For many beer lovers, a nice thick head of foam is one of life's pure pleasures, and the longer that foam lasts, the better the beer-drinking experience. A team of Swiss researchers spent seven years studying why some beer foams last longer than others and found that the degree of fermentation—i.e., whether a given beer has been singly, doubly, or triply fermented—is crucial, according to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

As previously reported, foams are ubiquitous in everyday life, found in foods (whipped cream), beverages (beer, cappuccino), shaving cream and hair-styling mousse, packing peanuts, building insulation, flame-retardant materials, and so forth. All foams are the result of air being beaten into a liquid formula that contains some kind of surfactant (active surface agent), usually fats or proteins in edible foams, or chemical additives in non-edible products. That surfactant strengthens the liquid film walls of the bubbles to keep them from collapsing.

Individual bubbles typically form a sphere because that's the shape with the minimum surface area for any volume and hence is the most energy-efficient. One reason for the minimizing principle when it comes to a bubble's shape is that many bubbles can then tightly pack together to form a foam. But bubbles "coarsen" over time, the result of gravity pulling down on the liquid and thinning out the walls. Eventually, they start to look more like soccer balls (polyhedrons). In a coarsening foam, smaller bubbles are gradually absorbed by larger ones. There is less and less liquid to separate the individual bubbles, so they press together to fill the space.

This "jamming" is why foams are typically far more rigid than their gas (95 percent) and liquid (5 percent) components. The more tightly the bubbles jam together, the less they can move around and the greater the pressure inside them becomes, giving them properties of a solid.

Various factors can affect foam stability. For instance, in 2019, Japanese researchers investigated a phenomenon known as "collective bubble collapse," or CBC, in which breaking one bubble at the edge of a foam results in a cascading effect as the breakage spreads to other bubbles in the foam. They identified two distinct mechanisms for the resulting CBCs: a so-called "propagating mode," in which a broken bubble is absorbed into the liquid film, and a "penetrating mode," in which the breakage of a bubble causes droplets to shoot off and hit other bubbles, causing them to break in turn.

Higher levels of liquid in the foam slowed the spread of the collapse, and changing the viscosity of the fluid had no significant impact on how many bubbles broke in the CBC. Many industrial strategies for stabilizing foams rely on altering the viscosity; this shows those methods are ineffective. The researchers suggest focusing instead on using several different surfactants in the mixture. This would strengthen the resulting film to make it more resistant to breakage when hit by flying droplets.

However, as the authors of this latest paper note, "Most beers are not detergent solutions (though arguably some may taste that way)." They were inspired by a Belgian brewer's answer when they asked how he controlled fermentation: "By watching the foam." A stable foam is considered to be a sign of successful fermentation. The authors decided to investigate precisely how the various factors governing foam stability might be influenced by the fermentation process.

Triple that fermentation

“The idea was to directly study what happens in the thin film that separates two neighboring bubbles,” said co-author Emmanouil Chatzigiannakis of ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. “And the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of bubbles and foams is beer.”

To that end, Chatzigiannakis et al. conducted experiments on six commercial beers: two triple-fermented Belgian beers (Westmalle Tripel and Tripel Karmeliet); two Swiss lagers (Feldschlösschen and Chopfab); and two additional Belgian beers: the single-fermented Westmalle Extra and the double-fermented Westmalle Dubbel.

Single-fermented lager beers had the least stable foam, with triple-fermented beers boasting the most stable foam; the foam stability of double-fermented beers fell in the middle of the range. The team also discovered that the most important factor for foam stability isn't fixed but largely depends on the type of beer. It all comes down to surface viscosity for single-fermented lagers.

But surface viscosity is not a major factor for stable foams in double- or triple-fermented beers. Instead, stability arises from differences in surface tension, i.e., Marangoni stresses—the same phenomenon behind so-called "wine tears" and the "coffee ring effect." Similarly, when a drop of watercolor paint dries, the pigment particles of color break outward toward the rim of the drop. In the case of beer foam, the persistent currents that form as a result of those differences in surface tension lend stability to the foam.

The researchers also analyzed the protein content of the beers and found that one in particular—lipid transfer protein 1 (LPT1)—was a significant factor in stabilizing beer foams, and their form depended on the degree of fermentation. In single-fermented beers, for example, the proteins are small, round particles on the surface of the bubbles. The more proteins there are, the more the foam will be stable because those proteins form a more viscous film around the bubbles.

Those LPT1  proteins become slightly denatured during a second fermentation, forming more of a net-like structure that improves foam stability. That denaturation continues during a third fermentation, when the proteins break down into fragments with hydrophobic and hydrophilic ends, reducing surface tensions. They essentially become surfactants to make the bubbles in the foam much more stable.

That said, the team was a bit surprised to find that increasing the viscosity with additional surfactants can actually make the foam more unstable because it slows down the Marangoni effects too strongly. "The stability of the foam does not depend on individual factors linearly," said co-author Jan Vermant, also of ETH Zurich. "You can't just change 'something' and get it 'right.' The key is to work on one mechanism at a time–and not on several at once. Beer obviously does this well by nature. We now know the mechanism exactly and are able to help [breweries] improve the foam of their beers.”

The findings likely have broader applications as well. “This is an inspiration for other types of materials design, where we can start thinking about the most material-efficient ways [of creating stable foams],” said Vermant. “If we can't use classical surfactants, can we mimic the 2D networks that double-fermented beers have?” The group is now investigating how to prevent lubricants used in electric vehicles from foaming; developing sustainable surfactants that don't contain fluoride or silicon; and finding ways to use proteins to stabilize milk foam, among other projects.

DOI: Physics of Fluids, 2025. 10.1063/5.0274943  (About DOIs).

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Posted Wednesday 27 August 2025 at 5:13 pm AEST (my time).

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In early June, shortly after the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season, Google unveiled a new model designed specifically to forecast the tracks and intensity of tropical cyclones.

Part of the Google DeepMind suite of AI-based weather research models, the "Weather Lab" model for cyclones was a bit of an unknown for meteorologists at its launch. In a blog post at the time, Google said its new model, trained on a vast dataset that reconstructed past weather and a specialized database containing key information about hurricanes tracks, intensity, and size, had performed well during pre-launch testing.

"Internal testing shows that our model's predictions for cyclone track and intensity are as accurate as, and often more accurate than, current physics-based methods," the company said.

Google said it would partner with the National Hurricane Center, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Service that has provided credible forecasts for decades, to assess the performance of its Weather Lab model in the Atlantic and East Pacific basins.

All eyes on Erin

It had been a relatively quiet Atlantic hurricane season until a few weeks ago, with overall activity running below normal levels. So there were no high-profile tests of the new model. But about 10 days ago, Hurricane Erin rapidly intensified in the open Atlantic Ocean, becoming a Category 5 hurricane as it tracked westward.

From a forecast standpoint, it was pretty clear that Erin was not going to directly strike the United States, but meteorologists sweat the details. And because Erin was such a large storm, we had concerns about how close Erin would get to the East Coast of the United States (close enough, it turns out, to cause some serious beach erosion) and its impacts on the small island of Bermuda in the Atlantic.

When a storm is active, it can be difficult to discern which of the many different models provides the best forecast for a tropical cyclone. We can look at their performance with the storm to date, but even then, there are uncertainties. Only after the fact can we run the numbers and see which models did the best in predicting where a tropical system would go and how strong it got.

Now that Erin has dissipated, we can make such a determination, and in the biggest test of the Atlantic season to date, Google's Weather Lab performed the best at periods of 72 hours or less. (This is a three-day forecast for the storm).

How did DeepMind do?

You can see the data for yourself in the charts below, compiled by James Franklin, former chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the National Hurricane Center. Google's model is shown as GDMI on these graphs.

Track error performance for Hurricane Erin.

Credit: James Franklin/Blue Sky

In terms of track, Google's model not only beat the "official" track forecast from the National Hurricane Center but also bested a number of physics-based models that make global forecasts as well as hurricane-specific models.

A physics-based model is a traditional forecast model based on complex equations. Also called numerical weather prediction, such models take initial atmospheric conditions and then crunch through calculations to determine how the atmosphere will change over time.

This process requires intensive computational power but has historically served meteorology well. Error trends in hurricane track forecasts have dropped significantly over the last quarter of a century as computer hardware has improved and our ability to gather and input real-time atmospheric conditions has strengthened.

Intensity error for Hurricane Erin.

Credit: James Franklin/Blue Sky

Similarly to track forecasts, Google's model also outperformed other models for the first 72 hours when it came to intensity forecasts. Its performance at two days is particularly striking.

Time to take AI weather modeling seriously

There are a couple of additional notes to add here. The TVCN and IVCN models shown on the graphs represent "consensus" models for track and intensity that are closely watched by forecasters at the hurricane center. Their output is not generally made public, but the models essentially provide a bias-corrected average of some of the best models. In this context, bias-corrected means that the software corrects for known forecast biases in various models. So the fact that Google's model beat the consensus models is significant.

From a forecast standpoint, the period of three to five days out is the most important. This is when important decisions about evacuations and other hurricane preparations need to be made to leave time for them to be put into action. Accordingly, we would like to see AI models perform better in this forecast range.

Nevertheless, the key takeaway here is that AI weather modeling is continuing to make important strides. As forecasters look to make predictions about high-impact events like hurricanes, AI weather models are quickly becoming a very important tool in our arsenal.

This doesn't mean Google's model will be the best for every storm. In fact, that is very unlikely. But we certainly will be giving it more weight in the future.

Moreover, these are very new tools. Google's Weather Lab, along with a handful of other AI weather models, has already shown equivalent skill to the best physics-based models in a short time. If these models improve further, they may very well become the gold standard for certain types of weather prediction.

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Posted Wednesday 27 August 2025 at 5:12 pm AEST (my time).

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Tesla rejected a $60 million settlement in the wrongful death case that ended up costing the company $243 million in punitive and compensatory damages, Reuters reported today, citing newly filed legal documents.

The proposal stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the families of the victims in a 2019 crash in which a Tesla Model S driver using Autopilot crashed into a parked vehicle, killing a woman and seriously injuring her boyfriend. The lawyers representing the families revealed the settlement offer as part of a request to the court to force Tesla to pay the families’ legal fees.

Tesla rejected the settlement offer from the plaintiffs’ lawyers, while countering with a much smaller sum as well as a demand for non-disclosure, said Brett Schreiber, the attorney representing the victims’ families.

“In response to our settlement demand of [$60 million] Tesla made a settlement offer that was a fraction of the verdict and a fraction of our demand — but required confidentiality and our clients weren’t interested,” Schreiber said in a statement to The Verge.

Tesla’s rejection in the settlement is a rare glimpse into how the EV maker approaches lawsuits involving its driver assist features like Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Over the years, there have been hundreds of crashes involving Tesla’s partially autonomous features and dozens of fatalities. But the company has been able to avoid liability, either by settling with victims or convincing courts to dismiss the lawsuits.

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Posted Wednesday 27 August 2025 at 2:36 am AEST (my time).

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Flesh-eating screwworm larvae poised to invade the US have snuck into Maryland via the flesh of a person who had recently traveled to El Salvador, upping anxiety about the ghastly—and economically costly—parasite.

Reuters was first to report the case early Monday, quoting Andrew Nixon, spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, who said in an email that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had confirmed the case on August 4 in a person who had returned from a trip to El Salvador.

While other outlets have since reported that the screwworm case found in Maryland is the first human case in the US, or first travel-related case in the US, or the first case in years—none of those things are true. Screwworms are endemic in parts of South America and the Caribbean and travel-related cases have always been a threat and occasionally pop up in the US. While the CDC doesn't keep a public tally of the cases, experts at the agency have noted several travel-related human cases in the US in recent years, including one as recent as last year.

The new case in Maryland doesn't change anything in the US. "The risk to public health in the United States from this introduction is very low," Nixon wrote to Reuters. But, what has changed is that the risk of an incursion at the US-Mexico border is no longer low—in fact it's rather high currently.

Savage parasites

Screwworms were once endemic to the US before a massive eradication effort that began in the 1950s drove the population out of the US and Central America. The flies were held at bay with a biological barrier of constant releases of sterile male flies along the Darién Gap at the border of Panama and Colombia. The flies were declared eradicated from Panama in 2006. But, in 2022, the barrier was breached and the flies have worked their way back up through Central America, including El Salvador, since then. Now they are merely 370 miles or less from the Texas border, and state and federal agencies are preparing for an invasion, including with plans to build a sterile fly facility in the state.

(The latest human case may mark a "first" in the US in that it may be the first travel-related case from a country in Central America experiencing an outbreak since the previous eradication.)

