Cloudflare has become the latest web infrastructure giant to collapse in the span of a month, replacing entire sites, including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and even the outage-tracking DownDetector, with an error message for hours this morning. It’s the latest in a string of outages that Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of the internet performance monitoring platform Catchpoint, says should be a “wake-up call” for companies.

“Everybody’s putting all their eggs in one basket, and then they’re surprised when there is a problem,” Daoudi says. “It’s on the company’s side to make sure that they have redundancy and resiliency.”

The outage comes after issues affecting Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services occurred within just one week of each other, bringing down large chunks of the internet that rely on major providers to keep their websites running. Cloudflare similarly powers a sizable part of the internet. It keeps websites online with its content delivery network, while offering several other services, including DDoS attack protection and DNS. Last year, the company said around 20 percent of the web runs through Cloudflare’s network. It also serves 35 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list, in addition to “millions” of other customers.

Cloudflare’s speedy performance and security record make it a popular choice for websites across the globe, but this latest outage draws attention to just how concentrated the web infrastructure industry has become. After the AWS outage took down the secure messaging app Signal, the service’s president, Meredith Whittaker, said the company didn’t have any other choice but to use a major cloud service provider to run on. “The entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players,” she wrote.

But even with companies relying on just a few web infrastructure providers, the last chain of outages makes it clear that they need a backup plan. “Outages will be here, and they’re just going to keep happening more frequently. The blast radius will keep growing,” Daoudi tells The Verge. “The question is, what are you doing about it?”

Though Microsoft and AWS linked their outages to issues related to DNS — a system that translates website domain names into IP addresses — Cloudflare traced its outage to a single file. “The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic,” Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton said. “The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.”

It may seem absurd that a file issue like this could bring down swaths of the internet, but for companies as large as Cloudflare, it can happen. “When you operate infrastructure at Cloudflare’s scale, even small deviations can have outsized consequences,” Rob Lee, the chief of AI and research at the SANS Institute, tells The Verge. “These platforms are built for speed, so anything that delays or halts decision making can cascade quickly. In high performance environments, a millisecond delay can become a complete traffic stoppage.”

According to Lee, a configuration file like the one Cloudflare describes “drives routing security policies, load balancing decisions, and how traffic is distributed globally.” If the file suddenly increases in size, “it can trigger slower parsing, memory issues, CPU contention, or logic failures inside the systems that rely on it,” Lee adds.

AWS similarly blamed “faulty automation” for setting off a chain of issues that led to its most recent widespread outage — the kind of error that’s bound to happen again. “Are you going to complain about it every time Cloudflare sneezes?” Daoudi says. “Or are you going to build around it?”

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Posted Wednesday 19 November 2025 at 4:33 pm AEST (my time).

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On Tuesday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai warned of “irrationality” in the AI market, telling the BBC in an interview, “I think no company is going to be immune, including us.” His comments arrive as scrutiny over the state of the AI market has reached new heights, with Alphabet shares doubling in value over seven months to reach a $3.5 trillion market capitalization.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC at Google’s California headquarters, Pichai acknowledged that while AI investment growth is at an “extraordinary moment,” the industry can “overshoot” in investment cycles, as we’re seeing now. He drew comparisons to the late 1990s Internet boom, which saw early Internet company valuations surge before collapsing in 2000, leading to bankruptcies and job losses.

“We can look back at the Internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the Internet was profound,” Pichai said. “I expect AI to be the same. So I think it’s both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.”

Over the past year, some analysts and tech industry critics have expressed increasing skepticism about a web of $1.4 trillion in deals surrounding Google competitor OpenAI in particular. The company has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on infrastructure over eight years, while it expects to generate around $13 billion in revenue this year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner in August that investors are “overexcited” about AI models and that “someone” will lose a “phenomenal amount of money.”

Reacting to the Pichai comments, prominent AI industry critic Ed Zitron told Ars Technica, “I think that this is the first moment where a magnificent 7 feels it’s necessary to be on the right side of history, leaning on the shaky talking point of ‘there was a lot of over investment in the Internet too’ because there really isn’t a defense for the—to use his own terminology—‘excess investment’ in AI.” He added, “I imagine others will follow.”

Market concerns and Google’s position

Alphabet’s recent market performance has been driven by investor confidence in the company’s ability to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as its development of specialized chips for AI that can compete with Nvidia’s. Nvidia recently reached a world-first $5 trillion valuation due to making GPUs that can accelerate the matrix math at the heart of AI computations.

Despite acknowledging that no company would be immune to a potential AI bubble burst, Pichai argued that Google’s unique position gives it an advantage. He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors.

Pichai also told the BBC that people should not “blindly trust” everything AI tools output. The company currently faces repeated accuracy concerns about some of its AI models. Pichai said that while AI tools are helpful “if you want to creatively write something,” people “have to learn to use these tools for what they’re good at and not blindly trust everything they say.”

In the BBC interview, the Google boss also addressed the “immense” energy needs of AI, acknowledging that the intensive energy requirements of expanding AI ventures have caused slippage on Alphabet’s climate targets. However, Pichai insisted that the company still wants to achieve net zero by 2030 through investments in new energy technologies. “The rate at which we were hoping to make progress will be impacted,” Pichai said, warning that constraining an economy based on energy “will have consequences.”

Even with the warnings about a potential AI bubble, Pichai did not miss his chance to promote the technology, albeit with a hint of danger regarding its widespread impact. Pichai described AI as “the most profound technology” humankind has worked on.

“We will have to work through societal disruptions,” he said, adding that the technology would “create new opportunities” and “evolve and transition certain jobs.” He said people who adapt to AI tools “will do better” in their professions, whatever field they work in.

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Posted Wednesday 19 November 2025 at 5:14 am AEST (my time).

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As Tesla’s profits shrink and its model lineup continues to age, the company remains focused on establishing new lines of business. Tesla CEO Elon Musk says there’s not much his Optimus robots won’t be able to do in the future—following people around to prevent them from committing crimes is the latest—despite the technology not quite existing yet.

Musk’s robotaxis are a little closer to reality, with a kind of limited service being offered in Austin, Texas, as well as parts of San Francisco. But Tesla might need to rethink its approach to safety drivers after a Tesla rideshare passenger in San Francisco took to Reddit to share a video of the operator asleep in the driver’s seat.

In fact, the safety driver fell asleep three times during the ride, which took place a little over a week ago, according to Reddit user ohmichael. In his post, which contains a 12-second clip of a man sleeping and then waking in the front seat of a moving Tesla, the poster says he contacted Tesla to report this behavior but never heard back.

Later in the thread, another poster claims to have had the same safety driver who also fell asleep, this time on a traffic-choked drive from Temescal to San Francisco.

Being a human safety driver in an autonomous car is a relatively hard task, and Waymo insists on a lot of training before letting its employees loose in its cars on the road. It’s possible that Tesla is being far less diligent in this regard.

Tesla’s robotaxi experiment is proving to be more fraught than, say, Waymo’s. There have been at least seven crashes since the launch of its Austin trial in July, although Tesla continues to redact the data it provides to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Its operation in California may be even more shaky. Although Tesla Robotaxi LLC has a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test autonomous cars on public roads with a safety driver, it has no permits from the California Public Utilities Commission for autonomous vehicles. CPUC permits are required to test or deploy an autonomous vehicle with or without a safety driver onboard. (In March, Tesla obtained a permit to operate a conventional ride-hailing service with human drivers.)

Ars has reached out to Tesla regarding the sleeping driver and the status of its California ride-hailing operation and will update this article if we hear back.

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Posted Wednesday 19 November 2025 at 5:11 am AEST (my time).

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For decades—yes, literally decades—it has been easy to dismiss Blue Origin as a company brimming with potential but rarely producing much of consequence.

But last week the company took a tremendous stride forward, not just launching its second orbital rocket, but subsequently landing the booster on a barge named Jacklyn. It now seems clear that Blue Origin is in the midst of a transition from sleeping giant to force to be reckoned with.

To get a sense of where the company goes from here, Ars spoke with the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, on the eve of last week’s launch. The first thing he emphasized is how much the company learned about New Glenn, and the process of rolling the vehicle out and standing it up for launch, from the vehicle’s first attempt in January.

“I’ve been surprised at how smoothly the past 30 days has gone, which is way, way less time than the first flight, and kind of on our nominal schedule,” Limp said. “You know, there’s little things that have poked their heads up, but it hasn’t been anything that’s really set us back.”

Launch was delayed due to weather and then a solar storm, but when the skies cleared New Glenn lifted off on time, and the vehicle’s first and second stages performed exceptionally well.

Cadence and manufacturing

Limp said success on New Glenn’s second flight would set the company up for a significant increase in cadence. The company is building enough hardware for “well above” a dozen flights in 2026, with the upper-end limit of 24 launches. The pacing item is second stages. Right now Blue Origin can build one per month, but the production rate is increasing.

“They’re coming off the line at one a month right now, and then we’re ramping from there,” he said of the second stages, known internally as GS-2. “It would be ambitious to get to the upper level, but we want to be hardware rich. So, you know, we want to try to keep building as fast as we can, and then with practice I think our launch cadence can go up.”

The biggest part of increasing cadence is manufacturing. That means BE-4 rocket engines for the first stage, BE-3U engines for the upper stage, and the stages themselves.

“With rockets, it’s hard,” Limp said. “Building prototypes is easy but building a machine to make the machines in volume at rate is much harder. And so I do feel like, when I look at the factories, our engine factory in Huntsville, the rocket factory here at Rocket Park and Lunar Plant 1, I feel like when you walk the floor there’s a lot of energy.”

Since he joined Blue Origin about two years ago, Limp said increasing production has been among his foremost goals.

“You’re never done with manufacturing, but I feel on the engine front we’re incredibly strong,” he said. “We’re going to double the rate again next year. We’ve got work to do, but on second stages I feel like we’re getting there. With the booster, we’re getting there. The key is to be hardware rich, so even if some of these missions have anomalies, we can recover quickly.”

Next stop, the Moon

Blue Origin recovered the New Glenn first stage from last week’s flight and brought it into port on Monday. Although it looks much cleaner than a used Falcon 9 first stage, much of this is due to the use of methane propellant, which does not produce the soot that kerosene propellant does. It will take some time to determine if and when this recovered first stage will be able fly again, but if it’s not ready soon Blue Origin has a third first stage nearing completion.

Whichever first stage gets called upon, New Glenn’s next payload is its Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander, a vehicle that is taller than the Apollo Lunar Module that carried humans to the Moon five decades ago.

Limp said the company will soon begin stacking the lunar lander (he promised photos) in Florida. After it is assembled, the lander will be put on a barge and shipped to Johnson Space Center in Houston for testing in a vacuum chamber.

“We’re getting pretty far along,” Limp said of Mark 1. “As soon as you start putting the gold foil on it, it starts looking like a lunar lander. So I can assure you, it’s coming together. Our plan is to still try to fly that in Q1, so I don’t see anything that’s keeping us from being able to do that.”

And after this the goal is to begin flying New Glenn more frequently, to serve a variety of commercial and government customers.

“There’s never been such a high demand for launch as there is right now, even with the cadence that SpaceX is doing,” he said. “So you know, there’s a lot of customers that are rooting for all launch companies—not just Blue, but all of us—to succeed because there’s a lot of people that are waiting in line to get to space.”

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Posted Tuesday 18 November 2025 at 11:43 am AEST (my time).

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Scientists have found traces of ancient opiates in the residue lining an Egyptian alabaster vase, indicating that opiate use was woven into the fabric of the culture. And the Egyptians didn’t just indulge occasionally: according to a paper published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, opiate use may have been a fixture of daily life.

In recent years, archaeologists have been applying the tools of pharmacology to excavated artifacts in collections around the world. As previously reported, there is ample evidence that humans in many cultures throughout history used various hallucinogenic substances in religious ceremonies or shamanic rituals. That includes not just ancient Egypt but also ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya, Inca, and Aztec cultures. The Urarina people who live in the Peruvian Amazon Basin still use a psychoactive brew called ayahuasca in their rituals, and Westerners seeking their own brand of enlightenment have also been known to participate.

For instance, in 2023, David Tanasi, of the University of South Florida, posted a preprint on his preliminary analysis of a ceremonial mug decorated with the head of Bes, a popular deity believed to confer protection on households, especially mothers and children. After collecting sample residues from the vessel, Tanasi applied various techniques—including proteomic and genetic analyses and synchrotron radiation-based Fourier-transform infrared microspectroscopy—to characterize the residues.

Tanasi found traces of Syrian rue, whose seeds are known to have hallucinogenic properties that can induce dream-like visions, per the authors, thanks to its production of the alkaloids harmine and harmaline. There were also traces of blue water lily, which contains a psychoactive alkaloid that acts as a sedative, as well as a fermented alcoholic concoction containing yeasts, wheat, sesame seeds, fruit (possibly grapes), honey, and, um, “human fluids”: possibly breast milk, oral or vaginal mucus, and blood. A follow-up 2024 study confirmed those results and also found traces of pine nuts or Mediterranean pine oil; licorice; tartaric acid salts that were likely part of the aforementioned alcoholic concoction; and traces of spider flowers known to have medicinal properties.

Vessels of alabaster

Now we can add opiates to the list of pharmacological substances used by the ancient Egyptians. The authors of this latest paper focused on one alabaster vase in particular, housed in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian Collection. The vase is intact—a rare find—and is inscribed in four ancient languages and mentions Xerxes I, who reigned over the Achaemenid Empire from 486 to 465 BCE. The authors were particularly intrigued by the presence of a dark-brown residue inside the vase.

Papaver somnifera entry in a facsimile of the ca. 515 CE Anicia Juliana Codex of De materia medica by Dioscorides.

C. Zollo/courtesy of Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University

 

pXRF analysis of YBC alabastra.

Andrew J. Koh

 

FTIR analysis of YBC alabastra.

Andrew J. Koh

 

Past scholars had speculated the vases most likely held cosmetics or perfumes, or perhaps hidden messages between the king and his officials. Yet there are also several known pharmacopeia recipes contained in such works as the Anicia Juliana Codex of De materia medica by Dioscorides. The current authors analyzed residue samples with nondestructive techniques, namely portable X-ray fluorescence XRF (pXRF) and passive Fourier Transform Infrared (pFTIR) spectroscopy.

The result: distinct traces of several biomarkers for opium, such as noscapine, hydrocotarnine, morphine, thebaine, and papaverine. That’s consistent with an earlier identification of opiate residues found in several Egyptian alabaster vessels and Cypriot juglets excavated from a merchant’s tomb south of Cairo, dating back to the New Kingdom (16th to 11th century BCE).

The authors think these twin findings warrant a reassessment of prior assumptions about Egyptian alabaster vessels, many of which they believe could also have traces of ancient opiates. A good starting point, they suggest, is a set of vessels excavated from Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 by archaeologist Howard Carter. Many of those vessels have the same sticky dark brown organic residues. There was an early attempt to chemically analyze those residues in 1933 by Albert Lucas, who simply didn’t have the necessary technology to identify the compounds, although he was able to determine that the residues were not unguents or perfumes. Nobody has attempted to analyze the residues since.

Additional evidence of the value of the residues lies in the fact that looters didn’t engage in the usual “smash and grab” practices employed to collect precious metals when it came to the alabaster vessels. Instead, looters transferred the organic stuff into portable bags; there are still finger marks inside many of the vessels, as well as remnants of the leather bags used to collect the organics.

“It remains imminently possible, if not probable, that at least some of the vast remaining bulk of calcite vessels… in fact contained opiates as part of a long-lived Egyptian tradition we are only beginning to understand,” the authors concluded. Looters missed a few of the vessels, which still contain their original organic contents, making them ideal candidates for future analysis.

“We now have found opiate chemical signatures that Egyptian alabaster vessels attached to elite societies in Mesopotamia and embedded in more ordinary cultural circumstances within ancient Egypt,” said co-author Andrew Koh of the Yale Peabody Museum. “It’s possible these vessels were easily recognizable cultural markers for opium use in ancient times, just as hookahs today are attached to shisha tobacco consumption. Analyzing the contents of the jars from King Tut’s tomb would further clarify the role of opium in these ancient societies.”

