Scientists have captured the first clear evidence of a swirling vortex in spacetime — the four-dimensional framework combining space and time described by Einstein’s theory of general relativity — something predicted more than a century ago but never directly observed until now. The discovery, published in Science Advances, shows how a black hole — an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravity — can twist the very fabric of spacetime around it, pulling nearby matter into a wobbling motion.

The effect is called Lense-Thirring precession, or frame-dragging. It happens when a rapidly spinning black hole drags surrounding spacetime along with it, much like a spinning top pulling water into a whirlpool. This phenomenon arises from Einstein’s theory of relativity, which describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy rather than as a simple pulling force.

The team, led by the National Astronomical Observatories of China and supported by Cardiff University, studied a tidal disruption event called AT2020afhd. A tidal disruption event occurs when a star passes so close to a black hole that intense gravitational forces tear it apart. In this case, the star was destroyed by a supermassive black hole — a black hole millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun, typically located at the centers of galaxies. The remains of the star formed an accretion disk, a rotating structure of extremely hot gas and debris spiraling inward under gravity. At the same time, powerful jets of plasma and energetic particles shot outward at nearly the speed of light.

By tracking changes in X-ray and radio signals, the researchers noticed that both the disk and the jet were wobbling together in a cycle of about 20 days. X-rays are highly energetic forms of electromagnetic radiation commonly produced near black holes by extremely hot matter, while radio signals are longer-wavelength emissions used by astronomers to study jets, magnetic fields, and energetic particles. This synchronized motion is exactly what theories predicted but had never been confirmed in such detail.

Dr Cosimo Inserra, a co-author from Cardiff University, explained: “Our study shows the most compelling evidence yet of Lense-Thirring precession – a black hole dragging space time along with it in much the same way that a spinning top might drag the water around it in a whirlpool.”

The study adds important context. Theories and simulations have long suggested that the extreme curvature of spacetime near black holes bends the paths of light and matter, creating disk and jet precession under strong relativistic forces — effects that become important when gravity is intense or matter moves close to the speed of light. What makes this case stand out is the clear observational evidence. The team reported 19.6-day quasi-periodic variations — repeating but not perfectly regular cycles — in both X-rays and radio signals, with X-ray amplitudes more than ten times stronger than normal. The nearly synchronized variations point to a shared mechanism controlling both emission regions, the areas where detectable radiation is produced.

A disk-jet Lense-Thirring precession model was able to reproduce these variations, and the data suggest the black hole involved is low-spin, meaning it rotates more slowly than many rapidly spinning black holes predicted by relativity models. The study also uncovered short-term radio variability in tidal disruption events, something not seen before. Researchers say this highlights the importance of high-cadence radio monitoring — frequent repeated observations over short time intervals — which could reveal more about how black holes shape their surroundings.

This discovery confirms a prediction made by Albert Einstein in 1913 and later defined mathematically by Josef Lense and Hans Thirring in 1918. It opens new paths for studying black hole spin, accretion physics — the study of how matter falls into massive objects and releases energy — and jet formation, the process through which rotating matter and magnetic fields launch narrow streams of high-energy plasma into space. For scientists, it is a rare chance to watch spacetime itself being twisted by one of the universe’s most extreme objects.

Source: Cardiff University, Science Advances

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.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 25 May 2026 at 7:57 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

In hours of underwater video footage from a New York aquarium, a beluga whale named Natasha stretches her neck, pirouettes, nods, and shakes her head in front of a two-way mirror. Her daughter Maris does much the same. According to a new study published in PLOS One, both animals show the behavioral hallmarks of mirror self-recognition—a cognitive ability long considered a marker of self-awareness, and one that had never before been documented in beluga whales.

If the result holds up, belugas join a remarkably short list. The mirror self-recognition test (MSR) has been passed, with varying degrees of confidence, by humans (starting around age two), a handful of great apes (chimps, bonobos, orangutans, and—somewhat contentiously—gorillas), Asian elephants, bottlenose dolphins, probably magpies, possibly orcas, and, if you can believe it, a cleaner wrasse. That’s it. No dogs, no cats, no monkeys. Plenty of species we had assumed were self-aware have been tested and failed.

Looking at the mirror

So what is this test, exactly, and what is it supposed to tell us?

The procedure is this: While the animal isn’t looking, researchers place a mark on a spot it can only see via a reflection. A mirror is then put in front of the animal while the researchers watch. If the animal touches or examines the mark while looking at its reflection, it comprehends that the figure in the mirror is itself. The test is intuitive and easy to perform—and almost no species passes.

Why is this a test of self-awareness in the first place? The logic, going back to the psychologist Gordon Gallup (who invented the test in 1970), is that to use a mirror as a tool for inspecting your own body, you need a mental representation of yourself as a distinct entity. A piece of silvered glass, in this telling, can pry open a lot of cognitive doors.

Gallup himself is a tough grader. Plenty of positive results have been announced over the decades, and he’s pushed back on most of them. If an animal doesn’t show clear self-directed behavior—actively trying to touch or examine the mark—the test, in his view, fails. On that score, the beluga results sit right at the edge.

Revisiting old data

The footage is more than two decades old. “After the initial study we were hoping to conduct more studies with additional belugas over the next years but that was not possible,” senior author Diana Reiss said in an email. “Inspired by the numerous studies over the past years reporting on different aspects of beluga whale cognition and behavior, we decided to revisit and digitize the original videotapes and conduct a rigorous analysis.” Some tapes had degraded in the meantime, and portions of the original data were lost.

The original experiment exposed four belugas to the mirror together, in their usual social housing. Only Natasha and Maris showed sustained interest, so only they advanced to the experimental phase, where they were marked with waterproof lipstick during feeding sessions. Because the animals were awake and could feel the application, the researchers ran sham-mark controls: the same procedure, but without the pigment. The whales only showed self-recognition-like behaviors after being actually marked.

“The two beluga whales showed the same progression of behavioral stages reported for other species that show evidence of MSR,” first author Alexander Mildener said in an email. “The whales did not exhibit self-directed behaviors in the absence of the mirror or in the control condition. One of the whales also passed the mark test by demonstrating mark-directed behavior by orienting the area of her body that was temporarily marked toward the mirror.”

The sample is tiny, but that’s not unusual—if even a single animal can do something, the species is in principle capable of it. The harder question is whether what Natasha and Maris did really counts. Some of the most-cited behaviors—bubble bite play, barrel rolls—are documented forms of solo play that belugas engage in even without a mirror nearby. Their increased time spent at the reflective surface is suggestive, but doesn’t rule out the possibility that the mirror was just a novel source of stimulation.

The one genuinely mark-directed behavior came from Natasha, who repeatedly pressed the marked area—behind her right ear—against the mirror. Without arms, she couldn’t point. It’s the strongest data point in the study, but a softer kind of evidence than a chimp or an elephant typically delivers.

Even granting that belugas pass—and given that dolphins do, and orcas plausibly do too, it wouldn’t be a shock—the more interesting question is what a result like this tells us. Or, conversely: What does failing actually mean? One of the most persistent criticisms is that many animals fail simply because mirrors carry little relevance in their perceptual world. Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, told Ars in an email that “the MSR is not a test of consciousness itself, but a test of a particular kind of the ability to recognize one’s own body (or face). Failure to reliably pass the MSR does not mean that an animal lacks consciousness, or any form of selfhood.”

The test, he added, is motivated by what feels natural to humans. “It may well not feel natural to other species, even if they have the same kind of ability,” He said. “This raises various other reasons why animals might ‘fail’ the test: they may not like making eye contact, they might not like mirrors, or they simply just might not care enough about a very strange task.”

Seth has argued that consciousness may be something like an integrated experience of our perceptions, broadly construed—a view consistent with the increasingly mainstream idea that consciousness exists in degrees and forms across many species. If perceptions are central to the sense of self, that sense will look different depending on how each animal perceives the world. Humans are heavily visual; bats lean on echolocation; for dogs, smell is everything. That’s why researchers like Alexandra Horowitz, who heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, have been working on an olfactory version of the test.

From the opposite direction come critics who argue the test fails to measure self-awareness even when an animal passes it. That’s the position of Alex Jordan, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and co-author of the PLOS Biology studies on the cleaner wrasse. The wrasse passes the mirror test, Jordan says—but that doesn’t necessarily mean the fish is self-aware. The test was designed around us, and suffers from both anthropocentrism (treating humans as the yardstick) and anthropomorphism (projecting human traits onto other animals).

The mirror test, then, has problems from every angle. As Seth put it in his email: “When looking for evidence of consciousness or selfhood, it’s important to complement tests like the MSR with other tests”—ones that take into account what might be salient in a particular animal’s own perceptual world. And yet the MSR remains one of the few tools we have for trying to glimpse inside the minds of other animals—and, perhaps, our own. The trick is knowing exactly what it can, and can’t, tell us.

PLOS One, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0348287

Federica Sgorbissa is a science journalist; she writes about neuroscience and cognitive science for Italian and international outlets.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 25 May 2026 at 7:56 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

A new study from Penn State University and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory looks at how extraterrestrial observers might detect signals coming from Earth. The research, published August 21 in Astrophysical Journal Letters and presented at the 2025 Penn State SETI Symposium, focuses on the patterns of human deep space transmissions and how they could guide the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), the scientific effort to detect evidence of advanced alien civilizations through signs such as artificial radio or laser signals known as “technosignatures.”

SETI often involves scanning the skies for electromagnetic signals — waves of energy that include radio waves and travel across space — that might come from alien civilizations. To improve this search, scientists sometimes use our own transmissions as a model. Previous work suggested that the most noticeable technosignatures from Earth are signals sent through deep-space networks and interplanetary radar. This study builds on that idea by analyzing 20 years of logs from NASA Deep Space Network (DSN), a global system of giant antennas that communicates with spacecraft far beyond Earth.

The researchers found that most signals were sent along the ecliptic plane — the flat region around the Sun where most planets orbit — and often toward other planets. “Humans are predominantly communicating with the spacecraft and probes we have sent to study other planets like Mars,” said Pinchen Fan, graduate student at Penn State and lead author of the paper. “But a planet like Mars does not block the entire transmission, so a distant spacecraft or planet positioned along the path of these interplanetary communications could potentially detect the spillover.”

The study shows that if an extraterrestrial species were watching during an Earth-Mars conjunction — an alignment in which planets appear lined up from an observer’s perspective — there was a 77 percent chance they would catch one of our transmissions. That is a 400,000-fold increase compared to a random observer at a random time. Other planetary alignments gave a 12 percent chance. Outside of these alignments, the odds were much smaller.

“NASA's Deep Space Network provides the crucial link between Earth and its interplanetary missions like the New Horizons spacecraft and the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Joseph Lazio, project scientist at JPL. “It sends some of humanity's strongest and most persistent radio signals into space.”

The team also calculated that an average DSN transmission could be detected up to 23 light-years away — a light-year being the distance light travels in one year — with telescopes similar to ours. This means nearby solar systems that are oriented edge-on to Earth’s orbital plane are especially promising targets for SETI. Edge-on systems are planetary systems viewed sideways from Earth, making planetary crossings easier to observe. The study suggests that searches should prioritize these systems and time observations with exoplanetary conjunctions or planet–planet occultations, events in which one celestial body blocks another from view, since these conditions greatly improve the chance of intercepting signals.

Fan explained, “Considering the direction and frequency of our most common signals gives insights into where we should be looking to improve our chances of detecting alien technosignatures.” Astronomers already study exoplanets — planets orbiting stars beyond our Solar System — during transits, when a planet crosses in front of its star and slightly dims the star’s light. With the upcoming launch of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scientists expect to discover hundreds of thousands of new exoplanets, which will expand the search area.

Jason Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, added, “Humans are pretty early in our spacefaring journey, and as we reach further into our solar system, our transmissions to other planets will only increase. Using our own deep space communications as a baseline, we quantified how future searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence could be improved by focusing on systems with particular orientations and planet alignments.”

The study also noted that while radio signals are the most common, future searches could consider laser transmissions. NASA is testing interplanetary laser communication, and extraterrestrial civilizations might use lasers instead of radio waves, though lasers produce less spillover.

Source: Penn State University, IOP Science

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 24 May 2026 at 7:41 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results.

The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in South Texas at 5:30 pm CDT (6:30 pm EDT; 22:30 UTC) Friday. Within a few seconds, the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) rocket, the largest ever built, cleared the launch tower and turned onto an eastward heading over the Gulf of Mexico.

Starship splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean a little more than an hour later to conclude the first flight of the latest version of SpaceX’s stainless steel mega-rocket. Starship V3 fared better on its debut than the first flights of Starship V1 and V2 in 2023 and 2025. Both past versions of Starship broke apart during launch on their inaugural flights.

SpaceX officials appeared pleased with the performance of Starship V3 on Friday. Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, congratulated his engineers with a post on X: “Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch & landing! You scored a goal for humanity.”

“Congrats and a huge thank you to the SpaceX team that always delivers,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s second in command, wrote in an X post. “This was an incredible first flight of a brand new vehicle. Our collective future flying amongst the stars has become so much closer.”

Leaders at NASA, relying on SpaceX to provide Starship as a human-rated Moon lander, were closely watching the launch. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman was in Texas to witness the launch in person. He lauded SpaceX for a “hell of a V3 Starship launch.”

Starship’s 12th test flight was a long time coming. The last Starship test flight took off last October. The gap of more than seven months was the longest interval between Starship flights since the program’s first full-scale launch in April 2023. SpaceX used the time to complete construction and activation of a second launch pad at Starbase as engineers steered Starship V3 through ground testing, which had its own share of setbacks.

Starship climbs away from Starbase, Texas, after liftoff at 5:30 pm local time Friday.

Credit: SpaceX

What was good?

So what worked on Friday’s test flight? Plenty. Most importantly, the ship’s heat shield appeared to hold up during reentry over the Indian Ocean. Onboard cameras showed the vehicle’s aerodynamic flaps intact throughout the fiery descent through the atmosphere. The heat shield and flaps didn’t always fare so well on past Starship test flights. Starship executed a series of banking maneuvers on the way toward the splashdown zone northwest of Australia, simulating the path future ships will take returning to landings at Starbase.

