Before / after showing the image transformation. Buzz Aldrin is revealed as he takes the first selfie in space on Gemini 12, November 12, 1966.  

Credit: NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders

Six decades have now passed since some of the most iconic Project Gemini spaceflights. The 60th anniversary of Gemini 4, when Ed White conducted the first US spacewalk, came in June. The next mission, Gemini 5, ended just two weeks ago, in 1965. These missions are now forgotten by most Americans, as most of the people alive during that time are now deceased.

However, during these early years of spaceflight, NASA engineers and astronauts cut their teeth on a variety of spaceflight firsts, flying a series of harrowing missions during which it seems a miracle that no one died.

Because the Gemini missions, as well as NASA's first human spaceflight program Mercury, yielded such amazing stories, I was thrilled to realize that a new book has recently been published—Gemini & Mercury Remastered—that brings them back to life in vivid color.

The book is a collection of 300 photographs from NASA's Mercury and Gemini programs during the 1960s, in which Andy Saunders has meticulously restored the images and then deeply researched their background to more fully tell the stories behind them. The end result is a beautiful and powerful reminder of just how brave America's first pioneers in space were. What follows is a lightly edited conversation with Saunders about how he developed the book and some of his favorite stories from it.

Ars: Why put out a book on Mercury and Gemini now?

Andy Saunders: Well, it's the 60th anniversaries of the Gemini missions, but the book is really the prequel to my first book, Apollo Remastered. This is about the missions that came before. So it takes us right back to the very dawn of human space exploration, back to the very beginning, and this was always a project I was going to work on next. Because, as well as being obviously very important in spaceflight history, they're very important in terms of human history, the human evolution, even, you know, the first time we were able to escape Earth.

For tens of thousands of years, civilizations have looked up and dreamt of leaving Earth and voyaging to the stars. And this golden era in the early 1960s is when that ancient dream finally became a reality. Also, of course, the first opportunity to look back at Earth and give us that unique perspective. But I think it's really the photographs specifically that will just forever symbolize and document at the beginning of our expansion out into the cosmos. You know, of course, we went to the Moon with Apollo. We'll go back with Artemis. We spent long periods on the International Space Station. We'll walk on Mars. We'll eventually become a multi-planetary species. But this is where it all began and how it all began.

Ars: They used modified Hasselblad cameras during Apollo to capture these amazing images. What types of cameras were used during Mercury and Gemini?

Saunders: Mercury was more basic cameras. So on the very first missions, NASA didn't want the astronaut to take a camera on board. The capsules were tiny. They were very busy. They're very short missions, obviously very groundbreaking missions. So, the first couple of missions, there was a camera out of the porthole window, just taking photographs automatically. But it was John Glenn on his mission (Mercury-Atlas 6) who said, "No, I want to take a camera. People want to know what it's going to be like to be an astronaut. They're going to want to look at Earth through the window. I'm seeing things no humans ever seen before." So he literally saw a $40 camera in a drugstore on his way after a haircut at Cocoa Beach. He thought, "That's perfect." And he bought it himself, and then NASA adapted it. They put a pistol grip on to help him to use it. And with it, he took the first still photographs of Earth from space.

So it was the early astronauts that kind of drove the desire to take cameras themselves, but they were quite basic. Wally Schirra (Mercury-Atlas 8) then took the first Hasselblad. He wanted medium format, better quality, but really, the photographs from Mercury aren't as stunning as Gemini. It's partly the windows and the way they took the photos, and they'd had little experience. Also, preservation clearly wasn't high up on the agenda in Mercury, because the original film is evidently in a pretty bad state. The first American in space is an incredibly important moment in history. But every single frame of the original film of Alan Shepard's flight was scribbled over with felt pen, it's torn, and it's fixed with like a piece of sticky tape. But it's a reminder that these weren't taken for their aesthetic quality. They weren't taken for posterity. You know, they were technical information. The US was trying to catch up with the Soviets. Preservation wasn't high up on the agenda.

This is not some distant planet seen in a sci-fi movie, it's our Earth, in real life, as we explored space in the 1960s. 

The Sahara desert, photographed from Gemini 11, September 14, 1966. As we stand at the threshold of a new 

space age, heading back to the Moon, onward to Mars and beyond, the photographs taken during Mercury 

and Gemini will forever symbolize and document the beginning of humankind's expansion out into the cosmos.

NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders

 

Gemini took not only some of the first, but still some of the finest photographs of Earth ever captured on film 

- partly due to the high altitudes they flew to. Gemini 11's Earth orbit altitude record held for 58 years until last 

year's Polaris Dawn mission. Reflected in the window, Richard Gordon's hand can be seen as he releases the 

shutter of his Hasselblad camera to capture the moment of apogee, over eastern Australia on September 14, 1966.

NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders

 

The rudimentary-looking Gemini spacecraft, Earth, and the unfiltered, bright, white sunlight captured at the 

start of Gene Cernan's "spacewalk from hell" on Gemini 9A, June 5, 1966. Effectively blinded, exhausted, 

overheating, and losing communications with his Command Pilot, Cernan was fortunate to make it back 

inside the spacecraft alive.

NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders

 

The Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley, photographed 60 years ago (August 21-29, 1965), from Gemini 5. 

Gemini had to demonstrate all of the key concepts required to enable NASA to reach for the Moon with Apollo. 

At eight days, Gemini 5 was the first space mission that would be long enough for a return trip to the Moon.

NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders

 

Recovered from two separate frames of heavily underexposed film, and featured on the UK edition of Gemini 

And Mercury Remastered, Ed White gazes out into the heavens from inside Gemini 4, after his historic spacewalk. 

A star chart is seen above his head. White was later tragically killed in the Apollo 1 fire, along with Gus Grissom 

and Roger Chaffee.

NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders

 

Ed White floats in the void, during the first U.S. spacewalk on Gemini 4, June 3, 1965. These awe-inspiring 

photographs, of a human form against the backdrop of Earth, wowed the public and were a clear turning point 

in NASA's appreciation for space photography. White is also featured on the cover of the book.

NASA / ASU / Andy Saunders

 

"Light this candle!" Alan Shepard is waiting atop his Mercury-Redstone rocket, to become the second human, 

and first American in space, May 5, 1961. His heart rate quickened as the hatch was bolted shut.

NASA / Andy Saunders

 

Ars: I want to understand your process. How many photos did you consider for this book?

Saunders: With Apollo, they took about 35,000 photographs. With Mercury and Gemini, there were about 5,000. Which I was quite relieved about.  So yeah, I went through all 5,000 they took. I'm not sure how much 16 millimeter film in terms of time, because it was at various frame rates, but a lot of 16 millimeter film. So I went through every frame of film that was captured from launch to splashdown on every mission.

Ars: Out of that material, how much did you end up processing?

Saunders: What I would first do is have a quick look, particularly if there's apparently nothing in them, because a lot of them are very underexposed. But with digital processing, like I did with the cover of the Apollo book, we can pull out stuff that you actually can't see in the raw file. So it's always worth taking a look. So do a very quick edit, and then if it's not of interest, it's discarded. Or it might be that clearly an important moment was happening, even if it's not a particularly stunning photograph, I would save that one. So I was probably down from 5,000 to maybe 800, and then do a better edit on it.

And then the final 300 that are in the book are those that are either aesthetically stunning, or they're a big transformation, or they show something important that happened on the mission, or a historically significant moment. But also, what I want to do with the book, as well as showing the photographs, is tell the stories, these incredible human stories that, because of the risks they were taking. So to do that, I effectively reconstructed every mission from launch to splashdown by using lots of different pieces of information in order to effectively map the photography onto a timeline so that it can then tell the story through the captions. So a photograph might be in there simply to help tell part of the story.

Ars: What was your favorite story to tell?

Saunders: Well, perhaps in terms of a chapter and a mission, I'd say Gemini 4 is kind of the heart of the book. You know, first US space walk, quite a lot of drama occurred when they couldn't close the hatch. There's some quite poignant shots, particularly of Ed White, of course, who later lost his life in the Apollo 1 fire. But in terms of the story, I mean, Gemini 9A was just, there needs to be a movie about just Gemini 9A. Right from the start, from losing the prime crew, and then just what happened out on Gene Cernan's EVA, how he got back into the capsule alive is quite incredible, and all this detail I've tried to cover because he took his camera. So he called it the spacewalk from hell. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. He was incredibly exhausted, overheated. His visor steamed over. He went effectively blind, and he was at the back of the adapter section. This is at a point when NASA just hadn't mastered EVA. So, simply how you maneuver in space, they just haven't mastered, so he was exhausted. He was almost blind. Then he lost communication with Tom Stafford, his command pilot. He tore his suit, because, of course, back then, there were all kinds of jagged parts on the spacecraft.

And then when he's finally back in the hatch, he was quite a big chap, and they couldn't close the hatch, so he was bent double trying to close the hatch. He started to see stars. He said, Tom, if we don't close this hatch now and re-pressurize, I am going to die. They got it closed, got his helmet off, and Tom Stafford said he just looked like someone that had spent far too long in a sauna. Stafford sprayed him with a water hose to kind of cool him down. So what happened on that mission is just quite incredible. But there was something on every mission, you know, from Gus Grissom sinking of the Liberty Bell and him almost drowning, the heat shield coming loose, or an indicator that suggested the heat shield was loose on Glenn's mission. There's an image of that in the book. Like I said, I mapped everything to the timeline, and worked out the frame rates, and we've got the clock we can see over his shoulder. So I could work out exactly when he was at the point of maximum heating through reentry, when part of the strapping that kept the retro pack on, to try and hold a heat shield on that hit the window, and he's talking, but no one was listening, because it was during radio blackout.

After being informed his heat shield may have come loose, John Glenn is holding steadfast in the face of real 

uncertainty, as he observes the retro pack burn up outside his window, illuminating the cabin in an orange glow, 

during re-entry on February 20, 1962. "This is Friendship Seven. I think the pack just let go ... A real fireball 

outside! ... Great chunks of that retro pack breaking off all the way through!"

Credit: NASA / Andy Saunders

The process I used for this, on the low-quality 16 mm film, was to stack hundreds and hundreds of frames to bring out incredible detail. You can almost see the pores in his skin. To see this level of detail, to me, it's just like a portrait of courage. There he is, holding steadfast, not knowing if he's about to burn up in the atmosphere. So that was quite a haunting image, if you like, to be able to help you step on board, you know, these tiny Mercury spacecraft, to see them, to see what they saw, to look out the windows and see how they saw it.

Ars: What was new or surprising to you as you spent so much time with these photos and looking at the details?

Saunders: The human side to them. Now that we can see them this clearly, they seem to have an emotional depth to them. And it's that level of risk that they were taking. I think that's what really hit home. The Earth shots are stunning. You know, you can almost feel the scale, particularly with a super wide lens, and the altitudes they flew to. And you can just imagine what it must have been like out on an EVA, for example. I think Gene Cernan said it was like sitting on God's front porch, the view he had on his EVA. So those Earth shots are stunning, but it's really those the human side that really hits home for me. I read every word of every transcript of every mission. All the conversations were recorded on tape between the air and the ground, and between the astronauts when they were out of ground contact, and reading those it really hits home what they were doing. I found myself holding my breath, and, you know, my shoulders were stiff.

Ars: So what's next? I mean, there's only about 100 million photos from the Space Shuttle era.

Saunders: Thankfully, they weren't all taken on film. So if I wanted to complete space on film, then what I haven't yet done is Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, and the first, whatever it is, 20 percent of the shuttle. So maybe that's next. But I would just like a rest, because I've been doing this now since the middle of 2019, literally nonstop. It's all I've done with Apollo and now Mercury and Gemini. The books make a really nice set in that they're exactly the same size. So it covers the first view of the curvature of Earth and space right through to our last steps on the Moon.

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Lots of people are excited about the idea of using plants to help us draw down some of the excess carbon dioxide we've been pumping into the atmosphere. It would be nice to think that we could reforest our way out of the mess we're creating, but recent studies have indicated there's simply not enough productive land for this to work out.

One alternative might be to get plants to take up carbon dioxide more efficiently. Unfortunately, the enzyme that incorporates carbon dioxide into photosynthesis, called RUBISCO, is remarkably inefficient. So, a team of researchers in Taiwan decided to try something new—literally. They put together a set of enzymes that added a new-to-nature biochemical cycle to plants that let it incorporate carbon far more efficiently. The resulting plants grew larger and incorporated more carbon.

Cycles and recycles

In the abstract, incorporating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the biochemistry of the cell seems simple—you just link up a few of the carbon atoms and you're off. But in reality, it's fiendishly complicated. Carbon dioxide is an extremely stable molecule, so incorporating it requires a very energetically favorable reaction. In the Calvin cycle of photosynthesis, that reaction involves linking the carbon dioxide as part of a reaction that breaks apart a modified five-carbon sugar, creating two three-carbon molecules. Some of those molecules get fed into the cell's metabolism, while others get built up into a five-carbon sugar again, restarting the cycle.

It works, but again, the central enzyme that incorporates the CO₂ is inefficient. And, as the researchers behind the new work note in a paper describing it, the three carbon molecules it produces aren't a great match for all of the cell's metabolism. The lipids used to make fats and the cell membrane are built up two carbons at a time. For that to work, plant cells actually oxidize a carbon back off, releasing carbon dioxide, in order to create a two-carbon source for building lipids.

(For those of you who remember basic biochemistry, lipids are built using a molecule called acetyl Co-A, which has a two-carbon acetyl group attached to a larger molecule—the Co-A—that can easily be lopped off to combine the two carbons with other molecules.)

So, the team was interested in establishing something similar to the Calvin cycle, but capable of outputting a two-carbon molecule without re-emitting the carbon dioxide molecule that had just been captured. What they came up with is the malyl-­CoA-­glycerate cycle, which they fortunately abbreviated as the McG cycle so nobody would ever have to remember its real name. The reactions of the cycle (there are eight of them) are all catalyzed by existing enzymes, though those enzymes come from a number of different species, so they don't naturally occur together.

The McG cycle has a few very useful features. It spits out a two-carbon product at one of the steps, which can be directly used in the production of lipids. It also builds that molecule by incorporating carbon atoms at two different steps in the cycle, meaning a single cycle captures more carbon than gets taken up during the Calvin cycle in photosynthesis. (One of these is technically a bicarbonate molecule, which is produced when carbon dioxide dissolves in water.) Finally, there is a point in the McG cycle where it can exchange molecules with the Calvin cycle, allowing those two systems to interact and draw off any excess materials produced by either of them.

Nice, but does it work?

In 2018, the same lab tested the McG cycle in photosynthetic bacteria. In their new paper, they describe inserting all the genes into a plant cell and seeing how the plant responded. For testing purposes, they used a small weed named Arabidopsis that is a mainstay of plant research.

