For four decades, a frequently acrimonious debate has raged in paleontological circles about the correct taxonomy for a handful of rare fossil specimens. One faction insisted the fossils were juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex; the other argued that they represented a new species dubbed Nanotyrannus lancensis. Now, paleontologists believe they have settled the debate once and for all due to a new analysis of a well-preserved fossil.

The verdict: It is indeed a new species, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. The authors also reclassified another specimen as a second new species, distinct from N. lancensis. In short, Nanotyrannus is a valid taxon and contains two species.

“This fossil doesn’t just settle the debate,” said Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and head of paleontology at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “It flips decades of T. rex research on its head.” That’s because paleontologists have relied on such fossils to model the growth and behavior of T. rex. The new findings suggest that there could have been multiple tyrannosaur species and that paleontologists have been underestimating the diversity of dinosaurs from this period.

Our story begins in 1942, when the fossilized skull of a Nanotyrannus, nicknamed Chomper, was excavated in Montana by a Cleveland Museum of Natural History expedition. Originally, paleontologists thought it belonged to a Gorgosaurus, but a 1965 paper challenged that identification and argued that the skull belonged to a juvenile T. rex. It wasn’t until 1988 that scientists proposed that the skull was actually that of a new species, Nanotyrannus. It’s been a constant back-and-forth ever since.

As recently as 2020, a highly influential paper claimed that Nanotyrannus was definitively a juvenile T. Rex. Yet a substantial number of paleontologists still believed it should be classified as a distinct species. A January 2024 paper, for instance, came down firmly on the Nanotyrannus side of the debate. Co-authors Nicholas Longrich of the University of Bath and Evan Saitta of the University of Chicago measured the growth rings in Nanotyrannus bones and concluded the animals were nearly fully grown.

Dueling dinosaurs

Furthermore, there was no evidence of hybrid fossils combining features of both Nanotyrannus and T. rex, which one would expect if the former were a juvenile version of the latter. Longrich and Saitta had also discovered a skull bone, archived in a San Francisco museum, that did belong to a juvenile T. rex, and they were able to do an anatomical comparison. They argued that Nanotyrannus had a lighter build, longer limbs, and larger arms than a T. rex and likely was smaller, faster, and more agile.

Part of the problem is that such specimens are incredibly rare and usually consist of fragments. But this latest paper analyzes an exceptionally well-preserved fossil known as the “dueling dinosaurs,” the remains of a triceratops beside a tyrannosaur. It wasn’t available for paleontological research until now due to various legal issues, but the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences acquired it in 2020.

In addition to conducting a growth-ring analysis, the researchers looked at spinal fusions and developmental anatomy. They also studied over 200 other tyrannosaur fossils for comparative analysis and re-examined a second nearly complete fossil, dubbed “Jane,” which was previously believed to be that of a juvenile T. rex.

Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus rex arm comparison.

N.C. State University/CC BY-NC-ND

 

Right hand of Nanotyrannus lancensis.

N.C. State University/CC BY-NC-ND

 

The "dueling dinosaurs" N. lancensis specimen preserves the first complete tail of this genus.

N.C. State University/CC BY-NC-ND

 

Artist's impression of a pack of Nanotyrannus attacking a juvenile T. rex.

Anthony Hutchings/CC BY-NC-ND

 

Per the authors, the “dueling dinosaurs” specimen was nearly mature at around 20 years old. It had much larger forelimbs than a T. rex, a possible vestigial third finger, fewer vertebrae in the tail, and more teeth in the skull, as well as distinct skull nerve patterns revealed via CT scanning. Zanno et al. also concluded that “Jane” is in fact a Nanotyrannus, just not the same species as N. lancensis. They named the new species N. lethaeus.

“The situation is complex, hence why the debate has raged for decades,” Zanno told Ars. “The specimens that were studied in [the 2020] paper were still immature when they died, fitting the hypothesis that Nanotyrannus was a juvenile T. rex. And one represents a different species than the historical Nanotyrannus lancensis, which we name in this new paper. Thus, not only did one of those specimens represent an actively growing individual, we can now also say it isn’t the same species as Nanotyrannus lancensis.”

Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland told The New York Times that these new findings represent a “decisive blow” to the juvenile T. rex interpretation. Even long-time T. rex proponent Thomas Carr of Carthage College in Wisconsin called Zanno et al.’s findings “pretty conclusive,” although he was skeptical of the identification of “Jane” as a second species within the Nanotyrannus taxon.

“The extraordinary three-dimensional preservation of the “dueling dinosaurs” tyrannosaur was the key to unlocking the mystery of Nanotyrannus,” Zanno told Ars. “Having a 100 percent complete skeleton provided all the pieces of the puzzle we needed to put this debate to bed. The dueling dinosaurs tyrannosaur is a Nanotyrannus, and it is fully mature at half the length and one-tenth the mass of T. rex. Our new specimen provides the first conclusive evidence closing the casket on the teen T. rex hypothesis.”

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09801-6 (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 31 October 2025 at 5:10 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and used the embryos to start pregnancies.

The backlash against He was immediate. Scientists said the technology was too new to be used for human reproduction and that the DNA change amounted to genetic enhancement. The Chinese government charged him with “illegal medical practices,” and he served a three-year prison sentence.

Now, a New York–based startup called Manhattan Genomics is reviving the debate around gene-edited babies. Its stated goal is to end genetic disease and alleviate human suffering by fixing harmful mutations at the embryo stage. The company has announced a group of “scientific contributors” that includes a prominent in vitro fertilization doctor, a data scientist who worked for de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, and two reproductive biologists from a major primate research center. A scientist who pioneered a technique to make embryos using DNA from three people is also involved.

“I like to take on challenges when I see them,” says cofounder Cathy Tie, a former Thiel fellow who left college at 18 to start her first company, Ranomics, a genomics screening service. As Tie sees it, that challenge is to make the idea of human embryo editing more acceptable in society.

The idea of editing human embryos is tantalizing, because any changes made to the reproductive cells are heritable. Snip out a disease-causing mutation in an embryo and it would be deleted from future generations as well. But gene-editing technology also has the potential to cause unintended “off-target” effects. Edit the wrong gene by mistake and it could give rise to cancer, for instance. Those mistakes would also be passed down to any future children.

While newer forms of gene editing are more precise, there are still ethical issues to contend with. The prospect of being able to manipulate the DNA of a human embryo has raised fears of a new kind of eugenics, where parents with the means to do so could make “designer babies” with traits that they select.

Tie says the goal of Manhattan Genomics—originally called the Manhattan Project when the company first launched in August—is disease correction, not enhancement. Unlike the original Manhattan Project, a secretive US government program during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons, Tie says her venture will operate openly and transparently. “We’re revolutionizing medicine, and this technology is definitely very powerful. That’s what I think is the commonality here with manipulating the nucleus of the atom and manipulating the nucleus of the cell,” she says.

Earlier this year, Tie launched another gene-editing startup, the Los Angeles Project, with biohacker Josie Zayner. The two aimed to make glowing rabbits and other fantastical pets by editing them at the embryo level. Tie is no longer involved in that company, which later changed its name to the Embryo Corporation after her departure.

Tie’s announcement of Manhattan Genomics comes after a whirlwind public romantic relationship with China’s He. In May, she posted a photo of the two during what appeared to be a marriage celebration. However, she tells WIRED that they are no longer together and were never legally married. Their relationship, she says, was purely personal, and He is not involved with her new company. (He confirmed separately to WIRED that he and Tie are not together and he is not involved in Manhattan Genomics.)

The company’s other cofounder is Eriona Hysolli, previously the head of biological sciences at Colossal Biosciences, which earlier this year claimed to have brought back extinct dire wolves by editing the embryos of modern-day gray wolves.

Manhattan Genomics’ scientific contributors—so called because they will take a more hands-on role than traditional biotech advisers—include New York-based IVF doctor Norbert Gleicher and data scientist Stephen Turner, previously the head of genomics strategy at Colossal Biosciences, where he sequenced embryos before and after gene editing and analyzed off-target effects. Carol Hanna and Jon Hennebold, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), are providing expertise on primate embryology. A scientist who has conducted gene-editing work on human embryos was originally included among the list of scientific contributors, but when contacted by WIRED he said he was not officially working with the company.

John Quain is advising the company on ethics. Quain, a technology writer and a fellow in the bioethics program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, gave a talk at a philosophy event last year titled “Drawing the Germline: Why Moratoriums on Human Heritable Genetic Engineering Should Be Lifted.”

Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a biologist at OHSU, is consulting with the company on human embryo research. Mitalipov is known for developing a “three-parent baby” technique that involves removing the nucleus of a human egg and placing it into another. (Mitalipov did not respond to an interview request from WIRED).

In what Tie sees as a sign of growing interest in human embryo editing, she says the company received more than 150 applications from qualified scientists in the first 24 hours of posting a role for a genome engineer.

She did not specify what genes Manhattan Genomics will target first, but says the company will focus on ones that have the strongest correlation with disease and are the simplest to go after, such as those that cause Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anemia—known as monogenic disorders because they are caused by mutations in a single gene.

Since He’s experiments in 2018, scientists have honed newer, more precise forms of Crispr, which Tie plans to test and compare for safety and efficacy. She says the company will start with studies in mice then move to monkeys. Human trials are still many years off and would likely face regulatory obstacles in the US. A congressional rider bans the Food and Drug Administration from considering trials involving intentionally modified human embryos that are used to start a pregnancy.

“We are obviously at a very early stage, and it will take significant work in collaboration with the FDA to get to a practical clinical application,” Gleicher tells WIRED. “But I am optimistic that for carefully selected indications, it should be doable within a reasonable time frame.”

At least initially, Gleicher sees embryo editing being used in cases where an IVF patient has only a few embryos to work with and all of them are affected by a single-gene disease. Age is a major factor in the number of eggs, and thus embryos, an IVF patient is able to produce, so Gleicher says older patients may especially benefit. “This is, indeed, what attracted me to the project,” he says.

Gleicher’s New York-based clinic, the Center for Human Reproduction, serves a large population of patients over the age of 40. He says his patients frequently ask why it’s not yet possible to “improve” or “fix” embryos.

Turner got involved with the company through Hysolli, his colleague from Colossal, but says he wasn’t immediately supportive of Manhattan Genomics’ vision. “Embryo editing raises serious ethical and scientific questions. I agreed to get involved because I want to see this work, if it proceeds at all, done transparently, under independent oversight, and focused on preventing severe disease,” he says, adding that if those conditions aren’t met, he will no longer be involved.

Even if the company manages to show that embryo editing can be done safely, there may be few use cases for it—at least in terms of preventing serious inherited diseases.

“For mutations that are inherited, in the vast majority of cases they can be addressed by embryo screening rather than embryo editing,” says Kiran Musunuru, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who is developing gene-editing treatments.

A type of testing used in IVF called preimplantation genetic diagnosis can evaluate embryos for specific inherited genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, or Tay-Sachs. “There are very rare cases where no healthy embryos are possible, like when the two parents both have cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease,” Musunuru says. In those cases, he says donated healthy sperm or eggs could be used instead.

He also points to the fact that many genetic diseases are caused by spontaneous mutations that are not inherited from their parents. These “de novo” mutations are difficult to detect with preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and Musunuru says in those cases, gene-editing treatments would have to be given at the fetal stage or after birth. Musunuru was part of a team that created a custom Crispr treatment for an infant with a rare and often fatal metabolic disease.

Fyodor Urnov, a professor of molecular therapeutics at UC Berkeley and a scientific director at its Innovative Genomics Institute, says he worries that the interest in human embryo editing for reproductive purposes is driven by a “quasi-eugenics” mindset, rather than a true desire to fix genetic disease. “Why is money being poured into this? Because at the end of the day, those who have money want to ‘improve’ their babies,” he says.

At least one other company, Bootstrap Bio, is also seeking funding for human embryo editing. And in June, Coinbase CEO and billionaire Brian Armstrong posted on X that he was ready to invest in an embryo editing company. “I think the time is right for the defining company in the US to be built in this area, approaching it in a scientifically rigorous way, solving an unmet need,” he wrote. Manhattan Genomics has not disclosed its investors or how much it has raised, though Tie says Armstrong is not an investor.

Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, says he has concerns about heritable gene editing bypassing the typical route of academic research and being taken up by tech startups.

“Research might be slower or less efficient in academia, but it requires institutional oversight and the restrictions that come with government funds,” he says. Kahn served on an international commission convened by the US National Academy of Medicine, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the UK’s Royal Society from 2019 to 2020 to assess the potential clinical applications of heritable human genome editing. In a report released in September 2020, the commission recommended that gene-edited human embryos should not be used to create a pregnancy until scientists can establish that precise genomic changes can be made reliably without introducing undesired changes.

The committee did not propose an outright ban on human embryo editing but recommended proceeding cautiously and incrementally. It said that countries should have extensive societal dialogue before determining whether to permit its use. And even then, the technique should first be used only for those couples who have little or no chance of having a genetically related baby that does not inherit a serious monogenic condition—such as in the extremely rare case of a parent that carries two mutations for Huntington’s disease. Humans carry two copies of each gene, and each parent passes one of them on to their children. As only one copy of a mutated gene is needed to cause Huntington’s, one parent with two copies would pass on the disease to all embryos.

“When we were working on that report, I think we all thought this research would live in the academic environment, and so the rules would apply. But when you’re outside of that environment in a startup, the question of how do we make sure this happens responsibly becomes much more important,” Kahn says.

Tie says the company plans to follow the recommendations laid out in the commission’s report.

Just this year, the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, and the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy called for a 10-year moratorium on heritable gene editing, warning that it “remains far too risky and ethically fraught for clinical use.”

Tie maintains that human embryo editing is a valid route to explore. She says after announcing the company in August, dozens of people with genetic diseases in their families reached out to express their support. “Even though it’s not going to be used in the clinic right away,” she says, “it is still worthwhile to fight to get this to be evaluated seriously by regulators.”

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 31 October 2025 at 5:09 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

The report found that India recorded an average of 19.8 heatwave days last year, of which 6.6 days would not have occurred without human-induced climate change.

It also estimated that heat exposure in 2024 resulted in the loss of 247 billion potential labour hours, mostly in the agriculture and construction sectors. amounting to an economic loss of about $194bn (£151bn).

While heatwaves are not new to India, their frequency and intensity have been rising steadily over the past few decades because of global warming.