Screwworms—or technically New World Screwworms (NWS)—are parasitic flies that spawn hundreds of ravenous larvae in the wounds and orifices of a wide range of warm-blooded animals. The parasites get their names from the larvae, which look and act like screws, boring and twisting into their victim's flesh. As the larvae feast on living flesh, they create repulsive, excruciatingly painful festering wounds that can easily turn fatal in wild animals and livestock. The US Department of Agriculture has estimated that an outbreak of screwworms in Texas—a major cattle-producing state—could cause $1.8 billion in economic damage.

While the infection is typically not fatal in humans, it is still extremely painful and gruesome. Adult female flies can lay up to 400 eggs at a time, and each larva in a human patient has to be physically dug out from infected flesh. As CDC Medical Officer Rebecca Chancey remarked in a clinical presentation last October about their resurgence, the larvae are "pretty tenacious and hang on pretty tightly, so oftentimes, you know, a great deal of force is required to remove them." After that, treatment can involve removing necrotic tissue, cleaning the wounds, and treating for secondary infections while trying to manage the pain.

Gruesome cases

While details of the case in Maryland are not known, the CDC in that presentation last year laid out details of three other travel-related cases. One case in 2024 was in a Florida man who had traveled to the Dominican Republic and unknowingly had a screwworm fly lay eggs in his nose. The man had previously had a cancerous tumor removed from his nose and was immunosuppressed. Back in Florida, his face abruptly began swelling, and he developed constant nose bleeds. When he went to the hospital, doctors were shocked to find his nose and sinus cavities erupting with 100 to 150 larvae.

The CDC presentation linked to a local news outlet that covered the case at the time. The outlet spoke with David Carlson, the ENT at the hospital, who said he knew the man "was in big trouble [because] there was erosion that was occurring near the skull base in very close proximity to his eye and his brain."

"There were certain larvae inside the nose that were scurrying around and looking for places to feed and others that had burrowed into tissue," Carlson added.

Carlson first tried using suction to remove the larvae, but they were too large and just clogged the suction. Each larva had to be surgically removed individually using different instrumentation.

The local news outlet, First Coast News Jacksonville, posted graphic footage of the nasal excavation on YouTube, which you can view here.

The CDC presentation also pointed to a case in 2023, in which a 64-year-old man traveled to Argentina and Brazil soon after having surgery on his cheek. Larvae were visible in the wound before he got on his flight back home to Arkansas. And in 2014, a 26-year-old woman from Washington state took a trip to the Dominican Republic, fell asleep on the beach after drinking alcohol, and woke up with a screwworm infection in her ear. You can see pictures of the tissue and larvae her doctors at home removed from her ear here.

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Posted Tuesday 26 August 2025 at 6:39 pm AEST (my time).

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Photographs of Astyanax mexicanus, surface form with eyes (top) and cave form without eyes (bottom).  

Credit: Daniel Castranova, NICHD/NIH

Time and again, whenever a population was swept into a cave and survived long enough for natural selection to have its way, the eyes disappeared. “But it’s not that everything has been lost in cavefish,” says geneticist Jaya Krishnan of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. “Many enhancements have also happened.”

Though the demise of their eyes continues to fascinate biologists, in recent years, attention has shifted to other intriguing aspects of cavefish biology. It has become increasingly clear that they haven’t just lost sight but also gained many adaptations that help them to thrive in their cave environment, including some that may hold clues to treatments for obesity and diabetes in people.

Casting off expensive eyes

It has long been debated why the eyes were lost. Some biologists used to argue that they just withered away over generations because cave-dwelling animals with faulty eyes experienced no disadvantage. But another explanation is now considered more likely, says evolutionary physiologist Nicolas Rohner of the University of Münster in Germany: “Eyes are very expensive in terms of resources and energy. Most people now agree that there must be some advantage to losing them if you don’t need them.”

Scientists have observed that mutations in different genes involved in eye formation have led to eye loss. In other words, says Krishnan, “different cavefish populations have lost their eyes in different ways.”

Meanwhile, the fishes’ other senses tend to have been enhanced. Studies have found that cave-dwelling fish can detect lower levels of amino acids than surface fish can. They also have more tastebuds and a higher density of sensitive cells alongside their bodies that let them sense water pressure and flow.

Regions of the brain that process other senses are also expanded, says developmental biologist Misty Riddle of the University of Nevada, Reno, who coauthored a 2023 article on Mexican tetra research in the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. “I think what happened is that you have to, sort of, kill the eye program in order to expand the other areas.”

Killing the processes that support the formation of the eye is quite literally what happens. Just like non-cave-dwelling members of the species, all cavefish embryos start making eyes. But after a few hours, cells in the developing eye start dying, until the entire structure has disappeared. Riddle thinks this apparent inefficiency may be unavoidable. “The early development of the brain and the eye are completely intertwined—they happen together,” she says. That means the least disruptive way for eyelessness to evolve may be to start making an eye and then get rid of it.

In what Krishnan and Rohner have called “one of the most striking experiments performed in the field of vertebrate evolution,” a study published in 2000 showed that the fate of the cavefish eye is heavily influenced by its lens. Scientists showed this by transplanting the lens of a surface fish embryo to a cavefish embryo, and vice versa. When they did this, the eye of the cavefish grew a retina, rod cells, and other important parts, while the eye of the surface fish stayed small and underdeveloped.

Starving and bingeing

It’s easy to see why cavefish would be at a disadvantage if they were to maintain expensive tissues they aren’t using. Since relatively little lives or grows in their caves, the fish are likely surviving on a meager diet of mostly bat feces and organic waste that washes in during the rainy season. Researchers keeping cavefish in labs have discovered that, genetically, the creatures are exquisitely adapted to absorbing and storing nutrients. “They’re constantly hungry, eating as much as they can,” Krishnan says.

Intriguingly, the fish have at least two mutations that are associated with diabetes and obesity in humans. In the cavefish, though, they may be the basis of some traits that are very helpful to a fish that occasionally has a lot of food but often has none. When scientists compare cavefish and surface fish kept in the lab under the same conditions, cavefish fed regular amounts of standard fish food “get fat. They get high blood sugar,” Rohner says. “But remarkably, they do not develop obvious signs of disease.”

Fats can be toxic for tissues, Rohner explains, so they are stored in fat cells. “But when these cells get too big, they can burst, which is why we often see chronic inflammation in humans and other animals that have stored a lot of fat in their tissues.” Yet a 2020 study by Rohner, Krishnan, and their colleagues revealed that even very well-fed cavefish had fewer signs of inflammation in their fat tissues than surface fish do.

Even in their sparse cave conditions, wild cavefish can sometimes get very fat, says Riddle. This is presumably because, whenever food ends up in the cave, the fish eat as much of it as possible, since there may be nothing else for a long time to come. Intriguingly, Riddle says, their fat is usually bright yellow, because of high levels of carotenoids, the substance in the carrots that your grandmother used to tell you were good for your… eyes.

“The first thing that came to our mind, of course, was that they were accumulating these because they don’t have eyes,” says Riddle. In this species, such ideas can be tested: Scientists can cross surface fish (with eyes) and cavefish (without eyes) and look at what their offspring are like. When that’s done, Riddle says, researchers see no link between eye presence or size and the accumulation of carotenoids. Some eyeless cavefish had fat that was practically white, indicating lower carotenoid levels.

Instead, Riddle thinks these carotenoids may be another adaptation to suppress inflammation, which might be important in the wild, as cavefish are likely overeating whenever food arrives.

Studies by Krishnan, Rohner, and colleagues published in 2020 and 2022 have found other adaptations that seem to help tamp down inflammation. Cavefish cells produce lower levels of certain molecules called cytokines that promote inflammation, as well as lower levels of reactive oxygen species — tissue-damaging byproducts of the body’s metabolism that are often elevated in people with obesity or diabetes.

Krishnan is investigating this further, hoping to understand how the well-fed cavefish remain healthy. Rohner, meanwhile, is increasingly interested in how cavefish survive not just overeating, but long periods of starvation, too.

No waste

On a more fundamental level, researchers still hope to figure out why the Mexican tetra evolved into cave forms while any number of other Mexican river fish that also regularly end up in caves did not. (Globally, there are more than 200 cave-adapted fish species, but species that also still have populations on the surface are quite rare.) “Presumably, there is something about the tetras’ genetic makeup that makes it easier for them to adapt,” says Riddle.

Though cavefish are now well-established lab animals used in research and are easy to purchase for that purpose, preserving them in the wild will be important to safeguard the lessons they still hold for us. “There are hundreds of millions of the surface fish,” says Rohner, but cavefish populations are smaller and more vulnerable to pressures like pollution and people drawing water from caves during droughts.

One of Riddle’s students, David Perez Guerra, is now involved in a committee to support cavefish conservation. And researchers themselves are increasingly careful, too. “The tissues of the fish collected during our lab’s last field trip benefited nine different labs,” Riddle says. “We wasted nothing.”

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

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Posted Tuesday 26 August 2025 at 5:22 am AEST (my time).

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Robomart’s RM5 is a level-four autonomous delivery vehicle comprised of 10 individual lockers.

Image: Robomart

A new company aims to take the idea of sidewalk delivery robots and supersize it.

Los Angeles-based Robomart unveiled its new delivery robot Monday, with the goal of making “on‑demand delivery work economically.” The level-four autonomous vehicle is the size of a shuttle bus and can carry up to 500 lbs of payload. With no space for a human driver, the company’s RM5 vehicle is comprised of 10 individual lockers for customer orders, allowing it to make multiple deliveries on a single run.

“Robomart exists to deliver autonomy in a way that finally makes on‑demand delivery work economically,” said Emad Suhail Rahim, co‑founder and chief strategy officer of Robomart, in a press release. “With RM5, retailers get a profitable channel for on-demand delivery and consumers get everyday essentials delivered at affordable prices. That’s the future we’re building—an autonomous Instacart that’s actually profitable.”

Like Instacart or Uber Eats, the company aims to launch its own app where customers can browse options from a variety of retailers, restaurants, and grocery stores. And Robomarts says customers will only have to pay a flat delivery rate of $3 per order, promising “no markups, no service fees, no tips.”

The Sun’s most complex mysteries could soon be solved thanks to artificial intelligence. On August 20, IBM and NASA announced the launch of Surya, a foundation model for the sun. Having been trained on large datasets of solar activity, this AI tool aims to deepen humanity’s understanding of solar weather and accurately predict solar flares—bursts of electromagnetic radiation emitted by our star that threaten both astronauts in orbit and communications infrastructure on Earth.

Surya was trained with nine years of data collected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), an instrument that has orbited the sun since 2010, taking high-resolution images every 12 seconds. The SDO captures observations of the sun at various different electromagnetic wavelengths to estimate the temperature of the star’s layers. It also takes precise measurements of the sun’s magnetic field—essential data for understanding how energy moves through the star, and for predicting solar storms.

Historically, interpreting this vast amount of diverse and complex data has been a challenge for heliophysicists. To address this challenge, IBM says that Surya’s developers used the SDO data to create a digital twin of the sun—a dynamic virtual replica of the star that is updated when new data is captured, and which can be manipulated and more easily studied.

The process began with unifying the various data formats fed into the model, allowing it to process them consistently. Next, a long-range vision transformer was employed—AI architecture that enables detailed analysis of very high-resolution images and the identification of relationships between their components, regardless of their distance.

The model’s performance was optimized using a mechanism called spectral gating, which reduces memory usage by up to 5 percent by filtering out noise in the data, thereby increasing the quality of the processed information.

More Accurate Predictions in Less Time

Its developers say that this design gives Surya a significant advantage: Unlike other algorithms that require extensive labeling of the data that’s fed to them, Surya can learn directly from raw data. This allows it to quickly adapt to different tasks and deliver reliable results in less time.

During testing, Surya demonstrated its versatility in integrating data from other instruments, such as the Parker Solar Probe and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), two other spacecraft that observe the sun. Surya also proved to be effective in various predictive functions, including predicting flare activity and solar wind speed.

According to IBM, traditional prediction models can only predict a flare one hour in advance based on signals detected in specific regions of the sun. In contrast, “Surya provided a two-hour lead by using visual information. The model is thought to be the first to provide a warning of this kind. In early testing of the model, the team said they achieved a 16 percent improvement in solar flare classification accuracy, a marked improvement over existing methods,” the company said in a statement.