And, well, it worked remarkably well. The plants carrying all the genes for the McG cycle weighed two to three times as much as control plants that only had some of the genes. They had more leaves, the leaves themselves were larger, and the plants produced more seeds. In a variety of growing conditions, the plants with an intact McG cycle incorporated more carbon, and they did so without increasing their water uptake.

Having a two-carbon output also worked as expected. By feeding the plants radioactive bicarbonate, they were able to trace the carbon showing up in the expected molecules. And imaging confirmed that the plants were making so many lipids that their cells formed internal pockets containing nothing but fatty materials. Triglyceride levels increased by factors of 100 or more.

So, by a variety of measures, the plants actually did better with an extra pathway for fixing carbon. There are a number of cautions, though. For starters, it's not clear whether what we're learning using a small weed will also apply to larger plants or crops, or really anything much beyond Arabidopsis at the moment. It could be that having excess globs of fat floating around the cell has consequences for something like a tree. Plants grown in a lab also tend to be provided with a nutrient-rich soil, and it's not clear whether all of this would apply to a range of real-world conditions.

Finally, we can't say whether all the excess carbon these plants are sucking in from the atmosphere would end up being sequestered in any useful sense. It could be that all the fat would just get oxidized as soon as the plant dies. That said, there are a lot of approaches to making biofuel that rely on modifying the fats found in plants or algae. It's possible that this can eventually help make biofuels efficient so they actually have a net positive effect on the climate.

Regardless of practical impacts, however, it's pretty amazing that we've now reached the point where we can fundamentally rewire a bit of metabolism that has been in operation for billions of years without completely messing up plants.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adp3528  (About DOIs).

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Welcome to Edition 8.10 of the Rocket Report! Dear readers, if everything goes according to plan, four astronauts are less than six months away from traveling around the far side of the Moon and breaking free of low-Earth orbit for the first time in more than 53 years. Yes, there are good reasons to question NASA's long-term plans for the Artemis lunar program—the woeful cost of the Space Launch System rocket, the complexity of new commercial landers, and a bleak budget outlook. But many of us who were born after the Apollo Moon landings have been waiting for this moment our whole lives. It is almost upon us.

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

North Korea fires solid rocket motor. North Korea said Tuesday it had conducted the final ground test of a solid-fuel rocket engine for a long-range ballistic missile in its latest advancement toward having an arsenal that could viably threaten the continental United States, the Associated Press reports. The test Monday observed by leader Kim Jong Un was the ninth of the solid rocket motor built with carbon fiber and capable of producing 1,971 kilonewtons (443,000 pounds) of thrust, more powerful than past models, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

Mobility and flexibility ... Solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, have advantages over liquid-fueled missiles, which have historically comprised the bulk of North Korea's inventory. Solid rocket motors can be stored for longer periods of time and are easier to conceal, transport, and launch on demand. The new solid rocket motor will be used on a missile called the Hwasong-20, according to North Korean state media. The AP reports some analysts say North Korea may conduct another ICBM test around the end of the year, showcasing its military strength ahead of a major ruling party congress expected in early 2026.

Astrobotic eyes Andøya. US-based lunar logistics company Astrobotic and Norwegian spaceport operator Andøya Space have signed a term sheet outlining the framework for a Launch Site Agreement, European Spaceflight reports. The agreement, once finalized, will facilitate flights of Astrobotic's Xodiac lander testbed from the Andøya Space facilities. The Xodiac vertical takeoff, vertical landing rocket was initially developed by Masten Space Systems to simulate landing on the Moon and Mars. When Masten filed for bankruptcy in 2022, Astrobotic acquired its intellectual property and assets, including the Xodiac vehicle.

Across the pond ... So far, the small Xodiac rocket has flown on low-altitude atmospheric hops from Mojave, California, reaching altitudes of up to 500 meters, or 1,640 feet. The agreement between Astrobotic and Andøya paves the way for "several" Xodiac flight campaigns from Andøya Space facilities on the Norwegian coast. "Xodiac's presence at Andøya represents a meaningful step toward delivering reliable, rapid, and cost-effective testing and demonstration capabilities to the European space market," said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton.

Ursa Major breaks ground in Colorado. Ursa Major on Wednesday said it has broken ground on a new 400-acre site where it will test and qualify large-scale solid rocket motors for current and future missiles, including the Navy’s Standard Missile fleet, Defense Daily reports. The new site in Weld County, Colorado, north of Denver, will be ready for testing to begin in the fourth quarter of 2025. Ursa Major will be able to conduct full-scale static firings, and drop and temperature storage testing for current and future missile systems.

Seeking SRM options ... Ursa Major said the new facility will support national and missile defense programs. The company's portfolio includes solid rocket motors (SRMs) ranging from 2 inches to 22 inches in diameter for missiles like the Stinger, Javelin, and air-defense interceptors. Ursa Major aims to join industry incumbents Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and newcomer Anduril as a major supplier of SRMs to the government. "This facility represents a major step forward in our ability to deliver qualified SRMs that are scalable, flexible, and ready to meet the evolving threat environment," said Dan Jablonsky, CEO of Ursa Major, in a statement. "It’s a clear demonstration of our commitment and ability to rapidly advance and expand the American-made solid rocket motor industrial base that the country needs, ensuring warfighters will have the quality and quantity of SRMs needed to meet mission demands."

Falcon 9 launches first satellites in a military megaconstellation. The first 21 satellites in a constellation that could become a cornerstone for the Pentagon's Golden Dome missile-defense shield successfully launched from California Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Ars reports. The Falcon 9 took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and headed south over the Pacific Ocean, reaching an orbit over the poles before releasing the 21 military-owned satellites to begin several weeks of activations and checkouts.

First of many ... These 21 satellites will boost themselves to a final orbit at an altitude of roughly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers). The Pentagon plans to launch 133 more satellites over the next nine months to complete the build-out of the Space Development Agency's first-generation, or Tranche 1, constellation of missile-tracking and data-relay satellites. Military officials have worked for six years to reach this moment. The Space Development Agency (SDA) was established during the first Trump administration, which made plans for an initial set of demonstration satellites that launched a couple of years ago. In 2022, the Pentagon awarded contracts for the first 154 operational spacecraft, including the ones launched Wednesday. "Back in 2019, when the SDA was stood up, it was to do two things. One was to make sure that we can do beyond line of sight targeting, and the other was to pace the threat, the emerging threat, in the missile-warning and missile-tracking domain. That's what the focus has been," said Gurpartap "GP" Sandhoo, the SDA's acting director.

Another Falcon 9 was delayed three times. SpaceX scrubbed launching a communications satellite from an Indonesian company for a third consecutive day Wednesday, Spaceflight Now reports. Possible technical issues got in the way of a launch attempt Wednesday evening after back-to-back days of weather delays at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The Falcon 9 finally launched Thursday evening with the Boeing-built Nusantara Lima communications satellite, targeting a geosynchronous transfer orbit. It’s the latest satellite from the Indonesian company Pasifik Satelit Nusantara.

A declining market ... This was just the fifth geosynchronous communications satellite to launch on a commercial rocket this year, all by SpaceX. There were 21 such satellites that launched on commercial vehicles in 2015, including SpaceX's Falcon 9, Europe's Ariane 5, Russia's Proton, ULA's Atlas V, and Japan's H-IIA. Much of the world's launch capacity today is used to deploy smaller communications satellites into low-Earth orbit, primarily for broadband connectivity rather than for the video broadcast market once dominated by higher-altitude geosynchronous satellites.

Putin urges Russia to build more rocket engines. Russian President Vladimir Putin urged aerospace industry leaders on September 5 to press on with efforts to develop booster rocket engines for space launch vehicles and build on Russia's longstanding reputation as a leader in space technology, Reuters reports. Putin, who spent the preceding days in China and the Russian far eastern port of Vladivostok, flew to the southern Russian city of Samara, where he met industry specialists and toured the Kuznetsov design bureau engine manufacturing plant.

A shell of its former self ... "It is important to consistently renew production capacity in terms of engines for booster rockets," Russian news agencies quoted Putin as saying during the visit. "And in doing so, we must not only meet our own current and future needs but also move actively on world markets and be successful competitors." The Kuznetsov plant in Samara builds medium-class RD-107 and RD-108 engines for Russia's Soyuz-2 rockets, which launch Russian military satellites and crew and cargo to the International Space Station. Their designs can be traced to the dawn of the Space Age nearly 70 years ago. Meanwhile, the outlook for heavier-duty Russian rocket engines is murky, at best. Russia's most-flown large rocket engine in the post-Cold War era, the RD-180, produced by a company called Energomash, is out of production after the end of sales to the United States.

India nabs a noteworthy launch contract. Astroscale, a satellite servicing and space debris mitigation company based in Japan, has selected India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) to deliver a small satellite named ISSA-J1 to orbit in 2027. This is an interesting mission. The ISSA-J1 spacecraft will fly up to two large pieces of satellite debris in orbit to image and inspect them. ISSA-J1, developed in partnership with the Japanese government, is one in a series of Astroscale missions testing different ways of approaching, monitoring, capturing, and refueling other objects in space. The launch agreement was signed between Astroscale and NewSpace India Limited, the commercial arm of India's space agency.

Rideshare not an option ... "We selected NSIL after thorough evaluations of more than 10 launch service providers over the past year, considering technical capabilities, track record, cost, and other elements," said Eddie Kato, president and managing director of Astroscale Japan. India's PSLV is right-sized for a mission like this. ISSA-J1 is a rarity in that it must launch on a dedicated rocket because it has to reach a specific orbit to line up with the pieces of space debris it will approach and inspect. Rideshare launches, such as those that routinely fly on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, are cheaper but go to standard orbits popular for many different types of satellite missions. A dedicated launch on a Falcon 9 would presumably have been more expensive than a flight on India's smaller PSLV. Rocket Lab's Electron, another rocket popular for dedicated launches of small satellites, lacks the performance required for Astroscale's mission.

Russian cargo en route to ISS. Another cargo ship is flying to humanity's orbital outpost with the successful launch of Russia's Progress MS-32 supply freighter Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, NASASpaceflight.com reports. The supply ship launched aboard a Soyuz-2.1a rocket and arrived in orbit about nine minutes later, kicking off a two-day pursuit of the International Space Station. This was the 300th launch of an assembly, crew, or cargo mission to the ISS since 1998, including a handful of missions that didn't reach the complex due to rocket or spacecraft failures.

Important stuff ... The Progress MS-32 cargo craft will dock with the aft port of the space station's Russian Zvezda service module Saturday. The payloads flying on the Progress mission include food, experiments, clothing, water, air, and propellant to be pumped into the space station's onboard tanks. The spacecraft will also reboost the lab's orbit.

Metallic tiles? Not so great. It has been two weeks since SpaceX's last Starship test flight, and engineers have diagnosed issues with its heat shield, identified improvements, and developed a preliminary plan for the next time the ship heads into space, Ars reports. Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX executive in charge of build and flight reliability, presented the findings Monday at the American Astronautical Society's Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland. The test flight went "extremely well," Gerstenmaier said, but he noted some important lessons learned with the ship's heat shield.

Crunch wrap reigns supreme ... "We were essentially doing a test to see if we could get by with non-ceramic tiles, so we put three metal tiles on the side of the ship to see if they would provide adequate heat control, because they would be simpler to manufacture and more durable than the ceramic tiles. It turns out they're not," Gerstenmaier said. "The metal tiles... didn't work so well." One bright spot with the heat shield was the performance of a new experimental material around and under the tiles. "We call it crunch wrap," Gerstenmaier said. "It's like a wrapping paper that goes around each tile." On the next Starship flight, SpaceX will likely cover more parts of the heat shield with this crunch wrap material. Gerstenmaier said the inaugural flight of Starship Version 3, with upgraded engines and more fuel, is now set to occur next year.

An SLS compromise might be afoot in DC. The Trump administration is seeking to cancel NASA's Space Launch System rocket after two more flights, but key lawmakers in Congress, including Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, aren't ready to go along.  So is this an impasse? Possibly not, as sources say the White House and Congress may not be all that far apart on how to handle this. The solution involves canceling part of the SLS rocket now, but not all of it, Ars reports.

Goodbye EUS? ... The compromise might be to cancel a large new upper stage for the SLS rocket called the Exploration Upper Stage. This would save NASA billions of dollars, and the agency could instead procure commercial upper stages, such as those built by United Launch Alliance or Blue Origin, to fly on SLS rockets after NASA's Artemis III mission. It would also eliminate the need for NASA to finish building an expensive new launch tower at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The upper stage flying on the first three SLS missions is no longer in production. Sources indicated to Ars that Blue Origin has already begun work on a modified version of its New Glenn upper stage that could fit within the shroud of the SLS rocket.

Next three launches

Sept. 13: Soyuz-2.1b | Glonass-K1 No. 18L | Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia | 02:30 UTC

Sept. 13: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 15:41 UTC

Sept. 14: Falcon 9 | Cygnus NG-23 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 22:11 UTC

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What are the odds that Mark Zuckerberg would file a lawsuit against Meta? You’d think the chances were slim to none, but it actually happened. Well, sort of. For context, it wasn’t the Meta CEO who filed the suit, but rather a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana who happens to share the same name.

Meta recently deleted the lawyer's Facebook account for “impersonating a celebrity.” But that’s not the case; he simply shares the same name as Mark Zuckerberg. More concerningly, this isn’t the first time his Facebook profile has been flagged and taken down.

He's been in the same predicament five times over the past eight years. This has acted as a s setback for his business, since he uses the Facebook page to advertise his legal practice and even communicate with potential clients.

While speaking to Indianapolis’ 13WTHR, bankruptcy lawyer Mark Zuckerberg indicated:

“It’s not funny. Not when they take my money. This really pissed me off.”

So far, the lawyer has spent approximately $11,000 marketing his legal practice on Facebook. Despite repeated efforts to expand his client base, Facebook has blocked his ads multiple times for allegedly violating the platform's community guidelines on impersonation. Nevertheless, Mark Zuckerberg still receives payments for the ads, even though the lawyer's account has been deactivated.

Mark Zuckerberg has spent over $11,000 to advertise his page on Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platforms, but when Mark Zuckerberg’s account was disabled for allegedly impersonating Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg still had to pay for these advertisements. "I've had that name longer than him," the lawyer lamented.

The lawyer is suing Meta for negligence and a breach of contract. While speaking to the New York Post, he indicated:

“Normally, you would say, well, it’s just Facebook and it’s not a big deal. But this time it’s affecting my bottom line because I was paying for advertising for my business to try and get clients.”

Lawyer Zuckerberg has been in communication with Meta about his predicament since as early as 2017, when he sought assistance for his account being wrongly disabled.

