Science

New strain of bird flu wipes out Mississippi poultry farm; human flu may offer immunity

Published

2 days ago

March 20, 2025

New strain of bird flu wipes out Mississippi poultry farm; human flu may offer immunity

A new strain of a highly pathogenic bird flu known as H7N9 has surfaced at a poultry farm in Mississippi where chickens are raised for breeding.

The finding of the new strain came as researchers separately reported a potentially positive development: Exposure to human seasonal flu may confer some immunity to H5N1 bird flu.

The new strain found in Noxubee County, Miss., was confirmed March 12 and all of the roughly 46,000 birds either died or were euthanized after the infection spread, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service and Mississippi’s Board of Animal Health. None of the birds entered the food supply.

Authorities didn’t say how the birds were infected, although federal wildlife agents had been identifying low-pathogenic versions of the H7N9 virus for several years in wild birds. It is possible that the version found in the chickens is circulating in wild birds, but most researchers think it probably acquired it’s deadly attributes once it got into the Noxubee chicken operation.

And if that’s the case, “my money is on a one-and-done, perhaps with some local spread,” said Richard Webby, an infectious disease expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

Webby said most bird flu outbreaks follow that pattern: A low-pathogenic version is introduced to commercial poultry, and it becomes highly pathogenic once inside.

The introduction of H5N1 — the bird flu virus that’s been infecting dairy cows, commercial poultry, pet cats, wild animals and wild birds since March 2024 — into poultry and livestock populations was a notable exception to this trend: It was already circulating among wild birds and animals as a highly pathogenic virus.

John Korslund, a veterinarian and former USDA researcher, agreed with Webby and noted that the operation housed breeder broilers: Chickens that are grown and maintained for breeding purposes, not for their meat.

This is significant because breeders live for months, if not years.

If a low-pathogenic virus “happens to get into a broiler meat flock, the birds don’t get sick and they go onto slaughter,” he said. But when a breeder flock picks up that virus, “the virus can replicate for weeks … this may well be what happened in Mississippi.”

However, according to USDA rules, routine and periodic testing of breeder birds for low-pathogenic avian influenzas is required. In 2017, an outbreak of H7N9 occurred along the Mississippi flyway, probably starting in late February, but reported only in March. A summary report of the outbreak suggested the virus was introduced via wild birds.

As suspected in this case, it is believed it started as “low path” and only became “high path” once it got into the commercial operation.

Nevertheless, experts said, if they are wrong and a highly pathogenic virus is circulating in wild birds, it’ll start popping up in other states and sites too.

“Time will tell how nasty it gets this time,” Korslund said.

The key to preventing these kinds of outbreaks — or at least getting ahead of them — is wildlife surveillance, the experts said.

Agencies such as the USDA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Wildlife Health Center, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have divisions that are tasked with sampling wild birds and other animals for infectious diseases. The information they gather is then used by agriculture and public health officials to determine where and when to bolster biosecurity, or to keep a lookout.

Without that information, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada.”we’re flying blind.”

In the positive news that came out this week, a team of international researchers found that ferrets exposed to a common seasonal human flu — H1N1 — before being exposed to H5N1, acquire some immunity from the seasonal flu.

Ferrets that weren’t exposed to the seasonal flu before being infected with H5N1 had high levels of the virus in their respiratory tissues, as well as detectable virus in their hearts, spleen, liver and intestines.

In contrast, those that had been exposed to the seasonal flu beforehand had virus only in the respiratory tract — and at pretty low levels.

“The biggest take home message of our data is that prior human seasonal virus infection can provide some level of protection against the lethality of bird flu,” said Seema Lakdawala, a microbiologist at Emory University in Atlanta and one of the study’s researchers.

Webby, the St. Jude researcher, said the work supports other research that has looked at the potential protectiveness of prior exposure to flu viruses.

“It is for sure playing some role in modulating H5N1 disease in humans,” he said, but was unlikely the only factor. “After all, many people have severe seasonal H1N1 infections each year despite lots of immunity to the virus from previous H1N1 exposures.”

But the finding may help explain why the virus recently has been associated with generally mild disease in the people who have been infected. Seventy people in the U.S. have been infected since March 2024, and one person has died. (Four people, including the Louisiana patient who died, have been hospitalized).

Before last year, the virus was thought to have killed roughly 50% of those infected.

Rasmussen said the worry now is that if H5N1 mutates to become transmissible between people, it’ll be young children as well as the old and compromised who are likely to be most affected. Children younger than 5 are less likely to have been exposed to seasonal human influenza viruses than school-aged children and adults — potentially making them more susceptible to the harms of a virus such as H5N1.

