Nasa.gov reports that NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia celebrated its 60th anniversary on March 19 while also breaking ground on a new radio antenna. The pair of achievements are major milestones for the network, which communicates with spacecraft all over the solar system using giant dish antennas located at three complexes around the globe.

Canberra’s newest addition, Deep Space Station 33, will be a 34-meter-wide multi-frequency beam-waveguide antenna. Buried mostly below ground, a massive concrete pedestal will house cutting-edge electronics and receivers in a climate-controlled room and provide a sturdy base for the reflector dish, which will rotate during operations on a steel platform called an alidade.

When it goes online in 2029, the new Canberra dish will be the last of six parabolic dishes constructed under NASA’s Deep Space Network Aperture Enhancement Program, which is helping to support current and future spacecraft and the increased volume of data they provide. The network’s Madrid facility christened a new dish in 2022, and the Goldstone, California, facility is putting the finishing touches on a new antenna.

The Deep Space Network was officially founded on Dec. 24, 1963, when NASA’s early ground stations, including Goldstone, were connected to the new network control center at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Called the Space Flight Operations Facility, that building remains the centre through which data from the three global complexes flows.

The Madrid facility joined in 1964, and Canberra went online in 1965, going on to help support hundreds of missions, including the Apollo Moon landings.

By being spaced equidistant from one another around the globe, the complexes can provide continual coverage of spacecraft, no matter where they are in the solar system as Earth rotates. There is an exception, however: Due to Canberra’s location in the Southern Hemisphere, it is the only one that can send commands to, and receive data from, Voyager 2 as it heads south almost 21 billion kilometers through interstellar space. More than 24 billion kilometers away, Voyager 1 sends its data down to the Madrid and Goldstone complexes, but it, too, can only receive commands via Canberra.

“These new technologies have the potential to boost the science and exploration returns of missions traveling throughout the solar system,” said Amy Smith, deputy project manager for the Deep Space Network at JPL, which manages the network. “Laser and radio communications could even be combined to build hybrid antennas, or dishes that can communicate using both radio and optical frequencies at the same time. That could be a game changer for NASA.”

In Phys.org this week, I learned that Saccharin, the artificial sweetener used in diet foods like yogurts and sugar-free drinks, can kill multidrug-resistant bacteria—including one of the world’s most dangerous pathogens.

“Antibiotic resistance is one of the major threats to modern medicine,” said Professor Ronan McCarthy, who led the research at Brunel University of London’s Antimicrobial Innovations Center.

“Procedures such as tooth extractions and cancer treatment often rely on antibiotics to prevent or treat infection. But doctors are increasingly facing cases where the drugs no longer work.”

In 2019, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) killed 1.27 million people globally, with resistant infections contributing to nearly 5 million deaths.

Drug-resistant bacteria such as Acinetobacter baumannii, which causes life-threatening infections in people with a weakened immune system, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, linked to chronic lung infections and sepsis, are on the World Health Organization’s list of top-priority pathogens.

“In exciting work led by our team, we’ve identified a novel antimicrobial— saccharin,” Prof McCarthy said. “Saccharin breaks the walls of bacterial pathogens, causing them to distort and eventually burst, killing the bacteria. Crucially, this damage lets antibiotics slip inside, overwhelming their resistance systems.”

Saccharin has been part of the human diet for longer than 100 years. While it has been extensively tested for safety in people, little was known about its effect on bacteria—until now with a study appearing in EMBO Molecular Medicine.

The international team found that saccharin both stops bacterial growth and disrupts DNA replication, and stops the bacteria from forming biofilms—sticky, protective layers that help them survive antibiotics.

This is very promising news in the world of life-threatening infections.

And techxplore.com is reporting on a new method of predicting where people lost in the wilderness may be found, based on simulations of their decision-making processes, which could help mountain rescue teams save lives in the future.

Researchers from the University of Glasgow have developed a sophisticated computer system to model the actions of simulated people lost in outdoor environments.

The system, which is based on data drawn from accounts of how people in the real world behaved after finding themselves lost outdoors, creates a “heat map” showing the probability of where missing people may be found in any landscape.

The Glasgow team hopes it could lead to the development of a robust new method to help search and rescue teams choose where to focus their recovery efforts, which could incorporate sensor-equipped drones to help scour the landscape.

In a new Early Access paper published in the journal IEEE Access, the team outlines how they used data from historical studies of how lost people behaved in real-world situations, to create simulated “agents” who act based on different psychological states.

The algorithms that underpin the agents are guided by distinct sub-models, each with a different goal in mind. They all seek to find their way back to civilization by heading for either water, trees, buildings, paths or roads. The simulated agents make decisions about where to go based on factors including their current location and whether they could see their preferred terrain.

To help inform the agents’ behavior, the team’s system also took into account data gathered on missing peoples’ likelihood of being found in different types of terrain, and the distances people typically traveled from their reported last known location.

The research is part of ongoing efforts at the University of Glasgow to use cutting-edge technology to bolster the work of search and rescue teams. Related research has used a data-driven approach to explore ways of making AI-controlled drones better at searching the countryside for missing people.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR, struggling to find his car keys in his house, let alone find lost souls in a strange environment, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.