The lawyer's troubles spread beyond a deactivated Facebook account

Optical clocks are judged on accuracy, which is how close they get to “true” time, and stability, which is how consistently they measure it. This record is the result of 20 years of steady improvements to the aluminum ion clock’s laser, ion trap, and vacuum chamber. “It’s exciting to work on the most accurate clock ever,” said Mason Marshall, NIST researcher and first author of the study.

The clock works using quantum logic spectroscopy of a single ²⁷Al⁺ ion. A ²⁵Mg⁺ ion is trapped alongside it to help with sympathetic cooling and to read out the aluminum ion’s state. Aluminum is excellent for timekeeping because its “ticks” are extremely steady and less affected by temperature or magnetic fields, but it is hard to control with lasers. Magnesium is easier to handle, so it acts as a partner, cooling the aluminum ion and letting researchers measure it indirectly.

One big upgrade was extending the Rabi probe duration to 1 second, made possible by transferring laser stability from a remote cryogenic silicon cavity in Jun Ye’s lab at JILA via a 3.6 km fiber link. This cut instability by a factor of three compared to earlier aluminum ion clocks.

The team also redesigned the ion trap to reduce excess micromotion, tiny unwanted movements that can throw off timing. They used a thicker diamond wafer and adjusted gold coatings on the electrodes to fix electrical imbalances. The vacuum chamber was rebuilt from titanium, which reduced background hydrogen gas by 150 times and lowered collisional shifts, allowing the clock to run for days without reloading ions.

They also measured the ac magnetic field from the radio-frequency trap in a direction-sensitive way, removing uncertainty caused by field orientation.

These changes mean the clock can now reach 19-decimal-place precision in about 36 hours instead of three weeks. “With this platform, we're poised to explore new clock architectures — like scaling up the number of clock ions and even entangling them — further improving our measurement capabilities,” said graduate student Willa Arthur-Dworschack.

The achievement could help redefine the second with far greater precision and open new possibilities in Earth science and fundamental physics, including testing whether the constants of nature are truly constant.

Source: NIST, 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.

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Posted Friday 12 September 2025 at 6:35 pm AEST (my time).

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Back in 1971, the late physicist Stephen Hawking made an intriguing prediction: The total surface area of a black hole cannot decrease, only increase or remain stable. So if two black holes combine, the newly formed black hole will have a larger surface area. This became known as Hawking's area theorem. Analysis of the gravitational signal from a black hole merger detected in January provides the best observational evidence to date in support of Hawking's theorem, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The breakthrough just happens to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the LIGO collaboration's Nobel Prize-winning first detection of a black hole merger. A second paper has been submitted (but not yet accepted), placing theoretical limits on a predicted third tone at a higher pitch that could be lurking in the event's gravitational wave signal.

Now known as LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK), the collaboration searches the Universe for gravitational waves produced by the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced Virgo, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India in 2021, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.

Each instrument is so sensitive that it also picks up small ambient vibrations, like a rumbling freight train or natural thermal vibrations in the detectors themselves. So the LIGO collaboration goes to great lengths to shield its instruments and minimize noise in its data. On September 14, 2015, at 5:51 am EST, both detectors picked up signals within milliseconds of each other for the very first time. The waveforms of those signals serve as an audio fingerprint—in this case, evidence for two black holes spiraling inward toward each other and merging in a massive collision event, sending powerful shock waves across spacetime. Picking up the signals was a stunning achievement, and nobody was surprised when the first direct observation of gravitational waves won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Early detected mergers involved either two black holes or two neutron stars. In 2021, LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA confirmed the detection of two separate "mixed" mergers between black holes and neutron stars. Once the source was pinpointed, a network of telescopes around the globe was able to capture the accompanying “kilonova”—a massive burst of energy that behaves a bit like a high-powered strobe light, giving astronomers an unprecedented recording of a major celestial event that combined light and sound. It officially ushered in a new age of so-called multi-messenger astronomy (MMA).

A numerical relativity simulation of the recently observed GW250114 event, a binary black hole merger detected by LIGO on January 14, 2025.

The collaboration also detected asymmetrical mergers, where one black hole is much more massive than its partner, as well as discoveries that challenged the so-called "mass gap" between black holes and neutron stars. And this summer, the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration detected the gravitational wave signal (dubbed GW231123) of the most massive merger between two black holes yet observed, resulting in a new black hole that is 225 times more massive than our Sun.

Looking for telltale overtones

LIGO is now nearly four times more sensitive than when it recorded that first Nobel-worthy black hole merger. And that sensitivity enabled the collaboration to record the sharpest gravitational wave signal thus far, dubbed GW250114. The event was remarkably similar to its 2015 "twin," involving two black holes of about 30 solar masses whose merger produced an equally "loud" signal and resulted in a new black hole of about 63 solar masses. But the difference in the two signals' fidelity enabled researchers to better isolate certain frequencies or tones in the "ringdown," using that information to calculate the new black hole's properties and compare it to theoretical predictions.

The breakthrough has been several years in the making. In 2019, we reported that physicists had "heard" the ring of an infant back hole for the first time by splicing the 2015 signal into the telltale "overtones" in the data. Not only were the overtones present, but the pattern of pitch and decay matched predictions for the black hole's mass and spin derived using the general theory of relativity. The result also supported the so-called "no hair" theorem for the classical description of black holes, which holds that all you need to describe black holes mathematically is their mass and their spin, plus their electric charge. It was the first experimental measurement that succeeded in directly testing the no-hair theorem.

But the final reverberations as the newly formed black hole settled into its new state, aka the ringdown, from that first event were significantly fainter, and scientists were unable to distinguish between the ringing from the initial collision and the ringdown. For GW250114, LIGO's improved sensitivity meant that scientists could measure the frequency and duration of the merged black hole's ringdown much more precisely. The resulting analysis bolsters the 2019 results confirming the "no hair" theorem.

Audio comparison of the 2015 and 2025 gravitational wave signals. 

Credit: LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA

With the latest event, physicists obtained an "exquisitely detailed view of the signal both before and after the black hole merger," said co-author Maximiliano Isi of Columbia University, who led a 2021 study using the same method on the 2015 data to observationally confirm Hawking's area theorem. As with the no-hair theorem, the clearer signal from GW250114 further bolsters that earlier result. The GW250114 data revealed that the two initial black holes had a total surface area of about 240,000 square kilometers, about the size of the United Kingdom. After the merger, the new black hole was about 400,000 square kilometers, about the size of Sweden.

“Even though it's a very simple statement—'areas can only increase'—it has immense implications," said Isi. Notably, Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein later showed that a black hole's area is proportional to its entropy, which also must increase per the second law of thermodynamics. This is a key element in ongoing attempts to develop a quantum theory of gravity. "It’s really profound that the size of a black hole’s event horizon behaves like entropy," said Isi. "It means that some aspects of black holes can be used to mathematically probe the true nature of space and time.”

Caltech physicist Kip Thorne, a longtime friend of Hawking, recalled that when LIGO detected its first gravitational wave signature, Hawking called and asked him if the collaboration would be able to test his theorem. Hawking died in 2018. "If [he] were alive, he would have reveled in seeing the area of the merged black holes increase," said Thorne.

Physical Review Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.1103/kw5g-d732 (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 12 September 2025 at 6:33 pm AEST (my time).

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Crispr gene-editing technology has demonstrated its revolutionary potential in recent years: It has been used to treat rare diseases, to adapt crops to withstand the extremes of climate change, or even to change the color of a spider’s web. But the greatest hope is that this technology will help find a cure for a global disease, such as diabetes. A new study points in that direction.

For the first time, researchers succeeded in implanting Crispr-edited pancreatic cells in a man with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Without insulin, the body is then unable to regulate blood sugar. If steps aren’t taken to manage glucose levels by other means (typically, by injecting insulin), this can lead to damage to the nerves and organs—particularly the heart, kidneys, and eyes. Roughly 9.5 million people worldwide have type 1 diabetes.

In this experiment, edited cells produced insulin for months after being implanted, without the need for the recipient to take any immunosuppressive drugs to stop their body attacking the cells. The Crispr technology allowed the researchers to endow the genetically modified cells with camouflage to evade detection.

The study, published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, details the step-by-step procedure. First, pancreatic islet cells were taken from a deceased donor without diabetes, and then altered with the gene-editing technique Crispr-Cas12b to allow them to evade the immune response of the diabetes patient. Cells altered like this are said to be “hypoimmune,” explains Sonja Schrepfer, a professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California and the scientific cofounder of Sana Biotechnology, the company that developed this treatment.

The edited cells were then implanted into the forearm muscle of the patient, and after 12 weeks, no signs of rejection were detected. (A subsequent report from Sana Biotechnology notes that the implanted cells were still evading the patient’s immune system after six months.)

Tests run as part of the study recorded that the cells were functional: The implanted cells secreted insulin in response to glucose levels, representing a key step toward controlling diabetes without the need for insulin injections. Four adverse events were recorded during follow-ups with the patient, but none of them were serious or directly linked to the modified cells.

The researchers’ ultimate goal is to apply immune-camouflaging gene edits to stem cells—which have the ability to reproduce and differentiate themselves into other cell types inside the body—and then to direct their development into insulin-secreting islet cells. “The advantage of engineering hypoimmune stem cells is that when these stem cells proliferate and create new cells, the new cells are also hypoimmune,” Schrepfer explained in a Cedars-Sinai Q+A earlier this year.

Traditionally, transplanting foreign cells into a patient has required suppressing the patient’s immune system to avoid them being rejected. This carries significant risks: infections, toxicity, and long-term complications. “Seeing patients die from rejection or severe complications from immunosuppression was frustrating to me, and I decided to focus my career on developing strategies to overcome immune rejection without immunosuppressive drugs,” Schrepfer told Cedars-Sinai.

Although the research marks a milestone in the search for treatments of type 1 diabetes, it’s important to note that the study involved one one participant, who received a low dose of cells for a short period—not enough for the patient to no longer need to control their blood sugar with injected insulin. An editorial by the journal Nature also says that some independent research groups have failed in their efforts to confirm that Sana’s method provides edited cells with the ability to evade the immune system.

Sana will be looking to conduct more clinical trials starting next year. Without overlooking the criticisms and limitations of the current study, the possibility of transplanting cells modified to be invisible to the immune system opens up a very promising horizon in regenerative medicine.

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Posted Friday 12 September 2025 at 2:42 am AEST (my time).

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Neuroscientists from around the world have worked in parallel to map, for the first time, the entire brain activity of mice while they were making decisions. This achievement involved using electrodes inserted inside the brain to simultaneously record the activity of more than half a million neurons distributed across 95 percent of the rodents’ brain volume.

Thanks to the image obtained, the researchers were able to confirm an already theorized architecture of thought: that there is no single region exclusively in charge of decisionmaking and instead it is a coordinated process among multiple brain areas.

To illuminate all the regions involved in this decisionmaking process, the team trained mice to turn a small steering wheel to move circles on a screen. If the shape moved correctly toward the center, the animal received sugar water as a reward.

After running this experiment with 139 mice across 12 labs and monitoring their brain activity, the experiment managed to map 620,000 neurons located across 279 brain regions, with a subset of 75,000 well-isolated neurons then being analyzed. The resolution of the neural map produced is unprecedented in the study of brain and its neural networks during the thinking process. Moreover, it represents a milestone both in terms of the type of specimen observed and the extent of the brain area covered. Until now, only whole brains of fruit flies, fish larvae, or small sections of more complex brains had been mapped.

Decisionmaking Is a Holistic Process

The results were published in two papers in the journal Nature. Although the scientists involved acknowledge that the data are not definitive, they represent a starting point in the neural study of decisionmaking. The value of this data lies in the fact that the neural pathway of decisionmaking is now clearer, which will allow scientists to better understand complex thinking abilities and perform more advanced analyses. In addition, the dataset is publicly available.

“These initial conclusions corroborate aspects of brain function that were already intuited from the more limited studies available. It’s as if we suspected how a movie would end without having seen the ending; now they’ve shown it to us,” Juan Lerma, a research professor at the Spanish National Research Council, told the Science Media Centre España. (Lerma was not involved in the research.) “In short, the data show that, in decisionmaking, for example, many brain areas are involved, more than expected, while in sensory processing the areas are more distinct.”

The adult human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, each capable of establishing thousands of synaptic connections with other cells. Although it weighs about 1.4 kilograms, the human brain consumes about 20 percent of the body’s total energy at rest, a remarkably high proportion for its size. Although today’s supercomputers outperform the brain in numerical calculations, none yet matches its energy efficiency or its capacity for learning, adaptation, and parallel processing. There’s still a long way to go before neuroscience can fully map the neural processes of human decisionmaking, but studies like this one take us one step closer.

This article was originally published on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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Posted Thursday 11 September 2025 at 1:49 am AEST (my time).

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Amazon’s Zoox announced today that it’s making its robotaxis available to all customers in Las Vegas. The company says it is the first to operate with a purpose-built autonomous vehicle in public service. And the news comes a few weeks after federal regulators gave the company the green light to expand the use of its robotaxis for demonstration purposes.

Zoox says that its toaster-shaped AVs will be available for passenger trips on the Las Vegas Strip starting today. The vehicles are limited to pickups and dropoffs at only a handful of destinations, including Resort World Las Vegas, AREA15, Topgolf, New York New York, Luxor, and other “resort and entertainment properties.” The company says it will be adding new destinations as it gradually expands it service. And the rides will be free while the company waits for regulatory approval before it can charge for the service.

Zoox’s robotaxis are fully driverless insofar as they lack traditional controls like pedals and steering wheels. Instead, the interior of the vehicle features bench seats positioned on either side, so passengers face each other while they ride. The exterior is covered in sensors, including cameras, lidar, and radar. The vehicles typically won’t exceed 45 mph when in operation.

Zoox is also inviting interested riders to join its waitlist for a robotaxi service in San Francisco. Zoox has a permit to test its driverless vehicles in two cities, San Francisco and Foster City, under certain circumstances, but has yet to receive a permit for a commercial robotaxi service in the state. The company is also testing vehicles in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin. Zoox plans to deploy a total of 50 vehicles across both Las Vegas and San Francisco. “Over time, this will scale to meet increased demand,” spokesperson Marissa Wigam said.

In Las Vegas, Zoox’s robotaxis will pickup and dropoff passengers from designated zones at its partnering destination. Resort World and AREA15, in particular, have created Zoox-only zones with a “Zoox concierge” onsite to help with passenger with questions they may have.

Rides can be requested in the Zoox app, where customers will find a bevy of Uber-like details, like wait times, license plate numbers of arriving vehicles, and options to submit feedback. For those in need of assistance, a “help” button in both the app and vehicle will connect them to remote operators.

