When the US Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced 14 gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, the animals were, in some ways, stepping into a new world.

After humans hunted wolves to near-extinction across the Western US in the early 20th century, the carnivore’s absence likely altered ecosystems and food webs across the Rocky Mountains. Once wolves were reintroduced to the landscape, scientists hoped to learn if, and how quickly, these changes could be reversed.

Despite studies claiming to show early evidence of a tantalizing relationship between wolves and regenerating riparian ecosystems since the canines returned to Yellowstone, scientists are still debating how large carnivores impact vegetation and other animals, according to a new paper published this month.

The scientific intrigue centers on the degree to which carnivores have an indirect effect on other fauna and flora, a dynamic scientists call a “trophic cascade.” Beginning in the early 2000s, several studies appeared to show evidence of a transformational relationship between wolves, elk, and riparian vegetation in Yellowstone.

But as more time has passed, other studies have suggested that Yellowstone wolves’ connection to the park’s riparian ecosystems may be more subtle than previously believed.

“It’s not that there’s not evidence consistent with a trophic cascade in Yellowstone,” said Chris Wilmers, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the paper’s lead author. “It’s that the effects are a lot more complicated and weaker than what was initially thought.”

The theory of wolves changing the landscapes and vegetation along streams and rivers in Yellowstone was born out of the changes scientists observed in the park after human hunting decimated beaver and wolf populations. More elk and other ungulates dominated the landscape, grazing riparian vegetation on the open banks of streams whose dams were no longer as robustly maintained by beavers. Water began moving through the park more rapidly, carving riverbeds into deep v-shapes and lowering the water table. This, in turn, diminished overgrazed riparian vegetation habitat, leaving less material for any remaining beavers to dam the waterways. All this caused a negative feedback loop that dried out areas around the park’s streams.

When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, some scientists reported that they altered elk grazing patterns, causing them to become skittish about spending prolonged periods in open riparian habitat. This helped willow and aspen trees along stream banks regenerate, perhaps an early indication of a trophic cascade, one that could give beavers more material to slow flows and reduce waterside erosion.

But other scientists have questioned these theories, and for the new paper, Wilmers and four other researchers expanded the focus from wolves to include pumas and bears, other large carnivores that are recovering from the brink of human-driven extinction across the West.

In an analysis of about 170 citations published since the 1930s, Wilmers and his team found clear evidence of predator-induced trophic cascades in only limited circumstances. On Isle Royal National Park, a nearly 207-square-mile chunk of land in northwestern Lake Superior, for instance, wolves diminished moose populations to the point that trees grew taller. But in Yellowstone, a more than 3,000-square-mile park in the heart of one of North America’s most intact ecosystems, the connection between the predator’s reintroduction and changes in vegetation has generated more debate.

In 2024, researchers at Colorado State University published a 20-year study finding that willows fenced from grazers near simulated beaver dams in Yellowstone grew faster than both unfenced willows near dams and fenced or unfenced willows without dams, suggesting wolves’ presence alone may not be enough to improve the park’s riparian habitat. Without more beaver activity and healthier riparian vegetation, Yellowstone appeared locked in an “alternative stable state,” in which eroded stream banks and lower groundwater levels persist on a dry landscape, “caused primarily by the extirpation of apex predators during the early 20th century,” the researchers concluded.

Other research has shown that, since wolves returned to the park, human hunting, puma recovery, and grizzly predation on calves have also influenced elk populations, and growing bison herds may also account for diminished vegetation heights. Even irrigated fields outside the park could be influencing elk behavior.

Without a clear link between wolf predation and the decline of elk populations, the foundation for a scientific determination of a trophic cascade is too shaky to build upon, Wilmers concluded in the paper.

He said he was surprised by how few studies show evidence of wolves, bears, and cougars having an effect on elk, moose, and deer populations. Instead, the biggest driver of changing elk population numbers across the West is humanity.

“In most mainland systems, it’s only when you combine wolves with grizzly bears and you take away human hunting as a substantial component that you see them suppressing prey numbers,” Wilmers said. “Outside of that, they’re mostly background noise against how humans are managing their prey populations.”

In some studies, ungulate populations actually increased slightly in the presence of wolves and grizzlies, Wilmers said, likely because human wildlife managers overestimated the effects of predators as they reduced hunting quotas.

“This is a much-needed review, as it is well executed, and highlights areas where more research is needed,” said Rae Wynn-Grant, a wildlife ecologist and cohost of the television show Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, in an email to Inside Climate News. Wynn-Grant was not involved in the paper, and her work was not part of its survey.

In her view, the paper showed that an increase in predators on the landscape doesn’t automatically balance plant communities. “Our world would be much simpler if it did,” she said, “but the evidence suggests that so many variables factor into if and how ecosystems respond to increases in carnivore population in North America.”

Yellowstone, with its expansive valleys, relatively easy access, and status as an iconic, protected landscape, has become a hotspot for scientists trying to answer an existential question: Is it possible for an ecosystem that’s lost keystone large carnivores to be restored to a pre-extinction state upon their reintroduction?

Wilmers doesn’t think scientists have answered that question yet, except to show that it can take decades to untangle the web of factors driving ecological shifts in a place like Yellowstone. Any changes that do occur when a predator is driven to extinction may be impossible to reverse quickly, he said.

Yellowstone’s alternative stable state was a point echoed by researchers in both camps of the trophic cascade debate, and it is one Wilmers believes is vital to understand when evaluating the tradeoffs of large-carnivore reintroduction.

“You’d be better off avoiding the loss of beavers and wolves in the first place than you would be accepting that loss and trying to restore them later,” he said.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Posted Saturday 29 November 2025 at 2:30 am AEST (my time).

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According to reporting from the Flemish television network VTM, Laurent Simons defended his thesis this week at the University of Antwerp.

Laurent may very well be the youngest person in the world to have earned a doctorate in this particular field, although there's no real ranking system to consult.

Starting primary school when he was just four years old, Laurent had already finished by age six. Come age 12, Laurent had a master's in quantum physics, exploring bosons and black holes.

It is reported that Laurent has a photographic memory and an IQ of 145 – a status only about 0.1 percent of people achieve.

At age 11, after losing his grandparents, Laurent said he set his mind to an even loftier goal than a PhD: Immortality.

Or at least just to extend life.

He says it's not for himself; it's for others. Laurent wants to study medical science in the future.

While it might seem incredible, others even younger than Simons have achieved doctor status.

The Guinness World Records currently lists Karl Witte as the youngest person to be awarded a PhD. Witte was a German child prodigy who received his doctorate in 1814 at the age of 13.

In the field of physics specifically, one of the youngest graduates in recent years is Carson Huey-You, who received his doctorate last year at the age of 21.

Carson's mother said he was already reading chapter books by age two. By age five, it was precalculus.

According to The Brussels Times, IT giants in the US and China have already approached Laurent's parents, inviting the child prodigy to study at their research centers. At the time of reporting, his parents had denied all offers.

"There are two Laurents," his father told reporter Justin Stares in 2022, "the scientist and the boy."

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The first national randomized study of public Montessori preschool students revealed that by the end of kindergarten, participants demonstrated stronger long-term gains in reading, memory, and executive function than children from traditional preschools.

The findings are particularly relevant for policymakers, as the Montessori programs achieved these outcomes at significantly lower costs. The study, which followed 588 children across 24 programs throughout the United States, underscores the importance of continuing to track these students’ progress through later grades and beyond.

A nationwide study tracking preschool success

Researchers from the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Institutes for Research led a large-scale national study showing that public Montessori programs for children ages 3 to 6 produce stronger early learning outcomes while being more cost-effective for both schools and taxpayers. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this first-of-its-kind randomized controlled trial followed nearly 600 students enrolled in 24 public Montessori programs across the country.

By the end of kindergarten, students who gained entry through a random lottery into public Montessori preschools surpassed their peers in reading skills, executive functioning, short-term memory, and social understanding—all while costing about $13,000 less per child than conventional preschool programs. These cost estimates exclude additional potential savings from higher teacher satisfaction and retention, which have been supported by previous data. The results, verified by independent reviewers, stand in contrast to previous studies where preschool benefits often diminished or disappeared entirely by the end of kindergarten.

Credit: John DiJulio, University Communications

Expert perspectives and educational impact

“These findings affirm what Maria Montessori believed over a century ago—that when we trust children to learn with purpose and curiosity, they thrive,” said Angeline Lillard, Commonwealth Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. “Public Montessori programs are not only effective but cost-efficient.”

“Montessori preschool programs are already being used in hundreds of U.S. public schools, and our research shows that they are having a positive impact in key areas of early learning,” said Karen Manship, coauthor and Managing Director at the American Institutes for Research. “These findings provide valuable evidence to policymakers and educational leaders who are seeking to deliver better outcomes with increasingly limited resources.”

UVA Commonwealth Professor of Psychology Angeline Lillard is the lead author of the new study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world’s most widely cited scientific journals. Credit: Tom Cogill

“Montessori began in the low-income housing of early 20th-century Rome,” noted David Loeb of the University of Pennsylvania. “This research shows it still delivers on that promise for America’s children today.”

Key Findings

• Stronger early learning: Montessori children scored significantly higher in reading, memory, executive function, and understanding others’ perspectives by the end of kindergarten.

• Sustained benefits: Unlike many preschool programs where gains fade, Montessori students’ relative outcomes improved over time.

• Cost savings: When compared to traditional public preschool, Public Montessori programs cost $13,000 less per child across the three years from ages 3–6, due primarily to more efficient class structures, including harnessing the benefits of children teaching each other across age groups.

• Teacher morale and retention: In practice, those cost savings are likely even higher due to prior prevailing evidence that Montessori teachers experience higher job satisfaction and lower turnover.

• Benefits for all children: Effects were strongest among children from lower-income families, although children of all backgrounds benefited. These and other findings are a helpful reminder that Montessori was originally designed to reach low-income communities.

Montessori’s lasting legacy in modern education

Dr. Maria Montessori opened her first classroom in 1907 in the working-class tenements of Rome, and pioneered an educational model rooted in children’s natural drive to learn. Today, more than 600 U.S. public schools offer Montessori education. This national study affirms that Montessori’s century-old model is a highly effective approach to early education—delivering enduring benefits for children and communities alike.

The research also appears highly actionable for policymakers, because the results found the Montessori programs delivered better outcomes at sharply lower costs, and studies have demonstrated improved teacher morale and retention for Montessori programs.

Reference: “A national randomized controlled trial of the impact of public Montessori preschool at the end of kindergarten” by Angeline S. Lillard, David Loeb, Juliette Berg, Maya Escueta, Karen Manship, Alison Hauser and Emily D. Daggett, 20 October 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Around this time last year, officials at United Launch Alliance projected 2025 would be their busiest year ever. Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, told reporters the company would launch as many as 20 missions this year, with roughly an even split between the legacy Atlas V launcher and its replacement—the Vulcan rocket.

Now, it’s likely that ULA will close out 2025 with six flights—five with the Atlas V and just one with the Vulcan rocket the company is so eager accelerate into service. Six flights would make 2025 the busiest launch year for ULA since 2022, but it falls well short of the company’s forecast.

Last week, ULA announced its next launch is scheduled for December 15. An Atlas V will loft another batch of broadband satellites for the Amazon Leo network, formerly known as Project Kuiper, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This will be ULA’s last launch of the year.

The Vulcan rocket’s sole launch this year occurred August 12, when it took off on a mission sponsored by the US Space Force. The rocket deployed an experimental military navigation satellite and at least one additional classified payload into orbit. This mission was the third flight of the Vulcan rocket, and its first national security mission after the Space Force formally certified ULA’s new launch vehicle.

United Launch Alliance is one of the Space Force’s two certified launch providers for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program and the military’s most critical space missions, delivering satellites to orbit for reconnaissance, navigation, communications, and early warning. SpaceX, the other provider, has launched its Falcon 9 rocket fleet 151 times so far this year, including six times for the Space Force’s NSSL program.

Concerns about the Vulcan rocket are nothing new at the Pentagon. In May 2024, the defense official then in charge of procuring space hardware wrote a letter to Boeing and Lockheed Martin—ULA’s corporate parents—outlining his concerns about the Vulcan rocket’s entry into service. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays,” wrote Frank Calvelli, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition under the Biden administration.

A year-and-a-half later, the military still has satellites waiting to launch on Vulcan.

Great expectations

By the time of the launch in August, ULA had cut its forecast for 2025 to nine missions, but officials still expected more Vulcan flights before the end of the year. That is no longer the case. Now, the next two military missions booked to launch on Vulcan are scheduled for next year, according to a spokesperson for Space Systems Command. These missions will launch a pair of in-space reconnaissance satellites and a GPS navigation spacecraft.

Meanwhile, Amazon Leo is focusing on preparing for the next launch of 27 Internet satellites on the Atlas V next month and the network’s first launch on a European Ariane 6 rocket early next year. Amazon is in the early stages of building and launching more than 3,200 satellites to beam consumer-grade broadband connectivity around the world, a service intended to rival SpaceX’s Starlink network. Amazon has launched 153 operational satellites so far.

Amazon and the Space Force are ULA’s two primary customers, combining to make up about 90 percent of the company’s mission backlog. Amazon has reserved 38 launches on Vulcan rockets, plus five more flights on the soon-to-retire Atlas V. The Space Force, which also awards launch contracts for the National Reconnaissance Office’s spy satellites, currently has 27 launches booked on Vulcan rockets.

The Space Force’s upcoming missions on the Vulcan rocket will carry operational satellites, unlike the experimental payloads carried on the most recent Vulcan launch in August. The next military launch on Vulcan, designated USSF-87, will deploy two so-called GSSAP satellites designed to reconnoiter other objects, including classified Russian and Chinese satellites, in geosynchronous orbit. These are among the Space Force’s most precious satellites at a time when space surveillance is taking on greater importance.

The Vulcan rocket has been slow to ramp up after the malfunction of one of the rocket’s strap-on solid rocket boosters on its second test flight in October 2024. The rocket continued climbing into orbit after its liquid-fueled main engines compensated for the decline in thrust from the damaged booster.

Engineers traced the problem to a manufacturing defect in an insulator on the solid rocket motor, and telemetry data from all four boosters on the following flight in August exhibited “spot-on” performance, according to Bruno. But officials decided to recover the spent expendable motor casings from the Atlantic Ocean for inspections to confirm there were no other surprises or close calls.

The hangup delaying the next Vulcan launches isn’t in rocket production. ULA has hardware for multiple Vulcan rockets in storage at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Instead, one key reason for Vulcan’s past delays has been the rocket’s performance, particularly its solid rocket boosters. It isn’t clear whether the latest delays are related to the readiness of the Space Force’s GSSAP satellites (the next GPS satellite to fly on Vulcan has been available for launch since 2022), the inspections of Vulcan’s solid rocket motors, or something else.

