At the top of the world, northern Greenland’s huge glaciers — long thought to be relatively stable — are in trouble, a new study shows.

As the ocean warms, Greenland’s last remaining ice shelves are rapidly weakening, destabilizing the nearby glaciers and threatening potentially “dramatic” consequences for sea level rise, according to the study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

Ice shelves are tongues of floating ice that jut out over the ocean and act as dams that hold back glaciers on land and slow ice loss. When they melt and weaken, more of the land-based ice is able to slide into the ocean, adding to sea level rise.

Scientists analyzed eight ice shelves buttressing glaciers in northern Greenland, which together hold enough ice to raise sea levels by 2.1 meters — nearly 7 feet — should they break down and melt completely.

While glaciers in other parts of Greenland started to lose mass in the 1980s and 1990s, he said, so far, those in northern Greenland “have remained relatively stable.”

But this appears to no longer be the case, according to the study.

Millan and his co-authors used thousands of satellite images, along with climate models and measurements from the field, to better understand the drivers for — and timing of — historical and current changes to the ice shelves.

They found a “substantial and widespread” increase in ice shelf losses. Since 1978, the ice shelves supporting northern Greenland’s glaciers have lost more than 35% of their total volume, according to the study. It found that since the early 2000s, three have collapsed completely, and the remaining five are melting and destabilizing nearby glaciers.

“We can see that the ice shelves are weakening,” Millan said, “and that’s new key information that we didn’t know, because we thought that this part of Greenland was really stable.”

The ice loss came from a mixture of factors, the study found, including increased calving — chunks of ice breaking off to form icebergs — and surface melting.

But the predominant driver was basal melting, where warm ocean currents melt the ice from beneath. Between 2000 and 2020, a “widespread increase” in the rate of basal melting closely followed a rise in ocean temperature, the study found.

The scientists noted a direct impact on glaciers. As the ice shelves melt, the “grounding lines” — the point at which the glacier stops touching the ground and starts to float — are retreating, the study found.

“These natural boundaries are really the key parameter that indicates the glacier stability,” Millan said. As the grounding line retreats, he added, “the ice discharge into the ocean also starts to increase.”

If the oceans continue to warm, it could permanently weaken the ice shelves, Millan said. “And in a certain timescale, they could even collapse, which could have significant consequences on the contribution of the Greenland ice sheet to sea level rise.”

The region already plays a large role. Between 2006 and 2018, the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet contributed to more than 17% of observed sea level rise, according to the report.

It is not possible to give timescales for when such a collapse could happen, Millan said, but changes have happened fast since the early 2000s.

After the collapse of the Zachariæ Isstrøm glacier’s ice shelf in 2003, the ice discharge into the ocean doubled, according to the study. Millan said when he visited the glacier in 2016 and 2017, the changes were alarming. He described it as “a chaos of tabular icebergs.”

The future of the glaciers will depend heavily on what the world does to reduce planet-heating pollution, Millan said.

The report calls for continued monitoring to better asses how the ice shelves will respond to climate change and, in particular, to build on the study’s findings about the complex process of basal melting and the potential impacts on sea level rise.

“This will ultimately provide insight into the future of these glaciers as well as the fate of larger ice shelves in Antarctica,” the report notes. A recent study in Antarctica found that the rapid melting of the continent’s ice shelves may now be “unavoidable” due to melting from below.

Sophie Nowicki, an ice sheet expert in the geology department at the University at Buffalo, who was not involved in the research, said the study’s findings are significant because of the insight they provide into sources and triggers of changes to Greenland’s ice sheet.

The study also adds to an overall understanding of how polar regions are responding to the human-induced climate crisis, Nowicki said.

The poles were once seen as “fairly boring,” she said, but since scientists began to observe them with satellites around four decades ago, it has become clear that “these are dynamic, very fragile regions.”

As the planet continues to heat up, she added, “we should be concerned by how fast the changes are happening, but we should not be surprised.”

An aide to the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military was killed after receiving a live grenade as a birthday present that was immediately detonated by his 13-year-old son.

Major Gennadiy Chastyakov, who served as the assistant to Valery Zaluzhny, had received a gift box from a colleague for his birthday on Monday that contained several “Western model” grenades, Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko wrote on Telegram.

Chastyakov’s 13-year-old son then picked up one of the grenades and started turning the ring, Klymenko wrote. As Chastyakov took the grenade from him, the ring was pulled out and the weapon detonated.