Verge contributor Abigail Bassett tested Zoox’s robotaxis at CES earlier this year, and found the seats in particular to be too thin and uncomfortable. (Others who have tested the vehicles have made similar criticisms.) But aside from a few “pucker” moments, the robotaxi did relatively well. The route was predetermined, and with today’s announcement, it sounds like those waiting for a truly dynamic, go-anywhere, 24/7, purpose-built robotaxi service will have to wait a bit longer.

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Posted Thursday 11 September 2025 at 1:45 am AEST (my time).

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When treating severe burns and trauma, skin regeneration can be a matter of life or death. Extensive burns are usually treated by transplanting a thin layer of epidermis, the top layer of skin, from elsewhere on the body. However, this method not only leaves large scars, it also does not restore the skin to its original functional state. Unless the dermis, the layer below the epidermis, which contains blood vessels and nerves, is regenerated, it cannot be considered normal living skin.

Now, work by Swedish researchers may have brought medicine closer to being able to regenerate living skin. They have developed two types of 3D bioprinting techniques to artificially generate thick skin that is vascularized, meaning it contains blood vessels. One technique produces skin that is packed with cells, and the other produces arbitrarily shaped blood vessels in the tissue. The two technologies take different approaches to the same challenge. The approaches have been outlined in two studies published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

“The dermis is so complicated that we can’t grow it in a lab. We don’t even know what all its components are,” said Johan Junker, an associate professor at Linköping University and specialist in plastic surgery who lead this work, in a statement. “That’s why we, and many others, think that we could possibly transplant the building blocks and then let the body make the dermis itself.”

Junker and his team designed a bio-ink called “μInk” in which fibroblasts—cells that produce dermal components such as collagen, elastin, and hyaluronic acid—are cultured on the surface of small spongy gelatin grains and encased in a hyaluronic acid gel. By building up this ink three-dimensionally using a 3D printer, they were able to create a skin structure filled with high-density cells at will.

In a transplantation experiment using mice, the researchers confirmed that living cells grew inside tissue fragments made from this ink, secreting collagen and rebuilding the components of the dermis. New blood vessels also grew inside the graft, indicating that the conditions for long-term tissue fixation were met.

Blood vessels play an extremely important role in the construction of artificial tissues. No matter how many cells are cultured to create a tissue model, without blood vessels, oxygen and nutrients cannot be carried evenly to all cells. And without blood vessels, as the tissue structure grows, the cells in the center of the tissue die.

The research team has also created a technology called REFRESH (Rerouting of Free-Floating Suspended Hydrogel Filaments), which enables the flexible construction of blood vessels in artificial tissues by printing and arranging threads of hydrogel, a gels that 98 percent water. These threads are much tougher than ordinary gel materials and can maintain their shape even when tied or braided. Moreover, they also have shape-memory properties that allow them to return to their original shape even when crushed.

Notably, these threads can be disassembled without leaving any trace by the action of a specific enzyme. When the hydrogel threads placed in the tissue disappear, only a long, thin cavity remains in their original place. By using this as a flow channel equivalent to a blood vessel, a network of blood vessels can be freely formed inside artificially created tissue. By integrating these two technologies, it could be possible to incorporate a freely designed network of blood vessels into the thick, cell-filled artificial skin, allowing oxygen and nutrients to reach every nook and cranny.

The researchers also succeeded in constructing a complex 3D network by forming the hydrogel threads into knots or braids. In the future, they hope to combine this with technology to automate such operations, thereby realizing a method to efficiently stretch a network of blood vessels throughout an artificial organ.

There remain many uncertainties in the wound environment, such as how to avoid inflammation and bacterial infection, and careful verification of these techniques will be needed to bridge the gap between these results obtained in the laboratory and rolling out these techniques in clinical practice. Nevertheless, in the future these technologies may represent a breakthrough in solving long-standing problems in regenerative medicine.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

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Posted Thursday 11 September 2025 at 1:43 am AEST (my time).

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Last year, we reported on the discovery of an intriguing arrow-shaped rock on Mars by NASA's Perseverance rover. The rock contained chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by ancient microbial life. Granted, this was not slam-dunk evidence of past life on Mars, and the results were preliminary, awaiting peer review. But it was an intriguing possibility nonetheless.

Now further analysis and peer review are complete, and there is a new paper, published in the journal Nature, reporting on the findings. It's still not definitive proof that there was water-based life on Mars billions of years ago, but the results are consistent with a biosignature. It's just that other non-biological processes would also be consistent with the data, so definitive proof might require analysis of the Martian samples back on Earth. You can watch NASA's livestream briefing here.

"We have improved our understanding of the geological context of the discovery since [last year], and in the paper, we explore abiotic and biological pathways to the formation of the features that we observe," co-author Joel Hurowitz, an astrobiologist at Stony Brook University in New York, told Ars. "My hope is that this discovery motivates a whole bunch of new research in laboratory and analog field settings on Earth to try to understand what conditions might give rise to the textures and mineral assemblages we've observed. This type of follow on work is exactly what is needed to explore the various biological and abiotic pathways to the formation of the features that we are calling potential biosignatures."

On February 18, 2021, Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater, a site chosen because rocks resembling a river delta are draped over its rim, indicating that flowing water might have met a lake here in the past. The little rover has multiple cameras for both general imagery and spectral analysis, supplemented by an X-ray instrument. A ground-penetrating radar instrument can reveal layering hidden below the surface; a weather module tracks atmospheric conditions and airborne dust; and a drill on the end of its robotic arm grinds clean spots for analysis. The drill can also core out small cylindrical rock samples.

By the end of 2021, Perseverance had identified igneous rocks in the Seitah formation on the crater's floor, containing the mineral olivine surrounded by pyroxene. This combination is known as a cumulate; olivine crystallizes early and can settle to the bottom of a magma body and accumulate, and it's a common formation in magma chambers on Earth. Scientists thought that Jezero was once a lake; this was evidence of possible volcanic activity.

An arrow-shaped clue

As Ars Space Editor Eric Berger reported last year, the arrow-shaped rock that caused such a stir last year was collected on July 21, 2024, as the rover explored the Neretva Vallis riverbed. The science team operating Perseverance nicknamed the rock Chevaya Falls and subjected it to multiple scans by the rover's SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument. Samples were taken from two sites known as Bright Angel and Masonic Temple; the arrow-shaped rock came from Bright Angel.

That analysis revealed  tiny green specks of iron phosphates that have been chemically reduced, as well as iron sulfide minerals, all embedded in mudstone composed of iron minerals, clays, and calcium sulfates. Those distinctive colorful nodules and specks are a smoking gun for certain chemical reactions (known as redox) rather than microbial life itself. On Earth, microbial life can derive energy from these kinds of chemical reactions, so signs of such reactions suggest a plausible source of energy for microbes on Mars. In addition, there are organic chemicals present on the same rock, consistent with some form of life.

This latest paper confirms those initial findings and also concludes that the iron phosphate in the green specks is most likely vivianite, consistent with prior samples taken from the crater's Onahu site. The nodules and specks seem to have formed under low-temperature conditions and after the deposition of sediment. And the minerals of interest aren't evenly distributed throughout the mudstone; they are concentrated in specific zones. All of this taken together suggests that these might be biosignatures, per the authors.

So what needs to happen to definitively confirm these are actual signs of previous life on Mars? NASA has a seven-step process for determining whether something can be confirmed as extraterrestrial life. This is known as the CoLD scale, for Confidence of Life Detection. In this case, the detection of these spots on a Martian rock represented just the first of seven steps. Among other steps, scientists must rule out any non-biological possibility and identify other signals to have confidence in off-world life—i.e., solving the so-called "false positive" problem.

For instance, "Analyses of sulfur isotopes can be used to trace the geochemical and biogeochemical pathways that formed sulfate and sulfides," Janice Bishop (SETI Institute) and Mario Parente (University of Massachusetts Amherst) wrote in an accompanying perspective. "Such analyses would be needed to determine whether ancient microbes participated in the redox reactions that formed these minerals on Mars."

Michael Wong, an astrobiologist at Carnegie Science who was not involved in the research, told Ars that he appreciated Hurowotiz et al.'s care in not over-hyping their findings and thinks they make a compelling case. Unlike hints of biosignatures on distant exoplanets, he thinks scientists can have confidence in the Mars data. "We're right up against the rocks, we're taking spectra of things that we can get up close and personal with," he said.

The tricky part is in the interpretation of that data. "I think this is consistent with a potential biosignature," said Wong. "I wouldn't get too excited, of course, because there could be interesting geological mechanisms for creating these phenomena that we just haven't thought of yet."

Still cause for skepticism

That said, "I'd love to know a little bit more about what organics were found and in what abundances," said Wong. "If you can look at the distribution of, say, amino acids or lipids, these building blocks of life, that can be a really important clue as to whether or not it's actually life that was responsible here. Life is really good at making molecules that function well, and it doesn't care about making molecules that don't play into its metabolism and replication cycles. I'd love to know a little bit more about the isotopic ratios of those organic compounds, because life preferentially absorbs lighter isotopes than heavier ones."

Sara Walker, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study, told Ars that analyses like that of Hurowitz et al. "are often targeted at simple metabolic products or reactions that life on Earth is known to mediate, but which are not uniquely diagnostic of life, e.g. can be produced abiotically," she said. "It is not in general possible to exhaustively rule out all possible abiotic causes, especially in planetary science contexts where we have limited information, as is always the case for Mars data. A convincing biosignature detection would need to be based on detection of a signature of life that has no false positives."

Much will depend on NASA's planned Mars Sample Return mission. Returning pristine specimens from Mars to Earth for analysis in ground-based labs has been a top priority for the planetary science community's decadal survey process. "The Perseverance rover wasn't designed to make any definitive claims about biosignatures, but only to look for samples that have the most intriguing clues and would be the most interesting to bring back to Earth so that we can analyze it with all of the fancy instrumentation here," said Wong.

Getting those samples back has turned out to be a lot more challenging than NASA thought. In 2023, an independent review found ballooning costs and delays threatened the mission's viability. The effort would likely cost NASA between $8 billion and $11 billion, and the launch would be delayed at least two years until 2030, with samples getting back to Earth a few years later, the review board concluded. NASA put out a call to industry in April of this year to propose ideas on how to return the Mars rocks to Earth for less than $11 billion and before 2040, selecting seven companies to conduct more detailed studies.

"Ultimately, I suspect that we'll find that there are ways that you can make them under very specific abiotic—perhaps at high temperature—and biological conditions, and we'll end up at a point where the sample will need to come home so that we can study it and make the final determination for what process made these features," said Hurowitz. "But the follow-on work will provide testable hypotheses that can guide the examination of the Sapphire Canyon core sample we collected from the Bright Angel formation even before it comes back to Earth."

According to Walker, while sample return would be ideal, it may not be critical to detection of extraterrestrial biosignatures, or even provide a conclusive determination in the present case. For these kinds of signatures, "There will always be some doubt, whether studied here on Earth or elsewhere," Walker said. "There are lots of clever means to doing better science for biosignatures on other worlds. I would focus on ones that do not have false positives. But this is a direction that is very new in the field." Her own research involves using assembly theory and mass spectrometry to identify molecules that are too complex to form abiotically.

Those alternatives might be the best course given the current state of science funding in the US. "In planetary science and astrobiology, the funding cuts to the NASA science mission directorate makes it really difficult to imagine a near future in which we can actually do the analysis," said Wong. "We need to determine whether or not these ancient Mars rocks do or do not contain signs of alien life. We're leaving on the doorstep this really intriguing question that we can answer if we brought the samples back to Earth, but we simply aren't going to. We could be on the steps of a golden age of astrobiology if only we had the willpower to do it."

DOI: Nature, 2025. 10.1038/s41586-025-09413-0  (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 11 September 2025 at 1:41 am AEST (my time).

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A new independent report finds that although NASA's ambitious mission to fly across the surface of Titan is delayed and over budget, the fault is due to the space agency's management rather than the program itself.

Released Tuesday by NASA's Office of Inspector General, the report found that the mission's budget has soared from an initial figure of $850 million upon its selection in 2019 to $3.35 billion today. Additionally, the launch target has slipped from the year 2026 to 2028.

However, the cost increase and schedule slippages are not new. The space agency disclosed these issues nearly a year and a half ago. What is notable about the new report from NASA's inspector general is that the cause of these problems was not a serious technical problem or a flawed design of a vehicle intended to spend years flying across Titan.

Rather, the new report says the primary developer of the vehicle, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, did not receive the funding promised in early years and was directed by NASA to undergo several lengthy "replans" of the mission, in which the overall plan is redone and reviewed.

"The cost increase and schedule delay were in large part the result of NASA directing APL to conduct four replans prior to Dragonfly entering the Implementation Phase," the report states.

These changes were necessitated by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the crunch NASA faced to get other missions ahead of Dragonfly completed. Additionally the report cited supply-chain issues, as well as NASA's own uncertainty about the budget it would receive from Congress.

So how is Dragonfly doing now?

In recent years the Dragonfly mission has started to receive the funding and resources promised when NASA selected the mission six years ago. So how is it doing?

"The Dragonfly team is killing it," said Bobby Braun, who is head of APL's Space Exploration Sector, in an interview. "Probably the best part of my day is watching that team hit their milestones."

Both the spacecraft's hardware and software are progressing well, he said. Braun expressed confidence that the spacecraft is "on track" for a July 2028 launch date on a Falcon Heavy rocket. NASA confirmed this in a new update this week. On this timeline the spacecraft would arrive at Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 2034.

This is a challenging mission for a number of reasons, beginning with getting down to the surface. Because Titan has a thick atmosphere, it will take about 90 minutes for the spacecraft to descend. "Curiosity had 7 minutes of terror when it landed on Mars," Braun said. "We're going to have 90 minutes of terror on Titan."

Unlike Mars, where there were multiple orbiters to collect high-resolution surface data about potential landing sites, NASA only has imagery from the Cassini spacecraft that explored the Saturnian system from 2004 to 2017. Fortunately, this spacecraft deployed a small European probe, Huygens, that landed on Titan in 2005 and survived for about an hour. Dragonfly will draw on the experiences and atmospheric data collected by Huygens.

Among the key technologies on Dragonfly is an advanced Terrain Relative Navigation system to survey the surface and identify hazards. This will be useful not just during the initial landing but for subsequent flights as the rotocraft makes 20-minute jaunts across the surface, traveling a few kilometers at a time. Between each autonomous flight, the spacecraft will recharge its batteries using a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG power system. Dragonfly will need this power to transmit data directly from the surface of Titan back to Earth, as there will be no relay spacecraft in orbit around the moon.

