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Science

The James Webb Space Telescope is astronomy’s shiny new toy, but the Hubble Space Telescope isn’t old news — it’s at its scientific peak

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The Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 and has provided humanity a front-row seat to the cosmos for more than three decades.NASA

  • Since its launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has made revolutionary achievements in astronomy.

  • The new James Webb Space Telescope is popular, but Hubble has skills, like capturing visible and ultraviolet light, that Webb doesn’t.

  • The two telescopes will team up to study the cosmos in even greater detail.

For three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has delivered breathtaking cosmic views.

As the world raves about NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, aging Hubble continues to be an astronomical workhorse, providing important observations of the universe, while Webb soaks up the spotlight.

But as a pair, the telescopes are even more powerful than they are alone. Together, the space-based telescopes will give astronomers a more complete view and understanding of galaxies, stars, and planets than ever before.

“The Webb Space Telescope is good news for astronomy, and good news for the Hubble Space Telescope as well, since Webb and Hubble enhance and complement each other’s unique capabilities,” Jennifer Wiseman, senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told Insider.

“Hubble’s science return is expected to be strong, and even enhanced throughout this decade as Webb and Hubble unveil the universe together.”

Hubble being deployed from Discovery in 1990.

Hubble being deployed from Discovery in 1990.NASA/IMAX

Since Galileo Galilei constructed his telescope in 1609, astronomers have turned these tools to the sky. Astronomers developed these instruments significantly over time, allowing them to peer even deeper into the universe.

But their observations were constrained by Earth’s atmosphere, which absorbs light before it reaches ground-based telescopes. Enter space-based telescopes. By sitting high above the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere and away from light-polluted cities, observatories like Hubble provide, as NASA puts it, “an unobstructed view of the universe.”

Hubble launched on the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Though it was originally scheduled for only 15 years of service, it still zips through space about 340 miles above Earth’s surface, circling the planet every 97 minutes.

“Hubble is in good technical condition, even 32 years after its launch, with a strong suite of science instruments on board,” Wiseman said.

The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.NASA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University)

Over the years, Hubble’s images have played a significant part in our understanding of the universe. It provided evidence of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and measurement of the expansion rate of the universe. Hubble also helped discover and characterize the mysterious dark energy causing that expansion by pulling galaxies apart. Among its most iconic achievements is its Pillars of Creation image, taken in 1995, which shows newly formed stars glowing in the Eagle Nebula.

And Hubble’s still taking stunning pictures, even after Webb began delivering images from its scientific observations in July. Recently, Hubble snapped an image of star-studded NGC 6540, a globular cluster in the constellation Sagittarius.

A globular cluster NGC 6540 in the constellation Sagittarius, which was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen

Both Webb and Hubble are space-based telescopes, but they differ in many ways. Hubble sees ultraviolet light, visible light, and a small slice of infrared, while Webb will primarily look at the universe in infrared.

Webb — which is 100 times more powerful than Hubble — will be able to peer at objects whose light was emitted more than 13.5 billion years ago, which Hubble can’t see. This is because this light has been shifted into the infrared wavelengths that Webb is specifically designed to detect.

But because Webb has been designed this way, it will also miss celestial objects in the visible and ultraviolet light that Hubble can see.

“In fact, Hubble is the only major class observatory that can access UV wavelengths,” Wiseman said.

A deep field image from the Hubble space telescope, left, and a deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope, right.NASA/STScI; NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

While Webb has been referred to as Hubble’s successor, the two space-based observatories will be teaming up to unveil the universe together.

Wiseman points to how they’ll provide insights into how stars are born within the clouds of cosmic dust and scattered throughout most galaxies. “Hubble, for example, can detect and analyze in detail the hot blue and UV light blazing from star-forming nebulae in nearby galaxies,” Wiseman said, adding, “That can be compared to the vigor of star formation in the early universe as detected with Webb.”

The two space-based telescopes will also combine their gazes to peer at the atmospheres of other worlds, looking for signs they might harbor life.

Astronomers typically look for the ingredients that sustain earthly life — liquid water, a continuous source of energy, carbon, and other elements — when hunting for life-supporting planets. In 2001, Hubble made the first direct measurement of an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

“In our own galaxy, the understanding of planets within and beyond our own solar system will be greatly enhanced with the Webb and Hubble combo,” Wiseman said, adding, “Signatures of water, methane, and other atmospheric constituents will be identified using the combined spectroscopic capabilities of Webb and Hubble.”

