New story in Science and Health from Time: 2020 Was a Year of Climate Extremes. What Can We Expect in 2021? 2020 Was a Year of Climate Extremes. What Can We Expect in 2021?

2020 was a year of extreme weather around the world. Hot and dry conditions drove record-setting wildfires through vast areas of Australia, California and Brazil and Siberia. A record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season landed a double blow of two hugely destructive storms in Central America. Long-running droughts have destroyed agricultural output and helped to push millions into hunger in Zimbabwe and Madagascar. A super-cyclone unleashed massive floods on India and Bangladesh.

And overall, 2020 may end up the hottest year on record—despite a La Niña event, the ocean-atmospheric phenomenon which normally temporarily cools things down.

Though it’s historically been difficult to say if single weather events were directly caused by climate change, scientists have proven that many of the events that took place in 2020 would have been far less likely, or even impossible, without changes to the climate that are being driven by the warming of the Earth.

Thanks to increasing levels of heat-absorbing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global average temperatures last year were 1.15°C over the pre-industrial era. Depending on how quickly we can reduce our emissions of these gases, the global average temperature increase is expected to be anywhere between 1.5°C and 5°C by 2100. While emissions dipped briefly during the first COVID-19 lockdowns, they have now rebounded to close to 2019 levels.

A rise of a few degrees may not sound like much, but it has huge implications for the weather we’ll see in the coming years, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA focused on the links between climate change and extreme weather. “It’s a number that is describing really profound and vast changes in the climate system that we feel mostly through individual weather events and through extreme events.”

It’s impossible to know if 2021 will be as record-breaking as 2021, but it’s highly likely that more extremes are on the way. “From one year to the next, there’s still a lot of random variation superimposed on top of the long term trends,” Swain says. “While 2020 may have been a particularly extreme year in contrast to individual years in the past, scientifically and looking forward, what’s more meaningful is that 2020 was not really an aberration.”

Here’s what to expect from the climate next year—and what is likely to happen with the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the changes.

Hurricanes and storms

2020’s Atlantic hurricane season saw a record number of 30 named storms, including 13 hurricanes. In September, Hurricane Sally battered Florida and Alabama, cutting power to more than half a million homes. In November, Hurricanes Eta and Iota hit Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and other Central American countries in close succession, submerging towns, destroying infrastructure and farmlands, and killing dozens across the region.

Climate scientists aren’t sure if climate change will cause an increase in the number of hurricanes generally. But climate change is affecting the characteristics of hurricanes and making them more destructive. They are likely to be more intense, carrying higher wind speeds and heavier rains, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Read more: Central American Leaders Demand Climate Aid as a Record Storm Season Batters the Region

This year’s very active hurricane season was in part driven by La Niña, the ocean-atmospheric phenomenon, a counterpart to El Niño, which results in temporarily lower ocean surface temperatures across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and atmospheric changes, creating favorable conditions for hurricanes.

Early predictions for the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season published by meteorologists at Colorado State University suggest there is a 6 in 10 chance that the season will be very strong or above average.

High temperatures, wildfires and droughts

Globally, 2020 is currently tied with 2016 as the warmest year on record. Even if it takes second place, that is remarkable given the occurrence of La Niña this year, which tends to lower temperatures, and the fact that 2016 was an El Niño year, when temperatures are generally warmer.

There is reason to believe that 2021 may be slightly cooler, says Swain, since La Niña conditions are expected to continue through to March. “It may be that some of the cooling effect of this La Niña will be felt a little bit more next year than this year. But it’ll still be quite likely to be among the top five warmest years on record, because we just aren’t really seeing we just aren’t really seeing any of the kinds of cooler years that we saw even 30 or 40 years ago anymore.”

La Niña doesn’t affect the whole of the U.S. in the same way. It tends to lower winter temperatures in the northwest of the country, and increase them in the southeast. In its outlook for winter, up to the end of February, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted below average precipitation and a worsening of drought conditions across many southern states.

We are likely to see more episodes of extreme heat than we are used to in the coming years, scientists say, because they have been made far more likely on a warming planet. Studies found that climate change made Europe’s 2019 heatwave up to 100 times more likely, for example.

When high temperatures combine with dry conditions, strong winds and an abundance of vegetation as fuel, wildfires become highly likely. In January, Australia’s record-breaking temperatures and prolonged droughts drove bushfires burned more than 27 million acres across the country, and destroyed thousands of homes. California’s 2020 wildfires burned more than 4 million acres by October, double the state’s previous record.

Read more: Australia’s Wildfires and Climate Change Are Making One Another Worse in a Vicious, Devastating Circle

Again, it’s impossible to know if 2021 will beat the new records set in 2020. But it’s clear that increased wildfires are a part of our future. A group of California-based scientists, including Swain, found that since the early 1980’s, climate change had doubled the frequency of days with extreme fire weather in Autumn in the state. Previous studies have shown that fire seasons are getting longer as the world heats up.

Arctic melting

2020 was the second biggest year for Arctic ice melting after 2012—which is considered an outlier because of a destructive late-season cyclone. Worryingly, scientists say 2020’s sea ice melt followed a similar trajectory to 2012, without any such storm. And this was the first year since records began that Arctic sea ice had not started to freeze over by late October.

Read more: ‘A Climate Emergency Unfolding Before Our Eyes.’ Arctic Sea Ice Has Shrunk to Almost Historic Levels

The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, with a one degree rise in the average yearly temperature every decade for the last 40 years. As a result, scientists say we are likely to see increasingly faster melting and slower freezing each year. By 2035, a study published this August in Nature Climate Change found, it is likely that the Arctic ocean will be ice-free in summer.

Carbon emissions

When it comes to the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the changes we are seeing in our climate, 2020 has been an anomaly. Global emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, reached a new peak in 2019 – though they were just slightly above 2018 levels, raising hopes that emissions were levelling off. But this year they are expected to fall by up to 7% as a result of the drops in activity during the first COVID-19 lockdowns in March and April.

Read more: Pausing the World to Fight Coronavirus Has Carbon Emissions Down—But True Climate Success Looks Like More Action, Not Less

Coincidentally, 7% is the amount by which the U.N. says we’d need to cut carbon emissions every year for the next decade in order to keep in line with the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global average temperatures from increasing more than 1.5°C over the pre-industrial era.

But we shouldn’t expect the reductions to hold in 2021, says Glen Peters, research director at the Oslo-based Center for International Climate Research. “A few months ago, I would have expected that it would take a few years to slowly edge back to 2019 levels. And hopefully, during that time, emissions reductions would start to take effect,” he says. “But now, the monthly data suggests that emissions have almost come back to 2019 levels now.”

With governments likely to spend large amounts of money to get economies going again, Peters says emissions are likely to bounce back quite strongly. He expects emissions in 2021 to be roughly the same as in 2019.

But the nature of recovery packages that governments roll out will be decisive to the trajectory of emissions—and climate change—longer-term. If these packages are green, and include lots of stimulus for renewable energies like solar, for example, they’ll give you a spike in emissions next year to build all the solar, and you would reap the benefits in the years later,” Peters says. “It’s a question of whether the recovery packages set future reductions in motion.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains

When he was two years old, Ben stopped seeing out of his left eye. His mother took him to the doctor and soon discovered he had retinal cancer in both eyes. After chemotherapy and radiation failed, surgeons removed both his eyes. For Ben, vision was gone forever.

But by the time he was seven years old, he had devised a technique for decoding the world around him: he clicked with his mouth and listened for the returning echoes. This method enabled Ben to determine the locations of open doorways, people, parked cars, garbage cans, and so on. He was echolocating: bouncing his sound waves off objects in the environment and catching the reflections to build a mental model of his surroundings.

Echolocation may sound like an improbable feat for a human, but thousands of blind people have perfected this skill, just like Ben did. The phenomenon has been written about since at least the 1940s, when the word “echolocation” was first coined in a Science article titled “Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats, and Radar.”

How could blindness give rise to the stunning ability to understand the surroundings with one’s ears? The answer lies in a gift bestowed on the brain by evolution: tremendous adaptability.

