An Israeli spacecraft lost contact with Earth moments before it was to land on the moon and crashed late Thursday, failing in an ambitious attempt to make history as the first privately funded lunar mission. 

The spacecraft lost communication with ground control as it was making its final descent to the moon. Moments later, the mission was declared a failure.

“We definitely crashed on surface of moon,” said Opher Doron, general manager of the space division of Israel Aerospace Industries. He said the spacecraft was in pieces scattered at the planned landing site. 

Engine shut down

Doron said that the spacecraft’s engine turned off shortly before landing. By the time power was restored, he said the craft was moving too fast to land safely. Scientists were still trying to figure out the cause of the failure. 

One of the inertial measurement units failed. And that caused an unfortunate chain of events we're not sure about,'' he said.The engine was turned off. The engine was stopped and the spacecraft crashed. That’s all we know.” 

The incident occurred in front of a packed audience that included Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was broadcast live on national television.

The small robotic spacecraft, built by the nonprofit SpaceIL and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, had hoped to match a feat that has been achieved only by the national space agencies of three countries: the U.S., Russia and China.

If at first you don't succeed, try try again,'' Netanyahu said. He vowed to put an Israeli spacecraft on the moonintact” in the next two years.  

Scientists, who were giddy with excitement only seconds earlier, were visibly distraught, and celebrations at viewing centers across the country were dashed. 

President Reuven Rivlin hosted dozens of youngsters at his official residence. The children, some wearing white spacesuits, appeared confused as the crash unfolded. 

We are full of admiration for the wonderful people who brought the spacecraft to the moon,'' Rivlin said.True, not as we had hoped, but we will succeed in the end.” 

Launched in February

The failure was a disappointing ending to a 6.5 million-kilometer (4 million-mile) lunar voyage, almost unprecedented in length, that was designed to conserve fuel and reduce price. 

The spacecraft hitched a ride on the SpaceX Falcon rocket, launched from Florida in February.  For the past two months, Beresheet traveled around the Earth several times before entering lunar orbit.

The U.S. space agency NASA broadcast the landing attempt live on its dedicated TV channels, as well as online.

“While NASA regrets the end of the SpaceIL mission without a successful lunar landing of the Beresheet lander, we congratulate SpaceIL, the Israel Aerospace Industries and the state of Israel on the incredible accomplishment of sending the first privately funded mission into lunar orbit,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. 

Every attempt to reach new milestones holds opportunities for us to learn, adjust and progress,'' he added.I have no doubt that Israel and SpaceIL will continue to explore, and I look forward to celebrating their future achievements.” 
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Scientists have been monitoring what black holes do to the space around them for decades. Their immense gravity warps time and space in a way that Albert Einstein predicted and that researchers can see. But they’ve never seen a black hole until now. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Deadly floods in the U.S. that bear the fingerprints of climate change are prompting an exodus of workers from the Midwest, the world’s biggest professional social network, LinkedIn, said Wednesday.

The website, on which millions of U.S. workers maintain profiles, said data showed a spike in members changing their work location from areas flooded last month to cities in the Southwest and on the West Coast.

“When you look at the most real-time data that we have, and that’s our ‘job starts’, we’ve seen those come down quite a bit in the cities that have been hit,” said Guy Berger, chief economist at LinkedIn.

The finding emerged from a LinkedIn analysis of user-generated data. LinkedIn users can share their location and job information — such as when they start a new job — on their profile.

Hiring rates tracked through the platform dropped across the Midwest, LinkedIn said in its April U.S. workforce report, published Monday.

Omaha, Nebraska, and Fargo, North Dakota, registered among the most extreme decreases in hiring rates at nearly 8 and 14 percent respectively, it said.

The findings were based on the more than 155 million profiles of U.S. workers that are listed on the site, the company said.

The U.S. labor force — employed and unemployed people — totaled 163 million people last month, according to the Department of Labor.

Climate change had a hand in the record floods that have damaged crops and drowned livestock along the Missouri, Red and Mississippi rivers, especially in Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, scientists have said.

Fargo was also among communities impacted, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

LinkedIn’s workforce report said that it has noticed “migration trends” following other natural disasters, such as Hurricane Irma, which hit the U.S. East Coast in 2017.

Workers would likely move to such cities as Denver, Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix and Seattle, largely due to their proximity, affordability and growing economies, Berger predicted.

It was unclear how permanent the retreat of workers from Midwest areas that were recently flooded would prove to be, Berger said.

