The U.S. has formed a $1 billion partnership with AMD to construct two supercomputers that will tackle large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security, said Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Su. From a report: The U.S. is building the two machines to ensure the country has enough supercomputers to run increasingly complex experiments that require harnessing enormous amounts of data-crunching capability. The machines can accelerate the process of making scientific discoveries in areas the U.S. is focused on.

Energy Secretary Wright said the systems would "supercharge" advances in nuclear power and fusion energy, technologies for defense and national security, and the development of drugs. Scientists and companies are trying to replicate fusion, the reaction that fuels the sun, by jamming light atoms in a plasma gas under intense heat and pressure to release massive amounts of energy. "We've made great progress, but plasmas are unstable, and we need to recreate the center of the sun on Earth," Wright told Reuters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: I realize that, at this point, there are already far too many shows. Every channel, every streaming service is teeming with content demanding your attention, and there are simply too few hours in the day to watch them all. However, with that in mind, may I recommend a new show called Space Live? There's only one episode. The only potential downside is that the episode literally lasts for ever. Actually, that's inaccurate. Space Live isn't a show, it's a channel. It launched on Wednesday morning, tucked away on ITVX, and consists only of live footage of Earth broadcast from the International Space Station. It's beguiling to watch, especially for anyone who didn't realize that a person can be awestruck and bored simultaneously.

It's billed as a world first. ITV has partnered with British space media company Sen to use live 4K footage from its proprietary SpaceTV-1 video camera system, mounted on the International Space Station, giving us three camera views: one of the station's docking ports, a horizon view able to show sunrises and storms, and a camera pointing straight down as the ISS passes across the planet. A tracker in the corner of the screen shows the live location of the ISS, while a real-time AI information feed provides facts about our geography and weather systems.

Of course, if you wanted to be picky, you could argue it isn't exactly new. Nasa's YouTube channel has been streaming live footage from the ISS for years, and uniformly draws an audience of a few thousand. But Space Live is, if nothing else, slightly snazzier. The footage is certainly nicer: at 8.30am on Wednesday, Space Live showed gorgeous images of the sun's glare bouncing off the sea around the Bay of Biscay, while all Nasa could offer was a piece of cloth with the word "Flap" written on it. There's even a soundtrack, a constant, soothing kind of hold music that loops and loops without ever becoming fully annoying. It's an improvement, in other words. And, at least for the first orbit, it is absolutely spellbinding.

Google DeepMind is partnering with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to use its Torax AI software to simulate and optimize plasma behavior inside the company's Sparc fusion reactor. TechCrunch reports: There's a reason Google keeps coming back to the problem: AI might be uniquely suited to making fusion power possible. One of the biggest challenges facing fusion startups is keeping the plasma inside a reactor hot enough for long enough. Unlike nuclear fission reactions, which are self-sustaining, fusion reactions are difficult to maintain outside of stars like the Sun. Without that sort of mass and gravity, the plasma is constantly in danger of diffusing and snuffing itself out.

In CFS's reactors, powerful magnets substitute for gravity to help corral the plasma, but they're not perfect. Reactor operators have to develop control software that can enable the device to continuously react to changing plasma conditions. Problem is, there are almost too many knobs to turn, certainly more than a human is capable of. That's the sort of problem that AI excels at. Experts have cited AI as one of the key technologies that has enabled the industry's remarkable advances over the past several years.

CFS is currently building Sparc, its demonstration reactor, in a suburb outside Boston. The device is about two-thirds completed, and when finished later in 2026, the startup is predicting that it will be the first fusion device capable of producing more power than the plant needs to run itself. Google said Torax can be used with reinforcement learning or evolutionary search models to find the "most efficient and robust paths to generating net energy." The two companies are also exploring whether AI can be used to control the reactor's operation.

China now generates well over twice as much electricity as the United States. The country's economy has become substantially larger than America's in real terms, measured at purchasing power parity, economist Paul Krugman wrote this week. The Trump administration has moved aggressively against renewable energy development. It rolled back Biden's tax incentives for renewables through the One Big Beautiful Bill. The administration is attempting to stop a nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes. It canceled $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. A solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes was killed. The administration canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said solar power is unreliable because "you have to have power when the sun goes behind a cloud and when the sun sets, which it does almost every night."

