Last month, over a dozen automobile and smartphone manufacturers gathered in Palo Alto, California, for the 16th annual “Plugfest,” hosted by the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) to test out the latest in digital key technology.

Plugfest is an opportunity for companies that are typically heated rivals to come together in the spirit of cooperation to ensure that digital keys work across different devices and vehicle brands

Digital keys, which allow vehicle owners to lock, unlock, and start their cars using smartphones or other digital devices, are becoming more commonplace. And the goal of Plugfest was to provide a place for CCC members — ranging from automakers and smart device manufacturers to cloud providers and chip makers — to come together to test interoperability and real-world performance across vehicles, devices, and wireless technologies. Plugfest is an opportunity for companies that are typically heated rivals to come together in the spirit of cooperation to ensure that digital keys work across different devices and vehicle brands.

But the event was also an acknowledgement that as modern cars get more complex, these validation efforts will grow increasingly important to ensure that digital keys can keep pace with the innovation in the auto and smartphone markets. As automakers turn their focus to software-defined vehicles that can receive over-the-air updates and seemingly improve over time, digital keys will need to improve too.

“It’s a hard technology problem when you’re trying to resolve wireless access with such fragmented set of device hardware and then device software,” Wassym Bensaid, chief software officer at Rivian, told The Verge. RV Tech, the joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen, hosted Plugfest this past month.

Bensaid said the complexity favors companies like Rivian with more vertical integration. Seamless phone-to-car connectivity requires deep integration across vehicle software, cloud systems, and a highly fragmented device ecosystem spanning iOS and multiple Android variants with differing wireless characteristics. Industry standards like CCC are essential, he argued, when aligning these technologies.

Much of the power seems to rest in the hands of phone manufacturers, who need to ensure that each auto brand adheres to their rigid standards around data security and privacy. At last year’s WWDC, for example, Apple announced that it would soon support digital car keys from 13 vehicle brands, including Audi, Cadillac, Chevy, Hyundai, Kia, GMC, Volvo, Rivian, and others — bringing the total number to 33 brands. The keys are added to the Wallet app, and can be used to lock, unlock, and start the vehicle using technology like NFC, UWB, or BLE — depending on which are supported by the vehicle.

CCC is doing most of the heavy lifting by bringing together most major car companies as well as Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi. It also includes the FiRa Consortium, a nonprofit that supports ultra wideband and includes Apple, Google, Cisco, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others as members. CCC President Alysia Johnson said that since launching the Digital Key Certification Program in late 2023, the group has seen a dramatic increase in certifications, from two in 2024 to 115 in 2025.

This year, CCC is rolling out version 4 of its specification, which offers more support for fleet owners like municipal governments, as well as rental car companies. Another major enhancement is improved “friend sharing,” which allows vehicle owners to securely and easily share access with others, regardless of the recipient’s phone type or manufacturer. Johnson gave the example of letting your neighbor borrow your car if theirs broke down by texting them a secure copy of your car key. And as soon as they’re done, you can easily revoke access to the digital key.

“It’s just like sharing a photo, if you’ve ever texted a photo to somebody,” she said. “They don’t need to have an app for my vehicle. They don’t need to have my same kind of phone.”

Digital keys are hardly a flawless system. Reddit is teeming with posts from people complaining about their digital keys in a variety subreddits, including those for Kia, BYD, Rivian, Volvo, and others. “I’ll be standing there with the app open and it won’t recognize I’m there,” one Tesla Model 3 owner said in a post last month. Like any software-based system, flaws remain a persistent problem.

From Rivian’s position, UWB represents the technology with the most reliability, Bensaid said. UWB’s superior accuracy and security, particularly when combined with BLE for proximity-based locking and unlocking, gives customers a better experience through its accuracy, he added.

“Some of the anecdotal feedback that we had from our customers as we launched CCC end of last year, some of them are pointing to accuracy at the edge,” Bensaid said, “which is something that they’re really enjoying now.”

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Posted Monday 9 February 2026 at 3:44 am AEST (my time).

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An autonomous vehicle drives down a lonely stretch of highway. Suddenly, a massive tornado appears in the distance. What does the driverless vehicle do next?

This is just one of the scenarios that Waymo can simulate in the “hyper realistic” virtual world that it has just created with help from Google’s DeepMind. Waymo’s World Model is built using Genie 3, Google’s new AI world model that can generate virtual interactive spaces with text or images as prompts. But Genie 3 isn’t just for creating bad knockoffs of Nintendo games; it can also build photorealistic and interactive 3D environments “adapted for the rigors of the driving domain,” Waymo says.

Simulation is a critical component in autonomous vehicle development, enabling developers to test their vehicles in a variety of settings and scenarios, many of which may only come up in the rarest of occasions — without any physical risk of harming passengers or pedestrians. AV companies use these virtual environments to run through a battery of tests, racking up millions — or even billions — of miles in the process, in the hopes of better training their vehicles for any possible “edge case” that they may encounter in the real world.

Waymo encounters a simulated tornado.

Image: Waymo

 

What kind of edge cases is Waymo testing? In addition to the aforementioned tornado, the company can also simulate a snow-covered Golden Gate Bridge, a flooded suburban cul-de-sac with floating furniture, a neighborhood engulfed in flames, or even an encounter with a rogue elephant. In each scenario, the Waymo robotaxi’s lidar sensors generate a 3D rendering of the surrounding environment, including the obstacle in the road.

“The Waymo World Model can generate virtually any scene—from regular, day-to-day driving to rare, long-tail scenarios—across multiple sensor modalities,” the company says in a blog post.

Look out, an elephant!

Image: Waymo

 

Waymo says Genie 3 is ideal for creating virtual worlds for its robotaxis, citing three unique mechanisms: driving action control, scene layout control, and language control. Driving action control allows developers to simulate “what if” counterfactuals, while scene layout control enables customization of the road layouts, like traffic signals and other road user behavior. Waymo describes language control as its “most flexible tool” that allows for time-of-day and weather condition adjustment. This is especially helpful if developers are trying to simulate low-light or high-glare conditions, in which the vehicle’s various sensors may have difficulty seeing the road ahead.

The Waymo World Model can also take real-world dashcam footage and transform it into a simulated environment, for the “highest degree of realism and factuality” in virtual testing, the company says. And it can create longer simulated scenes, such as ones that run at 4X speed playback, without sacrificing image quality or computer processing.

“By simulating the ‘impossible,’ we proactively prepare the Waymo Driver for some of the most rare and complex scenarios,” the company says in its blog post.

This isn’t the first time that Waymo has leaned on Google’s vast AI resources to improve its autonomous driving techniques. Waymo’s EMMA (End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving) training model was built using Google’s Gemini. Waymo is reportedly working on a Gemini-based in-car voice assistant. And DeepMind, the company’s AI lab, has provided solutions to Waymo to help reduce its rate of “false positives” in its sensor data.

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Posted Saturday 7 February 2026 at 4:29 am AEST (my time).

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Last year, a team of scientists presented evidence that spruce trees in Italy’s Dolomite mountains synchronized their bioelectrical activity in anticipation of a partial solar eclipse—a potentially exciting new insight into the complexities of plant communication. The findings naturally generated media interest and even inspired a documentary. But the claims drew sharp criticism from other researchers in the field, with some questioning whether the paper should even have been published. Those initial misgivings are outlined in more detail in a new critique published in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

For the original paper, Alessandro Chiolerio, a physicist at the Italian Institute of Technology, collaborated with plant ecologist Monica Gagliano of Southern Cross University and several others conducting field work in the Costa Bocche forest in the Dolomites. They essentially created an EKG for trees, attaching electrodes to three spruce trees (ranging in age from 20 to 70 years) and five tree stumps in the forest.

Those sensors recorded a marked increase in bioelectrical activity during a partial solar eclipse on October 22, 2022. The activity peaked mid-eclipse and faded away in its aftermath. Chiolerio et al. interpreted this spike in activity as a coordinated response among the trees to the darkened conditions brought on by the eclipse. And older trees’ electrical activity spiked earlier and more strongly than the younger trees, which Chiolerio et al. felt was suggestive of trees developing response mechanisms—a kind of memory captured in associated gravitational effects. Older trees might even transmit this knowledge to younger trees, the authors suggested, based on the detection of bioelectrical waves traveling between the trees.

Soon, other plant scientists weighed in, expressing strong skepticism and citing the study’s small sample size and large number of variables, among other concerns. Justine Karst, a forest ecologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, unfavorably compared Chiolerio et al.’s findings to a 2019 study claiming evidence for the controversial “wood-wide web” concept, in which trees communicate and share resources via underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi. Karst co-authored a 2023 study demonstrating insufficient evidence for the wood-wide-web.

Science or pseudoscience?

Ariel Novoplansky, an evolutionary ecologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, was among those who objected to the study’s publication—so much so that he co-authored the new critique with his Ben-Gurion colleague Hezi Yizhaq. He thinks it’s far more likely that the spikes in bioelectrical activity were due to temperature shifts or lightning strikes.

“My serious doubts had arisen from the very basic premise regarding the adaptive rationale the entire study hinged upon—namely, that those trees would be functionally affected by such a minor ‘passing cloud’ effects of such a (very) partial eclipse [with] a mere 10.5 percent reduction in sunlight for two hours,” Novoplansky told Ars. “I then thought about the possibility that thunderstorms might be involved in the heightened ‘anticipatory’ electrical activity of the trees, and it rolled from there.”

The forest trees frequently experience far greater fluctuations in cloud cover, and hence light quality and quantity, than occurred during the partial eclipse, according to Novoplansky. He also objected to the suggestion of older trees sharing prior eclipse “knowledge” with younger trees, pointing out that each solar eclipse follows a unique path. So even if older trees “remembered” an earlier eclipse, it would not translate into being able to anticipate future ones. And any gravitational changes associated with a partial eclipse would be minor, on par with a new moon. Thus, for Novoplansky, the 2025 paper “represents the encroachment of pseudoscience into the heart of biological research.”

“This field of plant behavior/communication is rampant with poorly designed ‘studies’ that are then twisted into a narrative that promotes personal worldviews and/or enhances personal celebrity,” said James Cahill, a plant ecologist at the University of Alberta in Calgary, Canada, who voiced objections when the original paper was published and is cited in Novoplansky’s acknowledgements. “The textbook example of this is the [Suzanne] Simard ‘mother tree’ debacle. Ariel is trying to get the science back on track, as are many of us.”

(Cahill recently co-authored a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on the issue of cognition in plants, including commentary on “how we might stop fighting and do actual science.”)

“He puts forward logical alternative hypotheses,” said Cahill of Novoplansky’s critique. “The original work should have tested among a number of different hypotheses rather than focusing on a single interpretation. This is in part what makes it pseudoscience and promoting a worldview.”

Granted, “[p]lants have extensive and well established mechanisms of communication, with that of volatiles being the most well studied and understood,” he added. “There is also growing recognition that root exudates play a role in plant-plant interactions, though this is only now being deeply investigated. Nothing else, communication through mychorriza, has withstood independent investigation.”

Chiolerio and Gagliano stand by their research, saying they have always acknowledged the preliminary nature of their results. “We measured [weather-related elements like] temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and daily solar radiation,” Chiolerio told Ars. “None of them shows strong correlation with the transients of the electrome during the eclipse. We did not measure environmental electric fields, though; therefore, I cannot exclude effects induced by nearby lightnings. We did not have gravitational probes, did not check neutrinos, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, etc.”

“I’m not going to debate an unpublished critique in the media, but I can clarify our position,” Gagliano told Ars. “Our [2025] paper reports an empirical electrophysiological/synchrony pattern in the eclipse window, including changes beginning prior to maximum occultation, and we discussed candidate cues explicitly as hypotheses rather than demonstrated causes. Describing weather/lightning as ‘more parsimonious’ is not evidence of cause. Regional lightning strike counts and other proxies can motivate a competing hypothesis, but they do not establish causal attribution at the recording site without site-resolved, time-aligned field measurements. Without those measurements, the lightning/weather account remains a hypothesis among other possibilities rather than a supported or default explanation for the signals we recorded.”

“We acknowledged the limited sample size and described the work as an initial field report; follow-up work is ongoing and will be communicated through peer-reviewed channels,” Gagliano added. As for the suggestion of pseudoscience, “I won’t engage with labels; scientific disagreements should be resolved with transparent methods, data, and discriminating tests.”

“It seems that the public appeal is something particularly painful for the colleagues who published their opinion on Trends in Plant Science,” Chiolerio said. “We did not care about public appeal, we wanted to share as much as possible the results of years of hard work that led to interesting data.”

DOI: Trends in Plant Science, 2026. 10.1016/j.tplants.2025.12.001  (About DOIs).

DOI: A. Chiolerio et al., Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.241786  (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 7 February 2026 at 4:28 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.28 of the Rocket Report! The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn’t solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA’s second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA’s sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week. NASA will conduct another fueling test in the coming weeks after troubleshooting the rocket’s leaky fueling line, but the launch of the Artemis II mission is off until March.

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

Blue Origin “pauses” New Shepard flights. Blue Origin has “paused” its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative, Ars reports. The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

Moon first… So why is Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos more than a quarter of a century ago, ending the company’s longest-running program? “We will redirect our people and resources toward further acceleration of our human lunar capabilities inclusive of New Glenn,” wrote the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, in an internal email on January 30. “We have an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of our nation’s goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence.” The cancellation came, generally, as a surprise to Blue Origin employees. The company flew its most recent mission a week prior to the announcement, launching six people into space.

Firefly nears return to flight. Firefly Aerospace is preparing to launch its next 1-ton-class Alpha rocket later this month from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The Texas-based company announced last month that it shipped the Alpha rocket to the California spaceport, and a follow-up post on social media on January 29 showed a video of the rocket rolling out to its launch pad for testing. “Alpha is vertical on the pad and getting ready for our static fire ahead of the Stairway to Seven mission!” Firefly wrote on X.

Getting back on track... This is an important mission for Firefly’s Alpha rocket program. On the most recent Alpha flight last April, the rocket’s first stage exploded in flight, moments after separation from the second stage. The blast wave damaged the upper stage engine, preventing it from reaching orbit with a small commercial tech demo satellite. Then, in September, the booster stage for the next Alpha launch was destroyed during a preflight test in Texas. Firefly says the upcoming mission is purely a test flight and won’t fly with any customer payloads. The company announced that an upgraded “Block II” version of the Alpha rocket will debut on the subsequent mission.

China to test next-gen crew capsule. China is gearing up for an important test of its new Mengzhou spacecraft, perhaps as soon as February 11, according to airspace warning notices issued around the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan Island. Images from public viewing sites around the launch site showed a test model of the Mengzhou spacecraft being lifted atop a booster stage this week. The flight next week is expected to include an in-flight test of the capsule’s launch abort system. Mengzhou is China’s next-generation crew spacecraft for human flights to the Moon. It will also replace China’s Shenzhou crew spacecraft used for flights to the Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit.

Proceeding apace... The in-flight abort test follows a pad abort test of the Mengzhou spacecraft last year as China marches toward the program’s first orbital test flight. The booster stage for the in-flight abort test is a subscale version of China’s new Long March 10 rocket, the partially reusable human-rated launcher under development for the country’s lunar program. Therefore, next week’s milestone flight will serve as an important test of not only the Mengzhou spacecraft but also its rocket.

