A lot of the stuff we use today is largely made by robots—arms with multiple degrees of freedom positioned along conveyor belts that move in a spectacle of precisely synchronized motions. All this motion is usually programmed by hand, which can take hundreds to thousands of hours. Google’s DeepMind team has developed an AI system called RoboBallet that lets manufacturing robots figure out what to do on their own.

Traveling salesmen

Planning what manufacturing robots should do to get their jobs done efficiently is really hard to automate. You need to solve both task allocation and scheduling—deciding which task should be done by which robot in what order. It’s like the famous traveling salesman problem on steroids. On top of that, there is the question of motion planning; you need to make sure all these robotic arms won’t collide with each other or with all the gear standing around them.

At the end, you’re facing myriad possible combinations where you’ve got to solve not one but three computationally hard problems at the same time. “There are some tools that let you automate motion planning, but task allocation and scheduling are usually done manually,” says Matthew Lai, a research engineer at Google DeepMind. “Solving all three of these problems combined is what we tackled in our work.”

Lai’s team started by generating simulated samples of what are called work cells, areas where teams of robots perform their tasks on a product being manufactured. The work cells contained something called a workpiece, a product on which the robots do work, in this case something to be constructed of aluminum struts placed on a table. Around the table, there were up to eight randomly placed Franka Panda robotic arms, each with 7 degrees of freedom, that were supposed to complete up to 40 tasks on a workpiece. Every task required a robotic arm’s end effector to get within 2.5 centimeters of the right spot on the right strut, approached from the correct angle, then stay there, frozen, for a moment. The pause simulates doing some work.

To make things harder, the team peppered every work cell with random obstacles the robots had to avoid. “We chose to work with up to eight robots, as this is around the sensible maximum for packing robots closely together without them blocking each other all the time,” Lai explains. Forcing the robots to perform 40 tasks on a workpiece was also something the team considered representative of what’s required at real factories.

A setup like this would be a nightmare to tackle using even the most powerful reinforcement-learning algorithms. Lai and his colleagues found a way around it by turning it all into graphs.

Complex relationships

Graphs in Lai’s model comprised nodes and edges. Things like robots, tasks, and obstacles were treated as nodes. Relationships between them were encoded as either one- or bi-directional edges. One-directional edges connected robots with tasks and obstacles because the robots needed information about where the obstacles were and whether the tasks were completed or not. Bidirectional edges connected the robots to each other, because each robot had to know what other robots were doing at each time step to avoid collisions or duplicating tasks.

To read and make sense of the graphs, the team used graph neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence designed to extract relationships between the nodes by passing messages along the edges of the connections among them. This decluttered the data, allowing the researchers to design a system that focused exclusively on what mattered most: finding the most efficient ways to complete tasks while navigating obstacles. After a few days of training on randomly generated work cells using a single Nvidia A100 GPU, the new industrial planning AI, called RoboBallet, could lay out seemingly viable trajectories through complex, previously unseen environments in a matter of seconds.

Most importantly, though, it scaled really well.

Economy of scale

The problem with applying traditional computational methods to complex problems like managing robots at a factory is that the challenge of computation grows exponentially with the number of items you have in your system. Computing the most optimal trajectories for one robot is relatively simple. Doing the same for two is considerably harder; when the number grows to eight, the problem becomes practically intractable.

With RoboBallet, the complexity of computation also grew with the complexity of the system, but at a far slower rate. (The computations grew linearly with the growing number of tasks and obstacles, and quadratically with the number of robots.) According to the team, these computations should make the system feasible for industrial-scale use.

The team wanted to test, however, whether the plans their AI was producing were any good. To check that, Lai and his colleagues computed the most optimal task allocations, schedules, and motions in a few simplified work cells and compared those with results delivered by RoboBallet. In terms of execution time, arguably the most important metric in manufacturing, the AI came very close to what human engineers could do. It wasn’t better than they were—it just provided an answer more quickly.

The team also tested RoboBallet plans on a real-world physical setup of four Panda robots working on an aluminum workpiece, and they worked just as well as in simulations. But Lai says it can do more than just speed up the process of programming robots.

Limping along

RoboBallet, according to DeepMind’s team, also enables us to design better work cells. “Because it works so fast, it would be possible for a designer to try different layouts and different placement or selections of robots in almost real time,” Lai says. This way, engineers at factories would be able to see exactly how much time they would save by adding another robot to a cell or choosing a robot of a different type. Another thing RoboBallet can do is reprogram the work cell on the fly, allowing other robots to fill in when one of them breaks down.

Still, there are a few things that still need ironing out before RoboBallet can come to factories. “There are several simplifications we made,” Lai admits. The first was that the obstacles were decomposed into cuboids. Even the workpiece itself was cubical. While this was somewhat representative of the obstacles and equipment in real factories, there are lots of possible workpieces with more organic shapes. “It would be better to represent those in a more flexible way, like mesh graphs or point clouds,” Lai says. This, however, would likely mean a drop in RoboBallet’s blistering speed.

Another thing is that the robots in Lai’s experiments were identical, while in a real-world work cell, robotic teams are quite often heterogeneous. “That’s why real-world applications would require additional research and engineering specific to the type of application,” Lai says. He adds, though, that the current RoboBallet is already designed with such adaptations in mind—it can be easily extended to support them. And once that’s done, his hope is that it will make factories faster and way more flexible.

“The system would have to be given work cell models, the workpiece models, as well as the list of tasks that need to be done—based on that, RoboBallet would be able to generate a complete plan,” Lai says.

Science Robotics, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.ads1204

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Posted Friday 26 September 2025 at 3:50 am AEST (my time).

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The first astronauts set to fly to the Moon in more than 50 years will do so in Integrity.

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 Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission.

During Apollo, the previous NASA program to send astronauts to the Moon, the crews chose names to distinguish their pair of spacecraft—the command and service module and the lunar module—while they were in separate flights. As later vehicles, such as NASA's space shuttle orbiters and SpaceX's Dragon capsules, became reusable, names were used to help engage the public and impart a sense of character to each craft.

With Artemis, Wiseman wanted a name that would not only reflect their mission but would also define their success.

"We're bringing together the world," he said. "We're bringing together an amazing workforce, and they are bringing together an amazing vehicle."

Name game

As it turned out, the crew had no shortage of ideas.

Sequestering themselves in the same facility where they would be quarantined before their scheduled launch in early 2026, Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, as well as their backups, Andre Douglas and Jenny Gibbons, found their integrity.

"We had all kinds of things," Koch said in an interview. "We had sentences, phrases, we had light-hearted [monikers], we had mantras. We had names, we had geography. Everything was on the table. We really wanted it to be a completely open forum."

"There were names that I loved," said Wiseman, "there were names that Christina loved. We all had our little pet names."

Whole and undivided

Ultimately, Integrity was inspired by something one of their instructors said while on a team-building trip to Iceland.

"He coined this for us, and we held on to it," said Hansen, who, unlike his NASA crewmates, is a Canadian Space Agency astronaut. "It was this idea that you're not a person who has integrity, you're a person who strives to be in integrity. Sometimes you're out of integrity, and sometimes you're in your integrity. That was profound for all of us."

For Glover, it boiled down to the definition.

"The Latin root means 'whole.' It's a very simple concept, and it's about being whole. This crew comes together as pieces—the four of us and our backups—but the six of us make up a whole team. The vehicle, the pieces come together and make up a whole spacecraft," he said.

"What people anecdotally say is that integrity is what you do when no one's watching. That, and truth, honor, and integrity matter," said Glover. "There are so many layers to that name and what it means and what it inspires."

Integrating Integrity

Integrity is one of the tenets of the Astronaut Code of Professional Responsibility. It is also one of the Canadian Space Agency's core values.

"We all strive to be in integrity all of the time, but integrity isn't an absolute that you either have or don't have," said Koch. "So this helps us give grace and build trust with each other."

"I hope that people hearing [the name] over the 10 days of the mission appreciate all of the different things that it means, from a whole ship, a whole crew, to a wholeness and wellness that I think humanity just needs. We need to hear more of that togetherness and wholeness," said Glover.

Now that it has been announced, next up is for Integrity to be used as the crew's possible call sign.

"We waited to make sure the whole enterprise was ready for us to announce it before we even used it," said Glover. "I think we'll start using it in sims: 'Houston, Integrity. Integrity, Houston.' That's the plan.

"But if someone doesn't like that, then we won't, and we can say Orion," he said.

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Posted Thursday 25 September 2025 at 6:09 pm AEST (my time).

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Texas officials are telling residents to check their pets and livestock, and insisting on immediate use of pesticide bait after officials in Mexico confirmed an infection with the flesh-eating New World Screwworm (NWS) less than 70 miles from the US border.

NWS is a horrifying parasitic fly that attacks warm-blooded animals, laying hundreds of eggs in any openings or wounds, even minute ones. The resulting larvae both look and act like screws, boring and twisting into the animal while feasting on its living flesh. The ravenous larvae create ghastly wounds that can be deadly to livestock and wild animals.

Long ago, this ferocious fly was endemic in the US and stymied the livestock industry. However, in the 1950s, eradication efforts using sterile male flies and livestock monitoring began to push the fly population southward. By around 1966, it was cleared from the US, and Mexico zapped the population in the 1980s. By 2006, it was pushed out of Central America, with Panama declaring it eradicated and holding the flies at bay at the Darién Gap at the border with Colombia. However, in 2022, the gap was breached, and the flies have been steadily moving northward.

In July, Mexican officials found an NWS case in Veracruz, 370 miles from the US border. On Sunday, Mexico’s National Service of Agro-Alimentary Health, Safety, and Quality (SENASICA) confirmed the closest NWS case so far, in Sabinas Hidalgo, located in the state of Nuevo León, less than 70 miles from the US-Mexico border.

“Serious concern”

According to the US Department of Agriculture, SENASICA reported that the infected animal— an 8-month-old cow—had recently been moved to a certified feedlot in Nuevo León from a region in southern Mexico with known active NWS cases. In addition to the proximity, the USDA highlighted that "Sabinas Hidalgo is located near the major highway from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, to Laredo, Texas, which is one of the most heavily trafficked commercial thoroughfares in the world."

In a press release on Tuesday, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller called for an aggressive response. "The screwworm is dangerously close," Miller said. "It nearly wiped out our cattle industry before; we need to act forcefully now. That’s why I insist we start using pesticide bait immediately."

In addition to using the bait, Texas officials advise residents of southern Texas to check their pets and livestock for screwworm larvae.

Look for draining or enlarging wounds, as well as signs of discomfort. Also look for screwworm larvae (maggots) and eggs in or around body openings, such as the nose, ears, and genitalia, or the navel of newborn animals.

While NWS can infect humans—and those cases are grisly—it is relatively rare.

The US has halted imports of cattle, bison, and horses from Mexico to try to keep the parasite out. Officials have also set up nearly 8,000 traps across Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Among 13,000 screening samples, so far, none have turned up NWS.

"The recent case found only 70 miles south of our border should trigger serious concern," Miller said. "Although it hasn't crossed into our territory yet, its proximity means we must get ready for its potential arrival."

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Posted Thursday 25 September 2025 at 6:08 pm AEST (my time).

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Doomed Egyptian queen Cleopatra has captured the imaginations of people all over the world for centuries. Archaeologists have long sought to locate her tomb, which she shared with her lover, Mark Antony, per popular legend. Thus far, the search has been unsuccessful, although many believe she would have been buried near the royal palace in Alexandria, Egypt.

National Geographic explorer Kathleen Martinez thinks she might be on the verge of locating Cleopatra's final resting place at a site called Taposiris Magna. Her 20-year journey (and counting) to prove her hypothesis—and the exciting new discovery of a submerged ancient port several miles off the Mediterranean shore that was likely once part of that temple—are chronicled in Cleopatra's Final Secret, a new documentary film from National Geographic.

Martinez has a degree in archaeology but initially became a criminal lawyer. She brought that legal training to bear on the question of the location of Cleopatra's tomb, treating it as she would a forensic case. "I tried to understand her personality, who were her friends, who were her enemies," Martinez told Ars. "She was a strategist and she always had a Plan A and a Plan B." It simply made sense to her that Cleopatra would have brought that same strategic thinking to orchestrating her death. Martinez suggested that the queen arranged for loyal subjects to transport her body through secret tunnels to a hidden final resting place.

Martinez knows firsthand how difficult it can be for inmates to receive food and other items from family and friends, all of which are searched before reaching the intended recipient. Cleopatra was imprisoned in her palace, and legend has it that an ally brought her a basket of figs, and hidden within was the cobra that gave the Egyptian queen that fatal bite. Martinez pondered why Cleopatra would have bothered with an actual cobra when all she needed was the venom, mixed in with food or drink.

Martinez believes it was because the cobra is associated with Isis in Egyptian mythology, and Cleopatra had fashioned her image as being a human representation of the goddess. "It was the symbolism," said Martinez. "She was dying, but she was dying as Isis, as a goddess, not as a prisoner. And this is how she became a legend, a myth." It stood to reason, then, that given the choice, Cleopatra could have arranged for her body (and that of Antony) to be buried in a temple of Isis—a conclusion supported by Petrarch's writings, among other sources.

A temple fit for a queen

Kathleen Martinez at the temple at Taposiris Magna.

National Geographic

 

Excavators at Taposiris Magna.

