Alpine have signed Steve Nielsen as their Managing Director to oversee the day-to-day running of the team, reporting to executive advisor Flavio Briatore.
The French manufacturer have been looking for a senior leader to manage the team on a daily basis following Oli Oakes’ departure from the Team Principal role in May.
Following weeks of talks, Nielsen – a well-respected member of the paddock – will leave his role as Chief Motorsports Operations Officer, Sporting, at commercial rights holder F1 to take up his new job on September 1, ahead of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
Briatore, who has known Nielsen for decades, will continue to have overall responsibility for the project.
It marks a return to Enstone for Nielsen, who has spent multiple stints with the squad under the previous guises Benetton, Renault and Lotus, including as Sporting Director during the 2005 and 2006 World Championship winning years.
In recent years, Nielsen has spent time at F1 and governing body the FIA, and also has team experience from his time at Tyrrell, Honda, Toro Rosso and Arrows.
Alpine also confirmed the recent recruitment of Kris Midgley, who joined as Head of Aerodynamic Development.
Midgley, who reports to Executive Technical Director David Sanchez, previously worked at Enstone between 2007 and 2013 and most recently worked at Ferrari as Principal Aerodynamicist.
Alpine are currently bottom of the Teams’ Championship on 11 points but are hoping to improve their fortunes next season when they switch to Mercedes power.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA has discovered an interstellar comet that’s wandered into our backyard.
The space agency spotted the quick-moving object with the Atlas telescope in Chile earlier this week, and confirmed it was a comet from another star system.
It’s officially the third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system and poses no threat to Earth.
WATCH: Tracking killer comets before they strike
“These things take millions of years to go from one stellar neighborhood to another, so this thing has likely been traveling through space for hundreds of millions of years, even billions of years,” Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, said Thursday. “We don’t know, and so we can’t predict which star it came from.”
The newest visitor is 416 million miles (670 million kilometers) from the sun, out near Jupiter, and heading this way at a blistering 37 miles (59 kilometers) per second.
NASA said the comet will make its closest approach to the sun in late October, scooting between the orbits of Mars and Earth — but closer to the red planet than us at a safe 150 million miles (240 million kilometers) away.
Astronomers around the world are monitoring the icy snowball that’s been officially designated as 3I/Atlas to determine its size and shape. Chodas told The Associated Press that there have been more than 100 observations since its discovery on July 1, with preliminary reports of a tail and a cloud of gas and dust around the comet’s nucleus.
The comet should be visible by telescope through September, before it gets too close to the sun, and reappear in December on the other side of the sun.
Based on its brightness, the comet appears to be bigger than the first two interstellar interlopers, possibly several miles (tens of kilometers) across, Chodas said. It’s coming in faster, too, from a different direction, and while its home star is unknown, scientists suspect it was closer to the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
The first interstellar visitor observed from Earth was Oumuamua, Hawaiian for scout, in honor of the observatory in Hawaii that discovered it in 2017. Classified at first as an asteroid, the elongated Oumuamua has since showed signs of being a comet.
The second object confirmed to have strayed from another star system into our own — 21/Borisov — was discovered in 2019 by a Crimean amateur astronomer with that name. It, too, is believed to be a comet.
“We’ve been expecting to see interstellar objects for decades, frankly, and finally we’re seeing them,” Chodas said. “A visitor from another solar system, even though it’s natural — it’s not artificial, don’t get excited because some people do … It’s just very exciting.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Alberta’s oil production fell to the lowest in two years in May as wildfires and maintenance work crimped oil sands output.
Output from Canada’s biggest oil-producing province slid 397,000 barrels a day to 3.61 million barrels a day in May, the lowest since May 2023, provincial data released Thursday show. Flows from the oil sands, the world’s third-largest reserve of crude, dropped 384,000 barrels a day. Output from oil sands mines slid to the lowest in more than four years.
Both standard and ultrahigh resolution modes are effective for coronary CT angiography (CCTA) performed by photon-counting detector CT (PCCT) — but ultrahigh has an extra advantage in patients with severe coronary artery disease, researchers have found.