A Space Systems Command spokesperson told Ars that “appropriate actions are being executed to ensure a successful USSF-87 mission … The teams analyze all hardware as well as available data from previous missions to evaluate space flight worthiness of future missions.”

The spokesperson did not provide a specific answer to a question from Ars about inspections on the solid rocket motors from the most recent Vulcan flight.

ULA’s outfitting of a new rocket assembly hangar and a second mobile launch platform for the Vulcan rocket at Cape Canaveral has also seen delays. With so many launches in its backlog, ULA needs capacity to stack and prepare at least two rockets in different buildings at the same time. Eventually, the company’s goal is to launch at an average clip of twice per month.

On Monday, ground crews at Cape Canaveral moved the second Vulcan launch platform to the company’s launch pad for fit checks and “initial technical testing.” This is a good sign that the company is moving closer to ramping up the Vulcan launch cadence, but it’s now clear it won’t happen this year.

Vulcan’s slow launch rate since its first flight in January 2024 is not unusual for new rockets. It took 28 months for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and ULA’s Atlas V to reach their fourth flight, a timeline that the Vulcan vehicle will reach in May 2026.

The Delta IV rocket from ULA flew its fourth mission 25 months after debuting in 2002. Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket reached its fourth flight in 16 months, but it shares more in common with its predecessor than the others. SpaceX’s Starship also had a faster ramp-up, with its fourth test flight coming less than 14 months after the first.

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Posted Thursday 27 November 2025 at 12:41 pm AEST (my time).

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Many dog breeds are noted for their personalities and behavioral traits, from the distinctive vocalizations of huskies to the herding of border collies. People have worked to identify the genes associated with many of these behaviors, taking advantage of the fact that dogs can interbreed. But that creates its own experimental challenges, as it can be difficult to separate some behaviors from physical traits distinctive to the breed—small dog breeds may seem more aggressive simply because they feel threatened more often.

To get around that, a team of researchers recently did the largest gene/behavior association study within a single dog breed. Taking advantage of a population of over 1,000 golden retrievers, they found a number of genes associated with behaviors within that breed. A high percentage of these genes turned out to correspond to regions of the human genome that have been associated with behavioral differences as well. But, in many cases, these associations have been with very different behaviors.

Gone to the dogs

The work, done by a team based largely at Cambridge University, utilized the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, which involved over 3,000 owners of these dogs filling out annual surveys that included information on their dogs’ behavior. Over 1,000 of those owners also had blood samples obtained from their dogs and shipped in; the researchers used these samples to scan the dogs’ genomes for variants. Those were then compared to ratings of the dogs’ behavior on a range of issues, like fear or aggression directed toward strangers or other dogs.

Using the data, the researchers identified when different regions of the genome were frequently associated with specific variants. In total, 14 behavioral tendencies were examined, and 12 genomic regions were associated with specific behaviors, and another nine showed somewhat weaker associations. For many of these traits, it was difficult to find much because golden retrievers are notoriously friendly and mellow dogs, so they tended to score low on traits like aggression and fear.

That result was significant, as some of these same regions of the genome had been associated with very different behaviors in populations that were a mix of breeds. For example, two different regions associated with touch sensitivity in golden retrievers had been linked to a love of chasing and owner-directed aggression in a non-breed-specific study. That finding suggests that the studies were identifying genes that may be involved in setting the stage for behaviors, but were directed into specific outcomes by other genetic or environmental factors.

Well, it’s complicated

The same thing happened when the researchers looked at the regions that contain the equivalent genes in humans. “For example, the gene nearest the dog-directed aggression locus,” the authors write, “is associated in humans with intelligence, cognitive performance, educational attainment, and major depressive disorder.”

In total, the researchers identified a dozen sites that were associated with behavioral differences in both humans and dogs. Some of them made more sense than the example immediately above; for example, a genomic region associated with fear in dogs has had its human version linked to neuroticism and anxiety. Others get rather complex. A region near a gene called ROMO1 was linked to responding well to training in dogs. In humans, it has been associated with cognitive performance—which you can kind of see as connected—but also depression and irritability.

So, in short, the study identified a number of genes with a common function in behavior, likely conserved widely across mammals. But at the same time, it has generally failed to find a similar conservation of the specific behaviors that are being conserved, even across different dog breeds.

There are some caveats here. One is that the behavior ratings came from the dogs’ owners, which may have aspects of their own behavior that influence their interactions with their dogs or their interpretations of the dogs’ actions. In addition, the dogs may have been brought up in quite different environments. It’s hard to understand how this would create a spurious bias toward any particular genetic association, though a larger population should limit its impact.

The alternative is that many of these variants create what you might consider a point of flexibility for the nervous system. But other factors, either genetic or environmental, can bias that flexibility to specific destinations. And it’s important to note that, while we tend to think of “environmental factors” as things like chemical exposures, for behavior, they can just as easily be life experiences.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2421757122  (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 27 November 2025 at 5:52 am AEST (my time).

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The study led by the University of South Australia (UniSA) is the first to map how cognitive activity fluctuates across the day in individuals with chronic insomnia, compared to healthy sleepers.

The study, "Cognitive-affective disengagement: 24-hour rhythm in insomniacs versus healthy good sleepers," is published in Sleep Medicine.

Insomnia affects about 10% of the population, and up to 33% of older adults, with many reporting an overactive or 'racing' mind at night.

While this has long been linked to cognitive hyperarousal, it has remained unclear where these thought patterns stem from.

Researchers examined whether the inability to downregulate mental activity at night—a hallmark of insomnia—reflects underlying circadian rhythm abnormalities.

Under tightly controlled laboratory conditions, 32 older adults were monitored (16 with insomnia and 16 healthy sleepers) over 24 hours of wakeful bedrest.

This approach eliminated environmental and behavioral cues, allowing scientists to isolate the brain's internal rhythms.

Participants remained awake in a dimly lit room, in bed, with food and activity carefully controlled. They completed hourly checklists, assessing the tone, quality and controllability of their thoughts.

Both healthy sleepers and insomniacs showed clear circadian patterns in mental activity, with peaks in the afternoon and troughs in the early morning.

However, several key differences emerged in the insomnia group.

"Unlike good sleepers, whose cognitive state shifted predictably from daytime problem-solving to nighttime disengagement, those with insomnia failed to downshift as strongly," says lead researcher UniSA Professor Kurt Lushington.

"Their thought patterns stayed more daytime-like in the nighttime hours when the brain should be quietening."

Their cognitive peaks were also delayed by around six and a half hours, suggesting that their internal clocks may encourage alert thinking well into the night.

"Sleep is not just about closing your eyes," Prof Lushington says. "It's about the brain disengaging from goal-directed thought and emotional involvement."

"Our study shows that in insomnia, this disengagement is blunted and delayed, likely due to circadian rhythm abnormalities. This means that the brain doesn't receive strong signals to 'power down' at night."

Co-author, UniSA Professor Jill Dorrian, says the findings highlight new treatment possibilities for insomniacs, such as interventions that strengthen circadian rhythms.

"These include timed light exposure and structured daily routines that may restore the natural day-night variation in thought patterns," Prof Dorrian says.

"Practicing mindfulness may also help quieten the mind at night."

The researchers say that current treatments often focus on behavioral strategies, but these findings suggest that tailored approaches addressing circadian and cognitive factors could offer a solution.

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An unpiloted Chinese spacecraft launched late Monday and linked up 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.

A Long March 2F rocket fired its engines and lifted off with the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft, carrying cargo instead of a crew, at 11:11 pm EST Monday (04:11 UTC Tuesday). The spacecraft docked with the Tiangong station nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth about three-and-a-half hours later.

Chinese engineers worked fast to move up the launch of the Shenzhou 22, originally set to fly next year. On November 4, astronauts discovered one of the two crew ferry ships docked to the Tiangong station had a damaged window, likely from an impact with a small fragment of space junk. The crew members used a microscope to photograph the defect from different angles, confirming a small triangular area with a crack, Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told Chinese state media.

Astronauts made the discovery during a crew handover on the station, a few days after the arrival of a fresh three-person crew and just before the departure of three astronauts who had been in orbit since April. After engineers deemed the damaged Shenzhou 20 ship unsafe, Chinese space officials decided to send the outgoing crew back to Earth on the unblemished Shenzhou 21 spacecraft.

Shenzhou 21 successfully landed with its three occupants on November 14, but that still left three astronauts on the Tiangong station without a safe return craft. On the ground at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China’s remote Gobi Desert, technicians scrambled to ready a standby rocket and ship for launch as soon as possible.

A remarkable turnaround

“The mission command swiftly activated its contingency plan,” the China Manned Space Agency said in a statement. “The entire project team responded calmly and scientifically, with participating research and testing units working collaboratively to overcome challenges.”

The rapid turnaround offers a “successful example for efficient emergency response in the international space industry,” the space agency said. “It vividly embodies the spirit of manned spaceflight: exceptionally hardworking, exceptionally capable, exceptionally resilient, and exceptionally dedicated.”

Now, 20 days after the saga began, the Tiangong outpost again has a lifeboat for its long-term residents. Astronauts Zhang Lu, Fu Wei, and Zhang Hongzhang will return to Earth on the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft next year, soon after the arrival of their three replacements.

The Tiangong astronauts will head outside the station on a spacewalk to inspect the damaged window on Shenzhou 20. Eventually, Shenzhou 20 will depart Tiangong and reenter the atmosphere with cargo. Assuming a smooth landing, Chinese engineers will have an opportunity to get a closer look at the damage on the ground to inform the design of future spacecraft.

A preliminary assessment of the window indicates the crack is in the outermost layer of heat-insulating glass in Shenzhou 20’s porthole window, according to Chinese state media. Engineers on the ground conducted simulations and wind tunnel ablation tests to determine whether the window might fail during reentry. “The results showed that the cracks would still propagate further,” reported CCTV, China’s government-run television network.

“We held review meeting, and everyone agreed that ensuring the safe return of the astronauts was too risky with the glass damaged,” Zhou said.

While this crew is just one month into their planned six-month expedition, an emergency could force them to leave the station and return home at any time. Although remote, another collision with space junk, a major systems failure, or a medical emergency involving one of the astronauts could trigger an evacuation. That’s why Chinese officials wanted to quickly launch Shenzhou 22 to give the crew a ticket home.The International Space Station follows the same policy, with SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and Russian Soyuz ships serving as lifeboats until their crews’ scheduled return to Earth.

The situation with the damaged Shenzhou 20 spacecraft is a reminder of two recent incidents on the ISS. First, in 2022, a Soyuz crew ship that was docked at the ISS sprang a coolant leak—also due to a suspected space debris strike—spraying a shower of frozen crystals into space and rendering it unsafe to bring its crew home. Russia launched an empty replacement Soyuz two months later, and the damaged Soyuz MS-22 craft ultimately made a successful landing without a crew.

And then, last year, Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule suffered a series of helium leaks and propulsion problems that made NASA managers uncomfortable with its ability to safely return to Earth with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. The two astronauts remained on the ISS as Starliner made a successful uncrewed landing in September 2024, while SpaceX launched an already-scheduled Crew Dragon mission to the station with two of its four seats unoccupied. The Dragon spacecraft brought Wilmore and Williams home in March.

The incidents with Shenzhou 20 and Soyuz MS-22 highlight the risks of space junk in low-Earth orbit, especially tiny debris fragments that evade detection by tracking telescopes and radars. A minuscule piece of space debris traveling at several miles per second can pack a punch. Crews at the Tiangong outpost ventured outside the station multiple times in the last few years to install space debris shielding to protect the outpost from such impacts.

Luckily, the damage to Shenzhou 20’s window and Soyuz MS-22’s dramatic coolant leak were unmistakable. Tiny impacts on other unseen parts of a spacecraft would be more difficult to find.

China’s first human spaceflight emergency

It has been 22 years since China sent Yang Liwei, its first astronaut, into orbit on the Shenzhou 5 mission. Since then, China’s human spaceflight program has seemingly executed its missions like clockwork. Chinese astronauts performed the program’s first spacewalk in 2008, then China launched a pair of mini-space labs in 2011 and 2016, each hosting Shenzhou crews for stays lasting several weeks.

China started launching modules for Tiangong, its first permanently occupied space station, in 2021 and completed the lab’s initial assembly in 2022. Since then, Chinese astronauts have maintained a permanent presence in low-Earth orbit.

Chinese state media previously reported that the China Manned Space Agency, managed by the country’s military, kept a rocket and Shenzhou spacecraft on standby in the event of an emergency in space. Chinese officials tapped into this rescue capability with Shenzhou 22 this month.

China’s actions with the Shenzhou program this month are evidence of a mature human spaceflight program. In parallel with operations on the Tiangong space station, China is developing new rockets, a deep space capsule, and a human-rated lunar lander to carry astronauts to the Moon by 2030.

Updated at 4 pm EST (21:00 UTC) with more details from the China Manned Space Agency.

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Posted Wednesday 26 November 2025 at 12:47 pm AEST (my time).

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Our exploration of the outer Solar System has revealed a host of icy moons, many with surface features that suggest a complex geology. In some cases, these features—most notably the geysers of Enceladus—hint at the presence of oceans beneath the icy surfaces. These oceans have been ascribed to gravitational interactions that cause flexing and friction within the moon, creating enough heat to melt the body’s interior.

Something that has received a bit less attention is that some of these orbital interactions are temporary or cyclical. The orbits of any body are not always regular and often have long-term cycles. That’s also true for the other moons that provide the gravitational stress. As a result, the internal oceans may actually come and go, as the interiors of the moons melt and refreeze.

A new study, released today by Nature Astronomy, looks at one of the consequences of the difference in density between liquid water and ice (about 10 percent): the potential for the moon’s interior to shrink as it melts, leaving an area of low pressure immediately below its icy shell. If the moon is small enough, this study suggests, that could cause the surface of the ocean to boil.

Shifting ice

It can be tempting to think of the Solar System’s current configuration as being relatively static. But that’s definitely not the case; there are plenty of hints that the outer planets moved around a bit early in their history. And, even in its present state, the Earth experiences long-term orbital cycles that drive its entry to and exit from ice ages. The moon systems of the outer planets have the potential for even more complex interactions, with many individual bodies of varying sizes sharing space with a giant planet.

So, it’s easy to think that any oceans are the product of constant forces and were therefore always present. Or that the moons started out hot due to their formation and have been gradually cooling since. But the reality is that the tidal heating that drives the formation of these oceans can come and go over time and that the moons may experience periodic meltings and refreezings.

That can have significant consequences on the stresses experienced by the icy shells of these moons. Water is considerably more dense than ice. So, as a moon’s ocean freezes up, its interior will expand, creating outward forces that press against the gravity holding the moon together. The potential of this transition to shape the surface geology of a number of moons, including Europa and Enceladus, has already been explored. So, the researchers behind the new work decided to look at the opposite issue: what happens when the interior starts to melt?

