When Artemis I blasts off into the early morning sky over Florida, it may launch a new era of lunar science and exploration with it.
The NASA mission, scheduled to launch in the next two weeks, is the first of three planned flights aimed at landing humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. No astronauts will fly on the upcoming mission. But the flight marks the first test of the technology — the rocket, the spacesuits, the watery return to Earth — that will ultimately take people, including the first woman and the first astronaut of color, to the lunar surface.
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
The test includes the first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System, or SLS, and its Orion spacecraft, a rocket and crew capsule that have been decades in the making. These craft have been delayed, blown through their budgets and been threatened with cancellation more than once. Even within the spaceflight community, a lot of people feared they would never fly.
To see a human-capable moon rocket finally on the launchpad is “pretty astonishing,” says Casey Dreier, a Seattle-based space policy expert at the Planetary Society. “This is a reality that most of us alive on Earth today have never experienced.”
And if the Artemis program works, opportunities for science will follow.
“Because humans have to come back, alive, you have a huge opportunity to bring samples back with you,” Dreier says. Sending human astronauts may be a wedge to open the door for pure learning.
Artemis I is slated to lift off on August 29 at 8:33 a.m. EDT. The SLS rocket will lift Orion into space, where the crew capsule will separate from the rocket and continue to an orbit around the moon. After circling the moon for about two weeks, Orion will slingshot back to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. The whole mission will last about 42 days.
Orion will stay in space longer than any other human-rated spacecraft has without docking to another spaceship, like the International Space Station. At its closest approach, the spacecraft will fly about 100 kilometers above the lunar surface. It will also go up to 64,000 kilometers past the moon, farther from Earth than any spacecraft built for humans. The previous record, set by Apollo 13 in 1970, was 16,000 kilometers beyond the far side of the moon.
The Orion spacecraft’s outbound trajectory (green) will take it about 100 kilometers from the moon’s surface ( 1 ) before looping around and going into lunar orbit ( 2 ). After about two weeks circling the moon (gray), the capsule will leave lunar orbit ( 3 ) and start its return trip to Earth (blue). On its way back, the spacecraft will fire its engine, buzz the moon one more time ( 4 ) and then coast back to Earth for a watery landing.
The main goal of the mission is to prove that everything works. That includes Orion’s heat shield, which will need to protect astronauts as the capsule comes screaming through Earth’s atmosphere at 40,000 kilometers per hour and heats up to more than 2700° Celsius on its return trip. It also includes the procedure for retrieving the capsule and its crew and cargo after splashdown.
Even though it has no astronauts, the mission won’t be flying empty. Just beneath the Orion capsule are 10 CubeSats, small, simple spacecraft each about the size of a shoebox. After Orion separates from the SLS rocket, those CubeSats will go their separate ways to study the moon, the radiation environment in space and the effects of that radiation on organisms like yeast. One CubeSat will unfurl a solar sail and take off to explore a near-Earth asteroid ( SN: 8/26/11 ).
Inside the Orion capsule ride three humanoid passengers. In the commander’s seat is faux astronaut Moonikin Campos, named for Arturo Campos, a NASA engineer who played a key role in returning the Apollo 13 moon mission safely to Earth after its in-flight disaster in 1970. The “moonikin” — a mashup of moon and manikin — is based on a firefighter training rescue manikin, says NASA engineer Dustin Gohmert. Moonikin Campos will be wearing the new flight suit that was designed for the Artemis missions.
The spacesuit is like a personalized spacecraft, says Gohmert, of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It’s meant to be worn during takeoff, landing and any time there is an emergency in the cabin. The suit may look familiar to anyone who watched space shuttle launches, Gohmert says, because it does a very similar job: “It’s an orange suit that acts like a balloon that’s shaped like your body.”
The main difference is that the Orion suit, plus the accompanying helmet, seat and connection to the Orion spacecraft itself, are designed to keep a crew member alive for up to six days, the time it could take to get back to Earth if something goes wrong in deep space. Astronauts visiting the International Space Station, by contrast, were never more than a few hours from Earth.
