China's first commercial spacecraft launch site in Wenchang, South China's Hainan Province, is ramping up the final stages of construction, and plans to commence normalized commercial launch operations in 2024, a representative from the launch site told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The construction of the commercial spacecraft launch site began in July 2022, and the infrastructure needed for the site will be finished by the end of 2023. The first commercial launch mission will commence in the first half of 2024, and the launch site will enter the operations and normalized launch mission in the same year.

"According to current plan, the commercial launch site will commence launch missions at a high frequency in 2025, which means commercial launch missions will occur each month," Dong Chenghua, a representative from the administration bureau of the Wenchang International Aerospace City, where the commercial launch site locates, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

On April 13, 2018, China announced a decision to support Hainan in developing the whole island into a pilot free trade zone and gradually exploring and steadily promoting the establishment of a free trade port (FTP) with Chinese characteristics. By the end of 2025, the Hainan FTP is scheduled to initiate independent customs operations throughout the whole island according to a master plan released by the central authorities in 2020.

As one of the 13 key projects of the island, the Wenchang International Aerospace City will support the Hainan FTP construction from sectors of aerospace and relevant industries.

During 2015 to 2021, the scale of China's commercial spacecraft launch industry realized an average annual growth rate of 22.3 percent, and may hit 2.3 trillion yuan ($320 billion) in market size by 2024, industry data revealed.

Another representative from the administration bureau told the Global Times that the commercial spacecraft launch is in great demand among domestic private enterprises at present, which is mostly used in communication, remote control and navigation.

The Wenchang aerospace launch site is China's only coastal launch site with multiple natural advantages such as lower geographic latitude, less transport restrictions and high security for landing sites, which will largely reduce the cost for commercial spacecraft launch.

The launch site has facilitated multiple key launch missions including the China's space station Tiangong and the lunar probe Chang'e.

In addition, Wenchang commercial spacecraft launch site may have chance to explore the commercial launch market among Southeast Asian countries based on Hainan's geographic advantages.

There must be something wrong with the guy who never leaves home, right? Maybe not — at least if that guy is a male spotted hyena. Males that stay with their birth clan, instead of taking off to join a new group, may simply be making a good choice, a new study suggests.

Spotted hyenas are a matriarchal society. Females are in charge. They rank higher than every male in the clan. And the females generally stay with the clan for their entire lives. But males face a choice when they reach two and a half years in age. They can stay with the clan, or they can leave and join a new clan.

Each choice has its pros and cons. Staying with the clan means that a male hyena keeps a place at the top of the male pecking order. He’ll probably have his mother around to help. But he’ll be limited in the number of females he can mate with, because many of the female hyenas won’t mate with him because they might be related. If he joins a new clan, the male hyena might have access to more females — and they might even be better than the ones in his home clan — but he’ll start with the lowest social rank and have to spend years fighting his way to the top.

Among most group-living mammal species, the guys that stay at home turn out to be losers, siring fewer offspring. But spotted hyenas, it appears, are an exception.

Eve Davidian of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and colleagues tracked 254 male spotted hyenas that lived in eight clans in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania throughout their lives, a study lasting 20 years. When these males reached the age of maturity, they left their clans to take a look at the other options available to them. Forty-one hyenas returned to their home clans, and 213 settled with new ones.

Even though the males that stayed at home probably had fewer potential breeding partners, they still managed to sire as many offspring as those males that left for greener pastures. Many mated at an earlier age, and they tended to mate with higher-ranking females than males that joined new clans. And both groups lived similar lengths of time, the researchers report March 18 in Science Advances.

The guys who stay at home, it seems, aren’t losers who couldn’t find better prospects elsewhere. They just found good enough prospects at home, where they are at the top of the social ladder — and have mom around to help them get access to food and females.

Seems like a good strategy — for hyenas, at least.

Even top-caliber diamonds aren’t perfect. And their imperfections are finally settling a debate about the origins of the gem-quality diamonds used in jewelry.

