NASA has signed up to test SpinLaunch's extraordinary whirl 'n' hurl space launch technology, which accelerates a launch vehicle to hypersonic speeds using an electric centrifuge instead of a rocket, hurling it skyward like a space discus. New Atlas reports: The idea behind SpinLaunch is as staggering as the company's name is appropriate. The idea of winding up and throwing satellites most of the way into orbit just boggles the mind. But in initial testing, this company's kinetic launch system, which looks externally a lot like a turbocharger, has shown promise as an environmentally-friendly, and potentially cost-effective replacement for first-stage rocket launches. [T]he company says it'll be appropriate for smaller launch vehicles weighing up to about 440 lb (200 kg), carrying ultra-ruggedized satellites capable of dealing with the forces involved. The SpinLaunch system will do the first part, flinging them high into the air, where a second-stage rocket can take over and give them the final push into orbit.

And the advantages are pretty compelling. SpinLaunch says that eliminating the first-stage rocket from the launch vehicle will cut out some 70 percent of the fuel and structures needed by a traditional launch vehicle, and that it can get appropriate loads into orbit using a quarter of the fuel, and at a tenth of the price. NASA is one of many parties interested in this possibility, and it's now signed a Space Act agreement with SpinLaunch to develop and integrate a NASA payload for this kinetic launch system, which will be flung skyward from Spaceport America, New Mexico, in a test flight later this year.

This, like all SpinLaunch "regular" test flights to date, will be a slower sub-orbital launch with a speed closer to 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h, Mach 1.3) than 5,000 mph. The payload will be designed to take a range of measurements, which will be analyzed by both groups. All non-proprietary information learned from this test will be published, and SpinLaunch says it's working towards its first orbital launch in 2025. A render posted late last year by SpinLaunch shows how their system works.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman's skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old's. [...] The scientists in Cambridge believe that they can do the same thing with other tissues in the body. The head of the team, Prof Wolf Reik, of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, told BBC News that he hoped that the technique could eventually be used to keep people healthier for longer as they grow older. [...] Prof Reich stressed though that the work, which has been published in the journal eLife, was at a very early stage. He said that there were several scientific issues to overcome before it could move out of his lab and into the clinic. But he said that demonstrating for the first time that cell rejuvenation is possible was a critical step forward.

Prof Reik's team used [a method, called iPS, that involves adding chemicals to adult cells to turn them into stem cells] on 53-year-old skin cells. But they cut short the chemical bath from 50 days to around 12. Dr Dilgeet Gill was astonished to find that the cells had not turned into embryonic stem cells -- but had rejuvenated into skin cells that looked and behaved as if they came from a 23-year old. He said: "I remember the day I got the results back and I didn't quite believe that some of the cells were 30 years younger than they were supposed to be. It was a very exciting day!"

The technique cannot immediately be translated to the clinic because the iPS method increases the risk of cancers. But Prof Reik was confident that now it was known that it is possible to rejuvenate cells, his team could find an alternative, safer method. "The long-term aim is to extend the human health span, rather than the lifespan, so that people can get older in a healthier way," he said. Prof Reik says some of the first applications could be to develop medicines to rejuvenate skin in older people in parts of the body where they have been cut or burned -- as a way to speed up healing. The researchers have demonstrated that this is possible in principle by showing that their rejuvenated skin cells move more quickly in experiments simulating a wound. The next step is to see if the technology will work on other tissues such as muscle, liver and blood cells.

A new immunotherapy that targets cells infected with Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) has halted the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS) in a small trial. Perhaps even more incredibly, in some patients, it is possible that symptoms of MS were actually reversed, though this was not fully identified in the most recent presentation of results (PDF). IFLScience reports: [S]ignificant evidence has linked infection of EBV and the eventual development of MS. [...] Attempting to "transform treatment of Multiple Sclerosis," Atara Biotherapeutics has developed an allogeneic T-cell therapy called ATA188. The concept is simple -- when cells are infected with EBV, they express small proteins called antigens on the cell surface, and the immunotherapy contains immune cells that target and destroy them.