To help make that week tolerable, each suit will be custom fit to the astronaut. “I’d like to say the word ‘comfort,’ but that’s a difficult word to use,” Gohmert says. “Nothing will be comfortable about six days in a spacesuit, no matter what you do.”
The suit and spacecraft will provide the astronauts with oxygen and scrub the astronauts’ air of carbon dioxide. The suit will also have a tube for the astronauts to eat liquid food and a way for them to collect urine and feces, although Moonikin Campos won’t test those aspects. He will be equipped with radiation sensors, while his seat will have sensors to detect acceleration and vibration throughout the mission.
The suit, helmet and seat all take safety lessons from the space shuttle Columbia disaster , Gohmert says ( SN: 9/22/2003 ). A junior engineer at the time, Gohmert worked on the suits the Columbia astronauts wore and saw the seven-member crew off to the launchpad. “It was a pivotal point for all of us, of course, who were there at the time,” he says. “If we didn’t take lessons from that, we wouldn’t be doing them justice.”
Moonikin Campos will be accompanied by a pair of mockup female torsos named Helga and Zohar. Their mission is to report back on space risks that are unique to female bodies, which have never been near the moon. NASA plans to send a woman on the first crewed Artemis flight, and women have different cancer risks from space radiation than men.
The two torsos are figures used in medicine called anthropomorphic phantoms, which are made from materials that simulate human bone, tissue and organs. “They are in principle identical twins,” said physicist Thomas Berger of the German Aerospace Center in Cologne in a briefing on August 17. But Zohar — whose name means “light” or “radiance” in Hebrew — will wear a radiation protection vest provided by the Israel Space Agency and the private company StemRad, based in Tampa, Fla.
The vest is made of a polymer designed to deflect protons that the sun releases during solar storms and has more shielding over radiation-sensitive organs like breasts and ovaries. Each phantom will also carry more than 6,000 small radiation detectors to build a 3-D picture of the dose of charged particles a female astronaut might receive on a trip to the moon and back. Comparing the radiation levels each phantom receives will help refine the vest’s design for future astronauts.
Orion will also carry two other nonhuman passengers — the British stop motion television character Shaun the sheep and Snoopy , who will serve as an indicator of zero gravity.
SLS and Orion have had a checkered history . The program goes back to 2004, when President George W. Bush proposed sending astronauts to the moon and then to Mars. In 2010, President Barack Obama canceled that plan, and then in 2017 President Donald Trump directed NASA to retrain its sights on the moon.
All the while, Congress continued to fund the development of the SLS rocket. Originally, SLS was supposed to cost $6 billion and fly in 2016. It has so far cost $23 billion on the eve of its launch in 2022.
“The rhetoric has flip-flopped a bunch,” Dreier says, as political leaders kept changing their vision for NASA’s direction. “But if you look at the actual programs, very little changed. … The whole time, the money was going to a moon rocket and a moon capsule.”
The next Artemis mission, Artemis II, is scheduled to launch in 2024 and take astronauts — real, live, human astronauts — around the moon but not to its surface.
Artemis III will be the moon landing mission. On August 19, NASA announced 13 candidate landing regions , all near the moon’s south pole , an intriguing spot that has never been visited by humans ( SN: 11/11/18 ). That mission is scheduled to launch in 2025, but there are still a lot of untested elements. Those include the actual lander, which will be built by SpaceX.
There are still a lot of things that can go wrong and a long way to go. But the Artemis I launch is an optimistic dawn for lunar science nevertheless. “The whole [human spaceflight] system has all been shifting to point at the moon,” Dreier says. “I think that’s profoundly exciting. There’s going to be really interesting lessons that happen no matter what comes out of this.”
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
Ecologists in Germany have revealed the secret navigational skills of the death’s-head hawkmoth (one shown being released after a tiny tracker was placed on its back). All it took was tagging and chasing the nocturnal insects with an airplane.
Christian Ziegler/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Sitting alone in the cockpit of a small biplane, Martin Wikelski listens for the pings of a machine by his side. The sonic beacons help the ecologist stalk death’s-head hawkmoths ( Acherontia atropos ) fluttering across the dark skies above Konstanz, Germany — about 80 kilometers north of the Swiss Alps.
