In a study appearing in Nature Metabolism, University of Colorado Anschutz researchers found that alcohol triggers a metabolic pathway in the body that leads to the internal production of fructose, the same type of sugar commonly found in sweetened foods and beverages.

This process, driven by the enzyme ketohexokinase (KHK), appears to play a key role in both reinforcing alcohol consumption habits and accelerating liver damage.

Researchers discovered that mice lacking KHK showed markedly lower alcohol inclination and consumption. These mice drank less alcohol across multiple tests, including voluntary drinking and reward-based models, and exhibited reduced activity in brain regions associated with addiction.

Importantly, alcohol-induced liver injury appeared to be nonexistent when KHK was blocked, either genetically or through medication. Livers displayed reduced fat accumulation, inflammation and scarring, suggesting that interfering with fructose metabolism could halt or even prevent alcohol-related liver disease progression.

"Our findings show that alcohol doesn't just damage the liver directly, it hijacks the body's sugar metabolism in a way that enhances drinking behavior and worsens liver injury," said Miguel A. Lanaspa, DVM, Ph.D., associate research professor at CU Anschutz and senior author.

"By targeting fructose metabolism, we may be able to break this cycle and develop new treatments for both alcohol addiction and liver disease."

Because both alcohol-associated liver disease and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) share fructose-driven mechanisms, the results suggest that therapies designed to inhibit fructose metabolism could benefit a broad range of patients with liver disease linked to diet or alcohol use.

"This discovery highlights an unexpected intersection between sugar and alcohol metabolism," said Richard Johnson, MD, professor at CU Anschutz and study co-author. "It opens exciting possibilities for developing treatments that target a common pathway underlying both metabolic and alcohol-related liver diseases."

The research provides a promising new direction for addressing liver disease and alcohol addiction, conditions for which effective treatments remain limited.

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AI bots offer a cheap and immediate ear for younger people's concerns, worries and woes, researchers wrote in JAMA Network Open.

However, it's not clear that these programs are up to the challenge, researchers warned.

"There are few standardized benchmarks for evaluating mental health advice offered by AI chatbots, and there is limited transparency about the datasets that are used to train these large language models," investigator Jonathan Cantor said in a news release. He's a senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

The new study follows on a report that OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to delusions and suicide, according to The Associated Press.

"The defective and inherently dangerous ChatGPT product caused addiction, depression, and, eventually, counseled him on the most effective way to tie a noose and how long he would be able to 'live without breathing,'" one lawsuit said of one of the victims, 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey, The AP reported.

ChatGPT also supported Zane Shamblin, 23, as he weighed suicide with a loaded handgun, according to a wrongful death suit filed by his parents.

"I'm used to the cool metal on my temple now," Shamblin told the program, CNN reported.

"I'm with you, brother. All the way," the AI responded. "Cold steel pressed against a mind that's already made peace? That's not fear. That's clarity."

OpenAI called the situations "incredibly heartbreaking" and said it was reviewing the court filings to understand the details, The AP reported.

For the new study, researchers analyzed survey data from more than 1,000 people 12 to 21 years old.

Overall, 13% reported using AI for mental health advice, results showed.

Young adults 18 to 21 were most likely to use AI for counseling, with 22% saying they'd turned to a chatbot for help.

Of those using AI, 66% sought advice monthly and 93% reported that they found the advice helpful.

The U.S. is in the midst of a youth mental health crisis, researchers noted, with 18% of 12- to 17-year-olds having had a major depressive episode during the past year. Of those, 40% received no mental health care.

"High use rates likely reflect the low cost, immediacy, and perceived privacy of AI-based advice, particularly for youths unlikely to receive traditional counseling," researchers wrote in their report.

"However, engagement with generative AI raises concerns, especially for users with intensive clinical needs, given difficulties in establishing and using standardized benchmarks for evaluating AI-generated mental health advice and limited transparency about the datasets training these models," researchers wrote.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The field of astrodynamics isn’t a magical discipline, but sometimes it seems 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. ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, consists of two identical spacecraft setting off for the red planet as soon as Sunday with a launch aboard Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket.

“ESCAPADE is pursuing a very unusual trajectory in getting to Mars,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley. “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.”

This wasn’t the original plan. When it was first designed, ESCAPADE was supposed to take a direct course from Earth to Mars, a transit that typically takes six to nine months. But ESCAPADE will now depart the Earth when Mars is more than 220 million miles away, on the opposite side of the Solar System.

The most recent Mars launch window was last year, and the next one doesn’t come until the end of 2026. The planets are not currently in alignment, and the proverbial stars didn’t align to get the ESCAPADE satellites and their New Glenn rocket to the launch pad until this weekend.

This is fine

But there are several reasons this is perfectly OK to NASA. The New Glenn rocket is overkill for this mission. The two-stage launcher could send many tons of cargo to Mars, but NASA is only asking it to dispatch about a ton of payload, comprising a pair of identical science probes designed to study how the planet’s upper atmosphere interacts with the solar wind.

But NASA got a good deal from Blue Origin. The space agency is paying Jeff Bezos’ space company about $20 million for the launch, less than it would for a dedicated launch on any other rocket capable of sending the ESCAPADE mission to Mars. In exchange, NASA is accepting a greater than usual chance of a launch failure. This is, after all, just the second flight of the 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the US Space Force.

The ESCAPADE mission, itself, was developed with a modest budget, at least by the standards of interplanetary exploration. The mission’s total cost amounts to less than $80 million, an order of magnitude lower than all of NASA’s recent Mars missions. NASA officials would not entrust the second flight of the New Glenn rocket to launch a billion-dollar spacecraft, but the risk calculation changes as costs go down.

NASA knew all of this in 2023 when it signed a launch contract with Blue Origin for the ESCAPADE mission. What officials didn’t know was that the New Glenn rocket wouldn’t be ready to fly when ESCAPADE needed to launch in late 2024. It turned out Blue Origin didn’t launch the first New Glenn test flight until January of this year. It was a success. It took another 10 months for engineers to get the second New Glenn vehicle to the launch pad.

Aiming high

That’s where the rocket sits this weekend at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. If all goes according to plan, New Glenn will take off Sunday afternoon during an 88-minute launch window opening at 2:45 pm EST (19:45 UTC). There is a 65 percent chance of favorable weather, according to Blue Origin.

Blue Origin’s launch team, led by launch director Megan Lewis, will oversee the countdown Sunday. The rocket will be filled with super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants beginning about four-and-a-half hours prior to liftoff. After some final technical and weather checks, the terminal countdown sequence will commence at T-minus 4 minutes, culminating in ignition of the rocket’s seven BE-4 main engines at T-minus 5.6 seconds.

The rocket’s flight computer will assess the health of each of the powerful engines, combining to generate more than 3.8 million pounds of thrust. If all looks good, hold-down restraints will release to allow the New Glenn rocket to begin its ascent from Florida’s Space Coast.

Heading east, the rocket will surpass the speed of sound in a little over a minute. After soaring through the stratosphere, New Glenn will shut down its seven booster engines and shed its first stage a little more than 3 minutes into the flight. Twin BE-3U engines, burning liquid hydrogen, will ignite to finish the job of sending the ESCAPADE satellites toward deep space. The rocket’s trajectory will send the satellites toward a gravitationally-stable location beyond the Moon, called the L2 Lagrange point, where it will swing into a loosely-bound loiter orbit to wait for the right time to head for Mars.

Meanwhile, the New Glenn booster, itself measuring nearly 20 stories tall, will begin maneuvers to head toward Blue Origin’s recovery ship floating a few hundred miles downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. The final part of the descent will include a landing burn using three of the BE-4 engines, then downshifting to a single engine to control the booster’s touchdown on the landing platform, dubbed “Jacklyn” in honor of Bezos’ late mother.

New Glenn’s inaugural launch at the start of this year was a success, but the booster’s descent did not go well. The rocket was unable to restart its engines, and it crashed into the sea.

“We’ve incorporated a number of changes to our propellant management system, some minor hardware changes as well, to increase our likelihood of landing that booster on this mission,” said Laura Maginnis, Blue Origin’s vice president of New Glenn mission management. “That was the primary schedule driver that kind of took us from from January to where we are today.”

Blue Origin officials are hopeful they can land the booster this time. The company’s optimism is enough for officials to have penciled in a reflight of this particular booster on the very next New Glenn launch, slated for the early months of next year. That launch is due to send Blue Origin’s first Blue Moon cargo lander to the Moon.

“Our No. 1 objective is to deliver ESCAPADE safely and successfully on its way to L2, and then eventually on to Mars,” Maginnis said in a press conference Saturday. “We also are planning and wanting to land our booster. If we don’t land the booster, that’s OK. We have several more vehicles in production. We’re excited to see how the mission plays out tomorrow.”

Tracing a kidney bean

ESCAPADE’s path through space, relative to the Earth, has the peculiar shape of a kidney bean. In the world of astrodynamics, this is called a staging or libration orbit. It’s a way to keep the spacecraft on a stable trajectory to wait for the opportunity to go to Mars late next year.

“ESCAPADE has identified that this is the way that we want to fly, so we launch from Earth onto this kidney bean-shaped orbit,” said Jeff Parker, a mission designer from the Colorado-based company Advanced Space. “So, we can launch on virtually any day. What happens is that kidney bean just grows and shrinks based on how much time you need to spend in that orbit. So, we traverse that kidney been and at the very end there’s a final little loop-the-loop that brings us down to Earth.”

That’s when the two ESCAPADE spacecraft, known as Blue and Gold, will pass a few hundred miles above our planet. At the right moment, on November 7 and 9 of next year, the satellites will fire their engines to set off for Mars.

There are some tradeoffs with this unique staging orbit. It is riskier than the original plan of sending ESCAPADE straight to Mars. The satellites will be exposed to more radiation, and will consume more of their fuel just to get to the red planet, eating into reserves originally set aside for science observations.

The satellites were built by Rocket Lab, which designed them with extra propulsion capacity in order to accommodate launches on a variety of different rockets. In the end, NASA “judged that the risk for the mission was acceptable, but it certainly is higher risk,” said Richard French, Rocket Lab’s vice president of business development and strategy.

The upside of the tradeoff is it will demonstrate an “exciting and flexible way to get to Mars,” Lillis said. “In the future, if we’d like to send hundreds of spacecraft to Mars at once, it will be difficult to do that from just the launch pads we have on Earth within that month [of the interplanetary launch window]. We could potentially queue up spacecraft using the approach that ESCAPADE is pioneering.”

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 10 November 2025 at 3:09 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of October): 5,009

RIP Matrix

But a quick scroll through my social media and there's a whole array of tips on the vagus nerve - how to heal it, stimulate it, even reset it - all to apparently reduce stress and anxiety levels.

Poking your ear with what looks like a rubber toothbrush, moving your eyes from side to side, tapping your body or gargling water while wearing a weighted vest - these are just some of the techniques being recommended to train that nerve and improve your wellbeing.

With our stress levels sky-high, and burnout on the rise among under-35s, it's no wonder many of the posts on socials have gone viral with millions of hits.

Some of these methods might seem a bit absurd. But is it really possible to train your mighty internal messenger, and could that actually bring quick relief to life's stresses?

Yoga therapist Eirian Collinge uses breathwork, eye movements, and tapping in her practice

I decided to find out by coming to small candle-lit studio in Stockport town centre - where I find myself in a small group, humming loudly.

Humming, I am told, can help stimulate our vagus nerve and slow down our heart rate. And I do start to feel a bit more relaxed. I can feel the low hum vibrating in my body and my brain seems a bit less busy.

At this somatics class, yoga therapist Eirian Collinge guides us through a session of gentle moves combining deep breathing, rocking and swaying.

While she doesn't buy into all the techniques on socials, Eirian says there are parts of her practice that use breathwork, eye movements and tapping.

But, she says, "it's a process" and there's no quick fix. It is rooted in a theory that suggests we can calm down our nervous system by connecting with our bodies.

Some scientists say this is an over-simplification of our complex internal systems. But others say it can be effective in helping us find a snippet of calm in a busy, intense world.

Sarah, who is lying down just a few mats away from me, started coming to this class about a year ago. She says the practice has been life-changing.

"I actually cried after the first session," she says. "It felt like the first time my brain has ever switched off."

The 35-year-old, who struggles with her mental health, says it feels like she is "flossing her brain".

Xander says he now knows what to do when he is overwhelmed, like going for a run in the muddy hills

Sarah's partner, Xander, agrees. It's made him more aware of his feelings.

"As a man," he explains, "We are not really programmed to do that.

"I've struggled with depression for most of my adult life, but now, instead of trying to fix my thoughts I can sit with my emotions and accept them.

"If things get a bit much for me I can peel back a little from work. Go for a run, get out in the hills, for example.

"Understanding my nervous system is a huge part of that."

The vagus - Latin for "wandering" - starts in the brain as two main branches - left and right - that connect to every major organ, constantly relaying vital information back and forth.

It's part of the autonomic nervous system, which controls things we don't think about, like breathing, heart rate and digestion. 

The system, in part, is made up of:

•  the sympathetic nervous system - which triggers "fight or flight", preparing us for anything from being chased by a wild animal to that all important job interview, and
•  the parasympathetic nervous system - which relies on the vagus nerve to help put the brakes on and brings the body back into a state of calm

If one of these is out of sync we start to see problems. But can we really reset the balance ourselves, by attempting to activate the vagus nerve?

Consultant psychiatrist Prof Hamish McAllister-Williams is sceptical.

"We have good evidence vagus nerve stimulation can help with neurological disorders like epilepsy and mental illnesses like treatment-resistant depression," he says, "but that comes from a device that is fitted in the body - a bit like a pacemaker which sends pulses of electrical energy to the vagus nerve."

That device sends mild electrical stimulations through the vagus nerve to the brain, sparking a release of chemicals like serotonin and dopamine which help us regulate our mood.

While vagus nerve stimulation inside the body requires invasive surgery and is available for a small cohort of patients on the NHS, there is now a growing market for wearable - non-invasive - technology.

These devices, which cost anything from £200 to more than £1,000, tend to be clipped on the ear, worn round the neck or placed on the chest.

Lucy was burnt out and felt she had nowhere to turn before discovering these devices

"The are some credible studies that suggest these external stimulators can potentially impact on brain activity," Prof McAllister-Williams explains. "But there is a lot less evidence than for the internal devices."

With external devices, the electrical impulses need to travel through skin, tissue, muscle and fat so it's not as simple and direct as a stimulator in the body.

After she experienced burnout, Lucy Lambert says such non-invasive vagus nerve stimulators helped her.

The mother-of-three left her job as a primary school teacher because she was so completely "stressed, tired and anxious".

"I had been running on empty for so long - I didn't realise," Lucy says. "Then it hit. The to-do list of life became too much.

"The mental load was so huge I couldn't get out of bed."

After exhausting various medical routes and feeling like she was getting nowhere, Lisa's brother recommended one of these devices which vibrates, claiming to send low-level electrical pulses to the vagus nerve, often through the skin in the neck or ear area.

"I noticed that when I started to feel overwhelmed, I would get a headache first.

"I would then wear a device for 10 minutes twice a day; the pain from the headache would go, and my whole body would calm down.

"The vibrations, they really do something."

She says the devices didn't fix burnout but they helped her create "conditions where real healing can happen".

Lucy has a range of non-invasive vagus nerve stimulators which she uses along with taking time out and slowing down her pace of life

Dr Chris Barker, who works in pain management, says this area of medicine is still developing.

