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Foi em 8 de março de 2014 que um Boeing 777-200ER decolou de Kuala Lumpur, na Malásia, rumo a Pequim, sob operação da Malaysia da Airlines. Cerca de 38 minutos após a decolagem, a aeronave fez contato com o controle de tráfego aéreo enquanto sobrevoava o mar do sul da China. Na sequência, o avião saiu da rota planejada e desapareceu dos radares. 

• Voo 370 | Conheça a história do avião que desapareceu
• Quais foram os acidentes aéreos mais fatais dos últimos anos? Veja lista

O voo MH370 desapareceu dos radares civis 38 minutos após a decolagem, logo após a última mensagem do capitão Zaharie Ahmad Shah: "Boa noite, Malaysian três sete zero" — quando o comandante entrou em contato, o avião sobrevoava o espaço aéreo do Vietnã. 

Com 239 pessoas de diversas nacionalidadess a bordo, a aeronave desviou drasticamente de sua rota original. Segundo dados de radares militares, o avião saiu da rota na direção do nordeste da Malásia, e depois seguiu na direção da ilha de Sumatra, na Indonésia. Na sequência, fez uma manobra para a direção sul e o contato foi perdido. 

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Buscas pelo voo da Malaysia Airlines

Já fazem mais de 12 anos do desaparecimento do voo MH370 da Malaysia Airlines. Mesmo após tanto tempo, este mistério da aviação comercial moderna ainda segue em aberto — tanto que foi iniciada uma nova busca pelos destroços da aeronave em dezembro de 2025. 

Até o momento, mais de 30 fragmentos isolados foram encontrados no litoral da África e de algumas ilhas no oceano Índico, confirmados como parte da aeronave; mesmo assim, o "corpo" do avião e as caixas-pretas permanecem ocultos. 

Para os investigadores, encontrar o local do impacto é a única forma de encerrar as especulações. Um relatório de quase 500 páginas sobre o incidente indica que os controles do avião foram acionados de forma proposital para tirá-lo de sua rota, mas ainda não foi possível determinar o responsável. 

Como o local da provável queda ainda não foi identificado, há quem insista em teorias da conspiração que vão de queda do avião controlada remotamente a abduções de seres extraterrestres.

Alguns especialistas da aviação acreditam que a explicação é que, de fato, um piloto experiente teria desviado o avião da rota. Por outro lado, a equipe de investigação declarou que não encontrou nada suspeito na história, treinamento e saúde mental do capitão e copiloto da aeronave. Se você considera essa história um grande mistério, talvez queira entender também a ocasião na qual NASA e EUA derrubaram um avião. Mas por quê?

Leia a matéria no Canaltech.

Venus keeps the strangest clock and calendar in the solar system. It takes about 243 Earth days to turn once on its axis, and only about 225 Earth days to travel all the way around the Sun. On Venus, in other words, the day is longer than the year. The planet finishes a lap of the Sun before it has finished a single rotation.

It gets stranger from there, and the figures are worth pulling apart, because two different “days” are hiding in this story.

Two kinds of day

The 243-day figure is the time Venus takes to spin once relative to the distant stars, what astronomers call a sidereal rotation. It is the true turn of the planet on its axis.

But a day in the everyday sense is the gap between one sunrise and the next, and on Venus that is a different and shorter span: about 117 Earth days. The two numbers disagree because Venus is moving around the Sun while it spins, and its spin is unusually slow, so the Sun’s position in the sky is set by a tug-of-war between the planet’s rotation and its orbit rather than by rotation alone. The result, according to NASA’s figures, is a solar day of roughly 117 Earth days. Sunrise to sunrise takes nearly four Earth months.

Rising in the west

There is one more oddity, and it is the one most people have heard. On Venus the Sun comes up in the west and goes down in the east, the reverse of what it does here.

This is because Venus rotates backwards. Nearly every planet, Earth included, spins in the same direction it orbits, which is why our Sun rises in the east. Venus turns the other way, a motion called retrograde rotation, effectively almost upside down compared with its neighbours, its axis tipped close to 180 degrees. It is also the slowest-spinning planet in the solar system, which is part of why its day runs so long. From the surface, the Sun’s daily path would run the opposite way across the sky.

Why it spins like this is not settled. The leading ideas involve either a colossal ancient impact that flipped or reversed the planet, or the slow grinding action of solar tides on its massive atmosphere over billions of years. Both remain hypotheses.

What you would actually see

Here the romantic image needs a caveat, because nobody on Venus would watch a crisp sun lift over a western horizon.

The planet is wrapped in a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide topped with thick clouds of sulphuric acid, and almost no direct sunlight reaches the ground as a clear beam. A surface observer, if one could survive the 460-degree heat and crushing pressure, would experience a slow, dim brightening and fading of a uniformly glowing sky over those 117 days, rather than a disc rising at a point on the horizon. The direction of the Sun would be a smear of light, not a sunrise you could photograph.

That does not change the underlying mechanics. The Sun’s light still tracks east to west across that murky sky, just without a sharp Sun to mark it.

A planet out of step

Put together, Venus runs on a schedule that breaks every habit Earth has taught us. The day outlasts the year. The Sun, such as it is, rises in the wrong place. And the time from one dim dawn to the next is counted in months, not hours.

