People at risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis could benefit from taking an existing medication prescribed for established cases of the condition. A clinical trial found Abatacept to be “effective in preventing the onset” of rheumatoid arthritis. Researchers said their findings could be “promising news” for the health service as it works to keep up with an ageing population. Abatacept is currently prescribed to people who already have rheumatoid arthritis, but a team led by King’s College London set out to explore if it can prevent the disease in those deemed at risk. The drug – administere...
An American spaceship attempting a lunar landing has been rescheduled to launch early Thursday, the second private-led effort this year after the first ended in dismal failure.
Intuitive Machines, the Houston company leading mission "IM-1," hopes to become the first non-government entity to achieve a soft touchdown on the Moon and land the first US robot on the surface since the Apollo missions more than five decades ago.
Its hexagonal-shaped Nova-C lander named "Odysseus" had been set to blast off on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:57 am Wednesday local time (0557 GMT).
But NASA said the launch was postponed due to "off-nominal methane temperatures prior to stepping into methane load," according to a post on social media platform X.
"It is now scheduled for 1:05am ET (0605 GMT)" on Thursday, the space agency added.
Odysseus is powered by a mix of supercooled methane and oxygen to enable the spaceship to reach its destination quickly, avoiding prolonged exposure to a region of high radiation surrounding the Earth.
Intuitive Machine's Trent Martin told reporters before the postponement that the "opportunity to return the United States to the Moon for the first time since 1972 is a feat of engineering that demands a hunger to explore."
The craft was due to reach its landing site Malapert A on February 22, an impact crater 300 kilometers (180 miles) from the south pole.
NASA hopes to eventually build a long-term presence and harvest ice there for both drinking water and rocket fuel under Artemis, its flagship Moon-to-Mars program.
- Back to the Moon -
NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to ship science hardware to better understand and mitigate environmental risks for astronauts, the first of whom are scheduled to land no sooner than 2026.
The instruments include cameras to investigate how the lunar surface changes as a result of engine plume kicking up dust and a device to analyze the charged dust haze that appears during lunar twilight as a result of solar radiation.
Odysseus also carries an advanced landing system that uses laser pulses to detect hazards like small boulders and craters.
There is more colorful cargo aboard as well, including a digital archive of human knowledge and 125 mini-sculptures of the Moon by the artist Jeff Koons.
After touchdown, the payloads are expected to run for roughly seven days before lunar night sets in on the south pole, rendering Odysseus inoperable.
IM-1 is the second mission under a NASA initiative called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which the space agency created to delegate trucking services to the private sector to achieve savings and to stimulate a wider lunar economy.
The first, by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, launched in January, but its Peregrine spacecraft experienced an engine anomaly that caused a fuel leak and was eventually brought back to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
- Busy calendar -
Soft landing a robot on the Moon is challenging because it has to navigate treacherous terrain amid a lag of several seconds in communications with Earth and use its thrusters for a controlled descent in the absence of an atmosphere that would support parachutes.
Only five nations have succeeded: the Soviet Union was first, then the United States, which is still the only country to also put people on the surface.
In America's long absence, China has landed three times since 2013, India in 2023, and Japan was the latest, last month -- though its robot has struggled to stay powered on after a wonky touchdown left its solar panels pointing the wrong way.
Apart from Astrobotic's failed attempt, two other private initiatives got close: Beresheet, operated by an Israeli nonprofit, crash-landed in 2019, while Japanese company ispace also had a "hard landing" last year.
Intuitive Machines has two additional launches scheduled for this year, while another Texas company, Firefly Aerospace has one too. Astrobotic will get another shot in late 2024, carrying a NASA rover to the Moon's south pole.
NASA is increasingly purchasing services rather than hardware from commercial partners, unlike during the Cold War when it had a nearly unlimited budget and dictated contracts down to the last bolt.
SAN DIEGO — A new report from researchers at San Diego State University, citing "untreated sewage, industrial waste, and urban run-off due to inadequate infrastructure and urbanization," calls the Tijuana River "a public health crisis" that imperils the good health of a wide range of people who live, recreate and work near the polluted waterway, particularly when wet weather causes floods to spread.
A new planet starts its life in a rotating circle of gas and dust, a cradle known as a protostellar disc. My colleagues and I have used computer simulations to show that newborn gas planets in these discs are likely to have surprisingly flattened shapes. This finding, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, could add to our picture of exactly how planets form.