A primordial soup

Scientists are greatly intrigued by Titan because it is one of the few bodies in the Solar System with a surface pressure similar to Earth. The average temperature at the surface is very cold, -179.5° Celsius (-290° Fahrenheit), but there are lakes of Methane at the poles. Beneath sandy dunes at the equator, which are rich with complex carbon molecules, lies a crust of water ice perhaps 100 km thick.

In an interview, Dragonfly Principal Investigator Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle told Ars the vehicle's mobility will allow it to investigate areas in which this ice may have been liquid in the past. The spacecraft will explore impact craters where water may have existed in liquid form for thousands of years after meteors struck and imparted a significant amount of kinetic energy.

"Titan’s equatorial region has these large seas of sand dunes, but the sand has an organic composition, and it overlies this primordial water ice crust," Turtle said.

What might have existed there? What exists there today?

This will be NASA's first landing on another ocean world, with the primary objective of searching for the chemical building blocks of life. Areas of Titan, in the wake of impacts, would be much like a primordial Earth when life started here billions of years ago.

Is it 2034 yet?

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Posted Wednesday 10 September 2025 at 12:51 pm AEST (my time).

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Pfizer and BioNTech report that their updated mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for the 2025–2026 season produced strong immune responses, boosting neutralizing antibody levels by at least fourfold in older people and those with underlying medical conditions.

The positive results come as Americans face a confusing, state-by-state patchwork of access to the shots under the health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an ardent anti-vaccine activist who has unilaterally restricted access. Prior to the second Trump administration, all Americans ages 6 months and older had access to the vaccines. But under Kennedy, the Food and Drug Administration limited COVID-19 vaccine approvals to people 65 and older, and people under 64 years only if they have an underlying medical condition.

In Pfizer and BioNTech's latest trial, the companies limited enrollment to these groups. The phase 3 trial included 100 people total, 50 people aged 65 or older and 50 people aged 18 to 64 with an underlying condition. Those conditions included asthma, diabetes, heart conditions, HIV, mental health conditions, Parkinson's disease, obesity, or smoking. All participants had gotten last season's COVID shot at least six months prior to the trial and had not gotten any other COVID-19 vaccines or a COVID-19 infection since then.

This year's Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine targets the SARS-CoV-2 strain LP.8.1, a variant in the JN.1 family. In both age groups in the trial, the LP.8.1 vaccines boosted LP.8.1-neutralizing antibody levels by at least fourfold, on average. There were no new safety concerns relative to previous versions of the shot.

While LP.8.1 was the leading variant at the time regulators had to make a call on target strain for this year's shot, the current leading strain is XFG, another JN.1 family member. Pfizer did testing in mice previously to show that an LP.8.1-targeting vaccine would remain effective against XFG (and other emerging variants) and beat out last year's vaccine at providing protection.

While the trial data bodes well for the vaccine's effectiveness this year, it may offer little comfort to Americans struggling to gain access to the shot. According to a public health coalition funded by Kaiser Permanente, people eligible for the vaccine based on the new FDA criteria still need a prescription to get one in 10 states as of September 8. Off-label use (healthy children and adults) remains highly restricted in all states. That said, the situation is still evolving, and some states have already taken various actions (the states with diagonal lines in the map above) to clarify and ease access to COVID-19 vaccines this season.

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Posted Wednesday 10 September 2025 at 12:50 pm AEST (my time).

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It has been two weeks since SpaceX's last Starship test flight, and engineers have diagnosed issues with its heat shield, identified improvements, and developed a preliminary plan for the next time the ship heads into space.

Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX executive in charge of build and flight reliability, presented the findings Monday at the American Astronautical Society's Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland.

The rocket lifted off on August 26 from SpaceX's launch pad in Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border. It was the 10th full-scale test flight of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, combining to form the world's largest rocket.

There were a couple of overarching objectives on the August 26 test flight. SpaceX needed to overcome problems with Starship's propulsion and propellant systems that plagued three previous test flights. Then, engineers were hungry for data on Starship's heat shield, an array of thousands of tiles covering the ship's belly as it streaks through the atmosphere during reentry.

"Things went extremely well," Gerstenmaier said.

A little more than an hour after liftoff, the Starship guided itself to a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. The ship came within 10 feet (3 meters) of its targeted splashdown point, near an inflatable buoy in position to record its final descent.

Video from the buoy and a drone hovering nearby showed Starship coming in for splashdown, initially falling belly first before lighting three of its six Raptor engines to flip upright moments before settling into the ocean. But the ship had some battle scars. There was some visible damage to its rear end and flaps, and most notably, a rusty orange hue emblazoned down the side of the 171-foot-tall (52-meter) vehicle.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the discoloration was caused by the oxidation of metallic heat shield tiles installed to test their durability and performance in comparison to the ship's array of ceramic tiles. Unlike previous Starship flights, Musk said nearly all of the tiles remained on the vehicle from launch through landing.

Delving into the details

Gerstenmaier went deeper during his discussion of the Starship test flight Monday.

"We were essentially doing a test to see if we could get by with non-ceramic tiles, so we put three metal tiles on the side of the ship to see if they would provide adequate heat control, because they would be simpler to manufacture and more durable than the ceramic tiles. It turns out they're not," Gerstenmaier said.

"The metal tiles... didn't work so well," he said. "They oxidized extremely nice in the high oxygen environment. So, that nice orange color, kind of like a [space] shuttle external tank color, maybe paying homage to the shuttle program, was created by those three little metal tiles up on top."

Gerstenmaier has a talent for explaining complex technical concepts in a digestible manner. He began his career as an aerospace engineer working on the space shuttle program at NASA in 1977. He rose through the ranks at NASA to become head of all of the agency's human spaceflight programs, then joined SpaceX in 2020.

The experiment with metallic tiles is emblematic of the way SpaceX is developing Starship. The company's engineers move quickly to make changes and integrate new designs into each test flight. Metallic heat shield tiles aren't a new technology. NASA tested them in labs in the 1970s but never flew them.

"I think we learned a lot by taking them to flight, and we still had enough protection underneath that they didn't cause a problem," Gerstenmaier said. "In most of the tiles, there are fairly large gaps, and that's where we're seeing the heat get through and get underneath."

A mastery of Starship's heat shield is vital for the future of the program. The heat shield must be durable for Starship to be rapidly reusable. Musk eyes reflying Starships within 24 hours.

NASA's reusable space shuttles used approximately 24,000 delicate ceramic tiles to protect them from the hottest temperatures of reentry, but the materials were delicate and damage-prone, requiring refurbishment and touchups by hand between missions. SpaceX's Dragon crew capsule has a reusable structure that underlies the heat shield, but the heat shield material itself is only used once.

For Starship, SpaceX needs a heat shield that will stand up to the rigors of spaceflight—intense vibrations during launch, extreme thermal cycles in space, the scorching heat of reentry, and the crush of the launch pad's catch arms at the end of each mission. Musk has called the ship's reusable heat shield the "single biggest" engineering challenge for the Starship program.

Continuing his presentation, Gerstenmaier pointed to a patch of white near the top of Starship's heat shield. This, he said, was caused by heat seeping between gaps in the tiles and eroding the underlying material, a thermal barrier derived from the heat shield on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. Technicians also intentionally removed some tiles near Starship's nose to test the vehicle's response.

"It's essentially a white material that sits on Dragon and it ablates away, and when it ablates, it creates this white residue," Gerstenmaier said. "So, what that's showing us is that we're having heat essentially get into that region between the tiles, go underneath the tiles, and this ablative structure is then ablating underneath. So, we learned that we need to seal the tiles."

The primary structure for Starship is made of a special alloy of stainless steel. Most other spacecraft designed for reentry, like the space shuttle and Dragon, are made of aluminum. The steel's higher melting point makes Starship more forgiving of heat shield damage than the shuttle.

Engineers observed several more white blotches lower on Starship, where heat also leaked between tiles and burned the material underneath.

Previewing Flight 11

Not great, but SpaceX officials think they have a solution. Near the top of the ship, amid the patch of white, engineers noticed a few darker areas. These are places where SpaceX's ground team installed a new experimental material around and under the tiles.

"We call it crunch wrap," Gerstenmaier said. "It's like a wrapping paper that goes around each tile, and then... these tiles are mechanically held in place. They're snapped in by a robot. When we push the tile in, this little wrapping paper essentially sits around the sides of each one of the tiles, and then we cut it off on the surface."

Using this "crunch wrap" material could seal the spaces between the tiles without using gap fillers. The gap fillers on the space shuttle added complexity to the heat shield, and they sometimes dislodged in flight.

"This is kind of what we're going to fly on this next flight, on Flight 11," Gerstenmaier said. "When we fly here, we're going to put, essentially, crunch wrap everywhere, and see if we can get better sealing and better tile performance moving forward. These are areas where we're inventing things. We're doing test experiments. We're doing test envelope expansion. We're doing aerodynamic things. All these things are critical."

For Flight 11, Starship will fly on a suborbital trajectory similar to the flight profile the ship has flown on all of its missions to date. The next flight could happen in October and will prepare SpaceX for the debut of an upgraded Starship/Super Heavy rocket next year. SpaceX test-fired the Super Heavy booster for the next launch Sunday in Texas.

"I think this next flight, we won't push quite so many different techniques in," he said. "We're going to try to go more towards the configuration we want to go fly next year."

Going to orbit

"Next year, we step up to another version of both ship and booster, called V3 (Version 3)," Gerstenmaier said in response to a question from Ars. "It also has a new Raptor engine underneath, with more performance than the previous ones. So we'll fly V3 (suborbital) first, and then if that's successful, then we'll probably go orbital after that with the next V3."

That would mean an orbital flight no sooner than Flight 13. This matches a recent comment by Musk, who said SpaceX will likely attempt to catch and recover Starship back at Starbase somewhere around Flight 13 to 15, depending on the outcomes of the next couple of test flights. It also agrees with predictions from my colleague Eric Berger in a recent story on Starship.

To attempt a catch, Starship must accelerate to orbital velocity to fly all the way around the world and come back to Texas.

All of Starship's test flights so far have been suborbital, meaning they come back to Earth before circumnavigating the planet. SpaceX wants to make sure it can control where and when the ship comes back to Earth before orbiting the vehicle. An uncontrolled reentry of a vehicle as large as Starship would result in large chunks of debris falling to the ground.

Orbital missions will unlock the next phase of Starship's development. Recovering Starship in one piece will allow engineers to get a better handle on the performance of the ship's heat shield, among other things. Going to orbit with Starship will allow SpaceX to begin launching more powerful next-generation Starlink broadband satellites for the company's consumer Internet service. Most importantly for future flights to the Moon and Mars, orbital flight will pave the way for SpaceX to bring two ships together in space for the first demonstration of large-scale orbital refueling.

"We're going to try to do that next year," Gerstenmaier said. "In 2026, that'll be the focus, to get large-scale propellant transfer. If we're going to leave Earth orbit, we're going to need propellant transfer."

Gerstenmaier also briefly mentioned the results of experiments with Starship's Super Heavy booster on the most recent test flight.

On this flight, the booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico just off the Texas coastline after propelling Starship toward space. SpaceX used the flight to put the booster through higher stresses as it came back to Earth, guiding the rocket to a water landing in the Gulf instead of returning it to the launch pad for a catch by the tower's mechanical arms.

"What we were doing there is we're looking at the angle of attack and looking at how well the booster could fly itself to understand how much ability we had to get it back to the tower in the future," Gerstenmaier said.

SpaceX engineers noticed the booster's performance on descent in flight doesn't match predictions from computer models or wind tunnel tests. In ground experiments, the booster encounters unstable buffeting as it slows below the speed of sound.

Based on those results, "[we] should not be able to do what we do with our maneuver coming back with a booster, but we've been able to essentially show through flight that we have more stability than either CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) or the wind tunnels show that we have," Gerstenmaier said.

"So, the big question to the research community is, why are we seeing these differences?" he asked. "We had an inkling that it would be there, but we weren't 100 percent sure, and we were able to do that extremely well."

Gerstenmaier suggested that's a question best posed to universities and government labs. Companies like SpaceX innovate fast, but once they find a workable solution, they move on to something else.

"I get what I call a minimum viable solution," Gerstenmaier said. "I don't really understand why it works, but somehow it works, so we're going to use it, we're going to monetize it, we're going to make it work. You have the chance to help me understand why it works... And you may find out, hey, there's another approach that actually lets it work even better."

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Posted Wednesday 10 September 2025 at 12:48 pm AEST (my time).

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But what really caught my smart home eyes was an application of generative AI I've never seen before.

SwitchBot introduced an AI Art Frame, and it represents a completely new future for at-home wall art.

The AI Art Frame's concept and design are easy to grasp and made me wonder why the idea wasn't already more widespread.

It uses a colored E-Ink (when was the last time you heard that?) surface that mimics a hanging picture and is made to work with IKEA frames, among other options.

Connect the frame to the SwitchBot app and it allows you to enter text prompts or inspirational ideas for the Art Frame to work with.

The Frame then generates its own unique image using AI.

If you want to switch to a real photo, you can upload one of your pics for the frame to work with directly, too.

Thanks to the low-power E-Ink, the Frame's battery can last for up to two years and you can enter new prompts whenever you want.

The Art Frame comes in a variety of sizes and has a two-year battery life.

The applications for this kind of frame -- as long as you don't mind the vagaries of AI art -- are almost limitless.

You could change the picture for the seasons, for the book you're reading or the game you're playing, for the latest cartoon your kid is obsessed with, to mimic a different historical artist every month, or on any whim.

And because SwitchBot is offering its Art Frame in sizes from 7.3 inches to 31.5 inches, it can fit in all kinds of spots from a desk to a home wall.

SwitchBot says its AI Art Frame will be ready to ship in November, with pricing info to come at a later date.

I can't wait to try it and I wonder if AI art like this has a place in the average home. It could prove promising. 

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Profumo’s research looks at the idea that dark matter could have formed naturally in the very early universe, instead of being a completely new type of particle that interacts with normal matter in ways we can detect.

His most recent paper, published July 8, focuses on a “hidden sector” — a kind of mirror version of our universe with its own particles and forces that we cannot see, but which follow similar physical laws. The idea is based on quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that explains how quarks are bound inside protons and neutrons by the strong nuclear force. In this hidden sector, there could be a similar “dark QCD” with dark quarks and dark gluons forming heavy particles called dark baryons.

The study models this using confining SU(N) gauge theories in the large‑N limit. It finds that while glueballs and mesons in such a sector cannot form black holes under realistic conditions, dark baryons could. For certain ranges of the confinement scale, quark masses, number of colors N, and dark sector temperature, these dark baryons could collapse into light black holes with masses up to a few hundred times the Planck mass. If these relics are stable, their abundance — both from direct formation at confinement and from dark glueball and meson annihilation — would be exponentially suppressed as N increases. This leads to an upper limit of about N ≤ 100 for models where such relics make up all of the dark matter. The paper also maps out the parameter space where this could happen.