None of these are quirks of measurement or rounding. They follow directly from a planet that turns slowly, backwards, beneath a sky that never clears, which is a fair summary of how thoroughly Venus refuses to behave like home.

The post A Venusian day is 243 Earth days long — longer than the planet’s entire 225-day year — and because Venus rotates backwards, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east, though only once every 117 Earth days through its thick, cloud-choked sky. appeared first on Space Daily.

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Nature is often portrayed as a battlefield where every species competes for food, territory, and survival. Yet some of the most successful relationships in the natural world are built on cooperation. 

Across oceans, forests, and deserts, animals regularly interact with members of other species in ways that benefit both sides. Interestingly, from an evolutionary perspective, this cooperation should be difficult. This is because animals belonging to different species do not share the same instincts, sensory abilities, or interests. 

One animal may communicate through scent, another through movement, and a third through sound. Also, misunderstandings can be dangerous. A potential partner might instead become a competitor, a parasite, or even a predator.

“This gap in our understanding is noteworthy because animal interspecies cooperation combines features of multiple interaction types, sharing some challenges with broader mutualisms, such as cross-species communication and increased risk of harm or exploitation,” the authors of a new study note.

A new study examines how species overcome these obstacles through the exchange of information. The study authors argue that cues and signals help animals identify potential partners, assess their motivation to cooperate, and judge how reliable they are likely to be.

“Cues and signals are likely to be particularly crucial in animal interspecies cooperation, a specific form of mutualism that depends on real-time, interactive behavioural coordination to secure mutual benefit,” the study authors added.

By bringing together evidence from many forms of interspecies cooperation, the study provides a framework for understanding how communication helps make these unlikely partnerships possible.

Reducing risk and uncertainty in animal cooperation

The study emerged from a large interdisciplinary effort involving 58 researchers working across fields including animal behavior, ecology, evolution, anthropology, and linguistics. 

Rather than focusing on a single species or ecosystem, the team examined evidence from a broad range of cooperative relationships to understand the common principles that allow different species to coordinate their actions.

What interested the researchers was not the details of any one partnership but a challenge common to all of them, which was uncertainty. Whenever individuals from different species interact, they must somehow determine whether cooperation is worth the risk.

The researchers found that many cooperative systems contain mechanisms that reduce this uncertainty. These can include visual displays, sounds, chemical compounds, body postures, or repeated behavioral patterns. 

Regardless of the form they take, their purpose is similar—they provide information that allows one species to anticipate the actions of another.

Seen this way, communication functions less like a conversation and more like a mechanism for reducing uncertainty. Signals can reveal who a partner is, whether it intends to cooperate, and how predictable its behavior is likely to be. By making behavior more predictable, they reduce the risks that would otherwise discourage cooperation.

One example comes from the partnership between greater honeyguide birds and humans in parts of Africa. The birds use calls and behaviors that help direct people toward wild bees’ nests, while humans respond with their own vocal signals during the search. As a result, both sides gain access to resources they would struggle to obtain as efficiently on their own. 

From accidental clues to biological languages

The study also explores how communication systems may evolve over time. The researchers distinguish between cues and signals. A cue provides information to another species but did not evolve specifically for communication. 

A signal, in contrast, has been shaped by evolution because it influences how another organism responds. However, the study authors note, “signals can evolve from cues.”

The study points to interactions involving brightly colored cleaner fish on coral reefs as an example of how information can facilitate cooperation. Their distinctive appearance and behavior help client fish recognize them as cleaning partners rather than prey.

According to the researchers, characteristics that reliably convey useful information can become increasingly important if other species benefit from responding to them. Over time, natural selection may strengthen these interactions.

Individuals who provide clearer information gain more cooperative opportunities, while those who interpret the information more accurately gain greater benefits. The authors suggest that this process can lead to coevolution, with one species becoming better at providing information and the other becoming better at interpreting it.

In this way, what begins as an incidental cue can gradually develop into a more specialized signal that helps coordinate cooperation between species. The researchers also found that these communication systems are not always fixed. Some appear remarkably consistent, while others vary across environments and populations. 

This flexibility suggests that communication between species can be shaped not only by evolution but also by local ecological conditions and, in some cases, learning.

The hidden rules of cooperation

According to the study authors, “animal interspecies cooperation provides a powerful opportunity to investigate the evolution of communication.” 

By examining how species exchange information to coordinate their actions, the researchers argue that communication may be one of the hidden foundations of cooperation in nature.

By comparing interspecies cooperation with communication systems found within species and in other mutualistic relationships, the authors provide a broader framework for understanding how cooperation emerges and persists.

At the same time, the researchers emphasize that many forms of interspecies communication remain poorly understood. This is because most studies have focused on a relatively small number of well-known examples, leaving many species and ecosystems unexplored. 

Future work will investigate how signals originate, how they vary across populations, and how communication systems can evolve between cooperating species.

For now, the study’s message is simple. Cooperation does not require animals to share a common language. It requires enough information for each partner to recognize, interpret, and respond to the other. In nature, this ability may be what transforms a risky encounter into a lasting partnership.

The study is published in the journal Animal Behavior.

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When NASA’s Parker Solar Probe passed through the solar corona during perihelion encounters at the heliospheric current sheet, its instruments recorded energetic protons at energies far above what existing models of particle acceleration at that location could account for.

