Category: Environmental Impact

The White House has rehired a climate scientist who was forced out by the Trump administration, and is proposing to dramatically increase the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Science is back” has become a Biden slogan. But listening to scientists is only the first step—and only a partial step, given the deep distrust many Americans have for experts. We must improve how ordinary citizens help shape science policy.

This is one of the findings of a recent report from the Hastings Center that examines the role of citizens in shaping policy in health and science. That role should not be limited to electing candidates and then, a few years later, expressing approval or disapproval of their job performance. Too many issues are in play at once for the voting–governing connection to be meaningful for many of them, and most people do not choose candidates on the basis of a clear understanding of policies, anyway

It is unlikely, for example, that elections will provide guidance about the governance of new technologies such as gene editing, assisted reproduction or artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean that citizens’ views can’t help shape those policies through mechanisms such as public comment periods on proposed federal rules and public referenda at the state level. But those who influence rulemaking rarely represent the larger public, and neither comment periods nor referenda are deliberative processes in which people become informed about an issue and discuss it with people who might have different views.

What we need are opportunities for Americans to talk and listen to each other face to face, as equals, ideally in person but virtually if need be, about the values and the facts that should guide policy. Americans are not as divided as elected officials, and where they disagree, deliberation can reduce the distance between them. We also can learn to talk and listen with greater mutual respect. The nation was built on this principle of equality, and Americans of all political perspectives must live it.

There have been many small-scale efforts along these lines, mostly undertaken by academics or small nonprofits in what’s known as the civic renewal movement. Typically, these bring people from a community together to discuss local issues, which can help shift the focus from national politics and disagreements about issues that may be abstract and distant toward immediate, concrete problems and shared interests. For example, instead of discussing climate change in general, which is hard to disconnect from the national political divide, participants can focus on the effect of river flooding on farmers. This kind of local entry point can even lead to a deeper understanding of the broader national issue.

But deliberation is possible, and could be productive, at a national level as well. One example is America in One Room, in which 523 Americans spent a weekend together discussing a range of policy issues in order to become less polarized and more confident about U.S. democracy. Such an event is a logistical challenge, but similar events can be held online, which also reduces costs and allows more people to participate.

Public deliberation could also be tailored to the many issues that tend to elude the voting/governing feedback loop. Gene editing is a prime example. Reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and other bodies around the world have argued that policy on genetic editing technologies should be guided by public deliberation.

Public deliberation could also shape the distribution of scarce resources in a disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic, or the use of public health measures such as vaccine certificates. And the groundswell of support among the public for more attention to climate change suggests that public deliberation could help galvanize the political will to overcome the policy-making logjam in the federal government.

In the end, good science depends on democracy, and democracy depends on a deeper, richer engagement between citizens and governance structures. In a healthy democracy, institutions both private and governmental help create citizens who learn, talk and listen better—who are better able to be engaged and effective—and in turn, active, engaged citizens strengthen the institutions of a good democracy. We don’t just need good government: we need a good society that builds good citizens, who in turn build a better society.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Horns, spikes and bony plates—dinosaurs developed many adaptations to protect themselves. But paleontologist Lawrence M. Witmer has discovered that a group of dinosaurs called ankylosaurs had a secret weapon. It was even more important than their tanklike armor, and it was hidden inside their skull: their nasal passages.

Ankylosaurs’ thick full-body armor protected them from predators, but it did not allow much heat to escape from their huge body. Paleontologists were puzzled at how these animals were able to regulate their temperature and survive under the blazing Cretaceous-period sun.

Using advanced scanning and 3-D modeling technologies in his Ohio University lab, Witmer and his colleagues discovered that Euoplocephalus, a genus of ankylosaurs, had strange corkscrew-shaped nasal passages that Witmer likens to a “child’s crazy straw.”

Jason Bourke, a former doctoral student of Witmer’s, now at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State, modeled the dinosaur’s nasal airflow and found the corkscrew shape allowed the passages to act like the coils inside a modern air conditioner. They helped cool ankylosaurs’ blood before it reached the brain, preventing the animals from dying of heat stroke.

Witmer’s study is part of a larger research effort to understand how different groups of dinosaurs dealt with the extreme heat of their environment. In in ankylosaur fossils, the answer was relatively easy to find: their nasal passages were well-preserved inside their bony skull. But the answer is proving more elusive in dinosaurs whose skull had large openings, including long-necked sauropods and carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex.

For Witmer, unearthing this knowledge is not strictly about understanding the giants of the past. “Right now we’re seeing this unprecedented global warming, global climate change, which is disrupting all kinds of weather patterns,” he says. “Dinosaurs, in a sense, can give us some insight into how animals today might be able to deal with this increased heat that we see.”

I am very sure that there is life up there, somewhere in our solar system,” says Christine Moissl-Eichinger, a microbiologist at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. But like any scientist, Moissl-Eichinger knows full well that substantial proof is needed for such a substantial claim. So she and others are working to find that proof—both here on Earth and on Mars.

On the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance is searching for fossils and traces of alien biochemistry in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed thought to have once offered habitable conditions for microbial life. Back home, microbiologists are investigating oxygen-poor environments that may mimic the habitat of early Mars. This two-pronged approach of grounding scientists’ extraterrestrial extrapolations with studies of Earthly analogues could help clarify the bedrock limits for life on rocky planets, greatly aiding the development and execution of future extraterrestrial missions.

The Mars Analogues for Space Exploration project (MASE) was a four-year-long effort that used Earth to understand Mars by analyzing five types of harsh but habitable terrestrial environments that may resemble those that once—or even now—existed on our neighboring planet. Its funding concluded in 2017, but MASE researchers continue to publish results about the habitability of Mars. The study sites included a sulfidic spring, a briny mine, an acidic lake and river, and permafrost. Because of the extreme conditions in these environments, organisms that live here are called extremophiles.