In addition, she said, the bird flu viruses circulating in birds and livestock “as far as we know, can’t transmit easily between people. But, if there’s reassortment, then who knows? We don’t know what kind of residual population-level immunity we would have” from a virus such as that.

How seasonal flu vaccines could affect this protection isn’t clear.

“Seasonal vaccines will not provide the same diversity of immune response as natural infection and unlikely to provide the same level of protection,” said Lakdawala, who is testing this issue in the lab.

Science

After Lunar Disappointments, NASA Hits the Jackpot With Blue Ghost Moon Lander

Published

4 hours ago

March 21, 2025

Press Room

After Lunar Disappointments, NASA Hits the Jackpot With Blue Ghost Moon Lander

NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.

Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over.

But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.

On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s spacecraft die.

A quarter-million miles away, the sun had already set on Mare Crisium, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.

For the solar-powered spacecraft, the hours remaining were numbered and few.

“I think the mood generally is pretty light,” Ray Allensworth, the spacecraft program director at Firefly, said that afternoon. “I think people are just excited and also just kind of relieved to see how well the mission went and just kind of taking a moment to enjoy the last few hours with the lander.”

Scientists with cargo on the other commercial moon missions had invested years of effort and ended up with little or nothing. Those NASA assigned to Blue Ghost are coming away with a cornucopia of new data to work with.

Robert Grimm, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who led one of the scientific payloads, acknowledged his good fortune. “Better than being a crater,” he said.

One of the NASA experiments had collected data just as Blue Ghost landed. Four cameras captured views from different angles of the exhaust of the spacecraft’s thrusters as they kicked up lunar dust and carved a small crater.

“This gives us the ability with these cameras to measure three-dimensional shapes,” said Paul Danehy, one of the scientists working on the project known as Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies, or SCALPSS.

Engineers want to understand those dynamics to prevent potential disasters when bigger and heavier spacecraft like SpaceX’s Starship land astronauts on the moon. If NASA sets up a lunar outpost, spacecraft will return to that site more than once. Rocks flying upward could knock out an engine on a descending spacecraft or damage nearby structures.

In early looks at the photographs, one of the surprises is that the exhaust plume from the thrusters started kicking lunar dust when Blue Ghost was still about 50 feet above the surface, higher than expected. The same camera system is to record the dust cloud from a much larger lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1, which Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, plans to send to the moon later this year.

NASA not only wants to understand lunar dust, or regolith, but also how to get rid of it. The particles can be sharp and abrasive like shards of glass, posing a hazard to machinery and astronauts. An experiment on Blue Ghost called the Electrodynamic Dust Shield used electric fields to clean dust off surfaces.

Two experiments collected information that should cast light on the moon’s interior.

Dr. Grimm’s payload was the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder, the first of its kind deployed on the surface of another world.

To deploy, spring-loaded launchers flung four probes about the size of soup cans in four different directions. Connected by cables to the lander, the probes worked like supersized voltmeters. A second component, raised atop an eight-foot-high mast, measured magnetic fields.

Together, these readings reveal naturally occurring variations in electric and magnetic fields that tell how easily electric currents flow deep underground, and that tells something about what is down there. The conductivity of colder rocks, for example, is lower.

Blue Ghost also deployed a pneumatic drill, using bursts of nitrogen gas to excavate dirt. A needle at the end of the instrument measured temperature and how easily heat flows through the material. Because of rocks in the way, the drill went down only about three feet, not the 10 feet that had been hoped.

In videos, “you can see the rocks flying out and sparks,” said Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built the drill.

Still, three feet was deep enough for the scientific measurements, Dr. Zacny said. Data from the drill and the magnetotelluric sounder could both give hints about how the moon and other rocky worlds formed or why the near side of the moon looks so different from the far side.

“It’s really a basic question about lunar geology we’re trying to answer,” Dr. Grimm said.

Honeybee, which is part of Blue Origin, also built a second device called PlanetVac to demonstrate a simplified technology to collect samples. This device used compressed gas to stir up regolith into a small tornado and direct it into a container.

The technology will be used on a robotic Japanese space mission known as Martian Moons Exploration, which will bring back samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars.

“The fact that it worked on the moon gives us confidence that it should work on Phobos as well,” Dr. Zacny said.

Brian Walsh’s experiment on Blue Ghost did not look at the moon but back at Earth.

“It’s a really good vantage point,” said Dr. Walsh, a professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University.

