Astronomers have identified 3.32 billion celestial objects in the Milky Way in unprecedented detail.
The galactic panorama of stars, gas, dust and a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* was captured by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Dark Energy Camera on a 4-meter telescope. It’s housed at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in northern Chile, which sits at an altitude of 7,200 feet, allowing for one of the clearest views of the night sky.
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“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” said
Debra Fischer,
division director of astronomical sciences at the National Science Foundation. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come,” she said.
Gathering the latest batch of data from the project,known as the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, took over two years. It involved around 260 hours of observation with 21,000 exposures, resulting in more than 10 terabytes of data. Along with an earlier data release in 2017, the project has now covered 6.5% of the night sky.
Researchers pointed the telescope at a region of the Milky Way with “an extraordinarily high density of stars,” said
Andrew Saydjari,
a graduate student at Harvard University who worked on the project. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed,” he said.
Images released in the survey show part of the Milky Way’s spiral disk, where most of the stars and dust are located.
The team targeted a region of the Milky Way with ‘an extraordinarily high density of stars,’ a researcher said.
Photo:
DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
Onesmall portion of the broader panoramic image is entirely filled with celestial objects, illustrating the challenges researchers faced identifying individual stars due to the sheer number that overlap one another.
“By observing at near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust,”according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which is affiliated with the project.
The survey data was published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
On April 19, 2021, a toaster oven-size helicopter named Ingenuity spun its rotors and rose 10 feet above the surface of Mars, becoming the first craft to perform a powered flight on a world beyond Earth. It won’t be the last.
Three more extraterrestrial fliers are already under development at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other space agencies, and many more uncrewed copters, hoppers and floating machines are on drawing boards. These aerial robots could survey the clouds of Venus, search for life on Saturn’s moon Titan and scout out resources for Mars astronauts who might arrive in the late 2030s.
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Those missions face daunting technological hurdles, says Theodore Tzanetos, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Flying on other worlds requires ultra-lightweight materials, autonomous navigation and adaptations to extreme temperatures and different atmospheres. “With larger flying vehicles things get more complicated,” Mr. Tzanetos says. “How do you get them there? How do you make them reliable?”
But if he and his fellow rocket scientists pull it off, we will soon be touring the solar system like never before.
“There are so many things you can do with aerial mobility that you can’t do with a lander or a rover,” says Geoff Landis, a physicist at NASA’s John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “If you want to do global exploration, from pole to equator, you need something capable of flying.”
NASA’s six-rotor Mars Science Helicopter, currently under study, could be used as an aerial scout carrying scientific instruments.
Photo:
NASA (Rendering)
NASA’s Ingenuity shattered expectations of what a helicopter can achieve on other planets. Conceived as a low-budget technology demonstration and scheduled to make just five flights, the tiny craft so far has taken to the Martian skies dozens of times. Ingenuity proved that miniaturized components and large, counter-rotating rotor blades make controlled flight possible in an atmosphere that is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Along the way, it has provided unprecedented aerial views of the red planet’s surface and supported NASA’s nearby Perseverance rover.
Ingenuity’s achievements led NASA to ditch plans to send a European Space Agency rover to Mars to transport soil samples cached by Perseverance so that they can be returned to Earth for analysis. The agency now says that in 2028 it will launch a pair of new Ingenuity-style fliers, each enhanced with four wheels and a grasping arm to help collect the samples.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter have been exploring the Red Planet since touching down in February 2021. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Working with colleagues at JPL as well as NASA’s Ames Research Center and the company
AeroVironment Inc.,
Mr. Tzanetos has also drawn up a concept for a larger copter with six rotors instead of Ingenuity’s two. The Mars Science Helicopter, as the craft is known, would be able to carry up to about 10 pounds of instruments.
Then there is Dragonfly, a nuclear-powered helicopter in development at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. In 2027, NASA plans to launch Dragonfly toward Titan, where the atmosphere is four times denser and the gravity seven times weaker than Earth’s. Under those conditions, a modest nudge from Dragonfly’s eight rotors should be enough to send the half-ton science lab soaring through the sky.
“Titan’s just calling out to be flown on,” says APL’s Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, a planetary scientist at APL and the principal investigator for the Dragonfly mission.
Plans call for Dragonfly to take to the air once a month for nearly three years, logging up to 10 miles per flight, to explore a landscape dotted with liquid methane lakes, ice boulders and dunes made of grains of tar. Each time it touches down in a new spot, the octocopter will use its suite of instruments to assess the local environment, seeking out carbon compounds of the sort that scientists believe might be precursors of life. If a location seems particularly interesting, Dragonfly will collect surface samples using a pair of drills.
“We want to understand the chemical steps occurring on Titan, ones that may be like the early chemical steps that occurred here on Earth” before the first living things appeared, Dr. Turtle says.