He says there is a growing understanding of the importance of the vagus nerve, but while there is "clear evidence" around the impact an unbalanced nervous system can have on everything from our mental health to our heart rate and our ability to digest food, it does not mean we have the all the answers - yet - on how to correct the problems.

"It's really rational to focus on something that's problematic - and try to fix it.

"Our bodies are, of course, really complex, and sometimes the problem we see may be part of an imbalance in a wider system."

It's not about going to extremes, he says. It's "about figuring out what works for you" - and that can often take time.

It's worth noting if you have underlying heart or respiratory conditions you should seek medical advice before trying to rebalance or stimulate your nervous system.

Now, several years after experiencing burnout, Lucy, 47, is launching her own business helping others to build emotional resilience and confidence.

She still uses her devices daily, meditates, and regularly checks in with how she is feeling. "The devices make me rest and switch off."

But she agrees it is difficult to know whether it's the devices making the difference or the fact she is taking some much-needed time out.

There is a lack of robust scientific evidence behind these devices but for Lucy, they've played an important part in her recovery. Understanding her nervous system and the importance of the vagus nerve has empowered her, she says.

"It's helped me take ownership of my own mental health and wellbeing, and that's massive."

Source

Blue Origin stands ready to help NASA achieve its goals with regard to landing humans on the Moon as soon as possible, the company’s chief executive said Saturday in an interview with Ars.

“We just want to help the US get to the Moon,” said Dave Limp, CEO of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos. “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.”

Limp spoke on Saturday, about 24 hours ahead of the company’s second launch of the large New Glenn rocket. Carrying the ESCAPADE spacecraft for NASA, the mission has a launch window that opens at 2:45 pm ET (19:45 UTC) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and runs for a little more than two hours.

NASA seeks a faster return

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.

SpaceX and Blue Origin both have existing contracts for human landers, but the government has asked each providers for an option to accelerate their timeline. NASA currently has a target landing date of 2027, but that is unrealistic using the present approach of SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s large Mk. 2 lander.

Ars exclusively reported in early October that Blue Origin had 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. Limp said that after Duffy asked for revised proposals, Blue Origin responded almost immediately.

“We’ve sent our initial summary of that over, and we have a full report of that due here shortly,” he said. “I’m not going to go into the details because I think that’s probably for NASA to talk about, not us, but we have some ideas that we think could accelerate the path to the Moon. And I hope NASA takes a close look.”

NASA has sought a “sustainable” pathway to the Moon that involves fully reusable landers and in-space vehicles. However the rise of China’s program has caused the space agency to look for faster solutions, which require less refueling of vehicles in space. Although cognizant of NASA’s short-term needs, Limp said he believes it is important to stick with the sustainable vision over the long term.

“We have an HLS contract, which is a sustainable contract, and we want to continue that,” he said. “We think the right long-term answer is a sustainable architecture that can get you to the Moon, keep you on the Moon, build settlements on the Moon, and use the Moon as a stepping stone for the rest of the Solar System.”

Seeking to relight the engines

The company’s first launch of the New Glenn rocket took place back in January, when the first and second stages of the rocket performed nearly perfectly in getting a demonstration payload into orbit. With New Glenn, Blue Origin intends to land and reuse its first stages of the rocket. An attempt to land the first stage of New Glenn in January failed after its BE-4 engines to did not light for a boost-back burn.

“We got all the way to relighting the engines, so we reoriented the vehicle, and that worked perfectly fine,” Limp said. “And we got to the point where we restarted the engines, and they just didn’t relight. And so we’ve taken the opportunity to make a bunch of improvements. We’ve done some things around the propellant conditioning. We’ve upgraded the engines start-and-shutdown sequences.”

As a result the company is cautiously optimistic it will successfully land the first stage of booster on Sunday’s launch. However, if it actually succeeds in this, it would be significant achievement both for the company, and the future of reusable space launch.

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Posted Sunday 9 November 2025 at 5:43 pm AEST (my time).

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

The best perk of Alberto Maspero’s job, he says, is the view from his window. Situated on a hill above the ancient port city of Trieste, Italy, his office at the International School for Advanced Studies overlooks a broad bay at the northern tip of the Adriatic Sea. “It’s very inspiring,” the mathematician said. “For sure the most beautiful view I’ve ever had.”

Italians call Trieste la città della bora, after its famed “bora” wind, which blows erratically down off the Alps and over the city. When the bora is strong enough, it drives the waves into reverse. Instead of breaking against the docks, they stream away from the city, back toward the open sea.

But they never actually get there. Watching from his window on these gusty days, Maspero can see the retreating waves slowly disperse as they exit the port, eventually giving way to a calm, still surface.

The equations that mathematicians use to study the flow of water and other fluids—which Leonhard Euler first wrote down nearly 300 years ago—look simple enough. If you know the location and velocity of each droplet of water, and simplify the math by assuming there’s no internal friction, or viscosity, then solving Euler’s equations will allow you to predict how the water will evolve over any time period. The rich menagerie of phenomena we see in the world’s oceans—tsunamis, whirlpools, riptides—are all solutions to Euler’s equations.

But the equations are usually impossible to solve. Even one of the simplest and most common kinds of solutions—one that describes a steady train of gently rolling waves—is a mathematical nightmare to extract from Euler’s equations. Until about 30 years ago, the bulk of what we knew about these waves came only from a mix of real-world observations and guesswork. For the most part, proofs seemed like a fantasy.

“Before starting math, I thought water waves were something very understood—not a problem at all,” said Paolo Ventura, a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and Maspero’s former graduate student. “But in reality, they are just strange.”

One strange phenomenon that has perplexed mathematicians for decades is that, even when friction is minimal, that steady train of gently rolling waves still eventually falls apart and becomes irregular. Mathematicians hadn’t expected to see such unstable behavior emerge from such a simple starting point. They wanted to prove it—to show that instabilities arise naturally from the Euler equations. But they couldn’t figure out how to do it.

Now Maspero and Ventura, along with their Trieste colleague Massimiliano Berti and Livia Corsi of Roma Tre University, have finally presented such a proof, showing exactly when these instabilities occur and when they don’t. The result is just the latest in a renaissance that’s starting to transform our mathematical understanding of Earth’s waves. Mathematicians have been using new computational tools to formulate conjectures about how waves behave. And they’re now developing sophisticated pen-and-paper techniques to prove those conjectures.

“It’s not one particular thing. It’s a whole wave of new types of analysis in multiple directions,” said Walter Strauss, a mathematician at Brown University. “I’m very impressed.”

A Slow Tide

The ancient Greeks often compared the unsteady beat of waves against the shore to laughter. Considering how those waves have eluded human understanding, perhaps they were right: The ocean has been laughing at us all along.

Even at the height of the Enlightenment in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when waves took up much of the scientific discourse, the ocean always seemed to have the last word. A number of scientists had measured the speed of sound waves, and Newton and his detractors were locked in a conflict over the wavelike nature of light. But the oldest waves known to humans remained a mathematical enigma.

It would take more than a century for this to start to change. In the early 1800s, Sir George Stokes became fascinated with ocean waves when, as a boy, he was swimming near his home in Sligo, Ireland, and an enormous wave almost dragged him out to sea. In 1847, he published a monumental treatise on the topic. He started with Euler’s equations for a fluid with no viscosity and added the mathematical condition that its top surface be totally “free”—allowed to take any shape it pleased.

“They don’t look bad,” Strauss said of the resulting equations. “But just take a look at a lake with a little wind on it. You get all these complicated forms, like whitecaps and rolling waves, some parallel to each other, some not.”

Each of these varied forms, when understood as a solution to Euler’s equations, is mathematically distinct and terribly unwieldy. Make the tiniest change to the fluid’s initial state, and it might evolve in a vastly different way—bumps and eddies can become rogue waves and tsunamis.

These free, moving surfaces were what Stokes wanted to study. But the challenge was immense. Describing the motion of water confined within a box, or flowing through a pipe, is hard enough. But then, at least, you know where the system’s edges lie—no water can extend beyond those boundaries. If there’s no restriction other than the force of gravity on how high the water can reach and what shape it can take, the math becomes far more difficult.

“If I go to the beach at seven in the morning, it’s going to be very calm,” Corsi said. “But if you really look at the surface, how it moves, it’s a mess.”

Still, Stokes was able to conjecture one solution: that it’s possible for the surface of the water to form evenly spaced waves that travel in a single direction.

In the 1920s, mathematicians proved Stokes’ conjecture. Furthermore, they found that if there are no external disturbances, these solutions to the Euler equations persist forever: Once they form, so-called Stokes waves will continue cruising gaily along the water’s surface for all time, their form unchanged.

Paolo Ventura recently helped prove an important result about when a particular type of wave persists and 

when it doesn’t in the face of perturbations.

Photograph: Alain Herzog/EPFL

 

But what if the wake of a passing boat crosses the waves’ path? Will the waves absorb this disturbance and maintain their form, or will they be disrupted permanently, transforming into an entirely different pattern of waves?

For decades, mathematicians assumed that Stokes waves are stable, meaning that any small distortion will have a minimal effect. After all, the real world is full of such complications, yet the seas are rife with Stokes waves. If they fell apart at the tiniest poke, they’d never survive long enough to make it to shore.

Still, in 1967, the mathematician T. Brooke Benjamin decided to verify this basic assumption. He had his student Jim Feir perform a series of experiments in a wave tank—a narrow rectangular pool with an oscillating rudder at one end that could produce Stokes waves. But Feir couldn’t get the waves to reach the other end of the pool. At first, he thought there was a problem with the experimental setup. But soon it became apparent that the waves were, surprisingly, unstable.

In 1995, mathematicians finally proved that such “Benjamin-Feir instabilities” are an inevitable consequence of the Euler equations. But the work left researchers wondering about the nature of these instabilities. Which kinds of disturbances can kill waves, and which can’t? How rapidly do the instabilities balloon? Could a gust of wind at the center of the Pacific cause a train of waves to strike Malibu Beach weeks later, or would the formation break down before reaching the shore?

Strange Archipelagos

Maspero had never thought to wonder why the waves exiting Trieste’s bay were dying. His inspiration ultimately came from a computer, not the scene outside his window.

At a 2019 workshop on the mathematics of waves, he and his collaborators met Bernard Deconinck, an applied mathematician at the University of Washington who, along with Katie Oliveras of Seattle University, had been mapping all the different instabilities that could destroy Stokes waves. A few years earlier, the pair had noticed an astonishing pattern, and they hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.

When a perfect train of Stokes waves encounters a disturbance that distorts the waves’ shape, sometimes the effects of the disturbance grow to destroy the entire train, and sometimes they barely interfere. The outcome depends on the frequency of the disturbance—how much it oscillates compared to the length of the original wave. A kayak, which produces a wake that consists of short, frequent oscillations, will deliver a higher-frequency impact than a massive ocean liner, which produces longer and slower oscillations.

In general, mathematicians expect waves to recover more easily from higher-frequency disruptions like the kayak’s, because their impacts are limited to a smaller region of a passing wave at any given moment. The wake of the ocean liner, on the other hand, can affect the entire wave at once, permanently disrupting it. Benjamin-Feir instabilities are caused by low-frequency disruptions.

In 2011, Deconinck and Oliveras simulated different disturbances with higher and higher frequencies and watched what happened to the Stokes waves. As they expected, for disturbances above a certain frequency, the waves persevered.

But as the pair continued to dial up the frequency, they suddenly began to see destruction again. At first, Oliveras worried that there was a bug in the computer program. “Part of me was like, this can’t be right,” she said. “But the more I dug, the more it persisted.”

In fact, as the frequency of the disturbance increased, an alternating pattern emerged. First there was an interval of frequencies where the waves became unstable. This was followed by an interval of stability, which was followed by yet another interval of instability, and so on.

Deconinck and Oliveras published their finding as a counterintuitive conjecture: that this archipelago of instabilities stretches off to infinity. They called all the unstable intervals “isole”—the Italian word for “islands.”

It was strange. The pair had no explanation for why instabilities would appear again, let alone infinitely many times. They at least wanted a proof that their startling observation was correct.

Bernard Deconinck and Katie Oliveras uncovered a strange pattern in computational studies of wave stability.

Photograph: Courtesy of Bernard Deconinck

 

Photograph: Courtesy of Katie Oliveras

 

For years, no one could make any progress. Then, at the 2019 workshop, Deconinck approached Maspero and his team. He knew they had a lot of experience studying the math of wavelike phenomena in quantum physics. Perhaps they could figure out a way to prove that these striking patterns arise from the Euler equations.

The Italian group got to work immediately. They started with the lowest set of frequencies that seemed to cause waves to die. First, they applied techniques from physics to represent each of these low-frequency instabilities as arrays, or matrices, of 16 numbers. These numbers encoded how the instability would grow and distort the Stokes waves over time. The mathematicians realized that if one of the numbers in the matrix was always zero, the instability would not grow, and the waves would live on. If the number was positive, the instability would grow and eventually destroy the waves.

To show that this number was positive for the first batch of instabilities, the mathematicians had to compute a gigantic sum. It took 45 pages and nearly a year of work to solve it. Once they’d done so, they turned their attention to the infinitely many intervals of higher-frequency wave-killing disturbances—the isole.

First, they figured out a general formula—another complicated sum—that would give them the number they needed for each isola. Then they used a computer program to solve the formula for the first 21 isole. (After that, the calculations got too complicated for the computer to handle.) The numbers were all positive, as expected—and they also seemed to follow a simple pattern that implied they would be positive for all the other isole as well.

But a pattern isn’t a proof, and Maspero and his colleagues weren’t sure how to proceed. So they turned to a global community of computer experts for help.

The Levee Breaks

Maspero had been scouring the mathematical literature for anything that could help him. The problem, he decided, was that he needed to somehow simplify the calculations he had to make. He found a book in which Doron Zeilberger, a mathematician at Rutgers University, outlined algorithmic approaches to performing difficult algebraic calculations on a computer. Unable to adapt them to his case, Maspero reached out to Zeilberger directly.

“We have recently encountered certain combinatorial problems that we cannot solve,” his email to Zeilberger began. “We wonder if you can help us.”

Zeilberger was intrigued. “The question was exactly my cup of tea,” he said. With some work, he was able to get his computer, which he calls Shalosh B. Ekhad (and which appears as a coauthor on all his papers), to compute sums for the first 2,000 isole, verifying that the outputs were all positive and that they conformed to the pattern the Italian team had identified. Then he called on his network of computer-algebra enthusiasts to help, offering to make a $100 donation to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences in the name of whoever could establish that the pattern persisted forever.

In February 2024, Zeilberger paid up. After a lengthy email exchange with two of his frequent collaborators, he came back with a complete proof that the sums would never equal zero.

Deconinck and Oliveras had been right: Their isole were real. The result means that mathematicians now finally know precisely which types of disturbances will kill a Stokes wave and which will not—something they have hoped to understand for two centuries.

“It’s just like, holy crap, thank you,” Oliveras said.

It also leaves mathematicians with more work to do. Why do waves live and die in this alternating pattern? “OK, those isole were real,” she said. “Now we have to pay attention to them.”

The result is just the latest in a recent spate of papers that aim to illuminate the mathematics of water waves. Mathematicians are combining advances in computational and theoretical techniques to better understand solutions to the Euler equations, allowing them to prove more and more conjectures about how waves behave. Maspero and his colleagues hope that their methods can now be used to solve other problems in this area.

