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.

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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Far Side fans might recall a classic 1982 cartoon called “Cow Tools,” featuring a cow standing next to a jumble of strange objects—the joke being that cows don’t use tools. That’s why a pet Swiss brown cow in Austria named Veronika has caused a bit of a sensation: she likes to pick up random sticks and use them to scratch herself. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, this is a form of multipurpose tool use and suggests that the cognitive capabilities of cows have been underestimated by scientists.

As previously reported, tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals. Dolphins can toss objects as a form of play which some scientists consider to be a type of tool use, particularly when it involves another member of the same species. Potential purposes include a means of communication, social bonding, or aggressiveness. (Octopuses have also been observed engaging in similar throwing behavior.)

But the biggest surprise came when birds were observed using tools in the wild. After all, birds are the only surviving dinosaurs, and mammals and dinosaurs hadn’t shared a common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years. In the wild, observed tool use has been limited to the corvids (crows and jays), which show a variety of other complex behaviors—they’ll remember your face and recognize the passing of their dead.

In 2012, a captive cockatoo named Figaro was trying to retrieve a stone that had fallen behind a metal divider and picked up a stick to increase his reach. He failed but then the researchers placed a nut behind the divider as an added incentive. Figaro initially picked up a stick from the enclosure’s floor, but this proved to be too short to reach the food. So, he actually splintered off a piece of the enclosure’s wooden base, and successfully used that to pull the nut towards the wire until he could use his beak to grab it.

Figaro used a different tool in each subsequent trial, and in most cases made some modifications to it before successfully retrieving a nut. In at least one case, he performed four separate modifications before putting a stick to use in retrieving the nut. He also managed to use the tool in two different ways, often alternating dragging and sweeping motions in his efforts to pull the food within reach. Other cockatoos who repeatedly watched Figaro’s performance were also able to do so. By 2022, Figaro and his cockatoo cronies had learned how to combine tools—in this case, a stick and a ball—to play a rudimentary form of “golf.”

Meet Veronika

For all the scientific interest in animal tool use, there has been almost no research into the cognitive capabilities of livestock like cows, or their possible tool use, according to the authors of this latest paper. Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, was intrigued when she watched the footage of Veronika’s scratching behavior. “It was clear that this was not accidental,” said Auersperg. “This was a meaningful example of tool use.”

Veronika using a stick, applying different techniques and body areas.

Credit: Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró/CC BY-SA

To test the extent of Veronika’s tool use, Auersperg and her postdoc, Antonio Osuna-Mascaro, visited the farm where Veronika lives. Her owner, Witgar Wiegele, is an organic farmer and baker who keeps the cow as a pet. With Wiegele’s permission, they conducted a series of randomized trials with a deck scrub broom, chosen for its asymmetrical shape, placed in different orientations. The pair recorded 76 instances of Veronika using the broom over seven sessions of ten trials.

Each time, Veronika used her tongue to lift and position the broom in her mouth, clamping down with her teeth for a stable grip. This enabled her to use the broom to scratch otherwise hard-to-reach areas on the rear half of her body. Veronika seemed to prefer the brush end to the stick end (i.e., the exploitation of distinct properties of a single object for different functions) although which end she used depended on body area. For example, she used the brush end to scratch her upper body using a scrubbing motion, while using the stick end to scratch more sensitive lower areas like her udders and belly skin flaps using precisely targeted gentle forward pushes. She also anticipated the need to adjust her grip.

The authors conclude that this behavior demonstrates “goal-directed, context-sensitive tooling,” as well as versatility in her tool-use anticipation, and fine-motor targeting. Veronika’s scratching behavior is likely motivated by the desire to relieve itching from insect bites, but her open, complex environment, compared to most livestock, and regular interactions with humans enabled her unusual cognitive abilities to emerge.

The implication is that this kind of technical problem-solving is not confined to species with large brains and hands or beaks. “[Veronika] did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson’s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted, and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility,” the authors wrote. “Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.”

DOI: Current Biology, 2025. 10.1016/j.cub.2025.11.059 (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 4:25 am AEST (my time).

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There’s no denying the allure of alien artifacts. Science fiction is awash in the material remnants of extraterrestrial civilizations, which surface in everything from the classic books of Arthur C. Clarke to game franchises like Mass Effect and Outer Wilds.

The discovery of the first interstellar objects in the solar system within the past decade has sparked speculation that they could be alien artifacts or spaceships, though the scientific consensus remains that all three of these visitors have natural explanations.

That said, scientists have been anticipating the possibility of encountering alien artifacts since the dawn of the space age.

“In the history of technosignatures, the possibility that there could be artifacts in the solar system has been around for a long time,” says Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester.

“We've been thinking about this for decades. We’ve been waiting for this to happen,” he continues. “But being responsible scientists means holding to the highest standards of evidence and also not crying wolf.”

That raises some tantalizing questions: What is the best way to search for alien artifacts? And what should we do if we actually identify one? Given that these technosignatures could run the gamut from tiny alloy flecks to hulking spaceships—or perhaps, some material that is unimaginable to Earthlings—it is difficult to know what to expect.

To meet this challenge, researchers are currently working on an array of techniques to search for signs of alien remnants across our solar system—including in orbit around Earth.

For example, Beatriz Villarroel, an assistant professor of astronomy at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, has focused on a largely untapped observational resource: historical images of the sky taken before the human space age.

By studying archival photographic observations captured by telescopes prior to the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Villarroel has produced a portrait of the sky before it was speckled with our satellites. As the lead of the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project (VASCO), she had initially been looking for any evidence that stars, or other natural objects, might vanish on these archival plates.

Instead Villarroel found inexplicable “transients” that look like artificial satellites in orbit around Earth, long before the launch of Sputnik, which she and her colleagues reported in 2021.

“That’s when I realized this is actually a fantastic archive, not for searching for vanishing stars, but for looking for artifacts,” she says.

Last year, Villarroel and her colleagues published three more studies about the search for near-Earth alien artifacts in The Publications of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Scientific Reports that have generated spirited debate among scientists. Researchers have suggested a range of alternate explanations for the transients, which could involve instrumental errors, meteors, or debris from nuclear tests.

The mystery could potentially be resolved with a dedicated mission to search for artifacts in geosynchronous orbit, an environment about 22,000 miles above Earth. However, Villarroel doubts that such a mission would be green-lit by any federal space agency in the near term, due to the controversial nature of the topic.

“There's so much taboo that nobody's ever going to take such results seriously until you bring down such a probe,” she adds.

Frank says he agrees that the stigmatization of the search for otherworldly artifacts—and the search for alien life, more broadly—is counterproductive. But he sees the pushback over research into alien artifacts as a healthy and natural part of scientific inquiry.

“This is how science actually works,” he says. “You publish a paper in a reputable journal, and now we can have the scientific back and forth.”

To that end, we can expect plenty more of this back-and-forth in the coming years. The discovery of the first interstellar object, 1I/‘Oumuamua, in 2017—followed by 2I/Borisov in 2019 and 3I/ATLAS in 2025—has now brought ground truth to the long-standing dream of studying real, tangible material from other solar systems.

Beyond searching for artifacts close to Earth, scientists are also exploring new ways to search for artificial probes or other material detritus made by aliens that might pass through the solar system.

As Frank notes, the search for physical technosignatures has been the topic of scientific inquiry for more than half a century. In 1960, the physicist Ronald N. Bracewell speculated in Nature that aliens might send autonomous robotic scouts across vast interstellar expanses, which came to be known as Bracewell probes.

In a seminal 1985 paper in Acta Astronautica, researchers Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Francisco Valdes dubbed this effort “the search for extraterrestrial artifacts (SETA),” a subset of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and laid out several reasons why an intelligent species might prefer to make contact via a probe rather than, for instance, an interstellar radio signal.

“An intelligent artifact orbiting a garrulous inhabited world may engage in a true conversation with the indigenous civilization, an almost instantaneous, complex interaction between cultures,” the team said. “Contact via probes provides a potentially richer, deeper interaction than via interstellar radio links.”

The dawn of this new era of interstellar objects has inspired a range of anticipatory research about the best practices for identifying technosignature candidates. Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer, founded the Galileo Project to search for these artifacts in part due to his interpretations of ‘Oumuamua and ATLAS as possible technosignatures—a stance that has put him at odds with the majority of scientists in this field, who broadly consider all known interstellar objects to be natural in origin.

Researchers in the field are also developing criteria for identifying technosignatures and testing these methods on newly discovered interstellar objects. For example, Sofia Shiekh, a technosignature researcher at the SETI Institute, has published a guide for assessing possible artifacts, and led an effort to search for signs of artificial radio activity on 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar comet discovered in 2025, which did not find evidence of technosignatures.

In another study published last year, scientists led by James Davenport, an astronomer at the University of Washington, synthesized decades of SETA research into a comprehensive strategy to screen interstellar objects for hints that they might be alien artifacts..

In addition to the trio of interstellar objects discovered so far, we can expect many more farflung entities to come into the sights of next-generation telescopes in the coming years, especially the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which began operating from its Chilean desert perch in 2025.

Scientists are eager to spot hints of alien technologies in these observations, such as shiny reflective materials, unusual motions and trajectories, or even active communication signals.

“Since these things are coming from other solar systems, we also expect there's going to be some anomalies and there’s going to be some ways it's going to look different from what we've seen,” says Frank, who is a co-author on the study led by Davenport. “You’ve got to set limits on that and say, this is what we mean when it’s more than anomalous or weird—I would say the technical term is, that’s freaky.”

Of course, that raises the thorniest question of all: What do we do if we find something really freaky? Is it safe or wise to approach or intercept an artifact from an alien civilization?

Villarroel notes that an active probe might not cooperate with an attempt to study it or retrieve it. Even in the case of alien space trash or other inert artifacts, it would be important to establish some degree of risk mitigation in any attempt to rendezvous with an object.

Even so, if scientists were presented with the opportunity to take a closer look at an alien artifact, they would be hard-pressed to resist, Frank says. “Unless it immediately starts showing activity—like it sends us a message, or it starts dropping drones that are heading at us—if it's passing through the solar system, and it looks like an artifact, of course, we're going to send probes,” he predicts.

Michael Bohlander, chair in global law and SETI policy at Durham University, suggests that, in addition to anticipating possible safety or contamination risks, people need to be prepared for the potential social, cultural, and geopolitical dimensions of discovering an alien artifact or spacecraft.

“Depending on how close things get—from an artifact somewhere out in space to a spaceship found on Earth or maybe in orbit—lots of people would be excited about it, but scared at the same time,” he says. “Mass panics and hysterical reactions could be expected on a large scale. So there are multiple dimensions to the whole thing, and not just a technological one.”

Despite the roiling tensions and fragile alliances that alien arrivals often inspire in science fiction, Frank anticipates that this momentous discovery, if it ever occurs, will unite global scientists rather than dividing them.

“The worldwide scientific community would be totally collaborative on this, and we would be thrilled,” Frank concludes. “This would be the greatest thing that had ever happened in the history of humanity for scientists, if we had this kind of evidence.”

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Posted Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 4:24 am AEST (my time).

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Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, are the most prescribed medications for treating depression. While they are generally considered safe, they come with a range of physical side effects that can affect a patient’s quality of life. One of the stranger and less understood reactions is excessive yawning. This is not the yawning of boredom or simple tiredness but a distinct physiological response to the medication.

The link between yawning and brain chemical activity is well established in animal models. Neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, and acetylcholine play a role in triggering this reflex. However, few researchers have tracked this phenomenon systematically over time in a clinical psychiatric setting. Most existing information comes from isolated case reports rather than structured observation.

To bridge this gap, a team of researchers from the University of Health Sciences in Istanbul, Türkiye, designed a prospective study. Lead author Yusuf Ezel Yıldırım, a psychiatrist at the Bakirkoy Prof. Dr. Mazhar Osman Training and Research Hospital for Psychiatric, Neurologic and Neurosurgical Diseases, sought to understand if this yawning was merely a nuisance or if it held clinical meaning. The team wanted to see if the frequency of yawning correlated with the severity of a patient’s depression or their quality of sleep.

The researchers recruited 150 adults aged 18 to 65 who were diagnosed with major depressive disorder. A key requirement for participation was that none of these patients had taken SSRIs before the study began. This exclusion ensured that any changes observed could be attributed to the new medication regimen rather than past usage. The participants were prescribed standard SSRI treatments such as sertraline, escitalopram, or fluoxetine.

Before taking their first dose, patients completed several detailed questionnaires. These surveys measured the severity of their depression using the Beck Depression Inventory and the intensity of their insomnia using the Insomnia Severity Index. The team also used a scale specifically designed to rate the frequency and disruptiveness of yawning. This custom assessment asked patients to rank their yawning from nonexistent to a level that severely impacted daily activities.

One month after starting treatment, the researchers followed up with the participants to assess their progress. Of the original group, 110 patients completed this second phase of the study. The researchers compared the new scores against the baseline data gathered four weeks earlier. They looked for patterns connecting the physical side effects to the psychological outcomes.

The results showed a clear general trend regarding the physical reaction to the drugs. The severity of yawning increased for the group as a whole after starting the medication. The number of patients reporting “excessive yawning” that frequently disrupted their lives jumped from roughly 5 percent to over 15 percent. This confirmed that the medication was indeed driving the physical behavior in a substantial portion of the group.

However, the data revealed a more nuanced relationship when the researchers looked at individual treatment outcomes. At the start of the study, patients with higher depression scores tended to report more yawning. This connection persisted even after accounting for age and other factors. It suggests that the act of yawning is biologically linked to the depressive state itself, not just the drugs.

The most distinct finding emerged when the team divided the patients into two groups based on how well the medicine worked. One group consisted of “responders,” defined as those whose depression scores dropped by at least half. The other group was “non-responders,” whose condition did not improve as markedly.

Among the patients who responded well to the treatment, yawning severity decreased slightly or stayed the same. In contrast, the non-responders experienced a sharp rise in yawning severity. The statistical analysis showed that this increase was not a random occurrence. It implies that if a patient continues to yawn excessively or if the yawning worsens markedly, it might indicate that the depression is not lifting.

The study also examined whether sleep issues played a role in this phenomenon. While insomnia scores generally improved for everyone, the changes in yawning happened independently of how well the patients slept. The yawning was more closely tied to other physical side effects like nausea, sweating, or dry mouth. This points to a reaction in the autonomic nervous system rather than simple fatigue or drowsiness.

This distinction is important because yawning is often misinterpreted in clinical practice. When a patient on antidepressants reports constant yawning, doctors often assume the patient is sedated or lethargic. This can lead to the mistaken belief that the patient is experiencing “asthenia,” a state of physical weakness and lack of energy.

If a clinician misinterprets this yawning as a sign of worsening depression or fatigue, they might increase the medication dosage. Based on the study’s findings, increasing the dose in a non-responding patient who is already yawning excessively might not address the root issue. The yawning may be a red flag that the current treatment path is ineffective for that specific individual.

Despite these insights, the study has limitations that affect how the results should be interpreted. The follow-up period lasted only one month. It remains unclear if the yawning persists, worsens, or resolves over a longer timeframe such as six months or a year. Additionally, the data relied entirely on patients reporting their own symptoms, which can introduce bias.

Future research needs to include objective measures of yawning to verify self-reports. Longer studies could track the trajectory of this symptom over extended periods to see if the body eventually adapts. The researchers also note that cultural factors can influence how people perceive and report bodily functions, which may affect data collection in different regions.

