Scientists would be able to discover much more about what lies underground if our planet could be sliced open and viewed as a cross-section – but as that’s not really possible, they have to rely on a variety of other methods instead.
One new approach has just been proven in the field: A recently developed device called a quantum gravity gradiometer has been used to successfully spot a tunnel buried a meter (a little over 3 feet) underground.
Typical gravity sensors work by comparing slight differences in the positions of identical light waves. This works fine for large structures, but for smaller hidden objects the shimmy and shake of the ground, the equipment, and even random thermal vibrations make it increasingly harder to make out details.
A quantum gravity sensor adds a filter that makes use of the wave-like nature of atoms in free-falling, ultra-cold clouds, radically improving the sensor’s resolution. The almost imperceptible differences in how gravity affects these atoms reveal the composition of the ground underneath, highlighting gaps in the ground such as tunnels.
The experimental setup. (Stray et al, Nature 2022)
“This is an ‘Edison moment’ in sensing that will transform society, human understanding and economies,” says physicist Kai Bongs, from the University of Birmingham in the UK.
“With this breakthrough we have the potential to end reliance on poor records and luck as we explore, build and repair. In addition, an underground map of what is currently invisible is now a significant step closer, ending a situation where we know more about Antarctica than what lies a few feet below our streets.”
The new instrument is a type of atom interferometer – devices which have been in development for more than 20 years. The challenge has been getting them into a size and form that means they can be deployed practically outdoors.
Now that the quantum gravity gradiometer has passed its first real-world test outside of the lab, it offers plenty of potential to be useful in any kind of scenario where we need to know what’s lying underground.
That could be laying the foundations for a new subway system, for example, or in trying to predict a volcanic eruption. The new instrument is cheaper, faster, and more comprehensive than many currently available alternatives, and should also be more reliable in its mapping.
In particular, the sensor excels at cutting out interference from vibrations, variations in temperature, and shifts in magnetic fields – all of which can make it difficult for pieces of equipment to figure out what’s lying underground.
“Detection of ground conditions such as mine workings, tunnels and unstable ground is fundamental to our ability to design, construct and maintain housing, industry and infrastructure,” says geophysicist George Tuckwell, from the University of Birmingham.
“The improved capability that this new technology represents could transform how we map the ground and deliver these projects.”
While this “new window into the underground” is operational, there are still some limitations in terms of the size and depth of the structures that can be detected, and how different a structure’s density needs to be from its surroundings.
Development on the device will continue, and the researchers are confident it can be made more portable and user-friendly in the future. It could get up to 100 times more sensitive with further study, the team behind the sensor says.
“It is expected that such performance will be achieved in practical instruments within the next 5-10 years,” write the researchers in their published paper.
California Governor Gavin Newsom at a June 2021 press conference.Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
CA Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday the state will dismantle the death row at San Quentin State Prison.
Inmates in the country’s largest death row will be moved to the general population in other prisons.
Newsom said “wealth and race” are bigger factors to being on death row than “guilt or innocence.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced the state will dismantle San Quentin State Prison’s death row and turn it into a “positive, healing environment” over the next two years, the Associated Press reported Monday.
The inmates on death row in San Quentin — the country’s largest death row — will be transferred to prisons that “typically house people serving life-without-parole sentences,” Vicky Waters, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told Insider.
The vacant space at San Quentin will be transformed into a “positive, healing environment to provide increased rehabilitative, educational, and health care opportunities,” according to a proposed budget.
“The prospect of your ending up on death row has more to do with your wealth and race than it does your guilt or innocence,” Newsom said Monday. “We talk about justice, we preach justice, but as a nation, we don’t practice it on death row.”
While Newsom put a moratorium on state executions in 2019, the state hasn’t executed any inmates since 2006.
California has the highest number of death row prisoners in the country, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, with 694 inmates.
Waters told the AP that the transformation will be “innovative and anchored in rehabilitation.”
“For the first time in California’s history, eligible death-sentenced individuals may be housed in general population areas where they can have more access to job opportunities, enabling them to pay court-ordered restitution to their victims when applicable,” Waters told Insider.
“People on death row will not be resentenced, and would be rehoused following thorough reviews by Institutional Classification Committees, which will take several factors into account, including their security level, their behavior, and any safety concerns,” she added.
A representative for Newsom did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Have a news tip? Email this reporter at tmitchell@insider.com.
NASA’s incredibly powerful James Webb Space Telescope has been in space for three days now, but perhaps the riskiest part of its journey to deep space is just getting underway. Soon, the telescope will initiate an intricately choreographed mechanical dance as it slowly contorts its shape and unfurls, in order to reach its final form for observing the distant cosmos.
It’s a type of reverse space origami that’s never been performed before, but it’s absolutely necessary for the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, to fulfill its mission. The telescope was simply too massive to launch on any operational rocket while fully extended. So when it catapulted into space on top of a European Ariane 5 rocket on Christmas Day, it made the nail-biting trip folded in on itself like the world’s most expensive Swiss Army knife.
Now over the course of the next two weeks, JWST will twist and reshape — deploying one beam here, a mirror there — until it is completely configured for peering into the deepest parts of the Universe. “We sometimes call Webb the ‘Transformer Telescope,’” Amy Lo, the JWST alignments engineer at the telescope’s primary contractor Northrop Grumman, tells The Verge. It’s a daunting process with hundreds of moving parts that engineers have tested over and over again on the ground, as it has to be nothing short of flawless. But there are many points along the way where the failure of one small release mechanism or pulley could jeopardize the future of the entire JWST mission. While mission controllers on the ground have a few troubleshooting techniques they can employ if something gets stuck, ultimately the JWST spacecraft must do every deployment on its own to near perfection.
JWST completely folded up on top of the Ariane 5 rocket before launch.Image: NASA / Chris Gunn
JWST is heading to a final destination roughly 1 million miles from Earth, and there are no operational rockets or spaceships that can safely bring astronauts to such a distance to give the telescope a tuneup. And even if humans could reach it, JWST just isn’t designed to be serviceable. So if the telescope breaks in a fundamental way, that’s it for a mission that is running NASA a total of $9.7 billion.
