NASA has spent seven years trying to prevent Bennu — an asteroid taller than the Empire State Building and named after ancient Egypt‘s fiery bird-god — from crashing cataclysmically into Earth.

While Bennu’s chances of impact are just 1-in-2,700, more than five times a person’s chance of being struck by lightning, NASA’s team nevertheless has categorized it as one of the two ‘most hazardous known asteroids.’

In a worst-case scenario, the roughly 510-meter wide, carbon-based behemoth would smash into Earth with 1,200 megatons of energy: 24 times the power of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated (the Soviet Union’s ‘Tsar Bomba‘).

If it happens, Bennu’s impact would unleash its 1.2 gigaton impact 159 years from this Sunday, on September 24, 2182.

While Bennu is nowhere near the size of the dino-killing, six-mile across space rock that hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago, astronomers believe that the asteroid ‘could cause continental devastation if it became an Earth impactor.’

When NASA dispatched its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft for a rendezvous with the asteroid on September 8, 2016, part of its mission was to trail Bennu for two years from 2018 to 2020 collecting data to better calculate its future path. 

‘We improved our knowledge of Bennu’s trajectory by a factor of 20,’ Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told the journal Science.

Provided humanity lasts that long, NASA will conduct its final risk calculations on Bennu’s orbit during its next near-Earth pass in 2135 – about 47 years before its potential impact.  

‘In 2135, we’ll know for sure,’ Farnocchia said.

In the meantime, Bennu, not unlike its namesake god of creation and rebirth, also has something to tell us about the birth of our solar system.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx went to Bennu equipped with the tools to map the ancient asteroid, a sort of time capsule of the early solar system, and collect rare samples of this nearly untouched material.

This Sunday, the OSIRIS-REx will drop a payload of 8.8 ounces (250 grams) from its Bennu mission back down to Earth, as the probe skates past approximately 485 miles above our planet’s surface toward its next asteroid rendezvous mission.  

‘This is pure untainted material revealing early solar system secrets,’ astrophysicist Hakeem Oluyesi of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory told ABC News about the samples.   

‘A longshot discovery would be finding biological molecules or even precursor molecules for life,’ according to Oluyesi.

OSIRIS-REx was not only the US space agency’s first-ever asteroid sample collection run.

It is now poised to also become the largest-ever asteroid-sampling mission, besting Japanese space agency JAXA’s collection of 5.4 grams from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020.

But OSIRIS-REx’s mission is still days away from successful completion. 

‘It feels very much like the last few miles of a marathon,’ said Rich Burns, the OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. 

‘A confluence of emotions like pride and joy, coexisting with a determined focus to complete the race well.’

After careening across 63,000 miles of our solar system, and now hurtling towards Earth at a breakneck 28,000 mph, OSIRIS-REx will release its capsule of samples at approximately 4:42 AM Mountain Time (10:42 AM UTC) over Utah. 

The capsule, about the size of a mini-fridge and prepared to withstand friction temperatures twice as hot as molten magma, will be slowed in its descent to Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert by parachutes. 

Researchers plan to recover the samples from a pre-planned 36-mile by 8.5-mile area on the Pentagon’s Utah Test and Training Range southwest of Salt Lake City. 

Touchdown is expect at a little before 9:00 AM Mountain Time.

All the data collected by the OSIRIS-REx will help in future efforts to deflect Bennu in the event of a worst case scenario. 

But planetary scientist Lindley Johnson of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office believes such a dire case is unlikely.

‘I don’t think we need to do anything about Bennu,’ as Johnson told Science.

‘This data set [from OSIRIS-REx] will be enormously valuable in assessing deflection technologies,’ according to Johnson who believes that the nearly 50-year window between 2135 and 2182 will be plenty of time to mount an Armageddon-style deflection mission.

Nonetheless, if Bennu were to impact Earth, it would be similar to an explosion of more than 1.1 billion tons of TNT. 

Kelly Fast, program manager for the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement: ‘NASA’s Planetary Defense mission is to find and monitor asteroids and comets that can come near Earth and may pose a hazard to our planet. 

‘We carry out this endeavor through continuing astronomical surveys that collect data to discover previously unknown objects and refine our orbital models for them.

‘The OSIRIS-REx mission has provided an extraordinary opportunity to refine and test these models, helping us better predict where Bennu will be when it makes its close approach to Earth more than a century from now.’

NASA last updated its estimates of the planetary risks posed by Bennu in November 2021, with a paper entitled ‘Ephemeris and hazard assessment for near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu based on OSIRIS-REx data,’ published in the journal Icarus.  

While there is a slight chance Bennu will collide with Earth over the next three centuries, the space agency notes there is more than a 99.9 percent probability it will not. 