National Geographic

 

A scene straight out of Indiana Jones.

 

Martinez cheers after a big discovery.

Kenneth Garrett

 

Martinez and her team pose with various artifacts unearthed at the site.

National Geographic

 

Close-up of one of the artifacts: a carved head believed to depict Cleopatra.

Kenneth Garrett

 

The next step was to create a map of ancient Alexandria marking the locations of the temples that weren't too distant from the royal quarters where Cleopatra was a prisoner. Of those, Taposiris Magna—located in the coastal town of Borg El Arab, about 30 miles west of Alexandria—was the only temple for which scholars have almost no information: who built it, whether it ever functioned as a temple, to whom the temple was dedicated, and so forth. "That was a red light, not for the archaeologist, but for the lawyer in me," said Martinez.

Thus began Martinez's two decades of work to excavate Taposiris Magna. Among her more significant findings were the discovery in 2006 of foundation plates dedicating the temple to Isis, along with royal artifacts and many coins bearing Cleopatra's likeness. Last year her team unearthed burial shafts with mummies, tunnels, and another trove of artifacts—including a delicately carved head Martinez believes is a likeness of Cleopatra, although this has yet to be confirmed. All this strengthened Martinez's conviction that she was on the right track for locating Cleopatra's tomb—particularly since one 4,300-foot tunnel led directly out to the Mediterranean Sea.

Martinez concluded that perhaps part of the original temple site was now submerged underwater—and Cleopatra's tomb might be among those submerged structures. That said, "It's one thing to have an idea and another to make the discovery," she said. "We already have archaeological evidence that important trade and commercial activities were taking place in Taposiris Magna. But having this information doesn't mean that we will make the discovery. When I was standing a few years ago in front of the Mediterranean Sea, I was really scared that I would not ever be able to make the discovery. It's open sea, which is very dangerous, and I didn't have any experience searching underwater."

One of her team members suggested she contact someone who did have experience searching underwater: famed oceanographer Robert Ballard, best known for his 1985 discovery of the submerged wreck of the HMS Titanic. Ballard accepted Martinez's invitation to join the project, came to Egypt to check out the site, and immediately told her he thought she was on the right track with her search. That didn't make the undertaking an easy one, but the Egyptian Navy also pitched in to help.

A submerged ancient port

Martinez during the underwater survey.

Kenneth Garrett

 

Martinez (left) enlisted the help of Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard (right).

Kenneth Garrett

 

Martinez, Ballard, and the team look at seafloor scans.

Kenneth Garrett

 

Martinez gazes out onto the water as divers prepare to search for evidence of manmade structures underwater.

Kenneth Garrett

 

Still, the clock was winding down for that excavation season. Then divers found manmade stone pockets, once used to store fishing gear, a sign that this might have been a shoreline in Cleopatra's time. Sonar revealed ancient relics along the sea floor, including a series of colossal structures standing 20 feet high and arranged in rows, as well as several anchors and amphora. When the first anchor was found, Martinez recalled, one of the cameramen became so excited he jumped right into the water. And that 4,300-foot tunnel pointed directly at the submerged site. Divers also uncovered a basalt base that may have been a pedestal for a statue, as well as three pillars they dubbed the "Three Sisters."

The discovery of the port suggests that Taposiris Magna was both a significant religious center and a maritime trading hub. Now that Martinez and Ballard and the rest of the team have successfully mapped the area and identified five areas showing clear signs of human activity, the next step is to explore further with actual excavations. That's a major undertaking given that the structures are buried beneath thousands of years of sediment, and that sediment must be removed to find out exactly what is underneath.

But Martinez is game and plans to start with the "Salam 5" feature, consisting of several tall rectangular stone structures. While none of this is definitive proof, "nobody can tell me that Cleopatra is not at Taposiris Magna," Martinez told National Geographic. "To say that, you have to excavate the whole area and not find her. I'm not going to stop. For me, it is a matter of time."

Cleopatra's Final Secret premieres on September 25 on National Geographic and will be available for streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.

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Posted Thursday 25 September 2025 at 6:07 pm AEST (my time).

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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.

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.

All three spacecraft were mounted to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket for liftoff at 7:30 am EDT (11:30 UTC) on Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket arced on a trajectory heading east from Florida's Space Coast, shed its reusable first stage booster for a landing offshore, then fired its upper stage engine twice to propel the trio of missions into deep space.

A few minutes later, each of the spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9 to begin a multi-month journey toward their observing locations in halo orbits around the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitational balance point roughly 900,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth toward the Sun. The combined pull from the Earth and Sun at this location provides a stable region for satellites to operate in, and a good location for instruments designed for solar science.

Seeing the big picture

The primary mission launched on Wednesday is called the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). The spin-stabilized IMAP spacecraft is shaped like a donut, with a diameter of about 8 feet (2.4 meters) and 10 science instruments looking inward toward the Sun and outward toward the edge of the heliosphere, the teardrop-shaped magnetic bubble blown outward by the solar wind.

At the edge of the heliosphere, the solar wind runs up against the interstellar medium, the gas, dust, and radiation in the space between the stars. This boundary remains a poorly understood frontier in space science, but it's important because the heliosphere protects the Solar System from damaging galactic cosmic rays.

"IMAP is a mission of firsts," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. "It’ll be the first spacecraft dedicated to mapping the heliosphere’s outer boundary, a key piece in the heliophysics puzzle about the Sun’s influence on our Solar System. To do this, IMAP will spin every 15 seconds to measure the invisible using a very comprehensive suite of revolutionary instruments."

During each rotation, IMAP's sensors will scoop up all sorts of stuff: ions traveling 1 million miles per hour in the solar wind, interstellar dust particles, and energetic neutral atoms kicked back into the Solar System from the edge of the heliosphere.

"These energetic neutral atoms act as cosmic messengers," said David McComas, IMAP's principal investigator from Princeton University. "They’re unaffected by magnetic fields so they can propagate all the way in from the boundaries to Earth’s orbit and be measured by IMAP."

Tracking these energetic neutral atoms will allow scientists to map the boundary of the heliosphere and what shapes it. The Sun's movement through the Milky Way galaxy forms a shock wave on the front side of the heliosphere, similar to the wave created by the bow of a ship moving through water.

"We ended up with this fabulous observatory that measures everything," McComas said. "The particles coming out from the Sun are moving out in the solar wind to get to the outer heliosphere. Some fraction of them become neutralized and come right back, and we observe them a few years later as ENAs (energetic neutral atoms). So, we’re really observing the entire life cycle of this particle energization and how it interacts at the boundaries of the heliosphere."

IMAP follows a much smaller mission, named IBEX, that carried just two instruments to begin probing the edge of the heliosphere in 2008. IBEX discovered an unexpected ribbon-like pattern of energetic neutral emissions coming from the front of the heliosphere. Scientists have developed several theories to explain the ribbon signature. One of the theories postulates that the ribbon represents a group of particles that somehow leaked from the heliosphere and bounced around interstellar space before returning to the Solar System.

"It was found that interstellar matter, particles, and neutrals streaming in from outside the Solar System, actually... have a significant effect in how the entire heliosphere behaves," said Shri Kanekal, IMAP's mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

IBEX's discoveries fueled enthusiasm among space scientists for a more sophisticated follow-up mission like IMAP. NASA selected IMAP for development in 2018, and the $782 million mission will spend at least two years conducting scientific observations. The spacecraft was built at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

“Immense value”

Two years after NASA approved IMAP for development, the agency's heliophysics division selected another mission to head for the L1 Lagrange point. This smaller spacecraft, called the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, hitched a ride to space with IMAP on Wednesday.

The $97 million Carruthers mission carries two co-aligned ultraviolet imagers designed for simultaneous observations of Earth's exosphere, a tenuous cloud of hydrogen gas that fades into the airless void of outer space about halfway to the Moon. The hydrogen atoms in the exosphere generate a faint glow called the geocorona, which is only detectable in ultraviolet light at great distances. Images of the entire geocorona can't be collected from a satellite in Earth orbit.

The mission is named for George Carruthers, an engineer and solar physicist who developed an ultraviolet camera placed on the Moon by the Apollo 16 astronauts in 1972. This camera captured the first view of the geocorona, a term coined by Carruthers himself.

The 531-pound (241-kilogram) Carruthers observatory was built by BAE Systems, with instruments provided by the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab.

There's a lot for scientists to learn from the Carruthers mission, because they know little about the exosphere or geocorona.

"We actually don’t know exactly how big it is," said Lara Waldrop, the mission's principal investigator from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "We don’t know whether it’s spherical or oval, how much it changes over time or even the density of its constituent hydrogen atoms."

What scientists do know is that the exosphere plays an important role in shaping how solar storms affect the Earth. The exosphere is also the path by which the Earth is (very) slowly losing atomic hydrogen from water vapor lofted high into the atmosphere. "This process is extremely slow at Earth, and I’m talking billions of years. It is certainly nothing to worry about," Waldrop ensures.

The final spacecraft aboard Wednesday's launch is the world's first operational satellite dedicated to monitoring space weather. This $692 million mission is called the Space Weather Follow On-L1, or SWFO-L1, and serves as an "early warning beacon" for the potentially devastating effects of geomagnetic storms, said Irene Parker, deputy assistant administrator for systems at NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.

NOAA's previous satellites peer down at Earth from low-Earth orbit or geosynchronous orbit, gathering data for numerical weather models and tracking the real-time movement of hurricanes and severe storms. Until now, NOAA has relied upon a hodgepodge of research satellites to monitor the solar wind upstream from Earth. SWFO-L1, also built by BAE Systems, is the first mission designed from the start for real-time, around-the-clock solar wind observations.

"We’ll use SWFO-L1 to buy power grid, airline, and satellite operators precious time to act before billion-dollar storms strike," said Clinton Wallace, director of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

Once on station around the L1 Lagrange point, the satellite will be renamed SOLAR-1 before NOAA declares it operational in mid-2026. The platform hosts four instruments, one of which is a coronagraph to detect the massive eruptions from the Sun that spark geomagnetic storms. The other instruments will sample solar particles as they pass over the spacecraft about a half-hour before they reach our planet.

These instruments are akin to weather satellites that detect a hurricane's formation over the remote ocean and hurricane hunters that take direct measurements of the storm to assess its intensity before landfall, NOAA said.

Bundling IMAP, Carruthers, and SWFO-L1 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."

"It’s like a bus," Fox said. "You wait for one and then three come at the same time."

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Posted Thursday 25 September 2025 at 6:06 pm AEST (my time).

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On Tuesday, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced plans for five new US AI data center sites for Stargate, their joint AI infrastructure project, bringing the platform to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and over $400 billion in investment over the next three years.

The massive buildout aims to handle ChatGPT's 700 million weekly users and train future AI models, although critics question whether the investment structure can sustain itself. The companies said the expansion puts them on track to secure the full $500 billion, 10-gigawatt commitment they announced in January by the end of 2025.

The five new sites will include three locations developed through an OpenAI and Oracle partnership: Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an unspecified Midwest location. These sites, along with a 600-megawatt expansion near the flagship Stargate site in Abilene, Texas, can deliver over 5.5 gigawatts of capacity, which means the computers on site will be able to draw up to 5.5 billion watts of electricity when running at full load. The companies expect the sites to create over 25,000 onsite jobs.

Two of the sites will be developed through a partnership between SoftBank and OpenAI. One site in Lordstown, Ohio, where SoftBank has broken ground, is on track to be operational next year. The second site in Milam County, Texas, will be developed with SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company. These two sites may scale to 1.5 gigawatts over the next 18 months.

The new sites will join the flagship Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas. Oracle began delivering Nvidia hardware to that site in June, and OpenAI has already begun training (building new models) and inference (running ChatGPT) using the data center.

Here's a rundown of those announced Stargate sites so far:

• Abilene, Texas: Flagship campus, already operational with Nvidia GB200 racks, plus planned 600-megawatt expansion
• Shackelford County, Texas: New Oracle-developed site
• Doña Ana County, New Mexico: New Oracle-developed site
• Midwest location (undisclosed): New Oracle-developed site
• Lordstown, Ohio: New SoftBank-developed site, operational next year
• Milam County, Texas: New SoftBank/SB Energy site

The July agreement between OpenAI and Oracle to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate capacity represents a partnership worth over $300 billion between the two companies over five years. The companies say they selected the five new sites after reviewing over 300 proposals from more than 30 states in a nationwide process launched in January.

Why OpenAI wants massive computing power

The kind of numbers OpenAI and friends throw around—10 gigawatts here, $500 billion there—are somewhat staggering and mind-boggling in scope for the layperson who might not be familiar with the massive scale of Internet infrastructure. For example, ten gigawatts is equivalent to the output of roughly 10 nuclear reactors, which is enough electricity to power millions of homes. But what does OpenAI really need those data centers for? It all goes back to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's dream of providing intelligence as a service to billions of people.

"AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in the announcement. "That compute is the key to ensuring everyone can benefit from AI and to unlocking future breakthroughs."

Altman's statement reflects optimism about the usefulness of future AI systems, but despite warnings of an AI bubble and criticism of the underlying technology, there is still actual unmet demand for generative AI capacity today. ChatGPT serves 700 million weekly active users, more than double the US population, who regularly use the AI assistant to develop software, provide personal advice, and compose or edit correspondence and reports. While the outputs may be imperfect at times, people apparently still want them.