California has already integrated substantial solar power into its grid through battery storage technology. Republican support for higher education has collapsed over the past decade, according to polling data. The administration has also targeted vaccines and research in multiple areas. Krugman argues that by 2028 America will have fallen so far behind China that it is unlikely to catch up.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Scientists may have finally uncovered the mystery behind ultra-high-energy cosmic rays -- the most powerful particles known in the universe. A team from NTNU suggests that colossal winds from supermassive black holes could be accelerating these particles to unimaginable speeds. These winds, moving at half the speed of light, might not only shape entire galaxies but also fling atomic nuclei across the cosmos with incredible energy. [...]

But what on earth does that mean? The Milky Way is the neighborhood in the universe where you and I live. Our Sun and solar system are part of this galaxy, along with at least 100 billion other stars. "There is a black hole called Sagittarius-A* located right in the centre of the Milky Way. This black hole is currently in a quiet phase where it isn't consuming any stars, as there is not enough matter in the vicinity," [said postdoctoral fellow Enrico Peretti from the Universite Paris Cite]. This contrasts with growing, supermassive, active black holes that consume up to several times the mass of our own Sun each year. "A tiny portion of the material can be pushed away by the force of the black hole before it is pulled in. As a result, around half of these supermassive black holes create winds that move through the universe at up to half the speed of light," Peretti said.

We have known about these gigantic winds for approximately ten years. The winds from these black holes can affect galaxies. By blowing away gases, they can prevent new stars from forming, for example. This is dramatic enough in itself, but Oikonomou and her colleagues looked at something else, much smaller, that these winds could be the cause of." It is possible that these powerful winds accelerate the particles that create the ultra-high-energy radiation," said [lead author Domenik Ehlert]. The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The heliosphere "plays a major role in why life is possible on our planet," reports CNN, "and how it perhaps once existed on others such as Mars." (Basically solar winds create "a constant flow of charged particles" that form "an enormous bubble that protects the planets in our solar system from cosmic radiation permeating the Milky Way".)

NASA says the heliosphere's boundary is three times the distance between Earth and Pluto. (After leaving the heliosphere NASA's Voyager probes collected key data about the heliosphere.) But now there's a new mission to investigate "how that solar wind interacts with interstellar space at the boundary of the heliosphere," CNN reports — called the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (or IMAP): The spacecraft's 10 instruments will also fill gaps in the existing map of the heliosphere, pieced together from data collected by previous missions, and help further explain how the heliosphere largely shields our solar system from damaging cosmic rays, the most highly energetic particles in the universe. Along with two other space weather missions that lifted off aboard the same rocket on Wednesday, IMAP will help scientists better predict when solar storms unleashed by the sun could affect our planet. When aimed at Earth, harsh radiation from the storms, also known as space weather, can pose risks to astronauts on the International Space Station as well as interfere with communications, the electric power grid, navigation, and radio and satellite operations.

"This next set of missions is the ultimate cosmic carpool," said Dr. Joe Westlake, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, during a news conference on Sunday. "They will provide unprecedented insight into space weather. Every human on Earth, as well as nearly every system involved in space exploration and human needs, is affected by space weather...." The IBEX, or Interstellar Boundary Explorer, satellite has been mapping the heliosphere since launching in 2008. But IMAP can explore and map the boundaries of the heliosphere like never before because it has instruments with faster imaging that are capable of 30 times higher resolution. Once it reaches an orbit about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in about three months, IMAP will also capture observations of the solar wind in real time and measure particles that travel from the sun, study the heliosphere's boundary between 6 billion and 9 billion miles (9.7 billion to 14.5 billion kilometers) away, and even collect data from interstellar space.
Also launching was the SWFO-L1 mission, which CNN says is "intended to act as a solar storm detector, providing early warnings to protect astronauts in low-Earth orbit and satellites that provide critical communications on Earth. It's a tool that will be even more necessary as astronauts venture farther into deep space."

NASA streamed the launch live on YouTube.

The Moon is rusting -- and it's Earth's fault. Nature: Scientists have found that oxygen particles blown from Earth to the Moon can turn lunar minerals into hematite, also known as rust. The discovery adds to researchers' growing understanding of the deep interconnection between Earth and the Moon -- and shows how the Moon keeps a geological record of those interactions, says Ziliang Jin, a planetary scientist at Macau University of Science and Technology in China. He and his colleagues reported their findings earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters.

Most of the time, both Earth and the Moon are bathed in a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. But for around five days each month, Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon, blocking most of the flood of solar particles. During that time, the Moon is exposed mainly to particles that had been part of Earth's atmosphere before blowing into space -- a phenomenon known as Earth wind. That wind contains ions of various elements, including hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. When those charged particles hit the Moon, they can implant themselves into the upper layers of lunar soil and trigger chemical reactions.