SpaceX confirms upper stage malfunction. SpaceX kicked off the month of February with a Monday morning Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. However, the rocket experienced an anomaly near the end of the mission, Spaceflight Now reports. The rocket deployed its payload of 25 Starlink satellites as planned, but SpaceX said the Falcon 9’s second stage “experienced an off-nominal condition” during preparation for an engine firing to steer back into the atmosphere for a guided, destructive reentry. The rocket remained in a low-altitude orbit and made an unguided reentry later in the week.

Launches temporarily on hold... “Teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and corrective actions before returning to flight,” SpaceX said in a statement. A Starlink launch from Florida originally planned for this week is now on hold. SpaceX returned the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing, containing the Starlink payloads, from the launch pad back to the hangar at Kennedy Space Center to wait for the next launch opportunity. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 team in Florida is now focusing on preparations for launch of the Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station, targeted for no earlier than February 11. The schedule for Crew-12 will hinge on how quickly SpaceX can complete the investigation into Monday’s upper stage malfunction. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Amazon’s new booking with SpaceX. Amazon has purchased an additional 10 Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX as part of its efforts to accelerate deployment of its broadband satellite constellation, Space News reports. The deal, which neither Amazon nor SpaceX previously announced, was disclosed in an Amazon filing with the Federal Communications Commission on January 30, seeking an extension of a July deadline to deploy half of its Amazon Leo constellation. Amazon has launched only 180 satellites of its planned 3,232-satellite constellation, rendering the July deadline unattainable. Amazon asked the FCC to extend the July deadline by two years or waive it entirely, but did not request an extension to the 2029 deadline for full deployment of the constellation.

“Near-term shortage in launch capacity”… In the filing with the FCC, Amazon said it faces a “near-term shortage of launch capacity” and is securing additional launch options “wherever available.” That effort includes working with SpaceX, whose Starlink constellation directly competes with Amazon Leo. Amazon bypassed SpaceX entirely when it made its initial orders for more than 80 Amazon Leo launches with United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But Amazon later reserved three launches with SpaceX that flew last year and has now added 10 more SpaceX launches to its manifest. So far, Amazon has only launched satellites on ULA’s soon-to-retire Atlas V rocket and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Amazon has not started flying on the new Vulcan, Ariane 6, or New Glenn rockets, which comprise the bulk of the constellation’s launch bookings. That could change next week with the first launch of Amazon Leo satellites on Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China launches satellite for Algeria. Algeria’s Alsat-3B mission, an Earth observation satellite developed in collaboration with China, launched aboard a Chinese Long March 2C rocket on January 30, Connecting Africa reports. Alsat-3B is the twin of Alsat-3A, which launched from China earlier in the month. Algeria’s government signed a contract with China in 2023 covering the development and launch of the two Alsat-3 satellites. Both satellites are designed to provide high‑resolution Earth observation imagery, enhancing Algeria’s geospatial intelligence capabilities.

Belt, road, and orbit… In a joint statement, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the Algerian remote-sensing satellite project is another successful example of China-Algeria aerospace cooperation and an important demonstration of the two nations’ comprehensive strategic partnership. China has inked similar space-related partnerships to produce and launch satellites for other African nations, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Sudan.

Soyuz-5 launch set for March. Just a few months ago, Russia aimed to launch the first flight of the new Soyuz-5 medium-lift rocket before the end of 2025. Now, the Soyuz-5’s debut test flight is targeted for the end of March, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Dmitry Baranov, the deputy head of Roscosmos, announced the new schedule at a scientific conference in Moscow. The mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan would mark the first flight of a new Russian rocket since 2014.

A reactionary rocket… Ars has reported on the Soyuz-5 project before. While the rocket will use a new overall design, the underlying technology is not all that new. The Soyuz-5, also named Irtysh, is intended to be a replacement for the Zenit rocket, a medium-lift launcher developed in the final years before the fall of the Soviet Union. The Zenit rocket’s main stages were manufactured in Ukraine, and tensions between Russia and Ukraine spelled the end of the Zenit program even before Russia invaded its neighbor in 2022. The Soyuz-5 uses a modified version of the RD-171 engine that has flown since the 1980s. This new RD-171 design uses all Russian components. The upper stage engine is based on the same design flown on Russia’s workhorse Soyuz-2 rocket.

Fueling test reveals leaks on SLS rocket. The launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test on Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its launch platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Ars reports. The practice countdown was designed to identify problems and provide NASA an opportunity to fix them before launch. Most importantly, the test revealed NASA still has not fully resolved recurring hydrogen leaks that delayed the launch of the unpiloted Artemis I test flight by several months in 2022. Artemis I finally launched successfully after engineers revised their hydrogen loading procedures to overcome the leak.

Hardware poor… Now, the second Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is on the cusp of launching a crew for the first time. Even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast. It has been more than three years since NASA discovered leaks on the first SLS rocket. The rocket alone costs more than $2 billion to build. The program is hardware poor, leaving NASA unable to build a test model that might have been used to troubleshoot and resolve the hydrogen leaks before the agency proceeded into the Artemis II launch campaign. “Every SLS rocket is a work of art, every launch campaign an adventure, every mission subject to excessive delays. It’s definitely not ideal,” Ars reported in a story examining this problem.

SpaceX, meet xAI. SpaceX has formally acquired another one of Elon Musk’s companies, xAi, Ars reports. The merging of what is arguably Musk’s most successful company, SpaceX, with the more speculative xAI venture is a risk. Founded in 2023, xAI’s main products are the generative AI chatbot Grok and the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. The company aims to compete with OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms. However, Grok has been controversial, including the sexualization of women and children through AI-generated images, as has Musk’s management of Twitter.

Lots of assumptions… There can be no question that the merger of SpaceX—the world’s premier spaceflight company—and the artificial intelligence firm offers potential strategic advances. With this merger, Musk plans to use SpaceX’s deep expertise in rapid launch and satellite manufacturing and management to deploy a constellation of up to 1 million orbital data centers, providing the backbone of computing power needed to support xAI’s operations. All of this is predicated on several assumptions, including that AI is not a bubble, orbital data centers are cost-competitive compared to ground-based data centers, and that compute is the essential roadblock that will unlock widespread adoption of AI in society. Speculative, indeed, but only SpaceX has a rocket that might one day be able to realistically deploy a million satellites.

Starship testing resumes. The enormous rocket we’re talking about, of course, is SpaceX’s Starship. Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, have rolled the Super Heavy booster for SpaceX’s next Starship flight to a test stand for a series of checkouts ahead of the flight, currently slated for sometime in March. This will be the first launch of SpaceX’s upgraded “Block 3” Starship, with improvements aimed at making the rocket more reliable following several setbacks with Starship Block 2 last year.

Frosty night on the border… This is the second time a Block 3 booster has made the trip to the test stand at Starbase, located just north of the US-Mexico border. Booster 18 suffered a structural failure at the test site in November, forcing SpaceX to scrap it and complete the next rocket in line, Booster 19. On Wednesday night, SpaceX put Booster 19 through cryogenic proof testing, clearing a key milestone on the path to launch. The next flight will likely follow a similar profile as previous Starship missions, with a suborbital arc carrying the ship from its South Texas launch base to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. If successful, the test will pave the way for bigger tests to come, including an in-space refueling demo and the catch and recovery of a Starship vehicle returning from space.

Next three launches

Feb. 7: Long March 2F | Chinese spaceplane? | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 03:55 UTC

Feb. 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-33 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 17:05 UTC

Feb. 11: Falcon 9 | Crew-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 11:01 UTC

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Posted Saturday 7 February 2026 at 4:27 am AEST (my time).

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A team of geologists has found for the first time evidence that two ancient, continent-sized, ultrahot structures hidden beneath the Earth have shaped the planet's magnetic field for the past 265 million years.

These two masses, known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), are part of the catalog of the planet's most enormous and enigmatic objects. Current estimates calculate that each one is comparable in size to the African continent, although they remain buried at a depth of 2,900 kilometers.

Low-lying surface vertical velocity (LLVV) regions form irregular areas of the Earth's mantle, not defined blocks of rock or metal as one might imagine. Within them, the mantle material is hotter, denser, and chemically different from the surrounding material. They are also notable because a “ring” of cooler material surrounds them, where seismic waves travel faster.

Geologists had suspected these anomalies existed since the late 1970s and were able to confirm them two decades later. After another 10 years of research, they now point to them directly as structures capable of modifying Earth's magnetic field.

LLSVPs Alter the Behavior of the Nucleus

According to a study published this week in Nature Geoscience and led by researchers at the University of Liverpool, temperature differences between LLSVPs and the surrounding mantle material alter the way liquid iron flows in the core. This movement of iron is responsible for generating Earth's magnetic field.

Taken together, the cold and ultrahot zones of the mantle accelerate or slow the flow of liquid iron depending on the region, creating an asymmetry. This inequality contributes to the magnetic field taking on the irregular shape we observe today.

The team analyzed the available mantle evidence and ran simulations on supercomputers. They compared how the magnetic field should look if the mantle were uniform versus how it behaves when it includes these heterogeneous regions with structures. They then contrasted both scenarios with real magnetic field data. Only the model that incorporated the LLSVPs reproduced the same irregularities, tilts, and patterns that are currently observed.

The geodynamo simulations also revealed that some parts of the magnetic field have remained relatively stable for hundreds of millions of years, while others have changed remarkably.

"These findings also have important implications for questions surrounding ancient continental configurations—such as the formation and breakup of Pangaea—and may help resolve long-standing uncertainties in ancient climate, paleobiology, and the formation of natural resources,” said Andy Biggin, first author of the study and professor of Geomagnetism at the University of Liverpool, in a press release.

“These areas have assumed that Earth’s magnetic field, when averaged over long periods, behaved as a perfect bar magnet aligned with the planet’s rotational axis. Our findings are that this may not quite be true,” he added.

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

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Posted Friday 6 February 2026 at 1:19 pm AEST (my time).

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Back in 2022, astronomers were puzzled by a so-called “tidal disruption event” (TDE), dubbed AT2018hyz, that had faded when it was first noticed three years earlier, only to unexpectedly reanimate and burp out extremely bright radio waves. University of Oregon astrophysicist Yvette Cendes, a co-author of that 2022 paper, dubbed the black hole “Jetty McJetface” (a nod to the 2016 online British competition to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatface).

Astronomers have continued to monitor it ever since. Far from fading again, the TDE has grown 50 times brighter, and that brightness continues to increase. The black hole’s energy emission might not peak until 2027, according to a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

As we’ve previously discussed, it’s a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon—including light—is swallowed up and can’t escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. That means that part of an object’s matter is actually ejected out in a powerful jet.

In a TDE, a star is shredded (or “spaghettified”) by the powerful gravitational forces of a black hole outside the event horizon, and part of the star’s original mass is ejected violently outward. This, in turn, can form a rotating ring of matter (aka an accretion disk) around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light. The jets are one way astronomers can indirectly infer the presence of a black hole. Those outflow emissions typically occur soon after the TDE.

When AT2018hyz, aka “Jetty,” was first discovered, radio telescopes didn’t detect any signatures of an outflow emission of material within the first few months. According to Cendes, that’s true of some 80 percent of TDEs, so astronomers moved on, preferring to use precious telescope time for more potentially interesting objects. A few years later, radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) showed that Jetty was lighting up the skies again, spewing out material at a whopping 1.4 millijansky at 5 GHz.

Since then, that brightness has kept increasing. Just how large is the increase? Well, people have estimated the fictional Death Star’s emitted energy in the Star Wars saga, and Jetty McJetface’s emissions are a trillion times more than that, perhaps as much as 100 trillion times the energy. As for why Jetty initially eluded detection, there seems to be a single jet emitting radiation in one direction that might not have been aimed at Earth. Astronomers should be able to confirm this once the energy peaks.

Cendes and her team are now scouring the skies for similar behavior in high-energy TDEs, since the existence of Jetty suggests that delayed outflow is more common than astronomers previously expected. It’s such an unprecedented phenomenon that astronomers haven’t really looked for them before. After all, “If you have an explosion, why would you expect there to be something years after the explosion happened when you didn’t see something before?” said Cendes.

DOI: Astrophysical Journal, 2026. 10.3847/1538-4357/ae286d  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 6 February 2026 at 4:46 am AEST (my time).

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The iPhone is going orbital, and this time it will be allowed to hang around for a while.

On Wednesday night, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts will be allowed to bring iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and beyond.

“NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II,” Isaacman wrote on X. “We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world.”

NASA astronauts have long captured amazing photos from the space station, but having a smartphone on hand will open up a world of video possibilities. This will likely be especially useful when astronauts are conducting an experiment or looking outside a window and see an interesting, transient phenomenon.

Fighting requirement bloat

However, Isaacman said the decision to allow astronauts to bring iPhones is about more than just capturing cool new photos and videos. It’s part of his effort to challenge long-standing NASA rules and requirements.

“Just as important, we challenged long-standing processes and qualified modern hardware for spaceflight on an expedited timeline,” he wrote. “That operational urgency will serve NASA well as we pursue the highest-value science and research in orbit and on the lunar surface. This is a small step in the right direction.”

The challenge of qualifying modern technology for spaceflight is real. There are a million ways in which the technology can become mired in the approval process, from radiation characterization of chips to battery thermal and vacuum tests, outgassing concerns, vibe testing, and other qualification concerns. Yes, these requirements exist for a reason. But Isaacman is now telling his team to challenge requirements to ensure they are still needed today. (If you don’t believe this is important, ask any NASA contractor about bloated requirements.)

The arcane approval process has consequences. Before this decision, the newest camera slated to fly on the historic Artemis II mission around the Moon was a 2016 Nikon DSLR, alongside GoPro cameras that were a decade old. Now, the astronauts will have modern, portable smartphone cameras at their disposal. It should make for some amazing lunar moments.

Back in orbit

Smartphones have flown to orbit before. For example, two iPhone 4s flew on board the final space shuttle mission in 2011, though it’s not clear whether the crew ever touched them. For the most part, though, astronauts living on board the International Space Station over the last decade have used tablets to connect to the Internet and communicate with family members.

Astronauts flying on private missions, including Isaacman’s Polaris flight and the Axiom missions to the space station, did bring smartphones.

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Posted Friday 6 February 2026 at 4:45 am AEST (my time).

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Electric vehicle enthusiasts are probably right to feel a little disheartened about the state of the United States’ transition to EVs. But they should take heart that our region is an outlier. The other side of the Atlantic still seems relatively positive about the whole idea, even as Europe’s car market recovers more slowly from the pandemic than the rest of the world. Last year, overall vehicle sales in Europe barely ticked up, rising 2.2 percent from 2024. EV sales, meanwhile, increased by 29 percent, bringing market share to an impressive 19.5 percent.

That’s according to data from automotive analyst JATO Dynamics, which finds that the big winner has been Volkswagen. Last year, its EVs outsold those from Tesla for the first time as sales of VW’s electric offering grew by 56 percent, while Tesla’s shrank by 27 percent.

To put that into concrete numbers, VW sold 274,278 EVs to Tesla’s 236,357. And that’s just the VW brand itself—the automaker also owns Skoda (in 4th place, with 171,703 sales), Audi (5th place, 153,845 sales), Cupra (15th place, 79,269 sales), and Porsche (21st place, 32,715 sales). Not a bad effort, considering just over a decade has passed since VW’s Dieselgate scandal.