Prolonged exposure to extreme heat has serious repercussions on health. It can overwhelm the body's ability to regulate temperature, increasing the risk of dehydration, heatstroke, cardiovascular stress, and even death - particularly among the elderly, infants and outdoor workers.

And the 2025 Lancet Countdown report - which tracks the health impact of climate change and is widely regarded as a key scientific reference on the issue - warns that the health risks posed by rising global temperatures are now more severe than ever.

"Throughout last year,152 record-breaking extreme weather events were registered across 61 countries, and life-threatening, extreme heat events are becoming more intense than previously predicted," the report stated.

"The climate crisis is a health crisis. Every fraction of a degree of warming costs lives and livelihoods," said Jeremy Farrar, assistant director-general for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and Care at the World Health Organization (WHO).

The report found that heat-related mortality has increased by 23% worldwide since the 1990s, with an average of around 546,000 deaths each year.

India is among the most polluted countries in the world

It also found that the average person worldwide was exposed to 16 days of extreme heat last year that would not have occurred without climate change.

"This [report] paints a bleak and undeniable picture of the devastating health harms reaching all corners of the world," said Dr Marina Romanello, of University College London, who led the report's analysis.

"The destruction to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate until we end our fossil fuel addiction," she added.

Air Quality

The report also mentioned that India's air quality has worsened over the past few years.

Every year as the winter sets in, the air quality in the Indo-Gangetic plains turns toxic. This year too, the air quality has remained between poor and very poor category - at times, reaching hazardous - for almost a month now.

The report mentioned that 1.7 million deaths in 2022 were caused due to atmospheric pollution, particularly because of the tiny PM2.5 pollutants that can cause a host of serious health issues. Harmful emissions from burning fossil fuel led to 44% of these deaths.

It also noted that the heavy reliance on biofuels such as wood, dung and crop residue for cooking continues to silently claim thousands of lives across the country - especially among women and children in rural areas.

The report was released ahead of the COP30 summit, which is going to take place in Brazil next month. 

Source

A new study of more than 33,000 adults in the UK Biobank suggests that how you space out your daily steps may affect your future health outcomes.

In the analysis, people who took most of their daily steps during longer strolls had a lower risk of dying from any cause than those who took most of their steps in shorter strolls.

Participants who walked for longer bouts also had a lower risk of a future cardiovascular event, like a heart attack or stroke, and that was true even after adjusting for the total number of steps taken.

"There is a perception that health professionals have recommended walking 10,000 steps a day is the goal, but this isn't necessary," says co-lead author Matthew Ahmadi, a public health researcher at the University of Sydney.

"Simply adding one or two longer walks per day, each lasting at least 10-15 minutes at a comfortable but steady pace, may have significant benefits – especially for people who don't walk much."

The sweeping analysis included adults aged 40 to 79 years who did not have cardiovascular disease or cancer and who typically walked fewer than 8,000 steps a day.

For a week, participants wore a fitness tracker to measure their steps. Looking back at those results, researchers found that those who took most of their daily steps in 10 to 15 minute chunks had a roughly 4 percent chance of experiencing a cardiovascular-related event, such as a heart attack or stroke, within the following decade.

The association between cardiovascular risk and daily step patterns. (del Pozo Cruz et al., Ann. Intern. Med., 2025)

Meanwhile, those who took most of their steps in spurts shorter than 5 minutes had about a 9 percent higher risk of suffering a future cardiovascular incident.

What's more, for those who took longer walks, the risk of dying was less than 1 percent, compared with roughly 4 percent for those who walked for shorter bouts.

The associated benefits were particularly notable among the most physically inactive participants, who walked fewer than 5,000 steps a day. Among this group, longer bouts of walking were associated with up to 85 percent lower mortality compared with shorter walks.

As compelling as the figures seem, the findings are only observational and are derived from just three days to a week of physical activity data, so they should be interpreted with caution.

That said, the sample size is large, and the idea that time spent exercising can impact health outcomes is supported by other recent studies.

It should also be noted that some of these studies have found the opposite association: that shorter, faster bouts of walking or better than longer, slower strolls.

The pace of walking was not fully assessed in the recent UK Biobank analysis, but it suggests that the total number of daily steps is not the only factor to consider.

Cardiologists Fabian Sanchis-Gomar from Stanford University, Carl Lavie from John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans, and Maciej Banach, from Medical University of Lodz in Poland speculate that longer bouts of continuous walking may promote cardiometabolic benefits, boost blood flow, or improve insulin sensitivity, effects that are "less likely to arise from brief, intermittent activity."

The editorial's writers, who weren't associated with the study, argue the investigation's authors make a "compelling case" for testing sustained walking in future randomized clinical trials.

Applied statistician Kevin McConway, who was also not involved in the study, agrees the paper is "intriguing" but argues we need far more research to test these results before they inform future recommendations for heart health.

"It's too early to tell how, if at all, these new findings should feed into public health recommendations on physical activity and step counting," McConway says.

University of Sydney sports scientist and study author Emmanuel Stamatakis says that until now, the emphasis has largely been on the number of daily steps or the amount of walking people do, neglecting 'how' people walk.

"This study shows that even people who are very physically inactive can maximize their heart health benefit by tweaking their walking patterns to walk for longer at a time, ideally for at least 10 to 15 minutes, when possible."

The study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Source

Millennials—people born between 1981 and 1995—are the first generation at greater risk of developing tumors than their parents. Between 1990 and 2019, cases of early-onset cancer among people under 50 increased by 79% worldwide, and mortality by 28%.

The truth is that around 80% of cancers are "sporadic," meaning they are not caused by hereditary mutations but by external factors that damage DNA over time. This includes what we eat and breathe, as well as our level of physical activity, rest, stress and exposure to harmful substances.

In other words, the things that make the biggest difference are the lifestyle factors that surround us every day, and not the genetics we inherit. And we know that our parents' and grandparents' lifestyles differed greatly from our own.

Diet's effect on the body

One of the main factors behind this "new epidemic" is diet. Childhood obesity began to skyrocket in the 1980s. In 2022, more than 390 million children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 were overweight—160 million of these were obese, according to the WHO.

This condition is not just a question of aesthetics: it is associated with insulin resistance, low-grade chronic inflammation, and hormonal changes that increase the risk of developing colorectal, breast, or endometrial cancer.

Most importantly, the effects of childhood obesity do not disappear with age. According to the Colon Cancer Foundation, a meta-analysis involving more than 4.7 million people showed that those with a high body mass index (BMI) in early life are at greater risk of colorectal cancer in adulthood: 39% higher in men and 19% higher in women compared to those who had a healthy BMI in childhood.

Changes in diet have also altered our gut microbiota. It has been shown that diets rich in ultra-processed foods reduce bacterial diversity and increase the proportion of strains that produce pro-inflammatory metabolites.

This contributes to gastrointestinal diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome or SIBO, which often seem to be endemic among millennials—ask a group of 30-somethings which of them suffers from gastrointestinal problems and you'll find few hands are left unraised.

Alcohol's invisible effects

The second major culprit is alcohol, as millennial gatherings often revolve around a table laden with food and drink. For years it was thought that a glass of wine could "protect" you in some way, but today we know that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption: the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a Group 1 carcinogen, on the same level as tobacco. This is because the body converts ethanol into acetaldehyde, a compound that damages DNA.

Furthermore, consumption patterns differ between generations. While baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) drink more on a daily basis, millennials tend to drink less frequently but engage in more binge drinking, which carries significant risks.

This is confirmed by the Spanish Ministry of Health's 2024 EDADES survey, which explores the different levels of risk associated with different behaviors across generations.

And, as if that weren't enough, a recent study by Environmental Science & Technology found that many beers contain perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). These chemicals, also known as "forever chemicals," are linked to higher rates of testicular and kidney cancer.

Not enough sleep

We sleep less and worse than previous generations. Recent surveys show that millennials and generation Z get an average of 30–45 minutes less sleep per night than baby boomers, largely due to night-time exposure to screens and social media. This artificial light disrupts the release of melatonin, an antioxidant hormone that regulates the cell cycle.

Chronic lack of sleep not only impairs DNA repair, but also reduces melatonin's protective effects against cancer. Reduced levels of this hormone have been linked to a reduced ability to counteract oxidative DNA damage and increased cell proliferation.

Furthermore, disrupted circadian rhythms interfere with the expression of genes that are key to repairing DNA. This means mutations accumulate over time, increasing the risk of tumor-forming processes.

The weight of stress

Millennials are probably the generation with the highest cortisol levels. When this "stress hormone" remains elevated for a long time, it not only promotes insulin resistance and hypertension, but also weakens the immune system.

Research reveals that chronic stress increases inflammation, hinders the body's defenses from eliminating abnormal cells, and can even "awaken" dormant tumor cells. In fact, studies in the general population have found that people with higher stress levels are up to twice as likely to die from cancer as those who manage stress better.

The risks of self-medicating

Lastly, younger generations also resort to self-medication more than previous ones. This poses new short and long-term risks.

Frequent use of paracetamol is linked to increased liver damage and a possible increase in liver cancer. Oral contraceptives, used for very long periods due to delayed motherhood, slightly increase the risk of breast and cervical cancer, although they do protect against ovarian and endometrial cancer.

In addition, prolonged use of antacids and antibiotics has been linked to an increased risk of digestive cancer through indirect mechanisms such as carcinogenic compounds or intestinal dysbiosis (an imbalance in the gut microbiota).

What does the future hold for millennials?

The projections are worrying. It is expected that cancer cases could rise from around 20 million in 2022 to nearly 35 million in 2050—an overall increase of almost 77%. The trend is particularly marked in digestive and gynecological tumors, which are becoming more and more common in young adults.

We are the generation of immediacy, anxiety and quick-fix pills, but all is not lost, as we can take control of many of the factors that make us ill, starting today. Adopting healthier habits can reduce risks, and improve our quality of life in a future that is not as distant as we might like to believe.

Source

Lake Texcoco Ecological Park—which opened two years ago, becoming one of the largest urban parks in the world, covering 55 square miles—has its share of challenges. It is difficult to reach without a car. Squatters continue to build homes in its El Caracol section. And farmers from the settlements of Texcoco, Atenco, and Chimalhuacán are demanding compensation for lands that were expropriated for the controversial, and now canceled, New Mexico City International Airport (NAICM) previously being built on its lands. There is work that was paid for, but that will never be completed, for that enormous planned airport. All of this is true.

Architect Iñaki Echeverría, director of the project, starts by acknowledging the first issue, the main point of contention for many: accessibility. “Obviously, I knew accessibility wouldn’t be completely resolved to everyone’s satisfaction,” he says. Faced with budgetary constraints, Echeverría had to choose: “Either we focus on resolving all the legal and accessibility issues, or we create this park, clean it up, and create a showcase demonstrating that restoration efforts like this one are viable.”

The story of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico at the time, announced plans for a new transport hub for Mexico City. It would be built on the largely dry bed of Lake Texcoco, the body of water that had once surrounded Mexico City’s ancient ancestor, Tenochtitlán, the center of the Aztec empire. The marketing promise was that NAICM would be one of the greenest airports in the world. The terminal, designed by Norman Foster—winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1999 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2009—was going to be the first to obtain LEED platinum certification, the highest international recognition for energy efficiency and sustainable design.

Its site, Lake Texcoco, had already lost more than 95 percent of its original surface area, and in 2015 plans were made to drain it completely to build the airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexico’s president in 2018, he canceled the plan. It would end up costing more than $13 billion and would leave behind serious environmental damage: The incomplete project destroyed a key refuge for migratory birds; carved up mountains in the State of Mexico (the federal region that surrounds Mexico City); razed agricultural land; and altered the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous people that includes the Mexica (or Aztecs).

Echeverría, who says he has been obsessed with the area for nearly three decades, was appointed by the new government to restore the local ecosystem. “It felt like I was stepping onto Mars,” says the architect, reflecting on being placed at the helm of the project. The park covers an area equivalent to 21 times the area of Mexico City’s enormous Bosque de Chapultepec park. Echeverría offers his own comparisons: “This place is three times the size of the city of Oaxaca and, as a reference for those outside Mexico, it’s roughly three times the size of Manhattan.”

The restoration project wasn’t a mere whim of Mexico’s new president, but the culmination of a century of visions and plans. “We’ve been skating around this for 75 years,” Echeverría says, citing restoration projects that were proposed as early as 1913, including ones by Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a celebrated early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Macías in the 1950s. What was missing, Echeverría says, “wasn’t a lack of ideas, but of political will.”

The wetlands within the park represent a small portion of what was once a much larger oasis that was drained over the centuries. This process began with the founding of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in the 14th century and progressed rapidly under the empire’s Spanish conquerors, who drained most of the lake. “Perhaps if we had been conquered by the Venetians, things would have been different,” Echeverría says. “But here, they had to tame the swamps. They were wetlands, and they destroyed them.”

The area of the lake, which in 1521 covered 232 square miles, had fallen to 154 square miles by 1608. At the end of the 18th century, in José Antonio Alzate’s map, known as the Mapa de las Aguas (the Map of the Waters), the lakes in the Mexico basin are isolated, separated by vast tracts of land. By 1856, Lake Texcoco had shrunk to 135 square miles; at the beginning of the 20th century, it was only 103 square miles; and in the 1960s, all that was left was barely 62 square miles.

Ahead of the construction of the proposed airport, further modifications were made to the former wetlands. Nine rivers were diverted to the Dren General del Valle, a drainage channel, including the Papalotla, Coxcacoaco, and Texcoco rivers, while 16 hydraulic works were built to prevent water from reaching the new airport site. Almost 24 miles of tunnels were built to send water to the north of the Mexico Valley Basin. Between 60 and 80 hills in 15 municipalities were mined for gravel, increasing desertification, health impacts, and wind erosion in the region. In addition, the development ramped up pressure on the already threatened water security of the Valley of Mexico.

“Everything was arid and red,” explains Echeverría, “and I was surprised to see how much the area had changed. Places I knew from 20 years ago were completely altered or destroyed. I also felt a bit of disbelief at the damage that construction and engineering was capable of.”

But in March 2022, the land for the park was declared a Protected Natural Area, an important step in reversing the impact of these engineering works. To Echeverría, after many years of trying to kickstart the restoration of Lake Texacoco, it seemed as though the fortunes of the area had finally changed. “I had worked on the project for many years. I had mourned it and buried it, and then suddenly it was as if it had been resurrected. The lake refused to die and we were here to help it. It really is a very courageous step for the future of the Valley of Mexico. I felt incredibly excited to be able to take up the lake again.”

