The Artemis I rocket will not have its third launch attempt on Tuesday as planned due to concerns over Tropical Storm Ian making its way toward Cuba and Florida. CNN reports: After meeting on Saturday morning, NASA's Artemis team decided to forgo the September 27 launch opportunity and is now preparing the mega moon rocket stack for rollback. "On Tuesday, Tropical Storm Ian is forecast to be moving north through the eastern Gulf of Mexico as a hurricane, just off the southwest coast of Florida. A cold front will also be draped across northern Florida pushing south," said CNN Meteorologist Haley Brink.

"The combination of these weather factors will allow for increased rain chances across much of the Florida peninsula on Tuesday, including the Cape Canaveral area. Showers and thunderstorms are forecast to be numerous and widespread across the region. Tropical storm-force winds from Ian could also arrive as early as Tuesday night across central Florida." Meanwhile, the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft continue to sit on the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Team members continue to monitor the weather as they make a decision about when to roll the rocket stack back into the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy. NASA will receive information from the US Space Force, the National Hurricane Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to inform their decision. [...] The rocket stack can remain at the pad and withstand winds up to 85 miles per hour (74.1 knots). If the stack needs to roll back into the building, it can handle sustained winds less than 46 miles per hour (40 knots). On Friday, the Artemis team said that October 2 was a backup launch date. But it's unlikely that a new launch date will be set until the rollback decision has been made.

Saul Kripke, a math prodigy and pioneering logician whose revolutionary theories on language qualified him as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers, died on Sept. 15 in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 81. The New York Times reports: His death, at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center, was caused by pancreatic cancer, according to Romina Padro, director of the Saul Kripke Center at the City University of New York, where Professor Kripke had been a distinguished professor of philosophy and computer science since 2003 and had capped a career exploring how people communicate. Professor Kripke's classic work, "Naming and Necessity," first published in 1972 and drawn from three lectures he delivered at Princeton University in 1970 before he was 30, was considered one of the century's most evocative philosophical books.

"Kripke challenged the notion that anyone who uses terms, especially proper names, must be able to correctly identify what the terms refer to," said Michael Devitt, a distinguished professor of philosophy who recruited Professor Kripke to the City University Graduate Center in Manhattan. "Rather, people can use terms like 'Einstein,' 'springbok,' perhaps even 'computer,' despite being too ignorant or wrong to provide identifying descriptions of their referents," Professor Devitt said. "We can use terms successfully not because we know much about the referent but because we're linked to the referent by a great social chain of communication."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1977, said Professor Kripke had "introduced ways to distinguish kinds of true statements -- between statements that are 'possibly' true and those that are 'necessarily' true." "In Professor Kripke's analysis," he continued, "a statement is possibly true if and only if it is true in some possible world -- for example, 'The sky is blue' is a possible truth, because there is some world in which the sky could be red. A statement is necessarily true if it is true in all possible worlds, as in 'The bachelor is an unmarried man.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Beast: Luis Eduardo Garrido couldn't wait to test out his colleague's newest creation. Garrido, a psychology and methodology researcher at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, drove two hours between his university's campuses to try a virtual reality experience that was designed to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and different types of phobias. But a couple of minutes after he put on the headset, he could tell something was wrong. "I started feeling bad," Garrido told The Daily Beast. He was experiencing an unsettling bout of dizziness and nausea. He tried to push through but ultimately had to abort the simulation almost as soon as he started. "Honestly, I don't think I lasted five minutes trying out the application," he said.

Garrido had contracted cybersickness, a form of motion sickness that can affect users of VR technology. It was so severe that he worried about his ability to drive home, and it took hours for him to recover from the five-minute simulation. Though motion sickness has afflicted humans for thousands of years, cybersickness is a much newer condition. While this means that many of its causes and symptoms are understood, other basic questions -- like how common cybersickness is, and whether there are ways to fully prevent it -- are only just starting to be studied. After Garrido's experience, a colleague told him that only around 2 percent of people feel cybersickness. But at a presentation for prospective students, Garrido watched as volunteers from the audience walked to the front of an auditorium to demo a VR headset -- only to return shakily to their seats. "I could see from afar that they were getting sweaty and kind of uncomfortable," he recalled. "I said to myself, 'Maybe I'm not the only one.'"