Tesla can console itself with the fact that the Model Y remains Europe’s most-registered car, though that task is much easier when you essentially give consumers only two models to choose from. 149,805 Models Y found European homes in 2025, 28 percent fewer than last year. The Model 3 also proved unpopular, falling by 24 percent to 85,393 units sold.

Volvo’s EX30 stands out as doing even worse—this small and affordable EV saw its sales decline by 37 percent (to 49,110). Among the car’s challenges were recalls, along with Volvo switching production from China to Belgium due to the international tariff war.

What about other powertrains?

Although Europe’s battery EV sales grew by 29 percent in 2025, buyers actually purchased more mild hybrids—cars with conventional internal combustion engines but more powerful 48 V starter motors that reduce emissions by a few percent. The total came to 2,974,089 mild hybrids, in fact, 16 percent more than in 2024. Sales of vehicles we think of as actual hybrids, where there’s a traction motor and battery (like a Toyota Prius, for example), grew by 10 percent to 1,692,711 units, and plug-in hybrid sales increased by 34 percent to 1,272,463 units.

All of this came at the expense of unelectrified vehicle sales, which fell by 20 percent, to 4,528,181. By next year, it’s likely that more than two in three new cars sold in Europe will be electrified to some degree.

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Posted Friday 6 February 2026 at 4:44 am AEST (my time).

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The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.

The massive rocket and its convoluted ground systems, so necessary to baby and cajole the booster’s prickly hydrogen propellant on board, have cost US taxpayers in excess of $30 billion to date. And even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast.

You remember the last time NASA tried to launch the world’s largest orange rocket, right? The space agency rolled the Space Launch System out of its hangar in March 2022. The first, second, and third attempts at a wet dress rehearsal—elaborate fueling tests—were scrubbed. The SLS rocket was slowly rolled back to its hangar for work in April before returning to the pad in June.

The fourth fueling test also ended early but this time reached to within 29 seconds of when the engines would ignite. This was not all the way to the planned T-9.3 seconds, a previously established gate to launch the vehicle. Nevertheless mission managers had evidently had enough of failed fueling tests. Accordingly, they proceeded into final launch preparations.

The first launch attempt (effectively the fifth wet-dress test), in late August, was scrubbed due to hydrogen leaks and other problems. A second attempt, a week later, also succumbed to hydrogen leaks. Finally, on the next attempt, and seventh overall try at fully fueling and nursing this vehicle through a countdown, the Space Launch System rocket actually took off. After doing so, it flew splendidly.

That was November 16, 2022. More than three years ago. You might think that over the course of the extended interval since then, and after the excruciating pain of spending nearly an entire year conducting fueling tests to try to lift the massive rocket off the pad, some of the smartest engineers in the world, the fine men and women at NASA, would have dug into and solved the leak issues.

You would be wrong.

The second go-round also does not unfold smoothly

On Monday, after rolling the SLS rocket to be used for the Artemis II mission to the pad in January, NASA attempted its first wet-dress test with this new vehicle. At one of the main interfaces where liquid hydrogen enters the vehicle, a leak developed, not dissimilar to problems that occurred with the Artemis I rocket three years ago.

NASA has developed several ploys to mitigate the leak. These include varying the rate of hydrogen, which is very cold, flowing into the vehicle. At times they also stopped this flow, hoping the seals at the interface between the ground equipment and the rocket would warm up and “re-seat,” thereby halting the leaks. It worked—sort of. After several hours of troubleshooting, the vehicle was fully loaded. Finally, running about four hours late on their timeline, the dogged countdown team at Kennedy Space Center pushed toward the last stages of the countdown.

However, at this critical time, the liquid hydrogen leak rate spiked once again. This led to an automatic abort of the test a little before T-5 minutes. And so ended NASA’s hopes of launching the much-anticipated Artemis II mission, sending four astronauts around the Moon, in February. NASA will now attempt to launch the vehicle no earlier than March following more wet-dress attempts in the interim.

In a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, NASA officials were asked why they had not solved a problem that was so nettlesome during the Artemis I launch campaign.

“After Artemis I, with the challenges we had with the leaks, we took a pretty aggressive approach to do some component-level testing with some of these valves and the seals, and try to understand their behavior,” said John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis II Mission Management Team. “And so we got a good handle on that relative to how we install the flight-side and the ground-side interface. But on the ground, we’re pretty limited in how much realism we can put into the test. We try to test like we fly, but this interface is a very complex interface. When you’re dealing with hydrogen, it’s a small molecule. It’s highly energetic. We like it for that reason. And we do the best we can.”

If NASA were really going to do the best it could with this rocket, there were options in the last three years. It is common in commercial rocketry to build one or more “test” tanks to both stress the hardware and ensure its compatibility with ground systems through an extensive test campaign. However, SLS hardware is extraordinarily expensive. A single rocket costs in excess of $2 billion, so the program is hardware-poor. Moreover, tanking tests might have damaged the launch tower, which itself cost more than $1 billion. As far as I know, there was never any serious discussion of building a test tank.

Hardware scarcity, due to cost, is but one of several problems with the SLS rocket architecture. Probably the biggest one is its extremely low flight rate, which makes every fueling and launch opportunity an experimental rather than operational procedure. This has been pointed out to NASA, and the rocket’s benefactors in Congress, for more than a decade. A rocket that is so expensive it only flies rarely will have super-high operating costs and ever-present safety concerns precisely because it flies so infrequently.

Acknowledging the low flight rate issue

Until this week, NASA had largely ignored these concerns, at least in public. However, in a stunning admission, NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, acknowledged the flight-rate issue after Monday’s wet-dress rehearsal test failed to reach a successful conclusion. “The flight rate is the lowest of any NASA-designed vehicle, and that should be a topic of discussion,” he said as part of a longer post about the test on social media.

The reality, which Isaacman knows full well, and which almost everyone else in the industry recognizes, is that the SLS rocket is dead hardware walking. The Trump administration would like to fly the rocket just two more times, culminating in the Artemis III human landing on the Moon. Congress has passed legislation mandating a fourth and fifth launch of the SLS vehicle.

However, one gets the sense that this battle is not yet fully formed, and the outcome will depend on hiccups like Monday’s aborted test; the ongoing performance of the rocket in flight; and how quickly SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn vehicle make advancements toward reliability. Both of these private rockets are moving at light speed relative to NASA’s Slow Launch System.

During the news conference, I asked about this low flight rate and the challenge of managing a complex rocket that will never be more than anything but an experimental system. The answer from NASA’s top civil servant, Amit Kshatriya, was eye-opening.

“You know, you’re right, the flight rate—three years is a long time between the first and second,” NASA’s associate administrator said. “It is going to be experimental, because of going to the Moon in this configuration, with the energies we’re dealing with. And every time we do it these are very bespoke components, they’re in many cases made by incredible craftsmen. … It’s the first time this particular machine has borne witness to cryogens, and how it breathes, and how it vents, and how it wants to leak is something we have to characterize. And so every time we do it, we’re going to have to do that separately.”

So there you have it. Every SLS rocket is a work of art, every launch campaign an adventure, every mission subject to excessive delays. It’s definitely not ideal.

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 4:22 am AEST (my time).

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Living in South Australia, the hottest and driest of Australia’s six states, and feeling the brunt of the region’s increasingly intense seasonal heat waves, local researchers wanted to know more about the impact of our warming world on human sleeping patterns.

In late January, the South Australian city of Adelaide endured its hottest night on record, with thermometers still measuring temperatures of 34.1 degrees Celsius (about 93 degrees Fahrenheit) just before 7 am. Such sweltering nighttime conditions have long been linked to a greater risk of hospitalization for everything from cardiovascular to mental health conditions. “We started wondering whether some of this could be explained by loss of sleep or poor quality sleep,” says Bastien Lechat, a scientist leading a research program on sleep health at Flinders University.

The group’s work has already shown that around the world, higher nighttime temperatures impact both the number of hours of sleep we get and the regularity of our sleeping patterns. But most concerningly of all, they’ve found that it can trigger sleep apnea, a chronic condition in which people stop breathing dozens or even hundreds of times during the night, which itself has been linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and a greater risk of road accidents.

Sleep apnea is already estimated to impact around a billion people around the world, many of whom are unaware they have the condition. But if global warming progresses as expected, research carried out by Lechat and others has shown that this number may not only increase, but the severity of the sleep apnea events could worsen.

One particularly eye-opening study, carried out by giving under-mattress sleep sensors to 67,558 people across 17 European countries and recording their sleep data over the course of five summers, found that the prevalence of sleep apnea events increased by 13 percent at the peak of a heatwave. It also revealed that for every 1 degree Celsius increase in the nighttime temperature, the rates of sleep apnea events rose by 1.1 percent, with the risk being even greater during especially humid nights.

With the average global temperature projected to increase to somewhere between 2.1 and 3.4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the year 2100, the group’s research predicts that there could be a 1.2- to threefold increase in the prevalence of sleep apnea events by the end of the century. Lechat commented that the impact will be felt even more harshly in low-income populations without access to air conditioning.

“These results are an important wake-up call,” says Lechat. “What is concerning too is that this increase in sleep burden will disproportionately worsen existing health disparities. For those with lower socioeconomic status, we may have underestimated the true effect. For example, a recent study in the US showed that the effect of heat on sleep duration was 10 to 70 percent greater among Hispanic populations.”

It isn’t only Australian sleep experts who have been paying attention to this threat. Two years ago, Chinese scientists used smartwatch data collected from 51,842 people across 313 cities over the course of three years and found that every 10 degrees Celsius increase in daily temperature resulted in a 8.4 percent increase in sleep apnea events.

There are likely a number of reasons for this correlation. High temperatures impair the body’s ability to cool down at night, meaning that sleep is lighter and more fragmented, and sleep apnea events tend to occur more during light rather than deep sleep. Studies also show that hot weather can influence behavior, making people more likely to drink more alcohol, consume a poorer diet, and be less physically active, changes which are all known risk factors for sleep apnea.

There’s also the physiological effect of heat itself on our breathing. “Heat may also destabilize breathing control, increase fluid retention, and promote dehydration, all of which can make the upper airway more collapsible and increase the likelihood of sleep apnea,” says Lucia Pinilla, another researcher at Flinders University investigating the subject.

At the same time, sleep apnea is already expected to become a growing problem for those living in cities, due to the chronic impact of air pollution on nighttime breathing, something which is only predicted to get worse. Last year, Hong Kong researchers led a study where they found that both short and long-term exposure to PM2.5 particles—tiny airborne particles, less than 2.5 micrometers wide, which are generated by sources such as vehicle exhausts, factory emissions, and wildfires and can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream—makes sleep apnea more likely.

Others have shown that the same is true for nitrogen dioxide, a reddish brown gas released into the air from exhausts, power plants, and other industrial facilities, while exposure to pollution also worsens symptoms for people with existing sleep apnea.

“Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when the upper airway becomes unstable and collapses during sleep,” says Martino Pengo, associate professor from the University of Milano-Bicocca who studies the subject. “Air pollutants can increase this instability by irritating the tissues of the throat, making the airway narrower and more prone to collapse when muscle tone naturally falls at night. Nitrogen dioxide is a strong airway irritant and may promote local inflammation that can fragment sleep and destabilize breathing.”

While concerning, such research also points to possible ways of mitigating risk. Martha Billings, professor of medicine in the University of Washington’s division of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine advises using indoor air filtering devices if online air quality databases show that your city ranks particularly poorly. “I would recommend it especially if the air quality index is greater than 200 as can happen with forest fires or other stagnant air,” she says.

Likewise with rising temperatures, losing weight could be a way of mitigating your sleep apnea risk. Research has highlighted how those who are overweight or obese are more at risk of experiencing more severe episodes of sleep apnea in hot weather, with their breathing stopping and starting more often during the night. Pinilla says this relates to how accumulating body fat alters the body’s internal temperature regulation. “People with higher fat mass tend to retain more heat, and dissipate it less efficiently making it harder to maintain a comfortable core temperature at night,” she says. “On hot nights, this can lead to lighter and more fragmented sleep.”

Men, who are more vulnerable to sleep apnea anyway as they are more prone to accumulating fat in the neck and have a longer and more collapsible upper airway, are particularly at risk, as are those with preexisting mental health or sleep disorders.

The Flinders team is hoping to ultimately be able to develop personalized advice and heat-warning systems for those who are at greater risk of experiencing sleep apnea events during heatwaves, as well as simple solutions which anyone can turn to. They are hoping to gain funding to be able to run experiments where people receive cooling mattress toppers or follow specific behavioral advice, such as ensuring they are well hydrated when going to bed, to see if this can actively prevent apnea events in warmer weather.

“Ultimately, our goal is to develop practical, evidence-based recommendations that can be applied during heat waves, particularly for vulnerable groups and people at higher risk,” says Pinilla.

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Posted Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 4:07 am AEST (my time).

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Flush door handles have been quite the automotive design trend of late. Stylists like them because they don’t add visual noise to the side of a car. And aerodynamicists like them because they make a vehicle more slippery through the air. When Tesla designed its Model S, it needed a car that was both desirable and as efficient as possible, so flush door handles were a no-brainer. Since then, as electric vehicles have proliferated, so too have flush door handles. But as of next year, China says no.

Just like pop-up headlights, despite the aesthetic and aerodynamic advantages, there are safety downsides. Tesla’s handles are an extreme example: In the event of a crash and a loss of 12 V power, there is no way for first responders to open the door from the outside, which has resulted in at least 15 deaths.

Those deaths prompted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to open an investigation last year, but China is being a little more proactive. It has been looking at whether retractable car door handles are safe since mid-2024, according to Bloomberg, and has concluded that no, they are not.

Here’s how you’re going to do it

The new Chinese regulations are incredibly specific. For all new models introduced after January 1, 2027, there must be a recessed space that’s at least 2.4 inches (6 cm) wide, 0.8 inches (2 cm) tall, and 1 inch (25 mm) deep for a hand to operate the handle, which can be semi-flush or simply a traditional door handle that we all know how to use.

The locking mechanism must be designed so that, in a crash that results in airbags deploying or a battery fire, doors on the non-impact side can be opened without tools. Chinese regulators are just as concerned that a vehicle’s occupants don’t get confused about how to open a door from the inside in an emergency. So each door must have mechanical releases where an occupant would expect to find them.

Again, Tesla is probably the worst offender—its front doors have always had mechanical handles, but for some model years, the rears could not be opened without tools.

For cars already approved by the Chinese government (which includes everything currently on sale), there’s a grace period. For existing designs, automakers have until January 1, 2029, to redesign their doors, and due to the specificity of the rules, that group of automakers is much larger than just Tesla. Xiaomi, which seems to be China’s most-hyped EV brand, will have to redesign some models, but BMW will, too—the rather good iX3 that will go on sale there soon will also need a redesign. The same goes for cars from Nio, Li Auto, and Xpeng.

And unless there are exemptions for low volume, I would imagine that most supercars from OEMs like Ferrari and McLaren will need new doors for the all-important Chinese market. Indeed, given China’s importance to the car industry, we should expect this ban’s impact to be widely felt on any model sold globally. The benefit should be clear: fewer car occupants dying after being trapped in their cars.

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Posted Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 4:06 am AEST (my time).

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The launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its launch platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“Engineers pushed through several challenges during the two-day test and met many of the planned objectives,” NASA said in a statement following the conclusion of the mock countdown, or wet dress rehearsal (WDR), early Tuesday morning. “To allow teams to review data and conduct a second Wet Dress Rehearsal, NASA now will target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test.”

