China’s massive regreening campaigns over the past several decades have altered the country’s water cycle in significant and unexpected ways. A new study published in Earth’s Future finds that between 2001 and 2020, large-scale tree planting and grassland restoration increased evapotranspiration across most of China, reducing water availability in both the eastern monsoon zone and the northwestern arid region.

These two regions make up nearly three-quarters of China’s land area. At the same time, precipitation rose in the Tibetan Plateau, which experienced a net increase in available water.

Researchers explain that expanding forests and restoring grasslands reactivate the water cycle by pulling more water from the soil and releasing it into the atmosphere. However, the resulting moisture doesn’t necessarily fall back in the same place. Winds can carry atmospheric water thousands of miles, meaning that water lost through evapotranspiration in one region may become rainfall in a distant area. The study shows that while China’s regreening efforts intensified the overall water cycle, much of the country now loses more water than before.

These findings matter because China already struggles with uneven water distribution. The northern region contains only about 20 percent of the nation’s water but supports nearly half of its population and most of its farmland. Scientists warn that major government water-management projects may fail if they do not account for the water-redistribution effects caused by regreening.

In China’s Three Norths Shelterbelt Program, tree survival rates are often less than 30 percent, biodiversity has decreased, water tables have dropped, and local livelihoods have been disrupted.

The Chinese experience mirrors problems documented worldwide. Research consistently demonstrates that planting trees in grasslands, savannas, and other naturally treeless ecosystems causes serious environmental harm through water depletion, with trees in grasslands reducing streamflow and groundwater recharge due to increased evapotranspiration rates.

Studies in South Africa found that plantations consume more water than original vegetation, reducing river flow downstream. In grasslands and shrublands worldwide where forests were created, streams shrank by 52% and 13% of all streams dried up completely for at least a year.

Beyond water depletion, studies from South Africa, Australia and Brazil indicate that unique biodiversity is lost as tree cover increases in grasslands. Not all land is meant to be forested, and planting in grasslands can reduce carbon storage and increase biodiversity loss.

The wildlife impacts are severe, losing savanna grasslands can mean losing animals like wildebeest, giraffes, rhinos, lions, blackbucks, and the great Indian bustard. Contrary to popular belief, monoculture plantations can reduce carbon storage abilities, especially in grasslands. Grasslands store up to 30% of the world’s carbon tied up in soil, and converting them to forests may actually release stored carbon.

The African Great Green Wall initiative provides compelling evidence of these problems at massive scale. According to Chris Reij at the World Resources Institute, the 20% survival rate of newly planted trees in the Sahara since the 1980s demonstrates the ineffectiveness of current afforestation approaches. In Senegal, satellite analysis of 36 reforestation plots showed only two were much greener since the wall was established, and only one was more green than it would have been naturally. Dennis Garrity at the World Agroforestry Centre called the original Great Green Wall project “a stupid way of restoring land in the Sahel.”

The damage extends beyond ecology. Monoculture plantations frequently shift local community land ownership to private company holdings, displacing local communities and harming their livelihoods. Negative impacts include cultural loss, food insecurity, soil contamination, groundwater depletion and pollution, and loss of land rights.

These problems stem from a fundamental misunderstanding. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation defines any area over half a hectare with more than 10% tree cover as forest, which assumes landscapes like African savannas are degraded because they have fewer trees.

This definitional problem drives policies that destroy functioning ecosystems. A tree-focused worldview that equates ecological improvement with tree cover does not translate well to dryland ecologies that were originally steppes, grasslands or savannas.

Research shows that trees at higher densities compete with native vegetation, leading to reductions in moisture availability, biodiversity and groundcover protection from erosion.

The study also suggests that similar ecological restoration efforts in other countries may be reshaping local and regional water cycles in ways that must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

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Welcome to Edition 8.22 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week concerns the decision by SpaceX founder Elon Musk to take the company public, via IPO, sometime within the next 12 to 18 months. Musk confirmed this after Ars published a story on Wednesday evening. This understandably raises questions about whether a future SpaceX will be committed more to AI data centers in space or Mars settlement. However, one of the company’s founding employees, Tom Mueller, said this could benefit the company’s Mars plans. Clearly this is something we’ll be following closely.

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

Avio will build solid rocket motors in Virginia. The governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, announced Wednesday that Avio USA has selected his state to produce solid rocket motors for defense and commercial space propulsion purposes. Avio USA’s investment, which will be up to $500 million, is supported by its Italian parent Avio. The company’s factory will encompass 860,000 sq. feet.

From Italy with love … “Avio looks forward to establishing on U.S. soil a solid rocket motor production facility to contribute in strengthening the US industrial base by providing decades of experience in engineering and manufacturing,” said Avio Chief Executive Officer Giulio Ranzo. Final approvals and the site-selection announcement are expected to be completed early next year.

Orbex funding lags in European Launcher Challenge. One of the five launch companies in ESA’s European Launcher Challenge, Orbex, received far less funding than the other four at the agency’s ministerial conference after the United Kingdom deferred a decision on how to allocate most of its contribution. Unlike typical ESA programs, in which members contribute funds with the expectation of receiving contracts proportional to their investments, the launcher challenge allowed member states to choose among five “preselected challengers,” Space News reports.

Orbex not in prime position … Those companies were chosen in July based on technical and business maturity, and each could receive up to 169 million euros. They were: Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, Orbex, PLD Space, and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA). Isar, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, and RFA each received at least 169 million euros, while Orbex received just 34.9 million euros. The UK left 112.3 million euros unallocated, a move that puzzled many industry observers. “We are working with multiple partners to ensure this funding delivers our requirements for assured access to space and benefits U.K. taxpayers,” a UK Space Agency spokesperson said. This was not exactly a ringing endorsement of the UK-based launch company. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Europe takes a tentative step toward crewed launch. The European Space Agency has published a call for tenders to develop a launch abort system for a future crewed launch capability, European Spaceflight reports. The system would be used in the event of an emergency, either on the launch pad or during the initial stages of flight.

Looking beyond ISS … The new call is part of the European agency’s post-ISS low-Earth orbit strategy. This strategy, the material explains, includes the development of an end-to-end European crewed flight solution. In addition to developing a crewed launch capability, the agency’s post-ISS strategy includes options for low-Earth orbit infrastructure. These options include partnering with a commercial space station or building a European station. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

After Russian launch incident, NASA brings Dragon launches forward. With a key Russian launch pad out of service, NASA is accelerating the launch of two Cargo Dragon spaceships in order to ensure that astronauts on board the International Space Station have all the supplies they need next year, Ars reports. According to the space agency’s internal schedule, the next Dragon supply mission, CRS-34, is moving forward one month, from June 2026 to May. And the next Dragon supply mission after this, CRS-35, has been advanced three months, from November to August.

NET April for pad repairs … A source indicated that the changing schedules are a “direct result” of a launch pad incident on Thanksgiving Day at the Russian spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The issue occurred when a Soyuz rocket launched Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, as well as NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, on an eight-month mission to the International Space Station. The rocket had no difficulties, but a large mobile platform below the rocket was not properly secured prior to the launch and crashed into the flame trench below, taking the Soyuz pad offline. Russia has told NASA it will require at least four months to repair the pad.

Rocket Lab completes Neutron fairing test. Rocket Lab announced Monday that the Neutron rocket’s innovative “Hungry Hippo” captive fairing has successfully completed qualification testing and is en route to Virginia for Neutron’s first launch. Whereas typical rockets’ fairing halves fall away during launch and are disposable or require collection at sea for reuse, Neutron’s fairing halves open to release the rocket’s second stage and mission payload before closing again to return Neutron to Earth as a single reusable vehicle.

Gobbling marbles … To qualify the Hungry Hippo fairing for Neutron’s first launch, Rocket Lab completed an intensive qualification and acceptance testing campaign that validated the structure’s expected performance during the intense aerodynamic pressure of launch and re-entry featuring full-scale tests as well as a series of sub-component tests. “Building, qualifying, and shipping Hungry Hippo is a fantastic marker of progress toward Neutron’s first launch, and I’m proud of the team for their attention to detail and pulling off this significant milestone,” said Shaun D’Mello, the company’s vice president overseeing Neutron.

Terran R flight tanks assembled. Relativity Space has gone largely silent since being taken over by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, but the company still provides monthly updates online. On Tuesday the company published its November 2025 update and revealed that progress is being made on flight hardware for the debut launch of the large Terran R rocket. Relativity has not announced a new launch target yet.

More work to be done … “In November, the team completed all circumferential friction stir welds for the first stage tank for first flight,” the company said. “Measuring 163 feet (49.7 meters) in length, the tank is composed of eight barrel sections and three domes, joined by ten circumferential welds. The tank will now move into integration. With both the first and second stage tanks finished, focus has shifted to the interstage.”

Veteran Falcon 9 booster extends record. SpaceX achieved a couple notable milestones with its Falcon 9 rocket launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Monday, December 8, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, dubbed Starlink 6-92, featured the use of the company’s most-flown Falcon booster, tail number B1067. On its 32nd flight, it delivered SpaceX’s 3,000th Starlink satellite of the year to low-Earth orbit.

How is your payload fairing? … The use of B1067 on this mission brings SpaceX one step closer to its current goal of certifying its Falcon boosters for up to 40 missions a piece. The ultimate number of missions a booster flies will partially depend on the types of missions for which it was used and if it is needed on an expendable flight. SpaceX is looking to achieve the same level of reuse for the payload fairings on a Falcon rocket’s upper stage, but typically only provides updates on those during the launches of customer missions for the government or from other companies.

SpaceX likely to IPO next year to fund ambitions. SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year, and this represents a major change in thinking from the world’s leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk. The question is, why? He has not enjoyed the public scrutiny of Tesla, and feared that shareholder desires for financial return were not consistent with his ultimate goal of settling Mars. Ars attempts to answer this question by speaking to a number of people familiar with Musk’s thinking.

The short-term answer is data centers … Abhi Tripathi, a long-time SpaceX employee, believes that once Musk realized Starlink satellites could be architected into a distributed network of data centers, the writing was on the wall. “That is the moment an IPO suddenly came into play after being unlikely for so long. Much of the AI race comes down to amassing and deploying assets that work quicker than your competition. A large war chest resulting from an IPO will greatly help his cause and disadvantage all others.” Foremost among Musk’s goals right now is to “win” the battle for artificial intelligence. Taking SpaceX public and using it to marshal an incredible amount of resources shows he is playing to win.

New Glenn targets a four-launch certification. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket will have to complete four successful orbital flights as its pathway to certification under the US Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program, Space News reports. Gen. Philip Garrant, who leads the Space Systems Command, said Blue Origin selected the four-flight benchmark and the government agreed.

And then there were three? … “The government is supporting a four-flight certification for New Glenn,” Garrant said. The rocket has logged two successful missions so far, and Garrant said a third launch is expected “earlier in the new year than later.” If upcoming flights stay on track, he added, “I think they’re going to be in a fantastic place to become our third certified provider and compete for missions.” If certified, Blue Origin would join SpaceX and United Launch Alliance as the Space Force’s third heavy-lift launch provider. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

December 13: Long March 6 | Unknown Payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 01:05 UTC

December 14: Electron | RAISE and Shine | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 03:00 UTC

December 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-12 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 05:20 UTC

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Since the 1990s, physicists have pondered the tantalizing possibility of an exotic fourth type of neutrino, dubbed the “sterile” neutrino, that doesn’t interact with regular matter at all, apart from its fellow neutrinos, perhaps. But definitive experimental evidence for sterile neutrinos has remained elusive. Now it looks like the latest results from Fermilab’s MiniBooNE experiment have ruled out the sterile neutrino entirely, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.

How did the possibility of sterile neutrinos even become a thing? It all dates back to the so-called “solar neutrino problem.” Physicists detected the first solar neutrinos from the Sun in 1966. The only problem was that there were far fewer solar neutrinos being detected than predicted by theory, a conundrum that became known as the solar neutrino problem. In 1962, physicists discovered a second type (“flavor”) of neutrino, the muon neutrino. This was followed by the discovery of a third flavor, the tau neutrino, in 2000.

Physicists already suspected that neutrinos might be able to switch from one flavor to another. In 2002, scientists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (or SNO) announced that they had solved the solar neutrino problem. The missing solar (electron) neutrinos were just in disguise, having changed into a different flavor on the long journey between the Sun and the Earth. If neutrinos oscillate, then they must have a teensy bit of mass after all. That posed another knotty neutrino-related problem. There are three neutrino flavors, but none of them has a well-defined mass. Rather, different kinds of “mass states” mix together in various ways to produce electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. That’s quantum weirdness for you.

And there was another conundrum, thanks to results from Los Alamos’ LSND experiment and Fermilab’s MiniBooNE (MicroBooNE’s predecessor). Both found evidence of muon neutrinos oscillating into electron neutrinos in a way that shouldn’t be possible if there were just three neutrino flavors. So physicists suggested there might be a fourth flavor: the sterile neutrino, so named because unlike the other three, it does not couple to a charged counterpart via the electroweak force. Its existence would also have big implications for the nature of dark matter. But despite the odd tantalizing hint, sterile neutrinos have proven to be maddeningly elusive.

Enter MicroBooNE

To probe the mystery further, Fermilab built MicroBooNE, which employs two beams pumping neutrinos into a liquid-argon time projection chamber. When neutrinos interact with liquid argon particles, this triggers a decay process that should produce muon neutrinos. If electron neutrinos showed up in the data, that would suggest the existence of sterile neutrinos.

Earlier this year, MicroBooNE published the first measurements from all five years (2015–2021) of the data collected, concluding that a sterile neutrino is not the cause of its predecessor’s anomalous results—i.e., a null result. This latest paper follows up on that initial analysis and confirms the findings: The data is consistent with no oscillations into a sterile neutrino, effectively ruling out its existence.

Attention now turns to alternative explanations for those earlier anomalies and new experiments, such as Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program, which uses a near detector and a far detector—both of which have already begun collecting data. There is also the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) currently under construction in South Dakota, designed to receive high-energy neutron beams traveling 800 miles underground from Fermilab.

“MicroBooNE is big—it’s the size of a school bus,” said co-author David Caratelli of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of both MicroBooNE and DUNE. “But DUNE is football field-scale. One of the key things that MicroBooNE did was give us all confidence and teach us how to use this technology to measure neutrinos with high precision. What we learned with MicroBooNE on how to analyze the data that comes to the detector all directly applies to DUNE.”

DOI: Nature, 2025. 10.1038/s41586-025-09757-7  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 12 December 2025 at 12:17 pm AEST (my time).

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NASA has lost contact with one its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty.

Ground teams last heard from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on Saturday, December 6. “Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the red planet,” NASA said in a short statement. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.”

NASA said mission controllers are “investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.”

A long life at Mars

MAVEN is the newest of NASA’s three operational Mars orbiters. The robotic mission arrived at the red planet in September 2014 after a 10-month cruise from Earth, then settled into an elliptical orbit to begin studying interactions between the Sun and the Martian atmosphere.

Earlier in its mission, MAVEN discovered how the solar wind erodes the Martian atmosphere. Over billions of years, the erosion transformed Mars from a warm, wet, habitable world into the cold, inhospitable planet seen today. MAVEN’s science instruments measured the densities of light and heavy isotopes of argon to show how a process known as “sputtering” removed the majority of the air and water from the atmosphere. The spacecraft also made detailed in-situ plasma observations to help scientists understand Mars’ auroras.