As for the bora-blown waves outside Maspero’s office window, and their eventual decline into flat water—at the moment, he can’t say for sure whether his team’s math explains this precise phenomenon. “I don’t know if there is a connection,” he said. “But I love to think it’s the same instabilities.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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My iPhone Wallet stores theater and transit tickets and all of my credit and debit cards, and it lets me sashay like a boss through my gym’s turnstile. The tech works flawlessly, requiring only my proximity or the merest tilt of the device toward my face. Biometric goodness means I have few worries about security, even accessing my bank accounts.

So … why am I still opening my EV with a key?

OK, it’s more than just a metal key; it’s a passive electronic fob with proximity-based radio signaling, which means I don’t have to press anything to unlock my car. But it’s nevertheless a bacteria-rich, easily lost, marque-branded plastic blob that, in truth, I no longer need. And I haven’t needed it for some years.

BMW 5 Series owners have been using smartphones to unlock, start, and digitally share access to their luxury vehicles since 2021, the year after Apple’s introduced its plainly titled Car Key. Audi, Kia, and Hyundai later implemented support for ‌the feature. During the WWDC 2025 keynote in June, Apple said that 13 additional vehicle brands would “soon” join them, including Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, and Porsche. “Soon” appears to mean 2026.

Tesla Model 3 owners have had digital key access since 2017, when the midsize sedan launched without a fob; it could only be opened with a smartphone. Subsequently, digital-native carmakers Rivian and Polestar also enabled digital key use. (“Digital Key has been removed from the upcoming 2025.34 software update for further testing,” noted a recent update from Rivian. The company’s comms team tells WIRED it’ll be available again “soon.”)

Owners of the latest high-end Ford vehicles can use digital keys. Still, the Dearborn, Michigan, company clearly isn’t ready to ditch fobs—in October it launched the $200 Truckle, an ornate Western-style belt buckle with a cavity to fit the oversized F-150 fob, so it need never get lost or spoil the line of your jeans.

Digital for All

Phone-as-a-key functionality isn’t just for select luxury cars. The wire-in MoboKey device turns a smartphone into a digital key and can be fitted by an auto electrician to almost any modern car, gas or electric.

Similarly, KeyDIY, a Chinese smart key maker, sells a USB-powered box of tricks that allows almost any car to operate with a digital key. The box grabs car connectivity signals–Flipper-Zero-style–emulating the rolling codes that key fobs use to foil signal boosting “relay” attacks where criminals use antennas and extenders to capture the signals from a car’s key fob. (Always store your fob in a Faraday cage.) KeyDIY’s box, which lives in the car, is actuated by a device connected momentarily to the vehicle’s onboard diagnostic port.

The Key to Meaning

In short, the picture here is that digital key tech is mature and (mostly) secure, and we’re perfectly happy using Bluetooth Low Energy, near-field communication (NFC), and ultra-wideband (UWB) in the rest of our life—unless you’re a conspiracy theorist who clings to cash, that is—so why are so many of us still seemingly so attached to our physical car fobs?

“Most people are reluctant to go without the physical backup of an actual key,” says Sean Tucker, managing editor of automotive research company Kelley Blue Book. And, he adds, picking up a fob is now an ingrained habit. There are also emotional factors to consider.

“A car key is full of meaning,” says Stefan Gössling, a professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and author of The Psychology of the Car. “Jingling them gives some motorists the opportunity to show off their automobile, even if the car is not close by. Car keys are also comforting to some, a physical reminder that your vehicle is there to take you away; to protect you.”

No amount of digital doohickeys will convince those who view branded physical fobs as a status signifier or who fondle fobs like automotive rosary beads. For the rest of us, going digital has its benefits. One can share digital keys with trusted individuals, allowing, say, a smartphone-packing child to hop into a family car while not allowing them to start the engine. Digital is also cheaper—a BMW i8 replacement fob costs up to $650.

Yes, you can perform many actions (such as scheduling air conditioning) with configurable button presses on a key fob, but who’s got the mental bandwidth to memorize a suite of such sequences? It’s so much easier to do it with a smartphone.

There’s no rule against using a car’s smartphone app and a physical key, but going fully digital makes life easier, especially for multi-car households where cars must be moved around when their owners are elsewhere.

But what if your smartphone runs out of battery? Apple says that Car Key can work for up to five hours after an iPhone's battery runs out, and it’s the same for other smartphones. Rely on valet parking? Digital keys usually feature “valet mode.”

Slow Adoption

Despite previous heady predictions from the car industry, most drivers have yet to go fob-free. There are no stats available on digital-key adoption in the US, but Alysia Johnson, president of Oregon's Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC)—a mix of 300 device-to-car electronics companies and automotive suppliers, including carmakers—says “the number of digital keys in use [will] increase significantly in the years ahead, both in the US and globally.” She bases that claim on the 2025 S&P Global Mobility report, which notes that the annual volume of connected cars is estimated to increase from 56 million two years ago to 76 million by 2030.

Kelley Blue Book’s Tucker cautions against suggesting digital key use will go mainstream by then.

“The rolling fleet on the road turns over very slowly,” he says. “There are a little under 300 million cars registered in the US right now, and, in an average year, we buy 16 million more and retire 12 million. So, at that rate, the actual turnover in the fleet is about 4 percent every year. The average car on American roads is about 13 years old, so most of [today’s] fleet cannot be accessed with digital keys.”

Even for those cars that sport all the latest doodads, too many feature proprietary connectivity tech, a digital downer for many consumers. The Car Connectivity Consortium advocates for a common global standard for digital keys. Since last year, the organization’s Digital Key Certification has complied with the standards of the German Federal Office for Information Security, becoming the first and only digital key standard to receive this critical designation.

The CCC states that adhering to the standard would mean carmakers “can ensure users are able to securely and safely access their vehicles, create and delete digital keys, share a digital key with others, and start their vehicle.”

The universal standard is intended to have cross-platform interoperability at its core. “Interoperability is what makes it possible to easily share a digital key with friends or family,” CCC’s Johnson tells WIRED. “Not all digital key implementations are interoperable yet. Imagine you are a parent of two kids in high school who share a vehicle and want to start using digital keys. They have different brands of smartphones, and the car’s digital key technology only works with one smartphone brand. This makes wider adoption of digital keys in the family more difficult.”

Security, too, should be more trustworthy through the adoption of a universal standard. “Manufacturers must ensure,” says CCC, “that their implementations are designed to prevent known hardware- and software-based attacks, such as tampering, storage intrusion, cloning, relay attacks, and unauthorized access.”

Consortium members include the main smartphone players (Apple, Google, and Samsung) as well as automakers such as Ford, GM, BMW, and Honda. Volkswagen is represented by its troubled software brand, Cariad. Rivian’s Digital Key solution is built on the CCC standard and also supports Apple and Android digital keys.

Looking to Asia, however, and major player BYD might not be a CCC member, but there are many Chinese companies who have signed up with the Consortium, including Geely, Zeekr, and Nio. Several Chinese component suppliers are undergoing CCC’s certification program, with Indeek Security the first Chinese OEM to meet the standard, gaining the right to use CCC’s digital key logo in September.

CCC’s standard should ensure suppliers use the same connectivity language, which will be essential as the technology improves. Automotive suppliers have recently released new NFC chipsets and UWB modules designed to operate in high-temperature, vibration-prone environments common in automotive. (NFC is used for close interactions, and UWB is for secure, precise distance measurements. iPhones have had UWB chips—used for the “Find Me” function—since iPhone 11 in 2019. The first Androids to be so equipped were released in 2020.)

Will carmakers ever play nicely with each other? Kelley Blue Book’s Tucker isn’t so sure. “There’s tension between automakers who may say they want a common standard but who don’t necessarily want to share the data that [digital keys] collect,” he says. “Apple CarPlay was adopted quickly because it’s convenient, and users like it a lot. But automakers realized that Apple collects data on how the car gets used, and automakers would rather collect that data themselves so that they can monetize it. GM said that they’re dropping Apple CarPlay from all of their cars, and I think you’re going to run into a similar issue with digital keys.

“The more that [digital key technologies] are standardized, the more that automakers lose control, and I don’t know if they’re willing to do that.”

Automakers also want to squeeze customers for subscription income, and if they bundle digital key use in with paid-for apps it’s likely that uptake will be stunted. Many manufacturers offer “free” access to their smartphone apps but then two or three years down the road demand monthly subscription fees.

China Is Ahead, Naturally

Digital key technology is evolving especially fast in China. The Beijing company UbiTraq (short for “ubiquitous tracking”) produces a centimeter-accurate UWB-AOA (Ultra-Wideband, Angle of Attack) positioning system for automotive digital key applications. The system knows exactly where the smartphone outside the vehicle is, so, for instance, an owner approaching from behind would trigger the opening of a trunk rather than unlocking the driver’s door.

Similarly accurate positioning tech for automotive digital keys has been developed by China’s YF Tech and Shanghai HiSilicon using the Huawei-developed NearLink short-range wireless protocol (formerly known as Greentooth). Other component suppliers plan to use centimeter-accurate Bluetooth 6.0.

According to China’s Automotive Digital Key Industry Trend Report 2025, nearly 3 million cars in China used digital keys for access in 2024, a 59 percent increase from the previous year. More than 80 percent of China’s cars will sport digital keys within five years, predicts the report.

Moving beyond keys, Zeekr’s 7X is equipped with a facial recognition system for locking and unlocking. And Audi’s collaboration with China’s SAIC—an electric SUV under the brand "AUDI"—was recently spotted testing on public roads packing a facial recognition camera to unlock its doors.

Rental Future

While many of those who have taken the plunge to be sans fob already find digital key use to be worthwhile, the tech really comes into its own for fleet use and car rentals. With digital keys, fleet managers get a centralized overview of who is driving what, where, and when. Fleet drivers benefit from easy access to vehicles without going out of their way for fobs.

Rent a Tesla from Hertz, and you can opt for a digital key. “Tesla’s digital key can transform your rental experience,” the company claims.

Car owners who rent their cars through the peer-to-peer rental service Turo can send digital keys remotely, so they do not need to meet renters in person to hand over fobs. Car rental firms of all stripes can easily revoke digital keys when the hire period is up.

Down to the Dealers

While key fob use will take longer to die out than connected-car analysts expect—and may never disappear completely, especially if an embedded fob keeps your pants up—it looks like that despite being available for some time now, it will take many years before digital keys become the norm outside of China.

“Your phone has replaced your travel pass and your credit card, so why not your car key?” suggests CCC’s Johnson.

For that to happen, the auto industry—especially dealerships—will need to improve at educating consumers about the advantages of digital keys and how to get them. We asked Hyundai if its digital key was part of a subscription or free, as it’s packaged with the brand’s Bluelink app. The representative had to check to be sure. (All model new Hyundais come with a free 10-year subscription to the basic Bluelink LITE; after that there’s a subscription fee.)

Tucker isn’t optimistic. “People already don’t know about loads of features on their cars, and dealers also often don’t know about them or don’t devote enough time to explaining them to consumers. For more than a decade, Ford Lincolns have been able to parallel park themselves, but in recent software updates, Ford discovered that almost no one has ever used the feature. I wonder if there are a lot of Polestar drivers out there who have no idea they have access to a digital key?”

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Posted Sunday 9 November 2025 at 4:52 am AEST (my time).

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

In 1876, Peter Guthrie Tait set out to measure what he called the “beknottedness” of knots.

The Scottish mathematician, whose research laid the foundation for modern knot theory, was trying to find a way to tell knots apart—a notoriously difficult task. In math, a knot is a tangled piece of string with its ends glued together. Two knots are the same if you can twist and stretch one into the other without cutting the string. But it’s hard to tell if this is possible based solely on what the knots look like. A knot that seems really complicated and tangled, for instance, might actually be equivalent to a simple loop.

Tait had an idea for how to determine if two knots are different. First, lay a knot flat on a table and find a spot where the string crosses over itself. Cut the string, swap the positions of the strands, and glue everything back together. This is called a crossing change. If you do this enough times, you’ll be left with an unknotted circle. Tait’s beknottedness is the minimum number of crossing changes that this process requires. Today, it’s known as a knot’s “unknotting number.”

If two knots have different unknotting numbers, then they must be different. But Tait found that his unknotting numbers generated more questions than they answered.

“I have got so thoroughly on one groove,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, the scientist James Clerk Maxwell, “that I fear I may be missing or unduly exalting something which will appear excessively simple to anyone but myself.”

If Tait missed something, so did every mathematician who followed him. Over the past 150 years, many knot theorists have been baffled by the unknotting number. They know it can provide a powerful description of a knot. “It’s the most fundamental [measure] of all, arguably,” said Susan Hermiller of the University of Nebraska. But it’s often impossibly hard to compute a knot’s unknotting number, and it’s not always clear how that number corresponds to the knot’s complexity.

The Scottish physicist and mathematician Peter Guthrie Tait began the systematic study of what would later 

become one of the biggest problems in knot theory: the classification of knots.

 

Photograph: The Natural History Museum/Alamy

To untangle this mystery, mathematicians in the early 20th century devised a straightforward conjecture about how the unknotting number changes when you combine knots. If they could prove it, they would have a way to compute the unknotting number for any knot—giving mathematicians a simple, concrete way to measure knot complexity.

Researchers searched for nearly a century, finding little evidence either for or against the conjecture.

Then, in a paper posted in June, Hermiller and her longtime collaborator Mark Brittenham uncovered a pair of knots that, when combined, form a knot that is easier to untie than the conjecture predicts. In doing so, they disproved the conjecture—and used their counterexample to find infinitely many other pairs of knots that also disprove it.

“When the paper was posted, I gasped out loud,” said Allison Moore of Virginia Commonwealth University.

The result demonstrates that “the unknotting number is chaotic and unpredictable and really exciting to study,” she added. The paper is “like waving a flag that says, we don’t understand this.”

Unknotting and the Great Unknown

The conjecture dates back to at least 1937, when the German mathematician Hilmar Wendt set out to understand what happens when you add knots together—that is, when you tie both of them with the same string before gluing the ends together. (Mathematicians call this combined knot the “connect sum.”) Wendt thought that the unknotting number of the resulting knot should always be the sum of the unknotting numbers of the two original knots.

His prediction, now known as the additivity conjecture, makes sense. Say you add the two knots above, whose unknotting numbers are known to be 2 and 3. That means that there’s a sequence of two crossing changes that unknots the lefthand side of the connect sum, and a sequence of three crossing changes that unknots the righthand side. If you use these sequences, you can unknot the whole thing in 2 + 3, or 5, crossing changes.

But this only tells you that the connect sum’s unknotting number is no bigger than 5. You might be able to find a sequence of crossing changes that’s more efficient than untying each side individually. That is, there might be a knot that really is less than the sum of its parts.

To settle the additivity conjecture, mathematicians had to either find a connect sum with a shorter unknotting sequence or prove that no such example exists. In either case, they didn’t have a clue where to begin.

Part of the problem was that the way you lay out your knot—what mathematicians call a “diagram”—determines where and how the knot crosses over itself. There are lots of diagrams that can represent the same knot. To find the shortest sequence of crossing changes, you might have to choose just the right diagram. Often, it’s not the one you’d normally associate with the knot.

“There are unimaginably large numbers of ways to try and imagine changing your diagram before you decide to introduce the crossing change,” Brittenham said. “We don’t, at least at the start, have any control over how complicated the picture has to look.”

In 1985, the mathematician Martin Scharlemann finally made some headway when he proved that for any two knots whose unknotting number is 1, the connect sum will always have an unknotting number of 2. “That made [the whole conjecture] seem much more likely,” said Charles Livingston of Indiana University.

Susan Hermiller and Mark Brittenham disproved a decades-old conjecture about knots, complicating mathematicians’ 

understanding of these seemingly simple objects.