The other moons and small bodies of the solar system lack any significant atmosphere, meaning flight by winged craft is impossible there. Undaunted, aerospace engineers are coming up with flying machines designed for those worlds as well.
While a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021, Oliver Jia-Richards came up with a concept for a glider that would electrically charge the ground and repel itself against it, like two magnets pushing against each other. Now an aerospace engineer at the University of Michigan, Dr. Jia-Richards continues to test components for a levitating glider. He envisions a two-pound, saucer-shaped explorer that could cruise smoothly over rugged terrain in airless settings.
While at MIT, Oliver Jia-Richards came up with a concept for a space glider that would levitate by charging the ground below it.
Photo:
MIT (Rendering)
NASA’s Dr. Landis has conceptualized zero-atmosphere fliers that pack more punch, powered by bursts from a rocket engine. These “hoppers,” capable of covering dozens of miles at a time, might scavenge local resources so they wouldn’t need to carry propellant from Earth. On Pluto, for instance, “we could scoop up nitrogen snow, heat it up and use it to fuel our rocket,” Dr. Landis says.
Venus presents an opposite challenge for flying machines: an extremely dense atmosphere that crushes the surface with pressure equivalent to that 3,000 feet underwater on Earth. And ground temperatures on Venus hover around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. No helicopter, glider or hopper would last long there.
In July, a one-third scale prototype of a balloon probe for use on Venus was tested in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Photo:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The solution proposed by Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, is to build an altitude-adjustable balloon probe and park it 35 miles above the Venusian surface, where temperatures and pressures are surprisingly Earthlike. The so-called aerobot would feature a high-pressure chamber filled with helium to maintain buoyancy surrounded by a lower-pressure chamber that expands or contracts to change the craft’s altitude, dodging storms and avoiding the heat as needed.
Dr. Byrne has been collaborating with a team from the Jet Propulsion Lab and Near Space Corp. in Tillamook, Ore., to develop a one-third scale prototype of the aerobot. In July, it flew successfully over Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Now Dr. Byrne is working on a proposal for a full-size version, which would resemble a huge silvery peanut, roughly 45 feet wide and 60 feet tall.
An aerobot could fly for months atop the Venusian clouds, engineers suggest, investigating one of the solar system’s greatest puzzles: Why did Venus turn hellish while Earth became lush, though the two planets are so similar in size and composition? Could the same fate lie ahead for our planet? “If it were to fly, we would rewrite the textbooks—for Venus, for Earth and for rocky planets in general,” Dr. Byrne says.
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MIT astronomer Sara Seager wonders if ancient life on Venus might have taken refuge in the clouds, and if it might still be there today. She has helped draw up plans for a mission to find out. It would send a rocket-equipped aerobot to Venus to collect samples of the clouds and return them to Earth for analysis.
A concept for a Venus airship to support a crew of two for 30 days and a permanent outpost that could operate miles above the surface.
Photo:
NASA (Rendering)
Then again, maybe the scientists will go there instead. Giant airships could enable crewed missions to Venus, Dr. Landis says. Looking further ahead, he can imagine aerial cities on the planet, with people living inside oxygen-filled habitats that float atop the dense atmosphere.
“You could do a settlement on Venus probably more easily than almost any other place in the solar system,” he says.
PARIS — A French nun who was believed to be the world’s oldest person but had been reportedly growing weary of the burdens of age has died a few weeks before her 119th birthday, her nursing home in southern France said Wednesday.
Lucile Randon, known as Sister André, was born in the town of Ales, southern France, on Feb. 11, 1904, and lived through the two world wars. As a little girl she was astonished by her first contact with electric lighting at school and, more recently, survived COVID-19 without even realizing she’d been infected.
Spokesman David Tavella said she died at 2 a.m. on Tuesday at the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure nursing home in the southern port city of Toulon.
The Gerontology Research Group, which validates details of people thought to be 110 or older, listed her as the oldest known person in the world after the death of Japan’s Kane Tanaka, aged 119, last year.
The oldest living known person in the world listed by the Gerontology Research Group is now American-born Maria Branyas Morera, who is living in Spain, and is 115.
Sister André tested positive for the coronavirus in January 2021, shortly before her 117th birthday, but she had so few symptoms that she didn’t even realize she was infected. Her survival made headlines both in France and beyond.
In April last year, asked about her exceptional longevity through two world wars, she told French media that “working … makes you live. I worked until I was 108.”
But the local newspaper Midi Libre reported Sister Andre saying in 2020, after recovering from COVID-19, that “God has forgotten me.”
Her health was deteriorating and the paper reported that during a visit with her last May she was imprisoned by the infirmities of age, with loss of eyesight, poor hearing and her face contorted by joint pain.
In better days, Sister Andre was known to enjoy a daily glass of wine and some chocolate, and toasted her 117th birthday in 2021 with Champagne, red wine and port.
