News: General News

Social media is a defective product

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:58:18 +0000

Two lawsuits are being brought against giant tech firms for the dangers their apps pose to young people. Columnist Annalee Newitz says the outcome of those cases could dramatically change social media for the better

I just sat down to write, but before committing words to my document, I took out my phone to check my calendar. Then I got a chat notification from a friend, who sent me a link to some meme on Instagram. Might as well check it out. Beneath the post are a bunch of short videos queued up, algorithmically chosen to enchant me: one is about ravens in the Tower of London, another about Indonesian street food. I poke the raven one. Then another. I can scroll through these reels endlessly, and I do. The videos become increasingly disturbing and political. You know what comes next.

When I look up at my computer again, nearly 45 minutes have passed.

My day isn’t ruined, but I feel depressed and tired. Where did all that missing time go? How did Instagram suck me into watching hundreds of videos (not to mention dozens of ads), when all I wanted to do was check my calendar? And why did it make me feel so crappy?

The answers to those questions are being debated right now and will come to court in two California court cases brought by thousands of individuals and groups against the social media giants Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram), Google (owner of YouTube), Snap (owner of Snapchat), ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and Discord. The plaintiffs in these cases – ranging from school districts to concerned parents – argue that social media platforms pose a danger to children, causing grave psychological harm and even leading to death. Exposed to videos full of violence, impossible beauty standards, and “contests” that encourage dangerous stunts, kids are being led down dark rabbit holes from which they may never return. At stake in both cases is one fundamental question: are these companies at fault for making people feel terrible?

For over a decade now, many US lawmakers have implied that the answer is no. Instead of trying to regulate companies, several states in the US have passed laws that target how children use social apps. Some attempt to limit access by requiring parental consent for minors to create accounts, for example. Others have tried to prevent adolescent bullying by banning “like” counts on posts. Many of these laws have focused on the dangers of content on social media. Here in the US, that basically lets companies off the hook. There is an infamous part of our Communications Decency Act, known as Section 230, that prevents companies from being held liable for content posted by users.

You can understand why Section 230 seemed like a good idea when it was written in the 1990s. Back then, nobody worried about doomscrolling, algorithmic manipulation, or toxic “looksmaxxer” influencers who encourage their followers to hit their faces with hammers to create a more defined jawline. Also, Section 230 seemed practical: YouTube reports that 20 million videos are uploaded to its service every day. The company, and others like it, couldn’t function if they were liable for every unlawful thing posted to their service.

Lurking in the background of all this lawmaking is the fact that the US is a free speech absolutist nation. That means it’s very easy for companies such as Meta or Google to challenge laws that might curb people’s access to speech online, even if that speech is a video about how to lose weight by starving. Indeed, many of those laws limiting minors’ access to social media have been struck down by judges who view them as antithetical to free speech. As a result, many social media companies in the US have been able to whip out free speech laws as a shield against any kind of regulation.

Until now. What’s fascinating about the two current cases in California is that they deftly sidestep questions of content and free speech. Instead, they are arguing that the design of social media platforms themselves is “defective,” and therefore harmful; the endless scroll, the constant notifications, the auto-playing videos, and the algorithmic enticement that feeds our fixations – these features are deliberately created by the companies themselves. And, the lawsuits argue, these “defects” turn social media apps into “addictive” products, similar to “slot machines,” that are “exploiting young people,” by giving them an “artificial intelligence driven endless feed to keep users scrolling.” Ultimately, the goal of these lawsuits is to force social media companies to take responsibility for the negative impacts their products have on the most vulnerable consumers.

In many ways, this argument resembles the ones that the US government brought against tobacco companies in the 1990s. The government argued successfully that companies knew their products were harmful, but covered it up. As a result, the companies paid out a major settlement to victims, put warning labels on tobacco products, and changed their marketing to no longer appeal to children.

Already there are leaked documents from Meta suggesting that the company knew its product was addictive. A federal judge unsealed court documents for a case where a teenage girl became suicidal after becoming addicted to social media. Those documents contained internal communications at Instagram, in which a user experience specialist allegedly wrote: “oh my gosh yall [Instagram] is a drug… We’re basically pushers.” This is one of many documents from Instagram and YouTube that the lawyers say paint a picture of companies knowingly and negligently producing defective products.

The two trials are currently underway and have the potential to transform social media dramatically. Perhaps US law will finally acknowledge what many of us have known for years: the problem isn’t the content, it’s the conduct of the companies who feed it to us.

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A large meteor is visible from much of Ohio and parts of neighboring states

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:33:33 +0000

Meteor’s fiery passage through the atmosphere was captured by a space-based lightning mapper.

A large meteor crashed through the sound barrier above northern Ohio on Tuesday morning, producing a large fireball and what local residents described as an extremely loud “boom.”

According to various eyewitness reports, the meteor’s bright streak through the morning sky was visible across a wide area. A National Weather Service meteorologist in Pennsylvania, Jared Rackley, captured video of the meteor passing through the atmosphere and creating a large fireball. So far, there have been no reports of impacts on the ground.

The precise location of the fireball was pinpointed by a near-infrared optical detector on a geostationary satellite at 9:01 am ET (13:01 UTC). This “geostationary lightning mapper” revealed that the meteor traversed through the atmosphere in northern Ohio, just west of Cleveland, and over Lake Erie.

A meteoroid—a small body moving through space—is called a meteor when it encounters a planet’s atmosphere and subsequently produces a bright streak of light. This occurs because the meteoroid is traveling many times faster than the speed of sound.

In this case, the “boom” was not due to breaking the sound barrier, like a supersonic aircraft, but rather to the hypersonic meteoroid generating a powerful shockwave as it moved through the atmosphere. This shockwave compresses the air, producing a series of sonic booms or even a rumbling sound.

No further information was available about the size and impacts of the meteor as of mid-morning on Tuesday. This story will be updated if additional information becomes available.

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Posted Wednesday 18 March 2026 at 6:33 am AEST (my time).

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100 years later, where is Robert Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket?

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:38:40 +0000

“He didn’t preserve it as a sacred object… “

It flew for only two seconds, but its impact is still felt a century later.

Robert Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket, which lifted off from a snowy field on March 16, 1926, has been written about extensively. Earlier solid-fueled rockets existed, but liquid-fueled rockets promised the sustainability and control needed to send spacecraft and humans into Earth orbit and beyond.

“The rocket’s reach was short, but it marked the moment that humanity entered a new era,” said Kevin Schindler, author of “Robert Goddard’s Massachusetts,” speaking at the site of that first launch as part of a centennial commemoration held Saturday in Auburn (March 14). “It proved that liquid fuel could lift a craft skyward—the essential breakthrough that would one day carry humans to the moon.”

Photos from that day exist through the efforts of Goddard’s wife, as does a monument stand from where the rocket, nicknamed “Nell,” left the ground (today, located on a golf course). Over the decades, replicas of Nell have been built, even ones capable of flight. But a century later, a question about the rocket remains.

Where is it now?

First (and last?) to see

“Goddard didn’t seek the spotlight. He sought the truth. He was a scientist. Apart from his small team, very few people could say that they were truly there who felt the steady roar and saw the flash of fire against the New England snow. One of those people was my father,” said Thomas Hastings, addressing a small crowd who gathered in Auburn.

Hasting’s father, Gerald, who was 10 years old on that day in 1926, was sledding with some friends when he saw “four people in heavy coats got out of [their] vehicle and remove some rather large objects.” As he later learned, those four were Goddard, Goddard’s wife Esther, Goddard’s crew chief Henry Sachs, and Clark University assistant physics professor Percy Roope.

“Dad [later] commented that the scene felt very strange,” said Hastings. “He and his friends continued looking on with great interest as the nameless visitors took whatever it was they had removed from the vehicle and assembled the pieces.”

“You can imagine how his imagination soared suddenly. They saw fire and smoke and heard loud noise as some object shot up into the air,” Hastings said, recounting what his father told him. “Dad and his friends shook their heads at each other, completely baffled by what they had just witnessed, and they continued sledding like you would expect them to.”

Goddard wrote in his notebook that the rocket “rose 41 feet & went 184 feet, in 2.5 secs.” The next day, he added, “Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate.”

“It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said, ‘I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind,’” he wrote.

Nell’s “salvation”

Nell, which gained its name from the title character of the then-contemporary play “Salvation Nell,” found its salvation in pieces.

Hastings, as recounted by his son, recalled watching as the “strangers in dark coats ran through the snow, gathered up what it was they had brought and set on fire, and they put the pieces back into their vehicle.”

Esther took a photograph of her husband standing with the recovered parts. She also posed for a similar photo, together with Sachs and Roope. In his notebook, Goddard wrote that they brought the rocket’s remains back to his laboratory.

By all accounts, Goddard did not try to reassemble Nell, nor did he treat the pieces as historic artifacts.

“He didn’t preserve it as a sacred object,” wrote Michael Neufeld, who retired as a senior curator for the space history division of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in an email. “He didn’t have a lot of money at that point and reused everything.”

A nozzle and a flood

In 1950, five years after Goddard’s death, the Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics donated to the Smithsonian the scientist’s immediate successor to Nell. Goddard attempted to launch that rocket on May 4 and 5, 1926.

“It survives because its thrust was too weak to launch itself,” wrote Neufeld. “For some reason he preserved it.”

The National Air and Space Museum’s collection catalog describes the Goddard May 1926 rocket as “likely includ[ing] the nozzle” recovered from Nell.

“I gather the nozzle assertion is based on his notes. I haven’t seen them myself,” said Neufeld. “More may be on the May 1926 rocket, which we can’t prove.”

Goddard’s notebook is held at the Robert H. Goddard Library at Clark University today. In his March 16, 1926, entry, Goddard recorded that “the lower half of the nozzle burned off.” Photos taken prior to Nell’s launch show a longer nozzle than what is installed on the May rocket, perhaps supporting its suggested reuse.

Frank Winter, a retired curator of rocketry at the National Air and Space Museum, recently wrote an article for “Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly,” in which he cited an inventory of the Robert H. Goddard Collection at the Roswell Museum and Arts Center in New Mexico, including “the protective conical cap that was mounted on top of the propellant tanks, nozzle fragments and the combustion chamber” from Nell.

Unfortunately, the Roswell Museum has been closed since October 2024, ever since it was devastated by a flood. Reached for this article, Caroline Brooks, the Roswell Museum’s executive director, confirmed they have four pieces claimed to be part of the March 1926 flight.

As referenced by both Winter and Brooks, W.S. Crane researched and published a catalog for the museum’s Goddard holdings in 1994. The chamber is attributed to coming from Clark University and the nozzle fragments are described as a gift from Esther Goddard. The source of the nose cone is unknown.

The museum also has the rod, rollers, and wire that were used to ignite Nell. “Pulling the wire opened a hole in the bottom of the liquid oxygen tank, where the oxygen dripped onto a heated surface,” Crane wrote, adding that the assembly was also a gift from Mrs. Goddard.

“We are a few years out from a full recovery,” wrote Brooks in an email. “The Goddard collection will return in a contemporary and updated presentation (compared to the original exhibit, which dated back to 1959) when the museum reopens.”

Cente-Nell-ial

Today, the remains from the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket to fly might be less consequential than the legacy they helped create. Goddard’s design for Nell—especially mounting the exhaust nozzle above its propellant tank—was less a model for the engines that followed than a symbol of what is possible.

“Apart from its historic significance, this rocket became a minor source of embarrassment for Dr. Goddard, since the illogical position of the combustion chamber at the top is evidence that he had failed to consider some very basic physics in his design,” wrote Crane. “This is a great example of the role of common sense and intuition in pioneering engineering, and one of the very few times that Dr. Goddard’s failed him.”

Today, replicas, more than the remains, help the public understand Nell’s role in history. Since its opening in 1976, the National Air and Space Museum has displayed a full-scale, NASA-donated recreation of Goddard’s first rocket (which is now at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia).

In December 2003, for the national celebration of the centennial of flight, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center worked with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) to reconstruct “historically accurate, functional replicas” of Nell. The project was carried out to “clearly understand, recreate, and document the mechanisms and workings of the 1926 rocket” and created a “resource for researchers studying the evolution of liquid rocketry.”

On Monday, a different full-size replica premieres on display at The Museum of Worcester, just 10 minutes from where the real Nell launched. On exhibit through August, the rocket is a model, but its support frame was used in a 1929 launch test, on loan from Clark University.

“Goddard’s legacy is not just technological. It’s aspirational,” said Schindler. “It tells us that greatness can emerge from quiet places, that bold ideas can take root in small towns, and that the next breakthrough may come from someone standing right here looking up at the sky with wonder.”

“As we honor the centennial, we’re invited to step into the story ourselves. The next century of exploration will be shaped by those who choose to dream boldly, learn deeply, and support the next generation of explorers,” he said.

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Posted Tuesday 17 March 2026 at 5:38 am AEST (my time).

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The science of how fireflies stay in sync

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:37:43 +0000

Engineers have uncovered the mathematical rules fireflies follow to sync up their flashes.

Scientists have discovered that male fireflies in a South Carolina swamp follow local interaction rules to synchronize their flashing mating displays. The research is being presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. (A preprint is also available on the biorxiv.) Such work could one day lead to insights into how the body’s cells sync to its internal circadian rhythm, or how neurons fire together in the brain, as well as the design of drone swarms communicating through synchronized flashes.

As previously reported, research into swarming and flocking was largely relegated to observational biologists for decades. But in the 1980s, a computer graphics specialist named Craig Reynolds developed the so-called “boids” program, an agent-based computational model that has dominated collective behavior studies ever since. In such a model, each individual unit in a swarm is a dot moving in a straight line at a constant speed. By introducing a few simple rules regarding interactions between dots, a flocking pattern will emerge once the dots get dense enough. Another set of rules will produce a swarming pattern, and so forth.

Fire ants provide a textbook example of this kind of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour them from a teapot like ants, or they can link together to build towers or floating rafts—a handy survival skill when, say, a hurricane floods Houston. They also excel at regulating their own traffic flow. You almost never see an ant traffic jam.

Despite the ubiquity of flocking and swarming in nature, each species flocks or swarms a little bit differently in terms of the underlying mechanisms at work. In 2019, scientists found that flocks of wild jackdaws will change their flying patterns depending on whether they are returning to roost or banding together to drive away predators.

Bacteria or E. Coli can also exhibit collective behavior. For instance, the Hawaiian bobtail squid has a built-in flashlight to help the creature navigate those murky nighttime waters, hunt for prey, and hide from predators in turn. It’s a special organ on the underside, a convenient little cavity that houses colonies of bacteria, Vibrio fischeri. Once that bacterial colony reaches a critical threshold, they all begin to glow, serving as a light source for the squid—a phenomenon known as “quorum sensing.”

As for fireflies, we already know quite a bit about how they emit light. We know the enzyme they use to make light (called luciferase), as well as the chemicals they use in the light-generating reaction. Yet swarms of fireflies clearly exercise a level of control over when they light up, and they do so only in specialized organs, and those are aspects scientists are still keen to understand better.

Feeling the beat

Orit Peleg of the University of Colorado at Boulder has been fascinated for several years by how fireflies synchronize their flashes. Prior research involved field work in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to monitor thousands of male fireflies known for their fleeting flashes of mating displays (Photinus carolinus). The fireflies flash in rhythm: usually a few quick flashes, then a pause lasting several seconds, then another round of quick flashes. Peleg wanted to learn more about how this synchronization worked.

While a lot of work has been done to develop mathematical models for how the patterns emerge from local interactions, there has been very little experimental data. So Peleg’s lab developed a stereoscopic method for 3D tracking of the firefly flashes, enabling them to reconstruct the swarms and the flashing patterns. They monitored the bugs flashing near their location but also pitched a tent on site to capture some of the fireflies and isolate them in a darkened environment.

The team found that even a small number of interacting males can synchronize their flashes, but the periodic bursts only happen in groups larger than 15. And the flashes are correlated over several meters, evidence of long-range interactions typical of emergent collective behavior. But Peleg et al. also noted some individual trajectories, suggesting that there could be other competitive mechanisms at play, too—e.g., early flashing fireflies seemed to be more mobile and flashed longer than later ones.

Collective display of Photinus carolinus fireflies recorded in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in early June 2019.

Peleg’s lab has since built on that earlier research. The latest findings are the result of field work conducted each May for four years (2021–2025) at Congaree National Park in South Carolina. Once again, they pitched a pop-up tent isolated from external light sources. Then they exposed captured fireflies to a dim LED light that mimicked a firefly flash, blinking between once every second to once every 300 milliseconds.

The results: The fireflies were most likely to change their own flashing rhythm in response when the LED blinked almost, but not quite, at the same time as the fireflies. The males would speed up their next flash if the LED blinked just before and waited a bit longer for their next flash when the LED blinked right after. The authors compared it to one audience member in a crowded concert hall trying to clap along with the beat in synchronization with everyone else.

“For a whole season, I spent pretty much every night in the dark watching lights blink at a fixed frequency,” former graduate student (and co-author on the preprint) Owen Martin said of the field observations. “Then, occasionally, I’d get this magical experience where I’d see the firefly just start syncing with the light. I would wonder if I was just seeing things.” But the ensuing mathematical analysis confirmed the patterns: the individual flash dynamics were essentially following a phase-response curve, which the authors then used to develop an “integrate and fire” model that accurately reproduced the observed synchronized flashing patterns.

DOI: bioRxiv, 2026. 10.64898/2026.01.19.700439 (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 17 March 2026 at 5:36 am AEST (my time).

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A century after the first rocket launch, Ars staffers pick their favorites

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:36:24 +0000

“I realized that if something went wrong up there, things might go very badly down here.”

Robert Goddard, a Massachusetts-born physicist, launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket on this date 100 years ago.

It was not an overly impressive flight. The rocket, fueled by gasoline and liquid oxygen, rose just 41 feet into the air, and the flight lasted 2.5 seconds before it struck ice and snow.

Nevertheless, this rocket, named “Nell,” represented a historic achievement that would help launch the modern age of spaceflight. Three decades later, the first objects would begin to ride liquid-fueled rockets into space, followed shortly by humans. A little more than 40 years would pass before humans walked on the Moon.