"Astronomers have spotted a quasi-moon near Earth," reports CNN, "and the small space rock has likely been hanging out near our planet unseen by telescopes for about 60 years, according to new research." The newly discovered celestial object, named 2025 PN7, is a type of near-Earth asteroid that orbits the sun but sticks close to our planet. Like our world, 2025 PN7 takes one year to complete an orbit around the sun...

The newly found 2025 PN7 is just one of a handful of known quasi-moons with orbits near our planet, including Kamo'oalewa, which is also thought to be an ancient lunar fragment. Kamo'oalewa is one of the destinations of China's Tianwen-2 mission launched in May, which aims to collect and return samples from the space rock in 2027. The Pan-STARRS observatory located on the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii captured observations of 2025 PN7 on August 29. Archival data revealed that the object has been in an Earth-like orbit for decades.

The quasi-moon managed to escape the notice of astronomers for so long because it is small and faint, said Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a researcher on the faculty of mathematical sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid who recently authored a paper about the space rock. The paper was published on September 2 in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, which is for timely non-peer-reviewed astronomical observations. The space rock swings within 186,000 miles (299,337 kilometers) of us during its closest pass of our planet, de la Fuente Marcos said.... "It can only be detected by currently available telescopes when it gets close to our planet as it did this summer," de la Fuente Marcos explained. "Its visibility windows are few and far between. It is a challenging object...."

Astronomers are still trying to figure out 2025 PN7's size. About 98 feet (30 meters) across is a reasonable estimate, de la Fuente Marcos said. It also has the potential to be 62 feet (19 meters) in diameter, according to EarthSky. The space rock is currently the smallest-known quasi-moon to have orbited near Earth, de la Fuente Marcos said.

"Betelgeuse may have competition for the most exciting star about to go nova near Earth," writes Space.com.

"Astronomers have discovered the secret of a strange star system that has baffled them for years, finding it contains a dead star about to erupt after overfeeding on a stellar companion." The supernova explosion of this cosmic cannibal could be as bright as the moon, making it visible with the naked eye over Earth even in broad daylight. The system in question is the double star V Sagittae located around 10,000 light-years from Earth, containing a white dwarf stellar remnant and its victim companion star, which orbit each other roughly twice every Earth day. The new research and the revelation of this white dwarf's imminent catastrophic fate answer questions about V Sagittae that have lingered for 123 years...

White dwarfs represent the final stage of stars with masses around that of the sun, occurring when they run out of fuel for nuclear fusion... [W]hite dwarfs that have a stellar companion can get a second lease on life and a more conclusive and explosive end... [T]he stolen stellar material piles up on the surface of the white dwarf until it pushes this stellar remnant past the so-called Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses. This is the mass limit that a stellar remnant has to exceed to trigger a supernova...

However, this team found something very different and extraordinary happening with the stellar material being stolen by the white dwarf in V Sagittae... This investigation revealed that there is a giant halo of gas comprised of material stolen from the companion star wrapped around both the cannibal white dwarf and its stellar victim... "The white dwarf cannot consume all the mass being transferred from its hot star twin, so it creates this bright cosmic ring," team member Pasi Hakala from the University of Turku said. "The speed at which this doomed stellar system is lurching wildly, likely due to the extreme brightness, is a frantic sign of its imminent, violent end."

"The matter accumulating on the white dwarf is likely to produce a nova outburst in the coming years, during which V Sagittae would become visible with the naked eye," Pablo Rodríguez-Gil from Spain's Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias said. "But when the two stars finally smash into each other and explode, this would be a supernova explosion so bright it'll be visible from Earth even in the daytime."
The research was conducted with the Very Large Telescope (four individual telescopes high in the mountains of Chile) — and published last week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Libraries nationwide are fielding patron requests for books that don't exist after AI-generated summer reading lists appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. Reference librarian Eddie Kristan told 404 Media the problem began in late 2022 following GPT-3.5's release but escalated dramatically after the newspapers published lists created by a freelancer using AI without verification.

A Library Freedom Project survey found patrons increasingly trust AI chatbots over human librarians and become defensive when told their AI-recommended titles are fictional. Kristan now routinely checks WorldCat's global catalog to verify titles exist. Collection development librarians are requesting digital vendors remove AI-generated books from platforms while academic libraries struggle against vendors implementing flawed LLM-based search tools and AI-generated summaries that undermine information literacy instruction.

