NASA is set to fly the first test flight of its tiny Ingenuity helicopter on Mars Sunday, marking the advent of drones for space exploration.Why it matters: If successful, this flight will be the first time a human-built aircraft has flown on a world other than Earth, opening the door to new means of exploring planets far from our own.Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axios Markets. Subscribe for freeCatch up quick: Ingenuity flew to Mars with the Perseverance rover, which landed in February. The helicopter detached from the rover's underbelly earlier this month and survived its first frigid Martian night solo, paving the way for its first flight Sunday. When it takes off, Ingenuity will rev up its rotors and climb to about 10 feet in the air for 30 seconds, collecting photos and engineering data along the way before coming back to the ground.The flight is expected to occur at about 10:54 p.m. ET on Sunday, and NASA should have some indication of whether the test was successful by early Monday morning.The big picture: NASA thinks helicopters like Ingenuity would be invaluable as the space agency continues to explore Mars, in part because drones can do reconnaissance work that isn't possible with just rovers, landers and orbiters.Unlike orbiters, helicopters could give scientists and even astronauts on Mars high-definition views of various areas of a planet in context with other regions. "We have robotic assistants that are paired with astronauts today like on the International Space Station, and so there has been quite a bit of work done in how humans and robots could work together for exploration purposes," Bobby Braun, director for planetary science, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said during a press conference.These types of spacecraft can also move from one place to another relatively quickly and easily, unlike rovers, which take a large amount of planning for a drive.Yes, but: Ingenuity is a proof-of-concept, and it's possible the helicopter won't be able to make it off the ground at all. The atmosphere on Mars where Ingenuity is flying is only 1% as dense as Earth's, making it difficult for the helicopter's rotor blades to loft it into the air. Communications with the helicopter via Perseverance — which acts as a relay station between Earth and Ingenuity — are also difficult because of the time delay in sending signals to and from Mars, forcing scientist to give directions to Ingenuity and then let the little spacecraft work autonomously.What's next: If all goes well with this flight, Ingenuity is expected to take to the Martian skies again and again over the course of the next month to prove out its technology.Like this article? Get more from Axios and subscribe to Axios Markets for free.
A new study has extended women’s reproductive life spans to 37.1 but the earlier figure was always arbitrary and unscientific Women in the 30s have now been granted another couple of years before being considered ‘geriatric mothers’ by doctors. Photograph: sot/Getty Images Sign up for the Week in Patriarchy, a newsletter on feminism and sexism sent every Saturday. You might want to adjust your biological clock Good news, ladies! We’ve officially been granted two more years of useful life. According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the reproductive years for women in the United States increased from age 35 to 37.1. The study looked at 60-year trends in reproductive life spans and found that the average of menopause had gone up, while the average of the first period had gone down. This study obviously doesn’t mean that having a kid after the age of 35 is a breeze. However, I really hope it prompts us to stop treating 35 like it’s some kind of fertility cliff. Hit that magic number and you’re officially described as being of “advanced maternal age” or a “geriatric mother”. You’re given dire warnings about how hard it will be to get pregnant and all the problems you and your baby might face if you do. Your pregnancy is immediately labelled “high-risk” and subject to extra monitoring. Trying to get pregnant after 35 is a process that is often shrouded in stress and judgment. The quality of your eggs declines over time, that’s very clear, but the current obsession with the age 35 as a fertility threshold is outdated and unscientific. Take, for example, the often-cited statistic that one in three women aged 35-39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying. Want to know where that statistic from? Data from 1700s France. Researchers looked a bunch of church birth records from people whose life expectancy at the time was around 30, and came up with these statistics. One imagines the researchers would have been ridiculed in any other scenario. However, since this statistic serves the very useful purpose of shaming