MIL Submissions Engine

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Martin Elvis, Senior Astrophysicist, Smithsonian Institution

After a string of dramatic failures, the huge Starship rocket from SpaceX had a fully successful test on Oct. 13, 2025. A couple more test flights, and SpaceX plans to launch it into orbit.

A month later, a rival rocket company, Blue Origin, flew its almost-as-large New Glenn rocket all the way to orbit and sent spacecraft on their way to Mars.

While these successful flights are exciting news for future missions to the Moon as well as other planets, I’ve argued for several years that these superheavy-lift rockets can also boost research in my own specialty, astronomy – the study of stars and galaxies far beyond our solar system – to new heights.

Taking the broad view

Why do I say that? Astronomy needs space. Getting above the atmosphere allows telescopes to detect vastly more of the electromagnetic spectrum than visible light alone. At these heights, telescopes can detect light at much longer and shorter wavelengths, which are otherwise blocked by Earth’s atmosphere.

To get an idea of how that has enriched astronomy, imagine listening to someone play the piano, but only in one octave. The music would sound much richer if they used the full keyboard.

With the broader spectrum in view, astronomers can see objects in the sky that are much colder than stars, but also objects that are far hotter.

How much cooler and hotter? The hottest stars you can see in visible light are about 10 times hotter than the coolest. With the whole infrared-to-X-ray spectrum, the temperatures that come into view can be 1,000 times colder or 1,000 times hotter than regular stars.

Scientists have had nearly 50 years of access to the full light spectrum with sets of increasingly powerful telescopes. Alas, this access has come at an ever-increasing cost, too. The newest telescope is the spectacular James Webb Space Telescope, which cost about US$10 billion and detects a portion of the infrared spectrum. At that forbidding price, NASA can’t afford to match Webb across the spectrum by building its full infrared and X-ray siblings.

We’ll have to wait a long time even for one more. The estimated date to launch the next “Great Observatory” is a distant 2045 and may be later. The range of notes astronomers can play will shrink, along with our views of the universe.

Escaping the trap with heavy-lift vehicles

These new rockets give us a chance to escape this trap. For the same cost, they can send about 10 times more mass to orbit, and they have bodies about twice as wide, compared with the rockets that have been in use for decades.

Mass matters because telescopes contain heavy mirrors, and the bigger the mirror, the better they work. For example, building Webb’s large mirror meant finding a way to make a superb mirror that was 10 times lighter in weight per square meter than the already lightweight Hubble mirror. The engineers found a solution that was technically sweet but financially costly.

Similarly, the size of the rocket’s body matters because to fit Webb’s 21-foot-diameter mirror (6.5 meters) into the 13-foot-diameter body (4 meters) of its ride, the Ariane V rocket, it had to fold up like origami for launch. Normally, space missions try to avoid any moving parts, but for Webb they had no choice.

Again, the result was a technical triumph, but the complexity introduced over 300 places where one mistake could have ended the mission. Each one of the over 300 locations had to be 300 times less likely to fail than if there had been only one, pumping up the design, manufacturing and testing requirements – and inflating the cost.

The larger, wider Starship and New Glenn rockets mean that building a Webb-like space telescope today could be done with none of the origami-like folding and unfolding, with their attendant risks, and so be much cheaper.

New ideas

This opportunity is being seized by at least three teams. First, a proposed deep infrared telescope called Origins would take advantage of superheavy lift. Scientists at Caltech are studying a potential smaller version called Prima.

Second, an X-ray telescope that can take pictures as sharp as Webb – with a sensitivity to match – would likely use thicker and heavier mirrors than imagined just a few years ago.

And third, a study published in 2025 proposes a very low-frequency radio telescope, GO-LoW, that also takes advantage of using more mass. GO-LoW would be made of 100,000 tiny telescopes, so mass production savings kick in too.

All three of these telescopes would be easily 100 times more sensitive than their predecessors and at least comparable to Webb in their own bands of the spectrum.

It would be ideal if engineers could get these telescopes down to half the cost of a large observatory like Webb. Then, for the same price, NASA could fly two new Great Observatories instead of resigning itself to building one. If it could get the cost down to a third, it could potentially fly a full spectrum-spanning set.

Big challenges, big payoff

Of course, a lot could go wrong. For one thing, these rockets may not perform as advertised, either in capability or cost. Still, investing in a few starting studies won’t cost much and will likely have a big payoff.