Whenever we learn something new, pick up a new skill, or modify our habits, the physical structure of our brain changes. Neurons, the cells responsible for rapidly processing information in the brain, are interconnected by the thousands—but like friendships in a community, the connections between them constantly change: strengthening, weakening, and finding new partners. The field of neuroscience calls this phenomenon “brain plasticity,” referring to the ability of the brain, like plastic, to assume new shapes and hold them. More recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest that the brain’s brand of flexibility is far more nuanced than holding onto a shape, though. To capture this, we refer to the brain’s plasticity as “livewiring” to spotlight how this vast system of 86 billion neurons and 0.2 quadrillion connections rewires itself every moment of your life.

Neuroscience used to think that different parts of the brain were predetermined to perform specific functions. But more recent discoveries have upended the old paradigm. One part of the brain may initially be assigned a specific task; for instance, the back of our brain is called the “visual cortex” because it usually handles sight. But that territory can be reassigned to a different task. There is nothing special about neurons in the visual cortex: they are simply neurons that happen to be involved in processing shapes or colors in people who have functioning eyes. But in the sightless, these same neurons can rewire themselves to process other types of information.

Mother Nature imbued our brains with flexibility to adapt to circumstances. Just as sharp teeth and fast legs are useful for survival, so is the brain’s ability to reconfigure. The brain’s livewiring allows for learning, memory, and the ability to develop new skills.

In Ben’s case, his brain’s flexible wiring repurposed his visual cortex for processing sound. As a result, Ben had more neurons available to deal with auditory information, and this increased processing power allowed Ben to interpret soundwaves in shocking detail. Ben’s super-hearing demonstrates a more general rule: the more brain territory a particular sense has, the better it performs.

Recent decades have yielded several revelations about livewiring, but perhaps the biggest surprise is its rapidity. Brain circuits reorganize not only in the newly blind, but also in the sighted who have temporary blindness. In one study, sighted participants intensively learned how to read Braille. Half the participants were blindfolded throughout the experience. At the end of the five days, the participants who wore blindfolds could distinguish subtle differences between Braille characters much better than the participants who didn’t wear blindfolds. Even more remarkably, the blindfolded participants showed activation in visual brain regions in response to touch and sound. When activity in the visual cortex was temporarily disrupted, the Braille-reading advantage of the blindfolded participants went away. In other words, the blindfolded participants performed better on the touch-related task because their visual cortex had been recruited to help. After the blindfold was removed, the visual cortex returned to normal within a day, no longer responding to touch and sound.

But such changes don’t have to take five days; that just happened to be when the measurement took place. When blindfolded participants are continuously measured, touch-related activity shows up in the visual cortex in about an hour.

* * *

What does brain flexibility and rapid cortical takeover have to do with dreaming? Perhaps more than previously thought. Ben clearly benefited from the redistribution of his visual cortex to other senses because he had permanently lost his eyes, but what about the participants in the blindfold experiments? If our loss of a sense is only temporary, then the rapid conquest of brain territory may not be so helpful.

And this, we propose, is why we dream.

In the ceaseless competition for brain territory, the visual system has a unique problem: due to the planet’s rotation, all animals are cast into darkness for an average of 12 out of every 24 hours. (Of course, this refers to the vast majority of evolutionary time, not to our present electrified world.) Our ancestors effectively were unwitting participants in the blindfold experiment, every night of their entire lives.

So how did the visual cortex of our ancestors’ brains defend its territory, in the absence of input from the eyes?

We suggest that the brain preserves the territory of the visual cortex by keeping it active at night. In our “defensive activation theory,” dream sleep exists to keep neurons in the visual cortex active, thereby combating a takeover by the neighboring senses. In this view, dreams are primarily visual precisely because this is the only sense that is disadvantaged by darkness. Thus, only the visual cortex is vulnerable in a way that warrants internally-generated activity to preserve its territory.

* * *

In humans, sleep is punctuated by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep every 90 minutes. This is when most dreaming occurs. (Although some forms of dreaming can occur during non-REM sleep, such dreams are abstract and lack the visual vividness of REM dreams.)

REM sleep is triggered by a specialized set of neurons that pump activity straight into the brain’s visual cortex, causing us to experience vision even though our eyes are closed. This activity in the visual cortex is presumably why dreams are pictorial and filmic. (The dream-stoking circuitry also paralyzes your muscles during REM sleep so that your brain can simulate a visual experience without moving the body at the same time.) The anatomical precision of these circuits suggests that dream sleep is biologically important—such precise and universal circuitry rarely evolves without an important function behind it.

The defensive activation theory makes some clear predictions about dreaming. For example, because brain flexibility diminishes with age, the fraction of sleep spent in REM should also decrease across the lifespan. And that’s exactly what happens: in humans, REM accounts for half of an infant’s sleep time, but the percentage decreases steadily to about 18% in the elderly. REM sleep appears to become less necessary as the brain becomes less flexible.

Of course, this relationship is not sufficient to prove the defensive activation theory. To test it on a deeper level, we broadened our investigation to animals other than humans. The defensive activation theory makes a specific prediction: the more flexible an animal’s brain, the more REM sleep it should have to defend its visual system during sleep. To this end, we examined the extent to which the brains of 25 species of primates are “pre-programmed” versus flexible at birth. How might we measure this? We looked at the time it takes animals of each species to develop. How long do they take to wean from their mothers? How quickly do they learn to walk? How many years until they reach adolescence? The more rapid an animal’s development, the more pre-programmed (that is, less flexible) the brain.

As predicted, we found that species with more flexible brains spend more time in REM sleep each night. Although these two measures—brain flexibility and REM sleep—would seem at first to be unrelated, they are in fact linked.

As a side note, two of the primate species we looked at were nocturnal. But this does not change the hypothesis: whenever an animal sleeps, whether at night or during the day, the visual cortex is at risk of takeover by the other senses. Nocturnal primates, equipped with strong night vision, employ their vision throughout the night as they seek food and avoid predation. When they subsequently sleep during the day, their closed eyes allow no visual input, and thus, their visual cortex requires defense.

Dream circuitry is so fundamentally important that it is found even in people who are born blind. However, those who are born blind (or who become blind early in life) don’t experience visual imagery in their dreams; instead, they have other sensory experiences, such as feeling their way around a rearranged living room or hearing strange dogs barking. This is because other senses have taken over their visual cortex. In other words, blind and sighted people alike experience activity in the same region of their brain during dreams; they differ only in the senses that are processed there. Interestingly, people who become blind after the age of seven have more visual content in their dreams than those who become blind at younger ages. This, too, is consistent with the defensive activation theory: brains become less flexible as we age, so if one loses sight at an older age, the non-visual senses cannot fully conquer the visual cortex.

If dreams are visual hallucinations triggered by a lack of visual input, we might expect to find similar visual hallucinations in people who are slowly deprived of visual input while awake. In fact, this is precisely what happens in people with eye degeneration, patients confined to a tank-respirator, and prisoners in solitary confinement. In all of these cases, people see things that are not there.

We developed our defensive activation theory to explain visual hallucinations during extended periods of darkness, but it may represent a more general principle: the brain has evolved specific circuitry to generate activity that compensates for periods of deprivation. This might occur in several scenarios: when deprivation is regular and predictable (e.g., dreams during sleep), when there is damage to the sensory input pathway (e.g., tinnitus or phantom limb syndrome), and when deprivation is unpredictable (e.g., hallucinations induced by sensory deprivation). In this sense, hallucinations during deprivation may in fact be a feature of the system rather than a bug.

We’re now pursuing a systematic comparison between a variety of species across the animal kingdom. So far, the evidence has been encouraging. Some mammals are born immature, unable to regulate their own temperature, acquire food, or defend themselves (think kittens, puppies, and ferrets). Others are born mature, emerging from the womb with teeth, fur, open eyes, and the abilities to regulate their temperature, walk within an hour of birth, and eat solid food (think guinea pigs, sheep, and giraffes). The immature animals have up to 8 times more REM sleep than those born mature. Why? Because when a newborn brain is highly flexible, the system requires more effort to defend the visual system during sleep.

