The scientific community has a plan for achieving fusion power. It involves getting a better understanding of how to control fusion in a tokamak-style reactor using the currently under construction ITER reactor, and then using that knowledge to build DEMO-style plants. But ITER isn’t even expected to see hot plasmas until the middle of the 2030s, by which point solar panels will be so cheap that we’ll probably all be getting them free in our cereal boxes.

Commonwealth Fusion is a startup that’s basically asking “what if we did that, but now?” Its ITER equivalent, a tokamak called SPARC, is over 70 percent complete and is planned to be operating as soon as next year. The company already has a site and customers for the power-generating follow-on, called ARC. Both of those projects are predicated on using high-temperature superconductors to generate an extremely powerful magnetic field that will allow the company to build a smaller reactor, and thus get things done faster.

Years of running plasmas through tokamaks has given us confidence that the basics of these plans are sound. But there are lots of potential devils in the details (otherwise there’d be little need for experimental reactors). So Commonwealth’s scientists, in collaboration with the academic community, have recently released five peer-reviewed papers that detail its plans for ARC: what our best models tell us now, and what we’ll still need to learn from SPARC to finalize the design of a production fusion plant.

The basics of ARC

The articles are all published in the Journal of Plasma Physics—they’re open access, so you can view them yourself, but they are long (roughly 30–40 page PDFs) and highly technical. What follows is an overview of some of what’s there and a few things that stood out to me as I went through them.

ARC will be a tokamak that hosts fusion between hydrogen’s two heavier isotopes, deuterium and tritium. This reaction results in a helium nucleus and releases a neutron and radiation. The helium transfers heat to the plasma, maintaining the conditions needed for fusion, but it is otherwise a waste product, referred to as “ash” in the fusion context. The neutron and radiation, however, are put to use.

Part of that use is simply imparting energy into a blanket of molten salt that surrounds the fusion chamber. That energy, in the form of heat, will be used to drive a turbine that produces the electricity. The molten salt includes lithium ions; when one lithium isotope absorbs a neutron, it decays into more helium, plus tritium that can be used as fuel for the reactor. There are isotopes present that will also release additional neutrons, allowing this process to generate sufficient fuel.

Overall, the present design of ARC is expected to produce about 1.13 GW of fusion power, with 500 MW of that extracted as electricity. Some of that (100 MW) will be needed to power the plant’s operations, leaving 400 MW to be sent to the grid.

The rest of the energy is either kept in the tokamak to maintain the fusion reactions or lost due to inefficiencies in the heat and energy transfer of the system. There’s a lot of uncertainty about these numbers; the 1.13 GW is just the center of a range of potential values running from 900 MW to 1.3 GW, so the 400 MW output may need to be adjusted up or down accordingly.

Some of that 400 MW comes during periods where fusion is not occurring. The nuclear reactions will occur within 15-minute-long periods that will be interspersed with one minute resets. The resets are meant to be kept short enough that nothing has much of a chance to cool down before it gets heated up again—thermal inertia will let it continue generating power. That will be one of the key differentiators with SPARC, which doesn’t have the heat extraction needed to maintain stable fusion for these long time periods, and so can’t maintain the near constant temperatures needed for reliable power generation.

It’s inevitable that parts of the device will be exposed to radiation and perhaps fusion plasma. The inner walls of the reactor will be shielded by tungsten, which will limit erosion by the conditions. Meanwhile, the vacuum vessel is designed to be replaced every one to two years. The papers note that this flexibility will allow them to make some design changes even after ARC is built. To enable this, the whole tokamak is meant to split in half for maintenance.

Instabilities

The two big uncertainties in the operations of ARC are long-standing challenges for fusion: how to handle magnetic instabilities, and how to handle the helium ash and material that escapes the magnetic containment.

Some of the latter will simply be handled by the resets that happen after every 15 minutes of operation, which will clear the reaction chamber and add fresh fuel. But during operations, this will be handled by what’s called a divertor, an area where the magnetic field lines are shaped to allow some material out of confinement.

“To maximise ARC’s fusion power output while avoiding excessive erosion of the plasma-facing components, we will need to radiatively dissipate most of the power crossing the last-closed flux surface, injecting radiating impurities such as argon or neon to access divertor detachment,” one of the papers says. “Divertor detachment will need to be integrated with a high-performance core plasma, and with efficient impurity pumping to prevent the accumulation of helium ash in the core.”

The models they use predict that the system will keep enough pressure at the diverter to spit out enough of the helium ash to keep it from interfering with the fusion reactions. But that prediction will need to be tested empirically.

Magnetic instabilities can lead to a rapid loss of control of the plasma, potentially leading energetic, charged particles to slam into the reactor walls. The tungsten limits the damage and protects the more sensitive hardware, but will be eroded, and the tungsten that is eroded off can stay in the chamber and contaminate further runs of the system.

A lot of work has gone into designing systems that control the magnetic fields containing the plasma, trying to find sensor readings that presage instabilities and choosing adjustments that can suppress them. (This is something that AI-based systems may be useful for.) Commonwealth definitely plans to block as many instabilities as possible. But it’s also being realistic and expecting that some will inevitably happen. So, it’s planning to simply quench the system with as little damage as possible and restart as quickly as possible in order to not let the heat extraction system cool down significantly. In essence, the idea is to swiftly get the system into the state it’s normally in during the minute-long resets that are part of its typical operations.

One of the risks during the instabilities are runaway electrons, which accelerate to relativistic energies and can slam into the walls of the reaction chamber. These may be easy enough to handle with a carefully located wire within the reactor that can convert the electrons to current that can be extracted. But Commonwealth doesn’t plan to install one of them until it is clear that this is a significant problem: “SPARC will explore operation… which will provide the data on whether dedicated runaway electron mitigation systems are necessary in ARC.”

Far more problematic is the loss of the containment of the heavier particles in the plasma, which are capable of causing more significant erosion. The idea here is to cool the system to lower energies as quickly as possible while keeping the material from running into the wall. So, ARC will contain multiple locations where the controller can inject neon into the reaction chamber in order to handle both issues.

Physics vs. finance

There is obviously a lot more that the Commonwealth team is worried about than what stood out to me. One of the papers had a “non-exhaustive” list of physics issues that SPARC would help them sort out, and it was 18 items long. And, while that will limit the unanswered questions relevant to ARC, the construction of ARC is planned to overlap with the experiments in SPARC, so it’s possible there will be some last-minute scrambling needed to adjust ARC’s design while it’s in progress.

But overall, the peer-reviewed papers make a strong case that, as Commonwealth’s chief scientific officer, Brandon Sorbom, put it, “When we build the ARC Fusion Power Plant, it will work.” According to our best models, developed using real-world data from multiple tokamaks, ARC should be able to regularly trigger fusion reactions that release more energy than we put into them.

But there’s “working” from a physics perspective, and “working” from a market perspective. For this to work as planned, that fusion would have to be sustained for 15-minute periods and suffer very few instabilities over the course of the day to keep everything hot enough to work. And servicing activities like replacing the vacuum container will have to be done quickly enough so that the plant isn’t offline for long periods.

Plus there’s the financial issues of the large up-front cost for the sophisticated hardware and support infrastructure, as well as the highly technical staff needed to run this sort of facility. One of its major selling points is that it should provide around-the-clock energy without the need for some separate form of storage, but right now, grid operators don’t provide much in the way of financial incentives for that sort of reliability. So, Commonwealth will find itself competing with some very cheap forms of generation for parts of the day.

All of which is to say that ARC could work from a physical perspective and still ultimately fail when it starts producing power. Sorbom said the company had run the numbers under a range of assumptions and found that ARC made sense. But the finances are going to be the hardest risk to retire and may require having ARC operate for decades before we have a definitive answer.

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Posted Wednesday 10 June 2026 at 9:57 am AEST (my time).

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An encounter with a great white shark is undoubtedly a “thrilling” experience, considered especially rare in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The latest sighting, which has attracted media attention and made headlines around the world, occurred during a dive in the Strait of Sicily carried out by volunteers from Ghost Diving and Healthy Seas, organizations dedicated to protecting marine ecosystems.

The encounter was documented by diver Derk Remmers, who told the BBC that he struggled to switch on his camera because of the excitement. The footage—the first ever recorded of a great white shark in its Mediterranean Sea habitat—shows a huge adult male specimen of Carcharodon carcharias, a native species that is now considered critically endangered.

The Great White Shark

Carcharodon carcharias, commonly known as the great white shark, belongs to the Lamnidae family and is one of the largest predatory fish in existence. It can exceed 6 meters (20 feet) in length and weigh more than 2 tons. It feeds primarily on fish, including rays and other sharks, though adult individuals may also prey on marine mammals like seals and dolphins.

Equipped with an extremely keen sense of smell and excellent swimming abilities, the great white shark is considered one of the most efficient apex predators in the food chain. As such, it plays a crucial role in maintaining the balance of marine ecosystems by regulating the populations of its prey.

An Endangered Species

Found in temperate and subtropical waters throughout the world's oceans, the great white shark has also inhabited the Mediterranean Sea for millions of years. Today, however, its population there has been drastically reduced, and sightings have become increasingly rare. Despite its reputation, attacks on humans are very uncommon. And the species is increasingly threatened by human activities, particularly accidental capture in fishing operations, illegal fishing, habitat loss, and the decline of its natural prey.

For this reason, Carcharodon carcharias is classified as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, while the Mediterranean population is considered the most precarious and is classified as critically endangered.

A Rare Encounter

Every documented sighting of a great white shark in the Mediterranean therefore represents a valuable opportunity, as it provides useful information for scientific research and conservation strategies for the species in a sea where its presence is now extremely rare. At the same time, this latest encounter can be interpreted as an encouraging sign for marine biodiversity and a reminder of the importance of continuing and strengthening conservation efforts in marine ecosystems, which are considered among the most fragile in the world.

“Much of our knowledge about great white sharks in the Mediterranean comes from dead specimens caught during fishing operations,” says Carlo Cattano, a researcher at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn. “Observations like this are extremely valuable for improving our understanding of the distribution, habits, and behavior of this critically endangered species, whose survival is threatened by human activities. Our shark research has allowed us over time to identify several critical areas for threatened species, and this sighting is particularly significant in validating the conservation value of this area.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

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Posted Wednesday 10 June 2026 at 9:56 am AEST (my time).

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A longevity startup has dosed its first patient with a drug to reverse age-related sight loss.

Life Biosciences is testing its ER-100 drug, which the company claims has restored vision in monkeys, for safety and side effects in a study of around 18 adults over the next year.

It will be targeting patients with glaucoma and NAION, two conditions that cause damage to crucial cells in the optic nerve, which transmits visual information from the back of the eye to the brain. ER-100 is designed to rejuvenate those cells so that they work again and restore sight.

It is the first-ever cellular-rejuvenation therapy using this technology to receive FDA clearance to enter human clinical trials, and hence the first chance to test whether the technology can “ameliorate human disease,” according to Life Biosciences cofounder David Sinclair, who is also a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Aging biology—understanding how the body’s cells and functions deteriorate over time—is at the root of longevity science. ER-100 is the focus of major interest across biotech for its potential to reverse cellular aging. Life Biosciences, based in Boston, says it is developing applications for its technology to tackle a host of age-related diseases in a variety of organs, like fatty liver disease.

“Our research has suggested that aging is driven in large part by the loss of epigenetic information, not irreversible damage. This clinical study represents the first opportunity to test whether restoring that information can ameliorate human disease,” Sinclair said.

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Posted Wednesday 10 June 2026 at 7:49 am AEST (my time).

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Gold is weird. It’s one of the few metals that doesn’t really oxidize. Even silver and copper—from the same column of the periodic table—form weak oxides. Naively, you might expect that gold would tarnish just like silver. Gold also sits right next to platinum, but it has none of that metal’s catalytic properties.

Then came gold nanoparticles that acted like catalysts, and we were confused by their apparent willingness to take part in chemical reactions.

Now, a pair of scientists has explained that gold’s inertness isn’t inherent to the atom but rather to the surfaces that gold crystals form. Before we get to the results, let’s first take a look at the traditional explanation for gold’s inertness and why an inert material that has no catalytic activity suddenly acts as a catalyst when in its nanoparticle form.

Can’t play, won’t try

Atoms are made of a central nucleus surrounded by electrons. The electrons form a structure, pairing up and filling orbitals from lowest to highest energy, with each orbital requiring a different number of pairs.

These orbitals are not like planetary orbits but rather a kind of volume of influence—they’re sometimes round but have other shapes as well. The highest-energy orbitals are generally farther from the central nucleus, exposing them to the rest of the world.

An atom’s readiness to react is due to partially filled orbitals at the highest energy, but nothing is ever quite so neat. For very heavy atoms, the order in which orbitals are filled is complicated, and partially filled orbitals can end up closer to the nucleus. If that happens, those orbitals are shielded from the Universe by the outermost orbitals, which are full of happy electron pairs.

This is why, we are told, gold is inert: Its unhappy electrons are shielded by happy electrons.

Let me arrange a reaction

The discovery that gold nanoparticles could act as catalysts told us that this explanation was incomplete. It also made the lack of catalytic activity on bulk gold surfaces a bit of a mystery.

Generally speaking, a catalyst is a material that enables a reaction without being consumed by it (some catalysts are consumed, but let’s not sweat the details). Every reaction needs to overcome an energy barrier to start—we heat stuff up to set it on fire, for instance. A catalyst reduces that barrier, allowing a reaction to start at much lower energies.

Biological systems are incredibly good at making reactions run at low temperature and pressure through the use of catalysts. Industrial chemistry achieves speed, scale, and cost savings due to catalysts, enabling the production of everything from petrochemicals to drugs.

In catalysis, surface area and surface structure play hugely important roles. Essentially, a molecule first has to stick to the surface of the catalyst. Then, depending on where it sticks, the molecule bends and stretches out of shape. At extremes, this can cause it to fall apart—like, for instance, an oxygen molecule becoming two separate oxygen atoms, leaving both halves in a highly reactive state. The highly reactive halves can then react with other molecules to form new molecules at considerably lower temperatures than would have otherwise been required.

So a good catalyst has a large surface area with plenty of sites where the target species can stick and fall apart. For gold to behave as it does—active as a nanoparticle, non-catalytic in bulk—it has to present a surface that has catalytic sites when it is present as a nanoparticle, but those sites must disappear on bulk surfaces, even if you make them rough and irregular.