Previously, scientists had an explanation only for how cloudy and impurity-ridden fibrous diamonds form. Those diamonds crystallize inside fluid pockets deep within the Earth that contain compounds called carbonates. Carbonate-containing impurities inside fibrous diamonds provide information about the diamonds’ origins. Gem diamonds typically don’t contain these impurities, so scientists argued over whether the gems formed under different conditions than fibrous diamonds.
After an exhaustive hunt, geochemists have at last found microscopic impurities within gem-quality diamonds. These flaws suggest that pretty and ugly diamonds form from the same kinds of carbonate-containing fluids, the researchers report in the June 1 issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The finding may also offer insights into the history of plate tectonics.

The work “gives us the first strong constraint on how gem diamonds grow,” says Thomas Stachel, a petrologist at the University of Alberta in Canada who was not involved in the research. “People had proposed various explanations for how these diamonds form, but it seems diamond formation is less diverse than we thought.”

Diamonds are made up of carbon atoms. At the pressures and temperatures found in the deep Earth, these carbon atoms can form a crystal structure. Rising magma then carries the crystals to the surface.

The type of diamonds prized for jewelry formed as early as 3.5 billion years ago. Fibrous diamonds date back only a few million years and formed more quickly. That quick creation trapped bits of surrounding material inside the crystal structure. Those inclusions suggest that these diamonds formed from the carbon atoms in carbonate-containing fluids. Gem-quality diamonds formed more slowly and usually don’t contain any inclusions. “That’s why they’re gem quality —there’s nothing in them,” says study coauthor Brooke Matat Jablon, a geochemist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Jablon and geochemist Oded Navon, also at the Hebrew University, hunted for inclusions in diamond gemstones. The researchers finally found what they were looking for in diamonds that are symmetrical across a central boundary. As these diamonds grew, a microscopic inclusion would sometimes become trapped along the boundary. Using a beam of electrons, the researchers identified 32 inclusions in eight of 30 diamonds they examined. Twenty of those inclusions were the same carbonate-bearing fluids found in the fibrous diamonds.
The finding suggests that while fibrous diamonds and gem-quality diamonds differ in age and price, they share common origins. “We’re coming full circle on the story,” Jablon says. “We can quiet a debate that has been raging in the field for a long time. Going forward, we can generally assume most diamonds crystalize the same way.”

A similar mechanism for creating older, gem-quality diamonds and younger, fibrous diamonds suggests that Earth has maintained diamond-forming conditions for billions of years, Stachel says. Carbonates are carried into Earth’s depths when tectonic plates subduct and sink into the planet’s interior. If ancient diamonds form from carbonates, plate tectonics could have already been churning the planet’s exterior 3.5 billion years ago, he says.

Seabirds called common murres appear to use preening as a way to negotiate whose turn it is to watch their chick and who must find food. And when one parent is feeling foul, irregularities in this grooming ritual may send the other a signal that all is not well, researchers report in the July issue of The Auk: Ornithological Advances.

“The fascinating part of this study is the inference that communication between mates allows murres to negotiate the level of effort that each member of the pair puts into the breeding effort,” says John Piatt, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage, Alaska. “Reproductive success of this species requires a high degree of cooperation by each mate as they switch duties.”
Common murres (Uria aalge) lay only one egg each breeding season. Parental roles aren’t determined by gender for the birds; mothers and fathers take turns watching over their chick and foraging for fish. When one parent returns with a fish for the chick, the couple preen each other and switch roles. This swapping ceremony typically happens three to four times a day.

