Tech News
Radiologists Catch More Aggressive Breast Cancers By Using AI To Help Read Mammograms, Study Finds
science - Posted On:2026-01-30 02:14:57 Source: slashdot
A large Swedish study of 100,000 women found that using AI to assist radiologists reading mammograms reduced the rate of aggressive "interval" breast cancers by 12%. CBC News reports: For the study -- published in Thursday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet -- more than 100,000 women had mammography screenings. Half were supported by AI and the rest had their mammograms reviewed by two different radiologists, a standard practice in much of Europe known as double reading. It is not typically used in Canada, where usually one radiologist checks mammograms. The study looked at the rates of interval cancer, the term doctors use for invasive tumors that appear between routine mammograms. They can be harder to detect and studies have shown that they are more likely to be aggressive with a poorer prognosis. The rate of interval cancers decreased by 12 percent in the groups where the AI screening was implemented, the study showed. [...] Throughout the two-year study, the mammograms that were supported by AI were triaged into two different groups. Those that were determined to be low risk needed only one radiologist to examine them, while those that were considered high risk required two. The researchers reported that numerically, the AI-supported screening resulted in 11 fewer interval cancers than standard screening (82 versus 93, or 12 per cent). "This is really a way to improve an overall screening test," [said lead author, Dr. Kristina Lang]. She acknowledged that while the study found a decrease in interval cancer, longer-term studies are needed to find out how AI-supported screening might impact mortality rates. The screenings for the study all took place at one centre in Sweden, which the researchers acknowledged is a limitation. Another is that the race and ethnicity of the participants were not recorded. The next step, Lang said, will be for Swedish researchers to determine cost-effectiveness. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ArXiv Will Require English Submissions - and Says AI Translators Are Fair Game
science - Posted On:2026-01-29 16:44:59 Source: slashdot
The preprint repository arXiv will require all submissions to be written in English or accompanied by a full English translation starting February 11, a policy change that explicitly permits the use of AI translators even as research suggests large language models remain inconsistent at the task. Until now, authors only needed to submit an abstract in English. ArXiv hosts nearly 3 million preprints and receives more than 20,000 submissions monthly, though just 1% are in languages other than English. Ralph Wijers, chair of arXiv's editorial advisory council, advises authors to verify any AI-generated translations. "Our own experience is that AI translation is good but not good enough," he says. A 2025 study from ByteDance Seed and Peking University ranked 20 LLMs on translation quality between Chinese and English; GPT-5-high scored nearly 77, just below the human expert benchmark of 80, but most models including GPT-4o, Claude 4, and Deepseek-V3 scored under 60. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What ice fishing can teach us about making foraging decisions
Science - Posted On:2026-01-29 15:29:59 Source: arstechnica
Ice fishing is a longstanding tradition in Nordic countries, with competitions proving especially popular. Those competitions can also tell scientists something about how social cues influence how we make foraging decisions, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.
Humans are natural foragers in even the most extreme habitats, digging up tubers in the tropics, gathering mushrooms, picking berries, hunting seals in the Arctic, and fishing to meet our dietary needs. Human foraging is sufficiently complex that scientists believe that meeting so many diverse challenges helped our species develop memory, navigational abilities, social learning skills, and similar advanced cognitive functions.
Researchers are interested in this question not just because it could help refine existing theories of social decision-making, but also could improve predictions about how different groups of humans might respond and adapt to changes in their environment. Per the authors, prior research in this area has tended to focus on solitary foragers operating in a social vacuum. And even when studying social foraging decisions, it's typically done using computational modeling and/or in the laboratory.
Early Universe's supermassive black holes grew in cocoons like butterflies
Science - Posted On:2026-01-29 07:44:57 Source: arstechnica
When the James Webb Space Telescope sent its first high-definition infrared images back to Earth, astronomers noticed several tiny, glowing, crimson stains. These objects, quickly named “Little Red Dots,” were too bright to be normal galaxies, and too red to be simple star clusters. They appeared to house supermassive black holes that were far more massive than they had any right to be.