A team led by Mihir Desai at the Southwest Research Institute, with James Drake, Marc Swisdak, and Zhiyu Yin from the University of Maryland’s Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics has published an analysis of those measurements in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, identifying magnetic reconnection at the heliospheric current sheet as the mechanism responsible. The proton energies detected were, in the study’s framing, approximately a thousand times greater than the available magnetic energy per particle that models of this process had predicted.

The finding matters for two reasons: it identifies a source of energetic particles close to the Sun that was not anticipated, and it raises questions about how far the existing understanding of reconnection-driven particle acceleration extends.

What Parker measured at the current sheet

The heliospheric current sheet is a vast, warped surface in the solar wind where the Sun’s magnetic field reverses polarity. Parker crosses it during perihelion passes, when the spacecraft dips inside the corona. At those distances, the current sheet is narrower and more structured than it appears in the near-Earth solar wind, and the reconnection events occurring there have characteristics that instruments further from the Sun cannot resolve.

Within the exhaust region downstream of a reconnection event, where magnetic field lines have broken and rejoined and the released energy is being distributed into the surrounding plasma, Parker detected trapped protons at energies up to approximately 400 keV. The particles were confined within magnetic islands, structures that form within the reconnection exhaust as reconnected field lines roll up into closed loops. Magnetic island merging, as those loops interact and combine, appears to be the mechanism that accelerated the protons to the observed energies.

The thousand-fold discrepancy between what the models predicted and what Parker measured is the number that requires explanation. Reconnection as a particle accelerator was not a new idea: the process has been theorised to play a role in accelerating charged particles in a range of astrophysical environments. What was not predicted was that the energisation within near-Sun reconnection exhaust could reach this level through the island-merging pathway.

Why this source was not in the models

Current models of solar energetic particles, the high-speed charged particles that propagate through the solar system and can affect spacecraft and astronauts, have generally attributed the most energetic events to large-scale shocks: the driven shock fronts of coronal mass ejections, and the slower-building shocks of co-rotating interaction regions. Reconnection at the current sheet was considered a secondary contributor at best, capable of producing modest particle energies close to the Sun but not a major accelerator of the particles that eventually arrive as energetic storm particle events near Earth.

The Parker measurements suggest that picture needs revision. The magnetic island merging mechanism Desai and colleagues identify can evidently produce proton populations at energies that challenge the boundary between what reconnection does and what shock acceleration does. Whether this source can explain a significant fraction of observed near-Earth energetic particle events, or whether it contributes mainly at energies and scales that remain confined close to the Sun, is a question the paper does not yet resolve.

What this adds to the corona heating problem

A separate thread connects to the longstanding question of why the solar corona is so much hotter than the surface below it. The corona reaches temperatures of several million degrees Celsius while the photosphere sits at around 5,500°C. The energy source sustaining that gradient has not been fully identified. Reconnection, along with wave heating, is one of the leading candidates.

If reconnection at the current sheet is producing particles at the energies Parker measured, it is also depositing energy into the surrounding plasma at rates that may be higher than the models assumed. That does not resolve the corona heating problem, but it shifts the accounting. The energy going into particle acceleration through magnetic island merging is energy that must come from somewhere in the magnetic field, and tracing it may tighten the constraints on how much reconnection contributes to coronal heating overall.

Drake and Swisdak contributed the reconnection theory component of the analysis. The collaboration between the observational data from Parker and the theoretical modelling capacity at the University of Maryland is the structure the paper’s analysis rests on.

What comes next

Parker Solar Probe has now completed more than two dozen perihelion passes, with each close approach yielding data at distances and speeds no prior mission could reach. The heliospheric current sheet crossings that provided the data for this paper are repeatable: Parker will continue to encounter the current sheet during future perihelia, allowing the team to look for the magnetic island signature in additional events and test whether the particle energies observed here hold up as a consistent feature rather than a single anomaly.

Solar Orbiter, the European Space Agency mission operating in coordination with Parker, offers complementary measurements at somewhat greater distances. Comparing what the two spacecraft measure of the same particle populations as they propagate outward from the Sun will help establish which features originate close to the source and which are modified by the intervening solar wind. The energetic particle observations that puzzled researchers in the pre-Parker era now have a candidate mechanism. Whether that mechanism accounts for a large or small fraction of what actually reaches Earth remains the open question.

The post NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew in and out of the solar corona and found a source of high-energy particles that no existing model had predicted appeared first on Space Daily.

The Murchison meteorite is, by every available measure, one of the more scientifically valuable single rocks ever to fall on the planet. The fireball that delivered it streaked across the sky above the Goulburn Valley in southeastern Australia on a Sunday morning in September 1969, broke apart at high altitude, and scattered fragments across a roughly 35-square-kilometre area of farmland. One piece punched through the roof of a hay shed. The local dairy farmers who recovered most of the fragments over the following weeks sold the bulk of them to museums and universities, with the largest single collection now held by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Approximately 80 kilograms of the original 100-kilogram fall is currently held in scientific collections around the world. Over the subsequent five decades, Murchison has been examined more intensively than almost any other meteorite — yielding more than 70 distinct amino acids (including some that do not occur in any known terrestrial biology), sugars including ribose (the backbone of RNA), and several of the nucleobases that make up the building blocks of DNA. The rock has been at the centre of multiple revisions to scientific understanding of how organic chemistry distributes itself through the early solar system.