NASA stresses that, although the model was designed to study heliophysics, its architecture is adaptable to different fields, from planetary science to Earth observation. “By developing a foundation model trained on NASA’s heliophysics data, we’re making it easier to analyze the complexities of the sun’s behavior with unprecedented speed and precision,” said Kevin Murphy, NASA's director of data science, in a statement. “This model empowers broader understanding of how solar activity impacts critical systems and technologies that we all rely on here on Earth.”

The risk posed by abnormal solar activity is not minor. A major solar storm could directly affect global telecommunications, collapse electrical grids, and disturb GPS navigation, satellite operations, internet connections, and radio transmissions.

Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and lead scientist on the project, emphasized that Surya’s goal is to maximize the lead time for these possible scenarios. “We want to give Earth the longest lead time possible. Our hope is that the model has learned all the critical processes behind our star’s evolution through time so that we can extract actionable insights.”

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

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Posted Tuesday 26 August 2025 at 5:08 am AEST (my time).

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SpaceX completed its 33rd cargo delivery to the International Space Station 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.

The resupply flight is part of the normal rotation of cargo and crew missions that keep the space station operating. The Dragon spacecraft's cargo haul comprised packages of fresh food, including some 1,500 tortillas, and equipment for numerous research investigations demonstrating 3D printing in microgravity and examining how the human body responds to long-duration spaceflight.

The cargo manifest is typical of most Dragon resupply flights traveling to the International Space Station. 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.

Maintaining control

"The space station's altitude slowly decays over time due to the thin amount of atmosphere still at our altitude," said Bill Spetch, NASA's operations integration manager for the International Space Station. "To counteract that drag, we must occasionally raise the altitude of the ISS."

Responsibility for maintaining the station's orbit has historically been borne by the Russian space agency, which had the sole capability to reboost the ISS after NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011. Russia's Progress cargo freighters often use their own thrusters to raise the lab's altitude or steer it out of the way of space junk. What's more, Progress ships can refill propellant tanks inside the station's Russian command post, giving the outpost the ability to perform its own maneuvers when necessary.

But that is changing as NASA works with SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, the agency's other commercial cargo transport contractor, to modify their Dragon and Cygnus supply ships for reboost missions.

Northrop's Cygnus spacecraft first demonstrated its ability to raise the station's orbit in 2022. Cygnus missions connect with the space station at a berthing port on the bottom side of the complex. In the space station's usual configuration, this location is not ideal for a reboost because it is misaligned with the lab's velocity vector, an imaginary line running through the complex along its direction of travel.

In low-Earth orbit, thrusters raise the station's altitude by adding a small amount of velocity to the lab as it circles the Earth at more than 17,000 mph. The Cygnus spacecraft compensated for its suboptimal position on the ISS by using its steerable main engine, using gimbals to move the engine's nozzle to direct its thrust in the right direction.

SpaceX's Dragon cargo vehicles, on the other hand, are able to dock at the forward end of the space station's long axis. Theoretically, this would make it easier for Dragon to boost the station's orbit, but SpaceX must set aside enough propellant for the spacecraft to travel up to the ISS and then return to Earth at the end of its mission. Dragon's 16 Draco thrusters are also not steerable, but SpaceX demonstrated they could make small adjustments to the station's orbit last year.

When NASA asked SpaceX to modify Dragon for larger reboosts, engineers devised a new propulsion pack to be placed inside the hollow trunk of the spacecraft. This unpressurized compartment is mounted below the craft's pressurized cargo cabin, and it's where SpaceX usually carries larger experiments that are robotically attached to the outside of the ISS.

For this mission, SpaceX installed two additional Draco thrusters into the spacecraft's trunk. The small rear-facing rocket engines are closely aligned with the station's velocity vector, and they're connected to six dedicated propellant tanks in the trunk containing hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, combustible fluids that ignite upon contact with one another.

"Our capsule's engines are not pointed in the right direction for optimum boost," said Sarah Walker, SpaceX's director of Dragon mission management. "So, this trunk module has engines pointed in the right direction to maximize efficiency of propellant usage."

When NASA says it's the right time, SpaceX controllers will command the Draco thrusters to ignite and gently accelerate the massive 450-ton complex. All told, the reboost kit can add about 20 mph, or 9 meters per second, to the space station's already-dizzying speed, according to Walker.

Spetch said that's roughly equivalent to the total reboost impulse provided by one-and-a-half Russian Progress cargo vehicles. That's about one-third to one-fourth of the total orbit maintenance the ISS needs in a year.

"The boost kit will help sustain the orbiting lab's altitude, starting in September, with a series of burns planned periodically throughout the fall of 2025," Spetch said.

After a few months docked at the ISS, the Dragon cargo capsule will depart and head for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. SpaceX will recover the pressurized capsule to fly again, while the trunk containing the reboost kit will jettison and burn up in the atmosphere.

While this mission is SpaceX's 33rd cargo flight to the ISS under the auspices of NASA's multibillion-dollar Commercial Resupply Services contract, it's also SpaceX's 50th overall Dragon mission to the outpost. This tally includes 17 flights of the human-rated Crew Dragon.

"With CRS-33, we'll mark our 50th voyage to ISS," Walker said. "Just incredible. Together, these missions have (carried) well over 300,000 pounds of cargo and supplies to the orbiting lab and well over 1,000 science and research projects that are not only helping us to understand how to live and work effectively in space... but also directly contributing to critical research that serves our lives here on Earth."

Future Dragon trunks will be able to accommodate a reboost kit or unpressurized science payloads, depending on NASA's needs at the space station.

The design of the Dragon reboost kit is a smaller-scale version of what SpaceX will build for a much larger Dragon trunk under a $843 million contract signed with NASA last year for the US Deorbit Vehicle. This souped-up Dragon will dock with the ISS and steer it back into the atmosphere after the lab's decommissioning in the early 2030s. The deorbit vehicle will have 46 Draco thrusters—16 to control the craft's orientation and 30 in the trunk to provide the impulse needed to drop the station out of orbit.

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Posted Tuesday 26 August 2025 at 5:06 am AEST (my time).

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems that can beat us in chess, analyze huge reams of text, and compose sonnets. This has been one of the great surprises of the modern era: physical tasks that are easy for humans turn out to be very difficult for robots, while algorithms are increasingly able to mimic our intellect.

Another surprise that has long perplexed researchers is those algorithms’ knack for their own, strange kind of creativity.

Diffusion models, the backbone of image-generating tools such as DALL·E, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion, are designed to generate carbon copies of the images on which they’ve been trained. In practice, however, they seem to improvise, blending elements within images to create something new—not just nonsensical blobs of color, but coherent images with semantic meaning. This is the “paradox” behind diffusion models, said Giulio Biroli, an AI researcher and physicist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris: “If they worked perfectly, they should just memorize,” he said. “But they don’t—they’re actually able to produce new samples.”

To generate images, diffusion models use a process known as denoising. They convert an image into digital noise (an incoherent collection of pixels), then reassemble it. It’s like repeatedly putting a painting through a shredder until all you have left is a pile of fine dust, then patching the pieces back together. For years, researchers have wondered: If the models are just reassembling, then how does novelty come into the picture? It’s like reassembling your shredded painting into a completely new work of art.

Now two physicists have made a startling claim: It’s the technical imperfections in the denoising process itself that leads to the creativity of diffusion models. In a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning 2025, the duo developed a mathematical model of trained diffusion models to show that their so-called creativity is in fact a deterministic process—a direct, inevitable consequence of their architecture.

By illuminating the black box of diffusion models, the new research could have big implications for future AI research—and perhaps even for our understanding of human creativity. “The real strength of the paper is that it makes very accurate predictions of something very nontrivial,” said Luca Ambrogioni, a computer scientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

Bottoms Up

Mason Kamb, a graduate student studying applied physics at Stanford University and the lead author of the new paper, has long been fascinated by morphogenesis: the processes by which living systems self-assemble.

One way to understand the development of embryos in humans and other animals is through what’s known as a Turing pattern, named after the 20th-century mathematician Alan Turing. Turing patterns explain how groups of cells can organize themselves into distinct organs and limbs. Crucially, this coordination all takes place at a local level. There’s no CEO overseeing the trillions of cells to make sure they all conform to a final body plan. Individual cells, in other words, don’t have some finished blueprint of a body on which to base their work. They’re just taking action and making corrections in response to signals from their neighbors. This bottom-up system usually runs smoothly, but every now and then it goes awry—producing hands with extra fingers, for example.

When the first AI-generated images started cropping up online, many looked like surrealist paintings, depicting humans with extra fingers. These immediately made Kamb think of morphogenesis: “It smelled like a failure you’d expect from a [bottom-up] system,” he said.

AI researchers knew by that point that diffusion models take a couple of technical shortcuts when generating images. The first is known as locality: They only pay attention to a single group, or “patch,” of pixels at a time. The second is that they adhere to a strict rule when generating images: If you shift an input image by just a couple of pixels in any direction, for example, the system will automatically adjust to make the same change in the image it generates. This feature, called translational equivariance, is the model’s way of preserving coherent structure; without it, it’s much more difficult to create realistic images.

In part because of these features, diffusion models don’t pay any attention to where a particular patch will fit into the final image. They just focus on generating one patch at a time and then automatically fit them into place using a mathematical model known as a score function, which can be thought of as a digital Turing pattern.

Researchers long regarded locality and equivariance as mere limitations of the denoising process, technical quirks that prevented diffusion models from creating perfect replicas of images. They didn’t associate them with creativity, which was seen as a higher-order phenomenon.

They were in for another surprise.

Made Locally

Kamb started his graduate work in 2022 in the lab of Surya Ganguli, a physicist at Stanford who also has appointments in neurobiology and electrical engineering. OpenAI released ChatGPT the same year, causing a surge of interest in the field now known as generative AI. As tech developers worked on building ever-more-powerful models, many academics remained fixated on understanding the inner workings of these systems.

Mason Kamb (pictured) started his graduate work in 2022 in the lab of Surya Ganguli.

Photograph: Charles Yang

 

Surya Ganguli is a physicist at Stanford University.

 

To that end, Kamb eventually developed a hypothesis that locality and equivariance lead to creativity. That raised a tantalizing experimental possibility: If he could devise a system to do nothing but optimize for locality and equivariance, it should then behave like a diffusion model. This experiment was at the heart of his new paper, which he wrote with Ganguli as his coauthor.

Kamb and Ganguli call their system the equivariant local score (ELS) machine. It is not a trained diffusion model, but rather a set of equations which can analytically predict the composition of denoised images based solely on the mechanics of locality and equivariance. They then took a series of images that had been converted to digital noise and ran them through both the ELS machine and a number of powerful diffusion models, including ResNets and UNets.

The results were “shocking,” Ganguli said: Across the board, the ELS machine was able to identically match the outputs of the trained diffusion models with an average accuracy of 90 percent—a result that’s “unheard of in machine learning,” Ganguli said.

The results appear to support Kamb’s hypothesis. “As soon as you impose locality, [creativity] was automatic; it fell out of the dynamics completely naturally,” he said. The very mechanisms which constrained diffusion models’ window of attention during the denoising process—forcing them to focus on individual patches, regardless of where they’d ultimately fit into the final product—are the very same that enable their creativity, he found. The extra-fingers phenomenon seen in diffusion models was similarly a direct by-product of the model’s hyperfixation on generating local patches of pixels without any kind of broader context.

Experts interviewed for this story generally agreed that although Kamb and Ganguli’s paper illuminates the mechanisms behind creativity in diffusion models, much remains mysterious. For example, large language models and other AI systems also appear to display creativity, but they don’t harness locality and equivariance.

“I think this is a very important part of the story,” Biroli said, “[but] it’s not the whole story.”

Creating Creativity

For the first time, researchers have shown how the creativity of diffusion models can be thought of as a by-product of the denoising process itself, one that can be formalized mathematically and predicted with an unprecedentedly high degree of accuracy. It’s almost as if neuroscientists had put a group of human artists into an MRI machine and found a common neural mechanism behind their creativity that could be written down as a set of equations.

The comparison to neuroscience may go beyond mere metaphor: Kamb and Ganguli’s work could also provide insight into the black box of the human mind. “Human and AI creativity may not be so different,” said Benjamin Hoover, a machine learning researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and IBM Research who studies diffusion models. “We assemble things based on what we experience, what we’ve dreamed, what we’ve seen, heard, or desire. AI is also just assembling the building blocks from what it’s seen and what it’s asked to do.” Both human and artificial creativity, according to this view, could be fundamentally rooted in an incomplete understanding of the world: We’re all doing our best to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, and every now and then we generate something that’s both new and valuable. Perhaps this is what we call creativity.

