Suspect freed from custody over suicide capsule death in Switzerland

Agence France-Presse
December 2, 2024 

The Sarco suicide pod causes death by hypoxia (ARND WIEGMANN/AFP)

A man held since September over the death of a US woman inside a controversial suicide capsule in Switzerland was released from custody Monday, though he remains under suspicion.

A 64-year-old woman took her own life on September 23 inside the space-age looking Sarco capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, outside a village near the German border.

Several people were arrested at the scene, with all but one being quickly released.

The public prosecutor in the northern canton of Schaffhausen did not name the remaining suspect in custody.

However, The Last Resort, an assisted dying organization, had recently said the association's co-president Florian Willet -- the only other person present at the death -- was the man still being held

.

AFP The button inside the Sarco suicide capsule releases the nitrogen

The public prosecutor's office said in a statement that it had originally opened criminal proceedings on the grounds of incitement and aiding and abetting suicide, with strong suspicion of intentional homicide.

"Based on the latest investigation status, there is still a strong suspicion of the crime of incitement and aiding and abetting suicide, but no longer of intentional homicide, even if the autopsy report... is not yet available," it said.

"The public prosecutor's office has therefore released the last detained person from custody," it said, adding: "The presumption of innocence applies."

- Pod fills with nitrogen -

The Last Resort presented the Sarco pod in Zurich in July, saying they expected it to be used for the first time within months.

The capsule fills with nitrogen and causes loss of consciousness and death by hypoxia within five minutes, according to the organization.

The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country but assisted dying has been legal for decades.

Swiss law generally allows assisted suicide if the person commits the lethal act themselves, and The Last Resort said it saw no legal obstacle to its use in the country.

However, on the same day the Sarco was used, Switzerland's Interior Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider told lawmakers that the device was "not legal".

AFP The Last Resort's advisory board member Fiona Stewart presented the Sarco capsule in Zurich in JulyThe Last Resort said the person who died -- who was not named -- was a 64-year-old woman from the midwestern United States.

She "had been suffering for many years from a number of serious problems associated with severe immune compromise", the organization said.

The Sarco was invented by Philip Nitschke, a leading global figure in right-to-die activism.

The 3D-printable capsule cost more than 650,000 euros ($680,000) to research and develop in the Netherlands over 12 years.

The organization said future reusable Sarco pods could cost around 15,000 euros.

‘Couldn’t care less:' What older people who are ‘tired of life’ can tell us about assisted dying

Photo by Vlad Sargu on Unsplash
two men playing chess

The Conversation

November 30, 2024

I can totally relate to tiredness of life. Guess what? I saw a beautiful sunrise yesterday morning, acknowledged it, and couldn’t care less if I saw another one.


Nina* is a 72-year-old woman in reasonably good health. She talked to one of us (Sam) recently about her life – and in particular, the sense that she had grown tired of being alive and was ready for the exit.

Nina wasn’t feeling suicidal or filled with anxiety and depression, but she was certain that she was ready to die. Living, she said, had become a burden. In Nina’s case, not only did this mean that she felt like a burden to society, but also that life felt a burden to her.
You know, other people [family and friends] don’t get it. But I believe this is actually a positive thing, because it means I am less and less attached to Earthly things – to being alive.


In our interviews with older people over the past 15 years, some have described the phenomenon of “tiredness of life” in this matter-of-fact way – as though they are talking about the weather. The condition is not, as some might imagine, always accompanied by a flurry of distress, anxiety or panic.

The debate around assisted dying in the UK has intensified because of the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, which cleared its second reading in the House of Commons on November 29. (This bill applies to England and Wales. A separate bill is due before the Scottish parliament, but the Scottish government has indicated the bill could not be brought into force without the co-operation of the UK government.)

A concern expressed by many opponents of the bill is that it could encourage the idea that people who feel as though they are a burden – or simply that life itself is a burden – should consider ending their life, putting particular pressure on the more vulnerable in society, including disabled people.

A number of countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada, have already legalised various forms of assisted dying, whereby patients self-administer life-ending medication, and euthanasia, where a doctor administers it directly. If the UK parliament bill is passed into law – and there are still many stages to go – then irremediable suffering from a terminal medical condition would be a strict legal criterion for someone to have the legal right to end their life. But critics of the bill have also raised concerns about the potential for this legal definition to be extended in the future.

In the Netherlands, there has been a significant recent rise in euthanasia cases granted for psychological suffering, highlighting how non-terminal conditions – including profound existential distress, such as tiredness of life – are increasingly being considered there. In Belgium, around 20% of 3,423 reported cases of euthanasia between January 2022 and December 2023 did not involve people with a terminal condition.

Our interest in this issue stems from discussions with older people in many European countries about their day-to-day experiences of the late stages of life. We are not advocating for either side of the UK parliament bill, but believe the fact that some people grow tired of life – a condition that has been repeatedly and very lucidly expressed to us – should be discussed openly and thoughtfully as part of the debate, and to inform how best to support countries’ growing populations of older people.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

Research spanning the past 30 years shows this condition has often been described in academic literature under terms such as “completed life”, “finished with life”, or “existential suffering” in older people. Its core characteristics have tended to be a sense of existential loneliness, a wish to hasten death, and a demoralisation with being alive.