As companies like Meta (nee Facebook) make big bets that augmented reality and virtual reality technology will go mainstream, the tech industry is still trying to figure out how to better recruit users to the metaverse, and get them to stay once there. But experts worry that cybersickness could derail these plans for good unless developers find some remedies soon. "The issue is actually something of a catch-22: In order to make VR more accessible and affordable, companies are making devices smaller and running them on less powerful processors," adds the report. "But these changes introduce dizzying graphics -- which inevitably causes more people to experience cybersickness."

"At the same time, a growing body of research suggests cybersickness is vastly more pervasive than previously thought -- perhaps afflicting more than half of all potential users." When Garrido conducted his own study of 92 people, the results indicated that more than 65 percent of people experienced symptoms of cybersickness -- a sharp contrast to the 2 percent estimate Garrido had been told.

He says that these results should be concerning for developers. "If people have this type of bad experience with something, they're not going to try it again," Garrido said.

Citing McDonald's shelved meat-free burger trial and a 70% dip in Beyond Meat's stock, The Guardian suggests plant-based meats may not interest Americans as much as investors thought. From the report: Getting meat eaters in the US to adopt plant-based alternatives has proven a challenge. Beyond Meat, which produces a variety of plant-based products, including imitations of ground beef, burgers, sausages, meatballs and jerky, has had a rough 12 months, with its stock dipping nearly 70%. Multiple chains that partnered with the company, including McDonald's, have quietly ended trial launches. In August, the company laid off 4% of its workforce after a slowdown in sales growth. Last week, its chief operating officer was reportedly arrested for biting another man on the nose during a road rage confrontation. It's a dramatic reversal of fortune. Just two years ago, Beyond Meat, its competitor Impossible Foods and the plant-based meat industry at large seemed poised to start a food revolution.

For a time, Wall Street went vegetarian. In 2019 Beyond Meat was valued at over $10 billion, more than Macy's or Xerox. The most bullish investors believed that plant-based meat would make up 15% of all meat sales by 2030. But the reality of Americans' interest in plant-based meat has proven more complicated than investors thought, and the adoption of meat alternatives has been slower than what was once hoped. Today Beyond Meat is valued at just over $900 million. The sobering story is similar to those experienced by many new ventures that see exhilarating hype after a flood of Silicon Valley venture capital cash, fueled by excitement about innovation. Bill Gates backed Beyond Meat, and a number of venture capital firms that typically invest in tech startups funneled money to startups making plant-based meat. Even the meat industry's biggest players have, ironically, invested in companies coming up with plant-based meat. While eating plant-based meat (or no meat at all) has been shown to be the most effective thing individual consumers can do to fight climate change, "consumers seem hesitant to adapt their behavior when the environment -- not their health or wallets -- is the sole beneficiary," reports The Guardian. "Despite the increasing alarm over climate change, the number of Americans who are vegetarian or vegan has remained relatively stable over the last 20 years."

"Even when participants in a study conducted at Purdue University in Indiana were given information about the carbon footprint of meat production, participants were more likely to go with regular meat over a plant-based alternative."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In January this year, an undersea volcano in Tonga produced a massive eruption, the largest so far this century. The mixing of hot volcanic material and cool ocean water created an explosion that sent an atmospheric shockwave across the planet and triggered a tsunami that devastated local communities and reached as far as Japan. The only part of the crater's rim that extended above water was reduced in size and separated into two islands. A plume of material was blasted straight through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, over 50 km above the Earth's surface. We've taken a good look at a number of past volcanic eruptions and studied how they influence the climate. But those eruptions (most notably that of Mount Pinatubo) all came from volcanoes on land. Hunga Tonga may be the largest eruption we've ever documented that took place under water, and the eruption plume contained unusual amounts of water vapor -- so much of it that it actually got in the way of satellite observations at some wavelengths. Now, researchers have used weather balloon data to reconstruct the plume and follow its progress during two circuits around the globe.

Your vocabulary word of the day is radiosonde, which is a small instrument package and transmitter that can be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon. There are networks of sites where radiosondes are launched as part of weather forecasting services; the most relevant ones for Hunga Tonga are in Fiji and Eastern Australia. A balloon from Fiji was the first to take instruments into the eruption plume, doing so less than 24 hours after Hunga Tonga exploded. That radiosonde saw increasing levels of water as it climbed through the stratosphere from 19 to 28 kilometers of altitude. The water levels had reached the highest yet measured at the top of that range when the balloon burst, bringing an end to the measurements. But shortly after, the plume started showing up along the east coast of Australia, which again registered very high levels of water vapor. Again, water reached to 28 km in altitude but gradually settled to lower heights over the next 24 hours.

