News: General News

Japan lost a 5-ton navigation satellite when it fell off a rocket during launch

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:12:09 +0000

Imagine: You lost your car’s cargo rack, but didn’t notice until you reached your destination.

If you’re in the space business long enough, you learn there are numerous ways a rocket can fail. I’ve written my share of stories about misbehaving rockets and the extensive investigations that usually—but not always—reveal what went wrong.

But I never expected to write this story. Maybe this was a failure of my own imagination. I’m used to writing about engine malfunctions, staging issues, guidance glitches, or structural failures. Last April, Ars reported on the bizarre failure of Firefly Aerospace’s commercial Alpha rocket.

Japan’s H3 rocket found a new way to fail last month, apparently eluding the imaginations of its own designers and engineers.

The H3 is a relatively new vehicle, with last month’s launch marking the eighth flight of Japan’s flagship rocket. The launcher falls on the medium-to-heavy section of the lift spectrum. The eighth H3 rocket 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.

Officials from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are starting to get a handle on what happened. Agency officials briefed the government ministry overseeing Japan’s space activities last week, and the presentation (in Japanese) was posted on a government website.

The presentation is rich in information, with illustrations, a fault tree analysis, and a graph of in-flight measurements from sensors on the H3 rocket. It offers a treasure trove of detail and data most launch providers decline to release publicly after a rocket malfunction.

What happened?

Some of the material is difficult to grasp for a non-Japanese speaker unfamiliar with the subtle intricacies of the H3 rocket’s design. What is clear is that 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.

At this point in the mission, the H3 rocket was well above the thick lower layers of the atmosphere. Aerodynamic forces were not a significant factor, but the rocket continued accelerating on the power of its two hydrogen-fueled main engines. The Michibiki 5 satellite held on for a little more than a minute, when the H3’s first stage shut down and separated from the rocket’s second stage.

The jolt from staging dislodged the satellite from its mooring atop the rocket. Then, the second stage lit its engine and left the satellite in the dust. A rear-facing camera on the upper stage captured a fleeting view of the satellite falling back to Earth. In the briefing package, Japanese space officials wrote that Michibiki 5 fell into the Pacific Ocean in the same impact zone as the H3’s first stage.

Whatever caused the satellite to break free of the rocket damaged more than its attach fitting. Telemetry data downlinked from the H3 showed a pressure drop in the second stage’s liquid hydrogen tank after separation of the payload fairing.

“A decrease in LH2 tank pressure was confirmed almost simultaneously,” officials wrote. A pressurization valve continued to open to restore pressure to the tank, but the pressure did not recover. “It is highly likely that the satellite mounting structure was damaged due to some factor, and as a result, the pressurization piping was damaged.”

The second stage engine lost 20 percent of its thrust, but it fired long enough to put the rocket into a low-altitude orbit. The rocket’s temporary recovery was likely aided by the absence of its multi-ton payload, meaning it needed a lower impulse to reach orbital velocity. The orbit was too low to sustain, and the second stage of the H3 rocket reentered the atmosphere and burned up within several hours.

Getting to root cause

Investigators now have a grasp of what happened, but they are still piecing together why. JAXA presented a fault tree analysis to the Japanese science and technology ministry, showing which potential causes engineers have ruled out, and which ones remain under investigation.

The branches of the fault tree still open include the possibility of an impact or collision between part of the payload fairing and the Michibiki 5 satellite or its mounting structure. Engineers continue to probe the possibility that residual strain energy in the connection between the satellite and the rocket was suddenly released at the moment of fairing separation.

The rocket is supposed to vent pressure inside the fairing as it ascends through thinner air and into space. Measurements from the rocket indicate the pressure inside the fairing decreased as expected during the launch. Officials don’t believe this was a factor in the launch failure, but engineers are examining whether the measurements were in error.

The rocket and satellite also carried combustible propellants, high-pressure gases, and pyrotechnics. “While no data indicating leakage of these substances has been confirmed, the possibility that they caused the abnormal acceleration cannot be ruled out at this time,” JAXA said.

So far, the probe has found no evidence that a structural problem with the satellite itself was the root cause of the failure.

With last month’s incident, the H3 rocket has a record of six successful launches in eight flights. The H3’s debut launch in 2023 faltered due to an ignition failure on the rocket’s second stage.

JAXA must complete the latest H3 failure investigation in the coming months to clear the rocket to launch the nation’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission in a narrow planetary launch window that opens in October. MMX is an exciting robotic mission to land on and retrieve samples from the Martian moon Phobos for return to Earth. MMX’s launch was previously set for 2024, but Japan’s space agency delayed it to this year due to earlier problems with the H3 rocket.

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Posted Thursday 29 January 2026 at 6:10 am AEST (my time).

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A WB-57 pilot just made a heroic landing in Houston after its landing gear failed

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 03:41:51 +0000

“A thorough investigation will be conducted by NASA into the cause.”

One of NASA’s three large WB-57 aircraft made an emergency landing at Ellington Field on Tuesday morning in southeastern Houston.

Video captured by KHOU 11 television showed the aircraft touching down on the runway without its landing gear extended. The pilot then maintains control of the vehicle as it slides down the runway, slowing the aircraft through friction. The crew was not harmed, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said.

WB-57 landing.

“Today, a mechanical issue with one of NASA’s WB-57s resulted in a gear-up landing at Ellington Field,” she said. “Response to the incident is ongoing, and all crew are safe at this time. As with any incident, a thorough investigation will be conducted by NASA into the cause. NASA will transparently update the public as we gather more information.”

The B-57 line of aircraft dates back to 1944, when the English Electric Company began developing the plane. After the Royal Air Force showcased the B-57 in 1951 by crossing the Atlantic in a record four hours and 40 minutes and becoming the first jet-powered aircraft to span the Atlantic without refueling, the United States Air Force began buying them to replace its aging Douglas B-26 Invader.

Now used for science

The aircraft performed bombing missions in Vietnam and other military campaigns, and a variant that later became the WB-57 was designed with longer wings that could fly even higher, up to 62,000 feet. This proved useful for weather reconnaissance and, around the world, to sample the upper atmosphere for evidence of nuclear debris where US officials suspected the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

Although their utility for military purposes has faded, NASA has flown WB-57s as part of a broad-ranging science mission since 1972. The aircraft have flown above hurricanes, and missions as varied as collecting cosmic dust samples from comets and asteroids in Earth’s upper atmosphere, investigating clouds, and studying the environmental effect of plumes from the Titan, Space Shuttle, Delta, Atlas, and Athena rockets on the stratosphere. More recently, they have been used to observe launches of SpaceX’s Starship rocket and were due to be used in a similar manner for the Artemis II lunar mission.

After acquiring two of the aircraft earlier, NASA found a third one in the “boneyard” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona in 2013. After this one was restored, the space agency flew all three simultaneously in 2015, an event attended by Ars.

It was not immediately clear whether the damage to the WB-57 on Tuesday was repairable, nor what impact this might have on plans to observe the launch of the Artemis II mission and reentry of the Orion spacecraft after its journey around the Moon.

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Posted Wednesday 28 January 2026 at 1:41 pm AEST (my time).

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Volvo invented the three-point seat belt 67 years ago; now it has improved it

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:58:01 +0000

The EX60 senses a passenger’s size and weight, determining how much force to use.

With the launch of its all-new, all-electric EX60, Volvo has put lessons learned from the EX30 and EX90 to use. The EX60 is built on Volvo’s new SPA3 platform, made only for battery-electric vehicles. It boasts up to 400 miles (643 km) of range, with fast-charging capabilities Volvo says add 173 miles (278 km) in 10 minutes. Mega casting reduces the number of parts of the rear floor from 100-plus to one piece crafted of aluminum alloy, reducing complexities and weld points.

Inside the cabin, however, the real achievement is Volvo’s new multi-adaptive safety belt. Volvo has a history with the modern three-point safety belt, which was perfected by in-house engineer Nils Bohlin in 1959 before the patent was shared with the world. Today at the Volvo Cars Safety Center lab, at least one brand-new Volvo is crashed every day in the name of science. The goal: to test not just how well its vehicles are protecting passengers but what the next frontier is in safety technology.

Senior Safety Technical Leader Mikael Ljung Aust is a driving behavior specialist with 20 years under his belt at Volvo. He says it’s easy to optimize testing toward one person or one test point and come up with a good result. However, both from the behavioral perspective and from physics, people are different. What’s not different, he points out, is how people drive.

“We’re shaped into a very similar automated behavior when we drive, so that makes the collision prevention side of things a bit easier,” Ljung Aust says. “But on the injury-prevention side of things is where the seat belt comes in, we’re working on the principle of equal safety for all. The idea is that independent of who you are in terms of size, shape, weight, all of these things, you should have exactly the same protection.”

How it works

Basically, a seat belt is made up of a retractor mechanism, buckle assembly, webbing material, and a pretensioner device. Of these parts, the pretensioner is the one tasked with tightening the seatbelt webbing in a collision. As such, it reduces the forward movement of the passenger before the airbag deploys at speeds of up to 200 mph (321 km/h). All of these parts remain the same for Volvo’s newest seat belt iteration. It’s the tiny brain attached to the assemblage that’s different.

Volvo’s new central computing system, HuginCore (named after a bird in Norse mythology), runs the EX60 with more than 250 trillion operations per second. It has been developed in-house, together with its partners Google, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.

“With the HuginCore system we can collect a lot of data and make decisions in the car instantly and combine that with the belt’s ability to choose different load levels,” says Åsa Haglund, head of the Volvo Cars Safety Center. “A box of possibilities opens up where you can detect what type of crash it is and who is in the car and choose a more optimal belt force.”

Load limiters control how much force the safety belt applies to the human body during a crash. Volvo’s new system pushes the load-limiting profiles from three to 11, marking a major increase in adjustability. It’s kind of like an audio system, Ljung Aust muses. A sound system with 10 discrete steps up the volume ladder offers varied profiles along the way, while one with only one or two steps addresses fewer preference levels.

Using data from exterior, interior, and crash sensors, the car reacts to a collision in milliseconds—less than the blink of an eye, Ljung Aust says. In the case of a crash, it’s critical to hold the hips into the car, he explains, but the upper body should fold forward in a frontal crash in a nice, smooth motion to meet the airbag. Otherwise, the body is exposed to the same force as the slowing car.

Tempering that motion means adjusting for a passenger’s size to avoid injury; for instance, if the sensors detect a larger occupant in a severe crash, it’s designed to reduce the risk of head injury by using a higher belt load setting. Conversely, a smaller passenger in a lesser fender bender gets a lower belt load setting to reduce the incidence of rib fractures. Haglund notes that while one might make assumptions about what body type is more vulnerable in a crash, it has more to do with the kind of crash itself.

Mechanical engineering plus over-the-air updates

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to crash safety, but the multi-adaptive seat belt is a closer step toward individual protection. Ljung Aust likens the new seat belt system to an octopus; the “tentacles” are the sensors that feed information to the brain. From there, the processor collects the data that Volvo uses to make improvements over time. Over-the-air updates will send future improvements to the car’s HuginCore system.

The timing is where artificial intelligence plays a big part. For every crash, there is an optimal set of outcomes to trigger the belt force. The result needs to happen like that, he says with a snap of his fingers.

Modern safety belts use load limiters to control how much force the safety belt applies to the human body during a crash. But with the new safety belt’s expanded load-limiting profiles, it can optimize performance for each situation and individual. “What is changing is the level of sophistication in how we act on that information,” Ljung Aust says. “We can now be more nuanced with the forces we apply to keep you under the lowest pressure possible [in a crash].”

Not enough people know how a seat belt works, says Ljung Aust, and they should.

“If you find out how it works, you realize it’s pretty cool and it actually makes a difference,” he says. “And to the extent that you were not inclined to wear it before or not be happy about it, maybe that has a positive influence on your attitude. Having a seat belt is literally the best thing you can do.”

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Posted Wednesday 28 January 2026 at 6:56 am AEST (my time).

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Meet the mysterious electrides

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:36:14 +0000

These chemical oddities may explain why Earth seems to be deficient in certain elements.

For close to a century, geoscientists have pondered a mystery: Where did Earth’s lighter elements go? Compared to amounts in the Sun and in some meteorites, Earth has less hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, as well as noble gases like helium—in some cases, more than 99 percent less.

Some of the disparity is explained by losses to the solar system as our planet formed. But researchers have long suspected that something else was going on too.

Recently, a team of scientists reported a possible explanation—that the elements are hiding deep in the solid inner core of Earth. At its super-high pressure—360 gigapascals, 3.6 million times atmospheric pressure—the iron there behaves strangely, becoming an electride: a little-known form of the metal that can suck up lighter elements.

Study coauthor Duck Young Kim, a solid-state physicist at the Center for High Pressure Science & Technology Advanced Research in Shanghai, says the absorption of these light elements may have happened gradually over a couple of billion years—and may still be going on today. It would explain why the movement of seismic waves traveling through Earth suggests an inner core density that is 5 percent to 8 percent lower than expected were it metal alone.

Electrides, in more ways than one, are having their moment. Not only might they help solve a planetary mystery, they can now be made at room temperature and pressure from an array of elements. And since all electrides contain a source of reactive electrons that are easily donated to other molecules, they make ideal catalysts and other sorts of agents that help to propel challenging reactions.

One electride is already in use to catalyze the production of ammonia, a key component of fertilizer; its Japanese developers claim the process uses 20 percent less energy than traditional ammonia manufacture. Chemists, meanwhile, are discovering new electrides that could lead to cheaper and greener methods of producing pharmaceuticals.

Today’s challenge is to find more of these intriguing materials and to understand the chemical rules that govern when they form.

Electrides at high pressure

Most solids are made from ordered lattices of atoms, but electrides are different. Their lattices have little pockets where electrons sit on their own.

Normal metals have electrons that are not stuck to one atom. These are the outer, or valence, electrons that are free to move between atoms, forming what is often referred to as a delocalized “sea of electrons.” It explains why metals conduct electricity.

The outer electrons of electrides no longer orbit a particular atom either, but they can’t freely move. Instead, they become trapped at sites between atoms that are called non-nuclear attractors. This gives the materials unique properties. In the case of the iron in Earth’s core, the negative electron charges stabilize lighter elements at non-nuclear attractors that were formed at those super-high pressures, 3,000 times than at the bottom of the deepest ocean. The elements would diffuse into the metal, explaining where they disappeared to.

The first metal found to form an electride at high pressure was sodium, reported in 2009. At a pressure of 200 gigapascals (2 million times greater than atmospheric pressure) it transforms from a shiny, reflective, conducting metal into a transparent glassy, insulating material. This finding was “very weird,” says Stefano Racioppi, a computational and theoretical chemist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who worked on sodium electrides while in the lab of Eva Zurek at the University at Buffalo in New York state. Early theories, he says, had predicted that at high pressure, sodium’s outer electrons would move even more freely between atoms.

The first sign that things were different came from predictions in the late 1990s, when scientists were using computational simulations to model solids, based on the rules of quantum theory. These rules define the energy levels that electrons can have, and hence the probable range of positions in which they are found in atoms (their atomic orbitals).

Simulating solid sodium showed that at high pressures, as the sodium atoms get squeezed closer together, so do the electrons orbiting each atom. That causes them to experience increasing repulsive forces with one another. This changes the relative energies of every electron orbiting the nucleus of each atom, Racioppi explains—leading to a reorganization of electron positions.

The result? Rather than occupying orbitals that allow them to be delocalized and move between atoms, the orbitals take on a new shape that forces electrons into the non-nuclear attractor sites. Since the electrons are stuck at these sites, the solid loses its metallic properties.

Adding to this theoretical work, Racioppi and Zurek collaborated with researchers at the University of Edinburgh to find experimental evidence for a sodium electride at extreme pressures. Squeezing crystals of sodium between two diamonds, they used X-ray diffraction to map electron density in the metal structure. This, they reported in September 2025, confirmed that electrons really were located in the predicted non-nuclear attractor sites between sodium atoms.

Just the thing for catalysts

Electrides are ideal candidates for catalysts—substances that can speed up and lower the energy needed for chemical reactions. That’s because the isolated electrons at the non-nuclear attractor sites can be donated to make and break bonds. But to be useful, they would need to function at ambient conditions.

Several such stable electrides have been discovered over the last 10 years, made from inorganic compounds or organic molecules containing metal atoms. One of the most significant, mayenite, was found by surprise in 2003 when material scientist Hideo Hosono at the Institute of Science Tokyo was investigating a type of cement.

Mayenite is a calcium aluminate oxide that forms crystals with very small pores—a few nanometers across—called cages, that contain oxygen ions. If a metal vapor of calcium or titanium is passed over it at high temperature, it removes the oxygen, leaving behind just electrons trapped at these sites—an electride.

Unlike the high-pressure metal electrides that switch from conductors to insulators, mayenite starts as an insulator. But now its trapped electrons can jump between cage sites (via a process called quantum tunnelling)—making it a conductor, albeit 100 to 1,000 times less conductive than a metal like aluminum or silver. It also becomes an excellent catalyst, able to surrender electrons to help make and break bonds in reactions.

