Throughout this year, several high-ranking Chinese officials have led delegations to visit Egypt, reaching a high degree of consensus on strengthening bilateral cultural exchange and promoting tourism cooperation. They have put forward several practical measures to deepen exchange and cooperation between the two countries. As exchanges between the two countries deepen, an increasing number of Chinese tourists are choosing to travel to Egypt - this has kept Abbas Sayed Abbas, a Chinese-speaking Egyptian tourist guide, extremely busy.

Over the past two decades, Abbas has witnessed the continuous growth of cultural exchange between China and Egypt, and inspired by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), he also wants to do more to foster mutual understanding, people-to-people connections, and cultural integration between the two nations.

'Chinese culture fever'

"I had excellent grades in high school and could choose any university and study any language, but I told my older brother that I wanted to learn Chinese. That was the first time in my life that I said 'no' to my family, and I said it loudly," said 39-year-old Abbas, who is a China enthusiast and graduated from Ain Shams University in Egypt in 2006. Initially, when he chose to study Chinese, his family did not have high hopes.

After graduating from high school, Abbas and his brother, who was studying Russian, went together to check their exam results. On the way there, Abbas told his brother that he wanted to learn Chinese and work as a tourist guide for Chinese visitors. Abbas recalled that at that moment, his brother gave him a skeptical glance and said, "Chinese is too difficult. Don't learn Chinese; you should study Russian like me."

At that time in 2002, there were few Chinese tourists traveling to Egypt, and opportunities for translation work were also fleeting. 

Abbas told the Global Times that when he decided to learn Chinese, he didn't think too much about it and didn't aim to make a lot of money. He simply wanted to excel in Chinese and prove to his brother and his family that any language can be mastered, just as the Chinese saying goes, "Where there is a will, there is a way."

In 2022, Egypt launched a pilot project for Chinese language education in secondary schools, marking the official inclusion of Chinese teaching in Egypt's national education system. Abbas said that Egypt now has 12 public secondary schools offering Chinese education and nearly 30 universities offering Chinese subjects. They have also established four Confucius Institutes, two Confucius Classrooms, and two Luban Workshops. The "Chinese language craze" and "Chinese culture craze" in Egypt are on the rise.

As cultural exchanges between China and Egypt have deepened, Abbas increasingly feels that he made the right choice all those years ago. Starting from his sophomore year, he worked as a local Chinese tourist guide, welcoming Chinese tourists. 

Even though there weren't as many Chinese tourists back then, during the Chinese New Year, Chinese tour groups would visit Egypt, Abbas said, and he would seize the opportunity to work as their guide and translator to make some extra money.

'Happiest person in the world'

In 2010, Abbas applied and was hired as the assistant director of the China Cultural Center in Cairo. While introducing Chinese culture to the Egyptian people, he also received esteemed guests from China, such as serving as a translator for Chinese director Zhang Yimou in 2012.

Among these experiences, the most unforgettable one for him was welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor in 2016. Abbas told reporters that he in Egypt felt the energy of "Chinese Dream" put forward by President Xi - the dream to help ordinary people achieve their own dreams. Abbas had only seen President Xi on television before and was very eager to meet him in person. At the Karnak Temple entrance, President Xi invited Abbas for taking a photo with him and shook hands with Abbas, making Abbas felt like the "happiest person in the world."

Abbas mentioned that following the pandemic, Chinese tourists have started to return, gradually reviving local tourism economy. 

BRI brings new vitality

In addition to tourism and cultural exchanges, China and Egypt have cemented partnerships across a number of fields, including industry, energy, telecommunications, and infrastructure construction. The BRI is deeply aligned with Egypt Vision 2030. In addition to projects like the Central Business District in the new administrative capital, major projects like the New Alamein City and Egypt's first electrified light rail transit system are progressing on schedule. 

In Abbas' view, the BRI is about "connecting" countries. China first successfully "connected" itself and then extended these modern, advanced connections to the world. Abbas said the BRI not only revives the Silk Road but also connects the civilizations of the world, which serve as the greatest achievement of the BRI.