In 2000, a Dutch court examined the landmark case of 86-year-old former politician Edward Brongersma, who had requested euthanasia from his doctor, Philip Sutorius, due to his longheld belief that life had become meaningless after the death of his friends and family. Sutorius ultimately complied with his patient’s request, providing him with a lethal cocktail of drugs which the patient self-administered.

Sutorius was subsequently put on trial because Brongersma’s tiredness of life was not deemed to meet the legal requirement of “hopeless and unbearable suffering”. In the end, the court cleared the GP of wrongdoing, acknowledging the patient’s deep suffering. An appeal court reversed this decision but imposed no punishment, recognising Sutorius had “acted out of concern for his patient”.

This case exemplifies how existential suffering can challenge legal and ethical boundaries in euthanasia law. Our work in the Understanding Tiredness of Life in Older People network – a European consortium we set up in 2022 to coordinate and promote research efforts around the experience – seeks to contribute to this complex and often polarised debate.

We believe it is important to air the thoughts and experiences of people like Nina, who was living alone following a divorce in her 60s when she was interviewed. She reflected:
There is an increasing sense of suffering that I try to live with. It’s connected to a feeling that being alive is less and less appealing than the alternative … I feel I have lived my life as fully as was humanly possible. Now I want to drop my body at any time.

‘Maybe we are tired of living this way?’

After introducing the concept of tiredness of life in a 2023 Conversation article, I (Sam) received letters and emails from people around the world who recognised the concept in themselves, their family or friends. One, Ray, wrote to say he was “very happy that people are seeing the problem” – and that, “while no solutions are being presented … at least it is being talked about now”. He went on to explain his own life situation:
I am 67 and retired. I feel most of the time that society in general wants to push me to the back burner, or maybe just wants me to disappear. My list of friends is dwindling now, as some have gone through or are starting to go through an end-of-life situation. Several have lost their spouses to dementia or cancer, and without their lifelong spouse, they just slowly fade. Eventually, they stop answering phone calls or showing up for weekly lunches.
NCStock/Shutterstock

Ray’s reflections, like those of many we’ve encountered in our research, appear to stem from a sense of existential exhaustion that is not necessarily tied to clinical depression or a psychiatric condition, but rather to the accumulation of losses that come with ageing. This is something that stands alone and, in our view, deserves acknowledgement – and medical, psychological and societal support.

In his letter, Ray added: “I’m not sure most people have the slightest idea about the existential realities of being an older person in the modern world … Maybe we just want to feel needed again, and are tired of living this way?”

Our network’s research suggests common byproducts of ageing include a loss of meaning and identity as well as health and fitness, a profound sense of boredom, and sometimes an “aversion to life”. In 2015, Greta, aged 87 and living in a nursing home, explained to me (Els) how this feeling came about in her:
I am treated as a person … but for myself, I see nothing – nothing but blackness. You cannot care for people any more. You lose so much that you are no longer human. That’s how I feel about myself.


What some older people say about their inner life can be hard to hear, and difficult to accept – especially if they are a close relative experiencing such profound suffering. Greta said she always had a passion for art, and her room in the nursing home was full of expressive pictures she had painted over her lifetime. But due to a deterioration in her eyesight, she now felt a deep sadness at the loss of the “colourful world” she had loved so much:
When I was 58, I retired [and] said: ‘I am going to paint.’ Everyone laughed at me, but I used to draw when I was little. In a way, it has always been my talent. In spring, it’s so beautiful out here – that little pond with those trees and the daffodils all in bloom. It’s such a rustic spot. The delicate green of the weeping willows … But now, it’s all black.


Tiredness of life often seems connected to a feeling that it is no longer possible to “be yourself” while alive, making death a more desirable option. But estimating how many older people reach this state of mind is hard, given the condition’s many different manifestations – and, indeed, an ongoing debate about whether it should be recognised within the medical community.

Our aim is not to lobby for or against a particular stance, but to foster an honest conversation about what some older people – including those who may think about assisted dying – are experiencing in their day-to-day lives. Unlike those who are actively suicidal, people who are tired of life may express a more passive weariness, or a sense of “completeness”, rather than an urgent desire to end their life abruptly.

In his book, Being Mortal, the American surgeon Atul Gawande argues that advances in medicine have turned ageing into a “long, slow fade”, with an emphasis on biological survival rather than quality of life. Tiredness of life could be viewed as a byproduct of this focus. For example, Gawande describes the experience of his wife’s grandmother in a nursing home after suffering a fall:
She woke when they told her, bathed and dressed when they told her, ate when they told her. She lived with whomever they said she had to … She felt incarcerated, like she was in prison for being old.

‘I had ceased to be a sexual being’

In Sweden, care professor Helena Larsson has written about a gradual “turning out of the lights” in old age. While Gawande critiques modern medicine’s role in extending life at the expense of quality, Larsson suggests that gradual disengagement from life is a natural, perhaps inevitable, process in old age. From this perspective, it is possible to think about tiredness of life as part of a long-term process of “letting go”.

A counterpoint is provided by Susan Pickard, director of the Centre for Ageing and the Life Course at the University of Liverpool, who suggests we are in danger of losing sight of the fact that people can and do “continue to grow” even very far into old age. In a 2024 paper published in The Gerontologist, Pickard argues that the positive aspects of ageing are often overlooked, and asks whether we have become blind to the gifts that ageing has to offer.

