NASA is canceling the lease for the offices of a branch of the Goddard Space Flight Center in New York that does Earth science research.
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Join us on May 6 for a timely discussion on those challenging Starlink and the push for multi-orbit and multi-operator solutions.
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German satellite operator OroraTech opened its U.S. headquarters in Denver, Colorado, April 24 to push its growing wildfire-monitoring constellation into a country that regularly experiences some of the world’s most costly fires.
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The State of the Space Industrial Base 2024 report was released this week by the nonprofit NewSpace Nexus
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Three Chinese astronauts arrived at the Tiangong space station Thursday aboard the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft, hours after launching from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center
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China’s megaconstellation launches spark debris concerns; commercial space expands; Lightyear Explorer raises funds; key updates expected during China’s Space Day and Shenzhou-20 launch.
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The world’s smallest pacemaker to date is smaller than a single grain of rice, optically controlled and dissolves after it’s no longer needed. According to researchers involved in the work, the pacemaker could work in human hearts of all sizes that need temporary pacing, including those of newborn babies with congenital heart defects.
“Our major motivation was children,” says Igor Efimov, a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering, in a press release from Northwestern University. Efimov co-led the research with Northwestern bioelectronics pioneer John Rogers.
“About 1% of children are born with congenital heart defects – regardless of whether they live in a low-resource or high-resource country,” Efimov explains. “Now, we can place this tiny pacemaker on a child’s heart and stimulate it with a soft, gentle, wearable device. And no additional surgery is necessary to remove it.”
The current clinical standard-of-care involves sewing pacemaker electrodes directly onto a patient’s heart muscle during surgery. Wires from the electrodes protrude from the patient’s chest and connect to an external pacing box. Placing the pacemakers – and removing them later – does not come without risk. Complications include infection, dislodgment, torn or damaged tissues, bleeding and blood clots.
To minimize these risks, the researchers sought to develop a dissolvable pacemaker, which they introduced in Nature Biotechnology in 2021. By varying the composition and thickness of materials in the devices, Rogers’ lab can control how long the pacemaker functions before dissolving. The dissolvable device also eliminates the need for bulky batteries and wires.
“The heart requires a tiny amount of electrical stimulation,” says Rogers in the Northwestern release. “By minimizing the size, we dramatically simplify the implantation procedures, we reduce trauma and risk to the patient, and, with the dissolvable nature of the device, we eliminate any need for secondary surgical extraction procedures.”
The latest iteration of the device – reported in Nature – advances the technology further. The pacemaker is paired with a small, soft, flexible, wireless device that is mounted onto the patient’s chest. The skin-interfaced device continuously captures electrocardiogram (ECG) data. When it detects an irregular heartbeat, it automatically shines a pulse of infrared light to activate the pacemaker and control the pacing.
“The new device is self-powered and optically controlled – totally different than our previous devices in those two essential aspects of engineering design,” says Rogers. “We moved away from wireless power transfer to enable operation, and we replaced RF wireless control strategies – both to eliminate the need for an antenna (the size-limiting component of the system) and to avoid the need for external RF power supply.”
Measurements demonstrated that the pacemaker – which is 1.8 mm wide, 3.5 mm long and 1 mm thick – delivers as much stimulation as a full-sized pacemaker. Initial studies in animals and in the human hearts of organ donors suggest that the device could work in human infants and adults. The devices are also versatile, the researchers say, and could be used across different regions of the heart or the body. They could also be integrated with other implantable devices for applications in nerve and bone healing, treating wounds and blocking pain.
The next steps for the research (supported by the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics, the Leducq Foundation and the National Institutes of Health) include further engineering improvements to the device. “From the translational standpoint, we have put together a very early-stage startup company to work individually and/or in partnerships with larger companies to begin the process of designing the device for regulatory approval,” Rogers says.
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In this week's episode of Space Minds, Lori Garver, former NASA Deputy Administrator sits down with host David Ariosto. Garver describes what drives spaceflight-and what that means for the agency's shifting priorities.
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This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features the materials scientist Paul Meredith, who is director of the Centre for Integrative Semiconductor Materials (CISM) at the UK’s Swansea University.
In a conversation with Physics World’s Matin Durrani, Meredith talks about the importance of semiconductors in a hi-tech economy and why it is crucial for the UK to have a homegrown semiconductor industry.
Founded in 2020, CISM moved into a new, state-of-the-art £50m building in 2023 and is now in its first full year of operation. Meredith explains how technological innovation and skills training at CSIM is supporting chipmakers in the M4 hi-tech corridor, which begins in Swansea in South Wales and stretches eastward to London.