Since the dawn of communication, dreams have perplexed philosophers, priests, and poets. What do dreams mean? Do they portend the future? In recent decades, dreams have come under the gaze of neuroscientists as one of the field’s central unsolved mysteries. Do they serve a more practical, functional purpose? We suggest that dream sleep exists, at least in part, to prevent the other senses from taking over the brain’s visual cortex when it goes unused. Dreams are the counterbalance against too much flexibility. Thus, although dreams have long been the subject of song and story, they may be better understood as the strange lovechild of brain plasticity and the rotation of the planet.

For more information:

• Eagleman DM (2020). Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. New York: Pantheon.
• Eagleman DM, Vaughn DA (2020). The defensive activation theory: dreaming as a mechanism to prevent takeover of the visual cortex.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Belarus and Argentina Start Vaccinations With Russian Shots Belarus and Argentina Start Vaccinations With Russian Shots

(MOSCOW) — Belarus and Argentina launched mass coronavirus vaccinations with the Russian-developed Sputnik V shot on Tuesday, becoming the first countries outside Russia to roll out the vaccine, which has faced criticism over the speed with which it was approved.

The first batch of Sputnik V arrived in the former Soviet republic of Belarus on Tuesday, according to a joint statement by the Belarusian Health Ministry, the Russian Health Ministry and the Russian Direct Investment Fund that bankrolled development of the jab.

“A new stage starts in Belarus today with mass vaccinations against COVID-19. Medical staff, teachers, and those who come into contact a lot of people due to their jobs will be the first to get vaccinated. Vaccination will be entirely voluntary,” Belarus Health Minister Dmitry Pinevich was quoted in the statement as saying.

Hours later, a similar campaign kicked off in South America as Argentine medical workers began receiving the vaccine and officials insisted it was safe. President Alberto Fernández called it the largest vaccination campaign in the country’s modern history.

Teachers, those with complicating medical conditions and people over 60 were to be next in line in Argentina, which so far has received 300,000 doses, which also will be free and voluntary.

Argentina, a country of 45 million people, has recorded nearly 1.6 million infections with the new coronavirus and almost 43,000 deaths.

Belarus conducted its own trial of Sputnik V among 100 volunteers and gave the shot regulatory approval on Dec. 21, two days before Argentina did.

Russia has been widely criticized for giving the domestically developed Sputnik V regulatory approval in August after the vaccine only had been tested on a few dozen people. An advanced study among tens of thousand started shortly after the vaccine received the Russian government’s go-ahead.

Despite warnings to wait for the results of the study, Russian authorities started offering it to people in high-risk groups — such as medical workers and teachers — within weeks of approval. This month, mass vaccinations with Sputnik V started in Russia, even though it is still undergoing the late-stage trial.

Belarus has reported nearly 190,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and about 1,400 deaths since the start of the pandemic, but many in the Eastern European nation of 9.4 million people suspect that authorities are manipulating statistics to hide the true scope of the country’s outbreak.

President Alexander Lukashenko, who has faced months of demands by protesters to step down after an August election they say was fraudulent, has cavalierly dismissed the coronavirus. He shrugged off the fears and national lockdowns the new virus had caused as “psychosis” and advised citizens to avoid catching it by driving tractors in the field, drinking vodka and visiting saunas.

His attitude has angered many Belarusians, adding to the public dismay over his authoritarian style and helping to fuel months of post-election protests.

Opposition figures say Lukashenko’s government has allowed COVID-19 to run rampant in jails where it has detained thousands of protesters.

___

Almudena Calatrava reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Pfizer and BioNTech To Supply U.S. With Additional 100m Doses of Vaccine Pfizer and BioNTech To Supply U.S. With Additional 100m Doses of Vaccine

(WASHINGTON) — Pfizer and BioNTech will supply the U.S. with an additional 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine under a new agreement.

The drugmakers said Wednesday that they expect to deliver all the doses by July 31.

Pfizer already has a contract to supply the government with 100 million doses of its vaccine.

Pfizer’s vaccine was the first to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration and initial shipments went to states last week. It has now been joined by a vaccine from Moderna, which was developed in closer cooperation with scientists from the National Institutes of Health.

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Chang’e 5 Capsule Returns to Earth Carrying Moon Rocks In the Latest Breakthrough for China’s Space Program The Chang’e 5 Capsule Returns to Earth Carrying Moon Rocks In the Latest Breakthrough for China’s Space Program

BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese lunar capsule returned to Earth on Thursday with the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the moon in more than 40 years.

The capsule of the Chang’e 5 probe landed in the Siziwang district of the Inner Mongolia region, state media reported shortly after 2 a.m. (1800 GMT). The capsule earlier separated from its orbiter module and performed a bounce off Earth’s atmosphere to reduce its speed before passing through and floating to the ground on parachutes.

Two of the Chang’e 5’s four modules set down on the moon on Dec. 1 and collected about 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of samples by scooping them from the surface and by drilling 2 meters (about 6 feet) into the moon’s crust.

The samples were deposited in a sealed container that was carried back to the return module by an ascent vehicle.

The successful mission was the latest breakthrough for China’s increasingly ambitious space program that includes a robotic mission to Mars and plans for a permanent orbiting space station.

Recovery crews had prepared helicopters and off-road vehicles to home in on signals emitted by the lunar spacecraft and locate it in the darkness shrouding the vast snow-covered region in China’s far north, long used as a landing site for China’s Shenzhou crewed spaceships.

The spacecraft’s return marked the first time scientists have obtained fresh samples of lunar rocks since the former Soviet Union’s Luna 24 robot probe in 1976.

The newly collected rocks are thought to be billions of years younger than those obtained earlier by the U.S. and former Soviet Union, offering new insights into the history of the moon and other bodies in the solar system. They come from a part of the moon known as the Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, near a site called the Mons Rumker that was believed to have been volcanic in ancient times.

As with the 382 kilograms (842 pounds) of lunar samples brought back by U.S. astronauts from 1969 to 1972, they will be analyzed for age and composition and are expected to be shared with other countries.

The age of the samples will help fill in a gap in knowledge about the history of the moon between roughly 1 billion and three billion years ago, Brad Jolliff, director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in an email. They may also yield clues as to the availability of economically useful resources on the moon such as concentrated hydrogen and oxygen, Jolliff said.

“These samples will be a treasure trove!” Jolliff wrote. “My hat is off to our Chinese colleagues for pulling off a very difficult mission; the science that will flow from analysis of the returned samples will be a legacy that will last for many, many years, and hopefully will involve the international community of scientists.”

Chang’e 5 blasted off from a launch base in China’s southern island province of Hainan on Nov. 23 and appeared to have completed its highly technically sophisticated mission without a hitch.

It marked China’s third successful lunar landing but the only one to lift off again from the moon. Its predecessor, Chang’e 4, became the first probe to land on the moon’s little-explored far side and continues to send back data on conditions that could affect a future extended stay by humans on the moon.

The moon has been a particular focus of the Chinese space program, which says it plans to land humans there and possibly construct a permanent base. No timeline or other details have been announced.

China also has joined the effort to explore Mars. In July, it launched the Tianwen 1 probe, which was carrying a lander and a robot rover to search for water.

In 2003, China became the third country to send an astronaut into orbit on its own after the Soviet Union and the United States and its space program has proceeded more cautiously than the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1960s, which was marked by fatalities and launch failures. By taking incremental steps, China appears on the path toward building a program that can sustain steady progress.

“They have read, and admired the (U.S. lunar program) Apollo playbook, but learned format as well,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chines space program at the U.S. Naval War College. “Better to go slow and set up infrastructure for the future than to do it quickly and end up with little that allows you to continue.”

The latest flight includes collaboration with the European Space Agency, which is helping to monitor the mission. Amid concerns over the Chinese space program’s secrecy and close military connections, the U.S. forbids cooperation between NASA and the CNSA unless Congress gives its approval. That has prevented China from taking part in the International Space Station, something it has sought to compensate for with the launching of an experimental space station and plans to complete a permanent orbiting outpost within the next two years.