Pickard highlights the memoirs of Diana Athill, an English literary editor born in 1917 who “really shot into the sky” aged 90 by writing about her experiences of “deep old age”. In her memoirs, Athill described feeling a profound sense of loss at knowing she’d never again walk a puppy or live to see her tree fern grow. Yet, she also discovered unexpected gains, including the joy of platonic friendships and a newfound interest in life beyond sexuality.

Indeed, Athill said she considered “the possibility of friendship with men without sexuality” to be one of the greatest privileges of her old age:
I might not look or even feel all that old, but I had ceased to be a sexual being – a condition which had gone through several stages and had not always been a happy one, but which had always seemed central to my existence … An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became more interesting.


While we have spoken to many older people dealing with the sorts of losses described by Athill – who died in January 2019, aged 101 – we have not encountered much of the ambiguity reflected in her memoirs. This suggests she was something of an outlier, and that the reality for most older people is that their life feels less open to new opportunities – narrowing down rather than opening up.

The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “If we have our own ‘why’ of life, we shall get along with almost any ‘how’.” Developing a better understanding of the mindsets of people as they approach the final stages of their life should help us, as a society, offer them a clearer sense of purpose – a “why” that helps them find meaning to life, even as they face the inevitable losses of age.
Tiredness of life and assisted dying

Tiredness of life adds a complex layer to the ongoing debate about assisted dying, one that the media and academic research continue to grapple with in many countries. Assisted dying laws across 18 different jurisdictions vary widely in terms of minimum age, waiting periods, health conditions and consultation requirements, according to a 2021 study I (Kenneth) conducted with colleagues at the University of Ghent.

In some places, such as the Netherlands, people experiencing tiredness of life may be more likely to meet the criteria for assisted dying, while in others including Canada, they are not. In Belgium, an 85-year-old person experiencing gradual blindness and mobility issues may be legally eligible for assisted dying, but the same person might not qualify in countries with stricter terminal illness criteria.

Generally, a person requesting assisted dying needs to have an incurable or terminal illness with limited life expectancy, be suffering unbearably without meaningful prospects for improvement, and be of sound mind – free of pressure from people around them. It has been argued that people who are tired of life meet the latter two conditions, even if they do not have an incurable or terminal illness.

Makar/Shutterstock

Nonetheless, tiredness of life is a particularly complex issue in light of the eligibility criteria for euthanasia. When a person feels their life is “completed” but does not have an incurable illness or organ failure, it is always going to be more difficult for physicians to confirm the person’s request for assisted dying.

In countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, where assisted dying legislation is broadest, a minority of people request euthanasia on the grounds they are tired of life, according to research by palliative care physician Eva Bolt and colleagues. In the Netherlands, where eligibility for assisted dying has been considered for people who are not necessarily terminally ill or even close to dying, around 3% of euthanasia requests are thought to involve people who are tired of life.

However, the research also identified that a very low percentage of physicians feel comfortable fulfilling such requests – hesitation compounded both by legal uncertainties they may yet face, and by ethical discomfort when dealing with a patient request that does not align with clear-cut medical conditions.

An older person requesting assisted death may have some degree of age-related ill health, such as reduced mobility, hearing loss or blindness – but these may not limit life expectancy in any obvious sense. For many physicians responsible for assessing a request for assisted dying (and those providing the peer consultation that is mandatory under law), there can be professional, moral and emotional reluctance to grant the request.

Even when a physician feels a person suffering from tiredness of life is eligible for assisted dying and should be “allowed to die,” they may be inclined not to approve the request for fear of disciplinary repercussions.

In most countries with assisted dying laws, they mandate “a posteriori” case reviews, looking back on a case to determine cause and culpability in the aftermath of death. This is important because it is clearly impossible for doctors to “prove” that a person would have continued to feel tired of life indefinitely.

And doctors must also take into account the reaction of a person’s family when they assess an assisted dying request. Families often have difficulties understanding and accepting the choice of a loved one, particularly if the cause of their suffering is not visible and obvious.

A wish to die can be changeable, affected by shifts in physical, relational and social circumstances. There can be a degree of ambivalence: people may live with mixed feelings, even wishing to die and wishing to live simultaneously. This points to the fact that there may be a letting go process, and that people may reach a place of certainty about wishing to die after a period of psychological, emotional and spiritual tension.
Impact on family, friends and healthcare staff
I have two sons. My youngest son, who is quite close, keeping an eye on me, is very dear to me … And I also have a partner with whom I have a very good LAT [living apart together] relationship. But for me, it’s no longer a reason to go on living. I feel like a sawn-off tree.


We have also explored how tiredness of life in older people such as Brian, who was 94 when he talked to us, can affect the family and friends around them – and also healthcare professionals. While family connections were generally described positively, participants often expressed an intense desire not to be a burden.

NCstock/Shutterstock

This reluctance to openly discuss their suffering, despite the emotional closeness, reflects a broader struggle in family dynamics. Feelings of guilt, fear of burdening loved ones, and emotional unpreparedness frequently shape these conversations, making them much more complex than it might first appear.