In 2001, Hubble made the first direct detection of an atmosphere of world orbiting a star beyond our solar system. Artist’s impression of the planet, which orbits a star called HD 209458.G. Bacon (STScI/AVL)

And though Webb may be seen as the shiny new toy in astronomy, Hubble’s unique capabilities in capturing visible and ultraviolet light still make it a sought-after tool for understanding the cosmos. “Hubble is actually at its peak scientific performance now,” Wiseman said. That’s thanks to a team of NASA technical experts on the ground who monitor and quickly address any technical challenges that arise, she added.

“The number of proposals from scientists around the world who want to use Hubble has risen to over 1,000 per year, with only the top fraction of these selected for actual observations,” Wiseman said, adding, “Many of these complement proposed Webb observations.”

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Science

NASA’s new toy may have already spotted the oldest known galaxy

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Enlarge / The two newly imaged galaxies, with the older one at right.

One of the design goals for the James Webb Space Telescope was to provide the ability to image at wavelengths that would reveal the Universe’s first stars and galaxies. Now, just a few weeks after its first images were revealed, we’re getting a strong indication that it’s a success. In some of the data NASA has made public, researchers have spotted as many as five galaxies from the distant Universe, already present just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. If confirmed to be as distant as they appear, one of them will be the most distant galaxy yet observed.

Opening up

For many of its observatories, NASA allows astronomers to submit proposals for observation and allows those users to have exclusive access to the resulting data for a time afterward. But for its newest instrument, NASA has a set of targets where the data will be made public immediately, for anyone to analyze as they wish. Some of these include locations similar to one of the first images released, where a large cluster of galaxies in the foreground acts as a lens to magnify more distant objects.

(You can look at the details of one of the datasets used for this analysis, called GLASS, which used the cluster Abell 2744 to magnify distant objects, which were urther magnified by the telescope.)

The images in this dataset were long exposures done at different chunks of the infrared spectrum. The full range of the wavelengths that the NIRCam instrument covers was divided up into seven chunks, and each chunk was imaged for anywhere from 1.5 to 6.6 hours. A large international team of researchers used these chunks to perform an analysis that would help them identify distant galaxies by looking for objects that were present in some parts of the spectrum, but missing from others.

The search was based on the understanding that most of the Universe was filled with hydrogen atoms for hundreds of millions of years after the formation of the Cosmic Microwave Background. These would absorb any light at or above a wavelength that was sufficient to ionize the hydrogen, essentially making the Universe opaque to these wavelengths. At the time, this cutoff was somewhere in the UV end of the spectrum. But in the intervening time, the Universe’s expansion shifted that cutoff into the infrared portion of the spectrum—one of the key reasons that the Webb was designed to be sensitive to these wavelengths.

First you don’t see it (left), then you do. Reversed brightness images show an object appearing in a region of space highlighted by crosshairs, but only at longer wavelengths.

So the team looked for objects that were present in the images of the lowest energy chunks of the infrared spectrum imaged by Webb but absent from the higher-energy chunks. And the precise point at which it vanished indicates how red-shifted the cutoff is for that galaxy, and thus how distant the galaxy is. (You can expect future research to involve a similar approach.)

This method produced five different objects of interest, and a draft manuscript focuses on the two most distant of these: GLASS-z13 and GLASS-z11. The former is even more distant than the furthest confirmed distance of anything spotted in the Hubble Deep Field; if confirmed, this would make it the furthest object we know about and thus the closest in time to the Big Bang.

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Health

Children With Autism Exhibit Typical Joint Attention During Toy Play With a Parent

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Summary: Young children on the autism spectrum achieved joined attention similar to that of a neurotypical child when playing with their parents.

Source: Cell Press

For decades, autism research has relied on data collected during lab tasks or interviews with clinicians that are more constrained than the child’s day-to-day interactions with others.

A study published in the journal Current Biology on May 12 challenges the status quo by observing toddlers in more natural play settings.

By using a head-mounted camera to track kids’ eye movements as they played with toys, scientists observed that children with autism achieved joint attention—measured by time spent looking at the same toy at the same time as their parent—at typical levels.

To understand how children interact with social partners in more comfortable and natural settings, Julia Yurkovic-Harding, an autism researcher at Indiana University, was among the first to use a dual head-mounted eye-tracking method with children with autism to study social interactions between the children and their parents.

“The head-mounted eye tracking allows us to get precision in measuring their visual attention and manual action but allows us to let the children play more naturally,” says Yurkovic-Harding, the co-first author on the study.

Children who fall on the autism spectrum often have difficulty following a social partner’s eyes. This behavior, called gaze following, is a key part of how autism researchers tend to define joint attention.