New story in Science and Health from Time: SpaceX Launched Its Starship on the Highest Test Flight Yet. It Crash-Landed SpaceX Launched Its Starship on the Highest Test Flight Yet. It Crash-Landed

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX launched its shiny, bullet-shaped, straight-out-of-science fiction Starship several miles into the air from a remote corner of Texas on Wednesday, but the 6 1/2-minute test flight ended in an explosive fireball at touchdown.

It was the highest and most elaborate flight yet for the rocketship that Elon Musk says could carry people to Mars in as little as six years. Despite the catastrophic finale, he was thrilled.

“Mars, here we come!!” he tweeted.

This latest prototype — the first one equipped with a nose cone, body flaps and three engines — was shooting for an altitude of up to eight miles (12.5 kilometers). That’s almost 100 times higher than previous hops and skimming the stratosphere.

Starship seemed to hit the mark or at least come close. There was no immediate word from SpaceX on how high it went.

The full-scale, stainless steel model — 160 feet (50 meters) tall and 30 feet (9 meters) in diameter — soared out over the Gulf of Mexico. After about five minutes, it flipped sideways as planned and descended in a free-fall back to the southeastern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. The Raptor engines reignited for braking and the rocket tilted back upright. When it touched down, however, the rocketship became engulfed in flames and ruptured, parts scattering.

The entire flight — as dramatic and flashy as it gets, even by SpaceX standards — lasted six minutes and 42 seconds. SpaceX broadcast the sunset demo live on its website; repeated delays over the past week and a last-second engine abort Tuesday heightened the excitement among space fans.

Musk called it a “successful ascent” and said the body flaps precisely guided the rocket to the landing point. The fuel tank pressure was low, however, when the engines reignited for touchdown, which caused Starship to come down too fast.

“But we got all the data we needed!” he tweeted.

Musk had kept expectations low, cautioning earlier this week there was “probably” 1-in-3 chance of complete success.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who founded the Blue Origin rocket company, offered swift congratulations.

“Anybody who knows how hard this stuff is is impressed by today’s Starship test.”

Two lower, shorter SpaceX test flights earlier this year from Boca Chica, Texas — a quiet coastal village before SpaceX moved in — used more rudimentary versions of Starship. Essentially cylindrical cans and single Raptor engines, these early vehicles reached altitudes of 490 feet (150 meters). An even earlier model, the short and squat Starhopper, made a tiny tethered hop in 2019, followed by two increasingly higher climbs.

Wednesday’s test followed SpaceX’s latest space station supply run for NASA by three days, and the private company’s second astronaut flight by less than a month from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

Starship is actually the upper stage of Musk’s envisioned moon- and Mars-ships. It will launch atop a mega booster still in development known as the Super Heavy. The entire vehicle will tower 394 feet (120 meters) — 31 feet (9.4 meters) taller than NASA’s Saturn V rocket that hurled men to the moon a half-century ago.

SpaceX intends to use Starship to put massive satellites into orbit around Earth, besides delivering people and cargo to the moon and Mars. Earlier this year, SpaceX was one of three prime contractors chosen by NASA to develop lunar landers capable of getting astronauts on the moon by 2024.

Right before Wednesday’s launch, NASA announced the 18 U.S. astronauts who will train for the Artemis moon-landing program.

While accepting an award in Berlin last week, Musk said he’s “highly confident” of a human flight to Mars in six years — “if we get lucky, maybe four years.” But Musk is the first to admit his timelines can be overly optimistic.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Why Chuck Yeager Claimed He Had No “Right Stuff” Why Chuck Yeager Claimed He Had No “Right Stuff”

Frank Borman did not expect to hear congratulations from Chuck Yeager one day in 1962—and that’s just as well because he didn’t get one. It wasn’t a surprise that Yeager wouldn’t extend much courtesy to the likes of Borman. There were rules, after all, and there was a hierarchy after all, and Yeager, who on Dec. 7 died at the age of 97, was then the commander of the flight school at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where test pilots were trained. Borman was just one more young Air Force officer who had scrapped and competed to be assigned to so coveted a billet as learning under Yeager—the first person to break the sound barrier, a feat he’d accomplished 15 years earlier.

At the time, a lot of Yeager’s officers were being seduced away by NASA, which promised them the chance not just to fly jets through the atmosphere, but rocket ships high above it. Neither man could know in 1962 what history had in store for Borman—that he would become not just any astronaut, but a figure on the space age’s Mt. Rushmore, commanding Apollo 8 in 1968, the first mission to orbit the moon. All they knew, as Borman told me in a conversation in 2015, was that he was one more young defector from Yeager’s flying family—and that would not make for an easy audience with his commander.

“Colonel,” Borman said when he presented himself before Yeager, who was seated at his desk going through paperwork, “I just got some good news.”

“What’s that?” Yeager said, looking up with only passing interest.

“I was just selected to go to NASA and join the astronaut corps.”

Yeager said nothing at first, merely nodding. Then, at last, he spoke. “Well Borman,” he said, “You can kiss your Air Force career goodbye.” Then he looked back down at his work.

If Yeager was gruff, and he was; if he was unsentimental, and he was; if he was brusque and dismissive and impossible to rattle but easy to annoy—and he was—there was almost no other way he could be. You don’t fly 64 combat missions in World War II—shooting down 13 German planes, including five in one day to earn the honorific of “flying ace”—without a tough hide. You don’t get shot down over France, suffering leg and head wounds, and elude capture by the German Army by hiking across the Pyrenees with French partisans, making it to neutral Spain and eventually returning to England, by being easily moved. And you don’t return to battle during the Vietnam War, at age 43 flying 127 missions, if you are easily unsettled by such existential matters as injury and death.

All of that was true of Yeager, and all of that would have been enough to earn him his own spot on aviation’s more modest Rushmore. But it was on Oct. 14, 1947 when Yeager truly chiseled his name in history, flying a Bell X-1 aircraft 13,000 m (43,000 ft.) above the Mojave desert, gunning his jet to nearly 1,125 km/hr (700 mph), thereby exceeding the speed of sound and producing the first sonic boom ever created by human beings.

The achievement was more than just the stuff of record-setting. At the time, nobody knew if challenging the sound barrier meant that the sound barrier would slap back, ripping to pieces any plane that tried to defy it. It didn’t, and shortly after his historic flight, Yeager spoke almost indifferently about the experience, pronouncing it “nice,” and adding that it was “just like riding a fast car.”

It was inevitable that the astronauts who trained under Yeager would eclipse their one-time mentor. What was flying an airplane compared to circling—and walking on—the moon, after all? Mention the name Yeager to school children in the 1960s and they’d look back at you blankly. But mention names like Glenn and Armstrong and Shepard and Lovell and Aldrin and Grissom and, yes, Borman? That would get a reaction.

It wasn’t until 1979, when Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff was released, and 1983 when the movie followed, that the world became reacquainted with Yeager. Wolfe understood what pilots understood: that it didn’t matter where a man ( they were all men then) flew his machines, or what kinds of machines they were. Aircraft or spacecraft—either way it was thousands or even millions of pounds of explosive, high-speed hardware controlled by a comparative fly-weight bit of human. The stakes were mortal, the whole exercise was madness, but that was what made it worth doing.

Wolfe fell all over himself applauding Yeager, calling him “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.” But Yeager did not think much of all that. Never mind that he flew a total of 341 different kinds of planes in his life; never mind that he not only broke the sound barrier the first time but many times after, at much higher speeds. Never mind that in 2002, at age 79, he flew an F-15 jet at a speed of more than 1,600 k/h (1,000 mph) just because he could. None of that, Yeager believed, was the result of any kind of natural “stuff”—right or not. It was practice; it was work; it was nothing more.

“There’s no such thing as a natural born pilot,” he told Borman and the other young hot-rodders who came to learn at his knee. “If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you can use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.”

Yeager used lots of airplanes the next day over the course of his near-century-long life. And he taught uncounted other pilots to do the same. Honor his claim that he had no right stuff—and let’s hope he’d honor our belief that, yeah, he actually did.