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 25 August 2025 at 5:30 am AEST (my time).

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STARBASE, Texas—A beehive of aerospace technicians, construction workers, and spaceflight fans descended on South Texas this weekend in advance of the next test flight of SpaceX's gigantic Starship rocket, the largest vehicle of its kind ever built.

Towering 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall, the rocket will lift off during a one-hour launch window beginning at 6:30 pm CDT (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC) Sunday. The main concern for Sunday's launch attempt will be weather conditions at Starbase, located a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. There's just a 45 percent chance of favorable weather for liftoff Sunday, according to SpaceX.

It will take about 66 minutes for the rocket to travel from the launch pad in Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. You can watch the test flight live on SpaceX's official website. We've also embedded a live stream from Spaceflight Now and LabPadre below.

This will be the 10th full-scale test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster stage. It's the fourth flight of an upgraded version of Starship conceived as a stepping stone to a more reliable, heavier-duty version of the rocket designed to carry up to 150 metric tons, or some 330,000 pounds, of cargo to pretty much anywhere in the inner part of our Solar System.

But this iteration of Starship, known as Block 2 or Version 2, has been anything but reliable. After reeling off a series of increasingly successful flights last year with the first-generation Starship and Super Heavy booster, SpaceX has encountered repeated setbacks since debuting Starship Version 2 in January.

Now, there are just two Starship Version 2s left to fly, including the vehicle poised for launch Sunday. Then, SpaceX will move on to Version 3, the design intended to go all the way to low-Earth orbit, where it can be refueled for longer expeditions into deep space.

Starship's promised cargo capacity is unparalleled in the history of rocketry. The privately-developed rocket's enormous size, coupled with SpaceX's plan to make it fully reusable, could enable cargo and human missions to the Moon and Mars. SpaceX's most conspicuous contract for Starship is with NASA, which plans to use a version of the ship as a human-rated Moon lander for the agency's Artemis program. With this contract, Starship is central to the US government's plans to try to beat China back to the Moon.

Closer to home, SpaceX intends to use Starship to haul massive loads of more powerful Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit. The US military is interested in using Starship for a range of national security missions, some of which could scarcely be imagined just a few years ago. SpaceX wants its factory to churn out a Starship rocket every day, approximately the same rate Boeing builds its workhorse 737 passenger jets.

Starship, of course, is immeasurably more complex than an airliner, and it sees temperature extremes, aerodynamic loads, and vibrations that would destroy a commercial airplane.

For any of this to become reality, SpaceX needs to begin ticking off a lengthy to-do list of technical milestones. The interim objectives include things like catching and reusing Starships, in-orbit ship-to-ship refueling, and finally long-duration spaceflight to reach the Moon and stay there for weeks, months, or years. For a time late last year, it appeared as if SpaceX might be on track to reach at least the first two of these milestones by now.

Instead, SpaceX's schedule for catching and reusing Starships, and refueling ships in orbit, has slipped well into next year. A Moon landing is probably at least several years away. And a touchdown on Mars? Maybe in the 2030s. Before Starship can sniff those milestones, engineers must get the rocket to survive from liftoff through splashdown. This would confirm recent changes made to the ship's heat shield work as expected.

Three test flights attempting to do just this ended prematurely in January, March, and May. These failures prevented SpaceX from gathering data on several different tile designs, including insulators made of ceramic and metallic materials, and a tile with "active cooling" to fortify the craft as it reenters the atmosphere.

The heat shield is supposed to protect the rocket's stainless steel skin from temperatures reaching 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). During last year's test flights, it worked well enough for Starship to guide itself to an on-target controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, halfway around the world from SpaceX's launch site in Starbase, Texas.

But the ship lost some of its tiles during each flight last year, causing damage to the ship's underlying structure. While this wasn't bad enough to prevent the vehicle from reaching the ocean intact, it would cause difficulties in refurbishing the rocket for another flight. Eventually, SpaceX wants to catch Starships returning from space with giant robotic arms back at the launch pad. The vision, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, is to recover the ship, quickly mount it on another booster, refuel it, and launch it again.

If SpaceX can accomplish this, the ship must return from space with its heat shield in pristine condition. The evidence from last year's test flights showed engineers had a long way to go for that to happen.

The Starship setbacks this year have been caused by problems in the ship's propulsion and fuel systems. Another Starship exploded on a test stand in June at SpaceX's sprawling rocket development facility in South Texas. SpaceX engineers identified different causes for each of the failures. You can read about them in our previous story.

Apart from testing the heat shield, the goals for Sunday's Starship flight include testing an engine-out capability on the Super Heavy booster. Engineers will intentionally disable one of the booster's Raptor engines used to slow down for landing, and instead use another Raptor engine from the rocket's middle ring. At liftoff, 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines will power the Super Heavy booster off the pad.

SpaceX won't try to catch the booster back at the launch pad Sunday, as it did on three occasions late last year and earlier this year. The booster catches have been one of the bright spots for the Starship program as progress on the rocket's upper stage floundered. SpaceX reused a previously-flown Super Heavy booster for the first time on the most recent Starship launch in May.

The booster landing experiment on Sunday's flight will happen a few minutes after launch over the Gulf of Mexico east of the Texas coastline. Meanwhile, six Raptor engines will fire until approximately T+plus 9 minutes to accelerate the ship, or upper stage, into space.

The ship is programmed to release eight Starlink satellite simulators from its payload bay in a test of the craft's payload deployment mechanism. That will be followed by a brief restart of one of the ship's Raptor engines to adjust its trajectory for reentry, set to begin around 47 minutes into the mission.

If Starship makes it that far, that'll be when engineers finally get a taste of the heat shield data they were hungry for at the start of the year.

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Posted Monday 25 August 2025 at 5:28 am AEST (my time).

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In physics, we have a bunch of constants that are used in models to explain how the world works. These are fixed numbers that we plug into equations along with our variables. For example, the universal gravitational constant is used in predicting the motion of any falling object. That’s G = 6.6743 × 10⁻¹¹ m^3/kg⋅s².

What’s so weird about these constants is that they have very precise values that seem kind of random. I mean, why 6.6743 and not 6.6744? All we know is that they work. They’re not derived theoretically, just measured, with more and more precision over time as our instruments improve.

Last week I talked about the electric constant, also known rather whimsically as the “permittivity of free space.” It determines (among other things) how electrons and protons interact to form molecules—kind of a big deal for the existence of life, the universe, and you know, everything.

Today we’re looking at the magnetic constant, or the permeability of free space. It determines the strength of magnetic fields in a vacuum (and by extension in air). It’s also a pretty big deal. For starters, without magnetic fields, there’d be no light in the universe, since light is electromagnetic radiation.

In fact, electric and magnetic forces are intrinsically connected, and humans have learned how to harness this interaction to do all kinds of cool things like powering electric motors and generating electricity. Let’s see how it works!

A Pragmatical Note

First I have to fess up. I said the values of constants are measured, not derived. That’s not always entirely true. For instance, the speed of light (c) is considered a fundamental constant, but it’s related to the electric constant (ε₀) and the magnetic constant (μ₀)—the permittivity and permeability of free space—as shown by this equation:

This means these three values can’t be independent; if you know two of them, you can derive the third. How do physicists deal with this? We define the speed of light as exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. (How do we know it’s exact? Because we define a meter as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second.) Then we measure the magnetic constant (μ₀) and use that value along with the speed of light to calculate the electric constant (ε₀).

Maybe that seems like cheating, but to even start doing actual science, at some point we have to make up arbitrary units and define some parameters. In fact, when you come down to it, all systems of measurement are made up, just like all words are made up.

Permeability of Free Space

Magnetic fields (represented by the symbol B) can be created by magnets, as shown in the photo up top. But because of that interdependence we talked about, they can also be made by moving electrical charges. (I’m using the shorthand term “charges” for charged particles, like electrons.) This is described by the Biot-Savart law:

You can see the magnetic constant (μ₀) in there. We also have the value of the electric charge (q) moving with a certain velocity (v). So this says the magnetic field increases with the electric charge and decreases with the distance (r) from the moving charge—and the magnetic constant tells us precisely how much it varies.

Of course, we don’t deal with individual moving electrons very often. But we deal with streams of moving electrons all the time: That’s electric current, which we can measure. If we know the charge on the particles in coulombs, then the number of coulombs flowing per second gives us the current (I) in amperes. And we can write the equation above in terms of current: B = μ₀I/(2πr).

It’s Everywhere

What this tells us is that electric current generates a magnetic field. This is used in all kinds of machines. For instance, it gives us electromagnets, where the magnetic force can be turned on and off to move metal objects in factories and scrapyards. It’s also how audio speakers create sound: An electric signal vibrates a magnetic driver, which generates pressure waves in the air.

Also magnetic fields influence electric currents. This is how motors work. There's a current running through a coil of wire in the presence of a magnetic field that's usually created with some permanent magnets. The force on the coil of wire causes it to turn, and there's your motor. It could be a fan motor, part of your AC compressor, or the main drive for an electric car.

Wait! There's more. Just as a changing electric field creates a magnetic field, a changing magnetic field creates an electric field—and that produces an electric current. This is how most of our power is generated. Some energy source—steam, wind, moving water, whatever—spins a turbine that rotates a coil within a magnetic field. The changing magnetic flux induces a voltage in the coil, converting mechanical energy into electrical energy that can be transmitted to your home.

Measuring the Magnetic Constant

How can we measure μ₀? One method uses what’s called a current balance. A simple version of this has two parallel wires carrying electric current (I) in opposite directions, as shown in the diagram below. Then you suspend the two wires with strings so that they can move apart, like this:

The current in each wire creates a magnetic field at the location of the other wire, and this pushes them apart. As they move away, the magnetic force decreases and the horizontal component of the tension in the support string increases (because of the change in angle). Once these two forces are equal, the wires will be “balanced.”

If you know the value of the electric current and the distance between the wires (r), you can determine the magnetic constant, μ₀. Then, as we showed above, you can use this value along with the defined speed of light to calculate the electric constant, ε₀.

So yeah, all in all, you could say the magnetic constant is pretty important. Oh, and what is that constant value? According to the International Committee for Weights and Measures, μ₀ = 1.256637061272 × 10^–6 N/A². No more, no less.

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Posted Monday 25 August 2025 at 5:24 am AEST (my time).

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The US military's reusable winged spaceship rocketed back into orbit Thursday night atop a SpaceX rocket, kicking off a mission that will, among other things, demonstrate how future spacecraft can navigate without relying on GPS signals.

The core of the navigation experiment is what the Space Force calls the "world's highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space."

This is one of many payloads mounted on the military's X-37B spaceplane when it lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 11:50 pm EDT Thursday (03:50 UTC Friday).

The Falcon 9 rocket steered downrange and headed northeast from Florida's Space Coast. The rocket's first stage booster detached and returned to an on-target landing at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, while Falcon's upper stage propelled the X-37B into low-Earth orbit.

Space Force officials declared the launch a success in a press release early Friday. This is the eighth flight of an X-37B spaceplane since the vehicle's debut in April 2010. The X-37B program consists of two Boeing-built spaceplanes, each resembling smaller, unpiloted solar-powered versions of NASA's retired space shuttle orbiters. The program is managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office in partnership with the Space Force.

Military leaders tout the X-37B's purpose as a technological testbed that can ferry experiments from Earth to space and back. 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.

On this mission, the Space Force says the X-37B carries instrumentation to demonstrate quantum navigation, and a laser inter-satellite relay terminal to allow the spaceplane to connect with other spacecraft in orbit.

The quantum sensor package will "inform accurate unaided navigation in space by detecting rotation and acceleration of atoms without reliance on satellite networks like traditional GPS," the Space Force said in a statement before the launch.

Preparing for the worst

The Space Force operates the Global Positioning System satellite network to provide navigation services to ships, airplanes, and land vehicles. Originally conceived as a military service, GPS is now vital to everyday civilian life, whether it's in commercial aviation or finding directions to the nearest gas station.

The essential nature of GPS signals make them a juicy target for jamming and spoofing, particularly in geopolitical hotspots such as war zones in the Middle East, Ukraine, and parts of Russia. A wider war between the United States and a powerful adversary, like Russia or China, would likely include attempts to disrupt GPS signals across more regions.

Recognizing the importance of GPS signals, the Space Force said the quantum sensor experiment on the X-37B spaceplane will test technology useful for navigation in "GPS-denied environments." Quantum navigation could also help spacecraft navigate in deep space, around the Moon or other planets, where missions can't count on receiving GPS signals.