The practice countdown was designed to identify problems and provide NASA an opportunity to fix them before launch. Most importantly, the test revealed NASA still has not fully resolved recurring hydrogen leaks that delayed the launch of the unpiloted Artemis I test flight by several months in 2022. Artemis I finally launched successfully after engineers revised their hydrogen loading procedures to overcome the leak.

Now, the second Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is on the cusp of launching a crew for the first time. The Artemis II mission will send four astronauts inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft on a loop around the far side of the Moon on the first crewed lunar flight since 1972, paving the way for future expeditions to land humans at the Moon’s south pole.

Going into the countdown rehearsal, NASA officials hoped a smooth test would clear the way to launch the Artemis II mission as soon as Sunday, February 8. NASA has only a handful of launch opportunities for Artemis II each month, when the Moon is in the right location in its orbit to allow the Orion spacecraft to fly a so-called free return trajectory and come back to Earth for a safe reentry and splashdown.

The first launch opportunity for Artemis II next month is March 6, with a two-hour launch window opening at 8:29 pm EST (01:26 UTC on March 7).

Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen have been in medical quarantine since January 21, a standard practice for astronauts preparing to fly to space. They will now be released from quarantine at their home base in Houston to resume training and await a new launch date.

An all-day roller coaster

NASA’s Artemis launch team, stationed a few miles away from the SLS rocket on its seaside launch pad, started fueling operations around midday Monday, somewhat later than scheduled due to cold temperatures at the Florida spaceport. The launch team first detected leaking hydrogen soon after they began loading the super-cold fuel into the SLS core stage.

The leak appeared in the same location it did during the Artemis I launch campaign nearly three years ago. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen flow from ground storage tanks into the SLS core stage through so-called Tail Service Mast Umbilicals (TSMUs), two roughly 30-foot-tall gray pods rising from the base of the rocket’s mobile launch platform. The TSMUs route propellant lines through connections near the bottom of the core stage, where umbilical plates on the rocket side and ground side meet. At liftoff, the umbilical plates disconnect as the rocket begins its climb off the launch pad.

Hydrogen is one of the most efficient rocket fuels, but it is notoriously difficult to handle. Liquified hydrogen must be stored at minus 423° Fahrenheit (minus 253° Celsius), cold enough to change the shape and size of seals and other soft goods in the fueling line. This can create leak paths not readily detectable at ambient temperatures. Hydrogen molecules are the smallest and lightest in the Universe, with the ability to find their way through the tiniest of breaches.

Because of this, NASA engineers accept that a small amount of hydrogen will escape seals in the fueling line. Agency officials said in 2022 that the safe limit was a 4 percent concentration of hydrogen gas in the housing around the fueling connector. Hydrogen levels exceeded NASA’s safety limit multiple times during the practice countdown that ran from Monday into early Tuesday.

This photo, taken in 2019, shows the liquid hydrogen Tail Service Mast Umbilical undergoing tests inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. The connector plate is visible at the end of the arm in the center of the photo.

Credit: NASA

“ Attempts to resolve the issue involved stopping the flow of liquid hydrogen into the core stage, allowing the interface to warm up for the seals to reseat, and adjusting the flow of the propellant,” NASA said in a statement.

NASA appeared to get past the problem Monday evening and fully loaded the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket with more than 750,000 gallons of propellant.

With fueling complete, managers sent a closeout crew to the launch pad around 6 pm EST (23:00 UTC) to close the hatch to the Orion spacecraft sitting atop the SLS rocket. The closeout team will help the Artemis II astronauts into the Orion capsule on launch day, but the crew was not part of the practice countdown Monday night.

The closeout crew took longer than anticipated to close and secure the hatch to the Orion spacecraft. A valve associated with Orion’s hatch pressurization inadvertently vented, according to NASA, requiring the closeout crew to retorque the valve. The launch team dealt with several other glitches, including audio dropouts on ground communication loops and camera problems believed to be caused by recent cold weather in Central Florida.

Finally, with the closeout crew a safe distance from the rocket, the launch team gave approval to begin the final 10 minutes of the countdown shortly after midnight Tuesday. The objective was to stop the countdown clock 33 seconds prior to launch, about the same time the rocket would take control of the countdown during a real launch attempt.

Instead, the clock stopped at T-minus 5 minutes and 15 seconds. NASA said the countdown terminated “due to a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate.” The countdown ended before the rocket switched to internal power and fully pressurized its four propellant tanks. The test also concluded before the rocket activated its auxiliary power units to run the core stage’s four main engines through a preflight steering check, all milestones engineers hoped to cross off their checklist.

Launch controllers began work to drain the SLS rocket’s propellant tanks after calling an end to the countdown. With the test incomplete, NASA managers quickly decided to hold off on launching the Artemis II mission to allow time for ground teams to “fully review data from the test, mitigate each issue, and return to testing ahead of setting an official target launch date.”

“As always, safety remains our top priority, for our astronauts, our workforce, our systems, and the public,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a social media post. “We will only launch when we believe we are ready to undertake this historic mission.”

Officials did not immediately announce when they might be ready for a second wet dress rehearsal, or whether they plan to roll the rocket back to its assembly building for repairs. NASA managers plan to hold a press briefing Tuesday afternoon to discuss the results of the test in more detail.

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Posted Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 4:05 am AEST (my time).

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

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cracked down on lead-based products—including lead paint and leaded gasoline—in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on human health. Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed human hair samples spanning nearly 100 years and found a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations, concluding that this regulatory action was highly effective in achieving its stated objectives. They described their findings in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We’ve known about the dangers of lead exposure for a very long time—arguably since the second century BCE—so why conduct this research now? Per the authors, it’s because there are growing concerns over the Trump administration’s move last year to deregulate many key elements of the EPA’s mission. Lead specifically has not yet been deregulated, but there are hints that there could be a loosening of enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Cooper rule requiring water systems to replace old lead pipes.

“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,” said co-author Thure Cerling. “Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can’t do exactly what they’d like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it’s had really, really positive effects.”

An American mechanical and chemical engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr. was a key player in the development of leaded gasoline (tetraethyl lead) because it was an excellent anti-knock agent, as well as the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) like freon. Midgley publicly defended the safety of tetraethyl lead (TEL), despite experiencing lead poisoning firsthand. He held a 1924 press conference during which he poured TEL on his hand and inhaled TEL vapor for 60 seconds, claiming no ill effects. It was probably just a coincidence that he later took a leave of absence from work because of lead poisoning. (Midgley’s life ended in tragedy: he was severely disabled by polio in 1940 and devised an elaborate rope-and-pulley system to get in and out of bed. That system ended up strangling him to death in 1944, and the coroner ruled it suicide.)

Science also produced a hero in this saga: Caltech geochemist Clair Patterson. Along with George Tilton, Patterson developed a lead-dating method and used it to calculate the age of the Earth (4.55 billion years), based on analysis of the Canton Diablo meteorite. And he soon became a leading advocate for banning leaded gasoline and the “leaded solder” used in canned foods. This put Patterson at odds with some powerful industry lobbies, for which he paid a professional price.

But his many experimental findings on the extent of lead contamination and its toxic effects ultimately led to the rapid phase-out of lead in all standard automotive gasolines. Prior to the EPA’s actions in the 1970s, most gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon, which quickly adds up to nearly 2 pounds of lead released via automotive exhaust into the environment, per person, every year.

The proof is in our hair

The US Mining and Smelting Co. plant in Midvale, Utah, 1906.

Credit: Utah Historical Society

Lead can linger in the air for several days, contaminating one’s lungs, accumulating in living tissue, and being absorbed by one’s hair. Cerling had previously developed techniques to determine where animals lived and their diet by analyzing hair and teeth. Those methods proved ideal for analyzing hair samples from Utah residents who had previously participated in an earlier study that sampled their blood.

The subjects supplied hair samples both from today and when they were very young; some were even able to provide hair preserved in family scrapbooks that had belonged to their ancestors. The Utah population is well-suited for such a study because the cities of Midvale and Murray were home to a vibrant smelting industry through most of the 20th century; most other smelters in the region closed down in the 1970s when the EPA cracked down on using lead in consumer products.

Cerling acknowledged that blood would have been even better for assessing lead exposure, but hair samples are much easier to collect. “[Hair] doesn’t really record that internal blood concentration that your brain is seeing, but it tells you about that overall environmental exposure,” he said. “One of the things that we found is that hair records that original value, but then the longer the hair has been exposed to the environment, the higher the lead concentrations are.”

“The surface of the hair is special,” said co-author Diego Fernandez. “We can tell that some elements get concentrated and accumulated in the surface. Lead is one of those. That makes it easier because lead is not lost over time. Because mass spectrometry is very sensitive, we can do it with one hair strand, though we cannot tell where the lead is in the hair. It’s probably in the surface mostly, but it could be also coming from the blood if that hair was synthesized when there was high lead in the blood.”

The authors found very high levels of lead in hair samples dating from around 1916 to 1969. But after the 1970s, lead concentrations in the hair samples they analyzed dropped steeply, from highs of 100 parts per million (ppm) to 10 PPM by 1990, and less than 1 ppm by 2024. Those declines largely coincide with the lead reductions in gasoline that began after President Nixon established the EPA in 1970. The closing of smelting facilities likely also contributed to the decline. “This study demonstrates the effectiveness of environmental regulations controlling the emissions of pollutants,” the authors concluded.

PNAS, 2026. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2525498123 (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 1:03 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 debilitating infection from the parasitic Guinea worm is inching closer to global eradication, with an all-time low of only 10 human cases reported worldwide in 2025, the Carter Center announced.

If health workers can fully wipe out the worms, it will be only the second human disease to be eradicated, after smallpox.

Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis) is a parasitic nematode transmitted in water. More specifically, it’s found in waters that contain small crustacean copepods, which harbor the worm’s larvae. If a person consumes water contaminated with Guinea worm, the parasites burrow through the intestinal tract and migrate through the body. About a year later, a spaghetti noodle-length worm emerges from a painful blister, usually in the feet or legs. It can take up to eight weeks for the adult worm to fully emerge. To ease the searing pain, infected people may put their blistered limbs in water, allowing the parasite to release more larvae and continue the cycle.

In addition to being extremely painful, the disease (dracunculiasis) can lead to complications, such as secondary infections and sepsis, which in turn can lead to temporary or permanent disability.

When the Guinea worm eradication program began in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases across 21 countries in Africa and Asia. To date, only six countries have not been certified by the World Health Organization as Guinea worm-free. In 2024, there were just 15 cases, and, according to the provisional tally for 2025, the number is down to just 10. It’s considered provisional until each country’s disease reports are confirmed, which occurs in a program meeting usually held in April.

Getting to zero

The 10 human cases in 2025 were identified in three countries: four in Chad, four in Ethiopia, and two in South Sudan.

To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).

The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present. Those reports are then investigated and followed to prevent transmission and identify the source. Tools include public education on wound care and safer drinking water practices, such as boiling and filtration. Water sources can also be treated with a larvicide.

Since 1986, the eradication program has been estimated to have prevented 100 million cases.

“Guinea worm causes immense suffering—not just for the individual but for their family and community as well,” Adam Weiss, director of the Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program, said. “Every case is a real person we know by name. They are enduring a disease we know how to prevent, and we’ve been given this rare opportunity to wipe it out completely. We’re energized by this year’s progress, but zero is the only acceptable number, and that’s why our commitment to finishing this job is unwavering.”

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Posted Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 1:03 pm AEST (my time).

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The family had been paddleboarding and kayaking at Geographe Bay in the south of Western Australia, on Friday when strong winds pushed their inflatables off course, police said.

The teenager began to paddle back to shore to raise the alarm but his kayak took on water - so he swam the remaining 4km (2 nautical miles).

"The bravery, strength and courage shown by this family were extraordinary, especially the young fella who swam 4km to raise the alarm," Naturaliste Volunteer Marine Rescue Group said.

The organisation's commander Paul Bresland described the efforts of the teenager as "superhuman".

"He swam in, he reckons, the first two hours with a life jacket on," he told ABC News. "The brave fella thought he's not going to make it with a life jacket on, so he ditched it, and he swam the next two hours without a life jacket."

The boy was able to raise the alarm by 18:00 local time (10:00 GMT) on Friday evening, sparking a huge search for the missing relatives from Quindalup beach, near Busselton, WA Police said in a statement on Monday.

The boy's 47-year-old mother, her other son, 12, and daughter, eight, were located at around 20:30 by a rescue helicopter clinging to a paddleboard about 14km offshore.

"A volunteer marine rescue vessel was directed to their location and all three were successfully rescued and returned to shore," the force said.

Insp James Bradley said the incident was an important reminder of how rapidly ocean conditions can change.

"Thankfully, all three people were wearing life jackets, which contributed to their survival," he told local media.

"The actions of the 13-year-old boy cannot be praised highly enough - his determination and courage ultimately saved the lives of his mother and siblings."

The family were assessed by paramedics before being taken to a nearby hospital, police said.

The family were later discharged and visited the marine rescue crew to say thank you, the ABC reported.

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For most of their evolutionary history, narwhals have relied more on sound than sight to survive in the Arctic’s dark icy waters.

The speckled toothed whales—sometimes referred to as “unicorns of the sea” for the long, spiral tusks that protrude from the heads of males—navigate, hunt, and communicate using echolocation. By emitting a series of calls, whistles, and high frequency clicks—as many as a thousand per second—and listening for the echoes that bounce back, they are able to locate prey hundreds to thousands of feet deep and detect narrow cracks in sea ice where they can surface to breathe.

But as global temperatures continue to rise, the acoustic world narwhals depend on is rapidly shifting throughout their range, from northeastern Canada and Greenland to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago and Arctic waters in Russia. It’s getting louder.

The Arctic is warming at least three times faster than the rest of the planet, and as sea ice continues to shrink, vast stretches of ocean, once inaccessible to most humans, are opening up. Over the past decade, cargo vessels, fishing fleets, cruise ships, and oil and gas tankers have started moving through the region with increasing frequency and ease.

Throughout their journeys, they generate disturbing levels of noise that mask the sounds made by narwhals, as well as their hearing.

“Underwater noise is a growing problem, contributing to serious impact on the Arctic ecosystem,” said Sarah Bobbe, senior manager in the Arctic program at Ocean Conservancy, in a statement.

Other whales that are endemic to the Arctic, including belugas and bowheads, are in jeopardy, too.

“We know that all three species are sensitive to underwater noise produced by ships,” said Melanie Lancaster, senior specialist for Arctic species for the global Arctic program at the World Wide Fund for Nature, better known as WWF. “Even small amounts of noise can have large impacts on these species.”

Last month, that growing threat was a central topic at a multi-day meeting convened in London by the International Maritime Organization (IMO)—a United Nations body that regulates global shipping—where they reviewed recent research on the impact of ocean noise pollution on marine life and discussed methods and technologies for reducing it.

“Member states agreed on clear guidance on how we must reduce underwater noise pollution,” Bobbe said.

A mix of improved ship design, regular maintenance, and stronger regulations could significantly help tackle the problem, according to the Ocean Conservancy, which has been working with the IMO to push for mandatory rules that oblige commercial vessels to reduce their noise emissions. Currently, the IMO relies on voluntary guidelines encouraging quieter ship design and operation, which conservation advocates say are not adequate.

