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Secondary cratering on Earth: The Wyoming impact crater field

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Secondary cratering on Earth: The Wyoming impact crater field

Several dozen small impact craters, 10-70-m in size, have been discovered in southeastern Wyoming. A team of U.S. and German geoscientists found these ancient craters in exposed sedimentary layers from the Permian period (280 million years ago). After discovering the first craters, the team initially suspected that they are a crater-strewn field, formed by the breakup of an asteroid that entered the atmosphere. However, with the discovery of more and more craters over a wide area, this interpretation was ruled out.

Many of the craters are clustered in groups and are aligned along rays. Furthermore, several craters are elliptical, allowing the reconstruction of the incoming paths of the impactors. The reconstructed trajectories have a radial pattern.

“The trajectories indicate a single source and show that the craters were formed by ejected blocks from a large primary crater,” said project leader Thomas Kenkmann, professor of geology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. “Secondary craters around larger craters are well known from other planets and moons but have never been found on Earth,”

The team calculated the ballistic trajectories and used mathematical simulations to model the formation of the craters. All of the craters found so far are located 150-200 km from the presumed primary crater and were formed by blocks that were 4-8-m in size that struck the Earth at speeds of 700-1000 m/s.

The team estimate that the source crater is about 50-65 km in diameter and should be deeply buried under younger sediments in the northern Denver basin near the Wyoming-Nebraska border.

Reference:
Thomas Kenkmann, Louis Müller, Allan Fraser, Doug Cook, Kent Sundell, Auriol S.P. Rae. Secondary cratering on Earth: The Wyoming impact crater field. GSA Bulletin, 2022; DOI: 10.1130/B36196.1

Researchers publish most thorough study yet of ‘smart,’ spitting archerfishes

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Researchers publish most thorough study yet of ‘smart,’ spitting archerfishes

Archerfishes are the anti-aircraft gunners of the aquatic world. The fishes are famed for their amazing ability to shoot down land-based insects midflight with highly accurate streams of water they project from their mouths.

Yet, scientifically speaking, not enough really has been known about archerfish: What makes an archerfish? How many species are there? What other fishes are closely related? What fishes did they descend from?

Now, a new paper appearing in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology from researchers at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum is the most thorough examination ever produced of the evolutionary history and anatomical variation of archerfishes, which are also known by the scientific name Toxotidae.

“Archerfishes are a small group of fishes that predominantly live in Southeast Asia and Australia and a lot of the regions in between,” said lead author Matthew Girard, a research affiliate with the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum and a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Fishes at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “Sometimes people think of archerfishes as a famous group because they can spit water out of their mouths, and they are often studied just because they’re pretty smart animals—they have to calculate for refraction, and they’re able to hit things that are on the wing as they’re flying overhead.”

Researchers publish most thorough study yet of 'smart,' spitting archerfishes
Toxotes blythii under fluorescent light. Credit: Matthew Girard

Despite archerfishes’ renown among ichthyologists and aquarium enthusiasts, until now not much scholarly work has been performed on them.

“That’s really where our study comes in,” Girard said. “We looked at how these fishes are related and asked, ‘How did this amazing mechanism of allowing them to actually be able to spit come to evolve?’ We had some ideas of what other kinds of fishes they were related to, but for the first time we’ve generated a hypothesis of how all these species of archerfish are related to each other. We didn’t even really know if all of them could shoot. The studies that have looked at how they’re shooting or how smart they are, they’re generally using archerfish that are found in the aquarium trade—but there’s some rare ones out there, too. So, we were not only answering questions about how they’re related and how this shooting mechanism evolved, but can all of them even shoot in the first place, or is there variation in there? We did find that they all can shoot; they all at least have the structures in their mouth to be able to shoot, but there are differences among them.”

For the first time, the paper establishes an authoritative family tree of archerfishes, allowing researchers to trace through genetics and morphology how the spitting specialization may have evolved over time.

“There are other fish that eat insects and some that will jump out of water, but I would say there’s nothing really like this,” said co-author Leo Smith, associate curator at KU’s Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum. “There’s a potentially apocryphal story, which is that back in the mid-1800s in India, archerfishes would shoot out the colonizers’ cigarettes, just like if there was like a lightning bug. They would shoot them out and drive people crazy and that’s how the Western Europeans discovered the thing that was already there, that everybody there already knew about—but there are stories that they will spit out cigarettes.”

