China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has newly launched the city's first and one of the world's largest satellite manufacturing facilities, known as AMC. The facility revealed to the Global Times in an exclusive interview that their first made-in-Hong Kong, high-quality satellite would hopefully be delivered by the beginning of 2024.

Referred also as the ASPACE Hong Kong Satellite Manufacturing Center under the HK Aerospace Technology Group, the AMC, was launched on July 25, marking an important milestone in the development of the city's aerospace technology industry.

AMC is located at the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate and covering a site area of 200,000 square feet (approximately 18,580 square meters,) or three and a half football fields, the center hosts 18 subsystems and over 200 sets of equipment, covering various comprehensive production line equipment including satellite overall structure, optical calibration, vibration, mechanical performance, electromagnetic compatibility, thermal control, and precision, etc. It can provide the most comprehensive system production support for satellites and various related aerospace products before they leave the factory, AMC said in responding to the Global Times' inquiries via email.

According to AMC, at the early stage following its launch, its main products include remote sensing satellite constellation (both optical and radar,) key payloads such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical cameras, etc., used to obtain more detailed and accurate Earth observation data.

AMC would also provide customized technologies, including developing customized products according to specific use requirements, such as carbon monitoring satellites, meteorological satellites, etc., for monitoring and forecasting in specific fields.

AMC will also work to manufacture communication satellite constellation to provide global communication services and meet the communication needs of governments and commercial companies, navigation enhancement satellites to provide more accurate and reliable navigation positioning services, meeting the navigation needs of transportation departments and individual users, and multi-functional integrated satellites that integrate communication, navigation, and remote sensing functions to provide various application services.
The Hong Kong-based satellite manufacturing center said their main customers include government departments such as the China Meteorological Administration, environmental protection departments, transportation departments, commercial companies in the fields covering land asset management, carbon trading, ESG service products, research institutions including universities, key astronomical research laboratories, and remote sensing application laboratories, and individual users.

"The AMC satellites procurement and satellite applications require close cooperation with the mainland, especially in areas such as production line research and development, satellite product upgrades, satellite launch and orbit control, and supplier solutions," the group explained in the email it provided to the Global Times.

It is worth noting that China successfully launched the Golden Bauhinia-3, -4 and -6 satellites via the Long March-2D carrier rocket from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center on January 15, 2023. Those satellites are developed by the HK Aerospace Technology Group.

The group has successfully launched 12 satellites for its Golden Bauhinia Constellation project so far and plans to manufacture and launch the remaining satellites under the Golden Bauhinia Constellation project during the period from the end of 2023 to 2026.

The constellation is an active-passive hybrid low-orbit high-frequency satellite constellation that combines optical remote sensing and synthetic aperture radar to form an all-weather and near-real-time dynamic monitoring system.

AMC highlighted that after the comprehensive deployment of our Golden Bauhinia satellite constellation, they will consider user groups in the Greater Bay Area as an early priority and provide long-term satellite data application services to support its smart city construction, environmental governance, climate monitoring, and other key areas.

Chinese space observers hailed on Monday that as the country's space strengths have advanced to the first-class tier worldwide, science and research institutions such as universities in the Hong Kong SAR could fully play their part by keeping up the country's momentum, fully displaying their basic research and innovation capabilities, especially in the aerospace domain.

It is important for Hong Kong to play its due part as the innovation center and forerunner in the Greater Bay Area, which is in line with the national positioning of the city, Song Zhongping, a Hong Kong-based space watcher and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Monday.

In return, Hong Kong could bridge and improve international cooperation in space with the China as the city does in other fields, he added.

Also, as an international hub, Hong Kong could launch their satellites not only from the Chinese mainland, but also from overseas. The robust aerospace development could bring forth new economic growth and inject impetus to the city, Song noted.
The target market for ASPACE Hong Kong Satellite Manufacturing Center is expected to grow to $30 billion by 2027, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.

Sun Dong, Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry of the HKSAR government, said that the centre will be the most advanced satellite manufacturing centre in Asia in the next three to five years.

In fact, both the HKSAR and China's Macao Special Administrative Region have become increasingly involved in the country's major space program.

According to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) on May 29, the selection of the fourth group of taikonauts, China's new generation of astronauts, is proceeding as planned and will be completed by the end of this year, and more than 100 candidates then entered the second round, including more than 10 from Hong Kong and Macao.