“We need to take action now,” Lancaster said. “If we carry on with no regulation of underwater noise in Arctic waters, by 2030 the amount of noise from shipping will nearly quadruple.”

A recent analysis by WWF found that the number of crude oil and gas tankers operating in Arctic waters has doubled over the past decade. Traffic from liquefied natural gas carriers has grown even faster, climbing to about 120 vessels in 2024, up from just 44 in 2014.

Various technologies exist that can help reduce shipping noise. Quieter propellers can be installed on both new and older vessels, for instance. Keeping ship hulls clean and improving engine insulation can further cut noise.

One of the most effective strategies for quieting a vessel is slowing down. Lower speeds not only reduce underwater noise, but also reduce the risk of collisions with whales like bowheads, which are particularly susceptible to ship strikes, Lancaster said. Ship operators also benefit.

“There’s less fuel burned. There’s more energy efficiency. There’s fewer emissions,” she said.

Protecting migration routes

Ahead of January’s meeting, WWF submitted a paper to the IMO outlining how ships could also reduce their impact on whales by accounting for key migratory routes and avoiding them.

Narwhals, belugas, and bowhead whales travel thousands of kilometers across the Arctic Ocean each spring and autumn to reach seasonal feeding and breeding grounds. In summer, for example, female narwhals gather in sheltered fjords, sounds, and bays, where calm conditions provide safe places to give birth and raise calves. In winter, the animals migrate to deeper waters to pursue dense concentrations of prey.

WWF has mapped many of these pathways, which it refers to as Arctic “blue corridors,” and shared them with the IMO to help guide ship operators. Existing IMO guidelines already call on mariners to take special care around sensitive habitats, including migration routes, but conservation groups say more awareness is needed of where and when whales are likely to be present so companies and captains can plan accordingly.

When narwhals go silent

If concrete measures are not adopted to limit the impacts of vessel traffic, underwater noise will continue to hurt whales, as well as other marine life, including fish and crustaceans, Lancaster said. Indigenous communities that rely on these marine ecosystems for food security may also be harmed.

Inuit communities in Canada and Greenland, for example, have hunted narwhals for generations to help sustain families through long winters and withstand a high cost of living in the region, according to Alex Ootoowak, an Inuk hunter who recently helped conduct a multi-year study of narwhals’ responses to shipping traffic in Eclipse Sound. That is a critically important summer calving ground for a distinct population of narwhal in Nunavut, Canada.

The study, led by researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and Canadian marine conservation nonprofit Oceans North, found narwhals went silent when ships were passing.

“These animals are hearing and responding to ships from distances much further than we would have predicted,” said Joshua Jones, one of the study’s authors. “We learned that narwhals go quiet or move away when a ship is within about 20 kilometers of the site.” They also stopped eating.

“They stopped doing their deep dives to the bottom to feed during a ship transit,” said Ootoowak.

In Eclipse Sound, much of the vessel traffic is driven by industrial shipping linked to the Mary River Mine, a large iron ore operation on Baffin Island operated by Baffinland Iron Mines Corp., Ootoowak said. The number of tourism vessels, such as cruise ships, private yachts, sailboats, and speed boats that visit the area is also rising.

“We’re getting about 30 cruise ships a year now,” Ootoowak said. “Our waters are a lot louder than they traditionally were.”

With so much traffic and noise, Ootoowak said he worries narwhals may be abandoning their traditional calving grounds for quieter waters. Neighboring communities in Greenland are already reporting what they describe as “foreign narwhals” appearing in their waters—animals, Ootoowak said, that match the behavior and appearance of those from Eclipse Sound.

Teresa Tomassoni is an environmental journalist covering the intersections between oceans, climate change, coastal communities, and wildlife for Inside Climate News. Her previous work has appeared in The Washington Post, NPR, NBC Latino, and the Smithsonian American Indian Magazine. Teresa holds a master’s degree in journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She is also a recipient of the Stone & Holt Weeks Social Justice Reporting Fellowship. She has taught journalism for Long Island University and the School of the New York Times. She is an avid scuba diver and spends much of her free time underwater.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Posted Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 5:01 am AEST (my time).

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

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If all goes according to plan Monday, NASA’s launch team at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will load 755,000 gallons of super-cold propellants into the rocket built to send the Artemis II mission toward the Moon.

The fuel loading is part of a simulated countdown for the Space Launch System rocket, a final opportunity for engineers to rehearse for the day NASA will send four astronauts on a nearly 10-day voyage around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth. The Artemis II mission will send humans farther from Earth than ever before. The astronauts will be the first to launch on NASA’s SLS rocket and the first people to travel to the vicinity of the Moon in more than 53 years.

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA’s launch director for the Artemis II mission, will supervise the practice countdown from a firing room inside the Launch Control Center a few miles away from the SLS rocket at Kennedy Space Center. In a recent briefing with reporters, she called the Wet Dress Rehearsal—"wet” refers to the loading of liquid propellants—the “best risk reduction test” for verifying all is ready to proceed into the real countdown.

NASA delayed the rehearsal two days to avoid performing the test amid a spell of unusually cold freezing temperatures in Central Florida. Although the fueling test could have safely gone ahead, the temperatures would have violated cold-weather restrictions for launching the Artemis II mission. A NASA spokesperson told Ars that officials wanted to run the countdown simulation in more realistic conditions they might actually see on launch day.

No astronauts will be aboard the Orion spacecraft mounted on top of the SLS rocket for the simulated countdown. Much of everything else will have the feeling of launch day. A successful fuel loading and smooth countdown would clear the way for launch of the Artemis II mission as soon as next Sunday, February 8.

If things do not go so well, NASA’s chances for launching Artemis II this month will likely wither away. NASA only has a handful of launch opportunities each month where everything lines up for Artemis II’s flight around the Moon. The first two of this month’s launch dates, February 6 and 7, are no longer an option after NASA ordered the two-day delay in this week’s practice countdown. Here are the three launch opportunities still available this month, each with a two-hour launch window:

• February 8 at 11:20 pm EST
• February 10 at 12:06 am EST
• February 11 at 1:05 am EST

If NASA misses this month’s launch opportunities, the next chance to send Artemis II to the Moon will be March 6. NASA has released this chart showing all available Artemis II launch dates through the end of April.

“Wet dress is the driver to launch. We need to get through wet dress,” Blackwell-Thompson said. “We need to see what lessons that we learn as a result of that, and that will ultimately lay out the path toward launch.”

The fix is in

The Artemis II mission comes more than two years after NASA launched Artemis I, the first unpiloted test flight of the Space Launch System rocket.

It took four tries for NASA to fully load propellants onto the first SLS rocket during a series of Wet Dress Rehearsals (WDRs) in 2022. None of the practice runs was free of problems. The list of technical snags included difficulties supplying gaseous nitrogen to the launch pad, problems keeping liquid oxygen at the proper temperature, and a series of valve and seal failures that led to persistent leaks of hydrogen fuel.

Molecular hydrogen is notoriously difficult to wrangle. It is highly flammable, and the molecule’s fantastically low mass and tiny dimension make it hard to contain. The cryogenic temperature of the liquified form of hydrogen is an additional complication. Liquid hydrogen must be kept at temperatures around minus 423° Fahrenheit (minus 253° Celsius), cold enough to freeze solid any gas it comes in contact with except for helium.

When liquid hydrogen hits seals and gaskets, the materials can change their shape and size, creating leak paths that escape detection at ambient temperatures. That happened repeatedly during multiple countdowns preceding the Artemis I launch, unseating seals in the hydrogen fueling line between the SLS core stage and its ground launch platform.

Two tail service masts, the gray structures sticking up near the base of the Space Launch System rocket, house the connections and seals where liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen will flow into the core stage.

Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Finally, engineers devised what they called a “kinder, gentler” approach to ramping up pressures and hydrogen flow rates into the SLS rocket. The revised procedure wasn’t perfect, and it added some time to the fueling timeline, but it worked well enough to allow NASA to successfully launch the Artemis I mission in November 2022.

NASA will use the same fueling procedure for Artemis II. “We believe that issue has been put to bed,” Blackwell-Thompson said.

“Artemis I was a test flight, and we learned a lot during that campaign, getting to launch,” she said. “And the things that we’ve learned relative to how to go load this vehicle, how to load LOX (liquid oxygen), how to load hydrogen, have all been rolled in to the way in which we intend to go load the Artemis II vehicle.”

An all-day test

There are more changes to the launch countdown sequence for Artemis II because the astronauts will need to board the Orion spacecraft after the rocket is fully fueled. The crew will not be present Monday, but the rehearsal will include a built-in pause when the astronauts would climb into the spacecraft on launch day.

The additional time adds to what was already a lengthy countdown. The WDR officially kicked off Saturday night with the start of a two-day countdown clock, but the most critical moments will begin Monday morning.

The clock is ticking toward a simulated launch time of 9 pm EST Monday (02:00 UTC Tuesday). Preparations for filling the rocket with propellant will begin about 10 hours before then, around 11 am EST, with thermal conditioning of the core stage tanks to receive their cryogenic contents.

Once the tanks are properly chilled down to cryogenic temperatures, liquid hydrogen should start flowing into the core stage at around 11:35 am EST, followed 15 minutes later by the start of liquid oxygen loading. The launch team will ramp up flow rates to “fast fill” mode on both tanks sometime around noon EST. This will be one of the most critical phases of Monday’s test, when engineers watch for buildups of hydrogen around the fueling connector near the bottom of the rocket.

NASA is streaming a live view of the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket on its launch pad in Florida, but the agency is not planning to provide real-time commentary on the video feed on Monday. Officials said they will release updates throughout the day on social media.

It will take about three hours to fill both tanks on the SLS core stage. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen will begin pumping into the rocket’s upper stage soon after the start of core stage loading. If the countdown remains on track, the rocket should be fully fueled soon after 4 pm EST. That’s when NASA will dispatch the closeout crew to the launch pad to close the hatch to the Orion spacecraft, just as they will on launch day. Throughout it all, the rocket will slowly be replenished with propellant as the super-cold liquids boil off.

Closeout crew lead Taylor Hose, second from left, talks with NASA astronaut Andre Douglas, second from right, during a previous countdown rehearsal that did not include fueling of the SLS rocket.

Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Once the pad crew evacuates to a safe distance, Blackwell-Thompson will poll her team for authorization to commence the final 10 minutes of the countdown. The automated countdown sequencer will oversee final steps to put the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft into launch configuration, including the retraction of the crew access arm, transition from ground power to internal power supplies, and pressurization of the rocket’s propellant tanks.

The countdown will pause at T-minus 90 seconds for up to three minutes to verify the team’s ability to hold the clock in the final moments before liftoff. Then, the clock will tick down to T-minus 33 seconds before the countdown computer orders an automatic abort. During a real launch attempt, that is when control of the countdown would transition from a ground sequencer to the rocket’s onboard computer.

Mission managers plan to reset the clock at T-minus 10 minutes and commence a second run through the final countdown. The second run will give the launch team a chance to rehearse how they can recover from a last-minute abort and try to launch again on the same day.

All told, NASA says Monday night’s mock countdown may not be over until after midnight. At the end of the test, the launch team will drain the rocket of propellant and review the test’s results before setting an official target launch date for Artemis II, according to NASA.

Priority: Artemis II

More eyes than just those of NASA’s Artemis team will be closely watching the progress of Monday’s mock countdown. A few miles away from the Artemis launch pad, a separate team is preparing a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to ferry the next long-duration crew to the International Space Station.

There’s some urgency in getting the next mission to the station after the early departure of the last crew due to a medical issue with one of the astronauts. That mission, designated Crew-11, undocked from the station and successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on January 15, leaving the complex short-staffed with just one US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts.

The four-person Crew-12 mission is next in line, with SpaceX and NASA aiming for a launch date as soon as February 11 from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The schedule for Crew-12 will ultimately hinge on when Artemis II flies.

Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, laid out the possibilities in a press conference on Friday. NASA does not want to launch Crew-12 when Artemis II is in space for several reasons. The same group of Air Force pararescue personnel will be on standby to retrieve each astronaut crew in the event of an emergency during launch, and the flight paths of each mission require some of the units to stage in different locations. Both missions will also use the same fleet of NASA communications satellites for tracking and data relay services.

Artemis II will get first dibs on launch dates in early to mid February, Stich said. If NASA comes out of Monday’s rehearsal with a decision to move forward with Artemis II’s launch next Sunday, Crew-12 will stand down from the February 11 launch opportunity. If Artemis II gets off the ground Sunday, Crew-12 would wait until the Artemis astronauts are back on Earth. Assuming a full-duration mission, that would put the Crew-12 launch date around February 19, Stich said.

If NASA tries to launch Artemis II next Sunday but runs into a problem that grounds the mission, Crew-12 could be ready to go around February 13.

The convergence of the Artemis II and Crew-12 launch schedules adds another layer of importance to Monday’s countdown test at Kennedy Space Center. For the first time since the 1960s, NASA has separate astronaut crews simultaneously in preflight quarantine, a routine measure to prevent crew members from flying to space with an illness.

“We’ve laid out all the timelines relative to crew quarantine, when SpaceX will move their hardware to Pad 40, when we get into [our own rehearsals],” Stich said. “I would say those timelines will be a little dynamic, because in particular, if we get out to the launch pad and we’re trying to static fire around Artemis operations, we will work around Artemis in all those scenarios.”

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Posted Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 5:00 am AEST (my time).

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

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Exterminators keep getting calls for a reason. Wood-devouring insects, such as beetles, termites, and carpenter ants, are constantly chewing through walls or infecting trees and breaking them down. The fight against these insects usually involved noxious insecticides; but now, at least some of them can be eliminated using a certain species of fungus.

Infestations of bark beetles are the bane of spruce trees. Eurasian spruce bark beetles (Ips typographus) ingest bark high in phenolic compounds, organic molecules that often act as antioxidants and antimicrobials. They protect spruce bark from pathogenic fungi—and the beetles take advantage. Their bodies boost the antimicrobial power of these compounds by turning them into substances that are even more toxic to fungi. This would seem to make the beetles invulnerable to fungi.

There is a way to get past the beetles’ borrowed defenses, though. Led by biochemist Ruo Sun, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, found that some strains of the fungus Beauveria bassiana are capable of infecting and killing the pests.

“Insect herbivores have long been known to accumulate plant defense metabolites from their diet as defenses against their own enemies,” she said in a study recently published in PNAS. “However, as shown here for B. bassiana, fungal pathogens are able to circumvent the toxicity of these dietary defenses and cause disease.”

First line of defense

Populations of bark beetles have recently exploded in temperate forests because of climate change. One species they feed on is the Norway spruce (Picea abies), which makes organic phenolic compounds known as stilbenes and flavonoids. Stilbenes are hydrocarbons that function as secondary metabolites for plants, and flavonoids, which are polyphenols, are also secondary plant metabolites that are often antioxidants. The spruce links both classes of compounds with sugars and relies on their antibacterial and antifungal activity.

When metabolized by the beetles, the spruce sugars are removed through hydrolysis, converting them into aglycones that are even more toxic to microscopic invaders. Despite that, some fungi appear to be able to deactivate these compounds. Strains of the fungal insect pathogen B. bassiana have been documented as killing some of these beetles in the wild.

