Enlarge / NASA commander Butch Wilmore exits the Starliner spacecraft Saturday following the scrubbed launch attempt.

A computer controlling the Atlas V rocket's countdown triggered an automatic hold less than four minutes prior to liftoff of Boeing's commercial Starliner spacecraft Saturday, keeping the crew test flight on the ground at least a few more days.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were already aboard the spacecraft when the countdown stopped due to a problem with a ground computer. "Hold. Hold. Hold," a member of Atlas V launch team called out on an audio feed.

With the hold, the mission missed an instantaneous launch opportunity at 12:25 pm EDT (16:25 UTC), and later Saturday, NASA announced teams will forego a launch opportunity Sunday. The next chance to send Starliner into orbit will be 10:52 am EDT (14:52 UTC) Wednesday. The mission has one launch opportunity every one-to-two days, when the International Space Station's orbital track moves back into proper alignment with the Atlas V rocket's launch pad in Florida.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks as Yusaku Maezawa, founder and president of Start Today Co., looks on at an event at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, in 2018. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Friday night the dearMoon project—a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other 'crew members' on a circumlunar flight aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle—was abruptly canceled.

"It is unfortunate to be announcing that 'dearMoon', the first private circumlunar flight project, will be cancelled," the mission's official account on the social media site X said. "We thank everyone who has supported us and apologize to those who have looked forward to this project."

Shortly afterward the financial backer of the project and its 'crew leader,' Yusaku Maezawa, explained this decision on X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said, the assumption was that the dearMoon mission would launch by the end of 2023.

Enlarge / Behold, the most distant galaxy found to date. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI et al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's June 1, and today's photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's a banger.

This telescope, launched 18 months ago now, had as one of its express goals to deliver insights about the early Universe. The most straightforward way of doing so is to collect the faintest, most distant light that has spent the longest time traveling to reach Earth.

Enlarge (credit: Timothy Hearsum)

Fritz Haber: good guy or bad guy? He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his part in developing the Haber-Bosch process, a method for generating ammonia using the nitrogen gas in air. The technique freed agriculture from the constraint of needing to source guano or manure for nitrogen fertilizer and is widely credited for saving millions from starvation. About half of the world’s current food supply relies on fertilizers made using it, and about half of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies can be traced back to it.

But it also allowed farmers to use this newly abundant synthetic nitrogen fertilizer with abandon. This has accentuated agriculture’s role as a significant contributor to global warming because the emissions that result from these fertilizers is a greenhouse gas—one that has a warming potential almost 300 times greater than that of carbon dioxide and remains in the atmosphere for 100 years. Microbes in soil convert nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide, and the more nitrogen fertilizer they have to work with, the more nitrous oxide they make.

Agriculture also leaks plenty of the excess nitrogen into waterways in the form of nitrate, generating algal blooms that create low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ where no marine life can live.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft sits on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

NASA and Boeing officials are ready for a second attempt to launch the first crew test flight on the Starliner spacecraft Saturday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Liftoff of Boeing's Starliner capsuled atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is set for 12:25 pm EDT (16:25 UTC). NASA commander Butch Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams, both veteran astronauts, will take the Starliner spacecraft on its first trip into low-Earth orbit with a crew on board.

You can watch NASA TV's live coverage of the countdown and launch below.

Enlarge / MDMA is now in the FDA's hands. (credit: Getty | PYMCA/Avalon)

The safety and efficacy data on the use of MDMA (aka ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder therapy is "challenging to interpret," the Food and Drug Administration said in a briefing document posted Friday. The agency noted significant flaws in the design of the underlying clinical trials as well as safety concerns for the drug, particularly cardiovascular harms.

On Tuesday, June 4, the FDA will convene an advisory committee that will review the evidence and vote on MDMA's efficacy and whether its benefits outweigh its risks. The FDA does not have to follow the committee's recommendations, but it often does. If the FDA subsequently approves MDMA as part of treatment for PTSD, it would mark a significant shift in the federal government's stance on MDMA, as well as psychedelics, generally. Currently, the US Drug Enforcement Administration considers MDMA a Schedule I drug, defined as one with "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." It would also offer a new treatment option for patients with PTSD, a disabling psychiatric condition with few treatment options currently.

