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A simulated view of what the TOLIMAN telescope could see of the Alpha Centauri binary through its diffractive pupil.

The TOLIMAN telescope will use a diffractive pupil lens that spreads starlight into a flower-like pattern, making it easier for astronomers to detect perturbations that indicate orbiting planets.Peter Tuthill/University of Sydney

Private exoplanet-hunting space telescope

A proposed space telescope will use an innovative lens to search for habitable exoplanets in the Solar System’s nearest neighbour, Alpha Centauri. The project is a collaboration between scientists from Australia’s Sydney Institute for Astronomy and Saber Astronautics and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is backed by tech billionaire Yuri Milner’s alien-hunting Breakthrough Initiatives programme. The telescope will be named TOLIMAN, which is an Arabic-derived alternative name for Alpha Centauri. Or, in an admirable backronym, ‘Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighbourhood’. All being well, it will be “an agile low-cost mission that delivers results by about the middle of the decade”, says astrophysical imaging physicist Peter Tuthill.

Space.com | 5 min read

How COVID has affected mental health

A sweeping study of 8 million calls to helplines in 19 countries and regions found that call volumes jumped during the first wave of coronavirus infections. In France and Germany, suicide-related calls to helplines increased when lockdowns became more stringent, then decreased with the arrival of financial support from the government. “The increase in calls was mainly driven by additional people ringing because they wanted someone to talk to about this pandemic,” says economist Marius Brülhart. “There was no sign of an explosion in calls due to domestic violence or suicide.”

Nature | 4 min read

Second person ‘naturally’ free of HIV

A woman in Esperanza, Argentina, is the second person known to have eradicated HIV from her body without the help of drugs or a bone-marrow transplant. The “Esperanza Patient” was diagnosed with HIV in 2013, but has never shown any symptoms of AIDS. A tiny fraction of people infected with the virus have unusually robust immune responses that mean they can live long, healthy lives without medication, but HIV genes still lurk in their chromosomes. One of these ‘elite controllers’, Loreen Willenberg, is considered the first person known to have the natural ability to clear her body of HIV — scientists found had no intact virus in her cells. There have also been two people who have been cleared of HIV after a cancer-treating stem-cell transplant. “Just thinking that my condition might help achieve a cure for this virus makes me feel a great responsibility and commitment to make this a reality,” the Esperanza Patient told STAT.

STAT | 8 min read

Reference: Annals of Internal Medicine paper

COVID deaths might spike in Europe

COVID-19 could cause a further 300,000 deaths in Europe if all anti-infection restrictions are lifted and contacts between individuals return to pre-pandemic levels. A preprint study of the number of people in 19 countries who have been neither infected nor vaccinated assumes that everyone in the population will become exposed — “an extreme worst-case scenario”. The study is a useful exercise in helping countries to prepare for the challenges ahead, says infectious-disease modeller Sheryl Chang. “The numbers are shocking, and they may or may not happen, but people need to be aware that COVID-19 isn’t over.”

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: medRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Space debris caused by anti-satellite missile

A Russian anti-satellite test on Monday caused space debris that threatened the crew of the International Space Station (ISS). The crew members donned their spacesuits and sheltered in the Soyuz and Crew Dragon capsules in case they had to evacuate. The destruction of a Russian satellite produced more than 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris, said US Space Command. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he was “outraged” at the move. “With its long and storied history in human spaceflight, it is unthinkable that Russia would endanger not only the American and international partner astronauts on the ISS, but also their own cosmonauts,” he said. “Their actions are reckless and dangerous, threatening as well the Chinese space station.”

CNN | 6 min read

Infographic of the week

Graphic illustrating water under planetary interior conditions of Neptune as recreated in the laboratory.

Researchers have created stable superionic ice — also called hot black ice — by recreating the conditions that exist in the core of Neptune.

Physicists pressed water between diamonds and heated it with lasers to create the extreme pressure and temperature under which the mysterious substance can form. They then used X-ray diffraction to investigate its bizarre properties: it is hot, dark and less dense than normal ice.

“It’s a new state of matter,” says co-author Vitali Prakapenka. “It’s kind of like a solid oxygen lattice sitting in an ocean of floating hydrogen atoms.”

Superionic ice could exist deep inside water-rich giant planets, such as Neptune and Uranus. Because free-floating hydrogen ions can create a magnetic field, the ice could help explain how these worlds’ magnetospheres form.

(Nature Physics News & Views | 5 min read, Nature paywall & Live Science | 6 min read)

Reference: Nature Physics paper

See some more of the week’s key infographics, selected by Nature’s news and art teams.

Notable quotable

“I will then promptly print 100 copies of the assignment out, put them in a pile, light that pile on fire, and dance around the rubble as it burns.”

An adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University wrote a tongue-in-cheek e-mail encouraging his students to turn in an assignment that has proved frustrating for all of them. (Twitter post | 2 min read)