According to NBC News’s coverage of the 2020 Heck et al. paper on presolar grains in Murchison, the team published its dating results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2020. The analysis used a technique called cosmic-ray exposure dating, which Heck described with an unusually accessible analogy: cosmic rays — high-energy particles that constantly stream through the galaxy — interact with solid matter and produce new elements at a roughly constant rate. The longer a particle of matter has been drifting through space exposed to cosmic rays, the more of these new elements accumulate inside it. “I compare this with putting out a bucket in a rainstorm,” Heck told reporters at the time. “Assuming the rainfall is constant, the amount of water that accumulates in the bucket tells you how long it was exposed.” Applying this method to 40 large silicon-carbide grains extracted from the Murchison fragments, the Heck team was able to estimate how long each individual grain had been drifting through interstellar space before being incorporated into the asteroid that eventually fell to Earth.

What presolar grains actually are

The grains the Heck team dated are called presolar grains — solid particles that formed in the atmospheres of dying stars before the solar system existed, drifted through the interstellar medium for hundreds of millions or billions of years, and were then incorporated into the molecular cloud from which the Sun and planets eventually condensed. As reported in Sci.News’s coverage of the same paper, the typical formation environment for the silicon-carbide grains examined by the Heck team was the slowly-expanding atmosphere of an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star — a red giant in the late stages of its evolution, shedding its outer layers into space at a rate of roughly one solar mass every hundred thousand years. The carbon, silicon, and other elements in the stellar atmosphere condense as the gas cools and expands, forming microscopic dust grains that are then carried outward by the stellar wind into the surrounding interstellar medium.

Most of these grains, once released into space, are eventually destroyed by some combination of supernova shock waves, radiation, and chemical reprocessing within the molecular clouds where new stars form. A small fraction survive intact for billions of years, drifting through the galaxy as part of the general inventory of interstellar dust. When a new solar system begins to form by gravitational collapse of a dense region of interstellar gas, this dust is incorporated into the early protoplanetary disc — and the heat and chemistry of solar system formation typically destroys or substantially alters most of it. The grains that survive intact through the entire formation process do so because they are extraordinarily durable (silicon carbide is one of the hardest materials in nature) and because they are quickly incorporated into the deep interiors of primitive asteroids that never undergo significant thermal processing. Murchison’s parent body was one such asteroid. The grains inside the Murchison fragments are, in a literal sense, time capsules from before the solar system existed.

The age distribution

The headline figure from the Heck team’s analysis — that the oldest grains are approximately 7 billion years old, predating the solar system by approximately 2.5 billion years — captures the extreme of the distribution rather than the average. Per ScienceDaily’s coverage of the Field Museum announcement, the full age distribution of the 40 grains was substantially more informative than the single extreme number suggests. Approximately 60 percent of the grains formed between 4.6 and 4.9 billion years ago — in the few hundred million years immediately preceding the formation of the solar system. Approximately 10 percent formed more than 5.6 billion years ago. A small number formed at the extreme end, around 7 billion years ago. Every grain examined was, by the cosmic-ray exposure dating, older than the 4.6-billion-year-old Sun. This is what made them presolar.

The distribution itself carries scientific weight beyond the individual grain ages. The clustering of a substantial fraction of grains in a narrow age band suggests that an unusual number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy formed, lived their full life cycles, and died during a specific epoch several billion years before the Sun ignited — a “burst” of star formation that produced an unusually large population of dying stars whose outflows seeded the surrounding interstellar medium with the dust that would later contribute to the formation of the solar system. The Heck team’s interpretation, drawing on the age distribution, is that this burst occurred approximately 7 billion years ago. The implication is that the Sun and the planets formed, several billion years later, from a galactic environment that had been substantially enriched with material from this earlier generation of stars.

Why no comparable material exists on Earth

As reported by Malay Mail’s coverage of the age distribution, the broader reason presolar grains can only be found in meteorites — never in any rock of terrestrial origin — is that every piece of solid material that contributed to Earth’s formation has subsequently been heated, melted, recrystallised, or otherwise reprocessed by the geological activity of the planet itself. Plate tectonics has churned the entire crust through the mantle and back at least once. Volcanism has melted and re-erupted vast quantities of material. Even the oldest rocks on Earth, found in places like the Acasta Gneiss Complex in northern Canada, are at most 4.0 to 4.2 billion years old — substantially younger than the planet itself, and far younger than the presolar grains preserved inside primitive meteorites.

The Murchison meteorite, in this respect, occupies a peculiar epistemological position. It is the closest available physical sample of the early solar system, but it is also a sample of the pre-solar-system galaxy that produced the early solar system. The grains inside it are older than anything that can be found by digging downward through the rocks of Earth, by any depth or any drilling technology. They are, in essence, a sample of the chemistry of the Milky Way at a moment several billion years before any of the familiar features of the current solar system existed. The fragments collected by Australian dairy farmers in 1969 and sent to museums in Chicago and elsewhere have turned out to contain, embedded in their carbonaceous matrix, a small but real sample of stardust from stars that finished burning before the Sun began.