The quantum experiment flying on the X-37B is the product of an initiative led by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Two companies, Vector Atomic and Honeywell Aerospace, worked together to develop and build an atomic gyroscope to undergo qualification for spaceflight.

By measuring the rotation and acceleration of atoms, this new kind of gyroscope can sense motion with improved precision compared to conventional gyros flown on drones, airplanes, and satellites. The quantum payload on the X-37B packages the atomic gyro into an inertial measurement unit, a type of device used on many spacecraft to determine how they have moved through three-dimensional space, what direction they're heading, and how fast they're going.

This experiment is part of the DIU's Transition of Quantum Sensing program, which plans to conduct field tests of quantum sensors in all military domains: land, sea, air, and space.

"Quantum inertial sensors are not only scientifically intriguing, but they also have direct defense applications,” said Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, an Air Force engineer who manages the DIU's emerging technology portfolio. "If we can field devices that provide a leap in sensitivity and precision for observing platform motion over what is available today, then there's an opportunity for strategic gains across the DoD."

Teaching an old dog new tricks

The Pentagon's twin X-37Bs have logged more than 4,200 days in orbit, equivalent to about 11-and-a-half years. The spaceplanes have flown in secrecy for nearly all of that time.

The most recent flight, Mission 7, ended in March with a runway landing at Vandenberg after a mission of more than 14 months that carried the spaceplane higher than ever before, all the way to an altitude approaching 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers). The high-altitude elliptical orbit required a boost on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

In the final phase of the mission, ground controllers commanded the X-37B to gently dip into the atmosphere to demonstrate the spacecraft could use "aerobraking" maneuvers to bring its orbit closer to Earth in preparation for reentry.

Now, on Mission 8, the spaceplane heads back to low-Earth orbit hosting quantum navigation and laser communications experiments. Few people, if any, envisioned these kinds of missions flying on the X-37B when it first soared to space 15 years ago. At that time, quantum sensing was confined to the lab, and the first laser communication demonstrations in space were barely underway. SpaceX hadn't revealed its plans for the Falcon Heavy rocket, which the X-37B needed to get to its higher orbit on the last mission.

The laser communications experiments on this flight will involve optical inter-satellite links with "proliferated commercial satellite networks in low-Earth orbit," the Space Force said. This is likely a reference to SpaceX's Starlink or Starshield broadband satellites. Laser links enable faster transmission of data, while offering more security against eavesdropping or intercepts.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force's chief of space operations, said in a statement that the laser communications experiment "will mark an important step in the US Space Force's ability to leverage proliferated space networks as part of a diversified and redundant space architectures. In so doing, it will strengthen the resilience, reliability, adaptability and data transport speeds of our satellite communications architecture."

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Posted Saturday 23 August 2025 at 5:23 am AEST (my time).

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A team of astronomers has found what appears to be a previously undiscovered moon orbiting Uranus. If confirmed, this finding would mean the gigantic blue-green ice planet would have 29 moons. The discovery was made using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), extending the instrument’s list of achievements and raising expectations that other new discoveries might be made within the solar system.

With JWST’s infrared camera, the researchers took ten 40-minute exposures of Uranus and detected a tiny, fuzzy dot accompanying the icy giant’s other moons. With the preliminary information gathered, the researchers estimate that it is a body of about 10 kilometers in diameter, located 56,000 kilometers from the center of the planet.

This new satellite is part of Uranus’ group of 13 inner moons, which are characterized by their irregular shapes and low brightness. It orbits just beyond the outer edge of the planet’s main ring system, along with other nearby moons such as Mab, Cordelia, and Ophelia.

At the moment, the object has the code name S/2025 U1. To confirm its status as a natural satellite, the team plans to make further observations; if its status as a moon is confirmed, it will then be given an official name. Traditionally, Uranus’ moons have been named after characters from works by William Shakespeare or Alexander Pope—such as Francisco, Stefano, Miranda, Trinculo, Ariel, and so on. Any new name for it or any other newly discovered satellite must be approved by the International Astronomical Union.

William Herschel discovered the first two moons of Uranus in 1787—Titania and Oberon—six years after identifying the planet. Dozens of others have since been found. The last time observatories detected an official satellite was in 2003, when Margaret was found using the Hubble telescope. Along with S/2025 U1, there is another unnamed moon also awaiting confirmation, S/2023 U1, which was discovered two years ago. In total, the scientific community has identified 29 moons (including these two awaiting confirmation).

The discovery of S/2025 U1 marks a new step in the observation of the solar system. Neither the Hubble Telescope nor the Voyager 2 probe that flew by Uranus in 1986 were able to find this moon; the fact that the JWST was able to uncover it suggests there is still more complexity to be discovered within Uranus’ ring system, and that thanks to this new tool, more discoveries could follow.

“Looking forward, the discovery of this moon underscores how modern astronomy continues to build upon the legacy of missions like Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus on January 24, 1986, and gave humanity its first close-up look at this mysterious world,” said Maryame El Moutamid, leader of the team that conducted the study, in a NASA statement. “Now, nearly four decades later, the James Webb Space Telescope is pushing that frontier even farther.”

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

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Posted Saturday 23 August 2025 at 5:18 am AEST (my time).

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“I was talking with my colleagues at a conference 10 years ago and I just casually said that everyone loves music,” recalls Josep Marco Pallarés, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona. But it was a statement he started to question almost immediately, given there were clinical cases in psychiatry where patients reported deriving absolutely no pleasure from listening to any kind of tunes.

So, Pallarés and his team spent the past 10 years researching the neural mechanisms behind a condition they called specific musical anhedonia: the inability to enjoy music.

The wiring behind joy

When we like something, it is usually a joint effect of circuits in our brain responsible for perception—be it perception of taste, touch, or sound—and reward circuits that give us a shot of dopamine in response to nice things we experience. For a long time, scientists attributed a lack of pleasure from things most people find enjoyable to malfunctions in one or more of those circuits.

You can’t enjoy music when the parts of the brain that process auditory stimuli don’t work properly, since you can’t hear it in the way that you would if the system were intact. You also can’t enjoy music when the reward circuit refuses to release that dopamine, even if you can hear it loud and clear. Pallarés, though, thought this traditional idea lacked a bit of explanatory power.

“When your reward circuit doesn’t work, you don’t experience enjoyment from anything, not just music,” Pallarés says. “But some people have no hearing impairments and can enjoy everything else—winning money, for example. The only thing they can’t enjoy is music.”

To reliably screen for such people, his team designed the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire: a list of questions meant to assess different ways people engage with music, ranging from mood regulation to sensorimotor experiences like tapping or dancing. Using it, Pallarés found 15 people who scored very low on his questionnaire and who apparently did not enjoy music at all. They were compared to 15 who scored very high and were basically music lovers, and another 15 who were middle-of-the-road between those two extremes. Then, his team put all of them in a functional MRI brain scanner and played them some nice tunes. And he also had them gamble.

Connectivity issues

The experiment consisted of two tests. The first was simply listening to music. The second involved betting on choosing a winning number out of two randomly presented options, with the chance to win a modest payout. Using  the fMRI, they were able to see that gambling wins lit up the reward circuit in the 15 people Pallarés suspected of specific musical anhedonia. Music on the other hand, had no effect on reward circuits.

In the music lovers, songs activated the same circuit much more than winning money, and the middle-of-the-road group saw similar activity in both scenarios.

What made people with specific musical anhedonia different from the two other groups was how the different regions in the brain communicated with each other.

“Based on those fMRI experiments, we could figure out if it was about the connection between two different circuits—the one responsible for perception and the one responsible for reward—rather than about the functioning of those circuits themselves,” Pallarés explains. People who did not derive pleasure from music could hear it, as the auditory networks in their brains lit up on the scans (as they should). The reward circuit was also up and running, but the connection between them wasn’t working for some reason; it was as if information simply couldn’t get through.

This disconnection, Pallarés thinks, may involve a neural mechanism similar to that involved in many other conditions that make people unable to enjoy things like food, sex, or social interactions. But beyond that, we don’t know a lot.

Nature vs. nurture

The first thing that’s uncertain is whether specific musical anhedonia is a stable trait. Is the disconnection in the brain that seemingly causes it permanent, or can it be modulated through some kind of training, therapy, or even pharmacological interventions? Pallarés and his colleagues are already busy working on these questions, having started by looking at our DNA.

“We want to learn to what extent specific musical anhedonia has genetic basis and to what extent it stems from cultural conditioning,” Pallarés says. His co-authors have already performed an initial study to trace the genes responsible for this condition. “They found about 50 percent of variance in our sensitivity to music is explained by the genetic component,” Pallarés explains.

Once the nature vs. nurture question is settled, the team wants to see if the mechanism generalizes to other, similar conditions. “We want to see if a similar disconnection causes other disorders which are also very specific to certain stimuli. Then we’ll have to go and see if we can revert that,” Pallarés says.

Pallarés' paper outlining his work on specific musical anhedonia is published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.06.015

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Posted Saturday 23 August 2025 at 5:17 am AEST (my time).

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Climate change is warming ocean waters, making the environment more acidic thanks to the absorption of carbon monoxide from the atmosphere. This endangers various marine species, and monitoring those changes is vitally important. But it can be challenging to reach the deepest waters without the aid of very expensive equipment. Moon jellyfish can swim to those depths, however, making them a potential ally in the quest to study the deep ocean.

That's why researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder) have built "cyborg" jellyfish equipped with tiny microelectronics devices, with the aim of gathering critical data on temperature, acidity, and other relevant properties. To further improve their hybrid creations, the team has been studying the biomechanics of how jellyfish swim. Their research also involves analyzing water flow patterns generated by swimming jellies using suspended starchy biodegradable particles, described in the group's most recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Creating biohybrid creatures is a well-established field. For instance, as we previously reported, scientists have been intrigued by the potential of cyborg insects since the 1990s, when researchers began implanting tiny electrodes into cockroach antennae and shocking them to direct their movements. The idea was to use them as hybrid robots for search-and-rescue applications.

In 2015, Texas A&M scientists found that implanting electrodes into a cockroach's ganglion (the neuron cluster that controls its front legs) was remarkably effective at successfully steering the roaches 60 percent of the time. They outfitted the roaches with tiny backpacks synced with a remote controller and administered shocks to disrupt the insect's balance, forcing it to move in the desired direction.

In 2021, scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore turned Madagascar hissing cockroaches into cyborgs, implanting electrodes in sensory organs known as cerci that were then connected to tiny computers. Applying electrical current enabled them to steer the cockroaches successfully 94 percent of the time in simulated disaster scenes in the lab.

And earlier this year, Japanese scientists transformed cicadas into cyborg insects capable of "playing" Pachelbel's Canon. The idea is that cyborg cicadas might one day be used to transmit warning messages during emergencies. (You can listen to the sounds here.) They essentially hijacked the tymbals of male cicadas by attaching electrodes to create insect-computer hybrid speakers. A user interface sent electrical signals through an amplifier circuit and then on to the electrodes on the cicadas. Microphones recorded their chirps in response. Eventually, the team was able to induce the cicadas to produce specific musical notes over more than three octaves to "play" recognizable tunes.

Swimming with jellies

And now we have biohybrid moon jellyfish. Nicole Wu, an engineer at CU Boulder, built her first cyborg jellyfish in 2020, testing them in the shallow ocean waters off the coast of Woods Hole in Massachusetts. She describes the system as being akin to a pacemaker for the heart, electrically stimulating the jellies' swimming muscles to cause contractions, thereby steering them in a preferred direction. While moon jellies don't have brains or spinal cords, they do have rudimentary overlapping nerve nets that are well-suited to Wu's purposes.

"There's really something special about the way moon jellies swim," said Wu, describing them as one of the most energy-efficient animals on the planet. "We want to unlock that to create more energy-efficient, next-generation underwater vehicles."

Understanding the wakes and vortices that jellyfish produce as they swim is crucial, according to Wu, et al. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is a vital tool for studying flow phenomena and biomechanical propulsion. PIV essentially tracks tiny tracer particles suspended in water by illuminating them with laser light. The technique usually relies on hollow glass spheres, polystyrene beads, aluminum flakes, or synthetic granules with special optical coatings to enhance the reflection of light.

These particles are readily available and have the right size and density for flow measurements, but they are very expensive, costing as much as $200 per pound in some cases. And they have associated health and environmental risks: glass microspheres can cause skin or eye irritation, for example, while it's not a good idea to inhale polystyrene beads or aluminum flakes. They are also not digestible by animals and can cause internal damage. Several biodegradable options have been proposed, such as yeast cells, milk, micro algae, and potato starch, which are readily available and cheap, costing as little as $2 per pound.

