Having already returned visually stunning and scientifically spectacular results from its first six months in operation, the James Webb Space Telescope has recorded another inaugural milestone: its first exoplanet discovery confirmation. It peered 41 light years into the cosmos and found a planet in the Octans constellation with a diameter 99 percent that of Earth itself — say hello to LHS 475 b.

Specifically a team of astronomers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, first spotted evidence of the candidate exoplanet while digging through data generated from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). However it was Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) that confirmed the planets existence by observing two transits in front of its parent star. “There is no question that the planet is there. Webb’s pristine data validate it,” Lustig-Yaeger declared in a NASA press release. 

As the space agency notes, among telescopes in operation today (both terrestrial and orbital), only the JWST possesses the resolving capabilities to accurately characterize the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. The research team is still working to determine what, if any, sort of atmosphere is sitting atop the rocky mass using by analyzing its transmission spectrum. 

There is a chance that the planet will be devoid of its critical gaseous insulation but at these distances, it could simply be hiding a very small atmo close to the surface. "Counterintuitively, a 100% carbon dioxide atmosphere is so much more compact that it becomes very challenging to detect,” said Lustig-Yaeger. 

They are confident that it does not possess an oppressive atmosphere similar to that of Saturn’s moon Titan, however. “There are some terrestrial-type atmospheres that we can rule out,” he said. “It can’t have a thick methane-dominated atmosphere.” 

That said, the surface of the planet does appear to be several hundred degrees warmer than here on Earth which, if cloud cover is discovered in subsequent studies, it could suggest a greenhouse world climate closer to Venus. The researchers have also confirmed that LHS 475 b orbits its star in just two days — far too close to attempt with Sol but, because LHS circles a red dwarf that's producing less than half of our sun's energy, can theoretically maintain an atmosphere.

Microsoft’s latest research in text-to-speech AI centers on a new AI model, VALL-E. While there are already multiple services that can create copies of your voice, they usually demand substantial input. Microsoft claims its model can simulate someone's voice from just a three-second audio sample. The speech can match both the timbre and emotional tone of the speaker – even the acoustics of a room. It could one day be used for customized or high-end text-to-speech applications, but like deepfakes, there are risks of misuse.

Researchers trained VALL-E on 60,000 hours of English language speech from 7,000-plus speakers in Meta's Libri-Light audio library. The results aren’t perfect: Some are tinny machine-like samples, while others are surprisingly realistic.

Microsoft isn’t making the code open source, possibly due to the inherent risks. In the paper, the company said: "Since VALL-E could synthesize speech that maintains speaker identity, it may carry potential risks in misuse of the model, such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating."

We’ve all seen the 1992 movie Sneakers, right? Right?!

– Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Samsung's first Unpacked event of 2023 takes place February 1st

• Hyundai managed to put its 'crab-walking' e-Corner technology into an Ioniq EV

• What an 'oddball' star in the Cygnus cluster can teach us about how masers are made

• The best fast chargers for 2023

• DJI's lightweight RS 3 Mini camera stabilizer is designed to be used with one hand

• ‘TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge’ hits iOS and Android as a Netflix mobile exclusive

Amazon expands Prime shipping to more shopping sites

But you’ll need a Prime subscription.

Amazon is expanding Prime to cover more of the web. The company says it's making Buy with Prime "widely available" to eligible third-party sites in the US on January 31st. More shops can offer free shipping, streamlined checkout and simplified returns to Prime members. The theoretical advantages are clear: You get products with less hassle, while stores are more likely to turn visitors into paying customers. Amazon, meanwhile, is hoping to boost interest in Prime subscriptions. The catch, of course, is you have to pay for that pesky Prime sub.

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NASA funds ideas and prototypes for future space exploration

Including a Titan seaplane and faster deep space travel.

NASA

NASA is handing out $175,000 initial study grants to 14 new projects potentially useful for missions in and beyond the solar system. TitanAir might be the most unusual one: a seaplane from Planet Enterprises' Quinn Morley that could fly through the nitrogen-and-methane atmosphere of Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, and sail its oceans.