The moths, nicknamed for the skull-and-crossbones pattern on their backs, migrate thousands of kilometers between northern Africa and the Alps during the spring and fall. Many migratory insects go where the wind takes them, says Ring Carde, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside who is not a member of Wikelski’s team. Death’s-head hawkmoths appear to be anything but typical.
“When I follow them with a plane, I use very little gas,” says Wikelski, of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Munich. “That shows me that they are supposedly choosing directions or areas that are probably supported by a little bit of updraft.”
A new analysis of data collected from 14 death’s-head hawkmoths suggest that these insects indeed pilot themselves, possibly relying in part on an internal compass attuned to Earth’s magnetic field. The moths not only fly along a straight path , they also stay the course even when winds change, Wikelski and colleagues report August 11 in Science .
The findings could help predict how the moths’ flight paths might shift as the globe continues warming, Wikelski says. Like many animals, death’s-head hawkmoths will probably move north in search of cooler temperatures, he suspects.
To keep tabs on the moths, Wikelski’s team glued radio transmitters to their backs, which is easier to do than one might expect. “Death’s-head hawkmoths are totally cool,” Wikelski says. They’re also huge. Weighing as much as three jellybeans, the moths are the largest in Europe. That makes attaching the tiny tags a cinch, though the moths don’t like it very much. “They talk to you, they shout at you a little bit,” he says.
Once the researchers set the newly tagged and slightly annoyed moths free, Wikelski took off after them in a plane. As the insects flew south toward the Alps, a device onboard pinged the transmitters at a frequency related to the moths’ distance from the plane.
While detailed tracking of eight of the moths allowed him to follow the insects for about 63 kilometers on average, he pursued one for just under 90 kilometers. That’s the longest distance that an insect has been continuously tracked, he says. “It’s outrageously crazy work,” he says of the night flights at low altitude. “It’s also a little dangerous and it’s just showing it’s possible.”
Anil Oza is the summer 2022 science writing intern at Science News . He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in neurobiology and science communication.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
Lionfish certainly aren’t the fastest predators on the reef, but new research suggests that they can catch swift prey through pure tenacity, gliding slowly in pursuit until the perfect moment to strike.
Festooned with long striped spines, lionfish can make their surreal silhouettes disappear against a coral reef backdrop long enough to stalk and ambush small fish. But the predators also feed in open water where they’re more visible.
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
Curious about how the predators hunt in plain view, Ashley Peterson, a comparative biomechanist at the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues placed red lionfish ( Pterois volitans ) in a tank and recorded them as they chased down a green chromis ( Chromis viridis ), a small reef fish.
In 14 of the 23 trials, the lionfish successfully gulped down their prey. They also had a high rate of strike success, capturing the chromis in 74 percent of the trials where the lionfish made a strike attempt.
On average, the chromis swam about twice as fast as the lionfish. But many still fell victim to what Peterson and biomechanist Matthew McHenry, also at the University of California, Irvine, call a persistent-predation strategy — the lionfish swim toward a chromis, aiming for its current position, not the direction to intercept its path. And the lionfish’s pursuit is steady and incessant, the team found.
“If they’re interested in something and they want to try to eat it, they just seem to not give up,” Peterson says.
In contrast, the prey fish does bursts of fast swimming along with short pauses.
“Over time, all those pauses add up and allow this lionfish to get closer and closer and closer,” Peterson says. Then the slightest mistake or bit of distraction can doom the prey to the lionfish’s suction-creating jaws.
“This is a good example of ‘slow and steady wins the race,’” says Bridie Allan, a marine ecologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand who was not involved in the research. It would be interesting to see how the unwavering chase plays out in the wild, where there are no spatial restrictions like in a tank, she says.
If lionfish do use the strategy in the wild and prey react similarly, it’s possible that the tactic could contribute to the destructive potential of their invasion in the Caribbean, Western Atlantic and the Mediterranean , where the fish are devouring native ocean animals and disrupting food webs ( SN : 7/6/16 ) . But other factors, such as the lionfish’s huge appetite or prolific reproduction, could be more influential on invasiveness.