New story in Science and Health from Time: 2020 Marks the Point When Human-Made Materials Outweigh All the Living Things on Earth, a New Study Finds 2020 Marks the Point When Human-Made Materials Outweigh All the Living Things on Earth, a New Study Finds

In a startling sign of the impact that humans are having on our planet, a study published Dec. 9 estimates that 2020 marks the point when human-made materials outweigh the total mass of Earth’s living biomass.

Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science found that the total mass of human-made materials—such as concrete, steel and asphalt—have grown rapidly since 1900, when they made up the equivalent of just 3% of the mass of living biomass—plants, animals and microorganisms. As humans have constructed more buildings, roads, structures and objects over the last 120 years, the mass of human-produced materials has grown from less than 0.1 teratonnes to roughly 1 teratonne (1 trillion tonnes), the study, published in the journal Nature estimates.

Meanwhile, humans have been steadily reducing the amount of plant biomass on Earth through thousands of years of land-use, like cutting down trees to plant fields and raise livestock. Today, according to the study, all the living plants on Earth weigh roughly 1 teratonne, half of what they did when the agricultural revolution began 12,000 years ago. Plants account for 90% of the Earth’s living biomass, per the study.

To produce their estimates, scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science integrated a vast number of existing datasets. For the biomass side of the calculation they used data from a 2018 study, in which some of the same researchers collated data to find the mass of all living things on Earth and how it was distributed. That study found that humans themselves make up less than 0.01% of the world’s living biomass. To estimate the weight of human-made materials, they relied largely on the work of Vienna’s Institute of Social Ecology and University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences which for years have been collating data from national statistics bureaus, industry groups and other research in the field of material-flow analysis.

Ron Milo, one of the authors of the recent study, tells TIME that, though there is a large margin for error in the data given its “gigantic” scale, his team can say with 95% confidence that the “tipping point” where human-made materials outweigh living biomass takes place in the six years before or after 2020, with this year as the most likely date.

There is no sign that humans are slowing the expansion of our footprint on the planet, the study says. The rate at which new human-made materials are created began to speed up in the 1950’s, as a post-war construction boom took hold. Production has accelerated ever since, with the mass of human-made materials on earth doubling every 20 years for the last century.

For the last five years, humans have produced on average 30 gigatonnes (30 billion tonnes) of material every year. Another way to look at it: every week, we produce more than the equivalent of the body weight of every person in the world. If current trends continue, human-produced materials will weigh triple the total mass of living biomass by 2040, according to the study.

Milo says these findings are further evidence that we are living through a new geological era in which human activity is the dominant force shaping Earth’s climate and environment, which scientists have dubbed the Anthropocene. “Some people think that humanity is just one species out of many, and that we’re tiny and the world is huge. But our impact is not tiny,” Milo says. “Having a number really quantifies that.”

He hopes that the study—published at a time when governments, businesses and communities around the world are re-evaluating their contribution to environmental problems—will be a wake-up call. “It’s not that we should stop making things, but we need to be aware of the impact we are having and think about how we’re consuming natural resources. Our decisions, our policymaking could affect the rate at which human made materials become double or triple the mass of living things.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: The World Is Headed for 3 Degrees of Warming, U.N. Report Warns—But a Green Pandemic Recovery Could Offer Hope The World Is Headed for 3 Degrees of Warming, U.N. Report Warns—But a Green Pandemic Recovery Could Offer Hope

Dense U.N. reports may not make onto anyone’s must read list for the holidays, so think of the United Nations Environment Program’s 2020 Emissions Gap survey as a warning letter from Santa, on behalf of the planet. The report, released today, is published at the end of every year and measures national commitments to reduce emissions against what science says is needed to limit global warming to an increase of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the goal set out by the 2015 Paris Agreement. This year, we are still firmly on the naughty list, as we have been for the past five years. But there is an opportunity to turn that looming lump of coal in our future—a global climate catastrophe—into a gift, if governments turn their post-Covid recovery plans green. Think of it as the ultimate sendoff for 2020, turning the horrors of the past year into a vaccine for a new, more resilient era where the planet is protected along with the humans that live on it.

The report looks at what global emissions will look like in 2030 if countries fully implement their climate promises. So far, “we are not even close to where we should be,” says Anne Olhoff, Head of Strategy, Climate Planning and Policy at UNEP, and the report’s lead author. Despite a brief dip in carbon dioxide emissions caused by the pandemic, the world is still heading for a temperature rise of 3.2 °C this century. In fact, 2020 is on track to be one of the warmest on record, with wildfires, droughts, storms and glacier melt intensifying.

On Dec. 2, Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization announced that 2020’s global temperature is set to reach 1.2 °C above the pre-industrial levels, and that there is 20% chance of the global average temperature temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2024. That is the milestone the Paris Accords were established to avoid. Backed by almost every country on earth, the global compact called for keeping the global temperature from rising no more than 2°C, with a goal of 1.5 °C. Anything more than that represents an existential risk for many low-lying island states as sea levels rise.

In a Dec. 2 speech marking the release of the U.N. State of the Climate report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres listed extreme-weather events that occurred over the past year, including wild fires and the record active Atlantic hurricane season that were linked to climate change. He also cited the bleaching of coral reefs and reductions in biodiversity, saying that “humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back, and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.”

A rise of 3.2°C is almost impossible to comprehend, says Olhoff. “You have to keep in mind, these are global averages. A rise of 3.2 may mean two degrees in Denmark, but it could mean seven degrees in central Africa. It will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable. The increase in extreme weather events, the impact of melting of ice sheets, will be enormous.”

In order to slow that temperature rise, nations need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 6% a year through 2030. That is roughly on par with the reductions as a result of this year’s global shutdown over the Covid-19 pandemic, when factories closed and people around the world stopped flying, shopping and commuting. “We would need to see something of a similar magnitude every year to get on track to the Paris goals,” says Olhoff. But we need to do it in a way where we are not shutting down economies, where it won’t hurt people like it’s done this year.” In fact, this year’s suffering won’t count for much at all unless it is backed by long term structural changes to the way the world consumes energy and uses fossil fuels.

Which is why it is vital that post-Covid recovery plans focus as much on reducing carbon emissions as they do economic growth. According to the report, a green pandemic recovery could cut around 25% off the greenhouse emissions predicted for 2030 and put the world on the 2°C path (even more reductions would be required to achieve the 1.5°C goal).

That means governments need to support zero-emissions technologies and infrastructure, reduce or eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, ban new coal plants, and promote nature-based solutions such as large-scale landscape restoration and reforestation, all as an essential part of their recovery plans. According to Olhoff, fiscal investments into global recovery plans are worth 12% of global GDP this year. “That money can only be spent once,” she says. If the investments are not green, “there’s a big risk that they will commit us to an even more fossil fuel-based future that will be very difficult to break out of.”

So far, few recovery plans include the kind of green commitments that will make a difference. Olhoff is still optimistic that there is room for change. “A lot of these investments are just announced, they are not implemented yet, so there is still the opportunity to make them greener.” That’s where believing in Santa, or, say, an enlightened leadership from all nations, comes in. At least this year, according to the report, there has been a big increase in the number of countries, including large emitters, that have announced commitments to net zero emissions targets before or around the middle of the century. Of course, says Olhoff, “It doesn’t help if you just announce that you will be climate neutral in 2050. You have to back it up with climate action now and with much stronger climate commitments for 2030.” Santa’s watching.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Chinese Spacecraft Lifts Off From Moon Carrying Lunar Rocks Chinese Spacecraft Lifts Off From Moon Carrying Lunar Rocks

(BEIJING) — A Chinese spacecraft lifted off from the moon Thursday night with a load of lunar rocks, the first stage of its return to Earth, the government space agency reported.

Chang’e 5, the third Chinese spacecraft to land on the moon and the first to take off from it again, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for Beijing’s space program, which also has a orbiter and rover headed to Mars.

The Chang’e 5 touched down Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the moon’s near side. Its mission: collect about 2 kilograms (4 pounds) of lunar rocks and bring them back to Earth, the first return of samples since Soviet spacecraft did so in the 1970s. Earlier, the U.S. Apollo astronauts brought back hundreds of pounds of moon rocks.

