C.2 Solar System Science solicits proposals for research, data analysis, data preservation, and tools that support investigations to help ascertain the content, origin, and evolution of the Solar System and the search for life’s origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe. The Planetary Science Division is committed to supporting the most meritorious research, data analysis, data preservation, and tools development, and encourages efforts that involve emerging fields, systems science, and convergence research that works across disciplines to solve compelling scientific problems. Proposals may be submitted at any time through March 31, 2026 (the open period of ROSES-25), but reviews will occur a few times a year (see Table C.2-1 in Section 3.1).
ROSES-2025 Amendment 6 makes several changes: It establishes that the anonymized Table of Work Effort and references are outside of the 5-page S/T/M section (see Section 3.2), removes an exclusion regarding data archiving (see Section 2.1), changes the first proposal submission cut-off date for inclusion in the Winter 2025 review to September 15, 2025, changes the second estimated review date to Spring 2026 (see Table C.2-1 in Section 3.1), and removes the HEC requirement in the S/T/M as it appears as a cover page question, see Section 3.2. New text is in bold and deleted text is struck through.
On or about August 1, 2025, this Amendment to the NASA Research Announcement “Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) 2025” (NNH25ZDA001N) will be posted on the NASA research opportunity homepage at https://solicitation.nasaprs.com/ROSES2025
Questions concerning C.2 Solar System Science may be directed to Katharine Robinson, Rebekah Dawson-Rigas, and Curtis Williams at hq-scubed@mail.nasa.gov.
Treehoppers are tiny insects with wildly diverse shapes. Some resemble thorns, while others look like spinning tops or spikes. Over 3,000 treehopper species exist, yet the purpose behind their extreme body forms remains unclear.
A new study presents a surprising explanation. The body shapes of treehoppers might help them detect static electricity.
This fresh idea comes from Dr. Sam England and Professor Daniel Robert at the University of Bristol. The experts suggest that treehopper morphology evolved in part to sense electrical signals.
Insects can sense electric fields
Electric fields in air were once thought irrelevant to land animals. Water conducts electricity well. Air does not. But several recent discoveries changed this idea.
Bees, caterpillars, hoverflies, and even spiders can detect electric fields without touching the source.
This ability comes from hair-like sensory structures that deflect when electric forces act on them. These structures are usually setae or antennae. Treehoppers have plenty of them, especially on their dramatic pronotum.
How treehoppers detect electric signals
The pronotum is the shield-like extension on a treehopper’s back. Researchers found that it is covered with tiny, articulated setae that are likely mechanosensory.
These hairs could respond to electric fields, especially when placed at ridges and tips where the electric field is strongest.
The placement of the hair isn’t random. Shorter hairs (pit-type) sit near the base. Taller hairs (erect-type) appear at the outer tips. These positions make them well suited to catch electric signals from nearby insects.
Weird shapes make sensing easier
Using 3D computer modeling, the team found that the strange shapes of treehoppers enhance electric field detection. Sharp edges and protrusions increase the field strength near the sensory hairs.
Treehoppers with spiked or horned pronota experience electric fields up to 100 kV/m. This is far higher than those with flat shapes.
This increased exposure means they can detect other insects more effectively. Predators or mutualists approaching with a charge will create electrical signals that trigger responses.
Treehoppers react to electrical signals
To test this theory, the researchers exposed treehoppers to artificial electric fields. They placed the insects on a pole and turned on a voltage source when the insect reached the top. Many treehoppers turned back, indicating they sensed something unusual.
Those that experienced an electric field were more likely to retreat than those in the control group. This behavior supports the idea that treehoppers use electroreception to detect threats.
Enemies and friends have different charges
The study compared electrostatic charges of predators and allies. Predatory wasps often carried strong, negative charges. In contrast, stingless bees known to protect treehoppers carried weaker, mostly positive charges.
This difference might let treehoppers tell allies from enemies using charge polarity and strength.
The erect-type and pit-type setae even respond differently. Pit-type hairs, for example, can detect charge polarity more reliably and from more angles.