Observing protoplanets that have just formed and are still within their protostellar discs is extremely difficult. Until now only three such young protoplanets have been observed, with two of them in the same system, PDS 70.
We need to find systems that are young, and close enough for our telescopes to be able to detect the dim light from the planet itself and distinguish it from that of the disc. The whole process of planetary formation lasts only a few million years which is nothing more than a blink of an eye in astrophysical scales. This means we need to have luck to catch them in the act of forming.
Our research group performed computer simulations to determine the properties of gaseous protoplanets under a variety of thermal conditions in the planets’ cradles.
The simulations have enough resolution to be able to follow the evolution of a protoplanet in the disc from an early stage, when it is just a mere condensation within the disc. Such simulations are computationally demanding and were run on DiRAC, the UK’s astrophysics supercomputing facility.
Typically, multiple planets form within a disc. The study found that protoplanets have a shape known as oblate spheroids, like Smarties or M&M’s, rather than being spherical. They grow by drawing gas predominantly through their poles rather than their equators.
In comparison, the typical flattening of protoplanets is 90%. Such a flattening will affect the observed properties of protoplanets, and it needs to be taken into account when interpreting observations.
How planets start off
The most widely accepted theory for planet formation is that of “core accretion”. According to this model, tiny dust particles smaller than sand collide with each other, group together and progressively grow into larger and larger bodies. This is effectively what happens to the dust under your bed when it isn’t cleaned.
Once a core of dust with enough massive forms, it draws gas from the disc to form a gas giant planet. This bottom-to-top approach would take a few million years.
The opposite, top-to-bottom approach, is the theory of disc instability. In this model, the protostellar discs that attend young stars are gravitationally unstable. In other words, they are too heavy to be maintained and so fragment into pieces, which evolve into planets.
The theory of core accretion has been around for a long time and it can explain many aspects of how our Solar System formed. However, disc instability can better explain some of the exoplanetary systems we have discovered in recent decades, such as those where a gas giant planet orbits very very far from its host star.
The appeal of this theory is that planet formation happens very fast, within a few thousand years, which is consistent with observations that suggest planets exist in very young discs.
Our study focused on gas giant planets formed via the model of disc instability. They are flattened because they form from the compression of an already flat structure, the protostellar disc, but also because of how they rotate.
No flat Earths
Although these protoplanets overall are very flattened, their cores, which will eventually evolve into gas giant planets as we know them, are less flattened – only by about 20%. This is just twice the flattening of Saturn. With time they are expected to become more spherical.
Rocky planets, like Earth and Mars, cannot form via disc instability. They are thought to form by slowly assembling dust particles to pebbles, rocks, kilometer-sized objects and eventually planets. They are too dense to be significantly flattened even when they are newly born. There is no possibility that Earth was flattened at such a high degree when it as young.
But our study does support a role for disc instability in the case of some worlds in some planetary systems.
We are now moving from the era of exoplanet discoveries to the era of exoplanet characterisation. Many new observatories are set to become operational. These will help discover more protoplanets embedded in their discs. Predictions from computer models are also becoming more sophisticated.
The comparison between these theoretical models and observations is bringing us closer and closer to understanding the origins of our Solar System.
Flowers grown on inexpensive floating platforms can help clean polluted waterways, over 12 weeks extracting 52% more phosphorus and 36% more nitrogen than the natural nitrogen cycle removes from untreated water, according to our new research. In addition to filtering water, the cut flowers can generate income via the multibillion-dollar floral market.
In our trials of various flowers, giant marigolds stood out as the most successful, producing long, marketable stems and large blooms. Their yield matched typical flower farm production.
Why it matters
Water pollution is caused in large part by runoff from farms, urban lawns and even septic tanks. When it rains, excess phosphorus, nitrogen and other chemicals wash into lakes and rivers.
These nutrients feed algae, leading to widespread and harmful algae blooms, which can severely lower oxygen in water, creating “dead zones” where aquatic life cannot survive. Nutrient runoff is a critical issue as urban areas expand, affecting the health of water ecosystems.