That all went well, with the descent culminating in a dramatic maneuver to flip from horizontal to vertical. A final landing burn with the ship’s Raptor engines downshifted from three to two, then to a single engine as the rocket settled to a gentle water landing. Drones and buoy cameras recorded live views of the on-target splashdown. As expected, the ship—wider than and nearly as long a Boeing 777 jetliner—tipped over and exploded in a fireball, putting an exclamation point on V3’s trip halfway around the world from the Texas Gulf Coast.

Earlier in the flight, SpaceX demonstrated Starship V3’s improved payload deployment mechanism. The system is tailored for releasing SpaceX’s flat-packed Starlink Internet satellites. SpaceX tested the Pez-like deployment system on past test flights, but upgrades on Starship V3 allow the mechanism to release satellites at a faster rate. On Friday, the dispenser deployed 20 mockups of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellites, plus two spacecraft fitted with flashlights and cameras to inspect Starship’s exterior in space.

All of this worked perfectly as the ship soared to a maximum altitude of 121 miles (195 kilometers) in darkness over the South Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX says this version of Starship can haul up to 100 metric tons of payload into low-Earth orbit, more than double the capacity of Starship V2.

Meanwhile, initial inspections of SpaceX’s new launch pad at Starbase, used for the first time Friday, showed the facility weathered the intensity of liftoff with no significant problems. This is a promising sign for SpaceX’s plans for new launch pads at Cape Canaveral, Florida, which use the new Starbase pad as a design template.

What needs more work?

Something caused two Raptor engines—one of 33 on the Super Heavy booster and one of six on Starship itself—to fail during Friday’s launch sequence. Raptor failures are nothing new for SpaceX, but this flight marked the first use of the company’s upgraded Raptor 3, a redesign with higher thrust, lighter weight, and improved efficiency. Collectively, the 33 Raptor engines on the booster produced up to 18 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket used on last month’s Artemis II mission.

Starship and Super Heavy have engine-out capability, meaning they can recover from an early shutdown of an engine. Both stages proved this Friday. First, an engine in the outer ring on the Super Heavy booster shut down prematurely shortly after liftoff. A few moments later, an outer engine on the Starship upper stage cut off soon after the ship and booster separated from one another high over the Gulf.

The ship compensated by burning its five remaining engines a little longer than usual, and the rocket was still able to reach its planned trajectory. The booster, however, hurtled toward a high-speed impact in the Gulf after it was unable to complete maneuvers to return to a controlled splashdown offshore from Starbase. It was not immediately clear what caused the early end to the rocket’s boost-back burn: whether the malfunction stemmed from an external problem during stage separation or a separate issue within the booster’s propulsion system.

One key objective SpaceX did not accomplish Friday was a planned restart of one of the ship’s Raptor engines in space. Officials elected to forego the brief ignition after the ship’s engine failure during ascent.

What does this mean?

Friday’s results give SpaceX a lot to build on. The performance of the heat shield, widely recognized as perhaps the program’s most challenging engineering problem, must be reassuring for SpaceX officials seeking to eventually recover and rapidly reuse future ships. The ship’s resilience to an engine failure was also encouraging news for SpaceX.

But there’s still more work ahead for SpaceX to perfect the Raptor 3 engine, and skipping the engine relight in space will likely prevent SpaceX from attempting a full orbital flight of Starship on the next launch. All 12 of SpaceX’s Starship test flights to date have flown on suborbital trajectories. Officials want to ensure they can guide Starship back to Earth before putting a vehicle into orbit because an unguided reentry could endanger the public with falling debris. Starship, after all, is the world’s largest and most massive spacecraft other than the International Space Station.

A perfect performance on Flight 12 may have given engineers the data they need for an orbital flight on the next launch, and perhaps even attempt to bring Starship back to the launch site in Texas for a catch by giant mechanical arms on the launch tower. An orbital flight would also move SpaceX closer to beginning critical orbital refueling tests for NASA’s Artemis program, along with deploying real Starlink satellites from Starship.

The results from Friday’s flight show there’s still room for improvement, but SpaceX will be ready to chase perfection again soon. The company has more ships and boosters on track for test flights later this summer.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 24 May 2026 at 7:39 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have spotted a planet that looks and behaves in ways no one expected. Webb is the world’s most powerful infrared space telescope, developed by NASA with the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency (CSA). Unlike optical telescopes, Webb mainly observes infrared light — electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths longer than visible red light — allowing it to study cool planets, dusty regions, and distant galaxies invisible to ordinary telescopes.

The planet, called PSR J2322-2650b, is about the same mass as Jupiter but orbits a pulsar. A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star — the ultra-dense collapsed core left behind after a massive star explodes in a supernova. Although neutron stars can contain more mass than the Sun, they are only about the size of a city. Pulsars emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles, and as they rotate, those beams sweep through space like a lighthouse beam. This discovery is unusual because only a handful of planets have ever been found around pulsars, and none of them resemble this one.

PSR J2322-2650b has an atmosphere made mostly of helium and carbon. An atmosphere is the layer of gases surrounding a planet, held in place by gravity. Scientists study atmospheres by examining how light interacts with them, since different gases absorb specific wavelengths that reveal their chemical makeup. Instead of the usual molecules seen on exoplanets — planets beyond our Solar System — such as water or methane, scientists detected molecular carbon, specifically C₂ and C₃. Molecular carbon consists entirely of carbon atoms bonded together and is extremely unusual in planetary atmospheres, where carbon normally combines with oxygen or hydrogen to form compounds such as carbon dioxide or methane.

“This was an absolute surprise,” said Peter Gao of the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory. “I remember after we got the data down, our collective reaction was ‘What the heck is this?’ It's extremely different from what we expected.”

The planet’s chemistry is extreme. Observations show carbon-to-oxygen ratios greater than 100 and carbon-to-nitrogen ratios above 10,000. The carbon-to-oxygen ratio compares the abundance of carbon atoms to oxygen atoms in an atmosphere and helps scientists understand how planets form and evolve chemically. Most known exoplanets have far lower values. Such extraordinarily high ratios suggest the atmosphere is almost pure carbon.

Michael Zhang of the University of Chicago explained, “The planet orbits a star that's completely bizarre — the mass of the Sun, but the size of a city. This is a new type of planet atmosphere that nobody has ever seen before.”

Temperatures on the planet range from about 1,200°F on the cooler night side to 3,700°F on the hotter day side. Soot-like carbon clouds drift through the atmosphere, and under the enormous pressure inside the planet, these clouds could eventually turn into diamonds. Researchers believe crystallization may be occurring deep inside the object. Crystallization is the process in which atoms arrange themselves into ordered solid structures called crystals. Under extreme planetary pressure and temperature, carbon can crystallize into diamond-like material.

Roger Romani of Stanford University added, “As the companion cools down, the mixture of carbon and oxygen in the interior starts to crystallize. Pure carbon crystals float to the top and get mixed into the helium, and that's what we see. But then something has to happen to keep the oxygen and nitrogen away. And that's where the mystery comes in.”

The planet is extremely close to its pulsar, only about 1 million miles away. For comparison, Earth is about 100 million miles from the Sun. Because of this tight orbit, the planet completes a year in just 7.8 hours. The intense gravity from the pulsar stretches the planet into a lemon-like shape. Gravity is the force that attracts objects with mass toward one another, and when extremely strong objects lie close together, gravitational tidal forces can physically distort nearby planets and stars.

This system may be related to what astronomers call a “black widow” system, a binary system in which a pulsar gradually strips material away from a nearby companion star using intense radiation and streams of high-energy particles. High-energy particles are subatomic particles accelerated to enormous speeds by powerful magnetic fields and rapid rotation. But in this case, the companion is officially considered an exoplanet because it is below 13 Jupiter masses.

Zhang noted, “Did this thing form like a normal planet? No, because the composition is entirely different. Did it form by stripping the outside of a star, like ‘normal’ black widow systems are formed? Probably not, because nuclear physics does not make pure carbon.”

What makes this discovery possible is Webb’s infrared vision. Infrared light is especially useful in astronomy because it can pass through cosmic dust and reveal cool or faint objects. The pulsar emits mostly gamma rays and high-energy particles, which Webb cannot directly observe. Gamma rays are the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation and are usually produced by violent cosmic events such as pulsars, neutron stars, and black holes. Because Webb is designed specifically for infrared astronomy, the telescope can observe the planet’s spectrum without interference from the pulsar itself.

A spectrum is the pattern created when light is separated into its different wavelengths. Different atoms and molecules leave unique fingerprints in a spectrum by absorbing or emitting specific wavelengths, allowing astronomers to determine a planet’s composition, temperature, and atmospheric properties from enormous distances.

“This system is unique because we are able to view the planet illuminated by its host star, but not see the host star at all,” said Maya Beleznay of Stanford University. “So we get a really pristine spectrum. And we can study this system in more detail than normal exoplanets.”

Of the roughly 6,000 known exoplanets, PSR J2322-2650b is the only one that resembles a hot Jupiter orbiting a pulsar. Its unusual atmosphere, extreme chemistry, distorted shape, and strange dynamics are opening entirely new questions about how planets form, evolve, and survive in some of the harshest environments in the universe.

Source: NASA, Chicago University

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.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 24 May 2026 at 7:39 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Tom Akers and Joe Tanner are finally in the same class.

The two veteran space shuttle crew members were inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame together on May 16. They could also have been in the same NASA astronaut selection group, too, had history played out a little differently.

In 1984, Tanner reported to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) to fly as an instructor pilot and then applied for the next class of astronaut candidates.

“Tom came in with the class of 1987, which, interestingly enough, I interviewed for. He made it, and I didn’t,” said Tanner.

“And I’ve been leading the way ever since,” said Akers, interrupting Tanner while both laughed in a joint interview with collectSPACE.com. “I have never understood why it took NASA so long to pick him.” (Tanner became an astronaut in 1992.)

US Astronaut Hall of Fame class of 2026 members Tom Akers and Joe Tanner (at center) are

surrounded by 18 past honorees at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida on

Saturday, May 16, 2026.

Credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

Akers’ and Tanner’s spaceflight careers overlapped by five years and included four missions each. Although they never launched into Earth orbit together, they flew numerous T-38 jet training flights and knew each other well.

“Our families were friends,” said Akers. “We went to the same church, so we were more social friends than work friends at JSC.”

Twenty years after the last of their flights returned from space, Akers and Tanner were finally side by side under the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s display of the retired space shuttle Atlantis—a vehicle on which both rode—to be inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame as the class of 2026.

“It was something I was aware of as a possibility, but had never really given thought I would get inducted, said Akers. “So it was a pleasant surprise for sure.”

“We both knew we were on the ballot,” said Tanner. “I had been on the [nominee] ballot with Tom for 10 years.”

A pair of spacewalkers

The induction ceremony coincided with the 34th anniversary of Akers’ landing from what may have been his most famous mission. On May 16, 1992, he touched down on the space shuttle Endeavour after becoming one-third of the only three-person spacewalk in history.

Akers, together with his STS-49 crewmates Rick Hieb and Pierre Thuot, reached up with their gloved hands to grab hold of and secure a communications satellite in the orbiter’s payload bay.

“All of our spacewalks are designed really for two people; the system really isn’t made where it’s easy for three people,” Akers told collectSPACE. “That was a unique situation where we couldn’t get the capture bar on the Intelsat VI, and the ground [controllers] and our crew came up with the idea of three people going out. With the teamwork and great ground team support, it worked slick.”

Brian Duffy (at right) inducts Tom Akers into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame at the Kennedy Space

Center Visitor Complex in Florida on Saturday, May 16, 2026.

Credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

Akers and Tanner both conducted spacewalks to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), carefully manipulating delicate optical instruments in a closely confined area. Tanner also helped assemble the large backbone truss and solar arrays wings for the International Space Station (ISS).

“I have often been asked what is the difference between ISS and an HST EVA [extravehicular activity], and I think it’s hands and overall physical effort,” said Tanner. “Manual dexterity in your hands was more important for HST, and for ISS, you’re hauling around some pretty big, heavy objects and maneuvering a long way. That’s the biggest difference.”

In total, Akers spent almost 30 hours of his nearly 34 days in space conducting spacewalks. Tanner logged 43 days, including 46 and a half hours on EVAs.

Joining the ranks

Saturday’s ceremony was led by news correspondent John Zarella and included remarks by Curt Brown, board chairman of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which manages the nominee and selection process each year; Therrin Protze, chief operating officer of the visitor complex; and Kelvin Manning, deputy director for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

“Today’s induction of Tom Akers and Joe Tanner honors two astronauts whose careers embody excellence, leadership, and service,” said Brown, who became a NASA astronaut in the same class as Akers and flew with Tanner on Atlantis. “Their lasting contributions to NASA, and their ongoing work as educators and mentors, reflect the very best of the US space program.”

Joe Tanner (at left) is inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame by his STS-115 pilot Chris Ferguson

at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, May 16, 2026.

Credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

“We’re proud to welcome them into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame,” said Brown, who is a member of the 2013 class.

Brian Duffy, class of 2016, formally inducted Akers, presenting him with his Hall of Fame medal. Chris Ferguson, who flew as the pilot of Tanner’s last mission, STS-115, and who was inducted in 2022, honored his former crewmate similarly. Some 20 veteran NASA astronauts, including 15 other Hall of Fame members, attended the event.

The ceremony also included the unveiling of the etched-glass portraits and mission patch displays, which will next hang alongside the 111 other similar plaques representing the inductees. Founded in 1990, the US Astronaut Hall of Fame has been a feature of the Heroes & Legends attraction at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex since 2016.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 24 May 2026 at 7:37 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

As of July 1, all vehicles sold within the European Union must include a standard, preinstalled interface that allows a breathalyzer lock to be added to the ignition system. This measure is part of a larger strategy promoted by the EU to reduce drunk-driving-related deaths and injuries by at least 50 percent by 2030.

The requirement falls under the Vision Zero program, launched by European authorities more than five years ago, which aims to eliminate alcohol-related traffic fatalities entirely—or get as close to zero as possible—by 2050. The measure also aligns with the timetable established in the EU's General Safety Regulation, which sets specific deadlines for manufacturers to incorporate various safety features into vehicle designs, starting at the factory.