MIT's Mary Knapp has proposed a deep space observatory that would use a swarm of thousands of tiny satellites to detect low-frequency radio emissions from the early universe, and UCLA's Artur Davoyan’s idea could speed up exploration at the outer edges of space. His design would propel spacecraft with a "pellet-beam" of microscopic particles traveling at very high speed (over 74 miles per second) using laser blasts.

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The first-ever UK space flight fails to reach orbit

Virgin Orbit said the rocket suffered an anomaly that prevented it from reaching its destination.

Meanwhile, the UK’s first efforts at space flight have ended in failure. Virgin Orbit's historic Start Me Up mission launched from Spaceport Cornwall on January 9th as planned, but it failed to reach orbit. Apparently, the company tweeted, because of “an anomaly.” The mission carried payload satellites from seven commercial and government customers. They include a joint UK–US project called CIRCE (Coordinated Ionospheric Reconstruction CubeSat Experiment) and two CubeSats for the UK’s Ministry of Defense. As noted by Ars Technica, this failure could have a huge impact on the company, which is struggling to launch enough missions to break even.

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Apple may use in-house wireless chips in iPhones by 2025

Broadcom and Qualcomm may get the boot very soon.

Bloomberg sources claim Apple is not only prepping its first cellular modem (now slated for late 2024 or early 2025) but also a combination of Bluetooth and WiFi chips to replace the Broadcom chip currently handling those duties in iPhones. While the exact reasoning for the transition wasn't mentioned, it's no secret Apple started designing its own silicon across multiple products.

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Like going to the store to buy dog food and coming back with a duck, researchers with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory may have uncovered a significant insight into how masers (nature's lasers) are formed while conducting a routine study of the "oddball" star MWC 349A using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). It came in the form of a previously unseen jet of ejected material being launched away from the star at "impossibly high speeds," according to the NRAO.

MWC 349A, which resides 3,900 light years away from us in the Cygnus constellation, earned its oddball moniker by being 30 times larger than our own star as well as one of the brightest radio sources in the sky. It's also one of the only observed celestial objects that's known to have a hydrogen maser. Those are as cool as they sound, being radio wavelength analogs to lasers that emit powerful, narrow beams of radiation instead of coherent light. Naturally occurring masers are valuable research tools as they amplify radio wave emissions which enables researchers to study processes that are too far or obscured to observe visually — think star-sized bullhorns in space.   

“A maser is like a naturally occurring laser,” Sirina Prasad, primary author of the study and an undergraduate research assistant at the Center for Astrophysics, said in a release Monday. “It’s an area in outer space that emits a really bright kind of light. We can see this light and trace it back to where it came from, bringing us one step closer to figuring out what’s really going on.”  

The scientific community has been aware of MWC 349's existence since 1989 when they observed that it had, "some of the characteristics of a molecular maser source: It was extremely bright, and it varied in time, the result of sensitivity to changes in the detailed excitation processes," Ignacio Diaz Bobillo at the Center for Astrophysics wrote in 2013.  

He notes that the maser source offered three valuable features: 

The first is that the excited atoms produced a series of masers at a series of wavelengths from the corresponding set of hydrogen lines – some even at wavelengths short enough to be trumpeted as being natural lasers. The second is that the numerous lines allowed scientists to model the emitting region in detail. It is an edge-on disk rotating in so-called Keplerian fashion, that is, like the planets orbit in the solar system with those near the Sun orbiting faster than those far from the Sun (very different from the rotation of a solid disk). The final, mysterious point was that this first hydrogen maser source seemed to be unique.

No one understands why, but despite decades of searching for other hydrogen maser sources, only two other possible examples have been proposed, though they remain uncertain at best.

“Our previous understanding of MWC 349A was that the star was surrounded by a rotating disk and photo-evaporating wind," Prasad continued. "Strong evidence for an additional collimated jet had not yet been seen in this system." But that is what they stumbled upon this time around.

