NASA scientists must not have had an easy decision this winter as they considered more than a dozen intriguing concepts for Discovery-class missions to explore the Solar System.

But decide they did, selecting four missions for additional study and refinement on Thursday. NASA said the proposals were chosen based on their potential science value and feasibility of development plans, through a competitive peer-review process.

Each of the mission teams will now receive $3 million from NASA to finalize its proposals over a nine-month period. After this, NASA will likely select two missions to proceed into development and toward launch later in the 2020s. Discovery missions have a cost cap of $450 million.

The space agency chose the following four mission concepts for further study and provided the following summaries of their capabilities.

DAVINCI+

The mission seeks to analyze Venus’ atmosphere to understand how it formed and evolved before determining whether Venus ever had an ocean. The spacecraft will plunge through Venus’ inhospitable atmosphere to precisely measure its composition down to the surface. The instruments are encapsulated within a purpose-built descent sphere to protect them from the intense environment of Venus. The “+” in DAVINCI+ refers to the imaging component of the mission, which includes cameras on the descent sphere and orbiter designed to map surface rock-type. James Garvin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the principal investigator. Goddard would provide project management.

Io Volcano Observer

This mission would explore Jupiter’s moon Io to learn how tidal forces shape planetary bodies. Io is heated by the constant crush of Jupiter’s gravity and is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Little is known about Io’s specific characteristics, such as whether a magma ocean exists in its interior. Using close-in flybys, IVO would assess how magma is generated and erupted on Io. The mission’s results could revolutionize our understanding of the formation and evolution of rocky, terrestrial bodies, as well as icy ocean worlds in our solar system and extrasolar planets across the universe.

Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson is the principal investigator. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, would provide project management.

Trident

Trident would explore Triton, a unique and highly active icy moon of Neptune, to understand pathways to habitable worlds at tremendous distances from the Sun. NASA’s Voyager 2 mission showed that Triton has active resurfacing—generating the second-youngest surface in the solar system—with the potential for erupting plumes and an atmosphere. Coupled with an ionosphere that can create organic snow and the potential for an interior ocean, Triton is an exciting exploration target to understand how habitable worlds may develop in our solar system and others. Using a single fly-by, Trident would map Triton, characterize active processes, and determine whether the predicted subsurface ocean exists. Louise Prockter of the Lunar and Planetary Institute/Universities Space Research Association in Houston is the principal investigator. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, would provide project management.

VERITAS

This mission seeks to map Venus’ surface to determine the planet’s geologic history and understand why Venus developed so differently than the Earth. Orbiting Venus with a synthetic aperture radar, VERITAS charts surface elevations over nearly the entire planet to create three-dimensional reconstructions of topography and confirm whether processes, such as plate tectonics and volcanism, are still active on Venus. VERITAS would also map infrared emissions from the surface to map Venus’ geology, which is largely unknown. Suzanne Smrekar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is the principal investigator. JPL would provide project management.

Notably, two of the four missions are targeted for Venus. NASA’s last mission to Venus was Messenger, an orbiter launched in 1989. If selected, the DAVINCI+ mission would be the first NASA-led spacecraft to enter the planet’s atmosphere since 1978. Both of these Venus missions were finalists during the last call for Discovery class missions—which were announced in January 2017—missing out in the final cut. Both of the selected missions at that time, Lucy and Psyche, were dedicated to the study of asteroids.

Perhaps Venusian enthusiasts will fare better this time.

McClatchy Co., the second-largest newspaper company in the U.S., announced on Thursday that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The 163-year-old company, which owns prominent local newspapers including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee and 24 other publications in 14 states, said its Chapter 11 plan eliminates 60 percent of its debt while helping the company pivot to “a digital future.”

“The Chapter 11 filing will allow McClatchy to restructure its debts and, it hopes, shed much of its pension obligations. Under a plan outlined in its filing to a federal bankruptcy court, about 60 percent of its debt would be eliminated as the news organization tries to reposition for a digital future,” the bankruptcy announcement reads.

McClatchy had begun suspending some pension payments to former executives in January, opting to apply to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to assume control of its pension plan.

If a bankruptcy court accepts the Chapter 11 plan, the company would likely be led by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management LLC. McClatchy, a publicly traded company, would become a private company as a result.

