An anonymous reader quotes a report from KOMO News: A groundbreaking medical procedure for those with kidney stones will soon be offered at the University of Washington after more than two decades of research. It will also give astronauts the go ahead they need from NASA to travel to Mars. It's a groundbreaking procedure to get rid of painful stones while you're awake, no anesthesia needed. "This has the potential to be game changing," said Dr. Kennedy Hall with UW Medicine. Still being run through clinical trials at UW Medicine, the procedure called burst wave lithotripsy uses an ultrasound wand and soundwaves to break apart the kidney stone. Ultrasonic propulsion is then used to move the stone fragments out, potentially giving patients relief in 10 minutes or less.

This technology is also making it possible for astronauts to travel to Mars, since astronauts are at a greater risk for developing kidney stones during space travel. It's so important to NASA, the space agency has been funding the research for the last 10 years. "They could potentially use this technology while there, to help break a stone or push it to where they could help stay on their mission and not have to come back to land," said Harper. The research has been published in the Journal of Urology.

Amiga Trombone shares a report from Insider: With signs of growing inventory and slowing sales, auto industry executives admitted this week that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term. Several C-Suite leaders at some of the biggest carmakers voiced fresh unease about the electric car market's growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk. Among those hand-wringing is GM's Mary Barra, historically one of the automotive industry's most bullish CEOs on the future of electric vehicles. But this week on GM's third-quarter earnings call, Barra and GM struck a more sober tone. The company announced with its quarterly results that it's abandoning its targets to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of this year and another 400,000 by the first six months of 2024. GM doesn't know when it will hit those targets.

While GM's about-face was somewhat of a surprise to investors, the Detroit car company is not alone in this new view of the EV future. Even Tesla's Elon Musk warned on a recent earnings call that economic concerns would lead to waning vehicle demand, even for the long-time EV market leader. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz -- which is having to discount its EVs by several thousand dollars just to get them in customers' hands -- isn't mincing words about the state of the EV market. "This is a pretty brutal space," CFO Harald Wilhelm said on an analyst call. "I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody." "It's clear that we're dealing with a lot of near-term uncertainty," said Barra. "The transition to EVs, that will have ups and downs."
Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said that people are "finally seeing reality" regarding EVs. "I have continued to say what I see as reality," Toyoda, who recently stepped down as Toyota's CEO, said. "There are many ways to climb the mountain that is achieving carbon neutrality," such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids which have long made up a significant share of Toyota's EV sales.

"The reason (hybrids) are so powerful is because they fit the needs of so many customers," Toyota North America's vice president of sales Bob Carter told CNBC last year. "The demand for hybrid has been strong. We expect it to continue to grow as the entire industry transitions over to electrification later this decade."

An anonymous reader shares a report: It was always abundantly clear that the leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos from 2018 to 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, sought to kowtow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now we have an anecdote from Putin himself that highlights how much. The story concerns a satellite constellation now known as Sfera (or Sphere, in English), a modestly ambitious constellation of 264 satellites. The Sphere constellation is intended to provide broadband Internet service from middle-Earth orbit to Russia as well as high-resolution Earth observation satellites.

As is usual with Russian space projects, because they tend to be poorly funded, the timeline for Sphere's deployment has been delayed and its scope reduced. It also underwent an unscheduled name change. Prior to 2018, this satellite program was known as Ehfir (Ether), a reference to the invisible substance once thought to fill the universe and the medium through which light waves propagated.

However that changed in 2018 when Putin was publicly announcing the program's creation. He recently recalled this in remarks that were recorded by RIA Novosti's Telegram channel. They were translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell. "At first it was called Ehfir," Putin said. "And at one of my public speeches I was talking and said it was Sfera. I arrived at the Kremlin, and the former Roscosmos head greeted me and said, 'Vladimirovich, you said it was project Sfera, Sfera you said. That's what it is, project Sfera.'"

