In a recent study, University of Alaska Fairbanks paleontologist Matthew Wooller and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated what they thought were pieces of two mammoth vertebrae, only to get a whale of a surprise and a whole new mystery.

At first glance, it looked like Wooller and his colleagues might have found evidence that mammoths lived in central Alaska just 2,000 years ago. But ancient DNA revealed that two “mammoth” bones actually belonged to a North Pacific right whale and a minke whale—which raised a whole new set of questions. The team’s hunt for Alaska’s last mammoth had turned into an epic case of mistaken identity, starring two whale species and a mid-century fossil hunter.

“The first signs that something was amiss”

The aptly named Wooller and his team have radiocarbon-dated more than 300 mammoth fossils over the last four years, looking for the last survivors of the wave of extinctions that wiped out woolly mammoths and other Pleistocene megafauna at the end of the last Ice Age. Two specimens stood out immediately. Based on the radiocarbon dates, two mammoths had lived near Fairbanks as recently as 2,800 and 1,900 years ago. Wooller and his colleagues had been looking for the youngest woolly mammoth specimen in Alaska but were completely mystified.

“The radiocarbon data and their associated stable isotope data were the first signs that something was amiss,” wrote Wooller and his colleagues in their recent paper. At first, though, they had no idea quite how amiss things were.

Those unlikely radiocarbon dates came from a pair of vertebral growth plates (structures at the top and bottom of the vertebra where new bone forms during growth). The University of Alaska Museum of the North’s inventory listed them as mammoth bones from a site called Dome Creek, near Fairbanks, Alaska. DNA testing and some sleuthing by Wooller and his colleagues revealed that the specimens weren’t mammoth bones, and they were probably never even at Dome Creek.

Hunting mammoths in Alaska

Setting these two samples aside, the fossil record of mammoths in Alaska ends around 11,000 years ago. But hundreds of mammoth fossils in museum collections haven’t been directly dated, so it’s hard to say for sure that this is when the species died out. Ancient DNA frozen in permafrost, however, has offered some tantalizing hints that at least a few mammoths may have been stomping around mainland Alaska, northwestern Canada, and parts of Russia as recently as 5,700 years ago. If so, that could be a key piece of evidence in the Ice Age cold case about what killed off the Pleistocene megafauna: human hunters or the changing world.

Wooller and his colleagues have been searching since 2022 through a crowdfunding project called Adopt-a-Mammoth; de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences is also involved. Adopting a specimen costs $380 and comes with a photo, a copy of the test results, and the option to name your mammoth. (Tusky McTuskface, anyone?)

“Radiocarbon dates are expensive,” wrote the researchers in their recent paper. “However, dating specimens usually needs to occur before time and resources are devoted to additional analyses of specimens, such as DNA.” The Adopt-a-Mammoth project has dated around 300 mammoth fossils so far, hoping to find the youngest mammoth in the Alaskan fossil record. But the two vertebral growth disks from Dome Creek were way off the charts.

These are the two vertebral growth disks in question, so it’s not hard to see why a visual identification went wrong.

Credit: Wooller et al. 2026

“The ancient DNA came to our rescue”

Ratios of nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes in the bones also didn’t add up. These elements can offer clues about ancient diets (at a molecular level, you really are what you eat), but they suggest that two mammoths from what is now Fairbanks ate a diet heavy in protein from marine sources. In fact, their diets looked more like those of modern whales. That’s extremely weird for mammoths that lived 400 kilometers from the nearest beach. You could even say it looked fishy.

At this point, Wooller and his colleagues were starting to suspect that they weren’t looking at mammoth bones at all.

Vertebral growth disks aren’t one of the most species-diagnostic bones in the body, especially after spending a millennium or two underground. The researchers called in a handful of mammoth and whale experts for backup; each of them pretty much shrugged and said that they couldn’t tell what sort of animal the bones had come from just by looking. Seventy-five years ago, early 1950s fossil collector Otto Geist had identified the bones as mammoth based on their shape, but he may have been a little overconfident.

“The ancient DNA came to our rescue to secure the specimens’ true identity,” wrote Wooller and his colleagues. It also opened up a whole new mystery: The two bone disks belonged to a North Pacific right whale and a minke whale, neither of which has ever lived in the middle of mainland Alaska.

The mystery of the lost whales

So much for impossibly young mammoths! Wooller and his colleagues were left to explain how the same part from two different whales, of two different species, traveled 400 kilometers inland to Dome Creek. They saw three possible explanations: Either carnivores brought the bones to the site, humans brought the bones to the site, or the whales swam themselves to the site. And none of those explanations quite fit.

“Wayward cetaceans have been documented in inland waterways across the world, including Alaskan rivers such as the Yukon and Tanana,” wrote Wooller and his colleagues. And minke whales in particular have shown up as far as 1,000 kilometers inland. Dome Creek is miles from the nearest large river, the Tanana, but even so, if it had just been the minke whale bone, Wooller and his colleagues might have convinced themselves that they had stumbled across one very intrepid—or very lost—whale.

“That two individual whales of different species have made this improbable journey, died naturally, and left behind the very same skeletal element is not reasonable in our estimate,” wrote Wooller and his colleagues.

That left carnivores or people. No species of carnivore, past or present, was likely to have dragged bones hundreds of kilometers. People, on the other hand, transport all sorts of things over vast distances. And vertebral growth plates are surprisingly useful as plates, trays, or cutting boards. The only problem is that archaeologists haven’t found whale bones at any other sites in inland Alaska, meaning that they apparently weren’t a very common trading item. File that under “possible but not likely.”

Somehow, the best explanation is that the whale bones weren’t even from Dome Creek in the first place.

Lost and found at the museum

Paleontologist Otto Geist gathered a truly staggering number of Pleistocene bones from sites all over Alaska, and 1951 was an especially busy year for him. In addition to the 181 specimens from Dome Creek, Geist also returned to the museum with bones he had unearthed at several sites along the western coast of Alaska. It turned out that on the very same day the museum received the Dome Creek specimens, they also accepted a collection of bones from a site called Dexter Point, on the coast of Norton Bay.

“It is possible that the two whale bones examined in the current study derived from this Norton Bay locale and were inadvertently included with the Dome Creek assemblage,” wrote Wooller and his colleagues, although they acknowledge, “Ultimately, this may never be completely resolved.”

Meanwhile, the Adopt-a-Mammoth project continues, having provided an object lesson in the importance of “fully investigating anomalous radiocarbon results,” as the researchers put it. In other words, if your data looks fishy, it might actually be a whale.

Journal of Quaternary Science, 2026 DOI: 10.1002/jqs.70040

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Posted Wednesday 18 February 2026 at 6:24 am AEST (my time).

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Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem—in fact, it could even cloud it.

In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone securely in the shoulder socket—and is often blamed for pain and other symptoms. The trouble is, the vast majority of people in the study had no shoulder problems.

The finding calls into question the growing use of MRIs to try to diagnose shoulder pain—and, in turn, the growing problem of overtreatment of rotator cuff (RC) abnormalities, which includes partial- and full-thickness tears as well as signs of tendinopathy (tendon swelling and thickening).

“While we cannot dismiss the possibility that some RC tears may contribute to shoulder symptoms, our findings indicate that we are currently unable to distinguish clinically meaningful MRI abnormalities from incidental findings,” the study authors concluded.

The study was conducted by Finnish researchers, who tapped into a nationally representative sample of adults who had signed up for a public health survey. In the end, 602 participants, aged 41 to 76, completed the study, which included answering questions about shoulder pain and getting MRIs on both shoulders. Of the 602 participants, 492 (82 percent) reported no shoulder symptoms, while 110 (18 percent) did report symptoms.

The MRI revealed that 595 of them (99 percent) had at least one RC abnormality. The most common abnormality was a partial-thickness tear (62 percent), followed by tendinopathy (25 percent), and a full-thickness tear (11 percent). The prevalence of abnormalities was similar between males and females. But the abnormalities showed a clear age-related progression, with no full-thickness tears in participants under 45 and the greatest proportion in people 70 to 76.

Breaking the findings down to shoulders instead of people, of the 1204 shoulders in the study, 1,076 (90 percent) were asymptomatic while 128 (10 percent) were symptomatic. Of the 1,076 asymptomatic shoulders, 96 percent had RC abnormalities (1,039 of 1,076), and of the 128 symptomatic shoulders, 98 percent had abnormalities (126 of 128).

Prevalence of tendinopathy and partial-thickness tears was similar between the symptomatic and asymptomatic groups. It initially looked like full-thickness tears were more common in the symptomatic groups, but when researchers adjusted for other factors, including additional abnormalities spotted in the MRIs, the difference between the symptomatic and asymptomatic groups vanished.

Context

The authors argue that the findings suggest clinicians should rethink MRI findings, changing not just how they’re used, but also how they’re explained to patients. The language in particular should change given that “abnormalities” are ubiquitous—thus normal—and shouldn’t be described in terms that indicate a need for repair, like “tear.”

“While we refer to these findings as abnormalities, many likely represent normal age-related changes rather than clinically relevant structural changes,” the authors write. “Adopting more precise and less value-laden terminology—such as lesion, defect, fraying, disruption, structural alteration, or degeneration—may help reduce patient anxiety and the perceived need to do something or fix something by avoiding language that implies trauma or a requirement for repair.”

In an accompanying editorial, two orthopedic surgeons from the University of California, San Francisco, Edgar Garcia-Lopez and Brian Feeley, agree with the language shift and caution clinicians to proactively put MRI findings in context.

They also address the glaring question of when MRIs should even be used for shoulder pain. They suggest that for pain that’s not related to an injury, clinicians should first try a couple months of watch-and-wait with rest or physical therapy to regain function. If there’s no meaningful improvement, an MRI may be warranted. But they stressed that any further decisions on treatment should be based on the patient’s history, clinical exam, and functional limitations of their shoulder—not just what’s seen on the imaging.

“Of course, the findings of this study are not meant to dissuade clinicians from using MRI when appropriate, but to reinforce that the diagnosis and management of shoulder pain should be guided primarily by functional limitations,” the surgeons write.

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Posted Wednesday 18 February 2026 at 6:23 am AEST (my time).

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Heating accounts for nearly half of the global energy demand, and two-thirds of that is met by burning fossil fuels like natural gas, oil, and coal. Solar energy is a possible alternative, but while we have become reasonably good at storing solar electricity in lithium-ion batteries, we’re not nearly as good at storing heat.

To store heat for days, weeks, or months, you need to trap the energy in the bonds of a molecule that can later release heat on demand. The approach to this particular chemistry problem is called molecular solar thermal (MOST) energy storage. While it has been the next big thing for decades, it never really took off.

In a recent Science paper, a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and UCLA demonstrate a breakthrough that might finally make MOST energy storage effective.

The DNA connection

In the past, MOST energy storage solutions have been plagued by lackluster performance. The molecules either didn’t store enough energy, degraded too quickly, or required toxic solvents that made them impractical. To find a way around these issues, the team led by Han P. Nguyen, a chemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, drew inspiration from the genetic damage caused by sunburn. The idea was to store energy using a reaction similar to the one that allows UV light to damage DNA.

When you stay out on the beach too long, high-energy ultraviolet light can cause adjacent bases in the DNA (thymine, the T in the genetic code) to link together. This forms a structure known as a (6-4) lesion. When that lesion is exposed to even more UV light, it twists into an even stranger shape called a “Dewar” isomer. In biology, this is rather bad news, as Dewar isomers cause kinks in the DNA’s double-helix spiral that disrupt copying the DNA and can lead to mutations or cancer.

To counter this effect, evolution shaped a specific enzyme called photolyase to hunt (6-4) lesions down and snap them back into their safe, stable forms.

The researchers realized that the Dewar isomer is essentially a molecular battery. This snap-back effect was exactly what Nguyen’s team was looking for, since it releases a lot of heat.

Rechargeable fuel

Molecular batteries, in principle, are extremely good at storing energy. Heating oil, arguably the most popular molecular battery we use for heating, is essentially ancient solar energy stored in chemical bonds. Its energy density stands at around 40 Megajoules per kilo. To put that in perspective, Li-ion batteries usually pack less than one MJ/kg. One of the problems with heating oil, though, is that it is single-use only—it gets burnt when you use it. What Nguyen and her colleagues aimed to achieve with their DNA-inspired substance is essentially a reusable fuel.

To do that, researchers synthesized a derivative of 2-pyrimidone, a chemical cousin of the thymine found in DNA. They engineered this molecule to reliably fold into a Dewar isomer under sunlight and then unfold on command. The result was a rechargeable fuel that could absorb the energy when exposed to sunlight, release it when needed, and return to a “relaxed” state where it’s ready to be charged up again.

Previous attempts at MOST systems have struggled to compete with Li-ion batteries. Norbornadiene, one of the best-studied candidates, tops out at around 0.97 MJ/kg. Another contender, azaborinine, manages only 0.65 MJ/kg. They may be scientifically interesting, but they are not going to heat your house.

Nguyen’s pyrimidone-based system blew those numbers out of the water. The researchers achieved an energy storage density of 1.65 MJ/kg—nearly double the capacity of Li-ion batteries and substantially higher than any previous MOST material.

Double rings

The reason for this jump in performance was what the team called compounded strain.

When the pyrimidone molecule absorbs light, it doesn’t just fold; it twists into a fused, bicyclic structure containing two different four-membered rings: 1,2-dihydroazete and diazetidine. Four-membered rings are under immense structural tension. By fusing them together, the researchers created a molecule that is desperate to snap back into its relaxed state.

Achieving high energy density on paper is one thing. Making it work in the real world is another. A major failing of previous MOST systems is that they are solids that need to be dissolved in solvents like toluene or acetonitrile to work. Solvents are the enemy of energy density—by diluting your fuel to 10 percent concentration, for example, you effectively cut your energy density by 90 percent. Any solvent used means less fuel.

Nguyen’s team tackled this by designing a version of their molecule that is a liquid at room temperature, so it doesn’t need a solvent. This simplified operations considerably, as the liquid fuel could be pumped through a solar collector to charge it up and store it in a tank.

Unlike many organic molecules that hate water, Nguyen’s system is compatible with aqueous environments. This means if a pipe leaks, you aren’t spewing toxic fluids like toluene around your house. The researchers even demonstrated that the molecule could work in water and that its energy release was intense enough to boil it.

The MOST-based heating system, the team says in their paper, would circulate this rechargeable fuel through panels on the roof to capture the sun’s light and then store it in the basement tank. The fuel from this tank would later be pumped to a reaction chamber with an acid catalyst that triggers the energy release. Then, through a heat exchanger, this energy would heat up the water in the standard central heating system.

But there’s a catch.

Looking for the leak

The first hurdle is the spectrum of light that puts energy in the Nguyen’s fuel. The Sun bathes us in a broad spectrum of light, from infrared to ultraviolet. Ideally, a solar collector should use as much of this as possible, but the pyrimidone molecules only absorb light in the UV-A and UV-B range, around 300-310 nm. That represents about five percent of the total solar spectrum. The vast majority of the Sun’s energy, the visible light and the infrared, passes right through Nguyen’s molecules without charging them.

The second problem is quantum yield. This is a fancy way of asking, “For every 100 photons that hit the molecule, how many actually make it switch to the Dewar isomer state?” For these pyrimidones, the answer is a rather underwhelming number, in the single digits. Low quantum yield means the fluid needs a longer exposure to sunlight to get a full charge.