The selection process was launched in 2022 and will result in 12 to 14 reserve taikonauts being picked, each with different specialisms, such as spacecraft pilots, flight engineers and payload specialists, per the CMSA's previous comments.

Computer: 1, Human: 0.

That’s the score after the first match between Lee Sedol, the world’s top Go player and AlphaGo, the computer program that recently defeated the European Go champion.

AlphaGo is the creation of Google DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company based in London. The company’s program is the first to give top human players a run for their money in Go, a complex Chinese strategy game that almost makes chess look like Candy Land.

AlphaGo and Sedol will play four more matches over the next week in Seoul, South Korea. The winner will receive a $1 million prize and, perhaps more importantly, secure a place in history as either the man who triumphed over the best Go-playing machine ever created — or the first machine to surpass humankind’s players.

A new refrigerator-sized factory can rapidly pump out a diverse assortment of drugs on demand.

Researchers designed the system to offer a speedy alternative to large-scale pharmaceutical production. Rejiggering chemical inputs and the device’s collection of tanks and tubes allowed the team to produce four different drugs: an anesthetic (lidocaine), an antihistamine (Benadryl), an anti-anxiety medication (Valium) and an antidepressant (Prozac). The self-contained system was equipped to mix, heat, pump and purify ingredients into hundreds to thousands of doses of pharmaceutical-grade compounds. Making each medication took the device between roughly 12 and 50 hours, the team reports in the April 1 Science. Attached computers allow one person to control and monitor the whole process.

For now, the device only makes liquid medications. But it may be a step toward overcoming limitations of cumbersome drug-making supply chains by developing automated tools that make medications on demand.

The Kepler space telescope, NASA’s premier planet hunter, is about to embark on a hunt for planets toward the center of the galaxy. But on April 7, just hours before its new mission was set to begin, the observatory gave astronomers a scare by temporarily hunkering down in an emergency state that prevented mission controllers from communicating with the spacecraft. As of April 11, though, Kepler was talking to Earth again, and engineers are getting the telescope prepped for its new quest.

“A cause has not been determined; that will take time,” says NASA spokesperson Michelle Johnson. “The priority is returning the spacecraft to science mode.”
Kepler has previously had problems with its reaction wheels, which are necessary for keeping the spacecraft pointed in the right direction. After two of its wheels stopped working, the telescope took a break from planet hunting in 2013. Engineers at Ball Aerospace figured out how to get Kepler working again with the two remaining wheels by using pressure from sunlight to balance the telescope. While engineers don’t yet know why Kepler shut down this time, early reports indicate that the remaining reaction wheels are not to blame.

Once the spacecraft checks out, Kepler will kick off its latest effort, looking toward the galactic center for planets whose gravity distorts the light from far more distant stars. This technique, known as gravitational microlensing, has been used with ground-based telescopes to discover about 46 planets, some of them orphaned from their parent stars. But the method is a first for Kepler, which searches for dips in starlight caused by planets crossing in front of their suns.

This phase of Kepler’s mission will last until July 1. Even if it doesn’t turn up any new exoplanets, it’s guaranteed to see at least one world: To look at the center of the galaxy, Kepler has to point toward Earth. The telescope that has spent over half a decade searching for other worlds will snap a picture of our planet that will be released later this year.

Over the years, readers have on occasion written to me to point out what they see as an increasing politicization of Science News. These are not accolades — more than one of those readers has contemplated ending their subscription. Some of those critics deny climate change, some oppose GMOs, others view any policy discussion in our coverage as worrisome. So, are we actually getting involved in politics?
My short answer is no. But there are many areas in which science has important things to say to citizens and policy makers. And reporting on the body of evidence that relates to societal issues falls fully within our mission, even for scientific questions with political ramifications. It’s well worth the ink to inform people about pressing problems or provide factual information in what have become hotly contested and polarizing debates.
Science can help establish what’s known, what’s not known and how scientists might find answers. That’s what Science News reports on, with the aim of giving readers not a political argument but a clear idea of where the evidence currently stands and what questions remain. Facts based on sound science can perhaps even provide a common ground for people of differing opinions to speak to each other rationally.