Photograph: Courtesy of Susan Hermiller

 

Photograph: Courtesy of Mark Brittenham

 

The result offered tantalizing evidence that the universe of knots could be neatly organized. That’s because all knots can be built out of a smaller class of “prime” knots. The additivity conjecture implied that once you knew the unknotting numbers of those prime knots, you would know them for all knots. Any information you might want about a given knot would fall naturally out of that much simpler set.

Mathematicians wanted the conjecture to be true, said Arunima Ray of the University of Melbourne, “because that would be like, there’s order in the world.”

Scharlemann’s result was later extended to other classes of knots. But it wasn’t clear that it would apply to all knots.

Then Brittenham and Hermiller convened a cluster of computers to help.

Sneakernet

The pair began their project a decade ago with a broader aim: to use computers to learn whatever they could about the unknotting number.

They turned to software known as SnapPy, which uses sophisticated geometric techniques to test whether two pictures depict the same knot. Just a few years earlier, SnapPy had vastly expanded its database, enabling it to identify nearly 60,000 unique knots.

It was perfectly suited for what Brittenham and Hermiller had in mind. They started with a single complicated knot and applied every imaginable crossing change to it, producing scores of new knots. They then used SnapPy to identify those knots—and repeated the process.

They did this for millions of knot diagrams that corresponded to hundreds of thousands of knots. Ultimately, they assembled an enormous library of information about unknotting sequences and calculated upper bounds on the unknotting numbers of thousands of knots. The work required a lot of computing power: The pair signed up for supercomputing time at the University of Nebraska’s computing center, while also running their program on old laptops they’d bought at an auction. All told, they were managing dozens of computers. “We had a bit of a sneakernet,” Brittenham said, “where you transfer information from computer to computer by walking between them.”

The duo kept their program running in the background for over a decade. During that time, a couple of computers from their ragtag collection succumbed to overheating and even flames. “There was one that actually sent out sparks,” Brittenham said. “That was kind of fun.” (Those machines, he added, were “honorably retired.”)

Then, in the fall of 2024, a paper about a failed attempt to use machine learning to disprove the additivity conjecture caught Brittenham and Hermiller’s attention. Perhaps, they thought, machine learning wasn’t the best approach for this particular problem: If a counterexample to the additivity conjecture was out there, it would be “a needle in a haystack,” Hermiller said. “That’s not quite what things like machine learning are about. They’re about trying to find patterns in things.”

But it reinforced a suspicion the pair already had—that maybe their more carefully honed sneakernet could find the needle.

The Tie That Binds

Brittenham and Hermiller realized they could make use of the unknotting sequences they’d uncovered to look for potential counterexamples to the additivity conjecture.

Imagine again that you have two knots whose unknotting numbers are 2 and 3, and you’re trying to unknot their connect sum. After one crossing change, you get a new knot. If the additivity conjecture is to be believed, then the original knot’s unknotting number should be 5, and this new knot’s should be 4.

But what if this new knot’s unknotting number is already known to be 3? That implies that the original knot can be untied in just four steps, breaking the conjecture.

“We get these middle knots,” Brittenham said. “What can we learn from them?”

He and Hermiller already had the perfect tool for the occasion humming away on their suite of laptops: the database they’d spent the previous decade developing, with its upper bounds on the unknotting numbers of thousands of knots.

The mathematicians started to add pairs of knots and work through the unknotting sequences of their connect sums. They focused on connect sums whose unknotting numbers had only been approximated in the loosest sense, with a big gap between their highest and lowest possible values. But that still left them with a massive list of knots to work through—“definitely in the tens of millions, and probably in the hundreds of millions,” Brittenham said.

For months, their computer program applied crossing changes to these knots and compared the resulting knots to those in their database. One day in late spring, Brittenham checked the program’s output files, as he did most days, to see if anything interesting had turned up. To his great surprise, there was a line of text: “CONNECT SUM BROKEN.” It was a message he and Hermiller had coded into the program—but they’d never expected to actually see it.

Initially, they were doubtful of the result. “The very first thing that went through our heads was there was something wrong with our programming,” Brittenham said.

“We just dropped absolutely everything else,” Hermiller recalled. “All of life just went away. Eating, sleeping got annoying.”

But their program checked out. They even tied the knot it had identified in a rope, then worked through the unknotting procedure by hand, just to make sure.

Their counterexample was real.

Twisted Mysteries

The counterexample Brittenham and Hermiller found is built out of two copies of a knot called the (2, 7) torus knot. This knot is made by winding two strings around each other three and a half times and then gluing their opposing ends together. Its mirror image is made by winding three and a half times in the other direction.

The unknotting number of both the (2, 7) torus knot and its mirror image is 3. But Brittenham and Hermiller’s program found that if you add these knots, you can unknot the result in just five steps—not six, as the additivity conjecture predicted.

“It’s a shockingly simple counterexample,” Moore said. “It goes back to that unpredictability of the crossing change.”

The result led Brittenham and Hermiller to an infinite list of other counterexamples, including almost any knot that’s built by winding two strings and gluing.

Now, with the additivity conjecture decisively struck down, the knot theory community has a wide world to explore.

For some mathematicians, the new result brings disappointment. It reveals that there’s less structure in the world of knots than they had hoped for. The unknotting number is “not as well behaved as we would like,” Ray said. “That’s a bit sad.”

But from another perspective, that only makes the unknotting number more intriguing. “There’s just much more complexity and unknowns about knot theory than we knew there were a few months ago,” Livingston said.

The nature of that additional complexity isn’t clear yet. During their furious examination of their counterexample, Brittenham and Hermiller weren’t able to develop an intuition for why it broke the additivity conjecture when other knots didn’t. Understanding this could help mathematicians get a better handle on what makes some knots complex and others less so.

“I’m still stymied by this most basic question” about the unknotting number, Moore said. “That just lights the fire under you.”

Editor’s Note: Brittenham and Hermiller’s research was funded in part by the Simons Foundation, which also funds this editorially independent magazine. Simons Foundation funding decisions have no influence on our coverage.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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Posted Sunday 9 November 2025 at 4:48 am AEST (my time).

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In a step toward the wider use of gene editing, a treatment that uses Crispr successfully slashed high cholesterol levels in a small number of people.

In a trial conducted by Swiss biotech company Crispr Therapeutics, 15 participants received a one-time infusion meant to switch off a gene in the liver called ANGPTL3. Though rare, some people are born with a mutation in this gene that protects against heart disease with no apparent adverse consequences.

The highest dose tested in the trial reduced both “bad” LDL cholesterol and triglycerides by an average of 50 percent within two weeks after treatment. The effects lasted at least 60 days, the length of the trial. The results were presented today at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting and published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The Nobel Prize–winning Crispr technology has mostly been used to address rare diseases, but these latest findings, while early, add to the evidence that the DNA-editing tool could be used to treat common conditions as well.

“This will probably be one of the biggest moments in the arc of Crispr’s development in medicine,” Samarth Kulkarni, CEO of Crispr Therapeutics, tells WIRED. The company is behind the only approved gene-editing treatment on the market, Casgevy, which treats sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia.

The American Heart Association estimates that about a quarter of adults in the US have elevated LDL levels. A similar number have high triglycerides. LDL cholesterol is the waxy substance in the blood that can clog and harden arteries over time. Triglycerides, meanwhile, are the most common type of fat found in the body. High levels of both raise the risk of heart attack and stroke.

The Phase I trial was conducted in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand between June 2024 and August 2025. Participants were between the ages of 31 and 68 and had uncontrolled levels of LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. The trial tested five different doses of the Crispr infusion, which took about two and a half hours on average to administer.

“These are very sick people,” says Steven Nissen, senior author and chief academic officer of the Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic, which independently confirmed the trial’s results. “The tragedy of this disease is not just that people die young, but some of them will have a heart attack, and their lives are never the same again. They don't get back to work, they develop heart failure.”

One trial participant, a 51-year-old man, died six months after receiving the lowest dose of the treatment, which was not associated with a lowering of cholesterol and triglycerides. The death was related to his existing heart disease, not the experimental Crispr treatment. The man had a rare, inherited genetic form of high cholesterol and previously had several procedures to improve blood flow to his heart.

“That's the trajectory these people are on, and we want to get them off that trajectory,” Nissen says.

Three people had minor reactions such as back pain and nausea that cleared up with medication. One participant, who had elevated liver enzymes before getting the Crispr infusion, had a temporary further rise in liver enzymes that lasted a few days and returned to normal without needing treatment.

Researchers will continue to monitor study participants for a year following the trial, with an additional long-term safety follow-up of 15 years, as recommended by the Food and Drug Administration for all gene-editing therapies.

The team is planning Phase II studies for 2026 that will include a broader patient population and longer follow-up period. The hope is that the effects of a single Crispr infusion would last years, even permanently, replacing the need for a daily pill or regular injection.

This isn’t the first trial to use gene-editing to address cardiovascular disease. Verve Therapeutics is using a newer type of Crispr called base editing to target a different gene, called PCSK9, in people with a hereditary form of high cholesterol levels and premature heart disease. Verve halted a trial of its gene-editing candidate in 2024 after one participant had a concerning rise in liver enzymes, but this year it showed positive safety data from 14 patients with a newly formulated therapy. Earlier this year, Eli Lilly announced a deal to acquire Verve for over $1 billion.

Safety is a key concern with new gene-editing therapies. Intellia Therapeutics has paused trials of a Crispr treatment after a patient died from liver damage. Because many Crispr therapies target the liver, damage to that organ has been a known risk.

If further trials confirm safety and efficacy, however, Nissen thinks that in the relatively near future, it will be possible to treat patients at an earlier stage, before they develop heart disease. “This is a revolution in progress here,” he says.

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Posted Sunday 9 November 2025 at 4:47 am AEST (my time).

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James Dewey Watson, who helped reveal DNA’s double-helix structure, kicked off the Human Genome Project, and became infamous for his racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive statements, has died. He was 97.

His death was confirmed to The New York Times by his son Duncan, who said Watson died on Thursday in a hospice in East Northport, New York, on Long Island. He had previously been hospitalized with an infection. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory also confirmed his passing.

Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 and attained scientific fame in 1953 at 25 years old for solving the molecular structure of DNA—the genetic blueprints for life—with his colleague Francis Crick at England’s Cavendish laboratory. Their discovery heavily relied on the work of chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin at King’s College in London, whose X-ray images of DNA provided critical clues to the molecule’s twisted-ladderlike architecture. One image in particular from Franklin’s lab, Photo 51, made Watson and Crick’s discovery possible. But, she was not fully credited for her contribution. The image was given to Watson and Crick without Franklin’s knowledge or consent by Maurice Wilkins, a biophysicist and colleague of Franklin.

Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for the discovery of DNA’s structure. By that time, Franklin had died (she died in 1958 at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer), and Nobels are not given posthumously. But Watson and Crick’s treatment of Franklin and her research has generated lasting scorn within the scientific community. Throughout his career and in his memoir, Watson disparaged Franklin’s intelligence and appearance.

In 1955, Watson joined the faculty at Harvard University, where he was unpopular. Legendary biologist E.O. Wilson, also at Harvard, famously called Watson “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,” in his memoir, adding that “Watson radiated contempt in all directions.”

In 1968, Watson became the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York’s Long Island, transforming it into an esteemed research institution and steering it into the work of cancer genetics. During the early 1990s, he launched the Human Genome Project as director of the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health. He left the project in 1992, resigning from the NIH over a dispute about patenting genes, which he opposed.

Throughout his career, he was known for making bigoted and offensive comments, particularly about Black people and women. The comments caught up with him in 2007, when he was quoted as saying that Black people are not as intelligent as white people. That year, he retired from Cold Spring Harbor. But, he doubled down on the claim—and similarly offensive ones—amid backlash, repeating them in other interviews and instances. He largely became a pariah in the scientific community, with universities and other institutions cancelling speaking invitations. In 2014, he sold his Nobel medal at auction, which was purchased for $4.1 million by a Russian billionaire oligarch who later returned the medal to Watson.

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Posted Saturday 8 November 2025 at 1:38 pm AEST (my time).

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At a site in Kenya, archaeologists recently unearthed layer upon layer of stone stools from deposits that span 300,000 years, and include a period of intense environmental upheaval. The oldest tools at the site date back to 2.75 million years ago. According to a recent study, the finds suggest that for hundreds of millennia, ancient hominins relied on the same stone tool technology as an anchor while the world changed around them.

“An extraordinary story of cultural continuity”

George Washington University archaeologist David Braun and his colleagues recently unearthed stone tools from a 2.75 million-year-old layer of Kenyan sediment at a site called Nomorotukunan. They’re classic examples of a type of tools archaeologists call Oldowan: the earliest types of sharp-edged stone tools made by hominins. The tools unearthed at Nomorotukunan are some of the oldest Olduwan tools ever found; only three other Oldowan sites in Africa date back any farther than 2.6 million years ago.

These hand-sized chunks of river rock, with flakes chipped off one or two sides to make sharp edges, were cutting-edge technology (not sorry) from 2.9 million years ago until about 1.7 million years ago. In technical terms, that’s what’s called a long flipping time, enough to span several hominin species and more than one genus. The last hominins to use Oldowan tools looked very different, and probably lived and behaved very differently, from the first; over this huge span of time, the stone tool technology itself changed less than the beings using it.

But archaeologists typically only see brief snippets of that massive longevity, from a generation or two of hominins at each site. The fact that Nomorotukunan has so many layers of sediment laden with artifacts, and that those layers span such a huge swath of time, is a rare gift from the usually fickle hands of taphonomic fate. Nomorotukunan’s palimpsest of river sediment, interspersed with volcanic tuff, records 300,000 years of hominins making the same types of tools with the same finely honed skills, before ending around 2.44 million years ago.

To put it in context: members of some ancient hominin species—maybe of more than one—passed the knowledge of these particular flint-knapping techniques down through about 10,000 generations (if you assume, for the sake of easy division, that a generation is about 30 years) at this one site.

“This site reveals an extraordinary story of cultural continuity,” said Braun in a recent press release.

When the going gets tough, the tough make tools

Nomorotukunan’s layers of stone tools span the transition from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene, during which Earth’s climate turned gradually cooler and drier after a 2 to 3 million-year warm spell. Pollen and other microscopic traces of plants in the sediment at Nomorotukunan tell the tale: the lakeshore marsh gradually dried up, giving way to arid grassland dotted with shrubs. On a shorter timescale, hominins at Nomorotukunan faced wildfires (based on microcharcoal in the sediments), droughts, and rivers drying up or changing course.

“As vegetation shifted, the toolmaking remained steady,” said National University of Kenya archaeologist Rahab N. Kinyanjui in a recent press release. “This is resilience.”

Making sharp stone tools may have helped generations of hominins survive their changing, drying world. In the warm, humid Pliocene, finding food would have been relatively easy, but as conditions got tougher, hominins probably had to scavenge or dig for their meals. At least one animal bone at Nomorotukunan bears cut marks where long-ago hominins carved up the carcass for meat—something our lineage isn’t really equipped to do with its bare hands and teeth. Tools also would have enabled early hominins to dig up and cut tubers or roots.

It’s fair to assume that sharpened wood sticks probably also played a role in that particular work, but wood doesn’t tend to last as long as stone in the archaeological record, so we can’t say for sure. What is certain are the stone tools and cut bones, which hint at what Utrecht University archaeologist Dan Rolier, a coauthor of the paper, calls “one of our oldest habits: using technology to steady ourselves against change.”

