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).

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. August's list includes a 3D digital reconstruction of the Shroud of Turin; injecting succulent leaves with phosphors to create plants that glow in different colors; a nifty shape-changing antenna; and snails with a unique ability to grow back their eyeballs.

Digitally reconstructing the Shroud of Turin

Credit: Cícero Moraes

Perhaps the most famous "holy relic" is the Shroud of Turin, an old linen cloth that retains a distinct impression of the body of a crucified mine (both front and back). The legend is that Jesus himself was wrapped in the shroud upon his death around 30 CE, although modern scientific dating methods revealed the shroud is actually a medieval artifact dating to between 1260 and 1390 CE. A 3D designer named Cícero Moraes has created a 3D digital reconstruction to lend further credence to the case for the shroud being a medieval forgery, according to a paper published in the journal Archaeometry.

Moraes developed computer models to simulate draping a sheet on both a 3D human form and a bas-relief carving to test which version most closely matched the figure preserved in the shroud. He concluded that the latter was more consistent with the shroud's figure, meaning that it was likely created as an artistic representation or a medieval work of art. It was certainly never draped around an actual body. Most notable was the absence of the so-called "Agamemnon mask effect," in which a human face shrouded in fabric appears wider once flattened.

It's worth mentioning that skepticism surrounding the shroud's authenticity dates back centuries—even earlier than scholars previously thought, according to a new study published in the Journal of Medieval History. Nicolas Sarzeaud, a fellow of the Villa-Médicis Academy de France in Rome and a postdoc at the Université Catholique of Louvain in Belgium, uncovered a previously unknown ancient document—a treatise written in the 1370s by the medieval scholar Nicole Oresme in which he dismisses the shroud as a forgery—that is the oldest written evidence of skepticism surrounding the shroud to date. The next-earliest is a 1389 account by the bishop of Troyes, Pierre d’Arcis, who also dismissed the shroud as a fraud.

DOI: Archaeometry, 2025. 10.1111/arcm.70030  (About DOIs).

DOI: Journal of Medieval History, 2025. 10.1080/03044181.2025.2546884  (About DOIs).

Snails with eyes that grow back

It's been known since at least the 18th century that some snails possess regenerative abilities, such as garden snails regrowing their heads after being decapitated. Golden apple snails can completely regrow their eyes—and those eyes share many anatomical and genetic features with human eyes, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications. That makes them an excellent candidate for further research in hopes of unlocking the secret to that regeneration, with the ultimate goal of restoring vision in human eyes.

Snails are often slow to breed in the lab, but golden apple snails are an invasive species and thrive in that environment, per co-author Alice Accorsi, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Davis. The snails have "camera type eyes": a cornea, a lens to focus light, and a retina comprised of millions of photoreceptor cells. There are as many as 9000 genes that seem to be involved in regenerating an amputated eye in the snails, reducing down to 1,175 genes by the 28th day of the process, so complete maturation of the new eyes might take longer. It's not clear whether the new eyes can still process light so the snails can actually "see," which is a topic for further research.

Accorsi also used CRISPR/Cas9 to mutate one gene in particular (pax6) in snail embryos because it is known to control brain and eye development in humans, mice, and fruit flies. She found that apple snails with two non-functioning pax6 genes end up developing without eyes, suggesting it is also responsible for eye development in the snails. The next step is to figure out whether this gene also plays a role in the snails' ability to regenerate their eyes, as well as other potentially involved genes.

DOI: Nature Communications, 2025. 10.1038/s41467-025-61681-6  (About DOIs).

Gorgeous glowing succulents

Perhaps you caught the launch last year of the first genetically modified glowing plant: Light Bio's  green-hued "Firefly Petunia." It's not a particularly bright glow and genetic engineering is expensive, but it was nonetheless a solid step toward the long-term goal of creating glow-in-the-dark plants for sustainable lighting. Scientists at South China Agricultural University came up with a novel, cheaper approach: injecting succulents with phosphorescent chemicals akin to those used in commercial glow-in-the-dark products, aka "afterglow luminescence." They described the work in a paper published in the journal Matter.

The authors weren't initially looking at succulents for their phosphor injection experiments, because they thought the thicker barrier tissues would make the phosphor particles stick to the surface or cluster around the roots; they thought bok choy, for instance, would be a better medium. But their initial tests showed that the succulent Echevedia "Mebina" had a higher loading capacity and a more uniform glow when the phosphors were loaded into the mesophyll cell walls. The ideal particle size is roughly that of a red blood cell. They could even swap out the phosphors to create different glowing hues: green, red, or blue (cyan).

The resulting photographs are quite pretty, but not everyone is a fan of this approach. Michael Le Page, an environmental reporter at New Scientist, wrote a rather scathing takedown of the paper, dismissing the achievement as "little more than a cheap gimmick." He hastened to add that he is not opposed the idea of genuine glowing plants, ideally genetically engineered to make their own persistent phosphors. "But making plants glow by physically injecting glowing compounds into them is cheating," he wrote, adding that there could also be potential pollution issues when the plants inevitably die.

DOI: Matter, 2025. 10.1016/j.matt.2025.102370 External Link  (About DOIs).

Seabirds only poop when flying

Leo Uesake of the University of Tokyo was studying the biomechanics of sea birds running on the surface of the ocean to take off, when he noted an unusual behavior. His video footage showed that these streaked shearwater birds frequently defecated while in flight (see video above), and while he was initially amused, he realized there could be significant implications for marine ecology, according to a paper published in the journal Current Biology. That's because seabird feces has high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus and can hence enrich soil and coastal waters.

Uesake and co-author Katsufumi Sato of the University de la Rochelle in France strapped small backward-facing cameras roughly the size of an eraser to the bellies of 15 streaked shearwaters for their experiments. They captured about 200 "defecation events," almost always while the birds were flying and frequently just after takeoff. In fact, the birds let loose with the feces every four to ten minutes while in flight, excreting roughly 5 percent of their body mass every hour. As for why the birds choose to poop mid-air rather than when they are floating on the ocean surface, Uesake hypothesizes that it might be a way to avoid fouling their feathers or attracting predators. Or maybe it's just easier for the birds to defecate while flying compared to floating.

DOI: Current Biology, 2025. 10.1016/j.cub.2025.06.058  (About DOIs).

A shape-changing antenna

Think of an antenna and one is likely to envision the classic thin metal rods used for receiving TV signals, for instance. But MIT scientists have devised a different kind of antenna out of so-called "metamaterials": engineered materials whose geometry determines the mechanical properties, like stiffness and strength. Their antenna can dynamically adjust the frequency range by reconfiguring its shape to adapt to changing environmental conditions, reducing the need for multiple antennas, according to a forthcoming paper in The Proceedings of UIST'25. A special editing tool can create customized versions using a laser cutter.

The materials in question are known as "auxetic metamaterials" and can deform into three different geometric states, changing the radiation properties (specifically the resonance frequencies) in the process. That makes the antennas well-suited for sensing applications, such as monitoring someone's breathing by detecting the expansion of the chest. The meta-antenna has a dielectric rubber layer sandwiched between two conductive layers created with conductive flexible acrylic spray paint. They tested their prototype by incorporating meta-antennas into curtains that can dynamically adjust lighting in a room, and headphones that can transition smoothly between noise-cancelling and transparent modes. They could also be woven into smart textiles for noninvasive biomedical sensing or temperature monitoring.

Reusable "jelly ice"

It's always a challenge figuring out how to ship perishable foodstuffs. Packing in actual ice usually leads to a messy meltwater issue, potentially spreading pathogens (particularly from seafood), while cold gel packs are contained within plastic sleeves that are bulky and not compostable. Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have developed an alternative they've dubbed "jelly ice":  a reusable, compostable gelatin that can be frozen and won't leak as it thaws. UC-Davis grad student Jiahan Zou gave an update on their latest one-step process to make jelly ice at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, DC. (You can watch a short video here.)

The inspiration for jelly ice came from freezing tofu, which releases any water stored inside when it's thawed, much like ice. The team thought that gelatin might solve that issue, since the proteins in gelatin are both safe for food applications and they link together to form hydrogels. The tiny pores in the hydrogel can hold water as the material thaws so there is no meltwater. Jelly ice has close to 80 percent of regular ice's cooling efficiency, even when used repeatedly. The latest breakthrough is a new one-step process to make jelly ice into handy one-pound slabs, roughly the same size as cold gel packs.

The jelly ice packs can be tailored to any shape and are completely biodegradable, with no synthetic polymers. They even improved tomato plant growth in one composting experiment. The researchers have licensed their technology as a first step toward commercialization for food preservation applications as well as medical shipping and biotechnology. Zou is also investigating the potential of agricultural byproducts like soy protein as sustainable materials for things like removable countertop coatings, or cellular scaffolds for lab-grown meat.

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Posted Monday 1 September 2025 at 12:36 pm AEST (my time).

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Take a deep breath. A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires in cells throughout your body. You, being an aerobic organism, use oxygen as the cellular spark that frees molecular energy from the food you eat. But not all organisms on the planet live or breathe this way. Instead of using oxygen to harvest energy, many single-celled life-forms that live in environments far from oxygen’s reach, such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents or stygian crevices in the soil, wield other elements to respire and unlock energy.

This physical separation of the oxygen-rich and oxygen-free worlds is not merely a matter of life utilizing available resources; it’s a biochemical necessity. Oxygen doesn’t play nice with the metabolic pathways that make it possible to respire with the use of other elements, such as sulfur or manganese. It gives aerobes like us life, but for many anaerobes, or creatures that respire without oxygen, oxygen is a toxin that reacts with and damages their specialized molecular machinery.

“Oxygen—we love it, of course,” said Courtney Stairs, an evolutionary biologist at Lund University in Sweden. “But it’s actually a pretty harmful molecule for most of life on our planet, and even ourselves. We have ways to mitigate the negative effects of oxygen. So we can’t imagine life without it, but life is actually quite hard with it.”

For the first couple billion years of life on Earth, organisms avoided this predicament altogether. Back then, the air and oceans were mostly devoid of oxygen, so life was almost entirely anaerobic, or non-oxygen-breathing. Then, around 2.7 billion years ago, the seas filled with industrious, photosynthetic cyanobacteria. They had invented a way to turn sunlight into sugar and oxygen, and they flourished. Over hundreds of millions of years, their accumulated breathing filled the atmosphere and oceans with oxygen. This so-called Great Oxidation Event was a pivotal transformation in the biosphere and the physical chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. In this new environment, aerobic respiration evolved to dominate the world.

An ongoing mystery for researchers is how life navigated the shift from anaerobic to aerobic respiration; so much microbial biodiversity had to adapt to a world filled with what was once a biochemical bane. Now researchers have fresh insight into what that transition could have looked like billions of years ago, gleaned from an organism living today. A bacterium that researchers collected from the cauldron of a Yellowstone National Park hot spring does something that life really shouldn’t be able to do: It runs aerobic and anaerobic metabolisms simultaneously. It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

The findings “remind us yet again of just how much we still have to learn about microbial diversity and metabolism,” said Natalia Mrnjavac, a graduate student in evolutionary microbiology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany who was not involved in the study. “And for someone who loves microbes, that is thrilling.”

The findings, which were published earlier this year in Nature Communications, challenge assumptions about the limits of cellular respiration and may give researchers a model for understanding how life walks the edge of paradise and poison.

Metabolic Tricks

It has long been known that life-forms have evolved ways of alternating between aerobic and anaerobic respiration, for instance as a last resort when oxygen levels are low. But because oxygen disrupts anaerobic respiration, many researchers assumed that cells couldn’t grow while using both processes at the same time.

So when Eric Boyd, a microbiologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, and his colleagues uncovered reports from the late 1990s and early 2000s suggesting that some bacteria might be doing just that, their curiosity was piqued. Specifically, bacteria had been observed making sulfide, a product of anaerobic respiration, even when oxygen was present in the environment. “It’s weird to read something like that because it challenges the textbooks—of what you know to be true of microbial metabolism,” he recalled.

