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. 

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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.

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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.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

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

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Born on 16 December last year in Indian-administered Kashmir, the sheep has been named Tarmeem – the Arabic word for modification or editing.

Tarmeem is housed in a private enclosure at the Sher-e-Kashmir Agricultural University in the region's main city Srinagar along with its non-edited twin sister.

Researchers at the university told the BBC that they used CRISPR technology - a biological system for altering DNA – to develop it.

Basically what it allows scientists to do is use it like a pair of scissors to chop off bits of a gene that cause weaknesses or diseases.

"We extracted a number of embryos from pregnant sheep and edited a specific gene - known as the myostatin gene - which negatively affects muscle growth," researcher Dr Suhail Magray told the BBC.

The embryos or fertilised eggs were kept in controlled laboratory conditions for two-three days after which they were transferred to a female sheep - or the foster recipient.

"And then nature took over - 150 days later, lambs were born," he said. "Our aim was to increase the muscle mass in sheep and by knocking out the myostatin gene, we successfully managed to do that," he added.

After Tarmeem turned one earlier this month, Prof Riaz Shah, the dean of faculty of veterinary sciences and principal investigator on the project, gave the BBC a status update.

"It's growing well, showing normal physiological, biochemical and physical parameters," he said. "Tarmeem's muscle growth has expectedly shown significant increase - about 10% - in comparison to its non-edited twin. I think it is likely to increase further with age."

Experimentation is going on to evaluate its health and survival and the sheep is kept in a secure environment under strict surveillance, Prof Shah said, adding that they have submitted a research project to the government for funding support.

Prof Riaz Shah (right) says he expects the success rate in birthing gene-edited sheep to be high in future

Sheep have been genetically modified and gene-edited for decades, mainly for research and medical purposes. Early experiments, like the 1990s UK sheep "Tracy," produced therapeutic proteins in milk. Today, CRISPR is used to study traits such as muscle growth, disease resistance, and fertility.

The eight-member team that worked on developing India's first gene-edited sheep had been at it for seven years.

"There were a few false starts. We tried multiple strategies, and the breakthrough finally came in December 2024. We did seven IVF procedures, we had five live births and two abortions. Gene-editing was successful in only one," Prof Shah said.

"We started from zero. But we have now standardised the practice and I think the success rate would be high in future."

The scientists are excited by the experiment's success, saying it could help secure sustainable mutton production in the Kashmir Valley, which consumes around 60,000 tonnes annually but produces only half. That, of course, depends on government approval for farming or consumption.

"Land is getting squeezed, water is getting depleted, population is growing but space available for growing food is shrinking," says Prof Nazir Ahmad Ganai, the university's vice-chancellor.

"Our state is deficit in mutton, but gene-editing can raise a sheep's body weight by 30%. This would be very useful for sustainable food production as it would mean fewer animals can provide more meat," he says.

If the government grants permission for replicating this technology in large flocks, Prof Ganai says, they can use it to farm sheep and, later, other animals.

"Many institutions in India are working on pigs, goats and poultry. The future is bright," he adds.

Discovered in 2012, gene-editing technology earned its co-inventors Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna a 2020 Nobel Prize and has revolutionised medical research. But it remains controversial, with ethical debates fuelled by its resemblance to genetic modification (GM).

Scientists emphasise that gene editing and GM are fundamentally different: gene editing tweaks existing genes within a plant, animal, or human, while GM involves introducing foreign genes.

Countries like Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Colombia and Japan treat some gene-edited fish, cattle and pigs as natural, allowing them for consumption.

The US and China use the technology to create more productive, disease-resistant crops and animals; the US FDA recently approved a genetically enhanced pig, and the UK will allow gene-edited foods next year.

India's first gene-edited sheep (right) lives in a protected enclosure with its non-edited twin

Scientists also marvel at the applications CRISPR has for human disease control.

Doctors in the US and some other countries are already using gene-editing to treat rare blood disorders such as thalassemia and sickle cell anaemia. This year, it was used successfully in the US to treat a baby born with a rare genetic disorder and in the UK on a toddler with Hunter syndrome.

But in many parts of the world, including in the EU, restrictions remain strict although last year, European Parliament voted to reduce regulatory oversight of crops created through gene editing.

Indian agriculture ministry also this year approved two gene-edited rice varieties expected to boost yields. But it's too early to say whether Tarmeem the sheep would be treated as a natural genetic variant in India.

Prof Ganai is hopeful. "India became food-surplus through science, specifically the high-yield crops developed in the 1960s. With gene-edited sheep and other animals, India can do the same for the meat industry," he says.

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Others—with wide trunks—have been around for centuries and are cozy to touch: you can form an arm chain around them with a friend, trace your fingers along the bark or rest your ear on the trunk to listen to the inner workings of the tree. To hug a tree is an art. This ability does not come intuitively. It must be learned.

"Hugging trees is a way of having touch in one's life," Xiaoyang Wong, the leader of a forest therapy community in Beijing, told me. Wong is a 35-year-old former film editor who recently retrained as a forest therapist after the COVID pandemic left her feeling alone and isolated.

At first, many people feel awkward about hugging a tree, she told me. But in forest therapies, Wong encourages people to understand the tree's many worlds by observing it at close quarters, watching the ants and other insects as they weave in and out of the grain of the bark.

Only after being curious about it and speaking with it, she encourages people to decide to touch or even hug it. I was a natural at tree hugging, she told me. I, however, had only learned how to hug a tree from watching other people do this supposedly silly practice in parks across the city.

In Beijing, most of the ancient trees are fenced in by the local government to protect them from damage; however, the newer ones are still available for people to touch and gather around.

Seeking relief

On weekends and even late at night, I discovered people—young and old, mothers and daughters, friends and lovers—hugging trees or resting their backs against a trunk while seeking relief from everyday stresses.

These stresses have compounded, especially after the COVID pandemic when loneliness and isolation became commonplace. Moreover, as many young women in China contest the idea of marriage, they seek friendships and new ways of pursuing a good life.

Trees, scholars argue, make young people feel "rooted" and "alive." In my interviews with more than 25 young women and men as part of my ongoing research—which is yet to be published—I discovered that more women than men went to forest therapy, seeking both friendship with trees and other human beings.

In these therapies, Wong adapted the traditional forest bathing therapies with her own ideas to enhance people's engagement. These include "plant enactment" where people could take on the name of their favorite tree, and be called by this name all day. She encouraged us, the participants in the therapy, to share a gesture that we associated with our chosen plant, one that described how we imagined the tree would move.

Wong was joined in these sessions by other women who too had given up the pursuit of high-pressure jobs, and had instead taken this part-time work to look after people, trees and plants in the city.

In one of these group sessions, a tree hugger, Florian Mo, expressed his frustration at not being able to find and sustain love in his life. He argued that a key problem with Chinese society was the stigmatization of the pursuit of love at a young age.

He was 28 and reeling from a break-up. But for Mo, this was only because he had never learned how to love when he was a teenager. If he had done so, not only would he be a better partner today, as he shared with us, he would also be able to move on from his current heartbreak more easily.

For young people like Wong and Mo, trees emerged as spaces to explore themselves and connections to each other. And while the story of China's urbanization is often told through images of polluted air, water and soil, young people like Wong and Mo present an alternative narrative: that young Chinese generations seek to repair the urban environment by connecting with others while caring, nurturing and even hugging the trees with their friends and strangers.

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Statins sit at the intersection of medical treatment and everyday lifestyle because high cholesterol is strongly influenced by factors such as diet, physical activity, weight and smoking. Although statins are prescribed based on clinical evidence, their use often prompts questions about whether cardiovascular risk should be reduced primarily through medication, lifestyle change, or a combination of both.

Statins are a group of drugs that block an enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase. This enzyme plays a central role in the liver's production of cholesterol. Cholesterol is a fatty substance the body needs to build cell membranes, produce hormones, make vitamin D and generate bile, which helps digest fats.

Cholesterol travels through the bloodstream attached to proteins, forming particles known as lipoproteins. The most familiar are low density lipoprotein (LDL) and high density lipoprotein (HDL).

LDL is often labeled "bad cholesterol" because high levels can lead to fatty build-ups inside arteries, while HDL helps transport excess cholesterol back to the liver. Another important blood fat is triglycerides, which, when elevated, also increase cardiovascular risk.

Cholesterol itself is not harmful. Problems arise when LDL and triglyceride levels remain too high for too long. This can lead to atherosclerosis, a condition in which fatty deposits narrow and stiffen arteries, increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes. By lowering LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, statins reduce the likelihood of these deposits forming.

Large clinical trials have consistently shown statins to be effective. A major review found that statins significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

The size of the benefit depends on a person's underlying cardiovascular risk and how much their LDL cholesterol is lowered. Reflecting this evidence, national guidelines recommend statins for primary prevention in people at higher risk who have not yet had cardiovascular disease, and secondary prevention for those with established disease.

Given this strong evidence, why do statins still generate so much hesitation?

Like all medicines, statins have side effects. Common ones include headache, digestive upset and dizziness. More serious but uncommon or rare effects include liver inflammation and muscle problems.

One such condition is myopathy, meaning muscle pain or weakness with raised levels of creatine kinase, an enzyme released when muscle tissue is damaged. In very rare cases, severe muscle breakdown known as rhabdomyolysis can occur.

Large datasets show that most people tolerate statins well. When patients report muscle symptoms while taking statins, there is less than a 10% chance that the statin is actually the cause. Rhabdomyolysis is extremely rare, affecting only a few people per million users. The risk increases at very high doses or when statins are taken alongside medicines that interfere with how they are broken down.

Statins can also cause a small rise in blood glucose, mainly affecting people with prediabetes or diabetes. However, because statins substantially reduce heart attack risk in these groups, the overall benefit outweighs this modest increase. Most side effects are reversible once treatment is stopped, whereas damage from heart attacks or strokes can be permanent.

Drug interactions are another concern. Statins such as simvastatin and atorvastatin are broken down in the liver by enzymes known as CYP enzymes, particularly CYP3A4. When other medicines block these enzymes, statin levels in the blood can rise, increasing the risk of muscle-related side effects.

Important interactions include antifungal medications such as ketoconazole, certain antibiotics like erythromycin, immunosuppressants such as ciclosporin, and some heart drugs including amiodarone and diltiazem.

Even grapefruit can interfere with statin metabolism. It contains chemicals called furanocoumarins, which block CYP3A4 enzymes in the gut, allowing more statin to enter the bloodstream. Not all statins are affected to the same extent, so switching to a different statin could reduce this risk.

While statins are effective, they are not the only tool for managing cholesterol. Lifestyle measures play a central role and are recommended alongside medication. Obesity is a major cardiovascular risk factor.

A review found that combining diet and exercise reduced body weight, improved cholesterol levels and lowered cardiometabolic risk: it reduces factors linked to heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Dietary changes are particularly important. National guidelines recommend reducing saturated fat intake to help lower LDL cholesterol. Saturated fats are commonly found in butter, fatty meats and processed foods.

Replacing them with unsaturated fats, such as those found in olive oil, nuts and seeds, can improve cholesterol levels. Shifting towards plant-based proteins like beans, lentils and soy may also reduce reliance on red and processed meats.

Fiber intake matters too. Research shows that higher fiber consumption is associated with better cholesterol levels and lower heart disease risk.

A large 2019 review found that people with high fiber intake had a 15 to 30% lower risk of dying from heart disease or developing coronary heart disease. Whole grains, fruits and vegetables provide fiber alongside vitamins and antioxidants that support heart health.

Regular physical activity raises HDL cholesterol and lowers triglycerides. Current guidelines recommend 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week, but even smaller amounts offer meaningful benefits.

The choice between statins and lifestyle change is not an either-or decision. For people at high risk, including those with previous heart attacks, inherited cholesterol disorders or multiple risk factors, statins are often essential.

For others with mildly raised cholesterol, lifestyle changes may delay or prevent the need for medication. Healthy total cholesterol levels are usually below 5 mmol/L, but targets vary depending on individual risk.

Ultimately, treatment decisions should be personalized, balancing cardiovascular risk, the proven benefits of statins, potential side effects and what lifestyle change is realistically achievable.

Statins have transformed cardiovascular care and saved millions of lives. Yet they remain controversial. Addressing poor diet, physical inactivity and obesity remains central to reducing the burden of heart disease in the long term.

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A surprising study reveals that there is a trace of "wolf" lurking within the tiny body of a Chihuahua and the gigantic build of a St. Bernard.

An international research team from the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Natural History analyzed the genomes of 2,693 dogs and wolves and found that 64.1 percent of purebred dogs carry fragments of wolf DNA. Furthermore, a study of village dogs (free-roaming dogs living in or near human communities) from around the world found genetic traces of wolves in all 280 analyzed pups.

Dogs are thought to have evolved from populations of gray wolves, which became extinct during the Late Pleistocene epoch about 20,000 years ago. Although wolves and dogs still share habitats and can produce fertile offspring, interbreeding between the two has been thought to be extremely rare. Apart from deliberate breeding, there has been little evidence of genetic mixing since domestication.

