An anonymous reader shares a report: CERN, the European particle-physics collaboration that operates the Large Hadron Collider, will expel hundreds of Russian-affiliated scientists from its laboratories. The Geneva-based organization decided to cut ties with Moscow after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, ending nearly 60 years of collaboration, and the agreements are now lapsing.

A small asteroid, 2024 PT5, will temporarily become a mini-moon for Earth, orbiting in a horseshoe shape from September 29 to November 25, 2024. CBS News reports: Researchers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, an asteroid monitoring system funded by NASA, spotted the asteroid using an instrument in Sutherland, South Africa and labeled it 2024 PT5. Scientists from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid have tracked the asteroid's orbit for 21 days and determined its future path. 2024 PT5 is from the Arjuna asteroid belt, which orbits the sun, according to their study published in Research Notes of the AAs. But Earth's gravitational pull will draw 2024 PT5 towards it and, much like our moon, it will orbit our planet -- but only for 56.6 days. 2024 PT5, which is larger than some of the other mini-moons, will also return to Earth's orbit -- in 2055. [...]

The study's lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos told Space.com the mini-moon will be too small to see with amateur telescopes or binoculars but professional astronomers with stronger tools will be able to spot it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell's patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine -- until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed. While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient's white blood cell count was "really, really high," recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital's general medicine program. The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team's in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch. "There's lots and lots of other scenarios where patients' conditions are flagged earlier, and the nurse is alerted earlier, and interventions are put in earlier," she said. "It's not replacing the nurse at the bedside; it's actually enhancing your nursing care."

A year-and-a-half-long study on Chartwatch, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that use of the AI system led to a striking 26 percent drop in the number of unexpected deaths among hospitalized patients. The research team looked at more than 13,000 admissions to St. Michael's general internal medicine ward -- an 84-bed unit caring for some of the hospital's most complex patients -- to compare the impact of the tool among that patient population to thousands of admissions into other subspecialty units. "At the same time period in the other units in our hospital that were not using Chartwatch, we did not see a change in these unexpected deaths," said lead author Dr. Amol Verma, a clinician-scientist at St. Michael's, one of three Unity Health Toronto hospital network sites, and Temerty professor of AI research and education in medicine at University of Toronto. "That was a promising sign."

The Unity Health AI team started developing Chartwatch back in 2017, based on suggestions from staff that predicting deaths or serious illness could be key areas where machine learning could make a positive difference. The technology underwent several years of rigorous development and testing before it was deployed in October 2020, Verma said. Dr. Amol Verma, a clinician-scientist at St. Michael's Hospital who helped lead the creation and testing of CHARTwatch, stands at a computer. "Chartwatch measures about 100 inputs from [a patient's] medical record that are currently routinely gathered in the process of delivering care," he explained. "So a patient's vital signs, their heart rate, their blood pressure ... all of the lab test results that are done every day." Working in the background alongside clinical teams, the tool monitors any changes in someone's medical record "and makes a dynamic prediction every hour about whether that patient is likely to deteriorate in the future," Verma told CBC News.

Neuralink said on Tuesday it has received the FDA's "breakthrough device" designation for its experimental implant aimed at restoring vision. Called Blindsight, the device "will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see," said Neuralink founder Elon Musk. Reuters reports: The FDA's breakthrough tag is given to certain medical devices that provide treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening conditions. It is aimed at speeding up development and review of devices currently under development. Neuralink did not immediately respond to a request seeking details about when it expects the Blindsight device to move into human trials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Scientists in Brazil found microplastics in the brain tissue of cadavers, according to a new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Mounting research over the last few years has found microplastics in nearly every organ in the body, as well as in the bloodstream and in plaque that clogs arteries. Whether these ubiquitous pollutants can reach the human brain has been a primary concern for scientists. The latest research looked at a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb, which processes information about smell. Humans have two olfactory bulbs, one above each nasal cavity. Connecting the olfactory bulb and the nasal cavity is the olfactory nerve.