Profumo’s other paper, published in May, looks at whether dark matter could have been created by the universe’s edge or the “cosmic horizon” during a short period of accelerated expansion after inflation. This expansion would have been less extreme than inflation but still faster than what radiation or matter alone would allow.

The analysis assumes three things: first, that the phase was driven by a fluid with equation of state P = wρ, second, that the cosmic horizon in this quasi–de Sitter universe had a temperature inversely proportional to its size; and third, that observers are static (Here w lies between −1 and −1/3).

Under these conditions, the study calculates the frozen‑in density of a stable particle of mass m produced by the cosmic horizon, assuming it does not undergo number‑changing processes later. Depending on the equation of state and the temperature when radiation domination began and the quasi–de Sitter phase ended, the mass of dark matter from this process could range from about 10 keV to nearly the Planck scale.

“Both mechanisms are highly speculative, but they offer self‑contained and calculable scenarios that don’t rely on conventional particle dark matter models, which are increasingly under pressure from null experimental results,” said Profumo.

Source: UC Santa Cruz, APS (link1, link2)

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

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Posted Saturday 6 September 2025 at 1:17 pm AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.09 of the Rocket Report! The biggest news of the week happened inside the Beltway rather than on a launch pad somewhere. In Washington, DC, Congress has pushed back on the Trump administration's plan to stop flying the Space Launch System rocket after Artemis III. Congress made it clear that it wants to keep the booster in business for a long time. The big question now is whether the Trump White House will blink.

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.

Israel launches SAR satellite. The Israel Ministry of Defense, Israel Defense Forces, and Israel Aerospace Industries successfully launched the Ofek 19 satellite on Tuesday from the Palmachim Airbase. The launch was carried out by the country's solid-propellant Shavit 2 rocket. Ofek 19 is a synthetic aperture radar observation satellite with enhanced capabilities, 7 Israel National News reports.

A unique launch posture ... This was the seventh launch of the Shavit-2 vehicle, which made its debut in June 2007. The most recent launch prior to this week occurred in March 2023. Because of its geographic location and difficult relations with surrounding countries, Israel launches its rockets to the west, over the Mediterranean Sea. (submitted by MarkW98)

Canadian launch firm invests in launch site. Earlier this summer, Reaction Dynamics, an Ontario-based launch company, closed on a Series A funding round worth $10 million. This will support the next phase of development of the Canadian company's hybrid propulsion system, of which an initial suborbital demonstration flight is planned for this winter. Now the company has taken some of this funding and invested in a launch site in Nova Scotia, SpaceQ reports.

Getting in on the ground floor ... In a transaction worth $1.2 million, Reaction Dynamics is investing in Maritime Launch Services, which is developing the Spaceport Nova Scotia facility. Reaction Dynamics intends to launch its Aurora-8 rocket from the Canadian launch site. Bachar Elzein, the CEO of Reaction Dynamics, said the move made sense for two reasons. The first is that it secures "a spot to launch our very first orbital rocket," with Elzein adding, "we believe in their vision," and thus wanted to invest. That second factor had to do with all the work, the heavy lifting, MLS has done to date, to build a spaceport from the ground up. (submitted by JoeyS)

MaiaSpace completes tank tests. French rocket builder and ArianeGroup subsidiary MaiaSpace announced the completion of a monthslong test campaign that subjected several subscale prototypes of its propellant tanks to high-pressure burst tests, European Spaceflight reports. Over the course of six months, the company conducted 15 "burst" tests of subscale propellant tanks. Burst tests push tanks to failure to assess their structural limits and ensure they can safely withstand pressures well beyond normal operating conditions.

Working toward space ... The data collected will be used to validate mechanical models that will inform the final design of the full-scale propellant tanks. The tests come as MaiaSpace continues to work toward the debut flight of its Maia rocket, which could take place in 2027 from French Guiana. At present, the company intends the rocket to have a lift capacity of 1.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

Orienspace secures B+ round funding. Chinese commercial rocket company Orienspace has raised tens of millions of dollars in Series B+ financing as it moves towards a key test flight, Space News reports. Orienspace secured funding of between $27 million and $124 million, according to the Chinese-language Taibo Network. The capital will be used mainly for the follow-up development and mass production of the Gravity-2 medium-lift liquid launch vehicle.

Not a small rocket ... The company will soon begin comprehensive ground verification tests for the Gravity-2 and is scheduled to carry out its first flight test by the end of this year. In July, Orienspace successfully conducted a hot fire test of a Gravity-2 kerosene-liquid oxygen first-stage engine, including gimbal and valve system evaluations. Gravity-2 is expected to lift on the order of 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

Rocket Lab unveils Neutron launch complex. As Rocket Lab prepares to roll out its new Neutron, the firm recently unveiled the launch complex from which the vehicle will fly, DefenseNews reports. Located within the Virginia Space Authority’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops Island, the facility, dubbed Launch Complex 3, will support testing, launch, and return missions for the reusable rocket. Rocket Lab sees Neutron as a contender to help ease the bottleneck in demand from both commercial and military customers for a ride to space. Today, that demand is largely being met by a single provider in the medium-lift market, SpaceX.

A launch this year? ... It sounds unlikely. During the event, Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck said that although he believes the company's plan to launch this year is within reach, the schedule is aggressive with no margin for error. Speaking with reporters at the launch site, Beck said the company has some key testing in the coming months to qualify key stages of the rocket, which will give it a better idea of whether it can meet that 2025 timeline. "Nobody’s waving the white flag here until the last hour of the last day," he said. This one is unlikely to break Berger's Law, however.

SpaceX obtains approval to ramp up Falcon 9 cadence. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a record of decision on Wednesday approving SpaceX's plan to more than double the number of Falcon 9 launches from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40), the busiest of the company's four operational launch pads. The FAA concluded that the proposed launch rate "would not significantly impact the quality of the human environment," Ars reports.

Reaching ludicrous speed ... The environmental review paves the way for SpaceX to launch up to 120 Falcon 9 rockets per year from SLC-40, an increase from 50 launches covered in a previous FAA review in 2020. Since then, the FAA has issued SpaceX temporary approval to go beyond 50 launches from SLC-40. For example, SpaceX launched 62 of its overall 132 Falcon 9 flights last year from SLC-40. SpaceX's goal for this year is 170 Falcon 9 launches, and the company is on pace to come close to this target.

NASA sets date for science mission. NASA said Thursday that a trio of spacecraft to study the Sun will launch no earlier than September 23, on a Falcon 9 rocket. The missions include NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe), NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1) spacecraft. After launching from Kennedy Space Center, the spacecraft will travel together to their destination at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange point (L1), around 1 million miles from Earth toward the Sun.

Fun in the Sun ... The missions will each focus on different effects of the solar wind and space weather, from their origins at the Sun to their farthest reaches billions of miles away at the edge of our Solar System. Research and observations from the missions will help us better understand the Sun’s influence on Earth’s habitability, map our home in space, and protect satellites and voyaging astronauts and airline crews from space weather impacts.

Starship's heat shield shows promise. One of the key issues ahead of last week's test of SpaceX's Starship vehicle was the performance of the upper stage heat shield, Ars reports. When the vehicle landed in the Indian Ocean, it had a decidedly orange tint. So what gives? SpaceX founder Elon Musk provided some clarity after the flight, saying, "Worth noting that the heat shield tiles almost entirely stayed attached, so the latest upgrades are looking good! The red color is from some metallic test tiles that oxidized and the white is from insulation of areas where we deliberately removed tiles."

A step toward the goal ... The successful test and additional information from Musk suggest that SpaceX is making progress on developing a heat shield for Starship. This really is the key technology to make an upper stage rapidly reusable—NASA's space shuttle orbiters were reusable but required a standing army to refurbish the vehicle between flights. To unlock Starship's potential, SpaceX wants to be able to refly Starships within 24 hours.

Ted Cruz emerges as key SLS defender. All of the original US senators who created and sustained NASA's Space Launch System rocket over the last 15 years—Bill Nelson, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Richard Shelby—have either retired or failed to win reelection. However, Ars reports that a new champion has emerged to continue the fight: Texas Republican Ted Cruz. As part of its fiscal year 2026 budget, the White House sought to end funding for the Space Launch System rocket after the Artemis III mission, and also cancel the Lunar Gateway, an orbital space station that provides a destination for the rocket.

Money for future missions ... However, Cruz subsequently crafted a NASA provision tacked onto President Trump's "One Big, Beautiful Bill." The Cruz addendum provided $6.7 billion in funding for two additional SLS missions, Artemis IV and Artemis V, and to continue Gateway construction. In several hearings this year, Cruz has made it clear that his priorities for human spaceflight are to beat China back to the Moon and maintain a presence there. However, it is now increasingly clear that he views this as only being possible through continued use of NASA's SLS rocket.

SpaceX seeks to solve Starship prop demands. If SpaceX is going to fly Starships as often as it wants to, it's going to take more than rockets and launch pads. Tanker trucks have traditionally delivered rocket propellant to launch pads at America's busiest spaceports in Florida and California. SpaceX has used the same method of bringing propellant for the first several years of operations at Starbase. But a reusable Starship's scale dwarfs that of other rockets. It stands more than 400 feet tall, with a capacity for more than a million gallons of super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants.

That's a lot of gas ... SpaceX also uses large quantities of liquid nitrogen to chill and purge the propellant loading system for Starship. It takes more than 200 tanker trucks traveling from distant refineries to deliver all of the methane, liquid oxygen, and liquid nitrogen for a Starship launch. SpaceX officials recognize this is not an efficient means of conveying these commodities to the launch pad. It takes time, emits pollution, and clogs roadways. SpaceX's solution to some of these problems is to build its own plants to generate cryogenic fluids. In a new report, Ars explains how the company plans to do this.

Next three launches

September 5: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-57 | Kennedy Space Center Florida | 11:29 UTC

September 5: Ceres 1 | Unknown payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 11:35 UTC

September 6: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-9 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 15:45 UTC

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Posted Saturday 6 September 2025 at 3:14 am AEST (my time).

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A new study finds that technologies installed to remove forever chemicals from drinking water are also doing double-duty by removing harmful other materials—including some substances that have been linked to certain types of cancer.

The study, published Thursday in the journal ACS ES&T Water, comes as the Trump administration is overhauling a rule mandating that water systems take action to clean up forever chemicals in drinking water.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), colloquially referred to as forever chemicals, are a class of thousands of chemicals that do not degrade in the environment and have been linked to a slew of worrying health outcomes, including various cancers, hormonal disorders, and developmental delays. Because they do not degrade, they are uniquely pervasive: a 2023 study from the US Geological Survey estimated that 45 percent of tap water in the US could contain at least one PFAS chemical.

Last year, the Biden administration finalized a rule establishing the first-ever legal limits of PFAS in drinking water, setting strict limits for six kinds of PFAS chemicals and mandating that water utilities needed to clean up drinking water under these limits by 2029. But in May, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would be reconsidering regulations on four of the six chemicals in the original rule and extend the deadline by two years. The changes come after widespread outcry from water utilities, who say that the costs of installing PFAS filtration systems would be far beyond what the agency originally estimated.

“Building on the historic actions to address PFAS during the first Trump Administration, EPA is tackling PFAS from all of our program offices, advancing research and testing, stopping PFAS from getting into drinking water systems, holding polluters accountable, and more,” Brigit Hirsch, EPA press secretary, told WIRED in a statement. “This is just a fraction of the work the agency is doing on PFAS during President Trump’s second term to ensure Americans have the cleanest air, land, and water.”

Hirsch also emphasized that as EPA reconsiders standards for the four chemicals in question, “it is possible that the result could be more stringent requirements.”

Experts say the costs of cleaning up PFAS could have other benefits beyond just getting forever chemicals out of Americans’ water supply. The authors of the new study—all employees of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit that does research on chemical safety—say that technology that gets rid of PFAS can also filter out a number of other harmful substances, including some that are created as byproducts of the water treatment process itself.

The study looks at three types of water filtration technologies that have been proven to remove PFAS. These technologies “are really widespread, they’ve been in use for a really long time, and they’re well-documented to remove a large number of contaminants,” says Sydney Evans, a senior analyst at EWG and coauthor of the report.

Most routine water disinfection processes in the US entail adding a chemical—usually chlorine—to the water. While this process removes harmful pathogens, it can’t leach out PFAS or other types of contaminants, including heavy metals and elements like arsenic.

This method of disinfection can also, paradoxically, create some harmful byproducts as chlorine reacts to organic compounds present in water or in infrastructure like pipes. Long-term exposure to some of these byproducts has been linked to specific types of cancer. While there are some federal guidelines for water utilities to follow, experts say that a growing body of research illustrates that there’s a gap between what is legal and what is safe. (It’s also not uncommon for utilities to find water samples that exceed legal limits: officials in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Akron, Ohio, have notified residents this year that their water was polluted with disinfection byproducts.)

“There’s this gray area in between what is safe and what is legal where there’s still some risk, which is why we’re so concerned about all of these contaminants,” says Evans, some of whose past work has focused on the links between disinfection byproducts and cancer.

In the 2024 PFAS drinking water regulations, the EPA specifically identified lower levels of disinfection byproducts as a side benefit of the new PFAS rule. The agency estimated the rules could prevent 2,600 additional deaths and more than 7,000 illnesses from bladder cancer each year as a result of advanced filtration systems. Evans and her coauthors say they wanted to do their own research to provide specific numbers to support these claims.

The new research uses publicly available state and national data from water utilities across the country. The researchers focused on a sample group of 19 water systems that had installed some form of PFAS treatment between 2018 and 2022, comparing trends in concentrations of two separate disinfection byproducts before and after the installation. The results showed big reductions in the two types of byproducts they tracked: The level of trihalomethanes dropped by an average of 42 percent, while haloacetic acid levels dropped by an average of 50 percent. At high levels, trihalomethanes increase the risk of cancer in humans, while some haloacetic acids are suspected carcinogens.

Experts not involved with the study say that it’s a solid confirmation of what scientists have long suspected.

“It’s really an interesting first effort to try to diagnose ancillary benefits—and perhaps unintended benefits—from installing advanced water treatment systems intended to remove PFAS,” says P. Lee Ferguson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University. “This gets at a question many of us have asked, and that I’ve thought about quite a bit: [with] the very act of installing advanced treatment intended to remove really recalcitrant contaminants like PFAS, you really do have the potential to get a lot of other benefits.”