But now a new study published in Nature suggests a solution to the Little Red Dots mystery. Scientists think young supermassive black holes may go through a “cocoon phase,” where they grow surrounded by high-density gas they feed on. These gaseous cocoons are likely what the JWST saw as the Little Red Dots.
The first explanation scientists had for the Little Red Dots was that they were compact, distant galaxies, but something felt off about them right from the start. “They were too massive, since we saw they’d have to be completely filled with stars,” says Vadim Rusakov, an astronomer at the University of Manchester and lead author of the study. “They would need to produce stars at 100 percent efficiency, and that’s not what we’re used to seeing. Galaxies cannot produce stars at more than 20 percent efficiency, at least that’s what our current knowledge is.”
Extremophile Molds Are Invading Art Museums
science - Posted On:2026-01-28 22:44:58 Source: slashdot
Scientific American's Elizabeth Anne Brown recently "polled the great art houses of Europe" about whether they'd had any recent experiences with mold in their collections. Despite the stigma that keeps many institutions silent, she found that extremophile "xerophilic" molds are quietly spreading through museums and archives, thriving in low-humidity, tightly sealed storage and damaging everything from textiles and wood to manuscripts and stone. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the article: Mold is a perennial scourge in museums that can disfigure and destroy art and artifacts. [...] Consequently, mold is spoken of in whispers in the museum world. Curators fear that even rumors of an infestation can hurt their institution's funding and blacklist them from traveling exhibitions. When an infestation does occur, it's generally kept secret. The contract conservation teams that museums hire to remediate invasive mold often must vow confidentiality before they're even allowed to see the damage. But a handful of researchers, from in-house conservators to university mycologists, are beginning to compare notes about the fungal infestations they've tackled in museum storage depots, monastery archives, crypts and cathedrals. A disquieting revelation has emerged from these discussions: there's a class of molds that flourish in low humidity, long believed to be a sanctuary from decay. By trying so hard to protect artifacts, we've accidentally created the "perfect conditions for [these molds] to grow," says Flavia Pinzari, a mycologist at the Council of National Research of Italy. "All the rules for conservation never considered these species." These molds -- called xerophiles -- can survive in dry, hostile environments such as volcano calderas and scorching deserts, and to the chagrin of curators across the world, they seem to have developed a taste for cultural heritage. They devour the organic material that abounds in museums -- from fabric canvases and wood furniture to tapestries. They can also eke out a living on marble statues and stained-glass windows by eating micronutrients in the dust that accumulates on their surfaces. And global warming seems to be helping them spread. Most frustrating for curators, these xerophilic molds are undetectable by conventional means. But now, armed with new methods, several research teams are solving art history cold cases and explaining mysterious new infestations... The xerophiles' body count is rising: bruiselike stains on Leonardo da Vinci's most famous self-portrait, housed in Turin. Brown blotches on the walls of King Tut's burial chamber in Luxor. Pockmarks on the face of a saint in an 11th-century fresco in Kyiv. It's not enough to find and identify the mold. Investigators are racing to determine the limits of xerophilic life and figure out which pieces of our cultural heritage are at the highest risk of infestation before the ravenous microbes set in. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cancer Might Protect Against Alzheimer's
science - Posted On:2026-01-28 15:14:59 Source: slashdot
For decades, researchers have noted that cancer and Alzheimer's disease are rarely found in the same person, fuelling speculation that one condition might offer some degree of protection from the other. Nature: Now, a study in mice provides a possible molecular solution to the medical mystery: a protein produced by cancer cells seems to infiltrate the brain, where it helps to break apart clumps of misfolded proteins that are often associated with Alzheimer's disease. The study, which was 15 years in the making, was published on 22 January in Cell and could help researchers to design drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. "They have a piece of the puzzle," says Donald Weaver, a neurologist and chemist at the Krembil Research Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study. "It's not the full picture by any stretch of the imagination. But it's an interesting piece." [...] A 2020 meta-analysis of data from more than 9.6 million people found that cancer diagnosis was associated with an 11% decreased incidence of Alzheimer's disease. It has been a difficult relationship to unpick: researchers must control for a variety of external factors. For example, people might die of cancer before they are old enough to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and some cancer treatments can cause cognitive difficulties, which could obscure an Alzheimer's diagnosis. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The origin story of syphilis goes back far longer than we thought
Science - Posted On:2026-01-28 12:00:00 Source: arstechnica
When King Charles VIII of France occupied Naples in 1495, his army of nearly 20,000 mercenaries became the ground zero of the “Great Pox,” the first massive venereal syphilis pandemic in Europe, which went on to cause up to 5 million deaths. For a long time, the siege of Naples was considered the first time syphilis entered European accounts and culture. “But the evolutionary history of Treponema pallidum, the lineage of bacteria including the one that causes syphilis, goes way deeper in time,” says Elizabeth Nelson, an anthropologist at the Southern Methodist University.