DOI: Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, 2025. 10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.13.3.0317  (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 18 November 2025 at 2:39 am AEST (my time).

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"This is a strong, evidence-based recommendation that aligns Australia with the latest international guidelines. Switching to potassium-enriched salt is one of the most feasible and impactful ways to lower blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. We commend the Taskforce for giving this issue the prominence it deserves," says Professor Bruce Neal.

The George Institute for Global Health welcomed the statement which supports the inclusion of potassium-enriched salt in national hypertension management guidelines, describing it as an important and practical step toward improving blood pressure control and reducing cardiovascular deaths.

The National Hypertension Taskforce, launched in 2022 in response to Australia's low and stagnating rates of high blood pressure control, has the ambitious goal to double control rates from 32% to 70% by 2030. Hypertension currently affects one in three Australian adults and is the nation's leading cause of preventable death and disability.

Excess dietary sodium and low potassium intake are both linked to high blood pressure, with high sodium alone being attributed to 1.9 million deaths globally each year. But despite decades of public health campaigns, salt intake remains nearly double recommended levels while potassium intake continues to fall short.

With potassium-enriched salt, a portion of the sodium chloride in regular salt is replaced with potassium chloride, typically in a 75:25 ratio. Large-scale clinical trials show that this switch can lower blood pressure, reduce major cardiovascular events and decrease cardiovascular deaths.

A recent review of 32 hypertension guidelines worldwide showed all recommend sodium reduction as a strategy for hypertension management. Many also suggested increasing potassium intake, but only four mentioned potassium-enriched salt and just two specifically recommended its routine use for hypertension management.

However, newer international guidelines from the European Society of Hypertension, the European Society of Cardiology and the American College of Cardiology American Heart Association now recommend the use of potassium-enriched salt.

The George Institute supports the Taskforce's call for potassium-enriched salt to be incorporated into the next update of the Australian Guideline for the Diagnosis and Management of Hypertension, alongside measures to ensure safe use for people with kidney disease or on certain medications.

The Institute is also working with partners globally to expand access to potassium-enriched salt, and engaging industry, regulators, and consumers in scaling up the use of potassium-enriched salt.

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When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we could reconsider that evidence. “You know—ask ourselves if we should really believe that based on the evidence we’ve got,” says Jan M. Engelmann, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Engelmann says that from the beginning of the Western intellectual tradition, people thought that only humans are rational. So, he designed a study to see if rationality shows up in chimpanzees. It turned out that they’re almost as rational as we are.

Food puzzles

“There was quite a bit of research showing that chimpanzees can form their beliefs in response to evidence,” Engelmann says. The experiments usually involved chimpanzees deciding which of the two boxes contained a snack. When the researchers shook both boxes and there was a rattling sound coming from one of them, the chimps almost always chose the box where the rattling came from.

“But no one has ever looked into their ability to revise beliefs in rational ways,” Engelmann explains. He views revision of beliefs as the hallmark of rationality, a perspective that’s consistent with our best knowledge in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. “There are so many irrational ways of responding to counter evidence—you know, ‘I’m gonna keep believing what I believe, I’m not gonna switch my mind,’” Engelmann claims.

Engelmann and his colleagues tested whether chimpanzees can revise their beliefs rationally based on the same setup, where the animals chose between two containers. “It turned out, when they first got the evidence that the food was in one of those containers and they made their choice based on that, they could later change their mind when we offered them evidence to the contrary,” Engelmann explains.

Complicated choices

The team started by classifying evidence presented to the chimpanzees as either weak or strong. Weak evidence included things like crumbs around one of the containers. Strong evidence pointed to the food more directly, like the rattling sounds used in previous studies. The first two experiments relied on giving chimpanzees weak evidence pointing at one container, strong evidence pointing at the other one, and manipulating the order in which the evidence was received.

When the first piece of evidence was weak, the chimpanzees were way more likely to change their choice when they received strong counter-evidence later. When the order was reversed and the strong evidence was followed by the weak one, they usually stuck to their initial belief. “Quite frankly, I think many other animals would pass this test,” Engelmann says. “But then we moved on to making things more complicated for the chimpanzees.”

In the third experiment, the team tested whether the chimpanzees really think about the options they have. The setup was changed to include three containers. At the beginning, the chimpanzees heard rattling sounds from the first container, which was a piece of relatively weak evidence in this experiment. Then they received strong evidence pointing at the second container: they were shown the food in there through a glass pane. The team provided them with no evidence for the third container. Finally, the strong evidence container was removed, and the chimpanzees were allowed to make their choice. “We wanted to know if they stand and think like, ‘Hmm, the food could be here, but it also could be there,’” Engelmann says.

The chimpanzees apparently did organize the evidence they had in a hierarchy. When the strong evidence container was gone, they consistently went along with the weak evidence and chose the container with the rattling noise.

The fourth experiment showed the chimps most likely worked with mental representations of the evidence they had. When the team offered them the same auditory clue repeatedly, it did not increase the likelihood of them choosing the container it pointed to—they knew they had already heard the rattling, so they considered the evidence redundant.

“And then we went for the fifth experiment, which was sort of the big finale: We found chimpanzees understand second-order evidence,” Engelmann says.

Sparks of rationality

The goal of the final experiment was to see if chimpanzees can figure out if the evidence they’ve just received supports or contradicts other pieces of evidence they had. “They understand evidence about the evidence—more colloquially, they understand that the evidence can be misleading,” Engelmann explains.

In the first step, the chimps got the auditory evidence, the same rattling sound coming from the first container. Then, they received indirect visual evidence: a trail of peanuts leading to the second container. At this point, the chimpanzees picked the first container, presumably because they viewed the auditory evidence as stronger. But then the team would remove a rock from the first container. The piece of rock suggested that it was not food that was making the rattling sound. “At this point, a rational agent should conclude, ‘The evidence I followed is now defeated and I should go for the other option,’” Engelmann told Ars. “And that’s exactly what the chimpanzees did.”

The team had 20 chimpanzees participating in all five experiments, and they followed the evidence significantly above chance level—in about 80 percent of the cases. “At the individual level, about 18 out of 20 chimpanzees followed this expected pattern,” Engelmann claims.

He views this study as one of the first steps to learn how rationality evolved and when the first sparks of rational thought appeared in nature. “We’re doing a lot of research to answer exactly this question,” Engelmann says.

The team thinks rationality is not an on/off switch; instead, different animals have different levels of rationality. “The first two experiments demonstrate a rudimentary form of rationality,” Engelmann says. “But experiments four and five are quite difficult and show a more advanced form of reflective rationality I expect only chimps and maybe bonobos to have.”

In his view, though, humans are still at least one level above the chimps. “Many people say reflective rationality is the final stage, but I think you can go even further. What humans have is something I would call social rationality,” Engelmann claims. “We can discuss and comment on each other’s thinking and in that process make each other even more rational.”

Sometimes, at least in humans, social interactions can also increase our irrationality instead. But chimps don’t seem to have this problem. Engelmann’s team is currently running a study focused on whether the choices chimps make are influenced by the choices of their fellow chimps. “The chimps only followed the other chimp’s decision when the other chimp had better evidence,” Engelmann says. “In this sense, chimps seem to be more rational than humans.”

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb7565

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Posted Monday 17 November 2025 at 3:43 am AEST (my time).

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This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It can carry life-threatening diseases. It’s difficult to find and hard to kill. And it’s obsessed with human blood.

The Aedes aegypti is a species of mosquito that people like Tim Moore, district manager of a mosquito control district on the Western Slope of Colorado, really don’t want to see.

“Boy, they are locked into humans,” Moore said. “That’s their blood meal.”

This mosquito species is native to tropical and subtropical climates, but as climate change pushes up temperatures and warps precipitation patterns, the Aedes aegypti—which can spread Zika, dengue, chikungunya and other potentially deadly viruses—is on the move.

It’s popping up all over the Mountain West, where conditions have historically been far too harsh for it to survive. In the last decade, towns in New Mexico and Utah have begun catching Aedes aegypti in their traps year after year, and just this summer, one was found for the first time in Idaho.

Now, an old residential neighborhood in Grand Junction, Colorado, has emerged as one of the latest frontiers for this troublesome mosquito.

The city, with a population of about 70,000, is the largest in Colorado west of the Continental Divide. In 2019, the local mosquito control district spotted one wayward Aedes aegypti in a trap. It was odd, but the mosquitoes had already been found in Moab, Utah, about 100 miles to the southwest. Moore, the district manager, figured they’d caught a hitchhiker and that the harsh Colorado climate would quickly eliminate the species.

“I concluded it was a one-off, and we don’t have to worry too much about this,” Moore said.

But then, a few years later, it happened again. They found two more of the invasive mosquito species in traps in 2023.

“Coincidence is not a word you use much in science,” said Hannah Livesay, biologist at the Grand River Mosquito Control District, which is based in Grand Junction.

The team bought different traps and adjusted their techniques to hunt for the mosquito. Scientific literature and mosquito researchers told them the effort was bound to be pointless. It was unlikely the mosquito would make it through the winter.

Then, the results started coming in. In 2024, the first year of the Aedes aegypti surveillance program, the district caught 796 adults and found 446 eggs.

These mosquitoes weren’t just surviving in Colorado—they were thriving.

Dengue Virus Driven by Mosquitoes’ Expansion

Mosquitoes are often called the most dangerous species on the planet for their ability to spread life-threatening diseases to humans. Of those, malaria, carried by female Anopheles mosquitoes, has long been one of the most devastating.

However, as climate change allows the Aedes aegypti to move northward, survive at higher elevations and stay active for longer into the fall, dengue virus is fast emerging as one of the most dangerous of the world’s diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and ticks, researchers say.

Between 2000 and 2024, dengue cases reported to the World Health Organization increased more than twentyfold, as climate change, urbanization and global travel and trade pushed the mosquito vector for the disease into new areas. Climate change has also lengthened the season during which the insect can breed and thrive in areas where it’s endemic. About half the world’s population is now at risk of dengue, according to the WHO, and between 100 and 400 million infections occur each year.

The virus is often mild or asymptomatic, but for some people, it can become severe, so painful that it’s nicknamed “break-bone fever.” It can even be deadly. More than 2,500 dengue-related deaths have been reported globally in 2025, with outbreaks in Brazil, India, Australia and other countries. In the US, dengue is most common in Florida, where the Aedes aegypti mosquito has thrived for centuries in the subtropical and tropical climates.

In Colorado, state medical entomologist Chris Roundy said that while the mosquito is in Grand Junction, the state’s public health officials are not too worried about disease spread—yet.

“The presence of those mosquitoes does not mean that dengue is going to be there,” Roundy said.

For the mosquitoes to spread disease, they need to feed on a human who is already sick: Someone who traveled to Florida, contracted dengue and then returned to Grand Junction while they’re still infected, for example.

In other words, the chances of an outbreak of dengue or another of the diseases the Aedes aegypti carries in western Colorado remain pretty slim. Still, he said, “we are keeping a very close eye on [the mosquitoes] to see if they expand their area in Grand Junction, or if we start seeing them in other counties.”

The Hunt for Aedes

On a warm and sunny October morning in Grand Junction, David Garrett, team lead for the Grand River Mosquito Control District’s Aedes aegypti program, parked his white truck on what the team calls their “epicenter street” in the old residential neighborhood of Orchard Mesa, where the Aedes aegypti found a foothold in Colorado.

It was collection day.

Across the rest of Colorado, mosquito control operations aimed at preventing the spread of West Nile virus are winding down. Populations of the native Culex tarsalis mosquitoes, the primary vector for the virus, were declining rapidly in the autumn chill.

But in Grand Junction, Garrett is still in the field looking for the invasive mosquito species that seems to get active in the fall.

The traps need to be close to humans—the food source—and an inviting place for the mosquitoes to lay eggs. Unlike the mosquitoes that are native to the Western Slope, which breed in standing water like ditches and ponds, the Aedes aegypti mosquito prefers to breed in containers like potted plant saucers, watering cans, and decorative yard fixtures. The traps for them look like unassuming black plastic buckets with an oddly shaped funnel attached to their tops. The district has snuck them into corners of front yards, between bushes and along fences throughout the neighborhood.

Garrett plucks out the sticky papers that have been inside the traps for the previous week, replaces them with clean sticky papers and adds a bit of fresh water. He’ll take the samples back to the lab to count how many Aedes aegypti they snagged.

But before doing that, he paused to peel one of the sticky papers apart and counted four invasive mosquitoes stuck to it. Their jet black bodies with reflective white markings are easy to differentiate from the dusty brown of the native desert mosquitoes.

As of mid-October, the district had caught 526 adult Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in 2025, all in the Orchard Mesa area.

The mosquitoes don’t lay all their eggs in one basket. They skip from container to container, laying a few eggs in each. “You don’t find one and find them all,” said Livesay, the district’s biologist. “So, it’s really difficult to track them down.”

Back in the car, control district staff wound through the neighborhood. From the passenger seat, Livesay pointed with a frustrated sigh at an old tire lying in a yard. “Tires are one of the most common places you find them,” she said.

The species’ preference for backyards and gardens makes it incredibly difficult to control, Livesay said. The district had to get permission from dozens of homeowners in the Orchard Mesa area to set up and maintain traps on private property, and only a handful of homeowners have allowed them to spray insecticides in their yards.

Public awareness of the mosquito’s presence, and the potential health risk it could pose, has been gradual; the district has passed out fliers and chatted with residents, but the campaign doesn’t appear to have quite taken root. On the day the team checked its traps, several residents said that they weren’t aware that an invasive mosquito was present in their neighborhood.

The new species is also expensive to control: It has cost the district about $15,000 this year in new traps, additional staff who must stay later into the season and different insecticides after learning that the mosquitoes had a resistance to the one they use for the native mosquitoes—permethrin.

Given how costly it is to control them, further expansion of their range on the Western Slope is Moore’s biggest concern. Right now, the Aedes aegypti occupies about 100 acres of the Orchard Mesa neighborhood. He doesn’t want it to gain any more ground.

“If we can’t get rid of them, or at least confine them,” Moore says, “that’s a huge game changer for us.”

“We Need a Cold Winter”

While it’s virtually impossible to know how the mosquitoes got into Colorado, experts said, the pathway could’ve been as benign as a Grand Junction resident bringing home a potted plant from out of state.

Robert Hancock, a mosquito researcher and biology professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, said that, since the mosquito follows humans and is easily transported by the containers it breeds in, he’s not surprised when it pops up in Colorado and other high and cold locations. What does surprise him is when the mosquito can survive winters in those areas.

Hancock noted it’s recently been found to endure the winters in Utah, California, and Oregon—and now in Colorado.

“That’s the scary part, because it made it to the next summer in Grand Junction,” Hancock said, speaking in his Denver lab while feeding his own colony of Aedes aegypti, reared for research. (He allows the mosquitoes, which are completely free of disease, to feed on his own arm.)

As the climate warms, Hancock said, “Aedes aegypti is performing at an extraordinarily high level.”

More than half of pathogenic diseases can be aggravated by climate change, a 2022 article in the journal Nature Climate Change found.

Livesay, the biologist, suspects the newcomer mosquitoes are wiggling their way into basements and greenhouses to weather the Colorado winter, which doesn’t have as many freezing nights as it used to.

Grand Junction had only 17 days of below-freezing temperatures in 2024, the fewest on record, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Typically, the area gets more than two months’ worth of freezing weather. Winters there have, on average, warmed 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970.

“We need a cold winter for the mosquitoes to not make it through,” Livesay said. “Things are hovering just above freezing, and they’re able to last.”

This story was produced with support from the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Posted Sunday 16 November 2025 at 4:45 am AEST (my time).

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The scaly skin of a crest over the back of the juvenile duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens. 

Credit: Tyler Keillor/Fossil Lab

Edmontosaurus annectens, a large herbivore duck-billed dinosaur that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous period, was discovered back in 1908 in east-central Wyoming by C.H. Sternberg, a fossil collector. The skeleton, later housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and nicknamed the “AMNH mummy,” was covered by scaly skin imprinted in the surrounding sediment that gave us the first approximate idea of what the animal looked like.

