News: General News

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).

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

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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).

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

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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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Hunting for elusive “ghost elephants”

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 03:31:24 +0000

Werner Herzog directed this evocative NatGeo documentary of an ornithologist’s quest to find a new species.

Deep in the Angolan Highlands lurks a rumored new species of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive herd for years and the story of his journey is the focus of Ghost Elephants, a haunting, evocative documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and is now coming to National Geographic and Disney+.

It might seem unusual for an ornithologist to embark on a quest to find remote pachyderms, but for Boyes the connection is perfectly natural. He grew up in South Africa and wanted nothing more than to be an explorer, just like the people he read about every month in National Geographic magazine. “I grew up waiting for the magazine to arrive; I wanted the maps,” Boyes told Ars. “Those would become my garden, or the field beyond, or the river—wild places imagined and real.”

Boyes’ parents frequently took him and his brother out into the wild, including visits to Botswana and Tanzania. “We used to embed ourselves in baboon troops and walk with impalas,” said Boyes, and while his brother feared elephants, Boyes was walking with them from a young age. Ghost Elephants contains some gorgeous underwater footage of elephant feet plodding through the water, and elephants swimming on their sides, behavior that matches Boyes’ own experiences with the animals. Under the right circumstances, if they don’t feel threatened, elephants “will come and swim around you and with you and interact with you,” he said. “So elephants have always fascinated me.”

As an adult, Boyes conducted his PhD research on the Meyer’s parrot in the Okavango Delta, which has the single largest population of elephants in the world. They shared a symbiotic relationship of sorts with the parrots. “Every tree that the parrots were feeding on, the elephantss were feeding on,” he said. “The elephants were creating the nest cavities for the parrots by disturbing the trees.”

Boyes first met Herzog at a Beverly Hills restaurant through a mutual friend and the two ended up chatting at length, “about the meaning of life, where thoughts come from, personal experiences of loneliness, and the ghost elephants,” said Boyes. Herzog has said that after meeting Boyes, “An unexpected project that felt like the hunt for Moby Dick, the White Whale, came at me with urgency. Like many of my films, this is an exploration of dreams, of imagination—weighed against reality.”

Dreams weighed against reality

When Herzog visited Boyes in Namibia, he fell in love with the region’s culture, mythology, and people, and his camera captures far more than just a scientific quest for elephants. We are treated to a ritual elephant dance—during which a tribal elder falls into a trance, so the spirit of the elephant can enter his body—and a history of the tribe’s ingenious use of poisoned arrows to hunt. Boyes is granted an audience with the local king, seeking his blessing for the expedition. At one point, the director becomes fascinated by a poisonous spider he films in the middle of the night, carrying dozens of equally poisonous babies on her back.

“Once he was locked in, there was no discussion with him around the story or anything outside of being interviewed or being actively in the experience,” said Boyes of Herzog’s creative process. It was direct and efficient, with Herzog usually capturing the footage he needed right away, seeing no need for additional coverage. The questions the director asked were unique as well. “The first question was, ‘What would a world without elephants be like? What do you dream of?’” recalled Boyes. “He took us into a mode of thought that was very different from just preparing for an expedition. I love him. He’s wonderful.”

Ghost Elephants opens in the rotunda of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which has housed the largest elephant mount in the world since 1959—affectionately dubbed Henry or “the Giant of Angola.” A Hungarian big game hunter named Josef J. Fénykövi shot and killed Henry in November 1955 with a dozen high-caliber bullets. Henry is the largest elephant ever recorded, over 13 feet tall and weighing about 11 tons, and there was the remains of an old iron slug from a flintlock rifle embedded in Henry’s left front leg. So Henry could have been 100 years old or more at the time he was killed.

Visiting Henry is the perfect starting point for the film, since Boyes suspected he might be related to the new species of ghost elephant in the Angolan highlands. Boyes had searched for these elephants using modern camera traps and other advanced technologies, to no avail. This time, he recruited three KhoiSan master trackers—Xui, Xui Dawid, and Kobus—who left their southern village to accompany Boyes’ team into the Angolan Highlands.

It was not an easy trip, given the remoteness of the “Source of Life,” i.e., the Angolan Highlands Water Tower where the elephants live—so named because it provides 95 percent of the water to the Okavango Delta. They made the first part of the journey by car, abandoning the vehicles once they reached the first impassable river and carrying supplies and motorcycles through the water to the opposite bank. They traversed the final 30 miles on foot.

Finally, after several months, having collected dung samples (for DNA analysis) and captured a bit of blurry cell phone footage showing the barest glimpse of a ghost elephant lurking in thick foliage, Boyes reached what he described as a point of “complete surrender.” It was the last day of the expedition, and he and and several members of his team went out once more just before dawn. Other team members had been tracking two big bulls and Boyes et al. were able to follow the tracks, this time with master tracker Xui out in front.

About three hours in, Xui suddenly stopped and whispered, “Steve, Steve, Steve.” And an elephant walked into full view. Boyes was able to capture the footage on his cell phone—the only available camera at the time. Alas, the arrow meant to take a skin sample just bounced off the elephant’s thick hide and scared the animal away. Boyes and his cohorts pursued it for the next five hours until they ran out of water and made their way back to camp, exhausted.

On the hunt

The genetics analysis completed thus far has confirmed that these remote elephants are indeed a new, genetically isolated species, and that Henry’s father was a ghost elephant. Boyes, as a conservationist, is deeply concerned about their continued survival. The documentary includes disturbing 1950s footage of hunters slaughtering elephants from helicopters, felling the magnificent creatures with nary a thought about the delicate ecosystem they were disrupting. “What you’re seeing in that horrific footage is the wholesale destruction of wildlife populations to make room for agriculture and development,” said Boyes. “That happened all across Africa. We lost a huge amount of wildlife over that period.”

The very remoteness and inaccessibility of their home turf has protected the ghost elephants thus far. Even if a helicopter could reach the area, it wouldn’t have sufficient fuel to get back out. But traditional Western approaches to conservation, like establishing the land as a protected wildlife reserve free of any human presence, might not be the best strategy, per Boyes, who thinks we should be taking our cues from the local inhabitants. “They can talk for days about conservation,” he said. “They have their own hunting season, sacred sites, they confiscate weapons. They manage this very closely.”

So the idea of separating people from the elephants “is counterintuitive to them,” Boyes continued. “They’re like, ‘This place will completely fall apart without us.’ We’re talking about 20,000 people in a landscape the size of England, very connected to language, tradition, and culture.” The best strategy, he feels, is for those people “to remain there as the guardians and custodians of those landscapes, and to continue to protect the elephants.”

Meanwhile, the quest to document the herd continues. Last November, Boyes was able to get samples from five different bull elephants based on the tracks they left behind. They found the tracks of 16 more members of the herd across the river, including five babies, and then the tracks of another 18 elephants.

“The gift of working with the master trackers is that you don’t to need to see them to know that they’re there,” said Boyes. “I’ve gone back three times since filming to track the elephants and I’m going back again in May. I’m going back in July. I can’t get enough of these forests. But I don’t need to see [that first elephant] again. If I do, I do.”

Ghost Elephants premieres on National Geographic on March 7, 2026, and will be available for streaming on Disney+ the following day. There is also a companion coffee table book, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa’s Lost Headwaters.

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Posted Sunday 8 March 2026 at 1:29 pm AEST (my time).

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A unicorn-like Spinosaurus found in the Sahara

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:24:57 +0000

A unique head spike and fish-eating jaws help make sense of these dinosaurs.

The Spinosaurus is a sail-backed, crocodile-snouted dinosaur that Hollywood depicted as a giant terrestrial predator capable of taking down a T. rex in Jurassic Park 3. Then they changed their mind and made it a fully aquatic diver in Jurassic World Rebirth—a rendering that was more in line with the latest paleontological knowledge.

But now, deep in the Sahara Desert, a team of researchers led by Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, discovered new Spinosaurus fossils suggesting both scientists and filmmakers might have got it all wrong again. The Spinosaurus most likely wasn’t an aquatic diver because, apparently, it couldn’t dive.

Bones in the sand

While the T. rex-beating version of the Spinosaurus was considered unlikely due to its relatively fragile skull, the newer depiction as an aquatic diver made more sense in light of paleontological evidence. Until now, all remains of these predators were pulled from coastal deposits near ancient seas and oceans. That geographic distribution was consistent with the aquatic lifestyle interpretation. If a creature lived on the coast, maybe it swam out to sea like a prehistoric seal, only crawling out to the beaches to rest just as it was depicted in Jurassic World Rebirth.

But the Spinosaurus found by Sereno and his colleagues lived in a completely different neighborhood. The fossils were discovered in the central Sahara of Niger, in what was a terrestrial area called Jenguebi. “When you want to find something really, truly new, you have to go where few have been or maybe nobody has been,” Sereno says. “In the case of Jenguebi, I don’t think it’s seen a paleontologist before.” His team managed to find the site, led by local Tuareg guides after driving for over a day and half through the desert. “We had a team of nearly 100, including paleontologists, filmmakers, guides, and 64 armed guards. You feel like you’re in an Indiana Jones movie,” Sereno recalls. But the effort paid off.

Back in the Cenomanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, the Jenguebi was an inland basin laced with rivers—a riparian habitat situated between 500 and 1,000 kilometers away from the nearest marine shoreline. In these riverbank sediments, Sereno and his team unearthed multiple specimens of the new Spinosaurus species they called S. mirabilis. The skeletons were buried right alongside massive, long-necked dinosaurs, including various species of titanosaurian and rebbachisaurid sauropods. To Sereno, the proximity of these bones left no doubt that the animals they belonged to lived and died together in the same inland freshwater environment. And this inland existence drives a pretty big nail in the coffin of the aquatic diver idea.

Prehistoric heron

The researchers point out that all large-bodied secondarily aquatic tetrapods like whales, mosasaurs, or plesiosaurs, are marine. Finding a giant Spinosaurus thriving in an inland river system strongly supports the idea that it was a semiaquatic, shoreline ambush predator that would wade into shallow waters like a giant crane or heron. But there were other hints that the Spinosaurus was not a diver.

“When you calculate this animal’s lung volume and the air that was permanently in its bones, you’ll find out it was buoyant,” Sereno explains. The permanent air sacks in the bones, an anatomical feature shared by many modern birds, most likely kept the Spinosaurus afloat even when it exhaled all the air out of its lungs. “Birds that dive get rid of those air sacks—penguins got rid of them,” Sereno says. “It’s a balloon you can’t fight against.” He added that even its limbs were far too long to be effectively used as paddles.

This wading lifestyle, the team argues in the paper, was not something unique to the S. mirabilis but extended to other Spinosaurus species as well—the skeletal features of the newly discovered S. mirabilis were found fundamentally similar to its shoreline cousins like S. aegyptiacus on which the Jurassic World Rebirth vision was largely based. Sereno argues it’s highly unlikely that one was a wading river monster while the other was a deep-diving pursuit predator with limited land mobility.

But there was one thing that made S. mirabilis different from S. aegyptiacus. The word “mirabilis” in the newly discovered Spinosaurus’ name translates to “astonishing” in Latin. What Sereno’s team found so astonishing was the prominent crest atop the animal’s head, one of the largest we’ve ever discovered.

The scimitar crown

Instead of the bumpy, fluted ridge seen on S. aegyptiacus, S. mirabilis sported a blade-shaped, scimitar-like bony crest that arched upward and backward from its snout, reaching an apex high over its eyes. This structure was composed of solid bone, unlike the highly porous, pneumatic casques found on some modern birds. However, the bone itself was etched with fine longitudinal striations and deep grooves, indicating that the bony core was just the foundation.

In a living S. mirabilis, this crest would have been enveloped and substantially extended by a keratinous sheath, much like the vibrant growth developed by modern helmeted guinea fowls. If scaled up to a fully mature adult, the bony core alone would measure around 40 centimeters in length; with its keratinous sheath, it could have easily exceeded half a meter. For Sereno, the purpose of this “astonishing” scimitar crown was similar to crests worn today by cranes and herons. “It was asymmetrical. It varied between individuals. So, I think it was solely for display,” Sereno explains.

His team hypothesizes that visual signaling was the primary function of both the cranial crests and the massive trunk and tail sails that define spinosaurids. In the crowded shoreline and riverbank habitats, a towering, brightly colored crest or sail would be an excellent way to broadcast your size, maturity, and genetic fitness to rivals and potential mates without having to engage in a costly physical brawl.

Still, when it came down to it, S. mirabilis, weighing in at well over 7 tons, totally could brawl. “The Spinosaurus was enormous. I think it could have eaten anything it wanted even though its mainstay was fish,” Sereno says.

Crocodile jaw

The showpiece on its forehead aside, the S. mirabilis was a highly specialized killing machine. Its snout featured a low profile with parallel dorsal and ventral margins, terminating in a mushroom-shaped expansion at the tip. The upper and lower jaws allowed the teeth to interdigitate perfectly—there was a notable diastema, a gap in the upper row of teeth, that neatly accommodated the large teeth of the lower jaw. The S. mirabilis jaw structure appears similar to that of modern long-snouted crocodiles, optimized for snatching and snaring aquatic prey with a rapid, trap-like closure. Surprisingly, S. mirabilis showed greater spacing between the teeth in the posterior half of its snout compared to S. aegyptiacus despite being otherwise nearly identical.

Analysis of the animals’ overall body proportions led Sereno and his colleagues to suspect these dinosaurs resided in the functional middle ground between semiaquatic waders like herons and aquatic divers like darters, placing them in an ecological niche entirely separate from all other predatory theropods. Based on Sereno’s paper, the evolutionary history of the spinosaurids started in the Jurassic, when their ancestors first evolved that distinctive, elongate, fish-snaring skull before splitting into two main lineages: baryonychines and spinosaurines.

Then, during the Early Cretaceous, the spinosaurines enjoyed a golden age, diversifying across the margins of the Tethys Sea, a late Paleozoic ocean situated between the continents of Gondwana and Laurasia, to become the dominant predators in their respective ecosystems. What most likely brought an end to their reign was climate change.

The end of the line

The final chapter in the Spinosaurus history played out just before the Late Cretaceous, as the Atlantic Ocean was opening up. This is when spinosaurines, limited geographically to what today is Northern Africa and South America, pushed their biological limits, attaining their maximum body sizes as highly specialized shallow-water ambush hunters. This specialization, though, probably led to their extinction.

Around 95 million years ago, at the end of the Cenomanian stage, the world started to shift. An abrupt rise in global sea levels driven by climate changes drowned the low-lying continental basins and created the Trans-Saharan seaway. The complex, shallow river systems and coastal swamps that supported giant wading spinosaurines vanished beneath the waves. “We don’t see spinosaurid fossil records beyond this period,” Sereno explains. The spinosaurid lineage, unable to dive and adapt to more aquatic lifestyles, was brought to an end.

But we still don’t know much about its beginning. “This is going to be the subject of our next paper—where did the Spinosaurus come from?” Sereno says.

Sereno’s paper on the S. mirabilis is published in Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adx5486

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Posted Sunday 8 March 2026 at 4:24 am AEST (my time).

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Fastest Intel & AMD supercomputers helped unravel what really happens at a Black Hole's edge

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 02:47:11 +0000

Intel and AMD-powered super-fast supercomputers have helped answer an elusive question regarding Black Holes.

A team of astrophysicists from the Institute for Advanced Study and the Flatiron Institute has created the most detailed computer model yet of how matter falls into black holes. Their study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, is the first to calculate these flows in full general relativity and in the radiation-dominated regime without relying on shortcuts.

Lead author Lizhong Zhang explained, “This is the first time we’ve been able to see what happens when the most important physical processes in black hole accretion are included accurately. These systems are extremely nonlinear—any over-simplifying assumption can completely change the outcome. What’s most exciting is that our simulations now reproduce remarkably consistent behaviors across black hole systems seen in the sky, from ultraluminous X-ray sources to X-ray binaries. In a sense, we’ve managed to ‘observe’ these systems not through a telescope, but through a computer.”

The team ran a survey of radiation-dominated accretion flows across different mass accretion rates, two values of black hole spin, and varying magnetic field setups. Their models used a new algorithm that directly solves the radiation transport equation in general relativity, made possible by access to modern exascale supercomputers.