In a trial of 24 patients who received the therapy, 20 saw improvements or stability in their symptoms and no fatal or serious adverse effects were reported. Early brain scans suggest that some damaged nerve cells may have been "repaired" by the therapy in a process called remyelination, which could mean a reversal of damage caused by MS in the nervous system, but this has not yet been confirmed. While the results are extremely promising, it is an early Phase 1 trial with a small sample size and no placebo or control group, so it is unclear whether the results are significant at this stage. However, it is unlikely that this repair would occur naturally, suggesting the therapy is having a beneficial effect on some level.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency -- a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines. The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel's photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team's design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid. With the new TPV cell, the team has now successfully demonstrated the main parts of the system in separate, small-scale experiments. They are working to integrate the parts to demonstrate a fully operational system. From there, they hope to scale up the system to replace fossil-fuel-driven power plants and enable a fully decarbonized power grid, supplied entirely by renewable energy. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature.

Summer on Neptune seems to be cooling down. Observations dating back to 2003 show that the temperature in the planet's southern hemisphere has been dropping, despite the fact that these measurements were taken in the early part of its long summer. New Scientist reports: Michael Roman at the University of Leicester, UK, and his colleagues examined data from several of the world's biggest telescopes to figure out how the temperature of Neptune has changed since the first relatively detailed measurements were made in 2003. "Because we are observing Neptune in this southern summer, we basically expect temperatures to be getting slowly warmer in time," says Roman. "But what we saw was that they dropped by about 8C" over the course of 15 years, he says. The observations also revealed a surprise near the planet's south pole. Between 2018 and 2020, an area there warmed by about 11C, an unexpectedly rapid change given that it takes Neptune more than 165 Earth years to complete a circuit around the sun. "A season on Neptune is over 40 years long, so we'd expect these changes to be a lot more gradual," says Roman.

Scientists believe they have found evidence of microbes that were thriving near hydrothermal vents on Earth's surface just 300m years after the planet formed -- the strongest evidence yet that life began far earlier than is widely assumed. From a report: If confirmed, it would suggest the conditions necessary for the emergence of life are relatively basic. "If life is relatively quick to emerge, given the right conditions, this increases the chance that life exists on other planets," said Dominic Papineau, of University College London, who led the research. Five years ago, Papineau and colleagues announced they had found microfossils in iron-rich sedimentary rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq supracrustal belt in Quebec, Canada. The team suggested that these tiny filaments, knobs and tubes of an iron oxide called haematite could have been made by bacteria living around hydrothermal vents that used iron-based chemical reactions to obtain their energy.

Scientific dating of the rocks has suggested they are at least 3.75bn years old, and possibly as old as 4.28bn years, the age of the volcanic rocks they are embedded in. Before this, the oldest reported microfossils dated to 3.46bn and 3.7bn years ago, potentially making the Canadian specimens the oldest direct evidence of life on Earth. Now, further analysis of the rock has revealed a much larger and more complex structure -- a stem with parallel branches on one side that is nearly a centimetre long -- as well as hundreds of distorted spheres, or ellipsoids, alongside the tubes and filaments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Another piece of space infrastructure for Ukraine is under attack, according to an NBC report. Jammers from Russian forces besieging the country are targeting global positioning system (GPS) satellite signals that are used for navigation, mapping and other purposes, the report said, quoting the U.S. Space Force. "Ukraine may not be able to use GPS because there are jammers around that prevent them from receiving any usable signal," Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, told NBC Nightly News Monday (April 11). "Certainly the Russians understand the value and importance of GPS and try to prevent others from using it," Thompson added. He noted that Russia has not directly attacked any satellites in orbit, but the Space Force is keeping an eye out for such possibilities.

