Gateway's HALO Module Arrived In The U.S.

Earlier this month, NASA released to the public a set of photos highlighting a newly arrived module for Gateway, a small space station that the agency aims to launch to lunar orbit in 2027.

That module is HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost), which will serve as a living and working space for astronauts aboard Gateway.

A cargo plane flew the HALO module to the U.S. from Turin, Italy, where it was constructed by the company Thales Alenia Space. The cargo plane landed at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport in Mesa, Arizona on 1 April.

The newly released photos give you a good feel for the size of the lunar module, which takes up most of the space in the plane’s large cargo hold.

The next stop for the HALO module was Northrop Grumman’s integration and test facility in Gilbert, Arizona, where it's undergoing final outfitting. Northrop Grumman is one of the contractors working on NASA’s Artemis program of moon exploration, which sees Gateway as a vital piece of infrastructure.

The agency says that the lunar station will help "chart a path of scientific discovery toward the first crewed missions to Mars," which will follow after NASA establishes a sustainable human presence on the moon — a key Artemis goal.

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Strange Creatures Discovered In Ocean Floor of Antartica

Our world is mysterious and bizarre. New discovery each year prove this and now more strange creatures straight out of a science-fiction movie have been captured by scientists off the coast of Antarctica.

Pink and bulbous "sea pigs", hand-sized sea spiders and delicate sea butterflies are among the bizarre animals hauled up from the ocean floor by a team of Australian researchers aboard the icebreaker ship RSV Nuyina, which is on a 60-day voyage across the Southern Ocean to the Denman Glacier.

Some of the weird wildlife may even be previously undiscovered.

"[We've collected] a really large diversity of a broad suite of marine life, and likely some new species to science," Jan Strugnell, a professor of marine biology at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, told ABC News.

The RSV Nuyina was launched for the Denman Marine Voyage to investigate the effects of warming sea temperatures on the Denman Glacier, which is located about 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometres) south of Australia and has already retreated 3.1 miles (5 km) between 1996 and 2017/2018. It is considered the fastest-melting glacier in East Antarctica.

Along the way, the ship's researchers have been trawling the sea floor to bring up a huge variety of unusual organisms from the deep.

One of the strangest creatures was a sea pig. These bizarre animals are a type of sea cucumber and measure around 1.5 to 6 inches (4 to 15 centimeters) long. They get their name from their squishy, bloated bodies and stubby little legs, which make them vaguely resemble pigs. Sea pigs live on the sea floor, between 3,300 to 19,500 feet (1 to 6 km) below the ocean's surface, and feed on the organic material that falls from the upper ocean layers, sometimes called "marine snow."

The scientists also fished out sea spiders "as big as your hand" and sea stars "that grow to the size of a dinner plate," according to Strugnell.

Along with collecting creatures from the deep, the researchers have also been taking samples of seawater near the edge of the glacier to analyze temperature, salinity, oxygen and the level of metals present at different depths.

"For us to really understand how much heat enters the ice shelf, we need to be as close as possible to understand these processes and properties of the ocean," Herraiz Borreguero said.

"The system is changing. And it is really important that we observe the change so that we keep on challenging those climate models we rely on for our mitigation and adaptation strategies."

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NASA's Perseverance Rover Mining Rocks In Mars

The NASA's Perseverance rover is reveling in a scientific bonanza on Mars after finding a diverse array of rocks that are providing eager scientists a glimpse into the planet's ancient history.

The Perseverance rover is currently exploring Mars hills, boulders and rocky outcrops along the rim of Jezero Crater, a dry, bowl-shaped depression north of the Martian equator that likely held a lake billions of years ago. Since reaching the crater's western rim in December of last year, the rover has focused its attention on the layered terrain of a tall slope called Witch Hazel Hill, which could hold clues to a period when Mars had a vastly different climate.

In the past few months alone, the car-sized Perseverance has collected samples of five rocks, performed detailed analysis on seven others, and zapped an additional 83 with its laser for remote study — the robotic explorer's fastest pace of scientific data collection since it landed on the Red Planet four years ago, NASA says.

"During previous science campaigns in Jezero, it could take several months to find a rock that was significantly different from the last rock we sampled and scientifically unique enough for sampling," Katie Morgan, who is the Perseverance's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. "But up here on the crater rim, there are new and intriguing rocks everywhere the rover turns. It has been all we had hoped for and more."

The crater's western rim is proving to be a scientific goldmine because it contains lots of fragmented, once-molten rocks that had been blasted from deep beneath the surface billions of years ago by meteor impacts, possibly including the impact that created Jezero Crater itself, according to the statement.

Of key interest to astronomers is Perseverance's first crater rim sample, named Silver Mountain, which is a "one-of-a-kind treasure" likely dating back at least 3.9 billion years to the Noachian age — an early Martian period of heavy bombardment that shaped the planet's cratered landscape we see today, NASA recently said.

"My 26th sample, known as 'Silver Mountain,' has textures unlike anything we've seen before," the rover's official X account posted in February.

Not far away, the rover also found a rock rich in serpentine minerals, which typically form when water interacts with certain volcanic rocks. Scientists say this process can sometimes create hydrogen, a potential energy source for life as we know it here on Earth.