It may all sound like needless complexity for a mission of this magnitude, but there never was an easy path for JWST, according to NASA. “I actually strongly believe it’s not possible to make it simpler within the constraints that we have,” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA, tells The Verge. “This is what it is.”
Designers of JWST knew from the beginning that their creation would have to unfold while in space. In 1996, when scientists first proposed making a telescope like this, NASA’s administrator at the time, Dan Goldin, challenged engineers to create the spacecraft with a primary mirror that was up to eight meters wide. Ultimately, designers settled on a mirror that was 6.5 meters, or 21 feet across, but that decree determined JWST’s folded fate.
That’s because the largest rockets currently flying aren’t wide enough to carry a mirror of that size. Whenever you launch something into space, the spacecraft has to fit inside a rocket’s payload fairing — the bulbous structure that sits on top of the rocket throughout the first part of flight. The fairing is critical, as it shrouds the spacecraft during launch, protecting the payload from the atmosphere until reaching space. However, the fairing’s width is a major limiting factor for a spacecraft’s design, since the vehicle must fit inside. It’s a problem that those in the space industry often refer to as the “tyranny of the fairing.”
JWST’s primary mirror folded vs fully deployedNASA/Chris Gunn
The Ariane 5 rocket has one of the widest payload fairings currently on the market, spanning 5.4 meters, or nearly 18 feet wide. But that’s still too small to house JWST’s mirror fully extended. So from the start, JWST mission designers built the mirror in segments, with two flaps on either side that could swivel inward and outward. It was a major design challenge, as the segments need to come together to behave like a single, flat mirror in order to gather light from the distant cosmos. “Unfurling a primary mirror has never been done before on orbit in space,” says Lo.
JWST will deploy its mirror flaps around 12 to 13 days after launch. But before that happens, the observatory has an even more complex deployment that it must get through, one that will take up to six days to complete. It’s the deployment of JWST’s sunshield, an intricate apparatus designed to block heat from the Sun and keep the telescope extra cool while in space. While the deployment process is designed to be flexible and things could change, the first step of the sunshield deployment is supposed to get started today, which means almost everyone associated with this mission will be holding their breath for the next week.
“The sunshield itself is — of all of our deployments — that’s the one that is the most complex,” Lee Feinberg, the optical telescope element manager for JWST at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, tells The Verge. “It has the most moving parts.”
The sunshield is a necessary feature because of how the JWST is designed. The telescope will be observing distant stars and galaxies in infrared, a type of light that is invisible to our eyes but is emitted by anything that holds heat. But in order to collect infrared photons, JWST must operate at an unbelievably cold temperature, as low as -370 degrees Fahrenheit. If it gets too warm, the telescope might emit too much of its own infrared light, which could interfere with the spacecraft’s observations of the Universe.
The layers of JWST’s sunshield extended and pulled taut.Image: NASA / Chris Gunn
Enter the sunshield, which provides some impressive sunblock for JWST. The shield consists of five ultra-thin layers of a shiny material called Kapton, each layer the size of a tennis court. The outermost layer will always face the Sun and get most of its heat, operating at a scorching 230 degrees Fahrenheit. But each successive layer will be cooler and cooler, so that JWST’s instruments stay nice and cryogenic.
The shield’s heat-reflecting membranes are so delicate, that extra special care and engineering were needed in order to extend the layers outward in space and pull them taut without ripping. “There are systems that will spread the layers out and tension them,” Feinberg says. “It’s a little bit like a sail on a boat in terms of how you kind of wind it up.”
The entire process relies on hundreds of different moving parts, including up to 140 release mechanisms, 400 pulleys, 70 hinge assemblies, and 90 cables, according to NASA. There are also various contingency plans in place in case a deployment doesn’t perform as expected. NASA has the option to resend commands to the telescope, in case the first command does not trigger a move. Engineers have also built as many redundancies into the spacecraft as they could. There are areas with multiple circuits that can perform the same task, in case the primary circuit doesn’t fire properly.
But there are moments when there really are no backup options. Throughout the deployment process, there are more than 300 events known as “single point failures.” Those are the deployments that have to work as designed, because they can’t be built with redundancy. “Single point failures are funny little things. They’re used a lot,” says Lo. “And technically what they mean is, this thing must happen.” JWST relies on them heavily throughout the deployment process. For instance, a total of 107 release devices are needed to release the sunshield membranes, allowing them to unfurl to their full shape. All 107 of those devices are single point failures, according to Lo.
NASA is no stranger to single point failures, though. When the space agency landed its Perseverance rover on Mars this February, the landing sequence had roughly 100 single point failures baked in, according to Zurbuchen. The entire landing went flawlessly. Additionally, NASA and Northrop Grumman have tested JWST’s various deployments on the ground for the past two to three years, intricately rehearsing them for the final show. Each component was tested individually on the ground dozens of times first, before being added to the spacecraft. And then the entire telescope was folded and unfolded multiple times as a cohesive unit.
“So do we have confidence that we will deploy on orbit? Yes, we do,” says Lo. “And the reason is because we go through such rigorous testing from basically the ground level up.”
JWST’s testing took many years longer on the ground than planned, but it had to be rigorous because of its inability to be repaired. It’s one of the biggest differences between JWST and its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been orbiting the Earth since 1990. Hubble was purposefully designed to get tuneups while in orbit by visiting astronauts; JWST doesn’t have that capability. Plus sending humans to the telescope would introduce too much heat anyway. “Even if you put a spacesuit around you or me, it’s still way warmer than the telescope environment,” says Zurbuchen.