To mark this historic moment, a few Ars staffers are sharing some of their most memorable launches. Please add yours in the comments below.

Space Shuttle Endeavour

In February 2010, I was lucky enough to attend the penultimate night launch of the shuttle program, STS-130. This mission was a major ISS assembly flight, carrying both Node 3 and Cupola to the ISS. This one had nothing to do with me—instead, I was there as a plus-one for my wife, who had worked on Node 3 at Boeing and who had been invited to witness the hardware she’d worked on finally fly.

The day before the launch was a whirlwind of private tours through various KSC locations—we got to see one of the Crawler-Transporters up close, and then we had a photo-op right next to pad 39-A, where Endeavour was staged and ready. We got to see the VAB, the Orbiter Processing Facility, and the Space Station Processing Facility. There was also a big team lunch with some of the ESA partners my wife had worked with (including a group of Italian engineers from Alenia who, being ever Italian, had brought along a lot of wine).

The launch was originally scheduled for 04:39 Eastern the next morning, February 7, which meant no sleep. After a brief post-tour evening rest, we were all herded onto buses from the hotel at about midnight and then transported with the other program guests to the Banana Creek launch viewing area, about four miles from LC-39A. The Banana Creek viewing area is attached to the Saturn V visitor’s center, so we spent the hours before launch perusing the exhibits and enjoying KSC’s fantastic collection of historic human spaceflight artifacts.

Unfortunately, the morning’s launch attempt ended in a weather-related scrub, followed by an exhausted two-hour bus ride through bumper-to-bumper traffic on highway A1A back to the hotel, with the promise that we’d try things again the next evening. After some sleep, we were all herded back on the buses again around the following midnight and trucked back to Banana Creek.

This time, things went according to plan. At 04:18 Eastern time on February 8, Endeavour lifted silently into the sky on a retina-searing plume of incandescent light from the SRBs. It took several awe-filled seconds for the sound of the launch to come rolling across the water to reach us, but when it did, it was all-encompassing. I could feel the ground under my feet tremble as my clothes vibrated against my skin—something I’d previously only experienced watching top fuel dragsters.

Endeavor clawed its way upward, rolling and accelerating, and as it broke through the low cloud layer, the sun-bright light from the SRBs diffused through and turned the predawn darkness to noon. The thing I remember most is the CRACKLE-CRACKLE-CRACKLE of the solids burning. I’d always thought the crackling was just microphone clipping, but in person, it sounded exactly like it sounded on TV—just at a volume and frequency that literally shakes your pants.

The light faded as the shuttle climbed into the clouds, and when we caught sight of it again, it was a distant star, brighter than Venus and winking slightly as it drifted. The PAO announcer called SRB separation, but we couldn’t see anything notable. After that, a crush of folks all rushed to be first back on the buses for the multi-hour ride back to the hotel. My wife and I drifted with the crowd, holding hands, lost in thought.

It was an amazing experience. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t think I ever will again.

— Lee Hutchison

Delta 1

I’ve now been to a couple of milestone launches: the first US launch by Rocket Lab and the last flight of the Antares. But when I think about launches, I instantly go to one I saw nearly 50 years ago now, with a booster and payload I can’t even identify. (Note from Space Editor Eric Berger: This almost certainly was a Delta 1 rocket, launching the Himawari 1 meteorological satellite for Japan).

The only reason I can remember the year is because of what else happened during that same family vacation in Florida: New York City’s 1977 blackout (brought on by a heat wave that made us appreciate summer temperatures in Florida). That and the release of Star Wars. One of the many items on the vacation agenda was a visit to the Kennedy Space Center during the awkward years between the end of Saturn launches and the start of the Shuttle era. That didn’t mean nothing was going on—the Voyagers would launch later that year—but it meant there was nothing dramatic to time our visit for.

Still, my father learned of a pre-daylight launch, and the whole family dutifully loaded up the car at about five in the morning and headed from wherever we were staying to the Cape. Even so, we didn’t make it on time. At some point, my father spotted the rocket, pulled over to the side of the road, and woke us kids up, and we hustled out of the car. There, already rapidly ascending, was a rocket that lit the pre-dawn sky, giving everything a bluish tint.

All these years later, my memories are pretty limited. I don’t remember it moving out of view, whether I made any mental comparisons of the relatively small, thin booster to the Saturn launches I had seen on TV, or what we did for the next few hours while we were undoubtedly waiting for anything to open for the day. But the single, static image of that rocket has stuck with me ever since.

— John Timmer

Soyuz-FG

Big rockets make the biggest boom during launch—and often the most spectacular sights. I’ve had the privilege of seeing all the biggest ones outside of China—the Delta IV Heavy, Falcon Heavy, Starship, and Space Launch System. But my favorite launch of all time was one of the smallest I’ve seen, a Soyuz FG rocket in 2014.

At the time, I was in the midst of a months-long project to report on the state of NASA (called Adrift, if that gives you any sense of its tone). As part of the project, a photographer from the Houston Chronicle and I traveled first to Russia to see Star City and other space facilities in Moscow before flying down to Kazakhstan to observe the run-up to a crewed Soyuz launch.

As part of the trip, we went with several NASA leaders, along with the family of the space agency astronaut, Butch Wilmore, launching into space. It was an epic trip that included observing a protest march in Moscow over the treatment of Ukraine (this was 2014, and things felt super tense even then) with riot police stationed all along the way. We then walked right up to the Soyuz rocket on the pad.

The highlight was the late-night launch of the same Soyuz booster from an observation point less than 1.5 km from the pad. After riding a bus across some of the rattiest roads I’ve ever experienced, we climbed up onto a small covered stand. It all felt historic. This was the pad from which Sputnik first went to space, and then Yuri Gagarin a few years later. Soviet premiers had stood here before, probably shivering in the cold just like I was.

The Soyuz-FG is not a large rocket. It’s about 50 meters tall with a diameter of less than 4 meters. Its lift capacity is a modest 7 metric tons or so to low-Earth orbit. But the proximity to the launch site makes up for all this. As the rocket’s engines ignited, the Soyuz booster appeared to ascend almost directly overhead. There was a period of five or 10 seconds when, very viscerally, I realized that if something went wrong up there, things might go very badly down here.

A few minutes after the ascent, the then-director of NASA’s International Space Station program, Mike Suffredini, walked by on the way back to the buses. He quipped something to the effect of, “Scary enough for you?” Yes it was, Suff. Yes it was. Just one more reason to admire the brave men and women who climb on top of rockets and ride them into space.

— Eric Berger

Space Shuttle Atlantis

I have been fortunate to view a few rocket launches during my half-century on the planet, although early on, they were mostly the “build it at home, launch it at the park” ones from Estes. I now live in Washington, DC, and depending on where you live, the occasional rocket launch from Wallops Island in Virginia is visible from the city as a yellow dot that moves across the sky. Craning out a bedroom window, it’s neat but not very spectacular.

No such contortions were needed to witness NASA’s last shuttle launch as I stood next to the giant countdown clock a mere three miles from the launchpad. A lifetime of seeing footage of Apollo rockets launching left a false impression; there was nothing slow about the way Atlantis left the launchpad. With relatively low cloud cover that day, the shuttle was gone from sight quickly, but the sound, which took some time to reach us in the first place, carried on regardless.

Since then, a couple of other rocketry encounters have stuck with me. In the summer of 2020, with the pandemic raging, I took a very fast, very orange SUV out to Chincoteague Island in Virginia to watch another mission launch from Wallops, this time a National Reconnaissance Office mission aboard a Minotaur rocket. With few clouds in the sky, I was able to follow the Minotaur and its smoke trail for much longer than the shuttle, and once it was out of sight, I had the pleasure of that hybrid Porsche Cayenne to carry me home.

The most recent was a SpaceX launch that happened to coincide with the 2023 “12 Hours of Sebring” in Florida. Sebring is famous for attracting a crowd that likes to party, and by the time the Falcon rocket was ready to take to the skies, it was well into the evening, and many of the spectators were having a good time. That included the man with a 6-foot-tall staff made of beer cans duct-taped one atop the other; the staff started off as a single can, growing with each one he imbibed. But even he could find time to appreciate the sight of a missile heading into space above us while dozens of race cars roared past just a few feet away. That’s something you just don’t see every day.

— Jonathan Gitlin

Space Shuttle Discovery

I’ve had the privilege of seeing hundreds of rocket launches in my time as a space reporter. You might think it would be difficult to pick a favorite. One obvious choice is the first space shuttle launch I attended at Cape Canaveral, Florida, when I was still in grade school. This one, of course, holds a special place in my memory. Seeing SpaceX catch the booster stage of its giant stainless steel Starship rocket was also a wonder like none other I’ve seen.

Today, though, I want to write about the most spectacular launch I’ve witnessed. The date was April 5, 2010, when the shuttle Discovery made its way to the heavens from Kennedy Space Center.

The shuttle lifted off shortly before sunrise on Easter Monday, taking aim at the International Space Station with a crew of seven. I was a little more than 3 miles away as Discovery thundered into the early morning twilight. For all its faults, the space shuttle was a special machine, and it holds a special place in my heart. There was something enchanting about watching a winged spaceship rocket into orbit, hanging off the side of a butterscotch-colored fuel tank, with slender solid rocket boosters on each side. Who made that design choice?

Still, it was a sight to behold. The two boosters generated an extraordinarily bright exhaust plume, almost giving it the appearance of molten metal, which it kind of was. They’re loud, too. Really loud. Their crackling roar hits different than a liquid-fueled rocket, even one as large as Starship.

On this particular launch, the shuttle Discovery climbed into a high-altitude sunrise a couple of minutes after departing Florida’s Space Coast. Just as the shuttle jettisoned its twin boosters, the nearly transparent exhaust from Discovery’s three main engines caught the first sunlight of the day.

The engines, which are still flying on NASA’s SLS rocket, generate water vapor from the combustion of liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen. This water vapor instantly freezes in the cold temperatures, but the plume is usually invisible, whether it’s daytime or nighttime. The “jellyfish” effect was in full display on this spring morning. It was the only time, at least in my memory, that a space shuttle launch produced what looked like a jellyfish in the sky. Combining this spectacle with the raw power of the space shuttle, particularly those precarious but dazzling solid rocket boosters, made the launch of the STS-131 mission one I won’t soon forget.

— Stephen Clark

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 17 March 2026 at 5:35 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

RIP Matrix

As a doctor, I tell patients to get rid of these 5 medications

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

It’s time to give these medicine cabinet staples a second look.

Some of us have a medicine cabinet that looks less like a pharmacy and more like a museum. It’s why I make a point to do an inventory at least once a year with my spring cleaning. You never know what you’ll catch: a half-empty bottle of sinus medication from the winter-that-shall-not-be-named, or a leftover prescription medication that you should’ve tossed a while ago but instead shoved to the back of the drawer “just in case”— only for it to languish in darkness for years.

You might even find medications that made sense with the advice at the time but aren’t worth holding onto today. Every year, medical guidance evolves — sometimes quietly — and our cabinets don’t always keep up.

I find myself consistently surprised by how many people are still faithfully taking medications that science has either proven ineffective or determined to be actively harmful for them. Here are five that deserve a second look, a quick conversation with your physician and, quite possibly, disposal.

Aspirin for primary prevention of heart disease

For decades, a daily low-dose aspirin became a rite of passage for many people over 50 who wanted to protect their hearts. (It’s sometimes called “baby aspirin” because it’s such a low dose, often around 81 mg, but it’s not safe for children, so you should probably retire that name, too.)

Doctors recommended it because aspirin reduces clotting, which can contribute to heart attacks. But in 2022, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force updated its guidance to recommend against initiating aspirin for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease — meaning people who have never been treated for a heart attack or stroke — in adults 60 and older. The 2023 American Geriatrics Society Beers Criteria — which is the gold standard list of medications that are potentially inappropriate for older adults — went further, moving aspirin to a flat “avoid initiating” designation.

The reason? For people who have never had a heart attack or stroke, the data found that the bleeding risks from aspirin, including gastrointestinal bleeding, outweighed the cardiovascular benefits.

An important caveat: If you have already had a heart attack or stroke, aspirin becomes useful for secondary prevention — meaning it may help prevent future problems — and that’s a different conversation.

The same goes for adults ages 40-59 who are at increased risk of heart attack or stroke but haven’t had one. These categories require an individualized decision in consultation with your physician. But too often, I’ve seen older adults who have been on low-dose aspirin for years without any history or high risk of cardiovascular disease — mainly because no one took the time to pause and review why and whether it made sense to continue.

The ‘decongestant’ in many cold medicines

Phenylephrine is the active ingredient in many popular over-the-counter nasal decongestants. However, in September 2023, a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee voted unanimously that, based on the data, phenylephrine is no more effective than a placebo. It turns out phenylephrine gets so thoroughly absorbed in the gut before it reaches circulation, very little of it makes it to your nasal passages.

We saw a rise in phenylephrine’s dominance after pseudoephedrine — which actually works — was moved behind pharmacy counters in 2006 to prevent its use in methamphetamine production. Drug manufacturers reformulated their products with phenylephrine — and we’ve been paying for a placebo ever since.

So if you want a product that really works, you can still easily get pseudoephedrine — you just have to ask for it at the pharmacy and show your ID. But that bottle of pure phenylephrine sitting in your cabinet? Do yourself a favor and toss it.

This stand-alone stool softener

Colace doesn’t work. Or more precisely, it doesn’t work meaningfully better than a placebo when used as a stand-alone stool softener — and the evidence has been pretty clear for years.

Randomized controlled trials dating as far back as the 1950s have found that docusate sodium provides no statistically significant benefit over a placebo for constipation. In one of the most rigorous of these, a 2013 randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial found that hospice patients — a population that often struggles with constipation — were randomized to receive either docusate plus senna or a placebo plus senna. The researchers found no difference between the two groups in terms of stool frequency, volume, consistency or even patients’ perceptions of how complete their evacuations were. Because both groups received senna, the trial was well-designed to isolate docusate’s contribution — and that was essentially zero.

Talk to your physician if you have constipation about more effective options that you can buy over the counter, such as psyllium.

This antihistamine for sleep or allergies in older adults

Diphenhydramine, which is the active ingredient in Benadryl, feels harmless because it’s been around forever and is fairly inexpensive. It is not harmless, particularly for older people. The 2023 Beers Criteria lists diphenhydramine with a “strong” recommendation to avoid in older adults, citing its potent side effects, which include confusion, sedation, dry mouth, constipation, urinary retention and a higher risk of falling down. Older adults clear it from their systems much more slowly than younger people, meaning it hangs around longer and hits harder.

This is especially crucial to consider when you’re already on other common medications with anticholinergic properties, such as certain antidepressants, bladder drugs or stomach medications. Adding diphenhydramine can rapidly compound the problem.

For allergies, second-generation antihistamines such as loratadine or fexofenadine are at least as effective and less sedating because they don’t cross the blood-brain barrier as easily.

If you’re over 65 and using diphenhydramine for any reason, sleep or otherwise, it’s worth having a discussion with your doctor.

Codeine-containing cough syrup

That bottle of codeine cough syrup in the back of your cabinet, the one from a respiratory infection three winters ago, has two problems. First, it’s expired. Second, it probably didn’t work as well as you think.

A 2014 Cochrane review found that based on two older randomized control trials, codeine is no more effective than a placebo for reducing coughs from the common cold.

What codeine does reliably produce is constipation, sedation and, in rare cases, respiratory depression. It also carries the risk of dependence, so leftover bottles are exactly the kind of thing that shouldn’t be left sitting around accessible to family members (and the FDA has restricted codeine in children under 12 for good reason).

What I want my patients to know

Evidence changes, so our medicine cabinets should, too. Start with your expired medications. Most drugs lose potency gradually after their expiration date. For critical medicines like EpiPens, which can save your life if you have a dangerous allergic reaction, get a fresh set. Check out the guidance from the FDA website for how to safely dispose of your unused medications. And remember, don’t flush your medications unless they’re listed on the FDA’s “flush list.”

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Why global warming is accelerating and what it means for the future

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:13:20 +0000

Scientists disagree whether human-made climate change or natural fluctuations are mostly to blame for worse-than-expected heat in recent years

Temperatures over the past three years have been even higher than expected, provoking a debate among scientists. Almost everyone agrees that global warming has accelerated. But some researchers say it is speeding up even more than climate models show, while others argue that the surge in temperatures is due to natural fluctuations that will soon go away.

Depending on who is right, we could have even less time than we thought to avoid or adapt to catastrophic impacts.

“Ultimately, this is a question of how bad climate change is going to be,” says Zeke Hausfather at non-profit organisation Berkeley Earth in California.

Earth was warming at a steady rate of about 0.18°C per decade until the 2010s, when observed temperatures seemed to begin rising slightly faster.

Then, 2023 became the hottest year on record by a margin of 0.17°C, more than expected even with a slight acceleration in warming in the 2010s. Deadly floods struck Libya, unprecedented cyclones pummelled Mozambique and Mexico, and record wildfires torched towns in Canada, Chile, Greece and Hawaii.

That year, James Hansen at Columbia University, New York – who famously told the US Congress in 1988 that humans, not natural fluctuations, were heating the planet – published a widely discussed paper with colleagues arguing that the rate of warming had accelerated to about 0.32°C per decade after 2010.

They attributed this mainly to the “Faustian bargain” humanity made with aerosol pollution from fossil fuel burning. Sulphur aerosols reflect sunlight back into space, and they also help form reflective clouds. For decades, these aerosols and clouds have masked some of the warming from carbon dioxide emissions.

Now that the world is reducing aerosol pollution, which kills millions of people each year, this hidden warming is being unmasked, and climate change is accelerating, the paper argued.

China, the world’s biggest fossil fuel emitter, began a “war on pollution” when it hosted the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Since then, it has reduced its sulphur aerosol emissions by at least 75 per cent.

At the same time, the International Maritime Organization has been cracking down on sulphur emissions from ships. The air is less dirty over the oceans than over land, so this reduction in aerosols from ships can result in very few clouds, and ship tracks – lines of cloud that typically trail vessels – have diminished.