Rather than focus on a specific moon, the team did a general model of an ice-covered ocean. This model treated the ice shell as an elastic surface, meaning it wouldn’t just snap, and placed viscous ice below that. Further down, there was a liquid ocean and eventually a rocky core. As the ice melted and the ocean expanded, the researchers tracked the stresses on the ice shell and the changes in pressure that occurred at the ice-ocean interface. They also tracked the spread of thermal energy through the ice shell.

Pressure drop

Obviously, there are limits to how much the outer shell can flex to accommodate the shrinking of the inner portions of the moon that are melting. This creates a low-pressure area under the shell. The consequences of this depend on the moon’s size. For larger moons—and this includes most of the moons the team looked at, including Europa—there were two options. For some, gravity is sufficiently strong to keep the pressure at a point where the water at the interface remains liquid. In others, the gravity was enough to cause even an elastic surface to fail, leading to surface collapse.

For smaller moons, however, this doesn’t work out; the pressure gets low enough that water will boil even at the ambient temperatures (just above the freezing point of water). In addition, the low pressure will likely cause any gases dissolved in the water to be released. The result is that gas bubbles should form at the ice-water interface. “Boiling is possible on these bodies—and not others—because they are small and have a relatively low gravitational acceleration,” the researchers conclude. “Consequently, less ocean underpressure is needed to counterbalance the [crustal] pressure.”

How small does a moon have to be? Only three of the moons they examined are likely to have boiling oceans. One of them is Enceladus, famed for the geysers it produces in its southern hemisphere. Two others are Mimas, a small moon of Saturn, and Miranda, which orbits Uranus. Mimas is especially intriguing, given that evidence suggests that it might have recently developed its ocean (at least recently in astronomical terms).

None of this requires an especially deep ocean. The researchers estimate that Enceladus would only need to melt an ocean about 14 km deep in order to create the conditions where boiling is possible; for Mimas, it’s only 5 kilometers.

The researchers are careful to acknowledge that we don’t really know the implications of this, writing, “The fate of vapor generated in a subsurface ocean is uncertain.” They suggest it could act a bit like the liquid magma does in our crust, forcing its way into fractures and imperfections in the icy crust. The water should be cool enough to condense there, while others gases released from the water should remain in the gaseous phase, potentially extending any fractures.

The real question is what any of this means from the perspective of the surface. It’s possible that the failure of the crust due to the lack of pressure will create different features from the ones you’d see being generated by gas-driven fracturing. Unfortunately, the three moons where that sort of event might be happening don’t look a whole lot like each other. So, it’s possible that we’ll need to have more examples than our Solar System can provide to get a clear picture of what’s going on.

Nature Astronomy, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02713-5 (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 26 November 2025 at 3:33 am AEST (my time).

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Like many mushroom harvesters, I got interested in foraging for fungi during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I had been preparing for a summer of field work studying foraged desert plants in a remote part of Australia when the pandemic hit, and my travel plans were abruptly frozen. It was March, right before morel mushrooms emerge in central Pennsylvania.

I wasn’t doing a lot other than going on long hikes and taking classes remotely at Penn State for my doctoral degree in ecology and anthropology. One of the classes was an agroforestry class with Eric Burkhart. We studied how agriculture and forests benefit people and the environment.

These two things eventually led to a yearslong project on mushroom harvesting in our region.

Why people forage

Foragers have been harvesting wild mushrooms in what is now Pennsylvania and the rest of the US mid-Atlantic region for generations, but the extent and specifics of the practice in the region had not been formally studied.

In 2021, Burkhart and I decided that we wanted to better understand the variety of wild mushroom species that Pennsylvania harvesters collect and what they use them for.

We conducted a series of surveys in 2022 and 2023 that revealed a wide variety of fungi are foraged in the region—though morels, chicken of the woods, and chanterelles are most common. We also learned that harvesters use the mushrooms primarily for food and medicinal purposes, and that foragers create communities that share knowledge. These community-based projects often use social media tools as a way for mushroom harvesters to share pictures, notes, and even the results of DNA sequences.

Our findings were published in the journal Economic Botany in October 2025.

160 species

Having spent a year building connections with local mushroom harvesters, starting in central Pennsylvania, including members of mushroom clubs and mycological associations, we recruited a diverse group of harvesters from around the mid-Atlantic. We also used mushroom festivals, social media, and word of mouth to get the word out.

We asked harvesters about their favorite mushrooms, common harvesting practices, resources they used while harvesting, and any sustainability practices.

Over 800 harvesters responded to the survey and reported that, collectively, they foraged 160 species of wild mushrooms. Morels and chicken of the woods were the two most popular, as each were reported by 13 percent of respondents. About 10 percent of respondents reported collecting chanterelles. Other popular species were hen of the woods, oysters, lion’s mane, black trumpet, honey mushroom, turkey tail, bolete, reishi, puffball, chaga, shrimp of the woods, and Dryad’s saddle, which is also known as the pheasant’s back mushroom.

Harvesters reported a variety of reasons for collecting mushrooms. Many collected morels and chanterelles to eat, and species such as turkey tail, reishi, and chaga for medicinal purposes. Art was another common reason cited for foraging, with photography being the most popular use, followed by using mushrooms to create natural dyes and pigments.

Other survey respondents said they foraged to feel more connected to nature. And while there is a thriving commercial wild mushroom industry in the region, we found that only a small minority of harvesters sell their mushrooms. Most people reported giving their mushrooms to friends, neighbors, and family.

Citizen science

We also wanted to better understand which resources mushroom harvesters turn to in order to learn more about this hobby. We asked all the harvesters what they used as a resource when they were first learning to hunt for mushrooms. A quarter of new harvesters said they used the “the internet,” followed by “family,” at 24 percent, and then guidebooks, at 20 percent.

Based on the survey responses, we also learned that mushroom-identification phone apps are growing in popularity, especially among new harvesters. For example, a commonly used app called iNaturalist allows harvesters to upload a few pictures of their find—one of the mushroom in its habitat, another of the underside of the cap, and a third of the entire mushroom. From there, other community members can comment and help with identification.

Harvesters also use these apps to contribute to community science projects that document biodiversity.

Some mushrooms are poisonous if eaten, which is part of why harvesters are so careful with their identification. When learning a new mushroom species, it’s important to look into multiple sources to make sure what you’re harvesting is safe to eat.

With more harvesters documenting their findings on social media and sharing information about fungal biodiversity in the region, there is much to glean and learn about the diverse world of mushrooms in the mid-Atlantic. We believe that deeper collaboration between community groups and researchers at universities and other institutions is an opportunity for scientific growth within the field of mycology. This collaboration can support long-term tracking of fungal populations and any impact that harvesters might have on them.

Amy Wrobleski, PhD candidate in Ecology and Anthropology, Penn State. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Posted Wednesday 26 November 2025 at 3:32 am AEST (my time).

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The emergence of synthetic pigments in the 19th century had an immense impact on the art world, particularly the availability of emerald-green pigments, prized for their intense brilliance by such masters as Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and Claude Monet. The downside was that these pigments often degraded over time, resulting in cracks and uneven surfaces and the formation of dark copper oxides—even the release of arsenic compounds.

Naturally, it’s a major concern for conservationists of such masterpieces. So it should be welcome news that European researchers have used synchrotron radiation and various other analytical tools to determine whether light and/or humidity are the culprits behind that degradation and how, specifically, it occurs, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

Science has become a valuable tool for art conservationists, especially various X-ray imaging methods. For instance, in 2019, we reported on how many of the oil paintings at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had been developing tiny, pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Chemists concluded that the blisters are actually metal carboxylate soaps, the result of a chemical reaction between metal ions in the lead and zinc pigments and fatty acids in the binding medium used in the paint. The soaps start to clump together to form the blisters and migrate through the paint film.

Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil-based masterpieces across all time periods, including in works by Rembrandt. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has an ongoing project to determine the causes and mechanisms of metal soap formations on traditional oil paintings. And in 2023, researchers with the Rijksmuseum’s Operation Night Watch found rare traces of a compound called lead formate in that Rembrandt painting. In March 2022, scientists studied the deterioration of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Gypsy Woman with Mandolin (circa 1870). They used three complementary techniques to analyze paint samples under infrared light to determine the composition of the damaging metal carboxylate soaps that had formed on the top layer of paint.

Perhaps most relevant to this current paper is a 2020 study in which scientists analyzed Munch’s The Scream, which was showing alarming signs of degradation. They concluded the damage was not the result of exposure to light, but humidity—specifically, from the breath of museum visitors, perhaps as they lean in to take a closer look at the master’s brushstrokes.

Let there be (X-ray) light

Co-author Letizia Monico during the experiments at the European Synchrotron.

ESRF

 

Co-author Annelies Rios Casier (University of Antwerp) performing a micro-sampling from a green area of The Intrigue.

Lies Vanbiervliet

 

Photomicrographs of paint fragments taken from two altered emerald-green areas of The Intrigue, analyzed 

using vibrational spectroscopy techniques and advanced synchrotron technique methods.

Miliani et al., 2025

 

Emerald-green pigments are particularly prone to degradation, so that’s the pigment the authors of this latest paper decided to analyze. “It was already known that emerald-green decays over time, but we wanted to understand exactly the role of light and humidity in this degradation,” said co-author Letizia Monico of the University of Perugia in Italy.

The first step was to collect emerald-green paint microsamples with a scalpel and stereomicroscope from an artwork of that period—in this case, The Intrigue (1890) by James Ensor, currently housed in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, in Antwerp, Belgium. The team analyzed the untreated samples using Fourier transform infrared imaging, then embedded the samples in polyester resin for synchrotron radiation X-ray analysis. They conducted separate analyses on both commercial and historical samples of emerald-green pigment powders and paint tubes, including one from a museum collection of paint tubes used by Munch.

Next, the authors created their own paint mockups by mixing commercial emerald-green pigment powders and their lab-made powders with linseed oil, and then applied the concoctions to polycarbonate substrates. They also squeezed paint from the Munch paint tube onto a substrate. Once the mockups were dry, thin samples were sliced from each mockup and also analyzed with synchrotron radiation. Then the mockups were subjected to two aging protocols designed to determine the effects of UV light (to simulate indoor lighting) and humidity on the pigments.

The results: In the mockups, light and humidity trigger different degradation pathways in emerald-green paints. Humidity results in the formation of arsenolite, making the paint brittle and prone to flaking. Light dulls the color by causing trivalent arsenic already in the pigment to oxidize into pentavalent compounds, forming a thin white layer on the surface. Those findings are consistent with the analyzed samples taken from The Intrigue, confirming the degradation is due to photo-oxidation. Light, it turns out, is the greatest threat to that particular painting, and possibly other masterpieces from the same period.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ady1807  (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 25 November 2025 at 4:57 pm AEST (my time).

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The US space agency ended months of speculation about the next flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, confirming Monday that the vehicle will carry only cargo to the International Space Station.

NASA and Boeing are now targeting no earlier than April 2026 to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission, the space agency said. Launching by next April will require completion of rigorous test, certification, and mission readiness activities, NASA added in a statement.

“NASA and Boeing are continuing to rigorously test the Starliner propulsion system in preparation for two potential flights next year,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, in a statement.

Reducing crewed missions

NASA also said it has reached an agreement with Boeing to modify the Commercial Crew contract, signed in 2014, that called for six crewed flights to the space station following certification of the spacecraft. Now the plan is to fly Starliner-1 carrying cargo, and then up to three additional missions before the space station is retired.

“This modification allows NASA and Boeing to focus on safely certifying the system in 2026, execute Starliner’s first crew rotation when ready, and align our ongoing flight planning for future Starliner missions based on station’s operational needs through 2030,” Stich said.

SpaceX and Boeing were both awarded contracts in 2014 to develop crewed spacecraft and fly six operational missions to the space station. SpaceX, with its Crew Dragon vehicle, flew a successful crew test flight in mid-2020 and its first operational mission before the end of that year. Most recently, the Crew-11 mission launched in August, with Crew-12 presently scheduled for February 15.

Dragon has served as a reliable transport system for NASA as Boeing has faced development struggles.

Starliner’s first flight in December 2019, without crew, had to be truncated after software problems plagued the vehicle. It was nearly lost shortly after launch as well as before atmospheric reentry. It did not make a planned rendezvous with the space station.

The second mission, Orbital Flight Test 2, took place in May 2022. Because of problems on the previous mission, this spacecraft also flew uncrewed. This flight was more successful, reaching the space station despite some thruster issues.

Orbital Flight Test 3?

NASA then spent more than two years testing Starliner on the ground before its first crewed flight in 2024, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. During its approach to the space station, the Starliner spacecraft once again experienced serious thruster issues. (However, the life-and-death nature of this flight was not revealed until nearly a year later.) Starliner ultimately docked with the station, but after heated deliberations, NASA informed Boeing that the vehicle would return to Earth uncrewed.

As a result, a Dragon mission was launched later in 2024 carrying just two astronauts instead of a full complement of four. This allowed for the safe return of Wilmore and Williams in March 2025.

Since then, it has appeared likely that Boeing would be required to fly an uncrewed mission to demonstrate the safety of Starliner’s propulsion system, but this was not confirmed until Monday.

NASA has remained largely mum about the changes made to Boeing’s propulsion system and the tests it has undergone on the ground. Part of the problem with diagnosing the thruster issues is that the problems occurred in the “service module” portion of the spacecraft, which is jettisoned before the vehicle reenters Earth’s atmosphere and returns to Earth.

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Posted Tuesday 25 November 2025 at 4:56 pm AEST (my time).

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LAS VEGAS—Formula 1 held the third annual Las Vegas Grand Prix this past weekend in the Nevada city. The race is an outlier in so many ways, and a divisive one at that. Some love the bright lights that make it appear to be set in Mega-City One or F-Zero. Others resent the rampant commercialism of F1 at its most excessive. And this time, Ars was on the ground, making one of our periodic visits to the series. The race we saw was something of a damp squib, seemingly leaving McLaren’s Lando Norris in control of the championship.

At least that’s how it looked when I left the track on Saturday night. Within a few hours, Norris and his teammate (and one of his two title rivals) Oscar Piastri were both disqualified for having worn away too much of the “legality plank” underneath the car—more on that in a while.

Emblematic of the new F1

Unlike most Grands Prix, Liberty Media promotes this one itself. It spent half a billion dollars to get ready for the 2023 event, some of that on the pit lane and paddock complex, yet more on resurfacing the roads to the standards preferred by these thoroughbred racing cars. The track layout—which looks like a pig on its back—is typical of North American street circuits.

In other words, mostly long straights joined by slow, 90-degree corners. There are a couple of exceptions; technically, turn 17 is the fastest corner in the series. Cars negotiate this bend at more than 210 mph (337 km/h) in the dry, although the drivers scarcely register it as a corner in such conditions. On wet roads, it’s a different story, and this year we got to see what that was like as heavy rain deluged the city in the days leading up to the race.