Water pollution is an escalating crisis in our area of Miami-Dade and Broward counties in Florida. The 2020 Biscayne Bay fish kill, the largest mass death of aquatic life on record for the region, serves as a stark reminder of this growing environmental issue.
Inspired by traditional floating farm practices, including the Aztecs’ chinampas in Mexico and the Miccosukees’ tree island settlements in Florida, we tested the idea of growing cut flowers on floating rafts as a way to remove excess nutrients from waterways. Our hope was not only that the flowers would pay for themselves, but that they could provide jobs here in Miami, the center of the U.S. cut-flower trade.
Chemical conditions in the test tanks were the same as in nearby polluted waterways. Jazmin Locke-Rodriguez, CC BY-ND
We floated 4-by-6-foot (1.2-by-1.8-meter) mats of inexpensive polyethylene foam called Beemats in 620-gallon (2,300-liter) outdoor test tanks that mirrored water conditions of nearby polluted waterways. Into the mats we transplanted flower seedlings, including zinnias, sunflowers and giant marigolds. The polluted tank water was rich in nutrients, eliminating the need for any fertilizer. As the seedlings matured into plants over 12 weeks, we tracked the tanks’ improving water quality.
Encouraged by the success of the marigolds in our tanks, we moved our trials to the nearby canals of Coral Gables and Little River. We anchored the floating platforms with 50-pound (22.7-kilograms) weights and also tied them to shore for extra stability. No alterations to the landscape were needed, making the process simple and doable.
Some plants grow roots in places – such as the stem – other than where their original roots began. Jazmin Locke-Rodriguez, CC BY-ND
What still isn’t known
The success of the giant marigolds might be linked to the extra roots that grow from their stems known as adventitious roots. These roots likely help keep the plants stable on the floating platforms. Identifying additional plants with roots like these could help broaden plant choices.
Future raft designs may also need modifications to ensure better stability and growth for other cut-flower and crop species.
What’s next
Our promising findings show floating cut-flower farms could be a sustainable option for mitigating water pollution.
How floating cut-flower farms can clean polluted waterways.
One of us (Locke-Rodriguez) is expanding this research and working to scale up floating farms in South Florida as a demonstration of what could take place in the many locations facing similar issues worldwide.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
A private Houston-based company is set this week to lead a mission to the Moon which, if successful, will mark America's first lunar landing since the end of the Apollo era five decades ago.
Reputation will be on the line when Intuitive Machines' Nova-C spaceship will launch atop a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday, following recent completed touchdowns by China, India and Japan.
So why entrust such tasks to the commercial sector, especially after an attempt by another company with similar goals, Astrobotic, failed just last month?
The answer lies in the way NASA has fundamentally reorganized itself for Artemis, the agency's flagship Moon-to-Mars program.
During the Cold War, the space agency was handed blank checks and managed industrial contracts down to the last bolt -- but the new paradigm bets on America's mighty market economy to deliver breakthroughs at a fraction of historic costs.
While the current approach has borne some fruit, it also carries the risk of the United States falling behind its principal space rival, China, in achieving major milestones -- namely the next crewed mission to the Moon, and getting the first rocks back from Mars.
- SpaceX success -
The focus on fledgling companies under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative builds on the example set by the meteoric rise of SpaceX, which was derided in its startup phase as reckless, but is now arguably the agency's favorite contractor.
Scott Pace, a former member of the National Space Council, told AFP that NASA had intentionally adopted a policy that prioritized "more shots on goal" at lower costs.
"The reliability that SpaceX has now is as a result of painfully blowing up multiple rockets along the way," he said.
SpaceX launches are currently the only way astronauts launch from US soil, following the end of the NASA-led space shuttle program in 2011 that left NASA reliant on Russia's Soyuz rockets.
Elon Musk's company beat heavily-favored aerospace giant Boeing in certifying its system first, proving for experts the value of competition between companies providing different options.
Each space shuttle launch cost over $2 billion, adjusted for inflation, according to a study in the journal Nature, while the estimated average cost for NASA to buy a seat on a SpaceX flight is around $55 million, according to a government audit.
- On to Artemis -
During the Apollo era, NASA was given more than $300 billion, according to an analysis by Casey Dreier of the nonprofit Planetary Society -- far more than the $93 billion to be spent by 2025 on Artemis.
Rather than telling private industry exactly what to build, the agency now purchases services from companies -- though this at-times piecemeal approach carries certain drawbacks.
