Ray Blanco:

Chickpeas Grown in Lunar Soil Simulant, Boosting Hopes for Moon Farming

A team led by researcher Sara Oliveira Santos at Texas A&M University has successfully harvested chickpeas using simulated lunar soil and compost, publishing their findings in the international journal Scientific Reports last week.

The research team coated chickpea roots with mycorrhizal fungi and planted them in environments with various ratios of compost and simulated lunar soil to observe their growth. The simulant used was a mixture mimicking the composition of lunar regolith samples obtained during NASA's past Apollo crewed lunar missions.

Even in an environment where simulated lunar soil constituted 75% of the mix, the productivity of the chickpeas was similar to that of the control group grown in a commercial potting mix. Plants treated with mycorrhizal fungi had higher stem and root mass than untreated plants, providing evidence of improved plant growth. 

"This suggests that crop cultivation strategies used on Earth may also be viable on the Moon," explained Jessica Atkin, a doctoral student at Texas A&M and the study's first author.

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Davis Wilson:

Satellite Firm Pauses Imagery After Revealing Iran’s Attacks on U.S. Bases

Planet Labs, one of the world’s leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.

The company, which brands itself as Planet, operates a fleet of several hundred Earth-imaging satellites designed to record views of every landmass on Earth at least once per day. Its customers include think tanks, NGOs, academic institutions, news media, and commercial users in the agriculture, forestry, and energy industries, among others.

Planet also holds lucrative contracts selling overhead imagery to the U.S. military and U.S. government intelligence agencies.

In the last few days, Planet’s satellite imagery showed the aftermath of Iranian missile and drone strikes on U.S. and allied bases in the region, including damage to the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and to a $1 billion U.S.-built early warning radar in Qatar used for tracking incoming projectiles. 

Planet said it placing the hold to prevent “adversarial actors” from using its data for “Battle Damage Assessment” purposes. In other words, the company doesn’t want to help Iran’s military know where it succeeded and where it failed.

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Greg Guenthner:

Bitcoin Rebounds to $69K as Oil Skyrockets, Then Cools

Bitcoin’s bullish start to the week and the subsequent pullback align with crypto fund flows and escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.

Last week, crypto fund inflows reached $1.44 billion in the first three days, coinciding with the U.S. attack on Iran, but eventual outflows toward the end of the week put the cumulative weekly flows at $619 million.

“Bitcoin dominated flows with $521 million, while Ethereum and Solana attracted notable inflows; XRP was the only major asset to see meaningful outflows,” CoinShares head of research James Butterfill wrote.

Jonatan Randin, senior market analyst at PrimeXBT, pointed to escalating geopolitical risks as the primary driver of late-week outflows. “The Iran crisis intensified with IRGC officials confirming the Strait of Hormuz closure, oil broke above $85, and risk sentiment deteriorated across all asset classes,” he said. “When geopolitical risk rises this quickly, institutions reduce exposure to risk assets, and crypto is no exception.”

“Higher oil prices are putting pressure on U.S. equities and indices, and that pressure is now feeding directly into Bitcoin,” Georgii Verbitskii, founder of crypto investor app TYMIO, said. “In the current environment, BTC is still behaving largely as a risk asset, so when equity markets weaken, crypto tends to follow.”

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