The researchers hypothesize that the molecule has a fast leak, meaning a non-radiative decay path where the excited molecule shakes off the energy as heat immediately instead of twisting into the storage form. Plugging that leak is the next big challenge for the team.

Finally, the team in their experiments used an acid catalyst that was mixed directly into the storage material. The team admits that in a future closed-loop device, this would require a neutralization step—a reaction that eliminates the acidity after the heat is released. Unless the reaction products can be purified away, this will reduce the energy density of the system.

Still, despite the efficiency issues, the stability of the Nguyen’s system looks promising.

The MOST storage?

One of the biggest fears with chemical storage is thermal reversion—the fuel spontaneously discharges because it got a little too warm in the storage tank. But the Dewar isomers of the pyrimidones are incredibly stable. The researchers calculated a half-life of up to 481 days at room temperature for some derivatives. This means the fuel could be charged in the heat of July, and it would remain fully charged when you need to heat your home in January. The degradation figures also look decent for a MOST energy storage. The team ran the system through 20 charge-discharge cycles with negligible decay.

The problem with separating the acid from the fuel could be solved in a practical system by switching to a different catalyst. The scientists suggest in the paper that in this hypothetical setup, the fuel would flow through an acid-functionalized solid surface to release heat, thus eliminating the need for neutralization afterwards.

Still, we’re rather far away using MOST systems for heating actual homes. To get there, we’re going to need molecules that absorb far more of the light spectrum and convert to the activated state with a higher efficiency. We’re just not there yet.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aec6413

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Posted Tuesday 17 February 2026 at 5:37 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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SAARISELKÄ, FINLAND—If you’re expecting it, the feeling in the pit of your stomach when the rear of your car breaks traction and begins to slide is rather pleasant. It’s the same exhilaration we get from roller coasters, but when you’re in the driver’s seat, you’re in charge of the ride.

When you’re not expecting it, though, there’s anxiety instead of excitement and, should the slide end with a crunch, a lot more negative emotions, too.

Thankfully, fewer and fewer drivers will have to experience that kind of scare thanks to the proliferation and sophistication of modern electronic stability and traction control systems. For more than 30 years, these electronic safety nets have grown in capability and became mandatory in the early 2010s, saving countless crashes in the process.

Through a combination of cutting engine power and individually braking each wheel, the computers that keep a watchful eye on things like lateral acceleration and wheel spin gather it all together with the idea that the car goes where the driver wants it rather than sideways or backward into whatever solid object lies along the new path of motion.

Obviously, the quickest way to find out whether this all works is to turn it off. And then find a slippery road, or just drive like an oaf. Yet even when automakers let journalists loose on racetracks, they invariably require that we keep some of the electronic safety net turned on. Even on track, you can hit things that will crumple a car—or worse—and with modern tire technology being what it is, the speeds involved when cars do let go tend to be quite high, particularly if it’s dry.

The Artura is probably my favorite McLaren, as it’s smaller and more versatile than the more expensive, more powerful machines in the range.

Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

There are few environments that are more conducive to exploring the limits and capabilities of electronic chassis control. Ideally, you want a lot of wide-open space free of wildlife and people and a smooth, low-grip surface. A giant sand dune would work. Or a frozen lake. Which is why you can sometimes find automotive engineers hanging out in these remote, often extreme locations, braving the desert’s heat or an Arctic chill as they work on a prototype or fine-tune the next model.

And it’s no secret that sliding a car on the ice is a lot fun. So it’s not surprising that a cottage tourism industry exists that—for a suitable fee—will bring you north of the Arctic Circle where you can work on your car control and get some insight into just how hard those electronics are capable of working.

That explains why I left an extremely cold Washington, DC, to travel to an even colder Saariselkä in Finland, where McLaren operates its Arctic Experience program on a frozen lake in nearby Ivalo. The company does some development work here, though more of it happens across the border in Sweden. But for a few weeks each winter, it welcomes customers to its minimalist lodge to work on their car control. And earlier this month, Ars was among a group of journalists who got an abbreviated version of the experience.

Our car for the day was a Ventura Orange McLaren Artura, the brand’s plug-in hybrid supercar, wearing Pirelli’s Sottozero winter tires, each augmented by a few hundred metal spikes. Its total power and torque output is 671 hp (500 kW) and 531 lb-ft (720 Nm) combined from a 3.0 L twin-turbo V6 that generates 577 hp (430 kW) and 431 lb-ft (584 Nm), plus an axial flux electric motor that contributes an additional 94 hp (70 kW) and 166 lb-ft (225 Nm). All of that is sent to the rear wheels via an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission.

Winter tires work well on snow, but for ice, you really need studs.

Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

Where most hybrids use the electric motor to boost efficiency, McLaren mostly uses it to boost performance, providing an immediate shove and filling gaps in the torque band where necessary. In electric-only mode, it will do just that, right up to the 81 mph (130 km/h) speed limit of the mode. Being the sort of curious nerd I am, I took the opportunity to try all the different modes.

Once I got control of my stomach, that is.

Are you sure you should drink that?

Our first exercise was ironically the hardest: driving sideways around a plain old circle. A couple of these had been scribed into the ice—which freezes from November until April and was 28 inches (70 cm) thick, we learned—along with more than a dozen other, more involved courses. Even under the best of conditions, the Sun spends barely six hours a day on its shallow curve from horizon to horizon at this time of year. On the day of our visit, the horizon was an indistinct thing as heavy gray skies blended with the snow-covered ice.

The lack of a visual reference, mixed with 15 minutes of steady lateral G-forces, turned out to be unkind to my vestibular system, and about 10 minutes later, I found myself in shirtsleeves at minus-11˚F (minus-23˚C), saying goodbye to a cup of Earl Grey tea I’d previously and perhaps unwisely drunk a little earlier. At least I remembered to face downwind—given the sideways gale, it could have ended worse.

These are just some of the circuits that McLaren has carved into the ice in Ivalo. Beware of the innocent-looking circles—they’re deceptively hard and may turn your stomach.

Credit: McLaren

Fortified with an anti-emetic and some extremely fresh air, I returned to the ice and can happily report that as long as you slide both left and right, you’re unlikely to get nauseous.

Getting an Artura sideways on a frozen lake is not especially complicated. With the powertrain set to Track, which prioritizes performance and keeps the V6 running the whole time, and with stability and traction control off, you apply enough power to break traction at the rear. Or a dab of brake could do the job, too, followed by some power. You steer more with your right foot than your hands, adding or subtracting power to reign in or amplify the slip angle. Your eyes are crucial to the process; if you look through the corner down the track, that’s probably where you’ll end up. Fixate on the next apex and you may quickly find yourself off-course.

Most of the mid-engined Artura’s 3,303 lbs (1,498 kg) live between its axles, and it’s a relatively easy car to catch once it begins to slide, with plenty of travel for the well-mapped throttle pedal.

As it turns out, that holds true even when you’re using only the electric motor. 166 lb-ft is more than enough to get the rear wheels spinning on the ice, but with just 94 hp, there isn’t really enough power to get the car properly sideways. So you can easily control a lazy slide around one of the handling courses, in near silence, to boot. Turn the electronic aids back on and things got much less dramatic; even with my foot to the floor, the Artura measured out minute amounts of power, keeping the car very much pointed where I steered it rather than requiring any opposite lock.

It feels like the edge of the world out here.

Credit: McLaren

Turn it on, turn it off

Back in track mode, with all 671 hp to play with, there was much more power than necessary to spin. But with the safety net re-enabled, driving around the handling course was barely any more dramatic than with a fraction of the power. The car’s electronic chassis control algorithms would only send as much power to the rear wheels as they could deploy, no matter how much throttle I applied. As each wheel lost grip and began to spin, its brake would intervene. And we went around the course, slowly but safely. As a demonstration of the effectiveness of modern electronic safety systems, it was very reassuring.

As I mentioned earlier, even when journalists are let loose in supercars on track, it’s with some degree of electronic assist enabled. Because for the sportier kind of car, you’ll often find some degree of halfway house between everything on and buttoned down and all the aids turned off. Here, the idea is to loosen the safety net and allow the car to move around, but only a little. Instead of just using the electronics to make things safe, they’ll also flatter the driver.

In McLaren’s case, that mode is called Variable Drift Control, which is a rather accurate name—in this mode, you set the maximum slip angle (from 1˚–15˚), and the car will not exceed that. And that’s exactly what it does. A slug of power will get the rear wheels spinning and the rear sliding, but only up to the set degree, at which point the brakes and powertrain will interrupt as necessary.

It’s very flattering, holding what feels like a lurid slide between turns with ease, without any concern that a lapse in concentration might leave the car requiring recovery after beaching on a few inches of snow. Even when your right foot is pinned to the firewall, the silicon brains running the show apply only as much torque as necessary, with the little icon flashing on the dash letting you know it’s intervening.

If you have the space, there’s little more fun than drifting a car on ice. But it’s good to know that electronic stability control and traction control will help you out when you’re not trying to have fun.

Credit: McLaren

I can certainly see why OEMs ask that modes like VDC are the spiciest setting we try when they lend us their cars. They’re just permissive enough to break the rear loose and fire off a burst of adrenaline, yet cosseting enough that the ride almost certainly won’t end in tears. Fun though VDC was to play with, it does feel artificial once you get your eye in—particularly compared to the thrill of balancing an Artura on the throttle as you change direction through a series of corners or the satisfaction of catching and recovering a spin before it becomes too late.

But outside of a frozen lake, I’ll be content to keep some degree of driver aids running.

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Posted Tuesday 17 February 2026 at 4:08 am AEST (my time).

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A Crew Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station on Valentine’s Day, and astronauts popped open the hatches at 5:14 pm ET (22:14 UTC) on Saturday evening.

The arrival of four new astronauts as part of the Crew 12 mission—Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway of NASA, Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency, and Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos—brought the total number of crew on board the space station to seven, giving the US space agency a full complement in orbit.

The number of astronauts living on board the station fluctuates over time, depending on crew rotations and private astronauts making shorter stays, but since Crew Dragon began flying regularly at the end of 2020 NASA has sought to keep at least four “USOS” astronauts on board at all time. This stands for “US Orbital Segment,” and means astronauts from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan who are trained to operate the areas of the station maintained by NASA and its partner astronauts.

However, after one of the four Crew-11 astronauts experienced a health emergency a few days into the new year, NASA made an unprecedented decision to bring them home early. NASA has not named the afflicted Crew-11 astronaut, but the flier is said to be recovering on Earth.

Running solo

After these astronauts departed on January 15, just a single NASA astronaut, Chris Williams, remained in orbit. He had reached space on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in November, alongside two Russian cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. The space station is a big place, and with much of the facility now more than two decades old, Williams had to spend the majority of his time on maintenance and monitoring activities.

Back on Earth, NASA and SpaceX engineers were busy too. Because Crew 11 was brought home more than a month early, NASA and SpaceX scrambled to launch the Crew-12 vehicle a little sooner than expected, to minimize the time Williams had to manage the large US segment of the station on his own.

Expedition 74 welcomes NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 members aboard the International Space Station. In the front

from left are Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos;Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, both from NASA; and Sophie Adenot

from ESA (European Space Agency). In the back are Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos, Chris Williams of NASA,

and Sergei Mikaev of Roscosmos.

That culminated with a successful Dragon launch early on Friday, with the reinforcements reaching the space station on Saturday evening.

“This mission has shown, in many ways, what it means to be mission focused at NASA,” said the space agency’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, during a post-launch news conference. “In the last couple of weeks we brought Crew 11 home early, we pulled forward Crew 12, all while simultaneously making launch preparations for the Artemis II mission. It’s only possible because of the incredibly talented workforce we have here at NASA alongside our contractors, and our commercial and international partners.”

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Posted Monday 16 February 2026 at 1:20 pm AEST (my time).

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A recent study showed that Mars was warm and wet billions of years ago. The finding contrasts with another theory that this era was mainly cold and icy. The result has implications for the idea that life could have developed on the planet at this time.

Whether Mars was once habitable is a fascinating and intensely researched topic of interest over many decades. Mars, like the Earth, is about 4.5 billion years old and its geological history is divided into different epochs of time.

The latest paper relates to Mars during a time called the Noachian epoch, which extended from about 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago. This was during a stage in solar system history called the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB). Evidence for truly cataclysmic meteorite impacts during the LHB are found on many bodies throughout the solar system.

Two obvious scars from this era on Mars are the enormous Hellas and Argyre impact basins; both are well over a thousand miles across and each possesses enough volume to hold all the water in the Mediterranean with room to spare.

One might not imagine such a time being conducive to the existence of fragile lifeforms, yet it is likely to be the era in which Mars was most habitable. Evidence of landforms sculpted by water from this time is plentiful and include dried-up river valleys, lake beds, ancient coastlines and river deltas.

The prevailing climatic conditions of the Noachian are still a matter of intense debate. Two alternative scenarios are
typically posited: that this time was cold and icy, with occasional melting of large volumes of frozen water by meteorite impact and volcanic eruptions, or that it was warm, wet and largely ice-free.

Brightening Sun

All stars, including the Sun, brighten with age. In the early solar system, during the Noachian, the Sun was about 30% dimmer than it is today, so less heat was reaching Mars (and all the planets). To sustain a warm, wet climate at this time, the Martian atmosphere would have needed to be very substantial – much thicker than it is today – and abundant in greenhouse gases like CO2.

But when reaching high enough atmospheric pressure, CO2 tends to condense out of the air to form clouds and reduce the greenhouse effect. Given these issues, the cold, icy scenario is perhaps more believable.

One of the main science goals of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, which landed spectacularly in February 2021, is to seek evidence to support either of these two scenarios, and the new
paper using data from Perseverance may have done just that.

Perseverance landed at the Martian location of Jezero crater, which was selected as the landing site because it once contained a lake. Views of the crater from orbit show several distinct fan-shaped deposits emanating from channels carved through the crater walls by flowing water. Within these channels are abundant deposits of clay minerals.

Illustration of the Perseverance rover on the floor of Jezero Crater.

Credit: NASA

The new paper details recent analysis of aluminum-rich clay pebbles, called kaolinite, located within one of the ancient flow channels. The pebbles appear to have been subjected to intense weathering and chemical alteration by water during the Noachian.

While this is perhaps not surprising for a known ancient watery environment, what is interesting is that these clays are strongly depleted in iron and magnesium, and enriched in titanium and aluminum.

This is important because it means these rocks were less likely to have been altered in a hydrothermal environment, where scalding hot water was temporarily released by melting ice caused by volcanism or a meteorite impact.

Instead, they appear to have been altered under modest temperatures and persistent heavy rainfall. The authors found distinct similarities between the chemical composition of these clay pebbles with similar clays found on Earth dating from periods in our planet’s history when the climate was much warmer and wetter.

False colour image of the dried up river delta in Jezero crater, which Perseverance is currently exploring.

Credit: NASA

The paper concludes that these kaolinite pebbles were altered under high rainfall conditions comparable to “past greenhouse climates on Earth” and that they “likely represent some of the wettest intervals and possibly most habitable portions of Mars’ history”.

Furthermore, the paper concludes that these conditions may have persisted over time periods ranging from thousands to millions of years. Perseverance recently made headlines also for the discovery of possible biosignatures in samples it collected last year, also from within Jezero crater.