Researchers publish most thorough study yet of 'smart,' spitting archerfishes
Tongue and mouth bony structures in the archerfish’s closest relative, beach salmons (Leptobrama), the Primitive archerfish (Protoxotes) and other archerfishes (Toxotes). Credit: Matthew Girard

Girard sought tissue samples and specimens of archerfishes from institutions and natural history museums around the world—unheralded, often grueling work—and then analyzed their structures and genetics to better understand the group.

For instance, Girard, Smith and their co-authors found the oral structures of archerfishes support a blowpipe-mechanism hypothesis, but soft-tissue oral structures may also play a role in shooting.

“Just because other fish can move water, it’s not anything like this,” Smith said. “I equate it to, ‘I could put a trumpet in my mouth, and I suppose I could make noise come out of it, but not like Miles Davis.’ It’s like a fundamentally different thing, too, a really remarkable specialization for catching insects.”

Further, the research team determined archerfishes have a closely related “sister group” of fishes, called beach salmon—and found they, too, had “relevant shooting features in the oral cavity,” suggesting shooting water at prey could be what evolutionary biologists dub a co-opted or exapted trait.

“We think of adaptations like, for example, a sailfish that has this really beautiful sail on their dorsal fin—but a lot of fishes have dorsal fins and what they’ve done is kind of modify that dorsal fin to fit some other need,” Girard said. “If we look at the group that’s most closely related to archerfish, it’s already eating hard-body things. So, archerfish must have had all the structures that would allow that to happen, and all they had to do was kind of modify those to be able to shoot. So that’s what that co-option is—it’s really a nuance saying that the necessary parts were already there and all they did was modify a few things to allow this to happen.”

More information: M G Girard et al, Phylogenetics of archerfishes (Toxotidae) and evolution of the toxotid shooting apparatus, Integrative Organismal Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1093/iob/obac013
Provided by University of Kansas.

Astronomers capture surprising changes in Neptune’s temperatures

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Astronomers capture surprising changes in Neptune’s temperatures

An international team of astronomers have used ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), to track Neptune’s atmospheric temperatures over a 17-year period. They found a surprising drop in Neptune’s global temperatures followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole.

“This change was unexpected,” says Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, UK, and lead author of the study published today in The Planetary Science Journal. “Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we expected temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder.”

Like Earth, Neptune experiences seasons as it orbits the Sun. However, a Neptune season lasts around 40 years, with one Neptune year lasting 165 Earth years. It has been summertime in Neptune’s southern hemisphere since 2005, and the astronomers were eager to see how temperatures were changing following the southern summer solstice.

Astronomers looked at nearly 100 thermal-infrared images of Neptune, captured over a 17-year period, to piece together overall trends in the planet’s temperature in greater detail than ever before.

Observed changes in Neptune’s thermal-infrared brightness, a measure of temperature in Neptune’s atmosphere. The plot shows the relative change in the thermal-infrared brightness from Neptune’s stratosphere with time for all existing images taken by ground-based telescopes. Brighter images are interpreted as warmer. Corresponding thermal-infrared images (top) at wavelengths of ~12 µm show Neptune’s appearance in 2006, 2009, 2018 (observed by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope’s VISIR instrument), and 2020 (observed by Subaru’s COMICS instrument). The south pole appears to have become dramatically warmer in just the past few years. Credit: Michael Roman/NASA/JPL/Voyager-ISS/Justin Cowart.

These data showed that, despite the onset of southern summer, most of the planet had gradually cooled over the last two decades. The globally averaged temperature of Neptune dropped by 8 °C between 2003 and 2018.

The astronomers were then surprised to discover a dramatic warming of Neptune’s south pole during the last two years of their observations, when temperatures rapidly rose 11 °C between 2018 and 2020. Although Neptune’s warm polar vortex has been known for many years, such rapid polar warming has never been previously observed on the planet.

“Our data cover less than half of a Neptune season, so no one was expecting to see large and rapid changes,” says co-author Glenn Orton, senior research scientist at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the US.

The astronomers measured Neptune’s temperature using thermal cameras that work by measuring the infrared light emitted from astronomical objects. For their analysis the team combined all existing images of Neptune gathered over the last two decades by ground-based telescopes. They investigated infrared light emitted from a layer of Neptune’s atmosphere called the stratosphere. This allowed the team to build up a picture of Neptune’s temperature and its variations during part of its southern summer.