The BRI has brought many benefits to Egypt and has made a significant contribution to the world. In the long run, the great significance of this initiative lies in its embodiment of the precious value of building a community with a shared future for mankind, Abbas told the Global Times.

Four out of the total nine of the first batch international experiments are expected to be sent to the China Space Station in 2023, according to the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) Acting Director Niklas Hedman in a recent interview, who also lauded the space station as "truly international" and one that offers an "absolutely fantastic opportunity for researchers around the world."

The UNOOSA official's remarks over the weekend came following China's completion of the assembly of the country's first permanent space station and all space launch missions scheduled at the construction stage with the latest Shenzhou-15 manned spaceflight mission. 

Chinese space observers said that the country's genuine openness in sharing the use of its mega space infrastructure greatly contrasts with and offsets the current turbulence around the world, which is result of certain countries' political games of forcing countries to take a side in bloc confrontation even in space, 

According to Hedman, nine projects - including 23 research institutions and universities from a variety of countries across all five regional groups of the world - were selected. Seven of those projects are currently in development and four of those teams could deliver their experiments to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) for launch during 2023.

Headman said that "it [the China Space Station] is there and it will be open to international projects and researchers. It is truly international in that sense…therefore it is an amazing achievement for China's national space program but also internationally."

"It is an absolutely fantastic opportunity for researchers around the world to use the China Space Station," he said. 

The Global Times previously reported that the CMSA and the UN Committee on Peaceful Use of Outer Space (COPUOS) announced in June 2019 that these nine international projects in aerospace medicine, life sciences and biotechnology, microgravity physics and combustion science, astronomy and other emerging technologies are from 17 countries and 23 research bodies, including Polar-2, a Gamma-ray burst polarimetry project jointly proposed by Switzerland, Poland, Germany and China, and a spectroscopic investigation of nebular gas by India and Russia. 

Projects from Italy, Japan, Peru, Mexico and Saudi Arabia were also selected as the first batch of China Space Station awardees under the UNOOSA cooperation project going by the Access to Space for All, the UN office official website shows. 

Chinese space observers said that compared with the highly exclusive cooperative mechanism of the International Space Station (ISS), the China Space Station adopts true openness under a UN framework.

For the ISS - a partnership among NASA, Russia, Canada, the European Space Agency and Japan that has been in orbit for more than two decades - laboratory resources are split among the partner nations, which then offer their scientists opportunities to send experiments to the space station. However scientists living in countries that are outside of the partnership are generally shut out of the ISS, the New York Times reported on December 4.

China's Space Station is the first of its kind to be open to all UN member states. Let us hope that greater success is still to come for China's manned space program and that China's space station will soon become a "home in space" for all, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told a routine press conference on November 1.

China sends only fair and sincere invitations to the rest of the world to come on board its space station, especially for those developing countries that fail to meet the high threshold yet have great space development ambitions. China cares and hopes that experiments of these countries will yield breakthroughs in terms of livelihood improvement in sectors such as communications and agriculture, Wang Ya'nan, chief editor of Beijing-based Aerospace Knowledge magazine, told the Global Times on Sunday. 

The world may be challenged by uncertainties and great turbulence caused by political games staged by the US to force countries to take a side in the camp confrontation, but eventually China's true openness and inclusiveness will prevail in space cooperation, Wang predicted. 

Wang speculated that although the US-led project failed to make it to the first batch of international projects on the China Space Station, the door of future cooperation is still open. "It is a result of scientific consideration, rather than a political decision in the sense that the US has closed the way to invite China to the ISS cooperation."

Apart from the genuine openness, the technology advantages of the newer China Space Station also greatly attract researchers from around the world, Sun Jianchao, the technology manager with the Chinese team of the POLAR-2, told the Global Times on Sunday.

The China Space Station has a high-volume and high-speed data transmission capability and a powerful in-orbit computing capability provided by the supercomputer on the space station, which facilitates space experiments, Sun explained. 