Nelson and her colleagues found a 5,500-year-old Treponema pallidum genome in an individual excavated from a rock shelter in Colombia—a discovery that shows pathogens causing treponemal diseases like syphilis, bejel, or yaws are several millennia older than we thought. And this means we might have been thinking about the origins of syphilis in an entirely wrong way.
While the French occupation of Naples did not introduce syphilis to this world, it created the perfect storm that shaped the perception of this disease and its origins for centuries to come. The first ingredient of this storm was the French army and its leader. Charles VIII invaded Naples with a vast melting pot of brigands and mercenaries from all over Europe, including the French, Swiss, Poles, and Spaniards. The king himself wasn’t exactly the epitome of morality. Chroniclers like Johannes Burckard noted his “fondness of copulation” and reported that, once he’d been with a woman, he “cared no more about her” and immediately sought another partner—a behavior eagerly mirrored by his soldiers.
430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found
science - Posted On:2026-01-28 11:30:00 Source: slashdot
Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record. The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred. The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Japan lost a 5-ton navigation satellite when it fell off a rocket during launch
Science - Posted On:2026-01-28 08:29:56 Source: arstechnica
If you're in the space business long enough, you learn there are numerous ways a rocket can fail. I've written my share of stories about misbehaving rockets and the extensive investigations that usually—but not always—reveal what went wrong.
But I never expected to write this story. Maybe this was a failure of my own imagination. I'm used to writing about engine malfunctions, staging issues, guidance glitches, or structural failures. Last April, Ars reported on the bizarre failure of Firefly Aerospace's commercial Alpha rocket.
Japan's H3 rocket found a new way to fail last month, apparently eluding the imaginations of its own designers and engineers.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 Has a 4% Chance of Hitting the Moon
science - Posted On:2026-01-28 05:14:57 Source: slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Universe Today: There's a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4%), but non-negligible. And scientists are starting to prepare both for the bad (massive risks to satellites and huge meteors raining down on a large portion of the planet) and the good (a once in a lifetime chance to study the geology, seismology, and chemical makeup of our nearest neighbor). A new paper from Yifan He of Tsinghua University and co-authors, released in pre-print form on arXiv, looks at the bright side of all of the potential interesting science we can do if a collision does, indeed, happen. If Asteroid 2024 YR4 were to hit the Moon, researchers would be able to watch a large lunar impact unfold in real time and collect data on extreme collisions that usually exist only in computer models. Telescopes could follow how a newly formed crater and its pool of molten rock cool and solidify, while the resulting moonquake would offer a clearer picture of its internal structure via the seismic waves it sends through the Moon. Furthermore, researchers could compare the fresh crater to older ones to improve our understanding of the Moon's long history of impacts. Debris blasted off the surface could even deliver small lunar samples to Earth. Altogether, it would be a once-in-a-generation chance to learn more about how the Moon/rocky worlds respond to powerful impacts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ancient Martian Beach Discovered, Providing New Clues To Planet's Habitability
science - Posted On:2026-01-28 02:14:58 Source: slashdot
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: New findings from NASA's Perseverance rover have revealed evidence of wave-formed beaches and rocks altered by subsurface water in a Martian crater that once held a vast lake -- considerably expanding the timeline for potential habitability at this ancient site. In an international study led by Imperial College London, researchers uncovered that the so-called 'Margin unit' in Mars's Jezero crater preserves evidence of extensive underground interactions between rock and water, as well as the first definitive traces of an ancient shoreline. These are compelling indicators that habitable, surface water conditions persisted in the crater (home to a large lake around 3.5 billion years ago) further back in time than previously thought. "Shorelines are habitable environments on Earth, and the carbonate minerals that form here can naturally seal in and preserve information about the ancient environment," said lead author Alex Jones, a Ph.D. researcher in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering (ESE) at Imperial. The findings have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Scientists Launch AI DinoTracker App That Identifies Dinosaur Footprints
