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.

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

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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

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

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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.”

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

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All the world’s discarded phones, bricked laptops, and other trashed electronics are collectively a treasure trove of rare earth elements (REEs). But separating out and recovering these increasingly sought-after materials is no easy task.

However, a team of researchers says it has developed a way of separating REEs from waste—magnets, in this case—that is relatively easy, uses less energy, and isn’t nearly as emissions and pollution intensive as current methods. The team published a paper describing this method in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In short, this process involves using an electric current to heat waste magnets to very high temperatures very fast, and using chlorine gas to react with the non-REEs in the mix, keeping them in the vapor phase. James Tour, one of the authors and a professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, says that the research can help the United States meet its growing need for these elements.

“The country’s scurrying to try to see how we can get these [REEs],” he says. “And, in our argument, it’s all in our waste… We have it right here, just pull it right back out of the waste.”

Getting hot in here

In 2018, Tour and his colleagues discovered that this rapid heating process, called flash joule heating, can turn any carbon source—including coal, biochar, and mixed plastic—into graphene, a very thin, strong, and conductive material.

Building on this, in 2023, they developed a method that uses flash joule heating and chlorine. In this work, they identified the Gibbs free energy, the reactivity of a material, for the oxide form of all 17 REEs and nine common oxides found in REE waste.

Ground-up waste magnets are put on a platform made of carbon and surrounded by a glass chamber. A current runs through the platform, rapidly producing immense heat, thousands of degrees celsius in a matter of seconds. Chlorine gas is then released into the chamber, creating chlorides of unwanted elements like iron and lowering their boiling points.

Between the chlorine gas and the heat, the non-REE components vaporize and form deposits on the interior of the chamber. The REEs are left behind in oxide or oxychloride form on the carbon platform, ready to be collected.

The team studied the differences in reactivity with chlorine gas and the difference of boiling points between the oxide and chloride forms of the metals—iron’s boiling point is around 3,000° C, while iron chloride’s boiling point is only 315° C—as they “probed around” and tested different voltages and temperatures on neodymium-iron-boron and samarium-cobalt magnet waste.

Because magnets are hard, they were heated to 800° C to demagnetize and soften them prior to grinding them to dust. The separated REE residue at the end of the process can be remagnetized by exposing them to a magnet.

The end result is more than 90 percent pure and recovers more than 90 percent of the REEs from the waste magnets. Tour adds that the method could be used on different forms of e-waste, not just magnets.

“Get it from waste”

Tour and his colleagues also ran a life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis, comparing their method to a common method of recovering REEs from waste. Called hydrometallurgical extraction, it requires a fair amount of energy and the use of a lot of acids and solvents. “It’s a messy, messy process,” he says.

The team’s analysis suggests that the method involving Fast Joule Heating and chlorine gas reduces energy consumption, greenhouse gas emission, and operating costs by 87, 84, and 54 percent, respectively.

In 2022 alone, the world produced 66.2 million tonnes of this e-waste. Metal, unlike plastic, is infinitely recyclable, and the concentration of REEs in e-waste is much higher than occurs naturally. The two main ways of mining REEs both release toxic chemicals into surrounding environments. Setting up a mine is also very expensive, Tour adds.

“You might as well just get it from waste.”

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2507819122

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Posted Tuesday 21 October 2025 at 12:56 pm AEST (my time).

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The Ebbinghaus illusion: despite appearances, the two orange circles are the same size.  

Credit: Public domain

Chances are you’ve encountered some version of the “Ebbinghaus illusion,” in which a central circle appears to be smaller when encircled by larger circles and seems larger when surrounded by smaller circles. It’s an example of context-dependent size perception. But is this unique to humans or are some animals susceptible as well? According to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, it might depend on the specific sensory environment, since the illusion relies on contextual clues to be effective.

Prior research has produced mixed results on the question of animals and their susceptibility to optical illusions, per the authors. Dolphins, chicks, and redtail splitfins seem to be susceptible, for example, while pigeons, baboons, and gray bamboo snakes are not.

Perhaps the best-known example is cats’ undeniable love of boxes and squares—the “if it fits, I sits” phenomenon documented all over the Internet. This behavior is generally attributed to the fact that cats feel safer when squeezed into small spaces, but it also tells us something about feline visual perception. A 1988 study and a 2021 study concluded that cats are susceptible to the Kanizsa square illusion, suggesting that they perceive subjective contours much like humans.

The authors of this latest paper decided to test the Ebbinghaus illusion across two species that inhabit very different sensory environments: ring doves and guppies. The doves are terrestrial, pecking at small seeds scattered on the ground for food, so the authors reasoned that precision and attention to detail—rather than global processing to first analyze an entire scene, as humans do—would be more advantageous for the doves. Plus the doves have binocular vision and thus should be good at accurately judging size and distance.

Guppies, by contrast, live in the shallow waters of tropical streams. They must contend with dense vegetation, flickering light, and the unpredictability of predators. They must make rapid decisions in order to survive, and thus it would be advantageous for guppies to be able to judge relative size at a glance—a human-like global processing ability that is key to the Ebbinghaus illusion.

A tale of two species

The authors tested 38 ring doves and 19 guppies (of the “snakeskin cobra green” ornamental strain) for their experiments. The doves were placed in a testing cage with the bottom covered with an anti-slip wooden panel and a branch serving as a perch and starting point; the feeding station was at the opposite end of the cage. The guppies were tested in single tanks with a gravel bottom.

In both cases, the test subjects were presented with visual stimuli in the form of two white plastic cards. Sizes differed for the doves and the guppies, but each card showed an array of six black circles with a bit of food serving as the center “circle”: red millet seeds for the doves and commercial flake food for the guppies. The circles were smaller on one of the cards and larger on the other. The subjects were free to choose food from one of the cards, and the card with the unchosen food was removed promptly. If no choice was made after 15 minutes, the trial was null and the team tried again after a 15-minute interval.

The authors found that the guppies were indeed highly susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion, choosing food surrounded by smaller circles much more frequently, suggesting they perceived it as larger and hence more desirable. The results for ring doves were more mixed, however: some of the doves seemed to be susceptible while others were not, suggesting that their perceptual strategies are more local, detail-oriented, and less influenced by their surrounding context.

“The doves’ mixed responses suggest that individual experience or innate bias can strongly shape how an animal interprets illusions,” the authors concluded. “Just like in humans, where some people are strongly fooled by illusions and others hardly at all, animal perception is not uniform.”

The authors acknowledge that their study has limitations. For instance, guppies and ring doves diverged hundreds of millions of years ago and hence are phylogenetically distant, so the perceptual differences between them could be due not just to ecological pressures, but also to evolutionary traits gained or lost via natural selection. Future experiments involving more closely related species with different sensory environments would better isolate the role of ecological factors in animal perception.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2025. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1653695 (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 21 October 2025 at 12:52 pm AEST (my time).

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Google employees working at the company’s Chelsea campus in New York City received a notice on Sunday alerting them to a possible bedbug outbreak at the office. Exterminators arrived at the scene with a sniffer dog “and found credible evidence of their presence,” according to an email obtained by WIRED. The email was sent to all Google employees in New York on behalf of the company’s environmental, health, and safety team.

Employees were told to avoid the office until the treatment was complete. On Monday morning, they were allowed to return. Google is performing additional inspections at other Google campuses in New York, including buildings at the company’s Hudson Square campus, “out of an abundance of caution,” the email says.

The company advised employees to submit a report “if you experience symptoms you believe are linked to possible bedbug exposure.” Additionally, “if you suspect you’ve seen a bedbug onsite,” employees were told to report the sighting to the facilities team. Employees were also told to contact professional exterminators if they found bedbugs in their home.

Sources tell WIRED that Google’s offices in New York are home to a number of large stuffed animals that are rumored to be implicated in the outbreak. WIRED was not able to verify this information prior to publication. Google declined to comment.

This is not the first time a Google office in New York has been infested with bedbugs. In 2010, the company’s 9th Avenue offices in Manhattan experienced an outbreak amid a wider bedbug infestation in New York.

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Posted Tuesday 21 October 2025 at 12:50 pm AEST (my time).

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Two Falcon 9 rockets lifted off from spaceports in Florida and California on Sunday afternoon, adding 56 more satellites to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network.

The second of these two launches—originating from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California—propelled SpaceX’s Starlink program past a notable milestone. With the satellites added to the constellation 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. This number includes dozens of Starlink demo satellites, but not the dummy spacecraft carried on SpaceX’s recent Starship test flights.

The Starlink network surpassed 7 million global subscribers in August, primarily beaming Internet connectivity to homes and businesses. SpaceX is now aggressively pushing to broaden its service direct to smartphones.

The first two Starlink prototypes, named Tintin A and Tintin B, launched in 2018 as pathfinders. SpaceX began launching Starlink satellites with a radically different design in 2019, initially flying 60 satellites at a time. The number of spacecraft per launch has gone down as the satellites grew larger and more capable, with the Falcon 9’s capacity now maxed out at 28 satellites per flight.

SpaceX’s launch director nodded at the moment the Falcon 9 took off from California Sunday: “From Tintin to 10,000. Go Starlink, go Falcon, go SpaceX.”

A little more than an hour later, SpaceX confirmed the successful deployment of the rocket’s 28 satellites about 160 miles (260 kilometers) above the Earth. They were expected to unfurl their solar arrays and activate their plasma engines to begin climbing to their operational altitude of 332 miles (535 kilometers).

By the numbers

SpaceX is decommissioning aging and obsolete Starlink satellites as the company adds to the fleet. The retired satellites reenter the atmosphere, where they’re designed to burn up without any debris reaching the ground. Taking into account all the reentries, here are McDowell’s numbers for the Starlink fleet as it stands Monday, October 20:

• 8,680 total Starlink satellites in orbit
• 8,664 functioning Starlink satellites in orbit (including newly launched satellites not yet operational)
• 7,448 Starlink satellites in operational orbit

This represents roughly two-thirds of all functioning satellites in orbit today, but it’s difficult to know the exact percentage. It’s not easy to obtain a precise number of all active satellites. The number changes not just with every launch, but with every spacecraft that’s retired, something many satellite operators don’t announce publicly.

Most of the more than 47,000 objects tracked in orbit by US Space Command are dead satellites, abandoned rockets, or debris, but the US military doesn’t publicly differentiate between inert objects and active spacecraft. The European Space Agency estimates there are now roughly 12,500 functioning satellites in orbit. This means SpaceX owns and operates up to 70 percent of all the active satellites in orbit today.

SpaceX’s current generation of Starlink satellites, called the V2 Mini, have solar arrays spanning 100 feet (30 meters) tip to tip. The next iteration of the Starlink design, known as V3, will be too large to fit on the Falcon 9 rocket. Instead, it will launch about 60 at a time on SpaceX’s new Starship rocket, perhaps starting sometime next year.

Another reuse record

Sunday’s SpaceX launches weren’t just noteworthy for Starlink. The first of the two missions, departing from Florida’s Space Coast, 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 the East Coast and the West Coast. SpaceX engineers are now certifying the Falcon 9 boosters for up to 40 flights apiece.

The season of records isn’t over. SpaceX is expected to set another one later this week. The company’s launch log for 2025 currently stands at 132 Falcon 9 missions, tying the total number of Falcon 9 flights last year. SpaceX also launched two flights of the more powerful Falcon Heavy in 2024, bringing the 2024 mark to 134 missions by the Falcon rocket family.

That currently stands as the most launches by any single rocket family in a calendar year. SpaceX’s schedule for the coming days suggests the company is likely to break its own record sometime this weekend.

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Posted Tuesday 21 October 2025 at 12:48 pm AEST (my time).

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Formula 1 held the third of its five North American rounds this past weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Unlike the races in Montreal, Miami, and Las Vegas, the US Grand Prix is held on a proper road course, one purpose-built for the task of hosting F1 a little over a decade ago.

It’s a circuit Ars knows quite well—along with some friends, I was on the turn-19 banking for the first race in 2012, and we checked out Caterham’s setup the following year; toured the F1 tech center in 2015, where the race broadcasts are directed; then learned about tires there with Pirelli in 2021. And we’ve driven it in everything from an Audi TT-S to a Corvette ZR1 to a Mocabene Vent Noir. Not to mention all the Lone Star Le Mans races we’ve attended.

The crowds now exceed even the mass of humanity that showed up for that first race. And while Miami and Las Vegas have been pitched at the “more money than they know what to do with” people, ticket prices at COTA are more reasonable (for an F1 event). As long as you don’t mind brutal heat and humidity, it can be quite a good race to attend.

Replacing the boss made sense

At this stage in the championship, Oscar Piastri fans can be forgiven if they’re in full panic mode. The young Australian McLaren driver was the firm championship leader going into the summer break, but a series of disastrous weekends have seen his lead eroded by both his teammate Lando Norris, and now a resurgent Max Verstappen.