During the primary stage of the selection work, 42 applications were received from scientists of 27 countries and regions in Asia, Europe and North and South America. Seventy-two international cooperation teams and 258 research fellows submitted applications.

Sun recalled that it took the four-nation applicants about one year to attain the approval to come on board in 2019. 

The POLAR-2 experiment is expected to be sent to the China Space Station by around 2025, via the Tianzhou cargo spacecraft. It will be then installed outside the cabin of the Wentian lab module with the help of taikonauts and the smart robotic arms, according to Sun.

Data will be shared among project participants in an undifferentiated manner, Sun said. 

China's manned submersible Shenhai Yongshi (Deep-sea Warrior) placed underwater permanent survey markers at the core areas of two Ming Dynasty-era sunken ships in the South China Sea after conducting preliminary search and image recordings on Saturday, opening a new chapter in China's deep-sea archaeology.

An underwater archaeological investigation formally kicked off on Saturday for the two ships discovered last October in the South China Sea, said China's National Cultural Heritage Administration on Sunday.

The two ships were discovered in October 2022 in the South China Sea at a depth of about 1,500 meters. One site is mainly composed of about 100,000 porcelain relics. Based on a preliminary survey, the ship may have sunk during the Emperor Zhengde period (1506-21) of the Ming Dynasty. 

The other site has a large number of timber  logs, and the ship is believed to have been carrying overseas cargoes to China, dating back to the Emperor Hongzhi period (1488-1505) of the Ming Dynasty.

Archaeologists said the systematic archaeological investigation will last for about a year in three phases. 

The first phase began on Saturday and will last until early June. Manned submersibles will be released to determine the distribution range of the sites for multi-angle and comprehensive data collection and archaeological recording, and to extract specimens of representative cultural relics and samples of the seabed sediment.

The second and third phases are planned to be implemented from August to September in 2023 and from March to April in 2024. After the archaeological surveys, the next step will be proposed on the basis of the sunken ships' status and technical conditions.

The investigation of the two shipwrecks will provide evidence of ancient Chinese people's activity in the South China Sea, making breakthroughs in the study of Chinese maritime history, ceramic history, overseas trade history and the Maritime Silk Road.

Shenzhou-16 crew members Jing Haipeng, Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao successfully completed all the assigned tasks and safely returned to the space research module with the support of the robotic arm after about eight hours of their first extravehicular activity (EVA), the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSA) said on Thursday.

During the spacewalk, the astronauts completed tasks including bracket installation and lifting of panorama camera B in the core module and the unlocking and lifting of panorama cameras A and B of the Mengtian lab module.

Jing and Zhu went out for the spacewalk. Zhu has become the first space flight engineer to perform an EVA.

The Shenzhou-16 crew will also carry out a number of space science experiments and conduct multiple EVAs.

The Shenzhou-16 crew is composed of three types of astronauts: commander, flight engineer, and payload expert. They have been in orbit for 51 days since they entered the space station on May 30.

According to the CMSA, the radiation biology exposure experiment is significant for ensuring a healthy long-term stay in orbit for astronauts and promoting China's crewed lunar landing plans.

With the installation of gas cylinders in the electric propulsion system in orbit, this is the first time the "gas exchange" method has been used to complete the replenishment of electric propellants for long-term orbit maintenance of the space station, making its operation more economic and efficient.

The CMSA said the Shenzhou-16 crew are in good condition, and the space station is running stably.

China launched the Shenzhou-16 manned spacecraft on May 30, sending three astronauts to its space station for a five-month mission.

In a new campaign to combat new types of illegal activities across telecommunications networks, as well as to punish cross-border illegal activities, the Xi'an police from Northwest China's Shaanxi Province on Wednesday issued a disciplinary notice and disclosed information regarding more than 20 individuals from Chang'an district who are moving across areas such as northern Myanmar, the Golden Triangle, the United Arab Emirates, and Cambodia.