Boyd is interested in how life evolves and persists in some of the most chemically and thermally hostile places on Earth. He and his team study the mix of hardy microbes living in the seams between the surface and subterranean worlds, including the volcanic vents and thermal pools of Yellowstone National Park, not far from his university in Montana. The strange microbe, which appeared to use anaerobic respiration even when oxygen was available, was right up his alley. To learn more about it, Boyd and his team would have to explore the kinds of turbulent springs such a microbe would prefer, where volcanic bubbles mix with the oxygen-rich atmosphere and oxygen-free underground water.

From a roadside thermal spring near Nymph Lake in the northwest portion of the park, they collected and isolated a strain dubbed Hydrogenobacter RSW1. RSW1 seemed like a natural candidate for a study in unusual respiration. The bacterium is common in volcanically influenced hot springs around the world, from Iceland to New Zealand, and can grow on very limited amounts of oxygen. Plus, it is in the same order, Aquificales, as the curious microbes from the earlier reports. The researchers brought it back to the lab so they could grow it and study its metabolism.

The team members went through a process of incrementally determining what elements and molecules the bacterial strain could grow on. They already knew it could use oxygen, so they tested other combinations in the lab. When oxygen was absent, RSW1 could process hydrogen gas and elemental sulfur—chemicals it would find spewing from a volcanic vent—and create hydrogen sulfide as a product. Yet while the cells were technically alive in this state, they didn’t grow or replicate. They were making a small amount of energy—just enough to stay alive, nothing more. “The cell was just sitting there spinning its wheels without getting any real metabolic or biomass gain out of it,” Boyd said.

Then the team added oxygen back into the mix. As expected, the bacteria grew faster. But, to the researchers’ surprise, RSW1 also still produced hydrogen sulfide gas, as if it were anaerobically respiring. In fact, the bacteria seemed to be breathing both aerobically and anaerobically at once, and benefiting from the energy of both processes. This double respiration went further than the earlier reports: The cell wasn’t just producing sulfide in the presence of oxygen but was also performing both conflicting processes at the same time. Bacteria simply shouldn’t be able to do that.

“That set us down this path of ‘OK, what the heck’s really going on here?’” Boyd said.

Breathing Two Ways

RSW1 appears to have a hybrid metabolism, running an anaerobic sulfur-based mode at the same time it runs an aerobic one using oxygen.

“For an organism to be able to bridge both those metabolisms is very unique,” said Ranjani Murali, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the research. Normally when anaerobic organisms are exposed to oxygen, damaging molecules known as reactive oxygen compounds create stress, she said. “For that not to happen is really interesting.”

 

In the thermal spring Roadside West (top) in Yellowstone National Park, researchers isolated an unusual 

microbe from the gray-colored biofilm (bottom).

Photograph: Eric Boyd; Quanta Magazine

 

Boyd’s team observed that the bacteria grew best when running both metabolisms simultaneously. It may be an advantage in its unique environment: Oxygen isn’t evenly distributed in hot springs like those where RSW1 lives. In constantly changing conditions, where you could be bathed in oxygen one moment only for it to disappear, hedging one’s metabolic bets might be a highly adaptive trait.

Other microbes have been observed breathing two ways at once: anaerobically with nitrate and aerobically with oxygen. But those processes use entirely different chemical pathways, and when paired together, they tend to present an energetic cost to the microbes. In contrast, RSW1’s hybrid sulfur/oxygen metabolism bolsters the cells instead of dragging them down.

This kind of dual respiration may have evaded detection until now because it was considered impossible. “You have really no reason to look” for something like this, Boyd said. Additionally, oxygen and sulfide react with each other quickly; unless you were watching for sulfide as a byproduct, you might miss it entirely, he added.

It’s possible, in fact, that microbes with dual metabolisms are widespread, Murali said. She pointed to the many habitats and organisms that exist at tenuous gradients between oxygen-rich and oxygen-free areas. One example is in submerged sediments, which can harbor cable bacteria. These elongated microbes orient themselves in such a way that one end of their bodies can use aerobic respiration in oxygenated water while the other end is buried deep in anoxic sediment and uses anaerobic respiration. Cable bacteria thrive in their precarious partition by physically separating their aerobic and anaerobic processes. But RSW1 appears to multitask while tumbling around in the roiling spring.

It’s still unknown how RSW1 bacteria manage to protect their anaerobic machinery from oxygen. Murali speculated that the cells might create chemical supercomplexes within themselves that can surround, isolate and “scavenge” oxygen, she said—using it up quickly once they encounter it so there is no chance for the gas to interfere with the sulfur-based breathing.

RSW1 and any other microbes that have dual metabolism make intriguing models for how microbial life may have evolved during the Great Oxygenation Event, Boyd said. “That must have been a quite chaotic time for microbes on the planet,” he said. As a slow drip of oxygen filtered into the atmosphere and sea, any life-form that could handle an occasional brush with the new, poisonous gas—or even use it to its energetic benefit—may have been at an advantage. In that time of transition, two metabolisms may have been better than one.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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Posted Monday 1 September 2025 at 5:24 am AEST (my time).

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Seen from space, Antarctica looks so much simpler than the other continents—a great sheet of ice set in contrast to the dark waters of the encircling Southern Ocean. Get closer, though, and you’ll find not a simple cap of frozen water, but an extraordinarily complex interplay between the ocean, sea ice, and ice sheets and shelves.

That relationship is in serious peril. A new paper in the journal Nature catalogs how several “abrupt changes,” like the precipitous loss of sea ice over the last decade, are unfolding in Antarctica and its surrounding waters, reinforcing one another and threatening to send the continent past the point of no return—and flood coastal cities everywhere as the sea rises several feet.

“We’re seeing a whole range of abrupt and surprising changes developing across Antarctica, but these aren’t happening in isolation,” said climate scientist Nerilie Abram, lead author of the paper. (She conducted the research while at Australian National University but is now chief scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division.) “When we change one part of the system, that has knock-on effects that worsen the changes in other parts of the system. And we’re talking about changes that also have global consequences.”

Scientists define abrupt change as a bit of the environment changing much faster than expected. In Antarctica these can occur on a range of times scales, from days or weeks for an ice shelf collapse, and centuries and beyond for the ice sheets. Unfortunately, these abrupt changes can self-perpetuate and become unstoppable as humans continue to warm the planet. “It’s the choices that we’re making right now, and this decade and the next, for greenhouse gas emissions that will set in place those commitments to long-term change,” Abram said.

A major driver of Antarctica’s cascading crises is the loss of floating sea ice, which forms during winter. In 2014, it hit a peak extent (at least since satellite observations began in 1978) around Antarctica of 20.11 million square kilometers, or 7.76 million square miles. But since then, the coverage of sea ice has fallen not just precipitously, but almost unbelievably, contracting by 75 miles closer to the coast. During winters, when sea ice reaches its maximum coverage, it has declined 4.4 times faster around Antarctica than it has in the Arctic in the last decade.

Put another way: The loss of winter sea ice in Antarctica over just the past decade is similar to what the Arctic has lost over the last 46 years. “People always thought the Antarctic was not changing compared to the Arctic, and I think now we’re seeing signs that that’s no longer the case,” said climatologist Ryan Fogt, who studies Antarctica at Ohio University but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “We’re seeing just as rapid—and in many cases, more rapid—change in the Antarctic than the Arctic lately.”

While scientists need to collect more data to determine if this is the beginning of a fundamental shift in Antarctica, the signals so far are ominous. “We’re starting to see the pieces of the picture begin to emerge that we very well might be in this new state of dramatic loss of Antarctic sea ice,” said Zachary M. Labe, a climate scientist who studies the region at the research group Climate Central, which wasn’t involved in the new paper.

This extraordinary decline is kicking off a climatic feedback loop. The Arctic is warming around four times faster than the rest of the planet in large part because its reflectivity is changing. Sea ice is white and bright, so it bounces the sun’s energy back into space to cool the region. But when it disappears it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb that energy. So less reflectivity begets more warming, and more warming melts more sea ice, which begets more warming, and on and on. “We now expect that that same process is going to become a factor in the southern hemisphere, because we’ve lost this equivalent amount of sea ice,” Abram said.

Around Antarctica, however, the consequences could be even bigger and more complex than in the Arctic, and might even be irreversible. Models predict that if the global climate were to stabilize, so too would Arctic sea ice. “We don’t see that same behavior in Antarctica,” Abram said. “When you stabilize the climate and let these climate model simulations run for hundreds of years, Antarctic sea ice still continues to decline because the Southern Ocean is continuing to take up extra heat from the atmosphere.”

This could spell major trouble for the continent’s enormous cap of ice. That consists of two main parts: The ice sheets, which rest on land, and the ice shelves, which extend from the sheets and float on the sea. The problem isn’t so much about the sun beating down on the sheets, but increasingly warm water lapping at the bottom of the shelves. And the more the surrounding sea ice disappears, the more those waters are warming. Additionally, sea ice acts as a sort of shield, absorbing wave energy that would normally pound these edges of the ice shelves, breaking them apart.

So sea ice supports the ice shelves, which support the ice sheets on land. “When we melt ice shelves, they have a buttressing effect on the ice sheets behind them, so we get an enhanced flow of ice sheets into the ocean,” said Matthew England, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales and coauthor of the paper. One of these, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, could collapse if global temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, raising sea levels by more than three meters, or about 10 feet. And it could still partially collapse before that.

As ice shelves melt, they’re also borking a critical ocean system known as the Antarctic Overturning Circulation. When sea ice forms it rejects salt, creating salty, extra cold seawater that’s denser, and therefore sinks to the seafloor, creating circulation. But as ice shelves melt, they dilute the cold salty water, slowing the circulation and bringing more warm water in contact with ice shelves and sea ice. “This amplifying feedback that we’re talking about now is across systems,” England said. “It’s from the ocean back to the ice, and then back into the ocean again, that can trigger a runaway change where we do see the overturning potentially collapse altogether.”

When this circulation brings deeper waters back to the surface, it transports critical nutrients for phytoplankton—tiny photosynthetic organisms that absorb carbon and expel oxygen. Not only are these organisms responsible for sequestering half of the carbon from photosynthesis worldwide, they make up the base of the food web, feeding small animals known as zooplankton, which in turn feed bigger organisms like fishes and crustaceans. Sea ice is also a critical habitat for phytoplankton, so they stand to lose both their home and their nutrients.

Emperor penguins, too, establish their breeding colonies on stable sea ice, where their chicks grow up and develop the waterproof feathers they need to glide through the ocean. “That ice is being lost before the emperor penguins have been able to fledge, and when that happens, you have a complete breeding failure for the colony in that season,” Abram said. “We’re seeing those catastrophic breeding failure events happening right around the Antarctic continent.”

The relentless warming of Antarctica and its surrounding waters is a long-term trend—a sort of chronic sickness for the far south. But it’s being accentuated by acute attacks, like a freak heat wave in East Antarctica in March 2022 that spiked temperatures 40 degrees C (72 degrees F) above normal, obliterating records and shocking scientists. “Because of just the intensity of that extreme event,” Fogt said, “it can take places that are slightly vulnerable and push them over a tipping point where they’re no longer going to be able to recover, at least not for a long, long time.”

The bit of good news, though, is that year by year, researchers are getting ever more data about how Antarctica is responding to human-caused climate change, allowing them to more accurately model what might happen in the decades ahead. And scientists know full well how to treat the continent’s chronic disease: immediately and massively cut greenhouse gas emissions—or face the consequences. “Every fraction of a degree of warming that we can save stacks the odds of avoiding these catastrophic changes,” England said. “Sea level rises of multiple meters mean global political instability that will dwarf what we’re seeing right now.”

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Posted Sunday 31 August 2025 at 6:38 am AEST (my time).

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It is well known that heat causes exhaustion in the body due to dehydration. But aging?