With so many slow corners, and a very long run down Las Vegas Boulevard from turn 12 to turn 14, the cars run in the same specification as at Monza, wearing low-profile wings and generating as little downforce as possible. The track surface doesn’t generate much mechanical grip from the tires at first—as the race weekend progresses, there is a significant amount of “track evolution” as daily road grime gets replaced with a layer of rubber deposited by the Pirelli racing tires.

Then there’s the temperatures. The desert gets quite chilly in November without the sun shining on things, and the track surface gets down to just 11° C (52° F); by contrast, at the recent Singapore GP, also at night, the track temperature was more like 36° C (97° F).

So, low aero and mechanical grip, an unusual layout compared to most F1 tracks, and very cold temperatures all combine to create potential surprises, shaking up the usual running order.

We saw this last year, where the Mercedes shined in the cold, able to keep their tires in the right operating window, something the team wasn’t able to do at hotter races. But it was hard to tell much from Thursday’s two practice sessions, one of which was interrupted due to problems with a maintenance hatch, albeit not as serious as when one damaged a Ferrari in 2023. The cars looked impressively fast going through turn 17, and the hybrid power units are a little louder than I remember them, even if they’re not a patch on the naturally aspirated engines of old.

Very little of any use was learned by any of the teams for qualifying on Friday night, which took place in at times damp, at times wet conditions—so wet that the Pirelli intermediate tire wasn’t grooved enough, pushing teams to use the full wet-weather spec rubber. Norris took pole from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, with Williams’ Carlos Sainz making best use of the opportunity to grab third. Piastri would start fifth, behind the Mercedes of last year’s winner, George Russell.

If the race is boring, the off-track action won’t be

Race night was a little windy, but dry. And the race itself was rather boring—Norris tried to defend pole position going into Turn 1 but ran wide, and Verstappen slipped into the lead, never looking back. Norris followed him home in second, with Piastri fourth, leaving Norris 30 points ahead of Piastri and 42 points ahead of Verstappen with two more race weekends and 58 points left on offer.

Then, a few hours later, drama struck. Some of F1’s appeal is as a high-speed soap opera, particularly when the actual racing is boring (which it often has been in the past), and this weekend was no exception.

Both McLarens were disqualified in the post-race technical inspection for showing illegal amounts of wear to the legality plank that every F1 car is mandated to carry on its floor. The planks were first introduced in 1994 in the wake of Ayrton Senna’s and Roland Ratzenberger’s deaths as a way to prevent teams from running their cars too low to the ground. At the end of the race, the 10 mm-thick planks are allowed to show no more than 1 mm of wear—any more than that, and you’re out.

As backdrops go, this one is pretty dramatic.

Clive Mason/Getty Images

 

Lando Norris (L) and Max Verstappen (R) rode in a full-size Lego Cadillac during the driver’s parade.

Mark Thompson/Getty Images

 

You really can't ever count this guy out.

Clive Rose/Getty Images

 

But they’re not wood. When the planks were introduced, they were made of an engineered wood composite called Jabroc, but more recently the sport switched to a glass-fiber composite called Permaglass.

Both Norris’ and Piastri’s cars were worn beyond 1 mm, although not very much more than that. It’s not the first time this has happened to a car this season—Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton suffered the same fate at the Chinese Grand Prix. That leaves Norris still leading the championship, still on 390 points, with the same 24-point gap back to Piastri as before.

But now Verstappen is level-pegged with Piastri on 366 points. You get 25 for a win in F1, and another eight if you can win the sprint, so another bad weekend for Norris, coupled with a win for either of his rivals, would make things very interesting at the final round in Abu Dhabi. One thing’s for certain, though, if you wanted to script a dazzling championship comeback with as much drama as possible, setting up for an explosive season finale, this is probably how you’d do it.

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Posted Tuesday 25 November 2025 at 3:56 am AEST (my time).

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The company that pioneered small launch has had a big year.

Rocket Lab broke its annual launch record with the Electron booster—17 successful missions this year, and counting—and is close to bringing its much larger Neutron rocket to the launch pad.

The company also expanded its in-space business, including playing a key role in supporting the landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission on the Moon and building two small satellites just launched to Mars.

Overall, it has been quite a ride for the company founded nearly two decades ago in New Zealand by Peter Beck. A new book about the company’s origins and aspirations, The Launch of Rocket Lab, tells the story of the company’s rise in words and grand images.

Ars recently spoke with Beck about Rocket Lab’s past, present, and future. This interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

Ars: In reading through the book and considering the history of Rocket Lab, I’m continually amazed that a handful of engineers in the country with no space program, no space heritage, built the world’s second most accomplished commercial launch company. What do you attribute that success to?

Peter Beck: It’s hard to know. But there’s a few elements within Rocket Lab that have always remained steadfast, no matter what we do or how big we get. And I think a lot of space companies have tried to see how much they can get away with. And it turns out, in this industry, you just can’t get away with taking very many shortcuts at all. So I think that’s part of it. The attitude of our organization is like, nothing’s too big, nothing’s too hard. We just make it happen. The team works extremely hard. If you drive past the Rocket Lab car park on a Sunday, it looks just like the SpaceX car park on a Sunday. And, you know, the team is very mission-driven. They’re always fighting for a goal, which I think is important. And then, above anything, I just think we can never outspend Elon (Musk) and Jeff (Bezos). We have to out-hustle. And that’s just the reality. The Rocket Lab hustle comes down to just not accepting no as an answer. If a barrier comes up a lot of space companies, or a lot of companies in general, whether its regulatory or technical, it’s easy to submit to the problem, rather than just continue to attack it.

Ars: Electron keeps going. In fact, you’ve just flown a record 17th mission this year, and you continue to sign large deals. How has Electron survived the era of rideshare missions on the Falcon 9?

Beck: We’ve always had the thesis that there is a need for a dedicated small launch. You can put as many Bandwagons and as many Transporters as you want, and you can reduce the price to unsustainably low levels as long as you want. It doesn’t make any difference to us, because it’s a totally different product. As folks are building out constellations, it’s no use just getting dumped out in one orbit. So a lot of Electrons these days are just building out constellations for folks where they have optimized for a specific altitude and inclination and so forth. And we can hit those every time. And if you amortize the cost of launch over the actual lifetime of that constellation and the service that it can provide, it’s cheap, and it’s something rideshares can never deliver.

Ars: It’s surprising to me that after so many years and so many startups, there really isn’t a viable competitor in Electron’s class anywhere in the world.

Beck: It’s pretty hard to build a small rocket. I call it the pressure transducer equilibrium. A pressure transducer on a little rocket is a meaningful amount of mass. A pressure transducer on Neutron is totally irrelevant. Just throw 10 at them, and who cares? But on Electron, if you throw 10 pressure transducers at a problem, then you know, you’ve added a kilo. That’s a meaningful portion of the lift capacity of the vehicle. And there’s no super-magic store where you can go and buy a pressure transducer that scales with the size of the rocket. So you end up with a bunch of stuff that just doesn’t scale, that contributes meaningful mass to the vehicle. If you look at Electron’s payload performance, it’s really high for the size of that rocket. So that’s really hard to do because in an instance where you would throw 10 pressure transducers at a problem, we can only afford to throw one at Electron, but we still want the same redundancy and the same reliability and all of those kinds of things. So that just drives really, really difficult engineering solutions.

And then from a financial standpoint, it’s got a sticker price of $8.5 million, let’s call it. Your flight safety team doesn’t care if it’s a big rocket or a little rocket. Your range team doesn’t care if they’re opening a 12-inch valve or a 2-inch valve. All those teams just have to become ruthlessly efficient at doing that work. So if you go to a big rocket, you might have a flight safety team of 20 people. You come here, it has to be like three. So you have to find ways of really streamlining all those processes. And every little person and dollar and gram has to be ringed out.

Rocket Lab launches an Electron booster with a previously flown engine on Thursday.

Credit: Rocket Lab

Ars: What’s going on with the Electron reuse program? My sense is that you’ve kind of learned what you needed to know and are moving on.

Beck: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. It was a hugely valuable learning tool, but if you look at an Electron recovery, we might recover sort of a million dollars worth of stage one booster. And of course, the more we make, the cheaper they get, because we’re continuing to scale so that it’s ever decreasing that return. Quite frankly, and honestly, it’s just like, do we have reusability and recovery teams working on something that returns a million dollars every time it flies? Or, do we have them working on Neutron, where it’s tens of millions of dollars every time you fly? So it’s just about, you know, directing the resource for the biggest bang for the buck.

Ars: I listened to your recent earnings call where you discussed Neutron’s development and delay into 2026. What are the biggest issues you face in getting Neutron over the finish line?

Beck: It would be actually easier if there was an issue, because then I could just say something blew up, or this is a problem. But there’s no real issues. It’s just that we’re not going to put something on the pad that doesn’t meet kind of the standard that’s made us successful. Say something might pass the qualification test, but if we see something in a strain gauge on the back of the panel, or something that we don’t understand, we just don’t move on. We’re not going to move on unless we understand every little element of what’s going on. Maybe I’m on some kind of spectrum for details, but that’s what’s kept us successful. It’s just a bigger rocket, and it’s got more unique features like hungry hippo (the payload fairing opening mechanism) and giant carbon structures. So, you know, it’s not like anything has shit the bed. It’s just a big machine, and there’s some new stuff, and we want to make sure we don’t lose the magic of what we created. A little bit of time now can save a huge amount of heartbreak later on.

Ars: Toward the end of the book, you say that Rocket Lab is best positioned to compete with SpaceX in medium-lift launch, and break up the Falcon 9 monopoly. What is your sense of the competitive landscape going forward? We just saw a New Glenn launch and land, and that was really impressive—

Beck: Bloody impressive. Jeff (Bezos) laid down a new bar. That was incredible. People forget that he’s been working on it for 22 years, but even so, that was impressive.

Ars: Yes, it’s been a journey for them. Anyway, there’s also Vulcan, but that’s only flown one time this year, so they’ve got a ways to go. Then Stoke and Relativity are working at it. What’s your view of your competition going forward?

Beck: I hate comparing it to aviation, but I call medium-class lifters the Boeing 737 of the industry. Then you got your A380s, which are your Starships and your New Glenns. And then you’ve got your Electrons, which are your private jets. And you know, if you look at the aviation sector, nobody comes in and just brings an airplane in and wipes everybody out, because there’s different needs and different missions. And just like there’s a 737 there’s an A320 and that’s kind of what Neutron is intending to be. We had a tremendous pull from our customers, both government and commercial, for alternatives to what’s out there.

The other thing to remember is, for our own aspirations, we need a high-cadence, reusable, low-cost, multi-ton lift capability. I think I’ve been clear that I think the large space companies of the future are going to be a little bit blurry. Are they a space company, or are they something else? But there’s one thing that is absolutely sure, that if you have multi-ton access to orbit in a reusable, low-cost way, it’s going to be very, very difficult to compete with if you’re someone who doesn’t have that capability. And if you look at our friends at SpaceX, yeah, Starlinks are great satellites and all the rest of it. But what really enabled Starlink was the Falcon 9. Launch is a difficult business. It’s kind of lumpy and deeply complex, but at the end of the day, it is the access to orbit. And, you know, having multi-ton access to orbit is just critical. If you’re thinking that you want to try and build one of the biggest space companies in the world, then you just have to have that.

Ars: Rocket Lab has expressed interest in Mars recently, both the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter and a Mars Sample Return mission. As Jared Isaacman and NASA think about commercial exploration of Mars, what would you tell them about what Rocket Lab could bring to the table?

Beck: I’m a great believer that government should do things for which it makes no sense for commercial entities to do, and commercial should do the things that it makes no sense for governments to do. Consider Mars Sample Return, we looked at that, and the plan was $11 billion and 20 years? It’s just, come on. It was crazy. And I don’t want to take the shine off. It is a deeply technical, deeply difficult mission to do. But it can be done, and it can be done commercially, and it can be done at a fraction of the price. So let industry have at it.

And look, Eric, I love planetary science, right? I love exploring the planets, and I think that if you have a space company that’s capable of doing it, it’s almost your duty for the knowledge of the species to go and do those sorts of things. Now, we’re a publicly traded company, so we have to make margin along the way. We’ve proven we can do that. Look at ESCAPADE. All up, it was like $50 million cost, launched, and on its way to Mars. I mean, that’s the sort of thing we need to be doing, right? That’s great bang for your buck. And you know, as you mentioned, we’re pushing hard on the MTO. The reality is that if you’re going to do anything on Mars, whether it’s scientific or human, you’ve got to have the comms there. It’s just basic infrastructure you’ve got to have there first. It’s all very well to do all the sexy stuff and put some humans in a can and send them off to Mars. That’s great. But everybody expects the communication just to be there, and you’ve got to put the foundations in first. So we think that’s a really important mission, and something that we can do, and something we can contribute to the first humans landing on Mars.

Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is shown in this rendering delivering a stack of satellites into orbit.

Credit: Rocket Lab

Ars: You mentioned ESCAPADE. How’s your relationship with Jeff Bezos? I heard there was some tension last year because Rocket Lab was being asked to prepare the satellite for launch, even when it was clear New Glenn was not going to make the Mars window.

Beck: I know you want me to say yes, there is, but the honest truth is absolutely zero. I know David (Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO) super well. We’re great friends. Jeff and I were texting backwards and forwards during the launch. There’s just honestly none. And you know that they gave us a great ride. They were bang on the numbers. It was awesome. Yeah, sure, it would have been great to get there early. But it’s a rocket program, right? Nobody can show me a rocket program that turned up exactly on time. And yep, it may have been obvious that it might not have been able to launch on the first (window), but we knew there’s always other ways. Worst-case scenario, we have to go into storage for a little bit. These missions are years and years long. So what’s a little bit longer?

Ars: Speaking of low-cost science missions, I know Isaacman is interested in commercial planetary missions. Lots of $4 billion planetary missions just aren’t sustainable. If NASA commits to commercial development of satellite buses and spacecraft like it did to commercial cargo and crew, what could planetary exploration look like a decade from now?

Beck: I think that’d be tremendously exciting. One of the reasons why we did CAPSTONE was to prove that you can go to the Moon for $10 million. Now, we lost a lot of money on that mission, so that ultimately didn’t prove to be true. But it wasn’t crazy amounts, and we still got there miles cheaper than anybody else could have ever got there. And ESCAPADE, we have good margins on, and it’s just a true success, right? Touch wood to date, like we’ve got a long way to go, but success in the fact that the spacecraft were built, delivered, launched, and commissioned.