“It made me very, very, very, very happy,” she said in a telephone interview at the time with The Associated Press. “Because I met all those I love and I thank the heavens for giving them to me. I thank God for the trouble they went to.”
Sister Andre, who reportedly took her religious name in honor of a favorite brother, recalled the high points of her long life in the May interview with Midi Libre, saying: “The most beautiful day of my life was when the Armistice (ending World War I) was declared,” and the population of Ales gathered in the main square to sing the French national anthem.
Electricity, which she first encountered turning on a light in a classroom as a little girl, was a new word for her to learn and, she said, “a joy.”
Jeanne Calment, a French woman who also lived in southern France, died in 1997 at the age of 122, said to be the record of longevity.
Businesses and lawyers are beginning to assess what the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed ban of noncompete clauses in employment contracts could mean for worker mobility, wages and the way future compensation agreements are structured.
While a full or partial ban could expand the pool of potential hires, it also would weaken a tool that employers have come to rely on to retain talent and protect trade secrets and other proprietary information, lawyers say. More companies likely would turn to a patchwork of alternative mechanisms to keep people from leaving and taking valuable information with them, including nondisclosure agreements and employment contracts that reward longevity, they say.
“Employers have operated with an understanding that they can protect their interests through noncompetes,” said Matthew Durham, a Salt Lake City-based attorney with Dorsey & Whitney LLP who advises companies on employment matters. “What you’re seeing, reflected in the FTC proposal and elsewhere, is a growing hostility to the idea that there should be those kinds of restrictions, and it’s changing the environment that employers have been comfortable with in the last number of years.”
The FTC proposed a ban this month on nearly all noncompetes, saying that the clauses—which typically prohibit workers from moving to a new employer or starting new ventures of their own—hamper competition in the labor market, suppress wages and hold back innovation and entrepreneurship. The proposal came in response to an executive order from President Biden in 2021.
Businesses say they impose noncompete clauses on employees to protect trade secrets and other confidential information, including customer lists and financial data.
The FTC contends that noncompete clauses discourage innovation and entrepreneurship.
Photo:
Eric Lee for The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Durham and others say they believe the FTC may narrow its rule after hearing comments from the public, including employers and business organizations that have already signaled their opposition to the current proposal. The agency could, for example, allow noncompetes for highly compensated workers.
Noncompetes are common in employment contracts for senior employees like software engineers, sales representatives and top executives. Over time, they have been applied to many parts of the U.S. workforce, including some janitors, baristas, schoolteachers and entry-level workers. According to the FTC, one in five U.S. workers is currently subject to a noncompete clause.
Noncompetes are regulated at the state level, and many states have already taken action to limit use of the clauses by, in some cases, forbidding employers from imposing them on people earning under a particular wage threshold or for certain types of workers.
“The vast majority of people in America can’t afford a lawyer to defend a noncompete case,” said Jonathan Pollard, an attorney in Florida who represents workers whose employers are trying to enforce noncompete clauses. “Just the threat of enforcement is often enough to restrain talent in the labor market.”
The Federal Trade Commission proposed a new ban on noncompete clauses, which the agency says hurts workers and competition. Companies argue they protect trade secrets. WSJ breaks down what a federal ban could mean for workers and businesses. Photo illustration: Jacob Reynolds
Some states, such as California and Oklahoma, hold that the clauses are unenforceable in all or nearly all employment contracts.
A number of studies suggest noncompetes suppress wages and innovation. A review of Oregon’s 2008 ban on noncompetes for hourly workers found that wages rose an average of 2% to 3%. Another study, examining Hawaii’s 2015 ban on noncompete agreements for high-tech workers, found an 11% increase in job moves and a 4% increase in new-hire salaries.
The clauses restrain not just pay and entrepreneurship, but also professional development, workers and some attorneys say.
Daniel Bachhuber had worked as a software consultant for years when he decided to take an in-house job in the fall of 2018. His new employer required that he sign a one-year noncompete agreement, which he said was so broad it would have prevented him from practicing his core skills if he were to leave the company or be fired.
Mr. Bachhuber balked. Earlier in his career, he had been laid off a few weeks into a new job, just after his first child was born. If that happened at the new job, he recalled thinking, he would be unable to earn a living for a year. “I’m always thinking, worst case scenario, what kind of downstream protection do I have?” the 35-year-old said. “Even if I was employed just one day, I couldn’t go back to the same clients I had.”
Daniel Bachhuber turned down a job after an employer wouldn’t change a noncompete clause.
Photo:
Mason Trinca for The Wall Street Journal
He consulted a lawyer and tried to renegotiate the contract, hoping to salvage a role that would have expanded his skills and given him a chance to work directly with the chief technology officer on special projects. The company declined to change the noncompete clause and, reluctantly, Mr. Bachhuber turned down the position.
