most dogs gave up earlier when offered a preferred toy reward than when given their favorite treat.

Other studies have shown that dogs might prefer human attention to food.

“I think the next study should look at all three—attention, food, and toys—and what dogs really like best when training,” Dorey says.

Some dog trainers suggest using toys instead of food in training to avoid excess calories and to make the experience more fun for the dog. If dog owners want to follow this advice, the key is to not have toys competing with food, the researchers say.

“You can definitely train your dog with toys if you start really early,” Dorey says. “This is what’s done with search and rescue dogs, they start really early with toys as a reinforcer.”

Additional coauthors are from Johns Hopkins University, and the Florida Institute of Technology.

Source: University of Florida

Some “non-menthol” cigarettes use synthetic chemicals to mimic menthol’s distinct cooling sensations, a new study shows.

The “non-menthol” cigarettes are marketed as a “fresh” alternative in states where traditional menthol cigarettes are banned.

The synthetic additives could undermine existing policies and a US Food and Drug Administration ban on menthol cigarettes expected later this year that is intended to discourage new smokers and address the harmful health effects of tobacco use, researchers say.

Hundreds of municipalities across the United States and some states—Massachusetts and California—have already restricted the sale of flavored tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes.

For the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers identified a synthetic flavoring agent known as WS-3 in the newly introduced “non-menthol” cigarettes that delivers similar, or stronger, cooling sensations as menthol but without the minty aroma or taste.

“The simple replacement of menthol with another cooling agent that lacks a ‘characterizing’ odor threatens to derail the existing local and proposed federal menthol bans,” says coauthor Julie Zimmerman, professor of green engineering and of epidemiology (environmental health sciences) at the Yale School of Public Health, and vice provost for planetary solutions at Yale. “This is concerning as the goal of these bans is to attempt to curb smoking and reduce the number of new smokers.”

Flavored tobacco products such as menthol cigarettes tend to reduce tobacco’s harsh effects making them particularly popular among young people and those just starting to smoke.

Historically, menthol cigarettes have also been aggressively marketed towards African Americans, with up to 90% of African Americans who smoke using menthol cigarettes. Sustained tobacco use can cause nicotine addiction, severe respiratory problems, cancer, numerous other adverse health conditions, and death.

When California enacted its menthol ban in December 2022, the big tobacco companies—RJ Reynolds (makers of Newport menthol cigarettes) and ITG (makers of Kool menthol cigarettes)—introduced “non-menthol” cigarette brands as menthol substitutes, with very similar packaging and marketing strategies as their menthol counterparts.

In the present study, co-lead authors Hanno Erythropel, an associate research scientist at the Center for Green Chemistry & Green Engineering at Yale, and Sairam Jabba, a senior research scientist at Duke University, combined a bioassay with chemical analysis to determine whether “non-menthol” cigarettes purchased in California and Massachusetts contain chemicals that activate the cold/menthol receptor similar to menthol.

Their analysis detected WS-3 in four of the nine currently marketed products. RJ Reynolds manufactured all four products. The analysis also detected vanilla and tropical flavor chemicals in flavor capsules in the filters of the “non-menthol” cigarettes.

“These results mean that these ‘non-menthol’ cigarettes produce effects similar to menthol when smoked, which in turn facilitates the inhalation of the other, more unpleasant components of tobacco smoke,” says Erythropel. “In addition, we were surprised to find ‘sweet’ flavor molecules, such as vanilla, in some cigarettes, which seems incompatible with federal legislation that forbids such flavors in cigarettes to reduce their attractiveness.

“These findings are concerning, and the US FDA should develop strategies on how to address odorless cooling agents that could bypass tobacco product flavor regulations.”

Other countries have in fact begun to address this, says Erythropel. For example, Canada has detailed lists of specific ingredients that are allowed, and Belgium has restrictions on any “cooling” activity in tobacco products.

Sven-Eric Jordt, associate professor in the anesthesiology department at Duke University School of Medicine, is the paper’s senior author.