By 2011, Hosono had begun to develop mayenite as a greener and more efficient catalyst for synthesizing ammonia. Over 170 million metric tons of ammonia, mostly for fertilizers, is produced annually via the Haber-Bosch process, in which metal oxides facilitate hydrogen and nitrogen gases reacting together at high pressure and temperature. It is an energy-intensive, expensive process—Haber-Bosch plants account for some 2 percent of the world’s energy use.

In Haber-Bosch, the catalysts bind the two gases to their surfaces and donate electrons to help break the strong triple bond that holds the two nitrogen atoms together in nitrogen gas, as well as the bonds in hydrogen gas. Because mayenite has a strong electron-donating nature, Hosono thought mayenite would be able to do it better.

In Hosono’s reaction, mayenite itself does not bind the gases but acts as a support bed for nanoparticles of a metal called ruthenium. First, the nanoparticles absorb the nitrogen and hydrogen gases. Then the mayenite donates electrons to the ruthenium. These electrons flow into the nitrogen and hydrogen molecules, making it easier to break their bonds. Ammonia thus forms at a lower temperature—300 to 400° C—and lower pressure—50 to 80 atmospheres— than with Haber-Bosch, which takes place at 400 to 500° C and 100 to 400 atmospheres.

In 2017, the company Tsubame BHB was formed to commercialize Hosono’s catalyst, with the first pilot plant opening in 2019, producing 20 metric tons of ammonia per year. The company has since opened a larger facility in Japan and is setting up a 20,000-ton-per year green ammonia plant in Brazil to replace some of the nation’s fossil-fuel-based fertilizer production. The company estimates that this will avoid 11,000 tons of CO₂ emissions annually—about equal to the annual emissions of 2,400 cars.

There are other applications for a mayenite catalyst, says Hosono, including a lower-energy conversion of CO₂ into useful chemicals like methane, methanol, or longer-chain hydrocarbons. Other scientists have suggested that mayenite’s cage structure also makes it suitable for immobilizing radioactive isotope waste in nuclear power stations: The electrons could capture negative ions like iodine and bromide and trap them in the cages.

Mayenite has even been studied as a low-temperature propulsion system for satellites in space. When it is heated to 600° C in a vacuum, its trapped electrons blast from the cages, causing propulsion.

Organic electrides

The list of materials known to form electrides keeps growing. In 2024, a team led by chemist Fabrizio Ortu at the University of Leicester in the UK accidentally discovered another room-temperature-stable electride made from calcium ions surrounded by large organic molecules, together known as a coordination complex.

He was using a method known as mechanical chemistry—“You put something in a milling jar, you shake it really hard, and that provides the energy for the reaction,” he says. But to his surprise, electrons from the potassium he had added to his calcium complex were not donated to the calcium ion. Instead, what formed “had these electrons that were floating in the system,” he says, trapped in sites between the two metals.

Unlike mayenite, this electride is not a conductor—its trapped electrons do not jump. But they allow it to facilitate reactions that are otherwise hard to get started, by activating unreactive bonds, doing a job much like a catalyst. These are reactions that currently rely on expensive palladium catalysts.

The scientists successfully used the electride on a reaction that joins two pyridine rings—carbon rings containing a nitrogen atom. They are now examining whether the electride could assist in other common organic reactions, such as substituting a hydrogen atom on a benzene ring. These substitutions are difficult because the bond between the benzene ring carbon and its attached hydrogen is very stable.

There are still problems to sort out: Ortu’s calcium electride is too air- and water-sensitive for use in industry. He is now looking for a more stable alternative, which could prove particularly useful in the pharmaceutical industry to synthesize drug molecules, where the sorts of reactions Ortu has demonstrated are common.

Still questions at the core

There remain many unresolved mysteries about electrides, including whether Earth’s inner core definitely contains one. Kim and his collaborators used simulations of the iron lattice to find evidence for non-nuclear attractor sites, but their interpretation of the results remains “a little bit controversial,” Racioppi says.

Sodium and other metals in Group 1 and Group 2 of the periodic table of elements—such as lithium, calcium, and magnesium—have loosely bound outer electrons. This helps make it easy for electrons to shift to non-nuclear attractor sites, forming electrides. But iron exerts more pulling power on its outer electrons, which sit in differently shaped orbitals. This makes the increase in electron repulsion under pressure less significant and thus the shift to electride formation difficult, Racioppi says.

Electrides are still little known and little studied, says computational materials scientist Lee Burton of Tel Aviv University. There is still no theory or model to predict when a material will become one. “Because electrides are not typical chemically, you can’t bring your chemical intuition to it,” he says.

Burton has been searching for rules that might help with predictions and has had some success finding electrides from a screen of 40,000 known materials. He is now using artificial intelligence to find more. “It’s a complex interplay between different properties that sometimes can all depend on each other,” he says. “This is where machine learning can really help.”

The key is having reliable data to train any model. Burton’s team only has actual data from the handful of electride structures experimentally confirmed so far, but they also are using the kind of modeling based on quantum theory that was carried out by Racioppi to create high-resolution simulations of electron density within materials. They are doing this for as many materials as they can; those that are confirmed by real-world experiments will be used to train an AI model to identify more materials that are likely to be electrides—ones with the discrete pockets of high electron density characteristic of trapped electron sites. “The potential,” says Burton, “is enormous.”

Knowable Magazine, 2026. DOI: 10.1146/knowable-012626-2 (About DOIs)

“This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.”

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Posted Wednesday 28 January 2026 at 5:35 am AEST (my time).

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Amazon shutters all of its physical Go and Fresh stores

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:35:09 +0000

The closures are part of a move to double down on expanding Whole Foods Market.

Amazon Go and Fresh physical store locations will soon be no more, with Amazon announcing on Tuesday that it’s closing up the majority of the stores and converting others into Whole Foods Market locations. Customers will still be able to order from Amazon Fresh online, but won’t be able to shop at physical stores with the same name. Amazon is also planning to expand its same-day delivery option for groceries and household essentials to more cities over the coming year.

The Go and Fresh closures come as Amazon doubles down on expanding the Whole Foods brand rather than its own in-house physical grocery stores. That expansion includes over 100 new Whole Foods Market locations opening over the next few years, along with five new locations for the smaller, convenience store-style Whole Foods Market Daily Shop.

Amazon also stated that it will still be “testing new physical store experiences,” like its Amazon Grocery location in Chicago and a Whole Foods concept store in Pennsylvania where shoppers can also purchase products from Amazon. Earlier this month, an Amazon proposal for a sprawling Walmart-like supercenter was approved in the Chicago suburb of Orland Park, Illinois. That development does not appear to be a Whole Foods Market, so Amazon’s plans for more of its own brick-and-mortar stores may still be in the works despite closing its book stores, 4-star stores, Pop Up shop, Style stores, and now Go and Fresh stores.

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Posted Wednesday 28 January 2026 at 5:34 am AEST (my time).

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Former astronaut on lunar spacesuits: “I don’t think they’re great right now”

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:28:38 +0000

“These are just the difficulties of designing a spacesuit for the lunar environment.”

Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to do more than the first Moonwalkers did more than 50 years ago.

The Moonwalking experience will amount to an “extreme physical event” for crews selected for the Artemis program’s first lunar landings, a former NASA astronaut told a panel of researchers, physicians, and engineers convened by the National Academies.

Kate Rubins, who retired from the space agency last year, presented the committee with her views on the health risks for astronauts on lunar missions. She outlined the concerns NASA officials often talk about: radiation exposure, muscle and bone atrophy, reduced cardiovascular and immune function, and other adverse medical effects of spaceflight.

Scientists and astronauts have come to understand many of these effects after a quarter-century of continuous human presence on the International Space Station. But the Moon is different in a few important ways. The Moon is outside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere, lunar dust is pervasive, and the Moon has partial gravity, about one-sixth as strong as the pull we feel on Earth.

Each of these presents challenges for astronauts living and working on the lunar surface, and their effects are amplified for crew members who venture outside for spacewalks. NASA selected Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, for a $228 million fixed-price contract to develop commercial pressurized spacesuits for the Artemis III mission, slated to be the first human landing mission on the Moon since 1972.

NASA hopes to fly the Artemis III mission by the end of 2028, but the schedule is in question. The readiness of Axiom’s spacesuits and the availability of new human-rated landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin are driving the timeline for Artemis III.

Stressing about stress

Rubins is a veteran of two long-duration spaceflights on the International Space Station, logging 300 days in space and conducting four spacewalks totaling nearly 27 hours. She is also an accomplished microbiologist and became the first person to sequence DNA in space.

“What I think we have on the Moon that we don’t really have on the space station that I want people to recognize is an extreme physical stress,” Rubins said. “On the space station, most of the time you’re floating around. You’re pretty happy. It’s very relaxed. You can do exercise. Every now and then, you do an EVA (Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk).”

“When we get to the lunar surface, people are going to be sleep shifting,” Rubins said. “They’re barely going to get any sleep. They’re going to be in these suits for eight or nine hours. They’re going to be doing EVAs every day. The EVAs that I did on my flights, it was like doing a marathon and then doing another marathon when you were done.”

Rubins is now a professor of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She said treks on the Moon will be “even more challenging” than her spacewalks outside the ISS.

The Axiom spacesuit design builds on NASA’s own work developing a prototype suit to replace the agency’s decades-old Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs) used for spacewalks at the International Space Station (ISS). The new suits allow for greater mobility, with more flexible joints to help astronauts use their legs, crouch, and bend down—things they don’t have to do when floating outside the ISS.

Astronauts on the Moon also must contend with gravity. Including a life-support backpack, the commercial suit weighs more than 300 pounds in Earth’s gravity, but Axiom considers the exact number proprietary. The Axiom suit is considerably heavier than the 185-pound spacesuit the Apollo astronauts wore on the Moon. NASA’s earlier prototype exploration spacesuit was estimated to weigh more than 400 pounds, according to a 2021 report by NASA’s inspector general.

“We’ve definitely seen trauma from the suits, from the actual EVA suit accommodation,” said Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and medical doctor. “That’s everything from skin abrasions to joint pain to—no kidding—orthopedic trauma. You can potentially get a fracture of sorts. EVAs on the lunar surface with a heavily loaded suit and heavy loads that you’re either carrying or tools that you’re reacting against, that’s an issue.”

On paper, the Axiom suits for NASA’s Artemis missions are more capable than the Apollo suits. They can support longer spacewalks and provide greater redundancy, and they’re made of modern materials to enhance flexibility and crew comfort. But the new suits are heavier, and for astronauts used to spacewalks outside the ISS, walks on the Moon will be a slog, Rubins said.

“I think the suits are better than Apollo, but I don’t think they are great right now,” Rubins said. “They still have a lot of flexibility issues. Bending down to pick up rocks is hard. The center of gravity is an issue. People are going to be falling over. I think when we say these suits aren’t bad, it’s because the suits have been so horrible that when we get something slightly less than horrible, we get all excited and we celebrate.”

The heavier lunar suits developed for Artemis missions run counter to advice from former astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who spent 22 hours walking on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

“I’d have that go about four times the mobility, at least four times the mobility, and half the weight,” Schmitt said in a NASA oral history interview in 2000. “Now, one way you can… reduce the weight is carry less consumables and learn to use consumables that you have in some other vehicle, like a lunar rover. Anytime you’re on the rover, you hook into those consumables and live off of those, and then when you get off, you live off of what’s in your backpack. We, of course, just had the consumables in our backpack.”

NASA won’t have a rover on the first Artemis landing mission. That will come on a later flight. A fully pressurized vehicle for astronauts to drive across the Moon may be ready sometime in the 2030s. Until then, Moonwalkers will have to tough it out.

“I do crossfit. I do triathlons. I do marathons. I get out of a session in the pool in the NBL (Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory) doing the lunar suit underwater, and I just want to go home and take a nap,” Rubins told the panel. “I am absolutely spent. You’re bruised. This is an extreme physical event in a way that the space station is not.”

Barratt met with the same National Academies panel this week and presented a few hours before Rubins. The committee was chartered to examine how human explorers can enable scientific discovery at sites across the lunar surface. Barratt had a more favorable take on the spacesuit situation.

“This is not a commercial for Axiom. I don’t promote anyone, but their suit is getting there,” Barratt said. “We’ve got 700 hours of pressurized experience in it right now. We do a lot of tests in the NBL, and there are techniques and body conditioning that you do to help you get ready for doing things like this. Bending down in the suit is really not too bad at all.”

Rubins and Barratt did not discuss the schedule for when Axiom’s lunar spacesuit will be ready to fly to the Moon, but the conversation illuminated the innumerable struggles of spacewalking, Moonwalking, and the training astronauts undergo to prepare for extravehicular outings.

The one who should know

I spoke directly with Rubins after her discussion with the National Academies. Her last assignment at NASA was as chief of the EVA and robotics branch in the astronaut office, where she assisted in the development of the new lunar spacesuits. I asked about her experiences testing the lunar suit and her thoughts on how astronauts should prepare for Moonwalks.

“The suits that we have are definitely much better than Apollo,” Rubins said in the interview. “They were just big bags of air. The joints aren’t in there, so it was harder to move. What they did have going for them was that they were much, much lighter than our current spacesuits. We have added a lot of the joints back, and that does get some mobility for us. But at the end of the day, the suits are still quite heavy.”

You can divide the weight of the suit by six to get an idea of how it might feel to carry it around on the lunar surface. While it won’t feel like 300 pounds, astronauts will still have to account for their mass and momentum.

Rubins explained:

Instead of kind of floating in microgravity and moving your mass around with your hands and your arms, now we’re ambulating. We’re walking with our legs. You’re going to have more strain on your knees and your hips. Your hamstrings, your calves, and your glutes are going to come more into play.

I think, overall, it may be a better fit for humans physically because if you ask somebody to do a task, I’m going to be much better at a task if I can use my legs and I’m ambulating. Then I have to pull myself along with my arms… We’re not really built to do that, but we are built to run and to go long distances. Our legs are just such a powerful force.

So I think there are a lot of things lining up that are going to make the physiology easier. Then there are things that are going to be different because we’re we’re now in a partial gravity environment. We’re going to be bending, we’re going to be twisting, we’re going to be doing different things.

It’s an incredibly hard engineering challenge. You have to keep a human alive in absolute vacuum, warm at temperatures that you know in the polar regions could go as far down as 40 Kelvin (minus 388° Fahrenheit). We haven’t sent humans anywhere that cold before. They are also going to be very hot. They’re going to be baking in the sunshine. You’ve got radiation. If you put all that together, that’s a huge amount of suit material just to keep the human physiology and the human body intact.

Then our challenge is ‘how do you make that mobile?’ It’s very difficult to bend down and pick up a rock. You have to manage that center of gravity because you’re wearing that big life support system on your back, a big pack that has a lot of mass in it, so that brings your center of gravity higher than you’re used to on Earth and a little bit farther backward.

When you move around, it’s like wearing a really, really heavy backpack that has mass but no weight, so it’s going to kind of tip you back. You can do some things with putting weights on the front of the suit to try to move that center of gravity forward, but it’s still higher, and it’s not exactly at your center of mass that you’re used to on the Earth. On the Earth, we have a center of our mass related to gravity, and nobody ever thinks about it, and you don’t think about it until it moves somewhere else, and then it makes all of your natural motion seem very difficult.

Those are some of the challenges that we’re facing engineering-wise. I think the new suits, they’ve gone a long way toward addressing these, but it’s still a hard engineering challenge. And I’m not talking about any specific suit. I can’t talk about the details of the provider’s suits. This is the NASA xEMU and all the lunar suits I have tested over the years. That includes the Mark III suit, the Axiom suit. They have similar issues. So this isn’t really anything about a specific vendor. These are just the difficulties of designing a spacesuit for the lunar environment.

NASA trains astronauts for spacewalks in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, an enormous pool in Houston used for simulating weightlessness. They also use a gravity-offloading device to rehearse the basics of spacewalking. The optimal test environment, short of the space environment itself, will be aboard parabolic flights, where suit developers and astronauts can get the best feel for the suit’s momentum, according to Rubins.

Axiom and NASA are well along assessing the new lunar spacesuit’s performance underwater, but they haven’t put it through reduced-gravity flight testing. “Until you get to the actual parabolic flight, that’s when you can really test the ability to manage this momentum,” Rubins said.

Recovering from a fall on the lunar surface comes with its own perils.

“You’re face down on the lunar surface, and you have to do the most massive, powerful push up to launch you and the entire mass of the suit up off the surface, high enough so you can then flip your legs under you and catch the ground,” Rubins said. “You basically have to kind of do a jumping pushup… This is a risky maneuver we test a whole bunch in training. It’s really non-trivial.”

The lunar suits are sleeker than the suits NASA uses on the ISS, but they are still bulky. “If you’re trying to kneel, if you’re thinking about bending forward at your waist, all that material in your waist has nowhere to go, so it just compresses and compresses,” Rubins said. “That’s why I say it’s harder to kneel. It’s harder to bend forward because you’re having to compress the suit in those areas.