The landing site is near a formation called the Mons Rumker and may contain rocks billions of years younger than those retrieved earlier.

The ascent vehicle lifted off from the moon shortly after 11 p.m. Beijing time Thursday (1500 GMT) and was due to rendezvous with a return vehicle in lunar orbit, then transfer the samples to a capsule, according to the China National Space Administration. The moon rocks and debris were sealed inside a special canister to avoid contamination.

It wasn’t clear when the linkup would occur. After the transfer, the ascent module would be ejected and the capsule would remain in lunar orbit for about a week, awaiting the optimal time to make the trip back to Earth.

Chinese officials have said the capsule with the samples is due to land on Earth around the middle of the month. Touchdown is planned for the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where China’s astronauts have made their return in Shenzhou spacecraft.

Chang’e 5’s lander, which remained on the moon, was capable of scooping samples from the surface and drilling 2 meters (about 6 feet).

While retrieving samples was its main task, the lander also was equipped to extensively photograph the area, map conditions below the surface with ground penetrating radar and analyze the lunar soil for minerals and water content.

Right before the ascent vehicle lifted off, the lander unfurled what the space administration called the first free-standing Chinese flag on the moon. The agency posted an image — apparently taken from the lander — of the ascend vehicle firing its engines as it took off.

Chang’e 5 has revived talk of China one day sending astronauts to the moon and possibly building a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects.

China launched its first temporary orbiting laboratory in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022, possibly to be serviced by a reusable space plane.

While China is boosting cooperation with the European Space Agency and others, interactions with NASA are severely limited by U.S. concerns over the secretive nature and close military links of the Chinese program.

New story in Science and Health from Time: China Says Its Moon Probe Is Preparing to Return Rock Samples to Earth China Says Its Moon Probe Is Preparing to Return Rock Samples to Earth

BEIJING — China said Thursday its latest lunar probe has finished taking samples of the moon’s surface and sealed them within the spacecraft for return to Earth, the first time such a mission has been attempted by any country in more than 40 years.

The Chang’e 5, the third Chinese probe to land on the moon, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for Beijing’s space program, which also has a probe en route to Mars carrying a robot rover.

The Chang’e 5 touched down Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the moon’s near side, on a mission to return lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since 1976.

The probe “has completed sampling on the moon, and the samples have been sealed within the spacecraft,” the China National Space Administration said in a statement.

Plans call for the upper stage of the probe known as the ascender to be launched back into lunar orbit to transfer the samples to a capsule for return to Earth. The timing off its return was not immediately clear and the lander can last up to one moon day, or 14 Earth days, before plummeting temperatures would make it inoperable.

Chang’e is equipped to both scoop samples from the surface and drill 2 meters (more than 6 feet) to retrieve materials that could provide clues into the history of the moon, Earth other planets and space features.

While retrieving samples is its main task, the lander is also equipped to extensively photograph the area surrounding its landing site, map conditions below the surface with ground penetrating radar and analyze the lunar soil for minerals and water content.

Chang’e 5’s return module is supposed to touch down around the middle of December on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where China’s crewed Shenzhou spacecraft have made their returns since China first put a man in space in 2003, becoming only the third country do so after Russia and the United States.

Chang’e 5 has revived talk of China one day sending a crewed mission to the moon and possibly building a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects.

China also launched Its first temporary orbiting laboratory in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022, possibly to be serviced by a reusable space plane.

While China is boosting cooperation with the European Space Agency and others, interactions with NASA are severely limited by concerns over the secretive nature and close military links of the Chinese program.

New story in Science and Health from Time: China Is Poised to Bring Home Moon Samples in its Most Ambitious Lunar Mission Yet China Is Poised to Bring Home Moon Samples in its Most Ambitious Lunar Mission Yet

The moon’s Ocean of Storms was once a busy place. Back in 1967, the U.S. successfully landed its Surveyor 3 spacecraft in the vast plain in the northern lunar hemisphere; little more than two years later, the Apollo 12 crew returned, touching down within 200 meters (656 ft.) of the Surveyor and collecting more than 34 kg (75 lbs.) of lunar rock and soil to bring back to Earth. But things have been quiet in the Ocean of Storms since—until now.

Nearly 50 years after the U.S. abandoned its lunar dreams, China’s Chang’e 5 spacecraft is set for a Dec. 1 landing in NASA’s long-ago stomping grounds, attempting to become the first country to return any samples from the moon since the Soviet Union’s robotic Luna 24 spacecraft retrieved 170 grams (6 oz.) of lunar soil in 1976. If Beijing succeeds—and its lunar endeavors to date suggest it will—it could portend big things for a country that has fast become one of the world’s leading space powers.

It was at 4:30 a.m. local time on Nov. 24 that Chang’e 5 lifted off aboard a 20-story tall Long March 5 rocket—a launch that was broadcast live across China, “leaving many spectators…in awe and excitement as the gigantic booster thundered skyward,” the China National Space Administration’s official announcement read. That sort of success has been true of all of China’s recent lunar missions. In 2007 and 2010, Chang’e 1 and Chang’e 2 successfully executed lunar orbital missions. In 2013, Chang’e 3 landed on the moon and deployed a small rover. And in 2019 Chang’e 4 did the same, becoming the first spacecraft to touch down on the far side of the moon.

Chang’e 5 will be a landing mission too—but an order of magnitude more difficult than its predecessors. The 8.2 metric ton spacecraft is actually a four-part ship: an orbiter, a lander, an ascent stage and a reentry capsule. On Nov. 28, after a four-day translunar journey, the entire assembly entered an eight-hour elliptical orbit around the moon. It later conducted an engine burn to lower itself into a circular 200 km (120 mile) orbit—about twice the altitude at which the Apollo spacecraft used to fly.

The lander and the ascent stage have since separated from the rest of the craft and the plan for Dec. 1 involves an extensive engine burn that will bring them to a soft touchdown touch down near Mons Rümker, a volcanic formation in the Ocean of Storms that features relatively young and pristine soil—with relatively the key word. The scarcity of craters on the formation suggest that the area is about 2 billion years old, less than half of the moon’s estimated 4.5 billion year-old age.

The lander will spend less than two weeks there, excavating as deep as two meters (about 6.5 ft.) below the surface, and collecting up to 2 kg (about 4.4 lbs.) of rock and soil. Those samples will then be packed into to the ascent vehicle, which will lift off and rendezvous with the orbital segment still circling the moon. The samples will then be transferred to the re-entry vehicle which will separate from the orbiter and peel off for Earth, aiming for a landing in Inner Mongolia sometime in mid-December.

In some ways the final stage of the mission—the reentry through Earth’s atmosphere—will be the most hair-raising. Spacecraft that are orbiting the Earth fly at about 28,200 km/h (17,500 mph) and can more or less ease back into the atmosphere by tapping the brakes and slowing their speed. Spacecraft returning from the moon slam into the atmosphere at a much faster 40,200 km/h and must fly in a sort of roller coaster trajectory as they descend, bleeding off speed and g-forces if they are going to survive the intense heat of reentry.

If Chang’e 5 indeed succeeds in that final step, it will open the door to robotic, sample-return mission from Mars—and, eventually, crewed missions to the moon. Pei Zhaoyu, deputy director of China’s Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, sees the robotic lunar program continuing even after taikonauts—or China’s astronauts—reach the moon. “I think future exploration activities on the moon are most likely to be carried out in a human-machine combination,” he said in a press statement before the launch.

The exact nature of those future missions might be uncertain at the moment, but the likelihood that they will take place is much less so. China—like the U.S. in the 1960s—has made a commitment to the moon. And like the U.S. in the 1960s, it seems determined to make good on it.

New story in Science and Health from Time: For Much of the U.S., Good Weather Will Allow for an Outdoor (and Safer) Thanksgiving For Much of the U.S., Good Weather Will Allow for an Outdoor (and Safer) Thanksgiving

Public-health officials have for weeks been urging Americans to avoid gathering for Thanksgiving this year, lest the holiday turn into a national super-spreading event. But for those who still plan on getting together, experts say an outdoor get-together is far safer than prolonged time indoors, where it’s easier for the virus that causes COVID-19 to spread. Whether an outdoor Thanksgiving is really feasible, however, largely depends on, well, the weather.