For doctors, the immediate takeaway is practical and applicable to daily monitoring. Persistent yawning should not be automatically dismissed as a sign of tiredness or boredom. Instead, it might serve as a subtle biological signal that the current treatment plan requires adjustment. By paying attention to this overlooked symptom, psychiatrists may be able to identify patients who are not responding to treatment much earlier.

The study, “Prevalence of SSRI-Related yawning and relationship with clinical features in patients with major depressive disorder: A prospective study,” was authored by Yusuf Ezel Yıldırım, Eray Yurtseven, Pınar Çetinay Aydın, and Mehmet Güven Günver.

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Honey bees are able to carefully manage the temperature inside their hives, but new research shows that extreme summer heat can overwhelm this ability. A study published in Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology found that prolonged high temperatures can disrupt hive cooling and cause sharp declines in colony populations.

Studying Bees During an Arizona Heat Wave

The research, titled “Negative Effects of Excessive Heat on Colony Thermoregulation and Population Dynamics in Honey Bees,” examined nine honey bee colonies during an unusually hot summer in Arizona. Over a three-month period, outdoor temperatures often rose above 40°C (104°F). The findings suggest that stronger and more frequent heat waves pose a growing danger to honey bees and the pollination services they support around the world.

“Honey bee colonies have well-documented mechanisms to cope with heat exposure,” write authors Jun Chen, Adrian Fisher II, Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman, Cahit Ozturk, Brian H. Smith, Jennifer H. Fewell, Yun Kang, Kylie Maxwell, Kynadi Overcash, Keerut Chahal, and Jon F. Harrison. “However, there have been no studies to date that have assessed the limits of such thermoregulation or how natural heat waves affect the capacity of honey bees colonies to thermoregulate and grow.”

Large Temperature Swings Inside the Hive

Although the colonies were able to keep average brood temperatures within the ideal 34-36°C range needed for proper development, conditions inside the hives still fluctuated widely each day. Bees developing in the center of the brood experienced about 1.7 hours per day below the optimal range and about 1.6 hours above it.

The situation was much worse near the edges of the brood. In these outer areas, developing bees spent nearly eight hours each day outside the safe temperature range, exposing them to prolonged thermal stress.

Heat Stress Drives Population Declines

These repeated temperature changes had clear impacts on colony health. Colonies exposed to higher peak air temperatures and larger internal temperature swings experienced noticeable drops in population size. The researchers concluded that “excessive heat, with maximal temperatures exceeding 40°C, can reduce colony populations by impairing the thermoregulation of brood or by exposing adults to temperatures that shorten their lifespans.”

Why Colony Size Matters

The study also showed that larger colonies were better protected from heat stress. Bigger hives maintained more stable internal temperatures, while smaller colonies experienced much greater fluctuations. At the outer brood edges, the smallest colonies saw daily temperature swings of up to 11°C, compared with about 6°C in the largest colonies.

Because of this stability, both developing bees and adult workers in larger colonies spent far less time exposed to dangerous temperature extremes.

Climate Change Raises Global Concerns

The researchers warn that the conditions observed in Arizona may become increasingly common. “Climate projections indicate that global average temperatures could rise by approximately 2.7°C by the end of the century, with potential increases up to 4°C under higher emission scenarios,” the authors note. Rising temperatures are expected to increase the frequency and intensity of heat waves worldwide.

Humidity could further worsen the problem. The authors explain that “high humidity significantly reduces the effectiveness of evaporative cooling—the primary mechanism honey bees use to regulate hive temperatures—potentially making thermoregulation even more difficult.”

What This Means for Beekeepers and Agriculture

The findings carry important implications for beekeepers and for agricultural systems that depend on honey bee pollination. The researchers suggest that strategies such as providing supplemental water, placing hives in shaded areas, improving hive design and insulation, and ensuring access to high-quality forage may become increasingly necessary. These steps could help protect colonies from rising temperatures and support long-term stability in a warming climate.

Reference: “Negative Effects of Excessive Heat on Colony Thermoregulation and Population Dynamics in Honeybees” by Jun Chen, Adrian Fisher II, Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman, Cahit Ozturk, Brian H. Smith, Jennifer H. Fewell, Yun Kang, Kylie Maxwell, Kynadi Overcash, Keerut Chahal and Jon F. Harrison, 8 January 2026, Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology.

DOI: 10.1086/739493

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This is a replica of another cog, based on an excavated shipwreck from Bremen.

Note the sterncastle.

Credit: VollwertBIT

Archaeologists recently found the wreck of an enormous medieval cargo ship lying on the seafloor off the Danish coast, and it reveals new details of medieval trade and life at sea.

Archaeologists discovered the shipwreck while surveying the seabed in preparation for a construction project for the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. It lay on its side, half-buried in the sand, 12 meters below the choppy surface of the Øresund, the straight that runs between Denmark and Sweden. By comparing the tree rings in the wreck’s wooden planks and timbers with rings from other, precisely dated tree samples, the archaeologists concluded that the ship had been built around 1410 CE.

The Skaelget 2 shipwreck, with a diver for scale.

Credit: Viking Ship Museum

A medieval megaship

Svaelget 2, as archaeologists dubbed the wreck (its original name is long since lost to history), was a type of merchant ship called a cog: a wide, flat-bottomed, high-sided ship with an open cargo hold and a square sail on a single mast. A bigger, heavier, more advanced version of the Viking knarrs of centuries past, the cog was the high-tech supertanker of its day. It was built to carry bulky commodities from ports in the Netherlands, north around the coast of Denmark, and then south through the Øresund to trading ports on the Baltic Sea—but this one didn’t quite make it.

Most cogs would have been about 15 to 25 meters long and 5 to 8 meters wide, capable of carrying about 200 tons of cargo—big, impressive ships for their time. But Svaelget 2, an absolute unit of a ship, measured about 28 meters from bow to stern, 9 meters wide, and could have carried about 300 tons. Its size alone was a surprise to the archaeologists.

“We now know, undeniably, that cogs could be this large—that the ship type could be pushed to this extreme,” said archaeologist Otto Uldum of Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum, who led the excavation, in a press release.

Medieval Europe’s merchant class was growing in both size and wealth in the early 1400s, and the cog was both a product of that growth and the engine driving it. The mere fact of its existence points to a society that could afford to invest in building big, expensive trading ships (and could confidently expect a return on that investment). And physically, it’s a product of the same trading networks it supplied: while the heavy timbers of its frame were cut locally in the Netherlands, the Pomeranian oak planks of Svaelget 2’s hull came from Poland.

“The cog revolutionized trade in northern Europe,” said Uldum. “It made it possible to transport goods on a scale never seen before.”

The super ship’s superb superstructure

For about 600 years, layers of sand had protected the starboard (right, for you landlubbers) side of the wreck from erosion and decay. Nautical archaeologists usually find only the very bottoms of cogs; the upper structures of the ship—rigging, decks, and castles—quickly decay in the ocean. That means that some of the most innovative parts of the ships’ construction appear only in medieval drawings and descriptions.

But Svaelget 2 offers archaeologists a hands-on look at the real deal, from rigging to the ship’s galley and the stern castle: a tall wooden structure at the back of the ship, where crew and passengers could have sought at least a little shelter from the elements. Medieval drawings and texts describe cogs having high castles at both bow and stern, but archaeologists have never gotten to examine a real one to learn how it’s put together or how it connects with the rest of the ship’s construction.

“We have plenty of drawings of castles, but they have never been found because usually only the bottom of the ship survives,” said Uldum. “[The castle] is a big step forward compared to Viking Age ships, which had only open decks in all kinds of weather.”

Lying on and around the remains of the cog’s decks, Uldum and his colleagues also found stays (ropes that would have held the mast in place) and lines for controlling the ship’s single square sail, along with ropes and chains that would once have secured the merchant vessel’s cargo in the open hold.

Life at sea in the Middle Ages

The cog would probably have sailed with between 30 and 45 crew members. No remains were found on the wreck, but the lost crew left behind small, tantalizing traces of their lives and their presence. Uldum and his colleagues found combs, shoes, and rosary beads, along with dishes and tableware.

“The sailor brought his comb to keep his hair neat and his rosary to say his prayers,” said Uldum (and one has to picture the sailor’s grandmother beaming proudly at that description). “These personal objects show us that the crew brought everyday items with them. They transferred their life on land to life at sea.”

Life at sea, for the medieval sailors aboard Svaelget 2, would have included at least occasional hot meals, cooked in bronze pots over an open fire in the ship’s galley and eaten on dishes of ceramic and painted wood. Bricks (about 200 of them) and tiles formed a sort of fireplace where the cook could safely build a fire aboard the otherwise very flammable ship.

“It speaks of remarkable comfort and organization on board,” said Uldum. “Now sailors could have hot meals similar to those on land, instead of the dried and cold food that previously dominated life at sea.” Plenty of dried meat and cold biscuits still awaited sailors for the next several centuries, of course, but when weather and time permitted, at least the crew of Svaelget 2 could gather around a hot meal. The galley would have been a relatively new part of shipboard life for sailors in the early 1400s—and it quickly became a vital one.

Cargo? Go where?

One thing usually marks the site of a shipwreck, even when everything else has disintegrated into the ocean: ballast stones. When merchant ships were empty, they carried stones in their holds to help keep the ship stable; otherwise, the empty ship would be top-heavy and prone to tipping over, which is usually not ideal. (Modern merchant vessels use water, in special tanks, for ballast.) But Uldum and his colleagues didn’t find ballast stones on Svaelget 2, which means the cog was probably fully laden with cargo when it sank.

But the cargo is also conspicuously absent. Cogs were built to carry bulk goods—things like bricks, grain and other staple foods, fabric, salt, and timber. Those goods would have been stowed in an open hold amidships, secured by ropes and chains (some of which remain on the wreck). But barrels, boards, and bolts of fabric all float. As the ship sank and water washed into the hold, it would have carried away the cargo.

Some of it may have washed up on the shores or even more distant beaches, becoming a windfall for local residents. The rest probably sank to the bottom of the sea, far from the ship and its destination.

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Posted Saturday 17 January 2026 at 4:02 pm AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.25 of the Rocket Report! All eyes are on Florida this weekend as NASA rolls out the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to its launch site in Florida for the Artemis II mission. NASA has not announced a launch date yet, and this will depend in part on how well a “wet dress rehearsal” goes with fueling the rocket. However, it is likely the rocket has a no-earlier-than launch date of February 8. Our own Stephen Clark will be in Florida for the rollout on Saturday, so be sure and check back here for coverage.

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

MaiaSpace scores a major launch deal. The ArianeGroup subsidiary, created in 2022, has inked a major new launch contract with satellite operator Eutelsat, Le Monde reports. A significant portion of the 440 new satellites ordered by Eutelsat from Airbus to renew or expand its OneWeb constellation will be launched into orbit by the new Maia rocket. MaiaSpace previously signed two contracts: one with Exotrail for the launch of an orbital transfer, and the other for two satellites for the Toutatis mission, a defense system developed by U-Space.

A big win for the French firm … The first test launch of Maia is scheduled for the end of 2026, a year later than initially planned, at the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. The first flights carrying OneWeb satellites are therefore likely to launch no earlier than 2027. Powered by liquid oxygen-methane propellant, Maia aims to be able to deliver up to 500 kg to low-Earth orbit when the first stage is recovered, and 1,500 kg when fully expendable.

Firefly announces Alpha upgrade plan. Firefly Aerospace said this week it was planning a “Block II” upgrade to its Alpha rocket that will “focus on enhancing reliability, streamlining producibility, and improving launch operations to further support commercial, civil, and national security mission demand.” Firefly’s upcoming Alpha Flight 7, targeted to launch in the coming weeks, will be the last flown in the current configuration and will serve as a test flight with multiple Block II subsystems in shadow mode.

Too many failures … “Firefly worked closely with customers and incorporated data and lessons learned from our first six Alpha launches and hundreds of hardware tests to make upgrades that increase reliability and manufacturability with consolidated parts, key configuration updates, and stronger structures built with automated machinery,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. Speaking bluntly, reliability upgrades are needed. Of Alpha’s six launches to date, only two have been a complete success. (submitted by TFargo04)

Another PSLV launch failure. India’s first launch of 2026 ended in failure due to an issue with the third stage of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, designated PSLV-C62, was also the second consecutive failure of this four-stage rocket, with both anomalies affecting the third stage. This time, 16 satellites were lost, including those of other nations. ISRO said it initiated a “detailed analysis” to determine the root cause of the anomaly.

Has been India’s workhorse rocket … The four-stage launch vehicle is a mixture of solid- and liquid- fueled stages. Both the first and third stages are solid-fueled, while the second and fourth stages are powered by liquid propulsion. The PSLV Rocket has flown in multiple configurations since it debuted in September 1993 and achieved 58 fully successful launches, with the payloads on those missions reaching their intended orbit.

US military invests in L3Harris rocket motors. The US government will invest $1 billion in L3Harris Technologies’ growing rocket motor business, guaranteeing a steady supply of the much-needed motors used in a wide range of ‍missiles such as Tomahawks and Patriot interceptors, CNBC reports. L3Harris said on Tuesday it ‌is planning ‌an IPO of its growing rocket motor business into a new publicly traded company backed by a $1 billion government convertible security investment. The securities will automatically convert to common equity when the company goes public later in 2026.

Shifting investment strategy … “We are fundamentally shifting our approach to securing our munitions supply chain,” said Michael Duffey, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. “By investing directly in suppliers we are building the resilient industrial ⁠base needed for the Arsenal of Freedom.” However, the government’s equity position in L3Harris could face blowback from L3Harris’ rivals, given that it creates a potentially significant conflict of interest for the US government. The Pentagon will have an ownership stake in a company that regularly bids on major defense and other government contracts.

First Ariane 64 to launch next month. Arianespace announced Thursday that it plans to launch the first variant of the Ariane 6 rocket with four solid rocket boosters on February 12 from French Guiana. The mission will also be the company’s first launch of Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) satellites. This is the first of 18 Ariane 6 launches that Arianespace sold to Amazon for the broadband communications megaconstellation.

A growing cadence … The Ariane 6 rocket has launched five times, including its debut flight in July 2024. All of the launches were a success, although the first flight failed to relight the upper stage in order to make a controlled reentry. Arianespace increased the cadence to four launches last year and will seek to try to double that this year.

Falcon 9 launches the Pandora mission. NASA’s Pandora satellite rocketed into orbit early Sunday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, Ars reports. It hitched a ride with around 40 other small payloads aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, launching into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit before deploying at an altitude of roughly 380 miles (613 kilometers).

A satellite that can carry a tune … Pandora will augment the capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Over the next few weeks, ground controllers will put Pandora through a series of commissioning and calibration steps before turning its eyes toward deep space. From low-Earth orbit, Pandora will observe exoplanets and their stars simultaneously, allowing astronomers to correct their measurements of the planet’s atmospheric composition and structure based on the ever-changing conditions of the host star itself.

ArianeGroup seeking ideas for Ariane 6 reuse. In this week’s newsletter, we’ve already had a story about MaiaSpace and another item about the Ariane 6 rocket. So why not combine the two and also have a report about an Ariane 6 mashup with the Maia rocket? As it turns out, there’s a relatively new proposal to retrofit the existing Ariane 6 rocket design for partial reuse with Maia rockets as side boosters, Ars reports.