The results showed that when black holes accrete (or accumulate) matter at rates above the so-called Eddington limit, the flows form thick, radiation-pressure-supported disks that push out strong equatorial winds. In this regime, a narrow funnel-shaped photosphere near the center leads to very low radiative efficiency, meaning much of the energy is trapped rather than released as light.

The Eddington limit is the maximum luminosity an accreting black hole (or star) can sustain before radiation pressure pushes material away, halting further accretion. For black holes, it sets a theoretical cap on how fast they can grow.

For accretion near or below the Eddington limit, the structure depended on magnetic flux: with net vertical flux, the disk formed a thin, dense midplane layer surrounded by a magnetically dominated corona; without flux, the disk remained magnetically dominated throughout. None of the models reached the magnetically arrested disk state, but those with net flux and rapidly spinning black holes still produced powerful relativistic jets.

The study focused on stellar mass black holes, about ten times the mass of the Sun. These are harder to observe directly than supermassive black holes, which can be imaged, so researchers rely on spectra to understand them. Because stellar mass black holes evolve on timescales of minutes to hours, they are useful for studying how these systems change in real time. The team’s simulations matched well with observational data, including spectra from X-ray binaries and ultraluminous X-ray sources such as Cyg X-3 and SS433. They also suggested that their super-Eddington models might help explain the “little red dots” recently spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The work was powered by two of the world’s fastest computers, AMD-powered Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Intel-based Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory. These exascale machines can perform a quintillion operations per second, allowing the team to handle equations that were previously too complex. Christopher White designed the radiation transport algorithm, while Patrick Mullen implemented it in the AthenaK code optimized for exascale computing.

Looking ahead, the researchers plan to extend their approach to supermassive black holes, which shape the evolution of galaxies, and other types of black holes too. They aim to refine their models to capture how radiation interacts with matter under different conditions. Co-author James Stone summed up the achievement: “What makes this project unique is, on the one hand, the time and effort it has taken to develop the applied mathematics and software capable of modeling these complex systems, and, on the other hand, having a very large allocation on the world’s largest supercomputers to perform these calculations. Now the task is to understand all the science that is coming out of it.”

Source: Institute for Advanced Study, IOP Publishing

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 7 March 2026 at 12:46 pm AEST (my time).

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Asteroid defense mission shifted the orbit of more than its target

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 02:46:25 +0000

The binary asteroid’s orbit around the Sun was affected by the impact.

On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a binary asteroid system. By intentionally ramming a probe into the 160-meter-wide moonlet named Dimorphos, the smaller of the two asteroids, humanity demonstrated that the kinetic impact method of planetary defense actually works. The immediate result was that Dimorphos’ orbital period around Didymos, its larger parent body, was slashed by 33 minutes.

Of course, altering a moonlet’s local orbit doesn’t seem like enough to safeguard Earth from civilization-ending impacts. But now, as long-term observational data has come in, it seems we accomplished more than that. DART actually changed the trajectory of the entire Didymos binary system, altering its orbit around the Sun.

Tracking space rocks

Measuring the orbital shift of a 780-meter-wide primary asteroid and its moonlet from millions of miles away isn’t trivial. When DART slammed into Dimorphos, it didn’t knock the binary system wildly off its trajectory around the Sun. The change in the system’s heliocentric trajectory was expected to be small, a minuscule nudge that would become apparent only after months or years of continuous observation. By analyzing enough painstakingly gathered data, a global team of researchers led by Rahil Makadia at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has now determined the consequences of the DART impact.

To find the infinitesimal deviation DART created, Makadia’s team relied mostly on a technique called stellar occultation. When an asteroid passes in front of a distant star from the perspective of an observer on Earth, the star briefly blinks out. By precisely timing these blinks as they sweep across the globe, astronomers can pinpoint an asteroid’s position with astonishing accuracy.

Between October 2022 and March 2025, we captured 22 such stellar occultations of the Didymos system. Combined with a huge dataset publicly available at the Minor Planet Data Center that included nearly 6,000 ground-based astrometric measurements taken over 29 years, optical navigation data from the DART probe’s approach, and ground-based radar measurements, researchers finally had all they needed.

“Once we had enough measurements before and after the DART impact, we could discern how Didymos’ orbit has changed,” Makadia said.

When the vending-machine-sized DART probe crashed into Dimorphos at over 22,000 kilometers per hour, it decreased the along-track velocity of the entire Didymos system by roughly 11.7 micrometers per second. But the team thinks it’s still significant. “When you do it early enough, even a small impulse can accumulate over years and cause a meaningful shift,” Makadia explained.

Also, the DART impact itself was not the only force that changed Didymos’ orbit.

The ejecta engine

The pure kinetic energy of a 500-kilogram spacecraft hitting at hypersonic speeds is impressive, but on its own, it would not slow a huge asteroid that much. When DART struck Dimorphos, it blasted pulverized rock and dust out into the void. “The material kicked up off an asteroid surface acts like an extra rocket plume,” Makadia said.

Scientists call this effect the momentum enhancement factor, denoted by the Greek letter beta. If the spacecraft impact transferred exactly its own momentum and no debris was kicked up, beta would be exactly one.

Because Dimorphos orbits Didymos, some of the ejecta remained trapped in the system, where it altered the mutual orbit between the two rocks. But a crucial fraction of the ejecta achieved escape velocity from the entire binary system. The momentum carried away by the system-escaping debris is what ultimately contributed to shoving the center of mass of the whole Didymos-Dimorphos pair. “In our case, we found that the beta parameter due to DART impact was around two,” Makadia explained.

The debris blasted completely out of the Didymos system gave the asteroids a push roughly equal to the initial impact of the spacecraft itself.

To calculate how momentum was transferred, Makadia and his colleagues had to determine precisely how massive Didymos and Dimorphos are. By linking the heliocentric deflection to the previously known changes in Dimorphos’ local orbit, the researchers were able to perform a neat mathematical trick to uncover the bulk densities of both asteroids. And this revealed something a bit unexpected about the Didymos system.

“Most studies were going under the assumption that both asteroids have equal density—turns out that assumption was not correct,” Makadia said.

A rubble pile

Based on Makadia’s calculations, Didymos, the primary body, is relatively solid. It has a bulk density of around 2.6 tons per cubic meter, which aligns with standard estimates for siliceous asteroids. Dimorphos, however, is a different story. Its density is a surprisingly low 1.51 tons per cubic meter. This implies that the smaller asteroid targeted by DART is essentially a fluffy, loosely bound agglomeration of boulders, rocks, and dust, with empty voids between the rubble.

“This was a real surprise,” Makadia said. “We previously didn’t know anything about the density of Dimorphos.” The contrast in density tells the story of how this binary system formed.

Billions of years of uneven heating and radiation from the Sun can cause an irregularly shaped asteroid like Didymos to gradually spin faster, a phenomenon known as the YORP (Yarkovsky, O’Keefe, Radzievskii, Paddack) effect. Eventually, Didymos spun so fast that the centrifugal force overcame its gravity, and it began shedding loose material from its equator. That shed material eventually coalesced in orbit, gently clumping together to form the porous, fragile moonlet we now know as Dimorphos.

Overall, Didymos is nearly 200 times more massive than its smaller companion, which explains why shifting the larger asteroid system takes such an enormous amount of force. The sheer inertia of Didymos means that the barycenter deflection of its entire system was just a tiny fraction of the deflection felt locally by Dimorphos.

Planetary defense

Makadia’s findings confirm the models we used to estimate the consequences of the DART impact: The Didymos system still poses zero threat to us, at least for the next 100 years or so. “The pre-DART condition was that the closest the Didymos system can get to Earth was around 15 lunar distances, and this has not changed appreciably,” Makadia explained.

The goal of DART was primarily to take our planetary defense out of the realm of computer models and get us some hands-on, practical experience, and Makadia thinks we succeeded in doing that. “Our work proves that hitting the secondary asteroid is a viable path for deflecting a binary system away as long as the push is large enough,” he said. “This wasn’t the goal of DART, but we can always design a bigger spacecraft.”

This experience applies both to deflecting binary asteroid systems like Didymos and singular objects. “Our results definitely help us in all sorts of future kinetic impact endeavors,” Makadia added.

The final verification of the DART mission’s consequences, though, will come in late 2026, when the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft will arrive at the Didymos system.

By performing independent, in-situ measurements of things like the density of Didymos and Dimorphos, Hera will provide a lot of precise gravitational and physical data that Makadia hopes to use to refine his calculations.

“It’s a high-fidelity instrument that hopefully will give us confirmation of what we believe,” Makadia said. “Plus, there are always new things to be found out when we visit an asteroid. I’m very excited about when Hera gets there.”

Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea4259

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How moss helped convict grave robbers of a Chicago cemetery

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 02:45:53 +0000

Burr Oak Cemetery is the final resting place of Emmett Till and blues singer Willie Dixon, among others.

Back in 2009, residents were scandalized when employees at Burr Oak Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Alsip were accused of exhuming old graves in order to resell the burial plots, unceremoniously dumping older remains in another area on the grounds. The perpetrators were tried and convicted in 2015, but the forensic evidence of the moss that helped convict them has now been detailed in a new paper published in the journal Forensic Sciences Research. It’s a follow-up to a 2025 paper concluding that mosses and other bryophyte plants have been used as evidence in forensic cases only a dozen or so times over the last century.

“The focus was an attempt to elevate the profile of these small, often overlooked plants,” co-author Matt von Konrat, who heads the botany collections at Chicago’s Field Museum, told Ars. “Mosses are ubiquitous, resilient, and capable of preserving timeline and habitat information in ways that complement other forensic tools. Our recent publications help consolidate these cases into the scientific record and, we hope, encourage investigators to recognize and preserve botanical evidence more routinely. [We also wanted to] highlight the use of natural history collections and their stories and how they can be applied to questions and applied in ways we have yet to imagine.”

Burr Oak Cemetery dates back to 1927, when it was founded to serve as the final resting place for Chicago’s African American population, which had grown significantly since the turn of the century due to migration from the South. Among the luminaries buried there are Emmett Till, heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles, and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington.

The grave robbing was first discovered in June 2009. Sgt. Jason Moran, who led the local investigation, told reporters in 2019 that on his first visit to Burr Oak, he saw skeletal remains sticking up out of piles of dirt. After interviewing employees and family members of those buried there, he concluded that graves were being desecrated, and any original headstones removed, to make room for new burials. That’s when the sheriff’s office called in the FBI.

The official records were a bit of a mess, to say the least, but the ensuing investigation revealed that while the cemetery had space for 130,000 graves, between 140,000 and 147,500 people were listed as buried there. And some areas had apparently never been used for burials. The cemetery’s then-director, Carolyn Towns, grounds foreman Keith Nicks, Nicks’ brother Terrence, and another employee, Maurice Dailey, were charged.

The only reason they were caught is because they became increasingly reckless about their grave-robbing, even using a backhoe to dig up old graves, smashing skeletons to bits as they did so. Some 1,500 bones were recovered and identified as belonging to at least 38 individuals, but between 200 and 400 graves had been desecrated, per official estimates. Emmett Till’s decaying casket was found covered by a tarp and surrounded by debris in a garage behind the cemetery. (The restored casket is now housed at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History.)

The evidence of the moss

Prosecutors still had to prove their case. In addition to the skeletal remains, the FBI had collected broken mulberry branches and buried grass fragments for expert analysis. Von Konrat was just going about his museum business in 2009 when the FBI called, seeking expert advice on pieces of moss their team had found, inexplicably buried eight inches below the topsoil with the reburied remains. They needed his help identifying the species as well as determining how long it had been buried. This would provide the FBI with a crucial timeline of when the remains had been reburied.

“Moss is a little bit freaky,” said von Konrat. “Mosses have an interesting physiology, where even if they’re dry and dead and preserved, they can still have an active metabolism, a few cells that are still active. The amount of metabolic activity deteriorates over time, and that can tell us how long ago a moss sample was collected.” The key was chlorophyll, a green pigment central to photosynthesis. Chlorophyll degrades as a decaying plant’s cells stop functioning, so the museum team could measure how much light was being absorbed by the chlorophyll in control specimens whose age was known (both fresh and dried). Then they could compare those measurements to the forensic sample.

Von Konrat’s team relied upon the museum’s herbarium—which houses a wide variety of dried plants, including several years of samples of the same species from Cook County. They were able to identify the moss sample found at the site. A careful survey of the cemetery revealed that this species was not growing at the crime scene but was found in abundance at the spot where law enforcement suspected the bodies had been dug up from old gravesites. They also determined that the moss sample provided by the FBI was just a couple of years old.

“This led to the conclusion there was a high probability the moss evidence was transported with the human remains,” said von Konrat. Furthermore, “We were able to make comparisons and conduct physiological experiments with the evidence, fresh moss, and herbarium specimens to arrive at our conclusion that the moss had been buried for less than six months. This put the accused at the scene of the crime. Their defense was that this happened before their employment.”

That defense failed in light of the evidence of the moss; all the perpetrators were found guilty. Townes was given a 12-year sentence for her role as the mastermind behind the grave robbing. Dailey, who operated the backhoe, was put on probation. Keith Nicks, as foreman, received a six-year sentence, and his brother Terrence was sentenced to three years. In 2016, the recovered remains were reburied in a common grave at the dump site where they were found, with police officers serving as pallbearers.

“This investigation demonstrates how combining botanical identification and physiological experiments can yield crucial insights to assist forensic casework,” von Konrat et al. concluded. “We hope this encourages an increased awareness of bryophytes and similar microscopic plants when undertaking forensic investigation, ensuring critical plant evidence is not overlooked in the future.”

Forensic Sciences Research, 2026. DOI: 10.1093/fsr/owaf038 (About DOIs).

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With Gateway likely gone, where will lunar landers rendezvous with Orion?

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:12:28 +0000

“We will challenge every requirement, clear every obstacle, delete every blocker.”

Last week, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman unveiled a major shakeup in the Artemis Program, intended to put the nation on a better path back to the Moon. The changes focused largely on increasing the launch cadence of NASA’s large SLS rocket and putting a greater emphasis on lunar surface activities. Days later, the US Senate indicated that it broadly supported these plans.

This is all well and good, but it neglects a critical element of the Artemis program: a lander capable of taking astronauts down to the lunar surface from an orbit around the Moon and back up to rendezvous with Orion. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop these landers, Starship and Blue Moon MK2, respectively.

As part of his announcement, Isaacman said a revamped Artemis III mission will now be used to test one or both of these landers near Earth before they are called upon to land humans on the Moon later this decade.

NASA will launch Artemis III next year, he said, to be followed by one or possibly even two lunar landings in 2028. A single landing before the end of 2028 seems like a stretch, even for glass-half-full optimists in the space community. And for there to be a chance of happening, SpaceX or Blue Origin, or both, need to get hustling quickly.

Can they?

“Challenge every requirement”

Isaacman is mindful of these challenges, and one of his first moves as administrator was meeting with engineers from SpaceX and Blue Origin to hear their ideas for accelerating NASA’s Artemis timeline.

After this meeting on January 13, Isaacman said NASA would do what it could to facilitate the faster development of a Human Landing System: “We will challenge every requirement, clear every obstacle, delete every blocker and empower the team to deliver… and we will do it with time to spare.”

What does this actually mean? It suggests that Isaacman has directed his teams to make working with NASA less cumbersome for SpaceX and Blue Origin.

For example, to reach the Moon during the initial Artemis missions, a lander must dock with the Orion spacecraft. That may sound routine, as spacecraft have been rendezvousing and docking in space for six decades.

However, Orion is saddled with thousands of requirements, and virtually every decision point regarding docking must be signed off on by the lander company—SpaceX or Blue Origin—as well as NASA, Orion’s contractor Lockheed Martin, and the European service module contractor Airbus. Additionally, Orion has a lot of sensitive elements to work around, such as the plumes of its thrusters, and engineers have spent a lot of time working on issues such as ensuring consistent cabin pressures between vehicles. In short, it gets complicated fast.