The persistent-predation strategy may not be exclusive to lionfish, Peterson says. Other predatory fish groups with sluggish swimmers — like straw-shaped trumpetfish ( Aulostomus spp.) — could also use it.
In a natural setting, prey that are dodging lionfish and other slow swimmers may have more places to hide, Peterson says. But there are inherent risks in a busy, distracting environment too. “If you’re near a reef or up against the coral, you could get pinned if you aren’t really paying attention,” she says. That’s when determined and hungry slowpokes may have the upper hand.
Jake Buehler is a freelance science writer, covering natural history, wildlife conservation and Earth’s splendid biodiversity, from salamanders to sequoias. He has a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
As part of a small clinical trial, Michel Roccati uses an implanted electrical stimulator to activate his spine, allowing him to move around without a wheelchair after his spinal cord injury.
By his count, Michel Roccati is on his third life, at least. In the first, he was a fit young man riding his motorcycle around Italy. A 2017 crash in the hills near Turin turned him into the second man, one with a severe spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Today, the third Michel Roccati works out in his home gym in Turin, gets around with a walker and climbs stairs to visit a friend in a second-story apartment. Today, he says, his life is “completely different than it was before.”
Roccati, age 31, is one of three men who received experimental spinal cord stimulators as part of a clinical trial. All three had completely paralyzed lower bodies. The results have been a stunning success, just as Roccati had hoped. “I fixed in my mind how I was at the end of the project,” he says. “I saw myself in a standing position and walking. At the end, it was exactly what I expected.”
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
The technology that Roccati and others use , described in the February Nature Medicine , is an implanted array of electrodes that sits next to the spinal cord below the spot severed by the injury. Electrical signals from the device replace the missing signals from the brain, prompting muscles to move in ways that allow stepping, climbing stairs and even throwing down squats in the gym.
Today, Roccati spends time working at the consulting company he owns with his brother and sharing his ongoing physical accomplishments with researchers. “Every week we get a WhatsApp from Michel doing something new,” says study coauthor Robin Demesmaeker, a neural engineer at NeuroRestore, a research and treatment center in Lausanne, Switzerland.
These results and others prove that, with the right technology, people with severe spinal cord injury may be able to stand up and walk again. It’s a remarkable development.
But the really big news in this area goes far beyond walking. Many people with spinal cord injuries deal with problems that aren’t as obvious as paralysis. Low blood pressure, sexual dysfunction and trouble breathing or controlling hands, arms, bladder and bowels can all be huge challenges for people with paralysis as they navigate their daily lives. “These are the things that actually matter to people with spinal cord injuries,” says John Chernesky, who has a spinal cord injury. He works at the nonprofit Praxis Spinal Cord Institute in Vancouver, where he makes sure the priorities and voices of people living with spinal cord injuries are heard and addressed in research.
By figuring out the language of the spinal cord, researchers hope to learn how to precisely fill in the missing commands, bridging the gap left by the injury. The work may pave the way to treat many of these problems flagged by patients as important.
“The research field is changing … embracing all these other aspects,” says neuroscientist Kim Anderson Erisman of MetroHealth Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Already, early clinical trials are tackling the less obvious troubles that come with spinal cord injuries. Some of the same scientists that helped Roccati recently showed that similar spinal cord stimulation eased a man’s chronic low blood pressure. Other researchers are improving bladder and bowel function with stimulation. Still more work is focused on hand movements. The technology, and the understanding of how to use it to influence the nerves in the spinal cord, is moving quickly.
Not coincidentally, the way the research is being conducted is shifting, too, says Anderson Erisman, who has a spinal cord injury. “Scientists know the textbook things about spinal cord injuries,” she says. “But that’s not the same thing as living one day in the life with a spinal cord injury.” Involving people with such injuries in studies — as true partners and collaborators, not just subjects — is pushing research further and faster. Such collaboration, she says, “will only make your program stronger.”