Extremophile research was pioneered by the late Thomas Brock, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He found, against all expectations, that certain hardy microbes could thrive in geothermal springs hot enough to poach an egg. The microbiologist’s curiosity led to the isolation of a molecule—from a heat-loving bacterium—that is now used in laboratories across the world to amplify and sequence DNA. Brock passed away in April 2021, but his legacy lives on.

Brock published his extremophile findings in April 1969, mere months before humans first walked on the moon. This paved the way for astrobiology, the study of life in all its forms on this planet and elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiology is not about making money off of space travel, says Luke McKay, a researcher at Montana State University, who was not involved with that study or Moissl-Eichinger’s recent research. It is about basic science and answering a single, timeless question: Does life exist beyond Earth?

This is a question so profound that so far scientists have only managed to chip away at its edges, with each hard-won revelation usually accompanied by a host of newfound mysteries. Moissl-Eichinger and her team’s chief contribution has been their attempt at cultivating extremophiles from MASE’s five environments, but even this straightforward task has been devilishly difficult. Out of more than 1,000 different extremophile species gathered from those sites, the team managed to grow just 31 in the lab. This is a common struggle in environmental microbiology. Because these microbes live in extreme places, it is difficult for researchers to re-create the exact conditions they require to thrive. To capture more of the diversity, the team’s scientists used genetic sequencing, which allowed them to look at all the microbial DNA in their samples. They specifically searched for genes that may help microbes survive hostile conditions, such as extreme temperatures or the absence of oxygen.

“Cultured [microbial] isolates are not representative of the environment, and that’s why it’s really cool what they did. By using isolates and sequencing, I think they really tried to cover all the bases,” McKay says.

Despite their trouble culturing their extremophile samples, the researchers discovered a vast diversity of microorganisms in all five locations. Even in the most extreme Earthly environments, it seems, life indeed finds a way. Most remarkably, the team’s DNA sequencing revealed 34 unique microbial sequences that were conserved in all MASE sites, which is evidence of microbes surviving a combination of extreme environments. According to Moissl-Eichinger, although many microbes are adapted to live in certain conditions such as intense cold or scant oxygen, it is novel to find a group of microbes adapted to survive a combination of these extreme stressors. This ability to survive in many types of environments strengthens the researchers’ claims that similar microbes could exist on Mars—not only in the deep past but even today.

“Microbes are everywhere. They can live in places where we’d expect they could not thrive, but somehow they do,” Moissl-Eichinger says. “Of course, on Mars, we do not know if these [extremophiles] are the types of microorganisms we expect to see. They may just be very adapted to life on Earth.”

One way these microbes may be particularly adapted to our planet is their dependence on carbon-based compounds, or organic matter. These are the molecular building blocks of life on Earth and may be rare in some otherwise habitable extraterrestrial environments. Some microbes in environments with scarce organic matter can instead get nutrients from inorganic substances, such as ammonia and certain sulfur compounds. Yet all the microbes cultured in the MASE studies relied on organic carbon to survive—even those that could survive without oxygen. According to Moissl-Eichinger, this could be because microbes that consume organic matter grow faster. So with more time, she and her colleagues might successfully culture microbes that get their nutrients from other chemical sources, potentially revealing new biochemical pathways and ecological niches to consider when searching for life on Mars.

“We are far away from understanding what microbes could look like on Mars and how we can find them. But of course, research always gives a little piece by piece, and at some point, the picture gets fuller,” Moissl-Eichinger says.

Understanding how all these disparate pieces fit together may change our definition of what it means to be alive. According to McKay, extraterrestrial environments for life may be like those found on Earth, or they could differ vastly. At present, given our sample size of only one confirmed life-bearing world, both possibilities appear equally plausible.

“If [extraterrestrial life] is too [similar] to our life on Earth, people will argue that it is something that we brought with us. But if it is too different, will we be able to see it?” Moissl-Eichinger says. “Now that is the question that drives us.”

LAUNCH SITE ONE, West Texas—The richest person on Earth has now traveled beyond it.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of the spaceflight company Blue Origin, launched into suborbital space with three other people today (July 20) on the first crewed mission of the company’s New Shepard vehicle—a landmark moment for the man and the space tourism industry.

“Blue Control, Bezos. Best day ever!” Bezos said while in flight.

The autonomous New Shepard, which consists of a rocket topped by a capsule, lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One near the West Texas town of Van Horn today at 9:11 a.m. EDT (1311 GMT; 8:11 a.m.local time). 

The capsule carried Bezos, 57, his brother Mark, 53, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Dutch physics student Oliver Daemen 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) above Earth, then came down for a parachute-aided, dust-raising landing in the West Texas scrublands. The rocket also returned safely, making a vertical, powered touchdown at its designated landing zone. Its descent was punctuated by a deafening sonic boom, along with raucous cheers from the Blue Origin workers here who watched the flight.

All of this action, from liftoff to landings, took just over 10 minutes. But it was doubtless the experience of a lifetime for the four passengers.

“I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like,” Bezos told NBC’s TODAY on Monday (July 19). “People say they go into space and they come back changed. Astronauts always talk about that, whether it’s the thin limb of the Earth’s atmosphere and seeing how fragile the planet is, that it’s just one planet. So I can’t wait to see what it’s gonna do to me.”

Bezos became the second billionaire to reach space in less than two weeks. On July 11, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson flew on the first fully crewed flight of the VSS Unity space plane, which is operated by Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin’s chief rival in the suborbital space tourism business.

Two decades of work

Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000, six years after he established Amazon. The spaceflight company worked stealthily for a decade, generally staying out of the public eye.