Because Neptune is roughly 4.5 billion kilometers away and is very cold, the planet’s average temperature reaching around –220°C, measuring its temperature from Earth is no easy task. “This type of study is only possible with sensitive infrared images from large telescopes like the VLT that can observe Neptune clearly, and these have only been available for the past 20 years or so,” says co-author Leigh Fletcher, a professor at the University of Leicester.

Around one third of all the images taken came from the VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-InfraRed (VISIR) instrument on ESO’s VLT in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Because of the telescope’s mirror size and altitude, it has a very high resolution and data quality, offering the clearest images of Neptune. The team also used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and images taken with the Gemini South telescope in Chile, as well as with the Subaru Telescope, the Keck Telescope, and the Gemini North telescope, all in Hawai’i.

Because Neptune’s temperature variations were so unexpected, the astronomers do not know yet what could have caused them. They could be due to changes in Neptune’s stratospheric chemistry, or random weather patterns, or even the solar cycle. More observations will be needed over the coming years to explore the reasons for these fluctuations. Future ground-based telescopes like ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) could observe temperature changes like these in greater detail, while the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will provide unprecedented new maps of the chemistry and temperature in Neptune’s atmosphere.

“I think Neptune is itself very intriguing to many of us because we still know so little about it,” says Roman. “This all points towards a more complicated picture of Neptune’s atmosphere and how it changes with time.”

More information: “Sub-Seasonal Variation in Neptune’s Mid-Infrared Emission” The Planetary Science Journal (2022). DOI: 10.3847/PSJ/ac5aa4
Journal information: The Planetary Science Journal
Provided by ESO.

Is it time to send another message to intelligent aliens?

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Is it time to send another message to intelligent aliens?

Researchers want to open up a dialogue about what humanity should advertise about itself in deep space.

Scientists have crafted a new message for any intelligent extraterrestrials who might be out there. And they want feedback on whether they should send it.

The technology needed to send the message is not yet ready. And if and when the note is transmitted, it would take thousands of years for it to reach its destination. In other words, no one expects a return message from ET anytime soon. But the researchers behind the alien memo hope their ideas will open up a dialogue about how to contact aliens and what to say — and how to immortalize humanity as a species.

“We want to send a message in a bottle in the cosmic ocean, to say, ‘Hey, we are here,'” Jonathan Jiang, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, told Live Science, “even if we are not here some years later.”

Reaching out to ET
The message designed by Jiang and his team builds on previous missives that humanity has sent to space; in fact, researchers timed the creation of the new message for the 50th anniversary of the Arecibo message, the first high-power attempt to contact ET.

That 1974 message used binary code and conveyed information about humanity’s base-10 counting system, common important elements and a map of the solar system. The new message, described in a paper published to the preprint database arXiv, also encodes information in binary and describes basic math, physics and biology that aliens would need in order to understand humans, including descriptions of DNA, amino acids and glucose. It would also contain a map of the Milky Way, the solar system and Earth itself, including information about the makeup of the planet and its atmosphere.

The message is more advanced than its predecessors in several key ways. First, its map of Earth’s location in the Milky Way is more precise than the one in the Arecibo message. In that message, scientists tried using the location of rotating stars called pulsars as signposts to pinpoint Earth. But pulsars’ positions aren’t consistent enough over long periods of time, and these stars aren’t easily differentiated from one another in the vastness of the galaxy. Jiang and his team instead used globular star clusters in the Milky Way as landmarks on their proposed map. These spherical huddles of stars are bright and easily visible, and they have enough distinguishing features that they can act as useful signposts.

The researchers also included a first-of-its-kind time stamp so that any alien intercepting the message would know when it was sent. But how do you convey time to an unknown alien civilization that might have very different ways of measuring than Earthlings do?

The answer, said message co-designer Qitian Jin of the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, was in the hydrogen atom. The neutral hydrogen found in interstellar gas can enter a high-energy state after collisions with other atoms or electrons. After about 10 million years, one of these high-energy hydrogens undergoes a transition back to a lower-energy state — an event called a spin-flip transition. This spin-flip transition provides a convenient universal unit of time for communicating how long after the Big Bang the message was sent.

Related: 9 things we learned about aliens in 2021

“I think that is pretty important, for if you see it like a time capsule, when someone receives it, they know when it was sent,” Jin told Live Science. “So they can know our history. They can build upon that.”