The findings will help clinicians optimize protocols for PCCT CCTA, according to a team led by Mengzhen Wang, MD, of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China.
“For coronary CTA performed by photon-counting detector (PCD) CT, diagnostic performance for significant stenosis is optimized through acquisition in ultrahigh resolution (UHR) mode with reconstruction at 0.2-mm slice thickness,” the American Journal of Roentgenology noted in a statement about the study, which was published July 3.
CCTA is a widely used tool for evaluating the presence and severity of coronary artery disease, but its diagnostic efficacy is lower in patients with extensive coronary artery calcification, the team explained. That’s where PCCT comes in: The technology offers higher contrast-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution than conventional CT imaging.
In their study, Wang and colleagues assessed the diagnostic performance for detecting stenosis on CCTA performed by PCCT with various standard resolution and ultrahigh resolution protocols. The group used invasive coronary angiography (ICA) as the reference standard.
The research included a total of 122 inpatients who underwent CCTA between October 2023 and October 2024; of these, 61 patients underwent exams with a standard resolution protocol and 61 with an ultrahigh resolution protocol. The patients also underwent ICA.
The exams were reconstructed in the following manner:
Standard resolution: “SRnormal” and “SRVNCa” (virtual noncalcium) image sets, both using 0.6-mm slice thickness and Bv40 kernel.
Two radiologists measured the diameters of any stenoses; these were considered significant at a threshold equal to or greater than 50%.
Per-segment CCTA interpretation performance by reader
Measure
Reader 1
Reader 2
SRnormal
Sensitivity
92.9%
92.9%
Specificity
89.9%
88.8%
Accuracy
90.5%
89.6%
SRVNCa (virtual calcium)
Sensitivity
92.9%
93.5%
Specificity
91.6%
92.3%
Accuracy
91.9%
92.5%
UHRnormal
Sensitivity
96%
96%
Specificity
92.4%
91.6%
Accuracy
93%
92.2%
UHRthin
Sensitivity
100%
100%
Specificity
98.6%
98.9%
Accuracy
98.8%
99%
72-year-old female participant with heart failure. Patient underwent coronary CTA by photon-counting detector CTA, acquired in UHR mode. Agatston score was 1,615. Heart rate was 59 beats/min. (A) Reconstructed UHRnormal image. Proximal RCA shows calcified plaque. Inset shows cross-section of RCA at level of thin line traversing vessel. (B) Reconstructed UHRthin image. Proximal LCX shows calcified plaque. Inset shows cross-section of RCA at level of thin line traversing vessel. Insets show less blooming artifact from calcified plaque for UHRthin than for UHRnormal. Stenosis at site of calcification was measured as 60% for UHRnormal and 30% for UHRthin. (C) Image from subsequent invasive coronary angiography shows 30% stenosis of RCA (arrow). UHR = ultrahigh resolution. Images and caption courtesy of the AJR.
The key finding of the work was that both standard resolution and ultrahigh resolution PCCT achieved high diagnostic performance for significant stenosis using ICA as the reference standard — although the team did note that “the superior diagnostic performance of UHR mode was most evident in patients with heavily calcified vessels,” writing that “radiology practices could consider prioritization of UHR mode for patients with known extensive coronary calcification or with strong clinical suspicion for severe CAD.”
The massive GOP tax and spending package, passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday, will provide $10 billion to NASA programs that the administration had proposed to partially cut, including the space agency’s marquee moon program and operations at the International Space Station.
The reconciliation package includes $4.1 billionfor NASA’s Boeing Co.-built Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket and $20 million directed to the Lockheed Martin Corp. Orion crew capsule to help fund the fourth and fifth missions of the agency’s Artemis moon program. These missions, which Trump had suggested canceling in his original budget request, would establish a lunar space station called Gateway and utilize a contracted landing system from Blue Origin for the first time to place humans on the moon.
Neuroinflammation may play a significant role in positron emission tomography (PET) detection of progressive apraxia of speech (PAOS) and determining whether there is coexisting Parkinson-plus syndrome, according to new research presented at the Society for Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) conference.