Echeverría’s resolve would define the project. “I’d rather have someone come along now and say that while we haven’t solved the accessibility issue, there’s somewhere to go,” he says. In a megacity with tens of millions of people commuting every day, restoring the valley’s watershed, providing green spaces for residents, and mitigating climate change is no small feat.

Debate surrounding the canceled airport can blind people to the park’s true potential, Echeverría says. “This intervention and the protection of this area keep alive an opportunity for a viable future for the Valley of Mexico. That is the most important aspect of the project, in my opinion.”

I first visited the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park two years ago. Now, at the end of 2025, the water seems to be reclaiming its place. The rains of recent months have caused the land to flood and birds to repopulate the lakes and float on the blue-green waters, peeking out from the plants. Cyclists, skaters, and soccer players make use of the park.

The area is home to more than 60 percent of the bird diversity in the State of Mexico, including species like the Mexican duck (Anas diazi), and it’s a refuge for a large number of migratory birds, such as the snowy plover (Charadrius nivosus) and western sandpiper (Calidris mauri). It receives an annual average of 150,000 waterfowl and shorebirds that travel along the central flyway, a migratory route that runs down North America. Due to the abundance of birds found here, this wetland is designated as an Area of Importance for Bird Conservation in Mexico (AICA), and approximately 78 percent of the proposed Protected Natural Area is located within the AICA. Of the roughly 19,500 acres identified as priority areas for conservation, 65 percent received an even higher designation—as urgent priorities.

The park’s increasing green areas won’t benefit only birds—they’ll also regulate temperatures, lower health costs by mitigating particulate (PM 10) pollution, capture CO₂, raise biodiversity more generally, and establish better flood control. The site will be able to capture more than 1.4 million tons of carbon per year through its green and wooded areas. Environmental efforts such as grazing, reforestation, increasing protected green areas, and the recovery and remediation of water bodies will result in a reduction in bare soil, according to the National Commission for Protected Areas.

The area has also been designated as a Ramsar Site, recognizing it as a wetland of international importance. It is key to the regulation of water in the Valley of Mexico, benefiting millions of residents of the metropolitan area.

Echeverría is not seeking to restore the lake to its pristine state of 700 years ago. He is implementing what he calls “living engineering” or a “soft infrastructure,” a concept that merges design with engineering and prioritizes evolving strategies over rigid plans. “When your design is more of a strategy, it becomes flexible and therefore more resilient to uncertainty,” he says.

Instead of building the wetlands from scratch, Echeverría has reused portions of the abandoned airport and previous hydraulic projects. The method consists of letting nature do its work. Echeverría talks, for example, about the nine rivers that supply water to the area: “We reconnected them, which allowed two things to happen. One is that lagoons continue to form, and the other is that the water became cleaner and conditions improved.”

This work will allow the recovery of a number of important bodies of water located in the park, including the Ciénega de San Juan, the Xalapango and Texcoco Norte Lagunas, and Nabor Carrillo Lake. These are all essential for migratory birds, as well as local fish and frog species.

The philosophy behind Echeverría’s work wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was formed in New York, through the study of urban design via landscape design and observing how natural systems operate. His working methodology was also inspired by studying the work of theologian Raimon Panikkar, who focused on syncretism and the union of opposites.

For Echeverría, that was the key to a project that had been defined by conflict. “The issue of hybridization was what interested me most in all this. Because many mythological beings actually illustrate hybridization and the union of opposites,” he explains. “What I was trying to do was talk about opposites. About infrastructure and the city, but also about the countryside and the landscape. Different places and ideas that are always in dialectical opposition. I wasn’t interested in dialectics as a method, I was more interested in the idea of dialogue. That’s where a lot of my working methodology came from.”

The project is a rejection of the logic “that all this can be fixed with pipes,” as Echeverría characterizes some approaches to Mexico’s water drainage issues. He compares that approach to that of simply building more roads to solve traffic problems. “No matter how many roads you build, car dealers will always sell more cars, and they will fill them up.” In contrast, the park functions as a “buffer zone” that absorbs water to “give the drainage time to work,” without flooding the city. The architecture itself follows this philosophy of resilience. “We use precast concrete,” he explains, because “it allows for easier replacement work” and guarantees “a quality of work that is not easy to achieve when you have on-site production.”

For Echeverría, what has been achieved at Lake Texcoco has lessons for other depleted environments. The climate crisis—one of the greatest threats to ecosystems around the world—is not a death sentence, but rather a call for innovation. “The good news is that because we’ve done things so badly, there’s a lot of room for improvement,” he says. “This moment of crisis is the perfect moment for creative industries and for people with ideas. Anything goes and everything can be reimagined.”

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español. It was translated from Spanish by John Newton.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Wednesday 29 October 2025 at 6:19 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

Hurricane Melissa made landfall in southwestern Jamaica, near New Hope, on Tuesday at 1 pm ET with staggeringly powerful sustained winds of 185 mph.

In the National Hurricane Center update noting the precise landfall time and location, specialist Larry Kelly characterized Melissa as an “extremely dangerous and life-threatening” hurricane. Melissa is bringing very heavy rainfall, damaging surge, and destructive winds to the small Caribbean island that is home to about 3 million people.

The effects on the island are sure to be catastrophic and prolonged.

A record-breaking hurricane by any measure

By any measure, Melissa is an extraordinary and catastrophic storm.

By strengthening overnight and then maintaining its incredible intensity of 185 mph, Melissa has tied the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 as the most powerful hurricane to strike a landmass in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the United States, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands.

Melissa also tied the Labor Day storm, which struck the Florida Keys, as the most intense storm at landfall, measured by central pressure at 892 millibars.

Overall, Melissa is tied for the second strongest hurricane, measured by winds, ever observed in the Atlantic basin, behind only Hurricane Allen and its 190 mph winds in 1980. Only Hurricane Wilma (882 millibars) and Gilbert (888 millibars) have recorded lower pressures at sea.

Although it has started to move a little more quickly to the north, at 9 mph this morning, Melissa has been crawling across the northern Caribbean Sea for the last few days, lashing Jamaica and other Caribbean islands with strong surge and heavy rain. The only mitigating factor is that the storm’s strongest winds are blowing across a relatively confined area, about 20 miles across.

Hurricane hunter forced to abort flight

The storm was so strong that a Lockheed WC-130 aircraft, a hardy vehicle designed to fly into hurricanes, had its flight disrupted on Tuesday morning.

The hurricane hunter aircraft, operated by the US Air Force Reserve, encountered “heavy turbulence” upon entering the eye of Melissa. “During the event, the aircraft briefly experienced forces stronger than normal due to turbulence,” the Air Force Reserve stated. “While this does not automatically indicate damage, standard safety procedures require an inspection before returning to operations.”

Melissa will now accelerate to the north and then northeast along a track that will bring it over the eastern half of Cuba and then the Bahamas before potentially impacting Bermuda on Thursday. Although it will remain dangerous, the hurricane is expected to gradually weaken over this period.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Wednesday 29 October 2025 at 12:37 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

5:10 PM CDT Oct 28, 2025

JASPER COUNTY, Miss. —

All but one of the rhesus monkeys that escaped from an overturned truck in Jasper County were euthanized, according to officials.

"We have been in contact with an animal disposal company to help handle the situation," the Jasper County Sheriff's Office said. "Mississippi Wildlife and Fisheries is also on-site with our local law enforcement. We are continuing to look for the one monkey that is still on the loose."

The Jasper County Sheriff's Office said the truck was transporting the monkeys from Tulane University when it overturned on Tuesday, Oct. 28 on Interstate 59 near mile marker 117, north of Heidelberg. 

The monkeys, weighing approximately 40 pounds each, are aggressive toward humans and require personal protective equipment to handle. 

"Non-human primates at the Tulane National Biomedical Research Center are provided to other research organizations to advance scientific discovery. The primates in question belong to another entity and are not infectious. We are actively collaborating with local authorities and will send a team of animal care experts to assist as needed," Tulane University said in a statement.

Sheriff Randy Johnson said 21 monkeys were on the truck. Six of them escaped. Fifteen remained caged after the crash.

"The monkey that got away actually crossed interstate, went out into a wooded area," Johnson told ABC News.

The Jasper County Sheriff's Office originally said the monkeys carried hepatitis C, herpes and COVID. Tulane officials stressed that the animals were not diseased or infectious.

Source : https://www.wapt.com/article/monkeys-on-the-loose-near-heidelberg-mississippi/69181629

Meteorologists who have spent the past few days monitoring the rapid development of Hurricane Melissa in the Atlantic Ocean are sounding the alarm about the storm, which is set to make landfall in Jamaica today as a Category 5 hurricane. The sustained—and growing—intensity of the storm is remarkable, experts say, and has the makings of a historic hurricane.

“When I look at the cloud pattern, I will tell you as a meteorologist and professional—and a person—it is beautiful, but it is terrifying,” says Sean Sublette, a meteorologist based in Virginia. “I know what is underneath those clouds.”

There are a few ways to measure the strength of hurricanes. One is by air pressure: the lower the pressure, the stronger the storm. Early Tuesday morning, as it approached Jamaica, Melissa was measuring a minimum pressure of 901 millibars (mb)—lower than Hurricane Katrina’s peak low pressure of 902 mb and the lowest pressure ever recorded in a hurricane this late in the year, according to Colorado State University meteorologist Philip Klotzbach.

Incredibly, as of Tuesday morning, Melissa wasn’t done intensifying. At noon EDT, the National Weather Service posted an update measuring the storm’s pressure at 892 mb. If it makes landfall at this pressure, it would be tied with the catastrophic 1935 Labor Day hurricane, which hit Florida, as the most intense hurricane by pressure to make landfall.

“That record’s been in place for 90 years now,” says Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. “It would be a pretty big deal if that fell.”

The pressure dropping so much as a hurricane approaches land—especially around elevated ground—is “really remarkable,” McNoldy says. “Normally it would start to feel a mountainous island, like Jamaica, and it would kind of interrupt it a little and start to weaken it. But it’s actually still intensifying right now.”

A second way of measuring hurricanes is by wind speed; Melissa has also startled meteorologists with its strength here, as well as the speed at which it intensified. Wind speeds inside Melissa measured just 70 mph on Saturday as the storm formed in the Atlantic basin, lower than the 74 mph of the mildest Category 1 storms. Just 24 hours later, however, they had jumped to 140 mph—Category 4 strength. Melissa’s winds kept intensifying through Monday and Tuesday. As of 10 am Tuesday, it had maximum sustained winds of 185 mph.

“It’s extremely rare to have a storm rapidly intensify when it’s already really intense,” says McNoldy. “You usually see rapid intensification happen when it’s a tropical storm or a Category 1, 2 hurricane. That’s when it is very common to happen. But not when it’s already at the upper end of intensity.”

Melissa started forming last week, moving from the coast of West Africa over unusually warm ocean waters. Hurricanes can’t move on their own—they travel across the ocean thanks to ocean currents, winds, and other atmospheric factors—and some, like Melissa, stall for a period of time. Usually, hurricanes that stall over water for a longer period churn up deeper, colder ocean waters, which weakens them. However, the deeper waters in the Caribbean are much warmer than the rest of the Atlantic, which supercharged the storm on its way to Jamaica.

“The ability for Melissa to lock into the deep warm water of the Caribbean and maintain such a high level of intensity for so long while moving so slow is astounding,” says Matt Lanza, a certified digital meteorologist based in Houston. “It’s not something we see very often.”

Michael Fischer, an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School, says Melissa’s strong, sustained eye—the low-pressure center of the storm—is also remarkable. Strong hurricanes, Fischer says, can often undergo a natural process called an eyewall replacement cycle, where a secondary eye will form, choking off some of the air going into the first eyewall and temporarily weakening a storm. Radar observations and data from flights near Melissa, however, show no sign of this process occurring.

“We haven’t seen any clear evidence of this kind of traditional eyewall replacement cycle,” says Fischer. “I think that’s kind of unusual for a storm of this intensity.”

Melissa is the third Category 5 storm to form in the Atlantic this season—the first time this has happened since the deadly 2005 season, which brought Hurricanes Emily, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Sublette says that Katrina, which weakened slightly before making landfall as a Category 3, is not the correct comparison for how this storm could hit Jamaica today. Rather, he compares the potential impact of Melissa to 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 5 storm with 165 mph wind speeds—still far slower than Melissa was on Tuesday morning. Andrew is one of the most catastrophic storms to hit the US, causing 65 deaths and costing more than $27 billion in damage in 1992 dollars.

Once the storm hits Jamaica, Sublette says, he worries about what will happen when it interacts with the island’s mountains. “The wind is gonna be even higher” in the mountains, he says. “The rainfall is gonna be worse. There are going to be landslides—that’s not something we had in New Orleans or Miami.”

McNoldy is careful to point out that climate change does not cause specific storms to form, but merely ups the odds of them being more intense. But there’s no doubt that ocean waters have warmed in the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina and that those warm waters helped strengthen Melissa.

“I think that the fact that the Caribbean is so warm relative to normal has played a big role here,” says Lanza. “It makes you wonder if this is going to become a new normal going forward when we get storms like this.”

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Wednesday 29 October 2025 at 3:47 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

Apple and Microsoft are now both worth more than $4 trillion each.

This is the first time Apple’s market capitalization has crossed the $4 trillion mark, making it the third company to ever cross the milestone, after Nvidia and Microsoft. Redmond first crossed the mark in July, but its valuation then dropped slightly to $3.9 trillion, before returning to $4 trillion on Tuesday on the back of news that it had signed a new agreement with OpenAI.

Apple’s growth has been impressive: it reached $1 trillion in 2018, $2 trillion in 2020, and $3 trillion in 2022. Apple’s stock has soared following the launch of the iPhone 17 range, which seem to be outselling previous versions. The company is set to report its Q4 2025 results on Thursday, October 30.

Microsoft has also been thriving, thanks to demand for its Azure cloud service, which offers OpenAI’s large language models as well as the computing power needed to train AI models. The company said on Tuesday that its roughly 27% stake in OpenAI was valued at about $135 billion. The tech giant reports its quarterly results on Wednesday.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is getting close to the $4 trillion milestone, too: it’s currently trading at a market capitalization of $3.25 trillion.