It might be possible to send multiple messages with updated time stamps and information, Jin added, so that a theoretical alien civilization could learn more about Earth over time.

Sending and recieving
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) can be roughly split into two methods: passive and active. In passive SETI, scientists use massive telescopes to listen or look for hints that intelligent life is out there. Such hints might include radio waves, sent either inadvertently or deliberately by an alien civilization.

Active SETI involves sending signals. These efforts are far less common, and most so far have been largely symbolic. In 1972 and 1973, the Pioneer spacecraft were launched with a pair of plaques depicting a line drawing of a man and a woman and symbols meant to show where the craft originated. The plaques were the first message from humanity designed to travel outside the solar system, but the chances of them being found in the vastness of space are minuscule.

In 1977, NASA launched a similar long-shot effort on the Voyager spacecraft, the Golden Record. The record contains music, animal sounds and spoken greetings in 55 languages. It was designed by a committee headed by famous astronomer Carl Sagan and was inspirational to the current team of researchers, said Kristen Fahy, a science systems engineer at JPL and a co-designer of the new message.

“To follow up on that has really been just an honor,” Fahy told Live Science. The new message includes a line drawing of a man and a woman similar to those on the Pioneer plaques, but with a more egalitarian spin: While only the man in the 1970s versions was raising his hand in greeting, both the man and the woman are waving hello in the modern illustration.

The Arecibo message, in contrast to Pioneer and Voyager, was an Earth-based effort. It was sent toward the globular star cluster M13 in 1974 from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, mostly as a symbolic effort. This message is still on its journey to its intended destination; given that M13 is 25,000 light-years away, it’s traveled only about 0.2% of the distance it needs to traverse, Jiang and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

The newly proposed message would be beamed toward a ring of stars about 13,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, Jiang told Live Science. This region is thought to contain a number of planets in the habitable zones of their stars, he said.

“If there are aliens, they are most likely to be there,” he said.

The Arecibo telescope no longer exists; it collapsed in 2020 and then was demolished. The telescopes most likely to transmit the message are the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in Guizhou, China, also known as the Tianyan telescope, and the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, which was designed to search for extraterrestrial signals. Neither telescope can transmit messages right now — they can only receive them — but transmission abilities could be added in future updates, Jiang said.

NASA’s ‘Mega moon rocket’ test resumes. Why were so many details about it kept secret?

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NASA’s ‘Mega moon rocket’ test resumes. Why were so many details about it kept secret?

NASA’s was extra guarded about its big rocket test.

NASA’s new mega moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), is getting one step closer to reaching for the stars Wednesday (April 6) by completing what’s known as a wet dress rehearsal, in which the agency loaded the vehicle’s tanks with cryogenic fuel and simulated countdown in preparation for liftoff.

While NASA broadcasts live video of the test on its website, many key details about the event were kept secret, ostensibly for reasons having to do with national security. But do most of these details really need to be top secret? Here’s what we know about the agency’s decision to be so clandestine, and why not everybody is buying their stated rationales.

What is a wet dress rehearsal?

In anticipation of lighting up its gigantic new launch vehicle, which when capped by the Orion crew vehicle stands 322 feet (98 meters) tall, higher than the Statue of Liberty, NASA needs to test all of the SLS’s various components. During the uncrewed wet dress rehearsal, the agency loads up the rocket’s tanks with supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen — which when combined produce a powerful thrust to send the vehicle into space — and practices various scenarios in preparation for liftoff.

“The test runs about two days long and emulates our launch countdown,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson during a press briefing on Tuesday, March 29. Blackwell-Thompson is the launch director of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to eventually land the first woman and first person of color on the moon.

Engineers monitor temperatures and pressures in the tanks during the rehearsal, taking data the whole time that will help them once the rocket is ready for its debut flight. They also practice going through several different countdown sequences, once to T-minus 1 minute and 30 seconds, a second time down to 33 seconds before launch, and finally all the way down to T-minus 10 seconds before launch.

These allow launch controllers to simulate various situations in which a launch may have to be canceled — or “scrubbed” — due to a technical or weather-related issue, officials said during the March 29 briefing.

Why were key facts kept secret?

While NASA shared certain milestones about the wet dress rehearsal on social media, the agency was prohibited from discussing every detail due to concerns over International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Tom Whitmeyer, the agency’s associate administrator for common exploration systems development, told reporters during the press briefing.