A recent study concluded that extreme heat accelerates the aging of the human body, a worrying fact given the increasing frequency of heat waves due to climate change.

The researchers are not talking about the effects of solar radiation on the skin, but biological aging. Unlike chronological age—that answer that you give when asked how old you are—your biological age reflects how well your cells, tissues, and organs are functioning. Biological age can be calculated by looking at physiological and molecular markers in the body as well as by using various tests, for instance by measuring lung function, cognitive ability, or bone density.

Over time, the research found, exposure to extreme heat can weaken bodily systems, which shows up in tests of people’s blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood function. In the long term, this can increase the risks of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia. The research, which was published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that the aging effect of extreme heat was comparable to other behaviors known to be harmful to the body, such as smoking or drinking alcohol.

The researchers analyzed the long-term medical data of 24,922 people in Taiwan, collected between 2008 and 2022. During that time, the island experienced about 30 heat waves—defined by the research team as periods of high temperature lasting for several days. The researchers first calculated the biological age of the individuals, based on the results of various medical tests, such as liver, lung, and kidney function tests. They then compared people’s biological age with their chronological age, to see how fast their biological clock was ticking relative to their actual age. They then cross-referenced this information against people’s likely exposure to heat waves.

The results showed that the more extreme heat events people experienced, the faster their biological age accelerated relative to their chronological age. On average, among the cohort of people studied, being exposed to two years’ worth of heat waves added between eight and 12 days to a person’s biological age.

“While the number itself may seem small, over time and in different populations, this effect may have significant implications for public health,” said Cui Guo, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong and lead author of the study, in a statement from Nature.

The study also found that people doing physical labor and those residing in rural areas were more likely to be affected by accelerated biological aging, presumably due to greater exposure to the effects of heat waves. However, an unexpected positive effect was observed as well: The impact of heat exposure on biological aging actually decreased over the 15 years analyzed. The reason behind this is unknown, though Guo points to the possible influence of cooling technologies such as air-conditioning, which have become more common in recent years.

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

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Posted Sunday 31 August 2025 at 6:37 am AEST (my time).

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According to Ars Technica, ChatGPT's co-creator Shengjia Zhao threatened to leave Meta days after joining the company and even signed formal paperwork before he was given the title of "Chief AI Scientist" and decided to stay. Similarly, machine learning scientist Ethan Knight left the firm weeks after joining, while ex-OpenAI researcher Avi Verma completed his onboarding, but was a no-show on his actual first day. Rishabh Agarwal, who joined in April, found Zuckerberg's vision compelling but "felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk" and subsequently resigned.

It's not just the newbies leaving either. Apparently, half a dozen veterans, including GenAI members Chaya Nayak and Loredana Crisan, who share almost two decades of experience, have announced their exodus too.

To the outside world, this seems like utter chaos but Meta was quick to downplay these resignations, making some rather snarky comments:

We appreciate that there’s outsized interest in seemingly every minute detail of our AI efforts, no matter how inconsequential or mundane, but we’re just focused on doing the work to deliver personal superintelligence.

 

Some attrition is normal for any organization of this size. Most of these employees had been with the company for years, and we wish them the best.

For those unaware, Zuckerberg's quest to achieve "personal superintelligence" led him to build the Meta Superintelligence Lab which consists of four teams. One is the aptly named "TBD Lab" focusing specifically on achieving superintelligence through the new hires, the second develops AI products, the third works on infrastructure, and the fourth experiments with longer-term initiatives. Meta's AI efforts are being spearheaded by Zhao, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Alexandr Wang, and former GitHub chief Nat Friedman.

Many veteran employees are reportedly not pleased with the presence of new hires as it creates internal politics and unhealthy competition. Meta's other chief AI scientist Yann LeCun now reports to Wang, while Ahmad Al-Dahle is not leading any teams now despite being the driving force behind Llama and other GenAI efforts. Interestingly, Wang bypasses Chief Product Officer Chris Cox in the chain of command and directly reports to Zuckerberg.

There have also been reports that Zuckerberg and Wang are clashing over the timelines for achieving superintelligence, but Meta has dismissed these claims as being "manufactured tension without basis in fact that’s clearly being pushed by dramatic, navel-gazing busybodies". It remains to be seen if Meta will actually achieve superintelligence at some point, but Zuckerberg's house of cards is definitely trembling for now.

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Posted Saturday 30 August 2025 at 12:24 pm AEST (my time).

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At the beginning of the month, Tesla was found partly liable in a wrongful death lawsuit involving the death of a pedestrian in Florida in 2019. The automaker—which could have settled the case for far less—claimed that it did not have the fatal crash's data. That's until a hacker was able to recover it from the crashed car, according to a report in The Washington Post.

In the past, Tesla has been famously quick to offer up customer data stored on its servers to rebut claims made against the company. But in this case, the company said it had nothing. Specifically, the lawyers for the family wanted what's known as the "collision snapshot," data captured by the car's cameras and other sensors in the seconds leading up to and after the crash.

According to the trial, moments after the collision snapshot was uploaded to Tesla's servers, the local copy on the car was marked for deletion. Then, "someone at Tesla probably took 'affirmative action to delete' the copy of the data on the company’s central database," according to the Post.

Tesla only acknowledged that it had received the data once the police took the Tesla's damaged infotainment system and autopilot control unit to a Tesla technician to diagnose, but at that time the local collision snapshot was considered unrecoverable.

That's where the hacker, only identified as @greentheonly, his username on X, came in. Greentheonly told The Washington Post that, "for any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there."

During the trial, Tesla told the court that it hadn't hidden the data, but lost it. The company's lawyer told the Post that Tesla's data handling practices were "clumsy" and that another search turned up the data, after acknowledging that @greentheonly had retrieved the snapshot locally from the car.

"We didn't think we had it, and we found out we did... And, thankfully, we did because this is an amazingly helpful piece of information," said Tesla's lawyer, Joel Smith.

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Posted Saturday 30 August 2025 at 12:23 pm AEST (my time).

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One of the more curious aspects of the 10th flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket on Tuesday was the striking orange discoloration of the second stage. This could be observed on video taken from a buoy near the landing site as the vehicle made a soft landing in the Indian Ocean.

This color—so different from the silvery skin and black tiles that cover Starship's upper stage—led to all sorts of speculation. Had heating damaged the stainless steel skin? Had the vehicle's tiles been shucked off, leaving behind some sort of orange adhesive material? Was this actually NASA's Space Launch System in disguise?

The answer to this question was rather important, as SpaceX founder Elon Musk had said before this flight that gathering data about the performance of this heat shield was the most important aspect of the mission.

We got some answers on Thursday. During the afternoon, the company posted some new high-resolution photos, taken by a drone in the vicinity of the landing location. They offered a clear view of the Starship vehicle with its heat shield intact, albeit with a rust-colored tint.

Musk provided some clarity on this discoloration on Thursday evening, writing on the social media site X, "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."

The new images and 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.

So what comes next?

Tuesday's test was largely successful. There appeared to be an issue with one of the Raptor engines in the upper stage later in the flight, which has not yet been detailed by the company. Damage to the engine bay and one of the vehicle's flaps can be seen clearly in the new photographs. This did not appear to impact what was a soft and precise landing in the Indian Ocean, but obviously it was not nominal.

So, with this new information, what does it mean for SpaceX's plans to test future Starship vehicles? What follows is a mixture of informed guesswork and reporting. It is also very notional because SpaceX is known to change its plans rapidly in response to new data. So take this information with a pinch of salt.

Flight Test 11: SpaceX has not revealed a profile for this flight test. It will almost certainly be the last Starship based on the version 2 design, which has been an interim step before the company moves to the larger V3 vehicle, with newer Raptor engines and design improvements. For this reason, it is likely that the 11th test remains suborbital, with the goal of demonstrating Raptor performance in space and testing additional changes to the heat shield. It may also fly a different or steeper reentry angle to further stress the heat shield. This test could occur in the October time frame.

Flight Test 12: This likely will be the first flight of the V3 Starship. Because of this, it will probably follow a suborbital trajectory. Why is SpaceX flying all of these suborbital missions? When Starship flies into orbit, the company wants to be sure it can control where and when it comes back to Earth. Starship is the largest human vehicle to ever return from space, and large chunks would survive an uncontrolled reentry. So SpaceX wants to be confident in its operation of Starship before orbiting the vehicle. Consequently, the first flight of V3 will probably be a standard suborbital test of the ship, booster, and heat shield. Expect this flight in early 2026.

Flight Test 13 and 14: These missions will likely continue to test Starship V3. Assuming flight test 12 goes well, we could probably see a booster catch attempt on flight 13 and probably the first orbital flight, complete with operational deployment of Starlink satellites in this range. This is clearly the most important interim goal the company is working toward, as these larger Starlinks should improve network speeds and performance and increase direct-to-device capabilities.

Flights 15 to 20: At some point, we'll stop calling them test flights. During this range of missions, we can expect to see SpaceX make its first attempt to catch a Starship upper stage (Musk said recently this could occur on flight 13 to 15, depending on how V3 flights go). Somewhere in here, SpaceX is also likely to launch two Starships to conduct an in-orbit refueling test, demonstrating the ability of two Starships to transfer propellant. This is a key step toward allowing Starships to go to the Moon (for NASA's Artemis Program) and Mars. At this point, I think it is safe to predict this test will occur no earlier than the second half of 2026.

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Posted Saturday 30 August 2025 at 3:05 am AEST (my time).

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On the evening of September 7, the second (and final) total lunar eclipse of the year will take place—serving up the striking sight of a red “blood moon” in the sky across much of the world.

Total lunar eclipses occur when the Earth is positioned between the full moon and the sun, with the moon falling into the shadow of our planet. However, rather than disappearing into darkness, the shadowed moon instead turns red. This is because of a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering.

Visible sunlight, while it appears white, is actually made up of lights of different colors that have different wavelengths, and these interact differently with Earth’s atmosphere when passing through it. During a lunar eclipse, shorter wavelengths of visible light, toward the blue end of the visible spectrum, scatter outward, away from the region shadowed by the Earth. But those with longer wavelengths, toward the red part of the spectrum, are instead bent inward and cast into the shadowed region—and onto the surface of the moon.

This year’s first lunar eclipse, back in March, was best viewed from the United States, but unfortunately if you’re in the Americas you’re going to miss seeing the blood moon live this time. The totality phase of this September’s eclipse—when the moon is within Earth’s shadow and will appear a deep red—will be visible across Asia, central and eastern Africa, and Australia. These maps from Timeanddate.com show where on the planet the total eclipse can be seen.

The totality phase will begin at 17:30 UTC on September 7, with the moment of maximum eclipse coming roughly 40 minutes later, at 18:11 UTC, and totality then ending an additional 40 minutes later. Before and after totality, the moon will be partially eclipsed, becoming first more and then less shadowed. Timeanddate.com has a city lookup tool as well, where you can enter your location to find the timings of the eclipse for where you are.

If you’re not in a viewing zone but still want to watch live, the Virtual Telescope Project—conceived and coordinated by Italian astrophysicist Gianluca Masi—will provide a live broadcast of the eclipse and blood moon on YouTube.

This total lunar eclipse will occur just under three days before the moon reaches perigee, the point at which it is closest to Earth, which means that it appear slightly larger than average during the event.

After September 7, the next total lunar eclipse won’t happen until early March 2026—but luckily for those in the US, it will be visible in North America, Australia, and east Asia.

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

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Posted Saturday 30 August 2025 at 3:03 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.08 of the Rocket Report! What a week it's been for SpaceX. The company completed its first successful Starship test flight in nearly a year, and while it wasn't perfect, it sets up SpaceX for far more ambitious tests ahead. SpaceX's workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, launched six times since our last edition of the Rocket Report. Many of these missions were noteworthy in their own right, including the launch of the US military's X-37B spaceplane, an upgraded Dragon capsule to boost the International Space Station to a higher orbit, and the record 30th launch and landing of a flight-proven Falcon 9 booster. All told, that's seven SpaceX launches in seven days.