Dr. Walsh is interested in the magnetic bubble that deflects solar wind particles around Earth. His telescope recorded X-rays emitted when high-speed particles from the sun slam into atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The boundary between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind is like two sumo wrestlers pushing against each other. The view from afar should help scientists tell whether that boundary shifts slowly or in sudden leaps.

That is important because it affects how well Earth’s magnetic field protects us from occasional gargantuan belches of charged particles that bombard the planet during solar storms.

“We’re trying to figure out how that gate opens and how energy spills through,” Dr. Walsh said.

Blue Ghost has already left a lasting impression.

Maria Banks said that as she left the mission operations center each night, she would look up at the moon hanging in the sky.

“Which would just basically stop me in my tracks every day,” Dr. Banks said. “I don’t think I’ll ever see the moon the same again, because for the rest of my life, Firefly’s lander and our instruments will be up there.”

Science

Blue Ghost’s Long Day on the Moon

Published

16 hours ago

March 21, 2025

Press Room

The shadow of the Blue Ghost spacecraft after it landed on the moon, with Earth in the distance.

Firefly Aerospace

Blue Ghost just completed its mission, which lasted a full lunar day — two Earth weeks — on the near side of the moon.

The spacecraft, about the size of a small car, conducted a series of experiments. It drilled three feet into the lunar soil, took X-ray images of the magnetic bubble that surrounds and protects Earth and sought a mysterious yellow glow at sunset.

Built by Firefly Aerospace, a startup in Texas, Blue Ghost was launched from Earth in January and pulled into orbit around the moon in mid-February. A couple of weeks later, it took this video, sped up by a factor of 10, as it circled 62 miles above the surface. The shiny sheets are radiator panels that protected the spacecraft from the extreme heat while in sunshine.

A timelapse video of Blue Ghost orbiting the moon on Feb. 26.

Firefly Aerospace

Landing

In the early hours of March 2, Blue Ghost fired its engine to drop it out of orbit, falling toward the moon. Just over an hour later, it was on the surface in Mare Crisium, a lava plain inside an ancient 345-mile-wide impact crater in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

Blue Ghost became the first completely successful landing by a commercial company, and Firefly achieved that on its first try.

Moon dust and small rocks scattered during Blue Ghost’s landing.

Firefly Aerospace

Several companies and countries have aimed to land on the moon in recent years. The map below shows the crewed Apollo moon landing sites, as well as more recent robotic landings from China, India, Japan and commercial companies. Recent crash sites from failed landings are also shown.

Drag the moon in any direction to view the landing sites.

China has a 100 percent success rate with four successful Chang’e robotic landings, but many other missions have crashed.

The failures include Hakuto-R Mission 1, from Ispace, a Japanese company; Beresheet, from an Israeli nonprofit; Luna 25, from Russia; and Chandrayaan-2, from India. (India’s second try, Chandrayaan-3, was successful.)

Three other landers — SLIM, from the Japanese space agency, and Odysseus and Athena, from Intuitive Machines of Houston — landed and communicated back to Earth, but their success came with an asterisk. All three toppled over after landing.

Experiments

While Firefly built and operated Blue Ghost, NASA sponsored the mission, part of the agency’s efforts to tap into commercial ventures to send its scientific cargo to space at lower costs. NASA paid Firefly $101.5 million to carry 10 science and technology payloads to the lunar surface.

Blue Ghost landed at lunar sunrise so that the solar-powered spacecraft could operate for the longest possible duration.

Lunar sunrise at Mare Crisium.

Firefly Aerospace

One of Blue Ghost’s payloads, PlanetVac, demonstrated a technology to simplify the collecting of soil and rocks. It fired a blast of gas into the ground, which propelled material into a container. This technology will be used on a Japanese mission, Martian Moons Exploration, which will collect samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars, and bring them back to Earth for study.

PlanetVac collected a sample of lunar material.

Firefly Aerospace

Another experiment, Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder, flung four sensors, each a little smaller than a soup can, in directions at 90-degree angles to one another (like north, south, east and west on a compass). The sensors landed about 60 feet away, and, connected by cables to the lander, measured voltages — essentially a supersized version of a conventional voltmeter. An eight-foot-high mast shot upward, lifting an instrument to measure magnetic fields. The experiment gathered data about naturally occurring currents inside the moon, which provides hints about what the moon is made of down to 700 miles below the surface.

Blue Ghost launched a sensor trailing a thin cable, then raised a mast.

Firefly Aerospace

A pneumatic drill used bursts of nitrogen gas to blow away soil and rock, reaching three feet below the surface. A probe measured temperatures and the flow of heat from the moon’s interior.