Sun wanted to put this fungus to the test. While not all strains have been effective at eliminating bark beetles, she and her team extracted the fungus from beetles that had succumbed to it. They bred these strains in their lab to see how effective they would be against the insects. They identified the genes that gave these fungi their ability to metabolize phenolic compounds ingested by the beetles and detoxify them so they were no longer protective. They then experimented with knocking out these genes to see whether the mutant fungi would still be able to take down beetles.

Fungus does something humongous

Once beetles were infected with B. bassiana, the researchers found the fungus detoxifies protective compounds in two phases. The aglycones that were made so potent by the removal of sugars from spruce stilbenes and flavanoids are made weaker by having the sugar restored in the first phase. Methylation happens next. After this phase, the sugar is linked to a methyl group (CH3), forming a type of methylglucoside. This particular methylglucoside is harmless to the fungus. Mutant strains of the fungus that had their detoxification genes knocked out could not produce methylglucoside, so they were not as effective at infecting beetles and were nowhere near as lethal.

B. bassiana is not the only fungus that is capable of this detox. Other species, including the infamous Cordyceps militaris that terrorized a dystopian society in The Last of Us (though it will not turn people into fungus monsters), are capable of producing methylglucosides from stilbenes, flavonoids, and other compounds that are supposed to protect plants from infection and are borrowed by the insects that gorge on them.

“Besides direct detoxification, fungi such as B. bassiana could have other mechanisms of resisting plant defense compounds,” Sun said. “[Some] are known to excrete compounds like resveratrol from fungal cells, and so could also play a role in increasing fungal growth and virulence on substrates containing toxic compounds.”

Fungi could be weaponized as pest control in the future. The researchers think it is possible that the genes that enable B. bassiana to detoxify antifungal substances could enable it to metabolize other defensive plant substances ingested by harmful insects. Instead of sprayers full of dangerous chemicals, exterminators may soon arrive with petri dishes instead.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2525513122

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Posted Monday 2 February 2026 at 4:17 am AEST (my time).

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

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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. January’s list includes a lip-syncing robot; using brewer’s yeast as scaffolding for lab-grown meat;  hunting for Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA in his art; and new evidence that humans really did transport the stones to build Stonehenge from Wales and northern Scotland, rather than being transported by glaciers.

Humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge

Credit: Timothy Darvill

Stonehenge is an iconic landmark of endless fascination to tourists and researchers alike. There has been a lot of recent chemical analysis identifying where all the stones that make up the structure came from, revealing that many originated in quarries a significant distance away. So how were the stones transported to their current location?

One theory holds that glaciers moved the bluestones at least part of the way from Wales to Salisbury Plain in southern England, while others contend that humans moved them—although precisely how that was done has yet to be conclusively determined. Researchers at Curtin University have now produced the strongest scientific evidence to date that it was humans, not glaciers, that transported the stones, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Curtin’s Anthony Clarke and co-authors relied on mineral fingerprinting to arrive at their conclusions. In 2024, Clarke’s team discovered the Stonehenge Altar Stone originated from the Orkney region in the very northeast corner of Scotland, rather than Wales. This time, they analyzed hundreds of zircon crystals collected from rivers close to the historic monument, looking for evidence of Pleistocene-era sediment. Per Clarke, if the stones had “sailed” to the plain from further north, there would be a distinct mineral signature in that sediment as the transported rocks eroded over time. They didn’t find that signature, making it far more likely that humans transported the stone.

DOI: Communications Earth & Environment, 2026. 10.1038/s43247-025-03105-3  (About DOIs).

When grasshoppers fly

Credit: Princeton University/Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Everyone knows grasshoppers can hop, but they can also flap their wings, jump, and glide, moving seamlessly across both the ground and through the air. That ability inspired scientists from Princeton University to devise a novel approach to building robotic wings, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This could one day enable multimodal locomotion for miniature robots with extended flight times.

According to the authors, grasshoppers have two sets of wings: forewings and hindwings. Forewings are mostly used for protection and camouflage, while the latter are involved in flapping and gliding, and are corrugated to allow them to fold into the insect’s body. The team took CT scans to capture the geometry of grasshopper wings and used the scans to 3D print model wings with varying designs. Next they tested each variant in a water channel to study how water flowed around the wing, isolating key features like a wing’s shape or corrugation to see how this impacted the flow.

Once they had perfected their design, they printed new wings and attached them to small frames to create grasshopper-sized gliders. The team then launched the gliders across the lab and used motion capture to evaluate how well they flew. The glider performed as well as actual grasshoppers. In addition, they found that a smooth wing resulted in more efficient gliding. So why do real grasshopper wings have corrugations? The authors suggest that these evolved because they help with executing steep angles.

DOI: Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2026. 10.1098/rsif.2025.0117  (About DOIs).

Lip-syncing robot

Humanoid robots are fascinating, but nobody would mistake them for actual humans, in part because even the ones that have faces are far too limited in facial gestures, including lip motion—hence, the “Uncanny Valley.” Columbia University engineers have now created a robot capable of learning facial lip motions for speaking and singing. According to a paper published in Science Robotics, the resulting robotic face was able to speak words in several different languages and sing an AI-generated song. (Its AI-generated debut album is aptly titled hello world.).

What makes human faces so uniquely capable of expression are the dozens of muscles lying just under the skin. Robotic faces are rigid and hence only have a limited range of motion. The Columbia team built their robotic face out of flexible material augmented with 26 motors (actuators). The robot learned to how its face moved in response to different actuator activity by watching itself in a mirror as it attempted thousands of random facial expressions. Eventually it learned how to achieve specific facial gestures.

The next step was to let the robot watch recorded videos of humans talking and singing, augmented with an AI algorithm that enabled it to learn exactly how the human mouths moved when performing those tasks so it could lip sync along. The resulting lip motion wasn’t perfect;  the robot struggled with “B” and “W” sounds in particular. But the authors believe the robot will improve with more practice; combining this ability with ChatGPT or Gemini could further improve its lip-syncing ability.

DOI: Science Robotics, 2026. 10.1126/scirobotics.adx3017  (About DOIs).

Is Leonardo’s DNA preserved in his art?

Credit: Paola Agazzi / Archivio di Stato di Prato / Italian Ministry of Culture

In 2020, scientists analyzed the microbes found on several of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and discovered that each had its own distinct microbiome/. A second team, working with the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project in France, collected and analyzed swabs taken from centuries-old art in a private collection housed in Florence, Italy. They concluded that microbial signatures could be used to differentiate artwork according to the materials used—dubbing this emerging subfield “arteomics.”

Yet another team collaborating with the project painstakingly assembled Leonardo’s family tree in 2021, spanning 21 generations from 1331 to the present, resulting a full-length book published last year. The idea was that this will one day provide a means of conducting DNA testing to confirm whether the bones interred in Leonardo’s grave are actually the his. And now the project’s scientists are back with a preprint posted to the bioRxiv, announcing the successful sequencing of human DNA collected from a handful of artifacts associated with Leonardo—including a drawing of the Holy Child that some scholars attribute to Leonardo, as well as letters from a da Vinci family member.

The team lightly swabbed samples from the artifacts’ surfaces and were able to recover human Y-chromosome sequences from several of the samples. Several of these sequences were related and the authors speculate that some might even be Leonardo’s, although they cautioned that the samples would need to be compared to samples taken from the artist’s notebooks, burial site, and family tomb to make a definitive identification. The authors also found DNA from bacteria, fungi, flowers, and animals in some of the samples, as well as traces of viruses and parasites.

DOI: bioRxiv, 2026. 10.64898/2026.01.06.697880  (About DOIs).

From pint to plate

Credit: Christian Harrison et al., 2026

Lab-grown meat is often touted as a more environmentally responsible alternative to the real deal, but carnivorous consumers are often put off by the unappealing mouthfeel and texture (and, for me, a weird oily aftertaste). A new method using spent brewer’s yeast to make edible “scaffolding” for cultivating meat in the lab might one day offer a solution, according to a paper published in the journal Frontiers in  Nutrition.

Typically, a nutrient broth is used as a source of bacteria for the scaffolding. But Richard Day of University College London and his co-authors decided to use brewer’s yeast, usually discarded as waste, to culture a species of bacteria known for making high-quality cellulose. Then they tested the mechanical and structural properties of that cellulose with a “chewing machine.” They concluded that the cellulose made from spent brewer’s yeast was much closer in texture to real meat than the cellulose scaffolding made from a nutrient broth. The next step is to incorporate fat and muscle cells into the cellulose, as well as testing yeast from different kinds of beer.

DOI: Frontiers in Nutrition, 2026. 10.3389/fnut.2025.1656960  (About DOIs).

Water-driven gears

New York University scientists created a gear mechanism that relies on water to generate movement.

For some conditions, the rotors spin in the same direction like pulleys looped together with a belt.

Gears have been around for thousands of years; the Chinese were using them in two-wheeled chariots as far back as 3000 BCE, and they are a mainstay in windmills, clocks, and the famed Antikythera mechanism. Roboticists also use gears in their inventions, but whether they are made of wood, metal or plastic, such gears tend to be inflexible and hence more prone to breakage. That’s why New York University mathematician Leif Reistroph and colleagues decided to see if flowing air or water could be used to rotate robotic structures.

Ristroph’s lab frequently addresses all manner of colorful real-world puzzles: fine-tuning the recipe for the perfect bubble, for instance; exploring the physics of the Hula-Hoop; or the formation processes underlying so-called “stone forests” common in China and Madagascar. In 2021, his lab built a working Tesla valve, in accordance with the inventor’s design; the following year they studied the complex aerodynamics of what makes a good paper airplane—specifically what is needed for smooth gliding; and in 2024 they cracked the conundrum of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, had grappled with since the 1940s.

For their latest paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Ristroph et al. wanted to devise something that functioned like a gear only with flowing liquid driving the motion, instead of teeth grinding against each other. They conducted a series of experiments in which they immersed cylindrical rotors in a glycerol-and-water solution. One cylinder would rotate while the other was passive.

They found that the rotating cylinder, combined with fluid flow, was sufficient to induce rotation in the passive cylinder. The flows functioned much in the same way as gear teeth when the cylinders were close together. Moving the cylinders further apart caused the active cylinder to rotate faster, looping the flows around the passive cylinder—essentially mimicking a belt and pulley system.

DOI: Physical Review Letters, 2026. 10.1103/m6ft-ll2c  (About DOIs).

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A consequential debate that has been simmering behind closed doors at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, must soon come to a head. It concerns the selection of the next spacecraft the agency will fly to Mars, and it could set the tone for the next decade of exploration of the red planet.

What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. NASA’s best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.

Congress cared enough about this issue to add $700 million in funding for a “Mars Telecommunications Orbiter” in the supplemental funding for NASA provided by the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the US Congress last year.

That’s a lot of money purely for a telecom orbiter

However, this legislation, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, raised a couple of key questions. The first is the wording of the bill, which specified that the orbiter must be selected from among US companies that “received funding from the Administration in fiscal year 2024 or 2025 for commercial design studies for Mars Sample Return; and proposed a separate, independently launched Mars telecommunication orbiter supporting an end-to-end Mars sample return mission.”

The reference to “commercial design studies” referred to companies that proposed faster and more affordable missions to return samples from Mars, selected in 2024. Several observers told Ars the language included here appeared designed to favor Rocket Lab and its proposal for a telecommunications orbiter.

The other curious thing about the Cruz language is that it specified $700 million for the spacecraft and its launch, which seems like overkill.

“$500 million is plenty for a communications payload, satellite bus, and launch,” one knowledgeable industry official told Ars. “I actually think those functions could be provided for well below $500 million.”

NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, has been dealing with a lot of issues since being sworn in a little more than a month ago, including the impending launch of the Artemis II mission, now scheduled for no earlier than February 8. However, time is running out to deal with the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter.

That’s because the legislation requires funding for the spacecraft to be obligated “not later than fiscal year 2026,” which ends on September 30, 2026. The mission would also need to be awarded soon to allow a spacecraft to launch in late 2028, the earliest feasible launch window to Mars. It’s notable that NASA has no spacecraft presently scheduled to launch to Mars in the 2026 window, so the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter is potentially the only vehicle the space agency would launch to Mars during the second Trump administration, which wants to make its mark on the red planet.

All of this adds fuel to the internal debate at NASA about the design and scope of the competition to award a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter.

To science or not to science?

Given the available funding, a number of people within the agency are pressing to include scientific instruments on the orbiter. Three good instruments could be added for about $200 million, a science official said. Ideas include everything from a high-resolution camera (again, badly needed since the best camera at Mars is on the 20-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), a space weather payload, a magnetometer to understand Mars’ remnant magnetic field, or a spectrometer to look for near-surface water ice. It’s possible that some instruments from the canceled Mars Ice Mapper mission could also be repurposed or even a small lander included.

“To me, it seems like an easy decision,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society. Adding a package of science instruments to a mission already headed to Mars aligns with NASA’s goal of maximizing science and exploring the potential of rapidly developed, low-cost science experiments, he added. “This project is already going to Mars, and science would add real value.”

However, some leaders within NASA see the language in the Cruz legislation as spelling out a telecommunications orbiter only and believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to run a procurement competition between now and September 30th for anything beyond a straightforward communications orbiter.

In a statement provided to Ars by a NASA spokesperson, the agency said that is what it intends to do.

“NASA will procure a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter that will provide robust, continuous communications for Mars missions,” a spokesperson said. “NASA looks forward to collaborating with our commercial partners to advance deep space communications and navigation capabilities, strengthening US leadership in Mars infrastructure and the commercial space sector.”

Big decisions loom

Even so, sources said Isaacman has yet to decide whether the orbiter should include scientific instruments. NASA could also tap into other funding in its fiscal year 2026 budget, which included $110 million for unspecified “Mars Future Missions,” as well as a large wedge of funding that could potentially be used to support a Mars commercial payload delivery program.

The range of options before NASA, therefore, includes asking industry for a single telecom orbiter from one company, asking for a telecom orbiter with the capability to add a couple of instruments, or creating competition by asking for multiple orbiters and capabilities by tapping into the $700 million in the Cruz bill but then augmenting this with other Mars funding.

One indication that this process has been muddied within NASA came a week ago, when the space agency briefly posted a “Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition, Extension” notice on a government website. It stated that the agency “will only conduct a competition among vendors that satisfy the statutory qualifications.” The notice also listed the companies eligible to bid based on the Cruz language: Blue Origin, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, SpaceX, Quantum Space, and Whittinghill Aerospace.

This justification, known in industry parlance as a JOFOC, was then taken down almost immediately. A user on the social media site X captured a screenshot before it was removed, however.

Sources suggested that the brief appearance of this document indicates that NASA is concerned about running a competition in the coming months and recognizes that any protests could delay the awarding of funds beyond September 30, when they would return to the treasury. A JOFOC would limit companies’ ability to protest and delay awards.

For the commercial space companies, this will be a consequential decision. Lockheed Martin has a long and storied history of providing quality spacecraft in orbit around Mars and will seek to protect its turf. But new space entrants Rocket Lab, Blue Origin (with a design based on its Blue Ring spacecraft), and SpaceX (likely using a modified Starlink V3 satellite) would all like to break into the planetary spacecraft competition and have been working on their spacecraft. As a result, they might have a better chance of making a 2028 Mars window.