In the US, research by social anthropologist Miriam Moss and colleagues, explored conversations between residents of nursing homes who had expressed a wish to die, and their family members. These revealed that responses involving “avoidance and invalidation” were common from family members. An interview with the adult daughter of a recently deceased 81-year-old man was particularly revealing:
Interviewer: Did you ever talk about death and dying with your Dad?
Daughter: I didn’t want to discuss it. Every time he brought it up, I didn’t want to hear it [so] we never really discussed it.
Interviewer: How do you feel about that?
Daughter: I wouldn’t bring it up, just because I would be devastated.
Interviewer: Would it be hard for him?
Daughter: I don’t know … I don’t want any reason to discuss it, to be honest with you … He did tell me they were going to take him to a psychologist because someone came in, and he must have been having a bad day.

This conversation points to the broader emotional journey that family members undertake when faced with a loved one’s statement that they are tired of life. Avoidance of such conversations can stem from a deep-seated emotional defence mechanism.

Even outside cases of assisted dying, family members often grapple with overwhelming sadness, helplessness and guilt regarding loved ones who are struggling with day-to-day life. And this can also be true for carers supporting old people in clear distress.

In a 2015 study, geriatrician Liesbeth Van Humbeeck and colleagues revealed the emotional burden that nurses face when supporting older people who express tiredness of life in community nursing homes in Flanders, Belgium. Feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty were common among these nurses, who said they were unsure how best to provide care or relate to the older person.

The study also identified that this sense of helplessness can contribute to emotional burnout, particularly when healthcare professionals and carers feel they lack the proper tools or guidance to address such deep, complex existential issues. The nurses often found themselves navigating both professional frustration and moral distress as they struggled to offer meaningful support:
When you enter the room of such a person, it can be hard mentally. Because actually, we are there to help the resident – but we have the feeling then that we are powerless, that we cannot help him.


Another nurse highlighted the difficulty in identifying tiredness of life, saying: “I sometimes do not know whether it is tiredness of life or depression. I think we are quicker to diagnose depression than acknowledge tiredness of life.”

This distinction is important. Misdiagnosis can lead to inappropriate treatments, such as prescribing antidepressants to someone whose condition is not rooted in clinical depression. Without understanding the existential concerns behind tiredness of life, it is possible that healthcare providers and carers risk treating patients less effectively, overlooking the deeper emotional and psychological issues at play.

Van Humbeeck and colleagues argued that it is crucial for managers to recognise the feelings of uncertainty and powerlessness among nurses and carers as a clinical reality in the support of patients suffering from tiredness of life. We agree they need psychological support and guidance to help deal with the emotional toll they face in their work. They would also benefit from specialist communication training to help them navigate conversations with old people about feeling tired of life.

Strategies like these could help alleviate feelings of powerlessness among nurses, boosting their emotional resilience and enabling them to provide better care for their patients. As one nurse put it:
You have to take into account [each patient’s] personality. There are people who very quickly will say they are tired of life, but who do not mean that seriously. From these people you have to hear it often. But you also have very serious people, and when you ask them further questions, they can give you very apt answers.

A need for greater understanding

Opponents of broadening assisted dying to include people who say they are tired of life, rather than terminally ill, caution that this approach could allow healthcare workers, carers, policymakers and society as a whole to neglect their duties towards older people. They raise important arguments, such as the idea that legalising assisted dying and euthanasia may take us further away from grappling with how best to support older people who are suffering – risking endorsing the sense that some people’s lives have diminished value.

Concerns about attitudes towards the value of older people’s lives were visible during the COVID pandemic, as discussions emerged around whether older people were being disproportionately “sacrificed” in medical triage decisions, raising ethical questions about whose lives were prioritised when resources were limited.

MaKars/Shutterstock

Proponents of assisted dying emphasise the importance of personal autonomy, arguing that people should have the right to decide the course of their own lives – and deaths. They caution against ageist biases, noting that even when older people are of sound mind, their requests for assisted dying are sometimes dismissed based on stereotypes and assumptions about diminished capacity.

To navigate these complex ethical debates and support informed decision-making, we need robust, evidence-based research on the phenomenon of tiredness of life. Such knowledge will empower healthcare professionals to better understand this experience and respond with appropriate care, balancing empathy with ethical considerations. And it will help policymakers develop frameworks that are sensitive to the needs of older individuals while safeguarding their rights.

This need for greater understanding underpinned the creation of our research network in 2022. Comprising 15 academics from Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK, we are exploring the nuances of older people’s experiences, and developing a clearer understanding of its impact on them, their family and friends, and society more broadly – providing insights that inform both clinical practices and public policy.

Our initial review of 33 academic studies revealed that people experiencing tiredness of life often face a range of age-related struggles, including unpredictable life changes, fear of dependency, and a sense of social redundancy. These experiences can lead to severe consequences including euthanasia requests, refusal to eat or drink and, in some cases, suicide.

We are also exploring how tiredness of life overlaps with other phenomena such as demoralisation, depression, existential anxiety, loneliness, social death, and the concept of a “completed life”. Understanding these interconnections is, we believe, crucial for developing comprehensive care strategies that address the emotional and existential challenges faced by many older people.

As we continue to research tiredness of life, it becomes clear that this growing phenomenon is complex, deeply personal, and demands thoughtful consideration from healthcare professionals and policymakers alike. How society chooses to respond will shape not only the future of end-of-life care, but also how we understand the ageing process itself.

*All interviewees in this article have been given pseudonyms to protect their identity

_This article has been updated to clarify the assisted dying bill applies directly to England and Wales and indirectly to Scotland, where a separate bill is due to be debated. It was further updated to note the bill cleared its second reading in the House of Commons on November 29.