Body shapes for electric sensing
The researchers propose that these extreme morphologies may act as electrostatic lenses. Like antennas, they draw in electric signals and improve the insect’s ability to sense its environment.
The shapes extend sensory range, increase receptor surface area, and direct electric signals more effectively to sensitive spots. This might explain why certain shapes appear more often in predator-rich environments.
Other animals may do this too
This idea may apply to other animals. Many species across insects and spiders have exaggerated shapes. If those structures also enhance electroreception, it could reshape our understanding of evolution.
“We think our study provides a really exciting launch pad for investigating static electricity as a driver of organismal morphology more generally,” said Dr. England.
“There’s plenty of other insects, spiders, and other animals and plants that also have really extreme shapes, which in many cases are currently without explanation.”
“Our study provides the first evidence of the electrostatic sense potentially driving morphological evolution, but we can’t prove this just yet.”
Treehoppers may adapt to electrical cues
The next step is linking specific treehopper shapes to local electric environments. Researchers want to know if certain structures evolved to detect predators from particular angles or distances.
“If we can link treehopper shapes to certain aspects of their electrical ecology, like specific predators which approach from certain angles with particular static charges, this would really begin to strongly support our ideas around static electricity as an evolutionary driver,” noted Dr. England.
This research opens new paths. It pushes scientists to rethink why evolution created strange shapes and what hidden senses they might serve.
The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
—–
Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.
Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.
Nature is often the best model for science. For nearly a century, scientists have been trying to recreate the ability of some mammals and birds to survive extreme environmental conditions for brief or extended periods by going into torpor, when their body temperature and metabolic rate drop, allowing them to preserve energy and heat.
Taking inspiration from nature, Hong Chen, professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and of neurosurgery at WashU Medicine, and an interdisciplinary team induced a reversible torpor-like state in mice by using focused ultrasound to stimulate the hypothalamus preoptic area in the brain, which helps to regulate body temperature and metabolism. In addition to the mouse, which naturally goes into torpor, Chen and her team induced torpor in a rat, which does not. Their findings, published in 2023 in Nature Metabolism, showed the first noninvasive and safe method to induce a torpor-like state by targeting the central nervous system.
Now, the team is in pursuit of translating induced, or synthetic, torpor into potential solutions for humans, such as when there is reduced blood flow to tissues or organs, to preserve organs for transplantation or to protect from radiation during space travel.
Conventional medical interventions focus on increasing energy supply, such as restoring blood flow to the brain after a stroke. Synthetic torpor seeks to do the opposite by reducing energy demand.
“The capability of synthetic torpor to regulate whole-body metabolism promises to transform medicine by offering novel strategies for medical interventions,” said Chen in a Perspectives paper published in Nature Metabolism July 31.
Synthetic torpor has been used successfully in preclinical models with medications and specialized targeting of the neural circuit, but there are challenges to adapting these methods for humans. Previous human trials with hydrogen sulfide were terminated early due to safety concerns.
“Our challenges include overcoming metabolic differences among animals and humans, choosing the correct dose of medication and creating ways to allow a reversible torpor-like state,” said Wenbo Wu, a biomedical engineering doctoral student in Chen’s lab and first author of the Perpectives paper, a collaboration between Chen’s team and Genshiro Sunagawa from the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan. “Collaboration among scientists, clinicians and ethicists will be critical to develop safe, effective and scalable solutions for synthetic torpor to become a practical solution in medicine.”
Chen’s team, including Yaoheng (Mack) Yang, who was a postdoctoral research associate in her lab and is now assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, targeted the neural circuit with their induced torpor solution in mice. They created a wearable ultrasound transducer to stimulate the neurons in the hypothalamus preoptic area. When stimulated, the mice showed a drop in body temperature of about 3 degrees C for about one hour. In addition, the mice’s metabolism showed a change from using both carbohydrates and fat for energy to only fat, a key feature of torpor, and their heart rates fell by about 47%, all while at room temperature.