Built by Lockheed Martin, MAVEN has far outlived its original design life. More recently, MAVEN became an important node in NASA’s Mars relay network, passing signals between rovers on the Martian surface and controllers on Earth. If NASA is unable to revive the MAVEN spacecraft, the agency has two other orbiters that can pick up the slack.

But NASA’s two other Mars orbiters have been in space for more than 20 years. The older of the two, named Mars Odyssey, has been at Mars since 2001 and will soon run out of fuel, probably some time in the next couple of years. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2005, is healthy for its age, with enough fuel to last into the 2030s. MRO is also important to NASA because it has the best camera at Mars, with the ability to map landing sites for future missions.

Two European spacecraft, Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, have radios to relay data between mission controllers and NASA’s landers on the Martian surface. Mars Express, now 22 years old, suffers from the same aging concerns as Mars Odyssey and MRO. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is newer, having arrived at Mars in 2016, but is also operating beyond its original lifetime.

China and the United Arab Emirates also have orbiters circling Mars, but neither spacecraft is equipped to serve as a communications relay.

NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have the capability for direct-to-Earth communications, but the orbiting relay network can support vastly higher data throughput. Without overhead satellites, much of the science data and many of the spectacular images collected by NASA’s rovers might never make it off the planet.

MAVEN’s unique orbit, stretching as far as 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) above Mars, has some advantages for data relay. In that orbit, MAVEN could relay science data from rovers on the surface for up to 30 minutes at a time, longer than the relay periods available through NASA’s lower-altitude orbiters. Because of this, MAVEN could support the largest data volumes of any of the other relay options.

Before the loss of communications last weekend, NASA said MAVEN had sufficient fuel reserves to operate until at least the late 2030s.

MAVEN was one of 19 operating missions targeted for cancellation in President Donald Trump’s proposed NASA budget for fiscal year 2026. Congress largely rejected the Trump’s administration’s proposed budget cuts at NASA.

Mars is clearly a second priority at NASA amid a race between the United States and China to land astronauts on the Moon. But the recent trouble with MAVEN will likely rekindle long-running concerns about NASA’s aging spacecraft at Mars, especially the risk of losing capacity for communications relay and high-resolution mapping to support NASA’s active rovers, along with future robotic or human expeditions.

The space agency has investigated using commercial relay services to replace the government-owned network currently in place at Mars. NASA awarded study contracts to Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and SpaceX in 2024 to examine possible data relay architectures.

NASA was in the early stages of planning for a dedicated Mars Telecommunications Orbiter more than 20 years ago, with plans to put it into an orbit similar to the one occupied by MAVEN. The agency canceled the project in 2005. Since then, NASA has tacked on relay radios to science orbiters sent to Mars, giving them the ability to provide communications support as a secondary mission.

The Mars Telecommunications Orbiter name appeared again in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress earlier this year. Lawmakers included $700 million for a “high-performance” telecom relay station in Mars orbit to be developed through a fixed-price contract. Blue Origin and Rocket Lab are among the companies that have publicized their concepts for a Mars telecom orbiter in recent months. NASA officials have not said when they will release a request for bids for such a mission.

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Posted Thursday 11 December 2025 at 12:29 pm AEST (my time).

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Heat-reddened clay, fire-cracked stone, and fragments of pyrite mark where Neanderthals gathered around a campfire 400,000 years ago in what’s now Suffolk, England.

Based on chemical analysis of the sediment at the site, along with the telltale presence of pyrite, a mineral not naturally found nearby but very handy for striking sparks with flint, British Museum archaeologist Rob Davis and his colleagues say the Neanderthals probably started the fire themselves. That makes the abandoned English clay pit at Barnham the oldest evidence in the world that people (Neanderthal people, in this case) had learned to not only use fire, but also create it and control it.

A cozy Neanderthal campfire

Today, the Barnham site is part of an abandoned clay pit where workers first discovered stone tools in the early 1900s. But 400,000 years ago, it would have been a picturesque little spot at the edge of a stream-fed pond, surrounded by a mix of forest and grassland. There are no hominin fossils here, but archaeologists unearthed a Neanderthal skull about 100 kilometers to the south, so the hominins at Barnham were probably also Neanderthals. The place would have have offered a group of Neanderthals a relatively quiet, sheltered place to set up camp, according to Davis and his colleagues.

The cozy domesticity of that camp apparently centered on a hearth about the size of a small campfire. What’s left of that hearth today is a patch of clayey silt baked to a rusty red color by a series of fires; it stands out sharply against the yellowish clay that makes up the rest of the site. When ancient hearth fires heated that iron-rich yellow clay, it formed tiny grains of hematite that turned the baked clay a telltale red. Near the edge of the hearth, the archaeologists unearthed a handful of flint handaxes shattered by heat, alongside a scattering of other heat-cracked flint flakes.

And glinting against the dull clay lay two small pieces of a shiny sulfide mineral, aptly named pyrite—a key piece of Stone Age firestarting kits. Long before people struck flint and steel together to make fire, they struck flint and pyrite. Altogether, the evidence at Barnham suggests that Neanderthals were building and lighting their own fires 400,000 years ago.

In this excavation of the ancient campfire, the reddened sediment between band B and band B’ is heated clay.

Jordan Mansfield, Pathways to Ancient Britain Project.

 

This is what the former Neanderthal camp at Barnham looks like today.

Jordan Mansfield, Pathways to Ancient Britain Project.

Fire: the way of the future

Lighting a fire sounds like a simple thing, but once upon a time, it took cutting-edge technology. Working out how to start a fire on purpose—and then how to control its size and temperature—was the breakthrough that made nearly everything else possible: hafted stone weapons, cooked food, metalworking, and ultimately microprocessors and heavy-lift rockets.

“Something else that fire provides is additional time. The campfire becomes a social hub,” said Davis during a recent press conference. “Having fire… provides this kind of intense socialization time after dusk.” It may have been around fires like the one at Barnham, huddled together against the dark Pleistocene evening, that hominins began developing language, storytelling, and mythologies. And those things, Davis suggested, could have “played a critical part in maintaining social relationships over bigger distances or within more complex social groups.” Fire, in other words, helped make us more fully human and may have helped us connect in the same way that bonding over TV shows does today.

Archaeologists have worked for decades to try to pinpoint exactly when that breakthrough happened (although most now agree that it probably happened multiple times in different places). But evidence of fire is hard to find because it’s ephemeral by its very nature. The small patch of baked clay at Barnham hasn’t seen a fire in half a million years, but its light is still pushing back the shadows.

A million-year history of fire

Archaeologists suspect that the first hominins to use fire took advantage of nearby wildfires: Picture a Homo erectus lighting a branch on a nearby wildfire (which must have taken serious guts), then carefully carrying that torch back to camp to cook or make it easier to ward off predators for a night. Evidence of that sort of thing—using fire, but not necessarily being able to summon it on command—dates back more than a million years at sites like Koobi Fora in Kenya and Swartkrans in South Africa.

Learning to start a fire whenever you want one is harder, but it’s essential if you want to cook your food regularly without having to wait for the next lightning strike to spark a brushfire. It can also help maintain the careful control of temperature needed to make birch tar adhesives, “The advantage of fire-making lies in its predictability,” as Davis and his colleagues wrote in their paper. Knowing how to strike a light changed fire from an occasional luxury item to a staple of hominin life.

There are hints that Neanderthals in Europe were using fire by around 400,000 years ago, based on traces of long-cold hearths at sites in France, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Ukraine. (The UK site, Beeches Pit, is just 10 kilometers southwest of Barnham.) But none of those sites offer evidence that Neanderthals were making fire rather than just taking advantage of its natural appearance. That kind of evidence doesn’t show up in the archaeological record until 50,000 years ago, when groups of Neanderthals in France used pyrite and bifaces (multi-purpose flint tools with two worked faces, sharp edges, and a surprisingly ergonomic shape) to light their own hearth-fires; marks left on the bifaces tell the tale.

Barnham pushes that date back dramatically, but there’s probably even older evidence out there. Davis and his colleagues say the Barnham Neanderthals probably didn’t invent firestarting; they likely brought the knowledge with them from mainland Europe.

“It’s certainly possible that Homo sapiens in Africa had the ability to make fire, but it can’t be proven yet from the evidence. We only have the evidence at this date from Barnham,” said Natural History Museum London anthropologist Chris Stringer, a coauthor of the study, in the press conference.

Digging into the details

Several types of evidence at the site point to Neanderthals starting their own fire, not borrowing from a local wildfire. Ancient wildfires leave traces in sediment that can last hundreds of thousands of years or more—microscopic bits of charcoal and ash. But the area that’s now Suffolk wasn’t in the middle of wildfire season when the Barnham hearth was in use. Chemical evidence, like the presence of heavy hydrocarbon molecules in the sediment around the hearth, suggests this fire was homemade (wildfires usually scatter lighter ones across several square kilometers of landscape).

But the key piece of evidence at Barnham—the kind of clue that arson investigators probably dream about—is the pyrite. Pyrite isn’t a naturally common mineral in the area around Barnham; Neanderthals would have had to venture at least 12 kilometers southeast to find any. And although few hominins can resist the allure of picking up a shiny rock, it’s likely that these bits of pyrite had a more practical purpose.

To figure out what sort of fire might have produced the reddened clay, Davis and his colleagues did some experiments (which involved setting a bunch of fires atop clay taken from near the site). The archaeologists compared the baked clay from Barnham to the clay from beneath their experimental fires. The grain size and chemical makeup of the clay from the ancient Neanderthal hearth looked almost exactly like “12 or more heating events, each lasting 4 hours at temperatures of 400º Celsius or 600º Celsius,” as Davis and his colleagues wrote.

In other words, the hearth at Barnham hints at the rhythms of daily life for one group of Neanderthals 400,000 years ago. For starters, it seems that they kindled their campfire in the same spot over and over and left it burning for hours at a time. Flakes of flint nearby conjure up images of Neanderthals sitting around the fire, knapping stone tools as they told each other stories long into the night.

Nature, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09855-6 About DOIs).

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Artist's illustration of an astronaut walking alongside a Lunar Outpost Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, 

or MAPP, rover on the surface of the moon.  

Credit: Lunar Outpost/collectSPACE.com

B-9 had Will Robinson. Twiki had Buck Rogers. And, of course, C-3PO and R2-D2 had Luke Skywalker. Now, in a scenario straight out of science fiction, MAPP will have whoever NASA names to the crew of the second Artemis mission to land on the moon.

The space agency has selected Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, to become the first robotic rover to operate on the moon alongside astronauts. Although its tasks will be far simpler than those of the robots seen on TV and in the movies, the autonomous four-wheeled MAPP will help scientists learn more about the crew’s surroundings. Science instruments on the rover will characterize the surface plasma and behavior of the dust in the lunar environment.

“The Apollo era taught us that the further humanity is from Earth, the more dependent we are on science to protect and sustain human life on other planets,” said Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science, in a statement. “By deploying these… science instruments on the lunar surface, our proving ground, NASA is leading the world in the creation of humanity’s interplanetary survival guide to ensure the health and safety of our spacecraft and human explorers as we begin our epic journey back to the Moon.”

“The Apollo missions showed us the challenges posed by dust on the lunar surface, and NASA’s Artemis plans to find solutions as a critical step to building a sustainable human presence in space,” said Justin Cyrus, founder and CEO of Lunar Outpost. “This will be Lunar Outpost’s seventh contracted mission, demonstrating our ability to serve as a platform for multiple mission profiles and provide mobility and robotics to help astronauts conduct research on the moon.”

Danger Gene Cernan, danger

NASA’s next mission to launch to the Moon, Artemis II in 2026, will fly four astronauts near the Moon and then return them to Earth on a “shakeout cruise” for the Orion crew spacecraft. That will be followed by Artemis III, targeted for 2028, which will see the first humans return to the lunar surface since the late Gene Cernan, Apollo 17 commander, left the last (to date) boot print on the moon more than 50 years ago this month.

Artemis IV will mark the second lunar landing of the Artemis program and build upon what is learned at the moon’s south pole on Artemis III.

“After his voyage to the Moon’s surface during Apollo 17, astronaut Gene Cernan acknowledged the challenge that lunar dust presents to long-term lunar exploration. Moon dust sticks to everything it touches and is very abrasive,” read NASA’s announcement of the Artemis IV science payloads.

To that end, the solar-powered MAPP will support DUSTER (DUst and plaSma environmenT survEyoR), a two-part investigation from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The autonomous rover’s equipment will include the Electrostatic Dust Analyzer (EDA), which will measure the charge, velocity, size, and flux of dust particles lofted from the lunar surface, and the RElaxation SOunder and differentiaL VoltagE (RESOLVE) instrument, which will characterize the average electron density above the lunar surface using plasma sounding.

The University of Central Florida and University of California, Berkeley, have joined with LASP to interpret measurements taken by DUSTER. The former will look at the dust ejecta generated during the Human Landing System (HLS, or lunar lander) liftoff from the Moon, while the latter will analyze upstream plasma conditions.

Lunar dust attaches to almost everything it comes into contact with, posing a risk to equipment and spacesuits. It can also obstruct solar panels, reducing their ability to generate electricity and cause thermal radiators to overheat. The dust can also endanger astronauts’ health if inhaled.

“We need to develop a complete picture of the dust and plasma environment at the lunar south pole and how it varies over time and location to ensure astronaut safety and the operation of exploration equipment,” said Xu Wang, senior researcher at LASP and principal investigator of DUSTER, in a University of Colorado statement. “By studying this environment, we gain crucial insights that will guide mitigation strategies and methods to enable long-term, sustained human exploration on the Moon.”

Lunar Voyage 5

MAPP, which looks more like a mouse droid than a protocol or astromech unit, will not be new to the moon when it arrives on the surface with the Artemis IV astronauts. If all goes to plan, it will be Lunar Outpost’s third wheeled platform to reach the moon.

The Colorado-based company’s first MAPP mission, dubbed “Lunar Voyage 1,” arrived on the moon in March of this year but was trapped in its “garage” when its ride to the surface, a commercial uncrewed moon lander, toppled over upon its touchdown. Despite being unable to move, Lunar Outpost said the LV1 MAPP was able to collect data from the lunar surface and in transit, as well as confirm that the rover was ready to drive.

The Lunar Voyage 2 (LV2) MAPP is targeted for launch on Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 mission in 2026 as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Services Program (CLPS). The LV3 rover is booked for a commercial mission, followed by “Roo-ver” by the end of the decade as the Australian Space Agency’s first flagship mission and its contribution to NASA’s Artemis program.

Lunar Outpost earlier deployed an environmental monitoring system based on the life support system developed for NASA’s Gateway lunar orbit platform, and built MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), which successfully demonstrated producing oxygen 16 times on the Red Planet while mounted to NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.

MAPP has also been celebrated in pop culture, extending its similarities with the sci-fi robots that preceded it. In August, Lego and Lunar Outpost partnered on the release of the LegoTechnic Lunar Outpost Moon Rover Space Vehicle, a toy building block set that constructed three rovers, including a miniature MAPP.

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Posted Wednesday 10 December 2025 at 1:30 pm AEST (my time).

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Back in 2023, we reported on MIT scientists’ conclusion that the ancient Romans employed “hot mixing” with quicklime, among other strategies, to make their famous concrete, giving the material self-healing functionality. The only snag was that this didn’t match the recipe as described in historical texts. Now the same team is back with a fresh analysis of samples collected from a recently discovered site that confirms the Romans did indeed use hot mixing, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

As we’ve reported previously, like today’s Portland cement (a basic ingredient of modern concrete), ancient Roman concrete was basically a mix of a semi-liquid mortar and aggregate. Portland cement is typically made by heating limestone and clay (as well as sandstone, ash, chalk, and iron) in a kiln. The resulting clinker is then ground into a fine powder with just a touch of added gypsum to achieve a smooth, flat surface. But the aggregate used to make Roman concrete was made up of fist-sized pieces of stone or bricks.