The post In September 1969, a 100-kilogram space rock exploded in the sky above Murchison, Australia — and 50 years later, scientists analyzing dust grains buried inside the meteorite found particles between 5 and 7 billion years old, formed in the dying outer layers of stars that lived and died long before our Sun was born, in what remains the oldest solid material ever identified on the surface of the Earth appeared first on Space Daily.

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In 1950, the United States Census Bureau estimated that approximately 2,300 Americans were aged 100 or older. The total population of the country at the time was approximately 152 million, which made centenarians one of the rarest possible demographic categories — approximately one in every 66,000 Americans had reached the age. By 1990, the centenarian count had risen to approximately 37,000. By 2020, it had reached approximately 92,000. By 2024, it had passed 101,000. The trajectory has been steep and accelerating, and the demographic shift now visible in the centenarian numbers is one of the larger long-term changes in the structure of the American population — a category that was statistically negligible at the end of World War II is now projected to become, within the lifetimes of most people reading this, a substantial demographic constituency in its own right.

According to the Pew Research Center’s January 2024 analysis of Census Bureau projections, the US centenarian population is projected to more than quadruple from approximately 101,000 in 2024 to approximately 422,000 by 2054 — meaning that within the next 30 years, the proportion of Americans aged 100 or older will rise from approximately 0.03 percent of the population to approximately 0.1 percent. This is the official Census base-case projection. Higher-end estimates developed by demographic researchers — including the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society — have projected substantially higher numbers under more optimistic mortality-improvement scenarios, with some estimates exceeding 1.8 million US centenarians by mid-century and substantially larger numbers by 2100. The range between the Census base case and the higher-end projections is large, and the actual outcome will depend on whether mortality improvements at older ages continue at recent rates, accelerate, or plateau.

What is driving the projected growth

The proximate driver of centenarian growth is not improving mortality among the young or middle-aged — those mortality rates are already very low and have only modest room to fall. The driver is sharply declining mortality among nonagenarians: people aged 90 to 99 who, in previous generations, would typically have died before reaching 100. The mortality rate among 90-year-olds has been falling steadily across developed countries for decades, with each successive cohort of nonagenarians surviving slightly longer than the previous one. The result is that the share of any given birth cohort that eventually reaches 100 has been rising, and the absolute number of centenarians is rising even faster because the population at risk (the 90-year-olds in the country) has also been growing rapidly.

Per a CEOWORLD analysis of the global centenarian surge, the same pattern is visible internationally. The United Nations estimated approximately 722,000 centenarians worldwide in 2024 and projects that the number will rise to approximately 4 million by 2054 — a nearly six-fold global increase in 30 years. By mid-century, the largest national centenarian populations are projected to be China (approximately 767,000), the United States (approximately 422,000), India, Japan, and Thailand, with several Southeast Asian countries and parts of southern Europe showing particularly rapid centenarian growth on a per-capita basis. Japan, currently the country with the world’s highest median age, is projected to have approximately 40 centenarians per 10,000 people by 2054 — meaning that roughly one in every 250 Japanese residents will be aged 100 or older. Thailand is projected to have an even higher ratio, at approximately 49 per 10,000.

The contested longer-term projections

The substantive disagreement among demographers is not about whether centenarian numbers will rise — that is now essentially settled — but about how far they will rise, and how soon a majority of births in low-mortality countries will produce people who eventually reach 100. The optimistic position, associated with the demographer James Vaupel and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, holds that life expectancy in the most advanced countries has been increasing by approximately three months per year for the past 150 years and shows no clear sign of slowing — and that this trajectory implies that the majority of children born in low-mortality countries today will live to see their hundredth birthday. The skeptical position, associated most prominently with the American demographer S. Jay Olshansky and his collaborators, holds that life expectancy gains are now slowing substantially in the United States and other developed countries, that the easy mortality reductions from infectious disease control, smoking declines, and cardiovascular medicine have largely been achieved, and that further gains will be substantially harder to obtain.

The empirical evidence for the slowdown position has become more visible in recent years. US life expectancy peaked at approximately 78.9 years in 2014 and then declined — partly because of the opioid crisis, partly because of rising obesity-related mortality, partly because of COVID-19 mortality during the pandemic, and partly because of slowing gains in cardiovascular medicine. The current US life expectancy of approximately 76 years is substantially below the trajectory that the Vaupel projections would have predicted. As covered by a foundational MacArthur Foundation Research Network paper on demographic forecasts for the United States in the 21st century, the higher-end centenarian projections depend on assuming that the recent slowdown is temporary and that the longer-run Vaupel-style trajectory will resume. Whether it does is one of the central empirical questions in contemporary demography, and the answer will substantially affect both the centenarian counts in 2054 and the much larger projections for 2100.

The maximum lifespan question

As reported by a 2021 Bayesian analysis published in Demographic Research by Michael Pearce and Adrian Raftery at the University of Washington, the related question of what the maximum human lifespan will reach by 2100 is approachable with statistical methods even where the underlying biology is uncertain. The Pearce-Raftery analysis modelled the existing distribution of supercentenarians (people aged 110 or older) and the projected growth of that population through the rest of the century, and estimated that there is greater than 99 percent probability that the current record human lifespan — Jeanne Calment of France, who died in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days — will be broken before 2100. They estimate an 89 percent probability that someone will reach age 126, a 44 percent probability that someone will reach 128, and a 13 percent probability that someone will reach 130. These projections are not predictions about the typical lifespan but about the extreme tail of the survival distribution, which depends on the same nonagenarian mortality declines that drive the centenarian numbers.