However, researchers who use head-mounted eye tracking to study the development of typically developing children recently found that children don’t look at their parents’ faces very often when they’re playing with toys together.

This means that gaze following might not be an available cue for achieving joint attention in some more natural settings. Instead, typically developing children follow their parent’s hands, which are often touching or holding toys, as a way to know what their parent is looking at.

An assessment of data gathered during play sessions with a group of 50 kids aged 2 to 4 found that autistic children maintained joint attention at levels consistent with their neurotypical peers.

Children who fall on the autism spectrum often have difficulty following a social partner’s eyes. Image is in the public domain

These results were exciting to Yurkovic-Harding. “Every time that you find something that’s typical and intact in children with autism, there’s this opportunity to explore,” she says. Additionally, the children with autism also used hand-following rather than gaze-following cues to follow their parent’s attention into joint attention.

Experiences, where a child focuses on an activity, like playing with a toy truck or building with blocks, together with a parent, are thought to support language development.

The current study found that parents of children with autism spectrum disorder named toys more frequently when they were in joint attention together compared to when they weren’t looking at the same toy.

Yurkovic-Harding and her team hope that by identifying times when kids with autism are able to play in more typical ways, adults can encourage autistic children to do more of these activities and allow for more chances for learning.

“We need to push to understand the everyday lives of individuals with autism, the social pressures that they face day to day, and the social context that they interact in so we can help them exist in the social world that’s all around us in a way that is comfortable and confident for them,” she says.

About this ASD research news

Author: Press Office
Source: Cell Press
Contact: Press Office – Cell Press
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.
“Children with ASD Establish Joint Attention during Free-Flowing Toy Play without Face Looks” by Julia Yurkovic-Harding et al. Current Biology

Abstract

See also

Children with ASD Establish Joint Attention during Free-Flowing Toy Play without Face Looks

Highlights

  • ASD children engage in joint attention at frequent and typical levels during toy play
  • Like TD dyads, ASD dyads follow hands (rather than eyes) to establish joint attention
  • In both groups, parents name toys more frequently during moments of joint attention
  • These results raise questions about the meaning of joint attention deficits in ASD

Summary

Children’s ability to share attention with another person (i.e., achieve joint attention) is critical for learning about their environments in general and supporting language and object word learning in particular.

While joint attention (JA) as it pertains to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often more narrowly operationalized as arising from eye gaze or explicit pointing cues alone, recent evidence demonstrates that JA in natural environments can be achieved more broadly through multiple other pathways beyond gaze and gestures.

Here, we use dual head-mounted eye tracking to examine pathways into and characteristics of JA episodes during free-flowing parent-child toy play, comparing children with ASD to typically developing (TD) children. Moments of JA were defined objectively as both the child’s and parent’s gaze directed to the same object at the same time.

Consistent with previous work in TD children, we found that both TD and ASD children rarely look at their parent’s face in this unstructured free play context. Nevertheless, both groups achieved similarly high rates of JA that far exceeded chance, suggesting the use of alternative pathways into JA. We characterize these alternate pathways, find they occur at similar levels across both groups, and achieve similar ends: namely, for both groups, targets of JA are named more frequently by parents in those moments than non-jointly attended objects.

These findings broaden the conceptualization of JA abilities and impairment in ASD and raise questions regarding the mechanistic role of the face-gaze-mediated JA pathway in ASD.

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Technology

This video teaches you how to build a retro flip-walker toy out of LEGO

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This LEGO flip-walking vehicle looks like it has a mind of its own, but it’s really just powered by gravity and a tiny motor. Custom LEGO builder JK Brickworks walks us through the build in a video on YouTube, which was actually inspired by the old-school Bear Mobill toy made by Bandai in 1987. It looks like the original toy is supposed to be some kind of sci-fi military vehicle, but JK Brickworks gives it a flashy new look.

The hypnotic flipping motion is triggered by a forward-moving trolley in the center. It weighs down the machine just enough at the end of its track, causing the build to flip over on two legs, resetting the entire process. As shown in JK Brickworks’ video, the toy’s unique flipping motion lets it climb up small steps and even go up a slight incline.

If you want a more in-depth look at how to build this oddly-satisfying flippy machine, you can check out the almost two-hour-long recorded livestream of JK Brickworks putting it together piece-by-piece. It looks like JK Brickworks plans on creating in-depth building instructions as well, as he notes “instructions will be forthcoming” in the description of his design breakdown video.

Sure, the machine may serve no purpose whatsoever and have an unnecessarily obnoxious way of moving, but it’s interesting that such a vehicle even exists. As pointed out by some users on Reddit, the only toy that gets close to this level of intrigue is probably the 1983 He-Man dragon walker, which swings itself sideways to take a single step forward.