The regulation that will become mandatory in July obliges automakers to provide an electrical connection and reserve a space inside the vehicle to allow the installation of an “alcolock” device. This device must comply with European standard EN 50436 for Alcohol Ignition Interlocks and have a certificate issued by an authorized accrediting entity.

The operation of an alcolock is simple. Before starting the vehicle, the driver must blow into the device, which measures the level of alcohol present in the breath. If the result exceeds the legal limit, the system, which connected to the vehicle’s ignition or starting mechanism, automatically blocks the ignition cycle and prevents the car from starting.

This type of technology already operates in several European countries, mainly as part of programs aimed at repeat offenders of alcohol-related offenses or in certain sectors of professional transport. Official figures estimate that its implementation can reduce fatal accidents associated with alcohol consumption by up to 65 percent.

Since 2018, the European Union's road safety program has incorporated different technologies to reinforce safe driving. As of 2024, new vehicles integrate an intelligent speed assistant, a system that detects the permitted speed limit using cameras or GPS and alerts the driver when they are exceeded the limit.

In addition, there is the emergency lane keeping assistant, capable of correcting the trajectory when the vehicle deviates without prior signaling. Also noteworthy is the event data recorder, popularly known as the “black box,” which stores key information during the seconds prior to an accident to facilitate law enforcement and traffic safety agency investigations.

Recently, a requirement was added to incorporate the adaptive brake light, a mechanism that, in the event of sudden braking, automatically and intensely activates the rear lights to warn other drivers of the need to slow down and avoid a collision.

The obligation to install an interface for an on-board breathalyzer is the final step in this set of safety measures. As of the first day of July, no car will be allowed to leave a dealership within the EU without full compliance with all these requirements.

This story was originally published by WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 23 May 2026 at 5:40 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The Ebola outbreak erupting from the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to escalate wildly, with cases nearing 750, deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced, the World Health Organization reported in a press briefing Friday. The latest numbers already place the outbreak as the third largest on record, though it was only first reported a week ago, on May 15. And WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the outbreak is still “spreading rapidly.”

A revised WHO assessment has moved the risk level from “high” to “very high” at the national level, while risk remains “high” at the regional level and “low” at the global level, Tedros added.

WHO officials have acknowledged that a delay in detecting and responding to the outbreak enabled it to balloon, and that they are now racing to get ahead of the virus.

WHO representative Dr. Anne Ancia spoke during today’s briefing from the DRC, saying that when officials got to the area, they found the virus was “already rampant and silently disseminating for a few weeks already.” In the outbreak investigation so far, the earliest known suspected case was in a health worker, who developed symptoms on April 24 in Bunia, the capital city of Ituri. WHO only got word of a potential outbreak on May 5, with news of a cluster of deadly, unidentified infections that led to the deaths of four health workers. By the time a WHO team arrived, there were already 80 cases.

“Now we are sprinting behind [the virus] so that we can really try to control this outbreak, and because it is still transmitting for the time being, yes, the number [of cases] will keep rising for some time until we are really able to put all the response operation in place,” she said.

Their work is made harder by various challenges. The virus behind the Ebola outbreak is the uncommon Bundibugyo virus, which doesn’t have established vaccines or therapeutics. That leaves active case finding, isolation, and contact tracing as the primary tools to halt the spread. Moreover, the virus is spreading in areas with armed conflict, intense population mobility, weak health systems, and where millions face acute hunger and need humanitarian assistance.

Disease of compassion

As WHO and other partners scramble to prevent more deadly infections, public health experts in the US are criticizing the Trump administration’s role. The US had long been a global leader in Ebola responses in the region. But that is no longer the case given the Trump administration’s demolition of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), severe cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, numerous public health leadership roles vacant, and complete withdrawal from the WHO.

In a New York Times opinion piece Thursday, Craig Spencer—an emergency medicine doctor and Brown University professor, who contracted Ebola while treating patients in Guinea in 2014 with Doctors Without Borders—wrote that the US has “abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.”

“I know how destructive the disease can be—and how unprepared we are for its return,” he wrote.

He noted reporting from the Times finding that the delay in detecting the outbreak was, in part, due to samples from infected patients being transported to a national lab in Kinshasa, Congo, at the wrong temperature. That task had previously been managed by USAID. The Times also reported that the US previously played a crucial role in logistics and delivering supplies, notably personal protective equipment, such as face shields, respirators, impermeable coveralls, and surgical hoods—supplies that health workers in DRC lacked for weeks at the start of the outbreak.

“My heart is breaking for those workers,” Megan Fotheringham, who was USAID’s deputy director of infectious diseases, including during the Ebola outbreak in Ituri between 2018 and 2020. “They are not protected, and they are putting their lives on the line.” She told the Times that if USAID was able to continue its work, it could have moved stockpiles of personal protective equipment within hours.

Spencer noted that he and others often refer to Ebola as a disease of compassion because it spreads via bodily fluids to those who have intimate contact with victims. “This means parents taking care of their sick children, family members who wash the bodies of their dead relatives, and health care providers who take care of patients at the most contagious stage of their illness,” he wrote. He recalled a family of seven being infected, with the parents caring for their children while battling the disease themselves, and only the parents survived.

Panic and neglect

Epidemiologists Katelyn Jetelina and Emily Smith pointed out Friday that, while the disease is one spread by compassion, this outbreak seems to be spreading by “the global withdrawal of it.”

In a CDC press briefing Friday morning, Satish Pillai, incident manager for CDC’s Ebola response, said that the US is ramping up resources and sending more field staff to the outbreak area. The Trump administration has also said it is funding the establishment of up to 50 treatment clinics in Ebola-affected regions of the DRC and Uganda. But Uganda, which has only reported two imported cases from DRC, responded by saying it was “not aware” of any such plans.

Pillai again dodged questions on why an American doctor infected in the outbreak and another exposed were sent to Germany and the Czech Republic, respectively, and not to the US. He also skirted questions about the US’s travel restrictions, which have also been criticized by public health experts.

With the US withdrawal from global health, the WHO has struggled to make up for the loss of funding and support. At the end of the press briefing, WHO officials were asked what the Ebola outbreak response was expected to cost and if the agency would have enough funds to cover it. Epidemic and pandemic management director Maria Van Kerkhove said the agency is still working on an estimate, but added that while funding was a challenge right now, the focus shouldn’t be on response costs.

“There’s billions of dollars that are spent on war every single day,” Van Kerkhove said. “So, there’s plenty of money that can be handled for this. And what is extremely frustrating is that money will come for a response. But what we actually need money for … is prevention. This constant, steady stream of funding to support national governments in the capacities that they have across surveillance, detection, research, infection prevention, control, workforce, building trust in communities, et cetera, regularly as opposed to going into this cycle of panic and neglect.”

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 23 May 2026 at 12:23 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Humans do not just visit space; they live there, but a major part of that is coming to an end. The platform that made the longest continuous human presence in space possible is becoming history.

With NASA and its partners beginning preparations for the destructive end of the International Space Station (ISS) as soon as 2030, those who collect, curate, and study the station are now asking how to preserve the historic and culturally significant artifact, given that it is far too large and complex to keep intact.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on Thursday hosted a three-part panel discussion, bringing together space program officials, museum curators, an archeologist, and an astronaut to begin answering the why, what, and how the ISS might be saved. The sessions were part of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) ASCEND conference in Washington, DC.

NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen on the “Why Save ISS Heritage” panel during the AIAA’s ASCEND

conference, on Thursday, May 21, 2026, in Washington, DC.

Credit: AIAA/David Becker/PWHL

“I had a friend who works on the Artemis [moon] program come up to me when we had 25 years [of continuous human residency]. ‘Congratulations, guys! You made space boring.’ And we did—and that’s a good thing, actually,” said Jacob Keaton, acting director of the International Space Station for NASA’s Space Operations Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in DC. “Not only did we make it boring because of the technical competence that the team brings to the table, we made it boring because it became part of our national fabric, almost.

“This is just something that we do. We have people in space,” said Keaton. “The ticket tape parades after Apollo were wonderful. That’s a historic achievement—for Artemis, too, absolutely. But for the space station, this is just who we are now. I think it’s underappreciated the amount of work that it took to become boring.”

From “boring” to “evocative”

So how do you capture “boring” and make it accessible in how the program will be exhibited in museums for many years to come?

“I like spaceflight nominal, that’s my favorite type of spaceflight,” said Stephen Bowen, acting director of cross-directorate technical integration at NASA and an astronaut who has spent 227 days in space, including 186 on the International Space Station in 2023. “Nominal is the way to be. I don’t need any excitement.”

Bowen said what should be preserved are the crews’ experiences from the 74 expeditions to date, and those still to come.

“Having the opportunity to train around the world and throughout, you get to meet amazing people. Just that aspect can get lost if we don’t continue these international missions, and I think that’s really important going forward,” he said.

“I’m not a big person on holding onto things,” said Bowen. “The biggest legacy, and what we should preserve, is just continue to fly similar missions. I think that’s the biggest thing we can continue to do to maintain those specific items.”

“We can’t bring everything back from the space station, so I’ll leave it up to others to figure out what that is, and what priority,” he said.

Some of those others include Justin Walsh, a professor of art history, archeology, and space studies who performed the first archeological fieldwork to occur off Earth as the creator of the International Space Station Archeological Project, and Jennifer Levasseur, curator of the International Space Station collection at the National Air and Space Museum.

“The cupola has long held a fascination with people,” said Levasseur as the moderator of the day’s second panel, speaking of the station’s multi-windowed module. “Obviously, bringing it back may not be the best answer, but how can we preserve that view is a really important one, because it is such a cherished view.”

“It’s also a physical space, a space one has to go into to be able to experience, and so there’s something unique and special about that,” she said.

The galley table on the International Space Station is an often cited candidate for what to save as an

artifact given its traditional role as the place where the expedition crews gathered together.

Credit: NASA

Given Walsh’s interest in the lived experiences of the crews, his choices centered on the international nature of those present.

“I think everybody’s mentioned the [galley] table—that’s a really obvious thing—but I was also thinking of the physical library of books on board the ISS in all of the languages that are spoken by crew members—certainly Russian and English,” he said. “I think it would be great to bring some or all of that back.

“And then the other thing I was thinking of, because it keeps appearing in my photographs from our experiment on ISS, is there’s a paper notebook. A bound paper notebook that is used by the crew in the Destiny [US laboratory], where they’re writing down the things that they have to do,” said Walsh. “That there is a kind of communication station.

“They are getting their instructions from the ground, but they’re also leaving notes for each other, and as a collaborative device to use this old technology, it’s just wonderful. I like that as an evocative aspect of the ISS,” he said.

Space on the rides home

What is returned from the ISS will ultimately be limited by how much room is available on the dwindling number of vehicles set to land, with cargo remaining in the program. If the space station is de-orbited in 2030, as currently planned and agreed upon by all partners, the last significant down-mass availability will be three years from now.

“2028 is really when we start letting the ISS begin its natural [orbital] decay,” said Ryan Landon, manager of the International Space Station research integration office at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “About 18 months before deorbit, the USDV [US Deorbit Vehicle] will come up and dock. That will be right after the last crew comes up, and so once those two vehicles are on board, we will no longer have a vehicle that can return. Our last cargo home will be in the middle of 2029.

“That’s tough to think about. It’s a whole lot earlier than the next year and a half that the station’s going to be in orbit, and so thinking about our priorities and what we need to bring home is a big question,” Landon said. “I probably have a better appreciation today for the legacy and the heritage and other hardware to bring home, so that’ll be an interesting discussion, as far as weight and volume.”

The demand for storage on the remaining rides home for legacy and preservation purposes will compete with the station’s primary purpose: conducting and returning science.

Fish-eye image of the inside of a fully packed SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft, like the type

used to launch supplies to the International Space Station and return equipment back to Earth.

Credit: NASA

“We obviously seek to continue to utilize the International Space Station right up until that last moment when Ryan turns the lights out and sends things back home, so there will be drivers to maintain as much science capacity on those final return vehicles as we can,” said Michael Roberts, chief scientist for the ISS National Lab. “But it’s not lost on anyone that there is a tremendous scientific knowledge, as well as historical knowledge, that can be retained from the return of some of that instrumentation that’s up there.”

So the likelihood of returning everything that everyone wants from the ISS before the shipments end is low.

The data that is already on the ground, as well as the hardware that has been brought back over the past two and a half decades, will help fill some of those gaps, but of even more importance will be capturing the stories from the people who put the space station up there and made it into the one-of-a-kind facility it is today, said Brian Odom, NASA’s chief historian.

“The window of that opportunity is going to close so quickly. Let’s get the historians together. Let’s look at this program, people who are familiar, let’s get them in contact with the practitioners, with the engineers, with the scientists, with the astronauts and really determine what have been the big themes,” said Odom, calling for an oral history initiative. “Let’s use this opportunity to do just that, and then begin the process of crafting a narrative.”

Disclosure: collectSPACE’s editor, the author of this article, was also a panel member, representing the worldwide community of space memorabilia collectors.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 23 May 2026 at 8:10 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Welcome to Edition 8.42 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX nearly launched its Starship rocket on Thursday amid much pomp and circumstance in South Texas, only to be foiled by a ground system issue. Such delays are to be expected, with almost entirely new hardware on both the rocket and the ground side of things. The company will try again as soon as Friday evening, and as we discuss in this week’s report, the stakes are quite high for SpaceX and much of the rest of the US spaceflight enterprise.

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.

Firefly expands Central Texas footprint. Firefly Aerospace on Tuesday announced that it has moved into a new headquarters, expanded its cleanroom space, and added an innovation lab to support its growing workforce and accelerate spacecraft production. The expansion includes two new buildings adjacent to Firefly’s existing spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, Texas, enabling a single campus with 144,000 total square feet for spacecraft assembly and testing, mission control, avionics and component production, engineering, and business operations.

Everything’s bigger in Texas … The new campus is twice the size of Firefly’s former Cedar Park facilities and is less than 30 miles from Firefly’s 200-acre Rocket Ranch in Briggs, Texas, where the company operates six test stands and 217,000 square feet of facilities for launch vehicle engineering, manufacturing, and integration. The overall goal is to move from developing space vehicles to producing them at scale.