The study received funding support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institutes of Health, and the Center for Tobacco Products of the US Food and Drug Administration.

Source: Colin Poitras for Yale University

WASHINGTON — Scientific Systems, a defense contractor based in Woburn, Massachusetts, won a $1.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to develop software for in-space object detection and identification.

The company will work on the project with Stanford University’s Space Rendezvous Laboratory over the next 15 months, Scientific Systems’ vice president Owen Brown told SpaceNews Oct. 17.

“We will develop software that will be used in small cameras to allow satellites to safely identify, approach, and service other satellites or debris objects,” said Brown. 

The contract is a Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 2 award from the Space Force’s Orbital Prime program, a research and development project focused on debris removal and in-space services technologies. Scientific Systems won one of 20 Phase 2 contracts awarded to date by Orbital Prime. 

Scientific Systems is working on other military space programs, including as a subcontractor to SAIC in the Space Development Agency’s software app factory. It also developed a payload for an SDA demonstration of autonomous satellite operations that launched in 2021 on a Loft Orbital satellite. 

Machine learning technology

For the Orbital Prime project, Scientific Systems is using a computer vision tool designed for autonomous inspection, tracking and identification of unknown objects. Stanford’s Space Rendezvous Lab is contributing machine learning technology.

Brown said the company’s long-term goal is to install the software on a space camera and test it in rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) in orbit. 

“This award puts us on a path to create RPO-in-a-box,” he said. That would be an integrated hardware and software product for spacecraft performing servicing missions, for example. Scientific Systems’ tool would help ensure that the vehicle approaches a client satellite safely, said Brown.

He said the technology has been demonstrated in the air domain with a sense-and-avoid software tool used by unmanned aircraft for safety of flight.  

Simone D’Amico, founder and director of the Space Rendezvous Laboratory at Stanford University, said the project will help “create new capabilities for the rapidly developing on-orbit servicing and manufacturing ecosystem.”

“We will be integrating our machine-learning based relative navigation approaches with unique algorithms being created by Scientific Systems,” D’Amico said. 

Sean Phillips, a technical adviser at the Air Force Research Laboratory, said the solution proposed by Scientific Systems and Stanford will help advance “next-generation autonomous satellite operations for close-proximity interactions like satellite inspection.”

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NEW DELHI, India — China is preparing to place a new communications satellite in lunar orbit to facilitate ambitious upcoming moon landing missions.

Queqiao-2 is set to launch on a Long March 8 rocket from the coastal Wenchang spaceport in early 2024, according to Zhang Lihua of DFH Satellite under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), the satellite’s developer.

The 1,200-kilogram satellite will feature a 4.2-meter-diameter parabolic antenna and a mission lifetime of more than eight years, Zhang said during a presentation at the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Baku, Oct. 3.

Li Guoping of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) presented a slide detailing China’s exploration timeline earlier at IAC indicating Queqiao-2 is set to launch in March.

Its initial task will be communications support for Chang’e-6; a first-ever attempt at collecting samples from the far side of the moon. That mission is scheduled to launch in Q2 2024 and will target the mid-latitude Apollo crater within the South Pole-Aitken basin.

The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, meaning that one hemisphere of the planetary body always faces our planet. Queqiao-2’s 24-hour-period, elliptical frozen orbit will take it out beyond the moon, from which it will have line of sight with both ground stations on Earth and Chang’e-6 in Apollo crater. Chang’e-6 lunar surface operations will likely be wrapped up in around 48 hours.

Queqiao-2 will then support the 2026 Chang’e-7 and 2028 Chang’e-8 missions to the lunar south pole. The lunar satellite will switch to a 12-hour period orbit for these missions. It will meanwhile assist the ongoing Chang’e-4 lunar far side lander and rover after the short-term Chang’e-6 mission. The elliptical frozen orbit is very stable, according to Zhang, requiring little fuel for maintenaince. 