The deeper question that the centenarian projections raise is the relationship between living longer and living well. The available evidence on healthspan — the proportion of life spent in good health, rather than in disability or substantial decline — suggests that healthspan has been increasing more slowly than lifespan. The result is that the gap between the two has been widening: people are living longer, but with more years of substantial disability, more years of cognitive decline, and more years of dependence on caregivers and the healthcare system. The economic implications are substantial. The current pension systems, healthcare systems, and family structures of most developed countries were built around assumptions about average lifespan and the typical duration of post-retirement life that no longer hold. The institutional response, across most of the developed world, has been slower than the underlying demographic shift. Whether the eventual centenarians — including, possibly, a substantial fraction of the children born this year — will arrive at their hundredth birthdays in good health, in supported decline, or somewhere in between will depend on whether the gains of the coming decades are made primarily in extending lifespan or primarily in extending healthspan. The two trajectories produce very different futures.

The post By the end of this century, the United States is projected to have more than one million centenarians — people aged 100 or older — for the first time in human history, in a demographic shift driven by sharply falling mortality among nonagenarians, and some demographers now believe that a majority of children born today in low-mortality countries can reasonably expect to reach their hundredth birthday appeared first on Space Daily.

The popular framing of the question — why has no human walked on the Moon since 1972? — usually proceeds as though there is some technical answer to be found. The rockets must have stopped working. The engineering must have been forgotten. The expertise must have been lost in the half-century since Apollo 17 splashed down. The actual answer is substantially simpler and substantially less satisfying. The Apollo programme was not cancelled because it stopped being possible. It was cancelled because it stopped being useful for what it had been built to accomplish. The capability question is a downstream consequence of a political question that was settled in the early 1970s, when the American government decided that the goal of beating the Soviet Union to the Moon — having been achieved on 20 July 1969 with Apollo 11 — was no longer worth paying for, and that the remaining momentum of the Apollo programme should be redirected toward other priorities.

According to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s editorial reconstruction of the Apollo cancellations, the decisions to end the lunar programme were made in a sequence that began almost immediately after Apollo 11’s success. By December 1969 — five months after Neil Armstrong’s first footstep — one of President Richard Nixon’s top aides told NASA that “the President says that he doesn’t have enough money within the next couple of years and must accept limitation of [space] activity” and that Nixon “did not see the need to go to the moon six more times.” On 4 January 1970, the Apollo 20 mission was formally cancelled. In September 1970, Apollos 18 and 19 followed. The remaining missions — Apollos 14 through 17, the latter three already in advanced preparation — were allowed to proceed and were completed by December 1972. The Saturn V production line was shut down in 1970. The remaining unflown Saturn Vs were sent to museums, where they remain as the largest functional rockets ever built, permanently grounded.

Why the political momentum collapsed

The Kennedy speech of 25 May 1961 — “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” — was framed in terms of national capability and human aspiration, but the actual policy logic that funded it was strategic competition with the Soviet Union. The Soviets had launched Sputnik in 1957, put Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April 1961 (six weeks before Kennedy’s speech), and were widely perceived to be ahead of the United States in space capability. The Apollo programme was, in essential terms, a national project to recover technological prestige from a position of perceived inferiority. It was funded at scales that no comparable peacetime project before or since has matched — peaking at approximately 4.4 percent of the entire US federal budget in 1966.

The strategic logic for that funding evaporated essentially the moment Armstrong stepped off the lunar module ladder in July 1969. The Soviets, by 1969, had already effectively conceded the lunar race — their N1 super-heavy rocket failed in four successive test launches between 1969 and 1972, and the Soviet crewed lunar programme was wound down quietly. There was no longer any external competitor to beat. There was no longer any strategic prestige to be gained from continued lunar landings. And the public, which had supported Apollo as a Cold War project, had never developed the underlying enthusiasm for lunar exploration as a scientific or exploratory enterprise that would have been required to sustain funding in the absence of the Cold War rationale. Polls throughout the late 1960s consistently showed that a majority of Americans thought Apollo was not worth the cost, even at the peak of the programme’s popularity.

The internal NASA decisions

Per The Planetary Society’s analysis of how Nixon shaped the post-Apollo NASA, the popular blame placed on Nixon for ending Apollo is partially deserved but oversimplifies the institutional dynamics. NASA itself, under Administrator Thomas Paine, agreed to terminate Saturn V production and cancel later Apollo missions in order to free up budget for the post-Apollo programmes the agency wanted to pursue — an experimental space station that would become Skylab, and a reusable spacecraft that would become the Space Shuttle. The choice was framed within NASA as a redirection of resources from the now-completed lunar landing programme toward new objectives, rather than as an abandonment of human spaceflight. The institutional case for shutting down the Saturn V line was that it was no longer needed for the missions the agency intended to pursue, and that maintaining a manufacturing line for a rocket the agency was not going to use would have consumed budget that could be spent on the Shuttle.