Isar may assist Canadian launch firms. European Spaceflight attempts to make sense of news this week that a German submarine company has partnered with a German launch company, Isar Aerospace, to sell 12 new submarines to Canada. Confused yet? The German maritime defense company TKMS is competing with South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean for the submarine contract, and final bids were due in March. Beyond finances, the competitors are looking for ways to sweeten their proposals. After submitting its bid, TKMS said it had partnered with German launch services provider Isar Aerospace to help establish sovereign Canadian access to space.

Isar probably will help, rather than compete … In recent months Canada has gotten serious about developing its own sovereign access to space. As part of its Launch the North initiative, Canada will invest $105 million over three years to establish a small-lift launch capability by the end of 2028. The initial awards included $8.3 million for Reaction Dynamics, the Canada Rocket Company, and NordSpace. The submarine proposal appears to be not an effort to supplant those three companies, but rather envisions Isar’s role as an industrial and technical enabler of the Canadian efforts.

Another Chinese launch firm raises funding. China’s Zenk Space has secured 180 million yuan ($26 million) ahead of the planned June debut of its Zhihang-1 kerolox rocket, the company’s first orbital launch attempt, Space News reports. The funding will provide solid financial backing for the Zhihang-1 inaugural mission and ensure all pre-launch activities proceed smoothly, the company said. The launch could take place in June.

Rocket leverages existing technology … Zhihang-1 is a 49.8-meter-long, 3.35-m-diameter, kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher capable of 4,000 kilograms to a 500-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit. The rocket uses YF-102 kerosene-liquid oxygen engines purchased from state-owned CASC’s Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology. CAS Space’s Kinetica-1 and Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-2 also use the YF-102. Propellant tanks are sourced from commercial firm R-Space.

SpaceX files financial document ahead of IPO. After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX on Wednesday afternoon released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Founded in 2002 and still led by Elon Musk, SpaceX submitted the filing in anticipation of an initial public offering of its stock as soon as June 12, Ars reports.

From money winner to money loser … The document revealed no major surprises about the company’s space operations, but there was a trove of details about its sprawling operations, which now encompass launch, spaceflight, space-based Internet, and, thanks to its recent acquisition of Musk’s xAI, social media and AI. The company reported revenues of $18.67 billion in 2025, up significantly from $14.02 billion the year before. However, after turning a small profit in 2024, the company lost $4.94 billion in 2025 largely due to spending on artificial intelligence development.

Roscosmos begins rocket advertising in earnest. Since January 1, Russian rockets have been regularly plastered with advertising for banks, restaurants, and more, Ars reports. Last fall, President Vladimir Putin, who has served in that role for all but four years this century, approved changes to federal laws governing advertising and space activities to allow for the placement of advertising on spacecraft.

Marginal gains so far … Six large advertisements have been placed on Russian rockets in 2026. These include ads for PSB Bank, the Kofemaniya restaurant chain, the Russian Media Group, and the Russian Olympic Committee. The other two were public service announcements. The policy change is intended to offset Roscosmos’ losses in recent years, which have mounted after the onset of Western sanctions. However, annual revenues from space advertising may only amount to a few million dollars per year.

Ground system issue scrubs Starship test flight. SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day, Ars reports. Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.

A fix to be attempted … That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before SpaceX called off the launch attempt. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, attributed the scrub to a hydraulic pin that failed to retract on an umbilical arm connecting the launch tower to the rocket. “If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow,” Musk wrote on X. The 90-minute launch window Friday would open at 5:30 pm CDT (22:30 UTC).

There is a lot on the line with this test flight of Starship. After seven months of down time, SpaceX returned its Starship vehicle to the launch pad. Only this time it’s a new rocket, V3 of the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster, and a new launch pad at its Starbase facility in South Texas. SpaceX’s goal with the test flight is to gather data about the performance of the radically remade new vehicle and its launch pad. For all that this is a test flight, however, in a preview of the launch, Ars reports that there is a lot on the line for SpaceX, NASA, and much of the US commercial space industry.

Time for Starship to fulfill its promises …  The US commercial space industry is depending on lower launch costs and higher capacity. NASA’s lunar ambitions with the Artemis program, to a great degree, hinge on its success. And the stakes are highest of all for SpaceX. Starlink direct-to-cell? Orbital data centers? SpaceX’s fantastic valuation after its IPO? An eventual city on Mars? All of these rely entirely on Starship fulfilling its promise of rapid, low-cost, reusable launch.

ULA confirms solid rocket test success. United Launch Alliance oversaw the completion of a critical milestone last month on the road to resuming flights with its Vulcan rockets, Spaceflight Now reports. The company said Northrop Grumman performed a successful static fire test of a Graphite Epoxy Motor 63XL Solid Rocket Booster. A Northrop spokesperson said the test served to “demonstrate nozzle design enhancements which were already in work and an advanced propellant technology for future solid rocket motors across their portfolio.”

A review process is ongoing … During the launch of a mission for the United States Space Force in February, dubbed USSF-87, one of the four SRBs attached to the Vulcan booster suffered a nozzle problem prior to SRB separation. The rocket rolled more than intended following the incident. The tests are part of a review process underway by the US military to allow the rocket to return to flight for its missions. Vulcan’s next flight is expected to be for a commercial customer, Amazon, sometime this summer.

Contractor dies at Starbase. A person at SpaceX’s rocket complex in Texas died in a workplace accident Friday, The Wall Street Journal reports. Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Treviño said that his office responded to the accident but isn’t releasing information about the victim. The person worked for a contractor helping to develop the company’s Starbase complex and died after a fall, people familiar with the matter said.

Starbase has its own emergency plan … The fire department for Brownsville was dispatched to respond to the accident on Friday, said the city’s fire chief, Jarrett Sheldon. That request was quickly canceled, and the department didn’t send personnel out to Starbase, he said. SpaceX didn’t respond to requests for comment. Representatives for the city of Starbase, created as a company town for SpaceX’s facilities and staff, also didn’t respond to requests for comment. Representatives from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Next three launches

May 22: Starship | Flight Test 12 | Starbase, Texas | 22:30 UTC

May 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-37 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14:00 UTC

May 24: Long March 2F | Shenzhou 23 | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 15:08 UTC

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 23 May 2026 at 8:09 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.

Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.

That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before SpaceX called off the launch attempt.

“It is sounding like we are not going to be able to clear this issue in time today, so we are going to be standing down from a launch,” said Dan Huot, a SpaceX official hosting the company’s live broadcast Thursday. “We got the vehicle totally loaded. We hit a couple of different holds as we worked through that count.”

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, attributed the scrub to a hydraulic pin that failed to retract on an umbilical arm connecting the launch tower to the rocket. “If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow,” Musk wrote on X. The 90-minute launch window Friday would open at 5:30 pm CDT (22:30 UTC).

The upcoming Starship test flight will mark the first liftoff from a brand new launch pad at Starbase, Texas, the one-year-old city encompassing SpaceX’s South Texas test site near the US-Mexico border. It will be the 12th full-scale test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster to date, and the first to employ an overhauled design SpaceX calls Starship Version 3. Starship V3 introduces numerous changes, including 39 more efficient, higher-thrust Raptor engines, a redesigned propulsion system, three larger grid fins to replace four smaller ones, and a reusable hot staging ring permanently attached to the top of the Super Heavy booster.

There’s a lot riding on Starship V3: NASA’s aim to land astronauts on the Moon before China, SpaceX’s own plans to deploy a new generation of Starlink Internet satellites and orbital data centers, and the dreams of the broader space enterprise for low-cost access to space. It also comes on the cusp of SpaceX’s highly-anticipated initial public offering. Starship and Super Heavy are designed for full reusability, but SpaceX has, so far, only reused the booster stage. The company does not plan to recover either stage of the rocket on this flight.

What to expect

SpaceX got through most of the countdown Thursday, essentially repeating what the launch team accomplished in a recent dress rehearsal. Engineers pumped more than 11 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen into the rocket in less than 40 minutes, demonstrating a faster loading procedure than on past versions of Starship. For comparison, it takes SpaceX about the same amount of time to load a million pounds of propellant into its smaller Falcon 9 rocket.

When it lifts off, the 12th flight of Starship will follow a similar profile as the ones before it. But there are a few tweaks to the flight plan. The rocket will head slightly farther south over the Gulf of Mexico, running the gap between the Yucatan Peninsula and the western tip of Cuba, rather than flying over the Florida Keys.

The Super Heavy booster, itself more than 20 stories tall, will fall away from the Starship upper stage nearly two-and-a-half minutes into the flight before guiding itself toward a controlled splashdown off the coast of Texas. The upper stage’s six engines will give Starship enough velocity to fly halfway around the world, but not quite enough speed to reach low-Earth orbit.

Once in space, the ship will release 20 mock-ups of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellites, plus two deployable Starlinks fitted with cameras to take pictures of the rocket’s upper stage in flight. Starship V3 features a modified payload deployment mechanism to release Starlinks at a faster rate than on Starship V2. This demonstration will help pave the way for Starship to launch operational satellites, potentially as soon as later this year, according to SpaceX.

Then, around 48 minutes after liftoff, Earth’s gravity will pull Starship back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. Engineers will track the performance of the heat shield during reentry before the ship reignites its engines for a final landing burn, targeting a pinpoint splashdown northwest of Australia.

Most of this should seem familiar if you’ve watched a Starship test flight before. What’s new about this launch is not where Starship will go or what it will do, but how it will fly.

“The flight test’s primary goal will be to demonstrate each of these new pieces in the flight environment for the first time, with each element of the Starship architecture featuring significant redesigns to enable full and rapid reuse that incorporate learnings from years of development and test,” SpaceX wrote on its website.

If this flight doesn’t go well, SpaceX has a “large pipeline of V3 ships and boosters in the factory,” Musk wrote on X. A seven-month gap since the last Starship launch “was due to the almost total redesign of the primary structure, engines, electronics and launch tower from V2,” he added.

SpaceX’s hardware-rich approach to rocket development means the company would likely be able to recover from a setback rather quickly. Three of five flights of Starship V2 failed last year, but SpaceX avoided lengthy groundings and reeled off all five launches in a period of nine months.

Musk predicted that a similar failure, if it were to occur on the next flight, would likewise have a modest effect on Starship’s schedule. But every week and month counts for the US space program’s race to the Moon, and SpaceX’s position as a soon-to-be public company adds an extra dash of importance to what happens with Flight 12.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 22 May 2026 at 6:07 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Atlantic hurricane season is almost upon us, and the early signs indicate it might be less active than usual. But that’s no reason to delete your weather app and ignore the forecast.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting eight to 14 named tropical systems, of which three to six will become hurricanes and one to three will be Category 3 or higher.

“What’s driving this forecast is largely an El Niño event,” said NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs.

Characterized by a tongue of hot water stretching across the Pacific, El Niño is likely to emerge this summer. That stretch of warm ocean rearranges weather patterns around the world. In the case of the tropical Atlantic, El Niño stirs up winds that make it hard for hurricanes to spin up. Those that do can sometimes be torn apart by what’s going on in the upper atmosphere. (The opposite is true in the Pacific, and NOAA is predicting a very active season in that ocean basin.)

During the three past super El Niños, accumulated cyclone energy—a metric that factors in storms’ strength and longevity—was well below normal.

That said, El Niño, even an extremely strong one, is only one of many factors that impact hurricane season. Hot local ocean temperatures can help storms form and gain strength, and the Atlantic is currently warmer than normal.

At the same time, Sahara dust can gum up the atmosphere and inhibit storms from forming. It’s also notoriously hard to predict when plumes of it will kick up. That’s what happened last year, when a below-average number of named storms formed despite an active forecast. Despite the lower-than-expected activity, last year still spawned Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest storms to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin.

All of which is to say that the seasonal forecast is a handy guide for what to expect, and it’s great for federal and state agencies to preposition supplies and resources. But it’s what happens with individual storms that ultimately matters.

“Even though we’re expecting a below average season in the Atlantic, it’s important to understand it only takes one,” Jacobs said, noting that even in quiet years, Category 5 storms have still made landfall.

The Trump administration has slashed staffing at NOAA and reduced the collection of some data, such as weather balloons, that can impact forecasts. Jacobs touted the value of new observations, including aerial drones that will be deployed operationally for the first time.

NOAA has also ramped up the use of artificial intelligence weather models trained on historical data. During the 2025 hurricane season, the agency tested an experimental hurricane model developed with Google DeepMind. Late last year, it also rolled out a suite of AI weather models to use in operational forecasting, in addition to traditional weather models that use equations to forecast the weather.

The agency says that the AI version of its flagship model provides better prediction of the tracks of tropical cyclones—the generic name for hurricanes—though it lags traditional weather models in predicting their intensity.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 22 May 2026 at 9:02 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

NASA confirmed Thursday that the Russian segment of the International Space Station has begun leaking atmosphere into space again. It’s an old problem that NASA recently hoped was resolved.

For more than half a decade, engineers from Roscosmos and NASA have been tracking the leak rate from a small Russian module attached to the space station that leads to a docking port. The source of these leaks, microscopic structural cracks, have been difficult to find and address.

In January, NASA said that after multiple inspections and sealant applications, the pressure inside this segment, known as the PrK module, had reached a “stable configuration.” The PrK module is essentially a transfer tunnel attached to the Zvezda Service Module on the Russian segment of the space station.

This announcement by NASA was greeted by a sigh of relief in the space community, as atmospheric leaks on a pressure vessel like the International Space Station are never a good thing.

Leaks begin again

Unfortunately, the leak returned three weeks ago. After a couple of sources reported this to Ars, NASA confirmed the issue on Thursday. On May 1, after Russian cosmonauts unloaded cargo from the Progress 95 cargo spacecraft, Roscosmos noted a “slow pressure drop” in the PrK module.

“Teams performed data analysis, which indicated a loss of about one pound per day,” NASA spokesperson Josh Finch told Ars. “Roscosmos allowed the pressure in the transfer tunnel to gradually decrease while monitoring the rate. The area now is being maintained at a lower pressure, with small repressurizations as needed. There are no impacts to station operations, and NASA and Roscosmos are coordinating on next steps.”

Although there is no impact on astronauts aboard the station, nor any immediate concerns about the station’s health, the returning leak issue raises new questions about the long-term viability of the ISS.

