Day: August 2, 2023

There are already so many streaming services out there, but the market is not fully saturated just yet. The space agency NASA has announced its own streaming service, NASA+, and it’s completely free.

“See more rockets, more science, and more space,” NASA said of its new streaming service.

NASA+ won’t have any ads or subscription options, so thankfully this one won’t add to your existing monthly bill. What it will have includes a collection of original video series and live coverage for NASA missions. After all, NASA is putting humans back on the Moon and going to Mars, so now is a good time to get people excited about space again with a new streaming service.

“Transforming our digital presence will help us better tell the stories of how NASA explores the unknown in air and space, inspires through discovery, and innovates for the benefit of humanity,” NASA boss Marc Etkind said in a news release.

NASA+ will be available on “most major platforms” through the NASA App on iOS and Android devices. Users can also stream content through Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, and via the web.

In addition to launching NASA+, NASA is revamping its websites, and you can get a sneak peek at the progress made so far right here.

As mentioned, NASA is sending humans back to the moon. The Artemis program began with the launch of the uncrewed Artemis I in November 2022 that orbited around the Moon but didn’t come down for a landing. Artemis II (November 2024) will take a crew of human astronauts to the Moon, but it won’t be until 2025’s Artemis III–if all goes to plan–that humans will land on the Moon to conduct further research. If all goes to plan, it will be the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972 that humans visited the lunar surface.

After this, NASA plans to send an astronaut to Mars.

NASA’s latest rocket launch took place on August 1, with a ship heading to the International Space Station carrying supplies.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

All that Andrew McCalip wanted for his 34th birthday was a shipment of red phosphorus. It was a tough request—the substance happens to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is controlled by the US Drug Enforcement Agency—but also an essential one, if McCalip was going to realize his dream of making a room-temperature superconductor, a holy grail of condensed matter physics, in his startup’s lab over the next week. It required four ingredients, and so far he had access to three.

His followers on X (that is, Twitter, post-rebrand), offered ideas: He could melt down the heads of a pile of matchsticks, or try to buy it in pure form off Etsy, where the DEA might not be looking. Others offered connections to Eastern European suppliers. They were deeply invested in his effort. Like McCalip, many had learned about a possible superconductor called LK-99 earlier that week through a post on Hacker News, which linked to an Arxiv preprint in which a trio of South Korean researchers had claimed a discovery that, in their words, “opens a new era for humankind.” Now McCalip was among those racing to replicate it.

Superconductivity—a set of properties in which electrical resistance drops to zero—typically appears only under frigid or high pressure conditions. But the researchers claimed LK-99 exhibited these qualities at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Among the evidence: an apparent drop in resistance to zero at 400 Kelvin (127 degrees Celsius) and a video of the material levitating above a magnet. The authors, led by Ji-Hoon Kim and Young-Wan Kwon, proposed that this was the result of the Meissner effect, the expulsion of a magnetic field as a material crosses the threshold of superconductivity. If that were true, it could indeed lead to a new era: resistanceless power lines, practical levitating trains, and powerful quantum devices.

On X and Reddit, large language models went by the wayside. The new star was condensed matter physics. Online betting markets were spun up (the odds: not particularly good). Anons with a strangely sophisticated knowledge of electronic band structure went to war with techno-optimistic influencers cheering on an apparent resurgence of technological progress. Their mantra was seductive, and maybe a little reductive: a return to a time of leapfrogging discoveries—the lightbulb, the Manhattan Project, the internet—where the impact of scientific discovery is tangible within the span of a human’s earthly presence. “We’re back,” as one X user put it.

Experts are doubtful. Multiple versions of the LK-99 paper have appeared online with inconsistent data—reportedly the result of warring between the authors about the precise nature of the claim. The researchers aren’t well known in the field, and their analysis lacks basic tests typically used to confirm superconductivity. Spurious claims are also so common in the field that physicists joke about USOs—“unidentified superconducting objects”—a play on UFOs. (Most recent sighting: a room-temperature, high-pressure material from a University of Rochester lab that has been dogged by accusations of plagiarism and rigged data.) There are more likely explanations for the levitation, explains Richard Greene, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Maryland, including magnetic properties in the compound in its normal, non-superconducting state. The betting markets probably had it right: Odds are the new era is not yet upon us.

But the claim is still worth checking out, Greene adds. In his long career studying superconductive materials, he’s seen advances come from outsiders with puzzling papers that explored unfamiliar types of compounds. That includes, in the 1980s, a class of materials that exhibited superconductivity above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 degrees C), making way for all sorts of applications, from magnetic resonance imagery to tokamaks for nuclear fusion. Plus, because physicists understand the mechanics of only certain forms of superconductivity, a seemingly strange or inconsistent result can’t immediately be discounted. Perhaps it’s just something nobody has seen before.

For the first time, scientists have used genetic engineering to trigger ‘virgin birth’ in female animals that normally need a male partner to reproduce.

Previously, scientists have generated young mice and frogs with no genetic input from a male parent. But those offspring were made by tinkering with egg cells in laboratory dishes rather than by giving female animals the capacity for virgin birth, also known as parthenogenesis.

Earlier research identified candidate genes for parthenogenesis, says study co-author Alexis Sperling, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. But her team, she says, not only pinpointed such genes but also confirmed their function by activating them in another species.

No male needed

In mammals, offspring are produced when males’ sperm fertilizes females’ eggs. But many species of insect and lizard, as well as other animals, have also evolved parthenogenesis, which requires no genetic contribution from a male, as an alternative to sex.

To identify the genes that underlie parthenogenesis, Sperling and her colleagues sequenced the genomes of two strains of the fly Drosophila mercatorum: one that reproduces sexually and another that reproduces through parthenogenesis. The researchers then compared gene activity in eggs from flies capable of parthenogenesis with that in eggs from flies capable of only sexual reproduction to identify the genes at work during one process but not the other.

The comparison allowed the authors to identify 44 genes that were potentially involved in parthenogenesis. The researchers altered the equivalent genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which usually cannot reproduce asexually.

After altering various combinations of genes, the scientists hit on a combination that induced parthenogenesis in roughly 11% of female fruit flies. Some of the offspring of these genetically engineered flies were also capable of parthenogenesis.

Although the parthenogenetic flies received genes only from their mothers, they weren’t always clones of their parent. Some had three sets of chromosomes, whereas eggs laid by mothers reproducing through parthenogenesis usually have only two.

Less complicated than sex

“Parthenogenesis is the most effective way to reproduce. In animals, doing sex is very complicated,” says Tanja Schwander, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who has studied parthenogenesis in stick insects. Studying parthenogenesis, she says, helps biologists to understand the benefits and trade-offs associated with sexual reproduction.

The new work could also help biologists to understand the evolution of parthenogenesis itself, says Chau-Ti Ting, an evolutionary biologist at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. She hopes to determine whether other species of fly have genes for parthenogenesis similar to those in D. mercatorum; this could help her to piece together how the behaviour evolved.

Sperling notes that some agricultural pests use parthenogenesis to multiply quickly, amplifying their power to damage crops. In the United Kingdom, for example, a species of moth turned to parthenogenesis because of widespread use of pesticides that disrupt the male moths’ reproduction. Now the moths have become a major pest, Sperling says. She hopes to study which policies and pest-management strategies could trigger pests to rely on parthenogenesis — knowledge that could help to keep pests in check.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 28, 2023.