These precious samples have now been cached in special sealed containers on the rover for collection by a future Mars sample return mission. Unfortunately, the mission has recently been cancelled by Nasa and so what vital evidence they may or may not contain will probably not be examined in an Earth-based laboratory for many years.

Crucial to this future analysis is the so-called “Knoll criterion” – a concept formulated by astrobiologist Andrew Knoll, which states that for something to be evidence of life, an observation has to not just be explicable by biology; it has to be inexplicable without it. Whether these samples ever satisfy the Knoll criterion will only be known if they can be brought to Earth.

Either way, it is quite striking to imagine a time on Mars, billions of years before the first humans walked the Earth, that a tropical climate with – possibly – a living ecosystem once existed in the now desolate and wind-swept landscape of Jezero crater.

Gareth Dorrian is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Space Science at the University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Posted Monday 16 February 2026 at 1:19 pm AEST (my time).

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It was the image that launched a cultural icon. In 1967, in the Northern California woods, a 7-foot-tall, ape-like creature covered in black fur and walking upright was captured on camera, at one point turning around to look straight down the lens. The image is endlessly copied in popular culture—it’s even become an emoji. But what was it? A hoax? A bear? Or a real-life example of a mysterious species called the Bigfoot?

The film has been analysed and re-analysed countless times. Although most people believe it was some sort of hoax, there are some who argue that it’s never been definitively debunked. One group of people, dubbed Bigfooters, is so intrigued that they have taken to the forests of Washington, California, Oregon, Ohio, Florida, and beyond to look for evidence of the mythical creature.

But why? That’s what sociologists Jamie Lewis and Andrew Bartlett wanted to uncover. They were itching to understand what prompts this community to spend valuable time and resources looking for a beast that is highly unlikely to even exist. During lockdown, Lewis started interviewing more than 130 Bigfooters (and a few academics) about their views, experiences, and practices, culminating in the duo’s recent book “Bigfooters and Scientific Inquiry: On the Borderlands of Legitimate Science.”

Here, we talk to them about their academic investigation.

What was it about the Bigfoot community that you found so intriguing?

Lewis: It started when I was watching either the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet and a show called Finding Bigfoot was advertised. I was really keen to know why this program was being scheduled on what certainly at the time was a nominally serious and sober natural history channel. The initial plan was to do an analysis of these television programmes, but we felt that wasn’t enough. It was lockdown and my wife was pregnant and in bed a lot with sickness, so I needed to fill my time.

Bartlett: One of the things that I worked on when Jamie and I shared an office in Cardiff was a sociological study of fringe physicists. These are people mostly outside of academic institutions trying to do science. I was interviewing these people, going to their conferences. And that led relatively smoothly into Bigfoot, but it was Jamie’s interest in Bigfoot that brought me to this field.

How big is this community?

Lewis: It’s very hard to put a number on it. There is certainly a divide between what are known as “apers,” who believe that Bigfoot is just a primate unknown to science, and those that are perhaps more derogatorily called “woo-woos,” who believe that Bigfoot is some sort of interdimensional traveller, an alien of sort. We’re talking in the thousands of people. But there are a couple of hundred really serious people of which I probably interviewed at least half.

Many people back them. A YouGov survey conducted as recently as November 2025, suggested that as many as one quarter of Americans believe that Bigfoot either definitely or probably exists.

Were the interviewees suspicious of your intentions?

Lewis: I think there was definitely a worry that they would be caricatured. And I was often asked, “Do I believe in Bigfoot?” I had a standard answer that Andy and I agreed on, which was that mainstream, institutional science says there is absolutely no compelling evidence that Bigfoot exists. We have no reason to dissent with that consensus. But as sociologists what does exist is a community (or communities) of Bigfooting, and that’s what interests us.

Bartlett: One of the things that at least a couple of people reacted to once the book was published was the way we phrased that. On the blurb on the back of the book we say something along the lines of “Bigfoot exists if not as a physical biological creature then certainly as an object around which hundreds of people organise their lives.” A couple of people took that to be some kind of slight against them. It wasn’t.

Do these people have any sort of shared personality traits or other things that connected them?

Lewis: The community is very white, male, rural, and blue collar—often ex-military. I think Bigfooting is growing among the female population, but there’s a sense of the kind of ‘masculine hunter in the dark’ persona.

Bartlett: In America, you find a lot more veterans in the general population. But I think there’s also the issue of how they like to present themselves, because when you’re dealing with witness testimony, you’ve got to present yourself as credible. If you can say something like, “I was in the service” or “I was in the armed forces,” then at least you’re not likely to be spooked by a moose.

Credit: Douglas Sacha via Getty

What surprised you the most about them, did they challenge any stereotypes?

Lewis: Some were very articulate, which did surprise me a little. I guess that’s my own prejudice. I was also very surprised about how open people were; I expected them to not tell me about their encounters. But a fair few of them did. Many of them wanted to be named in the book. I was also surprised about how much empirical data they collect and how much they attempt to try and analyse and make sense of it. And how they were willing to admit that a certain idea was bunk or a hoax. I expected them to be defending bad evidence.

Bartlett: There are extracts of this in our book, people saying “I was fooled by these tracks for ages. I thought they were real and then I found this and that and the other out about it and I revised my opinion.” So that did surprise me too.

If they collect empirical evidence, does that make what they do science?

Bartlett: When you’re working in institutional science you’re working to get grants, you’re working to get good quality publications. You might want your name associated with particular ideas, but you do that through peer-reviewed papers and by working with PhD students who go off to other labs. In Bigfooting, you’ve got self-published books, you’ve got Bigfoot conferences, you’ve got YouTube channels, you’ve got podcasts and things like this, and they’re not necessarily a good way of making and testing knowledge claims. This is an aspect where Bigfooting is quite different to mainstream science.

It was interesting to study the fringe physicists and seeing where the common deviation from science was. And that’s a focus on individualism; the idea that an individual alone can collect and assess evidence in some kind of asocial fashion. The physicists I studied were quite clear that ideas like consensus in science were dangerous, when in reality, consensus, continuity, and community are the basis of most of science.

What is the most common form of evidence in this community?

Lewis: Witness testimonies. Without those reported testimonies, Bigfooting would not exist. A large part of the work of a Bigfooter is to collect and make sense of these testimonies. They get upset when these testimonies don’t have much weight within institutional science. They’ll make the comparison to court and how testimonies alone can put someone on death row. So they don’t understand why testimonies don’t have much weight in science. Beyond the testimony, footprint evidence is probably the most famous and also the most pervasive sort of trace evidence.

Bartlett: One of the reasons footprints are so important is that there’s the legacy of the Yeti and footprint evidence which proved to be relatively persuasive, convincing some institutional scientists that there was something in the Himalayas. And then there was the fact that the sort of two major academic champions of Bigfoot were persuaded by the footprint evidence: the late Grover Krantz (around 1970) and Jeffrey Meldrum (in the 1990s).

Lewis: These days, you also see camera traps, audio recorders, even DNA testing of hairs and those sorts of things. They’re capturing anomalous sounds and often blurry images. Some believe that a Bigfoot communicates through infrasound, although that is certainly disputed within the community. So what you’re getting now is more and more different types of evidence.

Photograph of an alleged Bigfoot footprint taken in Hoopa, California, in September 1962 and featured in a Humboldt Times newspaper article.

Credit: Wikipedia

How can you know whether an image or a sound really points to Bigfoot?

Bartlett: What they do is go out into the forest and record a sound, for example, and compare it to databases of birds and other animals. And they may find there is nothing that matches it. Is it something that doesn’t sound like a car or a person or a bear or a moose? In which case, there’s the space for Bigfoot. And it’s the same with images to some degree.

Would you say that this interpretation is the biggest weakness or contradiction in their evidence?

Lewis: It allows them to create space for Bigfoot. Because if you can’t match it to something else, what could it be? You have this absence and then from that absence you create a presence. They believe it’s a scientific argument. In fact, it’s kind of interesting how Bigfooters will always enrol other kinds of magical beasts to strengthen the case for Bigfoot. So, one sentence I hear quite a lot is “it ain’t no unicorn.”

What’s the hierarchy in this community? Who’s at the top?

Lewis: A-listers tend to be anyone associated with academia. So Andy’s already mentioned Jeff Meldrum, unfortunately he passed away very recently, but he was their route to contemporary academia. So in any conference, if Jeff Meldrum was speaking, he’d be last. Anyone who’s on TV, such as the Finding Bigfoot and the Expedition Bigfoot presenters would also be in the A-list category. And then you’ve got various different groups just below. For example, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which is probably the most well-known group.

What could Bigfooters learn from scientists and vice versa?

Lewis: From reading books and from discussing it with people, there was a sense that Bigfooters are anti-science. We did not find that. What we argue in the book is that they’re not anti-science. In fact, I would say a lot of them are pro-science, but they’re counter-establishment. I think academia should be thinking about these people as citizen scientists and what they’re doing as a kind of gateway into understanding your local area.

For example, they found an animal, I think it was a pine marten, on a camera trap that was not supposed to be in the area. So they are collecting lots of data. They are not irrational. It’s different from, for example, ghost hunting, because you don’t have to imagine there’s something entirely new in the world. It’s just an animal that exists out there that hasn’t been found. Implausible, yes. But not impossible. What they do lack, however, is academic discipline; anyone can be a Bigfooter.

Was there a specific encounter you heard about that was particularly compelling?

Lewis: Did I get caught up in the moment? Sometimes, of course, you do, just as you do in a film. If you’re in the pitch dark night and you’re watching a horror film, you take it away with you for a while until you settle back down. I often went to bed buzzing, thinking I don’t know what I just heard; they were great stories at the end of the day. But I learned to separate the interview from my thoughts on the interview.

If you encountered Bigfoot in the woods, how would you go about convincing others?

Lewis: A lot of Bigfooters would begin with qualifiers like, “My dad doesn’t believe in Bigfoot,” or “I have questioned myself for years thinking about this incident and what it was.” So, they would set themselves up as a rational, logical individual. That then created a connection between me and them. And of course, I’d probably be doing the same.

Bartlett: If I were to encounter Bigfoot, I would probably draw on all the techniques of proving that I’m a credible, hard-headed, rational person that we see in those witness encounters. I would expect to be disbelieved. And so therefore I would stress I was putting my credibility as an academic on the line here. So I’d deploy all those kinds of rhetorical techniques that are used by Bigfooters, aside from just the description of the encounter

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Posted Monday 16 February 2026 at 1:17 pm AEST (my time).

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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Saturday the agency is looking at ways to prevent the fueling problems plaguing the Space Launch System rocket before the Artemis III mission.

Artemis III is slated to be the first crew mission to land on the Moon since the Apollo program more than 50 years ago. As for Artemis II, which remains on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida after missing a launch window earlier this month, NASA is preparing for a second countdown rehearsal as soon as next week to confirm whether technicians have resolved a hydrogen fuel leak that cut short a practice countdown run February 2.

Artemis II is the first crew flight for SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. The nearly 10-day mission will carry four astronauts around the far side of the Moon and return them to Earth.

Again and again

Fuel leaks are nothing new for the Space Launch System. The same kind of leak delayed the first test flight of the SLS rocket for several months in 2022. With that launch, ground teams thought they fixed the problem by changing how they load super-cold liquid hydrogen into the rocket’s core stage. The launch team used the same loading procedure February 2, but the leak cropped up again.

“Considering the issues observed during the lead-up to Artemis I, and the long duration between missions, we should not be surprised there are challenges entering the Artemis II campaign,” Isaacman wrote Saturday in an update on the social media site X. “That does not excuse the situation, but we understand it. I am impressed with the NASA team and our contractors working diligently through the campaign.”

Engineers traced the fueling issues to ground support equipment. Specifically, the hydrogen leaks originate in the area where fueling lines on the rocket’s launch platform connect to the bottom of the core stage. Two Tail Service Mast Umbilicals, or TSMUs, route liquid hydrogen and and liquid oxygen into the rocket during the countdown, then disconnect and retract into protective housings at liftoff.

The TSMU supplying liquid hydrogen to the core stage has two lines, 8 inches and 4 inches in diameter, connecting through matching umbilical plates on the ground side and the rocket side. Technicians replaced seals around the two fueling lines after the practice countdown, or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), earlier this month.

The full Moon is seen behind the Space Launch System rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Tail Service Mast Umbilicals (TSMUs) are the gray structures that extend above the launch platform on the bottom left of the core stage.

Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky

On Thursday, NASA’s launch team tested the seals by partially filling the core stage with liquid hydrogen. This “confidence test” ended earlier than planned when the launch team encountered a new problem that reduced the flow of fuel into the rocket. In a statement released Friday night, NASA said workers will replace a filter suspected to be the cause of the reduced flow before proceeding into the next WDR.

The confidence test ended as the launch team transitioned to “fast fill” mode for liquid hydrogen, when pressures and flow rates put the finicky seals through the most stress. However, NASA said engineers achieved several key objectives of the confidence test.

Isaacman wrote Saturday that the test “provided a great deal of data, and we observed materially lower leak rates compared to prior observations during WDR-1.”

Although the launch team wasn’t able to test the seals in the most stressing conditions Thursday, officials apparently got enough data to move forward to the next WDR. During this upcoming test, NASA will attempt to fully load hydrogen and oxygen into the rocket and count down to less than a minute before launch, before stopping the clock and draining the SLS propellant tanks.

In his social media post, Isaacman characterized the outcome of Thursday’s confidence test this way: “I would not say something broke that caused the premature end to the test, as much as we observed enough and reached a point where waiting out additional troubleshooting was unnecessary.”

Changing the rules

During the first WDR earlier this month, hydrogen gas concentrations in the area around the fueling connection spiked higher than 16 percent, NASA’s safety limit. This spike was higher than any of the leak rates observed during the Artemis I launch campaign in 2022. Since then, NASA reassessed their safety limit and raised it from 4 percent—a conservative rule NASA held over from the Space Shuttle program—to 16 percent.

John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s Artemis II mission management team, said the decision to relax the safety limit between Artemis I and Artemis II was grounded in test data.

“The SLS program, they came up with a test campaign that actually looked at that cavity, the characteristics of the cavity, the purge in the cavity … and they introduced hydrogen to see when you could actually get it to ignite, and at 16 percent, you could not,” said Honeycutt, who served as NASA’s SLS program manager before moving to his new job.

Hydrogen is explosive in high concentrations when mixed with air. This is what makes hydrogen a formidable rocket fuel. But it is also notoriously difficult to contain. Molecular hydrogen is the smallest molecule, meaning it can readily escape through leak paths, and poses a materials challenge for seals because liquified hydrogen is chilled to minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 253 degrees Celsius).

So, it turns out NASA used the three-year interim between Artemis I and Artemis II to get comfortable with a more significant hydrogen leak, instead of fixing the leaks themselves. Isaacman said that will change before Artemis III, which likewise is probably at least three years away.

“I will say near-conclusively for Artemis III, we will cryoproof the vehicle before it gets to the pad, and the propellant loading interfaces we are troubleshooting will be redesigned,” Isaacman wrote.

Isaacman took over as NASA’s administrator in December, and has criticized the SLS program’s high cost—estimated by NASA’s inspector general at more than $2 billion per rocket—along with the launch vehicle’s torpid flight rate.