The striking thing was how much of it there was. Compared to normal background levels of stratospheric water vapor, these radiosondes were registering 580 times as much water even two days after the eruption, after the plume had some time to spread out. There was so much there that it still stood out as the plume drifted over South America. The researchers were able to track it for a total of six weeks, following it as it spread out while circling the Earth twice. Using some of these readings, the researchers estimated the total volume of the water vapor plume and then used the levels of water present to come up with a total amount of water put into the stratosphere by the eruption. They came up with 50 billion kilograms. And that's a low estimate, because, as mentioned above, there was still water above the altitudes where some of the measurements stopped. The recent findings appear in a new study published in the journal Science.

A pair of researchers who previously identified what may be the first known interstellar meteor to impact Earth have now presented evidence of a second object that could have originated beyond the solar system, before it burned up in our planet's skies and potentially fell to the surface, according to a new study. Motherboard reports: Amir Siraj, a student in astrophysics at Harvard University, and astronomer Avi Loeb, who serves as Harvard's Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, suggest that a fast-moving meteor that burst into a fireball hundreds of miles off the coast of Portugal on March 9, 2017, is an "additional interstellar object candidate" that they call interstellar meteor 2 (IM2) in a study posted to the preprint server arXiv this week. The paper has not been peer-reviewed. In addition to their potential origin beyond the solar system, these objects appear to be extraordinarily robust, as they rank as the first- and third-highest meteors in material strength in a NASA catalog that has collected data about hundreds of fireballs.

"We don't have a large enough sample to say how much stronger interstellar objects are than solar system objects, but we can say that they are stronger," Siraj said in an email. "The odds of randomly drawing two objects in the top 3 out of 273 is 1 in 10 thousand. And when we look at the specific numbers relative to the distribution of objects, we find that the Gaussian odds are more like 1 in a million." This makes IM2 "an outlier in material strength," Loeb added in a follow-up call with Siraj. "To us, it means that the source is different from planetary systems like the solar system."

Loeb has attracted widespread attention in recent years over his speculation that the first interstellar object ever identified, known as 'Oumuamua, was an artifact of alien technology. Spotted in 2017, 'Oumuamua sped through the solar system and was up to a quarter-mile in scale, making it much larger than the interstellar meteor candidates identified by Siraj and Loeb, which are a few feet across. Loeb's claims of an artificial origin for 'Oumuamua have provoked substantial pushback from many scientists who do not consider a technological explanation to be likely. Loeb also thinks these interstellar meteor candidates could be alien artifacts, though he and Siraj present a mind-boggling natural explanation for the strangely robust objects in the study: The meteors may be a kind of interstellar shrapnel produced by the explosions of large stars, called supernovae. [...] Loeb, of course, is keeping his mind open. "We don't say, necessarily, that it is artificial," Loeb said in the call, referring to the supernovae explanation. But, he added, "obviously, there is a possibility that a spacecraft was designed to sustain such harsh conditions as passing through the Earth's atmosphere, so we should allow for that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Vultures are hard birds for humans to love. They are an obligate scavenger, meaning they get all their food from already dead prey -- and that association has cast them as a harbinger of death since ancient times. But in reality, vultures are nature's flying sanitation crew. And new research adds to that positive picture by detailing these birds' role in a surprising process: mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. With their impressive vision and the range they can cover in their long, soaring flights, the 22 species of vultures found around the world are often the first scavengers to discover and feed on a carcass. This cleanup provides a vital service to both ecosystems and humans: it keeps nutrients cycling and controls pathogens that could otherwise spread from dead animals to living ones.

Decaying animal bodies release greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. But most of these emissions can be prevented if vultures get to the remains first, a new study in Ecosystem Services shows. It calculates that an individual vulture eats between 0.2 and one kilogram (kg) of carcass per day, depending on the vulture species. Left uneaten, each kg of naturally decomposing carcass emits about 0.86 kg of CO2 equivalent. This estimate assumes that carcasses not eaten by vultures are left to decay. But many carcasses are composted or buried by humans, which result in more emissions than natural decay, so vulture consumption can avert even more emissions when replacing those methods. The avoided emissions may not sound like much, but multiply those estimates by the estimated 134 million to 140 million vultures around the world, and the number becomes more impressive: tens of millions of metric tons of emissions avoided per year.