OpenAI regularly faces severe capacity constraints to produce those outputs, which leads to limits on how often its users can query the chatbot. ChatGPT Plus subscribers frequently encounter these usage limits, particularly when using more compute-intensive features like image generation or simulated reasoning models. Free users, who represent a gateway for future subscriptions, face even stricter limitations. OpenAI lacks the computing capacity to meet current demand, let alone room for future growth.

Training next-generation AI models compounds the problem. On top of running existing AI models like those that power ChatGPT, OpenAI is constantly working on new technology in the background. It's a process that requires thousands of specialized chips running continuously for months.

The circular investment question

The financial structure of these deals between OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia has drawn scrutiny from industry observers. Earlier this week, Nvidia announced it would invest up to $100 billion as OpenAI deploys Nvidia systems. As Bryn Talkington of Requisite Capital Management told CNBC: "Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia."

Oracle's arrangement follows a similar pattern, with a reported $30 billion-per-year deal where Oracle builds facilities that OpenAI pays to use. This circular flow, which involves infrastructure providers investing in AI companies that become their biggest customers, has raised eyebrows about whether these represent genuine economic investments or elaborate accounting maneuvers.

The arrangements are becoming even more convoluted. The Information reported this week that Nvidia is discussing leasing its chips to OpenAI rather than selling them outright. Under this structure, Nvidia would create a separate entity to purchase its own GPUs, then lease them to OpenAI, which adds yet another layer of circular financial engineering to this complicated relationship.

"NVIDIA seeds companies and gives them the guaranteed contracts necessary to raise debt to buy GPUs from NVIDIA, even though these companies are horribly unprofitable and will eventually die from a lack of any real demand," wrote tech critic Ed Zitron on Bluesky last week about the unusual flow of AI infrastructure investments. Zitron was referring to companies like CoreWeave and Lambda Labs, which have raised billions in debt to buy Nvidia GPUs based partly on contracts from Nvidia itself. It's a pattern that mirrors OpenAI's arrangements with Oracle and Nvidia.

So what happens if the bubble pops? Even Altman himself warned last month that "someone will lose a phenomenal amount of money" in what he called an AI bubble. If AI demand fails to meet these astronomical projections, the massive data centers built on physical soil won't simply vanish. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, fiber optic cable laid during the boom years eventually found use as Internet demand caught up. Similarly, these facilities could potentially pivot to cloud services, scientific computing, or other workloads, but at what might be massive losses for investors who paid AI-boom prices.

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Posted Thursday 25 September 2025 at 3:44 am AEST (my time).

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Car owners in San Francisco fed up with parking tickets had a brief moment of respite on Tuesday thanks to a website called Find My Parking Cops. The site kept tabs on where city workers were issuing tickets, showing the locations of parking control officers on a city map in real time.

I’m using the past tense to tell you about it because shortly after the site went live, the real-time data feed powering it went dark.

Before that sad turn of events, and while the buzz around the site was still high, I spoke to the creator, Riley Walz, about how he put it together. Walz is a software engineer known for building stunty websites. He got the idea for this one after looking at all of the information listed on the parking tickets issued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Each ticket shows the make of the car, the license number, and so on. But right at the top is the ticket’s citation number.

“I figured out that the ticket numbers are predictable,” Walz says, “which means I can efficiently scrape them.”

Walz’s website looked quite similar to Apple’s Find My feature, a tool sometimes used by iOS owners to track the location of family and friends. But rather than people you know IRL, this site showed the trail of tickets issued by parking enforcers as they zipped around San Francisco in their tiny single-seaters.

The website quickly went viral on social media Tuesday, the same day as its initial release. It enjoyed a few good hours, before the site’s functionality vanished: City officials appear to have cut off the sources of data that Walz was using to track parking enforcement.

“In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live,” reads an announcement Walz added to Find My Parking Cops on Tuesday afternoon. “I can’t get data from it anymore.”

“Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly,” an SFMTA representative said in an emailed statement on Tuesday afternoon, after Walz’s site was no longer functional. “We welcome creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption.”

Ticket Master

The idea for Find My Parking Cops was first sparked when Walz’s roommate got a parking fine. Walz noticed the nine-digit identification number on the ticket and started looking for patterns. By using publicly available information, he believed he cracked the code.

“It seems each possible ticket number follows a pattern: add 11, except add 4 if the last digit is 6. So, no ticket can end in 7, 8, or 9,” Walz wrote in a blog post explaining the site. “So, the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610, and after that is 984,946,621.”

He suspected this absurd-seeming pattern was due to limitations baked into the software used by parking control officers. Whatever its reason for existing, the pattern of sequential ticket IDs, paired with parking officers likely claiming batches of ticket numbers, meant Walz was able to track their routes by plotting each parking ticket on a map as soon as it was entered into the system. A car owner could look at the activity of the officers currently out on patrol and see if any of them were slowly descending on their neighborhood.

Last year, parking officials in San Francisco issued over a million tickets within city limits, which amounted to over $100 million in fines for car owners. “I actually don't have a car, but I have plenty of friends that talk about it,” says Walz. Like most costs in San Francisco, these tickets can quickly add up. For example, forgetting to move your car during the weekly street sweeping—an error my household has made more than once—will cost you $90 every time.

Dude, Where’s My Parking Cop?

The website’s live updates were pulled from the city government’s website and visualized on an Apple Map. Find My Parking Cops tracked the routes of individual parking control officers, giving them each unique visual identifiers, as well as their cadence of tickets.

On Tuesday, for example, the site displayed one officer seemingly starting their shift around 10:30 am and handing out 35 tickets over the next few hours as they patrolled a neighborhood in Lower Pacific Heights. The citations logged were primarily for expired meters, which costs $107 per ticket, and not having a residential permit, which costs $108 per ticket. In total, the fines racked up by that one officer over a few hours amounted to almost $4,000.

Who’s handing out the most tickets each week? Walz included a leaderboard on the website that ranked just how much in fines each officer handed out. While officers were only identified on the map by a number and their initials, their cumulative ticket cost was tracked. When WIRED was last able to check Walz’s website on Tuesday, the top fine giver had issued 157 tickets so far, handing out over $16,000 in fees for violations.

Prior to Find My Parking Cops, Walz created another San Francisco–specific website. This one used a phone, placed on a street corner in the Mission District, to identify what songs people were listening to in public. He then uploaded a live feed of the songs, captured and identified through the Shazam app, onto the Bop Spotter website. It provided a little peek into what neighborhood residents were bumping at the time while also slyly nodding at the abundance of surveillance in the city. He’s also previously built a site, called IMG_0001, to surface old YouTube clips uploaded by everyday people in the platform’s early days. Those grainy, private videos stand in stark contrast to the stuff that dominates the platform today.

The parking ticket tracker was another side project for Walz. “I worked in my free time on the weekends the last few weeks to make it happen,” he says.

While Walz's websites sometimes come with a dose of social commentary, he didn’t envision this project as making some kind of grand, sweeping statement about parking tickets or what it means to drive in 2025. Rather, it's another entry in his repertoire of cool websites powered by unique data sources.

“I'm not ‘pro’ parking cop. I'm not ‘anti’ parking cop,” says Walz. “It's just data I was able to unearth, and I thought it would be cool to visualize it.”

And now it’s gone. Representatives for Apple did not respond to immediate requests for comment. I reached out to Walz after the city’s data feed was cut off, but he didn’t pick up.

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Posted Wednesday 24 September 2025 at 1:08 pm AEST (my time).

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It's a rare occurrence for scientists to witness sharks mating in the wild. It's even rarer to catch three leopard sharks—two males and one female—engaging in what amounts to a threesome in the wild on camera, particularly since they are considered an endangered species. But that's just what one enterprising marine biology team achieved, describing the mating sequence in careful, clinical detail in a paper published in the Journal of Ethology.

It's not like scientists don't know anything about leopard shark mating behavior; rather, most of that knowledge comes from studying the sharks in captivity. Whether the behavior is identical in the wild is an open question because there hadn't been any documented observations of leopard shark mating practices in the wild—until now.

Hugo Lassauce, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) in Australia, was working with the Aquarium des Lagons in Nouméa, New Caledonia, to monitor sharks off the coast of that South Pacific territory. Lassauce has been snorkeling daily with sharks for a year as part of that program—always with an accompanying boat for safety purposes—and had seen bits of the leopard shark mating behavior before, but never the entire sequence. Then he spotted a female shark on the sand below with two males hanging onto her pectoral fins—classic pre-copulation (courtship) behavior observed in captive leopard sharks.

“I told my colleague to take the boat away to avoid disturbance, and I started waiting on the surface, looking down at the sharks almost motionless on the sea floor," said Lassauce. “I waited an hour, freezing in the water, but finally they started swimming up. It was over quickly for both males, one after the other. The first took 63 seconds, the other 47. Then the males lost all their energy and lay immobile on the bottom while the female swam away actively.” (Add your own salacious jokes here. You know you're thinking them.)

Three sharks, two cameras

Lassauce had two GoPro Hero 5 cameras ready at hand, albeit with questionable battery life. That's why the video footage has two interruptions to the action: once when he had to switch cameras after getting a "low battery" signal, and a second time when he voluntarily stopped filming to conserve the second camera's battery. Not much happened for 55 minutes, after all, and he wanted to be sure to capture the pivotal moments in the sequence. Lassauce succeeded and was rewarded with triumphant cheers from his fellow marine biologists on the boat, who knew full well the rarity of what had just been documented for posterity.

The lengthy pre-copulation stage involved all three sharks motionless on the seafloor for nearly an hour, after which the female started swimming with one male shark biting onto each of her pectoral fins. A few minutes later, the first male made his move, "penetrating the female's cloaca with his left clasper." Claspers are modified pelvic fins capable of transferring sperm. After the first male shark finished, he lay motionless while the second male held onto the female's other fin. Then the other shark moved in, did his business, went motionless, and the female shark swam away. The males also swam away soon afterward.

Apart from the scientific first, documenting the sequence is a good indicator that this particular area is a critical mating habitat for leopard sharks, and could lead to better conservation strategies, as well as artificial insemination efforts to "rewild" leopard sharks in Australia and several other countries. “It’s surprising and fascinating that two males were involved sequentially on this occasion,” said co-author Christine Dudgeon, also of UniSC, adding, “From a genetic diversity perspective, we want to find out how many fathers contribute to the batches of eggs laid each year by females.”

Journal of Ethology, 2025. DOI: 10.1007/s10164-025-00866-4 (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 24 September 2025 at 5:04 am AEST (my time).

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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.

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.

Hardware nearing readiness

The mission’s Space Launch System rocket has been stacked and declared ready for flight. The Orion spacecraft is in the final stages of preparation and will be attached to the top of the rocket later this year.

Early next year, the combined stack will roll out to the vehicle’s launch site at Kennedy Space Center, said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director. At the pad, the rocket and spacecraft will be connected to ground systems, and after about two weeks, it will undergo a “wet dress rehearsal.”

During this fueling test, the first and second stages of the rocket will be fully loaded with liquid hydrogen and oxygen, and the countdown will be taken down to T-29 seconds. After this test, the rocket will be de-tanked and turned around for launch.

Due to the orbits of Earth and the Moon and various constraints on the mission, there are launch windows each month that last four to eight days. In February, that window opens on the fifth, and it would be an evening launch, Blackwell-Thompson said.

After launching, the Orion spacecraft will separate from the upper stage of the SLS rocket a little more than three hours after liftoff. It will spend about 24 hours in orbit around Earth, during which time the four astronauts on board will perform various checkouts to ensure the vehicle’s life support systems, thrusters, and other equipment are performing nominally.

If everything looks good, the spacecraft will perform a burn of its main engine to put it into a free return trajectory around the Moon. On this course, which would bring Orion back to Earth regardless of any problems with its propulsion system, the spacecraft would fly to the Moon and beyond it by 5,000 to 9,000 miles before returning to our planet.

Testing the heat shield

There, after 10 days, Orion will begin its descent. One of the most important objectives for this flight involves testing the heat shield of the spacecraft during its fiery reentry. Although the heat shield did not fail during the Artemis I test flight in 2022, significant pieces of the charred material unexpectedly broke off during flight. NASA spent the better part of two years investigating this issue before declaring that it had understood the problem.

During reentry, the ablative material decomposes and emits gases. These were intended to dissipate through the porous heat shield. However, during Artemis I—which carried no astronauts—the gases built up more rapidly than expected, and these pressures liberated chunks of the heat shield. After studying and testing the problem, NASA engineers decided that if they modified Orion's reentry path, they could create an environment in which the gases did not build up as much.

"The confidence we have in Artemis II is built upon numerous tests over the course of a couple of years," said Rick Henfling, Artemis II entry flight director. "I have the utmost confidence" in the engineers who performed this analysis, he added.

The NASA officials said Tuesday they did not feel pressure, or "go fever," to push forward with Artemis II as soon as possible. The mission is a stepping stone toward Artemis III, which seeks to land two astronauts on the Moon near the South Pole. In doing so, NASA is competing with China to reach the Moon and explore it for water ice and other resources.

"The administration has asked us to acknowledge that we are, indeed, in what is commonly called a second space race," said Lakiesha Hawkins, acting deputy associate administrator, Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. "There is a desire for us to be the first to return to the surface of the Moon. With that being said, NASA's objective is to do so safely."