Queqiao-2, or “Magpie Bridge-2”, is a more capable follow-up to Queqiao, launched in 2018 to facilitate the Chang’e-4 mission. That first relay satellite remains operational in a halo orbit around the Earth-moon Lagrange point L2 roughly 70,000 kilometers beyond the moon.

It will use X and UHF bands to communicate with spacecraft, and S and Ka-bands for communications with Earth. It features multiple data rates and reconfigurable software.

The new satellite will launch with a pair of experimental CubeSats, named Tiandu-1 and Tiandu-2, to test lunar communications and navigation payloads.

The CubeSats are being developed by China’s new Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) under CNSA, which is playing a growing role in the country’s lunar exploration and related diplomatic efforts.

Queqiao-2 also carries science payloads. These are an extreme ultraviolet camera, an array neutral atom imager and an Earth-moon length baseline very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) experiment.

The spacecraft could also aid other countries’ lunar efforts. “Apart from providing relay support for future Chinese lunar missions, it is possible to provide relay communication services for other lunar landing exploration missions at the lunar south pole or lunar far side in the future,” Zhang said.The Queqiao-2 satellite is also potentially the next step in a constellation of the same name.

The wider Queqiao constellation would provide communications, navigation and remote sensing support for China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project. Notably, an expanded future version of the network would include relay satellites at Venus and Mars to assist deep space exploration.

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Lions will avoid human-dominated areas unless they’re facing food scarcity and habitat fragmentation, a new study shows.

Humans and wildlife, including large carnivores, interact at an unprecedented scale as they increasingly share the world’s landscapes.

The new findings, published in the journal Communications Biology, suggest that expanding human land use, along with the effects of climate change, could increase the risk of human-lion conflict, which in turn threatens lion populations.

“Our study found that understanding the complex responses of wildlife to human disturbance—such as agricultural land or towns—is a key first step in fostering coexistence between humans and wildlife,” says Kirby Mills, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Global Change Biology.

“In human-dominated landscapes, wildlife have to balance the tradeoffs between hunting prey and the potentially lethal risks of encountering humans. This is particularly true for large carnivores that often try to kill livestock, because threats to livestock can prompt retaliatory killing of large carnivores, which is a leading cause of large carnivore population declines around the world.”

As almost half of the current range of lions lies outside of protected area boundaries, the carnivores are required to regularly navigate degraded human-dominated landscapes. Yet research addressing the tradeoffs the lions must make—between available prey and risks from humans—is rare, especially at very large spatial scales.

The researchers aimed to contribute to a better understanding of lion responses to human disturbance by reviewing previously published data from 31 study sites spanning 40% of lion ranges worldwide. They found that at more than two-thirds of study sites, lions avoided areas of human activity or hunted primarily at night, particularly in locales dense with cattle ranches.

These behavioral adaptations, however, can affect entire ecosystems.

“Increasing nocturnal activity to avoid human encounters can influence competition between species, predator-prey dynamics, and ecosystem function,” says Neil Carter, associate professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability.

“Avoiding human-dominated areas altogether effectively limits the amount of habitat that lions can use and can increase competition, contribute to heightened risks of regional extinction, restructure wildlife community dynamics, and, ultimately, reduce biodiversity.”

The study also found that lions are more likely to forage in higher risk areas when seasonal vegetation cover—which predicts prey availability—or human presence is more variable, indicating that lions may be less likely to avoid humans when food is more limited or their habitats are more fragmented.

Contributing to all these factors is the unpredictable effects of climate change.

“Climate change across Africa is projected to exacerbate resource stress for humans and wildlife alike, but the effects of climate change are too rarely emphasized in wildlife conservation,” says Nathan Sanders, professor and chair at the ecology and evolutionary biology department.

“Our findings reinforce what many others have called for, things like dedicating adequate funding and management capacity to protected areas where lions live, while engaging with and empowering local communities.

“Successful conservation of large carnivores depends on sustainable coexistence with empowered and supported local communities, especially as the planet gets ever warmer and resources become increasingly limited.”