Rogozin, who was listening to these remarks, acted immediately -- presumably to save his boss from embarrassment. After Rogozin said the constellation was named Sphere, Putin recalled that he asked how's that? Rogozin replied that it had already been renamed Sfera, not to worry. Laughing, Putin added, "So I didn't even make it back and it's already renamed to Sfera. So I said, well, OK then." Rogozin confirmed the anecdote on his Telegram channel this week.

Alexandra Witze reports via Nature: A meteorite that slammed into Mars in September 2021 has rewritten what scientists know about the planet's interior. By analysing the seismic energy that vibrated through the planet after the impact, researchers have discovered a layer of molten rock that envelops Mars's liquid-metal core. The finding, reported today in two papers in Nature, means that the Martian core is smaller than previously thought. It also resolves some lingering questions about how the red planet formed and evolved over billions of years.

The discovery comes from NASA's InSight mission, which landed a craft with a seismometer on Mars's surface. Between 2018 and 2022, that instrument detected hundreds of "marsquakes' shaking the planet. In July 2021, on the basis of the mission's observations of 11 quakes, researchers reported that the liquid core of Mars seemed to have a radius of around 1,830 kilometers3. That was bigger than many scientists were expecting. And it suggested that the core contained surprisingly high amounts of light chemical elements, such as sulfur, mixed with iron. But the September 2021 meteorite impact "unlocked everything," says Henri Samuel, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris and lead author of one of today's papers1. The meteorite struck the planet on the side opposite to where InSight was located. That's much more distant than the marsquakes that InSight had previously studied, and allowed the probe to detect seismic energy traveling all the way through the Martian core4. "We were so excited," says Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the University of Bristol, UK, and a co-author of Samuel's paper.

For Samuel, it was an opportunity to test his idea that a molten layer of rock surrounds Mars's core5. The way the seismic energy traversed the planet showed that what scientists had thought was the boundary between the liquid core and the solid mantle, 1,830 kilometers from the planet's centre, was actually a different boundary between liquid and solid. It was the top of the newfound layer of molten rock meeting the mantle (see 'Rethinking the Martian core'). The actual core is buried beneath that molten-rock layer and has a radius of only 1,650 kilometers, Samuel says. The revised core size solves some puzzles. It means that the Martian core doesn't have to contain high amounts of light elements -- a better match to laboratory and theoretical estimates. A second liquid layer inside the planet also meshes better with other evidence, such as how Mars responds to being deformed by the gravitational tug of its moon Phobos.

The second paper in Nature today2, from a team independent of Samuel's, agrees that Mars's core is enveloped by a layer of molten rock, but estimates that the core has a radius of 1,675 kilometers. The work analyzed seismic waves from the same distant meteorite impact, as well as simulations of the properties of mixtures of molten elements such as iron, nickel and sulfur at the high pressures and temperatures in the Martian core. Having molten rock right up against molten iron "appears to be unique," says lead author Amir Khan, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich. "You have this peculiarity of liquid-liquid layering, which is something that doesn't exist on the Earth." The molten-rock layer might be left over from a magma ocean that once covered Mars. As it cooled and solidified into rock, the magma would have left behind a deep layer of radioactive elements that still release heat and keep rock molten at the base of the mantle, Samuel says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it's possible to have babies in space. Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth -- or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish? Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements.

"Humanity needs a backup plan," he says. "If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species." Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space -- yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it's likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared. Despite the burgeoning interest in deep space exploration and settlement, prompted in part by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we still know very little about what happens to our reproductive biology when we're in orbit. A report released in September by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine points out that almost no research has been done on human reproduction in space, adding that our understanding of how space affects reproduction is "vital to long-term space exploration, but largely unexplored to date."

Some studies on animals have suggested that the various stages of reproduction -- from mating and fertilization to embryo development, implantation, pregnancy, and birth -- can function normally in space. For example, in the very first such experiment, eight Japanese medaka fish developed from egg to hatchling aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1994. All eight survived the return to Earth and seemed to behave normally.Yet other studies have found evidence that points to potential problems. Pregnant rats that spent much of their third trimester -- a total of five days -- on a Soviet satellite in 1983 experienced complications during labor and delivery. Like all astronauts returning to Earth, the rats were exhausted and weak. Their deliveries lasted longer than usual, likely because of atrophied uterine muscles. All the pups in one of the litters died during delivery, the result of an obstruction thought to be due in part to the mother's weakened state.