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Winning the new space race with China is contingent on the competitiveness of the United States commercial space industry. While the Chinese space program enjoys the full financial and regulatory […]
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Harvard University is suing the Trump administration over its plan to block up to $9bn of government research grants to the institution. The suit, filed in a federal court on 21 April, claims that the administration’s “attempt to coerce and control” Harvard violates the academic freedom protected by the first amendment of the US constitution.
The action comes in the wake of the US administration claiming that Harvard and other universities have not protected Jewish students during pro-Gaza campus demonstrations. Columbia University has already agreed to change its teaching policies and clamp down on demonstrations in the hope of regaining some $400,000 of government grants.
Harvard president Alan Garber also sought negotiations with the administration on ways that it might satisfy its demands. But a letter sent to Garber dated 11 April, signed by three Trump administration officials, asserted that the university had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investments”.
The letter demanded that Harvard reform and restructure its governance, stop all diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes and reform how it hires staff and students. It also said Harvard must stop recruiting international students who are “hostile to American values” and provide an audit on “viewpoint diversity” on admissions and hiring.
Some administration sources suggested that the letter, which effectively insists on government oversight of Harvard’s affairs, was an internal draft sent to Harvard by mistake. Nevertheless, Garber decided to end negotiations, leading Harvard to instead sue the government over the blocked funds.
We stand for the values that have made American higher education a beacon for the world
Alan Garber
A letter on 14 April from Harvard’s lawyers states that the university is “committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in its community”. It adds that it is “open to dialogue” about what it has done, and is planning to do, to “improve the experience of every member” of its community but concludes that Harvard “is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any other administration”.
Writing in an open letter to the community dated 22 April, Garber says that “we stand for the values that have made American higher education a beacon for the world”. The administration has hit back by threatening to withdraw Harvard’s non-profit status, tax its endowment and jeopardise its ability to enrol overseas students, who currently make up more than 27% of its intake.
The Trump administration is also planning swingeing cuts to government science agencies. If its budget request for 2026 is approved by Congress, funding for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate would be almost halved from $7.3bn to $3.9bn. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a successor to the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, would be axed. Two missions to Venus – the DAVINCI atmosphere probe and the VERITAS surface-mapping project – as well as the Mars Sample Return mission would lose their funding too.
“The impacts of these proposed funding cuts would not only be devastating to the astronomical sciences community, but they would also have far-reaching consequences for the nation,” says Dara Norman, president of the American Astronomical Society. “These cuts will derail not only cutting-edge scientific advances, but also the training of the nation’s future STEM workforce.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also stands to lose key programmes, with the budget for its Ocean and Atmospheric Research Office slashed from $485m to just over $170m. Surviving programmes from the office, including research on tornado warning and ocean acidification, would move to the National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.
“This administration’s hostility toward research and rejection of climate science will have the consequence of eviscerating the weather forecasting capabilities that this plan claims to preserve,” says Zoe Lofgren, a senior Democrat who sits on the House of Representatives’ Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), meanwhile, is unlikely to receive $234m for major building projects this financial year, which could spell the end of the Horizon supercomputer being built at the University of Texas at Austin. The NSF has already halved the number of graduate students in its research fellowship programme, while Science magazine says it is calling back all grant proposals that had been approved but not signed off, apparently to check that awardees conform to Trump’s stance on DEI.
A survey of 292 department chairs at US institutions in early April, carried out by the American Institute of Physics, reveals that almost half of respondents are experiencing or anticipate cuts in federal funding in the coming months. Entitled Impacts of Restrictions on Federal Grant Funding in Physics and Astronomy Graduate Programs, the report also says that the number of first-year graduate students in physics and astronomy is expected to drop by 13% in the next enrolment.
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A series of spectacular images of the cosmos has been released to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope‘s 35 years in space. The images include pictures of Mars, planetary nebulae and a spiral galaxy.
Hubble was launched into low-Earth orbit in April 1990, stowed in the payload bay of the space shuttle Discovery. Yet the telescope experienced a difficult start as its 2.4 m primary mirror suffered from spherical aberration – a fault that caused the curvature of the mirror to not bring light to focus at the same point. This was fixed three years later during a daring space walk in which astronauts successfully installed the COSTAR instrument.
During Hubble’s operational life, the telescope has made nearly 1.7 million observations, stuyding approximately 55 000 astronomical targets. Its discoveries have resulted in over 22 000 papers and over 1.3 million citations.
Operating for three decades has allowed astronomers to see astronomical changes such as seasonal variability on the planets in our solar system, black-hole jets travelling at nearly the speed of light as well as stellar convulsions, asteroid collisions and expanding supernova bubbles.