That changed in 2010, when Blue Origin won a contract from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which aimed to encourage the development of private American astronaut taxis to fill the shoes of the space shuttle, which was about to retire. The company snagged another contract the next year but didn’t land the big deal; NASA announced in 2014 that it had selected the vehicles built by SpaceX and Boeing—capsules known as Crew Dragon and CST-100 Starliner, respectively. 

Blue Origin continued to work on its own vehicles, including New Shepard, which is designed to carry people and payloads on brief trips to suborbital space. The 59-foot-tall (18 meters) craft is named after NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, whose suborbital jaunt on May 5, 1961, was the United States’ first crewed spaceflight.

New Shepard first launched to suborbital space in April 2015. The capsule landed softly as planned on that flight, but the rocket crashed during its touchdown attempt. But the next New Shepard iteration aced a test flight that November, pulling off the first-ever vertical landing of a rocket during a space mission. (SpaceX nailed a landing of its own a month later with the first stage of its Falcon 9 orbital rocket, a feat Elon Musk’s company has now pulled off more than 80 times.)

In January 2016, the same New Shepard flew successfully again, notching another reusability milestone. Over the next five-plus years, that vehicle and two others flew 12 more uncrewed test missions, the latest an “astronaut rehearsal” this past April. 

All were successful, paving the way for today’s mission, which was the third flight of the fourth New Shepard vehicle, known as RSS Next Step.

Making, and acknowledging, history

Blue Origin announced the July 20 target on May 5. Both of those dates were chosen advisedly: May 5 was the 60th anniversary of Shepard’s pioneering flight, and July 20 is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Bezos has often cited Apollo 11 as a big inspiration, saying that his dreams of spaceflight were born when he watched the historic lunar landing at the age of five.

Blue Origin made some history of its own today, and not just for the company annals: Funk and Daemen became the oldest and youngest people, respectively, ever to reach the final frontier.

The off-Earth journey was a dose of long-overdue justice for Funk. She’s one of the “Mercury 13,” women who passed NASA’s physiological screening tests in the early days of the space age but were never seriously considered for flight. Back then, you had to be a man—and more specifically, a white military man—to be a NASA astronaut. 

The agency didn’t fly a female astronaut to space until June 1983, when Sally Ride reached orbit on the space shuttle Challenger’s STS-7 mission. (Challenger’s STS-8 flight, which launched that August, carried Guion Bluford, the first African American to reach space.)

Funk takes the oldest-spaceflyer mantle from John Glenn, who launched at the age of 77 in October 1998 on the STS-95 mission of the shuttle Discovery, decades after becoming the first American to reach orbit.

Blue Origin announced on July 1 that today’s flight would include Funk. Daemen was a later addition to the manifest; the company revealed his participation just last Thursday (July 16). In mid-June, Blue Origin auctioned off the fourth and final seat on RSS Next Step, for the astronomical sum of $28 million. But the still-anonymous person who placed that bid had scheduling conflicts, company representatives said, so Daemen took their place.

Daemen’s father, Somerset Capital Partners CEO Joes Daemen, paid for the seat and decided to let his son fly, CNBC reported. So, in addition to all the other milestones, RSS Next Step flew its first paying customer today.

Suborbital space tourism lifts off

Virgin Galactic made its big announcement about Branson’s flight on July 1, the same day that Blue Origin did its Funk reveal. The dramatic news drops sparked many stories about a “billionaire space race,” which both Branson and Bezos have attempted to tamp down. 

”There’s one person who was the first person in space—his name was Yuri Gagarin—and that happened a long time ago,” Bezos said on TODAY, referring to the cosmonaut’s landmark orbital mission on April 12, 1961. (And Branson wasn’t the first billionaire to reach the final frontier. For example, megarich software architect Charles Simonyi bought two trips to the International Space Station, flying there in 2007 and 2009 aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.) 

“I think I’m gonna be number 570 or something; that’s where we’re gonna be in this list,” Bezos added. “So this isn’t a competition. This is about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things in space.”

Blue Origin aims to help make those incredible things happen over the long haul. The company is building an orbital launch system called New Glenn and a lunar lander named Blue Moon. Blue Origin also leads “The National Team,” a private consortium that proposed a crewed landing system for use by NASA’s Artemis program of lunar exploration. NASA picked SpaceX’s Starship vehicle for that job, but The National Team and another unsuccessful submitter, Alabama-based company Dynetics, have filed protests about the decision with the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Whether or not there’s personal competition between Branson and Bezos, the companies led by the two billionaires are vying for the same relatively small pool of rich, adventurous customers.

Virgin Galactic’s most recently stated ticket price was $250,000. Blue Origin has not announced how much it’s charging for a regular (non-auctioned) seat, but it’s thought to be in the low six figures as well.

Both companies offer passengers three to four minutes of weightlessness and great views of Earth against the blackness of space. But there are significant differences between the two flight experiences. For example, New Shepard is an autonomous capsule that launches vertically and lands under parachutes, whereas VSS Unity is a two-pilot space plane that takes off under the wing of a carrier aircraft and lands on a runway.

New Shepard also gets a few miles higher than VSS Unity, a fact that Blue Origin highlighted in a couple of Twitter posts on July 9. Those tweets told folks that spaceflights with Virgin Galactic come with an asterisk because Unity doesn’t reach the Kármán line, the 62-mile-high (100 km) mark considered by some to be the point where space begins. (Unity does fly higher than 50 miles, or 80 km, the boundary recognized by NASA, the U.S. military and the Federal Aviation Administration.)

This competition will heat up soon, if all goes according to plan. Blue Origin plans to launch two more crewed New Shepard missions this year, with the next one targeted for September or October, company representatives said during a prelaunch press conference on Sunday (July 18). Those flights will presumably have paying customers on board, just as today’s did.

Virgin Galactic aims to fly a few more test flights this fall, then begin full commercial operations early next year from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Both companies plan to ramp up their flight rate over time, allowing them to reduce prices and broaden the customer pool substantially—perhaps enough for the rest of us to swim in it someday. 

