Welcome to Edition 8.13 of the Rocket Report! It's difficult for me to believe, but we have now entered the fourth quarter of the year. Accordingly, there are three months left in 2025, with a lot of launch action still to come. The remainder of the year will be headlined by Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket making its second flight (and landing attempt), and SpaceX's Starship making its final test flight of the year. There is also the slim possibility that Rocket Lab's Neutron vehicle will make its debut this year, but it will almost certainly slip into 2026.

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

An Alpha rocket blows up on the pad. The booster stage for Firefly Aerospace's next Alpha rocket was destroyed Monday in a fiery accident on the company's vertical test stand in Central Texas, Ars reports. Firefly released a statement confirming the rocket "experienced an event that resulted in a loss of the stage." The company confirmed all personnel were safe and said ground teams followed "proper safety protocols." Imagery posted on social media platforms showed a fireball engulfing the test stand and a column of black smoke rising into the sky over Firefly's facility roughly 40 miles north of Austin.

Supposed to be a return-to-flight mission ... Engineers were testing the rocket before shipment to Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to prepare for launch later this year with a small commercial satellite for Lockheed Martin. The booster destroyed Monday was slated to fly on the seventh launch of Firefly's Alpha rocket, an expendable, two-stage launch vehicle capable of placing a payload of a little over 2,200 pounds, or a metric ton, into low-Earth orbit. This upcoming launch was supposed to be the Alpha rocket's return to flight after an in-flight failure in April, when the upper stage's engine shut down before the rocket could reach orbit and deploy its satellite payload.

Europe wants a mini Starship. The European Space Agency signed a contract Monday with Avio, the Italian company behind the small Vega rocket, to begin designing a reusable upper stage capable of flying into orbit, returning to Earth, and launching again. The deal is worth 40 million euros ($47 million), Ars reports. In a statement, Avio said it will "define the requirements, system design, and enabling technologies needed to develop a demonstrator capable of safely returning to Earth and being reused in future missions."

Don't expect progress too quickly ... At the end of the two-year contract, Avio will deliver a preliminary design for the reusable upper stage and the ground infrastructure needed to make it a reality. The preliminary design review is a milestone in the early phases of an aerospace project, typically occurring many years before completion. For example, Europe's flagship Ariane 6 rocket passed its preliminary design review in 2016, eight years before its first launch. Avio and ESA did not release any specifications on the size or performance of the launcher.

Rocket Lab scores 10 more Electron launches. Synspective, a Japanese company developing a constellation of radar imaging satellites, has signed a deal with Rocket Lab for an additional 10 Electron launches, Space News reports. The companies announced the agreement on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress, confirming that each launch would carry a single StriX radar imaging satellite.

A repeat customer ... Synspective signed a separate contract in June 2024 for 10 Electron launches, scheduled for 2025 through 2027. That was the largest single contract for Electron to date. Rocket Lab notes that Synspective is its largest Electron customer, with six launches completed to date and a backlog of 21 launches through the end of the decade. Synspective aims to place 30 synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites in orbit by 2030. This contract ensures that Electron will continue flying for quite a while.

German investment could benefit small launchers. During his address at Germany’s third annual Space Congress, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced that Germany would invest 35 billion euros ($41 billion) in space-related defense projects by 2030, European Spaceflight reports. "The conflicts of the future will no longer be limited to the Earth’s surface or the deep sea," he said. "They will also be fought openly in orbit. That’s why we are building structures within the Bundeswehr to enable us to effectively defend and deter [threats] in space in the medium and long term."

Launch an investment area ... The investment will cover five main priorities: hardening against data disruptions and attacks, improved space situational awareness, redundancy through several networked satellite constellations, secure, diverse, and on-demand launch capabilities, and a dedicated military satellite operations center. Although Germany’s heavy-lift needs will continue to be met by Ariane 6, a program to which the country contributes heavily, domestic small-launch providers such as Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar Aerospace, and HyImpulse are likely to see a boost in support.

Blue Origin seeks to expand New Shepard program. Blue Origin is developing three new suborbital New Shepard launch systems and is mulling expanding flight services beyond West Texas, Aviation Week reports. The current two-ship fleet will be retired by the end of 2027, with the first of three new spacecraft expected to debut next year, Senior Vice President Phil Joyce said during the Global Spaceport Alliance forum.

Looking for an overseas partner ... Joyce said the new vehicles feature upgraded systems throughout, particularly in the propulsion system. The new ships are designed for quicker turnaround, which will enable Blue Origin to offer weekly flights. The company’s West Texas spaceport can accommodate three New Shepard vehicles, though Blue Origin is interested in possibly offering the suborbital flight service from another location, including outside the US, Joyce said. "We are trying to find a partner that is willing to invest," he added. (submitted by Chuckgineer)

Next Nuri launch set for November. The Korea AeroSpace Administration completed a review of preparations for the next launch of the Nuri rocket and announced that the vehicle was ready for a window that would open on November 28. The main payload will be a satellite to observe Earth's aurora and magnetic field, along with a smaller secondary payload.

Coming back after a while ... The liquid-fueled Nuri rocket is the first booster to be entirely developed within Korea, and has a lift capacity of 3.3 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. The rocket failed on its debut launch in October 2021, but flew successfully in 2022 and 2023. If the rocket launches in November, it will be Nuri's first mission in two and a half years. (submitted by CP)

Galactic Energy scores big fundraising round. Beijing-based Galactic Energy has raised what appears to be China’s largest disclosed round for a launch startup as it nears orbital test flights of new rockets, Space News reports. The company announced Series D financing of 2.4 billion yuan ($336 million) in a statement on Sunday. The funding will be used for the Pallas series of reusable liquid propellant launchers and the Ceres-2 solid rocket, both of which appear close to test launches. The investment will also go toward related production, testing, and launch facilities.

Big funding, big ambitions ... Founded in February 2018, Galactic Energy has established a strong record of reliability with its light-lift Ceres-1 solid rocket, and previously raised $154 million in C-round funding in late 2023 for its Pallas-1 plans. Pallas-1, a kerosene-liquid oxygen rocket, is to be able to carry 7 metric tons of payload to a 200-km low-Earth orbit. New plans for Pallas-2 envision a capability of 20,000 to 58,000 kg, depending on a single-stick or tri-core configuration, with an aggressive target of a debut launch in 2026.

Blue Origin seeks to reuse next New Glenn booster. There's a good bit riding on the second launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, Ars reports. Most directly, the fate of a NASA science mission to study Mars' upper atmosphere hinges on a successful launch. The second flight of Blue Origin's heavy-lifter will send two NASA-funded satellites toward the red planet to study the processes that drove Mars' evolution from a warmer, wetter world to the cold, dry planet of today. But there's more on the line. If Blue Origin plans to launch its first robotic Moon lander early next year—as currently envisioned—the company needs to recover the New Glenn rocket's first stage booster.

Managing prop ... Crews will again dispatch Blue Origin's landing platform into the Atlantic Ocean, just as they did for the first New Glenn flight in January. The debut launch of New Glenn successfully reached orbit, a difficult feat for the inaugural flight of any rocket. But the booster fell into the Atlantic Ocean after three of the rocket's engines failed to reignite to slow down for landing. Engineers identified seven changes to resolve the problem, focusing on what Blue Origin calls "propellant management and engine bleed control improvements." Company officials expressed confidence this week the booster will be recovered.

SpaceX nearing next Starship test flight. With the next Starship launch, scheduled for no earlier than October 13, SpaceX officials hope to show they can repeat the successes of the 10th test flight of the vehicle in late August, Ars reports. On its surface, the flight plan for SpaceX's next Starship flight looks a lot like the last one. The rocket's Super Heavy booster will again splash down in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from SpaceX's launch site in South Texas. And Starship, the rocket's upper stage, will fly on a suborbital arc before reentering the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean for a water landing northwest of Australia.

Preparing for a future ship catch ... There are, however, some changes to SpaceX's flight plan for the next Starship. Most of these changes will occur during the ship's reentry, when the vehicle's heat shield is exposed to temperatures of up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). These include new tests of ceramic thermal protection tiles to "intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle." Another new test objective for the upcoming Starship flight will be a "dynamic banking maneuver" during the final phase of the trajectory "to mimic the path a ship will take on future flights returning to Starbase," SpaceX said. This will help engineers test Starship's subsonic guidance algorithms.

Senators seek to halt space shuttle move. A former NASA astronaut turned US senator has joined with other lawmakers to insist that his two rides to space remain on display in the Smithsonian, Ars reports. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) has joined fellow Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both of Virginia, and Dick Durbin of Illinois in an effort to halt the move of space shuttle Discovery to Houston, as enacted into law earlier this year. In a letter sent to the leadership of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Kelly and his three colleagues cautioned that any effort to transfer the winged orbiter would "waste taxpayer dollars, risk permanent damage to the shuttle, and mean fewer visitors would be able to visit it."

Seeking to block Cruz control ... In the letter, the senators asked that Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) block funding for Discovery's relocation in both the fiscal year 2026 Interior-Environment appropriations bill and FY26 Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill. The letter is the latest response to a campaign begun by Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both Republicans from Texas, to remove Discovery from its 13-year home at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and put it on display at Space Center Houston, the visitor center for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Next three launches

October 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-39 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 13:00 UTC

October 6: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-59 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla.| 04:32 UTC

October 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-17 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 01:00 UTC

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Posted Saturday 4 October 2025 at 3:05 am AEST (my time).

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Cardiologists and public health specialists weigh the balance between aspirin's potential benefit in lowering cardiovascular events and its known risk of major bleeding. Guidelines from the US Preventive Services Task Force recommend considering aspirin for adults aged 40 to 59 years who are not at high bleeding risk and have an estimated 10-year cardiovascular risk of at least 10%, as calculated with pooled cohort equations.

Investigators have developed the Predicting Risk of Cardiovascular Disease EVENTs (PREVENT) equations, which generate lower and better calibrated risk estimates than pooled cohort equations, but the implications for aspirin use have not been examined.

In the Research Letter, "Using the PREVENT Equations to Guide Aspirin Use for Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease," published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers analyzed whether applying PREVENT alters eligibility for aspirin.

The team used 2015 to 2020 data from 3,158 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, representing an estimated 59.4 million US adults aged 40 to 59 years without cardiovascular disease.

Respondents with conditions associated with bleeding risk were excluded, such as severe kidney disease, elevated urine albumin, low platelet count, cancer, heart failure, or use of certain medications (steroids, antiplatelets, anticoagulants).

Eligibility was assessed by calculating 10-year cardiovascular risk using both pooled cohort equations and PREVENT.

Aspirin candidacy was defined as a risk of 10% or greater. Researchers also reported the proportion of adults already taking aspirin despite the calculated risk falling below this threshold.

Results showed that 8.3% of middle-aged adults, or about 4.9 million, qualified for aspirin under pooled cohort equations. Only 1.2%, or about 700,000, qualified under PREVENT. Among those meeting pooled cohort criteria, 85.9% did not meet the threshold with PREVENT. Of the estimated 7.6 million adults who reported aspirin use for prevention, nearly 97% did not meet PREVENT's eligibility threshold.

Authors conclude that PREVENT's adoption raises urgent questions about whether the same 10% cutoff applied to older calculators should be used. Establishing PREVENT-specific thresholds will likely require dedicated modeling studies to determine the net benefit of aspirin.

Researchers note that most adults self-reporting aspirin use during the study period did not meet the criteria by either calculator, pointing to a substantial opportunity to discontinue therapy where benefit is unlikely.

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Also:  First human transplant of kidney modified to have ‘universal’ blood type.

In a step toward increasing access to donor organs, scientists have converted a blood-type-A kidney to blood type O and then transplanted it into a brain-dead person.

The kidney, which had essentially been turned into a universal transplant organ, functioned well for two days before showing signs of rejection. With refinement, this strategy could pave the way for shorter waits on organ donor lists.

In a study published Friday (Oct. 3) in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, researchers detailed this successful conversion of a kidney from a donor with type A blood to a type-O organ using enzymes, which are proteins that kick-start chemical reactions in the body.

Kidney transplantation has been a treatment for patients with renal disease since the 1950s. Like all organ transplants, however, it is somewhat limited by the need to match the blood type of the donor with that of the recipient, along with the requirement to find an appropriately sized organ that's geographically close enough to transplant in time.

Humans have four major blood groups — A, B, AB and O — and the immune system of a person with one blood type may react against another type. For example, a transplant candidate with type O blood can only receive a type-O donor kidney, but someone with A, B or AB blood type can also receive a type O kidney. That's because each blood type is defined by immune-triggering substances, called antigens. O blood lacks these antigens, so it can be given universally, while other blood types would set off a type-O person's immune system.

However, in the late 1980s, scientists developed a way to transplant ABO-incompatible (ABOi) organs — an organ from a donor with one blood type into a donor with an incompatible blood type — into recipients who needed them. But the process is demanding and takes several days. Then, in 2022, researchers developed an enzyme-based treatment protocol that can convert an organ into a "universal" transplant called enzyme-converted O, or ECO.

"The ECO process has been demonstrated for lungs," study co-author Stephen Withers, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at the University of British Columbia, told Live Science in an email. "We hope it works for all other organs — it should!" (Earlier this year, a different research group reported converting a kidney using ECO, but they started with a blood-type-B kidney in their experiment.)

Withers was part of the 2022 team that converted lungs from type A to type O. But that team did not transplant the ECO lungs into a person in that proof-of-concept experiment. In the new study, Withers and colleagues used a type-A kidney that had been deemed unsuitable for transplantation and converted it to a type-O kidney by perfusing the kidney with a special fluid, which took about two hours.

"Perfusion devices and organ preservation solutions are quite commonly used to keep organs in good condition between donation and transplantation," Withers explained. To convert the organ, the researchers put specific enzymes into the perfusion fluid that removed the blood-group antigens that can cause rejection.

"In this way, organs will not then get recognized and targeted by the anti-A antibodies present in the blood stream of the recipient," Withers said. The procedure doesn't permanently rid the organ of problematic antigens, but it could help stave off the worst of the immune system's reaction.

To see whether the kidney could escape immediate rejection in a human, the team turned to a brain-dead recipient whose family consented to the study. The team transplanted the ECO kidney into the recipient, who carried a high quantity of anti-A antibodies.

In a typical transplant, antibody therapy is given to the recipient before and after the transplant to prevent "hyperacute" rejection, which happens quickly. But the research team wanted to test whether creating an ECO kidney would prevent early rejection, so they didn't apply this therapy.

"We needed to understand how things progressed," Withers said. They wanted to monitor the rate at which antigens reappeared in the kidney and for how long the recipient's body could tolerate that reappearance.

The researchers found that the ECO kidney worked well for two days following transplantation, with no signs of rejection. Immune responses to the new kidney appeared on day three, which is when the ECO kidney began creating new A antigens.

"In an actual clinical transplant, there are a number of procedures that can be applied to minimize initial antibody-mediated rejection, including optimized immunosuppression," Withers said. If these methods, which are standard care in any organ transplant, are also used for ECO kidneys, this could enable longer-term tolerance of the transplant.

Converting organs from one blood type to another is important for increasing patients' access to donor organs, the researchers wrote in the study. This is particularly important for "type-O transplant candidates, who constitute over 50% of the waiting list and typically wait 2-4 years longer than do other blood types," they wrote.

Although the ECO kidney was successfully transplanted, the development of this transplant process is still in its early stages.

"I do not know whether this will be applied universally," Withers said. "However, it is certainly a possibility."

Source

The work is based on the largest standardized collection of Type Ia (pronounced “one A”) supernovae ever put together, with 2087 explosions from 24 different surveys. Type Ia supernovae happen when certain stars reach the end of their lives and explode in a very predictable way. Because their brightness is always about the same, astronomers use them as “standard candles,” like identical light bulbs scattered across space, to measure distances in the universe.

These supernovae were key to the 1998 discovery that the universe’s expansion is speeding up, which led to the idea of dark energy and later earned a Nobel Prize. They remain important because they are common, precise, and can be seen across huge distances, making them one of the best tools for studying the cosmos.

To make the data more reliable, the international Supernova Cosmology Project created a new dataset called Union3. It puts all the supernovae on the same distance scale and updates the way their light curves are analyzed using a method called SALT3, which takes into account the full rest-frame optical spectrum. The researchers also introduced a new statistical framework called UNITY1.5 (Unified Nonlinear Inference for Type-Ia cosmologY). This helps deal with tricky issues like selection effects, outliers, and differences in how the explosions are observed, while keeping uncertainties under control.