One of the worlds in the TRAPPIST-1 system, a mere 40 light-years away, just might be clad in a life-supporting atmosphere," reports ScienceAlert.

"In exciting new JWST observations, the Earth-sized exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e shows hints of a gaseous envelope similar to our own, one that could facilitate liquid water on the surface." Although the detection is ambiguous and needs extensive follow-up to find out what the deal is, it's the closest astronomers have come yet in their quest to find a second Earth... [T]he first step is finding exoplanets that are the right distance from their host star, occupying a zone where water neither freezes under extreme cold nor evaporates under extreme heat. Announced in 2016, the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system was immediately exciting for this reason. The red dwarf star hosts seven exoplanets that have a rocky composition (as opposed to gas or ice giants), several of which are bang in the star's habitable, liquid water zone...

Red dwarf stars are also much more active than Sun-like stars, rampant with flare activity that, scientists have speculated, may have stripped any planetary atmospheres in the vicinity. Closer inspections of TRAPPIST-1d, one of the other worlds in the star's habitable zone, have turned up no trace of an atmosphere. But TRAPPIST-1e is a little more comfortably located, at a slightly greater distance from the star... [T]he spectrum is consistent with an atmosphere rich in molecular nitrogen, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide and methane.

This is pretty tantalizing. Earth's atmosphere is roughly 78 percent molecular nitrogen. If the results can be validated, TRAPPIST-1e might just be the most Earth-like exoplanet discovered to date. That is not a small if, though. Luckily, more JWST observations are in the pipeline, and the researchers should be able to validate or rule out an atmosphere very soon.
After analyzing four transits of TRAPPIST-1e across TRAPPIST-1, "We are seeing two possible explanations," says astrophysicist Ryan MacDonald of the University of St Andrews in the UK. "The most exciting possibility is that TRAPPIST-1e could have a so-called secondary atmosphere containing heavy gases like nitrogen. "But our initial observations cannot yet rule out a bare rock with no atmosphere..."

Astrophysicist Ana Glidden of MIT led the second team interpreting the results, and says "We are really still in the early stages of learning what kind of amazing science we can do with Webb. It's incredible to measure the details of starlight around Earth-sized planets 40 light-years away and learn what it might be like there, if life could be possible there."

"We're in a new age of exploration that's very exciting to be a part of."

Physicists have confirmed Stephen Hawking's 1971 black hole area theorem with near-absolute certainty, thanks to gravitational waves from an exceptionally loud black hole collision detected by upgraded LIGO instruments. New Scientist reports: Hawking proposed his black hole area theorem in 1971, which states that when two black holes merge, the resulting black hole's event horizon -- the boundary beyond which not even light can escape the clutches of a black hole -- cannot have an area smaller than the sum of the two original black holes. The theorem echoes the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy, or disorder within an object, never decreases.

Black hole mergers warp the fabric of the universe, producing tiny fluctuations in space-time known as gravitational waves, which cross the universe at the speed of light. Five gravitational wave observatories on Earth hunt for waves 10,000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. They include the two US-based detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) plus the Virgo detector in Italy, KAGRA in Japan and GEO600 in Germany, operated by an international collaboration known as LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK).

The recent collision, named GW250114, was almost identical to the one that created the first gravitational waves ever observed in 2015. Both involved black holes with masses between 30 and 40 times the mass of our sun and took place about 1.3 billion light years away. This time, the upgraded LIGO detectors had three times the sensitivity they had in 2015, so they were able to capture waves emanating from the collision in unprecedented detail. This allowed researchers to verify Hawking's theorem by calculating that the area of the event horizon was indeed larger after the merger. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A new minister in Albania charged to handle public procurement will be impervious to bribes, threats, or attempts to curry favour. That is because Diella, as she is called, is an AI-generated bot. From a report: Prime Minister Edi Rama, who is about to begin his fourth term, said on Sept 11 that Diella, which means "sun" in Albanian, will manage and award all public tenders in which the government contracts private companies for various projects.

"Diella is the first Cabinet member who isn't physically present, but is virtually created by AI," Mr Rama said during a speech unveiling his new Cabinet. She will help make Albania "a country where public tenders are 100 per cent free of corruption." The awarding of such contracts has long been a source of corruption scandals in Albania, a Balkan country that experts say is a hub for gangs seeking to launder their money from trafficking drugs and weapons across the world, and where graft has reached the corridors of power.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later. The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models.

Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided "at all costs." It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels. The new results are "quite shocking, because I used to say that the chance of Amoc collapsing as a result of global warming was less than 10%," said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was part of the study team. "Now even in a low-emission scenario, sticking to the Paris agreement, it looks like it may be more like 25%. "These numbers are not very certain, but we are talking about a matter of risk assessment where even a 10% chance of an Amoc collapse would be far too high," added Rahmstorf. "We found that the tipping point where the shutdown becomes inevitable is probably in the next 10 to 20 years or so. That is quite a shocking finding as well and why we have to act really fast in cutting down emissions."

"Observations in the deep [far North Atlantic] already show a downward trend over the past five to 10 years, consistent with the models' projections," said Prof Sybren Drijfhout, at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who was also part of the team. "Even in some intermediate and low-emission scenarios, the Amoc slows drastically by 2100 and completely shuts off thereafter. That shows the shutdown risk is more serious than many people realize."

The findings have been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Southwest Research Institute led a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey, discovering a previously unknown tiny moon orbiting Uranus. A team led by SwRI's Dr. Maryame El Moutamid discovered the small object in a series of images taken on Feb. 2, 2025, bringing Uranus' total moon count to 29. "As part of JWST's guest observer program, we found a previously unknown satellite of the ice giant, which has been provisionally designated S/2025 U 1," said El Moutamid, a lead scientist in SwRI's Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. "This object, by far the smallest object discovered to date, was detected in a series of 10 long exposures obtained by the Near-Infrared Camera."

Located in the outer solar system, Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. Known as "the sideways planet" for its extreme axial tilt, the cyan-colored ice giant has a deep atmosphere composed of hydrogen, helium and methane. Scientists think Uranus' larger moons are roughly equal parts water ice and silicate rock. "Assuming that the new moon has an albedo comparable to other nearby satellites, this object is probably around six miles (10 km) in diameter," El Moutamid said. "It is well below the detection threshold for the Voyager 2 cameras."

"The planet Uranus emits more heat than it gets from the Sun," reports Science Daily , citing a new study led by University of Houston researchers, in collaboration with planetary scientists worldwide. "This means it's still slowly losing leftover heat from its early history," says the first author on the paper, "a key piece of the puzzle that helps us understand its origins and how it has changed over time."

The study found the planet emitting about 12.5% more heat than it absorbs via sunlight, which "suggests Uranus does have its own internal heat — an advance that not only informs NASA's future missions but also deepens scientists' understanding of planetary systems, including processes that influence Earth's climate and atmospheric evolution." The discovery resolves a long-standing scientific mystery about the giant planet, because observational analyses from Voyager 2 in 1986 didn't suggest the presence of significant internal heat — contradicting scientists' understanding of how giant planets form and evolve...

Additionally, the team's methodology provides testable theories and models that could also be applied to explore radiant energy of other planets within and beyond our solar system... It could even impact technology innovation and climate understanding on Earth [giving insights into "the fundamental processes that shape planetary atmospheres, weather systems and climate systems," said one of the paper's authors.]
The article adds that the researchers now think the planet "may have a different interior structure or evolutionary history compared to the other giant planets."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Astronomers have observed the calamitous result of a star that picked the wrong dance partner. They have documented what appears to be a new type of supernova, as stellar explosions are known, that occurred when a massive star tried to swallow a black hole with which it had engaged in a lengthy pas de deux.

The star, which was at least 10 times as massive as our sun, and the black hole, which had a similar mass, were gravitationally bound to one another in what is called a binary system. But as the distance separating them gradually narrowed, the black hole's immense gravitational pull appears to have distorted the star -- stretching it out from its spherical shape -- and siphoned off material before causing it to explode. An AI algorithm detected the event in real time, enabling astronomers to conduct comprehensive observations. Data from four years before the supernova showed bright emissions as the black hole consumed its companion's outer hydrogen layer. The exact mechanism remains uncertain -- either gravitational distortion triggered the star's collapse or the black hole completely tore it apart first. Following the explosion, the black hole consumed residual stellar debris, growing more massive.