Source

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital have removed a genetically engineered pig kidney from a 67-year-old New Hampshire man after a period of decreasing kidney function, the hospital confirmed to WIRED in a statement. The organ functioned for nearly nine months, longer than previous pig organ transplants, before it was removed on October 23.

Tim Andrews received the pig kidney on January 25 after being on dialysis for more than two years due to end-stage kidney disease. His rare blood type meant that he faced a much longer wait time for a human donor kidney than most patients, who already wait on average three to five years for a kidney.

The shortage of human donors has pushed scientists to look to animals as a potential source of organs. Kidneys are the most in demand, with nearly 90,000 people waiting to receive one in the US alone. Due to the shortage of organs, the US performed just 28,000 kidney transplants in 2024.

Pig organs are being explored as an option, though genetic differences between pigs and humans mean they would be swiftly rejected if they were transplanted into a person. Scientists have therefore turned to gene editing to make pig organs more compatible with the human body, and have so far carried out a handful of experimental transplants.

Andrews was the fourth person in the world to receive a kidney from a genetically engineered donor pig. The first, Richard Slayman, whose surgery was also performed at Massachusetts General, died in May 2024 almost two months after his transplant. A second person, Lisa Pisano, had a combined pig kidney transplant and heart pump surgery at NYU Langone Health, but had the kidney removed in May 2024 after less than two months due to failure. Pisano later passed away. Towana Looney became the third pig kidney recipient, again at NYU Langone, and lived with the organ for more than four months before surgeons removed it in April this year due to organ rejection.

Since Andrews’ surgery, a patient in China has received an edited pig kidney, and surgeons at Massachusetts General have transplanted one into another patient, 54-year-old Bill Stewart, bringing the total number of people known to have received pig kidneys to six.

Before the pig kidney transplants, two patients received genetically engineered pig hearts at the University of Maryland in 2022 and 2023 but never became healthy enough to leave the hospital. They both died within two months of their procedures.

Andrews was discharged on February 1, and his pig kidney functioned as expected for several months. In July, Leonardo Riella, medical director for kidney transplantation at Mass General, told WIRED that Andrews’ kidney was doing well after showing signs of cellular rejection two weeks following the transplant. Riella and his team were able to successfully treat that rejection to keep his kidney functioning.

Riella said Andrews was on four immunosuppressant medicines to prevent further rejection, which can happen at any point after a transplant. “Off and on, we have had to adjust his medications. It’s definitely more intense than a regular human transplant,” Riella told WIRED at the time.

Andrews’ kidney was provided by biotech company eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from a pig donor that was genetically edited using Crispr technology to remove harmful pig genes and add certain human genes. In all, the eGenesis pigs have 69 edits.

For Pisano’s procedure, the NYU team used a donor pig from Revivicor, a subsidiary of Maryland-based United Therapeutics, with a single genetic edit. The donor pig used for Looney’s procedure was also from Revivicor but had 10 gene edits. The number of edits needed to keep pig organs functioning in the human body is something that scientists are actively debating.

Andrews will now resume dialysis and remain on the list for a human donor kidney, according to Mass General.

Though the kidney ultimately failed, eGenesis considers the transplant a success. “The life-supporting function provided by the donor organ highlights the possibilities for patients around the world who are desperately waiting for a transplant,” the company said in a statement provided to WIRED. “Cross-species transplantation has been a goal for centuries that has only recently become possible due to decades of research and the convergence of enabling technologies.”

The hospital plans to carry out another genetically edited pig kidney transplant before the end of the year.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 28 October 2025 at 12:54 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

With the milestone just days away, you are likely to hear this week that there has now been a continuous human presence on the International Space Station (ISS) for the past 25 years. But what does that quarter of a century actually encompass?

If only there was a way to see, hear, and experience each of those 9,131 days.

Fortunately, the astronauts and cosmonauts on the space station have devoted some of their work time and a lot of their free time to taking photos, filming videos, and calling down to Earth. Much of that data has been made available to the public, but in separate repositories, with no real way to correlate or connect it with the timeline on which it was all created.

That is, not until now. Two NASA contractors, working only during their off hours, have built a portal into all of those resources to uniquely represent the 25-year history of ISS occupancy.

ISS in Real Time, by Ben Feist and David Charney, went live on Monday (October 27), ahead of the November 2 anniversary. In its own way, the new website may be as impressive a software engineering accomplishment as the station is an aerospace engineering marvel.

ISS in Real Time – Overview

Scraping space station data

“Everything that is on the website was already public. It’s already on another website somewhere, with some of it tucked away in some format or another. What we did was a lot of scraping of that data, to get it pulled into the context of every day on the space station,” said Feist in an interview with collectSPACE.com.

As an info box on the front page of ISS in Real Time tallies, at its debut the site contained mission data for 9,064 days out of the 9,131 (99.32 percent coverage); 4,739 days with full space-to-ground audio coverage; 4,561,987 space-to-ground comm calls in 69 languages; 6,931,369 photos taken in space over 8,525 days; 10,908 articles across 7,711 days; and 930 videos across 712 days.

Or, to put it another way, particularly appropriate for the history it spans, had this project relied only on the technology that existed when Expedition 1 began, the data archive would fill 3,846 CD-ROMs.

And they did all this in a period of about 11 months, but only in the hours when they were not at work writing software (Feist) or designing user interfaces (Charney) for Mission Control, the EVA (Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk) Office, or other communities supporting the ISS and Artemis programs at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“Being inside NASA actually didn’t help at all,” said Feist. “If you’re inside NASA and you want to use data, you have to make sure that it’s public data. And because there’s this concept in the government of export control, you have to never, ever make the mistake of publishing an image or something else that you found somewhere else without knowing if it’s already public.”

“So even though we were at NASA, what we had to do was pretend we weren’t there and find the data anywhere we could find it in the public already,” he said.

As it turned out, that worked fairly well for days beginning in 2008 and onward. ISS occupancy, however, pre-dates a lot of the multimedia archives we take for granted today.

“This was the problem,” said Feist. “If stuff was released publicly back then, it was done to media on tape. There was no such thing as streaming video in 2000—YouTube wasn’t invented until 2005. So there’s just no way to go back in time on the Internet and go find the treasure trove that we know exists internally. We know NASA has full days archived on tape, but it just hasn’t been exported yet.”

Even after the change to digital photography and video, there still remained the challenge of linking each file to the day, hour, minute, and second that it was captured. For example, while the Internet Archive has been a tremendous source for the project, only sometimes do the videos it holds include the unique identifier that is needed to determine when the video was taken.

In other situations, Feist turned to artificial intelligence to sort through the tens of thousands of files to learn if they were appropriate for inclusion.

“We know that NASA publishes all of its PAO [public affairs office] photos to Flickr. Right now, there are about 80,000 photos in just the Johnson Space Center collection on Flickr alone. So we scraped those, and then I wrote an AI process as part of the pipeline to figure out which of those photos were flight photos and which of them were ground photos, so that we only show flight photos,” he said.

Visualizing 25 years

As Feist was figuring out how to import all the data, Charney was figuring out how the public would access it all.

This is not the first project of its type that Feist and Charney have brought online. In 2019, they introduced Apollo 11 in Real Time, which did for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing what ISS in Real Time does for the 25 years of human occupancy. Apollo 13 and Apollo 17 sites followed (and more Apollo missions are still to come, Feist and Charney say).

They also built a version of ISS in Real Time for NASA, called Coda, which has been in use internally at the space agency for the past four years.

Even with all of that as a foundation, designing the user interface for ISS in Real Time required Charney to wrap his head around all of the different ways people would be using the site.

“The entire site is an experience,” Charney told collectSPACE. “Just the idea that we could visualize 25 years of what went on, or that we even have every day over the past 25 years in here, is something we wanted to explore and feel the data throughout those 25 years.”

One of the questions was what users would find if they picked a day when no data is available. How could they still make it interesting and still play as though you were in Mission Control?

“Some days have all of the media available—video and tons of photos. And then there are other days where there is no data. There are a lot of days that have at least a photo, but for others, we found there are a lot of great articles we could use so that even on a day that doesn’t have a lot of media, there is some interesting information you can access,” said Charney.

Through Charney’s design, in addition to the data coming from the space station, users can also see where the ISS was in its orbit over Earth, which astronauts were aboard the station, and what spacecraft were docked at any given moment. Visitors can also access transcripts of the space-to-ground comm audio, including translations when the discussion is not in English.

Feist and Charney plan to continue to build out the site and add more data as it is released by NASA, so it remains as close to as “in real time” as possible. They also have ideas for other data sets they could add, including the archived and live telemetry that provide the status of systems and conditions aboard the ISS.

Ultimately, it is the longevity of ISS in Real Time that sets it apart, they said.

“One thing that’s cool about this is you can go to the first day that the Expedition One crew was aboard and let it play. It will then play all the way through that day’s timeline and go to the next day, and then play all the way through that timeline and go to the next day,” said Charney. “So if you start on November 2 and have 25 years to go, the space station, as currently planned, will likely have long met its end before you reach the end.”

“So this might be the longest interactive experience ever built,” said Feist.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 28 October 2025 at 12:51 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

Hurricane Melissa will make landfall in southern Jamaica less than 24 hours from now, and it is likely to be the most catastrophic storm in the Caribbean island’s history.

As it crawled across the northern Caribbean Sea on Monday morning, Melissa officially became a Category 5 hurricane with 160 mph winds, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The hurricane will likely fluctuate in intensity over the next day or so, perhaps undergoing an eyewall replacement cycle. But the background conditions, including very warm Caribbean waters and low wind shear, will support a very powerful hurricane and the potential for further strengthening.

Strongest Jamaican hurricane

This means that Melissa will almost certainly be the strongest tropical system to strike Jamaica in more than 150 years of records, eclipsing Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, which struck the island as a Category 3 storm and caused 45 deaths.

The island, the third largest in the Caribbean by area and with a population of more than 3 million people, has had plenty of advance warning about the threat of Melissa. Forecasts have generally indicated that the island would be in the storm’s crosshairs and that rapid intensification was likely over the weekend.

Official track forecast for Hurricane Melissa on Monday morning.

Credit: National Hurricane Center

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to prepare for a hurricane like this. Melissa has already brought waves of heavy rainfall to Jamaica, and before it exits to the north on Tuesday night, some locations are likely to see in excess of 40 inches. That will cause significant mudslides in the country. The storm’s winds will destroy buildings and power lines, and its surge will inundate coastal areas.

The sole bright spot is that, as of Monday, the core of the storm’s strongest winds remains fairly small. Based on recent data, its hurricane-force winds only extend about 25 miles from the center. Unfortunately, Melissa will make a direct hit on Jamaica, with the island’s capital city of Kingston to the right of the center, where winds and surge will be greatest.

Beyond Jamaica, Melissa will likely be one of the strongest hurricanes on record to hit Cuba. Melissa will impact the eastern half of the island on Tuesday night, bringing the trifecta of heavy rainfall, damaging winds, and storm surge. The storm also poses lesser threats to Hispaniola, the Bahamas, and potentially Bermuda down the line. There will be no impacts in the United States.

A sneakily strong season

Most US coastal residents will consider this Atlantic season, which officially ends in a little more than a month, to be fairly quiet. There have been relatively few direct impacts to the United States from named storms.

One can see the signatures of Erin, Humberto, and Melissa in this chart of Accumulated Cyclone Energy for 2025.

Credit: CyclonicWx.com

But this season has been sneakily strong. Melissa is just the 45th storm since 1851 to reach Category 5 status, as defined as having sustained winds of 157 mph or greater. Already this year, Erin and Humberto reached Category 5 status, and now Melissa is the third such hurricane. Fortunately, the former two storms posed minimal threat to land.

Before this year, there had only ever been one season with three Category 5 hurricanes on record: 2005, which featured three storms that all impacted US Gulf states and had their names retired, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 28 October 2025 at 3:37 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

Mexico City is one of the more unusual places that Formula 1 races, and it’s all thanks to altitude. The city sits at than 7,350 feet (2,240 m) above sea level, which makes the air noticeably thin compared to the average Grand Prix held at sea level. Like humans, F1 cars need air.

Oxygen is necessary if you want any internal combustion to happen inside the turbocharged 1.6 L V6 engine. A good flow of air across the various radiators and heat exchangers in the car is vital if you want to make it to the end of the race. And the downforce-generating wings and underbody only generate downforce by creating differences in air pressure above and below the car.

At over a mile above sea level, there’s about 20 percent less air, and therefore less power created by combustion, less efficient cooling of the cars, and less downforce able to be generated.

That’s why, despite a very long straight that sees F1 cars reach some of their highest speeds all year—well over 210 mph (337 km/h)—the cars feature Monaco-spec wings that generate as much downforce as possible. Mexico City-spec adds lots of new vents and louvres to the cars’ bodywork as well as the high downforce elements, and even so, engine problems are a little more common here than elsewhere due to thermal management.

Lap 1, turn 1: chaos.

Mark Thompson/Getty Images

 

The first of Verstappen's excursions across the grass happened at turn 1 at the start.

YURI CORTEZ/AFP via Getty Images

 

Hamilton looked much faster in the Ferrari this weekend, at least until he was penalized for not rejoining the 

track properly after a clash with Verstappen's Red Bull.

Bryn Lennon - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

 

The Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez circuit stands out in another way, too: It’s the only one with a baseball stadium dropped in the middle of it. The stadium is no longer used for the bat-and-ball sport, but it fills up for F1 with up to 40,000 fans, even if they don’t have the most exciting array of corners to watch.

New championship leader

It’s been 13 years since the last time F1 saw a change in the championship lead so late in the season, but that’s just what happened this weekend. McLaren’s Lando Norris had the measure of everyone in qualifying to secure pole position. And even with the 2,723-foot (830-m) run to turn 1, which positively encourages slipstreaming, he was well in the lead at the start and remained there for 71 laps, finishing just over half a minute ahead of everyone else.

Doing so vaulted him past his teammate Oscar Piastri to regain the lead Norris held in the early part of the season, albeit by just a single point. But if that makes it sound like it was a boring race, think again.

Behind Norris, the chasing pack went into turn 1 four-wide. Both Ferraris were in the mix: Charles Leclerc qualified second, and his teammate Lewis Hamilton was third. Max Verstappen could qualify his Red Bull no higher than fifth, behind George Russell’s Mercedes. A number of drivers had to take to the grass at turn 1 to avoid crashing, giving Norris plenty of breathing room to build a lead.