Back in 2020, NASA unveiled stunning videos and images showing the moment the spacecraft pulled off its six-second touch-and-go (TAG) mission where it bounced off the Bennu’s surface and picked up samples along the way.

Once completed Sunday, the triumphant $1.16 billion mission will be the first American effort to take a sample from an asteroid with the hopes to unlock secrets about the origin of life on Earth.

NASA’s October 2020 images show how the spacecraft descended within three feet of the target landing spot dubbed Nightingale on the asteroid while avoiding boulders the size of buildings. 

Upon contact, the spacecraft’s 11-foot robotic arm can then be seen smashing some porous rock upon initial impact with the surface.

A nitrogen gas bottle then fired on the surface to stir up material and suck it up in a ‘rubble shower’.

The spacecraft spent five seconds of the six seconds on Bennu collecting the material before backing away, with a majority of the sample collected in the first three seconds.

Three years later, fruits of those six seconds, a smaller safer piece of Bennu will finally collide gently with Earth. 

• Perception affected by size of trapezius muscle that starts at base of the neck 

By Sophie Freeman

Published: 20:33 EDT, 10 September 2023 | Updated: 21:09 EDT, 10 September 2023

Brain surgeons have developed a device the size of a grain of rice they hope could be a breakthrough in treating deadly brain cancers.

The 6mm-long gadget is implanted onto the surface of tumors, where it releases drugs into the masses to shrink or kill them.

When implanted into hard-to-treat brain tumors, the device can deliver multiple different cancer medications all at once. It was trialed on six patients with glioblastomas, the lethal brain cancer that killed President Joe Biden’s son, Joseph (Beau) Biden III, and Senator John McCain.

Most people with a glioblastoma only live 12 to 18 months on average after receiving the diagnosis and only about seven percent are still alive after five years. 

The device’s development is an answer to the challenge of finding a targeted way to treat cancer within the shortest window of time, given medications can typically only be tried one at a time, making finding the most effective treatment a lengthy process.

A challenge in developing targeted therapies for gliomas in the past is that it can be hard to test multiple combinations of drugs in tumors cells because doctors can only treat patients with one method at a time, representing a significant barrier to treating cancers like gliomas, which combination therapy has shown to be a promising treatment for.

However, this little device could be the solution to this challenge because it can safely administer up to 20 different cancer medications into extremely small areas of a patient’s brain tumor all at once during brain surgery.  

While the device was tested on patients with gliomas, researchers believe it could be used on multiple types of brain tumors, signaling a major breakthrough in cancer treatment. 

The five-year survival rate for adults with brain cancer ranges from 21 percent to 72 percent. 

Dr Pierpaolo Peruzzi, a neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women’s who performed the surgeries said: ‘In order to make the greatest impact on how we treat these tumors, we need to be able to understand, early on, which drug works best for any given patient.

‘The problem is that the tools that are currently available to answer this question are just not good enough. 

‘So we came up with the idea of making each patient their own lab, by using a device which can directly interrogate the living tumor and give us the information that we need.’

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston focused their efforts on a type of brain cancer called gliomas, which affects central nervous system cells that protect crucial neurons.

Specifically, researchers aimed to find the best possible way to treat an extremely aggressive form of glioma called glioblastoma, the lethal brain cancer that killed President Joe Biden’s son, Joseph (Beau) Biden III, and Senator John McCain.

Working with six patients, they inserted the tiny rod-shaped devices, which release miniscule doses of anti-tumor medications to highly concentrated areas, into their tumors. 

The intratumoral microdevices (IMD) are no longer than six millimeters, roughly the size of a grain of rice or a pencil tip.

Each one contains nine different medications, though it could hold up to 20. One of the drugs loaded into the devices was Temozolomide, a common chemotherapy drug that damages the DNA of cancer cells, preventing them from dividing and growing, eventually killing them off.

The rod-like devices were implanted as part of a standard procedure called resection to remove part or all of the cancerous mass. Dr Peruzzi identified the tumor in each patient and implanted two devices in each one approximately 10 to 15mm apart at the start of surgery.

The IMDs remained in the tumor while Dr Peruzzi worked on surgically removing the mass, giving the microdoses of medicine two to three hours to work within the tumor itself.

Dr Peruzzi said: ‘This is not in the lab, and not in a petri dish. It’s actually in real patients in real time, which gives us a whole new perspective on how these tumors respond to treatment.’

He then removed part of or the entire tumor and the IMDs, which had been infusing parts of the tumor with nine different medicines.

From there, scientists on the team froze the removed mass with the devices affixed to it and were able to look at how effective they were at delivering concentrated doses of the drugs to extremely specific regions of the tumors.