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The Borg have landed—or, at least, researchers have discovered their counterparts here on Earth. Scientists analysing samples from muddy sites in the western United States have found novel DNA structures that seem to scavenge and ‘assimilate’ genes from microorganisms in their environment, much like the fictional Star Trek ‘Borg’ aliens who assimilate the knowledge and technology of other species.

These extra-long DNA strands, which the scientists named in honour of the aliens, join a diverse collection of genetic structures—circular plasmids, for example—known as extrachromosomal elements (ECEs). Most microbes have one or two chromosomes that encode their primary genetic blueprint. But they can host, and often share between them, many distinct ECEs. These carry non-essential but useful genes, such as those for antibiotic resistance.

Borgs are a previously unknown, unique and “absolutely fascinating” type of ECE, says Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her colleagues describe their discovery of the structures in a preprint posted to the server bioRxiv. The work is yet to be peer-reviewed.

Unlike anything seen before

Borgs are DNA structures “not like any that’s been seen before”, says Brett Baker, a microbiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scientists agree that the find is exciting, but have questioned whether Borgs really are unique, noting similarities between them and other large ECEs.

In recent years “people have become used to surprises in the field of ECEs”, says Huang Li, a microbiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “However, the discovery of Borgs, which undoubtedly enriches the concept of ECEs, has fascinated many in the field.”

Their vast size, ranging between more than 600,000 and about 1 million DNA base pairs in length, is one feature that distinguishes Borgs from many other ECEs. In fact, Borgs are so huge that they are up to one-third of the length of the main chromosome in their host microbes, Banfield says.

Banfield studies how microbes influence the carbon cycle—including the production and degradation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas—and, in October 2019, she and her colleagues went hunting for ECEs containing genes involved in the carbon cycle in Californian wetlands. There, they found the first Borgs and later identified 19 different types from this and similar sites in Colorado and California.

Borgs seem to be associated with archaea, which are single-celled microorganisms distinct from bacteria. Specifically, those Banfield and her team have discovered are linked to the Methanoperedens variety, which digest and destroy methane. And Borg genes seem to be involved in this process, says Banfield.

Scientists can’t yet culture Methanoperedens in the laboratory—an ongoing challenge for many microbes—so the team’s conclusions that Borgs might be used by the archaea for methane processing are based on sequence data alone.

“They’ve made an interesting observation,” says systems biologist Nitin Baliga, at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. But he cautions that when researchers sift through fragments of many genomes and piece them together, as Banfield’s team has done, it’s possible to make errors. Finding Borgs in cultured Methanoperedens will be necessary for the finding to be considered definitive, he adds.

Costs and benefits

Assuming Borgs are real, maintaining such a massive ECE would be costly for Methanoperedens, Banfield and colleagues say, so the DNA structures must provide some benefit. To learn what that might be, the researchers analysed the sequences of hundreds of Borg genes and compared them with known genes.

Borgs seem to house many genes needed for entire metabolic processes, including digesting methane, says Banfield. She describes these collections as “a toolbox” that might super-charge the abilities of Methanoperedens.

So what makes a Borg a Borg? In addition to their remarkable size, Borgs share several structural features: they’re linear, not circular as many ECEs are; they have mirrored repetitive sequences at each end of the strand; and they have many other repetitive sequences both within and between the presumptive genes.

Individually, these features of Borgs can overlap with those seen in other large ECEs, such as elements in certain salt-loving archaea, so Baliga says the novelty of Borgs is still debatable at this stage. Borgs also resemble giant linear plasmids found in soil-dwelling Actinobacteria, says Julián Rafael Dib, a microbiologist at the Pilot Plant for Microbiological Industrial Processes in Tucumán, Argentina.

Banfield counters that although the individual features of Borgs have been seen before, “the size, combination and metabolic gene load” is what makes them different. She speculates that they were once entire microbes, and were assimilated by Methanoperedens in much the same way that eukaryotic cells gained energy-generating mitochondria by assimilating free-living bacteria.

Now that scientists know what to look for, they might find more Borgs by sifting through old data, says Baker, who used to work in Banfield’s lab. He thinks he might already have discovered some candidates in his own genetic database since the preprint was posted.

Resistance is futile

When analysing the Borg genome, Banfield and colleagues also saw features suggesting that Borgs have assimilated genes from diverse sources, including the main Methanoperedens chromosome, Banfield says. This potential to ‘assimilate’ genes led her son to propose the name ‘Borg’ over Thanksgiving dinner in 2020.

Banfield’s team is now investigating the function of Borgs and the role of their DNA repeats. Repeats are important to microbes: differently-structured repeats called CRISPR are snippets of genetic code from viruses that microbes incorporate into their own DNA to ‘remember’ the pathogens so they can defend against them in the future.

CRISPR and its associated proteins have been a boon for biotechnology because they have been adapted into a powerful gene-editing technique—hinting that Borg genomes might also yield useful tools. “It could be as important and interesting as CRISPR, but I think it’s going to be a new thing,” says Banfield, who is collaborating on future investigations with her preprint co-author, Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer of CRISPR-based gene editing at the University of California.

One potential application that the researchers see for Borgs could be as an aid in the fight against climate change. Fostering the growth of microbes containing them could, perhaps, cut down the methane emissions generated by soil-dwelling archaea, which add up to about 1 gigatonne globally each year. It would be risky to do this in natural wetlands, Banfield says, but it might be appropriate at agricultural sites. So, as a first step, her group is now hunting Borgs in Californian rice paddies.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 16 2021.

For Blue Origin, this coming moment has been more than two decades in the making.

The spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos is set to launch its first crewed mission on Tuesday (July 20), which will send the billionaire and three other people to suborbital space aboard a reusable rocket-capsule combo called New Shepard. Liftoff is set for 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One near Van Horn, Texas.

The flight is a huge milestone for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded back in September 2000. It will mark the company’s official entry into the suborbital space tourism business, because among New Shepard’s four passengers is its first paying customer, an 18-year-old Dutch man named Oliver Daeman. 

Tuesday will also be a very big day for Bezos himself, and not just for professional reasons. The world’s richest person has repeatedly said that traveling to space is a nearly lifelong dream, one inspired when he watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 at the age of five. And his own flight is a sort of tribute to that epic mission, for it’s launching 52 years to the day that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity’s first-ever steps on a world beyond Earth.

New Shepard takes flight

Blue Origin operated very much under the radar for years after its founding. The company really came into the public eye only in 2010, when it won a development contract from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. 

Blue Origin secured another such deal a year later, but NASA ultimately chose SpaceX and Boeing to fly agency astronauts to and from the International Space Station. (SpaceX is in the middle of its third crewed mission to the orbiting lab; Boeing is gearing up for a key uncrewed test flight of its CST-100 Starliner capsule to the station on July 30.)

The company made more news in October 2012 with a successful pad-abort test of New Shepard in West Texas. The crew capsule fired its escape motor and zoomed away from a rocket simulator, showcasing tech that could help keep passengers safe in the event of an emergency during launch.

Then, in April 2015, New Shepard took flight in earnest for the first time. The capsule reached a maximum altitude of 58.1 miles (93.5 kilometers)—higher than the 50-mile (80 km) line that NASA and the U.S. military recognize as the boundary of space—and came back down to Earth safely under parachutes. The rocket didn’t fare quite so well, crashing during its landing attempt.

Seven months later, the next iteration of New Shepard flew even higher, getting about 62.5 miles (100.6 km) above the West Texas scrublands. And this time, both the capsule and the rocket aced their landings—a major milestone, and one that inspired some competitive back-and-forth between Bezos and SpaceX chief Elon Musk. (SpaceX managed to land the first stage of its orbital Falcon 9 rocket just weeks later, a feat Musk’s company has repeated dozens of times since.)

In January 2016, the same New Shepard vehicle flew to suborbital space again, in another landmark reusability moment. 

And the test flights continued. To date, four New Shepard vehicles have launched on 15 suborbital missions, the last 14 of which have been completely successful. That string of success has convinced Bezos and the rest of the Blue Origin team that New Shepard is ready to start carrying people—and that Bezos should be among the first to fly.

Billionaires lift off

Blue Origin announced in early May that New Shepard’s first crewed mission would lift off on July 20, and that the company would auction off one of the seats. (In another nod to history, the announcement came on May 5, the 60th anniversary of the first American human spaceflight, the suborbital jaunt of NASA astronaut and New Shepard namesake Alan Shepard.)

A month later, Bezos revealed that he and his brother Mark will be on the flight—news that significantly juiced the auction, which was won by a still-unnamed bidder for $28 million. (That bidder later pulled out of the flight due to scheduling conflicts, according to Blue Origin; his or her spot was taken by Daemen.)

Then, on July 1, Blue Origin announced that trailblazing aviator Wally Funk will be on the flight as well. The 82-year-old is one of the “Mercury 13,” women who passed the same physiological screening tests that NASA put its astronauts through in the early days of the space age. None of those women were seriously considered as astronaut candidates at the time; American human spaceflight was a male-only affair until 1983, when Sally Ride launched to orbit aboard the space shuttle Challenger.

Funk will become the oldest person ever to reach space when New Shepard lifts off on July 20, breaking the record set by then-77-year-old John Glenn during a space shuttle mission October 1998. And Daeman will set a record as well, becoming the youngest-ever spaceflyer.

The same day that Blue Origin announced Funk’s involvement, the company’s main rival in the suborbital space tourism business, Virgin Galactic, came out with a bombshell of its own: It planned to launch its first fully crewed spaceflight on July 11, and billionaire Virgin Group founder Richard Branson would be on board.

This news—and the actual flight, which went well—stole some of Bezos’s thunder. But now it’s Blue Origin’s turn in the spotlight.

Big plans

If all goes according to plan on Tuesday, New Shepard could start full commercial operations in the coming weeks or months. Virgin Galactic aims to do the same in early 2022, after a few more test flights, so a bona fide suborbital space tourism industry may be about to get the ground at long last. (Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004.)

But Blue Origin’s ambitions extend far beyond suborbital space. The company is also developing a huge reusable rocket called New Glenn to carry people and payloads to Earth orbit, with a debut flight expected in 2022. 

Blue Origin is working on a moon lander as well, and it leads “The National Team,” a private consortium that proposed a human landing system for use by NASA’s Artemis program of lunar exploration. In April of this year, NASA chose SpaceX’s Starship as the Artemis crewed lander, but The National Team and another finalist that was not selected, Dynetics, filed protests with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which is expected to issue a decision on the matter in early August.

Blue Origin’s long-term goals are even bolder. The company aims to help humanity become a truly spacefaring species, and to protect our home planet in the process.

“Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth,” the company’s vision statement reads, in part. “In order to preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space.”

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By Christina Olson

Edited by Dava Sobel

In a year of panic, envy

any creature who estivates

in the heat. Line a cavity

with mucus & hunker down.

A bunker hardens around you.

Watch the river shrivel

without worry. In the 1950s,

humans dug up backyards,

poured concrete, stocked

canned goods. The lungfish

feeds not off Spam but from

its own muscle, digests

itself into slime & vitamin.

When the rivers flood again,

emerge from your opposite

hibernation. Your legs don’t walk,

but they taste. Masticate, mash,

gulp, slurp. Scientists say

you are in a constant state

of agitation, but they are just

jealous. They too want to touch

everything again. To pull

themselves from the muck

& mire. They watch you

gulp a goldfish. Exhale orange

flakes. Swim between stars

in this little galaxy, the one

you built wholly from yourself.