A carbonated orbit emerges

One way NASA is helping the lander companies is by no longer requiring them to dock with Orion in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, an elliptical orbit that comes as close as 3,000 km to the surface of the Moon and as far as 70,000 km. This is where NASA planned to construct the Lunar Gateway space station, which is now likely to be canceled. It’s a boon for lunar landers since it required more energy to first stop there before dropping down to the surface.

Why not simply have Orion meet the landers in a low-lunar orbit, similar to the Apollo Program? This would allow the landers to consume less propellant on the way down and back up from the Moon. The reason is that, due to a number of poor decisions over the last 15 years, the Orion spacecraft’s service module does not have the performance needed to reach low-lunar orbit and then return safely to Earth. Hence the use of a near-rectilinear halo orbit.

However, a research paper published in July 2022 by NASA engineers at Johnson Space Center analyzes several other circular and elliptical orbits that Orion could reach with its present propulsive capabilities. Out of this analysis came another useful orbit with a name that just rolls off the tongue: Elliptical Polar Orbit with Coplanar Line of Apsides, or EPO/CoLA.

There are many details about the EPO/CoLA orbit in the research paper, but critically, its closest point to the Moon lies just 100 km above the Moon’s surface (the apolune distance is 6,500 km). For many landing sites, the paper notes, a Human Landing System vehicle can perform a single burn to reach a much lower orbit.

As part of his change in plans, Isaacman said the Space Launch System rocket’s upper stage would be “standardized” for Artemis IV and beyond. That means the first lunar landing mission will use a new upper stage, likely the Centaur V built by United Launch Alliance. This will have more propulsive capabilities than the current rocket, so it is possible that for Artemis IV, Orion could reach an even more favorable orbit (i.e., closer to the Moon, requiring less energy to reach the surface) than EPO/CoLA.

Can Starship be accelerated?

At the end of the day, it’s helpful to find new orbits and relax requirements where appropriate. But it will still be up to the lander contractors to deliver the goods, and for NASA, the sooner the better.

Last November, Ars looked at several ways Starship might be brought online faster as a lunar lander. Perhaps the biggest problem with using Starship as a lander is the need to fly multiple uncrewed tanker missions to refuel Starship in low-Earth orbit before it transits to the Moon and awaits a crew aboard Orion. This necessitates an estimated one- or two-dozen launches.

The best solution we could come up with was flying an optimized, expendable Starship tanker stage that would maximize propellant delivery per flight. When asked about this, though, SpaceX founder Elon Musk shot down the idea. Once Starship begins flying at rate, Musk believes, a dozen or more tanker missions per lunar flight will not pose a major impediment.

So it should come as no surprise that SpaceX has not proposed significant changes to its Human Landing System hardware. In response to NASA’s desire to accelerate the Artemis timeline, the company has indicated that it will prioritize the Human Landing System more as part of the Starship program. The company also suggested that eliminating the requirement to dock in near-rectilinear halo orbit could open up new mission plans, including potentially docking with Orion in orbit around Earth rather than the Moon.

What about Blue Origin?

Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, has been more responsive. Last October, Ars reported that the company had started working on a faster architecture that would not require orbital refueling. A month later, Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said the company “would move heaven and Earth” to help NASA reach the Moon sooner.

Based on recent documents reviewed by Ars, the company is continuing to refine its plan for a human lunar landing. Without a requirement to rendezvous in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, a lunar landing could potentially be accomplished with as few as three launches of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. This would require the more powerful 9×4 variant of the New Glenn rocket now in development. The EPO/CoLA orbit described above enables such a mission profile.

One mission plan seen by Ars shows the launch of a simplified MK2 lander on one rocket, and two more launches of transfer stages, which subsequently dock in low-Earth orbit. The first transfer stage pushes this stack out of low-Earth orbit before separating. The second transfer stage pushes the lander into EPO/CoLA, where it docks with Orion and two astronauts move on board MK2. This second transfer stage then moves the lander to a 15 x 100 km lunar orbit before separating. MK2 then flies down to the Moon.

After a short stay on the Moon, the interim MK2 lander would ascend back to the EPO/CoLA, where it meets up with Orion.

There are plenty of questions about the readiness of the Blue Origin hardware, of course. And there are a lot of moving pieces now with the Moon landing moving to Artemis IV and the probable use of new orbits for a rendezvous with Orion near the Moon. So all of this remains very notional.

Neither NASA nor Blue Origin has spoken publicly about their accelerated landing plans. Hopefully, that will change soon, because it’s entirely possible that NASA’s best chance to reach the Moon before China will come down to the ability of a company that proudly sports a turtle as a mascot to move a little more quickly.

Note: This story was updated at 11:30 am ET Friday with additional information.

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Why are vertebrate eyes so different from those of other animals?

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:11:08 +0000

A new hypothesis proposes that our ancestors lost their eyes, then rebuilt them.

After losing its original eyes, one of our distant ancestors may have done what evolution does best: tinkered with what was available, reshaping a single central visual organ into two new eyes.

That’s the idea behind a new theoretical synthesis published in Current Biology. According to the data considered by its authors—a team from the University of Sussex (UK) and Lund University (Sweden)—vertebrate eyes, ours included, may not descend directly from the paired eyes of early bilaterian animals. Instead, they may have been “reinvented” from what was once a single light-sensitive organ that survived an evolutionary detour.

Strange eyes

“Vertebrate eyes are so fundamentally different from the lateral eyes of other animal groups,” explains Dan-Eric Nilsson, senior author of the study from Lund University and a leading expert in eye evolution. “The key difference is the identity of the main photoreceptor, which is of ciliary nature in the vertebrate eye but rhabdomeric in other animal groups, such as arthropods and cephalopods,” he adds.

To understand what Nilsson is getting at, we need to unpack a few key concepts.

There are two major classes of light-sensitive photoreceptor cells—rhabdomeric and ciliary—that differ in shape, in the visual pigments (opsins) they contain, and in their electrical responses to light.

Most invertebrates rely on rhabdomeric photoreceptor cells for vision, while ciliary cells mediate light sensing but not vision—they generally help regulate internal biological clocks. Vertebrates, however, brought both types of photoreceptors into the same organ.

In the vertebrate retina, ciliary photoreceptor cells—rods and cones—carry out image-forming vision, while the rhabdomeric component both monitors ambient light levels and relays visual information from rods and cones to higher brain centers.

The authors argue that the invertebrate, rhabdomeric-based arrangement represents the ancestral state of eyes, inherited from the common bilaterian ancestor and shared by present invertebrates.

How did vertebrates end up on a different evolutionary path?

After the bilaterian lineage split—one branch giving rise to insects, crustaceans, and mollusks, the other leading to a group called deuterostomes that includes chordates and vertebrates—one of our distant ancestors appears to have become more sedentary.

“The ancestral deuterostome adopted a burrowing lifestyle, either living sessile on the seafloor or partially burrowed, with only parts of its body protruding,” says George Kafetzis, research fellow at the University of Sussex. Under those conditions, two lateral eyes may have become more of a liability than an advantage. “Neural tissue in general is very expensive to maintain and function,” Kafetzis explains.

As a result—an idea already proposed in the literature—the lineage may have gradually lost its paired eyes.

Make do with what you’ve got

If that ancestral deuterostome had stayed buried in the mud, we wouldn’t be here to worry about eye evolution. But some of its descendants returned to a free-swimming existence, one where paired lateral eyes once again became a clear advantage. For a swimming animal, two eyes are essential for steering: by comparing light input from each side, the nervous system can determine whether it needs to maintain course or turn.

By then, however, the rhabdomeric lateral eyes were gone. So what was left to work with? Fortunately, that ancestral deuterostome still needed to monitor ambient light to distinguish day from night and whether it was in open water or in shadow. To do so, the people behind the hypothesis suggest that it had retained a single, centrally located cyclopean organ.

“We think that in this early deuterostome, the median eye contained both ciliary and rhabdomeric cells,” Kafetzis explains. As a result, both cellular lineages were incorporated into a single, ancient, cyclopean eye, which later evolved into the vertebrate eyes.

The vertebrate third eye

A trace of this transformation may still survive in the pineal complex at the base of the brain—often referred to as a vertebrate “third eye.” Scientists have long recognized striking similarities between the retina and the pineal organ, leading many to suspect that the two evolved from a single ancestral structure, with the pineal representing a more rudimentary version.

Kafetzis and his colleagues see it differently.

Many researchers suspect that one class of neurons—the bipolar cells—is unique to the retina and represents a key evolutionary innovation of the vertebrate eye. Bipolar cells connect rods and cones to ganglion cells (hence the name “bipolar”). “We think that these bipolar-like cells already exist in the pineal,” says Kafetzis. “It’s just that they don’t look like the typical bipolar—they don’t have a cell before and a cell after.”

For this reason, Kafetzis and his colleagues argue that bipolar neurons are not a de novo evolutionary invention but instead have a chimeric origin, blending features of both rhabdomeric and ciliary cells and bridging the two photoreceptor lineages.

Though grounded in existing ideas and data, the new proposal offers a potentially far-reaching synthesis. Several aspects still require firmer evidence. The idea that the ancestral chordate adopted a burrowing lifestyle remains debated, and the claim that early bilaterians already possessed paired lateral eyes is still speculative.

The authors acknowledge that their model now needs testing. In the paper, they lay out several ways to do so—from molecular comparisons of pineal and retinal cells to developmental studies and broader sampling of eye development across other deuterostome species.

“We want to put forward some literature-based and inspired hypotheses that are testable, and now we can go out and test them,” concludes Kafetzis.

Cell, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.12.056

Federica Sgorbissa is a science journalist; she writes about neuroscience and cognitive science for Italian and international outlets.

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Rocket Report: SpaceX launch prices are going up; Russia fixes broken launch pad

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:09:54 +0000

It looks like United Launch Alliance will build more upper stages for NASA’s SLS rocket.

Welcome to Edition 8.32 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week is NASA’s shake-up of the Artemis program. On paper, at least, the changes appear to be quite sensible. Canceling the big, new upper stage for the Space Launch System rocket and replacing it with a commercial upper stage, almost certainly United Launch Alliance’s Centaur stage, should result in cost savings. The changes also relieve some of the pressure for SpaceX and Blue Origin to rapidly demonstrate cryogenic refueling in low-Earth orbit. The Artemis III mission is now a low-Earth orbit mission, using SLS and the Orion spacecraft to dock with one or both of the Artemis program’s human-rated lunar landers just a few hundred miles above the Earth—no refueling required. Artemis IV will now be the first lunar landing attempt.

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.

Sentinel missile nears first flight. The US Air Force’s new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile is on track for its first test flight next year, military officials reaffirmed last week. The LGM-35A Sentinel will replace the Air Force’s Minuteman III fleet, in service since 1970, with the first of the new missiles due to become operational in the early 2030s. But it will take longer than that to build and activate the full complement of Sentinel missiles and the 450 hardened underground silos to house them, Ars reports.

Nowhere to put them... No one is ready to say when hundreds of new missile silos, dug from the windswept Great Plains, will be finished, how much they cost, or, for that matter, how many nuclear warheads each Sentinel missile could actually carry. The program’s cost has swelled from $78 billion to an official projection of $141 billion, but that figure is already out of date, as the Air Force announced last year that it would need to construct new silos for the Sentinel missile. The original plan was to adapt existing Minuteman III silos for the new weapons, but engineers determined that it would take too long and cost too much to modify the aging Minuteman facilities. Instead, the Air Force, in partnership with contractors and the US Army Corps of Engineers, will dig hundreds of new holes across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The new silos will include 24 new forward launch centers, three centralized wing command centers, and more than 5,000 miles of fiber connections to wire it all together, military and industry officials said.

Space One is now 0-for-3. Japan’s Space One said its Kairos small ‌rocket self-destructed 69 seconds after liftoff on Thursday, failing to achieve the country’s first entirely commercial satellite launch for the third attempt in a row, Reuters reports. Three months after a failure of Japan’s flagship H3 rocket, the unsuccessful flight of the smaller Kairos launcher dealt a fresh blow to Japan’s efforts to establish domestic launch options and reduce its reliance on American rockets amid rising space security needs to counter China. Kairos measures about 59 feet (18 meters) long with three solid-fueled boost stages and a liquid-fueled upper stage to inject small satellites into low-Earth orbit. The rocket is capable of placing a payload of about 330 pounds (150 kilograms) into a Sun-synchronous orbit.

Accidental detonation... The Kairos rocket terminated its flight Thursday at an altitude of approximately 18 miles (29 kilometers) above the Pacific Ocean, just downrange from Space One’s spaceport on the southern coast of Honshu, the largest of Japan’s main islands. “No significant abnormalities were found in the flight or onboard equipment” before the self-destruction, Space One’s vice president, Nobuhiro Sekino, told a press conference, suggesting that the rocket’s autonomous flight termination system went wrong. This is a rare mode of failure in rocketry, but it has happened before. The first flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket was terminated erroneously in 2017, despite no issues with the launch vehicle itself. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

PLD Space raises $209 million. PLD Space has raised 180 million euros ($209 million) to ramp up production of the Spanish startup’s Miura 5 launch vehicle, marking the largest funding round for a European space business announced this year, Space News reports. PLD said the Series C equity funding round is led by Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, with co-investment from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities, and the Spanish public funds management company Cofides. The startup has now raised more than 350 million euros ($400 million) to date. Miura 5 has not flown yet, but PLD says it is designed to place more than a metric ton (2,200 pounds) of payload mass into low-Earth orbit.

All about scaling... The fresh cash will support PLD’s “transition to commercial operations and the scaling of its industrial and launch capabilities,” the company said in a statement. “Miura 5 was designed to address a clear and growing capacity gap in the market, and this investment support strengthens our ability to transition into commercial operations,” said Ezequiel Sánchez, PLD Space’s executive president. “It accelerates the build‑out of the industrial and launch infrastructure required to deliver reliable access to space for an expanding pipeline of global customers.” (submitted by Leika and EllPeaTea)

MaiaSpace delays first launch. Another European launch startup, the French company MaiaSpace, has announced the first flight of its two-stage Maia rocket will take place in 2027, slipping from a previously expected late 2026 launch, European Spaceflight reports. MaiaSpace is a subsidiary of ArianeGroup, which builds Europe’s flagship Ariane 6 rocket. The Maia rocket will be partially reusable, with a recoverable first stage. Just two months ago, MaiaSpace said it was targeting an initial suborbital demonstration flight of the Maia rocket in late 2026.

Ensemble de lancement... On February 24, officials from MaiaSpace and the French space agency CNES gathered at the site of the former Soyuz launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, to sign a temporary occupancy agreement allowing MaiaSpace to begin dismantling Soyuz-specific infrastructure at the site. During the event, MaiaSpace officials revealed they expected to host the inaugural flight of Maia from the facility in 2027. When asked for comment by European Spaceflight, a representative explained that the company remained committed to launching its first rocket less than five years after the company’s creation in April 2022. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Korean company eyes launching from Canada. South Korean launch newcomer Innospace is exploring a planned spaceport in Nova Scotia, Canada, as a potential facility to expand operations to North America, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The company, which has yet to successfully fly its Hanbit-Nano rocket, said on March 4 that it has reached a nonbinding, preliminary “letter of intent” with Canada’s Maritime Launch Services. Innospace said the letter of intent “establishes a strategic framework” for Korean and Canadian officials to “assess the technical, regulatory, and commercial feasibility” of launching Hanbit rockets from Nova Scotia. The first flight of the Hanbit-Nano rocket failed shortly after liftoff last year from a spaceport in Brazil, and Innospace already has preliminary agreements for potential launch sites in Europe and Australia.

Looking abroad... Several launch startups are looking at establishing additional launch sites beyond their initial operating locations. Firefly Aerospace is looking at Sweden, and Rocket Lab has already inaugurated a second launch site for its Electron rocket in Virginia after basing its first flights in New Zealand. Innospace is unique, though, in that the South Korean rocket company’s first launch pad is already halfway around the world from its home base. Meanwhile, Canada is investing in its own sovereign orbital launch capability. “We look forward to working with Innospace to evaluate how our strategic position on the Eastern Atlantic rim of North America can support their launch program while advancing reliable, repeatable access to orbit and strengthening Canada’s commercial launch capability,” said Stephen Matier, president and CEO of Maritime Launch Services.