ITAR is a regulatory regime that restricts the sharing of information about weapons and technology in ways that may be harmful to U.S. national security or foreign policy, according to the U.S. Department of State(opens in new tab).

“We’re really super sensitive to cryogenic launch vehicles that are of this size and capability,” Whitmeyer told reporters. “They are very analogous to ballistic-type capabilities that other countries are very interested in.”

In particular, hostile foreign countries might like to get as much information as possible about things like “timing, sequence, flow rates, temperatures,” he added. “Anything that would help them or other folks that could be used to do similar things,” meaning building gigantic and potentially deadly missiles.

The complex interactions involved in loading up both the SLS’s core rocket stage and its upper stage at the same time were a particular concern, Whitmeyer said. “How long it takes to do certain tasks — that’s considered to be important information by other countries,” he added. “So we have to be careful when we share data, particularly for the first time.”

What are people saying about the concerns?

The need to keep everything under wraps didn’t sit well with some experts. “Sigh. ITAR has been the excuse for so much ridiculousness over the years,” tweeted astronomer Jonathan McDowell(opens in new tab) of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who follows space launches closely.

McDowell shared(opens in new tab) a detailed timeline that was given to reporters in 1992 in anticipation of the launch of the space shuttle Endeavor, suggesting NASA’s current skittishness with regards to national security is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Reporter Michael Baylor, who works for NASASpaceflight.com, which focuses on space-related news, had even harsher words. “I am sorry, but this excuse is total BS. It is industry standard to broadcast the primary countdown loop. Pretty much all of the U.S. launch providers do it, and NASA did it during Shuttle. If you are worried about ITAR, you make the callout on a different loop,” he tweeted(opens in new tab).

Cryogenic fuels are not generally used much in ballistic missile systems, Baylor added(opens in new tab). This is probably due to the fact that keeping fuel at supercooled temperatures for a long period of time is difficult and expensive, meaning that many countries have abandoned missiles that use such fuel, according to a website maintained by the Federation of American Scientists(opens in new tab).

Now that the wet dress rehearsal is over, it’s possible additional data will be shared during a post-test media teleconference on April 5, and NASA should be more forthcoming during the upcoming launch of the Artemis 1 mission, expected this summer, Whitmeyer said. “We’re doing everything we can to provide as much information as possible.”

Originally published on Live Science.

World’s oldest known case of cannibalism revealed in trilobite fossils

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World’s oldest known case of cannibalism revealed in trilobite fossils

The trilobite Redlichia rex likely chomped on its own kind.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. But before there were dogs — or even dinosaurs — there were trilobites brutally biting each other on the Cambrian seafloor. New research has revealed that these armored predators didn’t only hunt smaller and weaker animals for food, but would occasionally take bites out of their trilobite comrades of the same species. This finding represents the earliest evidence of cannibalism in the fossil record to date.

Trilobites are now-extinct marine arthropods that first appeared in the fossil record around 541 million years ago. They were stout creatures with thick exoskeletons, which is likely one of the reasons so many trilobite fossils remained preserved all these years; exoskeletons fossilize much easier than softer tissues.

Russell Bicknell, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, spent five years examining trilobite fossils from the Emu Bay Shale formation on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. There are two trilobite species from the same genus found in this formation: Redlichia takooensis, a deposit feeder(opens in new tab) that ate particles on the ocean floor, and the larger, predatory R. rex.

Many of the R. takooensis fossils were found with what appeared to be bite marks, mostly on their hind ends. This was expected, as paleontologists already knew that R. rex made meals of R. takooensis. In the Emu Bay formation, fossilized feces, called coprolites, left behind by R. rex contain trilobite shell remnants. This suggests that R. rex had the capability of eating the smaller trilobite species. What was unexpected, though, were signs of similar bite marks on R. rex. These injuries, the researchers concluded, were likely the result of cannibalism.

“There’s not much else in this deposit that has the toolkit, is biomechanically optimized for this kind of thing, and could willingly crunch down on something hard,” Bicknell told Live Science. While not much is known about trilobite mouthparts, Bicknell is certain that these injuries weren’t “bites” in the traditional sense. Instead, the underside of a trilobite featured two rows of legs, and on these legs were little inward-facing spines. If you have ever eaten crab legs or lobster, then imagine an animal with legs like the tool modern chefs use to crack open these shells. R. rex was born to hunt trilobites, and apparently it didn’t matter much which species.

