Image:NASAシャトル時代のエンジンで再び月へ！NASAは、アポロ計画以来となる月への有人飛行に向けて、完全使い切り型のロケットの打ち上げ準備を現在進めています。今回のロケットには、過去のNASAのミッションで使用された3基のロケットエンジンが使われているということです。NASAは1月17日に組み上げが完了したロケット、スペース・ローンチ・システム「SLS」をケネディ宇宙センターの発射台へ移

Scientific American's Elizabeth Anne Brown recently "polled the great art houses of Europe" about whether they'd had any recent experiences with mold in their collections. Despite the stigma that keeps many institutions silent, she found that extremophile "xerophilic" molds are quietly spreading through museums and archives, thriving in low-humidity, tightly sealed storage and damaging everything from textiles and wood to manuscripts and stone. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the article: Mold is a perennial scourge in museums that can disfigure and destroy art and artifacts. [...] Consequently, mold is spoken of in whispers in the museum world. Curators fear that even rumors of an infestation can hurt their institution's funding and blacklist them from traveling exhibitions. When an infestation does occur, it's generally kept secret. The contract conservation teams that museums hire to remediate invasive mold often must vow confidentiality before they're even allowed to see the damage. But a handful of researchers, from in-house conservators to university mycologists, are beginning to compare notes about the fungal infestations they've tackled in museum storage depots, monastery archives, crypts and cathedrals. A disquieting revelation has emerged from these discussions: there's a class of molds that flourish in low humidity, long believed to be a sanctuary from decay. By trying so hard to protect artifacts, we've accidentally created the "perfect conditions for [these molds] to grow," says Flavia Pinzari, a mycologist at the Council of National Research of Italy. "All the rules for conservation never considered these species." These molds -- called xerophiles -- can survive in dry, hostile environments such as volcano calderas and scorching deserts, and to the chagrin of curators across the world, they seem to have developed a taste for cultural heritage. They devour the organic material that abounds in museums -- from fabric canvases and wood furniture to tapestries. They can also eke out a living on marble statues and stained-glass windows by eating micronutrients in the dust that accumulates on their surfaces. And global warming seems to be helping them spread. Most frustrating for curators, these xerophilic molds are undetectable by conventional means. But now, armed with new methods, several research teams are solving art history cold cases and explaining mysterious new infestations... The xerophiles' body count is rising: bruiselike stains on Leonardo da Vinci's most famous self-portrait, housed in Turin. Brown blotches on the walls of King Tut's burial chamber in Luxor. Pockmarks on the face of a saint in an 11th-century fresco in Kyiv. It's not enough to find and identify the mold. Investigators are racing to determine the limits of xerophilic life and figure out which pieces of our cultural heritage are at the highest risk of infestation before the ravenous microbes set in.

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Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record. The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred. The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

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Image:NASAおよそ50年ぶりとなるNASAの月への有人飛行ミッション、アルテミス計画。早ければ、来月頭にもアルテミスIIミッションとして、宇宙船オリオンの打ち上げが行われます。人類が地球低軌道の向こう側へ行くのはアポロ計画以来だし、オリオンにはアメリカの航空史において大きな意味をもついろんなアイテムを乗っけていくし、なかなかエモいアルテミス。そんなエモさを乗せたオリオン宇宙船が地球から月へ

OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when preparing to publish their research. That's where Prism comes into the picture. Like Crixet before it, the app offers robust LaTeX editing and a built-in AI assistant. Where previously it was Crixet's own Chirp agent, now it's GPT-5.2 Thinking. OpenAI's model can help with more than just formatting journals -- in a press demo, an OpenAI employee used it to find and incorporate scientific literature that was relevant to the paper they were working on, with GPT-5.2 automating the process of writing the bibliography. [...] Later in the same demo, the OpenAI employee used Prism to generate a lesson plan for a graduate course on general relativity, as well as a set of problems for students to solve. OpenAI envisions these features helping scientists and professors spend less time on the more tedious tasks in their professions.

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Image:Shutterstock2010年、カリフォルニア州ロサンゼルス近郊のトーランスに住むイギリス人男性が飼っていたナイジェルという名のヨウム（アフリカハイイロオウム）が、行方不明になってしまいました。何年待っても戻らず、再会はもう無理だろうと諦めかけていたところ、4年後に別の場所で保護されました。男性は再会を喜びましたが、何かがオカシイ。そのヨウムは、イギリス英語ではなくスペイン語を話す

Image:EgyptianMinistryofTourismandAntiquities2024年8月4日の記事を編集して再掲載しています。エジプトとフランスの考古学者チームが、ナイル川水中で発見したのは大規模な碑文や絵。そこにはトトメス4世やアメンホテプ3世など、時の権力者であるファラオについて書かれていました。ダム建設で水中へ調査研究、発見したのは、エジプト考古省とフランスのモンペリエ大学に

Image:NASA人類未踏の月裏側観測！50年以上ぶりに、宇宙飛行士が月のそばを飛行することになるNASAのアルテミスIIが、いよいよ来週に迫ってきました。アルテミスIIでは、今後、人類が再び月面を歩くことになるアルテミスIIIでも使われるロケットと宇宙船で初めての有人試験飛行を行ないます。とはいえ、アルテミスIIは宇宙飛行システムやハードウェアの試験だけではありません。このミッションでは、NA

海洋調査船 RV Falkor（too）号が、世界で最も高いビルであるドバイのブルジュ・ハリファの2倍の高さの海山を発見しました。

©AhmedPhotographerviaWikimediaCommons気候変動は、河川地域に深刻な影響をもたらすことが明らかに…。人類は、歴史的にも肥沃な土壌、豊富な淡水、そして食料源にも恵まれた、河口付近の低地である河川デルタ地帯に定住してきました。現在もこれらの地域は世界的にも人口密集地となっているわけですが、そこに暮らす数億人の人々は、脅威にさらされています。沿岸部の洪水は河川デルタ地帯

Image:AnnyStudio/Shutterstockこの記事は「ギズモード・タイムマシン」──すこし前の今日って、何があったんだろう？未来から観察してみたら、懐かしさだけでなく、意外な発見だってあるかもしれません。2018年1月「あと10年でやってくる？AIでペットとコミュニケーションをとれる未来！」を掲載しました。タカラトミーのバウリンガルが頭に浮かびますが、テクノロジーは着々と成長し、今