NASA’s expenditures for the rocket’s ground systems at Kennedy Space Center are similarly enormous. NASA spent nearly $900 million on Artemis ground support infrastructure in 2024 alone. Much of the money went toward constructing a new launch platform for an upgraded version of the Space Launch System that may never fly.

All of this makes each SLS rocket a golden egg, a bespoke specimen that must be treated with care because it is too expensive to replace. NASA and Boeing, the prime contractor for the SLS core stage, never built a full-size test model of the core stage. There’s currently no way to completely test the cryogenic interplay between the core stage and ground equipment until the fully assembled rocket is on the launch pad.

Existing law requires NASA continue flying the SLS rocket through the Artemis V mission. Isaacman wrote that the Artemis architecture “will continue to evolve as we learn more and as industry capabilities mature.” In other words, NASA will incorporate newer, cheaper, reusable rockets into the Artemis program.

The next series of launch opportunities for the Artemis II mission begin March 3. If the mission doesn’t lift off in March, NASA will need to roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to refresh its flight termination system. There are more launch dates available in April and May.

“There is still a great deal of work ahead to prepare for this historic mission,” Isaacman wrote. “We will not launch unless we are ready and the safety of our astronauts will remain the highest priority. We will keep everyone informed as NASA prepares to return to the Moon.”

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Posted Sunday 15 February 2026 at 11:20 am AEST (my time).

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There are plenty of unanswered questions about the origin of life on Earth. But the research community has largely reached consensus that one of the key steps was the emergence of an RNA molecule that could replicate itself. RNA, like its more famous relative DNA, can carry genetic information. But it can also fold up into three-dimensional structures that act as catalysts. These two features have led to the suggestion that early life was protein-free, with RNA handling both heredity and catalyzing a simple metabolism.

For this to work, one of the reactions that the early RNAs would need to catalyze is the copying of RNA molecules, without which any sort of heritability would be impossible. While we’ve found a number of catalytic RNAs that can copy other molecules, none have been able to perform a key reaction: making a copy of themselves. Now, however, a team has found an incredibly short piece of RNA—just 45 bases long—that can make a copy of itself.

Finding an RNA polymerase

We have identified a large number of catalytic RNAs (generically called ribozymes, for RNA-based enzymes), and some of them can catalyze reactions involving other RNAs. A handful of these are ligases, which link together two RNA molecules. In some cases, they need these molecules to be held together by a third RNA molecule that base pairs with both of them. We’ve only identified a few that can act as polymerases, which add RNA bases to a growing molecule, one at a time, with each new addition base pairing with a template molecule.

Some ligases can link two nucleic acid strands (left), while others can link the strands only if they’re held together

by base pairing with a template (center). A polymerase can be thought of as a template-dependent ligase that

adds one base at a time. The newly discovered ribozyme sits somewhere between a template-directed ligase and a polymerase.

Credit: John Timmer

Obviously, there is some functional overlap between them, as you can think of a polymerase as ligating on one base at a time. And in fact, at the ribozyme level, there’s some real-world overlap, as some ribozymes that were first identified as ligases were converted into polymerases by selecting for this new function.

While this is fascinating, there are a few problems with these known examples of polymerase ribozymes. One is that they’re long. So long, in fact, that they’re beyond the length of the sort of molecules that we’ve observed forming spontaneously from a mix of individual RNA bases. This length also means they’re largely incapable of making copies of themselves—the reactions are slow and inefficient enough that they simply stop before copying the entire molecule.

Another factor related to their length is that they tend to form very complex structures, with many different areas of the molecule base-paired to one another. That leaves very little of the molecule in a single-stranded form, which is needed to make a copy.

Based on past successes, a French-UK team decided to start a search for a polymerase by looking for a ligase. And they limited that search in an important way: They only tested short molecules. They started with pools of RNA molecules, each with a different random sequence, ranging from 40 to 80 bases. Overall, they estimated that they made a population of 10¹³ molecules out of the total possible population of 10²⁴ sequences of this type.

These random molecules were fed a collection of three-base-long RNAs, each linked to a chemical tag. The idea was that if a molecule is capable of ligating one of these short RNA fragments to itself, it could be pulled out using the tag. The mixtures were then placed in a salty mixture of water and ice, as this can promote reactions involving RNAs.

After 11 rounds of reactions and tag-based purification, the researchers ended up with three different RNA molecules that could each ligate three-base-long RNAs to existing molecules. Each of these molecules was subjected to mutagenesis and further rounds of selection. This ultimately left the researchers with a single, 51-base-long molecule that could add clusters of three bases to a growing RNA strand, depending on their ability to base-pair with an RNA template. They called this “polymerase QT-51,” with QT standing for “quite tiny.” They later found that they could shorten this to QT-45 without losing significant enzyme activity.

Checking its function

The basic characterization of QT-45 showed that it has some very impressive properties for a molecule that, by nucleic acid standards, is indeed quite tiny. While it was selected for linking collections of molecules that were three bases long, it could also link longer RNAs, work on shorter two-base molecules, or even add a single base at a time, though this was less efficient. While it worked slowly, the molecule’s active half-life was well over 100 days, so it had plenty of time to get things done before it degraded.

It also didn’t need to interact with any specific RNA sequences to work, suggesting it had a general affinity for RNA molecules. As a result, it wasn’t especially picky about the sequences it could copy.

As you might expect from such a small molecule, QT-45 didn’t tolerate changes to its own sequence very well—nearly the entire molecule was important in one way or another. Tests that involved changing every single individual base one at a time showed that almost all the changes reduced the ribozyme’s activity. There were, however, a handful of changes that improved things, suggesting that further selection could potentially yield additional improvements. And the impact of mutations near the center of the sequence was far more severe, suggesting that region is critical for QT-45’s enzymatic activity.

The team then started testing its ability to synthesize copies of other RNA molecules when given a mixture of all possible three-base sequences. One of the tests included a large stretch in which one end of the sequence base-paired with the other. To copy that, those base pairs need to somehow be pried apart. But QT-45 was able to make a copy, meaning it synthesized a strand that was able to base pair with the original.

It was also able to make a copy of a template strand that would base pair with a small ribozyme. That copying produced an active ribozyme.

But the key finding was that it could synthesize a sequence that base-pairs with itself, and then synthesize itself by copying that sequence. This was horribly inefficient and took months, but it happened.

Throughout these experiments, the fidelity averaged about 95 percent, meaning that, in copying itself, it would make an average of two to three errors. While this means a fair number of its copies wouldn’t be functional, it also means the raw materials for an evolutionary selection for improved function—random mutations—would be present.

What this means

It’s worth taking a moment to consider the use of three-base RNA fragments by this enzyme. On the surface, this may seem a bit like cheating, since current RNA polymerases add sequence one base at a time. But in reality, any chemical environment that could spontaneously assemble an RNA molecule 45 bases long will produce many fragments shorter than that. So in many ways, this might be a more realistic model of the conditions in which life emerged.

The authors note that these shorter fragments may be essential for QT-45’s activity. The short ribozyme probably doesn’t have the ability to enzymatically pry base-paired strands of RNA apart to copy them. But in a mixture of lots of small fragments, there’s likely to be an equilibrium, with some base-paired sequences spontaneously popping open and temporarily base pairing with a shorter fragment. Working with these base-paired fragments is probably essential to the ribozyme’s overall activity.

Right now, QT-45 isn’t an impressive enzyme. But the researchers point out that it has only been through 18 rounds of selection, which isn’t much. The most efficient ribozyme polymerases we have at present have been worked on by multiple labs for years. I expect QT-45 to receive similar attention and improve significantly over time.

Also notable is that the team came up with three different ligases in a test of just a small subset of the possible total RNA population of this size. If that frequency holds, there are on the order of 10¹¹ ligating ribozymes among the sequences of this size. Which raises the possibility that we could find far more if we do an exhaustive search. That suggests the first self-copying RNA might not be as improbable as it seems at first.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt2760  (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 14 February 2026 at 1:04 pm AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.29 of the Rocket Report! We have a stuffed report this week with news from across the launch spectrum. Long-term, probably the most significant development this week was a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket successfully launching and then executing a picture-perfect ocean landing. China is catching up rapidly to the United States when it comes to reusable launch.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Orbex is going away. The UK-based launch company Orbex has entered insolvency proceedings after a planned takeover by European space logistics startup The Exploration Company fell through, European Spaceflight reports. In a statement, Orbex said the decision came after all “fundraising, merger and acquisition opportunities had all concluded unsuccessfully.” For anyone paying attention, this decision should not come as a surprise. A decade into its existence, Orbex had yet to produce demonstrable, ready-for-flight hardware.

Other companies interested in assets … According to the company, the appointment of administrators will give Orbex time to secure “as positive an outcome as possible for its creditors, employees and wider stakeholders.” It added that the process could include the sale of all or parts of the business or its assets, and another UK-based company, Skyrora, has expressed some interest. (submitted by Polynomics, zapman987, and EllPeaTea)

Firefly’s next Alpha mission launching soon. This week, Firefly said that its next Alpha rocket underwent a successful 20-second static fire test. This clears the way for the rocket to make a launch attempt no earlier than February 18 from its launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Au revoir Block I … It’s an important mission, because the previous Alpha launch, in April 2025, ended in failure when stage separation damaged one of the rocket’s upper stage engines and prevented the mission from reaching orbit. Moreover, the company lost the first stage of the flight in September during an accident in Texas. The upcoming flight, “Stairway to Seven,” will be the final flight of Block I of the Alpha booster.

How can launch companies compete with SpaceX? Rocket firms are divided on how to compete with SpaceX in a market where demand outstrips supply, yet customers remain price sensitive, Space News reports. During a panel at the SmallSat Symposium on February 11, executives from several launch companies acknowledged the challenge of competing with SpaceX, which accounted for about half of all orbital launches globally in 2025, despite strong customer demand for launch services.

A low price is nice … “If your idea is to go into the market competing with SpaceX on price, you’re probably not in a good competitive position,” said Brian Rogers, vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, one of the few small launch vehicle developers to thrive despite competition from SpaceX. But this view was far from universal. Devon Papandrew, vice president of business development at Stoke Space, disagreed. “You absolutely have to have a plan to compete with SpaceX on price,” he said. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Rocket Lab blows up a few Archimedes engines. According to reporting by Ars, Rocket Lab has blown up two Archimedes rocket engines in the last three months at its test stand in southern Mississippi. The engine test anomalies come at a critical time for Rocket Lab, as it is attempting to finalize development of a flight version of the Archimedes engine, which burns liquid oxygen and methane and has a sea-level thrust of 165,000 pounds. Nine of these engines will power the company’s much-anticipated Neutron rocket, which is aiming for a debut launch later this year.

Testing the engine to its limits … Rocket Lab Chief Executive Officer Pete Beck downplayed concerns in a statement. “We test to the limits, that’s part of developing a successful rocket,” Beck said. “We often put the engine into very off nominal states to find the limits and sometimes they let go, this is normal and how you ensure rockets don’t fail in flight.” Beck has previously said that Rocket Lab’s goal is to identify failures during component-level testing so that, when Neutron launches, it has a high chance of reaching orbit on its first attempt.

Proton rocket returns to flight. After a nearly three-year break, a Russian Proton rocket flew again with the Elektro-L No. 5 meteorological satellite from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, Russian Space Web reports. This mission was supposed to launch in late 2025, but in December, final checks revealed a problem with the Block DM-03 upper stage.

A not-so-great launch record … The mission marked the last use of the Block DM-03 space tug on Proton, which will now be solely used as an upper stage for the Angara-5 rocket. First launched in 1965, the Proton rocket has undergone several upgrades in the six decades since then. It has launched 430 times, with 48 partial and total failures. No new Protons are under construction, and it will be phased out by the end of this decade in favor of the newer Angara vehicles. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX exempted legal labor case. The National Labor Relations Board abandoned a Biden-era complaint against SpaceX after a finding that the agency does not have jurisdiction over Elon Musk’s space company, Ars reports. The US labor board said SpaceX should instead be regulated under the Railway Labor Act, which governs labor relations at railroad and airline companies.

A common carrier? … In January 2024, an NLRB regional director alleged in a complaint that SpaceX illegally fired eight employees who, in an open letter, criticized CEO Musk as a “frequent source of embarrassment.” The complaint sought reinstatement of the employees, back pay, and letters of apology to the fired employees. SpaceX responded by suing the NLRB, claiming the labor agency’s structure is unconstitutional. But a different issue SpaceX raised later—that it is a common carrier, like a rail company or airline—is what compelled the NLRB to drop its case.

More powerful Ariane 6 rocket launches. This first launch of the four-booster version of Ariane 6 took place on Thursday, launching  32 satellites for Amazon’s Leo constellation to low-Earth orbit. “This first flight of Ariane 64 sustains Europe’s autonomous access to space,” Toni Tolker-Nielsen, the European Space Agency’s director of space transportation, said  in a news release.

More vrooom coming … Previous launches of Europe’s new Ariane rocket have used two solid rocket boosters. The heavier variant of the rocket is necessary to support Amazon’s constellation as well as more demanding missions to geostationary orbit. And more power is coming. In the near future, the P120C boosters will be replaced by upgraded P160C models, each carrying more than 14 metric tons of solid fuel. The Associated Press provided some interesting color behind the scenes of the launch from the location in France where the rocket’s main engines are manufactured. (submitted by biokleen and EllPeaTea)

Stoke Space increases fundraising round. The Washington-based launch company announced this week that it had extended its recent Series D funding round. The round was initially announced in October 2025 at $510 million, but has now been increased to $860 million. The original Series D funding focused on completing activation of Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and expanding production capacity for the Nova launch vehicle. Stoke will use the additional capital to accelerate future elements of its product roadmap, the company said.

Putting the $ into $toke $pace … “We’re extremely grateful for our investors’ continued support,” said Andy Lapsa, co-founder and CEO of Stoke. “We’re executing with urgency to bring Nova to market and deliver for our customers. It’s a special vehicle, and there’s more in the pipeline.” With the extension, Stoke has now raised $1.34 billion to date. That is an impressive raise, and it will heighten expectations for the company’s debut of the Nova rocket.

Falcon 9 back after second stage anomaly. A Falcon 9 launched a batch of Starlink satellites on Saturday after SpaceX completed an investigation into an engine malfunction during the rocket’s previous launch, Space News reports. The rocket deployed its payload of 25 Starlink satellites into orbit about 62 minutes after liftoff. The launch was the first Falcon 9 mission since Feb. 2, when the rocket carried another set of Starlink satellites into orbit from Vandenberg.

That didn’t take long … While that mission successfully deployed its payload, SpaceX later said an “off-nominal condition” with the upper stage prevented it from performing a planned deorbit burn. The Federal Aviation Administration said Feb. 6 that it had authorized SpaceX to return the Falcon 9 to flight. “The final mishap report cites the probable root cause as the Falcon 9 second-stage engine’s failure to ignite prior to the deorbit burn,” the agency stated. “SpaceX identified technical and organizational preventive measures to avoid a recurrence of the event.” The FAA provided no additional details about the anomaly. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China performs an impressive rocket landing. China’s space program, striving to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, carried out a test flight of a new reusable booster and crew capsule late Tuesday (US time), and the results were spectacular, Ars reports. The launch of a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket, still in development, provided engineers with an opportunity to verify the performance of an important part of the new Mengzhou capsule’s safety system. A test version of the Mengzhou spacecraft, flying without anyone onboard, climbed into the stratosphere on top of the Long March booster before activating its launch abort motors a little more than a minute into the flight as the rocket reached the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure, known as Max-Q.