For you: more from our Insights series:

Assisted dying: first-hand accounts of what it’s like to help a loved one die

Dying is more painful when society won’t listen – stories of financial hardship that show how end-of-life care needs to change

Existential crisis: how long COVID patients helped us understand what it’s like to lose your sense of identity and purpose in life

Loneliness, loss and regret: what getting old really feels like – new study

Sam Carr, Reader in Education with Psychology and Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath; Els van Wijngaarden, Associate Professor in Contemporary Meanings of Ageing and Dying, Radboud University, and Kenneth Chambaere, Professor in Public Health, Sociology and Ethics of the End of Life, Ghent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

BIDEN DO THE RIGHT THING

PARDON LEONARD PELTIER

 #PARDONLEONARDPELTIER

SPACE/COSMOS

Trump may cancel NASA’s powerful SLS Moon rocket – here’s what that would mean for Elon Musk and the future of space travel

Elon Musk greets Donald Trump as he arrives to attend a viewing of the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in Brownsville, Texas, U.S., November 19, 2024. Brandon Bell/Pool via REUTERS

The Conversation

December 02, 2024

Since Donald Trump’s recent electoral victory, rumours and speculation have circulated that Nasa’s giant Moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), could be under threat. The rocket is one of several key elements needed for the US space agency’s Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972.


For the first lunar landing mission, called Artemis III, the SLS will launch four astronauts on Nasa’s Orion crew capsule. Orion will then travel to the Moon. Once in lunar orbit, Orion will dock with Elon Musk’s Starship vehicle (which has been launched separately). Two astronauts will float into Starship, which undocks from Orion and travels down to the lunar surface.

After walking on the Moon, the two astronauts return to lunar orbit in Starship, which docks with Orion. The two moonwalkers rejoin their crewmates and go home on Orion, leaving Starship in orbit around the Moon.

The US space journalist Eric Berger recently posted on X: “To be clear we are far from anything being settled, but based on what I’m hearing it seems at least 50-50 that Nasa’s Space Launch System rocket will be cancelled.”

No official announcements have been made. However, such a move could be in line with previous speculation that the Trump administration could gut Nasa, forcing it to contract out much of its work to the private companies.

But could another rocket easily take the place of the SLS? This question goes to the heart of what America wants to achieve amid an emerging 21st-century space race. China has pledged to send its astronauts to the lunar surface by 2030. Unlike the US, China is usually conservative in its estimates, so we can assume deadline slippage is unlikely. Meanwhile, several elements of Artemis are holding up the schedule.

One of these delayed elements is Musk’s Starship, which acts as the lander on Artemis III. It still needs to demonstrate key milestones including refuelling in space and performing a landing on the Moon without crew. Some in the space community believe that if China were to get to the Moon first this century, it would deal a significant blow to US ambitions in space.

Musk has been brought into the incoming administration as one of two chief cost cutters, aiming to make reductions of up to US$2 trillion (£1.57 trillion) from the federal budget. Some observers have been alarmed by Elon Musk’s closeness to Trump and by comments by the president-elect about shifting focus towards a crewed Mars mission.

These comments seem to mirror the views of Musk, who has focused much of his energy on ambitions to settle the red planet, not the Moon. The billionaire has said he wants to send humans on a trip to Mars using his Starship vehicle by 2028 – a timeline that some view as unrealistic. The SLS performed very well during the Artemis I mission in 2022. NASA/Kim Shiflett

It was actually the first Trump administration that established the Artemis programme in 2017. After initial missions to the lunar surface, the programme aims to establish a permanent base where astronauts can learn how to live and work on the Moon, carrying out cutting-edge research.

However, the schedule has been slipping. US astronauts were to have landed on the Moon this year. Nasa now says the first landing, during the Artemis III mission, will not take place until Autumn 2026.

Delays have been introduced by redesigns to spacesuits, problems with Orion’s heat-shield and life support systems and, as mentioned, with Starship. An upgraded mobile launch tower for the SLS has also been plagued by cost overruns and schedule slippage.

 

Could Nasa’s Orion crew capsule launch on another rocket? Nasa

Notably, an element that isn’t contributing to delays is the SLS, which performed very well during the Artemis I mission in 2022. Many billions of dollars have already been invested in designing and building the SLS and associated infrastructure at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Nasa says the SLS is “the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts, and cargo directly to the Moon in a single launch”. But its expense has been criticised: each SLS launch is estimated to cost more than US$2 billion (£1.6 billion).

News of delays and technical issues with Artemis have coincided with hugely positive PR for Musk’s SpaceX – especially around its test flights of Starship. This included last month’s feat, where the vehicle’s massive booster stage was caught in a pair of robotic arms as it fell back from space to the company’s launchpad in Texas – wowing space enthusiasts around the world. Unlike many launch vehicles, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. Its cost efficiency could greatly benefit future crewed missions.

If the SLS were to be cancelled, could Musk’s Starship replace it? Under this scenario, the SpaceX vehicle could presumably serve both as the launcher to send astronauts on their way to lunar orbit and as the lander to take them down to the surface. This is technically feasible, but would be far from a straightforward, like-for-like replacement. The SLS is already an operational rocket, whereas Starship is still in its testing phase and has key steps still to achieve before astronauts can board it.