Russia completes launch pad repairs. Late last year, a Soyuz rocket launched three astronauts to orbit from the Russian-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. But post-launch inspections revealed significant damage. A service structure underneath the rocket was unsecured during the launch of the three-man crew to the International Space Station. The structure fell into the launch pad’s flame trench, leaving the complex without the service cabin technicians use to work on the Soyuz rocket before liftoff. But Russia made quick repairs to the launch pad, the only site outfitted to launch Russian spacecraft to the ISS. Rockets will soon start flying from Pad 31 again, if all goes to plan, Space.com reports.

Restored to service... Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, announced Tuesday that the launch pad has been repaired. More than 150 employees from the agency’s Center for Operation of Space Ground-Based Infrastructure and representatives from four contractors have wrapped up work at the damaged launch pad. Roscosmos said 2,350 square meters of structures were prepared and painted, and more than 250 linear meters of welds were completed during the repair. Meanwhile, the head of the Roscosmos ground infrastructure division told a Russian TV channel in January that “multiple members” of the launch pad team were under criminal investigation after leaving the service structure unsecured during the November launch, according to Russian space reporter Anatoly Zak. The first launch from the restored pad is scheduled for March 22, when a Soyuz rocket will boost a Progress supply ship to the ISS. A Soyuz crew launch will follow this summer.

SpaceX price hike. SpaceX recently increased launch prices from $70 million to $74 million for a dedicated Falcon 9 ride, and $6,500 per kilogram to $7,000 per kilogram for a rideshare slot, Payload reports. The company has long signaled a steady pace of price bumps, so the move does not come as a surprise. Nonetheless, the increase (along with the lack of real alternatives) highlights a tough truth in the industry: Access to orbit has gotten significantly more expensive in recent years despite all the hoopla and hopium of falling launch prices.

Keeping up… The price of a dedicated launch on a Falcon 9 has risen about 20 percent since 2021, in line with US inflation. A rideshare slot, on the other hand, now costs about 40 percent more than it did in 2021, doubling the rate of inflation, according to Payload. Rideshare pricing is the far more important number to track here. Without a price-competitive alternative, the broader space startup community has relied almost exclusively on Falcon 9 Transporter and Bandwagon missions to get to space over the last five years. Ars has previously reported on how NASA pays more for launch services than it did 30 years ago, a trend partly driven by the agency’s requirement for dedicated launches for many of its robotic science missions.

NASA aims for standardized SLS rocket. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced sweeping changes to the Artemis program on February 27, including an increased cadence of missions and cancellation of an expensive rocket stage, Ars reports. The upheaval comes as NASA has struggled to fuel the massive Space Launch System rocket for the upcoming Artemis II lunar mission and Isaacman has sought to revitalize an agency that has moved at a glacial pace on its deep space programs. There is growing concern that, absent a shake-up, China’s rising space program will land humans on the Moon before NASA can return there this decade with Artemis.

CU later, EUS… “NASA must standardize its approach, increase flight rate safely, and execute on the president’s national space policy,” Isaacman said. “With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays, and achieve our objectives.” The announced changes to the Artemis program include the cancellation of the Exploration Upper Stage and Block IB upgrade for SLS rocket, and future SLS missions, starting with Artemis IV, will use a “standardized” commercial upper stage. Artemis III will no longer land on the Moon. Instead, the Orion spacecraft will launch on SLS and dock with SpaceX’s Starship and/or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon landers in low-Earth orbit.

NASA favors ULA upper stage. United Launch Alliance’s Centaur V upper stage, used on the company’s Vulcan rocket, will replace the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) on SLS missions beginning with Artemis IV, Bloomberg reports. ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, also built the interim upper stages flying on the Artemis I, II, and III missions. Those stages were based on designs used for ULA’s now-retired Delta IV Heavy rocket. With that production line shut down, ULA will now provide Centaur Vs to NASA. This means Boeing, which was on contract to develop the EUS, will still have a role in supplying upper stages for the SLS rocket. Boeing is also the prime contractor for the rocket’s massive core stage.

Building on a legacy… The Centaur V upper stage is the latest version of a design that dates back to the 1960s. Centaurs began flying in 1962, and the Centaur V is the most powerful variant, with a wider diameter and two hydrogen-fueled RL10 engines. The Centaur V still uses the ultra-thin, pressure-stabilized stainless steel structure used on all Centaur upper stages. The Centaur has a reliable track record, and the Centaur V’s predecessor, the Centaur III, was human-rated for launches of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule.

Artemis II helium issue fixed. NASA has fixed the problem that forced it to remove the rocket for the Artemis II mission from its launch pad last month, but it will be a couple of weeks before officials are ready to move the vehicle back into the starting blocks at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Ars reports. Ground teams moved the SLS rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building last month to repair an issue with the upper stage’s helium system. Inspections revealed that a seal in the quick disconnect, through which helium flows from ground systems into the rocket, was obstructing the pathway, according to NASA. “The team removed the quick disconnect, reassembled the system, and began validating the repairs to the upper stage by running a reduced flow rate of helium through the mechanism to ensure the issue was resolved,” NASA said in an update posted Tuesday.

Targeting April 1… NASA is not expected to return the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft to the launch pad until later this month. Inside the VAB, technicians will complete several other tasks to “refresh” the rocket for the next series of launch opportunities. NASA has not said whether the launch team will conduct another countdown rehearsal after it returns to Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy. The first of five launch opportunities in early April is on April 1, with a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC). There are additional launch dates available on April 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Next three launches

March 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-18 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 10:58 UTC

March 10: Alpha | Stairway to Seven | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 00:50 UTC

March 10: Falcon 9 | EchoStar XXV | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 03:14 UTC

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Posted Saturday 7 March 2026 at 5:09 am AEST (my time).

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Nerve damage, energy management, and Apple TV: F1 in 2026 starts today

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:01:51 +0000

Drivers aren’t happy about energy management, and one team won’t finish the race.

Later this evening—Friday morning local time—the new 1.6 L V6 engines that power this year’s crop of Formula 1 machinery will roar into life as practice for the first race of the year gets underway in Melbourne, Australia. After several years in which the teams’ performances converged so much that the sport was determined by finer margins than ever, 2026 sees a comprehensive reset.

The cars are smaller and lighter, and they have different aerodynamic configurations for the corners and the straights. The hybrid systems are more powerful, and each runs on its own bespoke sustainable fuel. There’s even a new way to watch as F1 makes a $750 million move from ESPN to Apple. Over the offseason, throughout the preseason shakedown in Barcelona, and then two three-day tests in Bahrain, plenty of questions have arisen: Are the new technical regulations a mistake? Can we still watch F1TV? And just what the heck is going on, Aston Martin?

400 kW + 350 kW = headaches?

After more than a decade with the same power units—and the same few manufacturers—the sport wanted to attract some new blood. Drawing in more car companies, which have boards and shareholders to answer to, required acknowledging road relevance and some commitment to sustainability and decarbonization. Since OEMs are all about electrification, that meant a greater emphasis on the hybrid side of the power units. And the veneer of environmental responsibility arrives in the form of heavily audited, fully sustainable fuels.

The engines are still 1.6 L V6s and turbocharged, but those turbochargers no longer contain the hybrid system known as the MGU-H. (It was dropped for cost grounds and a lack of road applications, but Porsche has started selling cars using this technology, and boy, are they good.) There’s now a much more powerful MGU-K, the electric motor that lives between the V6 and the transmission, and a more powerful battery. The combustion engines now generate 400 kW (536 hp), with the MGU-K adding another 350 kW (469 hp).

The rules package succeeded in attracting new power unit makers to the sport. Ferrari and Mercedes have been joined by Audi, Honda, and Red Bull’s in-house engine program (with help from Ford), although it is true that Alpine (formerly Renault) ended its long-running engine operation at the end of 2025 as its team opts for Mercedes power instead, joining the other customer teams McLaren and Williams.

Cadillac signed up, too, and it takes to the grid in Australia as the sport’s 11th team, although it will use Ferrari power units (like Haas) for the next three years while it develops its own for 2029.

On paper, 750 kW (1,006 hp) F1 cars should get everyone pretty excited. But they’ll only have that much power when the 4 MJ (1.1 kWh) battery is fully charged. That can happen in a couple of ways: regen via the rear wheels under braking and by siphoning power from the V6, which the sport calls “superclipping.” You’ll hear the engines continue to strain even as the cars lose speed at the end of long straights as horsepower is diverted into the battery and away from pushing the car through the air.

Each lap, each car is allowed to deploy up to 8.5 MJ (2.36 kWh), which means depleting and replenishing the battery more than once per lap. Because electrical energy is limited, drivers will have to use it intelligently. An optimal lap probably won’t be completely flat out the entire way; making up too much time in one corner using the full hybrid deployment might cost more on the following straight when there’s no more MGU-K contribution.

It’s fair to say some of F1’s biggest stars have not been entirely enthusiastic about having to adopt some of the same energy management techniques already used by their peers driving hybrid prototypes in the World Endurance Championship and all-electric single-seaters in Formula E.

After the first day of testing last month, four-time world champion Max Verstappen had some thoughts. “As a pure driver, I enjoy driving flat out,” he said. “And at the moment, you cannot drive like that. There’s a lot going on. A lot of what you do as a driver, in terms of inputs, has a massive effect on the energy side of things. For me, that’s just not Formula 1. Maybe it’s better to drive Formula E, right? Because that’s all about energy efficiency and management. That’s what they stand for.”

Not every track shares the same characteristics, however.

“Some tracks, you don’t have to do lift and coast for a single lap, and in some places, you have to do a lot of lift and coast for a qualifying lap,” driver Lewis Hamilton told reporters today. “There can be a big difference between deployment, of a second. If you don’t lift in one corner, for example Turn 6 and Turn 5 here [in Australia], if you take it flat or if you lift, it has a massive compound effect through the rest of the lap. You can do a good lap, but you could be a second down because the deployment is off.”

An MGU-K on the front axle would have helped; about 60 percent of the braking is done by the front wheels, and that energy is lost as heat instead. But all-wheel drive was vehemently opposed by every other OEM during the planning stages out of fear of Audi’s experience with all-wheel-drive hybrids in WEC. And they probably did us a favor in that regard: Mark Hughes convincingly argues that adding a front motor would open the door to stability control in F1, something that was already prevented in 2008 and which would certainly ruin the sport if allowed.

An easier fix, albeit one that would slow lap times, would be to restrict the amount of energy the MGU-K could deploy, down to 250 or even 200 kW (335–268 hp). During testing in Bahrain, the sport’s organizing body, the FIA, had some teams try this out. Don’t expect any power restriction for the first few races, though; sensibly, the sport will give it some time to see how everything works in practice.

Six laps? All day??

F1 in 2026 will see much greater variability in performance between the teams than the ultra-tight gaps we saw last year. That, of course, was the result of several years of stable rules that didn’t allow much freedom due to factors like weight balance and suspension setup. Mercedes is a favorite going into this year, but Ferrari, Red Bull, and McLaren also look very strong. Haas, Alpine, and Racing Bulls head the midfield, with Audi impressing and Williams disappointing, and Cadillac certainly hasn’t embarrassed itself.

If only Aston Martin or its engine partner, Honda, could say the same. The team’s Canadian billionaire owner, Lawrence Stroll, has invested hundreds of millions into the UK-based team, building a state-of-the-art factory and wind tunnel and recently hiring Adrian Newey, the megastar designer and aerodynamicist whose cars have been responsible for 12 championships so far (Newey even has a stake in the team).

2026 is Aston Martin’s first year with a works engine supply, provided by Honda. The Japanese OEM has an on-off relationship with the sport, most recently deciding in 2020 to leave, then changing its mind again in 2024 due to the new rules. That four-year gap meant that the current program at Honda was effectively started from scratch, and it has been hard going.

In fact, as early as January last year, the head of Honda Motorsport, Koji Watanabe, told me that Honda was having problems. “Everything is new. [The] motor is new, [developing] 350 kW—it’s a very compact one that we need. And also the lightweight battery is not so easy to develop. Also the small engine with big power. So everything is very difficult, but we try our best,” Watanabe said.

Once the power unit was fitted to the car, things got much worse. Aston Martin was late to the Barcelona shakedown, and its drivers posted the slowest lap times in both the first and second Bahrain tests. The team also completed fewer laps than any other—just 206 during the first three-day test and a mere 128 laps during the second test. (For comparison, Mercedes, McLaren, and Ferrari each did more than 420 laps during the first test, and Mercedes, Racing Bulls, and Haas did more than 400 laps during the second test.)

The problems were myriad, affecting both the gearbox and the power unit. Chief among the issues was a vibration that shook apart components like the battery pack, destroying spares. So on the final day of testing, the team was limited to a mere six laps of the Bahrain circuit. With so little testing and so much to debug, the prospect of Aston Martin finishing in Australia—or any of the first few races—seems doubtful.

But wait, it gets worse. Earlier today, Newey held a press conference in Australia, where he explained that the team hadn’t made any progress in damping the vibration, which resonates through the carbon fiber tub. Having parts like mirrors shake off is less than ideal, but the vibration is also transmitted through the steering wheel, and the problem is so severe that both Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll risk permanent nerve damage if they try to complete an entire race distance.

Asked to describe conditions in the car, Stroll (who suffered a hand injury last year) said, “I don’t know how you can compare it. I guess just electrocute yourself on a chair or something like that, not far off. It’s just… it’s very uncomfortable vibrations. It’s bad for the engine but also for the human inside the car. We need to get on top of it, but I think we will.”

Could this precipitate a driver move? Stroll Jr. is a permanent fixture as long as Stroll Sr. owns the team. But two-time champion Alonso already lost several years of his career to a poor Honda power unit and uncompetitive McLarens, and at 44, he’s now much closer to retiring. Rather than the Newey world-beater he thought he was getting, Alonso, who hasn’t won a race for 13 years, might well be looking at his old home Alpine a little wistfully. Alpine boss Flavio Briatore is also Alonso’s long-time manager, and Briatore certainly has no qualms when it comes to benching or replacing drivers. If I were Franco Colapinto or Pierre Gasly, I’d keep an eye on that.

Apple

If you had come into the #macintosh channel on the Ars IRC server in 2003 and told us that Apple would one day be the broadcast home of F1 in the US, you probably would have been asked where you got such good drugs. But last year, after producing a blockbuster movie about the sport, Apple snatched the US rights from ESPN.

Understandably, for existing ESPN customers who don’t have and don’t want an Apple TV subscription ($13 a month), this wasn’t great news. There was also a lot of confusion about F1’s standalone digital TV offering. After a rocky launch in 2018, F1TV has come into its own, offering a much less British-centric commentary feed than the UK’s Sky (which it includes as an alternate audio option), in-car feeds, and a comprehensive archive of races dating back decades.

If you were previously subscribed to both Apple TV and F1TV Premium, you have one less bill to pay. If you’re an Apple TV subscriber in the US, you now have access to F1TV Premium via its website and apps. I’m a subscriber to both, and my two accounts were tied together without any problems.

Whether you use the F1TV app or Apple’s, you’ll have the option for both the F1TV commentary of Alex Jacques and Joylon Palmer or the Sky audio feed of David Croft and Martin Brundle, plus Spanish-language audio. Apple says each Grand Prix will have up to 30 other feeds, including in-car from all 22 cars, a driver tracker, a telemetry feed, and more.

The computer company is going all out, with integrations across its various services. Apple Music will offer live audio broadcasts of races and curated playlists from drivers, and F1 will feature in the Podcast and News apps. There are even enhanced maps for some circuits—if Monza makes the cut, I will report back on it later this year. For a non-Apple Maps map look at the sport, consider this interactive map created by an Ars reader, F1 fan, and geospatial expert that includes all the team factories and the 24 circuits.

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Posted Friday 6 March 2026 at 12:01 pm AEST (my time).

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

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TerraPower gets OK to start construction of its first nuclear plant

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:18:35 +0000

Plant won’t be done until 2030 at the earliest, and it still needs an operating license.