Ultrasound is the only noninvasive energy modality capable of safely penetrating the skull and precisely targeting deep brain structures. While ultrasound neuromodulation lacks cell-type specificity compared with genetic-based neuromodulation, it provides a noninvasive alternative for inducing synthetic torpor without the need for genetic modifications.”
Hong Chen, professor of biomedical engineering, McKelvey School of Engineering and of neurosurgery, WashU Medicine
Chen and her team indicate that synthetic torpor offers a promising therapeutic strategy with additional applications, including inhibiting tumor growth and potential development of new therapies for tau protein related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease. However, much remains unknown about how brain regions, peripheral organs and cellular pathways coordinate metabolic suppression and arousal. Researchers also need to study the long-term risks and potential side effects and call for more preclinical studies and technological innovations that will facilitate a dual approach, which would include modulating neural circuits associated with hypometabolism and influencing peripheral metabolic pathways through systemic interventions, such as with drugs or peripheral neuromodulation.
“Synthetic torpor is no longer just a theoretical concept – it is an emerging field with the potential to redefine medicine,” Chen said. “Bridging fundamental neuroscience, bioengineering and translational medicine will be key to overcoming current challenges and advancing synthetic torpor toward real-world applications. Synthetic torpor could transition from a scientific curiosity to a human reality through interdisciplinary collaborations.”
Source:
Washington University in St. Louis
Journal reference:
Yang, Y., et al. (2023). Induction of a torpor-like hypothermic and hypometabolic state in rodents by ultrasound. Nature Metabolism. doi.org/10.1038/s42255-023-00804-z.
On July 29, Firefly Aerospace (Cedar Park, Texas, U.S.) was awarded a $176.7 million NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract to deliver five NASA-sponsored payloads to the Moon’s south pole in 2029. The mission will use Firefly’s composites-intensive Elytra orbital vehicle and Blue Ghost lunar lander to enable payload operations that include evaluating the Moon’s south pole resources, such as hydrogen, water and other minerals, and studying the radiation and thermal environment that could affect future astronauts and lunar infrastructure.
During Blue Ghost Mission 4 operations, Firefly’s Elytra Dark transfer vehicle will first deploy the Blue Ghost lander into lunar orbit and remain on orbit to provide a long-haul communications relay for the mission. Blue Ghost will then land in the Moon’s south pole region, deploy the rovers and enable payloads operations with data, power and communications services for more than 12 days on the lunar surface.
The NASA-sponsored payloads onboard Blue Ghost include two rovers — the MoonRanger rover and a Canadian Space Agency rover — as well as a laser ablation ionization mass spectrometer (LIMS), a laser retroreflector array (LRA) and the stereo cameras for lunar plume surface studies (SCALPSS), which also flew on Blue Ghost Mission 1. These payloads will help uncover the composition and resources available at the Moon’s south pole, advance lunar navigation, evaluate the chemical composition of lunar regolith and further study the effects of a lander’s plume on the Moon’s surface during landings.
Following Blue Ghost Mission 4 operations, Elytra Dark will remain operational in lunar orbit for more than 5 years in support of Firefly’s Ocula lunar imaging service. The mission enables a third Elytra Dark in Firefly’s growing constellation to provide customers with faster revisit times for lunar mapping, mission planning, situational awareness and mineral detection services. The first two Elytra Dark vehicles will launch as part of Blue Ghost Mission 2 to the far side of the Moon in 2026 and Blue Ghost Mission 3 to the Gruithuisen Domes in 2028.
“Firefly’s Elytra Dark spacecraft are companions for Blue Ghost — they’re highly maneuverable vehicles built with the same flight-proven components and propulsion system that successfully landed Blue Ghost on the Moon,” says Chris Clark, VP of spacecraft. “As our Elytra constellation continues to grow in lunar orbit, Firefly is in a position to provide lunar imaging services and a communications relay for missions anywhere on the Moon’s surface. And with extra payload capacity on both Elytra and Blue Ghost, we invite additional government and commercial customers to join our fourth mission.”