Employers have other tools to protect information besides noncompete agreements, including nondisclosure agreements, trade secret laws and nonsolicitation agreements, which prohibit workers from poaching customers or employees of their prior firm.
But those tools generally can only be used after an employee violates the agreement, said Julie Levinson Werner, who represents employers as a partner with law firm Lowenstein Sandler LLP. “Once someone goes to another company, you’re really on the honor system. You have no way to monitor what information is being disclosed or not,” she said.
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Observers on both sides say that limitations on the clauses will compel employers to get more creative about how they retain talent, using everything from compensation to career advancement to keep workers engaged and loyal to the company. Some companies use deferred compensation—such as retention bonuses or rolling stock options that vest after, say, three years—to give people incentives to stay.
“Do you get better results with honey or vinegar?” said Ms. Werner. “If you want to motivate people and have them happy to stay, you have to look at compensation, the overall environment, how you treat them.”
The fate of the FTC’s final rule is up in the air. After a 60-day comment period, the commissioners will consider potential changes to the initial proposal and then issue a final rule. That rule will likely be challenged by business groups or individual companies, and courts will determine its trajectory, attorneys say.
Parents and doctors are looking for new strategies to help adolescents with obesity. One controversial approach drawing the interest of some families is intermittent fasting, which limits people to eating for just a part of the day or week.
Intermittent fasting has gained traction among adults who use it to try to manage weight and improve health. Doctors have largely avoided trying it with adolescents out of concern that introducing a fasting period to their schedules might result in nutritional gaps or trigger eating disorders when teens are rapidly growing and developing.
Now, a small number of doctors and researchers are evaluating types of intermittent fasting in adolescents, searching for solutions as rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes rise. One pediatric endocrinologist in Los Angeles is launching a clinical trial looking at eating within a set time window in adolescents with obesity. Researchers in Australia are completing a separate trial, the results of which they expect to publish later this year.
Roughly one-fifth of children in the U.S. are considered obese, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pediatricians are so concerned that the American Academy of Pediatrics for the first timethis month recommended physicians offer weight-loss drugs for children with obesity.
Any approach that limits when and how an adolescent eats must be handled cautiously, doctors say.
Families and doctors need to be very careful with any form of intermittent fasting in youth as it can be a slippery slope with a potential risk of eating disorders, says
Jason Nagata,
a pediatrician and eating-disorder specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Doctors have also raised questions about the potential long-term effects of intermittent fasting on developing bodies.
Courtney Peterson,
an associate professor of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who studies intermittent fasting in adults, says she would be worried about adolescents’ getting enough nutrients. “I think it’s worth testing but testing with caution,” she says.
Her research has found that adults with obesity who ate between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. lost on average an extra 5 pounds more than a control group eating over 12 hours or more, and adults with prediabetes who ate over a six-hour period starting early in the day showed improvements in blood-sugar levels.
Intermittent fasting is an umbrella term for eating strategies that involve fasting. One such strategy, time-restricted eating, or TRE, limits eating to a set number of hours a day—often eight—with no limitations on what or how much you eat. In the remaining hours, you refrain from eating or drinking except for water.
Alaina Vidmar,
a pediatric endocrinologist and obesity-medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, is starting a clinical trial to evaluate whether an eight-hour window of eating, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., results in changes in insulin and glucose response for teens with obesity.
The researchers are also looking at weight loss and body-fat mass, as well as blood pressure and cholesterol.
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The research stems from conversations Dr. Vidmar had with families of patients with obesity in recent years. Some had asked her about time-restricted eating, or had tried it and said they liked it. She tested the concept in teenagers with obesity to see if setting an eight-hour window of eating was feasible in a pilot study published in the journal Nutrients in 2021.
“They enjoyed doing it, they felt like their whole family could do it, and over time they were losing weight,” Dr. Vidmar says of the teens.
Now, her lab is enrolling 100 youth between 12 and 21 years old with Type 2 diabetes and obesity in a 12-week trial. Participants are screened and monitored for any negative eating behaviors, she says. So far, she hasn’t found that time-limited eating “impacts eating behaviors or worsens disordered eating in any way,” she says.
In Australia, researchers are studying how teens with obesity respond to a different form of fasting called intermittent energy restriction.
In this approach, for three days a week you eat roughly one-quarter of the calories you normally do, says
Natalie Lister,
a researcher and dietitian at the University of Sydney. On the other four days, you have no calorie limits.
Dr. Lister says she and colleagues started looking into intermittent fasting in adolescents with obesity a few years ago when patients started asking about it. They conducted a pilot trial with 30 adolescents, published in 2019. Now, the researchers are completing a trial whose results they expect to publish later this year.
The health team monitors for eating disorders and depression, and the study doesn’t enroll anyone with a high risk of disordered eating, says Dr. Lister. Dietitians provide guidelines to help ensure participants are meeting nutritional requirements.