Specifically, Russia is targeting the Navstar system of satellites used by the United States and made available openly to many countries around the world, Thompson said. (Russia has its own independent system, called GLONASS, while the Europeans have one called Galileo and China has one called Beidou.) Navstar uses 24 main satellites that each orbit the Earth every 12 hours. The system works by sending synchronized signals to users on Earth. Because the satellites move in different directions, the user receives their signals at slightly different times. When four satellites are available, GPS receivers can use their signals to calculate the user's position, often to within just a few feet. In late February shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, SpaceX's Starlink satellites were activated over the country to help restore internet services destroyed by the Russians. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk later warned that Starlink user terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia and advised users to take precautions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Putin said Russia is working on a "next-generation transport ship," as well as a nuclear-powered space tug. And, according to Russian media reports, Putin added, "We will resume the lunar program." The next-generation ship presumably refers to the "Orel," or Eagle, spacecraft that would be capable of launching cosmonauts into low Earth orbit as well as to the Moon. The problem with this is that Orel, under various guises and names, has been in development for nearly two decades and is likely years away from flying -- if it ever does. And the nuclear-powered space tug is a concept that is years or more likely decades-to-never away from launching.

That leaves the lunar program Putin mentioned. He is referring to a series of three robotic missions planned for launch to the Moon, Luna 25, Luna 26, and Luna 27. These missions, too, have been in the planning stages for a long, long time. Luna 25 was originally scheduled to launch on a Soyuz rocket a decade ago, and its current launch date is now August 2022. There is reason to be skeptical about all of the above happening, because even before the war in Ukraine, Putin significantly slashed Roscosmos' budget. Now, more resources than ever will likely be devoted to the war effort. Hours after Putin made his announcements, the European Space Agency (ESA) Council agreed to discontinue cooperative activities with Russia on the three Luna missions. "The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions put in place represent a fundamental change of circumstances and make it impossible for ESA to implement the planned lunar cooperation," the space agency said in a statement.

Instead, the council said it would now work with NASA and its commercial partners.

For the first time the world is in a position to limit global heating to under 2C, according to the first in-depth analysis of the net zero pledges made by nations at the UN Cop26 climate summit in December. From a report: Before these pledges it was more than likely that at the peak of the climate crisis there would be a temperature rise above 2C, bringing more severe impacts for billions of people. Now it is more likely that the peak temperature rise will be about 1.9C. However, the researchers said this depended on all nations implementing their pledges on time and in full, and warned that the policies to do so were not in place. The pledges also include those that developing countries have said will not happen without more financial and technical support. Achieving the pledges needed for the 2C limit was a "historic milestone," and good news, the scientists said. However, they said the bad news was that the cuts in global emissions currently planned by 2030 were way off track to keep the peak below 1.5C. That is the global goal, but currently there is less than a 10% chance of hitting that target.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, researchers from Harvard and MIT detail work they've done on a "living cellular therapeutic device" that promises to protect humans from the harmful side effects antibiotics can have on our guts. Engadget reports: Per Science Daily, they modified a strain of bacteria that is frequently used in cheese production to deliver an enzyme that can break down beta-lactam antibiotics. Many of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics in the US, including penicillin, fall under that family. Using gene editing, they further modified how their bacterium synthesizes the enzyme to prevent it from transferring that capability to other bacteria. The result is a treatment that reduces the harmful effects of antibiotics while still allowing those drugs to do their work.

In a study involving mice, the researchers found their bacteria "significantly" reduced the damage ampicillin did to the test subject's gut microbes and allowed those communities to recover fully after just three days. By contrast, in mice that only received the antibiotic, the researchers saw a much greater loss of microbial diversity. "We are now focusing on getting these living therapies to patients and are finalizing the design of an effective, short, and inexpensive clinical trial," said Andres Cubillos-Ruiz, the lead author of the study.

Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC). The Verge reports: After analyzing data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the union coalition found that Amazon workers are twice as likely to be seriously injured than people who work in warehouses for other companies. The report considers "serious injuries" to be ones where workers either have to take time off to recover or have their workloads reduced, following OSHA's report classification (pdf) of "cases with days away from work" and "cases with job transfer or restriction." The data shows that, over time, the company has been shifting more toward putting people on light duty, rather than having them take time off. The report authors also note that Amazon workers take longer to recover from injuries than employees at other companies: around 62 days on average, versus 44 across the industry.