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Health

Glass Tumbler Found In Woman’s Urinary Bladder 4 Years After Use As Sex Toy

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Oh, that’s where that glass tumbler went. A case report published in the journal Urology Case Reports described how doctors found a glass tumbler that a 45-year-old woman had misplaced about four years earlier. And urine for a surprise as to where they found this glass tumbler. Here’s a hint. It wasn’t in the woman’s cupboard.

When you need a doctor to find something that you’ve lost, chances are something’s gone quite wrong. After all, you don’t tend to call your doctor every time that you can’t find your Spiderman underwear. In this case, the woman had been suffering urgenturia for about a year before eventually going to the emergency room. Now, urgenturia may sound like a cafeteria when you want food very quickly. But instead it is a feeling of urinary urgency, a continuing sensation of needing to empty your bladder. It’s called urgency because the words “I really have to pee” aren’t usually followed by “let’s take a leisurely stroll in the park” or “can you tell me that really long story about your thumbtack collection again?”

Urinary urgency is a common symptom of a urinary tract infection (UTI) because when your bladder walls get irritated they often begin to contract or spasm. The case report, authored by a team from the Academic Hospital Habib Bourguiba in Sfax, Tunisia (Ahmed Chaabouni, Ahmed Samet, Mohamed Fourati, Houcem Harbi, Mohamed Amine Mseddi, and Mourad Hadjslimene), indicated that the woman had received treatment for bladder infections several times previously. However, each time no one had taken a closer look at her bladder.

While the woman was in the emergency room, a urinalysis on a sample of her urine found both red blood cells and lots of white blood cells. This might have been expected for a typical UTI. However, an X-ray of her pelvic area revealed something even more unusual: an object that appeared shaped like a glass. And nothing in your pelvis should be shaped like a glass, regardless of what you may nickname your genitals.

The woman then underwent surgery to remove this object from her bladder. And the surgery revealed a glass more than half full situation. It was a glass tumbler that had apparently been sitting in her bladder for a while because it was encased in calcified material. The picture in the following tweet shows what doctors had extracted from her bladder:

All told, this combination glass tumbler and bladder stone measured 8 cm by 7 cm by 8 cm. That’s a fairly large stone as eight centimeters is about one-twentieth the height of Napoleon. With this glass tumbler successfully removed from her bladder, the woman was able to leave the hospital after two days and apparently had no problems afterwards.

Whenever you find a glass tumbler in someone’s bladder, you typically should have follow-up questions. After all, bar or kitchen items shouldn’t just randomly appear in one’s bladder. Upon questioning from the doctors, the patient mentioned that she had used the glass tumbler as a sex toy four years prior, inserting it into her vagina. Apparently, she hadn’t removed the glass tumbler from her vagina. Over time, this object probably caused inflammation and the breakdown of the tissue between her vagina and her bladder. The following diagram shows how your bladder sits in front of your vagina:

This tissue breakdown then may have allowed the glass tumbler to slowly migrate from her vagina into her bladder. When a tunnel forms between your bladder and your vagina, it’s called a vesicovaginal fistula. A fistula is any abnormal connection between two body parts. The prefix “vesico-” stands for something involving your bladder, and the suffix “vaginal” not surprisingly stands for something involving your vagina. That’s why you should avoid anything called vesico-pancakes.

In general, it’s a bad idea to put anything into your vagina that don’t belong in your vagina. Your vagina isn’t a suitcase or a treasure chest. Instead, it’s a much more complex body part that’s lined with acid-producing bacteria. These microbes help maintain specific conditions in your vagina such as a pH level that can range from 3.8 up to 5 depending on your age. Putting anything not designed to go in there could disrupt these conditions, leading to tissue damage, infection, or both. That’s why legitimate sex toys should be designed in a way that minimizes disruptions to your vagina.

Moreover, it’s a good idea to keep track of whatever you happen to put into your vagina. This doesn’t necessarily mean creating a spreadsheet along with graphs and pie charts. Or maintaining an accurate inventory of every single item in your house just to make sure nothing went into you without you knowing it. However, it does mean that your vagina should not be the same as Las Vegas. Whatever happens in there shouldn’t necessarily stay in there. Instead, make sure that you remove what’s been put in your vagina within a reasonable amount of time. And if you have to ask yourself, “who was the President when I put this in there,” you’ve probably waited too long.