"The last four months have been a whirlwind for the science team, and we still feel that Witch Hazel Hill has more to tell us," said Morgan. "We'll use all the rover data gathered recently to decide if and where to collect the next sample from the crater rim."

"Crater rims — you gotta love 'em," she added.

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This Is A Truly Random Number Generator

If you try to think of a number between 1 and 10 ... was it 7? If it was, don't feel too bad, as human brains are notoriously bad at both true randomness and understanding probability. Even if you're the galaxy-brained to fall for my tricks and slyly thought of something clever like '3 and three-quarters,' you may still be interested to know that scientists have potentially cracked a truly random number generator.

A peer-reviewed research paper published in the scientific journal Nature claims that certifiable randomness can be achieved using "a 56-qubit Quantinuum H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer" (via Popular Mechanics).

Traditionally, computers are incapable of true randomness, though they can still produce an approximation that passes the vibe check for humans—you know, those guys who witness true randomness out in the world and insist it's not random at all. Quantum computers, on the other hand, are a whole other ball game, which may have positive ramifications for data security in the future.

Even the veneer of randomness is pretty key to data encryption. For example, traditional computers may create encryption based on the result of multiplying two large prime numbers together, generating a seemingly random number. As this string of numbers only has those two large prime numbers in common, someone who wants to 'unlock' the encryption would only need one of them as a 'key'. However, maths nerds everywhere will tell you that's more likely than you think.

As prime numbers are ultimately predictable, encryption protocols are always changing without actually being dynamic to outpace obsolescence. So, the over 30 authors of the paper in Nature (four of whom now hold patents related to this quantum computing work) came together to essentially throw away the 'key.'

With their quantum computer, the researchers were able to create randomised strings containing 70,000 bits of data that the team writes "is uncorrelated with any side information." Besides that, 70,000 bits is definitely too long for your favourite maths nerd to memorise—though not for lack of trying.

The team's quantum computing method is able to not only generate these incredibly long, highly random numbers, but can also generate them in a reasonable amount of time. Though we're all still a ways off from parking any number of qubits on our desks, the team insist that their findings could still be applicable in the here and now; they wrote, "[W]e demonstrate a useful beyond-classical application of gate-based digital quantum computers."

As a proposed use case for quantum computers, it's perhaps more promising than trying (and failing) to properly run Doom. Still, with data breaches only getting bigger and uglier, I don't think anyone can afford to ignore what is potentially a quantum leap in the right direction for data security.

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Fungus Turns Cave-Dwelling Spiders Into 'Zombies'

Several scientists in Europe discovered a previously unknown species of fungus that turns cave spiders into "walking zombies." The fungus lures them out of their webs before instigating an untimely death and then uses the spiders’ corpses to spread its spores.

The newly discovered species, named Gibellula attenboroughii, acts in a similar way as the zombie ant fungus, seemingly manipulating its prey to move to a more suitable spot for the fungus to spread, according to a study published 24 January in the journal Fungal Systematics and Evolution.

But the way in which the fungus affects the arachnid’s brain is still a mystery, and a multitude of questions remain about the fungus’ evolutionary pathway and ecological impacts.

"We know very well the ants, the wasps, and very few other examples. And now this is in a different family, so it’s a new origin of behavior manipulation," said study coauthor Dr. João Araújo, a mycologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen. "It’s something really interesting that’s not super common in the parasitic world."

The finding opens up new research opportunities to better understand animal-controlling fungus and illuminates the diversity of fungi yet to be uncovered, researchers said.

The newfound species is part of a larger branch of fungi that exclusively infects spiders.

Researchers observed a different species of Gibellula (G. aurea found in Brazil) possibly manipulating spiders to move to the underside of leaves before death, as described in a November 2022 study coauthored by Araújo. However, the maneuver was not as strikingly evident as it is when G. attenboroughii targets cave spiders, Araújo said.

So far, scientists have only observed G. attenboroughii infecting the spiders Metellina merianae and Meta menardi, both cave-dwelling orb weavers that are found in Europe.

The first sighting of the peculiar fungus has a colorful backstory: In 2021, a television crew first spotted the fungus on an orb weaver spider while filming a show in an abandoned gunpowder storeroom at Castle Espie Wetland Centre in Northern Ireland’s County Down.

The crew noticed that the spider placed itself in an exposed position before death, away from its web, suggesting the fungus had caused behavioral change.

Further observations revealed more infected spiders in caves in both Northern Ireland and Ireland, all positioned in exposed areas of the roof or walls of the chambers, according to the study.

"Most spiders that are web-building spiders very much like to stay on their web. They’re built to be good inside of a web, but then they’re actually quite bad at walking around on the ground," said Dr. Jay Stafstrom, an expert on arachnid sensory ecology and postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

"The fact that a fungus can infect something and then behaviorally alter that animal so that it then helps the fungus spread, I think it’s just very intriguing," said Stafstrom, who was not part of the study.

The researchers said they are unsure of the exact mechanics and inner workings of the fungus. But the team hypothesizes the fungus lures the spiders out of their lairs where they are exposed to circulating air currents, which helps spread its spores, said Araújo, who is also an honorary research associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom.

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