Hex is best (if you like jewelry)

Gold (and, indeed all metals in the solid state) forms a crystal. If you cut a crystal along different planes of atoms, you get different arrangements on the surface. In gold, some planes reveal a square lattice, while others have a hexagonal lattice. The researchers hypothesized that some of those surfaces would be more catalytically active than others.

To confirm this, the researchers studied the behavior of an oxygen molecule on each type of gold surface. They asked how much molecular oxygen would stick to the surface, and for the molecules that did stick, what energy is required to cause the oxygen molecule to split. They showed that the surface structure commonly observed in bulk gold—a hexagonal pattern—does not hold onto oxygen very strongly, and the oxygen’s structure is not deformed. That means it still takes a lot of energy to split the oxygen molecule into two atoms that are ready to react.

On the other hand, if the gold structure is a square pattern, oxygen molecules readily stick to the surface and are deformed to the point of splitting, leaving them available to react (indeed, under these conditions, gold will oxidize as well). The researchers estimate that the square lattice gold surface is as active as common catalytic metals, such as platinum.

Hiding your sensitive bits

Gold surfaces are also quite active in the sense that gold atoms will readily rearrange themselves on the surface. By shuffling around, they change an exposed flat square lattice into a slightly rougher inactive hexagonal lattice. But the change, called surface reconstruction, can’t happen in just any way. Instead, the atoms move to form a 2D repeating structure that covers the exposed face, and the area required to form a complete unit of the repeating structure is quite large. On a chunk of gold, this is not an issue because there are plenty of atoms to go around, so each surface ends up almost completely inert.

On nanoparticles, the story is different. The limited number of atoms means there are not enough atoms or space for surface reconstruction. So a material known for its inertness suddenly shows its true colors and starts to react and act as a catalyst.

These studies show just how intricate the details of surface chemistry and catalysis can be. Inert metals become active and then return to inertness simply due to a change in material volume. It also opens new avenues for research on catalysis, though I don’t imagine gold will become the catalyst of choice any time soon.

Physical Review Letters, 2026, DOI: 10.1103/g3bc-t1qv

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Posted Wednesday 10 June 2026 at 7:48 am AEST (my time).

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Some 250,000 electric vehicles manufactured by General Motors are driving around the US today—right now!—with an oft-secret capability: Their big, powerful batteries can charge other things. Potentially appliances, homes, and now, thanks to a software update pushed by the automaker this week, an electrical grid. Twelve of GM’s EVs have this “bidirectional charging” capability, way more than US competitors’ battery-electrics.

The potential for this tech, known as vehicle-to-grid charging, is exciting. An EV should not only be able to power a home through a days-long outage. It should also support the wider grid, helping utilities balance out electricity use during periods of high demand, like the moment the heat becomes undesirable and everyone turns on their air conditioning at once. Even better, car owners can charge up their batteries on wheels when demand and prices are low, and discharge it into the wider grid when it's high—making them money in the process. The company can “turn every GM EV on the road into a distributed power resource,” Sterling Anderson, the automakers' chief product officer, said at a company event in San Francisco on Tuesday.

As US automakers work through policy about-faces that have upended EV sales projections in the US, forays into energy solutions like bidirectional charging give car companies opportunities to train their battery-making muscles. Anderson also says that while V2G charging looks like an automaking side quest, it also helps GM answer the bigger and maybe even existential question of, “How do we make a car more valuable?” Maybe it can be really fun to drive. Maybe, one day, it can drive itself and run your errands. Or maybe, one day, it can make energy for you when it’s plugged in in your driveway.

But as any parent knows, the chasm between potential and reality can gape. To use their cars to power their homes, drivers need to buy a $20,000 system from the automaker's four-year-old GM Energy subsidiary, and have it installed by someone who knows what they’re doing. Also, they need to make sure their local utilities—and there are nearly 3,000 of them across the US—have worked with GM to not only OK the equipment, but to create programs that guarantee the owner money when their car helps out their whole region’s electrical grid. (GM says that homeowners generally get that $20,000 upfront price back after five or so years of use.)

Though a quarter million Americans have GM vehicles with the bidirectional charging capacity, GM Energy’s customers only number in the "thousands," according to the company. (A spokesperson declined to share more specific numbers.)

Still, Wade Scheffer, GM Energy’s vice president, insists: The reason more people aren't using their cars to power their lives comes down to “awareness, awareness, and awareness.” To that end, at Tuesday’s event the subsidiary announced two partnerships with utilities: a “stress test” of bidirectional charging capabilities with 30 GM employees, enabled by Michigan’s DTE Energy, and a plan to get 52,000 GM EVs on PG&E’s major Northern California grid by 2030. The automaker says it’s worked out dozens of partnerships with other utilities.

Still, getting all of those GM cars hooked up and contributing to the grid will be a long and likely winding road. Not all states are enthusiastic about EVs or new energy tech right now. And even in early adopter states, where lawmakers are gung ho about innovative climate and energy policies, vehicle-to-grid tech is still in its early stages.

It took researchers with the University of California at Irvine several years of collaboration with Kia and Hyundai to get a vehicle-to-home charging project up and running in six Southern California homes. “Here we are two years later—not four weeks later—and utilities around the country are just beginning to address this,” says Scott Samuelsen, who directed the project and is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Irvine. “It’s very new.” The project hopes to discover how EV’s bidirectional charging abilities might fit into normal people’s lives—and, eventually, save them money.

In March, Washington state’s Puget Sound Energy announced a pilot program that the utility is hoping will teach it to work with new sorts of companies—auto manufacturers, vehicle charging firms—while supporting the wider electrical grid. The project will run through early next year. Key among the utility’s tasks is guaranteeing different automakers’ and charging companies’ equipment can talk to each other, using the same sorts of standards. Clint Stewart, a senior product development manager at PSE, describes himself as a “techno-optimist”; he believes bidirectional charging is coming at scale. But not right away. “I’d like to believe that in five years, we’ll be at a point where it’s relatively figured out,” he says.

On GM’s to-do list: ensuring customers have complete control of when their vehicles’ top the grid, so that they’re not stranded with no charge when they need to unplug and get somewhere. Eventually, the system might learn a car owners’ schedule, and know not to suck out the EV’s charge right before, say, the kids’ soccer practice. There are a few things to work out.

GM Energy’s Scheffer is eager to meet the moment. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how drivers interact with their vehicles and turn them into something more than just transportation,” he says.

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Posted Wednesday 10 June 2026 at 7:47 am AEST (my time).

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The US space agency unveiled the crew for its Artemis III mission on Tuesday during an enthusiastic event at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

For this spaceflight into low-Earth orbit, which will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes, NASA chose an experienced, all-male crew with military backgrounds. They were revealed inside a darkened Teague Auditorium where hundreds of friends, family members, and NASA employees cheered enthusiastically.

The four crew members are:

• NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, commander
• ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano, pilot
• NASA astronaut Andre Douglas, mission specialist
• NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, mission specialist

The Artemis III test flight will serve as a bridge between the recent Artemis II lunar flyby mission, which was successfully completed in April, and a planned lunar landing with the Artemis IV mission.

“We are the unifying link between Artemis II and Artemis IV,” Bresnik said Tuesday.

Reducing risks for lunar landings

NASA added this low-Earth orbit Artemis mission several months ago after new Administrator Jared Isaacman decided the agency needed to “buy down risk” before putting humans on the Moon. And that is the goal with Artemis III, an approximately two-week mission due to launch no earlier than summer 2027.

Space agency officials outlined plans for the flight on Tuesday, which will include three separate launches and nominally two dockings in low-Earth orbit.

The first launch will be a Blue Origin “lander test vehicle” that will have the capability to loiter in orbit for up to 90 days. Then the four Artemis III astronauts will launch inside the Orion spacecraft on top of a Space Launch System rocket. The crew will subsequently rendezvous with the Blue Moon lander, dock, and enter the Blue Origin vehicle. On board the crew will test out the life support systems on Blue Moon and perform other functions. Orion will control the combined vehicles in flight.

Around this time the third launch will occur of SpaceX’s Starship rocket. This will send a Starship—which is unlikely to be modified with more than a docking adapter—into orbit. After the Artemis crew undocks with Blue Moon they will then rendezvous and dock with the Starship vehicle. However, this vehicle will not include life support equipment, and therefore the crew will not enter Starship.

Following all of this, the Artemis III crew will undock from Starship and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. If successful the mission will have demonstrated the ability of Orion to perform proximity operations with the two lunar landers, test flying in a “stack,” and provide NASA some comfort about the complicated maneuvers that will be needed during Artemis IV, when a crew will dock with a lunar lander, go to the Moon, and then return to Earth in Orion.

“Artemis III will be an extraordinary demonstration of what is possible,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during the crew announcement event.

An aggressive timeline

After the four astronauts were revealed, Isaacman spoke with reporters for a few minutes. He reiterated he is “extremely” confident in the timeline for a 2027 Artemis III launch, as well as a 2028 lunar landing. Americans, he said, should expect excellence from their space agency.

However these timelines have generally been regarded as aggressive by space industry experts, who are more accustomed to NASA moving at a lumbering pace. The prospect of flying Artemis III next year was further clouded by the May 28 explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket at the vehicle’s only launch pad in Florida, causing catastrophic damage to the facilities there.

The New Glenn rocket is optimized to launch the Blue Moon landers under development by Blue Origin. The space company founded by Jeff Bezos has said it expects to return New Glenn to flight before the end of this year, but most experts have told Ars the timeline is more likely to be 12 to 18 months.

During the crew announcement event, NASA officials stressed that they expected New Glenn to be ready next year to launch Blue Moon for the Artemis III mission and continue building up capabilities (including a larger and more powerful variant of the New Glenn rocket) needed to support a lunar landing.

What if the landers are not ready?

NASA faces significant challenges to bring about the Artemis III mission next year and to complete a series of test objectives involving the interaction between Orion and the two lunar lander prototypes.

So what happens if the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft are ready next summer, but one or both of the landers is not?

Isaacman said they would not launch Artemis III until they are ready to fly a meaningful mission.

“I would say, at a very high level, we’re not going to launch this mission until we feel like the objectives that are outlined are sufficient to bring down the risk for a follow-on landing to the Moon itself,” Isaacman said.

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Posted Wednesday 10 June 2026 at 7:47 am AEST (my time).

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The US space agency unveiled the crew for its Artemis III mission on Tuesday during an enthusiastic event at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

For this spaceflight into low-Earth orbit, which will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes, NASA chose an experienced, all-male crew with military backgrounds. They were revealed inside a darkened Teague Auditorium where hundreds of friends, family members, and NASA employees cheered enthusiastically.

The four crew members are:

• NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, commander
• ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano, pilot
• NASA astronaut Andre Douglas, mission specialist
• NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, mission specialist

The Artemis III test flight will serve as a bridge between the recent Artemis II lunar flyby mission, which was successfully completed in April, and a planned lunar landing with the Artemis IV mission.

“We are the unifying link between Artemis II and Artemis IV,” Bresnik said Tuesday.

Reducing risks for lunar landings

NASA added this low-Earth orbit Artemis mission several months ago after new Administrator Jared Isaacman decided the agency needed to “buy down risk” before putting humans on the Moon. And that is the goal with Artemis III, an approximately two-week mission due to launch no earlier than summer 2027.

Space agency officials outlined plans for the flight on Tuesday, which will include three separate launches and nominally two dockings in low-Earth orbit.

The first launch will be a Blue Origin “lander test vehicle” that will have the capability to loiter in orbit for up to 90 days. Then the four Artemis III astronauts will launch inside the Orion spacecraft on top of a Space Launch System rocket. The crew will subsequently rendezvous with the Blue Moon lander, dock, and enter the Blue Origin vehicle. On board the crew will test out the life support systems on Blue Moon and perform other functions. Orion will control the combined vehicles in flight.

Around this time the third launch will occur of SpaceX’s Starship rocket. This will send a Starship—which is unlikely to be modified with more than a docking adapter—into orbit. After the Artemis crew undocks with Blue Moon they will then rendezvous and dock with the Starship vehicle. However, this vehicle will not include life support equipment, and therefore the crew will not enter Starship.

Following all of this, the Artemis III crew will undock from Starship and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. If successful the mission will have demonstrated the ability of Orion to perform proximity operations with the two lunar landers, test flying in a “stack,” and provide NASA some comfort about the complicated maneuvers that will be needed during Artemis IV, when a crew will dock with a lunar lander, go to the Moon, and then return to Earth in Orion.

“Artemis III will be an extraordinary demonstration of what is possible,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during the crew announcement event.

An aggressive timeline

After the four astronauts were revealed, Isaacman spoke with reporters for a few minutes. He reiterated he is “extremely” confident in the timeline for a 2027 Artemis III launch, as well as a 2028 lunar landing. Americans, he said, should expect excellence from their space agency.

However these timelines have generally been regarded as aggressive by space industry experts, who are more accustomed to NASA moving at a lumbering pace. The prospect of flying Artemis III next year was further clouded by the May 28 explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket at the vehicle’s only launch pad in Florida, causing catastrophic damage to the facilities there.

The New Glenn rocket is optimized to launch the Blue Moon landers under development by Blue Origin. The space company founded by Jeff Bezos has said it expects to return New Glenn to flight before the end of this year, but most experts have told Ars the timeline is more likely to be 12 to 18 months.

During the crew announcement event, NASA officials stressed that they expected New Glenn to be ready next year to launch Blue Moon for the Artemis III mission and continue building up capabilities (including a larger and more powerful variant of the New Glenn rocket) needed to support a lunar landing.

What if the landers are not ready?

NASA faces significant challenges to bring about the Artemis III mission next year and to complete a series of test objectives involving the interaction between Orion and the two lunar lander prototypes.

So what happens if the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft are ready next summer, but one or both of the landers is not?

Isaacman said they would not launch Artemis III until they are ready to fly a meaningful mission.

“I would say, at a very high level, we’re not going to launch this mission until we feel like the objectives that are outlined are sufficient to bring down the risk for a follow-on landing to the Moon itself,” Isaacman said.

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Posted Wednesday 10 June 2026 at 7:47 am AEST (my time).

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Humanity has littered the sky with the refuse of fossil fuel use, releasing enough CO₂ to change the planet’s climate. We are also chucking incredible sums of carbon in the form of plastics into landfills and into the environment around (and inside of) us. What if cleaning up one of these problems could also help clean up the other?

A new study led by Ruth Ebenbauer at Aarhus University experiments with this idea by upcycling discarded polystyrene into (part of) a material commonly used in carbon-capture systems.

Adding amines

This material is based on amines—a simple chemical group that conveniently acts like a sponge for CO₂. An amine will grab CO₂ molecules when exposed to them, but let go of the CO₂ when heated or depressurized, leaving it ready to go again. The first “CO₂ scrubbers” tried in smokestacks used amines dissolved in water to do this, but solid amines are used in all kinds of carbon-capture systems now because they require less energy. These solid materials—often made into granules similar to the activated carbon in a water filter—have high surface area and high porosity, so the amines can efficiently partner up with CO₂ molecules.

Currently, these materials are all derived from fossil fuels. There are two components: the amine groups themselves, and something else that provides a structure for them to sit within. The research team’s idea was that polystyrene could be a great fit for that structural component. Polystyrene has been used for Styrofoam and for solid items like eating utensils or the clear portion of a CD case. Less than 1 percent of it is recycled in the US, while Europe manages a slightly less awful 10 percent.

The upcycling process has two chemical steps. The first attaches bromine atoms to aromatic rings in the polystyrene, using gold as a catalyst. The second step introduces a two-carbon form of amine (a common ingredient in a wide array of products) and a copper catalyst, which swaps amine groups in where the bromine atoms were.

Some of the amine groups hang out solo, while others link with each other to help create the porosity within the solid.

The researchers tested this process with a few plastic objects, including Styrofoam, food packaging, a fork, a CD case, and a Lego base plate (which has another chemical component). They found that the material they produced performed well in the carbon-capture cycle, both at the extremely high CO₂ concentration of a smokestack and the lower concentration of ambient air.

Chemical structure of polystyrene with and without attached amines (NH₂ and NH), and an illustration of

capturing and releasing carbon by controlling temperature.

Credit: Ebenbauer, et al./Chem Circularity

Fine tuning

The researchers also found that they could control the material’s properties along the way. They could tune the amine content up or down, as well as adjusting the proportion that made porosity-building linkages instead of CO₂-grabbers.

Since the amine-containing starting material they used was ultimately fossil-fuel derived, they also tested turning a couple other kinds of synthetic materials into amines instead. Past research has shown a few pathways to do this, but those give you slightly more complicated forms of amines that may not be as reactive.

In this case, they used these amines in an upcycling reaction on urethane foam mattress material and decorative building trim. This worked, producing carbon-capture material made completely from waste, but the chunkier amine groups made from waste didn’t perform as well. Its capacity for CO₂ was lower, and it failed to sponge up CO₂ from ambient air.

But the polystyrene still held up its end of the bargain, and there’s a flexible blueprint here. With the right source and process for amines, carbon-capture material could be entirely produced from the flood of plastics going into landfills. And even if it’s only half produced from plastics, that would still be improvement. This could both provide a market to redirect some of the plastic waste and technically reduce the carbon footprint of carbon capture (although the vast majority of its footprint is the energy required to run the process.)

Carbon capture isn’t a license to keep using fossil fuels. It’s an additional action we can take to rein in atmospheric CO₂ more quickly. And the more sustainably you can run that process, the better it is.

Chem Circularity, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.checir.2026.100027 (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 9 June 2026 at 7:57 am AEST (my time).

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NASA’s Artemis II crew are the fastest people alive, and now they have the patch to prove it.

Mission Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen (the latter with the Canadian Space Agency) spent 10 days in early April flying by the Moon. Their journey took them farther away from Earth than any humans have gone (52,756 miles [406,771 km]) and then, on the way back on board their Orion spacecraft Integrity, they sped up to about 24,664 miles per hour (39,693 k/ph) reentering the atmosphere.

Only three other people in history have traveled faster. NASA’s Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan set the record for the highest speed attained by a crewed vehicle relative to the Earth’s surface: 24,791 mph (39,897 kph) on May 26, 1969.

Cernan died in 2017, Young in 2018, and Stafford in 2024.

“The number that we saw on the displays—and I was very in tune with what Orion thinks it is going to do—was 38.89 as the Mach. But it depends on how you measure that number. It is actually challenging how you measure from space,” said Glover at the crew’s post-flight press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on April 16, six days after landing.

Mach, as a measurement, compares the speed of an object to the local speed of sound. So the number changes based on altitude, air temperature, and air density. At sea level, 24,664 mph would be Mach 32, or 32 times the speed of sound.

At the point where the Artemis II crew reached peak velocity, the air was thinner and the temperature was colder than at sea level.

Mach 39

“There will be a new [Mach patch] coming out when we figure it out,” Glover said.

It took three weeks (including the time for NASA’s embroidered patch supplier, A-B Emblem in Weaverville, North Carolina, to produce it for the crew) but the Mach 39 patch made its public debut on Friday (June 5) in a video posted on social media by Wiseman. That is, if you were paying attention for such details.

In the clip, Wiseman makes no mention of the emblem, but instead focuses on reenlisting a member of the Artemis II recovery team into the US Navy (Wiseman is a retired captain in the service). But on his NASA blue flight suit, the new Mach 39 patch is attached to his left chest, below his name tag and similar looking “100 Days” in space insignia.

The Mach 39 patch replaces Wiseman’s Mach 25 patch, the 40-year-old original design, which inspired the new Artemis edition.

Dan Brandenstein, who with Jim Buchli came up with the idea and design for the original Mach 25

patch, is seen wearing his on the right arm of his NASA flight suit in 1985.

Credit: NASA

“It was after STS-1 [in 1981],” former astronaut Dan Brandenstein, referring to the origin of the patch, told collectSPACE.com. “I don’t know where we were, it might have been in a bar, we might have been sitting around the office, I’m not sure where the discussion came up, but he [Jim Buchli] was a former Marine and I was Navy, and all the F-4 pilots, after they went Mach 2, McDonnell Douglas gave them a Mach 2 Club patch. So all of the fighter jocks that flew the F-4s had these Mach 2 patches on their flight jacket, and so we started talking about it.”

Brandenstein and Buchli thought about how the space shuttle reached Mach 25 on reentry, so they should get a patch for that. Together they worked on a design, which ultimately had the number “25” in dark blue set against a light blue rectangle tilted slightly forward. A space shuttle orbiter is depicted on approach, gliding past the numbers and in its wake is a white contrail outlined and inscribed in red with the word “MACH.”

From the start, the patch was intended as a badge of honor, not a souvenir.

“We had it made and gave one to John and Crip [STS-1 crewmates John Young and Bob Crippen], and then it became history. Everybody got one after they flew,” said Brandenstein.

Modern Mach-inations

The Artemis II crew’s Mach 39 patch adopts the general look of Brandenstein and Buchli’s original emblem with the number updated and the winged orbiter replaced by an Orion with its solar wings deployed from the European Service Module.

This is also not the first time the Mach 25 patch has been redesigned.

In 2009, the STS-125 crew flying on space shuttle Atlantis realized that their reentry speed was going to be slightly higher than most other missions as they were entering a higher orbit to conduct the final servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope. As such, upon landing, they adopted Mach 26 patches.

Two years later, Mike Fincke was the first astronaut photographed while wearing a “MAXA 25” patch with the shuttle replaced by a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. At that point, Fincke had flown twice to and from the International Space Station on Soyuz missions. Subsequent similar Soyuz versions of the patch retained the English “MACH” rather than use the Russian “MAXA.”

Vintage and modern examples of the Mach 25 patch and its vehicle variants, including Soyuz, Starliner, and Dragon.

Credit: collectSPACE.com

In 2019, A-B Emblem mocked up and proposed to the Astronaut Office additional variants for use by SpaceX Dragon and Boeing Starliner commercial crews, with each patch depicting their respective capsules. A year later, Doug Hurley was seen wearing a Dragon patch (and a shuttle Mach 25 patch) on his blue flightsuit after becoming one of the first two people to launch on the SpaceX spacecraft.

“I see that they modified the patch with ‘100’ on it for people who spent 100 days on the space station,” Brandenstein said.

Dating back to 2004, the “100 Days” patch subs out the space shuttle with the International Space Station and “MACH” with “DAYS.” It has become a tradition to celebrate ISS crew members’ 100th day in space with the presentation of a patch as part of the festivities.

As astronauts have logged more time over multiple stays, rather than wear multiple 100 Days patches, new versions for 200, 300, and 500 days were made. Fincke (back on the station for his third long-duration stay) presented Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov with a 600 Days patch on December 5, 2025.

JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui (left) and NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren mark 100 days on the

International Space Station in 2015.

Credit: NASA

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Posted Tuesday 9 June 2026 at 7:44 am AEST (my time).

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A little more than five years ago, a shiny white Falcon 9 rocket made its debut flight, boosting a Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Over the next year, it would launch a pair of astronaut missions and a handful of commercial spacecraft.

But since then, this first stage booster, designated B 1067, has mostly flown Starlink missions. It has launched them one after another, always returning safely to a drone ship before undergoing refurbishment and flying again. Sometimes it has flown twice in a single month.

On Monday morning, B 1067 once again took to the skies, launching 29 Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit from Florida. Upon landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, the vehicle completed its 35th mission overall, retaining its title as fleet leader for SpaceX.

Is 40 the goal, or will it be extended again?

The successful launch brings SpaceX closer to its most recently stated goal of qualifying its Falcon 9 first stage vehicles to support 40 missions each. Since that goal was outlined more than two years ago and the company has continued flying its experienced boosters safely across dozens of missions, SpaceX may be intending to push past 40 missions.

We take the Falcon 9 rocket for granted. It now launches so often—a few times a week—that its flights are a complete non-event. Even a milestone like a 35th launch and landing, bringing it closer to space shuttle Discovery‘s record of 39 spaceflights across nearly four decades, seems hardly worth mentioning.

But in reality, the Falcon 9 rocket is the bedrock of SpaceX’s success today. And whatever one might think of the company’s impending IPO—whether it’s a financial boondoggle or a long-awaited opportunity for investors to own a piece of SpaceX—its valuation is largely due to the Falcon 9 vehicle.

The success of Falcon 9 allowed SpaceX to launch cargo and then crew to the space station for NASA, giving it instant credibility as a global spaceflight leader. Experimentation with the Falcon 9 first stages led SpaceX to pioneer first-stage landings and reuse. The record-setting cadence of reused Falcon 9 boosters allowed SpaceX to dominate launch internationally and deploy its Starlink mega-constellation, finally pushing the company to reach profitability.

SpaceX is targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion in its IPO on Friday, which is predicated on Starship flying frequently and deploying massive networks of orbital data centers in space.

But it’s only because of the success of the Falcon 9—with which SpaceX proved it could fly rapid, reusable rockets and use them to deploy thousands of satellites—that anyone gives credence to the company’s future plans. Starship and orbital data centers are the Falcon 9 and Starlink constellations on steroids. Absent the Falcon 9, they seem like the hallucinations of a bad AI model. With the success of the Falcon 9 rocket, a line just might possibly exist from here to there.

More launches than ULA in half a decade

Finally, it’s worth considering just how much work this single Falcon 9 rocket, once so clean and shiny and now so dark and grimy, has accomplished in its short lifetime.

For some context, consider the performance of SpaceX’s top US-based competitor in medium- and heavy-lift launch, United Launch Alliance. Since Booster 1067 made its debut in June 2021, the company has flown its workhorse Atlas V rocket a total of 22 times and the Vulcan rocket four times, and the Delta IV Heavy vehicle made its final three flights.

So in the time that this single Falcon 9 first stage has flown and landed 35 times, its competitor company has made 29 total launches. Put another way, this rocket has put more mass into orbit than more than two dozen expendable rockets over half a decade of effort.

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Posted Tuesday 9 June 2026 at 7:43 am AEST (my time).

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Ötzi the Iceman, Europe’s most famous mummy, is crawling with microbes, some long dead, some still eking out a living after thousands of years, and some very modern.

After he died in the Ötztal Alps, the Copper Age man now known as Ötzi lay alone and forgotten for 5,300 years, until a group of hikers stumbled on his freeze-dried remains in 1991. Since then, he’s received a lot of attention from scientists, who have sequenced his DNA, pored over his last meal and the remains of his gut microbes, and examined his clothes and his broken tools. Today, Ötzi lies in a high-tech resting place at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy, where, it turns out, his body is still home to a handful of cold-adapted yeast species that have probably been with him since just after he died.

Slightly morbid souvenirs from the Alps

Microbiologist Mohamed S. Sarhan (of the Institute of Mummy Studies at the private Eurac Research center) and his colleagues recently sampled material from Ötzi’s stomach and meltwater from inside his body, swabbed his skin, and even sampled airborne microbes from his frozen storage room and the lab outside it. They also took samples from a block of frozen alpine soil taken from next to Ötzi’s body back in 1991.

We already know quite a bit about Ötzi’s gut microbes thanks to a 2019 study, but Sarhan and his colleagues wanted the bigger picture. Instead of just sequencing all the microbial DNA they could find on Ötzi, the researchers wanted to understand which species were really part of his ancient one-man ecosystem and which were modern contaminants.

Sarhan and his colleagues cultured some of the samples, and also put some through a process called shotgun metagenomics, which involves sequencing all the bits of DNA floating around in a sample. Inside Ötzi’s guts, Sarhan and his colleagues—like previous studies—found ancient DNA from a host of bacteria that match what we expect of ancient, “non-Westernized” gut microbiomes. But elsewhere on and in the mummy, the team also found some microbes that weren’t actually dead.

Two mountaineers (one of them Reinhold Messner) with Otzi, Europe’s oldest natural human mummy, in the

Otztal Alps between Austria and Italy in September 1991.

Credit: Paul Hanny/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Ötzi is kept in carefully maintained conditions, as close as possible to the glacier that preserved his body for more than 5,000 years. The chamber is a brisk -6º Celsius, with 99 percent humidity carefully maintained by a spray of UV-treated water. That’s enough to protect the mummy from most of the microbes that usually help decompose human remains. But Sarhan and his colleagues were surprised to find that it’s also the perfect environment for a few microbes that Ötzi carried with him down from the mountains.

In samples from the mummy, Sarhan and his colleagues found four strains of cold-tolerant yeasts, all closely related to similar yeasts found in Arctic glaciers, in Antarctica, and high in the mountains of Italy and Russia. And unlike Ötzi’s long-dead gut bacteria, which left just broken, aging fragments of DNA behind, the yeasts seem to be alive and reproducing (albeit at, ahem, a glacial pace).

“These yeasts have accompanied Ötzi on his long journey through the millennia,” said Frank Maxiner, director of the Institute for Mummy Studies at Eurac and a coauthor of the recent study, in a press release. (Ötzi probably doesn’t find that terribly comforting, but you never know.)

Thawed ancient microbes or a long-lived colony?

The yeasts—species of Phenolifera, Glaciozyma, Goffeauzyma, and Mrakia, for the mycology fans—turned up on Ötzi’s skin, in his stomach, and in water sampled from inside his body. Sarhan and his colleagues cultured live yeast from the samples, but their shotgun metagenomics results also revealed a bunch of short fragments of DNA, most bearing the kind of damage that happens when DNA molecules break down over time. That’s a hallmark of ancient DNA, which meant that the yeasts had most likely been living on and in Ötzi’s body since shortly after he died.

And when Sarhan and his colleagues compared samples taken in 2010 to those taken in 2019, they saw longer fragments and less damage, on average—in other words, there was more recent DNA in the mix, which suggested the yeasts were slowly but persistently growing.

Yeasts like Glaciozyma have been found in small depressions in the glacial ice not far from where Ötzi’s body lay, so it makes sense that they’d have been among the microorganisms drawn to a fresh food source in the form of a dead Copper Age mountaineer. Or, as Sarhan and his colleagues put it, “potential postmortem infiltration through the mummy’s natural openings.” It’s the circle of life.

This photo shows the area of the Ötztal Alps where Ötzi spent his last days and the first 5,300 years of his afterlife.

Credit: By 32 Fuß-Freak – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=180672357

From there, the yeasts probably lay dormant in between brief thawing sessions, when they proliferated in transient patches of meltwater or moist tissue. And the yeasts may have actually gotten some help from modern efforts to preserve Ötzi’s remains. Three out of the four species can break down phenol, an antifungal compound that conservators used to treat the mummy in 1991. The treatment would have given those particular species an evolutionary edge over others.

“The central question that imposes itself now is whether these yeasts are descendants of ancient yeasts that maintained their multiplication along the years, or they were in a dormant state that was revived after thawing the mummy,” wrote Sarhan and his colleagues.

The researchers did reportedly make sourdough using cultures of at least one of the yeast species they identified on Ötzi, but they almost certainly didn’t use actual cultures taken from the mummy—for a mix of ethical, health, and practical reasons, ranging from “Eww!” to “Please don’t eat valuable scientific research material.” Having identified the species, it would have been easy to culture the same yeast from a starter that had, hopefully, never developed a taste for human flesh.

Life, uh, finds a way

Sarhan and his colleagues also found traces of a soil bacterium called Pseudomonas, which has probably also been with Ötzi at least since death, in nearly all of the samples from the mummy, as well as the soil taken from near his body on the glacier. And like the yeast, the bacteria seem to still be alive, in the slow way of organisms that live in the cold.

They’re even still evolving; the bacteria from Ötzi’s body have some small but noticeable genetic differences from the bacteria in the soil where he died, although they’re clearly related. It looks as if Pseudomonas colonized Ötzi’s body once and then, as Sarhan and his colleagues put it, “this specific strain may have adapted to the unique conditions of the conservation facility or the mummy’s tissues themselves.”

Meanwhile, in swabs from the mummy’s skin, Sarhan and his colleagues found bacteria like Methylobaderium and Sphingomonas, both known for being resilient in tough environments and for forming biofilms. Those species are currently a huge part of the microbiome on Ötzi’s skin, but not inside his body. Sarhan and his colleagues say they’re probably there thanks to the constant spray of UV-treated water that maintains the humidity in the conservation chamber.

“These taxa… have effectively reshaped the mummy’s external microbiome,” wrote Sarhan and his colleagues.

Not an artifact, but a “living archive” of microbes

Elisabeth Vallazza, the Director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology that houses Ötzi, said in a press release that Ötzi is stable and he’s carefully monitored, adding that “further research and full conservation efforts are certainly needed to preserve it for many more generations.”

We can think of Ötzi’s microbiome in three parts: the microbes that lived in and on his body while he was running for his life through the Alps (like Rombousta hominsis and Clostridium moniliforme), the ones that moved in after his death (like Pseudomonas and the yeasts—which is also a great band name), and the ones that came from the environment he now rests in (like Methylobacterium). Five thousand years after his death, Ötzi’s body is still a whole ecosystem, built on the ruins of the one that once inhabited his body along with him.

“The Iceman is not a static relic, but a dynamic biological interface,” wrote Sarhan and his colleagues. And that’s the great truth of existence: life’s short, then you die—and the whole time, you’re a dynamic biological interface.

Microbiome, 2026. DOI: 10.1186/s40168-026-02417-6  (About DOIs).

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Posted Sunday 7 June 2026 at 7:05 am AEST (my time).

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Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire startup ecosystem has developed around the use of different—and typically smaller—reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.

The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power.

Antares is one of a number of companies that is basing its design on a new fuel system called TRISO that takes some of the complexity and safety out of the reactor design and places them in the fuel design. The fuel design is based on tiny pellets with a uranium oxide core. The pellets are surrounded by several layers of carbon that can moderate the energy of both the neutrons and lighter nuclei that are released by fission reactions. All of that is encased in a hard ceramic shell that’s designed to withstand the highest temperatures that can be produced by the encased uranium.

As long as your reactor can keep the TRISO pellets contained, then there should be no risk of meltdown or even the release of the most dangerous isotopes produced from the reactions. There are still some safety concerns, as neutrons will still escape and can potentially convert some of the surrounding material into unstable isotopes. But the Antares design surrounds the TRISO with a graphite sheath, which should slow most of these neutrons down.

To mitigate non-radioactive risks, the Antares design uses sodium to take heat from the reactor to a heat exchanger. The heat is transferred to pressurized nitrogen, which then drives a turbine in a closed Brayton cycle setup.

At the moment, Antares is just testing what it calls a Mark 0 reactor, which is not connected to the power-generation portion. Instead, it’s being used to validate the company’s modeling of the physical conditions in its reactors and generate safety data that can be used during licensing applications. Attempts to run the entire system, including electrical generation, are expected to happen next year.

While the work was done at a Department of Energy Lab, the company is working with the Department of Defense’s Project Pele program for developing a mobile nuclear reactor. The company has also received support from NASA.

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Posted Saturday 6 June 2026 at 8:01 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.44 of the Rocket Report! The news this week is decidedly weighted in favor of heavy-lift rockets, largely due to the fallout from last Thursday’s explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn on its launch pad in Florida. Blue Origin aims to resume launches at the badly damaged launch facility by the end of the year, but there’s good reason to be skeptical of this timeline. With New Glenn grounded, will Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos approach Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch his Blue Moon lander to the lunar south pole? It sure sounds like NASA is pushing for that.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Spaceport development moves forward in Canada. There’s been a lot of talk about the Canadian government’s recent commitment to invest in a sovereign launch capability. There was the announcement last year of a federal budget of 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($131 million) over three years to establish a sovereign launch program. In March, the government said it would lease a dedicated launch pad at a commercially developed spaceport in Nova Scotia for national defense purposes, committing 200 million Canadian dollars ($144 million) to the deal. The agreement is a boon for Maritime Launch Services, which is developing Spaceport Nova Scotia after years of slow progress at the coastal site, SpaceQ reports.

Keeping civil… The initial phases of development focus on civil works, with road construction, utility connections, and construction of a “central hub” that will connect key commodities to the spaceport’s launch pads. Design work on the spaceport’s first launch vehicle integration facility should be complete in July, with construction tendering to start before the end of August, according to Stephen Matier, the CEO of Maritime Launch Services.

Canada is spending serious money on developing its own access to space, with federal grants awarded to three Canadian launch startups, and now an agreement to bankroll construction at Spaceport Nova Scotia. But Canada has a long path ahead. The nation has little experience in the launch sector, and it’s hard not to wonder if there’s any significant private investment that will follow the government’s sizable financial commitment in this area. (submitted by JoeyS-IVB)

A new Chinese rocket designed for reuse. The race to field China’s first reusable launch vehicle is far less predictable than a similar competition that played out in the United States a decade ago. A new rocket entered the field Monday with the first successful launch of China’s Long March 12B rocket, Ars reports. Engineers did not attempt to recover the Long March 12B’s booster stage, but the rocket flew with grid fins and landing legs, and Chinese officials touted plans to eventually land and reuse the first stage. The Long March 12B’s debut follows China’s first two attempts to recover an orbital-class booster with the Zhuque-3 and Long March 12A rockets in December. Neither landed successfully, but both rockets reached orbit.

A new rocket (almost) every month… Another new Chinese rocket, the partially reusable Tianlong-3 developed by a company named Space Pioneer, failed on its first launch in April. Several more new rockets designed for booster reuse could fly later this year. The Long March 12B is the largest of China’s new crop of would-be reusable rockets. It was developed by China Commercial Rocket Co. Ltd., or CACL, an opaque business venture set up by China’s sprawling state-owned aerospace enterprise. According to Chinese state media reports, engineers designed and developed the Long March 12B in just 21 months. If the claim is true, it would be a remarkably fast timeline to progress from a clean sheet to an orbital flight.

Impulse Space’s wallet just got a lot heavier. On Tuesday, Impulse Space, a company dedicated to improving space mobility, announced it has raised $500 million in Series D funding, Ars reports. Since it was founded five years ago by SpaceX veteran Tom Mueller, the company has now raised more than $1 billion. “Timing is everything,” Mueller said in an interview about the new round of funding. By this, he means the company has found its way into many markets. The company has already flown three missions with a small spacecraft, Mira, which was first launched in 2023 with a novel propulsion system powered by non-toxic propellants, nitrous oxide and ethane.

Lots to do... Impulse has more customers lined up. After the company announced its much larger “Helios” kick stage, demand from commercial customers was higher than anticipated. The US Space Force has become increasingly interested in satellite mobility, and now Impulse Space also believes it can provide landing services in the “1-ton-class” to NASA for its new Moon Base initiative.

Amazon is running out of Atlas Vs. United Launch Alliance overcame adverse weather conditions to launch a batch of Amazon Leo’s broadband internet satellites on its Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 29, Spaceflight Now reports. This was the seventh batch of production satellites that ULA launched on behalf of Amazon and the penultimate mission for the tech giant using an Atlas V rocket. There were 29 satellites aboard the Atlas V.

One more to go... Amazon purchased a total of 47 launches from ULA: 38 Vulcan rockets and nine Atlas V rockets. Amazon has now used eight of those Atlas Vs and none of the Vulcans, which are grounded after a solid rocket booster anomaly on a US Space Force mission in February. In all, Amazon purchased more than 100 rockets to launch more than 3,200 satellites for its first-generation constellation. The two rockets Amazon intends to use most—ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn—are currently unavailable.

Blue Origin strives for a quick comeback. The chief executive of Blue Origin, whose large New Glenn rocket exploded spectacularly less than a week ago at the company’s launch site in Florida, vowed Monday night that the company would launch again before the end of 2026, Ars reports. Writing on the social media site X, Blue Origin’s Dave Limp said the company had been able to complete a preliminary survey of the LC-36A launch site. “Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility, we can share a bit of good news,” Limp said. “The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen, and LNG tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good.”

Taking inventory... Limp also confirmed that the company would press ahead with a rebuild of the LC-36A site, which is designed for the 7×2 variant of the New Glenn rocket. One option had been to focus on building a larger pad next door, at LC-36B, capable of supporting the larger 9×4 variant of the rocket (the nine and four, respectively, refer to the number of engines in the first and second stage of the rocket). Notably, Limp also said Blue Origin had a plan to replace the massive transporter-erector that moves the New Glenn rocket from its nearby integration hangar out to the launch pad. This was damaged beyond repair during the test failure on Thursday, May 28.

Rebuilding a launch pad takes time. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there’s at least one other launch pad explosion we can use for comparison to Blue Origin’s accident at LC-36. Nearly 10 years ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on a launch pad a few miles north of where Blue Origin’s rocket went up in flames last week. The Falcon 9 explosion was somewhat less powerful, but some of the parallels between these two spectacular explosions were uncanny, Ars reports.

Been there, done that… To better understand the challenges Blue Origin now faces, Ars spoke with several SpaceX veterans who experienced the Falcon 9 failure in 2016 and worked the long days afterward to get the rocket flying and rebuild the shattered facility at Space Launch Complex-40. Blue Origin’s CEO, Dave Limp, has said the company will launch from its damaged pad by the end of the year, less than seven months from now. None of the former SpaceX employees Ars spoke with—some on the record, some off—believe this timeline is realistic. Twelve months was generally viewed as the best-case scenario. Eighteen months was seen as most likely.

Blue’s explosion key to understanding methane. Last week’s explosion of a New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was a learning experience for safety officials looking to open up the spaceport to hundreds more launches per year, Ars reports. Most of the rockets that will launch from Cape Canaveral in the 2030s will be fueled by methane or liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen. The US Space Force, which runs the spaceport, maintains strict rules for methane/liquid oxygen, or methalox, rockets because there is little data on how the combustible fluids might ignite in an accident. Comparatively, kerosene and hydrogen are known quantities.

A real blast… For now, military officials are treating any methalox rocket with “100 percent TNT blast equivalency” and maintaining wide keep-out zones around their launch pads when the rockets are loaded with propellant. Their intention is to ensure the safety of the public and workers at the spaceport. With more data on how methane-fueled rockets explode, officials expect the keep-out zones to get smaller over time. To that end, NASA, the Space Force, and SpaceX have conducted subscale ground tests to gather measurements on methane’s explosive yield. With last week’s New Glenn failure, engineers have real-world data on the blast wave and overpressure generated by the most powerful explosion in the history of Cape Canaveral.

NASA chief urges new ride for Blue Moon. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was supposed to launch the company’s first lunar lander, Blue Moon Mark 1, sometime this fall. The Blue Moon test mission is an important precursor for Blue Origin’s future human-rated Moon lander for the Artemis program, and NASA is eager to see it fly. The rocket’s explosion on the launch pad last week makes a launch on New Glenn this year unachievable. NASA now wants to find an alternative launcher for the first of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon demo missions, Spaceflight Now reports. In an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman described a “whole of government response” to the May 28 incident with the New Glenn. “We are also decoupling the lander from the launch vehicle and the pad itself,” he said.

Only one option... “NASA is laser focused on the lander because we’re laser focused on our mission to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon before 2028, and we’re going be able to keep that lander in development, progressing, so it’s available for our test mission in 2027, which is Artemis III, and potentially available to meet our landing objectives in 2028,” Isaacman said.

A NASA spokesperson confirmed to Spaceflight Now that NASA would like to see the launches of the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and potentially the Blue Moon Mark 2 crewed lander move to a rocket that’s not New Glenn. For Mark 1, at least, the only realistic option is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, but there are several technical hurdles to making that happen.

Artemis III booster segments shipped to KSC. While there is some uncertainty regarding timelines and landers, the rocket for the Artemis III mission is being prepared for launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Northrop Grumman began shipping all of the remaining solid rocket booster segments for the mission’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from Utah on Tuesday, June 2, NASASpaceflight reports. The Union Pacific train will deliver the eight remaining booster segments to Kennedy, joining other booster components previously shipped to the Florida launch site.

Chris Cianciola, NASA’s deputy SLS program manager, said at a departure ceremony in Utah that NASA will begin stacking the boosters on the SLS mobile launch platform this summer, with an eye toward having the rocket ready for launch as soon as March 2027. The mission will launch only when at least one of NASA’s Artemis lunar landers is ready for a demonstration mission in low-Earth orbit. Officials have said that isn’t likely to occur until later in 2027, and that was before Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explosion last week.

A Trumped-up ride...  The train carrying the booster segments to Florida is being pulled by Union Pacific locomotive 4547, built in partnership with Wabtec and GE Transportation. In response to online criticism, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on X: “A major vendor, Union Pacific, decided to paint one of its locomotives in patriotic colors to celebrate America’s 250th birthday as it transports components of a NASA rocket. They also decided to paint “45 47″ on the train to recognize the sitting president during this important anniversary.”

This is the third locomotive in Union Pacific’s presidential series. The rail operator previously honored President Abraham Lincoln and President George H.W. Bush with specially numbered locomotives. President Donald Trump is the first president to receive the honor while still in office.

Next three launches

June 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-43 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02:00 UTC

June 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-35 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 10:07 UTC

June 9: Zhuque-2E | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 08:20 UTC

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Posted Saturday 6 June 2026 at 8:00 am AEST (my time).

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Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket erupts in a fireball at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Last week’s explosion of a New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was a learning experience for safety officials looking to open up the spaceport to hundreds more launches per year.

The launch base on Florida’s Space Coast is gearing up for a flurry of new arrivals. SpaceX is building multiple launch pads for its super-heavy Starship rocket, which will operate within a few miles of launch pads operated by SpaceX rivals Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. Two other companies, Stoke Space and Relativity Space, are also developing launch sites along a narrow stretch of coastline at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

All of them have, or will soon have, rockets burning methane or liquified natural gas, replacing legacy launch vehicles fueled by kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid propellants. There are good technical reasons for making the switch, but until last week, engineers had scant real-world data on the damage that millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen would cause if a fully loaded rocket exploded on the launch pad or soon after liftoff.

By 2036, the Space Force projects that the spaceport could support up to 500 launches per year, five times last year’s total. The combination of these lofty launch forecasts and the Space Force’s conservative safety protocols has caused some tension at the Cape Canaveral spaceport.

Competitors of SpaceX have worried that daily launches and landings of the company’s reusable super-heavy Starship rocket might force evacuations of their own facilities for safety reasons. The US Space Force, which runs the spaceport, maintains strict rules for methane/liquid oxygen, or methalox, rockets. Comparatively, kerosene and hydrogen are known quantities.

For now, military officials are treating any methalox rocket with “100 percent TNT blast equivalency” and maintaining wide keep-out zones around their launch pads when the rockets are loaded with propellant. Their intention is to ensure the safety of the public and workers at the spaceport. With more data on how methane-fueled rockets explode, officials expect the keep-out zones to get smaller over time. To this end, NASA, the Space Force, the FAA, and SpaceX have conducted sub-scale ground tests to gather measurements on methane’s explosive yield.

Artist’s illustration of Starships stacked on two launch pads at the Space Force’s Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Credit: SpaceX

Real-world data

The 100 percent blast equivalency policy was in effect at Cape Canaveral last Thursday, when Blue Origin loaded its New Glenn booster full of methane and liquid oxygen at Launch Complex 36. The smaller second stage was filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as Blue Origin’s launch team counted down to a brief test-firing of the rocket’s seven BE-4 engines.

A fireball enveloped the rocket as the engines lit, destroying the launch vehicle and much of the launch pad. The explosion knocked Blue Origin’s only launch facility out of commission. The company says it aims to repair the site and resume launching by the end of the year, but past launch pad rebuilds have taken at least twice as long. It took SpaceX about 15 months to return one of its launch pads to service after a Falcon 9 rocket exploded during a similar test in 2016. That event was not as powerful as the Blue Origin incident last week.

“New Glenn is the biggest rocket we’ve launched here off the Eastern Range, and with that, it had the most fuel,” said Col. Brian Chatman, commander of the Space Force unit that operates the Cape Canaveral spaceport. “That makes it the largest explosion that we’ve had out here.”

There were no injuries to any personnel. The explosion destroyed Blue Origin’s transporter-erector that supports the rocket during horizontal rollout and raises it vertically on the pad. Blue Origin says it won’t replace the transporter-erector and will instead employ an “alternative vertical conop” (concept of operations) when it resumes New Glenn operations at Launch Complex 36, which the company leases from the Space Force.

Exploding rockets are nothing new in the launch business. Launch vehicles routinely blew up on the launch pad in the early years of the Space Age. The only rocket bigger than New Glenn to fail with a full load of fuel on or near its launch pad was the Soviet Union’s N1 rocket more than 50 years ago.

The Blast Danger Area (BDA) for last week’s ill-fated New Glenn test—based on the assumption of 100 percent blast equivalency—spanned a diameter of 7,174 feet, or an average distance of 3,587 feet from the pad, according to the Space Force. That is approximately two-thirds of a mile. All personnel were evacuated from this area before Blue Origin started fueling the rocket.

The farthest debris found so far was thrown a half-mile from the launch pad, Chatman said. He said engineers collected “phenomenal data” from the explosion, and officials will use the measurements to improve models on methalox rocket explosions. “As the teams are now going out and looking at the surrounding area, we’ll have a good feel for what overpressure impacts look like across the range and what that explosion looked like in and around the area,” Chatman said.

“Blue Origin also had some sensors and collected some data inside their integration facility and is working in lock step with the government, both on the Space Force side and on the NASA side, to help us evaluate and work that data into our models.”

SpaceX’s combined Starship and Super Heavy booster is the only methane-fueled rocket larger than New Glenn with plans to launch from Cape Canaveral. Starship already flies from SpaceX’s private base in South Texas, which operates under guidelines set by the Federal Aviation Administration. The only launch facilities there are owned by SpaceX, eliminating any concern about interference with competitors.

SpaceX is developing Starship launch infrastructure at Pad 37 and Pad 39A, also used by the company’s Falcon

Heavy rocket. SpaceX launches Falcon 9s from Pad 40. United Launch Alliance flies Vulcan and Atlas V rockets

from Pad 41, and Blue Origin has based its New Glenn rocket at Pad 36. Stoke and Relativity are building pads

between Pad 36 and Pad 37.

Credit: NASA (labels by Ars Technica)

When Starship comes to Florida, Chatman said the initial BDA in place when the rocket is fueled will extend an average distance of about 6,000 feet from the pad, for a total diameter of roughly 12,000 feet. The exact size can change based on environmental conditions each day. Roads, waterways, and facilities within that footprint will be inaccessible during Starship tests, launches, and returns.

The Commercial Space Federation, a lobbying group whose members include SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other companies with methane-fueled rockets, has argued the government should set its TNT blast equivalency to no greater than 25 percent, a change that would greatly reduce the size of keep-out zones around launch pads.

“We know we have a conservative approach,” Chatman said. “We know that we will be able to bring in that BDA… We don’t know how far we’ll be able to bring that in. We are going to make a data-driven decision on how much we reduce the BDA, but until we have all that data fed into the models and that true analysis done, we’re going to continue with the conservative approach that we have with that 100 percent blast TNT equivalency because we just validated that (with the Blue Origin explosion) … We had zero casualties, zero injuries across the board.”

Outside of the launch pad itself, Chatman said the overpressure from the New Glenn blast shattered windows at a Space Force hangar now used as a museum about a mile away from the pad. There was also damage to a weather balloon facility at the base. Blue Origin is on the hook to pay for any repairs to property outside of the pad, as it is for the build of the pad itself, Chatman said.

“The Launch Complex 36 rebuild, that’s on Blue, and we’ll look to Blue to be able to support them to continue to work as they rebuild that pad,” Chatman said.

Story updated at 3 pm EST (20:00 UTC) to include FAA’s role in methane explosive analysis.

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Posted Saturday 6 June 2026 at 7:59 am AEST (my time).

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When the pandemic hit, just like so many Americans, researcher Emma Harrington started working remotely. What shocked her most in those early days of COVID was how productive she was. Then a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, she found that she could still focus on her work despite being at home. But it wasn’t all positive: the “social ramifications” took a toll, particularly during periods when she lived alone. “I struggled with having just whole days where I couldn’t be sure that I would see people, even in brief ways,” she recalls.

It turns out that Harrington isn’t alone—new research by her and her colleagues suggests that the long-term shift to remote or hybrid work after the pandemic may have had an adverse effect on workers’ mental health. The study was published today in Science.

Importantly, the research compared workers’ mental health and alone time before and after the peak years of the pandemic in a bid to capture the effect of remote work outside of 2020 and 2021, when COVID was most acute and people were forced to isolate. Certainly, many workplaces have remained entirely remote or have a hybrid in-office policy. For example, a 2023 poll from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that as many as one in five people said they worked remotely.

Harrington, now an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, and her co-authors analyzed the results of five surveys that were completed between 2011 and 2024 and included a total of 588,322 Americans. The team sorted workers into “remotable” jobs, such as software engineering or law, versus “nonremotable” careers, such as nursing.

What they found was stark: after controlling for confounding factors such as age, parental status and education levels, workers in remote-friendly jobs, particularly those who lived alone, reported spending much more time by themselves and having greater indicators of mental distress than their nonremote peers.

One statistic particularly stood out to Harrington: in more recent years, around 25 percent of survey respondents who were both working in remotable jobs and living alone said they’d spent the entire day alone. “That amount of isolation could have pretty detrimental mental health impacts,” Harrington says.

The study doesn’t capture all the nuanced effects of remote work. The authors specifically didn’t focus on work productivity, for example, or individual benefits, such as skipping stressful commutes or spending extra time with family. “Our results are not saying that there are no benefits of remote work,” Harrington says. Instead the findings indicate “net effects” on mental well-being across the country, she explains.

After all, remote work is popular: research shows that about 80 percent of workers want to work from home at least one day per week. Data suggest that “the best way to improve mental health with WFH [work from home] is: let people choose,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, who studies remote work but was not involved in the new Science study. “People don’t want to be forced into the office five days a week but also don’t want to be forced to lock down WFH five days a week.”

“My big fear is: this study is misunderstood as showing the WFH is bad for mental health, and this leads a lot of CEOs to say, ‘WFH is bad for you, so get back to the office now; it’s for your own good,’” Bloom adds.

It’s unclear what may be driving the discrepancy between people’s preferences for remote work and potential negative effects on their mental well-being, Harrington says. “Our hypothesis about this is that it just takes a while for these negative impacts to materialize for people,” she says. That lag might make it difficult for people to link remote work to their negative mental health outcomes, she says. But more research is needed to know for sure.

It’s also unclear whether going into the office a few days per week might “mitigate” any negative mental health outcomes, the authors write. It’s also important to consider how much the work environment itself may affect employees.

At the very least, we ought to consider ways to make remote work better, the authors conclude. “Across a range of remote work arrangements, both individuals and organizations may want to prioritize making remote work less isolating by, for example, coordinating in-office days for hybrid workers or encouraging informal interaction, even online,” they write. Zoom party, anyone?

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It may appear that humanoid robots capable of handling any task have almost arrived—especially when tech companies showcase them performing acrobatic feats or handling household chores. But there is still a significant gap between these robot demonstrations and proving that the same robots can reliably and repeatedly manage such tasks in the real world.

The latest wave of robot videos can be particularly tricky, given the human tendency to anthropomorphize objects with a humanoid figure. A robot arm doing a dance move may simply seem “cool,” but a humanoid robot doing the same dance move can trigger more misleading assumptions, said Jonathan Hurst, cofounder of Agility Robotics and a robotics researcher at Oregon State University.

“People automatically extrapolate and assume that the robot that looks like a person can do all the things that a person who can dance could do—which is not true,” Hurst told Ars. “But a lot of the startup companies do kind of prey on that for being able to raise a lot of money.”

One of the biggest challenges is developing robots that can generalize their skills across many different conditions and environments in the same way that humans can, said Sergey Levine, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and cofounder of the AI and robotics company Physical Intelligence. But that degree of generalization is practically impossible to capture within a single robot demonstration.

“Maybe the robot can pour a glass of wine, but can it pour it out of any bottle and into any glass in any environment?” Levine said. “That’s actually a lot harder than having a robot do a backflip in one stage demo.”

The real measure for robotic capabilities involves conducting “quantitative, large-scale evaluations” in real-world environments, Levine explained. “There’s always a gap between the kind of things that somebody can show in a demo and what the real capability of the robot is,” he said.

What to watch out for

There are several things to keep in mind when watching the surge of robot demonstration videos and even livestreams. First, such robotic demonstrations are not necessarily indicative of robots operating autonomously without human control or oversight, said Dipam Patel, a PhD candidate in computer science at Purdue University and a research assistant at the US Army DevCom Army Research Lab. Many demonstrations still rely on human operators directly controlling the robots’ actions through teleoperation.

“Unless a research paper or a company is explicitly mentioning that [the robot] is completely autonomous, you should take it with a very big pinch of salt,” Patel told Ars.

Another question to consider is whether the demonstration shows robots tackling a completely new test environment for the first time, or whether the robots are simply repeating a task they had already learned to do in that specific training environment. The new test environment would be significantly more impressive at showcasing robots capable of doing tasks autonomously in a generalized way, Patel said.

It is also worth checking the video playback speed for any robot demonstration, because “usually the robots are very slow” for safety and other reasons, Patel said. Companies may sometimes disclose that a robot demonstration video is running at two times or four times normal speed—meaning the robot could be taking twice as long or four times as long as a human to do the same task.

Robot demonstration videos can also vary wildly in their informative value and transparency. Some are clearly intended to be performative entertainment clips that can go viral on social media, or polished promotional videos from companies seeking new clients and investors. Others may provide more of a behind-the-scenes look at the robot training process while acknowledging robot mistakes along the way.

But even if a robot demo video appears incredibly impressive and authentic while coming from a more reputable company or research lab, just keep in mind that it’s still a small glimpse of the bigger picture. The real indicators of progress in robotic capabilities are not so easily packaged for Internet audiences.

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Posted Friday 5 June 2026 at 11:30 am AEST (my time).

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NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft was in excellent shape when it disappeared behind Mars on December 6 of last year. The routine passage, called an occultation, was supposed to last less than an hour, but ground teams didn’t hear from the spacecraft when it was supposed to regain contact with Earth.

The loss of communication triggered contingency plans for engineers to try to restore a link with MAVEN, which orbits Mars more than 200 million miles from Earth. To no avail, they listened for faint signals and uplinked commands in the blind. Hopes of saving the mission faded over time, and NASA officials announced Wednesday that they’re giving up on it.

“NASA has ceased efforts to search for the MAVEN spacecraft and are beginning activities to decommission the mission,” said Mike Moreau, MAVEN’s project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. 

Loss of signal

It will take some time for engineers to try to unravel what happened to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which launched from Earth in 2013 and arrived in orbit around Mars in 2014 to study the interaction between the Martian atmosphere and the solar wind. MAVEN was an unqualified success, lasting 11 years at Mars and far outliving its original prime mission. But the spacecraft’s sudden failure was a surprise. Many of NASA’s planetary exploration missions operate for decades.

With the scant information available,  investigators may never determine exactly what went wrong with MAVEN. Investigators are combing through data the spacecraft transmitted before Mars blocked the signal, and engineers were able to recover fragments of telemetry from MAVEN after it reemerged from behind the planet.

“As part of this investigation, the team members at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were successful in recovering some fragments of telemetry and Doppler shift data from the spacecraft,” Moreau said. “These data were extracted from recorded signals that were recovered during the hours following the loss of signal.”

Ground controllers didn’t see these faint signals in real time. They were recorded as part of a separate science campaign seeking to gather information about the density and dynamics of the upper Martian atmosphere, which can distort radio signals that pass through it.

“One of the bits of that we were able to confirm is an inertial rate measurement that told us the spacecraft was spinning at about 2.7 revolutions per minute,” Moreau said. “We also confirmed that that was consistent with a Doppler signature that we saw in the data. That’s faster than the spacecraft is expected to rotate, and that indicates a problem that the spacecraft probably couldn’t recover from.”

Without the ability to point its solar arrays toward the Sun, the tumbling spacecraft likely drained its batteries within hours.

“That was one of the data points that helped us understand that the spacecraft probably reached a power state that was not supportable to continue operations,” Moreau said. “Those are the facts that we know. The anomaly review board is still looking at the root cause of what actually initiated the failure.”

MAVEN is orbiting Mars on an oval-shaped, elliptical path taking it as close as 110 miles (180 km) and as far as 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft, about the size of a small car, will remain in this orbit for 50 to 100 years before naturally falling into the Martian atmosphere and burning up.

Artist’s illustration of the MAVEN spacecraft in its elliptical orbit around Mars (not to scale).

Credit: NASA/University of Colorado/LASP

What is lost?

There are two answers to this question. MAVEN was built as a research platform to help scientists understand how the atmosphere of Mars has changed over billions of years. Before MAVEN, scientists knew Mars must have been warmer and wetter and that it had a thicker atmosphere in the ancient past. The atmosphere on Mars today is too thin to support liquid water at the surface, and there is now widespread evidence of a network of lakes and rivers that covered Mars billions of years ago.

MAVEN found evidence of the mechanisms that stripped molecules from the upper layers of the atmosphere, a process known as atmospheric escape. The spacecraft’s science instruments monitored how the Martian atmosphere responded to blasts of charged particles emitted by massive eruptions from the Sun.

“One of our most exciting discoveries used 11 years of MAVEN data to observe, for the first time at any planet, an atmospheric escape process called sputtering,” said Shannon Curry, MAVEN’s principal investigator at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This is where charged particles crash into the upper atmosphere and splash out the neutral atmosphere, much like doing a cannonball in a pool. Our team used noble gas isotopes to confirm that this process has been a dominant escape mechanism for billions of years.”

A solar storm in 2024 hit Mars particularly hard. “We saw orders of magnitude more atmospheric escape, and we even captured images of glowing aurora across the planet,” Curry said.

MAVEN’s scientific legacy is secure, but the goodbye isn’t easy for teams working on the project, which scientists first proposed to NASA in 2006.

“I think the team has really experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission,” Moreau said.

“At the same time, we are incredibly proud of the science we’ve accomplished over the last decade,” Curry said. “MAVEN was the best observer of atmospheric escape anywhere in the Solar System. We now have a better understanding of atmospheric escape at Mars than at any other planet, including Earth.”

The second answer is a little more uncertain. For most of its time at Mars, the MAVEN spacecraft provided a relay for scientific data uplinked from NASA’s rovers and landers on the Martian surface. The relay allowed NASA to return significantly more data and imagery from rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity than would be possible through a direct-to-Earth radio connection.

With MAVEN out of the picture, NASA has four other orbiters it can use to provide this critical radio link. But officials aren’t sure how much longer they will last. Three of the four remaining relay orbiters are older than MAVEN, which played an outsized role in the relay network thanks to its higher orbit.

“Over the life of the mission, MAVEN supported more than 8 percent of all of our relay sessions planned by our rovers and landers, but it accounted for nearly 18 percent of all of the data returned, illustrating its usefulness when returning large data volumes,” said Tiffany Morgan, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

The network still has plenty of capacity to support the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, with some minor caveats.

“We do have remaining assets, and those assets have adjusted the amount of data that they return, and the rovers have also adjusted their planning for how they connect to those assets,” Morgan said. “There is a slight delay on occasion, because we don’t have as many assets in view, to getting our science data back, and MAVEN was critical in returning science data versus operational data. But the Mars Relay Network is resilient enough at this point in time to accommodate, for the most part, the loss of MAVEN with the added delay.”

NASA is asking commercial companies to develop a replacement for the existing Mars Relay Network. The new commercial system, called the Mars Telecommunications Network, is expected to provide higher throughput and broader coverage for NASA’s future missions to the red planet.

“Instead of each mission designing its own communications solution, we’ll build in a more capable architecture deliberately designed for Mars,” said Greg Heckler, deputy program manager for capability development at NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation office. “It will be built on the lessons from MAVEN, from the other orbiters, from every mission operating in this environment, including the current rovers, and from some of our growing endeavors around the Moon.”

NASA wants the Mars Telecommunications Network to be operational by the 2030s. The agency released a request for proposals last month.

“I think there’s … urgency,” Heckler said. “I think NASA establishing this infrastructure is going to be very important to continue science operations of the current missions here today and then enable us to execute on these newer, bigger missions yet to come.”

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Posted Friday 5 June 2026 at 7:50 am AEST (my time).

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Despite having tiny brains, bumblebees have demonstrated a remarkable ability to socially learn how to use tools, solve simple puzzles, and cooperate to achieve a goal. It seems they can also solve object-manipulation tasks without any previous training, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. According to the authors, it’s the first time this kind of spontaneous problem-solving has been demonstrated in an insect.

In 2024, Olli Loukola of the University of Finland co-authored a study demonstrating that bumblebees could cooperate to solve complex challenges. It’s the kind of cognitive task scientists had previously only observed in large-brained mammals like humans and chimpanzees. Loukola et al. trained pairs of bees to push a Lego block to the middle of a mini-arena or push against a door at the end of a tunnel to get a reward.

The team noticed that the bees were more likely to engage in the tasks if their partners also participated, compared to untrained control groups. They concluded that bees can learn to solve novel cooperative tasks outside the hive and may even be intentionally working together, although the researchers cautioned that more detailed monitoring of the behavior was needed to fully understand the partners’ roles.

For this latest study, Loukola was interested in whether bees could spontaneously solve problems. The first experiment featured an artificial flower placed above a pit in the floor so that there was insufficient space for a bee to hover to reach the flower. The bee would have to roll a small ball into the pit and climb on top to reach the flower. “This is essentially an insect version of the classic ‘box-and-banana’ problem,” said Loukola. “The animal must realize that an object can be repositioned and then used as a tool to reach an otherwise inaccessible goal.”

One set of bees was trained to recognize the flower as a source of sugary reward and that the ball could be moved into the pit, but they were not trained to solve the experimental conundrum. “They only learned the properties of the individual elements and success would therefore reflect spontaneous problem-solving rather than gradual reinforcement learning,” the authors wrote. A second group was trained that the flower was a source of reward but not that the ball was movable. And a third group received no training at all.

Bees in the first group solved the problem at a much higher rate than those in the other two groups, whose poorer performances were similar. The first group also made more attempts at working the problem, and the bees interacted with the ball more efficiently and in a more structured way than those in the other two groups.

To bee or not to bee

Those initial results were interesting, but Loukola et al. wanted to rule out the possibility that bees might have an inherent preference for rolling balls, such that perceptual feedback may influence their actions, i.e., rolling the ball might be rewarding on its own. So the team performed a second version of the experiment in which a barrier with a small opening blocked the bees’ view of the flower. The bees had to roll the ball through the opening to climb on top and reach the flower.

“This design assessed whether bees could solve the task without continuous perceptual feedback,” the authors wrote. All told, 16 of 22 bees succeed in this task. Granted, the bees could still potentially catch a glimpse of the flower once the ball was near the opening, so the team repeated the experiment with three openings in the barrier to further limit visual feedback. This time, there were no significant differences in performance between trained and untrained (control group) bees.

In one last experiment, Loukola et al. sought to isolate the bees’ goal-directed performance from accidental success and from visual feedback cues. This time, the testing apparatus featured a rectangular arena with two compartments, both invisible to the bees. During pretraining, 30 bees were shown the flower positioned above one of those compartments. For the actual test, the flower was not visible from the ball’s starting location, and the bees had to move the ball into the correct compartment. The results: 23 of the 30 bees succeeded at the task, and 16 of the successful 23 bees did so without first moving the ball to the incorrect compartment.

The team acknowledged that the experimental setups had no way to track the bees’ gaze, posture, or other behavioral cues that might have let them pinpoint the precise “Eureka!” moment when the bees “understood” the problem. Further experiments should test how well bees grasp causal relationships. “Nonetheless, the present design provides the clearest evidence to date that bumblebees are capable of generating novel, goal-directed solutions, establishing a foundation for future studies to further investigate the cognitive processes underlying insight in insects,” the authors concluded.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.ady1618 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 5 June 2026 at 7:50 am AEST (my time).

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An international team led by Université de Montréal (University of Montreal) PhD student Érika Le Bourdais has found that the ancient white dwarf star LSPM J0207+3331 is still pulling in planetary debris, even though it has been cooling for about three billion years. White dwarfs are dense, Earth-sized stellar remnants left behind when Sun-like stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and shed their outer layers. The star, located 145 light-years away in the constellation Triangulum, is the oldest and coldest white dwarf known to have a surrounding disk of dust.

The star was first spotted in 2019 by a citizen scientist through the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project. Its cool temperature immediately suggested that it was very old, since white dwarfs gradually lose heat over time. Using the W. M. Keck telescopes in Hawaii, astronomers later confirmed that the star shows infrared signals consistent with dust rings formed by asteroids breaking apart under its strong gravity. Such infrared excesses occur when a star emits more infrared light than expected, often because warm dust surrounding it absorbs and re-radiates energy.

“This discovery challenges our understanding of planetary system evolution,” said Le Bourdais. “The fact that we still see planetary debris being accreted three billion years after the star became a white dwarf suggests that asteroids, comets, and even planets can remain in orbit around these stars for a very long time.”

Spectroscopic analysis—a technique that studies light to identify the chemical elements present in an object—revealed thirteen heavy elements in the star’s atmosphere: sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, calcium, titanium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, and strontium. Normally, heavy elements sink quickly in hydrogen-rich white dwarfs, making them hard to detect. “We expected to see only a few elements, but we found dozens!” explained Le Bourdais.

The research paper adds more detail. The absence of carbon features suggests the debris came from a carbon-volatile-depleted source. The abundance pattern shows slight deficits of magnesium and silicon compared to iron but otherwise resembles Earth-like material. This points to a differentiated rocky body—one whose materials have separated into distinct layers such as a metallic core and rocky mantle—with a metallic core fraction higher than Earth’s. In other words, the star is accreting the remains of a large rocky object, similar in structure to Earth or the asteroid Vesta.

“White dwarfs offer one of the only ways we can directly measure the composition of exoplanets,” said Patrick Dufour, co-author and professor at Université de Montréal. “When planetary debris come too close, they are torn apart by the star’s gravity and end up polluting its atmosphere, leaving a detailed chemical fingerprint of its composition.”

The team also detected weak Ca II H & K line core emission, making this only the second known isolated polluted white dwarf to show this feature. These are specific spectral signatures produced by ionised calcium and can indicate unusual physical activity in a star’s upper atmosphere. The finding suggests that extra physical processes may be happening in or above the star’s upper atmosphere. The study stresses the importance of including heavy elements in model atmosphere calculations, since leaving them out can distort the inferred structure and lead to inaccurate stellar parameters.

Earlier work suggested the star’s infrared excess came from two dust rings. The new analysis shows that a single silicate dust disk—a ring composed largely of rock-forming minerals rich in silicon and oxygen—can explain the observed signal at 11.6 μm, simplifying the picture of the system’s structure.

The question of how debris ended up falling into the star so late remains open. One idea is that giant planets in the system slowly destabilised smaller bodies over billions of years. Another possibility is that a passing star disturbed the orbits of debris. “Future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope or archival data found in the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission could help distinguish between a planetary rearrangement and the gravitational effect of a close stellar encounter,” said John Debes, co-author and researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Dufour noted that hydrogen-rich white dwarfs are the most common type, and the coolest among them are the oldest stars in the galaxy. “We didn't have the habit of looking for signs of accretion in them. This unique case motivates us to expand our search to more of these stars.”

The findings show that even after billions of years, planetary systems can remain active and complex. Substantial accretion events—the gradual accumulation of surrounding material onto a celestial object—can still occur long after a star’s death, offering a rare window into the composition and fate of distant worlds.

Source: University of Montreal, IOPScience

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Posted Thursday 4 June 2026 at 12:57 pm AEST (my time).

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The age of robotaxis, long the preserve of science fiction, is now a reality, at least in a handful of American cities. It took just over a decade to get from the DARPA Grand Challenges to the start of Waymo’s commercial service in California, albeit initially with a safety driver on board.

Proponents of the technology, which has attracted at least $100 billion in investment, say robotaxis will be safer than human-driven vehicles. And last year, Waymo’s data showed its cars were involved in many fewer crashes than human drivers, with much lower insurance claims, although recent issues with school buses and flooded roads show the technology isn’t perfect.

But safety isn’t the only selling point: Autonomous vehicles are said to cut traffic. But data from Waymo’s reports to the California Public Utilities Commission shows that, at least in that regard, robotaxis are no better than ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber.

Is there anyone in there?

The study, published in Transport Findings by MIT Transit Lab Assistant Director of Research Awad Abdelhalim, analyzes data from August 2023 through December 2025, a roughly 1,000-day period. During that time, Waymo’s robotaxis completed 13.8 million trips for 19.3 million passengers over a total traveled distance of 86.3 million miles (138.8 million km), growing at a rate of around 15 percent a month. Abdelhalim wanted to see what proportion of those rides were made by empty robotaxis—known as “deadheading”—and how the number changed over time.

Initially, only 36 percent of Waymo’s miles were driven with a passenger onboard. But by the end of the study period, that had increased to around 56 percent and then plateaued, Abdelhalim found. So about 44 percent of Waymo’s driven miles are conducted with empty EVs.

I’m not entirely surprised; on each of my recent visits to San Francisco, the sensor-festooned Jaguar I-Paces have been thick on the ground, but rarely did I spot any humans riding in them.

In fact, there are two different kinds of deadheading: empty vehicles driving around waiting to be assigned a ride and empty vehicles driving to collect their passenger(s). And Waymo has been steadily reducing the number of miles driven empty en route to a pickup as it expands its fleet. The number of deadhead miles per trip has also been declining, in part due to Waymo’s introduction of freeway service, the author suggests.

A similar analysis conducted late last year on Waymo’s CPUC data from January 2024 through September 2025 by Matthew Raifman, who studies policy and autonomous vehicles at UC Berkeley, also found that 44 percent of Waymo’s miles were driven with empty vehicles and that two-thirds of those empty miles were robotaxis driving around waiting to be assigned a customer.

No better, no worse than ride-hailing

Interestingly, similar arguments about reducing traffic were once made about ride-hailing. In 2014, other researchers at MIT published a study claiming that ride-hailing could reduce car ownership and cut traffic. Two of the authors later walked back their conclusions after evidence showed that ride-hailing actually increased traffic and CO₂ emissions, partly because it was cheap enough to encourage trips people otherwise wouldn’t have taken. They noted that robotaxis would probably fall into the same trap. (A 2018 study found that almost half of the increase in vehicle miles traveled in San Francisco was attributable to ride-hailing services.)

In total, about 40 percent of the miles traveled by a Lyft or Uber driver are deadhead miles, suggesting there’s little difference in congestion whether there’s a human behind the wheel or not. Incidentally, this fact helps explain some of the statistical safety advantage of a robotaxi—if the average number of occupants of a robotaxi is always lower than the average number of occupants of a ride-hailing vehicle, the expected injury rate for the robotaxi should be correspondingly lower.

Meanwhile, effective congestion reduction could be achieved through a robust expansion of public transport. The same number of people on a bus takes up much less room on the road than if they were spread out in passenger cars, and the numbers get even better for trains and subways. But public transport doesn’t come cheap. Waymo might have raised $16 billion earlier this year for its robotaxis, and at least $100 billion has been invested in the sector since the 2010s. Meanwhile, the American Public Transport Association called for $268 billion in investment over five years, and a report by Transportation For America puts the price tag for a “world class” transit system at $4.6 trillion over the next 20 years.

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Posted Thursday 4 June 2026 at 8:25 am AEST (my time).

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For decades, scientists have understood that plants can release volatile organic compounds—essentially airborne chemical signals—to attract the natural enemies of the things that eat them, like caterpillars. What we didn’t know was exactly how a plant translates the physical act of being eaten into a specific, predator-summoning distress signal.

“[One] thing we didn’t know is how the plant detects the caterpillar in the first place,” says Adam Steinbrenner, a biologist at the University of Washington. Now, after years of experimenting with common bean plants in the lab and in the agricultural fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, Steinbrenner’s team pinpointed a single immune receptor that orchestrates its anti-caterpillar defense system.

Drooling caterpillars

When an herbivorous insect like a caterpillar feeds on a plant, it introduces its saliva straight into the plant’s damaged tissues. This saliva contains biological clues called HAMPs: herbivore-associated molecular patterns. One of the HAMPs molecules is a peptide called inceptin, and there’s an 11-amino acid fragment of inceptin named In11, as well. Both of them turn out to be a fragment of the ATP synthase found in chloroplasts—basically a piece of one of the plant’s own proteins. As the caterpillar ingests the leaf, its gut enzymes chop up the plant’s cellular engines and their pieces, including In11, are regurgitated back onto the leaf’s surface, albeit at extremely small concentrations.

Over millions of years, plants like the common bean have evolved a specialized cell-surface receptor called the inceptin receptor just to detect In11. When this receptor interacts with In11, it sets off a signaling cascade in the plant’s cells, initiating immune responses. Proving that this specific receptor is responsible for releasing predator-summoning signals, though, was extremely tricky. “We were excited to do that, but we needed the perfect comparison plants—plants lacking the receptor versus ones that have the intact receptor,” Steinbrenner says.

The problem was that common bean plants are notoriously difficult to genetically modify, so the usual modern techniques like gene silencing were off the table. Picking an easier-to-modify plant was off the table, too. “We were sort of limited to bean because this receptor we were studying is only present in certain bean species,” Steinbrenner explains. To get around it, his team had to introduce the modifications they needed the old-fashioned way—through selective breeding.

Breeding siblings

The first step was to find a common bean plant with a muted In11 receptor. What the team needed was a natural mutant that was unable to detect the caterpillar’s saliva. They screened a massive panel of Mesoamerican beans, looking for varieties that failed to produce ethylene gas, a classic plant stress indicator, when exposed to In11. Out of 89 varieties tested, they found two that completely ignored the peptide. Of these two, they picked a Honduran strain called W6 13807.

When the researchers sequenced the genome of this insensitive bean, they found it had a naturally occurring 103-base-pair deletion in the gene that encodes the inceptin receptor. This mutation, they found, deletes a crucial chunk of the receptor, resulting in a truncated, non-functional protein.

To test the effect of this dysfunctional receptor on the plant’s defenses, the team began breeding the plants for their experiment. Through a series of genetic crosses and backcrosses between the mutant and a standard bean variant that was responsive to In11, they created sibling plants that were nearly identical genetically except for the presence or absence of the functional inceptin receptor. “We were just being breeders and that took several years”, Steinbrenner recalls.

When these two siblings were put side by side in the lab and in the field, it turned out the consequences of having a broken inceptin alarm were rather grave for the bean plants.

The cost of silence

First, the researchers examined direct defenses—the chemical and physical changes the plant undergoes to make its leaves less palatable for caterpillars and thus hamper their growth. When caterpillars fed on the mutant beans with inactive inceptin receptors, though, they had a field day. Over a five-day feeding period, their growth rate was over 70 percent higher than on the plants with a functional receptor.

More detailed analysis revealed exactly why this was the case. In plants that could detect the In11 peptide, a feeding caterpillar triggered the rapid up-regulation of 527 genes, including the ones responsible for anti-herbivore defenses. The plants that were oblivious to the In11 in the caterpillar spit failed to mount this targeted response. Instead, they reacted as if they were just being mechanically wounded by the wind or a passing animal. Without the receptor, they entirely missed that a live, hungry insect was actively eating them.

Another consequence for In11 insensitive beans was that they were unable to summon predatory wasps.

Calling air support

When a normal bean plant detects In11, it begins synthesizing and emitting a highly specific blend of volatile organic chemicals. To a predatory wasp, this blend of scents signals not just “a plant is damaged,” but specifically “a caterpillar is actively feeding here right now.” Lab tests showed that the plants without the active inceptin receptor failed to emit this volatile blend when exposed to either the synthetic In11 peptide or actual caterpillar oral secretions.

To see how much this lack of chemical signaling mattered in the wild, the researchers packed up their sibling bean lines and headed to an experimental agricultural field in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, they placed pairs of bean plants—one with the active receptor and one without it—out in the open. They treated the plants with either water, caterpillar oral secretions, or In11. Then, they attached live sentinel caterpillars to the leaves and sat back to watch what happened.

It turned out local predatory wasps were highly active in the field, but they weren’t searching randomly. Driven by the airborne chemical cues, the wasps disproportionately targeted the plants that had functional inceptin receptors. The plants treated with In11, or caterpillar spit were sending out their chemical distress signals into the wind, and the wasps were coming in to attack and remove the caterpillars in response to the call.

At the same time, the plants unable to detect the molecular signature of the caterpillar’s drool were largely ignored by the wasps. They weren’t completely defenseless, though. “There are other papers that show if you knock out all immune signaling, the caterpillars grow twice as big—they get enormous,” Steinbrenner says. This, he suggests, indicates the immune system had other pathways to deter herbivores like the caterpillars.

Crop defense systems

While the team connected the broken inceptin receptor to a muted distress call, the exact downstream immune signaling pathway isn’t fully understood. The authors suspect that the highly specific caterpillar detection they saw piggybacks on the plant’s general wound response, potentially triggering secondary internal alarms known as damage-associated molecular patterns, or DAMPs. Exactly how the initial receptor activation ultimately translates into the production of volatile organic compounds remains a puzzle.

Another caveat lies in the choice of the attacker. The Spodoptera exigua, known as the beet armyworm, is a generalist herbivore, meaning it feeds on a wide variety of plants and is rather susceptible to botanical defenses. Specialist herbivores that feed on specific plants likely evolve metabolic countermeasures to detoxify or otherwise bypass chemical defenses of their hosts. In the study, the researchers acknowledge that we’re not yet sure whether a functional inceptin receptor provides broad-spectrum resistance, or if specialized pests can fool this alarm system.

Finally, in the Oaxacan field test, the team showed that predatory wasps use the airborne distress signals to find their prey, but the relative importance of direct leaf defenses versus this indirect wasp recruitment isn’t clear. In their future research, the scientists want to investigate this in more detail. Still, the team hopes their work will help us better protect crops like bean plants from pests.

“Today, we do that with chemicals, with pesticides, but if we could use the best receptors and the best volatiles from lots of different plants, maybe we might be able to confer immunity to most problematic pests or pathogens in a sort of targeted way,” Steinbrenner says. “That’s the big picture, the goal of our lab in the long run. And I think doing that would mean understanding more of these types of receptors and volatiles.”

Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aec3229

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Posted Thursday 4 June 2026 at 8:24 am AEST (my time).

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Male bowerbirds are notorious for their complex mating rituals. They build intricate tunnels out of twigs—the bowers from which they get their name—and then decorate them with random colorful items gleaned from the environment. When a female of the species shows up to check out a male’s fancy digs, the male tosses his shiniest objects in her direction and shows off his plumage in hopes of impressing her.

According to a new paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science by University of Exeter scientists, urbanization and the associated growing availability of brightly colored human-made items have had a significant impact on courtship display behavior in Australian male bowerbirds. There are marked differences in the choice of decorations for bowerbirds in urban versus rural environments. This might be because urban birds simply have greater access to the items than their rural counterparts, since birds in both environments show a marked preference for human items.

The University of Exeter researchers monitored the bowers of 61 male great bowerbirds in two sites in Australia’s northern Queensland—the rural Dreghorn Cattle Station and the urban Townsville City—during the prime breeding season (September–December 2023). Then they photographed the bower decorations in situ from above in both visible and UV light (bowerbirds can see in the UV range), using an umbrella to create diffuse lighting.

Next, they selected the 10 decorations closest to the bower entrance, since these were the most likely to be used by the male bird for his displays. These were also photographed and marked to identify the original source. Then the team removed all existing decorations from each bower and created a mixed slush pile of 10 randomly selected urban bowers and 10 randomly selected rural bowers, and they left the site alone for three days. Males were never offered any items from their own bower.

When the team returned to the sites, they determined which decorations had been selected from the slush pile and moved to a bower, and whether it came from an urban or rural source. After recording the data, all the original decorations were returned to their bowers.

Green glass and red wire

The subsequent analysis revealed that rural bowerbirds most often used green glass and green leaves or seeds for decoration, while urban birds preferred green glass and red wire. Plastic items were also popular, although “we also found items including a pair of handcuffs, medicine jars at bowers near a hospital, and fluorescent mouth guards from a site near an Australian Rules football ground,” said University of Exeter co-author Caitlin Evans.

Urban bower decorations were more than 10 times more likely to be human-made than those of rural bowers, which had more natural items, such as fruit, seeds, leaves, and sticks. Urban bowers also had nearly five times as many decorations as rural ones, averaging 90 items per bower compared to 20 for the rural birds. One overachieving urban male gathered 300 items to decorate his bower. Both urban and rural male bowerbirds showed a strong preference for human items when given a choice of items sourced from each environment. And red decorations in urban bowers were more vivid, and the green items duller, than in rural bowers.

“Our results suggest that display produced by urban males may represent an adaptive change to a more attractive display and that rural males are restricted in their displays by the materials in their environment,” the authors wrote. Further, the ready availability of human items to urban birds “may reduce energetic costs and risks associated with leaving the bower unguarded.” Even rural birds manage to find some human items, most likely by raiding farm bins or garages.

The fact that urbanization appears to be altering the display traits of the great bowerbird might affect sexual selection, for example, by altering how females assess bowers when selecting a mate.  The current study did not measure differences in male mating success relative to the use of human-made materials, although prior research has indicated that there are higher male display and mating rates in urban versus rural environments. This may be due to other factors, such as higher population density. Nor is it clear if urban female bowerbirds have different preferences for courtship traits than rural females.

“Our study demonstrates that availability of human items—often glass and plastic—is affecting the behavior of bowerbirds,” said co-author Laura Kelley, also from the University of Exeter. “We don’t yet know whether this has any negative or positive impact on them, but it’s a reminder of how human activity is changing the natural world in unanticipated ways.”

Royal Society Open Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.260109 (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 3 June 2026 at 2:27 pm AEST (my time).

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One way archaeologists learn how ancient people, including Neanderthals, did things is to attempt to do those things themselves, a process called experimental archaeology. Normally, that involves making stone tools, butchering deer, or distilling birch tar. But in a new study, it meant doing very destructive things to teeth from one of the world’s most carefully protected animals.

That’s because the archeologists suspected that Neanderthals once used rhino teeth as tools. By using the teeth to make stone tools, the researchers demonstrated that Neanderthals probably did the same thing, adding to what we know about the wide range of items in their toolkits.

We need to hit some rhino teeth with rocks for science

Some Neanderthal archaeological sites in Europe and Asia seem to have many more rhinoceros teeth lying around than you’d expect. We know Neanderthals hunted a now-extinct species of rhinoceros in Europe and eastern Asia, but the people who had inhabited these sites looked like they had been collecting rhino teeth for some reason.

Depending on the species, a rhinoceros has more than 260 bones but only 24 to 34 teeth. Yet at the 300,000-130,000-year-old cave site of Panxian Dadong in southern China, 74 percent of the rhino remains are teeth, not bones. And teeth make up 91 percent of the rhino fossils at Payre, a rock shelter in southeast France.

Many of those teeth had markings that looked suspiciously like what you’d get from using a piece of bone as a hammer: groupings of shallow pits and overlapping cracks, “produced by the accumulation of blows in the same zone.” There are also thin, shallow scratches from hitting the jagged edge of a stone tool.

To explore whether the markings really were the product of human tool-making and use, though, University of Aberdeen archaeologist Alicia Sanz-Royo and her colleagues needed something to compare them to. Which meant they needed to try their own bone-knapping on actual rhino teeth. But since rhinos are at best a threatened species and trade in rhino parts is heavily regulated under international law, getting those teeth was not easy.

“Obtaining rhinoceros teeth for the experiments proved to be an extremely difficult but indispensable exercise for this study,” wrote Sanz-Royo and her colleagues in their recent paper. But only the real thing would do, “due to the unique structure and exceptional hardness of rhinoceros teeth,” she wrote. In other words, the exact properties that would have made rhino teeth an appealing material for hand tools in the first place.

Teeth as tools

It was pretty easy to get access to modern-day rhinoceros teeth—if all the researchers wanted to do was look at them. The National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris has a collection of 236 teeth for comparative anatomy research, which Sanz-Royo and her colleagues examined closely to learn what kinds of marks form on teeth during a lifetime of chewing tough grasses mixed with dust and grit. But for some reason, the museum was oddly reluctant to let a bunch of archaeologists hit their anatomical collection with sharp rocks to document the results.

In the end, Sanz-Royo and her colleagues got 18 white rhino teeth from three French zoos. Expert knapper David Pleurdeau of the MNHN, a co-author of the recent study, then set to work on the teeth with an assortment of quartz and flint tools (knapping is the ancient art of carefully striking a rock with another rock to shape it into a tool). The goal was to see what kind of marks his work—standard steps in making, maintaining, and using stone tools—left on the teeth.

David Pleurdeau making and retouching stone tools using a rhinoceros tooth. Bottom: the results of Pleurdeau’s work.

Credit: Sanz-Royo et al. 2026

Pleurdeau used some of the teeth to retouch flakes: sharp bits of stone that would have been used for cutting or drilling. He used some teeth as hammers to knap flint and tried using quartz hammers to knap the teeth themselves. A few served as anvils, on which he used quartz and flint tools to cut leather and plant fibers.

Meanwhile, Sanz-Royo and her colleagues also put three of the teeth into fancy lab machinery to simulate millennia of burial. The team spun them in rotors filled with dirt and rock to mimic falling down slopes and tumbling through sediment-laden floods. They also very scientifically squashed them with a mechanical press designed to put precise pressure on a column of material (in this case, dirt and pebbles with a rhino tooth buried in it) to mimic burial.

When Sanz-Royo and her colleagues compared their results to the marks on teeth from sites like Payre, El Castillo in Spain, and Peche-de-l’Aze II in France, they noticed striking (not sorry) similarities. Like the experimental teeth, the ones from Neanderthal archaeological sites had the same overlapping small fractures, shallow indentations, and shallow scratches. Tellingly, none of those marks showed up on rhinoceros teeth from paleontological sites, where scientists had unearthed animal remains but no signs of human (of any sort) presence.

In other words, the experiments strongly pointed to Neanderthals having used the rhinoceros teeth as tools, most likely for hammering rock.

The chewing surface of the molars of an extinct Florida rhino.

Credit: Florida Museum

Rhinoceros-tooth hammers, elephant-bone scrapers, and wooden spears

When we think about the literal stuff of Neanderthals’ day-to-day life, stone tools usually come to mind first because they’re what most often survive tens or hundreds of millennia to be unearthed by archaeologists.

We’re learning that Neanderthals made and used items from a surprising range of materials. Some aren’t that surprising: wood for digging sticks and spears, plant fibers for string, grasses and leaves for bedding, hides for clothes or bags, birch tar for glue or antiseptic, and antler or deer bone for scraping, knapping, drilling, and hide-working—even shells or eagle talons for jewelry. But some of the items in a Neanderthal’s toolkit seem surprising and unusual to us now because of how the world has changed. Neanderthals would have seen using materials like mammoth bones for building shelters and elephant bones and rhinoceros teeth for tools as mundane, even though no elephants or rhinos walk in those parts of the world today.

Tooth enamel is the hardest part of the entire mammal skeleton; 97 percent of it is hydroxyapatite, the hard mineral component of bone (most bone tissue is only about 40 to 70 percent hydroxyapatite). That means, compared to bone, enamel is less likely to crack under pressure or the shock of a hard impact, such as whacking a piece of rock with it (we beg you not to try this at home with your own teeth). Rhino enamel is thicker and harder than that of most other animals because it has evolved to do a lot of very tough chewing.

Sanz-Royo and her colleagues say that based on their experiments, Neanderthals at sites across Europe and Asia were apparently using rhinoceros teeth as soft (compared to rock) hammers for knapping or retouching stone tools or as anvils paired with harder stone hammers or cutting tools. It makes sense, especially at sites like Panxian Dadong, where good-quality stone like flint, chert, or quartz may have been hard to come by; basalt and limestone aren’t great for making sharp tools.

During his experiments, Pleurdeau even worked out the most comfortable way to hold a rhino tooth while working, so paleo-ergonomics is officially a thing now. So not only do we know that Neanderthals used rhino teeth to make and maintain their stone tools, but we also know how they probably held them and what that experience would have felt like.

Journal of Human Evolution, 2026. DOI: j.jhevol.2026.103829. (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 3 June 2026 at 2:26 pm AEST (my time).

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Mathematicians warned against rising tech industry influence in a declaration describing the many challenges that AI poses to mathematics research. The timing of the declaration comes two weeks after OpenAI publicized one of its AI models as having disproved an 80-year-old mathematical conjecture in geometry.

The declaration was developed by a working group of 16 researchers over eight months following a conference held at Leiden University in the Netherlands in September 2025. Published on June 2, 2026, the resulting Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics has been endorsed by the International Mathematical Union—the international non-governmental organization that hosts conferences and oversees the most prestigious prizes in mathematics such as the Fields Medal.

“Mathematicians should find it quite striking that tech companies are suddenly interested in their work,” said Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London, in a statement. “The Leiden Declaration is a well-thought-through response to what is currently happening, as AI continues to disrupt this space.”

The Leiden Declaration, which has already drawn hundreds of signatories, warns that recent AI developments are threatening “characteristic values” of mathematical research, “often in ways that disproportionately affect students and early-career mathematicians, and hence the long term future of the discipline.”

First, it points out how AI models can “produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs.” Such developments put reviewers under increasing pressure and are “jeopardizing our ability to implement traditional standards for the correctness, transparency, and independent verifiability of proof,” the declaration warns.

“Inaccurate AI-generated drafts are cheap to produce, and there is a risk of cluttering the literature with claimed results that are simply wrong,” said Leslie Ann Goldberg, head of computer science at the University of Oxford, in a statement. “Once that happens, the errors are likely to propagate as new results are built on faulty foundations.”

Second, the declaration highlights how “models trained on published works frequently return outputs that do not properly cite the human works they synthesize,” while also pointing out that many current AI models were trained on data obtained through “exploiting licenses and access arrangements” or “simply violating copyright protections.”

Third, the declaration describes how the use of AI “may become incentivized for its own sake, disrupting our mechanisms for hiring, funding and recognition” while leaving out researchers who lack access or are “unwilling to use technologies controlled by organizations whose values they do not share.”

Fourth, the declaration warns against mathematics research “communicated through informal channels such as press releases or blog posts, often without any research paper or other disclosure of information necessary for scientific evaluation.” Such communication strategies can lead to “oversimplification” in media reporting that overemphasizes AI tools’ significance at the expense of prior human contributions, and “misleadingly uses specific mathematical tasks as metrics for the general reasoning capacities of commercial products.”

Fifth, the declaration describes “increasing involvement of technology companies in mathematical research” as threatening the “autonomy of mathematics,” especially as university budgets are under pressure and researchers may feel greater professional incentive to collaborate with technology companies on “asymmetric terms.” This also raises the risk that mathematics research questions amenable to AI-driven techniques may be prioritized.

The OpenAI example

Many of the Leiden Declaration’s warnings seem especially relevant to how OpenAI announced its model’s mathematical achievement on the same day that news publications reported the company was preparing to offer stock shares to the general public. The declaration pointedly described corporate press releases highlighting AI mathematical achievements as operating on “market timelines before the accepted processes of community evaluation in mathematics can take place.”

“The tech industry proceeds in accordance with commercial logic, which is antithetical to the values of mathematics,” said Michael Harris, a mathematician at Columbia University and an author of the declaration, in a New York Times interview. He also spoke of the declaration attempting to “recover control of the narrative about the values and goals of mathematics from the AI industry.”

OpenAI uploaded a research paper describing its AI model’s mathematical proof along with commentary from independent mathematicians. But the company did not disclose information about prompts, AI training data, and the amount of computational resources used to solve the mathematics problems in question, said Rodrigo Ochigame, a historian and anthropologist of computing and artificial intelligence at Leiden University and another author of the declaration.

“The AI model is proprietary and unavailable to anyone outside the company,” Ochigame told The New York Times. “We get a flashy promotional video, while basic information needed to assess the scientific meaning of the result is kept secret.”

The OpenAI achievement was “remarkable” but likely involved substantial compute resources, said Ursula Martin, a mathematician and computer scientist at Oxford University and an author of the declaration, in The New York Times interview. She suggested that similar quantities of equivalent effort from human mathematicians would have probably solved the problems in the same way—and she cautioned that mathematics is also about the “cultivation of ideas, understanding, judgment and human insight” beyond solving problems.

Similar expressions of support for human intellectual efforts in mathematics appear in endorsements published on the Leiden Declaration website.

“In my experience, mathematical ideas, like children, must be nurtured and grow over the years,” said Peter Scholze, director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, in a statement. “Just like I do not want my children to be educated by AI, I am pondering my mathematical ideas without use of AI, and generally avoid reading AI-generated text as best as I can.”

Recommendations for humans

So what is a human mathematician to do during the AI boom? The Leiden Declaration recommends that individual mathematicians transparently disclose their use of AI tools, retain responsibility for the correctness of their mathematical work, continue crediting human authors while properly attributing work even if AI tools make that difficult, and consider using only AI tools that align with the values articulated in the declaration

The declaration also reminds mathematicians that mathematics has “applications in the development of technology for use in warfare, oppression, mass surveillance, and the undermining of democracy,” and so mathematicians should make ethical decisions accordingly when choosing external partnerships with tech companies.

Professional mathematical organizations can develop guidelines for the use of AI and other automated tools in publication and review, protect the rights of researchers as authors through licensing agreements that prevent their work from being used as training data without consent, and support the role of peer-reviewed publications. The declaration also suggests such organizations “actively prepare to become involved if major mathematical results are claimed using unconventional means.”

The authors of the declaration also offer straightforward recommendations for policymakers, including “protect the rights of authors,” “regulate the artificial intelligence industry,” and “invest in public computational infrastructure.” Under “don’t believe the hype,” the declaration warns about how “there is currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products.”

Lastly, the declaration acknowledges that the tech industry “has offered lucrative jobs, monetary rewards, computing resources, and intellectually stimulating opportunities that some mathematicians have found attractive… in an era of underfunding of higher education and precarious academic employment.” It calls on such collaborations between mathematicians and the tech industry to abide by the standards laid out in the declaration.

“By endorsing the declaration, the IMU affirms that the future of mathematical research must be guided by human judgment, fair and transparent practices, and the shared values of the global mathematical community,” said Ulrike Tillmann, vice president of the International Mathematical Union, in a statement. “Mathematics is, and should always remain, a profoundly human endeavor.”

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Posted Wednesday 3 June 2026 at 2:25 pm AEST (my time).

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The estimated size of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has fallen by hundreds of cases as outbreak response efforts have ramped up and increased testing has ruled out illnesses.

On Tuesday, a representative for the World Health Organization confirmed to Reuters that Congolese authorities are now reporting 437 cases in the DRC, including 321 confirmed cases and 116 suspected. That’s a significant difference from the case count the WHO relayed Friday, which totaled 1,041 cases, including 135 confirmed cases and 906 suspected. Over the weekend, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Jean Kaseya, also wrote in an op-ed that there were more than 1,100 suspected cases.

The number of deaths has also been lowered to 48 confirmed deaths. On Friday, the WHO had reported 241 deaths, including 18 confirmed and 223 suspected.

When asked more about the decline in suspected cases and deaths, WHO representative Christian Lindmeier told reporters at WHO’s headquarters in Geneva that the other cases “have been cleared out and have either other diseases or have just had fever and nothing else.”

The suspected cases were in those who sought care at health centers and were identified as having matching symptoms of Ebola disease, which can begin with nonspecific flu-like symptoms, such as fever and aches. Confirmed cases are those who have tested positive for the virus.

On Tuesday, Uganda’s relatively small number of cases also changed—in this case, upward. The neighboring country reported six new cases among contacts of previously confirmed cases. That brings Uganda’s total to 15 confirmed cases, including one death.

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Posted Wednesday 3 June 2026 at 7:49 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

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