This is the thing. Take your billion-dollar mission. How many $50 million missions, or $100 million missions, could you do? Imagine the amount of science you can do. I think part of the reason why the public gets jaded with some of these science missions is because they happen once a decade, and they’ve got billions of dollars of price tags attached to them. It’s kind of transitorily exciting when they happen, but they’re so far apart. In the end of the day, NASA has to capture the public’s imagination, because the public are funding it. So it has to seem relevant, relevant to mum and dad at home. And you know, when mum and dad are home and it’s tough, and then they just hear billions of dollars and, you know, years of overrun and all the rest of it, how can they feel good about that? Whereas, if they can spend much less and deliver it on time and have a constant stream of really interesting missions in science, I think that it’s great for public justification. I think it’s great for planetary science, because obviously you’re iterating on your results, and it’s great for the whole community to just have a string of missions. And also, I think it’s great for US space supremacy to be blasting around the Solar System all the time, rather than just now and again.

Ars: Ok Pete, it’s November 18. How confident should we be in a Neutron launch next year? 50/50?

Beck: Hopefully better than 50/50. That would be a definite fail. We’re taking the time to get it right. I always caveat anything, Eric, that it’s a rocket program, and we’ve got some big tests in front of us. But to date, if you look at the program, it’s been super smooth; like we haven’t exploded tanks, we haven’t exploded engines. We haven’t had any major failure, especially when we’re pushing some new boundaries and some new technology. So I think it’s going really, really smoothly, and as long as it continues to go smoothly, then I think we’re in good shape.

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Posted Tuesday 25 November 2025 at 3:54 am AEST (my time).

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The Shenzhou-22 is being sent to China's space station Tiangong to replace the Shenzhou-21, which was forced to return to Earth six months before schedule after another vessel docked at the station was damaged.

The early departure of the Shenzhou-21 has left Tiangong and a trio of Chinese astronauts manning it without a flightworthy vessel for 10 days so far, an unprecedented situation for the space station since it began full operations in late 2022.

This means that if the space station suffers an emergency while in orbit, its three residents would have no way to evacuate.
With the Shenzhou-22 set to remove this risk, it remains to be seen how Chinese space authorities will handle the damaged Shenzhou-20 vessel, which experts have suggested could be undocked from Tiangong and de-orbited over the Pacific.

The Shenzhou-22 will be sent up from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, according to a statement from China Manned Space Agency, as with all other recent Shenzhou missions.

The key difference with its predecessors is that this launch will be unmanned, a necessary condition to avoid exceeding Tiangong's ideal capacity of three long-term residents.

This means that China's next crewed spaceflight mission, scheduled for around April next year, will likely be the Shenzhou-23.
Earlier in the month, damage sustained by the Shenzhou-20 led its crew to stay aboard the space station an extra nine days with the newly arrived Shenzhou-21 crew, forcing Tiangong to operate at its maximum capacity of six for longer than usual.

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AI systems have recently had a lot of success in one key aspect of biology: the relationship between a protein’s structure and its function. These efforts have included the ability to predict the structure of most proteins and to design proteins structured so that they perform useful functions. But all of these efforts are focused on the proteins and amino acids that build them.

But biology doesn’t generate new proteins at that level. Instead, changes have to take place at the nucleic acid level before eventually making their presence felt at the protein level. And the DNA level is fairly removed from proteins, with lots of critical non-coding sequences, redundancy, and a fair degree of flexibility. It’s not necessarily obvious that learning the organization of a genome would help an AI system figure out how to make functional proteins.

But it now seems like using bacterial genomes for the training can help develop a system that can predict proteins, some of which don’t look like anything we’ve ever seen before.

Training a genome model

The new work was done by a small team at Stanford University. It relies on a feature that’s common in bacterial genomes: the clustering of genes with related functions. Often, bacteria have all the genes needed for a given function—importing and digesting a sugar, synthesizing an amino acid, etc.—right next to each other in the genome. In many cases, all the genes are transcribed into a single, large messenger RNA. This gives the bacteria a simple way to control the activity of entire biochemical pathways at once, boosting the efficiency of bacterial metabolisms.

So, the researchers developed what they term a “genomic language model” they call Evo on an enormous collection of bacterial genomes. The training was similar to what you’d see in a large language model, where Evo was asked to output predictions of the next base in a sequence, and rewarded when it got it right. It’s also a generative model, in that it can take a prompt and output novel sequences with a degree of randomness, in the sense that the same prompt can produce a range of different outputs.

The researchers argue that this setup lets Evo “link nucleotide-level patterns to kilobase-scale genomic context.” In other words, if you prompt it with a large chunk of genomic DNA, Evo can interpret that as an LLM would interpret a query and produce an output that, in a genomic sense, is appropriate for that interpretation.

The researchers reasoned that, given the training on bacterial genomes, they could use a known gene as a prompt, and Evo should produce an output that includes regions that encode proteins with related functions. The key question is whether it would simply output the sequences for proteins we know about already, or whether it would come up with output that’s less predictable.

Novel proteins

To start testing the system, the researchers prompted it with fragments of the genes for known proteins and determined whether Evo could complete them. In one example, if given 30 percent of the sequence of a gene for a known protein, Evo was able to output 85 percent of the rest. When prompted with 80 percent of the sequence, it could return all of the missing sequence. When a single gene was deleted from a functional cluster, Evo could also correctly identify and restore the missing gene.

The large amount of training data also ensured that Evo correctly identified the most important regions of the protein. If it made changes to the sequence, they typically resided in the areas of the protein where variability is tolerated. In other words, its training had enabled the system to incorporate the rules of evolutionary limits on changes in known genes.

So, the researchers decided to test what happened when Evo was asked to output something new. To do so, they used bacterial toxins, which are typically encoded along with an anti-toxin that keeps the cell from killing itself whenever it activates the genes. There are a lot of examples of these out there, and they tend to evolve rapidly as part of an arms race between bacteria and their competitors. So, the team developed a toxin that was only mildly related to known ones, and had no known antitoxin, and fed its sequence to Evo as a prompt. And this time, they filtered out any responses that looked similar to known antitoxin genes.

Testing 10 of the outputs returned by Evo, they found half were able to rescue some toxicity, and two of them fully restored growth to bacteria that were producing the toxin. These two antitoxins had only extremely weak similarity to known anti-toxins, at about 25 percent sequence identity. And they weren’t simply formed by pasting together a handful of pieces of known anti-toxins; at a minimum, they appeared to be assembled from parts of 15 to 20 individual proteins. In an additional test, the output would have been needed to have been patched together from parts of 40 known proteins.

Evo’s success wasn’t limited to proteins. When they tested a different toxin that had an RNA-based inhibitor, the system could output DNA that encodes RNAs with the right structural features, even if the specific sequence wasn’t closely related to anything known.

Completely new proteins

The team performed a similar test with inhibitors of the CRISPR system, which we use for gene editing, but bacteria evolved as a form of protection from viruses. The naturally occurring CRISPR inhibitors are very diverse, with many of them seemingly unrelated to each other. Once again, the team filtered the outputs to only include those that encoded proteins and filtered out any of those proteins that looked like something we already knew about. Of the list of outputs they made proteins from, 17 managed to inhibit CRISPR function. Two of those were distinctive in that they had no similarity to any known proteins and confused software that is designed to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins.

In other words, along with the sorts of outputs you’d expect, Evo appears to be capable of outputting entirely new yet functional proteins. And it seems to do so without taking any consideration of the structure of the protein into account.

Given that their system appears to work, the researchers decided to prompt it with just about everything: 1.7 million individual genes from bacteria and the viruses that prey on them. The result is 120 billion base pairs of AI-generated DNA, some of it containing genes we already knew about, some of it presumably containing truly novel stuff. It’s not clear to me how anyone would productively use this resource, but I’d imagine there are some creative biologists who will think of something.

It’s not clear that this approach will work with more complex genomes, like the one we’ve got. Organisms like vertebrates mostly don’t cluster genes with related functions, and their genes have far more intricate structures that might confuse a system that’s trying to learn the statistical rules of base frequencies. And, to be clear, it solves different problems from the sort of directed design efforts that have developed enzymes that do useful things like digesting plastics.

That said, it’s still kind of amazing that this works at all. And conceptually, it’s intriguing because it brings the issue of finding functional proteins down to the nucleic acid level, where evolution normally does its thing.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09749-7  (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 22 November 2025 at 4:06 pm AEST (my time).

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Today all that’s left of the ancient city of Semiyarka are a few low earthen mounds and some scattered artifacts, nearly hidden beneath the waving grasses of the Kazakh Steppe, a vast swath of grassland that stretches across northern Kazakhstan and into Russia. But recent surveys and excavations reveal that 3,500 years ago, this empty plain was a bustling city with a thriving metalworking industry, where nomadic herders and traders might have mingled with settled metalworkers and merchants.

Welcome to the City of Seven Ravines

University College of London archaeologist Miljana Radivojevic and her colleagues recently mapped the site with drones and geophysical surveys (like ground-penetrating radar, for example), tracing the layout of a 140-hectare city on the steppe in what’s now Kazakhstan.

The Bronze Age city once boasted rows of houses built on earthworks, a large central building, and a neighborhood of workshops where artisans smelted and cast bronze. From its windswept promontory, it held a commanding view of a narrow point in the Irtysh River valley, a strategic location that may have offered the city “control over movement along the river and valley bottom,” according to Radivojevic and her colleagues. That view inspired archaeologists’ name for the city: Semiyarka, or City of Seven Ravines.

Archaeologists have known about the site since the early 2000s, when the US Department of Defense declassified a set of photographs taken by its Corona spy satellite in 1972, when Kazakhstan was a part of the Soviet Union and the US was eager to see what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Those photos captured the outlines of Semiyarka’s kilometer-long earthworks, but the recent surveys reveal that the Bronze Age city was much larger and much more interesting than anyone realized.

This 1972 Corona image shows the outlines of Semiyarka's foundations.

Radivojevic et al. 2025

 

This elevation map, using radar from a NASA satellite, shows Semiyarka's position overlooking the river valley.

Radivojevic et al. 2025

 

A drone photo of Semiyarka, looking from southeast to northwest.

Radivojevic et al. 2025

When in doubt, it’s potentially monumental

Most people on the sparsely populated steppe 3,500 years ago stayed on the move, following trade routes or herds of livestock and living in temporary camps or small seasonal villages. If you were a time-traveler looking for ancient cities, the steppe just isn’t where you’d go, and that’s what makes Semiyarka so surprising.

A few groups of people, like the Alekseeva-Sargary, were just beginning to embrace the idea of permanent homes (and their signature style of pottery lies in fragments all over what’s left of Semiyarka). The largest ancient settlements on the steppe covered around 30 hectares—nowhere near the scale of Semiyarka. And Radivojevic and her colleagues say that the layout of the buildings at Semiyarka “is unusual… deviating from more conventional settlement patterns observed in the region.”

What’s left of the city consists mostly of two rows of earthworks: kilometer-long rectangles of earth, piled a meter high. The geophysical survey revealed that “substantial walls, likely of mud-brick, were built along the inside edges of the earthworks, with internal divisions also visible.” In other words, the long mounds of earth were the foundations of rows of buildings with rooms. Based on the artifacts unearthed there, Radivojevic and her colleagues say most of those buildings were probably homes.

The two long earthworks meet at a corner, and just behind that intersection sits a larger mound, about twice the size of any of the individual homes. Based on the faint lines traced by aerial photos and the geophysical survey, it may have had a central courtyard or chamber. In true archaeologist fashion, Durham University archaeologist Dan Lawrence, a coauthor of the recent paper, describes the structure as “potentially monumental,” which means it may have been a space for rituals or community gatherings, or maybe the home of a powerful family.

The city’s layout suggests “a degree of architectural planning,” as Radivojevic and her colleagues put it in their recent paper. The site also yielded evidence of trading with nomadic cultures, as well as bronze production on an industrial scale. Both are things that suggest planning and organization.

“Bronze Age communities here were developing sophisticated, planned settlements similar to those of their contemporaries in more traditionally ‘urban’ parts of the ancient world,” said Lawrence.

This bronze axe head was found in the western half of Semiyarka.

Radivojevic et al. 2025

 

The remains of a crucible, a vessel used for smelting tin and copper ore into bronze.

Radivojevic et al. 2025

Who put the bronze in the Bronze Age? Semiyarka, apparently.

Southeast of the mounds, the ground was scattered with broken crucibles, bits of copper and tin ore, and slag (the stuff that’s left over when metal is extracted from ore). That suggested that a lot of smelting and bronze-casting happened in this part of the city. Based on the size of the city and the area apparently set aside for metalworking, Semiyarka boasted what Radivojevic and her colleagues call “a highly-organized, possibly limited or controlled, industry of this sought-after alloy.”

Bronze was a part of everyday life for people on the ancient steppes, making up everything from axe heads to jewelry. There’s a reason the period from 2000 BCE to 500 BCE (mileage may vary depending on location) is called the Bronze Age, after all. But the archaeological record has offered up almost no evidence of where all those bronze doodads found on the Eurasian steppe were made or who was doing the work of mining, smelting, and casting. That makes Semiyarka a rare and important glimpse into how the Bronze Age was, literally, made.

Radivojevic and her colleagues expected to find traces of earthworks or the buried foundations of mud-brick walls, similar to the earthworks in the northwest, marking the site of a big, centralized bronze-smithing workshop. But the geophysical surveys found no walls at all in the southeastern part of the city.

“This area revealed few features,” they wrote in their recent paper (archaeologists refer to buildings and walls as features), “suggesting that metallurgical production may have been dispersed or occurred in less architecturally formalized spaces.” In other words, the bronze-smiths of ancient Semiyarka seem to have worked in the open air, or in a scattering of smaller, less permanent buildings that didn’t leave a trace behind. But they all seem to have done their work in the same area of the city.

Notice how the area where artifacts were found stretches beyond the visible outlines of ancient buildings.

Radivojevic et al. 2025

 

Fragments of broken pottery found in Semiyarka

Radivojevic et al. 2025

Connections between nomads and city-dwellers

East of the earthworks lies a wide area with no trace of walls or foundations beneath the ground, but with a scattering of ancient artifacts lying half buried in the grass. The long-forgotten objects may mark the sites of “more ephemeral, perhaps seasonal, occupation,” Radivojevic and her colleagues suggested in their recent paper.

That area makes up a large chunk of the city’s estimated 140 hectares, raising questions about how many people lived here permanently, how many stopped here along trade routes or pastoral migrations, and what their relationship was like.

A few broken potsherds offer evidence that the settled city-dwellers of Semiyarka traded regularly with their more mobile neighbors on the steppe.

Within the city, most of the ceramics match the style of the Alekseevka-Sargary people. But a few of the potsherds unearthed in Semiyarka are clearly the handiwork of nomadic Cherkaskul potters, who lived on this same wide sea of grass from around 1600 BCE to 1250 BCE. It makes sense that they would have traded with the people in the city.