The analysis showed weak but noticeable tension, at the level of 1.7σ to 2.6σ, with the standard flat cold dark matter model that assumes dark energy never changes. Instead, the results hint at possible evidence for “thawing” dark energy, where its properties evolve over time (w₀ > −1, wₐ

The findings also line up with results from another project that studied how galaxies are spread out in space, giving more weight to the idea that dark energy might not be uniform.

The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and other institutions worldwide. It also used computing power from UH’s high-performance cluster, Koa.

David Rubin, lead author and associate professor in the UH Mānoa Department of Physics and Astronomy, said, “This project shows how Hawaii’s expertise and computing power can help answer some of the biggest questions in the universe. It’s exciting that our work from Hawaii is part of a global effort to unlock the secrets of dark energy.”

The team has released their supernova distances, light-curve fits, and the UNITY1.5 framework to the scientific community. With the number of useful supernovae expected to increase by more than tenfold in the coming years, future studies will face new challenges in keeping uncertainties low. For now, the results add to growing evidence that dark energy may not be as simple as once thought.

Source: University of Hawai'i, IOP Science

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Posted Friday 3 October 2025 at 5:04 pm AEST (my time).

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Japan is just a few days away from running out of Asahi Super Dry as the producer of the nation’s most popular beer wrestles with a devastating cyber attack that has shut down its domestic breweries.

The vast majority of Asahi Group’s 30 factories in Japan have not operated since Monday after the attack disabled its ordering and delivery system, the company said.

Retailers are already expecting empty shelves as the outage stretches into its fourth day with no clear timeline for factories recommencing operations. Super Dry could also run out at izakaya pubs, which rely on draught and bottles.

Lawson, one of Japan’s big convenience stores, said in a statement that it stocks many Asahi Group products and “it is possible that some of these products may become increasingly out of stock from tomorrow onwards.”

“This is having an impact on everyone,” said an executive at another of Japan’s major retailers. “I think we will run out of products soon. When it comes to Super Dry, I think we’ll run out in two or three days at supermarkets and Asahi’s food products within a week or so.”

The executive said that it would look to other brands such as Suntory or Kirin to quench Japanese drinkers’ thirst but acknowledged that many customers are fiercely loyal to Super Dry’s taste.

Asahi declined to comment on any possible shortage or retailer inventories. Japan’s largest brewer produces the equivalent of 6.7 million large bottles of beer per day on average in the country, based on Financial Times calculations using its 2024 sales figure.

The Asahi incident follows a spate of cyber incidents at other major companies that have proved highly disruptive. Earlier this week, the UK government provided a £2 billion emergency credit line to Jaguar Land Rover after production stopped for a month due to a devastating cyber attack.

According to cyber security experts at the Tokyo-based group Nihon Cyber Defence (NCD), Japanese companies are increasingly seen as attractive targets for ransomware attackers because of their poor defenses and the fact that many companies simply paid the demanded sum through back channels.

In 2024 Japan’s National Police Agency said it had received 222 official reports of ransomware attacks—a 12 percent rise from the previous year, but experts at NCD said it represented just a small fraction of the real volume of attacks.

In a survey conducted by the agency, Japanese companies said that in 49 percent of ransomware cases, it took at least a month to recover the data lost in the attack. Asahi said in a statement that there was no confirmed leakage of customer data to external parties.

In a measure of growing public and private sector panic over cyber vulnerabilities, Japan passed a law in May that granted the government greater rights to proactively combat cyber criminals and state-sponsored hackers. The chair of the government’s policy research council at the time, Itsunori Onodera, warned that without an urgent upgrade of the nation’s cyber security, “the lives of Japanese people will be put at risk.”

Asahi, whose shares fell 2.6 percent on Thursday, not only produces Super Dry beer in Japan but also soft drinks, mints, and baby food, as well as producing own brand goods for Japanese retailers.

Asahi is still investigating whether it was a ransomware attack, according to a spokesperson.

As a result of the cyber attack, Asahi has postponed the planned launch of eight new Asahi products, including fruit soda, lemon-flavored ginger ale, and protein bars, indefinitely.

On Wednesday, Asahi trialled using paper-based systems to process orders and deliveries in a small-scale trial and it is in the process of figuring out whether to proceed with more manual-style deliveries.

Operations in other regions of the world, such as Europe, where it sells Peroni Nastro Azzurro, have not been affected by the cyber attack.

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Posted Friday 3 October 2025 at 4:06 am AEST (my time).

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A relatively new spacecraft company, Inversion, revealed its new "on demand" delivery vehicle Wednesday evening during a splashy ceremony at its factory in Los Angeles.

The company said it is building the Arc spacecraft to provide a capability to the US military to deliver as much as 500 pounds (225 kg) of supplies almost anywhere in the world, almost instantaneously.

"The nominal mission for us is pre-positioning Arcs on orbit, and having them stay up there for up to five years, able to be called upon and then autonomously go and land wherever and whenever they're needed, being able to bring their cargo or effects to the desired location in under an hour," said Justin Fiaschetti, co-founder and chief executive of Inversion, in an interview with Ars before the event.

Inversion was founded in early 2021 by Fiaschetti and Austin Briggs. Both were students at Boston University. Fiaschetti had internships at SpaceX and Relativity Space, where he worked on propulsion. He dropped out of Boston University to co-found Inversion because of a simple idea.

Space is a highway

"Space is fun to talk about as a destination, and people really were talking about it that way then," Fiaschetti said. "But the true economic value of space is accessing the globe, and we realized we could do that with physical cargo, rather than with just data. And so we founded Inversion to go and build reentry vehicles to go do that."

Three years later the company, with just 25 employees, cobbled together a small spacecraft named "Ray" as a demonstration of its technology. It launched as part of SpaceX's Transporter-12 mission in January of this year. Ray was intended to fly in space using Inversion's in-house subsystems before firing its bipropellant rocket engine to perform a deorbit burn and land off the coast of California.

The Arc spacecraft lands under parachutes in this rendering.

Credit: Inversion

The test spacecraft, with a mass of about 200 pounds (90 kg) performed well, Fiaschetti said. It demonstrated the capability to raise and lower its orbit, and remains power positive to date, periodically checking in with Inversion flight controllers. However, the spacecraft will not make a controlled landing.

"Ray won't be coming back," Fiaschetti said. "We're doing long-term testing of software on orbit."

Although Ray did not land, Inversion now feels confident enough in its technology to move into the production of the larger Arc vehicle, which was unveiled on Wednesday evening. About the size of a large table top—Arc is four feet wide and eight feet tall—the company is aiming to launch the first Arc vehicle by the end of 2026. Fiaschetti said Inversion is "on a really good path" to make that timeline.

So what does the military want to ship?

Arc is a lifting body spacecraft, and it will do the majority of its maneuvering in the atmosphere, where it has 1,000 km of cross-range capability during reentry. It will land under parachutes and therefore not require a runway. Because the vehicle's propulsion system uses non-toxic materials, a soldier can approach it immediately after landing without any protective gear.

So what would the US military want to pre-position in space for delivery at a moment's notice to any location around the world?

"We like to describe this as mission-enabling cargo or effects," Fiaschetti said. "This could be a wide variety of specific payloads, anything from medical supplies to drones to what have you. But the key discriminator is, does this make a difference in the moment it's needed when it gets back down to the ground? You know, for the military and national security, if they need their cargo before the fight is over."

The company says it has already built a "full-scale manufacturing development unit of the primary structure" for the first Arc vehicle. It would be an impressive capability if the small team at Inversion—now 60 people strong, and growing—can bring the Arc spacecraft to market. If, of course, is the operative word. "Space is hard" may be a cliché, but it also happens to be true.

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Posted Thursday 2 October 2025 at 6:51 pm AEST (my time).

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The extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna may be people’s fault after all, according to a recent study.

A team of archaeologists recently examined animal bones at sites dating to the waning years of the last Ice Age. Their results suggest that extinct megafauna like giant sloths, giant armadillos, and elephant-like creatures were on the menu for Pleistocene hunters in South America. And that means human hunters may have played a nontrivial role in killing off the continent’s last great Ice Age megafauna.

Giant ground sloth: It’s what’s for dinner

Archaeologist Luciano Prates of Mexico's National University of La Plata and his colleagues counted the animal bones left behind by ancient people at 20 archaeological sites in modern-day Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. They compared the number of bones from extinct megafauna (technically, “megafauna” describes any animal over 44 kilograms) to the number of bones from smaller prey. They also tallied the remains of still-living species of megafauna like vicuñas. The archaeologists hoped to learn whether giant sloths, giant armadillos, and now-extinct species of horses were staples in the diets of Ice Age South Americans.

They chose sites that dated back more than 11,600 years, before the last of the now-extinct Ice Age megafauna vanished from the continent. The team only counted bones with clear signs that people had butchered the animal for food, like cut and percussion marks.

At 15 of the 20 sites, most of the butchered bones came from now-extinct megafauna; at 13 of those sites, extinct Pleistocene megafauna accounted for more than 80 percent of the total animal bones. That suggests that ancient hunters had a clear preference for now-extinct prey like giant sloths, giant armadillos, extinct horses, and even relatives of modern elephants—at least when they could get them.

In what’s now central Chile, the top menu item was Notiomastodon platensis, an extinct relative of modern elephants (they were about the size of a modern Asian elephant but had no tusks). Meanwhile, in Patagonia (the southern swath of South America, spanning parts of Argentina and Chile) and the Pampas grasslands of Uruguay and Argentina, people seemed to prefer two species of giant sloths.

And that makes perfect sense, because when you reduce hunters’ choices to simple math using what’s called the prey choice model (more on that below), these long-lost species offered bigger returns for the effort of hunting. In other words, giant sloths are extinct because they were delicious and made of meat.

Yup, it’s humanity’s fault—again

As the last Ice Age drew to a close, the large animals that had once dominated the world’s chilly Pleistocene landscapes started to vanish. Mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and giant armadillos died out altogether. Other species went locally extinct; rhinoceroses no longer stomped around southern Europe, and horses disappeared from the Americas until European colonists brought new species with them thousands of years later.

Scientists have been arguing about how much of that was humanity’s fault for quite a while.

Most of the blame goes to the world’s changing climate; habitats shifted as the world mostly got warmer and wetter. But, at least in some places, humans may have sped the process along, either by hunting the last of the Pleistocene megafauna to extinction or just by shaking up the rest of the ecosystem so much that it was all too ready to collapse, taking the biggest species down with it.

It looks, at first glance, like South America’s late Ice Age hunters are safely not guilty. For one thing, the megafauna didn’t start dying out until thousands of years after humans first set foot in the region. Archaeologists also haven’t found many sites that contain both traces of human activity and the bones of extinct horses, giant armadillos, or other megafauna. And at those few sites, megafauna bones made up only a small percentage of the contents of ancient scrap piles. Not enough evidence places us at the crime scene, in other words—or so it seems.

On the other hand, the Ice Age megafauna began dying out in South America around 13,000 years ago, roughly the same time that a type of projectile point called the fishtail appeared. That may not be a coincidence, argued one study. And late last year, another study showed that farther north, in what’s now the United States, Clovis people’s diets contained mammoth amounts of… well, mammoth.

So, the evidence is mixed. Now, Prates and his colleagues are arguing we’re not off the hook. Humans and extinct megafauna only shared South America for less than 3,000 years, and it was over 10,000 years ago, so the odds of evidence being preserved are fairly low. At many of those sites, Pleistocene layers—which would include extinct megafauna—are mixed with bones left behind during the Holocene, which skews the numbers in favor of smaller prey and species that survived the end of the Ice Age.

The researchers focused on 20 sites where the timeline was clear, so they could determine what people were doing before 11,600 years ago, when megafauna was still potentially on the menu. And if some researchers were inclined to exonerate humanity because it looked like we didn’t actually kill that much megafauna, Prates and his colleagues’ results suggest otherwise.

“Our results,” write Prates and his colleagues, “put human foragers again at the heart of the debate.”

Pleistocene hunters shopped in bulk

According to the “prey choice model,” a system that researchers use to explore how hunter-gatherers choose what to hunt, megafauna are prime prey. The prey choice model ranks animals based on how many calories they’re likely to provide versus the amount of energy expended in pursuing them (and in lugging the carcass home and carving it up into edible chunks). Giant sloths, giant armadillos, and extinct American horses all consistently rank near the top of that list.

Pleistocene hunters were every bit as intelligent as modern people, and extremely savvy about their own environments, so they were likely making their own versions of prey choice calculations and opting to shop in bulk, as it were.

Surprisingly, modern-day megafauna like guanaco, taruca, and vicuña don’t rank very high on the prey-choice list compared to the megafauna of yesteryear. You can feed a band of hunter-gatherers by hunting taruca, but not as efficiently or well as you can by going after giant sloths. It appears that more recent hunters shifted to these options only once their more statistically optimal choices got too scarce. And that—along with modern conservation efforts—probably helps explain why these species are still around today.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx2615 10.1126/sciadv.adx2615; (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 2 October 2025 at 12:13 pm AEST (my time).

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How calm, cool, and utterly chill is the crew of NASA’s first Moon mission in more than half a century?

Let’s start with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

"You know me, personally, I hope to take a very short nap on the pad," he said. "There's enough time built in there to have a nap. I’ve been practicing falling asleep. So if the loops are quiet enough, and I get a minute, I’ll try for a nap."

Imagine that. Hansen will be seated atop a Brobdingnagian rocket, fueled with explosive liquid hydrogen and oxygen, just about to blast off on a wild ride that will ultimately carry him and three other crew members out to the Moon and back. Perhaps a billion people around the world will be watching.

And there he’ll be, trying to catch a few winks.

That Hansen is contemplating a nap on the launch pad of the Artemis II mission underscores just how frenetic the opening day of this mission will be as the astronauts test out the Orion spacecraft to ensure it is indeed ready to fly them to the Moon. It will be a super-busy, high-stress time, during which everything must go right or they'll have to come straight back to Earth. So yes, maybe the crew should grab some sleep when they can.

To understand their activities in space on that first day, Ars spoke with each of the four crew members—Hansen, alongside Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Payload Specialist Christina Koch—about their duties during this stretch. Here is the mission in their own words.

Liftoff

Glover: Launch comes after you’ve been awake for seven hours, and your brain is going in a bunch of different places, right? And so you've already worked a full day, and then you go do, like, the most energetic thing you've ever done in your life.

Liftoff of the Artemis II mission is presently scheduled for no earlier than February 5, 2026. If the rocket, spacecraft, and weather are good, the mission will launch at 8:09 pm ET. On this timeline, the crew would wake up at about 1 pm and receive a weather briefing before being suited up. About three hours before liftoff, they will clamber into the Orion spacecraft and strap into four seats. At this point, Hansen and maybe one or two of the other crew members will attempt to sleep for a few minutes, given the work ahead.

No one will be able to sleep when the launch window opens, however.

Wiseman: About seven seconds prior to liftoff, the four main engines light, and they come up to full power. And then the solids light, and that’s when you’re going. What's crazy to me is that it's six and a half seconds into flight before the solids clear the top of the tower. Five million pounds of machinery going straight uphill. Six and a half seconds to clear the tower. As a human, I can’t wait to feel that force.

A little more than two minutes into flight, the powerful side-mounted boosters will separate. They will have done the vast majority of lifting to that point, with the rocket already reaching a velocity of 3,100 mph (5,000 kph) and an altitude of 30 miles (48 km), well on its way to space. As payload specialists, Koch and Hansen will largely be along for the ride. Wiseman, the commander, and Glover, the pilot, will be tracking the launch, although the rocket's flight will be fully automated unless something goes wrong.

Wiseman: Victor and I, we have a lot of work. We have a lot of systems to monitor. Hopefully, everything goes great, and if it doesn’t, we’re very well-trained on what to do next.

After 8 minutes and 3 seconds, the rocket's core stage will shut down, and the upper stage and Orion spacecraft will separate about 10 seconds later. They will be in space, with about 40 minutes to prepare for their next major maneuver.

In orbit

Koch: The wildest thing in this mission is that literally, right after main-engine cutoff, the first thing Jeremy and I do is get up and start working. I don't know of a single other mission, certainly not in my memory, where that has been the case in terms of physical movement in the vehicle, setting things up.

Koch, Wiseman, and Glover have all flown to space before, either on a SpaceX Dragon or Russian Soyuz vehicle, and spent several months on the International Space Station. So they know how their bodies will react to weightlessness. Nearly half of all astronauts experience "space adaptation syndrome" during their first flight to orbit, and there is really no way to predict who it will afflict beforehand. This is a real concern for Hansen, a first-time flier, who is expected to hop out of his seat and start working.

Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen is a first-time flier on Artemis II.