Good news: a look at the Thanksgiving Day forecast reveals that, for most of the U.S., temperatures will be above normal and the skies will be clear.

“When it comes to Thanksgiving weather, most of the country will have lucked out,” says John Homenuk, a meteorologist at New York Metro Weather, via email. “Warmer than normal air and calm conditions are expected from the Plains states to the Great Lakes and Tennessee Valley. Cooler, but mostly pleasant weather is also expected in the Pacific Northwest down the West Coast to the Desert Southwest. Outdoor activities should at least be possible in many of these regions, but especially the Central U.S. and Ohio Valley, where temperatures are expected to be several degrees warmer than normal.”

Homenuk also sent along this map, which shows expected temperatures across the U.S. in terms of how far above or below normal they’re expected to be for this time of year:

However, an outdoor Thanksgiving may be less of an option across much of the U.S. East Coast, which is likely in for some wet weather. “Areas like Philadelphia, New York City and Boston are likely to be dealing with showers and dreary conditions throughout the morning and early afternoon,” says Homenuk. “Some clearing is possible later in the day if a cold front can sweep through quickly enough.”

Even with this weather forecast in mind, it’s still safer to avoid gathering this year with anybody you don’t already live with (and no, getting a single COVID-19 test can’t guarantee a safe Thanksgiving). But if you’re committed to having people over or heading somewhere else despite the risks, it’s looking like turkey al fresco will be a viable option for many.

Still, it’s wise to keep the guest list as short as possible and ensure everybody stays masked and distanced as much as possible; it’s especially important to keep people apart while they’re masks-down and eating. One other suggestion: rather than inviting a bunch of people over for an all-day hang and dinner, have a smaller group over for a distanced outdoor hangout for part of the day, then do dinner with your immediate household later.

New story in Science and Health from Time: China Launches a Mission to Bring Back Material From the Moon China Launches a Mission to Bring Back Material From the Moon

WENCHANG, China — China launched an ambitious mission on Tuesday to bring back rocks and debris from the moon’s surface for the first time in more than 40 years — an undertaking that could boost human understanding of the moon and of the solar system more generally.

Chang’e 5 — named for the Chinese moon goddess — is the country’s boldest lunar mission yet. If successful, it would be a major advance for China’s space program, and some experts say it could pave the way for bringing samples back from Mars or even a crewed lunar mission.

The four modules of the Chang’e 5 spacecraft blasted off at just after 4:30 a.m. Tuesday (2030 GMT Monday, 3:30 p.m. EST Monday) atop a massive Long March-5Y rocket from the Wenchang launch center along the coast of the southern island province of Hainan.

Minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s first and second stages and slipped into Earth-moon transfer orbit. About an hour later, Chang’e 5 opened its solar panels to provide its independent power source.

Spacecraft typically take three days to reach the moon.

The launch was carried live by national broadcaster CCTV which then switched to computer animation to show its progress into outer space.

The mission’s key task is to drill 2 meters (almost 7 feet) beneath the moon’s surface and scoop up about 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of rocks and other debris to be brought back to Earth, according to NASA. That would offer the first opportunity for scientists to study newly obtained lunar material since the American and Russian missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Chang’e 5 lander’s time on the moon is scheduled to be short and sweet. It can only stay one lunar daytime, or about 14 Earth days, because it lacks the radioisotope heating units to withstand the moon’s freezing nights.

The lander will dig for materials with its drill and robotic arm and transfer them to what’s called an ascender, which will lift off from the moon and dock with the service capsule. The materials will then be moved to the return capsule to be hauled back to Earth.

The technical complexity of Chang’e 5, with its four components, makes it “remarkable in many ways,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a space expert at the U.S. Naval War College.

“China is showing itself capable of developing and successfully carrying out sustained high-tech programs, important for regional influence and potentially global partnerships,” she said.

In particular, the ability to collect samples from space is growing in value, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Other countries planning to retrieve material from asteroids or even Mars may look to China’s experience, he said.

While the mission is “indeed challenging,” McDowell said China has already landed twice on the moon with its Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4 missions, and showed with a 2014 Chang’e 5 test mission that it can navigate back to Earth, re-enter and land a capsule. All that’s left is to show it can collect samples and take off again from the moon.

“As a result of this, I’m pretty optimistic that China can pull this off,” he said.

Read more: China is Quickly Becoming a Space Superpower

The mission is among China’s boldest since it first put a man in space in 2003, becoming only the third nation to do so after the U.S. and Russia.

Chang’e 5 and future lunar missions aim to “provide better technical support for future scientific and exploration activities,” Pei Zhaoyu, mission spokesperson and deputy director of the Chinese National Space Administration’s Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center told reporters at a Monday briefing.

“Scientific needs and technical and economic conditions” would determine whether China decides to send a crewed mission to the moon, said Pei, whose comments were embargoed until after the launch. “I think future exploration activities on the moon are most likely to be carried out in a human-machine combination.”

While many of China’s crewed spaceflight achievements, including building an experimental space station and conducting a spacewalk, reproduce those of other countries from years past, the CNSA is now moving into new territory.

Chang’e 4 — which made the first soft landing on the moon’s relatively unexplored far side almost two years ago — is currently collecting full measurements of radiation exposure from the lunar surface, information vital for any country that plans to send astronauts to the moon.

China in July became one of three countries to have launched a mission to Mars, in China’s case an orbiter and a rover that will search for signs of water on the red planet. The CNSA says the spacecraft Tianwen 1 is on course to arrive at Mars around February.

China has increasingly engaged with foreign countries on missions, and the European Space Agency will be providing important ground station information for Chang’e 5.

U.S. law, however, still prevents most collaborations with NASA, excluding China from partnering with the International Space Station. That has prompted China to start work on its own space station and launch its own programs that have put it in a steady competition with Japan and India, among Asian nations seeking to notch new achievements in space.

China’s space program has progressed cautiously, with relatively few setbacks in recent years. The rocket being used for the current launch failed on a previous launch attempt, but has since performed without a glitch, including launching Chang’e 4.

“China works very incrementally, developing building blocks for long-term use for a variety of missions,” Freese-Johnson said. China’s one-party authoritarian system also allows for “prolonged political will that is often difficult in democracies,” she said.

While the U.S. has followed China’s successes closely, it’s unlikely to expand cooperation with China in space amid political suspicions, a sharpening military rivalry and accusations of Chinese theft of technology, experts say.

“A change in U.S. policy regarding space cooperation is unlikely to get much government attention in the near future,” Johnson-Freese said.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Exclusive: Pfizer CEO Discusses Submitting the First COVID-19 Vaccine Clearance Request to the FDA Exclusive: Pfizer CEO Discusses Submitting the First COVID-19 Vaccine Clearance Request to the FDA

On Friday, Pfizer CEO and chairman Albert Bourla announced that the company has filed a request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine, making it the first to do so. In a discussion on TIME 100 Talks, Bourla says that if the FDA authorizes the vaccine, the company will be ready “within hours” from receiving the green light to start distributing the vaccine. Pfizer has been manufacturing doses even while safety and efficacy tests were ongoing, in order to avoid delays in shipping once authorized.

According to Bourla, Pfizer is on “on track” to deliver the 50 million doses promised to the U.S. government by the end of the year, with 1.3 billion doses through next year.

In an in-depth conversation about the journey the company has taken in developing its vaccine, Bourla admitted that, throughout the process, he wasn’t always sure that having a safe and effective vaccine ready for FDA review in less than a year was possible. “Conviction is a part of it, so I was always telling [our teams] that we will make it, and we will make it by October, and if not us, then who?” he says. “But I knew that it was an extremely risky suggestion, I knew it was going to be difficult, and the stars needed to be aligned all the way to the end.”