In the case of what researchers can say with respect to the efficacy of gun laws, it turns out that there are more questions than answers. The numbers on U.S. gun violence are clear: In 2013, the United States had many more gun-related deaths than other nations with similar standards of living. But as Meghan Rosen investigated the state of the knowledge, it became evident that now, in the United States, it’s hard to even do the science. Researchers told her that they just don’t have the data needed to answer questions about the impacts of different gun control laws.

“I thought the evidence behind well-known gun control policies would be more clear-cut,” Rosen says. But studies of background checks, waiting periods and a 1994 assault weapons ban don’t necessarily show a corresponding reduction in gun violence. Maybe such laws don’t do what lawmakers intended, but there are also confounding factors that may dilute any conclusions, Rosen reports. The 1994 ban on assault weapons, for example, stopped only sales of new weapons and didn’t apply to those already in circulation. Most disturbing to Rosen was the blocking of scientific research by Congress, which has maneuvered to stop the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health from doing or funding work that might advocate or promote gun control laws. That has effectively reduced research into the best ways to prevent gun violence.

The science that has been done on whether U.S. gun control laws reduce gun violence has been mixed. There aren’t a lot of straightforward answers to guide policy. But in this case, science has not had a fair chance to build the foundation for an evidence-based conversation. Without facts, it really is all political. Our aim is to find and report on those facts (or the lack of them), so that they can become part of the conversation.

A gut microbe collected from chinchilla droppings might be the first complex life form to lack even a shred of a supposedly universal organelle.

Monocercomonoides, a one-celled gut microbe collected from a pet chinchilla in Prague decades ago, apparently has no mitochondria, the organelles known as the cell’s power plants. Cataloging DNA in the microbe turns up none of the known genes for mitochondrial proteins. But stealing genetic material from bacteria — which survive without mitochondria — allowed the microbe to do without them, too, researchers report May 12 in Current Biology.
Mitochondria are tiny capsules that speckle the insides of all complex cells from pond scum to people, or so textbooks have said for decades. Some complex (or eukaryotic) cells look as if they have no mitochondria; so far, though, further searches have eventually detected mitochondrial remnants.

But Monocercomonoides appears to have completely done away with mitochondria and the genes to make them, says study coauthor Anna Karnkowska, an evolutionary biologist now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

This discovery marks “the most extreme mitochondrial reduction observed,” says Vladimír Hampl of Charles University in Prague, also a coauthor of the study.

The new work also supports the idea that there really is no single core function that defines mitochondria. Although commonly described as cell powerhouses, mitochondria don’t have much to do with supplying energy for cells that live in low-oxygen or no-oxygen environments, Karnkowska says. For these anaerobic cells, mitochondria can serve as more of a building studio. One supposedly essential mitochondrial function, scientists have proposed, is assembling clusters of iron and sulfur that activate a class of widely useful cell compounds.

Bacteria and other simple (prokaryotic) cells have their own assembly systems, and they don’t need to wall off the construction of iron-sulfur clusters. The newly studied Monocercomonoides carry the genes for an assembly system that looks as if it was taken from bacteria, the researchers conclude.
Researchers discovered the lack of mitochondrial genes and the bacterial substitute while working out the DNA components that encode instructions for all the proteins in the whole organism. There were notably no signs of chaperone proteins for conveying other proteins through membranes, something mitochondria do. Nor did other signature mitochondrial proteins show up.

“Pretty amazing story,” says Roland Lill of Philipps University of Marburg in Germany, who studies the way cells use iron. The new paper doesn’t change the basic idea that complex cells need very special conditions, usually created only inside mitochondria, to build their iron-sulfur clusters. “But the beauty of biology,” he says, “is that there are always amazing exceptions to basic biological rules.”

Laser blasts might help scientists tweak Earth’s thermostat by shattering the ice crystals found in cirrus clouds.

Zapping tiny ice particles in the lab forms new, smaller bits of ice, researchers report May 20 in Science Advances. Since clouds with more numerous, smaller ice particles reflect more light, the technique could combat global warming by causing the clouds to reflect more sunlight back into space, the scientists say.