While putting together the study’s methodology, the researchers also demonstrated how large the gap in advanced technology is between smaller water systems and bigger ones. Just 7 percent of water systems serving fewer than 500 customers had some kind of advanced water filtration system, as opposed to nearly 30 percent of water systems serving more than 100,000 people. These smaller systems, the EWG researchers say, overwhelmingly serve rural and under-resourced populations. Cost explains a lot here: these types of technologies are much more expensive than treating water with chlorine. (In May, the EPA said it would launch an initiative called PFAS OUT, which will connect with water utilities that need to make upgrades and provide “tools, funding, and technical assistance.”)

The relatively small sample size of 19 water systems, and the lack of detail in the data, means there are some wide discrepancies in the results, says Bridger Ruyle, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at NYU who studies PFAS and water systems. Some of the systems in the study saw a nearly complete reduction in disinfection byproducts after they installed advanced filtration; at the other extreme, some water systems actually showed a gain in byproducts after they installed the filtration systems.

This, Ruyle says, doesn’t mean that the technology isn’t effective. Rather, it calls for more research into how variables like new exposure sources and seasonality might be affecting specific plants.

“In the lab, you can do all of these controlled studies, and you can say, ‘Oh yes, we eliminate all of the PFAS, and that also takes care of some other contaminant issues of concern,’” he says. “But when you’re talking about the real operation of a water facility, the environmental behavior of PFAS and these other chemicals are not the same. You could have different seasonal patterns, you could have different sources, you could have climate change impacting different components. And so, just because we’re treating a certain inflow of PFAS, a lot of other things could be happening to these other chemicals kind of independently.”

The question of cost comes back to who, exactly, needs to be on the hook to pay to clean up water. In communities across the country, water utilities are folding new PFAS testing and remediation measures into other needed upgrades, and some consumers are seeing their bills skyrocket. But understanding the full benefits of some of these fixes can help scientists and policymakers better grasp the path forward.

“This is an enormous financial challenge,” Ruyle says. “And at the same time, it’s a financial need. There’s a big focus now in the Trump administration from the MAHA movement [around] what are these causes of all of these health and well-being ills. If you’re not willing to put up the money to upgrade infrastructure, to actually address proven causes of environmental harm, then what are we going to do?”

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Posted Friday 5 September 2025 at 3:11 am AEST (my time).

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Aspirin is one of the most widely taken medicines in the world, having been recommended for decades as a way of protecting against heart attacks and strokes in at-risk patients. However, a new study has revealed that clopidogrel, another commonly used blood thinner, or anticoagulant, is more effective in preventing serious heart attacks and strokes and carries no additional risk.

The finding is the result of research conducted by an international team of scientists from the US, UK, Switzerland, Australia, and Japan. Their work is a meta-analysis—a study that collects and analyzes the results of multiple smaller studies, with the aim of reaching a more reliable conclusion by looking at a larger amount of data. In total, this meta-analysis looked at clinical data from nearly 29,000 patients diagnosed with coronary artery disease (CAD), a condition where fat builds up in the arteries, which can lead to secondary effects such as heart attacks and heart failure.

The specialists conducted a systematic search of medical databases such as PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Embase to find randomized trials of treatments for CAD published up to April 12, 2025. The aim was to identify papers comparing the efficacy of aspirin versus clopidogrel in the prevention of cardiovascular deaths, heart attacks, and strokes.

The analysis focused on seven investigations that included clinical information from persons with confirmed cases of CAD treated with aspirin or clopidogrel for an average of 2.3 years. After a follow-up of 5.5 years, the researchers observed that those who received clopidogrel had a 14 percent lower risk of a major cardiovascular event compared with those treated with aspirin.

Ultimately, the team concluded that these findings “add to the evidence” that clopidogrel is superior to aspirin for preventing major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events. In the researchers’ view, these findings support using clopidogrel over aspirin in patients with established CAD to try to prevent them going on to have major complications as a result of their condition, such as a heart attack. The findings were published in the journal The Lancet.

In terms of mortality and bleeding risk, the meta-analysis concluded that the rates were similar in both groups, confirming that clopidogrel is as safe as aspirin.

“To the best of our knowledge, clopidogrel monotherapy is the only antiplatelet treatment that has consistently demonstrated greater efficacy than aspirin without compromising safety,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

The discovery could transform medical guidelines internationally. Clopidogrel is a widely available, affordable drug with reliable generic versions, characteristics that would make it easy to incorporate into routine clinical practice. Nevertheless, specialists stress that more extensive research is needed to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of clopidogrel and its performance in diverse populations in order to support its inclusion in treatment standards.

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the world. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 17.9 million people die each year from these conditions. More than four out of every five of these deaths are due to coronary heart disease or stroke. The new research suggests that clopidogrel could become a key alternative to combat this public health problem, the incidence of which continues to rise around the world.

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

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Posted Friday 5 September 2025 at 3:10 am AEST (my time).

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Remember the first time you saw a SpaceX rocket nail a bullseye landing after hurtling back from space? How about the first time two boosters landed side by side, punctuating the inaugural launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket with thrilling synchrony?

Some of SpaceX's most defining moments happened on a piece of beachfront property at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This is where SpaceX first landed a reusable Falcon 9 booster coming back from space and, a few years later, landed two boosters side by side.

In all, SpaceX has landed 66 Falcon boosters at Landing Zones 1 and 2 since recovering the first Falcon 9 booster on December 21, 2015. Now, SpaceX is preparing to hand the landing zones back to the US Space Force, which owns the property and has reallocated the real estate to two startup launch companies.

SpaceX plans to build two landing zones for Falcon rockets next to the company's existing launch pads in Florida, aligning with a recent Space Force policy to co-locate launch and landing sites on the same property.

The Space Force says co-located launch and landing pads will free up room for the spaceport to host more launch companies and shrink the area around the base that safety authorities must evacuate for each mission. Ultimately, this will reduce interruptions and scheduling conflicts between SpaceX and other launch providers at the Cape Canaveral spaceport.

Staying power

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a record of decision on Wednesday approving SpaceX's plan to more than double the number of Falcon 9 launches from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40), the busiest of the company's four operational launch pads. The FAA concluded that the proposed launch rate "would not significantly impact the quality of the human environment."

The environmental review paves the way for SpaceX to launch up to 120 Falcon 9 rockets per year from SLC-40, an increase from 50 launches covered in a previous FAA review in 2020. Since then, the FAA has issued SpaceX temporary approval to go beyond 50 launches from SLC-40. For example, SpaceX launched 62 of its overall 132 Falcon 9 flights last year from SLC-40.

SpaceX's goal for this year is 170 Falcon 9 launches, and the company is on pace to come close to this target. Most Falcon 9 launches carry SpaceX's own Starlink broadband satellites into orbit. The FAA's environmental approval opens the door for more flights from SpaceX's busiest launch pad.

But launch pad availability is not the only hurdle limiting how many Falcon 9 flights can take off in a year. There's also the rate of production for Falcon 9 upper stages, which are new on each flight, and the time it takes for each vessel in SpaceX's fleet of drone ships (one in California, two in Florida) to return to port with a recovered booster and redeploy back to sea again for the next mission. SpaceX lands Falcon 9 boosters on offshore drone ships after most of its launches and only brings the rocket back to an onshore landing on missions carrying lighter payloads to orbit.

When a Falcon 9 booster does return to landing on land, it targets one of SpaceX's recovery zones at military-run spaceports in Florida and California. SpaceX's landing zone at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California is close to the Falcon 9 launch pad there.

The Space Force wants SpaceX, and potentially other future reusable rocket companies, to replicate the side-by-side launch and landing pads at Cape Canaveral.

To do that, the FAA also gave the green light Wednesday for SpaceX to construct and operate a new rocket landing zone at SLC-40 and conduct up to 34 first-stage booster landings there each year. The landing zone will consist of a 280-foot diameter concrete pad surrounded by a 60-foot-wide gravel apron. The landing zone's broadest diameter, including the apron, will measure 400 feet.

SpaceX is in an earlier phase of planning for a Falcon landing pad at historic Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, just a few miles north of SLC-40. SpaceX uses LC-39A as a launch pad for most Falcon 9 crew launches, all Falcon Heavy missions, and, in the future, flights of the company's gigantic next-generation rocket, Starship. SpaceX foresees Starship as a replacement for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, but the company's continuing investment in Falcon-related infrastructure shows the workhorse rocket will stick around for a while.

The new landing locations at SLC-40 and LC-39A will replace Landing Zones 1 and 2, nearly 10 miles to the south. SpaceX landed its last rocket at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) last month but will continue using Landing Zone 2 for now. Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX's vice president of build and flight reliability, told reporters in July that the company is working with the Space Force and NASA to determine the "right time" to move out of Landing Zone 2.

A break in launches of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket makes this a good time to make the transition. Falcon Heavy rockets have two side boosters, both of which typically return to Landing Zones 1 and 2 at the same time. These kinds of double rocket landings won't be possible again until SpaceX activates the new landing pad at SLC-40.

SpaceX doesn't have any Falcon Heavy launches on its schedule until the second half of 2026 at the earliest. That should provide ample time to get a new landing site up and running at SLC-40, and maybe LC-39A, too.

The Space Force reallocated the land around LZs-1 and 2 to a pair of small rocket companies in 2023. The two companies, Vaya Space and Phantom Space, will share the property, originally known as Launch Complex-13 when it was used for Atlas rocket launches from 1958 until 1978.

Vaya and Phantom have not announced when they might start building their launch facilities. Neither company has attempted to launch an orbital-class rocket before, but both claim they will do so in 2026 or 2027.

Vaya and Phantom are operating on limited budgets compared to other rocket startups that have reached the launch pad. Each company has raised less than $50 million, well short of the fundraising achievements of companies like Isar Aerospace of Germany, Australia's Gilmour Space, and Japan's Space One, all of which recently tried—and failed—to send their first rockets into orbit.

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Posted Friday 5 September 2025 at 3:09 am AEST (my time).

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Daily squirts of a safe, over-the-counter allergy nasal spray may prevent COVID-19 infections from taking hold, according to results published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine. In a mid-staged trial, the spray appeared to reduce infections by promising 67 percent, though a larger trial will need to confirm that robust efficacy.

The trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 trial conducted by researchers at Germany's Saarland University between March 2023 and July 2024. The study included 450 healthy adults, about half of whom (227) spritzed their noses three times a day with the generic antihistamine nasal spray, azelastine, which can be purchased over the counter in the US. The placebo, meanwhile, was a spray with an identical composition except for the absence of the antihistamine. The two groups had similar mixes of previous COVID-19 vaccination and infection statuses.

After about 56 days of frequent mistings, only five people using the allergy spray (2.2 percent) caught a SARS-CoV-2 infection, while 15 people using a placebo (6.7 percent) got the pandemic infection. That 4.5 percentage-point drop represents a 67 percent reduction in COVID-19 cases, though the numbers here are small. Still, the researchers noted that the five people using the allergy spray who contracted COVID-19 took more time to get the infection than the 15 in the placebo group (31 days versus 19.5). This could hint that the spray held off some infections from exposures early in the trial. And when the allergy spray users did get COVID-19, they were positive on a rapid antigen test for less time than those infected in the placebo group (3.4 days versus 5.1 days), suggesting they cleared the virus a bit faster.

Intriguingly, people using the allergy spray also had fewer respiratory infections overall compared with those in the placebo group (21 infections versus 49 infections). This was particularly the case for rhinovirus infections, the cause of the common cold. These findings are backed by several earlier studies suggesting that azelastine can fight off various viruses that try to invade our noses. Overall, the findings suggest that the allergy spray may protect against COVID-19 using a general antiviral mechanism that can guard against other respiratory viruses. But what that mechanism might be on the mucus membrane of the nose is unclear for now.

COVID context

Like all trials, there are limitations. As mentioned, the number of infections here is small—the impressive efficacy numbers could potentially vanish in a larger trial with more infections. And, while the trial had a high-quality design, it was undertaken in just one location in Germany and mostly involved healthy white women between the ages of 20 and 46, so the findings are not generalizable. The study was also funded by a pharmaceutical company that makes an azelastine nasal spray (though not the one that is sold over the counter in the US).

Still, with the previous studies, the trial offers some hope that this accessible nasal spray could be used as a viral prophylactic for respiratory seasons in the future. And the results land at a time when access to COVID-19 vaccines—which have firmly proven to be safe and highly effective—has been severely restricted in the US by health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As it stands now, it appears that only people ages 65 and over, and those at higher risk of COVID-19 will have access to the shots this year, though some aspects of that access are murky, including how people will prove they're at high risk. For healthy children, teens, and adults under 65, there may be no access or extremely limited access. That includes groups that medical experts recommend get vaccinated, namely healthy pregnant people and children ages 6 months to 23 months, both of which are considered at high risk from COVID-19 by medical experts, but not federal guidance under Kennedy. Experts also recommend access for healthy people who have contact with vulnerable people, such as cancer doctors, people who live with immunocompromised family members, and people who work in nursing homes.

With limited vaccine access and the normal slew of respiratory viruses on the horizon, a simple nasal spray is an appealing addition to the defenses. The main side effects are fairly minor, including bitter taste in the mouth, nosebleeds, and tiredness.

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Posted Wednesday 3 September 2025 at 5:34 pm AEST (my time).

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Robots can serve pizza, crawl over alien planets, swim like octopuses and jellyfish, cosplay as humans, and even perform surgery. But can they walk on water?

Rhagobot isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of a robot. Inspired by Rhagovelia water striders, semiaquatic insects also known as ripple bugs, these tiny bots can glide across rushing streams because of the robotization of an evolutionary adaptation.

Rhagovelia (as opposed to other species of water striders) have fan-like appendages toward the ends of their middle legs that passively open and close depending on how the water beneath them is moving. This is why they appear to glide effortlessly across the water’s surface. Biologist Victor Ortega-Jimenez of the University of California, Berkeley, was intrigued by how such tiny insects can accelerate and pull off rapid turns and other maneuvers, almost as if they are flying across a liquid surface.

"Rhagovelia’s fan serves as an inspiring template for developing self-morphing artificial propellers, providing insights into their biological form and function," he said in a study recently published in Science. "Such configurations are largely unexplored in semi-aquatic robots."

Mighty morphin’

It took Ortega-Jimenez five years to figure out how the bugs get around. While Rhagovelia leg fans were thought to morph because they were powered by muscle, he found that the appendages automatically adjusted to the surface tension and elastic forces beneath them, passively opening and closing ten times faster than it takes to blink. They expand immediately when making contact with water and change shape depending on the flow.

By covering an extensive surface area for their size and maintaining their shape when the insects move their legs, Rhagovelia fans generate a tremendous amount of propulsion. They also do double duty. Despite being rigid enough to resist deformation when extended, the fans are still flexible enough to easily collapse, adhering to the claw above to keep from getting in the animal’s way when it’s out of water. It also helps that the insects have hydrophobic legs that repel water that could otherwise weigh them down.