and scaring women it was parroted endlessly. There is, by the way, more modern – and significantly more cheering – data to hand. One study published in 2004 that looked at 770 European women found that, with sex at least twice a week, 78% of women aged 35 to 40 conceived within a year, compared with 84% of women aged 20 to 34. The Atlantic notes that these encouraging figures were left out of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s (ASRM) 2008 committee opinion on female age and fertility, which instead relied on “the most-ominous historical data”. A few years later the ASRM also launched a controversial ad campaign reminding people that “women in their twenties and early thirties are most likely to conceive.” Our current obsession with the age 35 being a fertility cliff isn’t just unscientific, it’s unhelpful. As an obstetrician-gynecologist recently wrote in Slate: “this monolithic thinking creates stress and a stigma.” Because doctors use this cut-off point to guide the care of patients, you get a barrage of sometimes unnecessary extra testing and treatment once you’re over 35. This often results in a “care cascade” that can do more harm than good. You know who isn’t treated as over-the-hill the moment they reach 35? Men. There still seems to be a pervasive idea that men don’t have biological clocks and can become a dad at any age. However, I’m afraid sperm doesn’t exactly age like a fine wine; sperm quality declines as men get older. Studies have shown that babies born to older fathers have been found to have an increased likelihood of health issues, psychiatric problems and cognitive disorders. Men can be solely responsibe for 20-30% of infertility cases and contribute to 50% cases overall according to one study. You don’t get many men in their 30s stressing about freezing their sperm to preserve its quality though, do you? I’m not trying to suggest we shame men for waiting “too long” to have a kid, by the way. It’s just time we stop shaming women. If organizations like the ASRM want women to have kids earlier in life, then the focus should be on making parenthood more affordable, not on fearmongering ad campaigns. And instead of making women the culprits for infertility, we ought to be shaming the plastics industry. It’s been posited that one reason infertility rates are rising is the fact that we’re all consuming the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. Fertility is complicated; it’s affected by multiple things and is different for every individual. But let’s just fixate on the age 35 shall we? Utah is making men pay half of the pregnancy costs Dads-to-be now have to pay half the cost of a mother’s medical care related to pregnancy and delivery. It’s the first law of its kind in the US. You know what would be better? Having universal healthcare, so that having a baby isn’t so damn expensive. Pakistani PM blames rape on how women dress There has been a rise in rape cases in Pakistan. According to the prime minister, Imran Khan, this is a natural consequence in “any society where vulgarity is on the rise”. His comments have incensed anyone with a brain. Polish teen’s fake beauty site helps domestic abuse victims Domestic violence surged during lockdown. In response, 18-year-old Krysia Paszko set up a website that looked like it was selling cosmetics but was actually covertly offering victims help. “I was inspired by this French idea, where by going to the pharmacy and asking for the number 19 mask, you could signal that you were a victim of abuse,” she told AFP. Tishaura Jones elected St Louis’s first black female mayor A historic win, hot on the heels of another historic win. Last year in Ferguson, Missouri, 10 miles from St Louis, Etta Jones was elected as the first Black and first female mayor. Meet the women who really, really like meat A Facebook group called the Women Carnivore Tribe has 27,000 members. Some of them reckon a carnivorous diet goes against gendered stereotypes. Personally, I’m not entirely convinced that eating steak is a constructive way to Do Feminism. An interview with the man who keeps uploading a journalist’s feet to wikiFeet I had no idea what wikiFeet was before I read this disturbing (but also brilliant) piece and my life was better for it. The week in pain-triarchy A Texas woman who had the world’s longest nails – at one stage they were nearly 19 feet long – has finally cut them after 30 years. Seems like a painful and disgusting way to get your name in the history books, but to each their own.
Ingenuity was supposed to spin its blades at full speed on Friday, but a "watchdog" timer that identifies issues abruptly cut the test short.
The study, published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, underscored systemic inequalities that make people of color more vulnerable to COVID-19.