But study coauthor Carolyn Walsh noticed that switches don’t always go smoothly. Video of 16 pairs of murres, documenting a total of 198 role swaps, showed that sometimes both birds appeared indecisive. Each parent would hop on and off the chick several times before the birds preened each other and one left to fish. “It’s as if they’re resisting leaving the colony; neither bird actually wants to go,” says Walsh, an animal behavior researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada.
For about a fifth of all switching ceremonies, the brooding parent was slow to preen its mate and then refused to switch, forcing the parent that had just returned with a fish to go back out and fish some more.
Irregular behavior also occurred when the parent on fishing duty returned without food, which happened about 10 percent of the time. The empty-beaked bird would quickly start preening its mate, but the mate would be slow to preen back, or might not preen at all. “The brooder is basically communicating, ‘The chick still needs a fish, you better go get one,’” Walsh says.
The ceremony could be a way for the seabirds to communicate their well-being, Walsh says. By withholding preening and delaying the switching ceremony, a murre in poor condition may be trying to negotiate with its partner to have the easier job of brooding. Staying in the nest may allow the bird to rest and recover its strength.

Flying out to sea to fish is energetically costly for murres because they aren’t very aerodynamic. The seabirds are “absolutely ridiculous looking” when they fly, Walsh says. “Their wings are really meant for swimming in the water.”

In physical tests, Walsh and colleagues found a correlation between body condition and ceremony irregularities. Her team captured birds, weighed them and sampled their blood for beta-hydroxybutyrate, a metabolite associated with continual weight loss.

Switching ceremonies lasted about two minutes longer for the lightest birds, around 900 grams, compared with the heaviest birds weighing in at about 1,000 grams. Birds with lower mass and higher metabolite levels also were more likely to preen irregularly, Walsh says.

The longer ceremonies may also be a sign that there’s unrest in the nest. Murres usually mate for life, but pairs can “divorce.” A previous study by Walsh found that mates heading for a split take more time to switch roles.

Some dinosaurs liked to cheat on their vegetarian diet.

Based on the shape of their teeth and jaws, large plant-eating dinosaurs are generally thought to have been exclusively herbivorous. But for one group of dinosaurs, roughly 75-million-year-old poop tells another story. Their fossilized droppings, or coprolites, contained tiny fragments of mollusk and other crustacean shells along with an abundance of rotten wood, researchers report September 21 in Scientific Reports. Eating the crustaceans as well as the wood might have given the dinosaurs an extra dose of nutrients during breeding season to help form eggs and nourish the embryos.
“Living herd animals do occasionally turn carnivore to fulfill a particular nutritional need,” says vertebrate paleontologist Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London. “Sheep and cows are known to eat carcasses or bone when they have a deficiency in a mineral such as phosphorus or calcium, or if they’re pregnant or ill.” But the discovery that some plant-eating dinos also ate crustaceans is the first example of this behavior in an extinct herbivore, says Barrett, who was not involved in the new study.

Ten years ago, paleoecologist Karen Chin of the University of Colorado Boulder described finding large pieces of rotted wood in dino dung. The coprolites were within a layer of rock in Montana, known as the Two Medicine Formation, dating to between 80 million and 74 million years ago. That layer also contained numerous fossils of Maiasaura, a type of large, herbivorous duck-billed dinosaur, or hadrosaur (SN: 8/9/14, p. 20).
Chin wondered whether the wood itself was the dino’s real dietary target. “The coprolites in Montana were associated with the nesting grounds of the Maiasaura ,” she says. “I suspected that the dinosaurs were after insects in the wood. But I never found any insects in the coprolites there.”

Her hunch wasn’t too far off. Now she’s found evidence of some kind of crustaceans in dino poop. The new evidence comes from an 860-meter-thick layer of rock in Utah known as the Kaiparowits Formation, which dates to between 76.1 million and 74 million years ago. Ten of the 15 coprolites that Chin and her team examined contained tiny fragments of shell that were scattered throughout the dung. They were too small to identify by species, and may have been crabs, insects or some other type of shelled animal, Chin says. Based on the scattering of shell fragments, the animals were certainly eaten along with the wood rather than being later visitors to the dung heap.

Since bones from hadrosaurs are especially abundant in the Kaiparowits Formation, Chin suspects those kinds of dinos deposited the dung. Other large herbivores, such as three-horned ceratopsians and armored ankylosaurs, also roamed the area (SN: 6/24/17, p. 4).