Zaluzhny, the chief of Ukraine’s military, wrote on Telegram that his “assistant and close friend” died “under tragic circumstances.”

Police found five more unexploded grenades in the apartment, Klymenko said.

Kyiv regional police reported that the assistant’s son was seriously injured by the explosion, and is being medically treated.

According to Klymenko, police identified the “fellow serviceman” who gave the gift to Chastyakov, and found two similar grenades during a search of his office.

Police said criminal proceedings had been initiated and an investigation is ongoing, though the Ukrainian interior ministry later said it considers the death an “accident” based on preliminary information.

“According to the information we have now, we can say that it was an accident, negligent ammunition handling,” Mariana Reva, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Interior said on national TV.

“It is possible that the case will be reclassified based on the evidence collected.”

The gift “was in the form of a box, with a bottle of alcohol and six grenades inside,” Reva said.

She said that the colleague “presented these grenades to a colleague, pointing out that the grenades were combat grenades.”

“Unfortunately, the deceased did not take these words seriously,” Reva added.

Klymenko assisted Zaluzhny as the military chief led Ukrainian troops in the war with Russia.

“From the beginning of the full-scale invasion, (Gennadiy) was a reliable shoulder for me, completely devoting his life to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the fight against Russian aggression,” the military chief wrote on Telegram.

The assistant had a wife and four children; in addition to the son’s injuries, his daughter suffered minor injuries, according to Reva.

Zaluzhny has in recent days found himself in a public difference of opinion with Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who disputed his commander-in-chief’s characterization of the state of the war.

Zaluzhny told the Economist that “we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate” and “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” comments which Zelensky’s office quickly pushed back against.

The 51-year-old rights activist was awarded the Nobel on October 6 for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.” That battle has come at a huge personal cost – she’s been sentenced to more than 30 years in jail, and has been banned from seeing her husband and children.

According to her family, an Iranian prosecutor refused to grant Mohammadi’s request to be transferred from Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, where she is being held, to a heart and lung hospital for “urgent medical care.”

US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported that she was denied access to hospital treatment last week after refusing to wear the mandatory hijab.

“It’s been a week now that they are refusing to give her the medical aid she needs,” the activist’s family said in the statement, adding that they were “concerned” about her “physical condition and health.”

Mohammadi was using the hunger strike to demonstrate against Iran’s “policy of delaying and neglecting medical care for sick inmates” and its mandatory hijab policy for Iranian women, the family added.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Monday that it was “deeply concerned” for Mohammadi’s health.

“The requirement that female inmates must wear a hijab in order to be hospitalized is inhumane and morally unacceptable,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the committee, said in a statement.

When it came to power four decades ago, the Islamic Republic used the compulsory hijab to “showcase the image of domination, subjugation and control over women” as a means to control society, Mohammadi wrote.

Another young woman, 16-year-old Armita Geravand, fell into a coma last month after she was allegedly assaulted by the country’s morality police for not wearing a headscarf on the Tehran metro. Geravand was announced dead on October 28 by Iranian state media, a month after Iran’s parliament passed draconian legislation imposing penalties of up to 10 years in prison for women who breach the country’s already strict hijab rules.

Mohammadi herself has spent most of the past two decades in prison and is currently serving a sentence of 10 years and 9 months, accused of actions against national security and propaganda against the state.

In August she was sentenced to an additional year in jail for her continued activism inside prison after she gave a media interview and a statement about sexual assaults in jail, which she says have “significantly increased” since the protests swept Iran last year, leading her to describe the abuse as now “systematic.”

Mohammadi was already serving time for publishing a book last year about Iran’s brutal prison methods, titled “White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Women Prisoners,” as well as a documentary film telling the stories of prisoners held in solitary confinement – a punishment Mohammadi herself has endured.

For refusing to be silenced behind bars, Mohammadi has been banned from speaking directly with her husband and children for more than a year.

The family have promised to hold the Iranian regime “responsible for anything that happens to our beloved Narges.”

Two powerful NASA telescopes have detected the oldest and most distant black hole ever found.

Data captured via energetic X-rays by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope has helped astronomers spot the signature of a growing black hole within the early universe just 470 million years after the big bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.

The discovery, described in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, may help astronomers piece together how some of the first supermassive black holes formed in the cosmos.