Egypt’s best-known archaeologist on Saturday revealed further details on a Pharaonic city recently found in the southern province of Luxor. Zahi Hawass said that archaeologists found brick houses, artifacts, and tools from pharaonic times at the site of the 3,000-year-old lost city. It dates back to Amenhotep III of the 18th dynasty, whose reign is considered a golden era for ancient Egypt.
The satellites of the US-based SpaceX and UK company OneWeb came dangerously close to colliding. 'Red alerts' were sent to both firms by the US Space Force
It seems unlikely that vaccinated people spread the coronavirus. So Fauci told Insider the US may return to normal sooner than we think.
The archaeology team began excavating the great city, known as the 'Rise of Aten,' in September 2020 and have unearthed entire neighborhoods.
The United Arab Emirates named the next two astronauts in its space program Saturday, including the country's first female astronaut. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai who also serves as the autocratically ruled country's prime minister and vice president, named the two astronauts on Twitter. A later government promotional video described al-Matroushi, born in 1993, as an engineer at the Abu Dhabi-based National Petroleum Construction Co.
Crew members of the Serena IV in the Strait of Gibraltar were shocked after a pod of killer whales broke their vessel's rudder.
"I'm feeling a lot of emotions": NASA's Ingenuity engineers are getting antsy for their helicopter's first flight.
In the summer of 2017, Joshua Malone, then an undergraduate at Augustana College in Illinois, visited a field-research camp in Wyoming and picked up some rocks. Rounded at the edges and the size of small fists, they were out of place amid the fine-grained mudrock that had surrounded them, and Malone asked his father, David, a geologist at Illinois State University who led the dig at the site, if he knew where the rocks had come from. Four years later, the two have developed a surprising answer. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times In a study published this year in the journal Terra Nova, the Malones and colleagues say the stones came from a rock formation in southern Wisconsin about 1,000 miles to the east of where they were found. What is even more surprising is their hypothesis for how the rocks made that journey: They were carried in the guts of long-neck dinosaurs. These animals, known as sauropods, reached lengths of more than 100 feet and weights of 40 tons, and regularly swallowed stones known as gastroliths, perhaps to help them digest plants, just as some birds and reptiles do today. The hypothesis would explain how the rocks acquired their smooth and rounded textures. But questions remain about whether they really made the whole journey in the bellies of these great beasts. The gastroliths were found in Jurassic-aged mudstones in a rock formation called the Morisson. A rainbow of pinks and reds, the Morisson formation brims with dinosaur fossils, including those of sauropods, such as Barosaurus and Diplodocus, as well as meat-eaters such as Allosaurus. But the rocks, which are similar to gastroliths dug up elsewhere, were found on their own without any dinosaur remnants. To get a clue as to how they had ended up in modern-day Wyoming, the team crushed the rocks to retrieve and date the zircon crystals contained inside, a bit like studying ancient fingerprints. “What we found was that the zircon ages inside these gastroliths have distinct age spectra that matched what the ages were in the rocks in southern Wisconsin,” said Malone, now a doctoral student studying geology at the University of Texas at Austin. “We used that to hypothesize that these rocks were ingested somewhere in southern Wisconsin and then transported to Wyoming in the belly of a dinosaur. “There hasn’t really been a study like this before that suggests long-distance dinosaur migration using this technique, so it was a really exciting moment for us.” The Wisconsin-Wyoming connection hints at a trek hundreds of miles longer than previous estimates for sauropod migrations. Changing seasons can drive migrations as animals relocate in search of food and water. And sauropods in particular, says Michael D’Emic, a vertebrate paleontologist at Adelphi University in New York and co-author of the study, would have needed gargantuan amounts of these resources to sustain their gargantuan lives. “Sauropods grew quickly to reach their unparalleled sizes — on par with the rates that large mammals grow today,” he said. “This means that their caloric needs were immense, so given the highly seasonal environments they lived in, it’s not surprising that they would have had to migrate long distances in search of food.” But other scientists say that because the rocks were not found alongside any actual dinosaur remains, the paper’s hypothesis will need more evidence to be proved correct. “Unfortunately, we have no real evidence that these