Currently, the CAPSTONE operations mission team has good knowledge of the state and status of the spacecraft. They are in contact with the spacecraft and working towards a solution with support from the Deep Space Network. Additional updates will be provided as they become available. Rocket Lab successfully launched CAPSTONE on a historic pathfinding mission to the moon to support NASA’s Artemis program on June 28. It is a CubeSat designed to test a unique lunar orbit, which is intended in the future for Gateway, a lunar space station....

New laboratory experiments that are simulating the carbon released by thawing soil are bolstering concerns that continued carbon emission could lead to a carbon disaster. Disappearing Arctic ice is an anthropogenic cause of climate change. The melting of the permafrost can actually drive global warming. As it thaws, microbes devour the locked carbon, unleashing carbon dioxide and amplifying the warming power of carbon pollution in a feedback loop. Scientists struggle to quantify this threat....

Researchers will soon begin studying data from Cassini’s gas analyzer and dust detector instruments, which directly sampled the moon’s plume of gas and dust-sized icy particles during the flyby. Those analyses are likely to take several weeks, but should provide important insights about the composition of the global ocean beneath Enceladus’ surface and any hydrothermal activity occurring on the ocean floor. The potential for such activity in this small ocean world has made Enceladus a prime target for future exploration in search of habitable environments in the solar system beyond Earth....

Daniele Bjørn Malesani was carrying out a routine follow-up observation of a gamma-ray burst, named GRB 211211A, using the Nordic Optical Telescope on the Canary island La Palma. A standard procedure after having received the text message that was automatically triggered by the spacecraft “Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory” which monitors the sky for gamma-ray bursts. But something wasn’t quite right… Malesani is an astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands and a guest researcher at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen....

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences built a chromatic intensity interferometer with a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide (PPLN) and successfully measured two very close laser sources of different wavelengths. This work was published in Physical Review Letters. In 2016, Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize winner, and his colleagues theoretically proposed that photons of different wavelengths could enter the detector to interfere and extract the phase information through introducing a color erasure detector, which was based on the frequency conversion into an intensity interferometer....

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Adams School of Dentistry have launched a clinical trial to test whether mouthwash can reduce a person’s risk of spreading coronavirus. Laboratory experiments have shown mouthwash can quickly kill coronaviruses, but there’s no evidence mouthwash can prevent the virus from infecting people. The Adams School of Dentistry is investigating how well mouthwash works to reduce the amount of coronavirus in the mouths of those with COVID-19, and if it can lessen the chance of spreading the virus to others....

For decades, the human genome could only tell us what we already suspected about the evolution of certain traits. Researchers were able to trace the genetic origin stories of lactose tolerance (as opposed to lactose intolerance), malaria resistance, and more only after observing these successful traits in specific populations. Now, the study of positive selection – the ability to determine which genetic changes have conferred an evolutionary advantage – has reached a turning point: the genome itself can be used as a starting point to guide scientists to important genetic locations, leading to hypotheses about human health and disease....

We are closer to understanding the incredible ability of squid to instantly camouflage themselves thanks to research from The University of Queensland. Dr. Wen-Sung Chung and Professor Justin Marshall, from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute, completed the first MRI-based mapping of the squid brain in 50 years to develop an atlas of neural connections. “This the first time modern technology has been used to explore the brain of this amazing animal, and we proposed 145 new connections and pathways, more than 60 percent of which are linked to the vision and motor systems,” Dr....

The change is contained in new revisions to the DSM-5, a set of standards used to categorize mental illness, and it eliminates the bereavement exclusion, which exempts grieving people from diagnoses of depression for two months unless the symptoms are self-destructive. Now under the changes, depression could be diagnosed more easily just two weeks after a death. The bereavement exclusion separated the normal responses from the more severe ones, like worthlessness and suicidal impulses....

NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., NIAID Deputy Director for Clinical Research and Special Projects H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and CDC Director Robert R. Redfield, M.D., shared their observations in the context of a recently published report on the early transmission dynamics of COVID-19. The report provided detailed clinical and epidemiological information about the first 425 cases to arise in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. In response to the outbreak, the United States and other countries instituted temporary travel restrictions, which may have slowed the spread of COVID-19 somewhat, the authors note....

