Ladder of Escalation.

"So what?"

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1. NASA is poised to launch Europa Clipper, a $5.2 billion mission to Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, as early as October 10. The spacecraft will blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It will study Europa, a possible home for extraterrestrial life, through a series of flybys after reaching Jupiter in 2030. Europa isn’t a craterous rock like our moon. Its surface is coated with ice, and telescope and spacecraft observations suggest it harbors a colossal liquid ocean in its interior that holds twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined. Europa also possesses some of life’s critical building blocks: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. These conditions could be sufficient for life to have developed there, either in the depths of the ocean or in subsurface lakes. (Source: technologyreview.com, science.nasa.gov)

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2. A fruit fly might not be the smartest organism, but scientists can still learn a lot from its brain. Researchers are hoping to do that now that they have a new map — the most complete for any organism so far — of the brain of a single fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). The wiring diagram, or ‘connectome’, includes nearly 140,000 neurons and captures more than 54.5 million synapses, which are the connections between nerve cells. “This is a huge deal,” says Clay Reid, a neurobiologist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, who was not involved in the project but has worked with one of the team members who was. “It’s something that the world has been anxiously waiting for, for a long time.” The map is described in a package of nine papers about the data published in Nature today. Its creators are part of a consortium known as FlyWire, co-led by neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton University in New Jersey. The FlyWire “tutorials” are truly astonishing. (Source: nature.com, flywire.ai, italics mine)

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