In adults with obesity, the data on TRE is mixed when it comes to weight loss, but two systematic reviews of the existing research both found a modest weight-loss benefit overall, says Dr. Peterson. Studies have also found that adults experience improvements in measures such as insulin resistance, reducing blood-glucose levels, particularly when their eating window starts early in the day.
Matthew Muros, a 15-year-old in Carson, Calif., struggles with his weight and prediabetes. Matthew participated in Dr. Vidmar’s pilot studies last year. The first two weeks were challenging, he notes.
“I did feel really hungry. I just kept on drinking water,” he says.
He says it got easier, and when the study was over he decided to stick with the schedule. He has lost about 30 pounds, and his blood-glucose levels have improved.
He has also changed his diet, having less soda, fast food and carbohydrates. “I’m trying to eat a little bit more healthy,” he says.
is headed to court in a securities-fraud trial over tweets from 2018 in which he floated the possibility of taking
Tesla Inc.
private, with in-person jury selection poised to begin Tuesday.
The class-action case originates with an Aug. 7, 2018 tweet in which the Tesla chief executive said, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”
An investor,
Glen Littleton,
sued Tesla, Mr. Musk and members of Tesla’s board at the time, alleging that Mr. Musk’s tweets were false and cost investors billions by spurring swings in the prices for Tesla stock, options and bonds. In court filings, Mr. Musk has said he was indeed considering taking Tesla private and believed he had the support of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund to do so. The deal, which would have been valued around $72 billion, never materialized.
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U.S. District Judge
Edward Chen,
who is overseeing the San Francisco jury trial that is scheduled to run through Feb. 1, has ruled that Mr. Musk’s tweets about taking the company private weren’t true and that he acted recklessly in making them.
Questions for the jury include whether Mr. Musk’s tweets were material to investors and whether he knew they were untrue.
The case is unusual in that securities-fraud cases usually resolve before going to trial, such as through a settlement, said
Jill Fisch,
a securities-law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The defendants in this case face “an uphill battle” in light of the judge’s pretrial decision about the veracity of Mr. Musk’s statements, she said.
Attorneys for the lead plaintiff didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did an attorney for Tesla, Mr. Musk and the other board members.
Twitter has been in turmoil since Elon Musk took over. To get a sense of what’s going on behind the scenes, The Wall Street Journal spoke with former Tesla and SpaceX employees to better understand how Musk leads companies. Illustration: Ryan Trefes
Mr. Musk is expected to take the stand as early as Wednesday, some two months after he did so in Delaware in a trial over his pay package at Tesla. In 2021, he also appeared before Delaware’s business-law court to defend Tesla’s roughly $2.1 billion 2016 takeover of home-solar company SolarCity Corp.
Also on the list of possible witnesses are Tesla board chair
Robyn Denholm,
board members
Ira Ehrenpreis,
James Murdoch
and
Kimbal Musk
—the CEO’s brother. The head of investor relations,
Martin Viecha,
also may be called.
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This week’s trial comes at a busy time for Mr. Musk, who has been scrambling to turn around Twitter Inc. after buying the social-media company last fall in a deal valued at $44 billion. His rocket company SpaceX is pushing for the first orbital launch of a new rocket Mr. Musk wants to use for deep-space missions.
Tesla, meanwhile, has slashed prices across its vehicle lineup, with some of last week’s cuts in the U.S. nearing 20%, in a bid to juice demand. The company’s stock has fallen roughly 70% since its peak in November 2021, erasing around $850 billion in market value. Mr. Musk’s personal wealth has fallen more than $200 billion in that time, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Court proceedings involving Mr. Musk can be feisty. In the SolarCity case, for example, Mr. Musk called opposing counsel a “bad human being.”
Tesla has reduced prices across its vehicle lineup in an effort to boost demand.
Photo:
Jay Janner/USA TODAY NETWORK/Reuters
In advance of this week’s trial, Mr. Musk asked the court to move the trial to Texas on the basis that potential jurors in San Francisco could be biased against him. Judge Chen rejected the request.
“It isn’t that hard it seems to me to find 15 people,” he said.
The court requires nine jurors and six alternates to proceed with the case. Roughly 190 potential jurors were asked to fill out questionnaires about their views of Mr. Musk and other issues. The court plans to bring in about 50 of them for further questioning Tuesday.
Opening arguments could start as early as Tuesday after the jury is selected.
The lead plaintiff is seeking damages for investor losses he alleges stemmed from Mr. Musk’s and Tesla’s statements. Tesla stock closed up 11% the day Mr. Musk initially tweeted about potentially taking Tesla private, later giving back all those gains and falling further as questions emerged about the deal.
The defendants have said the plaintiff won’t be able to prove to a jury that the statements were materially false. Mr. Musk was considering taking Tesla private, the defendants have said, even if some of his assertions about the deal may not have been literally accurate.