China getting there on rocket reuse … The abort motors pulled the capsule away from the booster, simulating an in-flight escape that might be necessary to whisk crews away from a failing rocket. The Mengzhou spacecraft later deployed parachutes and splashed down offshore from Hainan Island. Remarkably, the booster continued its ascent without the crew capsule, soaring into space on the power of its kerosene-fueled YF-100 engines before reentering the atmosphere, reigniting its engines, and nailing a propulsive landing in the South China Sea, right next to a recovery barge waiting to bring it back to shore.

Vulcan experiences a second nozzle issue. Moments after liftoff from Florida’s Space Coast early Thursday morning, a shower of sparks emerged in the exhaust plume of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. Seconds later, the rocket twisted on its axis before recovering and continuing the climb into orbit with a batch of US military satellites, Ars reports. The sight may have appeared familiar to seasoned rocket watchers. Sixteen months ago, a Vulcan rocket lost one of its booster nozzles shortly after launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket recovered from the malfunction and still reached the mission’s planned orbit.

Next launch likely to be delayed … Details of Thursday’s booster problem remain unclear. An investigation into the matter is underway, according to ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But the circumstances resemble those of the booster malfunction in October 2024. The incident on Thursday’s mission suggests the defect was not fixed, or there is a separate problem with Northrop’s boosters. The next Vulcan launch is scheduled for no earlier than March with a GPS navigation satellite for the US Space Force. This schedule is now in doubt. The military’s Space Systems Command said in a statement it will “work closely with ULA per our mission assurance space flightworthiness process before the next Vulcan national security space mission.” (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Starship nearing next test flight. The upgraded Super Heavy booster slated to launch SpaceX’s next Starship flight has completed cryogenic proof testing, clearing a hurdle that resulted in the destruction of the company’s previous booster, Ars reports. The proof test is notable because it moves engineers closer to launching the first test flight of an upgraded version of SpaceX’s mega-rocket named Starship V3, or Block 3.

Launch possible within the next six to eight weeks … SpaceX launched the previous version, Starship V2, five times last year, but the first three test flights failed. The last two flights achieved SpaceX’s goals, and the company moved on to V3. Assuming that the remaining test work goes according to plan, SpaceX could be in position to launch the first Starship V3 test flight before the end of March.

New Glenn pushing on second stage reuse again. Engineers at Blue Origin have been grappling with a seemingly eternal debate that involves the New Glenn rocket and the economics of flying it. The debate goes back at least 15 years, to the early discussions around the design of the heavy lift rocket. The first stage, of course, would be fully reusable. But what about the upper stage of New Glenn, powered by two large BE-3U engines?

Do you want a job? … Now, Ars reports, reuse is back on the menu. Blue Origin has posted a new job listing for a director of Reusable Upper Stage Development, which says, “As the Director of Program Management for the New Glenn Upper Stage and Payload Accommodations (GS2PA), you will work with the Vice President of New Glenn GS2PA and directly support the execution of a lean engineering initiative to incrementally develop a reusable upper stage.” Ars estimates it presently costs Blue Origin more than $50 million to manufacture a New Glenn second stage.

Next three launches

February 12: Falcon 9 | Crew-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. | 10:15 UTC

February 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-13 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 22:00 UTC

February 16: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-103 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 05:00 UTC

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Posted Saturday 14 February 2026 at 3:25 am AEST (my time).

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Very few people alive today have seen the Appalachian forests as they existed a century ago. Even as state and national parks preserved ever more of the ecosystem, fungal pathogens from Asia nearly wiped out one of the dominant species of these forests, the American chestnut, killing an estimated 3 billion trees. While new saplings continue to sprout from the stumps of the former trees, the fungus persists, killing them before they can seed a new generation.

But thanks in part to trees planted in areas where the two fungi don’t grow well, the American chestnut isn’t extinct. And efforts to revive it in its native range have continued, despite the long generation times needed to breed resistant trees. In Thursday’s issue of Science, researchers describe their efforts to apply modern genomic techniques and exhaustive testing to identify the best route to restoring chestnuts to their native range.

Multiple paths to restoration

While the American chestnut is functionally extinct—it’s no longer a participant in the ecosystems it once dominated—it’s most certainly not extinct. Two Asian fungi that have killed it off in its native range; one causes chestnut blight, while a less common pathogen causes a root rot disease. Both prefer warmer, humid environments and persist there because they can grow asymptomatically on distantly related trees, such as oaks. Still, chestnuts planted outside the species’ original range—primarily in drier areas of western North America—have continued to thrive.

There is also a virus that attacks the chestnut blight fungus, allowing a few trees to survive in areas where that virus is common. Finally, a handful of trees have grown to maturity in the American chestnut’s original range. These trees, which the paper refers to as LSACs (large surviving American chestnuts), suggest that there might have been some low level of natural resistance within the now-vanished population.

Those trees are central to one of the efforts to restore the American chestnut. If enough of them have distinct means of resisting the fungi, interbreeding them might produce a strain that not only survives the fungi but can also thrive in the Appalachians.

A related approach took advantage of the fact that the American chestnut can produce fertile hybrids with the Chinese chestnut, which had co-evolved with the introduced fungi and were thus resistant to lethal infections. The hope was that continued back-breeding of these hybrids with American chestnuts would result in trees that were very similar to American chestnuts yet retained the fungal resistance of their Asian cousins.

Both efforts suffered from the same problem that faces any biologist working on trees: They are slow-growing and can take years to reach a size at which they produce seeds. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the American chestnut can’t pollinate itself, so you need at least two trees before any breeding is possible.

Concerned about what this might mean for the potential reintroduction of the chestnut into the Appalachians, a third project turned to biotechnology. Research had identified oxalic acid as a key factor in the blight’s virulence. Wheat naturally produces an enzyme that degrades oxalic acid, and researchers inserted the gene that encodes that enzyme into the American chestnut genome, creating a genetically modified tree that can potentially disarm the fungus’ attack.

Without understanding the nature of resistance or the effectiveness of the transgenic gene, there’s no way to know which method would be most effective. So researchers from the American Chestnut Foundation assembled a massive collaboration to examine all these options and determine what would be needed to reintroduce blight-resistant chestnuts into the wild.

Tracking resistance

The scale of the effort is immense. All told, the team infected over 4,000 individual trees with the blight fungus and tracked their growth in Appalachian nurseries for an average of over 14 years. The trees were scored for resistance on a zero-to-100 scale based on the damage caused by the infection. This data was combined with some serious lab work; the team produced the highest-quality chestnut genomes yet (of both American and Chinese species) and gathered biochemical data on how the trees respond to infection.

It quickly became apparent that there were significant differences in the growth rates of some of the resistant trees. When planted at sites where viruses kept the blight in check, the Chinese chestnuts grew more slowly than native trees, while hybrids grew at an intermediate rate. That could make a big difference, as rapid growth may have enabled the chestnut to reach its former dominance of the canopy.

Somewhat surprisingly, this slow growth turned out to be a problem for the genetically modified American chestnuts as well. By chance, the wheat gene ended up being inserted into a gene known to be important for the growth of other plants. It seems to be important in the chestnut as well; plants with two copies of the inserted genes survived at 16 percent of their expected rate, and those with a single copy grew 22 percent slower than unmodified trees.

That said, there was a lot of variability among the genetically modified trees, with 4 percent of the tested trees showing both high blight resistance and growth comparable to that of unmodified American chestnuts. It will be important to determine whether this collection of traits remains consistent in ensuing generations.

In a bit of good news, the progeny from surviving American chestnuts grew like American chestnuts. In less good news, among 143 of these trees, only seven had resistance levels of above 50 on the team’s 100-point scale. It’s possible that interbreeding these trees could further boost resistance, but it also poses the risk of creating a population that’s too inbred to thrive after reintroduction.

Root causes

The research team decided to use their testing to investigate the genetic basis of resistance. There’s a very practical reason for this: If resistance is mediated by just a handful of genes that each have large impacts, it should be possible to continue breeding resistant strains back to regular American chestnuts and selecting for resistance. But if there are many factors with relatively small impacts, it will require directed interbreeding of hybrids to maximize both resistance and DNA originating from the American chestnut.

The team completed the highest-quality chestnut genomes for both the American and Chinese species, identifying about 25,000 to 30,000 genes in the different assemblies. They then used this information for two types of genetic analysis: quantitative trait locus identification and genome-wide association. Both approaches aim to identify regions of the genome associated with specific properties and estimate their impact.

The work suggested that resistance arises from a relatively large number of sites, each with relatively minor effects. For example, the sites in the genome identified by quantitative trait analysis typically boosted resistance by about 10 points on the researchers’ 100-point scale. In the genome-wide analysis, 17 individual genetic differences were associated with about a quarter of the heritable resistance traits. All of this suggests that, for the hybrids (and likely for the weaker blight resistance found in surviving American chestnuts), directed breeding among surviving trees will be needed.

For the root rot fungus, in contrast, it looks like there are a limited number of important alleles with a large impact.

The researchers also took an alternative approach to identify resistance factors, comparing 100 chemicals produced by resistant and susceptible strains. Among the 41 chemicals detected at higher levels in the Chinese chestnut, the researchers found a metabolite, lupeol, that completely suppressed the growth of the fungal pathogen. Another, erythrodiol, limited its growth. If we can identify the genes involved in producing those chemicals, we could use that knowledge to guide directed breeding programs—or even engage in gene editing to increase their production.

The team’s current plan is to use genomic predictions to select hybrid seedlings for planting in test orchards, aiming to identify plants with high growth and resistance. From there, the process can be repeated. But even after the exhaustive exploration of resistance traits, the researchers seem to believe that all three approaches—selecting resistant American chestnuts, breeding hybrids derived from Chinese chestnuts, and directed genetic modification—can help bring the American chestnut back.

The researchers warn, though, that as environmental disturbances and invasive species continue to push some key species to the brink of extinction, we need to get better at this kind of species rescue operation.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adw3225  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 13 February 2026 at 12:47 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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An elephant’s trunk is a marvelous thing, flexible enough to bend and stretch as it forages for food, but also stiff enough to grasp and maneuver even delicate objects like peanuts or a tortilla chip. That’s because the trunk is highly sensitive when it comes to sensing touch. Scientists have determined that the whiskers lining the trunk are crucial for that sensitivity thanks to their unique structure, amounting to a kind of innate “material intelligence, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

As previously reported, there is a long history of studying whiskers (vibrissae) in mammals. Rats, cats, tree squirrels, manatees, harbor seals, sea otters, pole cats, shrews, tammar wallabies, sea lions, and naked mole-rats all share strikingly similar basic whisker anatomies, according to various prior studies. Among other potential applications, such research could one day enable scientists to build artificial whiskers as tactile sensors in robotics, as well as learn more about human touch.

Whiskers are much more complex than one might think, both in structure and function. Rats, for instance, have about 30 large whiskers and dozens of smaller ones, part of a complex “scanning sensorimotor system” that enables the rat to perform such diverse tasks as texture analysis, active touch for path finding, pattern recognition, and object location, just by scanning the terrain with its whiskers.

Technically, the whiskers are just hairs, a collection of dead keratin cells. It’s what they’re attached to that makes them as sensitive as human fingertips. Each rat whisker is inserted into a follicle that connects it to a “barrel” made up of as many as 4,000 densely packed neurons. Together, they form a grid or array that serves as a topographic “map,” telling the rat’s brain exactly what objects are present and what movements are taking place in their immediate environment. All those barrels in turn are wired together into a kind of neural network, so the rat gets multidimensional cues about its environment. Rat whiskers also resonate certain frequencies; there are shorter whiskers near the nose, with longer ones further back, enabling rats to create a kind of “frequency map” by poking their noses all over the place

Elephant whiskers are probably most akin to cat whiskers, according to the authors of this latest paper. Unlike cat whiskers, however, an elephant’s do not move. The whiskers grow in rows along each side of the trunk’s surface; how many there are and the patterns in which they are arranged depend on the species. Andrew Schulz, a postdoc working on haptics at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and co-authors used a combination of micro-CTR imaging, electron microscopy, mechanical testing, and functional computer modeling to learn more about Asian elephant whiskers: not only their shape (geometry) but also their porosity and their material stiffness (i.e., how soft they are).

By a whisker

Whiskers on an elephant’s trunk in the wild

MPI-IS/A. Posada

 

Researcher preparing elephant whiskers from various parts of the elephant’s trunk for advanced microscopy

and characterization methods.

MPI-IS/W. Scheible

 

The micro-CT scans revealed that elephant whiskers are thick and blade-like, unlike the tapered whiskers of mice and rats. The structure is porous, with a hollow base and several internal channels, similar to those found in horse hooves or sheep horns. That makes the whiskers more resistant to impact and less prone to breakage—an important feature, since once damaged, elephant whiskers don’t grow back.

The researchers also used a diamond cube the size of a single cell to push against the walls of individual elephant and cat whiskers, both at the base and the tip. They found that the base of both elephant and cat whiskers was stiff like plastic, gradually softening to a more resilient, rubber-like tip—unlike the body hair of Asian elephants, which is stiff everywhere.

But could that stiffness gradient actually affect the trunk’s sensitivity to touch? To find out, the team 3D-printed a larger version of an elephant whisker about the size of a wand. Co-author Katherine Kuchenbecker, Schultz’s mentor at MPI, tested the wand as she walked through the halls, tapping columns and railings as she went. And yes, it did turn out to be a sensitive instrument. “I noticed that tapping the railing with different parts of the whisker wand felt distinct—soft and gentle at the tip, and sharp and strong at the base,” said Kuchenbecker. “I didn’t need to look to know where the contact was happening; I could just feel it.”

The team’s computational simulations confirmed that hypothesis. “The stiffness gradient provides a map to allow elephants to detect where contact occurs along each whisker,” said Schultz. “This property helps them know how close or how far their trunk is from an object … all baked into the geometry, porosity, and stiffness of the whisker. Engineers call this natural phenomenon embodied intelligence. Bio-inspired sensors that have an artificial elephant-like stiffness gradient could give precise information with little computational cost purely by intelligent material design.”

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adx8981 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 13 February 2026 at 12:46 pm AEST (my time).

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But in the coming decades, Chamonix will likely be one of many former host cities unable to host the Winter Olympics ever again because rising global temperatures are reducing the amount of snowfall, according to climate scientists.

The evidence is in the data.

The average snowfall in the European Alps, for example, has fallen 8.4% per decade since the 1970s, according to a report from the European Geosciences Union, a nonprofit organization based in Munich, Germany, that conducts climate science research.

In fact, only 52 out of the 93 cities and regions that have hosted the Winter Games and Paralympic Games in the past will "remain climate reliable" by the 2050s, according to a study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee. The remaining 41 cities would not have enough snow to host the Games.

Samuel Muñoz, a Northeastern University professor in the Department of Marine and Environmental Studies and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said these changes are just the latest example of climate change's impact on society.

But "it's useful to connect climate change to something tangible in people's lives, like winter sports and activities, including the Olympics," said Muñoz.

Changes to our planet "can sometimes feel abstract," he said. People may not understand what climate scientists are talking about when they warn about Earth's overall temperature rising.

"But discussing climate change in terms of something like winter sports, with direct personal or economic implications, can help to ground the issue for people," he said.

