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Science

1st private astronaut mission to space station readies for launch

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The International Space Station photographed by Expedition 56 crew members from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking, October 4, 2018. (NASA/Roscosmos via Reuters)

Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes

HOUSTON — The International Space Station is set to become busier than usual this week when its crew welcomes aboard four new colleagues from Houston-based startup Axiom Space, the first all-private astronaut team ever flown to the orbiting outpost.

The launch is being hailed by the company, NASA and other industry players as a turning point in the latest expansion of commercial space ventures collectively referred to by insiders as the low-Earth orbit economy, or “LEO economy” for short.

Weather permitting, Axiom’s four-man team will lift off on Friday at the earliest from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, riding atop a Falcon 9 rocket furnished and flown by Elon Musk’s commercial space launch venture SpaceX.

The launch was initially scheduled for Wednesday. An Axiom spokesperson said on Monday the delay would give SpaceX more time to complete pre-launch processing work.

If all goes smoothly, the quartet led by retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria would arrive at the space station about 28 hours later as their SpaceX-supplied Crew Dragon capsule docks at ISS some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

Lopez-Alegria, 63, is the Spanish-born mission commander and Axiom’s vice president of business development. He is set to be joined by Larry Connor, a real estate and technology entrepreneur and aerobatics aviator from Ohio designated as the mission pilot. Connor is in his 70s but the company did not provide his precise age.

Rounding out the Ax-1 team are investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, 52, both serving as mission specialists. Stibbe is set to become the second Israeli in space, after Ilan Ramon, who perished with six NASA crewmates in the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster.

The Ax-1 crew may appear to have a lot in common with many of the wealthy passengers taking suborbital rides lately aboard the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic services offered by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, respectively. But Axiom executives said their mission is more substantive.

“We are not space tourists,” Lopez-Alegria said during a recent news briefing, adding that the Axiom team has undergone extensive astronaut training with both NASA and SpaceX and will be performing meaningful biomedical research.

‘Many beginnings’

“It is the beginning of many beginnings for commercializing low-Earth orbit,” Axiom’s co-founder and executive chairman, Kam Ghaffarian, told Reuters in an interview. “We’re like in the early days of the internet, and we haven’t even imagined all the possibilities, all the capabilities, that we’re going to be providing in space.”

The so-called Ax-1 team will be carrying equipment and supplies for 26 science and technology experiments to be conducted before they are slated to leave orbit and return to Earth 10 days after launch. These include research on brain health, cardiac stem cells, cancer and aging as well as a technology demonstration to produce optics using the surface tension of fluids in microgravity, company executives said.

Launched to orbit in 1998, ISS has been continuously occupied since 2000 under a U.S.-Russian-led partnership including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

While the space station has hosted visits by civilian visitors from time to time, the Ax-1 mission will mark the first all-commercial team of astronauts to use ISS for its intended purpose as an orbiting laboratory.

They will be sharing the weightless workspace alongside seven regular crew members of the ISS — three U.S. astronauts, a German astronaut and three Russian cosmonauts.

Axiom said it has contracted with SpaceX to fly three more missions to orbit over the next two years. NASA selected Axiom in 2020 to design and develop a new commercial wing to the space station, which currently spans the approximate size of a football field. Flight hardware for the first Axiom module is currently undergoing fabrication, the company said.

Plans call for eventually detaching the Axiom modules from the rest of the outpost when ISS is ready for retirement, around 2030, leaving the smaller Axiom station in orbit as a commercial-only platform, Ghaffarian said.

Other private operators are expected to place their own stations in orbit once ISS is decommissioned.

As Kathy Lueders, associate NASA administrator for space operations, described Axiom’s role on a recent teleconference with reporters, “This is going to be an important partnership going forward.”

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Business

Russia war could further escalate auto prices and shortages

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An e-Golf electric car with the VW logo on a rim is pictured in the German car manufacturer Volkswagen Transparent Factory in Dresden, eastern Germany, April 28, 2017. Russia’s devastating war on Ukraine is bringing a whole set of new problems to the global auto industry. (Jens Meyer, Associated Press)

Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes

DETROIT — BMW has halted production at two German factories. Mercedes is slowing work at its assembly plants. Volkswagen, warning of production stoppages, is looking for alternative sources for parts.

For more than a year, the global auto industry has struggled with a disastrous shortage of computer chips and other vital parts that has shrunk production, slowed deliveries and sent prices for new and used cars soaring beyond reach for millions of consumers.

Now, a new factor — Russia’s war against Ukraine — has thrown up yet another obstacle. Critically important electrical wiring, made in Ukraine, is suddenly out of reach. With buyer demand high, materials scarce and the war causing new disruptions, vehicle prices are expected to head even higher well into next year.

The war’s damage to the auto industry has emerged first in Europe. But U.S. production will likely suffer eventually, too, if Russian exports of metals — from palladium for catalytic converters to nickel for electric vehicle batteries — are cut off.

