Gene losses allow vampire bats to live solely on a diet of blood

While bats have been closely associated with vampires for centuries, there are actually only three species of bats that drink blood. Most of them eat fruits, insects, nectar and small animals, like frogs and fish, instead. Blood is low in calories, while being rich in iron, protein and little else, making it a terrible, terrible food source. Now, a team of scientists has figured out how and why those vampire bat species are the only mammals that can live solely on a diet of blood.

Upon comparing the genome of common vampire bats to 26 other species, the scientists found 13 genes in the blood-sucking mammals that either no longer work or are missing. Three of those losses had been reported in another study published in 2014, with all of them indicating a reduced sense of taste reception in vampire bats. The remaining 10 gene losses are new discoveries, according to the team.

The loss of a gene called REP15 indicates enhanced iron uptake in the animals’ gastrointestinal cells, which they also shed and excrete quickly. This prevents iron overload that can have severe detrimental effects. The absence of two other genes allow glucose to remain longer in the bats’ bodies and prevent hypoglycemia, since blood contains minimal carbohydrates. Another absent gene might also be the consequence of the “extensive morphological and physiological modifications” in the stomach of common vampire bats. Instead of being a muscular organ, their stomachs are expandable structures used to store large amounts of liquid and serve as a major site of fluid absorption. 

The loss of one gene even contributed “to the evolution of vampire bats’ exceptional social behaviors.” Since they can’t survive too long without feeding, seeing as blood is very low in calories, vampire bats can regurgitate their meals and share with others. They can also keep track of who shared with them in the past and will extend extend help to them in the future if needed. Hannah Kim Frank, a bat researcher at Tulane University, told AP: “It’s totally bizarre and amazing that vampire bats can survive on blood — they are really weird, even among bats.”

The study revealing the loss of genes that allow them to live off blood doesn’t make vampire bats any less weird, or intriguing. You can read the whole study in the Science Advances journal.

NASA to accept new Artemis lunar lander proposals from commercial companies

Back in April 2021, NASA chose SpaceX to develop a lunar lander that will take astronauts to the moon for its future Artemis missions. SpaceX’s vehicle won’t be the only one flying astronauts to the surface of the Moon, though: NASA has announced that it’s welcoming proposals from American companies for landers that can take human spacefarers from the Gateway station in the lunar orbit to the Moon itself. By having that capability, the lander design can be used for missions beyond Artemis III, which will be the first crewed landing on the Moon since Apollo 17.

In its announcement, the agency said it’s also exercising an option under its existing contract with SpaceX and is asking the company to change the landing system it proposed to meet the new requirement. “Pursuing more development work under the original contract maximizes NASA’s investment and partnership with SpaceX,” the agency said. Having a second lunar lander “provides redundancy in services” and can help ensure reliable transportation for astronauts that will be part of future lunar missions.

While the call for a second lunar lander is new, the plan to have more than one company working on the project isn’t. NASA was originally supposed to choose more than one lunar lander provider for Artemis, but the agency didn’t receive enough funding from Congress, prompting it to go with SpaceX alone. 

Blue Origin, one of the finalists for the contract, filed a complaint with the US Court of Federal Claims, calling the decision “fundamentally unfair.” The Jeff Bezos-owned space corporation argued that NASA allowed SpaceX to modify its bid and wasn’t given the same chance to do so. To note, the contract SpaceX won was worth $2.9 billion, while Blue Origin’s bid was almost twice that at $5.9 billion. NASA believed Blue Origin bid high on purpose on the assumption that NASA would haggle and that it would receive more funding than it did. While the court dismissed Blue Origin’s lawsuit in November, SpaceX had to pause work on the lander twice, losing months in the process. When NASA pushed back the Artemis III mission to 2025, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Blue Origin’s lawsuit was partly to blame.

NASA will issue a draft solicitation for the second lunar lander in the coming weeks before issuing a formal request for proposals this summer.

Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s Human Landing System Program manager, said:

“This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe. We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in their landers to the surface of the Moon under NASA’s guidance before we ask for services, which could result in multiple experienced providers in the market.”

Earth’s orbital economy of tomorrow could be worth trillions

As the scope and focus of human spaceflight has evolved, so too have NASA’s methods and operations. Regions that were once accessible only by the world’s most powerful nations are today increasingly within reach of Earth’s civilian population, the richest uppermost crusts, at least. The business community is also eyeing near Earth space as the next potentially multi-trillion dollar economy and is already working with the space agency to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to continue NASA’s work in the decades following the ISS’ decommissioning. At SXSW 2022 last week, a panel of experts on the burgeoning private spaceflight industry discussed the nuts and bolts of NASA’s commercial services program and what business in LEO will likely entail.