To Edelbroek, these inconclusive results point to a need to systematically isolate each step in the reproductive process in order to better understand how it is affected by conditions like lower gravity and higher radiation exposure. The mini lab his company developed is designed to do exactly that. It is about the size of a shoebox and uses microfluidics to connect a chamber containing sperm to a chamber containing an egg. It can also rotate at different speeds to replicate the gravitational environment of Earth, the moon, or Mars. It is small enough to fit inside a capsule that can be housed on top of a rocket and launched into space.After the egg has been fertilized in the device, it splits into two cells, each of which divides again to form four cells and so on. After five to six days, the embryo reaches a stage known as a blastocyst, which looks like a hollow ball. At this point, the embryos in the mini lab will be cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth.

Pebble, the first of the would-be Twitter replacements to emerge after Elon Musk bought Twitter, is shutting down. The social media platform -- previously known as T2 to indicate a desire to build a Twitter clone -- was founded by former Twitter employees Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle. Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Pebble was an early-stage, Twitter-like social network. Its goal was to become the "place to have the authentic conversations we've always wanted to have." Its founders, who were largely Twitter alumni, designed Pebble to look and feel like pre-Musk Twitter, with a 280-character limit and direct messaging. I rather liked it, but it appears I was in the minority. Pebble was always a bit rough around the edges, and it never made it past about 20,000 users.

In what was still a surprising announcement, Pebble revealed its plans to shut down operations on November 1, 2023. In a letter to users, Pebble said: "The painful truth, however, is that we were not growing quickly enough for investors to believe that we will break out. Combine that with a crowded space of alternatives -- and the uphill climb is even steeper. In order to continue to build out a complete Pebble, we would have needed more investment, and more time." That was not to be -- and Pebble's backers ran out of money and time.

A spokesperson for the platform stated: "While we are immensely proud of what we achieved with our dedicated team and an incredible community, the reality is that our growth rate was not meeting the expectations set by our investors." With the digital landscape burgeoning with alternative platforms, Pebble was competing in an increasingly crowded marketplace. As the platform prepares for its final curtain call, the team behind Pebble is shifting its focus to showing gratitude to its supportive community. They are exploring potential avenues to ensure that the connections formed on Pebble can continue in another guise. Further details are expected to be shared soon.

NASA is demonstrating laser communications on multiple missions -- showcasing the benefits infrared light can have for science and exploration missions transmitting terabytes of important data. NASA: The International Space Station is getting a "flashy" technology demonstration this November. The ILLUMA-T (Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) payload is launching to the International Space Station to demonstrate how missions in low Earth orbit can benefit from laser communications. Laser communications uses invisible infrared light to send and receive information at higher data rates, providing spacecraft with the capability to send more data back to Earth in a single transmission and expediting discoveries for researchers.

Managed by NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, ILLUMA-T is completing NASA's first bi-directional, end-to-end laser communications relay by working with the agency's LCRD (Laser Communications Relay Demonstration). LCRD launched in December 2021 and is currently demonstrating the benefits of laser communications from geosynchronous orbit by transmitting data between two ground stations on Earth in a series of experiments. Some of LCRD's experiments include studying atmospheric impact on laser signals, confirming LCRD's ability to work with multiple users, testing network capabilities like delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) over laser links, and investigating improved navigation capabilities.

John Timmer reports via Ars Technica: Today, a startup called Atom Computing announced that it has been doing internal testing of a 1,180 qubit quantum computer and will be making it available to customers next year. The system represents a major step forward for the company, which had only built one prior system based on neutral atom qubits -- a system that operated using only 100 qubits. The error rate for individual qubit operations is high enough that it won't be possible to run an algorithm that relies on the full qubit count without it failing due to an error. But it does back up the company's claims that its technology can scale rapidly and provides a testbed for work on quantum error correction. And, for smaller algorithms, the company says it'll simply run multiple instances in parallel to boost the chance of returning the right answer. [...]