Scientists from the University of Geneva and from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany injected water drops into a chilled chamber that mimics the frigid conditions high in the atmosphere, where wispy cirrus clouds live. The water froze into spherical ice particles, which the scientists walloped with short, intense bursts of laser light.
When the laser hits an ice particle, ultrahot plasma forms at its center, producing a shock wave that breaks the particle apart and vaporizes much of the ice. The excess water vapor left in the aftermath then condenses and freezes into new, smaller ice particles.
Applying this technique to clouds is “a long, long, long way in the future,” says physicist Mary Matthews of the University of Geneva, a coauthor of the study. Current laser technology is not up to the task of cloud zapping — yet. “What we are hoping for is that the advances in laser technology, which are moving faster and faster all the time, will enable high-powered, mobile lasers,” Matthews says.

But tinkering with cirrus clouds could backfire if scientists aren’t careful, says atmospheric scientist Trude Storelvmo of Yale University. The clouds also trap heat, through the greenhouse effect, so breaking up their ice particles could actually warm the Earth. The method“could potentially work, but only if you target certain types of cirrus clouds,” she says, such as those that are very thick.

There could also be warming if fossil fuels are burned to power the laser, says David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. “I think it’s really interesting research, but I’m just not seeing how it’s going to make the world a cooler place.”

U.S. 191 is one of the driving options for people headed to Grand Teton or Yellowstone National Parks. But the road also cuts through prime territory for mule deer and pronghorns. And cars and large wildlife don’t usually mix well. When they do tangle, the cars end up heavily damaged, and the animals end up dead.

In an effort to reduce this conflict, the Wyoming Department of Transportation spent nearly $10 million to install two overpasses and six underpasses, along with deer-proof fencing, on sections of the highway near Daniel Junction in 2012. The sites for the passes were chosen based, in part, on the migration patterns of mule deer and pronghorns through the area.

Shortly after the installation, the animals were seen using the crossings, and vehicle collisions appeared to decline. The project was labeled a success. Now, an analysis of the project finds just how successful it has been: Car collisions with pronghorn have disappeared entirely and those with mule deer have dropped by 79 percent, Hall Sawyer of Western Ecosystems Technology Inc., and colleagues report May 16 in the Wildlife Society Bulletin.

Two digital cameras were installed at each overpass and one at each underpass to monitor wildlife using the crossings during the spring and fall migration periods in 2012 through 2015. Thousands of animals started using the pathways, and each year, more and more animals crossed the highway using these safe paths. Over the years, 40,251 mule deer and 19,290 pronghorn made their way through the passages.

Of the mule deer passing through, 79 percent used the underpasses. But among pronghorns, 92 percent took the overpasses. This confirms something that researchers had thought would be true but never really had any data to back up. They figured that ungulates such as pronghorns that live in open areas and are heavily reliant on vision to detect predators should prefer overpasses, because the structures would allow the animals to have better vision and movement. The new finding supports this, at least for pronghorns, and shows that building overpasses, which are more expensive than paths beneath highways, really is necessary for some animals.

This area of U.S. 191 was one of the worst for wildlife vehicle collisions before the crossings were built, averaging 85 per year from 2005 to 2012. By the third year after the installation, though, collisions had dropped to just 16 per year.

When the crossings were put in place, the Department of Transportation claimed that, by preventing vehicle collisions, the project would essentially pay for itself in 20 years. But this project has been so successful, the team calculates, that a crossing could pay for itself in just 4 years. And then, of course, there’s the benefit for the wildlife itself, which can now more easily and safely move through the landscape.
The team does note that Wyoming did have to make a few adjustments to the project to accommodate human behavior. The overpasses are edged with high berms to prevent animals from seeing the highway, but those berms proved tempting to ATV users and motorcyclists. Because this activity is damaging to vegetation and could reduce effectiveness of the crossings, the Bureau of Land Management had to post signs warning people away.

And when the crossings first went up, some canny hunters figured that the overpasses were good spots to find hundreds of pronghorn; hunting is now banned within 800 meters of a wildlife overpass.

Scientists have found a new way to study how cancer cells divide and thrive in difficult-to-reach crannies of the body.