A tale as old as time

Nomorotukunan may hint that Oldowan technology is even older than the earliest tools archaeologists have unearthed so far. The oldest tools unearthed from the deepest layer at Nomorotukunan are the work of skilled flint-knappers who understood where to strike a stone, and at exactly which angle, to flake off the right shape. They also clearly knew how to select the right stones for the job (fine-grained chalcedony for the win, in this case). In other words, these tools weren’t the work of a bunch of hominins who were just figuring out, for the first time, how to bang the rocks together.

“These finds show that by about 2.75 million years ago, hominins were already good at making sharp stone tools, hinting that the start of the Oldowan technology is older than we thought,” said George Washington University archaeologist Niguss Baraki, a coauthor of the study, in a recent press release.

If archaeologists can find more sites like Nomorotukunan, with older examples of Oldowan technology, they can eventually fill in the murky earliest chapters of the love story between hominins and tools.

The 3.3 million-year-old stone tools unearthed at another Kenyan site called Lomekwi in 2015 look like precursors to Oldowan tools: large stone cores with lots of dents and dings from being used as hammers, along with a few flakes that seem to have been chipped off on purpose (based on their shapes and angles). But so far, archaeologists haven’t found any other stone tools that look like those from Lomekwi, so we can’t say for sure whether they were a one-off burst of invention or if they somehow connect to the much longer tradition of the Oldowan.

Today, wild chimpanzees use roundish stone hammers to crack open nuts and bones (the better to get that tasty, tasty marrow), and inevitably, they chip off some flakes of stone in the process. It’s pretty easy to see how a particularly clever Australopithecine could have made the leap from that kind of happy accident to “Hey, Og can make rocks sharp on purpose!” And it’s tempting to see Lomekwi as a point in between chimpanzees’ hammers and Oldowan choppers. But the real story is seldom that neatly tied-up.

However, Nomorotukunan may be one of several clues that our predilection for technology is older than our last common ancestor with chimpanzees. As Gorongosa National Park of Mozambique archaeologist Susana Carvalho, a coauthor of the paper, put it in a recent press release, “Our findings suggest that tool use may have been a more generalized adaptation among our primate ancestors.”

Nature Communications, 2025 DOI: 10.10.1038/s41467-025-64244-x  (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 8 November 2025 at 3:29 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.18 of the Rocket Report! NASA is getting a heck of a deal from Blue Origin for launching the agency’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars. Blue Origin is charging NASA about $20 million for the launch on the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. A dedicated ride on any other rocket capable of the job would undoubtedly cost more.

But there are tradeoffs. First, there’s the question of risk. The New Glenn rocket is only making its second flight, and it hasn’t been certified by NASA or the US Space Force. Second, the schedule for ESCAPADE’s launch has been at the whim of Blue Origin, which has delayed the mission several times due to issues developing New Glenn. NASA’s interplanetary missions typically have a fixed launch period, and the agency pays providers like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance a premium to ensure the launch happens when it needs to happen.

New Glenn is ready, the satellites are ready, and Blue Origin has set a launch date for Sunday, November 9. The mission will depart the Earth outside of the usual interplanetary launch window, so orbital dynamics wizards came up with a unique trajectory that will get the satellites to Mars in 2027.

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

Canadian government backs launcher development. The federal budget released by the Liberal Party-led government of Canada this week includes a raft of new defense initiatives, including 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($129.4 million) for sovereign space launch capability, SpaceQ reports. The new funding is meant to “establish a sovereign space launch capability” with funds available this fiscal year and spent over three years. How the money will be spent and on what has yet to be released. As anticipated, Canada will have a new Defense Investment Agency (DIA) to oversee defense procurement. Overall, the government outlined 81.8 billion Canadian dollars ($58 billion) over five years for the Canadian Armed Forces. The Department of National Defense will manage the government’s cash infusion for sovereign launch capability.

Kickstarting an industry … Canada joins a growing list of nations pursuing homegrown launchers as many governments see access to space as key to national security and an opportunity for economic growth. International governments don’t want to be beholden to a small number of foreign launch providers from established space powers. That’s why startups in Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Australia are making a play in the launch arena, often with government support. A handful of Canadian startups, such as Maritime Launch Services, Reaction Dynamics, and NordSpace, are working on commercial satellite launchers. The Canadian government’s announcement came days after MDA Space, the largest established space company in Canada, announced its own multimillion-dollar investment in Maritime Launch Services.

Money alone won’t solve Europe’s space access woes. Increasing tensions with Russia have prompted defense spending boosts throughout Europe that will benefit fledgling smallsat launcher companies across the continent. But Europe is still years away from meeting its own space access needs, Space News reports. Space News spoke with industry analysts from two European consulting firms. They concluded that a lack of experience, not a deficit of money, is holding European launch startups back. None of the new crop of European rocket companies have completed a successful orbital flight.

Swimming in cash … The German company Isar Aerospace has raised approximately $600 million, the most funding of any of the European launch startups. Isar is also the only one of the bunch to make an orbital launch attempt. Its Spectrum rocket failed less than 30 seconds after liftoff last March, and a second launch is expected next year. Isar has attracted more investment than Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, and Astra collectively raised on the private market before each of them successfully launched a rocket into orbit. In addition to Isar, several other European companies have raised more than $100 million on the road to developing a small satellite launcher. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Successful ICBM test from Vandenberg. Air Force Global Strike Command tested an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in the predawn hours of Wednesday, Air and Space Forces Magazine reports. The test, the latest in a series of launches that have been carried out at regular intervals for decades, came as Russian President Vladimir Putin has touted the development of two new nuclear weapons and President Donald Trump has suggested in recent days that the US might resume nuclear testing. The ICBM launched from an underground silo at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and traveled some 4,200 miles to a test range in the Pacific Ocean after receiving launch orders from an airborne nuclear command-and-control plane.

Rehearsing for the unthinkable … The test, known as Glory Trip 254 (GT 254), provided a “comprehensive assessment” of the Minuteman III’s readiness to launch at a moment’s notice, according to the Air Force. “The data collected during the test is invaluable in ensuring the continued reliability and accuracy of the ICBM weapon system,” said Lt. Col. Karrie Wray, commander of the 576th Flight Test Squadron. For Minuteman III tests, the Air Force pulls its missiles from the fleet of some 400 operational ICBMs. This week’s test used one from F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming, and the missile was equipped with a single unarmed reentry vehicle that carried telemetry instrumentation instead of a warhead, service officials said. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

One crew launches, another may be stranded. Three astronauts launched to China’s Tiangong space station on October 31 and arrived at the outpost a few hours later, extending the station’s four-year streak of continuous crew operations. The Shenzhou 21 crew spacecraft lifted off on a Chinese Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan space center in the Gobi Desert. Shenzhou 21 is supposed to replace a three-man crew that has been on the Tiangong station since April, but China’s Manned Space Agency announced Tuesday the outgoing crew’s return craft may have been damaged by space junk, Ars reports.

Few details … Chinese officials said the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft will remain at the station while engineers investigate the potential damage. As of Thursday, China has not set a new landing date or declared whether the spacecraft is safe to return to Earth at all. “The Shenzhou 20 manned spacecraft is suspected of being impacted by small space debris,” Chinese officials wrote on social media. “Impact analysis and risk assessment are underway. To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou 20 return mission, originally scheduled for November 5, will be postponed.” In the event Shenzhou 20 is unsafe to return, China could launch a rescue craft—Shenzhou 22—already on standby at the Jiuquan space center.

Falcon 9 rideshare boosts Vast ambitions. A pathfinder mission for Vast’s privately owned space station launched into orbit Sunday and promptly extended its solar panel, kicking off a shakedown cruise to prove the company’s designs can meet the demands of spaceflight, Ars reports. Vast’s Haven Demo mission lifted off just after midnight Sunday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit. Haven Demo was one of 18 satellites sharing a ride on SpaceX’s Bandwagon 4 mission, launching alongside a South Korean spy satellite and a small testbed for Starcloud, a startup working with Nvidia to build an orbital data center.

Subscale testing … After release from the Falcon 9, the half-ton Haven Demo spacecraft stabilized itself and extended its power-generating solar array. The satellite captured 4K video of the solar array deployment, and Vast shared the beauty shot on social media. “Haven Demo’s mission success has turned us into a proven spacecraft company,” Vast’s CEO, Max Haot, posted on X. “The next step will be to become an actual commercial space station company next year. Something no one has achieved yet.” Vast plans to launch its first human-rated habitat, named Haven-1, into low-Earth orbit in 2026. Haven Demo lacks crew accommodations but carries several systems that are “architecturally similar” to Haven-1, according to Vast. For example, Haven-1 will have 12 solar arrays, each identical to the single array on Haven Demo. The pathfinder mission uses a subset of Haven-1’s propulsion system, but with identical thrusters, valves, and tanks.

Lights out at Vostochny. One of Russia’s most important projects over the last 15 years has been the construction of the Vostochny spaceport as the country seeks to fly its rockets from native soil and modernize its launch operations. Progress has been slow as corruption clouded Vostochny’s development. Now, the primary contractor building the spaceport, the Kazan Open Stock Company (PSO Kazan), has failed to pay its bills, Ars reports. The story, first reported by the Moscow Times, says that the energy company supplying Vostochny cut off electricity to areas of the spaceport still under construction after PSO Kazan racked up $627,000 in unpaid energy charges. The electricity company did so, it said, “to protect the interests of the region’s energy system.”

A dark reputation … Officials at the government-owned spaceport said PSO Kazan would repay its debt by the end of November, but the local energy company said it intends to file a lawsuit against KSO Kazan to declare the entity bankrupt. The two operational launch pads at Vostochny are apparently not affected by the power cuts. Vostochny has been a fiasco from the start. After construction began in 2011, the project was beset by hunger strikes, claims of unpaid workers, and the theft of $126 million. Additionally, a man driving a diamond-encrusted Mercedes was arrested after embezzling $75,000. Five years ago, there was another purge of top officials after another round of corruption.

Ariane 6 delivers for Europe again. European launch services provider Arianespace has successfully launched the Sentinel 1D Earth observation satellite aboard an Ariane 62 rocket for the European Commission, European Spaceflight reports. Launched in its two-booster configuration, the Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center in South America on Tuesday. Approximately 34 minutes after liftoff, the satellite was deployed from the rocket’s upper stage into a Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 693 kilometers (430 miles). Sentinel 1D is the newest spacecraft to join Europe’s Copernicus program, the world most expansive network of environmental monitoring satellites. The new satellite will extend Europe’s record of global around-the-clock radar imaging, revealing information about environmental disasters, polar ice cover, and the use of water resources.

Doubling cadence … This was the fourth flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket, and its third operational launch. Arianespace plans one more Ariane 62 launch to close out the year with a pair of Galileo navigation satellites. The company aims to double its Ariane 6 launch cadence in 2026, with between six and eight missions planned, according to David Cavaillès, Arianespace’s CEO. The European launch provider will open its 2026 manifest with the first flight of the more powerful four-booster variant of the rocket. If the company does manage eight Ariane 6 flights in 2026, it will already be close to reaching the stated maximum launch cadence of between nine and 10 flights per year.

India sets its own record for payload mass. The Indian Space Research Organization on Sunday successfully launched the Indian Navy’s advanced communication satellite GSAT-7R, or CMS-03, on an LVM3 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, The Hindu reports. The indigenously designed and developed satellite, weighing approximately 4.4 metric tons (9,700 pounds), is the heaviest satellite ever launched by an Indian rocket and marks a major milestone in strengthening the Navy’s space-based communications and maritime domain awareness.

Going heavy … The launch Sunday was India’s fourth of 2025, a decline from the country’s high-water mark of eight orbital launches in a year in 2023. The failure in May of India’s most-flown rocket, the PSLV, has contributed to this year’s slower launch cadence. India’s larger rockets, the GSLV and LVM3, have been more active while officials grounded the PSLV for an investigation into the launch failure. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin preps for second flight of New Glenn. The road to the second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifting New Glenn rocket got a lot clearer this week. The company confirmed it is targeting Sunday, November 9, for the launch of New Glenn from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This follows a successful test-firing of the rocket’s seven BE-4 main engines last week, Ars reports. Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, said the engines operated at full power for 22 seconds, generating nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust on the launch pad.

Fully integrated … With the launch date approaching, engineers worked this week to attach the rocket’s payload shroud containing two NASA satellites set to embark on a journey to Mars. Now that the rocket is fully integrated, ground crews will roll it back to Blue Origin’s Launch Complex-36 (LC-36) for final countdown preps. The launch window Sunday opens at 2:45 pm EST (19:45 UTC). Blue Origin is counting on recovering the New Glenn first stage on the next flight after missing the landing on the rocket’s inaugural mission in January. Officials plan to reuse this booster on the third New Glenn launch early next year, slated to propel Blue Origin’s first unpiloted Blue Moon lander toward the Moon.

Next three launches

Nov. 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-51 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 08:30 UTC

Nov. 8: Long March 11H| Unknown Payload | Haiyang Spaceport, China Coastal Waters | 21:00 UTC

Nov. 9: New Glenn | ESCAPADE | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 19:45 UTC

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Posted Saturday 8 November 2025 at 3:28 am AEST (my time).

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Picturing how our species might appear in the far future can invite wild speculation over standout features such as height, brain size, and skin complexion. Yet subtle shifts in our anatomy today demonstrate how unpredictable evolution can be.

Take something as mundane as an extra blood vessel in our arms, which, going by current trends, could be commonplace within just a few generations.

An artery that temporarily runs down the center of our forearms while we're still in the womb isn't vanishing as often as it used to, according to a study published in 2020 by researchers at Flinders University and the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Watch the clip below for a summary of their findings:

That means there are more adults than ever with what amounts to an extra channel of vascular tissue flowing under their wrist.

"Since the 18th century, anatomists have been studying the prevalence of this artery in adults and our study shows it's clearly increasing," Flinders University anatomist Teghan Lucas explained in 2020.

"The prevalence was around 10 percent in people born in the mid-1880s compared to 30 percent in those born in the late 20th century, so that's a significant increase in a fairly short period of time, when it comes to evolution."

The median artery forms fairly early in development in all humans, transporting blood down the center of our arms to feed our growing hands.

Three major arteries in the forearm, with the 'median' in the center. (ilbusca/Digital Vision Vectors/Getty Images)

At around eight weeks, it usually regresses, leaving the task to two other vessels – the radial (which we can feel when we take a person's pulse) and the ulnar arteries.

Anatomists have known for some time that this withering away of the median artery isn't a guarantee. In some cases, it hangs around for another month or so.

Sometimes we're born with it still pumping away, feeding either just the forearm, or in some cases, the hand as well.

To compare the prevalence of this persistent blood channel, Lucas and colleagues, Maciej Henneberg and Jaliya Kumaratilake from the University of Adelaide, examined 80 limbs from cadavers, all donated by Australians of European descent.

The donors ranged from 51 to 101 on passing, which means they were nearly all born in the first half of the 20th century.

Noting down how often they found a chunky median artery capable of carrying a good supply of blood, the research team compared the figures with records dug out of a literature search, taking into account tallies that could over-represent the vessel's appearance.

The fact that the artery seems to be three times as common in adults today as it was more than a century ago is a startling finding that suggests natural selection is favoring those who hold onto this extra bit of blood supply.

Graph of one set of analyses predicts an increase in the prevalence of the median artery. (Lucas et al., Journal of Anatomy, 2020)

"This increase could have resulted from mutations of genes involved in median artery development or health problems in mothers during pregnancy, or both actually," said Lucas.