The collimated jet is streaking away from the star and its gas disk at a blistering 500km/s — at those speeds you can get from San Diego, California to Phoenix, Arizona faster than you can say "please, no, anywhere but Phoenix." Literally. Prasad's team believes that the material is accelerating to such high speeds with the help of the star's immensely powerful magnetic field which is generating powerful magnetohydrodynamic winds.

"Although we don’t yet know for certain where it comes from or how it is made, it could be that a magnetohydrodynamic wind is producing the jet, in which case the magnetic field is responsible for launching rotating material from the system," Prasad noted. "This could help us to better understand the disk-wind dynamics of MWC 349A, and the interplay between circumstellar disks, winds, and jets in other star systems."

NASA is still willing to fund unusual concepts in its bid to advance space exploration. The agency is handing out $175,000 initial study grants to 14 projects that could be useful for missions in and beyond the Solar System. The highlight may be TitanAir, a seaplane from Planet Enterprises' Quinn Morley that could both fly through the nitrogen-and-methane atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan and sail its oceans. The "flying boat" would collect methane and complex organic material for study by sucking it in through a porous leading edge.

A project from UCLA's Artur Davoyan, meanwhile, could speed up missions to the outer edge of the Solar System and even interstellar space. His design (shown at middle) would propel spacecraft by producing a "pellet-beam" of microscopic particles travelling at very high speed (over 74 miles per second) using laser blasts. The concept could dramatically shorten the time it takes to explore deep space. Where Voyager 1 took 35 years to reach interstellar space (the heliopause, roughly 123AU from the Sun), a one-ton spacecraft could reach 100AU in just three years. It could travel 500AU in 15 years.

Artur Davoyan

Other efforts are sometimes similarly ambitious. MIT's Mary Knapp has proposed a deep space observatory that would use a swarm of thousands of tiny satellites to detect low-frequency radio emissions from the early universe, not to mention the magnetic fields of Earth-like exoplanets. Congrui Jin from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln has envisioned self-growing habitat building blocks that could save space on missions to Mars, while Lunar Resources' Peter Curreri has devised pipelines that could shuttle oxygen between Moon bases.

These are all very early initiatives that aren't guaranteed to lead to real-world tests, let alone missions. However, they illustrate NASA's thinking. The administration is funding the projects now in hopes that at least one will eventually pay off. If there's even partial success, NASA could make discoveries that aren't practical using existing technology.

Virgin Orbit's historic "Start Me Up" mission launched from Spaceport Cornwell on January 9th as planned, but it has failed to reach orbit and has ultimately ended in failure. If you follow the the company's tweets during the event, everything went well at first. Virgin Orbit confirmed LauncherOne's clean separation from its carrier aircraft, Cosmic Girl, as well as the ignition of its NewtonThree first stage rocket engine. The mission also seemed to have gone through a successful stage separation, with the company tweeting about NewtonFour's, the second stage engine's, ignition. "LauncherOne is now officially in space!" the tweet after that reads. 

LauncherOne's upper stage shut down and was supposed to coast halfway around our planet before deploying its payload. As Ars Technica reports, the next tweet after that said the rocket and its payload satellites had successfully reached orbit. But the company deleted that tweet and replaced it with an announcement that said an anomaly prevented the mission from reaching orbit as planned. According to Reuters, a graphic display it saw over the launch's video feed showed that the mission reached second-stage cutoff but stopped three steps ahead of payload deployment a couple of hours after take off. 

Matt Archer, Commercial Space Director at the UK Space Agency, said the government and various entities that include the company will conduct an investigation about the failure over the coming days. Archer also said that the second stage suffered a "technical anomaly and didn't reach the required orbit." It's unclear what the investigation entails, but Virgin Orbit promised to share more details when it can. Meanwhile, Cosmic Girl and its crew was safely able to return to Spaceport Cornwall.