Amazon employees have said it's not the work itself that's particularly dangerous but rather the grueling pace the company's automated systems demand. Amazon actually had workers go slower in 2020 to help combat COVID-19, which accounts for the notably lower injury rates that year. But, as the report notes, the injuries increased by around 20 percent between 2020 and 2021 as the company resumed its usual pace -- though the injury rates for 2021 were still lower than they were in 2019. [...] Unfortunately, this study's results tell the same story we've been hearing for years. Even with its reduced injury rates in 2020, Amazon workers were still hurt twice as often as other warehouse workers, according to SOC. Further reading: Amazon Workers At 100 More Facilities Want To Unionize (Yahoo Finance)

As climate crisis allows new maritime routes to be used, sooty shipping emissions accelerates ice melt and risk to ecosystems. From a report: In February last year, a Russian gas tanker, Christophe de Margerie, made history by navigating the icy waters of the northern sea route in mid-winter. The pioneering voyage, from Jiangsu in China to a remote Arctic port in Siberia, was heralded as the start of a new era that could reshape global shipping routes -- cutting travel times between Europe and Asia by more than a third. It has been made possible by the climate crisis. Shrinking polar ice has allowed shipping traffic in the Arctic to rise 25% between 2013 and 2019 and the growth is expected to continue. But Arctic shipping is not only made possible by the climate crisis, it is adding to it too. More ships mean a rise in exhaust fumes, which is accelerating ice melt in this sensitive region due to a complex phenomenon involving "black carbon," an air pollutant formed by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels.

When black carbon, or soot, lands on snow and ice, it dramatically speeds up melting. Dark snow and ice, by absorbing more energy, melts far faster than heat-reflecting white snow, creating a vicious circle of faster warming. Environmentalists warn that the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average, has seen an 85% rise in black carbon from ships between 2015 and 2019, mainly because of the increase in oil tankers and bulk carriers. The particles, which exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular illness in towns, are short-term but potent climate agents: they represent more than 20% of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from ships, according to one estimate.

Apple's plan to add a highly anticipated blood-pressure monitor to its smartwatch has hit some snags and the technology isn't expected to be ready until 2024 at the earliest, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The company has teams working on an updated sensor and software for the Apple Watch that would determine if a user has high blood pressure, but accuracy has been a challenge during testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The feature has been planned for at least four years, but it's probably two years away from hitting the market and may slip until 2025, they said. Apple's shares were up about 1% at 9:41 a.m. in New York. Blood-pressure features may become a key selling point for smartwatches in coming years, but the technology hasn't been easy to master. Though Apple rivals such as Samsung have launched watches with the capability, they require monthly calibration with a traditional monitor. Last year, Alphabet-owned Fitbit launched a public study to test wrist-based blood-pressure measurement.

A SpaceX Crew Dragon safely delivered four private astronauts to the International Space Station this past Saturday. Gizmodo reports: SpaceX capsule Endeavor reached the ISS at 8:20 a.m. EDT on Saturday, April 9, following a nearly 21-hour journey. The crew of the Ax-1 mission -- Michael Lopez-Alegria, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy -- launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The ISS is currently orbiting at a height of 260 miles (418 km) above Earth. The docking would've happened 45 minutes earlier, had it not been for a problem having to do with ISS crew members not being able to receive video from the Crew Dragon's center line camera. Ground controllers remedied the problem by routing video from a SpaceX ground station, according to NASA.

The four crew members will stay on the orbital outpost for eight days, where they will perform some 25 experiments having to do with science, education, and commercial activities. Axiom Space is aiming to build the world's first fully commercial space station, the construction of which is slated to begin at the ISS in late 2024. The Ax-1 mission represents an important milestone in the ongoing commercialization of low Earth orbit. [...] Axiom said the first day was mostly about preparing equipment for what will be a very busy week. The team has just 100 hours to complete their respective tasks.

Psilocybin, a drug found in magic mushrooms, appears to free up the brains of people with severe depression in a way that other antidepressants do not, a study has found. The BBC reports: The results, based on brain scans of 60 people, mean the drug could treat depression in a unique way, the researchers say. Patients with depression are warned not to take psilocybin on their own. A synthetic form of the drug is tested on people in trials under strict medical conditions, with psychological support from experts provided before, during and after it is taken.