As Ars has reported previously, the submission of MDMA for approval is based on two clinical trials. The first trial, published in Nature Medicine in 2021, involved 90 participants with moderate PTSD and found that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy significantly improved Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 (CAPS-5) scores compared with participants who were given psychotherapy along with a placebo. In the second study, published in September in Nature Medicine, the finding held up among 104 participants with moderate or severe PTSD (73 percent had severe PTSD).

Enlarge / The spliceosome is a large complex of proteins and RNAs. (credit: NCBI)

Almost 1,500 genes have been implicated in intellectual disabilities; yet for most people with such disabilities, genetic causes remain unknown. Perhaps this is in part because geneticists have been focusing on the wrong stretches of DNA when they go searching. To rectify this, Ernest Turro—a biostatistician who focuses on genetics, genomics, and molecular diagnostics—used whole genome sequencing data from the 100,000 Genomes Project to search for areas associated with intellectual disabilities.

His lab found a genetic association that is the most common one yet to be associated with neurodevelopmental abnormality. And the gene they identified doesn’t even make a protein.

Trouble with the spliceosome

Most genes include instructions for how to make proteins. That’s true. And yet human genes are not arranged linearly—or rather, they are arranged linearly, but not contiguously. A gene containing the instructions for which amino acids to string together to make a particular protein—hemoglobin, insulin, serotonin, albumin, estrogen, whatever protein you like—is modular. It contains part of the amino acid sequence, then it has a chunk of DNA that is largely irrelevant to that sequence, then a bit more of the protein’s sequence, then another chunk of random DNA, back and forth until the end of the protein. It’s as if each of these prose paragraphs were separated by a string of unrelated letters (but not a meaningful paragraph from a different article).

Enlarge / A sea-borne variant of the commercial Ceres 1 rocket lifts off near the coast of Rizhao, a city of 3 million in China's Shandong province. (credit: VCG via Getty Images)

Welcome to Edition 6.46 of the Rocket Report! It looks like we will be covering the crew test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and the fourth test flight of SpaceX's giant Starship rocket over the next week. All of this is happening as SpaceX keeps up its cadence of flying multiple Starlink missions per week. The real stars are the Ars copy editors helping make sure our stories don't use the wrong names.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Another North Korean launch failure. North Korea's latest attempt to launch a rocket with a military reconnaissance satellite ended in failure due to the midair explosion of the rocket during the first-stage flight this week, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reports. Video captured by the Japanese news organization NHK appears to show the North Korean rocket disappearing in a fireball shortly after liftoff Monday night from a launch pad on the country's northwest coast. North Korean officials acknowledged the launch failure and said the rocket was carrying a small reconnaissance satellite named Malligyong-1-1.

Enlarge (credit: Alistair Berg)

Misinformation is not a new problem, but there are plenty of indications that the advent of social media has made things worse. Academic researchers have responded by trying to understand the scope of the problem, identifying the most misinformation-filled social media networks, organized government efforts to spread false information, and even prominent individuals who are the sources of misinformation.

All of that's potentially valuable data. But it skips over another major contribution: average individuals who, for one reason or another, seem inspired to spread misinformation. A study released today looks at a large panel of Twitter accounts that are associated with US-based voters (the work was done back when X was still Twitter). It identifies a small group of misinformation superspreaders, which represent just 0.3 percent of the accounts but are responsible for sharing 80 percent of the links to fake news sites.

While you might expect these to be young, Internet-savvy individuals who automate their sharing, it turns out this population tends to be older, female, and very, very prone to clicking the "retweet" button.

Enlarge / Holstein cows at a dairy farm. (credit: Getty | John Carl D'Annibale)

Another dairy farm worker in Michigan has been infected with avian influenza virus, state and federal health officials reported Thursday.

The case marks the third time the outbreak of bird flu in milking cows is known to have spilled over to a human. The dairy farm worker in Michigan, like the others, had close contact with H5N1-infected dairy cows, suggesting another case of cow-to-human transmission.