Climate change skeptics have long denounced the existence of global warming. In Italy, Matteo Salvani, the country's deputy prime minister, has argued that the melting alps "are a natural recurring phenomenon."

But during this year's Winter Olympics, which is being held in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, organizers are using about 2.4 million cubic meters of artificial snow and are hosting several events in the high altitude and alpine regions of Bormio and Livigno, which are more resistant to the effects of climate change, according to the Milano Cortina 2026 Foundation, the organizing body of this year's Winter Olympics.

But what exactly is causing a drop in snowfall?

"The type of precipitation that occurs—snow or rain—has to do with the air temperature between the clouds and the ground surface," Muñoz said.

As Earth's atmosphere gets warmer as a result of greenhouse gases, it's more likely that we will see more rain than snow, he said.

"This does not mean that it will never snow, just that it's more likely that precipitation will be rain instead of snow," he said.

Earth's temperatures are expected to increase in the years to come, explained Auroop Ganguly, a Northeastern professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2025 was the third warmest year on record, with annual global surface temperature 2.11°F (1.17°C) above the 20th century average.

A 2025 Emissions Gap Report from the United Nations Environment Program notes that current global projections put Earth's overall temperature rising "as much as 2.8°C by 2100."

As a result, the number of cities that will be able to host the Winter Games will continue to shrink.

So what is the best move for organizations in the near future? They'll have to be more careful about future venues, host the games at multiple locations of various attitudes, and potentially start earlier in the year, experts say.

"It may mean we have to go even further north, maybe some places in Scandinavia, places in Russia," said Ganguly. "Those may work together with some artificial snow."

Ideally, larger systemic changes should be put in place to prevent the situation from getting worse, including through the adoption of more renewable energy sources, reducing our burning of fossil fuels, and cutting down on deforestation, he added.

"But we will just have to be prepared for these scenarios that are already happening but may exacerbate," he said. "We'll see this more and more over the years."

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Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is accustomed to getting makeovers. It got another one Wednesday with the removal of the Crew Access Arm used by astronauts to board their rides to space.

Construction workers first carved the footprint for the launch pad from the Florida wetlands more than 60 years ago. NASA used the site to launch Saturn V rockets dispatching astronauts to the Moon, then converted the pad for the Space Shuttle program. The last shuttle flight lifted off from Pad 39A in 2011, and the agency leased the site to SpaceX for use as the departure point for the company’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

SpaceX started launching from Pad 39A in 2017, then installed a new Crew Access Arm on the pad’s tower the following year, replacing the aging shuttle-era arm that connected to the hatches of NASA’s orbiters. SpaceX added the new arm ahead of the first test flight of the company’s human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2019. Astronauts started using the pathway, suspended more than 200 feet above the pad surface, beginning with the first crew flight on a Dragon spacecraft in 2020.

Now, Pad 39A is undergoing another facelift in preparation for launches of SpaceX’s powerful Starship rocket. Construction of a new launch tower for Starship is well along about 1,000 feet east of the existing tower at Pad 39A, still inside the facility’s circular perimeter. SpaceX aims to launch the first Starship flight from Kennedy Space Center later this year, following a series of flights from the company’s Starbase test site in South Texas.

With the arrival of Starship, SpaceX is suspending Falcon 9 flights from Pad 39A in favor of launches from nearby Pad 40, located a few miles to the south at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, on property leased from the US Space Force. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, wrote on X in December that the decision will allow teams to “put full focus on Falcon Heavy launches and ramping Starship from the Cape.”

Astronauts are seen walking across the Crew Access Arm before boarding SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Au revoir, not adieu

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, primarily used to launch payloads for the Space Force and NASA, will continue flying from Pad 39A, the only site currently outfitted to accommodate the triple-core rocket. The next Falcon Heavy launch is scheduled for no earlier than April, with no more than a handful of flights per year planned for the rest of the 2020s.

Ground teams installed a Crew Access Arm at Pad 40 ahead of the first crew launch there in 2024. All future Crew Dragon flights will now depart from Pad 40 for the foreseeable future, beginning with the launch of the Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station later this week.

“It’s great to have two launch pads off the Florida coast. For our manifest going forward, we’re planning to launch most of our Falcon 9 launches off of Space Launch Complex 40. That will include all Dragon missions going forward,” said Lee Echerd, a SpaceX senior mission manager for human spaceflight. “That will allow our Cape team to focus at 39A on Falcon Heavy launches and hopefully our first Starship launches later this year.”

Pad 40 has been the primary Falcon 9 launch site for most of the rocket’s history, while Pad 39A provided a location for crew launches and an augmentation to support SpaceX’s growing launch cadence. But there are signs the Falcon 9 launch cadence, which reached 165 missions last year, may be peaking as the company turns its attention to Starship. And SpaceX has steadily reduced the time it takes to reconfigure Pad 40 between launches, cutting the turnaround time to less than 48 hours.

If needed, SpaceX officials said they could reinstall the crew arm for Dragon missions launching from Pad 39A.

Repairs required

Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, said there’s another pressing reason for removing the crew arm at Pad 39A. The bearings that connect the arm to the launch pad’s tower need repairs.

“To physically get access to those, the arm needs to be removed,” Gerstenmaier said. “Those bearings have to come out and they have to be reinstalled. We’ll do that work at the Kennedy Space Center. And the intent there is, we don’t need to put the arm back up … When we get a call-up for a mission and we have to go fly a mission, if it requires that, we have plenty of time to get the arm back up.”

SpaceX has continued launching Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from Pad 39A amid the nearby construction work to prepare for Starship flights. “That doesn’t impact our ability to launch from the pad,” Gerstenmaier said.

That could change as SpaceX begins testing and launching Starships from Kennedy Space Center. Starship launch operations may routinely force the closure of Pad 39A to personnel.

“The right thing to do is get those bearings replaced in the environment on the ground, make some upgrades to them, and then we’ll be ready to go and put the arm back up when it’s time to go fly, if we need to go fly,” Gerstenmaier said.

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 4:43 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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A collage of classic Byte magazine covers featuring illustrations by Robert Tinney.

Credit: Robert Tinney / Byte Magazine

On February 1, Robert Tinney, the illustrator whose airbrushed cover paintings defined the look and feel of pioneering computer magazine Byte for over a decade, died at age 78 in Baker, Louisiana, according to a memorial posted on his official website.

As the primary cover artist for Byte from 1975 to the late 1980s, Tinney became one of the first illustrators to give the abstract world of personal computing a coherent visual language, translating topics like artificial intelligence, networking, and programming into vivid, surrealist-influenced paintings that a generation of computer enthusiasts grew up with.

Tinney went on to paint more than 80 covers for Byte, working almost entirely in airbrushed Designers Gouache, a medium he chose for its opaque, intense colors and smooth finish. He said the process of creating each cover typically took about a week of painting once a design was approved, following phone conversations with editors about each issue’s theme. He cited René Magritte and M.C. Escher as two of his favorite artists, and fans often noticed their influence in his work.

A phone call that changed his life

A recent photo portrait of Robert Tinney provided by the family.

Credit: Family of Robert Tinney

Born on November 22, 1947, in Penn Yan, New York, Tinney moved with his family to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as a child. He studied illustration and graphic design at Louisiana Tech University, and after a tour of service during the Vietnam War, he began his career as a commercial artist in Houston.

His connection to Byte came through a chance meeting with Carl Helmers, who would later found the magazine. In a 2006 interview I conducted with Tinney for my blog, Vintage Computing and Gaming, he recalled how the relationship began: “One day the phone rang in my Houston apartment and it was Carl wanting to know if I would be interested in painting covers for Byte.” His first cover appeared on the December 1975 issue, just three months after the magazine launched.

Over time, his covers became so popular that he created limited-edition signed prints that he sold on his website for decades. “A friend suggested once that I should select the best covers and reproduce them as signed prints,” he said in 2006. “Byte was gracious enough to let me advertise the prints when they could fit in an ad (it did get bumped occasionally), and the prints were very popular in the Byte booth at the big computer shows, two or three of which my wife, Susan, and I attended per year. When an edition sold out, I then put the design on a T-shirt.”

Byte stopped commissioning Tinney’s cover art around 1987, opting for product photographs as competition in the computer magazine market intensified. His final cover was for the magazine’s 15th Anniversary issue in September 1990.

Computing’s Norman Rockwell

What made Tinney’s work distinctive was the fact that he was not a technical person. He had no engineering background and said in the 2006 interview that he always felt “a little uneasy” around Byte’s editors because he didn’t speak their technical language. But he saw that as a strength. “I’ve always thought that my interpretation of computer issues with non-technical visual metaphors was what gave my illustrations their distinctive character,” he told me. “So maybe that was a case of making lemonade out of lemons.”

That approach produced images that communicated instantly: a train running on a printed circuit board for an issue about computer engineering, a tiny computer wristwatch, or robots hatching from eggs. His 1981 Smalltalk cover featuring a colorful hot air balloon, according to his website, became a widely recognized symbol of object-oriented programming.

A collage of classic Byte magazine covers featuring illustrations by Robert Tinney.

Credit: Robert Tinney / Byte Magazine

After leaving Byte, Tinney created illustrations for electronics companies, including JDR Microdevices and Jameco Electronics, and created cover art for Borland’s Turbo Prolog and Turbo Basic software. He eventually transitioned to oil portraits and adopted Photoshop for commercial work. “Anything I can do with gouache and an airbrush, I can do about three times better with Photoshop,” he told me, “plus I don’t have to breathe the fumes!”

Tinney is survived by his wife of 48 years, Susan, and their three children, nine grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. A celebration of his life will be held in May 2026.

In his later years, Tinney grew philosophical about the future of illustration as a profession, noting that stock image databases had changed the economics of the field. But he remained upbeat about the value of artistic talent, comparing it in that 2006 interview to the skill of public speaking: “It’s a nice talent to have, but it isn’t easy to find someone who’ll pay you just to do it. You need to combine that basic talent with another skill to really have a marketable service.”

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 12:01 pm AEST (my time).

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If you've ever considered practicing meditation, you might believe you should relax, breathe, and empty your mind of distracting thoughts. Novices tend to think of meditation as the brain at rest, but a new international study concludes that this ancient practice is quite the opposite: Meditation is a state of heightened cerebral activity that profoundly alters brain dynamics.

Researchers from the University of Montreal and Italy’s National Research Council recruited 12 monks of the Thai Forest Tradition at Santacittārāma, a Buddhist monastery outside Rome. In a laboratory in Chieti-Pescara, scientists analyzed the brain activity of these meditation practitioners using magnetoencephalography (MEG), technology capable of recording with great precision the brain’s electrical signals.

The study focused on two classical forms of meditation: Samatha, a technique that focuses on sustained attention to a specific objective, often steady breathing, with the aim of stabilizing the mind and reaching a deep state of calm and concentration, and Vipassana, which is based on equanimous observation of sensations, thoughts, and emotions as they arise in order to develop mental clarity and a deeper understanding of the experience.

“With Samatha, you narrow your field of attention, somewhat like narrowing the beam of a flashlight; with Vipassana, on the contrary, you widen the beam,” explains Karim Jerbi, professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and one of the study’s coauthors. “Both practices actively engage attentional mechanisms. While Vipassana is more challenging for beginners, in mindfulness programs the two techniques are often practiced in alternation.”

The researchers recorded multiple indicators of brain dynamics, including neural oscillations, measures of signal complexity, and parameters related to so-called “criticality,” a concept borrowed from statistical physics that has been applied to neuroscience for 20 years. Criticality describes systems that operate efficiently on the border between order and chaos, and in neuroscience, it is considered a state optimal for processing information in a healthy brain.

“A brain that lacks flexibility adapts poorly, while too much chaos can lead to malfunction, as in epilepsy,” Jerbi explained in a press release. “At the critical point, neural networks are stable enough to transmit information reliably, yet flexible enough to adapt quickly to new situations. This balance optimizes the brain’s processing, learning, and response capacity.”

During the experiment, the monks’ brain activity was recorded by a high-resolution MEG system as they alternated from one type of meditation to the other with brief periods of rest in between. The data were then processed with advanced signal analysis and machine learning tools to extract different indicators of neural complexity and dynamics.

Striking a Balance

Results published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness show both forms of meditation increase the complexity of brain signals compared to a brain at rest. This finding suggests the brain in meditation does not simply calm down but rather enters a dynamic state rich with information. At the same time, the researchers observed widespread reductions in certain parameters linked to the global organization of neural activity.

One of the most striking findings in the analysis of the criticality deviation coefficient showed a clear distinction between Samatha and Vipassana. This indicates that, although both practices increase brain complexity, they do so through different dynamic configurations, consistent with their subjective experiences. In other words, Vipassana brings the practitioner closer to the balance of stability and flexibility, while Samatha produces a somewhat more stable and focused state. According to researchers, the closer the brain gets to this critical state of balance, the more responsively and efficiently it functions. This is reflected, for example, in a greater capacity to switch tasks or to store information.

Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that associates the practice of meditation with modulations in neural oscillations, an increase in the complexity of brain activity, and an alteration of brain criticality. “Since meditation is an active state that engages attentional processes, it affects several aspects of brain function, leading to improved well-being and a reduction in stress and symptoms of anxiety and depression,” Jerbi said.

By analyzing the ancient practice of meditation with cutting-edge technology, the study sheds new light on a thousand-year-old tradition. “This unique combination," Jerbi noted, "allowed us to document with unprecedented precision what happens in the meditating brain.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 11:59 am AEST (my time).

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A little more than two months ago, a Rocket Lab employee called the Stennis Space Center Fire Department from the nearby A3 test stand. There was a grass fire where Archimedes engines undergo testing. Could they please send personnel over?

According to the fire station’s November 30 dispatcher log, the employee said, “The fire started during a test when an anomaly caused an electrical box to catch fire.”

Satellite imagery from before and after the anomaly appears to show that the roof had been blown off the left test cell, one of two at the test stand at the historic NASA facility in southern Mississippi. One person with knowledge of the anomaly said, “The characterization of this as an electrical fire doesn’t reflect what actually occurred. This was a catastrophic engine explosion that resulted in significant infrastructure damage.”

According to two sources, this is one of at least two Archimedes engine tests that have failed in the past three months.

The engine test anomalies come at a critical time for Rocket Lab, as it is attempting to finalize development of a flight version of the Archimedes engine, which burns liquid oxygen and methane and has a sea-level thrust of 165,000 pounds. Nine of these engines will power the company’s much-anticipated Neutron rocket, which is aiming for a debut launch later this year.

Making mountains out of molehills?

In response to a query from Ars about the engine test anomalies, Rocket Lab Chief Executive Officer Pete Beck downplayed concerns.

“Eric, you are trying to make a story out of nothing,” Beck said. “We test to the limits, that’s part of developing a successful rocket. We often put the engine into very off nominal states to find the limits and sometimes they let go, this is normal and how you ensure rockets don’t fail in flight.”

Rocket companies do test engines to the point of failure. These tests often occur out of public view on private or government property. However, when NASASpaceflight installed cameras outside SpaceX’s McGregor engine test facilities in Texas, it became clear that rocket engines, such as the company’s new Raptor engine, are pushed to failure not infrequently. What is not clear is how often this failure is intentional.

Beck said Rocket Lab is presently pushing the Archimedes engine to find its failure modes and performance in edge cases.

