May 10, 2024: Many countries have better sunscreen than the U.S., the hellish process of transporting a giant camera 10,000 kilometers, and the discovery of large stores of hydrogen gas. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | A 1938 U.S. law requires that sunscreens are tested on animals and classified as drugs, rather than as cosmetics as they are in much of the world. As a result, Americans don't have access to more effective sunscreens that block UV light. For example, bemotrizinol is the bedrock ingredient in nearly all European and Asian sunscreens, and yet one U.S. company has spent 20 years and $18 million trying to gain FDA approval (thus far unsuccessfully) for a bemotrizinol sunscreen. A new bipartisan bill meant to help speed up approvals is pending in the House and would require the FDA to allow non-animal testing.
Why this matters: Skin cancer is the most common cancer in America, and 6.1 million adults are treated each year for basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas, according to the CDC. One in five Americans will develop skin cancer by age 70, and the disease costs the health care system some $8.9 billion a year, with those costs steadily increasing in the last two decades.
What the experts say: "The sunscreen issue has gotten people to see that you can be unsafe if you're too slow," says Alex Tabarrok, a professor of economics at George Mason University. "The FDA is just incredibly slow. They've been looking at this now literally for 40 years. Congress has ordered them to do it, and they still haven't done it." | | | Before it can officially begin its 1-year survey of the solar system next year, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's nearly three metric-ton camera needs to travel some 10,000 kilometers from San Francisco Bay to the observatory at the top of a mountain called Cerro Pachón in northern Chile. Its giant eye on the southern skies is a 3.2-gigapixel camera. By mass and pixel resolution, it is the largest digital camera on Earth.
The plan: In the next few weeks, a cleanroom team in a lab in Silicon Valley will wrap a steel-and-wire-rope exoskeleton around the camera to help keep it nestled in its shipping container. It will be loaded onto a Boeing 747 cargo plane for a 16-hour flight to Chile. Once on the ground, a caravan of nine trucks outfitted with air-ride suspension to reduce vibration will drive the camera and equipment six hours to the base of Cerro Pachón. From there the trucks will snake up the mountain on dirt roads and switchbacks for 35 more kilometers. The observatory at the top won't be able to receive more than one truck at a time, so the process will take three days, with three trucks per day.
What the experts say: More than five years of preparation have gone into the camera's six-day journey. "This has to work. It has to be successful. We cannot break anything along the way or lose anything or—pick your favorite failure mode," says engineer Margaux Lopez of the Rubin Observatory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who is in charge of the effort. "But we have a really solid logistics plan, and we're ready to go." | | | A worker shines a flashlight into the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's camera. J. Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory/NOIRLab (CC BY 4.0) | | | • Identifying exoplanets is one thing. Figuring out what their environments are like is another altogether, requiring cutting-edge methods. | 5 min read | | | • The far side of the moon is the most radio-quiet region in the nearby solar system, blocked from Earth's incessant radio emissions by the vast bulk of the moon's body. This makes it the perfect platform to study the deepest corners of the radio universe, and we must preserve its silence, writes Paul M. Sutter, a visiting professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College at Columbia University and adviser to NASA. "We should encourage governments to declare the far side of the moon as the first globally recognized off-world nature preserve, its use limited strictly to scientific endeavors with minimal human involvement," he says. | 4 min read | | | Scientific American reader Paul Cosgrove sent in this photo of a stained glass window he's making for his home in Victoria, British Columbia. The individual panels were inspired by our article on mathematicians' decades-long hunt for the "einstein tile"--a shape that fits together with itself out to infinity but never creates a repeating pattern. Cosgrove, a stained glass hobbyist, said this creation is about half complete and when finished will be about 27 inches by 27 inches. | | | OUR MOST POPULAR STORIES OF THE WEEK | | | Where Is the Edge of the Solar System? | 5 min read | Puppy-Dog Eyes in Wild Canines Spark Rethink on Dog Evolution | 2 min read | A Fight About Viruses in the Air Is Finally Over. Now It's Time for Healthy Venting | 5 min read | | | Do a Google image search for "Andes mountains roads" and you'll get an idea of the enormous challenge that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory camera moving team has before it. Some stretches of the narrow roads appear barely able to accommodate two cars passing, let alone a brigade of trucks. Fingers crossed for a smooth move! | I hope you're enjoying Today in Science. Reach out anytime with suggestions and feedback: newsletters@sciam.com. And have a great weekend! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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