Humans have long imagined what it would be like to see the world through different eyes. In Greek and Roman mythology, for example, the giant Argus Panoptes used his dozens of eyes to keep watch. The poet Ovid reported that they acted in independent pairs, with two at a time going to sleep while the rest remained alert.

A smaller many-eyed mystery fascinates scientists today: members of the family Salticidae, or jumping spiders, with their front pair of large, round eyes and three smaller peepers on each side of their head. A new study explores how these arachnids see—and, more specifically, what they care about seeing. Understanding how their eyes work together may inform future technologies, and offer a glimpse into a very different being’s perception.

“The results are indicative of cognitive processes that are sifting the world into categories of what is interesting—what is worth turning toward and investigating further, and what is not—what can be dismissed or ignored or kept in the corner of one’s eye,” says Nathan Morehouse, a University of Cincinnati biologist, who studies jumping spider vision and was not involved in the study. “These are really questions about alien minds.”

The “Cats of the Invertebrate World”

When Ximena Nelson teaches about these spiders at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, she likes to do an experiment with her students. She warns them that she is about to project a vivid close-up of a jumping spider’s face on a large screen at the front of the room and then watches as even the self-described arachnophobes coo with delight, as if they were seeing a seal pup.

The spiders “are so relatable to us because they’ve got big eyes, and they look at you,” says Nelson, an animal behavior researcher. She reviewed the new study but was not involved in the work.

Beyond their endearing aspect, however, it is these spiders’ unusual behavior that makes them rewarding research subjects—especially when studying perception. Unlike many arachnids, jumping spiders do not build webs or stay in one place. They scan their environment for prey, stalk it and then pounce to capture it. Ron Hoy, a Cornell University professor emeritus, who studies jumping spider neurology and was not involved with the research, says they act more like predatory felines. In fact, he says, the late influential neurologist Michael Land liked to call jumping spiders the “cats of the invertebrate world.”

The spiders’ near-360-degree eyesight helps them spot prey and hunt. But while their two large front eyes, called anterior medial eyes, have high acuity, those eyes’ field of vision is small. The lenses of the spiders’ eyes cannot swivel like those of humans, so when the arachnids want to shift their gaze, they simply reorient their entire body in the time it takes us to glance sideways. They pivot to face objects of interest (including potential prey, threats or mates) that they first spot with two of their less acute side-facing pairs of eyes, called the anterior and posterior lateral eyes.

This behavior led many scientists to think of these side eyes as mere motion detectors. But Massimo de Agró, now a researcher at the University of Regensburg in Germany, suspected they did more: the spiders seemed to use their lateral eyes to pick and choose what they turned toward. De Agró is the first author of the new study, which was published on Thursday in PLOS Biology and was based on experiments he conducted as a fellow at Harvard University.

Miniature Treadmills and a Light Show

Studying a jumping spider’s image processing is not as straightforward as implanting electrodes in its brain, as scientists might do with a larger animal. Not only is the spiders’ brain the size of a poppy seed, but these animals use hydrostatic pressure to extend their legs—this makes their whole body a bit like a “walking water balloon” that could pop from any invasive procedure, Morehouse says.

To track where jumping spiders were looking, de Agró and his co-authors used a popular technique for studying bumblebees and other small invertebrates. They floated a tiny, patterned ball on a cushion of upward-blowing air. Spiders were placed atop the ball and held in place from above. When they tried to turn their body by moving their legs, they would stay in place, but the ball would rotate, acting a little like a treadmill. A video camera recorded the ball’s movement and thus the spiders’ intended motion.

The researchers then simultaneously displayed two images in each spider’s periphery and noted which one it tried to turn toward in order to gauge which image it was more interested in investigating. One of the images tested was a series of moving dots that represented the “biological motion” of a spider walking from a side view—which the researchers were excited to find the arachnids could distinguish from randomly moving dots.

Hoy compares this abstraction to the “green screen” suits and white dots worn by actors when creating special effects for movies and TV shows: human brains will recognize a series of dots moving a certain way as human motion even before movie magic turns the dots into a superhero or zombie. “It’s very well known for humans, of course, that they can capture motion by abstract dots,” he says. “But the fact that they’re showing that this is also true for jumping spiders is pretty remarkable.”

De Agró, a psychologist by training, says this phenomenon was first described in humans in the 1970s—but that nobody had imagined invertebrates might be able to process the same abstraction. In addition to showing his spiders biological motion, he also created a dot display with a scrambled version of that same motion (which other animals have been shown to interpret as living movement, despite the scrambling) and another with random motion. All were shown to the arachnids’ anterior lateral eyes.

The spiders showed no preference between the biological and scrambled motion—yet they strongly preferred the random motion to either. De Agró says this result initially dismayed him because the random dots had been meant as a control that the spiders would not care to investigate.

“I was so sad when I saw the results of that first condition,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘What’s happening here? It’s clear there’s nothing happening.’” But then the spiders’ preferences stayed consistent across the other conditions.

De Agró concluded that the spiders may turn toward a moving image when they want more information about it—implying that the anterior lateral eyes not only detect motion but also give a jumping spider enough data to classify the motion into categories of living (spider dots and scrambled spider dots) and unknown (random dots).

Nelson says this study had an elegant design and surprising results. She also wonders whether male and female spiders might show different responses to these stimuli because females are much more focused on finding food, whereas males are singularly obsessed with finding a mate.

De Agró adds that he hopes the study will help arachnophobes see these spiders in a new light, especially given the invertebrates’ capability to engage in the kind of visual processing once presumed available only to humans and other mammals.