As part of the panel, The Commercial Space Age Is Here, Tim Crain, CTO of Intuitive Machines, Douglas Terrier, associate director of vision and technology of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and Matt Ondler, CTO and director of engineering at Axiom Space, sat down with Houston Spaceport director, Arturo Machuca. Houston has been a spacefaring hub since NASA’s founding and remains a hotbed for orbital and spacelift technology startups today.

“We’re going from a model of where we’ve had primarily government funded interests in space to one that’s going to be focused a lot on the commercial sector,” Terrier said, pointing out that Axiom, Intuitive Machines, and “SpaceX down in Boca Chica” were quickly being joined by myriad startups offering a variety of support and development services.

“[Space is] the most important frontier for the United States to continue to have world leadership in and our goal is to ensure that we continue to do that in a new model that involves harnessing the innovation and the expertise from both inside and outside of NASA in the community represented here,” he continued.

Axiom is no stranger to working with both sides of the government contractor dynamic. It is scheduled to launch the first fully private crew mission to the ISS in April and plans to build, launch and affix a privately funded habitat module to the station by 2028. “This commercial space, very similar to the beginning of the internet,” Older explained. “There were a few key technologies that really allowed the internet to explode and so there’s a few things in aerospace that will really allow commercial space to take off.”

“We think that the low Earth orbit economy is a trillion dollar economy, whether it’s bioprinting, organs, whether it’s making special fiber optic cable,” he continued. “I am completely convinced that 15 to 20 years from now we’re going to be surrounded by objects that we can’t imagine how we [had] lived without that were manufactured in space.”

“For the last 20 years humans have lived on the International Space Station continuously,” Terrier agreed. “My grandchildren are living in a world where humans live on the moon, where they’ll get a nightly news broadcast from the moon? I mean, the opportunities from a societal- and civilization-changing standpoint is beyond comparison.. is actually beyond comprehension.”

The space-based economy is already valued at around $400 billion, Terrier added, with government investment accounting for around a quarter of the necessary upkeep funding and the rest coming from the private sector. He noted that NASA plays two primary roles as President Kennedy dictated in his 1962 “Why Go to the Moon” speech at Rice University: the scientific exploration of space for one, but also “to create the conditions for commercial success for United States in space,” Terrier said.

“It’s synergistic in a sense that the more companies operating in space, the more of an industrial base we can call on — driving the price down, amortizing the access to space — so that NASA doesn’t have to bear that cost,” he said. “It creates a role where there are things like exploring out among the planets, for which there isn’t a business case — clearly the government needs to take the lead there. And then there are things where we’re now commercializing low Earth orbit and that is success for everybody.”

This won’t be the first time that the US government hands off control of technology it previously had monopoly power over, Crain added. He points to NACA as “NASA for aviation in the 20s” and guided the government’s commercialization of aircraft technology.

“The only reason we can build a commercial space station is because of 25 years of flying the international space station and all the things that we’ve learned from NASA,” Ondler said. “NASA has learned about keeping humans alive [in space] for long periods of time. We’re really leveraging so much history and so much of the government’s investment to build our commercial station.”

Ondler pointed out that construction of the 7-foot x 3-foot Earth Observatory window being installed in Axiom’s station module, “by far the largest space window ever attempted,” would not have been possible without the knowledge and coaching of a former NASA space shuttle engineer. “her expertise, just her helping an engineer in one little area,” Ondler said, “allowed him to design a really good window on his first try.”

“We definitely stand on the shoulder of the great work that the space community has done until now, in terms of technology,” Crain agreed. The Apollo era, he notes, was dominated by producing one-off spacecraft parts meticulously designed for often singular use cases but that system is no longer sufficient. “The more we can make our supply chain, not custom parts, but things that have already been used already in a terrestrial market, the better off we are,” he said.

“Our mindset has to shift from ‘well, let’s go all in, I’m building this first lander’ to doing it the first time already looking at the second lander,” Crain continued. “What are the differences between the two, how do we regularize that production in a way so that our design, the core of that vehicle, is basically the same from flight to flight?”