“You only need to miss one part not to be able to make a car,” said Mark Wakefield, co-leader of consulting firm Alix Partners’ global automotive unit. “Any bump in the road becomes either a disruption of production or a vastly unplanned-for cost increase.”

Supply problems have bedeviled automakers since the pandemic erupted two years ago, at times shuttering factories and causing vehicle shortages. The robust recovery that followed the recession caused demand for autos to vastly outstrip supply — a mismatch that sent prices for new and used vehicles skyrocketing well beyond overall high inflation.

In the United States, the average price of a new vehicle is up 13% in the past year, to $45,596, according to Edmunds.com. Average used prices have surged far more: They’re up 29% to $29,646 as of February.

Before the war, S&P Global had predicted that global automakers would build 84 million vehicles this year and 91 million next year. (By comparison, they built 94 million in 2018.) Now it’s forecasting fewer than 82 million in 2022 and 88 million next year.

You only need to miss one part not to be able to make a car.

–Mark Wakefield, Alix Partners’ global automotive unit

Mark Fulthorpe, an executive director for S&P, is among analysts who think the availability of new vehicles in North America and Europe will remain severely tight — and prices high — well into 2023. Compounding the problem, buyers who are priced out of the new-vehicle market will intensify demand for used autos and keep those prices elevated, too — prohibitively so for many households.

Eventually, high inflation across the economy — for food, gasoline, rent and other necessities — will likely leave a vast number of ordinary buyers unable to afford a new or used vehicle. Demand would then wane. And so, eventually, would prices.

“Until inflationary pressures start to really erode consumer and business capabilities,” Fulthorpe said, “it’s probably going to mean that those who have the inclination to buy a new vehicle, they’ll be prepared to pay top dollar.”

One factor behind the dimming outlook for production is the shuttering of auto plants in Russia. Last week, French automaker Renault, one of the last automakers that have continued to build in Russia, said it would suspend production in Moscow.

The transformation of Ukraine into an embattled war zone has hurt, too. Wells Fargo estimates that 10% to 15% of crucial wiring harnesses that supply vehicle production in the vast European Union were made in Ukraine. In the past decade, automakers and parts companies invested in Ukrainian factories to limit costs and gain proximity to European plants.

The wiring shortage has slowed factories in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere, leading S&P to slash its forecast for worldwide auto production by 2.6 million vehicles for both this year and next. The shortages could reduce exports of German vehicles to the United States and elsewhere.

In this March 21 image made from video, Mark Wakefield, co-leader of AlixPartners’ global automotive unit, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the consulting firm’s offices in Southfield, Mich. (Photo: Mike Householder, Associated Press)

Wiring harnesses are bundles of wires and connectors that are unique to each model; they can’t be easily re-sourced to another parts maker. Despite the war, harness makers like Aptiv and Leoni have managed to reopen factories sporadically in Western Ukraine. Still Joseph Massaro, Aptiv’s chief financial officer, acknowledged that Ukraine “is not open for any type of normal commercial activity.”

Aptiv, based in Dublin, is trying to shift production to Poland, Romania, Serbia and possibly Morocco. But the process will take up to six weeks, leaving some automakers short of parts during that time.

“Long term,” Massaro told analysts, “we’ll have to assess if and when it makes sense to go back to Ukraine.”

BMW is trying to coordinate with its Ukrainian suppliers and is casting a wider net for parts. So are Mercedes and Volkswagen.

Yet finding alternative supplies may be next to impossible. Most parts plants are operating close to capacity, so new work space would have to be built. Companies would need months to hire more people and add work shifts.

“The training process to bring up to speed a new workforce — it’s not an overnight thing,” Fulthorpe said.

Mercedes stars, are on display at the Daimler-Benz factory in Sindelfingen, southern Germany, Feb. 1, 2011. (Photo: Michael Latz, Associated Press)

Fulthorpe said he foresees a further tightening supply of materials from both Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine is the world’s largest exporter of neon, a gas used in lasers that etch circuits onto computer chips. Most chip makers have a six-month supply; late in the year, they could run short. That would worsen the chip shortage, which before the war had been delaying production even more than automakers expected.

Likewise, Russia is a key supplier of such raw materials as platinum and palladium, used in pollution-reducing catalytic converters. Russia also produces 10% of the world’s nickel, an essential ingredient in EV batteries.

Mineral supplies from Russia haven’t been shut off yet. Recycling might help ease the shortage. Other countries may increase production. And some manufacturers have stockpiled the metals.

But Russia also is a big aluminum producer, and a source of pig iron, used to make steel. Nearly 70% of U.S. pig iron imports come from Russia and Ukraine, Alix Partners says, so steelmakers will need to switch to production from Brazil or use alternative materials. In the meantime, steel prices have rocketed up from $900 a ton a few weeks ago to $1,500 now.