Starting from the date of the notice, these individuals who are illegally located overseas and involved in high-risk fraud are required to voluntarily return to China through proper channels before September 10, 2023. Within 14 days prior to their return, they must report to the local police station in their registered residence on their own or through their family members, the notice said.

Family members of those who are still stranded overseas and involved in high-risk fraud should actively cooperate with the public security organs, promptly contact and urge these individuals to return to China and surrender themselves. Those who voluntarily surrender and truthfully confess to their illegal activities may receive lenient or mitigated punishments according to law. Those with minor offenses may be exempted from punishment according to the law. However, those who persist in their refusal to return to China after the deadline will be subject to investigation and pursuit through legal means, the notice warned.

Xi'an police stated that the over 20 individuals involved in fraud will be publicly exposed and strictly punished according to the law. Their household registration will be frozen, and all household registration-related services, such as identity cards and driving licenses, will be suspended. Communication and banking services will be strictly controlled. All mobile phone cards will be deactivated, and non-counter services of their bank cards will be suspended. All government policy subsidies, social welfare benefits, and national assistance guarantees will be suspended. 

Moreover, when these individuals or their direct three-generation family members undergo political reviews for joining the Communist Youth League, the Communist Party of China, joining the military, or applying for civil service positions or positions in public institutions, their reviews will be strictly conducted in accordance with the law and regulations.

Furthermore, the Xi'an police emphasized in the notice that any unit, organization, or individual that provides safe harbor, financial resources, transportation, or information, or engages in forgery, cover-ups, or other facilitation to help these individuals involved in overseas illegal activities evade punishment will be held legally accountable.

Waterlily beetles (Galerucella nymphaeae) literally fly across water, high speed videography and a bit of mathematical modeling reveals.

The beetles have a combination of hydrophobic hairs that line their legs and hydrophilic claws that grip the surface of water without getting too wet. Prior to “take off,” the insects lift their middle pair of legs. Then, the insects beat their wings extremely fast and fly horizontally across a pool of water. It looks a lot like water-skiing.
In lab tests, waterlily beetles reached 0.5 meters per second — without an active brake system. Surface tension keeps the insects afloat, they found. The insects create ripples in the water, which generates drag at speeds greater than 0.23 meters per second (more drag than when the beetles just fly through air). Thus, for these beetles, skiing across a pond at breakneck speeds costs a lot of energy and requires greater wing thrust than normal flying. However, this mode of getting around could be more advantageous for foraging and help them avoid underwater predators like fish, the researchers speculate March 2 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Ancient Assyrians sent their dead to the afterlife with fearsome companions: turtles. Excavations of a burial pit in southeastern Turkey revealed skeletons of a woman and a child, plus 21 turtles, a team led by archaeologist Rémi Berthon of France’s National Museum of Natural History reports in the February Antiquity.

The burial is part of an Assyrian site called Kavuşan Höyük that dates to between 700 and 300 B.C. The turtle bonanza included shells from one spur-thighed tortoise (Testudo graeca) and three Middle Eastern terrapins (Mauremys caspica), plus bones from 17 Euphrates soft-shelled turtles (Rafetus euphraticus). Butchering marks on the R. euphraticus bones indicate that the turtles may have been eaten in a funerary feast, Berthon and his colleagues write.
Back then, turtles were not a regular meal in Mesopotamia. Turtle bones, however, were thought to ward off evil. The abundance of R. euphraticus turtles, a notoriously aggressive species, in this burial pit suggests the deceased had high social status.

To ancient Assyrians, these ferocious reptiles probably represented eternal life and served as psychopomps — mythical guides to the afterlife, the team writes.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on 4/15/16 to note that turtles were a rare part of the Mesopotamian diet.