Behind him, things were a little more interesting. Leclerc managed to keep second place, but with much less speed than Norris, a following pack formed behind him. By lap 7, Verstappen had managed to fight his way past Russell, then diced with Hamilton, his old foe from the 2021 title. Neither car was able to keep entirely to the track, and Hamilton was handed a 10-second penalty, putting an end to any thoughts of finally grabbing his first Ferrari podium finish. Eventually, he finished eighth.

The stadium section doesn't have the best sequence of corners, but there are few places to get a good a view of the cars.

Peter Fox/Getty Images

 

Oliver Bearman equalled Haas' best ever finish with fourth place.

Hector Vivas/Getty Images

 

Piastri has seven wins to Norris' six, but he's also been struggling for good results over the last few events.

ALFREDO ESTRELLA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

 

Norris, Leclerc, and Verstappen all stuck to a one-stop strategy, with the Red Bull driver starting on medium tires and then swapping to the softs; his rivals did the opposite. Verstappen was in a much stronger position in the final phase of the race, with newer, softer rubber than the Ferrari ahead. But although he closed the gap to fractions of a second, he was denied a chance to overtake Leclerc when a virtual safety car interrupted the race with just three laps to go.

With his third place, Verstappen is now 36 points behind championship leader Norris, with a total of 116 points left on offer for the season.

Fourth went to the Haas of Oliver Bearman, who saw a chance early on to get into the front-running pack but was unable to hold off Verstappen for the final podium spot toward the end of the race. As for Piastri, he was able to claw his way back to fifth after starting eighth. That earned him 10 points, so he only gave away five to Verstappen, although Norris now leads him by 357 points to 356.

The next race will be in Brazil on November 9.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 28 October 2025 at 3:35 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

For millennia, some of the world’s largest filter-feeding whales, including humpbacks, fin whales, and blue whales, have undertaken some of the longest migrations on earth to travel between their warm breeding grounds in the tropics to nutrient-rich feeding destinations in the poles each year.

“Nature has finely tuned these journeys, guided by memory and environmental cues that tell whales when to move and where to go,” said Trisha Atwood, an ecologist and associate professor at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. But, she said, climate change is “scrambling these signals,” forcing the marine mammals to veer off course. And they’re not alone.

Earlier this year, Atwood joined more than 70 other scientists to discuss the global impacts of climate change on migratory species in a workshop convened by the United Nations Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. The organization monitors and protects more than 1,000 species that cross borders in search of food, mates, and favorable conditions to nurture their offspring.

More than 20 percent of these species are on the brink of extinction. It was the first time the convention had gathered for such a purpose, and their findings, published this month in a report, were alarming.

“Almost no migratory species is untouched by climate change,” Atwood said in an email to Inside Climate News.

From whales and dolphins, to arctic shorebirds and elephants, all are affected by rising temperatures, extreme weather, and shifting ecosystems, which are disrupting migratory routes and reshaping critical habitats across the planet.

Asian elephants, for instance, are being driven to higher ground and closer to human settlements as they search for food and water amidst intensifying droughts, fueling more frequent human-elephant conflicts, the report found. Shorebirds are reaching their Arctic breeding grounds out of sync with the insect blooms their chicks depend on to survive.

The seagrass meadows that migrating sea turtles and dugongs feed on are disappearing due to warmer waters, cyclones, and sea level rise, according to the report. To date, around 30 percent of the world’s known seagrass beds have been lost, threatening not only the animals that depend on them, but also humans. These vital ecosystems store around 20 percent of the world’s oceanic carbon, in addition to supporting fisheries and protecting coastlines.

Together, these examples reveal how climate change is tipping the delicate balance migratory species have long relied on to survive.

“Climate change is disrupting this balance by altering when and where resources appear, how abundant they are, the environmental conditions species must endure, and the other organisms they interact with, reshaping entire networks of predators and competitors,” Atwood said.

Especially among marine life.

On the United States’ West Coast, for instance, Atwood said, warming waters are pushing juvenile great white sharks out of their traditional southern habitats. This shift has led to a sharp rise in sea otter deaths in Monterey Bay, California, where they are increasingly getting bitten by the sharks.

Whales and dolphins are particularly vulnerable species as rising temperatures threaten both their prey and their habitat, according to the report.

Heatwaves in the Mediterranean are projected to reduce suitable habitat for endangered fin whales by up to 70 percent by mid-century as their prey dwindles or moves due to rising temperatures. In some places, such as the Northern Adriatic Sea, hotter temperatures may eventually prove intolerable for bottlenose dolphins. “Rising water temperatures could exceed the species’ physiological tolerance,” the report says, which also acknowledges that this is already happening in other parts of the world, such as the Amazon River.

In 2023, more than 200 river dolphins, which migrate seasonally between tributaries and lagoons in the Amazon, died due to record-high temperatures, along with much of their prey. In some areas, their shallow aquatic habitats exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “The river systems were unusually empty and dry and the animals got isolated,” said Mark Simmonds, scientific councilor for marine pollution for the U.N. convention, who led some of the discussions around climate change impacts on cetaceans at the workshop in February. “They lost the water that they would have been living in.”

Loss of prey in traditional habitats is of particular concern for migrating marine mammals that are forced to follow their prey into new, and sometimes more perilous, waters.

This is particularly evident in the case of critically endangered North Atlantic Right whales, which the report says are especially prone to ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear as they pursue their prey—tiny crustaceans called copepods—which are moving toward cooler waters. There are fewer than 400 of the whales left.

The North Pacific humpback whales that feed off the coast of California are also at risk.

According to the report, these whales have experienced significant changes in their migratory routes due to climate-driven shifts, which has resulted in many getting entangled in dungeness crab fishing gear.

While it is not completely clear what is driving these shifts, Ari Friedlaender, an ecologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who monitors whale migrations and did not attend the convention’s workshop, said it could be that changing ocean conditions may be pushing the whales’ prey closer to shore.

“The timing of when these animals migrate now puts them in overlap with that fishery, whereas [previously] they would have migrated through that same area, but at a different time of year,” he said.

In some places, such as the Southern Ocean, Freidlaender said he is especially concerned about the overall availability of prey needed to sustain the whales that feed there. “The food is limited in Antarctica.”

Ideally, migrating whales arrive at their polar feeding grounds right around the same time that krill, their preferred prey, are swarming in massive aggregations in response to phytoplankton blooms, which the little creatures feed on. This synchronicity allows the whales to gorge for several months while building the fat reserves they need to survive long stretches of time that they will go without food as they migrate back to their breeding grounds to mate and calve. But warmer temperatures and melting sea ice are disrupting these cycles.

Krill blooms in polar regions are weakening, peaking earlier, or failing to materialize altogether, Atwood said.“Increasingly, whales reach their feeding grounds to find krill stocks depleted.” This, in turn, forces the whales to travel even greater distances in search of sustenance. But it doesn’t always mean they find it.

“There may not even be an opportunity to go to a place where there is more food,” said Friedlaender.

Krill thrive in icy environments. They graze on algae growing on the underbelly of sea ice, which also provides a nursery-like environment for krill larvae to grow safely without being preyed upon. But as this sea ice disappears, some krill are leaving their traditional habitats and moving towards colder waters. Others are vanishing altogether. In some years, where there’s less sea ice, Friedlaender said, “There’s just not enough food around.”

As a result, it’s becoming more common to see some of the world’s largest whales, including humpbacks, showing up in tropical breeding grounds “looking very skinny,” Simmonds said.

This can have significant repercussions on their health, Friedlaender said, including their ability to reproduce. “It could have those sort of cascading impacts of really changing the dynamics of how that population grows.”

To conserve whales and other migratory marine life, Friedlaender said, static protections such as implementing marine protected areas are not enough. Instead, he said, dynamic management strategies must be created and implemented that help protect the animals as they move, such as real-time monitoring of whale movements, shifting shipping lanes or requiring vessel speed limits when whales are present, as well as stricter fishing regulations in key habitats. Ongoing research into how climate change is reshaping animal migrations around the world is also critical, Atwood said, not only to safeguard the species themselves but to protect the ecosystems they help sustain.

“Because these animals are so uniquely adapted to move across huge swaths of land and oceans, oblivious to political borders, the solutions must be just as dynamic, far-reaching, and borderless,” she said. “Effective responses therefore require an integrated understanding of projected climatic and habitat changes, species’ ecologies and behavioral responses, and mechanisms for fostering international cooperation.”

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 26 October 2025 at 4:42 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

One of the things that emerging diseases, including the COVID and Zika pandemics, have taught us is that it’s tough to keep up with infectious diseases in the modern world. Things like air travel can allow a virus to spread faster than our ability to develop therapies. But that doesn’t mean biotech has stood still; companies have been developing technologies that could allow us to rapidly respond to future threats.

There are a lot of ideas out there. But this week saw some early clinical trial results of one technique that could be useful for a range of infectious diseases. We’ll go over the results as a way to illustrate the sort of thinking that’s going on, along with the technologies we have available to pursue the resulting ideas.

The best antibodies

Any emerging disease leaves a mass of antibodies in its wake—those made by people in response to infections and vaccines, those made by lab animals we use to study the infectious agent, and so on. Some of these only have a weak affinity for the disease-causing agent, but some of them turn out to be what are called “broadly neutralizing.” These stick with high affinity not only to the original pathogen, but most or all of its variants, and possibly some related viruses.

Once an antibody latches on to a pathogen, broadly neutralizing antibodies inactivate it (as their name implies). This is typically because these antibodies bind to a site that’s necessary for a protein’s function. For example, broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV bind to the proteins that help this virus enter immune cells.

Unfortunately, not everyone develops broadly neutralizing antibodies, and certainly doesn’t do so in time to prevent infections. And we haven’t figured out a way of designing vaccinations that ensure their generation. So we’re often found ourselves stuck with knowing what antibodies we’d like to see people making while having no way of ensuring that they do.

One of the options we’ve developed is to just mass-produce broadly neutralizing antibodies and inject them into people. This has been approved for use against Ebola and provided an early treatment during the COVID pandemic. This approach has some practical limitations, though. For starters, the antibodies have a finite life span in the bloodstream, so injections may need to be repeated. In addition, making and purifying enough antibodies in bulk isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and they generally need to be kept refrigerated during the distribution, limiting the areas where they can be used.

So, a number of companies have been looking at an alternative: getting people to make their own. This could potentially lead to longer-lived protection, even ensuring the antibodies are present to block future infections if the DNA survives long enough.

Genes and volts

Once you identify cells that produce broadly neutralizing antibodies, it’s relatively simple to clone those genes and put them into a chunk of DNA that will ensure that they’ll be produced by any human cell. If we could get that DNA into a person’s cells, broadly neutralizing antibodies are the result. And a number of approaches have been tried to handle that “if.” Most of them have inserted the genes needed to make the antibodies into a harmless, non-infectious virus, and then injected that virus into volunteers. Unfortunately, these viruses have tended to set off a separate immune response, which causes more significant side effects and may limit how often this approach can be used.

This brings us to the technique being used here. In this case, the researchers placed the antibody genes in a circular loop of DNA called a plasmid. This is enough to ensure that the DNA doesn’t get digested immediately and to get the antibody genes made into proteins. But it does nothing to help get the DNA inside of cells.

The research team, a mixture of people from a biotech company and academic labs, used a commercial injection setup that mixes the injection of the DNA with short pulses of electricity. The electricity disrupts the cell membrane, allowing the plasmid DNA to make it inside cells. Based on animal testing, doing this in muscle cells is enough to turn the muscles into factories producing lots of broadly neutralizing antibodies.

The new study was meant to test the safety of doing that in humans. The team recruited 44 participants, testing various doses of two antibody-producing plasmids and injection schedules. All but four of the subjects completed the study; three of those who dropped out had all been testing a routine with the electric pulses happening very quickly, which turned out to be unpleasant. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to make any difference to the production of antibodies.

While there were a lot of adverse reactions, most of these were associated with the injection itself: muscle pain at the site, a scab forming afterward, and a reddening of the skin. The worst problem appeared to be a single case of moderate muscle pain that persisted for a couple of days.

In all but one volunteer, the injection resulted in stable production of the two antibodies for at least 72 weeks following the injection; the single exception only made one of the two. That’s “at least” 72 weeks because that’s when they stopped testing—there was no indication that levels were dropping at this point. Injecting more DNA led to more variability in the amount of antibody produced, but that amount quickly maxed out. More total injections also boosted the level of antibody production. But even the minimal procedure—two injections of the lowest concentration tested—resulted in significant and stable antibodies.

And, as expected, these antibodies blocked the virus they were directed against: SARS-CoV-2.

The caveats

This approach seems to work—we can seemingly get anybody to make broadly neutralizing antibodies for months at a time. What’s the hitch? For starters, this isn’t necessarily great for a rapidly emerging pandemic. It takes a while to identify broadly neutralizing antibodies after a pathogen is identified. And, while it’s simple to ship DNA around the world to where it will be needed, injection setups that also produce the small electric pulses are not exactly standard equipment even in industrialized countries, much less the Global South.

Then there’s the issue of whether this really is a longer-term fix. Widespread use of broadly neutralizing antibodies will create a strong selective pressure for the evolution of variants that the antibody can no longer bind to. That may not always be a problem—broadly neutralizing antibodies generally bind to parts of proteins that are absolutely essential for the proteins’ function, and so it may not be possible to change those while maintaining the function. But that’s unlikely to always be the case.

In the end, however, social acceptance may end up being the biggest problem. People had an utter freakout over unfounded conspiracies that the RNA of COVID vaccines would somehow lead to permanent genetic changes. Presumably, having DNA that’s stable for months would be even harder for some segments of the public to swallow.

Nature Medicine, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41591-025-03969-0 (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 25 October 2025 at 5:57 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

The Earth has just added its seventh confirmed quasi-lunar moon. It is 2025 PN7, a small Apollo-type asteroid detected in August solely by its brightness, thanks to the Hawaiian Pan-STARRS 1 telescope.

After analyzing its trajectory, scientists concluded that the object maintains a 1:1 resonance with the Earth. In other words, it orbits the sun at the same time as our planet. From a distant perspective, this synchronicity makes it look as if the Earth is accompanied by a tiny asteroid—as if it had an additional moon.

Unlike the moon, quasi-lunar moons are not gravitationally bound to the Earth. They are ephemeral companions, in cosmological terms, following their own path around the sun. Only at certain times do they come close enough to appear bound. In the case of 2025 PN7, its minimum distance is 299,000 kilometers, while at its farthest point it can reach 17 million km. For comparison, the moon remains at an average distance of 384,000 km from Earth.