But this ecosystem service is not evenly distributed around the world. It occurs mostly in the Americas, says the study's lead author Pablo Plaza, a biologist at the National University of Comahue in Argentina. Three species found only in the Americas -- the Black, Turkey and Yellow-headed vultures -- are responsible for 96 percent of all vulture-related emissions mitigation worldwide, Plaza and his colleagues found. Collectively, vultures in the Americas keep about 12 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere annually. Using estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that is akin to taking 2.6 million cars off the road each year. The situation outside of the Americas stands in stark contrast. "The decline in vulture populations in many regions of the world, such as Africa and Asia, has produced a concomitant loss of the ecosystem services vultures produce," Plaza says.

Specks of dust that a Japanese space probe retrieved from an asteroid about 186 million miles (300m kilometers) from Earth have revealed a surprising component: a drop of water. The discovery offers new support for the theory that life on Earth may have been seeded from outer space. The Guardian reports: The findings are in the latest research to be published from analysis of 5.4 grammes of stones and dust that the Hayabusa-2 probe gathered from the asteroid Ryugu. "This drop of water has great meaning," the lead scientist, Tomoki Nakamura of Tohoku University, told reporters before publication of the research in the journal Science on Friday. "Many researchers believe that water was brought [from outer space], but we actually discovered water in Ryugu, an asteroid near Earth, for the first time."

Hayabusa-2 was launched in 2014 on its mission to Ryugu, and returned to Earth's orbit two years ago to drop off a capsule containing the sample. The precious cargo has already yielded several insights, including organic material that showed some of the building blocks of life on Earth, amino acids, may have been formed in space. The team's latest discovery was a drop of fluid in the Ryugu sample "which was carbonated water containing salt and organic matter," Nakamura said. That bolsters the theory that asteroids such as Ryugu, or its larger parent asteroid, could have "provided water, which contains salt and organic matter" in collisions with Earth, he said. "We have discovered evidence that this may have been directly linked to, for example, the origin of the oceans or organic matter on Earth." "The fact that water was discovered in the sample itself is surprising," given its fragility and the chances of it being destroyed in outer space, said Kensei Kobayashi, an astrobiology expert and professor emeritus at Yokohama National University. "It does suggest that the asteroid contained water, in the form of fluid and not just ice, and organic matter may have been generated in that water."

Maarten Schmidt, who in 1963 became the first astronomer to identify a quasar, a small, intensely bright object several billion light years away, and in the process upended standard descriptions of the universe and revolutionized ideas about its evolution, died on Sept. 17 at his home in Fresno, Calif. He was 92. The New York Times reports: Dr. Schmidt's discovery of what was then among the farthest known objects in the universe answered one of the great conundrums of postwar astronomy, and like all great breakthroughs it opened the door to a whole host of new questions. Advances in radio technology during World War II allowed scientists in the 1950s to probe deeper into the universe than they could with traditional optical telescopes. But in doing so they picked up radio signals from a plethora of faint or even invisible, but intensely energetic, objects that did not fit with any conventional category of celestial body. Researchers called them "quasi-stellar radio sources," or quasars, for short -- even though no one could figure out what a quasar was. Many thought they were small, dense stars nearby, within the Milky Way.

In 1962, two scientists in Australia, Cyril Hazard and John Bolton, finally managed to pinpoint the precise position of one of these, called 3C 273. They shared the data with several researchers, including Dr. Schmidt, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. Using the enormous 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in rural San Diego County, Dr. Schmidt was able to hone in on what appeared to be a faint blue star. He then plotted its light signature on a graph, showing where its constituent elements appeared in the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. What he found was, at first, puzzling. The signatures, or spectral lines, did not resemble those of any known elements. He stared at the graphs for weeks, pacing his living room floor, until he realized: The expected elements were all there, but they had shifted toward the red end of the spectrum -- an indication that the object was moving away from Earth, and fast.

And once he knew the speed -- 30,000 miles a second -- Dr. Schmidt could calculate the object's distance. His jaw dropped. At about 2.4 billion light years away, 3C 273 was one of the most distant objects in the universe from Earth. That distance meant that it was also unbelievably luminous: If it were placed at the position of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would outshine the sun. Dr. Schmidt shared his results with his colleagues, and then in a paper in the journal Nature -- and not without trepidation, knowing how disruptive his findings would be. [...] The revelation shocked the astronomy world, and for a time made Dr. Schmidt something of a celebrity. Time magazine put him on its cover in 1966, with a fawning profile that compared him to Galileo. "The 17th century Italian startled scientists and theologians alike; the 20th century Dutchman has had an equally jarring effect on his own contemporaries," Time wrote, a bit breathlessly but not inaccurately. [...] For their work on quasars, in 2008 Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Lynden-Bell shared the prestigious Kavli Prize in Astrophysics.