But the case reported today is notable for being the first one involving respiratory symptoms. In the first two cases, the dairy workers (one in Texas, the other in Michigan) reported only eye infections (conjunctivitis). This third case—also in Michigan but from a different farm—reported upper respiratory symptoms, including cough, congestion, and sore throat, as well as eye discomfort and watery discharge, but not conjunctivitis. The worker was given an antiviral (Tamiflu) and is said to be recovering. No other workers on the farm have shown symptoms, and the worker's household contacts are being monitored.

Enlarge / Panty liners, hygienic tampons, and sanitary pads. (credit: Getty | LOU BENOIST)

People in the US are starting their menstrual cycles earlier and experiencing more irregularities, both of which raise the risk of a host of health problems later in life, according to an Apple women’s health study looking at data from over 70,000 menstruating iPhone users born between 1950 and 2005.

The mean age of people's first period fell from 12.5 years in participants born between 1950 and 1969 to 11.9 years in participants born between 2000 and 2005, with a steady decline in between, the study found. There were also notable changes in the extremes—between 1950 and 2005, the percentage of people who started their periods before age 11 rose from 8.6 percent to 15.5 percent. And the percentage of people who started their periods late (at age 16 or above) dropped from 5.5 percent to 1.7 percent.

In addition to periods shifting to earlier starting ages, menstrual cycles also appeared to become more irregular. For this, researchers looked at how quickly people settled into a regular cycle after the start of their period. Between 1950 and 2005, the percentage of people obtaining regularity within two years fell from 76.3 percent to 56 percent.

Enlarge / A hydro-fracking drilling pad for oil and gas operates October 26, 2017 in Robinson Township, Pennsylvania. (credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

In 2007, a geoscientist at Penn State named Terry Engelder calculated that Pennsylvania could be sitting on more than 50 trillion cubic feet of accessible natural gas deposits. Engelder later revised his calculation upward, to 489 trillion cubic feet, enough to meet US natural gas demand for 18 years. These massive numbers set off the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, leading to drilling across the state. Since the rush began, there have been 13,000 unconventional wells drilled in Pennsylvania.

Now, a new “astounding” calculation has caught the attention of the gas industry: A study from researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory shows the wastewater produced by Pennsylvania’s unconventional wells could contain enough lithium to meet 38 to 40 percent of current domestic consumption. Lithium is a critical mineral that’s an “essential component” of many clean energy technologies, including batteries for electric vehicles. 

The study used chemical and production compliance data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to estimate that approximately 1,160 metric tons of lithium per year could be extracted from this produced water, which is a combination of fluids used for fracking and water from natural formations underground that returns to the surface during the drilling process. The lithium in Pennsylvania’s produced water likely comes from ancient volcanoes that were erupting at the time the natural gas deposits were being formed. This volcanic ash contained lithium that eventually seeped into the water underground.

Enlarge / Armor based on the Dendra artifact being tested. (credit: Andreas Flouris and Stavros Petmezas)

The Dendra armor, one of the oldest suits of bronze armor ever found, had been considered a purely ceremonial piece. It seemed impossible to use in battle due to its cumbersome design.

It took over a decade of research, elaborate numerical models, and 13 Greek marines fighting in it from dawn till dusk to prove it was surprisingly good at its job, despite its odd appearance. “This made the Mycenaean warriors some of the best equipped in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age,” says professor Andreas Flouris, a researcher at the University of Thessaly, who led the study.

Mycenaean Conquests

“The Mycenaeans were an ancient Greek civilization that flourished during the late Bronze Age, roughly from 1600 BC to 1100 BC,” explains Ken Wardle, an archeologist at the University of Birmingham and co-author of the study. With their power centered around major cities like Mycenae, Thebes, Tiryns, and Pylos, the Mycenaeans peaked between 1400 BCE and 1200 BCE, when they occupied much of mainland Greece and gained influence over Aegean islands and Asia Minor.

Enlarge / A rendering of the European cargo reentry vehicle proposed by Thales Alenia Space. (credit: Thales Alecia Space)

The European Space Agency has awarded initial contracts to a German-based startup and one of the continent's established aerospace companies to develop spacecraft to ferry cargo to and from space stations in low-Earth orbit.