According to the article published in Research Notes of the AAS, the asteroid has been in a quasi-satellite phase since 1965, and is expected to remain so for 128 years. Some researchers estimate that 2025 PN7 will finally move away in 2083.

Why Does the Earth Have Quasi-Lunar Moons?

So far, seven bodies have been confirmed that appear to accompany the planet in its orbit. Astronomers believe that more may be discovered in the future. Earth is a natural reservoir of quasi-lunars because the Earth's orbit is similar to that of certain nearby objects that inhabit the so-called Arjuna group of asteroids, a population that has only recently begun to be studied in greater detail.

The Arjuna group does not form a ring like the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but comprises a legion of near-Earth rocks that orbit the sun on a similar path as our planet. Occasionally, some of these asteroids coincide with our trajectory and, depending on their orbital dynamics, are classified as quasi-lunar or mini moons.

The main difference between the two categories is that quasi-lunar moons orbit the sun together with the planet. Mini moons, on the other hand, do “go around” the Earth, but usually in a horseshoe-type orbital motion. In addition, mini moons appear for brief periods of weeks or months before they move on forever.

The seven known quasi-lunar moons belong to the Arjuna group and share a 1:1 resonance with the Earth's orbit. They are: 164207 Cardea, 277810, 2013 LX28, 2014 OL339, 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, 2023 FW13 and 2025 PN7.

The Pan-STARRS observatory has established itself as one of the leading detectors of near-Earth objects. Its list of findings includes quasi-lunar moons, comets, and even supernovae, thanks to a 1.4 billion-pixel digital camera, the largest of its kind in the world.

In astronomy, there are different ways to acquire a moon. Some planets, such as Jupiter or Saturn, capture bodies orbiting close to them. Others, like Earth, formed their satellites after collisions in the infancy of the solar system. In any case, the essential rule is clear: To qualify as a real-deal moon, a satellite must be permanently bound to the planet's gravity.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 25 October 2025 at 5:56 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

There are three species of bats that eat birds. We know that because we have found feathers and other avian remains in their feces. What we didn’t know was how exactly they hunt birds, which are quite a bit heavier, faster, and stronger than the insects bats usually dine on.

To find out, Elena Tena, a biologist at Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, and her colleagues attached ultra-light sensors to Nyctalus Iasiopterus, the largest bats in Europe. What they found was jaw-droppingly brutal.

Inconspicuous interceptors

Nyctalus Iasiopterus, otherwise known as greater noctule bats, have a wingspan of about 45 centimeters. They have reddish-brown or chestnut fur with a slightly paler underside, and usually weigh around 40 to 60 grams. Despite that minimal weight, they are the largest of the three bat species known to eat birds, so the key challenge in getting a glimpse into the way they hunt was finding sensors light enough to not impede the bats’ flight.

Cameras, which are the usual go-to sensor, were out of the question. “Bats hunt at night, so you’d need night vision cameras, which together with batteries are too heavy for a bat to carry. Our sensors had to weigh below 10 percent of the weight of the bat—four to six grams,” Tena explained.

Tena and her team explored several alternative approaches throughout the last decade, including watching the bats from the ground or using military-grade radars. But even then, catching the hunting bats red-handed remained impossible.

In recent years, the technology and miniaturization finally caught up with Tena’s needs, and the team found the right sensors for the job and attached them to 14 greater noctule bats over the course of two years. The tags used in the study weighed around four grams, could run for several hours, and registered sound, altitude, and acceleration. This gave Tena and her colleagues a detailed picture of the bats’ behavior in the night sky. The recordings included both ambient environmental sounds and the ultra-frequency bursts bats use for echolocation. Combining altitude with accelerometer readouts enabled scientists to trace the bats’ movements through all their fast-paced turns, dives, and maneuvers.

A study from 2000 hypothesized that greater noctule bats most likely attack birds at their roosts, where they’re most vulnerable. When Tena recovered the sensors and downloaded the data, she learned the bats did no such thing. Instead, they engaged the birds at high altitudes, like World War II interceptors attacking formations of bombers—think Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air drama. And it wasn’t pretty.

Aerial warfare

The Masters of the Air comparisons are justified in that the bats used similar tactics. But because they’re solitary hunters, they performed them individually, not in larger groups. Their attacks on birds, which the team later identified as European robins, began with the bats climbing very high—up to 1.2 kilometers into the night sky over Spain, where the study took place.

The bats then started diving down, issuing bursts of echolocation buzzes to find their prey and lock onto a single target. The pursuit was significantly longer than the roughly 10 seconds that other bat species need to catch significantly weaker and lighter insects. It took a half a minute to nearly three minutes from the beginning of the dive to the last registered distress calls of an unlucky bird. “They most likely kill the birds with a bite,” Tena said.

But even more surprising than the hunt itself was the way bats handled their prey after a successful attack. Tena’s team found severed avian wings on the ground beneath the location of the aerial battles between birds and bats. “That was another thing we learned,” Tena said. “Bats that managed to catch a bird did not land—their altitude did not change. They were consuming those birds mid-air.” Tena thinks the bats bite off the wings to reduce drag and the weight of the bird.

The bats were eating their catches in the sky, as evidenced by registered chewing sounds, which lasted for 23 minutes. “At this point, it is unclear why they don’t land to eat. They hunt at high altitudes, so perhaps the energy expenditure to land, eat, and climb back up again would be too high go through it,” Tena suggested. “Overall, the way they handle birds is quite similar to the way they handle insects.”

A comfortable niche

Tena thinks passerine birds flying at high altitudes at night are a food source that very few predators have managed to tap into. Falcons, which can also hunt migrating birds in flight, usually do so during the day. Nocturnal avian predators like owls, on the other hand, typically do not fly that high and hunt closer to the ground. Greater noctule bats can likely feed on night-flying passerine birds without any formidable competition.

Still, there are a few questions that remain unanswered. The first is how effective the bats are in targeting birds.

“We don’t have enough data to say what is their success rate,” Tena said. Most of the data her team collected focused on greater noctule bats doing something else they normally do: hunting insects. Attacks on birds were an exception rather than the norm for them. “We confirmed two cases of such attacks in our data. One was successful, the other one was not, so based on what we have, you could say they are 50 percent effective. But that’s hardly conclusive, and the truth is we don’t know,” Tena explained.

Another unknown is the extent to which the bats’ diet relies on birds, which are likely harder to catch than insects. “What we also want to investigate is anti-predator behavior in those birds. We know they can’t hear ultra-frequency sounds bats use for echolocation so perhaps they rely on listening for wing beats, but we can’t be sure,” Tena said.

For now, though, her team wants to focus on analyzing the data they already collected. “We published the portion about birds because it was the most impressive, but we also have huge amounts of data on bats hunting insects,” Tena explained.

Greater noctule bats are considered an endangered species in Spain, and understating their habitats and foraging behaviors, Tena thinks, should help inform future conservation efforts. “Still, at some point we want to tag the bats again, perhaps with even better sensors,” Tena said. “There’s a lot we are still missing for what’s happening above our heads.”

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adr2475

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 25 October 2025 at 4:29 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte led a disastrous military campaign into Moscow. The death toll was devastating: Out of some 615,000 men, only about 110,000 survivors returned. (Napoleon abandoned his army in early December to return home on a sled.) Roughly 100,000 of the casualties died in battle, while as many as 300,000 perished from a combination of the bitter cold of Russia’s notoriously harsh winter, starvation, and disease.

Scholars have debated precisely what kinds of diseases ravaged Napoleon’s troops. New DNA analysis of some soldiers’ remains has revealed the presence of two pathogens in particular, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. The first is Salmonella enterica, which causes paratyphoid fever; the second is Borrelia recurrentis, which is transmitted by body lice and causes relapsing fever. (A preprint of the paper appeared on bioaRxiv in July.)

“It’s very exciting to use a technology we have today to detect and diagnose something that was buried for 200 years,” said co-author Nicolás Rascovan of the Institut Pasteur. “Accessing the genomic data of the pathogens that circulated in historical populations helps us to understand how infectious diseases evolved, spread, and disappeared over time and to identify the social or environmental contexts that played a part in these developments. This information provides us with valuable insights to better understand and tackle infectious diseases today.”

Contemporary accounts, including personal memoirs, of the illnesses affecting Napoleon’s soldiers mention diarrhea, dysentery, fevers, pneumonia, jaundice, and especially typhus, commonly known at the time as camp fever. Evidence for the latter has been bolstered by research identifying body lice among soldiers’ remains—the primary vector for typhus—specifically, a 2006 DNA analysis of remains recovered in 2001 from a mass grave in Vilnius that found signs of the typhus pathogen R. prowazeklii and trench fever pathogen B. quintana, although the findings weren’t conclusive.  This was followed by a 2011 study that detected ancient DNA of the Anelloviridae family of viruses in a dental pulp sample recovered from Kalingrad.

State-of-the-art methodologies

Rascovan and his co-authors note in their paper that the 2006 study relied upon outdated PCR-based technologies for its DNA analysis. As for the virus family detected in the Kalingrad dental pulp, they argue that those viruses are both ubiquitous and usually asymptomatic in humans—and thus are unlikely to be the primary culprits for the diseases that wiped out the French army. So Rascovan’s team decided to use current state-of-the-art DNA methodologies to re-analyze a different set of remains of Napoleonic soldiers who died in Vilnius.

“In most ancient human remains, pathogen DNA is extremely fragmented and only present in very low quantities, which makes it very difficult to obtain whole genomes,” said Rascovan. “So we need methods capable of unambiguously identifying infectious agents from these weak signals, and sometimes even pinpointing lineages, to explore the pathogenic diversity of the past.”

An 1812 report from one of Napoleon’s physicians, J.R.L. de Kirckhoff, specifically noted typhus, dysentery, and diarrhea after the soldiers arrived in Vilnius, which he attributed to large barrels of salted beets the starving troops consumed, “greatly upsetting us and strongly irritating the intestinal tract.” Rascovan et al. note that such symptoms could accompany any number of conditions or diseases common to 19th-century Europe. “Even today, two centuries later, it would still be impossible to perform a differential diagnosis between typhus, typhoid, or paratyphoid fever based solely on the symptoms or the testimonies of survivors,” the authors wrote.

Over 3,200 individual remains, almost all men between the ages of 20 and 50, were excavated from the mass grave at Vilnius. Rascovan et al. focused on 13 teeth from 13 different individuals. To compensate for the degraded nature of the 200-year-old genome fragments, co-authors at the University of Tartu in Estonia helped develop a multistep authentication method to more accurately identify pathogens in the samples. In some cases, they were even able to identify a specific lineage.

Four teeth tested positive for S. enterica and B. recurrentis, providing the first direct genetic evidence of two infectious agents that had not previously featured heavily in the scientific conversations about the likely diseases afflicting Napoleon’s 1812 army. Conspicuously lacking was any sign of R. prowazeklii or B. quintana, contradicting the 2006 study.

However, given the small sample size,  the authors note that this does not completely rule out the presence of typhus and trench fever or other possible diseases among the soldiers who perished at Vilnius. Determining that would require analysis of many more samples. That said, “A reasonable scenario for the deaths of these soldiers would be a combination of fatigue, cold, and several diseases, including paratyphoid fever and louse-borne relapsing fever,” the authors concluded. “While not necessarily fatal, the louse-borne relapsing fever could significantly weaken an already exhausted individual.”

Sally Wasef, a paleogeneticist at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, told New Scientist that given the low quantities of recovered microbial DNA, “the results are more suggestive than conclusive.” However, she added, “This kind of work has strong potential to clarify the role of disease in past population declines, particularly where written records are incomplete or biased.”

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.09.047 (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 25 October 2025 at 4:28 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

Welcome to Edition 8.16 of the Rocket Report! The 10th anniversary of SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 rocket landing is coming up at the end of this year. We’re still waiting for a second company to bring back an orbital-class booster from space for a propulsive landing. Two companies, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and China’s LandSpace, could join SpaceX’s exclusive club as soon as next month. (Bezos might claim he’s already part of the club, but there’s a distinction to be made.) Each company is in the final stages of launch preparations—Blue Origin for its second New Glenn rocket, and LandSpace for the debut flight of its Zhuque-3 rocket. Blue Origin and LandSpace will both attempt to land their first stage boosters downrange from their launch sites. They’re not exactly in a race with one another, but it will be fascinating to see how New Glenn and Zhuque-3 perform during the uphill and downhill phases of flight, and whether one or both of the new rockets stick the landing.

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.

The race for space-based interceptors. The Trump administration’s announcement of the Golden Dome missile defense shield has set off a race among US companies to develop and test space weapons, some of them on their own dime, Ars reports. One of these companies is a 3-year-old startup named Apex, which announced plans to test a space-based interceptor as soon as next year. Apex’s concept will utilize one of the company’s low-cost satellite platforms outfitted with an “Orbital Magazine” containing multiple interceptors, which will be supplied by an undisclosed third-party partner. The demonstration in low-Earth orbit could launch as soon as June 2026 and will test-fire two interceptors from Apex’s Project Shadow spacecraft. The prototype interceptors could pave the way for operational space-based interceptors to shoot down ballistic missiles. (submitted by biokleen)

Usual suspects … Traditional defense contractors are also getting in the game. Northrop Grumman’s CEO, Kathy Warden, said earlier this year that her company is already testing space-based interceptor components on the ground. This week, Lockheed Martin announced it is on a path to test a space-based interceptor in orbit by 2028. Neither company has discussed as much detail of their plans as Apex revealed this week.

Lockheed Martin’s latest “New Space” investment. As interest grows in rotating detonation engines for hypersonic flight, a startup specialist in the technology says it will receive backing from Lockheed Martin’s corporate venture capital arm, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The strategic investment by Lockheed Martin Ventures “reflects the potential of Venus’s dual-use technology” in an era of growing defense and space spending, Venus Aerospace said in a statement. Venus said its partnership with Lockheed Martin combines the former’s startup mindset with the latter’s resources and industry expertise. The companies did not announce the value of Lockheed’s investment, but Venus said it has raised $106 million since its founding in 2020. Lockheed Martin Ventures has made similar investments in other rocket startups, including Rocket Lab in 2015.