So far, negotiations toward a cease-fire in Ukraine have gone nowhere, and the fighting has raged on. A new virus surge in China could cut into parts supplies, too. Industry analysts say they have no clear idea when parts, raw materials and auto production will flow normally.

Even if a deal is negotiated to suspend fighting, sanctions against Russian exports would remain intact until after a final agreement had been reached. Even then, supplies wouldn’t start flowing normally. Fulthorpe said there would be “further hangovers because of disruption that will take place in the widespread supply chains.”

Wakefield noted, too, that because of intense pent-up demand for vehicles across the world, even if automakers restore full production, the process of building enough vehicles will be a protracted one.

When might the world produce an ample enough supply of cars and trucks to meet demand and keep prices down?

Wakefield doesn’t profess to know.

“We’re in a raising-price environment, a (production)-constrained environment,” he said. “That’s a weird thing for the auto industry.”

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Science

Dress rehearsal: NASA moon rocket’s last test before launch

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The NASA Artemis rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard stands on pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., March 18. NASA is kicking off a critical countdown test for its new moon rocket. The two-day dress rehearsal began Friday at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and will culminate Sunday with the loading of the rocket’s fuel tanks. (John Raoux, Associated Press)

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA kicked off a critical countdown test Friday for its new moon rocket, a 30-story behemoth that could make its first lunar test flight by summer.

The two-day demonstration — the final major milestone before liftoff to the moon — will culminate Sunday as teams load nearly 1 million gallons of super-cold fuel into the rocket on the pad. The countdown will halt at the 9-second mark before engines ignite.

NASA plans to set a launch date after analyzing the results of the dress rehearsal for the Space Launch System rocket — SLS for short.

Officials have indicated the rocket could blast off as early as June, sending the attached Orion crew capsule hurtling toward the moon. The capsule will spend at least a month in space before returning to Earth.

No one will be on board for the first moonshot since NASA’s Apollo lunar landings a half-century ago. Astronauts will strap in for the second test flight slated for 2024, looping around the moon and back. That would pave the way for astronauts landing on the moon around 2025, according to NASA.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office recently warned, however, that technical challenges remain — primarily with the lunar lander and spacesuits — that could further delay the moon landing, already years behind schedule. The GAO also cited billions in escalating costs.

Towering 322 feet, the rocket made its debut at the Kennedy Space Center launch pad two weeks ago. Since then, all of its systems have been powered up in preparation for this weekend’s test. Officials stressed that possible thunderstorms or technical problems could drag out the rehearsal.

NASA promised to provide updates throughout the weekend, but the public won’t be able to listen in. The space agency cited security concerns.

“We are being cautious — an abundance of caution — and that’s particularly in the environment that we’re in nowadays,” said Tom Whitmeyer, head of NASA’s exploration systems development.

NASA expects to announce the crews for the initial lunar missions this summer. The pool of candidates includes nine men and nine women; two are at the International Space Station and two are due to arrive there in a few weeks.

Twenty-four astronauts flew to the moon during Apollo from 1968 through 1972; 12 landed on the lunar surface.

Unlike Apollo, NASA is partnering with private business for its moon program, named Artemis after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology. While NASA’s rocket and capsule will get astronauts into lunar orbit, SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship will carry them down to the lunar surface, at least for the first mission. NASA is seeking additional companies for later landings.

The space agency’s goal is to develop a sustainable moon presence, then aim for Mars. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson recently cited 2040 as the target for a Martian expedition with astronauts.

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Business

Signs of a housing bubble are brewing

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Home prices are rising faster than market forces would indicate they should and are becoming “unhinged from fundamentals,” according to a new blog post written by researchers and economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Until recently, the possibility of a bubble wasn’t widely supported. But after looking at housing markets across the US, the Fed researchers said new evidence is emerging.

“Our evidence points to abnormal US housing market behavior for the first time since the boom of the early 2000s,” the researchers wrote. “Reasons for concern are clear in certain economic indicators … which show signs that 2021 house prices appear increasingly out of step with fundamentals.”

Many Americans are still scarred by the last housing crash in 2007, which was fueled by cheap credit and lax lending standards that resulted in millions of homeowners owing more on their homes than they were worth.

But this time, the economists said they are worried about a different scenario.

Just because home prices are rising wildly does not always mean housing is in a bubble. And there are lots of reasons why home prices have risen steadily over the past decade — and shot up even more significantly in the past two years — including supply and demand imbalances in the market, rising labor and construction costs and how high or low the interest rates are for a mortgage, the researchers pointed out.

But they said prices may be rising to a point they call “exuberance,” in which prices become increasingly out of sync with the economic fundamentals underpinning the market.

One possible reason, they suggested, is that buyers may believe prices will continue to climb and fear they will miss out on snagging a lower price on a home now and get stuck paying more later.

This fear of missing out, or FOMO, effect can drive up prices and heighten expectations of higher prices ahead. That can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, researchers said, in which price growth can become exponential.

