Last year, a NASA mission proved that humans could change an asteroid’s course by crashing into one with a spacecraft. But if an impact alone is not enough, we do have at least one alternative option: nuking it.

A new study, released after NASA‘s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully moved an asteroid moonlet, studies how a nuclear device could redirect an errant space rock coming to Earth. (We haven’t found any problems yet despite decades of searching, but searching and research continues as a precaution.)

“If we have enough warning time, we could potentially launch a nuclear device, sending it millions of miles away to an asteroid that is headed toward Earth,” Mary Burkey, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in a Tuesday (Dec. 19) statement.

Related: ‘HAMMER’ Time? Spacecraft Could Nuke Dangerous Asteroid to Defend Earth 

Planetary defense researchers are actively investigating the very cinematic possibility of fending off an impending asteroid with a nuclear detonation, just like Bruce Willis did in the 1998 Hollywood movie "Armageddon." As part of that research, Burkey and colleagues developed a new model that simulates what a nuclear detonation’s high-energy, X-ray emissions will do to an asteroid.

On paper, nuking an asteroid has advantages over a mission like DART. The biggest is energy: Nuclear devices are capable of producing more energy per mass than any human technology. And because space launches must always minimize mass, a nuclear warhead can deliver a far more powerful punch than a DART-like spacecraft can ever manage. 

“We would then detonate the device and either deflect the asteroid, keeping it intact but providing a controlled push away from Earth, or we could disrupt the asteroid, breaking it up into small, fast-moving fragments that would also miss the planet,” said Burkey.

A nuclear detonation delivers much of its energy in the form of X-rays. If a nuclear explosion strikes an asteroid, this powerful radiation can wash over the asteroid, potentially vaporizing any material unlucky enough to be in its path. Burkey and colleagues developed their model to simulate these effects on four different asteroid materials and under a range of conditions.

It is critical to ensure that any sort of asteroid deflection attempt actually deflects the asteroid on a non-hazardous course — and does not cause collateral damage by sending asteroid shards toward humans. For that reason, the researchers say they hope that planetary defense scientists can use this model to get a clearer picture before they try anything.

The research was published on Dec. 19 in The Planetary Science Journal.

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Sniffing Women’s Tears Makes Men Less Aggressive

By Rachel Nuwer

When someone starts to cry, other people oftentimes feel empathy and concern. But the biological reasons for shedding tears can extend beyond merely prompting a sense of compassion. The tears themselves appear to take on a role as a chemical peacemaker between men and women, new research has discovered.

Women’s tears act to reduce aggression in men who are close enough to catch a whiff of the waterworks, according to findings published in PLOS Biology and confirmed through human behavioral studies, brain imaging and molecular biology. The researchers speculate that tears from people who aren’t women likely have a similar effect, but this has yet to be tested.

The new paper suggests that a fundamental reason why women shed emotional tears is “to convey a chemical signal that lowers aggression,” says Shani Agron, co-lead author of the study, which she conducted for her doctoral degree in neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. (Agron has since graduated.) “We believe this is a shared mechanism of many mammals.”

Producing tears has long been considered a uniquely human behavior, but that’s a flawed notion, says co-senior author Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who was Agron’s adviser. Dogs, for example, shed tears when they reunite with their owners after a period of separation. Baby mouse tears contain molecular cues that sway female mice to reject male advances, while pheromones in female mouse tears encourage males to stop fighting each other and mate with the female instead. Mole rat subordinates, moreover, go so far as to cover themselves in their own tears to chemically deflect aggression from dominant members in their group.

Humans, like other mammals, communicate information with body odors. But it wasn’t obvious that tears would have any olfactory effect on human behavior because people cannot perceive a smell from them. Additionally, while most mammals have a second olfactory organ that is responsible for detecting pheromones, in humans, this organ is thought to be vestigial.