The mission was carrying payload satellites from seven commercial and government customers. They include a UK-US joint project called CIRCE (Coordinated Ionospheric Reconstruction CubeSat Experiment) and two CubeSats for the UK Ministry of Defense's Prometheus-2 initiative. Ars says this failure could have a huge impact on the company, which is struggling to launch enough missions to break even. "Start Me Up" wasn't only the first orbital launch from UK soil, it was also the first international launch for Virgin Orbit and the first commercial launch from Western Europe. It could've been a high-profile success for the company and would've shown potential customers what it's capable of. 

NASA's 38-year-old dead satellite has returned to Earth without incident. The Defense Department has confirmed that the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) reentered the atmosphere off the Alaskan coast at 11:04PM Eastern on January 8th. There are no reports of damage or injuries, according to the Associated Press. That isn't surprising when NASA said there was a 1-in-9,400 chance of someone getting hurt, but it's notable when officials said there was a possibility of some parts surviving the plunge.

ERBS had a storied life. It travelled to aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984, and pioneering woman astronaut Sally Ride placed it in orbit using the robotic Canadarm. Crewmate Kathryn Sullivan performed the first spacewalk by an American woman during that mission. The satellite was only expected to collect ozone data for two years, but was only retired in 2005 — over two decades later. The vehicle helped scientists understand how Earth absorbs and radiates solar energy.

You might not see much ancient equipment fall to Earth in coming decades. The FCC recently proposed a five-year cap on the operation of domestically owned satellites that aren't in geostationary orbits. The current guidelines suggest deorbiting within 25 years. While there could be waivers for exceptional cases, future satellites like ERBS (which was in a non-Sun synchronous orbit) might bow out long before they're reduced to space junk.

The humble honeybee hasn’t had an easy go of things recently. Between climate change, habitat destruction, pesticide use and attrition from diseases, one of the planet’s most important pollinators has seen its numbers decline dramatically in recent years. All of that bodes poorly for us humans. In the US, honeybees are essential to about one-third of the fruit and produce Americans eat. But the good news is that a solution to one of the problems affecting honeybees is making its way to farmers.

This week, for the first time, the US Department of Agriculture granted conditional approval for an insect vaccine. A biotech firm named Dalan Animal Health recently developed a prophylactic vaccine to protect honeybees from American foulbrood disease. The drug contains dead Paenibacillus larvae, the bacteria that causes the illness.

Thankfully, the vaccine won’t require beekeepers to jab entire colonies of individual insects with the world’s smallest syringe. Instead, administering the drug involves mixing it in with the queen feed worker bees eat. The vaccine then makes its way into the “royal jelly” the drones feed their queen. Her offspring will then be born with some immunity against the harmful bacteria.

The treatment represents a breakthrough for a few reasons. As The New York Times explains, scientists previously thought it was impossible for insects to obtain immunity to diseases because they don’t produce antibodies like humans and animals. However, after identifying the protein that prompts an immune response in bees, researchers realized they could protect an entire hive through a single queen. The vaccine is also a far more humane treatment for American foulbrood. The disease can easily wipe out colonies of 60,000 bees at once, and it often leaves beekeepers with one choice: burn the infected hives to save what they can.

Dr. Annette Kleiser, the CEO of Dalan, told The Times the company hopes to use the vaccine as a blueprint for other treatments to protect honeybees. “Bees are livestock and should have the same modern tools to care for them and protect them that we have for our chickens, cats, dogs and so on,” she said. “We’re really hoping we’re going to change the industry now.”

After nearly four decades in space, NASA’s retried Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) is about to fall from the sky. On Friday, the agency said the likelihood of wreckage from ERBS harming anyone on Earth is “very low.” NASA expects most of the 5,400-pound satellite will burn upon re-entry. Earlier this week, the Defense Department predicted ERBS would re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday at approximately 6:40PM ET, give or take 17 hours.