“We’ve done these amazing things with joint mobility,” Rubins said. “The mobility around the joints is amazing… but now we’re dealing with this compression issue. And there’s not an obvious engineering fix to that.”

The fix to this problem might come in the form of tools instead of changes to the spacesuit itself. Rubins said astronauts could use a staff, or something like a hiking pole, to brace themselves when they need to kneel or bend down. “That way I’m not trying to compress the suit and deal with my balance at the same time.”

A bruising exertion

The Moonwalker suit can comfortably accommodate a wider range of astronauts than NASA’s existing EMUs on the space station. The old EMUs can be resized to medium, large, and extra large, but that leaves gaps and makes the experience uncomfortable for a smaller astronaut. This discomfort is especially noticeable while practicing for spacewalks underwater, where the tug of gravity is still present, Rubins said.

“As a female, I never really had an EMU that fit me,” Rubins said. “It was always giant. When I’m translating around or doing something, I’m physically falling and slamming myself, my chest or my back, into one side of the suit or the other underwater, whereas with the lunar suit, I’ve got a suit that fits me right. That’s going to lead to less bruising. Just having a suit that fits you is much better.”

Mission planners should also emphasize physical conditioning for astronauts assigned to lunar landing missions. That includes preflight weight and endurance training, plus guidance on what to eat in space to maximize energy levels before astronauts head outside for a stroll.

“That human has to go up really maximally conditioned,” Rubins said.

Rubins and Barratt agreed that NASA and its spacesuit provider should be ready to rapidly respond to feedback from future Moonwalkers. Engineers modified and upgraded the Apollo spacesuits in a matter of months, iterating the design between each mission.

“Our general design is on a good path,” Rubins said. “We need to make sure that we continue to push for increasing improvements in human performance, and some of that ties back to the budget. Our first suit design is not where we’re going to be done if we want to do a really sustained lunar program. We have to continue to improve, and I think it’s important to recognize that we’re going to learn so many lessons during Artemis III.”

Barratt has a unique perspective on spacesuit design. He has performed spacewalks at the ISS in NASA’s spacesuit and the Russian Orlan spacesuit. Barratt said the US suit is easier to work in than the Orlan, but the Russian suit is “incredibly reliable” and “incredibly serviceable.”

“It had a couple of glitches, and literally, you unzip a curtain and it’s like looking at my old Chevy Blazer,” Barratt said. “Everything is right there. It’s mechanical, it’s accessible with standard tools. We can fix it. We can do that really easily. We’ve tried to incorporate those lessons learned into our next-generation EVA systems.”

Contrast that with the NASA suits on the ISS, where one of Barratt’s spacewalks in 2024 was cut short by a spacesuit water leak. “We recently had to return a suit from the space station,” Barratt said. “We’ve got another one that’s sort of offline for a while we’re troubleshooting it. It’s a really subtle problem that’s extremely difficult to work on in places that are hard to access.”

Harrison Schmitt, speaking with a NASA interviewer in 2000, said his productivity in the Apollo suit “couldn’t have been much more than 10 percent of what you would do normally here on Earth.”

“You take the human brain, the human eyes, and the human hands into space. That’s the only justification you have for having human beings in space,” Schmitt said. “It’s a massive justification, but that’s what you want to use, and all three have distinct benefits in productivity and in gathering new information and infusing data over any automated system. Unfortunately, we have discarded one of those, and that is the hands.”

Schmitt singled out the gloves as the “biggest problem” with the Apollo suits. “The gloves are balloons, and they’re made to fit,” he said. Picking something up with a firm grip requires squeezing against the pressure inside the suit. The gloves can also damage astronauts’ fingernails.

“That squeezing against that pressure causes these forearm muscles to fatigue very rapidly,” Schmitt said. “Just imagine squeezing a tennis ball continuously for eight hours or ten hours, and that’s what you’re talking about.”

Barratt recounted a conversation in which Schmitt, now 90, said he wouldn’t have wanted to do another spacewalk after his three excursions with commander Gene Cernan on Apollo 17.

“Physically, and from a suit-maintenance standpoint, he thought that that was probably the limit, what they did,” Barratt said. “They were embedded with dust. The visors were abraded. Every time they brushed the dust off the visors, they lost visibility.”

Getting the Artemis spacesuit right is vital to the program’s success. You don’t want to travel all the way to the Moon and stop exploring because of sore fingers or an injured knee.

“If you look at what we’re spending on suits versus what we’re spending on the rocket, this is a pretty small amount,” Rubins said. “Obviously, the rocket can kill you very quickly. That needs to be done right. But the continuous improvement in the suit will get us that much more efficiency. Saving 30 minutes or an hour on the Moon, that gives you that much more science.”

“Once you have safely landed on the lunar surface, this is where you’ve got to put your money,” Barratt said.

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Posted Tuesday 27 January 2026 at 4:27 am AEST (my time).

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This is how much it costs to mine one Bitcoin in the U.S. [and elsewhere]

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:59:31 +0000

Back in its early days, Bitcoin was merely a passion project for a handful of dedicated enthusiasts eager to try this revolutionary financial technology. Anyone with a decent consumer PC could mine Bitcoins for a negligible price, as the mining difficulty was significantly lower, and discovering new blocks often required just a decent CPU.

It is estimated that, in 2009, the entire Bitcoin network consumed roughly one MWh of power for the entire year, comparable to the monthly electricity usage of a single average US household. Some sources say that the entire network used just 4.7 megawatt-hours of energy by mid-2010. Although sources vary, the difference is minimal and doesn’t change the fact that Bitcoin wasn’t a major energy spender during that period.

Fast forward 15 years, and the numbers look staggering in comparison. The same amount of energy that powered Bitcoin’s first 18 months of existence would now be burned through in roughly one second!

According to new research from BestBrokers, which analyzes global Bitcoin mining operations, the network currently consumes 417.18 gigawatt-hours of electricity worldwide every single day to produce around 450 coins.

That's 152,270 GWh annually, exceeding the total energy consumption of countries like Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands. In just a decade and a half, what was once a hobby for early adopters can now power entire economies.

Mining a single Bitcoin now requires 927,060.84 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is enough to power an average American household for roughly 88 years! In the US, this translated to a cost of $130,000 per coin in December 2025, based on the average commercial electricity rate of $0.141 per kWh.

For reference, Satoshi Nakamoto reportedly spent around $3,700 to mine one million Bitcoins in 2009!

If we take into account that Bitcoin was trading for around $87,000 in November 2025 (and still does at the time of writing), the average cost per mined coin points to substantial losses under standard commercial rates.

Source: BestBrokers.com

Only a handful of regions, where the cost of electricity is significantly lower than the global average, can even come close to profitability. The most favorable countries for mining Bitcoin in 2025 were Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Norway, where miners were spending $61,940, $66,563 and $66,630 per coin, respectively. Kazakhstan, in particular, went all-in on Bitcoin, dedicating 16.82% of the country's total power consumption to mining.

To be fair, these eye-watering loss figures assume mining at retail electricity rates. However, most large-scale mining operations typically secure more favorable rates through direct deals with power suppliers, which allows them to get closer to profit. Miners also claim that 54–59% of mining used renewables in 2024–2025. Still, these figures are mostly self-reported, so the clear picture of the total price per coin remains somewhat unclear.

To put this into perspective, the U.S. Bitcoin mining operation alone could charge every electric vehicle in America 126 times over, provide electricity to 5.5 million households, or charge 11 million iPhone 17s daily for a year. It could also power Google's entire global infrastructure for 1 year and 9 months

Bitcoin's value dropped sharply in 2025, but the mining continues. With all this infrastructure, miners are still betting that prices will eventually justify the energy costs. Whether that gamble pays off remains to be seen.

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Posted Monday 26 January 2026 at 11:55 am AEST (my time).

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No One Is Quite Sure Why Ice Is Slippery

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:43:57 +0000

A thin, watery layer coating the surface of ice is what makes it slick. Despite a great deal of theorizing over the centuries, though, it isn’t entirely clear why that layer forms.

The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this lubricating, liquidlike layer is what makes ice slippery. They disagree, though, about why the layer forms.

Three main theories about the phenomenon have been debated over the past two centuries. Last year, researchers in Germany put forward a fourth hypothesis that they say solves the puzzle.

But does it? A consensus feels nearer but has yet to be reached. For now, the slippery problem remains open.

Hypothesis 1: Pressure

In the mid-1800s, an English engineer named James Thomson suggested that when we step on ice, the pressure we exert melts its surface, making it slippery. Under normal conditions, ice melts when the temperature rises to 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). But pressure lowers its melting point, so that even at lower temperatures, a layer of water might form on the surface. This theoretical relationship between melting point and pressure was experimentally confirmed by Thomson’s younger brother William, better known as Lord Kelvin.

In the 1930s, though, Frank P. Bowden and T. P. Hughes of the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge cast doubt on the pressure melting theory. They calculated that an average skier exerts way too little pressure to significantly alter ice’s melting point. To do so, the skier would have to weigh thousands of kilograms.

Hypothesis 2: Friction

Bowden and Hughes suggested an alternative explanation for the formation of the water layer: that it melts because of heat generated by friction caused by whatever is sliding against it.

They tested their theory in an artificial ice cave in the Swiss Alps, using a complex contraption to measure the friction between ice and other materials. They found that the friction was higher with materials that are good at conducting heat, such as brass, than with poor conductors like ebonite. From this, they concluded that when ice is rubbed by a material that easily absorbs heat, less heat is available to melt the ice, making it less slippery. This supported their theory that frictional melting is responsible for ice’s slipperiness.

Although this explanation still appears in textbooks, many scientists disagree with it. “The problem with that is you only melt the ice behind you, not the ice you are actually skating on,” said Daniel Bonn, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam. Ice can be slippery the moment we step on it, before any motion has occurred that could cause frictional heating.

Daniel Bonn’s group at the University of Amsterdam created a microscopic ice-skating rink to investigate the slipperiness question.

Courtesy of Daniel Bonn

To test the friction hypothesis, Bonn and his team created a microscopic ice-skating rink. They rotated a piece of metal (standing in for the blade of a skate) at different speeds, each time measuring the force required to move the metal and the force that the metal exerted on the ice. The ratio of these forces gave them a measure of the ice’s slipperiness. The scientists found that the slipperiness did not depend on the speed, suggesting that frictional heating—which should increase with speed—isn’t what makes ice slippery.

Hypothesis 3: Premelting

There’s another possibility: that ice’s surface is wet even before anything makes contact with it.

In 1842, the English scientist Michael Faraday observed that two touching ice cubes will freeze to each other, and even a warm hand will stick to ice. He attributed this phenomenon to a thin, premelted layer that sits on ice’s exposed surface, and that freezes again when covered up. Faraday couldn’t explain why it happens, and it took almost a century for other scientists—notably Charles Gurney and Woldemar Weyl—to propose why “surface premelting” might occur.

They intuited that molecules near the surface behave differently from those deep within the ice. Ice is a crystal, which means each water molecule is locked into a periodic lattice. However, at the surface, the water molecules have fewer neighbors to bond with and therefore have more freedom of movement than in solid ice. In that so-called premelted layer, molecules are easily displaced by a skate, a ski or a shoe.

Today, scientists generally agree that the premelted layer exists, at least close to the melting point, but they disagree on its role in ice’s slipperiness.

A few years ago, Luis MacDowell, a physicist at the Complutense University of Madrid, and his collaborators ran a series of simulations to establish which of the three hypotheses—pressure, friction or premelting—best explains the slipperiness of ice. “In computer simulations, you can see the atoms move,” he said—something that isn’t feasible in real experiments. “And you can actually look at the neighbors of those atoms” to see whether they are periodically spaced, like in a solid, or disordered, like in a liquid.

They observed that their simulated block of ice was indeed coated with a liquidlike layer just a few molecules thick, as the premelting theory predicts. When they simulated a heavy object sliding on the ice’s surface, the layer thickened, in agreement with the pressure theory. Finally, they explored frictional heating. Near ice’s melting point, the premelted layer was already thick, so frictional heating didn’t significantly impact it. At lower temperatures, however, the sliding object produced heat that melted the ice and thickened the layer.

“Our message is: All three controversial hypotheses operate simultaneously to one or the other degree,” MacDowell said.

Hypothesis 4: Amorphization

Or perhaps the melting of the surface isn’t the main cause of ice’s slipperiness.

Recently, a team of researchers at Saarland University in Germany identified arguments against all three prevailing theories. First, for pressure to be high enough to melt ice’s surface, the area of contact between (say) skis and ice would have to be “unreasonably small,” they wrote. Second, for a ski moving at a realistic speed, experiments show that the amount of heat generated by friction is insufficient to cause melting. Third, they found that in extremely cold temperatures, ice is still slippery even though there’s no premelted layer. (Surface molecules still have a dearth of neighbors, but at low temperatures they don’t have enough energy to overcome the strong bonds with solid ice molecules.) “So either the slipperiness of ice is coming from a combination of all of them or a few of them, or there is something else that we don’t know yet,” said Achraf Atila, a materials scientist on the team.

Materials scientists at Saarland University in Germany showed in computer simulations that as two blocks of ice slide against each other, an amorphous layer in the middle gradually thickens.

Courtesy of Saarland University

The scientists looked for alternative explanations in research on other substances, such as diamonds. Gemstone polishers have long known from experience that some sides of a diamond are easier to polish, or “softer,” than others. In 2011, another German research group published a paper explaining this phenomenon. They created computer simulations of two diamonds sliding against each other. Atoms on the surface were mechanically pulled out of their bonds, which allowed them to move, form new bonds, and so on. This sliding formed a structureless, “amorphous” layer. In contrast to the crystal nature of the diamond, this layer is disordered and behaves more like a liquid than a solid. This amorphization effect depends on the orientation of molecules at the surface, so some sides of a crystal are softer than others.

Atila and his colleagues argue that a similar mechanism happens in ice. They simulated ice surfaces sliding against each other, keeping the temperature of the simulated system low enough to ensure the absence of melting. (Any slipperiness would therefore have a different explanation.) Initially, the surfaces attracted each other, much like magnets. This was because water molecules are dipoles, with uneven concentrations of positive and negative charge. The positive end of one molecule attracts the negative end of another. The attraction in the ice created tiny welds between the sliding surfaces. As the surfaces slid past each other, the welds broke apart and new ones formed, gradually changing the ice’s structure.

The scientists repeated the simulations, replacing one of the ice surfaces with other materials that are either attracted or repelled by water. Again, molecules on the surface of the ice were displaced with sliding, but more so when the other substance attracted the ice.

In another simulation by the German team, a more realistic, rough surface slides across the ice, displacing surface molecules.

Courtesy of Saarland University

The simulations indicated that sliding mechanically destroys the ordered crystal lattice of ice, creating an amorphous layer that thickens as the sliding goes on. The team says that this, rather than melting, explains ice’s slipperiness—especially at low temperatures.

A Consensus Kept on Ice

MacDowell trusts the results from Atila and collaborators, although he thinks amorphization occurs only at high sliding speeds (the authors disagree, but simulating low sliding speeds requires a prohibitive amount of computational power).

Bonn also supports the new explanation, which he says aligns with experimental studies of objects sliding on ice conducted by his group in 2021. Those experiments and the new simulations both suggest that ice is slippery because of structural changes in its surface, though the researchers characterize what’s happening in different terms. Atila believes that the changes are driven by the mechanical displacement of water molecules, whereas Bonn focuses on how mobile the surface molecules are to begin with. He compares the surface to a floor filled with little balls: “Because they’re so mobile, it’s impossible to stay upright if you’re in such a room. Just as it’s very difficult to stay upright when you’re on ice.”

The difference between their descriptions “is a semantic issue,” according to Bonn, but Atila’s coauthor Sergey Sukhomlinov disagrees. “I believe these are different mechanisms, even though they may look similar,” he said.

We’re surely getting closer to settling the seemingly simple, centuries-old question of why ice is slippery. At this point, the lack of a shared vocabulary among researchers might be one of the biggest hindrances to resolving the issue. Similar effects might get different names, suggesting different hypotheses. Bonn also blames the fact that “ice researchers do have different and contradictory opinions, but they don’t really tell each other that they disagree with each other.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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Posted Monday 26 January 2026 at 4:38 am AEST (my time).

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Did Edison accidentally make graphene in 1879?

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:38:03 +0000

Rice University chemists replicated Thomas Edison’s seminal experiment and found a surprising byproduct.

Graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super capacitors, antennas, water filters, transistors, solar cells, and touchscreens, just to name a few. The physicists who first synthesized graphene in the lab won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. But 19th century inventor Thomas Edison may have unknowingly created graphene as a byproduct of his original experiments on incandescent bulbs over a century earlier, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Nano.

“To reproduce what Thomas Edison did, with the tools and knowledge we have now, is very exciting,” said co-author James Tour, a chemist at Rice University. “Finding that he could have produced graphene inspires curiosity about what other information lies buried in historical experiments. What questions would our scientific forefathers ask if they could join us in the lab today? What questions can we answer when we revisit their work through a modern lens?”