Defendants, in a trial brief, said Mr. Musk believed he had secured backing to take the car maker private from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. A lawyer for the defendants said Friday that his team had chosen not to enforce subpoenas calling on fund representatives to testify. The sovereign-wealth fund didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk and Tesla each agreed in 2018 to pay $20 million to settle civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the same tweets. Mr. Musk also agreed to step down as chairman of the company, while remaining CEO. He later said in legal filings that he felt pressured to settle with the SEC. Last year, a federal judge denied Mr. Musk’s request to scrap his settlement.
Write to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com and Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com
People who exercise regularly had lower rates of hospitalization and death from Covid-19 in a study published recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Regular exercise improves overall health and healthier people generally have fewer serious complications with Covid-19 infections. Earlier research has shown an association between exercise and better Covid-19 outcomes. This latest study goes a step further and suggests that even people whose age or health conditions make them higher-risk have better outcomes if they are regular exercisers.
Higher amounts of physical activity were associated with lower rates of death and hospitalizations from Covid across nearly all demographics, says Jim Sallis, a public health professor at the University of California San Diego and co-author of the study. A very active 70-year-old still had a higher risk of Covid-related complications than did a similarly active 40-year-old, but the exercisers in both groups had hospitalization rates lower than those who didn’t work out.
The study used data from nearly 200,000 adult Covid-19 patients across the Kaiser Permanente network in Southern California. It asked patients to self-report the number of minutes of moderate exercise they did per week and analyzed the records of how many people in the study cohort were hospitalized, experienced deterioration, such as admission into an intensive-care unit, or died within 90 days of a Covid diagnosis.
The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual Covid shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to Covid could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes
“You don’t have to run, you don’t have to sweat, you don’t have to do anything except get up and go out for a walk,” Dr. Sallis says. “That’s what most people do, and we see how much protection they’re getting from that.”
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that physical activity provides several types of protection from severe illness.
Exercise improves the body’s immune response by mobilizing and redistributing immune cells that can recognize and kill infected cells, says Richard Simpson, a professor at the University of Arizona whose research focuses on exercise immunology and who wasn’t involved with the Kaiser Permanente study. Without exercise, viruses have more time to replicate inside our bodies, which can result in more severe symptoms, he says.
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Physical activity can also help reduce inflammation, the body’s natural immune response to damage or pathogens. Chronic inflammation has been linked to more severe Covid-19 outcomes, especially in the lungs. Cytokines, small messenger proteins that help regulate inflammation, are released during exercise.
The study data were collected from the beginning of the pandemic to May 2021, when vaccines were just starting to become more available and before more recent waves of Covid. However, the researchers believe the results of the study are still broadly applicable.
“Exercise is as effective as many of the drugs that we use and has no side effects,” says Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician in New York City who wasn’t involved with the study. “We want to get people taking it every day.”
A plane crashed into a river gorge in central Nepal on Sunday, killing at least 68 people and sending Nepalese authorities into a scramble to determine what brought the aircraft down.
The Yeti Airlines turboprop hit the gorge of the Seti River about a mile from its destination, Pokhara International Airport, according to Brig. Gen. Krishna Prasad Bhandari, the spokesman for the Nepalese army. Photos and TV footage showed black plumes of smoke and fire at the site, with crowds swarming around the wreckage.
Gen. Bhandari said that as of Sunday evening the rescue team had retrieved 68 bodies and that search operations had been suspended until Monday morning. There were 72 passengers aboard, including four crew members.
“It’s dark now and the crash site is a river gorge where it’s difficult to work at night,” he said.
Rescue teams worked to retrieve bodies at the crash site of a Yeti Airlines plane.
Photo:
Rohit Giri/REUTERS
The passenger list included 53 Nepalese, five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans, and one each from Australia, Argentina, France and Ireland, Nepal’s civil aviation authority said. The names of all passengers were released by the aviation regulator on its Twitter account.
Tribhuban Poudel, a 37-year-old publisher and editor of a local newspaper in Pokhara, had been traveling home on the morning of the Nepali Hindu festival of Maghe Sankranti to celebrate with his family after attending a gathering of journalists in Kathmandu, according to his friend Manoj Basnet, a Kathmandu-based media executive.
“He had risen in his life through struggles and was ever available to help whoever he could, including his friends,” Mr. Basnet said. Mr. Poudel is survived by his mother, wife and a 3-year-old son.
The aviation authority said flight number YT-691 took off from the capital of Kathmandu at 10:32 a.m. local time for what is usually a 30-minute journey. The plane’s last communication with the Pokhara airport tower was at 10:50 a.m. from the Seti River gorge, and it crashed soon after.
A Yeti Airlines plane in Pokhara last year.
Photo:
NICOLAS ECONOMOU/REUTERS
Flightradar24, a flight-tracking site, said that the ATR 72-500 aircraft was 15 years old and equipped with an old transponder that had unreliable data. In a Twitter post, the website said that the transponder stopped transmitting position data at 10:50 a.m., and that the last signal from the transponder was received at 10:57 a.m.