Some researchers worry the olfactory pathway may also be an entry point for microplastics getting into the brain, beyond the olfactory bulb. "Previous studies in humans and animals have shown that air pollution reaches the brain, and that particles have been found in the olfactory bulb, which is why we think the olfactory bulb is probably one of the first points for microplastics to reach the brain," said lead study author Dr. Thais Mauad, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Sao Paulo Medical School in Brazil.

Mauad and her team took samples of olfactory bulb tissue from 15 cadavers of people who died between the ages of 33 and 100. Samples from eight of the cadavers contained microplastics -- tiny bits of plastic that ranged from 5.5 micrometers to 26.4 micrometers in size. In total, the researchers found 16 plastic fibers and particles in the tissues. The smallest were slimmer than the diameter of a human red blood cell, which measures about 8 micrometers. The most common type of plastic they found was polypropylene, followed by polyamide, nylon and polyethylene vinyl acetate. "The nose is a major point of defense to keep particles and dust out of the lungs," Campen wrote in an email. "So seeing some plastics in the olfactory system, especially given how they are being found everywhere else in the body, is completely expected." [...] "There is evidence that very small airborne particles can move to the brain via the olfactory bulb, but this is not known to be a major route of trafficking material to the brain," Campen said. Campen notes it's more likely that nanoplastics enter the brain through the bloodstream, which picks up plastic bits from the lungs or digestive tract, rather than the olfactory bulb. "However, it's extremely difficult for particles, even those in pharmaceuticals, to enter the brain through the blood," notes NBC News. "That's because the brain is surrounded by a semipermeable membrane called the blood-brain barrier."

The FDA has approved sleep apnea detection on the Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Watch Ultra 2. "The green light comes four days ahead of the Series 10's September 20 release date," notes TechCrunch. From the report: The feature, announced at last week's iPhone 16 event, will arrive as part of the imminent watchOS 11 release. Once enabled, it requires 10 nights of sleep tracking data spread out over a 30-day span to determine whether a user may have the condition. During that time, it also offers insights into nightly sleeping disturbances, utilizing the on-board accelerometer.

The FDA classes the feature as an "over-the-counter device to assess risk of sleep apnea." Apple is quick to note that the addition is not a diagnostic tool. Rather, it will prompt users to seek a formal diagnosis from a healthcare provider. The condition, which causes breathing to become shallower or repeatedly stop during the night, is associated with a variety of different symptoms. The Mayo Clinic notes that it can cause insomnia, headaches, daytime sleepiness, and other longer-term conditions.

Retraction Watch: A Nobel prize-winning genetics researcher has retracted two more papers, bringing his total to 13. Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins' Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for "discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability." Since pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis and others began using PubPeer to point out potential duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza's work in 2019, the researcher has retracted 12 papers. A previous retraction from 2011 for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori -- who with 31 retractions sits at No. 25 on our leaderboard -- brings the total to 13.

NASA will coordinate with U.S. government stakeholders, partners, and international standards organizations to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) following a policy directive from the White House in April. From a report: The agency's Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program is leading efforts on creating a coordinated time, which will enable a future lunar ecosystem that could be scalable to other locations in our solar system. The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how scientists calculate Earth's globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Exactly where at the Moon is still to be determined, since current analysis indicates that atomic clocks placed at the Moon's surface will appear to 'tick' faster by microseconds per day. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. NASA and its partners are currently researching which mathematical models will be best for establishing a lunar time. To put these numbers into perspective, a hummingbird's wings flap about 50 times per second. Each flap is about .02 seconds, or 20,000 microseconds. So, while 56 microseconds may seem miniscule, when discussing distances in space, tiny bits of time add up.

"Even black holes have edge cases," writes Astronomy magazine contributing editor Steve Nadis, in an article in Quanta magazine (republished today by Wired): Black holes rotate in space. As matter falls into them, they start to spin faster; if that matter has charge, they also become electrically charged. In principle, a black hole can reach a point where it has as much charge or spin as it possibly can, given its mass. Such a black hole is called "extremal" — the extreme of the extremes. These black holes have some bizarre properties. In particular, the so-called surface gravity at the boundary, or event horizon, of such a black hole is zero. "It is a black hole whose surface doesn't attract things anymore," said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. But if you were to nudge a particle slightly toward the black hole's center, it would be unable to escape.