For another, like the poet Goethe on his deathbed, we astronomers will always be asking for “more light.” But if we call for yet bigger and more complex telescopes than the already awesome Great Observatories recommended by the National Academies 2020 Astronomy Survey, then we will bring back all the costly issues faced by the Webb designers.

Space agencies have the challenge of keeping the astronomers’ endless desires under strict control – building to cost must come first.

But if agencies can keep astronomers’ ambitions from becoming too astronomical, while taking full advantage of the new design space opened up by the superheavy-lift rockets, then our understanding of the universe could advance beyond imagination in just a decade or so.

Martin Elvis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Superheavy-lift rockets like SpaceX’s Starship could transform astronomy by making space telescopes cheaper – https://theconversation.com/superheavy-lift-rockets-like-spacexs-starship-could-transform-astronomy-by-making-space-telescopes-cheaper-270001

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, Honorary Reader in MIgration and Politics, University of Kent

What is an election and when is it completed?

That’s the legal question at the heart of Watson v. Republican National Committee, the mail-in ballot case the U.S. Supreme Court took up in November 2025. The court will most likely hand down a ruling before the midterm elections in 2026.

Mississippi law, similar to that of 15 other states, allows for mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be received by election officials up to five days later, then counted.

But the Republican National Committee is arguing in the Watson case, which was brought against the state of Mississippi in January 2024, that this procedure is not legal. An election, the argument goes, includes the receipt of ballots; therefore, all ballots must be in hand at the close of Election Day – the congressionally established “Tuesday after the first Monday” in November.

President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive rrder 14248 similarly calls for ballots to be received no later than Election Day if they are to be counted, saying that doing otherwise “is like allowing persons who arrive 3 days after Election Day, perhaps after a winner has been declared, to vote in person at a former voting precinct, which would be absurd.”

The Supreme Court’s decision on mail-in ballots could have major consequences for the 47.6 million Americans who voted by mail in 2024, as well as more than 900,000 overseas military and civilian voters covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. More than 28 million of the 47.6 million domestic mail-in votes and nearly 800,000 of the 900,000 votes cast and counted under the uniformed and overseas citizens act were from states that allow for return of mail-in ballots after Election Day.

As a political scientist and scholar of migration, I have conducted research for over 20 years on military service members and civilian U.S. citizens living overseas.

Currently, 16 states plus the District of Columbia allow domestic absentee ballots that are postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive after Election Day; 29 states extend that right to military and civilian voters living overseas, recognizing that international mail often delays ballot return.

According to the U.S Constitution, states administer elections. Under the equal protection clause, however, the federal government can pass legislation to prevent inequalities in access to voting. This includes facilitating the right to vote of military service members and civilian U.S. citizens living overseas.

The Supreme Court will decide whether federal law overrides state election administration in determining whether ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive later can be counted.

A 250-year history

The history of absentee, or mail-in, ballots in U.S. elections stretches back 2½ centuries.

Soldiers first voted by mail during the American Revolution, when men from the town of Hollis, New Hampshire, wrote their town leaders asking to have votes counted in local elections.

Pennsylvania passed the first law allowing soldiers to vote absentee in the War of 1812, a right expanded in the Civil War when 19 Union and seven Confederate states allowed soldiers to vote absentee.

Absentee voting for soldiers from all states was codified in federal law in 1942. A 1944 amendment specified that ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within two weeks after Election Day could be counted.

Some civilians residing overseas, including civilian government employees and spouses and dependents of military and civilian employees, gained absentee ballot voting rights with the 1955 Federal Voting Assistance Act. All overseas U.S. citizens were enfranchised with the 1975 Overseas Citizens Voting Act. The 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act consolidated military and civilian voting rules. Later laws addressed electronic communications.

Over 1,000 military service members requested an absentee ballot in Mississippi’s 2024 election, along with nearly 1,000 civilian overseas voters. Nationally, more than 900,000 people voted in 2024 under the uniformed and overseas citizens act.

Many of these U.S. citizens would be affected by a ballot receipt deadline on Election Day. Their votes, coming from around the world, are often not able to be counted because of late arrival.

Under the magnifying glass in Florida

Overseas absentee military and civilian ballots came to widespread notice in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. That election – and ultimately the presidency — centered on state election law being waived by canvassing boards under pressure from the Republican Party to count military and civilian absentee ballots received after Election Day.