These efforts are in the early stages. The stimulators are not available to the vast majority of people who might benefit from them. Only a handful of people have participated in these intense clinical trials so far. It’s unclear how well the results will hold up in larger trials with a greater diversity of volunteers. Also unclear is how attainable the technology will be for people who need it. For now, the research often requires large teams of experts, typically in big cities, with patients needing surgery and months of training the body to respond.
Still, the promise of spinal cord stimulation extends beyond spinal cord injuries. Stimulating nerves on the spinal cord could help people with symptoms from strokes, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and other disorders in which signals between the brain and body get garbled. Initially, “hardly anyone wanted to believe these [improvements] were happening,” says V. Reggie Edgerton, an integrative biologist at the University of Southern California’s Neurorestoration Center and the Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center in Downey, Calif. “But now, they’re happening so regularly that it’s undeniable.”
Not so long ago, a serious spinal cord injury was a death sentence. “Prior to World War II, the life expectancy of a person with a spinal cord injury was measured in days or weeks,” Chernesky says. If the injury didn’t kill a person directly, they’d often succumb to respiratory distress or blood poisoning from a bladder infection. “If you lived six months, that was impressive,” he says.
The spinal cord ferries signals between brain and body. Signals from the brain tell leg muscles to contract for a step, blood vessels to expand and the bladder to hold steady until a bathroom is within reach. Signals from the body to the brain carry sensations of moving, pain and touch. When the spinal cord is injured, as it is for an estimated 18,000 or so people each year in the United States alone, these signals are blocked.
In the United States, an estimated 18,000 people suffer a spinal cord injury each year. Vehicle crashes and falls are the most common causes, data collected from 2015 to 2021 show. Violence, particularly gunshot wounds, and sports accidents are also common reasons.
Researchers have long dreamed of repairing the damage by bridging the gap, perhaps with stem cells or growth factors that can beckon nerve cells to grow across the scar. The idea of using electricity to stimulate nerves below the site of the injury came, in part, from an accidental observation. In the mid-1970s, scientists were testing spinal cord stimulation as a treatment for severe and chronic pain. One participant happened to be a woman who was paralyzed from multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the body attacks its own nerves. With the device implanted on her spinal cord to ease pain, she was able to move again. That surprising discovery helped spark interest in spinal cord stimulation as a way to restore movement.
Earlier this year, Demesmaeker and his colleagues, including Grégoire Courtine of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, published the achievements of Roccati and two other men. All three men had been unable to move their lower limbs or feel any sensations there.
Most previous studies had relied on an electrode array designed and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat chronic pain. That device has electrodes that are implanted along the spinal cord, where their electrical jolts can ease long-term pain in the back and legs. But Roccati and the two other men received a specially designed device that was slightly longer and wider than that earlier device, able to cover more of the spinal cord’s nerve roots and provide more stimulation options.
Several weeks after surgery, the men visited the laboratory in Lausanne to start searching for the optimal stimulation settings. The timing, pattern and strength of the electrode signals were adjusted to allow Roccati to move. “We found a good sequence with the engineers that allowed me to stand up and see my body standing in the mirror in front of me,” Roccati says. “It was a very emotional moment. A standing ovation appeared from everyone in there.”
That first day, he took steps with the stimulation while being supported by a harness. That quick improvement is important, says biomedical engineer Ismael Seáñez of Washington University in St. Louis. “From day one, you can start training.” After months of intense practice (four to five sessions a week for one to three hours at a time), Roccati could walk without the harness, using only a walker.
The men in the trial have all been getting stronger, even when the stimulation is off. That suggests that there’s some sort of repair happening in the body, perhaps due to stronger neural pathways in the spinal cord. Just how the stimulation repairs the spinal cord is one of the big remaining mysteries.
“It’s exciting to see,” Seáñez says. “But it’s a first step in all of the different challenges faced by people with spinal cord injuries.”
Nerves in each spinal cord region carry signals to and from different body parts. That means the outcome of an injury depends on its location, with lower injuries affecting less of the body.