High risk, high consequence

In the past, NASA officials have downplayed the severity of the leak risks publicly and in meetings with external stakeholders of the ISS. Internally, however, there appears to be greater concern. The space agency uses a 5×5 “risk matrix” to classify the likelihood and consequences of risks to spaceflight activities, and the Russian leaks have been classified as a “5” on both high likelihood and high consequence. Their potential for “catastrophic failure” is discussed in meetings.

Despite its dwindling budget, Roscosmos has managed the problem over the last several years largely by keeping the hatch to the PrK module closed to the rest of the station. It was thought that the issue could be similarly managed through 2030, when the space station was due to be retired.

However, NASA and the US Congress are now considering extending the space station’s lifespan to at least 2032, if not longer. The reemergence of cracking on the space station—some of its modules have now been in space for nearly three decades—calls into question whether continually extending its operation is a viable long-term strategy.

Can NASA keep extending ISS into perpetuity?

NASA must win international partner support for these extensions, including from Russia. The agency’s decision-making is further complicated by the desire to continue flying the station until private replacements are ready.

The US space agency has struggled to find a viable path forward with “commercial” space stations, a plan in which NASA would help fund development of one or more private space stations while also agreeing to be one of several customers with its astronauts. In March, NASA proposed a revised plan for these commercial space stations at its Ignition event, which included private firms docking initial modules to the International Space Station, but it has not been particularly well-received.

The commercial companies are wary about NASA’s discussions to extend the station’s lifespan because they say they will be ready by 2030. Phil McAlister, NASA’s former director of commercial spaceflight, said the agency would be best served by fully supporting the development of commercial space stations and working with the private companies to ensure they are ready by 2030.

“This further confirms the wisdom of the current policy of retiring the ISS in 2030 and replacing it with more modern, more cost-effective, and safer commercial platforms,” McAlister told Ars.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 22 May 2026 at 9:01 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The robotics startup Figure AI has been livestreaming humanoid robots placing thousands of packages onto a conveyor belt for nearly a week—a spectacle that included a robot competing against a human intern at one point.

The promotional robot demo has become a viral sensation among tech enthusiasts, spurring YouTube commenters to name the robots and the company to rapidly roll out related robot merchandise in response. Users on X have described the livestream in glowing terms, such as “the greatest product demo since Steve Jobs’ ‘one more thing.’” But despite such sentiments, it’s worth bearing in mind that even the most impressive robot demos represent narrow windows for understanding real-world robot capabilities.

Figure’s event began on May 13 as a planned eight-hour robot demonstration featuring the company’s latest Figure 03 robots. The chosen robotic task involved inspecting the bar codes on various small packages—including cardboard boxes and soft padded envelopes or bags—and then placing the packages on a conveyor belt with the bar codes facing downward. The demo would feature the robots performing the task autonomously without any human intervention, according to Figure CEO Brett Adcock.

But Adcock initially played down expectations by noting that the Figure team was aiming for the robots to work for eight hours straight, whereas a previous Figure demo had lasted just one hour. “High odds something breaks,” Adcock posted on X.

The robots rely on the company’s Helix 02 neural network system that supposedly enables full-body control and “long horizon autonomy” to direct the robot’s actions for various tasks. Figure’s website describes the robots’ whole-body controller system as having been trained on more than 1,000 hours of human motion data, along with spending time training in simulation across more than 200,000 parallel environments.

That Helix 02 system runs “entirely onboard” each robot’s hardware, with AI inference being done on the device, Adcock explained in his X post. However, the robots are networked together for communication purposes, so they can autonomously request another robot to step in if they need to recharge their batteries—each robot is expected to work about three to four hours before its batteries run low. The robots may also swap out if they encounter hardware or software issues.

It keeps going and going

By the time Figure had livestreamed eight hours of the robots performing “autonomous, unsupervised work,” Adcock was declaring that the team had decided to keep going with the livestream 24/7. He also highlighted YouTube comments that named several of the robots Bob, Frank, and Gary.

On May 14, the robots had surpassed 30 hours of collective work, with individual robots taking turns swapping in and out. Adcock was capitalizing on the attention by wearing a T-shirt with the image of the robot dubbed “Frank,” all while touting the company’s merch store to viewers. He also welcomed another robot to the team by attaching a nametag with the name Rose.

Adding to the spectacle, people began placing bets through the prediction market Polymarket on how long the robots could run without failure and how many packages they could handle.

By May 15, the robots had seemingly achieved “48 hours of nonstop autonomous operation without a failure,” Adcock posted on X. “We are now running this until a failure to perform the use case,” he added.

David McCall, Figure’s head of design, also appeared briefly on the livestream to give another robot a “Jim” nametag. That particular robot would feature prominently in the Figure team’s next attention-grabbing scheme in response to one viewer’s comment—pitting robot against human on the same task.

Human versus machine

On May 17, Adcock laid out the “Man vs. Machine” scenario for the head-to-head competition that would last 10 hours. The human competitor would get meal breaks and paid rest breaks during the shift in accordance with California labor laws. Aimé Gérard, an intern working at Figure AI, was chosen to represent the human side.

A comparison video revealed some of the current differences between the humanoid robots’ performance and human capabilities. Whereas Gérard could speedily and precisely pick up packages for inspection before moving them along, the robots moved at a slower but methodical pace. The robots also sometimes spent extra time trying and failing to pick up packages or grabbed repeatedly at empty air when trying to sweep packages along.

That difference allowed Gérard to stay ahead on the package task until he took a mandated break, according to Business Insider. But he quickly recovered the human lead from the robotic competition once he returned—eventually claiming victory by sorting 12,924 packages versus the robots’ 12,732 packages.

The human intern worked at a rate of 2.79 seconds per package, whereas the robots averaged 2.83 seconds per package, according to Adcock. “This is the last time a human will ever win,” the Figure CEO predicted in his post on the competition.

What lies ahead

Not all the attention for the livestreamed robot demonstration has been uniformly positive. Some commenters pointed out moments when the robots seemed to mishandle packages and berated robots for occasionally dropping packages.

Others have questioned whether the robots are truly operating autonomously, despite Figure’s CEO insisting they operate independently, without any human teleoperators controlling their movements. The lack of independent verification on the ground for such robotic demonstrations often makes it difficult to confirm. There is also a history of some companies—notably Tesla—having relied on human teleoperators for many of their humanoid robot demonstrations.

The Figure event may appear especially compelling because it’s relatively rare for companies to present livestreamed endurance runs featuring humanoid robots. Such livestreams can convey seemingly greater transparency than short videos by allowing viewers to see robotic flaws and fumbles in real time. That may encourage viewers’ belief in the robots’ demonstrated capabilities, which in this case is limited to the Figure 03 robot’s ability to handle packages in one specific warehouse-style setup.

Even taking this particular demonstration at face value, what does this mean for Figure AI’s broader vision? The company is one among many betting on AI-powered humanoid robots becoming general-purpose workers capable of performing various tasks normally done by humans. To gain widespread adoption, humanoid robots will need to prove as capable and cost-effective as either human workers or industrial robots, with more specialized forms suited for specific tasks.

The robotics startup Figure AI has been livestreaming humanoid robots placing thousands of packages onto a conveyor belt for nearly a week—a spectacle that included a robot competing against a human intern at one point.

The promotional robot demo has become a viral sensation among tech enthusiasts, spurring YouTube commenters to name the robots and the company to rapidly roll out related robot merchandise in response. Users on X have described the livestream in glowing terms, such as “the greatest product demo since Steve Jobs’ ‘one more thing.’” But despite such sentiments, it’s worth bearing in mind that even the most impressive robot demos represent narrow windows for understanding real-world robot capabilities.

Figure’s event began on May 13 as a planned eight-hour robot demonstration featuring the company’s latest Figure 03 robots. The chosen robotic task involved inspecting the bar codes on various small packages—including cardboard boxes and soft padded envelopes or bags—and then placing the packages on a conveyor belt with the bar codes facing downward. The demo would feature the robots performing the task autonomously without any human intervention, according to Figure CEO Brett Adcock.

But Adcock initially played down expectations by noting that the Figure team was aiming for the robots to work for eight hours straight, whereas a previous Figure demo had lasted just one hour. “High odds something breaks,” Adcock posted on X.

The robots rely on the company’s Helix 02 neural network system that supposedly enables full-body control and “long horizon autonomy” to direct the robot’s actions for various tasks. Figure’s website describes the robots’ whole-body controller system as having been trained on more than 1,000 hours of human motion data, along with spending time training in simulation across more than 200,000 parallel environments.

That Helix 02 system runs “entirely onboard” each robot’s hardware, with AI inference being done on the device, Adcock explained in his X post. However, the robots are networked together for communication purposes, so they can autonomously request another robot to step in if they need to recharge their batteries—each robot is expected to work about three to four hours before its batteries run low. The robots may also swap out if they encounter hardware or software issues.

It keeps going and going

By the time Figure had livestreamed eight hours of the robots performing “autonomous, unsupervised work,” Adcock was declaring that the team had decided to keep going with the livestream 24/7. He also highlighted YouTube comments that named several of the robots Bob, Frank, and Gary.

On May 14, the robots had surpassed 30 hours of collective work, with individual robots taking turns swapping in and out. Adcock was capitalizing on the attention by wearing a T-shirt with the image of the robot dubbed “Frank,” all while touting the company’s merch store to viewers. He also welcomed another robot to the team by attaching a nametag with the name Rose.

Adding to the spectacle, people began placing bets through the prediction market Polymarket on how long the robots could run without failure and how many packages they could handle.

By May 15, the robots had seemingly achieved “48 hours of nonstop autonomous operation without a failure,” Adcock posted on X. “We are now running this until a failure to perform the use case,” he added.

David McCall, Figure’s head of design, also appeared briefly on the livestream to give another robot a “Jim” nametag. That particular robot would feature prominently in the Figure team’s next attention-grabbing scheme in response to one viewer’s comment—pitting robot against human on the same task.

Human versus machine

On May 17, Adcock laid out the “Man vs. Machine” scenario for the head-to-head competition that would last 10 hours. The human competitor would get meal breaks and paid rest breaks during the shift in accordance with California labor laws. Aimé Gérard, an intern working at Figure AI, was chosen to represent the human side.

A comparison video revealed some of the current differences between the humanoid robots’ performance and human capabilities. Whereas Gérard could speedily and precisely pick up packages for inspection before moving them along, the robots moved at a slower but methodical pace. The robots also sometimes spent extra time trying and failing to pick up packages or grabbed repeatedly at empty air when trying to sweep packages along.

That difference allowed Gérard to stay ahead on the package task until he took a mandated break, according to Business Insider. But he quickly recovered the human lead from the robotic competition once he returned—eventually claiming victory by sorting 12,924 packages versus the robots’ 12,732 packages.

The human intern worked at a rate of 2.79 seconds per package, whereas the robots averaged 2.83 seconds per package, according to Adcock. “This is the last time a human will ever win,” the Figure CEO predicted in his post on the competition.

What lies ahead

Not all the attention for the livestreamed robot demonstration has been uniformly positive. Some commenters pointed out moments when the robots seemed to mishandle packages and berated robots for occasionally dropping packages.

Others have questioned whether the robots are truly operating autonomously, despite Figure’s CEO insisting they operate independently, without any human teleoperators controlling their movements. The lack of independent verification on the ground for such robotic demonstrations often makes it difficult to confirm. There is also a history of some companies—notably Tesla—having relied on human teleoperators for many of their humanoid robot demonstrations.

The Figure event may appear especially compelling because it’s relatively rare for companies to present livestreamed endurance runs featuring humanoid robots. Such livestreams can convey seemingly greater transparency than short videos by allowing viewers to see robotic flaws and fumbles in real time. That may encourage viewers’ belief in the robots’ demonstrated capabilities, which in this case is limited to the Figure 03 robot’s ability to handle packages in one specific warehouse-style setup.

Even taking this particular demonstration at face value, what does this mean for Figure AI’s broader vision? The company is one among many betting on AI-powered humanoid robots becoming general-purpose workers capable of performing various tasks normally done by humans. To gain widespread adoption, humanoid robots will need to prove as capable and cost-effective as either human workers or industrial robots, with more specialized forms suited for specific tasks.

My favorite video

This demonstration, focused on a repetitive task, does not show off such general-purpose capability involving a more diverse array of tasks or environments—something that Figure has only hinted at in short video demonstrations so far. Still, the company has already raised nearly $2 billion from Silicon Valley investors and companies, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Amazon, and OpenAI.

Figure’s biggest real-world test to date involved deploying its Figure 02 robots to the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg in South Carolina in 2025. Over an 11-month period, the previous version of Figure’s humanoid robots focused on picking up sheet-metal parts from racks or bins and placing them on a welding fixture.

The robots supposedly contributed to the production of 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles while working 10-hour shifts throughout a typical Monday to Friday workweek. “Figure 02 handled the precise removal and positioning of sheet metal parts for the welding process—a task that is particularly demanding in terms of speed and accuracy while also being physically exhausting,” according to a BMW Group press release.

It remains to be seen whether BMW will also put the Figure 03 humanoid robot to work in more pilot deployments. In the February 2026 press release, the automaker said it was still evaluating future use cases for Figure’s latest robot.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Thursday 21 May 2026 at 6:02 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

The Ebola outbreak first reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Friday has seemingly escalated quickly into a large, uncontrolled multinational outbreak.

As of May 17, there were 10 confirmed cases, 336 suspected cases, and 88 deaths in the DRC, as well as two confirmed cases and one death in neighboring Uganda, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has offices in the region. The numbers already put the outbreak within the top 10 Ebola outbreaks recorded by size, though still far from the worst—the 2014–2016 West African outbreak had over 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths.

International emergency

On Sunday, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), though it noted that it does not meet the criteria for a pandemic emergency. In making the PHEIC determination, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cited several factors in addition to the immediate large size, including clusters of suspected cases and deaths in multiple DRC health zones, four deaths among healthcare workers, and a lack of apparent links between geographically distant cases and clusters. The features collectively suggest that the outbreak is larger than what is currently being detected and is spreading regionally.

“Moreover, the ongoing insecurity, humanitarian crisis, high population mobility, the urban or semi-urban nature of the current hotspot, and the large network of informal healthcare facilities further compound the risk of spread,” the WHO said.