Edison didn’t invent the concept of incandescent lamps; there were several versions predating his efforts. However, they generally had a a very short life span and required high electric current, so they weren’t well suited to Edison’s vision of large-scale commercialization. He experimented with different filament materials starting with carbonized cardboard and compressed lampblack. This, too, quickly burnt out, as did filaments made with various grasses and canes, like hemp and palmetto. Eventually Edison discovered that carbonized bamboo made for the best filament, with life spans over 1200 hours using a 110 volt power source.

Lucas Eddy, Tour’s grad student at Rice, was trying to figure out ways to mass produce graphene using the smallest, easiest equipment he could manage, with materials that were both affordable and readily available. He considered such options as arc welders and natural phenomena like lightning striking trees—both of which he admitted were “complete dead ends.” Edison’s light bulb, Eddy decided, would be ideal, since unlike other early light bulbs, Edison’s version was able to achieve the critical 2000 degree C temperatures required for flash Joule heating—the best method for making so-called turbostratic graphene.

Wizardry at Menlo Park

Plus, Eddy had access to Edison’s original 1879 patent describing the invention process. Eddy recreated Edison’s experiment, attaching light bulbs to a 110-volt power source and switching it on for 20 seconds at a time to rapidly heat the carbon-based material to between 2000 to 3000 degrees C. (Switch it on for any longer and you get graphite rather than graphene.) Then he examined the results using a modern optical microscope.

His first attempt didn’t work out because the bulbs he bought turned out to use tungsten rather than carbon filaments. “You can’t fool a chemist,” said Eddy. “But I finally found a small art store in New York City selling artisan Edison-style light bulbs.” Those artisan bulbs used bamboo filaments, with diameters a mere 5 micrometers larger than Edison’s original filaments.

This time, Eddy noticed that the carbon filament turned to a “lustrous silver.” Raman spectroscopy revealed that parts of the filament had turned into turbostratic graphene. The team also took before and after images using transmission electron microscopy. Eddy and his co-authors acknowledge that this is not definitive proof that Edison produced graphene. The inventor lacked the means to detect it even if he had been aware that such a material existed. And even if one were to analyze Edison’s original bulb, any graphene would have long since turned into graphite.

The authors concluded by noting the research potential of revisiting other early technologies using the tools of modern materials science, such as vacuum tubes, arc lamps, and early X-ray tubes. These also may have accidentally produced unusual materials or reactions that weren’t analyzed or even noticed at the time. “Innovation can emerge from reinterpreting the past with fresh tools and new questions,” they wrote. “In the case of ‘Edison graphene,’ a 140-year-old invention continues to shed light not just literally but scientifically.”

DOI: ACS Nano, 2026. 10.1021/acsnano.5c12759 (About DOIs).

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Posted Monday 26 January 2026 at 4:37 am AEST (my time).

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Science finds clue to solving one of the most fundamental puzzles of Universe

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:36:45 +0000

For decades, scientists have sought to understand why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe. A key concept in this search is CP violation, which refers to differences in the behavior of particles and their antiparticles.

CP violation happens when particles and their antimatter counterparts don’t behave identically under charge (C) and parity (P) transformations. In practice, certain decays occur more often than their CP-conjugates due to interference between weak and strong interaction phases. This asymmetry is crucial for explaining the matter–antimatter imbalance in our universe.

Earlier studies revealed unexpectedly large CP violation effects in charmed meson decays, but results for charmed baryon decays remained inconclusive. To address this gap, Professor Xiao-Gang He and Dr. Chia-Wei Liu of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute (TDLI) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University conducted a systematic analysis. Using SU(3) flavor symmetry theory together with the framework of final-state re-scattering, they predicted significantly stronger CP violation effects in charmed baryon decays than previously estimated.

A baryon is a subatomic particle made of three quarks bound together by the strong nuclear force. It carries a baryon number of +1, distinguishing it from mesons. Protons (uud) and neutrons (udd) are the lightest baryons, forming atomic nuclei, while heavier baryons include strange, charm, or bottom quarks and decay into lighter ones.

The study emphasizes the role of final-state re-scattering in CP violation. This process allows secondary interactions among particles, which generate strong phases essential for CP violation to occur. According to their findings, the matter-antimatter asymmetry in charmed baryon decays could reach a level of one-thousandth, a magnitude far greater than earlier theoretical expectations.

Founded in 2017, TDLI has focused on advancing fundamental physics research. Professor He, who leads the Particle and Nuclear Physics division, explained, “The research on charm CP violation opens new pathways for experimental exploration and provides deeper insights into the fundamental mechanisms underlying the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry. It offers important opportunities for further tests of the Standard Model and potential discoveries of new physics.”

The Standard Model explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.

The predictions now await experimental confirmation. Current facilities such as BESIII in China, LHCb at CERN, and Belle II in Japan already possess some capability to detect CP violation in charm decays. Looking ahead, China’s planned Super Tau-Charm Facility (STCF) is expected to provide enhanced sensitivity, enabling more precise measurements.

The study represents a step forward in understanding one of the most fundamental questions in physics: why matter exists in greater abundance than antimatter. By pointing to larger CP violation effects in charmed baryons, the research offers new directions for experiments and potential insights into physics beyond the Standard Model.

Source: Science China Press

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

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This Autonomous Aquatic Robot Is Smaller Than a Grain of Salt

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:11:34 +0000

Researchers have succeeded in developing the smallest fully autonomous robot in history. It measures less than 1 millimeter and can swim underwater for months powered only by light.

Miniaturization has long been a challenge in the history of robotics.

While engineers have made great strides in the miniaturization of electronics in the past few decades, builders of miniature autonomous robots have not been able to meet the goal of getting them under 1 millimeter in size. This is because small arms and legs are fragile and difficult to manufacture. Above all, the circumstances of the laws of physics change in the microscopic world. Instead of gravity and inertia, drag and viscosity become dominant.

Against this backdrop, researchers in the US have announced the results of a study that accomplishes a 40-year-old challenge. A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan has developed a new robot that is smaller than a grain of salt, measuring only 200 x 300 x 50 micrometers. At 0.3 mm on its longest side, that's far below the 1-mm threshold. Yet it can sense its surroundings, make decisions on its own, and swim and move in water.

This experimental robot is smaller than a grain of salt.

Photograph: Marc Miskin/University of Pennsylvania

Moreover, it operates completely autonomously and is not dependent on any external controls such as wires or magnetic fields. The production cost is said to be as low as 1 cent per unit.

“We have succeeded in miniaturizing an autonomous robot to 1/10,000th the size of a conventional robot,” says Mark Miskin, one of the researchers, who's an assistant professor of electrical systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “This opens up a whole new scale for programmable robots.”

The Electric Slide

The propulsion system developed by Miskin and his team is a breakthrough in conventional robotics. Fish and other large aquatic organisms move forward due to the reaction of water pushing backward, in accordance with the third law of motion in Newtonian mechanics. But pushing water on a microscopic scale is like pushing sludgy tar. The viscosity of the water is so great that small arms and legs can never compete with it.

So the researchers adopted a completely new approach. Instead of swimming by moving parts of its body, the new robot moves by generating an electric field around it and gently pushing charged particles in the liquid. The robot exploits the phenomenon that moving charged particles drag nearby water molecules, creating a water current around the robot. It is as if the robot itself is not moving, but the ocean or river is moving.

This image shows the movement of charged particles generated around a robot moving in liquid.

Photograph: Lucas Hanson/William Reinhardt/University of Pennsylvania

The robot is driven by light from an LED and can move a distance equal to its body length in a maximum of one second. The direction of movement can be changed by adjusting the electric field, and the robot can follow complex paths or move in groups like a school of fish.

The greatest advantage of this method of movement is its extremely high durability due to the absence of moving parts. According to Miskin, it can swim continuously for months on end.

Micro Computer

Propulsion alone is not enough to achieve true autonomy. Autonomous robots must sense their environment and make decisions about how to navigate it. All of this must be controlled by a chip measuring less than 1 mm. David Blau and his team at the University of Michigan took on this challenge.

Blau and his team hold the record for building the world's smallest computer. When they first met Miskin at a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency presentation, they were convinced that their technologies would complement each other perfectly. It took five years for the idea to actually take shape.

The biggest obstacle to making the tiny robot work, he says, was power. The robot's solar panels generate only 75 nanowatts of power. That is less than 1/100,000th of the power consumed by a smartwatch. To solve this problem, the team designed a special circuit that operates at extremely low voltages. This successfully reduced the power consumption to a sustainable level.

Space constraints were another hurdle. The solar panels took up most of the surface, leaving little space for the computational infrastructure. So the researchers radically rethought the program, which required many instructions, and condensed it into a single special instruction, which they were able to fit into the robot's small memory space.

These robots can be manufactured in units of several hundred at once.

Photograph: Maya Lassiter/University of Pennsylvania

Tiny Dancer

The robot is equipped with an electronic sensor that can detect minute temperature changes. However, because its microscopic body can't carry robust communications components, the robot uses a method borrowed from the insect kingdom to transit the measurements it detects.

The robot is programmed to translate the sensor readings into “dance moves.” The researchers use a microscope to observe the robot's movements and decode the information. “This is very similar to the way honeybees communicate with each other,” Blau explains.

In addition to this, each robot is given a unique ID and is designed to upload different instructions to different units. This allows multiple robots to play different roles in performing large tasks collaboratively.

Each individual robot is equipped with a complete onboard computer that can receive and execute instructions autonomously.

Photograph: Miskin Lab/Blaauw Lab

According to the team, this is the first time a complete computer with a processor, memory, and sensors has been mounted on a robot less than 1 mm in size. The micro-robot functions on the same scale as a microbe, which could be useful for applications such as helping doctors monitor individual cells and helping engineers assemble tiny devices.

This story was originally published in WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese. The original was edited by Daisuke Takimoto.

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Tiny falcons are helping keep the food supply safe on cherry farms

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:33:08 +0000

Their presence appears to lower the risk of food-borne illnesses from pathogens.

Every spring, raptors return to nesting sites across northern Michigan. The smallest of these birds of prey, a falcon called the American kestrel (Falco sparverius), flies through the region’s many cherry orchards and spends its days hunting for even tinier creatures to eat. This quest keeps the kestrels fed, but it also benefits the region’s cherry farmers.

Fruit farmers have been working symbiotically with kestrels for decades, adding nesting boxes and reaping the benefits of the birds eliminating the mice, voles, songbirds, and other pests that wreak havoc by feeding on not-yet-harvested crops. In addition to limiting the crop damage caused by hungry critters, new research suggests kestrels also lower the risk of food-borne illnesses.

The study, published in November in the Journal of Applied Ecology, suggests the kestrels help keep harmful pathogens off of fruit headed to consumers by eating and scaring off small birds that carry those pathogens. Orchards housing the birds in nest boxes saw fewer cherry-eating birds than orchards without kestrels on site. This translated to an 81 percent reduction in crop damage—such as bite marks or missing fruit—and a 66 percent decrease in branches contaminated with bird feces.

“Kestrels are not very expensive to bring into orchards, but they work pretty well” at deterring unwanted bird species, said Olivia Smith, lead study author and assistant professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. “And people just like kestrels a lot, so I think it’s an attractive strategy.”

Finding a good strategy for managing pests is essential for cherry farmers. Pests cause expensive damage that worsens yields already impacted by other threats to the cherry industry, such as climate change, labor shortages, and the vagaries of international trade. To stop the added damage from pests, growers have turned to nets covering their trees, noisemakers, scarecrows, pesticides, and even the removal of natural habitats around crop-growing areas.

However, these options can be expensive and aren’t always effective. Even with these management strategies in place, birds like starlings, robins, and crows cost farms in some top cherry growing states—including Michigan, New York, Oregon, Washington, and California—about $85 million annually. For many growers, this is where the kestrels come in.

It may seem counterintuitive to solve a bird problem by bringing in more birds, but kestrels are skilled hunters whose presence drives off songbirds afraid of being eaten. Habitat loss, competition for food, and climate change are leading to slow and steady population declines for the American kestrel, losses of about 1.4 percent annually. Still, these birds are abundant enough that, in many areas of the continental United States, all farmers need to do to attract them is add a nesting box to their land.

“I’ve noticed a difference having the kestrels around, hovering over the spring crops,” said Brad Thatcher, a farmer based in Washington state who has housed kestrels on April Joy Farm, an organic fruit and vegetable farm, for over 13 years. “There’s very little fecal damage from small songbirds at that time of year versus the fall.”

With farmers who already had kestrels on their land reporting fewer songbirds and less crop damage, study authors hypothesized that food safety risks associated with pathogens birds carry may also be lower for farms harboring kestrels. To test this, the researchers evaluated 16 sweet cherry orchards in Michigan’s Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties (the latter of which is considered the “Cherry Capital of the World”). Eight of the orchards studied had nesting boxes for kestrels and eight did not.

The study authors randomly selected two areas of each orchard to search for crop damage and fecal contamination. The orchards frequented by kestrels saw the amount of damaged fruit drop from 2.5 percent to 0.47 percent. The number of crops contaminated by bird droppings also saw a three-fold decrease, falling from 6.88 percent to 2.33 percent. When researchers tested this excrement, they found that more than 10 percent contained campylobacter, a type of bacteria that is common in birds and causes food-borne illness in humans.

Campylobacter is a common cause of food poisoning and is on the rise in Michigan and around the world. It spreads to humans through food products made from, or that come into contact with, infected animals, primarily chickens and other birds. So far, only one outbreak of campylobacteriosis has been definitively linked to feces from wild birds. Still, because it causes milder symptoms than some other types of bacteria, the Centers for Disease Control considers campylobacter a significantly underreported cause of food-borne illness that may be more common than current data indicates.

“Trying to get more birds of prey would be beneficial to farmers,” Smith said. “If you have one predator, versus a bunch of prey, you have fewer birds overall. If you have a lot fewer birds, even if the ones that are there are carrying bacteria, then you can reduce the transmission risk.”

The study’s findings that kestrels significantly reduce physical damage and food safety risks on Michigan cherry farms demonstrate that managing crops and meeting conservation goals—by bolstering local kestrel populations and eliminating the need to clear wildlife habitat around agricultural areas—can be done in tandem, study authors say. They recommend farmers facing pest-management issues consider building kestrel boxes, which cost about $100 per box and require minimal maintenance.

Whether nesting boxes in a given region will be successfully inhabited by kestrels depends on whether there is an abundance of the birds there. In Michigan’s cherry-growing region, kestrels are so abundant that 80 percent to 100 percent of boxes become home for kestrels rather than other nesting birds, said Catherine Lindell, avian ecologist at Michigan State University and senior author of the study.

“It seems like this is just a great tool for farmers,” Lindell said, suggesting interested farmers “put up a couple boxes and see what happens.”

K.R. Callaway is a reporter and editor specializing in science, health, history, and policy stories. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in journalism at New York University, where she is part of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP). Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Sky & Telescope, Fast Company and Audubon Magazine, among others.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:31:22 +0000

Another partially reusable Chinese rocket, the Long March 12B, is nearing its first test flight.

Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launchers suffered back-to-back failures within a span of approximately 12 hours. Rocket Lab’s march toward a debut of its new Neutron launch vehicle in the coming months may have stalled after a failure during a key qualification test. We cover all this and more in this week’s Rocket Report.

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.

Australia invests in sovereign launch. Six months after its first orbital rocket cleared the launch tower for just 14 seconds before crashing back to Earth, Gilmour Space Technologies has secured 217 million Australian dollars ($148 million) in funding that CEO Adam Gilmour says finally gives Australia a fighting chance in the global space race, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The funding round, led by the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and superannuation giant Hostplus with $75 million each, makes the Queensland company Australia’s newest unicorn—a fast-growth start-up valued at more than $1 billion—and one of the country’s most heavily backed private technology ventures.

Homegrown rocket… “We’re a rocket company that has never had access to the capital that our American competitors have,” Gilmour told the newspaper. “This is the first raise where I’ve actually raised a decent amount of capital compared to the rest of the world.” The investment reflects growing concern about Australia’s reliance on foreign launch providers—predominantly Elon Musk’s SpaceX—to put government, defense, and commercial satellites into orbit. With US launch queues stretching beyond two years and geopolitical tensions reshaping access to space infrastructure, Canberra has identified sovereign launch capability as a strategic priority. Gilmour’s first Eris rocket lifted off from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland on July 30 last year. It achieved 14 seconds of flight before falling back to the ground, a result Gilmour framed as a partial success in an industry where first launches routinely fail.

Isar Aerospace postpones test flight. Isar Aerospace scrubbed a potential January 21 launch of its Spectrum rocket to address a technical fault, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Hours before the launch window was set to open, the German company said that it was addressing “an issue with a pressurization valve.” A valve issue was one of the factors that caused a Spectrum to crash moments after liftoff on Isar’s first test flight last year. “The teams are currently assessing the next possible launch opportunities and a new target date will be announced shortly,” the company wrote in a post on its website. The Spectrum rocket, designed to haul cargoes of up to a metric ton (2,200 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, is awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.

Geopolitics at play... The second launch of Isar’s Spectrum rocket comes at a time when Europe’s space industry looks to secure the continent’s sovereignty in spaceflight. European satellites are no longer able to launch on Russian rockets, and the continent’s leaders don’t have much of an appetite to turn to US rockets amid strained trans-Atlantic relations. Europe’s satellite industry is looking for more competition for the Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets developed by ArianeGroup and Avio, and Isar Aerospace appears to be best positioned to become a new entrant in the European launch market. “I’m well aware that it would be really good for us Europeans to get this one right,” said Daniel Metzler, Isar’s co-founder and CEO.

A potential buyer for Orbex? UK-based rocket builder Orbex has signed a letter of intent to sell its business to European space logistics startup The Exploration Company, European Spaceflight reports. Orbex was founded in 2015 and is developing a small launch vehicle called Prime. The company also began work on a larger medium-lift launch vehicle called Proxima in December 2024. On Wednesday, Orbex published a brief press release stating that a letter of intent had been signed and that negotiations had begun. The company added that all details about the transaction remain confidential at this stage.

Time’s up... A statement from Orbex CEO Phil Chambers suggests that the company’s financial position factored into its decision to pursue a buyer. “Our Series D fundraising could have led us in many directions,” said Chambers. “We believe this opportunity plays to the strengths of both businesses, and we look forward to sharing more when the time is right.” The Exploration Company, headquartered near Munich, Germany, is developing a reusable space capsule to ferry cargo to low-Earth orbit and a high-thrust reusable rocket engine. It is one of the most well-financed space startups in Europe. Orbex is one of five launch startups in Europe selected by the European Space Agency last year to compete in the European Launcher Challenge and receive funding from ESA member states. But the UK company’s financial standing is in question. Orbex’s Danish subsidiary is filing for bankruptcy, and its main UK entity is overdue in filing its 2024 financial accounts. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A bad day for Chinese rockets. China suffered a pair of launch failures January 16, seeing the loss of a classified Shijian satellite and the failed first launch of the Ceres-2 rocket, Space News reports. The first of the two failures involved the attempted launch of a Shijian military satellite aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang launch base in southwestern China. The Shijian 32 satellite was likely heading for a geostationary transfer orbit, but a failure of the Long March 3B’s third stage doomed the mission. The Long March 3B is one of China’s most-flown rockets, and this was the first failure of a Long March 3-series vehicle since 2020, ending a streak of 50 consecutive successful flights of the rocket.

And then… Less than 12 hours later, another Chinese rocket failed on its climb to orbit. This launch, using a Ceres-2 rocket, originated from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern China. It was the first flight of the Ceres-2, a larger variant of the light-class Ceres-1 rocket developed and operated by a Chinese commercial startup named Galactic Energy. Chinese officials did not disclose the payloads lost on the Ceres-2 rocket.

Neutron in neutral. Rocket Lab suffered a structural failure of the Neutron rocket’s Stage 1 tank during testing, setting back efforts to get to the inaugural flight for the partially reusable launcher, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The mishap occurred during a hydrostatic pressure trial, the company said Wednesday. “There was no significant damage to the test structure or facilities,” Rocket Lab added. Rocket Lab last year pushed the first Neutron mission from 2025 to 2026, citing the volume of testing ahead. The US-based company said it is now analyzing what transpired to determine the impact on Neutron launch plans. Rocket Lab said it would provide an update during its next quarterly financials, due in a few weeks.

Where to go from here?… The Neutron rocket is designed to catapult Rocket Lab into more direct competition with legacy rocket companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. “The next Stage 1 tank is already in production, and Neutron’s development campaign continues,” the company said. Setbacks like this one are to be expected during the development of new rockets. Rocket Lab has publicized aggressive, or aspirational, launch schedules for the first Neutron rocket, so it’s likely the company will hang onto its projection of a debut launch in 2026, at least for now. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon 9 launches NRO spysats. SpaceX executed a late night Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base on January 16, carrying an undisclosed number of intelligence-gathering satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, NROL-105, hauled a payload of satellites heading to low-Earth orbit, which are believed to be Starshield, a government variant of the Starlink satellites. “Today’s mission is the twelfth overall launch of the NRO’s proliferated architecture and first of approximately a dozen NRO launches scheduled throughout 2026 consisting of proliferated and national security missions,” the NRO said in a post-launch statement.

Mysteries abound… A public accounting of the agency’s proliferated constellation suggests it now numbers nearly 200 satellites with the ability to rapidly image locations around the world. The NRO has dozens more satellites serving other functions. “Having hundreds of NRO satellites on orbit is critical to supporting our nation and its partners,” the agency said in a statement. “This growing constellation enhances mission resilience and capability through reduced revisit times, improved persistent coverage, and accelerated processing and delivery of critical data.” What was unusual about the January 16 mission is it may have only carried two satellites, well short of the 20-plus Starshield satellites launched on most previous Falcon 9 launches, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and expert tracker of global space launch activity.

Long March 12B hot-fired at Jiuquan. China’s main space contractor performed a static fire test of a new reusable Long March rocket Friday, paving the way for a test flight, Space News reports. The test-firing of the Long March 12B rocket’s first stage engines occurred on a launch pad at the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Test Zone at Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The mere existence of the Long March 12B rocket was not publicly known until recently. The new rocket was developed by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Aerospace Science Technology Corporation, with the capacity to carry a payload of 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in expendable mode. It’s unknown if the first Long March 12B test flight will include a booster landing attempt.

Another one… The Long March 12B has a reusable first stage with landing legs, similar to the recovery architecture of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The booster is designed to land downrange at a recovery zone in the Gobi Desert. The Long March 12B is the latest in a line of partially reusable Chinese rockets to reach the launch pad, following soon after the debut launches of the Long March 12A and Zhuque 3 rocket last month. Several more companies in China are working on their own reusable boosters. Of them all, the Long March 12B appears to be the closest to a clone of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Like the Falcon 9, the Long March 12B will have nine kerosene-fueled first stage engines and a single kerosene-fueled upper stage engine. Chinese officials have not announced when the Long March 12B will launch.

Artemis II rolls to the launch pad. Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward last weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad, Ars reports. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

Key test ahead… “This is the start of a very long journey,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We ended our last human exploration of the Moon on Apollo 17.” The Artemis II mission will set several notable human spaceflight records. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will travel farther from Earth than any human in history as they travel beyond the far side of the Moon. They won’t land. That distinction will fall to the next mission in line in NASA’s Artemis program. This will be the first time astronauts have flown on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The launch window opens February 6, but the exact date of Artemis II’s liftoff will be determined by the outcome of a critical fueling test of the SLS rocket scheduled for early February.

Blue Origin confirms rocket reuse plan. Blue Origin confirmed Thursday that the next launch of its New Glenn rocket will carry a large communications satellite into low-Earth orbit for AST SpaceMobile, Ars reports. The rocket will launch the next-generation Block 2 BlueBird satellite “no earlier than late February” from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. However, the update from Blue Origin appears to have buried the real news toward the end: “The mission follows the successful NG-2 mission, which included the landing of the ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ booster. The same booster is being refurbished to power NG-3,” the company said.

Impressive strides… The second New Glenn mission launched on November 13, just 10 weeks ago. If the company makes the late-February target for the next mission—and Ars was told last week to expect the launch to slip into March—it will represent a remarkably short turnaround for an orbital booster. By way of comparison, SpaceX did not attempt to refly the first Falcon 9 booster it landed in December 2015. Instead, initial tests revealed that the vehicle’s interior had been somewhat torn up. It was scrapped and inspected closely so that engineers could learn from the wear and tear.

Next three launches

Jan. 25: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 15:17 UTC

Jan. 26: Falcon 9 | GPS III SV09 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 04:46 UTC

Jan. 26: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 21:00 UTC

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This 67,800-year-old hand stencil is the world’s oldest human-made art

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:30:23 +0000

The world’s oldest art has an unintentional story to tell about human exploration.

The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago.

On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island in Indonesia), a cave wall bears the stenciled outline of a person’s hand—and it’s at least 67,800 years old, according to a recent study. The hand stencil is now the world’s oldest work of art (at least until archaeologists find something even older), as well as the oldest evidence of our species on any of the islands that stretch between continental Asia and Australia.

Hands reaching out from the past

Archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, and his colleagues have spent the last six years surveying 44 rock art sites, mostly caves, on Sulawesi’s southeastern peninsula and the handful of tiny “satellite islands” off its coast. They found 14 previously undocumented sites and used rock formations to date 11 individual pieces of rock art in eight caves—including the oldest human artwork discovered so far.

About 67,800 years ago, someone stood in the darkness of Liang Metanduno and placed their hand flat against the limestone wall. They, or maybe a friend, then blew a mixture of pigment and water onto the wall, covering and surrounding their hand. When they pulled their hand carefully away from the rock, careful not to disturb the still-wet paint, they left behind a crisp outline of their palm and fingers, haloed by a cloud of deep red.

The result is basically the negative of a handprint, and it’s a visceral, tangible link to the past. Someone once laid their hand on the cave wall right here, and you can still see its outline like a lingering ghost, reaching out from the other side of the rock. If you weren’t worried about damaging the already faded and fragile image, you could lay your hand in the same spot and meet them halfway.

Today, the stencil is so faded that you can barely see it, but if you look closely, it’s there: a faint halo of reddish-orange pigment, outlining the top part of a palm and the base of the fingers. A thin, nearly transparent layer of calcite covers the faded shape, left behind by millennia of water dripping down the cave wall. The ratio of uranium and thorium in a sheet of calcite suggests that it formed at least 71,000 years ago—so the outline of the hand beneath it must have been left behind sometime before that, probably around 67,800 years ago.

That makes Liang Metanduno the home of the oldest known artwork in the world, beating the previous contender (a Neanderthal hand stencil in Spain) by about 1,100 years.

“These findings support the growing view that Sulawesi was host to a vibrant and longstanding artistic culture during the late Pleistocene epoch,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues in their recent paper.

The karst caves of Sulawesi’s southwestern peninsula, Maros-Pangkep, are a treasure trove of deeply ancient artwork: hand stencils, as well as drawings of wild animals, people, and strange figures that seem to blend the two. A cave wall at Liang Bulu’Sipong 4 features a 4.5-meter-long mural of humanlike figures facing off against wild pigs and dwarf buffalo, and a 2024 study pushed the mural’s age back to 51,200 years ago, making it the second-oldest artwork that we know of (after the Liang Metanduno hand stencil in the recent study).

Archaeologists have only begun to rediscover the rock art of Maros-Pangkep in the last decade or so, and other areas of the island, like Southeast Sulawesi and its tiny satellite islands, have received even less attention—so we don’t know what’s still there waiting for humanity to find again after dozens of millennia. We also don’t know what the ancient artist was trying to convey with the outline of their hand on the cave wall, but part of the message rings loud and clear across tens of millennia: At least 67,800 years ago, someone was here.

Really, really ancient mariners

The hand stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno is, so far, the oldest evidence of our presence in Wallacea, the group of islands stretched between the continental shelves of Asia and Australia. Populating these islands is “widely considered to have involved the first planned, long-distance sea crossing undertaken by our species,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues.

Back when the long-lost artist laid their hand on the wall, sea levels were about 100 meters lower than they are today. Mainland Asia, Sumatra, and Borneo would have been high points in a single landmass, joined by wide swaths of lowlands that today lie beneath shallow ocean. The eastern shore of Borneo would have been a jumping-off point, beyond which lay several dozen kilometers of water and (out of view over the horizon) Sulawesi.

The first few people may have washed ashore on Sulawesi on some misadventure: lost fishermen or tsunami survivors, maybe. But at some point, people must have started making the crossing on purpose, which implies that they knew how to build rafts or boats, how to steer them, and that land awaited them on the other side.

Liang Metanduno pushes back the timing of that crossing by nearly 10,000 years. It also lends strong support to arguments that people arrived in Australia earlier than archaeologists had previously suspected. Archaeological evidence from a rock shelter called Madjedbebe, in northern Australia, suggests that people were living there by 65,000 years ago. But that evidence is still debated (such is the nature of archaeology), and some archaeologists argue that humans didn’t reach the continent until around 50,000 years ago.

“With the discovery of rock art dating to at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi, a large island on the most plausible colonization route to Australia, it is increasingly likely that the controversial date of 65,000 years for the initial peopling of Australia is correct,” Griffith University archaeologists Adam Brumm, a coauthor of the recent study, told Ars.

Archaeologists are still trying to work out exactly when, where, and how the first members of our species made the leap from the continent of Asia to the islands of Wallacea and, eventually, via several more open-water crossings, to Australia. Our picture of the process is pieced together from archaeological finds and models of ancient geography and sea levels.

“There’s been all sorts of work done on this (not by me), but often researchers consider the degree of intervisibility between islands, as well as other things like prevailing ocean currents and wind directions, changes in sea levels and how this affects the land area of islands and shorelines and so on,” Brumm said.

Most of those models suggest that people crossed the Makassar Strait from Borneo to Sulawesi, then island-hopped through what’s now Indonesia until they reached the western edge of New Guinea. At the time, lower sea levels would have left New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand as one big land mass, so getting from New Guinea to what’s now Australia would actually have been the easy part.

A time capsule on the walls

There’s a sense of deep, deep time in Liang Metanduno. The cave wall is a palimpsest on which the ancient hand stencil is nearly covered by a brown-hued drawing of a chicken, which (based on its subject matter) must have been added sometime after 5,000 years ago, when a new wave of settlers brought domesticated chickens to the island. It seems almost newfangled against the ghostly faint outline of the Paleolithic hand.

A few centimeters away is another hand stencil, done in darker pigment and dating to around 21,500 years ago; it overlays a lighter stencil dating to around 60,900 years ago. Over tens of thousands of years, generations of people returned here with the same impulse. We have no way of knowing whether visitors 21,500 years ago, or 5,000 years ago might have seen a more vibrantly decorated cave wall than what’s preserved today—but we know that they decided to leave their mark on it.

And the people who visited the cave 21,500 years ago shared a sense of style with the artists who left their hands outlined on the wall nearly 40,000 years before them: both handprints have slightly pointed fingers, as if the artist either turned their fingertip or just touched-up the outline with some paint after making the stencil. It’s very similar to other hand stencils, dated to around 17,000 years ago, from elsewhere on Sulawesi, and it’s a style that seems unique to the island.

“We may conclude that this regionally unique variant of stencil art is much older than previously thought,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues.

And Homo sapiens wasn’t the first hominin species to venture as far as Indonesia; at least 200,000 years earlier, Homo erectus made a similar journey, leaving behind fossils and stone tools to mark that they, too, were once here. On some of the smaller islands, isolated populations of Homo erectus started to evolve along their own paths, eventually leading to diminutive species like Homo floresiensis (the O.G. hobbits) on Flores and Homo luzonensis on Luzon. Homo floresiensis co-discoverer Richard Roberts has suggested that other isolated hominin species may have existed on other scattered islands.

Anthropologists haven’t found any fossil evidence of these species after 50,000 years ago, but if our species was in Indonesia by nearly 68,000 years ago, we would have been in time to meet our hominin cousins.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09968-y (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 24 January 2026 at 4:29 am AEST (my time).

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All sorts of interesting flags and artifacts will fly to the Moon on Artemis II

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:03:46 +0000

More than 2,300 commemorative items fill the duffel bag-size pouch.

NASA’s first astronauts to fly to the Moon in more than 50 years will pay tribute to the lunar and space exploration missions that preceded them, as well as aviation and American history, by taking with them artifacts and mementos representing those past accomplishments.

NASA, on Wednesday, January 21, revealed the contents of the Artemis II mission’s Official Flight Kit (OFK), continuing a tradition dating back to the Apollo program of packing a duffel bag-sized pouch of symbolic and celebratory items to commemorate the flight and recognize the people behind it. The kit includes more than 2,300 items, including a handful of relics.

“This mission will bring together pieces of our earliest achievements in aviation, defining moments from human spaceflight and symbols of where we’re headed next,” Jared Isaacman, NASA’s administrator, said in a statement. “Historical artifacts flying aboard Artemis II reflect the long arc of American exploration and the generations of innovators who made this moment possible.”

The Artemis II mission, which may launch as soon as early February, is set to take three NASA astronauts—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch—and a representative of the Canadian Space Agency, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day flight that takes them farther out into space than any humans have ever traveled before and then return them safely to Earth.

The mission includes a flyby of the Moon, affording the crew an opportunity to see parts of the far side never observed directly by human eyes.

Banners aboard

“During America’s 250th anniversary, Orion will carry astronauts around the Moon, while also carrying our history forward into the next chapter beyond Earth,” said Isaacman.

Inside the OFK are numerous flags of different types, including hundreds of US and “America 250” flags for post-flight presentation. The kit also holds two special examples of the stars and stripes, one that is returning to space for its third time, and another that is finally getting its chance to fly.

The “Legacy Flag,” which first flew on STS-1, the inaugural space shuttle mission in 1981, was then launched to the International Space Station on STS-135, the final space shuttle mission, in 2011 and brought back to Earth by the SpaceX Demo-2 crew, the first astronauts to fly into orbit on a US commercial spacecraft in 2020. NASA then pledged to fly the 13×8 inch (33×20 centimeter) American flag yet again on the next crewed flight to the Moon.

A larger, 3×5-foot (0.9×1.5-meter) US flag is also in the Artemis II OFK. It was prepared like at least seven others to be deployed on the lunar surface until its mission, Apollo 18, was canceled due to budget cuts. The banner was instead put on display at NASA Headquarters in Washington until recently, when it was taken off exhibit to make its premiere flight to the Moon on Artemis.

Other flags inside the mission’s OFK include those representing US states and military branches, the United Nations, various schools, and other countries. The European Space Agency (ESA), which provided the service module for the Artemis II Orion spacecraft, has aboard one of its logo flags for display after the mission.

From the ground to flight

The Artemis I OFK that flew on an uncrewed test flight in 2022 carried tree seeds around the Moon, similar to how Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa did in 1971. The resulting Artemis Moon trees, like the Apollo Moon trees before them, have since grown to become living reminders of what humanity is capable of achieving.

On Artemis II, NASA is flying soil samples collected from the base of established Artemis Moon trees that were planted at the agency’s 10 centers. The packets of earth represent “the full cycle of exploration: launch, flight, growth and return to space again,” as explained by NASA. The Canadian Space Agency will restart that cycle with tree seeds it is flying on Artemis II to be planted around Canada.

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has loaned a 1×1-inch (2.54×2.54 cm) swatch of muslin fabric that was cut from the right wing of the original Flyer that the Wright Brothers used to make the first powered flight in 1903. The swatch was cut from a larger sample that previously launched on the space shuttle Discovery‘s STS-51D mission in 1985.

After Artemis II, NASA will return the fabric to the museum, which displays the Wright Flyer as well as other space-flown swatches, including pieces that were landed on the Moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969.

Before Apollo 11 touched down with the first humans, NASA’s Ranger 7 became the first US mission to successfully make contact with the lunar surface. Artemis II will carry a copy of a 4×5 inch (10×13 cm) negative of a photo from that 1964 robotic mission. The photo represents “a major turning point in the race to the Moon that will be echoed today through the success of Artemis,” according to NASA officials.

Shavings and a name card… two bits (of rodeo)

Beyond patches, pins, and decals, a few other standout items in the 10 lb (4.5 kg) Artemis II Official Flight Kit include an SD card recorded with the names of 2.9 million (and counting) people who signed up to be on the mission and metal shavings from the construction of the Space Launch System (SLS) core stage, the largest component of the mission’s launch vehicle.

There is also a badge and a “leather back number” from the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, an annual event in “Space City,” home to the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

In addition to the OFK, the astronauts each have their own Personal Preference Kit (PPK), a smaller pouch in which they can carry mementos that have significance to them. As examples, Wiseman said he is flying a notecard to take down his thoughts during the flight; Glover has a Bible, heirlooms for his wife and children, and a collection of inspirational quotes compiled by Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart; Koch has handwritten notes from people she loves to serve as a tactile connection between her and them; and Hansen has four Moon pendants that he is taking for his wife and three children.

Click here for the complete Artemis II Official Flight Kit (OFK) manifest as released by NASA and transcribed by collectSPACE.

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Posted Friday 23 January 2026 at 4:03 am AEST (my time).

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mRNA cancer vaccine shows protection at 5-year follow-up, Moderna and Merck say

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 02:45:57 +0000

The vaccines are tailor-made to target each patient’s unique cancer.

In a small clinical trial, customized mRNA vaccines against high-risk skin cancers appeared to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and death by nearly 50 percent over five years when compared with standard treatment alone. That’s according to Moderna and Merck, the two pharmaceutical companies that have collaborated on the experimental cancer vaccine, called intismeran autogene (mRNA-4157 or V940).

So far, the companies have only reported the top-line results in a press release this week. However, the results align closely with previous, more detailed analyses from the trial, which examined rates of recurrence and death at earlier time points, specifically at two years and three years after the treatment. More data from the trial—a Phase 2 trial—will soon be presented at a medical conference, the companies said. A Phase 3 trial is also underway, with enrollment complete.

The ongoing Phase 2 trial included 157 patients who were diagnosed with stage 3 or stage 4 melanoma and were at high risk of having it recur after surgical removal. A standard treatment to prevent recurrence after such surgery is immunotherapy, including Merck’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab). This drug essentially enables immune cells, specifically T cells, to attack and kill cancer cells—something they normally do. But, in many types of cancers, including melanoma, cancer cells have the ability to bind to receptors on T cells (called PD-1 receptors), which basically shuts the T cells down. Keytruda works by physically blocking the PD-1 receptors, preventing cancer cells from binding and keeping the T cells activated so they can kill the cancer.

In the trial, all 157 patients received Keytruda, a standard treatment. But they were randomized in a 2:1 ratio so that some would also get the customized mRNA vaccines. These vaccines were tailored specifically to each patient’s melanomas, carrying genetic instructions to build up to 34 unique markers of their mutated cancer cells. Once in the patient, healthy cells produce those markers and use them to train T cells to identify and attack the cancer cells.

mRNA’s potential

Previous data from the trial reported that 107 participants received the mRNA vaccine and Keytruda treatment, while the remaining 50 only received Keytruda. At the two-year follow-up, 24 of the 107 (22 percent) who got the experimental vaccine and Keytruda had recurrence or death, while 20 of 50 (40 percent) treated with just Keytruda had recurrence or death, indicating a 44 percent risk reduction. The companies did not report the breakdown of the two groups in the press release this week for the five-year follow-up, but said the risk reduction was 49 percent, which is also what the companies reported for the three-year follow-up.

As for side effects, the companies reported that little had changed from previous analyses; adverse events were similar between the two groups. The top side effects linked to the vaccine were fatigue, injection site pain, and chills.

The results “highlight the potential of a prolonged benefit” of the vaccine combined with Keytruda in patients with high-risk melanoma,” Kyle Holen, a senior vice president at Moderna, said.

They also “illustrate mRNA’s potential in cancer care,” he said, noting that the company has eight more Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials going for mRNA vaccines against a variety of other cancers, including lung, bladder, and kidney cancers.

Marjorie Green, a senior vice president at Merck, called the five-year follow-up data a “meaningful milestone” and “encouraging.”

“[W]e look forward to late-stage data from the INTerpath clinical development program with Moderna, across a range of tumor types where significant unmet needs remain,” she said.

While the top-line results appear positive, conclusions can’t be drawn until the full data from the trial are published. The vaccines are also being developed amid a political environment hostile to mRNA vaccines. Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has railed against mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, making false claims about their safety and efficacy. In August, Kennedy unilaterally canceled $500 million in grant funding for the development of mRNA-based vaccines against diseases that pose pandemic threats.

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Posted Thursday 22 January 2026 at 12:45 pm AEST (my time).

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What We Know About the Winter Storm About to Hit the US—and What We Don’t

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 02:44:45 +0000

A huge portion of the United States is going to be hit with snow or freezing rain this weekend. Exactly where, what, and how much remains uncertain.

Over the past weekend, when weather models first started forecasting a winter storm that would sweep over large parts of the country, Sean Sublette, a meteorologist living in Virginia, started telling people in his area to prepare for snow. At the time, Sublette says, “a lot of the data started to point to a substantial snow storm for the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, with significant ice farther southward into Carolina's Tennessee Valley.”

Then, Sublette woke up Wednesday morning. “I go through the data again, and I go, ‘Oh, fuck,’” he says. The models were now structuring the storm much differently.

“Some of the data is putting down crippling amounts of ice for my area of central Virginia,” he says. “This does not mean I am buying it hook, line, and sinker yet. But it is a sobering chunk of data to suggest heavy freezing rain, which is that type of precipitation that's liquid until it touches something and then freezes. That's the stuff that weighs down power lines. That's the stuff that weighs down the trees and brings them over on top of the power lines.”

Meteorologists who spoke to WIRED say that it’s still too early to pinpoint exactly how this weekend’s storm is going to affect different regions of the country. But, they say, people in several states should begin thinking ahead to the weekend and next week, and keep an eye out for more up-to-date forecasts from local trusted sources over the next few days.

On Wednesday morning, the National Weather Service issued a series of possible forecasts—what it called “Key Messages”—on the upcoming storm, predicting heavy snow starting on Friday falling from the Rocky Mountains and Plains regions and moving to the East Coast on Sunday. Freezing rain and sleet are projected to hit states south of the snow zone. Maps provided by the NWS show the storm hitting nearly 30 states, from as far west as New Mexico and Texas, all the way up to Maine and as far south as Georgia.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how the storm will form and how it will affect specific areas. “We know that this storm system is absolutely waterlogged,” says Matthew Cappucci, an atmospheric scientist and meteorologist, who contributes to The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang. The system, Cappucci says, gathered up a lot of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, guaranteeing some form of precipitation for much of the southern and eastern United States. But there’s still uncertainty about how other atmospheric elements will shape the storm. That includes a cold, low-pressure eddy of air in the higher levels of the atmosphere (called, in meteorologic speak, an upper level low) that’s forming over the Pacific, whose formation will help determine how and where precipitation will fall.

“A wide swath of the southern and eastern United States will see 2-plus inches’ worth of water,” says Cappucci. “Whether that comes down as rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, or a combination remains the wild card.”

The National Weather Service’s announcements are not winter weather warnings, Sublette says, but “messages”; forecasts will get more specific as the storm keeps developing. But there’s enough data available to start preparing for worst-case scenarios. Many of the regions that could be hit by the storm are historically underprepared for extreme winter conditions: A 2014 ice storm that swept across portions of Georgia and South Carolina left some areas without power for days. This storm will hit just a few weeks shy of the five-year anniversary of a winter storm in Texas that caused a two-week power outage and ultimately killed nearly 250 people.

A stretch of predicted cold temperatures immediately following the storm, similar to the one that hit Texas, could also create hazardous conditions—especially if snow or ice take out power lines or make driving difficult.

“It's 20 degrees,” Sublette says, imagining a scenario in which freezing rain hits Virginia. “Stuff starts weighing down. Stuff starts getting knocked over, and you’ve got thousands of power outages by Monday morning. People start losing heat. It's only 28 degrees in the afternoon—oh my God, we've got a problem.”

Despite some of the dire predictions being distributed online, both Sublette and Cappucci caution against buying into specific scenarios days out from a possible storm.

“There is an abundance of misinformation out there and information overload,” Cappucci says. “Ultimately, the public has to be able to sift through the noise and find a trusted source, but that's becoming increasingly difficult in a sea of clickbait, hype, and monetized posts.”

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Posted Thursday 22 January 2026 at 12:44 pm AEST (my time).

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Watch a robot swarm “bloom” like a garden

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 02:43:31 +0000

The Swarm Garden: An array of modular robot agents that adapt to changing conditions for living architecture.

Researchers at Princeton University have built a swarm of interconnected mini-robots that “bloom” like flowers in response to changing light levels in an office. According to their new paper published in the journal Science Robotics, such robotic swarms could one day be used as dynamic facades in architectural designs, enabling buildings to adapt to changing climate conditions as well as interact with humans in creative ways.

The authors drew inspiration from so-called “living architectures,” such as beehives. Fire ants provide a textbook example of this kind of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour them from a teapot like ants, as Goldman’s lab demonstrated several years ago, or they can link together to build towers or floating rafts—a handy survival skill when, say, a hurricane floods Houston. They also excel at regulating their own traffic flow. You almost never see an ant traffic jam.

Naturally scientists are keen to mimic such systems. For instance, in 2018, Georgia Tech researchers built ant-like robots and programmed them to dig through 3D-printed magnetic plastic balls designed to simulate moist soil. Robot swarms capable of efficiently digging underground without jamming would be super beneficial for mining or disaster recovery efforts, where using human beings might not be feasible.

In 2019, scientists found that flocks of wild jackdaws will change their flying patterns depending on whether they are returning to roost or banding together to drive away predators. That work could one day lead to the development of autonomous robotic swarms capable of changing their interaction rules to perform different tasks in response to environmental cues.

The authors of this latest paper note that plants can optimize their shape to get enough sunlight or nutrients, thanks to individual cells that interact with each other via mechanical and other forms of signaling. By contrast, the architecture designed by human beings is largely static, composed of rigid fixed elements that hinder building occupants’ ability to adapt to daily, seasonal, or annual variations in climate conditions. There have only been a few examples of applying swarm intelligence algorithms inspired by plants, insects, and flocking birds to the design process to achieve more creative structural designs, or better energy optimization.

Adaptive shading experiment on a sunny day.

Credit: Merihan Alhafnawi

The authors were interested in exploring adaptive and dynamic facades in architecture, inspired by past attempts to integrate biological elements to create “living buildings”: using panels of algae to generate energy and provide shade, for example. Most such efforts rely on arrays of rigid mechanical modules to respond to external stimuli, such as the Al Bahr Towers in Abu Dhabi. More recently, architects have explored arrays of soft modules for facades, such as bimetallic beams and shells that respond to shifts in temperature to control building ventilation and temperature.

Building a Swarm Garden

Merihan Alhafnawi, a mechanical engineer at Princeton, and co-authors turned to swarm robotics to design their proof-of-concept project, dubbed the Swarm Garden. They built an array of 40 modular, rearrangeable robotic units they called SGbots, connected via a Wi-Fi network to enable a shared communication protocol designed to facilitate collective decision-making.

Each bot has a back-facing ambient light sensor to detect lighting changes and a front-facing proximity sensor to enable it to find and communicate with its nearest neighbors. And each bot has an actuator designed to retract or extend a thin plastic sheet through a thin slot; the sheets can buckle or open up into a “bloom” in response to environmental stimuli.

A demonstration showing the interaction mode used in the public exhibition that allows users to bloom the robots with hand gestures.

Credit: Merihan Alhafnawi

Alhafnawi et al. designed two case studies to demonstrate the potential of their Swarm Garden. In the first, they used a Swarm Garden for adaptive shading, placing 16 SGbots on an office window and letting them operate continuously for three days. The bots fully extended their sheets to block sunlight when the light was especially strong, gradually buckling as the sun weakened and the room became darker. Additional simulations showed the array also worked well when placed horizontally in atrium spaces.

The second case study was designed to showcase the potential of swarm robots for creative interior design. This involved an array of 36 SGbots at a public exhibition in April 2024 at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts. In one demonstration (see video above), users could cause the bots to “bloom” and retract using simple hand gestures. In another (see video below), users donned wearable devices so they could induce LED color changes with gestural arm movements. One of the co-authors even performed a live dance while equipped with a wearable device midway through the three-hour exhibition.

Responses of the Swarm Garden from certain interactions involving arm movement caused by users equipped with the wearable device.

Credit: Merihan Alhafnawi

The next step is for the team to collaborate with architects to determine the feasibility of real-world deployment of Swarm Garden arrays. The authors also want to explore more sustainable and resilient materials since there is considerable stress on the plastic sheets from the buckling-to-blooming process. And they suggest employing kirigami-inspired cuts could lower actuation power.

“We envision a future where the built environment is increasingly inspired by living architectures, creating facades that constantly adapt to their surroundings and occupants,” Alhafnawi et al. concluded. “The Swarm Garden offers a glimpse into that future: an architectural swarm that collectively responds to sunlight and human interaction. It further shapes occupants’ spaces by being animated with movement, vibrant with colors, and beautiful in appearance, inspiring creativity and expression.”

Science Robotics, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.ady7233 (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 22 January 2026 at 12:40 pm AEST (my time).

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World's Oldest Rock Art Discovered in Indonesian Cave

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:26:33 +0000

The dark bowels of a limestone cave on Muna Island, off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia, just yielded an ancient secret.

There, a team of archaeologists has discovered human-made rock art older than any other reliably dated example, with a minimum age of 67,800 years ago. The eerie hand stencils with their pointed fingers represent an important piece of the puzzle about early human migration across the region, tens of thousands of years ago.

"What we are seeing in Indonesia is probably not a series of isolated surprises, but the gradual revealing of a much deeper and older cultural tradition that has simply been invisible to us until recently," archaeologist Maxime Aubert of Griffith University in Australia, who co-led the research, told ScienceAlert.

"The amount and great age of rock art found there show that this was not a marginal or temporary place. Instead, it was a cultural heartland where early humans lived, travelled, and expressed ideas through art for tens of thousands of years."

In recent years, both Sulawesi and the Indonesian portion of Borneo have emerged as unexpectedly important sites for understanding early human creativity and migration. In many cases, cave paintings were discovered decades ago, but researchers lacked reliable methods to determine their age.

Thanks to advances in dating techniques, scientists now know that some of these artworks are far older than previously thought, with minimum ages exceeding 40,000 years and stretching beyond 51,000 years.

"Each time we apply these methods in new areas, the ages turn out to be much older than expected," Aubert said. "That tells us the problem was not that early humans were suddenly making art in one place, but that we have been looking in the wrong places, or not looking carefully enough."

This most recent finding was made in Liang Metanduno, a cave long known to contain ancient rock art. Aubert and his colleagues wanted to determine where the creations in this cave fit into the timeline of ancient art in the Indonesian archipelago.

Maxime Aubert in Liang Metanduno. (Ahdi Agus Oktaviana)

If archaeologists are lucky, over a timespan of thousands of years, a thin layer of calcite is deposited over the art, precipitated from water running over the surface of the rock. This water often contains a small amount of uranium, which is soluble in water. Over time, uranium decays into thorium, which is not water-soluble.

Because the rate at which uranium decays into thorium is precisely known, scientists can look at the ratios of uranium and thorium in samples of the coating to determine how old it is.

That means it is not the paint itself that has been dated to 67,800 years ago, but the mineral crust that formed on top of it. The art beneath must therefore be at least that old.

And, combined with previous evidence, this suggests that much of the rock art in the region is potentially far older than previously estimated, which in turn would change how we understand Sulawesi – a key stopping point for early human migration to Australia.

Archaeologist Shinatria Adhityatama of Griffith University and the Indonesian National Archaeology Research Institute working in the cave. (Maxime Aubert)

"Art may have become especially important as populations grew and groups interacted more often," Aubert said.

"One way to think about this is through modern examples. Traffic lights are needed in large cities, but not in small villages. In a similar way, art, symbols, and shared images may have helped people communicate identity, belonging, and shared meaning as social networks became larger and more complex."

For archaeologists, this kind of symbolic behavior matters because of when and where it appears. The newly dated art sits along a proposed northern migration route that early modern humans are thought to have taken as they moved through Island Southeast Asia toward Sahul, the Ice Age landmass that once joined Australia and New Guinea.

Finding evidence of complex artistic traditions along this corridor helps fill a long-standing gap between early sites in mainland Asia and the earliest traces of people in Australia, and suggests that humans could have arrived on Sahul by as early as 65,000 years ago.

It also throws open many more exciting questions, such as how much more rock art of this era remains to be discovered in the surrounding area, how symbolic traditions traveled and spread, and whether there are even earlier chapters of this story yet to be discovered.

"What excites us most is that this art shows early people in Southeast Asia were already expressing ideas, identity, and meaning through images tens of thousands of years ago. These were not isolated experiments. They were part of a long-lasting cultural tradition," Aubert said.

"For us, this discovery is not the end of the story. It is an invitation to keep looking."

The research has been published in Nature.

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Also: Oldest known rock art is a 68,000-year-old hand stencil with claws.

Webb reveals a planetary nebula with phenomenal clarity, and it is spectacular

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 02:05:18 +0000

The colors show the star’s final breath transforming into the raw ingredients for new worlds.

The Helix Nebula is one of the most well-known and commonly photographed planetary nebulae because it resembles the “Eye of Sauron.” It is also one of the closest bright nebulae to Earth, located approximately 655 light-years from our Solar System.

You may not know what this particular nebula looks like when reading its name, but the Hubble Space Telescope has taken some iconic images of it over the years. And almost certainly, you’ll recognize a photograph of the Helix Nebula, shown below.

Like many objects in astronomy, planetary nebulae have a confusing name, since they are formed not by planets but by stars like our own Sun, though a little larger. Near the end of their lives, these stars shed large amounts of gas in an expanding shell that, however briefly in cosmological time, put on a grand show.

Now the James Webb Space Telescope has turned its sights on the Helix Nebula, and, oh my, does it have a story to tell. NASA released the new images of the nebula on Tuesday.

In this image, there are vibrant pillars of gas along the inner region of the nebula’s expanding shell of gas. According to the space agency, this is what we’re seeing:

A blazing white dwarf, the leftover core of the dying star, lies right at the heart of the nebula, out of the frame of the Webb image. Its intense radiation lights up the surrounding gas, creating a rainbow of features: hot ionized gas closest to the white dwarf, cooler molecular hydrogen farther out, and protective pockets where more complex molecules can begin to form within dust clouds. This interaction is vital, as it’s the raw material from which new planets may one day form in other star systems.

In Webb’s image of the Helix Nebula, color represents the temperature and chemistry. A touch of a blue hue marks the hottest gas in this field, energized by intense ultraviolet light from the white dwarf. Farther out, the gas cools into the yellow regions where hydrogen atoms join into molecules. At the outer edges, the reddish tones trace the coolest material, where gas begins to thin and dust can take shape. Together, the colors show the star’s final breath transforming into the raw ingredients for new worlds, adding to the wealth of knowledge gained from Webb about the origin of planets.

It is, in a word, phenomenal.

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Posted Wednesday 21 January 2026 at 12:02 pm AEST (my time).

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Macaque facial gestures are more than just a reflex, study finds

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 02:02:40 +0000

Study is first to implant micro-electrode arrays to record neurons as they produce facial gestures.

Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces have made it possible to more accurately extract speech from neural signals in humans, but language is just one of the tools we use to communicate. “When my young nephew asks for ice cream before dinner and I say ‘no,’ the meaning is entirely dictated by whether the word is punctuated with a smirk or a stern frown,” says Geena Ianni, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s why in the future, she thinks, neural prostheses meant for patients with a stroke or paralysis will decode facial gestures from brain signals in the same way they decode speech.

To lay a foundation for these future facial gesture decoders, Ianni and her colleagues designed an experiment to find out how neural circuitry responsible for making faces really works. “Although in recent years neuroscience got a good handle on how the brain perceives facial expressions, we know relatively little about how they are generated,” Ianni says. And it turned out that a surprisingly large part of what neuroscientists assumed about facial gestures was wrong.

The natural way

For a long time, neuroscientists thought facial gestures in primates stemmed from a neat division of labor in the brain. “Case reports of patients with brain lesions suggested some brain regions were responsible for certain types of emotional expressions while other regions were responsible for volitional movements like speech,” Ianni explains. We’ve developed a clearer picture of speech by tracing the origin of these movements down to the level of individual neurons. But we’ve not done the same for facial expressions. To fill this gap, Ianni and her team designed a study using macaques—social primates that share most of their complex facial musculature with humans.

The study started by putting the macaques in an fMRI scanner to monitor their brain activity while recording their faces with a high-resolution camera. The team then exposed their participants to various stimuli: videos with other macaques making faces at them, interactive avatars, or other live macaques. “This elicited socially meaningful facial expressions that are part of the subjects’ natural repertoire,” Ianni says.

Based on the video analysis, scientists identified three facial gestures they wanted to focus on: the lipsmack macaques use to signal receptivity or submission; the threat face they make when they want to challenge or chase off an adversary; and chewing, a non-social, volitional movement. Then, using the fMRI scans, the team located key brain areas involved in triggering these gestures. And when this was done, Ianni and her colleagues went deeper—quite literally.

Under the hood

“We targeted these brain areas with sub-millimeter precision for implantation of micro-electrode arrays,” Ianni explains. This, for the first time, allowed her team to simultaneously record the activity from many neurons spaced across the areas where the brain generates facial gestures. The electrodes went into the primary motor cortex, the ventral premotor cortex, the primary somatosensory cortex, and the cingulate motor cortex. When they were in, the team once again exposed the macaques to the same set of social stimuli, looking for neural signatures of the three selected facial gestures. And that’s when things took a surprising turn.

The researchers expected to see a clear division of responsibilities, one where the cingulate cortex governs social signals, while the motor cortex is specialized in chewing. Instead, they found that every single region was involved in every type of gesture. Whether the macaques were threatening a rival or simply enjoying a snack, all four brain areas were firing in a coordinated symphony.

This led Ianni’s team to the question of how the brain distinguished between social gestures and chewing, since it apparently wasn’t about where the brain processed the information. The answer was in different neural codes—different ways that neurons represent and transmit information in the brain over time.

The hierarchy of timing

By analyzing neural population dynamics, the team identified a temporal hierarchy across the cortex in macaques. The cingulate cortex used a static neural code. “The static means the firing pattern of neurons is persistent across both multiple repetitions of the same facial gesture and across time,” Ianni explains, and maintained their firing pattern till 0.8 seconds after that. “A single decoder which learns this pattern could be used at any timepoint or during any trial to read out the facial expression,” Ianni says.

The firing rates in the motor and somatosensory cortex, on the other hand, looked radically different. This suggests there is a dynamic neural code defined by rapidly changing firing rate relationships amongst the neural populations.

The team thinks this means that the cingulate cortex manages the social purpose and context of the facial gesture, which is relatively stable. This may be where the brain integrates sensory cues—like the look of another monkey’s expression—with its own internal state to produce the right facial gesture for the occasion.

The dynamic code areas implement this expression by driving individual muscles. “They’re driving the kinematics like ‘move this lip a millimeter to the left, now a millimeter to the right,’” Ianni explains. These constant miniscule movements of muscles are necessary because facial expressions are usually dynamic—macaques’ eyelids, lips, cheeks, and ears are constantly twitching and changing their position even if the end effect looks still from a distance.

The journey begins

But that’s just the beginning of a long journey.

“There have been such fabulous, impressive advances in the field of assistive communication devices even since I started this project,” Ianni says, and points to neural prostheses developed by Maitreyee Wairagkar’s team Ars covered in 2025 as one of the examples. Building a similar neural prosthesis for decoding facial gestures is unlikely to happen overnight, though. We’re a rather long way away from truly restoring the ability to communicate through facial gestures to patients who lost it.

Ianni’s study is the first that recorded neurons producing facial gestures with multi-electrode arrays. This means we’ve only just begun to build up base science on the neural mechanism behind making faces. This is the point where neural speech decoding technology was in the late 1990s, and we still can’t make that reliable enough for regular clinical products.

Still, Ianni remains hopeful. “I hope our work goes towards enabling the field, even the tiniest bit, towards more naturalistic and rich communication designs that will improve lives of patients after brain injury,” she says.

Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aea0890

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Posted Wednesday 21 January 2026 at 12:02 pm AEST (my time).

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The first commercial space station, Haven-1, is now undergoing assembly for launch

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:20:09 +0000

“We have a very strong incentive to send a crew as quickly as we can safely do so.”

As Ars reported last week, NASA’s plan to replace the International Space Station with commercial space stations is running into a time crunch.

The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from now, and the US space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several different private companies.

Although there are expected to be multiple bidders in “phase two” of NASA’s commercial space station program, there are at present four main contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast Space. At some point later this year, the space agency is expected to select one, or more likely two, of these companies for larger contracts that will support their efforts to build their stations.

To get a sense of the overall landscape as the competition heats up, Ars recently interviewed Voyager chief executive Dylan Taylor about his company’s plans for a private station, Starlab. Today we are publishing an interview with Max Haot, the chief executive of Vast. The company is furthest along in terms of development, choosing to build a smaller, interim space station, Haven-1, capable of short-duration stays. Eventually, NASA wants facilities capable of continuous habitation, but it is not clear whether that will be a requirement starting in 2030.

Until today, Haven-1 had a public launch date of mid-2026. However, as Haot explained in our interview, that launch date is no longer tenable.

Ars: You’re slipping the launch of Haven-1 from the middle of this year to the first quarter of 2027. Why?

Max Haot: This is obviously our first space station, and we’re moving as safely and as fast as we can. That’s the date right now that we are confident we will meet. We’ve been tracking that date, without slip, for quite a while. And that’s still a year, probably two years or even more, ahead of anyone else. It will be building the world’s first commercial space station from scratch, from an empty building and no team, in under four years.

Ars: Where are you with the hardware?

Haot: Last Saturday (January 10) we reached the key milestone of fully completing the primary structure, and some of the secondary structure; all of the acceptance testing occurred in November as well. Now we are starting clean room integration, which starts with TCS (thermal control system), propulsion, interior shells, and then moving on to avionics. And then final close out, which we expect will be done by the fall, and then we have on the books with NASA a full test campaign at the end of the year at Plum Brook. Then the launch in Q1 next year.

Ars: What happens after you launch Haven-1?

Haot: We are not launching Haven-1 with crew inside. It’s a 15-ton, very valuable and expensive satellite, but still no humans involved, launching on a Falcon 9. So then we have a period that we can monitor it and control it uncrewed and confirm everything is functioning perfectly, right? We are holding pressure. We are controlling attitude. These checkouts can happen in as little as two weeks.

At the end of it, we have to basically convince SpaceX, both contractually and with many verification events, that it will be safe to dock Dragon. And if they agree with the data we provide them, they will put a fully trained crew on board Dragon and bring them up. It could be as early as two weeks after, and it could be as late as any time within three years, which is a lifetime of Haven-1. But we have a very strong incentive to send a crew as quickly as we can safely do so.

Ars: Have you picked the crew yet?

Haot: We are in deep negotiations, maybe more than that, with both private individuals and nation states. But there’s nothing we are ready to announce yet. Especially with the Q1 launch date, in our desire to follow with the crew right after, this is now becoming pretty urgent. We believe, with our partner at SpaceX, one year for training is very comfortable, and we think we can compress it to maybe as little as six months for both training on Dragon and Haven-1 so long as we have an experienced crew. So we have a bit of time left to announce it.

Ars: You mentioned Haven-1 has a three-year lifetime. How many crews will you try to cycle through?

Haot: The nominal plan is for a two-week mission, and we have one fully contracted with SpaceX, as well as a second one that we have a deposit and an option on. And then we plan to do two more. That’s assuming they are 10-day missions with two days of transfer on either side. So two-week missions. We also have the option to maybe do a 30-day mission if we want. So the exact duration and makeup will be decided as we make progress with customers and potentially NASA.

Ars: What is the plan after Haven-1?

Haot: If you look at the first module of our second station, what will be the difference? We have two docking ports, not one. We expect to have more power, and potentially more volume, depending on the launch vehicle. What you see on our website and what we do might be different. We have a lot of optionality. But other than that, it’s all of the exact same components of Haven demo and Haven-1, which are basically being iterated on. And so that’s the key. The life support system, the air revitalization system, the software, the primary structure—the first module of Haven-2 will be just tweaks on Haven-1. That’s why we think we’re in the best position of all of the competitors. And that’s not been enabled by chance, right? It’s been enabled by a billion-dollar investment in 1,000 employees and all the facilities to mass produce the follow-on modules.

Ars: NASA is nearing the second phase of its competition for commercial space stations, known as CLDs. Do you plan to compete with Haven-1 or Haven-2 for these contracts?

Haot: We have not decided because, as you know, it’s unclear yet what the requirements will be. Will they be asking for a 30-day demonstration flight? On our end it’s unclear if we want to bid that 30-day demonstration with Haven-1, or Haven-2 with two or three modules. If they ask for a 30-day mission, we have the option to offer it on Haven-1 in 2027 if we want to.

Ars: Last week a key space staffer in the US Senate, Maddy Davis, said she was “begging” for NASA to release the phase two “request for proposals” that would set the ground rules for the CLD competition. Do you feel the same way?

Haot: Vast is dedicated to ensuring we have continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit after the ISS is retired. The date we are aiming at is end of 2030. Maddy mentioned an ISS extension. We agree, for America, if no one is ready it should be extended. But in our view, we will be ready, and we need to make sure we’re ready to start a continuous crewed mission by the end of 2030. That’s less than five years away now, right? So we definitely agree with the sentiment, and I think the full industry agrees, and I’m pretty sure Jared Isaacman also agrees that it is overdue and it’s time to make a decision and release an RFP.

Ars: What do you hope to see in that RFP when it comes to requirements?

Haot: We obviously can’t decide what NASA will do, and we will be competitive in whatever they decide. But there’s a few key recommendations we feel strongly about. The first one is that, as they consider whether they proceed with a demonstration mission or something else, we think they should focus on what is right for the country. What we are hearing is that they are trying to tweak the approach to do something fair to all of the bidders. And I don’t think it should matter whether people have been doing a right thing or wrong thing, and whether what’s right for the country puts somebody in a better position or not.

The second piece, obviously, is to move faster, which we just talked about. The third piece is that we think it’s really important that they require a demonstration. If you look at every human space flight program in history, none of them went straight from the program starting to a long-duration mission on a spacecraft. They all had a stepping stone, and right now none of us has proven we can have humans safely on orbit in a space station. And so in our view, they should require demonstration, and not on the eve of January 1, 2031. They should require a demonstration with crew as quickly as possible before they buy services.

Ars: You mentioned doing the “right thing for the country.” What does that mean for NASA?

Haot: It means you’re focused on commercial stations being ready by 2030, so there is not a need to extend the ISS. And it means ensuring we have not just one winner, but two, in case history repeats itself, such as Boeing and SpaceX in crew transportation.

Ars: Do you think the government has committed enough funding to make the commercial space station program a success?

Haot: I’m a vendor, and obviously I’d like as much buffer as possible, and as much funding as possible. With the current budget we don’t think more than two winners is reasonable, but it should absolutely be two in the best interest of the country. If there was a bigger budget, obviously, three would be great. And so if you look at the CLD budget line, which is approved for next year—projected over five years for development, and you assume two winners, and then services that come later—we are confident we can be successful and profitable with two companies operating.

Obviously, we also need international customers, right? We need Europe. We need Japan, where we just opened a subsidiary. We need all the new emerging human spaceflight nations in the Middle East, in Europe, in Asia. And a little bit of private spaceflight. We’re not in a space tourism era, in orbit, but there are still some private individuals willing to fund a mission and do important work. With that, we get to profitability.

We think a big differentiator of Vast is that we are really excited and eager to unlock the orbital economy. I’m talking about in-space semiconductor, fiber, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and so on. We think that’s our upside. We want to unlock it. But we don’t know how quickly it will happen or how big it will be. What we do know is, whoever has a platform up there with flight crew, facilities, and power will be the one unlocking it. But in our business model, if that’s delayed, we can still be profitable.

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Posted Wednesday 21 January 2026 at 4:19 am AEST (my time).

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Amateur mathematicians solve long-standing maths problems with AI

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:16:06 +0000

Professional mathematicians have been stunned by the progress amateurs have made in solving long-standing problems with the assistance of AI tools, and say it could lead to a new way of doing mathematics

Amateur mathematicians are using artificial intelligence chatbots to solve long-standing problems, in a move that has taken professionals by surprise. While the problems in question aren’t the most advanced in the mathematical canon, the success of AI models in tackling them shows that their mathematical performance has passed a significant threshold, say researchers, and could fundamentally change the way we do mathematics.

The questions being solved by AI originate from Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who was famous for his ability to pose useful but difficult questions during a career that spanned over six decades. “The questions tended to be very simple, but very hard,” says Thomas Bloom at the University of Manchester, UK.

By his death in 1996, there were more than 1000 of these unsolved Erdős problems, spanning a wide range of mathematical disciplines, from combinatorics (the study of combinations) to number theory. Today, they are seen as signposts for progress in these fields, says Bloom, who runs a website that catalogues the problems and tracks mathematicians’ progress in solving them.

Because Erdős problems are often simple to state, mathematicians began experimenting with feeding them to AI tools like ChatGPT. Bloom says that in October last year, he began seeing people use AI models to find relevant references in the mathematical literature that helped with their solutions.

Soon after, AI tools began finding partial improvements to results, some of which had been found in past papers, while others appeared new.

“I was surprised then,” says Bloom. “Before, when I tried ChatGPT, it just made up papers, completely hallucinating, and so I had given up using it. But clearly, there was some sort of change around October. I actually found genuine papers because it had read them all, and often in a non-trivial way.”

Inspired by this progress, Kevin Barreto, an undergraduate mathematics student at Cambridge University, and Liam Price, an amateur mathematician, began looking for simple and understudied Erdős problems that they might solve with AI. After finding one such problem, number 728, a conjecture in number theory, they fed it to ChatGPT-5.2 Pro to solve it.

“I looked at the statement, and thought, ‘This one might be able to get solved by ChatGPT, so let’s try it,’” says Barreto. “Sure enough, it comes back with an argument that’s quite nice and that a lot of people would actually agree was rather sophisticated.”

After ChatGPT produced a proof, Barreto and Price used another AI tool called Aristotle, created by the AI company Harmonic, to verify their work. Aristotle converts the conventional language proof into one written in Lean, a mathematical programming language. It can then be instantly checked by a computer for correctness. This is an important step, says Bloom, as it saves the limited time that researchers have to check whether a result is correct or not.

As of mid-January, six Erdős problems have been fully solved by AI tools, though subsequent scrutiny by professional mathematicians revealed that five of these problems had previously been solved in the mathematical literature. Only one problem, number 205, has been fully solved by Barreto and Price with no pre-existing solution. AI tools have also enabled small improvements and partial solutions to seven other problems that don’t appear to be pre-existing in the literature.

As a result, there is an ongoing debate about whether these tools are really proving new ideas, or merely digging out old and forgotten solutions. Bloom points out that the AI models often have to translate the problems into new forms, and are discovering papers that make no mention of Erdős. “A lot of these papers, I wouldn’t have found, and maybe nobody would have found for a lot longer without this sort of [use of] the AI tool,” he says.

Another question is just how far this approach can go. All of these problems aren’t the most demanding in mathematics, and could perhaps be accomplished by a first-year PhD student, but that is still impressive, says Bloom. “To me, it’s incredible that AI is capable of that, because this takes non-trivial effort.”

Barreto also says that the problems being solved are relatively straightforward, even when compared with more difficult Erdős problems, which current AI models fall short of solving. “Once [AI] gets through the low-hanging fruit problems, a lot of them are going to need more capable models,” he says. Some of the hardest problems have prize money set aside for anyone who can solve them, but Barreto thinks that is unlikely to happen soon: “Some people are trying to do bounty problems, and to me that’s kind of nuts. I don’t think the models are there yet.”

Solving Erdős problems using AI is promising progress, says Kevin Buzzard at Imperial College London, but because most of the problems it is solving are either relatively straightforward or have had little attention, it makes it hard to gauge whether it is a significant achievement – or something that should concern professionals. “That is progress, but mathematicians aren’t going to be looking over their shoulders just yet,” says Buzzard. “It’s green shoots.”

But even if the models’ capability stays static, their ability to handle relatively complex mathematics could fundamentally change how researchers research and write proofs, says Bloom, because it will allow mathematicians who have limited knowledge of areas outside their particular discipline to draw on other fields.

“Almost nobody knows every part of math, and that means that we’re quite limited in the sets of tools that we can use,” says Bloom. “The fact that you can just get an answer instantly, without having to bother another human, without having to waste months learning potentially useless knowledge, opens up so many connections. That’s going to be a huge change that we’ll see, just increasing the breadth of research that’s done.”

This could also allow mathematicians to practice an entirely new way of working, says Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has helped validate some of the AI-assisted Erdős problem solutions.

Mathematicians often focus on a small number of difficult problems because of limited time, while many less difficult but still important problems don’t get much attention. If AI tools can be applied to them all at once, it could lead to a more empirical, scientific way of doing mathematics, says Tao, where different ways of solving a problem could be tested on a large scale.

“We are just so resource-limited by how much expert attention we have, that we don’t look at 99 per cent of all the problems that we could be studying,” says Tao. “So we don’t do things like survey hundreds of problems, trying to find one or two really interesting ones, or do statistical studies like, we have two different methods, which one is better?

“This is a type of mathematics that just isn’t done,” he says. “We don’t do large-scale mathematics because we don’t have the intellectual resources, but AI is showing that you can.”

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The race to build a super-large ground telescope is likely down to two competitors

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:28:04 +0000

Ars checks in with the new president of the Giant Magellan Telescope.

I have been writing about the Giant Magellan Telescope for a long time. Nearly two decades ago, for example, I wrote that time was “running out” in the race to build the next great optical telescope on the ground.

At the time the proposed telescope was one of three contenders to make a giant leap in mirror size from the roughly 10-meter diameter instruments that existed then, to approximately 30 meters. This represented a huge increase in light-gathering potential, allowing astronomers to see much further into the universe—and therefore back into time—with far greater clarity.

Since then the projects have advanced at various rates. An international consortium to build the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii ran into local protests that have bogged down development. Its future came further into question when the US National Science Foundation dropped support for the project in favor of the Giant Magellan Telescope. Meanwhile the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) has advanced on a faster schedule, and this 39.5-meter telescope could observe its first light in 2029.

This leaves the Magellan telescope. Originally backers of the GMT intended it to be fully operational by now, but it has faced funding and technology challenges. It has a price tag of approximately $2 billion, and although it is smaller than the European project, the 25.4-meter telescope now represents the best avenue for US-based astronomy to remain competitive in the field.

Given all of this, I recently spoke with University of Texas at Austin astronomer Dan Jaffe, who is the new president of the telescope’s executive team, to get an update on things. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Ars Technica: What should we know about the Giant Magellan Telescope?

Dan Jaffe: This is going to be one of the premier next-generation optical infrared telescopes in the world. It will give the United States astronomical community access that helps us to be a leading nation in this field, inspire students to go into science and engineering, and really enrich the human experience through the new knowledge that we get about the nature of the universe. So I think it covers both this kind of aspiration that we have to enrich humanity in some way, to help foster the future economy by bringing more people into these technical fields, and also by driving technology in some areas. The kinds of work we’re doing on adaptive optics, for example, in building sensitive detector systems and spectrometers, drive the frontier of what you can do with these systems.

Ars: Why has this taken so long?

Jaffe: Well, it’s large, it’s complicated, and it’s unique. Those are the three things together that drive that. It involves a large amount of technology that’s needed to make something like this go in terms of size and precision and speed. And those things together make it take a long time, and also cost a fairly large amount of money. We’ve raised about half of the money. And many of the most difficult parts of the project are well underway in terms of construction or prototyping. All seven mirrors that are needed for the telescope are cast, and a number of them are already finished.

Ars: How is the telescope’s site in the Atacama Desert in Chile coming along?

Jaffe: We’ve broken ground on the site, and it’s been leveled in the foundation. Areas have been dug out, and the utilities have all been installed. It’s now kind of in a free state, waiting for some of the other parts of the project to catch up to it.

Ars: Since the European telescope is now likely to be completed first, does that mean GMT will miss out on a lot of science discoveries?

Jaffe: These telescopes are complementary in many ways. It depends not just on the glass itself, but on the instruments you put behind them, and what they’re capable of. And I expect that at this size scale there’ll be plenty of discoveries for all of us to make. And also with other things coming online, like the (Vera) Rubin telescope that will provide new types of phenomena to investigate, there won’t be a list of things we’ve got to do, and the first person to get to the finish line will do them. I think there’s going to be exciting science for all of us. Our community is growing right now. MIT and Northwestern have joined our consortium in the last year-and-a-half or two years, and I think we’re going to have plenty of very exciting science to do. As a public-private partnership for the whole US community, there’s a tremendous amount of brain power out there to be creative about new things and to be innovative, both in the kind of instrumentation we build and in the ways we use it.

Ars: How concerned are you about megaconstellations impacting observations by GMT?

Jaffe: Astronomers have always had to manage sources of noise including satellites, high-energy particles detected by instruments, and electronic noise. We address these with a variety of well-tested observing strategies and data-processing techniques that generally mitigate such issues very effectively. Satellites are most problematic for telescopes that are specifically designed to do surveys that cover wide areas of the sky and focus on imaging, not spectroscopy. The data and discoveries from these projects become the input and starting points for research on larger telescopes. The Giant Magellan Telescope will focus on spectroscopy of objects over small fields of view compared to a survey telescope—even when those targets are spread across wide areas of the sky. As a result, we are far less affected than large survey telescopes. We are, of course, always working to further improve our observing and data-processing strategies. At the same time, the astronomical community is working collaboratively with satellite operators to reduce their impact on science by altering satellite brightness and altitude and improving prediction and tracking. We’re confident that continued cooperation will allow ground-based astronomy to advance and coexist successfully with satellite technologies.

Ars: What are you most excited to observe with the telescope?

Jaffe: My own interest is in studying planetary systems, how they evolve, and how they form planets. And there I would say the giant telescopes, in particular the GMT because the implementation it has, will help to move us from a discovery phase to an investigation phase, where we try to learn about these planets around other stars. What are they made of? How hot are they? How are their atmospheres behaving? Things like that. So the capabilities of this telescope will put us into an era in the exoplanet world of really starting to learn about the nature of these exoplanets, not just finding more.

Ars: What kinds of things could we learn?

Jaffe: Well, in particular with my instrument, which breaks up the light into very fine intervals, you can study which molecules are present in exoplanet atmospheres much more precisely, and the ratio of the different isotopes, which tells you about where those molecules came from. You can measure temperatures. You can look at wind velocities. There are many, many things you can do that help you to study these planets in much more detail.

Ars: We’ve got this new generation of ground-based observatories coming online. What could we be doing with new space telescopes to complement this?

Jaffe: Generically, I would say there are two things you can do in space that are particularly helpful for ground-based astronomy. You can look at wavelengths that you can’t see from the ground. So ultraviolet and X-rays, in particular, are very important in that respect. The other thing is that you can look at things continuously, if you are in certain types of orbits. And so people are building a number of very small, specialized telescopes to just look at things for a long time. The Kepler observatory is a great example of this, for looking for those little dips as planets move in front of their host stars, something that people do from the ground, but it’s much, much harder. So depending upon the field, there are various complementary space projects of different scale that could be important. And you know, the GMT will follow-up on some of the discoveries with the James Webb Space Telescope. We have higher spatial resolution, so we’re able to look in more detail at some of the objects that were looked at there. We have different types of instrumentation that were not thought of when JWST was developed that can help with things. And I think the reverse will happen, as you were alluding to, that as we start to move into this era with the Giant Magellan Telescope, that this will engender certain types of space experiments that are that are targeted to the kinds of questions that we raise.

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Posted Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 4:27 am AEST (my time).

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Capturing the Moment a White Dwarf Exploded

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:27:26 +0000

A research team has successfully imaged a nova in high resolution—and the images suggest that the nova was not a single, impulsive explosion.

The Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA Array) at Georgia State University has generated detailed images of the early stages of two nova explosions that were detected in 2021. Through near-infrared interferometry, a process that combines light from multiple telescopes, the CHARA Array was able to capture in high resolution the rapidly changing conditions of their early post-explosion phase.

A nova is an astronomical phenomenon that occurs in a binary system when a white dwarf strips its companion star of hydrogen-rich gas, causing a thermonuclear runaway reaction on the white dwarf’s surface. The name derives from the sudden brightening that makes it appear as though a new star has appeared in the night sky. However, the ejecta immediately following the explosion are small and a challenge to observe, and until now astronomers could only infer the early stages through indirect methods.

“The images give us a close-up view of how material is ejected away from the star during the explosion," explains Gail Schaefer, CHARA Array director. “Catching these transient events requires flexibility to adapt our night-time schedule as new targets of opportunity are discovered.”

Explosive Results

Schaeffer and her team observed V1674 Herculis, a nova in the Hercules constellation, and V1405 Cassiopeiae, a nova in Cassiopeia. V1674 was one of the fastest novas ever recorded, reaching its peak brightness less than 16 hours after its discovery and rapidly fading in just a few days. By contrast, V1405 took 53 days to reach its peak brightness and remained bright for about 200 days.

Images taken 2.2 days (left) and 3.2 days (center) after the explosion caused by the nova V1674 Herculis.

As indicated by the arrows, two ejecta flows have formed. On the right is an illustration of the explosion image.

The image of V1674, captured just a few days after its discovery, shows an explosion that is clearly not spherical; there are two ejecta flows, one to the northwest and the other to the southeast with an elliptical structure radiating almost perpendicular to them. This is direct evidence that the explosion involved multiple ejecta interacting with each other.

Spectroscopic observations also detected different velocity components in the Balmer series of hydrogen atoms. While the absorption line before the peak was about 3,800 km/s, the component that appeared after the peak reached about 5,500 km/s.

The timing is significant. The new ejecta flow appeared in the image concurrent with the detection of high-energy gamma rays by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The collision of the different velocity streams formed a powerful, gamma-ray emitting shock wave.

The results of V1405 were even more startling. The first two observations during the peak period showed only a bright central light source and few surrounding ejections. The diameter of the central region was approximately 0.99 milliarcseconds, which when converted to distance corresponds to a radius of approximately 0.85 au (au stands for the astronomical unit, the distance between Earth and the sun).

If the accumulated outer layer of hydrogen-rich gas had been ejected at the start of the explosion, it would have expanded over 53 days and had a radius of 23-46 au. This huge discrepancy means that most of the outer layer was not fully ejected after more than 50 days. In other words, V1405's outer layer is thought to have been in the common envelope phase that enveloped the entire binary system until the visible light peak.

During the third observation, the structure had changed dramatically. The central light source accounted for only about half of the total radiation, while the remainder was emitted from the expanded region. At this time, a broad emission component of approximately 2,100 km/s appeared. Subsequently, the release of material generated new shock waves, and high-energy emissions were observed.

Novae as Space Labs

This discovery demonstrates that novae are far more complex than a single explosion. Observations over the past 15 years by the Fermi telescope have detected gamma rays in the gigaelectronvolt range from more than 20 novae. Novae can now be regarded as laboratories for studying shock waves and particle acceleration.

The observations of V1405 suggest the possibility that the orbital motion of its binary system acts as a force pushing out the outer layers that have expanded due to the explosion. In slowly evolving novae, the state in which the expanded outer layers envelop the entire binary system continues for several weeks. Such phenomena provide valuable opportunities to directly observe what happens when two stars approach each other so closely, a process believed to occur in more than 10 percent of stars in the universe. However, detailed mechanisms remain unexplained.

Novae, once regarded as simple explosions, are proving to be far richer and more fascinating than when initially observed. Through the new window of direct imaging by near-infrared interferometry, the true nature of some of the universe's most dramatic phenomena is just beginning to be revealed.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

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Posted Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 4:26 am AEST (my time).

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