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JUICE mission to explore Jupiter's icy, ocean-bearing moons lifted off aboard Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana today (Jody Amiet/AFP via Getty Images)
JUICE spacecraft will visit Jupiter’s moons
Today, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) successfully launched on its eight-year journey to Jupiter, where it will study three of the planet’s four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. The launch required a precise lift-off time to insert the spacecraft into the correct orbit around the Sun: exactly 12:14 UT. “There is no launch window, only one launch instant,” said programme director and launch operator Véronique Loisel.
The European Space Agency’s spacecraft will be the first to orbit a moon of another planet when it circles Ganymede in search of a hidden ocean beneath the icy surface. A complex manoeuvre around the Sun and Earth will slingshot JUICE towards the outer Solar System. The mission will eventually end with a crash landing on Ganymede’s surface.
Calls to reinstate gender-equality researcher
Around 4,000 academics have signed an open letter demanding that the University of Groningen in the Netherlands reinstate social-psychology professor Susanne Täuber. She was sacked after publishing an article on how her experiences in the university’s prestigious Rosalind Franklin Fellowship programme caused her to believe that initiatives “set up to promote gender equality might inadvertently work against women” at the university. Groningen would not comment on Täuber’s case, but court documents show that a manager described the article as “inappropriate and damaging”. Supporters of Täuber say her firing is a blow for academic freedom and has made many fear similar treatment if they criticize their own institutions.
Reference: Journal of Management Studies article written by Täuber
How to sleep like a bear and not get clots
Brown bears (Ursus arctos) don’t develop dangerous blood clots during hibernation — despite months-long periods of inactivity that would put humans at great risk of thrombosis. The bears’ blood platelets, the component that causes clotting, produce significantly less of the clotting protein HSP47 during the animals’ winter snooze than when they are active. In people, a similar mechanism seems to lower the risk of thrombosis during long periods of immobility: lowered levels of HSP47 were found in people with spinal-cord injuries and in participants of a space-flight-simulation study who spent a month in bed.
Scientific American | 4 min read
Astronomers spot runaway black hole
Some 40 million years ago, a supermassive black hole escaped the clutches of its host galaxy, leaving a sparkling trail of young stars as it sped away into space. The rogue black hole was first picked up by the Hubble Space Telescope as a faint linear trail. Further observations made with the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii revealed that the streak was a stream of blue stars stretching across a staggering 200,000 light years. The object weighs 20 million Suns and is travelling at more than 1,500 kilometres a second. “If this is a runaway black hole..., it is travelling very fast,” says astronomer Christopher Reynolds.
Scientific American | 5 min read
Reference: Astrophysical Journal Letters paper
Features & opinion
Six steps to cleaner lithium extraction
The challenge of sustainably mining and processing lithium for batteries and other green technologies “represents a rare opportunity in which the needs of fundamental research and global policy are aligned”, write six researchers. The time is ripe for the industry to upgrade its inefficient, wasteful and damaging methods, which have changed little over the past century. “If nothing changes, simply ramping up lithium production at existing sites could negate the benefits of the clean technologies they power,” they write.
Source: IEA
Stephen Hawking’s final theory
The Universe is a four-dimensional membrane in a five-dimensional space, and a small part of a much vaster hidden reality. This is Stephen Hawking’s final theory, described in On the Origin of Time by Hawking’s last collaborator, Thomas Hertog. The book is a fascinating tour of cosmology, writes reviewer and science philosopher Robert Crease. In accessible language and with colourful anecdotes, Hartog describes how Hawking flip-flopped on whether the Universe had a beginning. Still, Hertog’s “Hawking worship” and his scorn for philosophy could be a source of irritation for readers, Crease says.
Futures: The forever family
The temptation to create the perfect home clashes with all-too-real love and grief in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.
Five best science books this week
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes an exuberant memoir of studying penguins in Antarctica, a stimulating title about incentives and a graphic novel that explores a major unsolved challenge in computer science.
Podcast: Octopuses taste by touch
Octopuses’ suckers are covered with receptors that allow them to taste by touching things. “We describe this as being a chemotactile sense, which basically combines chemosensation, sensation of chemicals, with tactile sensation, or touch,” explains cell biologist Corey Allard on the Nature Podcast. Squid have similar receptors, but there are differences that mirror differences in the animals’ hunting behaviours: octopuses feel around for food in areas they can't see into, whereas squid ambush prey and pull it towards themselves before deciding whether to eat it.
Nature Podcast | 27 min listen
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