Wu thought starch particles were the most promising as biodegradable tracers and decided to study several different kinds of starches to identify the best candidate: specifically, corn starch, arrowroot starch, baking powder, jojoba beads, and walnut shell powder. Each type of particle was suspended in water tanks with moon jellyfish, tracking their movement with a PIV system. They evaluated their performance based on the particles' size, density, and laser-scattering properties.

Of the various candidates, corn starch and arrowroot starch proved best suited for PIV applications, thanks to their density and uniform size distribution, while arrowroot starch performed best when it came to laser scattering tests. But corn starch would be well-suited for applications that require larger tracer particles since it produced larger laser scattering dots in the experiments. Both candidates matched the performance of commonly used synthetic PIV tracer particles in terms of accurately visualizing flow structures resulting from the swimming jellyfish.

DOI: Physical Review Fluids, 2025. 10.1103/bg66-976x  (About DOIs).

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Posted Saturday 23 August 2025 at 5:14 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.07 of the Rocket Report! It's that time again: another test flight of SpaceX's massive Starship vehicle. In this week's report, we have a review of what went wrong on Flight 9 in May and a look at the stakes for the upcoming mission, which are rather high. The flight test is presently scheduled for 6:30 pm local time in Texas (23:30 UTC) on Sunday, and Ars will be on hand to provide in-depth coverage.

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

Firefly looks at possibility of Alpha launches in Japan. On Monday, Space Cotan Co., Ltd., operator of the Hokkaido Spaceport, announced it entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Texas-based launch company to conduct a feasibility study examining the practicality of launching Firefly’s Alpha rocket from its launch site, Spaceflight Now reports. Located in Taiki Town on the northern Japanese Island of Hokkaido, the spaceport bills itself as “a commercial spaceport that serves businesses and universities in Japan and abroad, as well as government agencies and other organizations.” It advertises launches from 42 degrees to 98 degrees, including Sun-synchronous orbits.

Talks are exploratory for now ... "We look forward to exploring the opportunity to launch our Alpha rocket from Japan, which would allow us to serve the larger satellite industry in Asia and add resiliency for US allies with a proven orbital launch vehicle," said Adam Oakes, vice president of launch at Firefly Aerospace. All six of Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket launches so far took off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The company is slated to launch its seventh Alpha rocket on a mission for Lockheed Martin, but a date hasn’t been announced while the company continues to work through a mishap investigation stemming from its sixth Alpha launch in April. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Chinese methane rocket fails. A flight test of one of Chinese commercial rocket developer LandSpace Technology's methane-powered rockets failed on Friday after the carrier rocket experienced an "anomaly," Reuters reports. The Beijing-based startup became the world's first company to launch a methane-liquid oxygen rocket with the successful launch of Zhuque-2 in July 2023. This was the third flight of an upgraded version of the rocket, known as Zhuque-2E Y2.

Comes as larger vehicle set to make debut ... The launch was carrying four Guowang low-Earth orbit Internet satellites for the Chinese government. The failure was due to some issue with the upper stage of the vehicle, which is capable of lofting about 3 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. LandSpace, one of China's most impressive 'commercial' space companies, has been working toward the development and launch of the medium-lift Zhuque-3 vehicle. This rocket was due to make its debut later this year, and it's not clear whether this setback with a smaller vehicle will delay that flight.

Avio gains French Guiana launch license. The French government has granted Italian launch services provider Avio a 10-year license to carry out Vega rocket operations from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana, European Spaceflight reports. The decision follows approval by European Space Agency Member States of Italy’s petition to allow Avio to market and manage Vega rocket launches independently of Arianespace, which had overseen the rocket’s operations since its introduction.

From Vega to Vega ... With its formal split from Arianespace now imminent, Avio is required to have its own license to launch from the Guiana Space Centre, which is owned and operated by the French government. Avio will make use of the ELV launch complex at the Guiana Space Centre for the launch of its Vega C rockets. The pad was previously used for the original Vega rocket, which was officially retired in September 2024. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

First space rocket launch from Canada this century. Students from Concordia University cheered and whistled as the Starsailor rocket lifted off on Cree territory on August 15, marking the first of its size to be launched by a student team, Radio Canada International reports. The students hoped Starsailor would enter space, past the Kármán line, which is at an altitude of 100 kilometers, before coming back down. But the rocket separated earlier than expected. The livestream can be seen here.

Persistence is thy name ... This was Canada's first space launch in more than 25 years, and the first to be achieved by a team of students, according to the university. Originally built for a science competition, the 13-meter tall rocket was left without a contest after the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the team, made up of over 700 members since 2018, pressed forward with the goal of making history and launching the most powerful student-built rocket. (submitted by ArcticChris, durenthal, and CD)

SpaceX launches its 100th Falcon 9 of the year. SpaceX launched its 100th Falcon 9 rocket of the year Monday morning, Spaceflight Now reports. The flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base carried another batch of Starlink optimized V2 Mini satellites into low-Earth orbit. The Starlink 17-5 mission was also the 72nd SpaceX launch of Starlink satellites so far in 2025. It brings the total number of Starlink satellites orbited in 2025 to 1,786.

That's quite a cadence ... The Monday morning flight was a notable milestone for SpaceX. It is just the second time in the company’s history that it achieved 100 launches in one calendar year, a feat so far unmatched by any other American space company, and it is ahead of last year's pace. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, said on the social media site X, "For reference on the increase in launch rate from last year, we hit 100 on Oct 20th in 2024. SpaceX is likely to launch more Falcon 9s this year than the total number of Space Shuttle missions NASA flew in three decades. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

X-37B launch set for Thursday night. The US Department of Defense’s reusable X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is about to make its eighth overall flight into orbit, NASASpaceflight.com reports. Vehicle 1, the first X-37B to fly, is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on Thursday at 11:50 pm ET (03:50 UTC on Friday, August 22). The launch window is just under four hours long.

Will fly for an unspecified amount of time ... Falcon 9 will follow a northeast trajectory to loft the X-37B into a low-Earth orbit, possibly a circular orbit at 500 km altitude inclined 49.5 degrees to the equator. The Orbital Test Vehicle 8 mission will spend an unspecified amount of time in orbit, with missions lasting hundreds of days in orbit before landing on a runway. The booster supporting this mission, B1092-6, will perform a return-to-launch-site landing and touchdown on the concrete pad at Landing Zone 2. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Report finds SpaceX pays few taxes. SpaceX has received billions of dollars in federal contracts over its more than two-decade existence, but it has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002, The New York Times reports. The rocket maker’s finances have long been secret because the company is privately held. But the documents reviewed by the Times show that SpaceX can seize on a legal tax benefit that allows it to use the more than $5 billion in losses it racked up by late 2021 to offset paying future taxable income.

Use of tax benefit called 'quaint' ... Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a group that investigates corruption and waste in the government, said the tax benefit had historically been aimed at encouraging companies to stay in business during difficult times. It was "quaint" that SpaceX was using it, she said, as it "was clearly not intended for a company doing so well." It may be quaint, but it is legal. And the losses are very real. Since its inception, SpaceX has invested heavily in its technology and poured revenues into further advances. This has been incredibly beneficial to NASA and the Department of Defense. (submitted by Frank OBrien)

There's a lot on the line for Starship's next launch. In a feature, Ars reviews the history of Starbase and its production site, culminating in the massive new Starfactory building that encompasses 1 million square feet. The opening of the sleek, large building earlier this year came as SpaceX continues to struggle with the technical development of the Starship vehicle. Essentially, the article says, SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine?

Three failures in a row ... SpaceX has not had a good run of things with the ambitious Starship vehicle this year. Three times, in January, March, and May, the vehicle took flight. And three times, the upper stage experienced significant problems during ascent, and the vehicle was lost on the ride up to space, or just after. Sources at SpaceX believe the upper stage issues can be resolved, especially with a new "Version 3" of Starship due to make its debut late this year or early in 2026. But the acid test will only come on upcoming flights, beginning Sunday with the vehicle's tenth test flight.

China tests lunar rocket. In recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030, Ars reports. Among these efforts, last Friday, the space agency and its state-operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, successfully conducted a 30-second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket's center core with its seven YF-100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen.

A winner in the space race? ... The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. As part of China's plan to land astronauts on the Moon "before" 2030, this rocket will be used for a crewed mission and lunar lander. Recent setbacks with SpaceX's Starship vehicle—one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA, alongside Blue Origin's Mark 2 lander—indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go. Ars concludes that it is now probable that China will "beat" NASA back to the Moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race.

Why did Flight 9 of Starship fail? In an update shared last Friday ahead of the company's next launch, SpaceX identified the most probable cause for the May failure as a faulty main fuel tank pressurization system diffuser located on the forward dome of Starship's primary methane tank. The diffuser failed a few minutes after launch, when sensors detected a pressure drop in the main methane tank and a pressure increase in the ship's nose cone just above the tank, Ars reports.

Diffusing the diffuser ... The rocket compensated for the drop in main tank pressure and completed its engine burn, but venting from the nose cone and a worsening fuel leak overwhelmed Starship's attitude control system. Finally, detecting a major problem, Starship triggered automatic onboard commands to vent all remaining propellant into space and "passivate" itself before an unguided reentry over the Indian Ocean, prematurely ending the test flight. Engineers recreated the diffuser failure on the ground during the investigation and then redesigned the part to better direct pressurized gas into the main fuel tank. This will also "substantially decrease" strain on the diffuser structure, SpaceX said.

Next three launches

August 22: Falcon 9 | X-37B space plane | Kennedy Space Center, Fla. | 03:50 UTC

August 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-6 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 17:02 UTC

August 23: Electron | Live, Laugh, Launch | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 22:30 UTC

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Posted Saturday 23 August 2025 at 5:14 am AEST (my time).

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As banks around the world prepare to replace many thousands of workers with AI, Australia's biggest bank is scrambling to rehire 45 workers after allegedly lying about chatbots besting staff by handling higher call volumes.

In a statement Thursday flagged by Bloomberg, Australia's main financial services union, the Finance Sector Union (FSU), claimed a "massive win" for 45 union members whom the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) had replaced with an AI-powered "voice bot."

The FSU noted that some of these workers had been with CBA for decades. Those workers in particular were shocked when CBA announced last month that their jobs had become redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly "led to a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week, FSU said.

But "this was an outright lie," fired workers told FSU. Instead, call volumes had been increasing at the time they were dismissed, with CBA supposedly "scrambling"—offering staff overtime and redirecting management to join workers answering phones to keep up.

To uncover the truth, FSU escalated the dispute to a fair work tribunal, where the union accused CBA of failing to explain how workers' roles were ruled redundant. The union also alleged that CBA was hiring for similar roles in India, Bloomberg noted, which made it appear that CBA had perhaps used the chatbot to cover up a shady pivot to outsource jobs.

While the dispute was being weighed, CBA admitted that "they didn’t properly consider that an increase in calls" happening while staff was being fired "would continue over a number of months," FSU said.

"This error meant the roles were not redundant," CBA confirmed at the tribunal.

Bank apologizes, but damage is done

Now, CBA has apologized to the fired workers. A spokesperson told Bloomberg that they can choose to come back to their prior roles, seek another position, or leave the firm with an exit payment.

"We have apologized to the employees concerned and acknowledge we should have been more thorough in our assessment of the roles required," CBA's spokesperson told Bloomberg.

A Bloomberg Intelligence report from earlier this year estimated that banks globally will slash "as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years" due to expectations that many tasks today will be assigned to AI in the near future. "Back office, middle office, and operations are likely to be most at risk," Bloomberg reported.

CBA's reversal shows that some banks may be tempted to rush AI initiatives and dismiss workers without thoroughly understanding the potential impacts on their business. But the backtracking hasn't seemed to slow down CBA much. Just last week, it announced a partnership with OpenAI that will "explore advanced generative AI solutions that aim to strengthen scam and fraud detection and deliver more personalized services" for its customers.

CBA did not suggest that this initiative would lead to further downsizing, claiming the bank's goal is to "invest in our people and their AI proficiency so they can better support our customers" and "embed the responsible use of AI across its workforce."

Ars could not immediately reach CBA or FSU to confirm how many workers have decided to return.

But FSU reported that for all 45 workers, "the damage has already been done."

These employees "have had to endure the stress and worry of facing redundancy" and were "suddenly confronted with the prospect of being unable to pay their bills." FSU warned that CBA's flip-flopping on AI serves as a "stark reminder to all of us that we can never trust employers to do the right thing by workers, and change can happen at any time and impact any one of us."

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Posted Friday 22 August 2025 at 1:55 pm AEST (my time).

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A local Neolithic community in northeastern France may have clashed with foreign invaders, cutting off limbs as war trophies and otherwise brutalizing their prisoners of war, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The findings challenge conventional interpretations of prehistoric violence as bring indiscriminate or committed for pragmatic reasons.

Neolithic Europe was no stranger to collective violence of many forms, such as the odd execution and massacres of small communities, as well as armed conflicts. For instance, we recently reported on an analysis of human remains from 11 individuals recovered from El Mirador Cave in Spain, showing evidence of cannibalism—likely the result of a violent episode between competing Late Neolithic herding communities about 5,700 years ago. Microscopy analysis revealed telltale slice marks, scrape marks, and chop marks, as well as evidence of cremation, peeling, fractures, and human tooth marks.

This indicates the victims were skinned, the flesh removed, the bodies disarticulated, and then cooked and eaten. Isotope analysis indicated the individuals were local and were probably eaten over the course of just a few days. There have been similar Neolithic massacres in Germany and Spain, but the El Mirador remains provide evidence of a rare systematic consumption of victims.

Per the authors of this latest study, during the late Middle Neolithic, the Upper Rhine Valley was the likely site of both armed conflict and rapid cultural upheaval, as groups from the Paris Basin infiltrated the region between 4295 and 4165 BCE. In addition to fortifications and evidence of large aggregated settlements, many skeletal remains from this period show signs of violence.

Friends or foes?

Archaeologist Teresa Fernandez-Crespo of Spain's Valladolid University and co-authors focused their analysis on human remains excavated from two circular pits at the Achenheim and Bergheim sites in Alsace in northwestern France. Fernandez-Crespo et al. examined the bones and found that many of the remains showed signs of unhealed trauma—such as skull fractures—as well as the use of excessive violence (overkill), not to mention quite a few severed left upper limbs. Other skeletons did not show signs of trauma and appeared to have been given a traditional burial.

This did not seem consistent with the usual massacres or executions of captured raiding parties, per the authors. It's possible the traumatized individuals were community members who had been killed in combat and brought home for burial. But battle-related injuries would typically target the head, not other body parts, and the marks on the remains are more consistent with intense torture and mutilation, per the authors. This may have been a form of punishment or sacrifice of the group's social outcasts, but isotropic analysis revealed otherwise.

The authors examined 40 bone samples and 31 teeth from the two sites to uncover clues to diet, social background (like infant and child-rearing practices), and provenance of the individual remains. They also analyzed 33 human bone samples excavated from 10 other Alsatian sites dating back to the same period, as well as 53 animal bone samples from the region to establish which game would have been available.

The results showed a marked difference in dietary patterns between remains that exhibited signs of violence and trauma ("victims") and those that did not ("non-victims"), suggesting the skeletons belonged to two distinct communities. The "non-victims" were local; the "victims" were not, showing signs of higher mobility and physiological stress, suggesting the latter may have belonged to invading groups.

"The lower limbs were [fractured] in order to prevent the victims from escaping, the entire body shows blunt force traumas and, what it is more, in some skeletons there are some marks—piercing holes—that may indicate that the bodies were placed on a structure for public exposure after being tortured and killed," Fernandez-Crespo told Live Science. "We believe they were brutalized in the context of rituals of triumph or celebrations of victory that followed one or several battles." And given the central location of the burial pits, "the act would have been a public theater of violence intended to dehumanize the captive enemies in front of the entire community."

DOI: Science Advances, 2025. 10.1126/sciadv.adv3162  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 22 August 2025 at 1:54 pm AEST (my time).

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Tesla is under investigation for failing to report crashes involving its partially autonomous driving technology in a timely manner.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires automakers to report crashes involving advanced driver assist features “within one or five days” of the incident, but Tesla was reporting crashes “several months or more” after they occurred, the agency said.

Tesla has told NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation that the delays were the result of a problem with its data collection that has since been fixed. But the agency is still opening an audit investigation as standard procedure to ensure the company is doing everything by the book.

The rule dates back to a standing general order (SGO) from 2021 that requires automakers and robotaxi companies to report crashes involving fully autonomous vehicles as well as Level 2 driver-assist systems. Under the SGO, companies are required to document collisions when an automated driving system was in use within 30 seconds of impact and report those incidents to the government.

Since it was implemented, Tesla has reported over 2,300 crashes to the federal government, according to NHTSA. An analysis of the crash data shows Tesla accounted for 40 out of 43 fatal crashes reported under the SGO.

Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features are considered Level 2 automated technology that requires full driver attention. By comparison, Alphabet’s Waymo uses Level 4 technology that doesn’t require a human driver.

Earlier this year, NHTSA proposed revising the SGO to remove some of the reporting requirements.

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Posted Friday 22 August 2025 at 3:17 am AEST (my time).

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What's the end game for the tech corporations plunging billions of dollars into the generative AI landscape? The easiest answer would be AGI (artificial general intelligence), but it has seemingly turned into a buzzword with a different meaning each time it's mentioned.

In simple terms, it refers to a powerful AI-powered system that surpasses human cognitive capabilities. However, Microsoft's multibillion-dollar OpenAI partnership agreement defines AGI as a powerful AI system with the capability of generating up to $100 billion in profit.

This threshold ties the ChatGPT maker to Microsoft by the hip amid immense pressure from investors to evolve into a for-profit entity or risk losing funding, while attracting outsider interference and hostile takeovers.

But as it seems, the next-gen technology is advancing and scaling at an alarming rate, potentially rendering a PhD obsolete even before you graduate. More concerning, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman recently published a blog post called "We must build AI for people; not to be a person," further suggesting that conscious AI might be coming.

According to Suleyman:

"It shares certain aspects of the idea of a “philosophical zombie” (a technical term!), one that simulates all the characteristics of consciousness, but internally it is blank. My imagined AI system would not actually be conscious, but it would imitate consciousness in such a convincing way that it would be indistinguishable from a claim that you or I might make to one another about our own consciousness."

I’m growing more and more concerned about what is becoming known as the “psychosis risk”. and a bunch of related issues. I don’t think this will be limited to those who are already at risk of mental health issues. Simply put, my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare, and even AI citizenship. This development will be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention.

 

Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman

Suleyman says his focus and mission are to create safe and beneficial AI as we forge toward superintelligence, designed to make the world a better place through products like Microsoft Copilot, which allow people to achieve incredible feats beyond their imaginations.

If you're in a hurry, here's what its "comprehensive" measurements found for a median Gemini text prompt:

• It consumes 0.26 mL of water, which is about five drops.
• It uses 0.24 Wh of energy, less than watching 9 seconds of television.
• It generates 0.03 grams of CO2e.
• Google claims it achieved a 44x reduction in total emissions per prompt between May 2024 and May 2025.

But according to The Verge, several experts are skeptical of the numbers Google presented, with Shaolei Ren, an associate professor at UC Riverside who studies AI's environmental impact, accusing the company of "hiding the critical information." Ren is the co-author of Making AI Less 'Thirsty': Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models, a paper Google cited in its study.

Ren's paper claimed that training GPT-3 in Microsoft's state-of-the-art U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 700,000 liters (about 185,000 gallons) of clean freshwater. His work also estimated that when you talk with ChatGPT, a conversation consisting of 20-50 questions and responses could "drink" a 500 ml (17 oz) bottle of water.

Experts like Ren and Alex de Vries-Gao of Digiconomist argue that Google omits indirect water use from its calculations. The company's figure only includes the water used on-site for cooling its data centers. It completely ignores the off-site water consumed by the power plants that generate the massive amounts of electricity these data centers require. This makes the five-drop figure a "tip of the iceberg" estimate at best, in Vries-Gao's words.

They also point out that Google used a "market-based" measure of carbon emissions instead of a "location-based" one. Market-based accounting allows a company to subtract the renewable energy credits it purchased, making its footprint appear smaller. The experts say a location-based measurement is more transparent because it reflects the actual carbon intensity of the local power grid supplying the data center, offering a real-world look at the company's local impact.

In the study's accompanying blog, Google says it wants to be more transparent about energy use and water consumption. The company's paper is not yet peer-reviewed, and it declined to answer specific questions from The Verge on the record.

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Posted Friday 22 August 2025 at 2:58 am AEST (my time).

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At first glance, Nam-Joon Cho’s lab at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University looks like your typical research facility—scientists toiling away, crowded workbenches, a hum of machinery in the background. But the orange-yellow stains on the lab coats slung on hooks hint at a less-usual subject matter under study.

The powdery stain is pollen: microscopic grains containing male reproductive cells that trees, weeds, and grasses release seasonally. But Cho isn’t studying irksome effects like hay fever, or what pollen means for the plants that make it. Instead, the material scientist has spent a decade pioneering and refining techniques to remodel pollen’s rigid outer shell—made of a polymer so tough it’s sometimes called “the diamond of the plant world”—transforming the grains to a jam-like consistency.

This microgel, Cho believes, could be a versatile building block for many eco-friendly materials, including paper, film, and sponges.

A lot of people think of pollen, when it’s not fertilizing plants or feeding insects, as useless dust, but it has valuable applications if you know how to work with it, says Cho, who coauthored an overview of pollen’s prospective applications in the 2024 Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He’s not the only scientist to think so. Noemi Csaba, a nanotechnology and drug delivery researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, wants to develop hollowed-out pollen shells into protective vehicles to deliver drugs to the eyes, lungs, and stomach.

Researchers studying pollen’s usefulness to people are a rare breed, Csaba says. “I find it a bit surprising,” she says. “Pollen is a very, very interesting biomaterial.”

Softening the shell

To begin working with pollen, scientists can remove the sticky coating around the grains in a process called defatting. Stripping away these lipids and allergenic proteins is the first step in creating the empty capsules for drug delivery that Csaba seeks. Beyond that, however, pollen’s seemingly impenetrable shell—made up of the biopolymer sporopollenin—had long stumped researchers and limited its use.

A breakthrough came in 2020, when Cho and his team reported that incubating pollen in an alkaline solution of potassium hydroxide at 80° Celsius (176° Fahrenheit) could significantly alter the surface chemistry of pollen grains, allowing them to readily absorb and retain water.

The resulting pollen is as pliable as Play-Doh, says Shahrudin Ibrahim, a research fellow in Cho’s lab who helped to develop the technique. Before the treatment, pollen grains are more like marbles: hard, inert, and largely unreactive. After, the particles are so soft they stick together easily, allowing more complex structures to form. This opens up numerous applications, Ibrahim says, proudly holding up a vial of the yellow-brown slush in the lab.

When cast onto a flat mold and dried out, the microgel assembles into a paper or film, depending on the final thickness, that is strong yet flexible. It is also sensitive to external stimuli, including changes in pH and humidity. Exposure to the alkaline solution causes pollen’s constituent polymers to become more hydrophilic, or water-loving, so depending on the conditions, the gel will swell or shrink due to the absorption or expulsion of water, explains Ibrahim.

This winning combination of properties, the Singaporean researchers believe, makes pollen-based film a prospect for many future applications: smart actuators that allow devices to detect and respond to changes in their surroundings, wearable health trackers to monitor heart signals, and more. And because pollen is naturally UV-protective, there’s the possibility it could substitute for certain photonically active substrates in perovskite solar cells and other optoelectronic devices.

Cho’s lab has also demonstrated that paper made from pollen can be printed on. It may be a sustainable alternative to traditional paper for writing, printing, and packaging, according to Cho, who has patented the microgel’s production process. Producing traditional paper destroys trees and is resource-intensive, requiring up to 13 liters of water for every page made. Pollen is naturally released in bulk from seed-producing plants, and deriving paper from it requires only a few simple steps. Ink can be removed with a simple alkaline solution wash—a process that lets the paper be reused.

Additionally, freeze-dried pollen microgel forms porous sponges. These could be made into such things as scaffolds for tissue engineering, or used to stem bleeding or to absorb oil spills.

Cho’s team usually works with sunflower and camellia pollen that they purchase inexpensively as a bee pollen mixture, mainly from China. But they say their alkaline hydrolysis method would work well with a broad swath of plant species. Pollen is abundant, Cho adds—a single floret of the common sunflower, for instance, produces 25,000 to 67,000 grains every summer. Moreover, it’s easy to collect from bees in commercial hives.

Pollen-based products have some way to go before reaching the market, Ibrahim adds; the key right now is to predict challenges and devise sustainable solutions. With other biomaterials researchers are working on, such as chitosan and cellulose, a crustacean or a tree must be destroyed. Compared with that, pollen is considerably less resource-intensive: “We’re not destroying the plant,” he says. “We’re not even destroying the flowers.”

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

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Posted Thursday 21 August 2025 at 1:11 pm AEST (my time).

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If you were to design the strangest diet possible, eating nothing but ants and termites would probably make the shortlist. Yet over the past 66 million years, mammals across the globe have repeatedly gone down this path—not once or twice, but at least a dozen times. From anteaters and aardvarks to pangolins and aardwolves, the so-called myrmecophages (animals that feed on ants and termites) have evolved similar traits: they’ve lost most or all of their teeth, grown long sticky tongues, and learned to consume insects by the tens to hundreds of thousands each day.

A new study reveals that this extreme dietary specialization, once thought rare and mysterious, has emerged independently in mammals at least 12 times in the last 66 million years (i.e., since the Cenozoic era began). This is a striking example of convergent evolution and shows just how powerful ants and termites have been in shaping mammalian history.

“The number of distinct origins for myrmecophagy was certainly surprising, as was the discovery that their origins seem to quite neatly follow the trend of growth across ant and termite colony sizes throughout the Cenozoic,” Thomas Vida, first author of the study and a researcher at the University of Bonn, told Ars Technica.

The rise of insect-eating mammals

To figure out how often and when mammals evolved a taste for ants and termites, the study authors first had to track down which species are truly “obligate myrmecophages”—animals that rely entirely on ants and termites, with little to no other food in their diet. That meant going through nearly a century’s worth of information. “We looked through a very large number of published natural history papers, zoological texts, and conservation reports as a baseline for identification,” Vida added.

This board dataset covered 4,099 living mammal species. The researchers then grouped these species into one of five dietary categories based on gut analyses and field observations: strict ant/termite specialists, general insect-eaters, carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores. Next, they ran several statistical models to work backward from this data to reconstruct the most likely diets for each ancestral node.

The results showed at least 12 separate origins of obligate myrmecophagy, with instances in each of the three main mammal groups: monotremes (egg-laying mammals), marsupials, and placentals. Surprisingly, some families, like Carnivora (dogs, bears, weasels), were responsible for about a quarter of all these origins, suggesting certain lineages were predisposed to make the leap.

Moreover, in every case, the ancestors were either insectivores or carnivores, with insect-eaters making the shift about three times more often than carnivores. The researchers also compared these timelines with the expansion of ants and termites themselves. Fossil evidence shows that during the Cretaceous (about 145–66 million years ago), these insects made up less than 1 percent of all insects on Earth.

It wasn’t until after the K–Pg extinction event, which wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and reshaped ecosystems, that ant and termite colonies began to expand. By the Miocene epoch (~23 million years ago), they accounted for 35 percent of all insect specimens. “The increasing abundance of social insects over the last 50 million years or so led to the repeated evolution of specialized diets in mammals. We sometimes call this selective pressure,” Phillip Barden, one of the study authors and a professor of biology at New Jersey Institute of Technology, told Ars.

Once mammals switched to an ant-and-termite-only diet, they almost never went back. The elephant shrew genus Macroscelides was the sole exception, shifting to omnivory after adopting myrmecophagy during the Eocene. This suggests that such specialization can be an evolutionary one-way street, possibly because losing teeth and developing highly adapted tongues, claws, and stomachs makes it difficult to return to a generalist diet.

“We only recover a single reversal out of specialized ant- and termite-eating, which could mean a few things. One possibility is that it is exceptionally difficult to re-evolve baseline feeding features once you become heavily specialized. It could also be that betting on ants and termites tends to pay off, that is, there is little selective pressure to de-specialize given the ubiquity of social insects in many environments,” Barden explained.

Insects are more influential than we realize

By showing that ant- and termite-based diets evolved repeatedly, the study highlights the overlooked role of social insects in shaping biodiversity. “This work gives us the first real roadmap, and what really stands out is just how powerful a selective force ants and termites have been over the last 50 million years, shaping environments and literally changing the face of entire species,” Barden said.

However, according to the study authors, we still do not have a clear picture of how much of an impact insects have had on the history of life on our planet. Lots of lineages have been reshaped by organisms with outsize biomass—and today, ants and termites have a combined biomass exceeding that of all living wild mammals, giving them a massive evolutionary influence.

However, there’s also a flip side. Eight of the 12 myrmecophagous origins are represented by just a single species, meaning most of these lineages could be vulnerable if their insect food sources decline. As Barden put it, “In some ways, specializing in ants and termites paints a species into a corner. But as long as social insects dominate the world’s biomass, these mammals may have an edge, especially as climate change seems to favor species with massive colonies, like fire ants and other invasive social insects.”

For now, the study authors plan to keep exploring how ants, termites, and other social insects have shaped life over millions of years, not through controlled lab experiments, but by continuing to use nature itself as the ultimate evolutionary archive. “Finding accurate dietary information for obscure mammals can be tedious, but each piece of data adds to our understanding of how these extraordinary diets came to be,” Vida argued.

Evolution, 2025. DOI: 10.1093/evolut/qpaf121 (About DOIs)

Rupendra Brahambhatt is an experienced journalist and filmmaker. He covers science and culture news, and for the last five years, he has been actively working with some of the most innovative news agencies, magazines, and media brands operating in different parts of the globe.

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Posted Thursday 21 August 2025 at 1:10 pm AEST (my time).

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Google is one step closer to reaching its nuclear ambitions now that it’s working with public power utility Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to purchase electricity from a next-generation reactor. It’s the first power purchase agreement for technology this advanced that a US utility has made, according to the companies.

The plan is for TVA to buy electricity from a reactor being developed by engineering company Kairos Power in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Once the reactor is up and running, expected in 2030, it should start supplying electricity to the local grid that serves Google data centers in Tennessee and Alabama.

If they manage to pull this all off, it could help jumpstart a whole new era for nuclear energy in the US. The nation’s current fleet of nuclear reactors uses decades-old technology that has struggled to compete with cheap electricity from gas-fired power plants and solar and wind farms. Kairos Power is building one of the first reactors that proponents hope can usher in a resurgence of nuclear energy, and meet rising electricity demand from Big Tech and AI.

The announcement follows news that Google would purchase electricity from “multiple” small modular reactors designed by Kairos Power. The Hermes 2 demonstration plant is the first reactor being developed under that agreement. It expands on the first Hermes demonstration reactor that Kairos broke ground on in July of last year after receiving the first construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a non-water-cooled reactor in more than half a century.

Unlike conventional reactors that use water, Kairos’ technology uses molten fluoride salt as a coolant. Since the reactor’s molten salt coolant has a much higher boiling point than water and doesn’t reach a boil, the reactor can operate at relatively low pressure. A low-pressure reactor like Kairos’ technology is supposed to cut costs for nuclear energy by getting rid of the need to build big high-pressure containment structures.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee — where Kairos is building Hermes 2 — was once the headquarters for the Manhattan Project. Now, instead of housing facilities enriching uranium for the first atomic bombs, Oak Ridge has become a hub for nuclear energy projects and research.

Eventually, Google aims to help Kairos deploy 500 megawatts of new nuclear capacity in the US by 2035. For context, America’s 94 operating nuclear reactors had a combined capacity of 97,000MW in 2024 and accounted for just under 20 percent of the US electricity mix. Hermes 2 is supposed to reach a capacity of 50MW.

Companies that generate carbon pollution-free electricity, like nuclear energy and renewables, can make money by selling the electricity they provide to the power grid and by selling so-called clean energy attributes that are like separate certificates representing the environmental benefits of avoiding fossil fuel emissions. Google will receive clean energy attributes from the Hermes 2 plant through TVA.

Tech companies with climate goals often buy clean energy attributes to try to cancel out the pollution caused by their electricity use. By matching its electricity use with those certificates, a company might claim that it runs on clean energy even if it’s plugged into a power grid that still runs on dirty energy. Extra income from clean energy attributes is supposed to help developers add more carbon pollution-free power to the grid (although research has shown that the environmental benefits are often overestimated). Google’s carbon emissions rose again last year as it ramps up its AI offerings.

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Posted Wednesday 20 August 2025 at 12:33 pm AEST (my time).

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Ancient rituals and customs often leave behind obvious archaeological evidence. From the impeccably preserved mummies of Egypt to psychoactive substance residue that remained at the bottom of a clay vessel for thousands of years, it seems as if some remnants of the past, even if not all are immediately visible, have defied the ravages of time.

Chewing betel nuts is a cultural practice in parts of Southeast Asia. When chewed, these reddish nuts, which are the fruit of the areca palm, release psychoactive compounds that heighten alertness and energy, promote feelings of euphoria, and help with relaxation. They are usually wrapped in betel leaves with lime paste made from powdered shells or corals, depending on the region.

Critically, the ancient teeth from betel nut chewers are distinguishable because of red staining. So when archaeologist Piyawit Moonkham, of Chiang Mai University in Thailand, unearthed 4,000-year-old skeletons from the Bronze Age burial site of Nong Ratchawat, the lack of telltale red stains appeared to indicate that the individuals they belonged to were not chewers of betel nuts.

Yet when he sampled plaque from the teeth, he found that several of the teeth from one individual contained compounds found in betel nuts. This invisible evidence could indicate teeth cleaning practices had gotten rid of the color or that there were alternate methods of consumption.

“We found that these mineralized plaque deposits preserve multiple microscopic and biomolecular indicators,” Moonkham said in a study recently published in Frontiers. “This initial research suggested the detection potential for other psychoactive plant compounds.”

Since time immemorial

Betel nut chewing has been practiced in Thailand for at least 9,000 years. During the Lanna Kingdom, which began in the 13th century, teeth stained from betel chewing were considered a sign of beauty. While the practice is fading, it is still a part of some religious ceremonies, traditional medicine, and recreational gatherings, especially among certain ethnic minorities and people living in rural areas.

Archaeologists have mostly found evidence for betel nut chewing in ancient times through easily visible stains and fragments of betel leaves and nuts in teeth. In an unprecedented investigation, Moonkham and his research team decided to look for biological traces of betel nuts in dental plaque. Going off previous research into ancient dental plaque for other purposes, he knew that plaque can illustrate more about the lives of people in past civilizations, revealing what they consumed as well as their health at the time of death.

Although 156 ancient human burials have been found at Nong Ratchawat, not many studies have checked them for bioarchaeological evidence, and the few that have were focused on health and disease.

For the new study, the researchers sampled plaque from six individuals with mostly unstained teeth. These included back teeth, such as molars and premolars, as well as more frontal incisors and canines. They then created different combinations of betel nuts, leaves, and lime paste, some including black catechu bark or tobacco to reflect local customs. Each was then ground with a mortar and pestle with some human saliva added to simulate the chewed end product.

Invisible evidence

After betel nuts were artificially “chewed,” chemicals were extracted from the mixture. The betel leaves and lime paste chewed with betel nuts have a purpose: Psychoactive compounds in betel nuts become more potent when lime paste creates an alkaline environment in the mouth. And it is thought that betel leaf helps with the absorption of these compounds.

Moonkham compared chemical signatures in the reference samples to those in archaeological samples of plaque. Because chewing tobacco with betel nuts is more of a modern practice, its absence from the archaeological samples was expected. Traces of arecoline, a stimulant exclusively found in betel nuts, were present in all the reference samples and in three archaeological samples that came from the unstained teeth of a woman. Though the evidence of arecoline in the ancient samples was fragmented by degradation over time, its chemical formula and molecular weight were enough to identify it.

In the teeth of the same woman, the researchers discovered signals from another psychoactive compound, arecaidine, which arecoline is converted into with the addition of lime. This woman’s teeth suggest that she was the only individual studied who had chewed betel nuts.

Why there was only one individual who showed evidence of betel nut chewing is still a mystery. She stands out further because she was also buried with distinctive clay vessels and stone beads, something rare at Nong Ratchawat. It is unknown whether these have any relation to social status. If anything, it goes against the previously discovered trend of stained teeth being found in more male than female burials.

What the evidence does prove is that betel nut chewing was practiced by at least some people in Bronze Age Thailand, adding to other, often more visible ancient evidence of the practice across Southeast Asia.

“Significant potential exists for additional biomolecular analysis of [plaque] from the remaining individuals,” the researchers wrote. “Future ethnoarchaeological research will examine sociocultural aspects of psychoactive plant utilization, gender and age consumption patterns, and the evolving social and cultural roles of these practices among various Thai and Southeast Asian communities.”

Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 2025. DOI: 10.3389/fearc.2025.1622935

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Posted Wednesday 20 August 2025 at 12:33 pm AEST (my time).

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