Atom Computing is now using the system internally and plans to open it up for public use next year. The system has moved from a 10x10 grid to a 35x35 grid, bringing the potential sites for atoms up to 1,225. So far, testing has taken place with up to 1,180 atoms present, making it the largest machine that anyone has publicly acknowledged (at least in terms of qubit count). The qubits are housed in a 12x5 foot box that contains the lasers and optics, along with the vacuum system and a bit of unused space -- Atom CEO Rob Hayes quipped that "there's a lot of air inside that box." It does not, however, contain the computer hardware that controls the system and its operations. The grid of atoms it's used to create, by contrast, is only about 100 microns per side, so it won't strain the hardware to keep increasing the qubit count.

China is increasing its lead over the US in AI patent filings, underscoring the Asian nation's determination to shape and influence a technology that could have broad implications for the world's richest economies. From a report: Chinese institutions applied for 29,853 AI-related patents in 2022, climbing from 29,000 the year prior, according to data that the World Intellectual Property Organization provided to Bloomberg News. That's almost 80% more than US filings, which shrank 5.5%. Overall, China accounted for more than 40% of global AI applications over the past year, the data from the United Nations-affiliated agency showed. Japan and South Korea rounded out the 2022 leaders, with a combined 16,700 applications. The numbers illustrate how Beijing has pushed Chinese companies and agencies to gain an edge in areas such as chipmaking, space exploration and military sciences. More recently, President Xi Jinping has ordered the nation to accelerate fundamental research in response to US efforts to curtail its access to advanced technologies. That's triggered a flood of investment by Chinese companies in AI and quantum computing.

Bitcoin has surged past $33,000 per coin on Monday, rising nearly 11% in 24 hours. According to CoinGecko, the coin is up more than 17% in the past seven days. Decrypt reports: Bulls have flooded the space as talk about a spot Bitcoin ETF has investors hopeful that the long-awaited crypto product will soon get approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A Monday CoinShares report showed that institutional investors are pouring money into the space; JPMorgan analysts said last week that a spot Bitcoin ETF could be approved by Christmas.

High-profile investment firms that have applied to the SEC for a spot ETF are fine tuning their applications in the hope that the regulator will give them the green light. Investors have been hungry for a spot Bitcoin ETF for the best part of a decade but Wall Street's biggest regulator experts say has denied applications for such a product, mostly citing the potential for market manipulation as one of the main reasons.

But analysts are now more optimistic than ever before: BlackRock, world's biggest fund manager, applied for a Bitcoin ETF of its own. Not long after, manager Grayscale scored a victory against the SEC when a federal judge sided with the firm over its application to convert its flagship Bitcoin fund into an ETF.

One 80-year-old retired teacher in Los Angeles lost $69,000 in bitcoin to scammers. And 46,000 people lost over $1 billion to crypto scams since 2021 (according to America's Federal Trade Commission).

Now the Los Angeles Times reports California's new moves against scammers using bitcoin ATMs, with a bill one representative says "is about ensuring that people who have been frauded in our communities don't continue to watch our state step aside when we know that these are real problems that are happening." Starting in January, California will limit cryptocurrency ATM transactions to $1,000 per day per person under Senate Bill 401, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law. Some bitcoin ATM machines advertise limits as high as $50,000... Victims of bitcoin ATM scams say limiting the transactions will give people more time to figure out they're being tricked and prevent them from using large amounts of cash to buy cryptocurrency.

But crypto ATM operators say the new laws will harm their industry and the small businesses they pay to rent space for the machines. There are more than 3,200 bitcoin ATMs in California, according to Coin ATM Radar, a site that tracks the machines' locations. "This bill fails to adequately address how to crack down on fraud, and instead takes a punitive path focused on a specific technology that will shudder the industry and hurt consumers, while doing nothing to stop bad actors," said Charles Belle, executive director of the Blockchain Advocacy Coalition...