According to NASA, the James Webb Space Telescope has captured the clearest view of Neptune's rings in more than 30 years. From the report: Most striking in Webb's new image is the crisp view of the planet's rings -- some of which have not been detected since NASA's Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright, narrow rings, the Webb image clearly shows Neptune's fainter dust bands. "It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we've seen them in the infrared," notes Heidi Hammel, a Neptune system expert and interdisciplinary scientist for Webb. Webb's extremely stable and precise image quality permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.

Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) images objects in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, so Neptune does not appear blue to Webb. In fact, the methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas. Images from other observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, have recorded these rapidly evolving cloud features over the years. More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet's equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune's winds and storms. The atmosphere descends and warms at the equator, and thus glows at infrared wavelengths more than the surrounding, cooler gases.

Neptune's 164-year orbit means its northern pole, at the top of this image, is just out of view for astronomers, but the Webb images hint at an intriguing brightness in that area. A previously-known vortex at the southern pole is evident in Webb's view, but for the first time Webb has revealed a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding it. Webb also captured seven of Neptune's 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb's images, but this is not a star. Rather, this is Neptune's large and unusual moon, Triton.

People who experience frequent bad dreams in middle age may experience a faster rate of cognitive decline and be at higher risk of dementia as they get older, data suggests. If confirmed, the research could eventually lead to new ways of screening for dementia and intervention to slow the rate of decline. From a report: Most people experience bad dreams from time to time, but approximately 5% of adults experience nightmares -- dreams distressing enough to wake them up -- at least once a week. Stress, anxiety, and sleep deprivation are all potential triggers, but previous research in people with Parkinson's disease has also linked frequent distressing dreams to faster rates of cognitive decline, and an increased risk of developing dementia in the future.

To investigate whether the same might be true of healthy adults, Dr Abidemi Otaiku at the University of Birmingham turned to data from three previous studies that have examined people's sleep quality and then followed them over many years, assessing their brain health as well as other outcomes. This included more than 600 middle-aged adults (aged 35 to 64), and 2,600 people aged 79 and older. Their data was analysed using statistical software to find out whether those who experienced a higher frequency of distressing dreams were more likely to go on to experience cognitive decline and be diagnosed with dementia. The research, published in eClinicalMedicine, found that middle-aged people who experienced bad dreams at least once a week were four times more likely to experience cognitive decline over the following decade than those who rarely had nightmares. Among elderly participants, those who frequently reported distressing dreams were twice as likely to be diagnosed with dementia in subsequent years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It's well known that weightlifting can strengthen our biceps and quads. Now, there's accumulating evidence that strengthening the muscles we use to breathe is beneficial too. New research shows that a daily dose of muscle training for the diaphragm and other breathing muscles helps promote heart health and reduces high blood pressure. "The muscles we use to breathe atrophy, just like the rest of our muscles tend to do as we get older," explains researcher Daniel Craighead, an integrative physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. To test what happens when these muscles are given a good workout, he and his colleagues recruited healthy volunteers ages 18 to 82 to try a daily five-minute technique using a resistance-breathing training device called PowerBreathe. The hand-held machine -- one of several on the market -- looks like an inhaler. When people breathe into it, the device provides resistance, making it harder to inhale.

"We found that doing 30 breaths per day for six weeks lowers systolic blood pressure by about 9 millimeters of mercury," Craighead says. And those reductions are about what could be expected with conventional aerobic exercise, he says -- such as walking, running or cycling. A normal blood pressure reading is less than about 120/80 mmHg, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These days, some health care professionals diagnose patients with high blood pressure if their average reading is consistently 130/80 mmHg or higher, the CDC notes. The impact of a sustained 9 mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure (the first number in the ratio) is significant, says Michael Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic who studies how the nervous system regulates blood pressure. "That's the type of reduction you see with a blood pressure drug," Joyner says. Research has shown many common blood pressure medications lead to about a 9 mmHg reduction. The reductions are higher when people combine multiple medications, but a 10 mmHg reduction correlates with a 35% drop in the risk of stroke and a 25% drop in the risk of heart disease.