Though a human servicing mission is not feasible for JWST, NASA did make one small design tweak in case the agency wants to give the telescope a tuneup someday. Included on the back of JWST are stickers in the shapes of crosses. They’re meant to serve as targets, to help guide a potential robotic spacecraft visitor to JWST in the future. Over the last decade, various space companies have been working on “servicing satellites,” designed to catch up with satellites already in space and grab hold of them, either to refuel their tanks or to tweak aging components. It’s possible that one day, NASA may want to send a servicing satellite to JWST to add more propellant to the telescope’s tanks, extending its time in space. If that happens, the targets will provide a reference point for where the visiting spacecraft should attach to fill up JWST’s tank.
However, no one at NASA is even thinking about such a refueling mission right now. Everyone associated with JWST is squarely focused on the deployments. And once the telescope is completely unfurled over the next two weeks, there is still plenty of work to be done as the observatory travels through deep space. NASA will continue to adjust JWST’s mirrors ever so slightly, ensuring that they all align as intended. And then about 29 days after launch, the telescope will execute one final burn of its thrusters, putting it into its final position in deep space.
At that point, the work is only beginning. Mission personnel will then test out and calibrate all of JWST’s instruments to make sure they work properly. That process will take months, with science operations scheduled to begin sometime this summer.
So even if JWST does deploy as intended after two weeks, the anxiety doesn’t really end. “That’s when I think a lot of us will breathe a sigh of relief, but of course, the instruments and the mirror phasing would have just begun,” Lo says. “A different group of folks — the instrument builders, designers, engineers, and the scientists — would only just start to be holding their breath.”
When it finally launches, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will give us our best look yet at the Universe around us – it’s the largest and most powerful telescope humans have ever built, and a new preprint study says it could spot potential signs of alien life in as little as 20 hours of transit time.
In advance of its expected launch in late December, one researcher has been looking into the potential of the JWST in terms of the transmission spectroscopy it could carry out – a promising method for detecting the composition of a planet’s atmosphere by the way that light from a neighboring star passes through it.
Using the example of TRAPPIST-1e – an exoplanet we know to be a promising candidate for biosignatures, or signs of alien life – astronomer Thomas Mikal-Evans has worked out how long it might take the JWST to detect methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) in the planet’s atmosphere. He’s made the results available on the preprint server arXiv ahead of peer review.
Depending on numerous variables, including the level of cloud and haze, a combination of CH4 and CO2 might be found in as little as five transits – brightness readings carried out by the telescope. At 4.3 hours per transit, that’s a little over 20 hours in total.
“If TRAPPIST-1e has an atmospheric composition similar to that of the Archean Earth, strong detections for both CH4 and CO2 are possible for 5-10 transit observations under the assumption of well-behaved instrumental noise and neglecting the effect of stellar variability,” writes Mikal-Evans, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
Of course, the presence of CH4 and CO2 around TRAPPIST-1e wouldn’t be the smoking gun of alien presence, but it’s the sort of evidence astronomers hunt for when searching the skies for biosignatures.
Bear in mind that the 20-hour estimate is right at the lower end; Mikal-Evans’s data suggest it could also take more than 200 hours to get a proper reading, depending on factors such as how cloudy the atmosphere ends up being. Besides, the exoplanet may end up having an altogether different atmospheric composition.
However, the result is still an exciting one. “It is widely anticipated that JWST will be transformative for exoplanet studies,” Mikal-Evans writes, and his results demonstrate that not only will it be possible to use the telescope to hunt for biosignatures in the atmospheres of distant alien planets, but it could even be achieved with relative ease.
(NASA/Desiree Stover)
Named after James E. Webb, a NASA administrator between 1961 and 1968 and a key figure in the Apollo space program, the JWST is a joint venture between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
The space agencies behind the JWST are concentrating on getting it actually into orbit first of all. In the last few days, unexpected vibrations due to an untimely clamp band release have delayed the launch of the telescope by a few more days while all the instruments get rechecked. It’s still hoped that blast off can happen on December 22.
However, this isn’t the first time the telescope has been pushed back. In fact, the project was first envisioned in the 20th century, and the telescope was originally going to launch all the way back in 2007.
Since then, countless delays, costing issues, and technical challenges have got in the way (including the latest issue of a global pandemic). The telescope is currently being prepared at a base in Kourou in French Guiana.
When the JWST does get up into space, expect a long series of exciting discoveries: the telescope is fitted with instruments that enable it to see across longer distances and longer wavelengths, revealing signs of the early Universe that its predecessor Hubble can’t spot. At its center is a huge golden mirror designed to help focus light.
Hopefully, by the end of the year, the JWST should have left Earth – and we’re very much looking forward to what it finds first.
The preprint on the biosignature study is available on arXiv.
Imagine a medicine that could help people process disturbing memories, sparking behavioural changes rather than merely burying and suppressing symptoms and trauma. For the millions suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, such remedies for their daily struggles could be on the horizon. Psychiatry is rapidly heading towards a new frontier – and it’s all thanks to psychedelics.
In an advanced phase trial published in Nature in May, patients in the US, Israel and Canada who received doses of the psychedelic stimulant MDMA, alongside care from a therapist, were more than twice as likely than the placebo group to no longer have PTSD, for which there is currently no effective medicinal treatment, months later. The researchers concluded that the findings, which reflected those of six earlier-stage trials, cemented the treatment as a startlingly successful potential breakthrough therapy. There are now hopes that MDMA therapy could receive approval for certain treatments from US regulators by 2023, or perhaps even earlier – with psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, not far behind in the process. (A small study at Johns Hopkins University, published last year, suggested it could be four times more effective than traditional antidepressants.)
You could say interest in psychedelics is mushrooming. Last month, in a first for psychedelics since the war on drugs was launched in the 1970s, US federal funding was granted for a psilocybin study, to treat tobacco addiction, following pressure by lawmakers, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This marks a jaw-dropping turnaround for hallucinogenic drugs. Even 10 years ago, they were effectively taboo in many academic fields and halls of power. But as the intellectual rationale behind the war on drugs has become increasingly untenable, hundreds of millions of dollars have been pumped into psychedelic pharmaceutical research. “Psychedelics are the most extraordinary tools for studying the mind and brain,” says Dr David Luke, co-founding director of the psychedelic consciousness conference, Breaking Convention. “It’s a hot-button topic with around a dozen dedicated research centres at top-level universities around the world.”