Along the nearby Irtysh River, archaeologists have found the fainter traces of several small encampments, dating to around the same time as Semiyarka’s heyday, and two burial mounds stand north of the city. Archaeologists will have to dig deeper, literally and figuratively, to piece together how Semiyarka fit into the ancient landscape.

The city has stories to tell, not just about itself but about the whole vast, open steppe and its people.

Antiquity, 2025 DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.10244  (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 22 November 2025 at 4:11 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch and landing of the second New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ space company revealed a roadmap this week showing how engineers will supercharge the vehicle with more engines. Meanwhile, in South Texas, SpaceX took a step toward the first flight of the next-generation Starship rocket. There will be no Rocket Report next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We look forward to resuming delivery of all the news in space lift the first week of December.

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.

Northrop’s Pegasus rocket wins a rare contract. A startup named Katalyst Space Technologies won a $30 million contract from NASA in August to build a robotic rescue mission for the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in low-Earth orbit. Swift, in space since 2004, is a unique instrument designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe. The spacecraft lacks a propulsion system and its orbit is subject to atmospheric drag, and NASA says it is “racing against the clock” to boost Swift’s orbit and extend its lifetime before it falls back to Earth. On Wednesday, Katalyst announced it selected Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to send the rescue craft into orbit next year.

Make this make sense … At first glance, this might seem like a surprise. The Pegasus XL rocket hasn’t flown since 2021 and has launched just once in the last six years. The solid-fueled rocket is carried aloft under the belly of a modified airliner, then released to fire payloads of up to 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. It’s an expensive rocket for its size, with Northrop charging more than $25 million per launch, according to the most recent public data available; the satellites best suited to launch on Pegasus will now find much cheaper tickets to orbit on rideshare missions using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. There are a few reasons none of this mattered much to Katalyst. First, the rescue mission must launch into a very specific low-inclination orbit to rendezvous with the Swift observatory, so it won’t be able to join one of SpaceX’s rideshare missions. Second, Northrop Grumman has parts available for one more Pegasus XL rocket, and the company might have been willing to sell the launch at a discount to clear its inventory and retire the rocket’s expensive-to-maintain L-1011 carrier aircraft. And third, smaller rockets like Rocket Lab’s Electron or Firefly’s Alpha don’t quite have the performance to place Katalyst’s rescue mission into the required orbit. (submitted by gizmo23)

Ursa Major rakes in more cash. Aerospace and defense startup Ursa Major Technologies landed a $600 million valuation in a new fundraising round, the latest sign that investors are willing to back companies developing new rocket technology, Bloomberg reports. Colorado-based Ursa Major closed its Series E fundraising round with investments from the venture capital firms Eclipse, Woodline Partners, Principia Growth, XN, and Alsop Louie Partners. The company also secured $50 million in debt financing. Ursa Major is best known as a supplier of liquid-fueled rocket engines and solid rocket motors to power a range of commercial and government vehicles.

Hypersonic tailwinds … Ursa Major says it is positioned to provide the US industrial base with propulsion systems faster and more affordably than legacy contractors can supply. “The company will rapidly field its throttleable, storable, liquid-fueled hypersonic and space-based defense solution, as well as scale its solid rocket motor and sustained space mobility manufacturing capacity,” Ursa Major said in a press release. Its customers include BAE Systems, which will use Ursa Major’s solid rocket motors to power tactical military-grade rockets, and Stratolaunch, which uses Ursa Major’s liquid-fueled Hadley engine for its hypersonic Talon-A spaceplane.

Rocket Lab celebrates two launches in 48 hours. Rocket Lab launched a payload for an undisclosed commercial customer Thursday, just hours after the company announced plans for the launch, Space News reports. The launch from Rocket Lab’s primary spaceport in New Zealand used the company’s Electron rocket, but officials released little more information on the mission, other than its nickname: “Follow My Speed.” An artist’s illustration on the mission patch indicated the payload might have been the next in a line of Earth-imaging satellites from the remote sensing company BlackSky, although the firm’s previous satellites have not launched with such secrecy.

Two hemispheres … Thursday’s launch from the Southern Hemisphere came just two days after Rocket Lab’s previous mission lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia. That flight was a suborbital launch to support a hypersonic technology demonstration for the Defense Innovation Unit and the Missile Defense Agency. All told, Rocket Lab has now launched 18 Electron rockets this year with 100 percent mission success, a company record.

Spanish startup makes a big reveal. The Spanish company PLD Space released photos of a test version of its Miura 5 rocket Thursday, calling it a “decisive step forward in the orbital launcher validation campaign.” The full-scale qualification unit, called QM1, will allow engineers to complete subsystem testing under “real conditions” to ensure the rocket’s reliability before its first mission scheduled for 2026. The first stage of the qualification unit will undergo a full propellant loading test, while the second stage will undergo a destructive test in the United States to validate the rocket’s range safety destruct system. Miura 5 is designed to deliver a little more than a metric ton (2,200 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Still a long way to go … “Presenting our first integrated Miura 5 unit is proof that our model works: vertical integration, proprietary infrastructure and a philosophy based on testing, learning, and improving,” said Raúl Torres, CEO and co-founder of PLD Space. The reveal, however, is just the first step in a qualification campaign that takes more than a year for most rocket companies. PLD Space aims to go much faster, with plans to complete a second qualification rocket by the end of December and unveil its first flight rocket in the first quarter of next year. “This unprecedented development cadence in Europe reinforces PLD Space’s position as the company that has developed an orbital launcher in the shortest time–just two years–whilst meeting the highest quality standards,” the company said in a statement. This would be a remarkable achievement, but history suggests PLD Space has a steep climb in the months ahead. (submitted by Leika and EllPeaTea)

Sweden digs deep in pursuit of sovereign launch. In an unsettled world, many nations are eager to develop homegrown rockets to place their own satellites into orbit. These up-and-coming spacefaring nations see it as a strategic imperative to break free from total reliance on space powers like Russia, China, and the United States. Still, some decisions are puzzling. This week, the Swedish aerospace and defense contractor Saab announced a $10 million investment in a company named Pythom. If you’re not familiar with this business, allow me to link back to a 2022 story published by Ars about Pythom’s questionable safety practices. The company has kept quiet since then, until the name surprisingly popped up again in a press release from Saab, a firm with a reputation that seems to be diametrically opposed to that of Pythom.

Just enough … The statement from Saab suggests its contribution of $10 million to Pythom will make it the “lead investor” in the company’s recent funding round. Pythom hasn’t said anything more about this funding round, but Saab said the investment will accelerate Pythom’s “development and deployment of its launch systems,” which include an initial rocket capable of putting up to 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of payload into low-Earth orbit. $10 million may be just enough to keep Pythom afloat for a couple more years but is far less than the money Pythom would need to get serious about fielding an orbital launcher. Pythom is headquartered in California, but it has Swedish roots. It was founded by the Swedish married couple Tina and Tom Sjögren. The company has a couple dozen employees, and a handful of them are based in Sweden, according to Pythom’s website. (submitted by Leika and EllPeaTea)

China is about to launch an astronaut lifeboat. China is set to launch an uncrewed Shenzhou spacecraft to the Tiangong space station to provide the Shenzhou 21 astronauts with a means of returning home, Space News reports. The launch of China’s Shenzhou 22 mission is scheduled for Monday night, US time, aboard a Long March 2F rocket. Instead of carrying astronauts, the ship will ferry cargo to the Chinese Tiangong space station. More importantly, it will provide a safe ride home for the three astronauts living and working aboard the orbiting outpost.

How did we get here? … The Shenzhou 20 spacecraft currently docked to the Tiangong station was damaged by a suspected piece of space junk, cracking its window and rendering it unable to meet China’s safety standards for returning astronauts to Earth. The damage discovery occurred just before three outgoing crew members were supposed to ride Shenzhou 20 home earlier this month. Instead, those three astronauts departed the station and returned to Earth on the newer, undamaged Shenzhou 21 spacecraft. That left the other three crew members on Tiangong with only the damaged Shenzhou 20 spacecraft to get them home in the event of an emergency. Shenzhou 22 will replace Shenzhou 20, providing a lifeboat for the rest of the crew’s six-month stay in space. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Atlas V launches for Viasat. United Launch Alliance launched its Atlas V rocket November 13 with a satellite for the California-based communications company Viasat, Spaceflight Now reports. The launch came a week after the mission was scrubbed due to a faulty liquid oxygen tank vent valve on the Atlas booster. ULA rolled the rocket back to the Vertical Integration Facility, replaced it with a new valve, and returned the rocket to the pad on November 12. The launch the following day was successful, with the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage deploying the ViaSat-3 F2 spacecraft into a geosynchronous transfer orbit nearly three-and-a-half hours after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

End of an era … This was the final launch of an Atlas V rocket with a payload heading for geosynchronous orbit. These are the kinds of missions the Atlas V was designed for more than 25 years ago, but the market has changed. All of the Atlas V’s remaining 11 missions will target low-Earth orbit carrying broadband satellites for Amazon or Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft heading for the International Space Station. The Atlas V will be retired in the coming years in favor of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.

SpaceX launches key climate change monitor. SpaceX launched a joint NASA-European environmental research satellite early Monday, the second in an ongoing billion-dollar project to measure long-term changes in sea level, a key indicator of climate change, CBS News reports. The first satellite, known as Sentinel-6 and named in honor of NASA climate researcher Michael Freilich, was launched in November 2020. The latest spacecraft, Sentinel-6B, was launched from California atop a Falcon 9 rocket this week. Both satellites are equipped with a sophisticated cloud-penetrating radar. By timing how long it takes beams to bounce back from the ocean 830 miles (1,336 kilometers) below, the Sentinel-6 satellites can track sea levels to an accuracy of about one inch while also measuring wave height and wind speeds. The project builds on earlier missions dating back to the early 1990s that have provided an uninterrupted stream of sea level data.

FAA restrictions lifted … The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a restriction on commercial space operations this week that limited launches and reentries to the late night and early morning hours, Spaceflight Now reports. The FAA imposed a daytime curfew on commercial launches as it struggled to maintain air traffic control during the recent government shutdown. Those restrictions, which did not affect government missions, were lifted Monday. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin’s New Glenn will grow larger. One week after the successful second launch of its large New Glenn booster, Blue Origin revealed a roadmap on Thursday for upgrades to the rocket, including a new variant with more main engines and a super-heavy lift capability, Ars reports. These upgrades to the rocket are “designed to increase payload performance and launch cadence, while enhancing reliability,” the company said in an update published on its website. The enhancements will be phased in over time, starting with the third launch of New Glenn, which is likely to occur during the first half of 2026.

No timelines … The most significant part of the update concerned an evolution of New Glenn that will transform the booster into a super-heavy lift launch vehicle. The first stage of this evolved vehicle will have nine BE-4 engines instead of seven, and the upper stage will have four BE-3U engines instead of two. In its update, Blue Origin refers to the new vehicle as 9×4 and the current variant as 7×2, a reference to the number of engines in each stage. “New Glenn 9×4 is designed for a subset of missions requiring additional capacity and performance,” the company said. “The vehicle carries over 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, over 14 metric tons direct to geosynchronous orbit, and over 20 metric tons to trans-lunar injection. Additionally, the 9×4 vehicle will feature a larger 8.7-meter fairing.” The company did not specify a timeline for the debut of the 9×4 variant. A spokesperson for the company told Ars, “We aren’t disclosing a specific timeframe today. The iterative design from our current 7×2 vehicle means we can build this rocket quickly.”

Recently landed New Glenn returns to port. Blue Origin welcomed “Never Tell Me the Odds” back to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Thursday, where the rocket booster launched exactly one week prior, Florida Today reports. The New Glenn’s first stage booster landed on Blue Origin’s offshore recovery barge, which returned it to Port Canaveral on Tuesday with great fanfare. Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, rode the barge into port, posing for photos with the rocket and waving to onlookers viewing the spectacle from a nearby public pier. The rocket was lowered horizontally late Wednesday morning, as spectators watched alongside the restaurants and fishing boats at the port.

Through the gates … Officials from Blue Origin guided the 188-foot-long New Glenn booster to the Space Force station Thursday, making Blue Origin the only company besides SpaceX to return a space-flown booster through the gates. Once back at Blue Origin’s hangar, the rocket will undergo inspections and refurbishment for a second flight, perhaps early next year. “I could not be more excited to see the New Glenn launch, and Blue Origin recover that booster and bring it back,” Col. Brian Chatman, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, told Florida Today. “It’s all part of our certification process and campaign to certify more national security space launch providers, launch carriers, to get our most crucial satellites up on orbit.”

Meanwhile, down at Starbase. SpaceX rolled the first of its third-generation Super Heavy boosters out of the factory at Starbase, Texas, this week for a road trip to a nearby test site, according to NASASpaceflight.com. The booster rode SpaceX’s transporter from the factory a few miles down the road to Massey’s Test Site, where technicians prepared the rocket for cryogenic proof testing. However, during the initial phases of testing, the booster failed early on Friday morning.

Tumbling down … At the Starship launch site, ground teams are busy tearing down the launch mount at Pad 1, the departure point for all of SpaceX’s Starships to date. SpaceX will upgrade the pad for its next-generation, more powerful Super Heavy boosters, while Starship V3’s initial flights will take off from Pad 2 a few hundred meters away from Pad 1.

Next three launches

Nov. 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-79 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06:59 UTC

Nov. 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-30 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 08:00 UTC

Nov. 25: Long March 2F | Shenzhou 22 | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04:11 UTC

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Posted Saturday 22 November 2025 at 4:10 am AEST (my time).

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During the pre-dawn hours in South Texas on Friday morning, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship first stage suffered some sort of major damage during pre-launch testing.

The company had only rolled the massive rocket out of the factory a day earlier, noting the beginning of its test campaign, it said on the social media site X: “The first operations will test the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

That testing commenced on Thursday night at the Massey’s Test Site a couple of miles down the road from the company’s main production site at Starbase Texas. However an independent video showed the rocket’s lower half undergo an explosive (or possibly implosive) event at 4:04 am CT (10:04 UTC) Friday.

Post-incident images showed significant damage, perhaps a crumpling of sorts, to the lower half of the booster where the vehicle’s large liquid oxygen tank is housed. Neither SpaceX nor company founder Elon Musk had commented on the failure within a couple of hours of its occurrence on Friday morning.

The likely loss of this vehicle, “Booster 18,” is significant for SpaceX. Although the company is hardware-rich—it has built a massive factory in South Texas to churn out such vehicles—it nonetheless had a lot riding on this rocket. This is the first Starship Version 3, which was intended to have many design fixes and upgrades from the previous iterations of Starship vehicles to improve the reliability and performance of the massive rocket.

SpaceX needs Starship to do a lot, soon

Booster 18 was due to undergo cryogenic propellant loading and pressurization tests at the Massey’s site before eventually performing a test-firing of the rocket’s 33 upgraded Raptor engines. It never got to the phase at which its engines could be ignited.