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.

Firefly announces cause of Alpha launch failure. Firefly Aerospace closed the investigation into the failure of one of its Alpha rockets during an April mission for Lockheed Martin and received clearance from the FAA to resume launches, Payload reports. The loss of the launch vehicle was a dark cloud hanging over the company’s otherwise successful IPO this month. The sixth flight of Firefly's Alpha rocket launched in April from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and failed when its first stage booster broke apart milliseconds after stage separation. This created a shockwave that destroyed the engine nozzle extension on the second stage, damaging the engine before the second stage ran out of propellant seconds before it attained orbital velocity. Both stages ultimately fell into the Pacific Ocean.

Too much stress ... Investigators concluded that "plume induced flow separation" caused the failure. The phenomenon occurs when a rocket's exhaust disrupts airflow around the vehicle in flight. In this case, Firefly said the rocket was flying at a higher angle of attack than prior missions, which resulted in the flow separation and created intense heat that broke the first stage apart just after it jettisoned from the second stage. Firefly will increase heat shielding on the first stage of the rocket and fly at reduced angles of attack on future missions. Alpha has now launched six times since 2021, with only two complete successes. Firefly said it was working on setting a date for the seventh Alpha launch. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

ESA books a ticket on European launchers. The European Space Agency has awarded launch service contracts to Avio and Isar Aerospace under its Flight Ticket Initiative, European Spaceflight reports. Announced in October 2023, the Flight Ticket Initiative is a program run jointly by ESA and the European Union that offers subsidized flight opportunities for European companies and organizations seeking to demonstrate new satellite technologies in orbit. The initiative is part of ESA's strategy to foster the continent's commercial space industry, offering institutional funding to support satellite and launch companies. Avio won contracts to launch three small European space missions as secondary payloads on Vega C rockets flying into low-Earth orbit. Isar Aerospace will launch two small satellite missions to orbit for European companies.

No other options ... Avio and Isar Aerospace were the obvious contenders for the Flight Ticket Initiative from a pool of five European companies eligible for launch awards. The other companies, PLD Space, Orbex, and Rocket Factory Augsburg, haven't launched their orbital-class rockets yet. Avio, based in Italy, builds the now-operational Vega C rocket, and Germany's Isar Aerospace launched its first Spectrum rocket earlier this year, but it failed to reach orbit. Avio's selection replaces Arianespace, which was originally part of the Flight Ticket Initiative. Arianespace was previously responsible for marketing and sales for the Vega rocket, but ESA transferred its Flight Ticket Initiative eligibility to Avio following its split from Arianespace. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Canadian rocket company ready for launch. NordSpace is preparing to launch its 6-meter tall Taiga rocket from Newfoundland, CBC reports. It will be a suborbital launch, meaning it won't orbit Earth, but NordSpace says the launch will be the first of a Canadian commercial rocket from a Canadian commercial spaceport. The rocket is powered by a 3D-printed liquid-fueled engine and is a stepping stone to an orbital-class rocket NordSpace is developing called Tundra, scheduled to debut in 2027. The smaller Taiga rocket will launch partially fueled and fire its engine for approximately 60 seconds, according to NordSpace.

Newfoundland to space ... The launch site, called the Atlantic Spaceport Complex, is located on the Atlantic coast near the town of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. It will have two launch pads, one for suborbital flights like Taiga, and another for orbital missions by the Tundra rocket and other launch vehicles from US and European companies. The Taiga launch is scheduled no earlier than Friday morning at 5:00 am EDT (09:00 UTC). NordSpace says it is a "fully privately funded and managed initiative crucial for Canada to build a space launch capability that supports our security, economy, and sovereignty." (submitted by Matthew P)

SpaceX's reuse idea isn't so dumb after all. A Falcon 9 rocket launched early Thursday from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites. These types of missions launch multiple times per week, but this flight was special. The first stage of the Falcon 9, designated Booster 1067, launched and landed on drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, completing its 30th flight to space and back, Ars reports. This is a new record for a reusable orbital-class booster stage and comes less than 24 hours after a preceding SpaceX launch from Florida that marked the 400th Falcon 9 landing on a drone ship since the first offshore recovery in 2016.

30 going for 40 ... SpaceX is now aiming for at least 40 launches per Falcon 9 first stage, four times as many flights as the company's original target for Falcon 9 booster reuse. Many people in the industry were skeptical about SpaceX's approach to reuse. In the mid-2010s, both the European and Japanese space agencies were looking to develop their next generation of rockets. In both cases, Europe with the Ariane 6 and Japan with the H3, the space agencies opted for traditional, expendable rockets instead of pushing toward reuse. In the United States, the main competitor to SpaceX has historically been United Launch Alliance. Their reaction to SpaceX's plan to reuse first stages a decade ago was dismissive. ULA dubbed its plan to reuse just the engine section of its Vulcan rocket "Smart Reuse" a few years ago. But ULA hasn't even attempted to recover the engines from the Vulcan core stage yet, and reuse is still at least several years away.

Russia nears debut of Soyuz-5 rocket. In recent comments to the Russian state-run media service TASS, the chief of Roscosmos said the country's newest rocket, the Soyuz-5, should take flight for the first time before the end of this year, Ars reports. "Yes, we are planning for December," said Dmitry Bakanov, the director of Roscosmos, Russia's main space corporation. "Everything is in place." According to the report, translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, the debut launch of Soyuz-5 will mark the first of several demonstration flights, with full operational service not expected to begin until 2028. It will launch from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.

Breaking free of Ukraine ... From an innovation standpoint, the Soyuz-5 vehicle does not stand out. It has been a decade in the making and is fully expendable, unlike a lot of newer medium-lift rockets coming online in the next several years. However, for Russia, this is an important advancement because it seeks to break some of the country's dependency on Ukraine for launch technology. The new rocket is also named Irtysh, a river that flows through Russia and Kazakhstan. The rocket has been in development since 2016 and largely repurposes older technology. But for Russia, a key advantage is that it takes rocket elements formerly made in Ukraine and now manufactures them in Russia.

SpaceX launches mission to reboost the ISS. SpaceX completed its 33rd cargo delivery to the International Space Station (ISS) early Monday, when a Dragon supply ship glided to an automated docking with more than 5,000 pounds of scientific experiments and provisions for the lab's seven-person crew, Ars reports. The resupply flight is part of the normal rotation of cargo and crew missions that keep the space station operating, but this one carries something new. What's different with this mission is a new rocket pack mounted inside the Dragon spacecraft's rear trunk section. In the coming weeks, SpaceX and NASA will use this first-of-its-kind propulsion system to begin boosting the altitude of the space station's orbit.

A rocket on a rocket ... SpaceX engineers installed two small Draco rocket engines in the trunk of the Dragon spacecraft. The thrusters have their own dedicated propellant tanks and will operate independently of 16 other Draco thrusters used to maneuver Dragon on its journey to the ISS. When NASA says it's the right time, SpaceX controllers will command the Draco thrusters to ignite and gently accelerate the massive 450-ton space station. All told, the reboost kit can add about 20 mph, or 9 meters per second, to the space station's already-dizzying speed. Maintaining the space station's orbit has previously been the responsibility of Russia.

X-37B rides with SpaceX again. The US military's reusable winged spaceship rocketed back into orbit from Florida on August 21 atop a SpaceX rocket, kicking off a mission that will, among other things, demonstrate how future spacecraft can navigate without relying on GPS signals, Ars reports. The core of the navigation experiment is what the Space Force calls the "world's highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space." The spaceplane also hosts a laser inter-satellite communications demo. This is the eighth flight of the X-37B spaceplane, and the third to launch with SpaceX.

Back to LEO ... This mission launched on a Falcon 9 rocket into low-Earth orbit (LEO) a few hundred miles above the Earth. This marks a return to LEO after the previous X-37B mission flew on a Falcon Heavy rocket into a much higher orbit. Many of the spaceplane's payloads have been classified, but officials typically identify a handful of unclassified experiments flying on each X-37B mission. Past X-37B missions have also deployed small satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a runway landing at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, or Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

Rocket Lab cuts the ribbon on Neutron launch pad. Launch Complex 3, the Virginia Spaceport Authority’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport and home to Rocket Lab’s newest reusable rocket, Neutron, is now complete and celebrated its official opening Thursday, WAVY-TV reports. Officials said Launch Complex 3 is ready to bring the largest orbital launch capacity in the spaceport’s history with Neutron, Rocket Lab's reusable launch vehicle, a medium-lift vehicle capable of launching 33,000 pounds (15 metric tons) to space for commercial constellations, national security, and interplanetary missions.

Not budging ... "We’re trying as hard as we can to get this on the pad by the end of the year and get it away," said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO. Beck is holding to his hope the Neutron rocket will be ready to fly in the next four months, but time is running out to make this a reality. The Neutron rocket will be Rocket Lab's second orbital-class launch vehicle after the Electron, which can place payloads of several hundred pounds in orbit. Electron has a launch pad in Virginia, too, but most Electron rockets take off from New Zealand.

Starship completes a largely successful test flight. SpaceX launched the 10th test flight of the company's Starship rocket Tuesday evening, sending the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean, Ars reports. The largely successful mission for the world's largest rocket was an important milestone for SpaceX's Starship program after months of repeated setbacks, including three disappointing test flights and a powerful explosion on the ground that destroyed the ship that engineers were originally readying for this launch.

Lessons to learn ... For the first time, SpaceX engineers received data on the performance of the ship's upgraded heat shield and control flaps during reentry back into the atmosphere. The three failed Starship test flights to start the year ended before the ship reached reentry. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has described developing a durable, reliable heat shield as the most pressing challenge for making Starship a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. But there were lessons to learn from Tuesday's flight. A large section of the ship transitioned from its original silver color to a rusty hue of orange and brown by the time it reached the Indian Ocean. Officials didn't immediately address this or say whether it was anticipated.

ULA recovering boosters, too. United Launch Alliance decided to pull four strap-on solid rocket boosters from the Atlantic Ocean after their use on the company's most recent launch. Photos captured by Florida photographer Jerry Pike showed a solid rocket motor casing on a ship just off the coast of Cape Canaveral. Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO, wrote on X that the booster was one of four flown on the USSF-106 mission earlier this month, which marked the third flight of ULA's Vulcan rocket and the first with a US national security payload.

A GEM from the sea ... The boosters, built by Northrop Grumman, are officially called Graphite Epoxy Motors, or GEMs. They jettison from the Vulcan rocket less than two minutes after liftoff and fall into the ocean. They're not designed for reuse, but ULA decided to recover this set of four from the Atlantic for inspections. The company also raised from the sea two motors from the previous Vulcan launch last year after one of them suffered a nozzle failure during launch. Bruno wrote on X that "performance and ballistics were spot on" with all four boosters from the more recent USSF-106 mission, but that engineers decided to go ahead and recover them to close out a "nice data set" from inspections of now six recovered motors—two from last year and four this year.

Next three launches

Aug. 30: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-7 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 03:09 UTC

Aug. 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-14 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 11:15 UTC

Sept. 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-8 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02:33 UTC

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Posted Saturday 30 August 2025 at 3:02 am AEST (my time).

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The AI market is undeniably booming. The six companies at the top of the world's valuation index, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta, are all deeply invested in AI in some form, and it seems like US stock markets are largely being held afloat by the unbelievable profits raked in by the firms.

NVIDIA, the company supplying the world with an estimated 90% of the specialized GPUs required in AI data centers, recently became the first company to hit (and surpass) a $4 trillion market valuation.

Microsoft also passed the $4 trillion valuation milestone roughly a week later, and it has invested a massive sum in OpenAI, its ChatGPT LLM, and Windows 11's Copilot AI assistant.