That decision turned out to be one of the more consequential institutional choices of the post-Apollo era. The Shuttle programme that NASA selected as its successor to Apollo was, by every available assessment, a substantially less ambitious vehicle than what the Saturn V could have supported, while also being substantially more expensive per launch than Apollo had been. The Shuttle operated from 1981 to 2011, completed 135 missions, lost two crews and 14 astronauts in catastrophic accidents, and never carried humans beyond low Earth orbit. The capability that had allowed twelve men to walk on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 was, by the time the last Saturn V was sent to a museum in the mid-1970s, no longer institutionally sustainable. Restarting it would require essentially rebuilding the entire programme from scratch — which is what NASA’s Artemis programme has, in fact, been attempting to do for the past several years, at substantial cost and with substantial delays.

What “lost capability” actually means

As covered by AmericaSpace’s detailed history of the Apollo cancellations, the popular claim that humanity “lost the capability” to return to the Moon is partially true and partially misleading. The engineering knowledge from Apollo was documented and survives in archives, technical reports, and the institutional memory of the relatively small number of engineers from the era who are still alive. The capability that was lost is not the knowledge itself but the institutional infrastructure that supported it: the Saturn V manufacturing line, the supplier networks, the specialised workforce, the test facilities, and the political-economic configuration that allowed roughly 400,000 people working across NASA and its contractor network to be mobilised on a single objective with a national-priority budget. None of these things are recoverable in their original form. They have to be rebuilt, which is essentially what the Artemis programme is now doing, and which is partly why the rebuild has taken decades and substantially exceeded its original budget.

The deeper point is that the question “why has no one been back to the Moon in fifty-three years?” has the same answer as the question “why was anyone there in the first place?” The Apollo programme was a Cold War project that happened to produce, as a byproduct, the most ambitious feat of exploration in human history. When the Cold War rationale for the project ended, the project ended. The capability that had been built for the project was allowed to decay because the institutional reasons for maintaining it had decayed first. The current revival of crewed lunar exploration — through Artemis, through China’s parallel programme, through the commercial-spaceflight ecosystem that has emerged over the past decade — is taking place because new institutional reasons have emerged: geopolitical competition with China, commercial interest in lunar resources, scientific interest in the lunar south pole, and a renewed sense in several capitals that human presence beyond Earth orbit is strategically valuable. Whether the new reasons will sustain a sustained human presence on the Moon, or whether the next round of lunar landings will be followed by another half-century pause, depends on whether the institutional infrastructure being built now is durable enough to survive the eventual evaporation of whatever specific political momentum is currently funding it. The Apollo experience suggests that this is not a question to be answered with technological optimism.

The post The reason no human being has walked on the Moon in more than half a century is not that humanity lost the capability to get there — it is that humanity lost the reason, in the moment the Cold War goal of beating the Soviet Union to the lunar surface had finally been accomplished and the political momentum behind Apollo evaporated appeared first on Space Daily.

Testamos de forma antecipada o novo Control Resonant, projeto da Remedy Entertainment que promete elevar ainda mais o patamar de suas franquias. Agora mais próximo de um jogo de ação, o título tem como principal objetivo mostrar o “outro lado da moeda”: Dylan, irmão de Jesse — protagonista do primeiro jogo.

• "Vai explodir mentes": diretor de Control Resonant promete ação insana
• 15 jogos anunciados no Summer Game Fest 2026 para botar agora na sua wishlist

Mesmo em poucas horas, tivemos a oportunidade de ver uma grande parte de como o estúdio deseja entregar a aventura aos fãs de seu universo e, pela primeira vez desde o início do desenvolvimento, o teste foi realizado com as versões de PC (porém, com o uso de controle DualSense).

Com isso em mente, afirmo que fazia muito tempo que não me divertia com um game como Control Resonant. Ouso dizer que, desde Devil May Cry 5, não via mecânicas de hack ‘n’ slash e exploração serem tão bem utilizadas. Mesmo que o projeto não esteja finalizado, ao menos ele expressa um grandíssimo potencial.

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A ação de Control Resonant

Ainda que o estúdio identifique a experiência como ação e aventura, elementos de hack ‘n’ slash existem aos montes. A horda de inimigos, os combos, a forma como você pode mudar de armas conforme aperta os botões e o ritmo que toda a ação desenrola na tela. Só faltou aparecer um “SSS+” na tela ao fim de cada luta.

Basicamente todo o modo que Dylan batalha é personalizado de forma que te atenda melhor. Há um espaço, que podia ser visitado a qualquer momento durante o teste, em que você configura a arma leve, arma pesada, defesas, habilidades especiais e tudo mais que encontra em Control Resonant.

Este “espaço mental” é muito similar ao de Saga Anderson, de Alan Wake II, inclusive. Contudo, ao invés de estudar e analisar os fatos, serve para aprimorar ainda mais o protagonista da aventura — com espaço até para testá-las em ação sem penalidades no gameplay. 

Os chefões brilham demais

Na oportunidade, pudemos enfrentar dois chefões de Control Resonant — com propostas diferentes. O primeiro te encara dentro de uma praça aberta, o que mostra como você pode reagir quando não se tem espaço nenhum para se esconder. Isso, obviamente, ressalta sua capacidade de desviar e contra-atacar.

Já o segundo te confronta em uma área mais ampla, com prédios e espaços para cobertura. No entanto, a arena está lotada de inimigos e você precisa se preocupar com tudo simultaneamente. Ambos trazem um excelente desafio e dão a sensação que encara uma aventura épica, ao seu próprio modo.