The first evidence that tears can chemically influence human behavior emerged in 2011, when Sobel and his colleagues published a study in Science that showed that women’s tears reduced levels of testosterone and self-reported sexual arousal in men. This earlier work raised more questions than it provided answers for. It took years of effort to conduct a more thorough follow-up, in part because of the difficulty of collecting tears from donors. The researchers need at least one milliliter of tears to use on each experimental participant, which is “a lot of tears,” Sobel says. Using an onion or other irritant to force someone’s eyes to water is not an option, Agron adds, because “these are a completely different type of tears.”

To collect the tears used in the new study, the team put out a call for volunteers who cry easily. Only a few men showed up, and none was able to produce enough tears to qualify. Of the 100 or so women who volunteered, only six were able to supply sufficient amounts of tears to warrant collection. Participants could use any means they wanted to elicit the tears—from listening to sad music to reading a sad letter—but most turned to the lab’s expansive “library of sad movies,” Agron says. In addition to tears, the researchers also collected drops of saline solution that they trickled down women’s face for use in control experiments.

The researchers next gathered data from 25 male volunteers who played a game in the lab that is often used in studies of aggression. During the competitive game, participants were led to believe that their opponent was another person. It was in fact a computer algorithm, however. Occasionally, the opponent stole money from the participants, who could then either choose to take revenge, with no monetary gain for themselves, or let their opponent get away with it but continue collecting more money for themselves. The researchers calculated aggressiveness by the number of times a participant chose revenge divided by the number of times they were provoked. The team also repeated this experiment in a second group of 26 male volunteers who played the game while inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, allowing their brain activity data to be collected.

All participants played the game twice, and before each session, they were asked to inhale from a “sniff jar” that they were told contained “assorted odors” but that in fact held either tears or saline. The researchers found that when the men sniffed the women’s tears, they were nearly 44 percent less aggressive in the game than when they sniffed the saline solution. The behavioral reduction in aggression was also accompanied by neuronal changes. The researchers observed that the men’s brain post-tear sniff exhibited less activity in the prefrontal cortex and the left anterior insula, regions that are associated with aggression and decision-making. Connectivity between the anterior insula and amygdala, a region that is responsible for emotional processing and also part of the olfactory network, increased as well.

Working with colleagues at Duke University, the team used molecular biology methods to test the effects of tears and saline on 62 human olfactory receptors in a lab dish. They identified four receptors that responded to tears but not saline. This finding helps to answer “a major question” about how pheromonelike signals are processed in humans, Agron says.

Agron, Sobel and their colleagues are now interested in running future experiments to test the effect of women’s tears on other women and that of babies’ tears on adults. Sobel hypothesizes that baby tears, especially, will likely have an aggressiveness-lowering effect on adults. “Babies cannot communicate with you in language,” he says. “But evolution may have provided babies with this tool to lower aggression.”

The fact that people continue to be able to produce tears throughout adulthood, Agron adds, indicates that crying is probably “a behavior that serves us throughout life.”

NASA has completed its first laser link with an in-orbit laser relay system, marking a significant advancement in space communication technology.

The successful demonstration of two-way laser communications on Dec. 5 between laser terminals in different orbits could provide a basis for faster communications between Earth and the moon or even beyond. 

The experiment has taken years to set up. The Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) payload was delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) on November 9, flying aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of NASA’s 29th commercial resupply services mission. 

After installation onto the Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility, engineers conducted tests to ensure ILLUMA-T’s functionality. ILLUMA-T was then used to communicate with NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) satellite, launched in 2021 and operating high up in geostationary orbit. 

Related: Artemis 2 will use lasers to beam high-definition footage from the moon (video)

While the ISS orbits around 230–275 miles (370–460 km) above the Earth, LCRD is orbiting at 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above the equator. This gap allows for a long distance test of laser communications.

Laser communications, also known as optical communications, use infrared light rather than traditional radio waves to send and receive signals. The much shorter, infrared wavelengths of lasers allow much greater amounts of information to be sent with each transmission compared with the longer wavelengths of radio.

Challenges include precisely aligning the transmitters and receivers and making the components small, light and power efficient enough for use in space.