ESA announced the two 25 million euro ($27 million) contracts May 22. The Exploration Company, co-located in France and Germany, and Thales Alenia Space of Italy beat out four other companies in the competition for ESA funding through the LEO Cargo Return Service program.

These contracts will run for two years, until June 2026. In this first phase of the program, The Exploration Company and Thales Alenia Space will refine their concepts, mature technologies, and focus on requirements for their cargo vehicles. ESA plans to award contracts for the second phase of the LEO Cargo Return Service program in 2026, eyeing a round-trip demonstration flight to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2028.

Enlarge (credit: Ashley Cooper)

When used to generate power or move vehicles, fossil fuels kill people. Particulates and ozone resulting from fossil fuel burning cause direct health impacts, while climate change will act indirectly. Regardless of the immediacy, premature deaths and illness prior to death are felt through lost productivity and the cost of treatments.

Typically, you see the financial impacts quantified when the EPA issues new regulations, as the health benefits of limiting pollution typically dwarf the costs of meeting new standards. But some researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have now done similar calculations—but focusing on the impact of renewable energy. Wind and solar, by displacing fossil fuel use, are acting as a form of pollution control and so should produce similar economic benefits.

Do they ever. The researchers find that, in the US, wind and solar have health and climate benefits of over $100 for every Megawatt-hour produced, for a total of a quarter-trillion dollars in just the last four years. This dwarfs the cost of the electricity they generate and the total of the subsidies they received.

Enlarge / Suri alpacas on a farm in Pennsylvania. (credit: Getty | Susan L. Angstadt)

Four backyard alpacas in southern Idaho have tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1, marking the first time bird flu has been detected in members of the fleecy camelid family, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

On Tuesday, the USDA announced that the agency's National Veterinary Services Laboratories confirmed the infection on a farm in Jerome County on May 16. While the infections are a first for the spitting llama relatives, the USDA said they weren't particularly surprising. The alpacas were in close contact with HPAI-infected poultry on the farm, which were "depopulated" this month. Of 18 alpacas on the affected farm, only four were found to be infected. There were no deaths documented, according to a report the USDA submitted to the World Organization for Animal Health.

Genomic sequencing indicates that the H5N1 virus infecting the alpacas (B3.13) matches both the virus currently circulating among US dairy cows and the virus that infected birds on the farm.

Enlarge / A stack of 60 Starlink satellites launched in 2019. (credit: SpaceX / Flickr)

SpaceX began launching operational Starlink satellites five years ago this month. Since then, the company has been rapidly developing its constellation of broadband satellites in low-Earth orbit. SpaceX has now launched about 6,000 satellites with its Falcon 9 rocket and has delivered on its promise to provide fast Internet around the world. Today, the company is the largest satellite operator in the world by a factor of 10.

But is this massive enterprise to deliver Internet from space profitable?

According to a new report by Quilty Space, the answer is yes. Quilty built a model to assess Starlink's profitability. First, the researchers assessed revenue. The firm estimates this will grow to $6.6 billion in 2024, up from essentially zero just four years ago. In addition to rapidly growing its subscriber base of about 3 million, SpaceX has also managed to control costs. Based upon its model, therefore, Quilty estimates that Starlink's free cash flow from the business will be about $600 million this year.

Enlarge / Processed image of Venus captured by the Akatsuki spacecraft. (credit: JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Kevin M. Gill)

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, confirmed Wednesday that it has lost communication with its Akatsuki spacecraft in orbit around Venus.

In its update, the space agency said it failed to establish communications in late April after the spacecraft had difficulty maintaining its attitude. This likely means there is some sort of thruster issue on the spacecraft that is preventing it from being able to orient itself back toward Earth.

"Since then, we have implemented various measures to restore service, but communication has not yet been restored," the agency stated. "We are currently working on restoring communication." JAXA added that it will announce further actions, if any, as soon as they've been decided upon.

A field of sand dunes in the Martian springtime. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 29, and today's photo comes from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is, you guessed it, in orbit around Mars.

The image shows an area of sand dunes on Mars in the springtime, when carbon dioxide frost is sublimating into the air. According to NASA, the pattern of dark spots is due to the fact that the sublimation process is not uniform.