In his treatise De architectura (circa 30 CE), the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius wrote about how to build concrete walls for funerary structures that could endure for a long time without falling into ruin. He recommended the walls be at least two feet thick, made of either “squared red stone or of brick or lava laid in courses.” The brick or volcanic rock aggregate should be bound with mortar composed of hydrated lime and porous fragments of glass and crystals from volcanic eruptions (known as volcanic tephra).

Admir Masic, an environmental engineer at MIT, has studied ancient Roman concrete for several years. For instance, in 2019, Masic helped pioneer a new set of tools for analyzing Roman concrete samples from Privernum at multiple length scales—notably, Raman spectroscopy for chemical profiling and multi-detector energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) for phase mapping the material. Masic was also a co-author of a 2021 study analyzing samples of the ancient concrete used to build a 2,000-year-old mausoleum along the Appian Way in Rome known as the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, a noblewoman who lived in the first century CE.

And in 2023, Masic’s group analyzed samples taken from the concrete walls of the Privernum, focusing on strange white mineral chunks known as “lime clasts,” which others had largely dismissed as resulting from subpar raw materials or poor mixing. Masic et al. concluded that was not the case. Rather, the Romans deliberately employed “hot mixing” with quicklime that gave the material self-healing functionality. When cracks begin to form in the concrete, they are more likely to move through the lime clasts. The clasts can then react with water, producing a solution saturated with calcium. That solution can either recrystallize as calcium carbonate to fill the cracks or react with the pozzolanic components to strengthen the composite material.

Under construction

However, the concrete recipe described by Vitruvius did not match the hot mixing process. “Having a lot of respect for Vitruvius, it was difficult to suggest that his description may be inaccurate,” Masic said. “The writings of Vitruvius played a critical role in stimulating my interest in ancient Roman architecture, and the results from my research contradicted these important historical texts.”

Then archaeologists discovered the remains of what was once an active construction site in Pompeii, with tools and piles of raw materials scattered about, a half-built wall, completed buttresses, and even mortar repairs to an existing wall. Masic described it as a veritable “time capsule” holding even more secrets about how the Romans made their concrete.

Masic et al.’s latest isotopic analysis of samples taken from the site confirms that the concrete had the same lime clasts as those used to build Privernum. Intact quicklime fragments showed they had been premixed with other dry raw materials—a crucial early step in a hot mixing process. Furthermore, the volcanic ash used in the cement contained pumice, and those pumice particles would chemically react with the surrounding solution over time to create new, strengthening mineral deposits. As for Vitruvius, Masic suggests that the historian may have been misinterpreted, pointing to a passing mention of latent heat during the cement mixing process that might indicate hot mixing.

Masic is confident enough in these results that he founded a new manufacturing company drawing on the lessons he’s learned over the last 10 years to make more durable modern concrete.  “This material can heal itself over thousands of years, it is reactive, and it is highly dynamic,” said Masic. “It has survived earthquakes and volcanoes. It has endured under the sea and survived degradation from the elements. We don’t want to completely copy Roman concrete today. We just want to translate a few sentences from this book of knowledge into our modern construction practices.”

DOI: Nature Communications, 2025. 10.1038/s41467-025-66634-7  (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 10 December 2025 at 4:33 am AEST (my time).

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Sending astronauts to the red planet will be a decades-long activity and cost many billions of dollars. So why should NASA undertake such a bold mission?

A new report published Tuesday, titled “A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars,” represents the answer from leading scientists and engineers in the United States: finding whether life exists, or once did, beyond Earth.

“We’re searching for life on Mars,” said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview with Ars. “The answer to the question ‘are we alone‘ is always going to be ‘maybe,’ unless it becomes yes.”

The report, two years in the making and encompassing more than 200 pages, was published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Essentially, the committee co-chaired by Newman and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, was asked to identify the highest-priority science objectives for the first human missions to Mars.

‘No turning back’

Although coincidental, the report’s publication on Tuesday comes as NASA’s next administrator, private astronaut Jared Isaacman, is expected to be confirmed by the full US Senate in the next week or so. Isaacman is interested in laying the groundwork for future human missions to Mars as SpaceX and Blue Origin take steps toward building reusable in-space transportation systems that could send humans to Mars within the next two decades.

“There’s no turning back,” Newman said. “Everyone is inspired by this because it’s becoming real. We can get there. Decades ago, we didn’t have the technologies. This would have been a study report.”

The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. In order of priority, they are:

• Search for Life: Is there evidence of life, past or present, on Mars?
• Water and carbon dioxide: Understand how water and carbon cycles changed over time
• Mars geology: Better understand the geological history of the planet
• Crew health: How do humans fare psychologically, cognitively, and physically in the Martian environment?
• Dust storms: Understand the origin and nature of large dust storms on the planet
• Search for resources: Develop in situ resource utilization, focusing initially on water and propellant
• Mars and genomes: Determine whether Mars changes reproduction and genome function in plant and animal species
• Understand microbes: Are microbial populations stable on Mars?
• Martian dust: How harmful and invasive is dust on humans and their hardware?
• Plants and animals: Does Mars affect plant and animal physiology and development across generations?
• Radiation sampling: Better understand the level and impact of radiation on the surface of Mars

The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms.

Science-driven exploration

Notably, the report also addresses the issue of planetary protection, a principle that aims to protect both celestial bodies (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. This has been a thorny issue for human missions to Mars, as some scientists and environmentalists say humans should be barred from visiting a world that could contain extant life.

In recent years, NASA has been working with the International Committee on Space Research to design a plan in which human landings might occur in some areas of the planet, while other parts of Mars are left in “pristine” condition. The committee said this work should be prioritized to reach a resolution that will further the design of human missions to Mars.

“NASA should continue to collaborate on the evolution of planetary protection guidelines, with the goal of enabling human explorers to perform research in regions that could possibly support, or even harbor, life,” the report states.

If NASA is going to get serious about pressing policymakers and saying it is time to fund a human mission to Mars, the new report is important because it provides the justification for sending people—and not just robots—to the surface of Mars. It methodically goes through all the things that humans can and should do on Mars and lays out how NASA’s human spaceflight and science exploration programs can work together.

“The report says here are the top science priorities that can be accomplished by humans on the surface of Mars,” Elkins-Tanton said. “There are thousands of scientific measurements that could be taken, but we believe these are the highest priorities. We’ve been on Mars for 50 years. With humans there, we have a huge opportunity.”

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Posted Wednesday 10 December 2025 at 4:32 am AEST (my time).

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Ryston Grenz hopes his cards might bring a little holiday cheer to people he doesn’t even know.

Ryston’s giving heart is making this season a little extra special for him, and for strangers he’s befriending.

Ryston is on a mission. The 5-year-old is determined to create the best Christmas cards ever. Each card he makes is hand-painted. The hearts, drawn on by hand, too. Ryston even glues the candy canes on by himself.

“It just makes me feel good to do it,” he said.

The words on the cards hold a special meaning, chosen by Ryston himself.

“He’s like, ‘Mom, I want it to say Jesus loves you. I want to make sure that people know that,’” said his mom, Jessie Grenz.

Once this batch of cards dries, Ryston will stash them in his mom’s car.

“When we go in places, he just picks a few to come with and decides who he wants to give them to,” explained Jessie.

His mom has captured a few of the exchanges on camera.

“It’s been fun to watch him say, ‘excuse me’ to get someone’s attention,” she said.

Ryston has handed out nearly 40 cards already. He gets a little braver each time he gives a card away.

“Being able to come out of his shell and talk to strangers and knowing that strangers aren’t inherently dangerous and just making that distinction that you can talk to other people and spread kindness without being afraid of them,” said Jessie.

For Ryston, spreading kindness is what it’s all about.

“It made me feel good, so that’s why I wanted to do some stuff,” Ryston said.

He hopes his cards make others feel good, too.

Jessie said it’s fun to see who he’ll pick to give a card to. She says often, he chooses people she wouldn’t have been brave enough to approach.

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The 2025 Formula 1 World Championship drew to a close this past weekend in Abu Dhabi, and with it came the end of the current generation of cars. After a grueling 24 races, the title was decided in a three-way fight by the finest of margins; just two points, less than half a percent, separated the winning driver from second place when the checkered flag waved on Sunday.

Coming into Abu Dhabi, McLaren’s Lando Norris was, if not a comfortable favorite, then at least the driver with the highest odds of prevailing. After a strong start to the season, the British driver’s form dipped at the Dutch Grand Prix. But he bounced back, retaking the championship lead from his Australian teammate Oscar Piastri in Mexico in October.

For much of the season, it seemed to be a two-car race. McLaren had a clear car advantage and two strong drivers, suggesting a repeat of the years we saw Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg duking it out to bring home titles for Mercedes. But that didn’t figure on Red Bull developing its car late in the season. New boss Laurent Mekies has revitalized the energy drinks squad, and four-time champion Max Verstappen was able to close inexorably toward the McLaren drivers in the points with a string of sublime performances.

At times, McLaren seemed to try to help him. Its commitment to scrupulous fairness between its own two drivers sometimes disadvantaged both. Then a double disqualification in Las Vegas gave Verstappen a huge catch-up.

Things got worse last weekend in Qatar (apologies for no race report; I took some time off, even if F1 didn’t). A perfectly timed safety car saw the entire field—minus the McLarens, running at the front—stopped for tires in a 57-lap race where Pirelli restricted the maximum stint length for anyone to just 25 laps. In effect, the entire grid got a free pit stop over the two orange cars, which tried to use their pace advantage to claw back the 16-odd seconds they lost to everyone else to no avail. Norris could have wrapped the thing up then, but it instead went to the final race.

Going into the final race—worth 25 points for a win—Norris was on 408, Verstappen on 396, and Piastri on 392 points. A podium finish was all Norris needed to seal the championship. If Verstappen won and Norris came fourth or worse, the Dutch driver would claim his fifth championship. Piastri, for a long time the title leader, had the hardest task of all—nothing less than a win, and some misfortune for the other two, would do.

Qualifying went Verstappen’s way, with Norris a few hundredths of a second faster than Piasrtri for second and third. The Ferrari of Charles Leclerc and the Mercedes of George Russell could have complicated things by inserting themselves between our three protagonists but came up short.

The big day

Come race day, Verstappen made an OK start, defended his position, then got his head down and drove to the checkered flag. The Yas Marina circuit, which is reportedly the most expensive race track ever created, had some corners reprofiled in 2021 to improve the racing, so the kind of “slow your rival down and back them into the chasing pack” games that Lewis Hamilton tried to play with Nico Rosberg in 2016 no longer work.

Verstappen was pursued by Piastri, who saw a chance to pass Norris on lap 1 and took it. For his part, Norris let him go, then gave his team some cause for panic by letting Leclerc’s Ferrari close to within a second before showing more speed. An early pit stop meant Norris had to do some overtaking on track. Which he did decisively, a far cry from the more timid driver we saw at times earlier this year.

Verstappen’s teammate, Yuki Tsunoda, was in one of the cars he needed to pass. Promoted from the junior Racing Bulls squad after just two races this season, Tsunoda has had the typically torrid time of Red Bull’s second driver, and Abu Dhabi was to be his last race for the team after scoring less than a tenth as many points as Verstappen. Tsunoda tried to hold up Norris and ran him to the far edge of the track but gained a five-second penalty for swerving in the process.

For once, McLaren split its strategies, letting Piastri run long on the hard tire to box Verstappen in. The Australian chased down Verstappen at the end thanks to a set of fresh softs but ultimately finished in second, nearly 13 seconds down the road, with Norris another four seconds behind.

Some supporters—the ones who put the “anatic” back in “fan”—will be upset that their preferred driver didn’t triumph, but frankly, any one of the three would have been a worthy champion.

All change

Will F1’s second ground effect era be mourned? The cars have been larger and heavier than ever, with tightly controlled design parameters that, after several years, have seen the teams all converge in performance. They have little suspension travel and suffer from ride-height sensitivity and a general lack of setup freedom compared to earlier generations of cars.

The first preseason test for the 2026 season is at the end of January, the first of three before the Australian Grand Prix kicks things off on March 6. The new machines will be slightly smaller and lighter, with bigger batteries and a more powerful electric motor, plus active aerodynamics to reduce drag on the straights.

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Posted Tuesday 9 December 2025 at 3:41 am AEST (my time).

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Popular genetics tests can’t tell you much about your dog’s personality, according to a recent study.

A team of geneticists recently found no connection between simple genetic variants and behavioral traits in more than 3,200 dogs, even though previous studies suggested that hundreds of genes might predict aspects of a dog’s behavior and personality. That’s despite the popularity of at-home genetic tests that claim they can tell you whether your dog’s genes contain the recipe for anxiety or a fondness for cuddles.

Gattaca for dogs, except it doesn’t work

University of Massachusetts genomicist Kathryn Lord and her colleagues compared DNA sequences and behavioral surveys from more than 3,000 dogs whose humans had enrolled them in the Darwin’s Ark project (and filled out the surveys). “Genetic tests for behavioral and personality traits in dogs are now being marketed to pet owners, but their predictive accuracy has not been validated,” wrote Lord and her colleagues in their recent paper.

So the team checked for relatively straightforward associations between genetic variants and personality traits such as aggression, drive, and affection. The 151 genetic variants in question all involved small changes to a single nucleotide, or “letter,” in a gene, known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

It turns out that the answer was no: Your dog’s genes don’t predict its behavior, at least not in the simplistic way popular doggy DNA tests often claim.

And that can have serious consequences when pet owners, shelter workers, or animal rescues use these tests to make decisions about a dog’s future. “For example, if a dog is labeled as genetically predisposed to aggression, an owner might limit essential social interactions, or a shelter might decide against adoption,” Lord and her colleagues wrote.

Why does your dog do that weird thing? It’s complicated

There probably is some genetic component to certain aspects of dog behavior; otherwise, breeders wouldn’t have had so much success at crafting working dog bloodlines with a propensity for things like intelligence or herding drive. But it’s a lot more complicated than something like “we found the gene behind zoomies,” for example—which is a pity for those of us who love simple answers and want to understand our pets better.

For starters, most behavioral traits are polygenic, which means that they’re the result of complex interactions among multiple genes, which may be spread across different chromosomes. It’s possible to tease out those connections, but it’s going to take exponentially more data than any dog genetic study has gathered so far. Darwin’s Ark is among the largest to date, with its 3,287 dogs, but Lord and her colleagues say it could take a sample of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dogs to find useful answers about the genetics of canine behavior.

Making matters even more complicated, less than half of any given doggy personality trait is actually down to genetics; for some traits, it’s as little as 8 percent. The rest is shaped by environmental factors—that complex mix of experience, training, and social learning. Environmental factors are so important that, as Lord and her colleagues put it, they can “limit the potential accuracy of genomic predictions.”

All of that means that a genetic test can tell us why your faithful correspondent’s dog has gray fur, but probably not why he barks until he’s been greeted properly.

False paw-sitives (we are not sorry)

Previous studies have found links between particular SNPs—including some of the 151 in Lord and her colleagues’ recent study—and dog behavioral traits. Lord and her colleagues say many of those associations may actually be false positives.