The consequences of housing market exuberance can include overpriced homes, investments based on distorted expectations of returns and reduced economic growth and employment.

The cycle is interrupted when policymakers intervene, spurring investors to become cautious and causing the flow of money into housing to dry up. This could cause a housing correction or possibly even a bust, according to the blog post.

The researchers recommended policy makers and market participants closely watch local markets for booms in prices in order to better respond, “before misalignments become so severe that subsequent corrections produce economic upheaval.”

Bubble brewing

The behavior of homebuyers and sellers over the past two years has been anything but normal, the researchers pointed out. Prices are at record highs and continue to move higher because there has been record low inventory. Still, homebuyers keep buying. Interest rates fell to record lows during the pandemic, but that does not alone explain the housing market frenzy, they wrote.
Other factors have played a role in pushing the market into bubble territory, the Fed researchers wrote, including pandemic-related stimulus programs and Covid-19-related supply-chain disruptions and associated policy responses. The researchers specifically highlight the role of investors, who are aggressively buying up homes.
Investors now buy 33% of the homes in the US, which is a 5% larger share than the average over the past decade, according to John Burns Real Estate Consulting. The business of ibuying — in which a company buys a home for cash to slightly fix it up and resell it again — is only 1.7% of the national housing market in the last quarter of 2021, according to Zillow. But in some cities, the share of homes going to ibuyers is as high as 11%.

The researchers found that as prices have risen signs of exuberance have emerged. The US housing market has been showing these signs for more than five consecutive quarters through third quarter 2021, they found.

Fed researchers also looked at the relationship between home prices and rents. They found that since 2020, the home price-to-rent ratio has rapidly skyrocketed beyond what market fundamentals can explain and began showing signs of exuberance in 2021.

Another indicator the researchers examined was the ratio of home prices to disposable income, which is closely tied to affordability. This home price-to-income ratio is increasing quickly, but not yet exuberant, the researchers said.

Silver linings

A lot was learned from the last housing crash, which has led to better early detection and warning indicators of housing bubbles, the researchers wrote. If these concerning trends continue, banks, policymakers and regulators ought to be better equipped to quickly react to avoid the most severe, negative consequences of a correction.

In addition, they wrote, there is no reason to expect any resulting correction would impact homeowners or the economy as significantly as the last housing crash. Americans are generally in better financial shape, homeowners have stronger equity positions and excessive borrowing is not as rampant as it was in the mid-2000s.

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World

AP PHOTOS on Day 35: Scouring rubble of destroyed homes

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By The Associated Press

March 30, 2022 GMT

In a village on the outskirts of Kyiv, residents sift through the rubble of their destroyed homes, searching for buried personal items. Serhiy Malyshenko, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, holds his military medals, charred black from the shelling by Russian forces.

Soldiers and other personnel comfort distraught Ukrainian seniors evacuated from Irpin, a key suburb northwest of the capital that has seen heavy fighting, as they arrive at an assistance center in the village of Yasnohorodka.

Full Coverage: Photography

At a private zoo in the village, workers and soldiers attempt to evacuate the surviving animals, wrangling ostriches and carrying a stressed pony to a truck. They were forced to halt when shelling resumed between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the area.

On Wednesday, Russian forces bombarded areas around Kyiv just hours after pledging to scale back operations to promote trust between the two sides, Ukrainian authorities said.



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US

Colorado wildfire: Evacuation orders for 8,000 homes are lifted after parts of the Boulder area torched

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“With the exception of NCAR Road, all roads in the area are now open. Officials anticipate that NCAR Road will remain closed for several days,” the agency said Sunday evening.

“While it is now safe to return home, people in the area of the fire should remain vigilant. Fire officials do not anticipate fully extinguishing the fire for several days. It is possible that the (city may) issue new evacuation orders if conditions deteriorate. Continue to follow this Boulder Office of Emergency Management page for updates.”

The cause of the wildfire remains under investigation.

The inferno broke out Saturday afternoon and burned out of control Saturday evening — prompting evacuation orders for thousands of residents, officials said.
“Evacuation areas include 19,000 people and 8,000 homes,” the Boulder Office of Emergency Management tweeted Saturday evening.
By Monday morning, the blaze had charred about 189 acres and was about 35% contained, the office of emergency management said.

No injuries had been reported, and no structures had been damaged, the agency said late Sunday.

Officials said a combination of cooler temperatures and stellar firefighting efforts helped keep the wildfire from scorching properties and injuring residents.

Mike Smith of the Boulder Incident Management Team said he was “very happy” with the battle against the blaze.

“We had over 200 firefighters from over 30 agencies,” Smith told reporters Sunday. “That, combined with all of the fuel mitigation treatments that we’ve done in this area, is one of the reasons that we had such great success.”



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US

Colorado wildfire near Boulder prompts evacuation for 8,000 homes

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“Evacuation areas include 19,000 people and 8,000 homes,” the Boulder Office of Emergency Management tweeted.