science - Posted On:2026-01-27 20:29:58 Source: slashdot
Scientists have released DinoTracker, a free AI-powered app that identifies dinosaur footprints by analyzing shape patterns rather than relying on potentially flawed historical labels. "When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do the Cinderella thing and find the foot that matches the slipper," said Prof Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the work. "But it's not so simple, because the shape of a dinosaur footprint depends not only on the shape of the dinosaur's foot but also the type of sand or mud it was walking through, and the motion of its foot." The Guardian reports: [...] Brusatte, [Dr Gregor Hartmann, the first author of the new research from Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany] and colleagues fed their AI system with 2,000 unlabelled footprint silhouettes. The system then determined how similar or different the imprints were from each other by analysing a range of features it identified as meaningful. The researchers discovered these eight features reflected variations in the imprints' shapes, such as the spread of the toes, amount of ground contact and heel position. The team have turned the system into a free app called DinoTracker that allows users to upload the silhouette of a footprint, explore the seven other footprints most similar to it and manipulate the footprint to see how varying the eight features can affect which other footprints are deemed most similar. Hartmann said that at present experts had to double check if factors such as the material the footprints were made in, and their age, matched the scientific hypothesis, but the system clustered prints with those expected from classifications made by human experts about 90% of the time. The findings have been published in the journal PNAS. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI Releases Prism, a Claude Code-Like App For Scientific Research
science - Posted On:2026-01-27 18:29:59 Source: slashdot
OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when preparing to publish their research. That's where Prism comes into the picture. Like Crixet before it, the app offers robust LaTeX editing and a built-in AI assistant. Where previously it was Crixet's own Chirp agent, now it's GPT-5.2 Thinking. OpenAI's model can help with more than just formatting journals -- in a press demo, an OpenAI employee used it to find and incorporate scientific literature that was relevant to the paper they were working on, with GPT-5.2 automating the process of writing the bibliography. [...] Later in the same demo, the OpenAI employee used Prism to generate a lesson plan for a graduate course on general relativity, as well as a set of problems for students to solve. OpenAI envisions these features helping scientists and professors spend less time on the more tedious tasks in their professions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Doomsday Clock Ticks To 85 Seconds Before Midnight, Its Closest Ever
science - Posted On:2026-01-27 12:30:00 Source: slashdot
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday set their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight -- the closest the timepiece has ever been to the theoretical point of annihilation since scientists created it during the Cold War in 1947. The clock now stands four seconds nearer than last year's setting, and this marks the third time in four years that the Bulletin has moved it closer to midnight. The Chicago-based nonprofit pointed to aggressive behavior by nuclear powers Russia, China and the United States, fraying nuclear arms control frameworks, ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, unregulated AI integration into military systems, and climate change. "In terms of nuclear risks, nothing in 2025 trended in the right direction," said Alexandra Bell, the Bulletin's president and CEO. The last remaining nuclear arms pact between the US and Russia, the New START treaty, expires on February 5. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trade wars muzzle allied talks on Trump's Golden Dome missile shield
Science - Posted On:2026-01-27 12:00:01 Source: arstechnica
Gen. Michael Guetlein, the senior officer in charge of the US military's planned Golden Dome missile defense shield, has laid out an audacious schedule for deploying a network of space-based sensors and interceptors by the end of President Donald Trump's term in the White House.