Study Shows Domestic Violence Reports on the Rise As COVID-19 Keeps People at Home UCLA-led analysis of calls to police in LA, Indianapolis also shows traffic stops and burglaries declining. A UCLA-led research team has found an increase in the incidence of domestic violence reports in two cities, Los Angeles and Indianapolis, since stay-at-home restrictions were implemented in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The scholars, who are leaders in applying mathematics to interpret and make sense of police crime data, predict that the incidence should gradually decrease as people return to normal routines, but would likely increase again if there is a second wave of COVID-19 infections that prompts new stay-at-home orders....

The novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is thought to spread through natural respiratory activities, such as breathing, talking, and coughing, but little is known about how the virus is transported through the air. University of Missouri scientists report, in Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, on a study of how airflow and fluid flow affect exhaled droplets that can contain the virus. Their model includes a more accurate description of air turbulence that affects an exhaled droplet’s trajectory....

In many parts of the world, the supply of COVID-19 vaccines continues to lag behind the demand. While most vaccines are designed as a two-dose regimen, some countries, like Canada, have prioritized vaccinating as many people as possible with a single dose before giving out an additional dose. In Chaos, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management and the University of California, Los Angeles illustrate the conditions under which a “prime first” vaccine campaign is most effective at stopping the spread of the COVID-19 virus....

Penn study suggests cardiac arrests and arrhythmias are likely triggered by systemic illness, not solely due to the viral infection itself. Patients with COVID-19 who were admitted to an intensive care unit were 10 times more likely than other hospitalized COVID-19 patients to suffer cardiac arrest or heart rhythm disorders, according to a new study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Researchers say the results suggest that cardiac arrests and arrhythmias suffered by some patients with COVID-19 are likely triggered by a severe, systemic form of the disease and are and not the sole consequence of the viral infection....

Magnetic fields are notoriously difficult to measure in space. The most common method relies on the emission from non-spherical dust grains that align their short axes with the direction of the field, resulting in infrared radiation that is preferentially polarized perpendicular to the field. Measuring this faint polarization signal, and inferring the field strength and direction, has only recently become easier to do with the HAWC+ instrument on SOFIA, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, and its 2....

The 16-mile-wide (26-kilometer-wide) crater Insitor is located almost exactly in the center of Kerwan crater (see the “Kerwan” map in PIA20014) on Ceres. Scientists can compute the chances that a cosmic dart would hit exactly at the bullseye of the largest crater on Ceres by using models of impact frequency as a function of time, combined with the period of time since Kerwan’s formation. By counting the number of craters within Kerwan and comparing that number to the distribution of craters on Earth’s moon and other bodies, it is possible to derive an approximate time for Kerwan’s formation of between 550 and 750 million years ago....

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, scientists and health care providers are seeking ways to keep the coronavirus from infecting tissues once they’re exposed. A new study suggests luring the virus with a decoy — an engineered, free-floating receptor protein — binds the virus and blocks infection. Erik Procko, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, led the study, published in the journal Science. To infect a human cell, a virus must first bind to a receptor protein on the surface of the cell....

In 1932, Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel Prize laureate, introduced the idea of isospin to explain the symmetry in atomic nuclei resulting from the similar properties of protons and neutrons. Isospin symmetry is still widely accepted today. However, isospin symmetry is not strictly conserved due to proton-neutron mass difference, Coulomb interaction, and charge-dependent aspects of nuclear force. Such asymmetry leads to fragmentation of the allowed Fermi transition to many states via strong isospin mixing, instead of being constrained to one state in β decay....

The “Cultural Landscapes Scanner” (CLS) project has born from the collaboration between Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT- Italian Institute of Technology) and the European Space Agency (ESA) in order to detect archaeological sites from above by analyzing satellite images through artificial intelligence (AI). IIT’s researchers of the Centre of Cultural Heritage Technology in Venice, led by Arianna Traviglia, will introduce AI to help archaeologists trace back the ancient presence of humans by revealing hidden traces in the soil....

Almost all post-COVID neuropathy appears due to infection-triggered immune dysfunction that is potentially treatable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus continue to experience “long-COVID” symptoms persisting at least three months after recovery from COVID, even after mild cases. These include difficulty getting through normal activities, faintness and rapid heart rate, shortness of breath, cognitive difficulties, chronic pain, sensory abnormalities, and muscle weakness. A new study led by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the National Institutes of Health suggests that some patients with long-COVID have long-lasting nerve damage that appears caused by infection-triggered immune dysfunction....