What’s this actually for? … Houston-based Venus Aerospace completed a high-thrust test flight of its Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE) in May from Spaceport America, New Mexico. Rotating detonation engine technology is interesting because it has the potential to significantly increase fuel efficiency in various applications, from Navy carriers to rocket engines, Ars reported earlier this year. The engine works by producing a shockwave with a flow of detonation traveling through a circular channel. The engine harnesses these supersonic detonation waves to generate thrust. “Venus has proven in flight the most efficient rocket engine technology in history,” said Sassie Duggleby, co-founder and CEO of Venus Aerospace. “With support from Lockheed Martin Ventures, we will advance our capabilities to deliver at scale and deploy the engine that will power the next 50 years of defense, space, and commercial high-speed aviation.”

South Korean startup receives permission to fly. Innospace announced on October 20 that it has received South Korea’s first private commercial launch permit from the Korea AeroSpace Administration,” the Chosun Daily reports. Accordingly, Innospace will launch its independently developed “HANBIT-Nano” launch vehicle from a Brazilian launch site as early as late this month. Innospace stated that the launch window for this mission has been set for October 28 through November 28. The launch site is the Alcântara Space Center, operated by the Brazilian Air Force.

Aiming for LEO … This will be the first flight of Innospace’s HANBIT-Nano launch vehicle, standing roughly 72 feet (22 meters) tall with a diameter of 4.6 feet (1.4 meters). The two-stage rocket is powered by hybrid propulsion, consuming a mixture of paraffin and liquid oxygen. For its debut flight, the rocket will target an orbit about 300 kilometers (186 miles) high with a batch of small satellites from customers in South Korea, Brazil, and India. According to Innospace, HANBIT-Nano can lift about 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of payload into orbit.

A new record for rocket reuse. SpaceX’s launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on October 19 set a new record for reusable rockets, Ars reports. It marked the 31st launch of the company’s most-flown Falcon 9 booster. The rocket landed on SpaceX’s recovery ship in the Atlantic Ocean to be returned to Florida for a 32nd flight. Several more rockets in SpaceX’s inventory are nearing their 30th launch. In all, SpaceX has more than 20 Falcon 9 boosters in its fleet on both the East and West Coasts. SpaceX engineers are now certifying the Falcon 9 boosters for up to 40 flights apiece.

10,000 and counting … SpaceX’s two launches last weekend weren’t just noteworthy for Falcon 9 lore. Hours after setting the new booster reuse record, SpaceX deployed a batch of 28 Starlink satellites from a different rocket after lifting off from California. This mission propelled SpaceX’s Starlink program past a notable milestone. With the satellites added to the constellation on Sunday, the company has delivered more than 10,000 mass-produced Starlink spacecraft to low-Earth orbit. The exact figure stands at 10,006 satellites, according to a tabulation by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who expertly tracks comings and goings between Earth and space. About 8,700 of these Starlink satellites are still in orbit, with SpaceX adding more every week.

China is on the cusp of something big. Launch startup LandSpace is in the final stages of preparations for the first flight of its Zhuque-3 rocket and a potentially landmark mission for China, Space News reports. LandSpace said it completed the first phase of the Zhuque-3 rocket’s inaugural launch campaign this week. The Zhuque-3 is the largest commercial rocket developed to date in China, nearly matching the size and performance of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, with nine first stage engines and a single upper stage engine. One key difference is that the Zhuque-3 burns methane fuel, while Falcon 9’s engines consume kerosene. Most notably, LandSpace will attempt to land the rocket’s first stage booster at a location downrange from the launch site, similar to the way SpaceX lands Falcon 9 boosters on drone ships at sea. Zhuque-3’s first stage will aim for a land-based site in an experiment that could pave the way for LandSpace to reuse rockets in the future.

Testing status … The recent testing at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China included a propellant loading demonstration and a static fire test of the rocket’s first stage engines. Earlier this week, LandSpace integrated the payload fairing on the rocket. The company said it will return the rocket to a nearby facility “for inspection and maintenance in preparation for its upcoming orbital launch and first stage recovery.” The launch is expected to happen as soon as next month.

Uprated Ariane 6 won’t launch until next year. Arianespace has confirmed that the first flight of the more powerful, four-booster variant of the Ariane 6 rocket will not be launched until 2026, European Spaceflight reports. The first Ariane 64 rocket had been expected to launch in late 2025, carrying the first batch of Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites. On October 16, Arianespace announced the fourth and final Ariane 6 flight of the year would carry a pair of Galileo satellites for Europe’s global satellite navigation system in December. This will follow an already-scheduled Ariane 6 launch scheduled for November 4. Both of the upcoming flights will employ the same Ariane 6 configuration used on all of the rocket’s flights to date. This version, known as Ariane 62, has two strap-on solid rocket boosters.

Kuiper soon … The Ariane 64 variant will expose the rocket to stronger forces coming from four solid rocket boosters, each producing about a million pounds (4,500 kilonewtons) of thrust. ArianeGroup, the rocket’s manufacturer, said a year ago that it completed qualification of the Ariane 6 upper stage to withstand the stronger launch loads. Arianespace didn’t offer any explanation of the Ariane 64’s delay from this year to next, but it did confirm the uprated rocket will be the company’s first flight of 2026. The mission will be the first of 18 Arianespace flights dedicated to launching Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband satellites, adding Ariane 6 to the mix of rockets deploying the Internet network in low-Earth orbit.

Duffy losing confidence in Starship. NASA acting Administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency’s plans to return humans to the Moon, Ars reports. Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in developing the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA’s projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back.

The rest of the story … “They’re behind schedule, and so the President wants to make sure we beat the Chinese,” Duffy said of SpaceX. “He wants to get there in his term. So I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We’re going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually lead us back to the Moon first.” The timing of Duffy’s public appearances on Monday seems tailored to influence a fierce, behind-the-scenes battle to hold onto the NASA leadership position. Jared Isaacman, who Trump nominated and then withdrew for the NASA posting, is again under consideration at the White House to become the agency’s next full-time administrator. (submitted by zapman987)

Rocket fully stacked for Artemis II. “The last major hardware component before Artemis II launches early next year has been installed,” NASA’s acting Administrator Sean Duffy posted on X Monday. Over the weekend, ground teams at Kennedy Space Center in Florida hoisted the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II mission atop its Space Launch System rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. This followed the transfer of the Orion spacecraft to the VAB from a nearby processing facility last week. With Orion installed, the rocket is fully assembled to its complete height of 322 feet (98 meters) tall.

Four months away? … NASA is still officially targeting no earlier than February 5, 2026, for the launch of the Artemis II mission. This will be the first flight of astronauts to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972, and the first glimpse of human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit for several generations. Upcoming milestones in the Artemis II launch campaign include a countdown demonstration inside the VAB, where the mission’s four-person crew will take their seats in the Orion spacecraft to simulate what they’ll go through on launch day.

New Glenn staged for rollout. Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, posted a video this week of the company’s second New Glenn rocket undergoing launch preparations inside a hangar at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket’s first and second stages are now mated together and installed on the transporter erector that will carry them from the hangar to the launch pad. “We will spend the next days on final checkouts and connecting the umbilicals. Stay tuned for rollout and hotfire!” Limp wrote.

“Big step toward launch” … The connection of New Glenn’s stages and integration on the transporter erector marks a “big step toward launch,” Limp wrote. A launch sometime in November is still possible if engineers can get through a smooth test-firing of the rocket’s seven main engines on the launch pad. The rocket will send two NASA spacecraft on a journey to Mars.

China launches clandestine satellite. China launched a Long March 5 rocket Thursday with a classified military satellite heading toward geosynchronous orbit, Space News reports. The satellite is named TJS-20, and the circumstances of the launch—using China’s most powerful operational rocket—suggest TJS-20 could be the next in a line of signals intelligence-gathering missions. The previous satellite of this line, TJS-11, launched in February 2024, also on a Long March 5.

Doing a lot … This launch continued China’s increasing use of the Long March 5 and its sister variant, the Long March 5B. The Long March 5 is expendable, and although we don’t know how much it costs, it can’t be cheap. It is a complex rocket powered by 10 engines on its core stage and four boosters, some burning liquid hydrogen fuel and others burning kerosene. The second stage also has two cryogenically fueled engines. The Long March 5 has now flown 16 times in nine years and seven times within the last two years. The uptick in launches is largely due to China’s use of the Long March 5 to launch satellites for the Guowang megaconstellation.

Next three launches

Oct. 25: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-12 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14:00 UTC

Oct. 26: H3 | HTV-X 1 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 00:00 UTC

Oct. 26: Long March 3B/E | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center | 03:50 UTC

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 25 October 2025 at 4:28 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

The end of the dinosaurs was clearly linked to an asteroid impact that brought the Cretaceous period to a close. But the details of their end have remained a matter of debate since the impact crater was discovered. There is a lot of evidence that the impact alone should have been enough to do them in. But the asteroid arrived amid major volcanic eruptions associated with previous mass extinctions. And fossils dating to just before the impact have suggested that dinosaur-dominated ecosystems had become less diverse, making them more prone to collapse.

Now, a new study has revealed that fossils we already know about originated within the last few hundred thousand years before the impact that killed off all dinosaurs except birds. The results indicate that species richness wasn’t likely to be a problem—at least in the neighborhood of the impact itself.

Wyoming vs. New Mexico

Most of what we know about the last days of the non-avian dinosaurs comes from the Hell Creek Formation, rich fossil beds in present-day Wyoming. These not only date from within a few hundred thousand years prior to the impact, but there may be deposits that capture the immediate aftermath of the impact. Beyond this area, which reflects the ecosystem of the northern Great Plains, we have little else. It hasn’t been clear whether the diversity of species present at Hell Creek reflects what was present more globally, or if there were regional differences in ecosystems

That matters because it gets at the root of the last argument about the state of dinosaurs immediately prior to the impact. If the sorts of communities we see in Hell Creek were it, then it’s easier to make the argument that dinosaurs lacked the diversity to survive the ecosystem-terminating catastrophe the K/T impact created.

To put the fossils in Hell Creek in context, we need some from elsewhere. But all the other known fossil assemblages come from earlier in the Cretaceous, making it difficult to say much about global dinosaur diversity.

That seemingly changes as of now, with new argon dating of strata from the Naashoibito Member in the San Juan Basin of present-day New Mexico. Many dinosaur fossils have been obtained from this region, and we know the site differs from the sort of ecosystem found at Hell Creek. But it was previously thought to date back closer to a million years before the mass extinction. The new dates, plus the alignment of magnetic field reversals, tell us that the ecosystem was a contemporary of the one in Hell Creek, and dates to the last few hundred thousand years prior to the mass extinction.

Diverse ecosystems

The fossils at Naashoibito have revealed an ecosystem we now label the “Alamo Wash local fauna.” And they’re fairly distinct from the ones found in Wyoming, despite being just 1,500 kilometers further south. Analyzing the species present using ecological measures, the researchers found that dinosaurs formed two “bioprovinces” in the late Cretaceous—essentially, there were distinct ecosystems present in the northern and southern areas.

This doesn’t seem to be an artifact of the sites, as mammalian fossils seem to reflect a single community across both areas near the mass extinction, but had distinct ecologies both earlier and after. The researchers propose that temperature differences were the key drivers of the distinction, something that may have had less of an impact on mammals, which are generally better at controlling their own temperatures.

Overall, the researchers conclude that, rather than being dominated by a small number of major species, “dinosaurs were thriving in New Mexico until the end of the Cretaceous.”

While this speaks directly to the idea that limited diversity may have primed the dinosaurs for extinction, it also may have implications for the impact of the contemporaneous eruptions in the Deccan Traps. If these were having a major global impact, then it’s a bit unlikely that dinosaurs would be thriving anywhere.

Even with the new data, however, our picture is still limited to the ecosystems present on the North American continent. We do have fossils from elsewhere, but they’re not exactly dated. There are some indications of dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous in Europe and South America, but we don’t have a clear picture of the ecosystems in which they were found. So, while these findings help clarify the diversity of dinosaurs in the time leading up to their extinction, there’s still a lot left to learn.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adw3282 (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 24 October 2025 at 6:06 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

Australia’s First Peoples may or may not have hunted the continent’s megafauna to extinction, but they definitely collected fossils.

A team of archaeologists examined the fossilized leg bone of an extinct kangaroo and realized that instead of evidence of butchery, cut marks on the bone reveal an ancient attempt at fossil collecting. That leaves Australia with little evidence of First Peoples hunting or butchering the continent’s extinct megafauna—and reopens the question of whether humans were responsible for the die-off of that continent’s giant Ice Age marsupials.

Fossil hunting in the Ice Age

In the unsolved case of whether humans hunted Australia’s Ice Age megafauna to extinction, the key piece of evidence so far is a tibia (one of the bones of the lower leg) from an extinct short-faced kangaroo. Instead of hopping like their modern relatives, these extinct kangaroos walked on their hind legs, probably placing all their weight on the tips of single hoofed toes. This particular kangaroo wasn’t quite fully grown when it died, which happened sometime between 44,500 and 55,200 years ago, based on uranium-series dating of the thin layer of rock covering most of the fossils in Mammoth Cave (in what’s now Western Australia).

There’s a shallow, angled chunk cut out of the bone near one end. When archaeologists first noticed the cut in 1970 after carefully chipping away the crust of calcium carbonate that had formed over the bone, it looked like evidence that Pleistocene hunters had carved up the kangaroo to eat it. But in their recent paper, University of New South Wales archaeologist Michael Archer and his colleagues say that’s probably not what happened. Instead, they have a stranger idea: “We suggest here that the purpose of this effort may have been the retrieval of the fossils from the bone-rich late-Pleistocene deposit in Mammoth Cave after its discovery by First Peoples,” they wrote in their recent paper.

The world used to be so much weirder

Based on the available archaeological evidence, it looks like people first set foot on Australia sometime around 65,000 years ago. At the time, the continent was home to a bizarre array of giant marsupials, as well as flightless birds even bigger and scarier than today’s emus and cassowaries. For the next 20,000 years, Australia’s First Peoples shared the landscape with short-faced kangaroos; Zygomaturus trilobus, a hulking 500-kilogram marsupial that looked a little like a rhinoceros; and Diprotodon optatum, the largest marsupial that ever lived: a 3,000-kilogram behemoth that roamed in huge herds (picture a bear about the size of a bison with a woodchuck’s face).

These species died out sometime around 45,000 or 40,000 years ago; today, they live on in ancient rock art and stories, some of which seem to describe people interacting with now-extinct species.