Sir, maia I have some cost savings? … It’s infeasible to recover the Ariane 6’s core stage for many reasons. Chief among them is that the main stage burns for more than seven minutes on an Ariane 6 flight, reaching speeds about twice as fast as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster achieves during its two-and-a-half minutes of operation during launch. Swapping out Ariane 6’s solid rocket motors for reusable liquid boosters makes some economic sense for ArianeGroup. The proposal would bring the development and production of the boosters under full control of ArianeGroup and its French subsidiary, cutting Italy’s solid rocket motor developer, Avio, out of the program. All the same, we’ll believe this when we see it.

Meet the EtherealX Razor Crest Mk-1. I learned that there is a rocket company founded in Bengaluru, India, named Ethereal Exploration Guild, or EtherealX. (Did you see what they did there?) I found this out because the company announced (via email) that it had raised an oversubscribed $20.5 million Series A round led by TDK Ventures and BIG Capital. So naturally, I went to the EtherealX website looking for more information.

Let me say, I was not disappointed … As you might expect from a company named EtherealX, its proposed rocket has nine engines, is powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, and has a maximum capacity of 24.8 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. (Did you see what they did there?) The website does not include much information, but there is this banger of a statement: “The EtherealX Razor Crest Mk-1 will house 9 of the most powerful operational liquid rocket engines in Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa, South America, and Antarctica – Stallion.” And let’s be honest, when you’ve bested Antarctica in engine development, you know you’re cooking. Alas, what I did not see on the website was much evidence of real hardware.

NASA topples historic Saturn and shuttle infrastructure. Two historic NASA test facilities used in the development of the Saturn V and space shuttle launch vehicles have been demolished after towering over the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama since the start of the Space Age, Ars reports. The Propulsion and Structural Test Facility, which was erected in 1957—the same year the first artificial satellite entered Earth orbit—and the Dynamic Test Facility, which has stood since 1964, were brought down by a coordinated series of implosions on Saturday, January 10.

Out with the old, in with the new … Located in Marshall’s East Test Area on the US Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, the two structures were no longer in use and, according to NASA, had a backlog of $25 million in needed repairs. “This work reflects smart stewardship of taxpayer resources,” Jared Isaacman, NASA administrator, said in a statement. “Clearing outdated infrastructure allows NASA to safely modernize, streamline operations and fully leverage the infrastructure investments signed into law by President Trump to keep Marshall positioned at the forefront of aerospace innovation.”

Space Force swaps Vulcan for Falcon 9. The next Global Positioning System satellite is switching from a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9, a spokesperson for the US Space Force Space Systems Command System Delta 80 said Tuesday, Spaceflight Now reports. SpaceX could launch the GPS III Space Vehicle 09 (SV09) within the next few weeks, as the satellite was entering the final stages of pre-flight preparations.

The trade is logical … SV09 was originally awarded to ULA as part of order-year five of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 contract, which was announced on October 31, 2023. This isn’t the first time that the Space Force has shuffled timelines and switched launch providers for GPS missions. In May 2025, SpaceX launched the GPS III SV08 spacecraft, which was originally assigned to ULA in June 2023. In exchange, ULA was given the SV11 launch, which would have flown on a Falcon Heavy rocket. The changes have been driven largely by repeated delays in Vulcan readiness.

Next three launches

January 16: Long March 3B | Unknown payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 16:55 UTC

January 17: Ceres 2 | Demo flight | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04:05 UTC

January 17: Falcon 9 | NROL-105 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 06:18 UTC

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Posted Saturday 17 January 2026 at 5:07 am AEST (my time).

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On Thursday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, expanding its effort to charge major tech companies for using Wikipedia content to train the AI models that power AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

While these same companies previously scraped Wikipedia without permission, the deals mean that most major AI developers have now signed on to the foundation’s Wikimedia Enterprise program, a commercial subsidiary that sells API access to Wikipedia’s 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes than the free public APIs provide. The foundation did not disclose the financial terms of the deals.

The new partners join Google, which signed a deal with Wikimedia Enterprise in 2022, as well as smaller companies like Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media. The revenue helps offset infrastructure costs for the nonprofit, which otherwise relies on small public donations while watching its content become a staple of training data for AI models.

“Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies’ work that they need to figure out how to support financially,” Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters. “It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we’re going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform… but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia’s work.”

The cost of “free” knowledge

The push for paid licensing follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI companies scraped Wikipedia content at an industrial scale. In April 2025, the foundation reported that bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content had grown 50 percent since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to core infrastructure despite making up just 35 percent of total pageviews.

By October, the Wikimedia Foundation disclosed that human traffic to Wikipedia had fallen approximately 8 percent year over year after the organization updated its bot-detection systems and discovered that much of what appeared to be human visitors were actually automated scrapers built to evade detection.

The traffic decline threatens the feedback loop that has sustained Wikipedia for a quarter century: Readers visit, some become editors or donors, and the content ostensibly improves. But today, many AI chatbots and search engine summaries answer questions using Wikipedia content without sending users to the site itself.

Meanwhile, the foundation’s own experiments with generative AI have met resistance from the volunteer editors who maintain the site. In June, Wikipedia paused a pilot program for AI-generated article summaries after editors called it a “ghastly idea” and warned it could undermine trust in the platform.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told The Associated Press that he welcomes AI models training on Wikipedia data. “I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated,” Wales said. “I wouldn’t really want to use an AI that’s trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI.” But he drew a line at free access: “You should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us.”

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Posted Friday 16 January 2026 at 4:37 am AEST (my time).

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How does procrastination arise? The reason you decide to postpone household chores and spend your time browsing social media could be explained by the workings of a brain circuit. Recent research has identified a neural connection responsible for delaying the start of activities associated with unpleasant experiences, even when these activities offer a clear reward.

The study, led by Ken-ichi Amemori, a neuroscientist at Kyoto University, aimed to analyze the brain mechanisms that reduce motivation to act when a task involves stress, punishment, or discomfort. To do this, the researchers designed an experiment with monkeys, a widely used model for understanding decisionmaking and motivation processes in the brain.

The scientists worked with two macaques that were trained to perform various decisionmaking tasks. In the first phase of the experiment, after a period of water restriction, the animals could activate one of two levers that released different amounts of liquid; one option offered a smaller reward and the other a larger one. This exercise allowed them to evaluate how the value of the reward influences the willingness to perform an action.

In a later stage, the experimental design incorporated an unpleasant element. The monkeys were given the choice of drinking a moderate amount of water without negative consequences or drinking a larger amount on the condition of receiving a direct blast of air in the face. Although the reward was greater in the second option, it involved an uncomfortable experience.

As the researchers anticipated, the macaques' motivation to complete the task and access the water decreased considerably when the aversive stimulus was introduced. This behavior allowed them to identify a brain circuit that acts as a brake on motivation in the face of anticipated adverse situations. In particular, the connection between the ventral striatum and the ventral pallidum, two structures located in the basal ganglia of the brain, known for their role in regulating pleasure, motivation, and reward systems, was observed to be involved.

The neural analysis revealed that when the brain anticipates an unpleasant event or potential punishment, the ventral striatum is activated and sends an inhibitory signal to the ventral pallidum, which is normally responsible for driving the intention to perform an action. In other words, this communication reduces the impulse to act when the task is associated with a negative experience.

The Brain Connection Behind Procrastination

To investigate the specific role of this connection, as described in the study published in the journal Current Biology, researchers used a chemogenetic technique that, through the administration of a specialized drug, temporarily disrupted communication between the two brain regions. By doing so, the monkeys regained the motivation to initiate tasks, even in those tests that involved blowing air.

Notably, the inhibitory substance produced no change in trials where reward was not accompanied by punishment. This result suggests that the EV-PV circuit does not regulate motivation in a general way, but rather is specifically activated to suppress it when there is an expectation of discomfort. In this sense, apathy toward unpleasant tasks appears to develop gradually as communication between these two regions intensifies.

Beyond explaining why people tend to unconsciously resist starting household chores or uncomfortable obligations, the findings have relevant implications for understanding disorders such as depression or schizophrenia, in which patients often experience a significant loss of the drive to act.

However, Amemori emphasizes that this circuit serves an essential protective function. “Overworking is very dangerous. This circuit protects us from burnout,” he said in comments reported by Nature. Therefore, he cautions that any attempt to externally modify this neural mechanism must be approached with care, as further research is needed to avoid interfering with the brain's natural protective processes.

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

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Posted Thursday 15 January 2026 at 12:08 pm AEST (my time).

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History buffs are no doubt familiar with the story of Shadrack Byfield, a rank-and-file British redcoat who fought during the War of 1812 and lost his left arm to a musket ball for his trouble. Byfield has been featured in numerous popular histories—including a children’s book and a 2011 PBS documentary—as a shining example of a disabled soldier’s stoic perseverance. But a newly rediscovered memoir that Byfield published in his later years is complicating that idealized picture of his post-military life, according to a new paper published in the Journal of British Studies.

Historian Eamonn O’Keeffe of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Canada, has been a Byfield fan ever since he read the 1985 children’s novel, Redcoat, by Gregory Sass. His interest grew when he was working at Fort York, a War of 1812-era fort and museum, in Toronto. “There are dozens of memoirs written by British rank-and-file veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, but only a handful from the War of 1812, which was much smaller in scale,” O’Keeffe told Ars. “Byfield’s autobiography seemed to offer an authentic, ground-level view of the fighting in North America, helping us look beyond the generals and politicians and grapple with the implications of this conflict for ordinary people.

Born in 1789 in Wiltshire’s Bradford-on-Avon suburbs, Byfield’s parents intended him to follow in his weaver father’s footsteps. He enlisted in the county militia when he turned 18 instead, joining the regular army the following year. When the War of 1812 broke out, Byfield was stationed at Fort George along the Niagara River, participating in the successful siege of Fort Detroit. At the Battle of Frenchtown in January 1813, he was shot in the neck, but he recovered sufficiently to join the campaigns against Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson in Ohio.

After the British were defeated at the Battle of Thames later that year, he escaped into the woods with indigenous warriors, despite his concerns that they meant to kill him. They did not, and Byfield eventually rejoined other British fugitives and made his way back to the British lines. He was one of 15 out of 110 soldiers in his light company still alive after 18 months of fighting.

But his luck ran out in July 1814. While engaged in a skirmish at Conjocta Creek, a musket ball tore through his left forearm. Surgeons were forced to amputate after gangrene set in—a procedure that was performed without anesthesia. Byfield described the operation as “tedious and painful” in A Narrative of a Light Company Soldier’s Service, the memoir he published in 1840, adding, “I was enabled to bear it pretty well.”

Byfield famously became incensed when he discovered his severed limb had been tossed into a dung heap with other amputated body parts. He retrieved his forearm and insisted on giving it a proper burial in a makeshift coffin he built himself. Due to his injury, Byfield’s military career was over, and he returned to England. While he was given an army pension, the sum (nine pence per day) was inadequate to support the veteran’s growing family.

A caricature depicting two jovial old pensioners sitting together on a bench, smoking and gesticulating.

Public domain/Lewis Walpole Library

 

Chelsea pensioners, cavalry and infantry, War of 1812.

Public domain/National Army Museum

 

Byfield couldn’t take up his father’s weaving trade because it took two hands to operate a loom. But according to his 1840 Narrative, he had a dream one night of an “instrument” that would enable him to work a loom with just one arm, which he successfully built with the help of a local blacksmith. He found work spinning thread at a textile mill and weaving it into finished cloth, augmenting that trade by working as a wheelchair attendant at a spa in Bath, among other odd jobs. He later found a mentor in Colonel William Napier, a distinguished veteran and military historian who arranged for an increase in Byfield’s pension, as well as finding a publisher for the Narrative.

A shifting narrative

Byfield’s 1840 memoir became a much-cited source for historians of the War of 1812 since it offered a personal perspective on those events from a rank-and-file British soldier. Historians had long assumed that Byfield died around 1850. But during his research, O’Keeffe discovered a second Byfield memoir in the collection of the Western Reserve Historical Society, published in 1851, entitled History and Conversion of a British Soldier. O’Keeffe believes this to be the only surviving copy of the 1851 memoir.

“I quickly noticed that [Byfield] appeared in British census records past the c.1850 date at which he was supposed to have died, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia entry on Byfield and other sources,” said O’Keeffe. “This discrepancy was my first indication that there might be more to discover on Byfield, and every time I returned to the subject I kept finding more information.” Byfield actually died in January 1874 at 84 years old. While historians had also assumed that Byfield was functionally illiterate, O’Keeffe found a draft manuscript of the 1840 memoir in Byfield’s handwriting, suggesting the soldier had acquired those skills after the war.

“My initial interest was sparked by the wartime memoir I already knew about, but I was increasingly fascinated by his later life, and what it could tell us about the experiences of veterans in general,” said O’Keeffe. “In most history books, British redcoats take center stage for the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of the Waterloo, but then quickly vanish from view; no doubt this is true for veterans of most if not all wars. Military memoirs of the period tend to encourage this dynamic by ending the story at demobilization, assuming that readers would not be interested in the civilian experiences of their authors. But Byfield’s very well-documented life helps bring the process of reintegration, of rebuilding one’s life after war and catastrophic injury, into sharper focus, and highlights the presence of war veterans in 19th-century British society.”

According to O’Keeffe, Byfield painted a much less rosy picture of his post-military life in the 1851 memoir, recounting his struggles with poverty and lingering rheumatic pain in his left stump. (“Oftentimes I was not able to lift my hand to my head, nor a teacup to my mouth,” the former soldier wrote.) When textile mills started closing, he relocated his family to Gloucestershire and eked out a living as a tollkeeper and by selling copies of his earlier Narrative for a shilling. He admitted to taking absence without leave during his war service and participating in plundering expeditions. The later memoir also recounts Byfield’s spiritual awakening and growing religious faith.

Byfield adopted very different narrative themes in his 1840 and 1851 memoirs. “In the 1840 narrative, Byfield sought to impress wealthy patrons by presenting himself as a dutiful soldier and deserving veteran,” said O’Keeffe. “The 1851 memoir, by contrast, was a spiritual redemption story, with Byfield tracing his progress from rebellious sinner to devout and repentant Christian. In the 1851 memoir, the veteran also dwells on periods of indebtedness, illness, and unemployment after returning to England, whereas in his earlier memoir he described maintaining his family ‘comfortably’ with his weaving prosthesis for nearly twenty years.”

Soldier with his left arm missing, a bandaged head, and with a quill in his right hand; 19th century watercolor by Sir Charles Bell.

Wellcome Collection/CC BY-NC

 

A Battle of Waterloo soldier missing his right arm; 19th century watercolor by Sir Charles Bell.

Wellcome Collection/CC BY-NC

 

Byfield’s luck seemed to change for the better when the Duke of Beaufort became a patron, first hiring the veteran as a gardener on the duke’s Badminton estate. Byfield complained in his 1851 account that the estate steward refused to pay him full wages because he was one-handed, insisting, “I never saw the man that would compete with me with one arm.”

Eventually, Byfield leveraged his connection to the duke to be named caretaker of a 100-foot tower monument to Lord Edward Somerset that was built in the Gloucestershire village of Hawkesbury Upton in 1845. This came with a keeper’s cottage, and the duties were light: Byfield maintained the tower, sold souvenir booklets, and welcomed any sightseers every day except Sundays.

Alas, Byfield became embroiled in a feud over control of the village’s Particular Baptist chapel; some objected to the doctrine and conduct of the minister, John Osborne, while others, like Byfield, defended him. There were lawsuits, arson, vandalism, and a charge of public drunkenness against Byfield, which he vehemently denied. Everything came to a head in an “unholy riot” in the chapel, during which Byfield was accused of starting the fight by “pushing about” and slashing someone’s eye and face with his prosthetic iron hook. Every rioter was acquitted, but the incident cost Byfield his cushy caretaker job in 1853.

Byfield later moved back to his hometown, Bradford-on-Avon, and married a widow after his first wife died. He kept petitioning for further increases to his pension, to no avail, and started peddling a third memoir in 1867 entitled The Forlorn Hope. No copies have survived, per O’Keeffe, but it did garner coverage in a local newspaper, which described the account as relating “the Christian experience of this Wiltshire hero and the great persecutions and trials he has passed through.”

“Years ago, I would have characterized the veteran as someone who was astonishingly phlegmatic about what happened to him,” said O’Keeffe. “Byfield’s description of the amputation comes across as remarkably unemotional to modern readers, and then he presents himself at the end of the first memoir as having literally dreamt up the prosthetic that allowed him to return to his civilian trade and live happily ever after, more or less.”

But as he studied Byfield’s writings more closely, “It became clear that the process of reintegration was far less smooth than this version of events would suggest, and that Byfield’s time in the army shaped the rest of his life in profound ways,” said O’Keeffe. “The fact that Byfield’s daughter chose to put her father’s military rank and regiment in the ‘occupation’ column on his death certificate, rather than listing any of the other jobs the veteran had held in the six decades since his amputation, is the most eloquent testimony of this, I think.”

Journal of British Studies, 2025. DOI: 10.1017/jbr.2025.10169 (About DOIs).

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A 14,400-year-old wolf puppy’s last meal is shedding light on the last days of one of the Ice Age’s most iconic megafauna species, the woolly rhinoceros.

When researchers dissected the frozen mummified remains of an Ice Age wolf puppy, they found a partially digested chunk of meat in its stomach: the remnants of the puppy’s last meal 14,400 years ago. DNA testing revealed that the meat was a prime cut of woolly rhinoceros, a now-extinct 2-metric-ton behemoth that once stomped across the tundras of Europe and Asia. Stockholm University paleogeneticist Sólveig Guðjónsdóttir and her colleagues recently sequenced a full genome from the piece of meat, which reveals some secrets about woolly rhino populations in the centuries before their extinction.

Scientists carefully autopsy the remains of a wolf puppy who lived and died 14,400 years ago near Tumat village in Siberia.

Credit: Guðjónsdóttir et al. 2026

One bad day for a rhino, one giant leap for paleogenomics

“Sequencing the entire genome of an Ice Age animal found in the stomach of another animal has never been done before,” said Uppsala University paleogeneticist Camilo Chacón-Duque, a co-author of the study, in a recent press release.

Scientists found the freeze-dried corpse of the wolf puppy—and her sister—eroding out of the permafrost near the Siberian village of Tumat in 2011 and 2015. When the team brought the puppy to a lab for dissection in 2022, they found small pieces of her last meal still in her stomach. DNA sequencing identified the meat as woolly rhino (or Coelodonta antiquitatis, if you’re fancy) and the puppies as wolves, not dogs.

But extracting a full genome’s worth of DNA from the rhino meat was a challenge. After 14,400 years in the permafrost, DNA molecules break down, leaving genomicists only small, degraded strings. Sorting the rhino’s DNA from the wolf’s was also no small feat.

The rhino’s DNA suggests that it came from a genetically healthy population that was large enough to avoid inbreeding. Inbreeding leaves its mark in descendants’ genomes in the form of long strings of homozygous genes, in which the individual inherits the same version, or allele, of a gene from both parents. It’s normal to have some homozygous genes, but a genome laden with lots of long stretches of homozygosity could be a sign of inbreeding over several generations. The Tumat rhino (or what was left of it) showed no such signs.

That came as a surprise, since woolly rhinos disappear from the fossil record about 400 years later. Already, the species was making its last stand in northeastern Siberia; its range had been shrinking eastward since around 35,000 years ago. But apparently, on the cusp of extinction, the species was still doing pretty well in northeastern Siberia (except for this particular rhino, who got eaten by a wolf after what one can only assume was a bad day).

This is the piece of woolly rhino meat in question, extracted from the stomach of a wolf puppy who lived near the end of the last Ice Age.

Guðjónsdóttir et al. 2026

 

Two researchers pose next to the spot where the Tumat wolf puppy and her sister were found in the Siberian permafrost.

Guðjónsdóttir et al. 2026

 

Woolly rhino horn, with study co-author Love Dalén for scale.

Guðjónsdóttir et al. 2026

Woolly rhino population was small but healthy

So what counts as a stable population?

In the genome of a 49,000-year-old woolly rhino from a few hundred miles east in Rakvachan, Siberia, Guðjónsdóttir and her colleagues found clues about the species’ even more ancient history. Big changes in population size, among other events, can leave traces in the genome, and the researchers used those to estimate that between 114,000 and 63,000 years ago, the woolly rhino population dropped sharply, from about 15,600 to about 1,600.

Those numbers refer to what ecologists call the “effective population,” which means the number of rhinos breeding and contributing to the group’s gene pool (so there would have been more than 1,600 running around, but not all of them were reproducing). After 63,000 years ago, the woolly rhino population seems to have leveled out.

According to ecologists, an effective population of 1,600 rhinos would have been more than enough to keep the species thriving. Smaller populations, especially with shrinking ranges, are more vulnerable to being wiped out by events like environmental change, natural disasters, or disease outbreaks. And small populations are also more likely to face the genetic consequences of inbreeding, a loss of genetic diversity, and genetic drift (in which potentially harmful mutations can pile up), leaving the species even more vulnerable. The whole thing can turn into a vicious cycle.

For most species, the threshold for avoiding those genetic pitfalls is an effective population of around 1,000.

The end came suddenly for woolly rhinos

Researchers had expected to find woolly rhinos in dire straits by 14,400 years ago. Prior to discovering the Tumat genome inside a wolf’s stomach, the most recently sequenced woolly rhino genome dated to 18,400 years ago (and it was found just a few miles from the Rakvachan rhino). That genome showed all the signs of a healthy, stable population. But by 14,000 years ago, woolly rhinos disappeared from the fossil record—so it looked like their population must have started its death spiral shortly after 18,400 years ago.

But it turns out that the last woolly rhinos in the world probably died off in just a few hundred years, starting sometime after 14,400 years ago. And the culprit was probably a period of rapid climate warming called the Bølling–Allerød interstadial. An interstadial is a warmer period between the deepest freezes of an Ice Age, and the Bølling–Allerød lasted from 14,700 years ago to 12,800 years ago. Across the northern hemisphere, temperatures rose sharply; ice sheets collapsed, sea levels rose, and the woolly rhinos’ world changed too fast.

When Guðjónsdóttir and her colleagues compared the Tumat rhino’s genome to the one from 18,400 years ago, they found the same very low level of inbreeding and genetic load (a buildup of harmful genes, often from inbreeding or genetic drift). Whatever happened to the woolly rhino gene pool in the end, it hadn’t happened yet when Tumat got eaten by wolves.

In fact, the end of the woolly rhinos may have come so swiftly that it didn’t have time to leave a trace in the genome. The only way to answer that would, of course, be to sequence the genomes of woolly rhinos who lived even closer to the species extinction. And we have to find them first.

Insights for modern climate change

The fate of the woolly rhino may eventually shed some light on what’s happening to modern species facing extinction.

“In the current biodiversity crisis driven by anthropogenic climate change, it becomes increasingly important to understand the underlying drivers of population declines and the propensity of species going extinct,” wrote Guðjónsdóttir and her colleagues in their recent paper.

Genome Biology and Evolution, 2026. DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evaf239 (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 15 January 2026 at 5:03 am AEST (my time).

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Like any industry led by designers, the automotive world is subject to trends and fashions. Often, these are things the rest of us complain about. Wheels that used to be 16 inches are now 20s, because the extra size makes the vehicle they’re fitted to look smaller, particularly if it’s an SUV with a slab of electric vehicle battery to conceal. Front seat passengers now find themselves with their own infotainment screen, often with some kind of active filter tech to prevent the driver from being distracted by whatever it is they’re doing. And of course le buzz du jour, AI, is being crammed in here, there, and everywhere.

But the thing about fashion and trends is that they don’t remain in style forever. For a few years, it was hard to drive a new car that didn’t use piano black trim all over the interior. The shiny black plastic surfaces hide infotainment screens well when the display is not turned on, but they scratch and show every speck of dust and lint and every smudge and fingerprint. And that’s true for the cheap econobox to the plush luxobarge. The industry finally cottoned on to this, and “black gloss has had its time—we can do without it,” Kia designer Jochen Paesen told me a few years ago.

Many of those design trends may have been annoying, but the switch away from buttons isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s affecting safety. And increasingly, safety regulators are pushing back. A couple of years ago, we learned that the Euro New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP) organization, which crash tests cars for European consumers, decided that from 2026, it would start deducting points for basic controls that weren’t separate, physical controls that the driver can easily operate without taking their eyes off the road. And now ANCAP, which provides similar crash testing for Australia and New Zealand, has done the same.

But why?

It’s helpful to know that the lack of physical buttons isn’t just a trend pushed by designers—the bean counters like it, too. It’s quicker—and therefore cheaper—during assembly to just fit a capacitive touch module that controls multiple settings or switches than it is to have individual buttons, each connected to a wiring loom. Which is why we’re seeing the controls for heating and cooling the interior, the headlights, seat heaters, and more move from knobs and dials and sliders and buttons to touch panels. Sometimes they’re standalone, sometimes they’re embedded along the bezels of the infotainment touchscreen. Sometimes they’re even their own touchscreen.

And they’re more distracting to use than physical buttons.

Like Euro NCAP, ANCAP does not require all functions to be physical buttons, lest all our cars look like the flight deck of a Boeing 747-400, or perhaps a first-generation Porsche Panamera. That won’t go nearly far enough for some, but it is at least a move in the right direction.

“From 2026, we’re asking car makers to either offer physical buttons for important driver controls like the horn, indicators, hazard lights, windscreen wipers and headlights, or dedicate a fixed portion of the cabin display screen to these primary driving functions,” it wrote in its guidance of what’s changed for 2026. Similarly, Europe is requiring turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features like the EU’s eCall function.

Encouragingly, it looks like automakers are starting to take this to heart and are designing newer models accordingly. Porsche was an early ditcher of buttons after having previously used many, many of them (like the aforementioned Panamera), but as we found in our preview of the next Cayenne, real buttons are back.

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Posted Thursday 15 January 2026 at 5:02 am AEST (my time).

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It looks like the wave of campaigns against data centers are getting under big tech companies’ skin — and Microsoft is the latest giant to promise to address frustrations on the ground in communities around their data centers.

The company announced a five-point plan today that it calls “Community-First AI Infrastructure.” That includes paying more to try to prevent data center energy demands from raising other customers’ electricity bills, minimizing the company’s water use, training workers and creating jobs, and contributing to the local tax base in locations it operates.

Tech companies have faced a surge of opposition against data center projects meant to satiate the needs of energy-hungry AI products. The issue has influenced local elections, with some communities even pushing developers to cancel or delay projects.

“We are at a moment in time when we need to listen and we need to address these concerns head on,” Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith said in a livestream today.

Rising electricity rates across the US have become one of the biggest flashpoints, a trend that’s driven in part by increasing power demand from data centers, manufacturing, and the electrification of homes, buildings, and transportation. Household electricity bills rose 13 percent nationally in 2025, according to a December report from advocacy group Climate Power. And data center power demand is expected to double or triple to consume up to 12 percent of electricity in the US by 2028, according to the Department of Energy.

Microsoft claims it’ll “ask utilities and public commissions to set our rates high enough to cover the electricity costs for our datacenters,” including costs associated with building new infrastructure to meet growing demand. Smith says the company would not accept electricity subsidies in interviews with The Seattle Times and GeekWire.

The company is also promising more transparency around where it plans to build data centers and how much energy it’s using. Data center developers and tech companies have caught flak from local residents for striking deals with utilities behind closed doors and asking local officials to sign NDAs that limit how much information the public can access. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other Democratic lawmakers sent Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and major data center developers a letter in December demanding that the companies answer questions about their power use and local lobbying efforts.

Microsoft’s not the only major tech company seemingly in a defensive position. Meta similarly reiterated a pledge in December to restore water sources in places where it has data centers. Amazon commissioned a study late last year that says the company’s data centers generate more in revenue for utilities than it costs for utilities to serve those facilities.

At least 25 projects across the US have been canceled following local backlash, according to a Heatmap Pro analysis published yesterday. “The truth is, infrastructure buildouts progress only when communities conclude that the benefits outweigh the cost,” Smith said.

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Posted Wednesday 14 January 2026 at 3:58 am AEST (my time).

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Among other things, the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to get us closer to finding habitable worlds around faraway stars. From its perch a million miles from Earth, Webb’s huge gold-coated mirror collects more light than any other telescope put into space.

The Webb telescope, launched in 2021 at a cost of more than $10 billion, has the sensitivity to peer into distant planetary systems and detect the telltale chemical fingerprints of molecules critical to or indicative of potential life, like water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. Webb can do this while also observing the oldest observable galaxies in the Universe and studying planets, moons, and smaller objects within our own Solar System.

Naturally, astronomers want to get the most out of their big-budget observatory. That’s where NASA’s Pandora mission comes in.

The Pandora satellite rocketed into orbit early Sunday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. It hitched a ride with around 40 other small payloads aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, launching into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit before deploying at an altitude of roughly 380 miles (613 kilometers).

Over the next few weeks, ground controllers will put Pandora through a series of commissioning and calibration steps before turning its eyes toward deep space. Pandora is a fraction of the size of Webb. Its primary mirror is about the size of the largest consumer-grade amateur telescopes, less than one-tenth the dimension of Webb’s. NASA capped Pandora’s budget at $20 million. The budget to develop Webb was more than 500 times higher.

Double-checking Webb

So what can little Pandora add to Webb’s bleeding-edge science? First, it helps to understand how scientists use Webb to study exoplanets. When a planet passes in front of its parent star, some of the starlight shines through its atmosphere. Webb has the sensitivity to detect the filtered starlight and break it apart into its spectral components, telling astronomers about the composition of clouds and hazes in the planet’s atmosphere. Ultimately, the data is useful in determining whether an exoplanet might be like Earth.

“I liken it often to holding a glass of wine in front of a candle, so that we can see really what’s inside,” said Daniel Apai, a member of Pandora’s science team from the University of Arizona. “We can assess, basically, the quality of the wine. In this case, we use the light that filters through the star’s [atmosphere] through the planetary atmosphere to judge what chemicals, gases in particular, may be present. Water vapor is one that we are the most sensitive to.”

But there’s a catch. Stars shine millions to billions of times brighter than their planetary companions, and starlight isn’t constant. Like the Sun, other stars have spots, flares, and variability over hours, days, or years. Hot spots and cool spots rotate in and out of view. And the star’s own atmospheres can contain some of the same molecules scientists are seeking to find on exoplanets, including water vapor.

Therefore, a star’s spectral signature easily outshines the signal coming from a nearby planet. Astronomers discovered this signal “contamination” when they started looking for potentially habitable worlds, injecting confounding uncertainties into their findings. Were the promising spectra they were seeing coming from the planet or the star?

Artist’s concept of the Pandora telescope with an exoplanet and two stars in the background.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab

“One of the ways that this manifests is by making you think that you’re seeing absorption features like water and potentially methane when there may not be any, or, conversely, you’re not seeing the signatures that are there because they’re masked by the stellar signal,” said Tom Barclay, deputy project scientist and technical lead on the Pandora mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The problem became apparent in the 2010s as astronomers used more powerful telescopes to see the finer details of exoplanets.

“This is something that we always suspected as a community,” Apai told Ars. “We always suspected that stars are not perfect. At some point, it becomes a problem. But it was not recognized how serious a problem that is until, I would say, about 2017 or 2018.”

Scientists quickly got to work looking for a solution, and NASA selected the Pandora mission for development in 2021, just months before the launch of Webb.

“When we’re trying to find water in the atmospheres of these small Earth-like planets, we want to be really sure it’s not coming from the star before we go tell the press and make a big stink about it,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s lead scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “So we designed the Pandora mission specifically to solve this problem.”

From low-Earth orbit, Pandora will observe exoplanets and their stars simultaneously, allowing astronomers to correct their measurements of the planet’s atmospheric composition and structure based on the ever-changing conditions of the host star itself. Webb could theoretically do this work, but scientists already fill every hour of Webb’s schedule. Pandora will point and stare at 20 preselected exoplanets 10 times during its one-year prime mission, collecting 24 hours of visible and infrared observations with each visit. This will capture short-term and longer-term changes in each star’s behavior.

SpaceX launched Pandora into a so-called “twilight orbit” that follows the boundary between day and night on Earth, allowing the satellite to keep its solar panels illuminated by the Sun while performing its observations.

“We can send this small telescope out, sit on a star for a really long time, and sort of map all the star spots, and really disentangle the star and planet signals,” Quintana said in a recent panel discussion at NASA Goddard. “It’s filling a really nice gap in helping us to sort of calibrate all these stars that James Webb is going to look at, so we can be really confident that all of these molecules that we’re detecting in planets are real.”

“I think this is really the most important scientific barrier that we have to break down to fully unlock the potential of Webb and future missions,” Apai said.

Looking down the barrel of Pandora’s 17-inch-wide (45-centimeter) telescope.

Credit: NASA/Jordan Karburn, LLNL

Ben Hord, a member of Pandora’s science team at Goddard, singled out one example in a presentation at an American Astronomical Society meeting last year. This planet, named GJ 486 b, is a “super-Earth” discovered in 2021 circling a relatively cool red dwarf star. Hord said astronomers had trouble determining if the planet has a water-rich atmosphere based on Webb’s observations alone.

“We want to know if water is in the atmospheres of these exoplanets, and this stellar contamination from the spots on the star can mask or mimic features like water,” Hord said. “Our hope is that Pandora will help James Webb data be even more precise by providing context and understanding for these host stars and these planetary systems.”

Planets around small dwarf stars are some of the best candidates for finding a true Earth analog. Because these stars put out a fraction of the heat of the Sun, a potentially habitable planet could lurk very close to its host, completing a year in a handful of days. This allows astronomers to see the planet repeatedly as it passes in front of its star, rapidly building a dataset on its size, structure, and environment.

Scientists hope they can extend the lessons learned from Pandora’s observations of a sample of 20 exoplanets to other worlds in our galactic neighborhood. As of late last year, astronomers have confirmed detections of more than 6,000 exoplanets.

“With a well-corrected spectrum, we can say there’s water, there’s nitrogen,” Quintana said. “So with every mission, as we evolve, we’re chipping away and taking bigger and bigger steps toward that question of, ‘OK, we know Earths are out there. We know they’re abundant. We know they have atmospheres. How do we know if they have life on them?’”

Building on a budget

A mission like Pandora was not possible until recently, certainly not on the $20 million budget NASA devoted to the project. With Pandora, the agency took advantage of a fast-growing small satellite industry churning out spacecraft at a fraction of what it cost 10 or 15 years ago.

The Pandora spacecraft weighed approximately 716 pounds (325 kilograms) at launch and likely would have required a dedicated rocket to travel to space before SpaceX started offering shared rides on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. NASA did not disclose what it paid SpaceX to launch Pandora, but publicly available pricing suggests SpaceX charges a few million dollars to launch a satellite of the same size. Before the rideshare option became available, NASA would have paid tens of millions of dollars for the launch alone.

The Pandora mission is part of NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program, an initiative set up to solicit ideas for lower-cost astronomy missions.

“It’s been very, very challenging to try and squeeze this big amount of science into this small cost box, but that’s kind of what makes it fun, right?” Barclay told Ars. “We have to be pretty ruthless in making sure that we only fund the things we need to fund. We accept risk where we need to accept the risk, and at times we need to accept that we may need to give up performance in order to make sure that we hit the schedule and we hit the launch [schedule].”

It helps that Pandora’s 17-inch (45-centimeter) telescope comes from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which had the technology on the shelf from a national security program. Pandora uses a small satellite platform from Blue Canyon Technologies, a Colorado company.

“There is no way we could have done Pandora 10 years ago,” Barclay said. “The small launch capabilities that come from companies like Rocket Lab and SpaceX and others meant that now the vendors of spacecraft buses and spacecraft instruments are able to push their costs down because they know that there’s a market for small missions out there. Other parts of the government are investing heavily in small spacecraft, and so that allows us on the science side to make use of that economies of scale.”

For comparison, the European Space Agency launched an exoplanet observatory about the same size as Pandora in 2019 at a cost of more than $100 million.

There are companies now looking at how to scale up production of larger satellites, too. Cheaper, heavy satellites could launch on new heavy- and super-heavy rockets like SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

“I think it is an amazing capability to have for astrophysicists because science is moving fast,” Apai said. “Exoplanet science is changing. I would say every three or four years, we have breakthroughs. And the product keeps changing. We push the boundaries, and if you ever have to work with 20- or 25-year-long mission lifetimes, that really just limits progress.”

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Posted Tuesday 13 January 2026 at 12:04 pm AEST (my time).

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Older adults can dramatically reduce the amount of ultraprocessed foods they eat while keeping a familiar, balanced diet—and this shift leads to improvements across several key markers related to how the body regulates appetite and metabolism. That’s the main finding of a new study my colleagues and I published in the journal Clinical Nutrition.

Ultraprocessed foods are made using industrial techniques and ingredients that aren’t typically used in home cooking. They often contain additives such as emulsifiers, flavorings, colors, and preservatives. Common examples include packaged snacks, ready-to-eat meals, and some processed meats. Studies have linked diets high in ultraprocessed foods to poorer health outcomes.

My team and I enrolled Americans ages 65 and older in our study, many of whom were overweight or had metabolic risk factors such as insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Participants followed two diets low in ultraprocessed foods for eight weeks each. One included lean red meat (pork); the other was vegetarian with milk and eggs. For two weeks in between, participants returned to their usual diets.

A total of 43 people began the dietary intervention, and 36 completed the full study.

In both diets, ultraprocessed foods made up less than 15 percent of the total calories—a significant reduction from the typical American diet, where more than 50 percent of total calories comes from ultraprocessed foods. The diets were designed to be realistic for everyday eating, and participants were not instructed to restrict calories, lose weight, or change their physical activity.

We prepared, portioned, and provided all meals and snacks for the study. Both diets emphasized minimally processed ingredients and aligned with the 2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the US government’s nutrient-based recommendations for healthy eating, while providing similar calories and amounts of key nutrients.

The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released on January 7, 2026, explicitly recommend eating less ultraprocessed food, but the previous versions of the guidelines did not specifically address food processing. Our feeding study design allowed us, for the first time, to examine the health effects of reducing ultraprocessed foods while keeping nutrient levels consistent with recommended targets.

We compared how participants fared while eating their habitual diets with how they responded to the two diets that were low in ultraprocessed foods. During the periods when participants ate fewer ultraprocessed foods, they naturally consumed fewer calories and lost weight, including total and abdominal body fat. Beyond weight loss, they also showed meaningful improvements in insulin sensitivity, healthier cholesterol levels, fewer signs of inflammation, and favorable changes in hormones that help regulate appetite and metabolism.

These improvements were similar whether participants followed the meat-based or the vegetarian diet.

Why it matters

Ultraprocessed foods make up more than half the calories consumed by most US adults. Although these foods are convenient and widely available, studies that track people’s diets over time increasingly link them with obesity and age-related chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. With older adults making up a growing share of the global population, strategies that preserve metabolic health could support healthy aging.

Most previous feeding studies testing how ultraprocessed foods affect people’s health haven’t reflected real-world eating, especially among Americans. For example, some studies have compared diets made up almost entirely of ultraprocessed foods with diets that contain little to none at all.

Our study aimed to more closely approximate people’s experience while still closely tracking the foods they consumed. It is the first to show that for older adults a realistic reduction in ultraprocessed foods, outside the lab, has measurable health benefits beyond just losing weight. For older adults especially, maintaining metabolic health helps preserve mobility, independence, and quality of life.

What’s still unknown

Our study was small, reflecting the complexity of studies in which researchers tightly control what participants eat. It was not designed to show whether the metabolic improvements we observed can prevent or delay diseases such as diabetes or heart disease over time. Larger, longer studies will be needed to answer that.

On the practical side, it’s still unclear whether people can cut back on ultraprocessed foods in their daily lives without structured support, and what strategies would make it easier to do so. It’s also not fully understood which aspects of processing—for example, additives, emulsifiers, or extrusion—matter more for health.

Answering these questions could help manufacturers produce foods that are healthier but still convenient—and make it easier for people to choose healthier food options.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Moul Dey is professor of Nutrition Science at South Dakota State University.

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

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Posted Tuesday 13 January 2026 at 3:48 am AEST (my time).

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The test measures a person's immune response to flagellin, a protein found on gut bacteria. This response is elevated in individuals long before they develop Crohn's disease, a team led by Dr. Ken Croitoru, a clinician scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, part of Sinai Health, has found. The team also included gastrointestinal medical resident, Dr. Richard Wu, and clinician scientist, and staff gastroenterologist Dr. Sun-Ho Lee.

Drs. Croitoru and Lee are also a part of Mount Sinai Hospital's Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), a globally recognized center focused on inflammatory bowel disease research.

Their findings, published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, highlight the interplay between the gut's bacteria and immune system responses as a critical step in developing Crohn's disease.

Understanding Crohn's disease and its impact

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory condition of the gastrointestinal tract that causes persistent digestive symptoms, pain and fatigue, significantly affecting quality of life. Its incidence among children has doubled since 1995, and rates continue to rise. Crohn's and Colitis Canada, a non-profit dedicated to curing IBD, estimates about 470,000 Canadians will be living with IBD by 2035.

The presence of flagellin antibodies long before any symptoms appear suggests that this immune reaction may contribute to triggering the onset of the disease, rather than being a consequence of it, Dr. Croitoru said. He believes that a better understanding of this early process could open the door to new approaches for predicting, preventing and treating the disease.

"With all of the advanced biologic therapy we have today, patients' responses are partial at best. We haven't cured anybody yet, and we need to do better," said Dr. Croitoru, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.

The GEM Project and early detection

This research is part of the Genetic, Environmental and Microbial (GEM) Project, a global cohort of more than 5,000 healthy first-degree relatives of people with Crohn's disease, led by Dr. Croitoru. Since 2008, the project has collected genetic, biological and environmental data to better understand how the disease develops. To date, 130 participants have developed Crohn's, giving researchers a rare opportunity to study the earliest pre-disease stages.

Previously, the team discovered that long before Crohn's disease develops, an inflammatory immune response targeting gut bacteria can appear. In healthy individuals, bacteria coexist peacefully in the gut and play an essential role in maintaining digestive health. In Crohn's disease, however, the immune system appears to mount an abnormal response against normally beneficial microbes.

Flagellin antibodies and risk prediction

Collaborators at the University of Alabama led by Dr. Charles Elson had previously developed a test to detect antibodies against flagellin and showed that individuals with Crohn's have elevated antibody levels targeting flagellin from Lachnospiraceae bacteria.

Drs. Croitoru and Lee now wanted to determine whether this immune response could also be detected in healthy individuals who are at risk of developing the disease.

"We wanted to know: do people who are at risk, who are healthy now, have these antibodies against flagellin?" said Dr. Croitoru. "We looked, we measured, and yes indeed, at least some of them did."

This study followed 381 first-degree relatives of Crohn's patients, 77 of whom went on to develop the disease. Among them, 28 individuals—more than a third—had elevated antibody responses. The responses were strongest in siblings, highlighting the role of shared environmental exposure, as previously shown by Dr. Croitoru.

The researchers also confirmed that this pre-disease response to the Lachnospiraceae flagellin was associated with intestinal inflammation and gut barrier dysfunction, both of which are characteristics of Crohn's disease. The typical timeline from blood sample collection to the pre-disease individuals being diagnosed with Crohn's was nearly two and a half years.

Implications for prevention and future research

"Confirming our previous study, immune response against bacterial flagellins show strong associations with future risk of Crohn's in healthy first-degree relatives," said Dr. Lee.

"We found that this immune response is driven by a conserved domain of the flagellin protein. This raises the potential for designing a flagellin-directed vaccine in selected high-risk individuals for prevention of disease. Further validation and mechanistic studies are underway."

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They say most winters in the last five years have seen a drop compared to average snowfall between 1980 and 2020.

Rising temperature also means what little snow falls melts very quickly and some lower-elevation areas are also seeing more rain and less snow, which is at least in part due to global warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientific reports.

Studies have also shown there is now what is known as "snow drought" during winter in many parts of the Himalayan region.

Accelerated melting of glaciers in the wake of global warming has long been a major crisis facing India's Himalayan states and other countries in the region. This dwindling snowfall during winter is making matters worse, experts have told the BBC.

They say that the reduction in ice and snow will not only change how the Himalayas look, it will also impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people and many ecosystems in the region.

As temperatures rise in spring, snow accumulated during winter melts and the runoff feeds river systems. This snowmelt is a crucial source for the region's rivers and streams, supplying water for drinking, irrigation and hydropower.

Apart from impacting the water supply, less winter precipitation - rainfall in the lowlands and snowfall on the mountains - also means the region risks being gutted by forest fires due to dry conditions, experts said.

They add that vanishing glaciers and declining snowfall destabilise mountains as they lose the ice and snow that act as cement to keep them intact. Disasters like rockfalls, landslides, glacial lakes bursting out and devastating debris flows are already becoming more common.

So, how serious is the drop in snowfall?

Meteorologists say central Himalayas have also seen significant decrease in winter snowfall leaving mountains bare and rocky

The Indian Meteorological Department recorded no precipitation - rainfall and snowfall - in almost all of northern India in December.

The weather department says there is a high possibility that many parts of northwest India, including Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh states, and the federally-administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, will see 86% less than long period average (LPA) rainfall and snowfall between January and March.

LPA is the rainfall or snow recorded over a region over 30 to 50 years and use its average to classify current weather as normal, excess or deficient.

According to the weather department, north India's LPA rainfall between 1971 and 2020 was 184.3 millimetre.

Meteorologists say the sharp drop in precipitation is not just a one-off thing.

"There is now strong evidence across different datasets that winter precipitation in the Himalayas is indeed decreasing," said Kieran Hunt, principal research fellow in tropical meteorology at University of Reading in the UK.

A study Hunt co-authored and published in 2025 has included four different datasets between 1980 and 2021, and they all show a decrease in precipitation in the western and part of the central Himalayas.

Using datasets from ERA-5 (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis), Hemant Singh, a research fellow with the Indian Institute of Technology in Jammu, says snowfall in the north western Himalayas has decreased by 25% in the past five years compared to 40-year long-term average (1980-2020).

Women walk along a mountain path in Uttarakhand state

Meteorologists say Nepal, within which the central Himalayas is situated, is also seeing a significant drop in winter precipitation.

"Nepal has seen zero rainfall since October, and it seems the rest of this winter will remain largely dry. This has been the case more or less in all the winters in the last five years," says Binod Pokharel, associate professor of meteorology at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu.

Meteorologists, however, also add that there have been heavy snowfalls during some winters in recent years, but these have been isolated, extreme events rather than the evenly distributed precipitation of past winters.

Another way scientists assess the decrease in snowfall is by measuring how much snow is accumulated on the mountains, and how much of that remains for a period of time on the ground without melting: known as snow-persistence.

The 2024-2025 winter saw a 23-year record low of nearly 24% below-normal snow persistence, according to a report by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

It said four of the past five winters between 2020 and 2025 saw below-normal snow persistence in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region.

"This is generally understood to be consistent with decreased winter precipitation anomalies and snowfall in a significant portion of the HKH (Hindu Kush Himalaya) region," said Sravan Shrestha, senior associate, remote sensing and geoinformation with ICIMOD.

A study Singh with the IIT in Jammu co-authored and published in 2025 shows that the Himalayan region is now increasingly seeing snow droughts – snow becoming significantly scarce – particularly between 3,000 and 6,000m elevations.

"With snowmelt contributing about a fourth of the total annual runoff of 12 major river basins in the region, on average, anomalies in seasonal snow persistence affect water security of nearly two billion people across these river basins," the ICIMOD snow update report warns.

Melting Himalayan glaciers pose long-term water scarcity risks, while reduced snowfall and faster snowmelt threaten near-term water supplies, experts warn.

Experts say dwindling snowfall will impact the lives of millions of people in the region

Most meteorologists cite weakening westerly disturbances – low-pressure systems from the Mediterranean carrying cold air – as a key reason for reduced rainfall and occasional snow during winter in northern India, Pakistan, and Nepal.

They say in the past, the westerly disturbances brought significant rain and snowfall during winter, which helped crops and replenished snow on the mountains.

Studies are mixed: some report changes in westerly disturbances, while others find no significant shift.

"However, we know that the change in winter precipitation must be related to westerly disturbances, since they are responsible for the majority of winter precipitation across the Himalayas," said Hunt.

"We think two things are happening here: westerly disturbances are becoming weaker, and with less certainty, tracking slightly further northward. Both of these inhibit their ability to pick up moisture from the Arabian Sea, resulting in weaker precipitation," he added.

The Indian weather department has labelled the westerly disturbance north India has experienced so far this winter as "feeble" because it could generate very nominal rainfall and snowfall.

Scientists may sooner or later find out what is behind the decrease in winter precipitation.

But what is already becoming clear is that the Himalayan region now faces a double trouble.

Just when it is rapidly losing its glaciers and icefields, it has also begun to get less snow. This combination, experts warn, will have huge consequences.

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Common plant-based fibres such as cotton and linen are naturally irregular and crinkled. At the microscopic level, they are made of long chains of cellulose molecules that exist in coiled shapes. During manufacturing, these fibres are stretched, twisted and aligned to form smooth threads. Chemical links called hydrogen bonds help hold the chains together, giving strength and cohesion to the fabric. Once woven or knitted, the fibres are locked in place under tension.

However, fibres have what experts call “memory.” When exposed to heat, moisture or mechanical action, they tend to relax and return to their original crinkled state. This explains why some fabrics wrinkle easily and why shrinkage occurs after laundering.

Hot water plays a key role. It increases the energy of fibres, causing them to vibrate and break hydrogen bonds. Loosely knitted fabrics are more vulnerable because their open loops allow greater movement, while tightly woven fabrics resist shrinkage by restricting fibre mobility. Cellulose is also hydrophilic, meaning it attracts water. As water molecules penetrate the fibres, they swell and become more flexible. Combined with the tumbling motion of a washing machine, fibres recoil to their natural state, leading to shrinkage.

Shrinkage is not limited to hot water. As many households have experienced with rayon, cold water can also cause fibres to swell. The effect is less severe, but mechanical agitation still contributes. To reduce the risk, experts recommend cold water, low spin speeds and gentle cycles. Labels may not fully explain the impact of agitation, so choosing a “delicate” setting is often safest.

Different fibres shrink in different ways. Wool, an animal-derived fibre made of keratin proteins, has a surface covered in overlapping scales called cuticle cells. During washing, these scales open and interlock, causing entanglement or “felting.” The result is denser, smaller clothing. Synthetic fibres such as polyester and nylon behave differently. Made from petroleum-based polymers, they contain crystalline regions that act as an internal skeleton, preventing crinkling and making them more resistant to shrinkage.

Researchers are exploring new materials to address the issue. Blended yarns that combine natural and synthetic fibres are one approach. Another involves shape-memory polymers that can change or return to a previous shape when exposed to heat or water. These differ from elastic fibres used in stretch fabrics, which simply bounce back after being stretched.

For garments that have already shrunk, a simple rescue method may help. Soaking the item in lukewarm water mixed with hair conditioner or baby shampoo—about one tablespoon per litre—can temporarily soften fibres. Stretching the fabric gently back into shape and drying it flat or under light tension may restore some size. As scientists explain, “conditioners have chemicals known as cationic surfactants. These will temporarily lubricate the fibres, making them more flexible and allowing you to gently pull everything back into place.” While not a complete reversal, this technique can make clothes wearable again.

Source: Swinburne University of Technology

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

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Posted Sunday 11 January 2026 at 5:59 pm AEST (my time).

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Poisoned arrows or darts have long been used by cultures all over the world for hunting or warfare. For example, there are recipes for poisoning projective weapons, and deploying them in battle, in Greek and Roman historical documents, as well as references in Greek mythology and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Chinese warriors over the ages did the same, as did the Gauls and Scythians, and some Native American populations.

Archaeologists have now found traces of a plant-based poison on several 60,000-year-old quartz Stone Age arrowheads found in South Africa, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. That would make this the oldest direct evidence of using poisons on projectiles—a cognitively complex hunting strategy—and pushes the timeline for using poison arrows back into the Pleistocene.

The poisons commonly used could be derived from plants or animals (frogs, beetles, venomous lizards). Plant-based examples include curare, a muscle relaxant that paralyzes the victim’s respiratory system, causing death by asphyxiation. Oleander, milkweeds, or inee (onaye) contain cardiac glucosides. In Southeast Asia, the sap or juice of seeds from the ancar tree is smeared on arrowheads, which causes paralysis, convulsions, and cardiac arrest due to the presence of toxins like strychnine. Several species of aconite are known for their use as arrow poisons in Siberia and northern Japan.

According to the authors, up until now, the earliest direct evidence of poisoned arrows dates back to the mid-Holocene. For instance, scientists found traces of toxic glycoside residues on 4,000-year-old bone-tipped arrows recovered from an Egyptian tomb, as well as on bone arrow points from 6,700 years ago excavated from South Africa’s Kruger Cave. The only prior evidence of using poisons for hunting during the Pleistocene is a “poison applicator” found at Border Cave in South Africa, along with a lump of beeswax.

Milk of the poisonous onion

The authors sampled 10 quartz-backed arrowheads recovered from the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter site in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The results revealed that five of the 10 tested tips had traces of compounds found in Boophone disticha, aka gifbol (poisonous onion), sometimes called the century plant, which is common throughout South Africa. Various parts of the plant have been used as an analgesic (specifically a volatile oil called eugenol) as well as for poisonous hunting purposes. Its more toxic compounds include buphandrine, crinamidine, and buphanine; the latter is similar in effect to scopolamine and can cause hallucinations, coma, or death.

Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter backed microlith 001.

Credit: Sven Isaksson et al. 2026

The new analysis specifically identified alkaloid residues of buphandrine and epibuphanisine. This cannot be a coincidence, per the authors. “If I speculate, Boophone poison was probably discovered by people eating the bulbs and then becoming sick or dying from it,” co-author Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa told New Scientist. “The plant also has preservative, antibacterial, and hallucinatory properties, so that it is used in traditional medicine, and human deaths still occur as a result of accidental overdosing.”

The hunter-gatherers who made the arrow tips probably derived the poison from the milky bulb extract of a B. disticha plant. The thick liquid can be dried in the sun until it has a gum-like consistency, or reduced by heating it over a fire. Even small amounts of this substance have proven lethal to rodents within 30 minutes. In humans, it causes nausea, coma, flaccid muscles, rapid pulse rates, labored breathing, and edema of the lungs depending on the dosage. (Small doses can have medicinal effects.)

The authors note that poison arrows are not meant to kill instantly on impact. Rather, the intent is to pierce the skin just enough to introduce the poison into the bloodstream, with the arrowhead breaking off on impact and remaining under an animal’s skin. The wounded animal would then run for a day or more as the hunters continued to track it. This is evidence of complex cognition, per the authors, suggesting advanced planning, abstraction, and causal reasoning.

Historical 18th century records describe how the plant was used for hunting purposes, such as Carl Peter Thunberg’s account of native hunters using the root of B. disticha to poison arrows for hunting game like springbok. For comparison purposes, the authors also analyzed 250-year-old arrowheads found in collections in Sweden, brought back from South Africa by travelers. Those arrowheads also had traces of the same type of poison.

“Finding traces of the same poison on both prehistoric and historical arrowheads was crucial,” said co-author Sven Isaksson of Stockholm University. “By carefully studying the chemical structure of the substances and thus drawing conclusions about their properties, we were able to determine that these particular substances are stable enough to survive this long in the ground. It’s also fascinating that people had such a deep and long-standing understanding of the use of plants.”

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adz3281 (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 10 January 2026 at 6:06 am AEST (my time).

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Last February, a sick infant named KJ received a gene-editing treatment made just for him. Created in just six months, it was meant to correct a rare genetic mutation that was causing toxic ammonia to build up in his small body. The treatment likely saved his life, and baby KJ was discharged from the hospital in June.

Now, a new startup called Aurora Therapeutics, cofounded by gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, is aiming to scale such treatments to many more patients with rare diseases. Doudna is one of the inventors of the gene-editing system known as Crispr, and won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for her work on the technology.

Aurora plans to take advantage of a new regulatory pathway announced by Food and Drug Administration officials Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad in the fall. The new program, called the “plausible mechanism pathway,” allows the FDA to approve personalized treatments for rare and fatal diseases based on data from just a handful of patients, according to Makary and Prasad in a New England Journal of Medicine article.

Typically, new drugs must be tested in hundreds, if not thousands, of patients in order to get regulatory approval. For drug trials of rare diseases, it’s difficult to recruit that many patients because so few people have the disease. The new FDA pathway provides a way for these types of drugs to be approved when a large, randomized trial isn’t possible.

“Once a manufacturer has demonstrated success with several consecutive patients with different bespoke therapies, the FDA will move toward granting marketing authorization for the product,” Makary and Prasad say in their article. Drug companies will then be able to use data from those patients to get similar drugs approved that are based on the same underlying technology.

That is key for Aurora, which will initially focus on treating a metabolic disorder called phenylketonuria, or PKU, that’s screened for at birth. The disease leads to toxic levels of phenylalanine, a building block of protein, in the blood. Patients with PKU must eat a highly restrictive low-protein diet. Without early treatment and monitoring, PKU can hinder brain development and impair cognitive functions. An estimated 13,500 people in the US are living with the disease.

“There are a lot of patients that could benefit from this therapy. But the problem is, you have many, many mutations—over a thousand—that cause this disease,” says Edward Kaye, CEO of Aurora Therapeutics and a pediatric neurologist.

Crispr works by using a guide RNA to deliver an editing molecule to a desired location in the genome. The guide RNA is like a car’s GPS—it goes where it’s programmed to go. In the case of baby KJ, scientists built a guide RNA to target his specific genetic mutation. It’s why his treatment only works for him.

Aurora’s strategy involves swapping out that guide RNA to make several versions of a PKU therapy that address different mutations. Previously, the FDA would have considered every version a totally new drug, each requiring its own clinical trial. But now, Aurora will be able to use the same technology platform to treat many mutations that cause PKU with less regulatory red tape.

Kaye says the company will use base editing, a more precise form of Crispr, and will have a standardized process to streamline the design and manufacturing of its therapies.

“We are very much about no mutation left behind,” says Fyodor Urnov, Aurora’s cofounder and a genome editing scientist at UC Berkeley. Urnov and several of his colleagues at Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute, which Doudna established in 2015, were involved in designing baby KJ’s treatment.

The Innovative Genomics Institute will continue to create bespoke gene-editing therapies for children with very rare diseases, while a trial at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine, where baby KJ was treated, will test the same type of gene editor used in KJ’s therapy in a group of similar disorders. He says establishing Aurora was necessary so that these treatments can eventually be available to many more patients.

So far, Crispr has yet to live up to its transformative potential. Several Crispr companies have downsized, and others have shut down in recent years. So far, there is only one approved drug on the market that uses Crispr technology. Called Casgevy, it debuted in December 2023 at $2.2 million to treat sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia, a related blood disorder.

Yet Urnov thinks the field is turning a corner as the technology matures.

“We are finally at a place where Crispr on demand has had all the technical problems worked out,” Urnov says. “I can say with reasonable certainty that, three to four years from now, there will be other children with their personalized editors.”

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Posted Saturday 10 January 2026 at 6:05 am AEST (my time).

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Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.

The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.

A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)

“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that's the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”

The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.

Global temperature calculations—like the ones used to determine the hottest years on record—usually only capture measurements taken at the ocean’s surface. (The study finds that overall sea surface temperatures in 2025 were slightly lower than they were in 2024, which is on record as the hottest year since modern records began. Some meteorological phenomena, like El Niño events, can also raise sea surface temperatures in certain regions, which can cause the overall ocean to absorb slightly less heat in a given year. This helps to explain why there was such a big jump in added ocean heat content between 2025, which developed a weak La Niña at the end of the year, and 2024, which came at the end of a strong El Niño year.) While sea surface temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution, thanks to our use of fossil fuels, these measurements don’t provide a full picture of how climate change is affecting the oceans.

“If the whole world was covered by a shallow ocean that was only a couple feet deep, it would warm up more or less at the same speed as the land,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and a coauthor of the study. “But because so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures [than those on land].”

Surface temperatures, Hausfather says, are what most directly impact human societies: They have direct effects on weather patterns and most of the ocean life we interact with. But the amount of heat stored in deeper parts of the ocean is a key metric for understanding how climate change is affecting the planet.

“Ocean heat content is in many ways the most reliable thermostat of the planet,” he says. “That’s where all the heat is going—and that's the reason why almost every year we set a new record for ocean heat content, because there's so much heat being absorbed by the ocean.”

The estimates of ocean heating in the paper were created using a mix of mathematical models of ocean warming as well as reams of data on ocean temperatures collected from sites around the world. Humans have been tracking ocean temperatures for a long time; Benjamin Franklin recorded sea temperatures during his transatlantic voyages. In the 1870s, the HMS Challenger expedition—which is largely credited with inventing modern oceanography—took measurements at deeper depths. But regularly measuring temperatures substantially below the surface is a relatively new phenomenon. The study’s earliest data goes back to the 1960s, when some navies began taking measurements of deeper ocean temperatures.

A key tool that revolutionized our understanding of deeper ocean temperatures is the international network of Argo floats, with more than 3,500 robotic buoys that were first deployed in the early 2000s to collect data on oceans around the world. In addition to the Argo floats, the study pulls data from a variety of other sources, including data measured from buoys, ship hulls, satellites—and animals. (“We actually put instruments on mammals that swim under ice, and so we can measure temperatures while they swim,” Abraham says. “They can take measurements where our robots can't go.”) The study also uses algorithmic models trained on particular sets of ocean data.

“It's really quite impressive that they get such consistent results using multiple datasets,” says Raphael Kudela, a professor of ocean science at UC Santa Cruz who was not involved in the study. Kudela says that studies like these help to hammer home just how much climate change is altering the planet.

“What people often don't grasp is that it's taken 100 years to get the oceans that warm at depth,” he says. “Even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, it's going to take hundreds of years for that to circulate through the ocean. We're going to pay this cost for a very, very long time, because we've already put the heat in the ocean.”

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Posted Saturday 10 January 2026 at 6:05 am AEST (my time).

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NASA officials said Thursday they have decided to bring home four of the seven crew members on the International Space Station after one of them experienced a “medical situation” earlier this week.

The space agency has said little about the incident, and officials have not identified which crew member suffered the medical issue. James “JD” Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, told reporters Thursday the crew member is “absolutely stable” but that the agency is “erring on the side of caution” with the decision to return the astronaut to Earth.

The ailing astronaut is part of the Crew-11 mission, which launched to the station August 1 and was slated to come back to Earth around February 20. Instead, the Crew-11 astronauts will depart the International Space Station (ISS) in the coming days and head for reentry and a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

“After discussions with our chief health and medical officer, Dr. JD Polk, and leadership across the agency, I’ve come to the decision that it’s in the best interests of our astronauts to return Crew-11 ahead of their planned departure,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Thursday.

The Crew-11 mission is led by commander Zena Cardman, 38, who is wrapping up her first mission to space. Second in command is pilot Mike Fincke, a 58-year-old astronaut on his fourth spaceflight. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, 55, and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, 39, round out the crew.

Isaacman said NASA will release more information about the schedule for Crew-11’s undocking and reentry within the next 48 hours. The crew will come home aboard the same SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft they launched in more than five months ago. The entire crew must return to Earth together because they rely on the same Dragon spacecraft as a lifeboat.

“For over 60 years, NASA has set the standard for safety and security in crewed spaceflight,” Isaacman said. “In these endeavors, including the 25 years of continuous human presence onboard the International Space Station, the health and well-being of our astronauts is always and will be our highest priority.”

From left to right: Crew-11 mission specialist Oleg Platonov, pilot Mike Fincke, commander Zena Cardman, and

mission specialist Kimiya Yui. This photo was taken during training at SpaceX’s facility in Hawthorne, California.

Credit: SpaceX

Lingering risk

Polk, a physician who has served as NASA’s chief medical officer since 2016, said the agency is not ready to release details about the medical issue, citing privacy concerns. “I’m not going to speak about any particular astronaut or any particular specific diagnosis,” Polk said. “I’d ask that we still respect the privacy of the astronaut.”

Two of the Crew-11 astronauts, Cardman and Fincke, were preparing to head outside the space station on a spacewalk early Thursday. Spacewalk preps at the space station include a period of time breathing high concentrations of oxygen to purge nitrogen from the astronauts’ bloodstreams, a mitigation to avoid decompression sickness when crew members are sealed inside their spacesuits’ pure oxygen atmosphere.

Polk said whatever happened Wednesday “had nothing to do” with preparing for the spacewalk. “This was totally unrelated to any operations onboard,” he said. “It’s mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity with the suite of hardware that we have at our avail to complete a diagnosis.”

Yui radioed mission controllers in Houston on Wednesday afternoon requesting a private medical conference with a flight surgeon, then asked ground teams to turn on camera views inside the station ahead of the session. Medical sessions are carried out on private radio channels and are not heard on the regular communication loops between the space station and mission control. Those open loops are streamed around the clock online, but NASA removed the audio feed from YouTube soon after the crew asked for the medical conference.

NASA publicly revealed a medical concern with one of the astronauts later Wednesday afternoon, then announced late Wednesday night that officials were considering bringing the crew home early.

“I won’t go into specific details about the medical incident itself,” Polk said. “But the crew is highly trained, and they came to the aid of their colleague right away, and that’s part of why we do that training.”

The space station is stocked with medical gear and medications to help astronauts respond to emergencies. Crew members are trained to perform ultrasounds, defibrillate patients, and start IVs, among other things. The medical treatment available on the ISS is akin to what an EMT might provide in transit to a hospital, former astronaut Tom Marshburn, himself a medical doctor, said in 2021.

“We have a very robust suite of medical hardware onboard the International Space Station, but we don’t have the complete amount of hardware that I would have in the emergency department, for example, to complete the workup of a patient,” Polk said.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, associate administrator Amit Kshatriya, and chief medical officer

James “JD” Polk brief reporters on the status of the Crew-11 mission Thursday.

Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Space station managers will take a few days to determine when the Dragon spacecraft will leave the station. SpaceX will dispatch a recovery ship from Southern California to sail for the splashdown zone in the Pacific, and officials will assess weather and sea conditions before selecting the best opportunity to depart the station. Like every crew return, the vessel will be staffed with medical personnel to examine the astronauts after exiting from the Dragon capsule.

“Because the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergent evacuation,” Polk said. “We’re not immediately disembarking and getting the astronaut down.”

But without a confirmed diagnosis of the astronaut’s medical issue, there’s some “lingering risk” for the astronaut’s health if they remained in orbit, Polk said. That’s why Isaacman and his deputies agreed to call an early end to the Crew-11 mission.

This was the most significant decision of Isaacman’s young tenure as NASA administrator. He was sworn in as NASA chief last month after clearing a confirmation vote in the Senate. Before taking the helm at NASA, Isaacman charted a career as an entrepreneur and private astronaut, flying to space twice on commercial missions with SpaceX.

An inevitability

After Crew-11’s departure, the space station will operate with a smaller crew of three until the arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission with a fresh team of astronauts next month. Isaacman said NASA and SpaceX are looking at options to move up the launch of Crew-12 from its current target date of February 15.

Until then, the station’s crew will consist of NASA astronaut Chris Williams and two Russian cosmonauts, who launched to the space station in November on a Russian Soyuz vehicle. Williams and his crewmates—Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev—have their own lifeboat in the Soyuz spacecraft, so they will still have a ride home in the event of a future emergency.

The space station regularly operated with just three crew members for the first decade of its existence. The complex has been permanently staffed since 2000, sometimes with as few as two astronauts or cosmonauts. The standard crew size was raised to six in 2009, then to seven in 2020.

NASA astronaut Zena Cardman works with a spacesuit helmet inside the International Space Station’s airlock.

Credit: NASA

Williams will be solely responsible for overseeing the lab’s US segment until Crew-12 arrives. He will be busy keeping up with maintenance tasks, so managers will likely defer some of the station’s scientific investigations until the complex is back to a full crew.

The early departure of Crew-11, leaving Williams as the only US astronaut aboard, also means NASA will be unable to perform spacewalks. This will mean a “slightly elevated risk” in NASA’s ability to respond to a major hardware failure that might require a spacewalk to fix, said Amit Kshatriya, the agency’s associate administrator.

NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, inked an agreement in 2022 to fly multinational crews on Dragon and Soyuz missions to ensure an American and a Russian are always at the space station. The so-called “seat swap” deal is proving worthwhile with this week’s events.

NASA has never before cut short a human spaceflight mission for medical reasons. “It’s the first time we’ve done a controlled medical evacuation from the vehicle, so that is unusual,” Kshatriya said.

The Soviet Union called an early end for an expedition to the Salyut 7 space station in 1985 after the mission’s commander fell ill in orbit.

In a sense, it is surprising that it took this long. Polk said predictive models suggested the ISS would have a medical evacuation about once every three years. It ended up taking 25 years. In that time, NASA has improved astronauts’ abilities to treat aches and pains, minor injuries, and routine illnesses.

Crews in orbit can now self-treat ailments that might have prompted a crew to return to Earth in the past. One astronaut was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis, or a blood clot, in 2018 without requiring an early departure from the space station. Another astronaut suffered a pinched nerve in 2021 and remained in orbit for another seven months.

One of the more compelling reasons for the space station’s existence is its ability to act as a testbed for learning how to live and work off the planet. The station has served as a laboratory for studying how spaceflight affects the human body, and as a platform to test life support systems necessary for long-duration voyages to deep space.

“We are doing all this to continue to learn,” Isaacman said. “We will absolutely learn from this situation as well, to see if that informs our future on-orbit operations, whether that be on the space station or our future lunar base that we’re pursuing right now, and eventually for deep space missions to Mars.”

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Posted Saturday 10 January 2026 at 6:04 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.24 of the Rocket Report! We’re back from a restorative holiday, and there’s a great deal Eric and I look forward to covering in 2026. You can get a taste of what we’re expecting this year in this feature. Other storylines are also worth watching this year that didn’t make the Top 20. Will SpaceX’s Starship begin launching Starlink satellites? Will United Launch Alliance finally get its Vulcan rocket flying at a higher cadence? Will Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket be certified by the US Space Force? I’m looking forward to learning the answers to these questions, and more. As for what has already happened in 2026, it has been a slow start on the world’s launch pads, with only a pair of SpaceX missions completed in the first week of the year. Only? Two launches in one week by any company would have been remarkable just a few years ago.

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.

New launch records set in 2025. The number of orbital launch attempts worldwide last year surpassed the record 2024 flight rate by 25 percent, with SpaceX and China accounting for the bulk of the launch activity, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Including near-orbital flight tests of SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy launch system, the number of orbital launch attempts worldwide reached 329 last year, an annual analysis of global launch and satellite activity by Jonathan’s Space Report shows. Of those 329 attempts, 321 reached orbit or marginal orbits. In addition to five Starship-Super Heavy launches, SpaceX launched 165 Falcon 9 rockets in 2025, surpassing its 2024 record of 134 Falcon 9 and two Falcon Heavy flights. No Falcon Heavy rockets flew in 2025. US providers, including Rocket Lab Electron orbital flights from its New Zealand spaceport, added another 30 orbital launches to the 2025 tally, solidifying the US as the world leader in space launch.

International launches… China, which attempted 92 orbital launches in 2025, is second, followed by Russia, with 17 launches last year, and Europe with eight. Rounding out the 2025 orbital launch manifest were five orbital launch attempts from India, four from Japan, two from South Korea, and one each from Israel, Iran, and Australia, the analysis shows. The global launch tally has been on an upward trend since 2019, but the numbers may plateau this year. SpaceX expects to launch about the same number of Falcon 9 rockets this year as it did last year as the company prepares to ramp up the pace of Starship flights.

South Korean startup suffers launch failure. The first commercial rocket launched at Brazil’s Alcantara Space Center crashed soon after liftoff on December 22, dealing a blow to Brazilian aerospace ambitions and the South Korean satellite launch company Innospace, Reuters reports. The rocket began its vertical trajectory as planned after liftoff but fell to the ground after something went wrong 30 seconds into its flight, according to Innospace, the South Korean startup that developed the launch vehicle. The craft crashed within a pre-designated safety zone and did not harm anyone, officials said.

An unsurprising result... This was the first flight of Innospace’s nano-launcher, named Hanbit-Nano. The rocket was loaded with eight small payloads, including five deployable satellites, heading for low-Earth orbit. But rocket debuts don’t have a good track record, and Innospace’s rocket made it a bit farther than some new launch vehicles do. The rocket is designed to place up to 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of payload mass into Sun-synchronous orbit. It has a unique design, with hybrid engines consuming a mix of paraffin as the fuel and liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. Innospace said it intends to launch a second test flight in 2026. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Take two for Germany’s Isar Aerospace. Isar Aerospace is gearing up for a second launch attempt of its light-class Spectrum rocket after completing 30-second integrated static test firings for both stages late last year, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The endeavor would be the first orbital launch for Spectrum and an effort at a clean mission after a March 30 flight ended in failure because a vent valve inadvertently opened soon after liftoff, causing a loss of control. “Rapid iteration is how you win in this domain. Being back on the pad less than nine months after our first test flight is proof that we can operate at the speed the world now demands,” said Daniel Metzler, co-founder and CEO of Isar Aerospace.

No earlier than… Airspace and maritime warning notices around the Spectrum rocket’s launch site in northern Norway suggest Isar Aerospace is targeting launch no earlier than January 17. Based near Munich, Isar Aerospace is Europe’s leading launch startup. Not only has Isar beat its competitors to the launch pad, the company has raised far more money than other European rocket firms. After its most recent fundraising round in June, Isar has raised more than 550 million euros ($640 million) from venture capital investors and government-backed funds. Now, Isar just needs to reach orbit.

A step forward for Canada’s launch ambitions. The Atlantic Spaceport Complex—a new launch facility being developed by the aerospace company NordSpace on the southern coast of Newfoundland—has won an important regulatory approval, NASASpaceflight.com reports. The provincial government of Newfoundland and Labrador “released” the spaceport from the environmental assessment process. “At this stage, the spaceport no longer requires further environmental assessment,” NordSpace said in a statement. “This release represents the single most significant regulatory milestone for NordSpace’s spaceport development to date, clearing the path for rapid execution of Canada’s first purpose-built, sovereign orbital launch complex designed and operated by an end-to-end launch services provider.”

Now, about that rocket... NordSpace began construction of the Atlantic Spaceport Complex last year and planned to launch its first suborbital rocket from the spaceport last August. But bad weather and technical problems kept NordSpace’s Taiga rocket grounded, and then the company had to wait for the Canadian government to reissue a launch license. NordSpace said it most recently delayed the suborbital launch until March in order to “continue our focus on advancing our orbital-scale technologies.” NordSpace is one of the companies likely to participate in a challenge sponsored by the Canadian government, which is committing 105 million Canadian dollars ($75 million) to develop a sovereign orbital launch capability. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

H3 rocket falters on the way to orbit. A faulty payload fairing may have doomed Japan’s latest H3 rocket mission, with the Japanese space agency now investigating if the shield separated abnormally and crippled the vehicle in flight after lifting off on December 21, the Asahi Shimbun reports. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency officials told a science ministry panel on December 23 they suspect an abnormal separation of the rocket’s payload fairing—a protective nose cone shield—caused a critical drop in pressure in the second-stage engine’s hydrogen tank. The second-stage engine lost thrust as it climbed into space, then failed to restart for a critical burn to boost Japan’s Michibiki 5 navigation satellite into a high-altitude orbit.

Growing pains… The H3 rocket is Japan’s flagship launch vehicle, having replaced the country’s H-IIA rocket after its retirement last year. The December launch was the seventh flight of an H3 rocket, and its second failure. While engineers home in on the rocket’s suspect payload fairing, several H3 launches planned for this year now face delays. Japanese officials already announced that the next H3 flight will be delayed from February. Japan’s space agency plans to launch a robotic mission to Mars on an H3 rocket in October. While there’s still time for officials to investigate and fix the issues that caused last month’s launch failure, the incident adds a question mark to the schedule for the Mars launch. (submitted by tsunam and EllPeaTea)

SpaceX opens 2026 with launch for Italy. SpaceX rang in the new year with a Falcon 9 rocket launch on January 2 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Spaceflight Now reports. The payload was Italy’s Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation Flight Model 3 (CSG-FM3) satellite, a radar surveillance satellite for dual civilian and military use. The Cosmo-SkyMed mission was the first Falcon 9 rocket flight in 16 days, the longest stretch without a SpaceX orbital launch in four years.

Poached from Europe… The CSG-FM3 satellite is the third of four second-generation Cosmo-SkyMed radar satellites ordered by the Italian government. The second and third satellites have now launched on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets instead of their initial ride: Europe’s Vega C launcher. Italy switched the satellites to SpaceX after delays in making the Vega C rocket operational and Europe’s loss of access to Russian Soyuz rockets in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. The rocket swap became a regular occurrence for European satellites in the last few years as Europe’s indigenous launch program encountered repeated delays.

Rocket deploys heaviest satellite ever launched from India. An Indian LVM3 rocket launched AST SpaceMobile’s next-generation direct-to-device BlueBird satellite December 23, kicking off the rollout of dozens of spacecraft built around the largest commercial communications antenna ever deployed in low-Earth orbit, Space News reports. At 13,450 pounds (6.1 metric tons), the BlueBird 6 satellite was the heaviest spacecraft ever launched on an Indian rocket. The LVM3 rocket released BlueBird 6 into an orbit approximately 323 miles (520 kilometers) above the Earth.

The pressure is on… BlueBird 6 is the first of AST SpaceMobile’s Block 2 satellites designed to beam Internet signals directly to smartphones. The Texas-based company is competing with SpaceX’s Starlink network in the same direct-to-cell market. Starlink has an early lead in the direct-to-device business, but AST SpaceMobile says it plans to launch between 45 and 60 satellites by the end of this year. AST’s BlueBird satellites are significantly larger than SpaceX’s Starlink platforms, with antennas unfurling in space to cover an area of 2,400 square feet (223 square meters). The competition between SpaceX and AST SpaceMobile has led to a race for spectrum access and partnerships with cell service providers.

Ars’ annual power rankings of US rocket companies. There’s been some movement near the top of our annual power rankings. It was not difficult to select the first-place company on this list. As it has every year in our rankings, SpaceX holds the top spot. Blue Origin was the biggest mover on the list, leaping from No. 4 on the list to No. 2. It was a breakthrough year for Jeff Bezos’ space company, finally shaking the notion that it was a company full of promise that could not quite deliver. Blue Origin delivered big time in 2025. On the very first launch of the massive New Glenn rocket in January, Blue Origin successfully sent a test payload into orbit. Although a landing attempt failed after New Glenn’s engines failed to re-light, it was a remarkable success. Then, in November, New Glenn sent a pair of small spacecraft on their way to Mars. This successful launch was followed by a breathtaking and inspiring landing of the rocket’s first stage on a barge.

Where’s ULA?… Rocket Lab came in at No. 3. The company had an excellent year, garnering its highest total of Electron launches and having complete mission success. Rocket Lab has now gone more than three dozen launches without a failure. Rocket Lab also continued to make progress on its medium-lift Neutron vehicle, although its debut was ultimately delayed to mid-2026, at least. United Launch Alliance slipped from No. 2 to No. 4 after launching its new Vulcan rocket just once last year, well short of the company’s goal of flying up to 10 Vulcan missions.

Rocketdyne changes hands again. If you are a student of space history or tracked the space industry before billionaires and venture capital changed it forever, you probably know the name Rocketdyne. A half-century ago, Rocketdyne manufactured almost all of the large liquid-fueled rocket engines in the United States. The Saturn V rocket that boosted astronauts toward the Moon relied on powerful engines developed by Rocketdyne, as did the Space Shuttle, the Atlas, Thor, and Delta rockets, and the US military’s earliest ballistic missiles. But Rocketdyne has lost its luster in the 21st century as it struggled to stay relevant in the emerging commercial launch industry. Now, the engine-builder is undergoing its fourth ownership change in 20 years. AE Industrial Partners, a private equity firm, announced it will purchase a controlling stake in Rocketdyne from L3Harris after less than three years of ownership, Ars reports.

Splitting up… Rocketdyne’s RS-25 engine, used on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, is not part of the deal with AE Industrial. It will remain under the exclusive ownership of L3Harris. Rocketdyne’s work on solid-fueled propulsion, ballistic missile interceptors, tactical missiles, and other military munitions will also remain under L3Harris control. The split of the company’s space and defense segments will allow L3Harris to concentrate on Pentagon programs, the company said. So, what is AE Industrial getting in its deal with L3Harris? Aside from the Rocketdyne name, the private equity firm will have a majority stake in the production of the liquid-fueled RL10 upper-stage engine used on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. AE Industrial’s Rocketdyne will also continue the legacy company’s work in nuclear propulsion, electric propulsion, and smaller in-space maneuvering thrusters used on satellites.

Tory Bruno has a new employer. Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin said on December 26 that it has hired Tory Bruno, the longtime CEO of United Launch Alliance, as president of its newly formed national security-focused unit, Reuters reports. Bruno will head the National Security Group and report to Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, the company said in a social media post, underscoring its push to expand in US defense and intelligence launch markets. The hire brings one of the US launch industry’s most experienced executives to Blue Origin as the company works to challenge the dominance of SpaceX and win a larger share of lucrative US military and intelligence launch contracts.

11 years at ULA… The move comes days after Bruno stepped down as CEO of ULA, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that has long dominated US national security space launches alongside Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In 11 years at ULA, Bruno oversaw the development of the Vulcan rocket, the company’s next-generation launch vehicle designed to replace its Atlas V and Delta IV rockets and secure future Pentagon contracts. (submitted by r0twhylr)

A California spaceport has room to grow. A new orbital launch site is up for grabs at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Spaceflight Now reports. The Department of the Air Force published a request for information from launch providers to determine the level of interest in what would become the southernmost launch complex on the Western Range. The location, which will be designated as Space Launch Complex-14 or SLC-14, is being set aside for orbital rockets in a heavy or super-heavy vertical launch class. One of the requirements listed in the RFI includes what the government calls the “highest technical maturity.” It states that for the bid from a launch provider to be taken seriously, it needs to prove that it can begin operations within approximately five years of receiving a lease for the property.

Who’s in contention?… Multiple US launch providers have rockets in the heavy to super-heavy classification either currently launching or in development. Given all the requirements and the state of play on the orbital launch front, one of the contenders would likely be SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy rocket. The company is slated to launch the latest iteration of the rocket, dubbed Version 3, sometime in early 2026. Blue Origin is another likely contender for the prospective launch site. Blue Origin currently has an undeveloped space at Vandenberg’s SLC-9 for its New Glenn rocket. But the company unveiled plans in November for a new super-heavy lift version called New Glenn 9×4. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 9: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-96 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18:05 UTC

Jan. 11: Falcon 9 | Twilight Mission | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13:19 UTC

Jan. 11: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-97 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18:08 UTC

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Posted Saturday 10 January 2026 at 6:03 am AEST (my time).

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Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.

The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.

A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)

“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that's the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”

The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.

Global temperature calculations—like the ones used to determine the hottest years on record—usually only capture measurements taken at the ocean’s surface. (The study finds that overall sea surface temperatures in 2025 were slightly lower than they were in 2024, which is on record as the hottest year since modern records began. Some meteorological phenomena, like El Niño events, can also raise sea surface temperatures in certain regions, which can cause the overall ocean to absorb slightly less heat in a given year. This helps to explain why there was such a big jump in added ocean heat content between 2025, which developed a weak La Niña at the end of the year, and 2024, which came at the end of a strong El Niño year.) While sea surface temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution, thanks to our use of fossil fuels, these measurements don’t provide a full picture of how climate change is affecting the oceans.

“If the whole world was covered by a shallow ocean that was only a couple feet deep, it would warm up more or less at the same speed as the land,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and a coauthor of the study. “But because so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures [than those on land].”

Surface temperatures, Hausfather says, are what most directly impact human societies: They have direct effects on weather patterns and most of the ocean life we interact with. But the amount of heat stored in deeper parts of the ocean is a key metric for understanding how climate change is affecting the planet.

“Ocean heat content is in many ways the most reliable thermostat of the planet,” he says. “That’s where all the heat is going—and that's the reason why almost every year we set a new record for ocean heat content, because there's so much heat being absorbed by the ocean.”

The estimates of ocean heating in the paper were created using a mix of mathematical models of ocean warming as well as reams of data on ocean temperatures collected from sites around the world. Humans have been tracking ocean temperatures for a long time; Benjamin Franklin recorded sea temperatures during his transatlantic voyages. In the 1870s, the HMS Challenger expedition—which is largely credited with inventing modern oceanography—took measurements at deeper depths. But regularly measuring temperatures substantially below the surface is a relatively new phenomenon. The study’s earliest data goes back to the 1960s, when some navies began taking measurements of deeper ocean temperatures.

A key tool that revolutionized our understanding of deeper ocean temperatures is the international network of Argo floats, with more than 3,500 robotic buoys that were first deployed in the early 2000s to collect data on oceans around the world. In addition to the Argo floats, the study pulls data from a variety of other sources, including data measured from buoys, ship hulls, satellites—and animals. (“We actually put instruments on mammals that swim under ice, and so we can measure temperatures while they swim,” Abraham says. “They can take measurements where our robots can't go.”) The study also uses algorithmic models trained on particular sets of ocean data.

“It's really quite impressive that they get such consistent results using multiple datasets,” says Raphael Kudela, a professor of ocean science at UC Santa Cruz who was not involved in the study. Kudela says that studies like these help to hammer home just how much climate change is altering the planet.

“What people often don't grasp is that it's taken 100 years to get the oceans that warm at depth,” he says. “Even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, it's going to take hundreds of years for that to circulate through the ocean. We're going to pay this cost for a very, very long time, because we've already put the heat in the ocean.”

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When it comes to cognitive ability, not all dogs are created equal. Most dogs can learn simple action cues like “sit” or “down.” But so-called “gifted word learner” (GWL) dogs exhibit a remarkable ability to learn the names of objects—for example, learning the names of specific toys so well that they can retrieve them from a large pile of toys on command. And according to a new study published in the journal Science, they can even learn labels for new toys just by overhearing their owners talking about those toys. Per the authors, this suggests that GWL dogs have sociocognitive skills that are functionally comparable to those of 18-month-old human toddlers.

Co-author Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, has been studying canine behavior and cognition for several years as part of the Genius Dog Challenge. For instance, the group’s 2022 study discovered that dogs store key sensory features about their toys—notably what they look like and how they smell—and recall those features when searching for the named toy. Prior studies had suggested that dogs typically rely on vision, or a combination of sight and smell, to locate target objects. GWL dogs can also identify objects based on verbal labels.

In that 2022 study, all the dogs—regardless of whether they were GWL dogs or typical dogs—successfully picked out the target toys in both light and dark conditions, though it took them longer to locate the toys in the dark. Most relied on visual cues, even though dogs possess an excellent sense of smell. However, the dogs sniffed more frequently and longer when searching for the toy in the dark.

The GWL dogs were also able to select the named toys when commanded by their owners, with similar reliance on visual cues—what the toy looks like—augmented by their sense of smell (what the toy smells like), particularly in dark conditions. This confirmed that when dogs play with a toy, they record its features using multiple senses, creating a “multistory mental image.” They prefer to rely primarily on visual cues, but dogs can incorporate other sensory cues, most notably smell, when the conditions call for it.

Last fall, Fugazza’s group built on those findings and concluded that certain dogs can not only memorize the names of objects like their favorite toys, but they can also extend those labels to entirely new objects with a similar function, regardless of whether or not they are similar in appearance. It’s a cognitively advanced ability known as “label extension,” and for animals to acquire it usually involves years of intensive training in captivity. But the dogs in this new study developed the ability to classify their toys by function with no formal training, merely by playing naturally with their owners. It’s akin to a person calling a hammer and a rock by the same name, or a child understanding that “cup” can describe a mug, a glass, or a tumbler because they serve the same function.

Dogs and their toys

This time, Fugazza et al. wanted to investigate how well GWL dogs listen to and learn from human verbal interactions. So they adapted an experimental protocol used to study this ability in children for their canine subjects. All dogs tend to get very excited about new toys, so the subjects (10 GWL dogs) were allowed to play with two new toys first. Then the owners would spend one minute holding the toy and identifying it with a simple label (“This is Toy A” or “This is Toy B”) while directly addressing their dogs. The dogs then played with the toys (both with their owners and on their own) for several minutes with no further mention of the labels.

Credit: Shany Dror et al, 2026

This training protocol was repeated twice a day for four nonconsecutive days, followed by a label comprehension test. The two new toys were placed on the floor with nine familiar toys in a room out of the owners’ line of sight. Owners would first ask their dogs to retrieve a familiar toy and then ask them to retrieve a new toy using its label (“Can you bring ?”). The label comprehension test was repeated 12 times for both the familiar and new toys.

Next, the entire experiment was repeated with one key variation: This time, during the training protocol, rather than addressing the dogs directly when naming new toys, the dogs merely watched while their owners talked to another person while naming the toys, never directly addressing the dogs at all.

The result: 80 percent of the dogs correctly chose the toys in the direct address condition, and 100 percent did so in the overhearing condition. Taken together, the results demonstrate that GWL dogs can learn new object labels just by overhearing interactions, regardless of whether the dogs are active participants in the interactions or passive listeners—much like what has been observed in young children around a year-and-a-half old.

To learn whether temporal continuity (a nonsocial factor) or the lack thereof affects label learning in GWL dogs, the authors also devised a third experimental variation. The owner would show the dog a new toy, place it in a bucket, let the dog take the toy out of the bucket, and then place the toy back in. Then the owner would lift the bucket to prevent the dog from seeing what was inside and repeatedly use the toy name in a sentence while looking back and forth from the dog to the bucket. This was followed by the usual testing phase. The authors concluded that the dogs didn’t need temporal continuity to form object-label mappings. And when the same dogs were re-tested two weeks later, those mappings had not decayed; the dogs remembered.

But GWL dogs are extremely rare, and the findings don’t extend to typical dogs, as the group discovered when they ran both versions of the experiment using 10 non-GWL border collies. There was no evidence of actual learning in these typical dogs; the authors suggest their behavior reflects a doggy preference for novelty when it comes to toy selection, not the ability to learn object-label mappings.

“Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human,” said co-author Shany Dror of ELTE and VetMedUni universities. “Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children. These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language. But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way—far from it.”

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adq5474 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 9 January 2026 at 2:18 pm AEST (my time).

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