Pfizer capitalized on a partnership begun in 2018 with German company BioNTech, which was founded by a husband-and-wife team of scientists with expertise in a genetic technology called mRNA. The platform is fast and flexible for developing vaccines, since it only requires knowing the genetic sequence of the virus the vaccine will target, rather than growing and manipulating the virus in question.

Still, no mRNA-based vaccine against an infectious disease had ever been approved, so Pfizer and BioNTech began exploring whether influenza might be the first. Instead, when the pandemic hit a year later, the teams shifted their attention to SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, with surprising success. Bourla says the partnership is built on a mutual focus on advancing science, and that the two companies began work, including sharing confidential information, before signing a formal contract, since those agreements can take months. “In fact, we are still finalizing the contractual obligations we have that we need to sign with them,” says Bourla. “It’s the perfect relationship for me. Ugur [Sahin, BioNTech’s co-founder and chief executive] is a wonderful human being, and a great scientist. He shares the same passion [as I do] about saving lives and I’m very optimistic that not only will we do very well together bringing a COVID-19 vaccine to the world, but later hopefully a flu vaccine.”

Bourla also believes the success of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, as well as that of Massachusetts-based biotech Moderna (which also has an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine candidate, shown to be 94.5% effective) validates the mRNA platform, and makes it a serious contender for future vaccines and drugs against emerging infectious diseases. That validity of mRNA vaccines will be further tested once their efficacy can be compared to those of other vaccines that use the more proven methods of relying on weakened cold viruses to deliver viral material to the immune system, or selected fragments of viral proteins.

While he expressed concern about the skepticism and mistrust that many American have expressed about the COVID-19 vaccines, mostly because they were developed so quickly, Bourla says he hopes the completion of the election and the magnitude of the efficacy and safety data start to reassure people. “The problem is that this vaccine, and the pandemic in general, became the focal point of political debate,” he says. “It was discussed in political rather than scientific terms. We reached an unthinkable point that wearing a mask is a political statement, which I think is wrong. Wearing a mask is something you need to do because science is telling you to do it.”

He noted that in an effort to reassure the public about the scientific integrity of the vaccine development and testing process, vaccine makers in the pharmaceutical industry came together in an unprecedented show of support against political pressure by pledging to stick to scientific standards and nothing else. “Myself, I released a lot of letters saying I will never succumb to any political pressure,” he says. “The only pressure we feel at Pfizer is the pressure 7 billion people around the world are giving us for a solution to this pandemic.”

Vaccine makers are a little less united on the question of whether they should profit from a pandemic shot. While some have said they will price their vaccines so they don’t profit from them, Bourla says Pfizer is making its vaccine available on a non-for-profit basis only for lower-income countries receiving vaccines through the World Health Organization vaccine distribution coalition run by GAVI. “We have elected for developed countries, to give [the vaccine] at a very low price [around $19.50]. We believe the price allows governments all over the world to give the vaccine free to their citizens,” he says. “If you think about the economic value of a vaccine—I’m not speaking about the human value because there is no way to measure human life—I think the millions of jobs that will not be lost, that hopefully will come back, and the billions in economic value that a successful vaccine will enable—I think it’s not appropriate to discuss if we sell it at $19.50 per dose.”

Bourla would not speculate on how long the FDA might take to decide on the company’s EUA request, but given the urgency of the pandemic, that decision could come soon. The agency will likely take into consideration the fact that the vaccine’s 95% effectiveness is in protecting against COVID-19 disease—not preventing infection from the virus. But with cases of COVID-19 continuing to surge around the world, stalling the virus and preventing people from getting sick would be a welcome advantage. More studies will also explore whether people who don’t become sick because they are vaccinated are less likely to spread infection; if that’s the case then the vaccines will be even more critical for controlling the pandemic.

“I hope the same time next year, we will be in a very, very different place,” he says. “When you have vaccine protection that is that high, 95% for example”—the effectiveness level Pfizer’s vaccine has shown in studies—”it takes less time to be able to develop protection through a vaccination scheme. So I truly believe the light at the end of the tunnel is not only real but it is bright and is coming. We need to be patient.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Renowned Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico Is to Close in a Blow to Science The Renowned Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico Is to Close in a Blow to Science

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The National Science Foundation announced Thursday that it will close the huge telescope at the renowned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in a blow to scientists worldwide who depend on it to search for planets, asteroids and extraterrestrial life.

The independent, federally funded agency said it’s too dangerous to keep operating the single dish radio telescope — one of the world’s largest — given the significant damage it recently sustained. An auxiliary cable broke in August and tore a 100-foot hole in the reflector dish and damaged the dome above it. Then on Nov. 6, one of the telescope’s main steel cables snapped, leading officials to warn that the entire structure could collapse.

NSF officials noted that even if crews were to repair all the damage, engineers found that the structure would still be unstable in the long term.

“This decision is not an easy one for NSF to make, but the safety of people is our number one priority,” said Sean Jones, the agency’s assistant director for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate. “We understand how much Arecibo means to this community and to Puerto Rico.”

He said the goal was to preserve the telescope without placing people at risk, but, “we have found no path forward to allow us to do so safely.”

The telescope was built in the 1960s with money from the Defense Department amid a push to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses. In its 57 years of operation, it endured hurricanes, endless humidity and a recent string of strong earthquakes.

The telescope boasts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film “Contact” and the James Bond movie “GoldenEye.” Scientists worldwide have used the dish along with the 900-ton platform hanging 450 feet above it to track asteroids on a path to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and determine if a planet is potentially habitable.

In recent years, the NSF-owned facility has been managed by the University of Central Florida.

Alex Wolszczan, a Polish-born astronomer and professor at Pennsylvania State University who helped discover the first extrasolar and pulsar planets, told The Associated Press that while the news wasn’t surprising, it was disappointing. He worked at the telescope in the 1980s and early 1990s.

“I was hoping against hope that they would come up with some kind of solution to keep it open,” he said. “For a person who has had a lot of his scientific life associated with that telescope, this is a rather interesting and sadly emotional moment.”

The announcement saddened many beyond the scientific world as well, with the hashtag #WhatAreciboMeansToMe popping up on Twitter along with pictures of people working, visiting and even getting married or celebrating a birthday at the telescope.

Ralph Gaume, director of NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, stressed that the decision has nothing to do with the observatory’s capabilities, which have allowed scientists to study pulsars to detect gravitational waves as well as search for neutral hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed.

“The telescope is currently at serious risk of unexpected, uncontrolled collapse,” he said. “Even attempts at stabilization or testing the cables could result in accelerating the catastrophic failure.”

Officials suspect a potential manufacturing error is to blame for the auxiliary cable that snapped after a socket holding it failed, but say they are surprised that a main cable broke about three months later given that it was supporting only about 60% of its capacity. Engineers had assessed the situation after the first cable broke, noting that about 12 of the roughly 160 wires of the second cable that eventually broke had already snapped, said Ashley Zauderer, program officer for Arecibo Observatory at NSF.

“It was identified as an issue that needed to be addressed, but it wasn’t seen as an immediate threat,” she said.

She and other NSF officials said that all standard maintenance procedures had been followed.

The closure is a blow for many of the more than 250 scientists that have used a telescope that is also considered one of Puerto Rico’s main tourist attractions, drawing some 90,000 visitors a year. It also has long served as a training ground for hundreds of graduate students.

“It was my Disney,” wrote Edgard Rivera-Valentín, a Universities Space Research Association scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas, in a series of tweets. He recalled first visiting when he was 4 or 5.

“Think about what the Golden Gate Bridge means to San Francisco, Statue of Liberty to New Yorkers. Arecibo is this and more to Puerto Rico because it has gone beyond an icon.”

The NSF said it intends to restore operations at the observatory’s remaining assets including its two LIDAR facilities, one of which is located in the nearby island of Culebra. Those are used for upper atmospheric and ionospheric research, including analyzing cloud cover and precipitation data. Officials also aim to resume operations at the visitor center.

Wolszczan, the astronomer, said the value of the telescope won’t instantly disappear because he and many other scientists are still working on projects based on observations and data taken from the observatory.

“The process of saying goodbye to Arecibo will certainly take some years,” he said. “It won’t be instantaneous.”