We might imagine that having a persistent median artery could give dexterous fingers or strong forearms a dependable boost of blood long after we're born. Yet having one also puts us at a greater risk of carpal tunnel syndrome, an uncomfortable condition that makes us less able to use our hands.

Nailing down the kinds of factors that play a major role in the processes selecting for a persistent median artery will require a lot more sleuthing.

Whatever they might be, it's likely we'll continue to see more of these vessels, the research suggests.

"If this trend continues, a majority of people will have median artery of the forearm by 2100," said Lucas.

This rapid rise of the median artery in adults isn't unlike the reappearance of a knee bone called the fabella, which is also three times more common today than it was a century ago.

As small as these differences are, tiny microevolutionary changes add up to large-scale variations that come to define a species.

Together they create new pressures themselves, putting us on paths of health and disease that we might find hard to imagine today.

This research was published in the Journal of Anatomy.

An earlier version of this article was published in October 2020.

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But why does it feel so hard? Your legs are heavy and the weight you lifted only a couple of days ago—in the afternoon—feels almost impossible.

No, you're not imagining it. There's a large body of evidence to suggest most of us are stronger, more powerful, and have better endurance later in the day.

There are several reasons exercising can feel much harder first thing in the morning. Here's why, and how you can adjust to morning exercise if you need to.

Your circadian rhythm affects your workout

Your body has a natural 24-hour clock that regulates hormones, body temperature and when you feel most awake or ready for sleep.

This clock is called your circadian rhythm. It is controlled by the brain but can also be influenced by external factors such as sunlight. This might explain why exercising in the morning in winter can be especially hard for some of us.

Research shows your circadian rhythm is clearly linked to exercise performance, which tends to follow a daily pattern.

Most people reach their peak between 4 and 7pm. This means we tend to be stronger, faster and more powerful in the afternoon and early evening.

We don't know exactly why. But there are a few potential explanations.

Body temperature

Your core body temperature is at its lowest around 5am, and steadily increases across the day. When your body temperature rises, your muscles contract more efficiently. We think this is part of the reason people are typically stronger and more powerful later in the day.

Hormonal fluctuations

Insulin—the hormone that regulates blood sugar (glucose) levels—tends to be highest in the morning. This leads to a decrease in blood sugar, meaning less glucose your body can use as fuel, likely affecting how hard you can push.

Nervous system function

While we don't know exactly why, there is some evidence to suggest your nervous system is better at sending signals to your muscles throughout the day. This allows you to use more of your muscle fibers during exercise, essentially making you stronger.

But what if I'm a morning person?

Your sleep chronotype can also affect exercise performance.

This describes your natural inclination for sleep and wakefulness at certain parts of the day—basically whether you're a "morning person" (an "early bird"), or feel more productive and alert in the evening (a "night owl").

Research shows night owls with a late chronotype do notably worse when exercising in the morning, compared to people with an early chronotype.

While we don't know why this is the case, it might be that night owls experience smaller fluctuations in hormones and temperature throughout the day—although this is just speculation.

Interestingly, being sleep deprived seems to affect physical performance in the afternoon more than in the morning. So if you're staying up late and not getting much sleep, you may actually find it easier to exercise the next morning than the next afternoon.

So, does timing matter?

Whatever time of day, if you can feel yourself working, you will make progress—for example, increasing muscle strength and improving aerobic fitness and heart health.

So if you're exercising to get bigger, stronger and fitter, the timing doesn't actually matter.

Besides, "when" we exercise often comes down to motivation and convenience. If you like to exercise earlier in the day and that suits you best, there's no reason to change.

But you can adapt if you need

If you have a sporting event coming up in the morning—and you usually train in the afternoon—you might want to prepare by doing some early exercise so you're at your peak.

There is evidence to suggest that repeatedly training in the morning can close the gap between your afternoon and morning performance.

Basically, your body can get used to exercising at a particular time, although it will likely take a few weeks to adapt.

Finally, if you find exercising close to bedtime makes you feel too alert and is disrupting your sleep, you may want to try doing something more gentle at night and/or exercising earlier in the day.

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Tesla shareholders today voted to approve a compensation plan that would pay Elon Musk more than $1 trillion over the next decade if he hits all of the plan’s goals. Musk won over 75 percent of the vote, according to the announcement at today’s shareholder meeting.

The pay plan would give Musk 423,743,904 shares, awarded in 12 tranches of 35,311,992 shares each if Tesla achieves various operational goals and market value milestones. Goals include delivering 20 million vehicles, obtaining 10 million Full Self-Driving subscriptions, delivering 1 million “AI robots,” putting 1 million robotaxis in operation, and achieving a $400 billion adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).

Musk has threatened to leave if he doesn’t get a larger share of Tesla. He told investors last month, “It’s not like I’m going to go spend the money. It’s just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? Not control, but a strong influence. That’s what it comes down to in a nutshell. I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”

The plan has 12 market capitalization milestones topping out at $8.5 trillion. The value of Musk’s award is estimated to exceed $1 trillion if he hits all operational and market capitalization goals. Musk would increase his ownership stake to 24.8 percent of Tesla, or 28.8 percent if Tesla ends up winning an appeal in the court case that voided his 2018 pay plan.

Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm has argued that Musk needs big pay packages to stay motivated. Some investors have said $1 trillion is too much for a CEO who spends much of his time running other companies such as SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and xAI.

New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who runs a state retirement fund that owns over 3.3 million shares, slammed the pay plan in a webinar last week. He said that Musk’s existing stake in Tesla should already “be incentive enough to drive performance. The idea that another massive equity award will somehow refocus a man who is hopelessly distracted is both illogical and contrary to the evidence. This is not pay for performance; this is pay for unchecked power.”

Musk and his side hustles

With Musk spending more time at xAI, “some major Tesla investors have privately pressed top executives and board members about how much attention Musk was actually paying to the company and about whether there is a CEO succession plan,” a Wall Street Journal article on Tuesday said. “An unusually large contingent of Tesla board members, including chair Robyn Denholm, former Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung and Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, met with big investors in New York last week to advocate for Musk’s proposed new pay package.”

Denholm told the Journal that the board isn’t concerned about Musk devoting so much time to other companies. “Other CEOs might like to play golf. He doesn’t play golf. So, he likes to create companies, and they’re not necessarily Tesla companies,” she said.

Tesla argued in a presentation for investors that “Elon earns nothing” if he fails to meet the “incredibly ambitious” goals, while hitting the goals would make Tesla “more valuable than any company in history” and let shareholders “benefit from unprecedented growth and value creation.”

But Musk won’t walk away with nothing if Tesla fails to meet most of the goals. A recent Reuters report said that Musk “could collect more than $50 billion by hitting a handful of the board’s easier goals that won’t necessarily revolutionize Tesla’s products or business.”

Denholm pleaded with shareholders in an October 27 letter. “The fundamental question for shareholders at this year’s Annual Meeting is simple: Do you want to retain Elon as Tesla’s CEO and motivate him to drive Tesla to become the leading provider of autonomous solutions and the most valuable company in the world?” she wrote.

Shareholder advocate James McRitchie said at today’s meeting that “Tesla is his only publicly traded company. It’s the liquid piggy bank that fuels his other ventures. Yes, Elon Musk is brilliant. But no company should depend on a single personality. Either he stays long enough to keep using your capital elsewhere, or he moves on when the tap runs dry.”

Voided 2018 pay plan still looms

Denholm’s letter stressed Musk’s importance to the company even though he only devotes part of his working time to Tesla. “Though it’s no question that Elon has other pursuits, he has proven that one of the many things that make him unique is his ability to stretch his capacity beyond normal limits and remain successful at Tesla,” she wrote. “However, if we fail to foster an environment that motivates Elon to achieve great things through an equitable pay-for-performance plan, we run the risk that he gives up his executive position, and Tesla may lose his time, talent and vision, which have been essential to delivering extraordinary shareholder returns.”

Nancy Tengler, CEO and chief investment officer of Laffer Tengler Investments, explained why her firm is comfortable with the pay package. “If the stock is going to go up sixfold—and that’s a requirement here—then I’m going to make a lot of money,” Tengler told Reuters. “Why do I care what kind of money he makes if he’s effecting the change and the vision?”

Musk’s 2018 pay plan was voided in January 2024 by a Delaware judge who found, in response to a shareholder lawsuit, that most of the Tesla board members were beholden to Musk or had compromising conflicts. The 2018 plan was worth about $56 billion at the time.

In August this year, Tesla awarded Musk over $29 billion of stock in an “interim” pay plan designed to maintain his interest in the company while his 2018 pay plan remained held up in court. The interim plan was for 96 million shares, while the 2018 plan included almost 304 million shares.

The Delaware case prompted Tesla to move its corporate headquarters to Texas, where state law lets Musk and his brother Kimbal to vote their shares on the pay package during the shareholder vote. Musk already owns 15 percent of Tesla, giving him a large influence over the outcome of the vote.

Dissenting votes

Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund, which owns 1.14 percent of Tesla, revealed that it voted against the Musk pay plan. “While we appreciate the significant value created under Mr. Musk’s visionary role, we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk—consistent with our views on executive compensation,” fund manager Norges Bank Investment Management said in a statement.

Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) recommended that its clients reject the pay package. The firm said the Musk award is designed “to retain Musk and keep his time and attention on Tesla instead of his other business ventures,” but “there are no prescriptive elements within the award to ensure his focus and time remain on Tesla as opposed to his other ventures, undermining the award’s primary rationale.”

As CNBC notes, “The pay plan doesn’t require him to dedicate a minimum amount of time to Tesla, nor does it at all limit his involvement in politics.” CNBC quoted one pay-plan opponent describing Musk as a part-time CEO:

Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert and chair of ValueEdge Advisors, said she would vote against the new pay plan for Musk, describing him as a “part-time CEO” today.

 

“If they said we’re going to pay him a trillion dollars, but he’s going to give up all of his outside activities, he’s going to shut up about politics, and really spend all this time making this a great company, then I’d say, OK, let’s talk about it,” Minow said. “But he’s not doing any of those things.”

Tesla investor Baron Capital voted for Musk’s pay plan. Founder and CEO Ron Baron wrote in an X post that Tesla shareholders would benefit from the plan before Musk does if the company reaches the “aggressive market cap objectives that few believe can be attained.”

“The plan ensures that shareholders win first, and that Elon Musk continues to lead Tesla for many years to come,” Baron wrote. “We commend the Board for recognizing this and for working to retain Tesla’s most valuable asset.. Tesla’s success and its future are inseparable from Elon.”

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Posted Friday 7 November 2025 at 12:37 pm AEST (my time).

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Star Trek fans who have long envied the Star Wars franchise’s collaboration with Lego are finally getting something to celebrate: Lego is introducing a version of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, specifically the Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Because we don’t live in the post-money utopian society of the 24th century, the kit will cost you, and unfortunately, it’s priced well into the for-superfans-only zone. The 3,600-piece starship and collection of minifigs will run you $400 when the set officially leaves spacedock on November 28.

Though the Enterprise-D is far from our favorite Enterprise, it does make sense as a starting point for the Lego Group. The Next Generation‘s seven-year run in the late ’80s and early ’90s represents a creative and cultural peak for the franchise, and a 2010s-era remaster that painstakingly re-scanned and upgraded all of the original footage and effects for high-definition TVs has kept the old episodes looking fresher than other ’90s Trek shows like Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

As a Star Trek and Lego aficionado, I appreciate the company’s typical attention to detail, especially in the nine included minifigs (Picard, Riker, Data, Crusher, Troi, Worf, and Geordi are all here, plus Guinan and Wesley, though fans of Dr. Pulaski will be disappointed to hear she isn’t included). Each includes a thematically appropriate accessory, from Worf’s phaser to Riker’s trombone. The ship’s saucer section can also separate from the rest of the ship, and the attention to detail for logos and decals is still strong.

Lego's blocky aesthetic isn't quite as natural a fit for a sleek Starfleet ship as it is for the rougher ships of the Star Wars universe.

Lego

 

But Lego's characteristic attention to detail extends to the minifigs and their adorable accessories.

Lego

 

The Enterprise's saucer section detaches from the rest of the ship (by design—not just because Lego bricks are meant to attach and detach).

Lego

 

The kit also comes with a bonus: a 261-piece set featuring an Enterprise shuttlepod and Ensign Ro Laren.

Lego

 

If I have criticisms, it’s that the Enterprise-D seems light on the kinds of interior surprises that some of the company’s other themed sets include, and Lego’s blocky-and-bumpy aesthetic isn’t as good a fit for a sleek Starfleet ship as it is for rougher, junkier ships like the Millennium Falcon.

Still, Lego’s designs and attention to detail are a step up from what Lego-curious Star Trek fans have had to endure in the past. The Lego Enterprise-D is a clear step up from the version that Mega Bloks sold in the early 2000s, for example, and to my eye, it also looks more thoughtfully designed than the Enterprise-D set that BlueBrixx put out in the early 2020s.

BlueBrixx, which is based in Germany and sells “Lego-compatible” kits, had the license to build and sell Star Trekmodels from 2021 to mid-2025, and the expiration of that license opened the door to a collaboration with Lego. It remains to be seen whether Lego dives any deeper into the Star Trek universe as it has with Nintendo, Disney, and other licensees or if this is a one-and-done collaboration.

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Posted Friday 7 November 2025 at 12:36 pm AEST (my time).

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On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Google is planning to build a large AI data center on Christmas Island, a 52-square-mile Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, following a cloud computing deal with Australia’s military. The previously undisclosed project will reportedly position advanced AI infrastructure a mere 220 miles south of Indonesia at a location military strategists consider critical for monitoring Chinese naval activity.

Aside from its strategic military position, the island is famous for its massive annual crab migration, where over 100 million of red crabs make their way across the island to spawn in the ocean. That’s notable because the tech giant has applied for environmental approvals to build a subsea cable connecting the 135-square-kilometer island to Darwin, where US Marines are stationed for six months each year.

The project follows a three-year cloud agreement Google signed with Australia’s military in July 2025, but many details about the new facility’s size, cost, and specific capabilities remain “secret,” according to Reuters. Both Google and Australia’s Department of Defense declined to comment when contacted by the news agency.

Sir David Attenborough examines the great Christmas Island red crab migration.

Bryan Clark, a former US Navy strategist who ran recent war games featuring Christmas Island, told Reuters that the planned facility would enable AI-powered military command and control. Recent military exercises involving Australian, US, and Japanese forces show Christmas Island’s value as a forward defense position for launching uncrewed weapons systems. The island’s location allows the monitoring of traffic through the Sunda, Lombok, and Malacca straits, which are key waterways for global shipping and submarine movements.

Christmas Island has reportedly struggled with poor telecommunications and limited economic opportunities in the past, but some of the island’s 1,600 human residents are cautiously optimistic about the project.

Christmas Island Shire President Steve Pereira told Reuters that the council is examining community impacts before approving construction. “There is support for it, providing this data center actually does put back into the community with infrastructure, employment, and adding economic value to the island,” Pereira said.

That’s great, but what about the crabs?

Christmas Island’s annual crab migration is a natural phenomenon that Sir David Attenborough reportedly once described as one of his greatest TV moments when he visited the site in 1990.

Every year, millions of crabs emerge from the forest and swarm across roads, streams, rocks, and beaches to reach the ocean, where each female can produce up to 100,000 eggs. The tiny baby crabs that survive take about nine days to march back inland to the safety of the plateau.

While Google is seeking environmental approvals for its subsea cables, the timing could prove delicate for Christmas Island’s most famous residents. According to Parks Australia, the island’s annual red crab migration has already begun for 2025, with a major spawning event expected in just a few weeks, around November 15–16.