As mentioned, dog genetics doesn’t have the huge sample populations that human genetic studies often work with, and most of the genetic sequences that are available aren’t accompanied by detailed behavioral information about that particular dog, which makes it difficult to get statistically useful results. One way that some studies try to get around this is something called breed-average studies. In a breed-average study, the researchers assign a behavioral phenotype to every dog based on their breed’s average score on a behavioral test.

This can work well enough for physical traits, which vary relatively little between dog breeds (one dachshund looks much more like the next dachshund than it does a dalmatian). But personality traits vary as much within breeds as between them, which means breed-average behavioral scores aren’t very useful. As Lord and her colleagues put it, “averaging phenotypes by breed and then testing for genetic predictions is inherently circular.”

The result is often that breed-average studies find things that look like connections between an SNP and a behavioral trait, when in reality, that SNP just happens to be located alongside the gene for a physical trait like fur color or ear shape. If that physical trait is common to a particular breed, then the SNP that’s tagging along with it in the genome will look like it’s linked to the breed-average behavioral score for that trait—even if it’s not.

And, in this latest study, “not” seemed a lot more likely. “We did not replicate any of the associations reported in the breed average studies,” Lord and her colleagues wrote.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2421752122 (About DOIs).

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Posted Monday 8 December 2025 at 4:53 am AEST (my time).

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The Black Death ravaged medieval Western Europe, ultimately wiping out roughly one-third of the population. Scientists have identified the bacterium responsible and its likely origins, but certain specifics of how and why it spread to Europe are less clear. According to a new paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, either one large volcanic eruption or a cluster of eruptions might have been the triggering factor, setting off a chain of events that brought the plague to the Mediterranean region in the 1340s.

Technically, we’re talking about the second plague pandemic. The first, known as the Justinian Plague, broke out about 541 CE and quickly spread across Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. (The Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, for whom the pandemic is named, actually survived the disease.) There continued to be outbreaks of the plague over the next 300 years, although the disease gradually became less virulent and died out. Or so it seemed.

In the Middle Ages, the Black Death burst onto the scene, with the first historically documented outbreak occurring in 1346 in the Lower Volga and Black Sea regions. That was just the beginning of the second pandemic. During the 1630s, fresh outbreaks of plague killed half the populations of affected cities. Another bout of the plague significantly culled the population of France during an outbreak between 1647 and 1649, followed by an epidemic in London in the summer of 1665. The latter was so virulent that, by October, one in 10 Londoners had succumbed to the disease—over 60,000 people. Similar numbers perished in an outbreak in Holland in the 1660s. The pandemic had run its course by the early 19th century, but a third plague pandemic hit China and India in the 1890s. There are still occasional outbreaks today.

The culprit is a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, and it’s well known that it spreads among mammalian hosts via fleas, although it only rarely spills over to domestic animals and humans. The Black Death can be traced to a genetically distinct strain of Y. pestis that originated in the Tien Shan mountains west of what is now Kyrgyzstan, spreading along trade routes to Europe in the 1340s. However, according to the authors of this latest paper, there has been little attention focused on several likely contributing factors: climate, ecology, socioeconomic pressures, and the like.

The testimony of the tree rings

“This is something I’ve wanted to understand for a long time,” said co-author Ulf Büntgen of the University of Cambridge. “What were the drivers of the onset and transmission of the Black Death, and how unusual were they? Why did it happen at this exact time and place in European history? It’s such an interesting question, but it’s one no one can answer alone.”

Büntgen et al. collected core and disc samples from both living and relict trees at eight European sites to reconstruct summer temperatures for that time period. They then compared that data with estimates of sulphur injections into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions, based on geochemical analyses of ice core samples collected from Antarctica and Greenland.

They studied a wide range of written sources across Eurasia—chronicles, treatises, historiography, and even a bit of poetry—looking for mention of atmospheric and optical phenomena linked to volcanic dust veils between 1345 and 1350 CE. They also looked for mentions of extreme weather events, economic conditions, and reports of dearth or famine across Eurasia during that time period. Information about the trans-Mediterranean grain trade was gleaned from administrative records and letters.

The tree ring data enabled Büntgen et al. to determine that there had been a volcanic eruption (or a cluster of eruptions) around 1345, specifically so-called “blue rings” that indicate unusually cold or wet summers—in this case, for three consecutive years (1345, 1346, and 1347). The textual sources also referenced details like an unusually high degree of cloudiness and darkened lunar eclipses, indications of the after-effects of volcanic activity.

That colder climate in turn led to widespread crop failures and associated famine, particularly in parts of Spain, southern France, Egypt, and northern and central Italy. While Milan and Rome were largely self-sufficient, per the authors, smaller urban centers like Bologna, Florence, Genoa, Siena, and Venice relied on a complex grain supply system to import grain from the Mongols of the Golden Horde via established trade routes along the Black Sea coast. Textual evidence supports this, showing substantial price hikes for cereals and the imposition of grain trade regulations in 1346. This saved people from starvation but also brought Y. pestis along for the ride, with devastating consequences.

Per the authors, while the factors that triggered the spread of the Black Death to Europe are unique, the study illustrates the risks of a globalized world and calls for a similar interdisciplinary approach to future threats. “Although the coincidence of factors that contributed to the Black Death seems rare, the probability of zoonotic diseases emerging under climate change and translating into pandemics is likely to increase in a globalized world,” said Büntgen. “This is especially relevant given our recent experiences with COVID-19.”

Communications Earth & Environment, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02964-0 (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 6 December 2025 at 12:32 pm AEST (my time).

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As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine, and the risk of mass displacement, the World Meteorological Organization warned Thursday.

The 22 Arab region countries covered in the WMO’s new State of the Climate report produce about a quarter of the world’s oil, yet directly account for only 5 to 7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from their own territories. The climate paradox positions the region as both a linchpin of the global fossil-fuel economy and one of the most vulnerable geographic areas.

WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said extreme heat is pushing communities in the region to their physical limits. Droughts show no sign of letting up in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions, but at the same time, parts of it have been devastated by record rains and flooding, she added.

“Human health, ecosystems, and economies can’t cope with extended spells of more than 50 degrees Celsius. It is simply too hot to handle,” she said.

The region in the report stretches from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the mountains of the Levant and the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. It spans more than 5 million square miles, roughly the area of the continental United States west of the Mississippi River. Most people live near river valleys or in coastal cities dependent on fragile water supplies, making the entire region acutely sensitive to even small shifts in temperature and rainfall.

Egypt’s Nile Delta, one of the world’s lowest-lying and most densely populated coastal plains, is particularly vulnerable. The delta is sinking and regional sea levels are rising rapidly, putting about 40 million residents and more than half of the country’s agricultural output at risk.

The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warns that large parts of the Nile Delta will face chronic flooding, salinized soils, and permanent inundation under nearly every future warming scenario. Some projections indicate that a third of the area’s farmland will be underwater by 2050. Because the delta is so low and flat, even modest sea-level rise will push saltwater far inland.

The new WMO report shows that the foundations of daily life across the Arab region, including farms, reservoirs, and aquifers that feed and sustain millions, are being pushed to the brink by human-caused warming.

Across northwestern Africa’s sun-blasted rim, the Maghreb, six years of drought have slashed wheat yields, forcing countries such as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia to import more grain, even as global prices rise.

In parts of Morocco, reservoirs have fallen to record low levels. The government has enacted water restrictions in major cities, including limits on household use, and curtailed irrigation for farmers. Water systems in Lebanon have already crumbled under alternating floods and droughts, and in Iraq and Syria, small farmers are abandoning their land as rivers shrink and seasonal rains become unreliable.

The WMO report ranked 2024 as the hottest year ever measured in the Arab world. Summer heatwaves spread and persisted across Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. Parts of Iraq recorded six to 12 days with highs above 50° Celsius (122° Fahrenheit), conditions that are life-threatening even for healthy adults. Across the region, the report noted an increase in the number of heat-wave days in recent decades while humidity has declined. The dangerous combination speeds soil drying and crop damage.

By contrast, other parts of the region—the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and southern Saudi Arabia—were swamped by destructive record rains and flooding during 2024. The extremes will test the limits of adaptation, said Rola Dashti, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, who often works with the WMO to analyze climate impacts.

Climate extremes in 2024 killed at least 300 people in the region. The impacts are hitting countries already struggling with internal conflicts, and where the damage is under-insured and under-reported. In Sudan alone, flooding damaged more than 40 percent of the country’s farmland.

But with 15 of the world’s most arid countries in the region, water scarcity is the top issue. Governments are investing in desalination, wastewater recycling, and other measures to bolster water security, but the adaptation gap between risks and readiness is still widening.

The worst is ahead, Dashti said in a WMO statement, with climate models showing a “potential rise in average temperatures of up to 5° Celsius (9° Fahrenheit) by the end of the century under high-emission scenarios.” The new report is important, she said, because it “empowers the region to prepare for tomorrow’s climate realities.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Posted Saturday 6 December 2025 at 3:25 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.21 of the Rocket Report! We’re back after the Thanksgiving holiday with more launch news. Most of the big stories over the last couple of weeks came from abroad. Russian rockets and launch pads didn’t fare so well. China’s launch industry celebrated several key missions. SpaceX was busy, too, with seven launches over the last two weeks, six of them carrying more Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. We expect between 15 and 20 more orbital launch attempts worldwide before the end of the year.

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.

Another Sarmat failure. A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe on November 28 on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet, Ars reports. Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border. A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site.

An unenviable track record … Analysts say the circumstances of the launch suggest it was likely a test of Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat missile, a weapon designed to reach targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) away, making it the world’s longest-range missile. The Sarmat missile is Russia’s next-generation heavy-duty ICBM, capable of carrying a payload of up to 10 large nuclear warheads, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Simply put, the Sarmat is a doomsday weapon designed for use in an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States. The missile’s first full-scale test flight in 2022 apparently went well, but the program has suffered a string of consecutive failures since then, most notably a catastrophic explosion last year that destroyed the Sarmat missile’s underground silo in northern Russia.

ESA fills its coffers for launcher challenge. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) European Launcher Challenge received a significant financial commitment from its member states during the agency’s Ministerial Council meeting last week, European Spaceflight reports. The challenge is designed to support emerging European rocket companies while giving ESA and other European satellite operators more options to compete with the continent’s sole operational launch provider, Arianespace. Through the program, ESA will purchase launch services and co-fund capacity upgrades with the winners. ESA member states committed 902 million euros, or $1.05 billion, to the program at the recent Ministerial Council meeting.

Preselecting the competitors … In July, ESA selected two German companies—Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg—along with Spain’s PLD Space, France’s MaiaSpace, and the UK’s Orbex to proceed with the initiative’s next phase. ESA then negotiated with the governments of each company’s home country to raise money to support the effort. Germany, with two companies on the shortlist, is unsurprisingly a large contributor to the program, committing more than 40 percent of the total budget. France contributed nearly 20 percent, Spain funded nearly 19 percent, and the UK committed nearly 16 percent. Norway paid for 3 percent of the launcher challenge’s budget. Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic contributed smaller amounts.

Europe at the service of South Korea. South Korea’s latest Earth observation satellite was delivered into a Sun-synchronous orbit Monday afternoon following a launch onboard a Vega C rocket by Arianespace, Spaceflight Now reports. The Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite-7 (Kompsat-7) mission launched from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana. About 44 minutes after liftoff, the Kompsat-7 satellite was deployed into SSO at an altitude of 358 miles (576 kilometers). “By launching the Kompsat-7 satellite, set to significantly enhance South Korea’s Earth observation capabilities, Arianespace is proud to support an ambitious national space program,” said David Cavaillolès, CEO of Arianespace, in a statement.

Something of a rarity … The launch of Kompsat-7 is something of a rarity for Arianespace, which has dominated the international commercial launch market. It’s the first time in more than two years that a satellite for a customer outside Europe has been launched by Arianespace. The backlog for the light-class Vega C rocket is almost exclusively filled with payloads for the European Space Agency, the European Commission, or national governments in Europe. Arianespace’s larger Ariane 6 rocket has 18 launches reserved for the US-based Amazon Leo broadband network. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

South Korea’s homemade rocket flies again. South Korea’s homegrown space rocket Nuri took off from Naro Space Center on November 27 with the CAS500-3 technology demonstration and Earth observation satellite, along with 12 smaller CubeSat rideshare payloads, Yonhap News Agency reports. The 200-ton Nuri rocket debuted in 2021, when it failed to reach orbit on a test flight. Since then, the rocket has successfully reached orbit three times. This mission marked the first time for Hanwha Aerospace to oversee the entire assembly process as part of the government’s long-term plan to hand over space technologies to the private sector. The fifth and sixth launches of the Nuri rocket are planned in 2026 and 2027.

Powered by jet fuel … The Nuri rocket has three stages, each with engines burning Jet A-1 fuel and liquid oxygen. The fuel choice is unusual for rockets, with highly refined RP-1 kerosene or methane being more popular among hydrocarbon fuels. The engines are manufactured by Hanwha Aerospace. The fully assembled rocket stands about 155 feet (47.2 meters) tall and can deliver up to 3,300 pounds (1.5 metric tons) of payload into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit.

Hyundai eyes rocket engine. Meanwhile, South Korea’s space sector is looking to the future. Another company best known for making cars has started a venture in the rocket business. Hyundai Rotem, a member of Hyundai Motor Group, announced a joint program with Korean Air’s Aerospace Division (KAL-ASD) to develop a 35-ton-class reusable methane rocket engine for future launch vehicles. The effort is funded with KRW49 billion ($33 million) from the Korea Research Institute for Defense Technology Planning and Advancement (KRIT).

By the end of the decade … The government-backed program aims to develop the engine by the end of 2030. Hyundai Rotem will lead the engine’s planning and design, while Korean Air, the nation’s largest air carrier, will lead development of the engine’s turbopump. “Hyundai Rotem began developing methane engines in 1994 and has steadily advanced its methane engine technology, achieving Korea’s first successful combustion test in 2006,” Hyundai Rotem said in a statement. “Furthermore, this project is expected to secure the technological foundation for the commercialization of methane engines for reusable space launch vehicles and lay the groundwork for targeting the global space launch vehicle market.”

But who needs rocket engines? Moonshot Space, based in Israel, announced Monday that it has secured $12 million in funding to continue the development of a launch system—powered not by chemical propulsion, but electromagnetism, Payload reports. Moonshot plans to sell other aerospace and defense companies the tech as a hypersonic test platform, while at the same time building to eventually offer orbital launch services. Instead of conventional rocket engines, the system would use a series of electromagnetic coils to power a hardened capsule to hypersonic velocities. The architecture has a downside: extremely high accelerations that could damage or destroy normal satellites. Instead, Moonshot wants to use the technology to send raw materials to orbit, lowering the input costs of the budding in-space servicing, refueling, and manufacturing industries, according to Payload.

Out of the shadows … Moonshot Space emerged from stealth mode with this week’s fundraising announcement. The company’s near-term focus is on building a scaled-down electromagnetic accelerator capable of reaching Mach 6. A larger system would be required to reach orbital velocity. The company’s CEO is the former director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Science, while its chief engineer was the former chief systems engineer for David’s Sling, a critical part of Israel’s missile defense system. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A blunder at Baikonur. A Soyuz rocket launched on November 27 carrying Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, as well as NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, for an eight-month mission to the International Space Station. The trio of astronauts arrived at the orbiting laboratory without incident. However, on the ground, there was a serious problem during the launch with the ground systems that support processing of the vehicle before liftoff at Site 31, located at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Ars reports. Roscosmos downplayed the incident, saying only, in passive voice, that “damage to several launch pad components was identified” following the launch.