The NCAR Fire broke out Saturday afternoon. It was just 123 acres by Saturday evening, but not contained at all, officials said. Several roads and highways near the fire were closed, according to officials.

“The state has deployed two firefighting aircraft, including a single-engineer tanker and Type 2 helicopter, and stands ready to assist with the response,” said Gov. Jared Polis in a statement. “We will continue to monitor this evolving situation.”

In a tweet, city officials noted the East Boulder Community Center would serve as an overnight shelter and mental health professionals were deployed to provide support for those evacuated.
Officials also encouraged people to call the Colorado State Mental Health Crisis Line at 1-844-493-8255 if needed.

CNN’s Melissa Alonso contributed to this report.



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Science

A dinosaur bigger than T. rex swam and hunted its prey underwater

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This illustration shows a spinosaurus hunting a large underwater sawfish. (Davide Bonadonna)

Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes

CHICAGO — It’s long been thought that dinosaurs were land lubbers — terrestrial creatures that steered largely clear of water.

A groundbreaking discovery in 2014 of a Spinosaurus with features that pointed to an aquatic lifestyle — retracted nostrils, short hind legs, a finlike tail and paddle-like feet — challenged that view.

However, whether some dinosaurs were truly at ease in the water or just stood in the shallows and dipped their heads in to pursue prey as a heron would has divided paleontologists.

In an attempt to resolve this heated debate, a group of researchers has studied 380 bones belonging to 250 animals — some living and others extinct — including marine reptiles and flying reptiles, as well as mammals, lizards, crocodiles and birds.

“There are certain laws that are applicable to any organism on this planet. One of these laws regards density and the capability of submerging into water,” said Matteo Fabbri, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a news release. He was the lead author of the study that published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Bone density can be used as evidence for adaptation to life in water, the study said, as even aquatic animals that are not clearly shaped for an aquatic lifestyle — such as the hippopotamus — have very dense bones.

The researchers found that spinosaurids — a family of predatory dinosaurs that can be up to 49 feet in length (larger than a T. rex) — had dense bones, suggesting they were adapted to life in the water. None of the other 39 dinosaurs the research team investigated as part of the study were likely at ease in water, they said.

Spinosaurids’ relationship with water

Within the spinosaurid family, they concluded that Spinosaurus, which has a distinctive sail-like feature on its spine, and its close relative Baryonyx had increased bone density and would have been able to swim and hunt while submerged underwater — a bit like a crocodile or hippo. Suchomimus, another related dinosaur, had lighter bones that would have made swimming more difficult. It likely lived by water and ate fish, as evidenced by its crocodile-like snout and conical teeth, but based on its bone density, it wasn’t actually swimming, the study found.

Thomas Holtz, a principal lecturer in vertebrate paleontology at the University of Maryland, said the study confirmed that the ancestors of Spinosaurus and Baryonyx spent enough time in water to evolve ballast, to provide stability, in the form of dense bones. However, he said his work on Spinosaurus showed it most likely struck at food from above — perhaps from shore, or while cruising lazily on the water’s surface — not from diving in the depths.

“The nostrils of Spinosaurus is not at all placed like it is in animals like hippos and crocs, which spend much of their time submerged; instead, it is placed back on the skull as it is in herons and other animals which feed by dipping their snout in the water to feed,” said Holz, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“The new evidence is consistent with it being able to submerge, at least sometime(s). But as we showed in a paper last year, it couldn’t have been a really fast swimmer with that large sail, at least not in shallow water.”

Jason Poole, an adjunct professor at Drexel University and the Bighorn Basin Paleontological Institute’s director of fossil preparation, said he would have liked to see more specimens related to Spinosaurus included in the study.

“Oddball dinosaurs tend to offer insight into the extremes of dinosaur evolution. The more specimens the better to understand how they got to be so odd,” said Poole, who wasn’t involved in the research.

“I think this study is a good one to keep the ball rolling but more work is always needed to get a better picture of the life of something so strange and far removed in time.”

Big data

The researchers, including scientists from the United States, Europe and Morocco, first compiled a database of sections of thigh bones and rib bones from a variety of animals to understand whether there was a universal correlation between bone density and behavior.

They cast a wide net. “We included seals, whales, elephants, mice, hummingbirds. We have dinosaurs of different sizes, extinct marine reptiles like mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. We have animals that weigh several tons, and animals that are just a few grams. The spread is very big,” Fabbri said.

They found that animals that submerge themselves underwater to find food have bones that are almost completely solid throughout, whereas cross sections of land-dwellers’ bones look more like donuts, with hollow centers.

They did find that other dinosaurs, such as the towering plant-eating sauropods, also had dense leg bones, but other bones were lightweight. Fabbri said this was a pattern also seen in very heavy living land animals like elephants and rhinos.

The research is an example of a big data approach to paleontology that has yielded intriguing insights into how dinosaurs experienced their world — something that is often hard to ascertain from studying fossils of individual animals.