“Right now we are in the part of the program where we are doing very nasty things to the engine like backing right off the suction pressure, inducing cavitation and exploring outside the run box,” he said. “These things can often lead to engines letting go. We have two test cells so we can do these types of tests and not interrupt our test cadence or production flow, hence there is zero impact to schedule, in fact 48 hours later we were running engines again.”

Beck has previously said that it is Rocket Lab’s goal to identify failures during component-level testing so that when Neutron launches, it has a high chance of reaching orbit on its first go.

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 11:58 am AEST (my time).

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The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom (circa 1000-1400 CE), along Peru’s southern coast, was one of the most wealthy and influential of its time before falling to the Inca and Spanish empires. Scientists have long puzzled over the foundation for that prosperity, and it seems one critical factor was bird poop, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“Seabird guano may seem trivial, yet our study suggests this potent resource could have significantly contributed to sociopolitical and economic change in the Peruvian Andes,” said co-author Jacob Bongers, a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney. “Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize (corn), and this agricultural surplus crucially helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy, driving their trade, wealth, population growth and regional influence, and shaped their strategic alliance with the Inca Empire. In ancient Andean cultures, fertiliser was power.”

Last November, Bongers co-authored a paper detailing evidence supporting the hypothesis that the mysterious “Band of Holes” on Mount Sierpe in the Andes might have been an ancient marketplace. Aerial photographs from the 1930s first revealed that long row of around 5,200 precisely aligned holes, seemingly organized into blocked sections, most likely constructed by the Chincha Kingdom. Scholars had suggested various hypotheses for what the site’s purpose may have been: defense, storage, or accounting, perhaps, or maybe to collect water and capture fog for local gardens. But nobody had any strong evidence for those suggestions.

Bongers conducted microbotanical sediment analysis of samples taken from the site and combined that data with new high-resolution aerial drone imagery. The former found traces of ancient maize pollens and reeds used in basket-weaving, indicating that the locals deposited plants transported in woven baskets or bundles into those holes. Bongers interpreted this as evidence of a pre-Inca marketplace where people exchanged local goods for the wares of mobile traders.

A nutrient-rich natural fertilizer

Now Bongers has turned his attention to analyzing the biochemical signatures of 35 maize samples excavated from buried tombs in the region. He and his co-authors found significantly higher levels of nitrogen in the maize than in the natural soil conditions, suggesting the Chincha used guano as a natural fertilizer. The guano from such birds as the guanay cormorant, the Peruvian pelican, and the Peruvian booby contains all the essential growing nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. All three species are abundant on the Chincha Islands, all within 25 kilometers of the kingdom.

“We’re all looking for the birds who did this.”

Diego H. and Claude Kolwelter, iNaturalist.org

 

Maize cobs from a tomb in the middle Chincha Valley in Peru.

C. O’Shea

 

Seabird imagery on various artifacts from the Peruvian southern coast.

Bongers et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0

 

19th century poster advertising the sale of Pacific seabird guano in the US.

Public domain

 

Those results were further bolstered by historical written sources describing how seabird guano was collected and its importance for trade and production of food. For instance, during colonial eras, groups would sail to nearby islands on rafts to collect bird droppings to use as crop fertilizer. The Lunahuana people in the Canete Valley just outside of Chincha were known to use bird guano in their fields, and the Inca valued the stuff so highly that it restricted access to the islands during breeding season and forbade the killing of the guano-producing birds on penalty of death.

The 19th-century Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi also reported observing the guano being used as fertilizer, with a fist-sized amount added to each plant before submerging entire fields in water. It was even imported to the US. The authors also pointed out that much of the iconography from Chincha and nearby valleys featured seabirds: textiles, ceramics, balance-beam scales, spindles, decorated gourds, adobe friezes and wall paintings, ceremonial wooden paddles, and gold and silver metalworks.

“The true power of the Chincha wasn’t just access to a resource; it was their mastery of a complex ecological system,” said co-author Jo Osborn of Texas A&M University. “They possessed the traditional knowledge to see the connection between marine and terrestrial life, and they turned that knowledge into the agricultural surplus that built their kingdom. Their art celebrates this connection, showing us that their power was rooted in ecological wisdom, not just gold or silver.”

PLoS ONE, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0341263 (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 11:57 am AEST (my time).

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China’s space program, striving to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, carried out a test flight of a new reusable booster and crew capsule late Tuesday (US time), and the results were spectacular.

The demonstration “marks a significant breakthrough in the development of [China’s] manned lunar exploration program,” the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement. China and the United States are racing to accomplish the next human landing on the Moon in a competition for national prestige and lunar resources. The Long March 10 rocket and Mengzhou spacecraft, both tested Tuesday, are core elements of China’s lunar architecture.

The launch of a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket, still in development, provided engineers with an opportunity to verify the performance of an important part of the new Mengzhou capsule’s safety system. The test began with liftoff of the Long March 10 booster from a new launch pad at Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province, at 10 pm EST Tuesday (03:00 UTC or 11 am Beijing time Wednesday).

A test version of the Mengzhou spacecraft, flying without anyone onboard, climbed into the stratosphere on top of the Long March booster before activating its launch abort motors a little more than a minute into the flight as the rocket reached the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure, known as Max-Q. The abort motors pulled the capsule away from the booster, simulating an in-flight escape that might be necessary to whisk crews away from a failing rocket. The Mengzhou spacecraft later deployed parachutes and splashed down offshore from Hainan Island.

NASA and SpaceX performed similar in-flight abort tests before flying astronauts on the Orion and Dragon spacecraft. The test boosters on the Orion and Dragon abort tests were expended, but the Long March 10 rocket wasn’t finished after the Mengzhou abort command. Remarkably, the booster continued its ascent without the crew capsule, soaring into space on the power of its kerosene-fueled YF-100 engines before reentering the atmosphere, reigniting its engines, and nailing a propulsive landing in the South China Sea, right next to a recovery barge waiting to bring it back to shore.

“The rocket’s first stage and the spacecraft’s return capsule were safely splashed down in the designated sea area according to procedures,” CMSA said.

A recap video released by Chinese state television shows highlights from the test flight.

One test, two goals

In a matter of minutes, Chinese engineers moved closer to human-rating the Mengzhou crew capsule and achieved the country’s most successful test of a reusable rocket.

“The test successfully verified the functional performance of the rocket’s first stage ascent and recovery phases, as well as the maximum dynamic pressure escape and recovery of the spacecraft,” CMSA said. “It also verified the compatibility of relevant interfaces across various engineering systems, accumulating valuable flight data and engineering experience for subsequent manned lunar exploration missions.”

The low-altitude demonstration of the Mengzhou launch abort system follows a ground-level abort test last year that verified the spacecraft’s ability to escape an emergency on the launch pad. The Long March 10 booster also completed two test-firings on the launch pad prior to the in-flight abort test. At the same time, Chinese engineers have run a prototype lunar lander through a series of ground tests.

The Mengzhou spacecraft is the vehicle China will use to ferry astronauts from the Earth to the vicinity of the Moon, where crews will transfer into a lander to carry them to the lunar surface. After a short stay on the Moon, Chinese astronauts will take off and rendezvous with the Mengzhou capsule to bring them home.

Chinese officials say the Mengzhou spacecraft will also service the country’s space station in low-Earth orbit, replacing the Shenzhou capsule in use since the 1990s. The Mengzhou capsule has the capability for “multiple reuses,” according to CMSA. Mengzhou flights to low-Earth orbit will carry crews of up to seven astronauts, with smaller crews for lunar missions.

A Chinese Long March 10 booster, powered by seven kerosene-fueled YF-100K engines, lifts off from the Wenchang

Space Launch Site on Hainan Island on February 11, 2026 (local time).

Credit: Liu Yang/VCG via Getty Images

Mengzhou, which means “dream vessel” in Chinese, is scheduled for its first orbital test flight later this year. The spacecraft will launch on a Long March 10A rocket and dock with China’s Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit. The Long March 10A, optimized for low-Earth orbit flights, will consist of a single reusable first-stage booster flying in combination with an upper stage. The full-size Long March 10, with 21 engines on three first-stage boosters connected together, will have the power to place payloads up to 70 metric tons into low-Earth orbit, and enough energy to propel the 26-metric-ton Mengzhou spacecraft to the Moon.

China’s leading state-owned space industry contractor, the China Aerospace and Science Technology Corporation (CASC), said the recovery of the Long March 10 booster after the in-flight abort test lays the foundation for “subsequent full-profile flight tests” and marks a “significant step” for China in “mastering reusable rocket technology.”

“The flight test further evaluated several key technologies, including the reliability of multiple engine restarts and high-altitude ignition during the rocket’s reentry phase, adaptability to complex force and thermal environments, and high-precision navigation control during the reentry phase.”

CASC oversees a sprawling industry of rocket and spacecraft manufacturers, including those responsible for designing and building the Mengzhou spacecraft and Long March 10 rocket.

The Mengzhou capsule splashes down in the South China Sea after the in-flight abort test.

Credit: China Manned Space Agency

The successful splashdown and recovery of the Long March 10 booster continues a busy period for China’s reusable rocket initiatives. No fewer than 10 Chinese companies are working on reusable rockets at different levels of maturity, all seeking to match the success of SpaceX’s reusable rocket program in the United States.

In December, two Chinese launch providers debuted new rockets—the Zhuque-3 and Long March 12A—with recoverable and reusable boosters. The rockets reached orbit, but their boosters missed their landings downrange from their launch pads.

Several Chinese companies have also completed high-altitude “hop tests” to evaluate vertical takeoff and vertical landing technologies ahead of launching their first orbital flights.

These advancements in China’s reusable rocket and lunar exploration programs come as NASA prepares to launch a crew of four astronauts on a loop around the far side of the Moon as soon as next month. A US-made lunar lander is likely still a few years away from being ready to transport crews to and from the lunar surface.

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 11:55 am AEST (my time).

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Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two.

The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and perhaps farther, though nobody knows—has been shrouded in mystery since it first came into view in the 1990s.

Over the past 30 years, astronomers have cataloged about 4,000 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), including a smattering of dwarf worlds, icy comets, and leftover planet parts. But that number is expected to increase tenfold in the coming years as observations from more advanced telescopes pour in. In particular, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will illuminate this murky region with its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began operating last year. Other next-generation observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will also help to bring the belt into focus.

“Beyond Neptune, we have a census of what's out there in the solar system, but it's a patchwork of surveys, and it leaves a lot of room for things that might be there that have been missed,” says Renu Malhotra, who serves as Louise Foucar Marshall Science Research Professor and Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona.

“I think that's the big thing that Rubin is going to do—fill out the gaps in our knowledge of the contents of the solar system,” she adds. “It's going to greatly advance our census and our knowledge of the contents of the solar system.”

As a consequence, astronomers are preparing for a flood of discoveries from this new frontier, which could shed light on a host of outstanding questions. Are there new planets hidden in the belt, or lurking beyond it? How far does this region extend? And are there traces of cataclysmic past encounters between worlds—both homegrown or from interstellar space—imprinted in this largely pristine collection of objects from the deep past?

“I think this will become a very hot field very soon, because of LSST,” says Amir Siraj, a graduate student at Princeton University who studies the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is a graveyard of planetary odds and ends that were scattered far from the sun during the messy birth of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. Pluto was the first KBO ever spotted, more than a half-century before the belt itself was discovered.

Since the 1990s, astronomers have found a handful of other dwarf planets in the belt, such as Eris and Sedna, along with thousands of smaller objects. While the Kuiper Belt is not completely static, it is, for the most part, an intact time capsule of the early solar system that can be mined for clues about planet formation.

For example, the belt contains weird structures that may be signatures of past encounters between giant planets, including one particular cluster of objects, known as a “kernel,” located at about 44 astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the distance between Earth and the sun (about 93 million miles).

While the origin of this kernel is still unexplained, one popular hypothesis is that its constituent objects—which are known as cold classicals—were pulled along by Neptune’s outward migration through the solar system more than 4 billion years ago, which may have been a bumpy ride.

The idea is that “Neptune got jiggled by the rest of the gas giants and did a bit of a jump; it's called the ‘jumping Neptune’ scenario,” says Wes Fraser, an astronomer at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, National Research Council of Canada, who studies the Kuiper Belt, noting that astronomer David Nesvorný came up with the idea.

“Imagine a snowplow driving along a highway, and lifting up the plow. It leaves a clump of snow behind,” he adds. “That same sort of idea is what left the clump of cold classicals behind. That is the kernel.”

In other words, Neptune tugged these objects along with it as it migrated outward, but then broke its gravitational hold over them when it “jumped,” leaving them to settle into the Kuiper Belt in the distinctive Neptune-sculpted kernel pattern that remains intact to this day.

Last year, Siraj and his advisers at Princeton set out to look for other hidden structures in the Kuiper Belt with a new algorithm that analyzed 1,650 KBOs—about 10 times as many objects as the 2011 study, led by Jean-Robert Petit, that first identified the kernel.

The results consistently confirmed the presence of the original kernel, while also revealing a possibly new “inner kernel,” located at about 43 AU, though more research is needed to confirm this finding, according to the team’s 2025 study.

“You have these two clumps, basically, at 43 and 44 AU,” Siraj explains. “It's unclear whether they're part of the same structure,” but “either way, it's another clue about, perhaps, Neptune’s migration, or some other process that formed these clumps.”

As Rubin and other telescopes discover thousands more KBOs in the coming years, the nature and possible origin of these mysterious structures in the belt may become clearer, potentially opening new windows into the tumultuous origins of our solar system.

In addition to reconstructing the early lives of the known planets, astronomers who study the Kuiper Belt are racing to spot unknown planets. The most famous example is the hypothetical giant world known as Planet Nine or Planet X, first proposed in 2016. Some scientists have suggested that the gravitational influence of this planet, if it exists, might explain strangely clustered orbits within the Kuiper Belt, though this speculative world would be located well beyond the belt, at several hundred AU.

Siraj and his colleagues have also speculated about the possibility of a Mercury- or Mars-sized world, dubbed Planet Y, that may be closer to the belt, at around 80 to 200 AU, according to their 2025 study. Rubin is capable of spotting these hypothetical worlds, though it may be challenging to anticipate the properties of planets that lurk this far from the sun.

“We know nothing about the atmospheres and surfaces of gas giant or ice giant type planets at 200, 300, or 400 AU,” Fraser says. “We know nothing about their chemistry. Every single time we look at an exoplanet, it behaves differently than what our models predict.”

“I think Planet Nine might very well just be a tar ball that is so dark that we can't see it, and that's why it hasn't been discovered yet,” he adds. “If we found that, I wouldn't be too surprised. And who knows what an Earth [in the belt] would look like? Certainly the compositional makeup will be different than a Mars, or an Earth, or a Venus, in the inner solar system.”

Observatories like Rubin and JWST may fill in these tantalizing gaps in our knowledge of the Kuiper Belt, and perhaps pinpoint hidden planets. But even if these telescopes reveal an absence of planets, it would be a breakthrough.

“There's a lot of room for discovery of large bodies,” says Malhotra. “That would be awesome, but if we don't find any, that would tell us something as well.”

“Not finding them up to some distance would give us estimates of how efficient or inefficient the planet formation process was,” she adds. “It would fill in some of the uncertainties that we have in our models.”