While NASA owns the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion crew capsule, it has contracted with SpaceX an unconventional and as yet unproven landing system based on the company's next-generation Starship rocket, to provide the first crewed lunar touchdown.
Starship has yet to complete a flight test without blowing up -- and it requires ultra-cold refueling multiple times while in orbit before it travels to the Moon, independently of SLS, to dock with Orion and pick up the astronauts.
Futuristic space fuel depots could be a great way to facilitate long-range missions to Mars -- the founding ideal of SpaceX, which Musk pursues with messianic fervor -- but getting it right could well delay the return of American boots to the Moon.
NASA has said this could take place by 2026 at the earliest, though that timeline threatens to drag. China, meanwhile, has set a deadline of 2030 for its own crewed landing -- and has lately stuck to its promises.
The Chinese "don't go through all of the shenanigans the US has, which is extreme polarization followed by government shutdown threats, followed by continuing resolutions," G. Scott Hubbard, a former top NASA official, told AFP.
For better or worse, America is locked into its new public-private paradigm.
Artemis was intentionally designed with an array of international partnerships -- Europe, Canada, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and more -- in order to prevent it from being scrapped, said Dreier.
Moreover, a previous Moon-to-Mars program called Constellation that was conceived in the 2000s and managed more like Apollo was canceled, largely due to budget constraints, so there is little realistic alternative.
I used to love rocket launches when I was younger. During every launch, I imagined what it would feel like to be an astronaut sitting in the spacecraft, listening to that final countdown and then feeling multiple gees push me up through the atmosphere and away from our blue marble.
But as I learned more about the severe limitations of human spaceflight, I turned my attention to the oldest and most accessible form of space exploration: the science of astronomy.
Since 2019, I’ve watched my unencumbered enthusiasm for rocket launches soften to tepid interest, and finally sour to outright dread. The corporate space race, led by SpaceX, is entirely responsible for this transformation in my mindset.
I am worried by the complete shift to the move-fast-and-break-things attitude that comes from the tech sector instead of government scientific agencies. I am put off by the colonialist language and billionaire-worship of private corporations. I am increasingly furious at the nonexistent public education and lack of transparency offered by these companies.
The corporate space race is well underway, with private companies flooding Low Earth Orbit with thousands of mass-produced satellites. In previous decades, the prohibitively high cost of launch kept the rate of increase and total number of satellites from growing too rapidly. But launches have been getting steadily cheaper for years.
Al Jazeera reports on the impacts of Starlink satellites.
SpaceX has launched thousands of their own Starlink communication satellites, as well as hundreds of satellites for their direct competitors. Half of all launches worldwide in 2023 were SpaceX rockets.
As an astronomer, I’m painfully aware of what these thousands of new satellites have done to the night sky worldwide. They reflect sunlight long after the sky has grown dark, looking like moving stars.
Starlink satellites are the most numerous and occupy some of the lowest orbits, so they make up the majority of the satellites seen in the sky.
Last year, SpaceX launched one of the brightest objects in the sky on behalf of another company: BlueWalker 3, a satellite with the same sky-footprint as a small house. They plan to operate a fleet of dozens, each as bright as the brightest stars in the sky.
Lost information and knowledge
These satellites are now increasingly obstructing telescopic space exploration, both on the ground and in space. Astronomers are the canaries in the coal mine for this rapidly expanding experiment in orbit: we see these satellites increasingly affecting our research every day.
I have watched over the past five years as satellite streaks in my own research images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have changed from an unusual occurrence to lost data in nearly every image.
A composite of 29 individual exposures from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Maunakea, taken in August 2022. The horizontal and diagonal white lines are bright satellites that unexpectedly flew through the field of view during observations, covering any objects behind them. (P. Cowan/W. Fraser/S. Lawler/CLASSY Survey Team/CFHT)
Astronomy is the only way to learn about the universe, the overwhelming majority of which can never be explored by humans. The farthest human-made object from Earth is the Voyager 1 probe, now eight times farther from the sun than Neptune after 46 years continuously travelling significantly faster than a speeding bullet.
But even if Voyager 1 was pointed directly toward our nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri (it’s not), it would take over 100,000 years to get there. We are light-years away from having technology that can robotically explore even our neighbouring solar systems on a human timescale, let alone bring humans out to the stars.