Another SpaceX rocket that has previously been touted as a contender to launch Orion is the Falcon Heavy. However, engineers would need to modify both the rocket and procedures for assembly and launch. This would carry many uncertainties, and with it the risk of further, significant delays to the Artemis schedule. This all suggests that there is not a lot of time to make major changes to Nasa’s Moon programme if the US is to get ahead in this 21st-century space race. 

Nasa has previously looked at whether Orion could be launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX, CC BY-NC

Rocket launches require specific designs to meet mission requirements, as well as extensive planning for carrying astronauts, spacecraft and payloads. The aims of Artemis are not just to land astronauts on the Moon, but to be able to land in a variety of regions on the lunar surface, including the relatively unexplored south pole.

The planning and development required is hugely complex and ambitious. It remains to be seen whether SpaceX, or any other commercial launch companies, are ready for such a major undertaking and commitment.

With tens of billions of dollars already invested in the SLS, it does not seem economically beneficial to completely scrap the rocket. As indicated by Nasa’s willingness to seek an innovative approach and work with commercial companies on future Artemis missions, there could be other ways for commercial space players to get involved.

It’s understandable for the incoming Trump administration to raise questions and query cost models in Nasa programmes. But it would be advisable for them to carefully consider the trade offs before making decisions with such wide-ranging consequences.

It might fall down to whether the priority is winning the new space race. Whatever goals that the new administration chooses to prioritise or target, it may have to carefully justify that decision to other legislators and to the American public.

Yang Gao, Professor of Robotics, Head of Centre for Robotics Research, King's College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Astronomers have pinpointed the origin of mysterious repeating radio bursts from space

The Conversation
December 2, 2024 

Radio signal in Space (Shutterstock)

Slowly repeating bursts of intense radio waves from space have puzzled astronomers since they were discovered in 2022.

In new research, we have for the first time tracked one of these pulsating signals back to its source: a common kind of lightweight star called a red dwarf, likely in a binary orbit with a white dwarf, the core of another star that exploded long ago.
A slowly pulsing mystery

In 2022, our team made an amazing discovery: periodic radio pulsations that repeated every 18 minutes, emanating from space. The pulses outshone everything nearby, flashed brilliantly for three months, then disappeared.

We know some repeating radio signals come from a kind of neutron star called a radio pulsar, which spins rapidly (typically once a second or faster), beaming out radio waves like a lighthouse. The trouble is, our current theories say a pulsar spinning only once every 18 minutes should not produce radio waves.

So we thought our 2022 discovery could point to new and exciting physics – or help explain exactly how pulsars emit radiation, which despite 50 years of research is still not understood very well.

More slowly blinking radio sources have been discovered since then. There are now about ten known “long-period radio transients”.

However, just finding more hasn’t been enough to solve the mystery.

Searching the outskirts of the galaxy

Until now, every one of these sources has been found deep in the heart of the Milky Way.

This makes it very hard to figure out what kind of star or object produces the radio waves, because there are thousands of stars in a small area. Any one of them could be responsible for the signal, or none of them.

So, we started a campaign to scan the skies with the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in Western Australia, which can observe 1,000 square degrees of the sky every minute. An undergraduate student at Curtin University, Csanád Horváth, processed data covering half of the sky, looking for these elusive signals in more sparsely populated regions of the Milky Way.


One element of the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope in Western Australia that observes the sky at low radio frequencies. ICRAR / Curtin University

And sure enough, we found a new source! Dubbed GLEAM-X J0704-37, it produces minute-long pulses of radio waves, just like other long-period radio transients. However, these pulses repeat only once every 2.9 hours, making it the slowest long-period radio transient found so far.

Where are the radio waves coming from?

We performed follow-up observations with the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, the most sensitive radio telescope in the southern hemisphere. These pinpointed the location of the radio waves precisely: they were coming from a red dwarf star. These stars are incredibly common, making up 70% of the stars in the Milky Way, but they are so faint that not a single one is visible to the naked eye.


The source of the radio waves, as seen by the MWA at low resolution (magenta circle) and MeerKAT at high resolution (cyan circle). The white circles are all stars in our own Galaxy. Hurley-Walker et al. 2024 / Astrophysical Journal Letters

Combining historical observations from the Murchison Widefield Array and new MeerKAT monitoring data, we found that the pulses arrive a little earlier and a little later in a repeating pattern. This probably indicates that the radio emitter isn’t the red dwarf itself, but rather an unseen object in a binary orbit with it.

Based on previous studies of the evolution of stars, we think this invisible radio emitter is most likely to be a white dwarf, which is the final endpoint of small to medium-sized stars like our own Sun. If it were a neutron star or a black hole, the explosion that created it would have been so large it should have disrupted the orbit.

It takes two to tango

So how do a red dwarf and a white dwarf generate a radio signal?

The red dwarf probably produces a stellar wind of charged particles, just like our Sun does. When the wind hits the white dwarf’s magnetic field, it would be accelerated, producing radio waves.

This could be similar to how the Sun’s stellar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field to produce beautiful aurora, and also low-frequency radio waves.

An artist’s impression of the AR Sco system: a binary red dwarf and white dwarf that interact to produce radio emission.

We already know of a few systems like this, such as AR Scorpii, where variations in the brightness of the red dwarf imply that the companion white dwarf is hitting it with a powerful beam of radio waves every two minutes. None of these systems are as bright or as slow as the long-period radio transients, but maybe as we find more examples, we will work out a unifying physical model that explains all of them.