Credit: NASA

Hansen: I'm definitely worried about that, just from a space motion sickness point of view. So I'll just be really intentional. I won't move my head around a lot. Obviously, I'm gonna have to get up and move. And I'll just be very intentional in those first few hours while I'm moving around. And the other thing that I'll do—it's very different from Space Station—is I just have everything memorized, so I don't have to read the procedure on those first few things. So I'm not constantly going down to the [tablet] and reading, and then up. And I'll just try to minimize what I do.

Koch and Hansen will set up and test essential life support systems on the spacecraft because if the bathroom does not work, they're not going to the Moon.

Hansen: We kind of split the vehicle by side. So Christina is on the side of the toilet. She's taking care of all that stuff. I'm on the side of the water dispenser, which is something they want to know: Can we dispense water? It's not a very complicated system. We just got to get up, get the stuff out of storage, hook it up. I'll have some camera equipment that I'll pull out of there. I've got the masks we use if we have a fire and we're trying to purge the smoke. I've got to get those set up and make sure they're good to go. So it's just little jobs, little odds and ends.

Unlike a conventional rocket mission, Artemis II vehicle's upper stage, known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, will not fire right away. Rather, after separating from the core stage, Orion will be in an elliptical orbit that will take it out to an apogee of 1,200 nautical miles, nearly five times higher than the International Space Station. There, the crew will be further from Earth than anyone since the Apollo program.

At this apogee, 50 minutes into the flight, the upper stage will need to ignite for the first time to raise Orion's perigee. This will bring the spacecraft back around the Earth. At this point, they'll reach a critical decision point. If everything goes well, the upper stage will conduct a longer burn to raise Orion's next apogee from 1,200 nautical miles to 38,000 miles. This will place the vehicle in an orbit around Earth that takes 23.5 hours.

Glover: That's going to be bananas. People keep talking about us seeing the Moon, but man, I'm super excited about seeing the full disk of the Earth from that far.

Prox Ops

This apogee burn is a long one, lasting for about 15 minutes. Following this, Wiseman and Glover have about an hour to get out of their suits and prepare for a big test of both the Orion spacecraft and their piloting skills. They will also swap seats, with Glover at the primary controls of Orion. At 3 hours and 24 minutes into the flight, Orion will separate the rocket's upper stage and then begin what is called "proximity ops," or just prox ops, for more than two hours. During this tense period, Orion will fly a series of maneuvers around the upper stage.

Wiseman: As soon as we separate, Victor and I are on stopwatches. We have to start sending commands to the vehicle to get a 180-degree pitch flip around maneuver. Then we start flying formation around that thing for the next two, two-and-a-half hours. It all comes super quick. From the moment we separate from the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, every second counts.

It will be a tense time for the crew. No one has ever flown Orion before.

Victor Glover, left, will fly Orion during proximity ops.

Credit: NASA

Wiseman: We are trying to characterize the handling qualities, the flying qualities of the Orion spacecraft and the European Service Module. Really, what we're trying to do is give data to the ground so they can anchor their models. We’ve got a lot of models on how this thing will fly. And we're going to fly around the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, roughly 10 meters off the nose of the ICPS, for a series of maneuvers, gross handling qualities, fine handling qualities. And then we're actually going to fly around to the side. So that'll let us do some pitch attitude, pitch changes as we go around. And then we're going to fly off the side target of the ICPS. It will be about two hours of those maneuvers, doing pure developmental test pilot handling qualities evaluations, Cooper-Harper ratings.

Glover, who served as pilot aboard the Crew-1 mission in November 2020, will be piloting the spacecraft for these exercises, as Wiseman communicates with Mission Control in Houston.

Glover: "We're going to be giving them handling quality data just like our old Navy test piloting days. Dragon's got a touchscreen, and Orion's got a THC [translation hand controller] and an RHC [rotational hand controller]. And you know me, I’m a fighter pilot. I like having that control stick and stick-and-throttle feel in my hands. This vehicle looks like something straight out of the '90s, early 2000s. It looks like a Space Shuttle because it was built by the same companies that built the Space Shuttle. It looks like you’ve gone back in time, but it’s taken us to the future of human spaceflight.

After completing these tests, the spacecraft will back away from the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, which will raise its perigee and be disposed of into a graveyard orbit. Orion, meanwhile, will continue on its high-Earth orbit, and Glover and Wiseman will turn piloting of Orion over to the flight computer.

Wiseman: In the simulators, once we get away from the ICPS and we hand automation to the vehicle, that is the first time I’ve seen the crew breathe a sigh of relief.

Fly me to the Moon?

After the proximity operations, the crew has about three hours to dry out their space suits and continue converting the cabin of Orion from its launch setup to spaceflight mode. This will include setting up a flywheel for exercise. Several of the crew members will work out at this time to stress the life support system to ensure it can handle the excess carbon dioxide and humidity from these exertions.

Glover: The first workout is a checkout of that exercise hardware, but it's also a checkout of the environmental control system. Because I'm going to be breathing, I'm going to be sweating, making more humidity and more CO₂  for the life support system to scrub out. And then if that's good, that's another check that means we can go to the Moon.

During this time frame, the crew will also set up a food warmer and get something to eat. Following these activities, there is a four-hour period allotted for a nap, then the crew will awaken for a burn by the Orion spacecraft's main engine to raise its perigee. This will all be automated, but the crew will need to carefully monitor the vehicle's performance and confer with Mission Control before bedding back down for another four-hour nap. If they can sleep, that is.

Hansen: We get a nap, roughly about a four-hour block there, and then we get up, and we do the perigee raise burn at that point, and we do an emergency comms check out, and then we go back to bed again. So it's a strange day from a sleep perspective. You know, it will be fine if we can sleep in all the little windows. The challenge is actually getting to sleep in that excitement. I think exhaustion will help.

What will not help is knowing that, at the end of their second nap period, NASA managers will have a final decision on whether Orion's propulsion and life support systems have been cleared for a Trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn, which will send the spacecraft flying to the Moon. Wiseman said he thinks the crew will already have a good sense of things after the perigee burn, which occurs after the first nap.

Artemis II flight plan.

Credit: NASA

Wiseman: I think we’ll know after we do our perigee burn. From there, we have 12 hours until we come back down to perigee and burn TLI. So I think we’ll know right there if there are no major failures. That perigee raise burn, for me—we’ll know if the vehicle is handling well. But from that 12 hours to when we do the TLI is when the Mission Management Team and the folks in Houston will be talking about preparedness for TLI. In most cases, if we miss TLI burn one, we can do another one 24 hours later.

Koch said she thinks the crew might know even earlier, especially if the tea leaves are not looking good.

Koch: In some ways, it could be immediate, like if there's a leak in one of our scrubber valves or something like that. We do some things literally during ascent. We actually activate some of our prop systems right away because we have to know whether we can use that prop for a once-around abort option. If we can't, then we have to do a different abort option. It could be something that we find out right toward the end. If we lose our second out of two inertial measurement units right before TLI, we're instantaneously no-go, and we will literally reach up and hit the cancel burn button. Our vehicle will start talking to us almost right away. We could even have inklings on the pad.

But if they do go, it will be glorious. After the TLI burn, the crew will have a few more hours of activities, including speaking to people back on Earth who will be excited to talk to astronauts who are breaking away from the pull of our planet's gravity. Then, finally, they will be able to take a break, have a couple of hours to wind down, have dinner, and then get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Glover: In my brain, until that point, this is all still one long day. So for me, the first real sleep is on the second day.

A sleep they will have decidedly earned, having tested Orion, burned its engines, and flown millions of miles from home.

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Posted Thursday 2 October 2025 at 4:28 am AEST (my time).

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If you want to get into stargazing in 2025, there’s no better place to start than viewing a meteor shower. Meteor showers, or shooting stars, happen when Earth’s orbital path crosses a path of debris left by a comet and that material burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Watching a meteor shower is one of the most accessible ways to engage with the night sky.

The next showers of the year are the Southern Delta Aquariids—which peak for about a week at the end of July—and the Perseids—which will peak overnight on August 12–13. Both showers will be active until August 23.

These are just two of nine major meteor showers that will grace skies in 2025, and details of when they will appear in the northern hemisphere are listed below—so mark your calendar for these.

How to Watch a Meteor Shower

You don’t need any special equipment to see a meteor shower—in fact, using devices like binoculars or telescopes actually prevents you from seeing meteors, because they travel too fast to be seen through the lenses of such equipment. All you need are your eyes, a dark sky with little to no moonlight, and a location that’s away from excess light, as moonlight and light pollution can wash out shooting stars.

Note that the moon appears (rises) and disappears (sets) in the night sky at different times depending on what time zone you are in. All moonrise/moonset times in this piece are for the eastern US. You can use tools like Time and Date’s moonrise/moonset calendar or this tool from the US Naval Observatory to check the precise moonrise/moonset times in your exact location.

You should allow your eyes about half an hour to adjust to the darkness. If you need to use a flashlight while outside, use one with red light instead of white to preserve your night vision.

Each meteor shower is named after its radiant, or the constellation that the shower appears to come from. A meteor shower’s radiant usually needs to be above the horizon before you can see the meteors. You don’t need to look directly at the radiant to see meteors; shooting stars will be visible throughout the entire sky once the radiant has risen.

If you need help finding a shower’s radiant, you can use an app like Stellarium, which can also tell you when the radiant will be above the horizon in your exact location. If you really want to maximize the number of meteors you’ll see, you should watch the sky when the shower’s radiant reaches its highest point in the sky. However, you don’t need to wait until the radiant is at its highest to enjoy the show—as long as the radiant is above the horizon, you should be able to see plenty of shooting stars.

The Next Big Meteor Showers

The Southern Delta Aquariids (July–August)

The Southern Delta Aquariids are active from about July 12 to August 23, producing peak activity for about a week centered on July 29–30. Unlike some other meteor showers, the Southern Delta Aquariids don’t have a sharp peak. Instead, the number of meteors per hour gradually increases and then slowly decreases during the period of activity.

Fortunately, the last week and a half of July will yield perfect viewing conditions: The new moon falls on July 23, so there will be little to no moonlight on the nights surrounding this date—plus, in the US the moon will set by midnight until the first couple nights of August, so there is ample opportunity to observe this meteor shower under moonless skies.

On July 26, the approximate start date for the Southern Delta Aquariids’ peak activity, the moon will be about 4 percent illuminated and will set around 10 pm. During the midpoint of the Southern Delta Aquariids’ peak, on July 29–30, the moon will be about 24 percent illuminated and set at about 11 pm. Toward the end of the Southern Delta Aquariids’ peak, on the night of August 2–3, the moon will be about 70 percent full and will set around 1 am.

In other words, the best time to view the shower will probably be in the lead-up to its peak rather than afterward. After the peak, observing conditions will suddenly deteriorate in the first week of August, when the moon will be almost full and won’t set until the early morning hours.

The Southern Delta Aquariids’ radiant is the constellation Aquarius, which rises around 10 pm local time and reaches its highest point in the sky around 3 am.

Although this meteor shower typically yields meteors that are somewhat dimmer and do not have persistent trains, this meteor shower is still worthwhile: You’ll be able to see about 25 shooting stars per hour in ideal viewing conditions.

The Perseids (July–August)

The Perseids are active from about July 17 to August 23, peaking overnight on August 12–13.

The Perseids are one of the strongest and brightest meteor showers of the year, producing 100 to 150 meteors per hour under dark skies. However, the number of meteors drops off sharply after the peak.

The Perseids often yield bright fireball meteors, and about a third of the Perseids have persistent trains. Shooting stars in this shower are also known for being particularly colorful: Most have a green or bluish color, but these meteors can produce yellow, red, purple, or pink hues as well.

Unfortunately, the Perseids will peak just a few nights after the full moon. On August 12–13, the moon will be about 86 percent illuminated and will rise around 10 pm in the US, so viewing conditions will be poor.

However, the Perseids are quite bright, so it might still be worth it to catch this meteor shower. If you do plan on watching, find a spot where the moonlight is blocked out as much as possible.

The Perseids appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus, which rises around 11 pm local time and will be highest in the sky just before dawn.

Coming Up Later in 2025

The Orionids (September–November)

The Orionids are active from around September 26 to November 22. According to the stargazing website Starwalk, the Orionids have a gradual peak due to the angle at which Earth crosses the path of this trail of comet debris. The Orionids produce peak activity for about a week, centered on the night of October 21–22.

The Orionids typically yield about 20 to 25 meteors per hour during their peak and are known for being particularly bright—many of the Orionids are fireball meteors. Like the Eta Aquariids, the Orionids are also debris left behind by Halley’s Comet.

The Orionids appear to radiate from the constellation Orion, which rises around 11 pm local time and is highest in the sky just before dawn.

The new moon falls on the night of October 21–22, and in the surrounding week the moon will set well before midnight, so you will have perfect viewing conditions to see this meteor shower.

The Leonids (November–December)

The Leonids are active from about November 3 to December 2. They have a sharp peak, producing the most meteors overnight from November 16 to November 17, according to the American Meteor Society. Other organizations, however, predict that this shower will peak from November 17 to November 18. During the Leonids’ peak, you can expect to see about 15 meteors per hour under dark skies.

Although the Leonids produce fewer meteors than many other of the major meteor showers, they are known for producing fast-moving, bright, fireball meteors.

The Leonids peak just before the new moon—on the morning of November 18, the moon will be just 6 percent illuminated and in the eastern US won’t rise until around 5 am on November 17, so you’ll have ample time to see this meteor shower under perfect viewing conditions.

The Leonids’ radiant is the constellation Leo, which rises around midnight local time and is highest in the sky around dawn.

The Geminids (December)

The Geminids are active from about December 4 to December 17, peaking overnight from December 13 to December 14. They have a sharp peak, so the night of the 13th is the best time for skywatching.

The Geminids are the most spectacular meteor shower of the year. In addition to boasting up to 120 or even 150 meteors per hour during its peak, this meteor shower is also the brightest and most colorful of the year.

The Geminids are bright, slow-moving meteors that often have yellow tones, but they can be a range of other colors, including green, blue, white, red, or orange. And unlike most meteors, which are caused by comet debris, the Geminids are the remnant of an asteroid.

The night that the Geminids peak, their radiant, the constellation Gemini, will be above the horizon all night and will reach its highest point around 2 am local time, so meteors will be visible almost the whole night.

That same night, the moon will be about 32 percent illuminated and will rise around 1:30 am in the eastern US, so if you watch this shower shortly after midnight, the moonlight won’t interfere with your viewing experience.

The Ursids (December)

The Ursids are active around December 17 to December 26, peaking in the early morning hours of December 22. This meteor shower is less active than others, typically yielding about 10 meteors per hour; however, viewing conditions will be perfect for skywatching. The moon will set at approximately 6 pm in the eastern US on the 21st, so no moonlight will interfere with this meteor shower.

Even though the Ursids typically produce the most meteors just before dawn, when its radiant, the Little Dipper (or Ursa Minor), is highest in the sky, you will be able to see meteors throughout the entire night during this shower’s peak. In northern latitudes the Ursids’ radiant is above the horizon all night.

Showers to Look Out for Next Year

The Quadrantids (January)

The Quadrantids take place in December and January and peak during the first week of the year. This meteor shower has a sharp peak, meaning that most of its activity occurs in a narrow window of time. The Quadrantids typically produce many fireball meteors—that is, meteors that are very bright—with up to 120 meteors per hour during the shower’s peak.

The Quadrantids’ radiant is the constellation Quadrans Muralis, though the International Astronomical Union no longer recognizes this group of stars as a constellation. In its place is the constellation Boötes, which is next to the Big Dipper.

The Lyrids (April)

The Lyrids are active in the second half of April, with their peak lasting around three nights. You can expect to see about 15 to 20 meteors per hour under ideal viewing conditions during the Lyrids’ peak. Under optimal viewing conditions, the stargazing website Earth Sky notes, about a quarter of Lyrids shooting stars produce persistent trains—lingering streaks of light that are the result of gases being ionized as the meteors enter Earth’s atmosphere.

The Lyrids’ radiant, the constellation Hercules, rises well before midnight, so meteors are visible all night, but are most likely to be seen just before dawn, when the radiant reaches its highest point in the sky.

The Eta Aquariids (May)

The Eta Aquariids are active approximately from mid-April to the end of May. This meteor shower does not have a sharp peak: Elevated activity lasts about a week, with activity peaking for one night in the first week of May.

In the northern hemisphere, the Eta Aquariids are a medium-strength shower that produces about 10 to 30 meteors per hour. According to the American Meteor Society, many of these meteors produce persistent trains. One other thing that makes the Eta Aquariids extra special is that these meteors are actually remnants of the famous Halley’s Comet.