Algo bacana disso tudo é que pudemos testar três trechos inteiros: o início da aventura, com as primeiras horas do título; uma fase mais avançada dentro da cidade de Nova York tomada por criaturas e monstros e, por fim, uma área subterrânea totalmente corrompida pelas anormalidades. 

O primeiro confronto ocorre já no começo, após você ter uma noção completa dos comandos e ação com Dylan. Já o segundo acontece apenas no fim do estágio mais adiante de Control Resonant — o qual os desenvolvedores revelaram que encontraríamos em cerca de 4 a 5 horas de gameplay.

Se as batalhas contra oponentes menores, como figuras vampirescas e demônios já agradam bastante, assim como o tão temido ônibus corrompido, os chefões elevam bastante o patamar e oferecem um desafio e tanto. Seja de resistência, de movimentações ou de inteligência, terá um equilíbrio de dificuldade com a sua habilidade.

Cuidado sob controle

Mesmo sem recursos como o path tracing e outros ajustes gráficos, Control Resonant já impressiona. O estilo artístico da Remedy Entertainment brilhou ali, com prédios “dobrados”, subterrâneo cheio de nuances visuais e elementos que formam padrões ao redor de toda a cidade. Você com certeza vai parar em um momento ou outro para admirar os cenários.

A decisão de contrastar a horda de monstros, com seus ataques geralmente de cor vermelha, em meio a uma cidade escura e cheia de corrupção, me soou como um acerto e tanto. É como se me dissesse que a única coisa colorida que saía daquele ambiente “morto” não traria esperança, mas sim morte. O impacto visual é notório. 

Em alguns trechos, em particular, também notei um grande cuidado com o modo que nós e Dylan enxergaríamos todo esse universo. Control Resonant faz um excelente trabalho em mostrar que nada daquilo é “estranho” para o personagem, enquanto para nós são momentos impressionantes.

Como dito, testamos o game no PC que seguia com algumas configurações já pré-estabelecidas. Não tinha path tracing ainda, mas seguia em 4K, ray tracing acionado e a tecnologia DLSS no modo performance — o que se mostrou algo já incrível, mesmo distante do lançamento.

Não é para menos, o computador estava equipado com uma placa de vídeo NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition. Não foi comentado sobre o que GPUs de menor poder, como as RTX 30 e 40, mostrarão daquilo que vimos no teste, mas apontam a recomendação de uma RTX 3070 e Radeon RX 6700 XT em diante. 

Por fim, o estúdio nos permitiu jogar uma build legendada e a tradução está em um nível muito similar ao que foi encontrado em Alan Wake II e Control. Isso ajudou a ressaltar o carisma de Dylan, que é um “peixe fora d’água” no mundo real. No lançamento, ele terá dublagem também em PT-BR.

Foco em opções

A proposta de Control Resonant é trazer ainda mais opções do que qualquer game da Remedy. Não digo apenas do modo como você configura a sua árvore de habilidades ou equipa as técnicas especiais, mas também dos modos distintos de se derrubar um inimigo, limpar áreas e completar suas missões.

Não que existam múltiplas opções, já que no fim a tarefa é a mesma: derrubar tudo enquanto perde a menor quantia de HP possível no processo. Porém, com o ambiente aberto e cenários corrompidos, tudo isso ganha camadas extras. A forma como usa o cenário e recupera sua saúde com a energia deixada pelos oponentes são partes essenciais do gameplay.

Toda a liberdade me surpreendeu bastante e mostrou que a Remedy não está de brincadeira com o novo projeto. Se Quantum Break e Control foram disruptivos, enquanto Alan Wake II teve um visual que encantou milhões ao redor do mundo, Control Resonant mostrou em poucas horas que tem capacidade e potencial de entregar as duas características em um game só.

Uma das maiores promessas de 2026

Claro que nunca se pode cravar nada sem ver o resultado final de uma experiência, mas o teste conseguiu me convencer de que o estúdio joga a sério com o novo lançamento. Eles sabem que vão encarar Marvel’s Wolverine e Onimusha: Way of the Sword no mês de setembro, então trazem algo de um impacto equivalente.

O resultado deste embate é incerto, mas que Control Resonant tem um grande potencial de atropelar os dois é inegável. Mecânicas de combate divertidas, gráficos de ponta, protagonista carismático e uma cidade inteira à beira de um colapso paranormal é uma boa mistura de ingredientes, diga-se de passagem.

Se você curte títulos como Devil May Cry V e os God of War clássicos, é nesta experiência que deve ficar de olho. A Remedy Entertainment pode não ser conhecida por vender milhões de unidades e ser extremamente popular, mas vale lembrar que todos os seus últimos games lançados são de uma qualidade ímpar. Alan Wake II, inclusive, concorreu ao Jogo do Ano em 2023.

O fim do ano pode estar apertadíssimo por conta do lançamento de GTA 6, mas se vai apostar suas fichas em outro game, eu recomendo que pense com carinho em Control Resonant. Tudo o que mostraram, tanto em vídeos quanto em testes, mostram que eles buscam o seu “arrasa-quarteirões”. O coelho na cartola da desenvolvedora chegará ao PS5, XBOX Series e PCs em 24 de setembro de 2026. 

Vale notar que, além da data de lançamento, a Remedy lançará Control Resonant com preço baratíssimo. Aproveite!

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