Despite all of the promises and hypotheses from major AI players as to what their technology will unleash on the world, for good or for bad, tech trends and major studies have increasingly pointed to the AI boom being one massive bubble that will rival (or surpass) the dot-com era.

A new report published by MIT's NANDA initiative — a program designed to help develop a "true internet of AI agents" — suggests that only about 5% of AI pilot programs actually make it beyond the incubation stage (via Fortune).

MIT's research involves surveys and interviews with hundreds of employees and heads of firms, as well as outside analysis of hundreds of AI pilot programs that may or may not have found success before completely stalling out.

What are those other 95% of AI pilot programs doing to fail? MIT's report suggests that it's the enterprise sector and its inability to easily adapt to AI tools that's the issue, rather than a lack of quality in the offered AI models.

We tend to lump all mammoths together as big, hairy elephant-like beasts with enormous tusks. But there were a number of mammoth species, including less furry ones that inhabited temperate regions. And the furry ones include at least three species: the Eurasian steppe mammoth, the Arctic-specializing woolly mammoth, and the late-evolving North America-only Columbian mammoth.

Because these species inhabited the Arctic, it has been remarkably easy to obtain DNA from them, providing a genetic picture of their relations. The DNA suggests that the woolly mammoth is an offshoot of the steppe mammoth lineage, and was the first to migrate into North America. But the Columbian mammoth was a bit of an enigma; some genetic data suggested it was also a steppe offshoot, while other samples indicated it might be a woolly/steppe hybrid.

But all of that data came from animals living in colder environments. In contrast, the Columbian mammoth ranged as far south as Central America. And now, a group of researchers has managed to obtain a bit of genetic information from bones found in the Basin of Mexico, which includes Mexico City. And these mammoths appear to form a distinct genetic cluster, and are all more closely related to each other than to any other woolly or Columbian mammoths.

Getting ancient DNA

DNA does not survive well in hot environments, which is why most of our picture of Columbian mammoths comes from regions where the species likely overlapped with its woolly contemporaries. These painted a somewhat confused picture. Data from the nuclear genome suggests that they're a hybrid of steppe and woolly mammoths. But the mitochondrial genome, which is inherited from the mother via the energy-producing organelles found in every cell, suggested they had a distinct origin from woolly mammoths.

This led a Mexican-European research collaboration to get interested in finding DNA from elsewhere in the Columbian mammoth's range, which extended down into Central America. The researchers focused on the Basin of Mexico, which is well south of where any woolly mammoths were likely to be found. While the warmer terrain generally tends to degrade DNA more quickly, the team had a couple of things working in its favor. To begin with, there were a lot of bones. The Basin of Mexico has been heavily built up over the centuries, and a lot of mammoth remains have been discovered, including over 100 individuals during the construction of Mexico City's international airport.

In addition, the team focused entirely on the mitochondrial genome. In contrast to the two sets of chromosomes in each cell, a typical cell might have hundreds of mitochondria, each of which could have dozens of copies of its genome. So, while the much smaller mitochondria don't provide as much detail about ancestry, they're at least likely to survive at high enough levels to provide something to work with.

And indeed they did. Altogether, the researchers obtained 61 new mitochondrial genomes from the mammoths of Mexico from the 83 samples they tested. Of these, 28 were considered high enough quality to perform an analysis.

Off on their own

By building a family tree using this genetic data, along with that from other Colombian and woolly mammoth samples, the researchers could potentially determine how different populations were related. And one thing became very clear almost immediately: They were in a very weird location on that tree.

To begin with, all of them clustered together in a single block, although there were three distinct groupings within that block. But the placement of that block within the larger family tree was notably strange. To begin with, there were woolly mammoths on either side of it, suggesting the lineage was an offshoot of woolly mammoths. That would make sense if all Columbian mammoths clustered together with the Mexican ones. But they don't. Some Columbian mammoths from much further north are actually more closely related to woolly mammoths than they are to the Mexican mammoths.

Drawing this all out on a map, you end up with a very strange situation. Rather than mitochondrial DNA being specific to a single species of mammoth, it appears to be linked to geographic location. At least based on the data we have, two mammoths are more likely to have similar mitochondrial DNA if they lived near each other than if they were the same species. Which, just to be clear, is not how genetics is supposed to work.

The researchers come up with two potential explanations for this. The first is that what we identify as the Columbian mammoth was the product of multiple hybridization events, each taking place at different locations and producing somewhat isolated Columbian populations. That would make Columbian mammoths less of a distinct species and more of a collection of hybrid populations that may have been kept somewhat isolated from each other by distance.

The alternative, which the researchers favor, is that the North American woolly mammoth population carried a lot of distinct mitochondrial lineages by the time any hybridization took place. As long as the hybridization event involved enough individuals, then some of these lineages would have ended up in the population that produced what became the Columbian mammoth.

Genetically, it's a very weird situation, and would benefit from some nuclear DNA to give us a clearer picture of what this population looked like genetically. However, the level of success with getting much in the way of mitochondrial DNA was low enough that this is unlikely to happen. So, what may be needed is a more exhaustive look at the Columbian mammoths that remained further north, where DNA is more likely to have survived the millennia since their extinction.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt9651  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 29 August 2025 at 12:32 pm AEST (my time).

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As SpaceX's Starship vehicle gathered all of the attention this week, the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket continued to hit some impressive milestones.

Both occurred during relatively anonymous launches of the company's Starlink satellites but are nonetheless notable because they underscore the value of first-stage reuse, which SpaceX has pioneered over the last decade.

The first milestone occurred on Wednesday morning with the launch of the Starlink 10-56 mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The first stage that launched these satellites, Booster 1096, was making its second launch and successfully landed on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship. Strikingly, this was the 400th time SpaceX has executed a drone ship landing.

Then, less than 24 hours later, another Falcon 9 rocket launched the Starlink 10-11 mission from a nearby launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. This first stage, Booster 1067, subsequently returned and landed on another drone ship, A Shortfall of Gravitas.

This is a special booster, having made its debut in June 2021 and launching a wide variety of missions, including two Crew Dragon vehicles to the International Space Station and some Galileo satellites for the European Union. On Thursday, the rocket made its 30th flight, the first time a Falcon 9 booster has hit that level of experience.

A decade in the making

These milestones came about one decade after SpaceX began to have some success with first-stage reuse.

The company first made a controlled entry of the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage in September 2013, during the first flight of version 1.1 of the vehicle. This proved the viability of the concept of supersonic retropropulsion, which was, until that time, just theoretical.

This involves igniting the rocket's nine Merlin engines while the vehicle is traveling faster than the speed of sound through the upper atmosphere, with external temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Due to the blunt force of this reentry, the engines in the outer ring of the rocket wanted to get splayed out, the company's chief of propulsion at the time, Tom Mueller, told me for the book Reentry. Success on the first try seemed improbable.

He recalled watching this launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and observing reentry as a camera aboard SpaceX founder Elon Musk's private jet tracked the rocket. The first stage made it all the way down, intact.

"I remember watching the live video and seeing the light of the engine on the ocean," Mueller said. "And holy shit, it was there. The rocket came down, landed in the ocean, and blew up. That was unreal. It worked the first time. I was like, get the barge ready. Get the landing legs ready. This shit works."

It would take a good deal more tinkering and experimentation, but by December 2015, SpaceX had landed its first rocket on a pad along the Florida coast. The first drone ship landing followed in April 2016. A little less than a year after this, SpaceX re-flew a Falcon 9 stage for the first time.

Silencing the doubters

Many people in the industry were skeptical about SpaceX's approach to reuse. In the mid-2010s, both the European and Japanese space agencies were looking to develop their next generation of rockets. In both cases, Europe with the Ariane 6 and Japan with the H3, the space agencies opted for traditional, expendable rockets instead of pushing toward reuse.

As a result, both of these competitors for commercial satellite launches are now about a decade behind SpaceX in terms of launch technology. If the ambitious Starship rocket is successful, that gap could widen further.

In the United States, the main competitor to SpaceX has historically been United Launch Alliance. Their reaction to SpaceX's plan to reuse first stages a decade ago was dismissive. The company's engineers wrote papers and performed studies that argued SpaceX's plans were impractical.

ULA engineers attempted to prove their approach was superior a decade ago.

Credit: United Launch Alliance

Almost one decade ago, to the date, United Launch Alliance began sharing a graphic that demonstrated its approach—to separate only the engine section of the Vulcan rocket—was superior. The company dubbed this approach SMART, an acronym for Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology. The implication in this name, of course, is that SpaceX's booster flyback approach was dumb.

According to the United Launch Alliance analysis in 2015, the SMART plan would result in cost savings as soon as the second launch of a booster. SpaceX's approach, by contrast, would require 10 flights for there to be any cost savings.

One imagines that those engineers never dreamed that, a decade later, SpaceX would fly the same rocket 30 times and reach an annual launch cadence that approaches the total number of rockets United Launch Alliance has flown during its 20-year existence. As for SMART, it remains a theoretical concept.

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Posted Friday 29 August 2025 at 5:10 am AEST (my time).

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Ankylosaurs, with their squat, armored bodies and bizarre, weaponized tails, are an iconic group of dinosaurs. While there were plenty of species present in the Cretaceous, they're thought to have origins that trace back to the Jurassic. It has been hard to say much about those origins, however, because the fossil evidence was so sparse. One of the earliest potential ankylosaur species, Spicomellus, was known from only a single partial rib; others are known only by jaw fragments or teeth.

Now, however, we have a much better picture of what Spicomellus afer looks like thanks to a much larger collection of bones discovered in Morocco. It turns out that the heavy armor and rows of chunky spikes found on Cretaceous ankylosaurs were actually subdued compared to the massive rows of meter-long spikes and bony collars found on Spicomellus. It looks like what would happen if you combined the aesthetics of punk with the flamboyance of glam and made a dinosaur out of the results.

A spiky find

Cretaceous ankylosaurs share a number of common features. One is a short, broad body form that kept the herbivores close to the ground when on all four limbs. Another common feature: bony plates, formed from the skin, that provided the animal with the equivalent of body armor. Some of these, especially along the animal's ribs, thickened into short, blunt spikes that provided added protection. Finally, many species had tails that ended in club-like growths that attached to the vertebrae in the tail through features with the highly technical name of "handles."

There's been some debate about the nature of all these eccentricities. One side of the argument suggests they were a protective response to the increasing number of large carnivores that evolved over the course of the Cretaceous. Others suggest that some of them were used in combat or displays that were essential for mating success. But there was general agreement that they probably evolved from simpler forms of basic protection that were likely present on the early species found in the Jurassic.

And we have known for sure that the armor was around back then, given that we've found the skin-derived osteoderms that comprise the armor in Jurassic deposits. But with little more than a rib and a handful of mouth parts to go on, it wasn't really possible to say much more than that.

Until now, that is. Because the new Spicomellus remains show extremely clearly that the armor of ankylosaurs got less elaborate over time.

There's the typical armor of a Cretaceous ankylosaur...

Encyclopaedia Britannica

 

And then there's whatever this thing is.

Matthew Dempsey.

 

The small, solid-looking spikes found along the edges of later ankylosaurs? Forget those. Spicomellus had a back that was probably bristling with sharper spines, along with far larger ones along its outer edges. Each rib appears to have generated as many as six individual spikes. At a handful of locations, these spikes extended out to nearly a meter, looking more like lances than anything needed to ward off a close-in attack.

And the largest of these were along its neck. On the upper surface of its neck, several osteoderms fused to form a massive half-collar of bone and then extended out five or more individual spikes, each among the longest on the animal's body. And there were three of these structures along the neck. "No known ankylosaur possesses any condition close to the extremely long pairs of spines on the cervical half-ring of Spicomellus," its discoverers note.

As if its hedgehog-on-acid appearance weren't enough, handles present on the tail vertebrae suggest that it also had a weaponized tail. All told, the researchers sum things up by saying, "The new specimen reveals extreme dermal armour modifications unlike those of any other vertebrate, extinct or extant, which fall far outside of the range of morphologies shown by other armoured dinosaurs."