So, how exactly does breath training lower blood pressure? Craighead points to the role of endothelial cells, which line our blood vessels and promote the production of nitric oxide -- a key compound that protects the heart. Nitric oxide helps widen our blood vessels, promoting good blood flow, which prevents the buildup of plaque in arteries. "What we found was that six weeks of IMST [inspiratory-muscle strength training] will increase endothelial function by about 45%," Craighead explains. [...] There may also be benefits for elite cyclists, runners and other endurance athletes, he says, citing data that six weeks of IMST increased aerobic exercise tolerance by 12% in middle-aged and older adults. "So we suspect that IMST consisting of only 30 breaths per day would be very helpful in endurance exercise events," Craighead says. It's a technique that athletes could add to their training regimens. Craighead, whose personal marathon best is 2 hours, 21 minutes, says he has incorporated IMST as part of his own training.

Saturn has quite the collection of moons, more than any other planet in the solar system. There's Enceladus, blanketed in ice, with a briny ocean beneath its surface. There's Iapetus, half of which is dusty and dark, and the other shiny and bright. There are Hyperion, a rocky oval that bears a striking resemblance to a sea sponge, and Pan, tiny and shaped just like a cheese ravioli. But one moon might be missing. From a report: According to a new study, Saturn once had yet another moon, about the same size as Iapetus, which is the third-largest satellite in Saturn's collection. The moon orbited the ringed planet for several billion years, minding its own business, doing moon things, until about 100 million to 200 million years ago, when other Saturnian moons started messing with it. The interactions between them pushed the unlucky moon closer to Saturn -- too close to remain intact. Gravity shredded it to bits.

Something remarkable might have come out of all this. While most of the moon debris fell into Saturn's atmosphere, some of the pieces hung back, whirling around the planet until they splintered further and flattened into a thin, delicate disk. This lost moon, the authors of the study say, is responsible for Saturn's trademark feature: the rings. These astronomers didn't set out to find a missing moon. They were trying to better understand why Saturn is the way it is now -- specifically, why the planet is tilted just so. "Planetary tilts are an interesting indicator of a planet's history," Zeeve Rogoszinski, an astronomer at the University of Maryland who was not involved in this recent work but who studies orbital dynamics, told me. Most of the planets in our solar system spin at an angle relative to the plane in which they orbit the sun. Earth's tilt, for example, is a result of the collision that scientists believe might have created our moon. Mars's tilt is chaotic, thanks to the influence of next-door neighbor Jupiter. Uranus likely got its dramatic lean after the planet was whacked with a massive rocky object a few billion years ago.

joshuark writes: A Las Vegas surgeon reports tech workers are paying $70,000 to $150,000 to get surgery to increase their height by 3-inches. The doctor is paid to break their legs (both femurs) and then inserts adjustable metal nails that are slowly tweaked over time. "I joke that I could open a tech company," Dr. Kevin Debiparshad told GQ. "I got, like, 20 software engineers doing this procedure right now who are here in Vegas. There was a girl" -- because girls can be tech bros too. -- "yesterday from PayPal. I've got patients from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. I've had multiple patients from Microsoft."

A new twist, borrow $70K to $150K from a loan shark in Las Vegas, and they'll break your legs later... "Since the onset of the pandemic's work-from-home era, the LimbplastX Institute (where Dr. D performs his procedures) has been seeing twice its normal number of patients, and sometimes as many as 50 new people a month," reports GQ. "That claim is backed up by a BBC report suggesting that hundreds of men in the U.S. are now undergoing the procedure every year."

"According to a 2009 study of Australian men, short guys make less money than their taller peers (about $500 a year per inch); are less likely to climb the corporate ladder (according to one survey, the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO is six feet); and, for the cis and straight among us, have fewer romantic opportunities with women (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent of cases)," adds the report. "The promise of Dr. D's institute is that, for a price, you too can increase your odds of becoming a Fortune 500 CEO. And people are willing to pay..."

Children under 12 may be losing the equivalent of one night's sleep every week due to excessive social media use, a new study suggests. Insider reports: Almost 70% of the 60 children under 12 surveyed by De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, said they used social media for four hours a day or more. Two thirds said they used social media apps in the two hours before going to bed. The study also found that 12.5% of the children surveyed were waking up in the night to check their notifications.

Psychology lecturer John Shaw, who headed up the study, said children were supposed to sleep for between nine to 11 hours a night, per NHS guidelines, but those surveyed reported sleeping an average of 8.7 hours nightly. He said: "The fear of missing out, which is driven by social media, is directly affecting their sleep. They want to know what their friends are doing, and if you're not online when something is happening, it means you're not taking part in it. "And it can be a feedback loop. If you are anxious you are more likely to be on social media, you are more anxious as a result of that. And you're looking at something, that's stimulating and delaying sleep." "TikTok had the most engagement from the children, with 90% of those surveyed saying they used the app," notes Insider. "Snapchat was used by 84%, while just over half those surveyed said they used Instagram."