Ortega-Jimenez and his research team observed the leg fans using a scanning electron microscope. If they were going to create a robot based on ripple bugs, they needed to know the exact structure they were going for. After experimenting with cylindrical fans, the researchers found that Rhagovellia fans are actually structures made of many flat barbs with barbules, something which was previously unknown.

The researchers also observed that the water striders produce vortices with each stroke as they trek across the water’s surface, which are not unlike the wakes that wings leave behind when flying. Their leg propulsion also produces waves. Knowing this, the researchers tried to replicate it.

Legs for days

This is a new frontier for robotics. Existing amphibious robots often use bulky pads, much like oars, to generate thrust, though some smaller models do employ thin hydrophobic legs modeled after another species of water strider. The thin legs do reduce surface tension that can slow them down, but still suffer from limited momentum.

Rhagobot was Ortega-Jimenez’s version of this already high-tech insect. After closely studying the structure and function of Rhagovelia legs and fans, he and his team created artificial versions that were also designed to morph when exposed to water. These were attached to the middle legs of Rhagobot. Just like their inspiration, the fans spread immediately when submerged in water and closed again once they were out. There is no need for an extra power source because the morphing of the fans is determined by the motion and speed of water.

The Rhagobot takes a step.

The team wanted to see if their artificial fans would give Rhagobot an edge. They built an alternate robot, modeled after another species of water strider that propels itself using surface tension, and pitted it against Rhagobot. Both were given the same amount of power, yet Rhagobot was able to travel farther and make sharper, faster turns than its competition because the fans gave it an edge

“Fan-induced thrust increased forward speed and allowed rapid braking as well,” Ortega-Jimenez said, adding that “The collapsibility of the fan also notably reduced the energy required for the robot to lift the leg from the water.”

In the future, Rhagobot could brave turbulent waters to be a part of environmental monitoring systems, and the researchers are excited about the potential that swarms of these bots could help with search and rescue missions during storms and floods—though adding the weight of sensors and power will be a significant challenge. It might even be able to explore places beyond Earth, such as the methane oceans of Saturn’s moon Titan. If Rhagovelia has proven anything, it’s that even the smallest of creatures can inspire huge leaps forward—on water or otherwise.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adv2792

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Posted Wednesday 3 September 2025 at 5:33 pm AEST (my time).

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If SpaceX is going to fly Starships as often as it wants to, it's going to take more than rockets and launch pads.

First, there's the sprawling factory that SpaceX has constructed at its Starbase location along the Gulf Coast in South Texas. The building, known as Starfactory, is designed to produce one Starship per day. A couple of miles to the east, SpaceX has built one Starship launch pad and is preparing to activate a second one.

With Starship, SpaceX seeks to buck the old way of doing things. Tanker trucks have traditionally delivered rocket propellant to launch pads at America's busiest spaceports in Florida and California. SpaceX has used the same method of bringing propellant for the first several years of operations at Starbase.

But a reusable Starship's scale dwarfs that of other rockets. It stands more than 400 feet tall, with a capacity for more than a million gallons of super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants. SpaceX also uses large quantities of liquid nitrogen to chill and purge the propellant loading system for Starship.

It's not just Starship's size. SpaceX has the green light from the Federal Aviation Administration to launch Starships up to 25 times per year from South Texas, and is seeking regulatory approval to fly up to 120 times from new launch pads on Florida's Space Coast. Eventually, SpaceX eyes daily launches of Starship, or even more, as the company deploys a fleet of ships traveling to low-Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars.

There are innumerable bottlenecks to achieving such a fast launch cadence. One of them is simply a matter of logistics. It takes more than 200 tanker trucks traveling from distant refineries to deliver all of the methane, liquid oxygen, and liquid nitrogen for a Starship launch. SpaceX officials recognize this is not an efficient means of conveying these commodities to the launch pad. It takes time, emits pollution, and clogs roadways. The sole two-lane highway leading to Starbase from nearby Brownsville, Texas, is riddled with potholes and cracks in the pavement from overuse by heavy trucks.

On-site, out of mind

SpaceX's solution to some of these problems is to build its own plants to generate cryogenic fluids. The company recently received approval from local authorities to build an air separation plant across the highway just north of the Starbase launch pads. Construction of the plant began this summer. Once operational, this facility will take in air, condense it, and separate it into oxygen and nitrogen. The resulting liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen will flow about 1,000 feet through a pipeline into ground storage tanks at the launch site.

But the air separation plant will only partially solve the propellant bottleneck. SpaceX still needs methane to fuel the 39 (eventually 42) Raptor engines that power the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage. The answer to this problem is a pair of methane liquefaction facilities to convert natural gas—initially delivered by truck or a future pipeline—into pure liquid methane, and eventually, a methane generation plant co-located with Starbase's dual launch pads.

SpaceX has flirted with the idea of propellant generation plants at Starbase before, but this is the closest the company has come to making it a reality. A public notice released by the US Army Corps of Engineers on August 27 describes SpaceX's plans, and an accompanying map illustrates the changes coming to the Starbase launch site.

The corps is seeking public comments on SpaceX's proposals. The corps says SpaceX's proposed expansion covers approximately 21 acres, including 18 acres of undeveloped "emergent wetlands" and "wind-tidal flats" about a quarter-mile inland from the beach.

The expansion would also include new storage areas for propellant and ground equipment, staging pads, internal roadways, and a new security wall around the southern perimeter of the launch site.

"The project has been designed to reduce the overall launch area expansion footprint and the proposed wetland impacts by incorporating blast walls throughout the infrastructure expansion, allowing infrastructure facilities to be located closer to the existing launch pads," the corps wrote in the public notice released last week. "Silt fencing would be installed around the permitted limits of disturbance to minimize erosion and sedimentation impacts to receiving waters and to ensure construction equipment remains within the permitted project limits."

Plans for Starship's future launch pads in Florida, still undergoing environmental reviews, show SpaceX intends to produce its own propellant there, too. The Army's public notice for SpaceX's plans at Starbase didn't include any details on how the air separation unit and methane liquefaction facility will work. But a draft environmental impact statement published by the Federal Aviation Administration last month lays out how SpaceX will bring the on-site propellant generation capability online at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

At first, natural gas will be delivered to the Florida launch pad by truck, and a pretreatment system will remove impurities to produce a stream of higher-purity gaseous methane. Then, SpaceX will chill the gas into a liquid state before pumping it into the rocket. "Surplus natural gas would be used for process work, power generation, or would boil off like a natural gas line venting," officials wrote in the environmental impact statement.

The air separation unit will dehumidify, liquify, and separate air into its major components—oxygen and nitrogen—and then transfer it into storage tanks. Residual nitrogen, oxygen, and argon gases would be vented back into the atmosphere.

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Posted Wednesday 3 September 2025 at 5:32 pm AEST (my time).

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Plastics that support modern life are inexpensive, strong, and versatile, but are difficult to dispose of and have a serious impact when released into the environment. Polyethylene, in particular, is the most widely produced plastic in the world, with more than 100 million tons distributed annually. Since it can take decades to decompose—and along the way can harm wildlife and degrade into harmful microplastics—its disposal is an urgent issue for mankind.

In 2017, European researchers discovered a potential solution. The larvae of wax moths, commonly known as wax worms, have the ability to break down polyethylene in their bodies. Wax worms have been considered a pest since ancient times because they parasitize beehives, feeding on beeswax. However, we now know that they also spontaneously feed on polyethylene, which has a chemically similar structure.

“Around 2,000 wax worms can break down an entire polyethylene bag in as little as 24 hours, although we believe that co-supplementation with feeding stimulants like sugars can reduce the number of worms considerably,” said Dr Bryan Cassone, a professor of biology at Brandon University in Canada, in a news release. Cassone and his team have been researching how these insects could be harnessed to help combat plastic pollution. “Understanding the biological mechanisms and consequences on fitness associated with plastic biodegradation is key to using wax worms for large-scale plastic remediation,” he says.

In previous experiments, Cassone and his team found out exactly how wax worms break down polyethylene. To understand their digestive mechanism, Cassone’s team fed polyethylene to wax worms for several days and followed the insects’ metabolic processes and changes in their gut environment. They found that as the wax worms ate the polyethylene, their feces liquefied and contained glycol as a byproduct.

But when the insects’ intestinal bacteria were suppressed by administering antibiotics, the amount of glycol in their feces was greatly reduced. This revealed that the breaking down of polyethylene is dependent on the wax worms’ gut microbes.

The team also isolated bacteria from the guts of wax worms and then cultured strains that could survive on polyethylene as their sole food source. Among them was a strain of Acinetobacter, which survived for more than a year in the laboratory environment and continued to break down polyethylene. This revealed how robust and persistent the wax worm’s gut flora is in its ability to break down plastics.

Yet in reality, when it comes to consuming plastic, gut bacteria are not working alone. When the researchers conducted genetic analysis on the insects, they found that plastic-fed wax worms showed increased gene expression relating to fat metabolism, and after being fed plastic, the wax worms duly showed signs of having increased body fat. Armed with their plastic-digesting gut bacteria, the larvae can break down plastics and convert them into lipids, which they then store in their bodies.

However, a plastic-only diet didn’t result in wax worms' long-term survival. In their latest experiment, the team found that wax worms that continued to eat only polyethylene died within a few days and lost a great deal of weight. This showed that it is difficult for wax worms to continually process polyethylene waste. But researchers believe that creating a food source to assist their intake of polyethylene would mean wax worms are able to sustain healthy viability on a plastic diet and improve their decomposition efficiency.

Looking ahead, the team suggests two strategies for using the wax worm’s ability to consume plastics. One is to mass produce wax worms that are fed on a polyethylene diet, while providing them with the nutritional support they need for long-term survival, and then integrating them into the circular economy, using the insects themselves to dispose of waste plastic. The other is to redesign the plastic degradation pathway of wax worms in the lab, using only microorganisms and enzymes, and so create a means of disposing of plastic that doesn’t need the actual insects.

In the insect-rearing route, a byproduct would be large amounts of insect biomass—countless larvae that have been fed on plastic. These could potentially be turned into a highly nutritious feed for the aquaculture industry, as according to the research team’s data, the insects could be a good source of protein for commercial fish.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

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Posted Wednesday 3 September 2025 at 3:33 am AEST (my time).

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Tesla’s latest “Master Plan” makes a few things clear right out of the gate: the company that was once known for accelerating the push toward a brighter future by popularizing electric vehicles and renewable energy is no longer interested in that quotidian stuff. Now, it’s all about artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, and the new buzzy catchphrase that is currently lighting up the tech world: “sustainable abundance.”

At a breezy 983 words, Master Plan 4 is the shortest entry in the company’s ongoing series of mission statements. It’s the first one to be posted on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, rather than on Tesla’s website. And it reads like it was written by the platform’s chatbot, Grok, with repeated use of em dashes and a suspiciously utopian tone about the future of AI and robotics.

But is it actually AI generated? It hardly matters, because the substance of the Master Plan is so vague, so empty, and so devoid of concrete proposals that it barely casts a shadow.

Here’s a sample:

Making technologically advanced products that are affordable and available at scale is required to build a flourishing and unconstrained society. It serves to further democratize society while raising everyone’s quality of life in the process. The hallmark of meritocracy is creating opportunities that enable each person to use their skills to accomplish whatever they imagine.

Compare that to the first Master Plan, published in 2006, which outlined the company’s desire to build an electric sports car, then use the revenue generated to build successively more affordable electric vehicles. Or Master Plan 2, published in 2016, which calls for building electric semi trucks and buses, developing self-driving vehicles, and then allowing customers to use those vehicles as profit-generating robotaxis. Or Master Plan 3, published in 2023, which positioned Tesla to lead the global effort to eliminate fossil fuels and convert the world to sustainable energy.

This is big, heady stuff! Sure, Tesla has barely touched the goals it listed in the second Master Plan, but at least they were goals in the traditional sense. This latest iteration is pure fluff. It risks floating away on a current of its own self-regard.

To be fair, a lot has happened between the third Master Plan and today. Elon Musk bought Twitter and transformed it into X. He founded xAI to compete in the global race to develop generative AI tools. He launched the Cybertruck, which subsequently flopped. He poured $300 million into the election of Donald Trump and then oversaw the slashing of billions of dollars from the federal government in the name of “efficiency.”

The damage to Tesla’s brand was staggering. The company’s sales are in decline in all major markets across the world, thanks to growing competition and Musk’s political affiliations. Tesla’s attempts to recapture some of that old magic, with robots and robotaxis, have been largely unsuccessful. This new plan is the latest effort to rekindle some sort of vision.

If you’re confused about what Tesla is promising, you’re not alone. X users commented that the plan “reads more like a glorified TED Talk than a Gannt Chart with deadlines and KPIs.” Instead, we get philosophical talk about “infinite growth, AI solving scarcity, and robots freeing up your time.” The previous Master Plans were visionary documents, too, but with more of an emphasis on deliverable products and action items, rather than amorphous platitudes and buzzword salad.

To be sure, Elon Musk seems to regret some of the things that were included in the previous plans. In a recent post on X, he admitted that second plan remains unfinished, but promises that it will be complete by “next year.” Master Plan 3 was “too complex for almost anyone to understand,” he said, touting the fourth plan as “concise.”

The focus on “sustainable abundance” is telling. We’ve been hearing a lot about abundance these days, mostly from the eponymous book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that outlines a plan for more housing, more clean energy, and more prosperity — as achieved through deregulation and higher productivity. There’s also the Abundance Institute, a think tank focused on innovation and prosperity with a heavy focus on AI policy.

But the idea of “abundance” has since achieved escape velocity and now seems to be an umbrella term for libertarians and centrist Democrats to push back against leftists and democratic socialists calling for universal healthcare and higher taxes on the rich.

To me, the more telling word choice in Master Plan 4 is “infinite.” The document declares that “growth is infinite,” suggesting that traditional barriers like labor, real estate, finances, or natural resources should not stand in the way of Tesla’s upward trajectory.

It’s one of Musk’s favorite rhetorical devices. He has described customer demand in Tesla’s vehicles as “infinite.” The Cybertruck’s towing capacity is also “infinite.” (It’s actually rated for 11,000 lbs, which last I checked is a long way off from infinite.)

What it really is — to borrow another phrase from the Tesla playbook — is ludicrous. The company’s self-driving cars don’t really drive themselves, solar roofs are on the back burner, the mythical $25,000 “Model 2” got canceled, and your Tesla won’t make you money while you sleep. Its robots can’t even serve a bucket of popcorn without some heavy human involvement.

Musk is high on his own supply, and this latest Master Plan is evidence of that.

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Posted Wednesday 3 September 2025 at 3:32 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of August): 4,048

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