More than a century later, a team of paleontologists led by Paul C. Sereno, a professor of organismal biology at the University of Chicago, got back to the same exact place where Sternberg dug up the first Edmontosaurus specimen. The researchers found two more Edmontosaurus mummies with all fleshy external anatomy imprinted in a sub-millimeter layer of clay. For the first time, we uncovered an accurate image of what Edmontosaurus really looked like, down to the tiniest details, like the size of its scales and the arrangement of spikes on its tail. And we were in for at least a few surprises.

Evolving images

Our view of Edmontosaurus changed over time, even before Sereno’s study. The initial drawing of Edmontosaurus was made in 1909 by Charles R. Knight, a famous paleoartist, who based his visualization on the first specimen found by Sternberg. “He was accurate in some ways, but he made a mistake in that he drew the crest extending throughout the entire length of the body,” Sereno says. The mummy Knight based his drawing on had no tail, so understandably, the artist used his imagination to fill in the gaps and made the Edmontosaurus look a little bit like a dragon.

An update to Knight’s image came in 1984 due to Jack Horner, one of the most influential American paleontologists, who found a section of Edmontosaurus tail that had spikes instead of a crest. “The specimen was not prepared very accurately, so he thought the spikes were rectangular and didn’t touch each other,” Sereno explains. “In his reconstruction he extended the spikes from the tail all the way to the head—which was wrong,” Sereno says. Over time, we ended up with many different, competing visions of Edmontosaurus. “But I think now we finally nailed down the way it truly looked,” Sereno claims.

To nail it down, Sereno’s team retraced the route to where Sternberg found the first Edmontosaurus mummy. This was not easy, because the team had to rely on Sternberg’s notes, which often referred to towns and villages that were no longer on the map. But based on interviews with Wyoming farmers, Sereno managed to reach the “mummy zone,” an area less than 10 kilometers in diameter, surprisingly abundant in Cretaceous fossils.

“To find dinosaurs, you need to understand geology,” Sereno says. And in the “mummy zone,” geological processes created something really special.

Dinosaur templating

The fossils are found in part of the Lance Formation, a geological formation that originated in the last three or so million years of the Cretaceous period, just before the dinosaurs’ extinction. It extends through North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and even to parts of Canada. “The formation is roughly 200 meters thick. But when you approach the mummy zone—surprise! The formation suddenly goes up to a thousand meters thick,” Sereno says. “The sedimentation rate in there was very high for some reason.”

Sereno thinks the most likely reason behind the high sedimentation rate was frequent and regular flooding of the area by a nearby river. These floods often drowned the unfortunate dinosaurs that roamed there and covered their bodies with mud and clay that congealed against a biofilm which formed at the surface of decaying carcasses. “It’s called clay templating, where the clay sticks to the outside of the skin and preserves a very thin layer, a mask, showing how the animal looked like,” Sereno says.

Clay templating is a process well-known by scientists studying deep-sea invertebrate organisms because that’s the only way they can be preserved. “It’s just no one ever thought it could happen to a large dinosaur buried in a river,” Sereno says. But it’s the best explanation for the Wyoming mummy zone, where Sereno’s team managed to retrieve two more Edmontosaurus skeletons surrounded by clay masks under 1 millimeter thick. These revealed the animal’s appearance with amazing, life-like accuracy.

As a result, the Edmontosaurus image got updated one more time. And some of the updates were rather striking.

Delicate elephants

Sereno’s team analyzed the newly discovered Edmontosaurus mummies with a barrage of modern imaging techniques like CT scans, X-rays, photogrammetry, and more. “We created a detailed model of the skin and wrapped it around the skeleton—some of these technologies were not even available 10 years ago,” Sereno says. The result was an updated Edmontosaurus image that includes changes to the crest, the spikes, and the appearance of its skin. Perhaps most surprisingly, it adds hooves to its legs.

It turned out both Knight and Horner were partially right about the look of Edmontosaurus’ back. The fleshy crest, as depicted by Knight, indeed started at the top of the head and extended rearward along the spine. The difference was that there was a point where this crest changed into a row of spikes, as depicted in the Horner version. The spikes were similar to the ones found on modern chameleons, where each spike corresponds one-to-one with the vertebrae underneath it.

“Another thing that was stunning in Edmontosaurus was the small size of its scales,” Sereno says. Most of the scales were just 1 to 4 millimeters across. They grew slightly larger toward the bottom of the tail, but even there they did not exceed 1 centimeter. “You can find such scales on a lizard, and we’re talking about an animal the size of an elephant,” Sereno adds. The skin covered with these super-tiny scales was also incredibly thin, which the team deduced from the wrinkles they found in their imagery.

And then came the hooves. “In a hoof, the nail goes around the toe and wraps, wedge-shaped, around its bottom,” Sereno explains. The Edmontosaurus had singular, central hooves on its fore legs with a “frog,” a triangular, rubbery structure at the underside. “They looked very much like equine hooves, so apparently these were not invented by mammals,” Sereno says. “Dinosaurs had them.” The hind legs that supported most of the animal’s weight, on the other hand, had three wedge-shaped hooves wrapped around three digits and a fleshy heel toward the back—a structure found in modern-day rhinos.

“There are so many amazing ‘firsts’ preserved in these duck-billed mummies,” Sereno says. “The earliest hooves were documented in a land vertebrate, the first confirmed hooved reptile, and the first hooved four-legged animal with different forelimb and hindlimb posture.” But Edmontosaurus, while first in many aspects, was not the last species Sereno’s team found in the mummy zone.

Looking for wild things

“When I was walking through the grass in the mummy zone for the first time, the first hill I found a T. rex in a concretion. Another mummy we found was a Triceratops,” Sereno says. Both these mummies are currently being examined and will be covered in the upcoming papers published by Sereno’s team. And both are unique in their own way.

The T. rex mummy was preserved in a surprisingly life-like pose, which Sereno thinks indicates the predator might have been buried alive. Edmontosaurus mummies, on the other hand, were positioned in a death pose, which meant the animals most likely died up to a week before the mud covered their carcasses. This, in principle, should make the T. rex clay mask even more true-to-life, since there should be no need to account for desiccation and decay when reconstructing the animal’s image.

Sereno, though, seems to be even more excited about the Triceratops mummy. “We already found Triceratops scales were 10 times larger than the largest scales on the Edmontosaurus, and its skin had no wrinkles, so it was significantly thicker. And we’re talking about animals of similar size living in the same area and in the same time,” Sereno says. To him, this could indicate that the physiology of the Triceratops and Edmontosaurus was radically different.

“We are in the age of discovery. There are so many things to come. It’s just the beginning,” Sereno says. “Anyway, the next two mummies we want to cover are the Triceratops and the T. Rex. And I can already tell you what we have with the Triceratops is wild,” he adds.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adw3536

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Posted Sunday 16 November 2025 at 4:43 am AEST (my time).

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A young woolly mammoth now known as Yuka was frozen in the Siberian permafrost for about 40,000 years before it was discovered by local tusk hunters in 2010. The hunters soon handed it over to scientists, who were excited to see its exquisite level of preservation, with skin, muscle tissue, and even reddish hair intact. Later research showed that, while full cloning was impossible, Yuka’s DNA was in such good condition that some cell nuclei could even begin limited activity when placed inside mouse eggs.

Now, a team has successfully sequenced Yuka’s RNA—a feat many researchers once thought impossible. Researchers at Stockholm University carefully ground up bits of muscle and other tissue from Yuka and nine other woolly mammoths, then used special chemical treatments to pull out any remaining RNA fragments, which are normally thought to be much too fragile to survive even a few hours after an organism has died. Scientists go to great lengths to extract RNA even from fresh samples, and most previous attempts with very old specimens have either failed or been contaminated.

A different view

The team used RNA-handling methods adapted for ancient, fragmented molecules. Their scientific séance allowed them to explore information that had never been accessible before, including which genes were active when Yuka died. In the creature’s final panicked moments, its muscles were tensing and its cells were signaling distress—perhaps unsurprising since Yuka is thought to have died as a result of a cave lion attack.

It’s an exquisite level of detail, and one that scientists can’t get from just analyzing DNA. “With RNA, you can access the actual biology of the cell or tissue happening in real time within the last moments of life of the organism,” said Emilio Mármol, a researcher who led the study. “In simple terms, studying DNA alone can give you lots of information about the whole evolutionary history and ancestry of the organism under study. “Obtaining this fragile and mostly forgotten layer of the cell biology in old tissues/specimens, you can get for the first time a full picture of the whole pipeline of life (from DNA to proteins, with RNA as an intermediate messenger).”

Combining DNA and RNA analysis led the researchers to discover that, while Yuka is usually described as a juvenile female based on inspection of the external anatomy, it’s actually a male. Both of these molecules contained sequences derived from the Y chromosome, which only males have.

“Whether this means that the initial anatomical exam was wrong, or that maybe Yuka is indeed an XY male genetically, but due to some developmental issue—its genitals stayed in a feminized form—we cannot actually say,” Mármol said. “We did not find any evidence with our data supporting the impaired genital development, so the answer to this remains unclear and merits further investigation.” 

Studying a fragile molecule

While scientists have studied DNA from creatures that lived up to 2 million years ago, RNA sequencing has lagged far behind with sparse success that previously extended only as far back as a 14,000-year-old specimen. That’s mainly because RNA normally breaks down very quickly. DNA is a stable repository of information; it’s less chemically reactive, and there are a lot of enzymes dedicated to preserving it. RNA, in contrast, is constantly produced and destroyed once it’s served its purpose, lasting only a few hours in living cells.

So when a cell dies, RNA usually degrades rapidly. But the process requires liquid water; if it’s frozen, as in many Ice Age remains, the process halts.

Now that scientists have demonstrated that it’s possible to recover such old RNA, the same technique could be applied to samples from other long-extinct species. We could potentially detect if the creatures were infected with RNA-based viruses like influenza or coronavirus when they died.

“Knowing that RNA is preserved means that we have another tool to use to reconstruct and validate ancient genomes,” said Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist who was not involved in the study. “In the future, we should be able to use this approach to explore how gene expression differs between extinct and living species or even between individuals of the same extinct species. I look forward to the next series of papers as this approach is applied more broadly.”

Mármol says he hopes to see more work done on Tasmanian tigers and woolly mammoths, “but other extinct species do come to my mind, such as the dodo, the moa, cave lions, cave bears, dire wolves, the great auk.” The best candidates are those that lived in cold, dry environments, since tropical conditions are unlikely to preserve RNA.

The method could also be applied to remains of the ancestors of still-living species as well. For example, Mármol says, “There is probably a great room to explore the biology and evolution of currently endangered species back when they were more numerous, and obtain a more comprehensive and functional understanding of the effect of population decline by including the RNA layer to paleogenetic studies.” Studying ancient RNA in combination with DNA and protein opens a new window into lost worlds, while also providing clues that could help pull today’s threatened species back from the brink of extinction.

Cell, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.10.025

Ashley Balzer-Vigil writes about space for a contractor for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and freelances as an environmental writer. She holds master’s degrees in space studies from the University of North Dakota and science writing from Johns Hopkins University. She writes most of her articles with one of her toddlers on her lap. 

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Posted Saturday 15 November 2025 at 5:15 pm AEST (my time).

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Our best friends come in a fantastic array of shapes and sizes; a Borzoi looks nothing like a Boston terrier, except for a certain fundamental, ineffable (except to taxonomists) doggyness about them. And it’s been that way almost from the beginning. A recent study of dog and wolf skulls from the last 50,000 years found that dogs living just after the last Ice Age were already about half as varied in their shape and size as modern dogs.

“Shaped like a friend” means a lot of different things

Biologist and archaeologist Allowen Evin, of CNRS, and her colleagues compared the size and shape of 643 skulls from dogs and wolves: 158 from modern dogs, 86 from modern wolves, and 391 from archaeological sites around the world spanning the last 50,000 years. By comparing the locations and sizes of certain skeletal landmarks, such as bony protrusions where muscles attached, the researchers could quantify how different one skull was from another. That suggested a few things about how dogs, or at least the shapes of their heads, have evolved over time.

The team’s results suggest that dogs that lived during the Mesolithic (before settled farming life came into fashion in the Middle East) and the Neolithic (after farming took off but before the heyday of copper smelting; 10,000 BCE is a general starting point) were a surprisingly diverse bunch, at least in terms of the size and shape of their skulls.

When Evin and her colleagues used statistical methods to quantify exactly how different the size and shape of dog skulls were, it turned out that dogs from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods had skulls about twice as diverse as those of Pleistocene canines, and already a little over half as diverse as the skulls of modern dogs. “Some ancient dogs show skull shapes that don’t match any living breed that we have studied,” Evin told Ars in an email. “These forms may reflect early regional adaptations or functions that no longer exist today.”

Those Mesolithic and Neolithic dogs didn’t have the kinds of really extreme features we see in modern dog breeds (looking at you, pugs), but showed they had a lot more variation than Evin and her colleagues expected. Today, there are several hundred distinct breeds of dog in the world (you’ll get different numbers depending on who you ask), and most of them were carefully shaped by dog breeders starting in the Victorian era.

“The concept of ‘breed’ is very recent and does not apply to the archaeological record,” Evin said. People have, of course, been breeding dogs for particular traits for as long as we’ve had dogs, and tiny lap dogs existed even in ancient Rome. However, it’s unlikely that a Neolithic herder would have described his dog as being a distinct “breed” from his neighbor’s hunting partner, even if they looked quite different. Which, apparently, they did.

Bones only tell part of the story

“We know from genetic models that domestication should have started during the late Pleistocene,” Evin told Ars. A 2021 study suggested that domestic dogs have been a separate species from wolves for more than 23,000 years. But it took a while for differences to build up.

Evin and her colleagues had access to 17 canine skulls that ranged from 12,700 to 50,000 years old—prior to the end of the ice age—and they all looked enough like modern wolves that, as Evin put it, “for now, we have no evidence to suggest that any of the wolf-like skulls did not belong to wolves or looked different from them.” In other words, if you’re just looking at the skull, it’s hard to tell the earliest dogs from wild wolves.

We have no way to know, of course, what the living dog might have looked like. It’s worth mentioning that Evin and her colleagues found a modern Saint Bernard’s skull that, according to their statistical analysis, looked more wolf-like than dog-like. But even if it’s not offering you a brandy keg, there’s no mistaking a live Saint Bernard, with its droopy jowls and floppy ears, for a wolf.

“Skull shape tells us a lot about function and evolutionary history, but it represents only one aspect of the animal’s appearance. This means that two dogs with very similar skulls could have looked quite different in life,” Evin told Ars. “It’s an important reminder that the archaeological record captures just part of the biological and cultural story.”

And with only bones—and sparse ones, at that—to go on, we may be missing some of the early chapters of dogs’ biological and cultural story. Domestication tends to select the friendliest animals to produce the next generation, and apparently that comes with a particular set of evolutionary side effects, whether you’re studying wolves, foxes, cattle, or pigs. Spots, floppy ears, and curved tails all seem to be part of the genetic package that comes with inter-species friendliness. But none of those traits is visible in the skull.

Why do dogs come in so many varieties?

But within a few thousand years, generations of domesticated life had started to become visible in dogs’ bones. The oldest dog with a recognizably doggy skull lived at Veretye, a Mesolithic site in northwestern Russia, around 10,800 years ago. Coincidentally, the Veretye dog is also the oldest dog (so far) identified as a dog based on its DNA.

Skulls from domestic dogs that lived about 11,800 years ago look distinctly dog-like; Evin and her colleagues’ statistical methods sorted their features into a different group from the Pleistocene canines and modern wolves. The first noticeable change was size; dog skulls dating to between 8,700 and 9,700 years ago were generally smaller than Pleistocene canine skulls. “On average, early Holocene dogs were smaller than Late Pleistocene wolves and many modern dogs. Especially the dogs from the Mesolithic/Neolithic were much smaller,” Evin told Ars. “Many domestic species exhibit a size decrease during the early phase of domestication, and several explanations have been offered, such as change in diet, or direct selection for more docile, smaller individuals.”