Repairs needed … However, video imagery of the launch site after liftoff showed substantial damage, with a large service platform appearing to have fallen into the flame trench below the launch table. According to one source, this is a platform located beneath the rocket, where workers can access the vehicle before liftoff. It has a mass of about 20 metric tons and was apparently not secured prior to launch, and the thrust of the vehicle ejected it into the flame trench. “There is significant damage to the pad,” said this source. The damage could throw a wrench into Russia’s ability to launch crews and cargo to the International Space Station. This Soyuz launch pad at Baikonur is the only one outfitted to support such missions.

China’s LandSpace almost landed a rocket. China’s first attempt to land an orbital-class rocket may have ended in a fiery crash, but the company responsible for the mission had a lot to celebrate with the first flight of its new methane-fueled launcher, Ars reports. LandSpace, a decade-old company based in Beijing, launched its new Zhuque-3 rocket for the first time Tuesday (US time) at the Jiuquan launch site in northwestern China. The upper stage of the medium-lift rocket successfully reached orbit. This alone is a remarkable achievement for a new rocket. But LandSpace had other goals for this launch. The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, booster stage is architected for recovery and reuse, the first rocket in China with such a design. The booster survived reentry and was seconds away from a pinpoint landing when something went wrong during its landing burn, resulting in a high-speed crash at the landing zone in the Gobi Desert.

Let the games begin … LandSpace got closer to landing an orbital-class booster than any other company on their first try. While LandSpace prepares for a second launch, several more Chinese companies are close to debuting their own reusable rockets. The next of these new rockets, the Long March 12A, is awaiting its first liftoff later this month from another launch pad at the Jiuquan spaceport. The Long March 12A comes from one of China’s established rocket developers, the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), part of the country’s state-owned aerospace enterprise.

China launches a lifeboat. An unpiloted Chinese spacecraft launched on November 24 (US time) and linked with the country’s Tiangong space station a few hours later, providing a lifeboat for three astronauts stuck in orbit without a safe ride home, Ars reports. A Long March 2F rocket lifted off with the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft, carrying cargo instead of a crew. The spacecraft docked with the Tiangong station nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth about three-and-a-half hours later. Shenzhou 22 will provide a ride home next year for three Chinese astronauts. Engineers deemed their primary lifeboat unsafe after finding a cracked window, likely from an impact with a tiny piece of space junk.

In record time … Chinese engineers worked fast to move up the launch of the Shenzhou 22, originally set to fly next year. The launch occurred just 16 days after officials decided they needed to send another spacecraft to the Tiangong station. Shenzhou 22 and its rocket were already in standby at the launch site, but teams had to fuel the spacecraft and complete assembly of the rocket, then roll the vehicle to the launch pad for final countdown preps. The rapid turnaround offers a “successful example for efficient emergency response in the international space industry,” the China Manned Space Agency said. “It vividly embodies the spirit of manned spaceflight: exceptionally hardworking, exceptionally capable, exceptionally resilient, and exceptionally dedicated.”

Another big name flirts with the launch industry. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has explored putting together funds to either acquire or partner with a rocket company, a move that would position him to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the Wall Street Journal reports. Altman reached out to at least one rocket maker, Stoke Space, in the summer, and the discussions picked up in the fall, according to people familiar with the talks. Among the proposals was for OpenAI to make a multibillion-dollar series of equity investments in the company and end up with a controlling stake. The talks are no longer active, people close to OpenAI told the Journal.

Here’s the reason … Altman has been interested in building data centers in space for some time, the Journal reports, suggesting that the insatiable demand for computing resources to power artificial-intelligence systems eventually could require so much power that the environmental consequences would make space a better option. Orbital data centers would allow companies to harness the power of the Sun to operate them. Alphabet’s Google is pursuing a similar concept in partnership with satellite operator Planet Labs. Jeff Bezos and Musk himself have also expressed interest in the idea. Outside of SpaceX and Blue Origin, Stoke Space seems to be a natural partner for such a project because it is one of the few companies developing a fully reusable rocket.

SpaceX gets green light for new Florida launch pad. SpaceX has the OK to build out what will be the primary launch hub on the Space Coast for its Starship and Super Heavy rocket, the most powerful launch vehicle in history, the Orlando Sentinel reports. The Department of the Air Force announced Monday it had approved SpaceX to move forward with the construction of a pair of launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37). A “record of decision” on the Environmental Impact Statement required under the National Environmental Policy Act for the proposed Canaveral site was posted to the Air Force’s website, marking the conclusion of what has been a nearly two-year approval process.

Get those Starships ready … SpaceX plans to build two launch towers at SLC-37 to augment the single tower under construction at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, just a few miles to the north. The three pads combined could support up to 120 launches per year. The Air Force’s final approval was expected after it released a draft Environmental Impact Statement earlier this year, suggesting the Starship pads at SLC-37 would have no significant negative impacts on local environmental, historical, social, and cultural interests. The Air Force also found SpaceX’s plans at SLC-37, formerly leased by United Launch Alliance, will have no significant impact on the company’s competitors in the launch industry. SpaceX also has two launch towers at its Starbase facility in South Texas.

Next three launches

Dec. 5: Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 09:00 UTC

Dec. 6: Hyperbola 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04:00 UTC

Dec. 6: Long March 8A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 07:50 UTC

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Posted Saturday 6 December 2025 at 3:24 am AEST (my time).

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A geothermal startup said Thursday that it has hit gold in Nevada—metaphorically speaking. Zanskar, which uses AI to find hidden geothermal resources deep underground, says that it has identified a new commercially viable site for a potential power plant. The discovery, the company claims, is the first of its kind made by the industry in decades.

The find is the culmination of years of research on how to find these resources—and points to the growing promise of geothermal energy.

“When we started this company, I think the most common message we heard was that geothermal was dead—it was a history of bones, a graveyard of so many failures,” says Carl Hoiland, a cofounder of Zanskar. “To get to this point where, thanks to these new tools and these new capabilities, you can systematically find these sites and systematically derisk them—we just think this is the first full-scale signal that the tide has turned.”

In theory, geothermal power is one of the simplest methods of generating renewable energy. Reservoirs of hot water underground, heated by the Earth’s core, produce steam that can then be used to power turbines at the surface, requiring no excessive mining or complex conversions of fuel. Geothermal resources are especially accessible in areas where tectonic plates meet and the Earth’s crust is thinner, making the western US a great candidate for power plants. The world’s largest developed geothermal field, in California, is built on the site of hot springs that humans have used for thousands of years; the first power plant was built there in the early 1920s.

But a big part of the geothermal puzzle is actually finding these resources. It’s rare to find hot springs or vents at the surface that lead to a productive spot to put a power plant. Most geothermal systems that are hot enough to make electricity are deep underground, and there is no evidence at the surface. These are known as hidden or blind systems—and identifying where they are is surprisingly challenging. As a result, many geothermal power plants are built over systems that were found accidentally, while drilling for agricultural wells, minerals, or oil and gas exploration.

“It is sort of a needle-and-haystack problem,” says Joel Edwards, Zanskar’s other cofounder. “A very small percentage of the land that you will look at will have a geothermal system associated with it.”

In the 1970s, during the oil crisis, the federal government decided to try to increase the US’s output of geothermal energy. As part of that effort, they mapped out a grid in Nevada to try to methodically drill for blind systems.

“Today, we might think that’s really stupid,” says James Faulds, a professor of geology at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the former director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology. “But back then they had so little data on the heat characteristics [of hidden systems]. It made sense at that time to do something like that.”

The government subsequently scaled back investment in research into geothermal, pouring money into other energy technologies like fracking, nuclear, and solar and wind. The industry, starved of funding, moved on to developing already-known systems; any profitable blind systems developed after the 1980s, Edwards says, were found by accident or via academic or government work. Today, geothermal energy accounts for less than 1 percent of the US energy supply.

But scientists in the field say there’s a vast and mostly untapped potential in blind systems in the western US. And Zanskar says that its technology—which uses AI to wrangle massive reams of geological data—can help find those systems.

Zanskar’s tech builds off the work of scientists like Faulds, who began researching and cataloging the attributes of known systems in the 2000s to try to create techniques to locate other blind systems. In the late 2010s, Faulds led a team of researchers, funded partly by a grant from the Department of Energy, to try to pinpoint blind systems in Nevada, using data on factors like fault patterns and electrical conductivity to triangulate where, exactly, a system might be located. The team successfully located a blind system that was hot enough to use for electricity with this technique in 2018.

Faulds says that they did not do further testing to see if this was a system that could be commercially viable, partly because it was enveloped by a wilderness study area and probably wouldn’t be a good option for a power plant. Edwards says there’s a “lot of overlap” between Faulds’s research group and Zanskar—Faulds was Edwards’s master’s thesis adviser, as well as the adviser for a data scientist for the company. “That group showed that you could actually find these blind hot spots for lower costs than the 1970s and 1980s explorers paid,” says Edwards.

Zanskar’s researchers have been collecting data on their sites in Nevada for the past few years, and Edwards and Hoiland say that their tech has been consistently identifying hot spots—potential blind systems—in areas not used before by the geothermal industry. What the company hadn’t done until this year, however, was to confirm that these systems could actually produce electricity—something requiring tests that involve drilling deep underground to ensure the water is hot enough to power a plant. The discovery announced today, the company says, is proof that their tech can find these kinds of systems. (More tests are still needed to understand the size and shape of the reservoir, as well as the rate of flow of the water—crucial factors to determine how much power the site can provide.)

“There’s a signal to the market with this announcement that there will be a power plug someday,” says Edwards.

In recent months, a spate of high-profile agreements and splashy headlines have trumpeted a new era for geothermal energy. Almost all of the public excitement centers around a technology known as enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, which manually creates conditions for geothermal through a process similar to fracking, eliminating the need to find blind systems. The most high-profile player, Fervo, has inked agreements with major oil companies, oilfield service providers, and utilities; one of its power plants began supplying power to Google data centers in Nevada in 2023.

But it may be that the potential for harnessing blind systems is being overlooked in the craze to embrace new technologies like EGS. While it uses less water than traditional fracking, EGS does need to draw from outside water sources for the injection process to break the rock; it also can produce some low-level seismic activity. It’s also simply more complex than traditional geothermal, introducing a new technological step of breaking rock versus simply drilling down to a system and then installing a power plant on top. “Engineering always comes with additional cost,” Hoiland says.

Ultimately, Zanskar’s cofounders say, the energy potential for blind geothermal systems could be much greater than what has been estimated in the past. In 2008, the US government issued a report on the country’s geothermal resources, estimating that undiscovered geothermal systems comprised a mean power potential of 30 gigawatts of electricity—enough to power more than 25 million homes.

But Faulds says that these estimates “might be underestimated by well over an order of magnitude,” saying that “tens to hundreds of gigawatts are likely from blind systems” in the US. He points to new technologies being developed that allow for deeper drilling involving hotter conditions. As that technology keeps advancing, “naturally our ability to harness that energy also keeps growing,” he says.

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Posted Friday 5 December 2025 at 3:44 am AEST (my time).

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The fossil and genetic evidence agree that modern humans originated in Africa. The most genetically diverse human populations—the groups that have had the longest time to pick up novel mutations—live there today. But the history of what went on within Africa between our origins and the present day is a bit murky.

That’s partly because DNA doesn’t survive long in the conditions typical of most of the continent, which has largely limited us to trying to reconstruct the past using data from present-day populations. The other part is that many of those present-day populations have been impacted by the vast genetic churn caused by the Bantu expansion, which left its traces across most of the populations south of the Sahara.

But a new study has managed to extract genomes from ancient samples in southern Africa. While all of these are relatively recent, dating from after the end of the most recent glacial period, they reveal a distinct southern African population that was relatively large, outside of the range of previously described human variation, and it remained isolated until only about 1,000 years ago.

A distinct population

Figuring out how the features of modern humans came together is a challenge. Fossils from a wide range of African sites show a mixture of modern and archaic features, making it difficult to identify when and where the complete set of what we consider modern features showed up in populations.

Genetics hasn’t proven entirely helpful, either. DNA survives for longer in cool, dry environments, and a lot of Africa has little to offer in that regard. Reconstructing the past from modern lineages isn’t easy, either. There are indications that our past was influenced by “ghost lineages” that haven’t survived to the present. And large-scale migrations within Africa have led to lots of mixing among different populations.

What we do know is that hunter-gatherer populations in southern Africa, such as the Khoe-San, represent some of the earliest branches off the original groups of modern humans. We can tell this in part because the populations have more genetic variations than any other group we’ve studied. But even these populations show clear signs of genetic input from populations that originated elsewhere in Africa.

To try to bring some clarity to the situation, a joint South African-Swedish team obtained DNA from a group of skeletons that range in age from about 1,000 to over 10,000 years old and come from southern Africa (defined as south of the Zambezi river). That’s only a small slice of the several hundred thousand years during which modern human features began to become common. But as it turns out, the skeletons come from what seems to have been a distinct population present at that time.

This first became apparent when the research team did a statistical analysis (principal coordinate analysis) of the variations found in the genomes from a group of older African skeletons. These showed East and West African populations forming separate clusters together, with a third cluster from Stone Age Malawi forming a roughly equilateral triangle with the first two. The new data from southern African skeletons formed a cluster far outside this triangle—as distant from it as a group of European genomes included as a control.

Another notable feature of these genomes is that the older ones show no sign of having genetic inputs from outside of this population. That doesn’t mean there were none—it’s entirely possible that an African ghost lineage contributed to the southern African population but not to any other lineages that survive to the present day. But there’s no indication that the southern African people were mingling with groups from outside this area until about 1,200 years ago.

Collectively, the genetic variants in this population are outside the range of previously described human diversity. That’s despite the fact that the present-day southern African hunter-gatherer populations are largely derived from southern African ancestors.

What’s distinct?

Estimates of the timing of when this ancient south African population branched off from any modern-day populations place the split at over 200,000 years ago, or roughly around the origin of modern humans themselves. But this wasn’t some odd, isolated group; estimates of population size based on the frequency of genetic variation suggest it was substantial.

Instead, the researchers suggest that climate and geography kept the group separate from other African populations and that southern Africa may have served as a climate refuge, providing a safe area from which modern humans could expand out to the rest of the continent when conditions were favorable. That’s consistent with the finding that some of the ancient populations in eastern and western Africa contain some southern African variants by around 5,000 years ago.

As far as genetic traits are concerned, the population looked like pretty much everyone else present at the time: brown eyes, high skin pigmentation, and no lactose tolerance. None of the older individuals had genetic resistance to malaria or sleeping sickness that are found in modern populations. In terms of changes that affect proteins, the most common are found in genes involved in immune function, a pattern that’s seen in many other human populations. More unusually, genes that affect kidney function also show a lot of variation.

So there’s nothing especially distinctive or modern apparent in this population, especially not in comparison to any other populations we know of in Africa at the same time. But they are unusual in that they suggest there was a large, stable, and isolated group from other populations present in Africa at the time. Over time, we’ll probably get additional evidence that fits this population into a coherent picture of human evolution. But for now, its presence is a bit of an enigma, given how often other populations intermingled in our past.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09811-4  (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 4 December 2025 at 12:21 pm AEST (my time).

