CES is a land of bold announcements of amazing, innovative products and technologies that will revolutionize the world, often set for release in two years’ time. Twenty-four months seems to be about the right hype window: close enough to generate excitement and investment, but far enough that everyone forgets about your promises before that deadline quietly comes and goes.

It was CES 2018 when Henrik Fisker made such a proclamation, saying that his team of gurus had cracked the code of solid-state batteries. By 2020, he said, those batteries would be in mass production. The car was the EMotion, which never did come to market. By 2021, the company had given up on the solid-state dream, and by 2024, the whole operation went bust.

In Las Vegas at CES 2026, it’s time for another bold proclamation about a small team of engineers that have figured out solid state. This time it’s Marko Lehtimaki, cofounder and CEO of Donut Lab, an EV technology startup that spun off from Verge Motorcycles (no relation to The Verge). Naturally, I’m skeptical, but there’s one key difference that’s giving me hope: Lehtimaki says the Donut Battery isn’t 24 months away. It’s in production right now.

If you’ve not been riding the hype wave around solid state, the promise is for a battery cell that is cheap, light, fast-charging, cool-running, energy-dense, and combustion-free. They’re still conceptually the same battery design as the past couple-hundred years. That means an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, separated by an electrolyte across which charge-carrying ions can scurry back and forth as the cell is charged or discharged.

In a traditional lithium-ion cell, the electrolyte is a liquid of some sort. In a solid-state battery, it is, of course, a solid. That may sound like a small shift, but it has huge ramifications, the biggest being effective durability. Like solid-state electronics, there’s nothing that wears or breaks down, which means a massive increase in durability, charging speed, and energy density.

For its solid-state batteries, Donut Lab is listing some incredible figures. To start with, there’s an energy density of 400 Wh/kg, which is about a third greater than that of a modern lithium-ion pack. In other words, 30 percent more range in an EV with the same weight battery pack.

Despite that boost, Lehtimaki says these cells are actually cheaper to manufacture. These batteries will appear first in the Verge TS Pro, and Lehtimaki told me that swapping to these hyper-advanced new cells actually reduced cost.

“The bill of materials went down, and it is going down with every other vendor buying at the rate that we are selling them,” Lehtimaki says.

Donut says the batteries can take a full charge in as few as five minutes, which would finally mean an EV that charges as fast as you can fuel up a car.

For this first application, though, it’s a bit slower: 10 minutes in the Verge TS Pro. The company is also being a little conservative when it comes to the lifespan of the cells. Where Donut Lab promises 100,000 charge cycles before the battery is worn out, Verge says 10,000.

Even that is a radical improvement over the roughly 1,500 cycles that you might expect out of a typical lithium-ion EV battery pack. 100,000, though, is a total game changer, creating a battery that will easily outlast the car it was created to power.

“The cycle life, the residual value of the battery, is actually 100 percent after the lifetime of the car. So it becomes the only component that keeps its value, and you can use it as a home battery, or whatever,” Lehtimaki says.

Image: Tim Stevens

There are other implications, too. Lehtimaki says that Donut Batteries are extremely thermally stable, offering nearly full capacity, even down to -22 degrees Fahrenheit. That means it will also require less cooling. I spoke with Neil Yates, founder and CEO at Watt Electric Vehicle Company, an EV platform maker that uses Donut Lab’s hub motors in its products and is looking to adapt the new batteries onto its platform as well.

“There will be no real active cooling requirement at all,” Yates says, thanks to the Donut Battery’s thermal resiliency. “We do a little bit to manage the enclosure in which they are, but that’s enclosure management, rather than specific battery management.” No active cooling means less plumbing required in the car, saving even more weight.

And, again, this is all said to be happening now. Lehtimaki says that the cells are actively in production in Finland, with initial production capacity of roughly one gigawatt-hour. But, he says Donut Lab can quickly spin up new factories in the U.S. if there is sufficient demand from American car manufacturers.

That’s aided by a battery chemistry totally free of any sort of conflict or difficult materials that might be subject to tricky import or export regulations or tariffs.

That might point to something like a sodium-metal construction, but Lehtimaki wasn’t willing to talk specifics. In fact, there are many details that we’ll have to wait for clarity on, including how Donut Lab managed to solve the so-called dendrite issue. This challenge has stymied many solid-state startups, a battery flaw that’s a little like a microscopic stalagmite growing from anode to cathode across the solid-state electrolyte. When they bridge across, you get a catastrophic short and, potentially, a lot of smoke and fire.

How did Donut Lab solve this issue where many major companies have failed? He credits having a small, agile team. “The party that has the capability and then iterates faster is the one that obviously makes the innovation,” Lehtimaki says. “I’ve always said that 20 engineers beat 2,000 engineers.”

There has been speculation online that Donut Lab is using technology from another Finnish startup, Nordic Nano, a renewable energy company that Donut Lab has invested in. Lehtimaki even serves as a board member at Nordic Nano, but says that’s not the source of this product. “It’s not from them,” he says.

Lehtimaki says that Donut and Verge Motorcycles’ engineers have been quietly working on battery designs since 2018, and this is the fruit of all that labor. Where are the patents? They’re coming, Lehtimaki says, and promised to have a lot more details to share within the next few months once they clear.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical here. There are some uncanny parallels between Lehtimaki’s claims and those that Fisker made back in 2018, including talk of smaller versions for phones. But unlike Fisker and all the many other solid-state prognosticators and promisers of mega-range, insta-charging EVs, Lehtimaki isn’t giving himself that 24-month window to milk investors before fading into the sunset. He says all will be proven in just a matter of weeks. That alone gives me reason for optimism, but at the very least I won’t have to wait long to be disappointed.

Photography by Tim Stevens

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 9 January 2026 at 5:21 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

The writer and comedian Megan Koester got her first writing job, reviewing internet pornography, from a Craigslist ad she responded to more than 15 years ago. Several years after that, she used the listings website to find the rent-controlled apartment where she still lives today. When she wanted to buy property, she scrolled through Craigslist and found a parcel of land in the Mojave Desert. She built a dwelling on it (never mind that she’d later discover it was unpermitted) and furnished it entirely with finds from Craigslist’s free section, right down to the laminate flooring, which had previously been used by a production company.

“There’s so many elements of my life that are suffused with Craigslist,” says Koester, 42, whose Instagram account is dedicated, at least in part, to cataloging screenshots of what she has dubbed “harrowing images” from the site’s free section; on the day we speak, she’s wearing a cashmere sweater that cost her nothing, besides the faith it took to respond to an ad with no pictures. “I’m ride or die.”

Koester is one of untold numbers of Craigslist aficionados, many of them in their thirties and forties, who not only still use the old-school classifieds site but also consider it an essential, if anachronistic, part of their everyday lives. It’s a place where anonymity is still possible, where money doesn’t have to be exchanged, and where strangers can make meaningful connections—for romantic pursuits, straightforward transactions, and even to cast unusual creative projects, including experimental TV shows like The Rehearsal on HBO and Amazon Freevee’s Jury Duty. Unlike flashier online marketplaces such as DePop and its parent company, Etsy, or Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist doesn’t use algorithms to track users’ moves and predict what they want to see next. It doesn’t offer public profiles, rating systems, or “likes” and “shares” to dole out like social currency; as a result, Craigslist effectively disincentivizes clout-chasing and virality-seeking—behaviors that are often rewarded on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. It’s a utopian vision of a much earlier, far more earnest internet.

“The real freaks come out on Craigslist,” says Koester. “There's a purity to it.” Even still, the site is a little tamer than it used to be: Craigslist shut down its “casual encounters” ads and took its personals section offline in 2018, after Congress passed legislation that would’ve put the company on the hook for listings from potential sex traffickers. The “missed connections” section, however, remains active.

The site is what Jessa Lingel, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has called the “ungentrified” internet. If that’s the case, then online gentrification has only accelerated in recent years, thanks in part to the proliferation of AI. Even Wikipedia and Reddit, visually basic sites created in the early aughts and with an emphasis similar to Craigslist’s on fostering communities, have both incorporated their own versions of AI tools.

Some might argue that Craigslist, by contrast, is outdated; an article published in this magazine more than 15 years ago called it “underdeveloped” and “unpredictable.” But to the site’s most devoted adherents, that’s precisely its appeal.

“ I think Craigslist is having a revival,” says Kat Toledo, an actor and comedian who regularly uses the site to hire cohosts for her LA-based stand-up show, Besitos. “When something is structured so simply and really does serve the community, and it doesn't ask for much? That’s what survives.”

Toledo started using Craigslist in the 2000s and never stopped. Over the years, she has turned to the site to find romance, housing, and even her current job as an assistant to a forensic psychologist. She’s worked there full-time for nearly two years, defying Craigslist’s reputation as a supplier of potentially sketchy one-off gigs. The stigma of the website, sometimes synonymous with scammers and, in more than one instance, murderers, can be hard to shake. “If I'm not doing a good job,” Toledo says she jokes to her employer, “just remember you found me on Craigslist.”

But for Toledo, the site’s “random factor”—the way it facilitates connection with all kinds of people she might not otherwise interact with—is also what makes it so exciting. Respondents to her ads seeking paid cohosts tend to be “people who almost have nothing to lose, but in a good way, and everything to gain,” she says. There was the born-again Christian who performed a reenactment of her religious awakening and the poet who insisted on doing Toledo’s makeup; others, like the commercial actor who started crying on the phone beforehand, never made it to the stage.

It’s difficult to quantify just how many people actively use Craigslist and how often they click through its listings. The for-profit company is privately owned and doesn’t share data about its users. (Craigslist also didn’t respond to a request for comment.) But according to the internet data company similarweb, Craigslist draws more than 105 million monthly users, making it the 40th most popular website in the United States—not too shabby for a company that doesn’t spend any money on advertising or marketing. And though Craigslist’s revenue has reportedly plummeted over the past half-dozen years, based on an estimate from an industry analytics firm, it remains enormously profitable. (The company generates revenue by charging a modest fee to publish ads for gigs, certain types of goods, and in some cities, apartments.)

“It’s not a perfect platform by any means, but it does show that you can make a lot of money through an online endeavor that just treats users like they have some autonomy and grants everybody a degree of privacy,” says Lingel. A longtime Craigslist user, she began researching the site after wondering, “Why do all these web 2.0 companies insist that the only way for them to succeed and make money is off the back of user data? There must be other examples out there.”

In her book, Lingel traces the history of the site, which began in 1995 as an email list for a couple hundred San Francisco Bay Area locals to share events, tech news, and job openings. By the end of the decade, engineer Craig Newmark’s humble experiment had evolved into a full-fledged company with an office, a domain name, and a handful of hires. In true Craigslist fashion, Newmark even recruited the company’s CEO, Jim Buckmaster, from an ad he posted to the site, initially seeking a programmer.

The two have gone to great lengths to wrest the company away from corporate interests. When they suspected a looming takeover attempt from eBay, which had purchased a minority stake in Craigslist from a former employee in 2004, Newmark and Buckmaster spent roughly a decade battling the tech behemoth in court. The litigation ended in 2015, with Craigslist buying back its shares and regaining control.

“ They are in lockstep about their early ’90s internet values,” says Lingel, who credits Newmark and Buckmaster with Craigslist’s long-held aesthetic and ethos: simplicity, privacy, and accessibility. “As long as they're the major shareholders, that will stay that way.”

Craigslist’s refusal to “sell out,” as Koester puts it, is all the more reason to use it. “Not only is there a purity to the fan base or the user base, there’s a purity to the leadership that they’re uncorruptible basically,” says Koester. “I’m gonna keep looking at Craigslist until I die.” She pauses, then shudders: “Or, until Craig dies, I guess.”

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 9 January 2026 at 5:20 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

Prior to World War II the vast majority of telescopes built around the world were funded by wealthy people with an interest in the heavens above.

However, after the war, two significant developments in the mid-20th century caused the burden of funding large astronomical instruments to largely shift to the government and academic institutions. First, as mirrors became larger and larger to see deeper into the universe, their costs grew exponentially. And then, with the advent of spaceflight, the expense of space-based telescopes expanded even further.

But now the tide may be turning again.

On Wednesday evening, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, announced a major investment in not just one telescope project, but four. Each of these new telescopes brings a novel capability online; however, the most intriguing new instrument is a space-based telescope named Lazuli. This spacecraft, if successfully launched and deployed, would offer astronomers a more capable and modern version of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is now three decades old.

A billionaire with a keen interest in science and technology, Schmidt and his wife did not disclose the size of his investment in the four telescopes, which collectively will be known as the Schmidt Observatory System. However, it likely is worth half a billion dollars, at a minimum.

“For 20 years, Eric and I have pursued philanthropy to seek new frontiers, whether in the deep sea or in the profound connections that link people and our planet, committing our resources to novel research that reaches beyond what might be funded by governments or the private sector,” Wendy Schmidt said in a statement to Ars. “With the Schmidt Observatory System, we’re enabling multiple approaches to understanding the vast universe where we find ourselves stewards of a living planet.”

Essentially the Schmidts have taken innovative telescope concepts that scientists have proposed for government funding and will provide the money needed to build them. Their gift has enormous potential to advance the study of astronomy and astrophysics.

Deep blue

Named for the deep sky blue of the rock Lapis lazuli, Lazuli is an optical space telescope with a mirror diameter of 3.1 meters (by comparison, the primary mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope is 2.4 meters). It is intended to launch as early as late 2028 and begin scientific operations in 2029.

There are some notable differences between Hubble and Lazuli, starting with the orbit. Lazuli will be located much farther from Earth, in an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 275,000 km and a perigee of 77,000 km, the latter distance about twice as high as geostationary orbit. This will afford the telescope a much clearer view than Hubble, located about 500 km above Earth and increasingly affected by the passage of Starlink and other communications satellites in its observations. At this higher altitude the Lazuli team believes it can maintain control of the telescope at all times and have a rapid data downlink.

“We sit on decades of technological developments since Hubble,” said Arpita Roy, lead of the Astrophysics & Space Institute at Schmidt Sciences, in an interview. “Lazuli is a very modern take on Hubble, with a larger mirror, swifter response, and different instruments.”

The instruments are a wide-field camera, a spectrograph, and notably, a coronagraph to blot out the light from stars to reveal the atmospheres and other details of exoplanets orbiting them.

Some specs on the Lazuli space telescope.

Credit: Schmidt Observatory System

Schmidt Sciences will act as the overall integrator and manager of the Lazuli project. The president of the philanthropic organization, Stuart Feldman, said he was not ready to disclose the telescope’s primary contractors yet. But he said a key goal of this telescope, and the other three projects, is to move quickly. Moving from a telescope concept to launching hardware in less than five years would be rapid indeed.

Feldman said in an interview that the major space telescopes planned, built, and launched by NASA have tended toward 25-year gestation periods. It is common today for an astronomer to design instruments on observatories that will only be used by their graduate students upon nearing retirement. Moving expeditiously should also better control costs.

Feldman said he had “moderate-high confidence” that deploying and operating Lazuli would be a success. “We are taking far more risks than NASA would be willing to do,” he acknowledged. “But we are doing things rigorously, and aiming for a very high probability of success.”

No privately funded observatory remotely close to Lazuli’s scope has ever been launched into space. If successful, it would be, in many ways, historic.

On the ground

The other three telescopes that will be funded by the Schmidts will be based on the ground, in the southern and western United States, but they are no less innovative than Lazuli. All three of the proposed telescopes are modular and take advantage of recent advances in computing power, storage, and AI processing and analyzing data.

They are:

• Argus Array: This is an array of 1,200 telescopes with 11-inch mirrors, likely located in Texas, to mimic the effect of an 8-meter optical telescope. It will image the entire Northern Hemisphere sky. Managed by the University of North Carolina, with a company called Observable Space building the telescopes, the Argus Array will be co-funded by the Schmidts and a Russian-born British financial trader named Alex Gerko. It will produce an image every second and capture objects as faint as the 18th or 19th magnitude, Feldman said. Enticingly, it will essentially be able to generate movies of the night sky, allowing astronomers who observe a supernova or other interesting object to rewind 30 minutes, or two hours, to see what happened leading up to the explosion.
• DSA radio telescope: This will be an array of 1,600 radio dishes, each with an antenna of about 6 meters, located in a valley in Nevada. It is far less expensive to fill a valley with these smaller antennas than to build a single Arecibo-size radio telescope. This project will be managed by the California Institute of Technology and fully funded by the Schmidts. The radio dishes will feed an enormous amount of data and require processing faster than Netflix’s global data stream currently does to map over a billion radio sources in the universe. It will aim to produce a picture of the sky every 15 minutes.
• LFAST: This instrument will conduct scalable, large-aperture spectroscopy. Likely based in Arizona, a prototype could be deployed by mid-2026. It will contain 20 80cm mirrors in a single rack to provide the equivalent observational power of a 3-meter telescope. Among its capabilities will be to search for biosignatures on other worlds, and it is designed to be expandable over time. It will be led by the University of Arizona and fully funded by the Schmidts.

Modular and affordable

The design of each telescope selected for the Schmidt Observatory System feels very modern. Their designs are enabled by recent developments in the miniaturization of electrical components, more powerful computers, artificial intelligence, lower-cost launch, and other trends.

These telescopes could probably not have been built even five years ago. Feldman said the storage for some of the ground telescopes requires petabytes. AI will be crucial to poring over all of this data to uncover new and novel observations. And prior to the current class of commercial heavy-lift rockets, a telescope had to scrimp on mass and power; but now, with cheaper and brawnier launch, it’s easier just to throw more solar cells on an instrument.

The plan is to freely and openly share data from the telescopes. The Schmidts have emphasized that this is not a commercial project in any way. They will not be selling time on the telescopes. Rather, there will be an open competition for the best scientific ideas and observations to make.

“We are basically providing a gift to the global astronomical community,” Feldman said. “We wish the data to be openly available for all of the instruments.”

The Schmidts’ approach also includes tapping into emerging commercial space companies, such as Observable Space, which is building the Argus Array telescopes.

“The Argus Array’s commitment to open data and open science represents a new model for how astronomical discovery should happen,” Dan Roelker, CEO of Observable Space, said. “We’re excited to partner with the University of North Carolina and Schmidt Sciences to build the more than 1,200 telescopes designed not just for today’s questions, but for discoveries we haven’t imagined yet.”

The Schmidts have been reticent to speak about costs, but Feldman acknowledged that building and launching a space telescope will easily cost in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.” And that’s just one of the four telescopes.

“Putting up a whole valley filled with 20-foot antennas is not child’s play either,” he said. “This is a very significant contribution to astronomy.”

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 9 January 2026 at 5:19 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

Anyone paying attention to battery research sees sulfur come up frequently. That’s mostly because sulfur is a great storage material for lithium, and it could lead to lithium batteries with impressive power densities. But sulfur can participate in a wide range of chemical reactions, which has made it difficult to prevent lithium-sulfur batteries from decaying rapidly as the sulfur forms all sorts of unwanted materials. As a result, despite decades of research, very few lithium-sulfur batteries have made it to market.

But a team of Chinese researchers has managed to turn sulfur’s complex chemistry into a strength, making it the primary electron donor in a sodium-sulfur battery that also relies on chlorine for its chemistry. The result, at least in the lab, is an impressive energy per weight with extremely inexpensive materials.

Sulfur chemistry

Sulfur sits immediately below oxygen on the periodic table, so you might think its chemistry would look similar. But that’s not the case. Like oxygen, it can participate in covalent bonding in biological chemistry, including in two essential amino acids. Also, like oxygen, it can accept electrons from metals, as seen in some atomically thin materials that have been studied. But it’s also willing to give electrons up, forming chemical compounds with things like chlorine and oxygen.

It’s that last feature the researchers behind the new paper are most interested in. Pure sulfur forms an eight-atom complex that can give up 32 total electrons under the right conditions. The trick was finding the right conditions.

The system had a cathode of pure sulfur and an anode that was simply a strip of aluminum that acted as a current collector. The electrolytes the researchers tested contained a lot of aluminum, sodium, and chlorine (typically something like eight Molar aluminum chloride and a 4.5 Molar solution of some sodium salt). The aluminum helps stabilize the foil at the anode, while the other two chemicals participate in the reactions that power the battery.

When the battery starts discharging, the sulfur at the cathode starts losing electrons and forming sulfur tetrachloride (SCl₄), using chloride it stole from the electrolyte. As the electrons flow into the anode, they combine with the sodium, which plates onto the aluminum, forming a layer of sodium metal. Obviously, this wouldn’t work with an aqueous electrolyte, given how powerfully sodium reacts with water.

High capacity

To form a working battery, the researchers separated the two electrodes using a glass fiber material. They also added a porous carbon material to the cathode to keep the sulfur tetrachloride from diffusing into the electrolyte. They used various techniques to confirm that sodium was being deposited on the aluminum and that the reaction at the cathode was occurring via sulfur dichloride intermediates. They also determined that sodium chloride was a poor source of sodium ions, as it tended to precipitate out onto some of the solid materials in the battery.

The battery was also fairly stable, surviving 1,400 cycles before suffering significant capacity decay. Higher charging rates caused capacity to decay more quickly, but the battery does a great job of holding charge when not in use, maintaining over 95 percent of its charge, even when idled for 400 days.

While the researchers provide some capacity-per-weight measurements, they don’t do so for a complete battery, focusing instead on portions of the battery, such as the sulfur or the total electrode mass.

But with both electrodes considered, the energy density can reach over 2,000 Watt-hours per kilogram. While that will undoubtedly drop with the total mass of the battery, it’s difficult to imagine that it wouldn’t outperform existing sodium-sulfur or sodium-ion batteries.

Beyond the capacity, the big benefit of the proposed system appears to be its price. Given the raw materials, the researchers estimate that their cost is roughly $5 per kilowatt-hour of capacity, which is less than a tenth of the cost of current sodium batteries.

Again, there’s no guarantee that this work can be scaled up for manufacturing in a way that keeps it competitive with current technologies. Still, if materials used in existing battery technologies become expensive, it’s reassuring to have other options to explore.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09867-2  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Thursday 8 January 2026 at 4:54 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

A group of 773,000-year-old hominin fossils from Morocco may shed new light on when our species branched off from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

A team of anthropologists recently examined a collection of fossil hominin jawbones, teeth, and vertebrae that belong to hominins who probably lived very close in time to our species’ last common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans. They reveal a little more about a murky but important moment in our evolutionary history.

From predators’ quarry to rock quarry

Archaeologists unearthed the 773,000-year-old bones just southwest of Casablanca in a cave aptly named Grotte à Hominidés. They’re just fragments of what used to be hominins: an adult’s lower jawbone, plus the partial lower jaw from another adult and a very young child, along with a handful of teeth and vertebrae. A hominin femur from the same layer of sediment in the cave has clear gnaw marks from sharp carnivore teeth, offering a chilling clue about how the bones got there.

The layer of sediment in which the fossils lay spanned a few thousand years on either side of a long-ago flip in the polarity of Earth’s magnetic field (periodically our planet just… does that), which happened around 773,000 years ago. It’s a slice of time not quite narrow enough to say whether the three jawbones’ owners might have known each other but narrow enough to put them all at a crucial point in the story of human evolution.

Around 1.8 million years ago, a species called Homo erectus emerged in Africa and spread around most of the world (sorry, Americas and Australia). And around a million years ago, populations of Homo erectus living in different places started to evolve along their own paths. Potentially with a few species in between, this process likely gave rise to species like Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis in the islands of Southeast Asia.

In Europe and Asia, we got Neanderthals and Denisovans (or Homo longi, if you prefer). And our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa. We, Neanderthals, and Denisovans share a branch of the hominin family tree, with the latter two splitting off from our branch sometime between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. That timing is what makes the Grotte à Hominidés fossils so important. At 773,000 years old, they’re all that’s left of hominins who lived right around the time of that big split between our ancestors on one path and those of Neanderthals and Denisovans on another.

Max Planck Institute anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and his colleagues used micro-CT imaging to build detailed digital models of all the bones and teeth. They then compared the shapes of certain features—like the boundary between enamel and dentine in the teeth or the points on the jawbone where chewing muscles would have attached—to compare the fossils to other hominin species. Archaeologists call that technique geometric morphometry, and it helps shed light on how closely related two species might be.

In this case, the results suggest that the Grotte à Hominidés hominins were a very late model of Homo erectus, already beginning to evolve in the general direction of our species.

How old is our branch of the family tree?

Anthropologists still aren’t sure what our last common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans looked like or where they lived because we just don’t have many African fossils of the right age. The Casablanca fossils at least bring us closer to that pivotal moment in human evolution, and they may even suggest that it happened a little earlier than we thought, closer to 800,000 years ago (although it will take more data from more fossils to be sure).

The Casablanca fossils are about the same age as hominin fossils from Spain, which belong to a species called Homo antecessor. This species has been suggested to be a likely ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans. Overall, it looks like the fossils from Casablanca are a North African counterpart to Homo antecessor, with the Spanish hominins eventually leading to Neanderthals and the North African ones eventually leading to us.

Both groups share some features in their teeth and lower jaws, but they’re also different in some important ways. The teeth and chins in particular share some older features with Homo erectus. But the jaws have more newfangled features in the places where chewing muscles once attached to the bone—features that Neanderthals and our species share. On the other hand, the teeth are missing some other relatively recent features that would later help define Neanderthals (and were already beginning to show up in Homo antecessor).

Altogether, it looks like the Homo erectus populations and the Neanderthals and Denisovans had been separated for a while by the time the hominins at Grotte à Hominidés lived. But not that long. These hominins were probably part of a generation that was fairly close to that big split, near the base of our branch of the hominin family tree.

Here’s looking at you, hominin

Based on ancient DNA, it looks like Neanderthals and Denisovans started evolving into two separate species sometime between 470,000 and 430,000 years ago. Meanwhile, our branch would eventually become recognizable as us sometime around 300,000 years ago, or possibly earlier. At various times and places, all three species would eventually come back together to mingle and swap DNA, leaving traces of those interactions buried deep in each other’s genomes.

And 773,000 years after a predator dragged the remains of a few unfortunate hominins into its den in northern Africa, those hominins’ distant descendants would unearth the gnawed, broken bones and begin piecing together the story.

Nature, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09914-y  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Thursday 8 January 2026 at 4:53 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

Last year delivered doses of drama and excitement in the space business, with a record number of launches, breathtaking vistas of other worlds, and a multitude of breakthroughs and setbacks. 2026 is shaping up to be another thrilling year in the cosmos.

For the first time in more than 54 years, astronauts are training to travel to the vicinity of the Moon, perhaps within the next couple of months. NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other companies are poised to take major steps toward actually landing humans on the Moon, perhaps within a few years.

New rockets are slated to debut in 2026, and scientists hope to open new windows on the Universe. Here, we list the most anticipated space missions scheduled for this year, ranked according to our own anticipation for them. We also assess the chances of these missions actually happening in the next 12 months. Unless specified, we don’t assess the chances of a successful outcome.

1. Artemis II

Final preparations for the Artemis II mission are well underway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft fully integrated inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Within a couple of weeks, the SLS rocket could roll to Launch Complex 39B for a countdown dress rehearsal. Then, perhaps in February, the Artemis II mission is scheduled to depart Florida’s Space Coast on a 10-day flight that will carry astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth. This will be the first crew flight on the SLS rocket and Orion capsule. Even if delays prevent a launch in February, Artemis II is well-positioned to fly by spring or summer. Chance of Artemis II happening in 2026: 90 percent.

2. Starship refueling demo

The next mission on our list is on SpaceX’s Starship roadmap for 2026. A demonstration of large-scale orbital refueling is key to unlocking Starship’s ability to travel beyond low-Earth orbit. SpaceX must master its refueling capability before sending Starships to the Moon to fulfill the company’s lunar lander contract with NASA. The same can be said for SpaceX’s future plans for Starship flights to Mars. This first refueling demo will involve two Starship launches from separate launch pads in Texas, or perhaps Florida. The ships will link up together in orbit, and one will attempt to transfer super-cold methane and liquid oxygen propellants to the other. Cryogenic refueling has never been tried at this scale in space before. Chance of a refueling demo happening in 2026: 50 percent.

3. Catch of Starship

SpaceX plans to debut its next version of Starship—Starship Version 3, or V3, with an inaugural test flight in the next few months. This first flight of Starship V3 will look a lot like SpaceX’s past Starship test flights, with the rocket launching from South Texas and flying on a suborbital arc halfway around the world for a precise ocean landing.

If that goes well, SpaceX could take the next step in Starship development on the following flight. This will entail launching Starship—the world’s largest rocket—into low-Earth orbit and bringing the ship back for a reentry over northern Mexico and recovery back at SpaceX’s test facility at Starbase, Texas. There, the ship will be caught back at its launch pad with giant mechanical arms, similar to how SpaceX has recovered the rocket’s Super Heavy booster. A successful catch would be a major leap toward making Starship fully reusable. Chance of a successful Starship catch happening in 2026: 70 percent.

4. Blue Moon Mark 1

Blue Origin’s first lunar lander is a behemoth. If successful, the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander will become the largest spacecraft to ever set down on the lunar surface. The craft stands more than 26 feet (8 meters) tall and is more than 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter. Engineers in Florida are finishing up assembly of the first Blue Moon Mark 1 before shipping it to Houston for environmental testing.

The lander will then travel back to Cape Canaveral for preparations to fly on top of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. The company’s current plan is to launch the Moon lander on a New Glenn rocket some time this year. The unpiloted lander’s first jaunt to the Moon will take on greater importance as engineers study the possibility of modifying future Blue Moon Mark 1s for astronauts. Chance of Blue Moon Mark 1 launching in 2026: 70 percent.

5a. Rocket Lab’s Neutron debut (tied with Stoke’s Nova)

Rocket Lab has comfortably held second place among US rocket companies for number of launches per year. The company’s light-class launcher, the Electron, surpassed a monthly launch cadence in 2025. Rocket Lab’s next rocket, the medium-lift Neutron, will open new markets for the company. Neutron is designed with a reusable first stage and integrated payload fairing, which will return to Earth in one piece after releasing the rocket’s expendable upper stage to accelerate into orbit.

The launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, is complete, but the rocket wasn’t ready to meet Rocket Lab’s goal of a first flight by the end of 2025. Rocket Lab’s founder, Peter Beck, has a history of giving his team ambitious schedules for the first flight of Neutron. His latest projection calls for delivering the first Neutron rocket to the launch site in the first quarter of 2026, “with first launch thereafter.” Chance of Neutron launching in 2026: 50 percent.

5b. First flight of Stoke’s Nova rocket (tied with Rocket Lab’s Neutron)

Unlike Rocket Lab, Stoke Space has no experience in launching orbital rockets, but the company’s founders have an impressive pedigree with long tenures overseeing propulsion projects at Blue Origin. Stoke’s first rocket, the Nova, is officially scheduled to fly for the first time in 2026. Construction is in an advanced stage for Nova’s launch site at Cape Canaveral, while Nova’s first and second stages underwent qualification testing last year.

Engineers completed the first hot-fire test of the rocket’s first stage engine in 2024 in Washington state, following earlier tests of the upper stage propulsion system. What’s unique about Nova is that it’s designed for full reusability, with a recoverable booster and upper stage. Stoke is the only company besides SpaceX that seems close to actually test-flying a fully reusable rocket. Chance of Nova launching in 2026: 30 percent.

7. Debut of China’s Moon ship

China’s goal of landing astronauts on the Moon by 2030 is now less than five years away, and a critical test of the country’s new human-rated spacecraft is scheduled for launch sometime in 2026. The partially reusable Mengzhou spacecraft is designed to carry up to seven people to the China’s Tiangong space station or a smaller crew on voyages to the Moon, eventually replacing China’s Shenzhou crew capsule tailored for low-Earth orbit missions.

Mengzhou is akin to NASA’s Orion spacecraft or Apollo command module and is a key element of China’s lunar architecture, along with a human-rated lander named Lanyue, which will make its debut in space on a separate mission. It will launch on China’s new Long March 10A rocket, which the China Manned Space Agency says will make its first flight along with Mengzhou—likely uncrewed—some time this year. We’ve seen hot-fire testing of the rocket’s booster stage in recent months, and China typically does not publicize launch schedules without believing they are realistic. Chance of Long March 10A and Mengzhou launching in 2026: 60 percent.

8. China’s race for a reusable rocket

The first of several reusable rockets under development in China launched in early December. The medium-class Zhuque-3 rocket, developed by a commercial startup named LandSpace, successfully reached orbit on its debut flight, a remarkable achievement in its own right. But LandSpace’s attempt to land the rocket’s first stage booster downrange showed it is close to recovering—and eventually reusing—a Zhuque-3 booster stage.

The rocket failed during its landing burn moments before landing, then crashed right next to its landing pad in the Gobi Desert. LandSpace will try again with Zhuque-3, and other companies have rockets that will make similar attempts in the coming months. Chance of a Chinese orbital-class rocket making a successful landing in 2026: 60 percent.

9. Launch of Haven-1

If you look at public schedules, the California-based company Vast seems to have a significant head start in the race to put a commercial space station in orbit before the International Space Station’s retirement in 2030. Vast’s first crewed habitat, named Haven-1, is under construction for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, followed by the first of up to four visits by private crews on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, with each stay lasting up to 10 days. This capability is far short of the permanent human presence supported by the ISS, but a successful launch and activation of Haven-1 would be a significant accomplishment for the commercial space industry.

Vast aims to follow Haven-1 with a larger space station to accommodate visitors for longer stays. So what’s the status of Haven-1? The primary structure of the flight module completed structural testing in October and was set to undergo final weld inspections and integration soon thereafter. Vast’s most recent public schedule called for the launch of Haven-1 as soon as May 2026, but it seems likely to take longer than that to fully outfit the module’s interior, which appeared bare during structural testing earlier this fall. Chance of Haven-1 launching in 2026: 30 percent.

10. NASA’s Roman Space Telescope

The next of NASA’s flagship-class astronomical observatories is now fully assembled at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named for NASA’s first chief astronomer, will have a field of view at least 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope. Roman’s primary science instrument will perform wide-area surveys of the Universe, covering 50 times more of the sky in five years than Hubble did in its first 30 years.

A secondary coronagraph instrument will advance astronomers’ ability to directly image exoplanets. NASA announced in December that assembly of Roman was completed, kicking off a series of environmental tests before its scheduled launch no earlier than September on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Chance of the Roman Space Telescope launching in 2026: 80 percent.

11. China’s Chang’e 7 mission

The next robotic mission in China’s lunar exploration program is scheduled for launch as soon as August 2026. Chang’e 7 won’t repeat China’s past feat of returning samples from the Moon, but it will have its share of firsts. The lander will attempt to set down in the Moon’s south pole region and deploy a miniature flying probe to search for water ice in cold traps hidden on the floors of dark craters. The target landing site is on the rim of Shackleton Crater, which is within range of cold, unlit regions thought to harbor water ice. If successful, Chang’e 7 will be the first mission to locate and characterize water ice deposits on the lunar surface, beating similar US missions to the Moon by a year or more. Chance of Chang’e 7 launching in 2026: 80 percent.

12. The rise of Europe’s commercial launchers

Similar to the way we addressed China’s emerging reusable rockets, we decided to group Europe’s new startup launch companies together in a single entry. Three of these European companies say they are targeting the first flight of their small satellite launchers in 2026. One is Isar Aerospace, headquartered near Munich, which launched its first Spectrum rocket in March 2025. The rocket didn’t make it far, but Isar is gearing up for a second orbital launch attempt in the early weeks of 2026.

Trailing behind Isar is Rocket Factory Augsburg, another German company, which appeared to be on track to launch its first RFA One rocket before a fiery accident during a test-firing in 2024. PLD Space of Spain is targeting a first flight of its Miura 5 rocket in 2026, although it seems to be lagging behind Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg. Other serious contenders in the European small launch arena include MaiaSpace of France and Germany’s HyImpulse. Both appear to have delayed their first orbital launch attempts to 2027. Chance of a European launch startup reaching orbit in 2026: 20 percent.

13. Terran R’s first flight

Relativity Space is officially targeting the first flight of its heavy-lift Terran R rocket in late 2026, but there is reason for skepticism. At its Long Beach, California, headquarters, Relativity is wrapping up welding on the first stage, second stage, and interstage adapter for Terran R’s first flight, while also installing internal fluid lines to flow propellant to the rocket’s engines. Each stage is expected to undergo structural testing and acceptance testing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi before shipment to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for launch preparations. At Stennis, Relativity is performing acceptance testing on first stage engines and continuing developmental testing on Terran R’s upper stage engine. Construction is still in full swing at the Terran R’s launch pad in Florida. Chance of Terran R’s first launch in 2026: 10 percent.

14. Debut of Eclipse

Another rocket that is officially scheduled to launch in late 2026 is Eclipse, the new medium-lift launcher under joint development by Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman. On paper, the Eclipse rocket is at about the same stage of development as Relativity’s Terran R. The most recent update from Firefly indicated the company has completed more than 100 hot-fire tests of the Eclipse’s Miranda main engine, more than Relativity has done with its Aeon R main engine. Relativity is already test-firing its upper stage engine, while Firefly has not yet achieved that milestone. Chance of Eclipse’s first launch in 2026: 20 percent.

15. IM-3 and Vestri

The first US company to put a spacecraft on the Moon plans to return to the lunar surface in 2026. Intuitive Machines is preparing to launch its third Nova-C lander in the second half of the year, but it hasn’t released a more specific schedule. In the company’s most recent quarterly update, officials said they are targeting May 2026 for a flight readiness review, the last review before shipping the spacecraft to the launch site in Florida.

Intuitive Machines’ first two landers toppled over after landing but still returned some limited science data to Earth. The next lander will incorporate updated navigation sensors to help guide it to a gentle touchdown in the Reiner Gamma region on the Moon’s near side. A secondary payload will hitch a ride to space on the same launcher with IM-3. The Vestri mission from the asteroid mining company AstroForge will head into the Solar System and attempt to land on a metal-rich asteroid. Chance of IM-3 and Vestri launching in 2026: 50 percent.

16. Blue Ghost Mission 2

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander completed the first-ever fully successful commercial mission on the Moon’s surface last March. The next Blue Ghost mission is more ambitious, with a landing targeted for the far side of the Moon “as early as 2026,” Firefly says. The next mission actually consists of three spacecraft, with a Blue Ghost lander aiming for the lunar far side, a Firefly-built Elytra orbiter for data relay, and a European Space Agency (ESA) orbiter called Lunar Pathfinder.

This will be the first US mission to attempt a landing on the lunar far side, following two Chinese landers that touched down on the back side of the Moon in 2019 and 2024. Updates from Firefly suggest the company is still in the early stages of manufacturing flight hardware for Blue Ghost Mission 2, while an ESA website shows a target launch schedule no earlier than November 2026. Chance of Blue Ghost Mission 2 launching in 2026: 10 percent.

17. America’s first geosynchronous refueler

Astroscale, a company founded with the purpose of cleaning up space debris, has pivoted to pursuing the more lucrative market of satellite servicing. Many of the key technologies needed for space debris cleanup, such as rendezvous and proximity operations, are also applicable to Astroscale’s new focus. Astroscale launched a satellite last year to approach a derelict Japanese rocket in low-Earth orbit, marking the first time any mission has inspected a piece of space junk.

Astroscale’s next mission will go for another first: refueling a US military satellite above geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the Earth. Western analysts believe China completed the first geosynchronous satellite refueling mission in 2025, and Astroscale’s contract with the US Space Force will attempt to do the same. The most recent schedule available for this mission shows a launch in mid-2026. Chance of Astroscale’s refueler launching in 2026: 50 percent.

18. Europe’s Plato mission

The European Space Agency’s next medium-class science mission, named for the Greek philosopher Plato, could become the most prolific planet hunter ever sent into space. Fitted with 26 ultra-sensitive cameras, Plato will search for exoplanets by detecting tiny dips in light as planets pass in front of other stars. Some estimates suggest Plato could discover several thousand to several tens of thousands of extrasolar worlds, doubling or tripling the number of exoplanets in the confirmed archive.

Plato is specifically designed to find Sun-Earth analogs, potentially habitable rocky planets around stars like the Sun. These are expected to be a small percentage of Plato’s total planet haul. Preparations for Plato’s launch appear to be going well. ESA said ground teams finished assembling the observatory in October, and Plato will spend the coming months in vibration, acoustic, and thermal vacuum testing. The mission has at least two months of schedule margin for its official launch date in December 2026. But given the launch is scheduled for so late in the year, there is a chance a minor delay could push the start of Plato’s mission into 2027. Chance of Plato launching in 2026: 60 percent.

19. Gaganyaan orbital test flight

India has lofty ambitions for its space program, including a heavy-lift rocket, a space station in low-Earth orbit, and eventually human landings on the Moon. The precursor to many of these objectives is Gaganyaan, India’s human spaceflight program. Gaganyaan has been in full-scale development since winning approval from the Indian government in 2018. The Gaganyaan program still has government backing, but India has a history of announcing unrealistic schedules for the spacecraft’s initial test flights.

The first uncrewed orbital test flight of the Gaganyaan capsule has been mere months away for the last five years. The first test flight is currently slated for the first quarter of 2026. India’s space agency has reported some progress in 2025, such as human-rating the capsule’s LVM3 launch vehicle, installation of the spacecraft’s propulsion system, and parachute tests. But it’s a good idea to be skeptical of any of India’s schedules until officials provide more meaningful updates. Chance of Gaganyaan-1 launching in 2026: 30 percent.

20. Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission

This is an exciting mission, but the most dramatic part of MMX’s journey will come after it arrives at Mars in 2027. MMX will attempt to land on the Martian moon Phobos up to two times and collect samples for a return to Earth. The mission is poised to begin with a launch in October to start its journey to Mars. The launch was previously set for 2024, but Japan’s space agency delayed it due to problems with the country’s new H3 rocket.

The H3 scored a series of successful flights until December, when it failed to deliver a Japanese navigation satellite to orbit. There’s still time for engineers to investigate the failure and return the H3 to flight before MMX’s planetary launch window in October, but the H3 failure introduced some doubt into a scheduled that seemed assured before last month. The fully integrated MMX spacecraft underwent environmental testing throughout 2025. MMX builds on Japan’s successful Hayabusa 2 mission, which brought specimens from an asteroid back to Earth in 2020. If all goes according to plan, samples from Phobos should be back on Earth in 2031. Chance of MMX launching in 2026: 80 percent.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Thursday 8 January 2026 at 4:52 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

As he addressed an audience of virologists from China, Australia, and Singapore at October’s Pandemic Research Alliance Symposium, Wei Zhao introduced an eye-catching idea.

The gene-editing technology Crispr is best known for delivering groundbreaking new therapies for rare diseases, tweaking or knocking out rogue genes in conditions ranging from sickle cell disease to hemophilia. But Zhao and his colleagues at Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity have envisioned a new application.

They believe Crispr could be tailored to create a next-generation treatment for influenza, whether that’s the seasonal strains which plague both the northern and southern hemispheres on an annual basis or the worrisome new variants in birds and other wildlife that might trigger the next pandemic.

Crispr can edit the genetic code—the biological instruction book that makes life possible—within the cells of every living being. That means it can take different forms. The best-known version is mediated by the Cas9 enzyme; this can fix errors or mutations within genes by cutting strands of DNA. But virologists like Zhao are more interested in Cas9’s less famous cousin, the Cas13 enzyme, which can do the same to RNA. In human cells, RNA molecules carry instructions from DNA to make proteins, but the genetic code of influenza viruses is composed entirely of RNA strands—a vulnerability that Cas13 can exploit.

“Cas13 can target these RNA viruses and inactivate them,” Zhao explained.

Human cells do not naturally make either Cas9 or Cas13; both of these enzymes are found in the immune systems of bacteria and microscopic organisms called archaea, where Cas13 enables them to disable invading viruses called phages. Zhao and a wider team of scientists are devising an innovative system to confer the same benefits to humans.

Initially pioneered in the lab as a novel Covid antiviral, their idea is to develop a nasal spray or an injection that uses lipid nanoparticles to deliver molecular instructions to flu-infected cells in the respiratory tract. It’s a two-stage process. The first molecule would be an mRNA that instructs the cells to make Cas13, with the second being a so-called guide RNA that directs Cas13 to a specific part of the influenza virus’s RNA code.

“Cas13 then cuts the viral RNA, disrupting the virus’s ability to replicate and effectively stopping the infection at the genetic level,” says Sharon Lewin, an infectious diseases physician at the Peter Doherty Institute who is leading the project.

While the main aim would be to use the technology as a way of curbing short-term infections, Zhao also envisions the spray being used to prevent infections, for example during a particularly virulent flu season. “You’d basically be preparing the cells in your respiratory tract to produce this Cas13, as a first layer of defense,” he says. “It’s like the army—you’d have those soldiers armed and ready to meet their enemy.”

The main attraction of this idea is that Cas13 can be engineered, via the guide RNA, to target so-called conserved regions of influenza’s genetic code. Those are known segments of RNA that are found in virtually all flu strains and are crucial to the virus’s survival. Conventional antivirals such as Tamiflu only target particular strains of flu, which swiftly acquire resistance.

Crispr-Cas13 is one of the leading innovations among so-called pan-fluenza antivirals, but there are others too. Monoclonal antibodies are also designed to target conserved regions of influenza’s genetic code, while other drugs aim to ramp up the production of interferons, the body’s inbuilt alarm system that signals immune cells to attack an invading pathogen.

With the influenza A strain alone killing 12,000 to 52,000 Americans every year, depending on the severity of the flu season, the need for better alternatives is clear. But as Nicholas Heaton, professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University points out, numerous hurdles still need to be overcome before any Crispr-Cas13 nasal sprays or jabs could be rolled out.

“I like the idea of it, but it’s putting a foreign protein from a bacteria into someone’s body,” he says. “So will the body make an immune response against it?” Heaton also cautions against “off-target effects,” the chance that a Crispr treatment will inadvertently go after your body’s own RNA as well as an invading virus.

One early safety assessment has already been carried out at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where scientists have used human lung and blood vessel cells to create a “lung on a chip.” In the case of severe flu infections, influenza invades and replicates within microscopic air sacs called alveoli, making this a useful model to examine whether training these cells to produce the Cas13 enzyme can help fight off severe flu.

According to Donald Ingber, the institute’s founding director who pioneered the lung-on-a-chip models, studies have shown that the Cas13-powered cells could fight off various strains of flu—from the H1N1 strain responsible for the 2009 swine flu pandemic to H3N2, which has been responsible for a particular virulent seasonal flu outbreak this winter. Not only that, but there seemed to be no unwanted consequences. “We didn’t see any off-target effects, which was amazing,” says Ingber. “We suppressed viral replication, but also the molecules that mediate inflammation which are secreted when your tissues are infected.”

Still, scientists are understandably cautious. Ingber says that figuring out a way to deliver a lipid nanoparticle containing the instructions to make Cas13—directly to alveoli cells deep within the lungs—is no easy task. Heaton also points out that any antiviral that targets a virus directly may help encourage the pathogen to further mutate, even if it is targeting seemingly integral parts of its genetic code. “Typically, what we find is that nature has a way,” he says. “It’s like with the old Jurassic Park movie.”

Heaton is also working on alternative ways of harnessing the power of Crispr to target flu. Another idea may be to play defense, using the Cas9 enzyme to adjust our own genetic code to make us more resistant to flu. “We all have genes that are being expressed that are allowing the virus to get into your cells and replicate,” he says. “But what if we could find one of these key genetic factors which the virus really needs and just turn it down a little. Is there something in our biology which we can do with less of that influenza can’t?”

To explore this, scientists have been carrying out a painstaking series of experiments. Research groups, including Heaton’s lab, take human cells, use Cas9 to remove genes one at a time, and see whether the influenza virus can still kill them. This has already yielded a key discovery: flu relies upon a gene called SLC35A1, which ensures that certain sugars are present on the outside of our cells. According to Heaton, this gene is the flu’s very own Achilles’ heel.

“Flu uses those sugars as a receptor,” he says. “Theoretically, if you could make an inhibitor of that gene and have somebody inhale it, that would essentially stop all flu.”

Of course, given that mammals and influenza have been in a biological arms race for millions of years, evolution would likely have already eliminated SLC35A1 if it were possible for humans to survive without it. However, Heaton is not ruling out a more nuanced approach.

“What if we don't completely eliminate this gene?” he says. “What if we only eliminate it or reduce it transiently in a specific part of our body. Would that be tolerated? It’s still very early stages with these technologies, but I like this idea of finding genes that can restrict the virus’s capabilities, and then trying to see whether that would be safe.”

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 6 January 2026 at 3:50 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

Which US rocket companies achieved the most during 2025?

Once again, Ars Technica is here to provide some answers in the form of our annual power ranking of US launch companies. We began doing this in 2022 and have since put out a top-10 list every year (see 2023 and 2024). Our intent, as always, is to spark debate, discussion, and appreciation for the challenge of operating a successful rocket company. It’s a demanding business, both technically and financially. We respect the grit and hustle because we know just how hard this stuff is.

Please also note that this is a subjective list, although hard metrics such as total launches, tonnage to orbit, success rate, and more were all important factors in the decision. And finally, our focus remains on what each company accomplished in 2025, not on what they might do in the future.

1. SpaceX (no change from 2024)

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. As of the first week of December, SpaceX has launched 165 rockets in 2025, the vast majority of which were used Falcon 9 boosters. The company has put more than 1 million kg of cargo into orbit and remains NASA’s essential contractor for keeping the International Space Station operating with a steady rotation of crew and consumables.

Regarding the larger Starship vehicle, this was a frustrating year for SpaceX. The first three launches of the massive rocket (in January, March, and May) resulted in a failure of the Starship upper stage. The last two flights of the year (in August and October) were much more successful, setting the stage for the company to move to its Block 3 version of the vehicle. However, the first of these Block 3 Super Heavy boosters failed catastrophically during pressure testing.

2. Blue Origin (+2)

This is the biggest mover on the list, leaping from No. 4 on the list to No. 2, and this is, of course, because Jeff Bezos’ company sent Katy Perry into space. (They could have achieved No. 1 had they not brought her back). In all seriousness, this was a breakthrough year for Blue Origin, finally shaking the notion that it was a company full of promise that could not quite deliver.

The company 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. I certainly did not think they would nail the landing on just the second launch, and it is to their immense credit that Blue Origin pulled this off.

Additionally, Blue Origin’s much smaller New Shepard rocket launched a record number of times, eight, this year. The company also neared completion of its first lunar lander, Blue Moon Mk 1. And it started producing BE-4 rocket engines by the dozen, so many in fact that United Launch Alliance chief Tory Bruno stopped complaining about having enough.

3. Rocket Lab (no change)

Rocket Lab had an excellent year, garnering its highest total of Electron launches (18 as of early December) and having complete mission success. Rocket Lab has now gone nearly three dozen launches without a failure. The company also continued to make progress on its medium-lift Neutron vehicle, although its debut was ultimately delayed to mid-2026, at least.

Additionally, Rocket Lab continued its ascendance as a spacecraft company. It played a key role in supporting Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander at the beginning of this year, and in November, its two ESCAPADE vehicles were safely switched on after launch, beginning their journey to Mars.

As it has grown, Rocket Lab’s ability to execute has remained excellent.

4. United Launch Alliance (-2)

It was supposed to be a breakthrough year for ULA, having finally gotten the Vulcan rocket flying and moving into an operational cadence. Alas, that did not happen.

In late 2024, the company’s CEO, Tory Bruno, told reporters that ULA aimed to launch as many as 20 missions in 2025, with roughly an even split between the legacy Atlas V launcher and Vulcan. Now, it’s likely that ULA will close out 2025 with six flights—five with the Atlas V and just one with the Vulcan rocket that the company is so eager to accelerate into service.

The Vulcan rocket’s sole launch this year occurred on August 12, when it took off on a mission sponsored by the US Space Force. In an article in November, Ars speculated that Vulcan flew just once in 2025 due to an ongoing investigation of the vehicle’s solid rocket boosters.

To top it all off, at the end of December, Blue Origin swooped in to hire Bruno away to run its new national security division. That is, ULA’s leader is leaving a company that largely subsists on national defense launch contracts to go be a national defense contract rainmaker at its direct competitor. From which ULA buys its rocket engines.

United Launch Alliance’s third Vulcan rocket lifted off August 12, 2025, on a national security mission for the US Space Force.

Credit: United Launch Alliance

5. Northrop Grumman (+1)

Only one other US company had a successful orbital launch in 2025, and it was Northrop Grumman. In April, the company’s Minotaur IV rocket carried a payload into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office.

The company also debuted its new, larger Cygnus XL spacecraft this year. However, the vehicle had some issues with its engine burns, delaying its arrival at the International Space Station. As Northrop’s new Antares 330 rocket is still in development, the Cygnus vehicle is flying on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. One of the interesting things to track next year is whether the Northrop-Firefly collaboration can succeed in getting the Antares 330 flying any time soon. Northrop is contracted for just one more Falcon 9 launch at present for Cygnus.

As part of its launch program, Northrop also provides solid rocket boosters for ULA’s Vulcan rocket and NASA’s Space Launch System vehicle.

6. Firefly (-1)

The year 2025 started out with a bang—a good one—for Firefly. In January, the company’s Blue Ghost lander launched on a Falcon 9 rocket and subsequently landed on the Moon. This was an extremely impressive achievement, as Firefly became the first private company to complete a fully successful soft landing on the Moon.

Unfortunately, it was a far less successful year in launch. The company launched its Alpha rocket just a single time in 2025, in April, carrying an experimental satellite for Lockheed Martin. However, a problem occurred during stage separation, damaging the rocket’s upper stage engine and preventing the payload from reaching orbit.

Then, in September, as Firefly was working toward a second Alpha launch in 2025, the rocket was destroyed on the company’s vertical test stand in Texas. Imagery posted on social media platforms showed a fireball engulfing the test stand and a column of black smoke rising into the sky over Firefly’s facility roughly 40 miles north of Austin. So 2025 also ended with a bang, albeit a bad one.

7. Stoke Space (no change)

Stoke Space has yet to launch a rocket, but it continues to make progress toward that goal. When Ars visited the company’s launch site in November, we found all of the elements for the Nova rocket’s ground systems in place, with finishing work being done. The company is working toward the debut of Nova in 2026, but as with all new rockets, caution should abound when it comes to launch dates.

What sets Stoke apart from some of its other similarly unproven competitors is the level of its fundraising. In October, Stoke announced a massive $510 million Series D funding round. That was a lot of money in a challenging time to raise launch firm funding and meant the company has a deep war chest in order to survive the challenging final months of developing a new launch vehicle. It also means that investors, with a peek behind the curtain, find Stoke to be highly credible.

Stoke Space successfully tests its advanced full-flow staged combustion rocket engine, designed to power the Nova launch vehicle’s first stage.

Credit: Stoke Space

8. Relativity Space (no change)

A year ago, Relativity Space looked to be fading into bankruptcy. However, in the spring of this year, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt stepped in to provide funding critical to keeping the California-based launch company solvent. He is now effectively the company’s owner and chief executive.

Thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars from Schmidt, as well as his efforts to privately raise additional capital, Relativity is back on solid footing and is pressing ahead with development of the Terran R rocket. This will be a beast of a launch vehicle if and when it reaches the pad and takes flight. The question is, how far along is Terran R really? Aside from slickly produced monthly updates, the company has been doing little public outreach under Schmidt. I’d be surprised to see Terran R take flight in 2026, but it sure would be cool if it did.

9. Astra (no change)

What’s going on at Astra, which last year was resurrected from a near-death experience? We can’t be quite sure, but the company has continued development of its Rocket 4 vehicle this year, which is intended to have a payload capacity of 600 kg to low-Earth orbit.

We know that work is ongoing with the vehicle’s first stage engine, thanks to hotfire test videos posted on social media channels in recent months, here and here. And in September, the company told Space News it is targeting mid-2026 for the debut launch of Rocket 4, which, if you speak the language of launch delays, almost certainly means 2027. But just like with Nova and Terran R, we are hopeful to see Rocket 4 take flight in 2026.

However, I would say there is about a one-in-three chance that we see a single one of these three new rockets launch in 2026.

10. Phantom Space and Vaya Space (previously unranked)

We are putting these companies on the list not because of a strong conviction that either will ever reach orbit. Rather, it is because a list of the top 10 launch companies ought to have at least 10 companies on it. And here we are.

Moreover, we have placed Phantom and Vaya together in the 10th spot because they are sharing Launch Complex 13 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This is the site formerly leased to SpaceX for use as its Landing Zone 1 and Landing Zone 2 pads.

We really don’t know how Phantom is doing with the development of its Daytona rocket, nor Vaya with its Dauntless launch vehicle. Both seem to be perpetually about two years away from a launch. If either reaches orbit before the end of this decade, I would be rather impressed.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 6 January 2026 at 3:48 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

Archaeologists have discovered Africa’s oldest known cremation pyre at the base of Mount Hora in Malawi. According to a paper published in the journal Science Advances, radiocarbon testing dates the site to about 9,500 years ago, prompting a rethinking of group labor and ritual in such ancient hunter-gatherer communities.

Many cultures have practiced some form of cremation. There is a Viking cremation site known as Kalvestene on the small island of Hjarnø in Denmark, for instance. And back in 2023, we reported on an unusual Roman burial site where cremated remains had not been transported to a separate final resting place but remained in place, covered in brick tiles and a layer of lime and surrounded by several dozen bent and twisted nails—possibly an attempt to prevent the deceased from rising from the grave to haunt the living.)

But the practice was extremely rare among hunter-gatherer societies, since building a pyre is labor-intensive and requires a great deal of communal resources. There is very little evidence of cremation predating the mid-Holocene (between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago). According to the authors of this latest paper, the earliest known concentration of burnt human remains was found at Lake Mungo in Australia and dates back 40,000 years, but there is no evidence of a pyre, making it challenging to determine specific details.

The oldest pyre discovered thus far is the Xaasaa Na’ site in Alaska, dating to around 11,500 years ago and containing the remains of a 3-year-old child. There is evidence of burned human remains in Egypt dating around 7,500 years ago, but the earliest confirmed cremations in that region only date back 3,300 years.

That’s what makes the discovery of an intact hunter-gatherer cremation pyre with the remains of an adult woman at the Hora-1 site so significant. Situated under an overhang at the base of a granite hill, Hora-1 was first excavated in the 1950s. Archaeologists determined that it had been a burial ground between 8,000 and 16,000 years ago, with the interment of several intact (uncremated) bodies. The pyre is unique: an ash bed containing 170 bone fragments, mostly from arms and legs. It’s the only example of cremation at the site.

A bed of ash

Reconstructed events of the 9,500-year-old pyre.

Patrick Fahy

 

Recovery of cremated remains.

Grace Veatch

 

Sediment walls showing striped layers of ash from the pyre.

Flora Schilt

 

Microscopic ash layers.

Flora Schilt

 

Bone modifications made with stone tools.

Jessica Thompson

 

Pyre points cropped.

Justin Pargeter

 

Examination of the remains found at the pyre site revealed that they belonged to an adult woman, 18 to 60 years old, who was likely cremated within a few days of her death. The team also found distinctive cut marks on several bones, suggesting that the bones had been skinned before the cremation. Given the absence of teeth or a skull in the pyre, it seems whoever cremated the woman also removed the head. The body was likely positioned with arms and legs flexed, based on the distribution of the limbs.

The disarticulation was unlikely to be due to scavengers, per the authors. “These hands-on manipulations, cutting flesh from the bones and removing the skull, sound very gruesome, but there are many reasons people may have done this associated with remembrance, social memory, and ancestral veneration,” said co-author Jessica Cerezo-Román of the University of Oklahoma. “There is growing evidence among ancient hunter-gatherers in Malawi for mortuary rituals that include posthumous removal, curation, and secondary reburial of body parts, perhaps as tokens.”

The authors also analyzed the layers of pyre sediment using microscopic and spectroscopic techniques and subjected charcoal samples to radiocarbon dating. Those collective results enabled the researchers to reconstruct the sequence of events of the cremation. The pyre was probably built by collecting and assembling at least 30 kilograms of deadwood and grass, which would have required considerable community effort. And since it takes temperatures of 500° C or more to cremate a body, the pyre would have been carefully tended to keep adding fuel to the fire.

There was also evidence of flintknapping activity around the pyre, including several stone points concentrated within the burning remains, suggesting they had been intentionally placed there. And while this is the only evidence of a cremation pyre, it’s clear that people continued to build fires at the site in the same exact spot for the next several hundred years, suggesting the cremation was tied to “a deep rooted tradition of repeatedly using and revisiting the site, intricately linked to memory-making and the establishment of a ‘persistent place,’” the authors concluded, thereby challenging “traditional assumptions about community-scale operations and place-making in tropical hunter-gatherer societies.”

One mystery in particular still remains. “Why was this one woman cremated when the other burials at the site were not treated that way?” said co-author Jessica Thompson of Yale University. “There must have been something specific about her that warranted special treatment.”

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adz9554 (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 6 January 2026 at 3:46 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

A major study published in BMJ Global Health looked at data from thousands of people and found that drinking just one standard drink per day—about 9 grams of alcohol—was linked to a 50% higher risk of a type of mouth cancer called buccal mucosa cancer. The risk was even higher among people who drank locally made alcoholic drinks.

Mouth cancer is a serious health problem in India. It is the second most common cancer in the country, with nearly 144,000 new cases and about 80,000 deaths each year. Most of these cancers affect the soft tissue inside the cheeks and lips. Sadly, fewer than half of patients survive for more than five years after being diagnosed.

In India, both alcohol and tobacco use are common, especially in rural areas. Many people use smokeless tobacco and drink local alcoholic beverages, some of which may contain dangerous chemicals. Until now, it has been difficult to tell exactly how alcohol and tobacco each affect cancer risk, especially when used together.

To study this issue, researchers compared 1,803 people with buccal mucosa cancer to 1,903 people without the disease. These participants came from five different research centers in India and were studied between 2010 and 2021. Most were between the ages of 35 and 54, but nearly half of the cancer cases occurred in people as young as 25 to 45 years old.

Participants answered questions about their drinking habits and tobacco use. They reported how long they had been drinking, how often, and what kinds of drinks they used. The list included 11 international drinks like beer, whisky, vodka, and rum, as well as 30 types of local brews such as desi daru, mahua, bangla, and apong.

The results were clear. People who drank alcohol regularly had a much higher chance of getting mouth cancer. Compared to people who didn’t drink, those who did had a 68% higher risk. The risk rose to 72% for those who preferred international drinks, and to 87% for those who mainly drank local brews.

Even tiny amounts of alcohol made a difference. People who drank less than 2 grams of beer per day still had a higher risk. Just one standard drink per day was linked to a 50% greater chance of cancer.

Using alcohol and tobacco together was especially harmful. People who used both had more than four times the risk of developing mouth cancer. Researchers believe that alcohol may damage the lining of the mouth, making it easier for harmful substances in tobacco to cause cancer.

The study estimates that about 11.5% of mouth cancer cases in India can be blamed on alcohol alone. In some states like Meghalaya, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh, that number goes up to 14%. Even more concerning, the combination of alcohol and chewing tobacco may account for nearly two-thirds—about 62%—of all buccal mucosa cancers in India.

The researchers also raised concerns about local alcoholic drinks, which are often unregulated and may contain toxic chemicals like methanol or acetaldehyde. Some of these drinks were found to have up to 90% alcohol content.

Because there are no strict safety rules, people who drink these products may be exposed to dangerous levels of harmful substances.

In conclusion, the study strongly suggests there is no safe level of alcohol use when it comes to mouth cancer risk. Public health experts say that cutting down or completely avoiding both alcohol and tobacco could greatly reduce the number of mouth cancer cases in India.

Taking action now could save many lives and help prevent this deadly disease from continuing to rise.

If you care about alcoholism, please read studies that your age may decide whether alcohol is good or bad for you, and people over 40 need to prevent dangerous alcohol/drug interactions.

For more information about alcohol, please see recent studies about moderate alcohol drinking linked to high blood pressure, and results showing this drug combo shows promise for treating alcoholism.

Copyright © 2025 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.

Source

Alzheimer’s disease is physically characterized by the accumulation of amyloid beta plaques in the brain. These plaques are formed from the aggregation of amyloid beta peptides, which are proteins produced as a normal byproduct of cellular activity.

When these peptides are produced at high rates or are not cleared effectively, they can clump together and disrupt brain function. Strategies to reduce the production or accumulation of these proteins are a major focus of preventative medicine.

Scientific literature has previously suggested that meditation might help slow brain aging and reduce the risk of dementia. However, it has been difficult to pinpoint which specific element of meditation drives these potential benefits.

Some practices emphasize mental training and focused attention, while others emphasize physical relaxation and breath control. The authors of the current study sought to disentangle these factors.

“When you are relaxed, whenever you breath in your heart rate increases and when you breath out it decreases. When you breathe slower, these oscillations in heart rate become larger,” said study author Mara Mather, a professor of gerontology, psychology and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California.

“We found that daily sessions involving breathing slowly to increase oscillations in heart rate tends to decrease levels of amyloid-beta in the blood (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30167-0). Amyloid-beta is a peptide (a small protein) that is a normal byproduct of cellular activity that is, like other metabolic waste products, usually cleared out of the brain and body.

“However, if production levels are too high or clearance rates are not high enough, amyloid-beta levels increase and can start to aggregate (stick together) in the brain, forming amyloid-beta plaque, a signature feature of Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Slow breathing is an important feature of some types of meditative practices but not of other types,” Mather explained. “We were interested in whether slow breathing during meditation would decrease plasma amyloid-beta levels more than meditating without slow breathing.”

To investigate, the researchers recruited 108 participants. The final analysis included 89 healthy young adults between the ages of 18 and 35. The decision to use young adults allowed the researchers to observe physiological changes in a system that had not yet been altered by age-related disease pathology. The participants were screened to ensure they did not already have a regular meditation practice.

Before the main experiment, the team conducted pilot studies to refine their methods. They discovered that novice meditators do not naturally slow their breathing when asked to focus on their breath or body. Even when participants were instructed to focus on the sensations of the belly, their breathing rates remained similar to their resting rates. This finding necessitated explicit instructions for the slow-breathing condition in the main trial.

The participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups for a one-week intervention. The first group practiced mindfulness with slow breathing. They were instructed to inhale for a count of five and exhale for a count of five. This resulted in a pace of approximately six breaths per minute.

The second group practiced mindfulness with normal breathing. They were told to focus on the sensations of their belly but were not given a specific count or rhythm to follow. The third group served as a control and did not engage in any intervention.

“We did a lot of pilot testing and were surprised to find that, at least in novices, asking people to mindfully focus on their breath does not usually make them slow their breathing,” Mather noted. “Thus, we used mindful attention to breath as our active comparison condition.”

Participants in the two active groups practiced their assigned technique for 20 minutes twice a day. This totaled 40 minutes of daily practice for seven days. They used a laptop and a specialized heart rate sensor during their sessions. This equipment recorded their physiological data and ensured they were following the protocol. Blood samples were collected from all participants before the intervention began and again after the week concluded.

The analysis of the heart rate data confirmed that the groups performed as intended. The group assigned to slow breathing showed large oscillations in their heart rate during the practice sessions. This confirmed they were successfully engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. The group assigned to mindfulness with normal breathing did not show these oscillations. Their physiological state during the practice was similar to their resting state.

The blood analysis revealed distinct differences in amyloid beta levels between the groups. Participants who practiced mindfulness with slow breathing showed a decrease in plasma amyloid beta 40 and 42 levels. This reduction occurred after only one week of daily practice. The findings support the hypothesis that parasympathetic activation through breathing can alter how amyloid proteins are produced or cleared.

The results for the normal breathing group were different. Participants who practiced mindfulness without slowing their breath showed an increase in plasma amyloid beta levels. This increase aligns with the theory that the mental focus required for meditation can increase physiological arousal in novices. The effort to maintain attention may have stimulated the release of noradrenaline, driving the production of amyloid beta.

“Despite hearing all the same mindfulness instructions, the two conditions showed opposite effects after one week of daily practice,” Mather told PsyPost. “The mindfulness alone condition showed increases in plasma amyloid-beta while the mindfulness plus slow breathing condition showed decreases.”

“This raises the question of why mindfulness alone would increase amyloid-beta levels. Mindfulness requires focused attention. Noradrenaline is a neuromodulator that supports focused attention. Previous studies (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-025-00911-8.epdf p. 287 for review) suggest that noradrenergic activity can increase amyloid-beta production, while muscarinic receptors that can sense vagus nerve activity tend to decrease amyloid-beta production.”

The control group showed no significant changes in amyloid beta levels over the one-week period. This stability in the control group strengthens the conclusion that the changes observed in the other groups were due to the specific interventions.

“Different types of meditative practices can have quite different effects on your physiology and attention,” Mather siad. “Each type of practice may have different benefits. Our findings suggest that practices that include slow breathing are more likely to decrease plasma amyloid-beta than those that do not.”

The researchers also measured tau proteins, another biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease. No significant changes were found in tau levels or in the ratio of amyloid types. The researchers noted that this was expected, as these markers typically take much longer to change or are more relevant in older populations with existing pathology.

In addition, the researchers assessed psychological outcomes. Participants completed questionnaires regarding their mood, stress, anxiety, and depression levels. Despite the clear physiological differences, there were no significant differences in emotional well-being between the groups at the end of the week. The researchers suggest that one week may be too short a duration to induce noticeable psychological improvements.

There are several potential misinterpretations to avoid when considering these results. A reduction in plasma amyloid beta does not guarantee a reduction in Alzheimer’s risk. While plasma levels are correlated with brain levels, they are not identical. It is also important to consider that the participants were young and healthy. It is not yet known if these effects would be identical in older adults or those with cognitive impairment.

Future research is needed to confirm if these changes in the blood reflect changes in the brain. The researchers are planning studies to measure amyloid beta in cerebrospinal fluid. This would provide a more direct assessment of brain health.

“We currently are working on getting funding to do a clinical trial in which we measure cerebrospinal fluid levels of amyloid-beta before and after a few weeks of slow breathing,” Mather told PsyPost. “Cerebrospinal fluid levels of amyloid-beta are low in healthy 20-year-olds and increase markedly until they get high enough that they start aggregating in brain tissue (usually around age 60 or 70).”

“If we see similar percent decreases in amyloid-beta levels in cerebrospinal fluid as we did in blood plasma, this would mean that people could dial back their amyloid-beta levels to about the levels of someone 5-10 years younger. This could potentially delay or prevent the amyloid-beta aggregation processes that seem to be such a critical trigger for Alzheimer’s disease.”

The researchers also aim to determine if these reductions in amyloid beta can be sustained over longer periods. If the effects are cumulative, daily slow breathing could potentially serve as a low-cost intervention to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

“No other behavioral intervention has been demonstrated to decrease amyloid-beta levels relative to a randomized control,” Mather said. “For instance, while sleep has been shown to reduce amyloid-beta levels every night, no one has designed a sleep intervention that reduces amyloid-beta better than our normal sleep. A critical next step for us to is to test what daily slow breathing does to amyloid-beta levels in the brain.”

The study, “A Randomized Clinical Trial Reveals Effects of Mindfulness and Slow Breathing on Plasma Amyloid Beta Levels.” was authored by Kaoru Nashiro, B Rael Cahn, Paul Choi, Hye Rynn J Lee, Shaakhini Satchi, Jungwon Min, Hyun Joo Yoo, Christine Cho, Noah Mercer, Lorena Sordo, Elizabeth Head, Jeiran Choupan, and Mara Mather.

Source

Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered have been in relatively tight orbits around their host stars, allowing us to track them as they repeatedly loop around them. But we’ve also discovered a handful of planets through a phenomenon that’s called microlensing. This occurs when a planet passes between the line of sight between Earth and another star, creating a gravitational lens that distorts the star, causing it to briefly brighten.

The key thing about microlensing compared to other methods of finding planets is that the lensing planet can be nearly anywhere on the line between the star and Earth. So, in many cases, these events are driven by what are called rogue planets: those that aren’t part of any exosolar system at all, but they drift through interstellar space. Now, researchers have used microlensing and the fortuitous orientation of the Gaia space telescope to spot a Saturn-sized planet that’s the first found in what’s called the “Einstein desert,” which may be telling us something about the origin of rogue planets.

Going rogue

Most of the planets we’ve identified are in orbit around stars and formed from the disks of gas and dust that surrounded the star early in its history. We’ve imaged many of these disks and even seen some with evidence of planets forming within them. So how do you get a planet that’s not bound to any stars? There are two possible routes.

The first involves gravitational interactions, either among the planets of the system or due to an encounter between the exosolar system and a passing star. Under the right circumstances, these interactions can eject a planet from its orbit and send it hurtling through interstellar space. As such, we should expect them to be like any typical planet, ranging in mass from small, rocky bodies up to gas giants. An alternative method of making a rogue planet starts with the same process of gravitational collapse that builds a star—but in this case, the process literally runs out of gas. What’s left is likely to be a large gas giant, possibly somewhere between Jupiter and a brown dwarf star in mass.

Since these objects are unlinked to any exosolar system, they’re not going to have any regular interactions with stars; our only way of spotting them is through microlensing. And microlensing tells us very little about the size of the planet. To figure things out, we would need some indication of things like how distant the star and planet are, and how big the star is.

That doesn’t mean that microlensing events have told us nothing. We can identify the size of the Einstein ring, the circular ring of light that forms when the planet and star are perfectly lined up from Earth’s perspective. Given that information and some of the remaining pieces of info mentioned above, we can figure out the planet’s mass. But even without that, we can make some inferences using statistical models.

Studies of collections of microlensing events (these collections are small, typically in the dozens, because these events are rare and hard to spot) have identified a distinctive pattern. There’s a cluster of relatively small Einstein rings that are likely to have come from relatively small planets. Then, there’s a gap, followed by a second cluster that’s likely to be made by far larger planets. The gap between the two has been termed the “Einstein desert,” and there has been considerable discussion regarding its significance and whether it’s even real or simply a product of the relatively small sample size.

Sometimes you get lucky

All of which brings us to the latest microlensing event, which was picked up by two projects that each gave it a different but equally compelling name. To the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network, the event was KMT-2024-­BLG-­0792. For the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, it was OGLE-­2024-­BLG-­0516. We’ll just call it “the microlensing event” and note that everyone agrees that it happened in early May 2024.

Both of those networks are composed of Earth-based telescopes, and so they only provide a single perspective on the microlensing event. But we got lucky that the European Space Agency’s space telescope Gaia was oriented in a way that made it very easy to capture images. “Serendipitously, the KMT-­2024-­BLG-­0792/OGLE-­2024-­BLG-­0516 microlensing event was located nearly perpendicular to the direction of Gaia’s precession axis,” the researchers who describe this event write. “This rare geometry caused the event to be observed by Gaia six times over a 16-­hour period.”

Gaia is also located at the L2 Lagrange point, which is a considerable distance from Earth. That’s far enough away that the peak of the events’ brightness, as seen from Gaia’s perspective, occurred nearly two hours later than it did for telescopes on Earth. This let us determine the parallax of the microlensing event, and thus its distance. Other images of the star from before or after the event indicated it was a red giant in the galactic bulge, which also gave us a separate check on its likely distance and size.

Using the parallax and the size of the Einstein ring, the researchers determined that the planet involved was roughly 0.2 times the mass of Jupiter, which makes it a bit smaller than the mass of Saturn. Those estimates are consistent with a statistical model that took the other properties into account. The measurements also placed it squarely in the middle of the Einstein desert—the first microlensing event we’ve seen there.

That’s significant because it means we can orient the Einstein desert to a specific mass of a planet within it. Because of the variability of things like distance and the star’s size, not every planet that produces a similar-sized Einstein ring will be similar in size, but statistics suggest that this will typically be the case. And that’s in keeping with one of the potential explanations for the Einstein desert: that it represents the gap in size between the two different methods of making a rogue planet.

For the normal planet formation scenario, the lighter the planet is, the easier it is to be ejected, so you’d expect a bias toward small, rocky bodies. The Saturn-sized planet seen here may be near the upper limit of the sorts of bodies we’d typically see being ejected from an exosolar system. By contrast, the rogue planets that form through the same mechanisms that give us brown dwarfs would typically be Jupiter-sized or larger.

That said, the low number of total microlensing events still leaves the question of the reality of the Einstein gap an open question. Sticking with the data from the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network, the researchers find that the frequency of other detections suggests that we’d have a 27 percent chance of detecting just one item in the area of the Einstein desert even if the desert wasn’t real and detections were equal probably across the size range. So, as is often the case, we’re going to need to let the network do its job for a few years more before we have the data to say anything definitive.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adv9266 (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 3 January 2026 at 12:23 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

Chronic back pain is a serious health issue affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It is not uncommon for back pain to significantly impair quality of life, forcing people to take time off work or undergo long-term treatment. Furthermore, the cumulative medical costs can place a financial strain on people's lives.

Against this backdrop, research that provides scientific support for measures to prevent back pain have been eagerly awaited. While it is widely known that exercise is good for overall health, specific evidence regarding the prevention of lower back pain is limited. In particular, it has long been unclear how effective simple daily actions can be.

A recent large-scale study conducted by Norwegian researchers clearly shows the numerical impact of differences in walking habits on lower back pain risk: "People who walk more than 100 minutes every day have a 23 percent lower risk of lower back problems than those who walk 78 minutes or less," explains Rayane Haddadj, a doctoral researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) specializing in public health.

Walking Time With the Greatest Effect

Hadaj and his team conducted a large-scale, four-year follow-up study of 11,194 adults (average age 55) who participated in the Norwegian Trøndelag Health Study (a cohort study of residents of Trøndelag) and who were free of chronic lower back pain at the start of the study.

The study involved participants wearing accelerometers on their thighs and hips to collect data on walking time and speed over a one-week period, and then annually assessing whether they had experienced back pain lasting three months or more in the past year.

The results showed that walking time is more important than walking speed in preventing back pain. While brisk walking also has some effect, it is the total amount of time walked per day that has the greatest impact on preventive effects. Those who walked 78 to 100 minutes per day had a 13 percent lower risk of back pain; those who walked 101 to 124 minutes a day had a 23 percent lower risk; and those who walked 125 minutes or more had a 24 percent lower risk.

These findings demonstrate that anyone can easily take measures to prevent back pain. No special equipment or expensive training is required; simply increasing the amount of time you walk in your daily life can potentially prevent it. Anyone can easily take up the challenge, even elderly people and those who don't normally exercise, as long as they put in the time.

If back pain can be reliably prevented, not only will quality of life be improved, but it will also directly lead to a reduction in health care costs for society as a whole. According to the research team, back pain is one of the most common health problems in Norway, with 60 to 80 percent of people experiencing it during their lifetime. In fact, they say, back and neck pain have the highest medical costs and represent an enormous burden to the health care system.

“Our findings show the importance of finding time to be physically active in order to prevent not only chronic back pain but many other illnesses as well, which will translate into huge savings for society in the long run,” says NTNU professor Paul Jarle-Mörck.

Preventing Back Pain With Small Measures in Daily Life

The causes of chronic lower back pain are complex. It is thought to develop from a combination of various factors, including aging, poor posture, muscle weakness, and psychological stress. Conventional treatments have focused on medication and physical therapy, making it difficult to reliably prevent recurrence. The effectiveness of walking, a simple and low-cost method, has now been demonstrated, which may spark a major change in treatment.

The benefits of walking are not limited to lower back pain. Walking has a wide range of positive effects, which include improving cardiopulmonary function, maintaining bone density, weight management, and improving mental health. This research supports the comprehensive health benefits of walking, not limited to the single symptom of lower back pain.

Small everyday changes, such as walking more when commuting or shopping, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator, can help prevent back pain. Even for those who already suffer from back pain, these can be effective ways to reduce the risk of recurrence.

Wear shoes, go outside, and walk. This may be the first step toward a future free of back pain.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 3 January 2026 at 4:28 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

The spread of influenza became more severe this fall, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has designated the 2024-25 flu season as the most severe season since 2017-18. In the UK, the spread has begun earlier than at any time since 2003-04.

Against this backdrop, some media outlets have begun using the term “super flu.” However, this term is not an official medical term. The actual name is “subclade K,” a new variant of influenza A H3N2.

This variant has multiple mutations in a protein on the surface of the virus called hemagglutinin, making it antigenically different from the variants used in existing vaccines. This allows it to partially evade immunity acquired through previous infection or vaccines, making people more susceptible to infection. Genetic analysis by the UK Health Security Agency has revealed that 87 percent of H3N2 viruses detected since late August 2025 are subclade K.

The Outbreak Began Earlier Than Usual

The term “super flu” is not necessarily scientifically accurate. The H3N2 strain already caused severe illness in the elderly and children, and the new mutant strain has not made it more deadly. Contrary to the name, the virus's inherent danger is said to be no different from the conventional H3N2 strain.

In 2025, the US influenza pandemic peaked in early February, with active epidemics occurring in 87.3 percent of the country. For 11 consecutive weeks, more than 50 percent of the country recorded high epidemic levels, an anomaly that led to 287 child deaths. However, these figures reflect the scale of the epidemic and do not imply an increase in the lethality of the virus itself.

The influenza epidemic is hitting earlier this year in many parts of the world. While the usual peak in Japan occurs between late December and February, in 2025 the epidemic began in earnest at the end of September. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, of the 23 H3 virus strains collected in Japan between September and November 5 that could be analyzed, 22 were subclade K.

The reason for the early outbreak is thought to be the decline in immunity of the population due to the countermeasures against new coronavirus infection (Covid-19), as well as a decline in physical strength due to the record-breaking heat wave. During the three years of the coronavirus pandemic, the influenza epidemic was largely suppressed. As a result, it is possible that population immunity to the virus was reduced. In fact, with the 2024 influenza pandemic in Australia at its highest level since 19 years, it would not be surprising to see a similar trend in the Northern Hemisphere.

Existing Vaccines Are Effective

There has also been much interest in vaccine efficacy in the face of this virulent strain. The vaccine for the 2025-26 season is based on the conventional J.2 lineage (subclade), which has different antigenicity from subclade K. However, early data from the UK has confirmed that 70-75 percent of vaccinated children and 30-40 percent of adults did not end up visiting the emergency room or being hospitalized after infection. This means that even if the antigenicity is not completely identical, the vaccine remains effective in preventing severe illness.

The basic prevention measures are the same as for conventional influenza. Vaccination is recommended from October to November before the epidemic, and the effect appears about two weeks after vaccination. It is particularly recommended for people aged 65 and over, people with underlying medical conditions, pregnant women, children aged 6 months to 5 years, and medical workers. In daily life, it is effective to thoroughly wash and disinfect your hands, and wear a mask when in crowds. Ventilation in rooms and maintaining appropriate humidity levels are also important in suppressing viral activity.

If symptoms appear, it is best to wait at least 12 hours after the onset of fever before visiting a medical institution. Anti-influenza medication is most effective when taken within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms, and Xofluza and Tamiflu are considered effective. People should refrain from going out for five days after the onset of symptoms and two days (three days for children) after the fever has subsided, and should make sure to get plenty of rest and stay hydrated.

Contrary to the impression given by the word "super," this current epidemic is an extension of the traditional influenza. For this reason, it is essential to respond calmly based on scientific understanding rather than fear.

In fact, the risk of developing severe symptoms can be significantly reduced by combining vaccination with basic infection control measures. Because this is a rare situation in which there are consecutive high-severity seasons, making responsible choices based on accurate information will help protect the health of society as a whole.

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 3 January 2026 at 4:27 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

You might be perfectly satisfied with the noise canceling in your life. Maybe you’ve got ANC headphones for your commute and you’ve found just the right soundproofing materials to finally stop the inter-apartment wars with your neighbors. In that case, don’t read on. We’re sure you won’t be interested in earbuds that can tune out arguments and tune in nature, or thin, affordable, sound-absorbing wallpaper. Not to mention the work that's being done to help people who are hard of hearing, and what's coming next in soundproofing. Yes, the future of noise cancellation is looking very interesting indeed.

But when we think about noise cancellation, what’s our baseline? If you want to block out all sound and go total cocoon, you can pick up a pair of Sony or Bose cans and get pretty close to that. But considering their ubiquity and cultural impact on how we engage with the outside world, let’s turn instead to Apple’s AirPods for an idea of more useful, fine-tuned features that could point to where the field is headed.

The third-gen AirPods Pro, alongside Apple’s over-ear AirPods Max, offer Active Noise Canceling, Transparency Mode, Adaptive Audio (which adjusts noise cancellation to your surroundings), and Hearing Protection, which automatically reduces dangerously loud sounds. Getting more advanced still, within the customisations available for Transparency Mode, there are several options for helping those that are hard of hearing. There's Conversation Boost, which focuses the audio pick-up on the person in front of you while canceling ambient noise, and Live Listen, which uses an iPhone microphone to boost a specific speaker’s voice—plus you can choose to amplify your own voice too.

This blurring of the lines between audio and health devices looks set to be a trend across the industry. “We really want to make sure that we take care of our customers’ hearing,” says Miikka Tikander, the Helsinki-based head of audio at Bang & Olufsen. Tikander points to recent data about the decline in hearing health in young adults and reports that there was a lot of emphasis from manufacturers on ANC and hearing health at the AES’ Headphone Technology conference in Espoo, Finland this August.

“Apple has a big lead in that area,” he says. “We want to make sure that our headphones can adapt, make this choice [on when to block out sound] on your behalf, if you let it, of course. Some people don't like that idea, but if there's a noisy event in your surroundings, the headset can take care of it, just tune it out a bit and get you back to normal listening once you are away from that noise.”

Enter the “Sound Bubble”

Hearvana AI is one startup looking to go much further than the AirPods’ current suite of noise canceling and ambient noise features. Cofounded by Shyam Gollakota, a computer science & engineering professor at the University of Washington, and two of his students, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, Hearvana recently raised $6 million in a pre-seed round which included none other than Amazon’s Alexa Fund.

One of the startup’s first big innovations was “semantic hearing,” which was the first project they approached, around three years ago. The team built a hardware prototype—a pair of on-ear headphones with six microphones across the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller—to test out a model that had been trained to recognize 20 different types of ambient sounds. This included things like sirens, car horns, birdsong, crying babies, alarm clocks, pets, and people talking, and then allowed the user to isolate say, one person’s voice as a “spotlight,” and block out all the other frequencies.

“So I'm going to the beach and I want to listen to just ocean sounds and not the people talking next to me, or I’m in the house vacuum cleaning but I still want to listen to people knocking on the door or important sounds, like a baby crying,” explains Gollakota, who is based in Seattle. “And that’s what we solved first. This was the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a door knock. They sound pretty different, right?”

The next question the team tackled was the headphones being able to understand the subtle differences between individual human voices, allowing for “target speech hearing” based on proximity and who the user is looking at.

The result is the “sound bubble” feature—Hearvana’s souped-up version of Conversation Boost, in which ambient chatter is quieted to 49 decibels and the person in front of you, or the people on your table in a restaurant, have their voices automatically amplified, with a less than 10-20 millisecond lag time. It’s not just limited to blunt distance either; you could, for example, enroll a tour guide’s voice by looking at them for three to five seconds to teach the model their audio characteristics, and then feel free to look away at the attraction as the amplification continues.

He says experts were skeptical that anything using deep learning would be able to sync up to the wearer’s visual senses quickly enough, especially with the power and compute constraints of headphones, but they got there. The key to solving the issue of making these features near real time is keeping the model small and specific, on-device, no need for the cloud.

“For the sound bubble, we collected robotic data in different rooms and at different distances and then two humans, the authors of the paper, held the device and collected conversation data for 30 minutes,” says Gollakota. “It’s kind of an art honestly. Big Tech is throwing huge amounts of data and compute at the problem—we’re taking the opposite approach. You get intuition, it comes from experience building these systems, you have to understand the domain better.”

Making Smartglasses Sound Better

One of the big questions hovering over the next decade in consumer tech is: Are we all going to be wearing dorky face computers soon, or not? Meta is certainly one company hoping that we are, and one of its more recent investments—a $16.2m audio research lab in Cambridge, UK—suggests it could be considering how audio plays its part in that experience too.

The lab, Meta says, is “dedicated to advancing audio technologies for Meta’s future AR and AI glasses,” and includes anechoic chambers for near-silent testing, a configurable reverberation room, which can mimic many different sound environments, and a 3,600 square foot area with sub-millimetre optical tracking to improve context-aware audio features.

However, the form factor clearly presents specific technical challenges. Currently, full noise canceling is a luxury that Ray-Ban Meta wearers must go without, as it’s an open-ear speaker set up for the glasses. There is an on-device five-mic array, which works with AI to reduce background noise during calls and recordings, plus it recently rolled out its AirPods Pro-style conversation focus feature. But it seems there's more to come.

Hearvana AI is also doing its own work in this area too. “Now that we've actually cracked the code for hearing aids and earbuds,” says Gollakota, “then smartglasses actually makes everything much easier because we have more microphones, there’s more compute and more power budget available.”

Next-Gen Soundproofing

Noise cancellation doesn't just happen in headphones and smartglasses, of course. Soundproofing is one of the original ways we used to reduce noise in our environment, and it's getting better all the time. MIT Materials Science and Engineering researcher Grace Yang has experimented with sound-suppressing silk fabrics, containing fibres that vibrate when a voltage is applied, in order to interfere with unwanted noise, and which could be used on walls or room dividers.

More conventional acoustic insulation makers, who manufacture the much thicker soundproofing options, are also increasingly turning to more natural and sustainable materials, such as sustainably grown hemp fibres (BASWA Natural), industrial hemp blended with recycled textile fibres (IndiNature’s IndiSilence) and mineral wool (ROCKwool), all of which are Quiet Mark certified.

And if you simply don’t have the time or the budget to create a soundproof environment at home, in the office or at an event, digital tools from companies such as Krisp and ai-acoustics are popping up to ‘de-noise’ audio recordings after the fact with AI-powered noise cancellation, anti-reverb and audio enhancement tools for meetings.

Perhaps one of the most incredible advancements in this area has come from a close study of nature. Marc Holderied’s bio-inspired meta-material went viral on TikTok in 2023, after he touted its use as “sonic wallpaper.” Holderied, a professor of sensory biology at the University of Bristol, says he doesn’t mind the eccentric academic label but he’s recently switched to an “acoustic wallpaper” descriptor to avoid any connotations with a certain video-game hedgehog. Now, he’s getting down to the serious matter of making it a reality.

Courtesy of Attacus Acoustics

 

Courtesy of Attacus Acoustics

 

Holderied’s sound absorber prototypes are based on the unique microscopic scale structures found on moth’s wings, which evolved to counter the high-frequency sounds produced by bats using echolocation in order to hunt. When the sound hits the scale, it vibrates to absorb the specific frequency it is tuned to and with different shapes and sizes of scales across the wings, vibrating at different frequencies, the whole sound is neutralized. “We are approaching the potential application from a position of tens of millions of years of experience, rather than starting from the engineering principles. So our reverse engineering actually gave us a head start,” says Holderied. “The key invention is that they are thinner by about a factor of 10 than existing solutions.”

Wall of Sound

So it’s thin and, according to its inventor, quick, cheap, and scalable too. How does it perform? “What we’re working on is to make this ultra thin and broadband, so the best prototype we have at the moment achieves one over 100,” he explains. “So that means one hundredth of the wavelength being absorbed. We are getting to 70 or 80 percent of energy absorbed and we are currently working on making the absorption coefficient higher into the 90 percent range. That's what we're working on; we have the theoretical models that allow us to do this.”

The prototype material can be made transparent—not completely clear, there’s some visible patterning—for use on windows, and it can work behind fabrics or integrated into wood panelling. Holderied and his team are also currently working on research into the nano structures inside the wing’s scales, which hasn’t been published yet. “We find remarkable stuff happening there that also contributes to the acoustic performance.”

The project will be spun out as the startup Attacus Acoustics in 2026, after the team decides how internationally to apply its patent early next year—then it will begin looking for investor funding. Holderied has hired a postdoc team member to be the new CEO (with two more full-time researchers on board) and after many talks with enthusiastic architects and automotive bosses, he is in discussions around developing a wall lining for passenger compartments with a large, international airplane manufacturer.

Holderied is also in the queue to use the University of Bristol’s Isambard for his complex modeling, and he’s already taken advantage of other super-computing facilities on the project. “We've got certified prototypes where the performance has been measured in a laboratory in Southampton, at The Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. We've got square metres of prototypes that we've built. We're building new prototypes all the time.”

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 3 January 2026 at 4:25 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

"Lowering the satellites results in condensing Starlink orbits, and will increase space safety in several ways," Nicolls wrote. One of the reasons behind the project is that Solar Minimum is approaching in the late 2020s - it's an 11-year cycle when the Sun's activity reaches its minimum.

The Earth's atmosphere gets thinner at higher altitudes during a Solar Minimum, which results in satellites feeling less drag at higher orbits. The reduced density makes it harder for a failed satellite to burn up, thereby increasing the risk that it could become a space hazard.

Shifting the satellites to lower orbits during solar minimum can cause them to burn up in months instead of years. Nicolls wrote that "as solar mininum approaches, atmospheric density decreases which means the ballistic decay time at any given altitude increases - lowering will mean a >80% reduction in ballistic decay time in solar minimum, or 4+ years reduced to a few months."

This will also reduce the risk of collision as the number of planned satellite constellations and debris objects is "significantly lower below 500 km." Starlink faced a close call recently when nine satellites were deployed from China without any known coordination with other operators.

Nicolls added in his X post that the shifting will further improve Starlink's safety, particularly when dealing with unknown risks such as uncoordinated maneuvers and launches by other satellite operators. He noted that Starlink has delivered extremely high reliability with only two dead satellites in its fleet of over 9000 operational satellites.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 3 January 2026 at 4:23 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’ve experimented with a monthly collection. December’s list includes a fossilized bird that choked to death on rocks; a double-detonating “superkilonova”; recovering an ancient seafarer’s fingerprint; the biomechanics of kangaroo movement; and cracking a dark matter puzzle that stumped fictional physicists on The Big Bang Theory, among other tantalizing tidbits

Secrets of kangaroo posture

Kangaroos and wallabies belong to a class of animals called macropods, with unique form and style of movement. Their four limbs and tail all contact the ground at slow speeds, while they use a hopping gait at higher speeds. Typically, high-speed movements are more energy-intensive than slow-speed motion, but the opposite is true for macropods like kangaroos; somehow the hopping speed and energy cost become uncoupled. According to a paper published in the journal eLife, this may be due to changes in a kangaroo’s posture at higher hopping speeds.

To investigate their hypothesis, the authors used 3D motion capture and data from force plates to create a 3D musculoskeletal model to analyze the motions of red and grey kangaroos, focusing on how body mass and speed influence three factors during hopping: hindlimb posture, efficiency of movement and associated tendon stress; and the ankles. This revealed that kangaroos adjust their posture so that the hindlimbs are more crouched while hopping, with the ankle joint doing most of the work per hop. The crouching position increases energy absorption, thus improving efficiency.

DOI: eLife, 2025. 10.7554/eLife.96437.3  (About DOIs).

Fossilized bird choked on rocks

Some 120 million years ago, a tiny bird choked to death on a bunch of small rocks lodged in its throat. Paleontologists recently discovered the fossil among the many specimens housed at the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in China. Not only does it represent a new species—dubbed Chromeornis funkyi, after techno-funk duo Chromeo—the fossilized bird is the first such specimen to be found with a throat filled with stones, according to a paper published in the journal Palaeontologica Electronica.

Certain bird species, like chickens, swallow small stones and store them in their gizzards to help grind up food. The authors examined prior CT scans of fossilized birds with gizzards and quantified how many gizzard stones were present, then compared that data to a CT scan of the C. funkyi fossil. The scan showed that the more than 800 tiny stones lodged in the throat were not gizzard stones. So the bird didn’t swallow the stones to help grind up food. The authors suggest the bird was sick; sick birds will sometimes eat stones. When it tried to regurgitate the stones, they got stuck in the esophagus and the poor bird choked to death.

DOI: Palaeontologica Electronica, 2025. 10.26879/1589  (About DOIs).

“Superkilonova” exploded twice

Back in 2017, astronomers detected a phenomenon known as a “kilonova”: the merger of two neutron stars accompanied by powerful gamma-ray bursts. Recording this kind of celestial event was unprecedented, and it officially marked the dawn of a new era in so-called “multi-messenger astronomy.” It’s the only unambiguously confirmed kilonova to date, but astrophysicists reported evidence of a possible second such event in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. And it’s unusual because this kilonova may have originated from a supernova blast mere hours before, making it a “superkilonova.”

Supernovae are the spectacular explosions that result from dying massive stars, seeding the universe with heavy elements like carbon and iron. Kilonovae occur when two binary neutron stars begin circling into their death spiral, sending out powerful gravitational waves and stripping neutron-rich matter from each other. Then the stars collide and merge, producing a hot cloud of debris that glows with light of multiple wavelengths. It’s the neutron-rich debris that astronomers believe creates a kilonova’s visible and infrared light—the glow is brighter in the infrared than in the visible spectrum, a distinctive signature that results from heavy elements in the ejecta that block visible light but let the infrared through.

This latest kilonova candidate event, dubbed AT2025ulz, initially looked like the 2017 event, but over time, its properties started resembling a supernova, making it less interesting to many astronomers. But it wasn’t a classic supernova either. So some astronomers kept tracking the event and analyzing combined “multimessenger” data from other collaborations and telescopes during the same time frame. They concluded that this was a multi-stage event: specifically, a supernova gave birth to twin baby neutron stars, which then merged to produce a kilonova. That said, the evidence isn’t quite strong enough to claim this is what definitely happened; astronomers need to find more such superkilnova to confirm.

DOI: Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. 10.3847/2041-8213/ae2000  (About DOIs).

An ancient seafarer’s fingerprint

In the 4th century BCE, an invading mini-armada of about four boats attacked an island off the coast of Denmark. The attack failed and the victorious islanders celebrated by sinking one of the boats, filled with their foes’ weapons, into a bog, where it remained until it was discovered by archaeologists in the 1880s. It’s known as the Hjortspring boat, and archaeologists were recently surprised when their analysis uncovered an intact human fingerprint in the tars used to waterproof the vessel. They described their find in a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

The fingerprint is significant because it offers a hint into where those would-be raiders from the sea originally hailed from. Prior scholars had suggested they came from somewhere near what is now Hamburg, Germany. But the authors of this latest paper noticed that the waterproofing tars were pine pitch, concluding that the raiders may have originated in the coastal regions of the Baltic Sea, along which pine-rich forests flourished. That would require the raiders to travel over hundreds of kilometers of open sea. The authors hope they can extract some ancient DNA from the tar to learn more about the ancient people who built the boat.

DOI: PLoS ONE, 2025. 10.1371/journal.pone.0336965  (About DOIs).

Roman liquid gypsum burials

Speaking of ancient fingerprints, archaeologists at the University of York found finger marks and fingerprints preserved in hardened gypsum used by Romans in Britain in their funerary practices in the third and fourth centuries CE. The university is home to the Seeing the Dead project, which studies the bodies preserved by pouring liquid gypsum (plaster of paris) over them in their coffins prior to burial. The gypsum hardened around the decomposing bodies, creating a cavity while preserving clear imprints of the body contours, clothing, and shrouding. It’s similar to the method used to create casts of the victims of Pompeii.

Some 70 gypsum burials have been found in Yorkshire thus far. In this case, researchers were examining a stone sarcophagus excavated in the 1870s that had yet to be analyzed. While cleaning the artifact and subjecting it to 3D scanning, they noticed a handprint with fingers clearly delineated in the hardened gypsum. They also found distinct fingerprints close to the edges of the coffin. The team had previously thought that the gypsum was heated to at least 300 degrees F (150 degrees C) before being poured over the body, but the handprint and fingerprints suggests someone had smoothed the gypsum over the body by hand, suggesting significantly cooler temperatures. While acknowledging it’s a long shot, the team hopes to extract DNA samples from the sarcophagus which might enable them to determine genetic sex.

Playing Super Mario combats  burnout

Young adulthood in the 2020s is fraught with a range of interconnected pressures: soaring cost of living, student loan debt, pressure to excel academically, and an “always on” digital culture, to name a few of the most common stressors. This in turn can lead to burnout. Perhaps playing video games can help—the right kind of video games, like Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi., as opposed to dystopian survival horror games or highly competitive multiplayer games. According to a study published in the journal JMIR Serious Games, Super Mario Bros. and Yoshi can help young adults recapture childlike wonder and reduce stress and anxiety that can lead to burnout.

The authors employed a mixed-methods approach for their study. First, they collected qualitative data from 41 college-aged subjects via in-depth interviews; all were experienced players of those two games. They followed this with a cross-sectional survey to collect quantitative data from 336 players. The resulting analysis showed that those who felt greater childlike wonder while playing also reported higher overall happiness; and the happiest players showed significantly lower risk of burnout. “By moving beyond escapism and nostalgia, [this study] offers a new perspective on how well-designed, globally familiar games can function as accessible, resilience-building digital microenvironments,” the authors concluded.

DOI: JMIR Serious Games, 2025. 10.2196/84219  (About DOIs).

Cracking a Big Bang Theory problem

Physicists may have had mixed feelings about The Big Bang Theory‘s depiction of their profession, but one thing the sitcom consistently got right was the equations featured on the ubiquitous white board—clever Easter eggs for physicists, courtesy of science advisor David Saltzberg. In one episode, Sheldon and Leonard are pondering an equation about how axions are generated from the sun—part of the duo’s efforts to estimate the likelihood of detecting axions produced by a fusion reactor. Leonard and Sheldon failed on that point, but real-world physicists think they’ve now cracked the case, according to a paper published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

Axions are hypothetical particles that could explain dark matter— the mysterious substance that comprises about 23 percent of all the mass in our universe—and represent a theoretical alternative to WIMPs, which thus far have eluded detection by physicists. Particles can exhibit wavelike behavior as well as particle characteristics. So an axion would behave more like a wave (or wave packet) than a particle, and the size of the wave packets is inversely proportional to their mass. That means these very light particles don’t necessarily need to be tiny. The downside is that they interact even more weakly with regular matter than WIMPS, so they cannot be produced in large colliders.

So physicists have been developing all kinds of smaller experiments for detecting axions, from atomic clocks and resonating bars, to shining lasers at walls on the off-chance a bit of dark matter seeps through the other side. Co-author Jure Zupan of the University of Cincinnati and colleagues proposed that axions could be produced by a fusion reactor powered by deuterium and tritium contained in a lithium-lined vessel. Among the fusion byproducts of such a reactor would be a large flux of neutrons which would interact with materials in the walls, or collide with other particles, thereby releasing energy and creating new particles: possibly axions or axion-like particles.

DOI: Journal of High Energy Physics, 2025. 10.1007/JHEP10(2025)215  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 2 January 2026 at 11:34 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025: 5,700+

RIP Matrix

There were a lot of horrifying things in the news this year—a lot. But some of it was horrifying in a good way.

Extraordinary medical cases—even the grisly and disturbing ones—offer a reprieve from the onslaught of current events and the stresses of our daily lives. With those remarkable reports, we can marvel at the workings, foibles, and resilience of the human body. They can remind us of the shared indignities from our existence in these mortal meatsacks. We can clear our minds of worry by learning about something we never even knew we should worry about—or by counting our blessings for avoiding so far. And sometimes, the reports are just grotesquely fascinating.

Every year, there’s a new lineup of such curious clinical conditions. There are always some unfortunate souls to mark medical firsts or present ultra-rare cases. There is also an endless stream of humans making poor life choices—and arriving at an emergency department with the results. This year was no different.

The top five medical cases of 2025 were chosen using a blend of editorial judgment and reader interest. There’s a mix of cases stemming from poor life choices and just plain bad luck. Florida man makes two appearances (we’ll let you guess which of the aforementioned categories he fits into). There’s a puzzling, oozing, explosive vomiting, a bioterror bacterial surprise, and, of course, parasitic worms. Best of all, nobody died—a happy ending we could all use as this year draws to a close.

Without further ado …

5. Man eats dubious street food—ends up blowing apart his GI tract

Street food can be among a region’s best culinary offerings. No one can be blamed for partaking. But, it does come with some risks—namely, food poisoning. An unfortunate 59-year-old man fell ill after eating some street food in China. It wouldn’t be a remarkable story if it weren’t for the degree of trauma his ensuing illness created. The man vomited so fiercely that the force his body created to launch the offending substance up and as far away as possible—presumably to another dimension—blew apart his esophagus (the muscular tube that conveys food between the throat and stomach).

Such organ-shattering is called Boerhaave syndrome, which is rare. If it isn’t treated quickly, it has a 60 percent to 100 percent fatality rate. The man, luckily, received care within a few hours of the blast, though his chest was already filling with fluid and his right lung was collapsing. He was rushed to emergency surgery and eventually made a full recovery. However, it required 35 days in the hospital and an additional three months with a feeding tube before his esophagus completely healed. It remains unclear what street food sparked the detonation, but presumably, it is one he won’t eat again.

4. Burning in woman’s legs turned out to be slug parasites migrating to her brain

For days, a 30-year-old woman in New England experienced searing pain that crept up her body, starting with her legs, then moving up her trunk and to her arms. She went to two different emergency departments seeking relief. But doctors at each found no clear explanation for her pain and sent her home with only a recommendation to see her primary doctor. The condition continued to worsen. After waking up in a mental fog, she was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where doctors discovered that she was infected with parasitic worms.

The pain and burning sensations the woman had experienced moving up her body was from worm larvae traveling along her peripheral nerves to get to her brain. The parasite behind the infection was the nematode Angiostrongylus cantonensis, also known as rat lungworm. This delightful parasite typically circulates between rats—its primary host—and slugs and snails. Infected rats poop out larvae, which are picked up by slugs and snails. Late-stage larvae develop in the slugs and snails, then move back to rats, who get infected by eating the infected mollusks. Back in the rat, the larvae make their way to the rat’s brain, where they become adults. Then they relocate to the lungs (hence the name) to mate.

Humans accidentally get infected by eating raw vegetables containing or contaminated by infected slugs or snails, or by eating undercooked creatures that eat slugs or snails, such as land crabs, freshwater prawns, or frogs. In the woman’s case, doctors suspected she got infected from eating raw seafood and salads on a recent trip to Hawaii, where the parasite is a known threat. Luckily, the woman was treated for the infection and made a full recovery.

3. Man gets drunk, wakes up with a medical mystery that nearly kills him

It’s not every day a person gets drunk and wakes up with a medical case so enigmatic that a master clinician with an expertise in medical reasoning is called in to help crack it. But a 36-year-old did just that in a case published this year in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The man showed up at the hospital with abdominal pain, a crackling in his lungs, bacteria in his blood, liver abnormalities, an injury in his small intestine, and a blood clot in his right kidney—and no clear idea of how any of those things happened or how they were connected.

In the case report, doctors lay out how they identified all of the aspects of his condition and then how master clinician Gurpreet Dhaliwal of the University of California, San Francisco, unraveled how they fit together.

Providing a fascinating look into diagnostic sleuthing, Dhaliwal reasoned out that it all came down to beers and a toothpick. The man—who had a history of binge drinking—got drunk, ate something, and accidentally swallowed a toothpick, Dhaliwal surmised. While still drunk, the man aspirated some of the food, causing his lung infection. The toothpick, meanwhile, pierced his small intestine near his right kidney, causing the injury and the blood clot. The injury then became infected, causing sepsis and his liver abnormalities.

After Dhaliwal came to his conclusion, medical imaging found the toothpick. After it was removed, the man made a full recovery.

2. Florida man eats feral pig meat, contracts rare biothreat bacteria

I promised Florida man made the list—and of course, he’s near the top. In this case, a Florida man was gifted the bloody meat of a feral pig, which he handled with his bare hands before cooking and eating it. In doing so, he inadvertently exposed himself to a highly infectious bacterium considered a potential bioterror threat. The man developed an insidious infection that lurked in his heart implant and took doctors nearly two years to properly diagnose.

The bacterium at hand is Brucella suis, which typically infects pigs. The bacterium is not particularly deadly, but it can spread by air and only takes a few bacterial cells to cause an infection, making it a good potential weapon. In 1954, B. suis became the first biological agent to be weaponized by the US government as part of its offensive biological warfare program.

Once the man’s infection was finally diagnosed, he was treated with an effective antibiotic regimen to clear it. He also got a new heart implant and made a full recovery. Unfortunately, due to the high infectiousness of the germ, doctors had to reach out to all the man’s previous health care providers and clinical lab workers to warn them of the exposure. Three lab workers were found to have had a high-risk exposure and had to undergo months monitoring and post-exposure prophylaxis.

1. Florida man eats diet of butter, cheese, beef; cholesterol oozes from his body

While that Florida man’s case was … unusual, it mostly stems to some bad luck—who among us hasn’t occasionally forgotten to check our gifted feral pig meat for bioterror threats? By contrast, this year’s top medical case goes to another Florida man, whose life choices are definitely in question.

In January, we shared the case of a Florida man who adopted a daily diet of six to nine pounds of cheese, sticks of butter, and hamburgers that had additional fat incorporated into them. He made the medical literature after eight months, when he showed up to cardiologists with cholesterol literally oozing out of his hands, feet, and elbows.

As the cholesterol was trying to escape his body, it created painless, yellowish nodules filled with lipids. The condition is called xanthoma and most often presents with nodules around the eye.

The cardiologists tested the man’s blood cholesterol levels and found that they exceeded 1,000 mg/dL. For context, the target level of total cholesterol for good cardiovascular health is under 200 mg/dL, while 240 mg/dL or over is considered high.

It’s unclear how things ended up for the man, but at least his doctors did not report that he died—at least not yet. Generally, xanthoma itself is benign; his cholesterol levels, on the other hand, put him at significant risk of cardiovascular disease. Still, he suggested to his doctors that he was pleased with his dairy-heavy diet, which he described as a “carnivore diet.” He claimed he lost weight, had more energy, and improved his “mental clarity.”

With that, we sign off on the medical line-up of 2025 and look forward to what medical horrors 2026 will hold—and what Florida man will do next.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Wednesday 31 December 2025 at 4:21 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of November): 5,412

RIP Matrix

Lobsters are generally notable for their large claws, which can serve as a deterrent to any predators. But there’s a whole family of spiny lobsters that lack these claws. They tend to ward off predators by forming large groups that collectively can present a lot of pointy bits towards anything attempting to eat them. In fact, studies found that the lobsters can sense the presence of other species-members using molecules emitted into the water, and use that to find peers to congregate with.

A new study, however, finds that this same signal may lure young lobsters to their doom, causing them to try to congregate with older lobsters that are too big to be eaten by nearby predators. The smaller lobsters thus fall victim to a phenomenon called an “ecological trap,” which has rarely been seen to occur without human intervention.

Lobsters vs. groupers

The study was performed in the waters off Florida, where the seafloor is dotted by what are called “solution holes.” These features are the product of lower sea levels such as those that occur during periods of expanded glaciers and ice caps. During these times, much of the area off Florida was above sea level, and water dissolved the limestone rocks unevenly. This created an irregular array of small shallow pits and crevices, many of which have been reshaped by sea life since the area was submerged again.

The crevices offer a great gathering place for spiny lobsters, which can congregate in a way that ensures their spiky bits are all arranged to effectively block an attack from the limited directions of approach. Unfortunately, they are also home to groupers, large fish that are capable of gulping down the smaller lobsters. But groupers don’t have the jaws to break down the shells of larger ones, rendering more mature spiny lobsters immune from their predation.

The authors, Mark Butler, Donald Behringer, and Jason Schratwieser, hypothesized that these solution holes represent an ecological trap. The older lobsters that find shelter in a solution hole would emit the chemicals that draw younger ones to congregate with them. But the youngsters would then fall prey to any groupers that inhabit the same solution hole. In other words, what is normally a cue for safety—the signal that there are lots of lobsters present—could lure smaller lobsters into what the authors call a “predatory death trap.”

Testing the hypothesis involved a lot of underwater surveys. First, the authors identified solution holes with a resident red grouper. They then found a series of sites that had equivalent amounts of shelter, but lacked the solution hole and attendant grouper. (The study lacked a control with a solution hole but no grouper, for what it’s worth.) At each site, the researchers started daily surveys of the lobsters present, registering how large they were and tagging any that hadn’t been found in any earlier surveys. This let them track the lobster population over time, as some lobsters may migrate in and out of sites.

To check predation, they linked lobsters (both large and small) via tethers that let them occupy sheltered places on the sea floor, but not leave a given site. And, after the lobster population dynamics were sorted, the researchers caught some of the groupers and checked their stomach contents. In a few cases, this revealed the presence of lobsters that had been previously tagged, allowing them to directly associate predation with the size of the lobster.

Lobster traps

So, what did they find? In sites where groupers were present, the average lobster was 32 percent larger than the control sites. That’s likely to be because over two-thirds of the small lobsters that were tethered to sites with a grouper were dead within 48 hours. At control sites, the mortality rate was about 40 percent. That’s similar to the mortality rates for larger lobsters at the same sites (44 percent) or at sites with groupers (48 percent).

Separately, the researchers tested whether lobsters can sense the presence of a red grouper by putting a lobster in a tank with water flowing in from pools, one with red groupers and one without. The lobsters appeared unable to tell the difference. That’s a bit of a surprise, given that earlier studies had shown that they are attracted to a healthy population of lobsters, but avoid populations that are injured or suffering disease. They’re also able to sense and avoid a different predator, the octopus.

The finding is relatively distinct. While there’s a long literature on ecological traps, most of them have developed due to changes humans have caused in the ecosystem, either accidentally or intentionally. A past review found that only about seven percent of the ecological traps described in the literature came about without human influence. That makes a degree of sense, given that human-driven ecological changes are likely to be relatively recent, and so haven’t given the animal being trapped the time to evolve a way of avoiding it.

For the handful of naturally occurring ecological traps that have been described, it’s possible that the benefits that get the animal caught in the trap are large enough to offset the risk of getting trapped. And that might be the case here, with the losses of juveniles being balanced by better survival of the adults, allowing greater production of juveniles to offset the losses. In either case, it would seem that evolving a way of detecting their presence could eliminate the trap, so it’s unclear why that hasn’t happened yet. It’s possible that the red groupers are relatively recent arrivals to this ecosystem, and so there hasn’t been time to evolve in response to them.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2527644123  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Wednesday 31 December 2025 at 4:20 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of November): 5,412

RIP Matrix

The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons.

Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated. While the system relies on a few decidedly not-neural features, it has the advantage that we have chips that can run neural networks using spiking signals, which would allow this system to integrate smoothly with some energy-efficient hardware to run AI-based control software.

Location via spikes

The nervous system in our skin is remarkably complex. It has specialized sensors for different sensations: heat, cold, pressure, pain, and more. In most areas of the body, these feed into the spinal column, where some preliminary processing takes place, allowing reflex reactions to be triggered without even involving the brain. But signals do make their way along specialized neurons into the brain, allowing further processing and (potentially) conscious awareness.

The researchers behind the recent work, based in China, decided to implement something similar for an artificial skin that could be used to cover a robotic hand. They limited sensing to pressure, but implemented other things the nervous system does, including figuring out the location of input and injuries, and using multiple layers of processing.

All of this started out by making a flexible polymer skin with embedded pressure sensors that were linked up to the rest of the system via conductive polymers. The next layer of the system converted the inputs from the pressure sensors to a series of activity spikes—short pulses of electrical current.

There are four ways that these trains of spikes can convey information: the shape of an individual pulse, through their magnitude, through the length of the spike, and through the frequency of the spikes. Spike frequency is the most commonly used means of conveying information in biological systems, and the researchers use that to convey the pressure experienced by a sensor. The remaining forms of information are used to create something akin to a bar code that helps identify which sensor the reading came from.

In addition to registering the pressure, the researchers had each sensor send a “I’m still here” signal at regular time intervals. Failure to receive this would be an indication that something has gone wrong with a sensor.

The spiking signals allow the next layer of the system to identify any pressure being experienced by the skin, as well as where it originated. This layer can also do basic evaluation of the sensory input: “Pressure-initiated raw pulses from the pulse generator accumulated in the signal cache center until a predefined pain threshold is surpassed, activating a pain signal.” This can allow the equivalent of basic reflex reactions that don’t involve higher-level control systems. For example, the researchers set up a robotic arm covered with their artificial skin, and got it to move the arm whenever it experiences pressure that can cause damage.

The second layer also combines and filters signals from the skin before sending the information on to the arm’s controller, which is the equivalent of the brain in this situation. So, the same system caused a robotic face to change expressions based on how much pressure its arm was sensing.

Easy fixes

A lot of the details of how the system operates were figured out empirically. For example, they applied the amount of pressure that registers as pain in human skin, and figured out how frequently their sensors generated spikes. This was then set as a threshold to emit a pain signal to the higher control system, and would trigger any reflex responses to excessive pressure. A lot of the more elaborate responses will ultimately depend on how these higher-level systems are programmed. For example, it’s easy for the system to generate a signal that indicates damage in a specific location in the skin; how the overall system responds to that damage isn’t specified by the skin itself.

But the team did make it easy to repair things if damage occurs. The skin is designed to be assembled from a collection of segments that can snap together using magnetic interlocks. These automatically link up any necessary wiring, and each segment of skin broadcasts a unique identity code. So, if the system identifies damage, it’s relatively easy for an operator to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware, and then update any data that links the new segment’s ID with its location.

The researchers call their development a neuromorphic robotic e-skin, or NRE-skin. “Neuromorphic” as a term is a bit vague, with some people using it to mean a technology that directly follows the principles used by the nervous system. That’s definitely not this skin. Instead, it uses “neuromorphic” far more loosely, with the operation of the nervous system acting as an inspiration for the system.

This is clearest in the case of the positional information. The nervous system actually maintains a map of the body, and links sensory inputs to locations on this map. Biology uses nothing at all like the encoding of positional information in the properties of the activity spikes that the NRE-skin uses. So, this system is more biology-inspired than it is a model of actual biology.

It also falls a bit short of biology in its current implementation, in that all it senses is pressure. Actual skin can process a variety of different sensory inputs, including things like temperatures, irritants, and more. These could all potentially be added to something like NRE-skin, but it would require a parallel processing system to keep the additional signals from getting intermingled with the ones from the pressure-sensitive hardware.

All that said, spiking neuromorphic processors can host neural networks and are far more energy-efficient when doing so. So, even with its limitations, this seems like an area of research worth exploring.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2520922122  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 30 December 2025 at 12:26 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of November): 5,412

RIP Matrix

Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique  for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it seems Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the protective benefits of charring wood surfaces more than 100 years earlier, according to a paper published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU funded research.

Check the notes

As previously reported, Leonardo produced more than 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later gathered into codices), less than a third of which have survived. The notebooks contain all manner of inventions that foreshadow future technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges for clearing harbors and canals, and floating footwear akin to snowshoes to enable a person to walk on water. Leonardo foresaw the possibility of constructing a telescope in his Codex Atlanticus (1490)—he wrote of “making glasses to see the moon enlarged” a century before the instrument’s invention.

In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, came across some recipes for mysterious mixtures while flipping through Leonardo’s notes. Vezzosi experimented with the recipes, resulting in a mixture that would harden into a material eerily akin to Bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 1900s. So Leonardo may well have invented the first manmade plastic.

The notebooks also contain Leonardo’s detailed notes on his extensive anatomical studies. Most notably, his drawings and descriptions of the human heart captured how heart valves can control blood flow 150 years before William Harvey worked out the basics of the human circulatory system. (In 2005, a British heart surgeon named Francis Wells pioneered a new procedure to repair damaged hearts based on Leonardo’s heart valve sketches and subsequently wrote the book The Heart of Leonardo.)

In 2023, Caltech researchers made another discovery: lurking in the margins of Leonardo’s Codex Arundel were several small sketches of triangles, their geometry seemingly determined by grains of sand poured out from a jar. The little triangles were his attempt to draw a link between gravity and acceleration—well before Isaac Newton came up with his laws of motion. By modern calculations, Leonardo’s model produced a value for the gravitational constant (G) to around 97 percent accuracy. And Leonardo did all this without a means of accurate timekeeping and without the benefit of calculus. The Caltech team was even able to re-create a modern version of the experiment.

“Burnt Japanese cedar”

Charred wood surface showing surface carbonization (yakisugi)

Unimoi/CC BY-SA 4.0

 

Western garden room with yakisugi cladding

Lorna Satchell/CC BY 4.0

 

Annalisa Di Maria, a Leonardo expert with the UNESCO Club of Florence, collaborated with molecular biologist and sculptor Andrea da Montefeltro and art historian Lucica Bianchi on this latest study, which concerns the Codex Madrid II. They had noticed one nearly imperceptible phrase in particular on folio 87r concerning wood preservation: “They will be better preserved if stripped of bark and burned on the surface than in any other way,” Leonardo wrote.

“This is not folklore,” the authors noted. “It is a technical intuition that precedes cultural codification.” Leonardo was interested in the structural properties of materials like wood, stone, and metal, as both an artist and an engineer, and would have noticed from firsthand experience that raw wood with its bark intact retained moisture and decayed more quickly. Furthermore, Leonardo’s observation coincides with what the authors describe as a “crucial moment for European material culture,” when “woodworking was receiving renewed attention in artistic workshops and civil engineering studies.”

Leonardo did not confine his woody observations to just that one line. The Codex includes discussions of how different species of wood conferred different useful properties: oak and chestnut for strength, ash and linden for flexibility, and alder and willow for underwater construction. Leonardo also noted that chestnut and beech were ideal as structural reinforcements, while maple and linden worked well for constructing musical instruments given their good acoustic properties. He even noted a natural method for seasoning logs: leaving them “above the roots” for better sap drainage.

The Codex Madrid II dates to 1503-1505, over a century before the earliest known written codifications of yakisugi, although it is probable that the method was used a bit before then. Per Di Maria et al., there is no evidence of any direct contact between Renaissance European culture and Japanese architectural practices, so this seems to be a case of “convergent invention.”

The benefits of this method of wood preservation have since been well documented by science, although the effectiveness is dependent on a variety of factors, including wood species and environmental conditions. The fire’s heat seals the pores of the wood so it absorbs less water—a natural means of waterproofing. The charred surface serves as natural insulation for fire resistance. And stripping the bark removes nutrients that attract insects and fungi, a natural form of biological protection.

Leonardo viewed wood as “not merely a construction material but a living organism—a system in balance with its environment,” Di Maria et al. concluded. “His interest is not limited to mechanical effectiveness but extends to the relationship between matter and environment, between natural processes and human intervention. This perspective positions the Florentine genius as a precursor to what we now call bioarchitectural practice: human intervention on materials must be calibrated to an understanding of their biological and physical properties.”

DOI: Zenodo, 2025. 10.5281/zenodo.17506250  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 30 December 2025 at 12:25 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of November): 5,412

RIP Matrix

In September 2025, a Widerøe Airlines flight was trying to land in Vardø, Norway, which sits in the country’s far eastern arm, some 40 miles from the Russian coast. The cloud deck was low, and so was visibility. In such gray situations, pilots use GPS technology to help them land on a runway and not the side of a mountain.

But on this day, GPS systems weren’t working correctly, the airwaves jammed with signals that prevented airplanes from accessing navigation information. The Widerøe flight had taken off during one of Russia’s frequent wargames, in which the country’s military simulates conflict as a preparation exercise. This one involved an imaginary war with a country. It was nicknamed Zapad-2025—translating to “West-2025”—and was happening just across the fjord from Vardø. According to European officials, GPS interference was frequent in the runup to the exercise. Russian forces, they suspected, were using GPS-signal-smashing technology, a tactic used in non-pretend conflict, too. (Russia has denied some allegations of GPS interference in the past.)

Without that guidance from space, and with the cloudy weather, the Widerøe plane had to abort its landing and continue down the coast away from Russia, to Båtsfjord, a fishing village.

The part of Norway in which this interruption occurred is called Finnmark. GPS disruption there is near-constant; problems linked to Russian interference have increased since the invasion of Ukraine.

Military and Pokemon players?

It’s one of the starkest geographic examples of how vulnerable GPS technology is. But such disturbances happen at a lower level all over the globe. The world’s militaries (including that of the United States) are big culprits, breaking out devices that can confuse or disrupt drones, missiles, and aircraft. But the equipment required to interfere with GPS at a less-than-military level is cheap and accessible and affects other aspects of life: Truck drivers, for instance, use it to look like they’ve delivered cargo on time. Players use it to fool augmented-reality games.

Given all this disruption, more U.S. institutions, from the Department of Defense to the Department of Transportation to the Federal Aviation Administration, are making moves toward alternatives and complements for GPS, though perhaps imperfectly. And the existing system has been undergoing a huge modernization program, introducing better-encrypted signals for military users, more varieties of signals for civilians, and higher-power signals for both to the tune of at least $22 billion. The military’s 2025 budget additionally requested $1.5 billion for more resilient “position, navigation, and timing” programs. Other departments have invested smaller amounts. In October 2025, for instance, the Department of Transportation awarded $5 million total to five companies to develop and demonstrate technologies complementary to GPS.

The update’s goals are to make the system more accurate, and harder to mess with. But as threats increase in frequency and sophistication, more work is necessary. “Sooner or later, we’re gonna see bad things happening here,” said John Langer, a GPS expert at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. “So we need to armor up for it before it happens.”

GPS is the invisible spine of society, in more ways than most people realize. It became central quickly after the satellite system, built in the 1970s for the military, was optimized for civilians. “Part of what makes GPS so successful is that it’s ubiquitous and it’s inexpensive,” said Langer.

Losing GPS would mean losing a lot more than Google Maps. The technology is integrated into everything from lights that turn on at sunset to dating apps that match users nearby. Its signals also undergird the electrical grid, cell networks, banking, defense technology, and the movements of robots used in industries like agriculture.

The U.S. government currently has 31 GPS satellites in orbit around Earth, and three other governments have their own systems: Russia made one called GLONASS, China created BeiDou, and the European Union built Galileo; all four systems’ data is available to the international community.

Finding your place

GPS works in a deceptively simple way: Each satellite carries an atomic clock aboard. It broadcasts that clock’s time toward Earth. That signal alone is what’s useful to energy infrastructure and financial transactions. But to get position information, a receiver—in a phone or other device—simply has to pick up signals from at least four satellites. It knows what time those signals were sent, where the satellites were when they sent them, and how long it took the signals to arrive. Through fancy triangulation, the phone (or guided missile) then computes its own location.

Or at least that’s the idea. GPS can be jammed, meaning that someone broadcasts a signal much stronger than that of GPS (which has had to travel across thousands of miles of space, and grows weaker with every meter), drowning the real signal in noise. It can also be spoofed, meaning someone sends out a fake signal that looks just like a GPS blip but indicates an incorrect location or time.

Threats like these were always a possibility—and those who built GPS knew about that problem from the beginning, said Todd Walter, director of the Stanford GPS Lab. “Around 2000 is when people got a little more serious about it,” he said. Hardware and software became cheaper, lowering the barrier to swamping or faking signals.

Problems ticked up when the augmented reality game Pokémon GO came online, in 2016. The game required people to travel to places in real life to win. Turns out, not all of them actually wanted to. “All of a sudden, everyone was interested in spoofing,” said Walter.

Pokémon GO cheaters used low-power devices close to the ground, and so didn’t affect cruising aircraft like Widerøe’s. The game made cheating high-tech and furthered methods and technology for signal scrambling, making it available to non-experts, Walter said. At the same time, spoofing arose in conflict zones, where drone and missile attacks are often guided by GPS. Don’t want to get hit by one? Fool its navigation system. “So now people say, ‘Well, we need to protect ourselves from that,’” said Walter. “And so then you see a huge increase in very powerful jamming and spoofing.”

In Norway, officials have noted that GPS disruptions, while most commonly affecting flights thousands of feet in the air, can also cause issues for police cars, ambulances, and ships. According to Espen Slette, director of the spectrum department at the Norwegian Communications Authority (known as Nkom), the agency has detected GPS jammers near hospitals, which could force life-saving helicopters to redirect to a more distant facility. Nkom has also clocked disruptions that affect agriculture and construction operations, while emergency responders have warned about how problems might home in on emergency beacon devices, like the satellite SOS buttons many people carry in the backcountry or aboard boats. The police’s chief of staff in Finnmark encouraged anyone venturing out to, old-school, carry a map and compass.

“It’s hard to grasp the full effect this has on society,” Slette wrote in an email.

Such widespread disruptions are not isolated to the Russia-adjacent Arctic. There are hotspots in Myanmar, most likely associated with drone warfare in the area; on the Black Sea, publicly associated with Russia, which has denied some cases of GPS interference; and in southern Texas, potentially from drug cartels near the border. A report from OpsGroup, a membership organization for international aviation personnel, found a marked increase in spoofing in 2024. “By January 2024, an average of 300 flights a day were being spoofed,” the report said. “By August 2024, this had grown to around 1500 flights per day.” From July 15 to Aug. 15, 2024, 41,000 flights total experienced spoofing. (While in the U.S., it’s generally illegal for civilians to jam or spoof signals, military-led disruptions during conflict are considered a legitimate and legal use-case.)

No going back

The uptick indicates that there’s no going back to a world without disruption hotspots. And that, combined with humans’ dependence on GPS, is why scientists and engineers are working on ways to shore up the system—and develop backchannels so a single-point failure doesn’t come to bite anyone, in conflict or in peacetime.

“There are many ways to mitigate GPS disruptions,” Slette wrote in an email. He suggests setting up devices to use signals from all four international constellations, and to install better receivers and antennas. That’s easier for militaries or infrastructure companies, and hard for people who are just buying the latest model of cell phone and have no control over its innards. But existing backups can tell a given device that something fishy may be up. Planes have inertial navigation systems, which mostly use motion-sensing devices to get an independent measurement; phones do too, and they can also check their data against cell towers, to see if something is off in their GPS signal.

But the U.S. government is worried enough about GPS issues that, across civilian and military agencies, research and development for more robust and resilient systems is ramping up. In March, for instance, the Federal Communications Commission launched a proceeding on GPS alternatives, exploring tools that could be used in addition to or instead of traditional GPS.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the Defense Innovation Unit, meanwhile, are investigating how quantum sensors might help with position, timing, and navigation. The United States’ military branches are also working on their alternative position, navigation, and timing capabilities, and their innovation arms like the Space Force’s SpaceWerx organization are running challenges to support alternative technologies. The Department of Defense acknowledges challenges to GPS and the consequent need to diversify the ways it gets position, navigation, and timing information, noting that it is pursuing the integration of alternative capabilities, according to a statement that public affairs officer Chelsea Dietlin requested be attributed to a Pentagon spokesperson. It is also looking toward working with commercial companies.

Even the Department of Transportation has a strategic plan that includes promoting technologies complementary to GPS. (Undark reached out multiple times to the Department of Transportation to request comment but did not receive a response.) A statement that FAA media relations specialist Cassandra Nolan requested be attributed to an agency spokesperson noted that the FAA is working on a system to detect GPS interference, and that it is working with the Department of Defense on navigation signals and antennas that are more resilient. In addition, the statement noted, the FAA already has “a layered aircraft tracking system that incorporates multiple technologies to guard against threats to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).”

But the newer efforts across government may not be as connected as they could be, according to Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group that largely comprises companies working in the GPS-problem space. For one, he said, efforts to bolster military and civilian systems have a fairly strict line between them. And neither has been as effective as he’d advocate: On the military side, plentiful programs exist, but they may not be working together. “It’s not clear if there is any coordination or synergies between the projects or how much senior leader support there is for comprehensive solution sets,” Goward wrote in an email.

On the civil side, Congress mandated in 2018 that a backup to GPS be established, but only experimental systems exist so far. There also have been efforts to repeal the law, with the disputed rationale that funding a single system isn’t feasible and there are better paths toward resilience. Goward contended that the government has hoped the private sector will come up with a usable solution, saving the government from creating one itself.

Starting over

And companies are coming to cash in on that desire, offering their solutions to both government agencies and other industries. “Our founding hypothesis was ‘let’s take 50 years of lessons learned but throw out the rulebook and do a clean-sheet design of a new GPS system incorporating a couple of fundamentals,’” said Patrick Shannon, CEO of one such company, called TrustPoint. The company, which has hired scientific and engineering experts in signal processing and space, aims to have a fleet of small satellites orbiting much closer to Earth than the current GPS constellation, and transmitting at a higher frequency.

TrustPoint’s satellites, a few of which have already gone to orbit, also send out an encrypted signal—something harder to spoof. With traditional GPS, only the military gets encrypted signals.

Many Russian jamming systems, he said, work tens of kilometers from their ground zero (their ground zero usually being a truck with a generator aboard). But with TrustPoint’s higher-frequency signals, the effectiveness of the jammer goes down by three times, and the circle of influence becomes 10 times smaller, shrinking even more if the receivers use a special kind of antenna that the U.S. government recently approved.

Messing with signals becomes less feasible, given those changes. “They would need exorbitant numbers of systems, exorbitant numbers of people, and a ton of cash to pull that off,” said Shannon.

So far, TrustPoint has launched three spacecraft, and has gotten five federal contracts in 2024 and 2025, totaling around $8.3 million, with organizations like the Air Force, Space Force, and the Navy.

Another company, called Xona Space Systems, is also putting satellites in low-Earth orbit, and has worked with both the Canadian and U.S. governments. The company plans to broadcast signals 100 times stronger than GPS, giving users two-centimeter precision, and making jamming more difficult. The signal also includes a watermark—a kind of authentication that, at least for now, protects against spoofing. They have launched one satellite that’s being tested by people in industries like agriculture, construction, and mining.

TrustPoint’s technology may offer novel defense against the dark GPS arts, but Xona, whose founders met while students at the Stanford GPS Lab, may have an edge anyway: Its signals are compatible with current infrastructure, so no one has to buy a new device. They just have to update their software. “We are not building receivers ourselves,” said Max Eunice, head of marketing and communications. Instead, they’re relying on the billions of earthly devices that already themselves rely on GPS.

Other solutions, like one called SuperGPS, stay closer to the ground. They use radio transmitters on Earth to do the same things GPS satellites do in space. The setup, as demonstrated by scientists at the Delft University of Technology and VU University in the Netherlands, involves scattering radio transmitters around an area or using those already in place. Each transmitter is synchronized to an atomic clock, which sends the time to transmitters via fiber optic cable, which may already be in a place due to existing communications infrastructure. Receivers can collect signals scattered across a wide range of radio frequencies, making it more difficult to jam or spoof them. The team published a proof of concept in a 2022 Nature paper and is working on a second iteration called SuperGPS2.

Tom Powell, another GPS expert at the Aerospace Corporation, said that looking at alternatives and augmentations like these is important—even though GPS recently underwent the 25-year modernization effort, making its own signals more robust to vulnerabilities. “Now that we have delivered, or nearly completely delivered, this modernization, is there a better way to do it in face of the current realities?” he said. He and other GPS experts don’t have answers yet. “We’re just asking questions right now.”

Walter, the director of the Stanford GPS Lab, thinks that whatever a better path looks like, it will likely still include the old-school, original system. “There’s nothing that really does replace GPS,” he said. “I see articles saying ‘post-GPS World’ and so forth. But really, GPS, I think, will always be there.”

People will, and should, strengthen it, Walter added, but that bolstering is going to be piecemeal—efforts may work in a particular region, or they cover some of GPS’s roles (such as providing accurate time) but not others, or they may back up navigation but not be as accurate. They may also cost money. “GPS is free, so that makes it almost impossible to compete with,” he said.

GPS is also straightforward, said Powell. “As satellites go, they’re pretty simple,” he said. They point at Earth, and they transmit signals that tell what time it is. From that, humans get to live in an interconnected, chronologically propriocepted world. Figuring out how to keep it that way, though, is proving a little more complicated.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 30 December 2025 at 4:29 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of November): 5,412

RIP Matrix

Colorectal cancers that occur after the age of 50 and are not linked to inherited genetic syndromes are known as average-onset or sporadic CRCs. Encouragingly, both the incidence and mortality of these cancers have declined steadily over the past three decades, largely due to improved screening, early detection, and treatment. In stark contrast, early-onset colorectal cancers (those diagnosed before age 50) have risen sharply during the same period, even as screening programmes expanded for older adults. 

This shift is particularly concerning given the global burden of colorectal cancer. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. In 2020 alone, an estimated 19 lakh new cases and more than 9.3 lakh deaths were recorded globally. Against this backdrop, the findings of the current study could open new avenues for prevention, earlier detection, and more targeted treatment of this deadly subset of colorectal cancer. 

What is colorectal cancer, and how is it caused?

Colorectal cancer is a type of malignancy that develops in the colon (large intestine) or the rectum, which together form the final part of the digestive tract. It is among the most common cancers worldwide and can be life-threatening if not detected and treated early. 

Age remains the strongest risk factor for colorectal cancer, with most cases traditionally occurring in people over the age of 50. However, the rising incidence among younger adults suggests that additional biological, environmental, and lifestyle factors are at play. 

Several factors are known to increase the risk of colorectal cancer. These include a family history of the disease or inherited genetic conditions such as Lynch syndrome and familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP). Individuals who have previously had colorectal cancer or certain types of precancerous polyps are also at higher risk. Lifestyle factors play a significant role as well. Diets high in processed and red meats and low in fruits, vegetables, and fibre, physical inactivity, obesity, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption have all been linked to increased CRC risk. 

One of the major challenges with colorectal cancer is that it often develops silently. Early-stage disease may cause no noticeable symptoms, making regular screening critical. When symptoms do appear, they can include persistent changes in bowel habits such as diarrhoea or constipation, blood in the stool, abdominal pain or bloating, unexplained weight loss, chronic fatigue, and iron-deficiency anaemia caused by slow internal bleeding.

Findings of the study

The new study, published in the journal Advanced Science, comprehensively links biomechanical changes in colon tissue to the development of early-onset colorectal cancer. 

“This is the first study to highlight the key role of biomechanical forces in the pathogenesis of early-onset CRC,” said Jacopo Ferruzzi, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Texas. “Our observations are consistent across multiple length scales and link connective tissue stiffening to altered biochemical signalling in cancer cells.” 

To arrive at these conclusions, researchers analysed intestinal tissue obtained from patients who had undergone surgery to remove colorectal tumours. The study examined 19 tissue samples from patients with average-onset CRC and 14 samples from patients with early-onset CRC. Importantly, each sample included not only the cancerous tumour but also adjacent noncancerous tissue, allowing for detailed comparisons. 

Biomechanical testing revealed that both the tumours and the surrounding noncancerous tissue were significantly stiffer in patients with early-onset CRC than in those with average-onset disease. This finding suggests that increased tissue stiffness may not simply be a consequence of cancer, but could precede and contribute to cancer development in younger individuals. 

To understand why the tissue was stiffer, the researchers examined collagen, a structural protein that becomes more abundant and altered during scarring and chronic inflammation. They found that collagen in early-onset CRC samples was denser, longer, more mature, and more highly aligned than in average-onset samples. These characteristics point to extensive fibrotic or scar-like remodelling of the colon tissue. 

Further genetic analysis strengthened this link. When researchers compared gene activity between the two groups, early-onset CRC tissues showed significantly higher expression of genes involved in collagen metabolism, blood vessel formation, and inflammation.  

However, the authors also clearly outlined the limitations of their work. The study had a relatively small sample size, consisting of 19 average-onset and 14 early-onset CRC tissue pairs, and not all samples yielded complete biomechanical data due to tissue damage or insufficient size. The researchers noted a lack of rectal cancer samples in the average-onset group, likely because aggressive chemoradiation therapy reduces tumour size and limits tissue availability for research. 

They also acknowledged that colorectal tissue exhibits highly anisotropic properties, meaning it behaves differently depending on the direction of force applied. Due to limited tissue availability, the team was unable to explore multiaxial mechanical behaviour and instead relied on models assuming isotropic properties. Spatial transcriptomic analysis was conducted on a limited number of regions and was not consistently performed on both normal and cancer tissues in all cases. Additionally, the “matched normal” tissues were taken from areas adjacent to tumours, which may be influenced by field effects. 

Despite these constraints, the study stated that “a coherent mechanobiological framework emerges from our multiscale approach integrating biomechanical measurements, quantitative histology, cellular phenotype analysis, spatial transcriptomics, and in vitro modelling.” They concluded that pro-inflammatory and pro-fibrotic remodelling drives tissue stiffening, leading to increased epithelial YAP activity and cell proliferation (key processes in early-onset CRC development). 

The researchers emphasised that future studies should focus on understanding biochemical and biomechanical interactions between stromal and epithelial cells, systematically manipulating tissue stiffness to define its role in cancer behaviour, and identifying mechanical biomarkers that could serve as early predictors of disease. 

Significance for India

The findings are particularly relevant for India, where colorectal cancer is emerging as a growing public health concern. According to the World Cancer Research Fund, India recorded 70,038 new colorectal cancer cases in 2022, with an age-standardised incidence rate of 4.9 per 100,000 (which means that roughly five out of every one lakh people developed colorectal cancer, after accounting for differences in age distribution) 

Out of approximately 1.92 million global cases, India ranked fifth after China, the United States, Japan, and Russia. 

Concerns about younger patients are not new in the Indian context. A 2017 study conducted at a tertiary cancer centre in India examined 778 colorectal cancer patients registered between August 2013 and July 2014. The study compared patients aged 45 years or younger with those older than 45 and followed them for a median period of nearly 28 months. 

The researchers found that younger patients more commonly presented with poor tumour differentiation, node-positive disease, and rectal cancers. They also received more intensive neoadjuvant treatments. While there was no significant difference in overall survival between the two age groups, disease-free survival was significantly lower among younger patients. “This study confirms the high incidence rates of CRC in young Indian patients,” the authors noted, adding that longer follow-up would be required to assess survival differences more clearly. 

More recent research has added nuance to this picture. A 2024 hospital-based study from eastern India examined the clinico-demographic profile of young colorectal cancer patients and analysed trends over time at a major tertiary cancer centre in Bihar.

The retrospective observational study, conducted at the State Cancer Institute, Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS), Patna, included 1,028 histopathologically confirmed CRC cases, of which 344 patients (33.4 per cent) were younger than 40 years.

The study found that the median age among young CRC patients was just 30 years, with cases ranging from 12 to 39 years. Rectal cancer was the dominant subsite, affecting nearly three out of every four young patients, and Stage III disease was the most common stage at diagnosis.

Chemotherapy was the most frequently administered treatment. 

Crucially, while the proportion of young CRC patients was significantly higher than that reported in developed countries, the study found no statistically significant increase over time. “The trends of this proportion have been consistent over the study period, i.e., from 2014 to 2021, without any significant change in our hospital-based cancer registry.

Rectal cancer affected nearly three out of every four CRC patients in this age group. More advanced disease at presentation emphasises the need for measures of screening, early diagnosis, and adequate infrastructure for treatment,” the study concluded, suggesting that the challenge in India may lie less in a rapidly rising incidence among the young and more in delayed detection, site-specific disease patterns, and gaps in early diagnostic pathways. 

According to a recent Lok Sabha reply, under the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases (NP-NCD) within the National Health Mission, the government supports screening, early diagnosis, referral, treatment, and health promotion for cancers. As of recent data, 770 District NCD Clinics, 364 District Day Care Cancer Centres, and over 6,400 NCD clinics at Community Health Centres have been established nationwide. 

Advanced care is provided through 19 State Cancer Institutes and 20 Tertiary Cancer Care Centres, with diagnostic and treatment facilities approved across all new AIIMS institutions. Specialised facilities such as the National Cancer Institute in Jhajjar and the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute in Kolkata offer superspecialty care, while additional cancer centres have been set up under the Department of Atomic Energy. The Union Budget 2025–26 further approved more than 200 new Day Care Cancer Centres across the country. 

Source

A team of American scientists claim they have done something miraculous: they “cured” lab mice suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, which has robbed more than seven million Americans, typically 65 years old and up, of their identity and cognitive ability.

The researchers achieved this feat by administering the rodents with the powerful compound P7C3-A20, which they announced in a new paper in the journal Cell Reports Medicine. Scientists from Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), University Hospitals, and the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center undertook the study.

“The key takeaway is a message of hope — the effects of Alzheimer’s disease may not be inevitably permanent,” said Andrew A. Pieper, the study’s principal investigator and a CWRU neuroscience professor, in a statement about the research. “The damaged brain can, under some conditions, repair itself and regain function.”

This research is part of a growing wave of very promising lab studies that point to a tantalizing future where Alzheimer’s and other neurological issues could be a thing of the past. Besides this P7C3-A20 research, others have scored remarkable lab results using different compounds and treatments.

This has made normally cautious scientists so excited that they are making bold predictions. University of Edinburgh neuroscience professor Tara Spires-Jones, who wasn’t part of this P7C3-A20 study, told the BBC this month she thinks scientists are closer than ever to a “truly life-changing” treatment — in as little as five to 10 years; instead of a slow death where people lose themselves, she forecasts that new tests will detect the condition early and innovative treatments will “really make your life normal.”

Scientists are also closer to understanding what causes Alzheimer’s, which seems to be sparked by different factors such as genetics, environment and other stressors — which means that future patients may receive personalized cocktail of anti-Alzheimer’s treatment and drugs suited for their own situation.

Regardless of the cause, previous research has suggested that Alzheimer’s is a form of inflammation. That means lessening or zeroing out inflammation in the brain would be key rather than managing symptoms.

In the P7C3-A20 study, the scientists focused on the impact of the crucial molecule NAD+, a coenzyme important for driving cellular metabolism and which decreases as we age, according to the study. Patients with Alzheimer’s suffer from a significant decrease of NAD+ in the brain, and hence their brain cells have trouble maintaining normal functionality, staving off inflammation, and canceling other physical hallmarks of the disease.

For the study, the team first took two types of lab mice that have been genetically bred to be predisposed to Alzheimer’s; one cohort had mutations for the amyloid protein and the other had tau protein mutations. Both proteins are important to cellular function, but they can become dangerous if they accrete in the brain in the form of amyloid plaques and tau tangles — causing a breakdown in normal cellular processes.

The team injected P7C3-A20 into both mice cohorts at two months of age, later finding out that this treatment successfully prevented them from developing the disease. But the big news was when they injected the compound into another batch of lab mice, who were suffering from a relatively advanced stage of Alzheimer’s at six months of age; after getting injections, these mice completely recovered their cognitive ability and NAD+ levels were restored to homeostasis levels

“We were very excited and encouraged by our results,” said Pieper in the statement. “Restoring the brain’s energy balance achieved pathological and functional recovery in both lines of mice with advanced Alzheimer’s. Seeing this effect in two very different animal models, each driven by different genetic causes, strengthens the new idea that recovery from advanced disease might be possible in people with AD when the brain’s NAD+ balance is restored.”

What’s also good about this study is that P7C3-A20 offers an alternative pathway to boosting NAD+ levels versus taking over-the-counter chemical precursors for NAD+, which can can raise NAD+ to such toxic levels that people could develop cancer, Pieper said. Supplements to boost NAD+ are just a click away on your cellphone, which should be worrying for anybody concerned about cancer.

The team wants to move to human clinical trials but some people are clearly not waiting; if you search online on how to obtain P7C3-A20 for yourself, numerous websites selling vials of the compound will pop up.

Source

Sarah Sajedi was visiting Phi Phi Island, Thailand, when she was dazzled by the beautiful scenery of the Andaman Sea. However, when she looked down at her feet, she saw that the white sandy beach was covered with plastic debris, most of which was from plastic bottles.

After many years in the business world as the cofounder of an environmental software company, the experience inspired Sajedi to become a researcher. She had always had a passion for waste reduction, but she realized that the problem was consumption itself.

Thus, as a doctoral student at Concordia University in Canada, Sajedi reviewed over 140 scientific papers to determine the effects of plastic bottles on the human body. She found that people ingest an average of 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year from food and drinking water, and those who use bottled water on a daily basis ingest nearly 90,000 more microplastic particles into their bodies.

“Drinking water from plastic bottles is fine in an emergency, but it is not something that should be used in daily life,” Sajedi explains. “Even if there are no immediate effects on the human body, we need to understand the potential for chronic harm.”

Long-Term Effects Remain a Mystery

Microplastics are plastic particles ranging in size from 1 micrometer (1/1,000 of a millimeter) to 5 mm. Nanoplastics are even smaller, less than one micrometer. These particles are invisible to the naked eye, but are constantly being generated during the manufacturing, storage, transportation, and decomposition of bottles.

Low-quality plastics, in particular, are prone to release microscopic debris due to sunlight, temperature changes, and physical manipulation. Unlike other plastic particles that enter the body through the food chain, those derived from plastic bottles are of concern because they are ingested directly with drinking water.

Once in the body, microscopic plastics can enter the bloodstream and reach vital organs. This triggers a chronic inflammatory response and exposes cells to oxidative stress, which can lead to hormone system disturbances, impaired reproductive function, and damage to the nervous system. It has also been linked to various types of cancer. On the other hand, the long-term effects on health remain unclear, due to the lack of extensive testing and standardized measurement methods.

Several analytical methods exist for detecting micro- and nanoplastics, but each has its own advantages and weaknesses. Some methods can detect extremely small particles but cannot determine their chemical composition, while others can analyze composition but miss the smallest particles.

Moreover, the most accurate and reliable instruments are extremely expensive and not available to all institutions. Sajedi and his team point out that this technical limitation is a hindrance to uniform research on a global scale.

Plastic Bottles Are Not Regulated

Governments around the world are working on legislation to limit plastic waste. However, regulations are currently limited mainly to items such as plastic bags, straws, and packaging materials.

In contrast, there is little regulation of plastic bottles, which are feared to have a direct impact on health. While some regions in the US and Canada have begun to take positive steps, a global regulatory framework is still in its infancy.

Plastic pollution is not only an environmental issue, but also a public health challenge. Access to safe drinking water for everyone is one of the basic human rights, but in the long run, a sustainable water supply that does not depend on plastic bottles is needed.

Sajedi's research, which began with a scene she saw on the sandy beaches of Phi Phi Island, may be a step toward visualizing the reality of pollution that is invisible—and at the same time, a step toward changing the consciousness of society as a whole.

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 29 December 2025 at 4:54 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of November): 5,412

RIP Matrix