By 8,200 years ago, those smaller skulls started showing more variety in their shape, and by 7,700 years ago, dog skulls varied more in size, too. But why?

Following humans around in return for food is a very different lifestyle than hunting or scavenging like a wolf. Some of the selective pressures that kept most wolves looking fairly similar would have been removed for dogs. At the same time, new pressures—adapting to diets that might have included grain or other table scraps, different types of physical activity, and eventually life in different climates—set in, reshaping dogs in a surprisingly diverse set of ways.

“Whereas Victorian breeding programs are the origins of many of today’s most extreme morphologies, early Holocene domestic dogs exhibited more diverse skull forms than previously considered,” wrote Evin and her colleagues in their recent paper.

Science, 2025 DOI: 10.1126/science.adt0995  (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 15 November 2025 at 5:14 pm AEST (my time).

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The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

The on-target touchdown came nine minutes after the New Glenn rocket, built and operated by Bezos’ company Blue Origin, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 3:55 pm EST (20:55 UTC). The launch was delayed from Sunday, first due to poor weather at the launch site in Florida, then by a solar storm that sent hazardous radiation toward Earth earlier this week.

“We achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. “It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds (Blue Origin’s nickname for the first stage) had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”

The two-stage launcher set off for space carrying two NASA science probes on a two-year journey to Mars, marking the first time any operational satellites flew on Blue Origin’s new rocket, named for the late NASA astronaut John Glenn. The New Glenn hit its marks on the climb into space, firing seven BE-4 main engines for nearly three minutes on a smooth ascent through blue skies over Florida’s Space Coast.

The engines consumed super-cold liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen, producing more than 3.8 million pounds of thrust at full power. The BE-4s shut down, and the first stage booster released the rocket’s second stage, with dual hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines, to continue the mission into orbit.

The booster soared to an altitude of 79 miles (127 kilometers), then began a controlled plunge back into the atmosphere, targeting a landing on Blue Origin’s offshore recovery vessel named Jacklyn. Moments later, three of the booster’s engines reignited to slow its descent in the upper atmosphere. Then, moments before reaching the Atlantic, the rocket again lit three engines and extended its landing gear, sinking through low-level clouds before settling onto the football field-size deck of Blue Origin’s recovery platform 375 miles (600 kilometers) east of Cape Canaveral.

A pivotal moment

The moment of touchdown appeared electric at several Blue Origin facilities around the country, which had live views of cheering employees piped in to the company’s webcast of the flight. This was the first time any company besides SpaceX has propulsively landed an orbital-class rocket booster, coming nearly 10 years after SpaceX recovered its first Falcon 9 booster intact in December 2015.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn landing also came almost exactly a decade after the company landed its smaller suborbital New Shepard rocket for the first time in West Texas. Just like Thursday’s New Glenn landing, Blue Origin successfully recovered the New Shepard on its second-ever attempt.

Blue Origin’s heavy-lifter launched successfully for the first time in January. But technical problems prevented the booster from restarting its engines on descent, and the first stage crashed at sea. Engineers made “propellant management and engine bleed control improvements” to resolve the problems, and the fixes appeared to work Thursday.

The rocket recovery is a remarkable achievement for Blue Origin, which has long lagged dominant SpaceX in the commercial launch business. SpaceX has now logged 532 landings with its Falcon booster fleet. Now, with just a single recovery in the books, Blue Origin sits at second in the rankings for propulsive landings of orbit-class boosters. Bezos’ company has amassed 34 landings of the suborbital New Shepard model, which lacks the size and doesn’t reach the altitude and speed of the New Glenn booster.

Blue Origin landed a New Shepard returning from space for the first time in November 2015, a few weeks before SpaceX first recovered a Falcon 9 booster. Bezos threw shade on SpaceX with a post on Twitter, now called X, after the first Falcon 9 landing: “Welcome to the club!”

Finally, after Thursday, Blue Origin officials can say they are part of the same reusable rocket club as SpaceX. Within a few days, Blue Origin’s recovery vessel is expected to return to Port Canaveral, Florida, where ground crews will offload the New Glenn booster and move it to a hangar for inspections and refurbishment.

“Today was a tremendous achievement for the New Glenn team, opening a new era for Blue Origin and the industry as we look to launch, land, repeat, again and again,” said Jordan Charles, the company’s vice president for the New Glenn program, in a statement. “We’ve made significant progress on manufacturing at rate and building ahead of need. Our primary focus remains focused on increasing our cadence and working through our manifest.”

Blue Origin plans to reuse the same booster next year for the first launch of the company’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar cargo lander. This mission is currently penciled in to be next on Blue Origin’s New Glenn launch schedule. Eventually, the company plans to have a fleet of reusable boosters, like SpaceX has with the Falcon 9, that can each be flown up to 25 times.

New Glenn is a core element in Blue Origin’s architecture for NASA’s Artemis lunar program. The rocket will eventually launch human-rated lunar landers to the Moon to provide astronauts with rides to and from the surface of the Moon.

The US Space Force will also examine the results of Thursday’s launch to assess New Glenn’s readiness to begin launching military satellites. The military selected Blue Origin last year to join SpaceX and United Launch Alliance as a third launch provider for the Defense Department.

Slow train to Mars

The mission wasn’t over with the buoyant landing in the Atlantic. New Glenn’s second stage fired its engines two times to propel itself on a course toward deep space, setting up for deployment of NASA’s two ESCAPADE satellites a little more than a half-hour after liftoff.

The identical satellites released from their mounts on top of the rocket to begin their nearly two-year journey to Mars, where they will enter orbit to survey how the solar wind interacts with the rarefied uppermost layers of the red planet’s atmosphere. Scientists believe radiation from the Sun gradually stripped away Mars’ atmosphere, driving runaway climate change that transitioned the planet from a warm, habitable world to the global inhospitable desert seen today.

“I’m both elated and relieved to see NASA’s ESCAPADE spacecraft healthy post-launch and looking forward to the next chapter of their journey to help us understand Mars’ dynamic space weather environment,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley.

Scientists want to understand the environment at the top of the Martian atmosphere to learn more about what drove this change. With two instrumented spacecraft, ESCAPADE will gather data from different locations around Mars, providing a series of multipoint snapshots of solar wind and atmospheric conditions. Another NASA spacecraft, named MAVEN, has collected similar data since arriving in orbit around Mars in 2014, but it is only a single observation post.

ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, was developed and launched on a budget of about $80 million, a bargain compared to all of NASA’s recent Mars missions. The spacecraft were built by Rocket Lab, and the project is managed on behalf of NASA by the University of California, Berkeley.

NASA paid Blue Origin about $20 million for the launch of ESCAPADE, significantly less than it would have cost to launch it on any other dedicated rocket. The space agency accepted the risk of launching on the relatively unproven New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the Space Force for the government’s marquee space missions.

The mission was supposed to launch last year, when Earth and Mars were in the right positions to enable a direct trip between the planets. But Blue Origin delayed the launch, forcing a yearlong wait until the company’s second New Glenn was ready to fly. Now, the ESCAPADE satellites, each about a half-ton in mass fully fueled, will loiter in a unique orbit more than a million miles from Earth until next November, when they will set off for the red planet. ESCAPADE will arrive at Mars in September 2027 and begin its science mission in 2028.

Rocket Lab ground controllers established communication with the ESCAPADE satellites late Thursday night.

“The ESCAPADE mission is part of our strategy to understand Mars’ past and present so we can send the first astronauts there safely,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding Martian space weather is a top priority for future missions because it helps us protect systems, robots, and most importantly, humans, in extreme environments.”

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Posted Saturday 15 November 2025 at 4:08 am AEST (my time).

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How many times have you said, “I wish the days were longer”? Well, NASA scientists say the construction of China’s Three Gorges Dam actually did make the days longer, by slowing the rotation of the Earth. Hallelujah! Extra time you can use to learn a new language, catch up at work, or even better, sleep in.

This raises a lot of questions. First of all, is it true? Did the dam actually make our days longer? And if so, why? And just how much extra time are we talking about here? I mean, you need to plan your schedule, right? Should we build more giant dams to get even more time?

Angular Velocity

To answer these questions, we need three basic physics ideas: (1) angular velocity, (2) angular momentum, and (3) the moment of inertia. I’ll explain each of these.

First, here’s a little experiment that you can do yourself. If you have a rotating desk chair, get it spinning with your feet off the ground and your arms tucked in. Now, before you throw up, extend your arms. It slows you down, right? Here's a version with a human on a rotating platform:

The speed of rotation is what we call angular velocity, represented by the Greek letter omega (ω). Why “angular”? Here’s a two-dimensional example below. Think of this circle as centered on an xy coordinate plane. I’ve drawn a radius (R) to a point on the circle where it cuts the horizontal axis:

Now imagine this point moving counterclockwise around the circle. As it does, the radius line sweeps around like the second hand on a (backward) clock—and at any point in time, it forms an angle (θ) with the x axis. The faster the point moves around the circle, the faster that angle changes. Hence, “angular velocity.”

To be specific, ω is defined by how much the angle changes (Δθ) in a certain increment of time (Δt). So if the spinning girl above completes one rotation in one second, we say she has an angular velocity of 360 degrees per second—or using radians, 2π radians per second.

Actually, you know this concept from your car. Engine speed is measured in revolutions per minute. What it’s counting is how many times the crankshaft rotates in a minute, usually anywhere from 600 to 3,000 rpm’s for responsible citizens.

The Moment of Inertia

Inertia is basically the same thing as mass. What does mass do in physics? Well, it's a property of an object that makes it more difficult to change its motion. It’s much harder to roll a heavy bowling ball than a light baseball. On the other end, it would be harder to stop the bowling ball too. More mass means more resistance to change—more inertia.

The “moment of inertia” is the same thing, but for rotational motion. Let’s say you have a car up on blocks. If you grab a tire and apply some torque to spin it, you increase its angular velocity. Now do the same thing with a bicycle wheel. Way easier, right? And it’ll be going faster than the heavy car wheel. This is because the bike wheel has a lower moment of inertia.

We know the inertia of an object depends on its mass, but the moment of inertia (I) also depends on where that mass is located, relative to the axis of rotation. Say you have two wheels of equal radius and mass, but one has all the mass on the outer part of the wheel and the other is just a solid disk. The disk has more of its mass closer to the axis of rotation, so it will have a smaller moment of inertia. See where this is going?

Angular Momentum

There’s one more thing to think about: angular momentum (L). This is just the product of the angular velocity (ω) and the moment of inertia (I😞

Now, if you have a system with no external interactions—like a person spinning in a chair, with no one pushing—the angular momentum (L) is constant. We say angular momentum is conserved. But look at the right side of the equation: For a given value of L, if you increase the moment of inertia (I), the angular velocity (ω) must decrease.

Dams and Days

So back to our original questions! The Earth is an isolated rotating system with a constant angular momentum. This means that if you alter the distribution of mass on Earth, the moment of inertia will change, and that will change the angular velocity.

This is exactly what a dam does. The water wants to move downhill to the sea, but a dam prevents that, so it holds the water’s mass farther away from Earth’s axis of rotation—just like spreading your arms in a spinning chair. So yes, a big dam really can change the speed of Earth’s rotation!

Now for the fun part. Let’s estimate how much longer an Earth day is because of the Three Gorges Dam. First, here’s an extremely exaggerated diagram:

The dam makes a big block of water (which we call a lake). Notice that the latitude (θ) of the dam site determines how far it is from the planet’s axis of rotation. As you move from the north pole toward the equator, that distance increases. So if you want to make the day as long as possible, in addition to stacking up water at a high altitude, you should build your dam near the equator.

OK, let’s calculate the change in the moment of inertia, ΔI. We can find this with the following equation. Don’t worry about the math! I just want you to see how it depends on the latitude (θ), the mass (m) and depth (h) of the water, and the radius of the Earth (R😞

We need to fill in these variables with actual numbers. Luckily, we have Wikipedia. So, given an initial value of Earth’s moment of inertia (I₁), I can use ΔI from above to find the change in the angular velocity (Δω) caused by the dam:

(If you want to see my numbers and calculations, they’re all in this Python code.)

After crunching the numbers, I get an Earth day that is 5.3 x 10^–6 seconds longer. Yes, that’s 5.3 extra microseconds! Due to our simplifying assumptions that’s likely an overestimate, but the increase is real. I grant you, there’s not a whole lot you can accomplish in 5 millionths of a second, but it shows that human activity really can alter a planet’s rotation.

It also means there’s a whole bunch of other things we could do to get still more time in the day. We could build skyscrapers all across the Great Plains. Or heck, we could just have everyone on earth stand up at the same time. That would also increase the moment of inertia and slow the Earth’s roll. I’m getting up from my desk right now—care to join me?

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Posted Saturday 15 November 2025 at 4:06 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.19 of the Rocket Report! Thursday was a monumental day in launch history with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket not just taking off successfully, but with the first stage masterfully returning to the surface of the ocean, hovering near the Jacklyn drone ship, and then making a landing in the center of the barge. It was fantastic to watch and cements our new reality of reusable rockets. The future of space access is very bright indeed.

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

Private Chinese rocket fails. Galactic Energy’s solid-fuel Ceres-1 rocket lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Sunday, carrying three satellites toward low-Earth orbit. The rocket’s first three stages performed well, according to media reports, but its fourth and final stage shut down too early, leading to the loss of all three payloads, Space.com reports.

Sincerely sorry … Those payloads were two satellites for China’s Jilin-1 commercial Earth-observation constellation, as well as a craft developed by Zhongbei University. “We offer our sincerest apologies to the mission’s customer and to everyone who supports Galactic Energy,” the Beijing-based company said in a statement. The Ceres-1 can lift 400 kg of payload to low-Earth orbit and debuted in November 2020. It flew successfully nine times in a row before suffering a failure in September 2023. The Ceres-1 bounced back from that problem, notching 11 consecutive successes before Sunday night’s setback.

Avio makes deals with major US contractors. Italian aerospace propulsion firm Avio announced agreements with US defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed Martin this week, granting each preferred access to solid rocket motors from its planned US manufacturing plant, Space News reports. The new facility is expected to be operational by early 2028, although Avio has not yet disclosed its location.

Surging global demand for missiles … Solid rocket motors are critical components that power many of the missiles and tactical weapons systems that both contractors produce, and both firms face rapidly increasing demand driven by ongoing conflicts globally. Avio said it plans to invest approximately $460 million to increase its manufacturing capacity, with most of that capital earmarked for the new US manufacturing facility.

Spectrum rocket starts to take shape. German launch services provider Isar Aerospace said this week that the stages for the second flight of its Spectrum rocket have arrived at its launch facility in Norway, European Spaceflight reports. While brief, the update stated that the company is “gearing up for pre-flight testing.” The update did not include an expected launch date.

A fairly rapid turnaround … The arrival of new flight hardware follows the inaugural flight of the Spectrum rocket on March 30. Less than 30 seconds after liftoff, the rocket’s flight termination system was triggered, and the vehicle splashed down in the Norwegian Sea just meters from the launch pad, exploding on impact. Following an investigation, the company identified an unintended opening of the vent valve, together with a loss of attitude control at the start of the rocket’s roll maneuver, as the cause of the failure.

Nova Scotia launch may take place this month. The first rocket launch to reach the edge of space from Canada since 1998 could happen as soon as November 18 from Spaceport Nova Scotia, spaceQ reports. The launch will be conducted by T-Minus Engineering, which is seeking to test its suborbital Barracuda hypersonic test platform. The Barracuda rocket, according to the company, “is a single-stage, solid-fuel suborbital vehicle that stands approximately 4 meters tall. Barracuda can carry payloads of up to 40 kilograms to altitudes reaching 120 kilometers.”

Seeking to go higher from Nova Scotia … The only other launch to date from Spaceport Nova Scotia was a university launch by York University in July 2023, which reached an altitude of 13.4 km. The last rocket to launch from Canada and reach space was a Magellan Aerospace Black Brant IXB suborbital research rocket with scientific payloads from the University of Calgary. The ACTIVE mission, financed by the Canadian Space Agency, was launched from the Churchill Rocket Research Range, Manitoba, on April 28, 1998. It reached an apogee of 315.6 km.