Once the Artemis missions begin in earnest, that supply chain will begin to stretch and expand. It will extend first to LEO, but should attempts to colonize the moon prove successful, it will grow to support life and business there, much like how towns continually grew along the trade and expansion routes of the American West. “You don’t load up your wagons in Virginia and go straight to San Francisco,” Terrier said. “You stop in Saint Louis and reprovision, and people build up an economy around that.”

“The cool thing is that it’s not just aerospace engineering anymore,” Crain added. He noted that, for example, retinal implants can be more accurately and efficiently printed in microgravity than they can planetside, but the commercial process for actually doing so has yet to be devised. “There’s a completely different industry that we’re gonna need. Folks to figure out, how do we build that [retinal implant printing] machine? How do we bring it and the raw materials up and down [from LEO]? We need marketing people and all those sort of folks. It’s not just aerospace engineering and I think that’s really what we mean when we talk about the trillion dollar economy.”

SpaceX will launch OneWeb’s satellites following Russia’s ultimatum

OneWeb will turn to a competitor to ferry its remaining first-generation internet satellites to space after Russia’s Roscosmos space agency issued an ultimatum to the company at the start of the month. On Monday, OneWeb announced an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The private firm will ferry the remainder of OneWeb’s constellation fleet, with the first launch scheduled for later this year.

“We thank SpaceX for their support, which reflects our shared vision for the boundless potential of space,” OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson said. “With these launch plans in place, we’re on track to finish building out our full fleet of satellites and deliver robust, fast, secure connectivity around the globe.”

On March 3rd, Roscosmos, just days before it was scheduled to put 36 OneWeb satellites in space, said it would not conduct any additional launches for OneWeb unless the company made assurances its network would not be used for military purposes and the UK sold its minority stake in OneWeb. The demand came in response to sanctions the UK imposed on Russia following the country’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th. At the time, the UK government said it would not sell its stake in OneWeb. To date, Russian Soyuz rockets have carried 428 OneWeb satellites to low Earth orbit. OneWeb’s first-generation network will eventually consist of 648 satellites.

Hitting the Books: The mad science behind digging really huge holes

Sure you could replace the President with a self-aware roboclone, take the moon hostage, threaten to release a millennia-old Eldritch horror to wreak unspeakable terror upon the populace, or just blew up a few financial servers in your pursuit of global dominion, but a savvy supervillain knows that the true path to power is through holes — the deeper, the better. 

In the excerpt below from his newest book, author Ryan North spelunks into the issues surrounding extreme mining and how the same principles that brought us the Kola Superdeep Borehole could be leveraged to dominate humanity, or turn a tidy profit. And, if you’re not digging the whole hole scheme, How to Take Over the World has designs for every wannabe Brain, from pulling the internet’s proverbial plug to bioengineering a dinosaur army — even achieving immortality if the first few plans fail to pan out.

How to Take Over the World cover
Riverhead Books

From HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain by Ryan North published on March 15, 2022 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 Ryan North.

The world’s deepest hole, as of this writing, is the now-­abandoned Kola Superdeep Borehole, located on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, north of the Arctic Circle. It’s a hole 23 centimeters (cm) in diameter, and it was started in May 1970 with a target depth of 15,000m. By 1989, Soviet scientists had reached a depth of 12,262m, but they found they were unable to make further progress due to a few related issues. The first was that temperatures were increasing faster than they’d expected. They’d expected to encounter temperatures of around 100°C at that depth but encountered 180°C heat instead, which was damaging their equipment. That, combined with the type of rock found and the pressure at those depths, was causing the rock to behave in a way that was almost plastic. Whenever the drill bit was removed for maintenance or repair, rocks would move into the hole to fill it. Attempts to dig deeper were made for years, but no hole ever made it farther than 12,262m, and the scientists were forced to conclude that there was simply no technology available at the time that could push any deeper. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 in an unrelated event, drilling stopped in 1992, the site was shut down, and the surface-­level opening to the hole was welded closed in 1995. Today, the drill site is an abandoned and crumbling ruin, and that still-­world-record-­holding maximum depth, 12,262m, is less than 0.2% of the way to the Earth’s center, some 6,371 km below.

So, that’s a concern.

But that was back in the ’90s, and we humans have continued to dig holes since! The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) has a plan to dig through the thinner oceanic crust, hoping to break through to the mantle and recover the first sample of it taken in place — but this project, estimated to cost $1 billion USD, has not yet been successful. Still, a ship built for the project, the Chikyū, has briefly held the world record for deepest oceanic hole (7,740m below sea level!), until it was surpassed by the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which dug a hole 10,683m below sea level and then exploded.