Learning how animals’ eyes function differently from ours may also widen the perspectives of programmers and robotics designers. Researchers have already created depth sensors—which can be used in video games, cars and phones—that were inspired by the way jumping spiders’ eyes work. Hoy says future iterations of these designs may benefit robots’ visual sensors on unfamiliar terrain, whether flying through a rain forest or exploring the surface of an extraterrestrial planet.

“Figuring out how that computation is made in an animal that has already outsourced a task to different eyes,” Hoy says, “would be a great way to think about how to design robots that have to navigate in an unpredictable, visually cluttered world.”

Astronaut Scott Kelly famously spent an entire year residing onboard the International Space Station (ISS), about 400 kilometers above Earth, and his NASA colleague Christina Koch spent nearly that long “on station.” Each returned to Earth with slightly atrophied muscles and other deleterious physiological effects from their extended stay in near-zero gravity. But another, more insidious danger lurks for spacefarers, especially those who venture beyond low-Earth orbit.

Space is filled with invisible yet harmful radiation, most of it sourced from energetic particles ejected by the sun or from cosmic rays created in extreme astrophysical events across the universe. Such radiation can damage an organism’s DNA and other delicate cellular machinery. And the damage increases in proportion to exposure, which is drastically higher beyond the protective cocoon of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field (such as on notional voyages to the moon or Mars). Over time, the accrued cellular damage significantly raises the risk of developing cancer.

To address the situation, at NASA’s request, a team of top scientists organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a report in June recommending that the space agency adopt a maximum career-long limit of 600 millisieverts for the space radiation astronauts can receive. The sievert is a unit that measures the amount of radiation absorbed by a person—while accounting for the type of radiation and its impact on particular organs and tissues in the body—and is equivalent to one joule of energy per kilogram of mass. Scientists typically use the smaller (but still quite significant) quantity of the millisievert, or 0.001 sievert. Bananas, for instance, host minute quantities of naturally occurring radioactive isotopes, but to ingest a millisievert’s worth, one would have to eat 10,000 bananas within a couple of hours.

Every current member of NASA’s astronaut corps has received less than 600 millisieverts during their orbital sojourns, and most, including Koch, have received much less and can thus safely return to space. But a year on the ISS still exposes them to more radiation than experienced by residents of Japan who lived near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accidents of 2011.

“Everybody is planning trips to the moon and Mars,” and these missions could have high radiation exposures, says Hedvig Hricak, lead author of the report and a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Using current spaceflight-proved technologies, long-distance voyages—especially to the Red Planet—would exceed the proposed threshold, she says.

That could be a big problem for NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks to send astronauts to the moon in preparation for future trips to Mars. Another problem for the space agency is that the epidemiological data it uses mostly come from a longevity study of Japanese survivors of atomic bomb blasts, as well as from the handful of astronauts and cosmonauts who have endured many months or even years in low-Earth orbit. NASA’s current space radiation limit, which was developed in 2014, involves a complicated risk assessment for cancer mortality that depends on age and sex, yet more relevant data are necessary, Hricak argues. In the atomic bomb survivor study, for instance, women were more likely to develop lung cancer than men, suggesting a greater sex-based vulnerability to harmful radiation. “But with the knowledge we presently have, we know we cannot make a comparison between high exposure versus chronic exposure,” Hricak says. “The environment is different. There are so many factors that are different.”

NASA wants to update its standards now because the agency is on the cusp of sending so many astronauts well beyond low-Earth orbit, where greater amounts of space radiation seem destined to exceed previously mandated exposure limits. Furthermore, Hricak says, having a single, universal radiation limit for all space travelers is operationally advantageous because of its simplicity. A universal limit could also be seen as a boon for female astronauts, who had a lower limit than men in the old system and therefore were barred from spending as many days in space as their male counterparts.

The new radiation limit proposed by Hricak and her team is linked to the risks to all organs of a 35-year-old woman—a demographic deemed most vulnerable in light of gender differences in the atomic bomb survivor data and the fact that younger people have higher radiation risks, partly because they have more time for cancers to develop. The goal of the radiation maximum is to keep an individual below a 3 percent risk of cancer mortality: in other words, with this radiation limit, at most three out of 100 astronauts would be expected to die of radiation-induced cancer in their lifetime.

“NASA uses standards to set spaceflight exposure limits to protect NASA astronauts’ health and performance, both in mission and after mission,” says Dave Francisco of NASA’s Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer. He acknowledges that, while astronauts on Mars missions would benefit from the thin Martian atmosphere that provides some limited protection, “transit in deep space has the highest exposure levels.”

That means long-haul space trips come with the biggest risks. A stay on the lunar surface for six months or more—presuming, of course, that astronauts eventually have a presence there and do not spend most of their time in subsurface habitats—would involve nearly 200 millisieverts of exposure, a higher amount than an extended visit to the ISS. And an astronaut traveling to Mars would be exposed to even more radiation. Whether they reached the Red Planet through a lunar stopover or on a direct spaceflight, they could have experienced significant radiation exposure en route. Even before they embarked on the trip back home, they could have already exceeded the 600 millisievert limit. The entire voyage, which would likely last a couple of years, could involve well more than 1,000 millisieverts. So if astronauts—and not just robots—will be sent to Mars, NASA likely will need to request waivers for them, Hricak says, although the exact process for obtaining a waiver has not yet been laid out.

The report’s proposal for a new radiation maximum is not without its critics. “For a mission to Mars, a 35-year-old woman right at that limit could have an over 10 percent chance of dying in 15 to 20 years. To me, this is like playing Russian roulette with the crew,” says Francis Cucinotta, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and former radiation health officer at NASA. Despite the supposed benefits the new limits would have for female astronauts, he is concerned that the risks are particularly pronounced for younger women in space.