Here comes the Baguette One. German space logistics company ATMOS Space Cargo has signed a memorandum of understanding with French launch services provider HyPrSpace to carry out a demonstration mission aboard its Baguette One rocket, European Spaceflight reports. Is this the best name for a rocket ever? Probably.

Raking in the dough … Founded in 2019, HyPrSpace is developing a suborbital demonstration rocket called Baguette One, slated for launch in 2026. The rocket will serve as a technology demonstrator to validate the company’s hybrid rocket engine for its OB1 (Orbital Baguette One) rocket. The mission will be launched from a DGA Essais de Missiles (DGA Missile Testing) site in the south of France.

Neutron debut slips into 2026. During an earnings call on Monday, Rocket Lab chief executive Peter Beck announced that the company’s medium-lift launch vehicle, Neutron, would not launch this year, Ars reports. Although Rocket Lab had been holding onto the possibility of launching Neutron this year publicly, it has been clear for months that a slip into 2026 was inevitable. The new timeline has the company bringing Neutron to Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia during the first quarter of next year. The first launch is scheduled to occur “thereafter,” according to the company’s plans.

Following the Rocket Lab plan … Beck said Rocket Lab would not be rushed by an arbitrary deadline. “We’ve seen what happens when others rush to the pad with an unproven product, and we just refused to do that,” he said, referring to other commercial launch companies that have not had success with their first launches. “Our aim is to make it to orbit on the first try. You won’t see us using some qualifier about us just clearing the pad, and claiming success and whatnot, and that means that we don’t want to learn something during Neutron’s first flight that could be learned on the ground during the testing phase.”

Relativity and SES expand launch agreement. The California-based launch company and Luxembourg satellite company announced Wednesday an “extended multi-year, multi-launch services agreement” using Relativity’s Terran R rocket. The companies said they are partnering for multiple launches aboard Terran R, a medium-to-heavy-lift reusable launch vehicle, that will bring the selected SES satellites to their final orbital position.

No contracts just yet … The expanded agreement includes previously unannounced SES launches. With this new agreement, Relativity’s Terran R aims to provide SES with high performance, reliability, and affordable access to space. Terran R’s first launch is planned for late 2026 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It is important to note that launch agreements are not necessarily launch contracts. However, it is a good sign for Relativity that customers are showing some confidence in the large new rocket still in development.

Indian demo mission scheduled for January 2026. The Indian space agency, ISRO, now plans to launch an uncrewed demonstration mission named Gaganyaan-1 in January 2026, News 9 reports. The mission, carrying a half-humanoid robot, will test the performance of a crewed spacecraft and service module in low-Earth orbit. It is a critical stepping stone toward the country’s first human spaceflight in 2027.

Making progress … “We are currently working on our Gaganyaan program, to take our citizens to space and bring them back safely, and lot of activities are going on,” V Narayanan, chairman of ISRO, said. “In fact, I want to tell, 8,000 tests are completed till today, almost 97 percent of tests are successful, except small setbacks, which we have fully understood. We are going to have three uncrewed missions, followed by the first crewed mission targeted in 2027.”

Blue Origin ready to help accelerate Artemis. Blue Origin stands ready to help NASA achieve its goals with regard to landing humans on the Moon as soon as possible, Ars reports. “We just want to help the US get to the Moon,” Dave Limp, CEO of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, told Ars. “If NASA wants to go quicker, we would move heaven and Earth, pun intended, to try to get to the Moon sooner. And I think we have some good ideas.”

Modifying existing hardware … This year, it has become increasingly apparent that, should NASA stick to its present plans for the Artemis III lunar landing mission, China is on course to beat the United States back to the Moon with humans. In recognition of this, about three weeks ago, NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy said the space agency was reopening the competition for a human lander. Blue Origin has begun work on a faster architecture, involving multiple versions of its Mk. 1 cargo lander as well as a modified version of this vehicle, tentatively called Mk 1.5.

How to launch to Mars when the window is closed. The field of astrodynamics isn’t a magical discipline, but sometimes it seems like trajectory analysts can pull a solution out of a hat. That’s what it took to save NASA’s ESCAPADE mission from a lengthy delay and possible cancellation after its rocket wasn’t ready to send it toward Mars during its appointed launch window last year, Ars reports. The Mars-bound mission had been due to launch on a New Glenn rocket before the close of the last Mars window, in the fall of 2024. But the rocket was not ready.

So what happens now that the rocket is ready? … “ESCAPADE is pursuing a very unusual trajectory in getting to Mars,” said Rob Lillis, from the University of California, Berkeley and the mission’s principal investigator. “We’re launching outside the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. We are using a very flexible mission design approach where we go into a loiter orbit around Earth in order to sort of wait until Earth and Mars are lined up correctly in November of next year to go to Mars.”

Next three launches

November 14: Atlas V | Viasat-3 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 03:04 UTC

November 15: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-85 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 03:01 UTC

November 15: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-89 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 03:01 UTC

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Posted Saturday 15 November 2025 at 4:05 am AEST (my time).

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Health officials in the United Kingdom are warning that this year’s flu season for the Northern Hemisphere is looking like it will be particularly rough—and the US is not prepared.

The bleak outlook is driven by a new strain of H3N2, which emerged over the summer (at the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s season) sporting several mutations. Those changes are not enough to spark the direst of circumstances—a deadly pandemic—but they could help the virus dodge immune responses, resulting in an outsized number of severe illnesses that could put a significant strain on hospitals and clinics.

In the UK, the virus has taken off. The region’s flu season has started around five weeks earlier than normal and is making a swift ascent.

Jim Mackey, who became chief executive of NHS England in April, is bracing for influenza’s wrath. “There’s no doubt this winter will be one of the toughest our staff have ever faced,” Mackey told The BMJ. “Since stepping into this role, the thought of a long, drawn-out flu season has kept me awake at night. And, unfortunately, it looks like that fear is becoming reality.”

Almost all of the UK cases so far this year have been from influenza A strains, with H3N2 accounting for the lion’s share, according to the UK Health Security Agency. The two circulating influenza A strains are the new H3N2 strain and an H1N1 strain, with an influenza B strain circulating at very low rates. In the latest UK data, H3N2 was behind over 90 percent of cases that had their influenza virus type analyzed.

“Of the two seasonal influenza A viruses, the current dominant circulating virus (A/H3N2) tends to cause more severe illness than A/H1N1, particularly in older adults,” Antonia Ho, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Glasgow, said in a statement. And the early start of the flu season only makes things worse, since not as many people are vaccinated early on, Ho added. “From previous experience, influenza waves that start early tend to affect a larger number of people in the population.”

While the UK faces a harsh season, the US couldn’t be in a worse position to prepare. The Trump administration has severely weakened the country’s public health infrastructure, significantly cutting public health funding to states and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while also annihilating whole teams and projects at the premier public health agency. In addition to that devastation, the government shutdown has halted normal flu surveillance operations.

Normally, the CDC would publish weekly reports with detailed flu surveillance data, indicating regional trends, infection rates, strain types, illness severity, and more. However, the agency’s surveillance reporting page has gone silent, with the latest report dating from September 25. The government shutdown began on October 1, and the US flu tracking typically begins at the start of week 40, which this year was October 4. Even with the shutdown coming to an end, it’s unclear how long it will take CDC experts to recover from the lapse or if they’ll be able to resume operations fully.

Basic data from states, monitored by epidemiologist Caitlin Rivers, finds flu activity is generally still low across the US. But it’s beginning to pick up speed in the South and select states, such as Hawaii, Arizona, and New York.

Get vaccinated

“This is not the time to be flying blind into the respiratory virus season,” Danuta Skowronski, the epidemiology lead for influenza and emerging respiratory pathogens at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, told CIDRAP News.

At the end of last month, Skowronski and colleagues published an analysis showing that the H3N2 strain now spreading has accumulated enough new mutations—aka genetically drifted—to the point of being “mismatched” from the H3N2 strain used as a target for this year’s flu shots.

“While mismatched vaccines may still provide protection, enhanced genetic, antigenic and epidemiological (eg, vaccine effectiveness) monitoring are warranted to inform risk assessment and response,” Skowronski and colleagues concluded.

Earlier this week, the UK Health Security Agency published a preliminary study finding that, despite the mismatch, this year’s shot still seems to provide important protection. The study found that soon after vaccination, the vaccine provided 70 to 75 percent protection against hospitalization in children aged 2 to 17 years, and 30 to 40 percent protection from hospitalization in adults. These protection levels are within the typical range for flu vaccines, but they’re more often seen at the end of a season—when vaccine protection has waned some—rather than early in the season, soon after vaccination.

Still, officials called the results “reassuring.” In particular, officials noted the strong numbers in children, which parents can tell you, have the ability to be superspreaders.

“The high vaccine effectiveness in children strengthens the case for ensuring all eligible young people get vaccinated,” Jamie Lopez Bernal, Consultant Epidemiologist for Immunisation at UKHSA, said. “When more children are protected, it helps stop the spread of flu to others around them.”

“The bottom line is that it’s looking possible that we may be facing a very bad flu season this year, and the best thing we can all do right now to tackle the problem is to get vaccinated,” Adam Finn, professor of Paediatrics at the University of Bristol, said in a statement.

Although it’s unclear how flu vaccinations are going in the US this season, at the end of last season, only about 47 percent of adults and 49 percent of children had received vaccinations.

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Posted Friday 14 November 2025 at 6:10 pm AEST (my time).

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An immune cell chemically linked to a CMOS chip. 

Credit: Yadav, et al.

Standard brain implants use electrodes that penetrate the gray matter to stimulate and record the activity of neurons. These typically need to be put in place via a surgical procedure. To go around that need, a team of researchers led by Deblina Sarkar, an electrical engineer and MIT assistant professor, developed microscopic electronic devices hybridized with living cells. Those cells can be injected into the circulatory system with a standard syringe and will travel the bloodstream before implanting themselves in target brain areas.

“In the first two years of working on this technology at MIT, we’ve got 35 grant proposals rejected in a row,” Sarkar says. “Comments we got from the reviewers were that our idea was very impactful, but it was impossible.” She acknowledges that the proposal sounded like something you can find in science fiction novels. But after more than six years of research, she and her colleagues have pulled it off.

Nanobot problems

In 2022, when Sarkar and her colleagues gathered initial data and got some promising results with their cell-electronics hybrids, the team proposed the project for the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. For the first time, after 35 rejections, it made it through peer review. “We got the highest impact score ever,” Sarkar says.

The reason for that score was that her technology solved three extremely difficult problems. The first, obviously, was making functional electronic devices smaller than cells that can circulate in our blood.

“Previous explorations, which had not seen a lot of success, relied on putting magnetic particles inside the bloodstream and then guiding them with magnetic fields,” Sarkar explains. “But there is a difference between electronics and particles.” Electronics made using CMOS technology (which we use for making computer processors) can generate electrical power from incoming light in the same way as photovoltaics, as well as perform computations necessary for more intelligent applications like sensing. Particles, on the other hand, can only be used to stimulate cells to an extent.

If they ever reach those cells, of course, which was the second problem. “Controlling the devices with magnetic fields means you need to go into a machine the size of an MRI,” Sarkar says. Once the subject is in the machine, an operator looks at where the devices are and tries to move them to where they need to be using nothing but magnetic fields. Sarkar said that it’s tough to do anything other than move the particles in straight lines, which is a poor match for our very complex vasculature.

The solution her team found was fusing the electronics with monocytes, immune cells that can home in on inflammation in our bodies. The idea was that the monocytes would carry the electronics through the bloodstream using the cells’ chemical homing mechanism. This also solved the third problem: crossing the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from pathogens and toxins. Electronics alone could not get through it; monocytes could.

The challenge was making all these ideas work.

Clicking together

Sarkar’s team built electronic devices made of biocompatible polymer and metallic layers fabricated on silicon wafers using a standard CMOS process. “We made the devices this small with lithography, the technique used in making transistors for chips in our computers,” Sarkar explains. They were roughly 200 nanometers thick and 10 microns in diameter—that kept them subcellular, since a monocyte cell usually measures between 12 and 18 microns. The devices were activated and powered by infrared light at a wavelength that could penetrate several centimeters into the brain.

Once the devices were manufactured and taken off the wafer, the next thing to figure out was attaching them to monocytes.

To do this, the team covered the surfaces of the electronic devices with dibezocyclooctyne, a very reactive molecule that can easily link to other chemicals, especially nitrogen compounds called azides. Then Sarkar and her colleagues chemically modified monocytes to place azides on their surfaces. This way, the electronics and cells could quickly snap together, almost like Lego blocks (this approach, called click chemistry, got the 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry).

The resulting solution of cell-electronics hybrids was designed to be biocompatible and could be injected into the circulatory system. This is why Sarkar called her concept “circulatronics.”

Of course, Sarkar’s “circulatronic” hybrids fall a bit short of sci-fi fantasies, in that they aren’t exactly literal nanobots. But they may be the closest thing we’ve created so far.

Artificial neurons

To test these hybrids in live mice, the researchers prepared a fluorescent version to make them easier to track. Mice were anesthetized first, and the team artificially created inflammation at a specific location in their brains, around the ventrolateral thalamic nucleus. Then the hybrids were injected into the veins of the mice. After roughly 72 hours, the time scientists expected would be needed for the monocytes to reach the inflammation, Sarkar and her colleagues started running tests.

It turned out that most of the injected hybrids reached their destination in one piece—the electronics mostly remained attached to the monocytes. The team’s measurements suggest that around 14,000 hybrids managed to successfully implant themselves near the neurons in the target area of the brain. Then, in response to infrared irradiation, they caused significant neuronal activation, comparable to traditional electrodes implanted via surgery.

The real strength of the hybrids, Sarkar thinks, is the way they can be tuned to specific diseases. “We chose monocytes for this experiment because inflammation spots in the brain are usually the target in many neurodegenerative diseases,” Sarkar says. Depending on the application, though, the hybrids’ performance can be adjusted by manipulating their electronic and cellular components. “We have already tested using mesenchymal stem cells for the Alzheimer’s, or T cells and other neural stem cells for tumors,” Sarkar explains.

She went on to say that her technology one day may help with placing the implants in brain regions that today cannot be safely reached through surgery. “There is a brain cancer called glioblastoma that forms diffused tumor sites. Another example is DIPG [a form of glioma], which is a terminal brain cancer in children that develops in a region where surgery is impossible,” she adds.

But in the more distant future, the hybrids can find applications beyond targeting diseases. Most of the studies that have relied on data from brain implants were limited to participants who suffered from severe brain disorders. The implants were put in their brains for therapeutic reasons, and participating in research projects was something they just agreed to do on the side.

Because the electronics in Sarkar’s hybrids can be designed to fully degrade after a set time, the team thinks this could potentially enable them to gather brain implant data from healthy people—the implants would do their job for the duration of the study and be gone once it’s done. Unless we want them to stay, that is.

“The ease of application can make the implants feasible in brain-computer interfaces designed for healthy people,” Sarkar argues. “Also, the electrodes can be made to work as artificial neurons. In principle, we could enhance ourselves—increase our neuronal density.”

First, though, the team wants to put the hybrids through a testing campaign on larger animals and then get them FDA-approved for clinical trials. Through Cahira Technologies, an MIT spinoff company founded to take the “circulatronics” technology to the market, Sarkar wants to make this happen within the next three years.

Nature Biotechnology, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41587-025-02809-3

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Posted Friday 14 November 2025 at 6:08 pm AEST (my time).

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Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don’t have enough common ground for that to even be possible? An alien species is bound to be biologically very different, and their language will be shaped by their home environment, broader culture, and even how they perceive the universe. They might not even share the same math and physics. These and other fascinating questions are the focus of an entertaining new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions About Science and the Nature of Reality.