Friday morning’s failure was less energetic than an explosion of a Starship upper stage during testing at Massey’s in June. That incident caused widespread damage at the test site and a complete loss of the vehicle. The Booster 18 problem on Friday appeared to cause less damage to test infrastructure, and no Raptor engines had yet been installed on the vehicle.

Nevertheless, this is the point in the rocket development program at which SpaceX sought to be accelerating with development of Starship and reaching a healthy flight cadence in 2026. Many of the company’s near-term goals rely on getting Starship flying regularly and reliably.

With this upgraded vehicle, SpaceX wants to demonstrate booster landing and reuse, an upper stage tower catch next year, the beginning of operational Starlink deployment missions, and a test campaign for NASA’s Artemis Program. To keep this Moon landing program on track, it is critical that SpaceX and NASA conduct an on-orbit refueling test of Starship, which nominally was slated for the second half of 2026.

On this timeline, the company was aiming to conduct a crewed lunar landing for NASA during the second half of 2028. From an outside perspective, before this most recent failure, that timeline already seemed to be fairly optimistic.

One of the core attributes of SpaceX is that it diagnoses failure quickly, addresses problems, and gets back to flying as rapidly as possible. No doubt its engineers are already poring over the data captured Friday morning and quite possibly have already diagnosed the problem. The company is resilient, and it has ample resources.

Nevertheless, this is also a maturing program. The Starship vehicle launched for the first time in 2023, and its first stage made a successful flight two years ago. Losing the first stage of the newest generation of the vehicle, during the initial phases of testing, can only be viewed as a significant setback for a program with so much promise and so much to accomplish so soon.

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Posted Saturday 22 November 2025 at 4:08 am AEST (my time).

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Astronomical events such as eclipses were central to Maya culture, reflected in the care the Maya took to keep accurate calendars to aid in celestial predictions. Among the few surviving Maya texts is the so-called Dresden Codex, which includes a table of eclipses. Researchers have concluded that this table was repurposed from earlier lunar month tables, rather than being created solely for eclipse prediction, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances. They also figured out the mechanism by which the Maya ensured that table would be accurate over a very long time period.

The Maya used three primary calendars: a count of days, known as the Long Count; a 260-day astrological calendar called the Tzolk’in; and a 356-day year called the Haab’. Previous scholars have speculated on how awe-inspiring solar or lunar eclipses must have seemed to the Maya, but our understanding of their astronomical knowledge is limited. Most Maya books were burned by Spanish conquistadors and Catholic priests. Only four hieroglyphic codices survive: the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, and the Grolier Codex.

The Dresden Codex dates back to the 11th or 12th century and likely originated near Chichen Itza. It can be folded accordion-style and is 12 feet long in its unfolded state. The text was deciphered in the early 20th century and describes local history as well as astronomical lunar and Venus tables.

For their study, co-authors John Justeson of the University at Albany and Justin Lowry of SUNY-Plattsburgh focused their attention particularly on pages 51 and 58, which consist of eclipse tables covering all solar and most lunar eclipses. It is accurate enough to run from its starting date in the eighth century up to the 18th century. (The Madrid Codex also contains an eclipse almanac, but it is primarily concerned with how agricultural cycles correspond with eclipses.)

The Mayan calendars were maintained by specialists known as “daykeepers,” a cultural tradition that continues today. There is general consensus that eclipses were important to the Maya. “They were tracking them, they had rituals around [eclipses], and it was built into their system of belief, ” Lowry told Ars. “So we know the eclipse table is part of the cultural knowledge of the time. We were just trying to figure out how the table came to be in its current state.”

A predictive mechanism

Lowry and Justeson’s analysis involved mathematically modeling the eclipse predictions in the Dresden Codex table and comparing the results to a historical NASA database. They focused on 145 solar eclipses that would have been visible in the Maya geographical region between 350 and 1150 CE.

They concluded that the codex’s eclipse tables evolved from a more general table of successive lunar months. The length of a 405-month lunar cycle (11,960 days) aligned much better with a 260-day calendar (46 x 260 =11,960) than with solar or lunar eclipse cycles. This suggests that the Maya daykeepers figured out that 405 new moons almost always came out equivalent to 46 260-day periods, knowledge the Maya used to accurately predict the dates of full and new moons over 405 successive lunar dates.

The daykeepers also realized that solar eclipses seemed to recur on or near the same day in their 260-day calendar and, over time, figured out how to predict days on which a solar eclipse might occur locally. “An eclipse happens only on a new moon,” said Lowry. “The fact that it has to be a new moon means that if you can accurately predict a new moon, you can accurately predict a one-in-seven chance of an eclipse. That’s why it makes sense that the Maya are revising lunar predicting models to have an accurate eclipse, because they don’t have to predict where the moon is relative to the ecliptic.”

The Maya also understood that they had to adjust their tables occasionally to account for slippage over time. “When we talk about accuracy, sometimes we think about being able to predict something down to the microsecond,” said Lowry, pointing to NASA records. “The Maya have a very accurate calendar, but they’re predicting to the day, not down to the second.”

But the Maya didn’t restart their tables from any single position, per the authors, which would just make the tables increasingly unreliable; instead, they used a series of overlapping tables. Lowry and Justeson concluded that the tables must have been restarted at one of two specific earlier points before the previous table ended: the 358th new moon (i.e., the most reliable overestimate of the overall length of the eclipse) and the 223rd new moon (the most reliable underestimate).

“The traditional interpretation was that you run through the table, eclipse by eclipse, and then you rebuilt the table every iteration,” said Lowry. “We figured out that if you do that, you’re going to miss the eclipses, and we know they didn’t. They made internal adjustments. We think they’d restart the table midway. When you do that, you go from having missed eclipses to having none. You would never miss an eclipse. So it’s not a calculated predictive table, it’s a calculated predictive table plus adjustments based on empirical observations over time.”

“This is the basis of true science, empirically collected, constant revision of expectations, built into a system of understanding planetary bodies, so that you can predict when something happens,” said Lowry. “But here it’s coded deeply within a religious system. Their rituals were fundamentally connected to astronomy and astrology. There’s this group of people over the course of 1,000 years—through war, through collapse, through famine, through external conquest—that have maintained observational records, every five or six months, of eclipses. It’s not that the Maya made their calendar more accurate. They made their calendar continue to be accurate, which is very cool.”

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adt9039 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 21 November 2025 at 12:46 pm AEST (my time).

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On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use :-) and :-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as “the inventor…or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.

The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon’s “bboard,” which was an early online message board. The discussion thread had been exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury.

That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled “WARNING!” He claimed that an elevator had been “contaminated with mercury” and suffered “some slight fire damage” due to a physics experiment. Despite clarifying posts noting the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.

The incident sparked immediate discussion about how to prevent such misunderstandings and the “flame wars” (heated arguments) that could result from misread intent.

“This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously,” Fahlman later wrote in a retrospective post published on his CMU website. “After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone.”

On September 17, 1982, the next day after the misunderstanding on the CMU bboard, Swartz made the first concrete proposal: “Maybe we should adopt a convention of putting a star (*) in the subject field of any notice which is to be taken as a joke.”

Within hours, multiple Carnegie Mellon computer scientists weighed in with alternative proposals. Joseph Ginder suggested using % instead of *. Anthony Stentz proposed a nuanced system: “How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes?” Keith Wright championed the ampersand (&), arguing it “looks funny” and “sounds funny.” Leonard Hamey suggested {#} because “it looks like two lips with teeth showing between them.”

Meanwhile, some Carnegie Mellon users were already using their own solution. A group on the Gandalf VAX system later revealed they had been using \__/ as “universally known as a smile” to mark jokes. But it apparently didn’t catch on beyond that local system.

The winning formula

Two days after Swartz’s initial proposal, Fahlman entered the discussion with his now-famous post: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways.” He added that serious messages could use :-(, noting, “Maybe we should mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.”

What made Fahlman’s proposal work wasn’t that he invented the concept of joke markers—Swartz had done that. It wasn’t that he invented smile symbols at Carnegie Mellon, since the \__/ already existed. Rather, Fahlman synthesized the best elements from the ongoing discussion: the simplicity of single-character proposals, the visual clarity of face-like symbols, the sideways-reading principle hinted at by Hamey’s {#}, and a complete binary system that covered both humor :-) and seriousness :-(.

The simplicity of Fahlman’s emoticons was key to their adoption. The university’s network ran on large DEC mainframes accessed via video terminals (Fahlman himself made his posts from a terminal attached to a DECSYSTEM-20) that were strictly limited to the 95 printable characters of the US-ASCII set. With no ability to display graphics or draw pixels, Fahlman’s solution used the only tools available: standard punctuation marks rearranging the strict grid of the terminal screen into a “picture.”

The emoticons spread quickly across ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern Internet, reaching other universities and research labs. By November 10, 1982—less than two months later—Carnegie Mellon researcher James Morris began introducing the smiley emoticon concept to colleagues at Xerox PARC, complete with a growing list of variations. What started as an internal Carnegie Mellon convention over time became a standard feature of online communication, often simplified without the hyphen nose to :-) or :(, among many other variations.

Lost backup tapes

There’s an interesting coda to this story: For years, the original bboard thread existed only in fading memory. The bulletin board posts had been deleted, and Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department had moved to new systems. The old messages seemed lost forever.

Between 2001 and 2002, Mike Jones, a former Carnegie Mellon researcher then working at Microsoft, sponsored what Fahlman calls a “digital archaeology” project. Jeff Baird and the Carnegie Mellon facilities staff undertook a painstaking effort: locating backup tapes from 1982, finding working tape drives that could read the obsolete media, decoding old file formats, and searching for the actual posts. The team recovered the thread, revealing not just Fahlman’s famous post but the entire three-day community discussion that led to it.

The recovered messages, which you can read here, show how collaboratively the emoticon was developed—not a lone genius moment but an ongoing conversation proposing, refining, and building on the group’s ideas. Fahlman had no idea his synthesis would become a fundamental part of how humans express themselves in digital text, but neither did Swartz, who first suggested marking jokes, or the Gandalf VAX users who were already using their own smile symbols.

From emoticon to emoji

While Fahlman’s text-based emoticons spread across Western online culture that remained text-character-based for a long time, Japanese mobile phone users in the late 1990s developed a parallel system: emoji. For years, Shigetaka Kurita’s 1999 set for NTT DoCoMo was widely cited as the original. However, recent discoveries have revealed earlier origins. SoftBank released a picture-based character set on mobile phones in 1997, and the Sharp PA-8500 personal organizer featured selectable icon characters as early as 1988.

Unlike emoticons that required reading sideways, emoji were small pictographic images that could convey emotion, objects, and ideas with more detail. When Unicode standardized emoji in 2010 and Apple added an emoji keyboard to iOS in 2011, the format exploded globally. Today, emoji have largely replaced emoticons in casual communication, though Fahlman’s sideways faces still appear regularly in text messages and social media posts.

As Fahlman himself notes on his website, he may not have been “the first person ever to type these three letters in sequence.” Others, including teletype operators and private correspondents, may have used similar symbols before 1982, perhaps even as far back as 1648. Author Vladimir Nabokov suggested before 1982 that “there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile.” And the original IBM PC included a dedicated smiley character as early as 1981 (perhaps that should be considered the first emoji).

What made Fahlman’s contribution significant wasn’t absolute originality but rather proposing the right solution at the right time in the right context. From there, the smiley could spread across the emerging global computer network, and no one would ever misunderstand a joke online again. :-)

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Posted Friday 21 November 2025 at 3:28 am AEST (my time).

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Since early July, telescopes around the world have been tracking just our third confirmed interstellar visitor, the comet 3I/ATLAS—3I, for third interstellar, and ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) for the telescope network that first spotted it. But the object’s closest approach to the Sun came in late October during the US government shutdown. So, while enough people went to work to ensure that the hardware continued to do its job, nobody was available at NASA to make the images available to the public or discuss their implications.

So today, NASA held a press conference to discuss everything that we now know about 3I/ATLAS, and how NASA’s hardware contributed to that knowledge. And to say one more time that the object is a fairly typical comet and not some spaceship doing its best to appear like one.

Extrasolar comet

3I/ATLAS is an extrasolar comet and the third visitor from another star that we’ve detected. We know the comet part because it looks like one, forming a coma of gas and dust, as well as a tail, as the Sun heats up its materials. That hasn’t stopped the usual suspect (Avi Loeb) from speculating that it might be a spacecraft, as he had for the earlier visitors. NASA doesn’t want to hear it. “This object is a comet,” said Associate Administrator Amit Kshatrya. “It looks and behaves like a comet, and all evidence points to it being a comet.”

The extrasolar descriptor comes from the shape of its orbit. The orbit’s shape is measured by eccentricity; an eccentricity of zero is a perfect circle, and that shifts to ever-narrower and longer ellipses as the eccentricity rises. By the time it hits one, gravity is no longer able to bend the far end of the ellipse closed. Instead, an object will trace a very narrow parabola—think something shaped like the business end of a champagne glass—before it escapes the gravitational clutches of the Sun and heads off into the galaxy.

As eccentricity continues to rise from there, the question shifts from “what shape is its trajectory?” to “how much does the Sun alter its path through the Solar System?” For 3I/Atlas, with an eccentricity of over six, the answer is “not very much at all.” The object has approached the inner Solar System along a reasonable approximation of a straight line, experienced a gentle bend around the Sun near Mars’ orbit, and now will be zipping straight out of the Solar System again.

So, the object clearly did not originate here, which means getting a better look at it is a high priority. Unfortunately, 3I/ATLAS’s closest approach to Earth’s orbit happened when it was on the far side of the Sun from Earth. We’ve been getting closer to it since, but the hardware that got the best views was all orbiting Mars and is designed largely to point down. NASA’s Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for Science, praised the operators for getting NASA’s hardware “pushed beyond their designed capabilities” when imaging the object.

That includes using the MAVEN mission (designed to study Mars’ atmosphere) to get spectral information, and the HiRISE camera, which captured the image below. Other images came from a solar observatory and two separate missions that are on their way to visit asteroids. Other hardware that can normally image objects like this, such as the Hubble and JWST, pivoted to image 3I/ATLAS as well.

What we now know

Hubble has gotten the best view of 3I/ATLAS; its data suggests that the comet is, at most, just a couple of kilometers across. It doesn’t show much variability over time, suggesting that, if it’s rotating, it’s doing so very slowly. It has shown some differences as it warmed up, first producing a jet of material on its side facing the Sun before radiation pressure pushed that behind it to form a tail. There is some indication that, as we saw during the Rosetta mission’s visit to one of our Solar System’s comets, most of the material may be jetting out of distinct “hotspots” on the comet’s surface.

Imaging suggests that a lot of the material coming off is in the form of dust grains. NASA indicated that two missions to asteroids, Lucy and Psyche, were especially helpful here, since they were farther from the Sun than 3I/ATLAS, and so could capture backlit images of the comet’s coma.