The Supreme Court decided in December 2000 to stop further counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day because of tight certification deadlines, with the Electoral College meeting just six days later.

Congress was concerned about the unequal treatment of ballots at home and abroad in the 2000 election. To move toward addressing these concerns, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which includes measures to facilitate overseas voting.

Ensuring that everyone gets a vote

Increasing mail-in voting has been a question of making sure everyone who qualifies to vote can do so. Oregon was the first state, in 1998, to offer mail-in voting. Surveys have shown that more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail in 2020. Sending ballots to all voters reduces that gap.

By 2020, 33 states offered “no excuse” domestic absentee voting, with others expanding or facilitating mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic that year.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program is charged with making it easier for overseas voters to vote. It continues to find obstacles, including problems in returning ballots on time. Meanwhile, Florida election supervisors in November 2025 requested that Florida officials reinstate a checkbox that was dropped from Florida absentee ballots in 2021. The checkbox allowed the voter to request an absentee ballot for the next election.

Mail-in ballot security

Following concerns about the security of mail-in ballots in the 2000 election in Florida, the 2002 Help America Vote Act required that all states have a minimum security requirement.

The multiple levels of scrutiny include signature comparison, ballot tracking and penalties for malfeasance from the moment of registration to ballot request, to ballot receipt. With these layers of security there were only an estimated four fraudulent votes cast for every 10 million mail-in ballots in the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 U.S. general elections.

Mail-in voting elsewhere

The United States is one of 32 countries worldwide that allow mail-in voting for at least some of its citizens. These include the United Kingdom since 1945 and Germany since 1957.

In Germany’s federal elections in 2025, 37% of all voters, or 18.5 million citizens, cast a ballot by mail. German citizens who are eligible to vote automatically receive ballots. In the United Kingdom’s 2024 election, just under 5%, or nearly 1.3 million citizens, applied for mail-in ballots.

The bottom line

The Supreme Court case could reshape the voting landscape in the United States, potentially affecting 47 million people, including some 5 million military and civilian voters living abroad. Watson v. Republican National Committee could also affect laws in 29 states. The outcome of the case has the potential to make voting more difficult for millions of civilian and military voters at home and abroad.

Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Americans have had their mail-in ballots counted after Election Day for generations − a Supreme Court ruling could end the practice – https://theconversation.com/americans-have-had-their-mail-in-ballots-counted-after-election-day-for-generations-a-supreme-court-ruling-could-end-the-practice-267409

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Katelyn Richard, Ph.D. Candidate in Analytical Chemistry, Colorado State University

I have a health goal for the new year that doesn’t require me to get out of bed earlier or eat fewer cookies. I am an atmospheric chemist and will be committing to clean air at home.

People in the U.S. spend as much as 90% of their lives indoors. Overall, air pollution is responsible for approximately 135,000 premature deaths per year in the U.S. And levels of some chemicals can be two to five times higher in indoor air than outdoors.

Fortunately, there are some straightforward ways to improve your home’s air quality this year, in three major categories of activity.

Cooking

Cooking is a major source of indoor air pollution.

Not all chemicals that cooking produces are bad, but some react to form other chemicals that like to clump together to form particulate matter. When inhaled, these particles enter the lungs and can then pass into the bloodstream, increasing people’s risk of heart disease and decreasing lung function.

The amount of particulate matter produced from your cooking depends on the food type, oil used and cooking temperature. High-fat-content foods, such as cheese, pork and bacon, emit the most particles, especially when cooked at high temperatures. Sunflower oil produces the least amount of particulate matter, followed by vegetable oil and then olive oil.

Cooking with a gas stove produces more particulate matter than with an electric stove, and the gas stove also emits other hazardous chemicals such as nitrogen dioxide and benzene.

Two simple and effective measures to keep kitchen air clean and prevent particulate matter from spreading through the home are using your range hood fan and opening nearby windows while cooking. The suction will move harmful chemicals out of your home and away from your lungs, and the fresh air will dilute what remains.

Personal care

In large cities such as Los Angeles and New York City, there are enough volatile organic chemicals from consumer products – paints, adhesives and personal care products – in the outdoor air to rival those produced by traffic and industry. Many of those products are first used indoors before they escape outside.

Government regulations limit the amount of chemicals allowed in some kinds of consumer products, such as adhesives and construction materials, because of their contribution to smog, but personal care products that contain fragrances remain largely unregulated.