Verstappen’s Red Bull team replaced its team boss earlier this year. Former boss Christian Horner was mired in scandal last year, but it was the undriveable car that led to his ousting earlier this year. In July, Laurent Mekies moved from the junior Racing Bulls team to become CEO and team principal of Red Bull, having a transformative effect in the process. A revitalized Verstappen had scored two second places and two wins in the four races leading up to the US GP, and even his beleaguered teammate Yuki Tsunoda has looked more comfortable in the car since Meikes’ arrival.

It’s not that Red Bull RB20 is faster than all the other cars, as its predecessors were from 2022–2023. But a new front wing and perhaps some new insights into car setup have made the car about as quick as this year’s McLaren in this second half of the season, and Verstappen appears to be driving at or near his stratospheric peak.

The start of the sprint got messy.

Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

 

Piastri will probably regret the line he took into turn 1.

Clive Mason/Getty Images

 

This weekend the gap to Piastri closed even more. It was only Piastri’s second visit to COTA, and neither this year nor the last has he looked like he has truly gelled with the track. Most F1 circuits are as smooth as a pool table, but not COTA—over the last 13-plus years the earthworks that were built to create its elevation changes have settled here and there, baking in the summers and cooling in the winters to litter the track with bumps everywhere that unsettle an F1 car on the limit.

Sprint SNAFU

Things weren’t helped by the sprint race on Saturday. Verstappen started on pole, with Norris and Piastri behind him. At turn 1, it all went wrong as four cars tried to occupy space only big enough for maybe three of them. Piastri got a little air as he collided with his teammate, ending both their races. Verstappen went on to win easily, taking eight points out of Piastri’s lead.

This generation of F1 car was designed to be able to follow another one without losing downforce, but as the teams have developed their cars over the last few years, that ability has eroded, and yet again running in clean air is the way to maximize laptimes.

It got worse for Piastri when he only qualified in sixth place for Sunday’s race, with Verstappen and Norris—his two title rivals—starting first and second again.

On Sunday, like in the sprint, Verstappen was unchallenged into turn 1 and drove to the checkered flag without much drama. Norris probably had the speed to challenge him, but the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc, which started the race on soft tires rather than mediums, used his grip advantage to pass Norris at the first turn. Within about four laps Leclerc’s tires had already given their best, allowing Verstappen to eke out a small lead.

What followed was a wonderfully exciting battle between Norris and Leclerc for second place. The drivers were on different strategies: Leclerc would switch to a medium after his soft tire, Norris would do the opposite. It took Norris a while to pass Leclerc the first time, with the McLaren driver trying the same cutback move at a number of corners without success before eventually succeeding.

But Leclerc stopped first, and when Norris made his tire change he yet again had to overtake Leclerc. This time Norris was much braver on the brakes into turn 12 to complete the move. Once in clean air, Norris was matching Verstappen’s speed, but the gap was too much to close down.

Verstappen’s win brings him to within 40 points of Piastri, with Norris just 14 points behind his teammate. And remember, there’s 25 points for a win—another non-finish for Piastri would be a disaster now. Should Verstappen manage to overtake both, he will have overcome the greatest points deficit in F1 history to do so.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but they do say it rhymes. And I’m hearing some of the same melodies as 2007, when dueling McLaren drivers took points off each other to allow Kimi Räikkönen and Ferrari to win the driver’s championship—and also 1986, when dueling Williams drivers lost to the McLaren of Alain Prost. If 2025 becomes Verstappen’s fifth world championship, it should go down as his most accomplished.

And there’s not long to wait: The next round takes place next weekend in Mexico City.

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Posted Tuesday 21 October 2025 at 3:55 am AEST (my time).

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While demand for software engineers and developers surged during the 2020/2022 tech boom, industry shifts driven by automation, hiring slowdowns, and a growing pool of candidates have reshaped the landscape.

Professor James O’Brien, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says the pressure is particularly intense for new grads entering the workforce.

“The entry level jobs, … work that maybe wasn’t the most complicated work or the most difficult … are increasingly being automated,” O’Brien said in an interview with CTV Your Morning on Friday.

“And because those jobs are going away … we’re seeing a decline in the number of entry level positions that are available.”

O’Brien noted that artificial intelligence now writes at least 20 per cent of code in some organizations, warning the trend might get worse.

“We’re going to see in computer science something that we see happening in other fields as well,” he said.

“Those jobs are also going to start to get automated by AI, and as they go awaywe’re going to see growing unemployment, not just in computer science, but probably really across the board.”

O’Brien emphasized the global nature of this trend, pointing to similar hiring declines for graduates in countries like India.

For him, the challenge isn’t jobs moving offshore, it’s automation.

“It depends a little bit on what you think is going to happen with the evolution of the technology we have today,” he said.

“I personally think that the technology is going to continue to advance.”

Still, he said opportunities remain.

“I would encourage students (to not) just focus on learning low-level skills, like how to write code in a particular language, but instead focus on learning the higher-level concepts,” he said.

“That kind of stuff is still in the domain of where humans are better than the AI systems. ...

It’s the lower level mechanic of how to write the code (that’s being replaced) ... not deciding what the code should be doing in the first place.”

Source

The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed Sunday that it is investigating an airliner that was struck by an object in its windscreen, mid-flight, over Utah.

“NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data,” the federal agency said on the social media site X. “Windscreen being sent to NTSB laboratories for examination.”

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.

Object’s origin not confirmed

The captain of the flight reportedly described the object that hit the plane as “space debris.” This has not been confirmed, however.

After the impact, the aircraft safely landed at Salt Lake City International Airport after being diverted.

Images of the strike showed that an object made a forceful impact near the upper right part of the window, showing damage to the metal frame. Because aircraft windows are multiple layers thick, with laminate in between, the window pane did not shatter completely. The aircraft was flying above 30,000 feet—likely around 36,000 feet—and the cockpit apparently maintained its cabin pressure.

So was it space debris? It is impossible to know without more data. A very few species of birds can fly above 30,000 feet. However, the world’s highest flying bird, Rüppell’s vulture, is found mainly in Africa. An unregulated weather balloon is also a possibility, although it’s not clear whether the velocity would have been high enough to cause the kind of damage observed. Hail is also a potential culprit.

Assuming this was not a Shohei Ohtani home run ball, the only other potential cause of the damage is an object from space.

That was the initial conclusion of the pilot, but a meteor is more likely than space debris. Estimates vary, but a recent study in the journal Geology found that about 17,000 meteorites strike Earth in a given year. That is at least an order of magnitude greater than the amount of human-made space debris that survives reentry through Earth’s atmosphere.

A careful analysis of the glass and metal impacted by the object should be able to reveal its origin.

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Posted Monday 20 October 2025 at 12:13 pm AEST (my time).

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For more than a century, the zipper has stayed more or less the same: two interlocking rows of teeth, a sliding pull, and the fabric tape that holds it together. It’s one of those inventions that conquered the world by blending into it. Billions are used every day, yet few people ever stop to think about how they work.

Now, after a hundred years of stasis, YKK, the Japanese company that makes roughly half the world’s zippers, has decided it’s time to rethink the mechanism that holds much of modern clothing together. Their new AiryString zipper looks ordinary at first glance. Then you realize what’s missing: there’s no tape.

That absence transforms everything. Without the woven fabric that normally flanks the teeth, the AiryString is lighter, sleeker, and far more flexible. It’s a small but important redesign that feels almost futuristic in its simplicity, a fastening system that sinks into a garment instead of sitting on top of it.

“We wanted to address the challenges involved in zipper sewing,” says Makoto Nishizaki, vice president of YKK’s Application Development Division. The idea grew out of a collaboration with JUKI Corporation, a leader in industrial sewing machines. Together, the two companies reconsidered how a zipper could be made and how it could merge more seamlessly with fabric. The partnership began in 2017 and made its public debut at the JIAM 2022 Osaka trade show—a detail that hints at how long YKK plays the long game.

If YKK’s name doesn’t ring a bell, check the pull tab on your jackets or pants, because you probably already wear their work. In 2023, the company had more than $6 billion in revenue. Founded in Japan in 1934, the company makes zippers for everyone from Prada and Arc’teryx to Patagonia and The North Face.

Its dominance comes from an unusual level of control: YKK manufactures its own machines, designs its own molds, and even spins its own thread. That self-sufficiency lets it experiment in ways competitors can’t, turning a mundane component into a field for continuous innovation.

Reinventing an Everyday Mechanism

The zipper, as we know it, hasn’t had a real overhaul since the 1910s. Its long reign owes much to reliability—it’s sturdy, inexpensive, and easy to sew. For most of the 20th century, that was enough. But materials have evolved. Designers now work with featherlight nylons, stretch fabrics, and technical blends that behave more like skin than cloth. The old zipper, with its woven borders and stiff seams, has started to feel out of sync with what surrounds it.

“There has been a growing demand from the market for lighter and more flexible garments,” Nishizaki says. “And similar expectations have extended to zippers.” However, removing the tape introduced a host of engineering problems. Those strips of fabric give a zipper its structure and provide the surface tailors sew through. Without them, YKK had to rethink every step of production.

The teeth were redesigned, the manufacturing process rewritten, and new machinery developed to attach the closure to garments. “The absence of the tape posed various production challenges,” Nishizaki says. “We had to develop new manufacturing equipment and a dedicated sewing machine for integration.” The result: a lighter, more flexible system that reduces material use and environmental impact compared with a standard Vislon zipper.

Early adopters are already experimenting. Descente Japan, known for technical sportswear, was among the first to prototype AiryString in 2022. The North Face has selected the system for use in its new Summit Series Advanced Mountain Kit. Smaller brands like Earthletica, an eco-conscious swim and performance label, have also tested it, describing the zipper as “soft, flexible, and almost silent.”

The effect is apparently tactile. Garments move more naturally, lie flatter against the body, and feel less mechanical. “We repeatedly conduct durability and strength tests by sewing AiryString and conventional zippers into various fabrics,” Nishizaki says. “In terms of usability, AiryString offers much smoother operability.” That translates to a softer, slicker glide—the satisfying pull that separates a well-made jacket from a cheap one.

Little Parts, Big Change

On the factory floor, the benefits add up, too. Traditional zippers consume extra fabric and dye and require multiple sewing passes. By removing the tape, YKK says it trims both material and labor. “It contributes to reducing work in customers’ sewing processes,” Nishizaki says. “It also reduces fiber use and water consumption in the dyeing process, lowering CO₂ emissions.”

The math adds up fast. YKK offers a 100 percent recycled-material version of AiryString and claims measurable cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and water usage. The impact is magnified by scale: The company operates in 71 countries and regions, and its trademark is registered in 177. When you make billions of zippers a year, these small efficiencies ripple globally.

That incremental progress mirrors YKK’s founding philosophy, the “Cycle of Goodness.” The principle—that no one prospers without benefiting others—has supposedly guided the company for decades. It’s visible in its other micro-improvements: corrosion-resistant alloys, sound-dampened sliders, recyclable polyester tapes. AiryString continues that tradition, shrinking the zipper’s physical and environmental footprint at once.

Adoption, though, will take time. AiryString can fit into existing workflows, but to unlock its full potential, factories will apparently need specialized sewing equipment. That limits early use to design-led and performance-oriented brands, such as The North Face, willing to retool. Once those experiments prove successful, the technology could spread quickly, especially in an industry where efficiency drives everything from pricing to sustainability.

When asked what zippers might look like in 50 years, Nishizaki doesn’t talk about smart fabrics or AI-assisted closures. He returns to YKK’s mantra: “Little parts. Big difference.” AiryString embodies that principle. It’s not a flashy reinvention, it's a recalibration. A century-old mechanism made lighter, cleaner, and almost invisible. In a world addicted to louder, faster innovation, YKK’s breakthrough succeeds by subtracting rather than adding.

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Posted Monday 20 October 2025 at 4:01 am AEST (my time).

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Led by neuroscientist Masako Tamaki, the research team has discovered how the ebb and flow of this fluid are closely synchronized with brain activity during deep sleep. Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shed new light on one of biology’s oldest mysteries—why we sleep, and what happens inside the brain when we do.

A Closer Look at Sleep’s Hidden Purpose

For decades, scientists have known that sleep is not just a period of rest. It is vital for learning, memory, emotional stability, and even the brain’s own housekeeping. Throughout the day, our neurons fire constantly, building up molecular “waste” as a natural byproduct of their activity. Sleep seems to act as the brain’s cleaning crew, clearing away this debris and restoring balance.

The cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, plays a central role in this process. It cushions the brain and spinal cord while also circulating nutrients and removing waste. But exactly how the CSF moves during sleep—and how that movement is linked to brain activity—has remained largely unknown.

Understanding this connection could explain why deep, stable sleep is so essential for normal brain function, especially in areas responsible for learning and memory.