One important problem with paralysis is low blood pressure. When the spinal cord is damaged, the signals that keep blood vessels constricted and blood pressure normal can get lost. Low blood pressure can leave people mentally foggy, exhausted and prone to fainting, not ideal conditions for physical rehab work. Blood pressure can also rise or fall quickly, upping the risk for stroke and heart attack. That’s a huge problem, says Aaron Phillips, who studies the physiology of the nervous system at the University of Calgary in Canada. “Blood pressure is one of the vital signs of life,” he says.
So Phillips, Courtine and colleagues decided to implant a spinal cord stimulator to see if it would help a man who had low blood pressure due to a spinal cord injury. When the machine was on, his blood pressure rose toward normal levels , the researchers reported last year in Nature . When the stimulation was turned off, the man’s blood pressure dropped.
The scientists homed in on an area in the mid-back, just around thoracic segment 11 in the human spine. That spot had the biggest effect on the man’s blood pressure. “We now know that there’s a key area in the spinal cord that, when stimulated, controls neural circuits and the connected blood vessels to elevate and decrease blood pressure,” Phillips says.
The system the researchers developed operated like a thermostat with a set point. In experiments with the man on a tilting table, monitors sensed low blood pressure when the table mimicked standing up. That triggered the stimulators, which in turn told the blood vessels to bring the pressure back up to an acceptable level.
The results represent “a huge pinnacle of my career,” Phillips says. But many challenges remain. The system used in the study in Nature needs tweaking, and the long-term effects of such stimulation aren’t known. Phillips and his colleagues hope to answer these questions. With funding from DARPA, a U.S. Department of Defense agency that invests in breakthrough technologies, the team is working on a wireless blood pressure monitor, and an upcoming clinical trial aims to enroll about 20 people with spinal cord injuries that affect their blood pressure.
In 2004, Anderson Erisman and her colleagues asked people with spinal cord injuries to share their priorities for regaining function. For people with quadriplegia, who have impairments from the neck down, hand and arm function were most important. For people with paraplegia, who have use of their arms and upper body, sexual function was the highest priority. Both groups emphasized the desire for restored bladder and bowel function , Anderson Erisman and colleagues reported in the Journal of Neurotrauma . Walking was not at the top of either group’s wish list.
That’s no surprise to Chernesky, who uses a wheelchair. “The general population looks at people with spinal cord injuries rolling around in wheelchairs, and they say, ‘Oh, poor bugger. I bet he wishes he could walk,’ ” he says. “They have no idea that quite rapidly after an injury, walking becomes a lower priority.”
Chernesky himself recently participated in a clinical trial designed to externally stimulate the cervical spine, in his neck, to improve arm and hand movements. The device he tested sent signals to the spinal cord through the skin — a less invasive approach than surgery, but one that may sacrifice some specificity compared with implanted versions. Throughout that process, Chernesky noticed improvements in energy, sleep, strength, core stability and movement of both upper and lower limbs.
Other scientists are working on similar ways to externally stimulate the spinal cord to improve people’s autonomic nervous system. That system keeps your blood pressure steady, makes you sweat when it’s hot and tells you when you need to head to a bathroom.
In studies at the University of Southern California and elsewhere, Edgerton and colleagues have recently shown that external stimulation improved bowel function . He and others have also seen stimulators improve bladder function in people with spinal cord injuries and strokes. “We know some subjects can now feel when their bladder is full,” says Edgerton, who started a company called SpineX in 2019 to develop the technology further. That newfound sensation gives people enough time to get to the bathroom. “This doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen in every individual,” he cautions. “But it happens a lot.”
The next phase of research will be boring — in the best possible way. Large, standardized studies will need to address some mundane but crucial questions, such as who might benefit from stimulation, how much improvement can be made for certain symptoms and whether the therapy causes any extra trouble for some people. “This type of technology will go from a very exciting proof of concept to standard clinical care,” Seáñez predicts.
Over his nearly 30 years of living with a spinal cord injury, Chernesky has witnessed enough so-called scientific breakthroughs to be skeptical. He’s immune to hype. But he admits that he’s excited by this moment. “Because now we can reverse paralysis,” he says. That doesn’t mean people are going to suddenly be tap dancing like Fred Astaire or playing a Chopin concerto anytime soon, he’s quick to add. “But every little bit matters.”