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Science

LEGO rolls out Artemis toy sets ahead of new NASA moon missions

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March 2, 2022

— LEGO rolled out its version of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) on Tuesday (March 1), two weeks before the space agency was scheduled to do the same with the real moon-bound rocket.

The toy company released the SLS and three other sets inspired by NASA’s Artemis program as part of an expansion to its long-running City line. The new kits are based on the major components of NASA’s return to the moon, from the SLS (“Rocket Launch Center”) to the Gateway (“Lunar Space Station”), moon base (“Lunar Research Base”) and habitable mobility platform (“Lunar Roving Vehicle”).

The SLS, which, itself, is part of the largest of the four new sets, comes closest to its real-life inspiration in both details and timing. NASA is preparing to roll out the massive booster from its assembly building to the launch pad this month, prior to its first launch later this summer. The Artemis I mission will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a three-week flight beyond the moon to assess the vehicles’ performance before beginning to fly astronauts.

Ultimately, NASA plans to use Orion and SLS, as well as a SpaceX-built human landing system to return Americans to the lunar surface, including the first woman and the first person of color.

The SLS in the LEGO Rocket Launch Center (set no. 60351) stands more than 16.5 inches tall and 4 inches wide (42 by 11 cm) when assembled, roughly 235 times smaller than the rocket on which it is based. Like the real SLS, though, the toy vehicle comprises a core stage with four rear mounted engines and two side mounted boosters (although the LEGO versions are noticeably more stocky than their full-size counterparts).

Designed with playability in mind — the set is intended for children ages 7 and older — the SLS is too small to accommodate LEGO minifigures inside its Orion spacecraft and so the core stage diverges from reality, with compartments for a cockpit, a payload bay with an included lunar rover and a fuel tank, the latter the only component of the real hardware. (An “easter egg” is included here in the form a decal that adds the logo of LEGO’s fictional gas station brand, “Octan,” to the fuel tank, cluing in kids to what the tank is meant to hold.)

The set also includes a launch support tower decked out in blue (rather than the real gantry’s steel gray) and outfitted with a crew elevator that can be raised and lowered, as well as a retractable crew walkway leading out to the rocket. At the base of the SLS are also two umbilical lines to feed fuel into the core stage’s tank. The feedlines automatically retract as the rocket lifts off (i.e. when you lift the SLS off its platform).

The SLS is the only model among the new sets to include decals with NASA’s logos, both the round “meatball” insignia and once-retired “worm” logotype as are emblazoned on the real rocket. Missing are decals of the American flag and the European Space Agency (ESA) logo, the latter representing Europe’s contribution of the Orion service module as adorns the real rocket.

The LEGO Rocket Launch Center includes 1,010 pieces, which in addition to the SLS are used to also build a launch control center, an observation dome, a service vehicle and a drone. The set also comes with six minifigures, including two astronauts “dressed” in the same style orange pressure suits (but with different faces and hairstyles) as the four minifigures packed on board the real Artemis I as part of an educational outreach partnership between LEGO Education and NASA.

As with the other new space sets, the box art and back of one of the instruction books for the Rocket Launch Center display the Artemis logo and photos showing the NASA inspiration for the toys. With the exception of the inclusion of VIPER, NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, as part of the Lunar Research Base, the other sets rely more on early NASA artist concepts and LEGO designers’ imaginations than the SLS, given the status of the Artemis program.

The Lunar Research Base (set no. 60350) is the second largest in the series, with 786 pieces used to build VIPER, a domed accommodation module with labs, a garage, an airlock and six minifigures. The base’s airlock can be connected to the Lunar Roving Vehicle (set no. 60348), which is a separate build from 275 pieces (including three minifigures).

Lastly, the Lunar Space Station (set no. 60349) is loosely based on the Gateway, a human-tended way station planned to orbit the moon in support of astronauts arriving from Earth on Orion, as well as descending to and rising from the moon’s surface aboard the human landing system. LEGO’s version is assembled from 500 pieces including science and botany labs and a docking space capsule (which is very loosely based on Orion), plus five astronaut minifigures.

Altogether, the four new sets represent the infrastructure NASA says it needs to prepare astronauts to fly onto Mars and into deep space in the future. For LEGO, the sets provide opportunities for learning, offering imaginative, open-ended play based on real-life space missions.

Available for sale at LEGO Stores and on LEGO’s website as of Tuesday (March 1), the Rocket Launch Center retails for $149.99, the Lunar Research Base lists for $119.99, the Lunar Space Station is $79.99 and Lunar Roving Vehicle $39.99.

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World

Australia welcomes back tourists with toy koalas, Tim Tams

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CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — International tourists and business travelers began arriving in Australia with few restrictions on Monday, bringing together families in tearful reunions after separations of two years or longer forced by some of the most draconian pandemic measures of any democracy in the world.

Australia closed its borders to tourists in March 2020 in a bid to reduce the local spread of COVID-19, but on Monday removed its final travel restrictions for fully vaccinated passengers.

Tearful British tourist Sue Witton hugged her adult son Simon Witton when he greeted her at Melbourne’s airport.

“Seven hundred and twenty-four (days) apart and he’s my only son, and I’m alone, so this means the world to me,” she told reporters.

Travelers were greeted at Sydney’s airport by jubilant well-wishers waving toy koalas and favorite Australian foods including Tim Tams chocolate cookies and jars of Vegemite spread.

Federal Tourism Minister Dan Tehan was on hand to welcome the first arrivals on a Qantas flight from Los Angeles which landed at 6:20 a.m. local time.

“I think there’ll be a very strong rebound in our tourism market. Our wonderful experiences haven’t gone away,” Tehan said.

Danielle Vogl, who lives in Canberra, and her Florida-based partner Eric Lochner have been separated since October 2019 by the travel restrictions.

She said she burst into tears when she heard about the lifting of the restrictions, which will allow them to reunite in April, and telephoned him with the news.

“I actually woke him up to tell him, because I thought it was big enough news to do that,” Vogl told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“He couldn’t believe it. … He was like ‘Are you sure, is this true?’ and I’m like ‘Yes, it’s happening. This is over now: we can be together again,’” she added.

Lochner was not eligible for an exemption from the travel ban because the couple weren’t married or living together.

“It’s been a very long and very cruel process for us,” Vogl said.

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said all travelers’ vaccination status would be checked before they arrived to avoid a repeat of Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic’s visa debacle.

Djokovic was issued with a visa through an automated process before he left Spain to compete in the Australian Open in January but was deported after he arrived in Melbourne because he was not vaccinated against COVID-19.

Tourism Australia managing director Phillipa Harrison said she expected tourist numbers would take two years to rebound to pre-pandemic levels.

“This is a really great start,” Harrison said. “This is what the industry had been asking us for, you know, just give us our international guests back and we will take it from there.”

Qantas on Monday was bringing in passengers from eight overseas destinations including Vancouver, Singapore, London and New Delhi.

The Sydney-based airline’s chief executive Alan Joyce said bookings have been strong since the federal government announced two weeks ago that the country was relaxing restrictions.

“It has been a tough two years for everybody in the tourism industry, but today is really one of the big steps on the way back to a full recovery so we are very excited,” Joyce said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said 1.2 million people had visas to enter Australia with 56 international flights due to touch down in the first 24 hours of the border reopening.

Australia on Monday reported 17,736 new COVID-19 infections and 34 deaths. Australia’s death toll since the pandemic began is 4,929.

Australia imposed some of the world’s toughest travel restrictions on its citizens and permanent residents in March 2020 to prevent them from bringing COVID-19 home.

Travelers had to apply for an exemption from the travel ban, but tourism wasn’t an accepted reason. International students and skilled migrants were prioritized when the border restrictions were relaxed in November in response to an increasing vaccination rate among the Australian population. Tourists from New Zealand, Japan and South Korea were also allowed in early.

Australian states and territories also have their own COVID-19 rules. The strictest are in Western Australia state, which covers a third of the island continent.

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Science

Bizarre rock spotted on Mars is being compared to a sex toy

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The unusual rock spotted on the Martian surface (Credits: Nasa/Twitter/@PaulHammond51)

One of the most amusing side-effects of space exploration is the hot takes that follow on from any interesting discovery.

When a Chinese rover saw a strange cube on the surface of the moon, the internet launched into a frenzy over it being some kind of alien ‘hut’ dwelling.

Now we’ve got an interesting-looking rock on Mars being compared to a dildo.

The stone in question was snapped by the Nasa rover Curiosity, that’s been exploring the Red Planet since 2012.

As the rover trundles across the Gale Crater, it records pictures of Martian geology that are uploaded for the general public to view.

The original image from Nasa’s Curiosity rover with the strange rock circled (Credits: Nasa)

This particular picture was shared on Twitter by freelance space writer Paul Scott Anderson.

‘Check out this groovy rock that the Curiosity rover just found on Mars yesterday,’ he posted earlier this week.

Which kicked off a discussion on what may have caused the smooth lines and general formation of the rock.

Given that Mars was once home to water, it’s possible the rock’s smooth apperance was shaped billions of years ago by liquid.

Or, as another user pointed out, it could just be a sex toy left behind by a careless Martian.

Hilariously, despite the images being made publically available by Nasa, Mr Anderson said he received a cease-and-desist letter from a company claiming they owned the image of the rock as an NFT.

So-called crater lakes were common on Mars billions of years ago when the planet had liquid water on its surface.

While some craters could hold a small sea’s worth of water, when the water became too much to hold, it would breach the edge of the crater, causing catastrophic flooding that carved the river valleys we now see on the dusty surface.

A 2019 study led by Professor Goudge from the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences determined these events happened rapidly.

‘If we think about how sediment was being moved across the landscape on ancient Mars, lake breach floods were a really important process globally,’ he said.

‘And this is a bit of a surprising result because they’ve been thought of as one-off anomalies for so long.’


MORE : Vast toxic lake in Costa Rica could ‘hold clues to life on Mars’


MORE : Liquid water spotted at Mars’ south pole may just be an illusion, study claims

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Business

Cathie Wood’s ARK Faces Loyalty Test After Tech-Stock Rout

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Cathie Wood

says the high-risk stocks in the exchange-traded funds sold by ARK Investment Management LLC are so cheap that they will inevitably rise. A surprising number of investors are willing to give it a shot.

Over the past week, with prices in the

ARK Innovation ETF

back at mid-2020 levels, investors have put about $168 million into the fund, boosting its net assets to $11.8 billion, according to FactSet. It is a noteworthy vote of confidence for a fund that has dropped 27% this month and lost half its value over the past year, as its brand of investing in largely unprofitable, untested firms has fallen out of favor.

What happens next at the ARK Innovation fund, which goes by the ticker ARKK, and other risky investments like it will help tell the story of financial markets in 2022. The most speculative assets, ranging from ARK and many of its holdings to so-called meme stocks such as

GameStop Corp.

and

AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.

to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, soared during the pandemic thanks to the enormous sums governments and central banks poured into the economy to counter the impact of lockdowns. Now those gains are eroding as the Federal Reserve prepares to begin raising U.S. interest rates as soon as March.

That is prompting a shift of investor behavior, causing a rethink of the sky-high valuations markets had attached to growth stocks. The result is a pullback from the riskiest assets and a repricing of even big technology stocks.

Ms. Wood’s ETFs are at the epicenter of the selloff that has pushed the S&P 500 down 7% and the Nasdaq Composite off 12% just four weeks into 2022. Worst hit have been the shares of technology and biotech firms that generate little to no profit, yet carry high valuations—the kind of companies Ms. Wood’s ARK favors.

Some of the holdings of the ARK Innovation ETF are down more than 50% from their recent highs, including

Spotify Technology SA,

Block Inc.,

Zoom Video Communications Inc.

and

Roku Inc.

Ms. Wood insists the fund’s holdings are due to rebound. “After correcting for nearly 11 months, innovation stocks seem to have entered deep value territory, their valuations a fraction of peak levels,” she wrote in a blog post last month.

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Can the ARK Innovation fund rebound? Join the conversation below.

Larry Carroll,

a financial adviser at advisory firm Wealth Enhancement Group in Rock Hill, S.C., still has some $18 million of client money in ARK Innovation after first buying shares in 2018. The firm manages about $55 billion across portfolios of stocks and bonds, with Mr. Carroll using ARK Innovation as a way of offering some clients exposure to hot tech companies.

Thanks to ARK’s sharp run-up in the early stages of the pandemic, he says he has already pulled more money out of the fund than he originally put in, leaving him comfortable maintaining a significant position in expectation that depressed shares will bounce back.

“The real question has been should we be buying more,” said Mr. Carroll. “I’ve resisted the urge mainly because I don’t think you’ll see ARK and the disruption stocks do well in this environment.”

Funds that beat the market often go through periods in which they lag behind, though the scale of ARK’s ups and downs makes it stand out. Investors have pulled a net $1.4 billion from ARK funds over the past month, the most redemptions of any U.S. ETF issuer, according to data from FactSet. That has pushed net outflows over the past six months to more than $8 billion, more than all the net outflows experienced by other ETF managers over the same period.

Some $16 billion flowed into ARK Innovation from the second quarter of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, through the first quarter of 2021, when the fund’s assets peaked at $28 billion. Investors who have bought in since then have been losing money, said

Vincent Deluard,

director of global macro strategy at

StoneX Group Inc.

Renato Leggi,

a client-portfolio manager at ARK, said some investors have started to agree with Ms. Wood’s assessment over the past week and are buying shares. She said the firm’s strategy requires that investors take a long-term view.

But

Klaus Derendorf,

a 50-year-old business-development executive from Los Angeles, said he sold his ARK Innovation fund shares in November and has boosted his cash holdings after losing about 20% in the fund in less than a year. “I gotta go back to real fundamentals,” he said.

Ms. Wood’s early returns gained her a large following on YouTube, Twitter and other social-media platforms.

Joe Seid,

a 58-year-old sales director from Chicago, bought ARK Innovation shares at the end of 2020, in part because he saw her on TV and his financial adviser flagged the fund as one of the hottest in the market. He sold last year after losing 10% of his investment and now thinks he might have gotten carried away.

“For me, these were way too speculative,” Mr. Seid said. “It didn’t really jibe with more core financial beliefs.”

Write to Michael Wursthorn at Michael.Wursthorn@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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Technology

My new toy is a USB-C cable with a built-in power meter

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While I’m waiting for the adapter that’ll turn my DeWalt power tool batteries into a powerful laptop charger, I thought I might introduce you to another intriguing USB-C trend. You can now buy $20 USB-C cables that come complete with their own wattage meter, letting you see just how fast they’re charging your devices.

I bought mine a month ago — it took its sweet time getting here — but so far, I’m impressed! For the past couple of days, I’ve been plugging it into everything to see how much it draws: 18W for my V2 Nintendo Switch, 30-31W for my DJI Mini 2 drone, 2.5-3W for one of my PS5’s DualSense controllers, 54-65W for my XPS 15, all the way up to 99W for a 14-inch M1 MacBook Pro or a Skydio 2 drone. Or, down to 0.5W while trickle-charging the Wyze Buds Pro.

Why a leaf? It was there, it looked pretty.
Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

On Amazon, the cables are largely sold by an alphabet-soup collection of brands like “WOTOBEUS,” “URVNS” and “CHIPOFY”, but the one I bought feels surprisingly high-quality despite that. The tiny teal screen and shiny reversible connectors are set in a metal head, connected to to a decent-quality braided cable with what feels like a reasonable amount of strain relief — though I haven’t tested its “35,000+ bend lifespan” quite yet.

What I did test is its ability to measure power, plugging it into literally every USB-C device my family owns, including an array of chargers. Using a Kill-A-Watt and a separate, detachable USB-C power meter as the baseline, I checked both its accuracy and whether it could charge my devices properly, compared to other cables.

My old detachable USB-C power meter is a bit more… bricklike than even the new standalones you can buy today.
Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

In most cases, it was right on the money, with a few important caveats:

  • It only shows watts, not volts and amps. It’s a handy shortcut, but you can learn more from standalone USB-C testers that cost as little as $11 or $17 now.
  • You’ve gotta plug the screen end into the thing you’re charging if you want a measurement. It’ll still charge the other way, but the meter isn’t bidirectional.
  • For some reason, a few combinations of cable and charger had wacky results: the 14-inch MacBook Pro wouldn’t charge at all from my 100W HyperJuice USB-C battery pack when using this cable, even though it charged just fine if I swapped out the battery for an adapter or this cable for a different cable.
  • The DJI Mini 2 also wouldn’t charge at full speed with this cable and one of my four USB-C adapters, even though it worked fine with the other three adapters and my 100W battery.
  • My cheapo USB-C to Lightning adapter didn’t work with this cable, so I wasn’t able to test it with an iPhone. But I had no such trouble with one of the standalone USB-C testers and an official Apple USB-C to Lightning charge cable.

The biggest caveat, though, is that this is NOT a high-speed data cable; it’s only suitable for high-speed charging. The transfer rate tops out at the old USB 2.0 speed of 480 Mbps, a far cry from the 5Gbps or 10Gbps you can get with USB 3.1. With a good short SuperSpeed cable, I was able to transfer a 5GB file to my PC from an external SSD in just 17 seconds. This charge cable took a full two minutes longer (2:17) to complete the same task, bottlenecked to just 40MB / second.

That seems to be a limitation of these early cables, unfortunately, as all of them advertise that low speed — even this new bidirectional j5create one that adds some other handy features onscreen. Meanwhile, the standalone USB-C power meter I bought several years ago lets me transfer data at full speed without issues.

None of that’s quite enough to sour me on this cable, because I didn’t have a nice, long charge cable capable of both USB 3 data rates and 100W charging to begin with, and I appreciate not needing to keep track of a meter dongle anymore. I’m fine just using it for charging and pairing a different cable with my SSD. But if you’re truly a USB-C PD connoisseur, I’d probably suggest you pick a standalone meter instead.

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