As a result of both actions, global sulphur dioxide emissions have fallen 40 per cent since the mid-2000s. “The atmosphere is cleaner, so more solar radiation is coming in,” says Samantha Burgess at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

That seemed to be underscored when 2024 was even hotter than 2023, exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time – a step towards missing the more ambitious Paris Agreement target. Temperatures remained almost as high in 2025, when heatwaves killed thousands in Europe and cyclones wreaked havoc on South-East Asia and Jamaica.

But while most scientists agree that reductions in our aerosol emissions have accelerated global warming, they disagree on how much. The 0.32°C per decade rate found by Hansen and his colleagues was higher than the 0.24°C rate estimated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the 0.29°C average given by the latest generation of climate models.

A major complication is that natural fluctuations have also been affecting the planet’s temperature. The first was the arrival in 2020 of an especially strong maximum in the roughly 11-year solar cycle, when sunspots and magnetic activity began boosting the amount of sunlight reaching Earth.

Then, in 2022, the eruption of a massive underwater volcano near Tonga in the South Pacific shot 146 million tonnes of water vapour, a greenhouse gas, into the stratosphere. At the same time, it ejected sulphur aerosols that cooled the atmosphere somewhat.

Finally, 2023 and 2024 saw a strong El Niño, a natural climate pattern in which weakening trade winds allow a mass of warm water to slosh back across the central and eastern Pacific, inflating the global temperature.

To find out how much global warming is accelerating, scientists have to estimate and exclude the impact of this natural variability, then try to fit a curve to a trend in observed temperatures that is only beginning to emerge. Less natural variability would mean more acceleration, and vice versa.

Earlier this month, a statistical analysis by Stefan Rahmstorf at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and US statistician Grant Foster found that global warming has jumped to about 0.36°C per decade.

But scientists like Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania have argued that Rahmstorf, Hansen and others have overestimated the impacts of aerosols and underestimated the impacts of natural fluctuations. He says that he and his colleagues are working on a study that finds only a modest quickening since the 1990s.

“Recent warmth, which is greatly influenced by the 2023-2024 El Niño event, is entirely consistent with standard climate model simulations,” says Mann. “There is no need to invoke any ad hoc mechanisms, including a supposed acceleration within the past decade.”

But it is possible that unexpected climate feedback loops have also been contributing to the recent heat. The biggest wild card is clouds, which are too small and scattered to be represented well by climate models.

A study last year by Helge Goessling at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and his colleagues attributed about 0.2°C of the almost 1.5°C of warming in 2023 to a decline in low-lying clouds. While some of this cloud loss was due to the reduction in sulphur pollution, some of it may be because of an “emerging low-cloud feedback”, the researchers said.

Traditionally, cold, moist air over the subtropical ocean and the warm, dry air above have formed what is known as a temperature inversion, keeping the layers separate. But if climate change is increasingly warming that cold air and breaking down the inversion, the dry air could be descending and reducing moisture and thus clouds, says Goessling.

“The more you warm up, the more you would be able to dissolve your low-level clouds,” he says. “It’s really most likely that there is a low-cloud feedback taking place.”

If the acceleration can be blamed mostly on sulphur reductions, then climate change will probably slow down again in future decades, once there is no more sulphur pollution to cut. But if climate feedback loops have been unleashed, then it could potentially continue to speed up.

That would mean we have underestimated climate sensitivity, or the amount of warming that will occur from a given rise in atmospheric CO2.

“The worst-case scenario would be that this is coming from a cloud feedback that the models aren’t predicting and would mean that we actually have a much more sensitive climate than any of the models are projecting,” says Brian Soden at the University of Miami, Florida.

The world is on track for 2.7°C of warming this century under current policies. Those projections, however, have an uncertainty of roughly plus or minus 1°C. More acceleration could mean Earth is headed for something closer to 3.7°C and humanity would have to cut carbon emissions even more to avoid devastating impacts.

“3.7°C… makes some regions uninhabitable,” says Hausfather. “2.7°C would still be bad, but many more regions could potentially adapt to that.”

Either way, fossil fuel emissions are also accelerating, a trend that governments must reverse to have any hope of limiting impacts, says Burgess.

“Global warming is a bit faster, but we’ve also lost time because we’ve not seen the ambitious measures to decarbonise our society,” she says.

Source

An engineering thesis disguised as a coupe: A history of the Honda Prelude

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Technology like four-wheel steering and variable valve timing debuted in the Prelude.

The Honda Prelude was never simply a car. It was an engineering thesis disguised as a coupe: compact, disciplined, and unapologetically technical. At its best, it distilled Honda’s faith in precision manufacturing and clever packaging into something accessible and aspirational.

Its return for 2026, after more than a quarter century away, isn’t nostalgia so much as institutional memory. The Prelude name carries expectations: balance over brute force, innovation over ornament, and a willingness to pursue mechanical elegance even when the market leans elsewhere.

And it’s worth remembering that the original Prelude emerged during a turbulent period for the industry. Constraint, not excess, shaped it, which may explain why it felt so deliberate from the start.

A time of economic turbulence

The Honda Prelude didn’t arrive during a champagne toast. It showed up in the middle of economic upheaval, when the global auto business stared nervously at its balance sheet and wondered whether the arithmetic still worked.

The story began on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon severed the dollar’s link to gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system that had anchored postwar commerce since 1944. By 1973, the dollar was formally devalued. Fixed exchange rates evaporate. The yen surges; Japanese exports become more expensive; corporate forecasts unravel.

Then came the oil shock. In October 1973, OPEC cut production, which sent energy prices sharply higher and injected fresh uncertainty into global demand. For Honda Motor Co., with roughly 60 percent of its sales tied to the United States, the math shifted overnight. A stronger yen squeezed margins. Higher fuel prices threatened volume, and Japan’s export machine suddenly looked exposed.

Something had to give.

At precisely this moment of instability, the company’s founders, Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa, stepped aside from the enterprise they had built from scratch. Honda was no longer a workshop operation; it employed 18,000 people and held 19.5 billion yen in capital. But scale offers no immunity; it merely increases the stakes.

Enter Kiyoshi Kawashima, then president of Honda R&D and senior managing director of Honda Motor Co. His New Honda Plan amounts to a corporate reset. Management structures would be modernized. Decision-making streamlined. And, crucially, Honda would expand globally rather than simply export into an increasingly volatile currency environment.

In a world of floating exchange rates and unpredictable oil prices, Honda chose reinvention over retreat. The Prelude would become one expression of that shift, proof that even in turmoil, discipline and design could travel.

Honda’s newest model

Honda’s American expansion started in 1959 with motorcycles. A decade later, the N600 arrived with two cylinders, modest size, and immense ambition. By 1973, as economic turbulence deepened, Honda introduced the Civic: a larger, four-cylinder, efficient, affordable hatchback perfectly calibrated for the moment. The even-larger Accord followed in 1976, positioned as Honda’s first true world car.

Both were powered by Honda’s CVCC engine, the first to meet the tough emissions standards of the 1970 US Clean Air Act without a catalytic converter. Its breakthrough was elegant engineering: a spark plug ignited a richer fuel mixture in a small prechamber, which then ignited a leaner mixture in the main cylinder, delivering cleaner combustion without costly add-ons. In an era defined by oil shocks and regulation, Honda didn’t lobby. It engineered its way forward.

And, having secured credibility with rational transport, it then did something faintly irrational. It built a sports coupe.

Launched in 1978, the first-generation Prelude was equal parts boxy and sleek; an Accord underneath, but tighter, shorter, and more intentional. Honda took the sedan’s suspension, brakes, and 1.8 L engine and fit them to a chassis with a wheelbase trimmed by 2.4 inches (60 mm). The output was modest: 72 hp (54 kW) and 94 lb-ft (127 Nm) of torque from a single-overhead-cam four-cylinder paired with a five-speed manual or a two-speed automatic (later upgraded to three), sending its power to the front wheels. Reaching 60 mph (97 km/h) took about 19 seconds, which is hardly exhilarating. And the Prelude carried a premium price despite delivering a driving experience that doesn’t justify it. Sales were meager, but Honda was just getting started.

The Prelude comes into its own

It isn’t until 1983 that Honda finally reimagined the Prelude as something more than a truncated Accord. It was a turning point that suggested the company was ready to treat the model not as a derivative, but as a distinct ambition. Now rated at 100 hp (75 kW), the car arrived wrapped in a sharp, wedge-shaped silhouette, proving to be a deliberate break from the excess it replaced, while its pop-up headlights became an essential element of its design. It was cleaner, more contemporary, and unmistakably forward-looking. More importantly, it laid the groundwork for what came next: the 1985 Prelude Si.

With a larger fuel-injected 2.0 L four-cylinder engine producing 110 hp (82 kW) and 114 lb-ft (155 Nm) of torque, the Si pushed the Prelude into more serious territory, trimming the 0–60 mph sprint into the nine-second range, a meaningful benchmark in the mid-1980s sport-compact calculus.

When the third-generation Prelude debuted for 1988, the styling suggested evolution rather than revolution, as it wore a carefully refined silhouette. But beneath the cautious redesigns, Honda was preparing a far more consequential statement.

This generation cemented the Prelude’s reputation as a technological outlier. It became the first car sold in the United States to offer four-wheel steering, an audacious bit of engineering that sounds exotic but functions with pure mechanical simplicity. At low speeds, the rear wheels turned in the opposite direction to the front wheels to tighten the car’s rotation; at higher speeds, they turned in the same direction, enhancing stability.

The power came from a single-overhead-cam 2.0 L four-cylinder that produced 109 hp (81 kW) and 111 lb-ft (150 Nm) of torque, and was paired with either a four-speed automatic or a five-speed manual. For drivers who sought something sharper, the Si’s 2.0 L dual-overhead-cam variant delivered 135 hp (101 kW) and 127 lb-ft (172 Nm) of torque, a figure that rose to 140 hp (104 kW) by 1990, reinforcing the Prelude’s gradual transformation from stylish coupe to legitimate sport compact contender, as the Honda Prelude Si 4WS became the Prelude’s flagship trim.

Continuing a proud tradition

Yet even the most devoted Prelude loyalist can tire of a familiar refrain. And so, when the fourth generation arrived in 1992, Honda didn’t abandon the long nose, short deck proportions. Instead, Honda reinterpreted it. The sharp creases and pop-up headlights were gone, replaced by fixed lighting and softer, almost liquefied sheet metal, as if the car had been left in the sun and allowed to melt into a more aerodynamic future. The more consequential shift came a year later.

In 1993, Honda introduced the Prelude VTEC, shorthand for Variable Valve Timing and Lift Electronic Control, a name that would soon enter the enthusiast lexicon. While the 1980 Alfa Romeo Spider 2000 was the first to offer variable-valve timing in the US market, Honda’s system went a step further. At higher revs, a more aggressive profile holds the valves open longer and wider to extract greater performance, while at lower rpm, the valves open more conservatively, prioritizing efficiency. Today, variable-valve timing is common across the industry. At the time, it felt revelatory, effectively delivering two engine personalities within a single powerplant. Following the audacity of four-wheel steering, VTEC further polished the Prelude’s identity as Honda’s rolling laboratory, a coupe that previewed the engineering future.

The base S model carried a 135 hp single-overhead-cam four-cylinder, very much in keeping with Honda’s disciplined approach. With the Si or SE, buyers were rewarded with a 2.3 L four-cylinder producing 160 hp (120 kW), giving the Prelude a sharper edge without sacrificing its daily civility. But the headline act was the VTEC model, the range-topping product of Honda’s engineering confidence. Its 2.2 L dual-overhead-cam four-cylinder delivered 190 hp (142 kW), a figure that placed the Prelude in sport-compact territory. It was the fullest realization of the car’s dual personality: civil at low revs, urgent when pushed.

Offered through 1996, this generation also marked the end of an experiment. Four-wheel steering, once the Prelude’s technological calling card, unceremoniously disappeared. It’s an omen of what is to come.

A final shot over the bow

When the fifth-generation Prelude arrived for 1997, its styling felt like a compromise between eras, a return to Honda’s earlier angular discipline, slightly softened to align with late-1990s tastes. It looked modern but cautious. And beneath the sheet metal, something had changed.

For the first time in years, the Prelude’s ambitions narrowed. There was a single engine: a 195 hp (145 kW) 2.2 L four-cylinder, paired with a five-speed manual or a four-speed automatic. The menu was simplified, perhaps strategically.

Four-wheel steering was gone. In its place came Type SH, fitted with Honda’s Active Torque Transfer System, or ATTS. It consisted of electromechanical clutches designed to send additional torque to the outside front wheel during a turn to sharpen turn-in and approach the balance of rear-wheel drive. Today, we call it torque vectoring. Then, it’s a costly, heavy experiment that proved too clever for its own good. Few buyers opted in. And so, the Prelude faded away.

In June 2001, after selling 826,082 Preludes in the United States, Honda ended production. The car peaked in 1986, when 79,841 examples found buyers. After that, demand slipped steadily, squeezed by competition from within, particularly the Accord Coupe, Civic Coupe, and Acura Integra, and by a market pivoting decisively toward sport-utility vehicles. By the first five months of 2001, just 3,500 Preludes were sold. The car that once served as Honda’s technological calling card exited quietly. It was less a failure than a casualty of shifting appetites, as its innovations were absorbed into the mainstream that it helped shape.

The Prelude’s second chance

And now, roughly 25 years later, Honda has revived the Prelude, less a sentimental callback than a calculated move in an auto industry that no longer resembles the one the Prelude left behind.

The auto industry, once defined by horsepower, styling cycles, and incremental engineering gains, is now shaped by software, batteries, and geopolitics. Tesla forced incumbents to think like tech companies. China emerged not just as a market, but as a manufacturing and innovation superpower. And governments, through emissions rules and subsidies, have become de facto product planners, pushing automakers toward electrification whether they are ready or not.

At the same time, the economics of making cars have grown more unforgiving. Development costs have soared. Margins are thinner. Scale matters more. Against this backdrop, reviving a legacy nameplate is no longer just a branding exercise. It’s a test of whether nostalgia can coexist with an industry that now runs on code, capital, and political risk. This explains the 2026 Honda Prelude.

Economics, not just nostalgia, fuel its return

With its in-house rivals long gone—the Accord Coupe was discontinued in 2017, and the Civic Coupe followed three years later—the Prelude returned first as a 2023 concept and now as a production car. In other words, Honda is reentering a segment it largely abandoned, now that the competitive clutter inside its own showroom has been cleared.

Underneath, the revival reflects a broader industry playbook: minimize investment while maximizing brand leverage. The Prelude rides on a shortened Civic platform, uses a Civic Hybrid drivetrain, and borrows suspension hardware from the Civic Type R. Honda has reengineered and retuned the components, but the strategy is clear: contain development costs, preserve margins, and spread R&D across as many units as possible.

Honda eliminated the previous Prelude after selling roughly 3,500 units. The new goal of 4,000 units annually suggests management is not betting on a coupe revival but that it’s testing the waters. In a US market dominated by high-margin SUVs and pickup trucks, the Prelude functions more like a brand halo with guardrails: a way to test whether nostalgia can deliver incremental profit without jeopardizing capital. In that sense, the car is less a throwback and more a case study in how legacy automakers now balance emotion with spreadsheets.

In that regard, the 2026 Honda Prelude continues to predict the future.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 16 March 2026 at 6:43 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

RIP Matrix

Wild Pigs Turning 'Neon Blue' in California Triggered Warnings

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Game hunters found startlingly 'neon blue' flesh inside wild pigs in California in 2025, prompting advisory statements about potential contamination.

"I'm not talking about a little blue," Dan Burton, owner of a wildlife control company, told Salvador Hernandez at The Los Angeles Times.

"I'm talking about neon blue, blueberry blue."

An investigation by local authorities found that the dramatic color change was caused by rodenticide poisoning, prompting them to issue a warning throughout Monterey County.

Rat poisons containing the chemical compound diphacinone are often sold dyed blue for identification. The compound's use has been highly restricted in California since 2024.

"Hunters should be aware that the meat of game animals, such as wild pig, deer, bear, and geese, might be contaminated if that game animal has been exposed to rodenticides," said pesticide investigations coordinator Ryan Bourbour from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

"Rodenticide exposure can be a concern for non-target wildlife in areas where applications occur in close proximity to wildlife habitat."

Concerningly, this isn't the first time wild pigs in the region have had their innards tainted blue.

A popular rodent control in agriculture, diphacinone is a first-generation rodenticide that acts as an anticoagulant, causing severe internal bleeding.

It works by binding to an enzyme that recycles vitamin K. This reduces available vitamin K, making it impossible for animal livers to produce enough of the clotting factors crucial to prevent internal bleeding.

Rodenticide bait. (CDFW)

Predators, including humans, who eat an animal poisoned with the toxin can become ill themselves; while the chemical breaks down faster than second-generation rodenticides, diphacinone remains active in the dead animal's tissues for some time, even if it's cooked.

Wildlife groups globally have long been urging us to stop relying on chemical pesticides because of the collateral damage these poisons inflict. From owls to bees, pesticides are causing great harm to wildlife.

Non-target animals either consume it directly or are impacted by secondary exposure when eating other animals that have ingested the poison, adding further strain on already endangered species.

Diphacinone has been found in the systems of many poisoned predators, including raptors, mountain lions, bobcats, foxes, as well as the endangered northern spotted owl and San Joaquin kit fox.

Though prognosis is typically poor, anticoagulant poisoning can be treated in animals if caught before symptoms appear and vitamin K is administered as an antidote.

But this devastating impact on wildlife is what prompted its strict control in California.

"Pesticide applicators are urged to take measures when applying rodenticides so as not to expose wildlife," the CDFW advises.

"Prior to application, it is important to ensure non-target wildlife are not using the area where the pesticide is to be applied. It is also important to use appropriate bait stations and application methods that exclude access to non-target species."

A wild pig with blue innards – discovered in 2015. (GlendilTEK/imgur)

California's wild pigs — which are hybrids between domestic pigs and European wild boars that were intentionally released a century ago – are voracious omnivores, so would happily eat both the poisoned rodents and the bait.

Since March 2025, a local trapper, Dan Burton, observed multiple wild pigs going out of their way to obtain oats baited with rodenticide, used in squirrel traps.

The associated dye appears to affect only the pigs' fat, leaving the rest of their tissues normally colored.

Pesticides are harmful to exposed humans as well. They have been linked to declining sperm rates, diabetes, cancers, Alzheimer's, and other health conditions.

The meat of a contaminated pig remains a standard pink, while the fat is stained blue. (GlendilTEK/imgur)

A 2025 US study found that the commonly used insecticide chlorpyrifos causes structural brain abnormalities and reduced motor function in children and adolescents.

Many of these pesticides have been used at large scales without adequate long-term studies of their impacts on human health.

"Excessive and uncontrolled pesticide use resulted in food contamination as well as environmental, agricultural, and aquatic pollution," a 2024 scientific review on pesticide use concludes.

"To address the worldwide threats posed by pesticides, international coordination and cooperation between nations are essential."

Integrated pest management aims to mitigate the risks of such dangerous animal control practices by combining multiple safer strategies instead. These include encouraging natural predators and constructing fences, traps, and other barriers, like crawlspace vents.

Other animal deterrents can include the targeted use of light and sound, such as playing talkback radio, or applying scents, such as peppermint essential oil.

The CDFW has urged anyone who encounters blue animals or other abnormalities to report them to the Wildlife Health Lab; details are here.

Source

Doubling the voltage: What 800 V architecture really changes in EVs

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Confused about electric vehicle voltages? You won’t be after reading this.

For more than a decade, most electric vehicles have shared the same electrical backbone: a battery pack operating at roughly 400 V. It’s the invisible standard behind everything from early compliance cars to today’s bestselling EVs. But over the past few years, a growing number of automakers have doubled that number, moving to 800 V architectures and promising dramatically faster charging, better performance, and improved efficiency.

Cars like the Porsche Taycan and Hyundai Ioniq 5 helped push 800 V into the mainstream conversation, touting 18-minute charging sessions and sustained high-speed performance. On paper, doubling the voltage sounds like a simple upgrade. In reality, it reshapes everything from cable thickness and thermal management to semiconductor choice and charging infrastructure compatibility.

The physics: Why higher voltage matters

Understanding why higher voltage matters is as important as the hardware that carries it.

The math behind it is as follows: P = V x I (power equals voltage times current). Simply put, if you double the voltage, you can deliver the same power with half the current. From an engineering perspective, this means lower resistive losses, less heat in connectors and cables, thinner wiring, and lighter harnesses.

Cable weight and packaging

One underappreciated advantage of higher-voltage EV architectures is their impact on vehicle weight and packaging. Because delivering the same power at 800 V requires less current, engineers can use smaller-gauge copper cables, smaller busbars, lighter charging leads, and less cooling hardware.

That matters because EV wiring harnesses are already substantial—some estimates put them at 132–154 lbs (60–70 kg), with the high-current cables required for 400 V fast charging among the thickest in the vehicle.

Moving to 800 V systems allows manufacturers to use less copper for the wiring harness, improving both efficiency and cost, while also benefiting the charging infrastructure itself, since station cables can be lighter and easier to manage at higher voltages.

From an EV owner’s perspective, it’s also simply easier to plug in when the charging cable isn’t trying to double as a portable gym workout. Higher-voltage systems allow stations to use lighter cables, making plugging in much less like wrestling a fire hose.

Charging

It’s worth noting that buying a car that supports 800 V doesn’t mean you’ll instantly get faster charging. For example, some manufacturers will claim their EV will charge up to 350 kW; however, the important bit to note here is “up to.”

Many variables determine how fast a car will charge regardless of whether it has 800 V underpinnings. These include station voltage capacity, current limits, battery temperature, and charging curve. An 800 V car plugged into a lower-voltage charger may use a DC-DC converter or split the battery into two 400 V halves.

Early DC chargers were designed around battery packs operating at roughly 350–500 V, because nearly all EVs used 400 V architecture. However, this has since changed, and many now support much higher voltages. Two of the most prominent examples include IONNA and Electrify America in the US. Both networks deliver up to 350 kW, while their hardware typically supports output voltages of anywhere between 920 and 1,000 V.

That higher ceiling is important, as it allows 800 V vehicles to draw large amounts of power without requiring extreme current levels. For example, delivering 350 kW to a 400 V vehicle would realistically require somewhere in the region of 900 A, which is far beyond what most charging cables and connectors can handle. At 800 V, the same power requires roughly half the current.

And while many EVs will boast rapid charging times because of this, compatibility still plays a crucial role. Say you plug your 800 V car into a 400 to 500 V charger, the car must either boost the voltage internally or reconfigure its battery pack to charge correctly.

Costs

Now, as good as 800 V sounds, there’s a downside: cost, a snowball that rolls from the factory to the EV buyer.

Components like SiC (silicon carbide) semiconductors, higher-rated contactors and DC converters, and higher-voltage cooling and insulation cost more. Then there’s the battery pack segmentation, which can be more complex, and high-voltage safety requirements.

According to Leapenergy, however, 800 V prices are coming down. Today, an 800 V platform costs an additional $1,180, but this is projected to fall to $420 by 2028.

Where’s the industry headed?

Industry forecasts suggest that 800 V architectures will initially remain concentrated in higher-end EVs before gradually filtering downmarket.

Some analysts estimate that 15–20 percent of EVs globally could adopt 800 V systems by 2030, although the share is much higher in premium segments, where more than half of vehicles priced above $60,000 may use 800 V platforms.

China’s fast-moving EV industry may push the technology even further, with projections of around 35 percent penetration by the end of the decade.

The shift is being driven largely by improvements in silicon-carbide power electronics, which enable higher voltages while reducing switching losses and improving charging efficiency. As those components scale and costs fall, what is currently a feature of premium EVs from companies like Hyundai Motor Group, Porsche, and Lucid Motors may gradually migrate into more mainstream vehicles.

400 V vs. 800 V verdict:

So here lies the big question: Is 800 V the future of EVs? Yes—but don’t expect it to happen overnight.

Doubling the pack voltage brings clear technical advantages. Lower current means less heat, lighter cabling, more efficient electronics, and the ability to sustain extremely high charging power without pushing connectors and wiring to their limits. That’s why performance-focused EVs like the Taycan have embraced 800 V architectures.

For drivers who regularly rely on high-power DC fast-charging, the difference can translate into noticeably shorter stops. And shorter stops mean you can do cooler stuff with your life, instead of waiting for your EV to charge.

However, 400 V systems aren’t going away any time soon. They’re simpler, cheaper, and well understood, and they work perfectly well for the vast majority of EV use cases—especially when most charging still happens at home or at relatively modest public chargers. That’s why hugely successful vehicles like the Tesla Model Y and Ford Mustang Mach-E continue to use optimized 400-volt platforms while still delivering competitive charging speeds.

For now, though, the takeaway is simpler: 800 V isn’t a revolution—it’s an evolution. It makes fast-charging faster and high-performance EVs easier to engineer, but the 400 V architecture that powered the first wave of modern EVs still has plenty of life left in it.

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Posted Saturday 14 March 2026 at 11:03 am AEST (my time).

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Science uncovers a 150-year-old hidden side of two most precious things to us

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

A group of scientists has found a way to spot very faint magnetic signals in everyday metals like copper, gold, and aluminum, using only light and a refined technique. Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows how something once thought invisible can now be measured.

The Hall effect, discovered nearly 150 years ago, explains how electric currents bend when exposed to a magnetic field. In magnetic materials such as iron, this effect is strong. In non-magnetic metals, however, the effect is much weaker. A related idea, the optical Hall effect, was expected to exist but was too subtle to detect with visible light.

“It was like trying to hear a whisper in a noisy room for decades,” said Prof. Amir Capua of Hebrew University. “Everyone knew the whisper was there, but we didn’t have a microphone sensitive enough to hear it.”

The team, led by Ph.D. candidate Nadav Am Shalom and Prof. Capua, worked with colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Manchester. They focused on how to measure these tiny magnetic effects in metals that do not behave like magnets in daily life.

“You might think of metals like copper and gold as magnetically ‘quiet’—they don’t stick to your fridge like iron does,” explained Prof. Capua. “But in reality, under the right conditions, they do respond to magnetic fields—just in extremely subtle ways.”

To make this possible, the researchers improved a method called the magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE). This technique uses a laser to see how magnetism changes the reflection of light. By using a 440-nanometer blue laser and strongly modulating the external magnetic field, they boosted sensitivity enough to detect signals in copper, gold, aluminum, tantalum, and platinum.

The team pointed out that the anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnets is much stronger than the ordinary Hall effect, which makes the optical Hall effect even weaker than MOKE. That is why it has been so hard to detect at visible wavelengths. Their upgraded MOKE method finally overcame this barrier.

The results partly matched the Lorentz-Drude theory, which describes how electrons respond to electromagnetic fields. But the data also showed contributions from plasma dynamics and interband transitions, meaning the behavior was more complex than the theory alone could explain.

Another surprising finding was that the “noise” in their measurements was not random. Instead, it scaled with the spin-orbit coupling of the metals, a property that links how electrons move with how they spin. This was tied to Gilbert damping enhancement, which describes how magnetic energy fades in materials. The researchers concluded that the noise came from optical interactions with spins, mediated by spin-orbit coupling.

“It’s like discovering that static on a radio isn’t just interference—it’s someone whispering valuable information,” said Am Shalom. “We’re now using light to ‘listen’ to these hidden messages from electrons.”

The new method avoids the need to attach wires to devices, which is difficult at very small scales. Instead, it only requires shining a laser, making it simpler and less invasive.

The implications are broad, from magnetic memory and spintronics to quantum computing. Because the technique does not require extreme cooling or very large magnets, it could be used more widely in engineering and materials science.

“This research turns a nearly 150-year-old scientific problem into a new opportunity,” said Prof. Capua. He recalled that Edwin Hall, who discovered the Hall effect in 1881, had tried to measure it with light but failed. Hall wrote: “I think that, if the action of silver had been one tenth as strong as that of iron, the effect would have been detected. No such effect was observed.”

By tuning their system to the right frequency, the team has now achieved what Hall could not, opening a new way to study how electrons behave in metals once thought magnetically silent.

Source: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Nature

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 Saturday 14 March 2026 at 11:02 am AEST (my time).

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Rocket Report: Pentagon needs more missile interceptors; Artemis II clears review

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:50:07 +0000

SpaceX has started commissioning a second launch pad at the company’s Starbase facility in Texas.

Welcome to Edition 8.33 of the Rocket Report! NASA officials seem optimistic about launching the Artemis II mission next month, so confident that they will forgo another fueling test on the Space Launch System rocket to check the integrity of fickle seals in a liquid hydrogen loading line. The rocket will return to the launch pad next week, with liftoff targeted for April 1 at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC). NASA has six launch dates available in early April after the agency added April 2 to the launch period. April 1 and 2 each have launch windows that open before sunset, an added bonus for those of us who prefer a day launch, for purely aesthetic reasons.

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.

Firefly’s Alpha rocket flies again. Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket successfully returned to flight Wednesday, March 11, launching a technology demonstration mission more than 10 months after the rocket’s previous launch failed, Space News reports. The launch followed several delays and scrubbed launch attempts. The two-stage Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and headed southwest over the Pacific Ocean, reaching orbit about eight minutes later. Firefly said the rocket’s upper stage later reignited its engine, demonstrating the restart capability required for some orbit insertion missions. This was the seventh flight of Firefly’s Alpha rocket, capable of hauling more than a ton of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Block II preview... The recent setbacks for Firefly’s Alpha program included a launch failure last April and a fire that destroyed a booster stage on the test stand. The Texas-based company billed this week’s flight as a purely demonstration mission to validate several upgrades for the Alpha Block II rocket configuration, which will debut on the next launch. The Block II will include a 7-foot (2-meter) increase to Alpha’s length, consolidated batteries and avionics built in-house, improved thermal protection systems, and stronger carbon-composite structures built with automated machinery. This week’s flight carried the rocket’s new in-house avionics suite and enhanced thermal protection system, Firefly said. “Flight 7 served as a critical opportunity to validate Alpha’s performance ahead of our Block II upgrade, and this team knocked it out of the park,” said Adam Oakes, Firefly’s vice president of launch. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Rocket Lab launches undisclosed satellite. Rocket Lab launched a spacecraft March 5 for a confidential customer, most likely Earth observation company BlackSky, Space News reports. The mission began with the liftoff of an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab’s private spaceport in New Zealand. The rocket delivered a “single commercial satellite” to a roughly 292-mile-high (470-kilometer) orbit for a “confidential customer,” Rocket Lab said in a press release. This was the 83rd flight of an Electron rocket, including suborbital flights for the US military’s Defense Innovation Unit testing hypersonic missile tech. Electron is a workhorse in the dedicated small launch sector, with capacity for up to 710 pounds (320 kilograms) of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Solving the puzzle... This was the second time in less than four months that Rocket Lab has launched a satellite mission for an undisclosed customer. BlackSky, a US-based remote sensing company, confirmed it was the customer for a November Rocket Lab launch under similar circumstances. BlackSky announced this week that it activated its newest “Gen-3” optical Earth-imaging satellite “in less than one week following launch.” While the company did not confirm its launch with Rocket Lab, this statement suggests BlackSky was, indeed, the customer on the March 5 mission. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Pentagon orders more SM-3s. In early February, the Pentagon and RTX, formerly Raytheon, reached an agreement to ramp up missile production, with a framework to dramatically increase manufacturing of Tomahawk cruise missiles, air-to-air missiles, and SM-3 and SM-6 missile interceptors. The announcement did not include a dollar value. The Defense Department put some numbers on the deal in the military’s daily dump of contract announcements Thursday. The Missile Defense Agency is ordering dozens of new SM-3 Block IB missiles, which are used to intercept enemy ballistic missiles in space. Thursday’s announcement added 23 SM-3 missiles to the order, bringing the total number to 78, for a total cost of more than $1.36 billion.

SpaceX delivers for EchoStar. A direct television satellite for Dish Network, a subsidiary of EchoStar, headed into geosynchronous Earth orbit on Monday night aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Spaceflight Now reports. The satellite, EchoStar XXV, flew to a geosynchronous transfer orbit before maneuvering to its operational position at 110 degrees west longitude above the equator. This was the 30th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket so far in 2026, putting SpaceX on a similar pace to last year.

A rarity these days... This was the first launch of a large commercial geosynchronous communications satellite in nearly six months. These types of satellites operate more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator, where their orbits match the rate of Earth’s rotation. They were once the favored solution for commercial broadcasting and data relay. Today, the strong trend is toward large mega-constellations in low-Earth orbit, with networks like SpaceX’s Starlink beaming broadband Internet to global customers. Commercial geosynchronous satellites are now a niche, primarily for markets like direct-to-home TV and satellite radio. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China resumes space launches. Two Chinese rockets launched Thursday, March 12, from spaceports in the northwest and south of the country. These were the first Chinese orbital launches in more than a month, a break that coincided with the Chinese New Year holiday. It is unclear whether the holiday was the reason for the interruption of satellite launches. China did not have such a long lull in launch activity over the last couple of years. Two Chinese rockets failed during launches in January, but China’s rocket industry has a deep bench, so there’s no obvious link between those failures and the recent letup in launches.

Assembling a network… The first of Thursday’s launches from China involved a Long March 8A rocket carrying a batch of Internet satellites, followed by the launch of a Long March 2D rocket with a pair of classified military satellites. These missions continued China’s rapid build-up of satellite networks for data relay and imaging surveillance.

Artemis II clears critical review. NASA plans to haul its Artemis II Moon rocket back out to its seaside launch pad next week to ready the huge booster for blastoff as early as April 1 on a delayed-but-historic flight to send four astronauts on a nine-day trip around the moon, CBS News reports. At the conclusion of a two-day flight readiness review, “all the teams polled ‘go’ to launch and fly Artemis II around the Moon, pending completion of some of the work before we roll out to the launch pad,” said Lori Glaze, associate administrator of Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters, in a press conference Thursday. “Just a reminder to everybody, we talk about it every time we talk about this flight, it’s a test flight, and it is not without risk. But our team and our hardware are ready,” Glaze said.

Behind schedule… Based on the ever-changing positions of the Moon and Earth, along with a complex mix of mission objectives, NASA must launch Artemis II by April 6, or the flight will slip another month or so. For an April 1 launch, liftoff is expected at 6:24 pm EDT, followed by splashdown in the Pacific Ocean nine days later. NASA workers had hoped to launch the Space Launch System rocket, the Orion crew capsule, and its four passengers—Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—in early February. But the long-awaited flight was delayed by hydrogen fuel leaks and, more recently, by problems with the rocket’s upper-stage propellant pressurization system. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Goodbye to NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage. The death of NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage was confirmed last Friday, March 6, in a seemingly pedestrian notice posted on a government procurement website: “NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA).” The announcement spells the end of the Exploration Upper Stage, a multibillion-dollar, Boeing-led development 10 years in the making that was still years away from being ready to fly, Ars reports.

We hardly knew ya… Contracted to Boeing more than a decade ago, the Exploration Upper Stage upgrade was intended to allow the SLS rocket to launch not just the Orion spacecraft to the Moon, but large payloads alongside it. That the development of capable rockets by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance to deliver large cargo to the Moon rendered it obsolete mattered, for a long time, not at all. If the Exploration Upper Stage was anything, it was a survivor—a testament to the power of pork and the value of political support from key Southern senators in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Florida. Now, NASA is going with a more affordable commercial option to upgrade the SLS rocket.

SpaceX activates second Starbase launch pad. For the first time since October, SpaceX has a rocket on the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, NASASpaceflight reports. This time, it is the first of SpaceX’s new Block 3 Super Heavy boosters mounted on SpaceX’s newest launch pad, Pad 2. The launch pad has been under construction for the past 22 months and will help usher in the next chapter for the Starship program. This is the start of pad commissioning, a process that will culminate with the first launch of the upgraded third-generation Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket. SpaceX previously put the new booster and ship through a series of checkouts at a separate test stand at Starbase.

Slipping until April… At some point, SpaceX is expected to test-fire the new Super Heavy booster on Pad 2. But the booster only has a subset of its 33 Raptor engines, so a static fire test does not appear to be in the plan for the booster’s current stay at the launch pad. Meanwhile, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X on March 7 that the first Block 3 launch is about four weeks away, suggesting a launch sometime in early April. SpaceX had been targeting March for the test flight. This time one year ago, Musk wrote that SpaceX was “tracking to a Starship launch rate of once a week” within 12 months. That launch cadence has not been achieved.

Next three launches

March 13: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-31 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14:33 UTC

March 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-48 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 10:00 UTC

March 15: Long March 6A | Unknown Payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 13:20 UTC

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Posted Saturday 14 March 2026 at 4:49 am AEST (my time).

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Magnetars drag spacetime to power superluminous supernovae

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:48:25 +0000

Frame-dragging may explain an odd pattern seen in the brightest supernovae.

Some of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe,” says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For years, astrophysicists tried to understand what exactly makes superluminous supernovae so absurdly powerful. Now it seems like we may finally have some answers.

Farah and his colleagues have found that these events are most likely powered by magnetars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that warp the very space and time around them.

The power within

Magnetars have been a leading candidate for the engine behind superluminous supernovae. The theory says these insanely magnetized stars are born from the collapsing core of the original progenitor star and emit energy via magnetic dipole radiation. “This core is roughly a one solar mass object that gets crushed down to the size of a city,” Farah explains. As its spin slows down, a magnetar bleeds its rotational energy into the expanding material of the dead star, lighting it up.

The problem was that this theory did not quite explain observations. In a standard magnetar model, the light curve of the supernova should rise rapidly and then fade away evenly as the neutron star loses its rotational energy. “This way the light curve, in the prediction of this model, just goes up and then down quite smoothly,” Farah says. But when astronomers observe superluminous supernovae, they almost never see this smooth fade. Instead, they see bumps, wiggles, and strange modulations. The light curve flickers over months.

For a while, scientists tried to patch the magnetar engine theory to fit observations. Maybe the expanding debris was slamming into irregular shells of material shed by the star before it died. Or perhaps the magnetar engine was spitting out random, violent flares. But these explanations required highly specific, fine-tuned parameters to match what we were seeing through our telescopes.

The solution to the strange flickering problem came when the Liverpool Gravitational Wave Optical Transient Observer collaboration detected an object designated SN 2024afav on December 12, 2024. Initially, the object looked like a standard superluminous supernova. “It was as bright and it had bumps in the light curve like many other objects of this kind,” Farah says. But as the telescopes kept watching, it started doing something unprecedented: It started to chirp.

The chirping star

In physics, a chirp refers to a signal with a frequency that steadily increases over time. In the case of SN 2024afav, its emissions were bumping up and down, but the gap between these bumps was shrinking. After a second and third bump both appeared with the gaps between them reduced by roughly 35 percent, Farah and his team realized they could calculate how much the gap between the bumps would decrease next.

The team adjusted their observation schedule, pointed their instruments at SN 2024afav, and discovered the fourth bump appeared exactly when they expected it would. The fifth bump enabled the scientists to narrow down the period reduction to about 29 percent.

The fact that Farah and his colleagues could accurately predict the bumps delivered a massive blow to our existing magnetar models. While a few irregular bumps could be explained away by the supernova ejecta crashing into clouds of gas, it doesn’t explain perfectly timed, cleanly sinusoidal modulations with a steadily decaying period. Random space rubble just doesn’t work that way.

“So, we came up with the new model to describe this behavior,” Farah explains. They proposed a new physical mechanism that relied on the Lense-Thirring effect, otherwise known as frame-dragging. Frame-dragging is a prediction of General Relativity, where a massive spinning object slightly drags the spacetime around with it as it rotates. “We didn’t try this mechanism before because it had never been seen around a magnetar before,” Farah says. But when his team did try it, it turned out to perfectly match what was going on.

The flickering in the superluminous supernovae, Farah hypothesized, was caused by the extreme gravity of a newborn magnetar dragging the very spacetime around it along as it was spinning.

Twisted space

To understand Farah’s Lense-Thirring solution, imagine a bowling ball spinning in a vat of molasses. As the ball rotates, friction drags the sticky fluid along, creating a swirling vortex. According to Einstein’s General Relativity, mass and energy can warp the fabric of spacetime, so if a sufficiently large mass is spinning rapidly, it drags the space-time along in a manner similar to the molasses. Around Earth, this effect is minuscule. But around a newborn magnetar, which is far more massive and spinning hundreds of times a second, spacetime is whipped into a violent, twisting frenzy.

When the progenitor star exploded to create SN 2024afav, it didn’t eject all of its material perfectly. Some of the stellar guts failed to escape and fell back toward the newborn magnetar, forming a small accretion disk around it. Crucially, this disk was misaligned, tilted relative to the rotational axis of the magnetar. Because the disk was tilted in this aggressively twisted spacetime, the Lense-Thirring effect forced the entire disk to wobble, or precess, around the magnetar’s spin axis like a top that was spinning ever more slowly.

As this misaligned disk wobbled, it acted like a giant cosmic lampshade: it periodically blocked, reflected, or redirected the intense radiation and jets spewing from the central magnetar. The high-energy photons emitted by the magnetar had to fight their way through the expanding supernova ejecta, getting reprocessed into optical light and diffusing outward over a span of about 15 days. Observed through our telescopes on Earth, this wobbling disk created a rhythmic fluctuation in the superluminous supernova’s brightness.

After Farah and his colleagues explained the bumps in the signal with the wobbling disk around the magnetar, they moved to explaining why the signal chirped.

The shrinking disk

The answer the team proposes lies in the environment of the disk itself. The size of this accretion disk isn’t static. It’s determined by an inward ram pressure from the infalling matter and the outward radiation pressure coming from the magnetar. Over time, as the exploding star runs out of fallback material, the accretion rate of the disk drops. With less matter pushing in, the disk loses equilibrium and begins to shrink, falling inward toward the magnetar. And the closer it gets to the spinning magnetar, the stronger the Lense-Thirring effect becomes.

As the accretion disk shrinks and falls deeper into the gravity well, the twisted spacetime whips it around faster and faster. “Imagine a pirouetting figure skater pulling her arms in to accelerate the spinning movement,” Farah suggests. In consequence, the precession speeds up, the wobbles get tighter, and the light curve chirps.

Finally, by measuring the chirps, Farah and his colleagues were able to work backward to measure the properties of the magnetar powering the SN 2024afav. They constrained its spin period to 4.2 milliseconds and precisely calculated its staggeringly powerful magnetic field. The team found that the magnetar’s properties that derived solely from the chirping matched the properties required to power the overall baseline brightness of the superluminous supernova. The engine that powered the main explosion was exactly the right size and speed to cause the wobbling we observed.

But the work on the revised “magnetar+LT” model is just beginning. “This object is so rare and so new,” Farah admits. “We were scraping the bottom of the barrel for references that were even remotely related to the idea we were pitching here.”

Superluminous siblings

Farah’s team went back and looked at archival data from other bumpy superluminous supernovae such as SN 2018kyt, SN 2019unb, and SN 2021mkr. They found that their “magnetar+LT” model explains the modulations in those events as well. A whole class of exploding stars that previously required multiple mutually exclusive physical explanations could be unified by a single, elegant model.

This model, though, still has many unanswered questions. “How the accretion disk forms, how it blocks or modulates the light from the magnetar, how that light then gets to the ejecta, and finally how it gets to the observer,” Farah listed. “Basically every step along the way we made the best assumptions we could.” For each of these steps, he admits, there were at least five different ways it could happen, and the team just went with their best guess of what was going on.

To really figure it all out, Farah says, we need to wait till more objects like SN 2024afav are discovered. And this, he hopes, should become possible with new observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile coming online. “The Rubin Observatory is expected to discover dozens of these chirped supernovae,” Farah says. “We will be able to test our models against many different objects. There’s definitely room for development and growth. This is just the very beginning.”

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10151-0

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Posted Saturday 14 March 2026 at 4:48 am AEST (my time).

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YouTube expands unskippable 30-second ads to TVs after $40 billion revenue year

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:10:00 +0000

YouTube's ad business has outgrown nearly every major media company – and now its ads are about to become harder to avoid.

After a record-breaking year in which YouTube pulled in $40.4 billion in ad revenue, surpassing the combined totals of Disney, NBC, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, Google is expanding how it delivers those ads to viewers watching on television.

The next phase of Google's strategy is unskippable, 30-second commercials on YouTube's TV app.

The move nods directly to the legacy television experience YouTube has steadily displaced: longer, linear-style spots meant to capture viewers who now stream the platform's content from their couches instead of their phones.

According to Google, the new format will appear only on connected TVs, the fastest-growing segment of YouTube's audience. Google says its AI-driven ad system dynamically chooses among 6-second bumpers, 15-second traditional ads, and these new 30-second unskippable TV placements to optimize engagement and reach. The company frames the change as a benefit for advertisers, allowing them to reach viewers in what it calls a "relaxed, living-room setting."

For users, however, it's a noticeably different experience. Ads that once could be skipped after a few seconds will now run in full, reviving the kind of commercial breaks many people thought streaming had left behind. Those who prefer shorter or skippable interruptions might have only one alternative: a YouTube Premium/Lite subscription, which offers an ad-free experience at a higher price.

The timing of YouTube's ad expansion shows how much the advertising landscape has shifted. In 2025, YouTube overtook the major Hollywood studios in ad revenue, reversing the gap from the previous year's totals. The platform's $40.4 billion haul exceeded the combined $37.8 billion generated by the four studios – a milestone that highlights how deeply digital video has eroded traditional broadcast and cable advertising.

Data courtesy of App Economy Insights

Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported total YouTube revenue of roughly $60 billion for the year, with subscriptions like YouTube TV, Premium, Music, and NFL Sunday Ticket contributing a sizable portion. Advertising, though, remains the engine of its business, drawing marketers eager to reach younger, highly engaged streaming audiences.

While YouTube's ad revenue still trails Meta's $196.2 billion, its position as the dominant video advertising platform is solidifying. MoffettNathanson, the research firm that first flagged YouTube's ascent past Disney, called the company "the new king of all media," a sentiment echoed by Wall Street analysts tracking audience fragmentation across digital and traditional channels.

That rise hasn't come without friction. YouTube has stepped up enforcement against ad blockers, testing new ways to detect and disable them while funneling frustrated users toward its paid tiers. With the expansion of unskippable ads on TV, Google appears to be experimenting with the boundaries of viewer tolerance – testing how far its audience will go before paying to opt out entirely.

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Explain it like I’m 5: Why is everyone on speakerphone in public?

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Your phone still functions when held to your ear, people!

The key to working at a place like Ars Technica is solid news judgment. I’m talking about the kind of news judgment that knows whether a pet peeve is merely a pet peeve or whether it is, instead, a meaningful example of the Ways that Technology is Changing our World.

The difference between the two is one of degree: A pet peeve may drive me nuts but does not appear to impact anyone else. A Ways that Technology is Changing our World story must be about something that drives a lot of people nuts.

“But where is the threshold?” I hear you asking plaintively. “It’s extremely important that I know when something crosses the line from pet peeve to important, chin-stroking journalism topic!”

Fortunately, the answer is simple. The threshold has been breached when your local public transit agency puts up a sign about the behavior in question.

Which brings me to the sign I saw yesterday in Philadelphia.

“Unless the tea is REALLY hot, keep the call off speaker,” it said.

(For those not in the US, “tea” in this context means gossip or news.)

SEPTA, the local transit agency, runs the buses and commuter rail in Philadelphia, and you can tell from the light-hearted-but-seriously-don’t-do-this tone of the message that speakerphone-wielding passengers are now widely complained about by their fellow riders.

I share their disdain, but for me, the dark and judgmental thoughts I have when I see this behavior are also paired with confusion. Why is it happening? Do these people not know that it is actually more work to hold your phone out in front of you than up to your ear? Do they have no common decency, manners, or taste? Do they genuinely not care if everyone in the frozen foods aisle overhears them talking about Aunt Kathy’s diagnosis? It’s bizarre.

At least when it comes to something like TikTok or Spotify, there’s a certain logic. Perhaps you have no headphones but need to unwind after a long day, and you just can’t imagine anyone who might not enjoy the soothing sounds of [Harry Styles/Cannibal Corpse/Wu-Tang Clan]?

But phone calls? People—are you aware that we can hear you and the person speaking to you?

Our long national nightmare

Ever since people began emerging from their pandemic isolation, I’ve seen a shocking amount of public speakerphone usage. Especially—of all places—in the grocery store. I can only assume that picking out spicy hummus and chicken tikka masala at Trader Joe’s is so boring for many people that they would rather have completely unrelated conversations, on speaker, in public, as a form of distraction.

It’s not just grocery stores and SEPTA trains, of course. Just yesterday, shortly after seeing the sign, I saw a woman walking along the sidewalk talking loudly into a phone held out in front of her. When will our long national nightmare finally end?

Not soon, if we can judge by that bastion of cultural reporting, the New York Post, which claimed in 2025 that speakerphone use on New York City public transit was “an unspoken act of aggression backed by the threat of violence—and everyone nearby knows it.” But New Yorkers weren’t going to do anything about it because people are “too scared of nasty blowback if they so much as look at the offender wrong.”

Londoners aren’t going to act, either, as My London noted in 2023. “Londoners being Londoners,” the outlet said, “they are unlikely to approach anyone directly and ask them politely to turn the volume down, but they will spend hours and hours online discussing other ways to deal with the problem, including spending £350 on Sony noise-cancelling headphones.”

I mentioned my frustrations to a friend from Chicago this week. Maybe Chicago has the answer? My friend had just encountered obnoxious speakerphone use at his local Starbucks, he said, where a couple had placed a phone on the table between them with the volume apparently on max. My friend could hear this quite clearly from two tables away, and he could not resist making his feelings known. So he marched over and told the couple that they were being loud, obnoxious, and inconsiderate… and then immediately shimmied his way out the door.

Frustrated members of the public have taken to social media to vent about the issue, hoping for good advice. But what they usually get is a warning, such as, “You think these guys don’t know they’re being obnoxious? Of course they do: they just don’t give a sh— about you or anyone else on the train. Unless you’re 6’2” and 250 pounds of anger and muscle and willing to risk eating a box cutter, put your AirPods or whatever in and ignore it like everyone else.”

You might think that Philly, of all places, would be a natural spot for the public to speak up—this is the city that memorably threw snowballs at Santa, an event so famous it has its own Wikipedia entry.

But I’ve never seen it happen, and frankly, I don’t do it either. I’m not scared of “eating a box cutter,” because despite what the post above implied, most of the people I’ve seen on speakerphone don’t seem aggressive or purposely obnoxious. Many are middle-aged, and their basic affect is just… oblivious.

Indeed, this was the explanation that USA Today came up with in 2024. People have just become (I am paraphrasing here) unconsciously self-centered jerk faces who don’t even think about how annoying their behavior might be in public spaces. Perhaps the pandemic is to blame, or the solipsism of the smartphone.

Maybe. I’m not fully sold on those explanations, which appear to have no real data behind them. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to think of a good reason for doing this, so who knows. Whatever the reason for it, though, people are not generally receptive to public criticism from strangers—and I’m not sure they ever were.

The search for answers

Ars readers are some of the smartest on Earth and so, when I saw the SEPTA sign validating my long-running disdain for public speakerphones, I wondered if our readers might not have scientific answers to my long-gestating questions:

Is public speakerphone use increasing?
If so, why? (WHY, I SAY!)
And—most importantly—how do we spread the good word about public spaces, private conversations, and the fact that phones still work when pressed to your ear?

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Posted Thursday 12 March 2026 at 12:26 pm AEST (my time).

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Quantum computing meets the Möbius molecule

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:58:33 +0000

A complex structure with multiple electrons is within reach of today’s hardware.

Last week, IBM trumpeted its contributions to a rather unusual paper: the production of a molecule with a half-Möbius topology, assisted by an algorithm run in part on a quantum computer. There was, to put it mildly, a lot going on in this paper, and it took a little while to digest. But it’s interesting in what it says about the sorts of chemistry that we can construct with tools developed over the past several decades, as well as how quantum computation is inching toward utility.

But getting the full picture requires about three different stories, so we’ll go through each of them separately before bringing the big picture together.

Orbitals with a twist

Those of you who can still dredge up your high school chemistry lessons probably remember benzene, a six-carbon ring with alternating single and double bonds that kept all the carbons locked into a single plane, creating a flat molecule. What you are a bit less likely to remember is that the double bonding is mediated by orbitals that extend vertically above and below the nucleus of the carbon atoms. Thanks to the alternating single-double nature of the bonds, electrons in these orbitals end up delocalized; the differences between the bonds become a bit irrelevant, and the molecule is best viewed as having some of its electrons floating around in a cloud. The same would hold true for even larger molecules with the same sort of bonding arrangement.

The way the orbitals are arranged in benzene, any electrons that circulate around the molecule will end up back where they started. By linking other atoms to the carbon ring, it’s possible to place orbitals at different angles from the vertical. With the right combination of additional orbitals, it’s possible to twist things so that an electron starts out on top of the molecule (assuming the ring is laid flat on a surface) but ends up at the bottom by the time it completes a full circuit around the ring. It would have to do a second loop around the ring to end up back where it started.

This has a direct analog in tracing a path along the surface of a Möbius strip, where you also need to perform two circuits to end up back where you started. In fact, some simple Möbius molecules have been synthesized in the past.

What sets the new research apart is its use of the fact that there are far more options for orbitals and bonds than we see in simple benzene derivatives. The large international team (which includes both academics and IBM researchers) found a way to create a half-Möbius arrangement, in which the orbitals of a ring-shaped molecule are arranged such that, after a single loop around the molecule, an electron would be neither on the top nor bottom of the molecule, but somewhere around the periphery.

It would need to perform two loops just to end up on the bottom and then two more loops to end up back where it started.

This isn’t a stable configuration; left on its own, the molecule would collapse into a far more mundane configuration in short order. And there’s no obvious use to it, even assuming we could keep it stable for long enough to test for applications. But it’s an interesting exploration of our ability to manipulate orbital configurations on the molecular level, and there’s no telling how that ability might ultimately pay off.

Like quantum computing, it’s weird and complicated

If you wanted to make something this odd, it’s not necessarily obvious how you would go about it. If tweaking orbital configurations were easy, someone probably would have done it already. And, as the authors of the paper that describes this work note, there are a lot of potential orbital shapes that are allowed by quantum mechanics, but the exact configuration that gets used in a molecule can depend on which of those orbitals are occupied and by how many electrons.

But as you deal with larger molecules—the team here worked with a 13-carbon ring studded with two chlorine atoms—the number of electrons involved gets complicated, and calculating what they would end up doing to the orbitals becomes increasingly intractable. In this situation, you’re looking at a series of orbitals that would be occupied by 24 electrons from the carbon atoms, plus another eight from the two chlorine atoms. This is beyond our ability to perform exact classical simulations of what the orbitals should look like.

But the orbitals are a quantum system, and it’s possible to map their nature to the sort of quantum system we can manipulate: a quantum computer. While an exact solution is likely beyond the capabilities of existing quantum computers, they proved useful for the execution of a mixed classical-quantum algorithm called Sample-based quantum diagonalization.

A sampling algorithm means just what it says: you gather a lot of samples of the behavior of a system and use those to extract general rules about its behavior. In this case, the classical part of the algorithm helps set up multiple operations on the quantum hardware, each of them providing an individual sample. Each of these samples can be executed faster than it would take classical hardware and is short enough that it doesn’t typically run up against the quantum hardware’s error limits. Because of the speed of the quantum hardware, lots of samples could be run, so any individual errors should get swamped by regular results.

The end result is that the team validated that certain manipulations could help them create the half-Möbius molecule with the right starting chemical.

How do you make this stuff?

The molecule they chose to make is, to put it mildly, an odd one. It’s a 13-carbon ring with chlorines linked to opposite sides of the ring. Because there is an odd number of carbons, this means that chlorines flank five carbons on one side of the ring and six on the other (see the structures below). Left on its own, the molecule would form alternating single and triple bonds. But the presence of the chlorines and an odd number of atoms mean that this alternation gets disrupted, leading to a double bond and some unpaired electrons floating around.

With the right processing, the starting molecule (top) would form the center structure. Directed application of voltages could convert it among the three forms on the bottom row.

One consequence of all of this is that the molecule isn’t really stable. The researchers made it in isolation, and it was kept at an extremely low temperature and isolated, sitting on the surface of a salt crystal. The second is that it’s probably impossible to design a series of chemical reactions that could synthesize it. Instead, the researchers started with a three-ring molecule with lots of chlorines attached and used a scanning tunneling microscope to apply precise voltages to specific atoms, breaking a few carbon-carbon bonds and popping off most of the chlorine atoms.

Once the correct molecule was formed, the same microscope was used to apply voltages to specific positions relative to the molecule, guided by earlier simulations. This shifted the configuration of the molecule, popping the two chlorines out of the flat plane defined by the carbon ring. Electrons shifted so that the side of the molecule with five carbons between the chlorines formed a series of double bonds; on the other side, single and triple bonds predominated.

This, in turn, altered the configuration of the orbitals to achieve the half-Möbius configuration that the researchers were aiming for. This was confirmed by atomic force microscopy, which registered the orbital configurations and showed that they largely matched the predictions derived from the computational sampling.

What to make of this

For starters, it’s worth stepping back to appreciate what was done here, since there are multiple aspects of this that could be considered science fiction just a couple of decades ago. Faced with a molecule that would be impossible to synthesize through chemical reactions, we applied precise voltages to individual atoms to tailor a single molecule to our precise needs. And then we manipulated its precise bonding configuration with additional carefully applied voltages.

All of that was made possible by our remarkable understanding of the quantum mechanical behavior of molecular orbitals.

By contrast, the use of quantum computing may seem relatively mundane. It involved a mixed quantum/classical algorithm, which was specifically tuned to work around the limits in error rates and qubit counts (it used over half of the 150 or so qubits on IBM’s Heron processor). But this is likely to be what quantum computing looks like for the next few years, as our gradually expanding capabilities start to bring a handful of slightly more sophisticated algorithms into reach with each bit of progress. And that’s pretty exciting in its own way.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aea3321 (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 12 March 2026 at 6:58 am AEST (my time).

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Reentry of NASA satellite will exceed the agency’s own risk guidelines

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 02:46:04 +0000

“Due to late-stage design changes, the potential risk of uncontrolled reentry increased.”

A NASA satellite that spent more than a decade coursing through the Van Allen radiation belts encircling Earth is about to fall back into the atmosphere.

Most of the spacecraft will burn up during reentry, but a fraction of the material making up the 1,323-pound (600-kilogram) satellite will likely reach Earth’s surface without vaporizing in the atmosphere. Uncontrolled reentries of satellites with comparable mass happen quite regularly—multiple times per month, according to one recent study—but most of them are older spacecraft or spent rocket bodies.

This reentry is notable because it poses a higher risk to the public than the US government typically allows. The risk of harm coming to anyone on Earth is still low, approximately 1 in 4,200, but it exceeds the government standard of a 1 in 10,000 chance of an uncontrolled reentry causing a casualty.

“Due to late-stage design changes, the potential risk of uncontrolled reentry increased,” a NASA spokesperson told Ars. “After taking into account the mission’s scientific benefits and the low risk of harm to anyone on Earth, NASA granted a waiver to address the non-compliance with the US Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices. Consistent with national policy, NASA notified the US Department of State about the exception.”

Plus or minus 10

The spacecraft, called Van Allen Probe A, launched in 2012 as part of a two-satellite mission to study Earth’s radiation belts. The belts are a collection of charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field, and they help protect our planet from cosmic radiation and solar storms.

It is difficult to predict satellite reentries. The density of the upper atmosphere varies, and the latest prediction from the US Space Force showed Van Allen Probe A will reenter the atmosphere early this week, with the reentry window open from late Monday through late Wednesday.

No one on the ground has ever been injured by falling space junk, but there are examples of space debris causing property damage.

NASA’s two Van Allen Probes launched into elliptical orbits ranging from a few hundred miles above Earth up to an apogee, or high point, of nearly 20,000 miles. The orbits are inclined 10 degrees to the equator, limiting the risk of injury or damage to a swath of the tropics. NASA ended the mission in 2019 when the satellites ran out of fuel.

At that time, NASA engineers expected the spacecraft to reenter the atmosphere in 2034. But higher-than-anticipated solar activity caused the atmosphere to swell outward, increasing atmospheric drag on the satellites beyond initial estimates, according to NASA. Van Allen Probe B is expected to reenter no earlier than 2030, with a similar risk to the public.

The two spacecraft were built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. NASA said the mission made several major discoveries, including “the first data showing the existence of a transient third radiation belt, which can form during times of intense solar activity.”

Several NASA satellites have reentered the atmosphere without complying with the government’s risk standard. One of the satellites, the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, fell out of orbit in 2018 with a 1-in-1,000 chance of harming someone on the ground. No one was hurt. RXTE was launched in 1995, just four months before NASA issued its first standard on orbital debris mitigation and reentry risk management.

While NASA has exceeded its standards before, the US government is not a top offender when it comes to unmitigated reentry risks. China launched four heavy-lift Long March 5B rockets between 2020 and 2022, and left its massive core stages in orbit to fall back to Earth. The four abandoned rocket cores, each nearly 24 tons in mass, reentered the atmosphere uncontrolled. Two of them dropped wreckage on land—in the Ivory Coast and Borneo—but no injuries were reported.

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Posted Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 12:45 pm AEST (my time).

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NASA and SpaceX disagree about manual controls for lunar lander

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 02:45:12 +0000

“NASA’s tracking of SpaceX’s manual control risk indicates a worsening trend.”

NASA’s inspector general released a new report on Tuesday that examines the space agency’s management of the Human Landing System development contracts signed with SpaceX and Blue Origin.

These landers are essential for NASA’s program to land humans on the Moon this decade and then establish a long-term settlement on the lunar surface. However, both NASA and the companies developing the landers have largely been silent about their efforts. For this reason the new report on Human Landing Systems (HLS) provides some interesting insights previously unknown to the public.

Overall, the report, signed by Office of Inspector General senior official Robert Steinau, finds that the fixed-price contracting approach has been beneficial for NASA as it seeks to broaden its utilization of the US commercial space industry.

“We found that the Agency’s contract approach has been effective at controlling costs and provided the HLS Program with insight into SpaceX’s and Blue Origin’s development of their lunar landers,” the report states. “The providers have also been able to utilize the Agency’s subject matter expertise and unique capabilities and facilitates to advance their lander development.”

Manual control desired

That’s not to say there have not been difficulties.

One of these involves the extent to which astronauts flying on board SpaceX’s Starship should be able to take manual control of the vehicle during flights down to the lunar surface.

“There is disagreement between NASA and SpaceX on whether the provider’s current proposed approach for landing meets the intent of the Agency’s manual control requirement,” the report states. “Despite the provider’s stated acknowledgment and commitment to meeting this requirement, NASA’s tracking of SpaceX’s manual control risk indicates a worsening trend.”

The report notes that during every one of the Apollo program’s crewed lunar landings, astronauts engaged the backup manual control method. (Of course, this occurred six decades ago, when flight software was considerably less sophisticated than today.)

As NASA and SpaceX near a key decision point, known as Critical Design Review, the issue remains unresolved. The new report suggests that this may result in automation being the only landing method.

A similar fight over Dragon

The space agency and SpaceX engaged in a similar back-and-forth during the design process for the Crew Dragon spacecraft a decade ago. SpaceX initially wanted touchscreens only, with limited flight commands available to astronauts. NASA pushed back and wanted what were essentially joysticks for astronauts to fly the vehicles like previous spacecraft. A former NASA astronaut then working at SpaceX, Garret Reisman, helped broker a compromise by which astronauts could manually fly the vehicles using controls on touchscreens.

However, the new report says the flight controls for Dragon were built on many successful missions by a cargo version of the vehicle that flew to the International Space Station.

“Starship will not have the same level of proven flight heritage in the actual operating environment for its crewed lunar missions,” the report states. “Incorporating this system capability is a key element of HLS’s human-rating certification and part of an essential crew survival strategy.”

A design for Blue Origin’s manual control has not yet been made, according to the inspector general.

There is other interesting information in the report, including details on the uncrewed demonstration flights that SpaceX and Blue Origin are both required to fly before human missions can take place. The inspector general notes that these flights will not require life support systems and airlocks, as human missions will. Nor will the tall Starship vehicle be required to test an elevator to bring crew down to the surface.

There will also be a limited ability to test the abrasive impact of lunar dust, expected to be returned inside the vehicles after Moonwalks, on life support equipment during these uncrewed demonstrations.

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Posted Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 12:44 pm AEST (my time).

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Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas Has Another Surprise: It’s Full of Alcohol

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:12:33 +0000

Analysis of the tail of 3I/Atlas reveals that it contains an anomalous proportion of methanol, a class of alcohol used in fuels.

Comet 3I/Atlas is now heading out of the solar system and into interstellar space, but scientists are still analyzing the data it left behind as it passed through our cosmic neighborhood. A new study, still under review, reveals a surprising detail: The comet is laden with alcohol.

Observations from the ALMA telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert show that the coma of this celestial object is heavily enriched in methanol, a type of alcohol common in fuels and solvents. Although methanol is commonly found in comets in the solar system, 3I/Atlas contained up to four times the typical amount.

According to the study, available at arXiv, 3I/Atlas is the second most methanol-rich comet ever measured, behind only the unusual C/2016 R2, discovered 10 years ago. Parallel investigations have also detected high abundances of other organic compounds, such as carbon dioxide, iron, and nitrogen, reinforcing the idea that this object has an out-of-the-ordinary composition.

The combination of excess methanol, a carbon dioxide-dominated coma, and other atypical chemical ratios supports the hypothesis that 3I/Atlas formed in an environment that is colder, more irradiated, or chemically distinct from any region where comets in the solar system formed.

The paper also suggests that 3I/Atlas may belong to the category of hyperactive comets, bodies that produce more water vapor than their surface can justify. In these comets, some of the gas comes not from the nucleus but from ice grains that float in the coma and sublimate. The researchers propose that 3I/Atlas released methanol, water, and carbon dioxide from both the nucleus and these icy grains.

In this case, a significant fraction of methanol came from detached ices that sublimated during the comet's approach to the sun. This behavior fits with that of hyperactive comets and reinforces the idea that 3I/Atlas is a natural, extremely cold, and chemically complex object, further ruling out any speculation about an artificial origin.

Today, the comet is moving away from the solar system at 60 kilometers per second. It is only the third confirmed interstellar object in history, but astronomers expect that future searches with new, more advanced instruments will reveal many more.

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Posted Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 5:12 am AEST (my time).

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How Can a Locomotive Pull a Long Train That’s Much Heavier?

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:11:15 +0000

For railroads, it’s all about managing static and kinetic friction.

Have you ever watched a mile-long freight train rumble by and wondered how one locomotive can pull more than a hundred fully loaded cars? The locomotive weighs maybe 150 metric tons, and each car is about 100 metric tons, which means it’s hauling 10,000 tons.

I mean, if you weigh 170 pounds, this would be like pulling three SUVs totaling 12,000 pounds. Ridiculous, right? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not about weight or mass—at least not directly. It’s about friction, which is the resistance to motion between two surfaces that are in contact.

Friction gets a bad rap—we use it as a metaphor for something that hinders productivity. But without it, things would not go smoothly. You couldn’t walk; you couldn’t even tie your shoes. You’d drop your latte. Your bicycle tires would spin in place and you’d fall over—luckily, since you’d have no brakes. In fact, all the nuts and bolts holding your bike together would fall off.

So, yes, to answer our question about freight trains, we need to understand how frictional forces work. All aboard the physics train!

What Is Static Friction?

Let’s start with something simple. Place a book on a table and give it a little nudge on the side. Just a light push—not enough to get it moving. Newton's second law says the net force on an object equals the product of its mass and acceleration (F_net = ma). Since the book isn’t accelerating (a = 0), the net force must be zero, meaning all the forces are balanced. Here’s a diagram:

Let’s look first in the vertical direction: We have a downward pull from gravity, and the strength of that force depends on the mass of the book (m) and the gravitational field (g) of the planet you’re on (F_g = mg). But the book isn’t accelerating downward, so there must be an equal force from the table pushing up. We call this a “normal force.” Result: The net vertical force is zero.

I know, the idea of an inert table pushing up on a book doesn’t seem very normal. Maybe it’ll help if you realize that gravity doesn’t pull you to Earth’s surface, as people often think—it pulls you to the center of the Earth. The normal force is what keeps you from plunging through the floor. (By the way, “normal” means perpendicular—it’s always perpendicular to the surface.)

Horizontally, we also have two forces. There’s the force of you pushing on the book from left to right, and again there must be an equal force pushing in the opposite direction. We call that resisting force static friction—“static” because the book’s not budging. This depends on just two things, the specific materials in contact, captured in a coefficient μ_s, and the normal force (N😞

This coefficient μ_s is just a number, usually between 0 and 1, which you can look up in a table for all kinds of different materials. For rubber tires on asphalt, it’s 0.9; for tires on ice it falls to 0.15 (hence snow chains). And N, as we saw above, equals the gravitational force, which in turn depends on the object’s mass. The greater the mass, the more friction you get.

Now, see that less-than-or-equal sign? This says μ_sN is the maximum static friction force in a given situation. If you push the book with a force of 1 newton, the frictional force will be 1 newton. Double the pushing force and the frictional force also doubles. It does whatever it has to in order to keep the two surfaces stationary—up to a point. If you keep pushing harder, your applied force will eventually exceed μ_sN and the book will start to slide. At that point, kinetic friction kicks in.

Kinetic friction is the resistance you get when the book is sliding across the table. It’s always lower than static friction, because it’s just harder to start something moving than to keep it moving. “OK,” you’re saying, “I got it. Static when stationary, kinetic when in motion.”

Ha! Then here’s a paradox: The force that enables you to move—let’s say to walk—is static friction, not kinetic friction. When you push off the ground with your back foot, static friction keeps your foot from sliding out from under you. (For laughs, see my recent article about trying to climb out of an ice bowl.) The same is true for the locomotive: It uses static friction to drive itself forward.

Train Tug-of-War

Now, suppose we have two identical locomotives chained back-to-back. What happens if they pull in opposite directions?

There's a bunch of forces here, but the only new one is what we call the tension force (T) in the chain. This results in an equal force pulling each locomotive in the backward direction. Resisting that pull is the static friction force (F_fs), which is now pushing in the forward direction.

Now, since both locomotives have the same mass (even the drivers are the same size), they will have the same normal force (N) and therefor the same maximum static friction. The result is easy to predict: The trains will huff and puff to no avail—it’s a stalemate.

What if the train on the right has a higher mass? That means it will have a larger normal force, and therefore a greater maximum value for friction. The lower-mass train on the left wouldn't be able to pull as hard and would lose the battle. Its wheels will lose traction and skid backward.

Now, this seems to suggest that a locomotive towing a bunch of cars would have to be more massive than all the cars put together. That would be true if the cars were using static friction—but they aren't!

Static Friction Beats Kinetic Friction

Take a dining room chair and push it in circles around the room. If anybody asks, tell them it’s for science. You’ll soon get tired, because the floor resists this sliding motion. That is the kinetic friction force. The equation looks very similar to the one for static friction:

But there are two key differences. First, we have a different coefficient, μ_k. This is always less than the coefficient of static friction, μ_s, so kinetic friction is lower. (This is why cars have antilock brakes: If you keep the wheels from locking up and skidding, you can stop in a shorter distance.) As an example, when two steel surfaces interact (like a train car wheel on a track), the coefficient of static friction would be 0.74, but the coefficient of kinetic friction would be 0.57.

The second difference is the equal sign instead of less-than-or-equal. This means the frictional force is constant as long as the object is sliding—it doesn’t equal the applied force anymore. That means the net force isn’t zero. Push harder on the chair by running and the chair will speed up.

Let's go back to that tug-of-war. The driver on the right now has an idea: Instead of gunning his engine, he throttles down to maintain a static friction interaction with the rails. Slow and steady. The guy on the left floors it—and what happens? His wheels spin and he gets a kinetic frictional force. Well, static friction beats kinetic friction, so the right train wins!

This would work even if the train on the left is somewhat heavier. So, it is possible for a train engine to pull cars that are more massive. But wait! There’s an even more important factor: A moving train car is rolling, not sliding. The wheel just touches the rail at one point and then rolls on to another point on the wheel. This is the magic of wheels: For the cars being towed, there is no longer any friction with the rails.

But there has to be kinetic friction somewhere, and indeed there is—it’s between the wheel axles and the car itself. To rotate, the axle has to slide along some surface in the housing that holds it in place. But with roller bearings and lubrication, μ_k can be massively reduced, from 0.56 for dry steel on steel to something like 0.002.

Now we’re talking! This is how a locomotive can pull a long train of cars with a much greater mass. The engine is pulling forward using steel-on-steel static friction, which is pretty high (0.74), giving it good traction. And the cars have a resistive kinetic friction force with a coefficient that is orders of magnitude smaller.

Some Extra Tricks

Still, that huge weight of 10,000 metric tons makes for a very high normal force—like roughly 100 million newtons. And remember, static friction is higher than kinetic friction. So even if you can keep a train moving, you might not be able to get it started.

That’s why trains have a trick called slack action. If you've ever been near a train as it starts moving, you probably heard a bunch of cracking that moves down the line of cars. The reason is that the connection from one car to the next is loose. So when the locomotive pulls the first car, the second car remains stationary until the slack is gone. With this trick, the locomotive can get one car moving at a time and add it to the group of moving cars. Pretty smart!

One last cool thing. There’s yet another type of friction called rolling friction. You see this on a truck with rubber tires: Under the weight of the vehicle, the tires flatten out on the bottom. So when the truck is moving, the tires are continually being deformed and returning to their proper shape. This flexing heats up the tires, and where there’s heat there’s energy loss. Since energy is conserved, this means the wheels slow down, and the truck has to burn more fuel to maintain its speed. Trains, on the other hand, have very little rolling friction, because their steel wheels barely deform at all. This makes trains a more energy-efficient mode of transportation.

So, you see—it is indeed possible for a locomotive to pull a bunch of cars that have more mass. You just need to use a little physics.

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Posted Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 5:10 am AEST (my time).

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Flexible feline spines shed light on “falling cat” problem

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:36:21 +0000

Falling cats in the study also seemed to show a marked preference for turning to the right.

Why do falling cats always seem to land on their feet? Scientists have been arguing about the precise mechanism for a very long time—since at least 1700, in fact—conducting all manner of experiments to pin down what’s going on. The research continues, with a paper published in the journal The Anatomical Record reporting on new experiments to analyze the flexibility of feline spines.

We covered this topic in-depth in 2019, when University of North Carolina, Charlotte, physicist Greg Gbur published his book, Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics. For a long time, scientists believed that it would be impossible for a cat in free fall to turn over. That’s why French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey’s 1894 high-speed photographs of a falling cat landing on its feet proved so shocking to Marey’s peers. But Gbur has emphasized that cats are living creatures, not idealized rigid bodies, so the motion is more complicated than one might think.

Over the centuries, scientists have offered four distinct hypotheses to explain the phenomenon. There is the original “tuck and turn” model, in which the cat pulls in one set of paws so it can rotate different sections of its body. Nineteenth-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell offered a “falling figure skater” explanation, whereby the cat tweaks its angular momentum by pulling in or extending its paws as needed. Then there is the “bend and twist,” in which the cat bends at the waist to counter-rotate the two segments of its body. Finally, there is the “propeller tail,” in which the cat can reverse its body’s rotation by rotating its tail in one direction like a propeller.

At the time, Gbur told Ars that, while all those different motions play a role, he thought that the bend-and-twist motion was the most important. “When one goes through the math, that seems to be the most fundamental aspect of how a cat turns over,” he said. “But there are all these little corrections on top of that: using the tail, or using the paws for additional leverage, also play a role.” This latest paper has Gbur rethinking that conclusion, according to his recent blog post, giving a bit more credence to the tuck-and-turn mechanism.

A spinal twist

A team of Japanese scientists removed the spines from five donated cat cadavers, preserving the ligaments and spinal discs and separating the thoracic and lumbar sections. Then they placed the sections into a twisting device to see how much force was required to twist them, and the limits of how far the sections could twist. They also took high-speed photographs of two cats in free fall after being dropped (eight times each).

The results: The upper section could twist further than the lower section, plus there was a “sweet spot” of sorts at about the 50-degree twist mark, where there was essentially no resistance to the twisting motion. That sweet spot did not exist for the lower section of the spine, supplying evidence for the “tuck and turn” hypothesis. “The flexibility of the upper part of the spine strongly supports this perception that the cat turns to get its head right-side up first and indicates that its biology is even tailored to make this as easy as possible,” Gbur wrote. Furthermore, the high-speed photographs clearly showed the waist kinking for a bend-and-twist motion, but with one of the rear legs extended and front paws tucked in, more typical of a tuck-and-turn mechanism.

The researchers were also surprised to find that the two cats they photographed while falling showed a marked preference to turn to the right: One turned to the right every time, while the other turned to the right six out of eight times. “Apparently there is some natural tendency for cats to twist right, even though they clearly can go both ways,” Gbur wrote. “My best guess at this point is that some asymmetric placement of internal organs may make it just a little easier to go one way than another.”

The debate will likely continue, per Gbur, in part because it’s so difficult to analyze the motion of falling cats, given that all the photo sequences to date have been taken from a single angle. “It would be really nice in the future to see someone take a multi-angle sequence that could be converted into a 3D model,” he wrote. “I suspect we might learn even more about how a cat performs its twist.”

The Anatomical Record, 2026. DOI: 10.1002/ar.70165Digital Object Identifier (DOI) (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 10 March 2026 at 1:35 pm AEST (my time).

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An unlikely set of clues helps reconstruct ancient Chinese disasters

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:35:34 +0000

Shang Dynasty oracle bones and modern weather models feature in the same study.

Warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean may have brought devastating floods to the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, according to a recent study in which its authors link three wildly different lines of evidence to tell the story.

People in Shang Dynasty China, around 3,000 years ago, probably didn’t realize that the massive floods sweeping through their heartland were the product of typhoons battering the southern Chinese coast hundreds of kilometers away. They certainly couldn’t have seen that the sheer intensity of those typhoons was fueled by a sudden shift in temperature cycles over the Pacific Ocean thousands of kilometers to the south and east. But, with the benefit of 3,000 years of hindsight and scientific progress, Nanjing University meteorologist Ke Ding and colleagues recently managed to connect the dots. The results are like a handwritten warning from the Shang Dynasty about how to prepare for modern climate change.

Typhoons, oracle bones, and abandoned settlements

Around 3,000 years ago, two great civilizations were flourishing in central China. In the Yellow River Valley, the Shang Dynasty rose to prominence, producing the first Chinese writing and also sacrificing thousands of people in ceremonies at the capital, Yinxu. Meanwhile, on the Chengdu Plain in southwestern China, the Shanxingdui culture built a walled capital city and sculpted large bronze heads, gold foil masks, and tools of jade and ivory, which they buried in huge sacrificial pits.

Archaeological sites across central China reveal that at various points between 2,500 and 4,000 years ago, disasters rocked these thriving societies, decimating the population, forcing settlements to relocate, and causing major cultural shifts and political upheaval.

Both civilizations rebounded after these disruptions; it didn’t take long, in the archaeological scheme of things, for populations to swell and settlements to rebuild. But for a little while, life was clearly disrupted.

A few wildly different clues point to the cause—or at least, one of the causes—of this upheaval: modern weather simulations, archaeological sites hundreds of miles from the Chinese coast, coastal sediments in Japan and South Korea that record the intensity of ancient typhoons, and even Shang Dynasty divination texts. All three of these lines of evidence converged on the same dates, telling a single horrifying story.

Reconstructing ancient storm seasons

We have a pretty good idea of how the size and intensity of a storm determines what kind of footprint it leaves on coastal sediments. Researchers look for similar traces in ancient sediments and use them to reconstruct what tropical storm seasons were like in the past (the field is called paleotempestology, which is your faithful correspondent’s new favorite word).

Based on paleotempestology records not only in China, but also along the coasts of South Korea and southwestern Japan, typhoons moving west across the Pacific Ocean tended to be more intense during the storm seasons around 2,800 years ago. Typhoons that curved northward had more intense seasons around 3,800 years ago and again around 3,300 years ago.

Those bouts of more intense typhoons may be related to something that happened off the coast of Peru around 3,000 years ago, when El Niño events suddenly got more frequent, more extreme, and longer-lasting. Paleoclimate researchers know this because around this time, shellfish species that live in cool water (but can’t take the heat) all but disappear from the Peruvian archaeological record, replaced by more heat-tolerant species. Around the same time, people living along the coast gave up building huge monumental temples, and villages shrank. You’re going to want to keep those dates in mind, because…

Ding and colleagues charted radiocarbon dates from sites across China’s Central Plains and Chengdu Plain, hoping to pinpoint changes in population and potential signs of a society in crisis. They noticed that the number of sites on the Central Plain, home to the Shang Dynasty, decreased sharply around 3,800 years ago and again about 3,300 years ago; at the sites that weren’t abandoned, changes suggested smaller populations overall. On the Chengdu Plain, something similar happened around 2,800 years ago. Villages, towns, and cities shifted toward higher ground; layers of mud left behind by flooding hint at the reason.

How does a typhoon in the Pacific flood inland China?

Seeing how well those dates lined up with when coastal sediments suggest more intense typhoons had been churning through the Pacific, Ding and colleagues ran some computer simulations using an LLM-based program called Pango-weather. The goal was to figure out how a typhoon on the coast could bring torrential rains and flooding to communities hundreds of miles inland. The answer wasn’t that the typhoon swept across the entire country; often, the typhoons in question never even made landfall. But they didn’t have to make landfall to stir up easterly winds that carried more water vapor across hundreds of miles to the plains.

Both the Shang Dynasty and Shu civilizations set up their capitals on plains just to the east of large mountain ranges. Normally, that works out very well for farmers, because the mountains force eastbound air upward, where it cools; water vapor condenses and rain falls. But settlements on the windward side of mountain ranges are also vulnerable to extreme rainfall events—like the ones caused by typhoons messing with the region’s airflow patterns.

Ding and colleagues’ results suggest that an increase in the average intensity of typhoons (which means that the researchers boosted the storms’ starting wind speed from about 54 kilometers per hour to about 126 kilometers per hour) caused more moisture to gather over regions like the Chengdu Plain and the Central Plains. Specifically, the Chengdu Plain was more impacted by typhoons moving west, while the Central Plains caught more flooding from typhoons that followed northward tracks. The effects were on the order of an extra 51 millimeters of rain a day in the Central Plains and extra 24 millimeters a day on the Chengdu Plain.

Consulting the oracle bones

The people of the Shang Dynasty and the Shu civilization probably didn’t know that large-scale weather systems, or even larger-scale climate shifts, were to blame for their woes, but they were definitely aware that they were living through periods in which serious floods were more likely. Writings on more than 55,000 pieces of burned bone from the late Shang Dynasty (2,996–3,200 years ago) reveal that Shang royals and nobles were very worried about heavy rains and floods during the period—worried enough to ask oracles to try to predict them.

Shang Dynasty rulers took their most pressing questions to oracles, who would throw oxen shoulder blades (scapulae) or the bony undersides of turtle shells (plastrons) onto a fire, then interpret the pattern of cracks in the burned bone. Fortunately for modern historians, those oracles also inscribed both the question and the answer into the bone itself, producing some of China’s first systematic writing.

Ding and colleagues counted the references to “upcoming rain” and “upcoming heavy rain” in the texts and found that Shang nobility asked their diviners about downpours much more often during the exact time periods when sediments suggest more intense typhoons and archaeological evidence suggest major social and political upheaval. And you don’t tend to keep asking if there’s going to be a big flood unless you have good reason to think that there might be.

When it rains, it pours

Of course, it’s not possible to say that these periods of unrest and struggle in ancient China happened entirely thanks to more intense typhoons, but the cycle of worsening storm seasons probably played a role. And in between floods, the lack of water may have been another major factor.

Paleoclimate records in ancient sediment reveal that even as typhoons were getting more intense, central China was baking under a drought—also thanks to the same cycle that drives El Niño today (recent studies suggest that El Niño years lead to severe droughts in central China and more intense typhoons in the Pacific). And the oracle bones reflect Shang dynasty rulers’ concerns about drought, too: references to prayers for rain and plagues of locusts closely match the periods of El Niño conditions identified in previous studies. The Shang Dynasty was getting hit with a one-two punch of climate disasters: years of drought, punctuated by heavy rains and devastating floods.

“This pattern bears similarities to the climatic challenges faced by the Maya civilization,” wrote Ding and colleagues, “where prolonged El Niño-like conditions may reduce overall rainfall while intensified cyclone activity could increase extreme rainfall, ultimately contributing to social declines.”

Why it matters today

Those 3,000-year-old oracle bones hold a warning for modern China. The character for “disaster” in the oracle bone scripts is a set of squiggly horizontal lines that immediately calls to mind floodwaters, and floods are still one of the deadliest and costliest disasters that China faces. Not only are floodwaters destructive, but they can leave behind too much salt in the soil and can also lead to outbreaks of insects and other pests (for both people and crops).

The mechanics that connect typhoon intensity to flooding in inland China work the same way they did during the Shang Dynasty. Current climate models predict that typhoons could be 14 percent more intense, on average, by the end of this century, thanks to humans and our pollution habits.

But the message from the oracle bones isn’t about despair; it’s about planning. As Ding and colleagues put it: “This study urges better preparation against the disastrous impact of intensified typhoons, especially in inland areas where facilities to mitigate extreme rainfalls and floods are relatively inadequate.”

Science Advances, 2026 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.eaeb1598 (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 10 March 2026 at 1:34 pm AEST (my time).

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2026 Australian Grand Prix: Formula 1 debuts a new style of racing

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:41:37 +0000

The key is understanding how to conserve energy across a lap. Oh, and be reliable.

Formula 1’s 2026 season got underway this past weekend in Melbourne, Australia. Formula 1 has undergone a radical transformation during the short offseason, with new technical rules that have created cars that are smaller and lighter than before, with new hybrid systems that are more powerful than anything since the turbo era of the 1980s—but only if the battery is fully charged.

The changes promised to upend the established pecking order of teams, with the introduction of several new engine manufacturers and a move away from the ground-effect method of generating downforce, which was in use from 2022. For at least a year, paddock rumors have suggested that Mercedes might pull off a repeat of 2014, when it started the first hybrid era with a power unit far ahead of anyone else.

That wasn’t entirely clear after six days of preseason testing in Bahrain, nor really after Friday’s two practice sessions in Melbourne, topped by Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and Oscar Piastri’s McLaren, respectively. The Mercedes team didn’t look particularly worried, and on Saturday, we found out why when George Russell finally left off the sandbags and showed some true pace, lapping more than six-tenths faster by the end of free practice than the next-quickest car, the Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton.

It’s never done that before

It wasn’t all smooth running for Antonelli, who tore three corners off his car during the same practice session, giving his mechanics a monstrous job to rebuild it all in a few short hours for qualifying. That almost didn’t happen, until qualifying was interrupted with a red flag caused by an uncharacteristic crash for four-time world champion Max Verstappen, who ended up in a crash barrier right at the start of his first flying lap.

“I’ve never experienced something like that before in my career. The rear axle just completely locked on, then of course you can’t save that anymore at that speed,” Verstappen told the media. Red Bull hasn’t yet revealed the precise cause of Verstappen’s crash, which forced him to start Sunday’s race from the back of the grid, but it’s likely related to the way the car’s electric motor can harvest more than half of the power output from the V6 engine.

Verstappen wasn’t the only driver caught out by unfamiliar hybrid behavior. Last year’s title hopeful and hometown hero Oscar Piastri looked to have the measure of his teammate (and reigning world champion) Lando Norris, but never even took the start of the race. On the way to the grid, Piastri took a little too much curb at turn 4, at which point his car delivered 100 kW more power than he was expecting; on cold tires, this spun the wheels, and before he could catch it, the car was in pieces and his weekend was over.

Ctrl-Alt-Del

If you are a relatively recent F1 fan, you may have only watched the sport during a period of extreme reliability. It was very much not always this way, and even when budgets for the top teams were two or three times what they’re allowed to spend now, cars broke down a lot.

Completely disassembling them and putting them back together overnight didn’t help, a practice that ended some years ago, but mostly it was technical rules that required teams to use the same engines for multiple races. Until 2004, you could use multiple engines in a single race weekend; by 2009, each driver was only allowed to use eight engines during a single season. Now, the limit is just three engines, and the same for the components of the hybrid systems, with grid penalties for drivers who exceed these limits.

That has been a rare occurrence of late, since the previous power units had been relatively stable since 2014 and were thus well-understood. But multiple drivers had issues this weekend in Oz. On Friday, we already discussed the vibration problem that limited Aston Martin’s running in preseason testing and during the first day of practice. That didn’t get much better for the team in green, which used Sunday’s race as a test session: Fernando Alonso completed 21 laps in total; Lance Stroll did 43 and actually took the finish—although it wasn’t classified, as the race distance was 58 laps.

But Aston Martin wasn’t alone in having problems. Williams has had its own trouble this year with a car that is uncompetitive and overweight, and Carlos Sainz missed the entire qualifying session after having a breakdown on his way back into the pit lane. On Sunday, Audi’s Nico Hülkenberg had to be pushed into the garage just before the start of the race with a power unit failure, marring what has otherwise been an excellent debut for the new power unit constructor, which took over the Sauber team.