On the other hand, there may be many different kinds of system that can produce long-period radio pulsations.

Either way, we’ve learned the power of expecting the unexpected – and we’ll keep scanning the skies to solve this cosmic mystery.

Natasha Hurley-Walker, Radio Astronomer, Curtin University


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Music can change how you feel about the past

The Conversation
December 2, 2024 

Girl listening to the music with a pair of headphones (Shutterstock)

Have you ever noticed how a particular song can bring back a flood of memories? Maybe it’s the tune that was playing during your first dance, or the anthem of a memorable road trip.

People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research my team and I published suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.

I’m a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with my mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie, our recently published research uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion and memory. Specifically, listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember – potentially offering new ways to help people cope with difficult memories.

Music, stories and memory

When you listen to music, it’s not just your ears that are engaged. The areas of your brain responsible for emotion and memory also become active. The hippocampus, which is essential for storing and retrieving memories, works closely with the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center. This is partly why certain songs are not only memorable but also deeply emotional.

While music’s ability to evoke emotions and trigger memories is well known, we wondered whether it could also alter the emotional content of existing memories. Our hypothesis was rooted in the concept of memory reactivation – the idea that when you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, allowing new information to be incorporated.



Memories are malleable. Artur Debat/Moment Open via Getty Images

We developed a three-day experiment to test whether music played during recall might introduce new emotional elements into the original memory.

On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories. The next day, they recalled these stories while listening to either positive music, negative music or silence. On the final day, we asked participants to recall the stories again, this time without any music. On the second day, we recorded their brain activity with fMRI scans, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

Our approach is analogous to how movie soundtracks can alter viewers’ perceptions of a scene, but in this case, we examined how music might change participants’ actual memories of an event.

The results were striking. When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music. For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.


Even more intriguing were the brain scans we took during the experiment. When participants recalled stories while listening to music, there was increased activity in the amygdala and hippocampus – areas crucial for emotional memory processing. This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously.

We also saw evidence of strong communication between these emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the parts of the brain involved in visual sensory processing. This suggests music might infuse emotional details into memories while participants were visually imagining the stories.
Musical memories


Our results suggest that music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone. Memories may also be more flexible than previously thought and could be influenced by external auditory cues during recall.

While further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and for medicine.

For people dealing with conditions such as depression or PTSD, where negative memories can be overwhelming, carefully chosen music might help reframe those memories in a more positive light and potentially reduce their negative emotional impact over time. It also opens new avenues for exploring music-based interventions in treatments for depression and other mental health conditions.



Music could help reframe negative memories into something less painful. Delmaine Donson/E+ via Getty Images

On a day-to-day level, our research highlights the potential power of the soundtrack people choose for their lives. Memories, much like your favorite songs, can be remixed and remastered by music. The music you listen to while reminiscing or even while going about your daily routines might be subtly shaping how you remember those experiences in the future.

The next time you put on a favorite playlist, consider how it might be coloring not just your current mood but also your future recollections as well.

Yiren Ren, Adjunct Researcher in Cognitive Brain Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How giant ‘batteries’ in the Earth could slash your electricity bills

Grist
December 2, 2024

An electric vehicle charging station is shown between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in Baker, California, U.S., November 19, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Solar panels and wind turbines give the world bountiful energy — but come with a conundrum. When it’s sunny and windy out, in many places these renewables produce more electricity than is actually needed at the time. Then when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing, those renewables provide little to no electricity when it’s sorely needed.

So for the grid of tomorrow to go 100 percent renewable, it needs to store a lot more energy. You’ve probably heard about giant lithium-ion batteries stockpiling that energy for later use. But when providing backup power, even a big battery bank will usually drain in four hours. The need for an alternative has the United States government, researchers, and startups scrambling to develop more “long-duration energy storage” that can provide a minimum of 10 hours of backup power — often by using reservoirs, caverns, and other parts of the landscape as batteries.

A new study from several universities and national labs in the United States and Canada shows that large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills. It looked specifically at the Western Interconnection, a chunk of the grid that includes the western U.S. and Canada, plus a bit of northern Mexico. The study found that building more long-duration energy storage there would reduce electricity prices by more than 70 percent in times of high demand.

“It’s like an orchestra,” said Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor of the paper published last month in the journal Nature Communications. “We need to think about all these factors, how they work. But bringing in more storage can only help in making this more cost-effective.”

The technologies already exist to hold renewable energy for at least half a day, with more on the way. One technique is known as pumped storage hydropower: When the grid is humming with renewable power, a facility pumps water uphill into a reservoir. Then, when solar or wind power drops off, the facility lets the water loose to flow back down into another reservoir, turning turbines that produce electricity. It’s exploiting energy from the wind and the sun, along with the power of gravity.

“Battery storage on its own — or what people call short-duration energy storage — is very important,” said Martin Staadecker, an energy systems researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the new study. “But you can’t just rely on lithium-ion batteries, because it would be very expensive to have enough to actually provide power for an entire week.”

