Month: June 2023

Enlarge / The upper stage for SpaceX's next Starship test fight, named Ship 25, undergoes testing earlier this month in Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX will debut numerous upgrades on the second launch of its full-scale Starship mega-rocket. Those upgrades include a major change in how the rocket’s two stages separate, propulsion system improvements, and a beefed-up launch pad in South Texas that should better withstand the blast from 33 main engines.

“There are really a tremendous number of changes between the last Starship flight and this one, well over a thousand,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO. “So I think the probability of this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. Maybe it's like 60 percent. It depends on how well we do at stage separation.”

Musk outlined some of the Starship rocket modifications in a Twitter Spaces discussion on Saturday with journalist Ashlee Vance. He said the next Starship rocket and upgrades to the launch pad at the Starbase facility in South Texas should be ready for the next test flight in about six weeks. “That’s just the best of our knowledge right now,” Musk said.

(credit: Alex Boersma/PNAS)

The largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon, famous for its utterly enormous jaws and correspondingly huge teeth.

Because of incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodon was and can only make inferences based on some of its living relatives, like the great white and mako sharks. But thanks to some new research on its fossilized teeth, we're now fairly confident that it shared something else with these relatives: it wasn't entirely cold-blooded and apparently kept its body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean.

Taking a temperature

Most sharks, like most fish, are ectothermic, meaning that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group termed mackerel sharks, have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps retain some of the heat their muscles produce. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their surroundings. A species called the salmon shark can maintain a body temperature that's 20° C warmer than the sub-Arctic waters that it occupies.

Japanese scientists working with nematodes (C. elegans) noticed one day that several cultivated worms in the lab mysteriously kept ending up attached to the lids of Petri dishes instead of the dog food agar where they were initially placed. Intrigued, they conducted experiments to figure out how the worms were getting from one point to the other in less than a second.

The researchers found that, rather than crawling up the walls of the dish, the worms were leaping from the bottom of the plate to the lid—and they were using electric fields to do so. They could even leap from the Petri dish onto a bumblebee, both individually and in large clusters. The team described their work in a new paper published in the journal Current Biology.

“Pollinators, such as insects and hummingbirds, are known to be electrically charged, and it is believed that pollen is attracted by the electric field formed by the pollinator and the plant,” said co-author Takuma Sugi, a biophysicist at Hiroshima University in Japan. “However, it was not completely clear whether electric fields are utilized for interactions between different terrestrial animals.”

Enlarge / The common furniture beetle (Anobium punctatum). (credit: Getty | Schellhorn/ullstein bild)

A couple in France developed a rare, "almost forgotten" disease after the beetles munching on their furniture developed their own infestation of toxin-toting mites, according to a case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine by doctors in Marseille.

The man and woman, both 30 years old, turned up at an infectious disease clinic three days after developing an intensely itchy rash all over their abdomens. The cause may have easily gone undetermined if it weren't for a telltale pattern of the woman's rash—the itchy pink marks on her trunk had central dots with pink trails reminiscent of a comet.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Andrey Denisyuk)

The Biden administration today announced how much broadband-deployment funding each US state and territory will be eligible to receive from a $42.45 billion grant program.

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program was approved by Congress in November 2021 and will pay Internet service providers to expand networks in unserved and underserved areas. The BEAD money is being distributed to states by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Texas leads the way with $3.31 billion in today's allocations, followed by California with $1.86 billion. Nineteen states will get at least $1 billion.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | BushAlex)

The song lyrics website Genius' allegations that Google "stole" its work in violation of a contract will not be heard by the US Supreme Court. The top US court denied Genius' petition for certiorari in an order list issued today, leaving in place lower-court rulings that went in Google's favor.

Genius previously lost rulings in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. In August 2020, US District Judge Margo Brodie ruled that Genius' claim is preempted by the US Copyright Act. The appeals court upheld the ruling in March 2022.

"Plaintiff's argument is, in essence, that it has created a derivative work of the original lyrics in applying its own labor and resources to transcribe the lyrics, and thus, retains some ownership over and has rights in the transcriptions distinct from the exclusive rights of the copyright owners... Plaintiff likely makes this argument without explicitly referring to the lyrics transcriptions as derivative works because the case law is clear that only the original copyright owner has exclusive rights to authorize derivative works," Brodie wrote in the August 2020 ruling.