Verstappen’s teammate, Isack Hadjar, had done the seemingly impossible for a Red Bull second driver and stepped up after Verstappen’s qualifying crash to claim third on the grid, behind the two extremely fast Mercedes drivers. But he only got as far as lap 10 before his power unit, the product of Red Bull’s in-house program with help from Ford, failed somewhat spectacularly, parking him by the side of the road. Five laps later, the (Ferrari-powered) Cadillac of Valteri Bottas broke down, too. Not quite the failure rate that some predicted, but six cars out of 22 still failed to make it to the checkered flag.

But it wasn’t all bad

That said, the other 16 cars did finish, including the Cadillac of Sergio Perez. Cadillac has managed to stand up a team from scratch and, since then, meet every deadline it needed to. Now, it has the rest of the season to show us it can make its car fast, something that equally applies to Williams and Aston Martin.

Audi had an almost as monumental task as Cadillac, designing and building a new power unit to install in what was the Sauber team before the German OEM took control. Aside from Hulkenberg’s problem, it had a pretty good debut. The cars lined up 10th and 11th for the race, and Gabriel Bortoleto showed off the talent that won him an F2 championship in his first year by finishing in 9th place, scoring the outfit points on its debut. Audi looks like a solid midfield contender, alongside Haas and Racing Bulls.

Alpine’s Pierre Gasly scored the final point, but that team, like Williams, looks a long way from making best use of its Mercedes power units and right now needs to combat a problem with understeer that affects its car in high-speed corners.

Russell initially battled Leclerc for the lead, passing and repassing each other several times over several laps, allowing a rejuvenated Hamilton to catch up with them. Russell was the meat in a sandwich between the two Ferraris until Hadjar’s crash called out the first virtual safety car. The two Mercedes took the opportunity to pit for new tires, undercutting their rivals in red.

The Ferraris of Leclerc and Hamilton probably weren’t fast enough to have won even if they’d pitted at the same time. They didn’t and finished in third and fourth, behind the victorious Russell with Antonelli in second place. In clean air, the Mercedes looked unstoppable in Melbourne, and the team clearly understands how to get the most out of these new power units compared to its customer teams.

A new style of racing

The peculiarity of these new hybrid power units has demanded a new way to be fast, particularly at the temporary circuit formed around the roads of Melbourne’s Albert Park, which lacks the heavy braking zones of most F1 tracks. This was evident with the cars decelerating well before the turn 9-10 complex as the engines diverted so much of their power away from the rear wheels and through the electric motor into the battery to use later in the lap. While not quite coasting, the drivers were clearly trying to maintain as much momentum as possible with little power actually going to the tires.

Whether they approved of this or not seems to rest on whether they have a fast car.

“I thought the race was really fun to drive. I thought the car was really, really fun to drive. I watched the cars ahead, there was good battling back and forth. So far, so good. It may seem different, but in my position, I thought it was great,” said Hamilton.

“It created a lot of action in the first few laps of the race, so I think, you know, on this kind of track there will be a lot of action, in some other track maybe a bit less. But I think today was much better than what we all anticipated, so I think, yeah we need to just wait a few more races before actually commenting on this new regulation,” said Antonelli.

“Maybe now, there’s a bit more of a strategic mind behind every move you make, because every boost button activation, you know you’re going to pay the price big time after that, and so you always try and think multiple steps ahead to try and end up eventually first. But it’s a different way to go about racing for sure,” Leclerc said.

“Everyone’s very quick to criticize things. You need to give it a shot, you know. We’re 22 drivers, when we’ve had the best cars and the least tire degradation, and we’ve been happiest, everyone moans the racing [is] rubbish. Now, drivers aren’t perfectly happy, and everyone said it was an amazing race. So, you can’t have it all. And I think we should give it a chance and see after a few more races,” said Russell.

Outside the top four, the verdict was less impressed—Verstappen in particular. And I noted with interest a press release this morning from Red Bull that his GT3 team announced that the four-time F1 champion will contest the 2026 Nurburgring 24-hour race in May, plus the qualifying races that lead up to it. Verstappen will race alongside Jules Gounon, Dani Juncadella, and Lucas Auer in a Mercedes-AMG GT3 after securing his permit to race at the fearsome German circuit last year. With little left to prove in F1, there is absolutely a greater than zero chance the Dutch driver walks away from single-seaters next year—at least until the next F1 rule change—to try and win endurance races like Le Mans.

But that will surely depend on how well things go over the next few races, the next of which takes place next weekend in Shanghai, China. For now, I’m cautiously optimistic. The first few races of the season are on tracks that won’t play to these hybrids’ strengths, and it’s easy to reflexively hate anything new. But the racing on Sunday was more than entertaining enough, even if it wasn’t quite the same as we saw last year.

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Posted Tuesday 10 March 2026 at 4:40 am AEST (my time).

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Why young people are facing a systemic mind health crisis

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:08:59 +0000

A new study of one million people finds more than 40% of young adults worldwide face a “mind health” crisis that makes daily life a constant struggle. Some scientists suggest there are key denominators that can account for this trend, with ultra-processed food and smartphones as key culprits.

This is based on findings from Global Mind Health, a 2025 report that flips the script from the early 2000s, when 18-34-year-olds led all age groups in mental well-being. Now they are four times more likely than adults over 55 to report “clinically significant” mental challenges.

Canada: With an average MHQ of 96 for those aged 55+ but only 32 for those aged 18-34 (65 out of 84).

A new analysis of data collected from some one million people in 84 countries reveals that 41% of the world’s Internet-enabled young adults (ages 18-34) now face a “mind health crisis” that substantially impairs their ability to navigate a constellation of cognitive, emotional, social and physical challenges and live a fully productive life.

The findings emerged from the Global Mind Health in 2025 report, which was released by Sapien Labs, a Washington, DC-area non-profit. The report is authored by experts in neuroscience, psychology and computational science. Their study, which is based on data gathered through online surveys conducted across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, documents a curious and concerning decline in the mental health of younger generations.

U.S.: With an average MHQ of 100 for those aged 55+ but only 36 for those aged 18-34 (58 out of 84). U.S. has the highest ultra-processed food consumption.

2000: Young people are the most content

The report notes that as of the early 2000s, this age group enjoyed “the greatest well-being of all age groups.” But now the opposite appears to be the case. For example, the Global Mind Health in 2025 report found that compared to adults over 55, today’s younger adults are four times more likely to suffer from “mental health challenges of clinical significance that substantially impact to their ability to function productively in their daily life.” The study identifies four primary reasons for their struggles: smartphone adoption in childhood; increased consumption of ultra-processed foods; deteriorating family bonds; and diminished spirituality — ranking countries on each of these factors.

Mind health, according to the World Health Organisation, refers to a state of emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It plays a crucial role in how individuals think, feel, and act, influencing their ability to cope with stress, relate to others, and make choices.

Zeitgeist reveals a shift – today’s young people are the most vulnerable

“The mind health crisis appears to be a progressive slide from generation to generation and goes far beyond rising rates of depression and anxiety in young adults,” said Tara Thiagarajan, Ph.D., lead author of the report. “The Global Mind Project asked respondents to assess a wide range of capacities that are essential for navigating life’s daily challenges as well as problems spanning major mental health disorders. We found that alongside struggles with depression and anxiety, young adults often experience challenges on many other fronts, from emotional control to handling relationships with others to their ability to focus.”

While noting that there are many causes of the decline, the report highlights four key factors:

Today’s young adults are the first generation that has been using smartphones since childhood;
They are more likely to consume ultra-processed foods;
They often report fraying family ties;
A growing number of them lack spiritual connections.

Each area has been associated to varying degrees with an increased risk of mental health challenges and overall erosion of coping capacity.

UK: With an average MHQ of 78 for those aged 55+ but only 20 for those aged 18-34 (81 out of 84, 4th worst in the world). UK has among the highest ultra-processed food consumption.

Sapien Labs used the data gathered via the online surveys to produce a Mind Health Quotient or “MHQ” score to serve as an assessment of an individual’s “mind health” — with mind health defined as the full complement of emotional, social, cognitive and physical capacities that are key to managing and thriving in life, work and relationships.

Wealth and mind health – an inverse correlation?

There were notable geographic disparities in the findings that point to a potential inverse correlation between wealth and mind health (this occurs when two variables move in opposite directions — as one increases, the other decreases).

The data revealed that 18-34-year-olds in sub-Saharan Africa, which has the lowest per capita income of any region in the world, scored far better than their peers in the U.S., Canada, Europe, India, Japan and Australia, all of which were near the bottom of the rankings. The data also showed that young adults in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa ranked higher in the four key contributors to mind health. For example, they were more likely to report strong spiritual connections and less likely to have a smartphone in childhood. However, in all countries, the Internet-enabled young adults still fared worse than older adults.

Previous Sapien Labs research revealed that the gap between generations developed prior to 2020, with the mind health of young adults ages 18-34 dropping precipitously over the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, while older generations experienced a relatively miniscule decline. Over the past five years, this gap has not significantly changed. Dr. Thiagarajan said policymakers should be focused on the economic impacts caused by a large number of young people entering the workforce with compromised mind health.

According to Thiagarajan: “In the U.S., spending on mental health research and care has risen dramatically, by billions of dollars, as it has across western countries. And while important, it’s not moving the needle,” she said. “We need to stop chasing the symptoms and instead begin tackling the broader problems that erode the productivity and well-being of young adults around the world. For example, policy interventions that limit smartphone access in childhood and consumption of ultra-processed foods help safeguard the mind health of the youngest generations — without them, the global economy will flounder for the next several decades.”

Drop in family ties

The report notes that smartphones and ultra-processed foods, along with diminished spirituality and deteriorating family ties, together account for the majority of the mind health challenges that emerged from the survey data. It points to evidence to account for each of these influences. For example:

Smartphones: Among those aged 18-24, the younger they were when they acquired their first smartphone in childhood, the more likely they are to have struggles as adults.
Ultra-processed foods: Mind health declines systematically with consumption of these products; after controlling for other factors, they are estimated to contribute 15-30% of the mental health burden.
Spirituality: Defined as a sense or feeling of connection to a higher power, among the 18-34 age group, those with spirituality ratings of 7 or higher (out of 9) typically have MHQ scores 20 points or more higher than those with ratings below 3.
Family bonds: Those with poor family relationships are almost four times more likely to have mind health scores in the distressed or struggling ranges compared to those who are close to many family members.

The report points to specific policy actions that can reduce their harms, particularly harms caused by early adoption of smartphones and increased consumption of ultra-processed foods. For issues linked to smartphones, the report calls for wider adoption of policies that ban their use during school hours and establish minimum age requirements for using social media. For ultra-processed foods, the report calls for new investments in research that can uncover the risks associated with the many different types of colors, flavors, preservatives, emulsifiers and other additives found in these products — and provide evidence to support regulations that can reduce their use.

“While the report is not the first to connect these influences to mental health challenges, the breadth and depth of the Global Minds data stands out for revealing the scale of the problems they are causing,” Thiagarajan adds. “Because when you see evidence that almost half of all young adults globally — the heart of the workforce — are struggling with an array of mental health challenges, that means we are facing a crisis that can undermine the health of entire economies and societies. It’s a clear signal that we need to act to address the root causes.”

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Tiny, long-armed dinosaur leads to rethink of dinosaur miniaturization

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:59:51 +0000

Small size seems to have come before a change in diet for a tiny dinosaur lineage.

Alvarezsaurids were mostly small-bodied theropods that paleontologists originally misinterpreted as early flightless birds, only to later recognize them as an ant-eating lineage of non-avian dinosaurs. For years, we suspected that Alvarezsaurids underwent a rare process of evolutionary miniaturization directly coupled to a diet of social insects like ants and termites. It was a tidy hypothesis: They got smaller to become more efficient at catching ants.

Now, a recently discovered fossil of one of the smallest alvarezsaurids ever found suggests that the evolution of miniature dinosaurs likely wasn’t as neat and linear as we thought. This new species, called Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, probably did not feed on ants at all. “It was a pursuit predator actively hunting insects and small mammals,” said Peter Makovicky, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota.

The oddball

Alverezsaurids, found mostly in the Late Cretaceous rocks of Asia and South America, had short forelimbs tipped with a single oversized thumb claw built for digging. They also had minute teeth and sensory adaptations akin to those in modern nocturnal birds—everything necessary to work on termite mounds. “The explanation of their small body size has been tied to this specialization,” Makovicky explained.

The dinosaur he and his colleagues found, however, did not look like a specialized ant-eater.

The fossil of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis was unearthed from the Candeleros Formation at the Cerro Policía locality in Argentina’s Río Negro Province and is estimated to have lived roughly 90 million years ago. It currently stands as the most complete and smallest Alvarezsaurid skeleton found in South America.

While missing its skull roof, parts of its right arm, its lower right leg, and much of its tail, the skeleton preserves plenty of its crucial anatomy. Its bone tissue reveals that the alvarezsaurid was a subadult, likely approaching sexual maturity, as indicated by the presence of what appears to be medullary bone, a temporary tissue associated with egg-laying in modern birds. Despite being nearly fully grown, this dinosaur is estimated to have weighed a mere 700 grams.

The real surprise, though, came when researchers realized that Alnashetri wasn’t a highly specialized, late-stage Alvarezsauroid. Instead, despite living in the Late Cretaceous, it occupied an early-branching position among earlier, basal members of the clade.

This combination of tiny size and early-branching status fundamentally breaks our previous model of how these animals evolved. If the miniaturization of Alvarezsauroids was strictly tied to their lifestyle as stubby-armed insect-eaters, an early-diverging species like Alnashetri should have some transitional features on a steady, clade-wide march toward that extreme endpoint. But it didn’t look that way.

“It’s a very long-limbed animal, so it was probably fairly fast. My best analogy would be something like a roadrunner from the American West,” Makovicky said.

Arms and teeth

Late Alvarezsaurids had tiny, robust forelimbs that were less than half the length of their femurs. Alnashetri, though, sported comparatively long forelimbs that were 61 percent of the length of its entire hindlimb. While it had three-fingered hands with a robust first digit, a hallmark of its group, it still retained slender second and third digits, unlike its later cousins.

Other features that challenge the established evolutionary model of miniature dinosaurs are Alnashetri’s jaws and teeth. Its dentition features non-serrated teeth set into sockets, but importantly, these teeth are not extremely small, as they were in the late Alvarezsaurids like Shuvuuia or Jaculinykus. “This decoupled the evolution of small body size from anatomical specializations,” Makovicky explained.

The team concluded that extreme miniaturization in Alvarezsaurids did not necessarily co-evolve with either the evolution of smaller arms more suitable for digging or small teeth built for crushing ants and/or termites. Instead of a clade-wide trend where the entire lineage steadily shrank over time, a new evolutionary model that includes Alnashetri suggests that Alvarezsaurid body mass fluctuated repeatedly. Alnashetri, it turns out, achieved its 700-gram frame independently from the other, highly specialized alvarezsaurid species.

But Alnashetri didn’t just upend the understanding of how Alvarezsaurids evolved their tiny bodies. It also redrew the map of where they lived.

Museum tour

Before Makovicky’s study, it was a mystery why Alvarezsaurids were found almost exclusively in the late Cretaceous rocks of Asia and South America. The previous leading hypothesis suggested that the group must have dispersed back and forth between these two landmasses relatively late in the game. But placing Alnashetri, a remarkably basal member, into their evolutionary tree created a massive ghost lineage. The phylogenetic analysis linked geographically close South American species to much older, geologically distant Asian taxa like Bannykus and Xiyunykus, implying that the group must have diverged way back in the Jurassic period.

To explain this chronological and geographic gap, Makovicky and his colleagues started digging through historical museum collections to see if early Alvarezsaurids had been hiding there under different names. It turned out they had.

The team successfully reidentified a small, fragmentary theropod from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation in North America, as well as a Lower Cretaceous taxon from the Isle of Wight in Europe. These were early, diverging Alvarezsaurids, and they possessed distinct features such as specialized ball-and-socket joints in the neck vertebrae that are unique in the Alvarezsaurid clade. These museum reidentifications entirely changed the biogeographical story.

If Alvarezsaurids were roaming North America and Europe in the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, they weren’t just performing a late-stage migration between Asia and South America. Instead, the new model proposed by Makovicky and his team reconstructs a widespread Pangaean distribution. Early Alvarezsaurids were likely present across the globe before the supercontinent Pangaea fully fractured.

The Late Cretaceous distributions we see in the fossil record today would therefore be the result of populations slowly becoming isolated as the continents drifted apart, combined with regional extinctions that wiped them out in places like North America and Europe. The populations in Asia and South America represent surviving pockets.

Still, Makovicky’s work produced far more questions than answers. If at least some Alvarezsaurids did not evolve their miniature bodies as an adaptation to eating ants, what made them so small?

Messy evolution

“We sort of falsified this nice narrative where Alvarezsaurid body size change was driven by ecology, but unfortunately, we don’t have anything good to replace it,” Makovicky acknowledged.

The classic story of Alvarezsaurids—a lineage steadily shrinking in lockstep as it committed to a life of termite-hunting, finally migrating across the Late Cretaceous globe—was neat and logical, but it’s apparently gone now. “That’s science. Sometimes you can falsify a hypothesis without necessarily finding a better one to support,” Makovicky added. But his team is already busy looking for evidence documenting the new, more complex and messier version of Alvarezsaurid evolutionary history. “We have a couple of angles we’re pursuing,” he said.

The first involves taking a closer look at Alnashetri’s anatomy using CT scans. The goal here is to treat Alnashetri as a starting point to understand the stepwise evolution of its ant-eating, specialized cousins. Most of this meticulous scanning is currently happening in Argentina. The second angle, though, seems way more thrilling. “By pure luck, we found another Alvarezsaur in the same general area,” Makovicky said.

The other Alvarezsaur is bigger than Alnashetri and has slightly shorter forelimbs. “It’s still being prepared, but I think it will sort of give us the next chapter in the story of how Alvarezsaurids evolved,” Makovicky explained. “It’s probably a few years out in the making.”

Makovicky’s work on Alnashetri is published in Nature: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10194-3

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Posted Monday 9 March 2026 at 5:59 am AEST (my time).

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