Co-author Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, who has worked on the ATLAS collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He’s also a gifted science communicator who previously co-authored two books with cartoonist Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame: 2018’s We Have No Idea and 2021’s Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe. (The pair also co-hosted a podcast from 2018 to 2024, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.) This time around, cartoonist Andy Warner provided the illustrations, and Whiteson and Warner charmingly dedicate their book to “all the alien scientists we have yet to meet.”

Whiteson has long been interested in the philosophy of physics. “I’m not the kind of physicist who’s like, ‘whatever, let’s just measure stuff,'” he told Ars. “The thing that always excited me about physics was this implicit promise that we were doing something universal, that we were learning things that were true on other planets. But the more I learned, the more concerned I became that this might have been oversold. None are fundamental, and we don’t understand why anything emerges. Can we separate the human lens from the thing we’re looking at? We don’t know in the end how much that lens is distorting what we see or defining what we’re looking at. So that was the fundamental question I always wanted to explore.”

Whiteson initially pitched his book idea to his 14-year-old son, who inherited his father’s interest in science. But his son thought Whiteson’s planned discussion of how physics might not be universal was, well, boring. “When you ask for notes, you’ve got to listen to them,” said Whiteson. “So I came back and said, ‘Well, what about a book about when aliens arrive? Will their science be similar to ours? Can we collaborate together?'” That pitch won the teen’s enthusiastic approval: same ideas, but couched in the context of alien contact to make them more concrete.

As for Warner’s involvement as illustrator, “I cold-emailed him and said, ‘Want to write a book about aliens? You get to draw lots of weird aliens,'” said Whiteson. Who could resist that offer?

Ars caught up with Whiteson to learn more.

Ars Technica: You open each chapter with fictional hypothetical scenarios. Why?

Daniel Whiteson: I sent an early version of the book to my friend, [biologist] Matt Giorgianni, who appears in cartoon form in the book. He said, “The book is great, but it’s abstract. Why don’t you write out a hypothetical concrete scenario for each chapter to show us what it would be like and how we would stumble.”

All great ideas seem obvious once you hear them. I’ve always been a huge science fiction fan. It’s thoughtful and creative and exploratory about the way the universe could be and might be. So I jumped at the opportunity to write a little bit of science fiction. Each one was challenging because you have to come up with a specific example that illustrates the concepts in that chapter, the issues that you might run into, but also be believable and interesting. We went through a lot of drafts. But I had a lot of fun writing them.

Ars Technica: The Voyager Golden Record is perhaps the best known example of humans attempting to communicate with an alien species, spearheaded by the late Carl Sagan, among others. But what are the odds that, despite our best efforts, any aliens will ever be able to decipher our “message in a bottle”?

Daniel Whiteson: I did an informal experiment where I printed out a picture of the Pioneer plaque and showed it to a bunch of grad students who were young enough to not have seen it before. This is Sagan’s audience: biological humans, same brain, same culture, physics grad students—none of them had any idea what any of that was supposed to refer to. NASA gave him two weeks to come up with that design. I don’t know that I would’ve done any better. It’s easy to criticize.

Those folks, they were doing their best. They were trying to step away from our culture. They didn’t use English, they didn’t even use mathematical symbols. They understood that those things are arbitrary, and they were reaching for something they hoped was going to be universal. But in the end, nothing can be universal because language is always symbols, and the choice of those symbols is arbitrary and cultural. It’s impossible to choose a symbol that can only be interpreted in one way.

Fundamentally, the book is trying to poke at our assumptions. It’s so inspiring to me that the history of physics is littered with times when we have had to abandon an assumption that we clung to desperately, until we were shown otherwise with enough data. So we’ve got to be really open-minded about whether these assumptions hold true, whether it’s required to do science, to be technological, or whether there is even a single explanation for reality. We could be very well surprised by what we discover.

Andy Warner

 

Andy Warner

 

Ars Technica: It’s often assumed that math and physics are the closest thing we have to a universal language. You challenge that assumption, probing such questions as “what does it even mean to ‘count'”? 

Daniel Whiteson: At an initial glance, you’re like, well, of course mathematics is required, and of course numbers are universal. But then you dig into it and you start to realize there are fuzzy issues here. So many of the assumptions that underlie our interpretation of what we learned about physics are that way. I had this experience that’s probably very common among physics undergrads in quantum mechanics, learning about those calculations where you see nine decimal places in the theory and nine decimal places in the experiment, and you go, “Whoa, this isn’t just some calculational tool. This is how the universe decides what happens to a particle.”

I literally had that moment. I’m not a religious person, but it was almost spiritual. For many years, I believed that deeply, and I thought it was obvious. But to research this book, I read Science Without Numbers by Hartry Field. I was lucky—here at Irvine, we happen to have an amazing logic and philosophy of science department, and those folks really helped me digest [his ideas] and understand how you can pull yourself away from things like having a number line. It turns out you don’t need numbers; you can just think about relationships. It was really eye-opening, both how essential mathematics seems to human science and how obvious it is that we’re making a bunch of assumptions that we don’t know how to justify.

There are dotted lines humans have drawn because they make sense to us. You don’t have to go to plasma swirls and atmospheres to imagine a scenario where aliens might not have the same differentiation between their identities, me and you, here’s where I end, and here’s where you begin. That’s complicated for aliens that are plasma swirls, but also it’s not even very well-defined for us. How do I define the edge of my body? Is it where my skin ends? What about the dead skin, the hair, my personal space? There’s no obvious definition. We just have a cultural sense for “this is me, this is not me.” In the end, that’s a philosophical choice.

Ars Technica: You raise another interesting question in the book: Would aliens even need physics theory or a deeper understanding of how the universe works? Perhaps they could invent, say, warp drive through trial and error. You suggest that our theory is more like a narrative framework. It’s the story we tell, and that is very much prone to bias.

Daniel Whiteson: Absolutely. And not just bias, but emotion and curiosity. We put energy into certain things because we think they’re important. Physicists spend our lives on this because we think, among the many things we could spend our time on, this is an important question. That’s an emotional choice. That’s a personal subjective thing.

Other people find my work dead boring and would hate to have my life, and I would feel the same way about theirs. And that’s awesome. I’m glad that not everybody wants to be a particle physicist or a biologist or an economist. We have a diversity of curiosity, which we all benefit from. People have an intuitive feel for certain things. There’s something in their minds that naturally understands how the system works and reflects it, and they probably can’t explain it. They might not be able to design a better car, but they can drive the heck out of it.

This is maybe the biggest stumbling block for people who are just starting to think about this for the first time. “Obviously aliens are scientific.” Well, how do we know? What do we mean by scientific? That concept has evolved over time, and is it really required? I felt that that was a big-picture thing that people could wrap their minds around but also a shock to the system. They were already a little bit off-kilter and might realize that some things they assumed must be true maybe not have to be.

Ars Technica: You cite the 2016 film Arrival as an example of first contact and the challenge of figuring out how to communicate with an alien species. They had to learn each other’s cultural context before they had any chance of figuring out what their respective symbols meant. 

Daniel Whiteson:  I think that is really crucial. Again, how you choose to represent your ideas is, in a sense, arbitrary. So if you’re on the other side of that, and you have to go from symbols to ideas, you have to know something about how they made those choices in order to reverse-engineer a message, in order to figure out what it means. How do you know if you’ve done it correctly? Say we get a message from aliens and we spend years of supercomputer time cranking on it. Something we rely on for decoding human messages is that you can tell when you’ve done it right because you have something that makes sense.

How do we know when we’ve done that for an alien text? How do you know the difference between nonsense and things that don’t yet make sense to you? It’s essentially impossible. I spoke to some philosophers of language who convinced me that if we get a message from aliens, it might be literally impossible to decode it without their help, without their context. There aren’t enough examples of messages from aliens. We have the “Wow!” signal—who knows what that means? Maybe it’s a great example of getting a message and having no idea how to decode it.

As in many places in the book, I turned to human history because it’s the one example we have. I was shocked to discover how many human languages we haven’t decoded. Not to mention, we haven’t decoded whale. We know whales are talking to each other. Maybe they’re talking to us and we can’t decode it. The lesson, again and again, is culture.

With the Egyptians, the only reason we were able to decode hieroglyphics is because we had the Rosetta Stone, but that still took 20 years there. How does it take 20 years when you have examples and you know what it’s supposed to say? And the answer is that we made cultural assumptions. We assumed pictograms reflected the ideas in the pictures. If there’s a bird in it, it’s about birds. And we were just wrong. That’s maybe why we’ve been struggling with Etruscan and other languages we’ve never decoded.

Even when we do have a lot of culture in common, it’s very, very tricky. So the idea that we would get a message from space and have no cultural clues at all and somehow be able to decode it—I think that only works in the scenario where aliens have been listening to us for a long time and they’re essentially writing to us in something like our language. I’m a big fan of SETI. They host these conferences where they listen to philosophers and linguists and anthropologists. I don’t mean to say that they’ve thought too narrowly, but I think it’s not widely enough appreciated how difficult it is to decode another language with no culture in common.

Ars Technica: You devote a chapter to the possibility that aliens might be able to, say, “taste” electrons. That drives home your point that physiologically, they will probably be different, biologically they will be different, and their experiences are likely to be different. So their notion of culture will also be different.

Daniel Whiteson: Something I really wanted to get across was that perception determines your sense of intuition, which defines in many ways the answers you find acceptable. I read Ed Yong’s amazing book, An Immense World, about animal perception, the diversity of animal experience or animal interaction with the environment. What is it like to be an octopus with a distributed mind? What is it like to be a bird that senses magnetic fields? If you’re an alien and you have very different perceptions, you could also have a different intuitive language in which to understand the universe. What is a photon? Is it a particle? Is it a wave?  Maybe we just struggle with the concept because our intuitive language is limited.

Author Daniel Whiteson

Daniel Whiteson

 

Whiteson collaborated with cartoonist Andy Warner

 

For an alien that can see photons in superposition, this is boring. They could be bored by things we’re fascinated by, or we could explain our theories to them and they could be unsatisfied because to them, it doesn’t translate into their intuitive language. So even though we’ve transcended our biological limitations in many ways, we can detect gravitational waves and infrared photons, we’re still, I think, shaped by those original biological senses that frame our experience, the models we build. What it’s like to be a human in the world could be very, very different from what it’s like to be an alien in the world.

Ars Technica:  Your very last line reads, “Our theories may reveal the patterns of our thoughts as much as the patterns of nature.” Why did you choose to end your book on that note?

Daniel Whiteson: That’s a message to myself. When I started this journey, I thought physics is universal. That’s what makes it beautiful. That implies that if the aliens show up and they do physics in a very different way, it would be a crushing disappointment. Not only is what we’ve learned just another human science, but also it means maybe we can’t benefit from their work or we can’t have that fantasy of a galactic scientific conference. But that actually might be the best-case scenario.

I mean, the reason that you want to meet aliens is the reason you go traveling. You want to expand your horizons and learn new things. Imagine how boring it would be if you traveled around the world to some new country and they just had all the same food. It might be comforting in some way, but also boring. It’s so much more interesting to find out that they have spicy fish soup for breakfast. That’s the moment when you learn not just about what to have for breakfast but about yourself and your boundaries.

So if aliens show up and they’re so weirdly different in a way we can’t possibly imagine—that would be deeply revealing. It’ll give us a chance to separate the reality from the human lens. It’s not just questions of the universe. We are interesting, and we should learn about our own biases. I anticipate that when the aliens do come, their culture and their minds and their science will be so alien, it’ll be a real challenge to make any kind of connection. But if we do, I think we’ll learn a lot, not just about the universe but about ourselves.

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Posted Friday 14 November 2025 at 6:07 pm AEST (my time).

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After several successful launches this year, Project Kuiper has its official name: Amazon Leo. It’s a nod to the term Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), which refers to orbits at an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) or less. That’s the region where Amazon’s constellation of 153 satellites orbit. The original code name referred to the Kuiper Belt, an asteroid belt in the outer solar system past Neptune.

Amazon plans to launch over 80 missions containing some 3,000 spacecraft. Leo has had six launches so far, including three launches using SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets with a total of 72 satellites on board. Amazon’s main rival in this space is SpaceX’s Starlink, which recently launched its 10,000th satellite.

Amazon is promising Leo will help “extend fast, reliable internet to those beyond the reach of existing networks,” much like Starlink has attempted to over the past several years. Starlink (and Amazon) may be able to achieve that under the right circumstances, and addressing a lack of good internet in many areas is an admirable goal. However, launching tens of thousands of satellites into orbit could introduce some major issues, like an excessive amount of debris, increased risk of collisions in orbit, and heightened danger for manned missions.

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Posted Friday 14 November 2025 at 6:07 pm AEST (my time).

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Mars is cold, parched, and extremely dusty. Powerful gusts of wind kick up literal tons of reddish dust that often takes the form of whorls known as dust devils. These winds also shroud the planet in dust by lifting material from the surface and blowing it into the atmosphere (what little Mars has left of an atmosphere), sometimes creating dust storms that rage for days.

Researcher Valentin Bickel wanted to know just how intense winds can be on the red planet. Using data obtained by the Mars camera CaSSIS (Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System), the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and stereo camera HRSC (High Resolution Stereo Camera) on board ESA orbiter Mars Express, he and his team used deep learning to analyze stereo images that were taken seconds apart at the same location. These images can track the motion of dust devils, and the researchers use them to infer how the winds behind the dust devils move and lift dust from the surface. That dust goes on to have a big influence on the Martian weather.

Bickel, of the Center for Space and Habitability at the University of Bern, noticed that the tumultuous Martian winds are even faster than previous observations had made them out to be. They carry more dust than was previously thought. “Our observations show that strong near-surface winds are abundant on Mars and play an important role in atmospheric dust sourcing, directly informing more accurate models of Mars’ atmosphere, weather, and climate,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.

Dust to dust

On Mars, copious amounts of dust influence both surface and atmospheric processes. Particles floating in the atmosphere are capable of doing everything from causing temperature changes to altering atmospheric dynamics in a way that can then set off immense dust storms. Dust that settles often modifies surface features, including in notable cases like the dark streaks on dry Martian slopes. Whether anything ever lived on Mars is still unknown, but dust could have affected its viability by carrying nutrients around and offering protection from solar radiation.

Where does all this dust come from? It’s thought to be the result of erosion caused by the winds. Because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, dust particles can be difficult to move, but larger particles can become more easily airborne if winds are turbulent enough, later taking smaller dust motes with them. Perseverance and previous Mars rovers have mostly witnessed wind vortices that were associated with either dust devils or convection, during which warm air rises.

CaSSIS and HRSC data showed that most dust devils occur in the northern hemisphere of Mars, mainly in the Amazonis and Elysium Planitiae, with Amazonis Planitia being a hotspot. They can be kicked up by winds on both rough and smooth terrain, but they tend to spread farther in the southern hemisphere, with some traveling across nearly that entire half of the planet. Seasonal occurrence of dust devils is highest during the southern summer, while they are almost nonexistent during the late northern fall.

Martian dust devils tend to peak between mid-morning and midafternoon, though they can occur from early morning through late afternoon. They also migrate toward the Martian north pole in the northern summer and toward the south pole during the southern summer. Southern dust devils tend to move faster than those in the northern hemisphere. Movement determined by winds can be as fast as 44 meters per second (about 98 mph), which is much faster than dust devils move on Earth.

Weathering the storm

Dust devils have also been found to accelerate extremely rapidly on the red planet. These fierce storms are associated with winds that travel along with them but do not form a vortex, known as nonvortical winds. It only takes a few seconds for these winds to accelerate to velocities high enough that they’re able to lift dust particles from the ground and transfer them to the atmosphere. It is not only dust devils that do this—the team found that even nonvortical winds lift large amounts of dust particles on their own, more than was previously thought, and create a dusty haze in the atmosphere.

Bickel and his team think that the northern hemisphere is the main source of dust. Other sources, which have not been focused on in the past, are Daedalia Planum, active mostly during the northern spring and summer, and Sinai Planum, active during the southern spring and summer. Regions such as Arabia and Elysium are thought to be devoid of dust devils because they are dust sinks—reservoirs of dust that are not reached by the wind.