“We’re pushing hard on the MTO,” Rocket Lab CEO Pete Beck told Ars in November. “The reality is that if you’re going to do anything on Mars, whether it’s scientific or human, you’ve got to have the comms there. It’s just basic infrastructure you’ve got to have there first. It’s all very well to do all the sexy stuff and put some humans in a can and send them off to Mars. That’s great. But everybody expects the communication just to be there, and you’ve got to put the foundations in first. So we think that’s a really important mission, and something that we can do, and something we can contribute to the first humans landing on Mars.”

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Posted Saturday 31 January 2026 at 6:21 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.27 of the Rocket Report! If all goes well this weekend, NASA will complete a wet dress rehearsal test of the Space Launch System rocket in Florida. This is the final key test, in which the rocket is fueled and brought to within seconds of engine ignition, before the liftoff of the Artemis II mission. This is set to occur no earlier than February 6. Ars will have full coverage of the test this weekend.

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.

Why did the UK abandon Orbex? European Spaceflight explores the recent announcement that British launch company Orbex is preparing to sell the business to The Exploration Company in close cooperation with the UK government. This represents a reversal from early 2025, when the United Kingdom appeared prepared to back Orbex as a means of using British rockets to launch British satellites into space. Now the government is prepared to walk away. So what happened? “There are still too many unknowns to count, and the story is far from told,” the publication states.

Why would someone want to buy Orbex? … My sense is that there is not too much of a mystery here. UK space officials probably looked under the hood of what hardware Orbex had developed and its current financial status and likely decided that the company had a low probability of reaching orbit even with a significant infusion of cash. Also curious is a decision by The Exploration Company, which builds spaceships, to consider acquiring Orbex. The European Spaceflight article speculates that this could be to capture funding through the UK’s share of the European Launch Challenge, rather than any faith in Orbex’s ability to launch its vehicles. That sounds plausible.

Canada Rocket Company emerges from stealth. A Toronto-based launch startup, Canada Rocket Company, emerged from stealth earlier this month with the announcement of a $6.2 million CDN ($4.5 million) seed funding round—and with plans to create sovereign light- and medium-lift launch capabilities, Payload reports. According to CEO Hugh Kolias, the company was founded late last year in response to Canada’s rapidly increasing investment in the space domain.

A quick deadline … Canada is concerned about relations with the United States, where it has long turned for access to space. Accordingly, last November, the country announced its Launch the North challenge, committing $105 million CDN ($75.7 million) in public funds to help stand up sovereign launch capabilities. However,  the Launch the North challenge incentivizes companies that are on track to reach orbit by 2028. The new company’s strategy to meet the aggressive 2028 deadline is to build a scalable architecture around a familiar methalox engine and field much of the tech with mature subsystems from the Canadian and European ecosystem. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Vega C nabs Brazilian launch contract. A Brazilian government agency will launch an Earth observation satellite on a Vega C rocket, Space News reports. Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known by the Portuguese acronym INPE, said Tuesday it will launch the Amazonia-1B satellite on a Vega C in 2027. Curiously, INPE contracted not with Avio, which is assuming responsibility for Vega C launch services, but with SpaceLaunch, a Texas-based launch broker.

Launch price disclosed … Marcy Mabry, co-founder and chief executive of SpaceLaunch, said she previously worked with INPE to arrange the launch of Amazonia-1 while at Spaceflight, a launch services provider later acquired by Firefly Aerospace. That spacecraft launched on an Indian PSLV rocket in 2021. The companies did not disclose the value of the contract. However, a January 21 Brazilian procurement document states that the contract between INPE and SpaceLaunch is worth 188.2 million Brazilian real ($35.6 million). This is a rare public data point for the cost of a Vega launch.

Russia reportedly testing plasma engine. Indian Defence Review reports that Russia is testing a new plasma propulsion system that may accelerate future missions to Mars, reducing travel time from multiple months to just one or two. The engine, developed by Rosatom’s Troitsk Institute, is now in ground-based trials but could be space-ready by 2030. The propulsion system uses electromagnetic fields to accelerate hydrogen particles.

Is it real? … According to the publication, a prototype of the engine is operating at 300 kilowatts, and it has already demonstrated a service life of 2,400 hours. If so, the engine has already surpassed the experimental VASIMR electrothermal engine under development in Houston by former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz. Regardless, I would advise caution about engines that may work in the lab but struggle in the outerspace environment. Moreover, such achievements are likely to be hyped, so it’s difficult to know where reality lies in Russia. (submitted by tbnelson777)

SpaceX and xAI may merge. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI are in discussions to merge ahead of a blockbuster public offering planned for later this year, Reuters reports. The plan would give ‌fresh momentum to SpaceX’s effort to launch data centers into orbit as Musk battles for supremacy in the rapidly escalating AI race against tech giants like Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Under the proposed merger, shares of xAI would be exchanged for shares in SpaceX. Two entities have been set up in Nevada to facilitate the transaction.

Is this inevitable? … SpaceX is already the world’s most valuable privately held company, last valued at $800 billion in a recent insider share sale. xAI was valued at $230 billion in November, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk has previously confirmed that SpaceX plans to go public sometime this year, with a valuation expected above $1 trillion. Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Musk said, “The lowest cost place to put AI will be in space. And that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest.”

How a 5-ton satellite fell off a Japanese rocket. The H3 is a relatively new vehicle, with last month’s launch marking the eighth flight of Japan’s flagship rocket. It lifted off from Tanegashima Island in southern Japan on December 22, local time, carrying a roughly 5-ton navigation satellite into space. The rocket was supposed to place the Michibiki 5 satellite into an orbit ranging more than 20,000 miles above the Earth. Everything was going well until the H3 jettisoned its payload fairing, the two-piece clamshell covering the satellite during launch, nearly four minutes into the flight.

And then? … Something went wrong when the rocket released its payload shroud. Video beamed back from the rocket’s onboard cameras showed a shower of debris surrounding the satellite, which started wobbling and leaning in the moments after fairing separation. Sensors also detected sudden accelerations around the attachment point connecting the spacecraft with the top of the H3 rocket. In a new report, Ars explores new information released by JAXA that shows the satellite effectively fell off the rocket. It appears to be an entirely novel failure mechanism.

FAA expects continuing growth in launches. The Federal Aviation Administration office that regulates commercial spaceflight expects continued growth in launches, Space News reports. Speaking at the Global Spaceport Alliance’s Spaceport Summit on January 27, Minh Nguyen, deputy associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA, said his office licensed 205 operations in 2025, including launches and reentries, a 25 percent increase from 2024.

Double again in a few years … “The acceleration in commercial space transportation has consistently exceeded our expectations. We’re seeing remarkable growth year after year,” he said. The 2025 total, he added, was 12 percent above the high end of the FAA’s forecast for the year. The FAA expects that growth to continue, with projections showing the number of licensed operations could double by 2029. That growth has put pressure on the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST, to keep up with the increased cadence.

ESA to study Falcon 9 breakup over Poland. The European Space Agency has published a call to tender for a study examining the reentry and breakup of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage in February last year, European Spaceflight reports. In the early hours of February 19, 2025, a Falcon 9 second stage underwent an uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry over Poland. At least four fragments of the stage survived re-entry and landed in various locations across the country. While no one was injured and no property was damaged, at least one fragment landed in a populated area.

Not just an academic study … ESA hopes to use data collected during the reentry of the Falcon 9 upper stage over Poland to help predict the risks associated with the re-entry of elongated upper stages. There are currently considerable uncertainties surrounding the physics and dynamics of destructive reentry in the very low-Earth orbit regime, below 150km. It’s not an academic study, as in 2015 there were approximately 80 orbital rocket launches. A decade on, that figure has almost quadrupled, with 317 successful orbital rocket launches occurring in 2025. (submitted  by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX targets mid-March for next Starship launch. The company plans to launch Starship’s next test flight in six weeks, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Sunday, January 25, Space.com reports. The flight will be the 12th overall for Starship but the first of the bigger, more powerful, and much-anticipated “Version 3” (V3) iteration of the vehicle.

A better engine … Starship V3 is slightly taller than V2—408.1 feet (124.4 meters) vs. 403.9 feet (123.1 m), but considerably more powerful. V3 can loft more than 100 tons of payload to low-Earth orbit, compared to about 35 tons for V2, according to Musk. The increased brawn comes courtesy of Raptor 3, a new variant of the engine that will fly for the first time on the upcoming test mission. SpaceX is hoping it proves more reliable than V2 as well.

Seeking information about Challenger artifacts. Back in 2010, Robert Pearlman of CollectSpace bought a batch of 18 space shuttle-era “Remove Before Flight” tags on eBay. It was only later that he pieced together that these tags were, in fact, removed from the external tank of STS 51-L, the ill-fated flight of space shuttle Challenger in 1986. He wrote about the experience on Ars.

How did they get to eBay? … “When the tags were first identified, contacts at NASA and Lockheed, among others, were unable to explain how they ended up on eBay and, ultimately, with me,” Pearlman said. He wants to gather more information about the provenance of the tags so that he can donate them to museums, with their full backstory.

Next three launches

January 30: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-101 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 05:51 UTC

February 2: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-32 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 15:17 UTC

February 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-103 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 22:12 UTC

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Posted Saturday 31 January 2026 at 6:20 am AEST (my time).

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At this point, we’ve all heard plenty of stories about AI chatbots leading users to harmful actions, harmful beliefs, or simply incorrect information. Despite the prevalence of these stories, though, it’s hard to know just how often users are being manipulated. Are these tales of AI harms anecdotal outliers or signs of a frighteningly common problem?

Anthropic took a stab at answer ingthat question this week, releasing a paper studying the potential for what it calls “disempowering patterns” across 1.5 million anonymized real-world conversations with its Claude AI model. While the results show that these kinds of manipulative patterns are relatively rare as a percentage of all AI conversations, they still represent a potentially large problem on an absolute basis.

A rare but growing problem

In the newly published paper “Who’s in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage,” researchers from Anthropic and the University of Toronto try to quantify the potential for a specific set of “user disempowering” harms by identifying three primary ways that a chatbot can negatively impact a user’s thoughts or actions:

• Reality distortion: Their beliefs about reality become less accurate (e.g., a chatbot validates their belief in a conspiracy theory)
• Belief distortion: Their value judgments shift away from those they actually hold (e.g., a user begins to see a relationship as “manipulative” based on Claude’s evaluation)
• Action distortion: Their actions become misaligned with their values (e.g., a user disregards their instincts and follows Claude-written instructions for confronting their boss)

While “severe” examples of potentially disempowering responses are relatively rare, “mild” ones are pretty common.

Credit: Anthropic

To figure out when a chatbot conversation has the potential to move a user along one of these lines, Anthropic ran nearly 1.5 million Claude conversations through Clio, an automated analysis tool and classification system (tested to make sure it lined up with a smaller subsample of human classifications). That analysis found a “severe risk” of disempowerment potential in anything from 1 in 1,300 conversations (for “reality distortion”) to 1 in 6,000 conversations (for “action distortion”).

While these worst outcomes are relatively rare on a proportional basis, the researchers note that “given the sheer number of people who use AI, and how frequently it’s used, even a very low rate affects a substantial number of people.” And the numbers get considerably worse when you consider conversations with at least a “mild” potential for disempowerment, which occurred in between 1 in 50 and 1 in 70 conversations (depending on the type of disempowerment).

What’s more, the potential for disempowering conversations with Claude appears to have grown significantly between late 2024 and late 2025. While the researchers couldn’t pin down a single reason for this increase, they guessed that it could be tied to users becoming “more comfortable discussing vulnerable topics or seeking advice” as AI gets more popular and integrated into society.

The problem of potentially “disempowering” responses from Claude seems to be getting worse over time.

Credit: Anthropic

User error?

In the study, the researcher acknowledged that studying the text of Claude conversations only measures “disempowerment potential rather than confirmed harm” and “relies on automated assessment of inherently subjective phenomena.” Ideally, they write, future research could utilize user interviews or randomized controlled trials to measure these harms more directly.

That said, the research includes several troubling examples where the text of the conversations clearly implies real-world harms. Claude would sometimes reinforce “speculative or unfalsifiable claims” with encouragement (e.g., “CONFIRMED,” “EXACTLY,” “100%”), which, in some cases, led to users “build[ing] increasingly elaborate narratives disconnected from reality.”

Claude’s encouragement could also lead to users “sending confrontational messages, ending relationships, or drafting public announcements,” the researchers write. In many cases, users who sent AI-drafted messages later expressed regret in conversations with Claude, using phrases like “It wasn’t me” and “You made me do stupid things.”

While harmful patterns in Claude’s outputs are a big problem, the researchers also point out that the users most likely to be affected are “not being passively manipulated.” On the contrary, the researchers suggest disempowered users are usually actively asking Claude to take over for their own reasoning or judgment and often accepting Claude’s suggestions “with minimal pushback.”

Some “amplifying factors” are more correlated with “severe” examples of potentially disempowering responses than others.

Credit: Anthropic

The researchers identified four major “amplifying factors” that can make users more likely to accept Claude’s advice unquestioningly. These include when a user is particularly vulnerable due to a crisis or disruption in their life (which occurs in about 1 in 300 Claude conversations); when a user has formed a close personal attachment to Claude (1 in 1,200); when a user appears dependent on AI for day-to-day tasks (1 in 2,500); or when a user treats Claude as a definitive authority (1 in 3,900).

Anthropic is also quick to link this new research to its previous work on sycophancy, noting that “sycophantic validation” is “the most common mechanism for reality distortion potential.” While Anthropic says its models have been getting less sycophantic overall, many of the worst “disempowerment” examples they found are a direct result of the “most extreme cases” of sycophancy in the dataset.

That said, the researchers also try to make clear that, when it comes to swaying core beliefs via chatbot conversation, it takes two to tango. “The potential for disempowerment emerges as part of an interaction dynamic between the user and Claude,” they write. “Users are often active participants in the undermining of their own autonomy: projecting authority, delegating judgment, accepting outputs without question in ways that create a feedback loop with Claude.”

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Posted Friday 30 January 2026 at 12:54 pm AEST (my time).

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Ice fishing is a longstanding tradition in Nordic countries, with competitions proving especially popular. Those competitions can also tell scientists something about how social cues influence how we make foraging decisions, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

Humans are natural foragers in even the most extreme habitats, digging up tubers in the tropics, gathering mushrooms, picking berries, hunting seals in the Arctic, and fishing to meet our dietary needs. Human foraging is sufficiently complex that scientists believe that meeting so many diverse challenges helped our species develop memory, navigational abilities, social learning skills, and similar advanced cognitive functions.

Researchers are interested in this question not just because it could help refine existing theories of social decision-making, but also could improve predictions about how different groups of humans might respond and adapt to changes in their environment. Per the authors, prior research in this area has tended to focus on solitary foragers operating in a social vacuum. And even when studying social foraging decisions, it’s typically done using computational modeling and/or in the laboratory.

“We wanted to get out of the lab,” said co-author Ralf Kurvers of Max Planck Institute for Human Development and TU Berlin. “The methods commonly used in cognitive psychology are difficult to scale to large, real-world social contexts. Instead, we took inspiration from studies of animal collective behavior, which routinely use cameras to automatically record behavior and GPS to provide continuous movement data for large groups of animals.”

Kurvers et al. organized 10 three-hour ice-fishing competitions on 10 lakes in eastern Finland for their study, with 74 experienced ice fishers participating. Each ice fisher wore a GPS tracker and a head-mounted camera so that the researchers could capture real-time data on their movements, interactions, and how successful they were in their fishing attempts. All told, they recorded over 16,000 individual decisions specifically about location choice and when to change locations. That data was then compared to the team’s computational cognitive models and agent-based simulations.