The LISTER experiment drilled into the surface.

Firefly Aerospace

Solar Eclipse

While people on Earth were taking in a blood moon and a total lunar eclipse on the evening of March 14, Blue Ghost witnessed and photographed a total solar eclipse.

Blue Ghost turned red as the sun slipped behind the Earth.

Firefly Aerospace

During the eclipse, temperatures dropped from 100 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 270 degrees. The spacecraft relied on battery power to continue operating through five hours of near-total darkness.

A series of images fading to darkness during the total solar eclipse on March 14.

Firefly Aerospace

This image shows the “diamond ring effect” as the sun began to emerge from behind Earth.

The diamond ring effect.

Firefly Aerospace

Sunset

On March 16, the sun began to set and the lunar day was nearly over. Before its mission ended, Blue Ghost snapped high-resolution images of the scene. It was more than a few final pretty snapshots. Scientists are hoping the pictures can help solve an enduring scientific mystery of the lunar horizon glow.

Eugene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 who in 1972 was the last man to walk on the moon, sketched observations of a glow along the horizon before sunrise. However, that phenomenon is not easily explained because the moon lacks an atmosphere to scatter light.

Sunset on March 16, with Earth and Venus just above the horizon.

Firefly Aerospace

Signoff

This was the last message from the Blue Ghost spacecraft, about five hours after sunset:

Mission mode change detected, now in Monument Mode

Goodnight friends. After exchanging our final bits of data,

I will hold vigil on this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity’s continued journey to the stars.

Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.

But it is remarkable that a species might be outlasted by its own ingenuity.

Here lies Blue Ghost, a testament to the team who, with the loving support of their families and friends, built and operated this machine and its payloads,

to push the capabilities and knowledge of humanity one small step further.

Per aspera ad astra!

Love, Blue Ghost

The spacecraft was not designed to survive the bitter cold of the lunar night. But another lunar mission, Japan’s SLIM spacecraft, surprised engineers last year by riding out several lunar nights. In early April, after the sun rises again, Firefly will listen for radio messages from Blue Ghost, just in case it does revive.

Science

U.S. Denied Entry to French Scientist Over Views on Trump Policies, France Says

Published

1 day ago

March 21, 2025

Press Room

U.S. Denied Entry to French Scientist Over Views on Trump Policies, France Says

A French scientist was prevented from entering the United States this month because of an opinion he expressed about the Trump administration’s policies on academic research, according to the French government.

Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education and research, described the move as worrying.

“Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values we will continue to proudly uphold,” Mr. Baptiste said in a statement. “I will defend the possibility for all French researchers to be faithful to them, in compliance with the law, wherever they may be in the world.”

Mr. Baptiste did not identify the scientist who was turned away but said that the academic was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research and had been traveling to a conference near Houston when border officials stopped him.

The U.S. authorities denied entry to the scientist and then deported him because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his “personal opinion” on the Trump administration’s science policies, Mr. Baptiste said.

It was not immediately clear what led the border authorities to stop the scientist, why they examined the contents of his phone or what they found objectionable about the conversations.

Customs officers are allowed to search the cellphone, computer, camera or any other electronic device of any travelers crossing the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, although the agency says that such instances are rare. In 2024, less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers had their electronic devices searched, according to the agency.

Mr. Baptiste’s office declined to provide further details about the case. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Paris also declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for the National Center for Scientific Research said that the scientist who was turned back did not wish to speak to the media and declined to comment further.

The Agence France-Presse news agency reported earlier on the scientist’s refused entry to the United States.

Mr. Baptiste, the minister, has been particularly vocal over the past few weeks in denouncing threats to academic freedom in the United States, where funding cuts and layoffs by the Trump administration have targeted institutions of higher education, scientific research and the federal government’s own scientific work force.

Mr. Baptiste has urged French universities and research institutes to welcome researchers seeking to leave the United States.

“Europe must be there to protect research and welcome the talent that can contribute to its success,” Mr. Baptiste wrote on social media after meeting with his European counterparts in Warsaw on Wednesday to address “threats to free research in the United States.”

Jennifer Jones, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in the United States, said she worried that cases like the one involving the French scientist would have a chilling effect on research collaboration across borders.

“My fear is that these are early cases with many more to follow,” Dr. Jones said. “I am hearing from my network that people are very concerned about any kind of international travel in either direction.”

“And that should worry all of us,” she added. If scientists limit their movements to conferences and other events designed to advance research, she said, “it is the public that is going to suffer.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.