The Eta Aquariids’ radiant, the constellation Aquarius, appears very low in the sky in the northern hemisphere in April and won’t start to peak above the eastern horizon until after 2 am local time. However, meteors from this shower are still visible even when the radiant is just below the horizon.

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Posted Wednesday 1 October 2025 at 5:10 pm AEST (my time).

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Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren't planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy crusts. And, as far as we can tell, the physics of the processes that produce large planets should make moon formation inevitable. Given how common planets are, our galaxy should be teeming with moons.

Yet, despite some tantalizing hints, we've not found a clear indication of a moon orbiting an exoplanet. What we have found are a few very young exoplanets that appear to have moon-forming disks around them. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has obtained a spectrum of the ring-forming disk around a giant super-Jupiter, and found that it's rich in small carbon-based molecules. That's despite the fact that the star it's orbiting seems to have a planet-forming disk that's mostly water.

Finding disks

We search for exo-moons and moon-forming disks using completely different methods. To spot an actual moon, we rely on its gravitational influence. At some points in its orbit, it will be towing its planet forward to speed up its orbit; at others, it will be holding its planet back. This introduces subtle variations in the timing of when the planet arrives in front of the star from Earth's perspective.

(The moon should also block out a bit more of the star's light at different points in its orbit, but this can easily be masked by variability in the star itself.)

Moon-forming disks, however, are only present early in an exosolar system's history. They are a bit like larger versions of the rings of Saturn, but with enough material to condense into moons. Over the first few million years of an exosolar system's history, that material will end up as some combination of dispersed, condensed into moons, or fallen into the planet.

Unfortunately, during their (astronomically speaking) short existence, the gravitational influence of these disks on the planet is relatively even, so we can't use that. And they don't emit or reflect enough light to avoid being swamped by the light originating from the star. So, if we're going to find evidence of one, it's going to have to be near a newly formed star, and orbiting a planet that's quite a distance from that star.

Fortunately, we have been able to spot a number of planets that fit these requirements. In fact, all the planets we've imaged directly have been orbiting newborn stars. That's because these planets are still glowing in the infrared from the heat released during their gravitational collapse, making them possible to spot even though they're so far from their host star that they're not reflecting much light. These planets are also giants, generally multiple times the mass of Jupiter, which is why they emit enough infrared to be visible from Earth.

Studies of these planets have suggested that several of them are surrounded by moon-forming disks. But we didn't have much information on the disks themselves until now.

Moons-to-be

That's changed thanks to the incredible resolving power of the JWST. Two astronomers, Gabriele Cugno and Sierra Grant, obtained images from near the star CT Cha, a young Sun-like (0.9 solar masses) star located about 625 light-years away. CT Cha is known to have a companion called CT Cha b, a super-Jupiter with over 15 times the mass of the familiar planet. The massive planet orbits about 15 times further away from its host star than Neptune does from our Sun, making it possible to resolve the planet separately from CT Cha itself.

A first scan of the spectrum in the vicinity of the planet revealed the likely presence of numerous chemicals, including small carbon compounds such as ethane, acetylene, and carbon dioxide. Once they knew what chemicals to look for and where the planet is, Cugno and Grant could perform a relatively simple experiment: set a spectrograph on the JWST so that it was sensitive to the peak emissions of many common molecules, and simply see whether the planet showed up in the image. If it did, those chemicals were present in the neighborhood of the planet.

The two researchers then modeled the emissions of the moon-forming disk, figuring out the list of chemicals that would re-create the observations, as well as the temperatures at which those chemicals were present. Many of these were at temperatures below 250 K, suggesting that they were liberated from icy materials either by sublimation or during collisions, but the acetylene appeared to be noticeably warmer, suggesting that a lot of this material is in the inner portion of the disk closest to the planet.

The striking thing about this is that repeating the procedure on the star turned up no evidence of carbon-based chemicals, even though the system is young enough that it should still have a planet-forming disk. Instead, the primary signal near the star comes from water molecules, which are absent from the moon-forming disk.

Why is all the carbon there?

It's tempting to think that the materials in a planet-forming disk would be evenly mixed, and so the material fed into the moon-forming disk should be the same as the stuff closer in to the star. But things are not nearly that simple. Many materials will freeze into a solid at different distances from the star, and so be present in higher densities outside their individual "snow lines."

In addition, CT Cha b, the planet, is orbiting in a region where there shouldn't be enough material for standard planet formation processes to occur, much less build a giant such as CT Cha b. So, Cugno and Grant infer that it most likely formed by an instability in the disk that formed the star, a process that often produces a binary star system, but can also result in a star orbited by a brown dwarf or giant planet.

An intriguing finding has been that, while Sun-like stars tend to have more water than carbon in their planet-forming disk, while smaller stars and brown dwarfs see the reverse, with lots of carbon and less water. CT Cha b indicates that this pattern extends into the planet-sized bodies. The intrigue comes from the fact that we don't know what produces this pattern; there are a number of hypotheses, not all mutually exclusive, and we haven't figured out how to get a definitive answer yet.

In any case, the big picture isn't exactly a surprise. If our models of planet and star formation are anywhere close to right, then a disk of materials that can form additional bodies is an inevitability. And the high frequency with which we're finding planets orbiting other stars suggests that those models are very accurate. So, we'd fully expected moon-forming disks to be there as well. Still, it's always important to have confirmation that things are actually working as expected, and further studies like this may give us a clearer picture of moon-forming disks that will ultimately allow us to build more sophisticated models and start building a detailed picture of how moons come to be.

The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae0290  (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 1 October 2025 at 5:09 pm AEST (my time).

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To trap its prey, the Venus flytrap sends rapid electrical impulses, which are generated in response to touch or stress. But the molecular identity of the touch sensor has remained unclear. Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that triggers that response and have published their work in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

As previously reported, the Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

In 2016, Rainer Hedrich, a biophysicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, led the team that discovered that the Venus flytrap could actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The plant detects the first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes. But the Venus flytrap doesn't close all the way and produce digestive enzymes to consume the prey until the hairs are triggered three more times (for a total of five stimuli).

And in 2023, scientists developed a bioelectronic device to better understand the Venus flytrap's complex signaling mechanism by mapping how those signals propagate. They confirmed that the electrical signal starts in the plant's sensory hairs and then spreads radially outward with no clear preferred direction. And sometimes the signals were spontaneous, originating in sensory hairs that had not been stimulated.

Glowing green

This latest research is an outgrowth of a 2020 paper detailing how the Japanese authors genetically altered a Venus flytrap to gain important clues about how the plant's short-term "memory" works. They introduced a gene for a calcium sensor protein called GCaMP6, which glows green whenever it binds to calcium. That green fluorescence allowed the team to visually track the changes in calcium concentrations in response to stimulating the plant's sensitive hairs with a needle. They concluded that the waxing and waning of calcium concentrations in the leaf cells seem to serve as a kind of short-term memory for the Venus flytrap, though precisely how calcium concentrations work with the plant's electrical network remained unclear.

This time, Hiraku Suda and Masatsugu at Saitama University sought to visualize the exact moment that a living plant converts a physical stimulus into a biological signal. They used the same fluorescent calcium sensor protein and were able to record how a gentle bending force on the plant produced a corresponding local rise in calcium concentration along with a small local electrical signal. A larger stimulus, however, acted like a switch being flipped, triggering a large electrical spike and a wave of calcium. Both of those signals then spread from the base of the hair out to the blade of the leaf.

The key to the response seemed to be an ion channel (DmMSL10) at the base of the sensory hairs. To test this, the team genetically modified flytraps to knock out that channel. Those plants only exhibited small local increases in calcium concentrations and electrical signals that never exceeded the threshold and spread to the leaves. This means that the ion channel serves as a kind of amplifier to boost the initial signals beyond the critical threshold so that the flytrap can react.

Finally, Suda and Masatsugu et al. tested both unmodified Venus flytraps and knockout plants in a more natural setting, building a mini-ecosystem in which ants were allowed to walk freely over the plants. The ant movement usually caused the unmodified plants to snap shut, but this response was much less frequent and plants snapped shut fewer times.

The authors concluded that the DmMSL10 ion channel is indeed a key mechanical sensor for the flytrap's sensitive sensory hairs. And since many plants have responses tied to mechanosensing, they suggest that this underlying molecular mechanism could extend to other plants besides the Venus flytrap.

Nature Communications, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-63419-w  (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 1 October 2025 at 6:27 am AEST (my time).

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On its surface, the flight plan for SpaceX's next Starship flight looks a lot like the last one.

The rocket's Super Heavy booster will again splash down in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from SpaceX's launch site in South Texas. And Starship, the rocket's upper stage, will fly on a suborbital arc before reentering the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean for a water landing northwest of Australia.

SpaceX will again test the rocket's satellite deployer and reignite one of the ship's Raptor engines in space to adjust the vehicle's path for reentry. These demonstrations will pave the way for future Starship flights into low-Earth orbit. All of the rocket's ascents to date have, by design, ended before reaching orbital velocity.

All of this went well on the previous Starship test flight on August 26, when SpaceX rebounded from four consecutive failures—three in flight and one on the ground. With the next Starship launch, scheduled for no earlier than October 13, SpaceX officials hope to show they can repeat the successes of last month's mission.

This will be the 11th full-scale test flight of Starship, and the fifth of this year. It will also be the last Starship test flight until at least early 2026, when SpaceX will debut a larger upgraded vehicle known as Starship Version 3.

Same but different

There are, however, some changes to SpaceX's flight plan for the next Starship. Most of these changes will occur during the ship's reentry, when the vehicle's heat shield is exposed to temperatures of up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Like on the last Starship flight, SpaceX has removed some of the ship's thousands of ceramic thermal protection tiles to "intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle."

Several of the missing tiles are in areas where tiles are bonded directly to Starship's stainless steel structure, without a backup ablative layer, according to SpaceX.

In an update posted Monday to its website, SpaceX did not mention the presence of any experimental metallic tiles on the next Starship flight. Engineers installed several metallic tiles on the ship that flew in August, but they "didn't work so well," SpaceX's Bill Gerstenmaier said in a presentation earlier this month.

The ship still made an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean, but cameras recording the landing showed a broad area of orange discoloration on one side of the vehicle. This was due to oxidation of the metallic tiles in flight, according to Gerstenmaier.

SpaceX added the metallic tiles to see if they might hold up better than the ceramic insulators. Engineers are refining the heat shield's design to make it robust against damage during reentry and landing. Any heat shield damage would require refurbishment, risking SpaceX's goal of making Starship fully and rapidly reusable.

On a future flight, perhaps sometime next year, SpaceX will attempt to bring a Starship vehicle back to its launch site at Starbase, Texas, where it will slow down using its engines to settle into the grappling arms of the launch pad's servicing tower.

One of the new test objectives for next month's Starship flight will be a "dynamic banking maneuver" during the final phase of the trajectory "to mimic the path a ship will take on future flights returning to Starbase," SpaceX said. This will help engineers test Starship's subsonic guidance algorithms.

Another reuse

While SpaceX is still some time away from recovering and reusing Starship's upper stage, the company is preparing to take another step forward in reusing the rocket's massive Super Heavy booster. The next flight—Flight 11—will mark the second time SpaceX has reused a Super Heavy booster flown on a previous mission.

This particular booster, numbered Booster 15, launched in March and was caught by the launch tower at Starbase after returning from the edge of space. SpaceX said 24 of the 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines launching on the booster next month are "flight-proven."

Similar to the last Starship flight, the Super Heavy booster will guide itself to a splashdown off the coast of South Texas instead of returning to Starbase.

"Its primary test objective will be demonstrating a unique landing burn engine configuration planned to be used on the next-generation Super Heavy," SpaceX said.

The new booster landing sequence will initially use 13 of the rocket's 33 engines, then downshift to five engines before running just the three center engines for the final portion of the burn. The booster previously went directly from 13 engines to three engines. Using five engines for part of the landing sequence provides "additional redundancy for spontaneous engine shutdowns," according to SpaceX.

"The primary goal on the flight test is to measure the real-world vehicle dynamics as engines shut down while transitioning between the different phases," SpaceX said.

Stepping stone to Version 3

After Flight 11, SpaceX will focus on the next-generation Starship design: Starship V3. This upgraded configuration will be the version that will actually fly to orbit, allowing SpaceX to begin deploying its new fleet of larger, more powerful Starlink Internet satellites.

Starship V3 will also be used to test orbital refueling, something never before attempted between two spacecraft with cryogenic propellants. Refueling in space is required to give Starship enough energy to propel itself out of Earth's orbit to the Moon and Mars, destinations it must reach to fulfill the hopes of NASA and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

The first flight of Starship V3 is likely to occur in early 2026, using a new launch pad undergoing final outfitting and testing a short distance away from SpaceX's original launch pad at Starbase. Gerstenmaier, SpaceX's vice president of build and flight reliability, told a crowd at a space industry conference earlier this month that the company will likely attempt one more suborbital flight with Starship V3. If that goes well, Flight 13 could launch all the way to low-Earth orbit sometime later next year.

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Posted Wednesday 1 October 2025 at 6:26 am AEST (my time).

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In a controversial step that raises the possibility of a new kind of infertility treatment, scientists report that they have produced functional human eggs in the lab that were able to be fertilized with sperm.

The proof-of-concept study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, involves using human skin cells to generate eggs, some of which were capable of producing early-stage embryos.

None of the embryos were used to try to establish a pregnancy, and it’s unlikely that they would have developed much further in the womb. Yet the authors, from Oregon Health and Science University, say the technique could one day be used as an alternative to in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

“The obvious applications would be for older women who have run out of their own eggs or women who don’t have eggs for other reasons, such as previous cancer treatment or genetic abnormalities,” says coauthor Paula Amato, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine. It could also be used to help same-sex couples have genetically related babies by creating eggs from male cells and sperm from female cells.

More people are turning to IVF to conceive, but it doesn’t always work. One of the reasons IVF can fail is because of poor egg quality, which declines with age and is a major factor in infertility. But if IVF patients could have a ready supply of eggs generated in the lab from a sample of their skin, it could vastly improve the success of IVF and allow many more people to have babies.

The Oregon group’s technique produced 82 eggs that were then fertilized with sperm in the lab. All of the resulting embryos had chromosomal abnormalities, and most did not make it past day three of fertilization. However, 9 percent continued developing to the blastocyst stage of development six days after fertilization, when embryos are typically transferred to an IVF patient. The authors stopped culturing the embryos at that point.

To make the eggs, researchers transplanted the nucleus of a human skin cell into a donor egg that had been stripped of its nucleus—the cell’s control center that houses its genetic material. This technique was famously used to produce Dolly the sheep, reported in 1997. Because she was a clone, Dolly’s DNA was an exact genetic replica of her mother’s.

In Dolly’s case, sperm from a father was not used. But for the Oregon team, the goal was to make embryos with genetic material from both parents. A normal sperm and egg have 23 chromosomes each, with a healthy embryo containing 46 chromosomes. But a skin cell taken from an adult already has 46 chromosomes—one set from each parent—so when its nucleus is transferred to the hollowed-out egg and combined with sperm, it ends up with an extra set of chromosomes.

An embryo with an extra full set of chromosomes cannot survive, so the team needed to figure out a way for the reconstructed eggs to shed half of their chromosomes. They stimulated the eggs with an electric pulse and applied a drug called roscovitine to mimic meiosis, or cell division, to reduce the number of chromosomes. The resulting eggs could be fertilized, but the embryos still contained chromosomal abnormalities—some had too many chromosomes, some had too few, while others had the wrong combination—and Amato says they likely would have failed in the womb.

“The biggest challenge is how to make this egg extrude half of its chromosomes—and the correct half,” Amato says. “We’re not quite there yet.” The team dubbed their technique “mitomeiosis” and is trying to better understand how chromosomes like to pair and how they segregate in order to find a way to experimentally induce those conditions.

The ability to make eggs and sperm in the lab—called in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG—has been a growing area of research in recent years.

In 2016, a group of Japanese researchers led by stem cell researcher Katsuhiko Hayashi reported that they produced healthy mouse pups after making mouse eggs entirely in a lab dish. Later, they generated mouse eggs using cells from males and as a result, created pups with two dads. Those advancements were achieved by reprogramming skin cells from adult mice into stem cells, then further coaxing them to develop into eggs and sperm.

Mitinori Saitou at Kyoto University first documented in 2018 how his team turned human blood cells into stem cells, which they then transformed into human eggs, but they were too immature to be fertilized to make embryos.

US startups Conception Biosciences, Ivy Natal, Gameto, and Ovelle Bio are all working on making eggs or sperm in a lab.