Earth sciences reporter Thomas Sumner recalls seeing the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth when he was in high school. The climate science presented in the movie didn’t surprise him too much — a science-minded student, he had already read about many of the issues. But, he says, the film started a broader dialog about global warming.
“People started caring,” he says, noting that he remembers his own family talking about it (and not always harmoniously) at the time. Revisiting the dramatic predictions made in the film proved an interesting journey for Sumner.
“The main criticism I heard was that the film had watered down the science,” he says. Climate science is amazingly complex, and so is modeling effects of change — from how much sea level might rise to how a warming climate could alter hurricane patterns. Even more striking to Sumner were the sheer number of uncertainties that remain. Those uncertainties are not about whether the climate is changing, but about the details of what such changes will mean for the oceans, the atmosphere and the living things on land — and when the various dominoes might fall. Telling the future is hard, especially about interrelated complex systems, but as Sumner reveals in his story, scientists have made steady progress in the last decade.

Another interesting point is the documentary’s (and Al Gore’s) role in politicizing climate science, which is fair to assume was one of the aims. “Gore was polarizing,” Sumner says. “He created a conversation about global warming, but he also cemented it as a political issue.”

Teeth and gums are neither political nor talked much about. But, as contributing correspondent Laura Beil reports, scientists studying a possible role for gum disease in what ails the body must contend with a slew of uncertainties, not unlike those faced by climate scientists. The bacteria that cause gum disease, some studies find, can travel to the arteries, heart, brain and other sites where they can cause havoc. Not all studies agree, and proving the oral bacteria–disease link beyond a doubt may not yet be within scientists’ grasp. But the fix is relatively simple, even if avoided by many: frequent flossing and regular visits to the dentist.

Keeping things simple was the underlying goal of the team of scientists attempting to build, from scratch, a synthetic organism with the least possible number of genes, as Tina Hesman Saey reports. After many tries, the effort succeeded, but not without first humbling the researchers involved. In the initial attempts, their computer-designed minimal genomes didn’t take. What ultimately worked was putting back some of the unknowns — genes with no known cellular job to do. Only then did the DNA inserted into the shell of a microbial cell yield a synthetic microbe capable of growing and reproducing.

Telling a good story about complex science, whether in a film or in a report on the latest research, requires some simplification. But sometimes the most interesting part lies in the uncertainty.

Our galaxy is teeming with planets. Over the last 25 years, astronomers have cataloged about 2,000 worlds in 1,300 systems scattered around our stellar neighborhood. While most of these exoplanets look nothing like Earth (and in some cases, like nothing that orbits our sun), the bonanza of alien worlds implies a tantalizing possibility: There is a lot of real estate out there suitable for life.

We haven’t explored every corner of our solar system. Life might be lurking beneath the surface of some icy satellites or in the soil of Mars. For such locales, we could conceivably visit and look for anything wriggling or replicating. But we can’t travel (yet) to worlds orbiting remote suns dozens of light-years away. An advanced alien civilization might transmit detectable radio signals, but primitive life would not be able to announce its presence to the cosmos.
At least not intentionally.
On Earth, life alters the atmosphere. If plants and critters weren’t around to keep churning out oxygen and methane, those gases would quickly vanish. Water, carbon dioxide, methane, oxygen and ozone are examples of “biosignatures,” key markers of a planet crawling with life as we know it. Setting aside questions about how recognizable alien life might be, detecting biosignatures in the atmosphere of an exoplanet would give astronomers the first strong clue that we are not alone.
Biosignatures aren’t proof of thriving ecosystems. Ultraviolet light from a planet’s sun can zap water molecules and create a stockpile of oxygen; seawater filtering through rocks can produce methane. “We’ll never be able to say 100 percent that a planet has life,” says Sarah Rugheimer, an astrophysicist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. But astronomers hope that, given enough information about an exoplanet and the star it orbits, they can build a case for a world where sunlight and geology aren’t enough to explain its chemistry — one where life is a viable possibility. Finding a planet similar to Earth is probably still decades away, but thanks to a couple of upcoming telescopes, astronomers might be on the verge of spying on habitable worlds around nearby stars.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will launch in 2017 on a quest to detect many of the exoplanets that orbit the stars closest to us. One year later, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch and peek inside some of these newfound atmospheres. With their powers combined, TESS and James Webb could identify nearby planets that are good candidates for life. These worlds will probably be quite different from Earth — they’ll be a bit larger and orbit faint, red suns — but some researchers hope that a few will offer hints of alien biology.
Eyes on the sky
Over the next decade, several telescopes will join existing observatories in the hunt for exoplanets and hints of alien life.