Academic and scientific enthusiasm around psychedelics has been increasing amid exasperation over the lack of advancement in psychiatry. “It has not progressed as a field of medicine relative to others for decades, and many psychiatrists have been deeply frustrated,” Luke claims. Yet there appears to be a set of long-ignored tools to treat causes rather than simply addressing symptoms, and psychedelics could do for psychiatry what the microscope did for biology, he says. “They work to treat the underlying commonalities of a range of mental illnesses and potentially prevent their occurrence, too.”
Unfounded claims that psychedelic drugs have no medical uses, as the US Congress once declared, and are fundamentally dangerous, kept research endeavours in a straitjacket. Possibly more accurately, there were concerns that the drugs prod people into becoming more rebellious. “It’s not that psychedelics are dangerous, it’s that they give you dangerous ideas,” says Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author. “That was the basic reason why there was such an overreaction and clampdown, because it was such a turbulent time with the Vietnam war.” Politicians rather than scientists or clinicians were in the driving seat behind systematically suppressing research, and usage.
This was all part of psychedelics’ mind-bending ride. Their use has increased under the radar, spurred on by cultural shifts in the west. Over the past decade, the recreational and spiritual use of hallucinogens has shed its taboos, following thousands of years of continued use in the Amazon, Mexico, Siberia and elsewhere.
“I realise for the first time this is the only genuine, religious experience I’ve ever had,” pop icon Sting recently said. “For me, the meaning of the universe cracked open.” He was followed more recently by Miley Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan, who have both told of their experiences attending plant medicine ceremonies. Not long ago, UK fitness icon Joe Wicks outlined his plans to visit the Amazon to drink the hallucinogenic healing medicine ayahuasca, after his lockdown workout sessions went viral. Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has told of his “really wonderful” experience with magic mushrooms, which provided “the confirmation I needed about how I feel about the universe”. It increasingly seems that public declarations of psychedelic use are in vogue.
Altered states: markets are now rushing to capitalise on the benefits. Illustration: Lisa Sheehan
Former Texas governor Rick Perry, a self-described “historically very anti-drug person”, is convinced psychedelics can transform the lives of war veterans suffering from severe PTSD, who are always on guard for danger, unable to sleep and behave self-destructively. “All of that properly done in the right type of clinical setting will save a multitude of lives,” he told local media earlier this year, referring to people he knows who have been abroad from the US for psychedelic treatment. With his public support, a state bill to expedite the study of psychedelics was passed in May.
“Psychedelic medicine has the potential to completely change society’s approach to mental health treatment, and research is the first step to realising that transformation,” said representative Alex Dominguez, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, in a statement at the time. “It’s said that ‘As goes Texas, so goes the nation.’ While states across the country consider how best to address the mental health crisis facing our nation, I hope they once again look to Texas for leadership.”
How did the mood music change so quickly for hallucinogens? Researchers were steadily unshackled – after groundbreaking research into the so-called “God molecule” DMT forced the door open – and promising data emerged as paradigm shifts solidified.
Ceremonies with ayahuasca are known to increasingly take place from London to Sydney. In the US, the União de Vegetal church and some Santo Daime congregations have in the past 15 years gained the legal right to use the DMT-containing brew for religious purposes because it is central to their beliefs. The Native American Church, which has some 250,000 members, gained the right to use mescaline-containing cactus peyote as a sacrament in the US – where it grows naturally in the southwestern desert – back in 1994. Meanwhile, Decriminalize Nature, which argues humans have an unalienable right to develop their own relationship with natural plants, persuaded US authorities in half a dozen municipalities, including Washington DC, to decriminalise all plant medicines, also in May. Earlier this year, the Californian senate passed a bill to legalise the possession and social sharing of psychedelics. Oregon has already voted to decriminalise the possession of personal amounts of all drugs, while psilocybin therapy has been licensed and the state’s health department has been tasked with licensing magic-mushroom growers and training people to administer them.Denver is even training emergency first responders in psychedelic harm reduction, a US first.
Increasing numbers of trials have reported steady doses of dazzlingly promising results for people with a risk of psychological issues. A study in the Lancet last year found that a high dose of psilocybin significantly reduces depressive syndromes and markedly improves anxiety for sustained periods. This appears to be due to the fostering of stronger communication between usually disconnected parts of the brain, engendering a higher state of consciousness as people are less constrained and more able to process emotions.
Voice of approval: former Texas governor Rick Perry is convinced psychedelics can transform the lives of war veterans suffering from severe PTSD. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA
“The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding,” New York University psychiatrist Stephen Ross told the New Yorker of a 2016 study that laid the groundwork for further research. “We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.” One of the key mooted advantages of psychedelics over existing drugs is that they work holistically to make the neuroplastic brain more malleable, therefore freeing people from long-held beliefs and memories – opening them evermore to new concepts and states of mind. Thus, they allow the brain to reset and rewire itself, rather than simply dampening down symptoms and even causing serious side-effects. This positions psychedelic therapies as revolutionary for addiction and OCD treatment, and a host of other treatment-resistant conditions, too. A large trial by scientists at the University of São Paulo also shows ayahuasca – a mixture of Amazonian shrubs – significantly reduces the severity of patients’ depression.
Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook credited her use of ayahuasca and iboga, the psychedelic African shrub used in coming-of-age ceremonies and to combat addiction, with inspiring her campaign strategy, which has helped force environmental issues to the forefront of the debate in the UK.