The crustacean diet cheat may have been a seasonal event, related perhaps to breeding to obtain extra nutrients, Chin and colleagues say.

But how often — or why — the dinosaurs ate the shelled critters is hard to prove from the fossil dung alone, Barrett says. Herbivore coprolites are rare in the fossil record because a diet of leaves and other green plant material doesn’t leave a lot of hard material to preserve (unlike bones in carnivore dung). Coprolites with crustaceans, on the other hand, are more likely to get fossilized — and that preferential preservation might make it appear that this behavior was more frequent than it actually was. “These kinds of things give neat snapshots of specific behaviors that those animals are doing at any one time,” he adds. “But it’s difficult to build that into a bigger picture.”

When Hurricane Maria’s 250-kilometer-per-hour winds slammed into Puerto Rico on September 20, they spurred floods, destroyed roads and flattened homes across the island. A week-and-a-half later, parts of the island remain without power, and its people are facing a humanitarian crisis.

The storm also temporarily knocked out one of the best and biggest eyes on the sky: the Arecibo Observatory, some 95 kilometers west of San Juan. The observatory’s 305-meter-wide main dish was until recently the largest radio telescope in the world (a bigger one, the FAST radio telescope, opened in China in 2016).

As news trickled out over the past week, it appeared that the damage may not be as bad as initially reported. The observatory is conserving fuel, but plans to resume limited astronomy observations September 29, deputy director Joan Schmelz tweeted earlier that day. “#AreciboScience is coming back after #MariaPR.”

But the direct whack still raises the issue of when – and even whether – to repair the observatory: Funding for it has repeatedly been on the chopping block despite its historic contributions to astronomy.

Arecibo’s recent work includes searching for gravitational waves by the effect they have on the clocklike regularity of dead stars called pulsars; watching for mysterious blasts of energy called fast radio bursts (SN Online: 12/21/16); and keeping tabs on near-Earth asteroids.

It played a key role in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence: In 1974, astronomers Frank Drake, Jill Tarter and Carl Sagan used it to send messages to any extraterrestrial civilizations that might be listening (SN Online: 2/13/15). It was also the telescope that, in 1992, discovered the first planets outside the solar system.

Arecibo also holds a special place in my personal history: Watching actress Jodie Foster use the giant dish to listen for aliens in the movie Contact when I was 13 cemented my desire to study astronomy. I chose to go to Cornell University for undergrad in part because the university managed Arecibo at the time, and I hoped I might get to go there. (I never did, but my undergrad adviser, Martha Haynes, uses Arecibo to study the distribution of galaxies in the local universe.) And one of the first science stories I ever had published was about Cornell professors testifying to the National Science Foundation, which owns Arecibo, to defend the observatory’s funding.
Ten years after that story ran in the Cornell Daily Sun, Arecibo’s funding situation is still in doubt. It’s not clear how the recent damage will affect its future.

Telescope operator Ángel Vázquez sent the first damage reports via short-wave radio on September 21. A line feed antenna, used to receive and transmit radio waves to study the Earth’s ionosphere, broke off and fell onto the observatory’s main dish, damaging some of its panels. A second, 12-meter dish was thought to have been destroyed entirely.

But the smaller dish survived with only minor damage. “Initial reports said it had just been blown away, but it turned out that was not correct,” says Nicholas White of the Universities Space Research Association, which co-operates the observatory with SRI International, a nonprofit headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., and Metropolitan University in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “That looks like it’s fine, although obviously we have to get up there and check it out.”

On September 23, observatory director Francisco Córdova posted a picture to the observatory’s Facebook page of two staff members standing in front of the big telescope dish with an outstretched Puerto Rican flag. “Still standing after #HurricaneMaria!” the post declares. “We suffered some damages, but nothing that can’t be repaired or replaced!”
The line feed antenna is a big loss, but it should be replaceable eventually, White says. And the damage to the main dish is fixable. Among the tasks was to get inside the Gregorian dome — the golf ball‒like structure suspended over the giant dish — and make sure the reflectors within it were aligned correctly. (Those reflectors were knocked askew by Hurricane George in 1998, says Cornell radio astronomer Donald Campbell.)