President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic over in the US, even as the number of Americans who have died from Covid continues to rise. From a report: Mr Biden said that while "we still have a problem", the situation is rapidly improving. Statistics show that over 400 Americans on average are dying from the virus each day. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that the end of the pandemic is "in sight". In an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS, Mr Biden said that the US is still doing "a lot of work" to control the virus. The interview - aired over the weekend - was partly filmed on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show, where the president gestured towards the crowds. "If you notice, no one's wearing masks," he said. "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape...I think it's changing."

In August, US officials extended the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency, which has been in place since January 2020, through 13 October. To date, more than one million Americans have died from the pandemic. Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the seven-day average of deaths currently stands at over 400, with more than 3,000 dead in the last week. In January 2021, by comparison, more than 23,000 people were reported dead from the virus over a single week-long span. About 65% of the total US population is considered fully vaccinated. Some federal vaccine mandates remain in place in the US - including on healthcare workers, military personnel and any non-US citizen entering the country by airplane.

The Mars rover Perseverance was the subject of a new NASA briefing Thursday. CNET describes it as a celebration of this year's discovery of organic matter — in June NASA for the first time measured the total amount of organic carbon in Martian rocks — and a celebration of rock samples. (Specifically, the two samples collected from mudstone rock on Wildcat Ridge in Jezero Crater.) The rover's Sherloc instrument investigated the rock. (Sherloc stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals.) "In its analysis of Wildcat Ridge, the Sherloc instrument registered the most abundant organic detections on the mission to date," NASA said.

Scientists are seeing familiar signs in the analysis of Wildcat Ridge. "In the distant past, the sand, mud and salts that now make up the Wildcat Ridge sample were deposited under conditions where life could potentially have thrived," said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley in a statement. "The fact the organic matter was found in such a sedimentary rock — known for preserving fossils of ancient life here on Earth — is important."

Perseverance isn't equipped to find definitive evidence of ancient microbial life on the red planet. "The reality is the burden of proof for establishing life on another planet is very, very high," said Farley during the press conference. For that, we need to examine Mars rocks up close and in person in Earth labs. Perseverance currently has 12 rock samples on board, including the Wildcat Ridge pieces and samples from another sedimentary delta rock called Skinner Ridge. It also collected igneous rock samples earlier in the mission that point to the impact of long-ago volcanic action in the crater. NASA is so happy with the diversity of samples collected that it's looking into dropping some of the filled tubes off on the surface soon in preparation for the future Mars Sample Return campaign.... The mission is under development. If all goes as planned, those rocks could be here by 2033 .
The hope is that in 2033, Perseverance will meet the lander "and personally deliver the samples," the article quips. But in the meantime, Perseverance "could wander up the crater rim." And there's one more update about the smaller exploration vehicle that Peseverance carried to Mars.

"Its companion Ingenuity helicopter is in good health and expected to take to the air again."

Randall Munroe does more than draw the online comic strip XKCD. He's also published a funny new speculative science book (following up on his previous New York Times best-seller), promising "short answers, new lists of weird and worrying questions, and some of my favorite answers from the What If site."

From his blog: In What If 2, I answer new questions I've receieved in the years since What If? was released. People have asked about touching exotic materials, traveling across space and time, eating things they shouldn't, and smashing large objects into the Earth. There are questions about lasers, explosions, swingsets, candy, and soup. Several planets are destroyed — one of them by the soup.
But besides launching a new book tour, he's also found some particularly geeky ways to promote the new book. On Thursday Munroe went on a language podcast to ask his own oddball questions — like how to spot an artificial language, and what does the word "it" refer to in the sentence "It's 3pm and hot." He's illustrated a a science-y animated video, and released several self-mocking cartoons.

And of course — answered some more strange science questions.

First, a rumor from the blog Phone Arena. "Not to be outdone by Apple and Huawei, Samsung is planning to incorporate satellite connectivity options in its Galaxy phones as well, hints leakster Ricciolo."