Law enforcement has cracked down on unlicensed crypto ATMs, but it can be tough for consumers to tell how serious the industry is about addressing the concerns. In 2020, a Yorba Linda man pleaded guilty to charges of operating unlicensed bitcoin ATMs and failing to maintain an anti-money-laundering program even though he knew criminals were using the funds. The illegal business, known as Herocoin, allowed people to buy and sell bitcoin in transactions of up to $25,000 and charged a fee of up to 25%.
So there's also provisions in the law against exorbitant fees: The new law also bars bitcoin ATM operators from collecting fees higher than $5 or 15% of the transaction, whichever is greater, starting in 2025. Legislative staff members visited a crypto kiosk in Sacramento and found markups as high as 33% on some digital assets when they compared the prices at which cryptocurrency is bought and sold. Typically, a crypto ATM charges fees between 12% and 25% over the value of the digital asset, according to a legislative analysis...

Another law would by July 2025 require digital financial asset businesses to obtain a license from the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.

"It's not every day that you get to update the firmware on a device that was produced in the 1970s," writes Hackaday, "and rarely is said device well beyond the boundaries of our solar system.

"This is however exactly what the JPL team in charge of the Voyager 1 & 2 missions are facing, as they are in the process of sending fresh firmware patches over to these amazing feats of engineering."

From NASA's announcement: One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft's antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft... In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction [almost 1 degree] before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings... While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost — akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally — the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can't know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won't happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. "This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don't have a playbook," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "But they continue to come up with creative solutions."
But that's not the only issue: The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch, and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2...

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally... The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn't determine the cause and thus aren't sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

"This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible," said JPL's Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. "These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they're sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe."
Since their launch in 1977, NASA's two Voyager probes have travelled more than 12 billion miles (each!), and are still sending back data from beyond our solar system.

In August the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant started releasing treated radioactive wastewater into the sea — a process they plan to continue for decades.

Now the International Atomic Energy Agency has sent a team to sample the water near the plant. And the Associated Press reports that a team member "said Thursday he does not expect any rise in radiation levels in the fish caught in the regional seas." The IAEA team watched flounder and other popular kinds of fish being caught off the coast earlier Thursday and brought on boats to the Hisanohama port in southern Fukushima for an auction. "I can say that we don't expect to see any change starting in the fish," said Paul McGinnity, an IAEA marine radiology scientist.

A small rise in the levels of tritium, which cannot be removed from the Fukushima Daiichi wastewater by the plant's treatment system called ALPS, is possible in locations close to the discharge points, but the levels of radioactivity are expected to be similar to those measured before the discharge last year, he said... The IAEA has reviewed the safety of the wastewater release and concluded in July that if carried out as planned, it would have a negligible impact on the environment, marine life and human health. During the Oct. 16-23 visit, the IAEA team also inspected the collection and processing of seawater and marine sediment near the plant...

The sampling work will be followed by a separate IAEA task force that will review the safety of the treated radioactive water...

Tokyo Electric Power Company and the government say discharging the water into the sea is unavoidable because the tanks will reach their 1.37 million-ton capacity next year and space at the plant will be needed for its decommissioning, which is expected to take decades, if it is achievable at all. They say the water is treated to reduce radioactive materials to safe levels, and then is diluted with seawater by hundreds of times to make it much safer than international standards. Some experts say such long-term release of low-dose radioactivity is unprecedented and requires close monitoring.

The BBC writes: Super Mario Bros: Wonder is a psychedelic take on the traditional 2D platformer that jazzes up Mario's usual Bowser-thwarting adventure with Wonder Effects that, as Polygon's Chris Plante put it, sees "the levels themselves collapse and contort, disobeying the laws established by decades of Mario games".

It's as if developers unearthed the "stuffed notebook of chaos" of every wacky idea ever rejected from the series and turned it into a single game, Plante said... [T]he game offers "so many different looks and wild hooks that the typically forgettable story simply didn't matter," said IGN's Ryan McCaffrey, who enthused: "Every frame oozes joy...." The Guardian's Keza McDonald says the game carries the sort of fun expected by Mario fans, "but with enough novelty and unexpected twists to prevent it from feeling over-familiar", and at the same time for newcomers "is a wonderful introduction to the fizzy creativity and attention to detail that has made Mario a family staple".