The three-year timeline is aggressive, with little margin for error in the event of budget or technological setbacks. The shield is designed to defend the US homeland against a range of long-range weapons, including Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), cruise missiles, and newer threats like hypersonic weapons and drones.
"By the summer of '28, we will be able to defend the entire nation against ballistic missiles, as well as other generation aerial threats, and we will continue to grow that architecture through 2035," Guetlein said Friday in a presentation to representatives from the US defense industry.
OpenAI's Science Chief Says LLMs Aren't Ready For Novel Discoveries and That's Fine
science - Posted On:2026-01-27 11:15:01 Source: slashdot
OpenAI launched a dedicated team in October called OpenAI for Science, led by vice president Kevin Weil, that aims to make scientists more productive -- but Weil admitted in an interview with MIT Technology Review that the LLM cannot yet produce novel discoveries and says that's not currently the mission. UC Berkeley statistician Nikita Zhivotovskiy, who has used LLMs since the first ChatGPT, told the publication: "So far, they seem to mainly combine existing results, sometimes incorrectly, rather than produce genuinely new approaches." "I don't think models are there yet," Weil admitted. "Maybe they'll get there. I'm optimistic that they will." The models excel at surfacing forgotten solutions and finding connections across fields, but Weil says the bar for accelerating science doesn't require "Einstein-level reimagining of an entire field." GPT-5 has read substantially every paper written in the last 30 years, he says, and can bring together analogies from unrelated disciplines. That accumulation of existing knowledge -- helping scientists avoid struggling on problems already solved -- is itself an acceleration. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meet the mysterious electrides
Science - Posted On:2026-01-27 10:14:56 Source: arstechnica
For close to a century, geoscientists have pondered a mystery: Where did Earth’s lighter elements go? Compared to amounts in the Sun and in some meteorites, Earth has less hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, as well as noble gases like helium—in some cases, more than 99 percent less.
Some of the disparity is explained by losses to the solar system as our planet formed. But researchers have long suspected that something else was going on too.
Recently, a team of scientists reported a possible explanation—that the elements are hiding deep in the solid inner core of Earth. At its super-high pressure—360 gigapascals, 3.6 million times atmospheric pressure—the iron there behaves strangely, becoming an electride: a little-known form of the metal that can suck up lighter elements.
Doctors face-palm as RFK Jr.’s top vaccine advisor questions need for polio shot
Science - Posted On:2026-01-26 17:29:59 Source: arstechnica
The chair of a federal vaccine advisory panel under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his stance clear on vaccines in a podcast last week—and that stance was so alarming that the American Medical Association was compelled to respond with a scathing statement.
Kirk Milhoan, who was named chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December, appeared on the aptly named podcast "Why Should I Trust You." In the hour-long interview, Milhoan made a wide range of comments that have concerned medical experts and raised eyebrows.
Early into the discussion, Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, declared, "I don't like established science," and that "science is what I observe." He lambasted the evidence-based methodology that previous ACIP panels used to carefully and transparently craft vaccine policy.
Did Edison accidentally make graphene in 1879?
Science - Posted On:2026-01-24 14:00:00 Source: arstechnica
Graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super capacitors, antennas, water filters, transistors, solar cells, and touchscreens, just to name a few. The physicists who first synthesized graphene in the lab won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. But 19th century inventor Thomas Edison may have unknowingly created graphene as a byproduct of his original experiments on incandescent bulbs over a century earlier, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Nano.