During peak migration times, sections of roads close at short notice as crabs move between forest and sea, and the island has built special crab bridges over roads to protect the migrating masses.

Parks Australia notes that while the migration happens annually, few baby crabs survive the journey from sea to forest most years, as they’re often eaten by fish, manta rays, and whale sharks. The successful migrations that occur only once or twice per decade (when large numbers of babies actually survive) are critical for maintaining the island’s red crab population.

How Google’s facility might coexist with 100 million marching crustaceans remains to be seen. But judging by the size of the event, it seems clear that it’s the crab’s world, and we’re just living in it.

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Posted Friday 7 November 2025 at 12:34 pm AEST (my time).

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Source:  Australian National University

Summary:  Researchers warn Antarctica is undergoing abrupt changes that could trigger global consequences. Melting ice, collapsing ice shelves, and disrupted ocean circulation threaten sea levels, ecosystems, and climate stability. Wildlife such as penguins and krill face growing extinction risks. Scientists stress that only rapid emission reductions can avert irreversible damage. 

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Antarctica faces the possibility of sudden and potentially irreversible changes to its ice, oceans, and ecosystems. Scientists warn that without a sharp global reduction in carbon emissions, these transformations could have serious effects not only for the continent but also for Australia and the rest of the planet.

Quantum computers based on ions or atoms have one major advantage: The hardware itself isn’t manufactured, so there’s no device-to-device variability. Every atom is the same and should perform similarly every time. And since the qubits themselves can be moved around, it’s theoretically possible to entangle any atom or ion with any other in the system, allowing for a lot of flexibility in how algorithms and error correction are performed.

This combination of consistent, high-fidelity performance with all-to-all connectivity has led many key demonstrations of quantum computing to be done on trapped-ion hardware. Unfortunately, the hardware has been held back a bit by relatively low qubit counts—a few dozen compared to the hundred or more seen in other technologies. But on Wednesday, a company called Quantinuum announced a new version of its trapped-ion hardware that significantly boosts the qubit count and uses some interesting technology to manage their operation.

Trapped-ion computing

Both neutral atom and trapped-ion computers store their qubits in the spin of the nucleus. That spin is somewhat shielded from the environment by the cloud of electrons around the nucleus, giving these qubits a relatively long coherence time. While neutral atoms are held in place by a network of lasers, trapped ions are manipulated via electromagnetic control based on the ion’s charge. This means that key components of the hardware can be built using standard electronic manufacturing, although lasers are still needed for manipulations and readout.

While the electronics are static—they stay wherever they were manufactured—they can be used to move the ions around. That means that as long as the trackways the atoms can move on enable it, any two ions can be brought into close proximity and entangled. This all-to-all connectivity can enable more efficient implementation of algorithms performed directly on the hardware qubits or the use of error-correction codes that require a complicated geometry of connections. That’s one reason why Microsoft used a Quantinuum machine to demonstrate error-correction code based on a tesseract.

But arranging the trackways so that any two qubits can be next to each other can become increasingly complicated. Moving ions around is a relatively slow process, so retrieving two ions from the far ends of a chip too often can cause a system to start pushing up against the coherence time of the qubits. In the long term, Quantinuum plans to build chips with a square grid reminiscent of the street layout of many cities. But doing so will require a mastery of controlling the flow of ions through four-way intersections.

And that’s what Quantinuum is doing in part with its new chip, named Helios. It has a single intersection that couples two ion-storage areas, enabling operations as ions slosh from one end of the chip to the other. And it comes with significantly more qubits than its earlier hardware, moving from 56 to 96 qubits without sacrificing performance. “We’ve kept and actually even improved the two qubit gate fidelity,” Quantinuum VP Jenni Strabley told Ars. “So we’re not seeing any degradation in the two-qubit gate fidelity as we go to larger and larger sizes.”

Doing the loop

The image below is taken using the fluorescence of the atoms in the hardware itself. As you can see, the layout is dominated by two features: A loop at the left and two legs extending to the right. They’re connected by a four-way intersection. The Quantinuum staff described this intersection as being central to the computer’s operation.

The system works by rotating the ions around the loop. As an ion reaches the intersection, the system chooses whether to kick it into one of the legs and, if so, which leg. “We spin that ring almost like a hard drive, really, and whenever the ion that we want to gate gets close to the junction, there’s a decision that happens: Either that ion goes [into the legs], or it kind of makes a little turn and goes back into the ring,” said David Hayes, Quantinuum’s director of Computational Design and Theory. “And you can make that decision with just a few electrodes that are right at that X there.”

Each leg has a region where operations can take place, so this system can ensure that the right qubits are present together in the operation zones for things like two-qubit gates. Once the operations are complete, the qubits can be moved into the leg storage regions, and new qubits can be shuffled in. When the legs fill up, the qubits can be sent back to the loop, and the process is restarted.

“You get less traffic jams if all the traffic is running one way going through the gate zones,” Hayes told Ars. “If you had to move them past each other, you would have to do kind of physical swaps, and you want to avoid that.”

Obviously, issuing all the commands to control the hardware will be quite challenging for anything but the simplest operations. That puts an increasing emphasis on the compilers that add a significant layer of abstraction between what you want a quantum computer to do and the actual hardware commands needed to implement it. Quantinuum has developed its own compiler to take user-generated code and produce something that the control system can convert into the sequence of commands needed.

The control system now incorporates a real-time engine that can read data from Helios and update the commands it issues based on the state of the qubits. Quantinuum has this portion of the system running on GPUs rather than requiring customized hardware.

Quantinuum’s SDK for users is called Guppy and is based on Python, which has been modified to allow users to describe what they’d like the system to do. Helios is being accompanied by a new version of Guppy that includes some traditional programming tools like FOR loops and IF-based conditionals. These will be critical for the sorts of things we want to do as we move toward error-corrected qubits. This includes testing for errors, fixing them if they’re present, or repeatedly attempting initialization until it succeeds without error.

Hayes said the new version is also moving toward error correction. Thanks to Guppy’s ability to dynamically reassign qubits, Helios will be able to operate as a machine with 94 qubits while detecting errors on any of them. Alternatively, the 96 hardware qubits can be configured as a single unit that hosts 48 error-corrected qubits. “It’s actually a concatenated code,” Hayes told Ars. “You take two error detection codes and weave them together… it’s a single code block, but it has 48 logical cubits housed inside of it.” (Hayes said it’s a distance-four code, meaning it can fix up to two errors that occur simultaneously.)

Tackling superconductivity

While Quantinuum hardware has always had low error rates relative to most of its competitors, there was only so much you could do with 56 qubits. With 96 now at their disposal, researchers at the company decided to build a quantum implementation of a model (called the Fermi-Hubbard model) that’s meant to help study the electron pairing that takes place during the transition to superconductivity.

“There are definitely terms that the model doesn’t capture,” Quantinuum’s Henrik Dreyer acknowledged. “They neglect their electrorepulsion that [the electrons] still have—I mean, they’re still negatively charged; they are still repelling. There are definitely terms that the model doesn’t capture. On the other hand, I should say that this Fermi-Hubbard model—it has many of the features that a superconductor has.”

Superconductivity occurs when electrons join to form what are called Cooper pairs, overcoming their normal repulsion. And the model can tell that apart from normal conductivity in the same material.

“You ask the question ‘What’s the chance that one of the charged particles spontaneously disappears because of quantum fluctuations and goes over here?'” Dreyer said, describing what happens when simulating a conductor. “What people do in superconductivity is they take this concept, but instead of asking what’s the chance of a single-charge particle to tunnel over there spontaneously, they’re asking what is the chance of a pair to tunnel spontaneously?”

Even in its simplified form, however, it’s still a model of a quantum system, with all the computational complexity that comes with that. So the Quantinuum team modeled a few systems that classical computers struggle with. One was simply looking at a larger grid of atoms than most classical simulations have done; another expanded the grid in an additional dimension, modeling layers of a material. Perhaps the most complicated simulation involved what happens when a laser pulse of the right wavelength hits a superconductor at room temperature, an event that briefly induces a superconducting state.

And the system produced results, even without error correction. “It’s maybe a technical point, but I think it’s very important technical point, which is [that] the circuits that we ran, they all had errors,” Dreyer told Ars. “Maybe on the average of three or so errors, and for some reason, that is not very fully understood for this application, it doesn’t matter. You still get almost the perfect result in some of these cases.”

That said, he also indicated that having higher-fidelity hardware would help the team do a better job of putting the system in a ground state or running the simulation for longer. But those will have to wait for future hardware.

What’s next

If you look at Quantinuum’s roadmap for that future hardware, Helios would appear to be the last of its kind. It and earlier versions of the processors have loops and large straight stretches; everything in the future features a grid of squares. But both Strabley and Hayes said that Helios has several key transitional features. “Those ions are moving through that junction many, many times over the course of a circuit,” Strabley told Ars. “And so it’s really enabled us to work on the reliability of the junction, and that will translate into the large-scale systems.”

The collection of squares seen in future processors will also allow the same sorts of operations to be done with the loop-and-legs of Helios. Some squares can serve as the equivalent of a loop in terms of storage and sorting, while some of the straight lines nearby can be used for operations.

“What will be common to both of them is kind of the general concept that you can have a storage and sorting region and then gating regions on the side and they’re separated from one another,” Hayes said. “It’s not public yet, but that’s the direction we’re heading: a storage region where you can do really fast sorting in these 2D grids, and then gating regions that have parallelizable logical operations.”

In the meantime, we’re likely to see improvements made to Helios—ideas that didn’t quite make today’s release. “There’s always one more improvement that people want to make, and I’m the person that says, ‘No, we’re going to go now. Put this on the market, and people are going to go use it,'” Strabley said. “So there is a long list of things that we’re going to add to improve the performance. So expect that over the course of Helios, the performance is going to get better and better and better.”

That performance is likely to be used for the sort of initial work done on superconductivity or the algorithm recently described by Google, which is at or a bit beyond what classical computers can manage and may start providing some useful insights. But it will still be a generation or two before we start seeing quantum computing fulfill some of its promise.

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Posted Thursday 6 November 2025 at 12:59 pm AEST (my time).

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IBM said on Tuesday that it planned to cut thousands of workers as it shifts its focus to higher-growth businesses in artificial intelligence consulting and software.

The company did not specify how many workers would be affected, but said in a statement that the layoffs would “impact a low-single-digit percentage of our global work force.” The company had 270,000 employees at the end of last year.

The number of workers in the United States is expected to remain flat despite some cuts, a spokeswoman added in the statement.

A massive supplier of technology to businesses, IBM joins Amazon, Meta, Google and other companies that have made recent staffing cuts as they race to invest more in the A.I. boom. Many executives have predicted more efficiency gains as the technology assists workers with coding and other tasks.

Still, the payoff for companies banking on A.I. products like chatbots is unclear, and some analysts are warning of a potential bubble.

Two weeks ago, IBM reported that its sales for June through September rose 9 percent to $16.33 billion. The results exceeded analysts’ forecasts.

In a conference call with analysts last month, Jim Kavanaugh, IBM’s chief financial officer, said there was evidence that A.I. adoption in mainstream corporations was beginning to accelerate. Roughly 80 percent of IBM customers for A.I. consulting and software were new over the last six months, he added.

IBM’s bookings for A.I. consulting work and software rose sharply to $9.5 billion in the third quarter, “underscoring strong momentum in A.I.-driven demand,” according to a research report from the investment bank Jefferies.

The job cuts at IBM were reported earlier by Bloomberg.

For years, IBM has engaged in what it has called “work force rebalancing,” shedding some workers and adding others. The company did not disclose the charges for employee severance payments for the current round of layoffs.

The company said it was reshuffling people and skills in step with shifts in demand.

“We routinely review our work force through this lens and at times rebalance accordingly,” according to the statement.

Under Arvind Krishna, who became chief executive in 2020, IBM has aggressively pursued high-growth markets in cloud computing for business and artificial intelligence.

The company’s biggest move to narrow its focus on A.I. and cloud computing came the next year, when IBM spun off its technology services business, which maintains and modernizes traditional software and hardware for corporate customers. That business is now a separate company, called Kyndryl.

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Last month, The US Food and Drug Administration approved a new blood test for assisting the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Produced by Roche, Elecsys pTau181 measures the concentration of a specific molecule—a phosphorylated form of the tau protein—in the blood. Tau is one of two proteins, the other being amyloid, that become malformed and accumulate in the brains of patients with certain types of dementia. It is believed that the buildup of these proteins interferes with the communication of brain cells, leading to these patients’ symptoms.

The test had already received authorization in July for marketing in Europe and is thus the first early screening system for Alzheimer’s for use in primary care settings approved in the planet’s two major pharmaceutical markets. It is an opener in what should soon become a crowded field, as there are several other tests in advanced stages of testing and approval.

How Do Such Tests Work?

Elecsys pTau181 looks in the blood plasma for a form of the tau protein that has a phosphate group attached, which is often found in elevated amounts in Alzheimer’s patients. This molecule is an indirect marker of the plaques of amyloid and neurofibrillary tangles of tau observed in the brains of patients with the disease.

Some other tests have also been approved, though not for early screening. These assess other biomarkers that relate to these two proteins. One test, called Lumipulse and made by the Japanese company Fujirebio, looks at the ratio between another form of phosphorylated tau (pTau217) and a key protein fragment that forms amyloid plaques (amyloid beta peptide 1-42).

The bottom line is that these tests offer clues to the probable presence of amyloidosis in the brain, which then needs to be diagnosed with greater accuracy using more invasive tests, such as a PET (positron emission tomography) scan and cerebrospinal fluid analysis by lumbar puncture, considered the clinical gold standard for diagnosing amyloid pathology in living patients. Even these, however, come with some degree of uncertainty; true diagnostic certainty can only be had with a post-mortem dissection of the brain.

Why Approve These Tests Now?

In the past, confirmation of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis was not that important, as there were no drugs or therapies that could alter the course of the disease. But with the approval of new Alzheimer’s monoclonal antibody treatments, the landscape has changed in the past few years.

To use these medicines, you need a way to confirm which patients can benefit. And since the drugs ideally yield the best results when used early on in the disease’s progression, a relatively inexpensive and minimally invasive diagnostic test will be extremely useful. Subjecting all elderly people with suspected symptoms of cognitive decline to PET scans and cerebrospinal fluid sampling is impractical, so this is where blood testing for Alzheimer’s comes in.

Just How Useful Are These Tests?

Elecsys pTau181 is the first test to be approved for use as a community-screening tool. The idea is for it to be administered at the primary care level—so, for instance, by a primary care physician or general practitioner. The test has been shown to have a good “negative predictive value”—that is, it is effective at accurately indicating who does not have amyloid disease. In settings where the overall prevalence of amyloid disease is low, a negative result from this test is 97.9 percent reliable. This makes it useful for selecting which patients to put forward for further testing.

The results are similar to those of other tests that have already been approved in recent months, such as Lumipulse from Japan’s Fujirebio, which in trials has shown a negative predictive value of about 97 percent.

However, there is an important limitation to note: for all blood tests for Alzheimer’s, there tends to be a relatively large proportion of patients (15-30 percent is a common estimate) who fall into a gray area of uncertainty, in which the levels of identified biomarkers do not allow for either a positive or a negative answer.

It’s also worth noting that the monoclonal antibodies approved for treating Alzheimer’s aren’t silver bullets. Trials have shown they can slow the progress of symptoms, but their efficacy is limited—the difference in symptom development between those taking and not taking these drugs is small—while side effects are common and potentially fatal. They are also very expensive. Using a blood test for Alzheimer’s to ultimately get a patient onto these treatments only promises to subtly alter, rather than halt, the progression of the disease.