NASA’s Tom Statler, the lead scientist for Solar System bodies, said that the amount of material being released by 3I/ATLAS is fairly typical of Solar System comets. But some of the details are a bit unusual. For example, the ratio of carbon dioxide to water being released is higher than we see from local comets. Those normally emit iron and nickel together, but 3I/ATLAS seems to be unusually nickel-rich. So, there are indications that it has a history that differs somewhat from our Solar System’s comets.

That history is tough to discern. 3I/ATLAS came from the direction of the galactic core, and doesn’t appear likely to have interacted with any other stars recently. If that’s right, then it’s possible that the object is older than the Solar System itself, and came from a star that formed relatively early in the Universe’s history, and thus had far fewer of the heavy elements.

For now, NASA has put up a webpage with a large collection of images of 3I/ATLAS and will update the site as more photos become available. But the scientists on the call today emphasized that it’s still very early going in terms of analysis, and some of these ideas may be refined as they make their way through discussions among scientists and peer review at journals.

Fox also made it clear that we were able to quickly spot and characterize the orbit of 3I/ATLAS partly because we’ve set up systems to identify any Earth-threatening objects as part of our planetary defense program. With that and other automated surveys in place, it’s likely that the three objects we’ve seen so far (two comets, one asteroid) will gradually be joined by others, and we’ll be able to build up a clearer picture of what’s floating out among the stars.

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Posted Thursday 20 November 2025 at 11:51 am AEST (my time).

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On a sunny morning on October 19 2025, four men allegedly walked into the world’s most-visited museum and left, minutes later, with crown jewels worth 88 million euros ($101 million). The theft from Paris’ Louvre Museum—one of the world’s most surveilled cultural institutions—took just under eight minutes.

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Posted Thursday 20 November 2025 at 3:53 am AEST (my time).

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Memo may not be the world’s fastest barista, but it is impressive—for a robot.

I recently watched as Memo, a new home robot from a company called Sunday Robotics, made coffee in an open-plan kitchen in Mountain View, California.

Memo looks like something out of Wall-E, with a gleaming white body, two arms, a friendly cartoonish face, and a red baseball cap. Rather than using legs as a fully humanoid robot would, Memo moves around using a wheeled platform and changes its height by sliding up and down a central column atop that platform.

The robot responded to a request for an espresso by rolling over to a countertop, and then using two pincerlike hands to slowly go through each step required to operate an espresso machine. It filled the porta filter with coffee grounds, tamped them down, slotted the porta filter into place and put a coffee cup below, pressed the buttons needed to start the machine, and finally retrieved the hot drink.

“We want to build robots that free people from laundry, from the dishes, from all chores,” Tony Zhao, cofounder and CEO of Sunday Robotics, told me as the robot brought the coffee over to the person who requested it.

Making a cup of espresso might not seem spectacular, but the feat is ridiculously hard for a robot to do in a real, messy kitchen. It requires the ability to identify different objects, figure out how to grasp them reliably, and use those objects properly. Sunday is not only building its own hardware but also training the models that allow its system to learn. “We think the way to make a home robot is to be full-stack, and to vertically integrate,” Zhao says. “And that’s a very ambitious thing to do.”

Today most robots still do precise, repetitive work in tightly controlled environments; for example, moving the same item from one position to another over and over again. Unlike humans, industrial robots cannot typically adapt or improvise to changes or unfamiliar situations. The last decade has seen some companies build robots that use AI to do simple things, like identify objects on a conveyor belt and decide how to grasp them. This is, however, far less complex than operating in an environment as varied and messy as a real home.

Of course, robot demos are not always a good indicator of how useful a robot will be. The real question is how well Memo can perform tasks in a wide variety of homes without Sunday’s engineers nearby.

Even so, the robot has some skills. Besides making coffee, I watched Memo clear glasses from a table and load them into a dishwasher. This feat was especially impressive because it involved figuring out how to grasp two glasses in the same hand. Memo held one glass between its thumb and pointer finger, and used the rest of its hand to grab the second.

This kind of dexterity relies on Sunday’s key innovation: a novel way of training robots that delivers more humanlike dexterity. Sunday pays remote workers to use gloves resembling Memo’s hands to do household chores. Zhao says the gloves, which cost roughly $400 a pair, provide a more accurate training signal than teleoperation, which is the standard way for a person to control a robot. The training data gathered from glove-wearing workers is fed into an AI model that takes input from the robot’s sensors and controls its motions.

“This is a very exciting variant on home robots,” says Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at UC Berkeley and the cofounder of Ambi Robotics. “It’s a beautiful design, and a much smarter kind of data capture.”

The fact that any company thinks it can build a useful and functional home robot is a sign of skyrocketing optimism about progress in robotics—and not without reason. Researchers have shown in the last few years that robots can tap into the capabilities of large language models, the brains behind today’s chatbots, and use them to respond to commands or make sense of a scene.

Some researchers hope that gathering large amounts of data that shows how to perform different actions—picking up cups, folding shirts, and so on—will produce a more general kind of robotic intelligence.

Zhao and Sunday’s other cofounder and CTO, Cheng Chi, have both contributed advances that have kindled hope of robotic breakthroughs. Zhao worked on a project called Mobile ALOHA at Stanford University that involved training robots using a low-cost mobile teleoperation system. Chi worked on a project from Stanford, Columbia University, and the Toyota Research Institute, that showed how a cheap clawlike device could be used to gather data from humans doing tasks like cleaning dishes.

“If you think about the most powerful AIs, ChatGPT or image-generation models,” Zhao says, “they are trained on the whole internet. We just don't have the internet for robotics.”

A handful of other startups are currently hustling to develop and deploy more capable robots, including systems designed to work in ordinary homes. Physical Intelligence, Skild, and Generalist are all working on robot models that can adapt to new situations using this approach. 1x recently revealed a humanoid home robot, though this system still requires teleoperation to perform some tasks.

Eric Vishria, a general partner at venture capital firm Benchmark, which is backing Sunday, said in a statement that the startup’s practical approach is the way to make robots more useful. “The promise of AI robotics isn’t doing a backflip or dancing demos, but robots that work in messy, real-world situations,” Vishria said, adding that Sunday’s “breakthroughs mark the start of an exponential curve toward a future where robots actually work in our day-to-day lives.”

Sunday plans to give Memo to beta testers next year. The pilot program will show how people respond to having a home robot that can do certain chores—albeit slowly, and perhaps not perfectly every time. A key question will be how reliably and efficiently Memo is able to do chores in real homes where kids, pets, and mess are guaranteed to complicate the challenge.

After beta testing, Zhao says Sunday will roll Memo out to the first users. Just as early home computers were complicated and appealed mostly to enthusiasts, he believes Memo might initially be popular with those who want to live in a robotic future and are willing to tolerate some rough edges. This might even involve users showing their robots how to do something new. “I do think that people should be able to teach their own robots,” Zhao says.

Perhaps the era of truly capable home robots is almost upon us. For now though, I’d settle for a decent espresso.

Updated 12:23 pm ET, November 19, 2025 to clarify the cost of the gloves used for collecting robotic training data.

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Posted Thursday 20 November 2025 at 3:52 am AEST (my time).

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The DRG-Lola is a thought experiment using current technology to create a single-seater that's faster than F1 around Monaco.  

Credit: Lola Cars

We’re in something of a purple patch if you’re a fan of clever new technology in single-seat race cars. Out in the Middle East, the autonomous A2RL crew held another race at Yas Marina, one that by all accounts was a lot more impressive than the last time the self-driving race cars competed against a human. Formula E teams are getting ready for the debut next year of their Gen4 era, which sees cars with real downforce and almost twice as much power. Meanwhile, we only have a few months left before we see the results of F1’s new technical rules change, as the sport adopts far more powerful electrical propulsion and active aerodynamics. But what if there was an electric single-seater that was faster around a track than any of these?

That’s the idea behind the DRG-Lola, a racing concept designed from the ground up by Lola Cars, the storied-now-reborn British race car manufacturer, and Lucas di Grassi, veteran of the hybrid LMP1 sportscar days and FIA Formula E champion. Di Grassi is one of the more thoughtful racing drivers out there and is a passionate advocate of clean technologies in racing—in 2020 he shared his earlier thoughts on where Formula E could take its technical direction.

The DRG-Lola is much closer to reality than that 2020 concept; di Grassi has relied on existing battery and motor technology, rather than some uninvented unobtanium to make it all work. It generates 804 hp (600 kW) from a pair of electric motors driving the front and rear axles and is powered by a 60 kWh battery pack that’s arranged in modules on either side of the driver’s cockpit.

Unlike an F1 or Formula E car, the wheels are covered, similar to the Adrian Newey-designed Red Bull X2010 and X2019 cars in the Gran Turismo series—doing so seriously reduces the car’s drag coefficient and therefore allows for significantly longer race distances, as the car needs to use less energy to push itself through the air.

Di Grassi has taken an interesting approach to generating downforce, the aerodynamic effect that pushes a car down onto the road surface to aid grip. At high speeds, most of this is generated by the car’s underbody and rear diffuser—roughly 530 kg of downforce at 180 km/h, according to Lola’s simulations.

What do you mean it sucks?

The real magic happens at lower speeds, courtesy of a pair of turbines that suck air in from under the car’s floor and route it out the back. Similar fan-based approaches to generating downforce have been used before to very good effect, notably the Chaparral J1, Brabham BT46, and most recently the McMurtry Spéirling, an EV with scarcely believable performance.

That descriptor would probably apply to the DRG-Lola, too. With the fans active at lower speeds, the car generates as much downforce as it does in triple digits, and di Grassi’s simulations suggest that could equate to 3-Gs of lateral grip in slow corners; by contrast, an F1 car relying on just mechanical grip is less than half that. “You’re able to use all the stresses that have been tested for the car [to make sure it holds together during high-speed cornering] in any corner,” di Grassi said.

One advantage of the suction fans is how efficient they are, requiring five times less energy per unit of downforce generated than a conventional rear wing (which creates drag and therefore requires energy to counter). The covered wheels should also help minimize spray during wet races.

The drag coefficient is around 0.48.

Lola Cars

 

The car's floor extends quite far forward.

Lola Cars

 

Diffusers at the rear.

Lola Cars

 

“You gain so much time in the low-speed corners that you’re able to have this amazing difference in performance,” he said. How much difference? About 4.3 seconds a lap at Monaco, and with a tenth of the energy per lap as a current F1 car, di Grassi and Lola reckon. Qualifying performance could be even greater, as cars could run with a minimum battery pack for the occasion, making a dent in what should be a 1,100 kg curb weight.

Just don’t expect to see a DRG-Lola race series just yet. For one thing, Formula E has the exclusive rights to the FIA’s single-seat electric championship, and with the Gen4 car due to arrive at the end of 2026, that series won’t be looking for a new car for another few years. But the idea is to inspire race car designers and series organizers, di Grassi said. “This is not a technical challenge anymore; we can do this,” he said.

“This project should serve as an inspiration for the future generations of electric racing cars. The question of whether such cars can be faster than Formula 1 has been answered with data and simulation. My plan is to build this car in the next two years,” he said.

For Lola, the project serves as notice that the marque, which was once well-represented across the motorsports world selling customer cars to numerous series, wants to reclaim those days. “At Lola, we are always looking for new ways to drive innovation through motorsport, and supporting Lucas with this design through utilizing our in-house expertise and state-of-the-art R&D facilities was a perfect project for this. The result is a car which pushes the boundaries of what is possible in electric racing through maximizing technological solutions which are already available,” said Lola Cars technical director Peter McCool.

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Posted Thursday 20 November 2025 at 3:51 am AEST (my time).

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We know that some environments can make us unwell. Mountain climbers often experience altitude sickness – the body's reaction to a significant drop in atmospheric pressure, which means less oxygen is taken in with each breath.

And yet, in high altitudes on the Tibetan Plateau, where oxygen levels in the air people breathe are notably low, human communities thrive.

Over more than 10,000 years of settlement in the region, the bodies of those living there have changed in ways that allow the inhabitants to make the most of an atmosphere that for most humans would result in not enough oxygen being delivered via blood cells to the body's tissues, a condition known as hypoxia.

Watch the video below for a summary of the research:

"Adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia is fascinating because the stress is severe, experienced equally by everyone at a given altitude, and quantifiable," anthropologist Cynthia Beall of Case Western Reserve University in the US told ScienceAlert.

"It is a beautiful example of how and why our species has so much biological variation."

Beall has been studying the human response to hypoxic living conditions for years. In research published in October 2024, she and her team revealed some of the specific adaptations in Tibetan communities: traits that improve the blood's ability to deliver oxygen.

To unlock this discovery, the researchers looked into one of the markers of what we call evolutionary fitness: reproductive success. Women who deliver live babies are those who pass on their traits to the next generation.

The traits that maximize an individual's success in a given environment are most likely to be found in women who are able to survive the stresses of pregnancy and childbirth.

Lo Manthang in Nepal, where some of the data was collected. (James J. Yu)

These women are more likely to give birth to more babies. Those offspring, having inherited survivability traits from their mothers, are also more likely to survive, reproduce, and carry those same traits forward.

That's natural selection at work, and it can be a bit strange and counterintuitive; in places where malaria is common, for example, the incidence of sickle cell anemia is high, because it involves a gene that protects against malaria.

Beall and her team studied 417 women aged 46 to 86 who had lived their entire lives in Nepal at altitudes above 3,500 meters (11,480 feet). The researchers recorded their number of live births – ranging from 0 to 14 per woman, with an average of 5.2 – along with physical and health measurements.

The noninvasive measurement of hemoglobin concentration and oxygen saturation. (Sienna R. Craig)

"Previously we knew that lower hemoglobin was beneficial, now we understand that an intermediate value has the highest benefit. We knew that higher oxygen saturation of hemoglobin was beneficial, now we understand that the higher the saturation the more beneficial. The number of live births quantifies the benefits," Beall said.

"It was unexpected to find that women can have many live births with low values of some oxygen transport traits if they have favorable values of other oxygen transport traits."

The women with the highest reproductive success rate also had a high rate of blood flow into the lungs, and their hearts had wider than average left ventricles, the chamber of the heart responsible for pumping oxygenated blood into the body.

Taken all together, these traits increase the rate of oxygen transport and delivery, enabling the human body to make the most of the low oxygen in the air respired.

It's important to note that cultural factors can play a role, too. Women who start reproducing young and have long marriages seem to have a longer exposure to the possibility of pregnancy, which also increases the number of live births, the researchers found.

Even taking that into account, however, the physical traits played a role. Nepalese women with physiologies most similar to women in unstressed, low-altitude environments tended to have the highest rate of reproductive success.

"This is a case of ongoing natural selection," Beall said. "Understanding how populations like these adapt gives us a better grasp of the processes of human evolution."

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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