Exoplanets don’t give up their secrets easily; they are distant, tiny and snuggled up to blazing stars. With some exceptions, current telescopes can’t directly see exoplanets, so astronomers use other means to infer their existence. In rare cases, a remote solar system is oriented so that its planets pass between their sun and Earth, an event known as a transit. During a transit, the star temporarily dims as a planet blocks some of its light.

Transits are powerful tools; not only can they help reveal a planet’s density — a way to distinguish gas planets from solid ones — but they also can allow astronomers to inventory the molecules floating in an exoplanet’s atmosphere. During a transit, molecules in the planet’s atmosphere absorb certain wavelengths of the star’s light, leaving a chemical fingerprint. By deciphering that fingerprint, researchers can deduce the chemical makeup of an alien world.

Pushing Hubble
Astronomers so far have used the transit technique primarily with space-based telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope to investigate the atmospheres of more than 50 exoplanets, most of them worlds the size of Jupiter and Neptune (SN: 11/15/14, p. 4). The puffy atmospheres of giant planets are easier to detect than the relatively slim atmospheres of small rocky worlds. As tools have improved, researchers have started to check out super-Earths, planets that are smaller than Neptune but larger than ours. Though no such planets exist in our solar system, they appear to be one of the most common types in the galaxy.

Only three super-Earths have come under telescope scrutiny so far: GJ 1214b, HD 97658b and 55 Cancri e. These worlds are nothing like Earth. Two of them orbit dim, red suns, all of them whip around their stars in a few days (or even hours) and none are in the coveted habitable zone — the region around a star where a planet’s temperatures are just right for liquid water. Around GJ 1214b and HD 97658b, astronomers found no signs of molecules absorbing starlight, leading researchers to conclude that both worlds are blanketed in clouds or haze (SN Online: 1/2/14).

In February, researchers reported signs of hydrogen cyanide on 55 Cancri e. If confirmed, it would be the first detection of any molecule in the atmosphere of a super-Earth. “These are very challenging measurements, at the limit of [the Hubble Space Telescope’s] capabilities,” cautions Heather Knutson, an astrophysicist at Caltech. “We’re still learning about the performance of the telescope at this level of precision.”

Astronomers will undoubtedly try to squeeze more information out of similar worlds. But, says Kevin France, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, “we’ve pushed Hubble about as far as we can.” And Hubble won’t be around forever (SN: 4/18/15, p. 18). To continue sniffing around in exoplanet atmospheres, researchers are looking toward Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.

James Webb “is going to be a revolution in astronomy,” says Jonathan Lunine, an astrophysicist at Cornell University. The infrared observatory boasts a mirror 2.7 times as wide as Hubble’s. James Webb will seek out the first generation of stars, track how galaxies grow and — most relevant to the search for life — poke around in planetary atmospheres.
Analyzing the atmospheres of planets the size of Neptune and Jupiter should be a breeze for James Webb. These large planets block enough light to make transits readily detectable, and the fluffy atmospheres are easier to measure. Super-Earths, which are smaller with thin atmospheres, are more challenging, but James Webb should be able to investigate a few. Although replicas of Earth are beyond even James Webb’s capabilities, there will be plenty for the observatory to do. “Even if we can’t get biosignatures on planets the size of Earth, we’re going to find out so much about the nature of exoplanets,” Lunine says. “It’s going to open up a huge number of doors.”