On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had issued its first construction approval in nearly a decade. The approval will allow work to begin on a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a company called TerraPower. That company is most widely recognized as being financially backed by Bill Gates, but it’s attempting to build a radically new reactor, one that is sodium-cooled and incorporates energy storage as part of its design.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it will gain approval to operate the reactor, but it’s a critical step for the company.

The TerraPower design, which it calls Natrium and has been developed jointly with GE Hitachi, has several novel features. Probably the most notable of these is the use of liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer. This allows the primary coolant to remain liquid, avoiding any of the challenges posed by the high-pressure steam used in water-cooled reactors. But it carries the risk that sodium is highly reactive when exposed to air or water. Natrium is also a fast-neutron reactor, which could allow it to consume some isotopes that would otherwise end up as radioactive waste in more traditional reactor designs.

The reactor is also relatively small compared to most current nuclear plants (345 megawatts versus roughly one gigawatt), and incorporates energy storage. Rather than using the heat extracted by the sodium to boil water, the plant will put the heat into a salt-based storage material that can either be used to generate electricity or stored for later use. This will allow the plant to operate around renewable power, which would otherwise undercut it on price. The storage system will also allow it to temporarily output up to 500 MW of electricity.

Globally, only about 25 significant reactors have been built using sodium cooling, and most of them weren’t used to generate power; the US hasn’t built one since the 1960s and hasn’t operated one since the 1990s. This is a radical design, and the company could still face many hurdles before getting approval to operate it.

That said, building it is a critical first step. The company chose the site in 2021 and submitted the construction application to the NRC in early 2024. That was shortly before the passage of the ADVANCE Act in June 2024, which sought to streamline the approval of nuclear projects and promote new generations of reactor designs. That may explain why the NRC completed its evaluation of TerraPower’s filing nearly 10 months ahead of its initial prediction.

The Kemmerer plant is being built as a joint public-private partnership as part of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. Right now, the project is expected to be completed in 2030, and so will arrive far too late to help with the expected surge in datacenter demand over the next several years. As a first-of-its-kind project, it should also be expected to experience construction delays. And while the Trump administration has been enthusiastic about simplifying the approval process for operating reactors, a 2030 timeline may delay the Kemmerer plant’s approval well into the next administration.

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Posted Thursday 5 March 2026 at 12:18 pm AEST (my time).

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Large genome model: Open source AI trained on trillions of bases

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:17:57 +0000

System can identify genes, regulatory sequences, splice sites, and more.

Late in 2025, we covered the development of an AI system called Evo that was trained on massive numbers of bacterial genomes. So many that, when prompted with sequences from a cluster of related genes, it could correctly identify the next one or suggest a completely novel protein.

That system worked because bacteria tend to cluster related genes together—something that’s not true in organisms with complex cells, which tend to have equally complex genome structures. Given that, our coverage noted, “It’s not clear that this approach will work with more complex genomes.”

Apparently, the team behind Evo viewed that as a challenge, because today it is describing Evo 2, an open source AI that has been trained on genomes from all three domains of life (bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). After training on trillions of base pairs of DNA, Evo 2 developed internal representations of key features in even complex genomes like ours, including things like regulatory DNA and splice sites, which can be challenging for humans to spot.

Genome features

Bacterial genomes are organized along relatively straightforward principles. Any genes that encode proteins or RNAs are contiguous, with no interruptions in the coding sequence. Genes that perform related functions, like metabolizing a sugar or producing an amino acid, tend to be clustered together, allowing them to be controlled by a single, compact regulatory system. It’s all straightforward and efficient.

Eukaryotes are not like that. The coding sections of genes are interrupted by introns, which don’t encode for anything. They’re regulated by a sequence that can be scattered across hundreds of thousands of base pairs. The sequences that define the edges of introns or the binding sites of regulatory proteins are all weakly defined—while they have a few bases that are absolutely required, there are a lot of bases that just have an above-average tendency to have a specific base (something like “45 percent of the time it’s a T”). Surrounding all of this in most eukaryotic genomes is a huge amount of DNA that has been termed junk: inactive viruses, terminally damaged genes, and so on.

That complexity has made eukaryotic genomes more difficult to interpret. And, while a lot of specialized tools have been developed to identify things like splice sites, they’re all sufficiently error-prone that it becomes a problem when you’re analyzing something as large as a 3 billion-base-long genome. We can learn a lot more by making evolutionary comparisons and looking for sequences that have been conserved, but there are limits to that, and we’re often as interested in the differences between species.

These sorts of statistical probabilities, however, are well-suited to neural networks, which are great at recognizing subtle patterns that can be impossible to pick out by eye. But you’d need absolutely massive amounts of data and computing time to process it and pick out some of these subtle features.

We now have the raw genome data that the process needs. Putting together a system to feed it into an effective AI training program, however, remained a challenge. That’s the challenge the team behind Evo took on.

Training a large genome model

The foundation of the Evo 2 system is a convolutional neural network called StripedHyena 2. The training took place in two stages. The initial stage focused on teaching the system to identify important genome features by feeding it sequences rich in them in chunks about 8,000 bases long. After that, there was a second stage in which sequences were fed a million bases at a time to provide the system the opportunity to identify large-scale genome features.

The researchers trained two versions of their system using a dataset called OpenGenome2, which contains 8.8 trillion bases from all three domains of life, as well as viruses that infect bacteria. They did not include viruses that attack eukaryotes, given that they were concerned that the system could be misused to create threats to humans. Two versions were trained: one that had 7 billion parameters tuned using 2.4 trillion bases, and the full version with 40 billion parameters trained on the full open genome dataset.

The logic behind the training is pretty simple: if something’s important enough to have been evolutionarily conserved across a lot of species, it will show up in multiple contexts, and the system should see it repeatedly during training. “By learning the likelihood of sequences across vast evolutionary datasets, biological sequence models capture conserved sequence patterns that often reflect functional importance,” the researchers behind the work write. “These constraints allow the models to perform zero-shot prediction without any task-specific fine-tuning or supervision.”

That last aspect is important. We could, for example, tell it about what known splice sites look like, which might help it pick out additional ones. But that might make it harder for it to recognize any unusual splice sites that we haven’t recognized yet. Skipping the fine-tuning might also help it identify genome features that we’re not aware of at all at the moment, but which could become apparent through future research.

All of this has now been made available to the public. “We have made Evo 2 fully open, including model parameters, training code, inference code, and the OpenGenome2 dataset,” the paper announces.

The researchers also used a system that can identify internal features in neural networks to poke around inside of Evo 2 and figure out what things it had learned to recognize. They trained a separate neural network to recognize the firing patterns in Evo 2 and identify high-level features in it. It clearly recognized protein-coding regions and the boundaries of the introns that flanked them. It was also able to recognize some structural features of proteins within the coding regions (alpha helices and beta sheets), as well as mutations that disrupt their coding sequence. Even something like mobile genetic elements (which you can think of as DNA-level parasites) ended up with a feature within Evo 2.

What is this good for?

To test the system, the researchers started making single-base mutations and fed them into Evo 2 to see how it responded. Evo 2 could detect problems when the mutations affected the sites in DNA where transcription into RNA started, or the sites where translation of that RNA into protein started. It also recognized the severity of mutations. Those that would interrupt protein translation, such as the introduction of stop signals, were identified as more significant changes than those that left the translation intact.

It also recognized when sequences weren’t translated at all. Many key cellular functions are carried out directly by RNAs, and Evo 2 was able to recognize when mutations disrupted those, as well.

Impressively, the ability to recognize features in eukaryotic genomes occurred without the loss of its ability to recognize them in bacteria and archaea. In fact, the system seemed to be able to work out what species it was working in. A number of evolutionary groups use genetic codes with a different set of signals to stop the translation of proteins. Evo 2 was able to recognize when it was looking at a sequence from one of those species, and used the correct genetic code for them.

It was also good at recognizing features that tolerate a lot of variability, such as sites that signal where to splice RNAs to remove introns from the coding sequence of proteins. By some measures, it was better than software specialized for that task. The same was true when evaluating mutations in the BRCA2 gene, where many of the mutations are associated with cancer. Given additional training on known BRCA2 mutations, its performance improved further.

Overall, Evo 2 seems great for evaluating genomes and identifying key features. The researchers who built it suggest it could serve as a good automated tool for preliminary genome annotation.

But the striking thing about the early version of Evo was that, when prompted with a chunk of sequence that includes known bacterial genes, some of its responses included entirely new proteins with related functions. Now that it was trained on more complex eukaryotic genes, could it do the same?

We don’t entirely know. If given a bunch of DNA from yeast (a eukaryote), it would respond with a sequence that included functional RNAs, and gene-like sequences with regulatory information and splice sites. But the researchers didn’t test whether any of the proteins did anything in particular. And it’s difficult to see how they could even do that test. With bacterial genes, they could safely assume that the AI-generated gene should be doing something related to the nearby genes. But that’s generally not the case in eukaryotes, so it’s difficult to guess what functions they should even test for.

In a somewhat more informative test, the researchers asked Evo 2 to make some regulatory DNA that was active in one cell type and not another after giving it information about what sequences were active in both those cell types. The sequences that came out were then inserted into these cells and tested, but the results were pretty weak, with only 17 percent having activity that differed by a factor of two or more between the two cell types. That’s a major achievement, but it isn’t in the same realm as designing brand new proteins.

What’s next?

Overall, given that this has come out less than four months after the paper describing the original Evo, it’s not at all surprising that there wasn’t more work done to test what Evo 2 can do for designing biologically relevant DNA sequences. Biology experiments are hard and time-consuming, and it’s not always easy to judge in advance which ones will provide the most compelling information. So we’ll probably have to wait months to years to find out whether the community finds interesting things to do with Evo 2, and whether it’s good at solving any useful protein design problems.

There’s also the question of whether further training and specialization can create Evo 2 relatives that are especially good at specific tasks, such as evaluating genomes from cancer cells or annotating newly sequenced genomes. To an extent, it appears the research team wanted to get this out so that others could start exploring how it might be put to use; that’s consistent with the fact that all of the software was made available.

The big open question is whether this system has identified anything that we don’t know how to test for. Things like intron/exon boundaries and regulatory DNA have been subjected to decades of study so that we already knew how to look for them and can recognize when Evo 2 spots them. But we’ve discovered a steady stream of new features in the genome—CRISPR repeats, microRNAs, and more—over the past decades. It remains technically possible that there are features in the genome we’re not aware of yet, and Evo 2 has picked them out.

It’s possible to imagine ways to use the tools described here to query Evo 2 and pick out new genome features. So I’m looking forward to seeing what might ultimately come out of that sort of work.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10176-5 (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 5 March 2026 at 12:17 pm AEST (my time).

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Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:17:21 +0000

SEM analysis of pottery residues showed people combined fish with a wide variety of plants when cooking.

Archaeologists are keen to learn more about the specific diets and culinary practices of ancient populations around the globe. An interdisciplinary team of scientists analyzed the residues on prehistoric ceramic cooking pots and concluded that early Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers likely foraged for plants as well as hunted fish and other animals for their sustenance, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. And they often combined ingredients for region-specific recipes.

This is a burgeoning area of archaeological research. For instance, back in 2020, we reported on researchers who spent an entire year analyzing the chemical residues of some 50 ceramic cooking pots. The aim was to gain new insights into ancient diets, and the authors actually cooked their own maize-based meals in replica pots to test their hypotheses. They found that the charred bits at the bottom of the pots provided evidence of the last meal cooked. But the patinas contained evidence of the remnants of prior meals that had built up over time. So it depends on which part of the pot you sample.

Most prior research has been typically useful primarily for identifying animal remains; it’s more challenging to identify the kinds of plants ancient peoples might have consumed. The authors of this latest paper combined several analytical techniques to study the residues of 58 pottery pieces dating between the 6th and 3rd millennium BCE. And they, too, conducted their own experiments, cooking various combinations of the ingredients in ceramic vessels over an open fire.

Regional recipes

The authors selected their pottery shards from coastal, lagoon, riverside, and lakefront sites to get a range of ecological settings, and focused on shards with substantial crusted residues from foodstuffs. They also examined botanical records, where available, to get a sense of which plants were locally available at each site. After initial examination under a microscope, the most heavily crusted areas were imaged with scanning electron microscopy to better examine their fine structure. They also analyzed the lipids and bulk isotopes present in the residues.

The results: The team found traces of wild grasses and legumes, fruits or berries, green vegetables, and roots and tubers native to the broader region. Shards recovered from sites in the Don River basin showed these people used the seeds of wild legumes (possibly clover) and grasses, as well as showing some evidence of bran and barley. By contrast, shards from the Upper Volga and Dnieper-Dvina region contained more traces of guelder rose berries and other fleshy fruits and smaller-seeded Amaranthaceae plants.

Shards from the Baltic region showed higher traces of freshwater fish, with some regions also including berries, sea beetroot, flowering rush, beets, and sea club-rush tubers. There were also traces of dairy products in shards from a site in Denmark, likely obtained from nearby farming communities.

For the cooking experiments, the authors explored different potential food mixtures focusing on two main plant species: guelder rose berries and species related to the Amaranthaceae family (beet, goosefoot, and saltbush specifically). The berries were gathered in the fall from the south of England and frozen right afterward. They boiled the berries with water in replica pottery vessels, combining some batches with freshwater fish like carp, and also varying the distance of the vessels from the open flames and active embers. They then sampled the cooking residues and compared those results to the samples taken from the prehistoric vessels.

“Our results show that there was a general tendency towards combining specific foods into distinct preparations and in particular regions,” the authors concluded, such as combining Viburnum berries with freshwater fish in the Upper Volga and Baltic regions. Fish accompanied by wild grasses and legumes were preferred in the Don River Basin, while other sites preferred their fish with green vegetables. So “hunter-gatherer-fishers were not living on fish alone,” the authors wrote. “They were actively processing and consuming a wide variety of plants.”

PLoS ONE, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0342740 (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 5 March 2026 at 12:17 pm AEST (my time).

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What It’s Like to Have a Brain Implant for 5 Years

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:33:41 +0000

No one has had a Synchron brain-computer interface longer than Rodney Gorham. He's still finding new ways to use it.

Rodney Gorham recently passed a milestone that few people have reached. He’s had a brain-computer interface implanted for five years.

Made by startup Synchron, the experimental implant allows him to control a computer and other digital devices around his home using just his thoughts. It’s been a lifeline for 65-year-old Gorham, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and can no longer walk, talk, or move his hands.

Synchron is among several companies, including Elon Musk’s Neuralink, aiming to commercialize brain-computer interfaces to help individuals with paralysis. Over the past five years, Synchron’s software and hardware have gone through many iterations, with Gorham helping to shape the evolution of the technology. Out of the 10 volunteers to get Synchron’s implant so far, Gorham has been living with it the longest. He received it in December 2020 as part of a trial in Australia. (The longest-ever user of an implanted brain-computer interface is Nathan Copeland, who’s had one for more than 10 years. He has four research-grade arrays in his brain made by Blackrock Neurotech.)

“We've done a lot of trial and error with Rodney trying out different things to figure out what we think the first use case we should build the first product and clinical trial around,” says Tom Oxley, Synchron’s founding CEO. “He's played a pivotal role in helping us test out new decoders, new interaction methods, and application integrations,”

Synchron’s first product is dubbed the Stentrode, a tiny mesh tube that sits in a blood vessel against the brain and collects neural signals. It’s inserted into the jugular vein at the base of the neck and threaded through the vessel until it reaches the motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for voluntary movement. A surgically placed unit in the chest receives the brain signals then transmits them out of the body to an external receiver.

The company is gearing up to test the Stentrode in a larger, so-called pivotal trial needed for regulatory approval. It’s been in talks with the US Food and Drug Administration to decide on the trial’s clinical endpoint—a measurable outcome used to assess the safety and effectiveness of a device. Determining the effectiveness of a brain-computer interface is a bit trickier than a traditional drug or device that directly treats a disease, and it’s a question that the field is currently grappling with.

Brain-computer interfaces rely on decoding algorithms to translate brain activity into the user’s intended actions. For instance, a person might think about making a fist or tapping their foot to carry out a mouse click on a computer screen. Someone who is paralyzed may not be able to physically make a fist or tap their foot, but the neurons in their brain still fire in a unique pattern when they attempt to do so. A decoder has to be able to consistently recognize that raw neural signal in order for a brain-computer interface to be useful.