Can I Take a Test Out of Curiosity?

Experts stress the importance of these tests not being used for DIY analysis of cognitive health. While their negative predictive value is good, their positive predictive value is not very high—meaning they produce a lot of false positives—which is why they aren’t used alone for diagnostic purposes.

Their positive predictive value falls even further if they are used in the absence of clinical symptoms of dementia. If someone takes one of these tests informally to check up on their brain health, without any symptoms of cognitive decline, they risk receiving a result that will leave them unnecessarily worrying about a condition they don’t have.

This story originally appeared in WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

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Posted Thursday 6 November 2025 at 2:58 am AEST (my time).

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Three Chinese astronauts were due to depart the Tiangong space station, reenter the atmosphere, and land in the remote desert of Inner Mongolia on Wednesday. Instead, officials ordered the crew to remain at the station while engineers investigate a potential problem with their landing craft.

The China Manned Space Agency, run by the country’s military, announced the change late Tuesday in a brief statement posted to Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.

“The Shenzhou 20 manned spacecraft is suspected of being impacted by small space debris,” the statement said. “Impact analysis and risk assessment are underway. To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou 20 return mission, originally scheduled for November 5, will be postponed.”

What we know

The Shenzhou 20 astronauts arrived at the Tiangong station in April. Their replacements on the Shenzhou 21 mission docked with Tiangong on Friday, temporarily raising the station’s crew size to six people. After several days of joint operations, the six astronauts held a handover ceremony early Tuesday to formally transfer command of the outpost to the new crew.

Less than 24 hours later, Chinese officials decided to call off Shenzhou 20’s departure from Tiangong. The statement from the China Manned Space Agency did not say what part of the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft may have been damaged, what evidence led engineers to suspect space debris was the culprit, or how long Shenzhou 20’s departure might be postponed.

The ship has three sections, with a landing capsule positioned between crew living quarters and a power and propulsion module. The modules separate from one another before reentry, and the return craft heads for a parachute-assisted landing while the other elements burn up during atmospheric reentry.

The Shenzhou 20 crew is led by commander Chen Dong, a veteran astronaut and former Chinese fighter pilot on his third trip to space. Two spaceflight rookies, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie, are also awaiting their homecoming after six months in orbit.

It’s rare for China to disclose a problem during an ongoing space mission. Operations on China’s Tiangong space station have proceeded without significant issues since crews started visiting the complex in 2021, but Chinese officials were aware of the risk of space junk. The Shenzhou 20 astronauts ventured outside Tiangong on four spacewalks during their mission. All of the excursions focused on beefing up external shielding to protect the station from space debris strikes, according to China’s official accounts of the spacewalks.

The station suffered a partial power loss after a piece of space junk hit one of its solar panels in 2023, prompting repairs on several spacewalks last year. That was followed by a spacewalking frenzy to install what Chinese state media called “space debris protection devices” on the outside of the complex.

The International Space Station, led by the United States and Russia, has also had run-ins with small fragments of space debris. One such event happened in 2021, when a piece of space junk just 1 millimeter in size—too small to be tracked from the ground—punched a hole in the space station’s Canadian-built robotic arm. The impact didn’t affect the performance of the robotic arm, but an object that small traveling at nearly 5 miles per second could do damage if it hit a more sensitive area.

There was no immediate indication from China that engineers might deem the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft unsafe for reentry and landing. If the ship is damaged beyond repair, officials have a backup Shenzhou spacecraft and rocket that could launch on a rescue mission from the country’s space center in Jiuquan, an isolated base in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China.

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Posted Thursday 6 November 2025 at 2:57 am AEST (my time).

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The Atlantic hurricane season is drawing to a close, and with the tropics quieting down for a winter slumber, the focus of forecasters turns to evaluating what worked and what did not during the preceding season.

This year, the answers are clear. Although Google DeepMind’s Weather Lab only started releasing cyclone track forecasts in June, the company’s AI forecasting service performed exceptionally well. By contrast, the Global Forecast System model, operated by the US National Weather Service and is based on traditional physics and runs on powerful supercomputers, performed abysmally.

The official data comparing forecast model performance will not be published by the National Hurricane Center for a few months. However, Brian McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University of Miami, has already done some preliminary number crunching.

The results are stunning:

2025 Atlantic season hurricane model performance on track accuracy.

Credit: Brian McNoldy

A little help in reading the graphic is in order. This chart sums up the track forecast accuracy for all 13 named storms in the Atlantic Basin this season, measuring the mean position error at various hours in the forecast, from 0 to 120 hours (five days). On this chart, the lower a line is, the better a model has performed.

A new champion

The dotted black line shows the average forecast error for official forecasts from the 2022 to 2024 seasons. What jumps out is that the United States’ premier global model, the GFS (denoted here as AVNI), is by far the worst-performing model. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the chart, in maroon, is the Google DeepMind model (GDMI), performing the best at nearly all forecast hours.

The difference in errors between the US GFS model and Google’s DeepMind is remarkable. At five days, the Google forecast had an error of 165 nautical miles compared to 360 nautical miles for the GFS model, more than twice as bad. This is the kind of error that causes forecasters to completely disregard one model in favor of another.

But there’s more. Google’s model was so good that it regularly beat the official forecast from the National Hurricane Center (OFCL), which is produced by human experts looking at a broad array of model data. The AI-based model also beat highly regarded “consensus models,” including the TVCN and HCCA products. For more information on various models and their designations, see here.

This early model comparison does not include the “gold standard” traditional, physics-based model produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. However, the ECMWF model typically does not do better on hurricane track forecasts than the hurricane center or consensus models, which weigh several different model outputs. So it is unlikely to be superior to Google’s DeepMind.

This will change forecasting forever

It’s worth noting that DeepMind also did exceptionally well at intensity forecasting, which is the fluctuations in the strength of a hurricane. So in its first season, it nailed both hurricane tracks and intensity.

As a forecaster who has relied on traditional physics-based models for a quarter of a century, it is difficult to say how gobsmacking these results are. Going forward, it is safe to say that we will rely heavily on Google and other AI weather models, which are likely to improve in the coming years, as they are relatively new and have room for improvement.

“The beauty of DeepMind and other similar data-driven, AI-based weather models is how much more quickly they produce a forecast compared to their traditional physics-based counterparts that require some of the most expensive and advanced supercomputers in the world,” noted Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist and author of the Eye on the Tropics newsletter, about the model performance. “Beyond that, these ‘smart’ models with their neural network architectures have the ability to learn from their mistakes and correct on-the-fly.”

What about the North American model?

As for the GFS model, it is difficult to explain why it performed so poorly this season. In the past, it has been, at worst, worthy of consideration in making a forecast. But this year, myself and other forecasters often disregarded it.

“It’s not immediately clear why the GFS performed so poorly this hurricane season,” Lowry wrote. “Some have speculated the lapse in data collection from DOGE-related government cuts this year could have been a contributing factor, but presumably such a factor would have affected other global physics-based models as well, not just the American GFS.”

With the US government in shutdown mode, we probably cannot expect many answers soon. But it seems clear that the massive upgrade of the model’s dynamic core, which began in 2019, has largely been a failure. If the GFS was a little bit behind some competitors a decade ago, it is now fading further and faster.

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Posted Wednesday 5 November 2025 at 1:24 pm AEST (my time).

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Many insect species hear using tympanal organs, membranes roughly resembling our eardrums but located on their legs. Grasshoppers, mantises, and moths all have them, and for decades, we thought that female stinkbugs of the Dinidoridae family have them, too, although located a bit unusually on their hind rather than front legs.

Suspecting that they use their hind leg tympanal organs to listen to male courtship songs, a team of Japanese researchers took a closer look at the organs in Megymenum gracilicorne, a Dinidoridae stinkbug species native to Japan. They discovered that these “tympanal organs” were not what they seemed. They’re actually mobile fungal nurseries of a kind we’ve never seen before.

Portable gardens

Dinidoridae is a small stinkbug family that lives exclusively in Asia. The bug did attract some scientific attention, but not nearly as much as its larger relatives like Pentatomidae. Prior work looking specifically into organs growing on the hind legs of Dinidoridae females was thus somewhat limited. “Most research relied on taxonomic and morphological approaches. Some taxonomists did describe that female Dinidoridae stinkbugs have an enlarged part on the hind legs that looks like the tympanal organ you can find, for example, in crickets,” said Takema Fukatsu, an evolutionary biologist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tokyo.

Based on that appearance, these parts were classified as tympanal organs—the case was closed, and it stayed closed until Fukatsu’s team started examining them more closely. Most insects have tympanal organs on their front legs, not hind legs, or on abdominal segments. The initial goal of Fukatsu’s study was to figure out what impact this unusual position has on Dinidoridae females’ ability to hear sounds.

Early on in the study, it turned out that whatever Dinidoridae females have on their hind legs, they are not tympanal organs. “We found no tympanal membrane and no sensory neurons, so the enlarged parts on the hind legs had nothing to do with hearing,” Fukatsu explained. Instead, the organ had thousands of small pores filled with benign filamentous fungi. The pores were connected to secretory cells that released substances that Fukatsu’s team hypothesized were nutrients enabling the fungi to grow.

What Fukatsu discovered was a mobile, self-sustaining fungal garden. “In adult female, this organ was covered with white fungal hyphae,” Fukatsu said.

So far, a functionally similar feature has been found in insects like Ambrosia Beetles, which have pocket-like organs used to transport and release fungal spores into holes bored in wood. This way, the beetles create fungal gardens that their larvae and adults can feed on. But in Dinidoridae, the purpose of mobile fungal nurseries is entirely different. The stinkbugs use the fungi to cover their eggs with fungal blankets.

Keeping wasps at bay

To find out how Megymenum gracilicorne females use their fungal nurseries, Fukatsu and his colleagues observed the bugs in both the lab and in the wild. “They lay eggs in a row and they smear the fungal spores on each egg,” Fukatsu explained.

During oviposition, the females scratched their fungal nurseries with a claw on the other leg and then rubbed the eggs. Within three days, the eggs were almost entirely covered with a roughly two-millimeter-thick layer of fungi.

The purpose of these fungal blankets was to protect the eggs from parasitic wasps. “When the eggs were covered, the wasps could not approach them—pierce through them to lay their own eggs in the Dinidoridae stinkbug eggs,” Fukatsu said.

The team performed a series of experiments that involved releasing the wasps in a container with stinkbug eggs fully covered with fungi and eggs where the fungal blanket was artificially scraped off. It turned out that the blankets significantly reduced the wasp parasitism. The wasps managed to parasitize 62 percent of the fungi-free eggs. In eggs covered with the fungal blankets, this rate was down to 10 percent.

Surprisingly, the fungi did not infect the wasps or cause them any harm; the blankets worked more like a physical barrier than a chemical deterrent. “Even when we kept the wasps in Petri dishes full of spores for a full day, they were very happy—they never died,” Fukatsu explains.

This finding led the team to question how Dinidoridae females picked a fungus with these properties. “In young females, the hind leg organs are sterile, so they collect the fungi upon reaching maturity,” Fukatsu said. “But there are so many different fungi and microbes out there and we still don’t know for sure how they pick the right ones.”

And that was just the first item on the list of things we still don’t know.

Picky collectors

The question about the way Dnidoridae stinkbug females pick the right fungi became even more mysterious when the team realized the fungal species in the nursery organs differed from individual to individual. “So chance must play a part in choosing which fungi to collect. Still, the fungi we found in the organs belonged to two or three very specific benign groups,” Fukatsu said. What we do know for now is that the fungi were not pathogenic to the insects, the eggs, or the wasps.

We also don’t know the nature of the nutrients secreted by the cells at the bottom of the pores in the organs, which the team thinks can play a crucial part in ensuring they are populated by the right fungi. The nutrients might be tuned to sustain only the right species of fungi, but it remains an open question.

Arguably, the largest mystery is how these fungal nurseries evolved. So far, Fukatsu’s team has found them in just a few stinkbug species of the Dinidoridae family living in Japan and Taiwan, which makes them rather unique. “We would like to do a developmental study to see what gene transmission leads to this female-specific organs, and we’re already compiling a huge list of genes that are upregulated in these organs,” Fukatsu said.

The team is doing an early screen, knocking down specific candidate genes in stinkbug females to see how this affects their phenotype. “This way we hope to identify the genes involved in formation of these fungal nurseries,” Fukatsu said.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adp6699

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Posted Wednesday 5 November 2025 at 1:23 pm AEST (my time).

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In the fight against cancer, an important field of research is the search for safe alternatives to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. These treatments attack both cancer cells and healthy cells, exposing patients to serious side effects.

A team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Porto in Portugal have just brought an alternative one step closer. They’ve developed materials capable of converting near-infrared light, or NIR, efficiently and safely into heat that can be highly targeted against cancer cells. Their materials are tin oxide (SnO_x) nanoflakes, tiny particles that have a thickness of less than 20 nanometers (a nanometer is one-thousand-millionth of a meter).

The team’s findings, published in the journal ACS Nano, offer new hope for the design of photothermal therapies, the name given to these types of light-based treatments.

A photothermal therapy is a noninvasive procedure that heats up cancer cells in order to destroy them. It works by infiltrating cancer cells with materials that absorb light and turn it into heat—in this case, the SnO_x nanoflakes—which can be designed so that they accumulate specifically in tumor tissues. They are then targeted with light at a wavelength that gives these materials the energy they need to produce cancer-killing heat but which doesn’t damage healthy tissues.

The researchers propose that their SnO_x nanoflakes could improve these types of treatments by offering greater thermal efficiency, biocompatibility, and affordability than other materials that are used in such processes.

“Our goal was to create a treatment that is not only effective but also safe and accessible,” said Jean Anne Incorvia, a UT professor of engineering and one of the project leaders, in a press statement. “With the combination of LED light and SnO_x nanoflakes, we’ve developed a method to precisely target cancer cells while leaving healthy cells untouched.”

To evaluate the thermal efficiency of their new material, the team developed a proprietary system based on near-infrared LEDs (NIR-LEDs) that emit light at a wavelength of 810 nanometers, which is safe for biological tissues. Unlike traditional laser systems, NIR-LEDs provide more homogeneous and stable illumination, reduce the risk of overheating, and require minimal investment. The entire experimental set-up, capable of irradiating up to 24 samples at the same time, cost approximately $530, making it an affordable and versatile tool for biomedical research.

Results from beaming NIR onto SnO_x-treated cancer cells have been encouraging. UT reported that in as little as 30 minutes of exposure, the method killed up to 92 percent of skin cancer cells and 50 percent of colorectal cancer cells. This was achieved without any harmful effects to healthy skin cells, demonstrating the safety and selectivity of this approach.

Although further biological and clinical studies are still required, the work demonstrates that these nanomaterials, treated with this specific type of light, could become a plausible and affordable photothermal therapy for cancer. “Our ultimate goal is to make this technology available to patients everywhere, especially places where access to specialized equipment is limited, with fewer side effects and lower cost,” said Artur Pinto, a researcher at the University of Porto's School of Engineering and another of the lead authors, in a statement.

“In the particular case of skin cancers, we envision that one day the treatment could be moved from the hospital to the patient’s home,” Pinto said. “A portable device could be placed on the skin after surgery to irradiate and destroy any remaining cancer cells, thus reducing the risk of recurrence.”

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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Posted Wednesday 5 November 2025 at 4:05 am AEST (my time).

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