ILLUMA-T and LCRD belong to NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program. Using laser communications greatly increases the efficiency of data transfer and can lead to a faster pace of scientific discoveries, according to a NASA statement.

"Laser communications will not only return more data from science missions, but could serve as NASA’s critical, two-way link to keep astronauts connected to Earth as they explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond," Dr. Jason Mitchell, director of SCaN’s Advanced Communications and Navigation Technology division.

"We are now performing operational demonstrations and experiments that will allow us to optimize our infusion of proven technology into our missions to maximize our exploration and science," David Israel, a NASA space communications and navigation architect, added.

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Scientist Discover How to Convert CO₂ into Powder That Can Be Stored for Decades

By John Fialka & E&E News

CLIMATEWIRE | A team of scientists from Massachusetts has developed a process to convert one of the world’s most threatening planet-warming emissions — carbon dioxide — into a powdery, harmless fuel that could be converted into clean electricity.

The breakthrough follows an almost centurylong effort to turn CO2 into a cheap, clean fuel. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exposed CO2 to catalysts and then electrolysis that turns the gas into a powder called sodium formate, which can be safely stored for decades.

“I think we have a big break here,” said Ju Li, an MIT professor leading the research team. “I could leave 10 tons of this stuff to my granddaughter for 50 years."

Researchers have previously turned CO2 into fuels that required too much energy to make, or were difficult to store long term.

The MIT process gets closer to an ambitious dream: turning captured CO2 into a feedstock for clean fuel that replaces conventional batteries and stores electricity for months or years. That could fill gaps in the nation’s power grids as they transition from fossil fuels to intermittent solar and wind energy.

But the effort has been an uphill battle. A 2018 study called CO2 a “notoriously inert molecule;" two years later, another paper declared the invisible gas as “far more pernicious” to work with than researchers had thought.

The MIT team traces its breakthrough to November 2022. That’s when Li, who started his career as an undergraduate at China’s University of Science and Technology, went to a conference of the school’s alumni in Boston.

The 48-year-old Li met Dawei Xi, a young doctoral student in engineering at nearby Harvard University. Xi, now 27, was skeptical of the conversion efficiency of captured CO2, predicting that the team’s efforts would make a fuel that was too acidic.

“We were arguing on basic electrochemistry,” Li recalled. “He provided much valuable guidance on how to do this.”

Xi eventually joined the research team, and Li introduced him to Zhen Zhang, one of his graduate students. Xi explained that his hunch was that the MIT process would became ”acidity imbalanced,” making the product useless after a short period of time.

Within a month, the pair had identified the problem and worked out what later proved in the MIT laboratory to be a highly efficient way to convert captured CO2.

The resulting powder closely resembles a commercial product that has been safely used for years to melt ice on highways and airports. It has been stored for 2,000 hours in tanks without a hint of corrosion, Li said.

Li’s team has also designed a refrigerator-sized fuel cell that uses a liquefied version of the stored power. That could produce electricity for homes, he said, and “nothing goes into the atmosphere.”

“Think of it as artificial wood,” Li said.

Li said he is beginning discussions with commercial companies interested in the MIT process that emerged. Li’s team is also exploring ways heavy industries might use it to meet company CO2 emission reduction goals.

So what happens next?

“There is this valley of death,” Li noted, using a term scientists often use to describe the difficult process of scaling up a laboratory solution into a commercial product.

“We will need space and money," he said, "and that’s not easy to do in a university.”

Last month, Li’s team published a study in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science outlining their efficient process for converting CO2 into fuel.

“Several improvements account for the greatly improved efficiency of this process,” said Zhang, the study’s lead author. That, he said, improves the prospect of CO2 utilization for long-term energy storage.

A fuel derived from CO2, Li said, could be more promising than hydrogen and methanol for power generation. Methanol is a “toxic substance” and its leakage could cause a “health hazard," Li said, while hydrogen gas can leak from pipes and tanks, “precluding” the possibility of long-term storage.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2023. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

• Tesla’s Cybertruck had a viral moment last week after it needed a rescue on a snowy hill.
• The US forest service has put out a press release saying it could be a learning experience.
• It invited Tesla executives to "sit down at the table with us and develop an educational experience for new Cybertruck owners."