‘It’s important that we are able to do this in a way that best captures the features of each patient’s tumor and, at the same time, is the least disruptive of the standard of care,’ Dr Peruzzi said.

‘This makes our approach easy to integrate into patients’ treatment and allows its use in real life.’

Their main goals were to determine whether the devices could be safely implanted and whether this type of medical technology could be scaled for use to treat the 15,000 Americans who will be diagnosed with a glioblastoma this year. 

Gliomas typically occur in the brain but can sometimes afflict the spinal cord. About a third of all brain tumors are gliomas that originate from glial cells. These cells help support, connect, and protect central nervous system neurons. 

Gliomas don’t typically travel outside of the brain, but they are particularly dangerous because they can spread to other tissues within the brain. The most talked-about form of glioma is called glioblastoma.

Brain surgeons classify brain tumor growth on a scale from one to four, with grade 1 tumors growing slowly and appearing the least aggressive, while grade 4 tumors spread rapidly and aggressively. Glioblastomas are automatically grade 4 tumors upon first diagnosis.

The deaths of Beau Biden and Sen McCain in 2015 and 2018, respectively, were both due to highly aggressive glioblastomas. It took less than two years following diagnosis for the glioblastoma to kill Mr Biden, while Sen McCain died just over a year after his diagnosis.

Gliomas are notoriously difficult to treat and chemotherapy, surgery, and other interventions often come up short because of their tentacle-like ability to invade surrounding healthy brain tissue.

The next generation of cancer treatments will increasingly rely on a highly personalized approach that includes tools such as Dr Peruzzi’s to speed up the process toward finding the right medicine for each individual patient, optimizing their chance of survival.

Dr Peruzzi said: ‘The ability to bring the lab right to the patient unlocks so much potential in terms of the type of information we can gather, which is new and exciting territory for a disease that has very few options at present.’ 

NATURE 

The Jewel Box

by Tim Blackburn (W&N, £20)

Hordes of pitch invaders descended upon the Stade de France in Paris — disrupting the final of the UEFA European Football Championship between France and Portugal in July 2016.

But they were not over-enthusiastic football fans. They were moths. One settled on the eyebrow of Portugal’s star, Cristiano Ronaldo, as he lay injured.

Nearly all the moths belonged to a single species: Silver Y. This remarkable moth, which is only 2cm in length, migrates from North Africa to Britain and back again. 

As many as 700 million of them crisscross the Channel and fly over Paris at certain times of the year.

The authorities at the Stade de France had left the floodlights on overnight in preparation for the big game and, in the words of Tim Blackburn, ‘inadvertently created the world’s largest moth trap’. 

Blackburn’s own more modest moth trap is the starting point for this engrossing investigation of moths and what they tell us about the workings of nature.

For the past few years it has been placed on the roof garden of his Camden flat, and sometimes in a Devon holiday home. Each morning, he inspects its contents. 

‘On a good night, I can pick more than 300 moths out of the trap,’ he tells us. He has so far recorded in excess of 500 species. 

For those who know little of moths, the numbers he quotes are surprising. Of all animal species so far named, roughly one in ten is a moth. 

There are around 140,000 species worldwide; Britain alone has 2,500. (This compares with about 60 species in this country of their more glamorous cousins, the butterflies.)

Their names are often eye-catching — Jersey Tiger, Mottled Willow, Maiden’s Blush, Flounced Rustic and True Lover’s Knot.

One species is known as the Dingy Footman. The name dates back to the 18th century, when footmen were rather more common than they are now. 

The creatures were so-called because ‘most Footmen sit with their greyish or yellowy wings tight to their bodies, looking like tiny stiff figures in formal tailcoat livery’.

The variety to be seen in British moths is remarkable. Oak Eggars have bodies covered in fur. 

‘The overall look,’ Blackburn comments, ‘is not unlike a bemused Honey Monster.’

The Death’s-head Hawk-moth takes its name from a mark on its back that resembles a skull. 

It’s as large as a mouse and ‘can squeak like one, too’. Britain’s largest resident species, the Privet Hawk-moth, has the wingspan of a small bird.

Moths are the prey of birds and bats. Some have evolved camouflage to fool their predators. The adult Buff-tip is easily mistaken for a piece of broken birch twig. 

Others disguise themselves as bird droppings: the Scorched Carpet looks like those of a large bird; the Chinese Character mimics those of a smaller one.

There are moths that can thwart bats. Sensitive ears, which can be located on all parts of their bodies, alert them to a bat’s approach. 

Others can produce their own ultrasound, ‘jamming’ the echolocation system their hunters use to track them.

There are species that Blackburn will never find in his moth trap. Numbers of the Beaded Chestnut have declined by 92 per cent in the past few decades; those of the Garden Dart by even more.