Source: University of Michigan

Surface ice in Greenland has been melting at an increasing rate in recent decades, while the trend in Antarctica has moved in the opposite direction, a new study shows.

Researchers studied the role of Foehn and katabatic winds, downslope gusts that bring warm, dry air into contact with the tops of glaciers.

They say that melting of the Greenland ice sheet related to these winds has gone up by more than 10% in the past 20 years; the impact of the winds on the Antarctic ice sheet has decreased by 32%.

“We used regional climate model simulations to study ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the results showed that downslope winds are responsible for a significant amount of surface melt of the ice sheets in both regions,” says Charlie Zender, professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine and coauthor of the study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “Surface melt leads to runoff and ice shelf hydrofracture that increase freshwater flow to oceans—causing sea level rise.”

While the impact of the winds is substantial, he says, the distinct behaviors of global warming in the Northern and Southern hemispheres are causing contrasting outcomes in the regions.

In Greenland, wind-driven surface melt is compounded by the massive island “becoming so warm that sunlight alone (without wind) is enough to melt it,” Zender says. The 10% growth in wind-driven melt combined with warmer surface air temperatures has resulted in a 34% increase in total surface ice melt.

Zender attributes this outcome in part to the influence of global warming on the North Atlantic Oscillation, an index of sea level pressure difference. The shifting of NAO to a positive phase has led to below-normal pressure across high latitudes, ushering warm air over Greenland and other Arctic areas.

The researchers found that, in contrast with Greenland, total Antarctic surface melt has decreased by about 15% since 2000. The bad news is that this reduction is largely due to 32% less downslope wind-generated melt on the Antarctic Peninsula where two vulnerable ice shelves have already collapsed.

Zender says it’s fortunate that the Antarctic stratospheric ozone hole discovered in the 1980s continues to recover, which temporarily helps to insulate the surface from further melt.

“The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica keep over 200 feet of water out of the ocean, and their melt has raised global sea level by about three-quarters of an inch since 1992,” says Zender, who holds a joint appointment in the computer science department.

“Although Greenland has been the No. 1 driver of sea level rise in recent decades, Antarctica is close behind and catching up and will eventually dominate sea level rise. So it’s important to monitor and model melt as both ice sheets deteriorate, including the ways climate change alters the relationship between wind and ice.”

He says he hopes that the research on the role of Foehn and katabatic winds in polar regions will help the climate science community strengthen the physical fidelity of Earth system models.

Additional coauthors are from UC Irvine and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The US Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research supported the work.

Source: UC Irvine

A new study reveals unprecedented levels of chronic absenteeism in schools across the United States during the 2021-22 school year.

The analysis, conducted in partnership with the non-profit initiative Attendance Works, shows that two-thirds of K-12 students—or 32.25 million children—were enrolled in a school with high or extreme levels of chronic absence, meaning at least one of five students in their school missed almost four weeks throughout the school year.

This is an enormous increase from the 2017-18 school year when only 25% of all enrolled students attended schools with high or extreme chronic absence. As a result, chronic absence has become widespread, and many more students and schools are, for the first time, experiencing high and extreme levels of chronic absence.

“Our analysis shows that a wave of high levels of chronic absenteeism has spread to many more schools and districts across the US,” says Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center and a research professor at the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins School of Education.

Not only is teaching and learning more challenging when large numbers of students are frequently missing class, such elevated levels of chronic absence can easily overwhelm a school’s capacity to respond. Increased chronic absenteeism rates in 2021-22 meant that an elementary school with typical enrollment and a chronic absenteeism rate equal to the national average had about 100 chronically absent students, a similar middle school about 150, and a similar high school about 200.

The researchers say the data is a call to action for everyone—at state, district, school, and community levels—to work together, avoid blame, and instead partner with students and families to address the issues that keep them from showing up every day.

Yet work on developing solutions has been underway for more than a decade, they say, resulting in many evidence-based interventions that can be tailored at the local level.