The vast majority of astronomy research is carried out by telescopes on Earth: large optical telescopes on remote mountaintops, large radio telescopes in radio-quiet zones that are meticulously maintained, as well as smaller telescopes scattered around the world.
There are a handful of telescopes in Low Earth Orbit that also have to contend with light pollution from Starlink and other megaconstellations. There are also a handful of telescopes outside Earth orbit which can only operate for a few years, unlike ground-based facilities that can be maintained and enhanced with new technologies for decades.
The Canada-Hawaii-France telescope, located on the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano located on the island of Hawaii.(Shutterstock)
Government regulation needed
Space exploration using Earth-based telescopes is growing increasingly less effective as more bright and radio-loud satellites are placed between Earth and the stars. But there are much worse problems ahead if corporations continue launching satellites: atmospheric pollution on launch and reentry, ground casualty risks from reentries, and the very real possibility of a runaway collisional cascade in orbit, referred to as the Kessler Syndrome.
Satellites are an incredibly useful part of our lives, but there are limits to how many can safely orbit Earth. Current regulations on launches and orbital operations by governments are very weak, and are not set up for the current regime of thousands of new satellites per year.
Regulation on the number of satellites in orbit would force corporations toward technology improvements and service models that use fewer satellites, keeping orbit usable for future generations.
With proper regulation, our oldest form of space exploration can continue. I desperately hope we never reach a point where the natural patterns in the sky are drowned out by anthropogenic ones, but without regulation, corporations will get us there soon.
Right-wing podcast host Charlie Kirk blamed Travis Kelce's angry moment at the Super Bowl on the COVID-19 vaccine.
Kirk reflected on Kelce's behavior at Super Bowl LVIII on his Monday radio program. The star tight end was accused of having a meltdown after his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, suffered a fumble.
"I don't want this to be forgotten. Yeah, okay, Super Bowl champion," Kirk said of Kelce. "He's, you know, dating Taylor Swift. Good luck with that. I mean, but this is inexcusable. It's unacceptable."
Kirk then played a clip of Kelce grabbing his coach's arm to stay in the game.
"All right. That's way too much spike protein," Kirk said, referring to the COVID-19 vaccine. "Travis Kelce's really fired up. What a great spokesperson for Pfizer — starts shoving 65-year-old men nearly to the ground. Bless your heart, Travis Kelsey. Bless your heart."
But Kirk downplayed conspiracy theories about rigging the game in favor of Swift's boyfriend.
"Now I will say this that it did feel as if you're just watching you're like, oh my goodness, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen," he recalled. "And they just keep on showing the Taylor Swift box, the Taylor Swift box. It just — it felt very — I don't want to say it felt scripted. But if you were to believe things were scripted, it would kind of play out that way."
In some cultures, people are frugal while in others they tend to be generous. Some cultures favour meticulous planning while others favour living in the moment. Theories abound about how and why differences like these between cultures emerge and, increasingly, researchers are looking to the environments people live in for answers.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we explore what role ecological factors, including the climate, play in shaping cultural norms and behaviour.
Scientists have long speculated about where cultural differences come from. Some have highlighted the role of institutions such as the Catholic Church. Others have pointed to the kind of crops traditionally grown in different regions, such as rice in the south of China and wheat in the north.
But a growing body of evidence suggests that human culture can be shaped by key features of the environment. Michael Varnum, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University in the US, wanted to track how much of an impact it made.
Using data from over 200 countries, Varnum and his team studied the connections between nine ecological variables – including rainfall and temperature, but also inequality, population density and disease threat – and 66 cultural variables including personality traits, social values and motivation.
The results indicate that a combination of long-term, sustained ecological conditions can explain nearly 20% of the differences between cultures.
In some communities in Iran, where it’s very dry and people have managed to live there in large numbers for a long time, the idea is that, for the group to be successful in those conditions, people had to get pretty good at thinking about the future and planning for it. So the amount of available water is really driving long-term thinking.
The level of variability in ecological factors can also play a part, for example in what’s called cultural tightness and looseness. Tighter cultures are those with strict rules and punishments for deviance, while loose cultures are those with weaker rules and are more permissive.