“Prior to this study, the leading science seemed to suggest that in order for a dog to be a dog, there can’t be very much wolf DNA present, if any,” explains Audrey Lynn, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History who specializes in bioinformatics. “But we found if you look very closely in modern dog genomes, wolf is there.”

Genomes Reveals Memories From 3,000 Years Ago

Lynn and her colleagues collected large-scale genome data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information and the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and used sensitive genomic methods such as local ancestry analysis (LAI) and phylogenetic analysis to study wolves, purebred canines, village dogs, and other canids from the late Pleistocene to the present. The research was conducted using highly sensitive genomic methods such as local ancestry estimation (LAI) and phylogenetic analysis.

By combining these advanced methods, the researchers were able to divide the entire genome into smaller sections, estimate the ancestry of each section, and capture minute amounts of gene flow that could not be detected using conventional statistical methods.

They found that the gene flow from wolves to dogs occurred on average about 1,000 generations ago (equivalent to about 3,000 years ago). In contrast, the gene flow from dogs to wolves was much more recent, concentrated around the beginning of the 19th century. This is thought to be related to the increase in stray dog populations that accompanied urbanization and the expansion of human activity.

At the whole genome level, canines and wolves are clearly separated. However, when the research team constructed phylogenetic trees for each of the 1,582 genes, they found that not a single gene supported the monophyly of dogs. Further examination of the mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome phylogenetic trees revealed a complex interplay between canine and wolf lineages. This discrepancy is evidence of multiple rounds of gene transfer in the past.

Imprints on Physique and Personality

The researchers found that wolf genes are linked to a variety of dog traits, most notably body size. Larger dogs tend to have more wolf ancestry, and certain working breeds, such as Arctic sled dogs, wild-dog breeds, and hunting dogs, are more likely to have this trait. Terriers, bird dogs , and scent hounds, on the other hand, were least influenced by wolf genes.

Notably, among large service dogs, the influence of wolf ancestry varied greatly among breeds. The Sarabi Dog, Central Asian Shepherd Dog, and Anatolian Shepherd Dog, which are livestock guard dogs from Turkey and Central Asia, inherited 0.5-1.2 percent of their genes from wolf ancestors, while Neapolitan Mastiffs, Bull Mastiffs, and St. Bernards showed almost no trace of wolf ancestry

On the other hand, even the Chihuahua, the world's smallest dog breed, was found to have a small proportion of wolf ancestry, about 0.2 percent. These differences speak to the historical specificity of the breed's evolution.

The personalities of dog breeds also showed striking patterns depending on the proportion of wolf genes they had. When compared with breed-specific personalities described by the Kennel Club, the organization responsible for certifying dog breeds, breeds with fewer wolf genes were more likely to be described as “friendly,” “willing to obey,” “easy to train,” and “affectionate.”

In contrast, breeds with strong wolf ancestry tended to be described as “suspicious of strangers,” “independent,” “wary,” and “territorial.” However, researchers cautioned that these descriptions are based on subjective human observations and that it's unclear whether wolf DNA is directly related

Adaptive Genes That Support Survival

Wolf-derived genes are not simply a remnant of evolution, but may actually contribute to the survival of dogs. When gene ontology analysis was performed on the regions of the village dog genome that were enriched for wolf ancestral elements, the only significant functional category was the olfactory transduction pathway. This result suggests that gene inflow from wolves may have enhanced the village dog's sense of smell, thereby improving its ability to search for human food waste.

Village dogs that are not directly cared for by humans generally have a very low survival rate. For stray dogs in urban environments, the survival rate at five months of age is less than 37 percent, with some reports suggesting it is as low as 16 percent. A keen sense of smell may play a key role in their survival in these harsh environments.

Physiological changes during domestication are thought to have weakened dogs' sense of smell compared to wolves, and it seems likely that the influx of wolf genes provided village dogs with an advantage by reinforcing this weakened sense of smell.

Another adaptation has also been identified: Tibetan mastiffs carry a mutation in the EPAS1 gene, derived from the Tibetan wolf, that allows them to survive in the low-oxygen environments of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas.

All 10 individuals analyzed by the research team were homozygous for this mutation (a condition in which an organism has the same pair of alleles), and it was also widely distributed among surrounding village dogs and other highland dog breeds, suggesting that gene introgression from wolves could be an efficient solution for dogs to cope with new environmental challenges.

Wolves as Evolutionary Tools

The breeds with the highest percentage of wolf ancestry were the Czechoslovakian Wolfdog and the Saarloos Wolfdog, which were developed through deliberate breeding, at 23-40 percent. Among typical dog breeds, the Grand Anglo-Français Tricolore, which originated in France, had 4.7-5.7 percent, and the Shiloh Shepherd, which originated in the United States, had 2.7 percent, showing strong traces of wolf ancestry.

Additionally, the Tamaskan Husky, which was developed with the aim of achieving a wolf-like appearance, retains 3.7 percent of its wolf ancestors' genes. Although this is a relatively new breed, the length of its gene fragments suggests that it was developed not by directly crossbreeding wolves or wolfdogs, but rather by concentrating wolf-derived gene fragments that were individually contained in the constituent breeds, such as the Alaskan Malamute, through selection targeted at wolf-like phenotypes.

“Through the years, dogs have had to solve all kinds of evolutionary problems that come with living with humans,” says Logan Kistler, a curator at the National Museum of Natural History. “And it seems like they use wolf genes as part of a toolkit to continue their evolutionary success story.”

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

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Posted Friday 26 December 2025 at 3:27 am AEST (my time).

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In 2026, we will see the beginning of precision medical forecasting. Just as there have been remarkable advances in weather forecasting with the use of large language models, so will there be for determining an individual’s risk of the major age-related diseases (cancer, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative). These diseases share common threads, such as a long incubation phase before any symptoms are manifest, usually two decades or more. They also have the same biologic underpinnings of immunosenescence and inflammaging, terms that characterize an immune system that has lost some of its functionality and protective power, and the accompanying heightened inflammation.

The science of aging has given us new ways to track these processes with body-wide and organ clocks, along with specific protein biomarkers. That enables us to determine whether a person or an organ within a person is aging at an accelerated pace. Along with that, new AI algorithms can see things that medical experts cannot, such as accurately interpreting medical images like retinal scans to predict cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases many years in advance.

These added layers of data can be combined with a person’s electronic medical records, which include their structured and unstructured notes, lab results, scans, genetic results, wearable sensors, and environmental data. In aggregate, this provides an unprecedented depth of information about the person’s health status, enabling a forecast for risk of the three major diseases. Unlike a polygenic risk score which can detect a person’s risk for heart disease, the common cancers and Alzheimer’s, precision medical forecasting takes it to a new level by providing the projected temporal arc—the “when” factor. When all of the data is analyzed with large reasoning models, it can provide a person’s vulnerabilities, and an individualized, aggressive preventive program.

We already know the risk of these three diseases can be reduced with lifestyle factors, such as an optimal anti-inflammatory diet, frequent exercise, and a regular, high-quality sleep pattern. But, along with attention to these factors, which are far more likely to be implemented when an individual is cognizant of their risk, we will have medications that will promote a healthy, protective immune system and reduce body-wide and brain inflammation. Already the GLP-1 medicines have been shown to be a front-runner for achieving these goals, but many more medications are in the pipeline.

The potential for precision medical forecasting has to be demonstrated and validated via prospective clinical trials that show, using the same metrics of aging, that a person’s risk is decreased. An example for people with increased risk of Alzheimer’s is the blood test known as p-tau217, and that risk can be markedly reduced with improved lifestyle factors, especially exercise. That could be confirmed with a brain organ clock and body-wide aging clocks.

This is a new frontier in medicine—the potential for primary prevention of the three age-related major diseases that compromise our health span and quality of life. It would not be possible without the advances in both the science of aging and AI. For me, this is the most exciting future use of AI in medicine: an unparalleled opportunity to prevent the major diseases from occurring, something that has been dreamed about but has not been possible at scale due to the deficiency in data and analytics. In 2026, it finally will.

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Posted Wednesday 24 December 2025 at 12:25 pm AEST (my time).

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There’s still another couple of months before the 2026 crop of F1 cars takes to the track for the first preseason test. It’s a year of big change for the sport, which is adopting new power unit rules that place much more emphasis on the electric motor’s contribution. The switch to the new power units was meant to attract new manufacturers to the sport, and in that regard, it has succeeded. But controversy has erupted already as loopholes appear and teams exploit them.

Since 2014, F1 cars have used 1,000 hp (745 kW) power units that combine a turbocharged 1.6 L V6 gasoline engine with a pair of hybrid systems. One is the MGU-H, which recovers energy from (or deploys it to) the turbocharger’s turbine; the other is a 160 hp (120 kW) MGU-K that harvests and deploys energy at the rear wheels. Starting next year, the MGU-H is gone, and the less-powerful 1.6 L V6 should generate about 536 hp (400 kW). That will be complemented by a 483 hp (350 kW) MGU-K, plus a much larger battery to supply it.

And the new rules have already attracted new OEMs to the sport. After announcing its departure at the end of 2021—sort of— Honda changed its mind and signed on to the 2026 regs, supplying Aston Martin. Audi signed up and bought the Sauber team. Red Bull decided to build its own internal combustion engines, hiring heavily from the Mercedes program, but Ford is providing Red Bull with the MGU-K and the rest of the hybrid system. And Cadillac has started an engine program, albeit one that won’t take the grid until 2029.

But Audi, Honda, and Ferrari, which has been a constant in the sport since its inception, have filed a complaint with the FIA, the sport’s organizing body, claiming that Mercedes—which will supply the Alpine, McLaren, and Williams teams as well as its own two cars—and Red Bull (which also includes Racing Bulls) are not coloring within the lines.

Compression ratios

At issue is the engines’ compression ratio, which compares the volume of the cylinder when the piston is at top dead center with the volume when the piston is at its closest to the crank. Under the 2014–2025 rules, this was set at 18:1, but for 2026 onward, it has been reduced to 16:1.

This is measured at ambient temperature, though, not while the engine is running. A running engine is hotter—much hotter—than one sitting at ambient, and as metals heat up, they expand. The engines have very short throws, so it doesn’t take much expansion to increase the compression ratio by reducing the distance between the piston and cylinder head at the top of its travel. The benefit could be as much as 15 hp (11 kW), which translates to a few tenths of a second per lap advantage.

Unfortunately for the other teams, the FIA stated that its rules indeed specify only that the compression ratio should be 16:1 based on static conditions and at ambient temperatures. “This procedure has remained unchanged despite the reduction in the permitted ratio for the 2026 season. It is true that thermal expansion can influence dimensions, but the current rules do not provide for measurements to be carried out at elevated temperatures,” the FIA said.

So if Mercedes and Red Bull do have a horsepower advantage, it’s one that will likely be baked into the 2026 season.

The compression ratio clarification wasn’t the only one issued by the FIA. For some time now, F1 has used ultrasonic fuel flow meters as a way to control power outputs. Under the outgoing regulations, this was capped at 100 kg/h, but with the move to fully sustainable synthetic fuels, this is changing to an energy cap of 3,000 MJ/h instead.

In the past, it had been theorized that teams could try to game the fuel flow meters—the most impressive idea I heard involved pulsing more fuel between the sensor’s sampling inputs to boost power, although I don’t believe it was ever implemented.

Don’t even think about being that clever this time, the FIA says. “Any device, system, or procedure, the purpose of which is to change the temperature of the fuel-flow meter, is forbidden,” it says, updating the regulation that previously banned “intentional heating or chilling” of the fuel flow meter.

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Posted Wednesday 24 December 2025 at 4:00 am AEST (my time).

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Mark Duguay of Windsor says he gave $275 worth of Tim Hortons cards to friends — and none of the cards were redeemable. They'd all been drained by a scammer. CBC's Dalson Chen reports.

 

Store-bought gift cards might seem like convenient stocking stuffers this time of year, but one Windsor, Ont., man says he'll never purchase them again — after wasting $275 on cards drained by scammers.

 

"I felt like a total idiot," said Mark Duguay, 66. "Very much embarrassed."

 

Duguay said earlier this month, his seniors' euchre club decided to do something nice for the club's five main organizers.

• Video
  How to spot gift card barcode swap scams

 

A collection was taken up, generating $275. Duguay was then tasked with using the money to buy five Tim Hortons gift cards, each with $55 on them.

 

Duguay obtained the cards from a Dollarama location. The euchre club gave the cards to the organizers at a gathering on Dec. 10, as a collective show of appreciation.

 

 

 

 

Police are warning holiday shoppers about ongoing scams where gift card barcodes are tampered with so that scammers keep the cash value of the card. We spoke to experts about what to watch for while shopping.

Duguay said that the next day, each of the five recipients came back to him and said their cards couldn't be redeemed for any amount.

He checked the cards himself with the same results. "It says 'access denied' on all the cards."

'There's nothing we can do'

Duguay said he went back to the Dollarama location to try to get a refund, but was told he needed to take up the problem with Tim Hortons — since he couldn't readily prove to the store that the cards weren't used by the recipients or by himself.

"They kept saying, 'There's nothing we can do,'" Duguay said.

 

Mark Duguay shows the Tim Hortons gift cards he bought from a Dollarama location in Windsor. (Dalson Chen/CBC)

In a statement to CBC Windsor, Dollarama advises that its customer service teams review gift card-related issues "on a case-by-case basis to determine appropriate resolution, as each card issuer has its own policies regarding reimbursement and replacement."

Dollarama said its stores have measures in place to help reduce the risk of gift card fraud. "However, our ability to prevent fraudulent activity is limited once a transaction is completed and the gift card leaves our premises."

Tim Hortons did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Jennifer Matthews, CEO of the Better Business Bureau for Western Ontario, said what happened to Duguay has happened to other consumers as scammers have been known to 'drain' gift cards. (CBC News)

Consumers warned of 'gift card draining'

Jennifer Matthews, CEO of the Better Business Bureau for Western Ontario, said what happened to Duguay is "unfortunately, not an uncommon experience, especially at this time of year."

In recent years, the Better Business Bureau has regularly warned the public of a scam known as "gift card draining."

"When these cards are in a common area of the store, what these scammers do very well is they take the cards and tamper with that code on the back ... and return those cards to the shelf," Matthews explained.

"So once somebody comes in and buys those gift cards, they are activated at the point of sale. The scammer has [the information], and they can drain the card of everything that the purchaser thought was going to be on the card as a gift."

Tips to help prevent getting scammed

Chuck Bell, advocacy programs director for Consumer Reports, said it's a good habit to check a gift card from a rack for signs of tampering — such as damage to the protective strip on the back.

But as the sophistication of scamming techniques grows, it's not always physically evident that a criminal has the card's information.

"It could also be a hacking problem," Bell said. "Sometimes there's more of a technological angle."

Consumer Reports recommends that gift givers consider ordering gift cards online or only trusting cards that are stored behind the counter.

 

Duguay with the empty Tim Hortons gift cards he bought for friends. (Dalson Chen/CBC)

Duguay said the five people who were gifted the Tim Hortons cards have been understanding.

But he's worried about what the rest of his euchre club — especially those who contributed to the $275 — thinks about him now.

"It's like I'm the one who stole the money," he said. "They all know [he got scammed]. But at the end of the day, how do I explain that? It's just my word against whatever is going on now.

"I'll never buy a gift card, ever again."

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A stuck Waymo robotaxi during the San Francisco power outage. 

Credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

San Francisco was affected by a massive power outage over the weekend. It started with a fire at a substation in the city on Saturday afternoon, causing a blackout that at times affected as much as a third of the city, leaving more than 130,000 homes without power. Among the city’s affected critical systems were the traffic lights, which paralyzed Waymo’s fleet of robotaxis, stopping them in their tracks and clogging traffic.

Any recent visitor to San Francisco can’t help but notice the profusion of sensor-festooned autonomous vehicles on the roads, especially the all-white Jaguar I-Paces that belong to Waymo. The robotaxi company has more than 800 AVs in its Bay Area fleet; that can feel like a conservative estimate when you see five or six at a time—invariably with no occupants—within a block.

The cars navigate the city, combining high-resolution maps with inputs from lidar, optical, and other sensors on the upfitted Jags. The cars drive conservatively, but they can get confused in edge cases—earlier this month, Waymo issued a recall to fix a problem in which its robotaxis would illegally pass stopped school buses.

When the traffic lights went out, Waymo’s robotaxis got a little too cautious at intersections. With no red-yellow-green to cue drivers, the rule is to treat the intersection as a four-way stop. Indeed, Waymo’s cars are programmed to do this, but it seems the scale of the outage over the weekend was just too much to handle.

Social media and Reddit began to fill with videos of stationary Waymos at intersections, and the company temporarily suspended service.

Most areas saw power restored by noon yesterday, although Pacific Gas and Electric said it expected some power to remain out until Monday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis are up and running again. “We are resuming ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area,” a company spokesperson told Ars. “Yesterday’s power outage was a widespread event that caused gridlock across San Francisco, with non-functioning traffic signals and transit disruptions. While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events.”

“Throughout the outage, we closely coordinated with San Francisco city officials. We are focused on rapidly integrating the lessons learned from this event and are committed to earning and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve every day,” Waymo said.

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Posted Tuesday 23 December 2025 at 5:53 pm AEST (my time).

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Caroline Muller looks at clouds differently than most people. Where others may see puffy marshmallows, wispy cotton candy or thunderous gray objects storming overhead, Muller sees fluids flowing through the sky. She visualizes how air rises and falls, warms and cools, and spirals and swirls to form clouds and create storms.

But the urgency with which Muller, a climate scientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg, considers such atmospheric puzzles has surged in recent years. As our planet swelters with global warming, storms are becoming more intense, sometimes dumping two or even three times more rain than expected. Such was the case in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in March 2025: Almost half the city’s yearly average rainfall fell in less than 12 hours, causing deadly floods.

Atmospheric scientists have long used computer simulations to track how the dynamics of air and moisture might produce varieties of storms. But existing models hadn’t fully explained the emergence of these fiercer storms. A roughly 200-year-old theory describes how warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air: an extra 7 percent for every degree Celsius of warming. But in models and weather observations, climate scientists have seen rainfall events far exceeding this expected increase. And those storms can lead to severe flooding when heavy rain falls on already saturated soils or follows humid heatwaves.

Clouds, and the way that they cluster, could help explain what’s going on.

A growing body of research, set in motion by Muller over a decade ago, is revealing several small-scale processes that climate models had previously overlooked. These processes influence how clouds form, congregate, and persist in ways that may amplify heavy downpours and fuel larger, long-lasting storms. Clouds have an “internal life,” Muller says, “that can strengthen them or may help them stay alive longer.”

Other scientists need more convincing, because the computer simulations researchers use to study clouds reduce planet Earth to its simplest and smoothest form, retaining its essential physics but otherwise barely resembling the real world.

Now, though, a deeper understanding beckons. Higher-resolution global climate models can finally simulate clouds and the destructive storms they form on a planetary scale — giving scientists a more realistic picture. By better understanding clouds, researchers hope to improve their predictions of extreme rainfall, especially in the tropics where some of the most ferocious thunderstorms hit and where future rainfall projections are the most uncertain.

First clues to clumping clouds

All clouds form in moist, rising air. A mountain can propel air upward; so, too, can a cold front. Clouds can also form through a process known as convection: the overturning of air in the atmosphere that starts when sunlight, warm land or balmy water heats air from below. As warm air rises, it cools, condensing the water vapor it carried upwards into raindrops. This condensation process also releases heat, which fuels churning storms.

But clouds remain one of the weakest links in climate models. That’s because the global climate models scientists use to simulate scenarios of future warming are far too coarse to capture the updrafts that give rise to clouds or to describe how they swirl in a storm—let alone to explain the microphysical processes controlling how much rain falls from them to Earth.

To try to resolve this problem, Muller and other like-minded scientists turned to simpler simulations of Earth’s climate that are able to model convection. In these artificial worlds, each the shape of a shallow box typically a few hundred kilometers across and tens of kilometers deep, the researchers tinkered with replica atmospheres to see if they could figure out how clouds behaved under different conditions.

The top frame of this computer simulation shows an atmosphere where the movements of air are somewhat disorganized, leading to clouds popping up in random locations. At the bottom is a simulation of an atmosphere where patterns of convection have become organized, and clouds spontaneously clump together into one large region—forming a storm.

Intriguingly, when researchers ran these models, the clouds spontaneously clumped together, even though the models had none of the features that usually push clouds together—no mountains, no wind, no Earthly spin or seasonal variations in sunlight. “Nobody knew why this was happening,” says Daniel Hernández Deckers, an atmospheric scientist at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.

In 2012, Muller discovered a first clue: a process known as radiative cooling. The Sun’s heat that bounces off Earth’s surface radiates back into space, and where there are few clouds, more of that radiation escapes—cooling the air. The cool spots set up atmospheric flows that drive air toward cloudier regions—trapping more heat and forming more clouds. A follow-up study in 2018 showed that in these simulations, radiative cooling accelerated the formation of tropical cyclones. “That made us realize that to understand clouds, you have to look at the neighborhood as well—outside clouds,” Muller says.

Once scientists started looking not just outside clouds, but also underneath them and at their edges, they found other small-scale processes that help to explain why clouds flock together. The various processes, described by Muller and colleagues in the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, all bring or hold together pockets of warm, moist air so more clouds form in already-cloudy regions. These small-scale processes hadn’t been understood much before because they are often obscured by larger weather patterns.

Hernández Deckers has been studying one of the processes, called entrainment—the turbulent mixing of air at the edges of clouds. Most climate models represent clouds as a steady plume of rising air, but in reality “clouds are like a cauliflower,” he says. “You have a lot of turbulence, and you have these bubbles [of air] inside the clouds.” This mixing at the edges affects how clouds evolve and thunderstorms develop; it can weaken or strengthen storms in various ways, but, like radiative cooling, it encourages more clouds to form as a clump in regions that are already moist.

Such processes are likely to be most important in storms in Earth’s tropical regions, where there’s the most uncertainty about future rainfall. (That’s why Hernández Deckers, Muller, and others tend to focus their studies there.) The tropics lack the cold fronts, jet streams, and spiraling high- and low-pressure systems that dominate air flows at higher latitudes.

Supercharging heavy rains

There are other microscopic processes happening inside clouds that affect extreme rainfall, especially on shorter timescales. Moisture matters: Condensed droplets falling through moist, cloudy air don’t evaporate as much on their descent, so more water falls to the ground. Temperature matters too: When clouds form in warmer atmospheres, they produce less snow and more rain. Since raindrops fall faster than snowflakes, they evaporate less on their descent—producing, once again, more rain.

These factors also help explain why more rain can get squeezed from a cloud than the 7 percent rise per degree of warming predicted by the 200-year-old theory. “Essentially you get an extra kick … in our simulations, it was almost a doubling,” says Martin Singh, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Cloud clustering adds to this effect by holding warm, moist air together, so more rain droplets fall. One study by Muller and her collaborators found that clumping clouds intensify short-duration rainfall extremes by 30 to 70 percent, largely because raindrops evaporate less inside sodden clouds.

Other research, including a study led by Jiawei Bao, a postdoctoral researcher in Muller’s group, has likewise found that the microphysical processes going on inside clouds have a strong influence over fast, heavy downpours. These sudden downpours are intensifying much faster with climate change than protracted deluges, and often cause flash flooding.

The future of extreme rainfall

Scientists who study the clumping of clouds want to know how that behavior will change as the planet heats up—and what that will mean for incidences of heavy rainfall and flooding.

Some models suggest that clouds (and the convection that gives rise to them) will clump together more with global warming — and produce more rainfall extremes that often far exceed what theory predicts. But other simulations suggest that clouds will congregate less. “There seems to be still possibly a range of answers,” says Allison Wing, a climate scientist at Florida State University in Tallahassee who has compared various models.

Scientists are beginning to try to reconcile some of these inconsistencies using powerful types of computer simulations called global storm-resolving models. These can capture the fine structures of clouds, thunderstorms, and cyclones while also simulating the global climate. They bring a 50-fold leap in realism beyond the global climate models scientists generally use—but demand 30,000 times more computational power.

Using one such model in a paper published in 2024, Bao, Muller, and their collaborators found that clouds in the tropics congregated more as temperatures increased—leading to less frequent storms but ones that were larger, lasted longer, and, over the course of a day, dumped more rain than expected from theory.

But that work relied on just one model and simulated conditions from around one future time point—the year 2070. Scientists need to run longer simulations using more storm-resolving models, Bao says, but very few research teams can afford to run them. They are so computationally intensive that they are typically run at large centralized hubs, and scientists occasionally host “hackathons” to crunch through and share data.

Researchers also need more real-world observations to get at some of the biggest unknowns about clouds. Although a flurry of recent studies using satellite data linked the clustering of clouds to heavier rainfall in the tropics, there are large data gaps in many tropical regions. This weakens climate projections and leaves many countries ill-prepared. In June of 2025, floods and landslides in Venezuela and Colombia swept away buildings and killed at least a dozen people, but scientists don’t know what factors worsened these storms because the data are so paltry. “Nobody really knows, still, what triggered this,” Hernández Deckers says.

New, granular data are on their way. Wing is analyzing rainfall measurements from a German research vessel that traversed the tropical Atlantic Ocean for six weeks in 2024. The ship’s radar mapped clusters of convection associated with the storms it passed through, so the work should help researchers see how clouds organize over vast tracts of the ocean.

And an even more global view is on the horizon. The European Space Agency plans to launch two satellites in 2029 that will measure, among other things, near-surface winds that ruffle Earth’s oceans and skim mountaintops. Perhaps, scientists hope, the data these satellites beam back will finally provide a better grasp of clumping clouds and the heaviest rains that fall from them.

Research and interviews for this article were partly supported through a journalism residency funded by the Institute of Science & Technology Austria (ISTA). ISTA had no input into the story. This story originally appeared on Knowable Magazine. 

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Posted Tuesday 23 December 2025 at 5:52 pm AEST (my time).

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Australia made history when it enacted a ban on social media for children under 16 last week. But although the laws have drawn praise and criticism from different corners of the public, their efficacy remains to be seen. Teenagers who fall under the restricted age limit seem to have no difficulty circumventing the ban and maintain unrestricted access to their online accounts.

It's a tale as old as the internet that no wall placed before youngsters will go unscaled. Australian leadership celebrated the law's introduction on December 10, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declaring, "Across Australia, those under 16 are starting their day a little differently, without social media." The kids beg to differ. In fact, many never experienced even an interruption of service. "None of my accounts on any platform has been shut down," one 15-year-old told CNN, "not even the ones that I put my real age."

The ban only applies to a handful of the most popular social media sites like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Critics worry this will drive children out onto the wider internet, where there are even fewer protections for them. But through a mix of fairly sophomoric workarounds and apparent system failures, many haven't had to leave their favorite platforms in the first place. Here's what's happening, and what it could mean for a wave of internet ID laws around the world.

Young teens are using AI, VPNs, and their parents help to dodge the ban

For children who grew up with the internet, dodging filters has always been a rite of passage. Whether parental filters on home computers or schoolwide VPNs, systems designed to keep youngsters out of online trouble have often appeared to underestimate their grasp of technology, proving to be inconvenient at best. Now, governments are beginning to learn that lesson in real-time, with Australia the latest to be humbled by its youth.

It was already common practice for teenagers to dodge preexisting platform restrictions for child-controlled accounts by misstating their date of birth when they sign up to a platform, and some Australian under-16s with such accounts claim they didn't experience a loss of service to their social media. Others simply used AI-generated photos of adults, taking a cue from users in the United Kingdom who had used similar techniques to bypass age-restriction laws that went into effect this past summer. In some cases, parents and older friends helped children maintain an online presence by using their own faces and identities to age-verify the accounts. If all else fails, the best VPN services are at the ready to help users pretend their web traffic is originating from outside the country.

Moreover, because the ban is limited to a small handful of platforms, teens are likely to migrate elsewhere if more effective methods emerge to enforce the ban. Banning TikTok but not TikTok alternatives is the result of not applying a blanket ban. Platforms like Discord were not included in the law, despite years of reports about child sexual exploitation on the gaming-centric community platform. Some sites, such as the infamous 4chan, remain unrestricted despite their ongoing reputations for graphic imagery and hate speech, among other concerns.

Teens dodging Aussie social media ban highlights enforcement challenges

The ease with which many young teenagers have circumvented Australia's social media ban on them highlights the difficulty of locking down the internet. At the core of the World Wide Web are openness and interoperability, principles that run counter to attempts to silo users. Even China, which famously maintains the world's most robust internet firewall, cannot fully prevent determined citizens from accessing the broader web. In Australia, where the goal is merely to prevent a subsection of users from accessing a small handful of websites and platforms, the needle is even harder to thread. If age-verification tools are too draconian, they will impede adult users, but even a slight crack in that armor will allow children to entirely elude restrictions.

Advocates of the law insist that breaking away from social media could help reverse negative mental health trends among youth. Critics worry that, in addition to being ineffective, blanket bans are not an evidence-based approach to the underlying concerns around the online lives of children — and some have suggested that the duty to protect children online falls to parents, not governments. Others fear that a data breach of the companies handling age verification could expose the private information and identities of children and adults alike. And yet more warnings come from freedom-of-speech advocates, who are increasingly concerned about governments' ability to track dissent and curtail freedoms.

With a slew of age- and identity-verification laws winding their way through legislative bodies in the United States and around the globe, all eyes are on Australia. Social media companies will watch closely, too. As goes the land down under, so may go the future of the open internet.

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The trade-off between quality and quantity is a fundamental economic dilemma. Now, a team of British, American, and Japanese researchers describes how it applies to biology, as well. They have discovered that this dilemma most likely shaped the evolutionary trajectory of ants, one of Earth’s most successful groups of organisms.

Their study reveals that, as ant societies grew in complexity and numbers, they didn’t just make their workers smaller—they also made them cheaper.

The cost of armor

In the insect world, the exoskeleton known as the cuticle serves as a protective barrier against predators, pathogens, and desiccation, while providing the structural framework for muscle attachment. But this protection comes at a price. Building a robust cuticle requires significant amounts of nitrogen and rare minerals like zinc and manganese. While skimping on armor for an individual insect may be a death sentence, the evolution of ants apparently found a way around it.

“There’s this question in biology of what happens to individuals as societies they are in get more complex?” said Evan Economo, an entomologist at the University of Maryland and co-author of the study. “For example, the individuals may themselves become simpler because tasks that a solitary organism would need to complete can be handled by a collective.”

Economo’s team hypothesized that the metabolic balance behind investing in cuticles in social insects like ants could favor the collective over the individual. The idea was that a colony of 10,000 workers could lose a few individuals to a predator without much consequence, so investing heavily in each worker’s defenses would seem like a waste of precious nutrients. To test this hypothesis, they examined whether ant lineages that maintain massive, specialized workforces reduce the investment in their individual workers’ exoskeletons.

Scanning superorganisms

To test this idea, the researchers needed to pull off a comparative study on the anatomy of ants at an unprecedented scale. “We worked with scans of ant specimens and species from all over the world to capture the global diversity of ants,” Economo says. The team used a massive database called Antscan, which contains three-dimensional X-ray microtomography imaging of ants from around the globe.

Microtomography works similarly to medical CT scans, but at a vastly higher resolution. Still, on its own, the technique could only generate lots of precise data—it still had to be interpreted. Parsing through 3D imagery of over 880 specimens, including workers, queens, and males belonging to over 500 different species, was another challenge. “The 3D scanning itself is a very advanced technology,” says Arthur Matte, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study. “But once you have the ants in three dimensions, it’s still very hard to segment manually every tissue you’re interested in.”

To solve this, Matte developed a computer vision algorithm for “unsupervised segmentation.” Because the cuticle is always the outermost tissue of an arthropod, the algorithm could automatically identify and measure the volume of the exoskeleton across all ants in the dataset.

The first thing scientists noticed when the results poured in was that cuticle investment varied wildly, ranging from 6 percent to 35 percent of an ant’s total body volume. So, the next thing they focused on was figuring out the reasons behind these variations.

The numbers game

The team started checking how factors like diet, temperature, humidity, and foraging style correlated with the size of the cuticle. To get a handle on this, segmented 3D scans were fed into evolutionary models. “One of the most insightful things we did was to individually remove such variables from the models to estimate their contributions to the final cuticle investment,” Matte explains. This way, scientists learned that temperature was responsible for just 12 percent of variation in cuticle size and diet—especially its nitrogen content—explained another 37 percent. But the factor that had the strongest impact on the model was the colony size.

Ants that invested less in their cuticle tended to have significantly larger colony sizes. More surprisingly, this reduction in cuticle investment and the resulting increase in colony size appeared to be associated with higher diversification rates. In biological terms, squishier ants could evolve to occupy new niches much faster than their heavily armored cousins. “Requiring less nitrogen could make these ants more versatile and able to conquer new environments,” Matte suggests. This efficiency may have allowed ants to transition from a diet of high-protein prey to more abundant but less nutritious liquid sugar sources, like honeydew or floral nectar.

“Ants reduce per-worker investment in one of the most nutritionally expensive tissues for the good of the collective,” Matte explains. “They’re shifting from self-investment toward a distributed workforce.”

Power of the collective

The researchers think the pattern they observed in ants reflects a more universal trend in the evolution of societal complexity. The transition from solitary life to complex societies echoes the transition from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones.

In a single-celled organism, a cell must be a “jack-of-all-trades,” performing every function necessary for survival. In a multicellular animal, however, individual cells often become simpler and more specialized, relying on the collective for protection and resources.

“It’s a pattern that echoes the evolution of multicellularity, where cooperative units can be individually simpler than a solitary cell, yet collectively capable of far greater complexity,” says Matte. Still, the question of whether underinvesting in individuals to boost the collective makes sense for creatures other than ants remains open, and it most likely isn’t as much about nutritional economics as it is about sex.

Expendable servants

The study focused on ants that already have a reproductive division of labor, one where workers do not reproduce. This social structure is likely the key prerequisite for the cheap worker strategy. For the team, this is the reason we haven’t, at least so far, found similar evolutionary patterns in more complex social organisms like wolves, which live in packs—or humans with their amazingly complex societies. Wolves and people are both social, but maintain a high degree of individual self-interest regarding reproduction. Ant workers could be made expendable because they don’t pass their own genes—they are essentially extensions of the queen’s reproductive strategy.

Before looking for signs of ant-like approaches to quality versus quantity dilemmas in other species, the team wants to take an even closer look at ants. Economo, Matte, and their colleagues seek to expand their analysis to other ant tissues, such as the nervous system and muscles, to see if the cheapening of individuals extends beyond the exoskeleton. They are also looking at ant genomes to see what genetic innovations allowed for the shift from quality to quantity.  “We still need a lot of work to understand ants’ evolution,” Matte says.

Science Advances. 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx8068

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Welcome to Edition 8.23 of the Rocket Report! Several new rockets made their first flights this year. Blue Origin’s New Glenn was the most notable debut, with a successful inaugural launch in January followed by an impressive second flight in November, culminating in the booster’s first landing on an offshore platform. Second on the list is China’s Zhuque-3, a partially reusable methane-fueled rocket developed by the quasi-commercial launch company LandSpace. The medium-lift Zhuque-3 successfully reached orbit on its first flight earlier this month, and its booster narrowly missed landing downrange. We could add China’s Long March 12A to the list if it flies before the end of the year. This will be the final Rocket Report of 2025, but we’ll be back in January with all the news that’s fit to lift.

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

Rocket Lab delivers for Space Force and NASA. Four small satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle into orbit from Virginia early Thursday, beginning a government-funded technology demonstration mission to test the performance of a new spacecraft design, Ars reports. The satellites were nestled inside a cylindrical dispenser on top of the 59-foot-tall (18-meter) Electron rocket when it lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. A little more than an hour later, the rocket’s upper stage released the satellites one at a time at an altitude of about 340 miles (550 kilometers). The launch was the starting gun for a “proof of concept” mission to test the viability of a new kind of satellite called DiskSats, designed by the Aerospace Corporation.

Stack ’em high… “DiskSat is a lightweight, compact, flat disc-shaped satellite designed for optimizing future rideshare launches,” the Aerospace Corporation said in a statement. The DiskSats are 39 inches (1 meter) wide, about twice the diameter of a New York-style pizza, and measure just 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) thick. Made of composite carbon fiber, each satellite carries solar cells, control avionics, reaction wheels, and an electric thruster to change and maintain altitude. The flat design allows DiskSats to be stacked one on top of the other for launch. The format also has significantly more surface area than other small satellites with comparable mass, making room for more solar cells for high-power missions or large-aperture payloads like radar imaging instruments or high-bandwidth antennas. NASA and the US Space Force cofunded the development and launch of the DiskSat demo mission.

SpaceX warns of dangerous Chinese launch. China’s recent deployment of nine satellites occurred dangerously close to a Starlink satellite, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering said. Michael Nicolls wrote in a December 12 social media post that there was a 200-meter close approach between a satellite launched December 10 on a Chinese Kinetica-1 rocket and SpaceX’s Starlink-6079 spacecraft at 560 kilometers (348 miles) altitude, Aviation Week and Space Technology reports. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators—this needs to change,” Nicolls wrote.

Blaming the customer... The company in charge of the Kinetica-1 rocket, CAS Space, responded to Nicolls’ post on X saying it would “work on identifying the exact details and provide assistance.” In a follow-up post on December 13, CAS Space said the close call, if confirmed, occurred nearly 48 hours after the satellite separated from the Kinetica-1 rocket, by which time the launch mission had long concluded. “CAS Space will coordinate with satellite operators to proceed.”

A South Korean startup is ready to fly. Innospace, a South Korean space startup, will launch its independently developed commercial rocket, Hanbit-Nano, as soon as Friday, the Maeil Business Newspaper reports. The rocket will lift off from the Alcântara Space Center in Brazil. The small launcher will attempt to deliver eight small payloads, including five deployable satellites, into low-Earth orbit. The launch was delayed two days to allow time for technicians to replace components of the first stage oxidizer supply cooling system.

Hybrid propulsion… This will be the first launch of Innospace’s Hanbit-Nano rocket. The launcher has two stages and stands 71 feet (21.7 meters) tall with a diameter of 4.6 feet (1.4 meters). Hanbit-Nano is a true micro-launcher, capable of placing up to 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of payload mass into Sun-synchronous orbit. It has a unique design, with hybrid engines consuming a mix of paraffin as the fuel and liquid oxygen as the oxidizer.

Ten years since a milestone in rocketry. On December 21, 2015, SpaceX launched the Orbcomm-2 mission on an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket. That night, just days before Christmas, the company successfully landed the first stage for the first time. Ars has reprinted a slightly condensed chapter from the book Reentry, authored by Senior Space Editor Eric Berger and published in 2024. The chapter begins in June 2015 with the failure of a Falcon 9 rocket during launch of a resupply mission to the International Space Station and ends with a vivid behind-the-scenes recounting of the historic first landing of a Falcon 9 booster to close out the year.

First-person account… I have my own memory of SpaceX’s first rocket landing. I was there, covering the mission for another publication, as the Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. In an abundance of caution, Air Force officials in charge of the Cape Canaveral spaceport closed large swaths of the base for the Falcon 9’s return to land. The decision shunted VIPs and media representatives to viewing locations outside the spaceport’s fence, so I joined SpaceX’s official press room at the top of a seven-floor tower near the Port Canaveral cruise terminals. The view was tremendous. We all knew to expect a sonic boom as the rocket came back to Florida, but its arrival was a jolt. The next morning, I joined SpaceX and a handful of reporters and photographers on a chartered boat to get a closer look at the Falcon 9 standing proudly after returning from space.

Roscosmos targets quick fix to Soyuz launch pad. Russian space agency Roscosmos says it expects a damaged launch pad critical to International Space Station operations to be fixed by the end of February, Aviation Week and Space Technology reports. “Launch readiness: end of February 2026,” Roscosmos said in a statement Tuesday. Russia had been scrambling to assess the extent of repairs needed to Pad 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan after the November 27 flight of a Soyuz-2.1a rocket damaged key elements of the infrastructure. The pad is the only one capable of supporting Russian launches to the ISS.

Best-case scenario… A quick repair to the launch pad would be the best-case scenario for Roscosmos. A service structure underneath the rocket was unsecured during the launch of a three-man crew to the ISS last month. The structure fell into the launch pad’s flame trench, leaving the complex without the service cabin technicians use to work on the Soyuz rocket before liftoff. Roscosmos said a “complete service cabin replacement kit” has arrived at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and more than 130 staff are working in two shifts to implement the repairs. A fix by the end of February would allow Russia to resume cargo flights to the ISS in March.

Atlas V closes out an up-and-down year for ULA. United Launch Alliance aced its final launch of 2025, a predawn flight of an Atlas V rocket Tuesday carrying 27 satellites for Amazon’s recently rebranded Leo broadband Internet service, Spaceflight Now reports. The rocket flew northeast from Cape Canaveral to place the Amazon Leo satellites into low-Earth orbit. This was ULA’s fourth launch for Amazon’s satellite broadband venture, previously known as Project Kuiper. ULA closes out 2025 with six launches, one more than the company achieved last year. But ULA’s new Vulcan rocket launched just once this year, disappointingly short of the company’s goal to fly Vulcan up to 10 times.

Taking stock of Amazon Leo… This year marked the start of the deployment of Amazon’s operational satellites. There are now 180 Amazon Leo satellites in orbit after Tuesday’s launch, well short of the FCC’s requirement for Amazon to deploy half of its planned 3,232 satellites by July 31, 2026. Amazon won’t meet the deadline, and it’s likely the retail giant will ask government regulators for a waiver or extension to the deadline. Amazon’s factory is hitting its stride producing and delivering Amazon Leo satellites. The real question is launch capacity. Amazon has contracts to launch satellites on ULA’s Atlas V and Vulcan rockets, Europe’s Ariane 6, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn. Early next year, a batch of 32 Amazon Leo satellites will launch on the first flight of Europe’s uprated Ariane 64 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A good year for Ariane 6. Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket launched four times this year after a debut test flight in 2024. The four successful missions deployed payloads for the French military, Europe’s weather satellite agency, the European Union’s Copernicus environmental monitoring network, and finally, on Wednesday, the European Galileo navigation satellite fleet, Space News reports. This is a strong showing for a new rocket flying from a new launch pad and a faster ramp-up of launch cadence than any medium- or heavy-lift rocket in recent memory. All five Ariane 6 launches to date have used the Ariane 62 configuration with two strap-on solid rocket boosters. The more powerful Ariane 64 rocket, with four strap-on motors, will make its first flight early next year.

Aiming high… This was the first launch using the Ariane 6 rocket’s ability to fly long-duration missions lasting several hours. The rocket’s cryogenic upper stage, with a restartable Vinci engine, took nearly four hours to inject two Galileo navigation satellites into an orbit more than 14,000 miles (nearly 23,000 kilometers) above the Earth. The flight profile put more stress on the Ariane 6 upper stage than any of the rocket’s previous missions, but the rocket released its payloads into an on-target orbit. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

ESA wants to do more with Ariane 6’s kick stage. The European Space Agency plans to adapt a contract awarded to ArianeGroup in 2021 for an Ariane 6 kick stage to cover its evolution into an orbital transfer vehicle, European Spaceflight reports. The original contract was for the development of the Ariane 6’s Astris kick stage, an optional addition for Ariane 6 missions to deploy payloads into multiple orbits or directly inject satellites into geostationary orbit. Last month, ESA’s member states committed approximately 100 million euros ($117 million) to refocus the Astris kick stage into a more capable Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV).

Strong support from Germany… ESA’s director of space transportation, Toni Tolker-Nielsen, said the performance of the Ariane 6 OTV will be “well beyond” that of the originally conceived Astris kick stage. The funding commitment obtained during last month’s ESA ministerial council meeting includes strong support from Germany, Tolker-Nielsen said. Under the new timeline, a protoflight mode of the OTV is expected to be ready for ground qualification by the end of 2028, with an inaugural flight following in 2029. (submitted EllPeaTea)

Another Starship clone in China. Every other week, it seems, a new Chinese launch company pops up with a rocket design and a plan to reach orbit within a few years. For a long time, the majority of these companies revealed designs that looked a lot like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Now, Chinese companies are starting to introduce designs that appear quite similar to SpaceX’s newer, larger Starship rocket, Ars reports. The newest entry comes from a company called “Beijing Leading Rocket Technology.” This outfit took things a step further by naming its vehicle “Starship-1,” adding that the new rocket will have enhancements from AI and is billed as being a “fully reusable AI rocket.”

Starship prime… China has a long history of copying SpaceX. The country’s first class of reusable rockets, which began flying earlier this month, show strong similarities to the Falcon 9 rocket. Now, it’s Starship. The trend began with the Chinese government. In November 2024, the government announced a significant shift in the design of its super-heavy lift rocket, the Long March 9. Instead of the previous design, a fully expendable rocket with three stages and solid rocket boosters strapped to the sides, the country’s state-owned rocket maker revealed a vehicle that mimicked SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship. At least two more companies have announced plans for Starship-like rockets using SpaceX’s chopstick-style method for booster recovery. Many of these launch startups will not grow past the PowerPoint phase, of course.

Next three launches

Dec. 19: Hanbit-Nano | Spaceward | Alcântara Launch Center, Brazil | 18:45 UTC

Dec. 20: Long March 5 | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 12:30 UTC

Dec. 20: New Shepard | NS-37 crew mission | Launch Site One, Texas | 14:00 UTC

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Posted Saturday 20 December 2025 at 3:57 am AEST (my time).

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SpaceX says it has lost control of a Starlink satellite that’s now falling back to Earth after suffering an anomaly. The sudden loss of communications, drop in altitude, “venting of the propulsion tank,” and “release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects,” suggests the anomaly was some kind of explosion. SpaceX says it poses no threat to the crew of the ISS and will burn up in the atmosphere “within weeks.”

This mishap comes a week after SpaceX reported a near miss with a Chinese satellite.

Space-tracking company Leo Labs says whatever happened to Starlink 35956 was likely caused by an “internal energetic source,” not a collision. Its radar network detected “tens of objects” around the satellite after the event.

The incident happened at 418km (260 miles), an increasingly crowded area known as low Earth orbit where over 24,000 objects, including satellites and debris, are currently being tracked.

By the end of this decade, there could be as many as 70,000 satellites operating in that same region, mostly in the service of space internet constellations like Starlink being launched by private and government organizations in the US, China, and Europe. Such density not only creates issues for astronomers, it also increases the odds of a collision that could, in theory, cascade out of control.

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Posted Friday 19 December 2025 at 7:21 pm AEST (my time).

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When the Perseverance rover arrived on Mars nearly five years ago, NASA officials thought the next American lander to take aim on the red planet would be taking shape by now.

At the time, the leaders of the space agency expected this next lander could be ready for launch as soon as 2026—or more likely in 2028. Its mission would have been to retrieve Martian rock specimens collected by the Perseverance rover, then billed as the first leg of a multilaunch, multibillion-dollar Mars Sample Return campaign.

Here we are on the verge of 2026, and there’s no sample retrieval mission nearing the launch pad. In fact, no one is building such a lander at all. NASA’s strategy for a Mars Sample Return, or MSR, mission remains undecided after the projected cost of the original plan ballooned to $11 billion. If MSR happens at all, it’s now unlikely to launch until the 2030s.

That means the Perseverance rover, which might have to hand off the samples to a future retrieval lander in some circumstances, must continue weathering the harsh, cold, dusty environment of Mars. The good news is that the robot, about the size of a small SUV, is in excellent health, according to Steve Lee, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“Perseverance is approaching five years of exploration on Mars,” Lee said in a press briefing Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union’s annual fall meeting. “Perseverance is really in excellent shape. All the systems onboard are operational and performing very, very well. All the redundant systems onboard are available still, and the rover is capable of supporting this mission for many, many years to come.”

The rover’s operators at JPL are counting on sustaining Perseverance’s good health. The rover’s six wheels have carried it a distance of about 25 miles, or 40 kilometers, since landing inside the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater in February 2021. That is double the original certification for the rover’s mobility system and farther than any vehicle has traveled on the surface of another world.

Going for 100

Now, engineers are asking Perseverance to perform well beyond expectations. An evaluation of the rover’s health concluded it can operate until at least 2031. The rover uses a radioactive plutonium power source, so it’s not in danger of running out of electricity or fuel any time soon. The Curiosity rover, which uses a similar design, has surpassed 13 years of operations on Mars.

There are two systems that are most likely to limit the rover’s useful lifetime. One is the robotic arm, which is necessary to collect samples, and the other is the rover’s six wheels and the drive train that powers them.

“To make sure we can continue operations and continue driving for a long, long way, up to 100 kilometers (62 miles), we are doing some additional testing,” Lee said. “We’ve successfully completed a rotary actuator life test that has now certified the rotary system to 100 kilometers for driving, and we have similar testing going on for the brakes. That is going well, and we should finish those early part of next year.”

Ars asked Lee why JPL decided on 100 kilometers, which is roughly the same distance as the average width of Lake Michigan. Since its arrival in 2021, Perseverance has climbed out of Jezero Crater and is currently exploring the crater’s rugged rim. If NASA sends a lander to pick up samples from Perseverance, the rover will have to drive back to a safe landing zone for a handoff.

“We actually had laid out a traverse path exploring the crater rim, much more of the crater rim than we have so far, and then be able to return to a rendezvous site,” Lee said. “So we did an estimate of the total mission drive duration to complete that mission, added margin for science exploration, added margin in case we need the rendezvous at a different site… and it just turned out to add up to a nice, even 100 kilometers.”

The time-lapse video embedded below shows the Perseverance rover’s record-breaking 1,351-foot (412-meter) drive on June 19, 2025.

Despite the disquiet on the future of MSR, the Perseverance rover has dutifully collected specimens and placed them in 33 titanium sample tubes since arriving on Mars. Perseverance deposited some of the sealed tubes on the surface of Mars in late 2022 and early 2023 and has held onto the remaining containers while continuing to drive toward the rim of Jezero.

The dual-depot approach preserves the option for future MSR mission planners to go after either batch of samples.

Scientists selected Jezero as the target for the Perseverance mission because they suspected it was the site of an ancient dried-up river delta with a surplus of clay-rich minerals. The rover’s instruments confirmed this hypothesis, finding sediments in the crater floor that were deposited at the bottom of a lake of liquid water billions of years ago, including sandstones and mudstones known to preserve fossilized life in comparable environments on Earth.

A research team published findings in the journal Nature in September describing the discovery of chemical signatures and structures in a rock that could have been formed by ancient microbial life. Perseverance lacks the bulky, sprawling instrumentation to know for sure, so ground teams ordered the rover to collect a pulverized specimen from the rock in question and seal it for eventual return to Earth.

Fill but don’t seal

Lee said Perseverance will continue filling sample tubes in the expectation that they will eventually come back to Earth.

“We do expect to continue some sampling,” Lee said. “We have six open sample tubes, unused sample tubes, onboard. We actually have two that we took samples and didn’t seal yet. So we have options of maybe replacing them if we’re finding that there’s even better areas that we want to collect from.”

The rover’s management team at JPL is finalizing the plan for Perseverance through 2028. Lee expects the rover will remain at Jezero’s rim for a while. “There are quite a number of very prime, juicy targets we would love to go explore,” he said.

In the meantime, if Perseverance runs across an alluring rock, scientists will break out the rover’s coring drill and fill more tubes.

“We certainly have more than enough to keep us busy, and we are not expecting a major perturbation to our science explorations in the next two and a half years as a result of sample return uncertainty,” Lee said.

Perseverance has its own suite of sophisticated instruments. The instruments can’t do what labs on Earth can, but the rover can scan rocks to determine what they’re made of, search for life-supporting organic molecules, map underground geology, and capture startling vistas that inspire and inform.

The rover’s sojourn along the Jezero Crater rim is taking it through different geological eras, from the time Jezero harbored a lake to its formation at an even earlier point in Martian history. Fundamentally, researchers are asking the question “What was it like if you were a microbe living on the surface of Mars?” said Briony Horgan, a mission scientist at Purdue University.

Along the way, the rover will stop and do a sample collection if something piques the science team’s interest.

“We are adopting a strategy, in many cases, to fill a tube, and we have the option to not seal it,” Lee said. “Most of our tubes are sealed, but we have the option to not seal it, and that gives us a flexibility downstream to replace the sample if there’s one that we find would make an even stronger representative of the diversity we are discovering.”

An indefinite wait

Planetary scientists have carefully curated the specimens cached by the Perseverance rover. The samples are sorted for their discovery potential, with an emphasis on the search for ancient microbial life. That’s why Perseverance was sent to Jezero in the first place.

China is preparing its own sample-return mission, Tianwen-3, for launch as early as 2028, aiming to deliver Mars rocks back to Earth by 2031. If the Tianwen-3 mission keeps to this schedule—and is successful—China will almost certainly be first to pull off the achievement. Officials have not announced the landing site for Tianwen-3, so the jury is still out on the scientific value of the rocks China aims to bring back.

NASA’s original costly architecture for Mars Sample Return would have used a lander built by JPL and a small solid-fueled rocket to launch the rock samples back into space after collecting them from the Perseverance rover. The capsule containing the Mars rocks would then transfer them to another spacecraft in orbit around Mars. Once Earth and Mars reached the proper orbital alignment, the return spacecraft would begin the journey home. All told, the sample return campaign would last several years.

NASA asked commercial companies to develop their own ideas for Mars Sample Return in 2024. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and Rocket Lab submitted their lower-cost commercial concepts to NASA, but progress stalled there. NASA’s former administrator, Bill Nelson, punted on a decision on what to do next with Mars Sample Return in the final weeks of the Biden administration.

A few months later, the new Trump administration proposed outright canceling the Mars Sample Return mission. Mars Sample Return, known as MSR, was ranked as the top priority for planetary science in a National Academies decadal survey. Researchers say they could learn much more about Mars and the possibilities of past life there by bringing samples back to Earth for analysis.

Budget writers in the House of Representatives voted to restore funding for Mars Sample Return over the summer, but the Senate didn’t explicitly weigh in on the mission. NASA is now operating under a stopgap budget passed by Congress last month, and MSR remains in limbo.

There are good arguments for going with a commercial sample-return mission, using a similar approach to the one NASA used to buy commercial cargo and crew transportation services for the International Space Station. NASA might also offer prizes or decide to wait for a human expedition to Mars for astronauts to scoop up samples by hand.

Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars, discussed these options a few months ago. After nearly a year of revolving-door leadership, NASA finally got a Senate-confirmed administrator this week. It will now be up to the new NASA chief, Jared Isaacman, to chart a new course for Mars Sample Return.

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Posted Friday 19 December 2025 at 12:19 pm AEST (my time).

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It probably sucked to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall circa the third century CE. W.H. Auden imagined the likely harsh conditions in his poem “Roman Wall Blues,” in which a soldier laments enduring wet wind and rain with “lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.” We can now add chronic nausea and bouts of diarrhea to his list of likely woes, thanks to parasitic infections, according to a new paper published in the journal Parasitology.

As previously reported, archaeologists can learn a great deal by studying the remains of intestinal parasites in ancient feces. For instance, in 2022, we reported on an analysis of soil samples collected from a stone toilet found within the ruins of a swanky 7th-century BCE villa just outside Jerusalem. That analysis revealed the presence of parasitic eggs from four different species: whipworm, beef/pork tapeworm, roundworm, and pinworm. (It’s the earliest record of roundworm and pinworm in ancient Israel.)

Later that same year, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of British Columbia analyzed the residue on an ancient Roman ceramic pot excavated at the site of a 5th-century CE Roman villa at Gerace, a rural district in Sicily. They identified the eggs of intestinal parasitic worms commonly found in feces—strong evidence that the 1,500-year-old pot in question was most likely used as a chamber pot.

Other prior studies have compared fecal parasites found in hunter-gatherer and farming communities, revealing dramatic dietary changes, as well as shifts in settlement patterns and social organization coinciding with the rise of agriculture. This latest paper analyzes sediment collected from sewer drains at the Roman fort at Vindolanda, located just south of the defense fortification known as Hadrian’s Wall.

An antiquarian named William Camden recorded the existence of the ruins in a 1586 treatise. Over the next 200 years, many people visited the site, discovering a military bathhouse in 1702 and an altar in 1715.  Another altar found in 1914 confirmed that the fort had been called Vindolanda. Serious archaeological excavation at the site began in the 1930s. The site is most famous for the so-called Vindolanda tablets, among the oldest surviving handwritten documents in the UK—and for the 2023 discovery of what appeared to be an ancient Roman dildo, although others argued the phallus-shaped artifact was more likely to be a drop spindle used for spinning yarn.

The worms crawl in

Roundworm egg from the analysis of sediment from the sewer drain.

Patrik Flammer

 

Whipworm egg from the analysis of sediment from the sewer drain.

Marissa Ledger

 

Per the authors of this latest paper, analyzing fecal matter (paleoparasitology) from Roman Britain  has thus far largely been done at urban centers such as London and York, and the only site where it has been done along Hadrian’s Wall is Carlisle. Vindolanda’s exceptional preservation makes it a prime candidate for learning more about the transmission of parasites and resulting gastrointestinal diseases among the Roman military manning the northern frontiers at that time.

The material was collected in 2019 from the main drain carrying latrine waste from the bath house toilet down to the stream and valley to the north. The team also excavated what was left of a 17th-century farmhouse, where they found sealed deposits from a previous third-century bath house drain at the site. They collected and analyzed 58 samples of sediment from those drains, as well as one sample collected from a nearby fort ditch circa 90 CE.

The analysis revealed that 28 percent of the samples contained eggs from either roundworms or whipworms, intestinal parasites typically spread as a result of poor sanitation, either via food, drink, or hands that come in contact with fecal matter. The first-century fort sample also contained roundworms and whipworms. Using a biomolecular method that binds antibodies to proteins produced by single-cell organisms, they found traces of a microscopic protozoan parasite called Giardia duodenalis. According to the authors, this suggests Roman solders regularly suffered from diarrhea and malnutrition.

Even having communal latrines and a sewer system apparently didn’t prevent parasitic transmission. “While the Romans were aware of intestinal worms, there was little their doctors could do to clear infection by these parasites or help those experiencing diarrhoea, meaning symptoms could persist and worsen,” said co-author Marissa Ledger of the University of Cambridge. “These chronic infections likely weakened soldiers, reducing fitness for duty. Helminths alone can cause nausea, cramping and diarrhea.”

DOI: Parasitology, 2025. 10.1017/S0031182025101327  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 19 December 2025 at 12:18 pm AEST (my time).

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In late November, in a quiet corner of Devon, England, workers began adding a secret, light brown powder to water as they mixed up a special fluid that can store energy. They blended it with the utmost care, like some kind of giant protein shake, over the course of multiple weeks. Their goal was to achieve a mixture 2.5 times denser than water.

“It’s quite a hands-on process. At bigger scales, we would automate it,” says Stephen Crosher, chief executive and co-founder of RheEnergise, a British energy-storage company. He emphasizes that the mineral-based fluid must flow easily. “You want it to be really runny.”

That’s because, in the company’s demonstration system, at a china clay mine near the city of Plymouth, this mystery liquid can now slosh down angled pipes connecting an upper container to a lower container 80 meters below. In the process, the fluid drives turbines to create electricity. Pumping the mixture back up at times when there’s excess energy on the grid resets the whole system. It’s a new take on an old energy-storage technology currently experiencing a renaissance: pumped hydro.

Pumped hydro first emerged in the late 19th century. During subsequent decades, countries including the US and UK built lots of large plants, though construction had waned by the 1990s. The tech was originally designed to complement fossil fuel power plants, making use of excess energy they produced. But today grid operators increasingly value pumped hydro plants as workhorses able to mediate highly variable wind and solar assets. They can fill in shortfalls in electricity generation or soak up surplus energy within minutes, and store it for short or long periods.

Currently, significant amounts of energy go to waste because there’s no way to consume it at the moment of generation. The UK, for one, has squandered more than £1 billion ($1.32 billion) this year alone by turning off wind turbines due to lack of energy demand.

Pumped hydro plants could help to solve this problem but building them has often been expensive and difficult. RheEnergise’s denser-than-water fluid means the firm can pack more potential energy into a smaller space and at lower elevations. To replicate the firm’s 500 kilowatt (kW) demonstrator with a water-based version, for example, you’d need more than twice the volume of liquid they’re using, and the upper reservoir would need to be elevated to 200 meters rather than 80.

Vast reservoirs and towering mountains, historically associated with pumped hydro projects, may no longer be essential. “In somewhere like the UK, we think there are probably 20–25 viable sites for traditional pumped hydro, whereas for us it’s 6,500,” says Crosher. There could be hundreds of thousands of potential locations for the company’s technology worldwide—if RheEnergise can prove it works as intended. The firm tells WIRED it generated the first power from the system this week. Should the results from these tests continue to satisfy, a commercial-scale 10 MW project could follow by 2028.

RheEnergise is just one example of how pumped hydro is evolving. “It’s a really exciting time,” says Rebecca Ellis, senior energy policy manager at the International Hydropower Association (IHA), a nonprofit membership organization. The IHA estimates that 600 GW of pumped hydro projects are in the global pipeline. 8.4 GW was installed in 2024, she adds. One project that helped boost that total was the 3.6 GW pumped hydro plant in Fengning, China. It’s the biggest such facility, in terms of power capacity, in the world.

Day in, day out, plants like this move water up hills and down hills on a gigantic scale—and with incredible power.

At Goldisthal in central Germany, an upper reservoir containing approximately 12 million cubic metres of water—enough to fill 4,800 Olympic swimming pools—is linked by a pumped hydro power station to a lower reservoir of nearly 19 million cubic meters. It has two 800-meter-long penstocks, slanting tubes connecting the reservoirs, and, at maximum power, a capacity of 1.06 GW.

“Goldisthal is our biggest power plant,” says René Kühne, head of energy company Vattenfall’s pumped hydro fleet in Germany. If required, the facility could provide 1.06 GW of electricity for between eight and nine hours. In just 90 seconds, Goldisthal can switch from standstill to full generation. Water floods down each penstock at 100 cubic metres per second. The plant can alternate between generation mode and pumping mode in a matter of minutes, which means that instead of supplying 1.06 GW of energy to the grid, it can absorb that much power.

In Vattenfall’s central control room, human operators aided by algorithms monitor the electricity grid, and the market, to judge whether their pumped hydro plants ought to be generating or pumping. Kühne adds that the frequency of alternating between these modes has gone up over time because of renewables’ variability.

If you can get the response right, however, you can make a lot of money. On its website, Vattenfall describes pumped hydro as “highly profitable.” A paper published last month estimated the effect of rising renewables in Spain between now and 2050. With gradually decreasing electricity prices, higher variability, and less need to import electricity overall, the authors found that energy storage would be utilized 12 percent more in the future—and that a system combining renewables with pumped hydro energy storage would see its profits rise.

Pumped hydro could, in principle, work in lots of places around the world, says Rosie Madge, a systems engineer at Energy Systems Catapult, a nonprofit research and innovation center: “Most countries in the world do have geographies that are suitable for it.”

A report by Madge and colleagues, published in October, scored 11 countries in terms of their suitability for pumped hydro and other long-term energy storage tech. Two notoriously flat nations, Denmark and the Netherlands, fared poorly. But the others were all extremely well-suited to conventional pumped hydro and a few, including the UK, Australia, and China, were very well-suited to the high-density version. The scores were based partly on how ready and willing each country was to deploy the tech, and also on market conditions.

But even in that analysis, it was conventional pumped hydro that appeared most deployable overall—when compared to multiple other long-duration storage technologies including high-density pumped hydro, hydrogen, ammonia, metal air batteries, compressed air, and non-pumped-hydro gravity storage.

If you want to get into the pumped hydro game, though, first you have to build your infrastructure. And doing so on a conventionally large scale is hard.

In Australia, a truly massive pumped hydro project called Snowy 2.0 is currently under construction. It is an expansion of an existing pumped hydro system that utilizes lakes in the Snowy Mountains of southern Australia. While Goldisthal can provide a total of 8.5 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy—its 1.06 GW capacity delivered over a maximum of 8.5 hours—Snowy 2.0 will offer an astonishing 350 GWh when completed.

However, Snowy 2.0 has been beset by delays and cost overruns. Work on the project involves constructing huge tunnels, totalling 27 km in length. But one of the tunnel boring machines deployed to dig them was stuck for several months in unexpectedly soft rock. It later became stuck again. Plus, the company behind the project, Snowy Hydro, and some of its contractors have been fined over several alleged incidents of pollution caused by construction activities. A 2024 report by the nongovernmental National Parks Association of New South Wales (NPA) claimed its officials had allegedly observed roughly a dozen environmental compliance failures from early 2022 to mid-2023.

In 2024, in response to the NPA report on its purported environmental performance, the company said: “Snowy Hydro takes its environmental compliance obligations very seriously and is committed to ensuring that the construction and operation of the Snowy 2.0 Project proceeds in a manner that is compliant with all applicable laws and approvals.”

Snowy 2.0 is currently due to complete in late 2028. Funded by taxpayers, it will swallow up much more than the original estimate of AUD$2 billion ($1.29 billion). The final bill will be at least six times that, likely ending up in the region of AUD$15–18 bn, according to Andrew Blakers of Australian National University. He calculates, though, that even at that price, Snowy 2.0 will cost roughly one Australian cent, per Australian, over its projected 150-year lifespan.

“If you want serious storage, you want pumped hydro,” he says, adding that the UK, for one, is currently “not serious” about pumped hydro and won’t be until it constructs a 500 GWh system at Loch Ness in Scotland. Multiple firms are vying to install new pumped hydro infrastructure there, though these schemes have faced local opposition.

Construction headaches sometimes come up for pumped hydro projects, and other large-scale infrastructure schemes, partly because it’s so difficult to know what’s in the ground before you start digging, says Brian Minhinick, global hydropower practice leader at Mott MacDonald, an engineering consultancy. “I’d very much like it that it didn’t happen,” he says. “We try to do our best.” Planning for various scenarios can help, as can using 3D models of pumped hydro projects to plan construction in detail. Workers can adjust those digital plans should they find unexpectedly hard or soft rock, for instance.

New machines have helped, too. “You can actually get drilling rigs that have three computer-controlled drill arms [operating] at the same time—to speed up the work,” adds Minhinick. They can, for example, simultaneously excavate multiple holes for packing explosives into, as part of drill-and-blast operations where tunnel-boring machines aren’t the tool of choice.

The sheer scale of some pumped hydro projects is one of their key advantages. Blakers says that building really large pumped hydro projects is how a country can show it means business when it comes to energy storage.

But Crosher at RheEnergise makes another point. While large-scale, traditional pumped hydro has its place, the world needs climate solutions fast. His goal is to offer a version of pumped hydro that is much easier and quicker to deploy. “If you want solutions for the climate emergency and the energy transition, then [traditional] pumped hydro will do part of it, but they’re too slow to do it all,” he says.

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Posted Friday 19 December 2025 at 2:39 am AEST (my time).

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If you’re human, you’ve probably hollered a curse word or two (or three) when barking your shin on a table edge or hitting your thumb with a hammer. Perhaps you’ve noticed that this seems to lessen your pain. There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. The technical term is the “hypoalgesic effect of swearing.” Cursing can also improve physical strength and endurance, according to a new paper published in the journal American Psychologist.

As previously reported, co-author Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele, became interested in studying the potential benefits of profanity after noting his wife’s “unsavory language” while giving birth and wondered if profanity really could help alleviate pain. “Swearing is such a common response to pain. There has to be an underlying reason why we do it,” Stephens told Scientific American after publishing a 2009 study that was awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Peace Prize.

For that study, Stephens and his colleagues asked 67 study participants (college students) to immerse their hands in a bucket of ice water. They were then instructed to either swear repeatedly using the profanity of their choice or chant a neutral word. Lo and behold, the participants said they experienced less pain when they swore and were also able to leave their hands in the bucket about 40 seconds longer than when they weren’t swearing. It has been suggested that this is a primitive reflex that serves as a form of catharsis.

The team followed up with a 2011 study showing that the pain-relief effect works best for subjects who typically don’t swear that often, perhaps because they attach a higher emotional value to swears. They also found that subjects’ heart rates increased when they swore. But it might not be the only underlying mechanism. Other researchers have pointed out that profanity might be distracting, thereby taking one’s mind off the pain rather than serving as an actual analgesic.

So in 2020, the Stephens team conducted a follow-up study, using the same methodology as they had back in 2009, asking participants to either chant the F-word or the fake swears “fouch” and “twizpipe.” (Fun fact: the earliest known appearance of the F-word in the English language is “Roger F$#%-by-the-Navel” who appears in some court records from 1310-11. )

The result: Only the F-word had any effect on pain outcomes. The team also measured the subjects’ pain threshold, asking them to indicate when the ice water began to feel painful. Those who chanted the F-word waited longer before indicating they felt pain—in other words, the swearing increased their threshold for pain. Chanting “fouch” or “twizpipe” had no effect on either measure.

F@%*-ing go for it

For this latest study, Stephens was interested in investigating potential mechanisms for swearing as a possible form of disinhibition (usually viewed negatively), building on his team’s 2018 and 2022 papers showing that swearing can improve strength in a chair push-up task. “In many situations, people hold themselves back—consciously or unconsciously—from using their full strength,” said Stephens. “By swearing, we throw off social constraint and allow ourselves to push harder in different situations. Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident and less distracted, and ‘go for it’ a little more.”

In two separate experiments, participants were asked to select a swear word they’d normally use after, say, bumping their head, and a more neutral word to describe an inanimate object like a table. They then performed the aforementioned chair push-up task: sitting on a sturdy chair and placing their hands under their thighs with the fingers pointed inwards. Then they lifted their feet off the floor and straightened their arms to support their body weight for as long as possible, chanting either the swear word or the neutral word every two seconds. Afterward, subjects competed a questionnaire to assess various aspects of their mental state during the task.

The results: Subjects who swore during the task could support their body weight much longer than those who merely repeated the neutral word. This confirms the reported results of similar studies in the past. Furthermore, subjects reported increases in their sense of psychological “flow,” distraction, and self-confidence, all indicators of increased disinhibition.

“These findings help explain why swearing is so commonplace,” said Stephens. “Swearing is literally a calorie-neutral, drug-free, low-cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance.” The team next plans to explore the influence of swearing on public speaking and romantic behaviors, since these are situations where most people are more hesitant and less confident in themselves, and hence more likely to hold back.

DOI: American Psychologist, 2025. 10.1037/amp0001650  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 19 December 2025 at 2:39 am AEST (my time).

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While not quite a separate dialect, Formula 1-speak can be heavy on the jargon at times. They say “box” instead of pit, “power unit” to describe the engine and hybrid system, and that’s before we get into all the aerodynamics-related expressions like “outwash” and “dirty air.” Next year is a big technical shakeup for the sport, and it seems we’re getting some new terminology to go with it. So forget your DRS and get ready to talk about Boost mode instead.

The F1 car of 2026 will be slightly narrower and slightly lighter than the machines that raced for the last time earlier this month. But not by a huge amount: minimum weight is decreased by 30 kg to 724 kg, the wheelbase is 200 mm shorter at 3,400 mm, and the car’s underfloor is 150 mm narrower than before.

The front wing is 100 mm narrower and has just two elements to it, although for the first time in F1 history, this is now an active wing, which works in conjunction with the three-element active rear wing. Active rear wings have been a thing in F1 since the introduction of DRS—the drag reduction system—in 2011, but now there’s a philosophical change to how they’ll work.

Straight mode, Corner mode

With DRS, a driver could activate it to reduce their car’s drag if they were within a second of a car in front and at one of the marked DRS zones on track. From next year, the cars will have Straight Mode, which lowers both front and rear wings to decrease drag—this will be allowed for any drive on any of the designated straights, regardless of whether they’re close to another car or not.

And there’s corner mode, where the wings are in their raised position, generating downforce and making the cars corner faster. Those names are better than X-mode and Z-mode, which is what they were being called last year.

At the start of the season, expect overall downforce to be reduced by around 30 percent compared to this year’s machinery. However, the cars should also produce around 55 percent less drag, says the sport’s organizers, the FIA. The reason for the big decrease in drag down the straights is because of the new powertrains. The complicated and expensive MGU-H that recovered energy from an F1 engine’s turbocharger is gone, and there’s a more powerful MGU-K that drives the wheels together with the V6.

Now, the power split of V6 to MGU-K is 400 kW and 350 kW, but there will be times when the battery pack is not fully charged and the electric motor will contribute much less power. Making the cars slipperier through the air, then, is a way to ameliorate that impinging too much on the show.

Allowing cars to follow each other closely through corners was a big motivating factor for the 2022 rules change that reintroduced ground effect downforce to the sport, although some of those gains were erased by the teams as they developed their cars. So it’s good to know that remains a priority for the 2026 ruleset, too.

“The 2022 cars started off with a significant improvement in their wake characteristics,” said Nicholas Tombazis, FIA single seater director. “I don’t remember the exact numbers, but downforce at approximately 20 metres behind went from about 50 percent on the previous generation of cars to about 80 or 85 percent to start with on the 2022 cars. And then that gradually decayed during the regulation cycle to what it is now, where we are probably talking about 70 percent. We believe that the start of the new cycle will be more like 90 percent, better than it’s ever been.”

Tombazis added that “the front wing end plates morphed into shapes that permitted quite a lot of outwash, while the inside of the front brake drums also worsened the characteristics, as did the side of the floor. We learned a lot from that, and in developing the regulations for 2026 we hope we will maintain the good characteristics for a longer period or hopefully not have this decay again.”

Overtake mode

Instead of using DRS as an overtaking aid, the hybrid power units will now fulfill that role. Overtake mode, which can be used if a driver is within a second of a car ahead, gives them an extra 0.5 MJ of energy and up to 350 kW from the electric motor up to 337 km/h—without the Overtake mode, the MGU-K tapers off above 290 km/h. There’s also a second Boost mode, which drivers can use to attack or defend a position, that gives a short burst of maximum power.

Change can often be unsettling, and over the past couple of years, there has been criticism of the rules, specifically the emphasis on so much hybrid power, which now requires active aero to not make the cars too slow. Some have even suggested a swifter end to the incoming rules and then a switch to naturally aspirated engines, although that now seems very unlikely.

F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali rejected that idea. “F1 needs to be relevant. And in terms of technical development, the fact that we receive new manufacturers in our sport means that the relevancy, from the technical perspective I’m talking, of course, it has been more important, has been achieved,” Domenicali told me. “Therefore, as always when there is such a technical change, it is quite massive. Like you said, it is not only a new power unit that you’re managing, it’s a new car, it’s a new way to race.”

As Domenicali said, the new technical regulations certainly have been a success in attracting new manufacturers to the sport. In addition to Audi joining the sport—we spoke with him at the Audi launch last month—Cadillac is entering as a new team as well (albeit without their own engines until 2029). After pulling back from the sport, Honda has recommitted. And Ford has signed up, too, providing the hybrid side of the power unit that will go into next year’s Red Bull and Racing Bull cars.

The first preseason test gets underway on January 26, with the first race weekend in Australia March 6–8.

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Posted Friday 19 December 2025 at 2:38 am AEST (my time).

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Physicists at the University of Amsterdam came up with a really cool bit of Christmas decor: a miniature 3D-printed Christmas tree, a mere 8 centimeters tall, made of ice, without any refrigeration equipment or other freezing technology, and at minimal cost. The secret is evaporative cooling, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv.

Evaporative cooling is a well-known phenomenon; mammals use it to regulate body temperature. You can see it in your morning cup of hot coffee: the hotter atoms rise to the top of the magnetic trap and “jump out” as steam. It also plays a role (along with shock wave dynamics and various other factors) in the formation of “wine tears.” It’s a key step in creating Bose-Einstein condensates.

And evaporative cooling is also the main culprit behind the infamous “stall” that so frequently plagues aspiring BBQ pit masters eager to make a successful pork butt. The meat sweats as it cooks, releasing the moisture within, and that moisture evaporates and cools the meat, effectively canceling out the heat from the BBQ. That’s why a growing number of competitive pit masters wrap their meat in tinfoil after the first few hours (usually when the internal temperature hits 170° F).

Ice-printing methods usually rely on cryogenics or on cooled substrates. Per the authors, this is the first time evaporative cooling principles have been applied to 3D printing. The trick was to house the 3D printing inside a vacuum chamber using a jet nozzle as the printing head—something they discovered serendipitously when they were trying to get rid of air drag by spraying water in a vacuum chamber.  “The printer’s motion control guides the water jet layer-by-layer, building geometry on demand,” the authors wrote in a blog post for Nature, adding:

At very low pressure, water molecules at the liquid surface escape continuously as vapor. Each departing molecule carries the latent heat of vaporization, thus cooling the water jet. The very fine jet we use for printing has a very high surface-to-volume ratio, making heat extraction very efficient: the bulk liquid cools rapidly, dropping tens of Kelvin over a fraction of a second. When the jet reaches the substrate or a previously deposited ice layer, it freezes just after its impact.

And when the holidays are over, just turn off the vacuum pump and watch your tree melt back into its watery state, “no residue, no post-processing waste.”

The applications aren’t limited to Christmas trees. The purity of the ice makes it ideal for biological applications such as scaffolding for tissue: any branching ice form can be cast in resin or polymer and when it melts, it will leave behind hollow channels. It can also be used to create custom fluid networks for microfluidics applications. And if you have plans to camp out on Mars with its cold temperatures and thin atmosphere, the method could enable 3D printed structures out of water ice, with no need for heavy and expensive cryogenic equipment.

arXiv, 2025. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2512.14580 (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 18 December 2025 at 12:35 pm AEST (my time).

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Like most tools, generative AI models can be misused. And when the misuse gets bad enough that a major dictionary notices, you know it’s become a cultural phenomenon.

On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. The dictionary defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

“It’s such an illustrative word,” Merriam-Webster president Greg Barlow told the Associated Press. “It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying, and a little bit ridiculous.”

To select its Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster’s editors review data on which words rose in search volume and usage, then reach consensus on which term best captures the year. Barlow told the AP that the spike in searches for “slop” reflects growing awareness among users that they are encountering fake or shoddy content online.

Dictionaries have been tracking AI’s impact on language for the past few years, with Cambridge having selected “hallucinate” as its 2023 word of the year due to the tendency of AI models to generate plausible-but-false information (long-time Ars readers will be happy to hear there’s another word term for that in the dictionary as well).

The trend extends to online culture in general, which is ripe with new coinages. This year, Oxford University Press chose “rage bait,” referring to content designed to provoke anger for engagement. Cambridge Dictionary selected “parasocial,” describing one-sided relationships between fans and celebrities or influencers.

The difference between the baby and the bathwater

As the AP points out, the word “slop” originally entered English in the 1700s to mean soft mud. By the 1800s, it had evolved to describe food waste fed to pigs, and eventually came to mean rubbish or products of little value. The new AI-related definition builds on that history of describing something unwanted and unpleasant.

Although he didn’t coin the term “AI slop,” independent AI researcher Simon Willison helped document its rise in May 2024 when he wrote on his blog comparing it to how “spam” had previously become the word for unwanted email. Quoting a tweet from an X user named @deepfates, Willison showed that the “AI slop” term began circulating in online communities shortly before he wrote his post advocating for its use.

The “slop” term carries a dismissive tone that sets it clearly apart from prominent corporate hype language about the promises and even existential perils of AI. “In 2025, amid all the talk about AI threats, slop set a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking,” Merriam-Webster wrote in a blog post. “The word sends a little message to AI: when it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes you don’t seem too superintelligent.”

In its blog post announcing the word of the year selection, Merriam-Webster noted that 2025 saw a flood of AI-generated videos, off-kilter advertising images, propaganda, fake news, AI-written books, and what it called “workslop,” referring to reports that waste coworkers’ time. Ars Technica has covered similar phenomena invading various fields, including using the term “hiring slop” to describe an overflow of AI-generated résumés in June.

While some AI critics relish dismissing all generated output as “slop,” there’s some subjective nuance about what earns the label. As former Evernote CEO Phil Libin told Axios in April, the distinction may come down to intention: “When AI is used to produce mediocre things with less effort than it would have taken without AI, it’s slop. When it’s used to make something better than it could have been made without AI, it’s a positive augmentation.”

Willison had his own nuanced take, since he’s a proponent of using AI responsibly as tools to help with tasks like programming, but not with spamming. “Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop,” he wrote in May 2024 when discussing the term. “But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it.”

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Posted Tuesday 16 December 2025 at 1:06 pm AEST (my time).

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It was almost 100 years ago that Clyde W. Tombaugh discovered Pluto. That was the last planet found until 1992, when humans found another one. But this new planet wasn't in our solar system—it was orbiting another star. We call this an extrasolar planet, or “exoplanet” for short.

Since then, astronomers have cataloged more than 6,000 exoplanets. If you thought it was hard to remember the names of our own planets, try all the planets, with names like HD 189733b. (A jolly place where it rains molten glass and the wind blows 9,000 kilometers per hour.)

Even the closest exoplanets are more than 4 light years away (36 trillion miles), which makes it doubtful that we’ll ever visit one—so why bother? The reason is, it helps us answer an age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? As far as we understand, you need a planet to have life, and the race is on to locate one with Earth-like qualities.

Why Are They Hard to Find?

The problem is, you can’t just take your best telescope and start looking around the sky. Telescopes have a limited resolving power—the smallest angular size they can “see.” For the Hubble Space Telescope that’s 0.05 arc second, which is incredibly tiny—about 1/72,000th of a degree. The HST could make out a giant, Jupiter-size planet at a distance of 590 billion kilometers. That’s amazing, but it’s just 0.06 light year, and the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light years away.

Another problem is the dimness of planets. Sure, Jupiter is easy to see in our own night sky, because of the sunlight reflecting off its surface. But you can't see Jupiter at all during the day, because that reflected light is much dimmer than direct sunlight. It’s the same for exoplanets. When we’re looking at the light from a star, the planets around it just aren’t bright enough to be discernable.

Luckily, there are other methods, and I’m going to explain the two that were used to find most of the exoplanets we know today. There's a bunch of cool physics here, so let’s go!

Orbits, Jiggly Stars, and Blue Shifts

What happens when a planet moves around a star? First, there’s a gravitational interaction that pulls the planet in the direction of the star. The magnitude of this force (F_G) depends on the mass of the star (M) and the planet (m), as well as the distance (r) between them:

(G is a gravitational constant, which we can ignore.) It's possible to use this force to make an object move in a circular path. Remember from Newton's second law, when a force acts on an object, the object accelerates, and we define acceleration as the change in the object’s velocity.

However, velocity is speed in a certain direction, so changing direction is itself a type of acceleration. In orbital motion, we call this centripetal (center-pointing) acceleration, and it depends on both the radius (r) of the circular path and the speed of the object (v). Putting this together with the gravitational force from above, we get the following equation:

Yes, some stuff (like the planet’s mass and the radius) cancel, but let's not worry about that now. You can see that there’s a relation between the orbital radius and speed of the planet. Let's go ahead and model the motion of a planet as it moves around a star.

Oh! Do you see that? The star isn't stationary! I didn't tell you the whole story. If the star pulls on the planet, the planet also pulls back on the star. This is because forces are always an interaction between two objects (Newton again, third law). Since there’s a gravitational pull on the star, it also moves in a circular orbit.

Obviously nothing in the simulation above is drawn to scale. A real star has vastly more mass than the planet, so the effect is tiny. Basically, the star just “jiggles.” We can’t see the movement, but we can still detect it. How? From the Doppler effect.

This is something you already know about, even if you don't know you know it. When a speeding train goes by, its sound changes in pitch, from high to low. It’s like NEEEEEEERrrrraawww … Right? Here’s an animation to help you understand what's going on. Imagine a ball that emits sound waves at regular intervals. These waves then expand from their starting location. Now, if the ball is moving toward you, this is what happens:

See how the wave fronts get squished together? This means more waves hit your ear per second—i.e., they have a higher frequency, and we hear that as a higher pitch. Also, on the back side the waves get unsquished. If the ball moved away from you, the pitch would drop.

That’s the Doppler effect, and it works with all wave phenomena—including, notably, light. When a light source is moving toward you, the frequency increases. For visible light, this means the color changes—it’s shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum. We call that a blue shift. When it moves away, the color moves toward the red end—that’s a red shift.

Voilà! Even though astronomers can’t see a star wobbling, they can tell if it’s moving by using a spectroscope to see how the light changes. But wait! There’s more. If you know the original frequency, you can tell how fast the star is moving based on the frequency shift.

The only problem with this technique is that the amount of color shift depends on the speed of light and the speed of the source. Light moves really fast (3 x 10⁸ meters per second), so that in most cases the Doppler shift is really hard to detect. Hard doesn’t mean impossible, though.

So here's how you find an exoplanet: Observe a star for several years and look for small shifts in its color spectrum. Then use this to determine the speed at which the star moves toward and away from Earth. If we can estimate the mass of the star (we can), then using its velocity and period of oscillation (how long one oscillation takes), we can calculate the mass and orbital distance of the planet. Hurrah!

That's kind of a big deal. If you’re hoping to find extraterrestrial life, you probably want to find an Earth-like planet in an Earth-like orbit—not too close to the sun and not too far, so that water can exist in a liquid state. It’s a small window.

The Transit Method

OK, here’s the second way of detecting an exoplanet. Let’s start by thinking about something familiar: a solar eclipse. This is when the moon passes in front of the sun, causing the moon's shadow to fall on Earth. In a total eclipse, the amount of light reaching Earth can be about 1,000 times less than normal. It looks like those “day-for-night” scenes in old movies.

Venus and Mercury also sometimes pass between the sun and Earth. We call these solar transits. They don't cast a shadow on Earth, but they do slightly decrease the overall solar brightness. (Fun fact: In the 1700s, the transit of Venus was used to calculate the distance from Earth to the sun.)

We can also get an exoplanet transit, when an extrasolar planet comes between its local star and our observation point on Earth. When that happens, the brightness of the star will decrease by just a tiny bit. Sensitive instruments can detect this change and figure out that there is an exoplanet around that star. This is how Kepler-10 b, the planet in the illustration up top was first discovered. (It was later confirmed by the stellar wobble and Doppler shift.)

If you could see this transit (which you totally can not see), it would look like this:

Now suppose you plotted the star's brightness, or intensity, as a function of time. During a transit, it might look something like this:

This is called a light curve, and there’s a bunch of stuff we can figure out from it. The flat bottom of the depression is the part where the planet is fully in front of the star. The depth of the dip tells us the size of the planet. Bigger planets block more light.

Second, the length of the depression tells us how long the planet is in front of the star. We can use that to determine the orbital period (how long it takes to complete a full circle). If we know the mass of the star and the orbital velocity, then we can calculate the orbital distance.

Finally, we keep watching to see if this dip happens on a regular schedule—that’s how we know we’ve got a legit exoplanet. It’s even possible to get transits from multiple planets, and we can identify them from their signature light curves.

Of course, both methods have limits. Doppler effects get harder to suss out the farther away you’re looking. And both require a specific favorable alignment. For example, if a distant planet system is perpendicular to our view from Earth, the star’s wobble won’t move it nearer and farther from us, so there’d be no Doppler shift.

For the transit method, the exoplanet has to orbit its star in a plane that includes Earth. If everything doesn’t line up, we won’t get a transit at all. Only a tiny percentage of solar systems will satisfy that condition.

Also, both detection methods are strongly biased toward finding large planets orbiting close to their stars—so-called “hot Jupiters”—because they cause bigger, more frequent signals. For Earth-like planets, you’d have to spend three years to get a minimally acceptable three-transit observation. And no one’s going to detect an extrasolar version of Pluto, with its 250-year orbit.

Now think of the 6,000 exoplanets found so far. All but one are in the Milky Way, which leaves aside the “billions and billions” (more like trillions) of other galaxies. And almost all known exoplanets are larger than Earth, even though Earth-size planets are believed to be common. And each of the 6,000 were cases where the planets were aligned just right for us to detect them.

Then … how many planets are really out there? Current guesses put it in the vicinity of 100 sextillion (1 followed by 23 zeroes). So what do you think? Are we alone in the universe?

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 15 December 2025 at 3:19 am AEST (my time).

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RIP Matrix

STEAM teacher Scott Johnson, recently named the 2025 Kentucky Teacher of the Year, spent nearly a year quietly researching, designing, and perfecting a 3D-printed prosthetic hand for one of his fourth-grade students, Jackson Farmer.

 Jackson was born without his right hand and has used a rubber prosthetic with limited function.

“He’s got a skin tone rubber type hand that he can wear, but it doesn’t have a lot of functionality to it. He can’t actually grip things and whatnot,” Johnson told WBKO.

So, without telling Jackson, Johnson began building a custom design—reaching out to engineers around the world, studying existing models, and fine-tuning every detail.

“For the longest time, I didn’t tell anyone other than my wife what I was working on,” Johnson said. “What if I found out I was trying to do something far beyond my skill set? I didn’t want to falsely get anyone’s hopes up.”

When the school’s Back to School Bash arrived this year, Johnson finally revealed the prototype.

“So, I asked him. I was like ‘I made this, and I would like to make one for you if it’s cool.’ ” Johnson recalled. With approval from Jackson’s mom, the project officially became a reality.

The result is a lightweight, sturdy prosthetic built from durable bioplastic, with foam and smooth interior elements for comfort.

Most impressively, the hand is completely mechanical—no electronics required. Jackson controls it using his own wrist movements: flexing down closes the fingers into a grip, and flexing up opens them again. A system of internal wires helps the fingers tighten naturally when he moves.

Each hand takes about 25 hours to print, four hours to assemble, and costs only around $20 in materials. Johnson covered every expense himself, a powerful contrast to medical prosthetics that can cost families thousands.

And this is only the beginning.

Johnson is already creating an updated version based on Jackson’s daily feedback. Because Jackson will stay at the school through sixth grade, Johnson plans to resize and reprint the hand as he grows—and even teach him how to modify the design on his own.

“We can scale up the file as he gets older,” Johnson said. “One day, he’ll be able to make his own edits. That’s the goal.” 

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