With depression, the brain can get stuck in a rut and locked into a particular negative way of thinking, he said. But when given psilocybin, people's brains opened up and became "more flexible and fluid" up to three weeks later. This could be seen in increased connections between regions of the brain when patients were scanned. These patients were more likely to experience an improvement in mood months later. Similar changes were not seen in the brains of people treated with a standard antidepressant.

The results, published in Nature Medicine, are taken from two studies. In the first, everyone received psilocybin; and in the second -- a randomized controlled trial - some were given the drug while others were given a different antidepressant. All participants also received talking therapies with registered mental health professionals. Brain scans were taken before, and then one day or three weeks after taking the therapy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The mysterious Antikythera mechanism -- an ancient device believed to have been used for tracking the heavens -- has fascinated scientists and the public alike since it was first recovered from a shipwreck over a century ago. Much progress has been made in recent years to reconstruct the surviving fragments and learn more about how the mechanism might have been used. And now, members of a team of Greek researchers believe they have pinpointed the start date for the Antikythera mechanism, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv repository. Knowing that "day zero" is critical to ensuring the accuracy of the device.

"Any measuring system, from a thermometer to the Antikythera mechanism, needs a calibration in order to [perform] its calculations correctly," co-author Aristeidis Voulgaris of the Thessaloniki Directorate of Culture and Tourism in Greece told New Scientist. "Of course it wouldn't have been perfect -- it's not a digital computer, it's gears -- but it would have been very good at predicting solar and lunar eclipses." [...] In 1951, a British science historian named Derek J. de Solla Price began investigating the theoretical workings of the device. Based on X-ray and gamma ray photographs of the fragments, Price and physicist Charalambos Karakalos published a 70-page paper in 1959 in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Based on those images, they hypothesized that the mechanism had been used to calculate the motions of stars and planets -- making it the first known analog computer. [...]

Voulgaris and his co-authors based their new analysis on a 223-month cycle called a Saros, represented by a spiral inset on the back of the device. The cycle covers the time it takes for the Sun, Moon, and Earth to return to their same positions and includes associated solar and lunar eclipses. Given our current knowledge about how the device likely functioned, as well as the inscriptions, the team believed the start date would coincide with an annular solar eclipse. [...] "The eclipse predictions on the [device's back] contain enough astronomical information to demonstrate conclusively that the 18-year series of lunar and solar eclipse predictions started in 204 BCE," Alexander Jones of New York University told New Scientist, adding that there have been four independent calculations of this. "The reason such a dating is possible is because the Saros period is not a highly accurate equation of lunar and solar periodicities, so every time you push forward by 223 lunar months the quality of the prediction degrades."

Rat sperm cells generated from stem cells in the lab have been used to produce fertile offspring for the first time. The approach could be adapted to rescue endangered rodents and may help to inform the artificial production of human sperm to treat infertility. From a report: Until now, cells that give rise to sperm and egg cells, called germ cells, have only been produced in the lab in mice. Toshihiro Kobayashi at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues have now shown that stem cells extracted from rat embryos can be grown in the lab to produce germ cells that form sperm when implanted into rat testes. The researchers then collected the sperm cells and injected them into egg cells, before implanting the fertilised embryos into female rats. These grew into healthy adult rats that were able to have offspring of their own. "Until recently, we didn't know enough about how rat germ cells develop in order to adapt the mouse procedure for rats. Now, we understand more about what proteins and growth factors are needed to generate the rat germ cells, so we could do this work," says Kobayashi. Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abl4412.

"Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang," writes Live Science.

"And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests." The researchers' calculations hint that these particles could have been created in just the right quantities to explain dark matter, which can only be "seen" through its gravitational pull on ordinary matter. "Massive gravitons are produced by collisions of ordinary particles in the early universe. This process was believed to be too rare for the massive gravitons to be dark matter candidates," study co-author Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a physicist at the University of Lyon in France, told Live Science. But in a new study published in February in the journal Physical Review Letters, Cacciapaglia, along with Korea University physicists Haiying Cai and Seung J. Lee, found that enough of these gravitons would have been made in the early universe to account for all of the dark matter we currently detect in the universe.

The gravitons, if they exist, would have a mass of less than 1 megaelectronvolt (MeV), so no more than twice the mass of an electron, the study found. This mass level is well below the scale at which the Higgs boson generates mass for ordinary matter — which is key for the model to produce enough of them to account for all the dark matter in the universe....