This is the first time the Mario developers have delved into online multiplayer in the traditional 2D space, where previously co-op play required players to share a console in person. "It feels more like you're working together," McDonald said. "Characters can revive one another if someone falls foul of a Bullet Bill or flaming pit, making the game much easier to get through as a team."
GamesRadar's Sam Loveridge added "There's also an attention to detail here that just heightens that magic playfulness. There's so much to spot, whether it's the snot bubble on a sleeping Goomba or the fact each character's face changes when they start dashing."

Although Kotaku has a suggestion. "Before you get too ahead of yourself turning Mario and company into giant elephants and whatnot, you should mess around with some gameplay settings first — especially the one that controls the Talking Flowers." Earlier this week, in another edition of Nintendo's ongoing web series, Ask the Developer, we learned that Wonder was originally going to have a live commentary feature like what you'd find in a sports game. It was scrapped, but found new life through the game's Talking Flowers characters who shout at Mario and crew whenever they walk by. Although the Talking Flowers are a cute addition to the game and make solo playthroughs a little less lonely, your mileage with them may vary. Some people think the Talking Flowers, who talk all the time, are pretty annoying, if you can believe that.

"Planetary scientists want to search for biosignatures in what they believe was once a Martian mud lake," reports Space.com: After scientists carefully studied what they believe are desiccated remnants of an equatorial mud lake on Mars, their study of Hydraotes Chaos suggests a buried trove of water surged onto the surface. If researchers are right, then this flat could become prime ground for future missions seeking traces of life on Mars... More generally, scientists suggest surface water on Mars froze over about 3.7 billion years ago as the atmosphere thinned and the surface cooled. But underground, groundwater might still have remained liquid in vast chambers. Moreover, life forms might have abided in those catacombs — leaving behind traces of their existence. Only around 3.4 billion years ago did that system of aquifers break down in Hydraotes Chaos, triggering floods of epic proportions that dumped mountains' worth of sediment onto the surface, the study suggests. Future close-up missions could someday examine that sediment for biosignatures...

Alexis Rodriguez, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, and his colleagues pored over images of Hydraotes Chaos taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in search of more clues. In the midst of the chaos terrain's maelstrom lies a calm circle of relatively flat ground. This plain is pockmarked with cones and domes, with hints of mud bubbling from below — suggesting that sediment did not arrive via a rushing flash flood, but instead rose from underneath. Based on simulations, the authors suggest Hydraotes Chaos overlaid a reservoir of buried biosignature-rich water — potentially in the form of thick ice sheets.

Ultimately — potentially from the Red Planet's internal heat melting the ice — that water bubbled up to the surface and created a muddy lake. As the water dissipated, it would have left behind all those tantalizing biosignatures. Curiously, that water might have remained underground even after those megafloods. In fact, the authors' results suggest the sediment on the surface of this mud lake dates from only around 1.1 billion years ago: long after most of Mars's groundwater ought to have flooded out, and certainly long after Mars was habitable. With that timeline in mind, Rodriguez and colleagues plan to analyze what lies under the surface of the lake. That, Rodriguez tells Space.com, would allow scientists to establish when in Martian history the planet might have hosted life.
Rodriguez tells Space.com that this region is now "under consideration" for testing with an under-development NASA instrument called Extractor for Chemical Analysis of Lipid Biomarkers in Regolith (EXCALIBR) — that could test extraterrestrial rocks for biomarkers like lipids.

"Dropbox said Friday that it's agreed to return over one quarter of its San Francisco headquarters to the landlord," reports CNBC, "as the commercial real estate market continues to soften following the Covid pandemic."

The article notes that last year Dropbox's accountants declared a $175.2 million "impairment" on the office — a permanent reduction in its value — calling it "a result of adverse changes" in the market. And the year before they announced another $400 million charge "related to real estate assets."