Varnum’s analysis suggests that cultures that experience a lot of variability in their ecology are likely to have tighter social norms than those that experience more consistent ecological patterns.
To find out more about his research, and how ecological factors may also influence the behaviour of other animals, listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast.
A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written by Mend Mariwany, and produced by Mend Mariwany and Meher Batia. Gemma Ware is the show’s executive producer. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor, Alice Mason runs our social media and Soraya Nandy does our transcripts.
From African elephants searching for water, to turtles crossing seas to nest, and to albatrosses on their ocean-spanning search for food, the world's migratory species are under threat across the planet, according to a landmark report Monday.
The first-ever State of the World's Migratory Species assessment, which focusses on the 1,189 species covered by the UN Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), found that one in five is threatened with extinction and 44 percent are seeing their populations decline.
Humans are to blame, by destroying or breaking up habitats, hunting, and polluting areas with plastics, chemicals, light and noise.
Climate change also threatens to interfere with migration routes and timings, by altering seasonal conditions.
"We are finding out the phenomenon of migration itself is under threat," CMS chief Amy Fraenkel told AFP, adding that the report should be a "wake up call about what's happening".
The report is released as over 130 signatory countries -- with the notable absence of the United States, China, Canada and Russia -- gather for a conference in Samarkand, Uzbekistan from February 12 to 17.
Migratory species often rely on very specialised sites to feed and mate and their journeys between them can cross international borders and even continents.
Iconic species that make some of the most extraordinary journeys across the planet include the monarch butterfly, the humpback whale and the loggerhead turtle.
"Today's report sets out the evidence that unsustainable human activities are jeopardising the future of migratory species," said Inger Andersen, head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Hunting, farming, fishing
Among the chief threats are agriculture and fishing.
Farming can destroy habitat, Fraenkel said, while "bycatch" by fishing vessels -- when other fish or animals become ensnared by fishing gear -- is the biggest continued threat for whales.
She said that while habitat destruction is considered the main risk to migratory animals, for some species the report found that it was "intentional killing", either for wild meat, or sport, or because the animals are thought of as pests.
"There is a big gap that we've now identified that needs action," she said.
The report, compiled by UNEP's World Conservation Monitoring Centre, found that over the past three decades, 70 CMS-listed species have become more endangered, including the steppe eagle, Egyptian vulture and the wild camel.
Just 14 now have an improved conservation status -- including blue and humpback whales and the white-tailed sea eagle.
Of the 158 mammals listed under the convention, 40 percent are globally threatened, according to the report.
Meanwhile almost all -- 97 percent -- of the 58 fish species listed are facing a high risk of extinction, including migratory sharks, rays and sturgeons.
More than 960 species of birds are CMS-listed and while only 14 percent were assessed as threatened, the authors stressed this still amounts to some 134 species.
The report also found 399 migratory species -- including albatrosses, ground sharks and stingrays -- are categorised as threatened or near-threatened but are not yet CMS-listed.
'Magnificent creatures'
The report, which is intended to feed into the Samarkand conference, includes a focus on species most at risk, highlighting the threats from fishing, farming and pollution.
They echo a flagship biodiversity agreement in 2022, when countries agreed to preserve 30 percent of the planet's land and sea by 2030.
Many of the migratory species listed on CMS provide economic value or "services" useful to humans -- from tourism centred on whales, dolphins, elephants and cheetahs to the pollination provided by birds and bats.
But Fraenkel said these species also connect communities across the world, their departures and arrival marking the passing of the seasons.
"They are really magnificent creatures," she said.
A study published Friday warned that a systemic collapse of the Atlantic Ocean currents driving warm water from the tropics toward Europe could be more likely than researchers previously estimated—an event that would send temperatures plummeting in much of the continent.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, could be headed for a relatively sudden shutdown that René Van Western, who led the Dutch study published in Science Advances, called "cliff-like."
"We are heading towards a tipping point."
For many millennia, the Gulf Stream has carried warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico northward along the eastern North American seaboard and across the Atlantic to Europe. As human-caused global heating melts the Greenland ice sheet, massive quantities of fresh water are released into the North Atlantic, cooling the AMOC—which delivers the bulk of the Gulf Stream's heat—toward a "tipping point" that could stop the current in its tracks.