The team found these hypothetical gravitons while hunting for evidence of extra dimensions, which some physicists suspect exist alongside the observed three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time. In the team's theory, when gravity propagates through extra dimensions, it materializes in our universe as massive gravitons. But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity. This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart.

"The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence," Cacciapaglia said.

NBC News looks at the "thriving ecosystem" of space businesses "dramatically expanding access to the cosmos and fueling what is projected to grow into a trillion-dollar commercial space industry."

"Yet alongside the numerous benefits to society, increasing access to space and supporting an economy in orbit comes with its share of challenges, including how to balance a growing industry with the safe and sustainable use of outer space...." Speckled among the operational satellites in low-Earth orbit are thousands of tons of space debris, ranging from tiny flecks of paint to spent rocket parts to huge defunct spacecraft that have languished in orbital graveyards for decades. Adding more satellites to the mix not only increases the chances of a catastrophic on-orbit collision, but also pushes humanity closer to a perilous tipping point, beyond which certain parts of low-Earth orbit may become too cluttered and risky to operate in safely. "We're really on borrowed time before we have another big collision," said Charity Weeden, vice president of global space policy and government relations at Astroscale U.S., a private company that specializes in satellite servicing and orbital debris removal. "There are thousands of close calls every day in orbit...."

But placing all the blame on these megaconstellations is oversimplifying the problem, said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a California-based aerospace company that operates networks of ground-based radars and tracking systems to monitor objects in low-Earth orbit and map their movements. For one, operational satellites make up only a small fraction of the total number of objects in low-Earth orbit that pose collision risks, he said. And unlike defunct spacecraft that have languished in orbit for decades, most newer satellites can be maneuvered out of harm's way, if necessary. It has also become standard practice for satellite operators to have an end-of-life plan to cut down on the accumulation of space junk. These strategies include purposefully commanding a spacecraft to "deorbit," or burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, or strand it in a higher, "graveyard" orbit away from the most congested sections around the planet.

Still, the risks are serious. And the amount of debris in space is expected to grow as launches continue. McKnight said "bad neighborhoods" have already emerged — areas in low-Earth orbit where big clouds of debris pose very real threats." There are certain places in Earth orbit where we are destined to have a major event within the next five to 10 years," he said. "We're looking at a 10 to 15 percent probability of a collision, which sounds unlikely, but by leaving these objects in orbit since the mid-'80s, we're rolling the dice a lot"

These risks were amplified by a series of recent anti-satellite missile tests — one conducted by China in 2007, one by India in 2019 and one carried out by Russia last year — and a separate accidental collision between two satellites in 2009. Each event is estimated to have produced thousands of pieces of debris larger than the size of a golf ball, and even smaller, harder-to-track objects, according to the Secure World Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on space policy...

Part of the problem is that while launches are subject to domestic regulations in individual countries, there is no international body to oversee what happens in orbit. Policies have yet to catch up with the industry's growth, and it's unclear if any binding global agreements can be achieved anytime soon.

"It's like we're building the plane as we're flying it," said Josef Koller, a systems director for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at The Aerospace Corp.
The article also points out that companies like Astroscale are currently "developing technologies to actively remove objects from orbit."

CNET points out the far side of the moon — the one that never faces earth — is "rugged, spotted with tons of craters" and "filled with totally different elements."

"In essence, our moon has two faces, and scientists are still trying to solve the mystery of why they're so different." But a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances might finally have an explanation for one major aspect of this enigmatic lunar duality. It has to do dark shadows, a massive impact many billions of years ago, and... lava....

They used computer simulations to see what might've gone on long, long (long) ago, way before there was any volcanic activity on the moon's surface. More specifically, they re-created a massive impact that, billions of years ago, changed the base of the moon, forming a gigantic crater that we now refer to as the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.... What they found is that this huge smash would've created a plume of heat that carried a bunch of specific chemical elements to the near side of the moon, and not the far side. "We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface," Jones said.

In other words, those elements presumably contributed to an era of volcanism on the lunar face we can see from Earth but it left the far side untouched.