Many common options for shampoo, conditioner, mousse, body wash, deodorant, lotion, laundry detergent and dryer sheets contain fragrance mixes composed of several chemicals, with the sole purpose of providing a pleasant aroma to consumer products. Fragrances release volatile organic compounds such as limonene, linalool, galaxolide, eugenol and diethyl phthalate that can react to form particulate matter. In addition to health risks from particulate matter formation, strong fragrances can trigger headaches, difficulty breathing, skin irritation and other physical responses that warrant concern.

I’m not suggesting you be smelly or live an unscented life. But consider whether you could choose perhaps three products that have your very favorite scents, and for the others buy fragrance-free versions when you need to resupply. That would reduce the volatile organic compounds and the ensuing potential for particulate matter formation without really changing how you smell.

Cleaning

Cleaning your home can improve indoor air quality by temporarily reducing the amount of chemicals on surfaces that can find their way back into the air. For example, oleic acid from cooking, squalene from human skin and bisphenol A from hard plastics can remain on surfaces for years if undisturbed.

But there’s a caveat: Cleaners are made of strong chemicals, designed to disinfect, degrease and eliminate odors, that may do more harm for air quality than good. To that end, the healthiest option may be found by carefully choosing the right cleaner for the job. For less intensive tasks like dusting or cleaning crumbs off the counter, consider avoiding strong disinfectants like bleach, hydrogen peroxide and a category of chemicals called quaternary ammonium compounds that can often be found in disinfectants, hair products and fabric softeners.

However, if you are cleaning the bathroom or a forgotten, moldy leftovers container, you may prefer a stronger disinfecting product. Be aware that studies have found bleach cleaners can produce harmful chlorinated byproducts, such as chloroform and carbon tetrachloride, which are possible carcinogens and worth avoiding altogether.

Still, nearly all commercially available cleaning products contain volatile organic compounds – like limonene for citrus scent, lactic acid for limescale and bacteria removal, and 2-phenoxyethanol for product preservation – that will increase chemical and particulate matter concentrations in the immediate area.

In this case, dilution is key to limiting your exposure. Increase ventilation while using these products by running the bathroom fan, opening windows while you clean, and using only as much of a cleaning product as is really required to do the job.

Overall improvements

Opening windows is an effective and often overlooked solution to improve indoor air quality. Chemicals that may be harmful to you in a closed space, where they are more concentrated, become less harmful when they are diluted and spread throughout the massive outdoor atmosphere. But avoid opening windows when smog, ozone or wildfire smoke levels are high outside, which would create an opportunity for outdoor air pollution to come indoors.

Luckily, your city or your neighbors are likely collecting outdoor air quality data that is publicly available to you, so you can track whether to open your windows.

If air pollution is too high outside, an indoor air cleaner may be a better option. And you don’t have to shell out big bucks, either. Air quality engineers have shown that a homemade air cleaner using a box fan, four air filters and duct tape – all commonly available at hardware stores or online – can cost under $70 and be as effective at cleaning the air as factory-made appliances.

Overall, the best way to improve air quality is to put fewer harmful chemicals into the air in the first place. While scientists and policymakers can measure and regulate outdoor air quality, it’s up to us all to keep the air in our own homes clean and healthy.

Katelyn Richard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Live healthier in 2026 by breathing cleaner air at home – https://theconversation.com/live-healthier-in-2026-by-breathing-cleaner-air-at-home-271474

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Y. Tony Yang, Endowed Professor of Health Policy and Associate Dean, George Washington University

When federal health officials announced on Jan. 5, 2026, that they were taking six out of 17 vaccines off the childhood immunization schedule, they argued that the move would give parents and caregivers more choice.

Instead of all U.S. children routinely receiving them, these six vaccines are now optional – available to families who request them after consulting a clinician, through a process called shared clinical decision-making, officials said. All six – hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, rotavirus, meningococcal disease and COVID-19 – will still be covered by federal programs such as Medicaid and the Vaccines for Children program, and by private insurers, at least through 2026.

I’m a health policy researcher and the co-author of the book “Vaccine Law and Policy.” I’ve spent years studying how vaccine laws and regulations affect uptake – and who gets left behind when policies change.

Shared decision-making sounds straightforward: a patient and their doctor putting their heads together to make an informed choice. But when applied to routine childhood vaccines, the concept shifts the burden of deliberation onto already-stretched clinicians and parents.

What is shared decision-making?