clasts are indeed former gastroliths,” said Oliver Wings, a geologist and vertebrate paleontologist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. “We cannot exclude the possibility of transport of the stones in the bellies of dinosaurs, but it remains just one possibility of several.” Nevertheless, Wings thinks the team’s new technique swings the door open for paleontologists to date other gastroliths, especially those found preserved with actual dinosaur skeletons. “It would be amazing if they could use that method on genuine gastroliths,” he said. However the rounded rocks got to Wyoming, their discovery helped carry Malone into a family tradition of studying geology. “I kind of rejected geology for the first 19 years of my life,” he said. “It wasn’t until this project, and being out there at that field camp, that I kind of started to get interested in maybe taking that direction in my life.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
Pfizer Inc and its German partner BioNTech SE on Friday asked U.S. regulators to allow the emergency use of their vaccine in adolescents aged 12 to 15. The vaccine is currently authorized for emergency use in the United States for people aged 16 and up. In March, the drugmakers said the vaccine was found to be safe, effective and produced robust antibody responses in 12- to 15-year olds in a clinical trial.
The European Medicines Agency is investigating reports of clots in people who received J&J's vaccine. The shot has not yet been given out in Europe.
Marine scientists set out to study the 'year of the quiet ocean' following the pandemic.
The distribution of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine has been varied for weeks, according to CDC data.
An unknown force seems to be making subatomic particles called muons act weirdly. That same force could be behind dark matter.
Egyptian archeologists have unearthed a 3,000-year-old lost city, complete with mud brick houses, artifacts, and tools from pharaonic times. Noted archeologist Zahi Hawass said an Egyptian mission discovered the mortuary city in the southern province of Luxor. It dates back to what is considered a golden era of ancient Egypt, the period under King Amenhotep III of the 18th dynasty.
Germany and France recommend mixing vaccine for the second dose, after restricting the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in younger populations.
A highly contagious variant of COVID-19 first identified in Britain is now predominant in Cyprus, its health ministry said on Friday, linking it to a recent surge in infections. The ministry said all 111 positive samples taken in March and sent to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control were found to be the variant known as B.1.1.7, which was first discovered in Britain late last year. The results explain a recent spike in infections since the strain is about 50 percent more contagious than the more common COVID-19 strain, the health ministry said.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the pandemic had exposed racism in America as an "epidemic impacting public health."
The 18-year-old Swedish climate activist said she is skipping the COP26, the UN's climate change conference.
The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft launched on Friday, with two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut on board.
Russia's Sputnik V shot is less effective against the South African COVID-19 variant but still does better than other vaccines, the lead scientist behind it was quoted as saying on Friday. "With regards to the 'South African' variant, the effectiveness of the antibodies produced by Sputnik V, like all other vaccines, against it declines," Alexander Gintsburg said in a interview with the Interfax news agency. He said that Sputnik V was tested against the British and South African variants, as well as the original strain, first detected in China's Wuhan province, by laboratories in the United States.
A trio of Russian and American space travelers launched successfully and reached the International Space Station on Friday. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov blasted off as scheduled at 12:42 p.m. (0742 GMT, 3:42 a.m. EDT) aboard the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan. It is the second space mission for Vande Hei and the third for Novitskiy, while Dubrov is on his first mission.
“Without modern infrastructure, the US cannot create decent jobs, social justice or climate safety.”
“The plan itself is really a big bait-and-switch...A fraction of the spending is actually devoted to traditional infrastructure projects.”
“Focusing on the size of the investment is misleading when you consider the high cost of not making it.”
“Rather than spending $2 trillion, we should privatize infrastructure where feasible and cut taxes and regulations on the rest.”
“Public investment can also be a major source of jobs and growth, helping to pull us out of the stagnation trap.”