Rodney Gorham, who has had Synchron’s Stentrode implanted for five years, with his dog Piper at home in Melbourne, Australia.

Photograph: Arsineh Houspian

Initially, Gorham used his brain-computer interface for single clicks, Oxley says. Then he moved on to multi-clicks and eventually sliding control, which is akin to turning up a volume knob. Now he can move a computer cursor, an example of 2D control—horizontal and vertical movements within a two-dimensional plane.

Over the years, Gorham has gotten to try out different devices using his implant. Zafar Faraz, a field clinical engineer for Synchron, says Gorham directly contributed to the development of Switch Control, a new accessibility feature Apple announced last year that allows brain-computer interface users the ability to control iPhones, iPads, and the Vision Pro with their thoughts.

In a video demonstration shown at an Nvidia conference last year in San Jose, California, Gorham demonstrates using his implant to play music from a smart speaker, turn on a fan, adjust his lights, activate an automatic pet feeder, and run a robotic vacuum in his home in Melbourne, Australia.

“Rodney has been pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” Faraz says.

As a field clinical engineer, Faraz visits Gorham in his home twice a week to lead sessions on his brain-computer interface. It’s Faraz’s job to monitor the performance of the device, troubleshoot problems, and also learn the range of things that Gorham can and can’t do with it. Synchron relies on this data to improve the reliability and user-friendliness of its system.

In the years he’s been working with Gorham, the two have done a lot of experimenting to see what’s possible with the implant. Once, Faraz says, he had Gorham using two iPads side by side, switching between playing a game on one and listening to music on the other. Another time, Gorham played a computer game in which he had to grab blocks on a shelf. The game was tied to an actual robotic arm at the University of Melbourne, about six miles from Gorham’s home, that remotely moved real blocks in a lab.

Gorham, who was an IBM software salesman before he was diagnosed with ALS in 2016, has relished being such a key part of the development of the technology, his wife Caroline says.

“It fits Rodney's set of life skills,” she says. “He spent 30 years in IT, talking to customers, finding out what they needed from their software, and then going back to the techos to actually develop what the customer needed. Now it’s sort of flipped around the other way.” After a session with Faraz, Gorham will often be smiling ear to ear.

Through field visits, the Synchron team realized it needed to change the setup of its system. Currently, a wire cable with a paddle on one end needs to sit on top of the user’s chest. The paddle collects the brain signals that are beamed through the chest and transmits them via the wire to an external unit that translates those signals into commands. In its second generation system, Synchron is removing that wire.

“If you have a wearable component where there's a delicate communication layer, we learned that that's a problem,” Oxley says. “With a paralyzed population, you have to depend on someone to come and modify the wearable components and make sure the link is working. That was a huge learning piece for us.”

Brain-computer interfaces will need to be easy for caregivers to set up in the home if patients are going to use them regularly.

During the years he’s been in the Synchron trial, Gorham’s condition has slowly progressed. Using his implant requires a lot of concentration, and he tires easily now. He used to do interviews with reporters via WhatsApp, but now it’s hard for him to text for long stretches. (This story relied on interviews with his wife Caroline, field specialist Faraz, and Oxley.)

It raises big questions for Synchron and other companies around the usefulness of these devices for patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Will patients be able to keep using them as their disease worsens? Will insurance cover an expensive device that requires surgery and has a potentially limited lifespan? Life expectancy after an ALS diagnosis is three to five years, but many people live longer. (Since Synchron’s first surgery in 2019, some participants have passed away due to the natural progression of their ALS.)

People with more stable forms of paralysis—for instance due to spinal cord injury—may be able to use a brain-computer interface for the rest of their lives. They may still experience mental fatigue from operating a device for hours a day, though.

“From my point of view,” says Caroline, “I think the companies have to take into consideration the human component more, because every human is different.”

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Posted Thursday 5 March 2026 at 4:32 am AEST (my time).

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No fooling: NASA targets April 1 for Artemis II launch to the Moon

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:49:30 +0000

“Engineers are assessing what allowed the seal to become dislodged to prevent the issue from recurring.”

NASA has fixed the problem that forced the removal of the rocket for the Artemis II mission from its launch pad last month, but it will be a couple of weeks before officials are ready to move the vehicle back into the starting blocks at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket could have launched as soon as this week after it passed a key fueling test on February 21. During that test, NASA loaded the Space Launch System rocket with super-cold propellants without any major problems, apparently overcoming a persistent hydrogen leak that prevented the mission from launching in early February.

However, another problem cropped up just one day after the successful fueling demo. Ground teams were unable to flow helium into the rocket’s upper stage. Unlike the connections to the core stage, which workers can repair at the launch pad, the umbilical lines leading to the upper stage higher up the rocket are only accessible inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy.

Mission managers quickly decided to roll the rocket back to the assembly building for troubleshooting. The rocket returned to the VAB on February 25, and within a week, engineers found the source of the helium flow issue. Inspections revealed that a seal in the quick disconnect, through which helium flows from ground systems into the rocket, was obstructing the pathway, according to NASA.

Sealing the deal

“The team removed the quick disconnect, reassembled the system, and began validating the repairs to the upper stage by running a reduced flow rate of helium through the mechanism to ensure the issue was resolved,” NASA said in an update posted Tuesday. “Engineers are assessing what allowed the seal to become dislodged to prevent the issue from recurring.”

NASA is not expected to return the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft to the launch pad until later this month. Inside the VAB, technicians will complete several other tasks to “refresh” the rocket for the next series of launch opportunities.

This work will include activating a new set of flight termination system batteries for the rocket’s range safety destruct system, which would be used to destroy the vehicle if it veered off course during launch. Workers will also replace flight batteries on the SLS core stage, upper stage, and solid rocket boosters, and recharge the batteries on the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort system, NASA said. At the bottom of the rocket, crews will replace a seal on the core stage liquid oxygen feed line.

NASA has not said whether the launch team will conduct another countdown rehearsal after it returns to Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy.

The first of five launch opportunities in early April is on April 1, with a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC). There are additional launch dates available on April 3, 4, 5, and 6. Each launch period has about five potential launch dates after accounting for several constraints on the mission trajectory, which will carry the Orion spacecraft and four astronauts around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth.

Artemis II will be the first human spaceflight to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972 and is the first crew mission for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface as early as 2028.

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Posted Wednesday 4 March 2026 at 11:49 am AEST (my time).

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What we can learn from scientific analysis of Renaissance recipes

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:48:45 +0000

Multispectral imaging, proteomics, historical texts yield new insights into 16th-century medical manuals.

Forget “eye of newt and toe of frog/wool of bat and tongue of dog.” People in the 16th century were more akin to DIY scientists than Macbeth’s three witches when it came to concocting home remedies for everything from hair loss and toothache, to kidney stones and fungal infections. Medical manuals targeted to the layperson were hugely popular at the time, according to Stefan Hanss, an early modern historian at the University of Manchester in the UK. “Reader-practitioners” would tinker with the various recipes, tweaking them as needed and making personalized notes in the margins. And they left telltale protein traces behind as they did so.

Hanss is part of an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, chemists, historians, conservators, and materials scientists who have analyzed trace proteins from the fingerprints of Renaissance people rifling through the pages of medical manuals. The team reported their findings in a paper published in The American Historical Review. It’s the first time researchers have used proteomics to analyze Renaissance recipes, enhanced further by in-depth archival research to place the scientific results in the proper historical context.

“We have so many recipes of that time, [including] cosmetic, medical, and culinary recipes, as well as handwritten recipes passed down for generations,” Hanss told Ars. “It’s really a key element of Renaissance culture, and [the manuscripts] are all covered with scribbled marginalia of [past] users. Experimentation was everywhere. It’s not only about book-learned knowledge but hands-on practical knowledge. It’s a key change in the way people constructed knowledge at that time.”

As previously reported, a number of analytical techniques have emerged over the last few decades to create historical molecular records of the culture in which various artworks were created. For instance, studying the microbial species that congregate on works of art may lead to new ways to slow down the deterioration of priceless aging art. Case in point: Scientists analyzed the microbes found on seven of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings in 2020 using a third-generation sequencing method known as Nanopore, which uses protein nanopores embedded in a polymer membrane for sequencing. They combined the Nanopore sequencing with a whole-genome-amplification protocol and found that each drawing had its own unique microbiome.

Mass spectrometry-based proteomics is a relative newcomer to the field and is capable of providing a thorough and very detailed characterization of any protein residues present in a given sample, as well as any accumulated damage. The technique is so sensitive that less sample material is needed compared to other methods. And unlike, say, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, it’s also capable of characterizing all proteins present in a sample (regardless of the complexity of the mixture), rather than being narrowly targeted to predefined proteins. In 2023, scientists used this approach to discover that beer byproducts were popular canvas primers for artists of the Danish Golden Age. Hanss et al. are extending this methodology to Renaissance medical manuals.

A thriving DIY medical marketplace

This latest study has its roots in an event Hanss organized a few years ago called “Microscopic Records,” which brought together experts in various scientific fields and early modern historians. One of the master classes on offer focused on proteomics. Hanss was intrigued when he learned that researchers had extracted proteins from the lower-right and left corners (i.e., where contact occurs when one turns a page) of archived manuscripts in Milan. “I thought, we must have a conversation about doing this for Renaissance recipes,” said Hanss. “We know there was experimentation, but we couldn’t really trace it. This is really the first time that we’ve sampled and identified and contextualized biochemical traces of materials.”

Hanss et al. focused on two 1531 German medical manuals published by 16th-century physician Bartholomäus Vogtherr: How to Cure and Expel All Afflictions and Illnesses of the Human Body and A Useful and Essential Little Book of Medicine for the Common Man. The two tomes are bound together into a single volume and are part of the collection of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at Manchester. The recipes included domestic remedies for brain disease, infertility, skin disorders, hair loss, wounds, and various other severe illnesses, written in the vernacular and targeted at the common populace.

It was a relatively new genre at the time, per the authors, a kind of everyday DIY science, since the manuals encouraged at-home hands-on experimentation. In 16th-century Augsburg (a printing hub), “experimentation was everywhere,” and the city boasted a thriving medical marketplace. It’s clear that people used the Rylands copies of Vogtherr’s manuals for their own experiments because the margins are filled with scribbled notes and comments dating back to that period.

The first step was to take high-resolution photographs and then run the pages through multispectral imaging (including infrared and UV wavelengths), which helped them recover the most faded, previously illegible handwriting, such as on the inside cover. One scribbled note turned out to be instructions to use a mixture of viola and scorpion oil as a treatment for ulcers. Then they sampled various pages from the manuals for the proteomics analysis, focusing on areas where Renaissance users would be most likely to rest their writing hand or leave fingerprints. That’s also why they avoided the bindings, which are far more likely to be handled by modern-day conservators.

While proteomics cannot establish the dates of specific samples, the team was able to distinguish between contemporary and old peptides based on degree of degradation (such as oxidation). The quantity of peptides detected was also a clue. In fact, the team ended up excluding one of the samples from the final paper because there was such a significantly higher number of peptide results (2,258) than expected, compared to all the other samples (which ranged from 40 to 210 peptides). And for these two particular manuals, “They were in use for more than a hundred years and we know the [users’] names,” said Hanss. “We could make an informed interpretation based on other recipes at the time, and letters exchanged between [Renaissance] medical practitioners.”

The handwritten marginalia are a fascinating window into how people experimented with and tweaked various Renaissance domestic remedies. For those suffering from urinary stones, for instance, a “reader-practitioner” commented that during painful flare-ups, “parsley powdered or soaked in wine” could be effective. There are references to the benefits of broadleaf plantain juice (administered anally), and eating scarlet hawthorn leaves.

The proteomics results confirmed, among other things, the presence of many popular ingredients used in the recipes, such as beech, watercress, and rosemary traces found next to hair loss remedies—commonly attributed to an “overheated brain—along with cabbage and radish oil, chicory, lizards, and, um, human feces. (Just how badly do you want to grow back that thinning hair?) The manuscripts also include recipes for blonde hair dyes. The analysis revealed traces of plants with particularly striking yellow flowers on those pages. “That is a common theme in cosmetic and medical discourse at the time,” said Hanss. “The idea was to look for resemblances between the remedies and what you wish to achieve in terms of the treatment.”

One of the most remarkable results, per Hanss et al., was the recovery of collagen peptides from hippopotamus teeth or bone, pointing to the global circulation of more exotic ingredients in the 16th century. Hippo teeth were said to cure kidney stones and “take away toothache,” and were even used to make dentures.

Hanss et al. also found that several of the proteins they found had antimicrobial functions, such as dermcidin (derived from human sweat glands), which kills E. coli and yeast infections like thrush. The samples also yielded insight into how Renaissance people’s bodies responded to the remedies. Traces of immunoglobulin, lipocalin, and lysozyme are indicators of an active immune response, for instance.

Hanss is so pleased with these initial results that he hopes to launch a large-scale project to extend this interdisciplinary approach to other collections of medical manuals. He also hopes to further improve the dating methodology. “The ingredients for success are there,” said Hanss. “It’s not only that we found new answers to old questions, but we are now in a position to ask completely new questions.”

The American Historical Review, 2025. DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhaf405 (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 4 March 2026 at 11:48 am AEST (my time).

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As Moon interest heats up, two companies unveil plans for a lunar “harvester”

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:55:39 +0000

“Ultimately, we want to build a fleet of electric harvesters.”

The Moon has received a lot of attention in recent months, particularly the surface of Earth’s cold and dusty companion.

This has largely been driven by a decision from SpaceX founder Elon Musk to pivot, at least in the near term, from Mars to lunar surface activities and the potential for using material there to build large satellites. But there has been a notable shift from NASA, too, which has started talking a lot more about building up elements of a base on the surface rather than an orbiting space station known as the Gateway.

In short, the world’s most successful space company and the largest space agency have both increased their lunar ambitions, suggesting a greater frequency of missions to the Moon in the coming years.

For companies that have long-term business plans focused around the surface of the Moon, these are very positive developments. And two of these lunar startups, Astrolab and Interlune, announced Tuesday morning they are forming a partnership amid this favorable environment.

Astrolab is one of three firms vying to build rovers for NASA’s scientific activities on the surface of the Moon, as well as to provide transportation for its astronauts. But the company has been working with commercial customers as well, and one of the most important long-term ones could be a Helium-3 mining company called Interlune.

“Ultimately, we want to build a fleet of electric harvesters that will go to the Moon and excavate, extract, and separate Helium-3 from the lunar regolith,” said Interlune chief executive Rob Meyerson. “The FLEX Rover is a great platform to go do that.”

Starting smaller with FLIP

This is not the first time the two companies have worked together. Last August, Interlune announced that it would fly a multispectral camera on a smaller prototype rover being built by Astrolab. This camera will be used to estimate helium-3 quantities and concentration in Moon dirt, or regolith.

This FLIP rover, about the size of a go-kart, is due to launch later this year on a lunar lander built by Astrobotic. It will fly atop the Griffin lander, taking the place of NASA’s VIPER rover, which has been moved to another spacecraft.

The mission will therefore be a learning exercise for both Astrolab, in testing out its software and other features of a small lunar rover, as well as Interlune, which will seek to ground truth data about the concentration of Helium-3 that has previously been estimated from samples returned to Earth during the Apollo program.

In addition to FLIP, Astrolab is developing a larger rover, FLEX, that is about the size of a minivan. This vehicle has a horseshoe-shaped chassis that can accommodate about 3 cubic meters of payload. This allows for a broad array of activities, from carrying multiple scientific instruments across the Moon and providing a long-distance rover for two astronauts, to moving large equipment or, in the case of Interlune, serving as a mobile harvester.

“Our thesis is to make the most versatile platform possible so we can serve a wide array of customers and achieve NASA’s goal of being one customer among many,” said Jaret Matthews, Astrolab founder and chief executive, in an interview. “So we have essentially a modular approach that allows us to either pick up cargo or implements or payloads. And so in this case, the excavating equipment that Interlune is developing would basically go under the belly of the rover.”