The final extraordinary aspect of the outbreak is that it is caused by the uncommon Bundibugyo strain of Ebola virus, which has no clinically validated treatments or vaccines. This is only the third Ebola outbreak caused by Bundibugyo, which has had fatality rates of 25–50 percent.

There are four virus strains known to cause Ebola disease in humans, and three have caused large outbreaks (Zaire, Sudan, and Bundibugyo). The most common strain is Zaire, for which treatments and vaccines have been developed. The viruses spill over from animals, including non-human primates and bats, and cause severe hemorrhagic fever, marked by diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding. Person-to-person spread occurs via contact with bodily fluids and symptoms can develop between two and 21 days—though most often eight to 10 days—after an exposure.

CDC response and infected American

On Monday morning, the CDC announced on its website that it is implementing new travel restrictions, including screening and monitoring Americans arriving from DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan, while also barring the entry of non-US passport holders who have traveled in those countries in the past 21 days.

Additionally, in a CDC press briefing on Monday afternoon, Captain Satish Pillai, incident manager for CDC’s Ebola response, said that one American in the DRC has been infected after being exposed as part of their work there. The person developed symptoms over the weekend and tested positive late Sunday. The CDC is now working to transfer that person, along with six other Americans, to Germany, where they will receive care. Pillai did not answer questions about the person’s identity or their work.

Serge, a Christian missionary organization, announced that the infected person is Dr. Peter Stafford, who has been working in the Nyankunde Hospital in Bunia, DRC, since 2023. The other six people the CDC is working to relocate are his wife, Dr. Rebekah Stafford, the couple’s four children, and a third doctor with the organization, Dr. Patrick LaRochelle. All three doctors had exposures, the organization said, but Rebekah Stafford and LaRochelle are currently asymptomatic.

Pillai noted that the CDC considers the risk to the American public to be low.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 19 May 2026 at 3:23 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

A thousand years ago, the ancestors of today’s Barkindji people carefully buried a dingo (or garli, in the Barkindji language) in a mound of shells.

Archaeologists recently studied the burial in what’s now New South Wales, Australia. They found that the Barkindji ancestors had buried the dingo with the same care and ceremony as any beloved human member of the community and looked after the grave for centuries. The burial reveals that dingoes were, as Australian Museum and University of Sydney archaeologist and study co-author Amy Way puts it, “deeply valued and loved” by ancient people in Australia.

The long-lost dingo

Five years ago, Barkindji Elder Uncle Badger Bates and National Parks and Wildlife Service archaeologist Dan Witter saw bones eroding out of a road cut in Kinchega National Park, an area along the Baaka, or Darling River, in Western Australia. Badger recognized the bones as a dingo, lying on its left side in what was once a carefully built mound of river mussel shells.

At the urging of the Menindee Aboriginal Elders Council, which worried that erosion would end up destroying the dingo bones and any information about the past they contained, a team of archaeologists, working alongside Barkindji elders, excavated and studied the skeleton. The bones turned out to belong to an elderly male dingo, with worn teeth and possible signs of arthritis. Broken and healed bones suggested that he’d lived a tough, active life but also been cared for by people.

And the layers of shells around him revealed that generations of Barkindji had tended his grave and ritually “fed” him by adding shells to the mound for centuries after his death. This is definitely not the first dingo burial ever found in Australia, but it’s farther north and west than any other example. It reveals a far more profound and lasting relationship between ancient people and dingoes than outside researchers, at least, had previously fully realized.

“This confirms these traditions were much more widespread than we once thought,” said University of Western Australia specialist Loukas Koungoulos, the lead author of the paper, in a press release.

The dingo’s bones revealed healed injuries and possible arthritis.

Credit: Amy Way

Hunting kangaroos and snoozing by the fire

The dingo’s bones tell their own story. Koungoulos says he was probably between 4 and 7 years old, which would be late middle age for a wild dingo today. Heavily worn teeth were the first hint of the dingo’s senior citizen status, but the ends of his leg bones also showed signs of bone decay, probably thanks to long-term inflammation: possibly something like arthritis.

And he was shorter than most wild dingoes, based on the length of his femurs. That’s not unusual—domesticated animals are often shorter than their wild relatives, and it doesn’t take many generations for that to show up—but it could say something interesting about exactly how close wild dingoes got to domestication in the centuries before European colonists wrecked everything.

At some point, the dingo had suffered a broken rib and lower leg. Koungoulos suggests the injuries look like the aftermath of a kangaroo kick and may have happened on a hunt. The injuries themselves aren’t too surprising; wild dingoes hunt kangaroos, and Aboriginal hunters worked with dingoes the same way people in other parts of the world have hunted with dogs for millennia. What’s more striking is that the two injuries were long-since healed. Somebody nursed this dingo back to health after his kangaroo encounter.

“What stands out about garli is that he was old and well-cared-for,” said Koungoulos. “The healed injuries, worn teeth, and careful burial tell us that this animal lived a long life alongside people, and that his death was marked intentionally and with respect.”

Barkindji elders stand with the excavated dingo skeleton; in the center is Uncle Badger Bates, who first identified the bones as a dingo.

Credit: Amy Way

How dingoes became beloved community members

People have lived in this part of Australia for at least 40,000 years, and the oldest traces of humans on the continent date to 65,000 years ago. But dingoes are relative newcomers; the first dingoes arrived on Australia’s shores between 3,500 and 5,000 years ago: just a relative handful of domestic dogs that tagged along with seafarers from New Guinea, according to genetic studies. But that small starting population went wild, both literally and figuratively.

And, of course, they’re undeniably friend-shaped. It didn’t take Australia’s First Nations peoples long to bond with the dingoes, finding a place for them in their creation stories and in their communities.

“These creatures were the first non-humans who answered back, came when called, helped in the hunt, slept with people, and learned to understand some of the vocabulary of human languages,” wrote anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose in her book Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. “People gave them names, fitted them into the wider kinship structure, and took care of dead dingoes in the same way they took care of dead people.”

The Baaka dingo is proof of just how deeply dingoes had worked their way into people’s hearts and lives by around a thousand years ago. Radiocarbon dating of the freshwater mussel shells reveals that the dingo’s burial mound was built between 916 and 963 years ago, around the same time the dingo died. But layers of shells kept being added over the centuries, in what Barkindji elders describe as a “feeding” ritual meant to honor the dead dingo as one of the community’s own ancestors.

“If garli were buried with the same care and respect we see for human ancestors, including mothers and elders, it tells us these animals were profoundly valued and loved,” said Way.

In many places, shell middens begin as refuse piles and eventually become parts of the foundations of buildings or settlements. But in Australia, middens “are sites built by the Old People,” write Way, Barkindji elder and artist Barb Quayle, and Barkindji custodian Dave Doyle in a 2023 article about their work. They’re built on purpose as burial sites for family members—both two- and four-legged. But this is the first time archaeologists have actually unearthed a midden with evidence that people added to it regularly for so many generations.

The site looks lonely today, but this once would have been a carefully tended grave and an important site for Barkindji ancestors in the area.

Credit: Amy Way

That’ll do, garli, that’ll do.

The Barkindji people have shown this small, elderly dingo the same care their ancestors did. Koungoulos and Doyle excavated the bones only after Quayle had performed a smoking ceremony over the grave, which involves passing smoke over the grave and the bones as a form of spiritual cleansing. Way and her colleagues have been working with Barkindji representatives for several years to learn more about the Barkindji people’s more than 40,000-year history in the region, combining traditional knowledge and priorities with modern scientific techniques.

And earlier this year, Barkindji Elders and archaeologists reburied the dingo on Barkindji land. In Australia, this kind of repatriation is called a return to Country.

“This research reinforces what Barkindji people have always known,” said Way. “These relationships with animals, ancestors, and Country were deep, deliberate, and ongoing.”

Australian Archaeology, 2026. DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2026.2650909. (About DOIs)

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 19 May 2026 at 7:42 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Scientists call them “lilliputian hallucinations,” a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures

Scientists have finally spotted something they have been searching for since the 1940s: small-scale torsional Alfvén waves in the Sun’s corona. Torsional Alfvén waves are rotating magnetic waves that travel through plasma along magnetic field lines, twisting them back and forth like a coiled spring. First predicted in 1942 by Swedish physicist Hannes Alfvén, these waves are believed to transport large amounts of energy through the Sun’s atmosphere. They were detected using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the most powerful solar telescope in the world. The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, could help explain why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface.

The corona, the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer, extends millions of kilometers into space and is made of extremely hot ionized plasma. Plasma is often described as the fourth state of matter, where atoms become so energized that electrons separate from atomic nuclei, creating electrically charged particles strongly influenced by magnetic fields. Although the Sun’s visible surface is far cooler at 5,500 degrees Celsius, the corona shockingly reaches temperatures above one million degrees Celsius, creating the long-standing “coronal heating problem.” Its plasma flows outward as the solar wind, a supersonic stream of charged particles that fills our solar system. The solar wind shapes the heliosphere and can disturb satellites, GPS systems, and electrical grids on Earth. How the corona receives enough energy to sustain such temperatures has been debated for decades.

Alfvén waves have long been considered one of the leading explanations. In a plasma made up of many flux tubes — narrow magnetic structures that channel plasma and energy through the Sun’s atmosphere — the only pure Alfvén mode is torsional, meaning it twists magnetic field lines around their central axis rather than swaying them side to side. These magnetic structures guide the movement of charged particles because plasma naturally follows magnetic field lines.

Professor Richard Morton of Northumbria University, who led the study, said: “This discovery ends a protracted search for these waves that has its origins in the 1940s. We've finally been able to directly observe these torsional motions twisting the magnetic field lines back and forth in the corona.”

The breakthrough was made possible by the telescope’s Cryogenic Near Infrared Spectropolarimeter (Cryo-NIRSP), an instrument designed to observe extremely fine magnetic and plasma structures in the corona. Morton tracked iron heated to 1.6 million degrees Celsius and developed new techniques to separate torsional motions from the more common swaying motions. “The movement of plasma in the sun's corona is dominated by swaying motions. These mask the torsional motions, so I had to develop a way of removing the swaying to find the twisting,” he explained.

Unlike kink waves, which make entire magnetic structures sway, torsional Alfvén waves produce twisting motions that can only be detected through spectroscopy, the scientific study of how matter interacts with light. In solar physics, spectroscopy measures tiny wavelength shifts caused by moving plasma through the Doppler effect. Plasma moving toward Earth produces a slight “blue shift,” while plasma moving away produces a “red shift.” By examining these opposite red and blue signatures on either side of magnetic structures, scientists can detect hidden twisting motions within the corona. The data showed that the quiet corona supports these torsional waves continuously.

Their measured amplitudes are small, but scientists believe they are underestimated because of the way the data is collected. Even so, the waves may carry a large fraction of the energy needed to power the corona and drive the solar wind.

“This research provides essential validation for the range of theoretical models that describe how Alfvén wave turbulence powers the solar atmosphere,” Morton added. “Having direct observations finally allows us to test these models against reality.”

The discovery matters not only for understanding the Sun but also for predicting space weather. The solar wind carries magnetic disturbances that can disrupt satellites, GPS systems, radio communication, and power grids on Earth. Alfvén waves may also explain “magnetic switchbacks” observed by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which are thought to transport significant energy through the solar wind.

The study involved researchers from China, Belgium, the UK, and the U.S., showing the scale of international collaboration in solar science. With the Inouye Solar Telescope now delivering extremely high-resolution views of the corona, scientists expect more insights into how these magnetic waves move, interact, and release energy throughout the Sun’s atmosphere.

Source: Northumbria University, Nature

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.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 18 May 2026 at 7:39 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

During the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert—the world's very first test of an atomic bomb—a new material spontaneously formed. It was discovered only recently, by an international research team coordinated by geologist Luca Bindi at the University of Florence, which identified the novel clathrate based on calcium, copper, and silicon. It's a material never before observed either in nature or as an artificial compound created in the laboratory.

What Are Clathrates?

The term “clathrates” denotes materials characterized by a “cage-like” structure that traps other atoms and molecules inside, giving them unique properties. Of great technological interest, these materials are being studied for various applications ranging from energy conversion (as thermoelectric materials capable of transforming heat into electricity) to the development of new semiconductors, to gas storage and hydrogen for future energy technologies.

The New Material

To discover the new material, researchers focused on trinitite, a silicate glass containing rare metallic phases. Using some techniques like x-ray diffraction, the team was able to identify a type I clathrate based on calcium, copper, and silicon within a tiny copper-rich metal droplet embedded in a sample of red trinitite.

The new material, the researchers say, formed spontaneously during a nuclear explosion. This indicates that the extreme conditions, such as extremely high temperatures and pressures, can generate new materials that are impossible to obtain by traditional methods.

Natural Laboratories

The discovery is even more interesting because in the same detonation event another very rare material was formed: a silicon-rich quasicrystal, already documented by the team of experts led by Bindi a few years ago.

A quasicrystal, as Bindi told WIRED at the time, is something that is not a crystal, but looks a lot like one. “Their peculiarity,” he said, “is that the atomic arrangement that is not periodic, but nearly so, creates incredible symmetries from which derive amazing physical properties, among other things, very difficult to predict.”

Establishing the link between these structures therefore helps scientists better understand how atoms organize under extreme conditions and expand the possibilities for designing new materials. “Events such as nuclear explosions, lightning strikes, or meteoritic impacts function as true natural laboratories,” the researchers explain. “They allow us to observe forms of matter that we cannot easily reproduce in the laboratory.”

In essence, this research opens new vistas for the development of innovative technologies, demonstrating that even destructive events can bequeath discoveries useful for the future.

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

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 18 May 2026 at 7:37 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

At age 49, Jan Janisch-Hanzlik’s multiple sclerosis was destroying her freedom to live the life she wanted. She gave up her active nursing job for a desk role. Frequent falls made her afraid to carry her grandchildren. She had to move to a bigger house to make room for the wheelchair she feared she might end up needing full-time.

Even the best available medication wasn’t improving Janisch-Hanzlik’s symptoms, and she worried they’d only get worse. So when she learned about a trial of CAR T cell therapy at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, close to the city of Blair where she lives, she phoned the clinic every other month until they were ready to enroll her as the first patient.