On the contrary, Hricak says, in its request for new limits, NASA has sought to be conservative. The European, Canadian, and Russian space agencies all currently have a higher maximum allowed dose of 1,000 millisieverts, while Japan’s limit is age- and sex-dependent like NASA’s current one, mainly because of a shared dependence on the atomic bomb survivor data.

But unlike someone in the vicinity of a nuclear explosion, the risk to an astronaut exposed to space radiation is long-term rather than immediate. Without proper shielding (which tends to be rather heavy and thus prohibitively expensive to launch) their chances of developing cancer, as well as cardiovascular disease, cataracts and central nervous system damage, slightly increase each day they are in space. In a person’s cells, space radiation can sever both strands of a DNA molecule’s double helix. And while a few such instances might come with very limited risks, each additional severance raises the odds of developing a harmful mutation that could cause cancer.

Fortunately, however, the body has ways of repairing some kinds of DNA damage, and it is possible to study that DNA repair in space, as was demonstrated by a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE in late June.

“This experiment set up a bunch of techniques that have never been implemented before in the very complex environment of the International Space Station,” says Sebastian Kraves, a co-founder of the Genes in Space student competition, which produced the investigation, and a co-author of the study. Using yeast cells onboard the ISS, Koch herself performed the experiment, which could become a precursor to future attempts to carefully monitor DNA damage and cellular repair in astronauts.

In addition to medical technologies, propulsion systems and shielding to protect against space radiation will likely advance as well. Particles expelled from the sun, for example, could be blocked with a few centimeters of aluminum or other materials, though astronauts outside their spacecraft or outside future lunar or Martian structures would be vulnerable. And they cannot be as easily shielded from more energetic cosmic radiation sources, such as heavy ions originating from distant exploding stars.

In any case, considering how little is known about various health risks from different kinds of space radiation, compared with radiation we are familiar with on Earth, researchers will surely continue with more studies like these to protect astronauts as much as possible. “I can tell you exactly how much exposure you’re going to get from a CT scan,” Hricak says, “but there are many uncertainties with space radiation.”

By Dana Gold & Lauren Kurtz

From political manipulation of COVID-19 research to censorship of weather forecasters who tried to contradict President Trump’s false claims about Hurricane Dorian, the Trump years were punctuated by jaw-dropping episodes of scientific misconduct.

But those are just the cases that couldn’t be covered up. There were countless more that were never made public. That’s why we’ve set up a safe and confidential way to report issues, including those that may still be happening. That way federal scientists as well as grantees, contractors and others employed outside the federal government have a way to safely speak out.

Because even though Trump is out of office, the problem isn’t solved. Claims of political interference in science are hardly new, and allegations have been made under Democratic administrations as well as Republican. But the scope and scale reached a fever pitch under the Trump administration, as various trackers and reports have documented. They list hundreds of publicly reported incidents, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Anonymous survey data indicate the true number is well into the thousands.

There are multiple examples of scientists who chose to speak out publicly about assaults on scientific integrity, typically after trying to raise concerns internally first without success and after facing retaliation.

Immunologist Rick Bright, who headed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, blew the whistle on the Trump administration’s unwillingness to prepare for the coronavirus pandemic and promotion of bogus drug therapies. Maria Caffrey was a climate scientist with the National Park Service who pushed back internally on repeated and aggressive attempts to censor references to human-caused climate change. Both suffered professional reprisal for defending scientific integrity. And they are hardly alone.

Our respective organizations, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and Government Accountability Project, provided legal support to far more science professionals than we can disclose, faced threats to science during the Trump administration. While some felt comfortable enough to publicly report their concerns, the vast majority ultimately decided not to come forward—rightly fearing retaliation and doubting that speaking up would make a difference, particularly during an administration overtly hostile to both whistleblowers and science. Indeed, policies instituted by the Obama administration, in response to the George W. Bush administration’s corruption of science, failed to predict and protect against how brazen the next administration would be.

The Trump administration provided a serious stress test, and most scientific integrity policies failed. In the aftermath, we must investigate, because it is only in reviewing the failures that we will fully learn how to prevent them from happening again.

Recognizing this, President Biden issued a memorandum on scientific integrity after a week in office that kickstarted a multiyear effort to better protect federal research. It formed an interagency task force to review where scientific integrity policies have fallen short, which is scheduled to release its findings in September. But even amid current reform efforts, federal employees may still not be comfortable reporting past violations; fear of retaliation continues, particularly as a number of perpetrators are still working within the government as career civil servants.

To truly achieve a thorough review, even the most cautious and reluctant whistleblowers must feel comfortable coming forward. To this end, we launched the Scientific Integrity Reporting Project to provide a confidential, anonymous platform for scientists and others to detail threats to scientific integrity. We plan to draw upon the examples to inform policy makers about how to better protect science in the future.

This project will provide a necessary and important complement to the processes underway in the federal government. In addition to providing scientists with enhanced confidentiality safeguards, we hope our efforts will produce a broader range of responses. Current efforts appear to focus on the Trump and Obama administrations, but we are interested in examples extending both further back and further forward in time to better understand long-term and ongoing issues. We are also explicitly seeking to include experiences of people who work with but not for the federal government and who may be aware of a wider range of scientific integrity violations and willing to share their stories too.

The politicization of science undermines public trust in critical scientific institutions and has devastating consequences for public health and safety, as vividly illustrated by the tragic fallout from the Trump administration’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Biden administration has recognized that a thorough accounting is needed for effective reforms, and it needs to look deep. By sharing their reports of assaults on scientific integrity they witnessed in the past, employees in and around federal science and across all disciplines can truly help protect the future.

Just as only narrowly avoiding the tip of an iceberg will still crash your boat into what’s concealed beneath the waves, if the Biden administration only addresses the breaches of scientific integrity so egregious they couldn’t be covered up, we’ll still be in dangerous waters.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.