Precursor activities underway

The companies did not say when they are scheduled to deploy an initial harvester, but both are working toward that goal. It is likely that a FLEX rover will be one of the payloads on the first SpaceX Starship mission to the lunar surface—probably, but not certainly, the lunar demo mission without crew—planned to fly to the Moon in 2027 or 2028. Interlune has been working with Vermeer, an industrial equipment manufacturer, to build a harvester to excavate and separate Helium-3 from the lunar surface.

Helium-3 does not occur naturally on Earth, and it exists in only very limited quantities from nuclear weapons tests, nuclear reactors, and radioactive decay. It has several applications, but the most near-term use is in cryogenics, Meyerson believes. The company has already announced contracts for the sale of thousands of liters for very low-temperature refrigeration. But first, it must demonstrate the ability to mine and refine the material, which exists in small quantities in lunar soil, and get it back to Earth. This is a difficult challenge, of course, but having partners to move across the Moon and get to and from there helps a lot.

Astrolab and Interlune plan to conduct prototype testing of a mobile harvester in Houston, where there is a new commercial facility known as the Texas A&M University Space Institute. This institute is currently under construction at NASA’s Johnson Space Center as the space agency seeks to broaden support for commercial space activities.

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Posted Wednesday 4 March 2026 at 5:54 am AEST (my time).

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Research roundup: Six cool science stories we almost missed

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:06:13 +0000

Smart underwear measures farts, brain cells play Doom, and AI discovers rules of an ancient game.

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. February’s list includes the revival of a forgotten battery design by Thomas Edison that could be ideal for renewable energy storage; a snap-on device to turn those boxers into “smart underwear” to measure how often we fart; and a dish of neurons playing Doom, among other highlights.

Reviving Edison’s battery design

At the onset of the 20th century, electric cars powered by lead-acid batteries outnumbered gas-powered cars. The internal combustion engine ultimately won out, in part because those batteries had a range of just 30 miles. But Thomas Edison believed a nickel-iron battery could extend that range to as much as 100 miles, while also having a long life and recharging times of seven hours. An international team of scientists has revived Edison’s concept of a nickel-iron battery and created their own version, according to a paper published in the journal Small.

The team took their inspiration from nature, specifically how shellfish form their hard outer shells and animals form bones: Proteins create a scaffolding onto which calcium compounds cluster. For the battery scaffolding, the authors used beef byproduct proteins, combined with graphene oxide, and then grew clusters of nickel for positive electrons and iron for negative ones. The team superheated all the ingredients in water followed by baking them at very high temperatures. The proteins charred into carbon, stripping away the oxygen atoms in the graphene oxide and embedding the nickel and iron clusters in the scaffolding. Essentially, it became an aerogel.

The folded structure limited the clusters to less than 5 nanometers, translating into significantly more surface area for the chemical reactions fueling the battery to occur. The resulting prototype recharged in mere seconds and endured for more than 12,000 cycles, equivalent to about 30 years of daily recharging. However, their battery’s storage capacity is still well below that of current lithium-ion batteries, so powering EVs might not be the most promising application. The authors suggest it might be ideal for storing excess electricity generated by solar farms or other renewable energy sources.

Small, 2026. DOI: 10.1002/smll.202507934 (About DOIs).

Vanishing star became a black hole

In 2014, NASA’s NEOWISE project picked up a gradual brightening of infrared light coming from a massive star in the Andromeda galaxy, an observation that was confirmed by several other ground- and space-based telescopes. Astronomers kept monitoring the star, so they also noticed when it quickly dimmed in 2016. Once one of the brightest stars in that galaxy, it effectively “vanished” from sight; it would be like Betelgeuse suddenly disappearing. It’s now only detectable in the mid-infrared range.

The obvious explanation was that the star was dying and had collapsed into a black hole, but if so, it didn’t go through the supernova phase that usually occurs with stars of this size. That makes it an intriguing object for further study. After analyzing archival data from NEOWISE, a team of astronomers concluded that this was indeed a case for direct collapse, according to a paper published in the journal Science.

Theoretical work from the 1970s provided a possible explanation. As gravity begins to collapse the star, and the core first forms a dense neutron star, the accompanying burst of neutrinos typically creates a powerful shock wave strong enough to rip apart the core and outer layers, leading to a supernova. But some theorists suggested that the shock wave might not always be powerful enough to expel all that stellar material, which instead falls inward, and the baby neutron star directly collapses into a black hole without ever going supernova.

Convection, it seems, is key. It occurs because the matter near the star’s center is hotter than the outer regions, so the gases move from hotter to cooler regions. The authors of this latest paper suggest that as the core collapses, gas in the outer layers is moving rapidly, which prevents them from falling into the core. The inner layers orbit outside the new black hole and eject the outer layers, which cool and form dust to hide the hot gas still orbiting the black hole. The dust warms in response into mid-infrared wavelengths, giving the object a slight glow that should last for decades.

This work has already led the team to re-evaluate a similar star first observed a decade ago, so this may constitute a new class of objects—ones that are harder to detect because they don’t go supernova and because of the faintness of the afterglow. At least now astronomers know to look for that distinctive signature.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt4853 (About DOIs).

Smart undies measure the gas you pass

Let’s face it, everybody farts, and those suffering from conditions that produce excess gas fart more than most. But physicians don’t have a reliable means of quantifying just how much gas people produce each day. In other words, they lack a baseline of what is normal—like we have for blood glucose or cholesterol—which makes it difficult to determine whether the farting in any given case is excessive. To address this, scientists at the University of Maryland have devised “smart underwear” to measure the wearer’s flatulence, according to a paper published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Brantley Hall and his cohorts developed a small device with electrochemical sensors that snaps onto one’s underwear; those sensors track any emitted farts around the clock, including as the wearer sleeps. In the past, fart frequency relied on small studies using invasive methods or unreliable self-reports. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Hall et al. recorded much higher farting estimates in their study: healthy adults pass gas on average 32 times per day, compared to just 14 times per day reported in past studies.

There was also considerable variation among individuals, with a lowest fart rate of just four times per day and a highest rate of 59 per day. This is a first step to determining a healthy baseline, which the team hopes to do via their Human Flatus Atlas program. People can volunteer to don the smart underwear 24/7 in hopes of correlating the flatulence patterns with diet and microbiome composition across a much larger sample size. You can enroll in the Human Flatus Atlas here; you must live in the US and be 18 years or older to participate. (Fun bonus fact: noted gastroenterologist Michael Levitt was apparently known as the “King of Farts” because of his extensive body of research on the subject.)

Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.biosx.2025.100699 (About DOIs).

Do you wanna build a snowman?

Just past Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a band littered with remnants from the early formative period of our Milky Way, including dwarf planets and smaller bodies known as planetesimals. Roughly 10 percent of those planetesimals consist of two connected spheres resembling a rudimentary snowman, called contact binaries. In a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Michigan State University researchers reported evidence for a process by which these contact binaries may have formed.

Planetesimals are the result of dust and pebbles gradually packing together into aggregate objects in response to gravity, much like forming a snowball. Every now and then, these nascent objects get ripped in two by the rotating cloud and form two separate planetesimals that orbit each other. Most theories of how the unusual snowman-shaped contact binaries formed rely on rare events or exotic phenomena, which would not account for the large number of contact binaries that we observe.

Prior computational simulations modeled colliding objects in the Kuiper Belt as fluid-like blobs that merged into spheres, but this did not result in conditions conducive to forming the snowman configuration. These new simulations retained the colliding objects’ strength and allowed them to rest against each other. This revealed that after two colliding planetesimals begin to orbit one another, gravity causes them to spiral inward until they eventually make contact and fuse. Because the Kuiper Belt is relatively empty, it is rare for the contact binaries to crash into another object, so they are less likely to break apart.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2026. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1802831115 (About DOIs).

Is this carved rock a Roman board game?

There is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example; a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum (“game of mercenaries”) favored by Roman legions; a 4,000-year-old stone board discovered in 2022 that just might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur; or a Bronze Age board game that might be the earliest form of Hounds and Jackals, originating in Asia, which challenges the longstanding assumption that the game originated in Egypt.

There may be other ancient games that archaeologists still don’t know about, nor is it always possible for them to tease out what the rules of play might be. AI is emerging as a useful tool for determining the latter. Most recently, researchers have used AI tools to work out the rules of what they believe might be another ancient Roman game board, according to a paper published in the journal Antiquity. The object in question is a flat stone housed in the Roman Museum in Heerlen, the Netherlands, with a distinctive geometric pattern carved on one side. Walter Crist of Leiden University noticed some visibly uneven wear consistent with pushing stone game pieces across the surface, with the most wear along one particular diagonal line.

Crist thought this might be a Roman game board and decided to pit two AI agents against each other in thousands of “games” to test different variations in possible rules, gleaned from known ancient board games from around the world. Crist and his co-authors identified nine possibilities, all so-called blocking games, in which a player with more pieces tries to stop their opponent from moving. They have dubbed this potentially new game Ludos Coriovalli. There is not yet any means of knowing for sure, since no other carved slabs with that particular pattern have been found, but it might be a prototype game, per Crist.

Antiquity, 2026. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.10264 (About DOIs).

Brain cells in a dish play Doom

In 2022, a company called Cortical Labs managed to get brain cells grown in a dish—dubbed DishBrain—electrically stimulated in such a way as to create useful feedback loops, enabling them to “learn” to play Pong, albeit badly. This provided intriguing evidence that neural networks formed from actual neurons spontaneously develop the ability to learn. Now the company is back with a video (see above) showing DishBrain playing Doom—technically the open-sourced Freedoom, which lacks some of the copyrighted demon and weapon elements.

Like four years ago, we’re talking about a dish with a set of electrodes on the floor. When neurons are grown in the dish, these electrodes can do two things: sense the activity of the neurons above them or stimulate those electrodes. But the team has added a new interface that makes the system easier to program, using Python. Teaching DishBrain to play Pong took years of painstaking effort; getting it to play Freedoom took just one week—a significant improvement.

DishBrain still can’t come close to matching the performance of the best Doom players, but it learned faster than conventional silicon-based machine learning. But it’s also not comparable to a human brain. “Yes, it’s alive, and yes, it’s biological, but really what it is being used as is a material that can process information in very special ways that we can’t re-create in silicon,” Brett Kagan of Cortical Labs told New Scientist. In fact, in 2024, scientists taught hydrogels—soft, flexible biphasic materials that swell but do not dissolve in water—to play Pong, inspired by the company’s earlier research. (Hydrogels can also “learn” to beat in rhythm with an external pacemaker, just like living cells.)

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Posted Tuesday 3 March 2026 at 5:04 am AEST (my time).

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Donut Lab’s solid-state battery can handle the (extreme) heat, test says

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

The Finnish startup’s battery not only survived extreme heat conditions, it actually gained capacity.

Finnish startup Donut Lab is out to prove that its solid-state battery is all that it claims to be. Last week, the test was about fast charging. This week is where things get hot.

Like the first test, this one was also conducted by state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The team set out to determine how well Donut Lab’s cells held up under extreme heat, which has been known to adversely affect traditional lithium-ion batteries. The results show that not only can the Finnish startup’s solid-state battery still discharge energy under conditions of up to 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), it actually gains capacity.

The group tested the 3.6V/26 Amp-hour solid-state battery under three different temperatures: 20C for a baseline at room temperature; “high heat” at 80C; and “extreme heat” at 100C. To ensure the battery functioned correctly during the test, VTT applied physical pressure to it using a steel plate and placed it on a heatsink inside a temperature-controlled chamber.

At room temperature, the cell delivered 24.9Ah, which served as the benchmark for the other tests. At 80C, the performance actually improved, delivering 27.5Ah, or about 110.5 percent of its room-temperature capacity. And at 100C, the cell delivered 27.6Ah, or 107.1 percent of its room-temp performance. While the battery still worked and could be recharged afterward, the physical pouch lost its vacuum seal, likely due to the extreme heat.

VTT found that the solid-state cell actually became more efficient at higher temperatures, providing more energy than it did at room temperature. Even at over 100C (a temperature that would be very dangerous for many standard batteries), the cell continued to provide power and could still be recharged.

Solid-state batteries, which are often referred to as the “holy grail” of batteries, have eluded researchers for decades. Most EV companies use “wet” lithium-ion batteries, which use liquid electrolytes to move energy around. But these batteries can be slow to charge, can freeze up in subzero temperatures, and contain flammable material that can be hazardous in the event of a crash. Solid-state packs are made of “dry” conductive material that can hold more energy without any of the thermal runaway problems of a traditional battery. This could mean electric vehicles with longer range, shorter charging times, and better performance under extreme conditions.

Lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes are more susceptible to extreme heat. If a liquid battery gets too hot, the liquid can vaporize and catch fire — a process called thermal runaway. And at high temperatures, the liquid can degrade, shortening the battery’s life or causing it to swell dangerously.

By replacing the flammable liquid with a solid ceramic or polymer material, Donut Lab says it can improve the battery’s tolerance to extreme heat, which could mean better efficiency. As seen in VTT’s study, heat actually lowers the internal resistance of the solid electrolyte, which allows ions to move more easily. That’s why the battery’s capacity actually increased at 80C and 100C.

But before you go popping the champagne, keep in mind that the report doesn’t address some key questions regarding Donut Lab’s solid-state battery. First, VTT doesn’t confirm the chemistry of the pack, but simply takes it at face value. Second, the test didn’t address what Verge contributor Tim Stevens refers to as the “dendrite issue,” in which microscopic stalagmites growing from anode to cathode across the solid-state electrolyte can cause electrical shorts. Perhaps Donut Lab will address that in subsequent independent test results, which it is promising as part of its “I Donut Believe” series.

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Posted Tuesday 3 March 2026 at 5:03 am AEST (my time).

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The strange animals that control their body heat

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:37:43 +0000

Some creatures can dramatically alter their internal temperature and outlast storms, floods and, predators

In 1774, British physician-scientist Charles Blagden received an unusual invitation from a fellow physician: to spend time in a small room that was hotter, he wrote, “than it was formerly thought any living creature could bear.”

Many people may have been appalled by this offer, but Blagden was delighted by the opportunity for self-experimentation. He marveled as his own temperature remained at 98° Fahrenheit (approximately 37° Celsius), even as the temperature of the room approached 200°F (about 93°C).

Today, this ability to maintain a stable body temperature—called homeothermy—is known to exist among myriad species of mammals and birds. But there are also some notable exceptions. The body temperature of the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, for example, can fluctuate by nearly 45°F (25°C) over a single day.

In fact, a growing body of research suggests that many more animals than scientists once appreciated employ this flexible approach—heterothermy—varying their body temperature for minutes, hours, or weeks at a time. This may help the animals to persist through all sorts of dangers.

“Because we’re homeotherms, we assume all mammals work the way we do,” says Danielle Levesque, a mammalian ecophysiologist at the University of Maine. But in recent years, as improvements in technology allowed researchers to more easily track small animals and their metabolisms in the wild, “we’re starting to find a lot more weirdness,” she says.

The most extreme—and well-known—form of heterothermy is classic hibernation, which has been most extensively studied in critters who use it to save energy and so survive the long, cold winters of the Northern Hemisphere. These animals enter long periods of what scientists call deep torpor, when metabolism slows to a crawl and body temperature can drop to just above freezing.

But hibernation is just one end of what some scientists now consider a spectrum. Many mammals can deploy shorter bouts of shallow torpor—loosely defined as smaller reductions in metabolism and smaller fluctuations in body temperature—as the need arises, suggesting that torpor has more functions than scientists previously realized.

“It’s extremely complicated,” says comparative physiologist Fritz Geiser of the University of New England in Australia. “It’s much more interesting than homeothermy.”

Australian eastern long-eared bats, for example, adjust their torpor use based on day-to-day changes in weather conditions. Mari Aas Fjelldal, a bat biologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the University of Helsinki, used tiny transmitters to measure skin temperatures as 37 free-ranging bats in Australia went about their daily lives. Like many heterothermic species, the bats spent more time in torpor when it was cold, but they also sank into torpor more often as rain and wind speeds picked up, Fjelldal and colleagues reported in Oecologia in 2021. This hunkering down makes sense, says Fjelldal: Wind and rain make flying more energetically demanding—a big problem when you weigh less than a small packet of M&M’s—and make it more costly to find the insects the bats eat.