“McClatchy’s plan provides a resolution to legacy debt and pension obligations while maximizing outcomes for customers and other stakeholders,” said Craig Forman, president and CEO. “When local media suffers in the face of industry challenges, communities suffer, polarization grows, civic connections fray and borrowing costs rise for local governments. We are moving forward with speed and focus to benefit all our stakeholders and our communities.”

Last year, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet made the ominous prediction that “most local newspapers are going to die in the next five years.”

“The greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news,” Baquet said at the International News Media Association World Congress in New York City. “I don’t know what the answer is.”

“Their economic model is gone. I think most local newspapers in America are going to die in the next five years, except for the ones that have been bought by a local billionaire,” Baquet continued.

“I think that everybody who cares about news — myself included, and all of you — should take this on as an issue,” he added. “Because we’re going to wake up one day and there are going to be entire states with no journalism or with little tiny pockets of journalism.”

The local newspaper industry has been plagued by layoffs in the digital era, with several struggling publications sold to hedge fund-led entities in recent years.

A judge has hit pause on a major US government contract in a win for Amazon, which had challenged the award.

The tech giant, which had been favoured to win the cloud computing deal, sued last year after the US Defense Department gave the opportunity to arch-rival Microsoft instead.

Amazon has accused officials of bowing to pressure from Donald Trump.

The US president has often attacked Amazon and boss Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post newspaper.

Amazon had asked the court to block the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, known as Jedi, which is worth up to $10bn over 10 years. The company is also seeking to question Mr Trump as part of the lawsuit.

On Thursday, Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith of the US Federal Claims Court agreed to the first demand, ordering the US to halt its Jedi activities, which are aimed at making the US Defence Department more technologically agile.

She also ordered Amazon to set aside $42m for costs if future proceedings found she was wrong to have issued the injunction.

Amazon declined to comment. In seeking the injunction the firm had said it was “important that the numerous evaluation errors and blatant political interference that impacted the Jedi award decision be reviewed”.

Microsoft said it was “disappointed with the additional delay”.

“We have confidence in the Department of Defense, and we believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process,” it said.

The contract in question, for cloud computing services for the military, is among the Defense Department’s biggest and it drew legal challenges over the procurement terms even before it was awarded.

Among other things it is intended to improve the military’s remote access to data and technology, and help it host classified military secrets.

Amazon and Microsoft are industry leaders among cloud services providers.

Last year, Mr Trump told reporters that the US was looking closely at the contract, noting that he had been getting “tremendous complaints” from several companies about it.

The Defense Department has denied claims of bias.

It is not the first time a company has accused Mr Trump of improperly swaying the federal government’s decision-making due to his objections to media coverage.

Telecoms operator AT&T made similar claims after the US took action to block its takeover of Time-Warner, which owns CNN. The court blocked the firm from pursuing White House records, but ultimately approved that deal on other grounds.

NASA has confirmed that an asteroid larger than the tallest man-made structure in the world is currently travelling towards Earth at a speed of almost 34,000 miles per hour.

According to International Business Times, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) identified that the “potentially hazardous” asteroid could come close to intersecting with our planet’s path on February 15, 2020, at 6:05 a.m. (EST).

“Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth,” NASA said in a statement.

The colossal space rock, which is expected to pass over our planet from a distance of around 3.6 million miles, is estimated to have a diameter of around 3,250 feet, making it large enough to potentially “trigger a nuclear winter and mass extinction events” should it collide with Earth.

For decades, films have dealt with the subject of potentially dangerous asteroid collisions. In fact, mankind was nearly destroyed by a giant space rock not once, but twice, in the 90s with Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact and Michael Bay’s Armageddon – but which of these apocalyptic flicks has stood the test of time?

If you’re thinking of going on a trip over the next few months, Southwest is having a fare sale right now that might be worth a look. The airline is offering one-way flights between a number of different destinations in the United States for $69 each way, making it so you can potentially go on that adventure for $138 or less.

Like most deals, there are a few caveats for this one. Tickets need to be purchased by February 20th at midnight and have to be made for a trip at least 21 days from now. Deals are specifically for travel in the continental U.S and inter-island Hawaii between March 3rd and May 20th, and for travel to/from San Juan, Puerto Rico between April 14 and May 14th.

Most of that discounted travel also has to happen on either a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Saturday.