The Challenge of Studying Deep Sleep

Studying sleep inside an MRI scanner poses a significant challenge. The machines are notoriously loud, producing rhythmic clanging and buzzing sounds that make it difficult for participants to fall into—and remain in—deep sleep. For researchers trying to observe how brain fluids behave during this stage, the noise has been a frustrating obstacle.

Tamaki and her team found a clever solution. They developed a technique known as sparse functional MRI (fMRI), which takes images intermittently—about once every three seconds—rather than continuously. The quiet gaps between scans allowed participants to fall into deeper stages of non-REM sleep naturally, while the fMRI and brainwave recordings continued collecting valuable data.

A Window into the Sleeping Brain

As volunteers slept inside the MRI, the researchers monitored two things simultaneously: the flow of cerebrospinal fluid and the slow, rhythmic brain waves characteristic of deep sleep. These slow waves are thought to reflect synchronized bursts of neural activity, when vast networks of neurons briefly turn on and off together.

The results were striking. During deep non-REM sleep, the team observed that slow brain waves triggered frequent, moderate increases in cerebrospinal fluid signals within about eight seconds. These patterns were distinct from what occurred during other stages of sleep.

In light sleep or moments of brief arousal, the fluid signals behaved differently—each slow wave produced a larger but less frequent surge, occurring more slowly. During REM sleep, when we dream, the changes were even subtler, taking nearly thirty seconds and remaining very small in amplitude.

These findings revealed that each sleep stage has its own unique relationship with cerebrospinal fluid flow, suggesting that the brain’s “cleaning cycles” are not uniform but finely tuned to the type of rest we are experiencing.

The Memory Network Awakens in Sleep

Sleep is not just about rest—it’s about reorganization. While we dream and drift, the brain’s memory centers, including the hippocampus and frontal cortex, are surprisingly active. These regions replay and strengthen the day’s experiences, converting fragile short-term memories into stable long-term ones.

Brain regions recruited during different stages of sleep. Slow-wave sleep induces activity in brain regions involved in learning and memory circuits. Credit: RIKEN

Tamaki’s study found that during deep sleep, when this memory network was most active, the cerebrospinal fluid patterns were especially distinct. The synchronized dance of slow waves and fluid signals seemed to occur only when these learning and memory regions were engaged.

This suggests that the same neural rhythms that consolidate our memories might also coordinate the brain’s cleaning system—clearing away the waste generated by intense mental activity while we are awake.

A Mystery Hidden in the Fluid

Despite these advances, one puzzle remains. The fMRI detects changes based on magnetic properties of hemoglobin in the blood, yet cerebrospinal fluid contains no blood at all. So why does it produce such clear signals?

The researchers suspect that these signals may reflect a complex mix of factors—perhaps small changes in surrounding brain tissues, shifts in pressure or volume, or subtle movements of the fluid as it circulates through the brain’s ventricles. Whatever the exact mechanism, the synchronization between deep sleep waves and CSF flow points to an intricate biological system evolved to keep our brains clean and healthy.

“Our findings indicate that deep sleep affects cerebrospinal fluid signals differently than do light sleep, REM sleep, or arousal,” explains Tamaki. “The rapid, yet moderate increases in the signal might relate to a process that is necessary for removing the particular kinds of waste that tend to accumulate within the learning and memory brain network during the day.”

The Cleansing Rhythm of Rest

What emerges from this research is an image of the sleeping brain not as idle or passive, but as exquisitely active in ways that sustain our mental life. During deep sleep, waves of neural activity wash through memory centers, setting off corresponding pulses in cerebrospinal fluid that may sweep away metabolic waste.

This nightly cleansing could be crucial for preventing neurological decline. Scientists have already linked poor sleep to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, where toxic proteins like beta-amyloid accumulate in the brain. If deep sleep helps clear such molecules, maintaining healthy sleep cycles might be one of our most powerful tools for long-term brain health.
The Beauty of the Sleeping Brain

There is something deeply poetic about the idea that, while we sleep, our brains quietly repair and renew themselves. What feels like stillness from the outside is, in truth, a complex ballet of waves, pulses, and flows—a living rhythm that has evolved over millions of years.

Tamaki’s research reminds us that deep sleep is not a luxury but a biological necessity. It is the time when our memories take root, our emotions settle, and our minds are cleansed of the noise of waking life.

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Sea surface temperatures between July and September were more than 0.25C above the previous high of 2022 - a big increase across an area roughly ten times the size of the Mediterranean.

While climate change is known to make marine heatwaves more likely, scientists are struggling to explain why the north Pacific has been so hot for so long.

But all this extra heat in the so-called "warm blob" may have the opposite effect in the UK, possibly making a colder start to winter more likely, some researchers believe.

"There's definitely something unusual going on in the north Pacific," said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a research group in the US.

Such a jump in temperatures across a region so large is "quite remarkable", he added.

The BBC analysed data from the European Copernicus climate service to calculate average temperatures between July and September across a large area of the north Pacific, sometimes known as the "warm blob".

The region extends from the east coast of Asia to the west coast of North America, the same area used in previous scientific studies.

The figures show that not only has the region been warming quickly over the past couple of decades, but 2025 is markedly higher than recent years too.

That the seas are getting hotter is no surprise. Global warming, caused by humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases, has already trebled the number of days of extreme heat in oceans globally, according to research published earlier this year.

But temperatures have been even higher than most climate models - computer simulations taking into account humanity's carbon emissions - had predicted.

Analysis of these models by the Berkeley Earth group suggests that sea temperatures observed across the north Pacific in August had less than a 1% chance of occurring in any single year.

Natural weather variability is thought to be part of the reason. This summer has seen weaker-than-usual winds, for example.

That means more heat from the summer sunshine can stay in the sea surface, rather than being mixed with cooler waters below.

But this can only go so far in explaining the exceptional conditions, according to Dr Hausfather.

"It certainly is not just natural variability," he said. "There's something else going on here as well."

One intriguing idea is that a recent change to shipping fuels might be contributing to the warming. Prior to 2020, dirty engine oil produced large amounts of sulphur dioxide, a gas harmful to human health.

But that sulphur also formed tiny, Sun-reflecting particles in the atmosphere, known as aerosols, which helped to keep a lid on rising temperatures.

So removing that cooling effect in shipping hotspots like the north Pacific could be revealing the full impact of human-caused warming.

"It does seem like sulphur is the primary candidate for what's driving this warming in the region," said Dr Hausfather.

Other research suggests that efforts to reduce air pollution in Chinese cities has played a role in warming the Pacific too.

That dirty air did a similar job to shipping in reflecting sunlight away, while cleaning it up could have had the unintended consequence of allowing more ocean heating.

Possible impacts for the UK?

The north Pacific's marine heatwave has already had consequences for weather on both sides of the Pacific, likely boosting very high summer temperatures in Japan and South Korea and storms in the US.

"In California, we've seen supercharged thunderstorms because the warm ocean waters in the Pacific provide heat and moisture," said Amanda Maycock, professor in climate dynamics at the University of Leeds.

"In particular, there are things we call atmospheric rivers… bands of air, which contain very high amounts of moisture that fuel themselves from the ocean waters," she added.

"So if we have warm ocean waters… they can then bring a lot of moisture onto the land, which then falls out as rain, or in the wintertime can precipitate out as snow."

The intense heat to hit Japan in August was likely amplified by Pacific Ocean heat, researchers say

Long-term weather forecasting is always challenging, but extreme heat in the north Pacific has the potential to affect the UK and Europe in the coming months too.

That's because of relationships between weather in different parts of the world known as teleconnections.

"Although the current warm conditions are located in the north Pacific, these can generate wave motions in the atmosphere that can alter our weather downstream into the north Atlantic and into Europe," said Prof Maycock.

"That can tend to favour high-pressure conditions over the continent, which brings us more of an influence from the Arctic, where we have colder air," she added.

"That can be drawn over Europe and bring us colder weather in early winter."

A colder outcome is by no means certain, as this is a complex area of science. Several other weather patterns also affect UK winters, which are typically getting milder with climate change.

And a warm north Pacific appears to have different effects later in the winter, favouring milder and wetter conditions in some parts of Europe.

Emerging La Niña in the tropical Pacific

Another factor to throw into the mix is what's happening further south in the eastern tropical Pacific.

There, surface waters are unusually cool - a classic sign of the weather phenomenon known as La Niña.

La Niña, and its warm sibling El Niño, are natural patterns, although research published this week highlighted that global warming could itself impact the swings between them.

Weak La Niña conditions are expected to persist over the next few months, according to NOAA, the US science agency.

All else being equal, La Niña generally increases the risk of a cold start to winter in the UK, but also brings a higher chance of a mild end, the Met Office says.

"These two drivers in the north and tropical Pacific will be acting together this winter," said Prof Maycock.

"But since the La Niña is quite weak this year, the extreme warmth in the north Pacific could be more important for forecasting the winter ahead."

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Results of a trial in North America show that the test was able to identify a wide range of cancers, of which three-quarters don't have any form of screening programme.

More than half the cancers were detected at an early stage, where they are easier to treat and potentially curable.

The Galleri test, made by American pharmaceutical firm Grail, can detect fragments of cancerous DNA that have broken off a tumour and are circulating in the blood. It is currently being trialled by the NHS.

The trial followed 25,000 adults from the US and Canada over a year, with nearly one in 100 getting a positive result. For 62% of these cases, cancer was later confirmed.

Lead researcher Dr Nima Nabavizadeh, associate professor of radiation medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, said the data showed that the test could "fundamentally change" their approach to cancer screening.

He explained that it could help detect many types of cancer "earlier, when the chance of successful treatment or even cure are the greatest".

The test correctly ruled out cancer in over 99% of those who tested negative.

When combined with breast, bowel, lung and cervical screening it increased the number of cancers detected overall seven-fold.

Crucially, three-quarters of cancers detected were those which have no screening programme such as ovarian, liver, stomach, bladder and pancreatic cancer.

The blood test correctly identified the origin of the cancer in nine out of 10 cases.

These impressive results suggest the blood test could eventually have a major role to play in diagnosing cancer earlier.

But scientists not involved in the research say more evidence is needed to show whether the blood test reduces deaths from cancer.

Clare Turnbull, professor of translational cancer genetics at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: "Data from randomised studies, with mortality as an endpoint, will be absolutely essential to establish whether seemingly earlier-stage detection by Galleri translates into benefits in mortality."

The topline results are to be released at the European Society for Medical Oncology congress in Berlin on Saturday, but the full details have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Much will depend on the results of a three-year trial involving 140,000 NHS patients in England, which will be published next year.

The NHS has previously said that if the results are successful, it would extend the tests to a further one million people.

Sir Harpal Kumar, president of biopharma at Grail called the results "very compelling".

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said: "The vast majority of people who die from cancer do so because we find their cancers too late."

Many cancers are found when they are "already very advanced" he added, explaining that the aim is to "shift to earlier detection, when we have the chance to use treatments that are much more effective and potentially curative".

But Naser Turabi of Cancer Research UK cautioned that further research is needed to "avoid overdiagnosing cancers that may not have caused harm".

"The UK National Screening Committee will "play a critical role in reviewing the evidence and determining whether these tests should be adopted by the NHS," he added.

Source

The Orion spacecraft, which will fly four people around the Moon, arrived inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida late Thursday night, ready to be stacked on top of its rocket for launch early next year.

The late-night transfer covered about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from one facility to another at the Florida spaceport. NASA and its contractors are continuing preparations for the Artemis II mission after the White House approved the program as an exception to work through the ongoing government shutdown, which began on October 1.

The sustained work could set up Artemis II for a launch opportunity as soon as February 5 of next year. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will be the first humans to fly on the Orion spacecraft, a vehicle that has been in development for nearly two decades. The Artemis II crew will make history on their 10-day flight by becoming the first people to travel to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972.

Where things stand

The Orion spacecraft, developed by Lockheed Martin, has made several stops at Kennedy over the last few months since leaving its factory in May.

First, the capsule moved to a fueling facility, where technicians filled it with hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, which will feed Orion’s main engine and maneuvering thrusters on the flight to the Moon and back. In the same facility, teams loaded high-pressure helium and ammonia coolant into Orion propulsion and thermal control systems.

The next stop was a nearby building where the Launch Abort System was installed on the Orion spacecraft. The tower-like abort system would pull the capsule away from its rocket in the event of a launch failure. Orion stands roughly 67 feet (20 meters) tall with its service module, crew module, and abort tower integrated together.

Teams at Kennedy also installed four ogive panels to serve as an aerodynamic shield over the Orion crew capsule during the first few minutes of launch.

It was then time to move Orion to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where a separate team has worked all year to stack the elements of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. In the coming days, cranes will lift the spacecraft, weighing 78,000 pounds (35 metric tons), dozens of stories above the VAB’s center aisle, then up and over the transom into the building’s northeast high bay to be lowered atop the SLS heavy-lift rocket.

