A digest of popular science news for the week that we haven't written about

A distant spacecraft has confirmed that Earth is habitable

A spacecraft heading to Jupiter's frozen moons has taken a very close look at Earth and discoveredthat our home planet is indeed habitable.

During its flyby on August 20, the European Space Agency's Juice probe pointed its MAJIS spectrometer and SWI submillimeter IR spectrometer at Earth's atmosphere, searching for molecules and elements that together indicate that life not only could have arisen and survived on Earth, but may be there right now.

Of course, we know that life teems on Earth. But that's precisely why astronomers are looking.

Juice is heading to the moons of Jupiter that are most likely to support life as we know it, so scientists wanted to make sure its instruments could make the appropriate detections once they got there.

“We are certainly not surprised by these results… It would be extremely disappointing to learn that the Earth is not habitable!” says planetary scientist Olivier Vitasse from ESA.

“But they point to MAJIS and SWI being successful at Jupiter, where they will help us figure out whether icy moons could be potential habitats for life that was once there or exists today.”

Both instruments measured various components of the Earth's atmosphere. MAJIS measured compositions including oxygen, water, ozone, and carbon dioxide. It also produced infrared heat maps of the Earth's surface.

SWI, on the other hand, counted the amount of elements known as CHNOPS, which stands for carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur—the six most common elements found in living organisms.

Collisions could increase the likelihood of the asteroid Apophis hitting Earth

On Friday the 13th in 2029, Earth will be visited by an interesting and frightening visitor: the asteroid Apophis. Named after the Egyptian snake god of chaos and destruction, Apep, the asteroid is so large that it will pass within 30,600 kilometers of Earth, so close to our planet that it will be visible to the naked eye.

New research suggests that if Apophis were hit by other, much smaller space rocks, the asteroid, which is about as wide as the Empire State Building, could be deflected from its current course and not miss Earth on subsequent flybys or, at worst, even on its 2029 flyby. But there's no need to panic just yet.

The study's author, Paul Wiegert, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario, toldthat the odds of a dangerous collision between small asteroids and Apophis are very small. “The odds of an asteroid striking Apophis enough to pose a threat to us in the future, after 2029, are 1 in a million, and the odds of Apophis hitting Earth in 2029 are only 1 in a billion,” he said.

“I calculated the probability that the asteroid Apophis, whose current trajectory is predicted to pass by our planet in 2029, will be deflected onto a more dangerous path by an unexpected collision with a small asteroid,” Wiegert explained. “This is the same type of small asteroid that sometimes appears in our atmosphere as 'shooting stars' or 'fireballs', and it could hit Apophis just as unexpectedly.”

James Webb Space Telescope Watches Black Hole 'Kill' Its Galaxy

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers observed supermassive black hole in the early universe that is killing its galaxy, starving it. Remarkably, this “galactic starvation” seems to happen very quickly, thanks to the creation of gas winds “blowing” at 2 million miles per hour.

Galaxies are considered “dead” or “quiescent” when they stop forming stars. This can happen when the building blocks of stars, dense clouds of gas and dust, are exhausted. Scientists have long suspected that galaxies can die prematurely because their central supermassive black holes “cleanse” them of gas and dust.

Observations The Webb findings represent the first reliable detection of such an effect, which can actually suppress star formation in starving galaxies. The findings were made by a team led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, who studied an early galaxy officially named GS-10578 but nicknamed Pabalo's Galaxy after the member of the team who suggested it be observed in detail.

Pabalo's Galaxy is about 11.5 billion light-years away, meaning it can be seen as it was just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang or so.

“We knew from previous observations that this galaxy was in a state of decay: it wasn't forming many stars given its size, and we suspected that there was a link between the black hole and the end of star formation,” team member Francesco D'Eugenio of Cambridge's Kavli Institute for Cosmology said in a statement. “However, before Webb, we couldn't study this galaxy in enough detail to confirm this link, and we didn't know whether this decay was temporary or permanent.”

Scientists discover new blood type, solving 50-year mystery

Thousands of lives could be saved around the world after NHS scientists discovered a new blood group system, solving a 50-year-old mystery. The research team, led by scientists at NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) in South Gloucestershire and supported by the University of Bristol, discovered a blood group called MAL.

They identified the genetic basis of the previously known blood group antigen AnWj, which was discovered in 1972 but remained unknown until now after the development of this world-first test.

NHSBT senior research fellow Louise Tilley said the discovery meant that rare patients could be given better care. Ms Tilley, who has been working on the project for 20 years, saidthat it is “quite difficult to calculate” how many people the test will help. However, NHSBT is a “last resort” for around 400 patients worldwide each year.

Every person has proteins called antigens in their red blood cells, but a small number of people may not have them.

Using genetic testing, staff at the NHSBT International Reference Blood Group Laboratory in Filton have developed the first test to identify patients who lack the antigen. The test could prove life-saving for those who react to blood transfusions and could make it easier to find potential developers of this rare blood type.

Philip Brown, who works in the lab, was diagnosed with a form of leukemia about 20 years ago and has had blood transfusions and a bone marrow transplant — without which he would have died. “Anything we can do to make our blood safer and better suited to patients is a step in the right direction,” he said.

Drug-resistant bacteria will kill tens of millions of people by 2050

About 40 million people will die from infections caused by drug-resistant superbugs in the next 25 years, the Global Health Organization predicts. analysisconducted on Monday, and researchers are calling for action to avoid this grim scenario.

Superbugs – strains of bacteria or pathogens that become resistant to antibiotics, making them much more difficult to treat – are recognized as a growing threat to global health.

Analysis conducted they call the first study to track the global impact of superbugs over time and assess what might happen next.

According to researchpublished in The Lancet, between 1990 and 2021, more than a million people died each year worldwide from superbugs, also known as antimicrobial resistance.

Deaths among children under five from superbugs have fallen by more than 50 percent over the past three decades, the study says, thanks to improved infection prevention and control measures in infants. But when children do become infected with superbugs, they are much harder to treat.

Deaths among people over 70 rose by more than 80 percent over the same period as the ageing population became more vulnerable to infections.

Deaths from MRSA infections, a type of staph that has become resistant to many antibiotics, doubled to 130,000 in 2021 compared with three decades earlier, a study has found.