But a repeat of extreme weather events could lead to “a sustained bleed of talent,” he said.

A handful of American cities, from Duluth, Minnesota, to Cincinnati, Ohio, have begun promoting themselves as future havens for U.S. climate migrants as climate change is predicted to cause intense natural disasters elsewhere.
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Fossil bones and teeth found in the Philippines have revealed a long-lost cousin of modern people, which evidently lived around the time our own species was spreading from Africa to occupy the rest of the world.   

It’s yet another reminder that, although Homo sapiens is now the only surviving member of our branch of the evolutionary tree, we’ve had company for most of our existence.

And it makes our understanding of human evolution in Asia “messier, more complicated and whole lot more interesting,” says one expert, Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

In a study released Wednesday by the journal Nature, scientists describe a cache of seven teeth and six bones from the feet, hands and thigh of at least three individuals. They were recovered from Callao Cave on the island of Luzon in the northern Philippines in 2007, 2011 and 2015. Tests on two samples show minimum ages of 50,000 years and 67,000 years.  

The main exodus of our own species from Africa that all of today’s non-African people are descended from took place around 60,000 years ago.  

Analysis of the bones from Luzon led the study authors to conclude they belonged to a previously unknown member of our “Homo” branch of the family tree.  One of the toe bones and the overall pattern of tooth shapes and sizes differ from what’s been seen before in the Homo family, the researchers said.  

They dubbed the creature Homo luzonensis.  

It apparently used stone tools and its small teeth suggest it might have been rather small-bodied, said one of the study authors, Florent Detroit of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.   

H. luzonensis lived in eastern Asia at around the same time as not only our species but other members of the Homo branch, including Neanderthals, their little-understood Siberian cousins the Denisovans, and the diminutive “hobbits” of the island of Flores in Indonesia.  

There’s no sign that H. luzonensis encountered any other member of the Homo group, Detroit said in an email. Our species isn’t known to have reached the Philippines until thousands of years after the age of the bones, he said.   

But some human relative was on Luzon more than 700,000 years ago, as indicated by the presence of stone tools and a butchered rhino dating to that time, he said. It might have been the newfound species or an ancestor of it, he said in an email.

Detroit said it’s not clear how H. luzonensis is related to other species of Homo. He speculated that it might have descended from an earlier human relative, Homo erectus, that somehow crossed the sea to Luzon.

H. erectus is generally considered the first Homo species to have expanded beyond Africa, and it plays a prominent role in the conventional wisdom about evolution outside that continent.  Some scientists have suggested that the hobbits on the Indonesian island are descended from H. erectus.

Tocheri, who did not participate it the new report, agreed that both H. luzonensis and the hobbits may have descended from H. erectus. But he said the Philippines discovery gives new credence to an alternate view: Maybe some unknown creature other than H. erectus also slipped out of Africa and into Europe and Asia, and later gave rise to both island species.

After all, he said in an interview, remains of the hobbits and H. luzonensis show a mix of primitive and more modern traits that differ from what’s seen in H. erectus. They look more like what one what might find in Africa 1.5 to 2.5 million years ago, and which might have been carried out of that continent by the mystery species, he said.

The discovery of a new human relative on Luzon might be “smoke from a much, much bigger fire,” he said.

Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, said the Luzon find “shows we still know very little about human evolution, particularly in Asia.”  

More such discoveries will probably emerge with further work in the region, which is under-studied, he said in an email.  

 
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A new report finds gender inequality strips women of their ability to control their sexual and reproductive options and limits their right to choose when and if they wish to start a family. The United Nations Population Fund released this year’s State of the World Population report titled “Unfinished Business: The Pursuit of Rights and Choices for All.”

Since the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) was created 50 years ago, the number of births per woman has dropped by nearly half to 2.5 births. Also, there has been a significant decrease in fertility rates in the least developed countries, as well as deaths from pregnancy-related causes.

But the UNFPA reports more than 200 million women worldwide are subjected to unwanted pregnancies because they have no access to modern contraceptives. In addition, more than 800 pregnant women die each day from preventable causes because of limited access to reproductive health services. Two-thirds of maternal deaths today occur in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the report.

Director of UNFPA in Geneva, Monica Ferro, says gender inequality is often used to control women’s sexuality and reproduction.

“Gender inequality limits the ability of women to freely make fundamental decisions about when and with whom to have sex, about the use of contraception or health care, and about whether and when to seek employment, or whether to seek higher education,” Ferro said. 