One other major open question about the Kuiper Belt is the extent of its boundaries. The belt suddenly tapers off at about 50 AU, an edge called the Kuiper cliff. This is a puzzling feature, because it suggests that our solar system has an anomalously small debris belt compared with other systems.

“The solar system looks kind of weird,” Fraser says. “The Kuiper cliff is a somewhat sharp delineation. Beyond that, we have no evidence that there was a disk of material. And yet, if you look at other stellar systems that have debris disks, the vast majority of those are significantly larger.”

“If we were to find a debris disk at, say, 100 AU, that would immediately make the solar system not weird, and quite average at that point,” he notes.

In 2024, Fraser and his colleagues presented hints of a possible undiscovered population of objects that may exist at about 100 AU—though he emphasizes that these are candidate detections, and are not yet confirmed to be a hidden outer ring.

However, even Rubin may not be able to resolve the presence of the tiny and distant objects that could represent a new outer limit of the Kuiper Belt. Time will tell.

As astronomers gear up for this major step change in our understanding of the Kuiper Belt, answers to some of our most fundamental questions hang in the balance. With its immaculate record of the early solar system, this region preserves secrets from the deep past. Here there are probably not dragons, but there may well be hidden planets, otherworldly structures, and discoveries that haven’t yet been imagined.

“I'd say the big question is, what's out there?” Malhotra says. “What are we missing?”

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 4:30 am AEST (my time).

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The upgraded Super Heavy booster slated to launch SpaceX’s next Starship flight has completed cryogenic proof testing, clearing a hurdle that resulted in the destruction of the company’s previous booster.

SpaceX announced the milestone in a social media post Tuesday: “Cryoproof operations complete for the first time with a Super Heavy V3 booster. This multi-day campaign tested the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, rolled the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) stainless-steel booster out of its factory and transported it a few miles away to Massey’s Test Site last week. The test crew first performed a pressure test on the rocket at ambient temperatures, then loaded super-cold liquid nitrogen into the rocket four times over six days, putting the booster through repeated thermal and pressurization cycles. The nitrogen is a stand-in for the cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen that will fill the booster’s propellant tanks on launch day.

The proof test is notable because it moves engineers closer to launching the first test flight of an upgraded version of SpaceX’s mega-rocket named Starship V3 or Block 3. SpaceX launched the previous version, Starship V2, five times last year, but the first three test flights failed. The last two flights achieved SpaceX’s goals, and the company moved on to V3.

Better results this time

The Super Heavy booster originally assigned to the first Starship V3 test flight failed during a pressure test in November. The rocket’s liquid oxygen tank ruptured under pressure, and SpaceX scrapped the booster and moved on to the next in line—Booster 19. This Super Heavy vehicle appears have sailed through stress testing, and SpaceX returned the booster to the factory early Monday. There, technicians will mount 33 Raptor engines to the bottom of the rocket and install the booster’s grid fins.

These components are changed from Starship V2. The Raptor engines set to debut on Starship V3 produce more thrust and include changes to improve reliability, according to SpaceX. The Raptor 3s are lighter with plumbing and sensors integrated into the engine’s main structure, eliminating the requirement for self-contained heat shields between the engines at the base of the rocket.

The new booster design only uses three grid fins, not four, to provide controllability during descent. The aerosurfaces help stabilize the rocket as it returns to Earth for recovery. The hot-staging ring at the top of the new version of the Super Heavy booster is integrated with the rocket to enable its return to Earth for reuse. The ring was jettisoned and expended on previous Starship flights.

Vapors from the boil-off of cryogenic liquid nitrogen surround the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) Super Heavy booster.

Credit: SpaceX

After receiving its engines and grid fins, the Super Heavy booster will roll out to the launch pad at Starbase. SpaceX’s launch team will fill it with methane and liquid oxygen for a test-firing of its 33 engines.

Meanwhile, the first of SpaceX’s upgraded Starship vehicles—essentially the upper stage that flies on top of the Super Heavy booster—will travel to the Massey’s Test Site for its own cryogenic proof test campaign. It is also expected to undergo a static fire test of its six Raptor engines.

Assuming that all goes according to plan, SpaceX could be in position to launch the first Starship V3 test flight before the end of March. This will be the 12th full-scale Starship/Super Heavy test flight overall, and the mission will likely follow the same trajectory as previous flights, with Starship arcing halfway around the world from South Texas to a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

With the upcoming launch, SpaceX is eager to prove Starship V3’s readiness for more ambitious test flights, including an important orbital refueling experiment considered a stepping stone toward sending future Starships to the Moon, Mars, and other distant destinations.

NASA officials are closely watching Starship V3’s development because the refueling demonstration is on the critical path for the agency’s Artemis lunar program. A human-rated version of Starship is NASA’s primary option for a Moon lander to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface on the Artemis III mission, the next Artemis flight after the Artemis II circumlunar mission that is awaiting liftoff in the coming weeks.

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Posted Wednesday 11 February 2026 at 11:46 am AEST (my time).

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xAI co-founder Tony Wu abruptly announced his resignation from the company late Monday night, the latest in a string of senior executives to leave the Grok-maker in recent months.

In a post on social media, Wu expressed warm feelings for his time at xAI, but said it was “time for my next chapter.” The current era is one where “a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible,” he wrote.

The mention of what “a small team” can do could hint at a potential reason for Wu’s departure. xAI reportedly had 1,200 employees as of March 2025, a number that included AI engineers and those focused more on the X social network. That number also included 900 employees that served solely as “AI tutors,” though roughly 500 of those were reportedly laid off in September.

Wu’s departure comes just months after fellow xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin departed the company in August to start his own AI safety-focused venture capital firm. Co-founders Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy also departed the company since its 2023 founding, and co-founder Greg Yang stepped back from the company last month amid complications from chronic Lyme disease.

Other recent high-profile xAI departures include general counsel Robert Keele, communications executives Dave Heinzinger and John Stoll, head of product engineering Haofei Wang, and CFO Mike Liberatore, who left for a role at OpenAI after just 102 days of what he called “120+ hour weeks.”

A different company

Wu leaves a company that is in a very different place than it was when he helped create it in 2023. His departure comes just days after CEO Elon Musk merged xAI with SpaceX, a move Musk says will allow for orbiting data centers and, eventually, “scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!” But some see the move as more of a financial engineering play, combining xAI’s nearly $1 billion a year in losses and SpaceX’s roughly $8 billion in annual profits into a single, more IPO-ready entity.

Musk previously rolled social media network X (formerly Twitter) into a unified entity with xAI back in March. At the time of the deal, X was valued at $33 billion, 25 percent less than Musk paid for the social network in 2022.

xAI has faced a fresh wave of criticism in recent months over Grok’s willingness to generate sexualized images of minors. That has led to an investigation by California’s attorney general and a police raid of the company’s Paris offices.

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Posted Wednesday 11 February 2026 at 11:45 am AEST (my time).

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The company said in a news release that the phased rollout will require users to verify their age to access age-restricted channels, servers and other parts of the platform. Users who don't verify their age will be defaulted into a "teen-appropriate experience."

"Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility," Savannah Badalich, Discord's head of product policy, said in the news release.

Discord said that users will be able to submit an ID to the platform's "vendor partners" or take part in what it calls "facial age estimation." The platform said that  age estimation  would use "video selfies" that would "never leave a user’s device." It added that more options will become available in the future. The announcement comes after the platform launched a similar setup in the United Kingdom and Australia.

"This global rollout builds on that approach to deliver consistent, age-appropriate protections worldwide," the company said.

Age verification system announcement comes after data breach

Discord's announcement comes amid increasing concerns for child protection and internet privacy on major online platforms.

The company's age estimation feature is similar to that of Roblox's AI-powered age-estimator facial scan that became mandatory to use the game's chat feature. Roblox is facing nearly 80 active lawsuits as attorneys general around the country investigate the popular game, with some parents alleging their childrenencountered predators through the platform.

But some digital freedom advocates disagree with Discord's new policy. In a post on X, the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed to a January article saying the organization is "against age-gating and age verification mandates."

"Every day, many people are asked to verify their age across the web, despite prominent cases of sensitive data getting leaked in the process," the article said.

Discord revealed in October that around 70,000 users suffered a data exposure that occurred after hackers compromised a vendor that the platform uses for age-related appeals. The company noted that the potentially exposed data included government ID photos.

Source : https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2026/02/09/discord-age-verification-measures/88596778007/

As more than 120 million people tuned in to the Super Bowl for kickoff on Sunday evening, SpaceX founder Elon Musk turned instead to his social network. There, he tapped out an extended message in which he revealed that SpaceX is pivoting from the settlement of Mars to building a “self-growing” city on the Moon.

“For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years,” Musk wrote, in part.

Elon Musk tweet at 6:24 pm ET on Sunday.

Credit: X/Elon Musk

This is simultaneously a jolting and practical decision coming from Musk.

Why it’s a jolting decision

A quarter of a century ago, Musk founded SpaceX with a single-minded goal: settling Mars. One of his longest-tenured employees, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, described her very first interview with Musk in 2002 to me as borderline messianic.

“He was talking about Mars, his Mars Oasis project,” Shotwell said. “He wanted to do Mars Oasis, because he wanted people to see that life on Mars was doable, and we needed to go there.”

She was not alone in this description of her first interaction with Musk. The vision for SpaceX has not wavered. Even in the company’s newest, massive Starship rocket factory at the Starbase facility in South Texas—also known as the Gateway to Mars—there are reminders of the red planet everywhere. For example, the carpet inside Musk’s executive conference room is rust red, the same color as the surface of Mars.

In the last 25 years, Musk has gone from an obscure, modestly wealthy person to the richest human being ever, from a political moderate to chief supporter of Donald Trump; from a respected entrepreneur to, well, to a lot of things to a lot of people: world’s greatest industrialist/supervillain/savant/grifter-fraudster.

But one thing that has remained constant across the Muskverse is his commitment to “extending the light of human consciousness” and to the belief that the best place to begin humanity’s journey toward becoming a multi-planetary species was Mars.

Until Sunday night.

Why it’s a practical decision

We cannot know Musk’s full rationale for pivoting to the Moon, at least in the near term. Only a year ago, he referred to the Moon as a “distraction.” But now, apparently, it’s not. What we can do is look at what has changed in the last 13 months.

The first change is that the one company with the potential to seriously challenge SpaceX in spaceflight over the next decade, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, has finally started to deliver. The company has now flown and landed its New Glenn rocket. Multiple sources have told Ars that Bezos has told his team to go “all in” on lunar exploration. This includes the development of a crew transportation system, Blue Moon Mark 1.5, that does not require orbital refueling. This raises the possibility that Blue Origin might land humans on the Moon before Starship, a threat sources at Starbase say SpaceX is beginning to take seriously.

The other major change is Musk’s obsession with artificial intelligence and his view that AI and space are increasingly intertwined in their ambitions. SpaceX and xAI recently merged, and a major focus of Musk going forward will be to construct orbital data centers to provide enormous computing resources for his vision of humanity’s online future.

He has also spoken increasingly of becoming a Kardashev-level civilization, a reference to a Soviet astronomer who conceived that humanity would advance by first being able to tap and store all energy sources available on its planet, and then by directly collecting a star’s energy through technology like a Dyson sphere. Musk has also made frequent references on social media to building a “mass driver” on the Moon.

All of this may sound like it’s straight out of the pages of a science-fiction novel, and it pretty much is. But the reality is that the Moon has reliable stores of oxygen and silicon, and building a catapult-like mechanism on the airless world would be an efficient way to move materials into space to build large orbital factories, data centers, solar farms, or even O’Neill cylinders.

In this, Musk is starting to sound a lot more like Bezos when it comes to his vision for human habitation in space, rather than the Mars-first advocate he has always been.

One other sobering thing to think about in terms of a lunar mass-driver: it is potentially an extremely potent weapon to threaten Earth with large projectiles. We cannot know if Musk has had any conversations with US military officials about this, but anyone who has read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein will understand Luna’s position as the ultimate high ground. And the US Space Force is not ignorant of this.

So what does all this mean?

In the short term, it does not mean a whole lot. To anyone paying attention, SpaceX was not on track to send a Starship to Mars in 2026, and the 2028 window was looking rather unlikely as well. Mars was always in the distance, and now it will remain so.

By focusing on the Moon, Musk is making a decision that benefits NASA and the United States. Because for all of Blue Origin’s promise with a slimmed-down lunar lander, Starship offers a promising avenue to return humans to the Moon in the near term.

Another advantage of Starship is its enormous payload capacity, able to bring 100 metric tons or more of cargo down to the Moon. For anyone seeking to build a commercial business on the Moon, Musk’s 180-degree pivot represents an enormous opportunity.

For Mars advocates, however, Musk’s turn is a bitter pill to swallow. There have long been many dreamers who spoke of settling Mars, but only Musk actually built the hardware and financial war chest to make such dreams a reality. And it is true that, in the long term, Mars offers a more favorable (although still inhospitable) environment for human settlement, with a thin atmosphere, water ice both on the surface and beneath the ground, methane, and more.

But those dreams are now deferred as Musk has bowed to a harsh reality: The Moon may be hard, but it is a lot easier to develop than Mars, which is only accessible every 26 months when the planets align.

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Posted Tuesday 10 February 2026 at 4:14 am AEST (my time).

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The latter could prove an important innovation in the audio market, since a lower noise floor is one of the most desirable features audiophiles want. Many spend large sums on cables and devices, sometimes even on certain "snake oil" products.

MAX phases are compounds made of an early transition metal combined with carbon or nitrogen, arranged in layered structures. This makes them good starting points for 2D materials, which are only a few atoms thick. A well-known group of such materials, MXenes, is usually made by removing metallic A-site atoms from MAX phases. But when non-metallic atoms such as oxygen, sulfur, or phosphorus occupy the A sites, both M–A and M–X sublayers are strongly covalent, blocking the usual etching process.

The researchers discovered that these covalent sublayers behave differently when exposed to high-temperature molten states. By using this difference in reactivity, they were able to structurally modify the sublayers, replacing X-site atoms with non-metals like boron, selenium, sulfur, phosphorus, and carbon. They also showed that Lewis acidic cations can lower the oxidation state of M elements, making it possible to attach more non-metals and turn non-van der Waals MAX phases into van der Waals layered materials. Prof. Huang explained, “By controlling the total formation enthalpy of a reaction, we can achieve targeted replacement of sublayer atoms. This opens a pathway to design layered materials with tailored properties.”

Enthalpy is a scientific term used in chemistry and physics to describe the total heat content of a system. In this research, controlling enthalpy allowed the team to carefully replace certain atoms in the layered structure of MAX phases, ensuring the reaction happened as intended.

Using this approach, the team created a new family of compounds called early transition metal chalcogenide carbides/nitrides (TMXCs). These materials combine features of MXenes and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). The atomic arrangements in monolayer TMXCs are similar to MXenes, but the oxidation states of the M-site atoms can be adjusted by both the substituted X-site atoms and intercalated cations. The researchers also showed that TMXCs can be exfoliated into monolayer nanosheets using electron-donor “chemical scissors,” producing single-atom-thick sheets with unique properties.

Both experiments and calculations confirmed that changing the X-element in the M–X sublayer alters the electronic structure of TMXCs. This ability to control structure and properties could make them useful in electrochemical energy storage, batteries, catalysis, and shielding against EMI.

Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nature

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

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Posted Monday 9 February 2026 at 6:03 pm AEST (my time).

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