“There’s a growing body of research indicating that psychedelics tend to greatly increase our connection to nature, even if you take them in a sterile research environment,” says Luke. Attitudes and ecological behaviours also change positively. In one survey, he found that the majority of people who used psychedelics stated that taking them had made them more concerned for the natural environment, had changed their diet and increased the amount of gardening they did. Users were also found to become more involved in environmental activism as feelings of compassion deepened. “Given that we are in the grip of an extremely fast, manmade, mass extinction event, the largest in millions of years, then we need every tool at our disposal, including psychedelics, or we might not even make it as a species ourselves,” he says.
Peak practice: fitness guru Joe Wicks has said he plans to visit the Amazon to drink the hallucinogenic healing medicine ayahuasca. Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock
As with renewable energies, markets are responding to the gargantuan potential profits to be made amid the new consciousness and the wheels of capitalism are now in full motion. The multi-billion-pound alcohol, pharmaceutical and wellness markets are facing serious disruption thanks to the ascendance of psychedelics. Magic mushrooms are even being legally imported into the US for the first time, for research, after a maiden delivery earlier this year. On the recreational side, high-street psychedelic dispensaries have been popping up in Canada despite their sale remaining illegal. Brazen vendors say there is already enough research to prove the drugs are safe.Naturally, there is a clamour among the disrupters to consolidate their companies’ positions at the forefront of the pharmaceutical psychedelics market.
Mental health company Compass was the first to be granted a patent for synthetic psilocybin in early 2020. It was subsequently granted another two in March for an oral psilocybin depression treatment, but faces criticism for an alleged intellectual property land grab that may hinder scientific research by limiting competition. Another 37 patents are being considered by US authorities, with 66 already granted, according to a patent tracker. One company even patented LSD for eating disorders before they had begun investigating whether it was effective.
Françoise Bourzat, a trainer of psychedelic guides in the Mazatec tradition and co-author of Consciousness Medicine, takes a dim view of how big capital is attempting to monopolise treatments rooted in thousands of years of wisdom traditions and discovered by indigenous people. “Money talks. We can’t stop this tsunami. But we need to emphasise the importance of reciprocity, social justice, accessibility and the sacredness of the work,” she implores. Companies should support education and healthcare provision in indigenous communities, given the profit they stand to make, she argues, since the medicines more belong to them – “they just didn’t patent”.
Star attraction: Lindsay Lohan has spoken about her experience of attending a plant medicine ceremony. Photograph: Robert Kamau/GC Images
She also has concerns over the manner in which treatment with psilocybin, and other psychedelics, could be delivered. “This work is rooted not in medical treatment but in the sacred practice of connecting with traditions that are both indigenous in nature and spiritual in practice,” says Bourzat, who is advising in Oregon on the state’s development of facilitator training. “The Mazatec community in Mexico use the mushroom for connection with the divine and curing tensions and physical ailments that for them are connected to a spiritual blockage or absence of energy circulating in the body and the heart. They connect sickness with unprocessed emotion, which is probably a sound conclusion.”
Many of the medicines (though not magic mushrooms, which are simple to grow and relatively ubiquitous) are finite resources, and already face serious pressure.
The manner of patenting and overharvesting carries a dark paradox given that psychedelics are supposed to engender more enlightened and selfless states. “The purpose of medicine is to create a bigger, deeper, more thorough experience of our inner functioning, our physical functioning, our emotional functioning, our energetic functioning, our spiritual functioning, our relational functioning, how we are with the land,” Bourzat told podcast Berkeley Talks. “Mushrooms bring it to your face, like, ‘This is your illness.’ By knowing your illness, you resolve your illness, you deal with it, you treat it from within yourself. The mushroom helps you see the truth.”
The fear among psychedelic advocates is that a potential deprioritisation of the human aspect of care – whether through sterile environments or through prescriptions where patients chart their development through apps without human contact – could be detrimental to the benefits of the treatment. “The mainstream medicalised approach that is emerging is minimising the value of human support. This work is supposed to be done within relationships,” Bourzat says.
McKenna agrees that it would be foolish for the pharmaceutical industry to ignore the culture and historical context of psychedelic usage, particularly if only those who are ill are allowed access. He believes everyone should have access to them, and not just in private clinical settings as appears the case with recently approved ketamine. The icon among psychonauts declares: “Any future regulatory frameworks should not set up situations where you have to be sick in order to take a psychedelic legally.”
At the southernmost tip of Texas, alongside the Gulf of Mexico, a gleaming stainless steel rocket has been rising from the salt marshes.
At nearly 400ft, the new SpaceX rocket will eventually be taller than the Saturn V that carried Nasa’s Apollo missions to the moon, and its 33 engines will deliver twice the thrust. For Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, it is meant to play a key role in one day establishing a human colony on Mars.
But the rocket, dubbed the Starship, could have a far more immediate impact on a space industry that has already been shaken by Musk’s ambitions. With the power to carry as much as 100 tons into low orbit around the Earth, his admirers claim Musk is about to transform the economics of the launch business.
“It’s game over for the existing launch companies,” says Peter Diamandis, a US space entrepreneur. “There’s no vehicle out there on the drawing board that could compete.”
Musk’s space company still has some way to go to live up to the promise, including winning regulatory clearance to launch Starship from its Texas site and showing that it can reliably reach space while returning both the rocket’s stages for reuse — an essential step in reducing launch costs.
Also, many experts question whether a large rocket designed to colonise another planet can double up as an all-purpose transport for more varied and mundane tasks closer to Earth. But SpaceX’s success in turning its current rocket, the Falcon 9, into the main workhorse for reaching space has made others in the commercial space industry nervous.
“If you’re not careful, SpaceX will be the only game in town,” says Fatih Ozmen, co-founder of Sierra Nevada Corp, a private US company that has been contracted by Nasa to fly cargo to the International Space Station. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ private space company, makes a blunter claim: SpaceX could end up with “monopolistic control” of US deep space exploration.
Musk’s venture has put itself in a commanding position in the new commercial space industry with surprising speed. It is only 13 years since it became the first private company to launch its own rocket into orbit, breaking into an industry previously dominated by nation states. It has also leapt ahead of contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, whose joint venture, United Launch Alliance, had carried the flag for US space launch — though using Russian engines.