Out go the hypotheses

Because it's so unusual, the skeleton's characteristics are difficult to place within a neat family tree of the ankylosaurs. The researchers conclude that some details of its skeleton do suggest Spicomellus groups among the ankylosaurs and conclude that it’s probably an early branch from the main lineage. But without any other significant examples from the lineage at that time, it's an extremely tentative conclusion. Still, the alternative is that this thing is unrelated to the only other organisms that share at least a few of its bizarre features, which is a difficult idea to swallow.

Assuming it is related to ankylosaurs, this throws a lot of our ideas about their evolution out the window. Since tail clubs are only present on a subset of the Cretaceous ankylosaur species, it was hypothesized that these evolved late and thus remained restricted to only some of the lineages we've found. Spicomellus suggests that these were present right from the start, so they must have been lost from many lineages.

Our ideas about the armor and spikes have their own issues. Initial hypotheses suggested those become more elaborate over time in response to the growing threat of Cretaceous predators. But now it appears that the opposite is true. The researchers who discovered the new fossil suggest that the less elaborate armor of later ankylosaurs probably was sufficient for protection, which raises the issue of why anything so bizarrely extravagant would evolve in the first place.

As you probably guessed, the answer is sex. "Structures with limited obvious functionality and that are energetically expensive to produce tend to be sexually selected and function for display or combat," the researchers argue. Their idea is that these spikes initially served both as protection and display but later shifted so that the emphasis was largely on protection.

Obviously, finding additional species from earlier in this group's history would help clarify just how much of an oddity Spicomellus was and could give us an improved picture of the trajectory of evolution of this group's distinctive features. But based on this new fossil alone, it's clear that we need to rethink a lot of things that made perfect sense based on the information we had.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09453-6  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 29 August 2025 at 5:09 am AEST (my time).

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STARBASE, Texas—SpaceX launched the 10th test flight of the company's Starship rocket Tuesday evening, sending the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The largely successful mission for the world's largest rocket was an important milestone for SpaceX's Starship program after months of repeated setbacks, including three disappointing test flights and a powerful explosion on the ground that destroyed the ship that engineers were originally readying for this launch.

For the first time, SpaceX engineers received data on the performance of the ship's upgraded heat shield and control flaps during reentry back into the atmosphere. The three failed Starship test flights to start the year ended before the ship reached reentry. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has described developing a durable, reliable heat shield as the most pressing challenge for making Starship a fully and rapidly reusable rocket.

And there were lessons to learn from Tuesday's test flight. The ship made it all the way to the Indian Ocean intact, arriving next to a prepositioned buoy northwest of Australia, where it was just after sunrise Wednesday morning at the time of splashdown. A camera on the buoy showed the ship slowing down before contacting the water, then tipping over and exploding as expected.

But a large section of the ship had transitioned from its original silver color to a rusty hue of orange and brown. Officials didn't immediately address this or say whether it was anticipated, but it could suggest heating damage to the rocket's stainless steel skin during reentry. If so, that might require more changes to the design of the ship's heat shield, but this is the kind of information engineers were looking for with this test flight.

The auspicious results showed that SpaceX has solved the problems that hamstrung the Starship program earlier this year. Most of the issues that led to the ship's recent failures were in the rocket's propulsion and propellant systems. Those all appeared to function well on Tuesday.

It also lays the foundation for SpaceX to test new Starship capabilities, such as recovering the ship back at the launch site and in-orbit refueling. These are critical prerequisites for Starship to achieve its full promise: flying cargo and eventually people to more distant destinations like the Moon and Mars.

"Congratulations to SpaceX on its Starship test," wrote Sean Duffy, NASA's acting administrator, on X. "Flight 10's success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III. This is a great day for NASA and our commercial space partners."

NASA has two contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a version of Starship to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Meanwhile, SpaceX's founder and CEO, Elon Musk, is focused on sending Starships to Mars.

Here’s what happened

Tuesday's mission began a little more than an hour earlier with the liftoff of SpaceX's 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage from the company's launch site in Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border, at 6:30 pm CDT (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC). SpaceX called off two launch attempts on Sunday and Monday due to a technical problem and bad weather.

But Tuesday's countdown was smooth, and the rocket lit 33 Raptor engines on its Super Heavy booster stage at the opening of the launch window. Moments later, the rocket lumbered skyward, riding nearly 17 million pounds of thrust and trailing a distinctive blue-orange flame from its methane-fueled engines.

Heading east over the Gulf of Mexico, Starship and its Super Heavy booster accelerated through the speed of sound and rocketed into the stratosphere in the first couple of minutes of the flight. Then, right on time, the booster shut off its engines and released from the Starship upper stage about two-and-a-half minutes into the launch.

Starship ignited six of its own Raptor engines to continue powering itself into space, while the Super Heavy booster flipped around to fly tail-first and relit some of its engines in the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere to reverse course and boost itself back toward the Texas coastline.

On this mission, SpaceX intentionally guided the Super Heavy booster toward a location in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from Starbase, forgoing another attempt to catch the rocket back at the launch pad. SpaceX has recovered three Super Heavy boosters in this manner before.

Instead, on Tuesday's flight, engineers wanted to test the rocket's ability to overcome an engine failure during its landing burn. One of the booster's three center engines was intentionally disabled during descent, and the rocket used a combination of two center engines and one engine from the middle ring of Raptor powerplants to slow down for splashdown.

The booster appeared to handle the stress test well, settling into the Gulf and tipping over as planned. The descent was visible to spectators onshore and was accompanied by a double sonic boom.

Meanwhile, the ship's upper stage fired its engines until the nine-minute mark in the flight, reaching a top speed during launch of 16,463 mph (26,495 kilometers per hour), just shy of the velocity needed for a stable orbit around the Earth. This put the rocket on a trajectory to soar to a peak altitude of 119 miles (192 kilometers), passing over the Atlantic Ocean, South Africa, and then the Indian Ocean before falling back into the atmosphere.

The flight's next milestone was a first for Starship. About 15 minutes into the mission, the ship opened its payload bay door and began releasing eight flat-packed steel panels installed on the rocket to simulate the deployment of SpaceX's next-generation Starship Internet satellites.

This was the first time SpaceX used the ship's payload deployment mechanism, which engineers liken to a Pez dispenser, using pulleys to move the rack of Starlink simulators and push them out of the rocket's side door one at a time. Future Starship flights will launch as many as 60 next-generation Starlinks per launch, greatly increasing the network's capacity, according to Dan Huot, a SpaceX official who anchored the company's live webcast of Tuesday's flight.

The ship then closed its payload bay door and prepared to restart one of its six engines for a brief maneuver to test its ability to change its trajectory. The three-second burn was successful, demonstrating that the ship could guide itself toward reentry on future flights into low-Earth orbit.

Finally, flying belly-forward with its nose pointed skyward, Starship plunged back into the atmosphere. A spectacular sheath of purple-orange plasma surrounded the ship as temperatures climbed to near 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Live video from multiple cameras outside the ship showed it moving its flaps to steer through reentry, using aerodynamic forces from the thickening air to aim for the splashdown zone, where a buoy was waiting to see it drop into the sea.

The reentry profile was designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the ship's rear flaps. Engineers planned to use the test as a learning exercise before SpaceX eventually returns a future ship from orbit back to the launch pad, where giant mechanical arms will catch it in a similar way to how SpaceX has shown it can catch Super Heavy boosters.

The ship made it all the way through reentry, turned to a horizontal position to descend through scattered clouds, then relit three of its engines to flip back to a vertical orientation for the final braking maneuver before splashdown.

Things to improve on

There are several takeaways from Tuesday's flight that will require some improvements to Starship, but these are more akin to what officials might expect from a rocket test program and not the catastrophic failures of the ship that occurred earlier this year.

One of the Super Heavy booster's 33 engines prematurely shut down during ascent. This has happened before, and while it didn't affect the booster's overall performance, engineers will investigate the failure to try to improve the reliability of SpaceX's Raptor engines, each of which can generate more than a half-million pounds of thrust.

Later in the flight, cameras pointed at one of the ship's rear flaps showed structural damage to the back of the wing. It wasn't clear what caused the damage, but super-heated plasma burned through part of the flap as the ship fell deeper into the atmosphere. Still, the flap remained largely intact and was able to help control the vehicle through reentry and splashdown.

"We’re kind of being mean to this Starship a little bit," Huot said on SpaceX's live webcast. "We're really trying to put it through the paces and kind of poke on what some of its weak points are."

Small chunks of debris were also visible peeling off the ship during reentry. The origin of the glowing debris wasn't immediately clear, but it may have been parts of the ship's heat shield tiles. On this flight, SpaceX tested several different tile designs, including ceramic and metallic materials, and one tile design that uses "active cooling" to help dissipate heat during reentry.

A bright flash inside the ship's engine bay during reentry also appeared to damage the vehicle's aft skirt, the stainless steel structure that encircles the rocket's six main engines.

"That's not what we want to see," Huot said. "We just saw some of the aft skirt just take a hit. So we've got some visible damage on the aft skirt. We’re continuing to reenter, though. We are intentionally stressing the ship as we go through this, so it is not guaranteed to be a smooth ride down to the Indian Ocean.

"We’ve removed a bunch of tiles in kind of critical places across the vehicle, so seeing stuff like that is still valuable to us," he said. "We are trying to kind of push this vehicle to the limits to learn what its limits are as we design our next version of Starship."

Shana Diez, a Starship engineer at SpaceX, perhaps summed up Tuesday's results best on X: "It's not been an easy year but we finally got the reentry data that's so critical to Starship. It feels good to be back!"

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Posted Thursday 28 August 2025 at 4:34 am AEST (my time).

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Marine biologist and conservationist David Shiffman was an early power user and evangelist for science engagement on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Over the years, he trained more than 2,000 early career scientists on how to best use the platform for professional goals: networking with colleagues, sharing new scientific papers, and communicating with interested members of the public.

But when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, renaming it X, changes to both the platform's algorithm and moderation policy soured Shiffman on the social media site. He started looking for a viable alternative among the fledgling platforms that had begun to pop up: most notably Threads, Post, Mastodon, and Bluesky. He was among the first wave of scientists to join Bluesky and found that, even in its infancy, it had many of the features he had valued in "golden age" Twitter.

Shiffman also noticed that he wasn't the only one in the scientific community having issues with Twitter. This impression was further bolstered by news stories in outlets like Nature, Science, and the Chronicle of Higher Education noting growing complaints about Twitter and increased migration over to Bluesky by science professionals. (Full disclosure: I joined Bluesky around the same time as Shiffman, for similar reasons: Twitter had ceased to be professionally useful, and many of the science types I'd been following were moving to Bluesky. I nuked my Twitter account in November 2024.)

A curious Shiffman decided to conduct a scientific survey, announcing the results in a new paper published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. The findings confirm that, while Twitter was once the platform of choice for a majority of science communicators, those same people have since abandoned it in droves. And of the alternatives available, Bluesky seems to be their new platform of choice.

Shiffman, the author of Why Sharks Matter, described early Twitter recently on the blog Southern Fried Science as "the world's most interesting cocktail party."

"Then it stopped being useful," Shiffman told Ars. "I was worried for a while that this incredibly powerful way of changing the world using expertise was gone. It's not gone. It just moved. It's a little different now, and it's not as powerful as it was, but it's not gone. It was for me personally, immensely reassuring that so many other people were having the same experience that I was. But it was also important to document that scientifically."

Eager to gather solid data on the migration phenomenon to bolster his anecdotal observations, Shiffman turned to social scientist Julia Wester, one of the scientists who had joined Twitter at Shiffman's encouragement years before, before also becoming fed up and migrating to Bluesky. Despite being "much less online" than the indefatigable Shiffman, Wester was intrigued by the proposition. "I was interested not just in the anecdotal evidence, the conversations we were having, but also in identifying the real patterns," she told Ars. "As a social scientist, when we hear anecdotal evidence about people's experiences, I want to know what that looks like across the population."