Want to learn more about Firefly’s developments? Take a look at these recent announcements.
Related Content
A new era for ceramic matrix composites
CMC is expanding, with new fiber production in Europe, faster processes and higher temperature materials enabling applications for industry, hypersonics and New Space.
Composites end markets: New space (2025)
Composite materials — with their unmatched strength-to-weight ratio, durability in extreme environments and design versatility — are at the heart of innovations in satellites, propulsion systems and lunar exploration vehicles, propelling the space economy toward a $1.8 trillion future.
Expanding high-temperature composites in India and the U.S.
Azista USA offers polymers and processes for carbon/carbon and other CMC, including novel hot-melt phenolic and phthalonitrile prepregs for faster cycle times, alternative solutions.
The agency’s largest interplanetary probe tested its radar during a Mars flyby. The results include a detailed image and bode well for the mission at Jupiter’s moon Europa.
As it soared past Mars in March, NASA’s Europa Clipper conducted a critical radar test that had been impossible to accomplish on Earth. Now that mission scientists have studied the full stream of data, they can declare success: The radar performed just as expected, bouncing and receiving signals off the region around Mars’ equator without a hitch.
Called REASON (Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface), the radar instrument will “see” into Europa’s icy shell, which may have pockets of water inside. The radar may even be able to detect the ocean beneath the shell of Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon.
“We got everything out of the flyby that we dreamed,” said Don Blankenship, principal investigator of the radar instrument, of the University of Texas at Austin. “The goal was to determine the radar’s readiness for the Europa mission, and it worked. Every part of the instrument proved itself to do exactly what we intended.”
The radar will help scientists understand how the ice may capture materials from the ocean and transfer them to the surface of the moon. Above ground, the instrument will help to study elements of Europa’s topography, such as ridges, so scientists can examine how they relate to features that REASON images beneath the surface.
Europa Clipper has an unusual radar setup for an interplanetary spacecraft: REASON uses two pairs of slender antennas that jut out from the solar arrays, spanning a distance of about 58 feet (17.6 meters). Those arrays themselves are huge — from tip to tip, the size of a basketball court — so they can catch as much light as possible at Europa, which gets about 1/25th the sunlight as Earth.
The instrument team conducted all the testing that was possible prior to the spacecraft’s launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 14, 2024. During development, engineers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California even took the work outdoors, using open-air towers on a plateau above JPL to stretch out and test engineering models of the instrument’s spindly high-frequency and more compact very-high-frequency antennas.
But once the actual flight hardware was built, it needed to be kept sterile and could be tested only in an enclosed area. Engineers used the giant High Bay 1 clean room at JPL, where the spacecraft was assembled, to test the instrument piece by piece. To test the “echo,” or the bounceback of REASON’s signals, however, they’d have needed a chamber about 250 feet (76 meters) long — nearly three-quarters the length of a football field.
The mission’s primary goal in flying by Mars on March 1, less than five months after launch, was to use the planet’s gravitational pull to reshape the spacecraft’s trajectory. But it also presented opportunities to calibrate the spacecraft’s infrared camera and perform a dry run of the radar instrument over terrain NASA scientists have been studying for decades.
As Europa Clipper zipped by the volcanic plains of the Red Planet — starting at 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) down to 550 miles (884 kilometers) above the surface — REASON sent and received radio waves for about 40 minutes. In comparison, at Europa the instrument will operate as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) from the moon’s surface.
All told, engineers were able to collect 60 gigabytes of rich data from the instrument. Almost immediately, they could tell REASON was working well. The flight team scheduled the full dataset to download, starting in mid-May. Scientists relished the opportunity over the next couple of months to examine the information in detail and compare notes.
“The engineers were excited that their test worked so perfectly,” said JPL’s Trina Ray, Europa Clipper deputy science manager. “All of us who had worked so hard to make this test happen — and the scientists seeing the data for the first time — were ecstatic, saying, ‘Oh, look at this! Oh, look at that!’ Now, the science team is getting a head start on learning how to process the data and understand the instrument’s behavior compared to models. They are exercising those muscles just like they will out at Europa.”