Such studies, according to Jingmai O’Connor, a curator at the Field Museum and co-author of the bone density study, that draw from hundreds of specimens, are “the future of paleontology.”

“They’re very time-consuming to do, but they let scientists shed light onto big patterns, rather than making qualitative observations based on one fossil.”

A study published last year examined and reconstructed the inner ears of ancient fossilized beasts and compared them with the ear canals of living animals. The researchers were able to deduce from that exercise whether the creatures would have been nocturnal hunters, attentive parents or clumsy fliers.

However, this kind of research does have limitations, since one individual feature cannot give a complete picture about the lifestyle of an animal, Holz said.

“Each piece of evidence adds to the total picture. In this particular case, they have provided a great new database of bone density in a wide variety of animals of different life habits. So in the future we can now compare other animals with lifestyles which are not well understood,” Holz said.

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US

The South is being walloped with severe weather and tornadoes after the same storm destroyed homes in Texas

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Five people were injured in a trailer in Beasley after a reported tornado touched down in the area, according to Jacqueline Preston of the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office.

That’s after more than a dozen tornadoes were reported across Texas on Monday. A 73-year-old woman in Grayson County died after her home was destroyed, as were dozens of other dwellings in the state, local officials said.

Tornado watches were in effect Tuesday afternoon for eastern Louisiana, most of Mississippi and western Alabama, with the area having significant threat of tornadoes through the early evening, according to CNN meteorologist Taylor Ward. Several tornado warnings have been issued, meaning a tornado has been spotted.

Winds were “howling along the Gulf Coast, where I can literally feel the atmosphere destabilizing,” CNN meteorologist Derek Van Dam reported Tuesday morning. “Almost like it’s gearing itself up for an afternoon of tornado mayhem. It’s time to have your severe weather preps in place in case the big one strikes.”

Wind gusts of 75 mph, large hail and “a few tornadoes with a couple intense tornadoes (are) possible,” the prediction center said. The tornado watch is in effect until 7 p.m. CT.

“A regional severe weather outbreak appears likely across the Lower Mississippi Valley and central Gulf Coast States today into tonight,” the Storm Prediction Center tweeted. “Tornadoes, some of which should be strong, and potentially widespread damaging winds will be the most impactful hazards.”

Nighttime tornadoes are more than twice as likely to be deadly as daytime ones, the prediction center said.

They “are particularly dangerous not only because people sleeping can get caught off guard but because an oncoming tornado can be shrouded in darkness, making it impossible for someone who is awake to actually see it,” Van Dam said.

Added to that danger is the fact that few residents have basements in the Baton Rouge area, according to meteorologist Hannah Lisney of the National Weather Service there.

“The only protection we have is getting into interiors of our homes and hoping we don’t take a direct hit from a tornado,” Lisney said.

Houma preemptively opened storm shelters, she said, because of the number of modular homes in the area and leftover damage from last year’s Hurricane Ida.

Major cities in the storm’s path include Baton Rouge and New Orleans; Jackson and Gulfport in Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and Memphis.

Aside from the tornado watch, about 10 million people from Louisiana up to Arkansas and Tennessee are under a flood watch, Ward said.

It’s important that people don’t forget about hazards other than tornadoes, including straight line winds, large hail and flooding, Lisney said.

“Everything is on the table,” she said.

The system will weaken as it continues moving east Wednesday, bringing a slight risk of severe weather to areas including Atlanta and Charlotte, Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina.

Track the severe weather and forecast here

20 tornado reports made in Texas and Oklahoma

Dozens of families lost their homes after the same storm on Monday pummeled swaths of Texas. At least 20 tornadoes were reported across Texas and Oklahoma, the National Weather Service said.

As of Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 customers had no power in Texas, according to PowerOutage.us.

In Jack County — northwest of the Fort Worth area — 60 to 80 homes were destroyed, local officials said.

“Many of our homes have been totally demolished and families have been removed from their places of residence,” Jack County Judge Keith Umphress told reporters.

A shelter has been set up for those who lost their homes, officials said.

It was a miracle more people weren’t injured — especially at Jacksboro Elementary School, which was sheltering a large number of students as a storm badly damaged the gymnasium, Jacksboro Fire Chief Jeremy Jennings said.

The children were about to be released for the day when officials decided to have everyone go back inside, Jacksboro Police Chief Scott Haynes said.

The gym at Jacksboro High School was also badly damaged and the facilities will be unusable “for some time,” Jennings said.

“We’re just very blessed to have facilities that were designed to sustain a storm, the storm damage that we received,” Jacksboro Independent School District Superintendent Brad Burnett told CNN affiliate WFAA.

Elementary school students got “pretty emotional” when they left the school and saw the damage caused by the storm, Burnett said.

Nine people in Jack County were hospitalized with minor injuries, the county’s Rural Fire Chief Jason Jennings said Tuesday.