Workers will methodically tighten 360 bolts to firmly connect the Orion spacecraft to the Space Launch System. Once complete, NASA will have the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket and spacecraft for Artemis II fully assembled for final tests and checkouts inside the VAB, the same structure used to ready space shuttles and Moon-bound Apollo missions for flight in past eras of human spaceflight.

The path ahead

One of the most critical activities planned in the VAB is a countdown rehearsal with the four-person Artemis II crew. The astronauts will take their seats inside the Orion spacecraft and practice their launch-day procedures, which include configuring the craft’s cockpit for flight. The rocket won’t be fueled for this event.

Other tasks planned for the rest of the year include testing of the rocket’s destruct system, which would be used if the vehicle flies off course after liftoff. NASA will then be ready to roll the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft to Launch Complex 39B, probably sometime in January if the mission holds to its February 5 target launch date.

At the pad, NASA will run the rocket through a practice countdown. This time, the rocket will be fueled with super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to make sure everything is in good shape for launch day. This is the same test that uncovered persistent hydrogen fuel leaks on the SLS rocket before the first unpiloted Artemis test flight in 2022.

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA’s Artemis II launch director, said last month that officials believe the hydrogen leak problem has been “put to bed” after changing the design of a leaky valve and demonstrating a gentler fueling procedure during the Artemis I countdown three years ago.

If the countdown rehearsal goes well, the launch team and rocket will be ready for the real launch attempt a few days later. Officials don’t plan to return the rocket to the VAB unless they uncover a major problem at the pad.

On launch day, Wiseman and his three crewmates will take their seats inside the Orion spacecraft a few hours before liftoff. Their ride to space will push them off the pad with 8.8 million pounds of thrust. A few minutes later, the Launch Abort System will jettison to reveal the Orion crew capsule. Once in orbit, Orion will break free of the rocket, and if everything looks good, they’re off to the Moon.

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Posted Saturday 18 October 2025 at 5:10 pm AEST (my time).

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Our hominid ancestors faced a Pleistocene world full of dangers—and apparently one of those dangers was lead poisoning.

Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo. Paleoanthropologist Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Australia’s Southern Cross University and his colleagues found evidence of exposure to dangerous amounts of lead in the teeth of fossil apes and hominins dating back almost 2 million years. And somewhat controversially, they suggest that the toxic element’s pervasiveness may have helped shape our evolutionary history.

The Romans didn’t invent lead poisoning

Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues took tiny samples of preserved enamel and dentin from the teeth of 51 fossils. In most of those teeth, the paleoanthropologists found evidence that these apes and hominins had been exposed to lead—sometimes in dangerous quantities—fairly often during their early years.

Tooth enamel forms in thin layers, a little like tree rings, during the first six or so years of a person’s life. The teeth in your mouth right now (and of which you are now uncomfortably aware; you’re welcome) are a chemical and physical record of your childhood health—including, perhaps, whether you liked to snack on lead paint chips. Bands of lead-tainted tooth enamel suggest that a person had a lot of lead in their bloodstream during the year that layer of enamel was forming (in this case, “a lot” means an amount measurable in parts per million).

In 71 percent of the hominin teeth that Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues sampled, dark bands of lead in the tooth enamel showed “clear signs of episodic lead exposure” during the crucial early childhood years. Those included teeth from 100,000-year-old members of our own species found in China and 250,000-year-old French Neanderthals. They also included much earlier hominins who lived between 1 and 2 million years ago in South Africa: early members of our genus Homo, along with our relatives Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. Lead exposure, it turns out, is a very ancient problem.

Living in a dangerous world

This study isn’t the first evidence that ancient hominins dealt with lead in their environments. Two Neanderthals living 250,000 years ago in France experienced lead exposure as young children, according to a 2018 study. At the time, they were the oldest known examples of lead exposure (and they’re included in Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues’ recent study).

Until a few thousand years ago, no one was smelting silver, plumbing bathhouses, or releasing lead fumes in car exhaust. So how were our hominin ancestors exposed to the toxic element? Another study, published in 2015, showed that the Spanish caves occupied by other groups of Neanderthals contained enough heavy metals, including lead, to “meet the present-day standards of ‘contaminated soil.’”

Today, we mostly think of lead in terms of human-made pollution, so it’s easy to forget that it’s also found naturally in bedrock and soil. If that weren’t the case, archaeologists couldn’t use lead isotope ratios to tell where certain artifacts were made. And some places—and some types of rock—have higher lead concentrations than others. Several common minerals contain lead compounds, including galena or lead sulfide. And the kind of lead exposure documented in Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues’ study would have happened at an age when little hominins were very prone to putting rocks, cave dirt, and other random objects in their mouths.

Some of the fossils from the Queque cave system in China, which included a 1.8 million-year-old extinct gorilla-like ape called Gigantopithecus blacki, had lead levels higher than 50 parts per million, which Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues describe as “a substantial level of lead that could have triggered some developmental, health, and perhaps social impairments.”

Even for ancient hominins who weren’t living in caves full of lead-rich minerals, wildfires, or volcanic eruptions can also release lead particles into the air, and erosion or flooding can sweep buried lead-rich rock or sediment into water sources. If you’re an Australopithecine living upstream of a lead-rich mica outcropping, for example, erosion might sprinkle poison into your drinking water—or the drinking water of the gazelle you eat or the root system of the bush you get those tasty berries from… .

Our world is full of poisons. Modern humans may have made a habit of digging them up and pumping them into the air, but they’ve always been lying in wait for the unwary.

Digging into the details

Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues sampled the teeth of several hominin species from South Africa, all unearthed from cave systems just a few kilometers apart. All of them walked the area known as Cradle of Humankind within a few hundred thousand years of each other (at most), and they would have shared a very similar environment. But they also would have had very different diets and ways of life, and that’s reflected in their wildly different exposures to lead.

A. africanus had the highest exposure levels, while P. robustus had signs of infrequent, very slight exposures (with Homo somewhere in between the two). Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues chalk the difference up to the species’ different diets and ecological niches.

“The different patterns of lead exposure could suggest that P. robustus lead bands were the result of acute exposure (e.g., wild forest fire),” Joannes-Boyau and his colleagues wrote, “while for the other two species, known to have a more varied diet, lead bands may be due to more frequent, seasonal, and higher lead concentration through bioaccumulation processes in the food chain.”

Did lead exposure affect our evolution?

Given their evidence that humans and their ancestors have regularly been exposed to lead, the team looked into whether this might have influenced human evolution. In doing so, they focused on a gene called NOVA1, which has been linked to both brain development and the response to lead exposure. The results were quite a bit short of decisive; you can think of things as remaining within the realm of a provocative hypothesis.

The NOVA1 gene encodes a protein that influences the processing of messenger RNAs, allowing it to control the production of closely related variants of a single gene. It’s notable for a number of reasons. One is its role in brain development; mice without a working copy of NOVA1 die shortly after birth due to defects in muscle control. Its activity is also altered following exposure to lead.

But perhaps its most interesting feature is that modern humans have a version of the gene that differs by a single amino acid from the version found in all other primates, including our closest relatives, the Denisovans and Neanderthals. This raises the prospect that the difference is significant from an evolutionary perspective. Altering the mouse version so that it is identical to the one found in modern humans does alter the vocal behavior of these mice.

But work with human stem cells has produced mixed results. One group, led by one of the researchers involved in this work, suggested that stem cells carrying the ancestral form of the protein behaved differently from those carrying the modern human version. But others have been unable to replicate those results.

Regardless of that bit of confusion, the researchers used the same system, culturing stem cells with the modern human and ancestral versions of the protein. These clusters of cells (called organoids) were grown in media containing two different concentrations of lead, and changes in gene activity and protein production were examined. The researchers found changes, but the significance isn’t entirely clear. There were differences between the cells with the two versions of the gene, even without any lead present. Adding lead could produce additional changes, but some of those were partially reversed if more lead was added. And none of those changes were clearly related either to a response to lead or the developmental defects it can produce.

The relevance of these changes isn’t obvious, either, as stem cell cultures tend to reflect early neural development while the lead exposure found in the fossilized remains is due to exposure during the first few years of life.

So there isn’t any clear evidence that the variant found in modern humans protects individuals who are exposed to lead, much less that it was selected by evolution for that function. And given the widespread exposure seen in this work, it seems like all of our relatives—including some we know modern humans interbred with—would also have benefited from this variant if it was protective.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr1524  (About DOIs).

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RIP Matrix

We all feel it: Our once-happy digital spaces have become increasingly less user-friendly and more toxic, cluttered with extras nobody asked for and hardly anybody wants. There’s even a word for it: “enshittification,” named 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The term was coined by tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow, a longtime advocate of digital rights. Doctorow has spun his analysis of what’s been ailing the tech industry into an eminently readable new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.

As Doctorow tells it, he was on vacation in Puerto Rico, staying in a remote cabin nestled in a cloud forest with microwave Internet service—i.e., very bad Internet service, since microwave signals struggle to penetrate through clouds. It was a 90-minute drive to town, but when they tried to consult TripAdvisor for good local places to have dinner one night, they couldn’t get the site to load. “All you would get is the little TripAdvisor logo as an SVG filling your whole tab and nothing else,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I tweeted, ‘Has anyone at TripAdvisor ever been on a trip? This is the most enshittified website I’ve ever used.'”

Initially, he just got a few “haha, that’s a funny word” responses. “It was when I married that to this technical critique, at a moment when things were quite visibly bad to a much larger group of people, that made it take off,” Doctorow said. “I didn’t deliberately set out to do it. I bought a million lottery tickets and one of them won the lottery. It only took two decades.”

Yes, people sometimes express regret to him that the term includes a swear word. To which he responds, “You’re welcome to come up with another word. I’ve tried. ‘Platform decay’ just isn’t as good.” (“Encrapification” and “enpoopification” also lack a certain je ne sais quoi.)

In fact, it’s the sweariness that people love about the word. While that also means his book title inevitably gets bleeped on broadcast radio, “The hosts, in my experience, love getting their engineers to creatively bleep it,” said Doctorow. “They find it funny. It’s good radio, it stands out when every fifth word is ‘enbeepification.'”

People generally use “enshittification” colloquially to mean “the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time.” Doctorow’s definition is more specific, encompassing “why an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds,” and how this process spreads to other online services, such that everything is getting worse all at once.

For Doctorow, enshittification is a disease with symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. It has infected everything from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google, to Airbnb, dating apps, iPhones, and everything in between. “For me, the fact that there were a lot of platforms that were going through this at the same time is one of the most interesting and important factors in the critique,” he said. “It makes this a structural issue and not a series of individual issues.”

It starts with the creation of a new two-sided online product of high quality, initially offered at a loss to attract users—say, Facebook, to pick an obvious example. Once the users are hooked on the product, the vendor moves to the second stage: degrading the product in some way for the benefit of their business customers. This might include selling advertisements, scraping and/or selling user data, or tweaking algorithms to prioritize content the vendor wishes users to see rather than what those users actually want.

This locks in the business customers, who, in turn, invest heavily in that product, such as media companies that started Facebook pages to promote their published content. Once business customers are locked in, the vendor can degrade those services too—i.e., by de-emphasizing news and links away from Facebook—to maximize profits to shareholders. Voila! The product is now enshittified.

The four horsemen of the shitocalypse

Doctorow identifies four key factors that have played a role in ushering in an era that he has dubbed the “Enshittocene.” The first is competition (markets), in which companies are motivated to make good products at affordable prices, with good working conditions, because otherwise customers and workers will go to their competitors.  The second is government regulation, such as antitrust laws that serve to keep corporate consolidation in check, or levying fines for dishonest practices, which makes it unprofitable to cheat.

The third is interoperability: the inherent flexibility of digital tools, which can play a useful adversarial role. “The fact that enshittification can always be reversed with a dis-enshittifiting counter-technology always acted as a brake on the worst impulses of tech companies,” Doctorow writes. Finally, there is labor power; in the case of the tech industry, highly skilled workers were scarce and thus had considerable leverage over employers.

All four factors, when functioning correctly, should serve as constraints to enshittification. However, “One by one each enshittification restraint was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittification impulse unchecked,” Doctorow writes. Any “cure” will require reversing those well-established trends.

But isn’t all this just the nature of capitalism? Doctorow thinks it’s not, arguing that the aforementioned weakening of traditional constraints has resulted in the usual profit-seeking behavior producing very different, enshittified outcomes. “Adam Smith has this famous passage in Wealth of Nations about how it’s not due to the generosity of the baker that we get our bread but to his own self-regard,” said Doctorow. “It’s the fear that you’ll get your bread somewhere else that makes him keep prices low and keep quality high. It’s the fear of his employees leaving that makes him pay them a fair wage. It is the constraints that causes firms to behave better. You don’t have to believe that everything should be a capitalist or a for-profit enterprise to acknowledge that that’s true.”