The evidence here all points to one depressing conclusion: the deepest holes humanity has ever made don’t go nearly far enough, and they’ve already reached the point where things get too hot — and too plastic — to continue.

But these holes were all dug not by supervillains chasing lost gold but by scientists, a group largely constrained by their “ethical principles” and “socially accepted morals.” To a supervillain, the solution here is obvious. If the problem is that the rocks are so hot that they’re damaging equipment and flowing into the hole, why not simply make a hole wide enough that some slight movement isn’t catastrophic, and cool enough so the rocks are all hardened into place? Why not simply abandon the tiny, 23cm-­diameter boreholes of the Soviets and the similarly sized drill holes of the IODP, and instead think of something bigger? Something bolder?

Something like a colossal open-­pit mine?

Such a mine would minimize the effects of rocks shifting by giving them a lot more room to shift — and us a lot more time to react — before they become a problem. You could keep those rocks cool and rigid with one of the most convenient coolants we have: cold liquid water. On contact with hot rocks or magma, water turns to steam, carrying that heat up and away into the atmosphere, where it can disperse naturally — while at the same time cooling the rocks so that they remain both solid enough to drill and rigid enough to stay in place. It would take an incredible amount of water, but lucky for us, Earth’s surface is 71% covered with the stuff!

So if you build a sufficiently large open-­pit mine next to the ocean and use a dam to allow water to flow into the pit to cool the rocks as needed, then you’ll be the proud owner of a mine that allows you to reach greater depths, both literal and metaphorical, than anyone else in history! This scheme has the added benefit that, if we’re clever, we can use the steam that’s generated by cooling all that hot rock and magma to spin turbines, which could then generate more power for drilling. You’ll build a steam engine that’s powered by the primordial and nigh-inexhaustible heat of the Earth herself.

The exact dimensions of open-­pit mines vary depending on what’s being mined, but they’re all shaped like irregular cones, with the biggest part at ground level and the smallest part at the bottom of the pit. The open-­pit mine that’s both the world’s largest and deepest is the Bingham Canyon copper mine in Utah: it’s been in use since 1906, and in that time it has produced a hole in the Earth’s crust that’s 4km wide and 1.2km deep. Using those dimensions as a rough guide produces the following chart:

How to take over the world
Penguin Randomhouse

… and here we have another problem. Just reaching the bottom of the crust needs a hole over five times the length of the island of Manhattan, dozens of times wider than any other hole made by humanity, and easily large enough to be seen from space. Reaching the bottom of the lower mantle would require a hole so huge that its opening would encompass 75% of the Earth’s diameter, and to do the same with the outer and inner cores requires holes that are wider than the Earth itself.

Even if you could turn almost half the Earth into an open-­pit mine cooled by seawater, the steam created by cooling a pit that size would effectively boil the oceans and turn the Earth into a sauna, destroying the climate, collapsing food chains, and threatening all life on the planet — and that’s before you even reach the hostage-­taking phase, let alone the part where you plunder forbidden gold! Things get even bleaker once you take into account the responses from the governments you’d upset by turning their countries into hole; the almost inconceivable amount of time, energy, and money required to move that much matter; where you’d put all that rock once you dug it up; or the true, objective inability for anyone, no matter how well funded, ambitious, or self-­realized, to possibly dig a hole this huge.

So.

That’s another concern.

It pains me to say this, but… there is absolutely no way, given current technology, for anyone to dig a hole to the center of the Earth no matter how well funded they are, even if they drain the world’s oceans in the attempt. We have reached the point where your ambition has outpaced even my wildest plans, most villainous schemes, and more importantly strongest and most heat-­resistant materials. Heck, we’re actually closer to immortal humans (see Chapter 8) than we are to tunneling to the Earth’s core. It’s unachievable. Impossible. There’s simply no way forward.

It’s truly, truly hopeless. It’s hard for me to admit it, but even the maddest science can’t realize every ambition.

I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do.

. . . for that plan, anyway!

But every good villain always has a Plan B, one that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. And heck, if you’ve got your heart set on digging a hole, making some demands, and becoming richer than Midas and Gates and Luthor in the process—who am I to stop you?