Roccati, for one, no longer has to recruit friends to carry him in his wheelchair up stairs to socialize. He feels more energetic. He is working on his summer six-pack abs. He has transformed, again, into someone new. “Now, after the implant, I am another type of person,” he says, a more optimistic version of himself.
This technology is still a long way from helping everyone who might benefit. Still, these stimulators hold great promise. “I am quite hopeful, almost certain, that these devices are going to become available, and there will be a lot of people buying them,” Chernesky says. “When you have nothing, and you can get a little bit back — how good is that?”
Laura Sanders is the neuroscience writer. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Southern California.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
In these images of pigs’ kidneys, green stain shows actin, a protein used by active cells. Cells appear brighter and healthier after being hooked up to a system called OrganEx (right) compared with cells in a pig connected to a traditional perfusion method called ECMO (left).
David Andrijevic, Zvonimir Vrselja, Taras Lysyy, Shupei Zhang/Sestan Laboratory/Yale School of Medicine
Call it cellular life support for dead pigs. A complex web of pumps, sensors and artificial fluid can move oxygen, nutrients and drugs into pigs’ bodies, preserving cells in organs that would otherwise deteriorate after the heart stops pumping.
In earlier work, scientists built a machine they named BrainEx, which kept aspects of cellular life chugging along in decapitated, oxygen-deprived pig brains ( SN : 4/17/19 ). The new system, called OrganEx, pushes the approach to organs beyond the brain.
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
“We wanted to see if we could replicate our findings in other damaged organs across the body, and potentially open the door for future transplantation studies,” says Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist at Yale University School of Medicine.
OrganEx aims to do the job of hearts and lungs by pumping an artificial fluid throughout pig bodies. Mixed in a 1–1 ratio with the animals’ own blood, the lab-made fluid has ingredients that provide fresh oxygen and nutrients, prevent clots and protect against inflammation and cell death.
Anesthetized pigs were put into cardiac arrest and then left alone for an hour. Then some pigs were placed on an existing medical system, called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. This adds oxygen to the pigs’ own blood and pumps it into their body. Other pigs received the OrganEx treatment.
Compared with ECMO, OrganEx provided more fluid to tissues and organs, the researchers found. Fewer cells died, and some tissues, including kidneys, even showed cellular signs of repairing themselves from the damage done after the heart stopped.
A similar system might one day be useful for protecting human organs destined to be donated. But for now, “there is still lots of work to be done in our animal model,” Sestan says.
Laura Sanders is the neuroscience writer. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Southern California.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
Bright, dusty spokes connect the inner and outer rings of the Cartwheel Galaxy in this new James Webb Space Telescope image, giving fresh insight into rare double-ringed galaxies. The two galaxies to the left are neighbors.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and Webb ERO Production Team
The Cartwheel Galaxy, so called because of its bright inner ring and colorful outer ring, lies about 500 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers think it used to be a large spiral like the Milky Way, until a smaller galaxy smashed through it. In earlier observations with other telescopes, the space between the rings appeared shrouded in dust.
Now, JWST’s infrared cameras have peered through the dust and found previously unseen stars and structure ( SN: 7/11/22 ). The new image shows sites of intense star formation throughout the galaxy that were triggered by the collision’s aftereffects. Some of those new stars are forming in spokelike patterns between the central ring and the outer ring, a process that is not well understood.
Ring galaxies are rare, and galaxies with two rings are even more unusual. That strange shape means that the long-ago collision set up multiple waves of gas rippling back and forth in the galaxy left behind. It’s like if you drop a pebble in the bathtub, says JWST project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “First you get this ring, then it hits the walls of your bathtub and reflects back, and you get a more complicated structure.”
The effect probably means that the Cartwheel Galaxy has a long road to recovery ahead — and astronomers don’t know what it will look like in the end.
As for the smaller galaxy that caused all this mayhem, it didn’t stick around to get its picture taken. “It’s gone off on its merry way,” Pontoppidan says.
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