Meantime, Arecibo staff, who managed to safely shelter in place during the storm, “have been showing up for work, funnily enough,” White says. “People just want to get back to normal.”

But normal is also a state of uncertainty. The NSF, which foots $8.3 million of the observatory’s nearly $12 million a year operating costs, has been trying to offload their responsibility for it for several years. (NASA covers the balance.) And NSF’s agreement with the three groups that jointly maintain and operate the observatory runs out in March 2018. In 2016, the NSF called for proposals for other organizations to take over after that.

The NSF can’t estimate yet how expensive the repairs will be or how long they will take to complete, so it’s reserving comment on how the damage will affect decisions about the observatory’s future. “We need to make a complete assessment,” says NSF program director Joseph Pesce.

Personally, I hope the observatory remains open, both for science and for inspiration. I’m still waiting for a reply to that 1974 Arecibo message.

Spacetime ripples from black holes are becoming routine.

For a fifth time, scientists have reported the detection of two colliding black holes via their gravitational waves, tiny vibrations that warp the fabric of spacetime. Unlike previous gravitational wave detections, which were heralded with news conferences often featuring panels of scientists squinting at journalists under bright lights, this was a low-key announcement. The event, caught on June 8, 2017, by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, was unceremoniously unveiled in a paper published online November 15 at arXiv.org.

With masses 7 and 12 times that of the sun, the pair of black holes was the lightest LIGO has spotted so far. The lack of fanfare over the detection signals a shift. Scientists are now aiming to collect data from many black hole crashes. That data can be analyzed to answer questions about the population as a whole, such as how two black holes get paired up in the first place.

Some birds of paradise really know how to work their angles. Tilted, microscopic filaments in some of the showy birds’ black feathers make that plumage look much darker than traditional black feathers, researchers report online January 9 in Nature Communications.

Dakota McCoy, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, and colleagues measured how much light each type of black feather absorbs. Superblack feathers absorb up to 99.95 percent of light that shines directly on them, while traditional black feathers absorb up to 96.8 percent, the researchers found.
Using scanning electron microscopy and nano-CT scanning, the team observed that ultrablack feathers have ragged, spike-studded barbules that curve upward at a roughly 30-degree angle to the tip, creating an array of deep, curved cavities. Traditional black feathers are smoother and lack such detailed microstructures. These spikes and pits scatter light multiple times, allowing for more light absorption and darker plumage, the scientists say. Even when the researchers dusted the feathers with gold, the darkest ones still retained their blackness, while traditional black plumes looked gilded in SEM images.

Superblack patches probably evolved to “exaggerate the perceived brilliance of adjacent color patches” during mating displays, the researchers write.

Zeptonewton
ZEP-toe-new-ton n.
A unit of force equal to one billionth of a trillionth of a newton.

An itty-bitty object can be used to suss out teeny-weeny forces.

Scientists used an atom of the element ytterbium to sense an electromagnetic force smaller than 100 zeptonewtons, researchers report online March 23 in Science Advances. That’s less than 0.0000000000000000001 newtons — with, count ‘em, 18 zeroes after the decimal. At about the same strength as the gravitational pull between a person in Dallas and another in Washington, D.C., that’s downright feeble.
After removing one of the atom’s electrons, researchers trapped the atom using electric fields and cooled it to less than a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero (–273.15° Celsius) by hitting it with laser light. That light, counterintuitively, can cause an atom to chill out. The laser also makes the atom glow, and scientists focused that light into an image with a miniature Fresnel lens, a segmented lens like those used to focus lighthouse beams.

Monitoring the motion of the atom’s image allowed the researchers to study how the atom responded to electric fields, and to measure the minuscule force caused by particles of light scattering off the atom, a measly 95 zeptonewtons.