Tesla’s Cybertruck had a viral moment when it needed a rescue on a snowy hill from a Ford pickup.

Ford CEO Jim Farley took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to clarify that the video of the Cybertruck’s off-roading troubles wasn’t a promotional stunt for his company.

The U.S. Forest Service, on the other hand, shared a press release on Thursday saying the viral video could be a learning experience.

Responding to the viral video, Stanislaus National Forest supervisor Jason Kuiken invited Tesla executives to "sit down at the table with us and develop an educational experience for new Cybertruck owners."

"We feel confident that had the driver of the Cybertruck had a better understanding of the topographical feature indicated on our maps, practiced Leave No Trace principles, and generally been more prepared, this whole incident could have been not only avoided, but also provided much-needed education to many new off-road users," said Kuiken.

"Ha! Nobody knows how to throw shade better than the Forest Service," one user commented on Facebook.

This isn’t the first time that Tesla’s off-road troubles have gone viral. In November, a video of a Cybertruck struggling to climb a dirt hill garnered over 8 million views.

In response, Ford CEO Jim Farley produced his own off-road demo of the Ford F-150 Lightning making its way up a very similar hill of dirt to shade the rival carmaker.

Representatives for Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside regular business hours.

As Hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea surface and deposit them when it made landfall. Larry was literally a perfect storm: Because it hadn’t touched land before reaching the island, anything it dropped would have been scavenged from the water or air, as opposed to, say, a highly populated city, where you’d expect to find lots of microplastics.

As Larry passed over Newfoundland, the instrument gobbled up what fell from the sky. That included rain, of course, but also gobs of microplastics, defined as bits smaller than 5 millimeters, or about the width of a pencil eraser. At its peak, Larry was depositing over 100,000 microplastics per square meter of land per day, the researchers found in a recent paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Add hurricanes, then, to the growing list of ways that tiny plastic particles are not only infiltrating every corner of the environment, but readily moving between land, sea, and air.

As humanity churns out exponentially more plastic in general, so does the environment get contaminated with exponentially more microplastics. The predominant thinking used to be that microplastics would flush into the ocean and stay there: Washing synthetic clothing like polyester, for instance, releases millions of microfibers per load of laundry, which then flow out to sea in wastewater. But recent research has found that the seas are in fact burping the particles into the atmosphere to blow back onto land, both when waves break and when bubbles rise to the surface, flinging microplastics into sea breezes.

The instrument in a clearing on Newfoundland was quite simple: a glass cylinder, holding a little bit of ultrapure water, securely attached to the ground with wooden stakes. Every six hours before, during, and after the hurricane, the researchers would come and empty out the water, which would have collected any particles falling—both with and without rain—on Newfoundland. “It’s just a place that experiences a lot of extreme weather events,” says Earth scientist Anna Ryan of Dalhousie University, lead author of the paper. “Also, it’s fairly remote, and it’s got a pretty low population density. So you don’t have a bunch of nearby sources of microplastics.”

The team found that even before and after Larry, tens of thousands of microplastics fell per square meter of land per day. But when the hurricane hit, that figure spiked up to 113,000. “We found a lot of microplastics deposited during the peak of the hurricane,” says Ryan, “but also, overall deposition was relatively high compared to previous studies.” These studies were done during normal conditions, but in more remote locations, she says.

The researchers also used a technique known as back trajectory modeling—basically simulating where the air that arrived at the instrument had been previously. That confirmed that Larry had picked up the microplastics at sea, lofted them into the air, and dumped them on Newfoundland. Indeed, previous research has estimated that somewhere between 12 and 21 million metric tons of microplastic swirl in just the top 200 meters of the Atlantic, and that was a significant underestimate because it didn’t count microfibers. The Newfoundland study notes that Larry happened to pass over the garbage patch of the North Atlantic Gyre, where currents accumulate floating plastic.