Occurrence of dust devils can also affect missions to Mars. As ESA’s ExoMars rover prepares to launch in 2028 and land in Oxia Planum, which is located in the northern hemisphere, scientists monitoring it on Earth should expect dust devils here and there—slightly more than InSight experienced when it landed near the Martian equator in Elysium Planitia. Excess dust can mess with solar panels and other hardware, but once on the planet’s surface, ExoMars will also be in a position to observe both vortical and nonvortical winds and how they lift and carry dust.

Until then, CaSSIS and HRSC will continue to monitor dust devils and the motion of winds and dust on Mars. As Bickel said in the study, “Integrated and spatiotemporally resolved monitoring—and possibly forecasting—of Mars’ atmospheric dynamics will be vital for future robotic—and specifically human—missions to Mars.”

Science Advances, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adw5170

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Posted Friday 14 November 2025 at 3:57 am AEST (my time).

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Importantly, at an individual level, the theoretical risk of developing cancer from a CT scan is thought to be very low, if it exists at all. Patients should not hesitate to undergo these tests if they are considered medically necessary.

However, the number of CT examinations performed annually in the US has increased by more than 30 percent since 2007, and researchers suggest that unwarranted tests are exposing the population to unnecessary radiation.

In a study published in April, a team in the US and the UK predicted that low levels of ionizing radiation from CT scans could theoretically account for 5 percent of all new cancer diagnoses in the US. CT scans conducted in 2023 could be responsible for an estimated 103,000 future cases of cancer.

That's based on some assumptions and historical data from high radiation events, but if right, it would put CT scans on par with other significant risk factors for cancer, like alcohol consumption, at least at a population level.

"CT is frequently lifesaving, yet its potential harms are often overlooked, and even very small cancer risks will lead to a significant number of future cancers given the tremendous volume of CT use in the United States," writes the international team of analysts, led by epidemiologist Rebecca Smith-Bindman from the University of California, San Francisco.

As of now, these are just theoretical risks, but that doesn't mean they aren't worth considering. While scientists know that high doses of radiation cause cancer, conclusive evidence to link low-level radiation to cancer is lacking.

The potential association is mostly based on long-term studies of atomic bomb survivors and those exposed to nuclear power plant meltdowns. For instance, in a group of 25,000 Hiroshima survivors, who received a dose of ionizing radiation on par with three or more CT scans, there was a slight but significant increase in cancer risk across a lifetime.

Whether those results extend to CT scans remains hotly debated, and the theoretical risks must be weighed against the benefits of this technology, which can now alert patients and doctors to a whole variety of hidden diseases and injuries with very low doses of radiation (about the same amount you absorb from your environment over three years).

The theoretical risks of CT scans must be weighed against the benefits. (Bethesda naval medical center, Maryland, Hospital)

"Any risk from a CT scan of a sick patient is likely much less than the risk of the underlying disease," said Cynthia McCollough, CT imaging expert and past president of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

In a large national trial, for instance, there was a 20 percent decrease in lung cancer deaths among smokers and ex-smokers who received low-dose CT scans compared to those who only had a chest X-ray.

The recent predictions on cancer risk are again based on historical tragedies, but compared to previous analyses, they consider more detail on the actual radiation exposure, which can depend on the type of CT device, the scanning duration, the size of the patient, and the sensitivity of their targeted body part.

The anonymous data comes from 143 hospitals and outpatient facilities across the US, catalogued in the UCSF International CT Dose Registry. Using statistics from 2016 to 2022, researchers predicted 93 million CT examinations were carried out in 2023, on roughly 62 million patients.

Based on the associated radiation risks, the team estimates that CT scans in 2023 may be tied to 103,000 future cancers.

"To empirically quantify lifetime risk would require decades-long follow-up studies of very large populations," the authors acknowledge.

However, their results suggest that some people may be more susceptible to cancer from low-dose ionizing radiation than others. Adults receive the vast majority of CT scans, but estimated radiation-induced cancer risks were higher in children and adolescents.

The projected number of future cancers (left axis; dark blue and orange circles) against a conservative estimate of cancer incidence (right axis; light blue circles and triangles). (Smith-Bindman et al., JAMA Intern. Med., 2025)

Those receiving CT scans at under one year of age, for instance, seem to have a higher potential lifetime risk for thyroid cancers, and this appears more common among female patients.

Far more research is needed to confirm if low-dose ionizing radiation actually impacts a person's cancer risk, and how.

"Estimated overall cancer risks from CT radiation doses are similarly high in Australian studies," said medical radiation specialist Pradip Deb from RMIT University. She argues it is important to avoid unnecessary CT scans if radiation-free procedures can do the same job.

Radiographer Naomi Gibson, President of the Australian Society of Medical Imaging and Radiation Therapy, agreed.

"Although the findings highlight the need for vigilance around long-term radiation exposure, this should not discourage the use of CT imaging when clinically justified," Gibson explained.

"In appropriately selected cases, the diagnostic and therapeutic value of CT scans significantly outweighs the potential radiation-associated risks."

The study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

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MUNICH, Germany—Audi’s long-awaited Formula 1 team gave the world its first look at what the Audi R26 will look like when it takes to the track next year. Well, sort of—the car you see here is a generic show car for the 2026 aero regulations, but the livery you see, plus the sponsors’ logos, will race next year.

“By entering the pinnacle of motorsport, Audi is making a clear, ambitious statement. It is the next chapter in the company’s renewal. Formula 1 will be a catalyst for the change towards a leaner, faster, and more innovative Audi,” said Gernot Döllner, Audi’s CEO. “We are not entering Formula 1 just to be there. We want to win. At the same time, we know that you don’t become a top team in Formula 1 overnight. It takes time, perseverance, and tireless questioning of the status quo. By 2030, we want to fight for the World Championship title,” Döllner said.

After the complicated liveries of cars like the R18 or Audi's Formula E program, the R26 is refreshingly simple.

Jonathan Gitlin

 

None of the sponsors have been announced yet, so the car is bare for now.

Jonathan Gitlin

 

The view Audi hopes its rivals get next year.

Jonathan Gitlin

 

I’ll admit, when I first saw the images Audi sent ahead of time, I was a little underwhelmed, but in person, as you approach it from different angles, it makes a lot more sense. The design is more than a little minimalist, juxtaposing straight-edged geometric blocks of color with the aerodynamically curved bodywork they adorn. The titanium references Audi’s latest concept car, and the red—which is almost fluorescent in person—is an all-new shade called Audi Red. It’s used to highlight the car’s various air intakes and looks really quite effective.

Why F1?

After a long and glorious history in sportscar racing and rallying before that, Audi’s motorsports activities virtually evaporated in the wake of dieselgate and then a brief Formula E program. Then in early 2022, Volkswagen Group revealed that after decades of “will they, won’t they” speculation, not one but two of its brands—Audi and Porsche—would be entering F1 in 2026. (The Porsche deal with Red Bull would later fall apart.)

The sport was already riding its post-COVID popularity surge, and a new technical ruleset for 2026 was written in large part to attract automakers like Audi, dropping one of the current hybrid energy recovery systems (the complex turbo-based MGU-H) in favor of a much more powerful electric motor (the MGU-K), and switching to synthetic fuels that must have at least 65 percent less carbon emissions than fossil fuels.

In August 2022, Audi confirmed a powertrain program that would be developed at its motorsports competence center in Neuberg, Germany. It also announced it was buying three-quarters of the Swiss-based Sauber team. The following year, then-Audi CTO and head of the F1 program Oliver Hoffman explained to Ars why the company was going to F1 now.

“Nearly 50 percent of the power will come out of the electric drive train. Especially for battery technology, thermal management, and also efficiency of the power electronics, there’s a clear focus. And together, the fit between Formula 1 and our RS technologies is [the] perfect fit for us,” Hoffman said at the time.

A team in trouble?

On track, things did not look great. The Sauber team had finished 2023 in 9th place, and 2024 was looking worse. (It eventually finished dead last with a miserable four points at the end of the year.) Rumors that Audi wanted out of the program had to be quashed, then in March 2024 Audi decided to buy all of Sauber, adding Andreas Seidl, formerly of McLaren and before that Porsche, to run the team, now called Audi Formula Racing.

But within a year, Hoffman was gone, together with Andreas Seidl. Replacing Hoffman as head of the Audi F1 project: Mattia Binotto, who saw Ferrari get close to but not quite land an F1 championship. Then in August, Jonathan Wheatley joined the team from Red Bull as the new team principal.

Binotto and Wheatley’s arrival seems to have unlocked something. At Silverstone, Nico Hülkenberg finished third, the first podium for the team since 2012 and the first ever for a driver that was long, long overdue. Hülkenberg now lies ninth in points. His rookie teammate Gabriel Bortoleto might have just had a disappointing home race, but last year’s F2 champ has shown plenty of speed in the Sauber this year. It will surely want to carry that momentum forward to 2026.

“The goal is clear: to fight for championships by 2030. That journey takes time, the right people, and a mindset of continuous improvement,” Binotto said. “Formula 1 is one of the most competitive environments. Becoming a champion is a journey of progress. Mistakes will happen, but learning from them is what drives transformation. That’s why we follow a three-phased approach: starting as a challenger with the ambition to grow, evolving into a competitor by daring the status quo and achieving first successes, and ultimately becoming a champion,” Binotto said.

What’s under the bodywork?

Technical details on the R26 remain scarce, for the same reason we haven’t seen the actual race car yet. Earlier today we visited Audi’s Neuberg facility, which is much expanded from the sportscar days—while those were also hybrid race cars, the state of the art has moved on in the near-decade since Audi left that sport, and F1 power units (the internal combustion engine, hybrid system, battery, but not the transmission) operate at a much higher level.

In addition to the workshops and cleanrooms where engineers and technicians develop and build the various components that go into the power units, there are extensive test and analysis facilities, able to examine parts both destructively (for example, cutting sections for a scanning electron microscope) and nondestructively (like X-raying or CT scanning).

Unlike in the LMP1 days of multiple Le Mans wins, actual on-track testing in F1 is highly restricted, limited now to just nine days over three tests before the start of the season. “When I think of my past LMP1 racing, we tested 50 days, 60 days, and if we had a problem, we just added the days. We went to Sebring or whatever,” said Stefan Dreyer, Audi Formula Racing’s CTO. “And this is also a huge challenge… moving into the future of Formula 1.”

For the first three years of the project, there was one goal: design and build a power unit for the 2026 regulations. The complete powertrain (the power unit plus the transmission) first ran a race simulation in 2024. In addition to Neuberg and Hinwil, Switzerland, where Sauber is based, there’s a new location in Bicester, England, part of that country’s “motorsports valley” and home to an awful lot of F1 suppliers and talent.

Now, the group in Neuberg has multiple overlapping jobs: assemble power units and supply them to the race team in Hinwil that is building the chassis, as well as begin development on the 2027 and 2028 iterations of the power units. It’s telling that all over the facility, video screens count down the remaining three months and however many days, hours, minutes, and seconds are left until the cars take to the track in anger in Australia.

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Posted Thursday 13 November 2025 at 1:43 pm AEST (my time).

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Scientists have found that the 2023 marine heat wave caused “functional extinction” of two Acropora reef-building coral species living in the Florida Reef, which stretches from the Dry Tortugas National Park to Miami.

“At this point, we do not think there’s much of a chance for natural recovery—their numbers are so low that successful reproduction is incredibly unlikely,” said Ross Cunning, a coral biologist at the John G. Shedd Aquarium.

This isn’t the first time corals have faced the borderline of extinction over the last 460 million years, and they have always managed to bounce back and recolonize habitats lost during severe climate changes. The problem is that we won’t live long enough to see them doing that again.

Killer heat waves

Marine heat waves kill corals by messing with the photosynthetic machinery of symbiotic microalgae that live in the corals’ tissues. When the temperature of water goes up too much, the microalgae start producing reactive oxygen species instead of nutritious sugars. The reactive oxygen is toxic to corals, which respond by expelling the microalgae. This solves the toxicity problem, but it also starves the corals and causes them to bleach (the algae are the source of their yellowish color).

The 2023 marine heat wave was not the first to hit the Florida Reef—it was the ninth on record. “Those eight previous heat waves also had major negative effects on coral reefs, causing widespread mortality,” Cunning told Ars. “But the 2023 heat wave blew all other heat waves out of the water. It was 2.2 to four times greater in magnitude than anything that came before it.”

Cunning’s team monitored two Acropora coral species: the staghorn and elkhorn. “They are both branching corals,” Cunning explained. “The staghorn has pointy branches that form dense thickets, whereas elkhorn produces arm-like branches that reach up and grow toward the surface, producing highly complex three dimensionality, like a canopy in the forest.”

He and his colleagues chose those two species because they essentially built the Florida Reef. They also grow the fastest among all Florida Reef corals, which means they are essential for its ability to recover from damage. “Acropora corals were the primary reef builders for the last 10,000 years,” Cunning said. Unfortunately, they also showed the highest levels of mortality due to heat waves.

Coral apocalypse

Cunning’s team found the mortality rate among Acropora corals reached 100 percent in the Dry Tortugas National Park, which is at the southernmost end of the Florida Reef. Moving north to Lower Keys, Middle Keys, and most of the Upper Keys, the mortality stayed at between 98 and 100 percent.

“Once you start moving a little bit further north, there’s the Biscayne National Park, where mortality rates were at 90 percent,” Cunning said. “It wasn’t until the furthest northern extent of the reef in Miami and Broward counties where mortality dropped to just 38 percent thanks to cooler temperatures that occurred there.”

Still, the mortality rate was exceptionally high throughout most of Acropora colonies across the Florida Reef. “What we’re facing is a functional extinction,” Cunning said.

But corals have been around for about 460 million years, and they have survived multiple mass extinction events, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. As vulnerable as they appear, corals seemingly have some get-out-of-death card they always pull when things turn really bad for them. This card, most likely, is buried deep in their genome.

Ancestral strength

“There have been studies looking into the evolutionary history of corals, but the difference between those and our work lies in technology,” said Claudia Francesca Vaga, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

Her team looked at ultra conserved elements, stretches of DNA that are nearly identical across even distantly related species. These elements were used to build the most extensive phylogenetic tree of corals to date. Based on the genomic data and fossil evidence, Vaga’s team analyzed how 274 stony coral species are related to one another to retrace their common ancestor and reconstruct how they evolved from it.

“We managed to confirm that the first common ancestor of stony corals was most likely solitary—it didn’t live in colonies, and it didn’t have symbionts,” Vaga said.

The very first coral most likely did not rely on algae to produce its nutrients, which means it was immune to bleaching. It was also not attached to a substrate, so it could move from one habitat to another. Another advantage the first corals had was that they were not particularly picky—they could live just as well in the shallow waters as in the deep sea, since they didn’t get most of their nutrients from their photosynthetic symbionts.

Descending from these incredibly resilient ancestors, corals started to specialize. “We learned that symbiosis and coloniality can be acquired independently by stony coral linages and that it happened multiple times,” Vaga said.

Based on her team’s research, past mass extinction events usually wiped out 90 percent of the species living in shallow waters—the ones that were colonial and reliant on symbionts. “But each such extinction triggered a process of retaking the shallows by the more resilient deep-sea corals, which in time evolved symbiosis and coloniality again,” Vaga said.

Thanks to corals’ deep-sea cousins, even the most extreme environmental changes—global warming or sudden, severe variations in the oceans’ acidity or oxygen levels—could not kill them for good. Each mass extinction event they’ve been through just reverted them to factory settings and made them start over from scratch.

The only catch here is time. “We’re talking about four to five million years before coral populations recover,” Vaga said.

Long way back

According to Cunning, the consequence of Acropora corals’ extinction in the Florida Reef is a lower overall reef-building rate, which will lead to reduced biodiversity in the reef’s ecosystem. “There are going to be cascading effects, and humans will be impacted as well. Reefs protect our coastlines by buffering over 90 percent of wave energy,” Cunning said.

In Florida, where coastlines are heavily urbanized, this may translate into hundreds of millions of dollars per year in damages.

But Cunning said we still have means at our disposal to save Acropora corals. “We’re not going to give up on them,” he said.