For the prospective study, researchers reviewed data from (11C)ER176 TSPO PET and (18F)flortaucipir tau PET scans obtained for 25 patients with PAOS (including 13 patients with Parkinson-plus syndrome) and 30 healthy control participants.
In a recent interview at the SNMMI conference, lead study author Ryota Satoh, Ph.D., said the study findings revealed significantly greater neuroinflammation for patients with PAOS in regions such as the premotor cortex, basal ganglia and the superior, middle and inferior frontal gyri in contrast to PET scans from healthy control participants.
While the uptake pattern on PET scans was limited to the left frontal gyri and bilateral premotor cortex in patients with PAOS and no Parkinson-plus syndrome, Dr. Satoh noted that those with PAOS and Parkinson-plus syndrome had broader uptake that extended to prefrontal, temporal and parietal cortices.
“These results suggest that tau-associated neuroinflammation could occur in early stages of the disease, but the degree of neuroinflammation increases and spreads once the patient develop Parkinson-plus syndrome,” noted Dr. Satoh, an assistant professor in the Department of Radiology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
(Editor’s note: For additional coverage of the SNMMI conference, click here.)
While acknowledging the need for larger cohort longitudinal studies, Dr. Satoh said the neuroinflammation may emerge as a key consideration in disease treatment in this patient population.
“Our results suggest that inflammation plays an important role in the disease mechanisms of PAOS, and it is related to underlying … tau. These results indicate an inflammation mechanism could be the target of the treatment of this disease,” added Dr. Satoh.
(Editor’s note: For related content, see “FDA Clears Emerging Brain PET System,” “Can Brain MRI-Based Connectome Mapping Predict the Progression of Parkinson’s Disease?” and “Researcher Presents First Non-Invasive Images or Alpha-Synuclein in the Brain.”)
For more insights from Dr. Satoh, watch the video below.
Reference
1. Satoh R, Utianski RL, Duffy JR, et al. Neuroinflammatory (11C)ER176 TSPO PET profile with colocalized tau uptake in progressive apraxia of speech. Presented at the Society for Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) conference, June 21-24, 2025, New Orleans. Available at: https://www.xcdsystem.com/snmmi/program/B95p18u/index.cfm?pgid=2402&sid=46745&mobileappid=4674500000 .
Paris was one of many European cities hit by a record-breaking heat wave at the end of June and early July 2025. NASA’s Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) instrument recorded surface temperatures of 82 degrees Fahrenheit (23 degrees Celsius) at 6:57 a.m. local time on July 1. Extreme daytime air temperatures – of over 100 degrees F (38 degrees C) – prompted officials to close the summit of the Eiffel Tower on July 1 and 2.
In this visualization of ECOSTRESS data, dark red indicates higher temperatures while green and blue are cooler. The city is peppered with areas of several blocks where surface temperatures reached more than 80 F (27 C), including around the Eiffel Tower, before 7 a.m.
The ECOSTRESS instrument measures thermal infrared emissions from Earth’s surface. This enables researchers to monitor plant health, the progress of wildfires, land surface temperatures, and the burn risk to people from hot surfaces such as asphalt. Land surface temperatures are hotter than air temperatures during the day. Air temperatures, which are measured out of direct sunlight, are usually what meteorologists report in a weather forecast.
The instrument launched to the space station in 2018. Its primary mission is to identify plants’ thresholds for water use and water stress, giving insight into their ability to adapt to a warming climate. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and manages the ECOSTRESS mission for the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. ECOSTRESS is an Earth Venture Instrument mission; the program is managed by NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder program at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
More information about ECOSTRESS is available here:
The unpiloted Roscosmos Progress 92 spacecraft heads into orbit.
Credit: NASA
HOUSTON—Russia’s Progress MS-31 resupply capsule is set for a July 5 arrival and docking at the International Space Station (ISS) following a July 3 launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. An autonomous docking of the cargo capsule for the delivery of about 5,600 lb. (2,368 km) of food, fuel…
Mark Carreau
Mark is based in Houston, where he has written on aerospace for more than 25 years. While at the Houston Chronicle, he was recognized by the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement Foundation in 2006 for his professional contributions to the public understanding of America’s space program through news reporting.
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