“To reproduce what Thomas Edison did, with the tools and knowledge we have now, is very exciting,” said co-author James Tour, a chemist at Rice University. “Finding that he could have produced graphene inspires curiosity about what other information lies buried in historical experiments. What questions would our scientific forefathers ask if they could join us in the lab today? What questions can we answer when we revisit their work through a modern lens?”
Edison didn't invent the concept of incandescent lamps; there were several versions predating his efforts. However, they generally had a a very short life span and required high electric current, so they weren't well suited to Edison's vision of large-scale commercialization. He experimented with different filament materials starting with carbonized cardboard and compressed lampblack. This, too, quickly burnt out, as did filaments made with various grasses and canes, like hemp and palmetto. Eventually Edison discovered that carbonized bamboo made for the best filament, with life spans over 1200 hours using a 110 volt power source.
NASA Confident, But Some Critics Wonder if Its Orion Spacecraft is Safe to Fly
science - Posted On:2026-01-24 13:44:59 Source: slashdot
"NASA remains confident it has a handle on the problem and the vehicle can bring the crew home safely," reports CNN. But "When four astronauts begin a historic trip around the moon as soon as February 6, they'll climb aboard NASA's 16.5-foot-wide Orion spacecraft with the understanding that it has a known flaw — one that has some experts urging the space agency not to fly the mission with humans on board..." The issue relates to a special coating applied to the bottom part of the spacecraft, called the heat shield... This vital part of the Orion spacecraft is nearly identical to the heat shield flown on Artemis I, an uncrewed 2022 test flight. That prior mission's Orion vehicle returned from space with a heat shield pockmarked by unexpected damage — prompting NASA to investigate the issue. And while NASA is poised to clear the heat shield for flight, even those who believe the mission is safe acknowledge there is unknown risk involved. "This is a deviant heat shield," said Dr. Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on a space agency-appointed independent review team that investigated the incident. "There's no doubt about it: This is not the heat shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts." Still, Olivas said he believes after spending years analyzing what went wrong with the heat shield, NASA "has its arms around the problem..." "I think in my mind, there's no flight that ever takes off where you don't have a lingering doubt," Olivas said. "But NASA really does understand what they have. They know the importance of the heat shield to crew safety, and I do believe that they've done the job." Lakiesha Hawkins, the acting deputy associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, echoed that sentiment in September, saying, "from a risk perspective, we feel very confident." And Reid Wiseman, the astronaut set to command the Artemis II mission, has expressed his confidence. "The investigators discovered the root cause, which was the key" to understanding and solving the heat shield issue, Wiseman told reporters last July. "If we stick to the new reentry path that NASA has planned, then this heat shield will be safe to fly." Others aren't so sure. "What they're talking about doing is crazy," said Dr. Charlie Camarda, a heat shield expert, research scientist and former NASA astronaut. Camarda — who was also a member of the first space shuttle crew to launch after the 2003 Columbia disaster — is among a group of former NASA employees who do not believe that the space agency should put astronauts on board the upcoming lunar excursion. He said he has spent months trying to get agency leadership to heed his warnings to no avail... Camarda also emphasized that his opposition to Artemis II isn't driven by a belief it will end with a catastrophic failure. He thinks it's likely the mission will return home safely. More than anything, Camarda told CNN, he fears that a safe flight for Artemis II will serve as validation for NASA leadership that its decision-making processes are sound. And that's bound to lull the agency into a false sense of security, Camarda warned. CNN adds that Dr. Dan Rasky, an expert on advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials who worked at NASA for more than 30 years, also does not believe NASA should allow astronauts to fly on board the Artemis II Orion capsule. And "a crucial milestone could be days away as Artemis program leaders gather for final risk assessments and the flight readiness review," when top NASA brass determine whether the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft are ready to take off with a human crew. Read more of this story at Slashdot.