Our wide-ranging conversation below has been edited for length to highlight the main points of discussion.

Macmillan Publishers

 

Copyright Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO)/CC-BY 3.0

 

Ars Technica: I was intrigued by your choice of framing device, discussing enshittification as a form of contagion. 

Cory Doctorow: I’m on a constant search for different framing devices for these complex arguments. I have talked about enshittification in lots of different ways. That frame was one that resonated with people. I’ve been a blogger for a quarter of a century, and instead of keeping notes to myself, I make notes in public, and I write up what I think is important about something that has entered my mind, for better or for worse. The downside is that you’re constantly getting feedback that can be a little overwhelming. The upside is that you’re constantly getting feedback, and if you pay attention, it tells you where to go next, what to double down on.

Another way of organizing this is the Galaxy Brain meme, where the tiny brain is “Oh, this is because consumers shopped wrong.” The medium brain is “This is because VCs are greedy.” The larger brain is “This is because tech bosses are assholes.” But the biggest brain of all is “This is because policymakers created the policy environment where greed can ruin our lives.” There’s probably never going to be just one way to talk about this stuff that lands with everyone. So I like using a variety of approaches. I suck at being on message. I’m not going to do Enshittification for the Soul and Mornings with Enshittifying Maury. I am restless, and my Myers-Briggs type is ADHD, and I want to have a lot of different ways of talking about this stuff.

Ars Technica: One site that hasn’t (yet) succumbed is Wikipedia. What has protected Wikipedia thus far? 

Cory Doctorow: Wikipedia is an amazing example of what we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) call the public interest Internet. Internet Archive is another one. Most of these public interest Internet services start off as one person’s labor of love, and that person ends up being what we affectionately call the benevolent dictator for life. Very few of these projects have seen the benevolent dictator for life say, “Actually, this is too important for one person to run. I cannot be the keeper of the soul of this project. I am prone to self-deception and folly just like every other person. This needs to belong to its community.” Wikipedia is one of them. The founder, my friend Jimmy Wales, woke up one day and said, “No individual should run Wikipedia. It should be a communal effort.”

There’s a much more durable and thick constraint on the decisions of anyone at Wikipedia to do something bad. For example, Jimmy had this idea that you could use AI in Wikipedia to help people make entries and navigate Wikipedia’s policies, which are daunting. The community evaluated his arguments and decided—not in a reactionary way, but in a really thoughtful way—that this was wrong. Jimmy didn’t get his way. It didn’t rule out something in the future, but that’s not happening now. That’s pretty cool.

Wikipedia is not just governed by a board; it’s also structured as a nonprofit. That doesn’t mean that there’s no way it could go bad. But it’s a source of friction against enshittification. Wikipedia has its entire corpus irrevocably licensed as the most open it can be without actually being in the public domain. Even if someone were to capture Wikipedia, there’s limits on what they could do to it.

There’s also a labor constraint in Wikipedia in that there’s very little that the leadership can do without bringing along a critical mass of a large and diffuse body of volunteers. That cuts against the volunteers working in unison—they’re not represented by a union; it’s hard for them to push back with one voice. But because they’re so diffuse and because there’s no paychecks involved, it’s really hard for management to do bad things. So if there are two people vying for the job of running the Wikimedia Foundation and one of them has got nefarious plans and the other doesn’t, the nefarious plan person, if they’re smart, is going to give it up—because if they try to squeeze Wikipedia, the harder they squeeze, the more it will slip through their grasp.

So these are structural defenses against enshittification of Wikipedia. I don’t know that it was in the mechanism design—I think they just got lucky—but it is a template for how to run such a project. It does raise this question: How do you build the community? But if you have a community of volunteers around a project, it’s a model of how to turn that project over to that community.

Ars Technica: Your case studies naturally include the decay of social media, notably Facebook and the social media site formerly known as Twitter. How might newer social media platforms resist the spiral into “platform decay”?

Cory Doctorow: What you want is a foundation in which people on social media face few switching costs. If the social media is interoperable, if it’s federatable, then it’s much harder for management to make decisions that are antithetical to the interests of users. If they do, users can escape. And it sets up an internal dynamic within the firm, where the people who have good ideas don’t get shouted down by the people who have bad but more profitable ideas, because it makes those bad ideas unprofitable. It creates both short and long-term risks to the bottom line.

There has to be a structure that stops their investors from pressurizing them into doing bad things, that stops them from rationalizing their way into complying. I think there’s this pathology where you start a company, you convince 150 of your friends to risk their kids’ college fund and their mortgage working for you. You make millions of users really happy, and your investors come along and say, “You have to destroy the life of 5 percent of your users with some change.” And you’re like, “Well, I guess the right thing to do here is to sacrifice those 5 percent, keep the other 95 percent happy, and live to fight another day, because I’m a good guy. If I quit over this, they’ll just put a bad guy in who’ll wreck things. I keep those 150 people working. Not only that, I’m kind of a martyr because everyone thinks I’m a dick for doing this. No one understands that I have taken the tough decision.”

I think that’s a common pattern among people who, in fact, are quite ethical but are also capable of rationalizing their way into bad things. I am very capable of rationalizing my way into bad things. This is not an indictment of someone’s character. But it’s why, before you go on a diet, you throw away the Oreos. It’s why you bind yourself to what behavioral economists call “Ulysses pacts“: You tie yourself to the mast before you go into the sea of sirens, not because you’re weak but because you’re strong enough now to know that you’ll be weak in the future.

I have what I would call the epistemic humility to say that I don’t know what makes a good social media network, but I do know what makes it so that when they go bad, you’re not stuck there. You and I might want totally different things out of our social media experience, but I think that you should 100 percent have the right to go somewhere else without losing anything. The easier it is for you to go without losing something, the better it is for all of us.

My dream is a social media universe where knowing what network someone is using is just a weird curiosity. It’d be like knowing which cell phone carrier your friend is using when you give them a call. It should just not matter. There might be regional or technical reasons to use one network or another, but it shouldn’t matter to anyone other than the user what network they’re using. A social media platform where it’s always easier for users to leave is much more future-proof and much more effective than trying to design characteristics of good social media.

Ars Technica: How might this work in practice?

Cory Doctorow: I think you just need a protocol. This is [Mike] Maznik’s point: protocols, not products. We don’t need a universal app to make email work. We don’t need a universal app to make the web work. I always think about this in the context of administrable regulation. Making a rule that says your social media network must be good for people to use and must not harm their mental health is impossible. The fact intensivity of determining whether a platform satisfies that rule makes it a non-starter.

Whereas if you were to say, “OK, you have to support an existing federation protocol, like AT Protocol and Mastodon ActivityPub,” both have ways to port identity from one place to another and have messages auto-forward. This is also in RSS. There’s a permanent redirect directive. You do that, you’re in compliance with the regulation.

Or you have to do something that satisfies the functional requirements of the spec. So it’s not “did you make someone sad in a way that was reckless?” That is a very hard question to adjudicate. Did you satisfy these functional requirements? It’s not easy to answer that, but it’s not impossible. If you want to have our users be able to move to your platform, then you just have to support the spec that we’ve come up with, which satisfies these functional requirements.

We don’t have to have just one protocol. We can have multiple ones. Not everything has to connect to everything else, but everyone who wants to connect should be able to connect to everyone else who wants to connect. That’s end-to-end. End-to-end is not “you are required to listen to everything someone wants to tell you.” It’s that willing parties should be connected when they want to be.

Ars Technica: What about security and privacy protocols like GPG and PGP?

Cory Doctorow: There’s this argument that the reason GPG is so hard to use is that it’s intrinsic; you need a closed system to make it work. But also, until pretty recently, GPG was supported by one part-time guy in Germany who got 30,000 euros a year in donations to work on it, and he was supporting 20 million users. He was primarily interested in making sure the system was secure rather than making it usable. If you were to put Big Tech quantities of money behind improving ease of use for GPG, maybe you decide it’s a dead end because it is a 30-year-old attempt to stick a security layer on top of SMTP. Maybe there’s better ways of doing it. But I doubt that we have reached the apex of GPG usability with one part-time volunteer.

I just think there’s plenty of room there. If you have a pretty good project that is run by a large firm and has had billions of dollars put into it, the most advanced technologists and UI experts working on it, and you’ve got another project that has never been funded and has only had one volunteer on it—I would assume that dedicating resources to that second one would produce pretty substantial dividends, whereas the first one is only going to produce these minor tweaks. How much more usable does iOS get with every iteration?

I don’t know if PGP is the right place to start to make privacy, but I do think that if we can create independence of the security layer from the transport layer, which is what PGP is trying to do, then it wouldn’t matter so much that there is end-to-end encryption in Mastodon DMs or in Bluesky DMs. And again, it doesn’t matter whose sim is in your phone, so it just shouldn’t matter which platform you’re using so long as it’s secure and reliably delivered end-to-end.

Ars Technica: These days, I’m almost contractually required to ask about AI. There’s no escaping it. But it’s certainly part of the ongoing enshittification.

Cory Doctorow: I agree. Again, the companies are too big to care. They know you’re locked in, and the things that make enshittification possible—like remote software updating, ongoing analytics of use of devices—they allow for the most annoying AI dysfunction. I call it the fat-finger economy, where you have someone who works in a company on a product team, and their KPI, and therefore their bonus and compensation, is tied to getting you to use AI a certain number of times. So they just look at the analytics for the app and they ask, “What button gets pushed the most often? Let’s move that button somewhere else and make an AI summoning button.”

They’re just gaming a metric. It’s causing significant across-the-board regressions in the quality of the product, and I don’t think it’s justified by people who then discover a new use for the AI. That’s a paternalistic justification. The user doesn’t know what they want until you show it to them: “Oh, if I trick you into using it and you keep using it, then I have actually done you a favor.” I don’t think that’s happening. I don’t think people are like, “Oh, rather than press reply to a message and then type a message, I can instead have this interaction with an AI about how to send someone a message about takeout for dinner tonight.” I think people are like, “That was terrible. I regret having tapped it.” 

The speech-to-text is unusable now. I flatter myself that my spoken and written communication is not statistically average. The things that make it me and that make it worth having, as opposed to just a series of multiple-choice answers, is all the ways in which it diverges from statistical averages. Back when the model was stupider, when it gave up sooner if it didn’t recognize what word it might be and just transcribed what it thought you’d said rather than trying to substitute a more probable word, it was more accurate.  Now, what I’m getting are statistically average words that are meaningless.

That elision of nuance and detail is characteristic of what makes AI products bad. There is a bunch of stuff that AI is good at that I’m excited about, and I think a lot of it is going to survive the bubble popping. But I fear that we’re not planning for that. I fear what we’re doing is taking workers whose jobs are meaningful, replacing them with AIs that can’t do their jobs, and then those AIs are going to go away and we’ll have nothing. That’s my concern.

Ars Technica: You prescribe a “cure” for enshittification, but in such a polarized political environment, do we even have the collective will to implement the necessary policies?

Cory Doctorow: The good news is also the bad news, which is that this doesn’t just affect tech. Take labor power. There are a lot of tech workers who are looking at the way their bosses treat the workers they’re not afraid of—Amazon warehouse workers and drivers, Chinese assembly line manufacturers for iPhones—and realizing, “Oh, wait, when my boss stops being afraid of me, this is how he’s going to treat me.” Mark Zuckerberg stopped going to those all-hands town hall meetings with the engineering staff. He’s not pretending that you are his peers anymore. He doesn’t need to; he’s got a critical mass of unemployed workers he can tap into. I think a lot of Googlers figured this out after the 12,000-person layoffs. Tech workers are realizing they missed an opportunity, that they’re going to have to play catch-up, and that the only way to get there is by solidarity with other kinds of workers.

The same goes for competition. There’s a bunch of people who care about media, who are watching Warner about to swallow Paramount and who are saying, “Oh, this is bad. We need antitrust enforcement here.” When we had a functional antitrust system for the last four years, we saw a bunch of telecoms mergers stopped because once you start enforcing antitrust, it’s like eating Pringles. You just can’t stop. You embolden a lot of people to start thinking about market structure as a source of either good or bad policy. The real thing that happened with [former FCC chair] Lina Kahn doing all that merger scrutiny was that people just stopped planning mergers.

There are a lot of people who benefit from this. It’s not just tech workers or tech users; it’s not just media users. Hospital consolidation, pharmaceutical consolidation, has a lot of people who are very concerned about it. Mark Cuban is freaking out about pharmacy benefit manager consolidation and vertical integration with HMOs, as he should be. I don’t think that we’re just asking the anti-enshittification world to carry this weight.