Shared decision-making is an approach doctors use when there’s genuinely more than one reasonable choice – say, weighing two cancer treatments with different side effects – and the “right” answer depends on what matters most to the patient. The idea is that doctor and patient talk it through together to help make the decision that feels right for that patient.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses this term for vaccines that aren’t automatically recommended for everyone but that might make sense for some people after a conversation with their doctor.

The key difference is what happens if no conversation takes place. For routine vaccines, the default is yes. Children get the shot unless there’s a medical reason not to. For shared clinical decision-making vaccines, there’s no default. If the conversation doesn’t happen, neither does the vaccine.

That distinction matters because the federal vaccine advisory committee has historically reserved shared decision-making for narrow situations. One example is the HPV vaccine for adults 27 to 45. Most people in that age group have already been exposed to HPV, so the vaccine helps some individuals but won’t change infection rates overall. In that case, a conversation with your doctor makes sense: The benefit depends on your personal circumstances.

Childhood vaccines against rotavirus and hepatitis B are different. They’re not for a small subset of people who might benefit – they prevent tens of thousands of hospitalizations a year.

When a vaccine is routine, it pops up as an alert in a child’s medical records and becomes part of the clinic’s standard workflow. The nurse draws it up, the doctor gives a heads-up to the parent, and the shot happens before the family leaves. Parents and other caregivers typically encounter it as part of normal pediatric care rather than as a separate decision to weigh.

That’s important because even in well-resourced practices, pediatricians already have limited time to cover many priorities – growth, feeding, sleep, development, safety and any questions the family may have. For lower-income families, who often face even shorter appointments and have fewer options for follow-up visits, that limitation can get magnified.

Studies have found that many low-income families do not receive all recommended care, in part because their time with the doctor during routine visits is so short.

What this looks like for a family coming in for a checkup

Even before this policy change, lower-income children in the U.S. were falling behind on vaccines. From 2011 to 2021, kids in higher-income families got more of their shots on time, while kids in lower-income families didn’t keep pace – and that gap kept widening.

Here’s how the new policy could make things harder:

A mother brings her 2-month-old to a clinic that serves mostly low-income families – the kind of practice that sees 25 or 30 kids a day for well-child visits. Under the old schedule, the visit runs on rails: The nurse pulls up the baby’s chart, sees that six vaccines are due, draws them up, and the doctor gives them during the exam. By the time Mom is buckling the car seat, the shots are done. The whole vaccine portion takes a few minutes.

Under the new policy, two of those vaccines – rotavirus and hepatitis B – are no longer automatic. Now, the doctor has to stop and have a conversation to explain what rotavirus and hepatitis B are, walk through the risks and benefits of each vaccine and ask what the parent wants to do.

That’s fine if there’s time. But this visit is 15 minutes long, and the doctor still has to check the baby’s growth, ask about their feeding and sleep habits and make sure development is on track. If the mother has questions or feels unsure, the clinic might ask her to come back or wait for a phone call. But she took two hours off her shift to get here and she doesn’t have paid leave. There may not be a next visit.

Now multiply that by every baby on the schedule that day. And this is just the 2-month visit. The same thing will happen at other ages when other vaccines that moved out of the “routine” category come due. Something has to give. Often, it’s the vaccines that no longer happen automatically.

Why more ‘choice’ can mean less access

Talking with families about vaccines already takes time. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, more than half of pediatricians report spending from 10 to 19 minutes counseling parents about vaccines, and nearly 1 in 10 spend more than 20 minutes – often several times per day.

Shared decision-making takes even longer. When vaccines are routine, the system does most of the work. When they require shared decision-making, that work lands on the doctor and parent in an already-packed appointment. The doctor must walk through the disease and the vaccine’s benefits and risks, ask what concerns the parent has, make sure they understand, and then document the whole conversation.

That’s one more barrier to vaccination, and one that won’t fall evenly. Getting medical care can take more time for families with fewer resources. When a policy change adds steps, those families feel it most.

The data might end up showing that some parents “chose” not to vaccinate. But for many families, it won’t really be a choice – it will be a reflection of who had time to come back, and who didn’t.

Y. Tony Yang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘Shared decision-making’ for childhood vaccines sounds empowering – but it may mean less access for families already stretched thin – https://theconversation.com/shared-decision-making-for-childhood-vaccines-sounds-empowering-but-it-may-mean-less-access-for-families-already-stretched-thin-272815