The trouble with an Earth-like world is that it doesn’t transit often and both the planet and its atmosphere are tiny. It’s the same kind of problem an alien group would experience trying to detect us. When viewed from afar, Earth blocks less than 0.01 percent of the sun’s light, and only a few percent of that is due to the atmosphere. To an alien astronomer, Earth crosses the sun once a year for, at most, 13 hours. And that’s assuming the aliens live in the right part of the galaxy to witness an Earth transit. Telescopes operated by the bulk of the Milky Way’s citizens will never line up with both the sun and Earth.

Focus on M dwarfs
The odds of finding life improve if astronomers focus their efforts on M dwarfs, which make up about three-quarters of the stars in the galaxy. The dim red orbs are small, so a transiting planet blocks a relatively large fraction of the star’s light, making transits easier to detect. Habitable worlds also transit more frequently. To sustain liquid water, a planet must huddle close to one of these cool stars to stay warm. An orbit in the habitable zone of an M dwarf is much shorter than a comparable trip around the sun. Rather than wait for a year between transits, astronomers might have to wait for only a few weeks or months. Plus, a planet on a cozy orbit is more forgiving when it comes to getting the viewing geometry just right to see a transit.
There are potential downsides to M dwarfs. Most of the light they radiate is infrared, so photosynthesis on orbiting planets would be very different compared with photosynthesis on Earth. There’s no guarantee that biosignatures from vegetation that thrives on infrared light would look anything like those from local varieties. Many M dwarfs also emit occasional blasts of ultraviolet radiation — blasts made even more dangerous because any habitable planet sits close to the star. Habitable worlds need to be so close, in fact, that the star’s gravity might prevent the planet from rotating, which could give rise to extreme climate differences between day and night. Recent research, though, indicates that none of these issues are necessarily deal breakers (SN: 2/7/15, p. 7). “There’s no reason why a planet around an M star couldn’t be like Earth,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, an astrophysicist at Cornell.

James Webb should be able to poke around in the atmospheres of a few habitable super-Earths around M dwarfs, though it’s going to need some targets first (SN: 5/17/14, p. 6). NASA’s premier planet hunter, the Kepler space telescope, (SN: 12/27/14, p. 20) found 1,039 exoplanets during its four-year primary mission, with 4,706 additional candidates awaiting confirmation. But most of Kepler’s finds are too distant for James Webb. That’s where TESS comes in. It will catalog all the short-period transiting worlds around the sun’s nearest neighbors. “Those are the ones that astronomers even decades from now are going to want to focus on,” says George Ricker, an MIT astrophysicist and principal investigator for the TESS mission.

Unlike Kepler, which gazed in one direction at 150,000 stars, TESS will spend two years monitoring 200,000 stars all around the sky. To cover that much ground, TESS will stare at one spot for about 27 days before moving onto a new patch. That’s not great for finding Earth twins on year-long orbits, but it’s good for finding worlds in the habitable zones of M dwarfs.

Based on Kepler’s results, astrophysicist Peter Sullivan, then at MIT, and colleagues calculated in 2015 that TESS should discover about 1,700 exoplanets. Of these, more than 500 could be less than twice the size of Earth, of which about 50 would lie in the habitable zones of their host stars. But picking biosignatures, or any signatures, out of those atmospheres is going to be difficult. Estimates vary, but James Webb will need roughly 200 hours to study one super-Earth around a nearby M dwarf, and those hours count only when the planet is passing in front of its star.

There’s a debate happening right now over how hard to chase that dream, Caltech’s Knutson says. Given its sluggish pace, James Webb might get to look at only a couple of habitable super-Earths. Astronomers could lavish large amounts of time on one or two systems that might not even pan out. Or they could focus telescope resources on Neptunes, Jupiters or hot super-Earths, where researchers can amass a lot of other data about a wide variety of worlds. While James Webb might get lucky and spy some biosignatures, the dream of finding another planet like Earth will probably have to wait a few decades for a larger observatory to come along.
Snapping a pic
The transit technique is powerful but inefficient. From our vantage point, most planets don’t transit their suns, and those that do transit only once every orbit.