Most of the injuries seen on the Emu Bay fossils were injuries to the abdomen and not the head. Bicknell believes this is because the injured animals were trying to get away from their predator’s clutches, but he also suggests there may have been a bit of survivorship bias at play too. The injured fossils are from the animals that got away — they weren’t eaten. Trilobites that sustained head injuries likely ended up as coprolites.

While this is the earliest documented example of cannibalism for any animal in the fossil record, Bicknell said it’s likely that cannibalism is much older and more widespread than even these fossils suggest.

“I would go as far as to say that arthropods have been eating arthropods since the dawn of arthropods becoming arthropods,” Bicknell said. However, direct evidence of such ancient cannibalism has not been available in the fossil record, until now.

While it is difficult to prove that cannibalism took place, Bicknell and his colleagues were able to systematically remove all other explanations for the injuries found in R. rex fossils. “What you’re left with is this almost demonstrable record of cannibalism, just short of going back in time and watching it happen,” said Bicknell.

This research was published April 1 in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology(opens in new tab).

First private mission reaches International Space Station

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First private mission reaches International Space Station

The first fully private mission reached the International Space Station early Saturday with a four-member crew from startup company Axiom Space.

NASA has hailed the three-way partnership with Axiom and SpaceX as a key step towards commercializing the region of space known as “Low Earth Orbit,” leaving the agency to focus on more ambitious voyages deeper into the cosmos.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavor docked at 1229 GMT Saturday and the crew entered the space station nearly two hours later, after launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday.

Commanding the Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) is former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, a dual citizen of the United States and Spain, who flew to space four times over his 20-year-career, and last visited the ISS in 2007.

He is joined by three paying crewmates: American real estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian investor and philanthropist Mark Pathy, and Israeli former fighter pilot, investor and philanthropist Eytan Stibbe.

“We’re here to experience this but we understand there’s a responsibility,” Connor said in comments shown on NASA’s live feed.

As the first civilian crew, he said, they “need to get it right.”

The widely reported price for tickets—which includes eight days on the outpost, before eventual splashdown in the Atlantic—is $55 million.

While wealthy private citizens have visited the ISS before, Ax-1 is the first mission featuring an all-private crew flying a private spacecraft to the outpost.

Houston-based Axiom pays SpaceX for transportation, and NASA also charges Axiom for use of the ISS.

Research projects

On board the ISS, which orbits 250 miles (400 kilometers) above sea level, the quartet will carry out 25 research projects, including an MIT technology demonstration of smart tiles that form a robotic swarm and self-assemble into space architecture.

Another experiment involves using cancer stem cells to grow mini tumors, and then leveraging the accelerated aging environment of microgravity to identify biomarkers for early detection of cancers.

“Our guys aren’t going up there and floating around for eight days taking pictures and looking out of the cupola,” Derek Hassmann, operations director of Axiom Space, told reporters at a pre-launch briefing.

In addition, crewmember Stibbe plans to pay tribute to his late friend Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut, who died in the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster when the spaceship disintegrated upon reentry.

Surviving pages from Ramon’s space diary, as well as mementos from his children, will be brought to the station by Stibbe.

The Axiom crew will live and work alongside the station’s regular crew: currently three Americans and a German on the US side, and three Russians on the Russian side.

The company has partnered for a total of four missions with SpaceX, and NASA has already approved in principle the second, Ax-2.

Axiom sees the voyages as the first steps of a grander goal: to build its own private space station. The first module is due to launch in 2024.

The plan is for the station to initially be attached to the ISS, before eventually flying autonomously when the latter retires and is deorbited sometime after 2030.

Record 1st-quarter deforestation in Brazilian Amazon

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Record 1st-quarter deforestation in Brazilian Amazon

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon set a new quarterly record in the first three months of 2022 compared to a year earlier, official data showed Friday.

Satellite images revealed the destruction of 941 square kilometers (363 square miles) of rain forest—the highest quarterly rate since the start of Brazil’s Deter monitoring program in 2015.

This is an area about the size of Dallas.

For the month of March, deforestation slowed by 15 percent year-on-year to 312 km2, according to data from the INPE Brazilian space agency.

But this followed on two months of record highs under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has pushed to open protected Amazonian lands to agribusiness and mining.