“Such high numbers of chronically absent students are beyond the capacity of a single school social worker or counselor to address,” Balfanz says. “The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch; we can build upon what has been learned about effective responses to chronic absenteeism over the past decade or more.”

The analysis is the first in a three-part series planned by the Everyone Graduates Center and Attendance Works to unpack the recently released chronic-absence data collection from the US Department of Education. For more on the first report, visit the Attendance Works website.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

A new tide forecast model holds the promise of helping coastal communities to prepare.

The model can produce short-term high-tide forecasts for Virginia Key that are 50% more accurate than those produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), even out to 10-days.

“It’s essential that we have better tide predictions.”

“I never envisioned this tool achieving such success, but it has. It’s capable of giving people a heads-up when tidal flooding events are going to occur,” says Nate Taminger, a part-time research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, who began working on the model four years ago as a university undergraduate majoring in meteorology, marine science, and math.

With two years of funding support from the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), Taminger is spearheading efforts to improve the model’s effectiveness with the goal of generating regular tide forecasts for Lake Worth in Palm Beach County, Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades, Key West, Vaca Key in the Florida Keys, Virginia Key near Miami, and Naples on Florida’s southwest coast.

Updated sea level rise data and other meteorological and oceanographic variables make the tide forecast tool effective. Specifically, it incorporates three adjustments to NOAA’s baseline tide predictions.

“For now, NOAA’s tide predictions are based on the average sea level during the 1983-2001 period. So, to bring that up to modern sea level, an appropriate offset is made using a linear trend through the past 20 years of data,” explains Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate and tropical cyclone expert at the Rosenstiel School, who mentored Taminger when he was an undergraduate at the university and is part of the team that created the model.

“Then, the current and forecast atmospheric surface pressure is used to make the second adjustment,” McNoldy continues. “High- and low-pressure systems in the atmosphere affect the sea surface height with a known relationship: higher pressure causes a dip or dent in the ocean surface and lower pressure causes a dome or bulge in the ocean surface. Finally, a multiple linear regression model is utilized on four additional environmental parameters, and that can adjust the water level up or down as well. The model is trained on each tide gauge’s available history, so it learns what environmental factors generate a given response in the water level at that location.”

Taminger detailed the specifics of the model during a climate resiliency conference held at the University of Miami campus in April 2022 and later to officials at the SFWMD, which used the model in advance of a recent flooding event in the region.

“We got the alarm out early and once [the model is refined], we hope to make the output easier for the public at large to see,” says Todd Kimberlain, SFWMD’s lead meteorologist. “It’s essential that we have better tide predictions. With this model, there’s just a very small difference between what the forecasts are and what actually occurs.”

McNoldy posts the model’s daily tide plots for Virginia Key, Key West, Vaca Key, and Lake Worth on a public webpage and plans to add tide forecasts for Port Everglades and Naples by December.

“[Tidal forecasts] are important for coastal shipping and boating interests, as some shallow features can be dangerous during low tide but fine during high tide,” McNoldy says. “And for low-lying coastal infrastructure, knowing when to expect high tides and how high they might be can help prepare for potential flooding events.”

Sea level rise, he explains, is making tidal flooding more frequent and more severe.

“In the Miami area, sea level is rising at an average rate of about 0.25 inches per year, or about 7.5 inches in the past three decades,” McNoldy says. “There are ups and downs in the mean sea level from one year to the next, but the overall trend is upward. This means that places now flood during some high tides that did not flood before, and places that used to experience some flooding during high tides now experience it much more often and with deeper water.”

The scientists are working on improving their tide forecast model at a time when the annual king tides have returned. Combined with the effects of sea level rise and heavy rains, king tides—which occur each fall when climatological, atmospheric, and oceanic conditions align to cause water levels to surge—can make flooding in Miami Beach much worse.

Professor of atmospheric sciences Brian Soden, who also served as one of Taminger’s faculty advisors and is part of the team that developed the model, says the new forecast tool could “help coastal communities better prepare and plan for disruptions caused by king tides.”

Source: University of Miami