The Stout Dart, described in a field guide as ‘drab and mousy’, has not been seen since 2007. In all likelihood, it is extinct, like 50 other moths which have disappeared from the British fauna since 1900.

Migrants have replaced some. The Box-tree moth, native to China and Korea, which turned up one night in Blackburn’s trap, hitch-hiked to Britain in shipments of Box plants.

Blackburn describes his moth trap as ‘a box of enchantment, one that can conjure life out of thin air’. 

He has used it to create an equally enchanting book, which not only celebrates moths but provides an introduction to the basic ideas of ecology and the study of the natural world.

A teen was left with a blister as big as an orange and struggling to dress himself after a moment of contact with ‘Britain’s most dangerous plant’.

Ross McPherson reckons he brushed past the dreaded giant hogweed while cycling near his home in Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland.

A few hours later, he noticed his hand turning red – and soon after it erupted in painful blisters that needed hospital treatment.

The blisters then had to be removed without anaesthesia, subjecting the 16-year-old to so much pain that he fainted.

‘I was riding my bike and I must’ve just brushed past it,’ said Ross. ‘It would’ve been seconds.

‘When I first noticed it, my hand was just red and slightly painful. I didn’t know what it was. It felt warm.’

Soon after, the blisters emerged.

He said: ‘The skin was swollen around my hand, it felt warm and it hurt.

‘It impacted daily life quite a lot: I couldn’t put clothes over it and, because it was over my joints, I couldn’t really use my left hand.

‘It felt like having a giant balloon on my hand that was susceptible to pain at any point in the day.’

He added: ‘I could barely get my coat off, I could barely put jumpers or t-shirts on; it was unusable basically – I couldn’t do anything with it.

‘I had smaller blisters over the knuckles, so moving my fingers was also excruciating, so I didn’t really do that either.’

Ross said his hand was initially assessed by his GP, who diagnosed contact dermatitis.

But he would ultimately be treated at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary after visiting its A&E department.

The teenager had a mixture of second and third-degree burns.

He described the pain as ‘absolute hell’.

He said: ‘The person we saw thought originally that we would have to go to the burns unit in Livingston to get it done.

‘But they told her just to do it in the Royal Infirmary, so she cut like a line in it and drained the fluid.

‘Some of it was jelly so she opened it up and pulled the jelly out, and she cut around all the dead and blistered skin, and pulled it off – there was quite a lot of it.

‘You’re not on anaesthetic because they need to make sure the nerves aren’t damaged and that you’re feeling it – because in the more serious cases that can happen.

‘It was absolute hell. It hurt so much. I fainted during it, it was that bad.’

When it was burst, the biggest blister was the size of an orange.

Ross said: ‘The largest one was seven centimetres by eight centimetres. It was like an orange.

‘It was heavy; I could feel the weight of it on my hand continuously.’

The giant hogweed’s sap stops the skin protecting itself against the sun’s rays, leading to gruesome burns when exposed to natural light.

Part of what makes it so dangerous is that it usually causes no immediate pain, so its victims can continue to burn in the sunshine heedless of any problem.

And it only takes a moment of exposure for the sap to do its work.

Now Ross’ hand is healing up, but he’ll be living with the after-effects for some time.

He said: ‘It’ll remain sensitive for years and years, but they can’t give an exact number.

‘They said put factor 50 sunscreen on it for the next couple of years, or a glove in the winter if possible.’

The giant hogweed is native to the Caucasus, but was introduced to Britain as an ornamental plant in 1817, and its spread has now got out of control.

Mike Duddy, of the Mersey Basin Rivers Trust, said in 2015 that the giant hogweed was ‘without a shadow of a doubt, the most dangerous plant in Britain’.

If exposed to the plant, you should thoroughly wash the area that made contact and keep it out of sunlight for a few days, the Woodland Trust advises.

Ross was unambiguous that it was giant hogweed he encountered, but a spokesperson for East Lothian Council said they’d been unable to locate it.

They said: ‘Suspected giant hogweed was reported to us in Dunbar and on investigation of the location provided it was concluded it was in fact common hogweed.

‘Every report of giant hogweed is fully investigated and actioned if it is on council land.

‘Members of the public are requested and encouraged to report giant hogweed to us via the website or calling the council contact centre so that these plants can be dealt with as they appear.’

A spokesperson for NHS Lothian said they could not comment on a patient’s care without their consent.

A giant black dot four times the size of the Earth has appeared on the sun – and you can see the phenomenon with the naked eye RIGHT NOW

By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com

Updated: 18:52 EDT, 24 May 2023

John Lewis halving size of its HQ after thousands of employees switch to working from home

By Daily Mail City & Finance Reporter

Published: 16:50 EDT, 30 April 2023 | Updated: 16:54 EDT, 30 April 2023

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