The plane was made by aircraft manufacturer ATR, a joint venture between
Airbus SE
and
Leonardo
SpA.
Pokhara is a popular tourist destination, with many flocking to the lakeside city for hiking and yoga. Nepal relies heavily on revenue from tourists, with the industry making up about 6.7% of the country’s GDP, according to the World Bank. In 2019, the tourism industry supported over one million jobs in Nepal.
Nepalese Prime Minister
Pushpa Kamal Dahal
called an emergency cabinet meeting in the aftermath of the crash. The government has formed a five-member probe committee of retired government officials and air-safety experts to ascertain the cause of the crash and give recommendations to avoid such an incident the future, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation said. The probe committee will have 45 days to present its report.
Rescue workers sifted through the wreckage of the Yeti Airlines turboprop.
Photo:
yunish gurung/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Plane crashes in Nepal have occurred in recent years, with poor weather conditions sometimes being blamed. Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountain peaks, including Mount Everest.
Last May, a Tara Air flight carrying 22 people crashed into the Himalayan mountains, killing all aboard. The plane, which had departed from Pokhara, went down after swerving due to inclement weather, government officials said.
In 2018, a US-Bangla Airlines flight from the capital city of Bangladesh crash-landed and caught fire at Kathmandu Airport, killing 51 of the 71 people aboard. A government investigation blamed the crash on pilot error, saying that he was under severe emotional distress.
On Sunday Mr. Basnet recalled his last words with Mr. Poudel about two months back. “He asked me when I planned to visit Pokhara the next time,” Mr. Basnet said.
Mr. Poudel had helped Mr. Basnet with local contacts and business leads when he was trying to find his footing as a media professional in Pokhara about a decade ago, Mr. Basnet recalled. They hadn’t seen each other in a while, but Mr. Poudel told him he had been keeping up on Mr. Basnet’s posts on social media.
“You are doing really good in life. Continue doing good,” Mr. Basnet remembered his friend telling him.
Write to Krishna Pokharel at krishna.pokharel@wsj.com and Shan Li at shan.li@wsj.com
NEW ORLEANS — R’Bonney Gabriel, a fashion designer, model and sewing instructor from Texas who competition officials said is the first Filipino American to win Miss USA, was crowned Miss Universe on Saturday night.
Gabriel closed her eyes and clasped hands with runner-up Miss Venezuela, Amanda Dudamel, at the moment of the dramatic reveal of the winner, then beamed after her name was announced.
Thumping music rang out, and she was handed a bouquet of flowers, draped in the winner’s sash and crowned with a tiara onstage at the 71st Miss Universe Competition, held in New Orleans.
The second runner-up was Miss Dominican Republic, Andreina Martinez.
In the Q&A at the last stage of the competition for the three finalists, Gabriel was asked how she would work to demonstrate Miss Universe is “an empowering and progressive organization” if she were to win.
“I would use it to be a transformational leader,” she responded, citing her work using recycled materials in her fashion design and teaching sewing to survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence.
“It is so important to invest in others, invest in our community and use your unique talent to make a difference,” Gabriel continued. “We all have something special, and when we plant those seeds to other people in our life, we transform them and we use that as a vehicle for change.”
According to Miss Universe, Gabriel is a former high school volleyball player and graduate of the University of North Texas. A short bio posted on the organization’s website said she is also CEO of her own sustainable clothing line.
Nearly 90 contestants from around the world took part in the competition, organizers said, involving “personal statements, in depth interviews and various categories including evening gown & swimwear.”
Miss Curacao, Gabriela Dos Santos, and Miss Puerto Rico, Ashley Carino, rounded out the top five finalists.
The Biden administration is preparing to seek congressional approval for a $20 billion sale of new F-16 jet fighters to Turkey along with a separate sale of next-generation F-35 warplanes to Greece, in what would be among the largest foreign weapons sales in recent years, according to U.S. officials.
Administration officials intend the prospect of the sale to prod Turkey to sign off on Finland and Sweden’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Ankara has blocked over objections to their ties to Kurdish separatist groups. Congress’s approval of the sale is contingent on Turkey’s acquiescence, administration officials said. The two countries ended decades of neutrality when they decided to join NATO last year in reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The sale to Turkey, which the administration has been considering for more than a year, is larger than expected. It includes 40 new aircraft and kits to overhaul 79 of Turkey’s existing F-16 fleet, according to officials familiar with the proposals.
Congressional notification of the deal will roughly coincide with a visit to Washington next week by Turkey’s Foreign Minister
Mevlut Cavusoglu.
The sale to Turkey also includes more than 900 air-to-air missiles and 800 bombs, one of the officials said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has faced U.S. pressure to approve NATO expansion.