Europa Clipper’s total journey to reach the icy moon will be about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) and includes one more gravity assist — using Earth — in 2026. The spacecraft is currently about 280 million miles (450 million kilometers) from Earth.
Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.
Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA Marshall executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at NASA Kennedy, managed the launch service for the Europa Clipper spacecraft. The REASON radar investigation is led by the University of Texas at Austin.
Farmers lose billions of dollars each year to diseases that clog a plant’s veins and leave entire fields limp. New work from UC, Davis shows that a carefully edited immune sensor can help crops recognize some of the bacteria behind those losses – a threat that’s growing as the climate warms.
The discovery builds on decades of study into how plants notice invaders and trigger internal alarms. It also highlights a fast moving molecular arms race, because microbes constantly tweak the proteins on their surface to slip past detection.
Rebuilding crop disease defenses
A team led by Gitta Coaker, a plant disease expert at UC Davis, found that natural versions of a plant sensor called FLS2 can detect one piece of a bacterial protein – but often miss similar ones.
By studying FLS2 genes from different plant species, they identified specific building blocks – or amino acids – that affect how well the sensor recognizes threats.
When they changed just 13 of these in a crop-friendly version, the sensor regained its ability to detect bacteria it had previously overlooked.
“We were able to resurrect a defeated receptor – one where the pathogen has won – and enable the plant to have a chance to resist infection in a much more targeted and precise way,” said Coaker.
She sees the strategy as a template for updating other sensors that guard against diverse pests.
Sensor targets bacterial tail
Many plants use FLS2 to detect a small piece of a bacterial tail protein called flagellin. This 22-amino-acid piece, known as flg22, triggers the plant’s immune system.
When FLS2 recognizes flg22, it sets off a strong defense response, flooding plant cells with calcium and reactive oxygen to fight off the bacteria.
But if bacteria make small changes to the end of flg22, the sensor may not detect them. That allows the bacteria to spread through the plant’s water-carrying tissue. The result is bacterial wilt – a fast-moving disease that can wipe out tomato or potato plants almost overnight.
AI guides plant edits
To predict which edits would matter most, the team turned to AlphaFold, an AI model that guesses protein shapes to near-atomic detail. The software flagged residues on FLS2’s concave surface that should touch the tricky flg22 variants.
Those predictions steered the lab work, trimming months of trial and error from the project. Matching computer output with greenhouse assays confirmed that the redesigned receptor could sense multiple strains at nanomolar peptide doses.
Importantly, the new sensor left normal growth untouched, a key point for breeders wary of yield penalties. The study shows that AI can make molecular tinkering far less of a guessing game.
Reprogramming crop disease defense
Plants cannot produce antibodies on demand, so boosting pattern recognition is their safest bet. Replacing a handful of residues acts like a firmware update, expanding what the cell sees without rewriting the entire gene.
In one test, tomato leaves expressing the edited receptor produced a reactive oxygen burst 20 times stronger than controls when exposed to Ralstonia peptides. Disease symptoms dropped sharply in subsequent challenge assays.
“This approach could be a path toward broad-spectrum resistance that doesn’t rely on chemical sprays,” said Coaker. She added that farmers need options that fit current management budgets.
Blocking bacteria at the root
Ralstonia solanacearum is one of the world’s most damaging crop diseases, capable of infecting over 200 plant species. It causes wilt and brown rot, leading to more than $1 billion in global losses each year.
Once inside, the bacteria clog water vessels, blocking sprays and antibiotics from reaching the infection. The best defense is early detection at the root, where the plant’s immune system can still recognize the invader.
To help crops do that, scientists are using CRISPR to make tiny edits – just a few genetic “spelling changes” – in immune receptor genes. These edits don’t add any foreign DNA and are treated like traditional breeding in countries such as the U.S.
By combining these enhanced receptors with other resistance genes, plant breeders may slow the rise of new, harder-to-stop bacterial strains. This could reduce the need for fungicides and antibiotics, which would also help protect soil and water.