Originally designed to target and wipe out cancer by reprogramming the patient’s immune cells, CAR T is now being offered to patients in hundreds of clinical trials for autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis, lupus, Graves’ disease, vasculitis, and many others. The hope is that CAR T can duplicate the success it has demonstrated in a range of blood cancers by hunting down and eliminating cells that target the self in autoimmune diseases. This would essentially reset the body’s defenses to a state like the one that existed before the disease took hold.

But along with CAR T’s promise come risks, questions, and challenges. There’s uncertainty about how well it will work for autoimmunity and how long any benefits might last, as well as what long-term side effects might arise. Janisch-Hanzlik knew this when she sat down to receive the experimental treatment on June 9, 2025; she felt a mix of hope and fear knowing that she would be spending the next week being monitored for side effects including dangerous inflammation.

In addition to her clinical expertise and desire to pioneer a new treatment, Janisch-Hanzlik’s two young grandchildren helped inspire her pursuit of a treatment with known risks and uncertain benefits. Because multiple sclerosis has a genetic component, Janisch-Hanzlik knew that they have an elevated chance of going through the same struggle she has. “I would want to be able to say I did everything that I possibly could to prevent them, or anyone else, from having something like this,” she says.

From cancer to autoimmunity

The first CAR T cancer treatment was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2017 for an aggressive form of leukemia. Since then, the powerful and intensive treatment has resulted in long-term remission for many cancer patients.

The basic premise of CAR T is to activate the power of key immune cells called T cells. T cells normally recognize other cells that have been infected by a virus or bacterium, or are otherwise abnormal, and either destroy them or recruit other parts of the immune system to do so.

In CAR T for cancer, scientists engineer those T cells to specifically hunt and destroy malignant cells. The technology got its start when cancer researchers figured out how to take out a patient’s own T cells, insert DNA instructions for a “chimeric antigen receptor,” or CAR, and put them back into the person’s circulation. The CAR, which sits on the T cell’s surface and latches on to a specific molecular partner on the surface of cancerous cells, activates the T cell to attack.

Today CAR T cells are most commonly programmed to attack B cells, another key immune player. B cells are normally responsible for making antibodies, but in certain blood cancers, they proliferate out of control. By giving T cells a CAR that recognizes one of a couple of molecules unique to the B cell surface, the cells are reprogrammed to find and eliminate those cancerous cells.

B cells also are the central problem in many autoimmune conditions: They mistakenly make antibodies against normal tissues instead of against invading pathogens. So as CAR T began to succeed against B cell cancers, it didn’t take long for doctors to reason that CAR T therapy might also be able to wipe out bad B cells in people with autoimmunity.

There are many variations on CAR T procedures, but the basic process involves removing, modifying, and

reinfusing patient T cells so they can attack their target, which is B cells in the case of autoimmune disease.

Credit: Knowable Magazine

A German team pioneered autoimmune CAR T in a woman with lupus, reporting positive results in 2021. Since then, that team and others have worked to translate the oncology success of CAR T to tackle a broad spectrum of autoimmune diseases.

“I think it’s a game changer,” says Amanda Piquet, an autoimmune neurologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz in Aurora. Piquet is evaluating CAR T therapy for a rare and poorly understood autoimmune condition called stiff person syndrome, with symptoms including muscle stiffness and painful spasms. There is no FDA-approved treatment. When she heard about a company called Kyverna that was testing CAR T cell therapy in the syndrome, she thought it was “a perfect opportunity.”

The study she led, which reported preliminary results in December 2025, tested a single dose of CAR T in 26 people. Before the treatment, many participants struggled with a slow, mechanical gait, and 12 used assistive devices such as walkers and canes. Most patients were able to walk faster by 16 weeks post-treatment, and eight no longer needed their assistive devices for short distances. In April, the company reported that all 26 patients, as of their last follow-up appointment four to 12 months out from the therapy, were no longer using any other immunotherapies.

Risks and uncertainties

Despite such striking results, reprogramming the immune system is no simple matter. In early treatment of cancer patients, CAR T cells produced life-threatening side effects, as outlined in a 2026 article in the Annual Review of Medicine. As CAR T cells attack their targets, the associated inflammation can cause symptoms like high fevers and low blood pressure. If that inflammation reaches the brain, it can cause additional problems such as confusion and drowsiness.

Fortunately, physicians now have a decade’s worth of experience recognizing and treating these problems. “They’re certainly reversible and don’t cause long-term damage most of the time,” says Emily Littlejohn, a rheumatologist at the Cleveland Clinic.

Physicians and patients also must contend with decreased immunity as both a side effect of the treatment and its desired outcome. In CAR T treatment, doctors typically use powerful chemotherapy drugs to temporarily reduce the body’s immune cell population to make room for the new, engineered cells, leaving patients temporarily immunosuppressed. And if the treatment works, it will decimate B cell populations. Patients can be vulnerable to infections for up to a year after treatment, says Littlejohn.

These effects are manageable with preventive antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines. Patients also retain antibodies that their B cells made before the treatment, which provide residual protection for a few months. And for reasons that are not yet fully understood, CAR T seems to leave older B cells, which provide immune memory of past infections, intact in some cases. One study found that autoimmune patients treated with CAR T still made antibodies for diseases they’d been previously vaccinated against, like chicken pox and measles. These are signs that the treatment did not completely return the immune system to its factory settings.

When evaluating CAR T risk, it’s important to consider that many existing treatments for autoimmune disease also suppress the immune system for as long as a person takes them, experts note.

But there are other possible CAR T risks for autoimmune patients. In February, FDA officials published a paper endorsing CAR T’s potential in autoimmunity but warning of “unpredictable long-term toxicity.” CAR T treatment for cancer, the authors noted, has been linked to diverse long-term issues such as Parkinson’s disease. There have also been cases where the bioengineered cells themselves turned malignant, causing new, T cell-based cancers.

Causing a secondary cancer may be an acceptable risk when treating a life-threatening cancer, but probably not for autoimmunity, says Matt Lunning, medical director for gene and cellular therapy at Nebraska Medicine in Omaha. How to balance the risk between the impacts of an autoimmune disease, which can range widely in severity, and the difficult-to-quantify risk of future side effects or cancers remains a major open question.

Researchers are already working on second- and third-generation versions of CAR T that they expect to be safer for both cancer and autoimmunity. For example, James Howard, a neuromuscular neurologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is testing a technology from a company called Cartesian Therapeutics that encodes the CAR using molecules of mRNA, the short-lived genetic messenger used in Covid-19 vaccines, instead of long-lasting DNA. The CAR T cells should wipe out B cells for only as long as the mRNA persists, then lose their B cell-targeting abilities. With no chance for genetically modified T cells to hang around long-term, there should be no cancer risk.

Another plus of Cartesian’s approach: Physicians infuse these T cells in sufficient numbers that they don’t need to reproduce in the patient’s body, which Howard thinks reduces risk for inflammation. In a recent trial, 15 people with autoimmune diseases received the Cartesian CAR T treatment; two-thirds saw their symptoms improve, and none suffered long-term serious side effects.

Treating CAR T sticker shock

Beyond side effects, the other major challenge facing CAR T therapy is its price tag, which reaches hundreds of thousands of dollars including hospital stays, cell engineering, and other expenses.

The treatment would likely be cheaper, and simpler, if scientists could eliminate the need for personalized engineering of each patient’s own cells and instead use donor cells, or if they could cut out the step of engineering and growing the cells in a laboratory. Lunning says he is eyeing up-and-coming procedures that would modify a person’s T cells within their own body ­instead of doing the genetic engineering in a lab.

Researchers are even further along with a version of CAR T that uses healthy donors as a source of T cells. These could then be used by many patients in an “off-the-shelf” approach. It’s a method that has its own challenges, because of the immune mismatch between donor and patient cells that would lead them to attack each other. This problem can be overcome with additional genetic modifications to the donated T cells that prevent recipient and donor systems from recognizing each other as foreign, says Bing Du, an immunologist at East China Normal University in Shanghai who’s among many researchers working on this approach. Du estimates a lab could make CAR T cells for more than 1,000 patients from a single donor’s blood cells, at significant cost savings.

This kind of off-the-shelf CAR T therapy is what Janisch-Hanzlik of Nebraska received, under Lunning’s care, in 2025. The study organizers at TG Therapeutics expect to complete their research in early 2029.

Janisch-Hanzlik ended up sailing through the follow-up without side effects. A couple of months after the infusion, she was watching TV when she noticed she no longer needed special glasses to correct double vision. She started forgetting to bring her cane when moving about her house or going grocery shopping; she didn’t need it. Now, nearly a year since the treatment, she rarely falls and no longer requires a daily, three-hour nap. She recently enjoyed a trip to the Grand Canyon and looks forward to spending more time with her grandchildren.

She does still have symptoms, including weakness in her right leg, numbness and tingling in her feet, and difficulty finding the right word when speaking. She asks her doctors if they think she’s going to get better, stay the same, or get worse again.

“I have been told so many times, ‘We don’t know, you’re the first. We’re just going to have to wait and see,’” she says. “I definitely am thankful for every day I have.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 18 May 2026 at 7:36 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have published new research in Physical Review Letters suggesting that we may witness a black hole explosion within the next ten years. For decades, scientists believed such events were extraordinarily rare, perhaps occurring only once every 100,000 years. The new study challenges that assumption and argues that the odds may be far higher, with existing gamma-ray telescopes already capable of detecting the event if it occurs.

The black holes involved in this prediction are known as primordial black holes (PBHs). Unlike ordinary black holes, which form when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives, primordial black holes are hypothetical objects thought to have formed less than a second after the Big Bang, when the early universe was unimaginably hot and dense. According to Big Bang cosmology, tiny fluctuations in matter density during those first moments may have collapsed under gravity, creating black holes with masses far smaller than stellar black holes. Physicists are especially interested in PBHs because they could preserve information about the infant universe and may even account for some of the mysterious dark matter believed to make up most of the universe’s mass.

What makes primordial black holes particularly important is a theory called Hawking radiation, proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1974. Hawking radiation emerges from quantum effects near a black hole’s event horizon, where pairs of particles can briefly appear due to fluctuations in empty space. One particle may escape while the other falls into the black hole, causing the black hole to slowly lose energy and mass. This process connects two major pillars of modern physics — quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity — and remains one of the most important theoretical ideas in cosmology.

The theory predicts a surprising effect: the smaller a black hole becomes, the hotter it gets. As a result, tiny primordial black holes would emit particles increasingly rapidly as they shrink. This process, known as black hole evaporation, accelerates over time in a runaway cycle until the black hole ultimately explodes in a burst of extremely energetic radiation, especially gamma rays. While evaporation for large stellar black holes would take far longer than the age of the universe, lightweight primordial black holes could theoretically be reaching their final explosive stages today.

Andrea Thamm, assistant professor of physics at University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-author of the study, explained: “The lighter a black hole is, the hotter it should be and the more particles it will emit. As PBHs evaporate, they become ever lighter, and so hotter, emitting even more radiation in a runaway process until explosion. It’s that Hawking radiation that our telescopes can detect.”

Detecting such an explosion would represent a historic scientific breakthrough. It would provide the first direct observational evidence for Hawking radiation, something physicists have searched for for decades. It would also offer the first confirmed proof that primordial black holes truly exist. More importantly, the radiation emitted during the final explosion could contain evidence of every fundamental particle in nature. That includes known particles such as electrons and quarks, but potentially also unknown particles associated with dark matter or entirely new sectors of physics never before observed.

The study proposes a new explanation for why such explosions may be more observable than previously believed. Traditionally, scientists assumed that exploding primordial black holes would be too rare and too short-lived for current telescopes to detect. However, the researchers introduce a speculative framework called the dark-QED model. Ordinary quantum electrodynamics (QED) is the highly successful theory describing how light and electrically charged particles interact through photons. The dark-QED model imagines a hidden version of this force involving hypothetical dark particles, including a dark photon and a heavy dark electron.

In this model, primordial black holes can carry a special kind of “dark” electric charge. That charge temporarily stabilizes the black hole and slows its evaporation, allowing it to survive much longer than expected. Eventually, however, the black hole discharges and transitions into behavior resembling a Schwarzschild black hole — the simplest theoretical black hole model, first described by physicist Karl Schwarzschild in 1916 using Einstein’s equations of general relativity. A Schwarzschild black hole possesses mass but no charge or rotation, and physicists often use it as the baseline model for understanding black hole physics.

According to the researchers, this extended lifetime dramatically increases the probability of observing a primordial black hole explosion. Instead of being a once-in-100,000-years event, they estimate there may be over a 90 percent chance of detecting one within the next decade using existing gamma-ray observatories. Gamma-ray astronomy focuses on the highest-energy form of electromagnetic radiation and is particularly useful for studying violent cosmic phenomena such as black hole evaporation, neutron stars and supernovae.

If scientists do observe such an explosion, the implications would extend far beyond black holes alone. It could reveal entirely new particles, provide insights into dark matter, and open an unprecedented window into the earliest moments of the universe immediately after the Big Bang. It would also offer one of the clearest opportunities yet to unite quantum mechanics with gravity — a goal physicists have pursued for nearly a century. With telescopes already scanning the skies, researchers are now watching for what could become one of the most important discoveries in the history of modern physics.

Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst, APS

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.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 18 May 2026 at 7:36 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Scientists have reported the discovery of the largest reliably measured superstructure—an enormous arrangement of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and dark matter linked together by gravity—in the universe. The formation, named “Quipu,” stretches about 1.4 billion light-years, a unit measuring how far light travels in one year through space, and is made mostly of dark matter, the invisible substance scientists detect only through its gravitational effects on galaxies and cosmic structures. It was identified while mapping galaxy clusters, huge collections of galaxies bound together by gravity, detected by the ROSAT X-ray satellite. The work was led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the Max Planck Institute for Physics, together with colleagues in Spain and South Africa.

Hans Böhringer, the project leader, explained: “If you look at the distribution of the galaxy clusters in the sky in a spherical shell with a distance of 416 to 826 million light-years, you immediately notice a huge structure that stretches from high northern latitudes to almost the southern end of the sky.” Quipu consists of 68 galaxy clusters, with a total mass of about 2.4×{(10)^7} solar masses, a standard astronomical unit equal to the mass of the Sun. Its size surpasses the Sloan Great Wall, which measures around 1.1 billion light-years.