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On Wednesday, three NASA astronomers released an analysis showing that several planned orbital telescopes would see their images criss-crossed by planned satellite constellations, such as a fully expanded Starlink and its competitors. While the impact of these constellations on ground-based has been widely considered, orbital hardware was thought to be relatively immune from their interference. But the planned expansion of constellations, coupled with some of the features of upcoming missions, will mean that at least one proposed observatory will see an average of nearly 100 satellite tracks in every exposure.

Making matters worse, some of the planned measures meant to minimize the impact on ground-based telescopes will make things worse for those in orbit.

Constellations vs. astronomy

Satellite constellations are a relatively new threat to astronomy; prior to the drop in launch costs driven by SpaceX’s reusable rockets, the largest constellations in orbit consisted of a few dozen satellites. But the rapid growth of the Starlink system caused problems for ground-based astronomy that are not easy to solve.

Unfortunately, even if we had an infinite budget, we couldn’t just solve this by increasing our reliance on space-based hardware. While orbital satellites may be above some of the problem-causing constellations, enough of the new hardware is orbiting at altitudes where they can interfere with observations. A check of the image archive of the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, shows that over four percent of recent images contain a satellite track, a significant increase from earlier in the century.

(There are some space-based telescopes that aren’t orbiting the Earth, like the James Webb Space Telescope, that will remain worry-free. But these require expensive launches and are too far from Earth for the sort of regular servicing that something like the Hubble has received.)

And the problem will only get worse, according to three astronomers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California (Alejandro Borlaff, Pamela Marcum, and Steve Howell). Based on filings made with the Federal Communications Commission, they found that the current total of satellites represents only 3 percent of what will be in orbit a decade from now if everybody’s planned launches take place.

To estimate the impact that this massive population of satellites might have on astronomy, the three researchers focused on several key orbiting observatories. One is the Hubble. Another is the recently launched SPHEREx, which will perform an all-sky survey in the infrared. The Chinese are developing a telescope called Xuntian that will operate in conjunction with their orbiting space station, and the ESA is preparing a mission called ARRAKIHS meant to characterize the dark matter halos of nearby galaxies.

Lots of tracks

The impact of satellites on observations depends on many factors. Many satellites have constant infrared and radio emissions and thus always have the potential to interfere with imaging at those wavelengths. They can also reflect sunlight, but they’re most likely to do that when they’re near the horizon (meaning what someone on the satellite would see as the dawn or dusk edges of the Earth). While it’s possible to prioritize observations that avoid the horizon, that becomes difficult when longer exposures are required. Surveys meant to identify asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit will always need to image near the horizon.

Another key factor is the altitude of the observatory. Something like Xuntian, which requires an orbit that takes it to a space station, will necessarily be at a relatively low altitude and therefore below more of the constellations. Something like SPHEREx, a smaller satellite that operates independently, can potentially be lifted to a higher orbit.

So the risk the constellations pose to observatories can vary greatly based on where your observatory is, what wavelengths it’s sensitive to, and what you’re doing with it. That’s why Borlaff, Marcum, and Howell looked at several very different pieces of hardware, although they did limit their analysis to interference from satellites that would be sunlit as they traversed across the observatory’s field of view.

If constellations are built out to their planned extents, there will be roughly 550,000 satellites in orbit. At that point, the researchers estimate that the average image captured by Hubble would have two satellite tracks, while SPHEREx would have five. Things get much worse from there: 69 for ARRAKIHS and 92 for Xuntian. Over a third of the Hubble images would see at least one track, while almost all the images from the other telescopes would have at least one.

Xuntian’s problems are largely the product of its low altitude. ARRAKIHS is higher, but it has a wider field of view and is expected to take long (600-second) exposures, increasing the chance that a satellite will wander by. Hubble, in contrast, has a narrow field of view, which limits how often satellites transit within its field of view.

To validate their estimates, the researchers modeled the impact of the present population of satellites on Hubble and came up with a rate of satellite tracks similar to the rate that has actually been observed.

No great solutions

There’s no obvious way to deal with this. Right now, best practices involve orienting satellites to limit their ability to reflect light toward ground-based telescopes. But that orientation actually increases the odds that they’ll reflect light toward space-based hardware. In addition, satellites will orient their solar panels toward the Sun, which means they’re more likely to be face-on and maximally reflective toward any telescopes pointed away from the Sun.

Lowering the orbits of constellations will get them out of the way of more of our observatories, but it will mean the satellites experience more atmospheric friction, so they’ll have a shorter liftime in orbit—something the companies putting them there are unlikely to accept. Nevertheless, that’s the best solution the astronomers have, as the researchers write that it is “critical to designate safe and limited orbit layers for a sustainable use of space.”

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09759-5  (About DOIs).

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

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China’s first attempt to land an orbital-class rocket may have ended in a fiery crash, but the company responsible for the mission had a lot to celebrate with the first flight of its new methane-fueled launcher.

LandSpace, a decade-old company based in Beijing, launched its new Zhuque-3 rocket for the first time at 11 pm EST Tuesday (04:0 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan launch site in northwestern China.

Powered by nine methane-fueled engines, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket climbed away from its launch pad with more than 1.7 million pounds of thrust. The 216-foot-tall (66-meter) launcher headed southeast, soaring through clear skies before releasing its first stage booster about two minutes into the flight.

The rocket’s upper stage fired a single engine to continue accelerating into orbit. LandSpace confirmed the upper stage “achieved the target orbit” and declared success for the rocket’s “orbital launch mission.” This alone is a remarkable accomplishment for a brand new rocket.

Learning on the fly

But LandSpace had other goals for this launch. The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, booster stage is architected for recovery and reuse, the first rocket in China with such a design. Made of stainless steel, the first stage arced to the edge of space before gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere. After making it through reentry, the booster was supposed to relight a subset of its engines for a final braking burn before a vertical landing at a prepared location about 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange from the launch pad.

But something went wrong as the booster approached the landing zone.

“According to telemetry data, an anomaly occurred after the first stage initiated its landing burn, preventing a soft landing on the designated recovery pad,” LandSpace wrote on X. “The stage debris came down near the edge of the recovery pad, and the recovery test was unsuccessful. The specific cause is under further investigation.”

Videos shared on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, showed the final moments of the booster’s supersonic descent. A fireball enveloped the rocket at the start of the landing burn, and it impacted the recovery pad at high speed. But the rocket appeared to survive the most extreme aerodynamic forces of reentry, and it nearly hit a bullseye at the landing pad, situated in a remote dune field in the Gobi Desert.

“During the first stage recovery system verification test, engines thrust throttling operated normally, attitude control remained stable, and the downrange recovery trajectory was nominal,” LandSpace said, adding that no one was harmed in the accident.

The crash landing may have been disappointing to LandSpace, but it’s actually an auspicious result for a first attempt. The rocket appears to have made it closer to landing than Blue Origin’s first New Glenn booster earlier this year. Blue Origin made a successful landing on its second attempt last month.

It took SpaceX numerous tries before it landed the first Falcon 9 booster 10 years ago this month, pioneering novel guidance algorithms, supersonic retro-propulsion, and experimentation in how to manage the substantial aero-thermal forces of reentry. For example, SpaceX discovered through flight testing that it needed to add grid fins to the Falcon 9 booster. LandSpace’s booster uses grid fins from the start.

Poised for a breakout

China needs reusable rockets to keep up with the US launch industry, which is dominated by SpaceX, a company that flies more often and hauls heavier cargo to orbit than all Chinese rockets combined. There are at least two Chinese megaconstellations now being deployed in low-Earth orbit, each with architectures requiring thousands of satellites to relay data and Internet signals around the world. Without scaling up satellite production and reusing rockets, China will have difficulty matching the capacities of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other emerging US launch companies.

Just three months ago, US military officials identified China’s advancements in reusable rocketry as a key to unlocking the country’s ability to potentially threaten US assets in space. “I’m concerned about when the Chinese figure out how to do reusable lift that allows them to put more capability on orbit at a quicker cadence than currently exists,” said Brig. Gen. Brian Sidari, the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, at a conference in September.

Without reusable rockets, China has turned to a wide variety of expendable boosters this year to launch less than half as often as the United States. China has made 78 orbital launch attempts so far this year, but no single rocket type has flown more than 13 times. In contrast, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is responsible for 153 of 182 launches by US rockets.

LandSpace’s first landing attempt shows China is positioned to close the gap. The company’s engineers will be smarter about landing rockets on the next try.

What’s more, several more Chinese companies are close to debuting their own reusable rockets. The next of these new rockets, the Long March 12A, is awaiting its first liftoff later this month from another launch pad at the Jiuquan spaceport.

The Long March 12A comes from one of China’s established rocket developers, the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), part of the country’s state-owned aerospace enterprise. The Long March 12A has comparable performance to LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 and will also target a landing of its booster stage downrange on its first flight.

A handful of other rocket developers also claim to be weeks or months away from launching their first reusable boosters. One of them, Space Pioneer, might have been first to flight with its new Tianlong-3 rocket if not for the thorny problem of an accidental launch during a booster test-firing last year. Space Pioneer eventually completed a successful static fire in September of this year, and the company recently released a photo showing its rocket on the launch pad.

These new rockets can each lift medium-class payloads into orbit. In its first iteration, the Zhuque-3 rocket is capable of placing a payload of more than 17,600 pounds (8 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit after accounting for the fuel reserves required for booster recovery. This makes Zhuque-3 the largest and most powerful commercial rocket ever launched from China.

LandSpace eventually plans to debut an upgraded Zhuque-3 carrying more propellant and using more powerful engines, raising its payload capacity to more than 40,000 pounds (18.3 metric tons) in reusable mode or a few tons more with an expendable booster.

LandSpace has raised more than $400 million since its founding in 2015, primarily from venture capital firms and government-backed investment funds. LandSpace initially developed its own liquid-fueled engines and a light-class launcher named Zhuque-2, which became the world’s first methane-burning launcher to reach orbit in 2023. LandSpace’s Zhuque-2 has logged four successful missions in six tries.

The larger Zhuque-3 is a “new-generation, low-cost, high-capacity, high-frequency, reusable LOX/methane launch vehicle,” LandSpace says. The company plans to reuse its Zhuque-3 boosters at least 20 times, “enabling efficient multi-satellite deployment for Internet constellations and China’s future space programs.”

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Posted Thursday 4 December 2025 at 4:28 am AEST (my time).

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In A Nutshell

• 62% experience recurring digital burnout, with constant notifications (24%) and social media overload (23%) driving the exhaustion
• 47% say their browser distracts them just as often as it helps them focus, creating a fundamental tension between productivity and chaos
• Younger generations struggle most: 35% of Millennials regularly feel burnt out and 30% often can’t disconnect, compared to 31% of Boomers who never experience burnout
• 92% want personalized browsers, and 81% are willing to switch, confirming that users aren’t accepting burnout, they’re actively seeking solutions

Endless notifications. Social media rabbit holes. Ten tabs open before you even realize it. For most Americans, this isn’t just a bad day online. It’s every day. The internet was supposed to improve our lives, but all that browsing is beginning to take a serious toll.

That’s one of the key takeaways of Shift’s 2026 State of Browsing Report. Following a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted by MX8 Labs, researchers confirmed something many have suspected but few have quantified: our browsers are breaking us.

Nearly two-thirds of people experience recurring digital burnout, and almost half say their browser distracts them just as often as it helps them focus.

What’s Driving Browser Burnout?

The culprits are surprisingly consistent across users. Constant notifications top the list at 24%, followed closely by social media overload at 23% and falling into news rabbit holes at 18%. For many Americans, the browser has become both a workspace and a distraction machine, with no clear boundary between the two.

Personal use dominates desktop browsing, with 40% of users spending most of their browser time on personal activities while only 26% use it primarily for work. This mixing creates a fundamental tension. The survey found 47% of users say browsers both distract and help them focus equally, a paradox that defines modern internet use.

Age reveals strikingly different patterns of digital wellness. While 31% of Baby Boomers never feel digitally burnt out and 30% never struggle to disconnect, younger generations face steeper challenges. Among Millennials, 35% regularly feel burnt out and 30% often struggle to disconnect. Gen X falls in between, with 44% occasionally feeling burnt out and 35% sometimes having trouble disconnecting.

People want more control online, but many struggle to escape the constant stream of content. (Photo by DimaBerlin on Shutterstock)

Users Want Control Of Their Browser, Not Just More Features

Despite widespread frustration, users are actively seeking solutions rather than simply accepting burnout as inevitable. An overwhelming 92% want personalization from their browser, and 47% say a browser that fits their workflow is very important. Perhaps most telling: 81% are willing to or considering switching browsers to better fit their needs.

The most requested browser features paint a clear picture of what users crave. Multiple accounts and logins top the list at 39%, suggesting people want cleaner separation between their digital lives. Task organization ranks second at 34%, followed by notification blockers at 31%. These requests all point to the same underlying need: better control over the chaos.

Modern work demands add another layer of complexity. Half of respondents use three to five apps daily for work. A third of workers spend most of their workday online, which typically runs four to six hours. The friction adds up quickly. Twenty percent cite app switching as a major productivity killer, another 20% blame slow performance, 16% point to too many notifications, and 15% struggle with lost logins.

The Real Cost of Digital Distraction

Distractions come with real costs beyond frustration. About 43% lose focus in their browser several times per day, while 21% get distracted multiple times every hour. When distraction hits, only 23% quickly regain concentration. More concerning: 13% lose substantial time, with distractions costing them 30 minutes or more each time.

The survey reveals a generation caught between capability and control. We have more tools than ever but feel less productive. We’re constantly connected yet struggling to disconnect. Personal and professional lives blur together in a single browser window, creating exhaustion without clear solutions.

It’s easy to simply blame too much technology for this widespread burnout. But it’s the technology that doesn’t adapt to how we actually work and live. Users aren’t asking for fewer features or simpler tools. They’re asking for browsers that understand context, that can separate work from play, that can shield them from constant interruptions without cutting them off entirely.

The path forward seems clear from user preferences. People want browsers that work with them rather than against them, that provide speed and personalization without intrusion. The question is whether the industry will respond to these needs or continue building tools that maximize engagement at the expense of wellbeing.

Survey Methodology

These insights are based on Shift’s 2026 State of Browsing Report. A panel of 1,000 U.S. adults were surveyed in September 2025 via MX8 Labs. Data has been weighted to be nationally representative.

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There’s a race in China among several companies vying to become the next to launch and land an orbital-class rocket, and the starting gun could go off as soon as tonight.

LandSpace, one of several maturing Chinese rocket startups, is about to launch the first flight of its medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket. Liftoff could happen around 11 pm EST tonight (04:00 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China.

Airspace warning notices advising pilots to steer clear of the rocket’s flight path suggest LandSpace has a launch window of about two hours. When it lifts off, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket will become the largest commercial launch vehicle ever flown in China. What’s more, LandSpace will become the first Chinese launch provider to attempt a landing of its first stage booster, using the same tried-and-true return method pioneered by SpaceX and, more recently, Blue Origin in the United States.

Construction crews recently finished a landing pad in the remote Gobi Desert, some 240 miles (390 kilometers) southeast of the launch site at Jiuquan. Unlike US spaceports, the Jiuquan launch base is located in China’s interior, with rockets flying over land as they climb into space. When the Zhuque-3 booster finishes its job of sending the rocket toward orbit, it will follow an arcing trajectory toward the recovery zone, firing its engines to slow for landing about eight-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.

A first step for China

At least, that’s what is supposed to happen. LandSpace officials have not made any public statements about the odds of a successful landing—or, for that matter, a successful launch. It took Blue Origin, a much larger enterprise than LandSpace backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, two tries to land its New Glenn booster on a floating barge after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A decade ago, SpaceX achieved the first of its now more than 500 rocket landings after many more attempts.