Small-scale farmers, especially in warm regions where tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are dietary staples, could benefit the most. Healthier crops mean more reliable income and better food security for their communities.
Future of plant immunity
Coaker’s group is now training machine learning models to rank other receptors for editability.
Early simulations suggest that tweaking as few as eight residues can widen perception for several unrelated microbial patterns.
If that holds up, crop scientists could one day scan whole pathogen genomes in silico and pre-test receptor updates before a disease outbreak ever starts.
The study is published in the journal Nature Plants.
—–
Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.
Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.
Drought is forcing Namibian desert elephants to seek water near human settlements. But human encounters with the giant mammals frequently end in tragedies. Elephants are being shot, and their population is shrinking. A conservation project using a combination of GPS data and high-resolution satellite images is trying to help the two species coexist in peace. Without it, the rare desert population might soon go extinct.
About 24,000 elephants live in Namibia, a southwest African country known for its desert landscapes and wildlife parks. Most of them dwell in the lush greenery of Etosha National Park in the north of the country and near the border with Botswana in the northeast.
But over the centuries, smaller groups of elephants have ventured into and learned to survive in the more arid plains in the western Kunene region. These elephants fascinate zoologists for their ability to handle the harsh weather conditions in the area, including strong, ice-cold winds and alternating droughts and heavy rains.
“Somehow, these elephants know when the winds are coming before they come,” Christin Winter, Conservation Program Manager at Namibia’s Elephant-Human Relations Aid (EHRA) charity, told Space.com. “They know where to hide from it; they know where water will pool when it rains because they remember it from previous seasons.”
But the extreme conditions are also forcing these elephants to approach human settlements. When droughts hit, elephants have no choice but to share water resources with humans, despite knowing all too well that people equal mortal danger.
Before the Namibian war of independence, which raged from the mid-1960s until the end of the 1980s, locals in the deserts of western Namibia knew how to live with elephants. But poaching for meat and ivory decimated the population so much that the elephants disappeared during the war. They began returning in the 1990s, but by then, social change erased the traditional knowledge. New settlers came into the region and brought with them many misconceptions about the giant mammals.
“There is a lot of fear and folklore around elephants — for example, that they eat people,” Winter said. “But there have been other problems. Elephants could break infrastructure, even damage houses. If you bump into them at night and you don’t know what to do, it can get dangerous.”
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
Local farmers frequently resort to defending their property with brute force. Elephants get shot at, wandering off wounded and dying in the fields. From a population that once counted around 3,000, only 150 animals remain in the region today.
“Over half of the local population of desert elephants was lost within a few years,” Winter said. “It has stabilized a bit, but there are also other environmental pressures that prevent calves from surviving. We have a very low number of adult elephants and very few teenagers, which is obviously not great.”
In a bid to help locals coexist with the magnificent species without either side suffering harm, the researchers fitted three elephants in the most affected group with GPS collars in 2021 to track their movements. Whenever an elephant approaches a village or farm, the “Earth Ranger” system generates an alert that gets shared with the community in real time.
Since the roll-out of the geofencing system, the number of incidents involving humans decreased, Winter said. To make things even better, the researchers are trying to combine the GPS tracking data with high-resolution images from Airbus’ Pleiades Neo satellites to understand why and when the elephants visit villages and farms. They collected data during the droughts and the subsequent rainy season to understand how the elephants’ movement patterns change throughout the year.
“The elephants will choose a place even within a risky environment where they feel the safest and where there is vegetation and water,” Winter said. “When there is enough water and food, that for them outmatches the risk of dying from shooting, which surprised us. They are willing to risk the consequences.”
Known for their impeccable memory, the elephants remember the tragedies that people inflicted on their families, Winter said. They only approach villages at night and move almost “like ghosts,” running away at the first hint of human presence.
The researchers hope the satellite data may help design new strategies to make human-elephant coexistence easier.
“We are trying to protect the natural water points and place troughs and dams strategically so that the elephants don’t need to go through the villages at night,” Winter said.