While it may be a household name, the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite had anything but a dull history. Per Phys.org, the Space Shuttle Challenger carried the satellite to space in 1984, a little more than a year before Challenger's heartbreaking demise in early 1986. Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly to space, released ERBS from Challenger’s cargo hold using the spacecraft’s robotic arm. During that same mission, Ride’s crewmate, Kathryn Sullivan, became the first American woman to perform a space walk. It was also the first mission to see two female astronauts fly to space together. As for ERBS, it went on to collect ozone and atmospheric measurements until 2005. Scientists used that data to study how Earth absorbs and radiates solar energy. ERBS's contribution to science is even more impressive when you consider NASA initially expected it would only stay functional for two years.

In a few days, the first orbital space flight taking off from UK soil might be launching from Spaceport Cornwell. Virgin Orbit has announced that the initial window for its historic "Start Me Up" mission will open on January 9th, Monday, at 22:16 UTC (5:15PM Eastern Time). If the launch needs to be pushed back due to technical issues or inclement weather conditions, the company has back-up dates lined up throughout the month. 

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) approved the licenses Virgin Orbit needs to perform launch activities in the UK back in December, following its approval of Spaceport Cornwall's first launch license. Virgin Orbit is working with the United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA), Cornwall Council and the Royal Air Force for this mission. 

Seeing as Start Me Up is the "first" in several ways — it's also the first international launch for Virgin Orbit, as well as the first commercial launch from western Europe — the private space corp said it will "maintain a conservative posture with regard to system health, weather, and all other elements of scheduling." That ups the probability of a delay, unless everything falls into place for Virgin Orbit on Monday. Even so, the LauncherOne orbital launch vehicle that will be used for this mission is now attached to Cosmic Girl, the Boeing 747 aircraft that will serve as its first stage launch platform. The company had to transport LauncherOne, which was manufactured in Long Beach, California, to the UK to make the journey possible.

In addition to making history, the mission will ferry satellites from seven customers, both commercial and government, to orbit. Its payload include CIRCE (Coordinated Ionospheric Reconstruction CubeSat Experiment), which is a joint project between the UK Defense Science and Technology Laboratory and the US Naval Research Laboratory, and two CubeSats for the UK Ministry of Defense's Prometheus-2 initiative.

Walter Cunningham, an astronaut who was the last surviving member of the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, died on Tuesday at 90. The Iowa-born Cunningham served in the US Navy and Marine Corps before joining NASA in 1963 and eventually taking part in the Apollo program’s first crewed (and first televised) flight.

NASA confirmed Cunningham’s death and added that he was "instrumental to our Moon landing's program success.” According to the Houston Chronicle, Cunningham died in a local hospital of complications from a fall.

Apollo 7 was NASA’s first spaceflight after the 1967 Apollo 1 tragedy, where a fire killed three astronauts during a rehearsal test. This led to a longer-than-usual training period, as NASA shelved human-crewed spaceflight for 21 months following Apollo 1. The crew spent many long hours studying the spacecraft's design and construction of the Apollo command and service modules (CSM) to help avoid a repeat tragedy, which could have been perilous for the astronauts and the program. Finally, the crew splashed down on Earth on October 22, 1968, after nearly 11 days in space. Apollo 7 further tested NASA’s equipment and helped pave the way for Apollo 11, where the first humans walked on the moon.

NASA

Cunningham retired from NASA in 1971 and tried his hand at public speaking, radio hosting, offshore engineering, commercial real estate and venture capital investing. Unfortunately, he also became an outspoken climate change denier. Speaking to Forbes in 2013, Cunningham went through a laundry list of fossil-fuel industry talking points, framing modern NASA as an organization controlled by the media while claiming climate-change science was closer to demagoguery than fact. (For the record, climate change is real, and we're running out of time to avoid catastrophe.)

“I definitely believe that we lived in the good old days,” Cunningham said in a 1999 NASA interview. “We lived in the golden age of manned spaceflight. We’ve been in space now for over 40 years. The first 40 years of aviation, we went from just barely flying to jet transport, you know. And now, we haven’t moved that far since we went into space. The days through Apollo will be remembered; there’ll never be another time like that again. Even when we go to Mars, it will be different. And I feel just fortunate that I was a small part of this particular time in spaceflight.”