In 1973, the prominent physicists Stephen Hawking, James Bardeen and Brandon Carter asserted that extremal black holes can't exist in the real world — that there is simply no plausible way that they can form. Nevertheless, for the past 50 years, extremal black holes have served as useful models in theoretical physics. "They have nice symmetries that make it easier to calculate things," said Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island, and this allows physicists to test theories about the mysterious relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity. Now two mathematicians have proved Hawking and his colleagues wrong. The new work — contained in a pair of recent papers by Christoph Kehle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ryan Unger of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley — demonstrates that there is nothing in our known laws of physics to prevent the formation of an extremal black hole.

Their mathematical proof is "beautiful, technically innovative and physically surprising," said Mihalis Dafermos, a mathematician at Princeton University (and Kehle's and Unger's doctoral adviser). It hints at a potentially richer and more varied universe in which "extremal black holes could be out there astrophysically," he added. That doesn't mean they are. "Just because a mathematical solution exists that has nice properties doesn't necessarily mean that nature will make use of it," Khanna said. "But if we somehow find one, that would really [make] us think about what we are missing." Such a discovery, he noted, has the potential to raise "some pretty radical kinds of questions." Before Kehle and Unger's proof, there was good reason to believe that extremal black holes couldn't exist.
Hawking, Bardeen, and Carter believed there was no way an extremal black hole could form, according to the article, and "in 1986, a physicist named Werner Israel seemed to put the issue to rest."

But the two mathematicians, studying the formation of electrically charged black holes, stumbled into a counterexample — and along the way "also constructed two other solutions to Einstein's equations of general relativity that involved different ways of adding charge to a black hole. Having disproved Bardeen, Carter and Hawking's hypothesis in three different contexts, the work should leave no doubt, Unger said... "This is a beautiful example of math giving back to physics," said Elena Giorgi, a mathematician at Columbia University....

In the meantime, a better understanding of extremal black holes can provide further insights into near-extremal black holes, which are thought to be plentiful in the universe. "Einstein didn't think that black holes could be real [because] they're just too weird," Khanna said. "But now we know the universe is teeming with black holes."

For similar reasons, he added, "we shouldn't give up on extremal black holes. I just don't want to put limits on nature's creativity."

"It is with great relief that I welcome you home!" SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell posted on X. "This mission was even more extraordinary than I anticipated."

"SpaceX's Polaris Dawn crew is home," reports CNN, "capping off a five-day mission to orbit — which included the world's first commercial spacewalk — by splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico." The Crew Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts landed off the coast of Dry Tortugas, Florida, at 3:37 a.m. ET Sunday.

The Polaris Dawn mission made history as it reached a higher altitude than any human has traveled in five decades. [870 miles (1,400 kilometers) — beating the 853-mile record set in 1966 by NASA's Gemini 11 mission.] A spacewalk conducted early Thursday morning also marked the first time such an endeavor has been completed by a privately funded and operated mis.sion.

But returning to Earth is among the most dangerous stretches of any space mission. To safely reach home, the Crew Dragon capsule carried out what's called a "de-orbit burn," orienting itself as it prepared to slice through the thickest part of Earth's atmosphere. The spacecraft then reached extremely hot temperatures — up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 degrees Celsius) — because of the pressure and friction caused by hitting the air while still traveling around 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour). The crew, however, should have remained at comfortable temperatures, protected by the Crew Dragon's heat shield, which is located on the bottom of the 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide) capsule. Dragging against the air began to slow the vehicle down before the Crew Dragon deployed parachutes that further decelerated its descent. Having hit the ocean, the spacecraft briefly bobbed around in the water until rescue crews waiting nearby hauled it out of the ocean and onto a special boat, referred to as the "Dragon's nest." Final safety checks took place there before the crew disembarked from the capsule and began the journey back to dry land.
You can watch video of the splashdown on YouTube.

