Month: March 2022

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gladwell / Getty Images)

Rumors of Russian Internet services degrading have been greatly exaggerated, despite unprecedented announcements recently from two of the world’s biggest backbone providers that they were exiting the country following its invasion of Ukraine.

Just as ISPs provide links connecting individuals or organizations to the Internet, backbone services are the service providers that connect ISPs in one part of the world with those elsewhere. These so-called transit providers route massive amounts of traffic from one ISP or backbone to another. Earlier this week Russian ISPs saw the exit of two of their biggest providers. One was Lumen, the top Internet transit provider to Russia. The other was Cogent, one of the biggest Internet backbone carriers in the world.

Still kicking

A transit provider disconnecting its customers in a country as big as Russia has never happened before, Doug Madori, the director of Internet analysis at network analytics company Kentik, said earlier this week. He and others said the move would constrain the overall amount of bandwidth coming into and out of Russia.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of what an Earth-like planet might look like in a nearby star system. (credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

We now know that our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is host to at least two planets. But we're not sure if there are any planets near Alpha Centauri, a binary system just beyond that. If there are, however, we now know what they might look like. New research has used modeling and spectroscopic data of the system's two stars to estimate what a rocky planet in the system’s habitable zone might be made of.

To estimate the composition of this hypothetical planet—dubbed α-Cen-Earth—the team developed what they call a devolatilization model. To start, they looked at the amounts of volatile (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc.) and non-volatile elements (like iron and silicon) in the Sun and the Earth and looked at how they differed.

Armed with this data, the team then looked at high-resolution spectroscopy data about the elements in the α Centauri A and α Centauri B stars—which provided them information about 22 elements. From their model and this data, they could estimate possible compositions of a hypothetical rocky planet in the system’s habitable zone. “You get a model of the chemical composition of rocky planets that would be in the habitable zone,” Charley Lineweaver, one of the paper’s authors, told Ars.

Enlarge / Transmission electron micrograph of a SARS-CoV-2 virus particle isolated from a patient sample and cultivated in cell culture. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Researchers in France have reported the first compelling genetic evidence of a recombinant SARS-CoV-2 virus that contains elements of both the omicron coronavirus variant and the delta variant. However, health experts at the World Health Organization and elsewhere have been quick to note that such a recombinant virus is expected to arise and, so far, there's no reason to be worried about the hybrid.

The delta-omicron recombinant—a combination of the delta AY.4 subvariant's backbone and the omicron BA.1 subvariant's spike protein—has been circulating at very low levels since at least early January 2022 in France. Researchers have also reported a smattering of cases in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. So far, epidemiology data on the recombinant's spread does not raise any red flags, and the variant does not appear to cause more severe disease, according to WHO technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove, who addressed the variant in a press briefing this week. However, researchers are in the process of conducting more studies on the recombinant and will be monitoring it closely, as the organization does with other new variants, she noted.

Coronaviruses are known to recombine, and researchers fully expected that such recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses would crop up from time to time. Generally, recombination can happen when two variants infect one person at the same time and invade the same cells. In this scenario, the cellular machinery that viruses hijack to make clones of themselves can sometimes abruptly switch from translating the genetic code of one of the variants to the code of the other, resulting in a mosaic virus.

Enlarge / Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin has been tweeting like he's unhinged since Russia invaded Ukraine. (credit: Yegor AleyevTASS via Getty Images)

It has now been half a month since Russia invaded Ukraine, setting into motion a set of consequences that have reverberated around the world.

In the space domain, this has led to a severing of ties between the West and Russia. Space News, for example, tallied up 16 commercial launches that had been scheduled to fly on the Russian Soyuz rocket during the next two years. These payloads are now stranded, affecting customers ranging from the private company OneWeb, to the European Commission, to the government of Sweden. And the joint Europe-Russia probe scheduled to launch to Mars this year, ExoMars, will be delayed for years and may very well be canceled, sources say.

Naturally this has led to speculation about the fate of the International Space Station, which has 15 partner nations and is the crown jewel of unity in space between NASA and Russia. In recent days there have been a number of stories about Russian "threats" to abandon NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the space station. Vande Hei is scheduled to return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule at the end of this month, landing in Kazakhstan. NASA officials are expected to be there to greet him and bring him back to the United States.