Same with the other factors. The best progress we’ve seen on interoperability has been through right-to-repair. It hasn’t been through people who care about social media interoperability. One of the first really good state-level right-to-repair bills was the one that [Governor] Jared Polis signed in Colorado for powered wheelchairs. Those people have a story that is much more salient to normies. “

What do you mean you spent six months in bed because there’s only two powered wheelchair manufacturers and your chair broke and you weren’t allowed to get it fixed by a third party?” And they’ve slashed their repair department, so it takes six months for someone to show up and fix your chair. So you had bed sores and pneumonia because you couldn’t get your chair fixed. This is bullshit.

So the coalitions are quite large. The thing that all of those forces share—interoperability, labor power, regulation, and competition—is that they’re all downstream of corporate consolidation and wealth inequality. Figuring out how to bring all of those different voices together, that’s how we resolve this. In many ways, the enshittification analysis and remedy are a human factors and security approach to designing an enshittification-resistant Internet. It’s about understanding this as a red team, blue team exercise. How do we challenge the status quo that we have now, and how do we defend the status quo that we want?

Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. That is the first law of finance, Stein’s law. We are reaching multiple breaking points, and the question is whether we reach things like breaking points for the climate and for our political system before we reach breaking points for the forces that would rescue those from permanent destruction.

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Posted Saturday 18 October 2025 at 3:39 am AEST (my time).

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

RIP Matrix

Welcome to Edition 8.15 of the Rocket Report! This year has been, at best, one of mixed results for SpaceX’s Starship program. There have been important steps forward, including the successful reuse of the rocket’s massive Super Heavy booster. Clearly, SpaceX is getting really good at launching and recovering the 33-engine booster stage. But Starship itself, part spacecraft and part upper stage, hasn’t fared as well—at least it hadn’t until the last couple of months. After four Starships were destroyed in flight and on the ground in the first half of 2025, the last two missions ended with pinpoint splashdowns in the Indian Ocean. The most recent mission this week was arguably the most successful yet for Starship, which returned to Earth with little damage, suggesting SpaceX’s improvements to the heat shield are working.

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.

SpaceX vet will fly with Blue Origin. Hans Koenigsmann is one of SpaceX’s earliest, longest-tenured, and most-revered employees. He worked at Elon Musk’s space company for nearly two decades, rising to the role of vice president for mission assurance and safety before leaving SpaceX in 2021. He led the investigations into every Falcon rocket failure, mentored young engineers, and became a public face for SpaceX through numerous presentations and press conferences. And now he has announced he is going to space on a future suborbital flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle, Ars reports.

Due diligence … Koenigsmann will fly to space alongside his friend Michaela “Michi” Benthaus as early as next month. She’s notable in her own right—a mountain biking accident in 2018 left her with a spinal cord injury, but she did not let this derail her from her dream. She will become the first wheelchair user to fly in space. Koenigsmann said one of his main concerns with the flight was safety, but meeting with Blue Origin engineers gave him confidence to climb aboard New Shepard. “When we met them, I asked a lot of technical questions on the safety side, and I feel like they answered the majority of them thoughtfully and correctly.” So, what’s it like for a long-time SpaceXer to work with a former competitor, Blue Origin? Read Eric Berger’s interview with Koenigsmann to learn more.

Europe’s drone ship. The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded a contract for the design of a reusable rocket stage recovery vessel to the Italian aerospace and defense systems company Ingegneria Dei Sistemi (IDS), European Spaceflight reports. The project is part of a broader contract awarded to the Italian rocket builder Avio for the development of a reusable rocket upper stage, which Ars reported on last month. The contract covers preliminary design work for the launch system and the ground system, and could be applied to a reusable evolution of Avio’s Vega family of rockets.

Looks familiar … On Wednesday, IDS announced that it had been awarded the contract to design the project’s recovery vessel, which falls under the systems ground segment. The company has subcontracted Italian naval systems consultancy Cetena and Norwegian shipbuilder Vard to assist with the project. An artist’s illustration of the vessel gives it a familiar look. It appears similar to the recovery ships that SpaceX used to attempt recovery of the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairings, with giant nets to catch the hardware falling from space under parachute. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

JAXA looks abroad. The Japanese space agency JAXA has selected Rocket Lab to launch a set of technology demonstration satellites on Electron rockets after continued delays with a Japanese launch vehicle, Space News reports. The agreement covers two launches from New Zealand, the first in December with JAXA’s 242-pound (110-kilogram) Rapid Innovative Payload Demonstration Satellite-4 (RAISE-4) technology demonstration satellite, and the second in early 2026 with a batch of eight smaller satellites for educational, ocean monitoring, and other demonstrations.

No more waiting … These satellites were supposed to launch on Japan’s solid-fueled Epsilon S rocket, but JAXA looked to another launch provider after lengthy delays with the Epsilon program. Epsilon S is an upgraded version of Japan’s Epsilon rocket, which has flown six times. The first flight of Epsilon S was originally expected in 2023, but back-to-back ground test failures of the vehicle’s second stage solid rocket motor have effectively grounded the rocket. Japanese officials are considering ditching the upgraded second stage design and going back to the original Epsilon configuration, but a launch is still at least a year away.

An update on a German launch startup. German rocket builder HyImpulse announced Thursday that it had secured $53 million (45 million euros) in new funding to continue developing its SL-1 rocket, European Spaceflight reports. HyImpulse said it will use the new capital to “drive forward the development and commercialization of the SL1 orbital rocket and expand its production capacities.” HyImpulse is one of a handful of serious European launch startups, having raised more than $86 million (74 million euros) since its foundation in 2018.

Still years away … The SL1 rocket will consist of three stages with hybrid propulsion, capable of delivering up to more than 1,300 pounds (600 kilograms) of payload to low-Earth orbit. The first flight of HyImpulse’s orbital rocket is scheduled for 2027. SL1 builds on the company’s SR75 suborbital rocket, which made its first test flight from Australia in 2024.

iRocket touts rapid build. Innovative Rocket Technologies Inc. (iRocket) reports a successful flight test of the company’s 2.75-inch (70-millimeter) diameter IRX-100 version of the Hydra 70 rocket system from a launch tube under its own power to exercise a range of motor and missile properties, Aviation Week & Space Technology Reports. The IRX-100 is iRocket’s version of the Hydra 70 short-range unguided missile primarily used on military helicopters. Asad Malik, iRocket’s CEO, wrote in a post on LinkedIn that the company designed and launched the rocket in just 30 days. “Speed, precision, and innovation are what define our team,” Malik wrote.

Pathfinder … The IRX-100 rocket launched from a desert location in California and reached an altitude of more than 12,000 feet, according to iRocket. We’ve reported on iRocket in several recent editions of the Rocket Report. In July, the company announced it was going public in a deal with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company founded by former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. But the SPAC and iRocket itself appear to have little money. Company officials hope the IRX-100 might offer a short-term source of revenue through military sales. iRocket’s longer-term goals include the development of a reusable orbital-class rocket, named Shockwave.

SpaceX launches for Kuiper. After more than a week of launch delays, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with two dozen of Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband Internet satellites onboard Monday night, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, dubbed Kuiper Falcon 03 or KF-03, faced several days of launch delays due to poor weather both at the Cape as well as offshore. This was the third and final Kuiper launch currently booked on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and the sixth launch of operational Kuiper satellites overall. Amazon now has 153 of its planned 3,232 Kuiper satellites in orbit.

SDA, too … Two days later, SpaceX launched a different Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to add 21 satellites to the Space Development Agency’s burgeoning low-Earth orbit constellation, Spaceflight Now reports. These satellites were built by Lockheed Martin, and they will join a batch of 21 similar spacecraft manufactured by York Space Systems launched last month. The satellites form the foundation for the Pentagon’s proliferated missile tracking and data relay network.

China launches another mysterious satellite. China conducted an orbital launch Monday with no apparent advance indication, successfully sending the Shiyan-31 remote sensing test satellite into orbit, Space News reports. The mission lifted off aboard a Long March 2D rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China. The Long March 2D can deliver up to 3.5 metric tons (7,700 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit. Shiyan-31 is believed to have an optical surveillance mission, and US tracking data indicated it was flying in an orbit about 300 miles (500 kilometers) above the Earth.

Surprise! … What was unusual about this launch was the fact that China did not publicize it in advance. Like most spacefaring nations, China typically issues airspace and maritime warning notices for airplanes and ships to steer clear of downrange zones where rocket debris may fall. No such warnings were released for this launch.

Starship flirts with perfection. SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian Ocean, Ars reports. This was the 11th full-scale test flight of the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, and it was arguably the most successful Starship test flight to date. It comes after a rough start to the year with a series of Starship failures and explosions that set the program back by at least six months.

Close to pristine … This time, Starship came back through the atmosphere with little sign of visible damage. The previous test flight in August also nailed its splashdown in the Indian Ocean, but it came down with a banged-up heat shield. This was the final flight of the second generation of Starship, called Starship V2. SpaceX plans to debut the larger, more powerful Starship V3 configuration in early 2026. If all goes well, SpaceX could be in position to attempt to recover Starship on land next year.

Orion’s other options. The Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket have been attached at the hip for the better part of two decades. The big rocket lifts, the smaller spacecraft flies, and Congress keeps the money rolling in. But now there are signs that the twain may, in the not-too-distant future, split, Ars reports. This is because Lockheed Martin has begun to pivot toward a future in which the Orion spacecraft—thanks to increasing reusability, a focus on cost, and openness to flying on different rockets—fits into commercial space applications. In interviews, company officials said that if NASA wanted to buy Orion missions as a “service,” rather than owning and operating the spacecraft, they were ready to work with the space agency.

Staying power … This represents a significant change. Since the US Congress called for the creation of the Space Launch System rocket a decade and a half ago, Orion and this rocket have been discussed in tandem, forming the backbone of an expendable architecture that would launch humans to the Moon and return them to Earth inside Orion. But time is running out for the uber-expensive SLS rocket, with differing proposals from the Trump administration and Congress to terminate the program after either two or perhaps four more flights. This appears to be one reason Lockheed is exploring alternative launch vehicles for Orion. If the spacecraft is going to be competitive on price, it needs a rocket that does not cost more than $2 billion per launch. Any near-term plan to send astronauts to the Moon will still require Orion.

Doubling up at Vandenberg. The Department of the Air Force has approved SpaceX’s plans to launch up to 100 missions per year from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. This would continue the tectonic turnaround at the spaceport on California’s Central Coast. Five years ago, Vandenberg hosted just a single orbital launch. This year’s number stands at 51 orbital flights, or 53 launches if you count a pair of Minuteman missile tests, the most in a single calendar year at Vandenberg since the early 1970s. Military officials have now authorized SpaceX to double its annual launch rate at Vandenberg from 50 to 100, with up to 95 missions using the Falcon 9 rocket and up to five launches of the larger Falcon Heavy.

No big rush … There’s more to the changes at Vandenberg than launching additional rockets. The authorization gives SpaceX the green light to redevelop Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) to support Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions. SpaceX plans to demolish unneeded structures at SLC-6 (pronounced “Slick 6”) and construct two new landing pads for Falcon boosters on a bluff overlooking the Pacific just south of the pad. SLC-6 would become the West Coast home for Falcon Heavy, but SpaceX currently has no confirmed contracts to fly the heavy-lifter from Vandenberg.

Next three launches

Oct. 18: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-19 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 23:46 UTC

Oct. 19: Kinetica 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 03:30 UTC

Oct. 19: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-17 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 14:52 UTC

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Posted Saturday 18 October 2025 at 3:38 am AEST (my time).

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

RIP Matrix

As recently as the 1990s, when the Greenland Ice Sheet and the rest of the Arctic region were measurably thawing under the climatic blowtorch of human-caused global warming, most of Antarctica’s vast ice cap still seemed securely frozen.

But not anymore. Physics is physics. As the planet heats up, more ice will melt at both poles, and recent research shows that Antarctica’s ice caps, glaciers, and floating ice shelves, as well as its sea ice, are just as vulnerable to warming as the Arctic.

Both satellite data and field observations in Antarctica reveal alarming signs of a Greenland-like meltdown, with increased surface melting of the ice fields, faster-moving glaciers, and dwindling sea ice. Some scientists are sounding the alarm, warning that the rapid “Greenlandification” of Antarctica will have serious consequences, including an accelerated rise in sea levels and significant shifts in rainfall and drought patterns.

The Antarctic ice sheet covers about 5.4 million square miles, an area larger than Europe. On average, it is more than 1 mile thick and holds 61 percent of all the fresh water on Earth, enough to raise the global average sea level by about 190 feet if it all melts. The smaller, western portion of the ice sheet is especially vulnerable, with enough ice to raise sea level more than 10 feet.

Thirty years ago, undergraduate students were told that the Antarctic ice sheets were going to be stable and that they weren’t going to melt much, said Ruth Mottram, an ice researcher with the Danish Meteorological Institute and lead author of a new paper in Nature Geoscience that examined the accelerating ice melt and other similarities between changes in northern and southern polar regions.