You can find deals specific to your home airport here. That link will default to Oakland, but you can find your city in the drop-down menu under “Search for low fares.”

What’s offered varies from airport to airport. Some of the fare sales are also a bit more than $69 each way but still are pretty discounted from their regular price on Southwest.

Like all fare sales, it’s also with doing a little price comparison before you book. While the sale definitely represents a discount in terms of Southwest’s normal prices, you still might be able to find a better deal for some of these fares on another airline, especially if you’re able and willing to book a round-trip ticket instead.

Scientists have unearthed new fossils of one of the largest turtles that ever lived: a car-sized reptile which prowled the lakes and rivers of what is now northern South America from about 13m years ago to 7m years ago.

The fossils of the turtle – Stupendemys geographicus – were found in Colombia’s Tatacoa Desert and Venezuela’s Urumaco region, and for the first time provide a comprehensive understanding of the creature which grew up to 13ft (4 meters) long and 1.25 tons in weight.

Stupendemys males boasted sturdy front-facing horns on both sides of its shell very close to the neck. Deep scars detected in the fossils indicated that these horns may have been used like a lance for fighting with other Stupendemys males over mates or territory. Females did not have the horns.

Fighting occurs among certain turtles alive today, particularly between male tortoises, according to palaeontologist Edwin Cadena of the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, who led the research published in the journal Science Advances.

Stupendemys is the second-largest known turtle, behind seagoing Archelon, which lived roughly 70m years ago at the end of the age of dinosaurs and reached about 15ft (4.6 meters) in length.

The first Stupendemys fossils were found in the 1970s but many mysteries remained about the animal. The new fossils included the largest-known turtle shell – 9.4ft (2.86 meters) long, even larger than Archelon’s shell – and the first lower jaw remains, which gave clues about its diet.

“Stupendemys geographicus was huge and heavy. The largest individuals of this species were about the size and length of a sedan automobile if we take into account the head, neck, shell and limbs,” Cadena said.

“Its diet was diverse, including small animals – fishes, caimans, snakes – as well as molluscs and vegetation, particularly fruits and seeds. Putting together all the anatomical features of this species indicates that its lifestyle was mostly in the bottom of large freshwater bodies including lakes and large rivers,” Cadena added.

Stupendemys – meaning “stupendous turtle” – inhabited a colossal wetlands system spanning what is now Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Peru before the Amazon and Orinoco rivers were formed.

Its large size may have been crucial in defending against formidable predators. It shared the environment with giant crocodilians including the 36ft-long (11-meter-long) caiman Purussaurus and the 33ft-long (10-meter-long) gavial relative Gryposuchus. One of the Stupendemys fossils was found with a two-inch-long (5cm) crocodile tooth embedded in it.

About 50,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now West Africa apparently procreated with another group of ancient humans that scientists didn’t know existed.

There aren’t any bones or ancient DNA to prove that theory, but researchers say the evidence is in the genes of modern West Africans. They analyzed genetic material from hundreds of people from Nigeria and Sierra Leone and found signals of what they call “ghost” DNA from an unknown ancestor.

Our own species — Homo sapiens — lived alongside other groups that split off from the same genetic family tree at different times. And there’s plenty of evidence from other parts of the world that early humans had sex with other hominins, like Neanderthals.

That’s why Neanderthal genes are present in humans today, in people of European and Asian descent. Homo sapiens also mated with another group, the Denisovans, and those genes are found in people from Oceania.

The findings on ghost DNA, published in the journal Science Advances, further complicate the picture of how Homo sapiens — or modern humans — evolved away from other human relatives. “It’s almost certainly the case that the story is incredibly complex and complicated and we have kind of these initial hints about the complexity,” says Sriram Sankararaman, a computational biologist at UCLA.

The scientists analyzed the genomes of 405 West Africans. Sankararaman says they used a statistical model to flag parts of the DNA. The technique “goes along a person’s genome and pulls out chunks of DNA which we think are likely to have come from a population that is not modern human.”

The unusual DNA found in West Africa isn’t associated with either Neanderthals or Denisovans. Sankararaman and his study co-author, Arun Durvasula, think it comes from a yet-to-be-discovered group.