“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said lead study author Akos Bogdan, in a statement. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.” Bogdan is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He was referring to an effect called gravitational lensing, which occurs when closer objects — in this case a galactic cluster — act like a magnifying glass for distant objects. Gravity essentially warps and amplifies the light of distant galaxies in the background of whatever is doing the magnifying, enabling observations of otherwise invisible celestial features.

Astronomers detected the black hole in a galaxy called UHZ1. At first glance, the galaxy appeared in the same direction as a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2744, which is located about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. But data collected by the Webb telescope showed that UHZ1 is actually much farther away and located beyond the cluster at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth.

A light-year, equivalent to 5.88 trillion miles, is how far a beam of light travels in a year. Given the distance between Earth and the objects from the early days of the universe, when telescopes like Webb observe this light, it’s effectively like looking into the past.

The team used the Chandra Observatory to detect superheated gas releasing X-rays within UHZ1, the telltale sign of a supermassive black hole growing in size.

The detection was made possible by the Abell cluster of galaxies, which intensified the light of the UHZ1 galaxy and the X-rays released by the black hole by a factor of four.

Decoding a cosmic mystery

Astronomers think the discovery will help them to better understand how supermassive black holes appeared and reached their monstrous masses so soon after the beginning of the universe.

The researchers want to know whether the giant celestial objects formed when massive clouds of gas collapsed or if they resulted from the explosions of the very first massive stars.

“There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they’ve formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed,” said Andy Goulding, research scholar in astrophysical sciences at Princeton University in New Jersey.

He is a coauthor on the Nature Astronomy paper and lead author of another paper on the UHZ1 galaxy published in September in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team reporting its results in the Nature Astronomy paper had discovered that the distant black hole’s mass is similar to the entire mass of all of the stars within the galaxy that hosts it. The mass falls somewhere between that of 10 million and 100 million suns, judging by the brightness and energy of the X-rays emitted by it, the researchers said.

Potential black hole theory

Typically, black holes located at the centers of galaxies only have about 0.1% the mass of the stars within their host galaxy.

The unusual black hole could be an “Outsize Black Hole” that formed when a huge cloud of gas collapsed, as theorized in 2017 by Priyamvada Natarajan, a coauthor on both studies and the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton professor of astronomy and professor of physics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

“We think that this is the first detection of an ‘Outsize Black Hole’ and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” Natarajan said. “For the first time we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind.”

Italy will build two detention centers in Albania to house migrants trying to reach its shores, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni said Monday, in an attempt to control migration figures that have almost doubled in the year since she took office.

Meloni said the facilities are due to open next spring and will initially take in 3,000 people. Once the centers are “fully up and running,” Meloni said her government hoped they could process up to 36,000 people a year.

Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party is facing growing domestic pressure as it has failed to deliver on an electoral promise to limit illegal migration. More than 145,000 people have reached Italy’s shores since January, compared with 88,000 people last year.

Speaking in Rome alongside her Albanian counterpart Edi Rama, Meloni hailed the deal as a “European agreement” and an “innovative solution” aimed at curbing the rise in crossings over the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa.

“Mass irregular immigration is a phenomenon that… member states of the European Union cannot deal with alone,” Meloni said at a joint news conference with Rama, adding “cooperation between EU member states and what are, for now, non-EU countries, can play a decisive role.”

Albania was granted European Union candidate status nearly a decade ago but has not yet joined the bloc. The deal marks the first time an EU country has outsourced its asylum procedures to a country attempting to join its ranks.

“If Italy calls Albania, it is there,” Rama said. “We are a European state, but we are missing the ‘U’ in front but this, but that does not prevent us to be and see the world as Europeans,” he said.

The centers will be built in the Albanian ports of Shengjin and Gjader and are “in full compliance with the European Union and international law,” Meloni said.

One center will be used to process migrants rescued by boats at sea; the second will be used to house migrants who qualify to apply for asylum in the EU. It is unclear what happens to those who do not qualify, but the Meloni government has focused on using the threat of immediate deportation as means to deter migrants from arriving on Italy’s shores.

Immediate deportation is not allowed inside the EU due to human rights statutes that allow all arrivals to apply for asylum. Because Albania is not an EU member, those rules will not apply.

The plan would allow Italy to skirt the Dublin agreement, which states that the first country in which migrants arrive must care for them and process their cases.

Italy will provide the manpower to process applications, but Albania will provide police for security and surveillance, Meloni said, adding that minors, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups would not be sent to Albania. Few other details about the deal, including its cost, have been revealed.

The European Commission issued a terse response Tuesday afternoon. “We’re in contact with the Italian authorities because we need to see the details. We’re asking to receive detailed information on this type of arrangement,” a spokesperson said.

The deal echoes the United Kingdom’s controversial agreement to send thousands of asylum seekers to Rwanda, which has been mired in legal challenges since its inception.

Human rights groups and opposition politicians decried the announcement. The secretary of the left-wing More Europe party Riccardo Magi wrote on X that the deal would create an “Italian Guantanamo.”

“The Italian government’s plan to build reception centers for refugees and asylum seekers in Albania is a testament to its disproportionate focus on preventing people from arriving in the EU, rather than creating safe and legal avenues for those seeking refuge,” said Susanna Zanfrini, IRC Italy country director.

“Big questions loom over the application of Italian jurisdiction in Albania, as it remains unclear how people on the move could access asylum and exercise their basic rights in a non-EU territory,” she added.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) also reacted to the announcement by comparing the memorandum to other investments made in transit countries to prevent people from departing to seek safety from war, famine and other strife.

“The pact signed between Italy and Albania goes one step further than the outsourcing agreements that the Italian government or European institutions have signed in recent years with Turkey, Libya and Tunisia,” MSF said in a statement.

“The lack of access to Italian soil, the extraterritorial management of asylum applications, the application of accelerated border procedures and the detention of people in a third country represent a new attack on the right to asylum, as it is understood today,” the MSF statement added.

MSF, which operates a rescue boat in the search and rescue area between Libya, Malta and Italy, also expressed concern that sending ships with migrants to distant ports puts those people in jeopardy.

Gaza is “becoming a graveyard for children,” the United Nations chief warned on Monday as the death toll rises and calls grow around the world for a ceasefire, one month into Israel’s assault on Hamas – the militant group that runs the enclave.

“The nightmare in Gaza is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters in New York, adding that the need for a ceasefire is becoming “more urgent with every passing hour.”

“The parties to the conflict – and, indeed, the international community – face an immediate and fundamental responsibility: to stop this inhuman collective suffering and dramatically expand humanitarian aid to Gaza,” he said.

His comments come four weeks after Israel declared war on Hamas, following the Islamist militant group’s brutal attack on October 7 that killed 1,400 people in Israel and saw about 240 others kidnapped.

Israel retaliated by launching an air and ground offensive on Gaza, vowing to eliminate the militant group.

From the start, global aid organizations and rights groups have warned that such an assault would be catastrophic for Gaza, which has been cut off from much of the world for nearly 17 years. A blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt meant severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people – contributing to widespread poverty, hunger and dependency on international aid.

The devastation of Israel’s attacks on Gaza is now becoming apparent, with the Hamas-controlled health ministry in the enclave saying Monday that more than 10,000 people have been killed since the war began. That includes more than 4,100 children and 2,600 women, the ministry said.

Around 1.5 million Gaza residents are now displaced – 70% of the population – with most living in crowded UN shelters, said Tamara Alrifai, spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on Monday.

Many evacuated their homes in the north after being warned by Israel to leave immediately; others were left homeless by relentless airstrikes that have razed buildings across the Gaza Strip.

A separate statement from the UNRWA described conditions in its shelters as “inhumane,” amid a lack of clean water and sanitation. In the Khan Younis Training Centre, where 22,000 have sought shelter, at least 600 people are sharing one toilet, the UNRWA said.

Thousands of cases of skin infections, diarrhea, chicken pox and other diseases have been detected, spread by people living in uncomfortably close quarters, it added.

Decomposing bodies trapped under collapsed buildings also present a health risk to survivors, the UNRWA said.

Emily Callahan, an American nurse who managed to leave Gaza last week, described seeing horrific injuries at the Khan Younis center and other shelters.

“There were children with just massive burns down their faces, down their necks, all over their limbs, and because the hospitals are so overwhelmed, they are being discharged immediately after,” she said.

“They are being discharged (from hospitals) to these camps with no access to running water … They are given two hours of water every 12 hours.”

Israel rejects calls for ceasefire

The Gaza crisis and mounting horror from international observers has put pressure on Western leaders to use their influence to ease the crisis.

On Monday, the UN Security Council failed to reach consensus on a draft resolution aimed at halting the ongoing conflict. The Deputy US Ambassador to the UN, Robert Wood, said no progress had been made, stating: “Israel will do what it feels.”

One sticking point has been language in the resolution that calls for an immediate ceasefire – which is supported by several members of the Council, but opposed by the US and United Kingdom, which both hold veto power.

Previous attempts to pass resolutions in the Security Council have faced challenges, including two US vetoes, further underscoring the complexity of reaching a consensus on this critical issue.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ambassador Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, who co-initiated the meeting with China, underlined that discussions are ongoing within the council. “We are working night and day on it; too many people have lost their lives including far too many humanitarian workers and UN workers,” she said.

She also announced that the UAE will take in 1,000 Palestinian children who require medical treatment along with their families for rehabilitation, and there would be “regular briefings, meetings” within the Security Council to “keep the spotlight on this very, very critical humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding on the Gaza Strip.”

In an interview with ABC News on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared there would be “no ceasefire, general ceasefire, in Gaza without the release of our hostages.”

However, he said he was open to short pauses taking place – “an hour here, an hour there … in order to enable goods, humanitarian goods to come in, or our hostages, individual hostages to leave.”

Some limited aid has been able to enter Gaza through Egypt via the Rafah crossing, the only remaining border point not controlled by Israel. But it’s still far from enough – more than 400 trucks of aid have crossed in the last two weeks, compared to 500 a day that used to enter Gaza before the war broke out, said Guterres.

The current “trickle of assistance does not meet the ocean of need,” he added, announcing that the UN and its partners are launching a $1.2 billion humanitarian appeal to help the entire population of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Guterres also reiterated his condemnation of the Hamas October 7 attacks and called for the release of hostages.

In response to Guterres’ comments, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan called for his resignation, accusing him of making “the false immoral comparison between a brutal terrorist organization that commits war crimes and a law-abiding democracy.”

Mourning his 8-year-old daughter believed killed in Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel, Thomas Hand said he was at least partially consoled militants had not taken her hostage.

Of all the terrible possibilities for her, death was the least painful, he said.

But then the Israeli military gave him the news that nearly made him collapse.

Emily might still be alive.

“It’s her birthday on the 17th of [November]. She will be 9,” he said. “She won’t even know day it is. She won’t know it’s her birthday. There will be no birthday cake. No party, no friends. She will just be petrified in a tunnel under Gaza. That is her birthday.”

Emily was sleeping at her friend’s house in the kibbutz of Be’eri when Hamas militants attacked one month ago, killing more than 120 residents and kidnapping many others in a bloody and indiscriminate rampage that has left a deep and abiding scar on the close-knit border community.

The IDF estimates 240 Israeli hostages are being held by Hamas in Gaza, including civilian men, women and children.

The militant group has released just four hostages – two elderly Israeli women and an American mother and daughter – while the IDF last week said troops had rescued an Israeli soldier.

Information about the status and whereabouts of the hostages remains scarce but many of the missing are believed to be trapped within the labyrinth of Hamas tunnels that have been dug beneath the enclave.

Israel insists there will be no ceasefire until the hostages are freed.

“I went ‘yes!’ I went ‘yes’ and smiled. Because that is the best news of the possibilities that I knew. That was the best possibility I was hoping for,” he said, tears streaming down his face.

“She was either dead or in Gaza. And if you know anything about what they do to people in Gaza, that is worse than death.”

Hand said he had been planning to hold a funeral for Emily so she could be buried beside her mother, who died from cancer a few years ago.

But the Israeli military has told him her body is not with the remains of the victims, and no blood was found inside the home where she slept the night before the attacks, he said.

The military also said cellphones belonging to the family Emily was staying with had been tracked inside Gaza, according to Hand.

Hand said he is now flooded with both hope and despair, anguished by what Emily might be enduring, but praying once more for her safe return.

“(I am) extremely worried about her,” he said. “What conditions she has been held in… your imagination is horrible.”

The survivors of the Be’eri massacre are temporarily living in a hotel. In the lobby, there’s a vigil for hostages, which Emily’s photo will be added to, Hand said.

“The unknown is awful, the waiting is awful,” he said. “That is what we have got to do now, just pray and hope that she comes back in some broken state that we can fix her. We will fix her somehow.”

Hand’s thoughts are now on the possibility of an emotional reunion with the daughter he had believed was dead.

“In my head, I can see her running to me, and me running to her, picking her up, never letting her go,” he said.

Irish chef Alan Fisher has unseated Nigeria’s Hilda Effiong Bassey to take the world record for the longest cooking marathon, the Guinness World Records (GWR) committee said Tuesday.

Fisher “cooked for an incredible 119 hours and 57 minutes at his restaurant in Japan,” GWR said, breaking the record set in May by Bassey, who is known on social media as Hilda Baci.

Bassey’s record-breaking, 93-hour, 11-minute cookathon shot her to instant fame in Nigeria.

Her record attempt was so popular that it crashed the GWR website for two days when it was confirmed in June, “due to the immense volume of traffic we received from her legion of loyal fans,” the organization said.

This is a developing story. More to follow

Aluminum rockets and steel skyscrapers; slick high-speed shuttles and glassy facades: that’s how “the future” has been imagined for decades.

But that’s not what Koji Murata imagines. A researcher at Kyoto University in Japan, Murata has been exploring how biological materials could be used in space.

Murata wondered if he “could build a wooden house on the moon or Mars,” and decided to test the theory — by creating a wooden satellite.

Recent research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that 10% of atmospheric aerosol in the stratosphere contained metallic particles from spacecraft, including satellites. The long-term impact of these metal fragments is unknown, but scientists are concerned it could damage Earth’s fragile ozone layer.

Wooden satellites would be better for the planet while still providing the same functionality as their metal counterparts, says Murata.

“At the end of their life, satellites re-enter the atmosphere. The difference is, the wood in the LingoSat will burn up and eventually become a gas, whereas metals become fine particles instead,” says Murata.

It’s not just a pipedream: Murata and his team have been working on the project for four years and sent wood samples to space in 2021 to test the material’s resilience to space conditions.

Now, they are working with Japan’s space agency (JAXA) and NASA to send the prototype satellite, called LingoSat, into orbit early next year.

Magnolia, cherry and birch

For Murata, who is head of the space-wood project at Kyoto University, wood is an obvious choice for space structures.

“When you use wood on Earth, you have the problems of burning, rotting, and deformation, but in space, you don’t have those problems: there is no oxygen in space, so it doesn’t burn, and no living creatures live in them, so they don’t rot,” he says.

The strength per weight of wood is the same as aluminum which also makes it a compelling choice for space construction, Murata adds — and the team’s tests conducted at the International Space Station found that wood is remarkably resilient in outer space.

For the satellite, Murata tested three wood types: Erman’s birch — which is commonly found in East Asia — Japanese cherry and magnolia obovata — a species native to Japan. While cypress and cedar would be more common wood types for construction, the team “chose materials that could withstand as much detailed work as possible,” because of the small size of the satellites, says Murata.

Ultimately, the magnolia wood won, as its cells are small and uniform in size, which makes the wood easier to work with and less likely to split or break, he says.

Sustainable satellites

Humans have been putting satellites into orbit since the 1950s, with up to 100 spacecraft launched every year until 2010. But over the past decade, commercial launches have become more accessible and this number has increased dramatically, surpassing 1,400 new satellites in 2021. With the number of rockets sent to space likely to increase, the NOAA research projected that in the coming decades, as much as half of atmospheric aerosol in the stratosphere could contain metallic particles from spacecraft.

Other organizations are also looking to use wood in space.

Finnish startup Arctic Astronautics designed the WISA Woodsat, a wooden satellite that was supposed to be launched into space in 2021. However, company founder Jari Mäkinen says the launch has been held up by bureaucratic hurdles.

At Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates, aerospace engineer Yarjan Abdul Samad is looking at graphene as a potential material for space objects.

Samad is exploring “nano-wood” — a low-density wood combined with graphene to improve its strength. Samad agrees with Murata that as a renewable and low-density material, wood has the potential to not just build satellites, but future space structures.

“There are many research (projects) going on for space agriculture,” says Samad. “If we have wood grown in space, it could be utilized for manufacturing in space.”

However, there are still a lot of unknowns about wood in space structures, says Tatsuhito Fujita, an engineer at JAXA who has been involved in reviewing the LingoSat project.

“The use of natural resources for space hardware (makes sense) from a sustainable development goals perspective, but since wood has never been used in satellites, we cannot tell what kind of benefit we can obtain at this moment,” says Fujita.

For JAXA and the J-Cube Program, the initiative launching the satellite, the priority is safety – and the LingoSat passed its preliminary evaluation with no critical concerns, says Fujita. “JAXA also hopes for lighter, stronger structural materials that are less likely to generate debris, and is conducting research to achieve this goal.”

To infinity

The LingoSat is in the final stages of its safety review and is expected to launch in a joint mission by JAXA and NASA in the summer of 2024. Murata says they will monitor the satellite for a minimum of six months, to see how it performs in space conditions — such as the extreme changes in temperature in space.

The researchers will monitor the satellite for at least six months as it orbits the Earth, as shown in this render. Credit: Kyoto University

“There is not much reduction in strength from minus 150 to 150 degrees Celsius (-238 to 302 degrees Fahrenheit), we confirmed that in our experiments,” says Murata. “But a satellite goes round the Earth and has these huge temperature differences in 90 minutes. We don’t know to what extent the satellite can withstand this intense, repeated cycle of temperature difference, so this has to be investigated.”

The team will also monitor its reactions to radio waves and magnetic fields, and how the wooden shell protects the satellite’s semiconductor and chip.

In theory, wood should be a cheaper material to manufacture from, although as a novel technology, Murata says they are still working out the costs.

So far, few materials have been used for space missions and objects, says Murata. He hopes that his research and the LingoSat can show the possibilities of other, lower-impact materials.

“It is a renewable, environmentally friendly, and people-friendly material,” says Murata. “I think wood could be used in space development, particularly as an interior material and for radiation shielding material, for small satellites and manned space vehicles.”

Yoav Peled says he has started wondering if the world has gone mad.

Sitting outside the Kirya, Israel’s equivalent of the Pentagon in Tel Aviv, Peled was cutting pieces of yellow ribbon off a large wheel last Thursday, handing them out to strangers passing by. The bands symbolize solidarity with the roughly 240 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

It is this solidarity – and specifically whether it still extends beyond Israel’s borders – that Peled was questioning.

As global leaders continue to pile pressure on Israel over the mounting civilian death toll from its bombardment of Gaza and huge crowds gather for pro-Palestinian protests in cities like London, Washington DC, Berlin, Paris, Amman and Cairo – almost all in support of civilians in Gaza, rather than Hamas – many Israelis are getting frustrated with what they see as unequal treatment.

It’s a feeling that cuts across the deep divisions within Israeli society: the world does not understand us.

A teacher at a religious school for girls, Itzahak brought some of her students to the little plaza outside the Kirya where Peled was handing out the ribbons. The spot has become a gathering place for the victims’ families, their supporters, and well-wishers after the October 7 terror attacks.

Missing people posters and photographs of the victims are displayed on the wall of the government complex, a seemingly never-ending row of smiling faces of men, women, children, babies, soldiers, and, at times, entire families.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said more than 1,400 people were murdered in the attacks. About 240 people were kidnapped and are believed to be held by Hamas and others in Gaza. Four women – two Americans and two Israelis – have been released, while one soldier has been rescued by the IDF.

“I think any country in the world that would find itself in our situation would probably do much, much more and no one would say anything. It’s just the Jews. Because the Jews are not entitled to live in a country in peace. That’s what we want. And I’m sorry, but no one understands it,” Itzahak said.

Anger against Netanyahu

There is a lot of love outside the Kirya complex. Some people come here to pray, hug each other, and spend time together. The group of students brought by Itzahak came with dozens of freshly baked loaves of bread, a powerful and deeply meaningful gesture in Judaism.

But there’s also a lot of anger and frustration. Most of it is aimed squarely at Israel’s embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Two shifts a day. From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.,” he said, holding a sign depicting Netanyahu and other members of his government in jail.

Like many in Israel, Zweig is placing some of the blame for the brutal October 7 Hamas attack on Netanyahu. “We should have taken down Hamas a long time ago, but instead Netanyahu started allowing Qatari money in,” he said referencing Netanyahu’s decision to allow Qatar to transfer millions of dollars to Hamas-run Gaza in 2018.

“You’re not going to change a terror organization’s agenda with money. Now, the price of taking them down will be much higher,” Zweig said.

It’s been a month since the attack and Ruby Chen still has had no news about his son, Itay. The second of three sons, a former Boy Scout, and a fierce basketball player, Itay was kidnapped on October 7.

On Saturday night, Chen and hundreds of other family members of the hostages gathered outside the Kirya to demand “greater actions by the government.”

They pitched up tents in the plaza, vowing to stay until their children, siblings, parents, grandparents, and other loved ones were released.

The organizers of the event said it was not “an anti-government protest,” but their frustration was clear.

In the early days after the Hamas terror attack, many of the hostages’ families were reluctant to criticize the government of Netanyahu. That has now changed.

A strongly worded statement issued by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum last week spoke of the “enormous anger” that the government was not speaking to them about the operation in Gaza.

A tense meeting between Netanyahu and some of the families, led to further heated exchanges, including a demand that the government should consider an “everyone for every one deal” floated by Hamas in a statement the terror group issued last week.

Such a deal would involve exchanging the hostages for Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons – some 6,630 people, according to estimates by the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.

It would be highly controversial because many of the prisoners have been either convicted or held on charges or suspicions related to acts of terrorism.

The IDF dismissed the Hamas offer as a tool of “psychological terror aimed to manipulate Israeli civilians.”

In October 2011, Israel agreed to exchange Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier kidnapped by Hamas in 2006, for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted terrorists who went on to carry out further attacks. Yahya Sinwar, who heads Hamas in Gaza and was identified by the IDF as one of the masterminds behind the October 7 attacks, was one of those released in the deal.

Chen said he still believes the government should do everything it can to secure the release of the hostages. “I’m not in a position to understand the dynamics. At the end of the day, we look at the end results … I still don’t know if my kid is dead or alive. That’s the bottom line,” he added.

The families have said that no ceasefire should be agreed until all the hostages are released.

And the country is behind them. Anger about the government’s response to the crisis is mounting even among some of the people who have previously supported Netanyahu and his government.

“I voted for someone else, but I think he has done wonderful things for Israel, he was a soldier, he was a courageous soldier, but he has been the prime minister for 15 years, so he is to blame. And he has to go. I think everybody knows this and he knows it as well,” Itzahak said.

Support for Netanyahu and his government has collapsed, with the latest polling conducted by Tel Aviv University for Israeli media showing the vast majority of Israelis want Netanyahu to quit. 

But while the government’s approval ratings are nose-diving, the decision to launch a war on Hamas has firm backing from most Jewish Israelis – despite the strong international criticism.

And while most of Israel’s Arab and Palestinian citizens, and a small minority of Jews, don’t approve of the war, a wide-ranging crackdown on freedom of speech means that any form of dissent against the war is risky.

Dozens of Palestinian residents and citizens of Israel have been arrested in Israel for expressing solidarity with Gaza and its civilian population. Israel Police said that as of October 25, it had arrested 110 people since the start of the war for allegedly inciting violence and terrorism, mostly on social media. Of these arrests, 17 resulted in indictments.

Public displays of solidarity with Gaza or criticism of Israel’s military response are few and far between. Demonstrations against the war have been banned and more than 100 people have been arrested for posting messages of solidarity with Gaza on social media.

‘Very fine line’ in criticizing Israel

A musician who recently finished his compulsory military service with the Israeli Navy – including stints patrolling around the Gaza Strip – Rapaport said he, too, was getting frustrated with the world’s reaction to the events in Gaza.

“When people ask, ‘why are you taking Gaza?’ what I don’t understand is – do we not have the right to protect our civilians and soldiers? What is a proportionate response? We try not to kill civilians,” he said.

“This conflict (between Israel and the Palestinians) isn’t black and white, but this war (with Hamas) is,” he added. “There’s very valid criticism of the Israeli government and Israel, but there’s a very fine line that has been crossed in a lot of these conversations between criticizing Israel and hating Jews. You can criticize Israel occupying the West Bank or Gaza, but you can’t say oh, so because of that it’s okay to kill 1,400 civilians.”

Rapaport said he had criticized Netanyahu’s government before the war, opposing his plans to reform the judicial system – a major fault line that has split the country.

“After the war, I think the whole government should go. But now… we are at war. I don’t trust Netanyahu as a person, but I have to trust him as a leader,” he said.

Later that night, Rapaport joined a large circle of musicians and mostly young people sitting at Zion Square. They were playing guitars and singing classic Israeli hits.

The songs ranged from sad to hopeful. Among them, “Lu Yehi,” a song inspired by the Beatles’ song “Let It Be.” The ballad was written by Naomi Shemer in 1973, during the first days of the Yom Kippur War, and has since become synonymous with that war and hope for Israel’s victory.

On Thursday night, the song’s words rang out in Zion Square, almost exactly 50 years since its debut and with Israel once more at war.