But the prospect raises significant ethical questions about how the technology should be used. In a 2017 editorial, bioethicists warned that IVG “may raise the specter of ‘embryo farming’ on a scale currently unimagined.” Conceivably, it could allow anyone at any age to have a child. And combined with advances in embryo screening, the fertility clinics of the future could use IVG to make mass numbers of embryos and then choose the ones with the most desirable qualities. Gene editing could also be used with IVG to snip out disease-causing DNA or create new traits.

Amato says it will likely take another decade of research before IVG could be deemed safe or effective enough to be tested in people. Even then, it’s unclear if the technique would be permitted in the US, since a Congressional rider forbids the Food and Drug Administration from considering clinical trials that involve genetically manipulating an embryo for the intention of creating a baby.

“Their method is very sophisticated and well-organized,” Hayashi, now a professor at the University of Osaka, says of the Oregon group’s approach. However, because of the high rate of chromosomal errors, “it is too inefficient and high risk to apply immediately to clinical application.”

Also, because their process requires donor eggs, it could limit its use as an infertility treatment. As IVF becomes more popular, the demand for donor eggs is increasing, and using them can involve wait times.

Amander Clark, a reproductive scientist and stem cell biologist at UCLA who was not involved in the work, agrees that in its current form, mitomeiosis isn’t ready to be used for fertility care. But in the meantime, the research has other uses.

“The technology of mitomeiosis is an important technical innovation and could be highly valuable to our understanding of the biology of meiosis in human eggs. Meiotic errors increase as women age. Therefore, understanding causes of meiotic errors is a critical area of research,” Clark says.

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Posted Wednesday 1 October 2025 at 6:25 am AEST (my time).

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A fossil skull from China that made headlines last week may or may not be a million years old, but it's probably closely related to Denisovans.

The fossil skull, dubbed Yunxian 2, is one of three unearthed from a terrace alongside the Han River, in central China, in a layer of river sediment somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million years old. Archaeologists originally identified them as Homo erectus, but Hanjiang Normal University paleoanthropologist Xiaobo Feng and his colleagues’ recent digital reconstruction of Yunxian 2 suggests the skulls may actually have belonged to someone a lot more similar to us: a hominin group defined as a species called Homo longi or a Denisovan, depending on who’s doing the naming.

The recent paper adds fuel—and a new twist—to that debate. And the whole thing may hinge on a third skull from the same site, still waiting to be published.

Denisovan or Homo longi?

The Yunxian skull was cracked and broken after hundreds of thousands of years under the crushing weight of all that river mud, but the authors used CT scans to digitally put the pieces back together. (They got some clues from a few intact bits of Yunxian 1, which lay buried in the same layer of mud just 3 meters away.) In the end, Feng and his colleagues found themselves looking at a familiar face; Yunxian 2 bears a striking resemblance to a 146,000-year-old Denisovan skull.

That skull, from Harbin in northeast China, made headlines in 2021 when a team of paleoanthropologists claimed it was part of an entirely new species, which they dubbed Homo longi. According to that first study, Homo longi was a distinct hominin species, separate from us, Neanderthals, and even Denisovans. That immediately became a point of contention because of features the skull shared with some other suspected Denisovan fossils.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers, which included one of the 2021 study’s authors, took samples of ancient proteins preserved in the Harbin skull; of the 95 proteins they found, three of them matched proteins only encoded in Denisovan DNA. While the June 2025 study suggested that Homo longi was a Denisovan all along, the new paper draws a different conclusion: Homo longi is a species that happens to include the population we’ve been calling Denisovans. As study coauthor Xijun Ni, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, puts it in an email to Ars Technica, “Given their similar age range, distribution areas, and available morphological data, it is likely that Denisovans belong to the Homo longi species. However, little is known about Denisovan morphology.”

Of course, that statement—that we know little about Denisovan morphology (the shapes and features of their bones)—only applies if you don’t accept the results of the June 2025 study mentioned above, which clocked the Harbin skull as a Denisovan and therefore told us what one looks like.

And Feng and his colleagues, in fact, don’t accept those results. Instead, they consider Harbin part of some other group of Homo longi, and they question the earlier study’s methods and results. “The peptide sequences from Harbin, Penghu, and other fossils are too short and provide conflicting information,” Ni tells Ars Technica. Feng and his colleagues also question the results of another study, which used mitochondrial DNA to identify Harbin as a Denisovan.

In other words, Feng and his colleagues are pretty invested in defining Homo longi as a species and Denisovans as just one sub-group of that species. But that's hard to square with DNA data.

Alas, poor Yunxian 2, I knew him well

Yunxian 2 has a wide face with high, flat cheekbones, a wide nasal opening, and heavy brows. Its cranium is higher and rounder than Homo erectus (and the original reconstruction, done in the 1990s), but it’s still longer and lower than is normal for our species. Overall, it could have held about 1,143 cubic centimeters of brain, which is in the ballpark of modern people. But its shape may have left less room for the frontal lobe (the area where a lot of social skills, logic, motor skills, and executive function happen) than you’d expect in a Neanderthal or a Homo sapiens skull.

Feng and his colleagues measured the distances between 533 specific points on the skull: anatomical landmarks like muscle attachment points or the joints between certain bones. They compared those measurements to ones from 26 fossil hominin skulls and several-dozen modern human skulls, using a computer program to calculate how similar each skull was to all of the others.

Yunxian 2 fits neatly into a lookalike group with the Harbin skull, along with two other skulls that paleoanthropologists have flagged as belonging to either Denisovans or Homo longi. Those two skulls are a 200,000- to 260,000-year-old skull found in Dali County in northwestern China and a 260,000-year-old skull from Jinniushi (sometimes spelled Jinniushan) Cave in China.

Those morphological differences suggest some things about how the individuals who once inhabited these skulls might have been related to each other, but that’s also where things get dicey.

Digging into the details

Most of what we know about how we’re related to our closest extinct hominin relatives (Neanderthals and Denisovans) comes from comparing our DNA to theirs and tracking how small changes in the genetic code build up over time. Based on DNA, our species last shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans sometime around 750,000 years ago in Africa. One branch of the family tree led to us; the other branch split again around 600,000 years ago, leading to Neanderthals and Denisovans (or Homo longi, if you prefer).

In other words, DNA tells us that Neanderthals and Denisovans are more closely related to each other than either is to us. (Unless you’re looking at mitochondrial DNA, which suggests that we’re more closely related to Neanderthals than to Denisovans; it’s complicated, and there’s a lot we still don’t understand.)

“Ancient mtDNA and genomic data show different phylogenetic relationships among Denisovans, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens,” says Ni. So depending on which set of data you use and where your hominin tree starts, it can be possible to get different answers about who is most closely related to whom. The fact that all of these groups interbred with each other can explain this complexity, but makes building family trees challenging.

It is very clear, however, that Feng and his colleagues' picture of the relationships between us and our late hominin cousins, based on similarities among fossil skulls in their study, looks very different from what the genomes tell us. In their model, we’re more closely related to Denisovans, and the Neanderthals are off on their own branch of the family tree. Feng and his colleagues also say those splits happened much earlier, with Neanderthals branching off on their own around 1.38 million years ago; we last shared a common ancestor with Homo longi around 1 million years ago.

That’s a big difference from DNA results, especially when it comes to timing. And the timing is likely to be the biggest controversy here. In a recent commentary on Feng and his colleagues’ study, University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks argues that you can’t just leave genetic evidence out of the picture.

“What this research should have done is to put the anatomical comparisons into context with the previous results from DNA, especially the genomes that enable us to understand the relationships of Denisovan, Neanderthal, and modern human groups,” Hawks writes.

(It's worth a side note that most news stories describe Yunxian 2 as being a million years old, and so do Feng and his colleagues. But electron spin resonance dating of fossil animal bones from the same sediment layer suggests the skull could be as young as 600,000 years old or as old as 1.1 million. That still needs to be narrowed down to everyone's satisfaction.)

What’s in a name?

Of course, DNA also tells us that even after all this branching and migrating, the three species were still similar enough to reproduce, which they did several times. Many groups of modern people still carry traces of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in their genomes, courtesy of those exchanges. And some ancient Neanderthal populations were carrying around even older chunks of human DNA in the same way. That arguably makes species definitions a little fuzzy at best—and maybe even irrelevant.

“I think all these groups, including Neanderthals, should be recognized within our own species, Homo sapiens,” writes Hawks. Hawks contends that the differences among these hominin groups “were the kind that evolve among the populations of a single species over time, not starkly different groups that tread the landscape in mutually unrecognizeable ways.”

But humans love to classify things (a trait we may have shared with Neanderthals and Denisovans), so those species distinctions are likely to persist even if the lines between them aren’t so solid. As long as that’s the case, names and classifications will be fodder for often heated debate. And Feng's team is staking out a position that's very different from Hawks'. “‘Denisovan’ is a label for genetic samples taken from the Denisova Cave. It should not be used everywhere. Homo longi is a formally named species,” says Ni.

Technically, Denisovans don’t have a formal species name, a Latinized moniker like Homo erectus that comes with a clear(ish) spot on the family tree. Homo longi would be a more formal species name, but only if scientists can agree on whether they're actually a species.

The third Yunxian skull

Paleoanthropologists unearthed a third skull from the Yunxian site in 2022. It bears a strong resemblance to the other two from the area (and is apparently in better shape than either of them), and it dates to about the same timeframe. A 2022 press release describes it as “the most complete Homo erectus skull found in Eurasia so far,” but if Feng and his colleagues are right, it may actually be a remarkably complete Homo longi (and/or Denisovan) skull. And it could hold the answers to many of the questions anthropologists like Feng and Hawks are currently debating.

“It remains pretty obvious that Yunxian 3 is going to be central to testing the relationships of this sample [of fossil hominins in Feng and colleagues’ paper],” writes Hawks.

The problem is that Yunxian 3 is still being cleaned and prepared. Preparing a fossil is a painstaking, time-consuming process that involves very carefully excavating it from the rocky matrix it’s embedded in, using everything from air-chisels to paintbrushes. And until that’s done and a scientific report on the skull is published, other paleoanthropologists don’t have access to any information about its features—which would be super useful for figuring out how to define whatever group we eventually decide it belongs to.

For the foreseeable future, the relationships between us and our extinct cousins (or at least our ideas about those relationships) will keep changing as we get more data. Eventually, we may have enough data from enough fossils and ancient DNA samples to form a clearer picture of our past. But in the meantime, if you’re drawing a hominin family tree, use a pencil.

Science, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/science.ado9202  (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 1 October 2025 at 6:24 am AEST (my time).

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The European Space Agency signed a contract Monday with Avio, the Italian company behind the small Vega rocket, to begin designing a reusable upper stage capable of flying into orbit, returning to Earth, and launching again.

This is a feat more difficult than recovering and reusing a rocket's booster stage, something European industry has also yet to accomplish. SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has a recoverable booster, and several companies in the United States, China, and Europe are trying to replicate SpaceX's success with the partially reusable Falcon 9.

While other rocket companies try to catch up with the Falcon 9, SpaceX has turned its research and development dollars toward Starship, an enormous fully reusable rocket more than 400 feet (120 meters) tall. Even SpaceX, buttressed by the deep pockets of one of the world's richest persons, has had trouble perfecting all the technologies required to make Starship work.

But SpaceX is making progress with Starship, so it's no surprise some other rocket builders want to copy it. The European Space Agency's contract with Avio is the latest example.

Preliminary design

ESA and Avio signed the deal, worth 40 million euros ($47 million), on the sidelines of the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. In a statement, Avio said it will "define the requirements, system design, and enabling technologies needed to develop a demonstrator capable of safely returning to Earth and being reused in future missions."

At the end of the two-year contract, Avio will deliver a preliminary design for the reusable upper stage and the ground infrastructure needed to make it a reality. The preliminary design review is a milestone in the early phases of an aerospace project, typically occurring many years before completion. For example, Europe's flagship Ariane 6 rocket passed its preliminary design review in 2016, eight years before its first launch.

An artist's concept released by Avio and ESA shows what the reusable upper stage might look like. The vehicle bears an uncanny resemblance to SpaceX's Starship, with four flaps affixed to the top and the bottom. The reusable upper stage is mounted atop a booster stage akin to Avio's solid-fueled Vega rocket. Avio and ESA did not release any specifications on the size or performance of the launcher.

Avio is not the first company to reveal a rocket concept that so closely mimics Starship. A new design for China's super heavy-lift Long March 9 rocket appeared at a Chinese airshow last year. It also looks a lot like SpaceX's design, with flaps on the upper stage and 30 methane-fueled engines powering its first-stage booster.

Toni Tolker-Nielsen, head of ESA's space transportation department, said the contract with Avio "paves the way" for Europe's long-term future in space.

"An upper stage is the last part of a rocket that delivers a payload," he said in a statement. "Also called an orbital stage, these elements have, so far, never been reused. Europe has demonstrated the capability of all aspects of launching hardware to space and returning it safely to Earth, but putting it all together into a complete reusable upper stage that also launches payloads has the possibility to be a game-changer."

It's a game-changer, but it's not easy. European entities have faced delays in a far less ambitious program to perform low-altitude vertical takeoffs and landings with a rocket demonstrator similar in purpose to the reusable booster prototypes SpaceX flew more than a decade ago.

The Ariane 6 rocket, funded by European governments, will take the lion's share of Europe's space missions to orbit for the foreseeable future. But the Ariane 6 is a throwaway design, with all hardware expended after each flight. A few smaller rocket startups in Europe are looking at reusable boosters, and ESA officials have signaled the continent's next flagship rocket will have at least some element of reusability.

Most European leaders recognize that Ariane 6 will struggle to compete commercially with SpaceX, but they consider a homegrown launch capability a strategic imperative core to European sovereignty. In short, they're willing to pay a premium to launch European missions on European rockets. Ultimately, however, this will be a disadvantage for Europe in any future geopolitical competition or conflict.

Avio, once part of Italian automaker Fiat, has broken away from Europe's rocket establishment in the last few years to gain greater independence from the industrial consortium behind the Ariane 6 rocket. Avio supplies the solid rocket boosters for Ariane 6 and is the prime contract for the smaller Vega C rocket, which uses four stages (a somewhat antiquated design in modern rocketry) and can place a little more than 2 metric tons of payload into orbit.

But Avio recently won approval from ESA to begin operating and selling launches on its own Vega rocket. Avio was previously required to go through Arianespace, the 45-year-old French-headquartered company that markets and operates the Ariane rocket family.

"Our goal is to deliver high-performance solutions that enable higher launch frequency and more competitive costs for our customers," said Giulio Ranzo, Avio's CEO, in a statement.

ESA and Avio are partnering on an evolution of the Vega rocket called Vega E, which will replace the two uppermost stages on the Vega C with a single element powered by a new Italian-made methane/liquid oxygen engine. Avio, also buoyed by funding directly from the Italian government, is also developing a larger methane-fueled engine, the MR60, that could be used in a cluster configuration to power a future reusable launch vehicle.

These engines could be used on Avio's proposed reusable upper stage.

"We are excited to work on the reusable upper stage, leveraging on our parallel experiences in liquid oxygen-methane engines and stages as well as on the Space Rider reentry vehicle," Ranzo said in a statement. "We aim to create an advanced, lightweight, performance-efficient solution for our next-generation launchers to serve customers with higher flight rates and competitive costs."

Giorgio Tumino, ESA's chief technical advisor on space transportation, said the upper stage contract with Avio will support several possible future scenarios, including evolutions of the Vega family of rockets as well as "other newly defined fully reusable launch systems in Europe."

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Posted Tuesday 30 September 2025 at 1:18 pm AEST (my time).

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Microplastics could be a factor in driving up cases of osteoporosis worldwide, according to recently published research. The study reveals that when these tiny plastic particles enter the body, they disrupt the functioning of bone marrow stem cells, which are essential for maintaining and repairing bone tissue.

Throughout your life, your bones are replenished. Osteoporosis is a condition where this process goes wrong, with the breakdown of bone outstripping the rate at which it is replaced. This leads to bones weakening over time and becoming more likely to fracture. The condition has many risk factors—age, sex, medications, diet, smoking and drinking, and genetics are all known to influence it—with the disease developing slowly over time. Often people don’t realize they have the condition until they break a bone.

This new analysis, published in the journal Osteoporosis International, adds exposure to microplastics as a potential new risk factor. The research reviewed 62 scientific articles that had run various laboratory and animal tests on the possible effects of micro- and nanoplastics on bone. Analysis of lab experiments showed that microplastics stimulate the formation of osteoclasts, cells created by stem cells in the bone marrow that degrade bone tissue to promote resorption, the process in which the body breaks down and eliminates old or damaged bone.