SpaceX’s ascendancy has been underlined over the past six months by a striking series of wins.
They include a $2.9bn contract awarded by Nasa to use the Starship to land its astronauts on the moon as early as 2024. It was the space agency’s decision to pick only one supplier for this programme, after earlier indicating it would select two, that brought the warning from Blue Origin. Nasa officials point out that they have only awarded SpaceX a single mission, leaving them open to choose other suppliers for future landings. But Blue Origin claims that adapting its systems to work with the Starship will force design changes that will lock the agency into a dependence on SpaceX in the long term.
Musk went on to upstage Bezos a second time late last month. Just weeks before, the Amazon founder and Sir Richard Branson had each made personal trips to the edge of space on their company’s respective rockets. The brief moments they enjoyed in microgravity were eclipsed when SpaceX carried four passengers more than five times higher for a three-day joyride around the Earth, making them the first all-civilian crew to reach space.
SpaceX also announced the first 500,000 orders for its Starlink broadband network, making it the first in a new generation of broadband communications companies operating from a constellation of satellites in low orbit, around 500km above the earth.
And last week, Nasa said two astronauts who had been scheduled to fly on a Boeing spacecraft would be switched to SpaceX’s spaceship instead. The company that defined an earlier era of aerospace has hit too many technical obstacles to carry astronauts on its first commercially developed spaceship, putting it well behind what until recently was just a scrappy start-up.
At the heart of SpaceX’s spate of successes is the Falcon 9, which has brought down the cost of reaching space and become a springboard both for the company’s wider business and Musk’s ultimate goal of reaching Mars.
“In terms of performance, cost and reliability, it really is the most successful rocket ever built,” says Diamandis.
SpaceX’s share of the global launch market, excluding China, climbed above 50 per cent for the first time in the first half of 2021, according to BryceTech, a space research and consultancy firm. And while China launched nearly as many rockets as SpaceX in that period, the US company lifted nearly three times as much weight into space.
The tactics that turned the Falcon 9 into the era’s most widely used rocket are now being applied to the Starship. They echo many of the things that also account for the breakout success of Musk’s electric car company, Tesla.
Foremost has been the success of Musk and SpaceX’s CEO, Gwynne Shotwell, at pushing disruptive technologies into mainstream production. In the case of the Falcon 9, that meant using 3D-printing for its engines, the most complex part of the rocket, and reusing the main booster, for future launches.
To master new techniques like these, SpaceX worked on almost every detail of designing and creating its own rockets rather than relying on suppliers, with Musk himself acting as a chief engineer in the early days to goad his team on. SpaceX also took on the full development risk itself, rather than being able to fall back on guaranteed payments from Nasa, forcing much greater financial discipline. As a result, the space agency estimates that the $400m SpaceX spent to develop the Falcon 9 rocket was 10 times lower than the likely cost of a rocket built under traditional government contracting.
Another advantage that SpaceX has shared with Tesla has been its ready access to cheap capital, thanks to the high valuation investors have been prepared to put on its business. Musk has raised more than $6.5bn for the company in the private market, lifting its valuation to $74bn earlier this year. Share sales by some of its investors have since valued it at more than $100bn, according to CNBC.
Most rivals have to generate cash from their existing businesses to fund new ventures, says Steve Collar, chief executive of satellite company SES. The ease with which SpaceX has been able to tap investors has opened the way for it to take much bigger risks, he adds.
One result of the ample cash, along with the company’s access to its own launch service, has been Starlink, which has beaten would-be rivals like OneWeb and Amazon’s Kuiper to launch its broadband service.
Racing to be first has involved technical gambles with its satellite designs, and Starlink is already on its third generation of technology. But even if it ends up writing off billions of dollars’ worth of satellites on the way to perfecting its constellation, the setback would not hurt the company the way it would a rival without access to such cheap capital, says Collar.
Rivals complain that as a result, SpaceX risks squeezing out other companies that haven’t yet achieved its scale and don’t enjoy its funding advantages. Blue Origin, which has lodged a formal complaint over Nasa’s moon landing award, said losing the contract would rob it of one important market for its New Glenn rocket, which has already cost $2.5bn to develop and has yet to leave the launch pad.
SpaceX’s vertically integrated manufacturing approach will also deprive other US suppliers of business, weakening the wider industrial base the country had built up to support its long-term ambitions in space, Amazon and others warn.
However, SpaceX’s customers — including those in government — do not seem to share the misgivings.
“Before SpaceX we only really had the ULA, so we’re in a better position than we were,” says Phil McAlister, director of NASA’s commercial space flight division.
Diamandis goes further: “The US government is lucky to have a company like SpaceX based here,” he says, since its efficiencies feed through directly into the US space programme. And companies that compete with SpaceX in some markets seem more than happy to use its launch services, despite supporting a rival.
“When they came into the [satellite] industry, that freaked people out a bit — but I don’t think it needs to,” says Collar of SES, which is still happy to rely heavily on SpaceX rockets.
The warnings that a vertically-integrated rocket company could weaken an important supply chain also gets short shrift in many parts of the emerging commercial space industry. Most new rocket companies have adopted a similar model. Jory Bell, a partner at Playground Global, a venture capital firm that has invested in the space industry, also points out that the traditional supply chain has served more of a political purpose than a commercial one. Having suppliers spread across the country has enabled a larger number of politicians to claim success by winning a share of government space contracts.
The most telling argument against the risk of monopoly, though, is that the plunging price of reaching space has brought a boom in demand that is far more than any one company can manage. Much of it is coming from new communications networks aiming to launch constellations comprised of thousands of satellites, as well as more governments eager to reach space for national defence or to take part in deeper space exploration.
“This is a market that will be supply-constrained for many years,” says Edison Yu, an analyst at Deutsche Bank. The space launch market will be worth $37.5bn a year by the end of the decade, he predicted — five times as much in 2021.