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Posted Wednesday 24 September 2025 at 5:03 am AEST (my time).

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On Monday, OpenAI and Nvidia jointly announced a letter of intent for a strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI's AI infrastructure, with Nvidia planning to invest up to $100 billion as the systems roll out. The companies said the first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will come online in the second half of 2026 using Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform.

"Everything starts with compute," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in the announcement. "Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we're building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale."

The 10-gigawatt project represents an astoundingly ambitious and as-yet-unproven scale for AI infrastructure. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that the planned 10 gigawatts equals the power consumption of between 4 million and 5 million graphics processing units, which matches the company's total GPU shipments for this year and doubles last year's volume. "This is a giant project," Huang said in an interview alongside Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman.

To put that power demand in perspective, 10 gigawatts equals the output of roughly 10 nuclear reactors, which typically output about 1 gigawatt per facility. Current data center energy consumption ranges from 10 megawatts to 1 gigawatt, with most large facilities consuming between 50 and 100 megawatts. OpenAI's planned infrastructure would dwarf existing installations, requiring as much electricity as multiple major cities.

The partnership follows OpenAI's rapid user growth to 700 million weekly active users. Nvidia's stock rose nearly 4 percent on Monday following the announcement, adding roughly $170 billion to its market capitalization. The partnership establishes Nvidia as OpenAI's preferred strategic compute and networking partner, alongside OpenAI's existing relationships with Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, and the recently announced Stargate project partners.

The partnership announcement comes a week after Nvidia disclosed a $5 billion investment in Intel, taking a 4 percent stake in its longtime competitor as the two companies plan to co-develop custom data center and PC products.

Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, noted the circular nature of the investment structure to CNBC. "Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia," Talkington told CNBC. "I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen."

Racing for nuclear power

In an August earnings call, Huang told investors that building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs between $50 billion and $60 billion, with about $35 billion going toward Nvidia chips and systems. At that rate, the 10 gigawatt project could require total investment exceeding $500 billion.

While the companies did not specify power sources in their announcement, the massive energy requirements have driven other tech giants to nuclear partnerships for similar projects. In September 2024, Microsoft signed a 20-year agreement to restart a Three Mile Island reactor for 835 megawatts, while in May of this year, Amazon Web Services purchased a data center next to Pennsylvania's Susquehanna nuclear plant with plans to use up to 960 megawatts.

Other massive AI infrastructure projects are emerging across the US. In July, officials in Cheyenne, Wyoming, announced plans for an AI data center that would eventually scale to 10 gigawatts—consuming more electricity than all homes in the state combined, even in its earliest 1.8 gigawatt phase. Whether it's connected to OpenAI's plans remains unclear.

Altman's ambition for mega-sized datacenter deals now stretches back over a year. In September of last year, Constellation Energy CEO Joe Dominguez told Bloomberg he had heard Altman wanted five to seven data centers of 5 gigawatts each. Alex de Vries of Digiconomist told Fortune that seven 5-gigawatt units would have "twice the power consumption of New York State combined."

The planned infrastructure buildout would significantly increase global energy consumption, which also raises environmental concerns. The International Energy Agency estimates that global data centers already consumed roughly 1.5 percent of global electricity in 2024. OpenAI's project also faces practical constraints. Existing power grid connections represent bottlenecks in power-constrained markets, with utilities struggling to keep pace with rapid AI expansion that could push global data center electricity demand to 945 terawatt hours by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

The companies said they expect to finalize details in the coming weeks. Huang told CNBC the $100 billion investment comes on top of all Nvidia's existing commitments and was not included in the company's recent financial forecasts to investors.

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Posted Tuesday 23 September 2025 at 12:22 pm AEST (my time).

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These days, Austin, Texas feels like ground zero for autonomous cars. Although California was the early test bed for autonomous driving tech, the much more permissive regulatory environment in the Lone Star State, plus lots of wide, straight roads and mostly good weather, ticked enough boxes to see companies like Waymo and Zoox set up shop there. And earlier this summer, Tesla added itself to the list. Except things haven't exactly gone well.

According to Tesla's crash reports, spotted by Brad Templeton over at Forbes, the automaker experienced not one but three crashes, all apparently on its first day of testing on July 1. And as we learned from Tesla CEO Elon Musk later in July during the (not-great) quarterly earnings call, by that time, Tesla had logged a mere 7,000 miles in testing.

By contrast, Waymo's crash rate is more than two orders of magnitude lower, with 60 crashes logged over 50 million miles of driving. (Waymo has now logged more than 96 million miles.)

Two of the three Tesla crashes involved another car rear-ending the Model Y, and at least one of these crashes was almost certainly not the Tesla's fault. But the third crash saw a Model Y—with the required safety operator on board—collide with a stationary object at low speed, resulting in a minor injury. Templeton also notes that there was a fourth crash that occurred in a parking lot and therefore wasn't reported. Sadly, most of the details in the crash reports have been redacted by Tesla.

Unlike every other autonomous vehicle developer, Tesla relies on a handful of monocular cameras rather than fusing the inputs from cameras, lidar, and radar.

But wait, there’s more

Ars would never make the mistake of calling Tesla's "FSD" system autonomous—it's a partially automated driving system that requires the driver to provide situational awareness. The human driver is also responsible for not hitting anything. For almost a decade, Musk has claimed that FSD is capable of driving coast to coast unaided, despite Tesla never actually attempting such a feat publicly.

Well, a couple of Tesla owners appear to have given it a try, with a plan to drive a Model Y from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida, operating under FSD the entire way.

At least, that was their plan. In reality, they crashed into road debris after just 60 miles, breaking the car's suspension.

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Posted Tuesday 23 September 2025 at 4:00 am AEST (my time).

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The black hole is estimated to have a mass of 36 billion Suns, making it about 10,000 times heavier than the one at the centre of the Milky Way. This puts it close to the upper limit of how big black holes are thought to get in the universe. For comparison, the Milky Way’s central black hole has a mass of about 4 million Suns.

Scientists know that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) exist at the centre of nearly every large galaxy. Their growth is linked to the growth of their host galaxies over billions of years. In massive elliptical galaxies, the mass of the black hole is usually tied to how fast stars move around in the galaxy’s centre, a property called stellar velocity dispersion. Until now, most measurements of black hole mass have been made in nearby galaxies, because it is very hard to study the central regions of galaxies that are farther away.

The Cosmic Horseshoe gave researchers a rare chance to push beyond that limit. They combined two methods: stellar dynamics, which looks at how stars move, and gravitational lensing, which studies how the galaxy bends light. Using Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) integral-field spectroscopy and sharp images from the Hubble Space Telescope, they modelled both the galaxy’s radial arc, which is sensitive to the inner mass, and the motion of stars in the host galaxy. This allowed them to pin down the central mass distribution and the black hole’s size.

The results were checked using Bayesian model comparison, which confirmed the presence of an ultramassive black hole. The outcome was consistent across different tests, giving the team confidence in the measurement. The Cosmic Horseshoe black hole was found to sit above the expected relation between black hole mass and stellar velocity dispersion. This matches a trend seen in the most massive galaxies, where the relationship appears steeper than in smaller systems. It suggests that at the very highest masses, black holes and galaxies may grow together in a different way.

The black hole’s presence was detected in two clear ways. It bent the path of light passing nearby, and it caused stars in the inner regions of its galaxy to move at nearly 400 kilometres per second. Together, these effects gave a reliable measurement of its mass.

The Cosmic Horseshoe is about 5 billion light-years from Earth. Scientists think that mergers of galaxies over time can lead to the growth of ultramassive black holes, and such a process is expected when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide in about 4.5 billion years.

The discovery came while researchers were studying the galaxy’s dark matter. Now that the method has been shown to work, they hope to use data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope to find more supermassive black holes across a wider range of distances and sizes. These results could help explain how black holes shape the growth of galaxies throughout cosmic history.

Source: University of Portsmouth, Royal Astronomical Society | 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 Tuesday 23 September 2025 at 3:58 am AEST (my time).

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The distance between the start line and turn 1 is shorter at Baku than any other F1 circuit I can think of.  

Credit: Clive Rose/Getty Images

Almost a decade old now, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix is part of the modern breed of Formula 1 street circuits. Set on the shores of the Caspian Sea, the anti-clockwise layout manages to combine some of F1's highest top speeds with a rather fiddly section through the old city, all of it lined with walls and barriers to punish mistakes. It's a low-downforce track, with mostly slow corners, similar to Montreal and Monza.

Despite the questionable record of the hosting country—something all too many F1 races can also offer, including the three held in the US—I have a soft spot for watching Baku, with its interesting mix of old and new architecture, and it usually puts on a good race. I particularly love the helicopter and drone shots that follow the action with a God's eye view, giving you a glimpse behind the building facades and into this city by the sea.

Friday's practice sessions gave the Ferrari-supporting Tifosi something to look forward to, with Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc topping the times for FP2. Hamilton, who has looked at sea this year after his switch to Ferrari, was made the bubbliest we've seen him all season when being interviewed on Friday, and his teammate Leclerc has four pole positions to his name at Baku, further stoking the hope.

Qualifying chaos

Saturday's qualifying session didn't pan out for the red cars. A good time for Hamilton in Q1 was not matched in Q2, and the seven-time world champion, who is yet to step on the podium this year (other than his Sprint win in China), was knocked out in Q2 and relegated to starting 12th. His was not the only hard day that saw a record six red flags interrupt the session, which took more than two hours to complete.

Strong, random gusts of wind caught out plenty, suddenly changing grip levels and even braking points and littering the track with leaves and branches. Williams' Alex Albon clipped his front left wheel on the apex of turn 1 on only his second lap, ending his day almost before it started.

A tailwind caught out Alpine's Pierre Gasly in Q1, and his rookie teammate Franco Colapinto hit the wall at the same corner shortly after. Sauber's Nico Hulkenberg also crashed, although not badly enough that he couldn't return to the pit under his own steam. As mentioned, Hamilton went no further than Q2, and Haas rookie Oliver Bearman was responsible for one of those six red flags when he collided with a wall.

Q3 was interrupted by light rain, just after Carlos Sainz had set a fantastic time in the other Williams. Had more rain arrived, Sainz would surely have started on pole position for Sunday's race. But things cleared up enough for the other drivers to complete some laps.

Or try to, at least. With only four times on the board, Leclerc crashed heavily at turn 15, the third time in recent years. Championship leader Oscar Piastri also found the wall in his McLaren, putting the pair in ninth and eighth for the race. Lando Norris, in the other McLaren, was only able to secure seventh on the grid—like Canada and Monza, the McLaren does not have an advantage at low-downforce circuits.

On the other hand, cold temperatures and low downforce play well to the Mercedes' strength, and its drivers George Russell and Kimi Antonelli would start fourth and fifth. As we saw at Monza, Red Bull has unlocked some speed on tracks with these characteristics, too, and Yuki Tsunoda put in one of his best qualifying performances all year to grab sixth for the start.

Liam Lawson, who started the season at Red Bull before swapping seats with Tsunoda to move to the Racing Bulls, had an even better day, snagging third. Sainz would still start on the front row, but next to Max Verstappen, who demonstrated his mastery of car control in changeable conditions and uncertain grip to get pole position.

Almost no chaos in the race

If Saturday was bad for McLaren, Sunday was worse. Piastri jumped the start, then got swamped on the grid after his anti-stall system kicked in. He made it as far as turn 5 before locking up his front tires and finding the wall, heavily. The championship leader would watch the rest of the race from behind the crash fencing.

The combination of cold temperatures, low downforce, and low cornering speeds meant that the Pirelli tires didn't really degrade, helping out the teams that, unlike McLaren, don't look after their tires well when the situation is reversed. Up front, Verstappen was never really in any threat. Sainz did his best to hang onto second but eventually claimed third—and his first podium for Williams. Second went to Russell, who had to bring his A game to beat Sainz, overcutting him in with a late pit stop. Antonelli came home in fourth, with Lawson a fine fifth place and Tsunoda in sixth.

The sole McLaren of Norris had a rather mid-field day, without the top speed to pass, even with the drag-reduction system. A botched pit stop by his team and poor tire choice didn't help, leaving him to finish seventh. The Ferraris of Hamilton and Leclerc could do no better than eighth and ninth, with Isack Hadjar taking the final point in the other Racing Bull.

With Norris' seventh and Piastri's DNF (his first for 43 races), McLaren fans online appeared to have a crisis of faith, flooding social media with laments that Red Bull and Verstappen were now a real threat. To them, I say, "Calm down and have a cup of tea and a nice biscuit." Piastri has a 69-point lead over Verstappen (a win is worth 25), and Norris is 44 points ahead. Every driver will make a few mistakes during a season, and it's better for Piastri to make them all this weekend than spread them out. Like Canada and Monza, Baku is an outlier—if the Red Bull manages to be this competitive at high-downforce Singapore (our next race), then you can think about panicking.

2025 is not like seasons past, where teams developed their cars all year. With such a big rule change coming for 2026 and the limited resources of the cost cap, upgrades are few and far between, and there's little reason to think the McLaren will suddenly be at a disadvantage for most of the remaining circuits. Then again, Murray Walker used to say that F1 spelled backward is "if"...

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Posted Tuesday 23 September 2025 at 3:53 am AEST (my time).

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For almost three weeks, the production lines at global car giant Jaguar Land Rover have stood still. Usually busy turning out an estimated 1,000 vehicles per day, staff at multiple JLR factories across Britain have been told to stay at home as the automotive firm responds to a damaging cyberattack. But as its recovery has stretched from days to weeks, the knock-on impacts are being felt at the hundreds of companies that supply JLR with parts and materials and risk turning the attack into a full-blown crisis.

On Friday, the UK government admitted that the cyberattack against JLR was having a “significant impact” on the company and on the “wider automotive supply chain.” The concession came as unions and officials have increasingly warned that thousands of jobs in JLR’s sprawling supply chain could be lost, and some smaller companies could go bankrupt. Reports claim JLR itself may be losing up to £50 million ($67 million) per week in the shutdown. Some firms have reportedly already laid off staff, with the Unite union claiming that workers in the JLR supply chain “are being laid off with reduced or zero pay.” Some have been told to “sign up” for government benefits, the union claims.

“It seems unprecedented in the UK to have that level of disruption because of a cyberattack or ransomware attack,” says Jamie MacColl, a senior research fellow in the cyber and tech research group at the security and defence think tank RUSI. That thousands of jobs could be put at risk, either temporarily or permanently, is “a different order of magnitude” to previous incidents, MacColl says.

JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, is one of the UK’s biggest employers, with around 32,800 people directly employed in the country. Stats on the company’s website also claim it supports another 104,000 jobs through its UK supply chain and another 62,900 jobs “through wage-induced spending.” Many other suppliers are also based outside of the UK, as well as some overseas factories.

At the start of September, JLR confirmed it had been “impacted” by a cyberattack and that the company was taking “immediate action” and “proactively shutting down our systems,” effectively grinding its factories and production processes to a halt. As the company investigated the attack, it revealed that “some data” has been “affected” but did not specify what that data is.

Despite efforts to get systems back online, the company confirmed on Wednesday that its “pause” in production has been extended to Wednesday, September 24. “We have taken this decision as our forensic investigation of the cyber incident continues, and as we consider the different stages of the controlled restart of our global operations, which will take time,” JLR said in a statement on Wednesday. “We are very sorry for the continued disruption this incident is causing and we will continue to update as the investigation progresses.”

JLR did not respond to questions from WIRED about what systems were disrupted, the financial cost of the cyberattack to suppliers, nor any measures the company was looking at to support businesses.

Almost immediately after the cyberattack, a group on Telegram called Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, claimed responsibility for the hack. The group name implies a potential collaboration between three loose hacking collectives— Scattered Spider, Lapsus$, and Shiny Hunters—that have been behind some of the most high-profile cyberattacks in recent years. They are often made up of young, English-speaking, cybercriminals who target major businesses.

Building vehicles is a hugely complex process. Hundreds of different companies provide parts, materials, electronics, and more to vehicle manufacturers, and these expansive supply chain networks often rely upon “just-in-time” manufacturing. That means they order parts and services to be delivered in the specific quantities that are needed and exactly when they need them—large stockpiles of parts are unlikely to be held by auto makers.

“The supplier networks that are supplying into these manufacturing plants, they’re all set up for efficiency—economic efficiency, and also logistic efficiency,” says Siraj Ahmed Shaikh, a professor in systems security at Swansea University. “There’s a very carefully orchestrated supply chain,” Shaikh adds, speaking about automotive manufacturing generally. “There’s a critical dependency for those suppliers supplying into this kind of an operation. As soon as there is a disruption at this kind of facility, then all the suppliers get affected.”

One company that makes glass sun roofs has started laying off workers, according to a report in the Telegraph. Meanwhile, another firm told the BBC it has laid off around 40 people so far. French automotive company OPmobility, which employs 38,000 people across 150 sites, told WIRED it is making some changes and monitoring the events. “OPmobility is reconfiguring its production at certain sites as a consequence of the shutdown of its production by one of its customers based in the United Kingdom and depending on the evolution of the situation,” a spokesperson for the firm says.

While it is unclear which specific JLR systems have been impacted by the hackers and what systems JLR took offline proactively, many were likely taken offline to stop the attack from getting worse. “It’s very challenging to ensure containment while you still have connections between various systems,” says Orla Cox, head of EMEA cybersecurity communications at FTI Consulting, which responds to cyberattacks and works on investigations. “Oftentimes as well, there will be dependencies on different systems: You take one down, then it means that it has a knock on effect on another.”

Whenever there’s a hack in any part of a supply chain—whether that is a manufacturer at the top of the pyramid or a firm further down the pipeline—digital connections between companies may be severed to stop attackers from spreading from one network to the next. Connections via VPNs or APIs may be stopped, Cox says. “Some may even take stronger measures such as blocking domains and IP addresses. Then things like email are no longer usable between the two organizations.”

The complexity of digital and physical supply chains, spanning across dozens of businesses and just-in-time production systems, means it is likely that bringing everything back online and up to full-working speed may take time. MacColl, the RUSI researcher, says cybersecurity issues often fail to be debated at the highest level of British politics—but adds this time could be different due to the scale of the disruption. “This incident has the potential to cut through because of the job losses and the fact that MPs in constituencies affected by this will be getting calls,” he says. That breakthrough has already begun.

“This cyberattack is not some mere flicker on a screen, it is fast becoming a cyber-shockwave ripping through our industrial heartlands,” Liam Byrne, a member of Parliament and chair of the House of Commons’ Business and Trade committee said on X. “If government stands back, that shockwave is going to destroy jobs, businesses, and pay packets across Britain.” Other lawmakers have also expressed concerns after speaking with impacted JLR suppliers, and the Unite union has said the British government should intervene with a “furlough” scheme to support workers.

“The recent cyber incident is having a significant impact on Jaguar Land Rover and on the wider automotive supply chain,” the UK’s Department for Business and Trade said in a statement on Friday, following a meeting with automotive industry groups. “The Government, including government cyber experts, are in contact with the company to support the task of restoring production operations, and are working closely with JLR to understand any impacts on the supply chain.”

The attack is likely another incident that demonstrates how fragile supply chains can be when they are faced with disruption. “We do need to shift to a more resilient supply chain and a resilient operation when it comes to things like manufacturing,” says Shaikh, from Swansea University.

Meanwhile, MacColl says that as global tensions are high—with multiple countries taking steps to make sure they are prepared for war—the attack indicates how production can be forced to grind to a halt. “If this is the effect just that criminals can have on our supply chains, then it's quite worrying to think about how unprepared we are for, say, a more coordinated and sustained attack from a potential state adversary,” MacColl says.

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Posted Monday 22 September 2025 at 4:54 pm AEST (my time).

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As we edge closer to the end of the year, I dread having the "end-of-year fatigue" conversations with friends. Most people often complain about having to clock in at work for 40 hours a week, leaving them with little time for resting, connecting with friends and family, and, at the very least, touching grass.

In June, Microsoft released a special Work Trend Index report, which revealed that most employees feel like they are trapped in "the infinite workday." The report suggested that a typical workday for an employee starts at 6 AM while they are still in bed.

However, the cycle doesn't end at 5/6 PM as expected. Most employees wind up carrying work back home, leaving them with little time for personal things. The same goes for the weekend, with Sunday feeling like the new Monday since it is often used to prep for Monday's meetings and leftover tasks from the previous week.

Microsoft indicated that the integration of AI into workflows not only boosts an employee's morale and performance index but also provides ample time for more daunting and important tasks.

It remains to be seen if organizations will warm up to the idea, but companies like Salesforce are already knee-deep into the approach. At the beginning of the year, CEO Marc Benioff indicated that the company was seriously debating hiring software engineers while citing incredible productivity gains from agentic AIs. The executive later revealed that the company uses AI to handle up to 50% of its tasks.

A 3-day workweek might be possible with AI, but its not that glamourous

Welcome to Edition 8.11 of the Rocket Report! We have reached the time of year when it is possible the US government will shut down its operations at the end of this month, depending on congressional action. A shutdown would have significant implications for many NASA missions, but most notably a couple of dozen in the science directorate that the White House would like to shut down. At Ars, we will be watching this issue closely in the coming days. As for Artemis II, it seems to be far enough along that a launch next February seems possible as long as any government closure does not drag on for weeks and weeks.

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.

Rocket Lab to sell common shares. The space company said Tuesday that it intends to raise up to $750 million by selling common shares, MSN reports. This new at-the-market program replaces a prior agreement that allowed Rocket Lab to sell up to $500 million of stock. Under that earlier arrangement, the company had sold roughly $396.6 million in shares before ending the program.

Seeking to scale up ... The program's structure enables Rocket Lab to sell shares periodically through the appointed agents, who may act as either principals or intermediaries. The larger offering indicates that Rocket Lab is aiming to bolster its cash reserves to support ongoing development of its launch services, including the medium-lift Neutron rocket and spacecraft manufacturing operations. The company's stock dropped by about 10 percent after the announcement.

Astra targets mid-2026 for Rocket 4 debut. Astra is targeting next summer for the first flight of its Rocket 4 vehicle as the company prepares to reenter the launch market, Space News reports. At the World Space Business Week conference in Paris, Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said the company was on track for a first launch of Rocket 4 in summer 2026 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. He highlighted progress Astra is making, such as tests of a new engine the company developed for the vehicle’s first stage that produces 42,000 pounds of thrust. Two of those engines will power the first stage, while the upper stage will use a single Hadley engine produced by Ursa Major.

Pricing a launch competitively ... The vehicle will initially be capable of placing about 750 kilograms into low-Earth orbit for a price of $5 million. "That’ll be very competitive," Kemp said in an interview after the presentation, similar to what SpaceX charges for payloads of that size through its rideshare program. The company is targeting customers seeking alternatives to SpaceX in a constrained launch market. “There’s a lot of interest because of the fear that there’s just not a lot of capacity,” he said, particularly for satellites too large to launch on Rocket Lab’s Electron. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Avio seeks to raise 400 million euros. Italian rocket builder Avio’s board of directors has approved a 400 million euro ($471 million) capital increase to fund an expansion of its manufacturing capacity to meet rising demand in the global space and defense markets, European Spaceflight reports. The company expects to complete the capital increase by the end of the year; however, it is still subject to a shareholder vote, scheduled for October 23.

Small rockets, big plans ... The capital raise is part of a new 10-year business plan targeting an average annual growth rate of about 10 percent in turnover and more than 15 percent in core profit. This growth is projected to be driven by a higher Vega C launch cadence, the introduction of the Vega E rocket, continued participation in the Ariane 6 program by providing solid rocket boosters, and the construction of a new defense production facility in the United States, which is expected to be completed by 2028.

Isar working toward second Spectrum launch. In a briefing this week, Isar Aerospace executives discussed the outcome of the investigation into the March 30 launch of the Spectrum rocket from the Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, Space News reports. The vehicle activated its flight termination system about half a minute after liftoff, shutting down its engines and plummeting into the waters just offshore of the pad. The primary issue with the rocket was a loss of attitude control.

Bend it like Spectrum ... Alexandre Dalloneau, vice president of mission and launch operations at Isar, said that the company had not properly characterized bending modes of the vehicle at liftoff. Despite the failure to get to orbit, Dalloneau considers the first Spectrum launch a successful test flight. The company is working toward a second flight of Spectrum, which will take place "as soon as possible," Dalloneau said. He did not give a specific target launch date, but officials indicated they were hoping to launch near the end of this year or early next year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Callisto rocket test delayed again. A new document from the French space agency CNES has revealed that the inaugural flight of the Callisto reusable rocket demonstrator has slipped from 2026 to 2027, European Spaceflight reports. This reusable launch testbed is a decade old. Conceived in 2015, the Cooperative Action Leading to Launcher Innovation in Stage Toss-back Operations (Callisto) project is a collaboration between CNES and the German and Japanese space agencies aimed at maturing reusable rocket technology for future European and Japanese launch systems.

Still waiting ... The Callisto demonstrator will stand 14 meters tall, with a width of 1.1 meters and a takeoff mass of 3,500 kilograms. This latest revision to the program’s timeline comes less than a year after JAXA confirmed in October 2024 that the program’s flight-test campaign had been pushed to 2026. The campaign will be carried out from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana and will include an integration phase followed by eight test flights and two demonstration flights, all to be completed over a period of eight months. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon 9 launches larger Cygnus spacecraft. The first flight of Northrop's upgraded Cygnus spacecraft, called Cygnus XL, launched Sunday evening from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, en route to the International Space Station, Ars reports. Without a rocket of its own, Northrop Grumman inked a contract with SpaceX for three Falcon 9 launches to carry the resupply missions until engineers could develop a new, all-domestic version of the Antares rocket. Sunday's launch was the last of these three Falcon 9 flights. Northrop is partnering with Firefly Aerospace on a new rocket, the Antares 330, using a new US-made booster stage and engines.

A few teething issues ... This new rocket won't be ready to fly until late 2026, at the earliest, somewhat later than Northrop officials originally hoped. The company confirmed it has purchased a fourth Falcon 9 launch from SpaceX for the next Cygnus cargo mission in the first half of next year, in a bid to bridge the gap until the debut of the Antares 330 rocket. Due to problems with the propulsion system on the larger Cygnus vehicle, its arrival at the space station was delayed. But the vehicle successfully reached the station on Thursday, carrying a record 11,000 pounds of cargo.

Launch companies still struggling with cadence. Launch companies are reiterating plans to sharply increase flight rates to meet growing government and commercial demand, even as some fall short of earlier projections, Space News reports. Executives speaking at a September 15 panel at the World Space Business Week conference highlighted efforts to scale up flights of new vehicles that have entered service in the last two years. "The key for us is cadence," said Laura Maginnis, vice president of New Glenn mission management at Blue Origin. However, the publication notes, at this time last year, Blue Origin was projecting eight to 10 New Glenn launches this year. There has been one.

It's difficult to go from 1 to 100 ... Blue Origin is not alone in falling short of forecasts. United Launch Alliance projected 20 launches in 2025 between the Atlas 5 and Vulcan Centaur, but in August, CEO Tory Bruno said the company now expects nine. As recently as June, Arianespace projected five Ariane 6 launches this year, including the debut of the more powerful Ariane 64, with four solid-rocket boosters, but has completed only two Ariane 62 flights, including one in August.

NASA makes some modifications to SLS for Artemis II. This week, the space agency declared the SLS rocket is now "ready" to fly crew for the Artemis II mission early next year. However, NASA and its contractors did make some modest changes after the first flight of the booster in late 2022. For example, the Artemis II rocket includes an improved navigation system compared to Artemis I. Its communications capability has also been improved by repositioning antennas on the rocket to ensure continuous communications with the ground.

Not good, but bad vibrations ... Additionally, SLS will jettison the spent boosters four seconds earlier during the Artemis II ascent than occurred during Artemis I. Dropping the boosters several seconds closer to the end of their burn will give engineers flight data to correlate with projections that shedding the boosters several seconds sooner will yield approximately 1,600 pounds of payload to Earth orbit for future SLS flights. During the Artemis I test flight, the SLS rocket experienced higher-than-expected vibrations near the solid rocket booster attachment points that were caused by unsteady airflow. To steady the airflow, a pair of 6-foot-long strakes flank each booster’s forward connection points on the SLS intertank.

Federal judge sides with SpaceX, FAA. The initial launch of Starship in April 2023 spread debris across a wide area, sending pulverized concrete as far as six miles away as the vehicle tore up the launch pad. After this, environmental groups and other organizations sued the FAA when the federal organization reviewed the environmental impact of this launch and cleared SpaceX to launch again several months later. A federal judge in Washington, DC, ruled this week that the FAA did not violate environmental laws as part of this review, the San Antonio Express-News reports.

Decision grounded within reason ... In his opinion issued Monday, Judge Carl Nichols determined the process was not capricious, writing, "Most of the (programmatic environmental assessment's) conclusions were well-reasoned and supported by the record, and while parts of its analysis left something to be desired, even those parts fell 'within a broad zone of reasonableness.'" The environmental organizations said they were considering the next steps for the case and a potential appeal. (submitted by RP)

Next three launches

September 13: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-12 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 15:44 UTC

September 21: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-27 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 09:20 UTC

September 21: Falcon 9 | NROL-48 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 17:23 UTC

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Does alcohol enhance one's foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.

Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2025 Ig Nobel prizes.

Biology

Citation: Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, Say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Ueda, Hiroyuki Hirooka, and Katsutoshi Kino, for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies.

Any dairy farmer can tell you that biting flies are a pestilent scourge for cattle herds, which is why one so often sees cows throwing their heads, stamping their feet, flicking their tails, and twitching their skin—desperately trying to shake off the nasty creatures. There's an economic cost as well since it causes the cattle to graze and feed less, bed down for shorter times, and start bunching together, which increases heat stress and risks injury to the animals. That results in less milk yield for dairy cows and less beef yields from feedlot cattle.

You know who isn't much bothered by biting flies? The zebra. Scientists have long debated the function of the zebra's distinctive black-and-white striped pattern. Is it for camouflage? Confusing potential predators? Or is it to repel those pesky flies? Tomoki Kojima et al. decided to put the latter hypothesis to the test, painting zebra stripes on six pregnant Japanese black cows at the Aichi Agricultural Research Center in Japan. They used water-borne lacquers that washed away after a few days, so the cows could take turns being in three different groups: zebra stripes, just black stripes, or no stripes (as a control).

The results: the zebra stripes significantly decreased both the number of biting flies on the cattle and the animals' fly-repelling behaviors compared to those with black stripes or no stripes. The one exception was for skin twitching—perhaps because it is the least energy intensive of those behaviors. Why does it work? The authors suggest it might have something to do with modulation brightness or polarized light that confuses the insects' motion detection system, used to control their approach when landing on a surface. But that's a topic for further study.

Chemistry

Citation: Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway, for experiments to test whether eating Teflon [a form of plastic more formally called "polytetrafluoroethylene"] is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content.

Diet sodas and other zero-calorie drinks are a mainstay of the modern diet, thanks to the development of artificial sweeteners whose molecules can't be metabolized by the human body. The authors of this paper are intrigued by the notion of zero-calorie foods, which they believe could be achieved by increasing the satisfying volume and mass of food without increasing the calories. And they have just the additive for that purpose: polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), more commonly known as Teflon.

Yes, the stuff they use on nonstick cookware. They insist that Teflon is inert, heat-resistant, impervious to stomach acid, tasteless, cost-effective, and available in handy powder form for easy mixing into food. They recommend a ratio of three parts food to one part Teflon powder.

The authors understand that to the average layperson, this is going to sound like a phenomenally bad idea—no thank you, I would prefer not to have powdered Teflon added to my food. So they spend many paragraphs citing all the scientific studies on the safety of Teflon—it didn't hurt rats in feeding trials!—as well as the many applications for which it is already being used. These include Teflon-coated stirring rods used in labs and coatings on medical devices like bladder catheters and gynecological implants, as well as the catheters used for in vitro fertilization. And guys, you'll be happy to know that Teflon doesn't seem to affect sperm motility or viability. I suspect this will still be a hard sell in the consumer marketplace.

Physics

Citation: Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas, and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness.

"Pasta alla cacio e pepe" is a simple dish: just tonnarelli pasta, pecorino cheese, and pepper. But its simplicity is deceptive. The dish is notoriously challenging to make because it's so easy for the sauce to form unappetizing clumps with a texture more akin to stringy mozzarella rather than being smooth and creamy. As we reported in April, Italian physicists came to the rescue with a foolproof recipe based on their many scientific experiments, according to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids. The trick: using corn starch for the cheese and pepper sauce instead of relying on however much starch leaches into the boiling water as the pasta is cooked.

Traditionally, the chef will extract part of the water and starch solution—which is cooled to a suitable temperature to avoid clumping as the cheese proteins "denaturate"—and mix it with the cheese to make the sauce, adding the pepper last, right before serving. But the authors note that temperature is not the only factor that can lead to this dreaded “mozzarella phase." If one tries to mix cheese and water without any starch, the clumping is more pronounced. There is less clumping with water containing a little starch, like water in which pasta has been cooked. And when one mixes the cheese with pasta water "risottata"—i.e., collected and heated in a pan so enough water evaporates that there is a higher concentration of starch—there is almost no clumping.

The authors found that the correct starch ratio is between 2 to 3 percent of the cheese weight. Below that, you get the clumping phase separation; above that, and the sauce becomes stiff and unappetizing as it cools. Pasta water alone contains too little starch. Using pasta water "risottata" may concentrate the starch, but the chef has less control over the precise amount of starch. So the authors recommend simply dissolving 4 grams of powdered potato or corn starch in 40 grams of water, heating it gently until it thickens and combining that gel with the cheese. They also recommend toasting the black pepper briefly before adding it to the mixture to enhance its flavors and aromas.

Engineering Design

Citation: Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal, for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, "how foul-smelling shoes affects the good experience of using a shoe-rack."

Shoe odor is a universal problem, even in India, according to the authors of this paper, who hail from Shiv Nadar University (SNU) in Uttar Pradesh. All that heat and humidity means people perspire profusely when engaging even in moderate physical activity. Add in a lack of proper ventilation and washing, and shoes become a breeding ground for odor-causing bacteria called Kytococcus sedentarius. Most Indians make use of shoe racks to store their footwear, and the odors can become quite intense in that closed environment.

Yet nobody has really studied the "smelly shoe" problem when it comes to shoe racks. Enter Kumar and Mittal, who conducted a pilot study with the help of 149 first-year SNU students. More than half reported feeling uncomfortable about their own or someone else's smelly shoes, and 90 percent kept their shoes in a shoe rack. Common methods to combat the odor included washing the shoes and drying them in the sun; using spray deodorant; or sprinkling the shoes with an antibacterial powder. They were unaware of many current odor-combatting products on the market, such as tea tree and coconut oil solutions, thyme oil, or isopropyl alcohol.

Clearly, there is an opportunity to make a killing in the odor-resistant shoe rack market. So naturally Kumar and Mittal decided to design their own version. They opted to use bacteria-killing UV rays (via a UV-C tube light) as their built-in "odor eater," testing their device on the shoes of several SNU athletes, "which had a very strong noticeable odor." They concluded that an exposure time of two to three minutes was sufficient to kill the bacteria and get rid of the odor.

Aviation

Citation: Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine, and Berry Pinshow, for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats' ability to fly and also their ability to echolocate.

Nature is rife with naturally occurring ethanol, particularly from ripening fruit, and that fruit in turn is consumed by various microorganisms and animal species. There are occasional rare instances of some mammals, birds, and even insects consuming fruit rich in ethanol and becoming intoxicated, making those creatures more vulnerable to potential predators or more accident-prone due to lessened motor coordination. Sánchez et al. decided to look specifically at the effects of ethanol on Egyptian fruit bats, which have been shown to avoid high-ethanol fruit. The authors wondered if this might be because the bats wanted to avoid becoming inebriated.

They conducted their experiments on adult male fruit bats kept in an outdoor cage that served as a long flight corridor. The bats were given liquid food with varying amounts of ethanol and then released in the corridor, with the authors timing how long it took each bat to fly from one end to the other. A second experiment followed the same basic protocol, but this time the authors recorded the bats' echolocation calls with an ultrasonic microphone. The results: The bats that received liquid food with the highest ethanol content took longer to fly the length of the corridor, evidence of impaired flight ability. The quality of those bats' echolocation was also adversely affected, putting them at a higher risk of colliding with obstacles mid-flight.

Psychology

Citation: Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac, for investigating what happens when you tell narcissists—or anyone else—that they are intelligent.

Not all narcissists are created equal. There are vulnerable narcissists who tend to be socially withdrawn, have low self-esteem, and are prone to negative emotions. And then there are grandiose narcissists, who exhibit social boldness, high self-esteem, and are more likely to overestimate their own intelligence. The prevailing view is that this overconfidence stems from narcissism. The authors wanted to explore whether this effect might also work in reverse, i.e., that believing one has superior intelligence due to positive external feedback can lead to at least a temporary state of narcissism.

Zajenkowski et al. recruited 361 participants from Poland who were asked to rate their level of intelligence compared to other people; complete the Polish version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory; and take an IQ test to compare their perceptions of their own intelligence with an objective measurement. The participants were then randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group received positive feedback—telling them they did indeed have a higher IQ than most people—while the other received negative feedback.

The results confirmed most of the researchers' hypotheses. In general, participants gave lower estimates of their relative intelligence after completing the IQ test, which provided an objective check of sorts. But the type of feedback they received had a measurable impact. Positive feedback enhanced their feelings of uniqueness (a key aspect of grandiose narcissism). Those who received negative feedback rated their own intelligence as being lower, and that negative feedback had a larger effect than positive feedback. The authors concluded that external feedback helped shape the subjects' perception of their own intelligence, regardless of the accuracy of that feedback.

Nutrition

Citation: Daniele Dendi, Gabriel H. Segniagbeto, Roger Meek, and Luca Luiselli, for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.

Move over, Pizza Rat, here come the Pizza Lizards—rainbow lizards, to be precise. This is a species common to urban and suburban West Africa. The lizards primarily live off insects and arthropods, but their proximity to humans has led to some developing a more omnivorous approach to their foraging. Bread is a particular favorite. Case in point: One fine sunny day at a Togo seaside resort, the authors noticed a rainbow lizard stealing a tourist's slice of four-cheese pizza and happily chowing down.

Naturally, they wanted to know if this was an isolated incident or whether the local rainbow lizards routinely feasted on pizza slices. And did the lizards have a preferred topping? Inquiring minds need to know. So they monitored the behavior of nine particular lizards, giving them the choice between a plate of four-cheese pizza and a plate of "four seasons" pizza, spaced about 10 meters apart.

It only took 15 minutes for the lizards to find the pizza and eat it, sometimes fighting over the remaining slices. But they only ate the four-cheese pizza. For the authors, this suggests there might be some form of chemical cues that attract them to the cheesy pizzas, or perhaps it's easier for them to digest. I'd love to see how the lizards react to the widely derided Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza.

Pediatrics

Citation: Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp, for studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby's mother eats garlic.

Mennella and Beauchamp designed their experiment to investigate two questions: whether the consumption of garlic altered the odor of a mother's breast milk, and if so, whether those changes affected the behavior of nursing infants. (Garlic was chosen because it is known to produce off flavors in dairy cow milk and affect human body odor.) They recruited eight women who were exclusively breastfeeding their infants, taking samples of their breast milk over a period when the participants abstained from eating sulfurous foods (garlic, onion, asparagus), and more samples after the mothers consumed either a garlic capsule or a placebo.

The results: Mothers who ingested the garlic capsules produced milk with a perceptibly more intense odor, as evaluated by several adult panelists brought in to sniff the breast milk samples. The strong odor peaked at two hours after ingestion and decreased fats, which is consistent with prior research on cows that ingested highly odorous feeds. As for the infants, those whose mothers ingested garlic attached to the breast for longer periods and sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic. This could be relevant to ongoing efforts to determine whether sensory experiences during breastfeeding can influence how readily infants accept new foods upon weaning, and perhaps even their later food preferences.

Literature

Citation: The late Dr. William B. Bean, for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.

If you're surprised to see a study on fingernail growth rates under the Literature category, it will all make sense once you read the flowery prose stylings of Dr. Bean. He really did keep detailed records of how fast his fingernails grew for 35 years, claiming in his final report that "the nail provides a slowly moving keratin kymograph that measures age on the inexorable abscissa of time." He sprinkles his observations with ponderous references to medieval astrology, James Boswell, and Moby Dick, with a dash of curmudgeonly asides bemoaning the sterile modern medical teaching methods that permeate "the teeming mass of hope and pain, technical virtuosity, and depersonalization called a 'health center.'"

So what did our pedantic doctor discover in those 35 years, not just studying his own nails, but meticulously reviewing all the available scientific literature? Well, for starters, the rate of fingernail growth diminishes as one ages; Bean noted that his growth rates remained steady early on, but "slowed down a trifle" over the last five years of his project. Nails grow faster in children than adults. A warm environment can also accelerate growth, as does biting one's fingernails—perhaps, he suggests, because the biting stimulates blood flow to the area. And he debunks the folklore of hair and nails growing even after death: it's just the retraction and contraction of the skin post-mortem that makes it seem like the nails are growing.

Peace

Citation: Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person's ability to speak in a foreign language.

Alcohol is well-known to have detrimental effects on what's known in psychological circles as "executive functioning," impacting things like working memory and inhibitory control. But there's a widespread belief among bilingual people that a little bit of alcohol actually improves one's fluency in a foreign language, which also relies on executive functioning. So wouldn't being intoxicated actually have an adverse effect on foreign language fluency? Renner et al. decided to investigate further.

They recruited 50 native German-speaking undergrad psychology students at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who were also fluent in Dutch. They were randomly divided into two groups. One group received an alcoholic drink (vodka with bitter lemon), and the other received water. Each participant consumed enough to be slightly intoxicated after 15 minutes, and then engaged in a discussion in Dutch with a native Dutch speaker. Afterward, they were asked to rate their self-perception of their skill at Dutch, with the Dutch speakers offering independent observer ratings.

The researchers were surprised to find that intoxication improved the participants' Dutch fluency, based on the independent observer reports. (Self-evaluations were largely unaffected by intoxication levels.) One can't simply attribute this to so-called "Dutch courage," i.e., increased confidence associated with intoxication. Rather, the authors suggest that intoxication lowers language anxiety, thereby increasing one's foreign language proficiency, although further research would be needed to support that hypothesis.

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Posted Friday 19 September 2025 at 12:08 pm AEST (my time).

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A sidereal day — Earth’s true rotation period relative to distant stars — lasts 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds and 90.5 milliseconds. The solar day, which is the basis for civil time, is about four minutes longer because Earth must rotate slightly more than 360 degrees for the Sun to appear in the same position in the sky.

On August 5, both the sidereal and solar days will be slightly shorter than average. Scientists attribute this to a combination of factors, including atmospheric winds, ocean currents, movements within Earth’s molten interior, and the gravitational pull of the Moon.

Since the 1970s, deviations in Earth’s rotation have been measured using atomic clocks and astronomical observations. In 1973, for example, the cumulative lag over the year was +1,106 milliseconds, prompting the introduction of leap seconds to keep atomic time aligned with Earth’s rotation.

Even small deviations matter for systems like GPS. A 1.33 millisecond difference can cause a positional error of about 62 centimetres at the equator. Without corrections, the drift in 1973 would have led to GPS errors of around half a kilometre.

To measure Earth’s rotation with such precision, scientists use quasars — extremely bright, distant objects powered by supermassive black holes. Because they are billions of light years away, quasars appear essentially stationary, making them ideal reference points. Radio telescopes track Earth’s position relative to these cosmic beacons, achieving sub-millisecond accuracy.

These measurements feed into computer models that account for atmospheric, oceanic, and celestial influences to predict day length. Winds are the largest short-term factor, as they interact with Earth’s surface and can slow its spin. In the northern hemisphere, winds are fastest in winter and slowest in summer, making June to August the period with the shortest days.

Long-term changes also affect rotation. Melting polar ice redistributes mass toward the equator, slowing Earth’s spin in the same way a spinning skater slows when extending their arms. Earthquakes and other geological events can also shift mass and alter rotation.

The Moon’s tidal pull has been gradually slowing Earth for billions of years. As tidal bulges are carried ahead of the Moon’s orbit, the Moon’s gravity drags them back, transferring rotational energy from Earth to the Moon and causing it to drift away at 3.8 centimetres per year.

From 1973 to 2020, Earth’s rotation slowed each year, requiring 27 leap seconds in total. Since 2020, however, Earth has been spinning slightly faster, likely due to interactions between its core and mantle.

August 5 was identified in advance as one of the year’s fastest days, along with July 5 and July 22, due to a combination of internal dynamics, seasonal wind patterns, and the Moon’s position reducing tidal drag.

While the change will not be perceptible to human senses, “to precision atomic clocks, quasar‐referenced astronomical measurements, it will be obvious.”

Source: The Conversation

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 19 September 2025 at 12:07 pm AEST (my time).

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the Earth you walk on today might not be the same planet that was born 4.5 billion years ago. Many scientists believe that in its infancy, Earth collided with another world the size of Mars, and that instead of being destroyed, it was transformed, incorporating the mass of that foreign body to become the planet we know. Recent research adds another layer of relevance to that hypothesized cosmic event: Scientists believe that without that other body, the basic conditions for life to emerge on Earth might never have appeared.

A team from the University of Bern in Switzerland argues that, due to its proximity to the sun, the proto-Earth that existed before this potential collision lost the volatile elements essential to form complex molecules. Any hydrogen, carbon, or sulfur, their analysis suggests, evaporated in just the first 3 million years after proto-Earth’s formation. And so if Earth had evolved without external inputs, they say, it would probably be a drier world, more hostile to the development of complex life.

On the other hand, if a body formed in the outskirts of the solar system—a region that produces rocks with abundant water and other volatile elements—and this then hit a rocky planet like proto-Earth, then this could have provided the strange chemical richness that characterizes our planet today, even after Earth’s initial aggressive evaporation process. This hypothesis coincides with other proposals that point to an extraterrestrial origin of water, according to which icy meteorites bombarded the primitive Earth and deposited their molecules.

In a study published in Science Advances, researchers precisely measured the radioactive decay of two isotopes, manganese-53 to chromium-53, in both terrestrial samples and meteorite fragments found on Earth. Since these space rocks formed at the same time as the sun and the solar system’s planets, analyzing traces of them and their composition is equivalent to opening a time capsule from the past. By calculating the radioactive decay of manganese-53, the researchers revealed the point in time when the planets stopped exchanging material with their environment and fixed the chemical elements they would keep forever.

Their results show that proto-Earth sealed its elements just 3 million years after the birth of the solar system. Moreover, they found that the early planet’s ratio of manganese to chromium was very low, suggesting that proto-Earth was an extremely hot world, capable of expelling manganese. Since this element is less volatile than other more important elements, such as hydrogen, carbon, or sulfur, these too must have escaped.

“Thanks to our results, we know that the proto-Earth was initially a dry rocky planet. It can therefore be assumed that it was only the collision with Theia that brought volatile elements to Earth and ultimately made life possible there,” Pascal Kruttasch, first author of the report, said in a University of Bern press release.

Theia is the name of the hypothetical body thought to have hit proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The researchers believe the impact would have occurred between 30 and 100 million years after the beginning of the solar system—that is, several tens of millions of years after the ancestor of our planet was known to be a very dry world.

However, the arrival of water and other volatile elements does not equate to the immediate emergence of life. Water alone does not produce life, but it does create a much more favorable chemical and physical environment for other molecules to appear and, with them, the biological processes that underlie cells. In this sense, Theia set the stage but did not ignite the spark.

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

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Posted Friday 19 September 2025 at 4:32 am AEST (my time).

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Certain dogs can not only memorize the names of objects like their favorite toys, but they can also extend those labels to entirely new objects with a similar function, regardless of whether or not they are similar in appearance, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. It's a cognitively advanced ability known as "label extension," and for animals to acquire it usually involves years of intensive training in captivity. But the dogs in this new study developed the ability to classify their toys by function with no formal training, merely by playing naturally with their owners.

Co-author Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, likens this ability to a person calling a hammer and a rock by the same name, or a child understanding that "cup" can describe a mug, a glass, or a tumbler, because they serve the same function. “The rock and the hammer look physically different, but they can be used for the same function," she said. "So now it turns out that these dogs can do the same.”

Fugazza and her Hungarian colleagues have been studying canine behavior and cognition for several years. For instance, in 2023, we reported on the group's experiments on how dogs interpret gestures, such as pointing at a specific object. A dog will interpret the gesture as a directional cue, unlike a human toddler, who will more likely focus on the object itself. It's called spatial bias, and the team concluded that the phenomenon arises from a combination of how dogs see (visual acuity) and how they think, with "smarter" dog breeds prioritizing an object's appearance as much as its location. This suggests the smarter dogs' information processing is more similar to that of humans.

Another aspect of the study involved measuring the length of a dog's head, which prior research has shown is correlated with visual acuity. The shorter a dog's head, the more similar their visual acuity is to human vision. That's because there is a higher concentration of retinal ganglion cells in the center of their field of vision, making vision sharper and giving such dogs binocular depth vision. The testing showed that dogs with better visual acuity, and who also scored higher on the series of cognitive tests, also exhibited less spatial bias. This suggests that canine spatial bias is not simply a sensory matter but is also influenced by how they think. "Smarter" dogs have less spatial bias.

Arya with a much-loved toy.

Claudia Fugazza/CC BY-SA

Gaia's toy makes a fetching hat.

Claudia Fugazza/CC BY-SA

 

Harvey would like to play.

Claudia Fugazza/CC BY-SA

 

Most relevant to the current paper is the group's 2022 study that discovered that dogs store key sensory features about their toys—notably what they look like and how they smell—and recall those features when searching for the named toy. Prior studies had suggested that dogs typically rely on vision, or a combination of sight and smell, to locate target objects. A few dogs can also identify objects based on verbal labels, which the authors call "gifted word learner" (GWL) dogs.

All the dogs—regardless of whether they were GWL dogs or typical dogs—successfully picked out the target toys in both light and dark conditions, although it took them longer to locate the toys in the dark. Most relied on visual cues, even though dogs possess an excellent sense of smell. However, the dogs sniffed more frequently and longer when searching for the toy in the dark.

The GWL dogs were also able to select the named toys when commanded by their owners, with similar reliance on visual cues—what the toy looks like—augmented by their sense of smell (what the toy smells like), particularly in dark conditions. This confirmed that when dogs play with a toy, they record its features using multiple senses, creating a "multistory mental image." They prefer to rely primarily on visual cues, but dogs can incorporate other sensory cues, most notably smell, when the conditions call for it.

Form and function

Having shown that the dogs could learn the names of their favorite toys, Fugazzi et al. turned their attention to studying whether the dogs could extend that ability to recognizing the functionality of their toys. In humans, babies rely on words for early perceptual categorization, but preferentially using an object's function over perceptual similarity to classify things doesn't emerge until the toddler or preschool stage. The team tested seven of the GWL dogs (six border collies and one Blue heeler) who had already demonstrated in the prior experiment their ability to learn the names of dozens of toys through everyday play.

Whisky and a pizza toy.

Helge O. Svela

 

Bindi with a pull toy.

Claudia Fugazza/CC BY-SA

 

Gadget cuddles with favorite toy.

Gillian Beltz-Mohrmann

 

Basket with a pull toy.

Elle Baumgartel Austin

 

First, the dogs were taught to associate the terms "pull" and "fetch" not with a single toy, but a group of toys that looked different but were used either to pull or to fetch during play sessions. Owners would call out the correct label each time. Once the dogs had demonstrated that they could correctly choose a pull or a fetch toy on command, the dogs moved to a new generalization phase. They were introduced to new toys—also differing in appearance—and owners played with them via pulling or fetching without saying the labels out loud.

“For these new toys, they’ve never heard the name, but they have played either pull or fetch, and so the dog has to choose which toy was used to play which game,” Fugazza said. “This was done in a natural setup, with no extensive training. It's just owners playing for a week with the toys. So, it’s a natural type of interaction.” Finally, the dogs were asked to select a pull or fetch toy from among the unlabeled items.

The results: statistically, the dogs were able to correctly select unlabeled toys more often than they would by pure chance, with no formal training. “We have shown that dogs learn object labels really fast, and they remember them for a long period, even without rehearsing,” Fugazza said. “And I think the way they extend labels also beyond perceptual similarities gives an idea of the breadth of what these labels could be for dogs.” The precise mechanism by which this learning takes place is still unknown, but the results pave the way for further studies into how language-related skills may function in dogs and other animals.

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.013  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 19 September 2025 at 4:30 am AEST (my time).

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Evolution has adapted the digits of mammals for an enormous range of uses, from our opposable thumbs to the spindly digits that support bat wings to the robust bones that support the hoofs of horses. But how we got digits in the first place hasn't been entirely clear. The fish that limbed vertebrates evolved from don't have obvious digit equivalents, and the most common types of fish just have a large collection of rays supporting their fins.

Despite this uncertainty, we have identified some genes that seem to be essential for both digit formation and the development of rays in the fins of fish, suggesting that there are parallels between the two. But a new study suggests that these parallels are a bit of an accident, and digits come by re-deploying a genetic network that controls a completely different process: the formation of the cloaca, a single organ that handles all of the fish's excretion.

Hox genes and digits

One of the key regulators of limb development is a set of genes called homeobox proteins, which attach to DNA and regulate the activity of nearby genes. In animals, many of these homeobox, or hox genes, are formed into clusters. Mammals have four clusters of hox genes, each of which encodes roughly 10 individual homeobox proteins. The cluster helps to organize where the hox genes are active, with the genes at one end of the cluster being active at the front of an embryo, and those at the other end active at the tail.

A similar thing seems to happen in limb development, with genes at one end of the cluster active during the formation of bones nearest the shoulder, and others becoming active as limbs closer to the end of the limb are forming. Ultimately, the specification of digits seems to require the hox genes at the far end of the cluster. In mice, eliminating the Hoxa13 and Hoxd13 genes causes the formation of digits to fail entirely.

There were some indications that the same thing is true in fish, where the elimination of equivalent hox genes also interfered with the formation of the rays at the ends of fins. This would suggest that digits formed by elaborating on a genetic system that already existed in order to produce fins.

However, when a US-French team started looking at the regulation of one set of hox genes in the limbs, things turned out to be a bit more complicated. The hox gene clusters have two chunks of regulatory DNA that help set the activity of the genes within the cluster, one upstream of the genes, one downstream. (For the molecular biologists among us, that's on the 5' and 3' sides of the gene cluster.) And we know that in vertebrates, some of the key regulatory DNA for one of the clusters is on the upstream side, since deleting it left all the genes in the cluster inactive in the region of the limb where digits form.

Same place, different reasons

So, the research team behind the new work deleted the equivalent region in a fish (the zebrafish) using the gene editing tool CRISPR. And, deleting the same area that wipes out hox gene activity in the digits in mice did... not very much. The hox gene activity was slightly reduced, but these genes were still active in the right place at the right time to make digits. So, while the activity looked the same, the reasons for the activity seem to be different in fish and mice. Which means that hox activity in the digits isn't the ancestral state; instead, it seems to have evolved separately in the ray-finned fish and vertebrate lineages.

So, the researchers asked a simple question: If the regulatory DNA they deleted didn't activate these genes in the limb, where was it needed? So, the researchers looked at where these hox genes were active in fish with and without the deletion. They found one region where it seems to matter: the developing cloaca. In fish, the cloaca is a single orifice that handles excretion (both urine and fecal material) as well as reproduction. So, it's basically the fish equivalent of our rear ends.

The team narrowed down the DNA responsible for the cloaca and showed that there were equivalent regions in mice, as well as fish that are more closely related to limbed vertebrates, like the gar. They also showed that deletion of some of the hox genes that are expressed in the digits caused severe defects in both the digestive and urogenital systems near the areas where these exit the bodies. This suggests that a role in the development of this region for hox genes is the ancestral state, and was present prior to the limbed vertebrates diverging from fish.

At the same time, the results suggest that the genetic system that produces this gene activity in the limbs was not the ancestral state. Which would mean that its activation in the digits was the product of co-opting the cloacal genetic program and deploying it in the developing limb. In other words, you have digits because a bit of the genetics that help you form your butt was used to activate the right genes where they're needed.

The strange thing about this is that a completely different genetic program activates the exact same genes in roughly the same location during the formation of fin rays. It's possible that this was also present in the common ancestor of zebrafish and limbed vertebrates, but wasn't strong or consistent enough to produce the sort of digits we see today, so there was a gradual transition to the sort of system we see today. Since we're unlikely to ever start gene editing lungfish or coelacanths, it may be difficult to ever get a clear picture on this matter.

In any case, the work is a great demonstration that the version of Occam's razor that's been adopted by science comes with a key caveat: The simplest explanation that fits the data is probably the right one. For a while, the simplest explanation seemed to be that a single genetic system produces fin rays and digits. But, with more data, that no longer seems as tenable, and we may have to fall back to an explanation that's considerably more complex.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09548-0  (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 18 September 2025 at 5:12 pm AEST (my time).

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When Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency began wielding its ax at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earlier this year, many believed this was done to weaken the agency's oversight over Tesla. But despite the Tesla CEO's sometimes-close relationship with the Trump administration, it appears there is still some independence left within NHTSA: earlier this week, the agency opened a new safety investigation into the door handles of the Tesla Model Y.

The timing may not be coincidental; last week, the safety hazard posed by badly designed retractable door handles entered the spotlight thanks to a comprehensive report by Bloomberg's Dana Hull. As Hull detailed, Tesla's door handles rely on the car's 12 V battery to work. Should this fail, there is no way to open the doors from the outside, something that has cost lives as first responders have been unable to free occupants from burning Teslas.

While front seat passengers have easily accessible interior emergency door releases, some Teslas lack any way of opening the rear doors from the inside after a crash. Other, more recent Models 3 and Y have manual releases located under a panel underneath the rear seat.

Break window to free child

NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation says it has received nine complaints from the owners of model year 2021 Tesla Model Y that have resulted in this investigation. The complaints detail owners' experiences with a 12 V power failure and inoperable doors, trapping children or dogs in cars on hot days. In most cases, the car suffered a power failure after the parent had placed the child in the back seat, and in four instances, the only way to free the trapped occupants was by breaking a window.

NHTSA notes that while there are manual emergency door releases, "a child may not be able to access or operate the releases even if the vehicle’s driver is aware of them." To make matters worse, NHTSA says that none of the reported complaints say they saw a low-voltage warning light before the 12 V battery failed. The agency also criticizes the complicated process required to start a Tesla with off-board 12 V power, which "requires applying 12 volts DC from a separate power source to two different points accessible from the vehicle’s exterior," something that "may not be readily available to owners or well known."

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Posted Thursday 18 September 2025 at 4:25 am AEST (my time).

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Located 700 meters underground near the city of Jiangmen in southern China, a giant sphere—35 meters in diameter and filled with more than 20,000 tons of liquid—has just started a mission that will last for decades. This is Juno, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, a new, large-scale experiment studying some of the most mysterious and elusive particles known to science.

Neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe with mass. They are fundamental particles, meaning they don’t break down into smaller constituent parts, which makes them very small and very light. They also have zero electrical charge; they are neutral—hence their name. All of this means that they very often don’t interact with other matter they come into contact with, and can pass right through it without affecting it, making them difficult to observe. It’s for this reason that they’re sometimes referred to as “ghost particles.”

They also have the ability to shift (or “oscillate”) between three different forms, also known as “flavors”: electron, mu, and tau. (Note that electron-flavored neutrinos are different from electrons; the latter are a different type of fundamental particle, with a negative charge.)

The fact that neutrinos oscillate was proven by the physicists Takaaki Kajita and Arthur Bruce McDonald. In two separate experiments, they observed that electron-flavored neutrinos oscillate into mu- and tau-flavored neutrinos. As a result they demonstrated that these particles have mass, and that the mass of each flavor is different. For this, they won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015.

But an important yet still unknown fact is how these masses are ordered—which of the three flavors has the greatest mass, and which the least. If physicists had a better understanding of neutrino mass, this could help better describe the behavior and evolution of the universe. This is where Juno comes in.

A Unique Experiment

Neutrinos can’t be seen with conventional particle detectors. Instead, scientists have to look for the rare signs of them interacting with other matter—and this is what Juno’s giant sphere is for. Called a scintillator, it’s filled with a sensitive internal liquid made up of a solvent and two fluorescent compounds. If a neutrino passing through this matter interacts with it, it will produce a flash of light. Surrounding the liquid is a massive stainless steel lattice that supports a vast array of highly sensitive light sensors, called photomultiplier tubes, capable of detecting even a single photon produced by an interaction between a neutrino and the liquid, and converting it into a measurable electrical signal.

“The Juno experiment picks up the legacy of its predecessors, with the difference that it is much larger,” says Gioacchino Ranucci, deputy head of the experiment and the former head of Borexino, another neutrino-hunting experiment. One of the main features of Juno, Ranucci explains, is that Juno can “see” both neutrinos and their antimatter counterpart: antineutrinos. The former are typically produced in Earth’s atmosphere or by the decay of radioactive materials in Earth’s crust, or else arrive from outer space—coming from stars, black holes, supernovae, or even the Big Bang. Antineutrinos, however, are artificially produced, in this case by two nuclear power plants located near the detector.

“As they propagate, neutrinos and antineutrinos continue to oscillate, transforming into each other,” Ranucci says. Juno will be able to capture all of these signals, he explains, showing how they oscillate, “with a precision never before achieved.”

Juno’s primary goal is to find a solution to the neutrino mass-ordering problem. It’s known that the electron-flavored neutrino weighs less than the mu-flavored neutrino, but it’s not yet understood whether the third neutrino flavor, tau, weighs more than the other two (in which case, we would speak of a direct hierarchy) or not (in which case, an inverse hierarchy). By measuring, in very high resolution, the energy spectrum of antineutrinos from the reactors, Juno aims to show whether the hierarchy is normal or inverse. The collaboration expects that after about six years of data collection, it should have something approaching a statistically significant finding in answer to the question.

But that’s not all that’s in store for the experiment. At a still later stage, it could help solve an even deeper mystery concerning the so-called Majorana neutrino—a theorized particle that has never been observed. (Majorana particles are particles that are simultaneously also their own antiparticles; a Majorana neutrino is therefore both a neutrino and its antineutrino.) Being able to understand whether or not neutrinos are Majorana particles would possibly mean getting to the bottom of one of the most complex questions in modern physics, namely why more matter is observed in the universe than antimatter, for which there is still no complete, coherent, and definitive explanation.

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

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Posted Thursday 18 September 2025 at 4:23 am AEST (my time).

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At the WIRED Health summit last week, Harvard biochemist and gene-editing pioneer David Liu said that later this year his lab plans to report on a single gene-editing strategy that could treat many unrelated diseases. He calls it disease-agnostic therapeutic gene editing.

“It sounds sort of crazy, but there’s actually a very good molecular biology reason why this could be possible,” he told the audience in Boston, stopping short of details.

Gene-editing treatments are currently being developed for several rare and inherited genetic diseases. One gene-editing treatment, called Casgevy, is approved and available commercially to treat sickle cell disease and a related blood disorder called beta thalassemia. Earlier this year, KJ Muldoon, a baby boy born with an often fatal genetic disease that causes ammonia to build up in his blood, was saved with a customized gene-editing treatment—a medical first.

These treatments work by targeting specific mutations related to those diseases. But they can be costly to develop and must be designed for specific patient populations. Sometimes those patient populations can be very small, as in the case of baby KJ. His condition, called CPS1 deficiency, affects just one in 1.3 million live births.

Liu envisions a future in which one gene-editing approach could be used on multiple different diseases, regardless of what organ or tissue they affect or their genetic cause. He says this kind of streamlined strategy is needed because collectively, there are so many rare diseases, and it would be impractical to design treatments for each one. Global Genes, a rare disease advocacy organization, estimates that there are at least 10,000 rare diseases that affect more than 400 million people worldwide.

“Genetic disease as a whole is not so rare. It’s actually many times more prevalent than cancer or HIV/AIDS,” Liu said. “We urgently need these ways to directly treat the root cause of these genetic diseases.”

Liu’s lab has developed two such ways to tackle rare diseases: base editing and prime editing. These next-generation versions of Crispr are already being used in around two dozen clinical trials around the world.

Base editing involves lab-made proteins that can change one DNA base, or “letter,” in a DNA sequence to another, such as changing a C to a T. They are akin to pencils that can correct single-letter misspellings. Baby KJ’s treatment used a base editor to treat his disease.

Prime editing, meanwhile, functions like a search-and-replace system for DNA. While traditional Crispr gene editing creates a double-stranded break in the DNA, prime editing allows for precise additions, deletions, or swaps without making that break. A prime editor, he explained, synthesizes a new segment of DNA and orchestrates repair processes in the cell, so that that new piece of DNA replaces the original sequence. Essentially, it’s a DNA word processor.

At WIRED Health, Liu teased that his lab has found a way to use prime editing in a disease-agnostic manner.

“Taking advantage of the ability of prime editing to do search-and-replace gene editing raises the possibility that a single composition of matter—potentially, a single drug—might benefit many, many more patients than going after diseases one mutation at a time,” Liu said. “That kind of future for gene editing, I think, will amplify, many-fold its impact and, most importantly, its access to the patients who need these treatments.”

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Posted Tuesday 16 September 2025 at 2:30 am AEST (my time).

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