On May 14, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ship Okeanos Explorer will depart from Port Canaveral in Florida on a two-week expedition led by NOAA Ocean Exploration, featuring the technology demonstration of an autonomous underwater vehicle. Called Orpheus, this new class of submersible robot will showcase a system that will help it find its way and identify interesting scientific features on the seafloor. Terrain-relative navigation was instrumental in helping NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance Mars rover make its precision touch down on the Red Planet on Feb. 18. The system allowed the descending robot to visually map the Martian landscape, identify hazards, and then choose a safe place to land without human assistance. In a similar way, the agency's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter uses a vision-based navigation system to track surface features on the ground during flight in order to estimate its movements across the Martian surface.

Welcome back to the "Life in 2050" series! So far, we've looked at how ongoing developments in science, technology, and geopolitics will be reflected in terms of warfare and the economy. Today, we are shifting gears a little and looking at how the turbulence of this century will affect the way people live from day to day. As noted in the previous two installments, changes in the 21st century will be driven by two major factors. These include the disruption caused by rapidly accelerating technological progress, and the disruption caused by rising global temperatures, and the environmental impact this will have (aka. These factors will be pulling the world in opposite directions, and simultaneously at that.

The US Air Force conducted a flight test that paves the way for AI-piloted fighter jets to man the skies. The military group flew its Skyborg Autonomy Core System (ACS) for two hours and 10 minutes over Florida and Gulf of Mexico on April 29. The technology is a combination of hardware and software designed to act as a brain for a drone, allowing it to conduct operations without human interference. Fitted to a Kratos UTAP-22 tactical unmanned vehicle, the ACS demonstrated basic aviation capabilities and responded to navigational commands, while reacting to geo-fences, adhering to aircraft flight envelopes and demonstrating coordinated maneuvering. The US Air Force conducted a flight test that paves the way for AI-piloted fighter jets to man the skies.

Following the successful landing of SN15, SpaceX now plans to attempt to fly a Starship prototype into orbit. In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the company details how it hopes its next test flight will unfold. According to the document, a Starship craft fitted with a Super Heavy booster will lift from the company's Boca Chica, Texas launch facility. Approximately three minutes into the flight, the booster stage will separate and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico about 20 miles from shore. The Starship rocket will pass over the Straits of Florida before entering orbit and then returning to Earth and attempting to make a soft ocean landing approximately 62 miles off the northwest coast of Kauai.