As of 2022, the U.S. had 43 pumped storage hydropower facilities with a combined generation capacity of 22 gigawatts. (For perspective, the U.S. has around 150 gigawatts of wind power and 140 gigawatts of solar.) According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. has the potential to double its capacity for that kind of energy storage. In 2021, the Biden administration launched its Long Duration Storage Shot, part of the Energy Earthshots initiative, aiming to reduce the costs of the technology by 90 percent in a decade. And last year, it announced $325 million for 15 long-duration energy storage projects, including one that stores heat energy in concrete and others to make newfangled batteries made of iron, water, and air.

The researchers looked at long-duration energy storage without considering the particular technique involved, asking what would be the cheapest way to get the Western Interconnection to be 100 percent emissions-free. Their study found that long-duration energy storage would be particularly beneficial to a utility’s customers, reducing electricity costs in times of high demand on the grid, like in the late afternoon as people return home and switch on appliances at the same time that solar power on the grid is waning. More storage also means more backup power for ever-hotter heat waves, when whole regions flick on their AC units.

Companies are figuring out how to store energy underground, too. A company called Hydrostor, based in Toronto, Canada, uses excess renewable energy on the grid to pump compressed air into subterranean caverns filled with water. That forces the water aboveground into a reservoir. When the grid needs electricity, Hydrostor lets that water flow back into the chamber, pushing the air back to the surface to drive turbines. “We’re kind of creating a piston underground of water,” said Jon Norman, president of Hydrostor. “We’re actually building a cavity out using techniques that they use in the hydrocarbon storage industry to store propane and butane.”

If a region runs low on renewable power, like when the sun sets, it would have to import carbon-free electricity from elsewhere. But that requires transmission lines that cut through hundreds or thousands of miles of land, which are difficult to get approved and expensive to build. The new study found that it would cost between $83 billion and $130 billion to deploy the amount of long-duration energy storage in the modeling — depending on how the price of the technology declines as it matures.

With long-duration energy storage, utilities can deploy more solar panels and wind turbines locally and store up their energy, rather than having to ship it from somewhere else. Kevin Schneider, an electrical engineer who studies the grid at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory but wasn’t involved in the new research, said that could reduce the significant costs of building long-distance transmission lines. “Getting that flexibility in the system, where you can have a reservoir of electricity that you can store up and then release, that’s what allows us to not have to build as much infrastructure, and also be a little bit more resilient.”

The grid of tomorrow, then, may hum with renewable energy stored both in giant battery banks, but also stored in the landscape itself. Solar and wind power would be wasted no more.

Revealed: Report flags Trump pick's ties to 'pure nuttery' that 'sparked acts of violence'

David McAfee
December 1, 2024 


Donald Trump's recent nominee has ties to an ideology that has "sparked multiple acts of violence," according to a new report.

David Corn, D.C. bureau chief of Mother Jones and MSNBC analyst, wrote Sunday that Kash Patel, chosen by Trump to lead the FBI, has embraced "the unhinged QAnon movement." Critics were outraged by the FBI selection.

According to Corn, Patel's "extremism goes far beyond assailing a supposed Deep State."

"Patel is a MAGA combatant who has fiercely advocated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots and unfairly persecuted political prisoners. (The still ongoing January 6 case, including scores of prosecutions for assaults on police, is one of the FBI’s largest and most successful criminal investigations ever.) Patel is also a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, when he was a Pentagon official, he spread the bonkers idea that Italian military satellites had been employed to turn Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in the 2020 election. And he has falsely claimed that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax cooked up by the FBI and so-called Deep State to sabotage Trump," Corn wrote. "Moreover, Patel has been supportive of the most loony conspiracy theory in MAGA land: QAnon."

Corn further explained the QAnon conspiracy theory, which he said "holds that an intelligence operative known only as Q has revealed through cryptic messages that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles is operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination and conspires against Trump."


"It is pure nuttery. Worse than that, QAnon has sparked multiple acts of violence," he added. "Yet Patel repeatedlyhas hailed QAnoners and promoted this conspiracy theory. In early 2022, when he sat on the board of Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, Patel amplified an account called @Q that pushed out QAnon messaging."

Read the full report here.

'Credibly accused of raping a woman': Guest sounds alarm on Pete Hegseth live on Fox News
David Edwards
December 1, 2024

Lucy Caldwell (Fox News/screen grab)

Fox News guest Lucy Caldwell, a Democratic strategist, argued that sexual assault allegations against Pete Hegseth should be taken seriously after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him to be defense secretary.

On Sunday's Media Buzz program, host Howard Kurtz said that Hegseth and other nominees had faced "credible" threats of violence.

"Also, Thanksgiving Day, Lucy, there were threats against four House Democrats in Connecticut," Kurtz said.

"No matter whom it's targeted against, violence is never the right way to resolve these issues," Caldwell agreed. "All violence is wrong."

"Some of Trump's cabinet appointees have been credibly accused of violent acts, including Pete Hegseth," she continued. "He has been credibly accused of raping a woman. So, I think we should condemn violence against these people. Violence that's carried out by them."

According to The Associated Press, police in Santa Cruz confirmed that sexual assault allegations against Hegseth were investigated in 2017.


ALSO READ: Trump allies promise revenge as Dems ram through Biden judges

Monterey County District Attorney Jeannine M. Pacioni later said her office declined to press charges because there was no “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Hegseth eventually paid the woman an undisclosed sum to head off a lawsuit, according to reports.

Over the weekend, The New York Times revealed that Hegseth's mother had called her son an "abuser of women" in emails.

Watch the video below from Fox News.