While in space, the crew performed 40 science experiments and research, according to the article. "Gillis, a trained violinist, also brought her instrument along for the mission and delivered a rendition of 'Rey's Theme' from "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." (Slashdot reader SuperKendall points out that the "Rey's Theme" rendition "was not just the astronaut playing violin in space, but was in conjunction with young adult orchestras around the world.")

SpaceX's COO said the performance "made me tear up. Thank you all for taking this journey."

It was one year ago that "an odd seismic signal appeared at scientific stations around the globe," reports the Washington Post. "A day passed, and the slow tremor still reverberated. When it continued for a third day, scientists worldwide began assembling..." Some initially thought the seismic instruments recording the signal were broken, but that was quickly nixed. Maybe it was a new volcano emerging before their eyes, others said. One jokingly ruled out an alien party. As theories were checked off, the scientists dubbed the signal an "Unidentified Seismic Object," or USO... Nine days later, the vibrations greatly dissipated. But the mystery of the USO lasted much longer.

A year later, the puzzle has been solved, according to a study published in the journal Science on Thursday. It took about 70 people from 15 different countries and more than 8,000 exchanged messages (long enough for a 900-page detective novel) to crack the case. The short answer: A mega-tsunami created waves that sloshed back and forth in a fjord in Greenland, creating vibrations that traveled around the world.
Extra heat from global warming "thinned a glacier in eastern Greenland over time so much that it could no longer support the mountain rock above it," according to the article. A mile-long avalanche "plunged into the Dickson Fjord, triggering a 650-foot-high tsunami — one of the highest seen in recent history." Like the rhythmic waves in a bathtub, "the mega-tsunami wave traveled back and forth in the inlet," which "radiated seismic waves globally, shaking the planet for nine days before it petered out."

In August a German research team had studied the megatsunami, concluding that climate change was speeding the melt of Greenland's glaciers and increasing the chance of landslide-driven megatsunamis. The article reports that an author of that study said when comparing it to this one, "The methods chosen by the teams are different, but the results agree well."

More details on that report about NASA from the Washington Post: NASA is 66 years old and feeling its age. Brilliant engineers are retiring. Others have fled to higher-paying jobs in the private space industry. The buildings are old, their maintenance deferred. The Apollo era, with its huge taxpayer investment, is a distant memory. The agency now pursues complex missions on inadequate budgets. This may be an unsustainable path for NASA, one that imperils long-term success. That is the conclusion of a sweeping report, titled "NASA at a Crossroads," written by a committee of aerospace experts and published Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The report suggests that NASA prioritizes near-term missions and fails to think strategically. In other words, the space agency isn't sufficiently focused on the future.

NASA's intense focus on current missions is understandable, considering the unforgiving nature of space operations, but "one tends to neglect the probably less glamorous thing that will determine the success in the future," the report's lead author, Norman Augustine, a retired Lockheed Martin chief executive, said Tuesday. He said one solution for NASA's problems is more funding from Congress. But that may be hard to come by, in which case, he said, the agency needs to consider canceling or delaying costly missions to invest in more mundane but strategically important institutional needs, such as technology development and workforce training. Augustine said he is concerned that NASA could lose in-house expertise if it relies too heavily on the private industry for newly emerging technologies. "It will have trouble hiring innovative, creative engineers. Innovative, creative engineers don't want to have a job that consists of overseeing other people's work," he said...

The report is hardly a blistering screed. The tone is parental. It praises the agency — with a budget of about $25 billion — for its triumphs while urging more prudent decision-making and long-term strategizing.

NASA pursues spectacular missions. It has sent swarms of robotic probes across the solar system and even into interstellar space. Astronauts have continuously been in orbit for more than two decades. The most ambitious program, Artemis, aims to put astronauts back on the moon in a few short years. And long-term, NASA hopes to put astronauts on Mars. But a truism in the industry is that space is hard. The new report contends that NASA has a mismatch between its ambitions and its budget, and needs to pay attention to fundamentals such as fixing its aging infrastructure and retaining in-house talent. NASA's overall physical infrastructure is already well beyond its design life, and this fraction continues to grow," the report states.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the report "aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead," according to the article.

