Science - USA (2021-12-24)

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PHOTO: NASA

and the National Supercomputing Center’s

Tianhe-3. Installation of what will be the

first U.S. exascale computer, Frontier,

is underway at Oak Ridge National

Laboratory; it is slated to come online

in 2022. Exascale supercomputers are

expected to enable the marriage of arti-

ficial intelligence with massive data sets,

transforming fields such as personalized

medicine and materials discovery and

generating more realistic models of climate

change and the accelerating expansion of

the universe.

Bevy of landers heads for Moon

SPACE SCIENCE | Fifty years after humans

last set foot on the Moon, robotic missions

are returning en masse—and reviving

dreams of human exploration. Following

successful Chinese rover landings, three

NASA-funded robotic landers, developed

by small startups, will launch in 2022,

and they could be joined by probes from

Russia, Japan, and India. NASA’s program

has two purposes: to conduct research,

especially on the extent and availability

of the Moon’s trace water, and to pave the

way for human exploration by cheaply

delivering payloads to the dusty surface.

The coming year will also mark the first

orbital launches for two mammoth rock-

ets capable of taking astronauts and heavy

payloads to the Moon and beyond: NASA’s

overdue and costly Space Launch System

and SpaceX’s Starship.

U.N. panel to tackle pollution?

ENVIRONMENT | The United Nations

Environment Assembly is set to vote in

February 2022 on a proposal to create

a scientific advisory body to study the

risks of chemical pollution and waste,

modeled on the Intergovernmental Panel

on Climate Change. The United Nations

already has several conventions on certain

types of pollution, such as mercury and

persistent organic chemicals. But propo-

nents of the new panel say there’s a need

for broad assessments to help policymakers

spot emerging problems and identify

research needs. More than 1800 scientists

have signed a petition of support to be

presented at the assembly.

Listening for spiraling black holes

ASTROPHYSICS | Gravitational wave

detectors have registered the collisions

of star-size black holes, but scientists are

also mounting a different kind of search

for bigger prey. In 2022, they hope to have

enough data to clearly discern the low-

frequency rumble of gravitational waves

from pairs of supermassive black holes,

with masses billions of times that of

the Sun, as they spiral toward merger.

To detect the spiraling pairs, observers

train large radio telescopes on dozens of

pulsars—collapsed stars emitting radio

beams that, as the pulsar spins, appear as

pulses with clocklike regularity. Tiny varia-

tions in the beats would signal passing

gravitational waves that stretch the space

between the pulsars and Earth. Although

these pulsar timing arrays cannot pinpoint

individual black hole binaries, teams in

Europe and North America say their arrays

have detected a faint signal that may be

the background rumbling of spiraling pairs

across the universe.

U.S. research innovators launch

FUNDING | The two biggest U.S. research

agencies are poised to create units that

would implement congressional mandates

to accelerate practical discoveries. The

National Institutes of Health could get up

to $3 billion in 2022 to stand up an

Advanced Research Projects Agency for

Health that would fund “breakthrough”

approaches to treating a host of diseases.

U.S. redefines research security

POLICY | Congress and the White House

could soon finalize legislation and regula-

tions designed to balance openness and

national security in the funding of academic

research. With U.S. policymakers worried

that federal research dollars could fuel

technological advances in China, Congress

appears ready to ban federally funded

scientists from participating in its foreign

talent recruitment programs and to tighten

oversight of any type of research support

from that economic giant. Several U.S.

scientists have already been accused of fail-

ing to disclose their ties to China, and the

outcome of their trials could determine the

fate of the government’s China Initiative,

a 3-year-old law enforcement effort that

critics say has unfairly targeted scientists

of Chinese descent and criminalized book-

keeping errors.

Ion beam to conjure rare nuclei

NUCLEAR PHYSICS | The fleeting atomic

nuclei normally forged only in stellar

explosions will find a home on Earth after

the $730 million Facility for Rare Isotope

Beams (FRIB) fires up at Michigan State

University. The world’s most powerful ion

source, the linear accelerator can fire any

nucleus—from hydrogen’s single proton to

uranium atoms’ massive core—into targets

to produce new, unstable nuclei. It aims

to yield 80% of all theoretically possible

isotopes, including more than 1000 that

have never been observed. With the FRIB,

physicists hope to bolster their understand-

ing of the structure of nuclei, decipher

how stellar explosions produce heavy ele-

ments, and search for new forces of nature.

China debuts exascale computers

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY | In 2022,

China is expected to demonstrate the

world’s two fastest and most powerful

computers, which recent reports indicate

have surpassed a long-sought performance

milestone. At a supercomputing confer-

ence in late November, news emerged that

China has built the first “exascale” super-

computers, able to carry out more than

1 quintillion (10^18 ) calculations per second.

China has yet to officially announce

the machines, for reasons that remain

unclear. And details about their perfor-

mance have yet to appear on the TOP

list of supercomputers, which ranks the

world’s top machines based on common

benchmarks. But according to technology

watchers, the new supercomputing champs

are Sunway Computer Co.’s OceanLight

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NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System

rocket, standing 98 meters tall, face prelaunch tests.