Friday CNBC reported: In a filing, Dropbox said it agreed to surrender to its landlord 165,244 square feet of space and pay $79 million in termination fees. Under the amendment to its lease agreement, Dropbox will offload the space over time through the first quarter of 2025. Since going remote during the pandemic three years ago, Dropbox has been trying to figure out what to do with much of the 736,000 square feet of space in Mission Bay it leased in 2017, in what was the largest office lease in the city's history. The company subleased closed to 134,000 square feet of space last year to Vir Biotechnology, leaving it with just over 604,000 square feet...

"As we've noted in the past, we've taken steps to de-cost our real estate portfolio as a result of our transition to Virtual First, our operating model in which remote work is the primary experience for our employees, but where we still come together for planned in-person gatherings," a company spokesperson told CNBC in an emailed statement... Dropbox's 2017 lease for the brand new headquarters was for 15 years... "As a result of the amendment the company will avoid future cash payments related to rent and common area maintenance fees of $137 million and approximately $90 million, respectively, over the remaining 10 year lease term," Dropbox said in Friday's filing.

A short walk away from Dropbox, Uber has been trying to sublease part of its headquarters.
The article also notes that San Francisco's office vacancy rate "stood at 30% in the third quarter, the highest level since at least 2007, according to city data."

Images from the James Webb Space Telescope "don't match scientists' models of how the universe formed," reports the Washington Post.

"But it might not be time to dump the standard model of cosmology yet. " A recent analysis in the Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests an explanation for the surprisingly massive-seeming galaxies: brilliant, extremely bright bursts of newborn stars.

The galaxies photographed by the telescope looked far too mature and large to have formed so fully so soon after the universe began, raising questions about scientists' assumptions of galaxy formation. But when researchers ran a variety of computer simulations of the universe's earliest days, they discovered that the galaxies probably are not as large as they seem. Instead, they attribute their brightness to a phenomenon called "bursty star formation." As clouds of dust and debris collapse, they form dense, high-temperature cores and become stars. Bursty galaxies spit out new stars in intermittent, bright bursts instead of creating stars more consistently. Usually, these galaxies are low in mass and take long breaks between starbursts.

Because the galaxies in question look so bright in photos produced by the Webb telescope, scientists at first thought they were older and more massive. But bursty systems with the ability to produce extremely bright, abundant light may appear more massive than they really are.
"Not only does this finding explain why young galaxies appear deceptively massive, it also fits within the standard model of cosmology," explains the announcement: In the new study, Guochao Sun, who led the study, Northwestern's, Claude-André Faucher-Giguère, the study's senior author, and their team used advanced computer simulations to model how galaxies formed right after the Big Bang. The simulations produced cosmic dawn galaxies that were just as bright as those observed by the JWST...

Although other astrophysicists have hypothesized that bursty star formation could be responsible for the unusual brightness of galaxies at cosmic dawn, the Northwestern researchers are the first to use detailed computer simulations to prove it is possible. And they were able to do so without adding new factors that are unaligned with our standard model of the universe.

Stephen Clark reports via Ars Technica: Earlier this week, SpaceX launched for the 75th time this year, continuing a flight cadence that should see the company come close to 100 missions by the end of December. SpaceX plans to kick its launch rate into a higher gear in 2024. This will be largely driven by launches of upgraded Starlink satellites with the ability to connect directly with consumer cell phones, a service SpaceX calls "Starlink Direct to Cell," a company official told Ars this week. The goal next year is 12 launches per month, for a total of 144 Falcon rocket flights. Like this year, most of those missions will be primarily devoted to launching Starlink broadband satellites. So far in 2023, more than 60 percent of SpaceX's launches have delivered the company's own Starlink satellites into orbit.

Here are some numbers. Last year, SpaceX launched 61 missions. In 2021, the number was 31. In the last 12 months, SpaceX has launched 88 Falcon rockets, plus one test flight of the company's much larger Starship rocket. SpaceX's success in recovering and reusing Falcon 9 boosters and payload fairings has been vital to making this possible. SpaceX has gone past the original goal of launching each Falcon 9 booster 10 times before a major overhaul, first to 15 flights, and then recently certifying boosters for up to 20 missions. Technicians can swap out parts like engines, fins, landing legs, and valves that malfunction in flight or show signs of wear. With so many launches planned next year, 20 flights is probably not a stopping point. "We might go a little higher," the SpaceX official said. SpaceX may also see an uptick in missions for external customers, like NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and commercial companies. "External demand for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches is 'steady,' the official said, but some customers that had launches scheduled for this year encountered delays with their satellites, moving them into 2024."