That should leave more than enough room for at least one big rival to SpaceX to emerge, according to many in the industry. And even if some existing launch companies struggle, held back by older technologies, uncompetitive manufacturing approaches or cultures built on government contracting, a new generation of disruptive rocket companies is rapidly emerging.
Along with Bezos’ own Blue Origin, they include Relativity Space, a company led by former SpaceX executives, which has raised $1.3bn and plans to make entire rockets using 3D printing, not just the engines.
“We don’t have to beat SpaceX — we just have to beat everyone else,” says Bell at Playground Global, one of Relativity’s financial backers. A generation of engineers and space entrepreneurs trained by SpaceX is helping to build an entire industry based on its ideas, he added.
Starship’s first orbital flight, when it comes, will still reverberate through the space industry. Its sheer scale will change the economics of getting to orbit, setting a new pricing benchmark against which others are likely to be judged.
The Falcon 9 has already brought the price for customers willing to share a launch with others down to $5,000 per kilogramme, around a third of what it was before, says Yu. That price could fall to $1,000, and perhaps even as low as $500, once Starship becomes fully operational, he predicts.
How well adapted it will be for the satellite launches that make up the bread and butter of today’s space industry is another matter. Since Starship will not be able to deposit its large payloads into multiple orbits, the satellites it carries will need their own propulsion to manoeuvre into place, making them considerably more expensive, says Yu.
“You need to get a lot of mass to orbit for some things — and you need speed and agility and precision for other things,” says Dan Hart, chief executive officer of Virgin Orbit, which reached orbit for the first time this year after launching a rocket from under the wing of a Boeing 747.
That is likely to make the Starship “a capability that’s more suited to Mars than commercial satellites”, says Collar at SES.
Some also question how committed SpaceX will be in the coming years to battle for market share in the routine satellite launch business. Falcon 9 was always intended as a stepping stone, to develop the cash flow and the technology needed to carry the company much deeper into space.
Musk should be taken seriously when he muses about turning away from the Falcon 9 and redirecting all of SpaceX’s effort to the Starship and the goal of reaching Mars, according to supporters like Diamandis. “He kills his old products and burns the ship,” he says — one reason he has often succeeded at ambitious new undertakings.
With a lock on today’s launch market, it is probably still far too soon to write the epitaph for the Falcon 9. But when the Starship finally takes to the heavens, it is likely to draw a clear dividing line between one era of space and the next.
(Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that have yet to be certified by peer review.
Coronavirus transforms pancreas cell function
When the coronavirus infects cells, it not only impairs their activity but can also change their function, new findings suggest. For example, when insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas become infected with the virus, they not only produce much less insulin than usual, but also start to produce glucose and digestive enzymes, which is not their job, researchers found. “We call this a change of cell fate,” said study leader Dr. Shuibing Chen, who described the work in a presentation on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, held virtually this year. It is not clear whether the changes are long-lasting, or if they might be reversible, the researchers noted earlier in a report published in Cell Metabolism. Chen noted that some COVID-19 survivors have developed diabetes shortly after infection. “It is definitely worth investigating the rate of new-onset diabetes patients in this COVID-19 pandemic,” she said in a statement. Her team has been experimenting with the coronavirus in clusters of cells engineered to create mini-organs, or organoids, that resemble the lungs, liver, intestines, heart and nervous system. Their findings suggest loss of cell fate/function may be happening in lung tissues as well, Chen, from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, told Reuters.
Certain genes may protect an infected patient’s spouse
A study of couples in which both partners were exposed to the coronavirus but only one person got infected is helping to shed light on why some people may be naturally resistant to the virus. The researchers had believed such cases were rare, but a call for volunteers who fit that profile turned up roughly a thousand couples. Ultimately, they took blood samples from 86 couples for detailed analysis. The results suggest resistant partners more often have genes that contribute to more efficient activation of so-called natural killer (NK) cells, which are part of the immune system’s initial response to germs. When NKs are correctly activated, they are able to recognize and destroy infected cells, preventing the disease from developing, the researchers explained in a report published on Tuesday in Frontiers in Immunology . “Our hypothesis is that the genomic variants most frequently found in the susceptible spouse lead to the production of molecules that inhibit activation of NKs,” study leader Mayana Zatz of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, said in a statement. The current study cannot prove this is happening, she added. Even if the findings are confirmed with more research, the contributions of other immune mechanisms would also need to be investigated, the researchers said.
Experimental pill shows promise against coronavirus variants
Laboratory studies show that Merck & Co’s experimental oral COVID-19 antiviral drug, molnupiravir, is likely to be effective in patients infected with any of the known variants of the coronavirus, including the dominant, highly transmissible Delta, researchers said on Wednesday in a presentation during IDWeek 2021, the virtual annual meeting of infectious disease organizations. Molnupiravir does not target the spike protein of the virus, which is the target of all current COVID-19 vaccines. Instead, it targets an enzyme the virus uses to make copies of itself. It is designed to work by introducing errors into the genetic code of the virus. Data showed that the drug is most effective when given early in the course of infection, Merck said. The company is conducting two large late-stage trials of the drug – one for treatment of COVID-19 and another as a preventive.
Click for a Reuters graphic https://tmsnrt.rs/3c7R3Bl on vaccines in development.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid and Deena Beasley; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
Study builds on previous work using ‘chemical looping.’
Scientists have found a new chemical process to turn a stinky, toxic gas into a clean-burning fuel.
The process, detailed recently in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Sustainable Chemical Engineering, turns hydrogen sulfide – more commonly called “sewer gas” – into hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen sulfide is emitted from manure piles and sewer pipes and is a key byproduct of industrial activities including refining oil and gas, producing paper and mining.
The process detailed in this study uses relatively little energy and a relatively cheap material – the chemical iron sulfide with a trace amount of molybdenum as an additive.
In addition to smelling like rotten eggs, hydrogen sulfide is highly toxic, corroding pipes and harming the health of people who encounter it.