The report says hundreds of millions of women worldwide — typically poorer, rural and less educated — are being left behind, unable to enjoy their rights to sexual and reproductive health.

Women fare best in countries that have invested most in gender-equality policies and programs, Ferro tells VOA, adding that most of these countries are in the developed world.

“If you look at the countries who are the most challenged ones, it is countries where women still face many barriers in accessing health, in accessing especially sexual, reproductive, health and rights,” she said. “And this has to do also with specific challenges, be it specific economic crises, shortfalls.” 

The UNFPA has set several goals timed to meet the sustainable development goals by 2030, including eliminating preventable maternal deaths, creating universal access to family planning, and achieving zero tolerance for violent and abusive practices that harm women and girls.
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Using eight radio telescopes literally spanning the globe, scientists have taken the first-ever photograph of a black hole.

The supermassive black hole is at the center of a huge galaxy called M-87, which is 55 million light-years from Earth.

The picture, the result of decades of work by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHTC), isn’t much to look at. It’s a fuzzy orange and yellow donut floating in space, but the implications for physics, and the incredibly intricate way that researchers got the picture, is science at its best.

The picture is exactly what scientists, particularly the late Albert Einstein, predicted it would look like. There is the eponymous center black hole where gravity is so powerful even light cannot escape, and a circular area of superheated energy rotating around the celestial entity at nearly the speed of light, called the event horizon.

“We now know that a black hole that weighs 6.5 billion times what our sun does exists in the center of M-87,” EHTC scientist Shep Doeleman announced at a press conference Wednesday in Washington. “And this is the strongest evidence that we have to date for the existence of black holes.”

This picture is so important because while scientists have been seeing the effects that black holes have on the structures around them, they have never actually seen one, and this photo in effect proves their existence, as well as one of the foundational principles of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

200 scientists

At its center, the black hole is so big that even though it’s a long distance away, scientists reasoned it was likely to be the largest such structures viewable from Earth. For that reason, M-87 was chosen for the experiment.

More than 200 scientists worked for about a decade to link the global network of eight radio telescopes, using atomic clocks. One by one in an exact sequence, the instruments were pointed at M-87 at what was, in effect, the same time, back in April 2017.

When the experiment was over, the researchers had five petabytes — or a million gigabytes — of visual information to review. At the press conference, researchers told the story about how it was much quicker to take the data by plane to the various supercomputers being used to analyze the information. They said this was easier than trying to transfer that much data into the cloud.

It took two weeks for a group of supercomputers to analyze the data and begin to form all the collected information into the modest photo that scientists released Wednesday.

And once that photo was collected, the researchers waited two years to publish their data while scientists from all over the world checked their work and signed off on the idea that what was photographed was actually a black hole.

What happens now?

The team isn’t done, though. They already are planning to create even bigger telescopes than the Earth-sized one they used by incorporating space telescopes like the Hubble and the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope. This should allow researchers to take photos of dozens of other black holes.
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An international scientific team has unveiled a landmark achievement in astrophysics – the first photo of a black hole

News conferences were held in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo to disclose a “groundbreaking result” from the Event Horizon Telescope project, begun in 2012 to directly observe a black hole using a global network of telescopes and international cooperation of more than 200 researchers.

They targeted two super-massive black holes residing at the center of different galaxies

A black hole swallows stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation -theoretically, all that can be seen are objects reacting to the black hole, not the hole itself.

 “Black holes are thought to evolve at the end of a lifetime of a star, and you can think of a star collapsing in on itself to make a super, super dense object.In the case of our own galaxy, we know that there is a black hole, a super-massive black hole, lurking at its heart,” London Science Museum Director of External Affairs Roger Highfield explains.”It is about as big as the orbit of Mercury, it is a few million times the mass of our own sun and we now think that these super-massive black holes lurk at the heart of every galaxy.”
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The U.N. population agency chief says she regrets the U.S. government’s decision to cut funding for programs that help ensure safe pregnancies worldwide.

Dr. Natalia Kanem said Wednesday that more than half the $70 million Washington used to give the agency annually was used for life-saving humanitarian programs.

The Trump administration announced in 2017 it was cutting all funding to UNFPA, a gesture to American conservatives.

Launching the agency’s annual report in Berlin, Kanem said “we do regret the decision of the United States to deny funding to UNFPA as we saved so many lives of women and girls together.”

She said UNFPA works in countries such as Venezuela to provide hospitals with supplies for safe births, train doctors “and also to provide contraception to women.”

 
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