“We don’t have a clear identity for this archaic group,” Sankararaman says. “That’s why we use the term ‘ghost.’ It doesn’t seem to be particularly closely related to the groups from which we have genome sequences from.”

The scientists think the interbreeding happened about 50,000 years ago, roughly the same time that Neanderthals were breeding with modern humans elsewhere in the world. It’s not clear whether there was a single interbreeding “event,” though, or whether it happened over an extended period of time.

The unknown group “appears to have split off from the ancestors of modern humans a little before when Neanderthals split off from our ancestors,” he says.

Sharon Browning, a biostatistics professor at the University of Washington who has studied the mixing of Denisovans and humans, says “the scenario that they are discovering here is one that seems realistic.”

Browning notes that the ghost DNA appears frequently in the genetic material. “That tells us that these archaic populations might have had some DNA that did some useful stuff that’s proved to be useful to the modern population,” she says.

But at the moment, Sankararaman says, it’s not possible to know what, if any, role these genetic materials have for modern humans who carry them. “Are they just randomly floating in our genomes? Do they have any kind of adaptive benefits? Do they have deleterious consequences?” he added. “Those are all questions which would be fantastic to start thinking about.”

He says there is likely evidence of other ghost populations in modern humans in other parts of the world. “I think as we get the genome sequences from different parts of the world at different points in time, there is always the possibility that we might discover these as-yet-unidentified ghost populations,” Sankararaman says.

It’s also possible that the ghost DNA found in this study comes from multiple groups, Browning added. “Within Africa, we don’t know how many archaic groups might have been involved, and the study doesn’t tell us that,” she says. “It tells us that there was integration, but it could have been from more than one archaic population, in theory.”

Compared with the Neanderthals, where there is abundant DNA fossil evidence, physical samples are much harder to come by in Africa. Browning says the climate on the continent has made it challenging.

“The conditions have to be right for the fossils to not totally disintegrate” in order to recover DNA, Browning says. Bones have been found in Africa from archaic populations, but no DNA has been recovered. Still, she adds, “the technology is continuing to improve, and people are still out there looking for more fossils.”

So what happened to this mysterious group of ancient humans? Scientists aren’t totally sure.

They might have died off, or they might have eventually been completely subsumed into modern humans.

One of the universe’s deep mysteries just got a lot stranger. Astrophysicists have discovered a clue that could help explain why, every once in a while, superfast bursts of radio waves flash across Earth from deep space. But the clue — a repeating 16-day pattern in one of the bursts, undermines one of the most popular theories for where the bursts are coming from.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have likely happened for billions of years. But humans only discovered them in 2007, and have detected only a few dozen of them since. And in June 2019, astronomers finally tracked an FRB to its home galaxy.

But no one knows what causes them. Because these bursts are so rare, unusual and bright — considering that they’re visible from billions of light-years across space — physicists have tended to assume they come from a cataclysmic event, such as the collision of stars.

This repeating pattern, however, suggests that something else is going on, that there’s some sort of natural machine in the universe for pumping regular shrieks of radio energy across space.

Researchers looking at data from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB) first spotted this FRB, known as FRB 180916.J0158+65, in 2019. In January 2020, they published a paper in the journal Nature that reanalyzed old data and found more than one burst from FRB 180916.J0158+65. They traced this FRB back to a relatively nearby spiral galaxy. What’s new in this latest paper, published Feb. 3 to the arXiv database, is the regular pattern in the bursts. The FRB, they found, goes through four-day cycles of regular activity, bleating out radio waves into space on an almost hourly basis. Then it goes into a 12-day period of silence. Sometimes the source seems to skip its usual four-day awake periods, or lets out only a single burst. CHIME/FRB is able to watch the FRB only some of the time, they noted, so it’s likely the detector misses many FRBs during the awake period.

No one knows what this pattern means, the researchers noted in a statement, but this pattern doesn’t fit neatly into any existing explanations for FRBs.

In general, patterns like this in astrophysics are often related to a spinning object or orbiting celestial bodies. Neutron stars often seem to strobe regularly from the perspective of X-ray detectors on Earth, because hot spots on their surface spin in and out of view like a lighthouse beacon. And tiny planets may dim the light of the stars they orbit everytime they pass between that star and Earth.

In other words, for astrophysics, patterns tend to indicate rotation. But no one knows if this pattern governs all FRBs or just some of them.