The satellite images help identify elephant hotspots, which then enables the researchers to negotiate with farmers.
“The big aim is to identify corridors and find ways to protect that habitat for the elephants,” Winter said. “We had one farmer who saw the data and realized that one corner of his farm was almost owned by the elephants, and he allowed us to have that corner in exchange for protecting the rest of his farm. With compromises like that, we can reduce the conflict and give the elephants a safe spot to be.”
Lightning is one of nature’s most spectacular and terrifying phenomena. The bright flashes and booming thunder have caught human imagination for centuries, sparking myths, scientific discoveries, and countless questions. While we’ve come a long way since Benjamin Franklin flew his kite in 1752 to prove that lightning is a form of electricity, some key details about how lightning actually begins have remained elusive—until now.
Lightning is triggered by charged particles within thunderclouds. But understanding exactly what happens in those crucial split seconds before the bolt strikes the Earth has remained one of meteorology’s great mysteries. How do the particles move? What forces push them to a breaking point, and what kind of reactions set off such immense energy?
A team of international researchers has now answered these questions using advanced mathematical models and simulations.
The next time you use your phone, you should raise your eyes to the skies and say thanks to … a dying star. More specifically, you should thank the explosions that happen on a class of celestial bodies known as white dwarfs. Scientists have long pondered where all that lithium that powers our phones and much else of the modern world comes from. This might seem strange, as lithium was one of only three elements that were created in the first moments after the Big Bang, the others being hydrogen and helium. However, the lithium produced was only a trace amount, and when astronomers looked at older stars, they found that there was even less lithium than expected. This discrepancy can be explained by the tendency of larger stars to pull lithium inwards towards the star’s core, where it’s destroyed.
Yet, when scientists study younger stars, the reverse is found to be true — these stars have far more lithium than previous generations. This begs the question — where does all this lithium come from? The smoking gun was found when data from a nova dating from December 2013 was recently re-analyzed by scientists. The re-analysis happened after it was discovered that the white dwarf was nearer than originally thought, which brought it into a range where meaningful data could be pulled from the observation. Let’s shine a light on how explosions on distant white dwarf stars are helping to make the lithium-ion batteries that are possibly powering the device you’re reading this on.
How novas produce lithium
Nazarii_Neshcherenskyi/Shutterstock
A white dwarf forms when a star about the same size as the sun has burned through all its nuclear fuel. At this stage, the outer and lighter layers of the star are expelled to form a planetary nebula, and what is left behind is the dense inner core. This is the white dwarf. In most cases, a white dwarf will be part of a binary or multiple star system. It’s estimated that about 85% of all stars exist in such systems. This is lucky for our smartphones and other electrical devices, because the nature of this relationship can cause thermonuclear explosions known as novae. Put simply, a nova occurs when a white dwarf gravitationally accumulates excess material from a neighboring star. This causes pressure and heat to rise on the surface until all that tension gives way in a massive, ring-shaped explosion.
It was the observation of such an explosion by the European Space Agency’s International Gamma-ray Astrophysics Laboratory in 2013 that solved the lithium puzzle. Recent re-examination of the data confirmed the presence of gamma rays carrying an energy of 478 kiloelectron volts. While this might seem like a random fact, this is the energy level that gamma rays produce when beryllium-7 decays radioactively into lithium-7. The amount of lithium produced was measured in solar mass units, where one solar mass is equivalent to the mass of the sun. Using this scale, it was estimated that the nova produced lithium totaling 100 millionths of a solar mass. Enough to power a smartphone or two.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — An international crew of four astronauts launched toward the International Space Station from Florida on Friday aboard a SpaceX rocket, beating gloomy weather to embark on a routine NASA mission that could be the first of many to last a couple months longer than usual.
The four-person astronaut crew — two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and Japanese astronaut — boarded SpaceX’s Dragon capsule sitting atop its Falcon 9 rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and blasted off at 11:43 a.m. ET. They will arrive at the ISS on Saturday.