NASA's Lunar Trailblazer mission ended prematurely after losing contact with the satellite just one day post-launch, the agency announced today. Engadget reports: The NASA satellite was part of the IM-2 mission by Intuitive Machines, which took off from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on February 26 at 7:16PM ET. The Lunar Trailblazer successfully separated from the rocket as planned about 48 minutes after launch. Operators in Pasadena, CA established communication with the satellite at 8:13PM ET, but two-way communication was lost the next day and the team was unable to recover the connection. From the limited data ground teams received before the satellite went dark, the craft's solar arrays were not correctly positioned toward the sun, which caused its batteries to drain. "While it was not the outcome we had hoped for, mission experiences like Lunar Trailblazer help us to learn and reduce the risk for future, low-cost small satellites to do innovative science as we prepare for a sustained human presence on the Moon," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator at NASA Headquarters' Science Mission Directorate. "Thank you to the Lunar Trailblazer team for their dedication in working on and learning from this mission through to the end."

"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched a crypto billionaire and five other people to the final frontier on Sunday," reports Space.com: The mission — known as NS-34, because it was the 34th overall flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle — lifted off from the company's West Texas spaceport at 8:43 a.m. EDT (1243 GMT; 7:43 a.m. local time in West Texas).

The highest-profile NS-34 passenger was Justin Sun, a 34-year-old billionaire who founded the blockchain platform Tron. In June 2021, Sun won an auction for a seat aboard the first-ever crewed flight of New Shepard, plunking down $28 million. [Sun was unable to take that flight due to a scheduling conflict, but Blue Origin says "the proceeds from the $28 million bid benefitted 19 space-focused charities"...] The people flying with Sun on Sunday were Arvinder (Arvi) Singh Bahal, an Indian-born American real estate investor and adventurer; Turkish businessman and photographer Gökhan Erdem; Deborah Martorell, a journalist and meteorologist from Puerto Rico; Englishman Lionel Pitchford, who has run an orphanage in Nepal for three decades; and American entrepreneur James (J.D.) Russell... All six passengers were spaceflight rookies except Russell, who flew on Blue Origin's NS-28 mission in November 2024.

NS-34 was the 14th human spaceflight to date for New Shepard, which consists of a rocket topped by a crew capsule. Both of these elements are reusable; the rocket comes back to Earth for a vertical, powered touchdown like those performed by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, and the capsule lands softly under parachutes. Each New Shepard flight lasts 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown.
"New Shepard has now flown 75 people into space," Blue Origin said in a statement, "including five people who have flown twice."

California researchers planned a multimillion-dollar test of salt water-spraying equipment that could one day be used to dim the sun's rays — over a 3,900-square mile are off the west coasts of North America, Chile or south-central Africa. E&E News calls it part of a "secretive" initiative backed by "wealthy philanthropists with ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley" — and a piece of the "vast scope of research aimed at finding ways to counter the Earth's warming, work that has often occurred outside public view." "At such scales, meaningful changes in clouds will be readily detectable from space," said a 2023 research plan from the [University of Washington's] Marine Cloud Brightening Program. The massive experiment would have been contingent upon the successful completion of the thwarted pilot test on the carrier deck in Alameda, according to the plan.... Before the setback in Alameda, the team had received some federal funding and hoped to gain access to government ships and planes, the documents show.

The university and its partners — a solar geoengineering research advocacy group called SilverLining and the scientific nonprofit SRI International — didn't respond to detailed questions about the status of the larger cloud experiment. But SilverLining's executive director, Kelly Wanser, said in an email that the Marine Cloud Brightening Program aimed to "fill gaps in the information" needed to determine if the technologies are safe and effective.âIn the initial experiment, the researchers appeared to have disregarded past lessons about building community support for studies related to altering the climate, and instead kept their plans from the public and lawmakers until the testing was underway, some solar geoengineering experts told E&E News. The experts also expressed surprise at the size of the planned second experiment....

The program does not "recommend, support or develop plans for the use of marine cloud brightening to alter weather or climate," Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric and climate science professor at the university who leads the program, said in a statement to E&E News. She emphasized that the program remains focused on researching the technology, not deploying it. There are no "plans for conducting large-scale studies that would alter weather or climate," she added.
"More than 575 scientists have called for a ban on geoengineering development," according to the article, "because it 'cannot be governed globally in a fair, inclusive, and effective manner.'" But "Some scientists believe that the perils of climate change are too dire to not pursue the technology, which they say can be safely tested in well-designed experiments... " "If we really were serious about the idea that to do any controversial topic needs some kind of large-scale consensus before we can research the topic, I think that means we don't research topics," David Keith, a geophysical sciences professor at the University of Chicago, said at a think tank discussion last month... "The studies that the program is pursuing are scientifically sound and would be unlikely to alter weather patterns — even for the Puerto Rico-sized test, said Daniele Visioni, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. Nearly 30 percent of the planet is already covered by clouds, he noted.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.