One option for improving the resilience of corals could be to crossbreed them with species from outside of Florida Reef, ideally ones that live in warmer places and are better adapted to heat. “The first tests of this approach are underway right now in Florida; elkhorn corals were cross-bred between Florida parents and Honduran parents,” Cunning said. He hopes this will help produce a new generation of corals that has a better shot at surviving the next heat wave.

Other interventions include manipulating corals’ algal symbionts. “There are many different species of algae with different levels of heat tolerance,” Cunning said. To him, a possible way forward would be to pair the Acropora corals with more heat-tolerant symbionts. “This should alter the bleaching threshold in these corals,” he explained.

Still, even interventions like these will take a very long time to make a difference. “But if four or five million years is the benchmark to beat, then yeah, it’s hopefully going to happen faster than that,” Cunning said.

The upside is that corals will likely pull off their de-extinction trick once again, even if we do absolutely nothing to help them. “In a few million years, they will redevelop coloniality, redevelop symbiosis, and rebuild something similar to the coral reefs we have today,” Vaga said. “This is good news for them. Not necessarily for us.”

Science, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/science.adx7825

Nature, 2025.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09615-6

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Posted Thursday 13 November 2025 at 1:42 pm AEST (my time).

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A new simulation could help solve one of astronomy’s longstanding mysteries—how supermassive black holes formed so rapidly—along with a new one: What are the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) “little red dots?”

Invisible leviathans lurk at the cores of nearly all of the 2 trillion or so galaxies strewn throughout space-time. Monster black holes entered the cosmic scene soon after the Universe’s birth and grew rapidly, reaching millions or even billions of times the Sun’s mass in less than a billion years. Astronomers have long wondered how these supermassive black holes could have grown so hefty in such little time.

The monster black hole mystery became even more perplexing in 2022 when “little red dots” were spotted at the far edges of space. When these tiny scarlet orbs began unexpectedly popping up in JWST images of the distant Universe, their nature was hotly debated. Now that scientists have amassed a sample of hundreds of them, many think the dots are growing supermassive black holes.

The problem is that they appear even earlier than astronomers thought possible, making the challenge of explaining early supermassive black holes even harder. Observations suggest that the little red dots mainly flickered on when the Universe was around 600 million years old and fizzled out within the next billion years (the supermassive black holes linger to the present time, but they no longer light up as little red dots).

A new study tries to explain the early formation of these immense objects via swelling swarms of stars.

Missing link

Many people thought it would violate the laws of physics for monster black holes to form so quickly. But a new study explains how colliding clusters of stars could have given rise to supermassive black holes within the Universe’s first several hundred million years—no new physics required.

“Right now, there are three main ideas for how supermassive black hole seeds form: direct collapse from gas clouds, remnants of the first stars, and dense star clusters,” said Fred Garcia, a graduate student at Columbia University who led the study. “Our work really supports the last case, where dense clusters evolve and their centers collapse to make intermediate-mass black hole seeds.”

The researchers used cosmological simulations to recreate the first 700 million years of cosmic history, focusing on the formation of a single dwarf galaxy. In their virtual galaxy, waves of stars were born in short, explosive bursts as cold gas clouds collapsed inside a dark matter halo. Instead of a single starburst episode followed by a steady drizzle of star formation as Garcia expected, there were two major rounds of stellar birth. Whole swarms of stars flared to life like Christmas tree lights.

“The early Universe was an incredibly crowded place,” Garcia said. “Gas clouds were denser, stars formed faster, and in those environments, it’s natural for gravity to gather stars into these tightly bound systems.”

Those clusters started out scattered around the galaxy but fell in toward the center like water swirling down a drain. Once there, they merged to create one megacluster, called a nuclear star cluster (so named because it lies at the nucleus of the galaxy). The young galactic heart shone with the light of a million suns and may have set the stage for a supermassive black hole to form.

A simulation of the formation of the super-dense star clusters.

A seemingly simple tweak was needed to make the simulation more precise than previous ones. “Most simulations simplify things to make calculations more practical, but then you sacrifice realism,” Garcia said. “We used an improved model that allowed star formation to vary depending on local conditions rather than just go at a constant rate like with previous models.”

Using the University of Maryland’s supercomputing facility Zaratan, Garcia accomplished in six months what would have taken 12 years on a MacBook.

Some clouds converted as much as 80 percent of their gas into stars—a ferocious rate compared to the 2 percent typically seen in nearby galaxies today. The clouds sparkled to life, becoming clusters of newborn stars held together by their mutual gravity and lighting a new pathway for supermassive black holes to form extremely early in the Universe.

Chicken or egg?

Most galaxies, including our own, are anchored by a nuclear star cluster nestled around a supermassive black hole. But the connection between the two has been a bit murky—did the monster black hole form and then draw stars close, or did the cluster itself give rise to the black hole?

The simulation supports the latter hypothesis. Eventually, many stars in the superdense cluster detonated and left behind black holes, which then sank even farther into the heart of the galaxy.

“All the stellar-mass black holes that migrate to the center of the stellar cluster eventually form their own incredibly dense, gravitationally bound cluster within the larger nuclear star cluster,” said Matías Liempi Gonzalez, a PhD candidate at the Sapienza University of Rome, who was not involved in the study. “Within this dense ‘dark core,’ the black holes are so close together that mergers become unavoidable. A black hole merges with another, the (now larger) new black hole merges with a third, and so on.” Gonzalez said this runaway black hole merger process could lead to a supermassive black hole embryo.

The findings validate previous theoretical work. “It’s very promising to see the properties of these dense nuclear star clusters that the authors report forming at very early cosmic epochs,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University who was not involved in the simulation. Natarajan previously coauthored a separate paper that suggested supermassive black holes could have formed so quickly partly by slurping up cold gas within nuclear star clusters. “These could definitely serve as incubators for the formation and rapid growth of black hole seeds as we proposed theoretically in 2014.”

The simulation may also help explain some of JWST’s surprising observations, like packs of star clusters found just 460 and 600 million years after the Universe was born, respectively. Future observations could more clearly link early star clusters to supermassive black holes and little red dots.

“This very exciting simulation work is going to permit direct comparison with JWST data in the coming years,” Natarajan said. The ESA-led mission LISA, which would put a gravitational wave detector in space, could even detect these black holes merging in early nuclear star clusters. Combining observations from different missions could soon reveal the full story of how the earliest lights in the cosmos forged its darkest giants.

The Open Journal of Astrophysics, 2025. DOI: 10.33232/001c.145064

Ashley writes about space for a contractor for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and freelances as an environmental writer. She holds master’s degrees in space studies from the University of North Dakota and science writing from Johns Hopkins University. She writes most of her articles with one of her toddlers on her lap. 

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Posted Tuesday 11 November 2025 at 12:43 pm AEST (my time).

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After a weekend off, perhaps spent trick or treating, Formula 1’s drivers, engineers, and mechanics made their yearly trip to the Interlagos track for the Brazilian Grand Prix. More formally called the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace, it’s definitely one of the more old-school circuits that F1 visits—and invariably one of the more dramatic.

For one thing, it’s anything but billiard-smooth. Better yet, there’s elevation—lots of it—and cambers, too. Unlike most F1 tracks, it runs counterclockwise, and it combines some very fast sections with several rather technical corners that can catch out even the best drivers in the world. Nestled between a couple of lakes in São Paulo, weather is also a regular factor in races here. And indeed, a severe weather warning was issued in the lead-up to this weekend’s race.

You have to hit the ground running

This was another sprint weekend, which means that instead of two practice sessions on Friday and another on Saturday morning, the teams get one on Friday, then go into qualifying for the Saturday sprint race. The shortened testing time tends to shake things up a bit, and we definitely saw that this weekend.

When we left Mexico, there was only a point’s difference between McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri in the championship. After a strong run in the middle of the season, when he led the championship and seemed to have the edge on Norris, Piastri has had a string of disappointing races. By recent standards, Brazil wasn’t quite so bad, but it wasn’t great, either.

Despite the weather warnings, none of the sessions required treaded tires. While the track surface was basically dry for the sprint race, the same couldn’t be said for the painted curbs—water had collected in the valleys between the stepped “teeth,” and as just about every racer knows, if the painted bits of the track are wet, you really don’t want to go near them if you have slick tires.

Sadly, Piastri demonstrated that to brutal effect as he began to get bolder with his lines. Perhaps he just used too much curb, or maybe the underbody of Norris’ car, a couple of places ahead in the lead, had sucked more water onto the track. Either way, the result was the same: A snap of oversteer pitched him into the opposite barrier with a thump. And with that, he gave away eight more points to Norris, who cruised home to win the sprint.

Qualifying threw more cats among more pigeons, notably with Max Verstappen’s exit in Q1. It’s not the first time the four-time world champion has been among the first few drivers eliminated in qualifying, but it is the first time it happened without some external factor, like a crash. Verstappen had tried a setup used by his teammate and found it lacking, getting no higher than 16th. Rather than start the race there in a car with a compromised setup, Red Bull elected to start him from the pit lane after changing in a fresh engine and a better setup.

This was probably the happiest Lewis Hamilton looked all weekend. His teammate Charles Leclerc was smiling 

until being taken out of the race at the first corner.

Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images

 

Brazil is passionate about F1, and the fans turned out in force for their new hometown boy.

Anni Graf - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

 

Norris, not content with the sprint pole and win, also took pole position for the main event, ahead of Mercedes’ youngster Kimi Antonelli and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. Piastri lined up fourth.

Race day

Turn 1 at Interlagos is particularly dramatic. It’s a steep downhill left, after a very heavy braking zone following the flat-out run from Juncao (also known as turn 12). It’s possible to take more than one line through there, but three cars fighting for the same bit of road rarely works out, and as Norris led everyone away after a safety car restart, behind him was Leclerc on the outside and Paistri on the inside, with Antonelli in between.

Antonelli and Piastri could have given each other a little more room, but they didn’t. They made contact, pitching the Mercedes into the Ferrari to its right. This broke Leclerc’s suspension, tore the tire off its rim, and ended his day. Antonelli and Piastri recovered, and the stewards decided that what most of us considered a racing incident was actually Piastri’s fault and awarded the Australian McLaren driver a 10-second penalty. In the end, fifth was the best he could do.

I’m far from the first person to say this, but F1’s officiating is getting way too hidebound. The sport has driving standard “guidelines,” not “rules,” but lately, the race stewards have been treating them like the latter and applying harsh penalties with little room for nuance. Worse yet, the way they treat who gets priority for a corner now practically encourages dive-bombing your opponent to get your wheels ahead of theirs before the apex, at which point you can apparently barge them off scot-free. But I digress.

On the eve of the race, plenty of people were ready to write off Max Verstappen’s title run. Still in third place, 36 points behind Norris, a pit lane start would surely leave the Dutch driver with little chance of closing in on the two McLaren men.

A pit stop following a puncture on lap 7 seemed to confirm that. But no. Having started on hard tires, which were far from optimum that day, he had made it to 13th place before carbon-fiber debris from Antonelli’s car punctured his front left.

The pit stop to replace them with a new set of mediums left him dead last—and apparently energized. What followed was one of the finest recovery drives the sport has seen in decades, with Verstappen climbing from 18th to 4th in just 14 laps. By lap 51, he was in the lead, briefly, although only by dint of Norris’ second pit stop. In the end, he finished third, harassing Antonelli for the final few laps. Whether you’re a fan of his or not, there is no denying that this is what a generational talent looks like, even among a crop of extremely good F1 drivers.

The championship is now probably Norris' to lose.

Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Image

 

Then again, it's unwise to count Max out.

Mark Thompson/Getty Images

 

Norris won the race by just over 10 seconds, adding another 25 points to Saturday’s eight, for a total of 390 with three races left to run. Piastri is still in second place but now sits more than a win behind Norris on 366 points. As for Verstappen, the 49-point deficit to Norris is a lot, but after yesterday’s drive, I’m not prepared to count him out.

Hard times

It was certainly a weekend to forget for Ferrari. While its sportscar team was clinching driver and manufacturer titles in Bahrain for the finale of the World Endurance Championship, its Brazilian GP was a double-bust. Leclerc retired on lap 6, and seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton followed him on lap 39, retiring a torrid-handling car that was the result of not one but two early collisions and yet another poor qualifying session.

And spare a thought for Gabriel Bortoleto, who made his home race debut. I’ve been very impressed with the young Brazilian, who won the Formula 2 title last year, but this was not a good weekend for him. A huge crash at the end of the sprint race—registering 57 Gs—meant his car wasn’t able to run in qualifying, and after starting from the pit lane, he was taken out at the beginning of the race after getting squeezed by Lance Stroll.

The sport takes another weekend off, then returns for the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend starting November 20.

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Posted Tuesday 11 November 2025 at 12:41 pm AEST (my time).

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More evidence has emerged to support the natural origin of comet 3I/Atlas. After several weeks of conspiracy theories, social media debates, and speculation on popular podcasts such as Joe Rogan's, this interstellar object is still a comet. The most recent confirmation came from an observatory in South Africa that detected the first radio signal from 3I/Atlas.

But how? A radio signal? That would have to confirm the object is technlogical in nature, wouldn't it? The thing is, this isn't a radio signal like a transmission emitted by a spacecraft. It's instead a radio frequency pattern detected by MeerKAT, a radio telescope composed of 64 antennas—each with a diameter of 13.5 meters—operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. And what did it detect? "OH absorption was detected on the 1665 MHz and 1667 MHz lines," according to the researchers.

What MeerKAT specifically detected were lines of radio absorption by hydroxyl radicals, that is, OH molecules, a pattern that would be consistent with typical comet activity. The lines appear as absorption because 3I/Atlas was very close to the sun and the observing geometry favors absorption over emission. This is the phenomenon explained in WIRED a few days ago when the controversy about non-gravitational acceleration arose: When comets reach their closest point to the sun, they sublimate ice into space and receive a greater amount of radiation. This also causes them to alter their trajectory.

The hydroxyl radical (OH) can absorb or emit radiation at specific frequencies (such as the 1665 and 1667 MHz lines) due to transitions in its energy levels. These OH spectral lines have been detected in nebulae, comets, and star-forming regions. OH helps astronomers map the star- and water-born regions of the universe because it can "glow" brightly at radio frequencies under certain conditions.

Is There Still Hope That It's More Than a Comet?

The detection was possible on October 24, five days before 3I/Atlas reached its closest point to the sun. MeerKAT attempted to detect radio signals earlier, on September 20 and 28, although it was unsuccessful. “Five weeks ago, I encouraged radio observatories like MeerKAT to search for radio emission from 3I/ATLAS given that the arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS coincided to within 9 degrees with the arrival direction of the Wow! Signal detected in 1977 at a frequency of 1.4204556 gigahertz,” astrophysicist Avi Loeb wrote in a Medium post. “In response, I was assured that 3I/ATLAS will be monitored by radio observatories like MeerKAT.”

Loeb acknowledged that "no radio detection of 3I/ATLAS has been reported so far, other than the OH absorption signal." Of course, continued monitoring of the object would need to be conducted to determine whether the OH production is constant or intermittent, along with factors such as the extent and structure of the tail, to reach more solid conclusions about its nature.

Loeb has been has been among the most vocal advocates the of hypothesis that 3I/Atlas has a technological origin. (And he has already invited Kim Kardashian to join his research team.). The MeerKAT findings have not dampened his drive to probe the comet's nature. "On March 16, 2026, 3I/ATLAS is expected to pass within 53 million kilometers from Jupiter. At that time, the Juno spacecraft will use its dipole antenna to search for a radio signal from 3I/ATLAS at low frequencies ranging from 50 hertz to 40 megahertz," he wrote.

Will the MeerKAT detection be enough to put an end to conspiracy theories about 3I/Atlas? Likely not, and at least the debates have heightened the general public's awareness of and interest in astrophysics. In the meantime, you can live the trajectory of comet 3I/Atlas here. And don't forget to mark December 19 on the calendar—that's when the interstellar guest will reach its closest point to Earth.

This story first appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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Posted Tuesday 11 November 2025 at 1:49 am AEST (my time).

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