“When you can walk away and say that, so far, we’ve seen no major injuries and no deaths, with the devastation of what we’re seeing in our community and around our county — God’s hand was at work at keeping protection,” Jack County Office of Emergency Management Manager Frank Hefner said.

Jacksboro’s fire chief has never encountered such destruction in his community, he said.

“I’ve been a part of emergency services for 24 years here, I’ve never seen anything nowhere near this magnitude here,” Jeremy Jennings said. “Nothing like this, not even anywhere else in this county.”

Farther south in the Austin area, state agencies such as the Texas Division of Emergency Management and the Texas Department of Public Safety were responding to storm damage in Williamson and Bastrop counties, Gov. Gregg Abbott said.

A reported tornado moved through Round Rock in Williamson County around 6 p.m. Monday, authorities said.

An emergency declaration was already in effect in Williamson County due to the recent fires and will apply to storm damage as well, Abbott said.

“As we speak right now, I want everybody across the state that’s going through this to know, the state of Texas is going to be with you every step of the way,” the governor said.

While many homes, businesses and city-owned buildings suffered significant damage in the Round Rock area, only minor injuries were reported, Round Rock Police Chief Allen Banks said.

Emergency responders were still evaluating the damage in the city about 15 miles north of Austin.

A deluge of much-needed rain

The storm has also dumped widespread rainfall of 1 to 2 inches, with some areas getting as much as 6 inches, Shackelford said.

The severe weather struck as Texas was grappling with more than 170 wildfires over the past week — which had charred more than 108,000 acres, fire officials said.
The new rainfall should help with drought conditions in the region, Shackelford said, with another 1 to 4 inches of rainfall expected.

CNN’s Derek Van Dam reported from Baton Rouge. Claudia Dominguez, Rebekah Riess, Monica Garrett, Dave Hennen, Taylor Romine, Joe Sutton, Susannah Cullinane and Theresa Waldrop contributed to this report.



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Entertainment

Spider-Man: No Way Home’s VFX wizards couldn’t see the memes coming

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By the time Marvel eventually got around to using Spider-Man: No Way Home’s trio of Spider-Men to recreate the pointing Spider-Man meme, the Spider-Man fandom had already taken matters into its own hands and turned Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock into the breakout star of the film by way of unintentional comedy. Though the movie’s earliest trailers were meant to mystify fans who didn’t yet know the multiversal specifics that would bring Molina’s Doc Ock face to face with Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, they also ended up setting off a wave of jokes taking the piss out of one of Spider-Man’s most self-serious villains.

Given the amount of planning that goes into Marvel’s tentpole features, one could have gotten the impression that everything about No Way Home’s rollout, from the immediate jump to speculation about characters edited out from the trailers to the rise of Doc Ock memes, was part of Marvel’s grand plan. But when we recently spoke with Scott Edelstein, a VFX supervisor for Digital Domain, one of the production houses that worked on No Way Home, he explained that while the studio runs a tight ship held together with precise coordination, he and the rest of his team had very little sense of how the public was going to run with and remix their work.

Paula Newsome as MIT Assistant Vice Chancellor and Tom Holland as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Digital Domain/Marvel Studios and Digital Domain/Marvel Studios

It’s come up in a couple of other conversations, and I wanted to ask you. What’s your experience been like since working from home became the norm for a lot of VFX professionals during the pandemic?

Scott Edelstein: It has allowed this work-life balance that we haven’t… it’s not the easiest thing in this industry, you know? For me personally, I was driving an hour and a half each way, so three hours of my day is sitting in the car. This setup really lets me wake up in the morning and be able to sit down at like 7AM with a cup of coffee and go through morning emails. By the time the team gets in, they already know what to do, and I can start getting my kids’ mornings kicked off, and it’s really changed a lot. I just — I think it’s made things more efficient, and I don’t see how we ever go back.

Efficient how?

When you’re talking about the leadership on a show, something like 80 percent of their day is going from meeting to meeting, running around the building to talk about this stuff. When you’re doing it all over Zoom, you’re not traipsing around trying to get to each different meeting room. While you’re in these Zoom meetings, you’re still working, and you’re paying attention, but you don’t always have to contribute 100 percent of the time.

I get that.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been in meetings with lots of people where we’re talking about stuff, and things are being actioned during the meeting. Before the meeting ends, stuff is already finished, and you’ve already looked at it and approved it, whereas before, people had to go back to their desks an hour later, and then get into it, and then wait for the next meeting to show you.

Was that your experience with No Way Home?

In part, yeah. For me, part of what was cool about working on No Way Home was the daily review process. Typically in the office, we’d go into the screening room, sit there, watch all the shots and talk about them, and give notes. Usually, we would be in the front row of a dark room, and you’re in there for however many hours a day. Artists sort of filter in the back, and their shots would come up, and you talk about them with the laser pointer on the screen. But you never really get a lot of face time with people that way because there are so many people.