LandSpace was established in 2015, soon after the Chinese government introduced space policy reforms, opening the door for private capital to begin funding startups in the satellite and launch industries. So far, the company has raised more than $400 million from venture capital firms and investment funds backed by the Chinese government.

With this money, LandSpace has developed its own liquid-fueled engines and a light-class launcher named Zhuque-2, which became the world’s first methane-burning launcher to reach orbit in 2023. LandSpace’s Zhuque-2 has logged four successful missions in six tries.

But the Beijing-based company’s broader goal has been the development of a larger, partially reusable rocket to meet China’s growing appetite for satellite services. LandSpace finds itself in a crowded field of competitors, with China’s legacy state-owned rocket developers and a slate of venture-backed startups also in the mix.

China needs reusable rockets to keep up with the US launch industry, dominated by SpaceX, which flies more often and hauls heavier cargo to orbit than all Chinese rockets combined. There are at least two Chinese megaconstellations now being deployed in low-Earth orbit, each with architectures requiring thousands of satellites to relay data and Internet signals around the world. Without scaling up satellite production and reusing rockets, China will have difficulty matching the capacities of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other emerging US launch companies.

Just three months ago, US military officials identified China’s advancements in reusable rocketry as a key to unlocking the country’s ability to potentially threaten US assets in space. “I’m concerned about when the Chinese figure out how to do reusable lift that allows them to put more capability on orbit at a quicker cadence than currently exists,” said Brig. Gen. Brian Sidari, the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, at a conference in September.

Without reusable rockets, China has turned to a wide variety of expendable boosters this year to launch less than half as often as the United States. China has made 77 orbital launch attempts so far this year, but no single rocket type has flown more than 13 times. In contrast, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is responsible for 153 of 182 launches by US rockets.

That’s no Falcon 9

The Chinese companies that master reusable rocketry first will have an advantage in the Chinese launch industry. A handful of rockets appear to be poised to take this advantage, beginning with LandSpace’s Zhuque-3.

In its first iteration, the Zhuque-3 rocket will be capable of placing a payload of up to 17,600 pounds (8 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit after accounting for the fuel reserves required for booster recovery. The entire rocket stands about 216 feet (65.9 meters) tall.

The first stage has nine TQ-12A engines consuming methane and liquid oxygen, producing more than 1.6 million pounds of thrust at full throttle. The second stage is powered by a single methane-fueled TQ-15A engine with about 200,000 pounds of thrust. These are the same engines LandSpace has successfully flown on the smaller Zhuque-2 rocket.

LandSpace eventually plans to debut an upgraded Zhuque-3 carrying more propellant and using more powerful engines, raising its payload capacity to more than 40,000 pounds (18.3 metric tons) in reusable mode, or a few tons more with an expendable booster.

From the outside, LandSpace’s new rocket looks a lot like the vehicle it is trying to emulate: SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Like the Falcon 9, the Zhuque-3 booster’s nine-engine design also features four deployable landing legs and grid fins to help steer the rocket toward landing.

But LandSpace also incorporates elements from SpaceX’s much heavier Starship rocket. The primary structure of the Zhuque-3 is made of stainless steel, and its engines burn methane fuel, not kerosene like the Falcon 9.

In preparation for the debut of the Zhuque-3, LandSpace engineers built a prototype rocket for launch and landing demonstrations. The testbed aced a flight to 10 kilometers, or about 33,000 feet, in September 2024 and descended to a pinpoint vertical landing, validating the rocket’s guidance algorithms and engine restart capability.

The first of many

Another reusable booster is undergoing preflight preparations not far from LandSpace’s launch site at Jiuquan. This rocket, called the Long March 12A, comes from one of China’s established government-owned rocket firms. It could fly before the end of this year, but officials haven’t publicized a schedule.

The Long March 12A has comparable performance to LandSpace’s Zhuque-3, and it will also use a cluster of methane-fueled engines. Its developer, the Shanghai Institute of Spaceflight Technology, will attempt to land the Long March 12A booster on the first flight.

Several other companies working on reusable rockets appear to be in an advanced stage of development.

One of them, Space Pioneer, might have been first to flight with its new Tianlong-3 rocket if not for the thorny problem of an accidental launch during a booster test-firing last year. Space Pioneer eventually completed a successful static fire in September of this year, and the company recently released a photo showing its rocket on the launch pad.

Other Chinese companies with a chance of soon flying their new reusable boosters include CAS Space, which recently shipped its first Kinetica-2 rocket to Jiuquan for launch preps. Galactic Energy completed test-firings of the second stage and first stage for its Pallas-1 rocket in September and November.

Another startup, i-Space, is developing a partially reusable rocket called the Hyperbola-3 that could debut next year from China’s southern spaceport on Hainan Island. Officials from i-Space unveiled an ocean-going drone ship for rocket landings earlier this year. Deep Blue Aerospace is also working on vertical landing technology for its Nebula-1 rocket, having conducted a dramatic high-altitude test flight last year.

These rockets all fall in the small- to medium-class performance range. It’s unclear whether any of these companies will try to land their boosters on their first flights—like the Zhuque-3 and Long March 12A—but all have roadmaps to reusability.

China’s largest rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, is not as close to fielding a reusable launcher. But the academy has far greater ambitions, with a pair of super-heavy rockets in its future. The first will be the Long March 10, designed to fly with reusable boosters while launching China’s next-generation crew spacecraft on missions to the Moon. Later, perhaps in the 2030s, China could debut the fully reusable Long March 9 rocket similar in scale to SpaceX’s Starship.

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Posted Wednesday 3 December 2025 at 12:11 pm AEST (my time).

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Credit: ArcGIS

Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago. The volcanic rock used for the moai came from a quarry site called Rano Raraku. Archaeologists have created a high-resolution interactive 3D model of the quarry site to learn more about the processes used to create the moai. (You can explore the full interactive model here.) According to a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, the model shows that there were numerous independent groups, probably family clans, that created the moai, rather than a centralized management system.

“You can see things that you couldn’t actually see on the ground. You can see tops and sides and all kinds of areas that just would never be able to walk to,” said co-author Carl Lipo of Binghamton University. “We can say, ‘Here, go look at it.’ If you want to see the different kinds of carving, fly around and see stuff there. We’re documenting something that really has needed to be documented, but in a way that’s really comprehensive and shareable.”

Lipo is one of the foremost experts on the Easter Island moai. In October, we reported on Lipo’s experimental confirmation—based on 3D modeling of the physics and new field tests to re-create that motion—that Easter Island’s people transported the statues in a vertical position, with workers using ropes to essentially “walk” the moai onto their platforms. To explain the presence of so many moai, the assumption has been that the island was once home to tens of thousands of people.

Lipo’s latest field trials showed that the “walking” method can be accomplished with far fewer workers: 18 people, four on each lateral rope and 10 on a rear rope, to achieve the side-to-side walking motion. They were efficient enough in coordinating their efforts to move the statue forward 100 meters in just 40 minutes. That’s because the method operates on basic pendulum dynamics, which minimizes friction between the base and the ground. It’s also a technique that exploits the gradual build-up of amplitude, suggesting a sophisticated understanding of resonance principles.

So the actual statues could have been moved several kilometers over weeks with only modest-sized crews of 20 to 50 people, i.e., roughly the size of an extended family or “small lineage group” on Easter Island. Once the crew gets the statue rocking side to side—which can require 15 to 60 people, depending on the size and weight of the moai—the resulting oscillation needs only minimal energy input from a smaller team of rope handlers to maintain that motion. They mostly provide guidance.

The evidence of the quarry

For this latest paper, Lipo’s team conducted a series of low-elevation drone flights over the Rano Raraku quarry between June 2023 and January 2024, taking some 20,000 high-resolution photographs at 30-meter increments to capture subtle archaeological features, including hundreds of moai in various stages of completion.  Those images were then stitched together to create their 3D model. “As an archeologist, the quarry is like the archeological Disneyland,” said Lipo. “It has everything you can possibly imagine about moai construction because that’s where they did most of the construction. It’s always been this treasure of information and cultural heritage, but it’s remarkably underdocumented.”

Credit: ArcGIS

The team’s initial analysis revealed 341 trenches with outlined blocks for carving, 133 voids where statues had been removed, and five bollards that the authors believe were used as anchor points to lower completed moai down slopes, as well as another bollard system serving large bedrock pits to make it easier to move moai down steep terrain. Most carvings started with cutting trenches into the bedrock to create rectangular blocks—a kind of moai “pre-form,” per the authors.

Most moai were carved from the top down in a supine position. The model also enabled Lipo et al. to identify three distinct quarrying procedures. The most common method was to define facial details before carving the outlines of the head and body of a moai. The second most common was to outline blocks completely before carving details. There were also a handful of cases where carvers worked sideways into a near-vertical cliff face.

Given that the carving techniques differed from site to site, the authors concluded that those sites represented separate workshops associated with specific family clans. Lipo’s confirmation that moai could be transported with far fewer people than previously believed also supports this interpretation. “It really connects all the dots between the number of people it takes to move the statues, the number of places, the scale at which the quarrying is happening and then the scale of the communities,” said Lipo.

Lipo’s interpretation has met with mild skepticism from other archaeologists. Dale Simpson of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, told New Scientist that while he agreed that Easter Island natives did not have a single chief, there was likely considerable collaboration between tribes or clans, rather than being highly decentralized and separate. “I just wonder if they’re drinking a little too much Kool-Aid and not really thinking about the limitation factors on a small place like Rapa Nui, where stone is king, and if you’re not interacting and sharing that stone, you can’t carve moai just inside one clan,” said Simpson.

PLoS ONE, 2025. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0336251  (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 3 December 2025 at 4:47 am AEST (my time).

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By the time the second group of NASA astronauts reach the Moon later this decade, the space agency would like to have a lunar rover waiting for them. But as the space agency nears a key selection, some government officials are seeking an insurance policy of sorts to increase the program’s chance of success.

At issue is the agency’s “Lunar Terrain Vehicle” (LTV) contract. In April 2024, the space agency awarded a few tens of millions of dollars to three companies—Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Astrolab—to complete preliminary design work on vehicle concepts. NASA then planned to down-select to one company to construct one or more rovers, land on the Moon, and provide rover services for a decade beginning in 2029. Over the lifetime of the fixed-price services contract, there was a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion.

The companies have since completed their design work, including the construction of prototypes, and submitted their final bids for the much larger services contract in August. According to two sources, NASA has since been weighing those bids and is prepared to announce a final selection before the end of this month.

NASA can only afford one

The problem is that NASA can only afford to fund one company’s proposal, leaving two other rovers on the cutting room floor.

This is bad for competition, and it leaves NASA vulnerable. Recently, one of NASA’s two new spacesuit providers, Collins, dropped out of the program. This left only Axiom Space as a provider of suits for the lunar surface. And back in 2014, with the Commercial Crew Program, NASA very nearly awarded all of its available funding to Boeing. (SpaceX was only added in during the final weeks before the decision was announced.) More than a decade later, Boeing has yet to deliver a finished crewed spacecraft.

“We have seen, over and over again with our commercial programs, that two is better than one,” an official told Ars.

In short, having just a single company advancing its lunar rover means there is a single point failure—if that company quits for whatever reason, NASA astronauts will be left without wheels on the Moon.

For this reason, the LTV program at NASA would like to award one company the services contract while also funding a second company as a “warm backup.” Essentially, the backup company would receive a few hundred million dollars—a tiny fraction of the overall contract—over the next several years to progress through the critical design review phase. This is the final step before the construction of flight hardware. So if a significant problem arose with the primary company, this second bidder could be activated.

“This would be a cheap insurance policy,” a source said.

Preserving flexibility

A warm backup would not only preserve flexibility in the LTV program but could also prevent one or more of the companies from going out of business.

The agency is concerned about losing the investments and innovations that two of the newest LTV companies, Lunar Outpost and Astrolab, have made in the lunar economy. Although leaders of both companies have said they will press on with lunar rover development if they don’t win the large services contract, NASA officials aren’t sure that will be possible. The companies have signed up some commercial customers for their rovers, but it may be difficult to close a business case without NASA’s investment. The third company, Intuitive Machines, has other lines of business beyond its LTV program.

The officials praised the varying designs of the rovers by each company, each of which supports different use cases from extra mobility to research capacity. NASA’s fairly lean requirements allowed the companies to develop innovative proposals.

“All of the proposed rovers are different, and it’s a great result of a competition,” one of the sources said.

Right now, the LTV program does not have the funding available to create a warm backup option. If the decision were made today, just a single company would receive an award.

The decision is complicated by the fact that NASA headquarters is reticent to make a decision on something like this, even at a cost of tens of millions of dollars a year, without firm leadership in place. It is clear that interim administrator Sean Duffy will be departing soon. NASA nominee Jared Isaacman is due to undergo a confirmation hearing on Wednesday, and there is some hope he will be confirmed by the full Senate in mid-December.

On such a timeline, Isaacman would need to decide early in his tenure to preserve a warm backup option for LTV.

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Posted Wednesday 3 December 2025 at 4:46 am AEST (my time).

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It’s a critical time for companies competing to develop a commercial successor to the International Space Station. NASA is working with several companies, including Axiom Space, Voyager Technologies, Blue Origin, and Vast, to develop concepts for private stations where it can lease time for its astronauts.

The space agency awarded Phase One contracts several years ago and is now in the final stages of writing requirements for Phase Two after asking for feedback from industry partners in September. This program is known as Commercial LEO Destinations, or CLDs in industry parlance.

Time is running out for NASA if it wants to establish continuity from the International Space Station, which will reach its end of life in 2030, with a follow-on station ready to go before then.

One of the more intriguing companies in the competition is Voyager Technologies, which recently announced a strategic investment from Janus Henderson, a global investment firm. In another sign that the competition is heating up, Voyager also just hired John Baum away from Vast, where he was the company’s business development leader.

To get a sense of this competition and how Voyager is coming along with its Starlab space station project, Ars spoke with the firm’s chairman, Dylan Taylor. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: I know a lot of the companies working on CLDs are actively fundraising right now. How is this coming along for Voyager and Starlab?

Dylan Taylor: Fundraising is going quite well. You saw the Janus announcement. That’s significant for a few reasons. One is, it’s a significant investment. Of course, we’re not disclosing exactly how much. (Editor’s note: It likely is on the order of $100 million.) But the more positive development on the Janus investment is that they are such a well-known, well-respected financial investor.

If you look at the kind of bellwether investors, Janus would be up there with a Blackstone or Blackrock or Fidelity. So it’s significant not only in terms of capital contribution, but in… showing that commercial space stations are investable. This isn’t money coming from the Gulf States. It’s not a syndication of a bunch of $1,000 checks from retail investors. This is a very significant institutional investor coming in, and it’s a signal to the market. They did significant diligence on all our competitors, and they went out of the way saying that we’re far and away the best business plan, best design, and everything else, so that’s why it’s so meaningful.

Ars: How much funding do you need to raise to complete Starlab?

Dylan Taylor: We currently estimate the cost to design, manufacture, and launch Starlab to be approximately $2.8 to $3.3 billion. And then if you look at what’s anticipated in Phase Two in the NASA services contracts, it’s about a $700 million capital plug that we need to raise in the market, and we’re well on our way on that. We’re not going to raise all of that now because obviously, after we win Phase Two, there will be a significant markup in valuation, and we’ll have the ability to raise additional capital at that time. So we’re only raising what we need at this stage of the project.