“Hydrogen sulfide is one of the most harmful gases in industry and to the environment,” said Lang Qin, a co-author on the study and a research associate in chemical and biomolecular engineering at The Ohio State University. “And because the gas is so harmful, a number of researchers want to turn hydrogen sulfide into something that is not so harmful, preferably valuable.”
Researchers have found a way to turn a toxic gas into a clean-burning fuel. Their process involves adding the element molybdenum to break the gas into separate elements.
The study is built on previous work by the same research group using a process called chemical looping, which involves adding metal oxide particles in high-pressure reactors to burn fuels without direct contact between air and fuel. The team first used chemical looping on coal and shale gas to convert fossil fuels into electricity without emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The initial process used iron oxide to break down the fossil fuels.
The researchers later applied the concept to hydrogen sulfide and invented the SULGEN process, which converts hydrogen sulfide into hydrogen. The researchers found that the pure chemical, iron sulfide, didn’t perform well at the large scales needed for industrial use, Qin said. The research team has been trying to identify other inexpensive chemicals that could catalyze that transformation in higher quantities. This study shows that introducing a trace amount of molybdenum into iron sulfide might be an attractive option.
That material is relatively inexpensive and easy to acquire, making it an attractive option for larger-scale operations.
Transforming this toxic gas into hydrogen fuel creates an alternative oil and gas, which are major contributors to climate change, the researchers said.
“It is too soon to tell if our research can replace any of the hydrogen fuel production technologies that are out there,” said Kalyani Jangam, lead author of the study and a graduate student in Ohio State’s Clean Energy Research Laboratory. “But what we are doing is adjusting this decomposition process and making a valuable product from that.”
For this most recent study, the researchers found that molybdenum improves the breakdown of hydrogen sulfide, splitting it into two parts – hydrogen fuel and sulfur.
This work is early in the scientific process – the researchers showed that the process worked in the lab; tests at the industrial level are forthcoming.
“The big picture is we want to solve the harmful gas issue, and we thought that our chemical looping process would allow that,” Qin said. “And here, we have found a way to do it in the lab that creates this value-added hydrogen fuel.”
Reference: “Mo-Doped FeS Mediated H2 Production from H2S via an In Situ Cyclic Sulfur Looping Scheme” by Kalyani Jangam, Yu-Yen Chen, Lang Qin and Liang-Shih Fan, 12 August 2021, ACS Sustainable Chemical Engineering. DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.1c03410
The senior author on this paper is Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. Yu-Yen Chen, a former doctoral student in Fan’s laboratory, also contributed.
BP and Chevron have made a landmark expansion into geothermal energy on Tuesday, betting on a new technology that could prove to be the world’s first scalable clean energy derived from a constant source: the natural heat of the earth,
The two major oil companies have headlined a $40 million funding round into a Canadian geothermal energy firm called Eavor. Based in Calgary, Eavor has pioneered a new form of technology that could feasibly be deployed in many places around the world.
The investment marks a key move into an area otherwise ignored by energy companies, which have largely looked to wind and solar projects in their efforts to diversify away from fossil fields.
It is the first investment into geothermal energy for BP
BP,
+1.45%
and a re-entry into the field for Chevron
CVX,
+0.58%,
which sold its geothermal assets in 2016.
Eavor has previously only accepted angel investment and venture capital. The $40 million injection will be used to further research and development to help scale the power system to be price-competitive.
Also read: Even with $1.1 trillion firepower, this fund is battling rivals to get its hands on green-energy opportunities
“We see Eavor’s potential to be complementary to our growing wind and solar portfolios,” said Felipe Arbelaez, BP’s senior vice president of zero carbon energy. “Technology such as Eavor’s has the potential to deliver geothermal power and heat and help unlock a low carbon future.”
Eavor has developed a new type of geothermal technology that, in very simple terms, creates an underground “radiator.”
The Eavor “Loop” consists of a closed-loop network of pipes installed typically 3 kilometers to 4 kilometers below the earth’s surface, originating and terminating in the same aboveground facility. The pipes are installed using advanced drilling techniques perfected in the oil patch.
Liquid travels in the pipes from the aboveground facility through the hot ambient underground environment, before naturally circulating back to the top of the loop. The hot liquid is then converted into electricity or transferred to a district heat grid.
A major advantage to this type of energy is that it is constant, providing a base load of electricity to a grid system without requiring challenging battery solutions of intermittent wind and solar power.
Shots from a virtual tour of Eavor’s full-scale prototype.
Photo courtesy of Eavor.
Unlike hydroelectricity, which relies on large sources of constant water flow, it is designed to be scaled, and Eavor envisions rigs installed under solar panel fields and in space-constrained regions like Singapore.
Geothermal energy has been around for decades, enjoying a boom period in the 1970s and 1980s before largely falling out of the spotlight in the 1990s. Relying on heat below the surface of the earth, it has long been an attractive proposition for oil-and-gas companies, which have core expertise in below-ground exploration and drilling.
The problem is that conventional geothermal technology relies on finding superhot water sources underground, making them expensive, risky, and rare bets. More recent advances have roots in the shale oil boom, and use fracking techniques to actually create the underground reservoirs needed to generate energy. But this can pose a problem from an environmental and sustainability standpoint.
Eavor’s solution doesn’t require the exploratory risk of traditional geothermal energy or disrupt the earth the way that fracking-style geothermal does.
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John Redfern, Eavor’s president and chief executive, told MarketWatch that the system’s predictability, established in field trials in partnership with Royal Dutch Shell
RDSA,
+1.25%,
is repeatable and scalable, making it much like wind and solar installations.
“We’re not an exploration game like traditional oil and gas or traditional geothermal. We’re a repeatable manufacturing process, and as such we don’t need the same rate of return,” Redfern said.
“Before we even build the system, unlike an oil well or traditional geothermal, we already know what the outputs can be. Once it is up and running, it is super predictable,” Redfern said. “Therefore, you can finance these things exactly like wind and solar, with a lot of debt at very low interest rates.”