Right.

With No Way Home, we had probably 200-ish artists on the project, and what I found that was really cool about work from home and Zoom meetings like this is like what we’re doing right now. [gesturing towards the camera]

Like when I’m talking to an artist about a shot, I’m not in a dark room in the front row, and they’re in the back. I’m looking at them, and we’re having a conversation about their work. I think that’s super cool. You can say what you want about the personal aspect of it and how it’s a creative environment and how being together helps you have that sort of back and forth. But I think that there’s other ways of doing that, and I think that the pandemic has shown us that we can do it from home.

Alfred Molina and Tom Holland on the set of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Digital Domain/Marvel Studios and Digital Domain/Marvel Studios

What were some concepts about Doc Ock’s physicality that you really wanted to highlight in the bridge fight scene that might not have been quite as technically feasible back in 2004 for Spider-Man 2?

Our approach was to watch the old films because we really wanted to pay homage to them. We wanted the personality of the arms to kind of come through in a similar way but also wanted to bring new technology into the mix to give them more character. Because of the way movies like this are shot, we sometimes had Alfred Molina on wires, and other times, he was standing on a platform that lifted him around. For the most part, it ended up being that he was more comfortable standing on this platform so that he wasn’t just dangling. We almost always replaced him from the neck down because we had to replace all of his legs and his jacket because that long coat he’s wearing is getting draped over stuff or stuck on things.

So we almost just kept his head for the whole time, but then you have to talk about his weight, his movement, and how you make it look like he’s not just floating. We paid a lot of attention to grounding it in a little bit of reality. So like, he’s got four arms, but we had to make sure that he wasn’t ever only standing on one of them while he’s also leaning way out and holding a car, you know? The weight transfer of how he walked had to make sense so that it felt like he was like a heavy piece of machinery crawling around.

Talk to me about the internal logic you developed for how Otto interacts with his tentacles and how they move and behave.

So, there’s a couple of things that go into this. For one thing, their inner lights change color depending on who’s in control. If you watch the old movie, you sort of get it even though the continuity of that maybe wasn’t so strong, but in this one, we really wanted to pay attention. When the lights inside are red, it means that his chip is fried, and so the arms’ AI is 100 percent in control. Under the bridge, when Spider-Man takes over with the nanotech, the lights turn blue because he is now in control of them, sort of like a Bluetooth connection. And then later in the film, when the chip gets fixed and Doc Ock is in charge again, they’re white, which is a nod to the original Spider-Man 2 when Otto first puts the arms on.

Something that Kelly Port, the overall VFX supervisor, had told us about from talking to Alfred on set for No Way Home is that Alfred actually named the arms way back in the day so that he, in his own head, could give them personality like, you know. So the two top arms were Moe and Flo, and the two bottom halves were Larry and Harry. The idea that we kind of ran with is that Moe and Flo — the two top arms — are kind of the more planning-oriented. They’re the ones that are really kind of communicating with Otto because they’re the smart ones. You can see moments in the bridge fight where you notice that they’re kind of looking around and maybe talking to him or planning with each other about what to do.

You can see some of that with Otto when everyone’s gathered together at Happy’s condo.

It’s a little bit more subtle, but yeah, you sort of see the interaction between Moe and Flo and Doc Ock. The tentacles are paying attention, but also, they’re looking and almost making eye contact with Doc Ock. Moe and Flo are following what’s going on in the room, but Larry and Harry — the guys on the bottom — are kind of just straight down or on the ground providing balance. Larry and Harry are more like the muscle, and they’re carrying out the plan. They’re really usually what’s walking him around, and a lot of times, when things get thrown or crushed, it’s Larry and Harry doing that kind of work.

With a project like this, where there’s so much blue screening, there are so many different moving parts that all have to sort of fit together to create a false reality. Does the potential for meme-ing factor into your creative process at all?

I wish I could say that we had time to really consider a lot of that, but when you’re in it, there’s so very little time, and you’re just in this little box. Our main focus is making this all look as real as possible. You have these blinders on, and you’re trying to make it look as real and as cool as you can make it. I think that if you are aware of anything, it’s just “that movement doesn’t look good” or “he doesn’t feel real” or “this character wouldn’t do that.” But as far as thinking so far ahead to what memes might come out of it, we just don’t, really.

We don’t really get to see the fan reaction or think about them until the thing comes out. It is fun, though, watching people react to trailers and come up with theories about things because you’re in it. You’re making those scenes, and you’re releasing these trailer pieces, and sometimes they’re not finished. Sometimes it’s not even going to be the same action shot that’s going to make it into the final film. But you hear these theories about, like, where Doc Ock got the nanotech. “What’s he doing with all that nanotech on his arms? He obviously took it from Tony Stark. He’s going to make himself way stronger, and it’s going to be so cool!” Meanwhile, we’re sitting there the whole time like, “No, Spider-Man’s just taking control of his body.”

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