Despite being 35 years in orbit around the Earth, Hubble is still one of the most sought after observatories with demand for observing time oversubscribed by 6:1.
“[Hubble’s] stunning imagery inspired people across the globe, and the data behind those images revealed surprises about everything from early galaxies to planets in our own solar system,” notes Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of NASA’s astrophysics division. “The fact that it is still operating today is a testament to the value of our flagship observatories.”
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SAN FRANCISCO – German space traffic management startup Okapi:Orbits raised 13 million euros ($14.75 million) in a seed funding round announced April 24. With the new investment, Okapi will expand […]
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Arizona-based Katalyst completed the acquisition of Colorado-based Atomos in March for an undisclosed amount.
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Boeing executives said the company is making progress on containing the costs of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle, but offered few details on technical work.
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Worms move faster in an environment riddled with randomly-placed obstacles than they do in an empty space. This surprising observation by physicists at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands can be explained by modelling the worms as polymer-like “active matter”, and it could come in handy for developers of robots for soil aeriation, fertility treatments and other biomedical applications.
When humans move, the presence of obstacles – disordered or otherwise – has a straightforward effect: it slows us down, as anyone who has ever driven through “traffic calming” measures like speed bumps and chicanes can attest. Worms, however, are different, says Antoine Deblais, who co-led the new study with Rosa Sinaasappel and theorist colleagues in Sara Jabbari Farouji’s group. “The arrangement of obstacles fundamentally changes how worms move,” he explains. “In disordered environments, they spread faster as crowding increases, while in ordered environments, more obstacles slow them down.”
The team obtained this result by placing single living worms at the bottom of a water chamber containing a 50 x 50 cm array of cylindrical pillars, each with a radius of 2.5 mm. By tracking the worms’ movement and shape changes with a camera for two hours, the scientists could see how the animals behaved when faced with two distinct pillar arrangements: a periodic (square lattice) structure; and a disordered array. The minimum distance between any two pillars was set to the characteristic width of a worm (around 0.5 mm) to ensure they could always pass through.
“By varying the number and arrangement of the pillars (up to 10 000 placed by hand!), we tested how different environments affect the worm’s movement,” Sinaasappel explains. “We also reduced or increased the worm’s activity by lowering or raising the temperature of the chamber.”
These experiments showed that when the chamber contained a “maze” of obstacles placed at random, the worms moved faster, not slower. The same thing happened when the researchers increased the number of obstacles. More surprisingly still, the worms got through the maze faster when the temperature was lower, even though the cold reduced their activity.
To explain these counterintuitive results, the team developed a statistical model that treats the worms as active polymer-like filaments and accounts for both the worms’ flexibility and the fact that they are self-driven. This analysis revealed that in a space containing disordered pillar arrays, the long-time diffusion coefficient of active polymers with a worm-like degree of flexibility increases significantly as the fraction of the surface occupied by pillars goes up. In regular, square-lattice arrangements, the opposite happens.
The team say that this increased diffusivity comes about because randomly-positioned pillars create narrow tube-like structures between them. These curvilinear gaps guide the worms and allow them to move as if they were straight rods for longer before they reorient. In contrast, ordered pillar arrangements create larger open spaces, or pores, in which worms can coil up. This temporarily traps them and they slow down.
Similarly, the team found that reducing the worm’s activity by lowering ambient temperatures increases a parameter known as its persistence length. This is essentially a measure of how straight the worm is, and straighter worms pass between the pillars more easily.
Identifying the right active polymer model was no easy task, says Jabbari Farouji. One challenge was to incorporate the way worms adjust their flexibility depending on their surroundings. “This self-tuning plays a key role in their surprising motion,” says Jabbari Farouji, who credits this insight to team member Twan Hooijschuur.
Understanding how active, flexible objects move through crowded environments is crucial in physics, biology and biophysics, but the role of environmental geometry in shaping this movement was previously unclear, Jabbari Farouji says. The team’s discovery that movement in active, flexible systems can be controlled simply by adjusting the environment has important implications, adds Deblais.
“Such a capability could be used to sort worms by activity and therefore optimize soil aeration by earthworms or even influence bacterial transport in the body,” he says. “The insights gleaned from this study could also help in fertility treatments – for instance, by sorting sperm cells based on how fast or slow they move.”
Looking ahead, the researchers say they are now expanding their work to study the effects of different obstacle shapes (not just simple pillars), more complex arrangements and even movable obstacles. “Such experiments would better mimic real-world environments,” Deblais says.
The present work is detailed in Physical Review Letters.
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