You’re going to sidestep the issues of heat and pressure in the Earth’s core by staying safely inside the crust, within the depth range of holes we already know how to dig. And you’re going to sidestep the issues of legality that tend to surround schemes to take the Earth’s core hostage by instead legally selling access to your hole to large corporations and the megarich, who will happily pay through their noses for the privilege. Why?

Because instead of digging down, you’re going to dig sideways. Instead of mining gold, you’re going to mine information. And unlike even the lost gold of the Earth’s core, this mine is practically inexhaustible.

It all has to do with stock trading. In the mid-­twentieth century, stock exchanges had trading floors, which were actual, physical floors where offers to buy and sell were shouted, out loud, to other traders. It was noisy and chaotic, but it ensured everyone on the trading floor had, in theory, equal access to the same information. Those floor traders were later supplemented by telephone trading, and then almost entirely replaced by electronic trading, which is how most stock exchanges operate today. At the time, both telephone and electronic trading could be pitched as simply a higher-­tech version of the same floor trading that already existed, but they also did something more subtle: they moved trading from the trading floor to outside the exchanges themselves, where everyone might not have access to the same information.

Turns out, there’s money to be made from that.

NASA’s SLS Moon rocket arrives at launch pad for the first time

NASA’s Space Launch System has finally reached the pad — although an actual launch is still some ways off. The SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft it carries arrived at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39B for the first time at 4:15AM Eastern today (March 18th) for one last test before the uncrewed (and delayed) Artemis I mission to the Moon. The team will conduct a “wet dress rehearsal” that replicates the mission short of liftoff, including the propellant load, countdown procedures and draining tanks.

The test will help NASA set an exact target launch date for Artemis I. The SLS won’t stay out for very long., though, as the agency plans to roll it back to the Vehicle Assembly Building several days after the test. There, crews will remove rehearsal sensors , top up batteries, add “late-load” cargo and conduct final checks. The rocket will return to the launch pad about a week before the real launch, tentatively slated for May or later.

The preliminary deployment still marks a few important milestones. NASA officially began development of the SLS in 2011, and spent over $23 billion (in 2021 dollars) on the project in roughly a decade — the launch pad rollout shows the investment is finally bearing fruit. It’s also an important moment for Orion, which is edging closer to crewed flights.

More importantly, the arrival indicates that the next chapter of NASA’s exploratory missions is about to begin. The SLS will not only be used for Artemis missions, but is expected to serve as NASA’s primary deep space exploration launcher throughout the 2020s. As important as private rockets like SpaceX’s Starship may be, it’s likely the SLS that will carry the most historic missions in the years ahead.

The ESA suspends its ExoMars joint mission with Russia

The ExoMars mission has been suspended. Its future is uncertain at this point in time, as the European Space Agency looks for a way to proceed without the involvement of Russian space agency Roscosmos. The ESA previously announced that it’s fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia by its member states following the country’s invasion of Ukraine and that a 2022 launch for the ExoMars rover was looking unlikely. Now, the mission has officially been put on ice after the ESA’s ruling council met in Paris to assess the situation.

The ESA said in a statement:

“As an intergovernmental organisation mandated to develop and implement space programmes in full respect with European values, we deeply deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the aggression towards Ukraine. While recognising the impact on scientific exploration of space, ESA is fully aligned with the sanctions imposed on Russia by its Member States.”

The council has determined that it’s impossible to keep cooperating with Roscosmos and has ordered the ESA Director General to take steps to suspend the operation. In addition, the council authorized the Director General to conduct and fast track an industrial study to find options on how the agency can move forward with ExoMars.

ExoMars is a two part mission, and the agencies sent its first spacecraft — the Trace Gas Orbiter — to Martian orbit back in 2016. They were supposed to launch a rover named after scientist Rosalind Franklin this year for the second part of the program after delays causes in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. The ESA was in charge of developing the rover, which was going to use a Russian launch vehicle and lander. 

This is just one of the space programs affected by the war in Ukraine. Roscosmos previously pulled out of the Guiana Space Center in retaliation for EU’s sanctions and also refused to launch OneWeb internet satellites that were supposed to head to orbit on Soyuz rockets. Dmitry Rogozin, the Director General of Roscosmos, also claimed that the sanctions against Russia could interrupt the operations of the country’s spacecraft that’s steering the ISS and could cause the station to “fall down into the sea or onto land. Russia stopped supplying the US with rocket engines, as well. At the time, Rogozin said “Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks.”