SCI COMMUN ### Conservation President Joe Biden's administration moved last week to overturn a regulation adopted by his predecessor that eliminated sanctions against companies whose operations accidentally kill migratory birds. Trump administration officials had said the fines should be reserved for intentional deaths—an interpretation that broke with long-standing policy and would have prevented, for example, any penalties against the companies responsible for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed as many as 1 million birds. Wildlife biologists have said the original, broader enforcement was essential to curtail steep declines in populations of 1100 bird species covered by the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Biden's administration would replace Trump's regulation with a new one, which could take months to finalize. Conservation advocates have long proposed a permitting program that would protect companies from legal action for accidental deaths if they adopt practices and technology shown to prevent most bird deaths. ### Energy ![Figure][1] CREDITS: (GRAPHIC) N. CARY/ SCIENCE ; (DATA) GLOBAL ENERGY REVIEW 2021 , IEA Electricity production from renewable sources, led by solar photovoltaics and wind, continued years of steady growth globally during the COVID-19 pandemic, a report says. The production grew 7% in 2020, even as overall demand for electricity dropped and generation from fossil fuels declined. This year, as social restrictions ease and demand climbs, renewable electricity is expected to increase by 8%, the International Energy Agency said last month in its Global Energy Review 2021 . Overall, production from renewables, especially in China, is forecast to provide half the total increase in electricity this year. But power from fossil fuels will grow as well, and analysts say the switch away from coal and other carbon-emitting energy sources is not happening fast enough to reduce the effects of global warming. ### COVID-19 In a move that promises to increase the meager supply of COVID-19 vaccines in poorer countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) last week gave a Chinese-made product the green light. Sinopharm, which makes its vaccine by chemically inactivating the pandemic coronavirus, received an Emergency Use Listing (EUL), a designation WHO gives after reviewing efficacy, safety, and manufacturing practices. It allows the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility, a global consortium promoting equity in vaccine distribution, to purchase and distribute Sinopharm's vaccine. COVAX and Sinopharm are still negotiating a price, and the company says it can increase production. More than 65 million doses have already been administered in 45 countries that have authorized its use. COVAX has struggled to buy affordable vaccines that have EULs—most are too expensive, or supplies were prepurchased by other countries. To date, COVAX has shipped fewer than 60 million doses. ### Vaccines After a protracted internal debate, the Biden administration last week said it supports a proposed international agreement to waive patents on the intellectual property used to make COVID-19 vaccines. The move was hailed by advocates of increased vaccine access and fairness in their distribution, who contend that it will attract new companies to help alleviate a global shortage and reduce costs. But many health officials and vaccinemakers caution that it will not increase supply for many months and that newcomers who want to produce the vaccines face bottlenecks including a lack of technical know-how and widespread shortage of raw materials. ### Public health U.S. regulators on 10 May authorized Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine for use in children ages 12 to 15, expanding availability beyond older teens and adults. The go-ahead is the first in the United States for this age group and a key step in restarting in-person schooling, team sports, and other group activities. The decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was expected after the companies announced in March results from a trial of 2260 adolescents in that age group; 18 who received a placebo developed COVID-19 versus none who received the vaccine. Pfizer has said it expects to obtain safety and efficacy data from clinical trials studying children ages 2 to 11 by September, when it plans to ask FDA to permit use in that age group. A small fraction of all Americans who have died from COVID-19 were under age 18, and children who contract COVID-19 tend to have milder symptoms, but some face long-term health problems. However, many U.S. parents remain hesitant to vaccinate their children because of misinformation and because FDA has only authorized COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use, not given them full approval. ### Virology The World Health Organization (WHO) on 10 May designated as a variant of concern a version of the pandemic coronavirus first identified in India in February. Evidence suggests the variant, B.1.617, now found in about 40 countries, is more transmissible than original strains of SARS-CoV-2, WHO said. It is the fourth variant to receive this WHO designation, following ones first found in Brazil, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. ### Governance To be better prepared for the next pandemic, the world needs a Global Health Threats Council akin to the United Nations Security Council, which would bring together country leaders from different regions along with representatives of the private sector and civil society, according to the first comprehensive review of the global response to COVID-19, released on 12 May. The 13-member Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, which was commissioned by the World Health Organization, also proposes creating an International Pandemic Financing Facility with annual funding of $5 billion to $10 billion and giving WHO a bigger budget, more independence, and new powers to investigate outbreaks anywhere in the world, among many other recommendations. The panel was led by two former heads of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Helen Clark of New Zealand, and included public health specialists, diplomats, and economists. “Pandemics pose potential existential threats to humanity and must be elevated to the highest level,” says the report, COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic . ### Public attitudes U.S. adults voice varying support for rules by governments and businesses that could require people to prove they received a COVID-19 vaccine before certain in-person activities, such as attending crowded events or entering their office, a Gallup poll reported last week. Most of the 3731 respondents surveyed in April favored proof to travel by airplane (57%) and attend large events such as concerts (55%). But support dipped below a majority for requiring proof to enter one's workplace (45%) or dine indoors at a restaurant (40%). Responses differed by political party affiliation and willingness to be vaccinated. ### Leadership Nancy Messonnier, a top official at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who drew the ire of former President Donald Trump in February 2020 for her unvarnished public warning about the impending coronavirus pandemic, will leave the agency on 14 May, she told colleagues last week in an email. Two weeks before the email, she had been reassigned from heading CDC's COVID-19 task force, Politico reported. She will join the Skoll Foundation as executive director for pandemics and health systems. At CDC since 1995, Messonnier led the launch of a low-cost meningitis vaccine in Africa and rose to head the agency's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. After she warned at a press conference 15 months ago that the pandemic might severely sicken many Americans, stock markets plunged, and she did not appear at any subsequent White House briefings. ### Seismology One of the largest seismic research projects in history, used to study structures in Earth's crust and mantle as deep as 3000 kilometers, is ending its run. Begun in 2004 and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the several hundred seismic stations of the Transportable Array collected earthquake data as a way of peering deep inside Earth. The stations were deployed at first in the western states and then were moved east across the country every few years. In 2017, the project's final phase began when the network was transported to Alaska. Pandemic-related delays prompted an extra year of operation, but in early May, more than 80 stations went dark, awaiting collection this summer. Another 100 will remain in Alaska, many of them in remote, previously unmonitored regions, filling gaps in the state's seismic coverage. ### Drug development A psychedelic drug has passed a major milestone by showing evidence of benefit as a supplement to talk therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), researchers report this week. The results came from the first phase 3 clinical trial combining psychotherapy with the drug 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), popularly called ecstasy, for people with severe, chronic PTSD. The study, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), recruited 90 people to receive talk therapy during 15 sessions, including three “experimental” ones in which they received either MDMA or a placebo. The MDMA group saw significantly greater improvements on a PTSD symptom scale, the researchers said in Nature Medicine . Two months after the final experimental session, 67% of those who got MDMA no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, versus 32% of those who got a placebo. MAPS aims to confirm those benefits in a 100-person trial now enrolling volunteers and, in 2023, to seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for MDMA-assisted therapy. ### Conservation Researchers are pressing Chile's government to increase protections for whales along its coast against deadly ship collisions. After three whales were found dead during just 8 days in April, 65 Chilean marine mammal specialists issued a public plea for the government to act. They called for rerouting ships away from sensitive regions, setting speed limits, and establishing an alert system to warn vessel pilots of nearby whales. Hundreds of vessels plying Chilean waters pose significant threats to the estimated 40% of the world's cetacean species that frequent them, researchers say. In 2008, Chile declared its entire 6500-kilometer-long coastline a whale sanctuary. But the country's protections for marine mammals still exist only on paper or lack details. The government says it is working to increase safety measures. But researchers say it must commit adequate funding to succeed. ### Space science NASA marked two milestones this week—the final tests on Earth of its next marquee space telescope, and the start of a long journey home for a trove of asteroid rocks. NASA engineers are wrapping up testing on the giant gold-tinted mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope. Afterward, the long-delayed, $9 billion observatory will be shipped off to French Guiana for launch on 31 October. Also this week, NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe began its 2-year flight back to Earth from the asteroid Bennu, carrying up to 400 grams of rocky chunks the spacecraft collected from its surface. It will be the largest U.S. haul of rocks collected in space since the Apollo program, and NASA's first from an asteroid. ### Aquaculture Nutrition expert Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted was awarded the World Food Prize this week for research that used aquaculture to improve the diets of millions of people across Asia and Africa. Thilsted, who began her career at Trinidad and Tobago's Ministry of Agriculture, Land & Fisheries, now heads nutrition research at WorldFish, a nonprofit research center in Penang state in Malaysia. In Bangladesh, she studied small, native fish species widely eaten by farmers. Thilsted identified micronutrients the fish contain and their valuable role in the healthy development of infants and toddlers; adding these fish also helps the body absorb other micronutrients in rice and vegetables. She developed ways to cheaply raise fish, combining large and small species in ponds, which increases production. These methods have helped make Bangladesh one of the world's top aquaculture producers. [1]: pending:yes

Scientists have recorded the first footage of a giant squid hunting in the wild. The elusive creatures are notoriously difficult to film, as their habitat is housands of feet under the sea, where it's dark and the crushing pressure of water requires specialist equipment. While several dead specimens have washed up on shore, the first still images of a living giant squid in the wild weren't recorded until 2004 and video wasn't obtained until 2012. Now marine biologists have, for the first time, captured footage of Architeuthis dux hunting prey in the wild. The footage was captured in 2019, but researchers have now released analysis of the creature's behavior.

Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently. Counting animals from such data is challenging, particularly when densely packed in noisy images. Attempting this manually is slow and expensive, while traditional computer vision methods are limited in their generalisability. Deep learning is the state-of-the-art method for many computer vision tasks, but it has yet to be properly explored to count animals. To this end, we employ deep learning, with a density-based regression approach, to count fish in low-resolution sonar images. We introduce a large dataset of sonar videos, deployed to record wild mullet schools (Mugil liza), with a subset of 500 labelled images. We utilise abundant unlabelled data in a self-supervised task to improve the supervised counting task. For the first time in this context, by introducing uncertainty quantification, we improve model training and provide an accompanying measure of prediction uncertainty for more informed biological decision-making. Finally, we demonstrate the generalisability of our proposed counting framework through testing it on a recent benchmark dataset of high-resolution annotated underwater images from varying habitats (DeepFish). From experiments on both contrasting datasets, we demonstrate our network outperforms the few other deep learning models implemented for solving this task. By providing an open-source framework along with training data, our study puts forth an efficient deep learning template for crowd counting aquatic animals thereby contributing effective methods to assess natural populations from the ever-increasing visual data.

Genghis Khan got his dying wish: despite attempts by archaeologists and scientists to find the Mongolian ruler's final resting place, the location remains a secret 800 years after his death. The search for his tomb, though, has inspired an innovative project that could help protect polar bears. "I randomly tuned into the radio one night and heard an expert talking about the use of synthetic aperture radar [SAR] to look for Genghis Khan's tomb," says Tom Smith, associate professor in plant and wildlife sciences at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah. "They were using SAR to penetrate layers of forest canopy in upper Mongolia, looking for the ruins of a burial structure." Talking to engineers, including BYU's Dr David Long, Smith learned that SAR is used by the military to detect enemy camps, tanks and vehicles hidden beneath camouflage and is being studied as a potential tool for finding avalanche survivors.

Progress within physical oceanography has been concurrent with the increasing sophistication of tools available for its study. The incorporation of machine learning (ML) techniques offers exciting possibilities for advancing the capacity and speed of established methods and also for making substantial and serendipitous discoveries. Beyond vast amounts of complex data ubiquitous in many modern scientific fields, the study of the ocean poses a combination of unique challenges that ML can help address. The observational data available is largely spatially sparse, limited to the surface, and with few time series spanning more than a handful of decades. Important timescales span seconds to millennia, with strong scale interactions and numerical modelling efforts complicated by details such as coastlines. This review covers the current scientific insight offered by applying ML and points to where there is imminent potential. We cover the main three branches of the field: observations, theory, and numerical modelling. Highlighting both challenges and opportunities, we discuss both the historical context and salient ML tools. We focus on the use of ML in situ sampling and satellite observations, and the extent to which ML applications can advance theoretical oceanographic exploration, as well as aid numerical simulations. Applications that are also covered include model error and bias correction and current and potential use within data assimilation. While not without risk, there is great interest in the potential benefits of oceanographic ML applications; this review caters to this interest within the research community.

SpaceX successfully launches NASA astronauts from Kennedy Space Center into space. The International Space Station's population swelled to 11 on Saturday with the jubilant arrival of SpaceX's third crew capsule in less than a year. All of the astronauts -- representing the U.S., Russia, Japan and France -- managed to squeeze into camera view for a congratulatory call from the leaders of their space agencies. This image provided by NASA, astronauts from SpaceX join the astronauts of the International Space Station for an interview on Saturday, April 24, 2021. A recycled SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts has arrived at the International Space Station, a day after launching from Florida.