There are even reports of pregnant hoary bats entering torpor during unpredictable spring storms, a physiological maneuver that basically pauses their pregnancies. “It means that they can, to some degree, actually decide a bit when to give birth,” says Fjelldal, “which is really handy when you’re living in an environment that can be quite harsh in the spring.” Fjelldal, who wasn’t involved in that study, notes that producing milk is expensive metabolically, so it’s advantageous to give birth when food availability is good.

Other animals, like sugar gliders—tiny, pink-nosed marsupials that “fly” through the trees using wing-like folds of skin—rarely use torpor but seem able to take advantage of it in the case of major weather emergencies. During a storm with category 1 cyclone winds of nearly 100 kilometers per hour and 9.5 centimeters of rain falling in a single night, the gliders were more likely to stay cuddled up in their tree-hole nests, and many entered torpor, reducing body temperature from 94.1°F (34.5°C) to an average of about 66°F (19°C), Geiser and colleagues found.

Similarly, in response to an accidental flooding event in the lab, researchers observed a highly unusual period of multiday torpor in a golden spiny mouse, its temperature reaching a low of about 75°F (24°C).

This more flexible use of torpor can help heterotherms wait out a catastrophe, Geiser says. In contrast, homeothermic species can’t just dial back their need for food and water and may not be able to outlast challenging conditions.

“Maybe there’s no food, maybe no water, it may be really warm,” says ecophysiologist Julia Nowack of Liverpool John Moores University in England, a coauthor on the sugar glider study. Torpor, especially in the tropics, has “lots of different triggers.”

Threats of a different sort, such as the presence of predators, can also prompt hunkering down. The (perhaps perfectly named) edible dormouse, for example, sometimes enters long periods of torpor in early summer. At first, this behavior puzzled researchers—why snooze away the summer, when temperatures are comfortable and food abundant, especially if it meant forgoing the chance to reproduce?

After looking at years of data collected by various scientists, a pair of researchers concluded that because spring and early summer are especially active periods for owls, these small snackable critters were likely opting to spend their nights torpid, safely hidden in underground burrows, to avoid becoming dinner. In what is thought to be a similar strategy to avoid nocturnal predators, Fjelldal’s bats alter their torpor use slightly depending on the phase of the moon, spending more time torpid as the moon grows fuller and they become easier to spot.

The fat-tailed dunnart, a mouse-like carnivorous marsupial native to Australia, is a third species to lie low when it feels more at risk of being eaten. In one study, researchers placed dunnarts in two types of enclosures: Some had lots of ground cover in the form of plastic sheeting, simulating an environment protected from predators, while other enclosures had little cover, simulating a greater risk of predation. In the higher-risk settings, the animals foraged less and their body temperatures became more variable.

Levesque, who has studied similar non-torpor temperature flexibility in large tree shrews, says that even small variations in body temperature can be important for saving water and energy.

Indeed, water loss during hot weather can pose serious risks to many mammals, and heterothermy is an important conservation tool for some. As Blagden observed, people are marvelously capable of maintaining stable temperatures even in horrifically hot environments, due in large part to our sweating abilities. But this isn’t necessarily a good strategy for smaller mammals—such evaporative cooling in a sweltering climate can quickly lead to dehydration.

Instead, creatures like Madagascar’s leaf-nosed bats use torpor. On warm days, the bats enter mini bouts of torpor lasting just a few minutes. But during especially hot days, the bats become torpid for up to seven hours, reducing their metabolism to less than 25 percent of normal and allowing their body temperature to rise as high as 109.2°F (42.9°C). And in an experiment with ringtail possums, slightly raising their body temperature by about 3°C (5.4°F) during a simulated heat wave saved the animals an estimated 10 grams of water per hour — a lot for a creature weighing less than 800 grams.

This heterothermic way of life gives some animals a bit of a buffer when it comes to coping with variability in their environments, says physiological ecologist Liam McGuire of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. But it can only do so much, he says; heterothermy is unlikely to exempt them from the challenge of rapidly evolving weather conditions brought by climate change.

As for Blagden, he saw the human body as remarkable in its capacity to maintain a steady temperature, even by “generating cold” when ambient temperatures climbed too high. Today, however, scientists are beginning to appreciate that for many mammals, allowing body temperature to be a bit more flexible may be key to survival as well.

This story originally appeared at Knowable Magazine.

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Posted Monday 2 March 2026 at 5:37 am AEST (my time).

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Photons that aren’t actually there influence superconductivity

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:05:44 +0000

Interactions between neighboring materials is mediated by virtual photons.

Despite the headline, this isn’t really a story about superconductivity—at least not the superconductivity that people care about, the stuff that doesn’t require exotic refrigeration to work. Instead, it’s a story about how superconductivity can be used as a test of some of the weirder consequences of quantum mechanics, one that involves non-existent particles of light that still act as if they exist.

Researchers have found a way to get these virtual photons to influence the behavior of a superconductor, ultimately making it worse. That may, in the end, tell us something useful about superconductivity, but it’ll probably take a little while.

Virtual reality

The story starts with quantum field theory, which is incredibly complex, but the simplified version is that even empty space is filled with fields that could govern the interactions of any quantum objects in or near that space. You can think of different particles as energetic excitements of these fields—so a photon is simply an energetic state of the quantum field.

Some of these particles have real existences we can track, like a photon emitted by a laser and absorbed by a detector some distance away. But the quantum field also allows for virtual photons, which simply act to transmit the electromagnetic force between particles. We can’t really directly detect these, but we can definitely track their effects.

One of the stranger consequences of this is that locations that have a strong electromagnetic field can be filled with virtual photons even when no real ones are present.

Which brings us to one of the materials central to the new work: boron nitride. Like the more famous graphene, boron nitride forms a series of interlinked hexagonal rings, extending out into macroscopic sheets. The bulk material is made of sheets layered onto sheets layered onto yet more sheets. This has an effect on light transiting through the material. In one direction, the light will simply slam into the material, getting absorbed or scattered. But if it’s oriented along the plane of the sheets, it’s possible for the light to travel in the space between the boron and nitrogen atoms.

But it’s not quite that simple. Because of the regular spacing of the atoms within individual sheets and the distance between those sheets, only certain wavelengths can transit smoothly.

In essence, hexagonal boron nitride forms a very distinct electromagnetic field, one that’s highly selective for a limited number of wavelengths. And that means that there are a lot of virtual photons at those wavelengths present in the material, even when no photons are around. And the new research relied on their presence to test an idea about an unusual form of superconductivity.

A bit less super

There’s an unusual superconductor called κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu[N(CN)2]Br (shortened to κ-ET) that’s a mix of copper and organic materials. It’s not a great superconductor—its critical temperature is just 12 Kelvin—but it doesn’t superconduct through the same mechanism that governs more conventional copper-based superconductors. There has been reason to expect that a carbon-carbon double bond is involved in the onset of superconductivity, but that has been difficult to test experimentally.

The researchers involved in the new work saw that the frequency of the stretching of this carbon-carbon bond matched the infrared wavelengths that could transmit through the boron nitride. That raised the possibility that sticking a lot of virtual photons nearby could influence the carbon-carbon vibrations, and thus the superconductivity. So, they built a device that had a piece of κ-ET superconductor and layered some boron nitride on top of it.

One feature of superconductors is that they expel magnetic fields. The research team found that the presence of boron nitride reduced the force needed to bring a magnet closer to the superconductor. Placing other materials on the surface showed no effect, suggesting that it’s something specific to the boron nitride. In a similar way, a related superconductor wasn’t affected by boron nitride. All of which suggests that there is something distinctive about the interaction between κ-ET and boron nitride. And, critically, this happens when there are no real photons transiting through the boron nitride.

Just to emphasize something from that: The boron nitride is suppressing superconductivity, not enhancing it. The researchers aren’t sure how deep into the superconductor the suppression penetrates, so they’ve not been able to determine whether this might reduce the critical temperature as well.

So, obviously, this particular interaction isn’t going to be a route to higher temperature superconductors. But it also may be a bit more than a clever demonstration of some weird physics. To begin with, boron nitride is helping us characterize what’s going on inside a superconductor in a way that can be difficult to accomplish via any other route. And there are plenty of other materials with the same sort of layered structure that might have resonances at different wavelengths, potentially allowing the development of a range of different probes.

More generally, this validates the idea that you can manipulate superconductivity in ways beyond the two levers we usually pull for that purpose: temperature and pressure. Some of the better-performing superconductors require temperature and/or pressure that’s never going to be very economical for general use. But the idea was that learning about them might help us find ways to achieve the same thing under more approachable conditions. But it hasn’t always been clear that there was any way to do so beyond changing the material’s chemistry. This new work suggests a potential alternative.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-10062-6 (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 28 February 2026 at 12:05 pm AEST (my time).

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The Air Force’s new ICBM is nearly ready to fly, but there’s nowhere to put it

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:04:51 +0000

“There were assumptions that were made in the strategy that obviously didn’t come to fruition.”

DENVER—The US Air Force’s new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile is on track for its first test flight next year, military officials reaffirmed this week.

But no one is ready to say when hundreds of new missile silos, dug from the windswept Great Plains, will be finished, how much they cost, or, for that matter, how many nuclear warheads each Sentinel missile could actually carry.

The LGM-35A Sentinel will replace the Air Force’s Minuteman III fleet, in service since 1970, with the first of the new missiles due to become operational in the early 2030s. But it will take longer than that to build and activate the full complement of Sentinel missiles and the 450 hardened underground silos to house them.

Amid the massive undertaking of developing a new ICBM, defense officials are keeping their options open for the missile’s payload unit. Until February 5, the Air Force was barred from fitting ballistic missiles with Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) under the constraints of the New START nuclear arms control treaty cinched by the US and Russia in 2010. The treaty expired three weeks ago, opening up the possibility of packaging each Sentinel missile with multiple warheads, not just one.

Senior US military officials briefed reporters on the Sentinel program this week at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Warfare Symposium near Denver. There was a lot to unpack.

Into the breach

Two years ago, the Air Force announced the Sentinel program’s budget had grown from $77.7 billion to nearly $141 billion. This was after something known as a “Nunn-McCurdy breach,” referring to the names of two lawmakers behind legislation mandating reviews for woefully overbudget defense programs. In 2024, the Pentagon determined that the Sentinel program was too essential to national security to cancel.

“We’ve gotten all the capability that we can out of the Minuteman,” said Gen. Stephen “S.L.” Davis, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command. Potential enemy threats to the Minuteman ICBM have “evolved significantly” since its initial deployment in the Cold War, Davis said.

The $141 billion figure is already out of date, as the Air Force announced last year that it would need to construct new silos for the Sentinel missile. The original plan was to adapt existing Minuteman III silos for the new weapons, but engineers determined that it would take too long and cost too much to modify the aging Minuteman facilities.

Instead, the Air Force, in partnership with contractors and the US Army Corps of Engineers, will dig hundreds of new holes across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The new silos will include 24 new forward launch centers, three centralized wing command centers, and more than 5,000 miles of fiber connections to wire it all together, military and industry officials said.

Sentinel, which had its official start in 2016, will be the largest US government civil works project since the completion of the interstate highway system, and is the most complex acquisition program the Air Force has ever undertaken, wrote Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) in a 2024 op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

Gen. Dale White, the Pentagon’s director of critical major weapons systems, said Wednesday the Defense Department plans to complete a “restructuring” of the Sentinel program by the end of the year. Only then will an updated budget be made public.

The military stopped constructing new missile silos in the late 1960s and hasn’t developed a new ICBM since the 1980s. It shows.

“It’s been a very, very long time since we’ve done this,” White said. “At the very core, there were assumptions that were made in the strategy that obviously didn’t come to fruition.”

Military planners also determined it would not be as easy as they hoped to maintain the existing Minuteman III missiles on alert while converting their silos for Sentinel. Building new silos will keep the Minuteman III online—perhaps until as late as 2050, according to a government watchdog—as the Air Force activates Sentinel emplacements. The Minuteman III was previously supposed to retire around 2036.

“We’re not reusing the Minuteman III silos, but at the same time that obviously gives much greater operational flexibility to the combatant commander,” White said. “So, we had to take a step back and have a more enduring look at what we were trying to do, what capability is needed, making sure we do not have a gap in capability.”

Decommissioning the Minuteman III silos will come with its own difficulties. An Air Force official said on background that commanders recently took one Minuteman silo off alert to better gauge how long it will take to decommission each location. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman, Sentinel’s prime contractor, broke ground on the first “prototype” Sentinel silo in Promontory, Utah, earlier this month.

The Air Force has ordered 659 Sentinel missiles from Northrop Grumman, including more than 400 to go on alert, plus spares and developmental missiles for flight testing. The first Sentinel test launch from a surface pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, is scheduled for 2027.

To ReMIRV or not to ReMIRV

For the first time in more than 50 years, the world’s two largest nuclear forces have been unshackled from any arms control agreements. New START was the latest in a series of accords between the United States and Russia, and with it came the ban on MIRVs aboard land-based ICBMs. The Air Force removed the final MIRV units from Minuteman III missiles in 2014.

The Trump administration wants a new agreement that includes Russia as well as China, which was not part of New START. US officials were expected to meet with Russian and Chinese diplomats this week to discuss the topic. There’s no guarantee of any agreement between the three powers, and even if there is one, it may take the form of an informal personal accord among leaders, rather than a ratified treaty.

“The strategic environment hasn’t changed overnight, from before New START was in effect, until it has lapsed, and within our nation’s nuclear deterrent,” said Adm. Rich Correll, head of US Strategic Command. “We have the flexibility to address any adjustments to the security environment as a result of that treaty lapsing.”

This flexibility includes the option to “reMIRV” missiles to accommodate more than one nuclear warhead, Correll said. “We have the ability to do that. That’s obviously a national-level decision that would go up to the president, and those policy levers, if needed, provide additional resiliency within the capabilities that we have.”

MIRVs are more difficult for missile defense systems to counter, and allow offensive missile forces to package more ordnance in a single shot. With New START gone, there’s no longer any mechanism for international arms inspections. Russia may now also stack more nukes on its ICBMs. Gone, too, is the limitation for the United States and Russia to deploy no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads at one time.

“The expiration of this treaty is going to lead us into a world for the first time since 1972 where there are no limits on the sizes of those arsenals,” said Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“I think this opens up the question of whether we’re going to be heading into a world that’s just going to be a lot more unpredictable and dangerous when you have countries like the United States and Russia that have a lot less transparency into each other’s nuclear arsenals, and fundamentally, as a result, a lot less predictability about the world that they’re operating in,” Panda continued.

Some strategists have questioned the need for land-based ICBMs in the modern era. The locations of the Air Force’s missile fields are well known, making them juicy targets for an adversary seeking to take out a leg of the military’s nuclear triad. The stationary nature of the land-based missile component contrasts with the mobility and stealth of the nation’s bomber and submarine fleets. Also, bombers and subs can already deliver multiple nukes, something land-based missiles couldn’t do under New START.

Proponents of maintaining the triad say the ICBM missile fields serve an important, if not macabre, function in the event of the unimaginable. They would soak up the brunt of any large-scale nuclear attack. Hundreds of miles of the Great Plains would be incinerated.

“The main rationale for maintaining silo-based ICBMs is to complicate an adversary’s nuclear strategy by forcing them to target 400 missile silos dispersed throughout the United States to limit a retaliatory nuclear strike, which is why ICBMs are often referred to as the ‘nuclear sponge,’” the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation wrote in 2021. “However, with the development of sea-based nuclear weapons, which are essentially undetectable, and air-based nuclear weapons, which provide greater flexibility, ground-based ICBMs have become increasingly technologically redundant.”

Policymakers in power do not agree. The ICBM program has powerful backers in Congress, and Sentinel has enjoyed support from the Obama, Biden, and both Trump administrations. The Pentagon is also developing the B-21 Raider strategic bomber and a new generation of “Columbia-class” nuclear-armed subs.

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Posted Saturday 28 February 2026 at 12:04 pm AEST (my time).

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