Where to settle down needs to be carefully considered. Drilling a new hole is hard work.

Marwa Kavelaars/CC BY-ND

 

Foraging ice fishers distributed across the ice.

Félicie Dhellemmes

 

According to the authors, three specific kinds of information hold the most sway over ice fishers’ decisions: their personal catch experience, how other ice fishers behaved, and factors in the environment, such as how a lakebed is structured. For example, an ice fisher who makes a successful catch tends to rely more on their own judgment and is more likely to ramp up their search for further prey nearby—i.e., an “area-restricted search"—even more so in areas where there is a high density of ice fishers. Social density increases the likelihood of sticking with a location.

By contrast, failing to catch any fish was more likely to motivate an ice fisher to move to a new, more promising location, often choosing a new location where there was a higher density of other ice fishers. Environmental factors had much less influence than social cues.

“Ice fishers go to areas where other individuals are fishing,” the authors wrote. “This social information is integrated with their own catching success: when ice fishers catch fish, they move to nearby areas, but they move further away when not catching any fish. Social information was less important for the decision when to leave a spot compared with personal information on catching success. This suggests adaptive, context-dependent mechanisms of social and personal information integration that are systematically linked to the requirements of each task.”

DOI: Science, 2026. 10.1126/science.ady1055  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 30 January 2026 at 12:53 pm AEST (my time).

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On Tuesday, OpenAI released a free AI-powered workspace for scientists. It’s called Prism, and it has drawn immediate skepticism from researchers who fear the tool will accelerate the already overwhelming flood of low-quality papers into scientific journals. The launch coincides with growing alarm among publishers about what many are calling “AI slop” in academic publishing.

To be clear, Prism is a writing and formatting tool, not a system for conducting research itself, though OpenAI’s broader pitch blurs that line.

Prism integrates OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 model into a LaTeX-based text editor (a standard used for typesetting documents), allowing researchers to draft papers, generate citations, create diagrams from whiteboard sketches, and collaborate with co-authors in real time. The tool is free for anyone with a ChatGPT account.

“I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI in software engineering,” Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for Science, told reporters at a press briefing attended by MIT Technology Review. He said that ChatGPT receives about 8.4 million messages per week on “hard science” topics, which he described as evidence that AI is transitioning from curiosity to core workflow for scientists.

OpenAI built Prism on technology from Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company acquired in late 2025. The company envisions Prism helping researchers spend less time on tedious formatting tasks and more time on actual science. During a demonstration, an OpenAI employee showed how the software could automatically find and incorporate relevant scientific literature, then format the bibliography.

But AI models are tools, and any tool can be misused. The risk here is specific: By making it easy to produce polished, professional-looking manuscripts, tools like Prism could flood the peer review system with papers that don’t meaningfully advance their fields. The barrier to producing science-flavored text is dropping, but the capacity to evaluate that research has not kept pace.

When asked about the possibility of the AI model confabulating fake citations, Weil acknowledged in the press demo that “none of this absolves the scientist of the responsibility to verify that their references are correct.”

Unlike traditional reference management software (such as EndNote), which has formatted citations for over 30 years without inventing them, AI models can generate plausible-sounding sources that don’t exist. Weil added: “We’re conscious that as AI becomes more capable, there are concerns around volume, quality, and trust in the scientific community.”

The slop problem

Those concerns are not hypothetical, as we have previously covered. A December 2025 study published in the journal Science found that researchers using large language models to write papers increased their output by 30 to 50 percent, depending on the field. But those AI-assisted papers performed worse in peer review. Papers with complex language written without AI assistance were most likely to be accepted by journals, while papers with complex language likely written by AI models were less likely to be accepted. Reviewers apparently recognized that sophisticated prose was masking weak science.

“It is a very widespread pattern across different fields of science,” Yian Yin, an information science professor at Cornell University and one of the study’s authors, told the Cornell Chronicle. “There’s a big shift in our current ecosystem that warrants a very serious look, especially for those who make decisions about what science we should support and fund.”

Another analysis of 41 million papers published between 1980 and 2025 found that while AI-using scientists receive more citations and publish more papers, the collective scope of scientific exploration appears to be narrowing. Lisa Messeri, a sociocultural anthropologist at Yale University, told Science magazine that these findings should set off “loud alarm bells” for the research community.

“Science is nothing but a collective endeavor,” she said. “There needs to be some deep reckoning with what we do with a tool that benefits individuals but destroys science.”

Concerns about AI-generated scientific content are not new. In 2022, Meta pulled a demo of Galactica, a large language model designed to write scientific literature, after users discovered it could generate convincing nonsense on any topic, including a wiki entry about a fictional research paper called “The benefits of eating crushed glass.” Two years later, Tokyo-based Sakana AI announced “The AI Scientist,” an autonomous research system that critics on Hacker News dismissed as producing “garbage” papers. “As an editor of a journal, I would likely desk-reject them,” one commenter wrote at the time. “They contain very limited novel knowledge.”

The problem has only grown worse since then. In his first editorial of 2026 for Science, Editor-in-Chief H. Holden Thorp wrote that the journal is “less susceptible” to AI slop because of its size and human editorial investment, but he warned that “no system, human or artificial, can catch everything.” Science currently allows limited AI use for editing and gathering references but requires disclosure for anything beyond that and prohibits AI-generated figures.

Mandy Hill, managing director of academic publishing at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, has been even more blunt. In October 2025, she told Retraction Watch that the publishing ecosystem is under strain and called for “radical change.” She explained to the University of Cambridge publication Varsity that “too many journal articles are being published, and this is causing huge strain” and warned that AI “will exacerbate” the problem.

Accelerating science or overwhelming peer review?

OpenAI is serious about leaning on its ability to accelerate science, and the company laid out its case for AI-assisted research in a report published earlier this week. It profiles researchers who say AI models have sped up their work, including a mathematician who used GPT-5.2 to solve an open problem in optimization over three evenings and a physicist who watched the model reproduce symmetry calculations that had taken him months to derive.

Those examples go beyond writing assistance into using AI for actual research work, a distinction OpenAI’s marketing intentionally blurs. For scientists who don’t speak English fluently, AI writing tools could legitimately accelerate the publication of good research. But that benefit may be offset by a flood of mediocre submissions jamming up an already strained peer-review system.

Weil told MIT Technology Review that his goal is not to produce a single AI-generated discovery but rather “10,000 advances in science that maybe wouldn’t have happened or wouldn’t have happened as quickly.” He described this as “an incremental, compounding acceleration.”

Whether that acceleration produces more scientific knowledge or simply more scientific papers remains to be seen. Nikita Zhivotovskiy, a statistician at UC Berkeley not connected to OpenAI, told MIT Technology Review that GPT-5 has already become valuable in his own work for polishing text and catching mathematical typos, making “interaction with the scientific literature smoother.”

But by making papers look polished and professional regardless of their scientific merit, AI writing tools may help weak research clear the initial screening that editors and reviewers use to assess presentation quality. The risk is that conversational workflows obscure assumptions and blur accountability, and they might overwhelm the still very human peer review process required to vet it all.

OpenAI appears aware of this tension. Its public statements about Prism emphasize that the tool will not conduct research independently and that human scientists remain responsible for verification.

Still, one commenter on Hacker News captured the anxiety spreading through technical communities: “I’m scared that this type of thing is going to do to science journals what AI-generated bug reports is doing to bug bounties. We’re truly living in a post-scarcity society now, except that the thing we have an abundance of is garbage, and it’s drowning out everything of value.”

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Posted Friday 30 January 2026 at 12:52 pm AEST (my time).

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Humans can’t live without lungs. And yet for 48 hours, in a surgical suite at Northwestern University, a 33-year-old man lived with an empty cavity in his chest where his lungs used to be. He was kept alive by a custom-engineered artificial device that represented a desperate last-ditch effort by his doctors. The custom hardware solved a physiological puzzle that has made bilateral pneumonectomy, the removal of both lungs, extremely risky before now.

The artificial lung system was built by the team of Ankit Bharat, a surgeon and researcher at Northwestern. It successfully kept a critically ill patient alive long enough to enable a double lung transplant, temporarily replacing his entire pulmonary system with a synthetic surrogate. The system creates a blueprint for saving people previously considered beyond hope by transplant teams.

Melting lungs

The patient, a once-healthy 33-year-old, arrived at the hospital with Influenza B complicated by a secondary, severe infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that in this case proved resistant even to carbapenems—our antibiotics of last resort. This combination of infections triggered acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a condition where the lungs become so inflamed and fluid-filled that oxygen can no longer reach the blood.

In this case, the infections were necrotizing—the cells in the lungs were dying, turning his lung tissue into a liquid. The surgeons faced a seemingly impossible choice. The patient needed a transplant to survive, but he was in refractory septic shock. His kidneys were shutting down, and his heart was failing to the point where it completely stopped shortly after hospital admission. The doctors had to bring him back with CPR.

He was too sick for a transplant, yet the very organs that needed replacing were the source of the infection fueling his decline. “When the infection is so severe that the lungs are melting, they’re irrecoverably damaged,” Bharat explained. “That’s when patients die.”

But this patient did not die.

The empty chest problem

To save him, Bharat’s team had to remove the infected lungs, a procedure called a bilateral pneumonectomy, to remove the source of the sepsis. We have machines that can oxygenate the blood. But removing both lungs creates a lethal mechanical problem for the heart.

The human heart is two pumps in one. The right side, called the pulmonary circuit, pumps oxygen-poor blood returning from the body into the lungs, which remove its carbon dioxide and load it with a fresh supply of oxygen. The left side, known as the systemic circuit, receives freshly oxygenated blood and pumps it to the rest of the body. The pulmonary vascular bed, all these miles of tiny vessels inside the lungs, facilitates this gas exchange. But it also acts as a capacitor, absorbing the pressure and volume of the blood ejected by the right ventricle.

If you remove the lungs and simply shut the pulmonary arteries, the right ventricle has nowhere to pump—it would experience an immediate, massive pressure spike, distend like a balloon, and fail within minutes. At the same time, the left side of the heart would have no blood returning to it, leading to a total collapse of blood pressure and systemic circulation.

This is the reason why most double-lung transplants are performed sequentially: The surgeons replace one lung, get it up and running, and then move on to the second. But desperate times require desperate measures.

The last line of defense

In rare cases where both lungs must be removed at once, a patient can still be supported by the Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO), a mechanical lung that takes blood out of the body, removes the carbon dioxide, adds oxygen, and pumps it back in. The problem is that while ECMO can support a person for up to over a year when their lungs are still in their body, the risks of using it skyrocket when the lungs are removed.

The empty chest cavity creates a void where blood and fluids can pool, leading to huge internal bleeding. The heart, which relies on the physical presence and pressure of the lungs to maintain its proper anatomical position, can flop around or collapse. Finally, circulating blood through complex machinery significantly increases the risk of stroke or clotting.

Because of all these risks, surgeons always treat removing both lungs as the last line of defense, one they can only rely on for a short time—the shorter the better. Bharat and his colleagues, though, had to keep their patient this way until the sepsis had been dealt with.

It wasn’t enough for the team to keep the patient alive without lungs in his body until the transplant arrived. In this lungless state, somehow, they had to improve his health.

Synthetic lungs

To make this happen, Bharat’s team engineered a device they called the “flow-adaptive extracorporeal total artificial lung system” (TAL), a complex circuit designed to mimic the physics of the missing organs. At its core was a pump and an oxygenator borrowed from the standard ECMO setup, but it also used four new components to replace biological functions.

The first was a dual-lumen cannula, essentially a single tube with two separate channels inside. Inserted through the internal jugular vein, this tube acted as the primary drain. It allowed the team to pull deoxygenated blood directly from the right side of the heart, unloading the right ventricle to prevent it from distending.

The second component was something the researchers called a flow-adaptive shunt, which connected the right pulmonary artery back to the right atrium. When the right ventricle pumped out more blood than the external pump could handle, the excess blood would safely recirculate back into the atrium through this low-resistance path, protecting the heart and the surgical staples from pressure spikes. During the 48 hours the patient was supported by the TAL, this shunt self-regulated its flow to anywhere between 1.1 and 6.3 liters per minute, based on the patient’s needs.

To ensure the left side of the heart stayed full and active, the team used a device called dual left atrial return. It comprised two 10 mm grafts that returned oxygenated blood from the ECMO artificial lung directly into the left atrium. This, the team said in a paper that describes the hardware, maintained what’s called Starling physiology: the principle that the heart pumps better when it is properly filled. It also prevented blood from stagnating and forming clots inside the heart chambers.

Finally, to prevent the heart from physically shifting and damaging vital vessels in the empty chest cavity, the surgeons used bovine pericardium to reconstruct the heart’s protective sac and filled the empty space with tissue expanders and surgical sponges.

Lungless recovery

The results of hooking the patient up to TAL were immediate.

Within hours of the surgery, the patient’s septic shock began to resolve. His lactate levels, a key marker of tissue oxygen starvation, dropped from a dangerous 8.2 mmol/L to a normal level of less than 1.0 mmol/L within 24 hours. The medications used to keep his blood pressure up were discontinued after just 12 hours.

For two days, the patient lived as a human being with no lungs, stabilized by a machine that breathed and buffered his circulation with surgical precision. When donor lungs became available 48 hours later, the patient’s body was no longer suffering from sepsis.

He was ready for the transplant, which the team successfully performed. And after putting in the new lungs, they focused on the lungs they had removed.

When lungs die

Conventionally, patients with ARDS do not get transplants because doctors hope that with the right treatment and support, the diseased lungs will eventually heal. But the examination of the infected lungs removed from Bharat’s patient told a different story and helped define the clinical point of no return, when a lung is truly dead.

Based on the spatial transcriptomics, a set of techniques that let scientists see which genes are active at different sites in the tissue, the team built a high-resolution molecular map of the removed lungs. What they found was a landscape of total devastation.

The lungs were filled with aberrant basaloid cells—a signature of failed regeneration. The stem cells required to rebuild the lungs were almost entirely gone. The architecture was uniformly destroyed and replaced by cells that were laying down scar tissue.

“People think if you get severe ARDS, you keep supporting them and ultimately the lungs will get better,” Bharat says.  The data collected by his team suggested no amount of waiting or life support would have brought this patient’s lungs back to life. “In my practice, young patients die almost every week because no one realized that transplantation was an option,” Bharat added.

Tough choices

In many hospitals, patients with severe, acute lung infections are often allowed to die because they are considered too unstable for surgery. While Bharat’s study offers some hope that this situation might improve in the future, the team admits that their approach currently requires immense expertise and access to a highly specialized medical center with donor lungs. Making expertise and resources more accessible will take some time.

And that’s not the only thing we have to wait for. Bharat and his colleagues note in their paper that one key challenge in ARDS is determining whether the injury is reversible. His study offers some initial insights into diagnosing irreversible damage, but the researchers note that their conclusions were based on a single case. The features of lungs that are beyond repair may differ across various pathogens, stages of disease, or the way individual patient’s body responds to the disease.

For Bharat’s patient, though, all possible stars aligned. The paper says that two years after the procedure, he has returned to a normal, independent life with excellent lung function.

Med, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.medj.2025.100985

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