“We thought it was just going to take ages for any kind of climate impacts to be seen in Antarctica. And that’s really not true,” said Mottram, adding that some of the earliest warnings came from scientists who saw collapsing ice shelves, retreating glaciers, and increased surface melting in satellite data.

One of the early warning signs was the rapid collapse of an ice shelf along the narrow Antarctic Peninsula, which extends northward toward the tip of South America, said Helen Amanda Fricker, a geophysics professor with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography Polar Center at the University of California, San Diego.

Stranded remnants of sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula are a reminder that much of the ice on 

the frozen continent around the South Pole is just as vulnerable to global warming as Arctic ice, 

where a long-term meltdown is well underway.

Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

After a string of record-warm summers riddled the floating Rhode Island-sized slab of ice with cracks and meltwater ponds, it crumbled almost overnight. The thick, ancient ice dam was gone, and the seven major outlet glaciers behind it accelerated toward the ocean, raising sea levels as their ice melted.

“The Larsen B ice shelf collapse in 2002 was a staggering event in our community,” said Fricker, who was not an author of the new paper. “We just couldn’t believe the pace at which it happened, within six weeks. Basically, the ice shelves are there and then, boom, boom, boom, a series of melt streams and melt ponds. And then the whole thing collapsed, smattered into smithereens.”

Glaciologists never thought that events would happen that quickly in Antarctica, she said.

Same physics, same changes

Fricker said glaciologists thought of changes in Antarctica on millennial timescales, but the ice shelf collapse showed that extreme warming can lead to much more rapid change.

Current research focuses on the edges of Antarctica, where floating sea ice and relatively narrow outlet glaciers slow the flow of the ice cap toward the sea. She described the Antarctic Ice Sheet as a giant ice reservoir contained by a series of dams.

“If humans had built those containment structures,” she said, “we would think that they weren’t very adequate. We are relying on those dams to hold back all of that ice, but the dams are weakening all around Antarctica and releasing more ice into the ocean.”

A comparison of the average concentration of Antarctic sea ice.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

The amount of ice that’s entered the ocean has increased fourfold since the 1990s, and she said, “We’re on the cusp of it becoming a really big number… because at some point, there’s no stopping it anymore.”

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is often divided into three sectors: the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest and thickest; the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is deemed the most vulnerable to thawing and melting.

Mottram, the new paper’s lead author, said a 2022 heatwave that penetrated to the coldest interior part of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet may be another sign that the continent is not as isolated from the rest of the global climate system as once thought. The extraordinary 2022 heatwave was driven by an atmospheric river, or a concentrated stream of moisture-laden air. Ongoing research “shows that there’s been an increase in the number of atmospheric rivers and an increase in their intensity,” she said.

Antarctica is also encircled by a powerful circumpolar ocean current that has prevented the Southern Ocean from warming as quickly as other ocean regions. But recent climate models and observations show the buffer is breaking down and that relatively warmer waters are starting to reach the base of the ice shelves, she said.

New maps detailing winds in the region show that “swirls of air from higher latitudes are dragging in all the time, so it’s not nearly as isolated as we were always told when we were students,” she said.

Ice researcher Eric Rignot, an Earth system science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who did not contribute to the new paper, said via email that recent research on Antarctica’s floating ice shelves emphasizes the importance of how the oceans and ice interact, a process that wasn’t studied very closely in early Greenland research. And Greenland shows what will happen to Antarctic glaciers in a warmer climate with more surface melt and more intense ice-ocean interactions, he added.

“We learn from both but stating that one is becoming the other is an oversimplification,” he said. “There is no new physics in Greenland that does not apply to Antarctica and vice versa.”

Rignot said the analogy between the two regions also partly breaks down because Greenland is warming up at two to three times the global average, “which has triggered a slowing of the jet stream,” with bigger wobbles and “weird weather patterns” in the Northern Hemisphere.

Antarctica is warming slightly less than the global average rate, according to a 2025 study, and the Southern Hemisphere jet stream is strengthening and tightening toward the South Pole, “behaving completely opposite,” he said.

Mottram said her new paper aims to help people understand that Antarctica is not as remote or isolated as often portrayed, and that what happens there will affect the rest of the global climate system.

“It’s not just this place far away that nobody goes to and nobody understands,” she said. “We actually understand quite a lot of what’s going on there. And so I also hope that it drives more urgency to decarbonize, because it’s very clear that the only way we’re going to get out of this problem is bringing our greenhouse gases down as much as possible, as soon as possible.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Posted Friday 17 October 2025 at 3:58 am AEST (my time).

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

RIP Matrix

Rainforests are usually regarded as so-called "carbon sinks" as they absorb more emissions than they emit with new trees offsetting the carbon released by dead ones.

But a study looking at data from Queensland forests found that extreme temperatures have caused more tree deaths than growths.

The lead author of the study, which was published in science journal Nature, said the findings have significant implications for global emissions reduction targets which are partly based on how ecosystems - such as rainforests - can absorb carbon.

"Current models may overestimate the capacity of tropical forests to help offset fossil fuel emissions," said Dr Hannah Carle of the Western Sydney University.

With fewer new trees, the report found that the trunks and branches of dead trees - known as woody biomass - became carbon emitters, rather than carbon absorbers, about 25 years ago.

"Forests help to curb the worst effects of climate change by absorbing some of the carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels, but our work shows this is under threat," said Dr Carle.

Dr Carle added that said an increase in trees dying in recent decades was due to climate change such as more extreme temperatures, atmospheric dryness and drought.

Based on 49 years of data from 20 forests in Queensland, the report also found a rise in the number of cyclones and the severity of them was killing more trees and making it harder for new ones to grow.

"We have in this study evidence that Australia's moist tropical forests are the first of their kind globally to to exhibit this [woody biomass] change," Dr Carle said.

"And that's really significant. It could be a sort of canary in the coal mine."

Senior author Patrick Meir also described the results as "very concerning", telling news agency AFP that it was "likely that all tropical forests [would] respond fairly similarly" - but added that more data and research would be needed to make a fair assessment.

Australia, one of the world's biggest polluters per capita, recently announced its new carbon reduction targets, pledging to cut emissions by at least 62% compared to 2005 levels over the next decade.

The country continues to face global criticism for its continued reliance on fossil fuels, with the government allowing one of the country's largest gas projects -Woodside's North West Shelf - to keep operating for another 40 years.

Last month, a new report into the impact of climate change found Australia had already reached warming of above 1.5C and that no community would be immune from "cascading, compounding and concurrent" climate risks.

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Winning image: Rice weevil (Sitophilus oryzae) on a grain of rice  

Credit: Zhang You/Nikon Small World

A stunning image of a rice weevil on a single grain of rice has won the 2025 Nikon Small World photomicrography contest, yielding valuable insight into the structure and behavior of—and providing a fresh perspective on—this well-known agricultural pest. The image was taken by Zhang You of Yunnan, China. Another of You's photographs placed 15th in this year's contest.

“It pays to dive deep into entomology: understanding insects’ behaviors and mastering lighting," You said in a statement. "A standout work blends artistry with scientific rigor, capturing the very essence, energy, and spirit of these creatures.”

There was an element of luck in creating his winning image, too. "I had observed rice weevils in grains before, but never one with its wings spread," You said. "This one was naturally preserved on a windowsill, perhaps in a final attempt to escape. Its tiny size makes manually preparing spread-wing specimens extremely difficult, so encountering it was both serendipitous and inspiring.”

Nikon's annual contest was founded in 1974 "to showcase the beauty and complexity of things seen through the light microscope." Photomicrography involves attaching a camera to a microscope (either an optical microscope or an electron microscope) so that the user can take photographs of objects at very high resolutions. British physiologist Richard Hill Norris was one of the first to use it for his studies of blood cells in 1850, and the method has increasingly been highlighted as art since the 1970s. There have been many groundbreaking technological advances in the ensuing decades, particularly with the advent of digital imaging methods.

This year's competition received over 1,900 submissions from 77 countries; a panel of judges evaluated the submissions based on originality, informational content, technical proficiency, and visual impact. Featured below are the remaining top 20 winners of this year's contest, with subjects ranging from rat liver cells, sunflower trichomes, and slime molds releasing spores, to a moth laying eggs and a parasitic fungus invading a fly, among other microscopic marvels. You can check out the full list of winners, as well as several honorable mentions, here. The 2025 winners for the video competition can be found here.

The winners’ circle

Second place: Colonial algae (Volvox) spheres in a drop of water.

Jan Rosenboom/Nikon Small World

 

Third place: Pollen in a garden spiderweb.

John-Oliver Dum/Nikon Small World

 

Fourth place: Heart muscle cells with chromosomes condensed following cell division.

James Hayes/Nikon Small World

 

Fifth place: Spores (blue/purple structures) of a small tropical fern (Ceratopteris richardii).

Igor Siwanowicz/Nikon Small World

 

Sixth place: Rat liver cells.

Francisco Lázaro-Diéguez/Nikon Small World

 

Seventh place: iPSC-derived sensory neurons labeled to show tubulin and actin.

Stella Whittaker/Nikon Small World

 

Eighth place: Mallow pollen germinating on stigma while being parasitized by a filamentous fungus.

Igor Siwanowicz/Nikon Small World

 

Ninth place: A fungus (Talaromyces purpureogenus) known for its red, diffused pigment.

Wim van Egmond/Nikon Small World

 

10th place: Heart muscle cells (iPSC-derived) showing condensed chromosomes in metaphase.

Dylan Burnette & James Hayes/Nikon Small World

 

11th place: Sunflower trichomes (hair-like plant outgrowths).

Marek Miś/Nikon Small World

 

12th place: The actin cytoskeleton (cyan) and endoplasmic reticulum (red) of a mouse brain cancer cell.

Halli Lindamood & Eric Vitriol/Nikon Small World

 

13th place: Slime mold (Arcyria major) releasing spores.

Henri Koskinen/Nikon Small World

 

14th place: Quartz with biotic goethite filaments.

Manfred Heising/Nikon Small World

 

15th place: Geometer moth (Geometridae) laying eggs.

Zhang You/Nikon Small World

 

16th place: Spore sacs (sporangia) of a fern.

Rogelio Moreno/Nikon Small World

 

17th place: Water fleas (Daphnia) and algae.

Hong Guo/Nikon Small World

 

18th place: Fluorescently marked mouse colon.

Marius Mählen, Koen Oost, Prisca Liberali & Laurent Gelman/Nikon Small World

 

19th place: Parasitic fungus (Cordycipitaceae) on a fly (Calliphoridae).

Eduardo Agustin Carrasco/Nikon Small World

 

20th place: Marine copepod.

Zachary Sanchez/Nikon Small World

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Posted Thursday 16 October 2025 at 12:28 pm AEST (my time).

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

RIP Matrix

With the expansion into London, Moove and Waymo will work together to lay the groundwork for Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing service in London. This strategic partnership will “continue to shape the future of mobility” and ensure safe, efficient, and sustainable fully autonomous ride-hailing.

"We're excited by a future where Waymo's safe and reliable autonomous technology is available in London, transforming how the capital moves," said Ladi Delano, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Moove. "This partnership represents a major step forward for urban mobility, bringing world-class innovation to one of the world's greatest cities."

“We’re thrilled to bring the reliability, safety and magic of Waymo to Londoners,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Waymo is making roads safer and transportation more accessible where we operate. We’ve demonstrated how to responsibly scale fully autonomous ride-hailing, and we can’t wait to expand the benefits of our technology to the United Kingdom.”

Waymo’s expansion to London will give people a new option on top of the extensive network of buses, tubes, bikes, and pedestrian options. To hail a ride, users will need to install the Waymo app and summon a vehicle.

Waymo’s launch in the UK has been hailed by road safety and blind and partially sighted people advocates. Those who care for road safety noted that the lack of human drivers has the potential to improve safety. At the same time, an advocate for the blind said that the vehicles would enable independent mobility options.

Source: Waymo and Moove

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Posted Thursday 16 October 2025 at 3:30 am AEST (my time).

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

RIP Matrix

A team of researchers led by Professor Emeritus Takuji Hoshino at Okayama University of Science (OUS) has developed a new wine grape variety called “Muscat Shiragai.” The grape was produced by crossing the wild Shiraga grape, which naturally grows only along the Takahashi River basin in Okayama Prefecture, with the well-known Muscat of Alexandria.

The group has submitted the new variety for official registration with Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), and the application has been formally accepted.

During a press conference at OUS, Professor Hoshino explained, “I wanted to create a wine grape that incorporates wild genetic traits. If this grape becomes widely cultivated and its wine contributes to regional revitalization and tourism, that would be the best outcome.”

Professor Hoshino, an expert in plant systematics, became the founding director of OUS’s Institute of Viticulture and Enology in April 2017. Working in collaboration with Funao Winery in Kurashiki City, he began studying the Shiraga grape, a rare and endangered native species found only in small parts of Okayama Prefecture.

This partnership inspired the vision of developing a distinctively “Okayama-born” wine grape through a cross with Muscat of Alexandria.

Launching the Project

In February 2018, OUS signed a comprehensive cooperation agreement with Kurashiki City and Funao Winery, launching the project as part of a national government–recognized regional revitalization initiative to promote “branding of local resources.”

The fruit and wine of the newly developed grape “Muscat Shiragai,” presented at a press conference by Professor Emeritus Takuji Hoshino (right). From left to right above: Kurashiki Deputy Mayor Kenji Komatsu, OUS President Hiroyuki Hirano, and Funao Winery CEO Kenichiro Miyake. Credit: Okayama University of Science

By fiscal year 2022, wines were being brewed from different breeding lines and evaluated for sugar content, acidity, pH, and taste, leading to the selection of promising strains. Drawing on these trial results, the new “Muscat Shiragai” variety was finalized in 2024.

The official application for new variety registration was jointly filed by Kake Educational Institution and Kurashiki City in December 2024 and was publicly announced in June 2025. The official registration is expected within four to five years.

Presentation and Tasting Event

The press conference, held at the Presentation Room in OUS Building A1, was attended by Kurashiki Deputy Mayor Kenji Komatsu, Funao Winery CEO Kenichiro Miyake, and OUS President Hiroyuki Hirano. Participants sampled the Muscat Shiragai grapes and wine, which were well received—described as “sweet and very delicious” for the fruit, and “with a subtle Muscat aroma and smooth drinking quality” for the wine.

Deputy Mayor Komatsu commented: “We are very much looking forward to offering a wine filled with the unique charm that can only be produced in Kurashiki. We also anticipate further research results to refine Muscat Shiragai into an even more sophisticated grape.”

CEO Miyake added: “With Muscat Shiragai as a branded grape, we hope to create a new high-value red wine identified with Kurashiki as its place of origin. Please look forward to the day when we can bring this to market.”

President Hirano noted: “Collaboration among industry, academia, and government is essential for building innovative local communities. OUS will continue integrating education and research, returning the results to the community, and contributing to solving regional and social issues.”

Currently, 20 vines are cultivated at Funao Winery and the OUS vineyard, yielding 41.6 kilograms in 2024. An additional 300 grafted vines were planted at the end of fiscal year 2023, with a goal of harvesting more than 500 kilograms by 2028–2029. The team also plans to optimize practices such as leaf removal, fertilization, and irrigation to further improve quality.

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Summary: A new human liver organoid microarray developed by Cincinnati Children’s and Roche recreates immune-driven liver injury in the lab. Built from patient-derived stem cells and immune cells, it accurately models how genetics influence drug reactions. The system replicated flucloxacillin-related toxicity seen only in people with a specific genetic variant, marking a major step toward predictive, patient-tailored drug safety testing. 

Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, working in partnership with Roche, have created a next-generation human liver organoid microarray platform designed to predict which medications might trigger harmful immune responses in certain individuals.

The findings, published online on Sept. 26, 2025, in Advanced Science, describe a fully human, miniaturized liver system developed from stem cells and a patient's own immune cells. This advanced model provides a new way to study why some people suffer severe immune-related liver injuries from drugs that are otherwise considered safe. Co-first author Fadoua El Abdellaoui Soussi, PhD, and corresponding author Magdalena Kasendra, PhD, both from the Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine (CuSTOM) at Cincinnati Children's, led the research.

"Our goal was to create a human system that captures how the liver and immune system interact in patients," El Abdellaoui Soussi says. "By integrating patient-specific genetics and immune responses, we can finally begin to explain why certain drugs cause liver injury in only a small subset of individuals."

A model that replicates immune-related liver injury

Certain drugs that pass traditional safety testing can still trigger idiosyncratic drug-induced liver injury (iDILI), a rare but serious immune reaction that can cause severe illness or force a drug to be withdrawn. Standard laboratory and animal models have long struggled to reproduce these complex immune responses that vary from person to person.

The new platform closes this gap by combining liver organoids made from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with each donor's own CD8⁺ T cells, which are immune cells that target infected or damaged tissue. The result is a fully human, immune-competent system that reflects both the genetic and immune diversity found in real patients.

As proof of concept, the researchers recreated the liver damage caused by the antibiotic flucloxacillin, which occurs only in individuals who carry the HLA-B*57:01 risk gene. Their model accurately reproduced the biological signs of immune-related liver injury, including T cell activation, cytokine release, and liver cell damage, closely mirroring what happens in susceptible people.

"Our goal has always been to bring human biology into the lab in a way that's scalable, reproducible, and meaningful for patients," says Kasendra, who serves as director of research and development at CuSTOM. "By linking foundational stem cell science with applied toxicology, this model moves organoid research another step closer to transforming how drugs are developed and tested."

Building on a foundation of organoid innovation

This new platform expands on previous work by co-author Takanori Takebe, MD, PhD, whose lab developed methods for reliably generating human liver organoids from iPSCs. By refining these techniques into a matrix-free microarray system and pairing them with patient-specific immune cells, the CuSTOM Accelerator team at Cincinnati Children's turned a scientific breakthrough into a scalable precision toxicology tool.

The collaboration with Roche played a key role in the project's success, combining the hospital's scientific expertise with Roche's experience in translational toxicology.

"This partnership shows the power of combining academic innovation with industry experience," says Adrian Roth, PhD, principal scientific director of Personalized Healthcare Safety at Roche. "Together we're building predictive human models that can improve patient safety and accelerate the development of new medicines."

A growing ecosystem for organoid medicine

Cincinnati Children's has been a global leader in organoid medicine since 2010, when its scientists created the first functional human intestinal organoids.

Under Kasendra's leadership, the CuSTOM Accelerator partners with biopharma and technology companies to translate these scientific advances into real-world solutions for drug safety, precision medicine, and regenerative therapy.

What's next

The CuSTOM Accelerator team continues working to automate organoid assays and enable high-throughput screening across large, genetically diverse donor populations. This next phase will allow researchers to capture the full spectrum of human variability -- an essential step toward developing therapies that are more effective, inclusive, and personalized.

Learn more about CuSTOM's ongoing collaboration with Molecular Devices and Danaher: Collaboration to Develop Liver Organoids for Drug Toxicity Screening -- Research Horizons

"This work reflects the vision of CuSTOM -- to turn human organoid science into practical tools that improve health," Kasendra says, "This is just the beginning -- by bridging biology, engineering, and clinical insight, we're getting closer to predicting how real patients will respond to new treatments before they ever reach the clinic."

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SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian Ocean.

The rocket's 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines roared to life at 6:23 pm CDT (7:23 pm EDT; 23:23 UTC), throttling up to generate some 16.7 million pounds of thrust, by large measure more powerful than any rocket before Starship. Moments later, the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket began a vertical climb away from SpaceX's test site in Starbase, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.

From then on, the rocket executed its flight plan like clockwork. This was arguably SpaceX's most successful Starship test flight to date. The only flight with a similar claim occurred one year ago Monday, when the company caught the rocket's Super Heavy booster back at the launch pad after soaring to the uppermost fringes of the atmosphere. But that flight didn't accomplish as much in space.

"Starship's eleventh flight test reached every objective, providing valuable data as we prepare the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy," SpaceX posted on X.

SpaceX didn't try to recover the Super Heavy booster on this flight, but the goals the company set before the launch included an attempt to guide the enormous rocket stage to a precise splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of South Texas. The booster, reused from a previous flight in March, also validated a new engine configuration for its landing burn, first reigniting 13 of its engines, then downshifting to five, then to three for the final hover.

That all worked, along with pretty much everything else apart from an indication on SpaceX's livestream that Starship's Super Heavy booster stage lost an engine early in its descent. The malfunctioning engine had no impact on the rest of the flight.

Flight 11 recap

This was the fifth and final flight of Starship's second-generation configuration, known as Version 2, or V2. It was the 11th full-scale Starship test flight overall.

It took a while for Starship V2 to meet SpaceX's expectations. The first three Starship V2 launches in January, March, and May ended prematurely due to problems in the rocket's propulsion and a fuel leak, breaking a string of increasingly successful Starship flights since 2023. Another Starship V2 exploded on a test stand in Texas in June, further marring the second-gen rocket's track record.

But SpaceX teams righted the program with a good test flight in August, the first time Starship V2 made it all the way to splashdown. Engineers learned a few lessons on that flight, including the inadequacy of a new metallic heat shield tile design that left a patch of orange oxidation down the side of the ship. They also found that another experiment with part of the ship's heat shield showed promising results. This method involved using a soft "crunch wrap" material to seal the gaps between the ship's ceramic tiles and prevent super-heated plasma from reaching the rocket's stainless steel skin.

Technicians installed the crunch wrap material in more places for Flight 11, and a first look at the performance of the ship during reentry and splashdown suggested the heat shield change worked well.

After reaching space, Starship shut down its six Raptor engines and coasted across the Atlantic Ocean and Africa before emerging over the Indian Ocean just before reentry. During its time in space, Starship released eight Starlink satellite mockups mimicking the larger size of the company's next-generation Starlink spacecraft. These new Starlink satellites will only be able to launch on Starship.

Starship also reignited one of its six engines for a brief maneuver to set up the ship's trajectory for reentry. With that, the stage was set for the final act of the test flight. How would the latest version of SpaceX's ever-changing heat shield design hold up against temperatures of 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius)?

The answer: Apparently quite well. While SpaceX has brought Starships back to Earth in one piece several times, this was the first time the ship made it through reentry relatively unscathed. Live video streaming from cameras onboard Starship showed a blanket of orange and purple plasma enveloping the rocket during reentry. This is now a familiar sight, thanks to connectivity with Starship through SpaceX's Starlink broadband network.

What was different on Monday was the lack of any obvious damage to the heat shield or flaps throughout Starship's descent, a promising sign for SpaceX's chances of reusing the vehicle and its heat shield over and over again, without requiring any refurbishment. This, according to SpaceX's Elon Musk, is the acid test for determining Starship's overall success.

In the closing moments of Monday's flight, Starship flexed its flaps to perform a "dynamic banking maneuver" over the Indian Ocean, then flipped upright and fired its engines to slow for splashdown, simulating maneuvers the rocket will execute on future missions returning to the launch site. That will be one of the chief goals for the next phase of Starship's test campaign beginning next year.

Patience for V3

It will likely be at least a few months before SpaceX is ready to launch the next Starship flight. Technicians at Starbase are assembling the next Super Heavy booster and the first Starship V3 vehicle. Once integrated, the booster and ship are expected to undergo cryogenic testing and static-fire testing before SpaceX moves forward with launch.

"Focus now turns to the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy, with multiple vehicles currently in active build and preparing for tests," SpaceX wrote on its website. "This next iteration will be used for the first Starship orbital flights, operational payload missions, propellant transfer, and more as we iterate to a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle with service to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond."

Starship V3 will have larger propellant tanks to increase the rocket's lifting capacity, upgraded Raptor 3 engines, and an improved payload compartment to support launches of real Starlink satellites. SpaceX will also use this version of the rocket for orbital refueling experiments, a long-awaited milestone for the Starship program now planned for sometime next year. Orbital refueling is a crucial enabler for future Starship flights beyond low-Earth orbit and is necessary for SpaceX to fulfill Musk's ambition to send ships to Mars, the founder's long-held goal for the company.

It's also required for Starship flights to the Moon. NASA has signed contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a human-rated derivative of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon as part of the agency's Artemis program. The orbital refueling demonstration is a key milestone on the NASA lunar lander contract. Getting this done as soon as possible is vitally important to NASA, which is seeing its Artemis Moon landing schedule slip, in part due to Starship delays.

None of it can really get started until Starship V3 is flying reliably and flying often. If the first Starship V3 flight goes well, SpaceX may attempt to put the next vehicle—Flight 13—into orbit to verify the ship's endurance in space. At some point, SpaceX will make the first attempt to bring a ship home from orbit for a catch by the launch tower, similar to how SpaceX has caught Super Heavy boosters returning from the edge of space.

But first, ground crews are wrapping up work on a second Starship launch pad designed to accommodate the upgraded, taller Starship V3 rocket. Monday's flight marked the final launch from Pad 1 in its existing form. The differences with the second launch pad include its flame trench, a common fixture at many launch pads around the world. Pad 1 was not built with a flame trench, but instead features an elevated launch mount where the rocket sits prior to liftoff.

SpaceX is expected to overhaul Pad 1 in the coming months to reactivate it as a second launch pad option for Starship V3. All of this work is occurring in Texas as SpaceX prepares to bring online more Starship launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX says it will need a lot of pads to ramp up Starship to monthly, weekly, and eventually daily flights.

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Posted Wednesday 15 October 2025 at 4:35 am AEST (my time).

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