Ars: How are you coming as far as progress on your initial contract with NASA?

Dylan Taylor: We have our CDR (critical design review) coming up. It’s December 15 to 18. We have achieved 27 milestones. We have four milestones left on our CLD Phase One contract.

Ars: You’ve changed your partners on the project a little bit. Where are you now on that?

Dylan Taylor: We moved the structure construction from Bremen, Germany, to Louisiana. That will be constructed by Vivace. So the structure will be made in the US. We have a significant presence, as you know, in Houston. We’ll have it in Louisiana. And we just added Leidos to the team, so there’ll be a big Huntsville component to our test and integration as well. So the key partners right now in terms of equity ownership and the joint venture are ourselves, Airbus, Mitsubishi, Palantir, Space Applications Services, and MDA. And then additional partners who are on the team that aren’t equity holders include Northrup, Leidos, and Hilton Hotels.

A rendering of the Starlab space station in orbit.

Credit: Voyager Technologies

Ars: What is your current timeline for development?

Dylan Taylor: We’re still on 2029. I don’t anticipate that pushing out for any reason in the near term. Obviously, if we had a significant delay on Phase Two selection, that could impact things. You know, some people think that we have Starship risk. In my view, I’m highly confident Starship will be ready to go when we’re ready to launch. If it’s not, based on the New Glenn upgrades that were recently announced, if they’re successful in implementing those, then theoretically New Glenn could also launch us. As you know, we’ve got a launch agreement with SpaceX on Starship, so that’s still the plan.

Ars: I would not consider a 2029 Starship launch date a major risk.

Dylan Taylor: Yeah, exactly. I’m not concerned about it. But there are people who are concerned. They bring it up a lot. Now, that being said, not to pick on the other players, but my understanding is Axiom has to launch on Falcon Heavy. I’m not sure SpaceX is that excited to do a Falcon Heavy launch, so in my mind, that could be a potential risk for them. Maybe, I don’t know.

Ars: What was your reaction to the directive that came out in August from NASA interim administrator Sean Duffy on commercial space stations?

Dylan Taylor: I was surprised at the fact that they appeared to be backing off the requirements a bit. You know, I don’t know where it (the Phase Two Request for Proposals from NASA) ends up. That’s anybody’s guess. But if I were to bet, I would think it would be more similar to the original procurement strategy than the memo. But we won’t know until it comes out.

Ars: Obviously, there is still an interim administrator at NASA. We had a government shutdown for a month. What’s your current understanding of the timeline for the Phase Two process?

Dylan Taylor: The last information we have is that they still expected to send the RFP out by the end of the year, and then have Phase Two selection sometime late Q1, early Q2 next year.  That information was mostly communicated prior to the government shutdown. So I think with the government shutdown—I’m guessing here because I don’t know—but I think you probably roll forward 45 days or so. If that’s the case, we’re probably looking at an RFP in January and a selection in probably in June or July. That’s our best estimate based upon what we have been told.

Ars: We’re now under five years from the International Space Station coming down. There’s still a lot of work to be done for replacement. I think it’s clear there are some challenges for this program, not speaking specifically about Starlab but just the general idea of commercial space stations. What advice would you have for Jared Isaacman to help make sure the CLD program is a success for NASA and the country?

Dylan Taylor: I know Jared, and I’m very optimistic. He’s very, very smart, a very capable person. He’s pro-commercial space.  Based on his testimony and just what I know about him, he believes that commercial solutions are often better than government solutions. So I’m very optimistic he’s going to be a transformational administrator. I think it’s very good for the industry. I think the advice I would have for him on this program would be the same advice I’d have for him on all programs. And it’s just simply clarity—clarity of mission, clarity of requirements, clarity of timeline, and the market will figure it out from there.

And specifically on CLDs, I think it’s important they make a selection sooner rather than later. In my view, that selection should not just be a Space Act Agreement. It should be tied to a services commitment on the backside as well. I think that’s important to signal who the chosen commercial space station successors are, whether there’s two or three. I don’t think there will be one. There shouldn’t be one.

Ars: Has the government committed enough funding to make the program a success?

Dylan Taylor: I think this is where I might deviate from our competitors a bit. I think the answer is yes. I mean, if we have a reasonable amount of capital allocated in Phase Two and service contract commitments, the rest of the capital markets will be there. We demonstrated this with Janus and our IPO, frankly. Separately, we raised $430 million on a convertible note for Voyager, in 48 hours, two weeks ago, at an interest rate of 0.75 percent. The capital is there for well-run companies that are able to communicate the future of these projects to investors.

So the short answer is, yes, I think there is enough funding. I think where sometimes NASA might get the story a bit wrong is that they think they need to provide all the capital for these programs. And that’s not really the case. They need to provide some of the capital. But most importantly, they need to provide the signal. We saw this on launch, right? I mean, NASA didn’t fund all of SpaceX’s development. They’re certainly not funding all of Starship’s development. But what they did do is they selected Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew winners, and then SpaceX is probably the best example of being able to raise capital around that.

Ars: Do you think there are customers beyond NASA for these stations? I’m sure you must. But who are they?

Dylan Taylor: There’s huge demand, Eric. Honestly, this has been one of my surprises. Over the last 12 months, and I really want to credit Axiom on this, with the PAM (private astronaut) missions, they really pioneered this notion of sovereign astronauts outside of the ISS consortium. There’s huge demand from emerging countries with space agencies that want a sovereign astronaut, that want to send their astronauts to the ISS or to a safe and qualified and NASA-approved space station. So there is a lot of demand there.

We’re in active discussions—I would say advanced discussions—with a lot of sovereign astronauts, and I fully anticipate that we’re going to be oversubscribed when it comes to astronaut demand. And then on the commercial capacity, on the research side, we see huge demand for our commercial research capacity on Starlab. And just to remind you, we have 100 percent of the research capacity of the ISS, and we see demand in excess of our capacity. We’re striking deals as we speak.

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Posted Tuesday 2 December 2025 at 5:04 pm AEST (my time).

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

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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. November’s list includes forensic details of the medieval assassination of a Hungarian duke, why woodpeckers grunt when they peck, and more evidence that X’s much-maligned community notes might actually help combat the spread of misinformation after all.

An assassinated medieval Hungarian duke

Back in 1915, archaeologists discovered the skeletal remains of a young man in a Dominican monastery on Margaret Island in Budapest, Hungary. The remains were believed to be those of Duke Bela of Masco, grandson of the medieval Hungarian King Bela IV. Per historical records, the young duke was brutally assassinated in 1272 by a rival faction and his mutilated remains were recovered by the duke’s sister and niece and buried in the monastery.

The identification of the remains was based on a contemporary osteological analysis, but they were subsequently lost and only rediscovered in 2018. A paper published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics has now confirmed that identification and shed more light on precisely how the duke died. (A preprint is available on bioRxiv.]

An interdisciplinary team of researchers performed various kinds of bioarchaeological analysis on the remains. including genetic testing, proteomics, 3D modeling, and radiocarbon dating. The resulting data definitively proves that the skeleton is indeed that of Duke Bela of Masco.

The authors were also able to reconstruct the manner of the duke’s death, concluding that this was a coordinated attack by three people. One attacked from the front while the other two attacked from the left and right sides, and the duke was facing his assassins and tried to defend himself. The weapons used were most likely a saber and a long sword, and the assassins kept raining down blows even after the duke had fallen to the ground. The authors concluded that while the attack was clearly planned, it was also personal and fueled by rage or hate.

DOI: Forensic Science International: Genetics, 2025. 10.1016/j.fsigen.2025.103381  (About DOIs).

Why woodpeckers grunt when they peck

Woodpeckers energetically drum away at tree trunks all day long with their beaks and yet somehow never seem to get concussions, despite the fact that such drumming can produce deceleration forces as high as 1,200 g’s. (Humans suffer concussions with a sudden deceleration of just 100 g’s.) While popular myth holds that woodpecker heads are structured in such a way to absorb the shock, and there has been some science to back that up, more recent research found that their heads act more like hammers than shock absorbers. A paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology sheds further light on the biomechanics of how woodpeckers essentially turn themselves into hammers and reveals that the birds actually grunt as they strike wood.

The authors caught eight wild downy woodpeckers and recorded them drilling and tapping on pieces of hardwood in the lab for three days, while also measuring electrical signals in their heads, necks, abdomens, tails, and leg muscles. Analyzing the footage, they found that woodpeckers use their hip flexors and front neck muscles to propel themselves forward as they peck while tipping their heads back and bracing themselves using muscles at the base of the skull and back of the neck. The birds use abdominal muscles for stability and brace for impact using their tail muscles to anchor their bodies against a tree. As for the grunting, the authors noted that it’s a type of breathing pattern used by tennis players (and martial artists) to boost the power of a strike.

DOI: Journal of Experimental Biology, 2025. 10.1242/jeb.251167  (About DOIs).

Raisins turn water into wine

Fermentation has been around in some form for millennia, relying on alcohol-producing yeasts like Saccharomyces cerevisiae; cultured S. cerevisiae is still used by winemakers today. It’s long been thought that winemakers in ancient times stored fresh crushed grapes in jars and relied on natural fermentation to work its magic, but recent studies have called this into question by demonstrating that S. cerevisiae colonies usually don’t form on fresh grape skins. But the yeast does like raisins, as Kyoto University researchers recently discovered. They’ve followed up that earlier work with a paper published in Scientific Reports, demonstrating that it’s possible to use raisins to turn water into wine.

The authors harvested fresh grapes and dried them for 28 days. Some were dried using an incubator, some were sun-dried, and a third batch was dried using a combination of the two methods. The researchers then added the resulting raisins to bottles of water—three samples for each type of drying process—sealed the bottles, and stored them at room temperature for two weeks. One incubator-dried sample and two combo samples successfully fermented, but all three of the sun-dried samples did so, and at higher ethanol concentrations. Future research will focus on identifying the underlying molecular mechanisms. And for those interested in trying this at home, the authors warn that it only works with naturally sun-dried raisins, since store-bought varieties have oil coatings that block fermentation.

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2025. 10.1038/s41598-025-23715-3  (About DOIs).

An octopus-inspired pigment

Octopuses, cuttlefish, and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin thanks to that skin’s unique complex structure, including layers of chromatophores, iridophores, and leucophores. A color-shifting natural pigment called xanthommatin also plays a key role, but it’s been difficult to study because it’s hard to harvest enough directly from animals, and lab-based methods of making the pigment are labor-intensive and don’t yield much. Scientists at the University of San Diego have developed a new method for making xanthommatin in substantially larger quantities, according to a paper published in Nature Biotechnology.

The issue is that trying to get microbes to make foreign compounds creates a metabolic burden, and the microbes hence resist the process, hindering yields. The USD team figured out how to trick the cells into producing more xanthommatin by genetically engineering them in such a way that making the pigment was essential to a cell’s survival. They achieved yields of between 1 and 3 grams per liter, compared to just five milligrams of pigment per liter using traditional approaches. While this work is proof of principle, the authors foresee such future applications as photoelectronic devices and thermal coatings, dyes, natural sunscreens, color-changing paints, and environmental sensors. It could also be used to make other kinds of chemicals and help industries shift away from older methods that rely on fossil fuel-based materials.

DOI: Nature Biotechnology, 2025. 10.1038/s41587-025-02867-7  (About DOIs).

A body-swap robot

Among the most serious risks facing older adults is falling. According to the authors of a paper published in Science Robotics, standing upright requires the brain to coordinate signals from the eyes, inner ears, and feet to counter gravity, and there’s a natural lag in how fast this information travels back and forth between brain and muscles. Aging and certain diseases like diabetic neuropathy and multiple sclerosis can further delay that vital communication; the authors liken it to steering a car with a wheel that responds half a second late. And it’s a challenge to directly study the brain under such conditions.

That’s why researchers at the University of British Columbia built a large “body swap” robotic platform. Subjects stood on force plates attached to a motor-driven backboard to reproduce the physical forces at play when standing upright: gravity, inertia, and “viscosity,” which in this case describes the damping effect of muscles and joints that allow us to lean without falling. The platform is designed to subtly alter those forces and also add a 200-millisecond delay.

The authors tested 20 participants and found that lowering inertia and making the viscosity negative resulted in similar instability to that which resulted from a signal delay. They then brought in ten new subjects to study whether adjusting body mechanics could compensate for information delays. They found that adding inertia and viscosity could at least partially counter the instability that arose from signal delay—essentially giving the body a small mechanical boost to help the brain maintain balance. The eventual goal is to design wearables that offer gentle resistance when an older person starts to lose their balance, and/or help patients with MS, for example, adjust to slower signal feedback.

DOI: Science Robotics, 2025. 10.1126/scirobotics.adv0496  (About DOIs).

X community notes might actually work

Earlier this year, Elon Musk claimed that X’s community notes feature needed tweaking because it was being gamed by “government & legacy media” to contradict Trump—despite vigorously defending the robustness of the feature against such manipulation in the past. A growing body of research seems to back Musk’s earlier stance.

For instance, last year Bloomberg pointed to several studies suggesting that crowdsourcing worked just as well as using professional fact-checkers when assessing the accuracy of news stories. The latest evidence that crowd-sourcing fact checks can be effective at curbing misinformation comes from a paper published in the journal Information Systems Research, which found that X posts with public corrections were 32 percent more likely to be deleted by authors.

Co-author Huaxia Rui of the University of Rochester pointed out that community notes must meet a threshold before they will appear publicly on posts, while those that do not remain hidden from public view. Seeing a prime opportunity in the arrangement, Rui et al. analyzed 264,600 X posts that had received at least one community note and compared those just above and just below that threshold. The posts were collected from two different periods: June through August 2024, right before the US presidential election (when misinformation typically surges), and the post-election period of January and February 2025.

The fact that roughly one-third of authors responded to public community notes by deleting the post suggests that the built-in dynamics of social media (e.g., status, visibility, peer feedback) might actually help improve the spread of misinformation as intended. The authors concluded that crowd-checking “strikes a balance between First Amendment rights and the urgent need to curb misinformation.” Letting AI write the community notes, however, is probably still a bad idea.

DOI: Information Systems Research, 2025. 10.1287/isre.2024.1609  (About DOIs).

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 2 December 2025 at 3:57 am AEST (my time).

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

RIP Matrix

If a child loses a baby tooth earlier than expected, there's no need to try to replace it. In most cases, no treatment is necessary. The adult tooth will eventually come in on its own. But if a permanent tooth comes out, it's a dental emergency that requires swift action.

Permanent teeth have the best chance of being saved when placed back in the socket within 15 minutes. You may still be able to save it within the first hour if you act quickly and carefully.

Go to the dentist or emergency room right away after following these steps:

1. Find the tooth as soon as possible. Carefully pick it up by the crown (the part you chew with)—not the root (the end that goes into the gums). Touching the root can damage delicate cells needed for reattachment.
2. Rinse the tooth gently with milk or saline solution. Do not use tap water to rinse it, and DO NOT SCRUB THE TOOTH.
3. Try to reinsert the tooth. If you feel comfortable, try to place the tooth back into its socket. Then, have your child bite down gently on a piece of gauze or cloth to hold it in place.

If you are unable to reinsert the tooth into the socket, KEEP THE TOOTH MOIST while seeking emergency care. You can place the tooth in a container with milk, saline or balanced salt solution (like Save-A-Tooth), or your child's saliva. Do not store the tooth in tap water.

After following these steps, go immediately to your child's dentist or the nearest emergency room. Let them know you're coming and that your child has a knocked-out permanent tooth.

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