Transparent artificial membranes — just nanometers thick — can be rolled into tubes to mimic capillaries that host spreading cancer cells, researchers report in the June ACS Nano. Cells squished inside such tubes didn’t organize their internal components the way they normally do before splitting. As a result, the cells divided unevenly, potentially introducing new mutations.
Inside the body, cancer cells fight for space. Sometimes they’ll spread, or metastasize, to other organs via tight blood vessels. Although cancer cells are more likely to kill once they spread, scientists still don’t understand how the abnormal cells divide inside such tiny tubes. These cells are difficult to study in the body because they’re tucked away in hard-to-reach places. They’re challenging to study in the lab, too, because they behave differently in a petri dish than in their natural environment.

By replicating that environment more closely, this experiment gives “an appreciation for what it’s like to be a cell in a body,” says Buzz Baum, a biologist at University College London who was not involved in the work.

Other researchers have looked at cells constrained in other ways. But the nanotubes are round, just like blood vessels. They’re transparent, making it easier to visualize what’s happening inside. And it’s possible to study many cells at once by growing nearly a thousand tubes, all exactly the same size, on a chip slightly larger than a postage stamp.

When watching single human cancer cells inside the tubes through high-powered microscopes, the team noticed that the squished cells didn’t divide symmetrically. Instead of sending half the chromosomes to each new cell, some of those cells got extra genetic instructions, while others were shortchanged.

The squished cells also took longer to divide. And the protein structures that help guide the chromosomes and organelles into place before division didn’t develop correctly, says study coauthor Wang Xi, a materials scientist who did the work at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden in Germany.
Cancer cells succeed by mutating enough that they can evade capture, without becoming too mutated to keep replicating.

“A cell that makes too many mistakes will just die,” says Baum.

When cells are trapped inside blood vessels, “they become misshapen but they’re still able to divide,” says Xi, now at the National University of Singapore.

Xi and his colleagues think that a bulging of the cell membrane in response to pressure, called blebbing, might help the trapped cells divide in a slightly less distorted way. When the researchers prevented the cells from blebbing, the division was even more uneven. But because the team can’t yet explain why this would be the case, it’s too soon to say whether blebbing itself is responsible for the improved division.

Baum says he has shown similar deformities in cancer cells dividing under other types of constraints. But, he adds, it’s important to have systems that more closely replicate the body’s internal environment. Otherwise, it can be a big jump between doing tests in a petri dish and in a live animal.

Study coauthor Christine Schmidt, a biochemist at the University of Cambridge, says understanding how cancer cells manage to divide in tight quarters could eventually inspire ways to kill spreading cancer cells without hurting healthy cells.

Knuckleballs baffle baseball players with their unpredictable swerves. A new study suggests a possible cause of the pitch’s erratic flight — sudden changes in the drag force on a ball, due to a phenomenon called a drag crisis.

The result is at odds with previous research that attributed the zigzags to the effect of airflow over the baseball’s seams. Scientists report the finding July 13 in the New Journal of Physics.

Knuckleballs are well known in baseball, but similar phenomena also confound players in soccer and volleyball. Knuckleballs occur when balls sail through the air with very little spin, producing unstable flight.
In drag crisis, the thin layer of air surrounding the ball flips between turbulent and smooth flow, abruptly changing the drag forces on the ball. If the transition occurs asymmetrically, it can push the ball to one side. “This phenomenon is intermittent” and hard to predict, says study coauthor Caroline Cohen, a physicist at École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France. “We can’t know in advance [to] which side it will go.” Balls must move at a certain speed to experience a drag crisis, which may be why knuckleballs tend to be thrown slower than other pitches, the researchers suggest. While the fastest pitches can top 100 miles per hour, knuckleballs are usually closer to 60 or 70 miles per hour.

The scientists built a knuckleball machine, designed to launch a beach ball without any spin, and measured how much the ball veered off course. Then they calculated the ball’s expected motion based on the physics of the drag crisis and found that the predicted trajectories matched the experiments. The scientists’ calculations also correctly predict knuckleball-like phenomena in soccer, volleyball, cricket and baseball — but not in sports like tennis or basketball, where knuckleballs aren’t seen due to the properties of the ball, including texture, typical speed and how far it flies.

“It’s a fine piece of work,” says Alan Nathan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies the physics of baseball (SN: 3/23/13, p.32). But he is not entirely convinced by the explanation of knuckleballs. “Wind tunnel experiments seem to strongly suggest that it’s associated with the seams on the ball,” Nathan says, which can create turbulence that causes the ball to swerve.

So knuckleballs may remain as much of a challenge to explain as it is to hit them.