Shiffman and Wester targeted scientists, science communicators, and science educators who used (or had used) both Twitter and Bluesky. Questions explored user attitudes toward, and experiences with, each platform in a professional capacity: when they joined, respective follower and post counts, which professional tasks they used each platform for, the usefulness of each platform for those purposes relative to 2021, how they first heard about Bluesky, and so forth.

The authors acknowledge that they are looking at a very specific demographic among social media users in general and that there is an inevitable self-selection effect. However, "You want to use the sample and the method that's appropriate to the phenomenon that you're looking at," said Wester. "For us, it wasn't just the experience of people using these platforms, but the phenomenon of migration. Why are people deciding to stay or move? How they're deciding to use both of these platforms? For that, I think we did get a pretty decent sample for looking at the dynamic tensions, the push and pull between staying on one platform or opting for another."

They ended up with a final sample size of 813 people. Over 90 percent of respondents said they had used Twitter for learning about new developments in their field; 85.5 percent for professional networking; and 77.3 percent for public outreach. Roughly three-quarters of respondents said that the platform had become significantly less useful for each of those professional uses since Musk took over. Nearly half still have Twitter accounts but use it much less frequently or not at all, while about 40 percent have deleted their accounts entirely in favor of Bluesky.

Making the switch

User complaints about Twitter included a noticeable increase in spam, porn, bots, and promoted posts from users who paid for a verification badge, many spreading extremist content. "I very quickly saw material that I did not want my posts to be posted next to or associated with," one respondent commented. There were also complaints about the rise in misinformation and a significant decline in both the quantity and quality of engagement, with respondents describing their experiences as "unpleasant," "negative," or "hostile."

The survey responses also revealed a clear push/pull dynamic when it came to the choice to abandon Twitter for Bluesky. That is, people felt they were being pushed away from Twitter and were actively looking for alternatives. As one respondent put it, "Twitter started to suck and all the cool people were moving to Bluesky."

Bluesky was user-friendly with no algorithm, a familiar format, and helpful tools like starter packs of who to follow in specific fields, which made the switch a bit easier for many newcomers daunted by the prospect of rebuilding their online audience. Bluesky users also appreciated the moderation on the platform and having the ability to block or mute people as a means of disengaging from more aggressive, unpleasant conversations. That said, "If Twitter was still great, then I don't think there's any combination of features that would've made this many people so excited about switching," said Shiffman.

Per Shiffman and Wester, an "overwhelming majority" of respondents said that Bluesky has a "vibrant and healthy online science community," while Twitter no longer does. And many Bluesky users reported getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, on Bluesky. They might have a lower follower count, but those followers are far more engaged: Someone with 50,000 Twitter/X followers, for example, might get five likes on a given post; but on Bluesky, they may only have 5,000 followers, but their posts will get 100 likes.

According to Shiffman, Twitter always used to be in the top three in terms of referral traffic for posts on Southern Fried Science. Then came the "Muskification," and suddenly Twitter referrals weren't even cracking the top 10. By contrast, in 2025 thus far, Bluesky has driven "a hundred times as many page views" to Southern Fried Science as Twitter. Ironically, "the blog post that's gotten the most page views from Twitter is the one about this paper," said Shiffman.

Ars social media manager Connor McInerney confirmed that Ars Technica has also seen a steady dip in Twitter referral traffic thus far in 2025. Furthermore, "I can say anecdotally that over the summer we’ve seen our Bluesky traffic start to surpass our Twitter traffic for the first time," McInerney said, attributing the growth to a combination of factors. "We’ve been posting to the platform more often and our audience there has grown significantly. By my estimate our audience has grown by 63 percent since January. The platform in general has grown a lot too—they had 10 million users in September of last year, and this month the latest numbers indicate they’re at 38 million users. Conversely, our Twitter audience has remained fairly static across the same period of time."

Bubble, schmubble

As for scientists looking to share scholarly papers online, Shiffman pulled the Altmetrics stats for his and Wester's new paper. "It's already one of the 10 most shared papers in the history of that journal on social media," he said, with 14 shares on Twitter/X vs over a thousand shares on Bluesky (as of 4 pm ET on August 20). "If the goal is showing there's a more active academic scholarly conversation on Bluesky—I mean, damn," he said.

And while there has been a steady drumbeat of op-eds of late in certain legacy media outlets accusing Bluesky of being trapped in its own liberal bubble, Shiffman, for one, has few concerns about that. "I don’t care about this, because I don’t use social media to argue with strangers about politics," he wrote in his accompanying blog post. "I use social media to talk about fish. When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish." He compared the current incarnation of Twitter as no better than 4Chan or TruthSocial in terms of the percentage of "conspiracy-prone extremists" in the audience. "Even if you want to stay, the algorithm is working against you," he wrote.

"There have been a lot of opinion pieces about why Bluesky is not useful because the people there tend to be relatively left-leaning," Shiffman told Ars. "I haven't seen any of those same people say that Twitter is bad because it's relatively right-leaning. Twitter is not a representative sample of the public either." And given his focus on ocean conservation and science-based, data-driven environmental advocacy, he is likely to find a more engaged and persuadable audience at Bluesky.

The survey results show that at this point, Bluesky seems to have hit a critical mass for the online scientific community. That said, Shiffman, for one, laments that the powerful Black Science Twitter contingent, for example, has thus far not switched to Bluesky in significant numbers. He would like to conduct a follow-up study to look into how many still use Twitter vs those who may have left social media altogether, as well as Bluesky's demographic diversity—paving the way for possible solutions should that data reveal an unwelcoming environment for non-white scientists.

There are certainly limitations to the present survey. "Because this is such a dynamic system and it's changing every day, I think if we did this study now versus when we did it six months ago, we'd get slightly different answers and dynamics," said Wester. "It's still relevant because you can look at the factors that make people decide to stay or not on Bluesky, to switch to something else, to leave social media altogether. That can tell us something about what makes a healthy, vibrant conversation online. We're capturing one of the responses: 'I'll see you on Bluesky.' But that's not the only response. Public science communication is as important now as it's ever been, so looking at how scientists have pivoted is really important."

We recently reported on research indicating that social media as a system might well be doomed, since its very structure gives rise to the toxic dynamics that plague so much of social media: filter bubbles, algorithms that amplify the most extreme views to boost engagement, and a small number of influencers hogging the lion's share of attention. That paper concluded that any intervention strategies were likely to fail. Both Shiffman and Wester, while acknowledging the reality of those dynamics, are less pessimistic about social media's future.

"I think the problem is not with how social media works, it's with how any group of people work," said Shiffman. "Humans evolved in tiny social groupings where we helped each other and looked out for each other's interests. Now I have to have a fight with someone 10,000 miles away who has no common interest with me about whether or not vaccines are bad. We were not built for that. Social media definitely makes it a lot easier for people who are anti-social by nature and want to stir conflict to find those conflicts. Something that took me way too long to learn is that you don't have to participate in every fight you're invited to. There are people who are looking for a fight and you can simply say, 'No, thank you. Not today, Satan.'"

"The contrast that people are seeing between Bluesky and present-day Twitter highlights that these are social spaces, which means that you're going to get all of the good and bad of humanity entering into that space," said Wester. "But we have had new social spaces evolve over our whole history. Sometimes when there's something really new, we have to figure out the rules for that space. We're still figuring out the rules for these social media spaces. The contrast in moderation policies and the use (or not) of algorithms between those two platforms that are otherwise very similar in structure really highlights that you can shape those social spaces by creating rules and tools for how people interact with each other."

DOI: Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2025. 10.1093/icb/icaf127  (About DOIs).

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Posted Thursday 28 August 2025 at 4:32 am AEST (my time).

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For decades, astronomers have wondered what the very first stars in the universe were like. These stars formed new chemical elements, which enriched the universe and allowed the next generations of stars to form the first planets.

The first stars were initially composed of pure hydrogen and helium, and they were massive—hundreds to thousands of times the mass of the Sun and millions of times more luminous. Their short lives ended in enormous explosions called supernovae, so they had neither the time nor the raw materials to form planets, and they should no longer exist for astronomers to observe.

At least that’s what we thought.

Two studies published in the first half of 2025 suggest that collapsing gas clouds in the early universe may have formed lower-mass stars as well. One study uses a new astrophysical computer simulation that models turbulence within the cloud, causing fragmentation into smaller, star-forming clumps. The other study—an independent laboratory experiment—demonstrates how molecular hydrogen, a molecule essential for star formation, may have formed earlier and in larger abundances. The process involves a catalyst that may surprise chemistry teachers.

As an astronomer who studies star and planet formation and their dependence on chemical processes, I am excited at the possibility that chemistry in the first 50 million to 100 million years after the Big Bang may have been more active than we expected.

These findings suggest that the second generation of stars—the oldest stars we can currently observe and possibly the hosts of the first planets—may have formed earlier than astronomers thought.

Primordial star formation

Stars form when massive clouds of hydrogen many light-years across collapse under their own gravity. The collapse continues until a luminous sphere surrounds a dense core that is hot enough to sustain nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion happens when two or more atoms gain enough energy to fuse together. This process creates a new element and releases an incredible amount of energy, which heats the stellar core. In the first stars, hydrogen atoms fused together to create helium.

The new star shines because its surface is hot, but the energy fueling that luminosity percolates up from its core. The luminosity of a star is its total energy output in the form of light. The star’s brightness is the small fraction of that luminosity that we directly observe.

This process where stars form heavier elements by nuclear fusion is called stellar nucleosynthesis. It continues in stars after they form as their physical properties slowly change. The more massive stars can produce heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, all the way up to iron, in a sequence of fusion reactions that end in a supernova explosion.

Supernovae can create even heavier elements, completing the periodic table of elements. Lower-mass stars like the Sun, with their cooler cores, can sustain fusion only up to carbon. As they exhaust the hydrogen and helium in their cores, nuclear fusion stops, and the stars slowly evaporate.

High-mass stars have high pressure and temperature in their cores, so they burn bright and use up their gaseous fuel quickly. They last only a few million years, whereas low-mass stars—those less than two times the Sun’s mass—evolve much more slowly, with lifetimes of billions or even trillions of years.

If the earliest stars were all high-mass stars, then they would have exploded long ago. But if low-mass stars also formed in the early universe, they may still exist for us to observe.

Chemistry that cools clouds

The first star-forming gas clouds, called protostellar clouds, were warm—roughly room temperature. Warm gas has internal pressure that pushes outward against the inward force of gravity trying to collapse the cloud. A hot air balloon stays inflated by the same principle. If the flame heating the air at the base of the balloon stops, the air inside cools, and the balloon begins to collapse.

Only the most massive protostellar clouds with the most gravity could overcome the thermal pressure and eventually collapse. In this scenario, the first stars were all massive.

The only way to form the lower-mass stars we see today is for the protostellar clouds to cool. Gas in space cools by radiation, which transforms thermal energy into light that carries the energy out of the cloud. Hydrogen and helium atoms are not efficient radiators below several thousand degrees, but molecular hydrogen, H₂, is great at cooling gas at low temperatures.

When energized, H₂ emits infrared light, which cools the gas and lowers the internal pressure. That process would make gravitational collapse more likely in lower-mass clouds.

For decades, astronomers have reasoned that a low abundance of H₂ early on resulted in hotter clouds whose internal pressure would be too hot to easily collapse into stars. They concluded that only clouds with enormous masses, and therefore higher gravity, would collapse, leaving more massive stars.

Helium hydride

In a July 2025 journal article, physicist Florian Grussie and collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics demonstrated that the first molecule to form in the universe, helium hydride, HeH⁺, could have been more abundant in the early universe than previously thought. They used a computer model and conducted a laboratory experiment to verify this result.

Helium hydride? In high school science you probably learned that helium is a noble gas, meaning it does not react with other atoms to form molecules or chemical compounds. As it turns out, it does—but only under the extremely sparse and dark conditions of the early universe, before the first stars formed.

HeH⁺ reacts with hydrogen deuteride—HD, which is one normal hydrogen atom bonded to a heavier deuterium atom—to form H₂. In the process, HeH⁺ also acts as a coolant and releases heat in the form of light. So the high abundance of both molecular coolants earlier on may have allowed smaller clouds to cool faster and collapse to form lower-mass stars.

Gas flow also affects stellar initial masses

In another study, published in July 2025, astrophysicist Ke-Jung Chen led a research group at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics using a detailed computer simulation that modeled how gas in the early universe may have flowed.

The team’s model demonstrated that turbulence, or irregular motion, in giant collapsing gas clouds can form lower-mass cloud fragments from which lower-mass stars condense.

The study concluded that turbulence may have allowed these early gas clouds to form stars either the same size or up to 40 times more massive than the Sun’s mass.

The two new studies both predict that the first population of stars could have included low-mass stars. Now, it is up to us observational astronomers to find them.

This is no easy task. Low-mass stars have low luminosities, so they are extremely faint. Several observational studies have recently reported possible detections, but none are yet confirmed with high confidence. If they are out there, though, we will find them eventually.

Luke Keller is a professor of physics and astronomy at Ithaca College.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Posted Thursday 28 August 2025 at 4:30 am AEST (my time).

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NVIDIA just announced a "robot brain" called Jetson AGX Thor. The device, referred to often as simply "Jetson Thor," can power robots across several industries, including agriculture, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and transportation.

While you may not have heard of physical AI or NVIDIA robotics stacks, you've likely seen clips of some devices powered by Jetson Thor's predecessors.

Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar, and Meta are among the early adopters of Jetson Thor. John Deere and OpenAI are evaluating the physical AI capabilities of the "robot brain."

“We’ve built Jetson Thor for the millions of developers working on robotic systems that interact with and increasingly shape the physical world,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.

“With unmatched performance and energy efficiency, and the ability to run multiple generative AI models at the edge, Jetson Thor is the ultimate supercomputer to drive the age of physical AI and general robotics.”

Jetson Thor is powered by an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU. The company's Blackwell architecture is used to create AI chips, such as the B30A AI chip. NVIDIA's consumer RTX graphics cards are also built on the Blackwell architecture.

Jetson Thor developer kits can be purchased now for $3,499.

STARBASE, Texas—For the third day in a row, SpaceX engineers prepared to send the company's massive Starship rocket into space Tuesday after a technical problem and bad weather grounded the test flight on two previous launch attempts.

The one-hour launch window opens at 6:30 pm CDT (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC) at SpaceX's sprawling rocket development site in South Texas, just a couple of miles north of the mouth of the Rio Grande River at the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX called off a launch attempt Sunday after detecting a leak in the plumbing that flows super-cold liquid oxygen propellant into the rocket. Technicians fixed the problem in time for another countdown 24 hours later, but the risk of lightning in the area prevented Starship from lifting off Monday evening.

Now, the Starship launch team hopes the third time is the charm. SpaceX will begin loading more than 10 million pounds of cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket about an hour before launch Tuesday.

On this flight, SpaceX aims to launch Starship halfway around the world from Texas toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The three previous test flights failed before Starship reached its target. You can read more about the goals of the 10th Starship flight in our earlier story.

The failures illustrated the challenge SpaceX is trying to solve with Starship, the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built.

Don’t break the heat shield

"There are thousands of engineering challenges that remain for both the ship and the booster, but maybe the single biggest one is the reusable orbital heat shield," said Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, on Monday.

SpaceX started off flying Starships with roughly 18,000 hexagonal tiles, each about the size of a dinner plate. These tiles were made of ceramic material, similar to the design of the heat shield tiles that flew on NASA's space shuttles. Beginning with a test flight in January, SpaceX introduced its "latest generation tiles" and added a backup layer between the tiles and Starship's underlying stainless steel structure to protect it from heat shield damage.

Returning from space, the ship sees temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius), hot enough to melt aluminum. One of the reasons SpaceX chose stainless steel for Starship's primary structure is because of the metal's higher melting point.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to catch ships coming back from space with big mechanical arms on the launch pad, similar to the way SpaceX has shown it can recover the rocket's huge Super Heavy booster. This would allow SpaceX to theoretically stack a freshly flown ship on top of a booster right on the launch pad, then quickly refuel it and launch it again.

There are plenty of things SpaceX must prove before the company is able to do this. But SpaceX has already demonstrated it can handle some of the more obvious problems, such as repeatedly igniting the rocket's Raptor engines. The most definitive test will be SpaceX's success or failure with Starship's heat shield.

"We are confident in making a fully reusable orbital heat shield but it will require many flights, many iterations to figure out where the weak points are in the heat shield, where we need to change the design, either strengthening the tile or changing how big the gap is between tiles, or changing what’s underneath the tile," Musk said in a discussion broadcast on SpaceX's official livestream of Monday's Starship launch countdown.

The heat shield was one of the most vexing problems with NASA's space shuttle program. Thousands of tiles peeled off of the space shuttle Columbia when NASA first flew the orbiter on top of its modified 747 carrier aircraft in 1979. Tile damage was a regular occurrence throughout the shuttle program's 30-year service life, necessitating tile repairs and replacement inside the shuttle's hangar between missions.

"The space shuttle heat shield would come back essentially partially broken and would require many months of refurbishment in order to fly again," Musk said. "What we’re trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be reflown immediately."

On each Starship flight this year, SpaceX has sought to test the performance of new tile designs, including metallic insulators and heat shield sections with "active cooling" to help dissipate the scorching temperatures of reentry into the atmosphere.

"There are 100 different variables that we could tweak with the heat shield tiles, but the only way to know exactly what we should be adjusting is to fly repeatedly and to be able to examine the ship upon landing," Musk said.

Before SpaceX can test the heat shield repeatedly, Starship must first make it through a single flight from start to finish. It has failed to do this on all three attempts this year, following a year of progress with Starship in 2024. SpaceX guided Starship to a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean on several occasions last year.

“We have successfully brought the ship back through the atmosphere and achieved a soft landing multiple times, so we know that this is possible," Musk said. "But we have, in the process, shed many heat shield tiles, so we need to be able to do this without shedding heat shield tiles and do so repeatedly."

SpaceX also must make sure the launch pad's catch arms don't damage Starship's heat shield when it comes in for landing. This will only be attempted after SpaceX officials are comfortable they have solved the heat shield problem during tests over the ocean.

"We need to make sure we don’t scrape the tiles off as we slide along the chopstick arms," said Bill Riley, SpaceX's vice president of Starship engineering.

Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut, engineer, and materials scientist, worked on alternatives to the shuttle's heat shield beginning in the 1970s. One of his first jobs at NASA was to demonstrate the feasibility of a heat shield for the leading edge of the space shuttle's wings that used heat pipes for active cooling.

"We were interested in looking at the more durable systems," Camarda told Ars. "The first thing I ever tested was actually an all-metallic shuttle wing leading edge, and it used heat pipes, and it was built by McDonnell Douglas. It was a competitor with the reinforced carbon-carbon, the passive leading edge system."

Ultimately, NASA went with the reinforced carbon-carbon heat shield for the leading edges of the shuttle's wings and nose cap, while the belly of the shuttle was shielded by ceramic tiles. It was one of these reinforced carbon-carbon panels that broke on the space shuttle Columbia when it was hit by a piece of foam from the shuttle's external fuel tank during launch in January 2003. The damage was undetected until the shuttle broke apart during reentry 16 days later, killing all seven astronauts onboard.

Camarda flew as a mission specialist on the next shuttle flight in 2005 after NASA developed techniques to repair a damaged heat shield in space.

"I did a lot of very early on radiant heating tests and hypersonic wind tunnel tests of this all-metallic wing leading edge, and it would basically take the heat from the lower surface and basically pump it up to the upper surface, so the entire wing leading edge would glow almost at the same temperature because it was such an effective two-phase heat transfer," Camarda said.

Camarda's work in the thermal structures branch at NASA's Langley Research Center was limited to ground testing in high-temperature wind tunnels. His designs never flew on the space shuttle.

"When I saw [SpaceX] was testing different kinds of metallic heat shields, the guys... in my old branch, were all saying, 'Wow, this is phenomenal! We wish we were young again and NASA was this vivacious, you know?' But unfortunately, we didn't get to see it."

Camarda said NASA's approach to testing is a lot different from the way SpaceX handles things.

"It's amazing what these guys are doing, and they're doing it so rapidly, and they're testing a lot of things all at once," Camarda said. "I almost wonder if that's a smart thing to do. He's failing large. Is his vehicle that inexpensive that he could use it as a hypersonic flight test? Is it so inexpensive that he could afford to do that?

"At a research center, we had such limited budgets that we had to scrimp and save every little thing," Camarda said. "So, we would take a building block approach, and never be so bold as to do this very large test with multiple hundreds of changes. It's crazy."

The elephant in the room

SpaceX has blamed Starship's setbacks this year on fuel leaks and an engine malfunction. Apart from the program's in-flight failures, another Starship exploded during a ground test in June when a nitrogen tank failed.

Elon Musk didn't mention any of this when he appeared for roughly 20 minutes on SpaceX's live webcast Monday. Musk originally planned to provide a "technical update" on the X Spaces platform Sunday. In this format, Musk presumably could have answered questions from members of the space press corps and space enthusiasts hungry for details not just on the promise of a rocket as potentially revolutionary as Starship, but the obstacles SpaceX must overcome to make it a reality.

But SpaceX canceled the event without explanation. Instead, Musk appeared on SpaceX's official prelaunch livestream. Most of the discussion centered not on detailed technical updates, but on familiar Musk talking points: making humanity a multi-planet species, and why a rocket like Starship is necessary to make it happen.

After the heat shield, one of the next big test objectives for the Starship program will be in-orbit refueling. This is a crucial prerequisite for any Starship flights that travel into deep space. SpaceX's gigantic rocket is designed to haul up to 150 metric tons of payload into low-Earth orbit, but it can't go any farther without a recharge of its cryogenic propellant tanks.

This, like so much of the privately developed Starship program, is something that's never been done in space before. Musk said this is something he "hopes to demonstrate next year."

But the schedule is fuzzy. Musk has recently claimed SpaceX will send its first uncrewed Starships to Mars next year, too. That won't happen without acing orbital refueling, something that NASA officials believe will likely take multiple tries to master.

Why is NASA interested in Starship refueling? The US space agency has more than $4 billion in contracts with SpaceX to develop a human-rated version of Starship that can land astronauts on the Moon. With these contracts, NASA is counting on Starship being ready to deliver a crew to the lunar surface before China.

The Moon was conspicuously absent from Musk's discussion Monday. He said the word "Mars" at least 13 times, but didn't mention the Moon at all. During his previous presentation on Starship in May, he devoted just 40 seconds of a 40-minute talk to the Moon.

This is notable, but not a surprise. Musk has called the Moon a "distraction" and in January wrote on X that SpaceX is "going straight to Mars." Even before his falling out with President Donald Trump this summer, Musk told Ars in May that the Artemis program's "ambitions are too low."

"We should be going 1,000 times farther, and going to Mars," Musk said at the time.

Meanwhile, NASA's acting administrator, Sean Duffy, continues to reiterate the agency's goal of landing astronauts on the Moon with Starship on the Artemis III mission in 2027. Duffy, who also serves as the secretary of transportation, said last month he was assured by SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell that the company is on pace with the Starship lander.

"They said if there's a hold-up for Artemis III, it's not going to be them," Duffy said.

But it's impossible to escape the tension between the government's goals in space and those of SpaceX. Maybe a successful Starship test flight would help break the ice.

Source

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Posted Wednesday 27 August 2025 at 5:14 pm AEST (my time).

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