Photo:
adem altan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The separate sale to Greece, which was requested by the Greek government in June 2022, includes at least 30 new F-35s. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the U.S.’s most advanced jet fighter. While officials described the timing of the notifications for both Turkey and Greece as coincidental, it could quell protests from Athens over the F-16 sale if its request is also granted. Greece and Turkey are historic regional rivals and a sale to Turkey alone would likely draw swift condemnation from Athens.
The potential sale of the aircraft could have far-reaching implications for Washington’s efforts to shore up ties with a pair of NATO allies amid the Western response to Russia’s assault on Ukraine.
A State Department spokesman declined to comment on potential arms transfers as a matter of policy until and unless they are formally notified to Congress. Congress has never successfully blocked a foreign arms sale requested by the White House.
The proposed deal with Turkey comes at a moment of tension in U.S.-Turkish relations, with Washington also attempting to convince President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan
to do more to enforce sanctions on Russia and to approve the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO.
The proposal also sets up a possible showdown with some congressional leaders who have vowed to oppose weapons sales to Turkey. Sen.
Bob Menendez,
a Democrat from New Jersey who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said he wouldn’t approve any F-16 sale to Turkey, citing human-rights concerns.
In recent months, Mr. Erdogan has also threatened to launch a new military incursion against Kurdish militants in Syria. Last month a Turkish court also convicted the mayor of Istanbul, a popular opponent of Mr. Erdogan, of insulting public officials in what human rights groups said was part of a crackdown on the Turkish opposition. The Turkish government says its courts are independent.
Under U.S. arms-export laws, Congress will have 30 days to review the deal. If Congress wants to block the deal it must pass a joint resolution of disapproval. Congress can also pass legislation to block or modify a sale at any time until the delivery.
The Biden administration is looking to sell at least 30 new F-35 jet fighters to Greece.
Photo:
robert atanasovski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
U.S. officials say they are encouraging Mr. Erdogan to drop his opposition to Finland and Sweden joining NATO. One official characterized the F-16s as the “carrot on a stick” to get Turkey to agree.
This, officials said, could ease opposition to the sale among some members of Congress. Officials within the State Department have argued for months that the expansion was imperative to NATO’s collective security. However, officials expect that while the Greece package could sail through Congress, the F-16s may be delayed over some members’ reluctance to embolden Ankara with the additional firepower.
Mr. Erdogan first threatened to veto the two countries’ entrance over their ties to Kurdish militant groups in Iraq and Syria. Turkey has fought a slow-burning war with Kurdish armed groups for decades in a conflict that has left tens of thousands dead.
NATO leaders say that Finland and Sweden have addressed Turkey’s concerns, upholding an agreement signed last year that called for both countries to evaluate Turkish extradition requests and drop restrictions on arms sales to Ankara.
Turkish officials say that Sweden hasn’t done enough to uphold its obligations to Turkey, citing what they say is continuing activity by the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Sweden. The Turkish government this week summoned Sweden’s ambassador over a demonstration in Stockholm in which protesters hung a puppet of Mr. Erdogan by its feet. The Turkish president’s hard line against Sweden has broad support within Turkey, including among opposition parties, who have long opposed what they see as a permissive approach to Kurdish militant groups in Europe.
The timing of a vote on NATO expansion in the Turkish parliament will also depend on Turkey’s national election this year, in which Mr. Erdogan faces a close race amid public discontent over the country’s struggling economy.
The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Biden administration remains cautiously optimistic that Turkey will eventually come around on Finland and Sweden. U.S. officials said last year that there would be no quid pro quo for Turkey’s approval of the NATO expansion, and said that the timing of the F-16 sale was dependent on the administration’s own internal process to complete the deal.
The proposed sales also come amid heightened tensions between Turkey and Greece, two longtime adversaries who have traded threats over the past year in the eastern Mediterranean.
Turkey was originally a participant in the U.S.’s cutting-edge F-35 program but was expelled after Mr. Erdogan approved the purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense system. The U.S. government said the Russian weapons system could potentially hack the F-35.
Biden administration officials have argued that selling F-16s to Turkey could help restore ties with the country, which maintains the second-largest army in NATO.
Under Mr. Erdogan, Turkey has played an important role in the Ukraine crisis, facilitating negotiations over prisoner exchanges and helping to broker an agreement that allowed Ukraine to resume its exports of grain through Black Sea ports. Mr. Erdogan’s close relationship with Russia’s President
Vladimir Putin
has also raised concerns in Washington, with scrutiny of inflows of Russian money to Turkey, including oligarch assets.
Finland and Sweden have formally applied to join NATO, but Turkey has threatened to block them from joining. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday explains why Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees the expansion as a threat to Turkey’s national security. (Video first published in May 2022). Photo composite: Sebastian Vega
—William Mauldin contributed to this article.
Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com and Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com