The study also found that, in relation to bones, plastic particles can reduce the viability of cells, induce premature cellular aging, modify gene expression, and trigger inflammatory responses. The combination of these effects generates an imbalance in which osteoclasts destroy more bone tissue than is regenerated, causing an accelerated weakening of bone structure.

When then looking at animal studies, the researchers found that the accumulation of microplastics in the body decreases the white blood cell count—which is suggestive of alterations in bone marrow function. In addition, these animal studies suggested that the impact of microplastics on osteoclasts may be associated with deterioration of bone microstructure and the formation of irregular structures of cells, increasing the risk of bone fragility, deformities, and fractures.

“In this study, the adverse effects observed culminated, worryingly, in the interruption of the animals’ skeletal growth,” said coauthor Rodrigo Bueno de Oliveira in a press release. “The potential impact of microplastics on bones is the subject of scientific studies and isn’t negligible.”

Oliveira, who is the coordinator of the Laboratory for Evaluation of Mineral and Bone Disorders in Nephrology at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, is now working with his team to further prove in practice the relationship between exposure to microplastics and bone deterioration. This research will begin by evaluating the effects of microplastic particles on rodents’ femurs.

“Although osteometabolic diseases are relatively well understood, there’s a gap in our knowledge regarding the influence of microplastics on the development of these diseases. Therefore, one of our goals is to generate evidence suggesting that microplastics could be a potential controllable environmental cause to explain, for example, the increase in the projected number of bone fractures,” Oliveira said.

Microplastics and nanoplastics are small fragments of plastic—some so small that they’re invisible to the naked eye—that become detached from everyday objects when sunlight, wind, rain, seawater, or abrasion degrade them. The main difference between the two lies in their size: microplastics measure from 1 micrometer (one-thousandth of a millimeter) to 5 millimeters, while nanoplastics are smaller than 1 micrometer. These particles have been detected all over the world in natural environments, as well as throughout the human body and in meat, water, and various agricultural products.

Studies have started to show that this type of plastic contamination can damage health. Experts argue that this means the world urgently needs to reduce its use of plastics. Every year more than 500 million tons of the material are produced worldwide, but only 9 percent is recycled, with much of the remainder spreading into the environment and degrading.

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

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Posted Monday 29 September 2025 at 4:03 pm AEST (my time).

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Water is the most fundamental need for all life on Earth. Not every organism needs oxygen, and many make their own food. But for all creatures, from deep-sea microbes and slime molds to trees and humans, water is nonnegotiable. “The first act of life was the capture of water within a cell membrane,” a pair of neurobiologists wrote in a recent review. Ever since, cells have had to stay wet enough to stay alive.

Water is the medium in which all chemical reactions in an organism take place, and those reactions are finely tuned to a narrow range of ratios between water and salt, another essential ingredient in life’s chemistry. The cells in your body are permeable to water, so if the water-salt balance of the surrounding fluid—blood, lymph, or cerebrospinal fluid, for example—is outside its healthy range, cells can swell or shrink, shrivel, or potentially burst. An imbalance can cause brain cells to malfunction, losing their ability to manage ion concentrations across their membranes and propagate action potentials.

Although these effects of insufficient water are felt by every cell in the body, cells themselves do not cry out in thirst. Instead, it’s the brain that monitors the body’s water levels and manifests the experience of thirst—a dry tongue, hot throat, and rapid onset of malaise—which compels a behavior: acquire water.

“These neural circuits that control hunger and thirst are located deep in primitive brain structures like the hypothalamus and brain stem,” said Zachary Knight, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who recently coauthored a review paper in Neuron on the neurobiology of thirst.

Because these brain areas are difficult to study—due not only to their location but also to their composition, with many different cell types and crisscrossed circuitry—it’s only in the past decade or so that neuroscientists have begun to understand how thirst fundamentally works. The body, researchers have found, is filled with sensors that feed clues to the brain about how much water or salt an organism needs to consume. How those sensors work, or what they even are, continues to elude scientists. Their existence offers a tantalizing insight: Water may be fundamental to life, but thirst is an educated guess.

Environmental Sensing

To understand thirst in mammals, think of it less as the body stating a fact to the brain—“I need water”—and more as the brain monitoring its environment, the body. Like an ecologist sampling a river, the brain examines blood’s chemical composition to learn what the body needs.

In nearly all cases, the so-called blood-brain barrier protects the brain from bacteria, viruses, or other dangers circulating in the blood. But there are a few exceptions where the brain directly interfaces with blood, including in the circumventricular organs, deep in the brain near the hypothalamus.

Two of these organs—the vascular organ of lamina terminalis (OVLT) and the subfornical organ (SFO)—are sensory organs not unlike a nose or an ear. They act like scientists dipping a bucket into the body’s river of blood to test its health. The brain infers the body’s salt and water needs from that data and funnels the information to neural circuits in even deeper regions, which then can trigger what we experience as thirst—the scratchy throat, dry mouth, and foggy brain that accompany desire for water.

The blood-testing organs don’t measure water levels but rather the concentration of salt, whose healthy range lies at almost exactly the same concentration as that of the brackish intertidal water in which vertebrates first evolved (which is about one-third as salty as seawater). When the water-salt ratio is too low, we get thirsty. The human body is about 60 percent water, although that number varies from tissue to tissue (bone is 31 percent, the brain 73 percent, the lungs 83 percent). A change of between 1 percent and 3 percent in the blood’s water content, which is normally around 60 percent, is sufficient for the OVLT and SFO to initiate familiar, unpleasant feelings that motivate a behavior. If salt levels are high, the animal drinks.

But there is a disconnect between drinking water and correcting the water-salt balance. It takes 30 to 60 minutes for water to enter the bloodstream once it’s consumed, and the brain cannot wait that long to figure out if the body has the water it needs. It must make a decision more or less immediately; an animal can’t sit around and do nothing but drink water for half an hour.

So, the brain guesses. More of those mysterious sensors kick in. One roughly estimates the volume of water passing through the mouth and throat and sends an initial signal to the brain. A second signal comes from the gut—from specific cell types that respond to water and even to the mechanical stretching of the stomach as it takes water in. Within a minute, these signals reach the brain and block the neurons in the OVLT and SFO that were activated to trigger thirst. The thirst response shuts off; the throat cools, and the mouth becomes moist again.

Thirst, though, represents only one side of maintaining homeostasis. Salt—more specifically, sodium—is one of the most important things an animal consumes. Animals need sodium for neurons to fire action potentials, for proteins to keep their shape and function, and for chemical reactions to occur inside cells—the everyday business of life. We need to maintain a concentration of sodium ions in the fluids of our bodies to enable all those functions. It’s the other side of thirst.

“There are only a couple of things that are so important for your body that there’s a completely innate drive to get it if you fall into deficiency,” Knight said. “Oxygen, food, water, and sodium.”

However, animals like us do not experience salt desire as a powerful, controlling drive as we do with oxygen, food, and water. Sensors signal salt levels to the brain; in addition to the OVLT and SFO, sensors in the heart detect the stretching of atria and ventricles. But there is no analogous salt pang when we need it, the way a stomach churns for food or a scratchy throat cries out for water. Instead, the need to consume salt is mediated by taste and the brain’s reward pathways. “The taste of salt is bimodal,” Knight said. “It tastes good at low doses; at high doses it tastes disgusting, like drinking seawater.”

Imagine the urge to eat a big bag of potato chips. If the body needs salt, those chips will cause a surge of pleasurable dopamine to flood the brain. If the body doesn’t need salt, that dopamine drip disappears. “It’s pretty much reinforcement learning,” said Yuki Oka, a neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology who studies how the body maintains homeostasis. “More dopamine means a repeated behavior.”

Everyone Thirsts Differently

Scientists monitoring a river collect data and then have a choice about whether to act on their findings. Similarly, just because the brain measures the blood’s sodium levels doesn’t mean it has to act on that information.

Take Elena Gracheva’s thirteen-lined ground squirrels. Gracheva, a neurophysiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, studies these rodents, native to North American grasslands, to understand how specific brain regions control thirst. The thirteen-lined ground squirrel is an ideal model for this, she said, because it hibernates for more than half the year, without eating or drinking. “They’re like monks,” Gracheva said. “They don’t go outside for eight months. They don’t have water in their underground burrow.” How do they not get thirsty?

Elena Gracheva (left) has traced how the brains of thirteen-lined ground squirrels (right) suppress their thirst response during many months of hibernation.

Courtesy of Gracheva Lab

 

CC-BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It isn’t that the squirrels don’t need water. They do. Their bodies cry out for it. But according to Gracheva’s research, during hibernation their brain ignores the body’s signals.

In mammals, a drop in blood water levels (which means a simultaneous rise in salt concentration, all things being equal) triggers two coupled processes. The hypothalamus pumps out the hormone vasopressin, which tells the kidneys to retain water rather than let it out as urine, and the SFO kicks off the thirst drive to direct the animal to drink. However, while ground squirrels are hibernating, their vasopressin levels jump, but the animal still doesn’t drink. “The circuit for vasopressin was normal, but thirst neurons were downregulated,” Gracheva said. “These two pathways are uncoupled.” The body is trying to retain the water it has but does not act to consume more.

The logic of the disrupted circuitry is extremely powerful. “Even if you wake them up in the middle of hibernation, they’re not going to drink,” Gracheva said.

The underlying network that Gracheva studies in squirrels is universal in mammals, up to and including humans. But that same neurological logic doesn’t lead to the same behaviors. Humans drink a glass of water when they’re thirsty. Cats and rabbits mostly get water from the food they eat. Camels can burn their fat stores for water (which produces carbon dioxide and water), but they also consume gallons of it and store it in their stomachs for when they need it later. Sea otters can drink ocean water and excrete urine that is saltier than the water they swim in; they are the only marine mammals to actively do this.

How each animal manages water and salt is specialized to its ecosystem, lifestyle, and selective pressures. The question “What does it mean to be thirsty?” has no one answer. We each thirst in our own way.

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Posted Monday 29 September 2025 at 4:02 am AEST (my time).

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One hundred and fifty million years ago, the Solnhofen Limestones of Germany were covered in small islands and warm saltwater lagoons. Coral reefs flourished with crinoids, sponges, jellyfish, and crustaceans; Dragonflies buzzed above the water as small reptiles sunned themselves at the water’s edge. Pterosaurs and Archaeopteryx took to the skies, but there was trouble in this Jurassic paradise: Tropical storms would turn it into a pterosaur graveyard.

What paleontologist Rab Smyth found in this graveyard finally revealed why so many fledgling pterosaurs had succumbed to the storm. Smyth, a researcher at the Center for Paleobiology and Biosphere Evolution at the University of Leicester, unearthed two Pterodactylus antiquus hatchlings, and their bones showed exactly how they had succumbed to storm winds. The wings of both specimens (ironically named Lucky I and Lucky II) revealed clean, slanted humerus fractures that suggested they had been twisted in the storm. Unable to fly, they drowned and were rapidly buried in the lagoon depths.

“Our results show that most pterosaurs are preserved predominantly through catastrophic events, often reflecting mass mortality episodes,” Smyth and his research team said in a study he led, recently published in Current Biology.

Ancient autopsy

Solnhofen is a Lagerstätte, a region known for its exceptional preservation of fragile creatures that would have otherwise been lost to time. Anything that sank to the bottom of a lagoon was buried in soft carbonate muds that hardened into limestone over hundreds of millions of years. Many juvenile pterosaurs, thought to have been overpowered by storm winds before being plunged into the lagoons and covered in mud, had already surfaced at the site. What makes this new discovery so significant is that none of the previous finds showed any skeletal trauma.

Most of the pterosaur fossils found at Solnhofen are rather small. Long thought to belong to a smaller pterosaur species, they were later found to be juveniles of a larger species. That raises the question of how their delicate bones and soft tissues were preserved while larger casualties of the storm only left behind fragmented skeletons. Juveniles had hollow bones just like adults, but their bones were much more fragile and should not have held up easily under the weight of sediments. The expectation would be that the bodies of more robust adults would have stood a better chance of fossilization.

Smyth thinks that so few adults show up on the fossil record in this region not only because they were more likely to survive, but also because those that couldn’t were not buried as quickly. Carcasses would float on the water anywhere from days to weeks. As they decomposed, parts would fall to the lagoon bottom. Juveniles were small enough to be swept under and buried quickly by sediments that would preserve them.

Cause of death

The humerus fractures found in Lucky I and Lucky II were especially significant because forelimb injuries are the most common among existing flying vertebrates. The humerus attaches the wing to the body and bears most flight stress, which makes it more prone to trauma. Most humerus fractures happen in flight as opposed to being the result of a sudden impact with a tree or cliff. And these fractures were the only skeletal trauma seen in any of the juvenile pterosaur specimens from Solnhofen.

Evidence suggesting the injuries to the two fledgling pterosaurs happened before death includes the displacement of bones while they were still in flight (something recognizable from storm deaths of extant birds and bats) and the smooth edges of the break, which happens in life, as opposed to the jagged edges of postmortem breaks. There were also no visible signs of healing.

Storms disproportionately affected flying creatures at Solnhofen, which were often taken down by intense winds. Many of Solnhofen’s fossilized vertebrates were pterosaurs and other winged species such as bird ancestor Arachaeopteryx. Flying invertebrates were also doomed.

Even marine invertebrates and fish were threatened by storm conditions, which churned the lagoons and brought deep waters with higher salt levels and low oxygen to the surface. Anything that sank to the bottom was exceptionally preserved because of these same conditions, which were too harsh for scavengers and paused decomposition. Mud kicked up by the storms also helped with the fossilization process by quickly covering these organisms and providing further protection from the elements.

“The same storm events responsible for the burial of these individuals also transported the pterosaurs into the lagoonal basins and were likely the primary cause of their injury and death,” Smyth concluded.

Although Lucky I and Lucky II were decidedly unlucky, the exquisite preservation of their skeletons that shows how they died has finally allowed researchers to solve a case that went cold for over a hundred thousand years.

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.006

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Posted Monday 29 September 2025 at 4:01 am AEST (my time).

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The violin is not a playable instrument but a microscopic image created to test the precision of the equipment. Images of the structure, placed alongside a human hair, were captured using a Keyence VHX-7000N Digital Microscope.

“Though creating the world’s smallest violin may seem like fun and games, a lot of what we’ve learned in the process has actually laid the groundwork for the research we’re now undertaking,” said Professor Kelly Morrison, Head of the Physics Department.

The project references the well-known phrase “the world’s smallest violin,” often used in popular culture to mock exaggerated or overly dramatic reactions or complaints. The expression is thought to have originated in the 1970s television show M*A*S*H and has since appeared in other media.

The nanolithography system allows researchers to design and test nanoscale structures using light, magnetism, and electricity. Morrison said, “Once we understand how materials behave, we can start applying that knowledge to develop new technologies, whether it's improving computing efficiency or finding new ways to harvest energy. But first, we need to understand the fundamental science and this system enables us to do just that.”

At the centre of the new laboratory system is the NanoFrazor, a nano-sculpting machine from Heidelberg Instruments. It uses thermal scanning probe lithography, in which a heated, needle-like tip etches patterns at the nanoscale. The system is housed in a sealed glovebox to prevent contamination from dust or moisture.

The violin was created by coating a chip with two layers of resist, then using the NanoFrazor to burn the pattern into the surface. After dissolving the underlayer, a cavity in the shape of a violin was left behind. A thin layer of platinum was deposited, and the remaining material was removed with acetone. The process takes about three hours, though the final version required months of refinement.

The system is being used for research into differnt computing technologies. One application, led by Dr Naëmi Leo, focuses on using heat in controlled ways to improve data storage and processing. Her work combines magnetic and electric materials with nanoparticles that convert light into heat, creating temperature gradients that could be harnessed for efficient devices.

Another one, led by Dr Fasil Dejene, explores quantum materials as alternatives to current magnetic data storage. Traditional hard drives store information in magnetic bits, but as devices shrink, maintaining stability becomes more difficult. Dejene’s research aims to test whether quantum materials can enable smaller, faster, and more reliable memory systems, with potential applications in brain-inspired computing.

Source: Loughborough University | Image via Depositphotos

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Posted Saturday 27 September 2025 at 5:58 pm AEST (my time).

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An Ebola outbreak in a southwestern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is escalating quickly, as some health responders say they have less than a tenth of the funding needed to contain the deadly disease.

The first case was identified in a 34-year-old pregnant woman on August 20, when she sought care at a local hospital in the Kasai province for fever, bloody vomiting, and hemorrhages. She died on August 25. Officials declared an outbreak on September 4, when the case tally was up to 28 with 15 deaths. As of this week, there have been at least 57 cases and 35 deaths—a 61 percent fatality rate, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Officials in DR Congo are struggling to respond to the outbreak, which is in a province known for its poor road networks, according to reporting by The Associated Press. Treating Ebola can require extensive resources, including protective equipment, medicines, and transportation to reach remote areas. Health facilities in the area of the outbreak are already overwhelmed and quickly running low on critical resources, including clean water and protective equipment. The only treatment center in the epicenter of the outbreak, the Bulape health zone, is at 119 percent capacity, the AP reported, citing information from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Africa (IFRC).

Susan Nzisa Mbalu, head of communications for IFRC, told the AP, "We urgently need our partners and donors to step up and support this lifesaving response to ensure we can contain the outbreak quickly and protect the most vulnerable communities."

Jeopardized efforts

This week, the IFRC requested $25 million to contain the outbreak, but it has only $2.2 million in emergency funds for its outbreak response so far. The WHO likewise estimated the cost of responding to the outbreak over the next three months to be $20 million. But WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told the AP on Thursday that it only had $4.3 million in funding to draw from—a $2 million emergency fund and $2.3 million in funding from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Gavi vaccine alliance.

"Without immediate support, gaps in operations will persist, jeopardizing efforts to contain the outbreak and protect vulnerable communities," Jasarevic said.

In the past, the US Agency for International Development, USAID, has provided critical support to respond to such outbreaks. But, with funding cuts and a dismantling of the agency by the Trump administration, the US is notably absent, and health officials fear it will be difficult to compensate for the loss.

Mathias Mossoko, the Ebola Response Coordinator in Bulape, told the AP that the US has provided "some small support" but declined to elaborate.

Amitié Bukidi, chief medical officer of the Mweka health zone—another health zone in the Kasai province—told the outlet that there was still much work to do to contain the outbreak. "The need is still very great,” he said. “If USAID were to be involved, that would be good."

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Posted Saturday 27 September 2025 at 12:36 pm AEST (my time).

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Most guns are tools for doing harm, but a team of American and Korean scientists has developed one that does the opposite, helping to patch up bone injuries. It comes a bit short of the Medigun from Team Fortress 2 or Ana’s Biotic Rifle, which featured in Overwatch. But it’s probably one of the first shots we have at making healing guns real.

3D printing on the fly

In more complex bone problems like severe, irregular fractures or resections done as part of bone cancer treatment, the bone won’t heal on its own. The most common means of stabilizing the injured site and making recovery possible is metal-based grafts, implants usually made with titanium alloys.

The problem with such implants is that they are difficult and expensive to manufacture, and it’s very hard to make them patient-specific. “3D printing has been highlighted as a novel approach to make such personalized implants, but this also requires substantial time and money,” said Jung Seung Lee, a biomedical engineering researcher at the Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. So his team wanted to find a way to make bone implants that would be faster and cheaper than a 3D printer.

What they came up with was a modified glue gun. The idea was to make the implant right at the injured site during surgery. The surgeon would point the bone-healing gun at the fractured bone, pull the trigger, and create a stabilizing scaffold by extruding a filament that would solidify in the fracture and hold the bone together. “It was basically a tweaked commercially available hot glue gun. We modulated the temperature, and by adjusting the tip module, we could control the resolution of the extruded scaffold,” Lee said.

Coming up with the gun design, though, was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out the ammo.

Bone-healing bullets

A hot glue gun is usually loaded with a solid stick of adhesive that is melted in the device and extruded through the tip. Making a stick that could heal bones was quite a challenge for several reasons. First, there was the temperature problem. Most adhesive sticks need to heat up to well over 100° Celsius before they start to melt. Extruding anything that hot right onto living tissue would cause a lot of damage. Second, once the material solidified, it needed to have mechanical properties comparable to a natural bone. Third, Lee’s team wanted their scaffolds to degrade over time and be replaced with regrowing bone tissues.

After examining a few candidate formulations, the team found the right material. “We used a biocompatible thermoplastic called polycaprolactone and hydroxyapatite as base materials,” Lee said. Polycaprolactone was chosen because it is an FDA-approved material that degrades in the body within a few months after implantation. The hydroxyapatite, on the other hand, supports bone-tissue regeneration. Lee’s team experimented with various proportions of these two ingredients and finally nailed the formulation that checked all the boxes: It extruded at a relatively harmless 60° Celsius, the mix was mechanically sound, it adhered to the bone well, and it degraded over time.

Once the bone-healing bullets were ready, the team tested them on rabbits. Rabbits with broken femurs treated with Lee’s healing gun recovered faster than those treated with bone cement, which is the closest commercially available alternative. But there is still a lot to do before the healing gun can be tested on humans.

Skill issues

While the experiment on rabbits revealed new bone tissues forming around the implants created with the healing gun, their slow degradation of the implanted material prevented the full restoration of bone tissues. Another improvement Lee plans involves adding antibiotics to the formulation. The implant, he said, will release the drugs over time to prevent infections.

Then there's the issue of load bearing. Rabbits are fine as test subjects, but they are rather light. “To evaluate the potential to use this technology on humans, we need to look into its long-term safety in large animal models,” Lee said.

Beyond the questions about the material, the level of skill required to operate this healing gun seems rather high.

Extrusion-based 3D printers, the ones that work more or less like very advanced hot glue guns, usually use guiding rods or rails for precise printing head positioning. If those rods or rails are warped, even slightly, the accuracy of your prints will most likely suffer. Achieving comparable precision with a handheld device might be a bit difficult, even for a skilled surgeon. “It is true that the system requires practice,” Lee said. “We may need to integrate it with a guiding mechanism that would position the head of the device precisely. This could be our next-gen bone printing device.”

Device, 2025.  DOI: 10.1016/j.device.2025.100873

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Posted Saturday 27 September 2025 at 3:07 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.12 of the Rocket Report! We often hear from satellite operators—from the military to venture-backed startups—about their appetite for more launch capacity. With so many rocket launches happening around the world, some might want to dismiss these statements as a corporate plea for more competition, and therefore lower prices. SpaceX is on pace to launch more than 150 times this year. China could end the year with more than 70 orbital launches. These are staggering numbers compared to global launch rates just a few years ago. But I'm convinced there's room for more alternatives for reliable (and reusable) rockets. All of the world's planned mega-constellations will need immense launch capacity just to get off the ground, and if successful, they'll go into regular replacement and replenishment cycles. Throw in the still-undefined Golden Dome missile shield and many nations' desire for a sovereign launch capability, and it's easy to see the demand curve going up.

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.

Sharp words from Astra’s Chris Kemp. Chris Kemp, the chief executive officer of Astra, apparently didn't get the memo about playing nice with his competitors in the launch business. Kemp made some spicy remarks at the Berkeley Space Symposium 2025 earlier this month, billed as the largest undergraduate aerospace event at the university (see video of the talk). During the speech, Kemp periodically deviated from building up Astra to hurling insults at several of his competitors in the launch industry, Ars reports. To be fair to Kemp, some of his criticisms are not without a kernel of truth. But they are uncharacteristically rough all the same, especially given Astra's uneven-at-best launch record and financial solvency to date.

Wait, what?! ... Kemp is generally laudatory in his comments about SpaceX, but his most crass statement took aim at the quality of life of SpaceX employees at Starbase, Texas. He said life at Astra is "more fun than SpaceX because we're not on the border of Mexico where they'll chop your head off if you accidentally take a left turn." For the record, no SpaceX employees have been beheaded. "And you don't have to live in a trailer. And we don't make you work six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day." Kemp also accused Firefly Aerospace of sending Astra "garbage" rocket engines as part of the companies' partnership on propulsion for Astra's next-generation rocket.

A step forward for Europe’s reusable rocket program. No one could accuse the European Space Agency and its various contractors of moving swiftly when it comes to the development of reusable rockets. However, it appears that Europe is finally making some credible progress, Ars reports. Last week, the France-based ArianeGroup aerospace company announced that it completed the integration of the Themis vehicle, a prototype rocket that will test various landing technologies, on a launch pad in Sweden. Low-altitude hop tests, a precursor for developing a rocket's first stage that can vertically land after an orbital launch, could start late this year or early next.

Hopping into the future ... "This milestone marks the beginning of the 'combined tests,' during which the interface between Themis and the launch pad's mechanical, electrical, and fluid systems will be thoroughly trialed, with the aim of completing a test under cryogenic conditions," ArianeGroup said. This particular rocket will likely undergo only short hops, initially about 100 meters. A follow-up vehicle, Themis T1E, is intended to fly medium-altitude tests at a later date. Some of the learnings from these prototypes will feed into a smaller, reusable rocket intended to lift 500 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. This is under development by MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of ArianeGroup. Eventually, the European Space Agency would like to use technology developed as part of Themis to develop a new line of reusable rockets that will succeed the Ariane 6 rocket.

Navy conducts Trident missile drills. The US Navy carried out four scheduled missile tests of a nuclear-capable weapons system off the coast of Florida within the last week, Defense News reports. The service’s Strategic Systems Programs conducted flights of unarmed Trident II D5 Life Extension missiles from a submerged Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine from September 17 to September 21 as part of an ongoing scheduled event meant to test the reliability of the system. "The missile tests were not conducted in response to any ongoing world events," a Navy release said.

Secret with high visibility ... The Navy periodically performs these Trident missile tests off the coasts of Florida and California, taking advantage of support infrastructure and range support from the two busiest US spaceports. The military doesn't announce the exact timing of the tests, but warnings issued for pilots to stay out of the area give a general idea of when they might occur. One of the launch events Sunday was visible from Puerto Rico, illuminating the night sky in photos published on social media. The missiles fell in the Atlantic Ocean as intended, the Navy said. The Trident II D5 missiles were developed in the 1980s and are expected to remain in service on the Navy's ballistic missile submarines into the 2040s. The Trident system is one leg of the US military's nuclear triad, alongside land-based Minuteman ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable strategic bombers. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Firefly plans for Alpha’s return to flight. Firefly Aerospace expects to resume Alpha launches in the "coming weeks," with two flights planned before the end of the year, Space News reports. These will be the first flights of Firefly's one-ton-class Alpha rocket since a failure in April destroyed a Lockheed Martin tech demo satellite after liftoff from California. In a quarterly earnings call, Firefly shared a photo showing its next two Alpha rockets awaiting shipment from the company's Texas factory.

Righting the ship ... These next two launches really need to go well for Firefly. The Alpha rocket has, at best, a mixed record with only two fully successful flights in six attempts. Two other missions put their payloads into off-target orbits, and two Alpha launches failed to reach orbit at all. Firefly went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange last month, raising nearly $900 million in the initial public offering to help fund the company's future programs, namely the medium-lift Eclipse rocket developed in partnership with Northrop Grumman. There's a lot to like about Firefly. The company achieved the first fully successful landing of a commercial spacecraft on the Moon in March. NASA has selected Firefly for three more commercial landings on the Moon, and Firefly reported this week it has an agreement with an unnamed commercial customer for an additional dedicated mission. But the Alpha program hasn't had the same level of success. We'll see if Firefly can get the rocket on track soon. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Avio wins contract to launch “extra-European” mission. Italian rocket builder Avio has signed a launch services agreement with US-based launch aggregator SpaceLaunch for a Vega C launch carrying an Earth observation satellite for an "extra-European institutional customer" in 2027, European Spaceflight reports. Avio announced that it had secured the launch contract on September 18. According to the company, the contract was awarded through an open international competition, with Vega C chosen for its "versatility and cost-effectiveness." While Avio did not reveal the identity of the "extra-European" customer, it said that it would do so later this year.

Plenty of peculiarities ... There are several questions to unpack here, and Andrew Parsonson of European Spaceflight goes through them all. Presumably, extra-European means the customer is based outside of Europe. Avio's statement suggests we'll find out the answer to that question soon. Details about the US-based launch broker SpaceLaunch are harder to find. SpaceLaunch appears to have been founded in January 2025 by two former Firefly Aerospace employees with a combined 40 years of experience in the industry. On its website, the company claims to provide end-to-end satellite launch integration, mission management, and launch procurement services with a "portfolio of launch vehicle capacity around the globe." SpaceLaunch boasts it has supported the launch of more than 150 satellites on 12 different launch vehicles. However, according to public records, it does not appear that the company itself has supported a single launch. Instead, the claim seems to credit SpaceLaunch with launches that were actually carried out during the two founders' previous tenures at Spaceflight, Firefly Aerospace, Northrop Grumman, and the US Air Force. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon 9 launches three missions for NASA and NOAA. Scientists loaded three missions worth nearly $1.6 billion on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for launch Wednesday, toward an orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, to measure the supersonic stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun, Ars reports. One of the missions, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will beam back real-time observations of the solar wind to provide advance warning of geomagnetic storms that could affect power grids, radio communications, GPS navigation, air travel, and satellite operations. The other two missions come from NASA, with research objectives that include studying the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space and observing the rarely seen outermost layer of our own planet's atmosphere.

Immense value ...All three spacecraft will operate in orbit around the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitational balance point located more than 900,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. Bundling these three missions onto the same rocket saved at least tens of millions of dollars in launch costs. Normally, they would have needed three different rockets. Rideshare missions to low-Earth orbit are becoming more common, but spacecraft departing for more distant destinations like the L1 Lagrange point are rare. Getting all three missions on the same launch required extensive planning, a stroke of luck, and fortuitous timing. "This is the ultimate cosmic carpool," said Joe Westlake, director of NASA's heliophysics division. "These three missions heading out to the Sun-Earth L1 point riding along together provide immense value for the American taxpayer."

US officials concerned about China mastering reusable launch. SpaceX's dominance in reusable rocketry is one of the most important advantages the United States has over China as competition between the two nations extends into space, US Space Force officials said Monday. But several Chinese companies are getting close to fielding their own reusable rockets, Ars reports. "It’s concerning how fast they’re going," said Brig. Gen. Brian Sidari, the Space Force's deputy chief of space operations for intelligence. "I’m concerned about when the Chinese figure out how to do reusable lift that allows them to put more capability on orbit at a quicker cadence than currently exists."

By the numbers ... China has used 14 different types of rockets on its 56 orbital-class missions this year, and none have flown more than 11 times. Eight US rocket types have cumulatively flown 145 times, with 122 of those using SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9. Without a reusable rocket, China must maintain more rocket companies to sustain a launch rate of just one-third to one-half that of the United States. This contrasts with the situation just four years ago, when China outpaced the United States in orbital rocket launches. The growth in US launches has been a direct result of SpaceX's improvements to launch at a higher rate, an achievement primarily driven by the recovery and reuse of Falcon 9 boosters and payload fairings.

Atlas V launches more Kuiper satellites. Roughly an hour past sunrise Thursday, an Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance took flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Onboard the rocket, flying in its most powerful configuration, were the next 27 Project Kuiper broadband satellites from Amazon, Spaceflight Now reports. This is the third batch of production satellites launched by ULA and the fifth overall for the growing low-Earth orbit constellation. The Atlas V rocket released the 27 Kuiper satellites about 280 miles (450 kilometers) above Earth. The satellites will use onboard propulsion to boost themselves to their assigned orbit at 392 miles (630 kilometers).

Another Kuiper launch on tap ... With this deployment, Amazon now has 129 satellites in orbit. This is a small fraction of the network's planned total of 3,232 satellites, but Amazon has enjoyed a steep ramp-up in the Kuiper launch cadence as the company's satellite assembly line in Kirkland, Washington, continues churning out spacecraft. Another 24 Kuiper satellites are slated to launch September 30 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and Amazon has delivered enough satellites to Florida for an additional launch later this fall. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

German military will fly with Ariane 6. Airbus Defense and Space has awarded Arianespace a contract to launch a pair of SATCOMBw-3 communications satellites for the German Armed Forces, European Spaceflight reports. Airbus is the prime contractor for the nearly $2.5 billion (2.1 billion euro) SATCOMBw-3 program, which will take over from the two-satellite SATCOMBw-2 constellation currently providing secure communications for the German military. Arianespace announced Wednesday that it had been awarded the contract to launch the satellites aboard two Ariane 6 rockets. "By signing this new strategic contract for the German Armed Forces, Arianespace accomplishes its core mission of guaranteeing autonomous access to space for European sovereign satellites," said Arianespace CEO David Cavaillolès.

Running home to Europe ... The chief goal of the Ariane 6 program is to provide Europe with independent access to space, something many European governments see as a strategic requirement. Several European military, national security, and scientific satellites have launched on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets in the last few years as officials waited for the debut of the Ariane 6 rocket. With three successful Ariane 6 flights now in the books, European customers seem to now have the confidence to commit to flying their satellites on Ariane 6. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Artemis II launch targeted for February. NASA is pressing ahead with preparations for the first launch of humans beyond low-Earth orbit in more than five decades, and officials said Tuesday that the Artemis II mission could take flight early next year, Ars reports. Although work remains to be done, the space agency is now pushing toward a launch window that opens on February 5, 2026, officials said during a news conference on Tuesday at Johnson Space Center. The Artemis II mission represents a major step forward for NASA and seeks to send four astronauts—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—around the Moon and back. The 10-day mission will be the first time astronauts have left low-Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

Orion named Integrity ... The first astronauts set to fly to the Moon in more than 50 years will do so in Integrity, Ars reports. NASA's Artemis II crew revealed Integrity as the name of their Orion spacecraft during a news conference on Wednesday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We thought, as a crew, we need to name this spacecraft. We need to have a name for the Orion spacecraft that we're going to ride this magical mission on," said Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission.

FAA reveals new Starship trajectories. Sometime soon, perhaps next year, SpaceX will attempt to fly one of its enormous Starship rockets from low-Earth orbit back to its launch pad in South Texas. A successful return and catch at the launch tower would demonstrate a key capability underpinning Elon Musk's hopes for a fully reusable rocket. In order for this to happen, SpaceX must overcome the tyranny of geography. A new document released by the Federal Aviation Administration shows the narrow corridors Starship will fly to space and back when SpaceX tries to recover them, Ars reports.

Flying over people ... It was always evident that flying a Starship from low-Earth orbit back to Starbase would require the rocket to fly over Mexico and portions of South Texas. The rocket launches to the east over the Gulf of Mexico, so it must approach Starbase from the west when it comes in for a landing. The new maps show SpaceX will launch Starships to the southeast over the Gulf and the Caribbean Sea, and directly over Jamaica, or to the northeast over the Gulf and the Florida peninsula. On reentry, the ship will fly over Baja California and Mexico's interior near the cities of Hermosillo and Chihuahua, each with a population of roughly a million people. The trajectory would bring Starship well north of the Monterrey metro area and its 5.3 million residents, then over the Rio Grande Valley near the Texas cities of McAllen and Brownsville.

New Glenn’s second flight at least a month away. The second launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, carrying a NASA smallsat mission to Mars, is now expected in late October or early November, Space News reports. Tim Dunn, NASA's senior launch director at Kennedy Space Center, provided an updated schedule for the second flight of New Glenn in comments after a NASA-sponsored launch on a Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday. Previously, the official schedule from NASA showed the launch date as no earlier than September 29.

No surprise ... It was already apparent that this launch wouldn't happen September 29. Blue Origin has test-fired the second stage for the upcoming flight of the New Glenn rocket but hasn't rolled the first stage to the launch pad for its static fire. Seeing the rocket emerge from Blue's factory in Florida will be an indication that the launch date is finally near. Blue Origin will launch NASA's ESCAPADE mission, a pair of small satellites to study how the solar wind interacts with the Martian upper atmosphere.

Blue Origin will launch a NASA rover to the Moon. NASA has awarded Blue Origin a task order worth up to $190 million to deliver its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the Moon's surface, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Blue Origin, one of 13 currently active Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) providers, submitted the only bid to carry VIPER to the Moon after NASA requested offers from industry last month. NASA canceled the VIPER mission last year, citing cost overruns with the rover and delays in its planned ride to the Moon aboard a lander provided by Astrobotic. But engineers had already completed assembly of the rover, and scientists protested NASA's decision to terminate the mission.

Some caveats ... Blue Origin will deliver VIPER to a location near the Moon's south pole in late 2027 using a robotic Blue Moon MK1 lander, a massive craft larger than the Apollo lunar landing module. The company's first Blue Moon MK1 lander is scheduled to fly to the Moon next year. NASA's contract for the VIPER delivery calls for Blue Origin to design accommodations for the rover on the Blue Moon lander. The agency said it will decide whether to proceed with the actual launch on a New Glenn rocket and delivery of VIPER to the Moon based partially on the outcome of the first Blue Moon test flight next year.

Next three launches

Sept. 26: Long March 4C | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 19:20 UTC

Sept. 27: Long March 6A | Unknown Payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 12:39 UTC

Sept. 28: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 23:32 UTC

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Posted Saturday 27 September 2025 at 3:06 am AEST (my time).

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In late 2017, a study by Krefeld Entomological Society looked at protected areas across Germany and discovered that two-thirds of the insect populations living in there had vanished over the last 25 years. The results spurred the media to declare we’re living through an “insect apocalypse,” but the reasons behind their absence were unclear. Now, a joint team of Japanese and Australian scientists have completed a new, multi-year study designed to get us some answers.

Insect microcosm

“In our work, we focused on ants because we have systematic ways for collecting them,” says Alexander Mikheyev, an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University. “They are also a group with the right level of diversity, where you have enough species to do comparative studies.” Choosing the right location, he explained, was just as important. “We did it in Fiji, because Fiji had the right balance between isolation—which gave us a discrete group of animals to study—but at the same time was diverse enough to make comparisons,” Mikheyev adds.

Thus, the Fijian archipelago, with its 330 islands, became the model the team used to get some insights into insect population dynamics. A key difference from the earlier study was that Mikheyev and his colleagues could look at those populations across thousands of years, not just the last 25.

“Most of the previous studies looked at actual observational data—things we could come in and measure,” Mikheyev explains. The issue with those studies was that they could only account for the last hundred years or so, because that’s how long we have been systematically collecting insect samples. “We really wanted to understand what happened in the longer time frame,” Mikheyev says.

To do this, his team focused on community genomics—studying the collective genetic material of entire groups of organisms. The challenge is that this would normally require collecting thousands of ants belonging to hundreds of species across the entire Fijian archipelago. Given that only a little over 100 out of 330 islands in Fiji are permanently inhabited, this seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

To go around it, the team figured they could run its tests on ants already collected in Fijian museums. But that came with its own set of difficulties.

DNA pieces

Unfortunately, the quality of DNA that could be obtained from museum collections was really bad. From the perspective of DNA preservation, the ants were obtained and stored in horrific conditions, since the idea was to showcase them for visitors, not run genetic studies. “People were catching them in malaise traps,” Mikheyev says. “A malaise trap is basically a bottle of alcohol that sits somewhere in Fiji for a month. Those samples had horribly fragmented, degraded DNA.”

To work with this degraded genetic material, the team employed a technique they called high-throughput museumomics, a relatively new technique that looks at genetic differences across a genome without sequencing the whole thing. DNA sampled from multiple individuals was cut and marked with unique tags at the same repeated locations, a bit like using bookmarks to pinpoint the same page or passage in different issues of the same book. Then, the team sequenced short DNA fragments following the tag to look for differences between them, allowing them to evaluate the genetic diversity within a population.  “We developed a series of methods that actually allowed us to harness these museum-grade specimens for population genetics,” Mikheyev explains.

But the trouble didn’t end there. Differences among Fijian ant taxa are based on their appearance, not genetic analysis. For years, researchers were collecting various ants and determining their species by looking at them. This led to 144 species belonging to 40 genera. For Mikheyev’s team, the first step was to look at the genomes in the samples and see if these species divisions were right. It turned out that they were mostly correct, but some species had to be split, while others were lumped together. At the end, the team confirmed that 127 species were represented among their samples.

Overall, the team analyzed more than 4,000 specimens of ants collected over the past decade or so. And gradually, a turbulent history of Fijian ants started to emerge from the data.

The first colonists

The art of reconstructing the history of entire populations from individual genetic sequences relies on comparing them to each other thoroughly and running a whole lot of computer simulations. “We had multiple individuals per population,” Mikheyev explains. “Let’s say we look at this population and find it has essentially no diversity. It suggests that it very recently descended from a small number of individuals.” When the contrary was true and the diversity was high, the team assumed it indicated the population had been stable for a long time.

With the DNA data in hand, the team simulated how populations of ants would evolve over thousands of years under various conditions, and picked scenarios that best matched the genetic diversity results it obtained from real ants. “We identified multiple instances of colonization—broadscale evolutionary events that gave rise to the Fijian fauna that happened in different timeframes,” Mikheyev says. There was a total of at least 65 colonization events.

The first ants, according to Mikheyev, arrived at Fiji millions of years ago and gave rise to 88 endemic Fijian ant species we have today. These ants most likely evolved from a single ancestor and then diverged from their mainland relatives. Then, a further 23 colonization events introduced ants that were native to a broader Pacific region. These ants, the team found, were a mixture of species that colonized Fiji naturally and ones that were brought by the first human settlers, the Lapita people, who arrived around 3,000 years ago.

The arrival of humans also matched the first declines in endemic Fijian ant species.

Slash and burn

“In retrospect, these declines are not really surprising,” Mikheyev says. The first Fijian human colonists didn’t have the same population density as we have now, but they did practice things like slash-and-burn agriculture, where forests were cut down, left to dry, and burned to make space for farms and fertilize the soil. “And you know, not every ant likes to live in a field, especially the ones that evolved to live in a forest,” Mikheyev adds. But the declines in Fijian endemic ant species really accelerated after the first contact with the Europeans.

The first explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries, like Abel Tasman and James Cook, charted some of the Fijian islands but did not land there. The real apocalypse for Fijian ants began in the 19th century, when European sandalwood traders started visiting the archipelago on a regular basis and ultimately connected it to the global trade networks.

Besides the firearms they often traded for sandalwood with local chiefs, the traders also brought fire ants. “Fire ants are native to Latin America, and it’s a common invasive species extremely well adapted to habitats we create: lawns or clear-cut fields,” Mikheyev says. Over the past couple of centuries, his team saw a massive increase in fire ant populations, combined with accelerating declines in 79 percent of endemic Fijian ant species.

Signs of apocalypse

To Mikheyev, Fiji was just a proving ground to test the methods of working with museum-grade samples. “Now we know this approach works and we can start leveraging collections found in museums around the world—all of them can tell us stories about places where they were collected,” Mikheyev says. His ultimate goal is to look for the signs of the insect apocalypse, or any other apocalypse of a similar kind, worldwide.

But the question is whether what’s happening is really that bad? After all, not all ants seem to be in decline. Perhaps what we see is just a case of a better-adapted species taking over—natural selection happening before our eyes?

“Sure, we can just live with fire ants all along without worrying about the kind of beautiful biodiversity that evolution has created on Fiji,” Mikheyev says. “But I feel like if we just go with that philosophy, we’re really going to be irreparably losing important and interesting parts of our ecology.” If the current trends persist, he argues, we might lose endemic Fijian ants forever. “And this would make our world worse, in many ways,” Mikheyev says.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.ads3004

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Posted Saturday 27 September 2025 at 3:05 am AEST (my time).

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Atomic nuclei are built from protons and neutrons. Certain counts of these particles, called “magic numbers,” make nuclei unusually stable. The classic magic numbers for stable isotopes are 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. This idea was explained in the mid-20th century by Maria Goeppert Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen through the nuclear shell model, work that won them the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics. While the magic numbers for stable isotopes are well established, the ones for exotic, short-lived isotopes are still being uncovered. Studying these rare cases helps scientists test nuclear forces under extreme conditions and better understand how elements formed in the Universe, as nuclear forces are two of the four fundamental forces of nature.

In recent years, researchers have found new neutron magic numbers such as 14, 16, 32, and 34 in exotic nuclei far from stability. But clear evidence for new proton magic numbers has been much harder to find. Earlier studies showed that oxygen-22, which has 14 neutrons and 8 protons, behaves like a magic nucleus at neutron number 14. Based on nuclear mirror symmetry, theorists predicted that proton number 14 should also be magic in its mirror nucleus, silicon-22, which has 14 protons and 8 neutrons.

Mirror nuclei are pairs of atomic nuclei where the number of protons and neutrons are swapped between the two nuclei.

The problem was that silicon-22 is extremely hard to produce in large enough amounts and decays very quickly, so this prediction had never been confirmed until now.

Using improved Bρ-defined isochronous mass spectroscopy (IMS) technique at the Cooling Storage Ring of the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou, the IMP team managed to measure the ground-state mass of silicon-22, the first mass measurement of the proton drip line nucleus.

A proton drip line nucleus is an exotic, proton-rich nucleus at the limit of nuclear stability, beyond which it cannot bind an extra proton and will decay via proton emission.

They also re-measured silicon-23 with nearly seven times better precision. The results showed that silicon-22 has a positive two-proton separation energy, meaning it does not naturally emit two protons. This confirms that silicon-22 sits at the proton drip line but does not undergo two-proton radioactivity, settling a long-standing debate in nuclear physics.

With the new mass value, the researchers calculated the proton pairing energy of silicon-22 and compared it with the neutron pairing energy of oxygen-22. The analysis confirmed that proton number 14 is indeed a new magic number, a conclusion also supported by the Gamow shell model.

The Gamow Shell Model (GSM) is an open-quantum system extension of the traditional nuclear shell model (SM) in the complex-energy plane to describe exotic weakly bound and resonant nuclei that the traditional SM cannot explain.

Both silicon-22 and oxygen-22 show “double-magic” properties, but the study found a difference in their internal structures. The protons in silicon-22 are more spread out than the neutrons in oxygen-22, showing a small breaking of mirror symmetry.

This discovery gives scientists fresh insight into the structure of exotic nuclei and how nucleons interact. It also pushes forward the broader effort to decode the nuclear “building code” under extreme conditions, helping us understand how matter itself was formed in the Universe under such conditions during its origin.

Source: IMP-CAS, APS | Image via Depositphotos

This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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Posted Friday 26 September 2025 at 6:00 pm AEST (my time).

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The number of confirmed planets outside of our solar system—known as exoplanets—has risen to 6,000, NASA has said. There is huge variety across these distant worlds, the space agency says, with discoveries including rocky planets, lava worlds, and gas giants enveloping their stars.

Plenty more discoveries are likely on the way. As a result of continued monitoring by NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI), there are more than 8,000 potential planets that have been identified and are awaiting confirmation. With future missions it has planned, including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory, the US space agency hopes to discover more Earth-like planets and worlds with possible signs of life.

This 6,000-planet milestone comes 30 years after the first exoplanet was discovered orbiting a star similar to our sun. “This milestone represents decades of cosmic exploration driven by NASA space telescopes—exploration that has completely changed the way humanity views the night sky,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, in a statement. “Step by step, from discovery to characterization, NASA missions have built the foundation to answering a fundamental question: Are we alone?”

As the number of confirmed exoplanets has increased, the scientific community has been able to build a picture of the planet population across the universe. Researchers estimate that rocky planets appear to be most common in the universe. They’ve also discovered planets the size of Jupiter that orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to our sun, or planets that have two stars. Some discovered worlds are covered in lava; others are surrounded by clouds of precious stones.

“Each of the different types of planets we discover gives us information about the conditions under which planets can form and, ultimately, how common planets like Earth might be and where we should be looking for them,” said Dawn Gelino, head of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program in a statement. “If we want to find out if we’re alone in the universe, all of this knowledge is essential.”

Although the number of confirmed exoplanets has reached 6,000, there are only about 100 that scientists have been able to observe directly. This is because light from faraway worlds is often so faint that it blends into the light emitted by the parent star. Detection methods therefore tend to be indirect; among the most common is the transit method, which involves detecting a planet by observing the star it orbits, which dims slightly for a brief time as the planet passes in front of it from our perspective.

The rate of exoplanet discoveries has greatly accelerated in recent years—the 5,000-planet milestone was passed just three years ago. But for some researchers, the process of discovering potential candidates to confirming them as exoplanets isn’t moving quickly enough. Once a possible planetary signal is detected, time-consuming follow-up observations then have to happen to rule out other possible explanations for the signal.

“We really need the whole community working together if we want to maximize our investments in these missions that are churning out exoplanets candidates,” said Aurora Kesseli, the deputy science lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive, in a statement. “A big part of what we do at NExScI is build tools that help the community go out and turn candidate planets into confirmed planets.”

Future research at NASA will focus on Earth-like rocky planets, and in particular on studying their atmospheres to look for biological signatures: any features, elements, molecules, or substances that could be evidence of life being there, past or present. Both of its forthcoming missions—the Roman Space Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory—will be equipped with tools to block out starlight, with the aim of making even the faintest Earth-like planets like Earth visible. Their findings will hopefully reveal new details about the diversity of planetary systems, as well as show how common solar systems like ours may be throughout the galaxy.

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

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Posted Friday 26 September 2025 at 3:51 am AEST (my time).

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