Moon missions, Musk v scientists, sperm and longevity
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Getting astronauts back on the moon came one small step closer this week as a private mission landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, the first to do so upright. Al Khan, chief engineer on OPS. Y'all suck to land it. We're on the moon. Woo!

Mr Space himself, Elon Musk, has been at the centre of a row at one of the world's most esteemed scientific institutions and a new study has found a link between the quality of a man's sperm and his longevity. So we're unpicking three science stories that have caught our eye this week.

From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Findlay and this is Science Weekly. Ian, we're starting this week with a pretty significant milestone in moon exploration. This was something called Blue Ghost Mission 1. Tell me about it. Yeah, so the Blue Ghost lander is built and operated by Firefly Aerospace. They're a Texas-based firm and it touched down just after 8.30am on Sunday UK time in London.

an area of the moon called the Mare Chrysium, which is the Sea of Crises. Now, this is only the second time that a private firm has soft landed on the moon. The first was the Odysseus lander, which was operated by a firm called Intuitive Machines. And that landed in a crater near the lunar South Pole in February last year. It actually hit pretty hard, to be fair. And it

And it tipped over. So it wasn't a complete success. So, you know, you could argue that this Blue Ghost lander is the sort of the most successful soft landing from a private company on the moon that we've had so far.

And when we talk about private missions, what does this mean? Because it could, you know, mean an individual, a company. Who is it that is behind these missions? So this is really a public-private partnership that NASA is funding. So NASA's put more than $2 billion aside for what they call the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative. Now, what

What they want to do with this is NASA really want to foster a commercial industry for companies that can take stuff to the moon.

whether that's supplies or experiments. So what they've done is they've got more than a dozen private companies and they fund those companies to build and operate these missions. Okay. So the money all comes from NASA, but it's the companies that design the landers that launch them and have to operate them when they're there. And all of this is really linked to the NASA Artemis project, which is this ultimate aim of returning humans to the moon.

So what's the goal of Blue Ghost Mission 1? Is it just to kind of test that they can do this?

A lot of these instruments on board are going to be doing pretty useful stuff. One of the things I really like about this particular mission is that it's also going to see whether the GPS signals produced by the satellites that orbit Earth can actually be picked up on the moon and used for doing navigation on the moon. So obviously those GPS satellites are

owned by the usdod we should say are circling the earth all the time we can tap into it use it for navigation it wasn't designed for using on the moon and you would think well are those signals reaching the moon are they strong enough and can you use them coherently because they're always going around the neighboring planet so that's going to be really cool to see if you can do navigation on the moon without having an entire lunar geo positioning i like the idea that

The astronauts who may one day be up on the moon will have some kind of version of Google Maps guiding them around all the lunar surfaces. And that actually takes us on to some more essential infrastructure I'm sure they'll want.

Which also brings us on to the next mission, because today, Intuitive Machines, who did that first toppled mission last February, they're giving it another shot. And this time they're taking something pretty intriguing with them, aren't they? Yeah, they're taking a bunch of cool things up there, actually. I mean, they're going to be drilling the surface to try and get the top of the mission.

try and understand the kinds of materials and so on that are in the lunar soil. But there's a couple of other things, though, that are worth mentioning. I really like on this mission, apart from the rover, they're going to deploy what's called a Micronova hopper. Now, this is a separate robot that has thrusters on it, and it can

hop and kind of travel into the sort of permanently shadowed regions. So it's going to be down in the sort of lunar South Pole. So it can jump into those and look at what the sort of surface features are like inside those permanently shadowed regions. And the reason they're interesting is the permanently shadowed regions on the moon is where a lot of the ice is. And when humans go there, they want to be near water ice because they want the water.

But I think something else that's really intriguing is that the mission is going to take this Nokia system, which is essentially to establish cellular communications on the moon. And what they're going to do is they're going to see if this

very compact cellular network can be used to keep contact with the lander, the rover and the hopper. So the hopper is going to be hopping out of sight or at least at long distances. So it's going to need to reconfigure in real time without having an engineer there sort of pulling out wires and replugging things. So you do it all locally on the surface of the moon instead, which is super cool.

And one day when the astronauts get to the moon, they can connect their phones up to the 4G network on the moon. Absolutely. And people can start staring at their phones on the moon instead of doing it back here on Earth. I love the idea that we're going to have a little sort of robotic lunar bunny for Easter hopping around. I hadn't even thought of the Easter connection. Fabulous.

It's probably worth noting that both of these moon missions were sent up by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which obviously SpaceX being one of Elon Musk's companies. And I mean, Maddy sticking with him, Elon Musk, he's been at the center of a bit of a row among scientists here in the UK. What's been happening there?

This is all about Elon Musk's fellowship of the Royal Society. Now, the Royal Society is the UK's National Academy of Sciences. It's an independent institution and it is highly prestigious. If you look back through history, who have been fellows, you're looking at some of the

The UK's most eminent scientists, you've got Isaac Newton, Darwin, Rutherford, Alan Turing, and scientists regard fellowship as a huge, huge honour. And Elon Musk was made a fellow in 2018 in recognition of his company's work in space travel, as you mentioned, his space rockets, as well as his electric vehicles and his brain machine interfaces.

But trouble began back in August last year when our colleague, science correspondent Nicola Davis, revealed that a number of fellows had written to the Royal Society to raise the possibility of removing Musk's fellowship because there were concerns that Musk's tweets on his site X were not in line with the Society's codex.

code of conduct. And this includes things like upholding the reputation of the society, you know, having due regard for the statement of values and not to act or fail to act in a way that would undermine the society's mission. And this was when Musk had tweeted things like civil war is inevitable below a video of violent riots in Liverpool. And

He had shared, although later deleted, a fake news report about Keir Starmer and he had promoted a conspiracy theory about UK policing. But at this point, it was still reasonably arguable that he hadn't broken any of the RS's rules. It wasn't a clear-cut case. So what happened next? Well...

What happened was Musk kept tweeting and the signatories of the original letter to the RS continued to...

assemble evidence of behaviours that they felt weren't compatible with this code of conduct. And this included suggesting that Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical advisor to the president of the US during the COVID pandemic, should be prosecuted. They also cited examples of Musk's posts on X, which were promoting vaccine conspiracy theories and apparently downplaying the climate crisis.

And ultimately, this all led to the resignation of fellow professor Dorothy Bishop. Now, she is a brilliant scientist. And one of her points when she resigned, funnily enough, was that she didn't think with Musk as a fellow that she could keep to the code of conduct and a particular point which was treating each other with courtesy.

And I guess all this has come to a head now. Musk is a key part of the actions being taken by the US administration in respect to their science organisations and the scientists working in them. Exactly. I mean, the key thing here is that he's leading the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, which is...

caused chaos in science and scientific institutions in the US. You know, last week Ian, we spoke in depth about this. And as a result of that, Stephen Curry, an Emeritus Professor of Structural Biology at Imperial College London, he wrote an open letter to the RS that ended up being signed by nearly 3,500 scientists, both fellows and other external academics, and

And he argued that Musk's actions were inconsistent with what was required by fellows and that the IRS should uphold its code of conduct. So we got in touch with Stephen Curry and this is what he told us. The thing that disappointed me was that the society itself didn't seem to be holding Mr Musk to account.

And I wrote the letter two or three weeks ago now because the situation became even more serious once the Trump administration had taken office and once it became clear that Elon Musk, a fellow of the Royal Society, had a very prominent role in that and was very active taking his chainsaw to the scientific budget, to people's jobs. And that has caused mayhem within the American research ecosystem.

It seems very strange that someone who's a fellow of a society that exists to promote science should be causing such long-term damage to the conduct of science in the United States.

When I asked Nicola about all this, she said that it really came down to two things. I think that there are those sort of two angles, a sort of big picture about what the Royal Society is about, what it stands for, what its function and purpose is, and to what extent they therefore have to take a stand on something like this. And then also just that rather more fundamental question of, you know, if you've got rules and regs, are you going to enforce them? And how did the Royal Society respond?

Well, I should say that the Royal Society has pointed out that in the event of any concerns raised about the behaviour of a fellow, the Society has a clear set of processes described in the Code of Conduct, which is published on their website, along with any relevant disciplinary regulations, and that any issues raised in respect of individual fellows are dealt with in strict confidence.

But on Monday night, they had a meeting of about 150 fellows and I spoke to Nicola who got the scoop on what happened. They met to talk ostensibly about the principles around public pronouncements and behaviour of fellows. That was what the meeting was allegedly for. But really, we are still very much in the dark as to why.

what the outcome of that was. The Royal Society said, well, fellows all agreed on the need to stand up for science and for scientists around the world in the face of growing challenges that science faces. But it hasn't said what that will mean. And it certainly hasn't said what that will mean for Musk's fellowship. So at the moment, everything is still very much up in the air. And I think that, you know, this is something which is going to rumble on. I think the key point here is that

These scientists aren't necessarily demanding for Musk to be expelled, although I'm sure plenty of them would support that action. And certainly Geoffrey Hinton, godfather of AI, has said that publicly. And I think they would also argue that this isn't about policing people's politics or views. So this is how Stephen Curry explained it.

There has to be room for disagreement and discourse and even for unpleasantness from time to time. So this is not about some sort of puritanical crusade. But my point would be that what we have here is an extraordinary set of circumstances, really unprecedented. This is the wealthiest man in the world. He has now at the center of the government of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth,

And he's a fellow of the Royal Society and he's acting in a way which is at odds with the principles and ambitions of that society.

And how has Musk reacted to all of this? Has he reacted at all? Well, I did find this quite funny because you would assume, bearing in mind everything that he's got on his plate at the minute in the US, that this, you could argue, slightly parochial story might have passed him by. But in fact, Musk responded to Geoffrey Hinton's post on X about his removal. And I'm going to read you the post.

Only craven, insecure fools care about awards and memberships. History is the actual judge, always and forever. Your comments above are carelessly ignorant, cruel and false. That said, what specific actions require correction? I will make mistakes but endeavour to fix them. So what, if anything, do we think is going to happen next?

As Nicola said, this is not over yet. Personally, I do think the R.S. might see themselves in a bit of a tight spot because I'm not sure they'll want to be seen as making any kind of political moves anymore.

You know, certainly as relations between the UK and the US are already on quite a tightrope. And nor will they want a backlash from Elon Musk himself, I'm sure. But they are going to have to address the calls of their fellows. I think that at some point they are going to have to come out and state what they're going to do or not do and explain why. And I think that that is something that a lot of people would like to hear right now.

And in the course of her reporting, Nicola previously contacted Musk for comment via his companies, including X, but didn't receive a response. Finally, Ian, and quite aptly, given we've been talking about a man who has spoken about the importance of procreation, you wrote a piece this week all about how sperm may be the canaries in the coal mine for men's health. Tell me more.

So this was actually, for the field, a really big study of Danish men, nearly 80,000 men, looking at how the quality of men's semen ties into...

their lifespan. What the researchers did in this study was they had access to sperm tests and all the analyses that are done when men turn up at fertility clinics because they and their partner are not able to have a family.

The researchers looked at all of these measurements of these men's sperm gathered between 1965 and 2015. And then because of the way the sort of national registers work in Denmark, they were able to look at those men to see what sort of medical issues they had going forward. They also were able to see what medical conditions most of them had in the 10 years before they gave sperm and that sperm was analysed.

And they look through to see basically who dies when. And the top line of the story really is that the men with the highest quality sperm lived two to three years longer than the men with the lowest quality sperm.

So would the idea there be that the healthier you are, the higher quality your sperm and, of course, the longer you're going to live? Yeah. And this was my initial thinking on this was that, you know, you'd imagine, you know, maybe there might be

a whole bunch of different cell types in the body that if you looked at them, you might think, yeah, that's a really good and healthy kidney. That person will probably last longer than someone who's got a really bad looking kidney, right? And it's all down, comes down to this, how well those cells work. Obviously the sperm are the smallest cell in any human. But if you look at the diseases these men had in the 10 years before they gave sperm to be analysed,

there aren't any diseases that pop up there that really explain the difference in lifespan. I mean, it could be a whole host of things. This could be environmental. It could be things like pollution. It could be genetic. There could be mutations on the X or Y chromosomes, the sex chromosomes that are affecting this. But one idea that the researchers themselves had was that this may be a prenatal thing, that something that is happening in

to the male foetus, something it's exposed to in the womb, is having an impact on their sperm

but also having a sort of undetected impact on their physiology that manifests as a greater illness later in life. Fascinating. So are the researchers going to go on and try and figure this out and kind of delve into some of these questions? Yeah, so what's really lacking at the moment is what these guys were dying early of. Now, it would be really interesting if you looked at that and you thought,

you saw that these people were all dying of, say, cardiovascular disease or some sort of hormonal metabolic thing. You know, that would give you a hint of what is the underlying cause here. Now, that is indeed what the researchers want to look at next. They want to find out, okay, these men with poor quality sperm are dying sooner.

but we don't know what of. And so if you can then look at enough medical records to say, well, actually the risk for X, Y, and Z are higher in these guys.

What becomes interesting then is when guys go to have their sperm analyzed, and normally they're pretty young when they do that, you would then hopefully be able to say, okay, well, you may be at greater risk of developing a particular condition later in life, maybe when you're 60, 70. And there are preventative actions you can take now because we know that people with the sort of sperm quality you have are at greater risk of these things.

Well, it's going to be really interesting to see where that goes. And thanks for coming on, Ian. No problem at all. Thanks again to Ian Sample, to Nicola Davis and to Stephen Curry. You can find all The Guardian's science journalism at theguardian.com.

And if you're after something to listen to next, I'd highly recommend today's episode of our sister podcast, Today in Focus. Michael Saffey hears how an organised network has scammed thousands of savers from the UK, Europe and Canada out of £27 million after they fell for fake celebrity adverts on Facebook and Google.

and he hears exactly how phone scammers operate. Just search for Today in Focus wherever you're listening to this podcast. That's all from us today. This episode was produced by Tom Glasser, the sound design was by Tony Onuchukwu, and the executive producer is Ellie Burey. We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then.

Thank you.

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