Since he entered office in 2019, Brazil’s average annual deforestation in the Amazon, a crucial resource in the race to curb climate change, has risen more than 75 percent from the previous decade.

The destruction is driven mainly by farming and land speculation in agricultural powerhouse Brazil, the world’s biggest exporter of beef and soy.

The country hosts about 60 percent of the Amazon forest.

“Clearly, we have seen in recent years a setback in environmental policy and the result is seen with deforestation records for the first quarter of 2022 and in previous years”, Greenpeace Brazil spokeswoman Cristiane Mazzetti said in a statement.

The new figures suggest Brazil may be on track to set a new yearly deforestation record in 2022.

Dozens hospitalised as Iraq gripped by dust storm

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Dozens hospitalised as Iraq gripped by dust storm

The storm erupted in the north of the country on Thursday, prompting the cancellation of flights serving Arbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region.

As the storm swept south, it shrouded Baghdad and cities as far south as Nasiriyah in a ghostly orange.

In the capital, buildings and vehicles were covered in ochre-coloured dust, AFP journalists reported.

The storm has caused “dozens of hospitalisations across Iraq due to respiratory problems”, health ministry spokesman Saif al-Badr told AFP.

The director of Iraq’s meteorological office, Amer al-Jabri, said that while dust storms were not uncommon in Iraq, they are becoming more frequent “due to drought, desertification and declining rainfall”.

Iraq is particularly vulnerable to climate change, having already witnessed record low rainfall and high temperatures in recent years.

Experts have said these factors threaten social and economic disaster in the war-scarred country.

In November, the World Bank warned that Iraq could suffer a 20 percent drop in water resources by 2050 due to climate change.

Who was king before Tyrannosaurus?

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Who was king before Tyrannosaurus?

Iconic tyrannosauroids like T. rex famously dominated the top of the food web at the end of the reign of the dinosaurs. But they didn’t always hold that top spot.

In a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, a research team led by the University of Tsukuba has described a new genus and species belonging to the Carcharodontosauria, a group of medium- to large-sized carnivorous dinosaurs that preceded the tyrannosauroids as apex predators.

The new dinosaur, named Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, was found in the lower Upper Cretaceous Bissekty Formation of the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan, and therefore lived about 90 million years ago. Two separate evolutionary analyses support classification of the new dinosaur as the first definitive carcharodontosaurian discovered in the Upper Cretaceous of Central Asia.

“We described this new genus and species based on a single isolated fossil, a left maxilla, or upper jawbone,” explains study first author Assistant Professor Kohei Tanaka. “Among theropod dinosaurs, the size of the maxilla can be used to estimate the animal’s size because it correlates with femur length, a well-established indicator of body size. Thus, we were able to estimate that Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis had a mass of over 1,000 kg, and was approximately 7.5 to 8.0 meters in length, greater than the length of a full-grown African elephant.”

This size greatly exceeds that of any other carnivore known from the Bissekty Formation, including the small-sized tyrannosauroid Timurlengia described from the same formation. Therefore, the newly named dinosaur likely topped the food web in its early Late Cretaceous ecosystem.

The genus’s namesake is fittingly regal; Ulughbegsaurus is named for Ulugh Beg, the 15th century mathematician, astronomer, and sultan of the Timurid Empire of Central Asia. The species is named for the country where the fossil was discovered.

Before the Late Cretaceous, carcharodontosaurians like Ulughbegsaurus disappeared from the paleocontinent that included Central Asia. This disappearance is thought to have been related to the rise of tyrannosauroids as apex predators, but this transition has remained poorly understood because of the scarcity of relevant fossils.

Senior author Professor Yoshitsugu Kobayashi at the Hokkaido University Museum explains “The discovery of Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis fills an important gap in the fossil record, revealing that carcharodontosaurians were widespread across the continent from Europe to East Asia. As one of the latest surviving carcharodontosaurians in Laurasia, this large predator’s coexistence with a smaller tyrannosauroid reveals important constraints on the transition of the apex predator niche in the Late Cretaceous.”

Reference:
Kohei Tanaka, Otabek Ulugbek Ogli Anvarov, Darla K. Zelenitsky, Akhmadjon Shayakubovich Ahmedshaev, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi. A new carcharodontosaurian theropod dinosaur occupies apex predator niche in the early Late Cretaceous of Uzbekistan. Royal Society Open Science, 2021; 8 (9): 210923 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.210923

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