Tereza Pultarova reports via Space.com: Light pollution is a growing threat to astronomy, but a new streetlamp technology could restore clear views of the night sky. [...] A study published earlier this year found that stars are disappearing from the sky at an average rate of 10% per year. This trend affects even the world's most remote observatories. Germany-based startup StealthTransit recently tested a solution to this growing issue. "Unfortunately, this problem haunts almost all observatories today," Vlad Pashkovsky, StealthTransit's founder and CEO, told Space.com in an email. "Modern telescopes are highly sensitive and feel the impact of outdoor lighting of cities located at the distance of 50 or even 200 kilometers [30 to 120 miles]. This means that virtually every observatory on Earth either already needs, or will need in the future 10 years, protection from the light of large cities."

StealthTransit's solution relies on three components: A simple device that makes LED lights flicker at a very high frequency that is imperceptible to the human eye, a GPS receiver, and a specially designed shutter on the telescope's camera that can blink in sync with the LED lights. The GPS technology guides the telescope's shutter to open only during the fleeting moments when the LED lights are switched off. The experiments, conducted at an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, showed that the technology, dubbed the DarkSkyProtector, could reduce unwanted sky glow in astronomical images by 94%. "We can say that the telescope was seeing almost a dark sky at this time," Pashkovsky said. "The important thing about our technology is that it makes all kinds of lights astronomy-friendly, including outdoor advertising and indoor lighting in apartments, offices and stores."

The technology could filter out lights from nearby towns and villages as well as those surrounding the observatory itself. It might sound impractical to refit an entire town with devices that allow lamps to blink, but Pashkovsky said that most existing LED lights can operate in the blinking mode and that new lamps designed specifically with sky protection in mind would be no costlier than existing LED technology. The most expensive element of the DarkSkyProtector system is the telescope shutter, which needs to be lightweight and agile enough to blink about 150 times per second. StealthTransit tested the prototype shutter on a 24-inch-wide (60 centimeters) telescope and hopes to make the technology available for larger telescopes. Although StealthTransit's technology is not yet ready for commercial use, Pashkovsky said, the firm hopes to have a product fit for the world's best telescopes in five to seven years.

The government of India said on Tuesday that it plans to put an astronaut on the moon by 2040 and build an Earth-orbiting space station by 2035. Space.com reports: On Aug. 23, India became just the fourth nation ever to soft-land a spacecraft -- its Chandrayaan-3 lander-rover duo -- on the surface of the moon. In a recent meeting with the Indian government department that manages the country's space program, Prime Minister Narendra Modi "directed that India should now aim for new and ambitious goals," according to an official statement. India's future moon exploration efforts will include a series of additional robotic Chandrayaan missions, a new launch pad and a heavy-lift launch vehicle, the statement added.

India's delayed Gaganyaan human spaceflight program, now aiming to fly three astronauts to low Earth orbit in 2025, will feature 20 major tests, including three uncrewed missions to test the launch vehicle over the course of the remainder of this year and all of next. [...] By the middle of the 2030s, India hopes to have a 20-ton space station in a fixed orbit 248 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, with capabilities to host astronauts for 15 to 20 days at a time, K. Sivan, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), has previously said.

Further down the pipeline of missions, ISRO is planning a Venus orbiter called Shukrayaan-1 to study the surface of that hellishly hot planet. The payloads for that mission are currently being developed, current ISRO chairman S. Somanath had said last month. A second orbiter mission to Mars is also on the books, according to the latest statement. The nation's first, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), was launched in 2013 and studied the Red Planet's atmosphere for eight years before it lost contact with Earth in April 2022. The follow-up mission, Mars Orbiter Mission 2 or MOM 2, will likely include cameras to study the planet's crust and may also include a lander, although many of the mission plans are yet to be finalized.