But it's not the first rumor we've heard about phone vendors and satellites. "Cringley Predicts Apple is About to Create a Satellite-Based IoT Business ," read the headline in June. Long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely predicted that Apple would first offer some limited satellite-based functionality,

But he'd also called those services "proxies for Apple entering — and then dominating — the Internet of Things (IoT) business. "After all, iPhones will give them 1.6 billion points of presence for AirTag detection even on sailboats in the middle of the ocean — or on the South Pole.... Ubiquity (being able to track anything in near real time anywhere on the planet) signals the maturity of IoT, turning it quickly into a $1 TRILLION business — in this case Apple's $1 TRILLION business." And beyond that, "in the longer run Cupertino plans to dis-intermediate the mobile carriers — becoming themselves a satellite-based global phone and data company [and] they will also compete with satellite Internet providers like Starlink, OneWeb, and Amazon's Kuiper."

So how did Cringely react last week when Apple announced "Emergency SOS" messaging for the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus — via communication satellites — when their users are out of range of a cell signals? He began by wondering if Apple was intentionally downplaying the satellite features: They limited their usage case to emergency SOS texts in the USA and Canada, sorta said it would be just for iPhone 14s, and be free for only the first two years. They showed a satellite app and very deliberately tried to make it look difficult to use. They gave no technical details and there was no talk of industry partners.

Yet there were hints of what's to come. We (you and I, based on my previous column) already knew, for example, that ANY iPhone can be made to work with Globalstar. We also knew the deal was with Globalstar, which Apple never mentioned but Globalstar confirmed, more or less, later in the day in an SEC filing. But Apple DID mention Find My and Air Tags, notably saying they'd work through the satellites even without having to first beseech the sky with an app. So the app is less than it seems and Apple's satellite network will quickly find its use for the Internet of Things [Cringely predicts]....

Apple very specifically said nothing about the global reach of Find My and Air Tags. There is no reason why those services can't have immediate global satellite support, given that the notification system is entirely within Apple's ecosystem and is not dependent on 911-type public safety agreements.

Maybe it will take a couple years to cover the world with SOS, but not for Find My, which means not for IoT — a business headed fast toward $1 trillion and will therefore [hypothetically] have a near-immediate impact on Apple's bottom line.
Speculating further, Cringely predicts that Globalstar — which has ended up with vast tracts of licensed spectrum — will eventually be purchased by a larger company. ("If not Apple, maybe Elon Musk.")

And this leads Cringely to yet another prediction. "If Elon can't get Globalstar, he and his partners will push for the regulatory expansion into space of terrestrial 5G licenses, which will probably be successful." This will happen, frankly, whether SpaceX and T-Mobile are successful or not, because AST&Science and its investors AT&T, Verizon and Zodafone need 5G in space, too, to compete with Apple. So there WILL eventually be satellite competition for Apple and I think the International Telecommunication Union will eventually succumb to industry pressure.
And by the end Cringely is also speculating about just how Apple will come up with innovative new satellite designs on a faster schedule...

Nanoracks just made space construction and manufacturing history with the first demonstration of cutting metal in orbit. TechCrunch reports: The experiment was performed back in May by Nanoracks and its parent company Voyager Space, after getting to orbit aboard the SpaceX Transporter 5 launch. The company only recently released additional details on Friday. The goal of Outpost Mars Demo-1 mission was to cut a piece of corrosion-resistant metal, similar to the outer shell of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur and common in space debris, using a technique called friction milling. Welding and metal-cutting is a messy operation on Earth, but all of that dust and debris simply falls to the ground. But "when you're in space, in the vacuum, it doesn't really do that. It doesn't just float away necessarily either," Marshall Smith, Nanoracks' senior VP of space systems, explained to TechCrunch back in May. "What you want to do is to contain this debris, not necessarily because it might be a micrometeorites issue, which it could be as well, but mostly because you want to keep your work environment clean."

The entire demonstration lasted around one minute. The main goal -- to cut a single small sample of the steel -- was successfully completed. Inside the spacecraft were two additional samples to cut as a "reach goal," and Nanoracks is investigating why they weren't cut as well. It was conducted in partnership with Maxar Technologies, who developed the robotic arm that executed the cut. That arm used a commercially available friction milling end-effector, and the entire structure was contained in the Outpost spacecraft to ensure that no debris escaped. Indeed, one of the main goals of the demonstration was to produce no debris -- and it worked. Nanoracks used a type of metal similar to an upper stage of a rocket precisely because the company's long-term goal is to modify used upper stages and convert them into orbital platforms, or what it calls "outposts." According to Smith, this is just the beginning. In the future, Nanoracks will attempt cuts on a larger scale in its quest to eventually conduct larger construction efforts.