Month: January 2024

Enlarge / A camera on Astrobotic's Peregrine spacecraft captured this view of a crescent Earth during its mission. (credit: Astrobotic)

Astrobotic knew its first space mission would be rife with risks. After all, the company's Peregrine spacecraft would attempt something never done before—landing a commercial spacecraft on the surface of the Moon.

The most hazardous part of the mission, actually landing on the Moon, would happen more than a month after Peregrine's launch. But the robotic spacecraft never made it that far. During Peregrine's startup sequence after separation from its United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket, one of the spacecraft's propellant tanks ruptured, spewing precious nitrogen tetroxide into space. The incident left Peregrine unable to land on the Moon, and it threatened to kill the spacecraft within hours of liftoff.

"What a wild adventure we were just on, not the outcome we were hoping for," said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic.

Enlarge / The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. (credit: Getty | Craig F. Walker)

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.

The accusations come from data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud. On January 2, David posted on his research integrity blog, For Better Science, a long list of potential data manipulation from DFCI researchers. The post highlighted many data figures that appear to contain pixel-for-pixel duplications. The allegedly manipulated images are of data such as Western blots, which are used to detect and visualize the presence of proteins in a complex mixture.

DFCI Research Integrity Officer Barrett Rollins told The Harvard Crimson that David had contacted DFCI with allegations of data manipulation in 57 DFCI-led studies. Rollins said that the institute is "committed to a culture of accountability and integrity," and that "Every inquiry about research integrity is examined fully."

Enlarge / These are the kinds of shark teeth discovered in burial sites and other ceremonial remains of the inland Maya communities. From left to right, there's a fossilized megalodon tooth, great white shark tooth, and bull shark tooth. (credit: Antiquity)

The megalodon, a giant shark that went extinct some 3.6 million years ago, is famous for its utterly enormous jaws and correspondingly huge teeth. Recent studies have proposed that the megalodon was robust species of shark akin to today's great white sharks, only three times longer. And just like the great white shark inspired Jaws, the megalodon has also inspired a 1997 novel and a blockbuster film (2018's The Meg)—not to mention a controversial bit of "docu-fiction" on the Discovery Channel.  But now a team of 26 shark experts are challenging the great white shark comparison, arguing that the super-sized creature's body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought in a new paper published in the journal Paleontologia Electronica.

“Our study suggests that the modern great white shark may not necessarily serve as a good modern analogue for assessing at least certain aspects of its biology, including its size,” co-author Kenshu Shimada, a palaeobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago, told The Guardian. “The reality is that we need the discovery of at least one complete megalodon skeleton to be more confident about its true size as well its body form.” Thus far, nobody has found a complete specimen, only fossilized teeth and vertebrae.

As previously reported, 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 (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives, like the great white and mako sharks.

Enlarge / Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet, May 2018. (credit: Getty Images | zphotos)

Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wasn't kidding when, earlier this month, he said more layoffs are coming. The latest group to be hit is Alphabet's X Lab, which is losing "dozens of employees," according to a new report from Bloomberg. This is something like the 11th Google layoff announcement we've covered in the past 12 months and the fourth one this month.

The X Lab is Alphabet's "moonshot" experimental group, which is responsible for wild concepts like a wearable head-up display, a self-driving car, smart contact lenses, flying Internet balloons, and delivery drones. This is the age of Google cost-cutting, and you'll notice none of those projects is a rip-roaring commercial success. On Google's financials, the X Lab is part of Alphabet's "Other Bets" group, which burns through around a billion dollars every quarter. It's a research arm, so the hope is that spending all this money will someday lead to new revenue streams. For the short-term Wall Street types, though, it's a money loser, quarter to quarter, and that makes it a prime candidate for cuts.

Bloomberg has a copy of the memo announcing the cuts to the X Labs staff, and there's more in there than just layoffs. X Lab CEO Astro Teller writes: "We’re expanding our approach to focus on spinning out more projects as independent companies funded through market-based capital. We’ll do this by opening our scope to collaborate with a broader base of industry and financial partners, and by continuing to emphasize lean teams and capital efficiency." Basically, Google wants these money losers to find their own funding somewhere else, at least partially.

Enlarge / President Joe Biden at a Rose Garden event at the White House on May 1, 2023, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )

An anti-voting robocall that seems to use an artificially generated version of President Joe Biden's voice is being investigated by the New Hampshire Attorney General's office. The calls sent on Sunday told Democrats to avoid voting in the Presidential Primary on January 23.

"Although the voice in the robocall sounds like the voice of President Biden, this message appears to be artificially generated based on initial indications," the state AG's office said in an announcement today. The recorded message appears "to be an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire Presidential Primary Election and to suppress New Hampshire voters," the announcement said.

The "Biden" voice in the recording (available with this NBC News article) sounds a bit off but perhaps could fool some people into thinking it came from the president.