Nelson added that the agency "will continue to work diligently to address the committee's recommendations."

Ars Technica's Stephen Clark reports: A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development. "NASA's problem is it always seems to have $3 billion more program than it has of funds," said Norm Augustine, chair of the National Academies panel chartered to examine the critical facilities, workforce, and technology needed to achieve NASA's long-term strategic goals and objectives. Augustine said a similar statement could sum up two previous high-level reviews of NASA's space programs that he chaired in 1990 and 2009. But the report released Tuesday put NASA's predicament in stark terms.

"In NASA's case, the not-uncommon tendency in a constrained budget environment to prioritize initiating new missions as opposed to maintaining and upgrading existing support assets has produced an infrastructure that would not be viewed as acceptable under most industrial standards," the panel wrote in its report. "In fact, during its inspection tours, the committee saw some of the worst facilities many of its members have ever seen." All of NASA's centers have facilities the agency considers marginal, but Johnson Space Center in Houston has the facilities with the worst average score. Johnson oversees astronaut training and is home to NASA's Mission Control Center for the International Space Station and future Artemis lunar missions. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which develops and operates many of NASA's robotic interplanetary probes, and Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, used for rocket engine testing, are the only centers without a poor infrastructure score.

These ratings cover things like buildings and utilities, not the specific test rigs or instruments inside them. "You can have a world-class microscope and materials lab, but if the building goes down, that microscope is useless to you," [Erik Weiser, NASA's director of facilities and real estate] told the National Academies panel in a meeting last year. The panel recommended that Congress direct NASA to establish an annually replenished revolving working capital fund to pay for maintenance and infrastructure upgrades. Other government agencies use similar funds for infrastructure support. "This is something that will require federal legislation," said Jill Dahlburg, a member of the National Academies panel and former superintendent of the space science division at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Longtime Slashdot reader davidwr writes: Winners of the 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes included studies on hair swirling (natural, not from grade-school bathroom torture), mammals that breath through their anal orifices, and a study on pigeon-guided missiles. There were also prizes for the study of the swimming abilities of a formerly-living trout. "Honors" were also bestowed for research in coin-flipping (no, it's not 50/50), why cows spew milk, and drunken worms, among other topics. Prizes included $10,000,000,000 (in now-worthless Zimbabwe dollars) and items related to Murphy's Law.

Media coverage includes AP, CNN, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, and by the time you read this, probably much more.

Have you ever been in a high-stakes situation in which you needed to perform but completely bombed? You're not alone. Experiments in monkeys reveal that 'choking' under pressure is linked to a drop in activity in the neurons that prepare for movement. Nature: "You see it across the board, you see it in sports, in all kinds of different sports and outside of sports as well." says Steven Chase, a neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chase and his colleagues investigated what happens in the brain that causes performance to plummet, and published their findings in Neuron on 12 September.

Choking under pressure is not unique to humans. In the same way that a tennis player might miss a match-winning shot, monkeys can also underperform in high-reward situations. The team set up a computer task in which rhesus monkeys received a reward after quickly and accurately moving a cursor over a target. Each trial gave the monkeys cues as to whether the reward would be small, medium-sized, large or 'jackpot'. Jackpot rewards were rare and unusually big, creating a high-stakes, high-reward situation. Using a tiny, electrode-covered chip implanted into the monkeys' brains, the team watched how neuronal activity changed between reward scenarios. The chip was situated on the motor cortex, an area of the frontal lobe that controls movement.

The researchers found that, in jackpot scenarios, the activity of neurons associated with motor preparation decreased. Motor preparation is the brain's way of making calculations about how to complete a movement -- similar to lining up an arrow on a target before unleashing it. The drop in motor preparation meant that the monkey's brains were underprepared, and so they underperformed. The results "help us understand how reward-outcome-mediated behaviour is not linear," says Bita Moghaddam, a behavioural neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. To a certain extent, "you just don't perform better as the reward increases," Moghaddam says. It would also be interesting to see how other brain regions respond in jackpot-reward situations, she adds, because multiple regions could be involved.