“To really give us the best probability of detecting life, we need to build a telescope that can do direct detection,” Rugheimer says. Direct detection requires snapping a picture of an exoplanet and looking for biosignatures such as oxygen and methane imprinted on light reflecting off its surface. Since this technique doesn’t require alignments between planets and suns, it can, in principle, work for any world around any star. But to catch an Earth 2.0, astronomers are going to need a bigger telescope.

Consider again those aliens who are looking for us. They would struggle to see Earth even if they set up camp 4.2 light-years away at the star next door, Proxima Centauri (an M dwarf, by the way). It’s like trying to see the head of a quilting pin 28 meters to the right of a basketball while standing about 7,500 kilo-meters away — roughly the distance from Honolulu to Pittsburgh. And the basketball is 10 billion times as bright as the pin.

No observatories come close to being able to capture an image of an Earth-like planet around a sunlike star. But astronomers are thinking about what it would take. One idea is to put a gigantic mirror in space equipped with a device that can block the light of the star, such as the High-Definition Space Telescope proposed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. To see a few dozen Earth twins and characterize their atmospheres, that telescope would need a mirror 12 meters across. That’s bigger than any optical telescope currently on the ground and has 25 times the light-collecting area of Hubble.

Such an observatory “would be a huge undertaking relative to what we’ve done in space before,” Lunine says. “But relative to other programs this country has undertaken, it’s not.”
One of the keys to success with the high-definition telescope is a coronagraph, a disk that blocks the light from any star the telescope points at. Many telescopes already use coronagraphs, especially spacecraft designed to look at the sun. James Webb will be outfitted with a coronagraph, though not one designed to search for other Earths.

The downside to a coronagraph is that it requires exceptional control of light that enters the telescope, which complicates the design. Other proposals to detect Earth-like planets, such as the NASA-commissioned Exo-S concept, use a starshade, a separate spacecraft shaped, appropriately, like the petals of a sunflower. The starshade flies tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope and maintains perfect alignment to prevent starlight from hitting the mirror (SN: 7/12/14, p. 11).

Since a starshade is free-floating and does all the lightsuppression work, it should be able to partner up with any telescope, even a relatively small one already in use. But no one has attempted formation flying in space at this scale. And every time astronomers want to look at a new star, the starshade would have to move around the telescope to maintain alignment, which could take days or weeks. All that movement will require fuel, which limits how many stars astronomers can search.
Today these missions and others like them exist only in papers and PowerPoint slides posted online. The concepts, the fruits of a community-wide brainstorming session on how to allocate funding in the 2030s and beyond, will require massive financial and logistical resources, but some astronomers think it will be worth it once TESS and James Webb can point to where the nearest habitable locales might be. “Once we know where the potential habitable worlds are in our sky, I hope that will change a lot of people’s curiosity,” Kaltenegger says. “I would want to know if there are other habitable worlds. I wouldn’t want to just guess.”

Everyone agrees that finding a world teeming with life elsewhere in the galaxy is going to be exceptionally difficult. “Maybe nature needs to be on our side,” says Mark Clampin, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “But it won’t stop people from trying very hard. And we’ll probably make a lot of discoveries along the way.”

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is in standby mode after a 66-kilovolt/18-kilovolt electrical transformer suffered a short circuit April 29 at 5:30 a.m. Central European Time. The culprit: A small wild animal, believed to be a weasel, gnawing on a power cable.

“The concerned part of the LHC stopped immediately and safely, though some connections were slightly damaged due to an electrical arc,” Arnaud Marsollier, who leads CERN’s press office, wrote in an e-mail to Science News.

Sadly, the weasel did not survive the event, but the LHC should be back online soon. “It may take a few days to repair but such events happened a few times in the past and are part of the life of such a large installation,” Marsollier writes. The power outage comes just as the LHC is preparing to resume collecting data.

This isn’t the the first time an odd event has stalled operations at the particle collider outside Geneva on the Swiss-French border. In 2009, a piece of bread (supposedly a baguette dropped by a bird or from an airplane) interrupted a power installation for an LHC cooling unit.