An AMOC shutdown would cause temperatures to rise in the Southern Hemisphere but plunge dramatically in Europe. In the study's model, London cools by an average of 18°F and Bergen, Norway by 27°F. An AMOC failure would also cause sea levels to rise along North America's east coast.
"We are moving closer [to the collapse], but we we're not sure how much closer," van Westen toldThe Associated Press. "We are heading towards a tipping point."
According to the study:
Although AMOC collapses have been induced in complex global climate models by strong freshwater forcing, the processes of an AMOC tipping event have so far not been investigated. Here, we show results of the first tipping event in the Community Earth System Model, including the large climate impacts of the collapse. Using these results, we develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal of AMOC tipping: the minimum of the AMOC-induced freshwater transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic. Reanalysis products indicate that the present-day AMOC is on route to tipping. The early warning signal is a useful alternative to classical statistical ones, which, when applied to our simulated tipping event, turn out to be sensitive to the analyzed time interval before tipping.
"The research makes a convincing case that the AMOC is approaching a tipping point based on a robust, physically based early warning indicator," said Tim Lenton, director of the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute. "What it cannot and does not say is how close the tipping point, because... there is insufficient data to make a statistically reliable estimate of that.
"We have to plan for the worst," added Lenton, who was not involved in the Dutch study. "We should invest in collecting relevant data and improving estimation of how close a tipping point is, improving assessment of what its impacts would be, and getting pre-prepared for how we could best manage and adapt to those impacts if they start to unfold."
Stefan Rahmstorf—who leads the Earth Systems Analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany and was not part of the new study—called the research "a major advance in AMOC stability science."
"The new study adds significantly to the rising concern about an AMOC collapse in the not-too-distant future," Rahmstorf told The Associated Press. "We will ignore this at our peril."
All the rain that has led to swollen rivers and flooding in parts of San Diego and large portions of Southern California has coincided with multiple snowstorms that blew across the Sierra Nevada in the northern half of the state.
That may translate to a second consecutive year of robust output from the state's hydroelectric power plants, which would help bolster the electric grid this summer.
But officials at the California Independent System Operator, which manages the power system for about 80 percent of the state, aren't celebrating yet.
An all-European quartet of astronauts, including Turkey's first, splashed down off the Florida coast on Friday morning, completing Axiom Space's third private mission to the International Space Station.
The Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) was the company's first launch where all three paid seats were bought by national agencies rather than wealthy individuals.
A live stream showed a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule named "Freedom" float down on parachutes to the Atlantic Ocean, where it was intercepted and brought aboard a recovery boat.
"I am very proud of my Ax-3 crewmates who helped their agencies achieve all of their science objectives, technology demonstrations and outreach events," Axiom's Chief Astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, a Spanish and US citizen and former NASA astronaut said in a farewell ceremony before the crew headed back to Earth.
The mission was initially meant to last two weeks, but the return journey was delayed by several days owing to bad weather, resulting in an 18 day stay on the ISS.
Lopez-Alegria was joined by Turkish pilot and air force colonel Alper Gezeravci, Walter Villadei, an Italian air force colonel who had previously flown to the edge of space on a Virgin Galactic space plane, and Marcus Wandt from Sweden, who was also representing the European Space Agency.
Nations with smaller space programs are increasingly turning to the private sector to fulfill their space ambitions, with Turkey in particular hailing the mission as a sign of its growing stature on the world stage.
The crew carried out 30 experiments, learning more about the impact of microgravity on the human body, advancing industrial processes and more.
Axiom Space was founded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini, a former ISS program manager for NASA, and entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian.
In addition to organizing private missions to the orbital outpost, the company is developing spacesuits for future NASA missions to the Moon.
It is also building a commercial space station that it intends to initially attach to the ISS, then separate and orbit independently sometime before the ISS is retired.
The exact costs of the Ax-3 have not been disclosed, but in 2018 when the company first announced the program, which involves chartering SpaceX hardware and paying NASA for services, it set a price tag of $55 million per seat.
More recently, Hungary was reported by spacenews.com to be planning a $100 million deal with Axiom for a future mission involving one astronaut.
Britain, which is striving to build a post-Brexit space strategy, has also signed an agreement for a future mission carrying UK astronauts.
Protection from commercial whaling has helped humpback whale populations recover on a global level. © Juan Barreto, AFP