The ROSAT satellite, launched in 1990, was key to this discovery. ROSAT was the first mission to map the entire sky in X-rays, a high-energy form of electromagnetic radiation emitted by extremely hot cosmic environments such as galaxy clusters. It created a catalogue of galaxy clusters by detecting the hot gas between galaxies that shines brightly in X-ray wavelengths. Joachim Trümper, the ROSAT project leader, recalled: “The catalogue was created with the help of the ROSAT X-ray satellite, built by Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. In 1990, the satellite mapped the entire sky using a high-resolution X-ray telescope for the first time.” Over the years, researchers refined the data, measuring distances and building a three-dimensional map of matter distribution. This map revealed Quipu as the largest known structure within a billion light-years of Earth.

The research paper adds important context. It explains that to measure cosmological parameters—the numerical values describing the universe’s expansion, matter density, geometry, and evolution—precisely, scientists must account for how local large-scale structures affect observations. These effects include changes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint leftover radiation from the early universe shortly after the Big Bang, distortions caused by gravitational lensing, where massive objects bend light by warping spacetime, and the impact of streaming motions on the Hubble constant, the value that measures how fast the universe is expanding. Streaming motions, for example, come from mass concentrations up to 250 megaparsecs away; a megaparsec equals one million parsecs, or about 3.26 million light-years.

The team carried out the first all-sky assessment of the largest structures at distances between 130 and 250 megaparsecs. Among the five most prominent, Quipu was the largest, with a length of more than 400 megaparsecs and a mass of about 2 × 1017 solar masses. These superstructures are not rare features.

They contain about 45% of galaxy clusters, 30% of galaxies, 25% of matter, and occupy 13% of cosmic volume. This means they form a major part of the universe. The researchers also found that galaxy density is higher around superstructures compared to isolated clusters. Simulations based on the Lambda-CDM cosmology model—the standard model of cosmology in which “Lambda” represents dark energy and “CDM” stands for cold dark matter—show similar structures, supporting the reliability of the findings.

The team noted that superstructures should leave a mark on the cosmic microwave background through what is called the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, a subtle change in CMB radiation caused when light passes through evolving gravitational fields created by massive cosmic structures. They searched for this in Planck satellite data and found a signal of the expected strength, though with low statistical significance, meaning the evidence is suggestive but not yet strong enough to rule out the possibility of chance fluctuations. Gayoung Chon emphasized: “Even if these are only corrections of a few percent, they become increasingly important as the accuracy of cosmological observations increases.”

Quipu was named after the knotted string system used by the Incas for record-keeping. The structure resembles a long fibre with side strands, much like the ancient script. The name also reflects the role of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, where many distance measurements were made. Quipus are displayed in Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, linking this cosmic discovery to human history.

This finding is important not only for mapping the universe but also for testing cosmological models and studying how galaxies evolve in different environments. It shows that the largest structures in the universe can influence even the most precise measurements scientists make today.

Source: Max Planck Institute, ArXiv

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.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 18 May 2026 at 7:35 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

Solar thermoelectric generators, or STEGs, are being looked at as a new way to make electricity from the sun. Unlike the solar panels most people are familiar with, which only use sunlight directly, STEGs can also use heat. They work by having a hot side and a cold side with semiconductor materials in between. The difference in temperature between the two sides produces electricity through something called the Seebeck effect.

The problem has been that STEGs are not very efficient. Most of them convert less than 1 percent of sunlight into electricity, while regular solar panels used on homes reach about 20 percent. This gap has kept STEGs from being widely used.

Researchers at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics say they have found a way to make STEGs much more effective. In a study published in Light: Science and Applications, they describe new methods that boost power generation by 15 times compared to earlier designs, with only a 25 percent increase in device weight.

“For decades, the research community has been focusing on improving the semiconductor materials used in STEGs and has made modest gains in overall efficiency,” said Chunlei Guo, professor of optics and physics and senior scientist at Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. “In this study, we don’t even touch the semiconductor materials—instead, we focused on the hot and the cold sides of the device instead. By combining better solar energy absorption and heat trapping at the hot side with better heat dissipation at the cold side, we made an astonishing improvement in efficiency.”

The team’s approach was to improve how the device absorbs and traps heat on the hot side, and how it releases heat on the cold side. On the hot side, they used femtosecond laser processing to turn regular tungsten into what they call a selective solar absorber, or W-SSA. This surface absorbs more than 80 percent of sunlight at high temperatures while giving off less infrared radiation, which means less wasted energy. To keep the heat in, they placed the absorber inside a small plastic chamber that acts like a greenhouse. This reduced heat loss from convection by more than 40 percent.

On the cold side, they used the same laser technique on aluminum to create a micro-structured heat dissipator, or μ-dissipator. This design improved cooling through both radiation and convection, doubling the performance of a normal aluminum heat sink. By making the hot side hotter and the cold side cooler, the temperature difference across the STEG increased, which in turn raised the amount of electricity produced.

The researchers showed that their improved STEGs could power LEDs much more effectively than current devices. Guo also pointed out that the technology could be used for wireless sensor networks, wearable electronics, and even medical sensors. It could also serve as a renewable energy option in rural areas where access to electricity is limited.

While STEGs are still less efficient than solar panels, this work shows that focusing on thermal management rather than just semiconductor materials can make a big difference. It opens up new possibilities for how solar energy might be captured and used in the future.

Source: University of Rochester, Nature

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.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 17 May 2026 at 7:36 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

As states seek out much-needed supplies of clean, reliable energy, some are looking to an unconventional source: abandoned oil and gas wells harnessed for geothermal heat.

Millions of inactive wells are littered across the United States, the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the sites have no official owner, and many are still polluting groundwater and leaking heat-trapping methane. The country has barely scratched the surface in dealing with this problem.

Policymakers in both Republican- and Democratic-led states are exploring whether these sites could instead be converted into new wells for producing geothermal energy. The holes are already drilled in the ground, after all. And regions with widespread oil and gas development have rich subsurface data that geothermal firms need in order to determine where and how to build their carbon-free systems.

The concept is relatively new and largely untested, though scientists and startups are working to change that. States are also laying the groundwork for action by lifting regulatory hurdles and launching in-depth studies.

In Oklahoma, the state Senate is considering a bill that would create a process for companies to buy abandoned oil and gas wells and repurpose them for geothermal energy or underground energy storage. Oklahoma has identified over 20,000 such wells, and state regulators estimate that it would take 235 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to plug all of them. Fixing a single old well can cost anywhere from $75,000 to $150,000 or more, by some calculations, depending on where it’s located and how complicated it is to clean up.

The Well Repurposing Act, which passed Oklahoma’s House in March, is modeled after a similar law that New Mexico adopted last year to address its 2,000-plus orphan wells.

The Oklahoma bill “recognizes that these wells are a liability, and that there may be a way to turn them into some sort of revenue generation and give them value,” said Dave Tragethon, communications director for the nonprofit Well Done Foundation, which works to find and cap abandoned oil and gas wells nationwide. “And if there’s value, that means there’s more of a willingness to address them and more of an opportunity to raise funding.”

In Alabama, legislators passed a law last month that allows the state to approve and regulate the conversion of oil and gas wells to tap alternative energy resources like geothermal. North Dakota adopted a bill last year requiring a legislative council to study the feasibility of using nonproductive wells to generate geothermal power. And in Colorado, state agencies just launched a technical study to evaluate the potential of repurposing old wells for geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration.

These efforts reflect the growing bipartisan support for geothermal energy, which has largely remained unscathed by the Trump administration’s efforts to block renewable energy projects. The energy resource has the potential to help meet the nation’s soaring energy demand while also slashing planet-warming emissions from electricity and heating.

Converting Wells Is Enticing but Complicated

Geothermal systems work by circulating fluids underground to capture naturally occurring heat, which can then be used to drive turbines for generating electricity or to directly warm the air and water in buildings. The industry is gaining momentum thanks to recent advances in drilling methods and technologies that are making it technically possible or financially viable to access geothermal energy in more places.

Many of those breakthroughs have come from the oil and gas industry, whose skilled workforce of drilling engineers and geoscientists, and deep corporate pockets, have helped launch startups and deploy cutting-edge systems. However, most of that expertise and funding is being poured into building new projects—not figuring out how to retool leaky wells left behind by earlier generations.

“Oil and gas well conversion presents an enormous opportunity, but it’s pretty far away technologically from being a reality,” said Emily Pope, a geologist and senior fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions who authored a recent study on next-generation geothermal power.

“There are some hurdles that are still pretty immense,” she said, adding that “it is worth doing some R&D to try and grow.”

One of the biggest challenges is the fact that oil and gas wells tend to reach relatively low to medium underground temperatures. But high heat is key for geothermal projects, especially ones that generate electricity. The hotter the resource, the more energy a developer can wring out of the system.

Plus, fossil fuel wells generally produce smaller volumes of liquid and gas than geothermal wells need in order to spin power turbines or transfer heat to buildings. Geothermal operators might also have to take extra steps to keep nasty elements in the subsurface reservoirs from mixing with the working fluids used to extract heat underground, said Arash Dahi Taleghani, an engineering professor with the Repurposing Center for Energy Transition at Pennsylvania State University.

He added that the high cost of converting wells to geothermal has limited the number of real-world examples so far.

Early Research Efforts Target Direct-Use Heat and Storage

At the University of Oklahoma, however, researchers have been evaluating how to turn four old oil and gas wells into sources of geothermal heat, which they hope to pipe into nearby public schools and homes in the city of Tuttle. The project was awarded a $1.7 million grant from the US Department of Energy’s Wells of Opportunity program in 2022, though it was paused last year during the Trump administration’s sweeping freeze on federal funding and is still waiting to start its next phase, KGOU reported in March.

Saeed Salehi was the Oklahoma project’s director before joining Southern Methodist University as an engineering professor in 2024. He said that repurposing wells for geothermal has several “clear advantages.”

Geothermal firms can avoid significant upfront drilling costs if the wells are already sufficiently deep and hot enough. Oil and gas firms, which today pay millions of dollars to properly seal and shut down modern wells, can give their assets a second life instead. And communities near the aging fossil fuel infrastructure could benefit from having clean, affordable heat and lower winter utility bills.

“We need to collect enough data and have enough successful projects to take it to scale,” Salehi said, calling repurposed wells “a custom solution for specific regions and areas.”

“Everything is going to take time, but I think we are moving in the right direction,” he added.

A smoother permitting process will be key to speeding things up, something Oklahoma, Alabama, and other states are aiming to address. States have traditionally lacked any regulatory framework for dealing with decades-old wells that no one is technically responsible for. Salehi said it took nearly nine months to get the Tuttle project’s permits, though the process is growing faster now.

In Pennsylvania, Dahi Taleghani said his team is looking to secure funding to repurpose old wells to supply the Penn State campus with geothermal heating. They have also studied the potential for using some of the state’s more than 200,000 abandoned wells to heat agricultural greenhouses, as well as to house energy-storage systems that compress air and stash it underground, acting as low-cost grid batteries.

“Decommissioning wells is expensive, costly, and it’s not generating any revenue,” Dahi Taleghani said. “So we’re looking to help create businesses that can go after these leaky wells, fix them, and then use them for geothermal applications.”

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 17 May 2026 at 7:35 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix

In a press briefing Friday, officials for the World Health Organization announced that the case count of the hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius in the South Atlantic has shrunk from 11 cases to 10 after a previously reported US case was found to be a false positive.

That US case was originally reported by US health officials as “mildly positive,” and the WHO had considered it “inconclusive,” but still counted in the outbreak as a case in the agency’s May 13 outbreak report and in a briefing on May 14.

The inconclusive case was in Dr. Stephen Kornfeld, an American doctor aboard the ship who helped respond to the outbreak after the ship’s doctor became ill. In an interview with CNN earlier this week, Kornfeld explained that he and others on board had taken nasal swabs early in May, before evacuation, and those swabs were sent for PCR testing in the Netherlands. Two labs in the Netherlands processed Kornfeld’s swabs; one lab reported a negative result, and the other reported a faint positive.

Generally, a faint positive result on a PCR test could suggest low levels of virus at the start or end of an infection, or it could simply suggest contamination.

Adding to the complexity of the potential case, Kornfeld said that he had developed a minor illness in early April while on the ship, just a few days after the first hantavirus case fell ill in the outbreak—a Dutch man who died on board from his infection.

In an interview with ABC News Friday, Kornfeld reported that his repeat testing was negative and so was his serology testing looking for antibodies against hantavirus—which he would have developed if his illness in April was actually an unusually mild hantavirus infection. Overall, the testing shows that he is not currently infected and has not had a previous infection. As such, he has been transferred from the biocontainment unit to the quarantine unit at the Nebraska Medical Center, where US passengers from the Hondius are being monitored.

“I physically feel great—I have felt great for many, many days,” Kornfeld told ABC. “Emotionally, I feel wonderful. It’s nice to be negative for hantavirus.”

Evacuation complete

Overall, there have been 10 cases: Seven cases who became ill on the ship, one case that disembarked the ship on April 24, before the outbreak was identified, and fell ill in Switzerland. The remaining two cases—one from France, the other from Spain—were identified as the ship was evacuated and passengers were being repatriated. The number of deaths has not changed since May 2, with three total: a Dutch couple and a German woman.

Also in the WHO press conference, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the operation in the Canary Islands to safely evacuate the ship is complete. The operation involved transferring the ship’s 120-plus passengers to their home countries or to quarantine in host countries en route to their final destinations.

“Because of the long incubation period of up to six weeks, more cases may be reported in coming days as passengers return to their countries, where they are being quarantined and tested in specialized facilities or at home,” Tedros warned. “This does not mean the outbreak is expanding; it shows that the control measures are working, that laboratory testing is ongoing, and that people are being cared for with support from their governments.”

The US is monitoring 41 people who may have been exposed. That includes 18 passengers (including Kornfeld) who were evacuated from the Hondius, passengers who had disembarked the ship on April 24, and people who shared a flight with a Dutch woman (the wife of the first case) who also fell ill from the infection and died in South Africa, on her way home.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 16 May 2026 at 12:00 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix