Reuters Science News Summary

Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 grounded after failure dooms batch of Starlink satellites

SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket was grounded by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday after one broke apart in space and doomed its payload of Starlink satellites, the first failure in more than seven years of a rocket relied upon by the global space industry. Roughly an hour after Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket's second stage failed to reignite and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites on a shallow orbital path where they will soon reenter and burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Genome evidence points to plague in Stone Age European population crash

Around 5,000 years ago, the population in northern Europe collapsed, decimating Stone Age farming communities across the region. The cause of this calamity, called the Neolithic decline, has remained a matter of debate. New research based on DNA obtained from human bones and teeth excavated from ancient burial tombs in Scandinavia - seven from an area in Sweden called Falbygden, one from coastal Sweden close to Gothenburg and one from Denmark - suggests disease, specifically the plague, may have driven the Neolithic decline.

NASA astronauts voice confidence that Boeing Starliner will bring them home

The first two astronauts to fly Boeing's Starliner capsule said from the International Space Station on Wednesday they were confident in the spacecraft's ability to return them home whenever the company and NASA solve thruster issues that have kept them in space far longer than expected. "I have a real good feeling in my heart that this spacecraft will bring us home, no problem," NASA astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams said during the test crew's first news conference since docking to the ISS more than a month ago.

Musk's Neuralink says tiny wires of brain chip in first patient now stable

The tiny wires of Neuralink's brain chip implant used in the first participant in a trial run by Elon Musk's company have become "more or less very stable", a company executive said on Wednesday. The company had in May said that a number of tiny wires inside the brain of Noland Arbaugh, who is paralyzed from the shoulders down due to a 2016 diving accident, had pulled out of position.

NASA releases Webb telescope images of a galactic merger

NASA released on Friday a pair of images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope showing two galaxies - one nicknamed the Penguin and the other the Egg - in the process of merging in sort of a cosmic ballet as the U.S. space agency marked two years since it unveiled the orbiting observatory's first scientific results. Webb, which was launched in 2021 and began collecting data the following year, has reshaped the understanding of the early universe while taking stunning pictures of the cosmos. The two galaxies in the images are situated 326 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).