Since they had shared the continent with humans for at least 20,000 years at that point, it doesn’t seem that the sudden arrival of humans caused an immediate mass extinction. But it’s possible that by hunting or even setting controlled fires, people may have put just enough strain on these megafauna species to make them vulnerable enough for the next climate upheaval to finish them off.

In some parts of the world, there’s direct evidence that Pleistocene people hunted or scavenged meat from the remains of now-extinct megafauna. Elsewhere, archaeologists are still debating whether humans, the inexorable end of the last Ice Age, or some combination of the two killed off the world’s great Ice Age giants. The interaction between people and their local ecosystems looked (and still looks) different everywhere, depending on culture, environment, and a host of other factors.

The jury is still out on what killed the megafauna in Australia because the evidence we need either hasn’t survived the intervening millennia or still lies buried somewhere, waiting to be found and studied. For decades, the one clear bit of evidence has seemed to be the Mammoth Cave short-faced kangaroo tibia. But Archer and his colleagues argue that even that isn’t a smoking gun.

Evidence of rock collecting, not butchery

For one thing, the researchers argue that the kangaroo had been dead for a very long time when the cut was made. Nine long, thin cracks run along the length of the tibia, formed when the bone dried and shrank. And in the cut section, there’s a short crack running across the width of the bone—but it stops at either end when it meets the long cracks from the bone’s drying. That suggests the bone had already dried and shrunk, leaving those long cracks before the cut was made. It may have just been a very old bone, or it may have already begun to fossilize, but the meat would have been long gone, leaving behind a bone sticking out of the cave wall.

Since there’s no mark or dent on the opposite side of the bone from the cut (which would have happened if it were lying on the ground being butchered), it was probably sticking out of the fossil bed in the cave wall when someone came along and tried to cut it free. And since a crust of calcium carbonate had time to form over the cut (it covers most of the fossils in Mammoth Cave like a rocky burial shroud), that must have happened at least 44,000 years ago.

That leaves us with an interesting mental image: a member of one of Australia’s First Peoples, 45,000 years ago, exploring a cave filled with the bones of fantastical, long-dead animals. This ancient caver finds a bone sticking out from the cave wall and tries to hack the protruding end free—twice, from different angles—before giving up and leaving it in place.

People have always collected cool rocks

We can’t know for sure why this long-ago person wanted the bone in the first place. (Did it have a religious purpose? Might it have made a good tool? Was it just a cool souvenir?) We also don’t know why they gave up their attempt. But if Archer and his colleagues are right, the bone leaves Australia without any clear evidence that ancient people hunted—or even scavenged food from the remains of—extinct Pleistocene megafauna like short-faced kangaroos.

“This is not to say that it did not happen, just that there is now no hard evidence to support that it did,” Archer and his colleagues wrote in their recent paper. We don’t yet know exactly how Australia’s First Peoples interacted with these species.

But whether Archer and his colleagues are correct in their analysis of this particular kangaroo bone or not, humans around the world have been picking up fossils for at least tens of thousands of years. There’s evidence that people in Australia have collected and traded the fossils of extinct animals for pretty much as long as people have been in Australia, including everything from trilobites to Zygomaturus teeth and the jawbones of other extinct marsupials.

“What we can conclude,” Archer and his colleagues wrote, “is that the first people in Australia who demonstrated a keen interest in and collected fossils were First Peoples, probably thousands of years before Europeans set foot on that continent.”

Royal Society Open Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.250078  (About DOIs).

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 24 October 2025 at 8:11 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

The proliferation of difficult-to-treat bacterial diseases represents a growing threat, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Antibiotic Resistance Surveillance Report. The report reveals that, between 2018 and 2023, antibiotic resistance increased by more than 40 percent in monitored pathogen-drug combinations, with an average annual increase of 5-15 percent.

According to data reported by more than 100 countries to WHO's Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS), one in six laboratory-confirmed bacteria in 2023 proved resistant to antibiotic treatment, all related to various common diseases globally.

Superbugs

For the first time, this edition of the report includes prevalence estimates of resistance to 22 antibiotics used to treat urinary tract, gastrointestinal, bloodstream, and gonorrheal conditions. The analysis focused on eight common pathogens: Acinetobacter spp, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, non-typhoidal Salmonella spp, Shigella spp, Staphylococcus aureus, and Streptococcus pneumoniae.

The results show that resistant gram-negative bacteria pose the greatest threat. Of particular note are Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, which are associated with bloodstream infections that can lead to sepsis, organ failure, and death. "More than 40 percent of E. coli and more than 55 percent of K. pneumoniae strains worldwide are now resistant to third-generation cephalosporins, the first-choice treatment for these types of infections," the report warns.

These microorganisms are joined by Salmonella and Acinetobacter, which are also developing resistance to essential drugs such as carbapenemics and fluoroquinolones. This reduces therapeutic alternatives and forces the use of last-resort antibiotics, which are often expensive and difficult to access, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

Medicine Lags Behind

“Antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide," said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement. "We must use antibiotics responsibly, and make sure everyone has access to the right medicines, quality-assured diagnostics, and vaccines.”

Optimizing surveillance systems and obtaining accurate data is an urgent task. Although there has been progress, it is still insufficient. Between 2016 and 2023, the number of countries participating in GLASS quadrupled from 25 to 104. However, 48 percent did not report data in 2023, and almost half of those that did report lacked sufficient infrastructure to generate reliable data.

WHO warns that addressing this problem must be a priority in regions such as Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, where one in three reported infections is resistant, as well as in Africa, where one in five has the same condition.

“Achieving this target will require concerted action to strengthen the quality, geographic coverage, and sharing of AMR surveillance data to track progress,” the report states. “Countries should scale up coordinated interventions designed to address antimicrobial resistance across all levels of health care and ensure that treatment guidelines and essential medicines lists align with local resistance patterns.”

The Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance warns that this problem is among the top 10 threats to humanity. Without effective action, annual deaths from drug-resistant infections could exceed 10 million by 2050.

"Our future also depends on strengthening systems to prevent, diagnose and treat infections and on innovating with next-generation antibiotics and rapid point-of-care molecular tests," Ghebreyesus concluded.

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Thursday 23 October 2025 at 3:33 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

In May 2025, the European Parliament changed the status of wolves in the EU from “strictly protected” to “protected,” which opened the way for its member states to allow hunting under certain conditions, such as protecting livestock. One of the arguments behind this change was that the “tolerance of modern society towards wolves” led to the emergence of “fearless wolves” that are no longer afraid of people.

“Regulators made it clear, though, that there is no scientific evidence to back this up,” says Michael Clinchy, a zoologist at Western University in London, Canada. “So we did the first-of-its-kind study to find out if wolves have really lost their fear of humans. We proved there is no such thing as a fearless wolf.”

Red riding hood

The big bad wolf trope is found in plenty of our myths and fables, with Little Red Riding Hood being probably the most famous example. This mythical fear of wolves, combined with real damage to livestock, led to extensive hunting. By the mid-20th century, we’d pushed wolves to the verge of extinction in Western and Central Europe. Human-wolf encounters became very rare, and the big bad wolf myth faded away. But starting in the 1970s, wolves became a protected species across Europe and North America, which caused wolf populations to bounce back and reoccupy some of their old habitats.

Zanette and Clinchy did their study in the Tuchola Forest, one of the largest Central European forests located in northern Poland. After the Polish wolf protection laws had come into force back in the 1990s, the first wolves were sighted there in 2005, and the first breeding was confirmed in 2013. Today, there are over 15 different wolf packs living in the Tuchola Forest, and the total number of wolves in Poland reached around 4,300 individuals in 2022.

This quickly became an issue, at least for some people. Mieczysław Kacprzak, an MP from Poland’s PSL Party, currently in the ruling coalition, addressed the parliament in December 2017, saying that wolves were roaming suburban roads and streets, terrorizing citizens—in his view, a tragedy waiting to happen. He also said children were afraid to go to school because of wolves and asked for support from the Ministry of Agriculture, which could lift the ban on hunting. An article in “Łowczy Polski,” a journal of the Polish hunting community with a title that translates as “The Polish Huntsman,” later backed these pro-hunting arguments, claiming wolves were a threat to humans, especially children.

The idea was that wolves, in the absence of hunting, ceased to perceive humans as a threat and felt encouraged to approach them. But it was an idea that was largely supported by anecdote. “We found this was not the case,” says Liana Zanette, a biologist at Western University and co-author of the study.

Super predators

To figure out if wolves really were no longer afraid of humans, Zanette, Clinchy, and their colleagues set up 24 camera traps in the Tuchola Forest. “Our Polish colleagues and co-authors, especially Maciej Szewczyk, helped us set those traps in places where we were most likely to find wolves,” Zanette says. “Maciej was literally saying ‘pick this tree,’ or ‘this crossroads.’” When sensors in the traps detected an animal nearby, the system took a photo and played one of three sounds, chosen at random.

The first sound was chirping birds, which the team used as a control. “We chose birds because this is a typical part of forest soundscape and we assumed wolves would not find this threatening,” Clinchy says. The next sound was barking dogs. The team picked this one because a dog is another large carnivore living in the same ecosystem, so it was expected to scare wolves. The third sound was just people talking calmly in Polish. Zanette, Clinchy, and their colleagues quantified the level of fear each sound caused in wolves by measuring how quickly they vacated the area upon hearing it.

When the results were in, the team counted over a hundred wolves caught by the traps. The ones that heard the birds from the speakers appeared a bit startled but generally remained calm. Hearing the dogs, on the other hand, usually made them move away somewhat hurriedly. But the wolves feared people the most. Compared to the control sound of birds, hearing people was twice as likely to make wolves run, and it made them run twice as fast. Comparison to dogs also ended up in our favor: The wolves found humans roughly 20 percent more threatening. The same pattern held true for deer and wild boars, typical prey of wolves, which also got caught in the camera traps.

“These results track with basically the same experiment we did in Africa, where we tested the entire savannah mammal community,” Clinchy says. In that work, Clinchy and Zanette found that leopards, hyenas, and many other animals feared humans more than lions. “You know, a lion is the apex predator, and yet pretty much everything across the board was twice as afraid of us,” Clinchy adds. And the team thinks there are good reasons we cause so much fear even in dangerous, aggressive carnivores.

“We are the super predators. Compared to every other predator on Earth, we kill prey at a much higher rate. Humans are uniquely lethal,” Zanette explains.

Risky rewards

The team argues that lifting the ban on hunting wolves won’t solve the problem of increasingly frequent human-wolf encounters because we’re already killing them at an alarming rate. Even back when wolves were strictly protected in the EU, humans killed wolves at seven times the rate they die naturally. In France alone, around 20 percent of the wolf population can be legally killed each year. Still, Clinchy admits there are scientific arguments to back the claim that hunting does instigate fear of humans in wolves. “The rate at which we kill wolves creates an enormous selective pressure,” he explains. But in his view, we have already exerted this pressure, and killing wolves even more simply won’t get us any further—they already fear us more than anything else in the ecosystem.

The reason behind increasingly frequent human-wolf encounters lies in another thing that makes us unique. “We have a huge amount of food around us that’s super abundant and super high quality,” Zanette says. “Instead of dealing with fearless wolves, we’re dealing with hungry wolves that are willing to take the risk of encountering a human.” The solution to the problem, Zanette says, lies in keeping wolves away from our food. “The critical significance of our study lies in re-focusing the discourse on human-wolf conflict toward public education on food storage, garbage removal, and livestock protection,” Zanette argues.

The question, though, is whether we really have reasons to fear such encounters just as much as wolves fear them. “There have been no fatal wolf attacks in Europe in the last 40 years or so,” Clinchy says. In Poland, a wolf bit an 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy playing outside in 2018, and a pack of wolves circled two forest workers for about 20 minutes in 2021 without attacking them. That’s about all there is in the Polish big bad wolf files.

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.09.018

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Wednesday 22 October 2025 at 4:37 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix

The mysterious impact of a United Airlines aircraft in flight last week has sparked plenty of theories as to its cause, from space debris to high-flying birds.

However the question of what happened to flight 1093, and its severely damaged front window, appears to be answered in the form of a weather balloon.

“I think this was a WindBorne balloon,” Kai Marshland, co-founder of the weather prediction company WindBorne Systems, told Ars in an email on Monday evening. “We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11 pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6 am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”

WindBorne is a six-year old company that seeks to both collect weather observations with its fleet of small, affordable weather balloons as well as use that atmospheric data for its proprietary artificial intelligence weather models.

Online detectives solve the case

Scott Manley, a popular YouTube creator and pilot, was among the first people to speculate online about the collision being caused by a WindBorne balloon, having coordinated the position of a balloon data point with the flight path of the aircraft. Asked about this by Ars, the company confirmed that its balloon likely hit the plane.

The strike occurred Thursday, during a United Airlines flight from Denver to Los Angeles. Images shared on social media showed that one of the two large windows at the front of a 737 MAX aircraft was significantly cracked. Related images also reveal a pilot’s arm that has been cut multiple times by what appear to be small shards of glass.

Speculation built over the weekend after one of the aircraft’s pilots described the object that impacted the aircraft as “space debris.” On Sunday the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that it is investigating the collision, which did not cause any fatalities. However, one of the pilot’s arms appeared to be cut up by small shards of glass from the windshield.

Balloons said to not “pose a threat”

WindBorne has a fleet of global sounding balloons that fly various vertical profiles around the world, gathering atmospheric data. Each balloon is fairly small, with a mass of 2.6 pounds (1.2 kg), and provides temperature, wind, pressure, and other data about the atmosphere. Such data is useful for establishing initial conditions upon which weather models base their outputs.

Notably, the company has an FAQ on its website (which clearly was written months or years ago, before this incident) that addresses several questions, including: Why don’t WindBorne balloons pose a risk to airplanes?

“The quick answer is our constellation of Global Sounding Balloons (GSBs), which we call WindBorne Atlas, doesn’t pose a threat to airplanes or other objects in the sky. It’s not only highly improbable that a WindBorne balloon could even collide with an aircraft in the first place; but our balloons are so lightweight that they would not cause significant damage.

WindBorne also said that its balloons are compliant with all applicable airspace regulations.

“For example, we maintain active lines of communication with the FAA to ensure our operations satisfy all relevant regulatory requirements,” the company states. “We also provide government partners with direct access to our comprehensive, real-time balloon tracking system via our proprietary software, WindBorne Live.”

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 21 October 2025 at 5:50 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix